Hopi traditionalist Chief Dan Evehema (105 yrs old) sends us a message from his kiva in Hotevilla Arizona; it is that we are coming up to the big bifurcation and the path which is going to open up for us is 'up for grabs', ... i.e. it's 'up to us' which branch of the bifurcation we follow. That is, as we close out the 'fourth world of destruction', we either enter into a fifth world of peace, or, undergo an 'ethnic cleansing' at the 'species' level; i.e. .... 'homo sapiens' becomes 'homo extinctus'

According to the Hopi prophecy, as interpreted by Chief Dan, what we need to do to get the butterflies flapping in our favor is as follows;

"Now we must look upon each other as brothers and sisters. There is no more time for divisions between people. Today I call upon all of us, from right here at home, Hotevilla, where we too are guilty of gossiping and causing divisions even among our own families; out to the entire world where thievery, war and lying goes on every day. These divisions will not be our salvation. Wars only bring more wars never peace. Only by joining together in a Spiritual Peace with love in our hearts for one another, love in our hearts for the Great Spirit and Mother Earth, shall we be saved from the terrible Purification Day which is just ahead."

The Hopi Chief's message seems congruent with our own instinctive understanding of the situation. One can't ignore the percentage rises of a whole raft of nasties in the heart of the 'leading societies' in the industrialized world, ... suicide (particularly amongst the young), depression, drug and alcohol abuse, psychic breakdown, violence, crime, poverty. And as we approach the turn of the millennium, we can also feel something blowing in the wind, ... something which says to us that we can't continue on this way, ... that something's got to give. Perhaps its the bit of Mohawk in each of us which is having us look at the impact of what we are doing today, five generations ahead, in the time of our great, great grandchildren; ... we've seen how easy it is to screw things up over one generation, what could we do in five?

That we live in a dysfunctional society is demonstrated by the number of people in the public eye, politicians, businessmen and economists particularly, who can look at all the financial indicators and the growth of technology and the creature comforts, available, from the perspective of those who's eyes and heart burn with the 'american dream', and declare that 'we're doing pretty good, folks'!

Survival Guideline #1: Seek friends and associates who are not blind, and/or do not feign blindness, to the current reality and whose individual and joint actions have 'butterfly potential'. As Wittgenstein says, you too, can be 'verhext' by the false pictures repetitively conveyed by words.

Of course, 'survival' is not intended in the terms of an individual win/lose survival since we now know that fragmenting the problem so as to solve it by parts can lead to an unholy 'sum'. If you pursue survival on an independent basis, you don't get to influence who all comes out in good shape on the survival 'team and that could be a shocker in itself. If there's any vision of the 'geometry' of the folks and the community you'd like to see come through the millennium into the new 'story', it may be useful to start thinking and cultivating a spirit of 'shared destiny' well in advance of the heat and chaos of bifurcation.

Survival Guideline #2: As you prepare for the uncertainties of the turn of the millenium, think of co-supportive ways to prepare, working together with those people you'd like most to become part of a colorful and cooperative post-bifurcation 'survival community'. e.g. invest your savings in local currency backed by your favorite baguette baker or brewmeister and share information on your areas of surfeit and deficit (spiritual and material) with those who you'd most enjoy bartering with to mutually fill the gaps.

Now if you work the type of complex systems material that Emile does, the features of the brothers-of-bifurcation described by the Chief seem rather familiar; i.e. the older brother coming from the west, who brings on purification like an invasion of fire ants and/or the boiling of the soil, and the 'true white brother' coming from the east to bring on a world of peace and the embrace of the ontogenetic 'self' in place of 'following' a structured 'religion'.

Of course, 'purification' has the sense of purging here, as in 'purging the earth of the spirit and matter of man'. This brings to 'mind' the adage 'united we stand and divided we fall' in the sense of getting our 'matter and mind' together, as the aboriginal myth everywhere seems also to suggest, not to mention depth psychologists, along with zen practitioners and japanese management consultants. If we go into the bifurcation 'narrows' without this 'mind and matter' unity, we could either lose our minds trying to save our ass, or lose our ass making up our minds. If neither of these extremes appeal to you, then the following guideline may be of assistance.

