COMMENT
FROM READER
6.24.2004
and 9.10.2004
Adrian
van der Meijden
Email
Hi
Nancy, him again, just read thru the Kybalion and am not impressed
much. I just confirmed why i would not pursue it any further.
There is another, older version written by monks of Mt Atmos I
think it was, older and better. The 3 x 7 matrix is age old. The
cerebrals tests are all learnt monkey tricks and NO IQtest can
exceed the mental capacity of its constructor, so where do those
who exceed that fit in?
Hermes
is oldest known, written up, not oldest. The 1st 2 chapters are
waffle. 'As above, so below' is not an analogy, it cannot be if
IT -Intelligence Transcendent; not a person, although personified
- is THE causa causorum. Any other "causes' are delimited
sets. For any inclusion we also exclude, which is mostly what
our intellect cannot handle. Monad is Hegel, not Hermes, i read
the emerald tablet. Truth, haha, is vastly misunderstood. Concentration
is relaxation of all attachments to the senses, there is also
decentration entailed. the comments on meditation are pisspoor.
It's about psychism, chasing phenomena, not true mysticism. Polarity
cannot apply on the IT level, can it. I thought it was the original
version I read months ago and it is NOT, having a near flypaper
memory, hohum.
3
planes, the I-Ching disagrees. Vedic Hymn, 1,164 is the ONLY complete
compendium of the law of three, viz, to act the IT has to divide
itself into something that acts, something that is acted on and
its resultant, as for the 3 pillars of the kabala. Compare the
charts of the occultist Greats of last Century and none of their
renditions agree. The formless infinite divides into time and
space and this was, during or before the stone ages, personified
as male actant, female receptive gestatative, and the child product,
and so taught as the 3 Kabiri [kobodls, kabouters, dwarves that
live underground, so how come it decorates the margins of Tibetan
texts? the Greeks thought of Kabirian rites as very rude. They
would if they thought in Physical terms. No wonder Freud found
it everywhere. Alchemy is oldest, read Geoffrey Ashe in "The
ancient wisdom" which traces it into 7,000 BCE in Siberia.
The I-Ching is non-centred and this Cross -3D & centred -
of sacrifice is explained in hymn 1.164, as well as In Kublah
Khan and understood by Lewis Carroll. The 7 elements are mineral,
vegetable, animal, human, plasmoid, aetheric & IT = gold as
the flesh of the gods, read the 7 days of Creation in Genesis.
Alchemy has this The One begets the two, the
TWO begets the three and from the THREE emerges the myriad, in
many ways by variations on a theme In the Vedas this comes as
the 3steps of Agni. the 3 x 7 matric is shown in the Bembine tablet
in personified form and so far nobody has managed to render it
in abstract metaphoric. Ch xv knowledge is vain indeed and no
help whatsoever in understanding the ultimate mystery. Basically
it's a rendition of what one may call Theosophy and western Alchemy
tried to adapt it to knowledge. The Amarna period saw Akhnaton's
father set him up with mono-theism and that's where all this flows
from, by going underground in the river Alpheus to re-ermerge
in the Renaissance from builders. Hence masonic the architect,
from Hierogamus. Akhnaton is Trismegistus, as shown in one or
other temple Moses, Oedipus and Akhanaton, ruler of it all, Israel,
Greece and Egypt.
Logic
was derived from the Greek language and it stinks, I got 20/20
for my first Logic test and have not bothered much since with
it. I had to brainstorm my mind to follow it, and did not like
that much. It took me a lot to undo that. In the unconscious one
may model it as the figurae IF, and, or and not used all together
and at once, which makes it inpenetrable to intellect which was
invented by stone age man and much abused since then. Each of
those are highly ambiguous and the 60 odd logics, algebras and
more recent theories of thought, Systems, Chaos, etccc., merely
each confine it to one only means of those words. It is parodied
by Jorge Luis Borges in his Garden of Forked Paths. Next logic
ignored the IF as mechanically unmanagable, so how does our mind
manage? Dear old Arsitottle was a nitpicking detail man. Yes,
I had to read him. His Logic is the sentence patterns EG.
Aristotle
is flesh,
All flesh is food,
Therefore Aristotle is food,
To
any shark and worm, bacterium, etc, as very logical, based on
their assumptions, if they would philosophise. Thus A = B, B =
C, > A = C, which is done better in Set Theory. Identity for
words is a phony. His universal and particular is an even worse
muddle. Read Empson, seven types of ambiguity. The sequences is
how the poet gives to aerie nothing a local habitation and a name,
much older than Shakespeare and Dante did it in four phases as
the gleam in the eye of the beholder, a vague unformed idea of
a potential changed into feasible, possible and actual which in
several steps is refined into the simile, as that apple is inedible.
For the Symbol the identity is a class of likeness in the Metaphor
a likeness is affirmed and in the simile 'literal it turns "well
defined", what a mystery. Is a Rose the plant, a species
or a flower that blooms bloomingly until it turns into a ?? I'm
too impatient until the name pops into my mind. Rose hip, I knew
it would. It always does. What blocked it was the darling buds
of May. funny that.
Its
the best advertised secret of all, and nothing they wrote in the
Kybalion cannot also be found elsewhere. The recipe is the formless
begets form = process, which cleaves into time and space and all
antiquity thought in dynamic terms, which makes myths hard to
follow when we depend on a limited Descartean mode. One or other
greek promoted dualism, I forget his name. That comes as the 3
axes of the Cross, still resident in our unconscious as the generic
model of it. The Vertical axis matches the central pillar of the
Kabala between IT and kingdom as the material world, a product
of its universal process. The two horizontals are time and space,
and Kepler adapted it and that's where most of this recent stuff
derives. It shows as verbs, act, nouns acted on and the sentence
is its embedment. Also penis and cunt, as how the Kabiri celebrated
it and a host of other triple
metaphors. It's a process recipe. Go gawp at stone age sites and
find triplets as dots, lines, figurae, etc.. Heraldry is another
application in use before words were formalised. I once visited
a tibetan Geshe, interpreted the pretty mandalas on his walls
and he suggested I go stay in a Tibetan Monastery and in two years
I'd be a Lama, big deal, no thanks.
