Healthy Culture Quotes and Proverbs

 

Water and Earth (A thawing of Frost)

 by I-P

Some say the world will begin with Water

Some say with Earth

From what I know of Compassion's Daughter

I hold with those who wager Water

But if there were to be a Second Birth

I think I know enough of laughter

Of humble, kind, good-natured mirth

To say that for creation Earth

Is of equal worth

If it does come after...

 

 

 

 

So. Long time no posts. I guess I lost faith in the written/virtual word as a medium for finding "Healthy Culture Nerds" to collaborate in a "cultural pilot project", possibly in the form of an intentional community*.Not sure I have really regained it, but I do have the urge to post, in no particular order, the following fairly representative quotes of myself together with some made-up "proverbs" related to Healthy Culture as I understand it these days. I will probably add to, and perhaps modify) them in the future and--if I get really inspired-- elaborate on each one (or just some of them) in future posts.--I-P

 

 

""Science", the faculty of "knowing-apart"; "Conscience", the faculty of knowing-together"...

 

"A culture, just as much as an individual, without a healthy functioning conscience, can be called "Sociopathic" and its form of self-replication (its educational process), "Sociopathogenic"...

 

Against a rapist epistemology:

"If might is right, rapists have the right to rape children because the rapists are presumably “mightier". Might is not Right nor (contra Bacon and Hobbes) is  “Knowledge" (presumably “Right Knowledge”) ,“Power” (presumably “Power-Over”--ie "Might”).  Right Knowledge is not Might: Right Knowledge is Communion, as the majority of cells in your body must know very  well, else you wouldn’t be  alive reading this…"

 

"People seem to think that they are trying to "enjoy Life" but "Life" is not what is happening; what is happening is the rape of the planet. People are trying to enjoy the rape of the planet..."

 

"Local Anesthesia, General Anesthesia, Coma, Death you think will release ya

but Local Wholesthesia, General Wholesthesia, Awakening, and Life is what will ease ya

'cause if the shoe fit, you don't feel it; if ya stomachs working right ya don't think of it:

Wholesthesia is the silence of Health, (check it out, dig it your self)

 

--From the song "Its Not Life" 

Anesthesia is "Nonsense", "Wholesthesia"?, thats "Complete Sense", "Euaesthesia" is "Good Sense", I'm wishing you "Good Sense"...

 

--From the song "Good Sense"

"War is the Denial of Life, "Peace" is the Denial of Death; Justice is not the Denial of Anything..."

"Justice is the situation of people acknowledging and resolving to treat their own individual symptoms of our shared sick culture, rather than projecting them onto each other individually or onto other groups collectively. It is a group of people helping each other do this. Justice is Shared Recovery."

"The context of this Shared Recovery is True Community"

 

 "True community is not just the "human community", (which ecologically speaking is just one population in a given place and not a community at all), but rather the the whole diversity of beings in a given place considered as fellow Individual-Persons with which to share recovery.

 

"If the land does not recover, the people cannot recover"

 

"While the people do not recover, the land cannot recover"

 

 "Justice is "Justice for All"

"Justice begins at Home: Be fair with Yourself...."

 

"Rhetoric, Logic and other forms of argument and persuasion implicitly separate Honesty (subjective reality) from Truth (objective reality), and so tend to involve both Dishonest Truth (misleading "facts", Lying by Omission, etc) and False Honesty (unconsciously excluded/censored "feeling/sensations/thoughts, etc). This is because in any such argument, the possibility that both parties could be wrong, and that, moreover the whole topic of discussion could be a red herring relative to a much more vital topic which is being ignored, is connived at by both participants, setting the whole discussion on an alienated and dishonest foundation to begin with.."

 

The expression of Righteousness is always an example of both of Dishonest Truth and False Honesty. Of  Dishonest Truth in as much as it is an arbitrary singling out and condemnation of one or another symptom of sick culture in another (while ignoring in ones self, the many, perhaps different but equally important symptoms of that same disease) Such symptoms can be expressed in terms of "crimes of omission" or "crimes of commission". Such righteousness is an example of  False Honesty in as much as subjective anesthesia/amnesia are behind ones ability to do this ignoring.

At the same time, Shame is always equally an example of this same Dishonest Truth/False Honesty, as such shame implies an equal amnesia and numbness regarding, in this case, ones of own past and present "virtues of omission" and "virtues of commission", ie; the share of healthy culture that is also present, even if unrecognized and cultivated.

Thus, when and wherever there is Righteousness or Shame (or Praise or Blame, or Reward or Punishment) of oneself or others, there is False Honesty/Dishonest Truth (ie; Alienated Phoniness and "Antisocializing"). Of course this is just something to know and try to heal, not to be ashamed about, such Shame just being a sign that the denial process is still the default one...

 

And, what happens in the absence of the dominance of these things in our shared culture? Cultural Recovery, Inner and Outer Healing is what happens, that is, if Coawareness, True Community, and Good Sense have taken their place. For there is a dimension perpendicular to the false dichotomies of Righteousness/Shame etc, a dimension across which there is a (relatively) true dichotomy. That dimension is that of Recovery or Denial which go in opposite directions along the same slanted and usually winding road. In one direction one takes progressively less and less for granted, becoming less and less self important and more and more awake alive and interactive, and in the other...well the opposite.

 

Even so, the reason I say the dichotomy is only relative and not absolute is because people in cultural recovery are always Relapsing into denial (and helping each other to Recover from such relapses). Given the nature of the situation (ie; that we were all born into, suffer from and are still surrounded by, sick culture) relapses are to be expected (though not courted), as just a part of the Shared Recovery Process. As such, they are just treated as sources of information relevant to improving that process (ideally anyway). Such relapses, once they are seen, acknowledged, and collaboratively "treated" as such, are in no way  a part of the denial dynamic and Laughing about them afterwards is part of what I was trying to get at in the " good natured" and "humble" Laughter of my poem.

Only from such an unpretentious Recovery dynamic, and from a Logic that correlates in principle (and cultivates in practice) both Honesty and Truth, can we expect to approach either Honest Truth outwardly expressed or True Honesty inwardly experienced. Such a Logic is 'Life-Logic" ie; Correlative Logic, or the logic of Coawareness, of Recovery as opposed to the prevailing logic of Denial".

"Everybody has a piece of the Truth; Everybody has a piece of the Lie"

"Basically, the house is on fire and those not being burned alive tend to be stupefied by the smoke."

 

"Evil is just Glamorized Stupidity"

 

 "The opposite of stupidity is not Cleverness; the opposite of stupidity is Awareness ("Coawareness" actually)"

 

Coawareness is the joint awareness of the "fire and smoke" outwardly in the world And equally of their effects inwardly in oneself. It is simultaneously the awareness of the existence also of some necessary degree of "non-fire" and "non-smoke" both inwardly and outwardly (otherwise we and the world would be dead already). This Coawareness results in realization of the necessity to coordinate inner and outer healing.

Recovery Culture chooses Compassion over Lies,

Denial Culture chooses Lies over Compassion...

