Hologram, Ecogram, Mandala, Part IV---Drawing Closer to Visionary LoveWisdom
We grapple—in this series of posts and overall, at this historical moment—with the possibilities for practice and realization that our culture makes less likely, and which language itself, in conjunction with our worldview and our style of consciousness and thinking, may seduce us into. In other words, certain experiences, insights, and general happenings or events become less likely in certain contexts of culture and consciousness, and language may contribute to the perpetuation of these limiting contexts. If “magic” is “real,” we may never experience it if we live in a culture and/or live with a consciousness that won’t allow us to experience that magic, and language may help keep that limiting culture and consciousness in place. We can put whatever we want in place of “magic”: Justice, spiritual realization, wisdom, love, beauty, equality, peace, as well as better alternatives to things like capitalism, “development,” and “progress”.
In general, profound philosophical realization demands from us the capacity to think a thought which, prior to the realization, we cannot think. And if our context also forbids that thought, and if language further forbids it, we face extra dimensions of challenge. We live in degraded ecologies—degraded ecologies of mind, degraded ecologies of soul, degraded ecologies of landscape. Those degraded ecologies struggle to offer us the fruit of insight, the medicine of healing, we so urgently need.
This becomes a tragic and crucial issue in the self-help catastrophe, and it reveals the shallowness of typical “law of attraction” thinking. One can find “law of attraction” gurus who have no shame in saying, “I always get what I want.” How boring. And also limited. If genuine spiritual growth means thinking a thought we cannot currently think, and if self-help and conquest consciousness (including its “spiritualized” forms, such as the “law of attraction”) leaves us stuck pursuing and “attracting” things we can already think, then these practices cut off our spiritual potential. They amount to more of the same: Pursuing our agendas, and thus perpetuating and furthering the pattern of insanity.
These approaches often tend to lack critical thinking, especially in relation to critiquing structures of power and domination, and in general skillfully thinking in/through/as larger ecologies of mind that include Nature and her beings (not only endangered species, but also marginalized and oppressed humans and non-humans—and thus also ourselves, here in the dominant culture, those lucky enough to have some forms of privilege, however meager it may seem at times, for all of us are Nature’s beings, and not the beings of the limited pursuits we tend to engage in, and every last privileged teacher and student of the “law of attraction” and other programs of the self-help catastrophe also functions under conditions of oppression, even as many of their actions effectively oppress others).
If we don’t learn how to develop a heightened emotional-rational experience, a refined form of thinking in/through/as an ecological, ecosensual awareness, then we will continue to reduce the appearance of ways of knowing that depend on such heightened states, states of achievement, consummatory states.
If our manner of doing science, running an economy, engaging in politics—and in general our manner of thinking, speaking, and moving—if all of that further rigidifies and reifies us into being cut off from more skillful, graceful and realistic ways of being and knowing, living and loving, we remain stuck, and the world remains at risk and continues to degrade.
If there is any flexibility in languages, and if they can either reflect and encourage (presence and cultivate) the ways of knowing and being that the world and its living ecologies demand of us, or reflect and encourage ways of knowing that can create negative side-effects and degraded ecologies, then we may see at least some of our troubles inscribed in the English language and other languages of the dominant culture.
David Bohm was interested in the connections between seemingly modest linguistic habits and seemingly revolutionary changes in worldview. How does language encourage bad views? How does it encourage a style of consciousness characterized by fragmentation and conquest? Here are some thoughts from Bohm’s Wholeness and the Implicate Order:
In the previous chapter it has been pointed out that our thought is fragmented, mainly by our taking it for an image or model of ‘what the world is’. The divisions in thought are thus given disproportionate importance, as if they were a widespread and pervasive structure of independently existent actual breaks in ‘what is’, rather than merely convenient features of description and analysis. Such thought was shown to bring about a thoroughgoing confusion that tends to permeate every phase of life, and that ultimately makes impossible the solution of individual and social problems. We saw the urgent need to end this confusion, through giving careful attention to the one-ness of the content of thought and the actual process of thinking which produces this content.
In this chapter the main emphasis will be to inquire into the role of language structure in helping to bring about this sort of fragmentation in thought. Though language is only one of the important factors involved in this tendency, it is clearly of key importance in thought, in communication, and in the organization of human society in general.