Survival Guideline #3. Search for a balanced answer to the question; "What's the difference between a lemming and a lunatic?" and work the middle zone. This means that you'll keep rump-bumping your fellow lemmings as you stampede along the 'expected course' while 'tuning in' to the navigational parameters supplied by ontogenetic purpose (i.e. to the 'force' which unifies 'mind' and 'matter', thought and action). If others in the vicinity start to catch the 'smell' of the ontogeny on their own and the 'group tracking capability' starts to stabilize, and at the same time everyone appears to be morphing from lemmings into stallions (or mares), you'll know you're 'in the zone'.

As we head into the white water of the millennial passage narrows, some of the undigested thoughts we've had in the past are going to re-erupt with a bothersome acidity, ... like this statement which Emile received in a recent email exchange, but which had often occurred to him in less poetic forms;

" ... there are, to paraphrase Hamlet, more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in [reductionist science]. Since most of the things that make life worth living -- felt experience, dreams, goals, plans, love, hate, friendship, -- are inherently inaccessible to the scientific method, it can be little surprise that when that method is presented as universal account of what we know or what it is to be human, it leaves us with a viciously stunted and frightened vision of human existence. One can accept the blessings that science has brought us, without having to view science as a comprehensive account of everything that is. That so many smart people could apparently have fallen for such an obviously fraudulent story will be seen in history as one of the wonders or horrors of our time. I suppose that, as other great dictators have found, if the lie is big enough, people will believe it. In terms of scope, the fraudulent overreaching claim of science surely ranks up there with the big lies of all time."

Whether the 'lie' is intentional or an 'emergent behavior' of the system, there seems no doubt as to the inherent truth of this statement. But it really isn't even concealed or denied by science. It's more as if science sees itself as 'in construction' and one day it will have a completed 'brain' but for now, we should simply assume that it will one day have the needed comprehensivity.

This line of thinking is kind of like a robot which has been programmed with the confidence that it can design any functionality it needs into itself as it goes along. And of course, the trail of breakage behind it doesn't enter into the tally as it notches up 'success' after 'success'. Then comes 'the big one' where robot science comes face to face with mother nature who is expecting some 'real action', and while able to feign engagement in foreplay, the robot is short of some rather essential hardware and co-resonance software. Some really clumsy stuff begins to happen which turns everyone off, ... yet the robot persists in asserting, ... 'of course I can do it, ... just give me time (and your money), ... and trust in me'.

Of course. Science as the child-toy of mother nature, born through the subfaculty of 'rationality' on a single species subset of mother nature's garden of diversity, .... is going to be up to dancing on a peer-peer basis with the big mothah.

When Emile started studying science, he marvelled at what a gap there was between the approximative problems and solutions he was being taught, and the real complex problems he could see out there, which he hadn't yet learned how to deal with, nor had any inkling of how they might be approached. More recently as he struggled up science mountain to get a view of the crest, he came through the perpetual canopy of clouds which shrouded the crest, and found there was a huge bloody crater where the crest should have been. What's more, when you looked at the fine print of the science trail guide, the hole at the top was openly conceded; i.e. the high priests like Weinberg were saying, ...'well of course we are leaving a lot of wonderful phenomena from turbulence to thought off of this particular peak at this time' etc., so it wasn't so much of a 'lie' as one of the games that Laing is always talking about, where everyone pretends the crest is there, that the 'check is in the mail', but pretends not to pretend, so that if you say, 'hey, you are pretending', then by saying this you break the rules and they punish you, ... so you are supposed to tow the line in science and pretend that you do not see that everyone is pretending not to pretend.

It's kind of similar to the not-uncommon experience a lot of people have when they get a rotational assignment at corporate headquarters. When they pass through the cloud canopy on their way up to the thirty-fourth floor executive suites, .... yup, ...you guessed it, ... cratersville.

Now at the top of the corporation as at the top of science, there is all sort of serious flagellation going on, stern faces making stern decisions and barking out stern orders, auto-confirming the wisdom of their prior strategies and the messes made by their predecessors etc., while out in the regional offices, it is not uncommon for those in the 'know' to mock the top and smilingly fill in the blanks in the desired manner to keep the self-fulfilling prophecies rolling in and the emperors wardrobes well stocked, as indeed they are paid to do. Meanwhile, old man river just keeps rolling along, flooding here, eroding and changing channels there, while thousands lay claim to having had the idea for it and thousands more rewarding them as if their claims were true.