I
could probably attain to knowing the mind of God as Feynmann puts
it, but don't see why I have myself. embroiled here that I should
bother now. As Rudi Rucker has it, once recognised, what's the
hurry. Cantor got himself incommunicado over it, which was dubbed
insanity, just as Johnny Nash was dubbed a schizophrenic. His
parents ruined him and he seemed unable to get out of that lot.
It was his truth.
TRUTH
names an ongoing process where each of us live by our own truth
and can grow by that as we detail and amplify into more understanding
from experience. Astrology is an adaptation as a wheel, dynamics
articulated just as is feng shui. Right at the onset of civilisation
we find occult arts, Yoga, T'ai C'i etc., peddled as a means to
both understand and drop this Cross of sacrifice and simply be
one's innate self. I'm psychic to a juncture that whenever I try
to ignore it, several things happen to re-convince me, some weirder
than others. I cannot repeat myself so cannot convert it into
a payable skill, haha. IOW it's formless and adapts to current
circumstance. Phenomenal psychism is good for them as like it.
I
could further go into Quantum Theory which recovered some of it,
because as Eddington wrote when we dig deeper all we do is retrieve
earlier insights. If one collapses all specialised fields of knowledge
into one, a glimpse arrives at how complex IT is. It began as
the everywhere numinous, implies archaic man was psychic, as is
anybody not acculturated, like babies. The shaman invented a sacred
language to be able to share their experiences, which were kept
secret from the public, just as is palace politics from applied,
public politics. The last adaptation into mundane scripting was
done in Egypt, about 5000 BCE when everything had gone commercial.
Secret/sacred derives from Kaput = head, on which Plato erected
his lovely cave. That's why Tibetans make things like cups from
ancestor skulls.
It
can be understood but barely expressed. It does not have to be
because they can recognise one another at sight. Not understood,
experienced, in various ways. There's nothing to learn either.
The ignorance of the masses is deliberately contrived by Governments;
read Ortega Y Gaset. The original Education Act was designed to
fit workers to the factory. They had a devil of a job doing it
in Africa with factories. As Merrell Wolff, philosopher, mystic,
has it, IN the mystical experience we can choose how to apply
it, in a myriad ways, tiddlypom variations on a theme, so how
does one formulate
that law? As a kid, 3yrs old at school, I thought dynamic, kaleidoscopic
fashion and had to learn to freeze brain so I could write an essay.
Whatever I needed just popped up in the mind and I thought nothing
of it, until I nearly drowned in knowledge. My first "University
paper/essay", was a 1500 words long sentence, to be told
I'd better do something about that. I did not know I'd outperformed
the longest sentence, and bummer, no mention in Ripley's....
PS,
in case you're interested the Cross comes epistemologically as
Whole
part
analog, digital
parallel series
and which composes all the "deep" thoughts of philosophy
as irreconcilable;
cosmological speculation, etc.
It's
even proof read, hence E&O,E. I'd be curious how it compares
with your version?
Please
contact Adrian HERE
for comments and further dialogue.
9.10.2004
THE POLITICS OF LANGUAGE
DISCLAIMER:
What I suggest here is that the language of politics uses
Double Binds, but the DB is not confined to that, The reverse relation does
not hold. Since ambiguity occurs everywhere and is lexical [ie puns and
jokes, thus humour as Koestler's bisociation], strategic and so on whence we
also find it in poetry and surrealism which makes politics is just another
use of that. It also opens up the gap between formal, logical discourse and
wolly or vague language, between which the Double Bind operates by having
the intent of control rather than communication as in poetry. Perforce in
an essay I cannot tackle the entire range of ramifications of my idea, which
portends that what binds you can also set you free.
-------
SUMMARY: :
This essay discusses the use of language to control and direct
other people. Since a society of itself exists to bind people into a group
or community it happens. The issue whether this is good or bad is a tricky
one to make and the entire usage very complex to study. I try to confine
myself to the paradoxical logic of the Double bind and hope the reader can
find his own instances in our society. Altogether I discuss the uses of
ambivalence, removed by rules of logic from formal discourse with the “well
defined” word. I must also confess that I gutted many books and websites to
stitch together what is put here to help articulate my experiences. So I am
not very original and you may debate whether all this is merely my opinions
or an agreement with many others who helped contribute to my understanding.
George Orwell wrote on the politics of language but we can do much better
now. The paper consists of two sections,
1: What’s wrong or the case with our social system
2: How to cure the effects of the Double Bind, the wee bit at the en d.
-----
ARGUMENT:
For the purpose of this essay politics is used to mean: social control and
manipulation of people beyond the uses of logic by means of Double Binds. A
double Bind relies on the gap between the “well-defined” word of knowledge
and intellect versus the unlettered “common” use of ambiguous words with
multi-meanings. Treated as a game with a theme and plot there is the
binder or imposer, the bind and the bound or victim. The Binder leads the
bound to get hooked by the meaning imputed and when hooked the hidden
agenda meaning of the Binder is substituted. At its simplest that is exactly
how our laws works. It is also in wide use in our society enough to call it
endemic. The Bind or plot is convoluted with about nine stages or phases. It
cannot be directly abstracted from the words - which have many meanings
anyhow - and has therapeutic and pathological uses. The first is to *help* a
victim unbind himself, the second to make and keep a victim bound. In
between there is a neutral use where speaker does not care whether you
comply or not.
