If we take as our jumping off point, Walter Truett Anderson's truism, that, "culture and consciousness always reflect one another", we come to find that a fragmenting diversity within homogenous cultural times signifies the consciousness that is being fostered amongst the cultural participants. In other words, diverse cultural fragments and shards are rendered via the supercolliding efforts of Western E-Progress. Through the jungles and savannahs, the plains and the hill country, culture is let loose from its moorings and set free to fly. Fragments. Culture in exile. Culture as economic refugee. Culture with no home. For the Spiritual Ground has been paved, the sacred yew sacrificed for a Happy Meal possibility.

Even though it may at times appear to be a paranoiac attack on the engines of progress, stating that "the belittling of consciousness and the devaluing of diversity in the name of the One Market is a fact of our times" is still true no less. Nothing, and I mean nothing is left out of the Market. The Market kills to make a buck. Which means that all colonized subjects are then framed in terms of the Market and the Market directive. This equates with a loss of consciousness through a loss of diversity. Loss of culture = loss of consciousness for the world as a whole. We know this from deep ecology practices; that a loss of diversity is a threat to the whole system, the whole habitat, the whole eco-system. Why should this not follow for cultural diversity and the noticing of the homogenous assault on cultural diversity through greed that we see now as franchised elements seek to make their mark-et on the world stage form Appalachia to Katmandu.

Being that everything is rendered a commodity in relation to the Market it follows that nothing is left out. The Market is that inclusive. It really doesn't matter what it is either; even taboos in relation to the Market no longer exist in the same way that they did in respect to their cultural ground. Certainly distinct groups of cultural-believers may deign to still derive an identity from those taboos that are the "devil's work". Yet, in relation to the Market as a totality, the notion of such "taboos" is no longer of any such merit or concern whatsoever; no, now taboos are commodities that sell just like kitsch at the Mall of America. Taboos have their remaining only voice in religion and politics, which are far less inclusive structures than is the Market. The Market takes up all, codes it in terms of "commodity enslavement" and "object-bondage", and then unleashes these newly coded commodities globally.

There is a market for everything; meaning, everything is consumable. Someone somewhere is in the Market seeking out and hunting down what you despise, just as there is someone marketing that despised element. Taboos are profitable too.

The taboos of one group are the commodities sought out by another; meaning, all has been taken up by and included in the Market --- taboos are not excluded, are not silent whispers in the alley, but are stamped with a Market-value just like any other commodity sacred or profane, mundane or sublime.

The Market has indeed subsumed the sacred and the profane alike under one amorphous heading. Profit. Capitalize. Surplus return on investment. A sucker born every minute. And it doesn't really matter how we feel about it. For now, it seems, that both the sacred and the profane share in common the commodified life of decentered postmodern globalism.

The fact that we live in an epoch that is dominated by the impersonal hand of the Market, signifies that all that we know --- in fact, all that we are --- is to be defined in terms of being a commodity. In terms of the Market, bodies are valued as commodities. The red light districts; the hog farms in Iowa; the slave labor in Chinese prison camps; the rail-thin supermodels on the catwalks of London and Paris: All wholes, all parts, all whole-parts are Market valued, Market derived, Market driven. Bodies, intensities, flows, fluids, plasmas, donors, gifts, thefts, heists, homes, whores, husbands, wifes, educations, addictions, and treatments: All whole-parts, or what Ken Wilber, among others, calls "holons", are commodities and will be value-determined according to the impersonal signification of the Market. Everything, if not already stamped and labeled according to the Market can be... Yes, there is a price on your head. You have a value according to the Market; what your profitability is to one of the specific cogs of the Market.

It is even seen that you or I could be a liability. A commodity that costs more than it returns. Labor that is not as productive as it used to be. An old racehorse put out to pasture, sent to the glue factory. A loyal employee is an expense too, not just an asset. For instance, if we do not fit into the Market schematic, then we are liability, and are valued, or devalued as being a Market deterrent, rather than a force for the Market.

The Market mentality is so pervasive that it begins to infect our religious institutions and our political alliances. As I have said again and again in these texts --- the Market is the one single dominant and totalizing ideological and material force in our age, without question.

