Ideology and Ontology: Belief Systems and the Experience of Reality

Seminar Outline
Ideology and Ontology: Belief Systems and the Experience of Reality
©2006 by Guy Burneko, Ph. D. (7/12/06, Rev. 12/24/06)
www.beyondthematrix.com/inst

What is the significance of ideology (or of myth, symbolic modes, belief and narrative) in a world that has no certain nature or essence -- a world that reduces entirely neither to thoughts nor to things -- except according to beliefs and ideological assertions that it does or doesn’t have a certain essence? What is the “ontological status of the world”? Is there some fixed essence or nature of Being, or is “it” somehow constituted with our languaging and, thus, in our belief and ideology systems? Does, as suggests Blake, the most imaginative use-of-language-in-belief guide the direction of the world’s growth? And how do belief systems share, or not, in the event, in the evolution, of consciousness and culture, and in the structure of reality itself? Is in all our discussion of techne simply the deployment of material and organizational skill, or is there also a wider sense of techne tou biou in which we realize a craft of life, an artful, care-ful shaping and living of shared being beyond instrumentalism and mechanics in a way that is conducive to wisdom, creativity and sustainability? Is there within/without thoughts-and-things-consciousness an acategorical or a spiritual reality that does not readily define itself in their terms? Is it languageable? Is it believable? Is it real by the usual criteria of thoughtness and thingness? Are thingness and thoughtness real by its criteria?

What are critical thinking and critical inquiry that work within a universe of discourse asking questions about the structures of society, belief, ideology and consciousness, and also asking questions from beyond their universe about their own manner of questioning? What is creative inquiry -- collaborative, communal or independent -- that surpasses or relativizes the subject/object episteme and realizes simultaneously imparting-and-receiving insight that reduces fully neither to subjective nor to objective categories? And what is critical inquiry (taking full advantage of contemporary Critical Theory and Frankfurt School hermeneutics as well as of depth psychologies and philosophical anthropology) that it can move beyond the ego-centered or the mental-rational perspective (cf. Gebser) that constructs the world as an object to its subject and thus all events as objects to one another? Can the ego be viewed as a process of distinction-making (Corbett) that, as it goes on, tends to reify its categories and itself – thus opposing category to category and itself to all that is not itself, ultimately eclipsing undivided Self (experience-as-such, mind-with-universe) by forsaking supple multipolar and polyvalent inclusivity for monopolar control in both conception and execution? What is a personal or a nation-state consciousness like that is creative and critical in evaluating and interpreting its own (ego)forms and also creative and critical in disclosing/interpreting other ways of thinking and knowing that are not ego-premised?

What kind of Being-disclosing consciousness reflexively and fruitfully hybridizes (itself with) other ways of thinking, knowing and being—and is thus transformed or liberated from prior habituations? Are questions of (the ontological status of) beings also questions of meanings; are questions of Being questions of meaning: Is ontology (also) political?

A deeply critical inquiry respects crosscultural and intercultural as well as intra-, inter- and transdisciplinary experience. It further is creative in its criticality, not just working out the premises of its own kind of world-formulation but generously invoking sometimes disequilibrating alternatives to its own mode of consciousness for the opening of yet further possibilities of shared being in all their unexpected and sometimes liberatory forms. As we learn in the Bhagavadgita, doing things (intellectual, social, practical and otherwise) as worth doing in themselves and not solely for their payoff, i. e., doing things without special regard for failure, career advancement or the accrual of dominance and wealth, without the front-loading of ego into all undertakings, is what keeps our karma (or actions) participatingly authentic-to-the-situation and to nondualized, nonfragmented Being. This presumably frees us from becoming ego-compulsive in repetition. Whence the analytical compulsion to divide and conquer in thought and influence?

The sustaining meanings and values of future life on Earth will in this interpretation be those that in opening us from the constructions of a dualizing ego-consciousness allow sustainable alternatives of supple noetic co-growthing and practical wisdom oriented beyond dominion and fractionation towards embodying ontological and epistemological integrality.

But a healthy ego-perspective is also said to be (Edinger) the condition of eventual post-egoic experience. So, are belief systems and ideologies, like languages (G. Steiner), ways by which persons bond with and include others who share their language, code and belief while excluding those who don’t just as, by analogy, a nascent ego creates distinctions along its formative way between self and non-self to accentuate its separate existence and define itself among and against others? Do languages and symbolically, linguistically coded belief systems also allow us to reason upon speculations (hypotheses, metaphors, images) and thus move beyond the given datum and factum of circumstance – just as, again by analogy, perhaps, the ego also finds resources to relativize and outgrow itself in connection with deeper Self – through myth, creed, fantasy and (eco)paradigm shift?