This implies we have an understanding of language, logic, human
interactions we can impose as a context on the game play or drama. Normally
people take the meaning their mind construes from what is heard and read.
This can lead to misunderstanding and wrong interpretations, unless there is
some affinity between people, without any such intent to manipulate another
person. We may thereby add a neutral or common use. An example, is: “Take
your raincoat”, when the weather is dampish.
For the wrongful use of the
Double Bind we have to rely on what goes on in the mind of the Binder, for
which we may need to check what exactly binder intends.
In the pathological
use binder often does not even know this by which it may be called
schizophrenic, although that is ambiguous too. The psychopathological use of
the term names an already victim of childhood abuse of various kinds. This
second use also names the binder because it can only happen in groups
between people; which includes the family.
The binder has two personae, the
externally *normal* and quite conventional one and a second one that does
the binding to control others.
Aristotle’s theory of drama includes three kinds, Fate, the group or a
representative of a group and the gods. When it rains or earthquakes we are
in a physical double bind and arguing does not help much. We just have hang
around until the situation settles or clears and then compare the beginning
and end to figure out whether it turned out well or not for our welfare. We
can now translate Aristotle into events we cannot change versus those
imposed by people and institutions. The means used for social control
comprise Constitutions which empowers a selected group to govern the
society. God kings were once said to reign but not govern. The Japanese
Dragon god emperor has his Samurai to govern. Aristotle mentions Atlantes
who was a king as of right, but took no part in a government. This hails
back to a historical time before the Greek City States. God kings ruled
because they were gods. Plato admits that he had a daimon who talked to him,
which now we would call our intuition. Plato visualised his ideas and we,
for the most part, do this with words. Plato personified his mental
activities which would nowadays be called schizophrenic, yet he is an
authority on knowledge.
Of course I must discuss the context here being our social environment,
largely governed by imagination of a virtual world confounded with a natural
one. In a natural ecology it’s every man for himself which seldom reaches
beyond a bluff or bodily mimicry, except by predators who kill for a living.
Recent studies of marine environment show us that most very plant and fish
in the sea has built in physical defenses, mostly poisons, to fend off
predators. The mammalian solution is to herd together to ward off isolate
predators, although some animals sacrifice their weakest members. The
mammalian designs differs quite from the Dinosaurian predatorial. Egg laying
by the numbers is another sacrifice to the gods.
Pavlov, the originator of behaviourism, trained dogs to find out whether
controls or control triggers used by a dog handler would take permanently.
He found that dog’s behaviour fell into three patterns: normal, paradoxical
and ultra-paradoxical. Normal is as expected by the research design, testing
for unconditional obedience. Any such experiment has to test this
hypothesis by trying to destroy the imposed pattern. Pavlov did this by
ringing the bell but withholding the reward with food, which led into the
next two patterns. In paradoxical behaviour dog shows signs of uncertainty
and doubt. In the ultra-paradoxical dog sulks or bites the hand that feeds
it. This also makes it clear that we can think on several levels at once and
together instead of solely by way of intellect the inner representative of
collective knowledge. Intellect is supposed to be governed by Logic used to
stitch knowledge together.by associational schemata or meta-patterns to
impose order. Contrariwise Skinner used positive, not punitive,
re-inforcement which rewards or approves only accepted behaviour and makes
no attempt to remove unwanted behaviours. One does nothing until the trainee
display the wanted behaviour. It works well for pigeons and the behaviour
takes better.
Politics actually comes on two levels, Palace Politics and its public
application. Palace Politics is to gain and keep control, common to kings
and all leaders. In a word it is tough, brutal , ruthless and monopolistic,
to remove any opponent from all power plays and usage. Nelson Mandela was
put in prison for subversive action, just short of treason because he
attempted, like Martin Luther King and Gandhi, to do this peacefully. Billy
Gates did it with his Windows, but it won’t last much longer. I contend
that the language of politics uses the Double Bind, being beyond logic and
applied politics rationalises this by way of standard logic and propaganda.
In fact one suspects the aristocracy is trained at their mother’s breast,
though this is not on record. We’re promised a safe and peaceful life, which
never happens and are told to trust the leader having the best intentions
for all of us. And there’s the rub because what A.E. van Vogt calls the
leadership betrayal principle sacrifices individuals for the good of the
group, as done by generals, judges in Court and other instruments of order.
Order means the kind the Government intends to maintain whereas one may
speak of a natural order of the kind Taoists advised the Chinese Emperor to
apply. namely “Leave it alone, it will settle of itself”. For Nature we may
call this an ecology whereby all animals and plants in an environment lack a
ruler. That is the idea of a democracy, which we have not had since the
onset of civilisation. Government by the people, for the people and not only
by representatives of the people but all the people. That gives us two
examples of a Double Bind built right into the foundations of society as
blind assumptions without validity.
A few quotes will do show that this is not purely my opinion. They could be
multiplied to hundreds.
"However sugarcoated and ambiguous, every form of authoritarianism must
start with a belief in some group's greater right to power, whether that
right is justified by sex, race, class, religion or all four. However far it
may expand, the progression inevitably rests on unequal power and airtight
roles within the family. ~ Gloria Steinem.
"The few who understand the system, will either be so interested in its
profits, or so dependent on its favors that there will be no opposition from
that class. The great body of people, mentally incapable of comprehending
the tremendous advantages will bear its burden without complaint. ~Baron Amherst von Rothschild, whose dynasty does it with finance.
