It is said that when Rollo of Normandy was asked to kiss the foot of Charles the Simple, he balked, and using the english (norman) words, "Nese bi God!" (No, by God), flatly refused to comply with the accepted custom. Thus was born the word "bigot", connoting an obstinate adherent to a particular creed or opinion, who uses the divinity to back up his argument.

And why not, really? Who said that Charles the Simple should have such power over people? .... just because his predecessors and their henchman won a few battles? Such justification is reminiscent of what we tell a child who asks too many questions about the 'way things are'; .... just Bi'Cause, darling, just Bi'Cause, ... but what are we supposed to Bi'Lieve, if that's all we get for an answer? .... that there is no purpose in these things? And if there is no 'purpose', and only 'if then else' 'cause', if life 'runs' on the basis of a hierarchy of cause-and-effect rules, what is it that holds everything together, that sustains this flowing, space-time unity which characterizes our reality?

Of course, this is a rather profound question which has been examined by many philosophers and scientists, and while the classical notion of 'cause' has been shown to be 'incomplete' by modern science and deceptively so by modern philosophy ("the belief in cause collapses with the belief in purpose", Friedrich Nietzsche in 'The Will to Power'), it persists in being deeply embedded in our western language.

Language is something which is a concern to me at the moment, as I try to pick up my fluency skills in french so that i might better be able to integrate into this french-speaking community, but this is an undertaking which is not nearly as straight forward as you might think.

As I was walking along Maisonneuve with a Parisian-born Quebecoise friend, she was telling me (in her Parisian french) that I must choose between learning 'french-french' or quebecois-french, as these are very different, and her mother, who still lives in Paris, cannot understand her daughter (22 yrs) who speaks quebecois-french.

In the midst of this discussion, we were interrupted by a french-french woman (tourist) who had heard my friend's french-french accent, and asked her, with a note of desperation in her voice, where she could find a french-french place to eat. My friend directed her to a restaurant, 'St. Malo' which served traditional french cuisine in a french-french atmosphere. In quebecois-french, this french tourist was 'une maudite francaise' (damned, accursed, french). Les maudit francais, as they are called by the quebecois are french-french, who in general are very particular about the french-french way they speak and who insist on french-french ways.

I quickly opted for learning quebecois-french, and a few minutes later, met my teacher, my friend's daughter, who would give me quebecois-french lessons in exchange for me giving her driving lessons, since I have a 'Char' (quebecois word for 'voiture') Bien.

Now from my studies of complex systems, it always intrigues me to run up against this particularity, as exemplified by the maudite francaise, this 'literality' and 'political correctness' which demands that things be done or interpreted in a certain way. Who decided all this stuff, anyhow? Who is this 'Sir Cause' guy who is reponsible for all these happenings or 'effects', who stands behind this justification of 'Bi'Cause'?

Now I happen to know, from reading it in a french-french book, that the french language was a bastard child, born of purpose --- it was naturally induced by the purpose of facilitating pan-european trade. It was so successful in this regard that it replaced Latin as the official language of the region in 1539 (four years after Jacques Cartier had first visited 'Hochelaga').

It is also known that Louis XIV was more cartesian that Descartes and not only ran a tight ship from 1661 to 1715, but gathered together a bunch of scholars to 'clean up' the french language so that everyone could speak french 'properly' (the french word 'propre' means in english, clean, neat, tidy, well-ordered). Now, while it was François I who had in 1537 introduced the "dép-t legal" or the copyrighting dues, making it compulsory for printers to submit to the royal library a copy of all the works they print, it was Louis XIV, and his minister Colbert, who proudly took it over and re-established the royal library in in the Rue de Richelieu, in the centre of Paris.

Quebec and Montreal colonists, to a large extent, escaped the wave of cartesian control which their french brothers endured under Louis, and the language they implanted pre-dated Louis' compulsory 'clean-up'. As Neil Rieck [1] points out, one could hardly equate 'french' with 'quebecois' at this time, since the french-french were on a very different social trajectory under the Louis XiV hegemony which was setting the stage for a bloody ten year uprising in 1789, known as the 'French Revolution'.

