Weblog: August 27, 2006

Waiting for Gnosis (‘Enlightenment’)

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

--- W. B. Yeats ‘The Second Coming’ (1920)

Current email dialogues have put into my mind this question of ‘waiting for Gnosis’, ... waiting for the re-birth of the global society of man in a more enlightened context.

But no, you are not going to be treated to another esoteric interpretation of Yeat’s The Second Coming that purports to speak of this awaited ‘re-birth’.

Rather than start from Yeats poem, we can start our reflection ourselves, from what we have experienced in our lives, and then see if there are resonant accords that emerge from Yeats’ symbolic imageries.

First of all, Yeats wrote this in 1920 when imperialism and colonization by the powerful were pretty much accepted and even celebrated (e.g. The British Empire). That the brown-skinned peoples got short-shrift from the Euro-American white dominated social dynamics of this era was seen as ‘the natural order of things’, as in Darwin’s ‘natural selection’ and ‘survival of the fittest’ per the manner in which he organized ‘the facts’ in The Origin of Species.

Today, many biologists question the validity of the way in which Darwin brought together a multiplicity of observations of nature into the generalization known as ‘natural selection’ (see for example; Alan Rayner’s views on evolutionary biology at http://people.bath.ac.uk/bssadmr/index.htm ).

The alternative, post-Darwinism synthesis acknowledges the inherent connectedness of nature as has been suggested, post-Darwin, by relativity and quantum wave dynamics. In the light of our modern understanding of energy-matter equivalence and wave dynamics, the view of ‘individual things evolving’ is put into perspective, and can be seen as a simplified ‘object paradigm’ view of the evolutionary dynamic that fails to account for the relational resonances and coevolutional interdependencies amongst the included ‘participants’ in an ‘energy-fluid-dynamics’.

Scientific models are necessarily generalizations of natural phenomena and different models can be more or less comprehensive in their generalizing; e.g. newtonian physics is a useful generalization of dynamics in terms of material bodies and how they behave, but it is not so comprehensive as relativity which is based in energy field-flow wherein ‘material bodies’ are included within the flow as local spatial-concentrations of energy. As Einstein notes, there are no discrete boundaries between matter and the space in which it is included, it is all ‘space’ (energy-field-flow) and the difference as one goes from the inside a material body to outside is simply a relative difference in the spatial-concentrating of energy.

Since relativity can deliver an understanding in terms of material bodies, replicating ALL of the results and predictions that newtonian physics is capable of, and go still farther, it is a more comprehensive generalization that does not ‘negate’ newtonian physics but ‘includes it’ as a simplified and less capable generalization.

[Note: Relativity and quantum theory resolve the limitation in newtonian physics, noted by Newton in his Principia, that multiple bodies seem to simultaneously come together (converge) and recede from one another (diverge), this condition of simultaneous mutual influence going beyond the generalization of dynamics in terms of ‘what independent material bodies do’. The laws of dynamics in classical physics are based on capturing a snapshot of a dynamic, the ‘initial conditions’ (location and size of mass, its momentum, spin etc.) and then formulating laws and principles that allow one to describe what this configuration will look like at some time in the future). This simple ‘object paradigm’ based newtonian generalization of dynamics cannot, for example, describe the ontogenesis of a human embryo where not only do the different ‘parts’ of the embryo seem to move relative to an invisible ‘gestalt’ but many of the ‘parts’ that the scientist captured in the ‘initial conditions’ are no longer present and trackable at ‘later times’ and moreover, new parts have emerged which are influencing the evolution of spatial-relationships which ‘did not exist’ during the capture of ‘initial conditions’.

A ‘fluid energy-field flow-dynamics’ as implied by relativity, offers promise of going beyond the limitations of the simple ‘object paradigm’ foundations of newtonian science. For example, entire regions of energy space including the material-energy-concentrations within them can converge and diverge in the relativity and quantum gravity models (Rovelli, Smolin) and be accompanied by ‘dissolution’ of matter or ‘creation of matter (energy concentration inclusions). As in the fluid dynamics we know, the concept of nested inclusion goes beyond the Russian Doll model wherein, if you open up an organism, you get ‘organs’ inside and if you open up an organ you get ‘cells’ inside, and if you open up a cell, you get ‘organelles’ inside, and so on with molecules and atoms and on down to quarks. That is, in fluid dynamics, nested inclusion is in terms of ‘whorls within whorls’. Inside of the Gulf Stream whorl are smaller local whorls or ‘eddies’ and inside those whorls are ‘lesser whorls’ and so on. As the oceanic basins open up (‘continental drift’) and Gulf Stream whorl expands, there is no ‘time-lag’ for the included whorls and lesser whorls to ‘also expand’ since they are ‘made of’ the Gulf Stream whorl (it is like a rubber canvas that they are imprinted on). Though we impose ‘objecthood’ on flow-features like hurricanes, they are simply flow-forms within the mother flow (e.g. the atmospheric space-flow).

The notion of ‘space’ AND ‘time is exposed as a simplifying convention in this energy-field-flow way of looking at things. Our natural hostspace takes on more the appearance of the embryo where the spatial-relational ’morphing’ becomes more basic that ‘material bodies’ and their ‘temporally-sequenced behaviours’. Hence the notion of a ‘space-time continuum’, an elastic flow-space in which ‘the motion of material bodies’ is a simplification of the same type as ‘the movement of hurricanes’ (hurricanes do not move since they are not ‘independent objects’, ... space transforms, ... and hurricanes are flow-features within that spatial-relational transformation).

The ‘object paradigm’ of newtonian science is a useful though simple generalization that allows us to predict, on the basis of the state of affairs now (initial conditions), what the state of affairs will be some time in the future. This is a ‘piecewise’ predicting and it cannot handle evolving spatial-relationships as in the case of the embryo, over times wherein many of the pieces being used to make the prediction no longer exist and many new pieces exist which were not included in the initial-conditions based model generalization.

The ‘energy-field-flow paradigm’ of relativity avoids the dependency on ‘parts’ and ‘time’ and delivers understanding instead, in terms of purely relative transforming spatial relationships (‘evolutionary time’ is inferred by the rate of spatial-relational transformation as it appears relative to us; i.e. to the transforming of our own bodies and those things we are most familiar with). While motion in the ‘object paradigm’ is defined as that of the center of an object relative to an absolute fixed euclidian space-frame, motion in the ‘energy-field-flow paradigm’ of relativity is ‘relative’ in an inner-outer converging/diverging spatial-relational sense as in wave dynamics; i.e. like the meteorologist who is also working with fluid dynamics, we cannot use it to deliver explicit forward-construction predictions, only short term spatial-relational transformational pattern-based predictions which are meanwhile useful in actualizing and shaping the individual and collective behaviours of those of us who share inclusion in the common flow-space. Reflection shows that models of this type are ‘inclusional’ in that what corresponds to an ‘object’ in the classical ‘object paradigm’ science is instead a persisting ‘flow-feature’ which is inner-outer dynamical balancing based (like the whorl in the bathtub water when the plug is pulled) rather than having an absolute self-center and self-center-sourced behaviour. Again, there is nothing in the ‘object paradigm’ and ‘time’ based classical model that cannot be dealt with in the ‘energy-field-flow (transforming spacetime continuum) paradigm’, and a capability/potential is opened up to deliver understanding on dynamical phenomena involving simultaneous mutual influence of multiple entities (through inner-outer dynamical balancing), as in the complex community dynamics of wildgeese, bird-flocks, fish-schools, and humans).]

Relativity explains everything newtonian physics does and more besides, as is the case with post-Darwinian theory relative to neo-Darwinian theory, where ‘competition amongst independent individual organisms’ is no longer seen as the fundamental operative in evolution, being subsumed by ‘cooperation’ in the spatial-relational sense of participants sharing inclusion within a common eco-social dynamics.

When eco-systemic interdependency is seen as a more fundamental dynamic in the evolutionary process than the ‘fitness’ of independent individual organisms locked in battle to acquire more than their ‘fair share’ of nature’s available resources, the life-sustaining strength of a diversity of participants rises to the fore as a primary influence in the shaping of evolution. Since 1920, when rising fascism in Europe was basically a ‘living embodiment’ of the over-simplified rational theory of ‘natural selection’ (‘fitness’ being translated into brute-force power over others), there has been a kind of parallel‘slouching-towards-bethlehem’ suggested-emergence of another (non-fascist) way that acknowledges the value of diversity, particularly with respect to the resilient sustaining of dynamical balance and harmony within eco-social community dynamics (e.g. the US underwent a dramatic ‘healing’ of the master-slave relationship between whites and blacks in the 1960s).