1. What is the Status of Reality? It depends on what the meaning of is is.
What is ontology; what, or how, is Being, ontos
In asking what, are we asking about a certain objectifiable, definable, foundation, entity, nature, presence or essence?
In asking how, are we inquiring as to a practice, conduct, condition or context of Being, or perhaps about how we are being-in-the-world such that that Being can ask about itself?
Is there a difference between Being and beings, between the ontological and the ontic, i. e. what is there to understand about the “ontological difference”?
And why are issues of authenticity or spontaneity implicated in the relation between Being and beings, among beings with one another?
Why is Gelassenheit relevant; and what are its intercultural cousins, e. g. Chinese ziran and wuwei.
What is the natural or cosmic characterization of B/being and becoming:
1. Cosmogenesis is diverse yet connected throughout
2. It is performed in mental/spiritual and material/physical forms
3. In our practical experience we find these forms correlated
3.1 The material universe finds itself in thought; thought emerges in a material matrix. Does either have primacy?
4. Does cosmos/reality reduce to any substance, material or mental, or is it irreducible and, therefore, hermeneutic and circular in its (self)understanding?

Consider Bateson’s “difference that makes a difference” and the “ecology of mind” as complements to “the ontological difference” and to the irreducible aspects of the physical/mental reality we create and share.


2. Being is Believing: How we are is guided by how we think we are.
Whether Schrödinger’s cat is alive or dead depends on a choice, a human act, the collapse of a multidimensional wave of possibilities: the quantum patriarchs, microphysical domain
Embryology follows chreodes or pathways: Waddington, Ayala, Dobzhansky, biology
The nervous system edits experience: Varela et al., cognitive biology
Archetypes provide tendencies to behavior, imagery, feeling and thought: Jung, Hillman, psychology and anthropology
We are socially constituted: Mead, social psychology
Everything that is said is said by someone—with some interest, from some point of view: Maturana, Varela, Wilden, politics

Traces everywhere, no bottom: Derrida, Rorty, politics and philosophy
There is no view from nowhere: Wilden, Varela et al.:
The quantum uncertainty relation and the limits of positivism: Heisenberg, Schrödinger, etc.
The structure of scientific revolutions: Kuhn
The human/technological resonance: Jahn & Dunne
The hermeneutic circle: Gadamer

“Everything possible to be believed is an image of truth”: Blake
Everything is true or becomes true within certain limits, these limits are found to be beliefs to be transcended: Lilly
“A narrative universe”: Bocchi & Ceruti
“The universe story”: Thomas Berry
The universe of experience as a self-making, self-interpreting story
Dzogschen & Zen Buddhism, philosophical Daoism, Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras
The politics of no-mind, the politics of ecstasy

As belief systems code our experience of reality, how do cultures (or how does a globalizing culture) sustainably outgrow their own code-limits? Conversely, how do alternative and hybrid polities of awareness sustain themselves from/amid impositions, hegemonisms, habituations and homogenizations?

3. Being is Beyond Belief: Openness to Being is not reducible to formulas
Authenticity (Heidegger), Sincerity (Confucius), Weak Ontology (White), Root Metaphors (Pepper)
Language as the “house of Being”
Gebser’s structures of consciousness and the “imparting and receiving” of verition
The mutually reinforcing ideologies of the person, the institution and the state
“The Primitive World and its Transformations”
The origin and dynamics of civilization: e. g., Vögelin, Toynbee, Jaspers, Marx, Banerji, Lewis-Williams, McKenna, Redfield
The rationale for the state
Defense, security and AIDS in a time of “polycentric holism”
“The Report from Iron Mountain”
Specialized knowledge, professionalization, competitiveness and authenticity
rituals, games, dramas, techne, phronesis and knack
Liminality and Communitas (Turner)
“Alternate Nationalism” (Banerji)
Cosmic communitas and ‘openness to being’
“Silent Music” (Johnston)
The spontaneities of the earth
Contemplative Leisure
The role of mature contemplatives in the ecohumane future
Contemplative ontology, psychology and ecology
(Corbett, Laughlin, Roszak, Burneko)
The Global Noetic Repertoire of Practical Wisdom
Phronesis, Zhi, Yogas & Autopoiesis: Practical nondualism in evolution

From what we know of cosmogenesis as taught by science today, we can provisionally generalize that it is an everywhere connected emergence of potentials. This connectivity, expressed variously by Laszlo, O’Murchu, Sagan and others, while it sports some leaps and novelties so radical they seem to have no relations or antecedents, augurs a wholeness that, as some mystical doctrines propose, is fractally performed in the seeming parts of the (“interminate,” Cusa) whole. Yet this whole lends itself to no conclusive reduction, for the more finely we tune the instruments of observation, the more nearly we see our own participation in the process of creatio continua. The indeterminate quantum physical “margins of reality” home our own conscious, unconscious, and hermeneutic involvement in the evocation and establishment of what we know as our reality and are also homed as well in consciousness (Goswami). The Big Bang grows (as) you and me, and I and thou in turn, and at the same time, “conceive” the Big Bang and what comes of it: the objective it doesn’t know it’s there without our (shared) awareness which in turn is always imbricated in the large ecology that is both nature and, by this construal, mind, or Mind. It is all, in this generalized sense, a deeply social affair – and not just interhumanly or intersubjectively social but inter-ontologically. The universe reduces entirely neither to mind nor matter, (or you or me or it). Our personal, national and other belief-narratives maintain among us the objective case of Being and beings. Are these “real” objects or a way the irreducible always-ongoing occasionally, we might say virtually, localizes the not-only-local? What if our ontology is hermeneutic, conversational, dialogical-interpretive? Is in this context spirit a kind of substance or, rather, an epistemology, as G. Bateson hints?

