The Western psyche has had a long running fascination with the drama of Absolutes. Not all cultures, tribes, nations have had such an "absolute" fascination-fixation. The quest for absolute truth and understanding can be seen as one of the main, if not the main, western dream and drama. This dream-drama is of such immense proportions that it must seem almost fanciful to those of other space-times/locales who have no such absolute fixation when it comes to absolutely understanding with absolute certainty and conviction what "this" is absolutely all about --- in an absolute sense.

 Whenever "Other" cultures have become engaged with the West's absolutism, out of will or necessity, it has not always revealed a pretty picture. For, there is only room for one set of absolutes. The Western psyche knows this. Come into contact with those "of the Western psyche" and you are bound to be convinced, or ye shall be convicted of crimes against humanities quest for the Absolute. It is almost comical if not for the tragic nature of the convictions of those who have found their "Absolute"; as they have felt compelled to kill in the name of their absolute interpretation.

Those who have resisted have been, if not out and out defamed and devalued, then denigrated as non-viable examples of the Absolutist God. Decapitated and dismissed heads roll out the temple doors, and their cultural relativism goes with them.

Absolutism of the Western brand has wielded a heavy dose of justice to those who have not been so privileged, or worthy, to see the same Singular Eye in the One Infinite Sky. And think as we might that this is all behind us, I have a story to tell as we venture along these trails of phosphorescent minds. The absolutist meme is still of a potent strain. Certainty still kills and crushes the often brittle bones of the relatively weaker and less "chosen" peoples. Yes, strains of The Absolute God still persist; now coming clothed in some new terms. Cyberville. One World Order. Free-Market Economy. Digital Revolution. Information Age. The underlying principles remain the same. It is just the terminology that changes. A new suit of clothes for the man.

This Absolute God has been seen wearing the masks of whatever; whatever Singular Notion that is absolutely just so; as if no interdependent linking was of any significance at all; as if there is but One Absolutely Primed Pump that is watering the mouths of all those who have seen the fallacy of a pluralistic world. Diverse manners and styles of abundant giftings, arising from out of the pell-mell of forces and fields, of Being-Becoming-Embodied-as-Whatever; these do not matter so much as The Answer. One World Order. Free-Market Economy. Global Village. Cyberville. Just do it!

Be wary of The Answer. For history forewarns us that The Answer might not have room for you and yours at the Absolute Inn.

Would The Answer be inclusive? In other words, would The Answer embrace the whole of humanity, of the glorious and the grand, the glimmering lights of our giving gifts and graces? What does history have to say? Have prior "Answers" been of the order of inclusiveness? Or have they been of the order of exclusiveness? The chosen few. The elite dictating to the masses.

Have we not seen how those types of Answers often arise from a limited field of inquiry and investigation? In other words, The Answer cannot account for the Kosmos, for the Earth, for the Diverse, for the Many. It is limited, severely. Anytime that humanity has been offered An Answer, then Absolute bloodshed has followed. Purges are necessary. A cleansing must take place. And contrary to what one would tend to assume, Absolutes have tended to be exclusive and limiting (which rather contradicts what I have grown to assume).

Applied Absolutes have diminished freedom, as much or more than they have brought freedom with them. Blood spills; flesh is flayed. And the Abstract Absolutes are where? In the Sky? A New Code? Locked away and under heavy security? Funny me, I thought they were meant to be writ on the Heart, for all. Not just for the elect who have realized how to perorm the correct prostrations at the appointed hour and in the appointed direction.

 

101

Someone has an insight. Or, perhaps, a group of someone's have an insight together, one that they share. An insight which, not so ironically, seems to coincide with their plans! How about that? What a coincidence!

The insight is powerful. It is even reckoned as Truth, sure and certain. Now, all that needs to take place is that this Truth needs to be communicated and implemented. Of course, this Truth, as we have by now surely seen, is as much a product of the assumptions guiding the seeker(s) of Truth as it is a stand-on-its-own Reality. In other words, Truth, as perceived, is like color, is of a quality; it is not solely objective and quantifiable. For even quanta are fluid and plastic, not readily definable, except as the observer is wont to "perceive" them. How we measure determines what results we get. We decide "how" to measure; where the arbitrary limits are to be placed; what is input and what is output; we draw the subjective line in the sands of time.

