SUMMARY: All my investigations continue to confirm the findings of Nietzsche in the following respect; Western civilization has put ‘reason’ (science) into an unnatural primacy over ‘intuition’, sourcing chronic dysfunction and incoherence in the Western social dynamic.  ‘Science’, and by this I mean popular, mainstream science that is based on a belief in ‘objective truths’ APPEARS to work well on simple problems but only because ‘science’ is ‘marking its own exam papers’ within its own synthetic dualist, being-base paradigm.  Because we are using scientific thinking on complex relational problems that are far beyond the competency of science, where the ‘error’ due to the inadequacy of science is much larger than on simple mechanical problems, we are engendering unanticipated, unmanaged (unmanageable) ‘externalities’ that are continuing to accumulate and infuse dissonance into the ongoing evolution of the transforming relational continuum we are all included in.  The ‘transvaluation of values’ that Nietzsche has claimed is needed to get us out of this predicament, and which my own inquiry affirms, involves a culture shift that would move us much closer to the indigenous aboriginal culture and to Buddhist, Taoist. and Vedic (Advaita Vedanta) cultures. That is, we would shift from a split-apart dualist understanding of inhabitant and habitat [e.g. man and nature] to an inhabitant-habitat nondualist understanding, affirmed by modern physics.

 

How can I say this in a simple way?  How about; -science and reason, which are dualist and being-based, are always wrong because they simplify the reality of our experience in order to get concise answers.  Yet we make ‘scientific reality’ (SCSR) our ‘operative reality’ that guides our actions and plans.  Our scientifically conceived actions and plans, while successful ‘by their own measure’, engender unanticipated and unmanaged ‘externalities’ that continue to mount. 

 

 

 

First, an issue with this summary and this update.  There is a problem in trying to share findings that point to the fundamental inadequacy of the NOUN-AND-VERB language being used here to report on findings of fundamental inadequacies in our reality-fabricating NOUN-AND-VERB language.

 

For example, there is a reason why the reviving of indigenous aboriginal languages (which are relational languages) is so important in revitalizing indigenous aboriginal cultures; i.e. because noun-and-verb languages like English (French, German etc.) synthetically reduce inherent-in-nature, inhabitant-habitat nonduality to inhabitant – empty-space dualities.   Instead of forms like ‘Katrina’ (hurricane) being understood in terms of inhabitant-habitat nonduality [storm-in-flow nonduality], noun and verb language RE-presents forms as ‘independent’ ‘things-in-themselves’ with their own ‘local agency’ that operate in a notional ‘empty space’.  When a television meteorologist shifts a plastic symbol for a hurricane around on a gridded geographical map, she obscures the physical reality of the world as an all-including unum, a transforming relational continuum wherein the  hurricane, and/or the human, are included relational forms, inhabitant-habitat nondualities.  As we are informed by modern physics, there are no such phenomena as ‘independent things-in-themselves’ nor is there ‘the movements of things’, there is only relational transformation.   The apparent ‘existence of things’ and ‘movement of things’ is, as Schroedinger says; ‘schaumkommen’ (‘appearances’).

 

The ‘General Issue’:

 

In our “physically experienced intuitive reality “ (PEIR), we are aware that we are included in a transforming relational continuum.   On the other hand, in what I am calling our “semantically constructed scientific reality” (SCSR), we imagine we are the master of our own actions; i.e. we understand ourselves as independent human beings, … ‘biological systems in themselves’ with our own local agency who are fully and solely causally responsible for our own actions and deeds.  By contrast, in our physically experienced intuitive reality (PEIR), we are included in a relational dynamic or ‘suprasystem’ that is inherently greater than our own ‘local system’ in the same sense that ‘turbulence’ is a suprasystem that is inherently greater that the ‘storm-systems’ that are included within it.

 

As ‘systems sciences’ pioneers such as Russell Ackoff observe; “every system” is included in a relational suprasystem. [e.g. the storm systems Irma, Katia and José appear to be ‘independent unities’ and are treated as such in ‘scientific reality’ (SCSR), … but in ‘intuitive reality’ (PEIR), they are NOT separate things but storm-in-flow nondualities or inhabitant-habitat nondualities [relational features in a relational flux].

 

Each form is mutually influencing all other forms (and vice versa) by way of all forms being nondually included in one common habitat aka ‘plenum’ aka ‘relational space’;

 

“The dynamics of the inhabitants are conditioning the dynamics of the habitat at the same time as the dynamics of the habitat are conditioning the dynamics of the inhabitants” – Mach’s principle

 

* * *

 

I am forced to use non-relational semantic structures in writing this essay since I am writing it in noun-and-verb English.  But there is always a more deeply rooted physical meaning than the superficial matter-based meaning given by noun-and-verb constructs. While I try to avoid anthropomorphic phrasing [human personification aka ‘anthropomorphisms’] such as; ‘Katrina is growing larger and stronger, Katrina is devastating New Orleans, which make form-in-flow nondualities show up as dualist ‘independent beings with their own local agency’, it is next to impossible to exclude all such semantic structures, yet it is important in sharing my findings.  If a form is used as a noun-subject; e.g. ‘the king’ or ‘the hurricane’, the reader has the choice to think first of the relational matrix it is centred within, which inductively actualizes the ‘figure’ and which puts wind in its sails.   Alternatively, the reader can think of the ‘figure’ on its own, as if it was its own ‘local agency’ that was causally responsible for authoring its actions; i.e. as if it was a [dualist] ‘powerboat’ rather than a [nondualist] sailboat.

 

I realize that this upfront qualifying is kind of an ‘unfriendly start’ and I would prefer to just start talking [writing] without any advance provisos, but it is very clear to me that many, if not most Western educated people assume that our discussion is about the world seen as a ‘semantically constructed scientific reality’ (SCSR) while what I am trying to share comes from ‘physically experienced intuitive reality’ (PEIR) which is the natural way of experiencing the world, but not the popular way of talking about it.

 

For example, in our physically experienced intuitive reality (PEIR), emotional influences are ‘at play’ and we know, intuitively, that the rebellion of the peasants is induced by landlord behaviours, such as monopolizing access to the land and its essential resources, and using that to impoverish and extort ‘slave labours’ from the peasants.   But in scientific reality (SCSR), ‘the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth’ will document the rebelling peasants’ violent actions as if driven by their internal rational thoughts, without any mention of inductive actualizing influence.

 

“The belief in willing. To believe that a thought may be the cause of a mechanical movement is to believe in miracles. The consistency of science demands that once we have made the world thinkable for ourselves by means of pictures, we should also make the emotions, the desires, the will, etc., thinkable—that is to say, we should deny them and treat them as errors of the intellect.” – Nietzsche.

 

Did the attack of the starving peasants on the landlords derive from their ‘rational will’ as Western courts of justice would see it, or could their actions have been inductively actualized by long-building tensions in the dynamic relational matrix of community?

 

How this ‘choice of reality’ [whether we put ‘reason’ into an unnatural primacy over ‘intuition’ or whether we put ‘intuition’ into its natural primacy over ‘reason’] impacts our social dynamic will be discussed in regard to a selection of ‘issues’.

