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“You will feel you have come home. You will feel like you understand your life. You will not want to leave it — this place of comfort”: Planetmates reveal what it feels like to become natural and planetmate once again.
Posted by sillymickel
Planetmates describe the process of reconnecting with your soul, with Nature, with truth, with the Unapproved and Hidden, with God and Reality: “The more you give up trying to determine who you are, the more you discover who you are”:
Planetmates describe the process of reconnecting with your soul, with Nature, with truth, with the Unapproved and Hidden, with God and Reality: “The more you give up trying to determine who you are, the more you discover who you are”:
“…in order to realize and reconnect again with your Self, you must surrender your frantic “trying to figure it out.” You must stop believing in the demons that you have used to help explain that which you cannot, because you have refused to see it. Rather, it is more important that you stop trying to understand and to control. You must allow, at least for that moment, that you might actually learn something, that you might be taught. You must let go, at least for that moment, of your sense of self-importance, and any thoughts about how you might be appearing to anyone outside of you. At least for that moment … give yourself at least that … you must “give up.”
“Just give up.
“You must “let go.”
“You need only stop looking outward and let yourself be simply aware of your body, how it feels. Look down toward it, not out into the world of symbols and reflections and struggles of the mind.
“You must only let whatever feeling there is in your body to arise….
“You must let yourself feel … .
“You will cry.
“You will weep …
“ … and weep.
“No doubt you will cry, for the first thing that will arise in you is the sadness of your disconnection from all that you really cared about in life. You will see clearly how you have become lost. You will begin to remember what was important to you in childhood and your heart will ache, seeing, in your mind, each step, each permutation, across the years of your life, of your fall from that innocence.
“You may cry for a long, long time, as it all becomes clear to you. As all those things you pushed to the side as unimportant — all your emotional attachments, your family, friends, and relationships, all your feelings about your endless treadmill in your world of struggling and sorrow — are remembered by you.
“You may even get angry and want to rage. Let yourself, for now, do that. No, we do not mean allow yourself to act it out on someone else. Just, like the crying, let it out. You may cry out, groan, even scream.
“It is no big deal. It will not harm you. You must learn now how to be taught, to be receptive. Let yourself get, for a change, instead of do. Let it come to you. Trust that something will come. Trust what comes. Watch as it comes, reconnects with the rest of you, and then more rises up and dawns upon you. You may actually feel like parts of your body and your brain are reconnecting; you might feel surges of energy; your body may jerk; you may have muscle twitches as the parts of your body and mind are snapping back into each other, making you whole. Similar, subtler feelings might occur of the upper and lower parts of your brain clicking back together. You might imagine your “inner wiring” — your electrical connections between brain and body — rearranging itself, linking together, and straightening along the length of your body.
“You might feel your body wanting to go through movements of its own, as if an alien thing had taken over it. This is nothing to be afraid of. That “alien” thing is really the larger you, trying to heal itself in the ways that it knows — more than your egoic mind ever possibly could — exactly how to do it. Your body-mind becomes whole in as precise and perfect a manner — as instinctual a manner — as a physical wound heals itself. You do not need to direct it. In fact, any attempt to push or guide this healing of soul only derails the process. You need only let go, and trust.
“And you will feel comforted. You will feel in your body the easing of all those years of deprivation, aching, wanting, and struggling. You will feel you have come home. You will feel like you understand your life. You will not want to leave it — this place of comfort — as you look all about you at all the efforts and empty achievements that have become your life and which take up all the activity of everyone around you.
“Your process of becoming planetmate again, of reconnecting with your soul, with Nature, with truth, with the Unapproved and Hidden, and with God and Reality will take a long time. It might even require more than this life. You did not become crazy overnight. While you cannot unthink your insanity, neither can you will sanity into existence and simply decide it. If you think you have awakened and it happened in a flash, then that is just the beginning. You are probably only becoming aware of the Abyss that exists. You have much further to go. It will take as long as it takes. And it does not matter how long it takes. The important thing is that you have given up trying to control it. You are allowing yourself to be taught by your inner guide, in its own way, and at its own pace. The practice of giving up trying to hurry anything along or direct it is part of what allows it to happen. The more you give up trying to determine who you are, the more you discover who you are….”
