Where Are We Coming From?

 

 

“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

 

 

 

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

I can’t escape from this persisting imperative that is living inside me, or am I living inside of it, … to try to ‘remind’ others of an important, invisible but intuitable ‘reality’ beyond the intellectual constructs of language, which, while it can’t be articulated, is the actual physical reality of our natural experience. I know that sounds crazy, and it seems crazy, but it is not letting me off the hook, just because it seems crazy.

I am trying to do this ‘reminding’ because it seems to me that we are all playing a game, but the rules of the game are that we can’t openly admit we are playing it, and if we break the rules and openly declare it, then we will be punished for it, for being disrespectful of those who are still playing the game. It is like we have forgotten that we are playing this game and now we are insulted if someone reminds us that we are.

But what right have I be a whistleblower? Whistleblowers are punished, that is evident, because when the games that are being played have become the norm that everyone pretends not to see so as to avoid ‘causing a disturbance’, whistleblowing is an attack against ‘normalcy’; i.e. it is misanthropic.

R.D. Laing captured this peculiar situation in his book ‘Knots’ which a friend gave me a copy of back in the sixties; … a friend who was presumably well ahead of me in her philosophical investigations and could see ‘what I was working towards’ in mine.

Anyhow, I can’t let myself ramble, yet what I have to say can’t be said. So I am going to ‘speak out’ anyhow, because there is a lot riding on this in terms of unintended infusing of confusion and incoherence into the social-environmental dynamic. I have to start with a qualification like Heraclitus did: “Listening not to me but to the Logos, it is wise to agree that one is all and all is one.” What is intended is that it is impossible to share our complex physical experience with other people, but we can use language to hopefully put another person into position to recall the same, or similar, inherently inarticulable experience.

What is involved is ‘the limitations of language’ and the fact that ‘language shapes ‘reality’; i.e. language allows us to construct an ‘operative reality’ which we use to direct our behaviour; e.g. constructs like ‘subject-verb-predicate’, ‘Katrina ravages New Orleans’, ‘the farmer produces wheat’, ‘the U.S. invades Iraq’ are intellectual abstractions that furnish us with an ‘operative reality’ that is nothing like the physical reality of our natural experience [e.g. we live within a relational activity continuum in which local jumpstart authoring of action is impossible regardless of what ‘subject-verb-object RE-presentations’ of science and logical reasoning impart to our intellectual ‘worldview’ constructions.]

“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

Wittgenstein, in ‘Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus’, makes the point that there is much in the physical reality of our natural experience that cannot possible ‘make it’ into the operative reality of our noun-and-verb Indo-European/Scientific language-and-grammar;

 

“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

 

Wittgenstein, in ‘Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus’, makes the point that there is much in the physical reality of our natural experience that cannot possible ‘make it’ into the operative reality of our noun-and-verb Indo-European/Scientific language-and-grammar;

There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical. (6.522)

 

 

My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) (6.54)

In understanding the world as a transforming relational activity continuum which includes ourselves, the observer/experient as a relational form within the relational activity continuum, we are clearly not in a position to articulate ‘what we are really experience’ in terms of ‘what is going on out there’ as if it is separate from us and in terms of ‘independent things out there’ and ‘their’ operations and interactions.  Mind you, things get a lot crisper and clearer if we use language and grammar to define the relational forms as things-in-themselves that jumpstart cause-and-effect results, and that ‘crystal clear’ articulation (‘is’ or ‘is not’, … ‘did’ or ‘did not’, ‘guilty’ or ‘innocent’, ‘good’ or ‘evil’) based on binary logical judgements gives us the ‘closure’ that we [Western culture raised people] seem to need. BUT should we make science and reason the ‘base case’ and assume that it is a good approximation of physical phenomena, or should we assumed that the physical phenomena of nature are the ‘base case’ and assume that science and reason ‘dumb us down’ by putting us into a simplified ‘operative reality’ that is dropping out the most essential, but inarticulable aspects of the physical reality of our natural experience?  Evidently, Wittgenstein, like Mach, was giving warning of the latter;

“For the crystalline purity of logic was, of course, not a result of investigation: it was a requirement. … The preconceived idea of crystalline purity can only be removed by turning our whole examination around. (One might say: the axis of reference of our examination must be rotated, but about the fixed point of our real need.)” – Wittgenstein, ‘Philosophical Investigations’, 107-108

Hopefully, then, I will be saying things that will facilitate your recall of your own complex experience, that gets you to the point where you are understanding what I am ‘pointing to’, but which is not there in the explicit content of my inherently limited-by-language statements.

Here is an example that lies at the core of what I am trying to share;

In psychology, there are debates over whether we have a ‘character’ composed of ‘traits’ that asserts and persists even as we find ourselves in very different situations, so that our behaviour is ‘intentionalist’ (coming inside-outwardly from our character-traits). ‘Situationism’ sees it differently; i.e. our character is outside-inwardly shaped from the relational situations we find ourselves included in.   Milgram’s ‘obedience to authority’ experiment, Zimbardo’s ‘prisoner’ experiment, the ‘Stockholm Syndrome’ in hostage situations etc. suggests that ‘situationism’ prevails over ‘intentionalism’.

There is no such thing as ‘intention’ in the physical reality of our natural experience. ‘Intention’ comes from ‘dualism’, the concept that has been built into Darwinism (and its cohort ‘social darwinism’) whereby we conceive of the ‘inhabitant’ as split apart from the ‘habitat’ so that we (Western society) believes that man is not included in nature but is in a ‘struggle with nature’ animated by his ‘intention’ to survive which breaks down into his intention to acquire food, clothing and shelter. Only when we conceive of man as an ‘independent system’ residing, operating and interacting in a habitat that is notionally ‘independent’ of the inhabitants that reside, operate and interact within it, do we get all of this intellectual rhetoric about the ‘intention’ to survive and to acquire food, clothing and shelter.

Such ‘intentionalist’ intellectual concepts come from the subject-verb-predicate constructs of noun-and-verb language and grammar. For organisms without language, for infant-organisms in their pre-lingual phase, and for indigenous peoples with flow-based languages, ‘intention’ does not exist; i.e. it is a concept that arises from language-based RE-presentation; i.e. of man as an independent system, … a portrait of man that requires an answer to the question: “if man is independent of the habitat he is situated in, … what sort of influence animates his behaviour?”. ‘Intention’ is the answer to a question that arises from noun-and-verb intellectual constructs that depict man as ‘independent’ of the habitat he reside, operates and interacts within. That is ‘intention’ arises from ‘dualism’ aka ‘inhabitant-habitat-independence’.

As John Lennon observes;

“Life is something that happens to us while we are busy making other plans”.

Or, in the same vein;

“The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men Gang aft agley, …” – Robert Burns, ‘Tae a Moose’ (on accidentally destroying a mouse’s nest with his plough)

Non-dualism or ‘situationism’ accords with Lev Vygotsky’s (the ‘father of Russian psychology’s) finding that ‘spontaneous (situational) concept formation’ prevails over ‘structured (intentional) concept formation’ in a child’s development.

In fact, the common understanding, influenced by Piaget (whom Vygotsky disagreed with), is that we have two separate modes of concept formation, ‘spontaneous’ (situational) and ‘structured’ (intentional) and that intentional concept formation prevails over situational concept formation. Vygotsky believed that Piaget (and thus mainstream Western thinking) had it wrong, … that there was only one process of concept formation with two reciprocally complementary aspects (situational and intentional) and that ‘situational’ was in a natural precedence over ‘intentional’.

 

For example, the relational processes of nature are circular, in the manner of a convection cell wherein the [situational] outside-inward orchestrating, many-to-one converging ‘sink’ influence is reciprocally complementary to the [intentional] inside-outward asserting one-to-many diverging ‘source’ action.   Together, the reciprocally complementing convergence and divergence [reception and transmission] constitute circular flow aka ‘the convection cell’ which seems to our sight and touch perceptions as a local ‘thing-in-itself’ but which is, in physical reality, a relational feature within a transforming relational activity continuum.

 

To cut to the quick, Vygotsky’s view which puts ‘situational’ in precedence over ‘intentional’ conflicts with the notion that our character is constituted by internal ‘traits’, and instead accords with the ‘situationist’ view in the ‘prisoner’ experiment, that ‘who we are’ and ‘how we see the world’ (our ‘operative reality’) is continually evolving in conjunction with the continually evolving situations we find ourselves in and that, therefore, our ‘self’ has no persisting core of character traits that continue to define it even as the situations we find ourselves in are continually changing. This ‘situationist’ understanding recalls Heraclitus statement;

 

“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” – Heraclitus

 

In support of this view is the situationist contention that social relations are the primary source of the ‘spiritual distress’ we call ‘mental illness’, as in ‘The Social Creation of Mental Illness’ by Raymond Cochrane and ‘The Myth of Mental Illness’ by Thomas Szasz, … ‘The Politics of Experience’ by Ronald D. Laing etc.   Yes, with our modern investigative technologies that can probe the finely detailed depths of our biochemistry and biophysics, we can prove that the symptoms of mental illness correlate with anomalies in our internal biochemical and biophysical dynamics.

 

However, these internal anomalies do not speak to their ‘origin’ any more than in the case where a detailed investigation of anomalous internal processes in storm-cells in the atmosphere exposes an ‘abnormal’ volatility of evaporation and condensation cycles and associated thermal energy cycling correlative with the releasing of kinetic energy (increasing pressure) and its recapture in potential energy (reducing pressure). That is, there is sufficient detailed evidence in their internal physics and thermodynamics to explain storm-cells.  However, the astute observer will notice the correlation between seasonal solar irradiance cycles and the incidence and severity of storm-cells, informing us that storm-cells are an activity within the relational activity continuum; i.e. the relational dynamics of the activity continuum that the cells are included in, are the source, not only of the behaviour of the cells, but of the cells themselves.

 

One may recognize in this structure, the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson in ‘The Method of Nature’, where he points to the inherent continuum of relational activity that permeates the ‘apparently static’ forms;

 

 

 

“The method of nature: who could ever analyze it? That rushing stream will not stop to be observed. We can never surprise nature in a corner; never find the end of a thread; never tell where to set the first stone. The bird hastens to lay her egg: the egg hastens to be a bird. The wholeness we admire in the order of the world, is the result of infinite distribution. Its smoothness is the smoothness of the pitch of the cataract. Its permanence is a perpetual inchoation. Every natural fact is an emanation, and that from which it emanates is an emanation also, and from every emanation is a new emanation. If anything could stand still, it would be crushed and dissipated by the torrent it resisted, and if it were a mind, would be crazed; as insane persons are those who hold fast to one thought, and do not flow with the course of nature. Not the cause, but an ever novel effect, nature descends always from above. It is unbroken obedience. The beauty of these fair objects is imported into them from a metaphysical and eternal spring. In all animal and vegetable forms, the physiologist concedes that no chemistry, no mechanics, can account for the facts, but a mysterious principle of life must be assumed, which not only inhabits the organ, but makes the organ.”  –Emerson, ‘The Method of Nature

 

This ‘mystery’ that Emerson is talking about that lies beneath the local ‘facts’ is the same ‘mystic’ that appears in Wittgenstein’s remark, that is beyond ‘articulation’ since it is like a ‘field’.   The ‘fields’ of gravity and electromagnetism (including thermal fields) are ‘everywhere at the same time’. Their influence is relational, meaning ‘non-local’, ‘non-visible’ and ‘non-material’.   You may use a sophisticated measurement instrument to detect an eddy current in a metallic object and thus conclude that ‘there is a current, there, in the metal object’, … but its source is not local, its source is ‘everywhere at the same time’ and it pervades the observer and his measuring instruments. It is, as Lamarck suggests, the source of the fundamental ‘cells’ in the organism; i.e. these ‘field influences’ that are the source of everything are ‘les fluides incontenables’, ‘fluids which can contain but which cannot themselves be contained’, … which animate ‘les fluides contenables’, ‘fluids saturated with minerals that can be contained’. This is the basis for organic life in Lamarck’s theory [as also in the evolutionary theory of Nietzsche, Rolf, Roux and Rüdimeyer, eclipsed by the mechanistic theory of Darwin].

There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical. (6.522)

However, the path of the mainstream Western world-view is the ‘mechanical’ path which assumes the existence of ‘independent material being’ as we get when we ‘take literally’ the subject-verb-predicate intellectual RE-presentations of our noun-and-verb Indo-European/Scientific language-and-grammar.   Once we impute independent ‘being’ to an ‘organism’, we are forced to explain its development and behaviour by way of ‘analytical inquiry’ which assumes that this ‘independent being’, this ‘whole material object or organism’ is what it is and does what it does, due to the dynamics of its internal components and processes. There is no ‘situational sourcing’ here, only ‘intentional sourcing’.   This is the ‘Newtonian mechanical’ world view, a synthetic [idealization-based] intellectual paradigm that Mach and others are warning us of, … “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.”