The great and bright possibility of following up on the above truism --- that "Culture and consciousness always reflect one another..." --- is that we notice how it, when applied now, points to a consciousness that is congealing around a new populist cultural ideology. This is new ideology is not socialism or democracy, or even a religious or other political ideology --- no, it is the ideology of the progressive Market, birthed with that Market. This new Market ideology is so expansive that it includes all other (present and former) ideologies within its domain. It renders the less-inclusive ideologies as partial, while making of itself that new and greater whole, or totality that embraces the included member ideologies. The fact that this new ideology comes after centuries of bloodshed and warfare due to differing political and religious ideologies in combative positions with one another is no coincidence. The sense is that the masses, that the consciousness of the people became so fed up with the bloodshed of the competing ideologies. So, there was this creation of a new totalizing, more ambiguous ideology of the Market. For the Market doesn't really state its ideological position in dogma per se, but in action, in sytsemic overhauls of previous regimes. The Market is an active ideology, powered by the greed-drives, and the hungry desires of the billion billions teeming in hustle and bustle so as to procure "theirs" from what is out there to be won.

The Market is such that it quietly profits off of all the other religious and political ideologies that persons and groups like to bicker over; with this profiteering also serving to strengthen its own position. I would not be stepping too far out on a limb by my saying that the Market ideology is the most powerful ideological force that the world has ever seen. And it gains this status precisely because it is not necessarily noted as being an ideology per se --- at least not in the traditional sense. The Market is ideologically ambiguous. Hence, it ascends to the Ideological Throne --- Globally.

Precisely because we are all involved in the Market --- that we cannot extricate ourselves from the Market except by degrees, and never totally --- this is why I say that the Market is and will continue for quite some time to be the most pervasive ideological force that the world will know.

The Market and the Myth of E(ternal progress: The sole global ideology.

 

41

The political form of postmodernism, if there ever is any, will have as its vocation the invention and projection of a global cognitive mapping, on a social as well as a spatial scale.

----Frederic Jameson

We have to be able to able to name the system, to map it --- to realize its territory and the influential embrace that it has come to have. In other words --- and in terms of what we have been discussing as our main task --- we are called to the task of languaging the influential forces of our time. Namely, the Market and its drives, the Market and its myths, the Market and its instrumental logic. Otherwise, we merely remain the colonized subjects of Market Imperialsim; the conquered maidens of our time.

As was stated above, the fact that the Market systematically includes in totalistic fashion, all and everything, connotes a consciousness that is congealing around a force or a center; one which has been categorized as the new Market ideology. This means that there has evolved, or merely come about, a consciousness that adjures value to the lifeworld in accordance with the ideology of the Market and the Market alone. The relevance of this totalizing force catches us all up within it (which is why it is a totalizing force!). So, does this signify a new totalitarianism of the lifeworld by and for the Market? Or does this signify a new Unity and Sister/Brotherhood by and for the Market? These are no doubt questions that bear out answers in time. Our efforts here are merely to cognitively map the global conclusiveness of the Market, all so as to better allow us to formulate "conscious" relations with the Market and its ideological offspring. For there can certainly be no authentic relationship with that which for us remains unmapped and non-conscious. We cannot orient ourselves in the postmodern space of Market innclusiveness, on a global scale, unless and until we possess the ability to cognitively map that space. In other words, by constructing a better cognitive representation "of the system" --- naming it, languauging it --- we confront and contradict one of the main suppositions of postmodern theory itself, that we, as Jameson states, "seem increasingly incapable of fashioning representations of our own current experience".

That we are demonstrating an inability to locate our selves in relation to the space of postmodern hyper-realism is not at all a great secret of our times. It is that surreal a space! And when Jameson writes that "this latest mutation in space --- postmodern hyperspace --- has finally succeeded in transcending the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself and organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively map its position in a mappable external world", we quite readily understand exactly what he is saying. That we are dealing with the "incapacity of our minds, at least at present, to map the great global multinational and decentered communicational network in which we find ourselves caught as individual subjects", can certainly leave us longing in nostalgia for what is imagined to have been a more certain and steady period of time from out of our past. The retreat to fundamentalism and the clinging to persistent ideological points of view becomes the last stronghold, the last stand. We cling to our own personal and collective Rock of Gibraltar. Jameson clarifies the issue further when he writes that, "We do not yet possess the perceptual equipment to match this new hyperspace... in part because our perceptual habits were formed in that older kind of space..." No wonder that there are parts of us clinging to the last steady edifice we have; namely, our memories of the way it used to be. "What the hell happened?" is not an unfamiliar response.

