Patterns within thought

[emile]

yes, i get what you mean and since i cited vygotsky (though my view is that our experience informs us of these things), i shall continue citing vygotsky (to bring out his full meaning of different consciousnesses) and to share why i believe vygotsky intends the same as you, that the two consciousnesses are a naturally reciprocal and complementary unity, and that this duality can be operative within an individual or within a collective.

that these two are complementary and reciprocal is in fact vygotsky’s major departure from the psychology of the west (though there are attempts within western psychology to revive vygotsky’s models).

i have already spoken about this geometry in general; i.e. in our western culture, we see the world in pure ‘yang’ terms of what things do, and we ignore the mutually defining (reciprocal and complementing) role of space.

my point is that the assertive yang aspect is innately incomplete (it is ‘visual perception based’ and thus after the fact of the matter-space, assertive-accommodative mutual defining). if we ‘start from’ visual perception, we have already left out the essential goodies, .. the ‘participation of space’. if we start from our experiencing of our common living space (intuition based) this includes the assertive aspect of the living space dynamic. that is, if the pool player orients his view to the transforming configuration of balls, then this orientation not only comprehends the actions and transactions of the balls but in the context of the transforming configuration of space (the possibility-to-move configuration). it is the transforming configuration of space that over-ridingly determines the evolution of play; i.e. perception in terms of the actions and transactions of the participants in the collective lacks the ‘meaning’ necessary for comprehending the evolutionary dynamic. this general principle (suggested by both relativity and quantum theory as well as our everyday experience) casts out Darwin’s theory of natural selection and genetic determinism (survival of the fittest) as well, as many biologist-heretics are finding cause to do as well, on the basis of a variety of arguments.,

so, this reciprocal complementarity the ‘structured/intellectual’ and the ‘spontaneous/experiential’ is something that pervades the world of understanding, … and argues against us accepting views of natural phenomena based on the one-sided yang ‘visual perception’ (‘structured/intellectual’) in terms of ‘things’ and ‘what they do’, out of the evolutionary meaning giving context of the ‘spontaneous/experiential’ geometro-dynamics of space (the accommodative possibilitizing, assertive-behaviour-shaping aspect of space).

vygotsky couched this assertive-accommodative (mutual defining in the continuing present) in terms of ‘spontaneous concept formation’ and ‘structured/scientific concept formation’. what he writes is clearly and forcefully in radical opposition to that which is commonly accepted in our culture and our educational practices. in particular, the student is asked to accept ‘knowledge’ out of the context of its (spatial-relational) historical development (e.g. we are asked to accept and use newtonian physics out of the historical context that produced it). in this manner the student fails to see that one particular theory or practice rather than another is ‘actualized’ and popularized due to the potentially biased accommodative shaping of the social hostspace (the historical spatial context that is ignored in structured learning but is retained in ‘situational learning’). to give an example, within structured education there is the suggestion of ‘gender bias’ as Elizabeth Keller says in 'Reflections on Gender and Science' (1985, Yale University Press);

"To the extent that such models [models that posit central governing elements] also lend themselves more readily to the kinds of mathematics that have been developed, we need further to ask, What accounts for the kinds of mathematics that have been developed? Mathematical tractability is a crucial issue, and it is well known that, in all mathematical sciences, models that are tractable tend to prevail. But might it not be that prior commitments (ideological, if you will) influence not only the models that are felt to be satisfying but also the very analytical tools that are developed?'

this is the point that vygotsky is trying to make with his comments on leaving out ‘historical development’ or ‘spatial context’ that preferentially accommodates the actualizing of some structures rather than others, i.e;

"Piaget comes to the conclusion that the child's thought is devoid of objectivity, critical approach, understanding of relations, and stability --- in a word, those characteristics essential for mastering historical material. Consequently, on the one hand, spontaneous concepts are shown to be of no value in rendering systematic knowledge. Piaget 'resolves' this contradiction by suggesting a principle of antagonism between development and learning. It seems that when he says that nothing is more important for effective teaching than a thorough knowledge of the spontaneous thought of children, he means that the child's thought must be known as any enemy must be known in order to be fought successfully.

We shall counter these erroneous premises with the premise that the development of nonspontaneous concepts must possess all the traits peculiar to the child's thought at each developmental level because these concepts are not simply acquired by rote but evolve with the aid of strenuous mental activity on the part of the child himself. We believe that the two processes --- the development of spontaneous and nonspontaneous concepts --- are related and constantly influence each other. They are parts of a single process: The development of concept formation, which is affected by varying external and internal conditions but is essentially a unitary process, not a conflict of antagonistic, mutual exclusive forms of thinking."

"He [Piaget] fails to see the interaction between these two types of concepts and the bonds uniting them into a total system." ... "It would look as if the inner development of the child's thought had no relation to socialization, while socialization had no relevance for the development of the child's concepts. This inconsistency is the weak spot in Piaget's theory, both theoretically and practically." ... "This [Piaget's] theoretical position leaves no alternative other than antagonism for the relation between development and learning."
this fundamental ‘geometro-dynamical unity’ (i don’t know what else to call it) can be seen in the difference between the poor and the skilled pool players approach to the game of pool. if piaget were to teach someone to play pool, he would teach them all about how to make shots, ‘cuts’, banks, double-banks, cross-corners, marseilles, ‘jump shots’, combinations etc. etc. and the student would graduate as a sharp-shooter. vygotsky, on the other hand, would teach that the transforming configuration of the balls, which was not something DIRECTLY determinable by the player, was an accommodative (or disaccommodative) shaping influence on the evolution of play, and thus that this spatial context gives transcending meaning to the structured (yang, assertive) aspect of play. many players will proceed on the purely yang assertive determinist basis and will snooker themselves in the process. and so it not-infrequently is with graduates of structured learning who fail to acknowledge that the accommodative quality of the evolving (social) hostspace is an over-riding influence. it is worth noting that structured action is based in time while the evolving accommodative quality of the (social) hostspace transpires in the continuing present.

the piaget pool player is coming from his intellectual consciousness while the vygotsky pool player is coming from his experiential (in-the-continuing-now) consciousness. while the latter implicitly includes the former, … the former does not include the latter; i.e. if one’s behaviour is driven by structured purpose, it ignores the accommodative, assertive behaviour-shaping over-pressure of the hostspace. when one becomes ‘snookered’ by the hostspace, one is either stifled or one has to go to war against the hostspace one is included in (e.g. Hitler). on the other hand, when one starts from experiential consciousness (intuition) rather than intellectual consciousness, one allows the actualizing of one’s assertive behaviours to be ‘space-guided’, … moving in such a way as to sustain harmonious flow in the hostspace collective.

so, vygotsky would say that while these two consciousnesses are ‘different’, it is important to consider them as a reciprocally complementing unified dynamic. in terms of education, this implies ‘situational learning’ being put in a natural precedence over ‘structured learning’. after all, graduates who simply impose their structured actions regardless of the situational context are clearly going to snooker themselves or generate destructive conflict.

carol, as you point out, the interplay between these two consciousnesses can occur either within the individual or within the collective (company, nation etc.). however, feurbach’s comments concerned ‘words’ and these are symbolic meaning based entities that must be recognized by at least one other person to qualify as a word that coordinates experience-derived meaning.