 

 

Table of Selected Topics

 

1. LANGUAGE AND PERCEPTION: It Takes a Whole Community to Raise a Child.

2. TRUTH AND REALITY: The Myth of Objective Truth

3. GOD AND SCIENCE: The Temporal and Eternal

4. SCIENCE AS ‘DECEPTION’: Dualist, Being-based Science is Deception

5. SUMMARY OF THE SUMMARIES

 

 

 

1. LANGUAGE AND PERCEPTION: It Takes a Whole Community to Raise a Child.

 

When we use ‘subjects’ in our discussion, the default assumption is that we can understand the ‘subject’ as a thing-in-itself by inquiring into its attributes, its internal components etc.   But supposing the subject is included in a relational matrix and is letting its development inductively actualized by the epigenetic influences it is situationally included in.  This is an example of inhabitant-habitat nonduality.  We could speak of a university-community nonduality where the needs in the community are inductively actualizing, orchestrating and shaping the development, actions and accomplishments of the university.

 

When the word ‘university’ is encountered in a written text, the reader could think of it in terms of its internal components [departments, faculties, administration, teachers, students, physical plant] etc.  This is what comes of ‘analytical inquiry’.  But prior to a university even being called a ‘university’, it is a collection of relational associations and processes within the relational dynamic complex of the community.  Ackoff calls this inquiry into the enveloping matrix of relations, ‘synthetical inquiry’ and makes the point that analytical inquiry must be ‘grounded’ in synthetical inquiry.  One could say the same of a hurricane in the turbulent flow of the atmosphere.

 

In the following picture, we could assume the red sphere is the university and the surrounding six spheres are other groups that have needs that the university is servicing.  Thus, the activities of the people in the university are inductively actualized by ‘epigenetic influence’ in the community in which they are included.  Analytical inquiry would have us look into what the people in the university were doing.  We might stop  our investigation right there and measure and describe the activities of all the people in the university.   Or we might ground such analytical inquiry in synthetical inquiry into how the relations with the community are inductively actualizing the dynamics of the university.

 

 

 

In ‘Thought and Language’, Lev Vygotsky points out that ‘spontaneous concept formation’ induced by the situation we find ourselves in, and ‘scientific concept formation’ which we can think of as our corresponding intention driven response that is inductively actualized by the unfolding situation, are a single system; i.e. a situational-intentional nonduality.   We might compare this with a Dionysian-Apollonian nonduality, and even with a Lamarckian-Darwinian nonduality.

 

But as Nietzsche observes, if we only pay attention to sight and touch, we reduce this nonduality to the actions of a central ‘being’ as if the animating influence is coming from its internal ‘local agency’ as directed by its ‘rational will’.   The needs of those around us, which beckon to us and influence our development [“It takes a whole community to raise a child”] constitute an ‘epigenetic field of influence’ that is non-local, non-visible and non-material, as is the nature of ‘field’ [gravity, electromagnetism, thermal].

 

Field-and-matter are a nonduality, according to modern physics.  The relational influences of field ‘come first’ and matter and material dynamics precipitate as ‘secondary phenomena’, like vapour cooled to the point of condensation.   The effect on perception has been found to be the following;

 

“Fields of force are the primary reality, and ‘matter’ a secondary or derived phenomenon” —Michael Faraday

 

What we observe as material bodies and forces are nothing but shapes and variations in the structure of space. Particles are just schaumkommen (appearances). – Erwin Schroedinger

 

“Space is not empty. It is full, a plenum as opposed to a vacuum and is the ground for the existence of everything, including ourselves.” — David Bohm

 

I ‘ran into this perception dilemma’ when studying ‘exceptionally performing teams.  If we regard each of the surrounding spheres as teams [host community, families, customers, suppliers, service companies] with the team under investigation in the centre, some people want to understand the actions of the team in terms of the team members and what they do [the analytical view].  But the exceptional team, itself, had committed to letting its ‘identity float’ and its development to be pulled into blossom in serving the needs of the suprasystem of teams in which it was included.  It’s actions were not driven and directed from out of its centre by local agency and central ‘rational purpose’.   A ‘switch’ had been ‘flipped’. They had consciously decided to abandon that standard ‘scientific’ rational control driven team approach.  They didn’t fully understanding the origin of the needs of their fellow groups  in the matrix but they committed to serving the needs of those groups.

 

[One can imagine a relational space in terms of clusters connected to clusters connected to clusters, each element in the cluster simultaneously ‘receiving epigenetic (inductive) influences and at the same time transmitting genetic (causative) influences’, as in a Huygen’s principle constituted wavefield dynamic].

 

Outside voyeur observers, practicing their ‘scientific dualism’ and looking in on the team, searching for the objective truth re the team dynamics, were examining the actions of each of the team members and trying to understand the team as a ‘system’; i.e. as an independent system-in-itself with its own internal process driven and directed actions and accomplishments.  A team deemed to be fully and solely causally responsible for its own actions and accomplishments.  This is the scientific, dualist, being-based mode of perception and understanding.  It does not and cannot deal with system-suprasystem nonduality.  We cannot carry off a ‘storm’ in a box and take it to the laboratory to inquire into ‘how it works’ since a storm is just the ‘appearances’ aspect of the storm-flow nonduality.

 

Epigenetic influence inductively actualizes genetic expression.  The dynamics and evolutionary development of the team was the ‘genetic expression’ and the analytical inquiry approach of science is designed to ‘explain’ the workings of a ‘system’ such as the biological system of a human as an ‘independently-existing biological system-in-itself’ with ‘its own internal process driven and directed development and behaviour.

 

Imagine what problems that science would have in finishing its inquiries into the workings of things if the ‘epigenetic influence’ door were opened up.  What if everything were influencing everything in the universe, as is the finding of modern physics?

 

“[In nature]… “the individual parts reciprocally determine one another.” … “The properties of one mass always include relations to other masses,” … “Every single body of the Universe stands in some definite relations with every other body in the Universe.” Therefore, no object can “be regarded as wholly isolated.” And even in the simplest case, “the neglecting of the rest of the world is impossible.” – Ernst Mach

 

Instead of the ‘exceptionally performing team’ having ‘discovered a new approach’, they were simply ‘dropping’ the Western penchant for putting reason (science) into an unnatural primacy over intuition.  Members of an ecosystem serve one another’s needs without understanding what they are doing.  It takes a whole community to raise a child-soldier.  The best analysts in the world will not be able to explain the child-soldier’s development and actions using the standard scientific assumption that he is an independently-existing system-in-himself with his own internal process driven and directed actions and deeds for which he is fully and solely causally responsible.

 

When we look around at our fellow members in the relational matrix, we cannot imagine what epigenetic influences are inductively actualizing, orchestrating and shaping their visible actions.  That path of investigation is impossibly difficult.

 

So what does ‘reason’ have us do?  We gather systems into ‘categories’ so that we can define them by first generalizing them and thus imputing them to exist as independent subjects or things-in-themselves by way of their ‘common attributes’, and then proceeding from general to particular by pointing to departures from the generalization.

