Fallacies of modern thinking

[Dancer]

So I guess what I am getting at is that the Fallacies you rightly refer to are based upon hidden assumptions some of which may be beneath our own belief systems?

Gordon.

[Christian B]

Emile,

you say "coherency-based center-of-self" - isn't it easier to say "individuality"? I believe that there is no need to use semi-scientific terminology and still mechanical terms from the theories about physical reality in order to describe human social behaviour.

If a criminal in a court of law says: "please judge everything is relative and non-Euclidian, hence I am not really an individual, so you cannot judge me, you must let me go."
Tell me should the judge let him go? If not why not?

[Christian B]

Gordon,

I am talking here about going beyond thought. Positivist, left, right, sceptics or believers, relativity, geometry, presumptions - it is all irrelevant. If one stops thinking and experience the Self, then one has the Knowledge. If you have not experienced this then what I am talking to you is only another "theory".

[emile]

christian,

popular usage of words such as 'individual' have not kept up with our scientific understanding, so my usage, although non-standard, complies with relativity, which the popular usage does not.

that is, there is no such thing as absolute motion/behaviour, therefore, there is no such thing as absolute behaviour, or behaviour of an 'individual' material entity in-its-own-right. what we have called an 'individual' entity is now a local intensification of the gravity field. the important implication here is that we can no longer 'isolate' the motion of a material entity (a local coherency in the gravity field) from the transforming dynamic of the gravity field. furthermore, in quantum gravity, the gravity field IS space, so that material entities are locally coherent spatial flow-features.

our treatment of the individual as having an 'absolute center' goes back to the parmenidean origins of western rational thinking wherein parmenides declared that the gods would not appreciate the fuzziness that mere mortals embraced (not to mention the fuzziness embraced by lau tsu and the buddhist and hindu traditions which parmenides was not familiar with though they were contemporaries that had developed alternative non-absolutist worldviews). we know of nothing, through our living experience that is absolute and in-its-own-right, and the absoluteness of individual self-centeredness is pure abstraction that we impose when we speak of an 'individual' as if it/he/she were some thing in-its/his/her own right. as poincare says, we impose it on our brand of science but it is not imposed on nature.

still, it is an abstraction-imposing tradition that we have grown very comfortable with, ... but you can hardly use that as an argument for its truthfulness, since it is not supported by our real-life experience.

i avoid that imposing of absoluteness by using the phrase 'coherency-based center of self' and it is easily seen, from the metaphor of the hurricane, that this satisfies the geometry of relativity wherein the 'object' is a feature included in the field dynamic; i.e. its apparent independence is based on its having a center of coherency, like a whorl in fluid dynamics. this makes an important difference as to how we think of our movements/behaviours, since if we think in terms of our movements being absolute (our having an absolute center of self), then our behaviour is 'independent' of the behaviours of others and other things, but if we think of our behaviour in terms of a transformation of the space we are included in, a common space that we all share, this leads to a different way of behaving where we allow ourselves to be guided by the dynamics of the enveloping space, ... as we do when we are driving in a crowded cluster of cars within a busy traffic flow; i.e. we are aware that we are all simultaneously mutually influencing one another through our relative movements, and we let our behaviour, in this case, be guided by the transforming geometry of space, wherein we are moving into openings as we we are making openings for others to move into. the mediating geometry of space, co-created by the multiple participants becomes the behaviour authoring source here, and there is no way, mathematically, to back out the causal behavoural contribution of the 'individual'. 'individuality', in the context of 'behaviour', is blurred to 'co-participating' in the geometro-dynamical transformation of space.

that is, when we have 'relaxed' our sense of behaving absolutely that comes from referencing a perceived absolute center of self, we are now participating in a 'three body+ dynamic' of simultaneous mutual inflluence, that can no longer be de-constructed into terms of the behaviours of individuals (newton recognized this basic dynamical fuzziness between space and individual material objects and avoided having to deal with it, as is recorded in his letters to bentley).

so, your usage of 'individual' is an obsolete but resistive habitude deriving from the absolutist greek tradition which feels comfortable for us westerners after 2500 years of use, but which flies in the face of our real-life experience, even the common experience of navigating within a busy flow-space, as a pedestrian, vehicle driver etc. cannot support it.