[Carol Massey]

Thank you Emile, for sharing your ideas with me. So much to contemplate!

Are you familiar with Daniel Quinn, writer, and author of the Ishmael series of books? Through his books (a series of novels), he is constantly affirming the importance of the hostspace considerations and acknowledgement, (making the attempt always to re-orient and expand human thought and action, and the way we process and act upon information to include the 'natural world' of which we are a part). He might say that typically the way we live disconnected from the 'whole' is evidenced by the havoc that is wreaked by humanity's thinking that it has somehow risen above the need to consider the hostspace (my words, of course).

I don't know that his work is related to what you are telling me about thought...but it seems in some way to be a parallel to our discussion here.

Good week to you.

[Dancer]

Sorry I have been very busy laterly, however I am still checking out this site and will reply soon

Gordon.

[emile]

carol,

friends who know my writing etc. have suggested that i read Ishmael and also ‘Spell of the Sensuous’ by david abram, and i did buys the book and browsed the former and read the latter, and while they were ‘coming from the same ‘inclusional’ geometry’, my preference is ‘to be direct’ rather than literary or fictional.

i am certainly not prejudiced against others whose similar ideas, they are attempting to share in a more poetic or literary way, …in fact i am very happy that they are making their thoughts/views available in these forms, because a diversity of approaches are likely to inspire more transformation than any single approach at opening the way to a revived awareness of how we western acculturated folks have shifted over to an informationally-reduced visual space perception of the world and have forgotten how to open ourselves up, at will, to inner-outer inclusional engagement with the evolving acoustic space of now.

thus, i use examples like the game of pool where one can see two very different strategies (behaviour-guiding approaches) for navigating in life,… strategies that we can actually see shaping the behaviours of individuals and collectives and thus the dynamics of the social hostspace we are all included in.

what science seems to have overlooked (and when i say ‘science’ i mean the mainstream science that is put into practice in our shared living space through technologies and theories of management and governance etc.) is that all meaning comes from spatial context. there is no innate meaning in the objects we have word-labelled and which we then use to construct visual realities in terms of ‘what these things do’. it is all a language game, as already mentioned.

science has shown that the same neural nets fire when we see things as when we remember what we have seen, thus the reality based on visual perception is ‘portable’, … and we can take it outside of our ‘acoustically’ felt experience of inclusion within the evolving hostspace of the continuing present. when you can feel the inner-outering of the primeval drumming, or that of a rockband in your tummy, this acoustic reality is an experiencing of the One-ness of evolving space, and it is not ‘portable’ as visual realities are. as henri poincaré points out in ‘the relativity of space’, the body of the frog whose head has been severed retains spatial relational awareness, and when a drop of irritant (acid) is placed on its skin, will use one of its legs to try to remove it, and if that leg is restrained, will use another leg to try and wipe the irritant off; i.e. it retains its awareness of the relative geometry of space though its visual reality and visual reality memory is no longer possible.

acoustic reality where we are attuned to the evolving-space-of-now dynamic is informationally more comprehensive than visual reality based on word-labelled things and ‘what they do’ (something we can port outside of our included-in-the-evolving-space-of-now acoustic reality). but how easy it is for us to free ourselves from the common will based on language-games and synthetic visual realities? how easy it is for us to hold on to our belief that international property boundaries don’t really exist, but are simply a language-game that we play? if we go by ‘seeing is believing’ and ‘what things do’, it is apparent that everybody acknowledges the existence of the international boundary, but in our gut, we know it is all ‘make-believe’, … a synthetic reality based on language games, … as the old turtle island elder will be quick to tell us.

should acoustic space reality guide our behaviour, or should our behaviour be driven by internal purpose based on visual reality constructs (language-game constructs). lao tsu has spoken to this problem. he says “know the male but keep the role of the female”; i.e. let your male assertiveness be subservient to sustaining harmony in the hostspace dynamic, as you would in ‘driving friendly in a heavy traffic flow’. this is not complicated but it is subtle, particular when one is taught to drive one’s behaviour from one’s internal purpose (from the center of oneself; i.e. to behave in a self-centered way). where’s the blindspot in visual-reality oriented science? it’s in the fact that many different strategies and plans, the stuff that relates to self-centered internal purpose driven assertive behaviour, transpire within a common hostspace (livingspace) and like individuals navigating a crowd dynamic give rise to a collective dynamic (hostspace dynamic) wherein multiple individuals move under one another’s simultaneous mutual influence, a geometro-dynamic that cannot be solved in terms of ‘what the constituent do’ since the constituents are continually referencing their movements to the emergent hostspace dynamic (collective dynamic) that is of a mutual defining assertive-accommodative ‘acoustic’ origin, rather than constituent-determined origin as our visual perception delivers it, after-the-fact, to us (after the fact of the coniunctio oppositorum engagement as our actualizing assertive potentials and the accommodative ‘give’ of the hostspace dynamic give birth to actualized assertive behaviour.

if space did not possess an ‘accommodative quality’ that shapes the actualizing of our assertive potentials, then our visual perception, which brings to us what actually happened, would be ‘the full truth’. but space does possess an ‘accommodative quality’ that does shape the actualizing of our assertive potentials so that our visual perception of what actually happens is radically incomplete.

that is, ‘science’ is radically incomplete insofar as it bases its inquiry on ‘what actually happens’.

as i recall, Ishmael, and certainly ‘Spell of the Sensuous’ both seek to impress on us that, as relativity also says; ‘space is a participant in physical phenomena’ (einstein’s words). as soon as we acknowledge that space is a participant, we have to perceive the world dynamic in a yin/yang context wherein actualizing assertive potentials and accommodative backpressure of space mutually define ‘what actually happens’,… the after-the-fact result that is then available to our visual perception and our scientific inquiry based on visual perception (‘seeing is believing’). but our gut, our acoustic perception is not so easily satisfied with such superficial understanding. when we are all hungrily waiting for a table to come free (for a hole to open up) in the crowded restaurant, we know full well that the shape of space inductive shapes the actualizing of assertive potentials by its accommodating or dis-accommodating back-pressure, and that the visually manifest movement of things is an incomplete after-the-fact of the mutually-defining acoustic space dynamic.