There is something appearing in unison with the postmodern crush of displaced meta-narratives. Buddhism has broken out onto the Western landscape like a herd of galloping stallions. A postmodern antidote?

 

42

The Buddhist notion of Impermanence appears to be quite appropriate in our time --- and it may even be, in part, why we in the West are seeing such a veritable flood of Buddhist philosophy and teaching; from the exiled Holiness of the Dalai Lama to the Soto and Rinzai schools of Japanese Zen. My personal suspicion is that the technologically inclined Western mind is all to aware of the validity of Impermanence and Emptiness, and that the reaching out to the East is in many ways a means to leverage the techno-economic juggernaut that is altering the "space" we live in faster than the Buddha can blink a meditative eye.

Perhaps the Western engine of progress has been a necessary component, and that not until the Western world hit the surrealistic bardo-like hyperspace of a hyperreal world would there be the direct necessity of an Eastern leveraging of the predominant Western disposition. It certainly would appear that something of that order has not only transpired, but is also serving to actually increase the now necessitous call for a deeper cultivation of a Buddhist-inpsired philosophic worldview; where Impermanence, Emptiness, Interdependence, and Compassion for all sentient beings, are increasingly noted as Eastern antidotes to the predominant Western positions that have had and are having such a vast influence on the whole.

With few exceptions (mostly for cultural purposes) Buddhist understanding is formulated on some basic, fundamental truths, which become foundations for elaboration and clarification. These basic truths are quite appropriate in the current postmodern climate, and the fact that Buddhism has been spreading in the West like wildfire is a sure indication of that. In other words, the Buddha's arrival in the West is no coincidence.

Foremost amongst the truths, as I am framing them here in relation to the postmodern temperament, is the notion of Impermanence. We could call Impermanence the Buddhist representation of change. Our relation with the reality of Impermanence is an intimate one, perhaps our most intimate material relationship of all. Change... Change... Change...

The imagined stasis and certainty that the Western view has been longing for is herein leveraged by the Buddhist teaching of Impermanence. Sogyal Rinpoche writes in The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying that "The realization of impermanence is paradoxically the only thing we can hold onto, perhaps our only lasting possession. It is like the sky, or the earth. No matter how much everything around us may change or collapse, they endure." So too this permanent feature of Being-in-Existence named Impermanence. The one constant: That all we hold dear, adore, love, realize is subject to the same death and decay that has claimed the Ancient Greek city-states and the Roman centurions, the Egyptian pharaohs and the Mayan priests. No matter how hard we cling to this, that or the other thing we can be sure that it all --- that all objects shall be wrested from our hands eventually. (This is to say nothing of the Essence, the Spirit of 'things', for that may end up being another story altogether). But this we do know: Change is certain. "The realization of impermanence is paradoxically the only thing that we can hold onto, perhaps our only lasting possession."

The Western predilection is to often associate the realization of Impermanence with a nihilistic portrayal of life. "If all is just 'ashes to ashes and dust to dust', then what's the point?" The point is that we don't know what the point may or may not be. But we do know that no-thing here remains indefinitely, and the fact that we do know this, that impermanence is permanent in relation to the 'things of this world', is a fundamental realization, a basic truth, a realization that we can have faith in. A touch of certainty amidst change. "This too shall pass", being the Western equivalent.

The realization of Impermanence is general and specific all at once. Impermanence applies to institutions and individuals alike, to ants, snails, slugs and softballs all the same. The fact that it does apply to all beings and non-beings remains with us, and in-forms our existence whether we are psychologically and/or conceptually fond of the notion or not. It doesn't matter! Impermanence is that constant, that sure; belief is not a requirement. We don't have to believe that the temperature, that the environment today is not exactly like it was yesterday to "know" that it isn't. The law of averages are not real. The mean is a conceptual construct of the Being-human attributes of rationality and instrumental logic, not an aspect of the Actual. The average is not the Actual. Impermanence is not an average, a summing up. Impermanence is flow, movement, cycles and change. Not-permanent.

