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Idle No More movement urged to remain grassroots ahead of January 11 protests

Thu, 01/10/2013 - 14:42 -- Anonymous (not verified)

From Straight - by Stephen Hui

Stephen Harper meeting not the end of Idle No More, local organizer says

Although Prime Minister Stephen Harper is preparing to meet with a delegation of First Nations chiefs on Friday (January 11), a long-time indigenous activist says this should not be viewed as a success for the Idle No More movement.

Indeed, Gord Hill told the Georgia Straight the high-level meeting actually represents the co-optation of the grassroots indigenous-sovereignty movement by band chiefs and councils that owe their power to the paternalistic Indian Act. According to the 44-year-old Kwakwaka’wakw author of The 500 Years of Resistance Comic Book, the Canadian government has historically used these “elites” to suppress efforts by First Nations people to fight colonialism and oppression.

“I wouldn’t even focus on January 11,” Hill said by phone from his East Vancouver home. “That’s something that the colonial regime and its collaborators are doing, so I wouldn’t even focus on that. People need to focus on the long-term strategy and methods of organizing.”

Hill calls himself a “critical supporter” of the Idle No More movement, which was started in October by four women in Saskatchewan, has rallied around hunger-striking Attawapiskat chief Theresa Spence, and has seen thousands take to the streets inside and outside the country. Although he hasn’t yet joined the ranks of Idle No More protesters, Hill is considering participating in the “global day of action” set to coincide with Harper’s meeting on Friday.

Meanwhile, Khelsilem Rivers, a Skwxwú7mesh community organizer, is helping coordinate January 11 protests in Canada and internationally. The 23-year-old activist previously helped stage Idle No More flash mobs at the Vancouver Convention Centre, Waterfront Station, and Park Royal.

On Friday, Rivers will attend an Idle No More rally at Vancouver City Hall (453 West 12th Avenue) at 1 p.m., which will be preceded by a march from the Native Education College (285 East 5th Avenue) starting at noon. There will be a flash mob at Robson and Burrard streets at 5:30 p.m.

Rivers stressed that Harper’s meeting won’t mark the end of Idle No More but the beginning of the “unprecedented” movement’s next phase. According to him, Idle No More has brought many indigenous and nonindigenous people together to discuss and take action on common issues, including the erosion of aboriginal rights and environmental protections by the Conservatives’ Bill C-45. Such conversations can help clear up misunderstandings among many Canadians about the role and history of First Nations in Canada, Rivers told the Straight.

“They see us as another ethnic minority with special rights, so they talk about it in terms of equality,” Rivers said by phone from his home on West Vancouver’s Capilano reserve. “What they fail to understand is that there’s a long history of legal and constitutional reasons for why indigenous people are considered nations and why we identify as nations.”

Judith Sayers, a former chief of the Hupacasath First Nation in Port Alberni, describes herself as “just a part of the movement”. The UVic visiting national-aboriginal-economic-development chair told the Straight the federal government must stop “ignoring” its constitutional duty to consult First Nations, whose people are now rising up to save what’s left of their lands and resources. And she cautioned that without unity between the grassroots and the chiefs, Idle No More will fail.

“I am excited that people are engaging, that I can see the common community person standing up and saying, ‘I’m opposed to Bill C-45 because blah, blah, blah,’ ” Sayers, 56, said by phone from the UVic campus. “How long has it been since I’ve been able to see that in our communities? People are standing up; they’re wanting to get engaged; and they want to talk about systems of government other than the Indian Act.”

For his part, Hill sees the Idle No More flash mobs, round dances, and blockades that have occurred as “really positive steps” because they’ve mobilized many previously “idle” indigenous people. But the activist argues that if the movement is to gain substantial concessions from the government, it needs to learn from social movements in Latin America that are capable of “paralyzing the economy” of their countries. So he’s critical of the founders and some organizers of Idle No More for opposing any actions that fall outside of peaceful protest.

“This is disarming the people,” Hill said. “It’s imposing pacifism on them, and it’s dampening their warrior spirit—their fighting spirit—which we need in a resistance movement.”

Jarrett Martineau, a 35-year-old PhD student in indigenous governance at UVic, helped create the j11action.com website to promote Friday’s day of action. Although the member of the Frog Lake First Nation in Alberta believes that no one should tell people “this is the only way to protest,” he maintains that peaceful civil disobedience can be and has been effective.

Indian Act chiefs have a “relationship” with the movement, Martineau told the Straight. But he argues that First Nations need to reestablish their traditional forms of governance. Fortunately, many youth involved in Idle No More are “in it for the long haul”, according to Martineau.

“We’re trying to point the focus away from what’s ultimately an administrative, photo-op meeting—that’s going to be the thing with Harper—towards the bigger movement,” Martineau said by phone from Victoria. “I think that’s partly, for us, why we think it’s going to be a historic day, because it marks a transition in terms of the people’s movement really taking ownership of the movement itself, independent of elected leadership.”

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Comments

Submitted by emile on

The publicity on Idle-No-More and the statements by many of the Idle-No-More activists present this movement as if it is intended to correct historical wrongs done to a particular physical race of people who resided in Turtle Island in the pre-colonial era, and their descendents. Insofar as this persists as the rallying call, this movement will not get the sustaining support it needs. Many people are already describing it as ‘racist’ and some polls are as much as 75% to 25% against it.

Of course there is more to it. The ‘First Nations’ [indigenous aboriginal] peoples are motivated by their ‘non-dualism’ [the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth], a belief system that is resurgent around the globe, and which is the deeper essence of the ‘green’ movement.

Non-dualism is ALSO the core understanding of modern physics pioneers, and is expressed in Mach’s principle which captures the dynamic unity of ‘inhabitants’ and ‘habitat’ [the dynamics of the former are conditioning the dynamics of latter at the same time as the dynamics of the latter are conditioning the dynamics of the former].

Non-dualism is not only the élan-vitale ['life-force' or 'spirit-force'] of anarcha-indigenism, it is the élan-vitale of a general anarchism that the world is impregnated with, as seen in the poetic aspect of society.

The dynamic physical reality of our life experience is one of relational transformation in which we are all included, however, what our institutionalized Western culture holds to be reality ‘re-casts’ the world dynamic from ‘relational transformation’ to linguistically idealized terms of ‘what things-in-themselves do in a succession of cause-effect actions’.

No-one is in charge of how the world we live in is transforming over our life-time and no-one ever could be in charge because ‘what people-as-things-in-themselves do’ is not a physical reality, not according to our experience and not according to modern physics. It is an over-simplified RE-presentation of the world dynamic. Physically, the dynamic world of our real-life experience is a continually transforming relational space.

As aboriginal traditionalists understand, we are all agents of transformation that relate to the physical space we share inclusion in, in the same relational [non-dualist] manner that storm-cells in the atmosphere relate to the continually transforming relational space of the atmosphere.

Sovereigntism and authoritarianism demand that we ‘give up’ our non-dualist understanding of ourselves as ‘agents of transformation’, and force us into the ‘dualist’ belief that we are NO MORE THAN ‘local, independently-existing things-in-ourselves’ notionally with our own locally originating, internal process driven and directed development and behaviour.