[Pt 4 of 28th Prasad — Family. More coming…
To see the entire book, to which this will be added eventually (book is two-thirds updated), go to http://mladzema.wordpress.com/the-great-reveal-book-6/ …
Planetmates: The Great Reveal is now available in print and e-book format. at Amazon
Falls from Grace: The Devolution and Revolution of Consciousness — Michael’s latest book – is now available in print and e-book formats.
at http://www.amazon.com/Falls-Grace-Devolution-Revolution-Consciousness/dp/1499297998/ref=tmm_pap_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1400787010&sr=1-3
To purchase any of Michael Adzema’s books, available in print and e-book formats, go to Michael Adzema’s books at Amazon.
To purchase a signed copy of any of my books, email me at sillymickel@gmail.com … Discount for blog subscribers.
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Posted in Anthropology, authenticity, being yourself, Birth, Child Abuse, Consciousness, Environmentalism, Evolution, God, individualism, life, meaning, Metaphysics, Mystical, nonconform, Philosophy, Primal Spirit, Primal Spirituality, Psychology, Religion, Spirituality, uniqueness
Tags: abyss, alien, body, brain, comfort, cry, demons, deprivation, emptiness, energy, fall from innocence, feelings, give up, God, groan, healing, home, inner guide, instinct, let go, life, Nature, planetmates, process, rage, reality, reconnection, sanity, scream, self, self discovery, self-importance, sorrow, soul, struggling, surrender, symbols, trust, truth, UNAPPROVED AND HIDDEN, weep
“You are looking in the wrong direction. You should be looking not outward into the world of symbols and reflections, but inward into the pleasure, pains, urges, and feelings of the body.”
Posted by sillymickel
“felt connection” with the Divine, meaning of Minotaur and labyrinth, impulses “getting out of control,” meaninglessness and the Abyss, the unreal demons, the process of becoming real again. What the Planetmates say, today












[Pt 3 of 28th Prasad — Family. More coming…
To see the entire book, to which this will be added eventually (book is two-thirds updated), go to http://mladzema.wordpress.com/the-great-reveal-book-6/ …
Planetmates: The Great Reveal is now available in print and e-book format. at https://www.createspace.com/4691119
and at Amazon at
Falls from Grace: The Devolution and Revolution of Consciousness – Michael’s latest book – is now available in print and e-book formats.
To purchase any of Michael Adzema’s books, available in print and e-book formats, go to Michael Adzema’s books at Amazon.
To purchase a signed copy of any of my books, email me at sillymickel@gmail.com … Discount for blog subscribers.
Invite you to join me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/sillymickel
friend me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sillymickel
Posted in Anthropology, authenticity, being yourself, Birth, Child Abuse, Consciousness, Environmentalism, Evolution, God, individualism, life, meaning, Metaphysics, Mystical, nonconform, Philosophy, Primal Spirit, Primal Spirituality, Psychology, Religion, Spirituality
Tags: absurd, abyss, animalistic, awareness, beliefs, Birth, body, Camus, connection, control, CULTURE, darkness, demons, Divine, Ego, emotion, end of times, existence, experience, feelings, Forgetting, give up, happiness, heart, illusions, impulses, infancy, instinct, intuition, knowledge, labyrinth, life, Love, Marxists, matrix, meaninglessness, minds, Minotaur, Nature, Nietzsche, nonsense, out of control, pain, planetmates, pleasure, power, real, reality, Sartre, self, self-importance, separation, soul, symbols, understanding, unreality, untruth, womb, wrong-gettedness
Your Words Imprison You in a World of Swirling Mental “Bookmarks” of Reality, Keeping You Blind: The Fifth Prasad from the Planetmates (updated)
Posted by sillymickel
Your “Wordism” Is a Cave Prison: Planetmates Tell Us, Your Language Is an Aberration Causing You to Never Really Hear or Understand Each Other.
