We have developed specific codes. These too are tools; coded language tools that are somewhat abstract, yet concretely effective when applied. The codes that we have developed teach us about the world and what we can do to effect change in ourselves and in our environment. These codes, specific and working within certain dimensions, teach us how to input data and what results we can expect as an output of that input into the modeled system.

We plug our data into the code, and then that data is filtered through the code and the results are outputted; which gives us an indication of what we can expect to happen in the concrete world if a similar input were to occur, not in a modeled system, but in an actual one. Mathematics is the primary meta-form that we employ for coding cause/effect chains. The equations are abstract deductions. They are not contextually specific in a concrete manner. The kinks are to be worked out after the fact, after the code has been applied to an actual system.

Rothman and Sudarshan write that "Presumably a stock price is not the same as a particle, but the mathematical world does not distinguish them." Apples or oranges? You see, it doesn't much matter in mathematics. Which goes to show how abstract and contextually unspecific mathematics can be.

It is up to the one working the equation to know what the "context" is, whether one is dealing in particles or pregnancy rates. We can glimpse a fragment of how this works by following a simple sum of numbers. For mathematics, as a language, it matters little what we are summing up --- tugboats, trees, tall blondes, two-toed tree sloths. It doesn't really matter, nor have any effect whatsoever on the numbers and sums when we count different things in different contexts. Math, apparently, does not discriminate. Still, we also know and have stated previously that context is important in the concrete world. WE DON"T LIVE IN THE ABSTRACT WORLD OF MATHEMATICS. We live, move, and have our being here in the concrete world, a place-space where context matters quite a lot... quite a very lot-lot in fact!!

It is my suggestion here, that mathematics is a tool, just one of many. Mathematics is a languaged tool, more specifically --- one that is a bit more abstract in many senses than other tool. Being that mathematics is a tool --- and, in essence, no different than other tools that allow us to "act on" and "express" a creative/destructive impulse --- it stands to reason that mathematics does not so much underlie Reality, as some are convinced, but instead is just an abstract language that humanity has developed so as to be able to "act" on the world.

The tool-maker invents tools out of necessity, from need.

It certainly can appear that a crude and primitive hammer is locked away in stone, but this is only because we need to be able to bang on something with other than our hands or head. We need a pounding extension of the self, conditions asked for it. So we attached a rock to a stick. Presto! The first hammer. Now the question is "Why should we expect anything different in relation to language and math, langauge and physics?" Are they not just other tools in our toolbag, also born of necessity?

It can certainly appear to some that mathematics underlies Reality and forms the intelligent foundations of the Universe; just as someone could say, after the fact, that the rock was an actual hammer waiting to be discovered by a Being-human. However, this is merely due to the fact that, according to Rothman and Sudarshan, "Once we have a theory, we find the mathematics to fit it. It does not seem to work the other way around." In other words, we go through much trial and error applying and trying out various mathematics to work out the theory mathematically. And those mathematics that prove the theory, the reinforce the theory, are what we later describe as a representation of the "Truth". Mathematics is whittled down to an essential equation that describes a concrete "action" in mathematical terms. Mathematics does not invent the action, underlie the force, or initiate the process, so much as express it in terms of a mathematical language.

We cannot know for sure if "our" mathematics is a universal language until we are ourselves universal, no longer in civilizational isolation here on Earth. In dialogue with beings that are not "of the Earth", we might come to find that it takes another mathematical language altogether to travel in interstellar space --- to voyage through the Galaxy.

We know that mathematics did not end at any point in our past. With Newton or Euclid, Pythagoras or Godel. Revisions have been as big a part of the plot to the story of discovery in physics, mathematics, and geometry as much as the so-called "objective truth" has. Why should one be so arrogant as to assume that they "have it", when by all indications those who thought they "had it" in the past where shown to "have just part of it" --- and quite often a small part at that? Arrogance is quite unbecoming on humans. No matter what field the Being-human is involved in --- be it physics or metaphysics, science or religion, art or war.

So here is a dose of humility.

It is quite bold and brazen to know that just a short time ago we were tree-swinging apes who now like to tell themselves that they are storming the Palace so as to acquire the Keys to the Kosmos. Then again, stranger things have happened. You couldn't write a story this good.