In his biography of physicist David Bohm, F. David Peat relates that "quantum theory... speaks of process and transformation rather than objects and interaction... the quantum cannot be broken apart; in every measurement the system and the apparatus are an indivisible unanalyzable whole."

Now, if we interpret the world as "system", and ourselves as the "apparatus" which is attempting to measure the system, we quickly find out that, in quantum terms, we cannot extricate ourselves from the results of our measurement, or from anything that we perceive for that matter. Life is part projection, co-creation. The observer, the one who looks into the mirror, colors the measurement. Perception is affected just by seeing, noting, measuring, categorizing, or classifying. The subject is "in" the quantified measurement, to speak nothing of trying to measure qualities.

As soon as the subject decides and determines "how" to measure, then that subject has just entered the scene --- is bound up with the results, unequiovocally. David Bohm concluded "that the entire enterprise of science is one of perception rather than of the accumulation of knowledge." It is the ability to manipulate forces and phenomena that seduces one into believing that science is free of the distortions brought about by perception and such dirty impurities as "subjectivity". Peat states that "Quantum systems do not exist in the abstract. It is not correct to say... that these properties exist independently of an observation. Physical properties must always be defined within the conditions under which they are observed."

So, we are back to context. Questions like "What is the relationship between the conditions at the moment of observation and what we perceive?" become crucial in order for us to understand why we perceived what we "think" we did.

"How where you feeling when you 'thought' you perceived that? What was going on in your immediate environment when you perceived that?"

Our questions must necessarily include the observer and how that observer is observing in the moment of observation. "Quantum systems do not exist in the abstract. Quantum theory denies independently existing objects and properties. It is not correct to say... that these properties exist independently of an observation." And if "these properties" do not "exist independently of an observation", then it is correct to say that those "properties" also do not exist independently of an observer (the observer who measured those properties as such).

Thus:

There is no observation possible apart from an observer; we are bound up seamlessly within THAT, and the field of THAT, which we "do" perceive.

Let's travel back to our discussion of Absolutes. When a person or persons, observes or perceives an Absolute, by rule that observation or perception is informed by the condition of that person or persons. Said more plainly: the condition of the one observing the "apparent" Absolute informs that act of observation. And when we say "the condition of the one observing" we are talking about the beliefs and the assumptions of that one; as well as the cultural space and the socio-political environs in which that person or those persons are embedded in.

All of one's psychological accumulations seep into the in-sight-full terrain of the perceived "Absolute". Christians "perceive" and "conceptualize" Christ. String theorists "perceive" and "conceptualize" super strings. Buddhists "perceive" and "conceptualize" one of the many Buddhas of the Primordial Sphere. Painters "perceive" and "conceptualize" in terms of Color, Light, and Shadow --- irrespective of subject matter or content. And Hindus may "perceive" and "conceptualize" one of the many Gods or Goddesses of Hindu lore.

Thus:

What is absolute for us is what we perceive as potentially being capable of absolute status. We see what we know, in terms of what we know. It's what we see.

 

102

There are many ways to "perceive". The Earth, or rather the Kosmos, is teeming with sentience that "perceives" the Kosmos in a hundred trillion billion distinct and quite different ways. Perception styles may indeed border on the Infinite. The human way is not the only way to perceive, to know so as to do. And, as we have realized, within the structure of the race of Being-humans there are distinctions that cannot be readily reduced one to another. We are each unique in "how" we sense, and make sense (or lack thereof!).

It is when we come across Absolutes backed up by extreme Power and Force, this is when we are being exposed to a leveling of interpretations. During the Inquisition the Roman Catholic hierarchy leveled interpretations into flatness and faded glories. Spiritual interpretations (and scientific interpretations as well) that were not in accordance with the Churches mandates of what was of the Most High were purged. The attempt was to get rid of the interpretations by literally burning the interpreter at the stake. It was a form of killing the messenger because one did not like the message!