* This is because the essence of healthy culture is likely to be lost in its translation into the cognitive idiom  of the dominant sick culture. Healthy culture communications are always directed to the Intelligence of the Heart (which is notably closer to the gut and arms and legs--that is to compassionate and courageous interactivity-- then the pseudo intelligence of the head alone). The dissociated left-brained attention of the dominant culture is likely to exclude the essence of what is being said in the very act of isolating,  "mastering", (or even just being able to superficially understand and repeat) the concepts. Such "power-over the letter" being mistaken for true "communion-with the spirit" of what one is trying to communicate can only be expected from those unconsciously  infected with a "power-over epistemology"...(I exclude myself from this only to the extent that I am Conscious that I share this infection with  you and everyone else in this culture and so am in ongoing self-imposed experimental treatment for it, which I call Recovery)...

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

"Science", "Conscience", and "Conference"

{sorry if you read this post in its barely first draft form (I posted it accidentally). While it is true that I tend to post things in a raw state and edit them more later (I do this because having posted them is the only thing that really motivates me--I suppose through a kind of shame really--to edit them at all, rather than just abandon them un-posted after having gotten whatever it was off my chest), but I didn't mean to post something that raw. Hopefully this version is a lot more ready for public perusal.}


So I have come to the conclusion that posting an elaborate thing about Life-Logic presented all at one time would be overwhelming and counter productive. I think its better to present the concepts separately, (sometimes by way of clarifying points relative to actual issues that are up with me), in relatively short blog posts like this one. Then, probably, when all the relevant ideas are adequately introduced and illustrated, I will tie the whole thing together in a more official "Life-Logic Part Two". In addition to keeping the reader from being too overwhelmed by a super-long blog post with a lot of new Ideas and language, this method works for me because It frees me up to post stuff that is more currently up with me as long as I can integrate a few Life-Logical Concepts into the mix.

These days I have been thinking about Conscience and Science, though I mean both words in a specific sense.


If Conscience is "knowing together"(and this is the etymological meaning of the word as well as the one that reflects the sense in which I mean it here), then "Science" is "Knowing-apart", knowing by separation, knowing in isolation. Though this certainly still seems to describe Modern Science as we know it (that is, "systems thinking" notwithstanding, each of the various sciences as well as the scientific method in general), I am here going to call "science" any kind of dissociated Knowing, or dissociated "way of knowing", and thus include more or less every sort of extant "discipline" in the contemporary world and any historical disciplines as well. Don't therefor, think I exclude things like Theology or any Art from being "sciences" in this special cultural sense of the term. Also, and necessarily because of the mutual arising of the outer and the inner, by "science", I also include any dissociated inner subjective of knowing/being that facilitates, and is facilitated by the, outer dissociated, disoriented, and uncoordinated state of  outer affairs.

In a similar way, I am not using the term "Conscience" to denote any exclusively moral, ethical, religious, or even subjective concept or state of affairs, but rather to denote the phenomenon and faculty of inner-and-outer "knowing-together" in a given manifestation of culture, whether on an individual or collective scale.

Translated into the (now hopefully familiar) context of Individual-Personhood, Conscience would be an inner process of knowing-together as an individual (with the mind, heart, body, and intuition all in uninhibited, inclusive, and equalitarian mutual communication), but (also and simultaneously) Conscience involves authentic (outer) communication (as a Person), with ones fellow beings in each of the (Civil, Neighborly, Familial, and "Religious") venues of social "Personhood". In other words Conscience (as I am here using the term) is inclusive and healthy knowing-together inwardly in a way that facilitates inclusive and healthy knowing-together outwardly. At the same time, Conscience is inclusive and healthy knowing-together outwardly in a way that facilitates inclusive and healthy knowing-together inwardly.

After all, if I am dissociating, repressing, and censoring aspects of myself as an individual I will be, in effect, alienated from parts of myself and what | say to myself inwardly, as well as outwardly to you will at best be a kind of phony denial-laden "propaganda". And why should I engage in such inner dissociation and repression and phoniness if equally alienated "dyspersonal") competitive, hostile,  social conditions were not provoking and sustaining such an artificial posture? What but the living Truth of the matter can be the first casualty of such an inner and outer "War"?

So again, to underline the difference between this conception of conscience and the normal one, here is an example: The situation of being five years old (or 10 or whatever) and being forced to sit in a chair for long periods of time is almost always an offense against conscience, as the process of knowing-together requires that the body as well as the mind, heart, and intuition be free to express themselves unless there is "inner consensus" for the temporary repression of a given function under special circumstances. If, in other words, the child had an understanding and feeling that this limited mobility was warranted (as well as the intuited faith in its warrant as justified by, for example the impression that the experience was a necessary part of a process which manifestly ends in a healthy world of happy free adult people) then conscience would not be violated by acquiescing to such an imposition, at least as long is it was very temporary. As it stands however, there is no intuitive, intellectual, or positive emotional justification for being forced into such a repressive mode vis-a-vis ones own body for long periods of time. To experience this kind of thing repeatedly, with no motivation for conforming to such a demand but fear, is to damage, not just ones body but ones conscience, it is to be forced out of a sense of the totality of who one is, and to be "broken" as an individual, much in the way horses and elephants are broken.*Such an habitual--indeed unconscious and compulsive "knowing-apart" is the likely experience of every "educated person" and was shared equally by someone like St. Augustine or Galileo, or Simone De Beauvoir, Mary Baker Eddy or you or me. Moreover, since informal education usually involves similar acts of unjustified and misguided impositions (always involving but not always focused on, the physical body), the faculty of conscience is basically crippled in everyone.

This example was chosen to show that conscience, as I mean the term, is equally inclusive of the knowing/sensing/moving of the body as of the knowing/thinking of the mind, the knowing/feeling of the heart, and and the knowing/intuiting of the intuition, though of course conscience itself does not privilege sense-knowing over that of the other three. It would not do, for example, to reintegrate the body in a way that did not equally include and educate the mind, heart, or intuition, nor is a seemingly healthy body in any way a sign of a conscience manifesting in this or that individual-Person. The point is that the faculty of conscience is damaged to the extent that any of these modes of knowing is chronically excluded from expression and from communication with the others. Now putting things this way has the danger of seeming to imply that such exclusion is really possible, since it implies that the functions in question are really separate. This would would be wrong (its difficult to get this kind of thing into words sometimes). The ways of knowing in question all intrinsically coexist and codistinguish each other just like north, south, east and west do; they are codeterminant. Thus conscience  or knowing-together  is actually just the experience/process that reflects consciousness and cognitive comprehension of the primary reality of existing together or Coexistence. Obviously, as the example above shows, this consciousness and cognition, can be, and usually is, damaged in a way that effects all its aspects. It may be damaged to some extent even before the kindergarden age of the above example, in which case such miseducation would serve to add insult to injury and, along with many other aspects of "socialization" into a sick culture, help to further suppress the inherent Individual-Personhood of the child.