 

18

Where Power remains the only game and goal, consequences are seen as inconsequential and meaningless unless they effect the desired Power. Consequences become just another opportunity to remonstrate our Power, our Capacity, our Capability, i.e., to prove that Power once again. It becomes simple: we have the ability... and that is all that matters. Running from the jungle and savannah of our past and trying to slay that animal in us with the force of Power applied abstractly, out of context, indiscriminate and unprovoked attacks on Being, on Life via the new extensions and appendages to self-hood that have been invented. The killer's thoughts now reach out farther than ever before. For the killer's tools extend the scope of the murderable. We don't even need to show up. Death from a distance.

Plug in your data,
Watch the machine work ---
It's miraculous!

All of the bugs?
Worked out.

The unnecessary?
Negated.

The vital?
Retained.

Plug in your data,
Watch the machine work ---
It's miraculous I tell you!

It's miraculous!

 

19

Humanity, for the most part, wants to understand the phenomenal forces and flows, fluxes and fields that we are embedded in; those which affect and color our experience. The question remains: "Is this desire for understanding motivated by love, or out of fear?"

Regardless of the above answer, it has been determined again and again that we "do" want to know. Forget unknowing, ignorance, and the like. We seek to comprehend, so as to better manage the forces, fields, flows and fluxes. The world is our factory now and we have to understand the forces "at work" so that we can get the most production and the greatest efficiency from the system. Produce! Capitalize! Profit through E-Progress.

The ages long movement towards intellectual understanding has been a movement centered about the desire to be able to more effectively control and manipulate our world. There is no noble sentiment in the knowledge pursuit. We want control! It is that simple.

We want to be able to better manage, and bureaucratically oversee those forces that touch and color our lifeworld. Again: Out of love or out of fear? It doesn't matter. We want to know. We want to know how to love and how to ease our fears. We want to know how to pleasure our lover and how to secure ourselves against threat of attack. We want to know. We want to know how to make more money this year. We want to know. We just want to know.

Very seldom, I suspect, do we realize in our day to day movements that this culture of ours, the culture of dominion, is not the only culture that exists on Earth at present --- or has in the past. Certainly the culture of dominion is the most pervasive culture at present --- the one with the most power and influence. Still, the culture of dominion has no claim on Truth --- Power? Most likely. Truth? Not necessarily. The two, as we have seen, are not necessarily bound up within one another as we might tend to expect.

There is a light dawning...
A sense of renewed humility
Rises amidst the fog.
Awakening the before
That has become
The after
Of Love.

 

20

The necessity of introducing new observables into the theoretical sciences was, and still is today, one of the driving forces that move us beyond the mechanical worldview.
 

----Ilya Prigogine, Isabelle Stengers

Where one person, whose discoveries are formed out of awe and wonder at the mystery of 'what', 'where', 'when', 'why' and 'how' --- in essence, the formation of a "new observable" --- another comes to co-opt these awe-some insights.

Ken Wilber writes that "in transformation (or self-transcendence), whole new worlds of translation disclose themselves. These "new worlds" are not physically located someplace else; they exist simply as a deeper perception of the available stimuli of this world... development is a constant conversion of "otherworldly" into "this worldly" via a deepening of perception brought about by emergent evolution and transformation."

Only "new observables" will serve to "move us beyond the mechanical world view". This means new perceptions; "deeper perceptions" of "this world", not of some "other" world. This is in the same vein as those words that have been attributed to Christ, "The Kingdom of Heaven is amongst Us". Nirvana is not other than here, meaning, someplace else. Nirvana and samsara (Heaven and hell) arise in one place, here. Deeper perceptions reveal.

The mechanical worldview has power and force in this world only because our perceptions are limited. And furthermore, our perceptions are shallow and limited because our language is the same --- shallow and limited. The main meta-form, that we use in the mechanical world-view in order to define the Nature of Existence is mathematical. We have seen how mathematics has been used to encode the mechanical worldview. This encoding has effected all of us who have been exposed to the mechanical worldview and its main force, which is mathematics. We have also glimpsed the fact that not all cultures, all persons, all worldviews deem mathematics as worthy of being the encoder of Reality. But we have also seen where Rothman and Sudarshan have stated that "For physical scientists, the chief weapon in the war on Reality is mathematics." Which is interesting, since I didn't know that Reality required a battle or a war in relation to itself.

