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.

* * *

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 individual or individual country being ‘free-to-pursue-individual-interests’.

The problem in not orienting one’s system to the common space the people live in, is that many individuals or many individual nations competing for common resources within a common space, can do injury to the quality of that space, or even to the destruction of its habitable quality for humans.

In order to understand why aboriginals chose to orient their system of self-rule to sustaining the quality of the common space they live in, rather that to ‘achieving some desired results’, one has to reflect on our basic ways of perceiving.

When a man sits down on a bus, we can perceive that as ‘an action’, but that is only one way, the western way, of perceiving. The alternative way of perceiving the same thing is in terms of changing the shape of space. The shape of space has a ‘quality’ that we can feel. For example, the woman who is carrying a child or the person who is frail can ‘feel’ the accommodating quality of a shared space which differs when people get up so that others can sit compared with the quality of a shared space wherein people greedily possess and hold on to space.

The shape of space is continually changing, while the actions of an individual have a beginning and ending, so there is quite a difference between these alternative ways of perceiving. When the little arrow starts and stops and starts moving again on the computer screen, it looks as ‘the arrow is moving’, but the computer programmer knows that it is just the shape of space that is transforming because he is changing the quality of colour of the space (the pixels) in a way that gives the impression of ‘an arrow that is moving’.

Science’s discovery of ‘relativity’ suggests that all motion is transformation of space (the transforming energy field that includes us and everything) and that matter is equivalent to complexly nested local concentrations of energy, ... thus all motion is the transformation of space even though our western culture chooses to simplify this and to perceive ‘things moving’ and thus ‘what things do’, including ‘I did this’ (assertive accomplishment) and ‘He did this to me’ (conflict) and so on.

All the while that we think in terms of ‘things moving’ we lose sight of ‘space transforming’. Thus, when I get on a bus and spot an empty seat and occupy it, this ‘action by an individual’ says nothing about changing the shape of space yet the changed shape of space, which is now not very accommodating to the other passengers getting on the bus. ‘Taking a seat on the bus’ is something that we can generalize and we can say it is true for all 40 passengers on a 40 passenger bus, ... but it says nothing of the quality of the transforming space; ‘look, there’s window seats in the back that we can take’, ... ‘now there’s only middle seats in the front of the bus’.

Our relationship with the space we are included in comes from our felt inner-outer experience (feeling compressed, suffocated, accommodated resistantly by space, and/or feeling expansive, blossoming-out, accommodated receptively by space). Meanwhile our visual perception presents to us only in the ‘positivist’ terms of ‘what we do’ or ‘what things do’, the ‘dislocation’ of independent objects.

But as in the example of the mouse ‘arrow’, we always have the option of understanding motion in terms of (a) transformation of space or (b) dislocation of independent objects (‘locomotion’, ‘what things do’).

So, many crucial aspects of the system of self-rule did not change after ‘Bastille Day’; i.e. “people were very angry with the decisions made by the kings and queens” while today “people are very angry with the decisions made by the presidents and prime ministers.”

What the revolutionaries missed, was that the real problem was with the nature of the power of rule itself. The power wielded by the ruler of a kingdom comes from the notion of ‘a kingdom’, and the revolutionaries had kept that same concept of the power of rule in the notion of an ‘independent nation’.

Any group of people, or any potential ‘ruler’ who develops a powerful following can create a ‘kingdom’ or ‘independent nation-state’ by superimposing some imaginary boundary lines on the unbounded landscape and simply declaring the kingdom to ‘exist’. If people ignore this ‘declaration of independence’ then one must ‘make believers’ out of them by the use of force in defending the imaginary-line boundaries, making everyone inside the imaginary lines pay taxes and bear arms to defend againsts external threats from ‘unbelievers’.

The ‘ruling power’ was therefore set up by the notion of an ‘independent kingdom’ or ‘independent nation’ and the idea that each such independent nation should have a ‘central governing authority’. Thus the ‘position of ruler’ came bundled in with the belief in an imaginary-line-bounded ‘owned property object’ called ‘kingdom’ or ‘nation’. If the ruler dies or is killed, then a new ruler must be found, since ‘the position of ruler is vacant.

The aboriginal system used no such imaginary-line based ‘kingdom of the mind’ and their chiefs and elders were selected by the people and they did not ‘rule over the land’, since the land, the ‘hostspace’ or ‘habitat’ they inhabited, was ‘nature’ along with their brothers, the four-leggeds, the winged ones, the rooted ones etc., rather than a ‘kingdom of the mind’ that existed only in the minds of ‘believers’ (a thought that was ‘policed’ by armed ‘thought police’ who defended the notional imaginary-line-boundaries and right of the ruler to make anyone residing within the imaginary-line boundaries to pay taxes and bear arms and obey whatever laws the ruler passed.).

The revolutionaries in France and the United States, while they changed the way in which the rulers of the kingdom or ‘independent nation’ were chosen, did not change the ‘kingdom of the mind’ based upon imaginary-line-bounded ‘owned property’ which required the ‘job of ruler’ as ‘sovereign-owned property manager’, rather than as in the aboriginal system where the leader or chief of council was chosen by the people for his demonstrated ability to sustain the quality of their shared living space.

That is, the revolutionaries in France and the United States and the modern systems of self-rule in the western world, retained the notion of the ‘independent individual’ and the ‘pursuit of individual self-interest’ at both person an nation level, both ideas being based purely on ‘belief’ of imaginary line/surface bounded ‘objects’. When many individuals deemed to be ‘independent’ by virtue of imaginary-line boundaries we impose on them, are unleashed in a common hostspace in a justice-system-protected pursuit of self-interest, we have a recipe for conflict and chaos.

In the aboriginal culture, the animating ethic is not ‘the pursuit of individual self-interest’ which sees the ‘individual’ as an ‘independent object’ with an imputed ‘internal first cause’ (self-determinism, ‘free will’) but instead understands the world in terms of an all-including dynamic in which ‘individuals’ are inherently bound up. The question of ‘free will’ or ‘internal first cause’ does not even arise, since the notion of ‘independent objects’ with ‘independent behaviours’ does not even arist.

It is by starting off with this notion of an ‘independent entity’ that is capable of ‘self-authoring’ its ‘own behaviour’ that has us ask ‘who/what is in charge of this independently-behaving-entity’?’ In the case of the human individual, we answer ‘the brain’ and in the case of the western nation, we answer ‘the President’ or ‘the central governing authority’.

This question and the answers we ‘make up’ to resolve it, follow directly from the unnatural assumption of ‘independence’ of the individual (organism, nation) which itself is an artifact of the free-ranging creativity of our minds; i.e. the ‘declaration of independence’ is something we impose on ourselves that is not imposed on nature.

Thus, the revolutionaries responsible for Bastille Day in France and Independence Day in the United States, while changing how the manner in which a central authority is installed and replacing ‘Kings’ with ‘Presidents’, did not touch the provision whereby the ‘kingdom’ is seen as an ‘independent object’ with ‘independent behaviour’ demanding a ‘central control authority’, ... a radical difference in the approach to self-rule as practiced by the aboriginal (e.g. native North American) which emulates the self-organization of nature, there being no need to put someone ‘in-charge-of-the-affairs-of-an-independent-kingdom-in-the-mind’ since they have no notion of any ‘independent-kingdom-in-the-mind’, ... only ‘people’ and ‘communities’ that nest inclusionally within nature, the mother hostspace that includes all.

Architecting a system of self-rule based on ‘independent-kingdoms-in-the-mind’ leads to a troubled social dynamic when one inhabits, as we do, a shared, common hostspace.

* * *

The social dynamic that is cultivated by this ‘independent-kingdoms-in-the-mind’ form of self-rule is ‘troubled’ by the need to ‘attach meaning to entities as independent objects’ rather than understanding entity behaviours in terms of the spatial-relational dynamic in which they are included forms.

This abstract practice pervades the western culture. For example, the entity ‘chair’, can be understood in terms of the behaviour it induces in us. We do not have to start by declaring it to be an ‘independent object’, after which point we are obliged to ‘attach meaning to it’.

For example, in the popular classic ‘It’s a Wonderful Life (a Frank Capra film with James Stewart) the alternative ways of understanding an entity such as an individual human being are explored. When we start with the assumption of the individual as an ‘independent object’, we must then ‘attach meaning’ in terms of ‘what he does’, what his ‘assertive achievements’ have been since we see him as this closed geometry form body driven by some inner purpose (gifted with ‘internal first case’ or ‘self-authorship’ of behaviour) and going here and there and doing this and that etc. But the alternative way to understand the individual is to explore the evolutionary dynamic of the shared community hostspace he lives in and the manner in which inclusion in the community dynamic has helped to shape it.

What we can see in this alternative understanding of the same entity that is innately invisible in attaching meaning to him as an independent object (‘what he does’, ‘what he achieves’) is his behaviour RELATIVE TO THE COMMON HOSTSPACE HE IS INCLUDED in. For example, no description of a man in terms of his assertive achievements will inform about his habit of NOT SITTING DOWN on the bus because of his sensitivity to others needing to sit down. Attaching meaning to him in terms of ‘what he does’ obviously cannot take into account ‘what he does not do’.

This, ‘what he does not do’ impacts the ‘accommodating quality of space’ and the ‘accommodating quality of space’ is what mutually shapes the actualizing of assertive potentials of individuals that share the same space.

So, attaching meaning to a person/nation-as-independent-object-driven-from-internal-first-cause on the basis of ‘what he/it does’ fails to report on how what he/it does transforms the accommodating quality of the common hostspace. Thus Claribel Alegria’s ‘my grandfather was a famous engineer, my grandmother had no name’. We can attach meaning to the grandmother-as-independent-object in positivist terms of her assertive actions and achievements; i.e. making meals, making the beds etc. but this doesn’t speak to how these actions are cultivating an accommodative space for her husband, so that he can focus on actualizing his assertive potentials. Since the actualizing of assertive potentials and the accommodating backpressure (receptive/resistive) of the common hostspace mutually shape what is actually actualized and since we can only ‘see’ ‘what is done’, we credit all of the authorship to the ‘independent object’ that we see ‘doing it’ discounting the contribution of the accommodating quality of space.

So this issue of different types of self-rule is caught up in some deep cultural-psychological difference involving ‘abstraction’ versus ‘natural experience’.

Every entity is bound up in the evolutionary dynamic of our natural hostspace and thus it can take its meaning from the evolutionary dynamic. For example, take ‘Canada’ and ‘the United States’. Natives are correct in their view that ‘these are not real objects, but are simply the way that Europeans divided up what they forcibly took possession of.’ Any group with enough military might, or who can solicit sponsorship and protection from those with military might, can superimpose some imaginary-boundary-lines on the unbounded landscape and ‘declare the existence of an independent kingdom/nation’. The military might is ‘what makes believers’ out of everyone, ... and if the military might declines or if the sponsorship of the militarily mighty is withdrawn, people will start ignoring the ‘imaginary-boundary-lines’ and the ‘kingdom-in-the-mind’ will be exposed for what it is, a ‘kingdom-in-the-mind’. Of course, those who intuitively/instinctively ‘self-organize’ such as aboriginals, the four-leggeds, the feathered ones, the rooted ones, etc. will not have missed a beat since they have never believed in such imaginary structures (though they will have ‘humoured’ the believers in order to avoid the police and military forces who are there to ‘make believers out of everyone’.

This weird ‘independent-kingdom-in-the-mind’ system is so familiar to us, since we were born into it, that it strikes us as ‘normal’. But to aboriginals and to those that study systems of governance, there is a radical difference between a system of self-rule based on (a) an ‘independent sovereign-owned property based on imaginary, closed-geometric-form line-boundaries, those who happen to be reside within it being forced by its ‘central control authority’ to pay taxes and bear arms to defend the imaginary-line-boundaries and if necessary to give one’s life therein, and (b) a natural unbounded habitat which serves as a common dynamical hostspace within which the inhabitants self-organize through inner-outer balance seeking dynamics, the local communities with their land-use traditions forming in the manner that little piles of sand form on the head of a drum from a continuing diverging (out-pushing) and converging (being pushed in). Natives had no ‘kingdom-of-the-mind’ ‘property’ concept, not even as a word in their language.

So from the point of view of someone who is minding his own business and suddenly gets a knock on the door and is informed that his tipi/cabin is located within an imaginary-line-bounded ‘owned property’ with a ‘central governing authority’ which demands that he respect the imaginary lines, pay taxes and agree to bear arms and give his life to defend belief in the imaginary lines, OR ELSE, forfeit the right to reside within the ‘property’, .... this is a shockingly different form of ‘self-rule’ than the natural self-organization which comes intuitively to people, e.g. as when they come together in communities in remote regions far from the reach of central authority in eras when transportation and communications relative undeveloped (in the manner of the sand-piles on the vibrating drum head).

In conclusion, Bastille Day, like Independence Day, celebrates the day when revolutionaries introduced revisions to their ‘governance’ to avoid having rulers impose their will on the people. However, they did not change the basic strategy of rule-by-a-central-control-authority, which depends on belief in an independent-kingdom-in-the-mind, one aspect of an ‘independent object oriented’ system of meaning/understanding whereby one starts with the object and attaches meaning to it in terms of ‘what it does’, its ‘assertive achievements’.

Of course, this way of understanding things, by means of attaching meaning to objects, rather than understanding them in the context of the transforming spatial-relational dynamics they are innately bound up in, entirely misses the fact that ‘what things do’ transforms the accommodative quality of our shared hostspace. The nonactions of persons who do not take the last seat on the bus when someone else needs it and who do not take the last porkchop when someone else is hungry are just that, ‘non-actions’ so they are not seen and cannot be used in attaching meaning to a person-object on the basis of ‘what they do’, their ‘assertive achievement’. Meanwhile by their non-actions they are enriching the accommodating quality of space that will show up in the actualizing of assertive potentials of someone else (a son, a husband, a stranger).

What this means is that the actions/behaviours of an ‘independent object’ (person/nation) are not self-authored, and therefore they are not ‘independent’ and neither are their behaviours independent.

In fact, there is no way to isolate ‘what a person intends to do’ and ‘how the accommodative backpressure of the hostspace he is included in helps or resists his doing it (how it shapes what is done)’ since all we can ever see is ‘the net’ of the two. For example, what we watch the boy doing over the course of a day includes the accommodative uplift of what the mother has done in washing his clothes, making his meals, cleaning the space he lives in etc., ... things he has ‘not done’ but which, by lowering the accommodative backpressure as he actualizes his assertive intentions, help to shape and amplify ‘his doing’ without ‘showing up on the books’ since the books are kept in terms of ‘what an individual does’.