These hierarchical, deliberately determining approaches to establishing ‘order’ NOTIONALLY shift the élan vitale of the world dynamic from the world/nature/the relational-spatial-plenum, to the notional [linguistically idealized] ‘things-in-themselves’ such as the notional ‘human organism-thing-in-itself’.

A whole new ‘dualist’ world view is constructed on this basis. It is the dualist world view that supports top-down authoritarian structures which deliberately impose order on the notional ‘thing-in-themselves’ humans. The shifting of the ‘élan vitale’ out of the fullness of the relational spatial-plenum of modern physics [the space-time continuum] leaves behind ‘space’ that is a hollow shadow of its former self; i.e. an empty and passive space, a fixed reference frame that is absolutely empty wherever it is ‘not occupied’; i.e. an Aristotelian logic-based ‘Euclidian space’.

The Idle-No-More energies and momentum are deriving from this lingering, immanent-in-nature, relational-spatial élan-vitale that is in no way confined to those who inhabited pre-colonial Turtle Island and their descendents. Of course the group of people defined as such have suffered at the hands of the colonizers. This is called ‘racism’.

It would be a great mistake for the ‘First Nations’ people to let themselves be defined by the racism that they have been subjected to by the colonizer institutions of governance, commerce and “justice”.

Before race and before history of residence, the ‘First Nations’ [a meaningless term, when one reflects on it, founded on Western concepts that run counter to the indigenous traditional belief system] are people that are innately included in the dynamic Unum of the common relational space we all share inclusion in wherein ‘Mitakuye oyasin’ [‘we are all related in an interdependent connectedness or web-of-life] applies. What then, does the goal of ‘renegotiating a treaty between two nations’ imply?’ Will the ‘dualists’ and the ‘non-dualists’ in the Idle-No-More activism please declare/identify themselves?

For the non-dualists, the Kayanerekowa or ‘Great Harmony’ [aka ‘Great Peace’] of the Iroquois five nation confederacy did not refer to ‘five thing-in-themselves-nations’ negotiating a mutually agreeable legally-binding treaty. One does not go back to a written document to ‘see what the Great-Peace ‘treaty’ says’, it is not a written message, it is an acknowledgement of ‘cosmic kinship’. As Sakokwenionkwas makes clear [see Kayanerekowa: The People of the Great Peace/Cosmic Kinship ], “the Kayanerekowa is not written but oral, it is not a repeated formula but it is each time spelled out differently in eloquent and poetic words that are left to the inspiration of the one who gives thanks and who invites all to be “of the good mind”.”

Why put poetic expression in precedence over Western, scientifically-reasoned contracts/treaties?

Science-as-philosophy [Mach, Poincaré, Schrödinger] gives a good answer, because science in application is constrained to dealing with the linguistically-idealized [pseudo-]reality of ‘what-things-in-themselves do’, while the physical reality of our real-life experience is in terms of relational-spatial transformation. Thus, where the treaty specifies that the ‘aboriginals are entitled to continue to make their livelihoods from the fish and game and agriculture in treaty-reserved lands’ [i.e. in terms of ‘things-in-themselves and what things do’], the unfolding physical reality is that the industrialization of surrounding lands, that delivers enormous wealth to the colonizers and enables their living ‘high on the hog’, has been at the cost of sacrificing the fisheries and game and the quality of water and air that has transformed not only industrialized lands, but the land generally, since it is all within an interdependent connectedness or ‘relationally transforming One-ness’.

The ‘treaty-speak’ promises, which are in the scientific terms of ‘what things-in-themselves do’, fail to take into account the physical reality wherein dynamics are actually experienced as the transformation of the energy-charged relational-spatial-Plenum we all share inclusion in. The physical reality in this situation is captured by Mach’s principle wherein SOME inhabitants in the inherently ‘common’ habitat are conditioning [in a nasty but highly profitable manner] the habitat-dynamic at the same time as the habitat-dynamic is conditioning the dynamics of the inhabitants. It is the common habitat and thus all of its inhabitants that lose fish and game and water and air quality sacrificed to the habitat-unfriendly industrial activities that are being driven by a subset of the inhabitants who are profiting enormously from it.

Contracts for transactions in the ‘free market’ work the same way. When jobs are plentiful and pay is good, contracts with banks/financial speculators are made by working people to borrow money to develop their homesteads. But financial speculators get greedy, suck out too much and kill the job and wages flow, so that working people default on debt repayment and foreclosure strips them of their life savings. It is just the same as with the loss of fisheries and game; i.e. the actions of those that you make contracts with serves to remove the benefits that are due to you in the contract, by their activities elsewhere that are, meanwhile, interdependently connected with, and potentially destructive to your activities.

The Western conceptual device of ‘the contract’ and/or ‘the treaty’ is a trap. It is trickery/treachery that is supported by the full force of the law and the Justice system. It is the sort of thing that gives rise to the reputation of Western civilized people as people who speak with forked tongue. When we have a personal mutual understanding in support of one another's respective well-being, it is 'beyond capture in words' [a warm handshake says more than can ever be captured in a legal document designed to fully and explicitly express an agreement so that it can be independently administered by lawyers and courts].

There is good reason to “put poetic expression in precedence over Western, scientifically-reasoned contracts/treaties.” and to walk the path of Sakokwenionkwas where mutual agreement/understanding [Kayanerekowa].... ...is not written but oral, it is not a repeated formula but it is each time spelled out differently in eloquent and poetic words that are left to the inspiration of the one who gives thanks and who invites all to be “of the good mind”.”

The ‘Idle-No-More’ movement is an exciting resurgence of non-dualist anarcha-indigenism, but the reverse-racism mixed in with it has the potential to hijack it.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

It does not leave much hope for a realisation and respectful disengagement.
Something like 'if you can not provide drawn up boundaries of land that we must respect under the terms of a treaty, then we will take everything and make you functionary cogs, and land 'keepers' (not even 'owners'.)

Mad respect for the Idle No More, I wish there was something akin to it here in the downunderverse, but how can they possible hope to make this the point of engagement, when we barely have a grasp on explaining it to our fellows (and are utterly misinterpreted as post-modern gobbledegookers) ? Surely it is inherent to anyone who has not been infected by the 'coloniozers' (i.e the indian act indians) but how can they hope to convince their brothers and sisters, without reference to western abstractions, such as dualism and non-dualism?

Submitted by emile on

yes, i take your point. at the same time, i think that the demonstrating, by Idle-No-More aboriginal participants, that agreements for living in peace and harmony must transcend the literal contents of contracts and treaties [useful supporting tools if NOT seen as the full and definitive embodiment of the agreement], and their law-based administrating, could have ‘transformative influence’ on the larger body of society. in order for that to happen, the aboriginal Idle-No-More participants would have to avoid letting the movement/process be seen as CULMINATING in the formulation of some new contracts with monetary provisions etc. ‘satisfactory to ‘both parties’’ [i.e. avoid culmination in a ‘written agreement’ subject to interpretation/administration by Western legal and justice institutions].