It would appear that science has become the Roman Catholic Church of our Middle Ages. Science wields the weapon of mathematics and defines Reality for us just as the priests and arch bishops of the Roman Catholic cleric wielded the weapons of dogma and creed. Science the New Inquisition? Nanobots and gene pool revolutionaries mounting an attack on the Real.

Has the object of the game become "the War for the definition of Reality"? Is that what this is about: Who controls how we define the world controls the world? Who has the dominant worldview has the world? I do know that that is the question at the level of institutions. Shaping the worldview of the institutionalized members.

This "war for Reality", or the "war for the definition of Reality" gets played out again and again. Revolution in defining. The rebellions against the old and archaic definitions. The preservation of the status quo. The War for Reality. An agonsitic conflict of the ages. The tension of definition deficits that gives rise to new radicals.

The battle for the definition of "What is Real" has been fought by Church and Science, Tribe and Nation, Ideology and Affiliation for millennia. This battle is now being fought more and more by Science and her technocratic arms of ideological appendages as She mounts up battle victory after battle victory. Just in case you haven't noticed, Science is winning the war on Reality, with their chief weapon --- mathematics.

There are many "ways" to perceive the world. There are many world filters we can look through. We bargain for perception. "What do you want to see?" "How do you want to see?" These questions move us into fields of perception. Some fields become shallow, like tidal pools at ocean's edge which ebb and flow. Some fields become vast and deep, like interstellar space lit up in points by the distant light of a raging inferno, a white-hot star, or a nebulous gaseous galaxy in-formation. "How do you want to see?" "What do you want to see?" "Where that focus?"

The answer always reveals where we are at, and what we deem important. There is an early 1990's movie called Jerry Maguire that includes the now famous lines, "Show me the money!" In the nineties that is what our culture wanted to see, and we are currently in the midst of the largest economic expansion in our history. We wanted to perceive more money. "Show it to me. I want to see the money!" Well, we are. We are seeing the money, like never before we are seeing dollar signs roll and stock prices tick ever higher and higher. The age of bigger, better, faster, flashier is here. A whole class of nouvea riche, the newly rich, have "seen" the Promised Land... and it is full of money. They have been shown. They have seen the money.

Yet, this won't last forever. Not all cultural participants will want to see the money indefinitely. The perception of money will be fleeting, and the sight of jumping-figures in bank accounts will be realized as being able to purchase only so much stuff. Yes, money can buy 'things' to have and 'places' to see, but many cannot buy "deeper perceptions" of "this world" that illumine "new observables" that "move us beyond the mechanical world view". Money cannot buy what is most vital and necessary: Transformation via deeper perception, the emergence of "observables", of new ways to perceive the world.

 

21

Some of humanities most profound insights have been caught wearing the masks of fear and control, manipulation and exclusion. Humanity has long explored and discerned the "way" that we "see", of "how" we interpret what we "see" as being Real. It is an art form --- perception. A cyber-friend, AnsonL, calls it the "art of awareness". It is a very Zen notion, though not limited to Zen. This "art of awareness" is implicit in the Socratic dictum to "Know thyself". Being aware is being able to perceive. The art of perception is the art of awareness.

The truth of the matter is that we cannot be sure if "what" we are "seeing" is authentic if we have not plumbed our own depths, and discerned the nature of "how" have been trained to see what we see. In other words, we can only have clarity when we know "how" our languaging influences our conceptions, which bleed into our perceptions, which frame a "reality" that we take as a simple and unequivocal given. Wilber tells us that there is no simple pre-given Nature, no static Reality that we just see. We "do not simply reflect a pregiven world. Rather, according to [our] capacity, [we] select, organize, give form to, the multitude of stimuli cascading around [us}." We "translate... reality according to the patterns of [our] agency, [the] relatively autonomous and coherent deep structures; and stimuli that don't fit the deep structure or regime are simply not registered and might as well not exist" for us.

If we don't "see" it, is either not "there", or it is "there" and we don't "see" it because it doesn't jive with our deep structures --- so there is nothing for it to connect with internally. In other words, there, must be an internal correlate within us that the external stimuli can link up with. There has to be a precedent, or else there is no registering of that stimuli as even existing. Even though a certain stimuli may be 'actual', if we are not entrained to notice it then it is not perceived. Our world does not include that stimuli, that form, that force, field, flow, flux, functioning. There is a reciprocal relationship; the nature of perception and awareness is a flow, a reciprocity between self and other, subject and world.

