Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Jitendra Darling on August 10, 2012 at 2:39pm

Jitendra is right here.  You can speak directly.  "Patriarchal crocodile tears" is an interesting, yet unfamiliar, phrase.  Please explain.

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Permalink Reply by Dyck Dewid on August 10, 2012 at 2:55pm

Relevant to suffering and connection, Following is excerpted from:  Occupy Raleigh: Unity in Five Reasons We Occupy  (a unanimous Raleigh Gen Assembly, Jan 2012)

....

3. I am sick, afraid, mad, and discouraged as I see or suspect corruption at work in my government; e.g., money and power are buying justice, representation, and favors of government; usurped and unfair salaries; banks, corporations, and governments are too big, have too much power, and have manipulated diminished accountability or no responsibility for their acts. Establishment-run security forces are trained, armed, and predisposed to violence and threat, to protect the status quo from the 99%. There is inherent difficulty expressing myself, as the language of the establishment is too limiting, small, restricted, and immature.

4. I feel betrayed and am mistrustful of government, corporations (including media), and the Supreme Court, all having earned no right to impunity or immunity, or social ambivalence. Corporate-government deal-makers enjoy lavish benefits at a time of social desperation, on the backs of the suffering.

5. I and my family are suffering physically (hunger, cold, illness, financial burden, loss of home, job, car, bankruptcy) and emotionally (shame, depression, sorrow, frustration, anger, fear, wobbly, feeling small–impotent). Those of us, perhaps a majority, who don’t have warrior behaviors have more injury and suffer even more. Further, I genuinely suffer, too, in knowing my brothers and sisters suffer, many worse than I.

(Purpose, Use, Background follows...)

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Permalink Reply by Ben Roberts on August 10, 2012 at 3:21pm

This beautiful post from Shikha on her OC.org blog feels like part of our conversation here as well:

It's funny to think that our tears can be occupied. Like there is some divine presence on the inside of our tears. I remember one time Rabbi Gafni said that God cries on the inside not on the outside [of His face, presumably] because if one single one of God's tears fell and touched the Earth, the whole world would become destroyed because God's pain is infinite.

I thought it was beautiful, to think that.

Why is there such a deep deep depth to pain and sorrow? There is something deeply horrific in the condition of the human experience. It is horrifying. I used to think it was because like, for example, with painting, contrast plays a huge role in the evaluation of beauty. When purple is next to yellow, both the purple and the yellow become extremely emphasized. Something is not just purple, it becomes EXTREMELY purple, next to something EXTREMELY yellow. The extremes become emphasized, because they are opposites on the color wheel. The same for light and dark, the brightest bright next to the darkest dark, emphasizes contrast, like saying, 'look, BOTH of these things are totally there.'

But when I contemplate the beauty of the rest of the universe, beyond human experience, it is a totally different kind of majesty. A beauty that needs no opposite; a beauty beyond contrast. The 'experience' of enormous stars crashing together in space is astoundingly beautiful and majestic because it is surrounded by so much space. The horrific and destructive parts of human experience, however, are not like that. Our experience is not encased in serenity, it is encased in garbage. We have basically surrounded ourselves with massive amounts of garbage, so that our house is garbage. Our whole context is no longer the unspeakable majesty of space, or even really the majesty of plant life, but basically insatiable lust and garbage.

Why is there such a depth of horror in the human experience?

I think if someone I love asked me that question I would say: it doesn't make sense. We are simply a tricky, tricky animal. But the truth is, I've wondered this question (of why) for years and years, and contemplated it over and over again, and I just simply don't know. I don't understand. Each time I figure out another way to explain it, I reflect and notice that I still don't understand. I don't even understand more; despite all the ways I've figured out to explain it, it still baffles me. It baffles me completely. It is possible it will baffle me completely, forever.

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Permalink Reply by Dyck Dewid on August 10, 2012 at 5:57pm

I took this pic in my garden. It is a tomato worm with larvae of a soldier beetle laid on her as she becomes their food as they hatch.  Emotions around this act of nature?  Are humans distinct from this web of life?

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Permalink Reply by Ben Roberts on August 10, 2012 at 3:30pm

Inspiration drawn at random from the GroupWorks card deck for this conversation:

Looks like a lovely echo of the beauty of colliding stars that Shikha referred to in the post above.  What is the magic we might weave over the next 90 minutes and beyond...?

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Permalink Reply by Mushin on August 11, 2012 at 2:36am

Jitendra loved the gathering and everyone's contribution.  Thanks

Early in the day I received the post to follow regarding the "gap"from a friend, an American writer living in Siberia and I responded to the post in a poetic manner expressing the integrated emergent magic of what I see arising in this Occupy Cafe Transformational Community.  Imagine a conclave of artists collaborating a new story from around the world?

