115

European Holocaust had roots in Africa, now Namibia is suing Germany

Without understanding what happened to the Herero and Nama people, it is impossible to understand what occurred right before and during World War II

Andre Vltchek

In 2014, after I published my report about Namibia, exposing the German ‘semi-denial’ that it had committed a Holocaust in its former Southwest African colony; a renowned German university sent me a letter. I paraphrase here, but the essence of the letter is kept intact:

Dear Professor Vltchek, we are impressed by your research and your conclusions, and we would like to translate and publish your groundbreaking analyses in German language. Unfortunately, we cannot afford any payment…”

It was one of the major universities in the country, with tremendous budgets and an international reputation.

I replied, asking why, with all those scholars and academics, with PhDs and experts, they had never sent a team of experts to Namibia, to investigate one of the most horrid crimes committed in the 20th Century? I wanted to know, why they would suddenly want to rely on the work of a foreigner, an outsider, an internationalist who refuses to call himself an academic (for me it is now a totally discredited term)? Murdering the Herero and Nama people in Southwest Africa by Germans was, after all, the key for comprehending what happened several decades later, in Europe itself, during the Holocaust that Germany went on to commit against the Jewish and Roma people.

The university never replied. I suppose they sensed that I was ‘dragging them’ into some extremely dangerous waters. They did not want to ‘be there’; they preferred the safe, calm waters, where some foreign left-wing intellectual writes something, they translate and publish it, putting a disclaimer that this doesn’t necessarily reflects the position of their respected journal and the university. As far as they were concerned, taboos should remain taboos, and the dunes of Namibia should be stirred just a little bit, for a limited intellectual discussion only. No storm, please!

*

It doesn’t take rocket science to discover what I did in Namibia. There, I met common people, in slums and universities. I met UN experts and Namibian government officials. I undusted various archive documents. I consulted scholars in neighboring South Africa.

In Africa, Namibian history is no secret. Nothing is taboo. This is what is common knowledge in Windhoek or in Cape Town in neighboring South Africa:

The Germans drove into the desert, and then exterminated, over 80% of the entire nation – the Herero. The Nama people lost around 50% of its population. The concentration and extermination camps were built; monstrous medical experiments on human beings were perpetrated. German ‘doctors’including those who were working on ‘the pure race doctrine’ in Namibia (the doctrine later used by the Nazis in Europe), subsequently ‘educated’ many German racist physicians, including the notorious ‘Angel of Death’ – Mengele. The most notorious doctor, who experimented on human beings in Africa, was Eugen Fischer.

Not surprisingly, the first German governor of the colony was the father of Hitler’s deputy, Herman Goering.

The holocaust in Africa is directly connected to the holocaust in Europe.

Almost the official, and a thousand times repeated lie related to the birth of German Nazism, a lie that is even taught in many European schools, would easily collapse like a house of cards if Namibian history were to get closely examined. The lie, in different variations, sounds like this:

Germany, deeply humiliated after WWI, facing terrible economic crises, suddenly went amok, got radicalized and ended up bringing extreme-right nationalist bigots to power.”

Do you recall the official Western line about a ‘peaceful Germany, a land of scholars and philosophers; a nation which shocked itself and the world, by suddenly turning to extreme violence and mass murder, abandoning its noble traditions?’ Such reasoning would stand only if the Others (non-white, non-Europeans), were not considered as human beings.

The Namibian holocaust (but also to some extent, the mass murder that Germany committed against the people of today’s Tanzania) shows that Germany clearly has a history of genocidal behavior, and that it committed, in the 1930’s and 1940’s, on its own continent, precisely what it had been doing much earlier, in Africa.

Obviously, all that was not just about Nazism (there were no Nazis yet, during the holocaust in Africa), but about the entire culture and mindset of the German people.

Fortunately, the silence has not been complete. Two monstrous events have been compared and linked together. Sporadically, the truth about the Namibian horror past has been appearing, even in the mainstream press.

On 21 October 2012, the Canadian daily newspaper, The Globe and Mail, reported:

In the bush and scrub of central Namibia, the descendants of the surviving Herero live in squalid shacks and tiny plots of land. Next door, the descendants of German settlers still own vast properties of 20,000 hectares or more. It’s a contrast that infuriates many Herero, fuelling a new radicalism here.

Every year the Herero hold solemn ceremonies to remember the first genocide of history’s bloodiest century, when German troops drove them into the desert to die, annihilating 80 percent of their population through starvation, thirst, and slave labor in concentration camps. The Nama, a smaller ethnic group, lost half of their population from the same persecution.

New research suggests that the German racial genocide in Namibia from 1904 to 1908 was a significant influence on the Nazis in the Second World War. Many of the key elements of Nazi ideology – from racial science and eugenics, to the theory of Lebensraum (creating ‘living space’ through colonization) – were promoted by German military veterans and scientists who had begun their careers in South-West Africa, now Namibia, during the genocide…”

In Windhoek, the capital of Namibia, a European expert working for the UN, a friend of mine, spoke to me, like almost everyone there, passionately, but without daring to reveal her name:

The first concentration camps on earth were built in this part of Africa… They were built by the British Empire in South Africa and by Germans here, in Namibia. Shark Island on the coast was the first concentration camp in Namibia, used to murder the Nama people, but now it is just a tourist destination – you would never guess that there were people exterminated there. Here in the center of Windhoek, there was another extermination camp…”

Acknowledging its crimes against the Jews (but not always against the Roma people), Germany maintains as monuments, all former concentration camps, including Buchenwald and Dachau. But there is absolutely nothing it does to honor the memory of its victims in other parts of the world, particularly Africa.

Racism is one of the essential characteristics of Nazism. Isn’t it a clear expression of racism to treat the victims of the same crime differently, simply because of the color of their skin?

*

Now the Namibian people are suing Germany in a court in New York City.

It appears they have had enough. Enough of waiting, of humiliation. For years there has been no compensation to the families of the victims, and no serious compensation to the nation.

For years, the Namibian government has been negotiating at least for the return of all skulls of the local people, which were used in German laboratories and by German scientists to prove the superiority of the white race, as well as ‘sub-humanness’ of other races, including the blacks. German colonialists decapitated countless Herero and Nama people, and at least 300 heads were transported to German laboratories for ‘scientific research’. Many were later ‘discovered’ in the Medical History Museum of the Charite hospital in Berlin, and at Freiburg University.

Insults were added to injury. Until now, the German settlers enjoy a repulsively lavish lifestyle on land that was stolen from the Herero and Nama people. Many descendants of the victims of the Southwest African holocaust are now living in overcrowded slums.

German and other Central European tourists are ‘in love with Namibia’; for its dunes, spectacular and pristine coast, as well as for the white German enclaves. I asked several of them about the past. Most of them did not know and seemed not to be interested to learn.

But the world may ‘discover’ the Namibian past, very soon, as Western imperialism is crumbling and oppressed people are rising to their feet.

Demands for compensation and acknowledgements of the horrific colonialist past are now flowing from Pakistan, India and other countries that were devastated by European racism and imperialism. The Namibian case may set the entire planet into motion, as it is almost the entire world that had been devastated by European colonialism.

The US courts may not resolve much, but what is happening there is symbolic, and just a beginning.

AFP reported on July 31st:

US District Judge Laura Taylor Swain presided over the one-hour hearing in a New York federal court but concluded the session by saying that she would not rule immediately. She also did not set a date for a decision.

The German government wants the lawsuit thrown out on the grounds of state immunity from prosecution. The Herero and Nama groups are seeking reparations for the genocide of their peoples under German colonial rule…

The Herero and Nama people brought the class-action lawsuit last year, seeking reparations over the tens of thousands killed in the massacres.”

There will be no easy victory for the Herero and Nama people. They have no lobby in the United States, and even back in Namibia, they are poor. They own no international media, no international banks or corporations.

But they are right in demanding justice!

The renowned Canadian international lawyer, Christopher Black, declared for this essay:

The European colonial powers imposed their dominance over other peoples through war and terror and committed violence on a vast scale. Their actions constitute the war crime of aggression and crimes against humanity, murder assault and slavery. Many of those nations are still trying to escape and recover from the occupation and destruction imposed on them and should be compensated by those colonial powers for the damage done. Meaningless apologies are not enough. There is legal precedent for the requirement that the colonial powers pay reparations to those peoples as Germany had to do regarding its genocide against the Jews. The determination of the amount and in what form it should be paid would be a contentious issue but the victims of colonialism have a moral and legal right to compensation for the crimes committed against them and the lasting damage done.”

Percentage-wise, the Herero and Nama nations lost more people than any other race, nation or ethnic group, during the entire 20th Century.

Without understanding what they suffered, what was done to them, there is no way to understand what took place right before and during World War II.

The entire anti-imperialist world has a clear obligation to support the cause of the Herero and Nama people in their quest for justice. Enough of ‘broken links’ and outright lies. Justice has to be the same for all. Nations that were, or are victims of Western genocides, massacres and colonialist plunder, should unite and declare loudly and clearly: “Never again!”

Originally published by NEO – New Eastern Outlook
Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He has covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. Three of his latest books are Revolutionary Optimism, Western Nihilism, a revolutionary novel “Aurora” and a bestselling work of political non-fiction: “Exposing Lies Of The Empire”. View his other books here. Watch Rwanda Gambit, his groundbreaking documentary about Rwanda and DRCongo and his film/dialogue with Noam Chomsky “On Western Terrorism”. Vltchek presently resides in East Asia and the Middle East, and continues to work around the world. He can be reached through his website and his Twitter.

SUPPORT OFFGUARDIAN

If you enjoy OffG's content, please help us make our monthly fund-raising goal and keep the site alive.

For other ways to donate, including direct-transfer bank details click HERE.

0 0 votes
Article Rating
Subscribe
Notify of
guest

115 Comments
newest
oldest most voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
WeatherEye
WeatherEye
Sep 19, 2018 2:53 PM

The Namibia genocide is part of a general phenomena of European colonialism whose foundation was the holocaust of 100m native Americans. Lebenstraum was the same reasoning as the English colonists for their growing population back home. Hitler himself took cue from “the nordics of North America”, and his ravings sound eerily similar to those of Theodore Roosevelt concerning the native unterminsch.

BigB
BigB
Aug 29, 2018 12:04 PM

As an afterthought, for those who advocate the West v East schema inherent in Andre’s thought: if an idea can be judged by its publishers relationship with hedge funds …it is worth checking out the authorship of the BRIC concept itself (the ‘S’ was added later).

Jim O’Neill was Chairman of the asset management division of the most rapacious hedge fund/asset managers Goldman $uchs, when he came up with the BRIC strategy in to re-invigorate neoliberal globalisation 2001. Since then, he has been a Tory minister (for Cameron and ‘Private Dancer’ May (check out her wooden moves in coverage of her Africa trip!)); has become a Life Peer (Baron O’Neill of Gatley); and, as of recently, is Chairman of Chatham House.

In 2010, he was named chairman of Goldman Sachs’s Division of Asset Management, a newly created position in which O’Neill managed over $800 billion in assets by “leverag[ing]” his “global perspective on world markets

{Source: CIA-ipedia}

Western imperialism v BRICS ‘Eastern’ anti-imperialism: can anyone smell a rat? Organically emerging anti-imperialism or highly leveraged ‘rock-star’ capitalist brand-development marketing ploy?

“In order for globalisation to advance, it had to be accepted by more people … but not by imposing the dominant American social and philosophical beliefs and structures.”

‘Anti-imperial’ multi-millionaire Baron O’Neill.

https://www.ft.com/content/112ca932-00ab-11df-ae8d-00144feabdc0

His marketing strategy is very effective and persuasive, wouldn’t you say?

George cornell
George cornell
Aug 29, 2018 12:13 PM
Reply to  BigB

Yes, indeed!

Norman Pilon
Norman Pilon
Aug 29, 2018 5:28 PM
Reply to  BigB

And then, oh, I don’t know, but I sense that reading something like this should make the anti-imperialist wishful thinkers sit up and take notice:

China’s Yuan Just Joined An Elite Club Of International Monetary Fund Reserve Currencies

China’s yuan joins the International Monetary Fund’s basket of reserve currencies on Saturday in a milestone for the government’s campaign for recognition as a global economic power.