In this way, once the "axial" (inner, individual) aspect of Knowing-together is sufficiently damaged generally, a kind of reinforcing entropy begins to be at work, so that, in the absence of outer (social, personal) support for healing, this state of inner (Individual) alienation, dissociation, and disorientation, is very likely to become our default experience of ourselves. And, once this relatively conscienceless state of affairs has been established in us, the reflex of knowing-apart (of dissociated knowing based on coerced but eventually internalized habits of self censorship and exclusion)  has also been established, and the person in question is open to identification with any kind of dissociated "science", in which compulsively isolated problems are "solved" in isolation, such that they generate new problems in other areas of life etc. By this time we feel ourselves and our entire lives as dissociated problems and, being exiled from our full experience of our selves and each other as Individuals, and from the full extent of our relationships/responsibilities as Persons; we have become Alienated-Phonies seemingly trapped in an artificial Alienated and Phony world in which denial is the most salient characteristic....

I feel the need here to balance this account--which seems to accent the subjective, Individual side of things with a similar sketch of what is going on outwardly ("objectively" "intersubjectively", "Personally"Politically") at the same time as this individual dissociation is happening. What is happening is that Personal Venues (the Civil, the Local, the Familial, the "Religious/Philosophical") are likewise both increasingly dissociated from each other and increasing dissociated and fragmented within themselves. Facilitated largely through the fear-induced and malignant meme of a dissociated and falsely dichotomous Logic/Rhetoric of Argument and Identification (Rather than one  of Coinference and Coidentification), the Outer world will be experienced, not as a coordinated fabric of coexistent and interwoven scales of association, relationship and responsibility, into which the thread of ones own authentic Individual coexistence is intrinsically woven, both sustaining and being sustained by the whole, but as panic-ridden, alienated and mutually contending collection of  factional and mutally dissociated "uses" and "thems", "here's" and "theres".

This is "history" really; "Civilizations" really being Pseudo Civilizations (arising from pseudo-locales), in which the "Civil" venue of Personhood ,which in my model represents a concern with and respect for The Stranger as Codistinct with the Neighbor, the Family member, and the fellow "Soul,"--or Creature (a fellow Being considered in terms of ultimate things), has been distorted, dissociated, and deformed to the same extent as the local, familial, and religious aspects of the culture with which it corresponds. I suppose you can think of such "civilizations" in terms of a full blown "cultural auto-immune disorder" (I think of the fist line of Stanley Diamonds, "In search of the Primitive": "Civilization begins with Oppression at home and Conquest abroad"...or words to that effect**). One can also think the dynamic as a kind of "Cultural Metastasis"; as the cumulative effect of the ongoing Traumas of Pubic and Private Violence (roughly War and domestic violence--including Child Abuse), on a given (already malignant) situation, combined with suitable external conditions for the expansion of culture in question. One can see how the Civil in my sense is itself lost in such "Civilization" at the same time as a the truly Local and Neighborly sensibility is lost through the cultures internal social stratifications and dissociations. I imagine this manifesting Locally as an Alienated  Provincialism in some places and times (in which a "hypo-civil", alienated and phony local "we" tends to dominate) and in others as an equally "delocalized", "hyper-civil" Techo-globalized Suburbia of alienated Strangers pretending to be neighbors (or pretending not to be neighbors) prevails***. And of course all such developments should be understood as the the more external aspects of a disease which has concurrently less visible  Familial, Spiritual symptoms.

You may be looking for causality at this point, ie; does the mutation of the Local culture cause the corruption of the civil impulse, or visa versa--or do both originate in mutations in Familial or Religous dynamics (which I have not gone into yet)? As I will explain later, the logic of causality (when considered as primary anyway) is one of the psychological wounds given and nursed by the very ongoing traumas responsible for the cultural malignancy in question; it is part of the problem.  A Healthy Logic is a logic of Mutuality rather than Causality (but, as I say, more of this later).  What I want to get across now is that the the general disorientation or "Dysmutuality" that manifests "subjectively" as a damaged process of inner Knowing-Together, is not separate from an outer world which is equally confused fragmented and at odds with itself.

I could go on talking about this outer "Personal" aspect of things, giving a paragraph each to how the general pathology of sick culture and a damaged faculty of "knowing-together"  might manifest in the Familial and "Spiritual" venues of Personhood respectively, but then I will probably have lost the balance- of-Personal-to-Individual Considerations which I was trying to gain by adding these few paragraphs on the personal side of knowing together--only I will I have lost it in the other direction. Suffice to say that neither a healthy Familial Venue (which cannot be even exclusively human, much less nuclear) nor a similarly healthy Spiritual/Religious venue can exist outside of each ones coordination with the other two aspects of Personhood. This is because, to reiterate; the very Existence each aspect of Personhood is really its Coexistence, its Coidentification, and so its consciously dynamic coordination, with the others as a necessary aspect of an Individual-Personal order of things. Without such Conscious "Personal" state of Socio-economic Coexistence, our Individualized-Personhood is obscured, hidden, and in a way prevented by "Privatized-Publicness" and by the host of factional and Phony "we's" that populate the Public-Private "Life". At the same time, the lack of an inner ("Individual") sense of Coexistence (our inner relationship between Mind, Heart, Body, and Intuition) is equally dissociated, disoriented and fragmented due to a damaged faculty of Individual Conscience and Cognition. So what I am saying is that the false-"we" is cocreated with an equally alienated and equally phony false-"I" through the same wound of fear induced betrayal, a betrayal of Shared SelfNature which can be seen as a Public/Private betrayal from the outside (the "Shared-Nature" side) and as Alienated and Phony from the inside (the "Shared-Self" side), but which amounts to a kind of initiation into the same Sick Culture of Fear, Dissociation and Denial--a culture in which, among many other things, Conscience is crippled in its subordination to "Science" and its pseudo imperatives of competition between falsely conceived, and falsely identified and dissociated selves and others.



A version of a previously introduced table might be helpful in "grocking" much of the above:

Coexistence as Shared Self-Nature
Structure of the Shared-Self (Our Shared Inner Relationship) Individual:	Structure of Shared-Nature ( Our Shared Outer Relationship): Personal:
Intuition (“Inner Elder”)	Religio/Philosopic Venue
Thinking (“Inner Adult”)	Civil Venue
Feeling (“Inner Child”)	Local Venue
Sensation (“Inner Animal”)	Familial Venue

{Note: the above table will have to do for now, but I wanted to try to make a sort of spherical diagram to illustrate this whole thing. For now you can imagine a kind of Sphere of coexistence in which the "northern hemisphere is divided into the 4 Personal quadrants/coordinates of Civil, Local etc and the "southern hemisphere" correspondingly represents the 4 Individual quadrants of Thinking, Feeling etc). In such a diagram the sphere as a whole would represent our Shared SelfNature...Though it might be misleading in some ways as well, I think such an image would be an improvement on the above table, as there would be more of a gestalt sense of the necessary wholeness of the conceptual model.... specifically one might better intuit how the derangement and stress in one part as a symptom of the derangement of the whole field...}

But I need to add one thing to complete my sketch of the both the faculty of Conscience and of what it means for it to be damaged, something that I hinted at above and that I think brightens the bleak situation described above considerably. This is that the inclusive coordinated "knowing-together" that is Conscience must include and engage the inner and outer "Knowing-apart" that is Science. How else, after all could it be real knowing-together if it dissociated and ignored its opposite (or perhaps you might say its "wound"?) It is Science that dissociates, excludes and ignores, not Conscience. Because of this, the inner and outer dynamic of conscience is the only dynamic that can (and must if it is to be real conscience) acknowledge, include and heal, inner and outer Science. Conscience is therefor not against Science but for Sciences healing integration into (basically its subordination to and to some extent transformation by) itself. Relative "Knowing-Apart" is sometimes necessary after all, it is just that only a primary  and ongoing process of knowing-together is going to be able to determine when where and for how long such relatively dissociated work or thinking is necessary or useful. Left to itself, any specialized science or "profession" can only be expected to become more and more blinkered, myopic, subdivided within itself as well as more alienated from and competitive with, other such "disciplines, to the ultimate detriment to any kind of common good, or any manifest common sense...