As Neil points out, while Canadian history texts say that 'The English defeated the French' on the Plains of Abraham in 1759, it was really the armies of the 'maudit francais' who were defeated, and it is also recorded in history that the residents of Quebec City cheered the conquering British armies for freeing them from the oppression emanating from France.

One may well expect the quebecois, and quebecois-french, to be relatively more 'purposive' in reasoning style, and less 'causal', having dodged the cartesian clean-up and euclidian 'brain-draw', to which their french-french cousins, by their own admission, succumbed, and continue to succumb through a cartesian educational system.

Now all of the above, while mostly new learning for me, is very relevant to my purpose here in Montreal, which seeks to relate the perceptual and inquiry systems of the indigenous peoples (e.g. kanien'kehaka or 'mohawks') to modern physics and the sciences of complexity. My goal is to help give young people, .... who are confused (understandably so) by the euclidian approach, which our western culture continues to flog on them in a most blatant manner through their education and more subtly through the everyday use of language, ...... to give young people an exposure to (i.e. an 'awareness of') the alternative and far more natural 'non-euclidian' approach to perception and inquiry which is rooted in purposive flow rather than mechanical 'cause'.

The more education one receives in the west, the deeper the indoctrination and the tougher it seems to be to visualize or to 'get in touch with' the non-euclidian alternative. If I quote Nietzsche or even a current day scientific type like Bart Kosko (expert in non-euclidian fuzzy logic) to a Ph.D. in a scientific field, ... from passages in which they ridicule the western 'Bi-Lief' in causality, the Ph.D. is quite likely to think me a most 'unscientific' person (this observation is drawn from experience rather than conjecture). But what they really intend is that I am 'non-euclidian', which is true, and I am that way because 'causality' for me simply does not jive with the natural reality in which we are enfolded and are a part of. And if science is purposive, ... i.e. if it is for the purpose of understanding nature, then we cannot get hung up on a human-crafted tool of science ('causality') and in our detached euclidian megalomania impose that abstract notion on nature itself, insisting that 'that's the way things really are'.

Kosko, in pointing out the perceptionally obvious (and logically transparent), that it just doesn't jive with our experience, common or scientific, to hold that the world is a euclidian world of discontinuous 'things' separated by void, since if we do .. "The world is thus in (bivalent) abstraction constituted of entities that are discontinuous, with nothing between them to bridge the impassable gulfs, little or great, that separate them from each other. The world becomes to us a mere collection of 'disjecta membra', drained of all union or mutual relations, dead, barren, inactive, unintelligible. And in order once more to bring relations into this scrap heap of disconnected entities, the mind has to conjure up spirits, influences, forces and what not from the vast deep of its own imagination. And all this is due to the initial mistake of enclosing things or ideas or persons (or sets) in hard contours which are purely artificial and are not in accordance with the natural shading-off continuities which are or should be well known to science and philosophy alike."

The notion of causality, which is at the very foundation of our western culture (which the quebecois may have mitigated through co-habitation with native north americans) goes hand in hand with this 'dead' euclidian view of reality, .... a reality which splits out space and time from their natural mutually interpenetrating flow. As soon as we strip out views of space, from their natural space-time flow context (a 'no-no' in modern physics because of relativity and space-time being a non-euclidian continuum), we focus in on 'the footprints of resonant flow, (resonant flow aka 'purpose'), a 'thing-based' conceptualization which we re-animate along an artificial 'linear time' axis.

But in the pushing and shoving football crowd, who was it who 'caused' the pregnant mother to die in a fall from grandstand's upper level? .... was the person who pressed against her until she toppled over the railing the 'responsible' one?. From a space-time flow view, across the madding crowd, many people were purposefully pushing their neighbours around, to keep their own balance, to shove back in anger, or to intimidate the opposing team's supporters, or whatever, and in turbulent flow, only the butterflies of deterministic chaos know exactly who or what caused the woman to die, .... i.e. as Ilya Prigogine says, the idea of deterministic 'cause' represents a 'divine viewpoint', since humans cannot possibly assess the 'initial conditions' with sufficient precision.