thus ‘ishmael’ tells us in narrative style, what we are missing, what we have come to ignore, while my own interest is to try to express it in terms of the general philosophy of science notions of space and time and matter and energy, particularly as henri poincaré has already done, in a very clear manner (to me, far more clearly and consistent with experience than Einstein tried to do it), publically disputing with Bertrand Russell over this very issue of dual ways of perceiving (visual and acoustic) or ‘dual forms of consciousness’ and disputing with Einstein over the artificiality of ‘time’ (purely a convention that we impose on science, that is not imposed on nature or on our natural experience, in poincaré’s view, while ‘time’ was ‘seen’ something more foundational in the ‘objective reality’ oriented VISION of Einstein (my software keeps putting capitals on Einstein while it doesn’t to bother to do so with poincaré which just goes to show you the many ways our culture and its tools can put a biased celebrity-worshipping spin on things, to the point that we begin to take our understanding of the world from our celebrity-worship (from scientific-celebrities aka ‘experts’) rather than trusting in our own felt experience.


p.s. this also serves as a response to christian's latest comment on the interconnecting thread which christian started on the fallacies of modern thought. that is, christian seeks to put 'intellectualism' in direct opposition to 'activism', ... negating the value of the time-honoured tradition of generation to generation sharing of evolved understanding through inspiring reflection on one's inclusional influence within the evolving space of now, as in the words of lao tsu cited above. the 'put down' of intellectualism by christian's intellectualizing is thus self-contradictory. to 'walk the talk' in orienting to activism rather than intellectualizing, would require that one just do it, and not try to intellectually 'sell doing it'. even then, 'silence' is a kind of reactive nihilism as richard chia observes;

"this state of `absolute nothingness' (What Nishitani,1982 calls `sunyata') cannot be reached through premature abandonment. Instead it is attainable only through the long and endless struggles and `companionship' with both language and silence. Neither language nor silence can express the full richness of the real. We are therefore pushed beyond both language and silence. Words are taken lightly and only as `surface pointers which must not be thought to exhaust the depths of the actual experiences encountered. At best, they lead to beneath the surface "hows" to the deeper causes and regularities of things and events, which only the keenest and most experienced observer will have noticed... .it probes beneath the surface of appearances'

[Carol Massey]

emile, the spring blooms are not treating my head kindly today and my ability to 'think' is seriously impaired by a booming headache. I simply want to acknowledge your post and let you know that 'I hear what you are saying'.

I arrived here from having spent 5+ years at the Jung Talk Forum, and I appreciate very much that there are those (yourself, being one of them) that interface with life directly, rather than through a veil of myth, symbols, icons, etc. I very much feel that unfolding life is time and space specific, meaning that although there was a time appropriate for me to learn more about Carl Jung and his writings, there is also a time to leave it behind, to move into the present, beyond the place where Jung's life ended. And all the talk about ego and Self, splitting me in half like that is simply no longer tolerable to me.

Time permitting over the next few days, and my head leaves off its thumping, I will respond more fully to your post, and others too that are very interesting to me.

Thanks, ever.

[Carol Massey]

hello emile, christian, gordon, all,

Here is an article that has caused disquiet among Jungian scholars (which you may have already read).

I'm thinking that while for one person a symbol may give its meaning and thereafter for that individual the symbol is dead, but for another person, the symbol may not as yet given its meaning...therefore, if it dies (as in the case with Pope John Paul II), there will be another symbol that arises to contain the meaning, a historical pattern of thought that remains at least partially unconscious, as compared to the former, death of a symbol and the consequent coming to consciousness of meaning (that the symbol contained).


I suppose you will have to copy and paste it into your browser:

http://www.beamish.org/Files/Giegerich_EndofMeaning.pdf

[emile]

the giegerich article (thanks, carol, i hadn't seen it) and the Jungian deliberation seems to be centered on ‘forms’ in the plural (archetypes etc.). as William blake said, the poets personified the powers of nature as human-form-like gods (rendered them in terms of closed-form causal agencies) and then the priests, seeing an opportunity for self-employment, got hold of this and literalized it, … missing the point, as blake said, that the only gods are those that reside in the human breast (our feeling experience).

giegerich’s ‘in-ness’ (what in our sharing circle we term ‘inclusionality’) is not simply that meaning that comes from the space opened up between the bellies of father sky and mother earth that we have lost the sense of, by re-centering everything in the closed form we call ‘the self’. the fact is that the personifications emerged from the limited ability of language, founded on the artefacts of visual perception, to convey spatial relationships. the circular disk of the earth enveloped by the ‘bitter river’ of okeanos are visual images that, by naming river and earth, give rise to the notion of ‘the existence’ of river and earth. heraclitus, on the other hand, given only passing mention by giegerich, speaks of ‘everything in flux’, which means that there are no closed form personas or archetypes to be used as godly or mundane foundations.

thus the suggestion we need to go back beyond the two centuries or so where we shifted from world view and behavioural guidance by myth and ritual, to world view and behavioural guidance by intellectualizing, … back 2700 years or more to the emergence of stand-alone symbols known as words (not the same thing as ideograms that, when clustered together, render meaning in a blitz of relational connective coherency [e.g. as in native American sign language whose relational entities reach out for meaningful fill-fulling to a simultaneous mutually influencing cluster of relational entities, … which, brought into coherent connection in the mind, emit an enlightening blitz of understanding] ).

a world of flow (as relativity suggests may be more suitable than a material object based world) can only be spatial relational, … the flow-forms (in place of existing objects capable of behaviour) are relational as in the hurricane with its inclusional in-ness in the atmospheric space of the continuing now. in other words, there is another view of the development of our existential angst whose historical development goes back before the myth and ritual (in the powers-of-nature personifying terms of gods initiated by the poets and their poetic use of language as blake observer) to the pre-lingual era of our consciousness; i.e. our child state wherein felt experience is available to us but not language, and therefore not visual perception in terms of the existential objects with which language allows us to give building-block meaning to our sense of vision. that is, our pre-lingual self, the child in us, doesn’t work with ‘words’ or ‘closed form objects’ that ‘exist’, but can only work with spatial relationships in the space of now. that same ‘child’ was here as long as man, and certainly before the merchants and traders took over the business of visual perception, reformulating it in terms of stand-alone building-block, symbolic-meaning based ‘words’, roughly 2700 years ago (when phonetic greek was popularized).

