-1- Western culture promotes a mode of understanding that puts language/intellect before experience. This gives rise to an intellectually INVENTED REALTY based on ‘sorcery’

example: DNA tests confirm that individual X is guilty of (is the source of) a rape and murder.

Such scalpel sharp logical determinations come from language and grammar.

-1a- DNA gathered in the King’s granary proves without a shadow of a doubt that Robin Hood is the source of the depletion of the King’s granary.

Observation: The concept of ‘sorcery’ of an action or development is language and grammar based intellectual abstraction that plays a foundational role in the psychological understandings we derive as in the above examples.  While the logic is razor sharp, there is also a ‘thinness’ to it, and the smell of an innate ‘incompleteness’ (as Goedel’s theorem affirms, all finite systems of logic are innately incomplete).

-2- As David Bohm shows, the proposition that ‘John Wilkes Booth’ sourced the death of Lincoln is language and grammar-based abstraction that occludes the natural primacy of the transforming relational unfolding.  Modern physics and indigenous aboriginal cultures (etc.) would understand this development (the death of Lincoln) in terms of ‘all my relations’ (mitakuye oyasin); i.e. in terms of the transforming relational continuum.  The aforementioned rape and murder can be psychologically ‘revisited’ and ‘reinterpreted’ in this relational context; e.g. perhaps our sensation based experiencing of the transforming relational continuum is the ‘greater reality’, … and should not be superseded by our language and grammar based reduction which, as Nietzsche shows, is reduced by way of a ‘double error’ that infuses in the psyche, the notion of ‘sorcery’;

The ‘double error’ is where we use ‘naming’ to impute ‘persisting thing-in-itself existence’ to a relational form in the transforming relational continuum (first error) and conflate this first error by imputing the power of sourcing actions and developments (second error) to the thing-in-itself we created with the first error.  THIS ‘DOUBLE ERROR’ [1] TRIGGERS THE PSYCHOLOGICAL IMPRESSION OF ‘SORCERY’ WHICH IS ANCHORED BY ‘EGO’ (as we psychologically impute the power of ‘sorcery’ to ourselves, giving rise to pride and/or shame depending on whether we (and/or the culture in which we are adherents) perceive our ‘sorcery’ as ‘good’ or ‘bad’).  Note that the judgements of ‘goodness’ or ‘badness’ of an action or development assume that actions and developments are ‘sourced’ by some ‘sourcing agency’ such as a name-instantiated thing-in-itself with powers of sourcing actions and developments; i.e. the ‘double error’ of language and grammar.

-3- Back to the DNA testing which seems to prove so conclusively WHO was the source of the rape and murder, and WHO was the source of the grain going missing from the King’s granary.

Modern physics would say that there is NO SUCH THING in the REALITY of our actual relational experience AS SORCERY.  ‘SOURCERY’ is the intellectual artefact of language and grammar; i.e. it is the PSYCHOLOGICAL DOUBLE ERROR

How about the teenage soldier recruited for battle who, in the course of such employment rapes and murders, and as in African civil wars, is later put through a ‘healing’ ritual since it is understood that ‘it takes a whole community to raise a murderous, rapist.  What is happening here to our concept of ‘sorcery’?  Is Bohm right, does the ‘sorce’ in ‘sorcery’ just keep receding from us like the Leprechaun that can’t be grasped firmly in our fist, but sifts through our grasping fingers like sand leaving us essentially ‘empty-handed’?

CONCLUSIONS: 

I think we will find, if we explore how our own psyche works these things out, that leaning on the psychological impressions conjured up by explicit (literal) language is self-deception.  This is a crazy-maker when one lives within a culture, such as Western culture, that collectively agrees to accept the double-error based INVENTED REALITY as their ‘operative reality’.  As Giordano Bruno exclaimed, before being burned as the stake for heresy in 1600 in the Campo dei Fiori, … ‘The majority has no monopoly on the truth’.  But of course, in Western culture, the ‘operative truth’ or ‘INVENTED REALITY’ is whatever the majority decides it is; “La raison du plus fort est toujours la meilleure”.

If we live in such a culture (as I/we do), we may be one of those who convicts Robin Hood on the basis of his ‘sourcing’ of the King’s loss of grain (aka his ‘robbery’ of the King’s granary which was full of the King’s robbings of the people, an innate ambiguity that is resolved by “La raison du plus fort est toujours la meilleure”.).  If we choose that ‘psychological road’, (of convicting Robin Hood) we will at the same time be choosing the road of the ‘ego’ and ‘sorcery’ in general, where we see ourself as the ‘source’ and thus ‘rightful owner’ of ‘our achievements’, obscuring and occluding the natural experiential understanding of ourselves as relational forms in the transforming relational continuum.