also, i am surprised that you would use a court of law or the justice system to arbitrate on such philosophical subtleties as the nature of individuality. the courts are as deeply ensconced in the absolutist greek abstractions as any of our western traditions, being forced to de-construct complex interdependent behaviours of collectives into terms of 'the behaviours of individuals' which is impossible in general, as just described in terms of three+ body dynamics. and if you cannot deconstruct the behaviour of a collective into terms of what each individual 'did', then how can you judge one person to be causally responsible and others 'innocent' for an emergent behaviour within a collective dynamic?

to deconstruct complexity and say that we understand the contribution of each individual to an emergent behaviour is a simplification that we impose on our mental modeling, that is not imposed on the natural reality of the situation. the skier does not really 'cause' the avalanche, he merely triggers it since the general case is that potential energy relationships build up over time and are released suddenly, often by a small 'butterfly' effect. it is our western tradition, born of our desire to identify 'the causal agent' (guilty party) and to ignore the building up of tensions over time, thus we identify the culprit on the basis of who's holding the smoking gun.

if you are driving in traffic and someone wiggles around a bit, that wiggle may gradually amplify and escalate until cars are swerving and screeching and when a car with a baby on board swerves into your path, you swerve to avoid it and hit another car. when the dust settles, there iis just your car and the car you have hit, plus the police, of course. according to the way our traditions work, the judge will forcibly deconstruct this complex dynamic (starting from the crash and working backwards in time) and assign CAUSAL responsibility to you who are holding the smoking gun; i.e. the front of your car is bashed in and the rear of the other car is bashed in, indicating that 'you hit him'. but this after-the-fact deconstruction fails to acknowledge the prevalence of the three+body nature of the dynamic, prior to the emergence of the conflict, a dynamic that cannot be deconstructed into 'individual behaviours'.

you might have been the most thoughtful and most skilled driver in the bunch, but the way such conflict emerges is not predictable and subject to sensitive dependence on initial conditions.

the problem involves relative 3+body motion (simultaneous mutual independence) and cannot be solved in euclidian coordinate space, but the judge is going to use euclidian space framing even if it is not appropriate and as he backs up the clock-time from time of the collision, you are going to emerge holding the smoking gun.

someone in the car you hit may have died and the relatives are crying out for justice. the dead person was from the town the accident occurred in and you are a stranger to these parts and your skin colour and ethnicity is very different. the townspeople swarmed around the two cars after the fact and could see for themselves that you caused the accident and that you killed their beloved friend, a brilliiant and beautiful young girl who had a great future ahead of her. why did you have to be driving so fast, beyond your capability to control your vehicle, as is evident from the crime scene.

should the judge let you go? if so, why so?

[Dancer]

I see however Krishnamurti also wanted to do this however his was also to give up knowledge in relation all world views including those you have expressed.

The problem is that are you really going beyond thought or is that merely another kind of thought?

You appear to have changed the subject from the fallaices of thought to beyond thought, my argument is that how much is beyond thought a fallacies in it's self?

Gordon.

[Christian B]

Dancer,

You say: "The problem is that are you really going beyond thought or is that merely another kind of thought?"

Yes, talking about it is just another kind of thought. But doing exercises to achieve this state of consciousness is activity which can lead to an experience of being beyond thought. If one experiences this strongly enough, one can then by will choose to detach oneself from any ideas when necessary. So the being precedes the linear mind.

One of the fallacies of the modern mind is to believe that there is nothing more subtle than the mind. Since you are questioning if thoughtlessness is just an another thought, it seems that you are committing this particular fallacy? Obviously you did not think about this much because if you did then you would remember many occasions where you were fully aware and had no thoughts.

[emile]

christian, ... re your answer to dancer on 'thought' and 'awareness'.

while i agree with your position that awareness goes beyond thinking, ... the issue of 'individuality' is involved.

what is the nature of the aware, unthinking self? ... the 'headless self' as the zen buddhists say, ... the 'self' that is 'one with the cosmos'?

this self is not like the ego-self which is centered in itself, ... the aware self is the nameless niche/receptacle in the world dynamic.

before the center-possessing coherency emerges (e.g. the hurricane in the atmospheric space) there is just the dynamical space, and when the hurricane has emerged, we can name it and start describing it in terms of 'its' behaviour. if you were a hurricane, once you started talking about yourself, what your name was, and what you were doing, you might start believing that this was the 'real you', ... this self-centered thing that did what it chose to, as if in its own 'independent' right.