from vygotsky’s research, it can be seen that symbolic meaning develops in three phases based on our movements or utterances (a) utterance for self, (b) utterance for others, (c) utterance in itself (having stand-alone symbolic meaning). this is how the development of symbolic meaning actually forms ontogenetically as we develop from infants to adults. there is no basic difference in the rise to symbolic stand-alone status of a gesture (ritual) or an utterance (intellectual commentary). that is, what really makes or breaks the development of symbolic meaning is what goes on in the (b) phase, … when you say ‘mokkie’, will others fetch your bottle (mokkie) for you? if you say that you are the president of the United States or King Ralph, will others take seriously the imaginary line boundaries to this closed-form entity you associate with the utterance ‘the United States’ or, in the case of King Ralph, ‘the Kingdom of Ralph’. the ‘kingdom of ralph’, you say, … oh, yes, … i know what you mean, … you enter into it when you cross that river over there, … etc. etc.

in other words, the symbolic meaning we associate with utterances, only becomes persistent when many others act in the way we desire when the tag-name for the symbolic-meaning is uttered. the efforts of the people of the united states (who had been promised a piece of the imaginary property for themselves if the swore an oath to defend its existence with their lives) in cultivating the desired behavioural response to any uttering of ‘the United States’, thus giving the utterance symbolic meaning seemingly in-its-own-right, was more successful than that achieved by King Ralph who never thought to implement the neat trick of dividing up the imaginary kingdom and selling it to his serfs in exchange for them giving their lives in belief of, and in defense of ‘its continuing existence’.

the meaning of a symbol is not in the symbol, but in the common behaviour it elicits when it is uttered or displayed. the ‘quark’ is not meaningful in itself, but in the behaviours it elicits in scientists who are committed to a belief in it and to a defense of its persisting existence. the pope and the quark may both be important symbols for particular groups while some groups find the quark more important than the pope and vice versa.

meanwhile, this is not to annihilate or to deny the relational dynamics surrounding the quark and the pope, but relational dynamics can be purely relational, like the hurricane or the whirlpool that effectively trans-FORMS the dynamical space it is included in, but in a mutually defining assertive-accommodative way, rather than in the abstract manner of a powerful ‘causal agent’, a ‘yang’ object that exists and acts in-its-own-right.

by giving ourselves up to a symbol and thus seeming to empower the symbol as a causal agency in-its-own-right, we can ride the crest of the wave of power constituted by the collective will, re-incarnated in the symbolism. the emperor’s soldiers obey the emperor, otherwise he wouldn’t be an emperor, he is an emperor thanks to the self-abnegation of his constituents who have agreed that the utterance or visual display of ‘emperor’ will elicit certain behaviours in them.

Thomas Mann wrote, writing in 1929 about the mesmerizing power of fascist leaders (as symbols of power), puts it in the metaphor of a magician and ‘mario’, an independent thinker that is usually immune to pressures to go along with the crowd, who is mesmerized into a grotesque erotic kiss by a magician, by the common will of the crowd after he has been invited ‘on stage’, … language playing its essential role, i.e;


“That national cement, the mother tongue, is paid symbolic honours down here, and there is something blithely symbolical in the pleasure people take in their respect for its forms and phonetics”

“The suffering, receptive, performing part was now his, the will that he had before imposed on others was shut out, he acted in obedience to a voiceless common will which was in the air. But he made it perfectly clear that it all came to the same thing. 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.”

perhaps i already cited from Mario and the magician, but the point i wanted to underscore is that becoming a club-member of the symbolic monster or god clubs we help to create by the self-abnegation that has us putting our behaviours in the service of mere symbolic utterances or symbolic displays, is also delivering to us a feeling of power by virtue of our membership in that club. soldiers of the emperor and supporters of Hitler do not give their support without getting something in return, … a ride on the crest of a powerful wave, and so it is with language game-play in general,… think about that one, bitch! (i.e. there is symbolic impact only if we agree to it).

... continuation coming, ...

[emile]

… continuation of the above,…. paragraph ending ‘only if we agreed to it).

medical science would have us believe in the ‘power of a virus’ to ‘kill us’ or the power of ‘pollen’ to give us an ‘allergic reaction’, but this is part of that same symbolic game-play since, for example, what medicine is reporting as the ‘more virulent and deadly strains’ of Clostridium difficile, they also say is being transmitted to hospital patients who are dying ‘from it’ by doctors, nurses, hospital workers and visitors, all of whom are not particularly bother by these ‘more virulent and deadly strains’. is there a clue here that the power is not vested one-sidedly in the symbolic entity we refer to as a ‘virus’ and that there is instead a mutual defining between the actualizing of an assertive behaviour and the accommodative backpressure (or lack thereof) of the dynamical bodyspace (recalling louis pasteur’s late-in-life concession to bechamp that ‘le microbe n’est rien, le terrain (bodyspace dynamic) est tout’.

can you imagine how modern virologists would respond to a modern day outbreak of scurvy if we did not already have a recorded history of it’s emergence and treatment in the pre-medical science era? it seemed to spread amongst people in close quarters (sailors) just like you’d expect from an ‘attacking virus’, and it had horrific symptoms; papules, hemorrhages, purpura and ecchymoses, gum swelling, bleeding and loose teeth, conjunctival hemorrhage, and bleeding also in the periorbital area and eyelids, sinking of the sternum, fractures and dislocations and tenderness of the bones, bleeding in muscles and joints, anorexia, hypotension and submucosal bleeding. fortunately, the first cure was learned of in 1540, given to Jacques Cartier by the Iroquois, a hot water extraction of the fluids from pine-needles, and later by with ‘lemons and limes’ by the british (1617, woodall, 1747, lind). hence the notion of ‘something missing’ in the dynamical space of the body as opening up a condition of resonant accommodation for particular assertive resonatings so that the resonant asserting and resonant accommodating mutually defined a dynamic not unlike the mutual influencing of periodicity of the wind in the accdommodative space of Puget sound and the resonant asserting of the Tacoma bridge.

so, this symbolic empowerment of objects that are seen to ‘exist’ and to ‘behave in their own right’, facilitated by language game-playing is deeply embodied in our western systems of meaning-giving (our way of understanding ourselves and the living space we are included in). in other words, the symbolic meaning invested in objects via language game-playing is not confined to religious cults but also to ‘science’ (the mainstream variety of the educated western public), and thus embodied in our cultural meaning-giving and meaning-sharing tools, has become resistant to change.

heretics who believe that the HIV-virus-that-causes AIDS theory is baloney have themselves been demonized to the extent that medical research careers and in some cases, lives, have been destroyed, … that’s an indication of how deep language-game symbolism is entrenched in our culture. one will find amongst the medical heretics those, for example, that believe that ‘cancer is not 'causal' and does not spread’ within the body, but is a locally troublesome resonance that emerges from an imbalance (associated with body-space deficiencies that we associate with waste removal backlogs/lack of nutrient access as in scurvy) in the mutually defining actualizing of assertive potentials and accommodative spatial backpressures. almost none of the trillions of dollars of research are going in these 'heretical' directions and if one chooses not to 'go to war against a phantom cause' but work the bodyspace rebalancing side, one must go to naturopaths and homeopathists who will use whatever intuitive guessing games they can (like the natives that developed a cure for scurvy) to try and add back in what has become deficient to restore ‘balance’ (rather than to defeat the dreaded symbolic-causal agent that language-game-playing terrorizes us into believing in) in the complex of simultaneous mutually influencing bodyspace dynamics.