Now so far I have presented this idea of Conscience only as an ideal, indeed I have even tried to show that it is something we have all likely never fully experienced in a conscious, undistorted way because of formal and informal education (education being, roughly, the transmission of culture across the generations).  Still, like the various other ideals I have introduced earlier (Wholesthesia, Good Sense, Common Sense, Consciousness, Comprehension, etc including the ideal of Healthy Culture itself) I nevertheless understand Conscience to be in some sense actual-though-latent, both in our selves and even in many of our institutions--at least in the same way that health is, in some sense and on some level, present-though-latent even in a sick body (or else the body would be dead already). What is needed then is some process or practice that can amplify and further facilitate the manifestation of this latent conscience in us.  Cointegrative Conference is one experimental ritual of healthy culture among others, that is meant to awaken, rediscover, cultivate, nurture, and well "recover" this latent Conscience in ourselves and our institutions, and involves a progressive  and ongoing process of inner and outer (Individual and Personal/Social) coordination and healing.

Basically it involves a regular "check-in" in and "checking-out" vis-a-vis each participants project of recovery from Alienated Phoniness in the four social venues of Personhood (relatively outer relationship) and the "fifth" or "Central venue" of (of relatively inner/intra relationship). The checking-in phase  is meant to inspire and coordinate collaborative joint experimental project in inspiring and co-creating, coordinating and sustaining a culture of recovery in each these venues, and of challenging the culture of alienated and phony denial that prevails in all of them in the current state of affairs.  Of course there is a lot more to this conference process, including the shared life-logical understanding informing and structuring the whole practice, but I only feel up to saying few other things about it before closing.

The words "Coductive and Codictive", in the above diagram, are very relevant to the Life-Logic that is used in Cointegrative Conference (I am not sure "used" is the right word since Cointegrative Conference is so essentially a Life-Logical process and Life-Logic so essentially Cointegrative and Conferential, that I am not so sure that it would be so misleading to regard them as two ways of describing the same process). They refer to the "axial" or polar aspects of cointegration that conscientious conference  "co-facilitates" and coordinates. (I know, the preceeding way too abstract and vague a statement.  Suffice to say that the Codictive Process is the aspect of Coinference meant to make make a gap in alienated interia of Public-Private Discourse in which Personal Communication is possible and the Coductive Process makes makes a gap in Alienated-Phoniness inwardly so as to make authentic Individual Communication possible. Obviously the Coductive and Codictive are Really complementary aspects of true Process conference.   But there will be more about these two aspects of Conscientious, Life-Logical, Cointegrative Conference, and about other aspects as well, in future posts.


Though it still may be a bit hard to comprehend at this point, I do want to reiterate that Conscience means not just inclusive just inner knowing but also inclusive outer knowing; it is not just Individual-but also Personal (personal, social, collective, political). What follows from this (in the light of the paradoxical bright side of things explained above) is that there is at least as much latent, health in ones (admittedly stricken) personal venue (whatever and where ever you are), to allow for whatever state of conscience is present but manifest (really just unrecognized) within you and your surroundings. Even though you many indeed be surrounded by alienated-phonies and basically moving from one alienated and phony environment to another in the course of your day (which would be extremely normal), there is nevertheless a real potential for inner and outer belonging and personhood there in as much as you are at least in the present moment able to name, acknowledge challenge that very outer normative denial and degeneration (as well as the inner one). In other words, the "glass"  of your personal environment may be (or seem) a great deal more then half empty, but it cant be completely empty;  there is at least something (maybe just the sky and the trees-- though there is almost certainly more) in your outer personal venue that is nourishing latent conscience in you, and the responsibility then is to try to nourish and increase and nourish those things in your turn.

In general, the requirements for participation in any experimental ritual of cultural recovery, specifically the one I am calling cointegrative conference, is the presence of enough manifest conscience to realize and accept, not only the outer "broken-ness" of our social, economic, and political institutions, but that Public-Private brokeness together with ones own corresponding inner "Alienated and Phony" broken-ness. It means being able to do this while simultaneously realizing that the part of us that is capable of sincerely holding such a realization, (as a necessary preliminary to a serious practical engagement with sick culture inside as well as outside), is nothing less then the previously latent, now awakening and manifesting Conscience within us, the very quality without which any hope is just disguised denial anyway. In other words, it is the very piece of the Truth in us that is responsible for our acknowledgement of the piece of the Lie in us, and that is responsible for our being able to acknowledge the need for help ourselves and the need to help each other--if "help" is actually the right word--in the process of inner/outer healing. The main kind of mutual help I mean here is that which involves helping each other, though various experiments in Cointegrative Conference, to realize when we are channeling our piece of the Lie (our sick culture) or our piece of the Truth (a process which incidentally is very much facilitated by associating with others who have different blind spots--different patterns of damage and denial--than oneself). Anyway, Conscience means knowing all of this and so it means, not a sense of despair but an awakening of the heart and of a sense of inner and outer responsibly; the responsibility to seek and commit to this path of inner/outer Recovery....

Cointegrative Conference then, is something one comes to in an absolutely non-competitive, absolutely non-exclusive spirit of recovery,or recovery as recovery "alienated phonies" sharing an  outer world which is now recovering (if only to a very small extent at present) from Public-Privateness, hoping to be helped by others as well to help others in a kind of cultural "twelve-step program" intent on healing this broken-ness inwardly as well, in a progressive and coordinated way. Recovery and Healing are paradoxical concepts implying, as they do, the coexistence of "opposites", of both sickness and health in this case, in the same process (which explains any difficulty in understanding them on the part of minds informed by the either/or panic logic--and the related endemic scientific "knowing-apart" of the dominant culture). For such Shared Recovery/Healing to happen then, we most abandon that logic for one that can sustain the motivation to engage in such a practice at all, that can support not only acknowledgment/admission of the presence of bad/damaged conscience, of incomprehension, and of nonsense with in us, but also the acknowledgment and realization of the latent presence of that very Conscience, Comprehension, and Common Sense that the practice and process of healing exists to further cultivate. This paradoxical acknowledgment of a latent "original virtue" as well as what might be metaphorically called "original sin", is one of the things that seems to make a RAP Group (that is a group of Recovering, Alienated, Phonies in regular Cointegrative Conference),  rather different from other kinds of recovery groups. Other, perhaps more basic differences are that Cointegrative Conference is neither single issue oriented nor, politically or economically neutral in the way such meetings, (as well as things like psychotherapy) tend to be. There are many more differences I won't go into here.