Nevertheless, current events such as 9/11 seem to have induced some retro-grade action where Yeats’ new forward-slouching ‘man-beast’ hybrid is doing some backstepping, and the ‘darkness’ of rationalist fundamentalism is tending towards dropping back into its dominating prevalence of the past twenty centuries.

What then, is holding up our Gnosis? How can we open up a receptive path for our own more enlightened cultural rebirth?

Insight can be gleaned by inquiry into ‘why we fight’, such as is explored in the documentary Why We Fight.

In our inquiry into ‘why we fight’ (see hyperlinked essay above), we find that there is a fundamental role for the irrational notions of ‘good’ versus ‘evil’ (the elimination of the latter) which we have tied to the rational notions of ‘right’ versus ‘wrong’ (the elimination of the latter). The quest for the amplification of ‘good’ and ‘correct’ behaviour and the elimination of ‘evil’ and ‘incorrect’ behaviour, is backed up operationally by a leader-follower system of organization.

When we, as soldiers, focus purely on the efficient and comprehensive execution of our duties and missions, leaving the political and moral issues to our commanding officers and politicians, we split apart the man’s-head and the body-of-the-beast with the military becoming the body-of-the-beast as driven (in an unnatural, inverted way) by-a-man’s-head constituted by think-tank strategists and corporate power-influenced political leaders (don’t forget, the ‘heart’ is in the ‘body-of-the-beast’, just watch the mother bear with her cub or the doe with her fawn).

Can we expect ‘enlightenment’ to come through leader-follower ‘systems of organization’ and therefore ‘through leaders’, or is enlightenment like an all-permeating tide that soaks into all participants in the global social organism?

That is, it is possible to conceive of enlightenment as something ‘spatial-relational’ or ‘self-organizational’ where we let go of our fragmented independent pursuit of the ‘enlightened thing to do’ and allow our behavioural potentials to be inductively actualized and shaped by our common community hostspace dynamic, as in natural ecosystems and the Buddhist adage; ‘there is no path to collective harmony, ... collective harmony is the path’.

Or is enlightenment like a ‘holy-ghost’ fire from beyond nature that drops in on each of us making us ‘whole’ as a still-independent-individual by upgrading our ‘inner purpose’ with ‘the more enlightened/correct thing to do’?

Do we ‘get enlightened’ by upgrading our internal wisdom so that it may shape our inner-purpose-driven behaviour? ... or do we ‘get enlightened’ by letting go of our one-sided (inside-outward) driving of our behaviour from our own personal ‘internal purpose’ (even if it be the new and improvement post-enlightment version) and instead relaxing our self-center driven asserting and allowing our behaviour to be actualized and shaped by the potentials for harmony and resonance inherent in our shared eco-social hostspace?

For myself, there is no question that the notion of enlightenment as upgraded internal wisdom that drives our still-thought-of-as-‘independent’ self is a bogus notion. That is, Gnosis is not something we ‘need to wait for’, we already have it and have been suppressing it for the 20 centuries Yeats refers to, or 25 according to the calculations of some, since we don’t really have to talk in terms of ‘second comings’ when dealing with something we have been repressing; i.e. the ‘comings’ do not refer to ‘the new world order’, the ‘comings’ refer to ‘triggering’ a release of what we have been suppressing, denying, ignoring so as to allow what is already there, awareness of our inclusion in the dynamical unity of our natural hostspace, to be released from its confinement and restored to its natural primacy.

The ‘first coming’ can be seen as an incitement to ‘letting go’ and liberating what is natural within us, the seamless psycho-somatic sythesis of rational mind and sentient soma, the pre-split-apart man-beast, ... it having been split apart with rational-man-head taking over the helm, ... rational man who can set his innate valuing of harmony and balance aside to punish (by killing and maiming) innocent parents and children for the ‘incorrect’ or ‘evil’ behaviours advocated by their ‘leaders’, ... a rational strategy based on ‘the-ends-justifies-the-means’, ... the rationally-perceived pathway to a better, more desirable future (pure abstraction) even as we transform the evolving space of the continuing present into a bloody mess, ... and make a mockery of the ancient wisdom; ‘there is no path to community harmony, ... community harmony is the path’.

What is ‘evil’ anyway, and why are we orienting our social organizing to its elimination?

‘Evil’ associates with an action, such as the ‘terrorist action on 9/11’, but ‘actions’ that have beginnings and endings are incapable of carrying understanding of the transforming eco-social hostspace dynamic we all share inclusion in.

The people in the cart on the way to the guillotine are said to have ‘free will’ and full, sole-sourcing authorship of their own behaviour. They can prove it by getting up and singing a song and dancing a jig of their own choosing whenever they wish, ... but such a view in terms of the actions of individuals, framed by the local cart-space, is innately too simple a view to convey understanding of what is going on, since they are inextricably bound up in a spatial-relational flow that is taking them somewhere beyond their choosing, beyond their control, beyond the scope of their ‘free will’ and their ‘internal purpose-driven’ behaviour. The local actions that we impute to be authored from their interiors, whether good or evil are far too dimensionally constrained to give us an understanding of the overall dynamic they are bound up in (a ‘whorl-within-whorl rather than ‘russian doll’ kind of dynamical inclusion where the inner is the outer and the outer is the inner as is the case with the local/inner hurricane flow and the nonlocal/outer atmospheric flow.)

The actions of individuals within our shared living space do not ‘determine’ the evolution of the dynamic of the shared living space that we are all included in. That is merely the bogus, because over-simplified, imagery of our rational mental modelling. The action of eliminating evil, as we well know, creates a highly tensioned shared living space dynamic that is fully capable of actualizing evil behavioural potentials. Rational modeling, as useful as it is in its forward asserting, positivist ‘what things do’ simplicity, lacks the capacity for dealing with the real-world situation where behavioural potentials are inductively actualized and shaped by the dynamical hostspace we are included in. If we are starving in a ‘land of plenty’ yet denied access to what we need to survive, we will steal to feed our crying, starving children and in the process we may even kill. Such is the stuff that classic stories like ‘Les Miserables’ are made of. ‘Evil’ pertains to actions or behaviours perpetrated by particular individual ‘causal agents’ (Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Hezbollah ... or, in the opinion of the ‘enemy side’, George Bush, Ronald Reagan, the US military). Social organization based on ‘eliminating evil’ and ‘proliferating good’ (organization based on the causal actions of ‘material objects/organisms’) cannot even comprehend or address the greater reality where behaviours are inductively actualized and shaped by the dynamical hostspace in which the ‘actors’ are included.

We clearly have alternative ways to understanding our relationship with the common hostspace we are included in. Modern physics (relativity, quantum theory, complexity) informs us that the energy-field-flow otherwise known as the space we live in has beeb inductively actualizing and shaping every’thing’ including material objects/organisms and their behaviours. It is only a simplification of convenience aka ‘convention’ (Poincaré) whereby we re-construct dynamical phenomena in terms of ‘independent material-objects’ and ‘their independent material-object behaviours’. We have been confusing our highly simplified rational mental modeling, our workman’s tool, with the far more complex natural reality of our lived experience, and it is giving us fits; i.e. the tool has been running away with the workman.

Why are we unable to let go of our deeply ingrained sense that the world social dynamic is causally constructed through the behaviour of independent participants whose behaviours are themselves driven in a fully-responsible self-authoring sense from their internal (‘good’ or ‘evil’) purpose?

Modern science is telling us that material bodies and their behaviours are inductively actualized and shaped by the dynamical (energy-field-flow) space that all things (i.e. ‘we’) are included in. We can see ourselves in the same sense of the sailor/sailboat whose sails, keel rudder engage with the flow-space he is included in so that he draws his motive power from that flow-space and allows his behaviour to be inductively actualized and shaped by it as he attunes to it in such a manner as to sustain dynamical balance and harmony with it.

But no, our rational models are ‘destination-oriented’ and we have been over-riding this inclusion-in-a-common-flow-space understanding of our inner-outer relationship with our dynamical hostspace, with a different sort of understanding in which we remove all of our sensitive ‘fins’ for attuning to and sustaining balance with our dynamical hostspace (making ourselves sleek and streamlined and otherwise fit for ignoring it), strapping a powerful engine on our stern that will allow us to proceed directly to our independently-chosen destination (‘desire future’) thus making ourselves over into an ‘ends-justified means’ vessel for satisfying the pursuit of our self-interest in a way that ignores attunement to the hostspace dynamic in which we are included.