What is going on here, in both science and corporate business, is a one-sided focus on 'causal mechanisms'. As researchers into dynamical systems point out, and as Einstein pointed out in connection with non-euclidian space-time, the 'reciprocal disposition' or 'negative space' geometry must be accounted for as well as the 'positive space' 'causal action'; i.e. .... space-time is a participant in physical phenomena.

Sure I can focus on taking and making a difficult pool shot and chances are the 'crowd will be with me', because this is action-in-the-instant and it is exciting, .... but what else did I do when I made that shot? I changed the reciprocal disposition, the negative space geometry of the configuration in a manner which fundamentally changed how the future would play itself out. Perhaps I shouldn't have even taken the shot, .... perhaps I prejudiced our team purpose?

In the negative space geometry is where the unaccounted for 'space-time continuum' effects of a so-called causal action are found, and because these 'reciprocal dispositions' concern unbounded space-time, they cannot be handled via the tools of analytical science, but only via 'geometrical-physical theorizing' as Einstein called it, aka intuition.

In domains closer to nature, such as farming, we are beginning to accept that if I am a farmer who brings in a big harvest, this causal result cannot be considered on its own, and we must instead consider the impact of the farming action on the negative space, .... was the soil depleted or replenished, ... were the bugs and birds killed with insecticide also participants in some other valuable ecological lifecycles?

We might refer to this as 'environmental awareness'. Whatever we call it, it represents a general principle in that every so-called 'causal mechanism' has its 'reciprocal disposition' impact, or 'negative space' geometric impact. If we divert a stream to power our mill, the downstream geometry will be changed, if we layoff an employee and divert his revenue stream, the social geometry will be changed.

So the 'crater' at the top of science and the corporation is pretty fundamental, .... it represents a major omission in reasoned thinking, ... our neglecting to account for all of the 'reciprocal disposition' impact; i.e. the 'geometrical behavior' which transcends the simplistic 'causal' view but which is likely to be more dispersed in space-time. Moreover, accounting for these negative space geometrical effects has to be done in-situ where the causal action occurs, because these effects don't 'roll up' linear 'sum-of-the-parts' style like causal effects are assumed to do. We can say that our shipping safety record is good because 999 out of 1000 tanker shipments were accident free, ..... but what does that mean if that 'one' accident was the Exxon Valdiz? Then again, it's only the big and immediate negative space problems like this which draw our awareness to the reciprocal disposition issue.

So what's going on right now, as we approach the millennial narrows? Is science 'coming clean'? One would have to say, ... no way Jose! Is corporate management 'coming clean'? Are the huge salaries keyed to harmonious 'environmental consequences' or solely to plain and simple 'causal results'?

As we come up to Y2K, we speak about the embedded chip problem, .... well in fact, the problem is far more extensive, ... it is a problem of faulty ROM embedded in our western inculturated minds, ..... faulty ROM which puts exclusionary logic in a primacy over inclusionary logic (aka intuition). Thoughtful people can handle this at the local level by simply overriding it. But the override can't be worked up the hierarchy because the 'tuning in' to the negative space impacts of one's causal actions so as to work in harmony with one's surroundings requires intuition and 'immersed space' perception. One cannot achieve this through headquarters directives or even through thoughtful decision making from the remote purvue of corporate headquarters, .... it can only be done from within the ontogenetic flow by those who executre the 'causal acts'.

Survival Guideline #4. Consider every causal action in terms of it's negative space geometric consequences (the five generations out of the Mohawks is not a bad target) and make it known to others around you, including your 'boss' that you expect the same from any organization that you are a participant in. Migrate towards regions and work environments where this practice is followed, then when your canoe comes into the narrow channels of the millennial passage, you can be sure that the canoes of those around you will consider the mutual geometry of approach and harmonize their actions (make their actions 'co-resonant') as the joint move through the limited safe water passages is executed.

Proceeding on to the stance of 'science' ('science' here meaning traditional analytical or 'mainstream' science), the inference above was that science is 'not coming clean'. From an emilian point of view, there is no merit in going into unanswerable questions of 'intent' and 'judgement'. We can see the dilemma and confusion in the following excerpt from the last essay;

"As Stephen Kellert comments in 'In the Wake of Chaos', "... while chaos theory [science of complexity] does not pay any attention to causal mechanisms, it does concentrate on revealing mechanisms of another sort; geometric mechanisms." Kellert quotes Albert Libchaber (dynamical systems researcher); "A physicist would ask me, How does this atom come here and stick there? And what is the sensitivity to the surface? And can you write the Hamiltonian of the system? And if I tell him, I don't care, what interests me is this shape, the mathematics of the shape and the evolution, the bifurcation from this shape to that shape to this shape, he will tell me, that's not physics, you are doing mathematics. . . . Yes, of course, I am doing mathematics. But it is relevant to what is around us. That is nature too."