[Carol Massey]

emile, you say, "that there is instead a mutual defining between the actualizing of an assertive behaviour and the accommodative backpressure (or lack thereof) of the dynamical bodyspace"

It seems this way to me, that this wholistic functioning of body intelligence within must include, as Bohm posits, that 'thought' is a bodily system as all other systems that we define as 'physical'. The same functional dynamic may be applied to thought as well as, say, the skeletal system (or any other). My profession is dental hygiene, and the laws regarding the positioning, or alignment/placement of teeth, within the the body, specifically in the maxillary and mandibular arches, is the effective result of many affective factors, i.e., stress, backpressure, presence or absence of opposing teeth, and myriad other affective factors, some asserting, some accomodating so that the effect is that teeth are located in the exact position where all these forces are balanced.

hmmm...

[emile]

carol, … yes, i think we can take bohm’s ideas on ‘thought as a system’ and lay them out on the table, as it were, to further elucidate on this point, and to clarify the simultaneous mutually-defining relationship between ‘spatial accommodating and material asserting'.

bohm differentiated between ‘thinking’ and ‘thought’, observing that we slip from one to the other and tend not to notice we are doing so. that is, there is only the space of now and our thinking transpires in the space of the continuing now. in ‘thought as a system’ bohm says;

“ … the future doesn’t exist. It isn’t spread out before you. All you have is the present When it comes to the psychological fact, the only fact you have is the present, the *now*.’

so we can’t think (in the continuing now) of a MATERIAL system as something that is ‘a functioning whole’ since to do so would be to ignore its inner-outer dynamical inclusion in-the-continuing-now within the suprasystem of nature. seeking to understand ‘the system of the body’ as a stand-alone ‘wholistic’ system and ignore its nested inclusion within the evolving suprasystem within which it is a dynamical feature (in the manner that whorls nest within whorls within a fluid flow) is a convention that is assisted by language game-play. general systems theorist russell ackoff uses the example of ‘university’ to make this point. without the concept of ‘university’ the activities that our ‘thought’ informs us of, when we mention the world ‘university’ are dynamics within the dynamical suprasystem of community. there is no necessity for language to exist for those activities to exist. if the word ‘university’ did not exist, we could still have people participating in these ‘learning’ dynamics. in order to understand a ‘university’, we can examine the functioning of its individual structures, functions, processes and how they integrate into a functioning whole (in such an undertaking we start thinking of our own object-naming and defining as if it is ‘reality’, … as poincaré says, we start using the curves we have derived from the data, to correct the data.).

of course, all of this is ‘analytical inquiry’, wholistic analysis if you like. ackoff points out that the university in fact nests inclusionally within the community dynamic and that one must therefore START one’s inquiry from an outside-inward orientation, and the outside-inward and inside-outward inquiries (accommodative-assertive) combination is what we need to understand ‘university’. in the naturally evolving ontogenesis of the community-suprasystem (outer inclusionally nesting whorl) – university-subsystem (inner inclusionally nesting whorl), wherein there is no discrete way to separate the inclusionally nesting dynamical forms, it would not behoove us to start thinking of, and working on the ‘university as a system’ on its own, since it is in a resonant coupling with its supersystem (that’s another way of saying that the suprasystem and subsystem are not really ‘two things’, but it is a simplifying convention to consider them thus. we can ‘cheat’, meanwhile, if we reify the university as thing and reify the community as another thing, and reduce the inner-outer dynamic in-the-continuing-now to time-based ‘adaptation’. this is part of the process letting go of our thinking and getting lost in our thoughts. that is, the separation of the suprasystem from the subsystem is ‘not real’ and the imposed reframing in terms of absolute space, absolute time and ‘adaptation’ is not going to lead us to the same understanding as if we remained true to our experiential inclusion within the evolving space of now.

now, it is not only possible but an acculturated habit to stop thinking and get lost in our ‘thoughts’ and if the university seems not be working well, to examine its structures, functions and processes as if they constituted one whole system in-its-own-right, … ignoring the over-riding influence of the simultaneous mutually-defining accommodative-assertive (outside-inward – inside-outward) dynamical balancing. that is, the inclusionally nesting supra-system-subsystem dynamic sourced the emergence of the persisting coherent pattern that we hung the objectifying name-label ‘university’ on. thus, if the university ‘gets sick’, our tendency is to examine its internal processes, both in their subsystemic parts and in how the activities of these parts integrate into an overall ‘wholistic’ functioning. this is a radical over-simplification wherein we are mesmerized by our own language games since none of the parts are really independent and neither is the ‘whole system’; i.e. the university dynamic is a flow-feature that nests inclusionally within the evolving-in-the-now community hostspace.

can you imagine, if you applied this language-game-play to the human individual, and a person developed ‘psychological problems’, how those who wished to help would respond? that’s right, they would psycho-analyze the person and they would look for ‘chemical imbalances’ and ‘genetic predispositions to psycho-pathology’ (schizophrenia genes) and perhaps even viral cause, … all inside-outward oriented influences and would in most cases administer drugs that did what? --- give the experient of psychopathology a ‘chemical lobotomy’ that gives him a sense of detachment from his environment (lowers his sensitivity to outside-inward influences). they will try to return HIM to ‘normality’ overlooking the mutual outside-inward, inside-outward codefining of behaviour, … a normality that is the very source of his psychopathology, as heretic psychiatrists such as r.d. laing, Thomas szasz, peter breggin etc. maintain.

i am sure you are well familiar with the problem of ‘normality’ via the Jungian dialogue, … but just wanted to close the loop back to the notion of a ‘system’ and the problems with ‘wholism’ which is to be distinguished from ‘holism’ (while the former gives the idea of a ‘whole’ system in itself, the latter implies the hole-based interconnecting nested inclusion of whorls within whorls as in fluid dynamics.)