The "green shoot" I am focused on is "a live radical simplicity of presence" (the root is deep profound ontological biological awareness breaking through the "concrete jungle" surrounding us.  I may feel the depths of sadness (love unattended, ignored, marginalized in man's consciousness) and in the same moment am the most optimistic person I know, people feel that as well when you smile.  That is a living paradox between being absolutely powerlessness and enactive embodied intentional knowing love embracing the moments.  

My questions are no longer "why" rather "how" does this structural determinism operate in me as an Homo sapiens amans, a biological central nervous system that emotes every moment.  A clearing for learning is by definition a exploration of a "blind spot" that lives beyond current our current distinctions and explanations. I am experiencing recurrent appreciative conversations in this emergent cafe community that passionately desires wholeness in the heart of matter.  I submit so do the Lakota people?  And it's the "uncertainty in the gap" where the possible adoring of each other's beauty arises in momentariness. We desire presencing learning within the blind spot of suffering in a clearing for learning we are sharing.  Sacred circling is a deep inner exploration of the heart.  Imagine a future existence where we are always living in the suspense, surprise and wonder of the next moment and not in fear of it?  Imagine being simple hollow bones (flutes the universe plays) and the music of wholeness in the emotional heart felt senses are free experiencing momentariness in its totality in presence, the deep deep U in the breath of life?  From such a splace is there anywhere to go or time?  Is there any past memory denied in unobstructed attention in present moments?  Is there any greater possible fulfillment in the future? And finally the big question embracing the moment is there eternity and infinity in the experience?

I loved the sharing of Shikha's writing, and I propose asking why is never answered rather just a commentary of fiction for entertainment and most the time confusing.

I offer to share this writing from 3-14-2012 to my cognitive friends in Chile (never sent) that reveals a view in appreciative inquiry regarding a hen, rooster and egg.  

In 2007 elder's translated the Order of Earth into Lakota "Maka Si Tomni" an ancient oral utterance used in Sun Dances denoting a contextual feeling, oneness, presencing awareness with all that is in momentariness, experiencing the surrounding universe in natural law as a two legged animal not a god.  In prayers they pray today to “Tunkashila” as if it were a western God/Christ.  In there ancestral understanding Tun = birth, Ka = ancient, shi = reality and la = adorning a person. 

Since 2008 Andrew James Campbell, Jhon Goes In Center and I have been participating in a reflexive active convergence in appreciative conversations of the Lakota wisdom continuum within this exploratory new domain of cognitive awareness’s intersecting the creative collapsing opportunities in global predatory chaos. The exploration has been both disturbing realizations of exponential unsustainable growth in deep rooted systemic cultural breakdowns occurring without any social restraints, causing severe intergenerational trauma by arrogant aggressive patriarchal elite political discourses, and revelations of a graceful unit of our humanity that enactively embody the historic wisdom of being Homo sapiens amans in the presence of the White Buffalo Calf Women through the sacred “Cunnupa.”

The Lakota people in our assessments are biological social loving wise sing up animals, not arrogant aggressive gods called savages by western history.  These wo/men actually adorned one another as a social praxis in a manner of interactive social relations.  You experience this reflexive silence in almost every conversation, they listen, cognate and stand back intentionally from speaking directly as authority figures with any arrogance or aggression.  To be a wo/man is to be humble first and foremost in presencing expansive intelligence in the living web of life.  The village is in disrepair at the moment, and the root of the Tree of Life is still solid; praying, drumming, singing, eating and dancing in sacred social ceremonies that actually have nothing to do with religion just community cultural gatherings. 

I imagine our humanness in humanity belongs to one unified hoop in this cultural manner, one common deep dark heart felt sense of belonging to the earth as mud people, and one emergent loving experience as a humanity in the future, not two, nor separated in this modern ego~ology called western psychological archetypal fantasies that we have imagined as interpretations and explanations of a transcendental sacred self called “god.”  Now we have 7 billion pontificating popes in subjective relativism eating each other like cannibals.  I understand the metaphor breaks the appreciative intellectual conversational boundaries and it was an intentional break!

I get the cognitive science perspective as Francisco Verela said “You enter the brain through the eye, march up the optic nerve, round & round the cortex, looking behind every neuron & then before you know it, you emerge into daylight on the spike of a motor nerve impulse, scratching your head & wondering where the self is.”  What I find beautiful is the Emerge N SEE notion of being “virtual identities” capable of instantaneous change bringing forth maturity, wholeness and transcending the swept along historic cultural drift in objectivity; discourses, institutions and patterns demanding obedience and negating independent freedom, self organization and positive/negative accountable feedback of autonomous regulation in natural law.