Suffice to say that what I am trying to do with these blog posts (besides just stay in recovery myself by responding as best I can to the fact that, as an Individual-Person, I have, among other things, an intrinsic relationship and responsibility to my fellow Citizens of the world--including the Human ones) is to attract those who have a strong enough latent conscience (and consciousness) to see that there is really nothing else to do but come together in such an experiment in inner and outer cultural recovery, since to do nothing (which is to say; to do anything else) is really just to strengthen the entropic, inner and outer denial, and ongoing alienated phoniness involved in all of this compulsive, "knowing-apart"; this crazy and unsustainable effort to solve falsely dissociated and falsely isolated "problems".

So then: my email is individualperson1@gmail.com. If you want to contact me and discuss all of this in some other format. Or you could just start a discussion via making a comment.

umm...thats all for now...

I-P

Ps: like always, I am sure that there are a few type-o's in the above but I don't think there are any important ones. I'll come back and fix things by and by.

*I think I might need to underline, in this example of one aspect of our shared education into a sick culture, that what is "broken"  ("damaged" is a better word) is the totality of the Individual rather then just the "body". I'll try to do this by using the informal language for the various aspects of "Individual" coexistence ( ie; "inner elder, inner animal, etc) reintroduced in the above table. One can then liken the imposition described as a kind of "home invasion" in which the "Child" of the house (Feeling function) is forced (for whatever misguided and or perverse reasons on the part of the intruder) to punish the Family Pet (Inner Animal/Sensation). In such a situation the same fear that makes the child obey will be making the "Parents" (Inner Adult) intellectually connive at or Rationalize away what is happening. The Grandparents (Inner Elder) would also eventually dissociate from the whole thing via some version of fear-inspired "metaphysic"(whether Scientific, Religious, or "Spiritual") that amounts to choice of voluntary senility. Of  course to be more accurate in our analogy, we must imagine this coercive imposition to be, not just a one-time "invasion", but more like the repeated, ongoing one that our education (and the way of life it prepares us for) constitutes. Nevertheless, the point here is that everything that is happening is a function of each "family-members" dysfunctional response to the same fear,  and that the damage being done is being done to the "whole household" (or "Family System") and not just to the Inner Animal (ie "Sensing") and the Inner Child (ie "Feeling") parts of the Individual. All of this helps to show how, in a sick culture, education (both formal and informal) tends to amount to some form or another of child abuse--but more on this in another post.

**When I think about it, this phrase "oppression at home and conquest abroad" is a pretty good description of Private/Public Alienated-Phoniness at any scale. You'd have to modify the word "conquest" and say "attempts at conquest; ie competition", but that is not much of a modification. Part of the general dynamic of competition is that it inevitably encourages inner censorship, inner oppression, inner betrayal, in order to "win" (actually, even to acquire and maintain membership in good standing in ones own "Team").  And of course, if acquired in either context, such outwardly confirmed "success" or "superiority" will of course be as phony as it is temporary, since betrayal of ones wholeness as an Individual was the price, not only of the success, but even of admission into the game. In which case, who exactly is it who has won? I want to point out that, in such contests "losers" as much as "winners" participate in the same self-betrayal and phoniness, though perhaps the former will have lost just because they were at least unconsciously healthy and self-respecting enough to put at least some limits on "oppression at home" (that is on self-oppression), implicitly leaving the "palm" of "Success" to those unlucky enough to have had a more effective mechanism of self oppression--a more effective inner tyranny--imposed on them through fear-based education. It doesn't strike me that this will always have been the case, however and I don't mean to make invidious comparisons or "shame" the "winner". Recourse to that kind of irony is of very limited use and often means that the ironist is still suffering unconsciously from some kind of alienated and competitive way of looking at things...

***The above language of the "Hypo-Civil" and the "Hyper-Civil" can be misleading as well as useful; I don't want to privilege either the Civil or Local (or Familial or "Spiritual/Religious/Philosophical) visa-vis each other, since the whole point is that, like North, South, East, and West, they intrinsically coexist and "co-orient" and codetermine each other.


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Myopia and Technologies of Denial

So I know this next post is supposed to be about Life-Logic, but I am still working on that. Hopefully it will be up next (there actually might be more than 2 parts to it and I can only vouch for the 2nd part as coming right after this one). This post is something related to part one that I thought I would post in the mean time.--I-P




I Think that so far, I have made it too easy to think of Alienated Phoniness as some kind of purely moral failing, something blameworthy. That would be a mistaken impression. I do think that there has to be a morality and some kind of moral freedom (at least at some point) involved in being in recovery from alienated phoniness, or in "choosing" (the quotes are there to reflect some ambivalence) to be in denial of the condition.  And once in recovery,  the condition of having to deal, as part of that recovery, in some compassionate and creative way, with the ubiquity of what I will here be calling "Technologies of Denial" in our sick culture is absolutely unavoidable. Still, the self or other blaming response is just another aspect of problem rather than a part of its solution.  In this situation, the more we can acknowledge and make conscious the many  different forms and patterns of symptoms of our shared suffering from the shared disease of sick culture, the more compassionate, rather than self righteous, we will become and the more inclined to heal ourselves and each other in a shared recovery process. In this post I want to try to contribute to this kind of possibility by using the physical (but also the psychological) condition of myopia and its "treatment" in the dominant culture.

 I read a definition of the metaphorical meaning of the word "myopia" that said it meant or implied, among other things, " a lack of far-sightedness".  Well, I think this would only really be true if  "far-sighted" was being used to mean  "healthy-sightedness", in which case why not use the word "near-sighted" to mean the same, unless appropriate "seeing far ahead" is being deemed intrinsically better than appropriate seeing of "what is near", by our collective unconscious.  However that may be,  what I want to affirm here is that "healthy-sightedness" both literally and metaphorically is the ability to properly coordinate that which is near with that which is far, with that which is in the mid-ground (and , I would venture to add, even with that which is in the imagination). It means not only to be able to "see the distant" but to see that distance in the context of the not so distant and the near, and like wise, healthy-sightedness means being able to see the near "in perspective"; in the context of he bigger picture and so of a deeper meaning.  And it means having an inclusive fluidity of (relative) focus, so as to be able to move freely from near to far to middle distance etc and back as appropriate without getting caught in dissociation("staring"). Thus myopia as well as hyperopia (whether considered literally or metaphorically, are both variations on the same theme of "Dysopia" or dissociated, uncoordinated visual cognition, and healthy-sightedness is equally different from both of them.

Now, if you've read the previous post on "Life-logic" as well as others you will understand that general cognitive disorientation and dissociation is sort of the basis of sick culture and is implicated in just about all of its manifestations. Its obvious to me that "dysopia"(and particularly its myopic version) is thus a part of this dynamic both metaphorically and literally. Here I want to show that pathological socio-cultural conditions exist that encourage both metaphorical and literal "short-sightedness", and then add insult to injury by providing technologies of denial that allow one to "function" without healing the underlying condition,  which is both internal, and external and which is left to keep on progressively degenerating.