For instance, whenever we are distracted by something else --- internally or externally --- we oftentimes do not "notice" what is actually right in front of us. In this way many of our apparent accidents take place because of distraction; "stimuli" that are actually there do not "register" internally because we are taken up with something else --- we are distracted. So....

.....Whammo! You guessed it.

"Where'd the heck that come from?", we say after the fact.

"You mean you didn't see it coming?"

"No. I must have been distracted by something else."

It wasn't that the stimuli wasn't there --- that it wasn't actually in this world --- no, it is that our internal channels of reception-perception were congested, backed up with traffic, with other concerns. So we missed out on noticing the 'already there-ness' of the stimuli; it just didn't "register", we didn't "get" it.

Which leads us to Zen and the "art of awareness".

To judge Zen by the ordinary standard of reasoning is altogether out of place, for that standard is simply inapplicable. We must acknowledge that our Western worldview is limited and that there is a much wider world beyond our mentality.

----D. T. Suzuki

We can take Zen as being a means to cultivate awareness, an Oriental art, an Eastern method to the Socratic dictum: "Know thyself". Zen is a movement, or a resting, in becoming increasingly intimate with "how" we perceive, and "how" those "deep structures" of our inner "regime, code, or canon" influence "what" we think we see. Zen is not just going with the flow. Living in the moment. Being one with it all. It does no good to go with the flow if we are still "perceiving" the flow nonconsciously, or with those patterns of crude limitation and cultural cast-offs. Zen is being what is, which means being-in-relationship with what is, which means perceiving what is. The sense-ability of Zen. Or, the zen-ability of Sense.

There is much insight that has been taken from Zen and co-opted for the mass-market. The market is not shy about using whatever means necessary to peddle a product. There is nothing untouchable in the world of marketing. The effect of this mass-market influence in relation to Zen is two-fold. First, more people are exposed to Zen. Second, Zen is exposed shallowly --- a mere surface reflection of its intrinsic depths. Only the surface of Zen is related, (and there is applied that, ever-inconspicuous, Madison Avenue high gloss finish as well). Certainly it is fine for Zen to reach a wider audience. At the same time, much of the depth and consequence of Zen is left out. When only the surface is glimpsed and co-opted, the depths of the intent and consequences of Zen are left behind. Zen does not arise transcendent of training anymore than a master craftsperson falls out of the womb. Perception is cultivated like a Japanese rock garden, or served like tea. Perception is an artful application of awareness. Artists may be gifted, but they must also work their art, apply their gift, or all of that talent goes for naught. Perception via awareness is no different. We each have the gift. The question becomes how it is shaped. Do we let culture mould our gift? Do we let the past and our family, own our awareness? Do we stop with Nature, or do we cultivate and train the gift, refine and reframe the art of aware-Being-human?

It is impossible to sum up Zen in a few words. There is no definition of Zen that will suffice at all times in all instances; for Zen, at the core, is a living-ness, a being alive that is zensible; that is fluid and dynamic; that adjusts to the context and is not static in the sense of a Western philosophy or religious affiliation. Zen is about moving with the currents of life; of being fully present to those currents, rather than being distracted by inner traffic jams and the mind congestion that is so pervasive.

Zen: Know thyself.

Imagine, if you will, that there is One Mind for all. Just One Mind. Now this Mind is filled up full to overflowing with competing voices and thoughts, concerns and dilemmas, notions, ideas, natures and opinions. Imagine this Mind as being like the airwaves surrounding the Earth. We have satellite communication and TV station towers and cellular telephone communication towers; radio station transmissions and the hum of passing cars and the churning of the engines of industry; the airwaves are full. The One Mind is congested. The One Mind has a head cold.

Zen is elixir for the One Mind. How so? Zen transforms the self, so that the self becomes transparent; where being transparent means that all of that congestion is no longer a problem, is no longer a distraction from the "immediacy of the life-moment" that one is engaged in now. The 'stuff' of the One Mind is seen as 'stuff', as patterned notions that are swirling, swimming, cycling in flux and flow all about the Being-human. The 'stuff' just is as is a leaf along the path; we don't need to bend over and pick up every leaf along the way. All the more, we don't need to attach our zense of self to every passing notion of mind 'stuff' that blows through and whirls 'round and 'round. Nature takes care of the leaves by recycling them back into soil and humus for all of the other beings. Nature takes care of mind 'stuff' similarly. There is no need to hold on short of "desire for" or "fear of".