but your aware self would know that you were simply an inner-outer relational flow-feature in the dynamical atmospheric space,... your aware self would be the simultaneous flipside-self that understood you as part of the overall space without having to name-label and describe what you, the ego-self, claim to be 'your actions' (actions which really belong to the space your ego-self is included in).

thus, 'individuality' can come in two ways, from ego-centric thinking and from space-based (one-ness with the cosmos-based) awareness that is beyond ego-centric thought, ... though the term 'individuality' is not very appropriate for awareness that is one with the cosmic dynamic.

relativity won't let you 'detach' the individual from the space-flow-dynamic that it/he/she is included in. to name-label a particular thing and start describing its behaviour in self-center based terms (ignoring that it is included in the enveloping/including space-dynamic) is a simplification that we impose on the basis that it is more convenient (Poincaré). we could forget the name label we imposed on the hurricane and forget the description of 'IT'S' behaviour and revert to describing the behaviour of atmospheric space (if we had name-labelled three vortices in the same space, which would all be simultaneously mutually influencing one another, ... if they diverged, they would be converging at the same time (three points in the space on the surface of a sphere diverge when they are converging).

relativity allows no such thing as individuality in a self-centered dynamical sense, it is only an imposed allusion based on 'ego-centric thought'. awareness of our inclusion in the dynamical space of now dissolves the notion of detached individuality.

[Dancer]

Obviously you did not think about this much because if you did then you would remember many occasions where you were fully aware and had no thoughts.

Not at all, I was merely piotning out the limits of both our thoughts and action or lack there of?(playing devils adovcate if you like)

Thoughtlessness, Hmm I thought we where talking about beyond thought surely in this chages things in that one context implies the other(ie thought)?

However if you have merely made an error in your wording and you meant to say 'beyond', then you too are falling into the same trap as me are you not, be defining the undefinable?

chow
Gordon.

[emile]

the thought that one might have an anxiety attack can bring on an anxiety attack if the person cannot 'let go' of that thought.

in pavlov's experiments with conditioned reflexes in dogs, the sound of a bell ringing can make a dog salivate. the dog has been conditioned by always ringing a bell just before his food is given to him. after that, the dog 'thinks' that food is on its way when the same bell is rung.

clearly, there is a state of awareness that is 'operative' and that is disturbed by thought; i.e. .thought is not the basis for itself. it does not stand on-its-own in empty thoughtlessness space, it is a disturbance to our awareness. unfortunately, our natural faculties for restoring our awareness to attunement with the dynamical space of now (the only place we live and experience) has atrophied and we are almost enslaved by thought (thought is past-present-future linear time-based while awareness is timeless, putting us in touch with our inclusional participation in the evolutionary dynamics of the space of now).

in neurofeedback, the person troubled by anxieties learns to return to a state of relaxed sensory awareness (e.g. to avoid an anxiety attack that comes from worried thinking about having one) . the way one does this is to restore the over-riding presence of SMR brainwaves so that the Beta waves associated with thinking are overwhelmed. one cannot rationally 'think' one's way out of 'thinking', one has to 'feel' one's way into another aware state, ... .and people who have gotten into touch with (have learned how to change their neural wave patterns) describe how this FEELS. for example, one person says it feels like the moment after you have tossed a tennis ball up to serve it, and just before you actually whack it, ... the feeling is that pregnant kind of relaxed pause. by watching and listening to your neural wave patterns and playing around with letting yourself FEEL different ways, you can see/hear how your neural wave patterns change and you can 'uptrain' SMR frequencies so that you are very aware but without focused thought. a friend said that she lets herself feel the way she feels when talking sweet nonsense to her parrot in order to bring up her SMR.


* * *
BETA (13 - 38 hz) -- full consciousness: Beta frequencies are associated with alertness and intense mental activities like performing calculations or logical analysis.

ALPHA (8 - 12 hz) -- subconscious: Alpha waves typically occur in relaxed awareness states, daydreaming or smooth, rhythmic athletic activities. A relaxed, euphoric, effortless feeling often accompanies this state.

SMR (12 - 14 hz)-- relaxed state of awareness: SMR waves are associated with sensorimotor activities accompanied by relaxed awareness along the transition from subconscious feeling to conscious visual information orientated thinking.