In the hermeneutic and interpretive way of storying things, the evolution (emergence, intensification) of consciousness is also to some degree never precise a significant participant in the general evolution of shared potentials near and far. To put it more dramatically, consciousness (including for shorthand unconscious awareness) is also (distributed throughout) the ecology of events. Whether we accept such nondualism or reject it, we can see that our ways of thinking and co-being are socially enabled and socially embedded not only in intersubjectively human but also among nonhuman and even nonliving societies, i. e., organizations of being. As these societies, especially among humankind, become more co-relatively intensively aware of the ongoingness (that they localize as themselves), they are (more-or-less) able to see their beliefs more as matters of choice than as determinants, etc. It is the part of language foremost to open the potentials of worlding beyond the terrain of any given moment, historical and existential. Languages are of art, music, pattern, rhythm, myth, etc. But the natural languages, those spoken by living human persons, are the most accessible means by which we participate in the self-organizing process-patterns of cosmos while also articulating and performing (with) their alternatives, transformations and (self)interpretations. The languaging of belief is both the binding and the loosing, the systole and diastole of ontogenesis. It stabilizes and encodes tradition; it also evokes new life and un-conventioned de-finition. It is the part of education to evoke fluency, creativity and care in the self-speaking of a universe of no certain nature ((apart from our (narrative, storied, paradigmatic) attributions of certainty)). Or, to emphasize this differently, the character of the universe we share is that of language in its human and other-than-human modes. As Heidegger proposed, language is the ‘house of Being.’ But a corollary of this idea is that there will be meaningful languaging that takes us out of our minds as they usually conceive meaningfulness: hence paradox, apophasis, Zen, mantra, wuxin, etc. And does this too have political and metapolitical import?

((Very parenthetically, and hoping not to verge too nearly on an essentialism about the social “nature” of languaging or of cosmos-ing, we might observe that the work of language, mind and of cosmogenesis is mutually characterized by, for examples:
A) The play of “difference that make a difference” in a circuit of events which G. Bateson calls (verging on his own essentialism at this moment) the basic or minimum “unit of mind.” For him, the unit of mind is any transformation or symmetry-break in a system that adds to the complexity or meaning of the system. Yet the meaning (or mind) is not localizable in any one part of the system, and thus, the (symmetry of?) mind is distributed, so to speak, around and throughout the system as, by extension, mind is distributed throughout nature – i. e. no individual human mind exists in a vacuum apart from social relations, those with nature, etc. In his Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity Bateson uses the imagery of someone chopping a tree to make the point that arms, eyes, delivered blows, an axe, a tree, split off chips are all part of a whole system that does not exist apart from all the pieces – each chip split off is a feedback difference making a meaningful systemic difference that is not realizable without all parts in, to use another of his phrasings, this ”ecology of mind.” Since Bateson’s view is to some degree related to information theoretical and even thermodynamic formulations – see Prigogine, Jantsch – it is a little harder (quantifiable) than that of Jung, for example, which is almost entirely qualitative.
B) Emphasizing less a common algorithm in language-mind-nature self-organization than their hypothetically common “root” or surd, we can see in Jung’s notion of archetypal tendencies in the psyche a link between personal, social and ethnic or national experience and the “psychoid” dimension of nature itself, ultimately cosmic nature, in, or as which these are effected. Not only does Jung connect the collective/transpersonal psyche with the dynamics of cosmogenesis, he also notes that the “irrepresentable” archetypes which we know only in their diverse cultural clothes are bearers and living expressions of the numen we associate with spiritual existence. In other words, psyche (or the individuative tendencies of Self) performs, manifests, nature and/as spirit. Stated another way, the categories nature, spirit, being, time, etc. are modes of psychic self-realization (i. e. not unalterable givens) in our spacetime or ego-mediated ways of living, believing and thinking.
C) When Derrida speaks of the bottomless dimension of experience irreducible to substantial, self-subsistent (material or ideal) elements/categories he is both reinventing earlier arguments of Buddhism (cf. Magliola, Nagarjuna) on the anatta/sunyata of things while also emphasizing that the co-creative and co-evocative tropes of deconstructionism demonstrate the fractal “traces,” the “disseminations” and the intertextualities of all supposedly separate forms of being in one another – to the degree that they cannot be said to be strictly separate forms of being. But neither, by the same logic that makes his own argumentation irreducible, can we say they are not separately existing: Except, to make another point, Derrida’s thinking goes on to make the wider proposal that the, as he calls it, différance between any x and y does not itself repose in some categorizable, spatiotemporal or even strictly epistemological category (see also G. Bateson). Différance is the uncharacterizable nothing that makes all characterizably different somethings possible (cf. also Guérry). And here Derrida, Bateson, apophasis, “weak ontology” and, again, the theme of language coincide. It is a quality of language and beings (following de Saussure) to be a music of differences; it is likewise a mode of the performance of nature. To the degree language homes Being it implicates mind-in-experience irreducible to either.))