At that time, no doubt, torture was high on the inquisitorial mind. Some of the best minds of that age also developed some of the most hideous torture devices the world has ever known. It was a great industry. I suppose the Church and Her rabid throngs held to the belief that if one put a "heretic" through enough pain then they would renounce their erroneous perceptions, their false gods, their egregious interpretations. These sorts of notions were also part of the Colonial mentality; where there was also lots of purging going on. Always the consequences being a leveling of interpretations. Cultures extinct. Peoples gone, no more. When the Absolute is right, then there is quickly no room for wrong. Somethings gotta go.

This is often the main problem with clutching to supposed and alleged "Absolutes": the tendency to fall into a myopic and overly defended stance. In relation to what we perceive as being "not" of the Absolute --- let us proclaim war!

"You! You there! Come over here!"

Alas, somethings change very slowly if they change at all. Let's all pray for a little Impermanence in relation to the calcified Absolutes.... A little rainy erosion might be good for some of those absolute "gods" and "devils"...

... because it really does matter if a person or a group believes they have accessed the Absolutely Highest Truth. The effects of these types of beliefs often signals death and violence to the "Other" --- to those who don't get it! There is an implied threat that rides side-saddle with "absolute certainty", especially when it comes in religious or socio-political forms, i.e., on a vast collective scale. Be wary of The Answer.

For the most part, I would say that humanity is still quite one-dimensional in relation to the Absolute. We have assumptions that, for whatever reason, limit what we can perceive the Absolute as. For instance, it could not be that the Absolute would manifest as the relative, could it? All the teeming diversity? All the apparent chaos and confusion? All of the fancifully fabricated styles and manners? The Absolute?

"No, this couldn't be the Absolute. The Absolute is the One and Only Way --- Heaven --- where the Absolute always is. Nothing relative about that! No, here is just a place to get away from. Here is just one more reason to want to get there... This couldn't be the Absolute. Never!"

Then again, not everybody reads the signs along the way as "meaning" the same thing as we might. What should we do about that? Kill the interpreter? Just because we don't like the interpretation?

By now I am sure that we have a pretty good indication of how humanities ages long push for "absolute certainty" has unfolded --- especially the latest Western-powered drive to transcendent certainty. Now, mind you, as we are quite well aware, not all cultures have this tendency to want to seek out and classify in such an absolute manner. It does appear, at this time, that the Western psyche --- most especially --- has been very susceptible to a sort of absolutism; such as we have not seen in so globalizing a manner.

What is it about the West? Is it our history? Is it a cultural habit, an educated belief, one that has been passed down through the generations--reinforced along the way, picked up by other cultures, infecting nations that were once immune?

Or, is it all a quite genuine goal and earnest indication of our seeking for a better life through discerning the Absolute Truth?

 

103

I found it comical that Plato, who places so high an emphasis on provable truth, depends, in his theory of forms, on sheer assertion. In the Republic, he never tells us what good is, only that it's there. He and a few people like him can see it; the rest of us can't. Either you get it or you don't. But that's what all self-appointed elites say.

----David Denby

From Plato onward and up, there have been untold dreamers who have sought out the Holy Grail of Absolute Truth. These kinds of grail quests have become so habituated, in relation to the Western psyche, that I doubt hardly a soul has truly pondered the potential motives behind these quests for the Absolute (not to mention some of the more insidious consequences as well). Is it not entirely possible that these Holy Grail Quests for the Absolute could be synonymous with a parable; namely, that of the Prodigal Child?