The literal use of laws and contracts [linguistic idealization based behavioural-instructions] is, in general, destructive to our social-relational health and harmony.

Submitted by skronk (not verified) on

Ah yes, 'reverse racism'. Its like real racism only without a history of genocide and colonialism.

Submitted by something something (not verified) on

Emile, the illusion of thing-in-itselfness that persists in the error of isolating and identifying itself as "me" loves the illusion of thing-in-itselfness that it similarly persists in the error of projecting upon an illusion it calls "you".

Submitted by emile on

If the ‘listening that is you’ is also accepting that the ‘me that is reaching out to grasp the understanding’ of what the ‘listening-that-is-you’ is saying is the ‘understanding that is the me that is reaching out to grasp it’, then we are on the same page.

And, i don’t want to leave our exchange without ‘de-mystifying it’ or ‘de-gobbledegooking it’, so here goes something for any third party reader;

There is a problem in ‘subjectizing ourselves’ and [mis]taking that for ‘reality’. This ‘subjectizing’ is an ‘idealizing’ process that is built into European languages. Nietzsche comments on it thusly;

“In every judgment there resides the entire, full, profound belief in subject and attribute, or in cause and effect (that is, as the assertion that every effect is an activity and that every activity presupposes an agent); and this latter belief is only a special case of the former, so there remains as the fundamental belief the belief that there are subjects, that everything that happens is related attributively to some subject. ..[snip] … That which gives the extraordinary firmness to our belief in causality is not the great habit of seeing one occurrence following another but our inability to interpret events otherwise than as events caused by intentions. It is belief in the living and thinking as the only effective force–in will, in intention–it is belief that every event is a deed, that every deed presupposes a doer, it is belief in the “subject.” Is this belief in the concept of subject and attribute not a great stupidity?” -Nietzsche, ‘Will to Power’, 550

thus, the above exchanges look ‘weird’ because they are attempting to ‘cancel out’ the ‘subject’, to remove the ‘I’ in ‘I understand what you are saying’ so that ‘I’ becomes one and the same as the ‘understanding’,... therefore, ... ‘The understanding that I am reaching out to grasp is the me that is reaching out to grasp it’.

This weird-looking word-construction is an attempt to use this European language, English, that commonly bases its meaning-building on ‘subjects’, to avoid dependency on ‘subjectizing’ action’ that is part of the continuing flow; i.e. to avoid having to ‘subjectize myself’ and thus imputing my actions to be divided out of the continuing flow of experience and jumpstarting from out of ‘myself’ as a notional ‘local thing-in-itself’.

E.g. European languages force us to subjectize even the emergent behaviour of our living space of ‘raining’; i.e. we say ‘IT’ is raining. what is this ‘it’? ‘It’ is a ‘filler’ for a language structure that forces us to suppose that “every deed presupposes a doer” ... “is this belief in the concept of subject and attribute not a great stupidity’”.

In the same vein, until very recently, the ‘cell’ in biology was thought to be a locally existing ‘thing-in-itself’ that was directed out of a central authority called ‘the nucleus’ which was thought to house the ‘genes’ used when the ‘cell reproduced’. Note that the ‘cell’ is the subject here, which is credited with ‘doing the deed of reproduction’. However, recent research [epigenetics] shows that the cell, rather than being its own ‘subject’ of ‘reproduction’ is instead a subjectless relation between ‘signals from the environment’ coming in through ‘receptors’ that are continually actualizing ‘effectors’. The subject based, doer-deed construct ‘IT is reproducing’ is no longer adequate to describe what is going on. One has to get rid of the subject and to see new development as the conjugate relation between outside-inward influence and inside-outward influence which happens to be Lamarck’s view of biological life which conflicts with the Darwinian and purely ‘genetic-determinist’, subjectized view which is one-sidedly subject-driven doer-deedery.

Ok, with that ‘de-mystification’ as background, to return to the aboriginal tradition as mentioned in the Kayanerekowa link previously given, the notion of ‘subject’ arises in the case of ‘sovereign state citizenship’, a notion that aboriginals reject. What they reject is the notion that the people of two different nations are ‘subjects’ of those two different nations seen as ‘things-in-themselves’;

“There was, further, still an “official” European Covenant Chain which was being “officially” betrayed by the very French, British, and American Nations which had “officially” signed it. The betrayal had, however, taken place long before. Kelsey puts it well: “In all their negotiations with the Indians, both British and French authorities behaved toward the Confederacy as though they considered it an independent nation… But the truth was that both the French and the British considered Indians, whether within or without the Confederacy, as subjects…” At first the Natives had not understood what the word “subject” meant. When they did, they categorically refused—all along—to be considered the subjects of any king, European or otherwise. Some accepted being called children of the French father Onontio, but they made it clear what they meant by father. Today, nothing much has changed. The words children and subjects of the Kings are not used, but their modern equivalents are: citizens of the United States and of Canada, subject to the laws of the United States and of Canada. And the Mohawks and Iroquois are still saying: “We are not citizens of your United States or your Canada. We are not subject to your laws. We are brothers and sisters who long ago made an eternal kinship and friendship alliance, based on the Two Row Wampum, where we welcomed you to share this land with us in mutual respect for each other’s cultures: you staying in your boat and we in our canoe, and linking arms forever.”

The point is, then, that the subjectizing idealizations of European language and its legal contracts are a ‘trap’, and cannot serve, on a ‘stand-alone’ basis, to convey mutual understanding.

However, as this weird looking opening to this change illustrates, it is non-trivial to use this European language we are using, without resorting to the ‘subjectizing’ that is built into its architecture. The treaty that guarantees access to ‘the fisheries in the treaty-reserved lands’ is not what the aboriginals want. They want a mutual agreement to preserve their ‘fishing’, and this would commit the parties to agreeing to sustain [suspending destructive-to-fishing industrialization as necessary] the habitat in which the ‘treaty-reserved lands’ are included so as to sustain the ‘fishing’.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

The thing is that while we can understand this abstraction, and perhaps relate the understanding to the first nations - that we, as recognised non-ends, quite implicitly understand their plea for respect. However, what i was getting at before was that it is quite impossible to break down the 'gobbledegookness' of using subjectivised english to talk 'around things in themselves' and relate that to people who quite literally, just want to smash and grab at the state - our sentences run too long. I could quite happily live under the conditions of linking arms, as an egoist (who recognises his machine connectedness) - but we are rare, ridiculed and ostracised for being 'selfish', confusing and 'double talkers'. Where I am going with this is that it is difficult to explain to those who have had their minds colonised by the patronising superiority complex of globalisation, that we stand aside from them, next to them, and behind them (and that all we wish for is the same) I do not doubt for a second that if we, the non-ends, were to approach an aboriginal who also viewd things in a similar fashion and state something along the lines (excuse the terrible poetic gesture, it is only for effect) 'we are two wolves that run in the same direction', the understanding could not possibly be lost on them. Where as if we said the same thing to an 'end', they would assume we had smoked ourselves retarded, and send us on our way.