The inarticulable implications of the finding that situationism prevails over intentionalism, are what I am trying to share. Our common belief is that our character is made up of interior traits that ‘change over time’ with continuing ‘experience’, much like mountains erode over time and become rounder and flatter. But that is not the physical reality of our natural experience; i.e. mountains and valleys are reciprocally complementary aspects of the continually transforming relational terrain so that if material falls from the mountain into the valley putting a dent in the mountain, this is at the same time, partially filling the valley. These are not two separate processes but one process, … that of transformation of a relational space. The notion that the mountain ‘gives’ and the valley ‘receives’ is a tautology, there is only one terrain which manifests as peaks and valleys, which, like the crests and troughs of ocean waves, are a ‘coincidentia oppositorum’, … ‘opposites in union’ which resolve in harmony, as in Heraclitean philosophy;

“The name of the bow (biós) is life (bíos), but its work is death.

 

 

 

All things come into being by conflict of opposites, and the sum of things (τὰ ὅλα ta hola, “the whole”) flows like a stream.

 

 

In the bow metaphor Heraclitus compares the resultant to a strung bow held in shape by an equilibrium of the string tension and spring action of the bow.

 

 

There is a harmony in the bending back (παλίντροπος palintropos) as in the case of the bow and the lyre.”

This is the same relational structure that Schroedinger speaks of in his modern physics based essay; ‘What is Life?’ The relational activity continuum [Brahman] and the relation features [Atmen], are a coincidentia oppositorum, ‘opposites in union’.   The relational activity continuum is primary, it is the field of relational influence that provides the ‘spring tension’ that is the source of the ‘spring action’.   The ‘spring actions’ show up as local relational forms within the field of spring tension.   In modern physics terms;

 

“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

 

That is, the relational forms are ‘pull outs’ from the relational activity continuum. The world is only given once as a relational activity continuum, thus the relational forms are features of the relational activity continuum that ‘appear’ to us as independent ‘particles’.

 

People who participated in the situationism experiments [Zimbardo’s ‘Prisoner’ experiment and Milgram’s ‘obedience to authority’ experiment] were shocked to discover this about themselves; i.e. that their ‘situationist character’ was in precedence over their ‘intentionalist character’ i.e. that their character was firstly shaped by the situation they were in and was only secondarily shaped by internal character traits aka ‘intentionalism’. The path of situationism is paved with castoff ‘intentions’ [loyalty to notional ‘internal character traits’ that we purport to define ‘who we are’.].   The researchers who conducted these experiments, which was a big ‘wake-up call’ those who participated in them, were anxious to share this understanding with as many people as they could because it conflicts with our traditional (Western acculturated) view of our ‘self’, the ‘world’ and our ‘operative reality’ thereof, which we use to direct our behaviour, the ‘errors’ in such ‘operative reality’ giving us an exposure to infuse confusion and incoherence into the social dynamic.

 

To become aware that ‘who we are’ evolves as the relational situation we are in evolves is a spooky feeling that was felt by the participants in the situationism experiments. The solid sense of ‘I would never have done that’, in the case of common abusive behaviours towards Jews in Nazi Germany, or the torture of prisoners in Guantanamo, collapses [or is at least seriously eroded] for people who have been participants in these experiments.

 

It is our Western ethic ‘to be loyal’ to our family, community, nation, roots; i.e. to be loyal to our ‘self’ seen as the product of our race and nation, … to carry the principles and intentions of our ‘root situations’ within us, as our self-defining internal character traits, even as we move ever deeper into the dark? heart of new situations dominated by other races and nations, … but is this wise?   If we instead ground ourselves in the understanding that we are all included in one big family, the different parts of the family and the different individuals included that are included in the parts being understood as spring actions that arise and persist because of all-including spring-tensions [the relational influence that is immanent in the relational activity continuum], then it doesn’t make sense to be loyal to our differences to the point that we ‘go to war’ against those ‘different others’, as if we were all ‘independent beings’ in a ‘survival of the fittest’ competition the end-game of which is to determine who shall rule the earth.

 

Here I am reminded of this amazing coincidence where one of the world’s greatest philosophers, Ludwig Wittgenstein, who committed to honest acceptance of the relational situation one found oneself in, and one of the world’s greatest fascists, Adolph Hitler, who committed to absolute loyalty to one’s own inner-circle, happened to go to the same elementary school together in Linz, Austria;

 

When the kids ‘got in trouble’, Wittgenstein would openly and honestly ‘try to work it out’ while Hitler had only the greatest disdain for those who broke the commitment of loyalty to the ‘inner circle’.

 

So, what I am writing about is this thing that cannot be directly articulated that concerns ‘who we are’ and the common but mistaken view we have of ourselves as someone with persisting internal character traits that determine who we are, … that persist regardless of the new situations we find ourselves in, and that we are loyal to in spite of relational influences tending to turn us into an ‘ugh’ ‘chameleon’.   The ‘shock’ of those participating in the experiments of ‘situational psychology’, that they were, at the base of it, ‘chameleons’, … ‘products of the situational relational dynamics we find ourselves in’, … is what this essay seeks to explore and expose.

 

Where we find ourselves today, in our globally dominating ‘Western’ society, is ‘playing a game’, the rules the game prohibiting open disclosure that we are playing a game, so that those who overtly ‘own up’ to playing the game are punished for ‘blowing the whistle’.   The ‘game’ is to pretend that we have ‘roots’ that we must be loyal to, whose principles and traits constitute the intentions behind our actions, … that we are ‘coming from’ some noble and righteous traits that we must be loyal to, … in spite of the pressures all around us, inviting us to be reshaped by the relational influences that we are situationally included in.

 

This is the battle that is troubling us all, the battle for whether to put ‘situation’ before ‘intention’ or ‘intention’ before situation’ [the latter being the Western culturally accepted norm]. This is a battle that pivots from how we view our ‘self’ vis a vis ‘other’, and thus from how we constitute our ‘operative reality’.

 

Modern physics, with its Heraclitean spring-tension [field] and spring action [hitter] view, is telling us that Rumi had it right;

 

I, you, she, we. In the garden of mystic lovers these are not true distinctions. —Jelaluddin Rumi

 

As also did, Muhammed, who is said to have said; “It is only the lesser, outer jihad that is going on ‘against the demons in the world out there’, the greater, inner jihad is going on ‘against the demons in the world in here’.

Lesser outer jihad (al-jihad al-asghar); a military struggle, i.e. a holy war

 

 

Greater inner jihad (al-jihad al-akbar); the struggle of personal self-improvement against the self’s base desires

Muhammed seems to have been touting on the same theme as Christians, … not that it necessarily ‘took’ with the adherents of either;

‘Do you think I have come to bring peace on the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division.’ Luke 12:51 (those conquering their own demons will be divided from those who have not)

We feel ‘contention’ between ‘intentionalism’ [spring action] and ‘situationalism’ [spring tension], … influences that are, on the one hand, inviting us to accept that our ‘one-ness with the world’ is primary and that our separate ‘material aspect’ is only ‘apparent’.

 

“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

 

 

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

 

‘Love’ is our intuitive-awareness of our essential condition of ‘one-ness with everything’ which can be channelled through to us by an ‘other’.   A loving relation is a ‘wormhole’ that resolves the separation forming out of our intentionalism [spring action], our desire to be loyal to our ‘inner self or inner circle’, … that is in basic contention with our situationalism’ [spring tension], our desire to be ‘one’ with the situational relations we find ourselves included in; e.g. the Stockholm syndrome.

 

On the one hand, while we crave reunification with the ONE, we are also hanging on to our separate identity, our material self that we know ‘intellectually’ by way of superficial appearance. Meanwhile, our love-experience is intuitive; we can feel our inherent ‘one-with-everything’ self, but it is inarticulable. It our intuition of connectedness with the ALL of Nature is said to be why coyotes howl at the moon.

 

The ‘connectedness with the ALL’, .. ‘it is us’. As with the storm-cell in the relational activity continuum of atmosphere, so it is with us. The spring tension in the relational activity continuum is the source of the spring-action of us and all other relational forms. Our love thus does not depend on a requiting. We cannot say to our children, or to a partner; ‘I need to know if you love me too, if not, I will shut off my love for you.’ Love doesn’t work that way;

“… This longing you express IS the return message.’ The grief you cry out from draws you toward union. Your pure sadness that wants help is the secret cup. Listen to the moan of a dog for its master. That whining is the connection. There are love dogs no one knows the names of. Give your life to be one of them.” —Jelaluddin Rumi

Finally, in this prologue to the introduction to the essay, … my points are these;

 

1. Our culture, through our noun-verb-predicate RE-presentations, teaches us that we are ‘independent beings’ with our own internal process-driven and directed behaviours; i.e. our own internally sourced ‘character traits’ and ‘intentions’. This is a mistake, a mistake that is the source of confusion and incoherence in our social dynamic.

 

2. Our situationist aspect is primary and our ‘intentionalist’ aspect is secondary; i.e. it is ‘appearance’ that flips this and gives us an upside-down ‘operative reality’ that we confuse for the physical reality of our natural experience. The relational dynamics of the oasis and the fertile valley open up nurturing niches for us to ‘dock into’, spring tensions that pull forth spring actions from settlers. An entire community/ecosystem can develop this way, without any ‘intention’ and without everyone ‘speaking the same language’ [communities form without dependence on intellectual operations]. But the analytical inquiry skills of intellection will give RE-present this, in terms of independent ‘beings’ and ‘what these independent beings are doing’ so that it makes it appear as if the community dynamic is driven by ‘intentions’; i.e. as if communities are spawned by groups that roam around with the intention to ‘form communities’; “Ok, everbody, we have taken a straw vote and the ayes have it. We will form a community right here, right now.”

 

3. As relational entities, unique, by way of our unique situational inclusion in the relational activity continuum, we are spring actions pulled into action by spring tensions. The intellectual conception of our ‘independent being’ is noun-verb-predicate based intellectual ‘idealization’ that has no place in the physical reality of our natural experience [which informs our intellect by way of our experience-based intuition].

 

4. ‘Science’ and ‘reason’ (the logical propositions of intellection) are based on simplified conceptual RE-presentations that deliver ‘economy of thought’ and which furnish an ‘operative reality’ but this science and reason based ‘operative reality’ is being confused for ‘reality’ and this is the source of confusion and incoherence in our social dynamics. We are not heeding warnings such as Mach’s;

 

“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

 

5. This essay is a ‘re-broadcast’ of warnings that have been given by Mach, Nietzsche, Schroedinger, Bohm and others. The warnings are not like religious doctrine that teach what moral and ethical principles that must be followed; … the warnings do not deliver any instructions as to ‘what we must do’, … they are warnings about the exposure that each of us has, to misconstrue our sense of ‘who we are’ and what ‘reality is’, based on literal acceptance of the noun-verb-predicate intellectual RE-presentations of language-and-grammar. The physical reality of our natural experience is NOT articulable. It is beyond language.

 

We can and cannot construct an operative view of self and an operative reality based on language. ‘We can’ and ‘we do’ construct ‘something’ that serves as a view of self [the intentionalist independent being that is the causal agent of material results] and serves as an operative reality [a world of independent material objects/organisms with independent process driven and directed development and behaviour that reside, operate and inhabit a habitat that is notionally independent of the inhabitants that reside, operate and inhabit it].   In other words, the operative reality and notional ‘self’ that the noun-verb-predicate idealized intellectual RE-presentations of language serve up for ‘self’ and ‘reality’ ARE NOTHING LIKE THE PHYSICAL REALITY OF OUR NATURAL EXPERIENCE.

 

This situation sets up conflict between the operative reality of our language-based intellectualizing and the physical reality of our natural experience. The tragedy of our modern society is that it has become popular, to put our intellectual operative reality into an unnatural precedence over our experience-based intuition.   This hijacking of our intuition by science and reason is infusing confusion and incoherence into the modern global social dynamic, with the support of Western academia, politics, commerce and justice.

 

* * *

 

 

Western Society: Intuition Hijacked by Science and Reason

My ‘travels’ into the underworld that resides beneath the foundations of science and [intellectual] reason, makes clear to me that ‘science’ and ‘reason’ are ‘dumbing us down’ and by so doing, infusing confusion and incoherence into the global social dynamic.

 

Intuition, also known as ‘instinct’ is something we are born with and which we use without yet having a language to ‘reason with’, or to develop scientific theories and predictions.   Intuition is something we are born with, which equips us to move through the stages of concept formation, from ‘gestures for ourselves’ through ‘gestures for others’ to ‘gestures in themselves’ (abstractions of experience). Understanding that is more relational and complex in the not-yet-individuated infant is the ground from which the simpler logic of adult understanding is extracted;

 

“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, ‘Mathematics and the Language of Nature’

 

The fact that the child’s intuitive understanding powers are at its peak when the child has not yet learned to use his intellect to make the ‘self-other-split’ (subject-object-split) to construct an ‘objective world out there’; i.e. while he/she is still ‘one-with-everything’, recalls the concept of ‘gnosis’.