The first on the list of outer conditions which encourage both literal and psychological myopia would be Slavery (and similar regimes of socio-economic coercion). Certainly the inherent violence of the "Master/Slave" relationship forces the slave into the myopic and narrow version of "sick-sightedness" since the slaves are obliged to follow orders about which they are not given the "bigger" picture; to "stare" at their work and evaluate it only in terms of uncoordinated, isolated, and usually external criteria of "efficiency" and the like.  Superficially Hyperopia,  (which is of course no healthier) would seem to be the more likely fate of the "Master" who allegedly is in charge, and has to be always looking to the future to plan the next move. However, if you examine this " distant future" that the supposed master is supposed to be responsible for, the "horizon" in question never seems either very distant or very broad. What we actually end up with in every coercion-based relationship, (and employer/employee, as well as Husband/Wife, in patriarchal societies and families are not to be excluded), is not so much a "Master/Slave" relationship but a kind of "hierarchy of Slaves", in which no one is really free to consider or act in terms of any defensible conception of the "big picture, whether dissociated or not.

I trace the reasons for this to the unavoidable Competition  in such systems, which, among other things, tends to ensure that a real comprehensive, responsible attitude toward the  future is not practically possible on anyones part because competition has a tendency to mutually enslave those who take part in it both to each others actions, and to certain short term considerations related to the necessity of winning or at least of staying in the game. To limit ones consideration of the future in such a way is to adopt a form of cognition no different then that of the slave since, of course consideration of at least a narrowly conceived future is equally possible even within the dissociated present which is forced on slave, as in the case of internal competition to please the master and rise in the hierarchy.

Thus, as I argue elsewhere; it seems better to abandon the concept of "master" completely in such a context and speak of a "Hierarchy of slaves", (or perhaps just of a "Culture of Slavery") since (at least for this purpose) one can easily consider the "Master" as just a high ranking slave in a delusional system in which "rank" is one of the delusions. You might say that "rank" helps facilitate the denial of the actual shared unfreedom and immaturity of the situation. I do think that, within such a system there is a useful distinction to be made between a slave and what I call a "conspiring captive" (this latter being a person who is conscious of being trapped in, but has not assimilated to, slave culture) but that is for another blog post.

So far, what we seem to have is a socio-economic paradigm that manifests a kind of continuum of various degrees of Myopia, but with Hyperopia nowhere to be found. Perhaps the hyperopic version of todays sick-sightedness, involves the kind exclusive devotion to a dissociated conception of the future that is the provence of those "visionaries" who are so besotted with their, usually one-dimensional and naive conceptions of future good,  that they are effectively blind to the present "near" evil at which they daily connive and to which they daily contribute. Interestingly, competition is implicated here as well, in this case competition between the vision of such "jihaders" and that dominant one of the "McPeople" they are trying to destroy (though "Jihaders" in the sense I mean is a category that would not cover all the Hyperopic "futurists" by any means : see my old post "McPeople" here: http://healthyculture-piankhy.blogspot.com/2008/10/mcpeople-parts-one-and-two.html for more on this angle of social analysis) . One can see how such a hyperopic view would be an inevitable dialectical counter to the prevailing myopia, although (contra Hegel), its clear that nothing good is to be expected from either a combination of,  or a battle between, two aspects of the same Dysopia.

But all of this has been much too metaphorical so far. What I am saying is that the epidemic of real physical eye-problems is in large part implicated both as contributing factor to, and as result of, our coercive, competitive and collectively dissociated and myopic socio-economic-politcal situation. Our culture has in the main created both the conditions of physical dysopia and means for its denial.  Thus myopia usually starts in childhood as a result of stresses and "misuses of the self" (what the Alexander Technique folks would call the "end-gaining" of squinting, among other things) encouraged and faciltated directly and indirectly by our overstressed culture of alienated rituals oin inner and outer competition. Moreover, Glasses, and contacts (at least as they tend to be used) facilitate only a kind of Alienated, Phony Sight; Since the coordinated, fluid and holistic nature of Healthy-Sightedness (which of course mimics and supports the coordinated cognition discussed in the previous post) is emphatically not restored by prescription lenses or other such treatment, they result in the production of persons literally subjectively alienated from and numbed to, their actual visual (and likely general) disorientation/confusion in a way that not only encourages a perpetual denial (phoniness) as to its existence, but to its progressive worsening, rather than true healing. Simply removing ones own glasses will demonsrate this state of benumbed cognitive alienation and disorientation.

The Phoniness seems to be about an ego-based sense of "competence" (note the relationship with the word "competition"), that seems to be demanded as part of the competitve "public/private" life of such sick cultures as our own.

To make a comparison; Just as a person getting breast implants very much decreases the possibility of their growing out of a fixation with self-objectification and one-dimensional and just plain false standards of beauty,( at the same time as losing a great deal of sensitivity to the feeling in her own breasts), so glasses and the like (when not used as a supplementary part of an active practice of original vision recovery) similarly inhibit cognitive growth and the progressive recovery of a balanced coordinated form of cognition and experience of oneself and other. Moreover in competitive culture and economy, both  these two kind of technical modification (as well as many many others I do not mention here), are likely to be motivated by the same pressures not to fail (and if possible to rise) in the hierarchy of Slaves-in-Denial alluded to above. And the decision may even be a very reluctant one. For example, maybe the breast implant is not the result of a willing assimilation to a phony conception beauty, but a reluctant concession to a "need" to stay "competitive" in the socio-erotic "market"  (or if you happen need to keep your job at the strip club, the real job market as well). And of course no one likes getting glasses or contacts (worst of all) eye surgery).

The problem I want to get at here is that the same sick culture usually provides (due to a myopic and uncoordinated path of technological innovation) the means, not to heal the disorders it produces and reinforces but, (through various forms of formal and informal Miseducation),  to repress and deny both the symptom and the disease, which thus only gets progressively worse. I suppose you could call such technology the Technologies of Denial, (here in a medical manifestation).

I also want to call such technologies Malignant Technologies* in the sense (which I will explore in a future post) that it is possible to understand the replication of healthy culture in general as like that of healthy biological tissue; that is, as something involving the "education" of cultural "stem cells" (young people) into the status of mature cells fulfilling their intended (and so meaningful) places in the living "tissue of reality". This process being analogous to the way that stem cells replace dying cells in a living body. Clearly cultural malignancy happens when an educational (we could also call it "initiatory") process that successfully manages this transition is replaced by one that (in the short term) seems to allow the cells to avoid this kind of growing up indefinitely, with the help  of technologies of denial. In short, cancer cells are immature confused, dissociated,  damaged, alienated from their purpose and place within the larger organism, as well as, being presumably unconscious and "in denial" of these things. Historical humanity, including its denial-facilitating technical infrastructure, could be described in exactly this way.

And it really seems to be the unconsciousness/denial that makes for the malignancy (though it seems that competition in various forms makes for much of the denial). This bringing together of Unconsciousness and Denial is a strange thing on the face of it since it is hard to see how you can be in denial of something of which your are unconscious. This gets back to the ambiguous feelings about the moral aspect of this whole situation that I brought up at the beginning. I think there is some resolution of the issue in the realization that "consciousness is consciousness of togetherness" and that no one is absolutely unconscious, and so the choice always exists to be open to greater inclusivity of meaning, or to be closed to it in principle (usually because of some intuited fear that such openness would disturb ones inner or outer status quo or otherwise challenge ones status or self-conception relative to others). Denial then would be a kind of fear-based siding of the emotions with the seeming security ofthe status quo against expanded consciousness,  probably in response to the competitive and alienated context which informs everything in this culture. So such a competitive culture selects for denial, alienation, and phoniness , both in terms of the malignant technologies of denial that thrive in it and in terms of the phony and alienated social relationships it fosters.