The majority of Western cultures have been, to one degree or another, "certainty-fixated". This archaic and still viable certainty-fixation --- that Western institutions of mind and culture have fostered --- bumps up against our present Impermanence. So, what gives? Nothing gives. Nothing needs to give.

Let me try and explain in more detail.

When the drive-for-certainty confronts Impermanence the two taken and held together have often been resolved into a new metaphysics, a new ideology or philosophy. Just invent the notion of a realm where transcendent certainty resides, and that reconciles the immanent ground of our material impermanence with our psychological need for an absolute, unequivocal permanence. That has been the answer in many cases. The transcendent Other becomes the domain of our psychological need for permanence with the fact that our existence is all too impermanent. We cannot very well erect permanence here in relation to our material constructs, though try as we might. But we can conceptualize permanence in relation to immaterial constructs, which of course becomes the transcendent Other, the Distant and Absolute God, the Pure Realm of Stasis and Stability. This transcendent positing has become such a refined psychological tool, leveraging and offsetting the swampy flows of material impermanence and change we are physicated in as subjects.

Permanence has been unlocatable here in the fields of change. The Western mind has not found but hints and clues here and there. The subatomic underpinnings of materiality that were revealed in the 20^th Century cascaded the hopes for an atomic certainty over the waterfalls of Impermanence and Change. Yet and still the Western mind longs for certainty within its setting-sun worldview.

Here comes the night.

The unlocatable stasis. The yearning for certitude. The longing for that doubtless knowing. The Western modus operandi fixated: to find beneath the layers and levels of change that which is Changeless, which abides all the turmoil, which centers all the flux, and borders all flows; which resolves all the chaos and certifies the malleable subject, reconciling hidden superstitions that infect even the most noble of minds.

Somewhere, maybe not here nor there, but somewhere, somewhere there is an undeniable Law that all can be certain of. It may not be found in appearance, but perhaps beneath appearances? Somewhere, maybe not here nor there, but somewhere, somewhere there is The Static Truth. And we shall find it! We shall overcome all obstacles to Certainty!

Would we know it if we saw it? Do you think that we would recognize this "Law", this "Static Truth" if we saw it? Maybe we are so desirous, so wanting to see exactly what we want to see --- the way that we want this "Law" to look like --- that we have been missing it all along? In other words, we are demanding that this "Law", this "Static Truth", appear to us objectively, and be open and subject to our coding, our classifying, our categorizing. It may be that these demands are exactly what is preventing us from noting/recognizing what is already the case; that which is the stable support, the foundation, the fundamental ground for all of our journeyings.

Once again we wander around looking for the donkey that we are already riding on.

"Where is Certainty and Truth in this time?", the cry goes out.

"It is a stubborn ass", comes the reply.

We don't particularly like that answer. It is not even an answer thank you very much. We'll continue our search, just as stubbornly as the ass we are always already riding on --- that stubborn donkey of Zen that is our Fundamental Ground.

The fact that we continue to search for these "static truths", and yet there are these fundamental components of the experience of Being-in Existence that we fail to acknowledge and recognize as such --- that we feel we can change, alter, and/or modify --- this just goes to show how utterly fallacious we can when it comes to recognizing what is "just so". In other words, we don't particularly like the appearance and the presentation of Truth, so it must not be the Truth that we are looking for, right? So, let's keep looking, let's keep digging, let's keep prying open and slamming shut the Truth Door again and again, all the while imagining that the next time we get a chance to open that Truth Door the "image of truth" --- the mask that truth wears --- will jive with our desires about how we want the truth to look.

If the Truth isn't pretty enough, doesn't "look right to us", do we just drop it? In that case, we don't really want the Truth per se, but something else entirely. We are looking for that which confirms our worldview. "Ah yes, I knew it all along."

Can we really lay Truth out on the surgeon's table and give Truth a facelift though? Is that what we really try and do? I say the answer is yes, yes we do in some cases. And we are not the first to do so; to try and remake, remodel, reduce, rename, reform, recalibrate, re-present, re-member the Truth in a way that matches our desires; in a way that diminishes our fears; in a way that coincides with our selfish cravings and mental masturbatory rites of passage.