“Nature is composed of sensations as its elements. Primitive man, however, first picks out certain compounds of these elements – those namely that are relatively permanent and of greater importance to him. The first and oldest words are names of “things.” Even here, there is an abstractive process, an abstraction from the surroundings of the things, and from the continual small changes which these compound sensations undergo, which being practically unimportant are not noticed. No inalterable thing exists. The thing is an abstraction, the name a symbol, for a compound [Complex] of elements from whose changes we abstract. The reason we assign a single word to a whole compound is that we need to suggest all the constituent sensations [Eindrücke] at once.

When, later, we come to remark the changeableness, we cannot at the same time hold fast to the idea of the thing’s permanence, unless we have recourse to the conception of a thing-in-itself, or other such like absurdity. Sensations [Empfindungen] are not signs of things; but, on the contrary, a thing is a thought-symbol for a compound sensation of relative fixedness. Properly speaking the world is not composed of “things” as its elements, but of colors, tones, pressures, spaces, times, in short what we ordinarily call individual sensations.

The whole operation is a mere affair of economy. In the reproduction of facts, we begin with the more durable and familiar compounds, and supplement these later with the unusual by way of corrections. Thus, we speak of a perforated cylinder, of a cube with beveled edges, expressions involving contradictions, unless we accept the view here taken.

All judgments are such amplifications and corrections of ideas already admitted.  

– Ernst Mach, ‘Science of Mechanics: A Critical and Historical Account of its Development’, Ch. IV, ‘The Economy of Science’

 

[Note: Evidently, mainstream science did not listen to Ernst Mach, even though Mach’s intuition of ‘relativity’ made him the mentor of Einstein and others who ‘fleshed out’ the relativity intuition with analytical equations (GR).  His relational views are nevertheless still ‘alive’ and being explored by physicist-mathematicians like Julian Barbour, Carlo Rovelli and others.]

 

SUMMARY OF ‘LANGUAGE AND PERCEPTION: It Takes a Whole Community to Raise a Child.

 

When we take a voyeur look at a ‘stranger’, particularly if not our race and colour, … if we ask ourselves whether our mind ‘heads outwards from the person’, as in ‘is this a person that ‘Dances with Wolves’? … or whether it heads inward to a scientific list of common properties describing this sort of independently-existing biological system-in-itself, what sort of answer do we get?

 

And if our mind takes the former ‘outward’ orientation in search for an understanding of the stranger, … would it move outward through prior generations of community whose epigenetic influence inductively shaped later generations, … outward to eras where nondual relations between natural habitat and inhabitant were far more intimate, … so that we would eventually come to understand self and other as being pulled into blossom by star power, by what’s way out there?   Perhaps the Lamarckian [epigenetic pulling into blossom] and Darwinian [genetic pushing into blossom] models are a nonduality with a likeness to the Dionysian – Apollonian nonduality, as discussed in ‘A Nietzschean View of Climate Change’.

 

In any case, we all have the option to understand the individual or team ‘in the centre’ [in the centre of what? since the relational matrix is unbounded], as a thing-in-itself and inquire into it using the analytical tools of science in ‘scientific reality’ [SCSR], or we can seek to understand it in ‘relational terms’, through our physically experienced intuitive reality (PEIR) wherein ‘epigenetic influence inductively actualizes genetic expression’.  Our experience based intuition informs us that it takes a whole community to raise a rebellion and the person standing there with the smoking gun that people are calling ‘Johnny Rebel’ is not the CAUSE of trouble in the community, but the RESULT.

 

Should we then follow the nondualist culture of indigenous aboriginal peoples and undertake ‘restorative justice’ which seeks to restore, cultivate and sustain balance and harmony through transforming relations?   Or should we stick with our secularized theological ‘scientific approach’, a mode of understanding that keys to ‘facts’, ‘objective truths’, where what is taken to be ‘the truth’, the whole truth and nothing but the truth’ is the description of the ‘eye’ witness which recounts the actions of the rebel in the utmost detail, entirely out of the context of the community matrix of relations which pull rebels into blossom.  The causal logic of science is impeccable and DNA evidence will complete forensic science’s job of establishing, without a shadow of a doubt, that Johnny Rebel aka ‘the child soldier’, is fully and solely causally responsible for actions and injuries to innocent, unarmed civilians.

 

Indigenous aboriginal communities opt for restorative justice as would I, if I had the choice, but the community I live in popularly opts for moral judgement based retributive justice which employs ‘semantically constructed scientific reality’ (SCSR) as the ‘operative reality’.  Within the family, however, restorative justice has predominated.

 

‘Political correctness’, as with the recent explosion of sexual harassment allegations in the Hollywood film industry, imply a shift away from the community taking responsibility for funny-business erupting in the community, and a regression around the notion of the ‘independent biological system-in-itself’ that is fully and solely responsible for his own actions and deeds.  That is, as people close to the Harvey Weinstein ‘case’ allowed, ‘we were enablers’ for the persistence of his sexually aggressive behaviour, just as one might say this with respect to child-soldiers in a community, or rebels.  Yes, we can examine their acts and use scientific reality (SCSR) to convict and punish them, but our intuitive reality (PEIR) informs us that “it takes a whole community to raise a sexual harasser”.

 

As Mach observed, it is ‘thought-economical’ to view the world as noun-and-verb language architecture construct it, as a collection of independent things-in-themselves with their own internal components and processes driven and directed actions and accomplishments that they are (deemed) fully and solely causally responsible for.  This semantically contrived, thought-economical mode of understanding is known as ‘reason’ and as ‘science’.

 

The topic of ‘justice’ segués on to topic 2.

 

2. TRUTH AND REALITY: The Myth of Objective Truth

 

Science seeks the ‘objective truth’ in the sense of an ‘accurate representation of the world as it is’, a ‘perspective-free’ view from nowhere, “unmediated by human minds and other “distortions”.”

 

However, if one agrees that the human observer is included in the same world system that he is observing, it follows that there can be no ‘objective reality out there’ that is common to all since we are all bound into the transforming relational continuum in a situationally unique manner; i.e. if we refer back to the picture of the relational matrix;

“the dynamics of each inhabitant are influencing the dynamics of the habitat (relational matrix) that we are included in, at the same time as the dynamics of the habitat (relational matrix) are influencing each of the inhabitants” – Mach’s principle.

 

Our individual experience can be expected to differ from anyone else’s and this personal experience becomes the sole source of ‘truth’ as in the indigenous aboriginal tradition, which leads to the ‘learning circle’ wherein the truth of each individual’s experience is respected and these truths are shared in an important ritual practice (‘learning-, healing-, sharing-, peace-making- … circles’) and there is no attempt to boil everything down into one semantically constructed ‘objective reality’ or ‘investigative finding’.  Instead, the understanding coming from circles is in the form of ‘holographic’ imagery that induces transformation in circle participants’ relations with one another and the common living space.

 

Nietzsche, and other modern philosophers are of the opinion that;

 

‘Objective truth’ does not mean ‘in touch with reality’, but instead means ‘in consensus with other inquirers’.

 

‘Rational consensus’ that smothers minority perspectives is destructive of important differences in perspective that come from unique and actual experience.