The Great Reveal from The Planetmates, The Fifth Prasad: Your “Wordism,” A Word Cave Prison
Planetmates Release The Fifth Prasad
PlanetMates tell us “Your Wordism–is an aberration causing you to never really hear or understand each other.”
This is highly reminiscent of Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” imho. Especially, “your minds — suffused and distracted with a non-stop stream of non-sensical repetitions of word symbols – imprison and isolate you in a world of swirling mental “bookmarks” of reality, tagged to, but only dimly reflective of What’s Real, and keeping you blind to the wondrous reality itself in which other beings live in clarity of purpose and life meaning, and with direct intra- and interspecies and inter-entity communication.”
Koala is First Consciousness at The Fifth Prasad.
"[Your Wordism]...you misconstrue as a benefit in awareness, while actually it serves to cover up your lack of knowledge of your meaning or reason for being as well as the fear that abides with that."
The Fifth Prasad – A Word Cave Prison
Your Wordism, for example — while actually an aberration, a flaw in your reality perceptors, causing you to never really hear or understand each other, let alone other beings or forms of life energy— is touted as a supreme accomplishment! Whereas, your minds—suffused and distracted with a non-stop stream of non-sensical repetitions of word symbols— imprison and isolate you in a world of
swirling mental “bookmarks” of reality, tagged to, but only dimly reflective of What’s Real, and keeping you blind to the wondrous reality itself in which other beings live in clarity of purpose and life meaning, and with direct intra- and interspecies and inter-entity communication. And this you misconstrue as a benefit in awareness, while actually it serves to cover up your lack of knowledge of your meaning or reason for being as well as the fear that abides with that.
Video Commentary by SillyMickel Adzema
What follows is a video of a reading of The Fifth Prasad, with commentary, elaboration, and context, by SillyMickel Adzema.
The Fifth Prasad” From The Great Reveal by The Planetmates – the audiocast
The link above takes you to the audio-only version of my commentary on The Fifth Prasad, exactly as is in the video. Click on the link to go the the audio site, or you can listen to it here using the audio player below.
http://ecdn0.hark.com/swfs/player_fb.swf?pid=txcnckwqbr
Image of The Fifth Prasad, Of “The Great Reveal” By The Planetmates
Paraphrase/ Elaboration of “The Fifth Prasad” — by SillyMickel Adzema
For example, you tout your Wordism, your language and the symbolic nature of your thought, as such an accomplishment as to raise you above the rest of Nature. You do not see what we do: distracted and confused beings unable to see or hear what is before and around them. This aberration from all other life we see as a flaw in your reality perceptors, causing you to have only part of your mind in the here and now and the other part somewhere else in constant struggle with and juggling an incessant stream of word symbols.
Indeed, much of that is not even what you might call thinking, for thinking is at least a directed stream, a linear, sometimes logically ordered, procession of word symbols. Rather, much of what goes on in half of your mind at all times is bits and fragments of sounds, words, phrases that you experienced most recently. They are nonsensically arranged and provide a background noise for you, as obvious and present as the sounds of traffic and the activities of city life and just as easily forgotten to be there. It is on that backdrop that you attempt to think and you engage your meager efforts toward taking in new information from your surroundings, including that which comes to you from other beings, human and otherwise. It is this hodge podge of disconnected fragments of experience, mysteriously raised up out of the stream of your experience because of their resonance with painful aspects of your past, which you in your dreams try to fit together, thus creating even more bizarre concoctions of mind even while at rest.