THETA (4 - 7 hz) -- light sleep: Theta waves are associated with sleep and dreaming, with deep unconscious imagery and deep former experiences rising to the surface of conscious processing.

DELTA (0 - 3 hz) -- deep sleep: Delta frequencies are strongest in deep sleep states without dreams and have a restorative effect.
* * *

many people in our culture think that their behaviour is purely their own behaviour and that their thoughts are purely their own thoughts. this happens because we impose the notion of absolute euclidian space on our mental models. in fact we are included in the dynamical space of the contiinuing now, ... so that when we are doing nothing (the state of 'inaction' as compares with the state of 'thoughtlessness'), we are sustaining dynamical balance with the world dynamic we are included in. standing still on the deck of a ship, we may call 'inaction', but it is sustaining balance with the dynamical space we are immersed/included in,... and such balancing is going on on many levels, even when we are in a coma.

so 'actionlessness' and 'thoughtlessness' are states where we revert to sustaining balance with the ambient dynamics we are included in, ... and 'actions' and 'thoughts' are intrusions into these conditions of dynamical balance. when we start to walk forward on the deck of the boat, we lean forward and become unbalanced and then our feet have to move forward too, to keep us from falling over. the same for thinking, when we start thinking, our awareness is no longer in relaxed balance, and our awareness becomes pre-occupied with its imbalances and trying to restore balance, but thinking is unbalanced awareness and it cannot restore balanced awareness; i.e. balanced awareness is the condition of thoughtlessness.

as relativity implies we are not stand-alone entities, our actions are not 'independent' and neither are our 'thoughts' independent since they represent disturbances to our awareness, and our awareness is continually seeking balance with the dynamics of the space we are immersed in.

in our conversations, because we have forgotten that we (westerners), since roughly 500 b.c. impose absolute framings on everything, ... .we treat 'action' and 'thought' as if they were entities that exist in-their-own-right. this 'euclidian' perception is a majory fallacy of modern thinking (dominated by the western mindset) that is the source oof much social dysfunction or, as bohm says, 'incoherence'.

it crops up everywhere, including in discussions that seek to go beyond our culturally constraining habits, but have trouble breaking free.

[Dancer]

[emile]the thought that one might have an anxiety attack can bring on an anxiety attack if the person cannot 'let go' of that thought.

everyone protects there world views this is a fundamental problem, from which sides polarize and become fixed.I woulsdn't use Pavlov's experiment apart from the lack of agreement among Psychologists, it is too Mechanistic.

I like to come back to Chris as we seem to have moved the debate from world view and possible solutions to the process of being or becoming?

If this is the case then I would like to know before we carry on which we are talking about or perhaps how Chris relates them?

Gordon.

[claireatcthisspace]

I will reply to this interesting discussion quite soon.

Claire

[Christian B]

"many people in our culture think that their behaviour is purely their own behaviour and that their thoughts are purely their own thoughts. this happens because we impose the notion of absolute euclidian space on our mental models." - Emile

I believe that you are making wrong connection here, and that right way of thinking is to realise that ALL verbal, therefore linear, thinking has a mechanical component. Relativity states that the speed of light is constant, so it is no less "absolutist" then Newtonian cosmology. Whenever we elevate physical theories into cosmologies we are killing the truth (life). You personally might find inspiring to speak in terms of relativity, non-Euclidian geometry and vortexes with "centres", but for me this is maybe good in some philosophical discussions but not as a general way of explaining human relationship. Physical theories have little place in social science; they are still too banal, too mechanical. Who is going to change his destructive ways of behaving after hearing about non-Euclidian geometry? If one repeats these words too often then this might become another kind of imprisonment.

You are right about the FEELING which brings another state of mind. If we know how to enter the state of mind without thought, which we for a lack of a better word call thoughtlessness, we can then use the thought as an instrument of our being more freely and creatively. In a thoughtless state there is no world-views hence there is no fear of not being always right. This is not preaching, just as telling people that they should go to sleep when they are very tired is not a religion, but reality of human nature.

At present most of us are imprisoned by thoughts, we are slaves to them. In an advanced spiritual environment one could spontaneously learn hot to grow out of this imposition, but in the world as it is now, I am afraid, one has to do quite determined exercises in order to achieve such state. I would argue that humanity is underachieving, somehow the process of maturation is stopped about the age of adolescence and most of us stay trapped in our superficial thoughts which by virtue of their continual repetition form a cage of mind. This cage then attempts to explain the world in its own terms and fails of course, for the world in its essence is life and not just a thought.