Submitted by emile on

i am not wanting to ‘speak in code’. two people who are on the same page can speak in highly condensed ‘code’; for example if we both know how to repair a fuel injection system, our vocabulary hardly matters, a few gestures with our hands or scratches on a pad, and couple of words, ... ‘you know, dat ting dere’ will do. and so, while i believe i understand what you are saying, i am nevertheless writing a lot of awkward text, that people may wish to call ‘gobbledygook’, that i have carefully loaded with sense-making relationships intended to convey ‘relational’ [‘non-dualist’, de-subjectized] understanding. you say;

“... it is quite impossible to break down the 'gobbledegookness' of using subjectivised english to talk 'around things in themselves' and relate that to people who quite literally, just want to smash and grab at the state - our sentences run too long.”

i don’t 'generally' disagree, but i also don’t believe the scene is static, and with ‘relational’ [non-dualist] initiatives like ‘restorative justice’ on the rise, more people may be looking for ‘less simple’ approaches to channel their anger. that’s why i ‘write a lot of NOT EMPTY but carefully prepared gobbledygook’, and while the silence is most often broken only by mockery, i do get some supportive feedback.

correct me if i’m wrong, but when you say ‘end’ and ‘non-end’, i am assuming that you are referring to ‘teleology’ and how the Western colonizing process convinces the individual that the world works by ‘doer-deed’ dynamics and induces the individual to define himself as a ‘doer-of-deeds’, making people into loose cannon balls [don quixotes or jack the rippers’] who see themselves as ‘doers’ who, in search of ‘completing themselves’, go out in search of ‘deeds’ to define ‘who they are’; i.e. Western colonizing psychologically breeds ‘goal-oriented individuals’ [i.e. puts ‘goal orientation on the highest priority]. so, to take the relative precedence of dual opposing orientations to the limit, these would be the ‘end’ people, with ‘destination-oriented powerboater temperament dominating the balanced/harmony-sustaining journey-orienting sailboater temperament’, ... while yourself, and as you have detected, myself, would be better described as ‘non-end’ people, wherein these opposing temperaments are in the inverse precedence.

the ‘idle-no-more’ pulse in canada, seems to have confused the media in the same way that ‘occupy wall street’ did, because the participants are ‘all over the place’ and the press sees success only in ‘doer-deed’ terms, thus, if people are ‘not together in their objectives’, their activism doesn’t ‘ACHIEVE’ anything. that is the view of the ‘ends’, but for the view of the ‘non-ends’, to become like ‘wolves running together’ is the first priority. the ‘doer-deed achievements’ that the ‘ends’, whom colonization has psychologically conditioned to put 'doer-deed achievements' first, put 'running as wolves together' a distant second priority; i.e. they don't give a shit what kind of 'coalition of the willing' they have to bribe to achieve their objective and, in doing so, fulfill their 'doer-deed' identity.

like i say, correct me if i have misunderstood you. re the gobbledygook, i obviously put considerable effort into carefully preparing the gobbledygook so that if readers do make the effort to assimilate it, they will not go away ‘empty-handed’.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

I agree with all of your interpretations of the things I have said, although I wasn't making claims about your writing being confusing, you have pointed me in numerous directions through the 'talking around' ideas, that I greatly appreciate - I was merely quoting other users that have expressed disdain for anything longer than a manifesto point, to articulate ideas, the accusatory 'gobbledygook' is their word, not mine. That is, I do not believe you write for the sake of writing, rather that it is perceived as such and that's why it is only you and I having this conversation. I found it inaccessible at first, but persevered and discovered many things I would not have, had I given up. That being said, I don't think the smashers do give your writing enough credit, because they are unwilling to learn how to read it, which is a shame.

Submitted by Assnonymous (not verified) on

i, too, enjoy feeding trolls and joining the emile reading (and comprehension) club. i've learned a lot from emile, as well. none of it has been worth anything in the positive sense, but it is good at sharpening the knives for attack. acknowledging reality carries more weight than a web-based fictionalizing commentary about what it SHOULD be. language games can only get you so far... unless you aspire to be a politician, lawyer, educator or some other servant to the state. ciao, amigos!

Submitted by emile on

evidently, you didn’t learn too much from emile or from citations of nietzsche; e.g;

“The reasons for which 'this' world has been characterized as 'apparent' are the very reasons which indicate its reality; any other kind of reality is absolutely indemonstrable.--- Nietzsche

given that all we can get to are ‘appearances’, how are you tapping into this ‘reality’ that you seem to hold out as ‘the reality’? certainly we have our experiences, but then we quickly move on to ‘interpretations’ of ‘what’s going on in the world?’, or, ‘what appears to be going on in the world?’

i accept that what we call ‘reality’ is ‘appearances’ and have been pointing out that different people have different ways of ‘interpreting what’s going on in the world’, and since they let their respective views of ‘reality’ shape their behaviour, their behaviours differ as a function of the ‘reality’ they believe to be ‘the actual case’. and one of the differences that arises from the different views/understandings of ‘reality’ manifests in the way in which people ‘organize’. those whose ‘reality’ features a world of local material things that move about and interact in a fixed, empty-where-not-occupied space [corresponds with newtonian physics], behave and organize in different ways from those whose ‘reality’ features a world constituted by a continually transforming relational space [corresponds with modern physics and aboriginal reality].

evidently, the world of our experience includes various people with various different views of ‘reality’. if you believe you are tapped into ‘the true reality’, good for you. however, if you want to ‘understand’ the world you share inclusion in, then it may help to acknowledge that there are others around you who are living in different realities; that is, ... if you want to understand their different behaviours and ways of organizing and 'where these are coming from'.

Submitted by Assnonymous (not verified) on

yes, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and you sir, are repugnant. i don't have to be assimilated into your flow, no matter how abundant that flow is. my interpretation of reality is my own and I don't act as if that singular interpretation is the truth. that is demonstrably what you do ad infinitum, as well as attribute this view to others when they don't agree with your perspective.

Submitted by emile on

hmmm. for someone who "doesn't act if their singular interpretation of reality is the truth", ... you do seem mighty confident that you have nailed down the truth of 'who i am'; i.e. the 'repugnant guy who "does act as if his singular interpretation of reality is the truth" and who further "attributes this "acting as if their singular interpretation of reality is the truth" to others. how about if i added the qualifier "on this hopefully rare occasion" to "you act as if your singular interpretation of reality is the truth", ... would you retract your "ad infinitum"?

Submitted by Assnonymous (not verified) on

In the words of your idol - "These are my truths." In other breaking news, opinions are like assholes. You sure push your agenda pretty strongly for a guy who believes all is ebb and flow. I don't think Heraclitus would be impressed with your unending flow. I don't think I've ever read an ebb from you once. It's all outward flow and no inward ebb. You are impervious to anything contrary to your existing interpretation of reality.

Submitted by gel-oberon 3 on

If being and nothingness occupy the same space then they're both the same. Form is emptiness emptiness is form. Reality is nothing nothing is real.