The yuan joins the U.S. dollar, the euro, the yen and British pound in the IMF’s special drawing rights (SDR) basket, which determines currencies that countries can receive as part of IMF loans. It marks the first time a new currency has been added since the euro was launched in 1999.The IMF is adding the yuan, also known as the renminbi, or “people’s money”, on the same day that the Communist Party celebrates the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.

“The inclusion into the SDR is a milestone in the internationalization of the renminbi, and is an affirmation of the success of China’s economic development and results of the reform and opening up of the financial sector,” the People’s Bank of China said in a statement.

Old ‘fake news?’ I mean the publisher of the article is, after all, ‘FORTUNE.’

On the other hand, China is communist, and so maybe this is just a very clever move by these communists to ‘infiltrate’ the institutions of capitalist globalization, so as in the end to derail them. Keep your friends close and your enemies closer, I guess.

Norman Pilon
Norman Pilon
Aug 29, 2018 5:32 PM
Reply to  Norman Pilon

P.S. Everything from “China’s yuan joins the International Monetary Fund’s . . .” to “. . .the People’s Bank of China said in a statement,” is being quoted.

BigB
BigB
Aug 30, 2018 3:11 PM
Reply to  Norman Pilon

Zhou Xiaochuan’s drive to get the yuan into the SDR basket is intriguing: not least that it destroys any anti-imperialist pretensions. To become accepted: the PBOC had to ‘internationalise’ and ‘liberalise’ the currency: Lagarde said “Jump!”; China answered “How high?” So why would ‘communist’ China jump through hoops to become part of the IMF reserve basket? The SDR is effectively a ‘dead reserve’: largely inactive since the 70s. That’s a lot of trouble to go to (and a lot of sovereignty to give up) if you do not later plan to commercialise the SDR as a liquid reserve alternative to the dollar: which was exactly the plan Zhou Xiaochuan revealed at the G-20 in 2009 …to create a “super-sovereign” reserve. A super-sovereign reserve: wouldn’t that make the IMF a centralised lender of last resort? The central bank’s central bank? And who controls the IMF?

This fellow has long seemed quite keen on the idea too:

On SDR lending: notice how he (Freudianly) let’s slip “Ve’ve done it: weissued 250bn …”

A singlepoint reserve administered by the IMF; where the US has a 15% voting veto; where there are no books or public records – or any transparency at all; where all officials are supra-sovereign and diplomatically immune; and the scions of this man are pulling the strings of humanities future? Is this the ‘global governance’ architecture that ‘communist’ China is building to oppose the ‘West’?

Edwige
Edwige
Aug 27, 2018 4:47 PM

Two small nuggets from British rule in southern Africa:

1) Kipling’s ‘If’ was written about Jameson of the false flag Jameson Raid 1895/6.
2) The opening lines of ‘I am the Walrus’ bear a striking resemblance to the song ‘Marching to Pretoria’. (The line “see how they run likes pigs from a gun” also makes sense as a pun of Boers/boars/pigs).

Here’s a skeleton from the French colonial closet:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voulet%E2%80%93Chanoine_Mission

Norman Pilon
Norman Pilon
Aug 27, 2018 11:45 AM

“Nations that were, or are victims of Western genocides, massacres and colonialist plunder, should unite and declare loudly and clearly: “Never again!””

There are no nations, Andre. There is no “West” and “East” and “Third World.”

There are networks of organized elites who declare everything within parts of the regions they control to be “their” nation or national home base, regarding everything within the geographic boundaries of the territories they control to be “their own,” regardless of whether the territories lie within their so-called “nation’s” boundaries or extend to the colonial territories under their imperial administrative control, although today the colonial side of the equation isn’t so blatant as only recently it was, but hidden behind a facade of ‘international trade deals’ between ostensibly independent “nations.”

It’s not anything peculiar about the “West” in general that sets it against the “East” in general, or the “West” in general against the Third World in general, but very specifically has everything to do with the rule and era of expansionary and predatory capital set against ordinary people everywhere.

All genocides were organized and perpetrated — as they still are — by predatory ruling classes, who would have perpetrated their crimes whether motivated by racist sentiments or otherwise, although being racist helped and helps to “rationalize” the slaughters when “they need to happen,” to make them more palatable to those committing them, as it still does.

In fact, racism or a sense of “cultural superiority” does not precede colonial expansion as a motive propelling the imperial project of subjugation, but actually derives from it. There is first the quest for profit and the power and prestige that derives from that, and only subsequently does the psychology of “otherness” begin to congeal from a need to justify to oneself one’s inhuman actions, thence the attitude of racist superiority, which dehumanizes the “other,” and which of course in due time calls forth from the subjugated “other” a sense of his or her own racial inferiority, given the social reality of his or her subjugation and oppression.

To suggest that there are and were such things as “Western genocides,” is to indiscriminately accuse all those who reside in the geographic “West,” or who rather reside in the countries whose rulers are part of the predatory alliance designated as the “West,” as somehow being complicit in those genocides. Furthermore, such a simplistic schema ignores the complicity of compradors in the genocide, massacres and plunder of their own “national brethren” (Kagame and Co. in Rwanda comes to mind, as but a single instance among many others, and a perfect example of how the “history” that is written by the “victors” is virtually always a complete inversion of actual events). The truth is, however, that the overwhelming majority of so-called “Westerners” are not in the least responsible for the crimes of the mafias who also hold them in thrall.

So, no, its not that the “nations” that were, or are, victims of “Western” genocides, massacres and colonial plunder, should unite and declare loudly and clearly, “Never again!” and thus resolutely set themselves steadfastly against the “Western nations,” against the ever present and ubiquitous “Western menace,” as if everyone in the so-called “West” was possessed of an essential “national” proclivity for mass-murder, but rather, that ordinary people EVERYWHERE should break with their murderous elites, who rule the “West” every bit as much as the “East” and the “Third World.”

Otherwise, we will all remain trapped in the paradigm of what Jean-Paul Sartre aptly called Other-Thought.

Let us indeed support the cause of the Herero and Nama people in their quest for justice, but let us also move ourselves beyond the divisive and simplistic narrative of “Western imperialism,” when the reality is that there is nothing essentially “Western” about the imperialism, but that it is the imperialism that is implicit in the pursuits of capital, which now has roots in every corner of the globe, and is espoused by all “nations,” that is to say, as I understand that term, as it was understood by Rosa Luxemburg.

Finally, a niggling question: in being compensated, will the benefit accrue to ordinary Hereros and Namas, or will most of the compensation fall into the hands of a congress of opportunistic business elites (in the way, for example, that compensation for victims of the Holocaust, literally in the billions, as noted by Norman Finkelstein, benefited an “industry” rather more than any actual victims and their survivors)?

Maggie
Maggie
Aug 27, 2018 12:54 PM
Reply to  Norman Pilon

Excellent post Norman.
If only people like you and Harry Stottle were our National Educators, I would feel far more confident about my Grandchildren’s future.
The ‘Never Again’ is beginning to grow throughout the world, thanks to the internet.. That is why those who are in control are so desperate to restrict the information being shared.

Jen
Jen
Aug 27, 2018 1:01 PM
Reply to  Norman Pilon

Vltchek’s article seems to be using two definitions of “nation”: one definition being the usual one of “nation” as sovereign state with clearly defined borders and institutions labelled with the name of the “nation”; and another definition of “nation” in the sense that is understood when people speak of First Nations, as in communities or linked groups of people who share a language or speak related dialects, and who also might share belief systems, kinship systems or culture or cultural elements in common. Until Vltchek explains what he means when he talks of “nation” or “nations’, we can’t presume that he is always referring to Namibia or any other country or set of countries when he could be referring to an ethnic group or a group of related peoples.

The lawsuit in New York appears to be a class action filed by the leaders of organisations representing the Nama and Herero peoples seeking reparations and the right to representation in talks between Germany and the Namibian government.

https://www.namibian.com.na/174508/archive-read/Herero-Nama-amend-genocide-lawsuit

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-38530594

While genocides in different countries may be carried out by groups plundering or seeking to exterminate their brothers and sisters, the fact that such genocides often benefit outside agents which turn out to be either the US, the EU or a former European colonial power, and that the roots of the genocides may lie in the “divide and rule” strategies that the colonial power used to keep the groups apart – as France may have done with the Tutsis and Hutus in the territories that later became Rwanda and Burundi – can still justify the use of the term “Western” to describe genocides or other forms of exploitation, depending on the context in which these occur. But you would have to fully understand that context to appreciate the justification.

BigB
BigB
Aug 27, 2018 3:30 PM
Reply to  Jen

If you read the article again, in the light of Norm’s comment, you may see it as infused with its own subtle subliminal racism?

Take these key linking passages:

Acknowledging its crimes against the Jews (but not always against the Roma people), Germany maintains as monuments, all former concentration camps, including Buchenwald and Dachau. But there is absolutely nothing it does to honor the memory of its victims in other parts of the world, particularly Africa.

Racism is one of the essential characteristics of Nazism. Isn’t it a clear expression of racism to treat the victims of the same crime differently, simply because of the color of their skin?

He links racism as an essential of Nazism: and racism as treating victims differentially: having already established the differential treatment of victims. Ergo ‘Germany’ (a metonym for the Germans) is racist and Nazi – follows as a subtly inferred conclusion.

After the second break (*) he drifts in a few more examples to subconsciously make a point (he may not have even realised he was making?). Particularly:

German and other Central European tourists are ‘in love with Namibia’; for its dunes, spectacular and pristine coast, as well as for the white German enclaves. I asked several of them about the past. Most of them did not know and seemed not to be interested to learn.

Were they not interested, or did they just wonder who was this strange bloke who wants to bother us on holiday? He does not say. What difference do these anecdotal meetings make to the article: if not to infer that the reported indifference was motivated by continuing racism? None.

The fabrication of an imperial v anti-imperial bloc is obscurantist and denies the existence of a transnational elite who are neither. Norm’s on the money as far as I am concerned.

Jen
Jen
Aug 28, 2018 12:03 AM
Reply to  BigB

True, Vltchek says racism is essential to Nazism but where does he say that Nazism is essential to racism?

I live in a country that was once notorious for having an official government policy of selecting immigrants according to their race (the White Australia policy) and for its appalling treatment of indigenous non-white people and kidnapped Pacific Islanders forced to work on sugar plantations here – but I would not say the country ever embraced Nazism or elements of Nazi belief.

As for the German and other European tourists, they seem like Japanese tourists unfortunate enough to come to Australia and who are asked questions about their history and the nature of Japan’s involvement in World War II. They know nothing because they’re not taught that history or are given a whitewashed version of it at school and university (if they choose to study history).

Norman Pilon
Norman Pilon
Aug 27, 2018 4:45 PM
Reply to  Jen

So, if I understand you correctly, the brothers and sisters in the so-called East or the Third World who have or might ever set upon their brothers and sisters would never have done so, or in the future do so, but for the conniving influences of Westerner imperialists?

Among Eastern capitalists, the thought of branching out their businesses around the globe, would never occur to them, and such expansion would never bring them into conflict with other national capitalist factions, whether in the West or the East or the South? The kinds of conflicts potentially involving armies and navies and air forces?

Because unlike the West, there is nothing about their capitalism that could be described as predatory and imperialistic?

So the problem isn’t profit seeking, but something to do with a cultural zeitgeist or something like that?

Someone recommended Dan Glazebrook to me only a day or so ago, and I stumbled upon something he recently wrote:

If Russia is helping Trump’s blockade of Iran, it better watch China

I don’t know, but the tittle suggests to me that what is in play, here, isn’t “Western” imperialism so much as the imperial designs of various oligarchic factions, whose bases of operations happen to be in Russia and China and the U.S., and who all have potentially conflicting appetites for the lucre that may be generated from gaining special access to or control over something the Iranian establishment has, namely, oil.

And then when you get into the article, it’s not just Russia, China, Iran and the U.S. that are part of the conflicting action, but Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and Algeria.

There’s something, here, about markets and the need for their domination, because without markets, you can’t make money, and making money is a capitalistic game, and capitalism cannot limit itself to one national jurisdiction if it sees opportunity on the other side of the border, and the next thing you know, not only must Russia watch out for the West, but for its Eastern brothers and sisters in Iran and China, whom all of a sudden it’s trying hard to out maneuver in the ‘world market.’

But lets not talk about Russian and Chinese and Iranian imperialism. It doesn’t exist. For these ‘nations’ only subscribe to a benign form of capitalism, and they keep their business undertakings at home.