Liberating language, liberating thinking and experience-as-such (especially as prior to objective/subjective denominations), is a premier gift (and liber is an adjective as well as a verb root). But who or what is holding us up that we feel we need liberation or transformation? Our mind-forged manacles? asked Blake; Our sense of separate selfhood? inquired rishis and buddhas; The need to do something? asks Zhuangzi of Nimrud. Indeed, further to problematize the iterations, What is more purposeful than the unpurposing of socially-shaped mentality? And once prepositions like “from” are fitted into phrasings like “liberating x from y,” How can we even begin to count the dualities that are born? Or to recast the matter, Are there optimal ranges of simultaneously concursive (Hershock) and discursive interactions such that the noocosm is least inhibited in its (self)development and yet midwifes greatest sustainability in and amid social and natural systems on Earth? Thomas Berry will ask about the spontaneities of the earth performed in our lives as a living dimension of the universe and its ongoing self-storying in our narratives. Stephen K. White’s “weak ontology” invites us to a pivoting and a pliable orientation that admits at once of the fundamental as the contestable. A. C. Graham co-relativizes reason and spontaneity and Zhuangzi’s monkey uncle proposes “four in the morning” unless, of course, you like four in the afternoon.

Of the belief-narratives that can lapse, default or be exalted into fundamental(ist) reductions/limitations, among the most influential today are scientism, religiosity and nationalism. Though everywhere internally and mutually contestable, these, along with their sibling the individual ego-structure, are among the most powerful ways individuals, societies and cultures organize (limit or transform) their consciousness, their identity and their effort. Collateral identifications, substantive and ascriptive, may be considered subalterns or tactics of these: racism, gender chauvinism, ethnocentrism, speciesism, ideolatry, cognicentrism. And yet again, the ideology, racism, or classism may encapsulate and contain in various tropes and topologies whole paradigms of science, creed or nation. It would only be another ideology, for example to specify which nameable structure is the greatest influence. In either case, as interpreted by John Weir Perry, Erich Fromm, Carolyn Merchant or Vandana Shiva, say, the mutually reinforcing relations between the story of the state and the story of the creed or the industrial-science complex help both inaugurate, stabilize, default and subvert the creative ontology which, ironically and by the above propositions, never entirely realizes itself in the mundane world without some communicable and meaningful mode of shared, not necessarily totalized, cocreativity. Or to state it differently, even individual creativity, fluency and care are inseverably “social” in origin and end. Again, alpha and omega may be seen as reciprocal, neither has tropical or substantial self-subsistence.

But the greatest of these, if not the most far- reachingly influential, is the State. For the state enjoys political, technical, martial, fiscal and rhetorical means of propagation and enforcement as well as the power to exact a price for its protection of itself, its story and for its protection of its (prospectively refractory) subject-constituents from itself. The nation-state may be considered the most puissant if not the most abiding organization of social awareness. Correlatively, as for Toynbee, it may be for the arising of great religions that great states/civilizations have emerged. And though the state depends increasingly on science, it was by the state that science, especially in its pronounced industrial positivist and utilitarian forms, was most effectively constellated and, as Berman proposes, became the “official” version of consciousness with the Enlightenment and the Scientific/Industrial Revolution. Moreover, in the legalism of war, (counter)terror, medical research codes and state murder, the state exceeds both Pilate and Caiaphas in its control over life and death—it publicly arrogates to itself ontological powers that not even churches are allowed except in the most profoundly fundamentalist settings which themselves make the point again, since in these settings the power of the creed is identified as the state in theocracy.

Where, further, the state equates political freedom with economic freedom (not, note, with economic democracy), freedom becomes derivative of the master means of economic organization. And the mastery inheres not only in the precedence of the system over other systems and over those human and other persons tributary to its ethos, but the mastery inheres also in the economic provisions by which a class, doxa or congeries of interests hold masterful de facto and de jure dominance over persons and interests. Concretely, the elevation of sometimes desperate and inescapably aggressive and exploitive competition between separate ego-interests to the level of universal arbiter, legitimizer or naturalizer of (for example, invisible hand) “justice” in social arrangements is fully satisfied in the ideology and practice of capitalism. And the situation is more clearly exacerbated as global resources diminish.