You say some people suffer from an attention deficit, when indeed you all do. All the magnificence of life when experienced by us when it is singular, when it is One Reality, is broken up and diffracted by you — like a prism breaking up the pure light of the sun — into a myriad of pale reflections of what is initially sublime existence. Your minds run round, from one thing to another, like peripatetic squirrels, never appreciating or fully taking in any of the stops along the way. In comparison to us, you appear to be acting blindly, often inconsistently if not completely without reason.
So, your mind is split in this manner. Only part of your attention is directed to the matters at hand and the people and their communications directly before you in the present. That is another reason why it can be said that you do not exist in the present: You sense life passing by “below” you … “below” your self, which is raised high, immersed in concept and under constant assault from trivia, and word and sound “salad.”
So, it is that you are imprisoned within your distractions. Even the word symbols you use are mere bricks in the walls of your jail cells, for they block you off from the world outside rather than illuminate it. You are like someone reading the tags on all the “presents” before you but never opening any. You are isolated behind this wall of swirling “bookmarks” of reality, which tell you that a world outside exists, though you rarely enter it. And these labels of Reality — a Reality which in the process of labeling gets broken up into parts with its essence, fullness, or “soul,” if you will, removed — naturally are a distant reflection from What Is in actuality.
Were you able — and in those rare cases, when you are able — to see magnificent Reality as we do, you would be, or are, terrified and cover your eyes and fall down in the face of it, unless or until you became accustomed to it. Our Reality is wondrous and full: Present experience, even if it appears from the outside as if we are simply staring off into the distance or dozing, is so much more entrancing and filled with delight, in comparison to your own diluted experience. So we are endlessly engaged and interested. When we are not engaged in purposive behavior, simply being in physical form is so rich and enticing that we could not imagine leaving off it or wishing for it to end, not to mention deliberately making it end on our own.
Beyond that, we have communications between each other — within a particular species but also with other species as well as with other forms of life energy your insanity makes you unable to even know about — which are complex and fascinating. These interactions that we have, as you observe them, are the tip of the iceberg of what is actually happening for us. But then you mis-observe and miscalculate the depth and expansiveness of each other’s of your experiences just as much as you do ours. There again, you have that tendency to placing all else below you. Caught up in your “catalog” or your “table of contents” of life and not the actual “stuff” of it, you not only miss out on the full experience of your own life, as you place it “below” your purview, but you do the same to the experiences of others of your own kind, and below even that you mis-appreciate the experience of life of us planetmates.
Of course, like in everything else of your misunderstandings, you have a sense of your experience of life being different from other species … you sense you are not “into” the here-and-now as they are. But then you go on to deem that another aspect of your superiority to us. You evaluate that disconnection you have with Reality as a benefit or advance over others’ experience. Yes, that disconnection allows you the illusion of manipulating and controlling those items of your Reality, but you have no idea what a paltry substitute that feeling of power and control is for the experience of direct immersion in those items and connection to and participation with them … regardless whether those items are, in your categories, “living” or “non-living.”
Of course, you prefer this prison to anything else. For, as always, you have a sense that outside of its walls lies a harsh reality … a harsh awareness of yourself. Outside of it, indeed, does lie the actual experience and feeling of your life, including all its disconnections because of your running from your experience and the dissatisfactions and discomfort of your early life. The fear of that awareness motivates all your actions of mind and behavior. You do not know the bliss and wonder that is possible for you were you to let those disconnections be healed, those fragments become completions as they are wont to, and were to exist in silent awareness, to simply be, without all the noise of them. You do not know the feeling of being aware of your reason for just existing and the fullness of undiffracted clarity and purpose we planetmates exist in continuously. You do not know of this possibility of a plenitude of experience that would be possible to you in time, though a part of you does. For you express it in myths, telling you of this wonderful place, this Garden, this Eden, that once existed for you. Indeed, it did, at your very beginning for you and a very long time ago for you as a species. It did exist and so could again for you. But, because of your insanity and your fearful retreat into a dark cave of words, you do not know that and would, of course, fear that knowledge if you heard it.