The issue is only and always “Western” imperialism. Get rid of that, and capitalism will really come into its own in the East and deliver on its promises by, I presume, magically transforming itself into the ‘socialism’ that it already is.

You write:

“Until Vltchek explains what he means when he talks of “nation” or “nations’, we can’t presume that he is always referring to Namibia or any other country or set of countries when he could be referring to an ethnic group or a group of related peoples.”

So a group of people related to one another on the bases of a host of factors, like ethnicity, language, culture, and so on, can be designated a ‘nation.’ But what does that really entail?

Does it tell us anything about the nature or quality of the social relations that exist between these individuals who comprise a nation in this sense?

Can ‘nations’ so designated not be internally fragmented and, therefore, in the ways that matter most, be anything but truly cohering societies?

Can a group of people who are ethnically alike in every aspect imaginable not be members of a class society, and thus be fundamentally at odds with one another?

And if they live in such a society, where an elite exploits and oppresses an underclass otherwise identical to themsleves in ethnic terms, do we not have a unity that in reality is a vacuous superficiality?

“In a class society,” Luxemburg writes, ” “the nation” as a homogeneous socio-political entity does not exist. Rather, there exist within each nation, classes with antagonistic interests and “rights.”

Consequently, just how important is ethnicity, unless it becomes an identifier marking you for extermination, or a chauvinistic tool used to inculcate people with a sense of fundamental separateness and difference from all other people who bear different ethnic characteristics, to foster a sham sense of “national unity” in a “nation” fragmented along class lines?

If Vltcheck isn’t seeing the world through the lens “essentialized” differences, why insist on “Western” imperialism, and implore the victims of that particular species of imperialism to unite, not against the imperialism that is the inner essence of capitalism, regardless of its ‘national’ brand, but very specifically against only “Western” imperialism, which presumably is inscribed in “Western” culture and, consequently, in the psyche of all Western individuals?

Jen
Jen
Aug 27, 2018 11:47 PM
Reply to  Norman Pilon

1) Unfortunately we live in a world where all societies have been interconnected since the mid-1800s. So all continents bear the imprint – psychological as well as physical – of what originally was a colonial / imperial structure (with its own ideology and economy) of European / Christian origin. The result is that (to take one example) Japanese imperialism has been as predatory as its European and American counterparts, and often more so, in East and SE Asia. This applies as much now as it did back in the 1930s – 40s.

The problem may very well be a cultural zeitgeist inherent in a particular ideology of or about capitalism that was selected and promoted by the countries where capitalism and industrialisation first developed, in a way similar to how Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution was seized upon by others to develop Social Darwinism which they then used to justify and bolster the European (later Western, when it had spread to North America and Japan) colonial / imperial project. Capitalist ideology need not have developed the way it has, if it had not been connected to colonialism by past political establishments in Britain, France and other countries competing for power and influence.

On a more prosaic level, the governments that dominate in many if not most Third World countries may very well be de facto lackey colonial governments in thrall to Washington, London, Paris or some other faraway power centre. The example of Colonel Gadhafi in Libya, for all his eccentricities, in trying to forge an independent path for Libya and Africa generally serves as a warning to other African nations (and beyond) as to what will happen to them if they try the same.

2) ‘… Percentage-wise, the Herero and Nama nations lost more people than any other race, nation or ethnic group, during the entire 20th Century …’

Vltchek appears to be using the word “nation” in the sense that indigenous groups in North America and other parts of the world use it to describe themselves. The word as it is now being used may no longer necessarily strictly imply that these groups possess all or most of the social and hierarchical constructs that Rosa Luxemburg refers to. If indigenous peoples decide to call themselves “nations”, rather than ethnic groups or tribes, the word is clearly beyond any one person’s ability to control its definition.

binra
binra
Aug 28, 2018 5:37 PM
Reply to  Jen

History tends to be told as if nothing else could have happened. Perhaps as part of the idea that nothing else could be happening and thus a passive acquiescence to the current narrative presumptions and assertions.

I recommend an enjoyable and informative book called ‘Lies my teacher told me’ by James W. Loewen. Not just because it expands and corrects the record in selected events but as a general insight into the way and the why of its distortion.

Adam Smith coined the ‘Invisible hand’ of an alignment of mutual self interest – but it no less applies to the alignment of corrupted self interest operating underneath the presentation – for the most part.

Corruption of true currency is an adulteration with the false. I am not meaning to use corruption as a pejorative so much as a blind and blinding condition of ignorance and arrogance to be corrected. Moral integrity is given witness by its fruits – not in the ability to act like we have some as a result of joining in accusations and vilifications of the sins of others.

Before history was what is called mythology. Though the gods have ‘departed’ and could not be believed or imagined by the perspective that then developed – even a few generations after, the archetypal patterns remain the same.
History also remains a mythological construct by which to predicate identity from which to develop cultural expression.

I read recently that the Aztec sacrificed captives (of wars waged in part to obtain them) – and performed specific surgical procedures to body parts, under the conviction that they were fending off the catastrophic end of an Epoch. At Just one event they ritually killed 80,000 people.
Fending off the End of the World or saving the world is of course the survival dictate writ LARGE. All else is subordinated. While no thing persists in a realm of change, an investment in possession and power becomes its own ‘world’ that of course also changes – but around and upon the idea of power, possessed and dispossessed.

Of course there is the idea that all power is of God and the wish to have it for our self and believe it, became the sin that generates subjection to a world of sin – or corrupted self and power running in place of true. But that became a stick to beat people with instead of a quality of being in which to truly recognize ourself and each other. Everything that comes into a world of form based reality becomes weaponised or marketized. But of course what we each choose as our purpose is our own.

BigB
BigB
Aug 28, 2018 1:03 AM
Reply to  Norman Pilon

There’s every reason to conceptualise a transnational superclass as the main tributary benefactors of imperialism. Lakshmi Mittal and Carlos Slim aren’t Western. Most of the transnational capital flows are unregulated and are routed through secrecy jurisdictions “offshore”. The greatest source of FDI into India comes from imperial Mauritius. Analysis by nation state or hemisphere (North; South; East; West) misses much of the transnational character of modern capital flows.

There’s also every reason to conceptualise a neoliberal World System, as did Samir Amin. Below the Trilateral imperialist core, the BRICS form a semi-periphery of sub-imperial regional agents. Turkey, Iran and possibly Australia would also fit the semi-periphery. Below would be the peripheral neo-colonies and full dependencies.

http://roape.net/2018/04/18/towards-a-broader-theory-of-imperialism/

Other than media chatter and misguided internet memes, I can find nothing to support the idea that there is an “Eastern” anti-imperial bloc emerging. To the contrary, every BRICS Declaration is a tributary genuflect to the neoliberal Washington Consensus and its instruments of ‘global governance’ …which is the exact phrase the BRICS use. They used to express fealty to ‘economic’ global governance, but they dropped that for 2018. An anti-imperial bloc expressing allegiance to global governance under the IMF and WTO? Right.

Ten minutes of research destroys any idea of an Eastern resistance: it is a figure of a fanciful imagination. For instance the BRICS Contingency Reserve Arrangements requires an IMF Structural Adjustment Policy for loans over 30% of quota. The AIIB has nine co-investments with the World Bank. Both the AIIB, CRA and NDB lend in $$$$$!

The alternative to “Western” imperialism appears to be Western imperialism!

Norman Pilon
Norman Pilon
Aug 28, 2018 1:25 AM
Reply to  BigB

Thank you for that link. Bookmarked for reading, either later this evening or tomorrow morning.

BigB
BigB
Aug 28, 2018 10:54 AM
Reply to  Norman Pilon

I should have made clear I was talking of the BRICS elite. There is plenty of resistance to globalism, North and South. Our recent discussion of Iran, or Colin Todhunter’s articles about India, for instance. The term is “BRICS from below” for authentic anti-capitalist resistance. The elite want global governance with a centralised commercialised SDR to replace the dollar.
A further layer is the link up of global cities under a global Parliament of Mayors (like Sadiq Khan). These become concentrated hyper-capitalist cancers causing enforced pauperisation and unequal development. Not to mention the ecological drain on resources caused by urbanisation. Or the social dehumanisation and degradation. Or pollution.

All people everywhere should join in solidarity to resist the globalised death of human scale community by linking with our comrades in the South: not cheering on our globalised oppression. In the light of this, comrade Vltchek’s Marxist-lyte crypto-capitalism is not only disingenuous, it’s dangerous. He should stick to travel writing and chronicling the global effects of cannibalistic capitalism: at which he excells.

Norman Pilon
Norman Pilon
Aug 28, 2018 3:07 PM
Reply to  BigB

“In the light of this, comrade Vltchek’s Marxist-lyte crypto-capitalism is not only disingenuous, it’s dangerous. He should stick to travel writing and chronicling the global effects of cannibalistic capitalism: at which he excells.”

Yes.

Norman Pilon
Norman Pilon
Aug 28, 2018 5:02 AM
Reply to  BigB

Um, yeah:

Quote begins:

“To take the example of Mozambique, Carlos Castel-Branco shows how its rulers aimed for “maximisation of inflows of foreign capital – FDI or commercial loans – without political conditionality” (much of which came from the BRICS as well as Portugal) [Norm’s emphasis] in a super-exploitative context: “the reproduction of a labour system in which the workforce is remunerated at below its social cost of subsistence and families have to bear the responsibility for maintaining (especially feeding) the wage-earning workers by complementing their wages,” a common phenomenon across the continent.

While there may occasionally be an exception,[19] consider a few of the most egregious examples involving the BRICS:

Brazil’s major subimperial construction firm Odebrecht admitted paying bribes of $51 million to officials in Angola and Mozambique (but the actual amounts are likely to be much higher), and both Odebrecht and the world’s second-largest mining company, Rio-based Vale, have faced regular protests over mass displacement at construction projects and coal-mining operations in Tete, Mozambique, as has the Brazilian government (dating to Workers Party rule) over its ProSavana corporate-agriculture land-grab.[20]

Russia’s Rosatom nuclear reactor deals across Africa – in South Africa, Egypt, Ghana, Nigeria and Zambia – are increasingly dubious, especially after the only country with an existing nuclear reactor, South Africa, witnessed an intense debate due in part to widespread corruption at the implementing agency (Eskom). As a result of growing fiscal crisis, the Rosatom deal appears to have fallen away.

Indian companies in Africa have been especially exploitative, led by Vedanta chief executive Anil Agarwal – caught bragging to investors of having bought the continent’s largest copper mine for just $25 million after fibbing to Zambian president Levy Mwanawasa and each year returning $500 million to $1 billion in revenues. ArcelorMittal’s Lakshmi Mittal’s major African steel operation, South Africa’s former state-owned ISCOR, was accused by even Pretoria’s trade minister of milking the operations. Jindal’s super-exploitative arrangements in Mozambique and South Africa are regularly criticised. But the most egregious state and private sector mode of accumulation by Indian capital in Africa must be the combination of the Gupta brothers and (state-owned) Bank of Baroda, whose corruption of South Africa’s ruling political elite led first to massive looting of the public sector (and illicit financial flows via Bank of Baroda) and then the fall of Jacob Zuma and allied politicians, as well as other South African and international firms caught up in the Gupta web (including western corporations Bell Pottinger, KPMG, McKinsey and SAP).

Chinese firms – both state-owned and private – have been accused of major financial, human rights, labour and environmental abuses in Africa, perhaps most spectacularly in the case of Sam Pa whose operations included mining diamonds in eastern Zimbabwe. In 2016, even President Robert Mugabe alleged that of $15 billion in revenues, only $2 billion were accounted for, in mines mainly controlled by the local military and Chinese companies. (In late 2017, coup leader Constantino Chiwenga travelled to Beijing and received permission from the Chinese military to proceed with Mugabe’s overthrow). In South Africa, the China South Rail Corporation played a major role in the Gupta corruption ring, in relation to multi-billion dollar locomotive and ship-loading crane contracts with the parastatal railroad Transnet.

South African businesses have a record of looting the rest of the continent dating to Cecil Rhodes’ (19th century) British South Africa Company, the Oppenheimer mining empire, and more recently current President Ramaphosa’s pre-2012 chairing of Africa’s largest cell-phone company, MTN. The latter was exposed – along with two other companies he led, Lonmin and Shanduka – in 2014-17 for having offshore accounts in Bermuda and Mauritius used to illicitly remove funds from Africa. South Africa’s corporate elites regularly rank as the most corrupt on earth in the biannual PwC Economic Crimes survey, with one recent report showing that “eight out of ten senior managers commit economic crime.”[21]

Quote ends.