the issue of ‘normality’ is one of ‘framing’. the only way to consider that something exists and behaves in-its-own-right, since this has us think of its movements as ‘absolute’, is to impose an absolute frame (e.g. Euclidian space) which we don’t talk about (since it is an acculturated habit). when poincare points out that it makes no sense to say ‘ the earth rotates’, most people ‘do not get it’. his point is that we can only say that things move relative to one another, and in order to say ‘the earth rotates’ we are imposing an absolute space frame which we cannot ever devise an experiment to prove that it exists. the absolute space frame takes the place, in our mind, of the suprasystem dynamic; i.e. the accommodative quality of the dynamical hostspace that is the invisible, co-defining partner of the actualizing assertive potentials that are the visible part of our perception. when we say ‘the university acts’, … as if it did so in-its-own-right, … as in the case of ‘the earth rotates’, we are imposing an absolute frame for the university to sit in, and we are removing the invisible but very real outside-inward spatial-behaviour-guidance of the suprasystem within which the ‘system’ is inclusionally nesting. we do this so often and so automatically in OUR culture (the western culture) that what we think of as ‘reality’ is now populated by absolute objects or ‘systems’ (wholistic in themselves) that do their stuff within an implied but untalked-about invisible absolute space-frame.

in doing this, we purge the ‘yin’ (accommodative, feminine) from our real-life experience in the continuing now, and slip from ‘thinking’ to ‘thoughts’ which reduce our world to pure ‘yang’ (assertive, masculine) dynamics.

as you point out in regard to teeth, this yin/yang inner-outer dynamical balancing is going on within the body (as it is, at the same time, within the cells nesting inclusionally within the body and as within the molecules nesting inclusionally within the cells) as is implied by ‘holodynamical reality’ which manifests as whorls within whorls in fluid dynamics (bohm uses this fluid-dynamical analogy). as poincaré says, it is for the convenience of simplification that we impose absolute (Euclidian) space-framing (and universal time) to substitute for the feminine outside-inward aspect of the dynamical balancing act, thus reducing reality to pure yang terms of the assertive actions and transactions of material objects that we ‘see’ as acting in-their-own-right’, such as the human individual, the university etc. we trade away the feminine (we banish the Goddess) in exchange for ‘emptiness’, the infinite emptiness of Euclidian space which is now what 'holds in its embrace' a yang collective that claims authorship for everything.

[Christian B]

>>>'silence' is a kind of reactive nihilism as richard chia observes<<

When one identifies oneself with the intellect then silence of the intellect will seem like death. Post-modernism assumes that we are intellects. But what if the intellect is no more than an arm on a greater body? Which fool will ignore the body for the sake of the arm?

[Carol Massey]

[emile said:] as you point out in regard to teeth, this yin/yang inner-outer dynamical balancing is going on within the body (as it is, at the same time, within the cells nesting inclusionally within the body and as within the molecules nesting inclusionally within the cells) as is implied by ‘holodynamical reality’ which manifests as whorls within emile said: whorls in fluid dynamics (bohm uses this fluid-dynamical analogy). as poincaré says, it is for the convenience of simplification that we impose absolute (Euclidian) space-framing (and universal time) to substitute for the feminine outside-inward aspect of the dynamical balancing act, thus reducing reality to pure yang terms of the assertive actions and transactions of material objects that we ‘see’ as acting in-their-own-right’, such as the human individual, the university etc. we trade away the feminine (we banish the Goddess) in exchange for ‘emptiness’, the infinite emptiness of Euclidian space which is now what 'holds in its embrace' a yang collective that claims authorship for everything.

Yes, emile, I understand that, and though I use the example of the alignment of teeth, there are other factors that are surely determinents of their positioning as well. Bruxism (clenching of teeth) when a person is under great stress (of course it can also occur for mechanical reasons, such as malocclusion, the way the upper and lower teeth interdigitate when they occlude. The body then knows to grind off the high spots to alleviate extra stress on those teeth that are hitting prematurely. I think the body always seeks balance and when it recognizes stress, it begins to do whatever is necessary to restore it to balanced function. So I see that this grinding (bruxing) of teeth may be purely mechanical, or, it may be stress-related to another order of stress, for example, a stressed individual who may be a student in the university that is studying for final exams. The perhaps these are, as you describe, things nesting (and perhaps resonating) inclusionally.

Innate body intelligence has fascinated me for many years. Another example, from working experience and observation for 40 years. Teeth must know to move coronally (in the direction of the crown of the tooth. But their information must be very specific and consequently, limited. If wisdom teeth are horizontally impacted, still beneath bone, they will continue to move coronally, unfortunately, not knowing which way is up, they literally destroy the roots of the second molars in front of them because of the constant pressure they are exerting in their effort to erupt into the mouth.

This is very interesting what you are saying about the difference in our 'thinking' and 'thoughts'. Could it be that 'thought' is instinctive? whereas, 'thinking' is actually a process that involves communication between our arational (gut) feeling, and our rational mind, and perhaps, the goal is the ability to discern the best response in any given 'now' moment. If we revert to 'thought', rather than 'thinking' are we limited to reacting to life in ways that are instinctive rather than being able to respond? In the above story about teeth, would it be correct to say that teeth do not think, yet there may be thought (information) that informs the cells of their function? Now of course, I'm thinking of Rupert's morphic fields, and although I heard you when you said that he regards this field as 'out there', when I read him, I automatically think of it as in-ness...or hololistically, undivided inner and outer.

Just a little 'thinking' I wanted to share with you.

Christian, I don't know anything really about post-moderism, but I think the intellect is an asset. For all my intuitive/arational hunches, I depend on my rational aspect to make some order and sense of it.

[emile]

carol, though you say, ‘innate body intelligence’, your inclusion of outside-inward influences on the body (social stress) suggest that the ‘intelligence’ is not wholly owned/authored by the ‘body’ but may be a co-property of the evolving space of the continuing now; i.e. ‘things’ come and go but ‘space’ persists, ...whatever ‘space’ is (it can be ‘modeled’ in different ways).

i have used the term ‘somatic awareness’, intending, i think, the same thing as your ‘innate body intelligence’ but wanting to get away from the notion that the organizing is ‘being done’ by ‘the body’. it’s just a subtlety to try to avoid the warp that words can put on us. but of course, the listener may interpret ‘somatic awareness’ in the same ‘soma has the capacity for awareness’ way, ... rather than that the soma’s awareness derives from the space the soma is included in (the hurricane has somatic awareness in the sense that it is aware of its inclusion in the atmosphere).

this is the difference between ‘inclusionality’ and sheldrake’s ‘morphic fields’. i have been talking about dynamics in general, in seeing them in a different way, free from the mesmerizing pitfalls of ‘the language game’. i will say more on the sheldrake difference in a minute.