The entire ‘accounting system’ based on what ‘independent individuals do’ (people/nations) is thus a false accounting system since it fails to address the over-riding contribution of the evolving space. By attaching meaning to ‘independent objects’ (pure abstraction), in terms of ‘what they do’, we are confusing our understanding of the world in the manner explored in ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’. The same sort of exploration could be made in terms of an individual nation included within a community-of-nations as with an individual person included within a community of persons, and the same result would be forthcoming; i.e. the notion of the ‘independence of behaviour’ would be shown to be false since ‘what an independent object does’ is inextricably shaped/amplified/attentuated by the accommodative backpressure of the space the object is doing it in, and the accommodative backpressure of the common space arises from the actions of the participants relative to one another.

The implication is clear, and we can see it in crowd dynamics where the banks, islands and flow-channels that accommodate the flow of people arise from the assertive movements of the people (in a ‘spatial-relational’ or ‘relative motion’ sense). Thus, as a collective we co-cultivate the accommodative backpressure that our actions based on the actualizing of our assertive potentisls push into, and since we can only see the ‘net’ of these two mutually shaping aspects, the individual-actualizing of assertive potentials/intentions and the accommodative backpressure of the common hostspace that includes the assertors, we can never know which part of what we do is coming from our intentions and which part from the shaping effects of the accommodative backpressure of the space we are situationally included in.

This is equivalent to saying that, as far as what we are able to experience goes, there are no such thing as ‘independent objects’ with ‘independent object behaviours’, and that such notions are abstractions of convenience.

When we start off with the notion of an ‘independent object’ (person or nation) we lock ourselves into ‘attaching meaning’ to the object in terms of ‘what it does’, its ‘assertive accomplishments’ as if they were ‘truly the person’s accomplishments’ or ‘the nation’s accomplishments’, forgetting that what we see is the net of the actualizing of the assertive potentials/intentions of the independent object and the accommodating backpressure of the dynamical hostspace the independent object is situationally included in. That is, we are forgetting that the assumption of ‘independence’ of an entity is an abstraction based on what the individual would ‘be like’ if we could ever extract him/it from the evolutionary flow in which he/it is included, which we cannot.

The ‘assertive accomplishments’ of an individual include the inductive uplift or suppressive downside from the accommodative backpressure of the hostspace the individual is situationally included in, ... and this accommodative backpressure is continuously co-cultivated by the participants within the shared hostspace. Collectives can differ widely as to the manner in which they co-cultivate accommodative backpressure (e.g. we can all behave as spoiled children or all as doting mothers, the former making the accommodative backpressure of our shared hostspace very resistive to our assertive intentions (all seats and all porkchops taken) and the latter making the accommodating backpressure of our shared hostspace very receptive to our assertive intentions).

What the children’s educational message on the meaning of Bastille Day did not mention, then, is that the revolutions in France and the United States traded out kings and queens for presidents and prime-ministers in the system of self-rule, ... both retaining the ‘kingdom-in-the-mind’ notion of the ‘independent-sovereign-owned-property’. This notion of ‘independent entities’ built into the systems of self-rule leads directly to a false system of accounting in terms of the ‘assertive actions and accomplishments’ of the individual (person and/or nation) which obscures the role of space in shaping community dynamics, and thus obscures the contribution of those who cultivate the accommodating quality of space, such contributions being ‘accounted for’ by the amplified assertive actions of the beneficiaries of being situationally included in an accommodating spatial backpressure that is very receptive to the actualizing of their assertive potentials/intentions.

The educational statement might therefore be revised to include the lower three paragraphs, as follows;

“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.

The idea of power-of-central-control invested in kings and queens, to rule over an ‘independent kingdom’ was not really taken away but modified so that we each become a king or queen having control over the ‘independent dominion of the self’. That is, the ‘central control’ power of the king was not removed from the new system but re-situated in the ‘independent nation’(the owned property) and in the ‘independent person’ (co-owner of the property).

Because the notion of ‘independence’ and ‘central control’ has us attach meaning to ourselves and to nations solely in terms of ‘what we do’ we are not addressing the quality of our shared living space which enables and shapes ‘what we do’. Many people and nations are becoming angry at this now 200+ year old system of self-rule based on ‘independent individuals and nations’ because it has been evolving for us a shared space whose quality of accommodating is out of balance (accommodating the actualizing of potentials for some moreso than for others).

It appears as if another revolution or evolution may be needed to correct this unnatural assumption of ‘independence’ that leads to ‘central control’ based self-rule on the scale of nations and individuals, making us forgetful of our interdependence mediated through how we cultivate the accommodating quality of space for one another.”

* * *

Weblog: July 10, 2006

This afternoon, I discovered the hiding place of the banished Goddess, and it was not a pretty sight. She was bound and bleeding, covered with cuts and bruises from having been raped and abused innumerable times. She looked at me and her look told me that I had been ‘one of them’. Her look, meanwhile, was not judgemental but stoic.

This discovery had come to me in the manner of a ship approaching through fog. First as just another one of the countless illusions the mind conjures up from swirling forms, and then persisting long enough to make me believe that I had seen her, ... or had I? Several times this afternoon, she re-appeared and then toward sundown, the fog lifted and I could see her clearly for the first time ever.

I suppose I should try to capture as clearly as I can, the array of ‘clues’ that came into coherent, connective confluence to expose her hiding place.

* * *

I had just written a couple of emails, one in response to a ‘progress report’ on ‘Unhooked Thinking’, an innovative effort into deepening our understanding of addiction, another in regard to a blog from a friend of a friend from the US working in the ‘green zone’ in Baghdad, and another to a friend in Quebec in regard to the motivation for Quebec ‘sovereignty’ or ‘separation’. There was quite a bit of overlap in the responses.

I would like to ‘cut to the quick’ here, if it is possible to find the words. The ingredients are these;

1. I was trying to understand that while I regretted both, I felt worse about Afghani’s dying in battle with Canadian soldiers, than I did about Canadian soldiers’ dying in the battle. Logically, it seemed inappropriate but the feelings were there anyhow, just as they had been in the case where James Roszko, when confronted by the RCMP, had gunned down four officers.

Call it ‘underdog support’ or whatever, it went beyond ‘deaths’ and the particulars, and what seemed to be ‘behind it’ was archetypeal, not in the Jungian sense, but in this sense where one feels the pain and suffering of an entire class or race of people. In the case of Roszko, I remember what his teacher had said, when Roszko had been a teenager, how sensitive he was and reaching out for love, with nothing in him at that stage that could filled him with hate and violence, ... and it made me think of how our society allows so many children to go through this, in contradiction to the ethos ‘it takes a whole community to raise a child’.

And in the case of the Afghanis, I was thinking about how our politicians and military keep saying we must eliminate evil where it is being spawned so that we do not have to do battle with it on our own soil, ... and how so many innocent men, women and children are being slain over there by this policy, ... and how it must feel to have one’s parents or one’s children maimed and murdered so as to protect Canadians and Americans, British and other ‘wealthy and powerful’ nations from the risk of having anything like that happen on their soil.

2. I was trying to understand the nature of ‘nationalism’ since I am anything but ‘nationalist’ myself, but I not only have come around to supporting the separation of Quebec from ‘Canada’ (the political owned-property-based object) but am hoping for it to come about, both for the sake of Quebec and Canada-minus-Quebec; i.e. for the sake of these lands and their peoples.

The seeking to understand the nature of the different forms of nationalism was common to both the blog from the proud-to-be-American friend of a friend working in Baghdad, and my Quebec friend caught between her dislike for Canadian nationalism as well as her dislike for Quebec nationalism.

* * *

In these exchanges were several quotes that reference how our psyche functions.

Perhaps the most crucial, to this sighting of the banished Goddess, was in regard to how I could be more touched by the death of the Afghani soldier (the Taliban doesn’t make the individual ‘less human’ for me) than by the death of the Canadian soldier. I was referring to our colonial notion of possessing property as a ‘pact with the Devil’ (metaphorically) since colonials are sold part ownership in a forcefully seized imaginary-line-bounded owned-property in exchange for bearing arms and, if necessary, giving their lives to perpetuate the purely belief-based existence of the nation-property.

[For those like myself who were born into this ‘pact with the Devil’ but want no part of it, there is no easy way out since the ‘central-governing-authority of the ‘owned-property-nation-state’ acquires its power by putting ‘generators’ into the flow of the social dynamic and so as long as the social dynamic hums along harmoniously, the central-governing-authority sustains its power to use in ways, some of which I dearly do not want to support. But my ethic of sustaining local community harmony is like having a generator attached to me that is fuelling the machinery that is killing Afghanis so there is the added ‘torment’ of involuntary personal contribution in the case of the deaths of Afghani’s that is not there in the case of the deaths of Canadian soldiers. It is not that some lives are more important than others, ... it is the desire to avoid contributing to deaths; i.e. it is one thing to help finance an arsenal but quite another to allow it to be used irresponsibly with unintended deaths of others being the result, as well as casualties that result from attempts to stop those who are using the weapons irresponsibly.]

In this manner, the innately non-objectifiable, unbounded land of nature is ‘objectified’; e.g. as ‘Canada’. The ‘believers’ are paid, in the manner of Judas, for turning in those who would foment disbelief in the Sovereign ownership of the land. That is, they are paid for their police-work to rout out internal unbelievers, and for the military-work to fend off external unbelievers, by being given co-owner membership in the belief-based land claim.

What we then get is a kind of ‘personified Divine object’, the ‘independent nation-object’ which is said to have its own powers of self-determinism, as in ‘Canada did this’, ‘Canada is responsible for that’, ...’Canada had nothing to do with that’.

This imputed self-determinism of man and personified objects such as the ‘nation’ is pure abstraction, but it serves to support the causal model wherein we can attribute ‘good works’ or ‘evil works’ to particular individual objects. The rationale behind internal-first-cause in objects such a man or a nation is;

“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.”

Of course, this kind of thinking in terms of people-objects or nation-objects initiating action, in our mental modelings, lifts the individual object right out of his being bound up in a continuing simultaneous mutual influence spatial-relational dynamic so that we can picture him standing alone, thinking creatively, and, using his powers of internal first cause, ... ‘launching a behaviour’.

This absurdity is commonly referred to as ‘rational thought’ and it is characterized by ‘causality’ or ‘determinism’ wherein the immediate future is constructed from the immediate past. By this mode of thinking, the remote past is dismissed as having any influence in the construction of the immediate future from the immediate past. For example, a dead body is found on the floor and adjacent to it, a man stands holding a smoking gun. Witnesses say that the man holding the smoking gun had moments earlier pointed the gun at the dead man, who was then alive and standing, pulled the trigger and fired, at which point the victim fell to the floor, dead.

What is the explanation for the man’s death? Answer: ‘The man holding the smoking gun caused his death’. That is all the causal model of western justice needs to know, since it imputes to individuals, the divine power of ‘internal first cause’.

So imbued in us is the acceptance of this imputed power of ‘internal first cause’ (independent behavioural authorship) in a person or in nation, that we rarely stop to think of how absurd it is.

You may say; ‘Of course it is the truth, that the man who pulled the trigger caused the death of the man standing in front of him whose heart was pierced by the bullet and who fell dead onto the floor’.

But such factual truth simply marks the place where our investigations cease. Such a scenario which extracts two men-objects out of the unbounded evolving hostspace dynamic is scarcely going to deliver contextual understanding. For example, the dead man may be an Israeli and the gunman may be a Palestinian or vice versa. Or perhaps the man with the gun is a military man commanded by his government to shoot the other man. Perhaps there were six brothers standing in line opposite another six brothers and the shooting is simply the last in a sequence of eleven shootings, back and forth, decimating the two lines of six and leaving only one man standing, all but the first shooting being ‘pre-emptive strikes’.

What I am trying to get at is that we create objects, like ‘Canada’ that have no real existence other than our ‘belief’ in them, and we impute to them ‘divine powers’ of self-determinism; i.e. ‘this object did this’, ... ‘that object did that’.

In the case of ‘Canada’, we are paid off (getting a piece of the ‘property ownership pie’) for believing in this creating of objects with divine powers of ‘independence’, and forcefully making believers, or at least ‘acceptors’, out of any potential unbelievers.

But how about ‘objects’ in general? When did it happen that we started imputing divine powers to objects?

In my email exchange on addiction, I had cited some historical evidence on this, as follows (between the asterisks);

* * * * * * * * * *

the celts and the vandals thought that making object-images of the gods and people was blasphemy and they knocked the heads off of roman statues.    meanwhile, this ‘personification’ of the continuous flowing powers of nature in terms of object-forms is so well accepted today; i.e. WE ARE SO ADDICTED TO IT, that we can barely imagine how humans used to relate to the world they were included in, e.g;

“Meanwhile, the Celts, Egyptians and other mythopoeic peoples did not espouse the notion of gods as discrete beings and, in a manner similar to Heraclitus, associated divinity with nature. There are many references to the Celtic General Brennus mocking the Greeks when he (briefly) took Delphi in 278 BC and found that the Greeks had 'fixed' (euclidianized) the gods in human shapes, as the following web note on Celtic Cosmology notes;

"The Celts do not seem to have had a hierarchy of divinity in the sense of a coherent pantheon dwelling in some remote place. The human world and the Otherworld formed a unity in which the human and divine interact. Each location has numinous powers which are acknowledged by the people as we can see by their naming of mountains, rivers and other natural features many of which have associated deities. When the Celts invaded Greece in 278 BCE, Brennus entered the precinct of Delphi, saw no gold and silver dedications and only stone and wooden statues and he laughed at the Greeks for setting up deities in human shape. Caesar mentions that the Germans worship forces of nature only." [164]

As Caithlin Matthews observes in 'The Celtic Tradition', "For the Gods [of the Celts] are nothing but the forces of those laws [natural laws] in manifest form, and the magic of the aos dana is their gift and means of communication between themselves and humankind." Thus there is a 'perceptual reciprocity' between a person and the 'holy ground' in the Celtic tradition, similar to the Native American traditions of the Lakota and Omaha [158] where even a rock may be addressed with the respect and reverence that one pays to an ancient elder; unmoved ... from time without end ... you rest ... in the midst of the paths ... in the midst of the winds ... you rest ... covered with the droppings of birds ... grass growing from your feet ... your head decked with the down of birds ... you rest ... in the midst of the winds ... you wait ... Aged one."