Itself interpretable as a latter day version of Christian religion (as is Marxism), especially via the Protestant Ethic, Capitalism’s Church of Money and Work helps maintain (through itself and in the State’s pursuit of national interests) relations and practices of aggression as well as an accompanying rhetoric of domination and aggression. Competition no longer bears the classical notion of “seeking together” (com-petitio) but rather connotes (per Varela, et al.) the bringing into the separated ego (again, individual corporate or State-embodied) as much as is desired while preventing as much as possible from being leaked or disseminated out – except at profit or interest. The ultimate logic of such anxious contemporary capitalism would be that of the single producer, monopoly, and the monarchy of its efficiencies. Globalization defers in actual fact to the multiple local realities of culture and geography, but its monologic remains in the practices and locutions of competitive aggression and the commodifications, dominations and exploitations of nature and of nonhuman and human persons, i. e. of the deeply social context of our shared ontology and irrespective of class, nationality, etc. Correspondingly, languaging (and educating) regress, albeit often tacitly, under its influence to the mean of competitive, aggressive atomistic utilitarianism. The original skhole or “pause” of school is conscripted by the unremitting imperium of busy assertion, promotion and commodification of self, other, aspiration and intention.

We hear less in the open marketplace the idiom of aggression, though it appears in ads and propaganda, for instance, gently chiding us for being unpretty, nonvirile or otherwise meager. But in the boardroom, behind closed doors, and in open celebration of the regime of consumership, language under the sign of capital is a utility and an ego-reinforcement (or ego-threat directing one to purchasable reinforcements). And in the organization of the human work units of the labor force, professionalized or nonprofessionalized, the language of capitalism also encodes a belief or ideology of the team/empire to whose ethos and leadership participants must subscribe in order to remain viable and remunerated. On one side, deference is paid the customer, always right; on another, deference is exacted by the wardens, monitors and stewards of the system in the way of productivity, wage-tractability and reliability. The total value of language is for the increase of wealth measured in ego-perspectival terms. Even where they seem playful and blue-sky, in a serious capitalist episteme the units of meaning are those of work and profit obedience. A measure of this, and perhaps a minor vestige of the earliest spirit of capitalism, is that many adhere with religious scrupulosity to the rituals, observances, expectations, liturgies and canons of the workplace, the credit rating, the observable consumption and to the increase of accumulations who never would give such full attention and concern to the doctrines, sacraments or practices of any religion. Work, Money, Capital interchangeably along with collateral questions of prestige, security and résumé-grooming have become the religion of a good portion of the world. As well, money, argues Jacob Needleman, has become ego in out time. Not incidentally, it is this Church that is most palpably implicated in many culture clashes seen abroad today. But again, it is in the ligations of the Corporate State that its belief system is most effected and imposed. In one analysis, the modern State is invented to justify the means of supporting and protecting the belief in capital as the capitol interest. (See also Huizinga, Roszak, de Grazia, Ariés, Postone)