The sailboat collective enjoys a hostspace-induced organizing capability that in inbuilt in nature. When the airflow/waterflow shifts, the whole collective can use this shift to simultaneously reorient their collective behaviour in the manner of a school of fish or flock of birds since each vessel is induced to turn into the flow in the manner of a weathervane (by way of its dynamical balance-seeking flow-engaging fins). The social hostspace dynamic also has this flow-orienting behavioural capability. When we are in freeway traffic-flow, we also allow our behaviour to be inductively actualized and shaped by the traffic-flow-space dynamic we are included in. We ‘let go of’ (we ‘relax but do not abandon’) our inner-purpose-driven destination-orientation, allowing precedence to be given to movement that serves the sustaining of a harmonious traffic-flow. This is the hostspace-attuned mode of the sailboat rather than the rigid self-center-driven destination-orientation of the power boat mode.

We are more likely to ‘drive friendly’ in this manner when we are vulnerable, as on a motorcycle or in a small car. The bigger and more secure the vehicle (on through to SUVs, humvees, bulldozers and tanks), the closer we approximate an ‘independent object’ with ‘independent object behaviour’, and with the desensitizing/numbing of our engagement with the hostspace we are included in, the more the destination-oriented mode of the ‘power boat’ collective tends to take over.

And with the regression to the powerboat mode, the organizing influence no longer comes by way of balance-sustaining attunement to the hostspace dynamic as in the sailboat collective. The collective shifts instead to the ‘leader-follower’ organizing strategy of neo-Darwinian ‘survival-of-the-fittest’.

Everyday, we are involved in both the sailboat mode (hostspace-attuned dynamical-balance-sustaining) and the powerboat mode (destination-oriented) of social-dynamics organizing.

But why is it we are allowing the powerboat mode, with its associated ‘leader-follower’ mechanics, to be the preferred method in business and government, institutions that we have proxied our own personal power over to?

Twenty-five centuries ago, the destinational uncertainty in the sailboat mode was fully accepted. Exploration and discovery was the natural order of the day, ... life was lived for the journey rather than for the attaining of a destination.

As the blank spaces on the map (on so many different types of maps) have been filled in, the sailboat mode with its hostspace-attuned balance-sustaining-seeking orientation has been overtaken by the powerboat mode where everyone ‘knows’ where they want to go, and if they don’t, the experts, politicians and corporate bosses and others in our leader-follower social dynamic will tell us where to go. Those who are not working towards explicit destinations/objectives are seen as oddballs or romantics, ... even though the destination-orientation enslaves us by reaching back and dominating our consciousness so that we cannot open up our sensibilities to the evolving space of the continuing present that we are uniquely situationally included in. So we ‘give up’ our life in the ‘space of now’ and become the embodied means driven by our ‘ends’. We are doing this to ourselves on both an individual and political nation-state basis.

Worse than this, our ‘ends’ or ‘desired future’ that is reaching back to pre-occupy us and consume the attention we would ‘naturally’ give to the transforming hostspace we are included in, are negatively formulated; i.e. we are orienting to the prevention of a nightmare future that we don’t want to happen. We are going to war against drug addiction, against poverty, against terrorism, against unemployment, against illness, against violence and criminality, and we are letting these ‘ends’, these ‘desired futures’ monopolize our senses and behaviours in the space of the continuing present. How can we give ourselves up to attuned dynamical-balance-sustaining with the hostspace we are included in, in the way of nature’s eco-social collectives, when our sentient engaging-with-the-space-of-now equipment is disabled to make us more effective slaves to a desired future?

There is no way to do so, without ‘letting go’ of the unnatural, rational headlock we have been putting ourselves into. We are coming apart, the central governing authorities cannot hold, as Yeats says. We are ‘our man-head’ driving ‘our natural beast’. Our soldiers, the cornerstones of power in our leader-follower social organization, are trained to kill and destroy whoever our politicians say we/they must in order to satisfy our ‘ends-justifies-the-means’ destination-orientation. The balance-sustaining-seeking spatial-relational ‘sailboat’ ethic of the native warrior (that resides in each of us) has been replaced in the modern soldier by unquestioning submission to authority and rational execution that does not seek to understand. This is the powerboat mode of organizing where the destination coordinates are entered into the GPS controlled helm and powerful engines actuated to drive the boat forward, oblivious to the nuances of the dynamical hostspace it is pushing through. The modern soldier must structure his behavour so as to over-ride the nuances of the dynamical hostspace he is included in and trust that the values of his nation, which has committed to uphold, truly do permeate the orders that he commits to execute as effectively and fully as his capacities allow.

In summary, we have invested heavily, over the past twenty to twenty-five centuries in institutionalizing a split which puts rationality (‘ends-justifies-the-means’ destination orientation) into an unnatural precedence over intuition (inner-outer dynamical-balance-seeking).

Correspondingly;

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

‘Waiting for Gnosis’, the title of this blog, is thus an oxymoron since it objectifies the unobjectifiable and names the nameless. Enlightment is within us and always has been. It is not going to drop out of the sky as drops of fire or come to us by way of internet downloads that ‘upgrade’ our internal wisdom banks with new and enlightened knowledge and understanding.

If the stuff of enlightenment is not in the dynamical hostspace of Nature then where is it? And if it is in Nature, it is in us since we are in Nature.

We have institutionalized the disabling of our inner-outer dynamical-engagement-sensing ‘fins’, akin to the sailboat sails, rudder, keel that allow us to attune in a harmony-seeking way to the dynamical hostspace we are included in. Twenty-five centuries of perfecting our powerboat, destination-oriented mode of social dynamics organizing has made this unnatural practice almost transparent to us.

The man-beast of Gnosis will reach Bethlehem when we stop holding back our own natural capacities for allowing our behaviour to be inductively actualized and shaped by the hostspace dynamics that we are included in. Enlightment will come ‘on its own’ like the flood tide when we ‘let go’ of the unnatural precedence we are giving to ‘ends-justifies-the-means’ destination-orientation with its leader-follower mechanics and its ‘wars on evil’ (that inductively actualize more of the same).

* * *

Weblog: August 2, 2006

The current Israel-Lebanon conflict raises questions about values. As the conflict continues to take ten Lebanese civilian lives for every Israeli civilian life, and as Israel, backed by the US administration of George Bush and the Canadian government of Stephen Harper argues on the basis of ‘who is right and who wrong’ to continue on with it, Prime Minister Fuad Siniora asks;

“Is the value of human life less in Lebanon than that of citizens elsewhere? Are we children of a lesser God? ... Is an Israeli tear-drop worth more than a drop of Lebanese blood?”

Once again in world history, we have a split between those who (a) put the principle of ‘who is right and who is wrong’ ahead of sustaining harmony and balance, and those who (b) put the sustaining of dynamical balance and harmony ahead of the principle of ‘who is right and who is wrong’.

In the Middle East, as in the case of European colonization of the Americas, once those with the most power take possession of lands, proclaiming them to be ‘sovereign-owned property’ defined by the imaginary-boundary lines and then holding ‘democratic elections’ where those who have been accorded ‘co-ownership’ in the sovereign property (and who agree to bear arms and give their lives if necessary to make believers out of others in their ownership of the land) get the chance to vote, ... the notion arises in the minds of the colonizers, at least, of the absolute self-right-ness of the ‘property owners’ to defend themselves from any residue of ‘unbelievers’. That is, once property ownership has been declared by and legalistically signed off by the ‘most powerful’ who have committed to take and hold possession of the property, ... the notion of the ‘inviolable rights of property ownership’ is invoked and used to justify the elimination of resistance on the part of those who have been displaced from the land, those who have lost free status within the land and those neighbouring peoples who have lost traditional access to and relations with the land.

It is not only ‘interesting’ how some western mind works in this regard, it is important to an understanding of how people ‘split’ on such conflicts as the current Israel-Lebanon conflict. For example, the current Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay opines; http://www.cbc.ca/story/world/national/2006/08/01/ottawa-mideast.html

“For me it’s not a difficult choice between siding with a state, a democratically-elected government, a democracy that’s being attacked by terrorists and a group of cold-blooded killers.”

Is there then such a thing as warm-blooded killers, which justifies the ten-to-one imbalance in Lebanese-to-Israeli civilian casualties? ... duly endorsed-by-democratic-process military killers representing a people who are saddened by the ‘ends-justifies-the-means’ burden of having to kill innocents in order to ‘do the right thing’, ... the ‘right thing’ being to defend the inviolable rights of property-owners?