 * * *

as mentioned before, in citing the gnostic poetry of william blake, the poets personified the powers of nature and this opened up a new occupation for those that took it literally, that we know as ‘the priesthood’.  

objectification is the literalization of the poetic and the evolutionary dynamic that we are included in is innately poetic (relational confluence).

* * * * * * * * * *

Perhaps you can begin to see some form ‘coming out of the mist’ too, ... something to do with our penchant for ‘making a pact with the devil’ (so to speak), by having something totally imaginary made into something ‘real’ providing that we sell ourselves, body and soul, to make it happen.’

Could you imagine that people might find more reality in something purely symbolic (nationhood, a flag, a statue) than in human life, ... so that if the imaginary thing represented by a symbol were ‘threatened’ we would take lives and give our own lives to preserve the imaginary thing (by killing unbelievers and/or making them over into believers).

In the case of ‘property ownership’ where we take an imaginary-line-bounded closed geometric form overlain on the unbounded landscape into an ‘object’ imputed to have divine powers (it can self-author water from a hole in the ground, self-author crops from its soil, self-author petroleum from deep inside it, etc. etc.), it is clear that this ‘works’ only if everyone agrees to believe in it. Those who ‘believe in property’ are thus able to become ‘property owners’ since these two things are flip sides of the same coin.

The belief in ‘property’, the giving of oneself body and soul to this belief, is the ‘pact with the devil’ that allows one to profit from the ownership of property.

* * *

There is a connective confluence coming up here momentarily.

Now, in the email exchanges on ‘nationalism’, in regard to working in the green zone in Baghdad, I was comparing this to the film Das Boot, in which the crew, some believing in the ‘politics’ of their mission and others seeing it as ‘crap’, nevertheless had to believe in themselves as a team and to mutually support one another on the way through an ordeal that was very likely to be ‘on the way out’ for all of them.

“There is a camaraderie between the military and KBR. I have met the Colonel and the Sergeant Major.  Both display a military bearing that commands respect.  Both are congenial.  Both are men of honor.  I am more than a little impressed with the dignity and discipline of the American soldiers.  I see them everyday dressed in their uniforms, wearing their heavy protective gear, and I thank God I am an American.” [KBR stands for Kellog, Brown & Root, engineering subsidiary of Halliburton]

There is a certain type of ‘nationalism’ that, as it turns out, has this same sort of structure as the ‘property-believer / property owner’ structure, and I had quoted Thomas Mann and his Mario and the Magician (1929) in this regard as follows;

“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.”

Clearly, co-ownership in the building of power through the masses, accrues to those who would subordinate themselves to it, as Mann suggests. What one ‘does with it’ is quite another matter. In Das Boot, the mission was ‘survival’, ... to return to base through the heavily guarded Straits of Gibraltar.

* * *

So, this is what ‘came out of the fog’ for me, ... the view of where we have been hiding the banished Goddess, ... in ‘property’.

We banish the Goddess, the participation of the hostspace we are included in, when we ‘objectify’ the emerging, transforming and subducting flow-forms that characterize the evolutionary dynamic that we are each and all included in (‘Nature excludes nothing’).

When we objectify the very space we are included in, and convert it into an assertive object, the owned-property-object-nation-state, ... we have essentially banished the feminine-spatial-accommodative by hiding it away and substituting in its place, the masculine-individual-assertive with imputed divine powers of ‘internal first cause’ or ‘self-authorship of behaviour’.

When we reflect on it, it is clear that the actualizing of our masculine assertive potentials and the feminine accommodating backpressure of the hostspace we are situationally included in, are two facets of a dynamical one-ness. Only self-centered pride; i.e. the imputed divine power of ‘internal first cause’ that we endow ourselves with, can claim authorship of the blossoming actualization of masculine assertive potentials when the individual re-situates within a feminine more-accommodative hostspace (e.g. only ‘pride’ can attribute the blossoming actualization that accompanies a move out from under oppression in a crowded Europe to the rich and free spaces of the New World in the Americas, on a one-sided basis to the individual and his masculine assertive ‘powers’).

Objectification is none other than ‘the banishment of the Goddess’, the dispelling of the very notion that dynamics are relative, masculine-individual-asserting –feminine-spatial-accommodating. And the nation-scale of objectification is special since we transform the feminine-accommodating hostspace we are included in, ... into a masculine-assertive nation-agent.

But look what ‘we get back in return’ for dispelling the notion that ‘space is a participant in our dynamics’ (the implications of the relativity [simultaneous individual-asserting – spatial-accommodating] of motion as expressed by Einstein). We get the ‘credits’ in terms of claiming causal authorship, for the one-sided objectification of authorship.

Who was responsible for the rise in production by 500% associated with in the move from Europe to North America? ‘By God, I was!’ ... is the claim. Who else? Why are Americans or Canadians so superior in their performance to their peasant forefathers in Europe, the so-called ‘teeming masses’ and ‘refuse’ of Europe? Was it the lifting of their spirits in being liberated from oppression?

We can’t attribute this ‘amplification’ of the actualizing of their masculine assertive potentials into the feminine accommodating of the hostspace they are included in because once we ‘objectify’ people and other entities (evolutionary flow-forms) by imposing a euclidian space frame over them and referencing their actions to the euclidian frame, then we have extracted them from inclusion within the relative evolutionary dynamic which is, at the same time, both masculine-individual-assertive and feminine-spatial-accommodating.

And of course, once we objectify everything, we have to impute to these now-stand-alone (independent) objects which are no longer enfolded within the embrace of the accommodating spatial-relational flow-dynamic, the divine powers of ‘self-determinism’ of behaviour.

The boost in actualization that we could have attributed to the feminine accommodating quality of the hostspace is no longer possible in our euclidian objectified world, and we must attribute all behavioural authorship to the objects themselves.

Thus, self-centered pride, based on the belief in one’s ‘independence’ and ‘free will’ lays claim to all productive results and the very existence of the feminine accommodating quality of space, though eagerly exploited (nothing could result without it), is thus denied.

But, but the same token, pity the poor non-achiever for he too will be seen as a sole causal self-author of what he produces, the feminine accommodating quality of space being done away with. But as we well know, the accommodating quality of space can be gated and modulated selectively (so as to discriminate) by crony collaboration, so that the actualizing of assertive potentials can be shut down in the manner that electron flow is shut down in a vacuum tube by increasing the negative potential in the flow-space.

Putting these two ‘equations’ together yields a powerful conjugate combination;

1. First, we agree to believe in a world of objects where the dynamics are solely attributable to the objects.

This is where the first part of the ‘banishment of the Goddess’ comes in; i.e.we make motion ‘absolute’ as if it is somehow the property of the ‘objects’ themselves, as in ‘the Earth rotates’ (which as Henri Poincaré points out, is non-sense, since it implies that space is absolute and it ignores how the earth and planets move under one another’s simultaneous mutual influence).

Once we do this, we can only attribute dynamical developments to ‘objects’ since the accommodative role of the hostspace (as in relativity) is out of the picture. Who produces the oil? The oil producing countries produce the oil.

Albertans are ‘the most successful people’ in Canada (they are sitting on 1.7 trillion barrels of oil). Newfoundlanders are the least successful people in Canada (their cod fisheries were wiped out some years ago by multiple nations fishing at levels that could not be sustained by the natural fisheries). The Albertans are very proud of ‘their success’ and they are unusually strong supporters of a ‘free market economy’ (socialism is certainly ‘not for them’). This same sense of pride carries forth to the national level where Canada is now trying to export its skills in succeeding to others, as in Afghanistan. Canadians and Americans stand up to take a bow as the new affluence levels are announced along with the new science and technology developments that come from the investing of that affluence, ... but where is ‘the Goddess’, the invisible accommodating quality of space?

Just as in the Claribel Alegria’s ‘My grandfather was a famous engineer, my grandmother had no name’, ... we give causal credit to the masculine assertive, to ‘what objects do’, ... and the contribution of the feminine accommodating quality of the home-maker-conditioned hostspace, being invisible, is ignored.

Visual perception only delivers information on ‘what things do’, but that is far from the full story, as our intuition well knows.

2. Second, we agree to subordinate ourselves to political authority so as to enable the amassing of power to be wielded by a single central assertive authority.

That is, ‘masculine pride’, the religious imputing of ‘internal first cause’ to objects and the fact that the feminine accommodating quality of the hostspace registers on our felt experience of inclusion in space, but not on our visual perception, ... is only the first part of the story of the banishment of the Goddess. There is also this ‘conjugate’ principle of ‘nationalism’ exposed by Thomas Mann;

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.”

Obeying and commanding are once again two facets of a dynamical one-ness, and once again there is ‘pact with the devil’ as in the case of ‘property ownership’ whereby one totally abandons oneself to the cause in order to buy part ownership in it. The accruing of massive power from the masses, by the masses subordinating themselves to a singular central command, is one means of acquiring power, that radically constrasts with the notion of ‘power’, for example, in the native american tradition, where power derives from natural authenticity, from attunement to the hostspace dynamic one is included in (i.e. from masculine-assertive-feminine-accommodative balance).

How does this ‘subordinating to authority – acquiring co-ownership of the power of control’ dyad relate to the property ownership dyad ‘believing in object existence – acquiring co-ownership of the believed-in object’?

Both dyads are born out of the ethic of ‘control’. In the first case one participates in the ‘amassing’ of the power of control and earns co-ownership by so doing. In the second case, the belief in object existence, in the special case where we are ‘included’ in the object (the owned-property-nation-state) depends upon the power of control, so that these two are like ‘coupled equations’ or ‘simultaneous equations’ wherein the power of control needed to sustain the belief in the owned-property-object-nation is supplied by obeying so as to amass powers of control.

These simultaneous equations are being refined and mated today, even in nations like Canada which one might have assessed formerly as ranking low relative to the United States with respect to ‘masculine pride’ (at both individual and nation scales) and ‘subservience to political authority’. This appears to be approaching a watershed at this time, as to whether the masculine assertive control based ‘simultaneous equations’ will ‘conjugate’ or whether ‘humility’ of the natural ‘we are all brothers included in a common hostspace’ kind and ‘authenticity’ born of the ‘each of us is unique due to our unique situational inclusion within the common dynamical hostspace’ kind, will rise up to ‘damp’ any runaway coupling of these two equations (‘humility’ and ‘authenticity’ both being attributes of acknowledging the ‘feminine’ – common accommodating hostspace.

In conclusion, the ‘banished Goddess’ has been emprisoned in the ideal of the nation-state, a ‘pact with the devil’ (metaphor) whereby we sell our soul (swear to give our life up for) the force-based promoting of belief in the existence of the owned-property-object-nation, in order to acquire co-ownership in it.

A key point to note is that the nation-scale of objectification is special since we transform the feminine-accommodating hostspace we ourselves are included in, ... into a masculine-assertive nation-agent with imputed divine powers of ‘internal first cause’ or ‘self-authorship of behaviour’.

As the most affluent of these nation-states take on the character of ‘growths’ whose root systems start to wrap around the world and starve out the competing growth in other regions, the job of policing belief in the owned-property-object-nation-state is moving into ‘root system protection mode’, escalating the ‘pact with the devil’ stakes over and above where they were when the nation state’s root system was less tentacular and extrusive.

Sustaining the control needed for the continuing assertive growth of the most powerful nation-states, while continuing to give all credit for ‘authorship’ of ‘results’ solely to the masculine assertive nation-state authorship of production sets up the scenario in which there is no sign of the essential contribution of the ‘Goddess’ (spatial accommodation) and since production is purely the masculine-assertive achievement of the nation-state, there is rightful protection of the increasingly tentacular and extrusive root systems of the most affluent and powerful nation-states.

Because the focus is constrained to ‘what things do’, the masculine assertive dynamic assessed in terms of assertive achievements or ‘production’, there is no concept of ‘dynamical balance’ between the masculine-individual-assertive (at person and nation scales) and the feminine-spatial-accommodating. Those local systems ‘starved’ by the root systems of the most powerful nation-states are seen solely in the visual, masculine-assertive context of ‘non-performant’ since the accommodative quality of the common hostspace is invisible and ignored/denied.

Ecosystemic diversity in a people-nation as contrasted with ‘property-nation’ sense is thus collapsing, giving way to masculine-assertive monoculture which, operating out of ungrounded idealized belief in objects with imputed divine ‘self-determinism’ powers and backed by the pure logic of assertive control, knows no limits to its growth (the United States is now said to be consuming at the rate that would require 5.3 planet earths to sustain, if everyone were consuming at the same rate).

Every time there are scenes of crowds cheering the flag of their political-property-object nation and singing the anthem of their political-property-object nation as they celebrate the belief in property that gives them co-ownership (provided they sign in blood to give their lives to sustain belief in the imaginary so that it persists as ‘real property’ that they can own and profit by), ... if one listens closely, one can hear the tortured screams of the banished Goddess. Over-shadowing her screams are the proud exclamations of praise for the space we are included in; no, not in terms of the feminine-accommodating, but in its transformed-into-masculine-state, that of an object gifted with divine powers of masculine-assertive self-authorship.

Weblog: July 9, 2006

The ‘flat-earth society’ is us!

Have you ever wondered about what the boss has to do with the operations of the complex dynamics you, as someone involved in the ‘operations’ has to contend with? You know that the operations are complex and that the business couldn’t possibly succeed without competent operational dynamics, but still we all keep ‘pretending’ that a company’s operations are ‘driven from the top’.

In fact we make the same assumption about a country; i.e. that ‘what a country does’ is driven by its political ‘bosses’ by way of a ‘central control hierarchy’.

Meanwhile ‘systems scientists’ write papers that suggest that this ‘vertical linear control hierarchy’ that makes the corporation or nation look as if it runs like a machine is ‘illusion’, since there is a basic split between ‘formulation of plans and objectives’ and ‘the operational responsibility for implementing plans and achieving objectives’.

If the truth be known, what we are talking about here, in this vertical linear control hierarchy theory is political ‘make-believe’ needed to defend the absurd notion of ‘independent ownership’ of the organization or property (e.g. we can divide the world up into nation-states any way we like by drawing imaginary lines any way we like, but we will equip each one with a ‘central governing authority’ to militarily defend its imaginary-line borders from external unbelievers and police its inhabitants for internal unbelievers, so as to sustain ‘belief’ in the existence (entirely synthetic) of the ‘independently owned property’.