 

‘Indigenous consensus’ is built slowly, around the circle, and the ‘give’ is not from compromise based on a political strategy, but from ‘give’ in relations that define community so that it is not the same community that gets up from the council circle.

 

Indigenous ‘concensus’ never builds by the ‘Socratic method’ and binary confrontation but proceeds slowly ‘around the circle’ with

 

So, when we see a majority of scientists agreeing with a particular hypothesis, this does not affirm the truth of the hypothesis but simply affirms that the people who agree have the same way of thinking about things.  Alexis Papazoglou nicely summarizes Nietzsche’s clear-thinking on this topic in an article entitled ‘The post-truth era of Trump is just what Nietzsche predicted’, an excerpt from which is as follows;

 

“As Nietzsche saw it, once we realise that the idea of an absolute, objective truth is a philosophical hoax, the only alternative is a position called “perspectivism” – the idea there is no one objective way the world is, only perspectives on what the world is like. … according to perspectivism, we agree on …  things not because these propositions are “objectively true,” but by virtue of sharing the same perspective.  When it comes to basic matters, sharing a perspective on the truth is easy – but when it comes to issues such as morality, religion and politics, agreement is much harder to achieve. People occupy different perspectives, seeing the world and themselves in radically different ways. These perspectives are each shaped by the biases, the desires and the interests of those who hold them; they can vary wildly, and therefore so can the way people see the world.”

“For Nietzsche, each perspective on the world will have certain things it assumes are non-negotiable – “facts” or “truths” if you like. Pointing to them won’t have much of an effect in changing the opinion of someone who occupies a different perspective.”

“A core tenet of Enlightenment thought was that our shared humanity, or a shared faculty called reason, could serve as an antidote to differences of opinion, a common ground that can function as the arbiter of different perspectives. Of course people disagree, but, the idea goes, through reason and argument they can come to see the truth. Nietzsche’s philosophy, however, claims such ideals are philosophical illusions, wishful thinking, or at worst a covert way of imposing one’s own view on everyone else under the pretense of rationality and truth”.

Even if he was right that all we have to go by are our different perspectives on the world, he didn’t mean to imply we are doomed to live within the limits of our own biases. In fact, Nietzsche suggests that the more perspectives we are aware of, the better we can be at reaching a watered-down objective view of things.

At the end of his 1887 book On the Genealogy of Morality, he writes:

“The more eyes, different eyes, we know how to bring to bear on one and the same matter, that much more complete will our ‘concept’ of this matter, our ‘objectivity’ be.”

– Alexis Papazoglou, Royal Holloway University of London

 

 

Although Nietzsche never made the connection with ‘learning circles’ in his writing, as far as I know [I haven’t read his total works], … his general inquiry develops the need for such activity.

 

But this is not just a ‘coincidence’ since Nietzsche is unique among philosophers in having intuited, with the help of ‘The Theory of Natural Philosophy’ (1758) of Roger Boscovich, who has been described by modern physicists as being “200 years ahead of his time”, the understanding that ‘matter is not physically real’, it is ‘appearance’.  The acknowledgement of the primacy of the relational influence of ‘field’ over ‘matter’ [understanding that ‘matter’ is a secondary phenomenon] establishes an ‘inhabitant-habitat nonduality’; a symmetry that crops up everywhere in this inquiry, as a very basic symmetry of nature; not matter, not field, but field-matter nonduality.  One might say that field produces matter to give it traction for transforming itself.

 

SUMMARY OF ‘TRUTH AND REALITY: The Myth of Objective Truth’

 

The basic finding here recalls the statement that the lesser jihad is fought ‘out there’ while the greater jihad is fought with our self ‘in here’.

 

When we see people coming together; as Democrats, as Republicans, as Communists, as Fascists, as people who rally around or against particular views of what is going on in the world ‘out there’, we can’t assume that, even if there is sufficient time and space for reason and argument, there will be a general movement towards the truth.   Instead, when this banding together around a ‘common perspective’ occurs, “These perspectives are each shaped by the biases, the desires and the interests of those who hold them”

 

The sole source of truth is our own unique experience. The experience of others is not something that we, as observers, can pick up in our voyeur observing. That is, the notion that we can extract ‘objective truth’ by ‘looking out there’ at what people are saying and doing is illusion.

 

The banding together in a faction that claims to be in possession of the ‘objective truth’ means nothing other than “here is a group of people with similar biases, desires and interests ‘in common’”.   But, “the majority has no monopoly on the truth” [Giordano Bruno].

 

Too often, consensus in rational argument is “a covert way of imposing one’s own view on everyone else under the pretence of rationality and truth”.

 

What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.

 

We still do not know where the urge for truth comes from; for as yet we have heard only of the obligation imposed by society that it should exist: to be truthful means using the customary metaphors—in moral terms: the obligation to lie according to a fixed convention, to lie herd-like in a style obligatory for all. Now man of course forgets that this is the way things stand for him. Thus he lies in the manner indicated, unconsciously and in accordance with habits which are centuries’ old; and precisely by means of this unconsciousness and forgetfulness he arrives at his sense of truth.” — Nietzsche, ‘On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense’ (aussermoralischen Sinne)

 

The “accurate representation of the world as it is’, a ‘perspective-free’ view from nowhere, “unmediated by human minds and other “distortions” is science’s notion of ‘objective truth’.  It is a dualist, being-based ‘objective truth’ built on semantic constructs that is blind to ‘nondualities’; i.e. it is unattainable idealization built upon abstractions (dualism, being).

 

Science can prove without a shadow of a doubt, that the rebel caused the injury and destruction, but to believe that, one has to believe in the existence of an independent biological system-in-itself called a ‘rebel’ with his own local agency who is fully and solely causally responsible for his own actions and accomplishments.

 

The ‘bottom line’ is that there is no ‘objective truth’ in spite of the fact that Western society spends a lot of its time debating ‘what is the truth’.  Forensic scientists may prove the truth of the allegation that the 9/11 rebels caused death and destruction, but millions of colonized indigenous peoples will say that, the truth is, that Euro-American colonization that has been going on for centuries with programs of cultural genocide against indigenous peoples, inductively actualized rebellious action.  What to do about the subjective perspectives on ‘truth’?

 

“The more eyes, different eyes, we know how to bring to bear on one and the same matter, that much more complete will our ‘concept’ of this matter, our ‘objectivity’ be.” — Nietzsche, ‘Genealogy of Morality’

 

And, of course, within the ‘learning circle’ or ‘peace-making circle’ where personal experience based perspective truths, can be shared, the consensus that is sought is not the scientific one that comes from rational debate, but a consensus that occurs through the transforming of relations so that that the community that was at odds with itself is not the same community that reaches consensus.