Of course, if there were only two people present, the pregnant woman and her assassin, it would be far easier to establish 'cause', right? In that moment, as she reached out and pushed the pregnant woman over the guard rail, what 'caused' her to do that? [assassins can be female too.].

Yeah, .... and who really killed Thomas A'Beckett? When one looks back into history, one learns that Henry II, surrounded by a lot of supporters, was back there pushing and shoving in the crowd, while Sir WIlliam Tracey, one of Henry's staunchest supporters, was standing just behind Thomas a'Becket 'at the railing'. Sir William, according to historical accounts, had heard Henry's 'fateful plea' to be rid of a'Becket (Henry had personally encouraged Thomas a;Becket to be ordained a priest and be consecrated as Archbishop, all in the year of 1163, so that he [Henry] could curb the growing power of the Church.), but then A'Becket 'got the faith' and reneged on the implicit 'mutual understanding'. While neither Henry nor Sir William were ever formally 'nailed' as being the 'cause' of Thomas a'Becket's death (i.e. murder), it is interesting that Henry was forced by public opinion to do penance at a'Becket's tomb in 1174 and Sir William, apparently in a state of deep remorse and repentance, built a new church in Devon (in the town of Bovey-Tracey) dedicated to his royalty-targeted 'quarry', Thomas a'Becket.

Now a modern court of law would probably determine, from Sir WIlliam's fingerprints on Thomas a'Becket's back (so to speak), that it was Sir William who 'caused' the death of Thomas a'Becket. After all, we must all take responsibility for our 'causal' actions, right? ... and the innuendo about what Henry might or might not have said and what he really intended was all too ambiguous (i.e. non-causal) to get him convicted, right?

The common people of the twelfth century obviously thought differently about 'cause' and 'justice', but in what way were they thinking differently?

Perhaps there are two questions here; one is their manner of thinking, and another is their notion of 'cause'. It would seem that they leaned less on euclidian 'literalism' (e.g. the existence of a stained nightie, as in the Lewinsky-Clinton affair) and more on the holistic perception of space-time flow.

Clearly, our sensory perceptions are the same as theirs, our physiology has not evolved that much (for either better or worse) over the past millenium; ... our pre-conceptualized perceptions are 'top-down' and based on 'tuning-in' to resonant, non-euclidian space-time flow, right? The 'bottom-up' euclidian constructs, as Kosko notes, are our post-conceptual cultural abstractions, ... they are 'analytical backfill', if you like, which we use to make clean and neat and tidy logical tree structures out of messy and ambiguous space-time flows, aka 'real life'. Our left lobe conceptualization captures the isolated 'footprints' of purposive flow out of the context of their dynamic space-time container, and re-animates them in uncluttered space and linear time.

So, how DO WE 'tune-in' to non-euclidian space-time flow, in which "space (the 'ether') is a participant in phenomena", as Einstein says, rather than space being an 'impassable gulf' between discrete 'things' as in the euclidian view. Einstein describes this natural perceptual ability of human beings as he speaks about the non-euclidian space-time continuum (i.e. 'flow') which characterizes our reality in a scientifically consistent manner ('sorry Descartes, you may have captured the imagination of an entire culture and still hold it captive, but your schema of 'bottom-up' causal inquiry is an abstraction which has been shown to be seriously 'incomplete' with respect to describing the complexity in nature').

Einstein gives us the following description of how we perceive non-euclidian space-time; i.e. how we ascribe geometry or order, to physical observations in a non-euclidian context; "First of all, an observation of epistemological nature. A geometrical-physical theory as such is incapable of being directly pictured, being merely a system of concepts. But these concepts serve the purpose of bringing a multiplicity of real or imaginary sensory experiences into connection in the mind. To 'visualise' a theory, or bring it home to one's mind, therefore means to give a representation to that abundance of experiences for which the theory supplies the schematic arrangement."