Of course nothing is ‘independent in Nature’. Everything is included in a continuing recycling flow-dynamic, the ‘evolutionary flow-dynamic’. Thus, this form of local ‘independent’-center-driven organization is a kind of ‘re-enactment’ of the ‘atomic theory’ of nature wherein ‘reality’ is deemed to emerge from the assertive actions and interactions of ‘independent’ material objects.

A vertical linear control hierarchy is a notional structure that depends on the notions of ‘up’ and ‘down’ and the ‘power of position’ being greater the higher up you are and lesser the lower down you are.

This linear ‘up’ and ‘down’ allocation of power is also available in the ‘heaven’ and ‘hell’ model, where the ultimate authority is situated vertically upward at ‘plus infinity’ and the power of this authority diminishes as one descends down towards ground level or ‘zero level’ of us mere more mortals, passing down through the levels of bosses and presidents only a short ways above the zero level. Of course, the vertical line of empowerment does not stop at ‘ground level’, it has a virtual extension on down to ‘minus infinity’ which is the ultimate in negative empowerment.

Whereas the positive authority pushes down, the negative authority ‘sucks’ and our western forefathers associated this sucking form of empowerment with ‘devils’ called ‘succubi’.

How we psychologically handle the geometry of the space we live in has inspired reflections and myth since the origins of man.

As the story goes in ancient Sumerian myth, in the Kaballah and in the ben Sira version of Genesis cited below, a problem developed between the first man and the first woman as to which was more important, the ‘masculine assertive’ (positive pushing-down-from-above power) or the ‘feminine accommodative’ (negative pulling-down-from-below power). When the ‘first woman’ refused to give up her claims to an ‘equality’ based in ‘reciprocal complementarity’, she was demonized, became known as a ‘succubus’ and banished, with a new wife being made out of the material of the first man, so as to be subservient to him;

“Adam’s ‘first wife’, ‘Lilith’ or ‘Lilitu’ has over 100 names and variations in myths ranging from Ancient Sumeria to Jewish Mysticism to tribal Malayasia to myths about the Third Millenium. She is the first wife of Adam (before Eve) according to the Jewish myth. She is a Sumerian fertility/agricultural goddess, and she is the Greek goddess of the dark moon. She is the mother of all succubi.”

After God created Adam, who was alone, He said, 'It is not good for man to be alone' (Gen. 2:18). He then created a woman for Adam, from the earth, as He had created Adam himself, and called her Lilith. Adam and Lilith began to fight. She said, 'I will not lie below,' and he said, 'I will not lie beneath you, but only on top. For you are fit only to be in the bottom position, while am to be in the superior one.' Lilith responded, 'We are equal to each other inasmuch as we were both created from the earth.' But they would not listen to one another. When Lilith saw this, she pronounced the Ineffable Name and flew away into the air. --- ben Sira version of Genesis

* * *

Ok, if you would prefer to go with ‘science’ in resolving any ambiguities as to whether the power should come ‘from above’ or ‘from below’, ... then we can review the complications that similarly arise in science.

In science, we have the principle of ‘power of position’ (potential energy) wherein, the higher the position above ‘ground level’ the greater the ‘power of position’. We have a term for this positioning called ‘elevation’ and the higher the elevation of the rock on the mountain, the greater is the ‘power of its position’ (‘potential energy’). So, in some sense, there is ‘geometric agreement’ with the notion in monotheism of an all powerful God ‘above us’ and this power is of the same masculine ‘assertive nature’ (pushing down on those below to direct their behaviour, as in a ‘vertical linear control hierarchy).

But as the geophysicist knows, there is a problem here. He can make his local topography maps relative to a ‘flat sea-level datum’ and this helps to visualize how things want to push down from above; e.g. water flows orthogonally downward across the iso-elevation contours of his topography map, mounds of earth want to ‘slump’ down into a flat plain etc.

But as soon as he wants to extend his maps regionally, he finds that the ‘real world’ is not ‘up’ and ‘down’ due to the curvature of the earth. For example, sediments undergoing continuous deposition by subsidence experience a shortening of their own baseline as they subside which compresses them as they subside (e.g. the blanket of sediments deposited at the surface of the earth will have an extension that associates with a circumference of 25,000 miles, but as this blanket of sediments subsides several miles in towards the center of the earth, the blanket has to shrink by compressing, in the process, this compression and the descent into hotter temperatures as the sediments ‘go down’ de-waters them squirting the fluids ‘upwards’, not only the water but the cooked hydrocarbons (petroleum) so this is a real process that it has been important to understand, and it implies that THERE IS NO ‘UP’ AND ‘DOWN’.

That is, there is movement inward and movement outward in a spherical sense with the mountains pushing down-and-in and the most fluid stuff squirting back out-and-up (providing the buoyancy that is the source of the power of elevated position). This more realistic imagery informs us of the simultaneity of the outside-inward-asserting and the inside-outward accommodating (backpressure). In fact this is just ‘one dynamic’ that WE split into two aspects, a masculine and a feminine, as in ‘Adam and Lilith’ being made of the same earth.

Instead of the question as to who should be on top pushing down and who should be on the bottom to be a passive receptacle for the down-pushing, ... or the active ‘succubus’ who animates a passive assertivity (the ‘succubus’ [demoness] was how ancients explained ‘noctural emissions’ in men), the linear terms ‘push’ and ‘pull’ now give way in this spherical spatial-relational reality where everything is in terms of inner-outer spatial-relationship, to ‘convergence’ and ‘divergence’ and nature’s innate tendency to sustain dynamical balance therein.

The vertical (masculine push-down-on-those-below) control hierarchy which is the artifact of a ‘flat-earth’ model, gives way in the greater reality of a ‘spherical earth’ model, to a new means of organizing, that of sustaining inner-outer dynamical balance.

There is no ‘highest authority’ in this purely relative spatial-relational mode of organizing (social or other) dynamics, there is only inclusionally nesting inner-outer balance-sustaining dynamics. This is in good accord with the notions in relativity and quantum wave theory where space is a fluid energy-field-flow dynamic (matter is a secondary thing as implied by matter-energy equivalence, a local concentration of energy in the energy-field-flow dynamic, as Schroedinger says, matter is ‘schaumkommen’ (appearances) whose essence is ‘resonance’, standing waves in sustained inner-outer dynamical balance;

the resonant standing-wave nature of matter in quantum wave dynamics

The ‘vertical linear control hierarchy’, then, associates with the ‘flat earth’ models such as ‘heaven and hell’ which have enjoyed continuing popularity in the west and, by their very use in the ‘colonizing application’, have come to prevail as the preferred means of social organizing.

The VLCH are designed to support the notion of piecewise ‘independent ownership’ and ‘self-determinism’ with the ‘highest authority’ (where the buck starts and stops) providing the necessary ‘internal first cause’ of actions required by an ‘independent entity’ to have ‘its own behaviour’. This ‘internal first cause’ (which makes possible the notion of ‘independent behaviour’) is not ‘reality’ but a convention that comes from absolutist logic and/or from monotheist religion;

“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.”

In order to divide the world dynamic up, piecewise, into notional entities (nations, corporations, independently operated properties) one has to notionally equip them with an internal source of ‘independent self-authoring behaviour’. If you have a big enough army, you too can draw some imaginary boundary lines on the map of the world and declare this new ‘independent piece’, a closed geometric form on the map that animals, aboriginals, birds, insects, winds, rivers, know nothing about, ... the new independent nation of ‘Imaginia’, ... and if your military is strong enough to make believers out of external others who contest the existence of those imaginary boundary lines, and your internal police force is strong enough to make believers out of aboriginals or internal others feeling ‘trapped’ by the drawing of the imaginary boundary lines and forced to swear an oath of subservience to the ‘entity’ (the ‘imaginary-line-bounded nation-entity’) and to commit to bearing arms and giving one’s life to its ‘continuing existence’, if it is threatened from without or within, ... then you will have succeed in giving birth to a nation based purely on forcing people to believe in the ‘independent existence’ of an ‘imaginary-line-bounded closed geometric form’, ... a ‘closed geometric form’ that you have imposed on a map of the world that ‘houses’ a central governing authority of the VLCH (vertical linear control hierarchy) ‘flat-earth’ variety (the VLCH having the property of ‘internal first cause’ so as to go together with the notion of the ‘independence’ of the property cookie-cuttered by the imaginary-line-boundaries and provide the internal self-authorship needed for the ‘independence of behaviour’ of the ‘independently owned property entity’.

This is where some systems scientists (e.g. Martine Dodds-Taljaard) balk; i.e. the VLCH bosses utilize their own organization charts to make their plans and prepare the commands to cascade down and animate who does what in fulfilling the plans and meeting objectives, ... but the people on the ground floor do not ‘live in the airy-fairy space of organization charts’, ... they are included in a shared, common world-space wherein a diverse multiplicity of initiatives are underway at the same time, and which are simultaneously mutually influencing one another’s movements. Thus this separation of ‘planning authority’ and ‘operationalizing responsibility’ does not make sense. Martine observes;

“We see this in corporations, civil institutions as well as [western] governments – the upshot is that those ‘in control’ of the game rules become largely concerned with their position, status and rewards, and in keeping ‘power’ centered in themselves, since there is no real accountability in the system.  Those exercising authority over the policy decisions, are not responsible for their implementation or execution.  Accordingly, the ‘top’ has the ‘bottom’ to blame if nothing happens or corruption and other pathological ‘products’ of this model emerge, and the ‘bottom’ can blame the top, because they are ‘only doing their duty’ as prescribed, and not responsible for the system, since they have no authority to change anything and are not allowed to make effective or efficient decisions about how to do what they do.  Within governance, this is in effect, a circle of ‘lawlessness’ and impunity.  It is also a recipe for corruption, gridlock, polarization and unaccountability.”  --- Martine Dodds-Taljaard, The Challenge of Governance in an Interdependent World.

Martine recognized that there is no such thing as an ‘independent’ entity, whether the ‘private property’ of an individual or ‘nation’ or ‘corporation’ but that like those standing on the peaks of mountains, their ‘power of position’ does not simply ‘push down’ on those below (that would be the ‘flat-earth’ model), but pushes inward on the common hostspace dynamic we are all included in, which is continually countering with an accommodative backpressure (receptive or resistive). That is, ask yourself whether you find the actualizing of your assertive powers more readily accommodated in some hostspace situations you find yourself to be included in, more than others; i.e. the actualizing of assertive potential powers and the accommodating backpressure (receptive/resistive) of the shared dynamical hostspace we are included in MUTUALLY SHAPE THE NET ACTUALIZING.

It is simply ‘not realistic’ in the interdependent world of our real-life experience, to believe in ‘independent owned properties’ and to attribute to them ‘independent behaviour’ by way of ‘internal first cause’ embodied in VLCHs.

Some of us, because we have imposed these ‘beliefs’ on ourselves for generations, have come to believe that ‘it is our productive powers’ that have authored the production of wheat from the land etc., and similarly, on a nation owned-property basis, to believe that ‘it is our productive powers’ that have authored the production of our nation, in a true VLCH kind of internal-first-cause pushed down mechanical way. Though when we have depleted the nutrients in the soil, cut down all the forests, over-grazed the land, we do not say that it is ‘we’ who have lost our productive powers, we say that the land has lost its productive powers.

We even use the VLCH model for our ‘self’ since it gives us the sense that we are each an ‘independent owned property’ (owned and operated by our self), and we nominate the ‘brain’ as our central governing authority and endow it with ‘internal first cause’ as required to notionally give us an ‘independent behaviour’.

But in reality, we are as INTERdependent as anything else in nature and our life is sustaining by continuing inner-outer balancing, the inner-outer dynamical-balance sustaining of material and fluid exchanges, the inner outer dynamical-balance sustaining of thermal energy exchanges and pressure dependent gas exchanges. We ‘don’t survive’ outside of a very special environmental interdependency, so that the ‘actualizing of our assertive potential powers and the accommodating of the dynamical hostspace we are situationally included in, are a mutual-shaping dyadic one-ness.

These notions of ‘the independent self’ and ‘the independent nation’ and the ‘independent corporation’ wouldn’t make any sense unless we NOTIONALLY ENDOWED THEM WITH SELF-AUTHORSHIP OF BEHAVIOUR by the provision of ‘internal first cause’ within ‘their’ imaginary line/surface bounded ‘closed geometric form’.

The VLCH (vertical linear control hierarchy) installed as a ‘central governing authority’ provides the ‘fix’ that makes these ‘independently existing objects’ appear to ‘come alive’ as independent entities when they are anything but, in the natural reality of our experience.

The VLCH is a ‘flat-earth’ model based on an absolute ‘up’ and ‘down’ where the ‘push down from above’ is seen to prevail, as holds true in western monotheism and in western mainstream science, the science of over-simplification that has banished the participation of space (the ‘feminine’), this side of relativity and quantum wave theory.

Thanks to this ‘flat-earth’ VLCH manner of understanding ‘organization’, the pride of the individual property owner (or nation-property-owner), as he credits himself, his own internal self-authorship, with the valuable production from his property (whether it be tourism, entertainment, sale of timber, cattle, wine, foodcrops or mineral resources, water etc.), takes himself out of the natural reality of his experience, wherein everything in the living space of nature is based on inner-outer dynamical balance-sustaining and puts himself into the absolute ‘up’ and ‘down’ (I am better than you, You are worse than me) world where heaven is above us and hell is below, ... where everything is seen in terms of mutually exclusive opposites.

This is the ‘flat-earth’ delusion we are suffering under in the current era. As dissonance rises, true to our flat-earth model, we seek to reward and amplify the ‘good’ and to punish and eliminate the ‘bad’.

The alternative, known well by the Native American aboriginals, is to accept that we are all brothers, ... all included in nature and that organization must be based on sustaining inner-outer dynamical balance, as in the six directions of the medicine wheel, the four directions in the plane plus the sky above and earth below providing for a continuously cycling flow of renewal provided that we put ourselves in the service of sustaining continuing dynamical balance.

Being ‘within the loop of the continually renewing evolutionary dynamic’, as is the aboriginal tradition, is something very different from seeing ourselves as the ‘first cause’ that is the independent author of what happens, in the ‘flat-earth’, heavens above Vertical Linear Control Hierarchy mode of organization.

We westerners go about our business on the earth, directed by this ‘flat-earth’ mentality wherein we see ourselves as ‘independent objects’ equipped for ‘independent behaviour’ by means of a central governing authority residing in our brain, a mental modeling of ourselves that can afford to ignore our innate inner-outer inhabitant-habitant interdependency, by virtue of this imputed divine ‘internal first cause’.