Like Humberto's experience when he first perceived his insight/paradigm shift as a biological scientist and thought maybe he was losing his mind exploring new landscapes as an observer and horizons in scientific explanations.  The same has occurred in my discovery and process of learning!  Only I can honestly report to have lost my mind, (not looking for it either) and I am beginning to live in this new EMERGE~N~SEE experience understanding that social relations has the capability of gathering human trust and harnessing a manner of appreciative conversations in cultural interactive breakdowns that literally disclose a new simplified trusted sustainable manner of dignity with one another that is radically different than the drunken party happening in addictive consumptive suicidal behaviors based in power of epistemological discourses.  I see we as humanity are on the move and leaving past belief systems behind in an emergent liberation of self knowledge. 

The experience is disclosing a living Milky Way. We are icke wichache in Lakota, just plain old Indians with no power enjoying the presencing of interactions in Wolakota, a manner of human dignity embracing peace and friendship valuing social relations over the notion of power and self importance in living together.  

Please take a moment to view Jhon Goes In Center presentation  “The Lakota Paradigm” to get an insight of where we are coming from as a community of learning since 2008.

I live on Pine Ridge Reservation and I am enclosing a working document regarding the Maka Si Tomni Men's Oyate currently designing a "Leadership Grant for Dallas Chief Eagle" with the Bush Foundation to give you an initial insight into our current work unfolding and concerns intersecting your notion of Matrix~Cultural~Biology. Your opportunity, in my assessment, offers our emergent work and learning a grounded biological Institute of researchers to grow appreciative inquiry and dialog in the endeavor envisioned in our reflexive actions of learning occurring in real time and pure play today.  This is going to be fun history making learning not suffering in guilt and remorse forever. 

The most amazing experience in this Lakota village (and maybe a key discovery to explore in the anxiety occurring in modernity’s cultural insanity) is death is not feared, rather, celebrated in marvelous adornment as a community that give~a~way and memorialize the experience of humanness in a loving legacy with no oral utterance for “good bye” in conversations, rather “latter.”  Recently I lost another very dear elder Lakota kola in my life and it brought to my attention how precious and priceless wise elder's are in the midst of us.  Taking any of them for granted is a mistake and death is a facticity in living.  What comes from the womb dies and what doesn’t lives forever. 

Humberto in my assessment is a great person in our cultural history breaking through the prejudicial ignorance of cultural systemic power in discourses, institutions and standard practices focusing on our common experience; caring, feeding and nurturing our humanness. I have offered to others that a thousand years from now Einstein will be a footnote in the history of man in this emerging Noosphere, while Humberto's insights will still be generating meaningful insights, innovations and learning in new dimensions of reality expanding the creative generative intelligence in our autonomous reflections and effective actions as a household of humanity.  

I am a small insignificant part of an emergent society of learning called “Maka Si Tomni.”  We value Francisco's notion "a man of the highest virtue does not keep to virtue and that is why he has virtue. A man of the lowest virtue never strays from virtue and that is why he is without virtue." So this caravan of Lakota dreamers is a seed showing a fragile green shoot breaking through the soil, and accepts the fact that we have all broken our promises to love from time to time in ignorance, and yet we have never quit getting up to continue to listen for the sounds of when the saints come marching in singing the heart song “Biology of Love.”  (2 minute You Tube)

I pray these utterances bring smiles, warmth, happiness to your hearth and blanket, inspiring laughter in our future endeavors; not frowns checking the many hoops we refuse to jump through to converse honestly. Introducing this troop of nameless wondering virtual troubadours is an enjoyable articulation in the dance among us as the path unfolds.  We have a repository of artistic scribbling and not too much interested in books because what we are seeing today is transformed almost in the next moment. 

As an emergent community of learning there is an interesting happening between Jhon, Andrew and I that Heinz von Forrester pointed to regarding the triadic relationships between the chicken, rooster and egg.  They are functionally one unit needing one another to experience a shared reality of value.  We wonder if there is a story here explaining the 2nd order creative collapsing opportunities to causation in the reductive objective explanations currently arising in a cultural breakdown and the experiencing of unsustainable emotional contradictory conditions and situations globally?  That is a question we are caring, feeding and nourishing in appreciative conversations not necessarily answering.  We have no power, positions, titles or publications, and actually understand our position as “icke wichache.” As common ordinary men with no self-importance wondering is enough.  We assess self importance is the fundamental denial operating as the cognitive "observer error" in this swept along historic constellation of conversations of unsustainable chaos. Simultaneously we are happy to be authentic fools in the condition and situation as well in the asylum of insanity surrounding us.  Maybe the best metaphor is the old "King of Hearts"; we take no pleasure in war and human suffering, and appreciate being crazy exploring what we know we don't know as comical history makers of a new future. 