Continue with The Great Reveal from the Planetmates, The Sixth Prasad — Ego as Opiate
Return to The Great Reveal from the Planetmates, The Fourth Prasad: Origins of Ego
To Read the Entire Book, of which this is an excerpt … on-line, free at this time … Go to The Great Reveal from The Planetmates
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Tags: aberration, accomplishment, awareness, benefit, blind, bookmarks, clarity, Communication, cover up, dim, direct, distracted, fear, fifth prasad, flaw, great reveal, imprison, interentity, interspecies, intraspecies, isolate, knowledge, lack, life, life energy, meaning, mental, minds, misconstrue, nonsensical, other beings, purpose, reality, reality perceptors, reason for being, reflective, repetitions, swirling, symbols, tagged, The Planetmates, What's Real, wondrous, word, wordism, your wordism
The Second Retreat from the Natural Self — Patriarchal Culture: One Gains the World in Exact Proportion to Which a Man Has Relinquished his Soul
Posted by sillymickel
Ritual Is the Attempt to Control Something Symbolically, Indirectly That One Has Split Off from and Is a Poor Substitute for the Real Potential of At-one-ment with Reality
It is this attempt to control something symbolically, indirectly that is the basis of ritual…. Ritual is a poor substitute for the real potential of identifying with and acting in accord with that reality…. The tragedy is that the indirect attempt pre-empts and thus makes impossible the true relationship and true accord, the at-one-ment, that could otherwise be.
Ritual and matriarchal religion are thus the “act-outs” of our repressed identification with Nature and not a reattunement with Nature as the Goddess-religion advocates would have it. From this perspective, then, ritual is not a way of tapping into a deeper relationship with feeling and Nature, it is an avoidance of real feeling, a running away from Nature, from one’s natural self, from the real, the authentic, the genuine self, from genuine action, from spontaneous and ever-creative being-in-the-world.
The Second Retreat: Patriarchal Culture
Now, patriarchal cultures, along with their patriarchal religions, follow a parallel but different pattern from the matriarchal ones, as discussed. Whereas matriarchal cultures are associated with agricultural lifeways and thus tied to the Earth and to sedentary living, Patriarchal cultures are said to be associated originally with nomadic lifestyles. I say nomadic, but I do not wish to confuse it with the nomadic ways of the forager and hunter-gatherer cultures. Early lifeways were nomadic in the sense of following the food source. They were not nomadic by choice.
However, the nomadic cultures, and the great patriarchies, evolved on the vast plains of Eurasia where the disconnection from the land involved in animal husbandry, in particular sheep herding, gave rise to nomadic warrior lifestyles and a conquering mentality. But there are other reasons why this sort of consciousness arose.
Parallel to the matriarchal cultures splitting off from true connection with Nature as Mother—that is, adopting agriculture and thus controlling, and alternately appeasing, the Nature which they at one time followed, patriarchal cultures entail a splitting off from oneself as Father, as Spirit, and a consequent need to act out and appease those energies. To understand this better, let us back up a little bit.
In hunter-gatherer cultures, we tend to have shamans as religious practitioners. These shamans can often journey in altered states of consciousness, can journey in the cosmos so to speak. Thus, although such people, as all of us, are ordinarily limited in time and space, they have a freedom of spirit — a spiritual freedom — quite unlike anything we know.
Corresponding to this, it is true that some hunter-gatherer societies focus a great deal more on their inner states and on altered realities — their much noted concern with dreams and their dream life is an example. The notable example of this is the Australian aboriginal culture. And this involves a democratization, if you will, of shamanic experience. Everyone dreams, many go on walkabouts, or as in the case of Native American cultures, on vision quests. Many other examples of profound spiritual journeying—often involving hallucinogens—could be given that are available to most if not all members of indigenous cultures.
However, patriarchal cultures tend to be hierarchical and specialized. This means that spiritual journeying is relegated to a select few, a specialized sect of priests. The vast majority of individuals in patriarchal cultures live onerous and oppressive lives that do not allow much in the way of spiritual journeying.
