For most of recent history, medical science has ignored 90% of the cells of our bodies. This is interesting for a vast array of reasons, but the most general observation is golden: our linguistic and analytical methods are often blind. Many of them »begin by throwing away most of reality... whether that be biological, relational, ideological... or linguistic. So here’s the thing. Our languages effectively prohibit some 96% of our possible intelligence. Our capacities for prodigy, insight, and discovery. These get replaced by habits that are blind, slave-like, and prone to defend themselves madly (because, secretly, our subconscious intelligence knows what’s going on, so when it is revealed, the conscious intelligence... goes to war to enforce its longstanding stupidities). I cannot teach you what you need to know about this in a block of text. But I can explain something simple. The »categories in our languages predispose our intelligence to see things in their image. But these images are too crude to contain what they claim to refer to. The basic classes are ‘thing’, ‘being’, ‘process’ and ‘unknown’. Things, which nouns effectively ‘tell us to see’ are understood as fundamentally separate, even when we refer to ‘living things’. ‘Beings’ are organisms, or, possibly, mysterious meta-beings. Processes are seen as effectively mechanical happenings we can analyze systematically. But most of reality does not fit in these classes, and will not. In fact, ‘things’ are not separate. They have a status that there is no class for in our language. A good example is ‘my brain’. Well, if you actually think about ‘my brain’ you discover that it is not very distinct from anything. In fact, my whole body is my brain, all of my relationships... my entire history, developmental, evolutionary... personal... the entire history of life on Earth is my brain. The SUN is my brain. Which brings us to another example. What is the Sun? In what simple class shall we contain this more-than-a-being-process-progenitor-object-way? Because, again, when you think about it, the sun preceded everything on Earth. Planets, places, living beings, minds, languages... sciences... religions. The sun is a class that »produces living worlds and minds. What class is that? But we call it the sun, think of it as ‘separate’ and pretend ‘it is an object-process’. Really? But the Sun is the progenitor of our »minds. Which class of object produces linked constellations of minds and living worlds? And every living thing and place... is like this. It is not a thing. It is more than ‘a being’. It is ceaselessly ‘pregnant’ and giving birth to new ways, lives, minds, and beings. No tree us ‘separate’. Where are the actal ‘edges ... of a ‘river’ which is, itself, »a living place and way? If we merely believe that our language is correct, and good, we will think that a brain is a separate thing in one’s head, and a river has definite boundaries, and is a distinct thing. But the water from the river... living water filled with life... is floating and sinking and being carried and ... consumed... is mist and seepage... the river is infinite. And more than merely alive. So I ask you to notice that our language falsifies identity. It tells us ridiculous things to see and think, almost incidentally... just by nature of its claim to completeness, separateness, and the strangely dangerous power of nouns. One last example: your body has no parts. That is a convenience of language. The ‘parts’ of an organism are fundamentally whole. Their distinction is secondary, and largely a matter of analytical import... problematically, when reified (when re-represented as concrete and true), people begin to think that they are, like machines, ‘made of parts’. This is absurd. Unities have precedence, especially in organismal form and activity. ‘Individuals’ are, like ‘parts’, largely a dangerous convenience of language.
Posted on: Fri, 02 Jan 2015 23:14:55 +0000
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