Source: Towards a Broader Theory of Imperialism

Socialism, right?

Jen
Jen
Aug 28, 2018 6:24 AM
Reply to  BigB

Odd … a journal called Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE) has an Editorial Working Group made up mostly of people working in British universities including the London School of Economics. The journal’s HQ is in London and it is published by Taylor and Francis, themselves owned by Informa PLC.

Informa PLC’s investors include Janus Henderson Investors.
https://informa.com/investors/shareholder-centre/major-shareholders/

Janus Henderson Investors is a shareholder in Thruvision, a British company that holds the contract to install body scanners in Los Angeles’ underground metro system.
http://thruvision.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/180606-Shares-in-Issue-Major-Shareholders-23-May-18.pdf

BigB
BigB
Aug 28, 2018 12:09 PM
Reply to  Jen

Professor Bond publishes far and wide: including Global Research and Counterpunch. It’s no refutation to his academic research unless it his sole outlet. He also publishes peer reviewed academic articles: and in journals such as Third World Quarterly at Tandfonline and Springer for instance – but they are expensive or subscription only.

Is what you are trying to say that a firm related to a firm is related to firm that has an immoral connection negates his research? Is the quality of the article to be judged by those who pick up the article: or by its own merit?

There are other academics recasting Samir Amins World Systems and dependency theories in a similar light. William I Robinson and Andrew Robinson (who also writes at Ceasefire magazine) are two I am acquainted with. The quality of the argument is in the research …not necessarily in who published it?

Jen
Jen
Aug 28, 2018 1:28 PM
Reply to  BigB

I just find curious that a paper critical of neoliberal economic policies pursued by BRICS countries or corporations headquartered in BRICS countries appears in a journal published by a subsidiary of a company whose shareholders seem to be mostly hedge funds. I’d come across the name of Janus Henderson Investors before and tried to remember where I’d seen mention of it.

BigB
BigB
Aug 28, 2018 2:18 PM
Reply to  Jen

Bond was wiring a critique of the John Smith v David Harvey debate, which they also published in full …is that negated too?

The debate is wider than this one publisher, I was trying to find a source that was not paywalled. It is an important debate, because the limited definition of military imperialism obscures the broader picture of corporate credit imperialism …which keeps most of the world in poverty. Not only to end up just as dead as by bomb or bullet, entire nations and peoples cannot develop their human potential due to malnutrition and deliberately imposed developmental sub-intelligence …which keeps them docile – or dead. Or dependent on aid – or dead.

Focusing on the ‘West’s’ military imperialisms reveals only a selected part of the picture. Resisting the West is easy to identify, but what about the wider effects of credit imperialism? Are we really effecting a transformative consciousness by cheerleading the BRICS elite? Or is a more sophisticated analysis required …toward a broader theory imperialism?

[I promise I won’t use Roape as a source anymore!]

Norman Pilon
Norman Pilon
Aug 28, 2018 10:54 PM
Reply to  BigB

A “subsidiary of a company whose shareholders seem to be mostly hedge funds,” eh?

It’s almost as if the hedge funds really want to know what is really going on, to be in possession of ‘actionable information.’

Now that is curious, isn’t it.

Personally, I don’t care where the information is from, as long as it’s substantive, is verifiable in terms of referencing matters of fact in the public record, makes sense to me, is more encompassing in terms of what it explains, and doesn’t enter into contradiction with what I’m virtually certain to be the case.

But here’s another thought:: capitalists are every bit as much as everyone else interested in getting at the truth about social, economic and political issues.

This doesn’t mean they want the truth to get out among the public at large, but they certainly want to know and understand the reality in which they have to operate and live, every bit as much as everyone else, and perhaps more so, as their power and status very much depends on being superlatively well informed.

Consequently, they tolerate the presence of radicals, radicals like avowed Marxists, who really are Marxists, in universities and NGOs, where they are kept busy earning a living and talking among themselves, and publishing in obscure and unread books, forums, magazines and websites. In this way they and their ideas are shuttered off from public view while being keenly scrutinized for any useful insights or bits of information by the bourgeoisie.

As long as the public remains largely oblivious to their ‘critiques’ and ‘observations,’ the establishment is rather happy to leave them pretty much to themselves and even provides them with funding and income to carry on their ‘work.’

Since some of their work is accessible to the public, only largely unsought by the public, I’d say we are remiss to not to seek out their analyses. I mean if we don’t, like our enemies, avail ourselves of accurately parsed information, how are we ever going to be able to move forward?

It seems to me, then, that not only should we not judge a book by its cover, but also not necessarily by its publisher, at least not always. . .

Jen
Jen
Aug 29, 2018 12:44 AM
Reply to  BigB

@ BigB: No need to mind me. You can refer to ROAPE as a source as often as you like. I wasn’t critical of the article you linked to or of the author. It’s just my custom to check out a site by clicking on the “About …” tab and following my hunches.

In an ideal world, academic journals would be self-financing or at least be able to rely on sources of funding other than private companies owned by investment funds, banks and other financial institutions with their fingers in several pies. Ah well, roll on that day …

BigB
BigB
Aug 29, 2018 10:47 AM
Reply to  Jen

In an ideal world, Jen, knowledge would be an open source, freely available, freely reproducible and where applicable, modifiable (valorisable) public good. Intellectual property rights are theft! Ah well, roll on that day … 🙂

Norman Pilon
Norman Pilon
Aug 28, 2018 2:13 PM
Reply to  Jen

So, ‘evidence’ is to be discounted because of where it is sourced? Have I got that right?

My approach is, yes, to pay heed to the source of anything I read, not as the ultimate criteria by which I will decide to accept or reject a set of given purports, but for the initial degree of skepticism I will bring to bear on the ‘revelations,’ so that if the source is to my mind questionable, or is telling a story different from the one to which I am accustomed and with which I feel comfortable, then I’ll do more digging. But if the source is an institution or someone that time and again has proven in my limited experience to be reliable, then I’m more apt to forgo the additional search for corroborating testimony.

Universities, and in particular, “Western” universities, while prone to the same ideological biases and loyalties that operate throughout a society, in all places, high and low, nevertheless are good places from which to start any information gathering, because although kept on a tight doctrinal leash, they do hold to standards of both honesty and scholarship.

One of the contradictions inherent to capitalist societies is that although deceit and outright lying is part and parcel of the propaganda and indoctrination operations directed against the masses, the capitalists themselves and their institutions must actually “know” what is going on so as to maintain control, and to ‘know’ what’s what, your ‘intelligence’ must be accurate, regardless of whether that ‘intelligence’ is in itself either inconvenient or discrediting of all your intents and convictions, thence the ‘fact’ that universities tolerate competent researches who actually tell and publish the ‘truths’ they discover in their areas of research, even when those ‘truths’ in themselves undermine the legitimacy of those who govern at large. So although scholars can and often do get it wrong, there is something to be said for academic credentials.

And what about Samir Amin? Would you be prepared to argue that he was ideologically compromised, too?

Norman Pilon
Norman Pilon
Aug 30, 2018 3:31 AM
Reply to  BigB

In case you missed it, I’ll throw another one back your way:

Is Imperialism still Imperialist? A Response to Patrick Bond — Walter Daum

Not that it gives much traction to Bevin’s and Vltcheck’s standpoint, but there are differences between Bond and Daum, and for the moment I’m rather leaning a bit in Daum’s direction on the issue of whether “. . . the East-to-West flow of wealth and value has not just been modified by the rise of China especially but has been reversed,” i.e., as David Harvey contends . . .

Just nuances. Nothing fundamental.

Norman Pilon
Norman Pilon
Aug 30, 2018 4:24 AM
Reply to  BigB

And THIS by Esteban Mora is even better, in my opinion.

bevin
bevin
Aug 28, 2018 1:32 AM
Reply to  Norman Pilon

“The issue is only and always “Western” imperialism. Get rid of that, and capitalism will really come into its own in the East and deliver on its promises by, I presume, magically transforming itself into the ‘socialism’ that it already is.”

Does anyone actually say this?
In reality capitalism and imperialism are inextricably linked and have been since they emerged in the sixteenth century. It is impossible for any part of the international system to escape from the domination of the empire. And the empire, which, at risk of lapsing into banality, is the centre of imperialism is also a state. Currently the empire state is the USA. Get rid of the USA’s Empire and there will be no Empire. There may be states competing for the chance to become the imperial power but that is a different thing: the difference between the vague ambition for power and hegemony.
The psychological insight-or theory- that some people enjoy ruling others, or that humans are prone to vices, is all that actually lies behind the discovery that Russians or Chinese are just as bad as Germans, Americans or British. Nobody doubts that.
But the reality is that, since the end of the fifteenth century an actual empire, centred on Europe has dominated, by force, international trade routes and thus commerce and finance.
It might have been otherwise but it wasn’t. Had it been otherwise-had Russia, sprawling athwart the steppes, or Iran or China dominated the international economy and employed state power to impose its will on the world we would,have reason to oppose their empire(s); and observe that human beings are much of a muchness and that all states are hierarchically organised. (And that Britain would have been just as bad as Iran if it had been able to rule and exploit India..)
So is it fair to charge Andre with a failure to censure the rulers of empires which do not exist for nursing the ambitions to rule the world? And exploit it?
I say that it is not-Mr Vltcheck has enough to do describing reality- the business of exploring the dark desires of men and internationally impotent ruling classes is best left to the soul searchers and holy men.
No figure is more familiar to those struggling against power than the handwringer in the corner who excuses his idleness and passivity on the grounds that, evil as the enemy is, a worse one might take its place, because humanity is ‘like that’.
In the meantime Syria is being torn to pieces, bleeding Iraq is still occupied by the imperialists, Yemen is attacked daily, Afghanistan and Libya and many other lands are being devoured by the empire’s bullies and neither Russia, nor China, nor Iran is in any sense to blame for this litany of killings. And that is why we talk of western imperialism.
Get rid of it and the possibility of renewing the world will exist.Do nothing and it will continue to expand, devouring all in its way.

Norman Pilon
Norman Pilon
Aug 28, 2018 3:06 AM
Reply to  bevin

“Does anyone actually say this?”

It depends what you mean by “actually.” If you mean it as I sometimes, albeit not always, do, then yes — and then no . . . Really it’s implied. Quite clearly. Very, very strongly. So much so that you might as well say it’s been said.

But permit me to make my case:

Over the course of more than a few pieces written by Vltchek, you glean the definite impression that, on one side, you have “Western” imperialism (which is, as everyone knows, capitalist, fascist, racist and other things), and, on the other side, everything and everyone else not Western, capitalist, fascist, racist and other things, and something very much like an axis of resistance, somewhere over there, in the East (and the South), states that are objectively in the service of capital, but described by Vltchek as ‘socialist’ because just as you find it is in capitalist ‘nations,’ there are public amenities and nice people, and parts of the economy are in the public sector.

The entreaty is, then: all who are the victims of or opposed to “Western Imperialism,” apparently the only real imperialism in the world, should resist in alliance with the leaders of the anti-imperialist bloc, i.e., Russia, China and Iran (and lesser partners), all of whom are ‘socialist,’ although objectively they aren’t, but one fine day will surely be.

Or am I grossly mischaracterizing Vltchek’s point of view? If I’m not mistaken, my only misrepresentation is that he (implicitly) concedes the capitalist nature of his anti-imperialist bloc, which he doesn’t, but should, — because objectively speaking, eh?

“So is it fair to charge Andre with a failure to censure the rulers of empires which do not exist for nursing the ambitions to rule the world? And exploit it?”

Yes. Because they do exist. Only you and he don’t see it. Others clearly do.

Have you had a chance to read Hinnebusch, yet? Let me know if you want the link. I’ll gladly provide it again . . . It pertains to Syria. See my comment HERE, oddly enough, beneath another piece by Vltcheck.