In other words, just like Henry the Second's subjects, we naturally 'tune-in' to resonant patterns in the space-time flow, and the 'cause' that we ascertain, before we conceptualize it in articulable lego-like euclidian constructs, is whatever makes 'resonant sense' of the perceived space-time dynamics (as we bring them into connection in our mind with our ontogenetic web of sensory experience). This resonance-based pre-conceptual understanding does not necessarily converge with post-conceptual logical-causal tree type abstraction, since the former interpretation utilizes the geometry of the spaces between tangibles, as well as the tangibles, while the latter interpretation is constrained to tangibles.

The more we focus in on detailed causal tree constructions, the more we diverge from our natural non-euclidian understanding that Henry loomed large in the wasting of Thomas a'Becket. A discrete explication of 'Cause' in a non-euclidian space-time flow context, however, is inarticulable in our euclidian language. It is amorphous and space-time resonance-based; i.e. it is pure, natural pre-conceptual 'understanding' as opposed to post-conceptual logical-causal abstraction, and it cannot be directly expressed, as the post-conceptual abstraction can, in a literal linguistic articulation. And, as psychologists like Daniel Schacter ('Searching for Memory') point out, pre-conceptual pattern information is stored in 'implicit' memory rather than in 'explicit' memory and cannot be voluntarily recalled (i.e. like the space-time resonances involved in riding a bicycle, we understand them from experience but cannot 'tell how').

Illiterate societies, which depend upon oral story-telling traditions for sharing understanding, obviously enjoy a fringe benefit of illiteracy by not being exposed to being mesmerized by our own written post-conceptual abstractions, propagated via euclidian language constructs. As Wittgenstein observes, the tidy, clean, well-ordered imagery we get from our euclidian language can be a barrier to understanding; "A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language, and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably." Understanding, apparently, is first-and-foremost about 'space-time resonances' rather than abstract literalism.

Now the indigenous peoples, as part of their 'learning systems' utilize mythical stories to ensure that non-euclidian 'understanding' remains in a primacy over euclidian 'knowledge', the latter being an approximative abstraction which comes very easily into the minds of us homo sapiens, so easily that it tends to keep slipping back in there even when we are wanting to open up our minds for the full monty of non-euclidian understanding.

The Ashanti people, for example, who live in the jungle regions west of the Volta along the coast of West Africa (Ghana) have a matrilineal culture which seems similar to the local native north american, at least from my reading of the Iroquis Constitution. The individual's descent and claim to land is traced through the mother's lineage (women have a great deal of freedom and are highly respected). The child, according to the Ashanti, inherits his or her blood from the mother and his spirit from the father. The father is responsible for naming and educating the child. Children may become "ranked" (given status) through their mother's lineage, but there are certain titles, such as royal titles, which can only be handed down through the paternal line.

In any case, the following Ashanti 'story' is a reminder which warns against allowing the approximative abstraction of euclidian 'logical-causal knowledge' from slipping into a primacy over non-euclidian 'understanding'.

"Anansi's Rescue from the RIver:

When the first of Anansi's sons was born, Anansi prepared to give him a name. But the baby spoke up and said, 'You needn't bother to name me. I have brought my own name. I am called Akakai.' This name signified 'Able to See Trouble'.

When the second of Anansi's sons was born, he too announced that he had brought his own name. 'I am called Twa Akwan,' he said. THis name signified 'Road Builder.'

When the third son was born, he said, 'My name is Hwe Nsuo.' That meant 'Able to Dry up Rivers.'

When the fourth son was born, he announced, 'I am Adwafo.' That meant 'The Skinner of Game.'

The fifth son said when he was born, 'I have been named already. I am known as Toto Abuo.' His name signified 'Stone Thrower.'

The sixth son told Anansi, 'I am called Da Yi Ya.' That meant 'Lie on the Ground like a Cushion.'

One day Kwaku Anansi went on a long journey. Several weeks passed, and he failed to return. Akakai, the son who had the ability to see trouble, announced that Anansi had fallen into a distant river in the middle of dense jungle.