The little images of truth that we dream up and conceptualize appear to come about; they bleed into the world for us as an icon or insignia that states our petty truth is just so. For it is right there, we can see it. "And I can show you. You will see. It is right there." However, only the dreamer can see his or her dream. The image of truth is just so for the one who sees that dream image and not for those who fail to see it or fail to also dream that exact image as a representation of the truth par excellence. In other words, the image of truth that arises for the one seeing that image as the representation of The Truth can be the only one who sees that image as such. No one but Moses "saw" nor "heard" what only Moses could "see" and "hear". Much the same for the dreamer in hyperspatial relationship with the simulated Real; where Truth gets a facelift and a boob-job, penile implants and lipo-suction. Now that's the Truth!

 

43

Our desire for a representation of Truth, a code of Law, a set of Absolutes, is, in many respects, the very stance that can prevent us from realizing the Truth. How so? Precisely because the Truth is Reality, not a representation of Reality, not a simulation of Reality, and not a code of/and/or about Reality. The Truth is Real; the Real is the Truth. There is not one single representation that can simulate Reality, for Reality needs no representation, nor representative, and cannot be re-presented. Re-presenting Reality is not Reality. Reality is presented as Reality, not as a representation of Reality. And yet the mode of our search is that once we think we have found something that is True that this means we can represent Reality, as Truth, as the Real.

The very assumptions that we build many of our hypotheses upon are those that state "we can discover the Truth and that this discovered Truth can be colonized by us and turned into a re-presentation of that Truth, that Reality". Those kinds of assumptions, if we start out with them, limit us from ever being able to realize the Truth, precisely because our assumption dictates that the representation is what we are after in relation to the Truth, more so even than the realization. In other words, we want to discover or have revealed to us the Truth about Reality in one shining moment... And then this shining moment of Truth can formulated by us; can be represented by dead figures, lifeless symbols, archaic speech. And right there, at that moment of turning to the representation the Real is forgone.

Reality, which is True, continues to live ItSelf. Reality, which is Truth, cannot be represented, but presents ItSelf as the Reality which is True. The Truth, which is Reality, is not a representation, but a presentation of Truth as the Real. Truth, as Reality, is an ongoing presentation of Truth as the Real. The representation of Truth, which is not Truth, is a dead-form; the representation is archaic instantaneously, immediately. Truth, which is Reality, continues to Be, while the representation of Truth is just that, "a representation", and not the Truth, not Reality.

Static desire determines, to us at least, that we must discover the Truth as re-presentable. Our desire can be for a representable Truth, a Truth that can be represented in symbol or image. So, those are the kinds of partial considerations that we gather, and then codify into various languages of representation, which are called verifications of the "objective truth" (as if that is supposed to convince).

When we come across or discover, or are moved by phenomena that do not match the code, that are not included in our representation then we re-extend the limits of our representations. For instance, our models of the Truth, taken in and as themselves, as being the Truth, are forced to expand by the Real so as to begin to include more and more of that which in the moment of the first representation was not noticed, or observable. As we come to notice more and more, our representations grow heavier and heavier, they become more and more burdensome to carry. It is as if we are trying and attempting to fit all of Reality into a representation of Reality; a model. The system of representation expands and grows to fit more "new observables" in; the codes swell and the axioms and partial truths become part of the greatest book of all time-the largest volume ever! And still it is not Reality, not the Truth!

But what does it all represent then? In other words, "What does it all mean?"

By asking "what it all means?" we are in es-sense asking "What this is all about?" "What is this supposed to represent?"

Is it like Shakespeare wrote, that all of this adds up to "...signifying nothing"? Or is this existence, this living/dying trip representative of some meaning, signifying something rather than nothing?

When we ask what our lifeworld, this Being-in-Existence, is supposed to mean --- what all of this is supposed to represent --- we are, in essence, asking and searching for a symbol, a signifier that will represent for us "what this all means" --- that will appease us as the seeker. "There, that's good. I like that. I am satisfied. This is the Truth."