Norman Pilon
Norman Pilon
Aug 28, 2018 3:25 AM
Reply to  bevin

P.S. You should also follow up the link provide by BigB, to a piece by Patrick Bond, titled, “Towards a Broader Theory of Imperialism” — advice being offered on the assumption, of course, that you might not yet have arisen to an actual and complete certainty about the non-imperialist nature of the anti-imperialist bloc. I do recall something that someone recently wrote about how you can’t be other than you actually are, but can believe that you are. Wise words. Everyone should heed them. Including the guy who wrote them.

binra
binra
Aug 28, 2018 5:54 PM
Reply to  Norman Pilon

Truth cannot be other than it is – but we can believe what is not true and suffer it with all the force we give the wish made real. The power of the mind is unlimited – but for what it has already given power to. That is, given a predicate, all else follows logically until the predicate is changed from its status as fact.
So the attempt to enforce or defend a narrative identity is as real as our investment in it. Many choose to kill themselves rather than lose face. Or indeed kill or deny others to save it. Was it it that demands sacrifice but an iDoll?

Norman Pilon
Norman Pilon
Aug 28, 2018 6:08 PM
Reply to  binra

“What is it that demands sacrifice but an idoll?”

The suffering of my children? Of another’s children? Of men and women everywhere who are unjustly and neddlessly made to bear the violence of profit seeking? Surely these things are worthy of a little sacrificing?

binra
binra
Aug 29, 2018 1:15 PM
Reply to  Norman Pilon

But they are what IS being sacrificed??

I do not regard my willingness to give as sacrifice, but I understand the world sees love as demanding sacrifice (of private self possession and control) and so a ‘feared love’ is substituted for, by private possession and control that joins – but only in order to protect the separation. The ‘power’ to maintain this as ‘real’ demands sacrifice of who you truly are, and so of your true appreciation of another.

A self image – or the agencies of the support of a self image – may be believed – but you are not an image of yourself. Insofar as we identify in image as if true, we reject all that does not support it and sacrifice ourself in maintaining control and possession. Where then is the basis for recognizing and appreciating the true of another?

Norman Pilon
Norman Pilon
Aug 29, 2018 4:10 PM
Reply to  binra

There is no self beyond your ‘self-image’ even if that image of ‘yourself’ objectively overstates or understates both your virtues and vices as you conceptualize them or estimate them to be, that is to say, in your created ‘images’ of your virtues and vices.

A person is a split being: s/he exists in the tension between consciousness and bodily existence. S/he is, in fact, two things at once: a ‘being in the world’ and ‘an object of referential consciousness’ that consciousness can never truly grasp in all of its entirety, in terms of every detail of that object’s unity in interiority/exteriority, and in all of its dynamic and constantly changing relations with the world.

Consequently, although your ‘self-image’ is not your self, and though that image is a representational ‘attempt’ at grasping in consciousness all aspects of your self, and as an ‘attempt’ is in some respects ‘successful,’ because it is always only an ‘attempt,’ it is also always an ultimate ‘failure.’ However, and this is the crux of the matter, because it is all that you can ever have on yourself in terms of knowing yourself, that ‘image’ is as close to yourself as you will ever be in conceptual terms.

So what you are left with is a ‘distillation’ of your really ‘real self,’ known by and in your consciousness to be ‘more’ than any one ‘representation of yourself’ that you can conjure to yourself in your attempt to penetrate through the phenomenal veils of your perceptions to your real self, perceptions that you know separate you from the noumenal reality of yourself as the intended ‘object’ of yourself in a moment of attempted self-awareness.

Since this is the ‘perceptual condition’ of human self-awareness, the ‘self as it is in-itself’ can never coincide with the ‘self as imagined by the self,’ no matter how hard anyone tries.

This is an insoluble perplexity to which you are condemned.

You will never be able to stand outside of yourself to arise to a truly exhaustively objective perception of who and what you are. Furthermore, you are a moving target, forever changing and in flux, but your mind is such that if formulates its ‘knowing’ in static terms. So . . .

My advice to you is: embrace this perplexity. As you do the fact that you will one day cease to exist. Fussing about it changes nothing, but if you are determined to change the matter, then your fussing will certainly amount to a waste of time.

You can approximate to an idea of who and what you are, but it will always only be an idea, an image, a projection, a guess, something that you know is not “absolute knowledge.”

Give up your aspiration, Binra. Accept that you are not God.

binra
binra
Aug 30, 2018 11:47 AM
Reply to  Norman Pilon

There is no self beyond self image?
A High and Mighty Proclamation Norman!
Is such a belief not also the basis from which a death-cult Lords it over the living?
Because to such a belief – there is no love but only the Narcissus of its own fantasy gratification and a sense of dissonant interference to be shut out – and no Creation but what power MAKES so, and thus no joy extending as the reflected meaning of All That Is.

So what is that which sees self image?
It IS no object. Nor in truth is it subject and so is truly Sovereign. there is no ‘other’ because the extensions of God are one in all and all in one.
Lies may seem to add to reality – but who would say that what they add is true but the wish to live what they give.

Indeed you cannot ever get outside the source of awareness of your existence.
But the belief you are a split off thought is a lens through which to experience as not self, but thing.
And the belief you can (be) split off from the Mind is ‘body’ serving the purpose given it by mind.
This is ‘attack’ on your own awareness of true and so its reflection AS your subjection is made true by your own will. Or rather by a wish to which the true will is sacrificed. False wants that deny true desire.

For ‘self’ you can substitute ‘reality’. The split self in image is but an image of reality ‘split’ into parts by which you take part as the idea of limiting total loss as a sense of temporary existence.

To be of God in God and one with God you need do nothing. Your creation is given you, You do not make it. But you are like God a creator and if you create unlike the love that knows you truly – you will make strangers of your brother and and a strange world in which to struggle, suffer and die.
Thinking is creating but miscreative thought is a block to the signal. The ability to block communication is not a new form of communication by which God is dead, but a basis for a thought reversal in which “Everything is BACKWARDS; everything is upside down! Doctors destroy health, Lawyers destroy justice, Universities destroy knowledge, Governments destroy freedom, Major media destroys information, And religions destroy spirituality”. (Michael Ellner).

Because the usurpation of the true is so deeply learned or normalised – it is foolish to take God as self as any claim of self – but wiser to let God be all there is right where you are – and that for me is with you now.
The projection of the ‘lording ego’ onto God, Self, Being (words can only sign ify), is a kind of false flag of victimism by which to escape, or dissociate from awareness of consequence by assigning it to another or external cause. This ‘sacrifice’ is the basis from which the ‘justification’ for attack is claimed – such that the blind or loveless act is sanctioned by a sense of self righteous vindication.

“Your image is as close to yourself as you can be in conceptual terms”
From your own mouth, Norman.
Concept, curtains, carpets and blinds – is actually a shop in Aylsham – but is also true.
You cannot get nearer or further from yourself in concept – (but you can think so).
Our concept of self can be transparent or opaque to the truly felt knowing of being.

Thus the whole idea of self in concept is a ‘Self-forgetting’ development of dissociative thought – excepting that an unreal purpose can only serve the true, unknowingly. (ie God is not mocked) and the realignment of learned abilities to true purpose (joy will do) is their transformation from private properties to true service.

“the ‘self as it is in-itself’ can never coincide with the ‘self as imagined by the self,’ no matter how hard anyone tries.”

The ONLY way you can be out of alignment with your self is by trying to either get it back or get there.
Synchronity is a Given – but a negative synchronicity is a hidden – in that it presents as a sense of denial or deprivation to be restored from a past or attained in a future. This belief is the trial of a need-driven self instead of the alignment in true need-fulfilment or desire. You don’t have to try to be yourself – but if you have deep habits of trying under the conviction that its you alone that has to manage your reality – then a ‘you alone’ will try to take over what comes naturally to align and unfold your need. And before you quote horror stories to witness against love as the true of life, not the deep habits of fear are not in one mind alone – but an entanglement of shadows given power and attacked.

The nature of awakening is not the getting there, so much as the recognition one never left. This is the basis for living from the ‘Well’ of being rather than in a desert seeking possession of scarce resource.

The zero-point of which the positive and negative charge embody the forms of charge relations.
The zero-point is not a nothing so much as the unified nature in Stillness of Everything. But to a mutually polarised exclusivity the other is a see saw opposition of attraction and repulsion that as you say is always moving as if to rest in completion but never can. The light of stillness is the ‘zero point’ that is not the negation of being, but its source, nature and condition. Be still and know, is the willing relinquishment of ‘thought control’ to an Already Movement within being (not within time) – that you simply are and in which you recognize yourself perfectly . Love extends by its own nature to give as it is receiving. Just don’t get in your own way or ‘do nothing’ to either grasp or recoil from all that is , as it is.

Aspiration to the ego is getting for itself – to become more than it is by getting from others and getting one up on others.
But aspiration as the uncovering and sharing in truth and beauty is of a different order and there is no communication between them. To choose one is to let the other go. But truth can only be covered over. Untruth has no power but by denying the very source of its power – or rather, by inducing you to do so.
The horror of guilt is a fixation in sin. You may think you ‘know’ better than God (as we all do in presuming to know a world of our own judgement as reality itself and acting as if that is true), but the ego (thinking about) does not know anything, being the condition in which knowledge is made a private possession. This is running off with a copy and believing both the Prodigal (or Promethean) possession – and the wretchedness (or the torture) of guilt.

The willingness to be still, is the point of recognizing true from false. There is no need to work on the false or change it or love and understand it – just attend or align in what truly moves you.
I do align in an aspirational culture and I do not join with the race to the bottom. Love or awareness of the nature of being comes only to the willingness to share it. Love is (like God) a corrupted word, by thought substitutions of masking and mimicry. Love is the capacity to be with what is and recognize what is Real.
The extension of a true recognition is not our doing but it may of course be the undoing of what we thought we were or had become or been done to.

Fixating in hate and conflict is feeding it. I see we have to look upon terror when we are ready, so as to raise our eyes from slavery of fear’s subjection and look past it. Beneath the denied and suppressed fear is a ‘wellspring’ of spontaneity and joy of being. One might say that terror symbols guard the treasure – or an Angel with a flaming sword. You/ we are quite right not to trust y/ourself to create while in a state of split purpose. Limitation is appropriate to a harmful intent no matter how well intentioned.

It is more than feasible to me that humanity is winding itself up in a paralysis or living death under the ruse of false power. Recognising our choice is the freedom to make another. I remind you that we are beings of choice by living my own and honouring yours as the power of choice even if I don’t join with or agree in it. I see this as the only way to wake up. Give only what you would in truth receive.
Why the ‘in truth’? Because a sense of lack of worth will project to everyone else, see an unworthy world and give it hell. But as I hope is clear, I hold our true worth is an Inherence of being and not a personal attribute in a hierarchy of better and worse, higher and lower, along the measuring stick of judgement.

The voice for the feeling and knowing of being undoes the mind of its own spin. Not destructively, but as a willingness to wholeness of being. I am not talking politics but of an intimacy that aligns us differently in our capacity to relate – not least to recognise another as our self. Concept does not know love, being a substitution for it.

Norman Pilon
Norman Pilon
Aug 30, 2018 8:37 PM
Reply to  binra

You haven’t read Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness,” have you? If you get the chance, my metaphysics and ontology are akin to his.

The ‘self’ is no thing, metaphysically speaking, though your conditioning is certainly inscribed in neural networks, which create the ‘appearance’ of the person or you ‘substance.’

The ‘self’ as being is really an illusion, albeit a ‘real’ illusion, ‘being’ being but a fevered projection of a brain generated awareness that sees in and behind all of its pattern recognitions ‘things’ or ‘substances.’

People are ‘real,’ but they are not ‘things,’ and even ‘things’ as we take them to be, as we designate them, are also not ‘things.’ People like to speak of matter as if they know of what ‘substance’ they speak, but they don’t. No one does.

But if you truly heed those aspects of reality which seem to be disclosed to us in our perceptions, I think that you begin to realize, or at least suspect, that all is patterned motion, energy in motion, eddies in an ethereal aether, with infinities in both directions, that is to say, with no limits either in how finely structured reality is in a subatomic direction or in intricately structured coherences in an astronomical one. The universe is infinite in expanse and details, from the infinitely large to the infinitely small.

Beyond certain ranges and scales, reality escapes us completely. At these limits, our nerve ends should open if we are really paying attention, and sense of all encompassing mystery and awe is all that should be pervading us.

Is that a high and mighty proclomation? Or merely an observation of the actual world and the limits to what we can understand?

The world is bigger than we are, and it can only strike us as a total mystery forever beyond the limits of human comprehension.