With respect to the convicting, on the basis of DNA evidence, a man for sourcing rape and murder, we are implicitly employing psychological grounding in ‘ego’, the sense that like oneself, we all have within us the power of ‘sorcery’ and thus are, as Western Christians believe, ‘independent beings’ who are the full and sole source of our own actions and deeds.

THIS IS A LANGUAGE-AND-GRAMMAR CONTRIVED CRAZY-MAKER (A double-error or ‘sorcery’ based crazy-maker) AND while it is built into Western culture by way of our Western culture adherents psycho—logical belief in language and grammar based ‘INVENTED REALITY’, IT IS IN NO WAY SUPPORTED BY THE REALITY OF OUR RELATIONAL EXPERIENCE.

(NOTE the pitfall cited by Emerson, whose ideas Nietzsche also embraced,  of our having “let the tool of language and grammar run away with the workman” i.e. whereby man redefines himself as a ‘sorcerer’ = infusing himself with ‘ego’).  This psychologically aberrant double error-based notion of ourselves as ‘independent beings with our own powers of sorcery’ is language and grammar induced bullshit that is the basis of ‘ego’ and the swelling and shrinking of our ego gives us an artificial sense of direction (e.g. since the Western system ‘rewards’ and punishes on the basis of ‘sorcery’, we can choose to go for the promotion that brings more money plus the new car and first class air travel privileges on the basis of ‘sorcery’ (our reward for being superior sorcerers), or shall we try to find our way into a non double-error based social relational dynamic where the group we are in does not play such ludicrous sorcery-celebrating games?)

This crazy-making Western culture adherence has been ‘locked in by high switching costs’.   That is, Western culture societies establish systems of rewards and punishments that generate a hierarchy of influence over what beliefs are held and enforced by the acculturated social collective.  Western culture stands out by its belief in ‘double error’ based ‘sorcery’ and the psychological abstraction of  ‘ego’ which comes bundled in with it.  On the other hand, modern physics, indigenous aboriginal cultures, Taoism/Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta, accept the ‘flow’ based reality or ‘Tao’ (the Tao that can be told is not the true Tao. – Lao Tzu) wherein the ‘transforming relational continuum’ is the basic reality and ‘sorcery’ (the artefact of language and grammar’) does not have an over-ride.

In fact, modern physics maintains that language and grammar can only be employed as inference of a reality that transcends explicit capture in ‘being’ based language, hence the ‘Wittgenstein ladder’ approach and ‘the Surprise version of the game of Twenty Questions’ of modern physics, both of which avoid name-based psychological instantiating of notional ‘things-in-themselves’ with notional ‘powers of sourcing actions and developments (the ‘double error’).

Western culture double error-based ego leads to ‘suboptimization’; i.e. the notion that by ‘naming’ we create ‘things-in-themselves’ (formerly calling on the magic of the sword of Excalibur or God as in rituals such as baptism or Christening), to have some ‘greater power’ notionally ‘inhabit’ these naming-instantiated (notional) things-in-themselves.

Once we have psychologically, with the help of language and grammar, liberated the name-instantiated thing-in-itself from the transforming relational continuum, and employed grammar to impute to it its own powers of sourcing actions and developments, whether ‘it’ is a ‘human’, a ‘nation’ or a ‘corporation’, … we have all of the ingredients for an INVENTED REALITY based on name-instantiated things-in-themselves with grammar-given powers of sorcery.  NO MORE ENTRAPMENT AS RELATIONAL FORM IN THE FLOW AND ALL THAT ‘ONE-WITH-EVERYTHING’ BUSINESS, thanks to our language and grammar stimulated psychological inventing of our new (ego-swelling) powers of SORCERY  which we can ‘show off’ within a language-and-grammar based ‘INVENTED REALITY’ featuring a multiplicity of name-instantiated, independently-existing  things-in-themselves with their own powers of sourcing actions and developments (i.e. a ‘double error’ based INVENTED REALITY).

This INVENTED REALITY is the OPERATIVE REALITY of modern Western culture adherents.

THIS IS A CRAZY-MAKER!   THIS IS ‘WESTERN CULTURE’ AS IT IS CURRENTLY, POPULARLY BEING OPERATIONALIZED.  For those sensitive ‘miner’s canaries’ who ‘sense something terribly amiss even as almost everyone around them seems to accept an INSANE NORMALITY that is ANYTHING BUT ‘NATURAL’, they are prone to becoming discombobulated by the huge gap between Western culture ‘normal’ and relational experience grounded ‘natural’, and if they show they are discombobulated, they are more likely to induce actions from their culture-conforming brethren to restore them to the unnatural norms of the culture (chemical lobotomizing has been the popular remedy), rather than precipitating any reforms in the crazy-making system, which is anchored in place by swollen egos based on double error belief in their own powers of sorcery).