The parable of the Prodigal Child, as told by Christ, was a parable about a young man who leaves behind the giftedness of his ancestor's land. In essence, the Prodigal Son takes all of his inheritance with him, he sets about to travel and wander, ever in pursuit of "more" and "better". Yes, out there, somewhere, lay yet "more" and "better" than what he has come to know in the land of his kin, in the land of his ancestors. For the Prodigal Son, the "absolutely certain" must not be here as this; not where he has already been and what he has already known. No, what is right here, in the ancestral lands, must, of course, be less than what is out there. Out there, it is waiting, waiting for the right seeker to find it; which is to be the Prodigal Child who searches for the Absolute; the Real; the True; the Good; the Ideal; the Eternally Beautiful; the Highest Pleasure; the Greatest Good; the Best Jewel; the Philosopher's Stone. It is the Eternal Elixir that calls the Prodigal Child. The Holy Grail is Out There; away, apart from the ancestral lands --- transcendent of this --- the Prodigal Child goes away. Falls apart. Returns broken, battered, bruised. Beat up by the search. Always returning to the ancestral lands.

Is it possible that the ages long search for The Absolute will always lead us away from, rather than towards, a deeper understanding? Will we, do we, waste our inheritance, as Prodigal Children, in pursuit of some Absolute that is more a figment of our imaginations than an Actual Reality? And meanwhile; meanwhile the relational domain suffers; the here and now suffers madly, as anguished cries of neglect resound throughout the domain of our former inhabitation --- for we are off seeking, ever off seeking; because for us, the Prodigal Children, the better awaits us, somewhere, somewhere over the rainbow. But not here. Never here. Never this. Never. It just couldn't be this.

Could it?

I can now see some of us standing outside the walls of our own life, too afraid to go back to where we were, were we left, yet no longer wanting to go forward, onward, dreaming new labyrinths of "apparent" truth that dissolve as we turn away and look elsewhere, ever elsewhere. I now see many standing, waiting, waiting for a sign that never comes. For we are the signs, we are the signs that have come, and yet we have bargained with a mirage. In order to look elsewhere, ever elsewhere, we have traded peace, contentment, ease, grace, a divine equanimity and tenderness that is never "out there", but is always and only known "right here" if at all. As Zen master and priest Suzuki Roshi puts it:

... it is a heretical view to expect something outside this world.

Yet many do just that, as Prodigal Children foresaking "what is" in favor of ghosts and figments of the imagination. Ghosts and figments, mirages, that in time leave all Prodigal Seekers broken and destitute, longing for the ancestral grounds that were left behind for bigger and better, more and more.

Many have spoken and have shared throughout the ages on the "potential" nature and consequences of certain irrefutable Absolutes. From Euclid's gemoetrical axioms --- based upon absolutely certain geometrical forms --- to Plato's realm of Absolutely Pure and Eternally Transcendent Ideas. Many theories and hypotheses on the Nature of the Absolute have been offered to us of the Western mind, infiltrating the mass consciousness.

Isaac Newton espoused an Absolute Space and an Absolute Time through which all celestial bodies coursed and flowed in Eternal Dance. Without this sure and certain foundation provided by the Absolute, Newton believed that we could not know anything at all --- not with absolute certainty, that is. Knowledge, for Newton and others akin to him, first had to rest on the immovable, unchangeable Nature of the Absolute. The Absolute would form the foundation for all Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. Without the support of the Absolute there could be no authentic understanding of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, at all. The Absolute was therefore a required necessity. "First", says Newton, "formulate and identify the Absolute. Then we shall proceed from there. Building our castle Heavenward, rising up to meet the Gods in the Eternal Sky."