Nietichez got it about right, in my opinion, metaphorically speaking:

Quote begins:

And do you know what “the world” is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself; as a whole, of unalterable size, a household without expenses or losses, but likewise without increase or income; enclosed by “nothingness” as by a boundary; not something blurry or wasted, not something endlessly extended, but set in a definite space as a definite force, and not a space that might be “empty” here or there, but rather as force throughout, as a play of forces and waves of forces, at the same time one and many, increasing here and at the same time decreasing there; a sea of forces flowing and rushing together, eternally changing, eternally flooding back, with tremendous years of recurrence, with an ebb and a flood of its forms; out of the simplest forms striving toward the most complex, out of the stillest, most rigid, coldest forms striving toward the hottest, most turbulent, most self-contradictory, and then again returning home to the simple out of this abundance, out of the play of contradictions back to the joy of concord, still affirming itself in this uniformity of its courses and its years, blessing itself as that which must return eternally, as a becoming that knows no satiety, no disgust, no weariness: this, my Dionysian world of the eternally self- creating, the eternally self-destroying, this mystery world of the twofold voluptuous delight, my “beyond good and evil,” without goal, unless the joy of the circle is itself a goal; without will, unless a ring feels good will toward itself— do you want a name for this world? A solution for all of its riddles? A light for you, too, you best-concealed, strongest, most intrepid, most midnightly men?— This world is the will to power—and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power—and nothing besides!”

Quote ends.

Something to chew on.

Then take a look at your so called ‘self,’ and see if it isn’t an insubstantial succession of mostly recurrent moods and perceptions, punctuated by new ones that are sometimes ‘one-offs,’ but that may join in the stream of recurrences that flutter in and out of that flickering light, a light constantly fluctuating in intensity, sometimes fading completely out, only to fade back in if your body survived you night’s sleep or nap and chaotic dreaming, a return to that “zero-point,” that twofold awareness that always generates at a minimum two buzzing poles in its apperceptions, the seeing of the seeing being done, on the one hand, and the seeing being done proper, and sometimes the seeings are sharp and defined, and sometimes not so much, for reasons of attention that attention knows nothing about.

P.S. Not to disappoint you, but there is no God. And if there was, how would you know?

binra
binra
Aug 30, 2018 10:52 PM
Reply to  Norman Pilon

How extraordinary to call Sartre to bolster an argument.
The non existence of the self as a thing-in-itsef is not merely an idea to believe but a direct realisation that cannot be meaningfully described as it is pure experience and not ‘happening to anyone’ and so it is not an experience of anything else. Far from being an absence or lack of self, it is extension of self – even as idea is extension of mind through which self-awareness is – but not ‘separate’ thoughts’ to a ‘separate or split off self-sense’

The separate self sense or self imaged identity confusion is (the basis of) the capacity to conceive and perceive separated things and beings as if conflicting forces and meanings. But the capacity to believe and perceive something is not the establishing of its truth so much as telling a story and living in it. Truth is already true and so is given and not determined. However what you give out (self definition) is what you get back (experience) and so you are free to open perspectives of the already true (or the More of what and who you are) as your gift to yourself AND to the whole.

The seeming Silence, or peace of yielded or release to being is infinitely rich (I was going to say pregnant) – but like the beauty quote in the Curtis fiction article is a terror to the separate self sense.

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the Angelic
Orders? And even if one were to suddenly
take me to its heart, I would vanish into its
stronger existence. For beauty is nothing but
the beginning of terror, that we are still able to bear,
and we revere it so, because it calmly disdains
to destroy us. Every Angel is terror.
And so I hold myself back and swallow the cry
of a darkened sobbing.

This describes the dilemma of a separated sense of self that IS undone in the presence of truth and hence is at war with truth to survive in its own terms. This embodies as the world experience of ‘the separate ones’ who are not in fact separate but are identified in image, symbol, thought and emotional result of such thought.

All thinking of the separate self sense is predicated on the body, the world and its use for separation (private agenda – albeit masked in public concern). Hence Jesus persisted in ‘My Kingdom is not of this world’ – which no one understood and thought it another world or an after death world rather than a healed perception of a perceptual distortion of the Only Thing Going On.

So I am not in any desire to prove what is evident by its fruits except so much as let it fruit through me as an expression of the qualities of being. The lie and the father of it is evident by its fruits. J says – and I hold true – that a house divided cannot stand. And so a unified consciousness reintegrated the separate self conflict.

If early Man posited Gods in immanent, and pervasive terms it was as the activation and development of the subjective consciousness – from which emerged a shift from the Mythic experience of archetypal structuring in ‘order and chaos’
to the more abstracted philosophical and historical sense of self as the inheritor of a world from which the Gods had departed, faded or become transcendent and abstract – although ritual forms persisted long after any sense of their origins – and still do.

The structure of consciousness in physical (out there in here) terms is not created so much as conditioned by trauma – from which we haven’t healed and are still reenacting upon ourself, our world and each other. This of course is biological embodiment or incarnation into what seems fixed and irrevocable conditions – that have corresponding fixed and irrevocable beliefs or indeed denials whose very nature is to be denied.

I write because I am alive with it – and life’s shares its qualities by simply being who you are and doing what is your joy or fulfilment to be doing. No one in the framework of the world as believed can make sense of this and yet no one really is IN the world. Mind or Consciousness is not IN the world. That is the reversal. But I am not talking about the split of subjective sense of ‘me’. That is our grown and learned construct through which to have such a conversation – and every other experience of relating as if through bodies, in symbolic and coded languages that nevertheless CAN be a vehicle of recognition in shared being – because when the separateness or armouring falls off – all that stands forth as the Obvious is shared being – call it what you want – or leave it unnamed.

The development of the ‘self’ and its abilities and cultural expressions is not unlike the patter of Saul’s (St Paul’s) life – in that all the abilities grown under a blind and yet zealous loyalty to an external authority became repurposed to serve a revealed Intimacy rising from the undoing of ‘self’ in direct revelation as the extension and recognition of true being
and not as idolised symbols, concepts or ritual observances.

Every movement of the Spirit into the defended illusion of a conflicted self seeking to project the conflict OUT and away that takes form as a movement, will be distorted by the weaponising and marketizing mind-set of the world. Ofter subverted into a masking by which to use the form for private agenda or getting for oneself at others expense.
hence the development of European culture had and has an underside.

However, I don’t join that such willingness as has been lived is invalidated because it was entangled with heartless wilfulness. Cynicism is itself a form of hatred. Everything in the ‘self’ and its ‘world’ we have made is an alloy of love and fear. The redeeming of our thought is the retaining and purifying of all that is true and the undoing or release of what never truly was. But this is the result of opening our thought (system) to the light of a present awareness, rather than hide our sense of self-possession in the dark. Sufficient unto the day be the evils thereof. That is, what comes up in your day and your life is coming up to be looked at for what its truth is. Then we are living a life aligned in joy that does not hide from the events or situations that seem to violate our peace and trigger conflicted reaction.

I don’t see a need to believe in God so much as to see the true of life in another and honour that. The belief that beliefs can be added is of course masking identity and these are generally seeking to offset hidden and fearful beliefs. Believing is seeing. Because we are collectively unwilling to open our beliefs to change we can only ‘see’ what they show us and so our freedom to open a fresh perspective is blocked while the pressure of increasing dissonance becomes overbearing. Actively believing against is a negative effect of something positively believed. The belief in evil as an act and a subjection is actively undermining of joy in being. is there another way of seeing than mimicking a judgemental god and his wrath? For whatever we act out is the revealer of what belief we actually and actively accept as our truth. Trying to believe is backwards and reveals that you don’t believe it. When you recognize the true of you there is no trying to ‘make it true’ or justify and prove your validity. All of that is just thinking as delay, diversion or procrastination. But once we see that we are free to make a new habit.

Norman Pilon
Norman Pilon
Aug 30, 2018 11:54 PM
Reply to  binra

How extraordinary it is to call it extraordinary to call Sartre to bolster an argument. What? One cannot suggest a reading of a text written by someone else, a text that one fancies does a better job than one could in expounding one’s worldview, or at least a good approximation to it.?

As for the rest of what you write, I see things one way, you see them another. You think you are closer to the truth of the metaphysics of the matter, I think I am. Whatever shall we do?

The self is an illusion . . . says who? Well, you know that I do. You know that Sam Harris does, also. Sartre, I am certain, is also another. When I and these other two claim the ‘self’ to be illusory, we mean that metaphysically speaking. Nobody questions the experience of ‘selfhood.’ But it is illusory in the sense of their being a unitary, substantiallized self, “a soul in the machine,” so to speak. Experience does not translate into ‘metaphysical proof’ of anything. In any case, you know and I know that the ‘self’ is ‘motion,’ that consciousness is not “stillness,” a ‘thing’ that reposes in the unity of an in-itself, of an object conceived as being identical to itself in every respect imaginable. Awareness is movement, not a self-coincident identity, though ‘you’ may conceive yourself to be as such, as apparently you do. My conception is different. Says who? From my perspective, certainly not “the kind of thing” you seem to be imagining. For you there is a split, evidenced by the ‘fact’ that belief may not coincide with the ‘truth’ about oneself; thus you conceive of a duality of ‘self:’ the ‘real self,’ as it exists apart from any belief about it, and the ‘ersatz self’ that looses itself in untruth for taking its ‘beliefs’ about itself to be itself. Or have I got that wrong?

I, on the other hand, am prepared to accept that I may have a false appraisal of the qualities, good or bad, that express me as a ‘personality,’ and therefore may entertain false notions in that respect, but as for being a metaphysical authentic self behind the qualities and false self-appraisal of those qualities — no. There is no ‘self’ beyond what manifests through my bodily behaviors, actions both external and internal, and once my body ceases to breathe, I cease to exist, in the same way that when my body sleeps and in common parlance I am unconscious, I am momentarily, as a ‘self,’ erased from the world.

Now you may not see things this way, but that’s roughly how I see them. Says who? Me. The guy sitting in this chair, who identifies completely with his so called physical or bodily manifestation, who fancies he has no existence apart from this body who he is and which in its extraordinary complexity produces the experience of ‘me’ which takes itself to be this body. That’s who says, Binra. And I’m willing to bet that at your end, there’s a body and an experience exclusively attached to that body, and that’s who is typing ‘your’ replies, him or her and only him or her, not some disembodied authentic something speaking through a physiological organism that is not itself.

binra
binra
Aug 31, 2018 2:16 PM
Reply to  Norman Pilon

Norman, are you taking personally what is – as far as I am concerned a shared considering of ideas that either find merit or not. They do not have to claim exclusive personal rights!
I see a blatant self contradiction in your assertion of self in the asserting that it is only an illusion – albeit ‘supported by ‘authorities’. And I see it not as an invalidation of you but as an illumination of how the world works – or rather fails to work – and by design of a plausible deniability.

My interest is not in being the one to call another a self illusion so much as attracting and sharing ideas that reflect the nature of directly observed experience and recognition. This is my desire (hence the attraction) – but it need not be anyone else’s.

Words can be used to mean almost anything in different contexts and so for communication to occur there has to be a joining of minds in shared purpose. The conflicting purposes of conflicted and conflicting minds are effectively blocking a deeper quality of communication and so before I reread your post I feel to say that I share felt qualites that to be said must wear inadequate clothes – because verbal linear concept is inadequate to represent a wholeness that is greater than its parts.

Because there is only one ‘territory’ with infinite ways of mapping, seeing or choosing not to see it – or seeing something else instead. Our differences are not in ‘Fact’ but in approach. So no problem on my part if we do not find a resonance within which to share ideas together as an illumination of the actual territory – whatever we call it and however it is framed.

I’m an inside out approach. My sense of self/reality have been undone many times in many ways such that I care not to make life in my own image but open to life moving me, so I don’t engage in thinking about life so much as letting life think me. As with making music, the creative is the art of allowing what truly moves to find a clearer expression by getting out of my own way.

Selflessness by my witness, opens to direct experience of selfulness, that once accepted instead of the interjection of ‘control’, naturally extends or radiates as joy and the acts of inspired being rather than the justifications of a sense of grievance and lack. At the level of my person I am always a beginner – because from any moment of recognition that I have identified ‘personally’ – that is in reaction, I am in the journey of willingness from selfishness to self-fulness – which by the way is always a shared state of being.

I will read properly what you read later. I respect your person because of who made it and yet I only join with what I find and accept true so as not to strengthen the false in myself or you.