Peter MacKay and Stephen Harper are finding that their unnatural elevation of the logical premise (with dubious foundations) over the current reality, the unfolding dynamical space of the continuing present, is in a minority in ‘Canada’.

As the Buddhist adage says; ‘There is no path to harmony, ... harmony is the path.’ ... and as those who have preserved the natural primacy of intuition-over-logic realize, the continuation of massive destruction and killing of innocents as the means to the end of ‘eliminating terrorists’ is creating the conditions to do just the opposite, to spawn new and more committed ‘freedom-fighters’ (the way that those currently labelled ‘terrorists’ connote themselves) throughout the region and throughout the world.

There is a ‘split’ in the world that is deeper than the particular issues of Israel and its neighbours in the Middle East. The split is with respect to the relative primacy of; (a) rational models which employ absolute logic (logic of mutual exclusion) and, (b) intuition which employes spatial relationships (logic of mutual inclusion). Polarized views as to which takes priority over the other is what is sourcing the ‘split’.

Where ‘property’ comes into this is by way of the logic of mutual exclusion applied so as to impute ‘independence’ to the ‘imaginary-line-bounded’ ‘owned-property’ that we purport to constitute ‘the democratic nation’. The American ‘Declaration of Independence’ is an example. Of course such ‘independence’ may be imposed on the mental models in our heads but it is not imposed on nature. The common hostspace of the earth, as our real-life experience informs us, has an INTERDEPENDENT nature to it, and thus the power of the US is heavily dependent on petroleum resources no longer to be found within the imaginary-line-bounded sovereign property known as the United States (consumed in the process of acquiring political-economic supremacy), setting up huge political, economic and military currents around the world as the US tries to maintain control over access to the world’s remaining petroleum reserves.

To those who put the logic of mutual exclusion first, order in the world must come from the rational judgements imposed by central governing authorities of the independent nation-states where the ends of administering these judgements justify the means (continuing conflict to eliminate resistance to the judgements), ... thus the strategy that puts the elimination of those resisting the judgement prior to any ceasefire (restoring of dynamical balance).

To those who put the logic of mutual INCLUSION first, order in the world must come from the sustaining of dynamical balance in the evolving shared hostspace of the continuing present, ... thus ‘implementing a cease-fire in the Israel-Lebanon conflict to stop the deaths of civilians and children takes precedence over the operationalizing of logical judgements.

Increasingly, this split in approach to collective self-organizing is coming to a ‘head’.

* * *

Weblog: July 16, 2006

From whence our ‘identity’? ... ‘brotherhood’ or ‘property-co-ownership’?

Brotherhood is an unbounded web of evolving relationships that can be local, regional or global. It may or not be tied to religion, race, profession, politics or gender. It is a powerful binding force because we are bound up in it through our evolving experience.

Political nationalism is logical, being based on co-ownership in an imaginary-line-bounded ‘land claim’ that is ‘centrally controlled’ and belief in the existence of which is protected by military force, which the youthful among the co-owners must supply. If the co-ownership contract is revised; e.g. if Quebec were to drop out of Canada, then the military obligation would immediately cease for those residing outside of the new imaginary-line-boundaries. Brotherhood is an ongoing inner-outer relational dynamic that does not ‘turn on and off’ in the same manner as the nation-state - whose powers cease when one travels beyond the on/off border that marks where it exists and where it does not, or when the ‘inter-national authorities’ change the imaginary-line configuration that decrees ‘now you are, and now you are not’ a member of such-and-such ‘nation’.

The co-owners of the sovereign property of a nation-state may well be bound together not only by ‘the logic of property ownership’ but also by ‘brotherhood’ but ‘brotherhood’ is not logical and it does not stop at political borders, nor does its influence fully permeate the population and area within the imaginary-line-boundaries of the nation and stop suddenly at the logical margins. For example, Lebanese-Canadians and Jewish Canadians will be bound together logically by co-ownership in the sovereign owned property known as Canada, but the webs of brotherhood they are respectively bound up in, both within Canada, in the Middle East and around the world, are likely to be very different.

Members of these two brotherhood webs, in the light of current violent conflict between Lebanon-based Hezbolah and the nation of Israel, are looking for very different actions from the government of Canada in its response to the conflict.

This blog entry is not about taking sides in this or any other particular dispute, but reaching down to explore the psychology associated with our personal ‘identity’ that associates to some greater or lesser extent with ‘brotherhood’ and also with ‘political nationality’ (co-ownership in an imaginary-line-bounded, centrally governed property).

Where does our behaviour ‘come from’ as an individual and as a collective? Does it come from ‘brotherhood’ or does it come from our sworn subservience to a centrally-governed nation-state based on the co-ownership of an imaginary-line-bounded property?

The different ways in which we can and do answer this question tells us a lot about the current state of evolution of our world social dynamic.

The film The Power of Nightmares by Adam Curtis (BBC, 2004) presents an important part of this story to us, but omits the very basics of how we give meaning to the world of our experience and our visual observations.

In Curtis view, radical Islam sees ‘evil’ is seen as a ‘virus’ that infects people (‘Jahiliya’, the pre-Islam state of spiritual ignorance). They see it as being spread from the United States. An Egyption scholar, Sayyid Qutb (1906 – 1966), one of the founding ‘prophets’ of the tenets of radical Islam, while studying Colorado, was revolted by such ‘degenerate’ social practices as a student dance where the girls and guys pressed their bodies together, the girls rubbing their breasts on the guys to make the whole body pressing on body into an illicit sexual pleasure-seeking.

Qutb’s conclusion was that the problem lay with western political leaders who were usurping God’s role, by authorizing this degenerate pursuit of individual self-interest. Qutb was influenced by Mawlana Maududi (Pakistan) who conceived of Islam as a revolutionary force in believed that Islam was a revolutionary force in the world;

“"Islam is a revolutionary ideology and program which seeks to alter the social order of the whole world and rebuild it in conformity with its tenets and ideals." According to Qutb:

[Islam] is, in effect, a revolt against any human situation where sovereignty, or indeed Godhead, is given to human beings. A situation that gives ultimate authority to human beings actually elevates those humans to the status of deities, usurping God's own authority. As a declaration of human liberation, Islam means returning God's authority to Him, rejecting the usurpers who rule over human communities according to man-made laws... Nothing of this is achieved through verbal advocacy of Islam [alone].

* * *

As has been discussed in this recent series of blog entries, ‘objectification’ is a psychology practice that imputes to an imaginary closed-geometric-form, that we impose on the continuing spatial-relational dynamics of the world, the divine power of ‘internal first cause’. That is how we come to talk about ‘the hurricane’ and ‘the nation’ as if they are ‘objects that exist’ and as if they possess an internal behavioural drive (self-determinism, ‘free will’). That is the implication of saying ‘hurricane Katrina ‘destroyed sections of New Orleans’, ... and, the United States ‘did such and such in Iraq and Afghanistan’.

Because such objectification is a primary ‘currency’ of our method of communicating, it is hard for us to see that we are ‘artificially’ splitting the inherent dynamical unity of nature into two independent parts, (1.) the asserting subject that we impute as having internal first cause (self-authoring of behaviour) and (2.) the rest of the world.

While Qutb maintains that the ultimate origin of this ‘first cause’ must be God, he sees this as being usurped by the politician, the head of central governing authority of the nation-state. It follows, by this reasoning, that the head of the nation-state must be some-one who ‘passes through’ to the people, the authority from God.

Adam Curtis goes on to describe the neo-conservative philosophy in the United States, a founder thinker for which was Leo Strauss, which ALSO takes for granted that people’s behaviour must come from a ‘central authority’, the political leaders of the nation-state in this case whose job it is to rule the (ignorant) masses;

Strauss believed in an elitist hierarchical society as in Plato’s Republic, where it was the natural right for the superior to rule over the inferior, and to use deception in order to do so;

“Strauss viewed religion as absolutely essential in order to impose moral law on the masses who otherwise would be out of control. At the same time, he stressed that religion was for the masses alone; the rulers need not be bound by it. Indeed, it would be absurd if they were since the truths proclaimed by religion were ‘a pious fraud’.”

... “Like Thomas Hobbes, Strauss believed that the inherently aggressive nature of human beings could only be restrained by a powerful nationalistic state. "Because mankind is intrinsically wicked, he has to be governed," he once wrote. "Such governance can only be established, however, when men are united – and they can only be united against other people."