Indeed, many still do believe that a sort of "a priori absolutism" is more than necessary in order for us to establish what "Truth Really Is". In other words, we have to "know" beyond a shadow of a doubt what is the given nature of Truth before we can go any further. One of the results of such assumptions is that, oftentimes, these "seekers of the absolute" will hold off on their relative relational life until they have absolute certainty of the absolute correctness and eternal justness of a certain choice or choices as they apply to the here and now (so even the absolute is supposed to be brought back here to the muck and mire of the relative and the relational --- ironic, eh?). The consequences of such a "waiting for certainty" become the ongoing exacerbation, decay, and turmoil of our lifeworld; a decay that is built upon the neglect of the relative while fancifully habituated with this search for the absolute --- those eternal ideas, the gnosis, the elixir that conveys meaning on this chaotic stew and slew of beings and bodies in our here and now. David Denby writes that "What is hard to accept is Plato's insistence that only the idea of dog is real, and that the particular dogs in the kennel and in the front yards of our houses are no more than apparent --- that is, they are imperfect copies of the unchanging and perfect original. According to Plato, only a philosopher, using the power of dialectic can perceive the good and the forms themselves. Most of us, obviously, would not make the cut."

Plato's philosophy served as the main inspiration behind the notion of the Ideal Forms, which underlie all phenomena. There is an Ideal Man and an Ideal Woman, and you, nor I, are It --- that Ideal. So, we can do our best to match the Ideal but we will never get there. Never get there. The same can be said for the whole of this world. There is an Ideal Earth, that is not this Earth, but some Transcendentally Real and Eternal Form upon which this Earth is based. We are copies of the Highest, mere intimations of what is possible. So much for worth and value, eh?

Yeah, welcome to Plato's Xeroxed dominion of copies of copies. Second-hand worlds and the not-quite-IT-ness of the beings that inhabit those second- hand worlds. Just the shadowy domains of imperfection are all this is.

It is not much of a leap to deeply intuit how this sort of Platonic rigmarole has infested our understanding of our selves and our relations as they exist here on this Earth. With this sort of Platonic-virus it is no wonder that we are the sort of seekers and fanatical self-helpers that we can tend to become. We have an Ideal that we have to get to, that we have to model ourselves after, that we have to embody as best as we can --- though it will never be enough. Because we are not That Ideal, just an offshoot, a second-hand reproduction, a fuzzy copy, a distorted rendition of the Highest, the Best, the One who never incarnates, is never here, has never been embodied or touched by the sludge and muck of a multi-faceted existence of many relations.

Plato had his time here on Earth before the birth of Christ. For much of the West Christ has come to signify that Ideal, that One Single Pure Form who walked the Earth. For us, we can only hope to model ourselves after Christ, after that One --- as he was the Ideal made real.

Now, we don't really know in detail the actual circumstances as they existed at that time, except by the records left to us. We can reconstruct the past based upon approximation, but not definitively. With this in mind, I am given pause and left to wonder how much of the Christian doctrine is itself informed by Platonic metaphysics and philosophy. There seem to be far too many coincidences to just dismiss these correlations as irrelevant. Could it be that the Christian doctrine of the Ideal come to Earth, and now risen, is taken in large part from Plato's metaphysics? For it is no secret that the marriage of Greco-Roman Ideals with Christian theology has become one of the most powerful ideological and material forces that the world has ever known. And we know from our own timeful experience that ideologies can converge and become married; where elements of one come to influence the other. This all seems to point to at least a partial influence of Greco-Roman Ideals in relation to Christian theology. The notions of the Transcendent, the Pure, and the Absent of God. And then we have here, the fallen world, which has become for us like a primitve child that we need to re-educate, re-form, re-configure from shadows to light, from wildness to civilized domesticity.

 

104

Is Power and Might an indication of a Transcendent Truth? Or is Power and Might an indication of Power and Might --- and just that? Personally, I feel that these are important questions for us to ask collectively. For we can easily possess and use Power and Might --- more so than ever. And if we firmly believe that it is a sort of "Transcendentally-Ordained" capability --- this Power and Might --- then we become prone to, perhaps, quite irresponsible uses of our Power and Might. There is a long historical record of just this sort of behaviour, too; where Power and Might become the insufferable ends and means of our lives.