So we are energy-wasting, convoluted thought-machines which try to recover our lost souls or spontaneity through a greedy consumption. We seek satisfaction, but only satisfaction which comes from within can melt the cage of mind and bring refreashing spontaneity which Yogi Tilopa mentions (among many others).

The fact is that spiritual teachers have discovered this natural truth, hence they set an example for all. But the cage of mind, ego, is just too arrogant, too adolescent to follow the good examples set by the liberated ones – everything has to be done “My way!”, but “my way” is usually no way at all, it is just walking dead and mumbling “Who are you to tell what I should do!”

The ego is angry that it does not rule the world, but since such world is only a figment of imagination, it can never be ruled by believing in its reality. The ego is in a magic circle by trying to conquer its own creation, by investing more thoughts into it and making the imprisonment even deeper. The way out, therefore, is to withdraw into pure being and let the dream of the material world dissolve ...... until the next adventure.

[emile]

christian, we both use words to share our views, though words are not adequate for the conveying of our felt experience.

thus, i do not defend my physics-based words, and physics is not, for me, a cosmology to be believed in. like poincare, original author on the principle of relativity, i believe we impose 'conventions' on our mental models of reality that are not imposed on nature, and thus my remarks can be construed more as stimulants to 'unlearning' (dissolving the cage we have put ourselves in) rather than 'learning'.

as poincare says, we say that 'the earth turns' because it is convenient to say so, ... but in saying it, we make it seem as if the earth moves in-its-own-right, and what it moves with respect to is left in the lurch. at other times, we say that the sun and planets move relativity to one another and the collective of sun and planets, ... the case of multiple entities moving under one another's simultaneous multiple influence. clearly, this latter view does not permit us to say 'the earth turns' and just leave it at that, since the movement of the earth is bound up in a collective movement that cannot be solved in terms of knowing the movement of an individual participant.

like many others, i was taught to think in terms that things, including myself were capable of movement/behaviour in-their-own-right. that i have assimilated an oversimplified convention and confused it with the dynamics of nature is a reality i have to deal with, and a reality we have to deal with since western education continues to leave this impression in one's mind. johannes kepler made this point back in the 15th century;

"As regards the academies, they are established in order to regulate the studies of the pupils and are concerned not to have the program of teaching change very often: in such places, because it is a question of the progress of the students, it frequently happens that the things which have to be chosen are not those which are most true but those which are most easy. And by that division in things which makes different people form different judgements, it so happens that certain people are in error contrary to their own opinion."

if one feels that we have gone too far in imposing the convenient simplifying assumption of the independence of things, which in turn implies that space is absolute, since if things move in their own right, we have reduced the space they do it in to absolute emptiness that has no influence on them.

when i was born, i knew none of this, ... after a western upbringing, i know it and use it without even being aware of it, ... until, ... in reflecting on the nature of things and the incoherence of some of my/our cultural assumptions, ... my inquiry leads me back to these basic assumptions that i never even knew i made, ... that came bundled into the teaching i received, ... embodied in the social dynamics of the cultural space i live in.

what i am saying is that these assumptions of space and time embodied in the ways and in the teachings of the culture i live in, undoubtedly have an influence on my social behaviour and so, instead of calling them 'physics', we could apply a more general label such as "learned foundational concepts that influence social behaviour".

where you say;

"Whenever we elevate physical theories into cosmologies we are killing the truth (life). You personally might find inspiring to speak in terms of relativity, non-Euclidian geometry and vortexes with "centres", but for me this is maybe good in some philosophical discussions but not as a general way of explaining human relationship. Physical theories have little place in social science; they are still too banal, too mechanical. Who is going to change his destructive ways of behaving after hearing about non-Euclidian geometry? If one repeats these words too often then this might become another kind of imprisonment."

.. you are not speaking about me, ... only about your interpretation of me and my intent. like poincare, i accept that many of our foundational notions, such as that of the geometry of space, and the relationship between ourself and others, are 'conventions' and we choose them for convenience, ... as he says, we can impose these conventions on our mental modeling sciences, but they are not imposed on nature. i quote poincare not because 'i trust that he is right', .but because he has formulated in a clear way, what is intuitive to me, what 'resonates' with my life experience, the sole source of truth.