Is it any wonder then that these cultures are nomadic? The usual pattern is that when some inner potential is split off from and repressed—when one disidentifies with it—that one begins acting it out in the external world. So we find that the inner potential for spiritual journeying and growing is acted out in patriarchal cultures in the form of nomadic wandering. The direct relationship with Spirit, with Father, which characterizes the hunter-gatherer, is repressed in patriarchal cultures; and Spirit and Father are projected outside of oneself where one must now seek to enter into a relationship with It.
In later centuries, nomadic wandering became nomadic invading and conquering, and ultimately imperialism. In all of these an inner journey into the self is replaced by a desire to extend one’s ego boundaries outward over greater and greater expanses of territory. The amount of territory gathered outside is equivalent to the amount relinquished inside, for what one doesn’t know inside one fears. And what one fears, one wishes to control and subjugate. So the fears of inner forces motivate the expansion outward; one projects one’s inner “unknowns” onto the vast unknown outside oneself, in the physical world of land and people, of geography and society. “What does it profit a man to gain the world and lose his soul?” is instead: One gains the world in the exact proportion to that which a man has relinquished his soul. (See Enlightenment Lobotomies – White Color Slavery… in Culture War, Class War)
Thus, in patriarchal cultures there are religions which seek to relate to and appease gods which represent their forgotten and repressed inner potentials of fate, destiny, spiritual growth, and adventure—their inner “fire.” The fire or light that one has dimmed within is sought without; one cannot help but do so. Since one cuts oneself off from one’s core creative and authentic decision-making center one feels oneself in the hands of a whimsical fate that is outside of oneself . . . and that is called Father and God, and is that which one must seek to appease.
Summary, Ritual as Symbolic Obfuscation and Addiction to Control
So the pattern is the same in both matriarchal and patriarchal cultures. It is the same pattern of disidentifying with some inner potential, repressing it, being forced to act it out symbolically in the outside world, projecting it outside of oneself as an external force or power, and then seeking to enter into a symbolic relationship with it wherein one can hope to have some indirect control over it since one has lost one’s direct relationship with it. And the reason for doing all this, in either case, is the same: It is fear, mistrust of
the Universe, in either the Universe’s maternal or paternal aspects … or, of course, both.
The patriarchal person is fearful of the spiritual forces within him- or herself. Hence she or he disidentifies with them and projects them outside of him- or herself where they must be related to symbolically. The matriarchal person mistrusts the Natural world and disidentifies with It, and with the physical body which is a part of It, in an attempt to control It. In doing so, these natural forces are projected outside of oneself where they can then only be related to symbolically.
In either case, it is this attempt to control something symbolically, indirectly that is the basis of ritual. In both cases ritual is a poor substitute for the real potential of identifying with and acting in accord with that reality. And in each instance, the tragedy is that the indirect attempt pre-empts and thus makes impossible the true relationship and true accord, the at-one-ment, that could otherwise be.
Continue with Ritual As Shadow, Part Four: Ritual Is Hardly Transformation … In Actuality, We “Die” to Our Real Self and Are Remade Into Something Society Can Use
Return to Ritual As Shadow: Magic, Ritual, and Superstition Occur with the Beginnings of Ego and the Agrarian Desire to Control Nature — the Matriarchal Consciousness
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We Can’t Know What We Can’t Know but We Cannot Unknow What We Are: Our Reality Is Species Determined and the Relativity of Science
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Biologically Constituted Realities, Part Two: Our Reality Is Species Determined: Relativity of Science
Summary: What I’m saying in this part is that basically our sciences have shown they can not determine what is real, let alone measure it, because they are extensions of our senses which are themselves imperfect. So we cannot really know what is real. Further, we find that just as culture creates our reality for us, that prior to that our biology creates the reality upon which culture can build. This means that we are able to understand what is human reality at least, though not ultimate reality, by looking at the only reality that all humans share—our biological one.