Submitted by emile on

both ‘being’ and ‘nothingness’ are absolutisms, abstract idealizations that are not to be confused with our physically experienced reality of situational inclusion in a transforming relational spatial-plenum [spacetime continuum]. that is, you say;

“If being and nothingness occupy the same space then they're both the same.

these abstractions of ‘being’ and ‘nothingness’ [not to mention the notion of ‘space’ as a ‘container’ that ‘being’ or ‘nothingness’ can ‘occupy’] are useful to our intellection if we don’t confuse them for physical reality. they mesh well with our intellectual modeling where we 'use our sensory measuring equipment' to sample relational transformation; e.g. we capture a succession of pictures with our visual sensing equipment. everything is static in the sample and there is a ‘time-gap’ between the sample that we can ignore as ‘nothingness’. the same is true in the digital sampling of music.

but the samples are not the music [the finger pointing to the moon is not the moon]. music is not ‘the playback of samples’. in such a playback, we have ‘something’ [being] followed by a short interval of ‘nothing’ between another ‘something’ [being]. this is not physical reality, this is to do with the measurement equipment that we are forced to use to ‘observe’ the dynamic world of our real physical experience. if we just experienced the music or just visually observed some phenomena and didn’t speak about it, no problem. but when we give RE-presentation to it, we break apart the continuum by sampling/measuring and RE-presenting it in terms of ‘being’ and ‘nothing’ arranged in notional split-apart ‘space’ and ‘time’ [‘space’ and ‘time’ used in this split-apart sense are mathematical abstractions].

psychologically [in the western mind] we associate each visual image of something out there with the next image in a time-sequence. these are not the associations of the physical reality of our experience wherein we are being at the same time emotionally if not physically transformed. there is no ‘time’ in the physical reality of the gravity field [or e/m, thermal, acoustic etc. field] which is ‘everywhere at the same time’, and there is no notion of a succession of events. there is only a succession of observations of phenomena going on 'out there'. and when we observe things we impose idealized absolute space and absolute time frames to give ‘RE-presentation’ to them. these idealized RE-presentations are not the physical reality of our experience [of inclusion in a continually transforming relational spatial plenum’].

‘being’ and ‘nothingness’ are concepts used for RE-presentation of phenomena going on 'out there', as in ‘sample’ and ‘hold’ in digital RE-presentation of music. neither the ‘sample’ nor the ‘gap’ in the ‘hold’ ‘time-interval’ are ‘real’. they are reductive artifacts of our manner of observing and RE-presenting our authentic experiencing of physical reality.

Submitted by emile on

Synopsis of the 'Idle-No-More' article and the posted comments [prior to the time of this posting]:

Two very different ‘world views’ and associated ‘values’ governing ‘social organizing approaches’ are exposing and resolving themselves in the ‘Idle-No-More’ movement. They could be compared to;

(a) the Apollo project mode (a) where the ‘organizing orchestration force’ was the ‘goal’ to put a man on the moon; an explicit objective whose achievement was subject to a time deadline arising from political competition [with Russia]. The American ‘citizens’ working on this project were told, by the same supreme central authority, President John F. Kennedy, that established the moon landing goal, to “ask not what your country can do for you --- ask what you can do for your country”. In this approach to order and organization, the human team were contributing ‘resources’, ‘commodities’ to be ‘consumed’ or ‘martyred’ to the ‘greater good’ of achieving the objective [winning the space race], much as in a military battle, and;

(b) the Apollo 13 mission mode (b) wherein the order and the ‘values’ of organization ‘inverted’, where the ‘organizing orchestration point’, the goal to put a man on the moon ‘collapsed’ due to an explosion that damaged equipment and made it impossible to achieve the goal. The ‘blowing away’ of the primary behaviour-orchestrating goal liberated the team members from their cogs-in-the machine roles and opened the way to self-organizing that would optimize ‘THEIR journey’ [safe passage], and in so doing, saw them cannibalizing expensive infrastructure and bending it to their own purpose. The Flight Director who had been the point-source of instructions and commands that directed their operations, relinquished his ‘control role’ and reduced himself to a ‘coach’ in support of the team’s safe-passage journey-oriented organization.

[Note: As a further indication of an ‘inversion of values’here, despite the cold war, the Russians ordered four ships to the splashdown area, and Premier Aleksei Kosygin sent a message, “I want to inform you the Soviet Government has given orders to all citizens and members of the armed forces to use all necessary means to render assistance in the rescue of the American astronauts.”]

Comparison to ‘Idle-No-More’. The infrastructure in Canada as in other authoritarian sovereign states is set up to facilitate the machine-like functioning of the social dynamic wherein the people are viewed, implicitly, [in this type of organization], as expendable commodities that serve the goal of keeping the state ‘competitive’ in the profits race and industrialization race or the ‘progress of civilized society’ race. As with JFK, the heads of authoritarian states understand the relationship of the citizen or ‘subject’ relative to the state in the terms implied by “Ask not what your country can do for you --- ask what you can do for your country”. That is, unlike the wolves that run together in the forest, the citizens/subjects of the sovereign state are expected to let their behaviours be firstly organized/orchestrated by the goals and objectives of the state. Like the Apollo astronauts prior to the collapse of the moon landing goal, the infrastructure that enables them to do their cog-in-the-machine jobs, all of which jointly orient to the achievement of the political goal of beating the russians in the space-race, is not for them to mess around with. Their use of the infrastructure is, only as permitted in their capacity as expendable resources in the goal oriented, doer-deed authoritarian state commanded social dynamic, which continually consumes generations of citizens in sustaining a competitive position in a politically commanded inter-national economy. [the political commanders may operate out of corporations as well as sovereign state governments]

Indigenous aboriginals never saw the world as a doer-deed dynamic and never gave themselves a ‘doer-deed identity’ wherein individual fulfilment comes through doer-deed achievements. The Western world view is a ‘mechanistic’ world view and western values, as incorporated in the sovereign state, are mechanistic, which means that the citizens or ‘subjects’ of the state are the means by which the state achieves its goals and objectives. No aboriginal leader ever said; ‘ask not what your tribe can do for you, ask what you can do for your tribe’ because, while they worked together, they worked in the (b) mode manner of Apollo 13 after their goal-oriented organization collapsed. They would chop up the hardwood floors of the government housing they were in and burn it to keep warm in a cold winter, if it made sense to do so to sustain balance and harmony in their continuing journey, just as the Apollo 13 crew cannibalized the infrastructure that was developed for achieving a political goal in which they, the astronauts, had been expendable cogs.

The aboriginals’ orientation is to ‘the journey’; i.e. to the sustaining of balance and harmony with the land/nature. It is not an orientation to some ‘destination’ determined by competition-based political objectives, which make the ‘subjects’ [citizens] of the state into cogs in the machinery of the state’s goal achievement politics.

The blockading of roads and railways by the ‘Idle-No-More’ movement is analogous to the cannibalizing of infrastructure in the (b) mode of the Apollo 13 team. It corresponds to a collapse of the abstract ‘goal-orientation’ that kept the team in infrastructure-facilitated cog-like roles within the goal-achievement oriented organization, and the associated inverting of values that leads to an organizing that orients to the sustaining of balance and harmony in the travellers' experiencing of the journey.