 

 

3. GOD AND SCIENCE: The Temporal and Eternal

 

Nietzsche may have declared that ‘God is dead’, but his model of the world is eternal;

 

“And do you know what “the world” is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster [Ger. Ungeheuer;  root is ‘enormous’, ‘colossal’]

 of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself; as a whole, of unalterable size, a household without expenses or losses, but likewise without increase or income …” –Nietzsche, ‘The Will to Power’, 1067

 

Nietzsche’s view was that the power of God was put into ‘grammar’; i.e. into the ‘subject’, giving the subject ‘local causal agency’ which Nietzsche termed ‘stupidity’;

 

“That which gives the extraordinary firmness to our belief in causality …. is belief that every event is a deed, that every deed presupposes a doer, it is belief in the “subject.” Is this belief in the concept of subject and predicate not a great stupidity?” … “Indeed, nothing has yet possessed a more naive power of persuasion than the error concerning being, as it has been formulated by the Eleatics, for example. After all, every word and every sentence we say speak in its favor. Even the opponents of the Eleatics still succumbed to the seduction of their concept of being: Democritus, among others, when he invented his atom. “Reason” in language — oh, what an old deceptive witch she is! I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.” – Nietzsche, ‘Twilight of the Idols’

 

Nietzsche’s objection to God was an objection to God as a Point Source, a Local Causal Agent that resides outside of Nature.  Some interpretations suggest that Nietzsche intended that ‘We killed God’ with science and its grammar [subject and predicate].  The point is that Nietzsche did come up with view that the world was one eternally transforming thing, as also with Spinoza and Tolstoy.

 

Tolstoy also mocked the notion of God as living in a heaven beyond nature.  Like Nietzsche, Tolstoy saw the world as one all-including transforming relational continuum;

 

“That eternal spirit proceeding from the infinite, is the origin of all and is what we call God.” — “God therefore as “that whole of which we acknowledge ourselves to be a part”

“What am I? A part of the infinite. It is indeed in these words that the whole problem lies.”

“… And the cause of everything is that which we call God. To know God and to live is the same thing. God is Life.” – Tolstoy

 

Schroedinger had the same thoughts, expressed in slightly different terms;

 

… In Christian terminology to say: ‘Hence I am God Almighty’ sounds both blasphemous and lunatic. But please disregard these connotations for the moment and consider whether the above inference is not the closest a biologist can get to proving God and immortality at one stroke.

In itself, the insight is not new. The earliest records to my knowledge date back some 2,500 years or more. From the early great Upanishads the recognition ATHMAN = BRAHMAN (the personal self equals the omnipresent, all-comprehending eternal self) was in Indian thought considered, far from being blasphemous, to represent the quintessence of deepest insight into the happenings of the world. The striving of all the scholars of Vedanta was, after having learnt to pronounce with their lips, really to assimilate in their minds this grandest of all thoughts.

 Again, the mystics of many centuries, independently, yet in perfect harmony with each other (somewhat like the particles in an ideal gas) have described, each of them, the unique experience of his or her life in terms that can be condensed in the phrase: DEUS FACTUS SUM (I have become God).

 To Western ideology the thought has remained a stranger.  – Erwin Schroedinger, ‘What is LIfe’, ‘Epilogue: On Determinism and Free Will’

 

 

David Bohm similarly saw the world as one transforming relational continuum which included everything.  He also saw ‘aboriginal science’ as reflecting the same worldview;

 

“Space is not empty. It is full, a plenum as opposed to a vacuum and is the ground for the existence of everything, including ourselves.” — David Bohm

 

The indigenous aboriginal belief in the ‘Great Spirit’ has the same ‘symmetry’; i.e. the symmetry of field-and-matter nonduality wherein the material aspect is ‘appearances’ or ‘secondary phenomena’;

 

As Richard Atleo aka Umeek, a hereditary chief of the Nuu-chah-nulth [Nootka] people, states in his book, ‘Tsawalk’;

 

“The material universe is like an insubstantial shadow of the actual substantial Creator. In this worldview, the highest form of cognition, of consciousness does not occur in the insubstantial shadowlike material realm, but in the realm of creation’s spiritual source’. … The Nuu-chah-nulth saw the material world as a manifestation of the spiritual.” — Umeek

 

SUMMARY OF ‘GOD AND SCIENCE: The Temporal and Eternal’

 

There is clearly a ‘place for God’ in the understanding of the world in modern physics and in ‘aboriginal science’; i.e. as the animating influence immanent in the transforming relational continuum.  In these views, there is no longer any ‘temporality’ in the world because there is no ‘being’ in its own right so nothing that ‘comes’ and ‘goes’ over ‘time’.  ‘Becoming’ [field] and ‘being’ [matter] are a nonduality with ‘being’ [matter] associating with ‘appearances’ as with the storm-cell in the flow.

 

There is no room for God in ‘science’ [Western mainstream science aka semantically constructed scientific reality (SCSR)] since science starts and finishes with the ‘material world’.  Christianity saw man as separate from nature and as having the power to control and improve on nature (or put it into decline).

 

“God, when he gave the world in common to all mankind, commanded man, … to subdue the earth; i.e., improve it for the benefit of life, and therein lay out something upon it that was his own, his labour.  He that in obedience to this commandment of God, subdued, tilled and sowed any part of it, thereby annexed to it something that was his property, which another had no title to, nor could without injury take from him” – John Locke, 1690.

 

The notion that God has given man the power of control over nature, is the origin of the scientific dualist view of inhabitant-habitat separation.  In the modern era, man has become ‘repentant’ for his sense that he has been doing injury to nature and is thus working on making amends, but without abandoning the belief that he has control over nature.  But it is this belief that he is independent of nature and that what he constructs is an improvement to nature is separate from nature that is the source of what he sees as ‘injury to nature’.  The works of man are not independent of nature, the world is given only once, as a transforming relational continuum and men, like all forms, are included in nature and serve as agents of transformation.

 

It is not man’s ‘environment-unfriendly’ actions against nature that need remediation [that is a dualist view of an inherently nondualist dynamic], but his belief that man is separate from, and has God-like power to improve on or reshape nature.  Just as he has been able to construct cities and highways, he sees himself as having the powers to repair the damages he has done to nature.   But his construction of cities and infrastructure is not ‘real’.  The only possibility in a world given only once as a transforming relational continuum is relational transformation.  The ‘construction’ and/or ‘annihilation’ of cities and infrastructure or any other notional ‘things-in-themselves’, as something ‘separate’, and as an accomplishment that man is fully and solely causally responsible for, is illusion.

 

Everything is included in nature; i.e. in the transforming relational continuum that is known as ‘nature’; … ‘man’, ‘cities’, ‘highways’, everything.  Believing in the illusion of the separate existence of (a) non-natural, human created structures, and, (b) nature,  is the source of the perceived ‘damage to the environment’.  Man’s construction of a dam in a river is not ‘adding a separate thing-in-itself’ which is the full and sole product of man’s generative agency which will perform according to man’s scientific and engineering specifications, but is a transformative activity within the all-inclusive natural world. The unanticipated ‘externalities’ seen as ‘damaging to the environment’ that were not in the engineering specs ARE NOT REAL because the constructed facility, as a ‘separate entity’ IS NOT REAL, and therefore cannot be the cause of anything.  The ‘damages to the environment’, rather than being due to a human failure to include sufficient detail in the engineering plans, are instead due to man thinking that the structures he is constructing are independently-existing things-in-themselves, that are not ‘born of nature’ but which man is fully and solely causally responsible for, as if man is separate from nature and has the power to transform nature, as is the way things appear in our semantically constructed scientific reality (SCSR).