Yet the State, internally contested as its mores and statements may be, speaks with a single voice in behalf of a widely diverse and manifold capital. And while its panasonic voice – like its panoptic eye -- must stay on the message that “it’s the economy, stupid” or that “the guarantee of freedom is the free economy,” it little recks the oppressive monotony that message itself conveys. And it only relishes the exclusion of messages as to any other significant aims and contexts than those fiscal. Its is, further, a finished doctrine, a closed belief, a state-sponsored religion; and it is one that is by its closure implicitly and explicitly dualizing and oppositional in its work. The finished belief, the more-or-less closed canon whose knack is its co-optation of any other, calls forth and guarantees the appearance of subaltern alternatives and so is always ideologically unstable by virtue of itself just as it is always restless in its market ups and downs. Further instabilities are constellated by the status differential of inferior/superior, poorer/richer; and, finally, there is an inescapable contest between doxa and heterodoxy which, finally, brings us to awareness of paradox. One form of the paradox is that the meaning panasonically thus enforced and seemingly challenged (but that is in fact only further highlighted by the contrasting kinds of meaningfulness it engenders and tacitly abets) will not be undone in more meaning-making but in the respite from such purposiveness. The antithetical responses to and solicitations of a given totalism of practice or view as found in global capitalism are more likely to imitate than to dissuade or shake it because their premise is in it – competitive, aggressive and exclusive winning. This is to say that a movement of opposite sign but comparable scale, intensity or goal-orientation is a reflection of that which it aspires to outdo or outclass. In still other words, the outgrowing of the belief-monarchy of State/Global Capital will realize itself in play or contemplation sooner than in further workhard ego-belief competitions of the kind under question (in which competing camps alike express a form of terror, one being less visibly violent than its counterpart). As Wilden (and Zhuangzi before him) notes, the outgrowing of ideology, itself a total all-answering scheme, is not another and adversarial total all-answering scheme, but a releasement from scheming totalizations. This isn’t a matter of simply not functioning in the world, or of becoming quiescently inert, but it is a matter of a certain “diligent indolence” (Keats) when it comes to social and technical strategizing, of non-attachment, and of what Merton called contemplation in a world of action. It would invite the combination of trade and exchange acumen minus the harrying profitist ego-appetite for conquest. This presupposes the relativization of means-based (i. e., persons and nature used as resources, as means, for something else) thinking by that of an ends-orientation tending towards experiences and the definitions of experience as ends in themselves, autotelic, conducive to and expressive of what Csikzentmihalyi calls “flow” and to what an older story calls the lila or play of all existence. Here is a place where authenticity, sustainability and liberatory transformation coincide in the evolution of a mature, even a mature contemplative, consciousness amid the transitional life form of humanity. And does the transitionality of our present existence indicate we are (merely) a means to some other end, or shall we hereby come to understand that every proposed (and belief-coded) end is a horizon of fusing co-being irreducible to any of its present, past or future self-realizations? This is to ask if the supposed evolution of consciousness beyond atomic capitalism or nationalism or any de facto totalizing ideology and praxis is not also the outgrowing of all kinds of reductive/conclusive consciousness and cognate thematizations, reifications and substantializations (cf. Herbert Guenther).
The paradox is that any freedom, (any liberation from the conscriptions of language and consciousness to the increase of the ego at all its scales) will grow from not only “alternative” mentalities or nationalisms that are inevitably and sometimes almost trivially generated by (in reply to) the dominant belief but also and more from what may be colorfully called non-mentalities, the no-mind (Chinese wuxin) of various contemplative and meditative forms whose per- and illocutionary address is evocative, concursive and placeworthy—not indifferent to particular moment, circumstance and personhood. The evocative position, says Wu Kuang-ming, is the position of no-fixed-position; it is the pivot of the Dao, (dao shu), what Kerenyi identifies as the gate of Hermes Stropheus. Concursive as contrasted with discursive consciousness is, for Peter Hershock, spoken and performed in the language of “conduct that is unprecedented” (which is his formulation of the Chinese wuwei). The term conduct here connotes socially relevant, adept, supportive and understandable; the term unprecedented means relational-awareness unbound to reproductive and replicative mimesis of precedent practice, habitus or desire but rather context-alertly unique and apt to the “minute particulars” (Blake) of ever-varying circumstance. Both notions suggest a mentality, a paramentation and a practice of communication and exchange that is not referenced on a necessarily subjective-objective from-to basis, nor measured on the dual axes of an appearance/reality graph, nor measured in ego-perspectivated aggrandizement, nor obeisant to a preset goal and purpose unflinching in its aim to procure, to exploit or to exalt any “other” that, (or who/m), given the inherently social savor of things, can never be other than its kin and co-constituent to begin with. Indeed, the composite of these intercultural notions is that of a vernacular and hybrid and circumstantial rather than (and as well as) a canonical and universal and monothetic ontology, an ontology (or indeterminately multiple onto-logoi) that moves placedly, placeworthily, with the course of events not seeking so much to control, direct or even improve them as mutually to sustain sustainingly co-growthful forms of co-becoming. Another variant of the liberation from imperial and site indifferent mentalities and their modes of economy are those expressed in Keith Basso’s Wisdom Sits in Places, Kemmis’ Community and the Politics of Place and in the book Indigenous Traditions and Ecology edited by John Grim with the revealing subtitle The Interbeing of Cosmology and Community.