“No oppression is so heavy or lasting as that which is inflicted by the
perversion and exorbitance of legal authority. ~ Joseph Addison
“Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence. ~ Charles De Gaulle
“Authority has every reason to fear the skeptic, for authority can rarely
survive in the face of doubt. ~ Robert Lindner.
"One of the best known models to arise out of this work has been Gregory
Bateson's double bind theory (Bateson, Jackson, Haley & Weakland,
1956-1972), which proposes that contradictions in the interaction between
family members predisposes its members to schizophrenia." Bateson, using
Systems Theory, applied the idea of a logical paradox to communication
between people.
I back refer this to Pavlov who already did this. It thereby
cannot be examined solely by a study of words and language alone and
requires we seek back into theories that abstract game rules and Systems
behaviours like Cybernetics, which was called “Control of man and machine”.
Game theory does not discuss the player. Enshrined in laws it becomes
machine like or reduced to standard protocols. The best example occurs in
Courts where a judge plays referee. And as we all know you may not argue
with a referee, his word is final. Courts follow St Augustine rules of
debate between two parties, whereas there may be fifteen or more angles,
tangles and levels of this in a given situation. Moreover we need to apply
logic to reveal paradoxes commonly excluded by all logics in their rules and
by definitions used to remove ambiguities, which seldom fully succeeds. I
mean one tests logic until it fails and the failure will be a Double Bind,
although called a paradox in Logic. This raises the spectre of axiomatics.
Reasoning by axioms boils down to: “I say, I say, I say” with the hidden
theme, that since I am the self-arrogating authority you may not argue, or
else The White Queen’s cardboard players do as she orders. Nowadays the
tale would have robots. Contrariwise the red players quibble to arrive at an
opinion, being live eccentrics.
Logically it comes by setting a condition a which implies consequence b.
But IF is the figure or hypothesis, excluded from most all logics The IF
conditional sets up the proposition or hypothesis and all assumptions of
logic. Normally a logical proposition and a theory will not show this.
1: IF it rains, taken an umbrella
2: I know because I experienced that having an umbrella keeps you dry.
3: Here, let me show you or teach you.
4: You stupid ninny, you better do as told because I know what i am doing.
5: It starts with “Just trust me!”, and ends in applied dogma as authority
games
It goes off the rails of plain advice or a suggestion at item 4 which
intrudes on our integrity and self determination. Moreover it displaces
advice based on common experience into a virtual bind imposed by authority.
Theory and axiomatics here becomes virtual because applied outside any
testable condition. You can check up on the rain. You cannot check up on a
hidden agenda in somebody’s mind. One has to first make the guess and then
test it yourself. Once upon a long time ago in the Athur Veda, a collection
of geis, spells, curses and healings, shows the way of it all. “Thou art
healed” is as much a Double Bind as the rest, but a therapeutic one, we
hope. Hypnosis is a Double Bind which nulls our self determination, taken
over by another person.
We have now been put into a Double bind, being unclear as to which party
speaks the truth, you or him, and confused as to who is right. We are in
danger of offending an authority whereas in a family it ends in verbal
battles, if not worse. What we imagine as a friend turns out not to be and
challenging that leads to breaking that relationship which now shifts into
enmity. We don’t like making enemies, do we? When in doubt or having
alternative experiences a first notion that can occur is “Am I going crazy?” Intellect is supposed to be mono-meaningful. It’s simpler to believe the
other party is crazy or something and stick with your own silly notions
instead of checking things out. Should you believe or are led to believe
that you can trust the voice of authority, please reconsider. We don’t
normally look into the relations between people and their varieties. We take
the relation we *know* already as binding and real. Since I contend that
all this is built into the social setup I am forced to go right into the
beliefs, foundations and assumptions of what we know, as is also any
psychiatric patient. or by being counselled. The risk there is that the
person “helping” us may not have a clue as to what actually is going on and
takes an only superficial view. In general psychology flows the law which
holds the individual responsible. Contrariwise politics always looks into
the social situation and conditions, as well as take a group view.
http://www.nonduality.com/1100gp.htm
Quote: “Our beloved "Jehovah" is
of course, both benevolent AND wrathful; and he is the source of the
crazymaking 'double-bind' which is so pervasive in our history and our
world-dream culture; I hold that without His 'help', there would be little
problem with schizophrenia, bipolar, etc. ) Jehovah was invented by
Akhnaton’s father in the Amarna period, 1250 BC odd, which heralds the
arrival of monotheism, as one theory fits all. Politically speaking it
heralds the first sole ruler. Consequently religion uses dragon killing to
“get rid of” the bad, unwanted thing. Psychology speaks of suppression.
Greek Oedipus rex, Hebraic Jehovah and Akhnaton are one and the same person,
Greece and Israel being satrap states of Egypt. In antiquity kings used to
play favours and allot territory to friends, just as English kings did with
barons in feudal times and modern presidents have loyal friends for
assistants. Akhnaton was a god king one does not argue with. Besides Ani, of
royal lineage, in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, applies a Double Bind to
the 72 judges of moral rectitude. He tells them that if they do not do as he
wishes he’ll use magic to force them. It certainly is word magic we use as
it reaches beyond logic into the advantages we can wrest from language,
which is fine for poetry and maybe so for science, but not so hot for human
consumption.