Western psychology therefore tries to explain problems with the behaviour of ‘independent individuals’ in terms of what is going on inside us, oblivious to the fact that looking for solutions inside is like looking inside the earth for problems with ‘its behaviour’, when in fact the earth, like the human individual, has no behaviour it can call ‘its own’ since it is bound up within an innately interdependent dynamic that forms from multiple bodies moving under their simultaneous mutual influence (as with the mountains sinking down into the interior of the earth from all possible outward-inward azimuths and by their own co-generated accommodative backpressure, giving themselves some buoyancy in the process.

Our ‘flat-earth’ society, with its splitting apart of ‘good’ and ‘evil’; (e.g. ‘the war on terrorism’), is busily using the same flat-earth tools that are creating problems for us, with renewed intensity, to try to resolve the problems. That is, we are trying to get out of the hole we have dug ourselves into by digging faster and more furiously.

Weblog: July 6, 2006

Space smells.

Philosophers are polite and generally use the example of ‘colour’ to denote experiences that are beyond rational description, ... but ‘smell’ is another experience that is ‘beyond description’.

In my July 4^th blog, at the very bottom, I mention the non-describable ‘quality of space’. When we are in a smelly space, we move so as to resituate ourselves in space, in a better-smelling situation. Others can make the space we are in smelly for us, without making it smelly for themselves. In Monty Python’s ‘Holy Grail’, ... the defender of the castle, speaking with a french accent hurls a succession of curses at the grail-seekers, including ‘I fart in your general direction’.

Science would explain what a fart was in terms of chemical nature of the invisible gases etc. but science cannot describe the experience of ‘smelling’. And newtonian science falls short of being able to describe the behavioural dynamics induced by the smelling experience because they are NOT ‘determined’ by an applied force, but inductively shaped by the smelling experience. If the smelliness field is unpleasing and increases with proximity the ground, the included experient will walk on his tiptoes, and if the smelliness field is unpleasing and increases with elevation (e.g. trapped by the ceiling with in a building), then the included experient which crouch down or walk on ‘all fours’. The included experient will attempt to move in the direction of less smelliness. Anyone who has ever been in a ‘teargas field’ knows how ‘directive’ a smelliness field gradient can be.

While the smelling experience is personal (we can never know how another person experiences smells), beyond rational explanation and invisible, that it really does happen is indicated by, for example, the coherent movement of a group of people who suddenly abandon an elevator. Sometimes the group splits and goes in opposite direction at the same time, as when there is a nearby presence of Roquefort cheese or garlic sausage.

If the smell of space or ‘smelliness field’ inductively shapes our behaviour, and if we can shape the ‘smelliness field’, then we can shape the behaviour of individuals and collectives by shaping the ‘quality’ of the field-space they/we are included in.

This is of philosophical/psychological interest since social dynamics are normally studied and understood in terms of ‘what people do’. But in the case of ‘shaping the quality of space’ and thereby inductively shaping the behaviour of individuals and collectives, ... we introduce a complexity to social dynamics that cannot be addressed in terms of ‘what people do’ as if ‘what they do’ is driven by their ‘internal purpose’.

In an internet-based ‘sharing circle’ on ‘inclusionality’, we regularly discuss how situational inclusion in space inductively influences the assertive dynamics of ‘the included’. Yesterday, one of the participants recalled the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert Pirsig and what a deep impression it had made on him. In the book, the narrator Phaedrus speaks about his obsession with understanding ‘the metaphysics of Quality’.

Pirsig was disappointed with the responses he received from people who kept re-reading ‘ZaMM’ who said they had read the book several times and though they continued to get more out of it, ... ultimately wanted to know ‘What he was ‘really talking about’’.

The following is from an April 21, 2005 National Public Radio interview with Pirsig by Noah Adams (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values was published in 1974 and a follow-up Lila:An Inquiry into Morals, was published in 1992)

Robert Pirsig: Professional philosophers said “well Pirsig has just given us a skeleton here in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. What we want some more flesh and blood. Don’t just give us this mystic term [Quality] which nobody can define, the center of which is nowhere and the edges of which can’t be found.’ So in Lila I’m saying ‘ok, here’s something positive’. Traditionally when you do that, all you do is raise more questions, you never answer any questions, and the interrogator says, ‘well ok now I’m satisfied’, that never happens. The schools of philosophy have been founded that way, where the fellow says one statement and the other fellow says ‘what do you mean by that’ and of course he says what he means, and then they say ‘what do you mean by that’ and you go on in further and further expansion. So I’m afraid that’s what happened with Lila. I feel that zamm is a sort of dynamic book, in terms of the metaphysics that I’ve given her, it takes a great leap forward into areas that i’ve never heard talked about before. Lila is an attempt to (pirsig’s emphasis) NAIL THAT DOWN.

Noah Adams (NPR interviewer); Well, you give very clear examples from anthropology, a lot of discussion about American Indians, very clear examples from biology and other sciences. Some of the parts I have more difficulty with and say to myself ... ‘in a quieter time I’m going to go back and, ...’

Robert Pirsig (disconsolately) Yeah, I’m afraid everybody’s going to do that. I’m really hoping that serious thinking people will really meet me halfway on this metaphysics of Quality and see what I’m trying to say. I’m very disappointed that so few people are understanding it. I really knocked myself out for about fifteen years trying to make this just as clear, and interesting and straight-forward and understandable as I could, but it looks like I haven’t made it all the way.

* * *

Well, it’s been a long time since I read ZaMM, but intuitively, it resonated (I felt its Quality) and in the following excerpt, I have highlighted (bold, italic) the connection Pirsig makes between ‘Quality’ and wave dynamics (which to me recalls that inner-outer resonance is the stuff that space is made of in quantum wave theory);

“This was the beginning of the crystallization that I talked about before. Others wondered at the time, "Why should he get so excited about `quality'?" But they saw only the word and its rhetoric context. They didn't see his past despair over abstract questions of existence itself that he had abandoned in defeat.

If anyone else had asked, What is Quality? it would have been just another question. But when he asked it, because of his past, it spread out for him like waves in all directions simultaneously, not in a hierarchic structure, but in a concentric one. At the center, generating the waves, was Quality. As these waves of thought expanded for him I'm sure he fully expected each wave to reach some shore of existing patterns of thought so that he had a kind of unified relationship with these thought structures. But the shore was never reached until the end, if it appeared at all. For him there was nothing but ever expanding waves of crystallization. I'll now try to follow these waves of crystallization, the second phase of his exploration into quality, as best I can.

...

I was talking about the first wave of crystallization outside of rhetoric that resulted from Phaedrus' refusal to define Quality. He had to answer the question, If you can't define it, what makes you think it exists?

His answer was an old one belonging to a philosophic school that called itself realism."A thing exists," he said, "if a world without it can't function normally. If we can show that a world without Quality functions abnormally, then we have shown that Quality exists, whether it's defined or not." He thereupon proceeded to subtract Quality from a description of the world as we know it.

The first casualty from such a subtraction, he said, would be the fine arts. If you can't distinguish between good and bad in the arts they disappear. There's no point in hanging a painting on the wall when the bare wall looks just as good. There's no point to symphonies, when scratches from the record or hum from the record player sound just as good.

Poetry would disappear, since it seldom makes sense and has no practical value. And interestingly, comedy would vanish too. No one would understand the jokes, since the difference between humor and no humor is pure Quality.

Next he made sports disappear. Football, baseball, games of every sort would vanish. The scores would no longer be a measurement of anything meaningful, but simply empty statistics, like the number of stones in a pile of gravel. Who would attend them? Who would play?

Next he subtracted Quality from the marketplace and predicted the changes that would take place. Since quality of flavor would be meaningless, supermarkets would carry only basic grains such as rice, cornmeal, soybeans and flour; possibly also some ungraded meat, milk for weaning infants and vitamin and mineral supplements to make up deficiencies. Alcoholic beverages, tea, coffee and tobacco would vanish. So would movies, dances, plays and parties. We would all use public transportation. We would all wear G.I. shoes.

A huge proportion of us would be out of work, but this would probably be temporary until we relocated in essential non-Quality work. Applied science and technology would be drastically changed, but pure science, mathematics, philosophy and particularly logic would be unchanged.

Phaedrus found this last to be extremely interesting. The purely intellectual pursuits were the least affected by the subtraction of Quality. If Quality were dropped, only rationality would remain unchanged. That was odd. Why would that be?

He didn't know, but he did know that by subtracting Quality from a picture of the world as we know it, he'd revealed a magnitude of importance of this term he hadn't known was there. The world can function without it, but life would be so dull as to be hardly worth living. In fact it wouldn't be worth living. The term worth is a Quality term. Life would just be living without any values or purpose at all.

He looked back over the distance this line of thought had taken him and decided he'd certainly proved his point. Since the world obviously doesn't function normally when Quality is subtracted, Quality exists, whether it's defined or not.

After conjuring up this vision of a Qualityless world, he was soon attracted to its resemblance to a number of social situations he had already read about. Ancient Sparta came to mind, Communist Russia and her satellites. Communist China, the Brave New World of Aldous Huxley and the 1984 of George Orwell. He also remembered people from his own experience who would have endorsed this Qualityless world. The same ones who tried to make him quit smoking. They wanted rational reasons for his smoking and, when he didn't have any, acted very superior, as though he'd lost face or something. They had to have reasons and plans and solutions for everything. They were his own kind. The kind he was now attacking. And he searched for a long time for a suitable name to sum up just what characterized them, so as to get a handle on this Qualityless world.

It was intellectual primarily, but it wasn't just intelligence that was fundamental. It was a certain basic attitude about the way the world was, a presumptive vision that it ran according to laws...reason...and that man's improvement lay chiefly through the discovery of these laws of reason and application of them toward satisfaction of his own desires. It was this faith that held everything together. He squinted at this vision of a Qualityless world for a while, conjured up more details, thought about it, and then squinted some more and thought some more and then finally circled back to where he was before.

Squareness.

That's the look. That sums it. Squareness. When you subtract quality you get squareness. Absence of Quality is the essence of squareness.

Some artist friends with whom he had once traveled across the United States came to mind. They were Negroes, who had always been complaining about just this Qualitylessness he was describing. Square. That was their word for it. Way back long ago before the mass media had picked it up and given it national white usage they had called all that intellectual stuff square and had wanted nothing to do with it. And there had been a fantastic mismeshing of conversations and attitudes between him and them because he was such a prime example of the squareness they were talking about. The more he had tried to pin them down on what they were talking about the vaguer they had gotten. Now with this Quality he seemed to say the same thing and talk as vaguely as they did, even though what he talked about was as hard and clear and solid as any rationally defined entity he'd ever dealt with.

Quality. That's what they'd been talking about all the time. "Man, will you just please, kindly dig it," he remembered one of them saying, "and hold up on all those wonderful seven-dollar questions? If you got to ask what is it all the time, you'll never get time to know." Soul. Quality. The same?

The wave of crystallization rolled ahead. He was seeing two worlds, simultaneously. On the intellectual side, the square side, he saw now that Quality was a cleavage term. What every intellectual analyst looks for. You take your analytic knife, put the point directly on the term Quality and just tap, not hard, gently, and the whole world splits, cleaves, right in two...hip and square, classic and romantic, technological and humanistic...and the split is clean. There's no mess. No slop. No little items that could be one way or the other. Not just a skilled break but a very lucky break. Sometimes the best analysts, working with the most obvious lines of cleavage, can tap and get nothing but a pile of trash. And yet here was Quality; a tiny, almost unnoticeable fault line; a line of illogic in our concept of the universe; and you tapped it, and the whole universe came apart, so neatly it was almost unbelievable. He wished Kant were alive. Kant would have appreciated it. That master diamond cutter. He would see. Hold Quality undefined. That was the secret.

Phaedrus wrote, with some beginning awareness that he was involved in a strange kind of intellectual suicide, "Squareness may be succinctly and yet thoroughly defined as an inability to see quality before it's been intellectually defined, that is, before it gets all chopped up into words -- .We have proved that quality, though undefined, exists. Its existence can be seen empirically in the classroom, and can be demonstrated logically by showing that a world without it cannot exist as we know it. What remains to be seen, the thing to be analyzed, is not quality, but those peculiar habits of thought called `squareness' that sometimes prevent us from seeing it."

Thus did he seek to turn the attack. The subject for analysis, the patient on the table, was no longer Quality, but analysis itself. Quality was healthy and in good shape. Analysis, however, seemed to have something wrong with it that prevented it from seeing the obvious.

* * *

So here we are, doing some serious thinking, and equating Quality to Resonance, inner-outer spatial-relational dynamical balance.

What would Robert Pirsig think about this?

Apparently, though reclusive, he (age 78) continues to read and respond to serious feedback funnelled through his publisher, so the thing to do would be to write to him.

But how to put the thoughts on this equivalence of Quality with Resonance (spatial-relational inner-outer dynamical-balance) succinctly?

Would a ‘smellyness field that induces inclusional re-situation’ sound too unserious?

One path that comes to mind is the Poincarean path of the split between visual perception and inclusional experience as in Poincaré’s essay The Relativity of Space and his related debate with Bertrand Russell over the different understanding of the world that comes from ‘visual perception’ and ‘felt experience’.

When Poincaré rhetorically asks; ‘Does the Earth rotate’ (to answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to this question makes no sense since it would imply that space is absolute). What our visual perception would bring to us, were we an astronaut on the moon or in orbit would be that ‘the Earth rotates’ but our feeling experience would be that everything, including ourselves, is bound up in the movement, and even science concedes that material bodies move under one another’s simultaneous mutual influence and that we cannot reduce this motion to the motion of individual things since it is innately ‘relative’.

This ‘tuning in’ to the relativeness of ourselves and the world is clearly the ‘Quality’ that Pirsig is talking about;

“this mystic term [Quality] which nobody can define, the center of which is nowhere and the edges of which can’t be found”

Only when we let go of our ‘object-orientation’ can we experience the relativity of space. In object-oriented mode, we will push on resolutely towards our ‘objective’ regardless of the quality of space we are situationally included in, ... a quality that we help to cultivate, whether we are a soldier burning villages or a travelling minstrel.

But as Pirsig says, when we ‘get stuck’, ... when the motorcycle breaks down and we can’t see how to fix it and we can’t move on, ... then we ‘let go’ and have a cup of coffee, ... and in this ‘just sitting’ state, the past and future pull back inside of the present and there is only this space of the continuing present. This is where Quality comes alive and begins to shape things.