Of course, it is possible merely to observe language as it is, and has been, in various differing social groups and periods of history, but what we wish to do in this chapter is to experiment with changes in the structure of the common language. In this experimentation our aim is not to produce a well-defined alternative to present language structures. Rather, it is to see what happens to the language function as we change it, and thus perhaps to make possible a certain insight into how language contributes to the general fragmentation. Indeed, one of the best ways of learning how one is conditioned by a habit (such as the common usage of language is, to a large extent) is to give careful and sustained attention to one’s overall reaction when one ‘makes the test’ of seeing what takes place. . . .
In scientific inquiries a crucial step is to ask the right question. Indeed, each question contains presuppositions, largely implicit. If these presuppositions are wrong or confused, then the question itself is wrong, in the sense that to try to answer it has no meaning. One has thus to inquire into the appropriateness of the question. In fact, truly original discoveries in science and in other fields have generally involved such inquiry into old questions, leading to a perception of their inappropriateness, and in this way allowing for the putting forth of new questions. To do this is often very difficult, as these presuppositions tend to be hidden very deep in the structure of our thought. . . .
What, then, will be our question, as we engage in this inquiry into our language (and thought)? We begin with the fact of general fragmentation. We can ask in a preliminary way whether there are any features of the commonly used language which tend to sustain and propagate this fragmentation, as well as, perhaps, to reflect it. A cursory examination shows that a very important feature of this kind is the subject-verb-object structure of sentences, which is common to the grammar and syntax of modern languages. This structure implies that all action arises in a separate entity, the subject, and that, in cases described by a transitive verb, this action crosses over the space between them to another separate entity, the object. . . .
This is a pervasive structure, leading in the whole of life to a function of thought tending to divide things into separate entities, such entities being conceived of as essentially fixed and static in their nature. When this view is carried to its limit, one arrives at the prevailing scientific world view, in which everything is regarded as ultimately constituted out of a set of basic particles of fixed nature.
The subject-verb-object structure of language, along with its world view, tends to impose itself very strongly in our speech, even in those cases in which some attention would reveal its evident inappropriateness. For example, consider the sentence ‘It is raining.’ Where is the ‘It’ that would, according to the sentence, be ‘the rainer that is doing the raining’? Clearly, it is more accurate to say: ‘Rain is going on.’ Similarly, we customarily say, ‘One elementary particle acts on another’, but, as indicated in the previous chapter, each particle is only an abstraction of a relatively invariant form of movement in the whole field of the universe. So it would be more appropriate to say, ‘Elementary particles are on-going movements that are mutually dependent because ultimately they merge and interpenetrate.’ However, the same sort of description holds also on the larger-scale level. Thus, instead of saying, ‘An observer looks at an object’, we can more appropriately say, ‘Observation is going on, in an undivided movement involving those abstractions customarily called “the human being” and “the object he is looking at”.’
These considerations on the overall implications of sentence structures suggest another question. Is it not possible for the syntax and grammatical form of language to be changed so as to give a basic role to the verb rather than to the noun? This would help to end the sort of fragmentation indicated above, for the verb describes actions and movements, which flow into each other and merge, without sharp separations or breaks. Moreover, since movements are in general always themselves changing, they have in them no permanent pattern of fixed form with the rheomode which separately existent things could be identified. Such an approach to language evidently fits in with the overall world view discussed in the previous chapter, in which movement is, in effect, taken as a primary notion, while apparently static and separately existent things are seen as relatively invariant states of continuing movement (e.g., recall the example of the vortex). (34-8)
In his book, Bohm proposes experimentation with a mode of language—not a new language, but something recognizable as English, though in a mode of communication in which verbs predominate. He called this mode the rheomode, a theoretical notion developed on the basis of his philosophical and scientific insights (e.g. though we seem to practice and realize a Newtonian universe, we seem to live in a cosmos unlike that one—i.e., we actively practice delusion, and we call it a scientific view).
Interestingly, F. David Peat, a physicist and collaborator with Bohm, was later contacted by Leroy Little Bear of the Blackfoot Nation. Little Bear had noticed similarities between a vision of reality offered by quantum physics and the vision of reality offered in Blackfoot Culture, what we might call its scientific/philosophical dimension. Little Bear had also been looking into Bohm’s work, and thought that as a scientist he might be more open to sincere conversation about these resonances than many other establishment scientists.[1] Bohm agreed to meet with Little Bear and others, and as they spoke, Bohm began to learn a little about the Blackfoot language, he realized it sounded a lot like his rheomode, and he found their worldview resonant with his own.