 

Where this thread of investigation leads is to the intuition that ‘science and reason’ have dropped out something fundamentally important. To put this into modern physics terms, the tools of ‘science and reason’ that are used to construct a pervasive, popular ‘operative reality’ have ignored the natural primacy of ‘relations’. The relational world is only ONE [the world is only given once, as a transforming relational activity continuum] and there is no split between ‘self’ and ‘other’, nor between ‘inhabitant’ and ‘habitat’, not in the physical reality of our natural experience [which intellectual reasoning seems to obscure].

 

In the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, the same ‘relations-first’ principles are found as are also found in indigenous aboriginal belief traditions and in the relational fields that are ‘everywhere at the same time’ of modern physics. Common to these views is that the creative sourcing of the world is relational influence that is non-local, non-visible, non-material and ‘everywhere at the same time’ [i.e. the creative sourcing is not a one-sided all-hitting, no-fielding process that ‘delivers new results’, the old goes out together with the arrival of the new; i.e. the creative sourcing is the relational influence that is immanent in the transforming relational activity continuum, ‘world given only once’;

 

“What you look forward to has already come, but you do not recognize it…the Kingdom of the Father is spread out on the earth, but men do not see it.”

 

 

 

“Again when Jesus saw infants being nursed by their mothers he said, “These infants being suckled are like those entering the Kingdom.” And the disciples asked, “Shall we, then, as little children, enter the Kingdom?” He answered them, “When you make two one, and when you make the inside the outside and the outside the inside, and the above like the below, and when you make the male and female one and the same…then you will enter (the Kingdom).” —

 

As in David Peat’s ‘Mathematics and the Language of Nature’, there is the suggestion that we move from a more physically real understanding, in infancy, to a kind of dumbed-down understanding based on the RE-presentations of language and intellection which, as Mach says, deliver ‘economy of thought’ but which, at the same time, should in no way be considered as addressing the basis of the real world. In other words, science and reason give us a simplified ‘operative reality’ which is radically incomplete with respect to the physical reality of our natural experience. As Mach says

 

“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

 

In the Gnostic view [I am not talking about ‘buying in’ to a full suite of religious beliefs, I am speaking to variations in historical understanding of concepts of space, time, matter, and field (relational influence)], the impression is that ‘binary logic’ has falsely eclipsed our more comprehensive relational understanding. This echoes David Peat’s [and Piaget’s] finding;

 

“To the infant’s developing mind, topology comes before geometry”.

 

Topology is an ‘entrée’ into ‘4-space’ where ‘relations’ are in precedence over ‘objects’. For example, the basic concepts in geometry are ‘forms-in-themselves’ so that we can ‘fit them’ to the relational forms of physical phenomena as we fit a ‘doughnut’ form to a ‘convection cell’ and thereby synthetically, intellectually, isolate an activity within an unbounded relational activity continuum. The storm-cell ‘Katrina’ with its central ‘eye’ or ‘doughnut hole’ can be understood in two ways; (a) relationally, as an activity within the overall celestial dynamic wherein solar irradiation of the ocean’s surface induces rising air currents that form the ‘eye’ and move on, cooling and diverging in the upper atmosphere, descending back down and converge again, taking on heat as they flow back into the ‘eye’ and rise again, … in a circular (toroidal) flow pattern that, while it may ‘present’ as a toroid, is a purely relational flow-feature, … and, (b) in the non-relational, objectified terms of an independent local system, by intellectually using geometry to think of the storm-cell as a ‘thing-in-itself’, a solid, closed-form ‘doughnut’ aka ‘cell’ that we say ‘is rotating’ [implying absolute movement] and ‘is moving’ and ‘is ravaging New Orleans’; i.e. we intellectually reduce a purely relational activity within a transforming relational activity continuum, to a notional ‘independent system’ that notionally ‘authors its own development and behaviour’, thanks to thought-and-language constructs based on noun-verb-predicate RE-presentations.

 

In our development from infants to adults, we [I am speaking of Western society which arises from using noun-verb-predicate RE-presentations which make possible this intellectual reduction that is the foundation of science and the binary reasoning that goes with it] construct an ‘intellectual operative reality’ which is greatly simplified (synthetically de-complexified by the removal of all-with-all relational interdependencies) from the physical reality of our natural experience, the latter being the only reality available to the infant. It is the introduction of binary logic that makes this synthetic de-complexification possible; e.g. the substituting of the ‘doughnut’ that is signified by a noun-subject that is then used to inflects verbs to produce predicative results for the relational activity within the relational activity continuum.

 

Binary logic is idealization used in the intellectual construction of Western society’s ‘operative reality’. While this ‘operative reality’ is a convenient tool because of the ‘economy of thought’ it delivers, it is in no way equivalent to the physical reality of our natural experience, and to confuse this ‘intellectual operative reality’ for the relational physical reality of our natural experience, has been said to be ‘man’s fall’. Ancient writings speak of this binary logic that splits apart that which is inherently a ‘unum’, coming into use through the moral judging of ‘good’ and ‘evil’;

 

In Genesis 2:9 we are told of two trees in Paradise, the tree of life, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. These fit well into the themes of Thomas; good and evil are two opposites, and life is a single thing, a unity. By eating of the tree of two things, Good and Evil, Adam and Eve are eventually cast out of Paradise.”

 

One might interpret this thus; We are Brahman (the eternal One-ness of the transforming relational activity continuum) at the same time as we are Atman, a transient relational form that gathers within Brahman and which will again be regathered in Brahman. By our judging of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ and holding ourselves to be ‘good’, we split apart ‘self’ and ‘other’ which at the same time, splits us out of the unum (there is no unum once we divide self from other), in which case we can no longer be Brahman at the same time as Atman; i.e. ‘we are cast out of paradise’.

 

Again, this is not an appeal to ‘buy in’ to a suite of religious beliefs, it is part of my own ‘travels’ into the underpinnings of modern thought and its regard for ‘science and reason’ which my intuition informs me, as also Nietzsche’s, is being put into an unnatural precedence over ‘intuition’, the understanding that comes to us directly from being included [uniquely and situationally] in the world as given only once, as a transforming relational activity continuum.

 

We could therefore say that our ‘faith’ in science and reason is what is keeping us exiled from paradise, or in Schroedinger’s Advaita Vedanta terminology, our belief in binary logical ‘truths’ and thus the ‘splitting apart of self-and-other’ make it impossible for us to be in Brahman (all things are one) at the same time as Atman.

 

The conjecture is, that we start off, as infants, with raw, organic understanding that is in unmediated communion with the One-ness (Brahman) which transcends what we later reduce it to with the tools of language and intellect, which incorporate ‘binary logic’ into our ‘operative reality’ as in the geometry-supported notion of ‘being’ or ‘thing-in-itselfness’. It is binary logic that allows us to make an ‘absolute split’ between ‘self’ and ‘other’ and between ‘inhabitant and habitat’ in contradiction to our intuition and in contradiction to the ‘relations-first’ findings of modern physics; e.g. there is no absolute separation between our ‘inside’ and ‘outside’.

 

As R.D. Laing captures this relational worldview; “The life that we are reaching out to grasp is the ‘we’ who are reaching out to grasp it”. This understanding, conformant with the relational space of modern physics, wherein ‘Atman’ is, at the same time ‘Brahman’ [as in Erwin Schroedinger’s ‘What is Life?’], is the so-called ‘gnosis’ that we are ‘weaned out of’ by noun-and-verb Indo-European/Scientific language-and-grammar, and which we have great difficulty ‘getting back into’. What has been ‘weaned out of us’ by socialization/education wherein we are taught how to enter into an ‘intellectual operative reality’ based on ‘independently-existing material objects/organisms’ and ‘what these things do’ [i.e. what we RE-present them as doing when we impute noun-subject status to them and have them inflect verbs], is the inherent primacy of ‘field’ [relational influence that is ‘everywhere at the same time’].   But ‘field’ is the ‘one-with-everything’ reality, and it has been called ‘spirituality’ or ‘the Great Mystery’ by indigenous aboriginal peoples.

 

1. Richard Atleo aka Umeek, a hereditary chief of the Nuu-chah-nulth [Nootka] people, in his book, ‘Tsawalk’, uses the same relational structuring [articulated with different terminology] as Erwin Schroedinger does in modern physics, in observing;

 

“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.”

 

One can compare this to the views of the modern-physics researchers;

 

“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

 

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

 

Intuitively, we are spiritual people, we understand we are included in a transforming relational activity continuum; i.e. understand that relational dynamics are in a natural precedence over material dynamics and that our use of language and intellection to RE-CAST the dynamics we observe and experience in terms of independent-material-things-and-what-they-do [thanks to noun-and-verb language], aka ‘science’ and ‘intellectual reason’, is something far less than the physical reality of our natural, relational, experience.

 

Why do we relegate this deeper intuitive understanding to second class status beneath ‘science’ and ‘reason’?   Is it impossible to pull it back out to the surface and restore it to its natural precedence? Part of the problem, it appears, is that we have used ‘science’ and ‘reason’ to understand ‘our self’, or at least to provide ourselves with an intellectual model of our ‘self’ as an ‘independent reason-driven system’ whose development and behaviour, so science says, is fully and solely internal process driven [biophysics and biochemistry driven].

 

Science and intellectual reason further support the notion that we reside, operate and interact within a habitat that is independent of the inhabitants that reside, operate and interact within it, a synthetic reality that is in direct contradiction to the findings of modern physics which understand that the world is given only once, as a transforming relational activity continuum, in which we are to the world, as we understand it in our infancy, as an undivided self. This pre-lingual understanding that we have buried beneath layers of intellectual simplification, has not ‘been erased’; … it’s continuing presence is what we call ‘intuition’ which is understanding in which ‘relations’ [as in ‘field’ aka ‘spirituality’] are still in a natural precedence over intellectual ‘reason’ based in noun-verb-predicate constructs.

 

I am not stepping outside of ‘modern physics’ to speak of ‘field’ as being ‘everywhere at the same time’ and being ‘the source of all things’, as affirmed by Schroedinger, Bohm, Faraday, Mach, Poincaré, Nietzsche and others, so that there is clearly a mapping between what others refer to this ‘deeper knowing’ as; e.g. ‘The Great Spirit’, ‘The Kingdom of God’, ‘The Tao’; e.g. the following description of ‘gnosis’;

 

“Here, as in Luke 17:20, the Kingdom of God is said to be an interior state; “It’s within you,” Luke says. And here it says, “It’s inside you but it’s also outside of you.” It’s like a state of consciousness. It’s hard to describe. But the Kingdom of God here is something that you can enter when you attain gnosis, which means knowledge. But it doesn’t mean intellectual knowledge. The Greeks had two words for knowledge. One is intellectual knowledge, like the knowledge of physics or something like that. But this gnosis is personal, like “I know that person, or do you know so and so.” So this gnosis is self-knowledge; you could call it insight [or ‘intuition’]. It’s a question of knowing who you really are, not at the ordinary level of your name and your social class or your position. But knowing your self at a deep level. The secret of gnosis is that when you know yourself at that level you will also come to know God, because you will discover that the divine is within you.”

 

What I am sharing here is what I would call ‘intellectual travels’ or ‘intellectual adventures’ and these go to places [e.g. philosophical investigations] where many have visited, but the ‘message’ in this collection of travels is not in the sum of the parts but is relationally encoded in each part (as in a hologram). This ‘relational mode of understanding’ will be discussed shortly, but for now, the point is that there is one question which all of the parts are incomplete answers to, so that the answers, together, resolve the question. In a ‘talking circle’ where each person shares his experiences, the question whose resolution is continuously improved is ‘what is the nature of the unfolding physical reality we are currently included in?’ This question is ‘imaged’ by the constructive interference of multiple observations and experiences brought into confluent mutual relation, the coherency in this relational connecting being the source of insight.

 

Relational imaging as a mode of sharing understanding is described by Charles Kahn in ‘The Art and Thought of Heraclitus’ as a combination of intentional redundancy (linguistic density) and linguistic resonance, akin to Wittgenstein’s approach to getting to the ‘synoptic view’ through ‘repeated surveying of the connections’;

linguistic density: a multiplicity of ideas are expressed in a single, ambiguous word or phrase;

 

 

resonance: a single verbal theme or image is echoed from one text to another, so that their meaning is enriched when they are understood together;

This travelogue has been compiled with ‘relational understanding’, as just described, as the intended mode of conveyance. In some sense, there is ‘art’ in the compilation which may or may not be tuned into. It is like seeing a 3D image of a dinosaur by staring absent mindedly (desirelessly) at scratchings (diffraction patterns) on the flat expanse of a 2D magazine page (hologram). There is no way to deliberately and purposefully make the 3D holographic image show itself, one has to instead let the disparate inputs ‘image’ [by relational constructive interference] on their own, so to speak.