The backing for liberal democracy in the US shifted in the 1960’s, highlighted by the Chicago riots and, in general, the failure of civil disorder to be controlled even by increasing the number of laws and the severity of punishment. According to Adam Curtis, this failure of politicians to be able to ‘control the people’ by ‘delivering dreams’ (e.g. Lyndon Johnson’s ‘Great Society’) opened the door for neoconservatist politicians to shift their power-base to ‘protecting us from nightmares’.

Who can argue that there has NOT been a shift away from the politician that promises to deliver dreams, towards the politician that promises to protect us against nightmares? And who can argue that ‘protection against nightmares’ has not risen up to be an important unifying force in the US and in the western world.

Overall, Curtis conjures up a very credible explanation, as far as it goes, for the polarization we are seeing in the world today; i.e. on the one hand, elitist radical Islam that believes that ‘democracy’, because of its system of giving central control to politicians, is usurping the role of God and infecting the world with Jahaliya (a virus that causes spiritual ignorance), on on the other hand, elitist neo-Darwinians intentionally spawning nightmarish myths involving the battle of good versus evil, wherein Americans are to see themselves as the only ones who can save the world from being taken over by evil.

* * *

All aspects of the above model imply a hierarchical world where the organizational dynamics are seen as involving independent entities driven from and by assertive behaviour; i.e. the assertive behaviour being (‘first-cause’) sourced in men, by God or by Politicians. In such an object-based model, chaos is seen to result from the first choice, which leaves God and a Political elite as the remaining viable choices, of which the Politician is the most viable since the politician can use the God concept as a management/controlling tool).

Nature clearly does not operate in this object-paradigm manner and the natural principle of organization embraced by aboriginals conceives of man and all creatures as naturally dynamical balance-seeking (inner-outer spatial-relational balance-seeking). Aboriginal man did not see himself as a ‘superior creature’ because he believed that man and all creatures are included in a common space (emerge, transform and recycle as flow-forms within a common flow) and it is the eternal pursuit of dynamical balance (peace and harmony) in this inner-outer individual-pushing – spatial-accommodating that the Great Spirit can be found ‘directing traffic’. This social organization by dynamical-balance-seeking is in a natural primacy over hierarchy in the aboriginal philosophy (hierarchy is symbolic in the aboriginal belief system but not foundational; i.e. the chief that leads the warriors into battle is understood as a tool of a-centric dynamical balancing, and NOT as a local ‘internal-first-cause based’ source of centrally-driven commands, whether it purport to be from ‘inner-self’, God or some other ‘politically higher’ Chief.

Out of this unbounded dynamical balance-seeking comes a sense of ‘brotherhood’ that has no dependency on being co-owners of a common land-claim, nor that kind of political brotherhood that comes from swearing an oath of subservience (citizenship) to the central control authority, giving one a share of power that has been described by Thomas Mann in Mario and the Magician;

“The capacity for self-surrender, he said, for becoming a tool, for the most unconditional and utter self-abnegation, was but the reverse side of that other power to will and to command.  Commanding and obeying formed together one single principle, one indissoluble unity; he who knew how to obey knew also how to command, and conversely; the one idea was comprehended in the other, as people and leader were comprehended in one another.”

The western system of objectifying everything, even the unbounded continuum of the land, gives rise to the corresponding need for a central force to reunify what has been broken down into ‘independent’ pieces, the result being the notion of some center-sourced drive of the dynamics we see, ... centered in the individual, God, the politician, ... but center-sourced from somewhere. The aboriginal notion of a-centric social organization which accepts that space is not only ‘a participant’ but is both the container and things included in it, is alien to western thinking.

Thus, if something starts breaking out all over, like a national pandemic, the western mind tries to understand it in terms of an assertive agency because that’s all there is, assertive agencies and therefore they are responsible for all dynamics.

In the modern western mind, the ‘fear’ that comes with these ‘nightmares’ the politicians and media are presenting us with, as if an ‘evil virus’ is out there, relates to this western banishing of the participation of space in dynamics. This should not be surprising since it comes from the same ‘logic’ (logic of mutual exclusion) that leads to the notion of ‘independent beings’ and the essential need for ‘hierarchical control’ of them.

For example, when a nation passes many laws and intensifies punishments to suppress civil disorder that is popping up like a pandemic all over the country, and civil disorder continues to rise nevertheless, ... when all you have to explain ‘what happens’ is ‘assertive agents’ (space is a non-participant) then it follows that the assertive agent that is causally responsible for making all these people go ballistic is ‘invisible’ (this is part of neo-conservative belief; e.g. one cannot assess the evil intent of the Soviet Union [in the Reagan era] simply by what is manifest and visible, that the Soviet Union possessed sophisticated technologies and methods that were invisible to CIA assessments.).

But what if the source of the continuing rise of civil disorder, at the same time, across the whole country, was coming from some quality of space? What if the ‘more oppressive space’ itself, as a result of toughening up the laws and the police actions, was itself ‘inducing’ the civil disorder? When everyone grows more suspicious of evil lurking in everyone else, might this not induce violent backlash that appears to be confirm our suspicions?

Were we to believe that space is a participant in dynamical phenomena (as relativity says it is), there would be no need for superstitious conjecture on the ‘invisible virus of evil’, the stuff of ‘the nightmares that politicians are going to protect us from’, we would have found the source of the problem and it would have been ‘us’, our own fear-based attempts to ‘control behaviour’ would be making our shared living space more oppressive so as to inductively cultivate and amplify, the very thing we were trying to suppress.

It is not hard to see how the mental models of radical Islam and neo-conservative US administrations could get into such a reciprocally complementing ‘death-spiral’.

* * *

But let’s return to the issue of ‘brotherhood’. We all ‘feel brotherhood’ of the unbounded dynamical-balance-seeking type of aboriginal belief at the same time as we participate in ‘nationalism’, ... thus there are two senses of brotherhood in us at the same time, the logical variety of brotherhood due to our co-ownership in a centrally-controlled imaginary-line-bounded owned property object (which parallels residency in the religious ‘City of God’), and our native dynamical-balance-seeking brothership that knows no boundaries and because of the particulars of our personal development could go on out ignoring the on/off boundaries of our nation and wrap around the world.

We could thus say to both the radical Islamists and the neo-conservatives; ‘Hold up there, ... don’t worry, ... you were thinking that we only had three choices for where behaviour is born, the individual, God and the Politician, the former being seen as resulting in chaos because of independent individuals pursuing their own self-interests, the middle being seen as a ‘pious fraud’ invented by men posing as God’s disciples, and the third being seen as depending on the existence of a superior class whose success in maintaining order is the cornerstone reference of their ‘superiority’ since they will use any means, including deception to achieve that end.’ .... ‘but there is another choice, and that is to understand that our dynamical hostspace is more foundational than material objects, itself having self-organizing capabilities, so that self-organization in the absence of a central control authority, dynamical-balance-seeking-egalitarian-brotherhood, is a more natural possibility.’

It will not be an easy pill to swallow, for westerners who were born into investing their belief in co-ownership in centrally-controlled, imaginary-line-bounded owned-property nation-states, to restore their capacity for unbounded global brotherhood into the primacy over nationalism as the basis for social organization. This central-control model is found in the three western religions of Islam, Christianity and Judaism, the only ‘odd’ feature associated with the religion of materialism (property-ownership) being that the (imaginary-line-bounded abstract concept of) property-object itself (the ‘nation’) takes on the God-like central control role.

How difficult it will be may be illustrated by this personal anecdote, expressed in another note that I shall take a short excerpt from. The background is this; over the past year, six RCMP officers have been killed in the line of duty, four in one altercation with James Roszco and two who died just days ago from injuries sustained in an altercation with Curtis Dagenais.

From the point of view of our felt experience in a space that is seeking to take control of us, we may feel as if we will kill to avoid being taken captive, being the boy who the big boys grab to take his pants down in front of the girls, ... or simply the timber wolf that will die before he lets himself be caged. Whatever one wants to say about these sort of ‘altercations’, an understanding of them cannot be conveyed in the over-simplistic terms of ‘assertive behaviour’ where a ‘positive assertive agent’ comes into full frontal conflict with a ‘negative assertive agent’. Such a mental model is linear and two-dimensional and has none of this inner-outer compressive-suffocative, expansive-liberative feeling of real life experience in such situations. Having been in one of these situations of inclusion in compressive-suffocative forces (by police), I can freely share that thoughts of ‘killing’ to restore the expansive-liberative felt experience that space can give came spontaneously to mind. A whole life-time of cultivating inner-outer dynamical balance, meanwhile, FOR ME, made the actualizing of such thoughts only the remotest of possibilities, ... although I would not have wanted to be holding a loaded rifle in my hands in the same moment as these animal ‘killer instincts’ arose within me, nor to go through this kind of compression-suffocation repetitively.