Peat went on to write a book called Blackfoot Physics. He also wrote an article called, “Blackfoot Physics and European Minds.” Here is how he summarizes some of what he learned from the Blackfoot Elders:
. . . it could be objected that, unlike the arts, science is objective and, from a cultural point of view, value-free. It is for this reason, it is said, that indigenous and marginalized cultures cannot really co-exist beside industrialized nations and are doomed to extinction. I do not believe this is true. Traditional cultures have enormous power and may, in the end, act to transform or renew our own technological society.
My test case is that of the Blackfoot people, a nation who once occupied an area of the North American plains east of the Rocky Mountains but now today live in reserves in Montana, US and reservations in Alberta, Canada. By tradition, they were hunters of buffalo; travelling with their tepees in the summer and wintering along river banks. Their language is a member of the great Algonquin family which runs from the Cheyenne in the central US plains though the Blackfoot and up into northern Canada with Ojibway and Cree finally into the Naskapi of Labrador.
My encounter, as a representative of Western science, with the Blackfoot was neither systematic nor anthropological. It was more an ongoing friendship and a series of discussions about our respective world-views. In turn, this led to a number of circles in which Western scientists sat with Blackfoot and other Native American Elders. . . .
. . . they taught me that we all possess a similar capacity and buried deep within the European mind lies something that may be able to temper the momentum of our present path. We are all indigenous people, in the sense that each of us is the carrier of a sacred relationship to the natural world and has access to a wider vision of a reality long denied.
What is the nature of Blackfoot reality? Certainly it is far wider than our own, yet firmly based within the natural world of vibrant, living things. Once our European world saw nature in a similar way, a vision still present in poets like Blake, Wordsworth and Gerard Manley Hopkins who perceived the immanence and inscape of the world. Nevertheless our consciousness has narrowed to the extent that matter is separated from spirit and we seek our reality in an imagined elsewhere of abstractions, Platonic realms, mathematical elegance, and physical laws.
The Blackfoot know of no such fragmentation. Not only do they speak with rocks and trees, they are also able to converse with that which remains invisible to us, a world of what could be variously called spirits, or powers, or simply energies. However, these forces are not the occupants of a mystical or abstract domain, they remain an essential aspect of the natural, material world. It is not so much that the Blackfoot live in an extended reality but that our own Western vision had become excessively myopic.
This wider reality embraces flux, movement, change and transformation. The creator of the land, Napi (the Old Man), is also its trickster, one who is constantly changing form, traversing boundaries and upsetting preconceptions. For example, what the West takes as the aberration of multiple personality becomes the acceptance that an individual is not a fixed thing but fluid, a being whose multiplicity is reflected in the way a person’s name keeps transforming during their life.
How is one to maintain orientation in a universe in which everything is caught up in the river of transformation? How can anything be preserved from change? The answer lies in participation within the flux by means of acts of renewal. (566-7)
Little Bear and Heavy Head wrote an article called, “A Conceptual Anatomy of the Blackfoot Word” (2004). The title of the article deliberately evokes a tension, which we can contemplate here in relation to Peat’s reflections. The Indigenous authors write:
We chose to exploit this particular metaphor, the juxtaposition of anatomical conceptions as an instrument for describing and understanding other complex experiences, to illustrate an important observation: that this association indexes a fundamental theme at the very heart of Western culture, as evidenced in the structure and utility of the modern English language. The anatomy metaphor is not only attractive for the English speaker; it actually makes perfect sense to him . . . It seems fair to claim that the anatomical metaphor is something of a Western imperative, in that its influence in both thought and action entirely prevalent in all dimensions of their experience . . . Not all peoples make sense of the world in this way . . . (31)
They seem to see the English universe and the Blackfoot Cosmos as incommensurable, the former composed of “solids within solids,” and the latter a “flux dynamics of massive fluidity” (32). Thus, they say they cannot possibly explain Blackfoot in the medium of English, since the English language reflects so well a metaphysical orientation toward objects and analyses.
We should perhaps pause here to consider the entire sensibility of “analytic” “philosophy,” and perhaps ask ourselves if the whole thing is founded on and/or expresses bad metaphysical assumptions (even though some of its practitioners eschew “metaphysics”). The same goes for our analytical sciences, sciences that seek to isolate variables, sciences that put isolated rats in cages and isolated humans in brain scanners, sciences predicated on degrading ecologies to build fancy equipment and to capture and torture sentient beings in the name of “research” and “knowledge”.