Twa Akwan, the builder of roads, constructed a highway through the jungle, and the bothers passed through it to the edge of the river.

Hwe Nsuo, who had the power to dry up rivers, dried up the river, and they found there a great fish which had swallowed Anansi.

Adwafo, the skinner of game, cut into the fish and released his father.

But as soon as they brought Anansi to the edge of the river, a large hawk swooped down out of the sky, caught Anansi in his mouth, and soared into the air with him.

Toto Abuo, the stone thrower, threw a rock into the sky and hit the hawk, which let go of Anansi.

And as Anansi dropped towards the earth, Da Yi Ya threw himself on the ground like a cushion to soften his father's fall.

Thus Kwaku Anansi was saved by his six sons and brought home to his village.

Then one day when he was in the forest, Anansi found a bright and beautiful object called Moon. Nothing like it had ever been seen before. It was the most magnificent object he had ever seen. He resolved to give it to one of his children.

He sent a message to Nyame, the Sky God, telling him about his discovery. He asked Nyame to come and hold the Moon, and to award it as a prixe to one of Anansi's sons --- the one who had done the most to rescue him when he was lost in the river.

The Sky God came, and held the Moon. Anansi sent for his sons. When they saw the Moon, each of them wanted it. They argued. The one who had located Anansi in the jungle river said he deserved the prize. The one who had built the road said he deserved it. The one who had dried up the river said he deserved it. The one who had cut Anansi out of the fish said he deserved it. The one who had hit the hawk with the stone said he deserved it. The one who had cushioned Anansi's fall to earth said he deserved it.

They argued back and forth, and no one listened to anybody else. The argument went on and on and became a violent squabble. Nyame, the Sky God, didn't know who should have the prize. He listened to the arguments for a long time. Then he became impatient. He got up from where he sat and went back to the sky, taking the Moon along with him.

And that is why the Moon is always seen in the heavens, where Nyame took it, and not on the earth where Nyame found it."

* * *

Now this Ashanti rejection of putting euclidian causal logic into a primacy over non-euclidian understanding, could have done a lot of good if impressed in youth upon some of the managers I have worked for, not to mention politicians and others who attempt to apply euclidian logic as opposed to non-euclidian understanding to establish causal 'credit' or 'blame'. [as a recent reformee, just like someone who has quit smoking, I get to lay it on heavy, on the still-addicted, so here goes;]

In the lived-myth (i.e. the reality) of the tribe I lived with for 32 years, a petroleum business tribe called the Ynocos tribe, there were three sons, one named 'Bean Counter - Cash Keeper', another named 'Engineer - Builder' and a third called 'Geologist - Oil Finder'. In the 1940's, the Ynocos Chief had recognized that the tribe was poor largely because it had no oil of its own, and simply traded in other people's oil. So the Chief conceived a son, Geologist - Oil Finder, to go out and find some oil which the tribe could call their own. Geologist - Oil Finder was very successful in his quest and soon the tribe had plenty oil, but no way to get it out of the ground. The Chief of the tribe got busy and conceived another son, Engineer - Builder, to build the facilities needed to get the oil out of the ground and to get it to market.

Soon, the tribe was prospering and the money was overflowing the tribal coffers and there was a problem in knowing how to share and spend it all. So the Chief conceived a third son, Bean Counter - Cash Keeper to help determine how the money should be spent.

Bean Counter - Cash Keeper could see that Engineer - Builder controlled the flow of money with his facilities, pipelines and tankers, so he invested heavily in those things that Engineer - Builder wanted, taking the money away from Geologist - Oil Finder and his growing family in the process. He also convinced his father, the Chief, to appoint several of Engineer - Builder's sons to sit on the tribal council and help advise on how to manage the flow of money.

The Ynocos people had many good years as a result of the skills of its three sons and their families and after the old Chief died a new Chief was elected. But by now, it was becoming obvious to the new Chief and to the whole tribe that the oil was almost gone, and Geologist - Oil Finder and his family were starving and in very poor health generally because of all the emphasis and resources going to the projects of Engineer - Builder's and Bean Counter - Cash Keeper's families and proteges.