many people would say that the hurricane is inanimate and therefore cannot have the property of ‘consciousness’ or ‘awareness’, ... but my view is that there is no need to make distinctions within nature, in terms of the basic organizing influences. there are examples everywhere where so-called ‘inanimate nature’ self-organizes in amazingly ordered ways, ... and what does science do with these examples, ... it sets them aside and describes them as ‘special cases’, ‘anomalous behaviour’, ‘complexity’, ‘nonlinear dynamics’ etc. etc. what is covered by mainstream science is only the ‘linearizable’ stuff. newton’s laws of motion describe the movement of an individual planet but they do not explain the sustained harmony in the collective dynamic of sun and planets (and moons and asteroids).

so instead of arguing about the hurricane being able to be ‘aware’ or ‘not’, ... we can reflect on a possible different view of what ‘awareness’ means.

the hurricane ‘has its own center’ and it is sensitive to/responsive to the ambient dynamics and to its internal dynamics (its response emerges from a mutually defining from the actualizing of its assertive potentials and the accommodating backpressure of the space it is inclusionally situated in.)

because we name-label the hurricane ‘hurricane’ (or freda etc.), as if it were an ‘object’ (because we ‘objectify it), we end up talking as if it were capable of its own behaviour. but what we are really looking at is spatial transformation; i.e. the hurricane is not moving, space is transforming and the eye is continually reforming in evolving space of the present. could mistaken notion of ‘the hurricane moving’ could be a general folly attributable to the ‘language game’. here’s how einstein describes ‘objects-that-move’ thinking in terms of the primacy of the gravity field, as in relativity;
"We cannot build physics on the basis of the matter-concept alone. But the division into matter and field is, after the recognition of the equivalence of mass and energy, something artificial and not clearly defined. Could we not reject the concept of matter and build a pure field physics? What impresses our senses as matter is really a great concentration of energy into a comparatively small space. We could regard matter as the regions in space where the field is extremely strong. In this way a new philosophical background could be created. Its final aim would be the explanation of all events in nature by structure laws valid always and everywhere. A thrown stone is, from this point of view, a changing field, where the states of greatest field intensity travel through space with the velocity of the stone. There would be no place, in our new physics, for both field and matter, field being the only reality. This new view is suggested by the great achievements of field physics, by our success in expressing the laws of electricity, magnetism, gravitation in the form of structure laws, and finally by the equivalence of mass and energy."
there is no basic difference in the ‘geometro-dynamics’ here between einstein’s ball and the hurricane, only a difference in relative energy concentration; i.e. the hurricane has almost the same density as the enveloping/including weather-field while the ball has significantly higher energy density than the enveloping/including gravity-field and is thus relatively less sensitive to the ambiant dynamics.
frame.

in pool games where the balls guide their own interpermeations by the manner in which they open up passageways for themselves, and in landslides or when you dump soil out of your wheelbarrow, self-organization happens. for example the grain-sizes in a landslide sort themselves out during the movement to fluidize the movement, and like the inverted ‘V’ flying flock of wildgeese, go farther and faster for less energy expenditure. how do the rocks ‘know’ to do this? the engineers don’t know. they just know this very non-linear self-organizing behaviour ‘just happens’ and they’ve got a name for it, ... ‘acoustic fluidization’. apparently, resonances develop in the ‘flow-space’ which guide the behaviours of the diverse multiplicity of constituents in a highly ordered way.

we could say, on the basis of all of this, that;

1. the notion of ‘objects-that-move’ is a(n over-) simplifying convention. there is only space that transforms, though some flow-features sustain their dynamical forms with sufficient persisting stability and such differential energy-densities (reducing their ambient sensitivities/responses) that they are name-labelled and described as ‘objects in-their-own-right’.

2. spatial-relational resonances may arise from the relative movements of a diverse multiplicity of participating flow-features within a common space, guiding, ordering and orchestrating the behaviour of the individual participants relative to one another and the collective, resulting in highly ordered collective behaviour that the individuals did not ‘produce’ but ‘allowed to emerge’..

all that has been done here (in 1. and 2.) is to remove ‘objects’ from the model and therefore to remove constructions involving ‘the movement of objects. this is what relativity suggests. not only that, this fits with our real-life experience as in the crowded restaurant waiting for a ‘space’ to open up. cartoonists will exaggerate the wait by portraying the person waiting, in the follow-up picture, as a skeleton. not only is his awaited translocational movement ‘spatial transformation’, HE IS at the same time included in the spatial transformation.

sheldrake’s model seeks to achieve the same outside-inward influenced transformation, but sheldrake does not abandon objects. instead of allowing the objects to be the causal agents of transformation (morphogenesis), he inverts the causality and endows a new object, the ‘morphic field’, with the power to cause transformation. it is still a yang (causal) model but he has taken the yang power from the objects and given it to the newly defined ‘morphic field’ which imposes ‘form’ on the objects. in the following citation from an interview, there is no hesitation on his part to accept the ‘objects’ and his concern is instead with how THEY (the objects) transform, rather than accepting that the spatial dynamic transcends the notion of ‘objects’ and what we conveniently declare to be objects are spatial-relational flow-features (nestings of spatial resonances).

... continued...

[emile]

... continuation....

RUPERT: The theory of formative causation is concerned with how things take up their forms, or patterns, or organization. So it covers the formation of galaxies, atoms, crystals, molecules, plants, animals, cells, societies. It covers all kinds of things that have forms, patterns, structures, or self organizing properties.

You see, all these things organize themselves. An atom doesn't have to be put together by some external agency. It organizes itself. A molecule and a crystal are not assembled by human beings bit by bit, they spontaneously crystallize. Animals spontaneously grow. All these things are different from machines, which are artificially put together by human beings.

So, what my theory is concerned with is self-organizing natural systems, and it deals with the cause of form. And the cause of all these forms I take to be organizing fields, form-shaping fields, which I call morphic fields, from the Greek word for form. The original feature of what I'm saying is that the forms of societies, ideas, crystals and molecules depend on the way that previous ones of that kind have been organized. There's a kind of built-in memory in the morphic fields of each kind of thing. So the regularities of nature I think of as more like habits, than as things governed by eternal mathematical laws that somehow exist outside nature.

RMN: Could you give a specific example of, and describe the morphogenetic process in terms of, the development of a well-established species, like a potato, for example?

RUPERT: Well, the idea is that each species, each member of a species draws on the collective memory of the species, and tunes in to past members of the species, and in turn contributes to the further development of the species. So in the case of a potato, you'd have a whole background resonance from past species of potatoes, most of which grow wild in the Andes. And then in that particular case, because it's a cultivated plant, there's been a development of a whole lot of varieties of potatoes, which are cultivated, and as it so happens potatoes are propagated vegetatively, so they're clones.

So each clone of potatoes, each variety, each member of the clone will resonate with all previous members of the clone, and that resonance is against a background of resonance with other members of the potato species, and then that's related to related potato species, wild ones that still grow in the Andes. So, there's a whole kind of background resonance, but what's most important is the resonance from the most similar ones, which is the past members of that variety. And this is what makes the potatoes of that variety develop the way they do, following the habits of their kind.