When multiple men come at you with a mean glint in their eye, intent on binding you and making a helpless captive out of you, you might as well be back there in the primeval forests of the pre-civilized world because is where the felt experience takes you. But when a police officer is injured or killed, we present it in terms of ‘the good’ and ‘the evil’ and particularly so when it concerns the RCMP in Canada who have become like sacred icons that symbolize ‘the good’.

Anyhow, an outline of the ‘personal situation’ I was referring to is as follows;

“everyone i know can differentiate between police, authorized to use lethal force, who are ‘coming from brotherhood’ in their mission ‘to protect you’, from those that are coming from the steely-logic of the central control authority.  i have personally been unjustly ‘roughed up’ by police (i have long hair and ride motorcycles and so do some others who may look the same but whose personalities differ)  and been put in jail (a few days) and spent thousands to reverse unjustly laid criminal charges against me (‘obstructing justice’) without ever being able to lay a complaint against the police who subjected me to the abuse of their power (the criminal lawyers, who appreciated and empathized with this all-too-common situation, told me that it would cost me a few thousand to refute the criminal charges but that i would need $150,000 for starters to pursue a complaint against the police and since the courts tend to rule in favour of the police, there would be little chance of winning, particularly not when three member of the police force had sworn a statement saying that i had first ‘roughed them up’ (absolutely false) which had made it necessary for them to rough me up in taking me under arrest.   without an on-the-spot witness whose credibility was powerful (she was a hispanic court translator well-known to the trial judge) i would not even have had a chance to reverse the criminal charges.

now, i am not on an ‘angry rant’ here, ... i am seriously concerned with the ‘psychology’ of ‘protection’ because, for example, i understand very well how a james roszko and a curtis dagenais can develop a hair-trigger temper to confrontations by the police, ... which in the moment of empassioned rage, can be lethal.”

What I am saying here is that I felt an influence of space, the oppressive compression that suffocates the spirit, or whatever words might suggest what you already know what I mean, ... but that was not how the ‘case’ was regarded because our whole system of conceptualizing such things is in terms of ‘what individual do’ (assertive behaviour). But what good is such a model if it fails to deliver an understanding of what is really going on? ... i.e. if it fails to address the fact that collectives can manipulate their relative spatial-relationships so as to selectively surround and suffocate others? Because if violent behaviour is being induced by this spatial-relational oppression tactic, then an increase in violent behaviour met by an increase in the police force could yield the opposite from desired result.

In other words, if it is assumed, consistent with the ‘assertive-agent-behaviour-only’ model of the western mindset, that the violence in the behaviour is coming from some invisible ‘internal first cause’ that we might term ‘evil’, then we can stick with the simple assertive-agent-behaviour-only model because we will have a logic that keeps it hanging together, by the addition of this ‘invisible behaviour-authoring source’. In this way, we can ascribe all of the sourcing of the violence to the internals of the man being cornered-like-a-rat and none to the spatial-relational art of ‘cornering-like-a-rat’.

When the media goes to cover the funeral of the ‘fallen heroes’, and I am not mocking here, I am trying to explore how we, as a culture, understand things, ... we find the sadness, love, remorse, that one could equally find in the family of the police-killer, but now framed with this symbolism of all that is good and noble.

My heart goes out to those who fall in the service of protecting all of us, and my heart goes out to those love-seeking children that community ignores and who grow up suspicious of the authority that has taken on itself the powers to ‘care for us’, ... while my reason goes out to an understanding of things in the context of the whole continually evolving spatial-relational social dynamic, and not to put things to rest using the superstitious notion of an ‘invisible internal first cause’ in the ‘negative assertive agent’. If space-based oppression by those who are doing well is, through the nominally ‘good’ practice of using police to ‘protect us’, is inducing violence in those who are relatively uncared for, ... using the analytical backfill of ‘invisible internal first cause’ (evil) to deliver an understanding of the violence is non-sensical.

When I, as a police-officer or soldier visit someone’s family residence, I will be doing so in the context of ‘brotherhood’ that is unbounded by politics, a brotherhood that is in no way born of membership in the same owned-property-nation-club, as in Mann’s; “he who knew how to obey knew also how to command, and conversely; the one idea was comprehended in the other, as people and leader were comprehended in one another.”

We are sitting here as bench-warming spectators in a game being played by radical Islamists and US neoconservatives and it is making the common space we live in, the only space we have to live in, as the astronauts commented yesterday on passing over the peaceful-looking Middle East, more oppressive every day in a social dynamics sense.

Is it not high time we conceded that ‘space’ has an influence that takes precedence over the objects that come and go within it? ... and that while we can manipulate and co-manipulate it, we cannot escape from our inclusion within it?

Weblog: July 15, 2006

The ‘Right to Exist’

When Europe brought to the Americas the concept of the ‘existence’ of a nation, not in the context of a nation-of-people in the land, but as an imaginary-line-bounded ‘sovereign-owned property-object’, inter-nation conflict dramatically escalated.

This week’s conflict involving Israel and neighbouring people’s is yet another example of the psychology split in the world between separates the views of those who choose to understand the world in terms of the ‘existence of independent objects’ imputed to have powers of internal first cause (personified as having the capacity of self-authorship of behaviour), ... and those who choose to understand the world in terms of a continuing evolution of relationships.

Psychologists such as J. J. Gibson have pointed out that the abstract procedure of ‘attaching meaning’ after-the-fact to ‘independent objects’ that we invent, such as the ‘owned-property-based-nation’ does not jibe with our natural experiencing of the world. The world of our experience is relational rather than ‘decreed’ on the basis of ‘independent-kingdoms-in-the-mind’.

The decreeing of the existence of Israel is just under sixty years old while the decreeing of the existence of Canada is a few days over 139 years old, ... but still there are those who do not accept this unnatural elevation of abstraction over natural relational experience; e.g.;

WE DIDN'T CROSS THE BORDER: THE BORDER CROSSED US!

What are borders? What is the Canada United States border? To the Kanien'keh?:ka (People of the White Flint) the boundary line that divides the upper half of North America between Canada and the US is a fictitious demarcation that slices throughout traditional unceded territory. The territory in question-Kanien'ke (The Land of the White Flint)-was in existence long before Europeans traveled to this beautiful land. In the eyes of the Kanien'keh?:ka the boundary that separates Canada and the US is merely a method devised by European settlers to settle their arguments over what they stole from the Indigenous nations of Turtle Island. The Kanien'keh?:ka see the bickering of these Europeans as the bickering of thieves fighting over the spoils of their crime. As Indigenous people we make no distinction between the US and Canada, there is no difference between our lands on either side of the imaginary line created by Europeans for Europeans. ( http://www.ainfos.ca/04/apr/ainfos00409.html )

It is well apparent to the indigenous peoples of North American, that the colonizing Europeans enticed buy-in to belief in the abstract ‘kingdoms-in-the-mind’ (sovereign-owned property-objects) by promising to colonial settlers ‘co-ownership’ in the imaginary-line-bounded kingdom in exchange for an oath to bear arms and give one’s life if necessary, to defend the belief in the existence of these imaginary-line-bounded ‘properties’ which were now being called ‘nations’.

The ‘right to exist’ of these new abstract type of imaginary-line-bounded nations is not from ‘nature’ but merely from the western convention of ‘property’ born of the free-ranging creativity of western abstract thought.

The above excerpt from aboriginal views on ‘unceded territory’ highlights the same problem as continues to exacerbate trouble the Middle East as regards ‘Israel’ (a decreed imaginary-line-bounded abstractly-defined object). Who says ‘Canada exists’? Mainly those who were sold co-ownership of it in exchange for defending belief in its existence, and others around the world who have embraced this abstract western concept of ‘property’, imaginary-line-based objectifications imposed on the unbounded natural landscape which WE WHO HAVE THE MILITARY MIGHT (and crony coalitions thereof) DECREE the ‘existence’ of.

Many of the people in Israel and Palestine and Lebanon who are tired of war and the continuously changing ‘boundaries’ designating what land is controlled by whom, are saying that ‘THEY [the politicians] MUST MAKE PEACE’. Others are ‘sticking to abstract principle’ and citing the ‘right of Israel to exist’, something that, according to the owned-property-based convention of ‘a nation’, the co-owners have, as part of the abstract contract of co-ownership, agreed to defend with their lives.