~^~ continued ...

[emile]

... continuation~^~


note that i do not use physics to make explicit explanations about 'what life is all about', ... my references to physics are about unlearning what we are all taught, both in school and through total immersion in our cultural dynamics.

many people do not think about the fact that their culture has imbued certain foundational assumptions into them that influence their mental models of the world and thus influence their social engagement with the world. you say: 'physical theories have little place in social science', ... and i say, that by whatever name you want to call them, these foundational assumptions about space, time and the independence (or interdependence) of things such as ourselves, which are very different depending on the culture one is raised in (e.g. native american cultures believe that all things are related, as relativity implies) do indeed have a profound impact on social dynamics.

so, perhaps we can agree that in the process of our acculturation, we allow our way of thinking to be imbued with certain foundational assumptions, and that in the western culture unlike the native american culture, for example, one of these foundational assumptions is the 'absoluteness' of space (i will retract 'Euclidian' which is a formal term for the same thing and implies five mathematical postulates, which are not needed in my statement).

do you believe that people's behaviours are 'independent', ... that we each act in-our-own-right? because if you do, the implication is bundled in with this belief that the dynamical space we are immersed in does not participate in our behaviour, ... or, ... in other words, that space is absolute.

i notice that your statements seem quite 'judgemental', and this ability to detect good and bad in others is also related to the notion that we are independent, ... otherwise, if we believe we are all related, you could not say that someone 'out there' was bad or defective in their behaviour, without acknowledging that something inside of you is bound up in that bad behaviour that is going on out there (i.e. 'we are all related'). e.g. the feeling of badness when we look upon others is a feeling that brews up within us that we project onto the others. that is, you write;

"The fact is that spiritual teachers have discovered this natural truth, hence they set an example for all. But the cage of mind, ego, is just too arrogant, too adolescent to follow the good examples set by the liberated ones – everything has to be done “My way!”, but “my way” is usually no way at all, it is just walking dead and mumbling “Who are you to tell what I should do!”

you speak as if you are not 'one of them', the 'walking dead', but that you are instead one of those that has listened to the spiritual teachers and become more enlightened than them. i am using the logic of mutual exclusion in this comment 'more than them', but i am not making a cosmology out of it, ... it is just a convention of convenience, ... or is it? do you believe that you and those 'others' are mutually exclusive?

i don't have anything against 'spiritual teachers' but i think that the proof of the pudding is in the eating. insofar as the spiritual teaching accomplishes enlightenment, this is fine, because enlightenment is surely something that transcends the words, books, chants, incense, mantras, music, dance, ... used to get there (jesus used his bodhisattva life to induce spiritual enlightenment) . so does it make sense to say that the spiritual teachers are teaching but many are not listening? how can they then be teaching? it is like a comedian who gets no laughs who says that his material is topnotch but that he has been getting bad audiences.

my writing is not about 'showing people the way'. my writing is about sharing how i accepted, along with the good-will and loving teaching that i received in growing up and through school and university and employment, ... hidden, unstated foundational assumptions about space, time and individuality. later, as kepler said, i became aware that i was often "in error contrary to my own opinions". that is, i was talking and acting socially as if i was independent while i was saying that i agreed with poincare that the geometry of space was a convenient convention that we imposed on our scientific mental models.

something had to give. i either had to say that it was a divinely revealed truth that space was absolute so that i could see myself and my behaviour as in-my-own-right, because i certainly could not prove it, it is unprovable (it requires a 'divine viewpoint'), ... or accept that it was merely a convention i imposed on the world, in which case, i could equally impose the convention of spherical space geometry which matched my actual life experience far better; i.e. i live and experience in the dynamical space of now, as people like eckhart tolle ('power of now', 'stillness speaks') are expressing so clearly,... and in his case, tolle does mention relativity and quantum mechanics as supporting evidence for the coherency of the ancient thinking (he has a buddhist spiritual training background).

as in my example of neurofeedback, unlearning can proceed by simply feeling one's way into a condition beyond that of rational entrapment. i would imagine that you could relate to this sort of approach, to giving oneself up to the spiritual teachings and the spiritual training ritual. where you write;

"the cage of mind, ego, is just too arrogant, too adolescent to follow the good examples set by the liberated ones – everything has to be done “My way!”, but “my way” is usually no way at all, it is just walking dead and mumbling “Who are you to tell what I should do!” "