Usually these things are ascribed to genes. Most people assume that inheritance depends on chemical genes and DNA and say there's no problem, it's all just programmed in the DNA. What I'm saying is that that view of biological development is inadequate. The DNA is the same in all the cells of the potato, in the shoots, in the roots, in the leaves, and the flowers. The DNA is exactly the same, yet these organs develop differently. So something more than DNA must be giving rise to the form of the potato, and that is what I call the morphic field, the organizing field.

* * *
our language invites us to objectify the world and then to build our models on the foundation of objects, and sheldrake takes up that invitation, yet there is plenty of evidence to suggest that objects are merely transient flow-features of the evolving living space of nature. sheldrake, having accepted the objectification of the world, attempts to explain transformation in terms of a reverse-engineered ‘morphic field’. bohm, on the other hand, speaks of a holodynamic which essentially dissolves objects into the same mutually-defining assertive-accommodative spatial-relational coherencies as in the jargon of ‘inclusionality’ (a jargon that seeks to avoid giving causal power to ‘objects’). talbot reviews the revised nature of ‘objects’ in bohm’s holomovement as follows;

“Bohm cautions that this does not mean the universe is a giant undifferentiated mass. Things can be part of an undivided whole and still possess their own unique qualities. To illustrate what he means he points to the little eddies and whirlpools that often form in a river. At a glance such eddies appear to be separate things and possess many individual characteristics such as size, rate, and direction of rotation, et cetera. But careful scrutiny reveals that it is impossible to determine where any given whirlpool ends and the river begins. Thus, Bohm is not suggesting that the differences between "things" is meaningless. He merely wants us to be aware constantly that dividing various aspects of the holomovement into "things" is always an abstraction, a way of making those aspects stand out in our perception by our way of thinking. In his attempts to correct this, instead of calling different aspects of the holomovement "things," he prefers to call them "relatively independent subtotalities.'' (meanwhile, the ‘spatial flow-feature’ intent is implied).

christian, in your comments on ‘the fallacies in modern thinking’, you suggest that many scientifically minded people are giving their theory god-like status and i agree. this is because they assume their theory to be describing and ‘governing’ our real-world reality. henri poincaré’s philosophy of ‘conventionalism’ on the other hand, points out that ‘objects’ and euclidian and non-euclidian space geometries are conventions we impose on mathematics and physics, without which, these sciences could not exist, but they are not imposed on nature. in other words, our scientific models are ‘talking to us’ and giving us practical help in navigating within nature, but the models of science are not imposed on nature, ... the fish in the school of fish does not move out of compulsion to follow the laws of the simulator or the laws of newton that pertain to individual dynamics, ... the fish allows its behaviour to be guided by the spatial resonances that emerge from the simultaneous mutually influencing movements of the collective he is included in (that stir the common hostspace), ... the same basic ‘acoustical fluidizing’ process that guides and complexly orchestrates the behaviour of rocks in the gravelly aggregate of a landslide. of course the fish’s movement will comply with newton’s laws, ... but that is trivial since such laws describe the movement of each individual, one at a time, relative to a fixed space frame, ... saying nothing whatsoever about the beautiful mutually defining collective motion that immerses him. imposing the fixed space frame is mathematical ‘trickery’ to strip an individual fish out of the school and make it seem as if he is moving in-his-own-right, when he is in reality being guided by the emerging shape of the hostspace dynamic he is immersed in.

the absolutism of religion (man-the-species is objectified in western religious doctrine, as is the individual person) is very closely aligned to the absolutism of objectifying science. in both cases, it constrains the explanation of complex behaviour to the actions of individual part(icipant)s (the divinely guided ‘self’ of western religion that is driven by an internal purpose of ‘doing good works’, rather than relaxing one’s divine ‘private agenda’ and letting oneself be guided by the sustaining of harmony in the common livingspace dynamic.

that is, objectification, either of the religious or scientific variety, since it encourages individuals to perceive their ‘self’ as independent and thus driven by their internal purpose, leaves individuals no room to let themselves be guided by the sustaining of harmony in the common livingspace dynamic, thus closing the door on self-organization as occurs in the holodynamical space of nature.

with respect to thought, thinking, intuition, instinct etc. there seems to be a need for reflecting on definitions, as in the case of ‘awareness’ or ‘consciousness’. in particular, since our sentient experience is confined to the space of now, ... it would be useful to differentiate between terms pertaining to inclusion in the evolving space of now and those terms which could be ported into the past or the future. when we look at things this way, we come back to the distinction (made by poincare, mcluhan and others) between object-referenced visual perception on the one hand and inner-outer felt (somatic) experiencing or ‘innate body intelligence’ on the other hand, the latter ‘acoustic space’ experiencing realm being that which enables spatial-resonance guided self-organization (sustained community harmony) while the former ‘visual space’ perception realm, by being in terms of ‘what individual things do’, cutting us off from our innate capacities for self-organization and forcing us to resort to imposed forms of order (control hierarchy).

it might be easier then, to differentiate between ‘thought’ (as in visual perception based constructs) which, being time-sequence based, necessarily stretch from past to future and do not confine themselves to the space of now, ... and, ‘included-in-the-space-of-now ‘acoustic space’ experiencing. at the informal team level, we give rein to inclusional experience and thus open the door to self-organization and sustained collective harmony, while in the language-based strategies and plans of visual space perception, we close the door on self-organization and collective harmony, and are forced to impose order on the collective.

[Carol Massey]

emile,

In considering the 'evolving space of now', would it be accurate to say that all 'concepts' of objective containers tend to put a lid on the 'acoustic hostspace dynamic', including morphic fields, memes, archetypes, alterverses, multiverses, heavens, hells, unconsciousness, past, future, ego, self, god, etc. IOW, any container that is utilized as something that tends to set us apart, projecting a portion of our being-ness 'outside' of a holistic, energetic, inclusionary, evolving, self-organizing system dynamic?

Of course, recognizing that we do function as individuals within boundaries, it is at least helpful to see as you explained several posts back, that these are simply arbitrary agreements between individuals, families, societies, nations, etc. and that they are the result of language based and visual perception.

If it seems that I'm parroting this back to you emile, well, I suppose I am, as I'm trying to understand and make the necessary adjustments in my thinking to accomodate the information you're sharing with me. Which I am very grateful for, BTW.

It isn't new to me, as I have always had an extremely open and fluid mind and my experience of being has included numerous events of what, heretofore, I would have labelled nonlocal phenomona...now I suppose I might call it a dynamic of hostspace conscious interaction.

Just feeling my way in the dark here.