So it should be recognized that the 'geometry of behavior' gives us a different and more comprehensive way to conceptualize reality; .. a way which subsumes mathematical physics as a 'contained special case' (the two-dimensional linear time case). I say 'two-dimensional' since it is only in a two-dimensional areal sense that we can see the past and the future as being mutually exclusive and linked by a mechanical causality. In a three dimensional curved space continuum, the past is continually enfolded within the present; e.g. as the rings on a cross section of a tree indicate and the way works, blending present and prior experience into an enfolded whole."

The point here is that the sciences of 'dynamical systems' and 'complexity' are opening the door to 'geometrical mechanisms' to explain complex systems behaviors, such as negative space 'attractors' etc. This is a more complete and powerful way to look at phenomena because it does not exclude the 'negative space geometry' as the causal approach does. But there is also another scary thing (to science) which happens here and that is that since one works the domain of geometry intuitively (as I have been doing in these essays), the door is open to non-experts to perceive problem formulation and solution in ways which are often more powerful than can be brought to bear in the realm of analytical science by the experts and high priests.

This situation is not at all unknown, and has been pointed out by analogy in the domain of business by Nonaka and Takeuchi in the context of 'knowledge creation'; i.e. "Japanese corporations on the other hand rely on innovations from groups of ordinary people. The Japanese have a corporate habit of meeting together at night where they would get drunk and informally discuss whatever innovation they had in mind. The nightly get-togethers or 'gashhuku' are a wellspring of innovative suggestions and ideas for improvement."

Well, this opportunity has been obvious forever, but the missing point in Nonaka and Takeuchi's analysis is Nietzsche's point that 'the belief in purpose collapses with the belief in cause'. If the workers get together to 'talk cause and effect', the main outcome of the 'gashhuku' is a hangover, both literally and figuratively speaking.

There is often a basic problem in communication associated with 'cause versus purpose'. For example, if I go to one of the high priests of science (or philosophy or psychology), based on my dialogueing with the rest of my gashhukuing rabble-rouser-ring (knowledge ring) and say to them, 'I have an idea for improvement', what will they reply? .... 'hey, let's hear it, man!', ... not bloody likely. First, they will ask for credentials, and then for a list of the literature that I've researched so that I can demonstrate that the innovation is beyond all known attempts and at the 'forefront'.

But there is no 'forefront' in three-dimensional curved space which is the realm of 'intuition'. 'Forefront' is a 'bottom-up' two dimensional notion of the same type that leads to hierarchical mountains with craters at their tops. The gashhuku crowd is not 'refining an existing story', .... they are using their intuition to 'die to the old story and be reborn to a new and larger one'. This is the process of 'geometrical-physical theorizing' as described by Einstein, ... of 'bootstrapping' and 'intuition', ... 'bringing into connection in the mind a multitude of real and imaginary experiences.' It's what really makes the organization 'zing' but the points are usually tallied by the 'analytical backfillers' who put it into analytical terms or equations. It wasn't Wittgenstein who was recognized for 'Goedel's theorem' although the idea is clearly implied in the geometry of his comments in 'Tractatus', instead it was Kurt Goedel, one of Wittgenstein's 'groupies' in the Vienna Circle, who worked it out over a ten year period following his exposure to Wittgenstein and 'Tractatus', and is now remembered for it in exclusivity, quite out of the context of Wittgenstein.

It's the same in science and the cultural obedience to linear causal principles out of the context of 'negative space' impact. That is, there is not yet a 'logical proof', but meanwhile, as Leonard Cohen says;

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded,

Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed

Everybody knows the war is over,

Everybody knows the good guys lost

Everybody knows the fight was fixed,

The poor stay poor, the rich get rich

That's how it goes, .... everybody knows.

Everybody knows that the boat is leaking,

Everybody knows the Captain lies

Everybody's got this broken feeling,

Like their father or their dog just died

Everybody talkin to their pockets,

Everybody wants a box of chocolates

and a long stemmed rose, .... everybody knows.

Everybody knows the deal is rotten,

Old Black Joe's still pickin cotton

For your ribb'ns and bows, .... and everbody knows.