But where, really, does this ‘right to exist’ come from beyond the brute force of alliances of those who have invented the abstract convention of ‘property’?

The aboriginals did not even have a word for such abstraction, and were astounded when the white chiefs in Washington were offering to ‘buy property from them’, ... ‘how can you buy and sell the sky?’

The basic difference in outlook that puts the abstract notion of ‘property’ in an unnatural primacy over the relationships of people with one another and the unbounded space which we share as a common habitat, has not ‘gone away’. One can see this difference in where people ‘are coming from’ in the split opinion over the current outbreak of hostilities in the Middle East, e.g. between Stephen Harper and France and Russia;

“Russia has criticized Israel's land, sea and air attack on Lebanon this week as a disproportionate response to the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah on Wednesday.”

"We condemn this disproportionate act of war which has two consequences: that of forcing everyone who wants to enter Lebanon to go either by sea or via Syria, and that of risking plunging Lebanon back into the worst years of the war with the departure of thousands of Lebanese who will want to flee at a time when they were in the process of rebuilding their country." M. Philippe Douste-Blazy, Minister of Foreign Affairs for France (July 13, 2006)

On one level of understanding, we all live within a common space, the unbounded space of nature, and it follows that we must find a way to live in dynamical balance and harmony within this common space.

On another, more abstract level of understanding, we each live within closed geometric forms or ‘sovereign-owned property objects’ called ‘nations’ which must not be trespassed without the authorization of the central governing authority of the nation. These ‘nation-objects’ do not ‘really’ exist except by the brute force of military might that seeks to ‘make believers’ out of those who would trespass by stepping over the imaginary-boundary lines. The belief in the existence of the nation-object is sustained by the indoctrination of children, and by rituals surrounding symbolic entities such as ‘flags’ and ‘anthems’ which celebrate the existence of the imaginary-line-bounded nation-objects.

There is no other foundation to the ‘existence of an object-nation’ (political nation as contrasted with people-nation or tribe), than this barter by the co-owners of this imaginary unit, to bear arms and give their lives to uphold belief in it, apart from crony alliances of other nations who support the belief in the imaginary objects known as ‘property’, to commit their military power to uphold the belief.

This belief in the imaginary, this ‘right of an imaginary-line-bounded-property-object’ to exist, is not much appreciated by the indigenous peoples of Turtle Island, or of ‘the Middle East’. In fact, indigenous peoples whose ancestors persist in spirit in a traditional habitat, are not impressed when powerful foreigners inform them that as of today, their place of residence falls within the imaginary lines of a newly decreed nation-object where the rules for all residents are that the must submit to the power of a central control authority which may levy taxes on all residents and require the services of residents to bear arms and give their lives to defend the notion of the ‘existence’ of this new imaginary ‘property’.

This is particularly bad news when the central control authority is committed to bring in and enforce their own foreign ethics and acculturation, including the practice of putting imaginary line and surface bounded objects into an unnatural primacy over the spatial-relational world of our natural experience.

However anyone wants to argue over the advisability or non-advisability of elevating the abstract and absolute notion of ‘existence’ of an ‘object’ over the ongoing spatial-relationships of our natural experience, ... this difference in the way we give meaning to the world is continuing to incite contention.

For those who stand by the inviolability of ‘property ownership’, all manner of violence is deemed justified to eliminate the actions of those who would ‘violate space which is not theirs’. This is the origin of Stephen Harper’s statement on the current outbreak of violence in the Middle East.

On the other hand, from those who realize the ‘secondary, synthetic reality’ constituted by imaginary-line based ‘political property objects’, the primary reality is ‘spatial-relational’, the challenge of cultivating and sustaining dynamical balance and harmony as was the ethos of pre-property-abstraction tribal peoples who believed that ‘all men are brothers’ included within a common hostspace (‘mitakuye oyasin’). A warrior that gave his life in battle did so in pursuit of sustaining inner-outer spatial-relational balance with his diverse brothers; i.e. he was a warrior for peace (dynamical balance and harmony-seeking in the manner of nature). The commitment to give one’s life to defend against trespassing of the imaginary-line boundaries of ‘owned property that exists’ is an entirely different proposition whose goal is not ‘dynamical balance’ but the elimination of any agencies that would violate the inviolable right of property-ownership (the right of existence of a co-owned property otherwise known as a political nation).

This believe in the inviolable right to own property splits apart ‘insiders’ (property-owners or ‘believers’ in the existence of the property) and ‘outsiders’ (non-property-owners or ‘unbelievers’ in the existence of the property)

It is one thing to say that ‘it is unthinkable’ to turn back the clock on, or even ‘soften’ our western practice inventing imaginary-line-bounded ‘kingdoms’ (kingdoms of the mind) and giving more credence to them than to our natural experiencing of unbounded spatial-relationships within a shared hostspace, ... but it is quite another thing to convert the ‘unbelievers’ over to this point of view.

As we can see from the modern day opinion of the ‘people of the white flint’, they will never buy into this western practice of elevating abstract concepts over natural experience, ... they are simply ‘putting up with it’ because they lack the military power to escape from their forced enslavement by the ‘central governing authority’ which comes bundled in with this notion of ‘the existence of a sovereign-owned property’ and which, police and military force, imposes on them THE BELIEF IN THE SUPREMACY OF ABSTRACT CONCEPTS (EXISTENCE OF PROPERTY-OBJECTS) OVER NATURAL EXPERIENCE OF LIVING IN A COMMON, UNBOUNDED SPACE.

Just how committed indigenous peoples are to retaining their belief in the primary of natural experience over abstraction is made manifest by ‘standoffs’ where natives draw the line and defend with their lives their natural relationship with the land in particularly ‘sacred’ traditional spaces, in the face of ‘property ownership documents’ that purport to give the right to ‘the owners of property’ to bulldoze up an ancestral grave site to add nine more holes to a golf-course.

Realistically, the western tradition of basing social organization on ‘property ownership’, which inevitably requires the elevation of belief in abstraction over the belief in natural experience (belief in our unbounded spatial relational experience) does not have a ‘good record’ due to the ‘hardness’ of social dynamics management based on absolute boundaries in spite of the absurdity of thinking in these terms (one nation’s rivers may continually be carrying polluted effluent into the neighbouring nations, therefore the nation cannot own its rivers. The same holds true for its air and its soil, although the unbounded dynamics of soil (e.g. the circular recycling flow of the land in plate tectonics) makes nonsense of absolute imaginary-line property boundaries more slowly than water and air).

Stephen Harper’s appeal to ‘the rights of the property owner’ in the case of Israel, therefore presumes a certain ethic, that of elevating belief in abstraction above a belief in our natural experience. This is an ethic that many people do not support, particular aboriginals and indigenous peoples of the world, those who have kept their traditional belief systems.

I would count myself amongst those, like the indigenous peoples, who do not accept this unatural elevation of abstraction above natural experience, and thus, though I cannot easily do anything about it, I reject Stephen Harper’s use of powers proxied from all of us, including myself, to propound an ethic that is not my ethic, a hard abstraction-based ethic that has been the source of terrible bloody conflict and that is radically unlike my own ethic of seeking to resolve conflict through dynamical balancing rather than a self-righteousness born of nothing more than the brute-military-force imposing of the abstract concept of ‘property’ and the ‘inviolable rights of the property owner’.

Meanwhile, like many natives, I know that I cannot ‘fight’ the reality that the military might of the world has a crony alliance-forming mechanism going that is backing up this western ethos of unnatural elevation of belief in abstraction over belief in natural experience, and it is not my wish to foment a blood bath to overthrow this absurdity and restore natural experience to its ‘natural’ primacy over abstraction. On the other hand, it is my ethos to settle conflict through dynamical balancing (the way of nature) and thus to speak out in support of a return to this ‘softer’, less bloody and obstinate approach to conflict resolution.

I do not believe in the central control authority of the imaginary-line bounded property-object known as ‘Canada’ though I was born into being held hostage by it and cannot resist its abstract ‘right-to-exist’ based imposing of rules and regulations governing my and everyone’s behaviour. And I do not accept that ‘Canada’ has given me many good things that I should be grateful for. I do not accept this because I do not accept that there is such an abstract thing called ‘Canada’, the personification of a ‘sovereign owned property’, making it over into some kind of benevolent faceless ghost-monster. But I do respect my fellow man and these beautiful and rich lands of northern North America, and I respect the diverse cultures that inhabit these lands, and it is to all of these ‘real and natural things’ that I pay my respects and commit my mutual support to.