 

Remediation will involve man’s renouncing of his dualist scientific reality based claim to have God-like powers of creation and annihilation of things-in-themselves that he is fully and solely causally responsible for.

 

To put God back in in nature, after having given man control over nature is logical contradiction that doesn’t work, but at the same time, belief in science undermines belief in a supernatural ‘heaven’.  Tolstoy mocks the concept of supernatural God in heaven and cannot find anywhere in the Bible where Jesus affirms this notion.  Thus ‘science’ by convincing people that there is no supernatural God in heaven, but yet at the same time retaining the primacy of man over nature, has left no place for God; i.e. ‘we have killed God’ with science.

 

Modern physics has reopened accommodations for God in ‘field’ [spirituality?] which is ‘everywhere at the same time’, is eternal, includes all, and is the animating source of all.

 

Nietzsche implied that the killing of God was not a good thing and that it would lead to a period of nihilism wherein people believed in nothing, and that this would eventually be superseded by the ‘beyond-good-and-evil’ ‘uebermensch’, in;

 

—this, my Dionysian world of eternal self-creation, of eternal self-destruction, this mysterious world of twofold voluptuousness; this, my “Beyond Good and Evil” without aim, unless there is an aim in the bliss of the circle, without will, unless a ring must by nature keep goodwill to itself,—would you have a name for my world? A solution of all your riddles? Do ye also want a light, ye most concealed, strongest and most undaunted men of the blackest midnight?—This world is the Will to Power—and nothing else! And even ye yourselves are this will to power—and nothing besides! – Nietzsche

 

 

4. SCIENCE AS ‘DECEPTION’: Dualist, Being-based Science is Deception

 

Science, reason, rationality are words we use that no-one seems to know what ‘they really are.  Philosophers are working on it, night and day, but it is elusive because it involves dependency on other concepts such as; ‘fact’, ‘experiment’, ‘objective’, ‘replication’ and ‘prediction’ (change over time)?

 

On top of all of that, we can’t trust the language we are using to work on these deep philosophical issues because different languages can put us into different ‘realities’; e.g. the relational languages of indigenous aboriginals and the thing-based (noun-and-verb) Indo-European languages.

 

All of this mind-bending philosophical inquiry argues that we should instead, go with Poincaré in his assertion that ‘experience is the sole source of truth’.   Experiencing does not depend on any particular language, but we use language to share our experiences and enlarge our world view beyond the unfolding now of our own uniquely situated experience, … a language-based enlarging that seems that it could benefit our understanding of self, other and world, although it gets us into the dilemma that different people with different experiences construct very different ‘enlargements’ even when using the ‘same language’.

 

This has already been discussed in Topic 1.  ‘Language and Perception: It Takes a Whole Community to Raise a Child.  The conclusion there was that ‘there is no ‘objective truth’; i.e. no ‘enlargement’ common to us all, that we are steadily ‘pulling the veils’ from, such a notion being a dualist illusion; i.e. where we could separate our observing post from the world and get a God’s-eye view of it, as if an objective reality, as such, could exist even before a consciousness to perceive it.  The solution there was to respect the truth of personal experience and to share our experiences so as to harvest meaningful differences in experience that can contribute to a holistic understanding.  The hologram is never ‘flattened out’ into a single ‘common’ perspective but is something one can ‘go inside and take a tour so as to see the same ‘countryside’ from different perspectives.

 

In this Topic, I would like to discuss science in the context of Thomas Kuhn’s remark that “scientists on different sides of a paradigm debate “live in different worlds””.  In speaking of this, I can tap into my own experience.  I often like to quote certain philosophers but that is only because they have captured well in words, what resonates with my own experience.  In this case, I will keep it mostly to my own words.

 

We all know (all Western civ kids were taught) science as built with a matter and force base where space was empty, and we have all heard about a ‘new science’ (modern physics) that filled space with energy in flux and made matter into a secondary phenomena; i.e. a concentration of field.  We may have read about Einstein’s frustration with scientists who persisted in portraying space as empty.  He said (paraphrasing); “look, for chrissake, “space is not Euclidian’ … “space is a participant in physical phenomena” … “space not only conditions the behaviour of inert masses, but is also conditioned in its state by them.”, … “the recognition of the fact that ‘empty space’ in its physical relation is neither homogeneous nor isotropic, compelling us to describe its state by ten functions (the gravitation potentials g(μ,ν), has, I think finally disposed of the view that space is physically empty.”, … can you not drag yourselves away from your old-paradigm knee-jerk restrictive thought patterns?

 

What we call ‘science’; i.e. that goes together with ‘reason’ and ‘rationality’ has never broken free of the matter-force old-paradigm.  Linguists like Benjamin Whorf tell us that science comes from noun-and-verb language and based on one’s own experience, it is not hard to intuit that language is the source of a semantically constructed scientific reality (SCSR) which is where ‘science does its reasoning business’, or rather where reason does its business, which puts reason at odds with intuition.

 

Take semantic constructs like ‘the farmer produces wheat’ or ‘Katrina produces devastation in New Orleans’.  These structures impute ‘local causal agency’ to the ‘noun-subject’.  Our experience-based intuition screams out that nature produces both farmers and wheat, and hurricanes as well.   The energy charged transforming relational continuum is the source of these foreground forms that language treats of as ‘systems-in-themselves’ when they are, based on our experience, relational forms within the energy-charged plenum, and by ‘within’ I do not mean ‘mechanical inclusion’ as in objects in a Euclidian box, I mean ‘nondual’ inclusion as in the relationship between field and matter, storm-cell and flow.

 

You may accuse me of going beyond my ‘experience’ in favouring the new paradigm of matter-space nonduality, but I disagree.  I am going with my experience-based intuition which is not dumbed-down by the mental pictures we construct with noun-and-verb language.   The world of those pictures is the semantically constructed ‘reality’ used by science.  Reasoning or scientific thinking happens inside of that semantically constructed pseudo-reality and is based on things-in-themselves and their notional local causal agency driven actions and deeds. Folks, we users of noun-and-verb language got dumbed-down by believing in the semantic constructions we produce with this language.  Not to worry, our experience based intuition is still intact and dying to be let out of the box it has been packed away in as the popularity of reason [scientific thinking] rose so high (in Western society) that it put reason into an unnatural primacy over intuition [Nietzsche’s grand theme].  Our having been dumbed down from intuitives  into scientific thinkers by noun-and-verb language has been caught by Whorf;

 

“It is sometimes stated that Newtonian space, time, and matter are sensed by everyone intuitively, whereupon relativity is cited as showing how mathematical analysis can prove intuition wrong. This, besides being unfair to intuition, is an attempt to answer offhand question (1) put at the outset of this paper, to answer which this research was undertaken. Presentation of the findings now nears its end, and I think the answer is clear. The offhand answer, laying the blame upon intuition for our slowness in discovering mysteries of the Cosmos, such as relativity, is the wrong one. The right answer is: Newtonian space, time, and matter are no intuitions. They are receipts from culture and language. That is where Newton got them.” – Benjamin Whorf, ‘The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior to Language’ 