As for Little Bear and Heavy Head, they seek to,
relay merely the existence of another intellectual tradition, one that could very well be of some relevance in contemporary discussions of such important concerns as the nature of cognition and the explanatory dilemmas of quantum physics. (32)
To do that, they say they need to thoroughly distance themselves,
from all of those familiar categories of language structure and, foremost of these, that which is known in the common form of English as the word. Our reason for this departure is that there simply is nothing of this order in the Blackfoot tongue. One could not argue, without considerable imposition, for the existence of any recognizable morphemes, lexemes, or sentences, nor of such classes as nouns and verbs. In fact, there must be very little carryover from science founded on Indo-European models of speech and thought if we are truly to approach any Blackfoot sense of meaning . . . (32)
They consider the example of the word “chair”:
One common Blackfoot equivalent of the abstract English singular “chair” is asóópa’tsisi . . . most directly transcribed to English as become-sit-facilitate-ing [note that it has four dimensions—n.p.]. There is nothing in this breakdown which could be equated with the static quality of the “chair” as known to the English speaker, and no indication of its concrete existence in a real world outside the human experience. It is not a noun (a thing) nor a verb (an interaction between a subject and either himself or an object). Instead, what we register in asóópa’tsisi is a facilitating event, logically interrelated and dependent upon a human event that is in-fact cited as an aspect of asóópa’tsisi as a happening. (33)
Consider how Little Bear and Heavy Head try and transcribe from Blackfoot a sentence that in English indicates something like “that boy brought this chair”: “by-way-of-transfer-move-ing that-familiar-ing young-yet-state-of-ing this-near-ing become-sit-facilitate-ing” (37).
Something in us may want to say, “Alright, but we still get the meaning.” What does it indicate when we want to close down like this? Why do we find it so tempting? Why do we have a hard time wonderstanding the difference a different worldview can make, in the most practical and intimate sense?
Interestingly, some of us may make fun of Benjamin Whorf for claiming that, to put it in crude terms, since Hopi language has no word for time, then the Hopi do not experience time. But why should we think that alternative experiences of time are not possible? Speaking from experience in the practice and realization of Indigenous ways of knowing, Little Bear and Heavy Head suggest that something inconceivable to conquest consciousness might arise in a liminal or ecosensual awareness with a different experience of life:
Upon thorough examination, it becomes apparent that time or tense, in the view position of the [“completed saying” linguistic structure], is experienced differently by the Blackfoot speaker than it is in the linear Western past-present-future ensemble. We could even go so far as to assert that there is no encounter with “time” (as such) in Blackfoot world view and, therefore, disclaim any existence of tense in the language. (34)
Little Bear and Heavy Head conclude their article with the suggestion that Western languages—perhaps, we could suggest, as a reflection of a style of experience or a style of consciousness—seem to create obstacles for the incorporation (in Nietzsche’s sense[2]) of the findings of contemporary physics.
They do not put it this way, but we might say we remain stuck in a Newtonian universe, even though our own science suggests that we live in a different reality. Without the capacity to practice-and-realize such a reality, to run the experiment of incorporation (the process of “getting it into our bones,” so to speak, getting it into our blood and guts, into our immediate responsiveness), we don’t really know that reality, and we haven’t entered it. We may claim to know about it, or claim to speak about it. But we ourselves remain stuck, and the general epistemology of practice-realization suggests this marks a direct, even if unintentional admission of ignorance. This is just a part of why Gregory Bateson wrote a memorandum when he was a University of California Regent that claimed the UC education is (like most education in the dominant culture) obsolete.
With the help of these suggestions, we can consider a rather puzzling passage from Dōgen:
Firewood becomes ash, and it does not become firewood again. Yet, we should not regard firewood as the before and ash as the after [of “some thing”]. Understand that firewood dwells in the reality place of firewood, which fully includes before and after and is free of before and after. Ash dwells in the reality place of ash, which fully includes before and after. Just as firewood does not become firewood again after it is ash, a human being does not return to birth after death.