Whether Pirsig would agree or not is a question, ... but in the context of ‘inclusionality’, this is where we lose our ‘center-driven independent-object’ orientation and become comfortable with our inner-outer-dynamical-balance-seeking nature, ... our spatial-relational, purely relative selves.

All centers dissolve in this state (centers are everywhere/nowhere and their edges cannot be found).

So for a scientist to become an artist (for a ‘square’ motorcycle mechanic to become a ‘groovy’ artistic motorcycle mechanic), he must allow his self-center to dissolve and in order to do this, he must let himself fall into this state of total boredom or ‘stuckness’ where he is in a place as described by Picasso; ‘La Peinture est plus fort que moi, elle me fait faire ce qu’elle veut’ (Painting is stronger than I am, it makes me do what it wants.).

This is also the mode that Pirsig was most often in while he let his writing flow through him in writing Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

But what about ‘the scientist’? How can he become, at the same time, an artist?

His problem is with his visual perception. Visual perception is from a ‘vantage point’ that gives a ‘perspective’ and this is a center-driven orientation. How can he still be a scientist and dissolve his visual perception so that his felt experience of inclusion in the space-of-now can rise to the surface? The groovy motorcycle mechanic does not have to totally forget about which wrench to use where, ... the transformation is with respect to the dissolution of any deliberate, analytical, by-the-manual procedure. He must forget about his destination, his objective, in the same way the impressionist painter let’s his deliberateness dissolve and put his hands in the service of what resonates in an ‘inner-outer’ sense that will give form and shape to what is being worked on. This is the ‘Quality’ that Pirsig is speaking of.

“Pirsig writes that it seems that most people view the steel of the motorcycles to be: "...primarily physical. But...'steel' can be any shape you want if you are skilled enough, and...[shape is] what you arrive at, what you give to the steel."

‘Shape’ is spatial-relational form. If what comes off the keyboard feels right, then it is right. There is no other criteria for it. To get analytical about it would be to ‘de-tune’ and be totally out of touch with ‘Quality’ or ‘Resonance’ since it something the connects with everything.

Do I know what I am going to write in the next paragraph? I have no explicit intention, though I drift in and out of reflecting on where I seem to be heading. One idea begets another, or rather, a collection of ideas comes into coherent connective confluence and then another and another.

Still, I want to switch to deliberate mode now, because I want to write to Robert Pirsig and ask him what he thinks about mapping ‘Quality’ to ‘Resonance’. It probably won’t work because I will be out of ‘spontaneous’ mode, but maybe I can get back into it as I am writing to him.

Mr. Robert Pirsig
In care of: William Morrow Company
1350 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10019

Dear Mr. Pirsig,

I read your Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance once and at some level, intuitively ‘got it’ though I suspect that I could ‘build resolution’ of my intuitive understanding by re-reading it, and bringing the ideas in it into connective confluence with similar ideas that I have since been exploring with a small group of others.

What I would like to ask you is whether you have considered mapping ‘Quality’ to ‘Resonance’ in Schroedinger’s view of Quantum wave dynamics where ‘resonance’ is ‘the stuff that space is made of’, space being the energy-field-flow that spawns local concentrated energy flow-forms that we refer to as ‘material bodies’.

Relativity and quantum wave theory are also about ‘dissolving’ anything that has a ‘center’, though there is one center that few scientists will ‘let go of’ and that is ‘their own’, that of the ‘scientific observer’.

Holding on to one’s center-based visual perception as ‘scientific observer’ is the final ‘hold-out’ that prevents the scientist who accepts relativity and quantum theory from opening the way for the artist in him to surface. He must let go of his ‘observer role’ in order to attune, inner-outerly, to the space-of-now and to let his behaviour be guided by the sustaining of inner-outer dynamical balance or ‘Resonance’. This is perhaps what occurs when he ‘gets stuck’ and allows what then flows through him to get him unstuck. If he is all the time moving along and developing and refining the theory, then such deliberateness will not allow him to be in touch/tune with ‘Quality’ or (inner-outer spatial-relational) ‘Resonance’.

If science is taken to be a tool for a scientist’s fixed executive center to wield and utilize (his pride may have him extolling and otherwise focusing on the virtues/utilities of his theories etc.), then science will not allow the art of science to surface. The scientist must ‘let go’ of science as a crow’s eye tool for observing what is going on, in order to let the art of science surface. The scientist claims that space, the universe, is ‘made of waves/resonances’ and he has drawn schematic pictures of it, such as the following;

But this picture delivers a concept that is ‘out in front’ of the scientist observer. The deeper implications are surely that the observer is also included in the spatial-relational dynamics of nature, the evolving space of the continuing present that is implied by relativity. Thus the observing scientist must let go of his ‘observing’ in order to dissolve his own center and allow himself to get in touch with his inner-outer dynamical-balance-seeking self.

So there is a message waiting to be delivered to him, or any of us in this discovery that resonance is the substance of space. (As Schroedinger says, matter is simply ‘Schaumkommen’ (appearances) an undulation in the resonant wave structure of space.). The message is like that of Zen for the motorcycle mechanic, ... there is a particularity to the space of now that is spatial-relational and something wants to take shape relative to the incompletedness in this particularity and it is this shape that wants to happen that motocycle-mechanicing-as-a-tool must give itself up to, with the mechanic letting himself be the channel through which the actualizing of his assertive potentials and the accommodating backpressure of the space he is particularly, situationally included in mutually shape one another in a resonant manner.

Scientists continue to search for the meaning of quantum theory ‘out there’ in front of them (in center-based scientific observation mode). Is this not a guarantee that they will not find the meaning? The above picture is a ‘generalization’ of ‘resonance’ as the substance of space, but our experience is particular since we are uniquely, situationally included in space, and thus there is an implication that our living consciousness and sense of self, RATHER THAN BEING CENTER-BASED (independently and absolutely existing), is inner-outer dynamical balance-sustaining or ‘resonance based’.

‘Quality’ is this letting go of center-driven perspective and behaviour and letting the particularity of the evolving space-of-now inductively shape what flows forth from us. And so it is with ‘Resonance’. We cannot be in touch with our ‘resonance-based self’ unless we let our center dissolve (and drop the assumptions of our ‘independence’ and ‘internal first cause’ or ‘self-determinism’).

I would welcome any comments you may have as to any insights, if any, that you feel might associate with mapping ‘Quality’ to ‘Resonance’.

Thank you for Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, as it has opened up far greater ‘traction’ and ‘attunement’ for continuing exploration of beyond-rationality realms that would otherwise have remained far more obscure and ‘uncommon’.

Regards,

Ted Lumley

* * *

If Robert Pirsig replies, I shall publish whatever comments he has, right here.

Weblog: July 4, 2006

There is a Buddhist saying that it is better to love others more than you need others. But more often than not, love comes together with a need ‘to be loved’, and our behaviours are then shaped by the need to keep the love-flow requited.

Nowhere does one have to face this ‘catch 22’ more directly, than where one’s love for others induces one to say things that are hurtful and likely to alienate those one loves, yet where not saying them would clearly be a betrayal of those one loves.

"The star-spangled banner does not fill me with pride: it fills me with shame, and that flag symbolizes sorrow and corruption to me right now," writes Cindy Sheehan. "The flag represents so much lying, fixed elections, profiting by the war machine, high gas prices, spying on Americans, rapid erosion of our freedoms while BushCo literally gets away with murder, torture and extreme rendition, contaminating the world with depleted uranium, and illegal and immoral wars that are responsible for killing so many. A symbol that used to represent hope to so many around the world now fills so many with disgust." --- Cindy Sheehan, July 4^th, 2006

I have not lost a son in a war that I believed my country ‘manufactured’, but yet I feel I understand what Cindy is saying and my sentiments on July 1^st, Canada Day, attempted to convey this, ... not with regard solely to the United States, but with regard to ‘colonialism’ in general, which, in my view, associates generally with the western idea of a property-ownership-based ‘democratic nation-state’.

The political anti-American (anti-western powers) word of ‘Imperialism’ may come to mind, ... but for me it misses the mark, because ‘colonialism’ is something we are doing to ourselves, and persuading others to do to themselves, ... and thus the notion of one center of control and ‘one Empire’ is not what I see going on.

What is going on today is more subtle than the ‘Imperialism’ of the Old Empires, and even the ‘British Empire’ when it was still de rigeur to speak in terms of the legitimacy of brute force and making slaves of other, less powerful peoples. And we may recall that it was only in the 1950’s that the term ‘British Empire’ fell out of fashion, and many Americans even speak today of the ‘American Empire’.

But the difference between ‘(self-)colonizing’ and Imperialism by a particular country (the US) is fundamental.

What I am saying is that the very concept of a property-ownership-based ‘democratic nation-state’ is misguided, and further, that it is this ‘colonialism’ based misguidedness that is inciting Cindy Sheehan to speak out against the practices of the administration of her own country, and to potentially alienate those she loves, because she loves them.

But are we ‘big enough’ to seriously reflect on the wisdom of a system that we have been, for numerous generations, ‘born into’ and taught to give our unqualified support to? I am speaking of the system known as ‘the democratic nation-state’.

This concept, ‘the democratic nation-state’, is what this note is about and while there is no better example than ‘the United States’, the essence of the concept is psychological rather than operational and pervades the modern WESTERNIZED world.

The concept of ‘colonizing’ that is foundational to ‘the democratic nation-state’ is a large-scale version of ‘staking a claim’ in mineral resource exploitation, and that is no accident since the ‘colonizing powers’ were interested in exactly that, ... ‘staking a claim’ to lands that were rich in natural resources that could ‘enrich the ‘mother countries’ of colonization’.

The ‘psychological’ ‘warp’ involved in the notion of ‘sovereign property ownership’, involves taking this idea of overlaying an ‘imaginary-line-bounded’ template over the unbounded dynamical hostspace of the earth, and proclaiming its INDEPENDENT existence as a ‘nation’.

Psychologically, we start to personify these abstracted objects, and we begin to think of them as have the powers of independent behaviour. Our language helps to trick us here, as we begin to say; ‘France did this’ and ‘Britain did that’, ... ‘Germany did this’ and ‘the United States did that’.

When you hear these personified statements and repeat them, do you really believe what you are saying? Do you believe that hurricane Katrina is an ‘independent’ assertive agent that wreaks havoc on the Gulf Coast?

The following graphic is a snapshot of a large number of these ‘nation-states’ that we personify as ‘independent objects’ that are endowed (i.e. that WE endow) with ‘independent object behaviours’;

If birds and insects could speak. If the wind and the spores and the red Sahara sand in the upper atmosphere could speak. If the el-niños could speak. Would they buy into the notion that these ‘nation-states’ outlined in yellow were ‘independent entities’ capable of ‘independent behaviours’?

Not only do we, western-acculturated people, insist these ‘nation-states’ exist and are capable of ‘independent behaviour’ but we use this notion to manage the global social dynamic.

Looking at that picture, can you feel ‘solid’ about treating any of these imaginary-line-bounded objects as ‘independent’ and thus justified in ‘re-constructing the world dynamic’ based on the dynamics of these ‘independent nation-states’?

Or would you say that anyone who took such a re-construction literally was either a fool or out-of-his-mind?

If we ‘google-earth’ to Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada, we can find the ‘Riverside Inn’ where people from all over the world may stop for a business visit, since this is the center of a tar-sands deposit, the estimated reserves of which are 1.7 trillion barrels, compared with worldwide conventional oil reserves of 1.75 trillion barrels.

The people of Alberta take credit for their prosperity. Our language games speak of ‘Albertans did this’ and ‘Albertans’ did that’, and if the imaginary-line-boundaries of ‘Alberta’ were in the shape of a hexagon that included parts of Saskatchewan, North Dakota, Montana and Idaho, ... we would still read about ‘Albertan’s and ‘how industrious and successful they are’.

By the same token, the same pride in ‘Canada’ and the exalting of ‘all that is Canadian’ would continue to go on after Quebec pulled out of the political object known as ‘Canada’. It’s amazing what superimposing a few imaginary lines onto the landscape will do for the psyche.

The western psyche is quite willing to reconstruct reality in terms of name-labelled ‘independent objects’ and ‘what they do’, totally forgetting about the accommodating/enabling role of space in the process;

“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.”

... as it says on the Statue of Liberty, ... and come they did, out of the oppressive European urban ghettos and feudal servility, and they were transformed into affluent and successful people who built a nation strong, affluent and free.

The indigenous peoples of North America would laugh with incredulity at such self-centered delusion. European man lived in a deforested countryside, an ‘over-grazed’ environment and what awaited him in America were original growth forests, rich self-sustaining fisheries, mineral deposits the likes of which were depleted long ago in Europe.

But still the immigrant credits HIMSELF, his people, with the ‘amazing success story’.

What is wrong with this picture? Why do we keep explaining ‘what happens’ in terms of ‘what things do?’ when it is bloody obvious that the accommodating quality of the hostspace we are situationally included in, is the mother of our actualizing of our assertive potentials. If the hostspace opens up for the actualizing of our assertive potentials, then we blossom, and if the hostspace closes down for the actualizing of our assertive potentials then our growth is stunted and disfigured. In any case, the accommodating quality of the hostspace we are situationally included in, trumps the actualizing of our assertive potentials. This is, in fact, the ‘principle of relativity’ and it applies to all dynamics.

This ‘psychological problem’ of the western culture, ... ‘OUR psychological problem’ is what Cindy Sheehan is talking about.

The ‘psychological problem’ is called ‘objectification’ and it is built into our concept of ‘democratic nation-states’.

There is nothing wrong with ‘objectification’ as long as one doesn’t start confusing it with reality. It is a linguistic shorthand. It is used, for example, to speak about ‘the people of Alberta’ as if they were distinct from ‘the people of Manitoba’, and saying that Albertans are so much richer and productive than ‘Manitobans’. Such people-categorizations (political object-based) are fully dependent on the imaginary-line-boundaries we impose over the continuous landscape; i.e. the yellow lines on the google-earth graphics, above.

More than this, the CENTRAL GOVERNING AUTHORITIES of these political objects are fully dependent, on the imaginary-line-boundaries we impose over the continuous landscape.

We could change the imaginary-line-boundaries, for example, by enlarging the closed geometric form that is ‘Alberta’ and continue to speak of ‘Albertans’ and ‘what they are like’ without skipping a beat.

Do you believe in your ‘national identity’?

Do you believe that you are ‘Canadian’ or ‘American’ because where you reside falls within the imaginary-line-boundaries of ‘Canada’ or ‘the United States’?