Normally we seek to be good and avoid bad but the point here is to go
beyond good and bad to examine how one is manipulated both ways. Tibetan
Yoga advises us to first visioneer and then kill both the gods and demons
in turn. This sounds quaint until one realises the gods are examples of
Double Binds, one cannot argue with a god, on pain of or else. That is
intended to show the entire drama is projected by our mammalian herd
instinct to stay in groups. It is actually far more efficient to use the gods
than our multi muddle. People fill offices and get personally embroiled,
gods are mere flat scripts. The poet who writes the myth is held inspired so
cannot be responsible. Originally all this was a powerful defense against
predators, robbers and thieves. But once man applies this to members of his
own group it all goes haywire The major shift from tribal organisation into
aggregated societies keeps the same arrangements which enlarges a group to
encompass everybody. Consequently it has to invent scapegoats.
Evil amounts to being faced with an experience and knowledge we cannot
emotionally handle so we project it out there to avoid feeling wrong. This
stereotypes scapegoats into being evil. There is no such thing as good and
evil except in its effects on environment and life alike. An action cannot
be good or bad except in its effects on something else. I can drink from a
cup or smash it. or throw it, ignore it and so on. A Double Bind is a lose
lose situation, applied in a metaphysical sense and abstracted from Nature
itself. Moreover understanding how the Double Bind works means going beyond
the rule in knowledge that we may only discuss the details and not the
theory, which is yet another Double Bind hiding the voice of authority in
print and laws. The theory is made out as like reality itself when it is
merely a sentence write large across the sky. We are led to confuse the
Institution as a social context with a natural context or environment.
Since we are not in the habit to argue with the vagaries of nature, as does
Don Camillo with his god the ploy works. In a Sufi tale the Mullah
Nashruddin, an image of the Sufi fool, he is found cursing and swearing in
front of the Minaret where the faithful are called to prayer. When asked to
explain himself he replies: “I’m only getting in first”. The Mullah
anticipates the flack but puts himself in a Double Bind making extra work.
He is a fool and fools do all the stupid things we do. We don’t normally
think of enlightenment or religious illumination as able to free us from all
those binds. But any reading of Sufi parables and Zen koans and mundos shows
they are designed to make the learner aware of Double Binds. The purpose of
the exercise is to unbind the person into overall integrity. This is best
done for oneself since then one can make further changes. You are faced with
the problem and have to figure out the answer yourself; designed to make you
think. The bind begins with the epistemic, constitutional bind built into
our society and spreads out through all aspects of our social life as
“human” relations where they are actually inhuman. It isolates us from our
fellow men, to enact a prescribed script externally imposed.
"Democracy
imposed from without is the severest form of tyranny”, writes L. Biggle jr.
Recent research into marine life reveals that all marine organisms, plants
and fish, have built in bodily defenses agionst predation, mostly; poisons,
but also claws and scales. The mammalian solution is to operate in groups,
also used by schools of fish. A single predator has problems culling a herd.
The hammerhead shark counters this by swimming through a school of fish by
thrashing its head sideways to kill as many as possible while surprise or
shock still reigns. Then it feeds on the return trip. Normally the outside
members of a school of fish acts as watchdogs and once inside a school of
fish the members are open to dangers of all kinds. This goes as far as our
immune system where viruses like AIDS have ways to fool it into accepting
the parasite, just as happens with computer parasites like spam, trojans and
viruses as unwarranted intrusions of our privacy and self determination. In
our society it is instigated by the leaders and executed by their servants.
Directly between people the two aspects exist in one person, which is
diagnosed as schizophrenia mainly because socially we are supposed to act
with “one” mind called intellect.
We may then speak of Institutional Double
Binds enshrined in law and interpeople Double Binds enacted in our relations
with other people. Most of the websites into Double Binds only tackle the
human variety. The deeper one goes into the context and structure of
society, right down to its foundations in a Constitution, the more
expressly this is stated. In a word, our social laws are Constitutionally
unassailable by any individual. Laws are enacted by a Parliament which as an
Institution is unsaillable and by which the members cannot be taken to
Court. Instead of the gods we now live under an absentee landlord, misnamed
as an institution. Man now acts as a predator of his own kind which is named
as cannibalism, of a metaphysical kind, an eater of souls as is
Mephistopheles in Faustus.
It is only this Century, with the advent of new theories of thought - their
general label ‘non-linear systems’ with Cybernetics as granddad - that we
can begin to name the parts of the action before ascribed to the gods, that
in turn are only symbols our our own soul and doings. It started during the
stone ages after man domesticated our plants and animals and that job done,
he started on man himself. Its rapes our environment and man himself alike.
Not only constitutions but the roots of our civilisation are entailed. The
intent was to simplify everything so everybody could use it. This changed
gradually into reductionism, grounded in a poor understanding of how our
mind works. Yoga disciplines aim to restore access to our full mind. T’ai C’
i for example aims to restore our sensory 3D body awareness, which our mind
anyhow constantly updates as we move around. That started alongside the
start of civlisation itself. Merely doing one’s job uses, so we are told,
10% of our ability to perform routine tasks. This is fine as long as we are
not denied full mental access, which nowadays it does. The current ongoing
paradigm changes appear to change this attitude.
Up until the mammal organisms, like a Cactus its prickles and nettle its
stingers, tactics are mainly defensive, except for predators. Approach a
rhinoceros and it displays a warning stance, move off and it returns to
munching lunch. Most ecological hassles never come to war. Only with
civilisation did this turn aggressive when man undertook to change man
himself. Lyall Watson, in his “Dark Nature” derives three rules from
Nature, to eplains it is not just human sins, viz:
1: Protect kith and kin at all costs.