Altogether, we find here also (the here in mind having not only a pedigree in contemporary philosophy, cognition theory, and the physics of the participant-observer but also in archaic techniques of ecstasy and yoga, ways negativa and affirmativa, and in the intercultural upaya/phronesis we inherit and carry forward as the practical wisdom of sustainable culture and consciousness)....we find here also a track to disarm and to engage the individual, organizational and State ego. Where we are less intent on making the world in our own image, in the image of an always receding point of achievement, we less impose on other cultures and worldviews thereby obliging them similarly to wave pennants and call to arms of their own design. Epics from Aeneid to A Space Odyssey have measured out the prefatory architectures of the State and the personal ego on grand scale; but today – and partly because of these and similar epics -- we find ourselves hostage to a mentality of quite narrowly linear perspectivalism in our construing of our situation and our selves. We have, by another metaphor, inherited the words of unimaginable emergence and transformation but dinned and tinkered their music into the player piano technologies of the lowest bidder. Instead of a beacon, the beliefs, the great codes or the master narratives have become a headlight bearing down on our children. And who today welcomes the dark invitation to a docta ignorantia alive in a contemplative leisure that is inherently non-negotiable, i. e. that has never yet been the negation of the otium we desperately want to (re)learn and that is an episteme of the maturing mind/heart? But we remind ourselves, enjoying running water and electricity and silicon as much as we do, that the issue is not necessarily Archaic Revival (McKenna) or noetic Luddism so much as the abatement, the relativization and transformation, of aggressively competitive assertion and imposition and their unchecked progress-creed with/by the meditations of sustainable ecosocial cogrowthing and growth of wisdom. A healthy ego is a necessary navigational instrument; but the currents, stars and beacons for its journeying guide it, transform it, beyond itself.
It may be that the autopoietic and self-organized sustaining of meaningful diversity without prejudice and without an imposing monarchy of praxis and theory is likeliest in the modes and ontologies of co-becoming sincere to a conversational and communicative rather than to a globally dominant ego-atomized aggressive assertive form of life. Indeed, the aggressive and assertive by its own logic would exclude all other forms, while the embodiment of an existential ecologic literally conduces to a holism of the present moment, to what Wu calls “co-thriving.” But again, the experiment is in outgrowing the ego-mind as we have long known it, without, not incidentally, forgoing the kinds of individuation that, in an everywhere social realm, are person-unique because of being co-responsive with other uniqueness. Being so co-responsive among one another by virtue of being unfreighted with such clenched ego, we may find we are not nearly so much one and other as we thought to begin with. The realization of mutual being is one with the relaxation of impressive, impositional aims. In the unexpected setting of the Old Testament we can read something in Ecclesiasticus (in the Jerusalem Bible translation) like this: “All things go in pairs by opposites, . . . .the one consolidates the excellence of the other.” This yinyang sensibility affords a deeper win-win than can an only aggressive compulsiveness whose fiduciary aim is its own permanent exaggeration, the assertion of ego-beings unopen to Being. And the learning organization that is our newly technological life on/as Earth today instantiates one by one, here and there with no directive Bourse, the noncalculizable metanoia/moksha that is also a spontaneous autopaideia. Humming in the reciprocally intercultural glossolalia between ziran (Daoist that-which-is-of-itself-what-it-is, according to Wagner) and zest, (Teilhard’s word for the élan of cosmic noogenesis) is the “silent music” beyond belief.

And not incidentally, the enameling and narrowing of intention, of sentiment and temperament that is obliged by the competitive workplace and its relations the bank, the insurance company, the investment firm etc. hardens us against spontaneous care and compassion and by degrees coarsens our spiritual and ethical being with the protective inauthenticity that opposes openness to Being with more ego. The legalistic honesty of fair dealing and approved book keeping is, for instance, made trivial by the legal but unwholesome cashiering, for example, of a disease suffering employee who’s had to miss work for treatment (that costs business extra in insurance premiums) and recuperation, or by the billioned default or malfeasance of pension fund administration. Their attempted justification in language further illustrates an inauthenticity as grand as it is self-serving for the increasingly few in number who can enjoy reliable health coverage on any terms. Such speech is also limiting, oppressive and insulting to human dignity. And it is characterizable as profoundly utilitarian and instrumental in that it enacts a settled belief-legislation of persons-as-means that excludes meta-formulations of autotelic ends; and, therefore, it effects the contraception of social consciousness and conscience. The frequent argument that we daily expand markets and goods or services stumbles on the stones of a widespread lack of peace of mind to enjoy life that we see occurring by virtue of the very economic imperatives under question. In the end, we obtain even the most modest security in the profit-utility State only by the aggressively competitive instrumentalization, the commodification, the deformation, of our aspirations, of ourselves and of those cobeings around us, including the natural ones. The cumulative effect is one of dis-ease and unbalance. It is this we recognize as the neurotic alienation of daily life (Freud, Marx).