We will see shortly that means that the way we come into the world—our conception, womb life, and birth—create the foundations upon which all are other perceptions are built, and these being unique to humans mean that humans will be the only species seeing the world exactly the way we do.
Further, while focusing on our biology as a basis for understanding what is fundamental about humanness, we are able to compare cultures in relation to that biology, though not in any other way. What we will see this means is that while we cannot compare cultures for the most part—this is called cultural relativity—we can compare them in terms of certain things all cultures share which have to do with the fact that all humans have the same kind of body and biological history: an example of that would be the way cultures deal with birth, specifically the pain of it.
“Ultimately our physics . . . is going to demonstrate that essentially there is no such thing as matter. All there is is mind and motion.” – Armand Labbe
Relativity of Science
But what of our science, one might ask, which can reputedly extend the range of our senses? Does it not provide accurate-enough “feedback” or “alternative”-enough perspectives to allow us a glimpse of what is , for truth, really real? Let us just look at what modern science tells us about the observations it makes on the world.
According to Zukav (1979), author of a widely read overview of the new physics, a major underpinning of modern physics is the realization and discovery that science cannot predict anything, as had been taken for granted, with absolute certainty. Relatedly, it informs us that there is simply no way to separate the observed event from the observer. That is to say that the observer is, her- or himself, an inexcludable variable and always affects the results of an experiment. In a very fundamental way, the perceiver influences what is seen in even the most “scientifically” pure observations and experiments: “The new physics . . . tells us clearly that it is not possible to observe reality without changing it” (Zukav, 1979, p. 30).
Zukav (1979) takes, as an example, that a condition is set up to perceive an event: If it is designed to find waves in light, it discovers waves; if it is designed to find particles, we get particles—in supposedly the same “outside world” . . . and regardless of the fact that logically light cannot be both a particle and a wave (pp. 30-31). That is the classic example, of course. The structure of the experiment, designed by the observer, determines what will be found.
What is this saying if not just what I have stated above: that we determine ultimately, because of our specific biology, what we sense; that we therein determine the “world” we experience.
In line with Anscombe’s (1958) terminology of “brute facts,” Searle (1969) claims a distinction between “brute facts” and “institutional facts.” D’Andrade (1984) explains,
Not all social-science variables refer to culturally created things; some variables refer to objects and events that exist prior to, and independent of, their definition: for example, a person’s age, the number of calories consumed during a meal, the number of chairs in a room, or the pain someone felt. (p. 92).
From what I have been saying, we can admit that these “brute facts” may not be culturally constituted as D’Andrade asserts, but they certainly are biologically constituted. They are species-specific facts—”brute” only in relation to our particular species.
Thus, the new-paradigm answer to the age-old philosophical question is clear: If a tree falls in the forest and there is no one there to hear it, does it make a sound? Absolutely not. Sound is as much species-relative as the practice of polygamy is culturally relative. In other words, there are species for which sound does not exist. Similarly, the event that we perceive as sound-tree-and-forest-interacting may be “perceived” as something quite different with different and/or more kinds of “senses” or, one might say, from a different vantage point.
Removing our anthropocentric blinders in this way we must conclude that the world, as experienced, is created of realities that are not only culturally constituted; there are also biologically constituted realities. The “brute facts” to which D’Andrade refers are—nothing brute about them—biologically determined facts. Indeed, there are biologically determined facts, bioculturally determined facts, and culturally determined facts—all existing on a continuum.
So do we then, indeed, create our own reality culturally, of which Sahlins (1976) writes. Yes, I believe we do. But I believe we do much more than that. I believe we create it biologically too—that our reality is species determined.
Relativity: Cultural and Biological
So what does this say about cultural relativity, of which so much is made in anthropological circles? I agree with Sahlins’s position on the total and symbolic nature of culture and the resulting extreme cultural relativism. As D’Andrade (1987) put it, Sahlins’s view is extreme enough that it undermines even science’s claim to validity (p. 5). But I do not imply by my agreement that I believe reality is only culturally determined by any definitional stretch of the term cultural that Sahlins, even from his “total heritage” perspective, could have had in mind. I intend to go further.