2: Attack and kill all non-kith and kin
3 IF either the neighbours don’t care, see it or join the mob.
Insights like that made Martin Luther King appalled at the silence of the
Majority where I prefer to believe the poor dears are by and large innocent,
though they still do this but unconsciously. I do not care to use that word
*instinct” it being used as a portmanteau to hide important distinctions
between lower and higher life forms. In a word language are logic are linear
systems. Instead of merely observing how we rationalise this, that word
rationalisation here is intended as “put into their rightful proportions”;
not as like in propaganda or self justification. Being the inheritors of
evolution itself we can hardly not use what is built in. That we can
intellectualise thse Double Bind processes shows it is not just our
instincts, we think that way. The cosmic irony results that civilisation
started with the intent to protect us from such dangers now being used to
control us. We can read in myth the intent to quell our animal traits,
referred to as demons and evil doers. Just think of the tale of Cain and
Abel or Oedipus and Judas, the antagonist in the Jesus drama.
It is a danger resulting from reasoning with our emotions, plainly to get
our own way and protect man from himself. The general discontent of the
people recognises people don’t like it, though they do not know exactly how
it works and how to change it. Only this Century have we begun to pickle it
in words. By and large 95% of a population is unlettered or bereft of a
higher education, so even on that count should we be surprised to find it
endemic in our society? The bureaucrat tells us what we “should” do, follow
laid down protocol, instead of what we can and could do. Of course once and
after the news spreads through a population it will begin to become common
place. Rumours travel and so do doubts. But that takes decades. Look at
cooking eggs, how many other ways can you imagine other than water or oil?
School is the Institution which mindmoulds us into the shift from parental
obedience - which we cannot help - into social obedience, which we can, but
only through social disobedience or hiding our fuller understanding behind a
social mask. Schools, it was noted long ago, use a hidden curriculum which
says: keep quiet, don’t ask questions and do as told, with teacher playing
judge, jury and hangman. Children can handle noise, adults cannot. Teachers
mostly imagine they teach but “educare” means to bring out, as did Plato
with the slave, one’s natural abilities and not to stomp in “facts” by rote
learning which are in a first place products of a theory one is not taught.
Parents, the Mother especially, issue Double Bind injunctions [Mother knows
best] a child could not understand even if they were expressly stated by
her. But soon enough we begin to think things through and ask questions that
get no answers, so it stops.
Again, in Psychological Theories the individual is made responsible and has
his doings ascribed to the person, whereas both Systems and Game theory
make no such imputations or projections of an individual into the situation,
quite the same as the detached observer who is supposed to merely observe,
as if he can isolate his mind and feelings from such observation. Should we
try to construct such a rubric for the individual we come out with many
levels of understanding, including a complete and full grasp of all the
parts of a relational action, the implied and unstated included. Indian
rhetoric distinguishes between people who understand immediately, on
refection, on being taught or not at all. This we assign respectively to
intuition, conscious thinking - to avoid that word intellect - and rote
habit training. And if you cannot think for yourself you’d make a poor
sorcerer’s apprentice and of course, make mistakes in the learning. Our
society is altogether into helping us avoid all mistakes and need I mention
the mess made of that lot? No mistakes and many sick and insane people. But
who learns to make distinctions about the language we learn as babies?
Contrariwise one can hardly imagine any manager doing their job without
using Double Binds. also known as orders by imposing his or her kind of
order. Any job can be done in several dozen different ways but unless people
work in tandem it tends to a muckup, unless everybody knows what everybody
else is up to and into, as happens in villages and primitive societies.
Norbert Wiener invented Cybernetics to the express purpose for people to
settle their own hash between them by sharing and communicating. That is
pure Taoism.
One of the multitude of commentators on the Double Bind makes the comment
that “if the devil can be warded off with laughter, why not a Double Bind?”
Indeed so by instead of having an external authority to create an
internal detached observer of the subjective events or never even taking
yourself at your word. That, if we peel natural religion out of organised
religion, was originally its job. To be aware of what we are really up to
instead of what we imagine we are. or are led to believe we do. The current
social changes going on merely take the reputed revolutions of the Buddha,
Jesus and Muhammed - which were subverted into organised religion - as
being taken one stage further by our escape and freedom from the ties of the
workbench and desk, our only social being as legally prescribed.
II: HOW TO CURE A DOUBLE BIND
Item one is “don’t go in for the dragon killer who seeks to remove, kill
and suppress or transcend Double Binds. It’s endemic to our culture, age old
and endemic to the Natural realm as well, by way of a wrongly framed Theory
of Evolution. It’s built into how our minds work, normally and under stress.
The entirety of plants and animals utilise defense tactics to ward off
predators, Among the nastiest kinds occur in the insect kingdom where the
game rule is unmitigated war although marine life is not being found even
worse. Viruses don’t have a problem of penetrating any defence tactics by
immune systems and have free access everywhere.
So the short advice is that you learn to live it , it’s incurable. We have
to learn to turn objective to our own self which Evolution designed for
animals and refuse to be tempted by one’s feelings to win, get even, get the
other guy to feel what you feel, revenge and avenge wrongs done to you. We
have to transcend what we are born with and educated into by self
evaluation. The advice for a rebel or dissident is that you have to know not
only what opponent knows but what he tries to hide, won’t mention and get
you to ignore. Words, naming concepts are exquisitely able to do so.
Concepts isolate the connectivity and wholeness of reality and there’s the
rub. We can give words the wrong or a false meaning. It’s called lying. We
can lie to others - for many reasons - and lie to others, as also deceive
our self and others. In Nature it’s called protective mimicry and the wings
of a butterfly have large dots to get a bird to imagine it’s a large animal.
Poisonous snakes are usually brightly coloured and some imitate this while
not being poisonous and the more sneaky poisonous snakes are near black,
nice when you move underneath the vegetation. Thistles have prickles and
horses get around that by moving their lips away from their teeth.
The simple ways to tackle that is to:
1: Have a mystical experience.
2: Transcend all inborn and externally imposed self concepts and feelings.