“What we call ‘normal’ is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection and other forms of destructive action on experience.” – R. D. Laing, author of ‘The Divided Self’

If they are able to, the miner’s canaries must (a) recognize the inbuilt insanity of Western culture, and (b) find a way to ‘co-exist’ as indigenous aboriginals, Taoist/Buddhists and Advaita Vedanta adherents living within a dominant Western culture majority have been trying to do; i.e. one must avoid getting ‘caught up in’ the aberrant Western culture game of believing in ‘sorcery’ (the ‘double error’ of language and grammar;

They are playing a game.  They are playing at not playing a game.  If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me.  I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game.”  – R.D. Laing

 

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FOOTNOTES: The following 3 footnotes refer to how language and grammar induces aberrant understanding (and behaviour) in the Western culture social dynamic.

 

[1]   The ‘double error’ origins of ‘sorcery’ in Western culture

“Our judgement has us conclude that every change must have an author”;–but this conclusion is already mythology: it separates that which effects from the effecting. If I say “lightning flashes,” I have posited the flash once as an activity and a second time as a subject, and thus added to the event a being that is not one with the event but is rather fixed, “is” and does not “become.”–To regard an event as an “effecting,” and this as being, that is the double error, or interpretation, of which we are guilty.” – Nietzsche, ‘Will to Power’, 531

“In its origin language belongs in the age of the most rudimentary form of psychology. We enter a realm of crude fetishism when we summon before consciousness the basic presuppositions of the metaphysics of language, in plain talk, the presuppositions of reason. Everywhere it sees a doer and doing; it believes in will as the cause; it believes in the ego, in the ego as being, in the ego as substance, and it projects this faith in the ego-substance upon all things — only thereby does it first create the concept of “thing.” Everywhere “being” is projected by thought, pushed underneath, as the cause; the concept of being follows, and is a derivative of, the concept of ego. In the beginning there is that great calamity of an error that the will is something which is effective, that will is a faculty. Today we know that it is only a word.” – Nietzsche, ‘Twilight of the Idols’

[2] Why we can’t stop thinking in terms of sorcerers, as in the example of Robin Hood being the source of missing grain from the King’s granary, and John Wilkes Booth as the source of Lincoln’s death;

“A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.”  Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

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“In the book ‘Causality and Chance in Modern Physics’ Bohm argued that the way science viewed causality was also much too limited. Most effects were thought of as having only one or several causes. However, Bohm felt that an effect could have an infinite number of causes. For example, if you asked someone what caused Abraham Lincoln’s death, they might answer that it was the bullet in John Wilkes Booth’s gun. But a complete list of all the causes that contributed to Lincoln’s death would have to include all of the events that led to the development of the gun, all of the factors that caused Booth to want to kill Lincoln, all of the steps in the evolution of the human race that allowed for the development of a hand capable of holding a gun, and so on, and so on. Bohm conceded that most of the time one could ignore the vast cascade of causes that had led to any given effect, but he still felt it was important for scientists to remember that no single cause-and-effect relationship was ever really separate from the universe as a whole.”  –The Holographic Universe: The Revolutionary Theory of Reality: Michael Talbot:

 

[3] Our natural condition is of sensory experience-based awareness of our inclusion in the transforming relational continuum is available to us in prelingual infancy and throughout life.  This sensory experience informed understanding never ‘leaves us’ but is, in the psyche, ‘buried beneath’ the intellectual activity and accumulating intellectual ‘knowledge deposits’ so that while, as Heraclitus says; “the knowledge of many things does not teach understanding”, relational experience based understanding has, through our Western culture participation, been buried beneath layers of intellectual knowledge based overburden.

To the infant’s developing mind, topology comes before geometry. In general, deeper and more fundamental logical operations are developed earlier than more specific rules and applications. The history of mathematics, which is generally taken as a process of moving towards deeper and more general levels of thought, could also be thought of as a process of excavation which attempts to uncover the earliest operations of thought in infancy. According to this argument, the very first operations exist at a pre-conscious level [i.e. ‘pre-intellectualizing’ level in the conscious and intuitive infant] so that the more fundamental a logical operation happens to be, the earlier it was developed by the infant and the deeper it has become buried in the mind.” – F. David Peat,

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