In other words, life experience is one dynamic that includes, at the same time, the conjugate aspects of 'quality of the journey' and 'attaining destinations' and it is possible for one's individual values or the values of a social collective to put one of these values in precedence over the other. BOTH/AND logic is required here rather than EITHER/OR logic [i.e. it is question of relative primacy, one option of which is where sustaining the quality of the journey is secondary to attaining the destination, and the other option is where sustaining the quality of the journey is primary, allowing this orientation to determine whatever destination, ... as with sailing so as to stay afloat in a storm where one 'let's go' of one's planned objectives and accepts whatever port one's journey takes one to.]

To the Western colonized mind, the question has been ‘what do the aboriginals hope TO ACHIEVE by their protest actions?’.

In this line of thinking, the goal of the protest could only be to improve, to the maximum, their ‘cog-status and conditions’ with the mechanism of goal-oriented corporatist sovereigntism.

But in the minds of the aboriginal traditionalists, as in the minds of the (b) mode Apollo 13 team, the desire would be to cannibalize goal-facilitating infrastructure, putting it in the service of sustaining a balance and harmony in the continuing journey. This inversion in values and this corresponding inversion in the sourcing orchestrating-force of organizing actually constitutes a ‘liberation’ from imprisonment as cogs in a top-down politically-mechanizing plan.

The empathy of even the Russians in the case of the (b) model Apollo 13 team is a ‘celebration of the free human spirit’, something that touches the heart of an entire global populace entrapped in political machinations without knowing how to escape, but recognizing the profound value of such escape.

Apollo 13 (b) mode gave us an unanticipated look into what happens when our Western cultural standard goal oriented sourcing of organization is superseded by a life-sustaining journey oriented sourcing of organization.

It was obvious in observing the ‘round dances’ of the Idle-No-More protest gatherings, that there was a celebration of the liberated human spirit and an understanding of how the loving feeling of wolves running together made the heart soar and was ‘to die for’.

Meanwhile, the media and the public and the politicians were seeing that the ‘success’ of this protest depended on striking while the iron was hot and demanding from the ‘authorities’, marginal improvements in their ‘cog-status’ within the national goal oriented political machinery that they had been long trapped in, but were now growing increasingly aware that they had the power to act together to liberate themselves from.

This love permeated, spirit-filled power to run together as wolves and be liberated from the political machinery that demanded that one ‘ask not what the political machinery can do for you --- ask what you can do for the political machinery’, ... is a collective self-discovery that is already defining ‘what success is’, and it is certainly NOT in the cultural standard terms of negotiating with the ‘political authorities’, a slightly improved cog-in-the-political-machine status for oneself.

The AFN chiefs are political appointments of the same type as colonizer-imposed puppet rulers [elected by the indigenous people and well-meaning but nevertheless part of the colonizing mechanism which establishes the colonizer as the 'higher authority' that the puppet negotiates with while the puppet is the highest authority within his people collective and thus a means for colonizers to impose their goals on people through puppet intermediaries]. the AFN chiefs no longer have a collection of encagement-habituated cogs-in-the-political machine as a ‘following’. This ‘collection’ has been self-transforming into a free-running wolf pack. the prospect of ‘getting them back into the cage’ with the bait of slightly improved meals and furnishings is now looking pretty dim, and getting them to trade the momentum of their protest movement in for such crumbs is looking ridiculous. Negotiating for improvements with the self-proclaimed colonizing authority is fine, but it is 'offline' to the primary interest which is full and total liberation from politico-colonizer machine entrapment.

As everybody knows, like 'the source of the Nile', the headwaters of this politico-colonizer machinery is not a 'one spot source', but is instead a broad 'highlands', the home of ascending politicians whether having risen through the ranks of governments or corporations or combinations thereof.

Submitted by gel-oberon 3 on

"Here reigns the rule of non-action which expresses itself thus: the fruitfulness of true action lies within itself. I could put it another way, I could say: true action is not a project that you accomplish, but a process to which you abandon yourself." - And The War Has Only Just Begun

Submitted by emile on

what are you trying to say? i don't see any pictures of the round-dance in here. is a beam of wisdom-transporting light supposed to come up your anus as you watch this?

Submitted by emile on

sorry. i did watch it. i found the narrative voice and images interesting like many mixtures of allusion can be, and i know there are many fans of tiqqun and the notion of 'restoration', but i couldn't see anything in it beyond the acknowledgement that there are many people in society who want fundamental change, who are keeping their antennas tuned for whatever possibilities may crop up. what do those who tune to the understandings of tiqqun think about 'idle-no-more'?

Submitted by gel-oberon 3 on

I've only read a few things about idle no more so at this point it's just a resonance feature on the horizon of my transformational relational space and a puff of wind in my sails so we'll see how it goes.

"Revolutionary movements do not spread by contamination but by resonance." - The Coming Insurrection

Submitted by anonymous on

Different realities induce different behaviours and different ways of organizing and ‘governing’ the social dynamic. In order to understand aboriginal protests such as ‘Idle-No-More’, one has to delve into the influence of different ‘realities’ that different people find themselves in.

We speak about different ‘belief’ systems, but that has to do with our intellectual views. For example, we may believe in the existence of the sovereign state we live in. That is an intellectual belief. And we may believe in Newtonian science and we may believe in God and a life in the hereafter and these are all intellectual beliefs that we can assert and reinforce by articulating them. Insofar as we ‘follow’ these beliefs, meaning that we let them shape our individual and collective behaviour, they make a difference in the world dynamic.

We may also believe things that are denied by others which may be EITHER ‘true’ OR ‘false’; e.g. that Iran is developing the capability to make nuclear weapons or that Saddam Hussein has ‘weapons of mass destruction’. Thus, the notion of ‘truth’ and ‘falsehood’ arises in association with ‘beliefs’; i.e. we may ‘believe’ something to be true without ‘knowing it, for certain, to be ‘true’. Our further inquiry may affirm that our belief is EITHER ‘true’ OR ‘false’. This is our approach in science, we form a hypothesis that we ‘believe to be true’ and we try to devise experiments that will ‘prove whether it is EITHER ‘true’ OR ‘false’. If it is true, we can articulate this truth in a language-based proposition. The language could be mathematical.

Protests often arise from differences in ‘beliefs’, articulated in words, where ‘proofs’ of EITHER ‘truth’ OR ‘falsehood’ of the expression of beliefs are not yet available, as when beliefs address something that one believes is ‘going to happen’; e.g. ‘these pipelines will damage the sensitive ecosystems that support our continuing nurturance and livelihoods [fishing, hunting etc.]’.

I have been putting EITHER/OR in capitals to indicate that many arguments and protests concerning ‘belief statements’ can be resolved LOGICALLY. The belief that Saddam has WMDs is EITHER ‘true’ OR ‘false’ and continuing inquiry can ‘resolve it’. Statements of belief that can be proven ‘true’ or ‘false’ give rise to the notion of ‘truth’ used in Western Justice, where one is asked to ‘tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me God.’. One is being asked to deliver a full and accurate factual account of the events under review.