The new Chief was a son of 'Bean Counter - Cash Keeper' and went to the Grand Council of his relatives, to be counselled on how he could return the Ynocos tribe to a state of prosperity. The Grand Council of the 'Bean Counter - Cash Keeper' family decided that too much money was being spent on the tribesmen and their families, which had grown very large, rather than on acquiring oil, so it was decided that those who had contributed most to the tribes prosperity would stay with the tribe but the others, who had not contributed as much, would be asked to leave the tribe. In this way, the Ynocos tribe could cut its expenses and afford to acquire more oil.

As he walked off into the jungle, one of the old Chief's grandson's was heard to say; 'but was it not for the good of our tribe's prosperity that our children were conceived?, ... but the son of Bean-Counter - Cash Keeper gave him a glazed-eye look, as if the old Chief's grandson just did not 'understand'.

* * *

The topology of euclidian thinking is a 'strange loop' topology like 'Escher's Waterfall' where the water which flows over the falls, the 'child' of the falls if you like, flows around to become the parent of itself. This is the only way in which a euclidian reality can 'rejuvenate' itself, by 'recycling' without metamorphosis, without the participation of space, since unoccupied space is seen in the euclidian reality as being separate from time and 'inert' (an impassable gulf). In our euclidian cultural delusion, we consume ourselves in order to sustain the system. Just as in the story of the Ynocos tribe, if the organization does not maintain the primacy of purpose of cultivating the ontogeny of its own people, it can fall into this 'strange loop' where the 'ends' (human or community ontogeny or 'self-development) become the 'means' and the 'means' (money or material goods) become the 'ends'. This is indeed where euclidian thinking leads, when it is put into a primacy over non-euclidian understanding.

When one elevates post-conceptual 'knowledge' above pre-conceptual understanding in the social systems of organization, as our culture has been progressively tending towards since 500 B.C. when Parmenides, Plato and Aristotle helped to stir the cultural flow into the euclidian channel, we infuse dysfunctional imbalances into the 'system' which complexify it enormously. In fact, it is now complexifying it to the point that it is seriously confusing and depressing our euclidian-thinking minds, ... particularly those of our youths.

As Wittgenstein observes in 'Philosophical Investigations', the causal relationships we determine in our systems inquiry are 'our requirement', rather than the 'result' of our inquiry, and to look deeper than our imposed logic, we must invert our perspective, so that instead of allowing our current need to modulate the perceptual viewplane, we must open ourselves up and 'tune-in' to our real 'ontogenetic need'. When non-euclidian understanding is in a primacy, we are 'tuning-in' to the resonant space-time flow of our own individual and community 'ontogenies' (an inclusionary container-oriented view which includes the observer in with what he is observing), and we are using knowledge to serve our ontogeny, rather than to fragment it. Knowledge and logical need go hand-in-hand while understanding and (real) ontogenetic need go hand-in-hand, and once the primacy inverts into self-consuming 'strange loop' mode where 'means' become 'ends', the degree of fragmentation will be proportional to the number and strength of knowledge-based needs. In the case of an individual youthful psyche, it is one's authentic (ontogenetic) 'self' which is consumed to satisfy logical, knowledge-stimulated needs.

The message of the Ashanti was that the behavior of the sons was resonant and purposive, a unifying space-time flow put into the service of the family ontogeny. The view expressed in the Ashanti myth was that, as Nietzsche put it, ... the belief in 'purpose' collapses with the belief in 'cause'. The father was rescued because of the space-time orchestration of the efforts of his sons, not because of this or that action-footprint, taken out of the context of overall purposive space-time flow.

The same was true in the case of the Ynocos tribe in which, for a good part of my life, I was a tribesman. It was the space-time orchestration of the tribal sons which made the tribe prosper, and to try to explain its prosperity in terms of abstract 'cause' is to look only at the static 'footprints of purpose' left in dead euclidian space and reconstructed in 'linear' rather than 'ontogenetic' time.