Norman Pilon
Norman Pilon
Aug 31, 2018 4:27 PM
Reply to  binra

“Norman, are you taking personally what is – as far as I am concerned a shared considering of ideas that either find merit or not. They do not have to claim exclusive personal rights!”

No. Nothing personal beyond pointing out that our views on the matter being discussed are different and irreconcilable.

“I see a blatant self contradiction in your assertion of self in the asserting that it is only an illusion – albeit ‘supported by ‘authorities’.”

There is no contradiction in what I assert: it is an illusion in “METAPHYSICAL” terms only, in the sense that, as far as I can tell, matters most to you.

You assert the existence of a ‘soul,’ as evidenced by your assertions that consciousness is not “in the world.” I say consciousness is “in the world, of the world, and by the world.” It is also a part of the inner qualitative experience of what it means to be a flesh and blood human being.

Human consciousness does not exist but as the experience of real flesh and blood humans. But apparently, for you, consciousness is a disembodied phenomena. Thus you posit a mind and body duality — but do correct me if I am wrong — and I posit no such duality. As Cohen once put it in a song, “your body’s really you,” and thus your consciousness is an aspect of the interiority of that body. I mean, have you ever been conscious without at the same time being aware that you are embodied? Perhaps in a dream, or a trance, drug induced or otherwise, but nevertheless having had to, so to speak, prepare the physiological ground beforehand for that particular experience, which always terminates, willy-nilly, with a return to corporeality if you survive it.

For you, mind and body are fundamentally distinct; for me, they are two sides of a fundamental unity, albeit one that is a ‘process,’ a movement, a dynamic that undergoes irreversible changes until that process crashes and ends, and then there is nothing left of the person that was the process but the historical traces in the world of that person’s passing.

So am I wrong to say that we do not see eye to eye on both the ontological and metaphysical statuses of consciousness?
For you, it is an ‘object,’ a ‘thing’, a ‘substance.’ For me it is a ‘process’ that is part-and-parcel of human physiology, without any presumption being made about the ultimate standing or nature of the ‘stuff’ underlying that physiology, other than to assert that whatever it is, it is real and that I myself am a manifestation of that reality, a reality that never stands still, but somehow coalesces into temporary structures that reproduce themselves but also eventually break down and disappear from the realm of ‘existence.’

As for my assertions being “supported by authorities,” nonsense. Others express better than I what I believe to be the case, so rather than misspeaking myself, or assaulting you with less articulate expressions, I’m pointing to succinct and far better articulated formulations of what also happens to be my position. Like this, for example, as another instance of a short, clear and eloquent exposition on the sense in which “the self” is an illusion and with which I concur :

binra
binra
Aug 31, 2018 6:09 PM
Reply to  Norman Pilon

Ok I read your response.
‘My’ self says and that it. End of communication.
My Dad used to have that sort of idea of a discussion. I would say something and after a bit he would say his bit and then shut down – and no actual communication was allowed beyond that.

I hold that what we are has and is the capacity to accept beliefs of self definition relative to any other idea, quality of existence or symbolic modelling of world, by acting as if they are true and having a the experience of self reinforcement resulting from that ‘choice’. But having done what we accept will determine our experience until we change our mind. This does not have to be via death. The beliefs we accept about our mind can in effect lock us into an incapacity to see or know anything outside the chosen limitations of a self-reinforcing experience – until we change our mind about our mind. The word ‘choice’ here is a truth that is only uncovered by a recognition of the current set – as a choice – albeit running as a default or habit from learned response that unexpectedly arose from unwatched or ‘idle’ thinking. Choices can include madness and death as a strategy of evasion, escape or denial. Both effectively abnegate the will.

It is said that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing – but that is in terms of the framing of the possession and use of knowledge for private agenda. Knowledge in the spiritual sense is total, without degree or range – because nothing is withheld or hidden from what you are but by our own framing of life in terms of defended identity.
The idea of knowledge as a way to gain private possession of, and power over is the split into FORMS taken from the ‘Knowing’ that are re-contextualised to serve such agenda. Hence knowledge in the world of such contest is not freely shared.

In rejecting part of wholeness, one rejects ALL of it, and this is not recognized in a world of conflicting bodies – each assigned and assigning a personality to each other.
All the Kings whatever can never put Humpty together again – and that is the intent – to abide in perpetual war under failure by design as the condition of gaining funding (support) for the false promise of answers that perpetuate the belief in conflicted separation.

The practical result of noticing and owning this is the abandon futility now.

I used Stillness as a term for a light in and of which all illusion of motion occurs. The still point of the turning world.
You have no problem in relating through the computer screen metaphors, as if you actually ‘go to a site’ or open a folder or drag a file – because the whole experience is created for you AS an interface to machine translations. Within a virtual reality all such screen interactive shortcuts become ‘natural’ language and thought – as if we actually are IN the machine given framework of inputs and outputs.

Perhaps our difference is that my sense of self/world is a limitation constructed within a higher or more Inclusive Consciousness – while yours is a sense of evolving from inanimate interactions of ‘random’ happenstance over billions of years that provides the prequel for your self/world to operate without a divine intent – and thus moral integrity is replaced by management of the personal identity – and that is the world we have co created by wanting it true.

To want to be different from what you are is to hold a different intent from the Only or Divine intent that Mind unalterably is as the revealing of the visibility and tangibility of You.. If you are not beholding it Good – is it because you have gone forth and multiplied ideas of conflict and division that effectively limit your capacity to recognize your Self – anywhere?

The considering of ideas – or indeed what anything is – is always determined by the active desire and intent. The idea of discernment is of the extending of true meeting a resonant match.

I see the machine or the personality structure or the body or the world as a vehicle THROUGH which communication occurs – with the nature of communion as the core quality of the exchange. I also see the development of the structure of such a self/world as the result of a breakdown in communication that is experienced as a physical separation and limitation because of what the body is used FOR.

How can anyone notice what they use the body FOR when they live under the dictate of such a wish fulfilled?

You are never unconscious. It is simply that whenever you resume your focus in the physical sense, none of the More of who and what you are is translatable to such terms or acceptable to the maintaining of a solid sense of self and world – which is called sanity but is really a stability of focus relative to the current needs of balancing with the whole.
Stability and reliability are not necessarily validity. The resort to a ‘static’ or frozen sense of self in defence against feared change is the building up of dissonance as crises that will bring down the whole ‘worldview’ regardless how reliably the belief operated up to that point.

My reference to ‘Stillness’ is as the inherent quality from which all things arise new. This is the gift of the ‘living now’ in place of a persistence in time as the carrot and stick of a tyrannous mind.
Stillness can only ‘speak your true name’ because it is Source nature of all that is true of you.
The nature of Stillness is in every loving thought as the disposition of radiance and gratitude for being.
The Timeless is without parallel in a world of time and so cannot be conceived but only accepted BY extending it.
Now is the closest approximation in this world to Eternity and our experience of time can be an edgeless now or flow of relational being in act. From a different premise we may feel we have no time at all because now has been sacrificed to deadlines and dictates of dissociative (subjective) thinking. Restoring the mind to unified purpose is the way to find the time you need for what you most need. Playing out conflicted drama is the dogged persistence in both wilfulness and obstruction (they are the same thing).

I write perhaps to those who alight in a resonance of their own interest and not specifically as a personal engagement with you Norman. You can very clearly describe the problem in the world – but I do not see the problem is really IN the world but in how we see ourselves in relation to our world and each other. Of course let common sense prevail while enquiring more directly of our thinking – because we cannot relate to anyone else BUT through our self – excepting of course as a self illusion.

Norman Pilon
Norman Pilon
Aug 31, 2018 6:23 PM
Reply to  binra

Binra,

Have I misconstrued your metaphysics? Do you believe, yes or no, in a fundamental difference between corporeality and spirituality? Do you believe that you have or are a ‘soul?’ If not, then there has been no communication between us. If so, I’ve heard and grasped at least the broad outline of your position. You believe in what you believe, and that’s fine with me. Must I convert to your viewpoint so that you come to accept that I’ve heard you? Or is it possible that we’ve had an actual exchange of viewpoints that remain other than one another, that you see no merit in my standing, and I in yours, each of us for his/her reasons?

P.S. I am not your Dad, whatever ideas he may have had about the give and take of dialogue.

binra
binra
Aug 31, 2018 10:35 PM
Reply to  Norman Pilon

Hello Norman – I went to reply to your last one and the page didn’t offer any options to reply so I thought you’d been assigned the final judgement 😉

I cant need anyone else to accept anything they are not already open or opening to. Nor can I need not to be misunderstood . It goes with the territory (human experience).
I don’t have the option to believe the physical version of existence that you operate under. Nor the right or the power or the wish to change anyone’s mind – although of course in a world of change everything is already changing (even if to replicate itself to seem the same).

The difference is you posit consciousness in the body as an effect of the body and I hold the body to be a stepped down translation consciousness through physical symbol – that is backed by extreme emotional charge by the way.
The power of terror to divide and rule in the world you are aware of. I have witnessed and travelled some of the territory of this within or beneath what I took to be myself and world. Hence I see our ‘beliefs’ as being essentially psychic emotional defences or strategies of survival – under an extreme but masked over and hidden sense of threat. Otherwise we would simply be psychotic or perhaps driven to question everything including the self and body we take to be our very life.

So I experience consciousness as a communication through the body. In that sense we are channels that can be open as the flow of relational experience or closed in the private struggle played out upon relationships as a sense of getting from them or trying to get away from them or get them out of my world etc.

The simple metaphor is the tv set. I don’t see the people on tv as IN the tv.
The tuning is the determiner of the channel you align in as your current experience.
Fear thinking (which can of course mask in forms of caring or concern) seeks and finds the witnesses to its case.
Love’s thinking – which is transparent to the giving and receiving of honour and worthiness to the truth of others and our world, are shared thoughts. The desire to be helpful one day as a result of suffering something one cant overcome will suddenly shift focus from the body and its trapped self to a relational integrative appreciation for being. This is an immediate change of channel and the symptoms of the ‘problem’ may likewise fall away quickly or slowly or be experience as a peripheral or purely practical matter instead of suffering as if besieged by them.

But I embrace the physical experience as no less spiritual and as a vehicle of a more inclusive Consciousness that is aware THROUGH its extension and reflection of experienced idea. Just as your thinking reflects who you currently hold yourself to be as your experience or perspective upon existence.
So I see the mind IN the body idea as the failure to fully incarnate in collapse and contraction upon itself in a clench whose dissociation of a subjective mind defends against re-living the trauma of a loss of support and capacity to abide an overwhelmingly negative experience.
To notice the use (accepted purpose) of the body from body-as-separator, body as symbol for frail and limited consciousness, body as dumping ground for unresolved conflict, etc and shift to body as communication device – across the whole spectrum of its perceptual range – is the opposite of the so called broad spectrum dominance that seeks to shut down our chakras, block out all higher communications and set causation in reversal as the physical subjection of its own maker. Ie; As control over life rather than allow life to communicate the flowing balance points within wholeness for the purpose you are focused in. The anti-life or evil that we witness and experience (and have participance in) is the logical result of accepted premise. All logic operates on some metaphysical assumption or acceptance and as they say – garbage in, garbage out. So to that point if we have garbage in, the call is to ‘reverse engineer’ the experience to identify the nature of the garbage in. (Or incomplete understanding running as if whole truth and defended against new inputs – ie; not hearing or seeing anything except what the beliefs that they they act from, allow.

If you frame it all differently and that works for you – then we both meet in a willingness to be of service to the whole in honouring the person regardless of agreement and have some intersect of ‘circles’ through which something alive occurs! In the measuring mind some effects are considered significant and others not so – but sharing life Is significance and is the context in which and through which we may arrive at honourable outcomes instead of loss of humanity to manipulative deceit that then manifest in such madness as the title of the page here.
What we bring to our relations is our currency however we find our own way to support living it. Therefore we do not have to agree or even seek agreement to share purpose and grow in living it. This is not the unity of getting everyone to be or do or conform or comply to the same anything. And I see that it is covered over by fear and the manipulation of fear.
Not just in the world, but as the nature of my own sense of consciousness. Humanity is generally not truly conscious but all presume to be – (except when you are asleep 😉 Divide and rule is effected against those who are already divided and ruled – what does that suggest as an awakening self responsibility to be unavailable to deceit?
Question more is a start, but a desire to truly know – rather than be deceived, is a willingness to question everything. This is a spirit of science that can no less be brought to our daily lives; the desire to uncover that which is already true – in place of sitting on the fence as if there is a fence.