How so, then, could I claim, at the outset, that I believe both positions can be true? How can reality be so thoroughly “created” (not only culturally but biologically as well) and yet there be universal commonalities on which to base analyses and cross-cultural understanding? Where I disagree with Sahlins and emphatically agree with D’Andrade is where D’Andrade (1987), in referring to a quote from Sahlins, writes
I think I agree if . . . [he] . . . means that people respond to their interpretations of events, not the raw events themselves.
However, if this means that culture can interpret any event any way, and that therefore there is no possibility of establishing universal generalizations, I disagree. I believe that there are strong constraints on how much interpretative latitude can be given to biological and social events. While the letters “D,” “O,” “G,” can be given any interpretation, pain, death , and hunger have such powerful intrinsic negative properties that they can be interpreted as “good” things only with great effort and for short historical periods with many failed converts. ( emphases mine, p. 6)
With this statement of D’Andrade, I enthusiastically agree also. I believe that there are “intrinsic” (biological) determiners of cultures, which create a basic underlying structure. Where I feel I take issue with D’Andrade is in contending that these “intrinsic” determiners are intrinsic to the species, not to the events themselves. This is as important to point out as it is important in physics to keep in mind that particles and waves only exist in relation to an observer.
In this regard, as Armand Labbe (1991) put it at a Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness conference, “Ultimately our physics . . . is going to demonstrate that essentially there is no such thing as matter. All there is is mind and motion.” At any rate, I contend that this biological “infrastructure” results in biocultural, species-specific, and hence transcultural patterns of thought and behavior. Further, these transcultural patterns create transcultural patterns of social structure, “external culture,” sociocultural behavior, and so on.
Continue with We Are What We’ve Experienced and The Perinatal Paradigm: Our Conception, Gestation, and Birth Create Our Windows to the World
Return to Biologically Constituted Realities, Part One — Creating Worlds: Our Science, Too, Is Built on a Judeo-Christian Assumption of Humans Being “God’s Chosen Species.”
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The Fifth Prasad, of “The Great Reveal” by The Planetmates
Posted by sillymickel
The Fifth Prasad:
Your Wordism, e.g. – while actually an aberration, a flaw in your reality perceptors, causing you to never really
hear or understand each other, let alone other beings or forms of life energy – is touted as a supreme accomplishment!
Whereas, your minds — suffused and distracted with a non-stop stream of non-sensical repetitions of word symbols – imprison and isolate you in a world of swirling mental “bookmarks” of reality, tagged to, but only dimly reflective of What’s Real, and keeping you blind to the wondrous reality itself in which other beings live in clarity of purpose and life meaning, and with direct intra- and interspecies and inter-entity communication.
And this you misconstrue as a benefit in awareness, while actually it serves to cover up your lack of knowledge of your meaning or reason for being as well as the fear that abides with that
(to be continued)
What follows is a video of a reading of The Fifth Prasad, with commentary, elaboration, and context, by SillyMickel Adzema.
Posted in Anthropology, authenticity, being yourself, Birth, Child Abuse, Consciousness, Environmentalism, Evolution, God, individualism, life, meaning, Metaphysics, Mystical, nonconform, Philosophy, Primal Spirit, Primal Spirituality, Psychology, Religion, Spirituality, uniqueness
Tags: aberration, accomplishment, awareness, benefit, blind, bookmarks, clarity, Communication, cover up, dim, direct, distracted, fear, fifth prasad, flaw, great reveal, imprison, interentity, interspecies, intraspecies, isolate, knowledge, lack, life, life energy, meaning, mental, minds, misconstrue, nonsensical, other beings, purpose, reality, reality perceptors, reason for being, reflective, repetitions, swirling, symbols, tagged, The Planetmates, What's Real, wondrous, word, wordism, your wordism