 

In the same sense as Heraclitus, I am not asking for anyone to ‘believe me’, all I am suggesting is;

 

“Listening not to me but to the Logos [the ‘field of influence that steers all into all’], it is wise to agree that one is all and all is one.” – Heraclitus

 

That is, one can check with one’s own intuition as to whether there is sense/meaning in the conjecture that the world is a transforming relational activity continuum and that our intellectual RE-presentation of the world in terms of ‘independent material objects and organisms’ that are causally responsible for the world dynamic, constitutes an intellectually over-simplified ‘operative reality’ that while it clearly delivers ‘economy of thought’, is far removed from the physical reality of our natural experience;

 

“Science itself, … may be regarded as a minimization problem, consisting of the completest possible presenting of facts with the least possible expenditure of thought” —Ernst Mach

 

As already mentioned, confusing this intellectualized ‘operative reality’ based on ‘material objects and organisms and what they do [the ‘results they cause’], is infusing the modern world dynamic with confusion and incoherence. There are continuing mis-matches between the results we get when we use our intellectualized ‘operative reality’ as the ‘go-by’ to guide our behaviour, and what actually results.   Science is constantly celebrating its validating of its own predictions [predicative logic], so where is the ‘gap’?

 

The proverbial ‘smoke and mirrors’ are at play here. Science manufactures synthetic certainty by disconnecting ‘figure’ from ‘ground’ [‘inhabitant’ from ‘habitat’] through the idealized intellectualization of ‘absolute space and absolute time’ as the containing reference frame that liberates ‘all things’ from their inherent relation with ‘all things’;

 

“[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

 

This inherent primacy of ‘relations’ over ‘things’, as understood intuitively by ourselves as infants, … an understanding which now lays buried beneath the simplified non-relational structures of binary logic as in science and reason, is ‘synthetically purged’ by our imposing of a notional ‘absolute space and absolute time’ theatre of operations that allows us to conceive of the ‘relational figures’ in the ‘relational ground’, as ‘independently-existing material systems’ whose development and behaviour derive exclusively from ‘forces’ that are either externally applied [‘inorganic case’] or which arise from internal processes within the ‘independent entity’ [‘organic case’]. In this intellectual, ‘synthetic-de-complexification’ of the physical reality of our natural experience [still accessible to us through our naturally inborn ‘intuition’ which has not been ‘erased’, but is merely buried beneath layers of synthetic intellectual simplification], we become ensconced in a pseudo-real-world of independent material objects and organisms who we hold to be responsible for changing the world ‘over time’ by a continuing succession of noun-verb-predicate, cause-effect actions, all of which, so we say, transpires within an absolute space and absolute time reference frame.

 

This common, popular, synthetic, intellectual ‘operative reality’ stands or falls on our belief in the REALITY of absolute space and absolute time. If we suspend our ‘belief’ in it being ‘real’ (we can still use it as ‘pragmatic idealization’ based tool), we lift off the synthetic structures of science and reason that have buried the relational understanding of our intuitive experience, and revert to the understanding, as in Mach’s principle, wherein ‘everything is relationally dependent on everything’, or in indigenous aboriginal terms, ‘mitakuye oyasin’, (all things are related) in which our view of ‘self’ loses its (synthetic, intellectual) ‘independence’ and we acknowledge, instead, that we are ‘strands in the web of life’ or ‘convection cells in the flow’ (purely relational features [although unique and particular with respect to our situational inclusion] within a transforming relational activity continuum, … ‘the world given only once’).

 

Without invoking ‘absolute space and absolute time’ to synthetically, intellectually, liberate relational forms by depicting them as ‘independent material systems’, the concept of an objective reality that exists outside of ourselves, that we can perceive but in which we, ourselves, are not included in our observations and is not ‘part of us’, is no longer viable.   Modern physics has given us understanding which has removed this subject-object split, but we cannot credit modern physics for doing any more than removing the flawed subject-object splitting assumption which had been built into science in the first place;

 

“The world is given to me only once, not one existing and one perceived. Subject and object are only one. The barrier between them cannot be said to have broken down as a result of recent experience in the physical sciences, for this barrier does not exist.” – Erwin Schroedinger

 

In other words, we cannot credit the physical sciences for discovering ‘something new’ since it is the physical sciences that put in place the notion of the ‘subject-object split’ and this ‘new discovery’ is nothing other than science celebrating the correcting of it’s own errors or ‘over-simplifications’.   Science cannot avoid ‘being in error’ since is it attempting to convert from tacit to explicit, that which is inherently tacit; i.e. our experience as relational features uniquely situated within a transforming relational activity continuum. Science can progressively upgrade its ‘operative reality versions’, but such a progression is not leading to ultimate truths, but to objectivised articulations of our pre-lingual, intuitive, relational experience;

 

“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.” – F. David Peat

 

In other words, intellectual inquiry through physics and ‘science’ (a synthetic intellectual ‘operative reality’ that has not yet ‘caught up’ with the ‘relations-first’ findings of modern physics), is not homing in on ultimate truths, it is successively removing its own simplified structures that it has superimposed over [and which tend to bury and obscure] the full relational complexity of intuitive understanding. Who is to say that the pre-lingual understanding of an infant [human, wolf or bear] who is capable of relational love and attachment, is something ‘less’ than the intellectual understanding that comes from language-based RE-presentations which reduce us to notional ‘independent beings’ that we are then forced to explain exclusively in inside-outward asserting terms so that our differences, as stand-alone entities, are made to prevail over our inherent relational connectedness? This is where ‘racism’ [and nationalism] originates and ‘racism’ is a binary logic based understanding which some ancients claim arrived through our succumbing to the temptation to ‘buy in’ to the dividing intellectual concept of ‘good and evil’;

 

In Genesis 2:9 we are told of two trees in Paradise, the tree of life, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. These fit well into the themes of Thomas; good and evil are two opposites, and life is a single thing, a unity. By eating of the tree of two things, Good and Evil, Adam and Eve are eventually cast out of Paradise.”

 

If we attribute ‘primary value’ to our relational selves and thus to the common ‘spiritual ground’ in which we gather as mutually dependent relational forms, then the comparison between ‘wolf’ and ‘human’ would identify the human’s ability of developing language-based intellectual structures to construct a simplified ‘operative reality’ to ‘substitute for’ [and thus to ‘hijack’] the physical reality of our natural experience. Those, whose behaviours are firstly directed by science and reason, go about as if they have their own private understanding of the world;

 

“Listening not to me but to the Logos [‘field of influence that is everywhere-at-the-same-time and that ‘steers-all-into-all’ in a reciprocal complementarity], it is wise to agree that one is all and all is one.” . . . “For this reason it is necessary to follow what is common. But although the logos is common, most people live as if they had their own private understanding.” — Heraclitus

 

This ‘private understanding’ that comes from science and reason, can make people into ‘zombies’ that are insensitive to the unfolding relational dynamics that they are uniquely, situationally included in. You can see the ‘extreme cases’ coming; i.e. those who have suffered the hijacking of the physical reality of their natural experience by science and reason are intent on directing/commanding the behaviours of those around them, and are ‘not interested’ in hearing about the situational experience of those they are directing, nor about how their directives may transform the collective’s relations with one another and with the relational space they are included in. This science and reason driven mode of organizing contrasts with ‘the circle process’ of indigenous aboriginals, which invites each member of the collective to shift from ‘head-voice’ to’ heart-voice’ and, as the talking piece is passed to them, share their experience, … an approach that keeps relational ‘experience’ in its natural primacy over ‘reason’.

 

‘Science’ in its currently popular incarnation is much valued for its ability to ‘predict outcomes’, something that ‘wolf’ and ‘bear’ cannot do. However, these ‘predicted outcomes’ are simply ‘circular reasoning’ that comes from first formulating logical propositions based on ‘what independent things do’ which fails to acknowledge the relational natural of the world. Thus, science is correct in predicting that increasing the concentration of DDT in the habitat will result in a decline in the mosquito population, or that sending in drones to attack ‘evil terrorists’ will, as predicted, achieve the result of annihilating the ‘evil terrorists’, but both of these reasoned propositions are in the one-sided all-hitting, no-fielding terms of ‘what things do’ aka ‘noun-verb-predicate’ intellectual constructs, and this is because the habitat that these causal agents reside, operate and interact in, is assumed to be independent of the agent-inhabitants that reside, operate and interact within it.

 

The phrase; ‘Mission accomplished’, refers to the validation of the scientifically reasoned proposition/prediction, which has assumed ‘absolute (Euclidian) space and absolute time’ as the reference frame/container within which these notionally independent figures or ‘causal agents’ notionally ‘do their deeds’ and achieve their predicted results.

 

Of course, this absolute ‘Euclidian space’ and ‘absolute time’ reference frame is nothing like the relational space of our actual experience. In other words, science’s predictions and the circular reasoning that sees science as validating its predictions, occurs within a synthetic intellectual ‘operative reality’ that is nothing like the reality of our experience;

 

“Space is another framework we impose upon the world” . . . ” . . . here the mind may affirm because it lays down its own laws; but let us clearly understand that while these laws are imposed on our science, which otherwise could not exist, they are not imposed on Nature.” . . . “Euclidian geometry is . . . the simplest, . . . just as the polynomial of the first degree is simpler than a polynomial of the second degree.” . . . “the space revealed to us by our senses is absolutely different from the space of geometry.” . . . “Finally, our Euclidean geometry is itself only a sort of convention of language; mechanical facts might be enunciated with reference to a [relational] non-Euclidean space which would be a guide less convenient than, but just as legitimate as, our ordinary space ; the enunciation would thus become much more complicated, but it would remain possible. Thus absolute space, absolute time, geometry itself, are not conditions which impose themselves on mechanics ; all these things are no more antecedent to mechanics than the French language is logically antecedent to the verities one expresses in French.” – Henri Poincare, Science and Hypothesis

 

It is not that science DOES NOT give us the desired result, it is that the ‘desired result’ is viewed within science’s ‘operative reality’ which is nothing like the physical reality of our experience. Scientific plans and technologies can rid us of unwanted microbes and terrorists, according to scientific plans and predictions. Science can stop our headaches, psychoses, anxieties, according to scientific plans and predictions. Science can construct for us, factories that produce all manner of desired products from cornflakes to Cadillacs, according to scientific plans and predictions.

 

Meanwhile, since the ‘operative reality’ of science and reason assumes one-sided all-hitting, no-fielding dynamics, as if in a space that is independent of the ‘hitters’, science blinds itself to the reality that killing targeted microbial forms is at the same time engendering new microbial forms, and that killing targeted terrorists is at the same time engendering new forms of terrorism, and as McLuhan observes, in science’s constructing of a factory, according to scientific plans and predictions, it matters little whether they are producing cornflakes or Cadillacs [the object of scientific plans and predictions], what matters is how our relations with one another and the common living space are transformed. That is, in the relational space of our natural experience, it is the transformation of relations that is the primary reality. This is available to our intuition but not to science and reason since the ‘operative reality’ of science and reason, based as they are on ‘independent material objects/organisms’ and ‘what they do’ as if they reside, operate and interact within a habitat that is independent of the inhabitants that reside, operate and interact within it, … is too simple an ‘operative reality’ to capture relational transformation.

 

Intuitively, we know that social relational tensions are the source of spiritual distress, the symptoms of which include ‘anxiety attacks’, ‘nervous breakdowns’ (psychotic episodes), depression, manic episodes etc.   Science and intellectual reason employ an ‘operative reality’ in which every result is seen as a ‘deed’ for which there must be a ‘doer’ of the deed; this ‘reality’ eliminates the very possibility of outside-inward, relational inducing of a result, forcing science to look into the interior of an individual for the causal source of symptoms that are manifest in the individual.   No matter how abusive and stressful a relational social dynamic may become, where individuals situated in a relational stress nexus manifest ‘spiritual distress’, inquiry into the cause will be confined to such individuals as have ‘symptoms’, since ‘mental disorders’ are viewed as ‘mental illnesses’ and the science of mental illness studies those ‘abnormal’ people who ‘have the illness’; i.e. ‘why study those ‘normal people’ that don’t have it’?

 

If the study were instead focused on ‘mental health’, all of those individuals who do not suffer from ‘spiritual distress’ would be included together with those that do, and it might then be found, that those that do not suffer ‘spiritual distress’ tend to be sourcing more stress than they are receiving and that some individuals, perhaps because of their caring/accommodating nature, tend to be the ‘designated patient’ or ‘designated buffer’ that absorbs and holds on to the hot potatoes of relational stress as they are bounced around within the relational social matrix.

 

For example, research by Cochrane and Sashidharan shows that the incidence of schizophrenia in non-native born blacks in the U.K. is 3-5 times higher than native born blacks. As these researchers point out, this effect cannot be due to genetic difference or other sources within the individual. Their point is that a science that studies ‘mental illness’ is not going to explain what is going on in this case, a study of mental health would instead be required, however, ‘science and reason’ employ an ‘operative reality’ that is in terms of intellectual noun-verb-predicate constructs [‘what things do’] and it is only ‘intuition’ that acknowledges relational influence [non-local, non-visible, non-material influence] as the source of physical phenomena. ‘Intuition’ is not supported by ‘science’ or ‘reason’. As a result, ‘science and reason’ stand in our way of understanding the physical reality of our natural experience, which includes ‘spiritual stress/distress’;

“From the outset it will be clear that most of the research in this field has followed the conventional epidemiological or medical paradigm by focusing on mental ill health as the dependent variable. It is, therefore, not surprising that there is a lack of empirically grounded research on mental well-being or the psychological resilience and survival of minority groups in this country” — R. Cochrane (University of Birmingham) and S. P. Sashidharan (North Birmingham Mental Health Trust) in ‘Mental Health and Ethnic Minorities’

In the same vein, Jill Astbury in ‘Crazy for You: The Making of Women’s Madness’, comments on the 1993 World Health Organization study that shows that women have twice the incidence of ‘affective disorders’ (depression, bipolar disorder etc.) as men. An investigation into ‘mental health’, rather than ‘mental illness’ would have revealed the frequent pushiness and abusive use of power by males that tends to render females ‘invisible’, shutting them off from opportunity-to-participate and from opportunity for authentic self-expression. In communities where ‘normalcy’ is a normalcy wherein masculine control hierarchies dictate the manner of participation and self-expression, the statistics, which might otherwise have celebrated the sensitivity and caring of women, imply, in the patriarchal context, their ‘inferiority’ or ‘defectiveness’.