But this line of investigation ignores that there is an entirely ‘other’ realm that is sourcing disagreement and protest that we have been ignoring because it is not being articulated. And, it is not being articulated because we must use ‘language’ for our articulations and ‘our language’, because of its architecture and grammar, is not capable of articulating these sorts of difference in belief.

The European languages accept, as a fact that can be established to be EITHER ‘true’ OR ‘false’, constructs such as the following; ‘Farmer John produced 6,000 bushels of wheat from his 100 acre farm.’ And, similarly; ‘The meadow produces 25 tons of grass each summer.

Not all cultures accept such statements as ‘facts’ even when they are ‘proved to be true’ by the normal techniques which one uses to LOGICALLY establish such ‘truths’. Indeed, not all people within the modern globally dominating Western culture accept such statements as ‘true facts’ even though ‘science’ would accept them as ‘true’ and a Western court of law would accept them as ‘true’.

I would not accept them as true and neither would aboriginal traditionalists and neither would Mach and Nietzsche and Poincaré and Schroedinger.

Why not?

I don’t believe in the ‘reality’ of dynamics that are said to [believed to] jumpstart from ‘local causal agency’. I don’t believe in the ‘reality’ of a world seen in terms of ‘what local things-in-themselves are doing over time’, which is how the above ‘facts’ have tried to explain the growth of wheat and the growth of grass, making ‘farmer John’ into a ‘doer of the deed’ and making ‘the meadow’ into a ‘doer of the deed’.

Furthermore, I believe that accepting such statements as ‘fact’ is screwing up not only our minds, but our social dynamics. And I am not the only one. I will give Nietzsche’s account of why this doer-deed language construct [a Fiktional idealization] that passes itself off as a ‘fact’ in our culture is an insidious way of screwing up our mind. My own path to the same understanding parallels Nietzsche’s, and starts from the notion that ‘everything is in flux’.

Everything in nature seems to work together [nature is a seamless continuum] and everything is undergoing continuous change, so it is in no way contradictory to our experience to consider the universe as a continually transforming relational space. Sure it has local forms in it that seem to be continually gathering and being regathered [recycled] within the continuum, and sure it is convenient to use language to name-label and define these ‘local forms’ but that doesn’t mean to say that we have to forget that everything is coming from the transforming continuum, and start shifting the sourcing of dynamics from the universe in its entirety, to the ‘local forms’ THAT HUMANS OBSERVE and impute the source of the development of the ‘local forms’ and the sourcing of their behaviour, to ‘themselves’ as local, independently-existing material systems.

That’s the problem. It’s not that we, for convenience, transfer the non-local, non-visible, non-material [relational] dynamics-sourcing influence of the entire atmosphere [and beyond] to the form-in-the-flow we name-label and define ‘Katrina’ and make Katrina out to be the doer of the dirty deed of destroying New Orleans, ... it’s instead, that in doing this and ‘running with it’, we forget the more comprehensive understanding of dynamics, in terms of a continually transforming relational space, that we started from, so that these ‘local doers’ and ‘the deeds they do’, we confuse for the physical realm. These doer-deed constructs are the artefacts of reducing our experience to language and grammar, they do not capture the dynamics of our real life experience in the continually transforming relational spatial-plenum that we are included in. Nietzsche has the following to say about the reduction of our experiencing of dynamics to terms of ‘things’ and ‘what things do’. He suggests that this ‘local substance-ness’ that we impute to things derives from our own ego sense-of-self;

“In its origin language belongs in the age of the most rudimentary form of psychology. We enter a realm of crude fetishism when we summon before consciousness the basic presuppositions of the metaphysics of language, in plain talk, the presuppositions of reason. Everywhere it sees a doer and doing; it believes in will as the cause; it believes in the ego, in the ego as being, in the ego as substance, and it projects this faith in the ego-substance upon all things -- only thereby does it first create the concept of "thing." Everywhere "being" is projected by thought, pushed underneath, as the cause; the concept of being follows, and is a derivative of, the concept of ego. In the beginning there is that great calamity of an error that the will is something which is effective, that will is a faculty. Today we know that it is only a word.” – Nietzsche, ‘Twilight of the Idols’

“[Descartes’ ‘I think therefore I am’ reflects] our grammatical custom that adds a doer to every deed. In short, this is not merely the substantiation of a fact but a logical-metaphysical postulate” … “That which gives the extraordinary firmness to our belief in causality is not the great habit of seeing one occurrence following another but our inability to interpret events otherwise than as events caused by intentions. It is belief in the living and thinking as the only effective force–in will, in intention–it is belief that every event is a deed, that every deed presupposes a doer, it is belief in the “subject.” Is this belief in the concept of subject and attribute not a great stupidity?” – Nietzsche, ‘Will to Power’ 484

The main point here is this shift of the sourcing of the world dynamic from influence/force immanent in the transforming relational spatial-plenum; i.e. from a non-local, non-visible, non-material influence as accords with modern [field] physics, to the interior of local things.

As Emerson also says in ‘The Method of Nature’ and Schroedinger in ‘What is Life’, rather than understanding ourselves as the ‘universe expressing itself’ [e.g. Katrina is the atmosphere/the spatial-plenum ‘expressing itself’], we instead ‘localize’ or ‘subjectize’ ourselves so that everything, our development, our behaviour, we see as jumpstarting from out of a local ‘subjectized’ self, the ‘ego’s’ view of self as a ‘thing-in-itself’, notionally with its own locally existing, internal process driven and directed development and behaviour. This view of self is what we have incorporated into our mainstream [Newtonian] mechanistic biological science, and by way of notional ‘things-in-themselves’, into mainstream science in general. This is NOT to say that this RE-presentation of the dynamics of transforming relational space of our experience in terms of ‘things-in-themselves’ and ‘what things do’ [linguistically intellectualized form] is not convenient and useful, ... it is merely to say that this linguistically intellectualized RE-presentation of dynamics does not match, in important ways, the dynamics of our sensory experience. And this difference, in whether we understand dynamics firstly or secondly, in terms of the linguistically intellectualized RE-presentation, can be, and is actually, the source of disagreement between different groups of people, both of whom let pass language constructs such as;

‘Farmer John produced 6,000 bushels of wheat from his 100 acre farm.’

To the aboriginal, it would be stupidity to understanding this statement ‘literally’, as if ‘farmer John’ was fully and solely responsible for producing the wheat, or that his farmland was responsible for it, though this way of talking is not without utility. The core objection is that these dynamics are NOT ‘local’ dynamics. This whole scenario is ‘the universe expressing itself’. Farmer John is the universe expressing itself. The soil and plants are the universe expressing itself. The ‘doer-deed’ concept is a stupid little tinpot concept or ‘fetishism’ as Nietzsche says. It is a convenient Fiktion, but it does not jibe with our sensory experience, which is of inclusion in a continually transforming relational spatial-plenum.