What is required to determine 'the most responsible' agent for a given system outcome is a 'divine viewpoint' as discussed earlier. 'No problemo', we say, since we have been well-trained, in the western culture, to sit on the throne of 'divine viewpoint' and to make our causal 'calls'. Most often, the annointed 'causal agents' are made in our 'own image', depending on whether we are Bean Counter - Cash Keeper, Geologist - Oil Finder, Engineer - Builder' or, .... franco-canadien or anglo-canadian, native north american or ethnic colonial, american or russian. Funny how it works that way, isn't it?

Where we are at now, is that it is 'money' rather than ontogenetically meaningful goods and services which we have put our trust in to back up our causal 'calls', and we preserve this 'trust' in money even at the expense of our own ontogeny. Money is rapidly becoming a force which is converting humanity into recyclable waste. If the international money sharks say to a country, via the currency rates, 'you are worth nothing, ... your goods and services are worth nothing, .... the product of your lifetime is worth nothing', ... we meekly comply and deliver the goods and services for whatever the currency markets will bear. We effectively prostitute our own ontogeny.

Money plays a special role in a 'strange loop' economy. In a natural, 'ontogenetic' system, a market economy emerges around the ontogenetic needs of people (i.e. 'demand' equates to people-oriented 'ends'), and the goods and services offered by people (i.e. 'supply' equates to people-oriented 'means'). Whereas, in a 'strange loop' means-over-ends inverted system, a market economy doesn't respond to people, it responds to money, and the system 'spends people on money' as the Ynocos tribe did, rather than 'spending money on people), as in an ontogenetic systems. Within the Ynocos tribe, however, it was still possible for ontogenetic microcosms (e.g. high performance teams) to sprout up and briefly blossom before being recycled in the 'strange loop' composting system.

Money, as an idealized form of goods and services is a useful device which improves space-time flexibility in a market economy and allows things to sprout up and blossom which otherwise could not. But as soon as we elevate causal knowledge above purposive understanding, we effectively invert 'means' and 'ends' and go into 'strange loop' mode, an unreal abstract euclidian world in which people become the expendible item and money becomes the primary goal, rather than ontogeny. So do we really expect that the static material outputs of human imagination and labour can in turn re-engender and sustain nature and humanity, ... can recreate human imagination and labour, and become the parent of itself? What kind of strange wizardry is this? ... or is it pure and simple 'self-deception'?

Ok, I know this has been a 'long trip' from Rollo of Normandy to here, but there is a question on the table here with respect to what we mean by 'Bi'Got', 'Bi'Cause' and 'Bi'Lief'.

If we see science as 'purposive' and as having the purpose to better understand nature, ... a nature which contains ourselves along with everything we observe, then our understanding tells us that it is the indigenous peoples beliefs which are most scientific. They are most scientific in the sense of maintaining consistency in their systems of inquiry, with sensory perception-based experience, as validated by modern physics. The 'so-called' 'scientific' consistency in our euclidian culture is with reference to self-made abstractions, based on euclidian generalization and causality which we then attempt to impose on nature. We in the west appear to have made a religion out of euclidian thinking. If we think that it is the indigenous peoples who have 'mythed the point', we are myopic indeed.

I am looking forward to learning more about the kanien'kehaka (mohawks) about the 'learning systems' of indigenous peoples in general and about how their non-euclidian teachings on honesty, kindness, sharing and strength might contribute to the emergence of a new understanding in western culture, which incorporates the western knowledge base within a natural primacy where 'understanding' prevails over 'knowledge'. Perhaps this learning can contribute in some way to rescue youth from the confusion and depression that they are increasingly falling into, as we of the maudite euclidien culture inadvertently infect them with increasingly lethal strains of ASIDS (acute systems inquiry deficiency syndrome).

* * * * * *

[1] http://www3.sympatico.ca/n.rieck/docs/english_canada_french_01.html

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