 

In the relational physical reality of our actual experience, space is not ‘empty’; it is a nurturing medium that can be used to abuse indirectly, by monopoly control and withholding (e.g. by sanctions and embargoes) to extort desired behaviours and/or stress and breakdown. Research into mental health, as contrasted with research into ‘mental illness’ would not constrain its focus to symptoms (illness), but would investigate the relational imbalances from which they derive. ‘Mental illness’ is not something that will be solved by ‘treating the mentally ill’ since these individuals are like part of an electrical circuit that give passage to too much current when the voltage (tension) rises, and undergo meltdown. As with abnormal behaviours in miner’s canaries, component meltdown in the relational social circuitry signals problematic operating conditions in the sense that;

 

“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

 

Our deploying of science and reason is ‘self-deception’ prone. As Emerson notes, science and reason are tools that have been running away with the workman. As Wittgenstein asserts, the propositions of logic are tautologies (circular reasoning). Poincaré claims that the mathematical laws of science are de-contextualized ‘idealizations’ which, while having pragmatic value, must not be confused for ‘reality’ [the price of confusing them for reality is the infusing of confusion and incoherence into the global social dynamic].

 

We don’t know what the real effect of spraying DDT is, in spite of ‘being right’ in our scientific prediction that by increasing the concentration of DDT we lower the mosquito population. We don’t the real effect of sending explosives-loaded drones over to exterminate those we have identified as ‘evil terrorists’, in spite of ‘being right’ in our scientific prediction that the desired result will be achieved [which raises the question, … “what do we mean by ‘desired result’”? This has a well-defined meaning in science; i.e. it refers to a set of measured variables called ‘initial conditions’ one or more of which we would like to ‘adjust’ to some new ‘desired’ value;

 

“The laws of nature are equations between the measurable elements α,β,γ,δ . . . . ω of phenomena. As nature is variable, the number of these equations is always less than the number of the elements. If we know all the values of α,β,γ,δ . . . . by which, for example, the values of λ,μ,ν . . . are given, we may call the group α,β,γ,δ . . . . the cause and the group λ,μ,ν . . . the effect. In this sense we may say that the effect is uniquely determined by the cause. The principle of sufficient reason, in the form, for instance, in which Archimedes employed it in the development of the laws of the lever, consequently asserts nothing more than that the effect cannot by any given set of circumstances be at once determined and undetermined. If two circumstances α and λ are connected, then, supposing all others are constant, a change of λ will be accompanied by a change of α, and as a general rule a change of α by a change of λ.” – Ernst Mach, ‘The Science of Mechanics: A Critical and Historical Account of its Development’

 

Science and reason inform us that it is possible to move criminals and military forces from England to Australia but there is no acknowledgement that the space we live in is relational and that;

 

“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” – Heraclitus

 

The England that is left behind when the boats leave is not the same England and the Australia that they arrive in is not the same Australia as awaited them. For some, colonization is the construction of a wonderful new world and for others (e.g. the indigenous aboriginals and the flora and fauna), colonization is the destruction of a wonderful established world. Science and reason can be used to support the truth of both of these contradictory claims. What science and reason cannot do, is to acknowledge that what is really going on here is the transformation of relational space; i.e. ‘construction’ and ‘destruction’ are conjugate aspects of the one dynamic of relational transformation. Science and reason ‘cannot acknowledge transformation’ because they are intellectualizing tools that employ being-based intellectual RE-presentations conveyed in noun-verb-predicate structures. Intellectual representations in the ‘positivist’ [all-hitting, no-fielding] terms of ‘what things do’ as if in a habitat that is independent of the inhabitants that reside, operate and interact within it, are not capable of conveying ‘transformation’.

 

‘Transformation’ is what happens to us while we’re busy using science and reason to prepare our action plans. It is not something going on in an absolute space ‘out there’, it is something that is happening to everything including us.

 

“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

 

That is, science has no knowledge of how its predictions and their operational affirmation will transform our relations with one another and the relational space we share inclusion in, … because, … the propositions of science are constructed and validated assuming that they transpire in an ‘operative reality’ characterized by an absolute space and absolute time reference/containing frame. Our intuition informs us that this is not realistic. The world is only given once, as a transforming relational activity continuum. The physical reality of our experience is nothing like the ‘operative reality’ of science and reason.

 

Thus, our intuition, which is naturally inborn, objects to the over-simplified RE-presentations of science and reason and says; ‘the space we live in is relational’, and change in a relational space is by way of the transforming of relations. The noun-verb-predicate intellectual structures that science and reason use to portray dynamics in terms of ‘independent things’ and their cause-effect actions are over-simplified intellectual RE-presentations, … pragmatic idealizations that must not be confused for reality, and where confused for reality, will infuse confusion and incoherence into the global social dynamic.

 

For example, our intuition tells us that relational tensions are the source of conflict and that drone assassinations are bound to increase relational tensions which can persist and accrue like charged springs or ‘ticking time-bombs’ that may be triggered later on in a seemingly unprovoked situation [as in earthquake, avalanche, volcanics and other ‘nonlinear’ physical phenomena]. Our intuition informs us that relational tensions can ratchet up over a long time, eventually releasing in ‘the big one’. Science and reason, because they do not take into account the relational structure of space, assume that the present depends only on the immediate past, and identify the cause of the violent release as the ‘hand holding the smoking gun’ whether that of the child soldier or the nasty San Andreas fault which has suddenly ‘shifted’ and caused a giant earthquake.

 

Why do we not go back earlier than the immediate past in trying to understand the source [as in a build up of relational tensions?]. Our intuition does go there, but the intellectual noun-verb-predicate constructs of science and reason do not go there and cannot get there, since going there is not compatible with acknowledging the ‘truth’ of logical propositions such as ‘the child soldier killed three villagers’. Emerson rejects such formulations using the example that while the real activity or ‘genius of nature’ is the ecosystemic relational engaging of earth, air, water and solar fire (irradiance) in which the pear tree is a relational feature, we say ‘the pear-tree produces pears’. The fact is that ‘the genius of nature’ (the ‘Great Spirit’ or etc.) not only inhabits the pear tree but creates it, implanting in it the ‘talent’ to produce pears. And, Nietzsche observes that such intellectual constructs [that are the fundamental underpinnings of science and reason] are ‘errors of grammar’; i.e. an activity within a transforming relational activity continuum is intellectually made into a ‘being’ which is then used as a noun-subject to inflect a verb and produce a predicative result (all of this is ‘in the head’ and far from the physical reality of our natural experience);

 

“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’

 

Insofar as science and reason are based in ‘being’, there is no way for science and reason to capture the physical reality of our natural experience of inclusion in a transforming relational activity continuum. And, on the other hand, without the intellectual device of subject and predicate constructs, it is difficult to even commence speaking about ‘what is going on’. What we always come back around to, is that the use of ‘being’ and ‘subject-verb-predicate constructs’, as in science and reason, is pure ‘idealization’ but ‘idealization’ that can be very useful. The problem is not with ‘pragmatic idealists’ but with ‘realists’ who really do confuse the ‘being-based’ ‘operative reality’ of science and reason, for ‘reality’.

 

The foundational assumptions built into the intellectual ‘operative reality’ of science make it impossible for science and reason to search back for more subtle ‘relational’ authorship of some or other unfolding phenomenon that captures our attention, such as the child soldier’s homicidal actions [noun-and-verb language hardly allows me to avoid using the being-based constructs I am objecting to]. In a relational world, all things are related so that it is impossible for any members of the global collective of humans to claim ‘independence’ from actions that arise within the global social dynamic [the strength or weakness of the interdependence is secondary]. Acknowledging this global relational interdependence leads to ‘restorative justice’ instead of moral judgement based retributive justice which rests dependently on the mechanical view of the individual as an ‘independently-existing system’ with internal process driven and directed behaviour who is fully and solely responsible for his own actions.

 

Moral judgement removes all responsibility from the collective, apart from the ‘offender’ [who is split apart from the collective by the ‘innocent’ versus ‘guilty’ designation], rendering everyone but the ‘offender’ entirely innocent of complicity in, for example, the child-soldier’s actions. Science and reason validate this moral judging since science and reason employ an intellectual ‘operative reality’ in which cause-and-result is taken to be ‘true’. ‘Facts’ based on noun-verb-predicate constructs are accepted as ‘truths’; e.g. ‘the terrorists destroyed the World Trade Towers’ is an intellectual-logical proposition that could be sworn on the Bible in a Western justice court of law as being ‘the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth’. Never have so many complicit contributors to social conflict been let off the hook as by such statements that associate with moral judgement [scapegoating] of the purportedly ‘independent’ individual, moral judgements that put the accusers on the ground of moral righteousness in the same fell stroke that drops the accused into the abyss of the purportedly moral degenerate.

 

‘That’s true’, you may say in evaluating the claim that “the terrorists destroyed the World Trade Towers”.   But it’s an ‘incomplete truth’ which ignores the relational nature of space and the relational tensions that build over time and then violently release; i.e. it’s an ‘incomplete truth’ that ignores the possibility that violence can derive from the release of long building relational tensions associated with, for example, an abuse of power [the continued humiliating of weaker others as has been continuing in the relations between colonizers and colonized]. For example, on the first anniversary of 9/11, September 11^th, 2002, an interview by Peter Mansbridge with Prime Minister Jean Chrétien was nationally televised in Canada which included the following;

[CBC’s Peter Mansbridge] “By the end of the day [9/11], what were you thinking about in terms of how the world had changed?”

 

 

[Prime Minister Jean Chrétien] “… it is a division in the world that is building up. And I knew that it was the inspiration of it.  For me, I think that the rest of the world a bit too selfish, and that there is a lot of resentment…. You know, the poor, relatively, get poorer all the time. And the rich are getting richer all the time. … You know, you cannot exercise your powers to the point of humiliation for the others.  And that is what the Western world, not only the Americans, the Western world has to realize, because they are human beings too, and there are long-term consequences if you don’t look hard at the reality in 10 or 20 or 30 years from now.”

 

 

“I do think that the Western world is getting too rich in relations to the poor world,” he said.

 

“And necessarily, we’re looked upon as being arrogant, self-satisfied, greedy and with no limits. And the 11th of September is an occasion for me to realize it even more.”

Science and reason will home in first, on the intellectual noun-verb-predicate construct; ‘the terrorists destroyed the World Trade Towers’, along with Western moral judgement based retributive justice which is supported by forensic [cause-effect, doer-deed] science. Once the allegations are proven to be true by forensic science, and the perpetrators are all rounded up, convicted and punished, what more needs to be said?   Some might say that this action was NOT an action-in-itself but was a ‘whorl’ in the relational activity continuum, a mini-feature in the ongoing strife between the colonizing powers and the colonized peoples and that it was in this continuing relational context that a group of resistors of ongoing colonization unleashed violence that derived from relational tensions that had been accruing from the ongoing colonizer-colonized relational polarization. In other words, “it takes a whole community to raise a child-soldier”.

 

The assumptions we build into science and reason are simplifications introduced for our own convenience; i.e. for economy of thought, since relational complexity wherein everything is dependent on everything, is impossible to fully grasp, intellectually, and/or impossible to capture in language-based RE-presentations. So we reduce BY OUR DEFINITIONS, our PORTRAYAL of complex physical phenomena by removing the role of reciprocal relations amongst things, and by installing mathematical language constructs that replace the non-local, non-visible, non-material dynamics of ‘field’ with notional ‘local’, ‘visible’ and ‘material’ cause-effect action dynamics; i.e;

“Origin of Mathematical Physics. Let us go further and study more closely the conditions which have assisted the development of mathematical physics. We recognise at the outset the efforts of men of science have always tended to resolve the complex phenomenon given directly by experiment into a very large number of elementary phenomena, and that in three different ways.
.
First, with respect to time. Instead of embracing in its entirety the progressive development of a phenomenon, we simply try to connect each moment with the one immediately preceding. We admit that the present state of the world only depends on the immediate past, without being directly influenced, so to speak, by the recollection of a more distant past. Thanks to this postulate, instead of studying directly the whole succession of phenomena, we may confine ourselves to writing down its differential equation; for the laws of Kepler we substitute the law of Newton.
.
Next, we try to decompose the phenomena in space. What experiment gives us is a confused aggregate of facts spread over a scene of considerable extent. We must try to deduce the elementary phenomenon, which will still be localised in a very small region of space. — Henri Poincaré, ‘Science and Hypothesis’, Chapter IX, Hypotheses in Physics”

We can see in this reduction of the authorship of the dynamics of our natural experience that are shaped by non-local, non-visible and non-material relational influence, to locally incipient, visible, material ‘cause-and-effect actions’, that our whole investigative orientation takes on a ‘down-and-in’ focus, having us anticipate an all-hitting [inside-outward asserting], no-fielding authorship of ‘change’. Science’s ‘down-and-in’ search for ‘cause’ explains why we constrain our investigation of spiritual distress deriving from non-local, non-visible, non-material relational influence, to the deep interior of the person suffering the distress, and why we label this phenomenon ‘mental illness’.   ‘Mental health’ as a relational social phenomenon is not ‘scientific’ since one has to go from ‘science’ to the ‘relations-are-all-there-are’ understanding of modern physics, in order to accept, as an authoring source, non-local, non-visible, non-material relational influence.