Everybody knows, but we're back to Laing again, and everyone is pretending they don't know, and if you show them you see they are, you'll either be ignored or punished.

In the corporate environment, you get both ignored and then punished for trying to 'get real' and use words like 'environmental awareness'. After all, companies are there to compete, right, not to worry about the lawn getting torn up during the scrimmage.

In the science environment, if you are 'coming from' the 'geometry of phenomenal behavior' instead of 'cause', you simply get ignored, as the chaos theorists have all said, not to mention Denis Gabor and his 21 year late Nobel prize for holography. In the end, the chaos folks have had to form their own group, which is still not accepted by mainstream science. Here's what David Ruelle had to say about his and Floris Takens now classic paper 'On the Nature of Turbulence' introducing the concept of 'strange attractors';

"We submitted our paper to an appropriate scientific journal, and it soon came back: rejected. The editor did not like our ideas, and referred us to his own papers so that we could learn what turbulence really was." Someone, I can't remember if it was Ruelle, had to work their way into the position of Editor of a scientific journal so that they could get their own work published.

Now consider how the channels will open up for an idea pertaining to science and systems which comes from a mixed bag of nondescripts who garnered their insight from a heavy gashhuku session in a London pub.

Survival Guideline #5. Do not expend any inordinate effort or energy in trying to have innovative ideas from negative space pattern recognition validated through formal channels presided over by the high priests of science and/or business theory. Instead, try to share them through a network of people who have a real need for them and who are 'ready' to accept well reasoned innovative ideas on the basis of their intuition and without allowing analytical validation to have veto power. Try to avoid situations where your ideas, or group innovation ideas, are channelled through analytical high priests to be subject to either 'blessing' or rejection.

Ok, to summarize, we can walk back down through the 'survival guidelines' in descending order;

Survival Guideline #4. Consider every causal action in terms of it's negative space geometric consequences (the five generations out of the Mohawks is not a bad target) and make it known to others around you, including your 'boss' that you expect the same from any organization that you are a participant in. Migrate towards regions and work environments where this practice is followed, then when your canoe comes into the narrow channels of the millennial passage, you can be sure that the canoes of those around you will consider the mutual geometry of approach and harmonize their actions (make their actions 'co-resonant') as the joint move through the limited safe water passages is executed.

Survival Guideline #3. Search for a balanced answer to the question; "What's the difference between a lemming and a lunatic?" and work the middle zone. This means that you'll keep rump-bumping your fellow lemmings as you stampede along the 'expected course' while 'tuning in' to the navigational parameters supplied by ontogenetic purpose (i.e. to the 'force' which unifies 'mind' and 'matter', thought and action). If others in the vicinity start to catch the 'smell' of the ontogeny on their own and the 'group tracking capability' starts to stabilize, and at the same time everyone appears to be morphing from lemmings into stallions (or mares), you'll know you're 'in the zone'.

Survival Guideline #2: As you prepare for the uncertainties of the turn of the millenium, think of co-supportive ways to prepare, working together with those people you'd like most to become part of a colorful and cooperative post-bifurcation 'survival community'. e.g. invest your savings in local currency backed by your favorite baguetteer or brewmeister and share information on your areas of surfeit and deficit (spiritual and material) with those who you'd most enjoy bartering with to mutually fill the gaps.

Survival Guideline #1: Seek friends and associates who are not blind, and/or do not feign blindness, to the current reality and whose individual and joint actions have 'butterfly potential'. As Wittgenstein says, you too, can be 'verhext' by the false pictures repetitively conveyed by words.

And in abbreviated form;

(1) Seek out those who 'see the game of pretend' in the culture and don't have to be prompted to speak openly about it.

(2) Coordinate your millenial passage preparations with others who you'd like to party with post-passage.

(3) 'Tune in' and let yourself be pulled by your natural ontogeny rather than to be pushed along by the 'common wisdom', and cultivate co-resonant ontogenetic 'tuning'.

(4) Think of the 'reciprocal disposition impact' of what you are doing, five generations out into the future, ... in terms of how it will effect the children of the future.

(5) Tap the contributions of 'high priests' in the overall minestrone if you can, but avoid and eschew their stand-alone judgements and vetos.

I'm sure there are lots more, ... anyone else want to have a go?

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Return to '98 Update Page and Index of Essays

Hopi message is at http://www.timesoft.com/hopi/message.htm