This relationship aspect deserves more comment. Generally speaking friendships, partnerships, social circles are not conscientious, soulful associations dedicated to the compassionate work of inner and outer healing. People are not coming together in an inclusive and non-alienated spirit to help each other and the world recover from our shared sick culture and from  the specific individual forms of Alienated Phoniness this takes in each each of us. Rather people tend to come together in basically dissociated, exclusive in-groups in which the tacit intention seems to be establishing and maintaining (or just assuming) some sense of superiority over those excluded, largely through what amounts to the the tacit denial of everyones equal and shared participation in the very sick, dissociated, culture that such associations exemplify and that I am trying to get across in this blog.

In this connection I can't resist mentioning the "logical technique" of "Invidious Comparison" by which this is collusive denial is usually facilitated (more of this and other "Life-Logical fallacies" in future life-logic posts). The formula is essentially "A" is good (and so does not have to change) because "A" is better than "B". Of course even If it were true that A were "better" than "B" in a given respect or even in every conceivable respect), it would not mean that A is Good. Before the concept got subsumed into the competitive paradigm, something was Good because it helped other things (indeed every other thing) be Good, more whole, more itself, rather than because it surpassed them. Unlike "better-ness" or "best-ness, Goodness does not presume some kind primary alienation, exclusion, or zero-sum competition. If A is a good A it would be because it helps B be a good B and visa versa. Goodness, like Truth, Beauty, etc, implies an inclusive, non-alienated, holistic, healing quality and emphatically does not belong at the beginning of any list which includes "better" and 'best" in our ordinary sense of those words, which take their essence from a sort one-dimensional, narrow (myopic), and usually linear framework.  Socially speaking, such an invidious confusion of better-ness with goodness, translates in to "We are good and so can afford to be complacent, because we are better than "They"  (in this or that respect which WE are sure is decisive), and thus our closeness to each other is more or less based on our alienation from outsiders and on our denial of our shared disease of alienated-phoniness, however different our symptoms may be from those of others. Moreover in such a model "they" (that is , those in group B), have just as much a claim to complacency and rightousness vis-a-vis some carefully chosen group C as A might claim toward them, and C of course will choose its own object of invidious comparison and so on and so on...In the light of ongoing entropy, what can this be but a shared dynamic of mutual degeneration cultural erosion?

Of course the point would not change anything essentially to reverse things and replace collusive and alienated shared complacency with equally alienated and misbegotten sense of inferiority, shame, envy and "ambition", as that would if anything only accelerate the same delusional, disintegrative, "synentropic" process.  It is as though we were all different particles of soil on an eroding hillside; complacency does nothing to slow or stop the ongoing erosion and a general competitive scramble to be higher up the hill, let alone "King of the Hill" would make things worse.

What I am trying to do with these blogs it to facilitate ways for everyone (including myself) to sustainably reverse this underling competitive (alienated) dynamic of denial-enabled cultural erosion in ourselves and each other--and so "build healthy cultural soil" together---in a way that is genuine, balanced and so avoids becoming simply another form of competitive alienation (for example in the "less-alienated-and-phony-than-thou" sense). This is why I want to be clear that accepting that (like everyone else), one suffers from and is involved in one way or another (actually in many, many ways) with the technology of denial (whether or not this is explicitly medical), is the most important aspect of recovery from it.  After all, this acceptance--which is more like an insight or act of comprehension--is obviously already a breach in the very regime of denial and mutual alienation the Technology of Denial itself exists to maintain, and so is also a sign of a present and potentially ongoing recovery of the  health and sanity.


Moreover, once this sophisticated; (shameless/prideless, yet inwardly and outwardly compassionate, committed, and resolute) attitude of recovery is awake in us, it is sometimes even possible, to use  or modify the technology itself in such a way that it does support healing. For instance, with regard to glasses,  there are various ways to limit the use of the glasses or contact lenses to when it is really necessary, while practicing vision exercises like the Bates Method when not using them. There is even a paradoxical use of lenses (a series of increasingly strong reading glasses for Myopes for example) which, when used properly and combined with other things, works to reverse the degenerative effects of normal glasses.Such Technologies might be called soft technologies or "Technologies of Recovery" rather than of Denial (I also call them Coremissive Technologies, but more on that later ). Of course such technologies can only be really technologies of Recovery if they are coordinated with a general culture of recovery;  otherwise another pattern of denial (perhaps a more "new-agey one) is likely to replace the old one.


Now | want to be very clear here; What I am saying is that the conditions of our culture make a persons suffering from one or another form of psycho-physical disorder inevitable, whether this is obvious or not. It is a sick culture and it does not produce healthy people (it does not even produce healthy conceptions of health). No one is born with or allowed to acquire, enough critical distance to escape some form or other of the alienated cosmology, identity politics, and rituals or our culture, even if these were not inextricably mixed up with an equally alienated and toxic physical infrastructure to which we are all forcibly exposed. This situation being  universal, the more obvious any given persons particular "pattern of trauma" is the better, in as much as it becomes that much easier to acknowledge and treat.

 What I am getting at is that I don't want anyone to feel guilty or ashamed for wearing glasses (or having breast implants, or being involved in any other the myriad heads of the hydra of sick culture) anymore than I want anyone to feel proud for not doing this or that particular thing. Pride and Shame are themselves forms of denial, and trying to perfectly address (or even assess) this or any particular aspect of sick culture in isolation would itself be a psychologically myopic move, as though curing this specific symptom  would  actually cure, rather than potentially strengthen (by strengthening denial), ones underlying disease of sick culture. It might not even make sense, in a given situation, to make this area visual cognition a priority in ones process of recovery (though making a beginning--since this is so easy to do seems like a good idea so long as its coordinated with a general process of recovering from sick culture as a whole).

To try to give more of an example of what mean, I will use myself:  I, who am also physically myopic to a certain vary variable extent, do some and have done all of the above mentioned coping/recovery work with glasses and without them. I don't wear glasses these days, (though I would if I really needed to for a specific limited purpose). I do eye exercises when I think of it but I can be a slacker at it. I listen to a lot of books with Text-to-speech on an ebook thing to spare my eyes, though I still probably read too much and not always in the best "Alexander Technique" way. Most of the time I feel that I am at least not going backward in this area. This is actually pretty good, almost ideal really, since there are so many other aspects of sick culture that I ( like everybody) suffer from and have to deal with. Going off the deep end about getting "perfect sight" would likely just mean a failure to "coordinate my problems", with the ultimate effect that this particular symptom would be gone (at least temporarily) while  various others, and worst of all, the actual underlying disease, will have only been strengthened (perhaps I would become "big headed about my sight, my cognitive myopia having ironically gotten worse while I myopically fixated on "conquering" my physical myopia).  Things could always change of course but for the time being at least I am happy with the state of coordination of this part of my recovery process with rest of it.  I see "very well" some of the time, not so well some of the time and fair-to-middling most of the time.  The main thing is for me to not be in denial about this general state of affairs or about the state any other symptom of my own sick culture and to do the best I can not to either over-fixate on it or neglect it all together.  Having as little recourse to the relevant technology-of-denial as practicable (glasses in this case)  actually facilitates the "minimizing neglect" part  because my state of seeing itself tells me when I have been too lax in my "healthy-sightedness" practices and in general need to step things up in this area relative with other things, at least for a while.  The main thing is to keep working on the disease while I keep all the various symptoms attended to best I can in a way that is coordinated with and facilitates that work; to keep everything more or less progressing in a coordinated way both in terms of my inner relationship with myself as an "Individual" and my outer relationships with others as a "Person"...