 

“By the principle of Occam’s razor, physicists and philosophers prefer ideas that can explain the same phenomena with the fewest assumptions. In this case you can construct a perfectly valid theory by positing the existence of certain relations without additionally assuming individual things. So proponents of ontic structural realism say we might as well dispense with things and assume that the world is made of [relational-spatial] structures, or nets of relations.” – Meinard Kuhlmann, ‘What is Real’, Scientific American, August 2013

 

In acknowledging that ‘relations’ are basic, we acknowledge, at the same time, that local events are secondary features in a transforming relational activity continuum. In this way of conceiving our ‘operative reality’, individual authorship is secondary ‘appearance’ and it is impossible to isolate the ‘dynamics of the inhabitant (member)’ from the ‘relational dynamics of the habitat (collective)’. This point has been made in the Systems Sciences with the example of the ‘university’ [Russell Ackoff].   Using analytical inquiry, the university dynamic can be RE-presented in terms of its internal components [departments, faculties, students, physical plant] and internal processes, all of which can be put back together to describe the university as an independent system.

 

As Ackoff points out, analytical inquiry must be grounded in synthetical inquiry which acknowledges that the university is serving some need within the relational dynamics of community, in which it is situationally included. Thus we can depict the ‘figure’ as independent of the ‘ground’ as well as acknowledge it as a relational feature within a transforming relational activity continuum.   The separation of ‘figure’ from ‘ground’ [the separation of ‘university’ from ‘community’] amounts to an ‘intellectual conversion’ of a relational feature in the relational flow, to an independent machine with its own ‘inputs’ and ‘outputs’. In the larger view, it is the community that is ‘putting in’ [its children, funding] and ‘taking out’ [graduates, intellectual products], and, as with storm-cells in the atmosphere, we intellectually invert the ‘physical reality’ by making the relational feature in the flow appear to be the independent author of its own development and behaviour.   Science and reason ‘do this’ [they make this ‘error of grammar’]. They do it by taking as ‘the truth’, an ‘operative reality’ that rests on ‘being’, that is formed from intellectual noun-verb-predicate constructs; e.g. ‘the university produced one thousand graduates’, analogous to ‘the terrorists destroyed the World Trade Towers’ and ‘the child soldier killed three of his own villagers’.

 

In all of these cases, the source of the dynamic is relational, such that;

 

 

“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

 

Fine, science and reason may conveniently simplify and deliver ‘economy of thought’ by taking an activity such as the university, which is a relational feature within the relational social dynamic of the community, and impute ‘being’ to it and then have it inflect a verb and author a predicate, but this machine-like ‘operative reality’ is pure intellectual contrivance and in no way RE-presentative of the physical reality of our natural experience.

 

Because we live in a relational space, we must look at ‘social-health-and-welfare’ in general as being, FIRSTLY, a condition of the relational social dynamic. Likewise, ‘criminality’ and ‘terrorism’ which do not exist as local, individual-sourced phenomena.

 

When we look at ‘criminality’ and ‘terrorism’ as we do ‘mental illness’, we are constraining our investigation to ‘symptoms’ and ignoring the source. The source does not lie in the interior of a notionally ‘independent’ human ‘being’.

Western psychology contributes to the confusion and incoherence on issues such as ‘mental illness’, ‘criminal behaviour’ and ‘terrorism’ by extending the complexity of the notional ‘independent’ individual ‘being’ by adding into this unrealistic model, a ‘psyche’ with a complex structure through which behavioural instructions flow. This reinforces the shunting of investigation into the deep interior of the ‘independent’ individual and preserves the ignore-ance of outside-inward orchestrating relational influence, “which not only inhabits the organism but creates it” [Emerson].

 

Western psychologists may contribute, in practice, through their caring and assisting in the ‘rehabilitation’ of the ‘spiritually distressed’ [i.e. the ‘mentally ill’, the ‘criminal’ and the ‘terrorist’], however, few are found openly refuting the basic problematic imputing of independent ‘being’ to the individual, as this would redefine them as shamans. And without refuting ‘independent being’, society will continue to treat the casualities of a dysfunctional relational social dynamic, as if their symptoms derived fully and solely from their own interior. The Freudian/Jungian concept of ‘the unconscious’ has greatly augmented the scope for explaining the behaviours of notional ‘independent beings’, notionally with their own internal process [biophysical and biochemical] driven and directed behaviours who reside, operate and interact in a habitat that is notionally independent of the inhabitants that reside, operate and interact within it.

 

This imputing of the source of ‘spiritual distress’, reduced to the notion of ‘mental illness’, ‘criminality’ and ‘terrorism’, so that it is NOT seen as arising from non-local, non-visible, non-material relational influence, but as instead arising fully and solely out of interior depths of the ‘independent being’, gives society the go-ahead to (a) let itself off the hook and do nothing at all to reform its practices which make it a spawning ground for ‘disturbing eruptions’ which are labelled ‘mental illness’, ‘criminal behaviour’ and ‘terrorism’, and (b) give society its mandate to deal with the affected individuals as if the sourcing of their behaviour is fully and solely attributable to their internal processes. As Franca Ongaro Basaglia [Psychiatria Democratica] observed;

 

“The problem of psychiatric illness and its institutions developed in our society primarily as a question of public order. It came into being as a socio-political problem, namely the defense of the healthy and working community from elements that would not conform to its modes of behaviour and rules of efficiency. Isolated care and treatment justified the segregation and internment of the ‘ill’ who were considered less for their illness than their potential as disruptive elements. This focus on abnormality and deviance, especially social disruption, meant that subjective suffering was not addressed – nor were the diverse variables giving rise to psychiatric problems. Despite decades of public concern and specific legislation opposing this approach, scientific theories, professional bodies and institutions have resisted abandoning the provision of a style of care that protects society to the detriment of those cared for.” (Franca Ongaro Basaglia, Int. J. Soc. Psychiat., 1992, 38, p36). see http://www.human-nature.com/hraj/trieste.html 

By imputing full and sole sourcing of ‘mental’, ‘criminal’ and ‘terrorist’ behaviours to the individuals through whom these behaviours [born of spiritual distress and outside-inward, non-local, non-visible, non-material relational influence] manifest, the general collective in charge of moral judging renders everyone apart from those manifesting ‘disorderly behaviour’, free of all responsibility. This is a view that is compatible with a world view in which ‘independent beings’ reside, operate and interact within a habitat that is notionally independent of the inhabitants that reside, operate and interact within it; i.e. ‘space’ is a non-participant in physical phenomena in this officially accepted [by society] science and reason endorsed view.

 

Note that the sourcing of mental, criminal and terrorist behaviour described as [born of spiritual distress and outside-inward, non-local, non-visible, non-material relational influence] which would be endorsed by the indigenous aboriginal shaman, is the parallel to Western psychology’s concept of the psyche’s ‘unconscious’. Western psychology has taken ‘psychical activity’ which could be understood in terms of the relational (spiritual) field, imputed ‘being’ to it [i.e. ‘the psyche’] and given the noun-subject ‘psyche’ and ‘its internal structures and processes] the God-like power to jumpstart the directing of the behaviour of the notional ‘independent being’ which ‘owns’ this internal structure [nobody knows exactly where the psyche is; i.e. it is a metaphysical concept like ‘the intelligence of plants’ that allegedly source the amazing cooperation across species of plants, insects, birds; i.e. it is a ‘filler’ that improves one’s ability to explain observed phenomena without altering the established model, … in this case, that of the notional ‘independent being’].

 

Is it not more intuitively realistic to understand that the world is given only once, as a transforming relational activity continuum in which we are each uniquely situationally included relational forms? In which case, we are not only inhabited by a field of non-local, non-visible, non-material relational influences, but we are created by them [Emerson].

 

The notion of ‘independent being’ preserves this continuing denial of any complicity of the relational social dynamic in the sourcing of mental illness, criminality and terrorism, while our intuition screams out at the folly of this omission.

 

Notwithstanding this ongoing attempt by science and reason to ‘hijack’ intuition, ‘gnosis’ is waiting for us somewhere inside the inborn source of understanding that goes by the name ‘intuition’, which has meanwhile been largely buried under the intellectual structures that ‘science and reason’ have constructed and laid over top of it, that modern physics is currently trying to backtrack on, and lift off.

 

The variable depth of understanding has cropped up in modern physics which has had to acknowledge problems arising from science’s attempt to ‘localize’ the sourcing of dynamics, which has driven the source deeper and deeper down and into non-directly visible notionally particulate structural underpinnings of observable macro-phenomena. For example, while ‘The Copenhagen Agreement on the interpretation of Quantum mechanics’ was non-unanimous in how to re-formulate the ‘operative reality’ of science [Schroedinger opted for the relational space of wave dynamics versus ‘probabilities’ and the retention of absolute things in absolute space], all accepted that the underlying microscopic material dynamics [mathematized intellectual idealizations] that purported to tell us ‘what is really happening’ which was notionally being ‘cooked up’ down there below and ‘behind the scenes’, was leading us down an intellectual garden path, and that the physical sciences needed to reground themselves in the macro-structures of our sensory experience.

 

With the ball put back in ‘our court’ by modern physics, the path to the enlightened truth about our ‘self’ and the world is no longer in the hands of ‘science and reason’, but in the hands of our sensory experience or ‘intuition’, on top of which we have been laying down ‘explicit structures’ which inevitably fall short in capturing the full-blown relational complexity that comes to us through our inherently ambiguous but comprehensive intuition. Our intuition gives us an awareness of our role as transmitters of relational influences, such relational influences, being purely relational, not being themselves ‘picturable’ since they are ‘prior to taking on form’;

 

The tao that can be told
is not the eternal Tao
The name that can be named
is not the eternal Name.
The unnameable is the eternally real.
Naming is the origin
of all particular things.
Free from desire, you realize the mystery.
Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.
Yet mystery and manifestations
arise from the same source.
This source is called darkness.
Darkness within darkness.
The gateway to all understanding.

 

— Lao Tzu, ‘Tao Te Ching’ (‘The Classic of the Virtuous Way’)

 

How, then, are we to ‘see-through and beyond the separate parts’ that our habit of applying geometry to the relational forms in the transforming relational activity continuum gives back to us in intellectual, language-based RE-presentations?

 

Wittgenstein attempts to speak to this by giving an analogy of ‘terrain’ and ‘roads’. The terrain is a relational structure that we are situationally included in. Our personal encounters give us experience that is radically incomplete with respect to the overall relational dynamic we are included in. The path to the ‘synoptic’ view of the relational terrain, that we naturally seek, is by way of bringing all of the experienced roads into connective confluence [e.g. as in the ‘circle process’ of the indigenous aboriginal tradition].

 

“There is a truth in Schopenhauer’s view that philosophy is an organism, and that a book on philosophy, with a beginning and an end, is a sort of contradiction [Elsewhere Wittgenstein quotes Heraclitus “everything is in flux” on this same problem of being forced to capture a complex continuing dynamic by ‘parts’].  One difficulty with philosophy is that we lack a synoptic view.  We encounter the kind of difficulty we should have with the geography of a country for which we had no map, or else a map of isolated bits.  The country we are talking about is language, and the geography its grammar.  We can walk about the country quite well, but when forced to make a map, we go wrong.  A map will show different roads through the same country, any one of which we can take, though not two, just as in philosophy we must take up problems one by one though in fact each problem leads to a multitude of others.  We must wait until we come round to the starting point before we can proceed to another section, that is, before we can either treat of the problem we first attacked or proceed to another.  In philosophy matters are not simple enough for us to say ‘Let’s get a rough idea’, for we do not know the country except by knowing the connections between the roads.  So I suggest repetition as a means of surveying the connections.”