That does not mean “Get rid of them”, as our society does, it means living
with it and not letting it have its way to exercise what Korzybski call the
Cortico-thalamic pause.
3: Understand how it works so you can recognise the nasty brute which comes
in more disguises than we have devils in medieval theology.That’s doing it
intellectually by its paradox logic.
4: Be born since 1992 as a crystal and indigo children and other labels.
Children can usually tell when they are Double Bound This lot is able to
flatten double Binds intuitively.
5: Get taught when you cannot judge whether the teacher is free of it.
6: Wait for progress or evolution to settle its hash. Social insight begins
with a few people and the news will spread. Once a person is clear of Double
Binding others you won’t catch them again, usually.
7: Make a serious self dedication to your unconscious or oversoul to help
you get unbound. You’ll go through all ways of hell and discover the meaning
of the proverb: “Whom the Gods love, they punish”. Probably mostly because
you are habit trained to received punishment when “wrong”. Begin then by
forgiving yourself for all your sins. It does not need absolution from a
priest or anybody else. It will take up half or more of your life. There are
always a few leftover Double Binds you missed before.
8: Have a deep life crisis That includes the Jesus experience, being alone
in the desert and realise that the desert nor sea cares not a hoot whether
you live or die, but you do one hopes. Thorough incarverations can also do
this, not not too often.
In undouble binding your self you put your self in a Double Bind to be free
of it. That’s the final one to deal with which religious and esoteric
disciplines call getting rid of one’s ego. We don’t need a self image of
“who am I?”, that’s the favorite Greek mistake. We are biologically equipped
to have our feelings prompt us. They only lie to us after we have been
taught to do so. This conflicts with what society wants us to be like,
further re-inforced by daily social contact, advertising, laws and what
else? People who routinely do this.
Since Bateson wrote, around 1972 the growth of websites devoted to it, from
different perspectives grew to 930,000. That is still a miniscule percentage
of a population. It occurs mainly in the West, comprising some 2 Billion odd
people. On that guesstimate the ratio comes at about 0.5%, sufficient to
wreak a grass roots revolution. Unfortunately they are mostly academics and
professionals, which makes up about 3% of any population. That makes it
600 million to one million which is better odds. It’s age old and as One Zen
Master points out:
An ordinary man is Buddha; desire and passion is enlightenment. One thought
of folly makes a man an ordinary
man. The next enlightened thought and he is Buddha. --Hui-neng.
In our currrent lifestyle we are constantly re-infected so we have to
indulge in daily spiritual washings to remove the picked up dirt. The good
news is that we can retrieve the Buddha mind, having found it only once. We
can set up a habit or run a ritual, either way works. Mine is a little ogre
at the back of my mind with a fantastic sense of humour. Every time I am
about to fall off the apple cart it warns me, by more or less saying: “Go
ahead and find out..:.. Contrariwise the Bible tells us once we
excomminicated one devil, forty others rush in to take up tenancy. Therefore
it’s best to start by simply watching yourself play sucker and do it
yourself too to others and yourself. Wait until you’ve accumulated enough
evidence to pluck them out by the roots..Like any plant they have very small
beginnings as a seed. One putdo0wn as a child and you may decide That won’t
happen to me’ but allow yourself to do it to others.
$$$First you say you do and then you don't" §§§
"By education most have been misled;
So they believe, because they so were bred.
The priest continues what the nurse began,
And thus the child imposes on the man." --John Dryden, "The Hind and the
Panther"
Quote stolen from http://fox.rollins.edu/~jsiry/Doubind.htm I did not ask
him.
It differs quite from Wordsworth more romantic: “The child is father to
the man”.
It is now done regularly by more and other than priests. Consider the
stranglehold the Mullahs still have in Muslim countries. The plain fact is
that our mind can do this and we can debate forever whether this is genes or
upbringing. After all culture and civilisation was invented by man and
despite the best of intentions it happens again and again and again in our
history. It is not that we can do this but that we don’t do this unless we
find a need to do so. In our society it is endemic and disempowers and
debases people which, of course, makes them try to hang onto what skerricks
of self determination they do have.
In general response feedback to stress and unnecessary or unwanted
interference with what we plan or intend to do creates a negative impression
which leads us to ignore - if we can - hindrances and blocks or counterwise
defend them out, often by attack and anger. This accumulates in our feelings
as irritation when emotional and conflict for the mind. This divides our
attention and disables us from concentrating on a task in hand. Animals don’
t have an intellect and not being subject to civilisation have free access
to their mind, mainly with feelings and intuition. Apart from that at some
level we *know* we are more able than social stereotypes permit, which adds
to the irritation. Dreams about being born a prince or princess or a mere
foundling abound. The trouble is we don’t know how to free our mind of
binds, brought about by social reductionism. In a way it is quite simple:
“To discover the Truth in anything that is alien, First dispense with the
indispensable in our own vision”, writes Leonard Cohen. Just as done for
theories with assumptions first, theory next as a pattern to fit the data
into, made out as facts by a theory so too in our mind. A concept is merely
a label for complex patterns we use as complete models. Emotionally we have
attitudes and beliefs, emotions and feelings that hold such patterns
together with attitudes first. Cohen then translates that memory is driven
by predilections, the rest our mind supplies as detail. We do this with
sentences too. We think of something and the words come naturally. We don’t
notice the set of mental actions used to do this.