, .. i would say that that ego is not present in all cultures in the same way, certainly not in the sense of individuality of 'the American Dream' type, where one is encouraged to 'do one's own thing' as if we were not bound up in a common dynamical space, that over-ridingly gates and shapes the actualization of our assertive potentials, ... as if we are all individuals in-our-own-right in an absolute, non-participating space. of course, together with this, the notion of a 'declaration of independence' of a nation in a clearly INTERdependent global community of nations further ingrains this unnatural primacy of the abstract and absolute over the experiential.

my sharing relates to unlearning that which we have learned unawarely and did not know we knew, it being embodied in our inventory of western metaphors and models of 'how to behave' and 'how to interpret behaviour' etc. i was drawn into this discussion by the title you gave it; 'the fallacies of modern thinking'.

maybe i should have qualified that i was commenting on 'the fallacies of the foundations of modern thinking'. to quote a physicist, heisenberg i think, ... 'we must include the tools of our inquiry in our inquiry'. unfortunately we were never taught what the foundational tools/conventions were, but learned them in a package deal. when we are encouraged to do our best in spite of our fellows losing when we 'win', and when we are taught to write our resumes as if we are fully the authors of our assertive behaviours (that the accommodative quality of the dynamical social space we are in doesn't have to be tied in), we are being infused with low-level foundational teachings at the same time, the foundational teaching that space is absolute and the things are independent and behave in-their-own-right. as stephen jay gould says, in trying to point out the widespread belief in the fallacy 'survival of the fittest',, ... we are taught that hitting can be value-ranked, rewarded and used to empower, ... without being warned that 'hitting' and 'fielding' are a bipolar (assertive-accommodative) unity and cannot be split apart..

'the cage of the mind' is as strong as it is, because it is embodied in our everyday western cultural practices from youth through adulthood and we have assimilated it unawarely through our acculturation.

i'd say there is a case for becoming aware of what it was that we unawarely learned and for unlearning it. since it is to do with the nature of space, time and matter (and thus social space dynamics), i have chosen terminology of physics to speak to the issue, but i am in no way making physics into a cosmology or belief system. perhaps, if you could look at it this way, there would not be so much of a judgement of 'the walking dead' but more compassion for young children whose trust in their parents, teacher and culture (and ditto for them who were similarly exposed in childhood) opened them up to 'brainwashing' at the level of those bootstrap routines that bring up the mindscreen framing and cursor to the ready that marks the point at which one believes one is starting one's 'own' thoughtwork.

[Dancer]

I willing answer emile once I have fully disgest it.

This is good have we have as a group changed the course of the explicate conversation.

I think both of you are right about the restrictions of language, in fact I would say that this can be seen from 2 Philosophers who grappled with what they thought where similar questions?

For instance if Heidegger was alive he have said that Bohm’s theory was merely an Ontical rather than a pure ontology structure. Where as with Hegel this would have been one in the same. But it’s real a question of language and the meaning you give to the word in question, sometimes a single word is not enough.

This is another reason why I believe that Heidegger makes a mistake about Hegel’s idea of ‘pure being’, he seem to believe that they start from the one in the same questioning or premise…however I don’t believe they do in that Heidegger’s ‘Being’ is not related to beings (entity’s) directly or even deduced in the same way as the Hegel ‘pure being’ is it it’s moments (entity’s). In fact I think even if you except Heidegger’s Being you can still have pure being as some abstraction indeterminate being that is indirectly defined just as the beings are that are determined by it.

Social theories
As for the link between Physical theories and social science you right that the former is too mech...however that does not mean that there is not a link between the two...This sounds like Hume who once said that you can't get an ought to from and is.

That may be true if you are looking to predicate emergance of moral rules from a set of axioms or physical properties all of which have some kind of hierarchical structure....which seem impossible.

However that does not mean we can't have emergence explainations, that dont need to be predicted from anything, but simpley have indirectly relations.Perhaps from something that is organic or without a hierarchical structure.

I personally don't believe that there is a universal truth, or even that truth it's self may be something purely regarded by Humans. I am also not sure whether there is a end to the exploration of Reality.

It like (for purely argments sake) living in and being a part of a simulation, no matter what experimental test you perform or what you think or do not think you will never prove whether or not you are within a simulation, because your thoughts actions are all a part of it as well?

Gordon ( within me myself and I)