 

This problem of having to understand ‘relational context’ in order to make sense of a ‘part’, leads to a different kind of intellectual inquiry that has been referred to in modern physics as ‘bootstrapping’ and/or as the ‘surprise version of the game of twenty questions’.   In essence, it proceeds by not starting from any explicit parts but by using ‘implicit parts’ that can morph as we add each additional part so as to allow a ‘sum’ that is greater than the parts, as in a relational space wherein;

 

“[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

 

This mutual dependency of all with all, is captured in Mach’s principle;

 

“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

 

As you can imagine, if one attempts to start by describing one of the inhabitants, one has already made an error since it is impossible to describe one part without describing the entire relationally interdependent matrix wherein relations are in a natural precedence over material parts.   This has been called ‘irreducible complexity’ and is an important argument in favour of Creationists in their debate with Darwinists [Lamarckian, Nietzschean understandings of evolution, which resolve this problem, are not considered in the long-standing feud between Darwinists and Creationists]. This problem also divides mathematicians in that ‘predicative logic’ which is common in mathematics cannot handle a situation wherein each addition of a new member to the set requires redefining the set membership criteria.

 

In order to get around building an understanding of the relational unum by parts, one has to, as Wittgenstein suggests, start from the connections, rather than from the ‘particulars’. Or, as Einstein puts it in ‘Geometry and Experience’;

“First of all, an observation of epistemological nature. A geometrical-physical theory as such is incapable of being directly pictured, being merely a system of concepts. But these concepts serve the purpose of bringing a multiplicity of real or imaginary sensory experiences into connection in the mind. To “visualize” a theory therefore means to bring to mind that abundance of sensible experiences for which the theory supplies the schematic arrangement.” – Albert Einstein, ‘Geometry and Experience’

This is the approach in the ‘circle process’ of indigenous aboriginal peoples; i.e. they do not make moral judgements on the basis of particular events or ‘parts’ of the interdependent relational unum.

 

We might then inquire into how we ‘see one another’, in a relational world where the interdependent relational unum available to our intuition is in a natural precedence over the ‘parts-wise material dynamics’ given by the intellectual language-based RE-presentations of science and reason.

 

I would compare the difference in view to the difference in how we look at storm-cells in the flow of the atmosphere; i.e. either as relational forms in a relational activity continuum in which case the form is an agent of transformation wherein influences from a relational field that is ‘everywhere at the same time’ are transmitting through the relational form that is at the same time influencing the relational space in which it is included [as in Mach’s principle]. This implies that we are ‘all related’ in that we are formings within a common ‘field’ of ‘relational influence’ or common ‘spiritual field’. This supersedes the simple science view in which the cell is intellectually depicted as an ‘independent internal process driven and directed system’ or ‘independent causal agent’ [simple doer-of-deeds as if in a habitat that is independent of the inhabitants that reside, operate and interact within it].

 

As Emerson puts it in ‘The Method of Nature’;

 

“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’

 

This completes the ‘overview’ to Western Society: Intuition Hijacked by Science and Reason

 

What follows are alternative perspectives on what is going on, consistent with Wittgenstein’s suggestion that we need repetition of the connections (from different perspectives) in order to get to the synoptic view (aperspectival view) which dissolves the subject-object split and thus removes the bias of particular perspectives that can each be proven true in spite of contradicting each other.

 

 

* * *

 

Historically, two different proposals have been formulated for how to understand our observations and experiencing of ‘the common living space’ and the various ‘forms’ that rise and fall within it, including ourselves. One is that it all arises from an invisible ‘field’ whose relational influence brews up storm-cells which are at the same time ‘conditioning’ the ‘field’ which is at the same time conditioning the behaviour of the storm cells and brewing up more cells. In this view, the cells are the agents of transformation within the field that are its means of evolution.

 

The field, being a purely relational influence like gravity and electromagnetism is not directly observable but is inferred by the directly observable cells that precipitate in the energy-charged field-plenum.   This invisible field [Logos, Tao, Nature] is the all-pervading living-sourcing-medium which explains such things as ecosystemic interdependence that is global (as in the Gaia hypothesis) is in general agreement with the findings of modern physics, and as applied to our human selves, associates us, at the same time, with the entirety of the world [e.g. ‘Brahman’], and with our local, visible material aspect, [e.g. ‘Atman’]. This is the worldview presented by physicists such as Erwin Schroedinger and others.

 

The ‘other’ worldview which has been adopted as the ‘official worldview’ of Western civilization (our institutions of government, commerce and justice are based on it) starts from the ‘storm-cells in the field’ and assumes that they are independent (what you see is all there is). All change, including the behaviour of these cells and the emergence of new varieties of cells, is assumed to derive from the ‘internal components and processes of the cells’ since the space the reside, operate and interact in is assumed to be absolute void of infinite extent which has no influence on the independent cells (classified as either inorganic objects or organic [living] organisms). The behaviour of the cells and the emergence of new forms of cell are seen as been fully and solely due to the operations and interactions of the cells in a notional absolute [non-participating] space and absolute time. The ‘convention’ wherein we assume the existence of absolute space and absolute time provides us with an imaginary ‘reference frame’ that allows us to measure, in fixed (absolute, unchanging) units of spatial extension (feet or metres) and time (seconds, years), the physical location and physical-material particulars of the objects and organisms.

 

Jumpstarting this worldview from the independent existence of material entities which are not moved or changed unless acted upon by ‘forces’, forces us (for logical consistency) to divide material entities into two categories since some entities manifest development implying internal growth force while others (rocks etc.) do not. Since the all-pervading field has been replaced with empty void and the material forms are seen as ‘independent’, those forms that manifest ‘development’ are said to be ‘living forms’ and to have an invisible flame called ‘life’ inhabiting them; i.e. because there is no assumption of an all-pervading field, there is no possibility to perceive these forms as we do storm-cells, as the conjugating of outside-inward orchestrating influences that shape inside-outward asserting material dynamics, as in a ‘living field’ that is not directly observable but which manifests through its relational forms;

 

“Since according to our present conceptions the elementary particles of matter are also, in their essence, nothing else than condensations of the electromagnetic field, our present view of the universe presents two realities which are completely separated from each other conceptually, although connected causally, namely, gravitational ether and electromagnetic field, or as they might also be called space and matter. Of course it would be a great advance if we could succeed in comprehending the gravitational field and the electromagnetic field together as one unified conformation. Then for the first time the epoch of theoretical physics founded by Faraday and Maxwell would reach a satisfactory conclusion. The contrast between ether and matter would fade away, and, through the general theory of relativity, the whole of physics would become a complete system of thought, like geometry, kinematics, and the theory of gravitation.” — Einstein, ‘Ether and the Theory of Relativity’

 

Quantum wave dynamics is another source of support for the inherent primacy of ‘field’;

 

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

 

Meanwhile, the search for mathematics to integrate gravity and electromagnetics is not holding up the man-on-the-street from changing his world view since it never did come from physics, it came from language, and if you grew up with a flow-based language (e.g. indigenous aboriginals), you understood that the ‘Great Spirit’ was the invisible source of all material forms and their dynamics, and if you grew up with a noun-verb-predicate language (e.g. Western Indo-Europeans), you jumpstarted the world dynamic from the material forms that you assigned noun-subject names to and had these noun-subjects inflect verbs and become the cause of some predicative result.   Now, if you want to explain the behaviour of one of these apparently ‘independent’ material entities, you have to use ‘analytical inquiry’ into its internal components and processes, and go as deep as you need to, to come up with new biophysical and biochemical concepts that purport to explain behaviour and development in purely inside-outwards asserting terms, without ever having to invoke the notion of an all-pervading relational field of influence.

 

All-in-all, it seems to me a great mistake for Western civilization to assume that ‘the world is a material structure that ‘exists’’, … and that some force must be applied to ‘make it change’, as Newton’s ‘laws of nature’ make it appear.   For example, it suggests that since man has force, man can ‘change the world’, and this banishes the understanding that man is part of nature. Furthermore, it sets up the notion that ‘an action’ is a cause-and-effect dynamic that exists in its own right, a ‘deed’ that is notionally fully and solely attributable to a ‘doer’ (the force-sourcing agency). This leads us on to moral judgement of an action as to whether it is good or bad, and from there to rewarding actions that are good and punishing actions that are bad.

 

The problem is, our intuition informs us that the ‘fielding’ shapes the ‘result’ as much or more as ‘the hitter’; i.e. the experiential conditioning of the war vet with PTSD is the larger influence as he goes bananas from the little girl’s popping of a party balloon. The drought-dessicating condition of the forest is the larger influence in ‘causing’ the incendiary flare up, than the shower of sparks from the logger’s chain saw as it strikes a rock.   The racial relational tensions that accrue between whites and blacks are the larger influence as the black goes bananas from the white’s uttering of the word ‘nigger’ [though not so if the same utterance comes from a ‘bro].

 

The listener/recipient/fielding of a word or action always brings his/her own experience to bear in forming the ‘result’ of the hitter’s action. Like the baseball hitter, neither knows the result of the reciprocal meeting of the asserting and accommodating actions until it actually unfolds.

 

“[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

 

Meanwhile, the logic of noun-and-verb grammar reduces the hitting-fielding dynamics of our natural experience, to all-hitting, no-fielding. Sparks from a chain saw blade striking a rock ‘cause’ a forest fire. Variations in the experiential conditioning of a forest that influence how it ‘fields’ a shower of sparks is not part of the intellectual subject-verb-predicate (cause-effect-action-results) conceptualizing.

 

This brings us back around to the initial proposition;

 

It seems to me a great mistake for Western civilization to assume that ‘the world is a material structure that ‘exists’’, … and that some force must be applied to ‘make it change’

 

In the forming of a storm cell, it is the conditioning of the ambient ‘ground’ (it is the conditioning of the atmosphere by solar irradiating) that induces the foreground ‘figure’ of the storm. The dynamics of the ‘ground’ not only inhabit the ‘figure’ but create it. As Emerson says in ‘The Method of Nature’, the genius of nature not only inhabits the organism, it creates it.

 

The notion that ‘man can change the world’ is like saying ‘the storm-cell can change the atmosphere’. We intuitively know that this concept is ‘upside-down’ relative to the physical reality of our natural experience.

 

But it is not experience-based intuition that is informing this notion that “the force of an independent agent acting on a material causes the changes that manifest in it. It is language and grammar, and more particularly, it is Indo-European and Scientific noun-and-verb language and grammar in which we built subject-verb-predicate constructs.   Such constructions RE-present dynamics in the purely mechanical, all-hitting, no-fielding terms of ‘independent objects/systems and what these independent objects/systems do’.

 

This ‘mechanical world view’ comes from this/our noun-and-verb language-and-grammar;

 

“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’

In the physical reality of our natural experience (as our experience-based intuition continually reminds us), everything is continually changing and we are included in that change; i.e. we are included in a transforming relational activity continuum.

 

“By the principle of Occam’s razor, physicists and philosophers prefer ideas that can explain the same phenomena with the fewest assumptions. In this case you can construct a perfectly valid theory by positing the existence of certain relations without additionally assuming individual things. So proponents of ontic structural realism say we might as well dispense with things and assume that the world is made of [relational-spatial] structures, or nets of relations.” – Meinard Kuhlmann, ‘What is Real’, Scientific American, August 2013

 

 

We are being recycled within the overall recycling continuum we call ‘Nature’ and “life is something that happens to us while we are busy making other plans” [John Lennon]

 

What is ‘real’ is a kind of ‘dramatic irony’. If we could watch the Titanic’s trajectory taking the large [but recyclable-like-any-material-thing] vessel in amongst a pack of icebergs, our projection is that the outside-inward orchestrating influences are going to prevail over the tin box that is providing a fixed reference frame for unfolding lives of the passengers who reside, operate and interact within it.   It is this reference frame that furnishes their notional ‘independence’ since it ‘blocks out’ a space that is notionally independent of the notionally independent material objects/systems that reside, operate and interact within it.

 

It may seen as if everything that is going on is a matter of ‘what things do’, if we go by listening to and by the talk of those inside the ballroom on the Titanic [we are doing such and such and planning on doing such and such], but our intuition is at the same time telling us that most things that happen to people are not in their plans [whose life is NOT shaken by unwanted developments?]. and it sounds as if that is the case with those inside the ship.   That is, our experience-based intuition informs us that Nature not only ignores such frames [the frames are artefacts of noun-and-verb language-and-grammar] but is continually assimilating and recycling material contents as part of its self-evolving relational dynamic.

 

I realize that this ‘note’ is long enough to make it difficult for the reader to ‘hang on to the propositions’ that are being made within it. In this last part, I will try to summarize the alleged ‘errors’ being made in Western civilization’s commonly embraced ‘operative reality’ that are giving us fits.

 

* * *

 

An action has no meaning in-itself (outside of relational context) but the ‘moral judging’ practice of Western civilization habitually supplies its own out-of-context meaning

 

The act of a dog biting a man cannot be morally judged as being fully and solely attributable to the dog.   The human collective that has teased, abused and poked the dog over its developmental phase, is part of the causal sourcing of the ‘unprovoked attack’ by the dog; i.e. the dog was provoked, but not necessarily by the person it bit. The provocations were ‘experiential conditioning’ that is kind of like loading a spring that will discharge on some later occasion/s.