Religions have served to abate, thwart, sponsor or to ignore some of the issues raised here. On one hand, these wonderful organizations of consciousness offer orientation and succor. At the same time, formal religions also canonize, restrict and punish various kinds of thinking and behavior. So long as we have nervous systems, we are likely to edit experience in selective ways, and the narratives and mythopoeia of religions and cognate ideologization will do this on a large scale of time and places. Religion is as natural as song, thought and, for that matter, sex. It is an organic and a noetic experiment; the very ability to tell a story of the universe is a way the evolving universe relates (to) itself. Calcifications and fascisms of belief and thought are familiar, yet belief is sometimes a raft carrying a people to a further shore better explored by then leaving the bark behind – or by creating a new mode of exploration. At least as interesting as science, and sometimes as congruous in its variety of ethos and visions to ecology and to business as to soul and salvation, in certain times and according to certain teachers, religious beliefs when understood and expressed neither with doctrinaire literalist reductionism nor with State-specific triumphalism engender the community and the aspiration not amenable to instrumentalization and conducive to sustainability. This is partly because the category of those themes we collectively call religious conforms in definition to the etymology of both re-ligio, or binding back, connecting, to origin, to the whole and to all, and of re-legere or paying attention, observance, to the things and the events and the persons of our world and, notably, to that mode of world wherein we feel the numinous, the sacred, the aweforthing. This version of realitying is irreducibly holistic by definition and experience, since it entails both physical givens and nonphysical unknowns – it is typically the esoteric and mystical rather than exoteric form of religion. Even the Jungian formulation that all experience is psychic experience elides the equally Jungian insight that psyche merges indistinguishably with nature in archetypal depth which at the same moment, bearing the numen, is indistinguishable from the spiritual. If, as medieval Catholic apologetics felt, our condition is one of “faith seeking understanding,” then, perhaps, the value of faith is in its connectedness with the openendedness of the possibilities of understanding of all known and prospective kinds. Such connectedness with such openness, while always growing around a nucleus of insight, is most likely genuine salt, rasa and sustenance where it is least imposing upon other such or upon those who participate its meanings. A “symbiotization of heterogeneity,” as a systems thinker once coined, is of a peace with the “deference” of perspectives to one another upheld by Confucians and with their notion of deferential self-emptying or the kenosis at the heart of the Christian communion. Similarly, languaging as worlding, (experiencing and co-thriving in ways conducive to authenticity and sustainability without smug conclusivity, armed fealty or any lack of intellectual rigor and emotional genuineness) performs the re-ligious even as it supposes to talk about religion. And for that matter, a society without religion is not necessarily one without spirituality; stated as the theme of the spring/summer 2006 Hedgehog Review, this is what may come “After Secularization.”

The status of the world is immeasurably coeval with the status of how we communicatively transluce, nonimposingly “impart and receive,” as Gebser offers, the mystery that is also daily experience, baking bread, doing politics and birthing universes. This is what the Big Bang is doing now; here is an ontology of tat tuam asi; and in the expressive words of Zhuangzi we find the related ontoepistemology: “A state in which ‘this’ and ‘that’ no longer find their opposites is called the hinge of the Way [dao shu]. When the hinge is fitted into the socket, it can respond endlessly.....A basket trap is for holding fish; but when one has got the fish, one need think no more abut the basket....words are for holding ideas; but when one has got the ideas, one need think no more about the words.”

Or as early consciousness researchers John Lilly and Gary Zukav liked to say in different ways, reality is what we take to be true, based on what we believe, which is based on our perceptions, depending on what we look for, which is in turn contingent on what we think; and what we think is based on what we perceive and determines what we believe and thus what we take to be true, i. e., take to be our reality.

The never closing (re)circularity of our hermeneutic ontology is also expressible as the confluence of cosmology, language and belief – or scientific paradigm if we think of science as myth with decimal points. The very notion of scientific objectification itself is part of our habituating package of outlook, not external to it; we are the ontological structure and the presencing of cosmos as much as these are topics/events we can objectively discuss. And no matter how we think or unthink, the seasons revolve in their silent discourse that, says Calvino with Confucius, comprehends the discourse of human beings.

Open the doors of perception, states Huxley with Blake; open the windows and doors of the house of Being calls Heidegger. “Raise high the roof beams, carpenter” (J. D. Salinger).

The play between affirmative, defined cosmology or belief and the labile, unpredictable spontaneity of our uncodified openness as Being in beings and language teaches afresh how everything important is paradoxical. For example, that we are a transitional form of life does not necessarily imply that we are utilities to some other, better, definable one. Life here now is also its own end. Any evolution of mind and spirit by which we measure it otherwise can become its own kind of ego-perspectival totalism and linear reductionism, a reified thematization/closure (again, Guenther on reductionism and creativity). This leads to existence conceived as an agent of our own ideological manufacture – and in that respect, as a co-variant of dirigiste capitalism and State indoctrinations. Nor is any state, belief or cosmology sustaining that is based on impositions of creed or destinations of consciousness, however noetically optimistic, beautiful or ethical (Schweitzer). Again, the co-authoring and co-thriving of all life is eclipsed by aggressive mentations and perspectivalizations that close or atomize the canon of future consciousness. But yet again, we need some measure of myth and symbol to preserve or bootstrap ourselves, or such as historically been the case. It is, however, as Gebser observes, a deficient consciousness that accepts the impositions of destinations on consciousness. These demonstrate the limits of our thinking in conceiving modes beyond itself. Such modes are by the terms of even the most subtle cogitation, amodal, acategoric or aperspectival. Cognate terms suggesting this spiritual, epistemological or noetic/experiential amodality include nirguna, sunya, neti, unknowing, etc. And their related practices and languagings we have seen as the “goblet words” and “knack” of Daoist sageliness, koan, parable, Keats’ “negative capability,” Gebser’s “verition,” apophasis and poiesis, phronesis, upaya, ziran, etc. We greet with Joyce, “here comes everybody.”

Namaste