Heinz von Forrester comment:

"Humberto Maturana, the Chilean neurophysiologist, who a few years ago, fascinated us with his presentation on “autopoiesis”, the organization of living things.

Here is Maturana’s proposition, which I shall now baptize “Humberto Maturana’s Theorem Number One”:  “Anything said is said by an observer.”

Should you at first glance be unable to sense the profundity that hides behind the simplicity of this proposition let me remind you of West Churchman’s admonition of this afternoon: “You will be surprised how much can be said by a tautology”. This, of course, he said in utter defiance of the logician’s claim that a tautology says nothing.

I would like to add to Maturana’s Theorem a corollary which, in a modesty, I shall call

“Heinz von Foerster’s Corollary Number One”: “Anything said is said to an observer.”

With these two propositions a nontrivial connection between three concepts has been established. First, that of an observer who is characterized by being able to make descriptions. This is because of Theorem 1. Of course what an observer says is a description. The second concept is that of language. Theorem 1 and Corollary 1 connect two observers through language. But, in turn, by this connection we have established the third concept I wish to consider this evening, namely that of society: the two observers constitute the elementary nucleus for a society.

Let me repeat the three concepts that are in a triadic fashion connected to each other. They are: first, the observers; second, the language they use; and third, the society they form by the use of their language. This interrelationship can be compared, perhaps, with the interrelationship between the chicken, and the egg, and the rooster. You cannot say who was first and you cannot say who was last. You need all three in order to have all three. In order to appreciate what I am going to say it might be advantageous to keep this closed triadic relation in mind.

I have no doubts that you share with me the conviction that the central problems of today are societal. On the other hand, the gigantic problem-solving conceptual apparatus that evolved in our Western culture is counterproductive not only for solving but essentially for perceiving social problems. One root for our cognitive blind spot that disables us to perceive social problems is the traditional explanatory paradigm which rests on two operations: One is causation, the other one deduction. It is interesting to note that something that cannot be explained—that is, for which we cannot show a cause or for which we do not have a reason—we do not wish to see. In other words, something that cannot be explained cannot be seen. This is driven home again and again by Don Juan, a Yaqui Indian, Carlos Castaneda’s mentor.

It is quite clear that in his teaching efforts Don Juan wants to make a cognitive blind spot in Castaneda’s vision to be filled with new perceptions; he wants to make him “see”. This is doubly difficult, because of Castaneda’s dismissal of experiences as “illusions” for which he has no explanations on, the one hand, and because of a peculiar property of the logical structure of the phenomenon “blind spot” on the other hand; and this is that we do not perceive our blind spot by, for instance, seeing a black spot close to the center of our visual field: we do not see that we have a blind spot. In other words, we do not see that we do not see. This I will call a second order deficiency, and the only way to overcome such deficiencies is with therapies of second order.

The popularity of Carlos Castaneda’s books suggest to me that his points are being understood: new paradigms emerge. I’m using the term “paradigm” in the sense of Thomas Kuhn who wants to indicate with this term a culture specific, or language specific, stereotype or model for linking descriptions semantically. As you may remember, Thomas Kuhn argues that there is a major change in paradigms when the one in vogue begins to fail, shows in-consistencies or contradictions.  

Here is the post from this morning.

http://kulturcritic.wordpress.com/2012/08/10/on-ordinariness-a-fora...

Latter

Mushin

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Permalink Reply by Dyck Dewid on August 11, 2012 at 12:01pm

Yet, after others stories and explanations and visions and constructs and sentiments around the human condition of sadness, I still need to wallow around in the stew... to smell it, to rub against, to taste the sharp and the smooth and slimy, to freeze and melt and boil.  I'll narrow to one area for now-- death, because I sense it is so utterly pervasive in our lives.

Why does the loss of a loved one bring sadness?  If it has much to do with my own fear of death or or fear of pain... then the function of sadness seems primarily to impose a suffering that will be removed only when illusion are removed, replaced with what is real.  Maybe this is a process of divine equal opportunity education. 

Perhaps it seems contradictory to be sad in the light of whatever my faith teaches me about death.  Perhaps I feel separate from Nature- the web of all existence governed by the evenhanded laws of Creating, Sustaining, Destroying.  Perhaps if I don't feel like I've lived-up-to the standards for a 'good' life so I fear what will become of me after life ends.  Perhaps my imagined perception of pain is so debilitating it blocks my curiosity and my pathways to illumination.  Perhaps I've avoided thinking about my ending altogether.

What kind of life can be built upon a denial of my own temporal existence?  Ultimately, a false and sad one, no?.

  

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