 

The same applies to the ‘child soldier’ whose horrific acts of murder and rape did not jumpstart from his own internal processes, but from the influence from the relational dynamics of the community that includes bully group authority figures (e.g. ‘warlords’);

 

“Children model their behavior primarily on the behavior of their parents and other authority figures. Whether or not this behavior is effective at producing happiness doesn’t prevent the child from modeling it; the modeling is not a result of reasoning, but is due to simple observation and imitation. This mimicry is illustrated in the old saying “Like father, like son,” or now better put, “Like parent, like child.” Whether parents are happy or not doesn’t stop a child from imitating what he or she observes; children are like dry sponges ready to absorb the first water they come in contact with.”

 

Thus, the community is conditioning the behaviour of its members at the same time as the members are conditioning the dynamics of the community. Those leaders of the community that allow desperate conditions to persist in parts of the community, that are the spawning grounds of extremist acts, cannot stand on a platform of righteousness and maintain total non-responsibility in judging the acts of extremists;

 

“How false is the supposition that an action must depend upon what has preceded it in consciousness ! And morality has been measured in the light of this supposition, as also criminality. . . . The value of an action must be judged by its results, say the utilitarians: to measure it according to its origin involves the impossibility of knowing that origin. But do we know its results ? Five stages ahead, perhaps. Who can tell what an action provokes and sets in motion ? As a stimulus ? As the spark which fires a powder-magazine ? Utilitarians are simpletons —“
.
“The re-establishment of “Nature”: an action in itself is quite devoid of value ; the whole question is this: who performed it? One and the same ” crime ” may, in one case, be the greatest privilege, in the other infamy. As a matter of fact, it is the selfishness of the judges which interprets an action (in regard to its author) according as to whether it was useful or harmful to themselves (or in relation to its degree of likeness or unlikeness to them).”— Nietzsche on ‘Morality’ and ‘Herd Behaviour’ in ‘The Will to Power’

 

* * *

 

Western civilization’s concept of a ‘machine’ is an intellectual noun-verb-predicate based conception that does not exist in the physical reality of our natural experience.

 

The machine called the ‘combustion engine’, like the machine called the ‘human being’, is intellectually modeled as an independent system with inputs and outputs and an internal process that converts fuel to mechanical energy. In the relational space of modern physics, as in our common, intuitively understood experience, the inputs put a dent into the habitat and the outputs transform the habitat.   Our noun-verb-predicate language constructs allow us to say “the rock rolled down the mountain and splashed into the river below, … but that doesn’t speak to the hole in the terrain that the rock’s removal left (allowing long buried seeds to develop into plants and trees) and it doesn’t speak to the rock’s partial plugging of the river that causes overflow in spring and flooding of the town in the valley below.

 

Machines [the way we intellectually model them as independent systems] can only exist in absolute space and absolute time. That’s the only place where we can forget about the dents/holes in the habitat that machine inputs are leaving and the transformation of the habitat that the machine outputs are contributing, not to mention that the machine is included in the habitat and will be recycled by-and-by. In other words, the basic intellectual model of a machine, as an independent material entity-in-itself, is in conflict with the physical reality of our experience wherein;

 

“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

 

The related problem that has been identified with categorizing entities like machines as ‘things-in-themselves’ is referred to as ‘Cantorism’, a disease that mathematics will have to recover from (Poincaré). Cantorism accepts ‘predicative definitions’ which means that one does not have to revise the conditions of membership in a category as one adds new members. This makes possible infinite sets.   In ‘impredicative definitions’ the adding of a new member requires revisions to the membership qualifications. This accords with our common understanding that you can’t keep taking materials out of the habitat to build machines without destroying some habitat and you can’t keep pushing machine output into the habitat without transforming the habitat; i.e. the habitat is the mother of the machine and it is a transforming relational activity continuum that includes everything. The machine is an intellectual blueprint drawn up on blank paper (empty space), but building and operationalizing it transpires in the continually transforming relational space; … the physical reality of our actual experience;

 

“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

 

Of course our living conditions are transforming as we build more machines (put more dents in the habitat) and as their operations and outputs become more ubiquitous (put more transformative influences out there in the relational common-space). Ask not what these machines are going to do for you, ask how they are going to transform our relations with one another and with our common living space.

 

The message is that the ‘transforming relational medium’ is the ‘real message’;

 

“Many people would be disposed to say that it was not the machine, but what one did with the machine, that was its meaning or message. In terms of the ways in which the machine altered our relations to one another and ourselves, it mattered not in the least whether it turned out cornflakes or Cadillacs.” — Marshall McLuhan, ‘Understanding Media’ [the transforming relational ‘medium is the message’]

 

Evidently, our intellectual model of ‘the machine’ helps to invert our view of the world dynamic from a transforming relational space whose transient forms we assign word-labels to and define as ‘independent things’ that, when we have these noun-subjects inflect verbs, appear to have the local jumpstart powers of cause-effect-action-and-results.   In our mind, the ‘hitter’, now liberated from the transforming relational activity continuum, becomes fully and solely responsible for his ‘hitting results’. Noun-verb-predicate intellectual constructs such as ‘the farmer cultivates his fields and produces wheat’, leaves the sun and rain and soil and the movements of the planets and the inherent connectedness and reciprocal influence of all of it;

 

“[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

 

It is not that the machine model is not useful. What is not useful is our habit of believing in the errors of grammar that lead us to say that ‘this machine does such-and-such’. This statement leaves out what is happening to the habitat (the common all-including relational space) as the input-flows pulls stuff out of the habitat and the output-exhausts transform the habitat. In the physical reality of our natural experience, the machine does not reside, operate and interact in a habitat that is independent of the inhabitants that reside, operate and interact within it. Building and operating machines is at the same time, transforming the habitat. In fact, the transforming habitat is the mother of these machines. As with the storm-cell in the atmosphere, the source of the inputting and outputting is the flow of the atmosphere; … the habitat, the world given only once, not only inhabits the cell/machine but creates it.

 

As Emerson says in ‘The Method of Nature’, the genius of nature that is immanent in the relational ecosystem (earth, air, sun, water) not only inhabits the pear tree, it creates it and it gives the pear-tree the ‘talent’ to make pears.   The noun-verb-predicate intellectual construct ‘the pear tree produces pears’ fails to capture the physical reality of the phenomenon, which is based in the transforming relational activity continuum. Logical truths (mechanical models)

 

“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

 

* * *

 

There is no such thing as ‘being’ in the physical reality of our natural experience, however, it is an intellectual idealization that plays a key role in noun-and-verb language-and-grammar RE-presentations, and thus in the shaping of our worldview aka ‘operative reality’.

 

In a flow-based language, a man would not be depicted as a ‘being’ but as an ‘activity’, a ‘manning’. Men keep ‘popping out’ into the transforming relational activity continuum like storm-cells into the atmosphere; i.e. they are relational forms within the relational activity continuum (the world given only once).   We focus on these ‘relational features’ or ‘activities’ within the relational activity continuum and we use language to impute ‘being’ to them so that they become the new jumpstart source of their development and behaviour, so that language allows us to construct RE-presentations that make us forget that the true source of physical phenomena is the transforming relational activity continuum which is the source of many swirls and whorls and subactivities that have their different forms and development cycles but all of these are ‘variations in relational structure of activity continuum’. This habit of reducing relational forms in the relational activity continuum to ‘material beings’ in the notional void of absolute space and absolute time reference frame is so much a part of the way we see things in our mind’s eye, that we tend to forget that such RE-presentations are intellectual constructs and NOT the physical reality of our actual experience. What we get from this practice is a notional ‘local author’ to explain all action and thus get rid of the physically actual non-local authorship.

 

“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 a transforming relational activity continuum; i.e. in a ‘field’, . . . influence is non-local, non-visible and non-material.   It may be convenient to say that ‘Katrina authored the devastation of New Orleans’ but Katrina is a relational feature within a larger system [a relational activity continuum] and is clearly not ‘where the buck starts and stops’.   Noun-and-verb language employs RE-presentations which simplify and deliver ‘economy of thought’.   The RE-presentational reduction of relational features to ‘beings’ removes the relational activity continuum by substituting the infinite void of absolute space and absolute time, as a reference frame for what is then the local, independent material beings that reside, operate and interact within the empty space which is independent of inhabitants that reside, operate and interact within it.   There is no longer any sign of the transforming relational activity continuum, the whorls in the flow have become ‘beings’ that are portrayed as the authors of their own development and behaviour.

 

“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’

 

So, this is the problem; … we are using these being-based constructs all of the time, drumming into our heads the notion that every change must have an author by speaking in terms of authored cause and result…. ‘the farmer produces wheat’.

 

As Emerson says, the genius of nature produces an entire ecosystem with earth, air, sun and water in which a pear-tree forms and the pear-tree has ‘talent’ to make pears, but it would be radically over-simplifying things to treat the statement ‘the pear-tree produces pears’ as a RE-presentation of the physical reality of our natural experience. The relational context that is the bigger story, has gone missing.

 

“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

 

But the popular practice is to do just that; … to regard the intellectual machinery employed in the representation of the world on the stage of thought, as the basis of the real world, or shall we say “a real world”, an ‘operative reality’ that associates with our noun-verb-predicate constructs.

 

* * *

 

Language allows us to construct intellectual RE-presentations that constitute an ‘operative reality’ that is NOT the physical reality of our natural experience.

 

In the physical reality of our natural (actual) experience, if we ‘construct a rock wall’, we have to move rocks, leaving dents in the terrain, destroying (an-nihil-ating) what was already in place. the new rock wall transforms the previously established flow of wind and runoff etc. The access to opportunities for snakes, beetles and birds are transformed by such action, … for some improved, for others reduced. In the game of pool, there is the expression; “it’s not what you make, it’s what you leave”, … meaning that the relations amongst things are more important than what we do with things, and ‘what we do with things’ is the small way of understanding what is really going on, … the transformation of relations.

 

Howard Zinn, in ‘A People’s History of the United States’, pointed to the same understanding; i.e. the colonizer’s perspective that they were ‘constructing a wonderful new world in America was experienced by the colonized indigenous peoples as the ‘destruction of a wonderful established world on Turtle Island’. It is not what you do with things, but what you leave. The construction of wooden houses is, at the same time, the destruction of forest.

 

Noun-and-verb language-and-grammar puts things in terms of ‘what things do’ and leaves unaddressed, what is destroyed in the process; i.e. it ignores that in the physical reality of our natural experience, the transforming of relations is what is primarily ‘real’, while the language-based RE-presentations of what is transpiring provides a simplistic INTELLECTUAL ‘operative reality’ that can be used organize actions, that is in no way EQUIVALENT to the physical reality of our natural experience.   This is problematic in our modern society since our Western culture with its noun-verb-predicate RE-presentations, is prone to ‘snookering itself’ by its habitual use of mechanical reasoning based on ‘what things do’. ‘Snookering’ or ‘hooking’ refers to what happens when one forgets that the primary dynamic is the transforming of relations that condition ‘opportunity to act’ which is closing down and opening up possibility-to-act.

 

In peoples with flow-based languages, the acknowledging of the natural precedence of relations (‘fielding’) over ‘what things do’ (‘hitting’) is automatic. The rockslide or avalanche to the flow-based perspective is a secondary symptom of the slumping of the hills or the relational transforming of the terrain, whereas in a subject-verb-predicate RE-presentation, a ‘rock’ is an independently-existing material object that resides, operates and interacts in a habitat that is independent of the material inhabitants that reside, operate and interact within it.

 

Transformation of the terrain [relational space] is primary in the physical reality of our experience; … it is ‘the way the world works’, but no so in the intellectual constructs of noun-and-verb language, which ‘drops out’ the inherent primacy of relational transformation.   In the inverted view of noun-verb-predicate intellectual constructs, which put ‘material things’ and ‘what things do into an unnatural ‘primary role’ in dynamics, we say that ‘mountains are worn down by erosional processes’, ignoring the fact that mountains and valleys are like wave-crests and wave-troughs and that gravity, a non-local, non-visible, non-material influence which is ‘everywhere at the same time’, is tending to balance out the potential energy differences constituted by mountain and valley. Newtonian physics will say that the rocks are falling down into the valley because of the externally applied gravitational force, but, as Poincaré points out, Newtonian physics is itself a ‘language convention’ that depicts to the intellect, independent ‘figures’ in a blank ‘ground’ [absolute space and absolute time], whereas, in modern physics and in the physical reality of our experience, there is no such thing as ‘blank ground’ and everything moves relative to everything [there is only transformation of relations].

 

“[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

 

The figures and ground are all one, in the relational view.

 

“No man [figure] ever steps in the same river [ground] twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” – Heraclitus

 

In other words, there is no inhabitant-habitat, figure/ground split, and there is, therefore, no need for the concepts of ‘being’ and its necessary complement, absolute space and absolute time reference frame.

 

The transforming relational activity continuum is primary and the simplifying assumptions of science and reason reduce it to an intellectual ‘operative reality’ that can be understood in terms of its noun-verb-predicate constructs, ‘pragmatic idealizations’ that must not be confused for ‘reality’, the price of such confusion [the hijacking of intuition by science and reason] being the infusing of confusion and incoherence into the relational social dynamic.

 

* * * * *