We place it here as a seed to germinate, and we will look more carefully at it, and at its relationship to language and time, in the next post. And to finish this post, let us plant another seed from Dōgen, one that invites us into the vitalizing possibility of the nonduality of Word and World. We might read this passage as some kind of poetic suggestion, but that leaves out its more radical potential for us:
When you follow the sutras [sacred texts/teachings], when you investigate your own skin, flesh, bones, and marrow, and drop away your own skin, flesh, bones, and marrow, the peach blossom is pierced, arises, sees, and is seen by the eyeball, and the sound of bamboo thunders, hears, and is heard by the ear . . .
In general, when studying in accord with the sutras, the sutras truly arise. What we call sutras are the worlds in the ten directions, the mountains, rivers, and the great earth, the grasses, trees, self, other. They are eating meals and wearing clothes, moment by moment activity. When you study by following these sutra texts one by one, you discover that they are moreover unique sutras, manifesting and existing before you in thousands of tens of thousands of volumes, as if they had lines of written characters, their prayer-poems [gathas] of non-characters are manifest and evident. When you attain a meeting with them and study by lifting up and twirling the body and mind, you inevitably reach a place where there is understanding and there is benefit.
. . . . When you receive a sutra from someone and give it to someone else, it becomes the vital emergence of the eye, dropping away self and other. It is just the entrusting of “my marrow,” penetrating self and other. Because the eye, or “my marrow,” is not self and not other, buddha ancestors have authentically transmitted it since olden times and have entrusted it from right now to right now.
There is a sutra of a walking stick, expounding vertically and horizontally, crushing emptiness and crushing existence. There is a sutra of a whisk, rinsing snow and rinsing frost . . . . Following sutras in this way, you practice, realize, and attain the way . . . .
Thus, both following a teacher and following a sutra are following yourself. A sutra is not other than a sutra as yourself. A teacher is invariably a teacher as yourself. This being so, to visit teachers everywhere is to visit yourself everywhere. To take up one hundred grasses is to take up yourself. To take up myriad trees is to take up yourself. Study yourself that always endeavors thus. In this study, drop away, merge with, and realize yourself. (from Jisho Zanmai, the Self-Experience or Self-Verifying of Well-Put-Togetherness, or, Well-Put-Togetherness of Self-Experience or Self-Verifying, it is like the meditative state of self-arising experience, not dependent on subject or object, or the self-verification of the mystery of the cosmos by means of intimacy—the mystery verifying or experiencing itself; translation here adapted from Kazuaki et al.)
[1] Bohm suffered significantly from the politics, psychology, and bad philosophy one finds in academia, including science. His polite comments about it can be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QI66ZglzcO0 I myself was interested to hear about a fellow philosopher whose science bubble was burst not so long ago. This philosopher was so eager to go out among the scientists, to escape “the popes” of philosophy departments and finally speak with rational people fully committed to evidence. He found quite a mess. One researcher seemed to be keeping up a line of work he knew was going nowhere, but which was central to funding his lab. Another researcher kept a very good scientist out of key conferences, because they had been in a sexual relationship that turned sour. Another researcher seemed to be fudging data, but no one was sure enough to try and prove it, and the researcher had enough status that mere suspicion, however seemingly well-founded, would not suffice. All of this is rumor. But we can find accusations based far less on hearsay. For instance, Professor Ian Harris, an orthopedic surgeon, has written a book called The Ultimate Placebo, in which he argues that, while surgeons do not likely recommend surgery in any consciously manipulative way, the evidence for its benefits might be surprisingly less convincing than one would hope, given the risks and potential negative side-effects. Similarly, physician-scientist John Iannadis argued that so-called evidence-based medicine has become invaded by industry (see “Evidence-based medicine has been hijacked,” Journal of Clinical Epidemiology Volume 73, May 2016, Pages 82-86). The history of science shows there are more spiritual demands placed on the scientist than many of them are able to deal with, outside of spiritual/philosophical training. We speak of “science” as if it could exist outside of any context (ah, Dewey’s fateful error again), outside of ecologies that bring about the mutual development of science, societies, the scientists as full human beings, and the world they study and live in. Our whole inquiry again and again touches on this key notion: Science cannot exist in any rigorous or sustainable fashion except as part of a spiritual practice, a spiritual way of life in a spiritually rooted culture. The same holds for art and all other human practices. There is no “exclusively” human practice aside from our gifts to Nature, to Sacredness, as part of our participation, our fulfilling our ontological-ethical-aesthetic responsibilities.
[2] “To what extent can truth endure incorporation? That is the question; that is the experiment” (GS 110).