 

I was ‘onto this’, intuitively, well before I read Whorf.  Most of our actions, according to my experience, draw from our relations with others and the environment that become relationally tensioned over time and, as happens with earthquakes and avalanches, we feel this tension in us bring us to the point of action and we act.  It is gross oversimplification to apply the matter and force picture of science and reason and capture it with ‘he did such and such’, as if the impetus for the action derived from the ‘local agency’ of the person as a thing-in-itself.  People in the world are like kids in a candy shop.  Sure, we can say that ‘the kid picked up a candy bar and ate it’, as if his actions are driven by his ‘local agency’, but when he is in the forest, he doesn’t pick up bear dropping and eat them.   The environment attracts and pulls forth actions from him; i.e. epigenetic influence inductively actualizes, orchestrates and shapes his ‘genetic expression’.  To impute ‘local agency’ to him, as science and reason do, is because science and reason are still mired down in the concept of ‘empty space’ that is like a separating insulation between ‘independent things-in-themselves’ called ‘humans’.

 

Biological science has hung on to its dualist, being-based model of a human as an independent biological system-in-itself with its own internal organs and processes driven and directed behaviour.  Social sciences have hung onto it also, and so Western moral judgement of a person’s actions, as if the person were fully and solely causally responsible for his actions and deeds, continues as the ‘operative reality’.  That is, the semantically constructed scientific reality (SCSR) continues to be employed as the ‘operative reality’ in spite of that dumbed-down reality being contradicted by our physically experienced intuitive reality.

“scientists on different sides of a paradigm debate “live in different worlds”” — Kuhn

 

I know that indigenous people do not like being colonized.  Not only have they shared their experiences openly, but I know from my own experience what it feels like to be marginalized in the common living space one shares inclusion in.  It builds relational tensions, until one’s tolerance threshold is reached and one ‘rebels’.  To say that the rebel’s action derives from his local agency as science does, when it is obvously inductively actualized, is absurd.  It is an absurdity that sets up the follow-on absurdity of moral judgement based retributive justice and the prison system.  In the new paradigm, the energy-charged relational space is the animating source; i.e. ‘epigenetic influence inductively actualizes genetic expression’.  It takes a whole community to raise a child.  Wait a minute, it is ‘primitive’ indigenous aboriginal people that say that.  We were all like them at one point, how did we get dumbed-down by science and they escaped it?  Whorf answered that question; – noun and verb language.

 

The problem is not with science’s tools of observation; i.e. sonar, radar, microscopes, telescopes, magnetic resonance scanners, nor with its tools of measurement.  The problem is with science being derived from a particular type of language, noun-and-verb language, in that that language is used for constructing a semantic reality featuring notional ‘independently-existing things-in-themselves’ that reside in a notional absolute space and absolute time measuring/reference frame that serves as the notional ‘operating theatre’.  One can’t ‘really’ separate the storming from the flow, or any ‘system’ from the relational ‘suprasystem’ it is nondually included in, so as to ‘make believe’ that it is a self-actualizing thing-in-itself with its own local agency, not in physically experienced intuitive reality’.  That can only happen in semantically constructed scientific reality.

Our modern Western ‘scientific society’ continues to support ‘Declarations of Independence’ that state that we are all born equal.  Let’s take another look at that one picture we’ve been using;

 

 

 

 

If we focus on red spheres only, as if they come ‘on their own’, loaded with their own local agency and are all ready to go, then sure, a case for ‘independence and equality’, but if they are born into a matrix of interdependent relations, all will be born into inequality.  “It takes a whole community to raise a child”.

 

Note that the notion of ‘factuality’ and ‘objective truth’ comes from analytical inquiry where we focus on the ‘team’ implied by the red sphere, their members and the actions of each member, as if their actions are driven from their own local agency and internal ‘rational purpose’.  Now imagine how loosey-goosey that becomes if we understand that continually emerging ‘needs’ in the groups in the relational matrix are inductively actualizing, orchestrating and shaping the dynamic of the red team.

 

If you had Apollonian tendencies, would you want to let go of the hard facts of understanding the team dynamic in terms of the dynamics of the constituent members, and open up your understanding of the team dynamic to acknowledge that the team activities were inductively actualized by epigenetic influences coming from somewhere out there in the relational matrix, such ‘influences’ being impossible to fully track back to their root source?  If the blossoming team dynamic is ‘genetic expression’ inductively actualized as some kind of Dionysian artistic creativity, then we have this field-matter nonduality to deal with, rather than the nice clean dualist mechanics coming from local beings with their own local agency.

 

One could go on and on, finding contradictions between our physically experienced intuitive reality and our semantically constructed scientific reality; e.g. the 9/11 rebellion was induced by Euro-American colonizing, so say indigenous aboriginals, who should know from their own experience, and in all cases, physically experienced intuition will come up with the understanding that ‘epigenetic influence inductively actualizes genetic expression’ and that there is no such thing as things-in-themselves with their own ‘local agency’.  The actions of notional things-in-themselves are ‘schaumkommen’ (‘appearances’), they do not exist in the physical reality of our actual experience.  There is the continuing flow, by the way, which keeps gathering and regathering things like humans within it, but no fixed identity things-in-themselves other than by semantic construction.

 

SUMMARY OF 4. SCIENCE AS ‘DECEPTION’: Dualist, Being-based Science is Deception

 

Building a model of the world using independent material things-in-themselves that operate in an empty space is a convenient simplification that delivers ‘economy of thought’ [Mach] but employing this semantically constructed scientific reality as our ‘operative reality’ can get us into trouble; … particularly when we use it to guide our actions and responses in social-relational dynamics.

 

It’s not like we haven’t been warned about this.  Mach pointed out that this mechanical view of the world of science and reason, just because we came upon it ‘first’ in evolving our ‘science’ does not justify us making it foundational, because if we have to add the participation of space, it means that we can’t simply make corrections to the old paradigm science, but are obliged to rip out the simple ‘things are primary’ foundations and put in the new relations-are-primary foundations, something that people will resist since their values, status, sense of who they are, have been influenced by the (incomplete) understanding that has been built on the back of simplistic abstract ‘mechanical world’ foundations.  As Mach says, we make simple mechanical models to facilitate comprehension, not to accurately the capture relational phenomena.

 

“Purely mechanical phenomena do not exist. The production of mutual accelerations in masses is, to all appearances, a purely dynamical phenomenon. But with these dynamical results are always associated thermal, magnetic, electrical, and chemical phenomena, and the former are always modified in proportion as the latter are asserted. On the other hand, thermal, magnetic, electrical, and chemical conditions also can produce motions. Purely mechanical phenomena, accordingly, are abstractions, made, either intentionally or from necessity, for facilitating our comprehension of things”.

 … “We … should beware lest the intellectual machinery, employed in the representation of the world on the stage of thought, be regarded as the basis of the real world.” – Ernst Mach, The Science of Mechanics, Ch. V.