Zen serves to entrain us to Reality; Reality as it is; Reality sans the greatest of weights --- that of the conditioned baggage we accrue and carry as I, me, and mine. (Again, let me stipulate that Zen is not the only "way".) Zen-style is becoming increasingly more fluid to circumstance, not mechanical, but fluid and responsive. Circumstance and context become the Zen keys to an ever more responsive and responsible orientation to Life, as it is.

The appropriate responsiveness does not always arise out of dictate and static code, canon, or law, but out of the requirements of the situation. And we can only know the requirements of the situation if we are not involved and invested in the distractions of the collective mind that is so often utterly congested and backed up with flows like the 411 at rush hour.

Zen-style is becoming local. We can only act here. Action arises not on a global level but on a local level. Zen-style is thoroughly local in that what is being asked for by the context one is in is what Zen-style gives, right here, right now --- for this situation alone, as needed. Zen-style knows all about changing diapers and doing dishes and folding clothes and vacuuming because Zen is not divorced from the local by imagining some sort of far-off and far-out global grandiosity. Zen-style says "It is good not to be too big. You might outgrow your circumstances. And circumstances are where Zen flowers most brilliantly. Small is beautiful. Very Zen."

 

22

I wonder sometimes how much some of us hate might Life? To the point where we do not trust Life at all --- that Process which has birthed us and which will offer us up as sacrifice at some point in time? Sure Life can be a challenge. Life is a frightful display for some us, and for others an even more frightful reality. Yet the exacerbation of suffering is a profoundly human attribute; meaning, that we are able to turn the suffering volume up on an already potentially painful condition. Ideologies compete for the cure to the human condition. Some state that we must cleanse the culture of the detritus of human waste; others that we must just see Life as it is and we will ease the not so noble art of suffering as the only way of life.

One of the untold secrets of the modern era has been that the great of atrocities in modern times --- from the purges of Stalinist Russia, the Maoist cultural revolution in China, to the genocidal cleansing of Jews from Eastern Europe and Germany during the rise and fall of Hitler --- is the intense nobility that accompanied the revolutionary forces. In short, they were all doing "good work", building through the blood of sacrifice a more "just" society. These were not mad men so much as idealists whose tactics were certainly somewhat extreme. Even the Indian purges of the Americas were often rationalized and perceived by the ones carrying out those purges as a godly act, a noble pursuit. After all, God gave up His Son for a sacrifice, so why not give up the indigenous for a sacrifice --- to procure the New Destiny, secure the New Nation? Genocide is good-intentioned. Imperialism and neo-colonial attitudes to the Other are for that Others own good. Just ask the ones who measure out the New Destiny; they know who must be offered up as a sacrifice so as to secure the cultural and societal revolution.

We seem to come back to a preferred view beneath all ideologies: The view that Life is so blasted insufficient as it is currently ordered? Therefore manipulation is our only way out of the hole of an insufficient peoples, an insufficient cultural milieu, a blasted oppression.

Zen-style questions those motives; and the view that undergirds such a motivational assumption. If we are saying that Life is not to be trusted, that Life is no good now, then how can we trust ourselves and our judgement of Life and Other? For we are a result of the Life that we are judging in a negative fashion. If Life cannot be trusted then there is nothing trustworthy --- for All we know is of Life. What else is there? There is nothing that we know, or can point to, or allude to, that is not of Life. Even our ideas and our ideologies are of the Living. The most wicked imagination and the most sublime terror are of the Living. If Life is not to be trusted then there is nothing trustworthy in the subject that is judging Life either. For that subject is of Life too.

Zen-style opens up the door to our assumptions and asks us to take an honest look. If Life is innately flawed, then how could a "good", "true", or "beautiful" ever come from that which is at its fundamental level innately flawed? Zen-style asks us to examine such assumptions; to know that what we believe about Life infests all of our perceptions --- and perception is the very act of relating and relationship itself: We must perceive the Other in order to relate to the Other.

Our fundamental assumptions are what influence all that follows from them, all that rests on those assumptions. If our assumptions go unexamined we can change everything else but those assumptions and it will not matter one bit. The fundamental level of awareness is where it all begins; meaning our assumptions in relation to Life Itself.

Streams originate as springs that bubble up from subterranean depths. So too our expressions that bubble up from subterranean assumptions.