How do you know what you are? Who decides what ‘a Canadian’ or what an ‘American’ is? Many Canadians ‘don’t like’ Americans and many Americans ‘don’t like’ Canadians and these international likes and dislikes prevail in the world.

Thus these imaginary-line-boundaries really play a head-game with us.

Basing our social organization on imaginary-line-bounded ‘property-ownership’ is PROVING to be dysfunctional.

But are we ‘big enough’ to seriously consider that we have been building our society on ‘incompetent’ (dysfunction-inducing) foundations, ... particularly when the ‘incompetent foundation’ is the ‘sacred cow’ known as ‘the democratic nation-state’, that we are trying to convince others, particular in the muslim world, that they must adopt.

Cindy Sheehan is ‘big enough’ to IMPLICITLY point to this incompetent foundation, albeit it, in the particular form of the ‘democratic nation-state’ known as ‘the United States’, but this is a ‘shocker’ to many people.

Many will immediately refute it, listing off the marvelous things about the ‘United States’ that they have experienced (mixing up their real-life experience with imaginary-line-based abstractions).

They are not really talking about ‘the United States-the-political-object’ which, after looking at the above map of the world and knowing from experience that the world-dynamic is innately unbounded and continuing, is exposed as an abstraction, ... but of their experiences in a geographical region populated by people they have found, in general, to be friendly and mutually supportive.

People immigrating to Quebec may say ‘what a great country Canada is’, but within a few years, they might well have to revise this to ‘what a great country Quebec is’. Those yellow lines on a map can, and often are, moved by the politicians. Politicians create political realities. On July 1^st I may say that ‘I am proud to be a Canadian’ and the next June 24^th (St. Jean-Baptiste Quebec National Day), that may no longer work, and I may say that ‘I am proud to be a Quebecer’, and list off the marvelous things about Quebec and Quebecers that I have experienced.

Something has changed and something has not. The people have not changed but the political labels have changed and the yellow imaginary lines have changed. The native traditionalists will laugh at these mind-games and, if they were interested, so would the deer and the eagles, the bears and the fish, who could never be convinced that they were crossing from one ‘realm’ into another when they moved across a certain ‘parallel of latitude’ in the forest, ... or rather, .... ‘in the heads’ of these curious animals that hide their reproductive parts.

But these mind games, which are foundational to ‘the democratic nation-state’ are not a ‘laughing matter’. They are responsible for the ‘horror’ felt by indigenous peoples of North America when it ‘sunk in’ that their conflict with the ‘Long Knives’ (American colonizers) was not about how they and the newcomers would have to redistribute themselves on Turtle Island, but that ‘losing the war’ would mean that this new, sacred-ground-demeaning concept of ‘property-ownership’ was intended to corral and enslave them, in the minds of the ‘Long Knives’, by virtue of an imaginary boundary line that their ‘colonizers’ had drawn around them, creating what the colonizers called a zone of ‘owned property’ on which no-one was allowed to reside on or trespass unless they submitted to the commands and instructions of the ‘central governing authority’ of this imaginary-line-bounded ‘owned property zone’.

Forced to believe in the imaginary-line-bounded ‘owned property zones’ (‘colonies’ and later ‘independent nations’) with their ‘central control authorities’, the indigenous peoples were ‘made over’ into a disempowered minority in ‘their own lands’ (i.e. as one might lease land in a nature preserve, in the manner of taking milk from a cow rather than butchering it).

What we call ‘minorities’ (disenfranchised minorities, disempowered minorities) pushes off from ‘controlling majorities’ as relate to the ‘central governing authority’ of an ‘owned property zone’.

That is, ‘disempowered minorities’ are created by property ownership based social organization as in ‘democratic nation-states’. Without this western abstract, absolutist ‘objectification of space’, imposed and sustained by force, ‘disempowered minorities’ would not exist (not in the same context). ‘Power’ in the native tradition, is not contrived by a group of political cronies that take over control of the central governing authority into which the people-proxied military power reports because there is no central governing authority. There is no central governing authority because there is no notion of an imaginary-line-bounded owned-property-zone. That is, the pre-property-ownership world did not have fixed yellow-line boundaries forming closed geometric forms implying a single ‘center which then allowed the mind to reconstruct the global dynamic in terms of what each of these fixed-line-boundary political property-objects ‘do’.

It is the military power associated with each yellow-line bounded ‘nation-state’ that makes everyone ‘believe’ in the existence of this abstract ‘owned property object’ and its ‘central governing authority’ (as the saying goes ‘sovereignty must be policed’). As mentioned earlier in this blog, this belief in the ‘existence’ of the ‘owned property object’ or ‘nation-state’ and the military defence of it, is secured by promising co-ownership to those who settle in it on the proviso that they agree to bear arms and give their lives, if necessary, to ‘make believers’ out of anyone who should challenge its ‘existence’. Not that the animals of the forest and the fish of the coastal waters will be convinced, nor natives, in the case of Canada and the United States, who will continue to observe that ‘Canada’ and ‘the United States’ are simply the artefacts of European colonizers fighting over what they stole.

Even though John Lennon’s song ‘Imagine’, which includes the line ‘imagine there’s no countries, it’s easy if you try’, enjoyed world-wide popularity, ... it seems to be quite another thing to seriously reflect on how the abstract objectification of space known as ‘countries’ (nation-states) may require a re-think on our part. Particularly when ‘nationalism’ and defending of borders is running high and the politicians in the central governing authority and the media are ‘pumping it up’ by reminding us what great things ‘Canada has done’ and what great things ‘Canada is doing’, ... and how productive and successful ‘Albertans’ are etc. etc.

But there is rising backlash to this aspect of ‘nation-states’ wherein they CREATE ‘disempowered minorities’.

Why should people put up with imaginary-line-boundaries making them into ‘disempowered minorities’. Poorly paid labourers around the world are asking themselves why they should not organize on a common beliefs and common needs basis first of all. Aboriginals around the world are asking themselves the same question, and 1.6 billion Muslims around the world (often made into disempowered minorities by those ‘yellow lines’) are particularly intent on asking themselves this question.

This issue of those with common beliefs (including but not limited to Muslims) being divided up into multiple ‘disempowered minority’ fragments and the rejection of initiatives to re-empower themselves transnationally is highlighted by the Canadian government’s refusing admission to British imam Sheik Riyadh al-Haq to come to Canada to speak to Muslim students in Toronto on Canada Day. The sheik spoke to the students nevertheless, over closed-circuit television and “spoke passionately” about “injustice around the world” and told the muslim students “they have a duty to protect the oppressed” ;

“[We must] voice our opinions, voice our sentiments, be active, canvas support, do everything possible in a legal, legitimate, responsible, wise and moderate manner.” [A video-clip report and excerpt from the imam’s speech can be seen at http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20060702/british_imam_060702/20060703?hub=Canada ]

What this advocacy amounts to, whether or not it is ‘hate-driven’ or whether or not it exceeds the threshold of moderation, is an ‘oppression-fighters-without-borders’ movement that transcends the social dynamics management undertaken by and through the ‘owned-property-based’ central governments of the ‘democratic nation-states’. ‘Feeling oppressed’ inductively shapes behaviours whether or not the ‘oppression’ can be rationally disputed.

Why should the property-ownership based nation-state central governing authorities insist that a ‘just war’ is constrained to those wars that are duly authorized by nation-state central governing authorities, ... and refer to trans-nation-state military training and operations as ‘terrorism’, and refer to members of trans-nation-state militarily-trained personnel as in Al Qa’ida and the Taliban, ... as ‘unprivileged belligerents’ and try them for murder where duly authorized nation-state soldiers are simply held as ‘prisoners of war’.

No, this note is NOT a justification for ‘terrorism’, or for any kind of violence or war, for that matter, it is a reflection on fundamental flaws in the notion of ‘owned property-based nation-states’ with their ‘control’ orientation as a means of social organization.

If we don’t want to address these flaws, then we can expect the extremists amongst those that advocate ‘without-borders’ social organization and the extremists (inflexibles) amongst those that advocate ‘democratic nation-state’ social organization to polarize against one another and turn the common hostspace we all share inclusion in, into a bloody theatre of ongoing war.

The psychological self-delusion that is going on with this ‘owned-property-based’ ‘democratic nation-state’ form of social organization is more general than in its manifestation at the ‘national’ level. It is extremely general in our western way of thinking and it goes like this;

1. Objectify any region of our dynamical hostspace at all by imposing (in the mind) imaginary-line/surface boundaries on it, giving it a name, and imputing to it, the ability to self-author its behaviour. (e.g. a hurricane, a human being, an imaginary-line-bounded ‘owned property-zone’ ‘nation-state’).
2. Re-construct dynamics in terms of these ‘independent objects’ as if these objects had ‘caused’ them, ... being sure to omit any reference to the ‘hostspace’ which they are uniquely situationally included in. (e.g. the immigrant coming from an urban ghetto in Europe undergoes an amazing blossoming of his assertive potentials, and we explain this as if the transformation was ‘self-determined’ from within him,.... rather than, as it was, inductively shaped by the accommodating quality of the hostspace that he re-situated himself within.
3. Develop a view wherein the evolution of the world dynamic is ‘caused’ by the salient assertive accomplishments of individuals and nations, as in neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory where we correlate ‘genes’ to ‘their assertive achievements’ in a causal sense, and regard the rest of the genetic material as ‘junk DNA’. For example, Albertans will be seen as ‘causing’ a lot of things to happen because of their oil wealth.

But we can see, from our above map of the world, that those yellow lines don’t really define the dynamics of Albertans, apart from in our abstracting minds, ... because the world dynamic is an ongoing flow within the unbounded natural space of the world, and any growth in the actualizing of ‘Albertan’ assertive potentials is inherently bound up in the growth of the accommodating quality of the global space they are included in, which ‘inductively shapes’ their productive behaviour.

So our western ‘objectificationist’ mental model of the world dynamic is one in which we reconstruct the ongoing unbounded spatial-relational dynamic, by imposing objectification on things and then imputing to these things the powers of ‘internal first cause’ or ‘self-determinism’, as in;

“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.”

This common western (flawed) thinking, wherein we give God-like powers of ‘first cause’ to ‘nation-objects’ as well as to ‘human-objects’, obviates the need to consider the ‘participation of space’ which is inherently tied up in dynamics per the principle of relativity.

For example, the solar system involves multiple material entities (planets) moving under one another’s simultaneous mutual influence. There is no way to break this down and speak in terms of ‘what the earth does’ but it is commonplace for us to speak in these terms as if the earth dynamic was its own independent behaviour and thus, as if we could say ‘the earth rotates’. As Henri Poincaré points out, it makes no sense to say ‘the earth rotates’ since we cannot ‘divide out’ the motion of the earth from the simultaneous mutually influencing motion of the planets relative to one another. But we do divide it out, and when we do so, we imply that ‘space is absolute’ and that the earth is rotating relative to an absolute fixed (euclidian) space, casting aside that the earth’s motion, and all motion, is ‘relative’ and that the earth is moving relative to the hostspace dynamic (energy-field-flow) it is included.

In the same way, it makes no sense to say ‘Albertans produce oil’ since the global oil-consuming space they live in is inducing them to produce oil and the actualizing of their assertive potential to produce oil and the accommodating receptivity for the producing of oil on the part of the hostspace they are included in, ... are a mutually shaping dynamical one-ness.

The mind-trap associated with this western mode of thinking is that we shift our focus to ‘what things do’, ... to the assertive side of the equation, and we ignore the accommodating role of the hostspace that gives life to the actualizing of assertive potentials. Thus, we begin to believe that the ‘high performers’ are who are making things happen and that we should therefore reward, respect and empower the ‘high performers’ and indeed this ‘empowerment’ is what gives rise to the ‘empowered majority’ in the ‘central governing authority’ of democratic-nation-states, and by default, it gives rise at the same time to multiple instances of ‘disempowered minorities’ such as poorly-paid labour, aboriginals, Muslims etc.

Now, imagine there’s no countries, ... it’s easy if you try, ... just go back to the picture of the globe and ignore the yellow imaginary [not real in nature] lines and picture the ongoing world dynamic including oil production in mid-northern turtle island (formerly known as ‘Alberta’) and you will find no reason to suppose that the same dynamics cannot go on in an even more unhindered manner (e.g. labour would no longer be corralled by the yellow imaginary lines of the ‘owned-property-object’ as they are now, due to global agreements amongst the ‘empowered majorities’, ... and natural balance-seeking would be restored. The ‘minorities’ would no longer be ‘disempowered minorities’ as they are in our system of ‘western democratic nation-states’ since every population segment would be a ‘minority’ as in the ‘diversity’ that sustains and ecosystem through natural balance-seeking.

[‘Majority rule’, and, ‘pursuit of individual self-interest’ in combination, could only ‘make sense’ in a world of independent objects where the role of the hostspace dynamic is zero; i.e. in a world where what we jointly decide upon is fully definable in terms of rational structures and ‘what things do. In the natural world of our experience, the space we are included in gives our lives quality. For example, in a vote on where to locate a stinky pulpmill, we will find a strong spatial correlation implicit in the ‘majority’ voted-for location and the ‘minority’ voted-for location, the former voters being upwind from the mill and the latter being downwind. The empowerment that accrues to the majority is thus a disempowerment of the minority and the former gets to ‘rub the latter’s nose’ in the stinkiness with all the police and military of the land backing them up as they do so (our justice system orients to ‘what people do’ and is blind to the alterations in the quality of our living space inflicted by empowered majorities on disempowered minorities.). This ‘minority disempowerment’ is a fundamental attribute of ‘owned property zone’ centrally governed systems as the indigenous peoples of North America realized when the European colonizers forcefully imposed this form of social organization. What had previously prevailed, in the absence of the abstract notion of a ‘centrally-governed, owned-property-zone’, was a continuous dynamical balance-seeking self-similar to the evolutionary dynamics of Nature, ... which allowed a diverse multiplicity of native communities to continually adjust their relative land-access for spatial-relational variations in weather, movement of game, water shortages, floods, forest fires etc. Inter-community conflicts arose, but not in the self-righteous ‘property ownership’ context of ‘this is my land, go get your own’, an exclusionary logic that fails to address the ‘quality of space’ with its ‘situational inclusion’ related issues.]

To conclude, ... the ‘colonialism’ implicit in the use of the ‘democratic nation state’ as a primary means of social organization is an abomination, based as it is on absolutist abstraction that personifies imaginary-line-based objects and imputes to them divine powers of internal first cause. The very basic beliefs and needs of ‘minorities’ (which are created relative to the ‘majorities’ that take control over the ‘central governing authority’ of the imaginary-line-based owned-property-object nation-state), tend to be ignored.