 

Science is deceptive because it portrays ‘terrorism’ as being caused by ‘terrorists’, … notional ‘independently-existing things-in-themselves that are fully and solely causally responsible for their actions and results.  This scientific worldview [old paradigm] ignores the contribution of Euro-American colonizers through the conditioning of the common global living space, setting up relational tensions and epigenetic influence that inductively actualize rebellion and terrorism [as seen in the new paradigm associated with modern physics that has not yet updated science].

 

Science is dualist, splitting apart the observer from the observed, the inhabitant from the habitat and imputing independent thing-in-itself being with local agency to that which, in our physically experienced intuitive reality (PEIR), are form-in-flow nondualities.  This reduction from nonduality to duality, a virtual ‘swap out of realities’, is the source of massive ‘incoherency’ [Bohm] wherein we employ semantically constructed scientific reality (SCSR) as our ‘operative reality’.  We eliminate Saddam and we engender unanticipated ‘externalities’ such as the rise of ISIS.  We construct a dam for hydro-electric and we destroy salmon runs.  We colonize the world and marginalize indigenous peoples [extinguish unique cultures].

 

Medical science is allopathic because it fails to see the organism as a relational complex first, wherein ‘illness’ as ‘imbalance’ opens the door to proliferation of non-symbiotic microbes.  The ‘microbial infection’ is the result, rather than the source of illness.

 

Plant science is forced to impute intelligence to plants [even though they have not a clue where the seat of it resides within the plant] to explain amazing forms of cooperation in ecosystems.  All of these ‘epicycles’ are ‘fixes’ to compensate for first having defined the plant as an independent thing-in-itself [after our own ego] and then having to equip it with its own intelligence to explain ecosystem dynamics.  Science, by denying that ‘epigenetic influence inductively actualizes genetic expression’ fails to see that the different forms in the ecosystem are inductively actualized, orchestrated and shaped; i.e. relations (relational influences) are in a natural primacy over things’.

 

Most troubling of all, science and reason have us believing in ‘objective truth’.    Because people believe in ‘objective truth’, and because it is a ‘mirage’, they end up sacrificing the family jewels, not to mention the lives of their own children and grandchildren, in chasing after a mirage, such as the mirage that eliminating rebels will eliminate rebellion [the rebellions won’t ‘dry up’ until the relational tensions ‘dry up’ and the relational tensions derive from attempts to eliminate rebels [instead of restoring relational balance and harmony].

 

‘Aboriginal science’ as indigenous peoples views of how the world works is termed by F. David Peat in ‘Blackfoot Physics’, is both ‘in here’ and ‘out there’ at the same time as in an epigenetic-genetic nonduality.  In the peace-making circle that has some limited semblance to the colonizer’s debating forum, personal experience based perspectives are shared around the circle.  There are no ‘true’ – ‘false’ confrontations and the circle participation goes around and around slowly and thoughtfully until concensus is reached (no one in the circle has further points to raise).  There is no need to type up a new statement that details the objective truth as it has been perfected by rational debate, because the concensus comes from adjustments ‘in here’ rather than ‘out there’ in a flexing of one’s identity that transforms relations with one another and the common living space.  The community that gets up from the council table is not the same community that sat down to begin the peacemaking circle.    The man who killed the couple’s only son may leave together with the bereaved parents.

 

Relations are in a natural primacy over material things.

 

5. SUMMARY OF THE SUMMARIES

 

 

Believe me, … wouldn’t I like to be able to summarize this whole thing in a few short words!  Where would I begin?  Probably with that one picture of a relational matrix of teams or groups implied by this figure;

 

If the central team was a team of ‘handymen’ serving the other teams in the matrix (and vice versa) whose activities were fully outside-inwardly (epigenetically) inductively actualized, then if we limited our study of ‘who they were and what they did’, to the team as a thing-in-itself, then we could capture all of their activities on video and, as voyeur observers, describe their actions in great detail.  But, … that would be the purely mechanical view.  In our physically experienced intuitive reality, our animating influence would derive from the ‘needs’ that were developing in the dynamics of the relationally connected groups that their actions were supporting.

 

To name the red team in the centre and to attribute to it, its own ‘local genetic agency’  coming up from the ‘logical genetic agency’ of its internal members, and from the inside of them; e.g. from their ‘rational purpose’, would be to ignore the inductive actualizing influence of the relational matrix the team is included in.  Didn’t Emerson speak of man as an induced relational channel, much like a tornado or hurricane?

 

“Whilst a necessity so great caused the man to exist, his health and erectness consist in the fidelity with which he transmits influences from the vast and universal to the point on which his genius can act. The ends are momentary: they are vents for the current of inward life which increases as it is spent. A man’s wisdom is to know that all ends are momentary, that the best end must be superseded by a better. But there is a mischievous tendency in him to transfer his thought from the life to the ends, to quit his agency and rest in his acts: the tools run away with the workman, the human with the divine. – Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘The Method of Nature’

 

Emerson is cautioning us against falling into the trap of reducing ourselves from one who channels influences from the vast and universal, to one who is more proud of ‘his product’ than of his channeling process.  This not only sounds like the difference between the Dionysian and Apollonian, it recalls the difference between a French and German toilet; i.e. the former use a hole in the floor which orients to the continual venting flux and the latter builds in a catch basin that facilitates celebrating the products that are produced [‘apologies to Emerson on that one’].

 

Apollo’s misapprehension: the eternity of beautiful forms; the aristocratic legislation, “thus shall it be for ever!”

Dionysus: sensuality and cruelty. Transitoriness could be interpreted as enjoyment of productive and destructive force, as continual creation.

 

— Nietzsche

 

Finally, it is evident to me, as described throughout this essay, that our physically experienced intuitive reality (PEIR) perceives nondualities while our semantically constructed scientific reality (SCSR) does not.

 

Nietzsche, in his final statement in Will to Power, opts for the Dionysian in a primacy over the Apollonian, putting emphasis on continuing ‘transformation’ and/or on the transforming continuum.

“ … this, my Dionysian world of the eternally self-creating, the eternally self-destroying, this mystery world of the twofold voluptuous delight, my “beyond good and evil,” without goal, unless the joy of the circle is itself a goal; without will, unless a ring feels good will toward itself–do you want a name for this world? A solution for all its riddles? A light for you, too, you best-concealed, strongest, most intrepid, most midnightly men?– This world is the will to power–and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power–and nothing besides!” — Nietzsche

 

The world is made of this continuing transformation and Nietzsche’s Zarathustra chooses to give himself up to it.  There is no desire for ‘power over’ and no goal [the ascendancy of the Aryan race as in the Nazi distortion’, this is very much like Tolstoy’s statement;

 

“That eternal spirit proceeding from the infinite, is the origin of all and is what we call God.” — “God therefore as “that whole of which we acknowledge ourselves to be a part” — Tolstoy

 

* * *

 

The striking impression that comes from both Nietzsche and Tolstoy is that of an ‘uebermensch’; i.e. one who is continually transcending himself in tune with the ‘all’ he is situationally included in, .. an ‘all’, that for Tolstoy, is called God.