Hence, in the Information Age we might seek to devalue and denounce all challengers to the party line. Or, better yet, we'll cloud the peoples knowing with assumptions that work to our advantage; for the assumptions will work below the surface of consciousness and will hasten to do the dirty work of cleansing for us. As we have shared already, in the Information Age "bad information" becomes the new weapon, the new virus, the abstract disease of our times with quite all too apparent and concrete implications for all of us. We could all use a dose of immunity to ward of such "bad information". Friedrich Nietschze suggests just such a necessary immunization:

Henceforth, let us be on guard against the dangerous old conceptual fiction that posited a "pure and will-less, painless, timeless knowing subject"; let us guard against the snares of such contradictory concepts as "pure reason", "absolute spirituality", "knowledge in itself": these always demand that we should think of an eye turned in no particular direction, in which the active and interpreting forces, through which alone seeing becomes seeing something, are supposed to be lacking; these always demand of the eye an absurdity and a nonsense. There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective "knowing"; and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our "concept" of this thing, our "objectivity" be.

Indeed, the Western psyche does have an ages-long, and quite deeply ingrained indoctrination into a sort of absolute seek and find. It is not so ironic either, considering how the West was won: by supplanting many views with one. And this trend is continuing exponentially, as William Greider suggests in his book One World Ready Or Not. Greider writes "that people no longer have free choice in this matter of identity. Ready or not they are of the world. As producers or consumers, as workers or merchants or investors, they are now bound to distant others through the complex strands of commerce and finance reorganizing the globe as a unified marketplace." Greider calls this the "deepest social meaning" of the now emerging globally unified Market-place. For whatever reason, and for whoever's consideration, we are indeed experiencing a convergence of immense proportions. There is no bona fide historical precedent for such a global convergence; one where identity becomes "global" rather than "local". Alvin and Heidi Toffler suggest just as much when they write in Civilization that, "...the creators and inhabitants of this latest supercivilization share more with one another, even at a distance... They may have more in common with an e-mail contatc in Vancouver or Hong Kong than with the blue-collar worker next door --- let alone the peasant left behind in one of history's backwater regions." Our friends and families are strung out on divergent portions of the world. Commerce and industry have collapsed the former boundaries that used to exist as a limit between first, second, and third world countries (at least on the surface, that is). For the wavefront, the techno-economic cusp, there is indeed no locality to the game anymore. The interconnectedness of the communications network has rendered "localities" somewhat obsolete. It is not necessary to aspire locally anymore. Now we can aspire globally. In a sense, it is just another sign of the collapse of space-time.

Like Spirit, Capital and Finance no longer know, nor recognize borders. Wherever the returns are, that is where Capital flows. National interests mean little; Capital follows the money trail of secrure returns, of offering up some more indebtedness to the good, secure debtors. Long-term loans: Finance at work. Capitalzing on holdings: Leveraging the markets for gain. Dumping the losers and investing in the winners. No more do the faithful rest here. No, we just follow the numbers man. The numbers don't lie. We don't need faith; not when you have numbers... it's all in black and white man. Read the transcripts. Watch the ticker. The numbers don't lie.

While Capital and Finance close their embrace around the globe at the turn of the millennium, a hundred plus years ago, Nietzsche, in his own admittedly European way, was calling for a retribalization of the world. This retribalization of the world was conceived as being a sort of tribalizing of consciousness and culture, if you will. This was, no doubt, set up against the backdrop of the totalitarianism of knowledge and power that was held by the ruling elite; who alone had the correct understanding of what was Truth, and who was fit to receive the sacred chalice of understanding. In Nietzsche's view, the more distinct and different kinds of eyes seeing and perceiving, then the better off we will all be. On the other hand, the more consolidated that the kinds of seeing and perceiving become, then the more susceptible we are to experiencing a flattening and leveling of interpretations; thus, kinds of knowledge, ways of singing the world, modes of being, and styles of becoming go extinct like species in an absent rainforest. This is what Nietzsche saw more than a hundred years ago. And this is the present tension of our times, as the global convergence gets ratcheted up another notch with each newly non-local breath that the techno-economic cusp takes. It is a tension we will all increasingly have to live with; which exists between the distinctness of the local and the homogenuous tenacity of the globalizing forces of the techno-economic wavefront.