So when the government presents to the aboriginals for their approval, an oilfield development plan that is inevitably formulated using doer-deed constructs because that’s what our language and grammar are built for, the aboriginal is seeing the world in its full transformational-relational glory as it listens to the tinpot doer-deed language constructs, while the government is seeing the world in terms of its tinpot doer-deed language constructs. This difference is what Poincaré refers to as a psychological difference in people which he calls ‘realism’ [the tinpot doer-deed literalist view which the literalist allows to trump his own sensory experience] and ‘pragmatist idealism’ [the view that sees the tinpot doer-deed literalist view as reductive ‘idealization’ and accepts it as ‘pragmatic idealization’ but sticks with his own sensory experience as the ‘primary reality’]. As Poincaré observes;

“At all times, there have been opposite tendencies in philosophy and it does not seem that these tendencies are on the verge of being reconciled. It is no doubt because there are different souls and that we cannot change anything in these souls. There is therefore no hope of seeing harmony established between the pragmatists [-idealists] and the Cantorians [-realists]. Men do not agree because they do not speak the same language, and there are languages which cannot be learned.” — Poincaré, Dernières Pensées, Ch. V. Les Mathematiques et la Logique

Now, if I go into a Western court of Justice and they ask me to swear an oath to “speak the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me God”, or something of that ilk, my authentic course of action would be to say; ‘Judge, the language has not yet been devised that would allow me to do that.’ How can I share with you my ‘truth’ wherein the accused and his actions are ‘the universe expressing itself’, which includes ‘the community expressing itself’. If the accused and his actions are an expression of the community he is living in, by way of non-local, non-visible, non-material influences, as is the way things work according to modern physics [the sourcing influences in a continually transforming relational space are non-local, non-visible and non-material], then by asking me to report to you by way of tinpot, doer-deed constructs which cannot possibly convey ‘the whole truth’, you are asking me to perjure myself, by alleging under oath that the accused is a ‘local, independently-existing machine made-of-meat, with his own locally originating, internal process driven and directed behaviour, as he would have to be for his behaviour to be captured in terms of tinpot, doer-deed language constructs.

Your honour, in order to inquire into the source of the behaviour of the accused, which is an expression of the community he is included in, we should have to gather evidence from all of the members of this community including from prior generations that are now passed away, to get to ‘the truth of the matter’. Since this is neither practical nor possible, would it not be ‘more just’ to put the quest for ‘healing’ and ‘restoration’ on an all inclusive community basis, before ‘punishment’ on a selective basis?

Summary:

Our determinations of what is EITHER ‘true’ OR ‘false’ are logical determinations based on propositions formulated in terms of language and grammar. European languages used for formulating the propositions commonly reduce dynamics to ‘doer-deed constructs’. This NOTIONALLY [psycho-LOGICALLY] converts/relocates the sourcing agency of the dynamics, which, in our experiencing of the world as a transforming relational spatial-plenum is non-local, non-visible and non-material, to notional local, visible, material ‘things’, the archetypeal ‘makeover’ we give to forms-in-the-flow that replicates our sense-of-self [our ‘ego’ sense of self rather than our sense of self as the universe expressing itself].

Our intellectual activity, in the case of disagreements, generally orients to the establishing of whether a proposition is EITHER ‘true’ OR ‘false’, but fails to examine the error and corruption associated with capturing the dynamics of our sensory experience in the linguistically idealized constructs of language and grammar. There is no doubt in my mind, that the tinpot doer-deed constructs that RE-present people as local, independently-existing material systems with their own locally originating, internal process driven and directed behaviours, ... in other words, ... ‘machines made of meat’, ... fail to adequately [‘truthfully’] capture the essence of man; i.e. as the universe expressing itself.

The ‘Idle-No-More’ protest is a case in point. The aboriginals who discuss scenarios of the ilk of “Farmer John produced 6,000 bushels of wheat from his 100 acre farm.”, see such scenarios in terms of ‘universe expressing itself’ rather than in the tinpot doer-deed constructs of linguistic idealization. However, they understand that linguistic idealizations are like the ‘finger that points to the moon’. They are thus, in Poincaré’s terms, ‘pragmatist idealists’. Meanwhile, the government and many others who view these same scenarios, take these tinpot doer-deed constructs LITERALLY.

As Emerson says, we have these alternative ways of regarding ourselves; (a) as the universe expressing itself, and (b) as local, independently-existing doers of deeds;

"Whilst a necessity so great caused the man to exist, his health and erectness consist in the fidelity with which he transmits influences from the vast and universal to the point on which his genius can act. The ends are momentary: they are vents for the current of inward life which increases as it is spent. A man's wisdom is to know that all ends are momentary, that the best end must be superseded by a better. But there is a mischievous tendency in him to transfer his thought from the life to the ends, to quit his agency and rest in his acts: the tools run away with the workman, the human with the divine. I conceive a man as always spoken to from behind, and unable to turn his head and see the speaker. In all the millions who have heard the voice, none ever saw the face. As children in their play run behind each other, and seize one by the ears and make him walk before them, so is the spirit our unseen pilot. That well-known voice speaks in all languages, governs all men, and none ever caught a glimpse of its form. If the man will exactly obey it, it will adopt him, so that he shall not any longer separate it from himself in his thought, he shall seem to be it, he shall be it. If he listen with insatiable ears, richer and greater wisdom is taught him, the sound swells to a ravishing music, he is borne away as with a flood, he becomes careless of his food and of his house, he is the fool of ideas, and leads a heavenly life. But if his eye is set on the things to be done, and not on the truth that is still taught, and for the sake of which the things are to be done, then the voice grows faint, and at last is but a humming in his ears. His health and greatness consist in his being the channel through which heaven flows to earth, in short, in the fulness in which an ecstatical state takes place in him. It is pitiful to be an artist, when, by forbearing to be artists, we might be vessels filled with the divine overflowings, enriched by the circulations of omniscience and omnipresence. Are there not moments in the history of heaven when the human race was not counted by individuals, but was only the Influenced, was God in distribution, God rushing into multiform benefit? It is sublime to receive, sublime to love, but this lust of imparting as from _us_, this desire to be loved, the wish to be recognized as individuals, — is finite, comes of a lower strain.” ---Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘The Method of Nature’

The alternative ways of seeing self/man; (a) as the universe expressing itself, and (b) as local, independently-existing doers of deeds, are brought out very clearly and poetically by Emerson. They recall the philosophy of Ernst Mach and his pioneering of ‘gestalt psychology’; e.g. the ambiguity between ‘figure’ and ‘ground’ and the relationship between the two [it is an ‘EITHER/OR’ relationship or a ‘BOTH/AND’ relationship] which Mach resolves in his ‘Mach’s principle’: “The dynamics of the figures are conditioning the dynamics of the ground at the same time as the dynamic of the ground are conditioning the dynamics of the figures” [i.e. it is a ‘BOTH/AND’ relationship that is reduced by linguistic idealization to an ‘EITHER/OR’ relationship].

Intellectual debates based on language content cannot possibly resolve disagreements that derive from the differences between the ‘realist’ world view and the ‘pragmatist idealist’ world view, since such difference lies beyond the carrying capacity of language that constructs meaning using ‘foreground figures’ and tells of ‘what they do’ as if they are not only exclusive of the ‘ground’ they are included in, but as if that ‘ground’ is a passive, non-contributory background, rather than the ultimate animator of their behaviour and the engenderer of them.

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