 Again: the general situation of being sufferers of sick culture, whether we suffer from actual physical dysopia or not, is universal; as I have tried to show above, Invidious comparisons are themselves an aspect of that culture, and any sense purity or righteousness is just a form of denial and bad taste. But the same is true of any sense of shame.  We all have Individual physical, (inner animal), emotional (inner child), mental (inner adult) and psychological (inner elder) problems to discover and coordinate (through inner and outer "co-inference") with Personal (Familial, Local, Civil, and "Religious") problems. Only by doing so is there any hope of sustainable and progressive (real) healing for anybody (see the epigraph of the previous post about cognition).

I may not have sufficiently proven the claims of the the above paragraph to you so far (though, If you have read the last 4 or 5 of these posts I am not sure why not, and would be interested to receive your comments on the matter). Anyway, I think if you keep reading this blog you will be convinced eventually.

So; conclusion: I have used as my main example the technology and culture of glasses (and their dissociation-and-denial-facilitating effects), rather then more obvious technologies of denial like the use of Alcohol and a host of other legal and illegal drugs, just because the glasses business is clearly such an "innocent" thing. All the others are also essentially innocent in the same way, but the fact that no one asked to be so systematically deprived of necessary love and affection during critical development years that the only way they can experience something that feels like a genuine hug is through an external chemical substitute, is, evidently, less easy to see then the fact the no one deliberately abuses their eyesight in order to become addicted to another substitute technology-of-denial like glasses/contacts/surgery that also worsens, rather than addresses the original condition and its causes.  On the other hand I think part of me also wants to scare you a little, as I have recently been scared, with the situation of ever increasing myriads of morally, intellectually and physically myopic "educated" professionals, specialists, managers, and "efficient" workers (all equally proud of being thoroughly "detail oriented" and  equally oblivious of any inability to put those details in proper perspective or single out the truly relevant ones), so adapted to the hierarchy of slaves and the culture of denial as to be unable to conceive of anything else, running around in charge things. Of course, things have pretty much been that way since even before what we call civilization. The fact that   in our time the situation seems to have hyper-metastasized, is not cause for panic, but, hopefully thinking about it will give you some sense of urgency about this whole sick culture/healthy culture thing.

*note: I  usually use the word "Comalignant" to stress the two-fold (inner/psychological as well as outer/social) nature of the pathology of sick culture I am describing, just as I use the word "Coremissive" (as well as "Cointegrative"), to describe the culture of recovery (healthy culture), when looked at from this point of view. I didn't in the above sentence because I thought introducing such a neologism at that time would be unnecessarily  distracting in that particular place....I'll say more about such things later...



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Postscript

Ever since writing this post I have felt that, because I so wanted people not to become psychologically myopic in thinking about their physical myopia, I down played the effects of the latter--and so the need to begin addressing--it a bit too much. Its a tricky balancing act I am trying to manage in addressing this kind of thing at all, but when you consider how much vision figures in brain and mind functioning in general, its not something I want to under-emphasize.

Since its been quite a while since I researched the topic, I wanted to finish the the book "Conscious Seeing" by Roberto Kaplan, (as well as another similar book, ) before adding this postscript, but other things seem to be supervening, and I think I can ease my conscience about it just by exploring the implications of what I have read so far.

Kaplan says that glasses and contacts have the effect of deferentially focusing light directly on the fovea centralis to compensate for the eyes inability to do this properly and in a balanced way. The fovea centralis is the most acutely "analytical" part of the retina, whereas the rest of the retina tends toward the more diffusive and field-like (corresponding to right-brain functioning).

This makes me suspect that glasses and contacts etc might facilitate that kind of either/or "panic-logic" that the culture is informed by, through (among other things) dissociating right brain and left brain thinking. My guess is that correspondingly, thinking and feeling are likely to become more dissociated from each other and less nuanced and flexible in themselves, so that a person under the influence of this sort of technology might have a tendency both to look at things in black and white ways, and/or to flip-flop between being over emotional (sentimental) and over intellectual (coldly calculating or excessively abstract). Of course this itself is an oversimplification of the actual kind of imbalance that is likely to result in a real person. Nevertheless, I suspect that, in a lot of people who have been wearing glasses most of their lives,  the brain circuits  will have been assimilating to the this one-sided effect of the lenses, (as well as to the subliminal emotional effect of the constant stress in the eyes that has to be there in order to maintain the exact degree of refractive error the glasses are prescribed to correct for), and that they are likely to think that the above mentioned, (or any similar) tendencies of thought and feelings they might have are either just a natural part of their character or something that just reflects reality ("feelings are usually opposed to thoughts--thats just the way it is").

All of this seems to me a big deal because, if one is making decisions and interpreting reality and information in such a dichotomized, uncoordinated, insufficiently nuanced or graduated way because of ones mind/brain's subconscious assimilation to an unhealthy technology, its going to be hard to sustain a balanced view of the importance of that very problem (as well as any other problem really). Either one will over emphasize the problem (and so abandon any attempt to deal with it--and our sick culture in general-- as hopeless) or one will under under emphasize it (since it is only one of a myriad of technologies and infrastructures of denial in a culture full of them and can therefor, presumably wait indefinitely to be addressed).

Although it is true that the culture is full of technologies of denial, (I would even say that it is a good rule to assume any technology, or ritual of the dominant culture to be at least partly guilty until proven wholly innocent), it seems that the ones that effect the mind itself--and so the powers of discernment-- in a constant and ongoing (and likely degenerative) way need to be singled out for special recovery measures for that very reason. Of course almost any psycho active drug that is used daily ( or at such a frequency that there is no time to for its effects to really wear off) is in this same category. And also, there are certain ritual and infrastructures of apartness which, in future posts, I will argue are similarly crucial to begin to address for similar reasons.

I want to emphasize the word "begin" in the previous sentence, since that is all I am taking about really. There is no idea of having to ever "having dealt with" any of aspect of sick culture in the sense of having achieved perfect state of achievement or whatever. That would very probably be a bad sign itself for many reasons, some of which I've already gone into. One begins....One begins again. In general the culture of recovery is pretty comic in spirit, full of back-slidings, errors, failed experiments etc...there are no ranks or grades and its the farthest thing from feeding the ego or any egoic sense of "righteousness" of any kind. Its like a kind of progressive balance between balance and imbalance itself, in which the one can only be maintained by constantly acknowledging and being sensitive to presence (manifest or not yet manifest), of the other.... the kind of thing that, when you're doing it right, the process itself is its own reward, (which is great because, as I say, the process is endless....)