The western practice of ‘objectification’ that falsely credits causal authorship to (and rewards, respects and empowers) individual people or individual nations, ignoring their situational inclusion within the common hostspace, persuades the people in fortunate spatial-situations that ‘it is really they themselves’ who are the cause of their own high performance/productivity’ which in turn influences the laws and allocation of public finances of the central governing authority, exacerbating the problem of ‘disempowered minorities’ and promoting a cronyism that intensifies the polarization between the empowered majority and the disempowered minorities; i.e. the self-empowering cronies cultivate a selective accommodating in the community hostspace that disproportionatliy inflates the actualizing of THEIR assertive potentials.

Trans-nation-state social organizing schemes are emerging so as to re-empower the multiple instances of ‘disempowered minorities’ constituted by people with common needs and beliefs (e.g. the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims, the anti-capitalist movements of poorly-paid labour, aboriginals etc.)

Meanwhile, the innate ‘control’ mentality (as contrasted with ‘balance-seeking’ in the non-owned-property forms of social organization) that is an inherent exposure in the ‘democratic nation state’ system of social organization is also ‘coming to a head’ as was mentioned in the opening of this essay;

"The star-spangled banner does not fill me with pride: it fills me with shame, and that flag symbolizes sorrow and corruption to me right now," writes Cindy Sheehan. "The flag represents so much lying, fixed elections, profiting by the war machine, high gas prices, spying on Americans, rapid erosion of our freedoms while BushCo literally gets away with murder, torture and extreme rendition, contaminating the world with depleted uranium, and illegal and immoral wars that are responsible for killing so many. A symbol that used to represent hope to so many around the world now fills so many with disgust." --- Cindy Sheehan, July 4^th, 2006

As the owned-property-zone (democratic nation-state) system comes under increasing attack by frustrated and humiliated minorities, the central-control authorities of the nation-states are demanding and being given, even greater powers; i.e. the power of the empowered majority is intensifying and, commensurately, the disempowerment of minorities is intensifying.

If there is an unwillingness on the part of the general westernized public to reflect on the weaknesses in the owned property basis for social organization, there is every likelihood of a spiralling decline into conflict between those who would organize trans-nationally based on common needs and beliefs and those would organize by the imaginary-yellow-line based central-control authorities of the globally fragmented multiplicity of owned-property nations.

* * *

[N.B: In writing notes such as the above, one cannot avoid referring to entities by name since that is the nature of our noun-and-verb language wherein the noun (‘being’, ‘existence’, ‘objecthood’) takes precedence (in native languages, ‘nouns’ or ‘names’ are derived from verbs since the greater reality is ‘flow-based’ rather than ‘existence-based’). The point to remember so as to avoid falling into the trap of objectifying entities and imputing to them absolute (‘divine’) powers of ‘internal first cause’ as in the case of the ‘owned-property-zones personified as ‘nation-states’ with internal first cause’ powers, ... can be captured in the example of ‘the hurricane’ and the evident inner-outer spatial-relational origins of its power. It is not delusional to ‘name it’ and to speak about it in a personified manner, so long as one does not impute ‘internal first cause’ to it. The hurricane, and the human individual and all ‘organisms’ in nature derive their power from the dynamical space they are situationally included in, through their inner-outer spatial-relational dynamics. There is no such thing as ‘absolute motion’ or ‘absolute behaviour’ (behaviour imputed to issue forth from the interior center of a closed geometric form object). Such a view is a simplified reduction of nature’s inner-outer balancing dynamics into imputed stand-alone machines (a reduction to the one-sided pole of ‘masculine-assertive’ dynamics and the ‘banishment’ of the ‘feminine-spatial-accommodating’ dynamic as is acknowledged in the principle of relativity of motion).

Like the hurricane, no nation and no human (an imaginary-line-based closed geometric form abstraction imputed to have internal ‘first cause’ self-authorship of behaviour) derives its power from within (natural dynamical entities are innately ‘inner-outer-balancing-flow-forms, the material aspect being ‘schaumkommen’ by way of energy-matter equivalence). Thus while we run afoul of natural reality when we credit a nation or a human with being its own self-powered source of actualization, ... and in our western culture, running afoul of natural reality is an ingrained addiction, ... we introduce un-reality that sources confusion and dysfunction (incoherence and conflict) in the social dynamic. The ‘assertive achievements’ of an individual in our society do not ‘issue forth’ from the individual, but are inductively shaped by the accommodating quality of the dynamical community in which he is included. The society and the pedagogues that extol the virtues of young high performers and watch them rise into positions of power in society, are not witnesses to some objective phenomena, ... it is the accommodating quality of the social hostspace that is inductively shaping the actualizing of the assertive potentials of these ‘high performers’. All dynamical behaviour is ‘relative’.

Thus ‘the hurricane rule’ that will avoid confusion is the reminder that; ‘power never issues forth from the center of an entity; power is constituted by the building of inner-outer assertive-accommodative resonance.’ (the quantum-wave-substance of space is resonance). Thus, an attribution of power to an individual himself (as a ‘ding-an-sich’ endowed with internal ‘first cause’) is mistaken and the forming of crony groups of ‘high achievers’ and putting them ‘in power’ within the central control authority of a nation-state is a misguided practice which has been the source of inter-national wars and the creating of ‘disempowered minorities’ within the nation-state.]

Weblog: July 1, 2006

Oh Canada!

A patchwork quilt of imaginary-line-bounded property-ownership based ‘multicultural-democratic-nation-states’ now wraps around the surface space of the earth, trapping within it, aboriginals and other unsuspecting minorities that never knew what hit them.

Each of these nation-state ‘patches’, thanks to its imaginary line-boundary based ‘existence’ or ‘objecthood’, is endowed with a ‘central authority’ that is responsible for sustaining belief in the ‘existence’ of its notionhood, ... er, ... nationhood. As the indigeneous people, in losing their natural freedom noted, the imaginary objects known as ‘Canada’ and ‘the United States’ were the artefacts of European colonizers fighting over how to divide up what they had stolen. The initial military occupation that claimed the existence of the imaginary-line-bounded ‘sovereign-owned property’ was secured by inviting European settlers in to ‘colonize the land, offering them ‘part ownership’ in the imaginary property, in exchange for swearing an oath of belief in it and to bear arms and give one’s life to ‘make believers out of others’ who tried to refute its existence.

The aboriginals who maintained their beliefs in the sacredness of the land were never ‘made into believers’ in these patchworks, but they were made, by brute force, into ‘acceptors. They form part of the minorities trapped inside these centrally-controlled imaginary-line-bounded jurisdictions.

Abused minorities within this patchworks, fragmented by the central-controls that police the nation-state walls, smell a rat. Why should they NOT organize trans-nationally along the lines of their common beliefs? Why should they continue to allow themselves to be oppressed by this system of social organization based membership in owned-property-based clubs that see their ‘patch’ as ‘independent and mobilize their members in the pursuit of self-interest, ... a process that has each ‘patch’ acquiring a greater-than-fair-share of the worlds wealth and amassing it behind secure walls in their respective ‘gated communities’.

Abused and discriminated-against minorities that this system of ‘property-ownership’ based organization replicates around the world include; aboriginals, poorly-paid labour (people who have been ‘commoditized by ‘the global economy’), and (brown-skinned) Muslims.

The rise to over 100,000 border-ignoring (transnational) activist groups is a current continuing growth phenomenon. These ‘Non-Governmental-Organizations’ including ‘peace-makers-without-borders’ and ‘war-makers-without-borders’ (so-called ‘terrorists’) organize around the notion of common beliefs, rather than being situated within a common imaginary-line-bounded, centrally-controlled owned-property-space.

Many of these forms of organization run ‘crosswise’ to the patchwork quilt of ‘multicultural democratic nation-states’ and are based on monocultural hierarchism, at the ‘command-and-control’ center of which is the ‘mon – arch’. Thus, in the monocultural hierarchy organized by the ‘abused minority’ fragmented by nation-state-imaginary-line-boundaries, known as ‘Islamic fundamentalists’, there is a hierarchy of mullah’s and ayatollah’s pointing to the ultimate center of authority beyond nature in the heavens (Allah).

Both of these ‘central-control’ based methods of social dynamics management are ‘western’ and are based on the binary logic of the excluded middle (that’s another, intrinsically interrelated blog-story for another occasion).

The indigenous peoples of North America, because they see themselves as ‘included in nature’ and because nature employs a dynamical balance-seeking organizing method, would, prior to colonization, push one another around, to be sure, the losers having to move away from the victors and sidle in a little closer with others ‘over there’. But much has been written about the natives ‘horror’ of realizing, as they were losing in the war with the American-European colonizers, that it was no longer a case of moving west as the colonizing armies pushed in from the east, ... that this loss, because of the European notion of ‘imaginary-line-bounded-owned-property-objects’ (nations-as-states, rather than nations-as-people), amounted to their en masse political enslavement.

Of course the native that kept their traditions would not swear an oath to promote belief in the imaginary-line-bounded-states and their center-driven controlling authorities, ... not even in exchange for ‘part ownership’, sure, ... of the unbounded landscape, the evolving space of nature that we all share inclusion in (which no son-of-the-land had the right to buy and sell). But they were killed by the tens if not hundreds of thousands and their villages and crops burned, in the process of ‘making believers out of them’ as regards ‘the existence of the imaginary-line-bounded nation-state’, a pseudo-existence based on military enforcement of belief in it, that in turn ‘authorized’ a central-governing-authority for each patch in the quilt.

This weird central-control organizational invention of the west, of taking possession of imaginary-line-bounded zones and, by military violence, making everyone believe, on a continuting basis, in ‘the existence’ of a nation-state, and thus in its ‘central control authority’ (if it is ‘independent’ it has to author its marching orders from within), ... is matched in weirdness only by this other central-control organizational invention of the west, which is the monocultural hierarchy where common beliefs are the organizing principle and the interpretation of what the beliefs are is by means of a hierarchy of ‘priests’ that interpret the holy writings that document the beliefs, at the center of which sits the God from which this ‘divine will’ purports to radiate.

What we are witness to in this era is NOT ‘the clash of civilizations’ (Huntington) but the clash of these two cross-wired forms of Western organization, both of which are based on central-control-hierarchies, ... the one being the control that issues forth from the center of an imaginary-line-bounded ‘owned property’, otherwise known as an independent multicultural ‘democratic nation-state’ and the other being the control that issues forth from the notional center of a monocultural belief system (e.g. from a monotheist God).

What the former multiple centers-seeking-control system did for us in the twentieth century is now on videtapes advertised on TV, a century of warfare such as the world has never seen for its merciless destruction of human life and social infrastructure.

The nation-state warrior is a specially-celebrated figure in the western central-control-oriented culture. He wears the decorations that honour his service in ‘just wars’. ‘Just wars’ are wars that are duly authorized by ‘independent nation states’. The protocols of war of the ‘nation-states’ are dignified and honorable. They guarantee that when warriors who have been killing enemy citizens and destroying towns are taken prisoner, they will be kept in a holding tank until the cessation of hostilities and then may return to their homes without prosecution.

No warrior in the service of a transnational monocultural hierarchy qualifies for treatment based on ‘just war’ protocols since he must be, but is not, duly authorized by the central authority of a nation-state, and he is instead acting on behaviour of a monocultural hierarchy which appears within the nation-states only as abused, discriminated-against impotent minorities replicated within a multiplicity of nation-states. The legal term for such warriors is ‘unprivileged belligerents’ and rather than being treated with the dignity of nation-state warriors and excused for their murders and mayhem in the service of their nations, they can be tried for murder.

It is worth recalling that ‘warriors’ evolved in the service of directly and immediately providing for and protecting their families and communities and this was true to a large extent even in the American revolutionary war (before any oaths of allegiance were sworn to bear arms and give one’s live in warriorship to sustain belief in the imaginary-line-bounded ‘property entity’). This was also true of many if not most of the allied warriors in the WWII conflict.

But, today, warriors are more often being used by nation-states and by monarchal hierarchies, to ‘pre-empt’ their possible loss of control and/or to secure the loss of control of their adversary. Wars are becoming ‘meta-wars’ and ‘warriors’ are commodities of war that are being consumed in the process, not to mention civilians, whose death and dismemberment is a tool of modern warfare, used to terrorize the enemy and so destabilize the sustainability of its community dynamic upon which its sustained warfare depends.

‘Canada’ is one of the imaginary-line-bounded ‘patches’ on the earth-wrapping patchwork quilt of property-ownership based, independent multicultural democratic nation-states, committed to the pursuit of their own self-interests (amassing a more-than-fair-share control over the common resources of the earth from behind the secure, defended walls of its gated community, walls that are being built thicker and higher as the abused minorities within evolve into transnationally-coordinated threats to the nation-state).

This of course, is the political definition of Canada. And if Quebec pulls out, the imaginary-line-bounded political definition of Canada will look like Leroy Brown after the shootout; i.e. like a jigsaw puzzle with pieces missing.

‘Canada’ is, at the same time, something more, ... something that doesn’t change if the central-control based political entity of Quebec pulls out of the central-control-based political entity of Canada.

‘Canada’ is the people and the lands of north turtle island, in the same sense as it was before the western central-control schemes based on property-ownership and monocultural hierarchy arrived. It is the heartfelt affiliations and mutual empathies and support in the spirit of ‘mitakuye oyasin’, ‘we are all related’. It’s the support my ‘Canadian’ uncles felt for their friends and brothers in Europe in WWII era that had them volunteer to become warriors in support of their brothers overseas and their brothers’ overseas communities. It is the diversity-celebrating, imaginary-border-eschewing affirmation of heartfelt brotherhood in John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ (‘imagine there’s no countries it’s easy if you try).

Should we not therefore, in celebrating ‘Canada’ on ‘Canada Day’, ... decide which of these ‘Canadas’ we are celebrating, before we glorify the ‘property-ownership’ based alternative identity of ‘Canada’ to the point that are fully committed to;

“... the clash of these two cross-wired forms of Western organization, both of which are based on central-control-hierarchies, ... the one being the control that issues forth from the center of an imaginary-line-bounded ‘owned property’, otherwise known as an independent multicultural ‘democratic nation-state’ and the other being the control that issues forth from the notional center of a monocultural belief system (e.g. from a monotheist God).”

This is easy if you try.

And you may call me a dreamer, .... but I am not the only one, ... John and I make at least two.

Back in time to June, 2006 blogs