Stated more simply: When we are asking questions of meaning we are asking questions of and about representation --- questions that do not call for Truth and Reality per se, but call out for representations of Truth and Reality, symbols of Truth and Reality. In essence, then, with this line of questioning relating to meaning we are asking for a Grand Signifier, an Overarching Symbol, a Transcendent Representation of Meaning and Significance bar none. Now, this is not asking for Truth and Reality, but for some 'thing', some 'symbol', some 'significant representation' that will re-present the Truth and Reality for us after it has left us and gone somewhere else to offer up another representation of Itself as Truth, as the Real!

This can all be summed up in an aphorism:

The representation of Truth is not the presentation of Truth. Reality, which is Truth, presents ItSelf, not a representation of Itself.

Certainly our representations can serve by pointing out, by alluding to and suggesting, but they cannot and will never be able to replace the Real, which is Truth, which is non-representable. And this is precisely where a fatal flaw, an indiscriminate use of understanding often steps in --- when and as we imagine that the representation is inviolable, that the presentation should conform to the representation, that the moment should match the model. It is the trap and blind-spot of all languaging that attempts to surround the Truth with symbols, bar none. Codes and canons all, the representation of the Real in replicated approximate fashion, with as many variable as we could account for at that time.

The Truth is lived, is presented as the Real, which can later be approximately modeled in one representational language, symbol-set or another. The Real is that which eludes representation. Representation is that which can allude to the Real, but not replace or stand in for --- except to the detriment of those who are leaning on the representations, which are so ever susceptible to the whims of the Real, the True, the Persistent Presentations of Nature's Economy.

In other terms, most specifically those words attributed to Jesus the Christ, who stated that "The Law is for the people, it is not the people for the Law." Now framed postmodernly, in the sense used here, we can state that "The representation is for the presentation, it is not the presentation for the representation." For what do representations rely on if not the Pure Presentations of Nature's Economy in full and often horrific bloom?

 

44

The "Law" is the representation of a moment, or an accumulation of moments when Truth or Reality were glimpsed. These moments are then coded and framed, represented in a language or a symbol, an engraving or an etching, and called "The Truth", "The Law".

The presentation is the moment of Truth or Reality glimpsed, intuited, apprehended now; un-coded, un-framed, presented as it is, just so, now, this.

Whenever a representation serves the presentation that it is derived from most clearly, then we are in close accordance with Reality even though we are dealing in representations. But when we determine that a representation should supersede the presentation that it was derived from, then we are attempting to set up a situation wherein we are expecting the presentation of Reality, which is Truth, to mash ItSelf into conformity by confining ItSelf to death by representation. As French poet-raconteur Stephane Mallarme has already implied:

To define is to kill,
To suggest is to create.

We know that the representation is the approximate definition, or what is agreed by us to be a fitting representative stand-in for the Truth. The representation is "What it means", is "What it all signifies". Whatever we are alluding to, or whatever we are pointing to can be represented by a sign. A representation of that 'thing', that 'quality' or 'essence' is not that 'thing', that 'quality' or 'essence' in itself. The representation is what we tell ourselves about the purely presented, the actual, the Real, i.e., "what it means to us". Again, the representation is not the presentation. The symbol is not that which is symbolized. The sign is merely a common element, a signifier that allows us to communicate in relation to actual Pure Presentations; it is a device of language, born of a desire to communicate.

We agree on a sign or signs, on the representations that we use. For there is no language, as it is currently, without representations of some sort. Some of us become attached to the representations and determine that they are the model, or the one and only template for all and every --- that all phenomena, or that every presentation should be made to conform to the one and only authentic representation which has been revealed as "The Greatest Sign". There has been a long history of such attachments to representations, to models, and to ideologies. The form of the sign, the revealed meaning of the representation becomes projected as the ideal to which all are made to conform in one way or another. It costs life. It has cost life. It is costing life. The attachment to representations at the expense of presentations is very much of the imperialistic or colonial mindset. This 'representational attachment' is what has prevented many from noting the non-representable donkey of Zen which they are always already situated upon. Because of the desire and the wanting of that Zen-donkey to be represented and representable, in accordance with a specific, or group of specific symbol-meaning desires, the "always already non-representable donkey" is not realized as such. So, we get a represented simulation that is projected and continually stands in for, and occludes the Presentation of Truth, which is Reality, which presents Itself so as to be represented however the self-aware Body chooses or is conditioned to.