Merely imagine the muscles and synchronized breathing needed to say
anything, or how many muscles and organs used to walk. We don’t think about
this as the whole charade is triggered by words. We can be word bound,
concept bound as in shaving ourselves, idea or sensory image bound and
pattern bound, with no such thing but the abstract only, when we don’t
appear to think and seemingly act spontaneously. In effect at this last level
it is like Schopenhauer’s will that makes the choices of what we do. Mind
itself is silent except when providing feedback to awareness to monitor an
action or thought. In the background our unconscious runs through a list of
our basic attitude near every fifteen minutes, which is called the stream
of consciousness. This runs smoothly when we agree or concur with previous
choices made but it gets stroppy and problematic when when we change our
mind and attitudes because then we have to re-design the whole thing from
the top down, or, if we are learning something, from the bottom up. It is
the very complexities of all this that makes it difficult and time consuming
to effect changes. IF, moreover, we don’t have much of an idea about how our
mind actually works and which of its many abilities we habitually prefer we’
re stuck up a gumtree without a chair. And precisely that knowledge
implication makes inaccessible because we lack practice with doing this. We
could almost say that civlisation makes us ignorant by its reliance on
custom and tradition. None of us are dumb or stupid. One can only be
ignorant of knowledge for lack of access. But our experience is always in
access, though culture limits this by stereotyping. For example we can make
over a thousand different sounds but any language hardly uses a hundred. So
too with the array of operations our mind can muster. We have some seven
organ systems each of which runs to a different pattern and all of which are
run by our unconscious. So making up patterns and world models should be a
piece of cake for any of us. We constantly update our world model and are
hardly aware we are using one.
As it were the external interference with our mind’s doings by education
overflows our natural abilities we exercise as a child. It works by the
simple principle that if externally organised the internal mechanisms say,
more or less, “OK then you do it!”. Lamarck differed from Darwin in holding
that use and practice leads evolution. It certainly leads our learning.
Apart from any specialised knowledge we may have been taught most of our
concept consist of badly detailed stereotypes. Morover teaching children
abstract ideas that cannot get familiar with by hands on practice and
experience disables us from self determination. The continuity of our
experience gets broken and our mind cannot act on itself without this
continuity and wholeness. To retrieve or restore this we have to restart
almost like a child, which is why antiquity called it a rebirth of the
spirit. It’s all there to start with, we just lose touch . Memories we don’t
constant access simply fade away. This happens with civilisation itself that
things get lost. We just discovered that the Aztecs had wheels, and you can
any how not make up a calendar without wheels, but they were not used for
transport. The knack was lost. Besides by insisting on custom and tradition
as what was done by Granddad is good enough for me, stifles progress and
change. So far we’ve only done better what we’ve been doing all along. Our
hammer started as a stone age tool.and so on for our entire toolkit up to
the age of electronics. So should we be surprised that our culture mould
needs a new one? And with it goes our individual ones. In essence it all
boils down to not taking yourself too seriously and have the occasional peep
inside and do some housecleaning. One Sikh saint was fond of calling himself
a washerwoman, One takes in a dirty psyche and delivers it clean, which
mostly consist of ignored hurts.
NOTE:
A problem with the phrase Double Bind is that although not held to be
logical, it is a well organised method or protocol. logic is so defined and
governed by rules as to deal only with the ‘well-defined’ words of its
grammar and jargon, mainly as done by intellect to handle knowledge. The
Double Bind acts politically in the gap or difference of concealed motives
or not expressly stated plans and intentions. it relies on the ambiguities
of words, misleading the victim into one meaning whereas the binder uses
another one. We may call this disinformation. We are taught and led to be
honest and trust others, where the Double Bind is a cheat. As a person
learns more about the Double Bind he becomes increasingly aware of its uses
in our society. The issue here is that we cannot actually tell from the
words alone and so may get confused about who does or does not do this,
while the words are much the same. A mere “go” will do the trick. Implicit
is the demand to obey. The way to understand it is holistic and
non-linear which fits in with recent theories of thought. In a Systems, like
the weather, we cannot quite predict the weather it being too complex for
our analysis. Recent Earth science combine sea, air and land such that each
of them drives the other. Thus, as Ishmael in “Moby Dick” tells us, the
universal thump is passed around in what our intuition calls cycles or wheels.
Actually scientific prediction is a nonsense because all we get is
statistical odds. This leads to uncertainty our society tries to resolve and
remove, which, as this argument shows, it fails and only becomes more
endemic. This is governed by the recent surveillance and communication
methods which has only escalated what was already going on but insufficient
to abuse our self determination or privacy. We can now photograph a person
reading a newspaper with satellites. Credit cards can be used to trace our
moves.
Unfortunately there is no simple or easy way to learn all this. Where ipse
teiscum of the Greeks to know thyself was a pastime for the aristocracy who
owned slaves, it has now become a necessity for all. Over something that
bothered me recently I had to scrape down my soul below the mud at the
bottom. I kept on producing one solution after another but my feelings kept
on nagging me. They were right. Patanjali in his “Yoga Aphorisms” uses the
metaphor of a pond and so does the medieval poet Walther von der Vogelweide.
Patanjali tells us to explore the pond right down into the mud where we now
know bacteria live that are essential to all life. In that sense we have to
learn the map, structure and processes that go on in our soul or psyche and
mind. Buddhism describes it as a trip up the mountain, going around and
around the mountain to pass by the sunlit and dark sides to gain the top and
have an overall view. Mysticism and Tibetan Yoga tells us to imagine a
light inside of us that we can expand and contract at will. All this shows a
need for a holistic and overall awareness normally ascribed to intuition.
Intellect, language and society does not provide us with the means.
Pre-logical thinking tells us that there is a high road and a low one, a
left and right handed path, another that goes forwards and backwards and
still another to the centre and circumference. This uses a three
dimensional image I want to emphasise as helpful. Whether we fill up the
details found with words, images, a zoo or whatever takes your fancy, it
helps to show how it all connects together as a whole, more or less like a
flowchart