In the same vein, I can refer to all of this by using the word ‘Canada’. This usage of ‘Canada’ carries within in it a rejection of all of this imaginary-line-bounded politically-owned-property objectification with-its-notional ‘central control authority’ bullshit. It was real people from this region who gave their lives in WWII, let’s not diminish them by elevating over top of them, the importance of their membership in a property-ownership club, the price of admission of which is to commit to a belief in the club’s ‘right to exist’ and to bear arms and to give one’s life in defending its ‘right-to-exist’. My uncles who served in WWII were sceptics about politics and politicians (the cause of WWII) but as members of ‘the brotherhood of man’ and in particular, the European family of man (rightly or wrongly), they risked their lives out of compassion for what was happening to their brothers. For politicians to claim their collective commitment in terms of ‘what Canada-the-political-property-object did’ is to elevate abstraction over natural feeling experience and to use them as ‘political footballs’.

John Lennon is clearly ‘not the only one’ who is able to ‘Imagine’; i.e. to ... ‘imagine there’s no countries’, ... ‘a brotherhood of man’.

To summarize, our western orienting of social dynamics management to the notional ‘central-control-authorities’ of each imaginary-line-bounded sovereign-owned-property-object we want to impose by brute-military-force, an orienting that elevates abstract absolutism over natural experience, is not the only approach to social-dynamics management. There is also the self-organization as in nature through inner-outer dynamical balance-seeking, as was the nature-based ethic of aboriginal peoples, ... which has not ‘died’ but is simply being suppressed by the force of military might.

Stephen Harper’s views on the outbreak of violence in the Middle East is ‘coming from’ this acculturated orienting of social dynamics management to ‘property ownership’ and the ‘inviolable rights’ thereof which many of the local residents, both here in North America, and in the Middle East, have never ‘bought into’.

The rights of Israelis to live in peace with their neighbours is a very different notion than ‘the right of Israel to exist’, in the same manner as is discussed above in terms of the alternative meanings of ‘Canada’.

Taking a hard line on the inviolability of the abstract political-legal right of property ownership is not going to convince the ‘people of the white flint’ that it is correct to plough up their ancestral grave-sites in order to extend a golf-course from nine to eighteen holes, although many hard-line believers of political-legal property rights support such a contention. Neither are the indigenous peoples of the natural region of Palestine, Lebanon and Israel going to accept that the taking of two Isreali lives by non-Israelis justifies the taking of any number of non-Israeli lives because of the condition of ‘being in the right’ which derives from the abstract notion of ‘property ownership’ and the ‘inviolable rights’ that accompany it. All of that is abstraction which can never be justified on a ‘brotherhood of man’ basis.

Still, that is what Harper intends when he describes the radically violent response of Israel to the kidnapping of two of their soldiers ‘a measured response’, which others (e.g. France, Russia) are calling a ‘disproportionate response’.

How can ‘traditional rights’ of inhabitation be over-ridden by the abstract ‘political-legal rights of property ownership’ imposed by those having the military power to impose belief in imaginary-line-bounded property-objects?

There is no ‘natural ethic’ to support this forcing of people into servility by painting them inside or outside of an imaginary-enclosure thus this question is not going to ‘go away’.

One only has to look at the easy mockery of our presenting of the virtues of ‘democratic nation states’ as the western initiative picks up their (nominal) initiative to ‘bring democracy to the Middle East’ (see the humourous/tragic video-clip of Robert Newman’s ‘History of Oil’ http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7374585792978336967

[example: a recorded BBC radio news bulletin announces; “The G8 has today endorsed an American plan to ‘bring democracy to the middle east’, ... Newman as standup comic comments “The level of naivety necessary before you can talk about an American plan ‘to bring democracy to the middle east’... you will not find that level of naivety anywhere outside of 1970s porno films – ‘Gee mister, you mean the time machine only works if I take off all my clothes’].

Meanwhile, we were born into this abstract ‘kingdoms-of-the-mind’, property-ownership based approach to social organization and it is a current reality. It is the evolutionary offspring of military force based western colonialism and ‘we are it’ at the moment.

But we are under no obligation to accept it in perpetuity, nor to keep quiet about the desirability of restoring our natural experience (as balance-and-harmony sustaining-seeking members of the brotherhood of man who share inhabitation of a common hostspace) to its ‘rightful’ (in a natural self-organizing sense) primacy over abstraction.

Demonstrating that we can revise imaginary-line based property-ownership boundaries, creating new and revising old flags and anthems without everything ‘falling apart’ (letting our interest in sustaining balance and harmony in the brotherhood of man prevail) is an ongoing process as in the dissolution of the central-controlled property of the USSR, and in the integration of local property-nations in the EEU, and the movement towards ‘separation’ of Quebec from Canada (the political abstraction known as ‘Canada’, not ‘Canada’ as a people and geographical region).

Would the union, in some form or other that provided sustained dynamical balance/harmony, of Palestine, Lebanon and Israel be a PIL to resolve the current conflict? Why is this ‘unthinkable’ at the moment, but conceivable in terms of the passing of millenia? The answer is, because ‘objects’ are abstractions that ‘exist absolutely’ (eternally) yet nothing in nature persists in its existence, everything is bound up in the evolutionary spatial-relational dynamic, including the property-object formulations of western abstraction-over-natural-experience man. To found one’s identity on a belief in the ‘absolute’ is an unnatural founding that takes the ‘believer’ out of the evolving space of the continuing present and allows him to impute to himself a God-like ‘center’ from which he deems his behaviour to spring;

“Just as no outside force caused God to create the world, so no outside force causes people to choose certain actions. For man is created in God's image, which includes the possession of free will.”

That is, the notion of an ‘independent nation-state’ personified as an assertive agent endowed with ‘internal first cause’ (center-based self-authorship of behaviour) is a ‘religious’ notion. The people of the white flint know that the much vaunted ‘separation of church and state’ of ‘western property-ownership based democratic nation-states’ such as ‘Canada’ and ‘the United States’ is bogus since the religion of centralized control endowed with ‘internal center-sourced first cause’ is foundational to the concept of ‘western democracy’. Thus the attempt to keep other religions out of politics is no more than an attempt by one religion to ban ‘competition’ from alternative religions such as the pantheism of aboriginal peoples and the implicit pantheism of ‘environmentally sensitive’ people who are alert to the dysfunction of social organization based on fragmenting the unbounded landscape into independently ‘existing’ property units.

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Weblog: July 14, 2006

Today is Bastille day.

What does our society teach its children about this day?

“Bastille Day is a National holiday in France. It is very much like Independence Day in the United States because it is a celebration of the beginning of a new form of government.

At one time in France, kings and queens ruled. Many people were very angry with the decisions made by the kings and queens.

The Bastille was a prison in France that the kings and queens often used to lock up the people that did not agree with their decisions. To many, it was a symbol of all the bad things done by the kings and queens. So, on July 14, 1789, a large number of French citizens gathered together and stormed the Bastille.

Just as the people in the United States celebrate the signing of the Declaration of Independence as the beginning of the American Revolution, so the people in France celebrate the storming of the Bastille as the beginning of the French Revolution. Both Revolutions brought great changes. Kings and queens no longer rule. The people rule themselves and make their own decisions.”

* * *

Is this honest and full disclosure? ... that ‘the people rule themselves and make their own decisions?

On the surface, that sounds like the sort of system that aboriginal peoples had, where people ‘held council’ when issues that were effecting everyone’s lives had to be dealt with so that everyone could participate in decisions.

But that is not the system that the French and American revolutionaries and the Western world in general chose live by. Instead of everyone participating directly in decisions, the arrangement was kept whereby powerful people, called Presidents and Prime Ministers continued to rule. These new ‘rulers’ have many of the same powers as Kings and Queens. For example, they can use their powers to levy taxes and wage wars and to spy on their own and other people..

One of the biggest differences is that the people get to replace their rulers every four years or so and pick new ones, if they don’t like the current ones. But even then, it is possible for the rulers to change the world everyone lives in an irreversible way, without consulting the people.

This is the biggest difference between this, our ‘western system’ and the aboriginal system. While the decisions in the aboriginal system seek to maintain the quality of the common space the people live in, the decisions in the western system seek to achieve some cause-and-effect result, such as ‘improving the nation’s income’, which gives a different meaning to ‘freedom’.

That is, the western system sees ‘freedom’ in terms of the in