If I write too much at a time. just alight in any portion in willingness, and leave it if its becomes a chore. Struggle is sign of doing what you do not want. My sense is, if we are to do something, find a way to consciously do it – or wear our life away under tax of burdens that need not be. I don’t know it matters if the sudden recognition of being on purpose instead of conflicted purposes is a result of a ‘higher communication’ finding a way in or the synergy of your life force lining up those neurons… or course, both.

binra
binra
Sep 2, 2018 10:05 PM
Reply to  Norman Pilon

Reading what you just wrote leads me to believe you either haven’t read or grasped the meaning of what I have said.

And so you frame your summary in terms of what I believe as the predicate for sharing of minds. I don’t require you to believe anything you are not already believing to share with you. But if you believe that someone has to share your viewpoint to be able to communicate then you will have that reward.

Because I can articulate in linear verbal concepts doesn’t mean that what I seek to share IS concepts.

When you look into another’s eyes and recognize them as of the same life, you are releasing the framing in the physical to a spiritual communication. Life is alive and not conceptually coded into maps of meanings that may be as far from Meaning as money is from true currency.
When you look at another and see all the reasons of justifications for NOT meeting or sharing in spirit, then you are using the perception of the body as a block.
This is not a metaphysical exploration but an embrace of the physical within the true or whole communication of being instead of as a separator for your own private agenda.

The meaning Soul became replaced by Psyche became replaced by mind. The Soul was created by God in the same image and likeness – a creator! What It creates can be aligned with or against it’s created nature. You can learn to go against the grain of your own nature as if to create a second nature that masks over, usurps and substitutes for true – and has NO IDEA that it is an illusory capacity of opposition given support by the very power it is predicated to exist as the denial of. Hence it cannot abide the light of its true nature and sees it as threat to be denied – without allowing the denial to become conscious.

Now you can read the pattern of this for the pattern of the world and recognize it because it is being revealed by light as an illusion of power – given sacrifice of true power.

I don’t care for expanding maps of meaning that are predicated upon masking over Meaning as a sense of private authority and control. I appreciate the undoing of the ‘meanings’ or beliefs that paint us into meaninglessness as if it is something to put together again, or make sense of.

Awakened and shared meaning is the basis for the undoing and releasing of meaninglessness. This does not require belief but it does require acceptance, and if belief is actively blocking such acceptance, then truth waits on welcome, though of course it rests in its own nature and not on ‘discovery’ to be itself.

You don’t have a Soul, you ARE Soul. Soul as a creation of God in awareness and relation TO existence BY which you are., But unless what I say stirs an intuitive recognition within, then mind of a personality can only misinterpret because a disconnecting or dissociative mind IS a misidentification seeking power.

This can be phrased in innumerable ways without using God or Soul, because the territory is not defined by mapping symbol. You are the territory, not the map, but you can align the map TO truly reflect the territory or you can seek to conform the territory to compliance and conformity within the model.

Any believed reality experience is a witness to the power OF the mind that generates that experience, and that mind is the pattern of personality filtering over a deeper ‘blueprint’ of NON Physical creation operating through the physical symbols as Divine Intent.

The following was in a recent reading and may speak directly and practically to much that arises in the ‘alt’ net of trying to understand or reconcile uncovered madness.

“… Learning is joyful if it leads you along your natural path, and facilitates the development of WHAT YOU HAVE. But when you are taught AGAINST your nature, you will lose by your learning, because your learning will IMPRISON you. Your will is IN your nature, and therefore CANNOT go AGAINST it. The ego cannot teach you anything as long as your will is free, because you WILL NOT LISTEN TO IT. It is NOT your will to be imprisoned, BECAUSE your will is free.

That is why the ego IS the denial of free will. It is NEVER God Who coerces you, because He SHARES His Will WITH you. His voice teaches ONLY His Will, but that is not the Holy Spirit’s lesson, because that is what you ARE. The LESSON is that your will and God’s CANNOT be out of accord because they ARE one. This is the UNdoing of EVERYTHING the ego tries to teach. It is not, then, only the DIRECTION (of the curriculum) which must be unconflicted, but also the CONTENT.

The ego wants to teach you that you want to OPPOSE God’s Will. This unnatural lesson CANNOT be learned, but the ATTEMPT to learn it is a violation of your own freedom, and makes you AFRAID of your will BECAUSE it is free. The Holy Spirit opposes ANY imprisoning of the will of a Son of God, KNOWING that the will of the Son IS the Father’s. He leads you steadily along the path of freedom, teaching you how to disregard, or look beyond EVERYTHING that would hold you back.

We said before that the Holy Spirit teaches you the difference between pain and joy.
That is the same as saying that He teaches you the difference between imprisonment and freedom. YOU CANNOT MAKE THIS DISTINCTION WITHOUT HIM. That is because you have taught YOURSELF that imprisonment IS freedom. Believing them to be the same, how can you tell them apart? Can you ask the part of your mind that taught you to believe they ARE the same to teach you the DIFFERENCE?”

~ (ACIM)

Norman Pilon
Norman Pilon
Sep 3, 2018 4:06 AM
Reply to  binra

So . . . you believe in God. Check. I don’t.

You believe that I don’t have a Soul, but am a Soul. Check. I don’t.

I believe that I am a flesh and blood human endowed with a continuously changing consciousness, one that is in its movement, or qualities, or patterns of activity, determined or shaped by matters of inheritance (i.e., biological replication, you know, that I had parents and that I am their offspring and that much about my person derives from that) and the social contexts of my upbringing and current living, as well as by my personal strivings or intentions

Question: what is the status of the human body or ‘material’ world in relation to both the Soul and God? Does the one depend upon the other for its existence? Is there something like a separation of realms? Are they to some degree independent from one another? Is there a difference between ‘materiality’ and ‘spirituality,’ between Souls-and-God and ‘matter?’ My sense is that you hold to some kind of dualism, as pertains ‘matter’ and ‘Spirit.’ Do you or don’t you, Binra? A simple yes or a no would suffice. For me, the answer is no. For me, there is no consciousness, no mind effect, without ‘body,’ so that the one is an aspect of the other, both amounting to a single indissoluble process, which is itself embedded in and an expression of other processes that together comprise the whole of the universe at a given instant, in the now, the eternal present.

Question: how do you establish your certitude of the existence of God as the creator of all, when all you have to go on is, on the one hand, the world of phenomenal appearance, and, on the other hand, your very fallible and limited human capacities for thought and reasoning?

How do you know that your ‘belief’ in God and the human Soul, as integral and unified existents, is not a mistaken ‘belief,’ Binra? I mean, you do spend a lot of time emphasizing the difference between ‘belief,’ which may be mistaken, and ‘truth,’ which pertains to reality as it is in-itself, that is, as distinct from what anyone may ‘believe’ to be the case. So how do you establish the “fact” that your belief about God and human Souls is ‘true,’ while mine is ‘false?’ What is the touchstone of true belief when it comes to ascertaining the existence of God, Binra? Is your certitude more than a circumscribed human belief? Or has God revealed Himself directly to you?

binra
binra
Sep 3, 2018 9:30 AM
Reply to  Norman Pilon

Norman, you twist my words – and I am open to using those words to signify meaning.
From what you have said you believe that your capacity to believe or not believe anything is either a biologically created illusion or a result of acquired and inherited ‘knowledge’ (of which you confess you can never be certain).
I accept that belief operates in whatever the truth and nature that Mind Is.
There is no where else for belief to operate.

You believe that your beliefs are your private possession and defend them as your self reinforcing experience.
Even when expressed as what you do NOT believe – and so your beliefs illuminate the predicate themes of who you are accepting and experiencing yourself to be.
Unconscious beliefs are presumed reality but consciously accepted truth transforms and aligns our ‘belief structure’ of thought word and deed to open to communication rather than manipulate its forms. But knowing – as I use the term now – is essentially communion/communication of being – prior to and closer to you than your ‘self construct of beliefs. Hence knowing or believing in the ‘heart’ is of a silence of the mind (where the mind gets out of the way) through which true desire rises to awareness because diversionary and reactive desires are no longer engaging attention.

The adjunct not to put new wine in old wine bottles is because the old way of thinking has to be changed at the foundation to be in fact changed at all. Trying to ‘add’ to a self that isn’t true founded with what seem like truths is how the new movement of human desire and discovery is weaponised and marketised to serve the belief in power, personally wielded – that you so clearly described in political terms.

This is because to the belief in power as THE underlying truth of our existence, all else must be subordinated or sacrificed to get it and maintain it FOR the purpose of a privately personal existence against pain of loss or death of the capacity to prevail or to survive to fight another day.

“Question: what is the status of the human body or ‘material’ world in relation to both the Soul and God?

I have already answered this at length in previous responses in this thread.
You experience your unique perspective of universal existence through the act of accepting and holding and extending idea. You are thus a creator even as it the Mind that created you by acceptance, embrace and radiance. What you accept as your self in relation to existence is the measure of your experience. If you make a mind unlike your creator – you make a ‘split mind’ of a split world and experience the split off mind as embodied in ‘non mind’ and a self set apart and other to ‘non self’. And give rejection, withholding and deprivation or lack because THAT is the nature of the experience you gave yourself FROM engaging a thinking unlike your true nature.

The body/world is the tangibility and visibility of You – always and in all ways – and You are reflected in experience according the the law that Mind Is: giving is receiving. The idea of giving different from a true receipt is split mind that thinks to get for itself alone. the idea of self as a thing-in-itself ‘alone amidst and set against – is the ‘ego’ belief. Part of the video and other communications that you are enjoying exploring is that this ‘self’ is an illusion – albeit serving purpose within a greater communication/consciousness than its own ‘bubble reality experience.
But when an illusion calls another illusion and illusion – the bubble is reinforced.
Transcendence of illusion is sharing the true rather than attacking the illusion.
Those who seek controversy will find it – but where you look is up to you.

The mainstream mafia frame their targets with ‘simple yes and no’ in order to reinforce their framing as the mind of the viewer. I have communicated in my own terms to what you – like my Dad – will not and perhaps cannot hear – because it is heretical to your own sense of survival. My Dad literally died full of shit. However, the release of such a burden is not unlike a really good shit.
If you feel your body in its movement, you can perhaps see that you get out of the way and cooperate within an already movement. If you fear the movement of life, you will only take on ‘power’ within powerlessness while diminishing natural trust in that which comes naturally.
The assignment of mental functions to the body level is the projection of feared and rejected or denied self. this is ‘magical’ thinking that then seeks ‘magical’ answers to its ‘war’ set in body and world.
That it can do so in scientific framing is simply the dressing up or masking in the authority of the day.
If you set body/world as your CAUSE – then you are locked into your own magical or wishful thinking as an experience of subjection because you WANTED to escape your own Cause, feared it, and hid it ‘out there’ as if to ‘escape’ and play out the game of judgement in private.

I recall that in playing hide and seek as a child, to find TOO GOOD a hiding place defeated the game – for after the glow of winning relative to them not being able to find you, fades, the experience is one of isolation and disconnection – even from the sense of gaming. And so either coming out or giving yourself aways, releases the ‘hollow victory’ of a private self isolation to a restoration of relational being.

If you actually wanted to know anything, you would not limit yourself and the conversation to framing in terms of personal competition and its insinuations of invalidation. The issues as I frame them have direct relevance and resonance to the issues that beset our world at a most fundamental level because false foundations are mental or psychic phishing or identity theft.

Resetting to original defaults is sometimes as simply as turning off the corrupted or captured process to rise afresh in being. Arguing about what the nature of being is or is not is just such a futility – but framed as if an answer will come without having to yield such thinking TO being. For thinging-in-itself runs on knowing it cant afford to really know anything. There is no thing-in-itself but only a concept taken out of context that is given power AS IF it speaks for who we are!

Norman Pilon
Norman Pilon
Sep 3, 2018 5:11 PM
Reply to  binra

You twist and turn and evade, Binra.

Belief informs experience, and it does. And belief can lead astray, can be in its very inception astray on the basis of its founding premises or metaphors. We both agree.

But you assert the existence of God, Whom you are not and Who created and creates the whole of ‘reality’ as it discloses itself to human awareness, to your awareness, a whole not embraceable in all of its myriad and concrete details by a mind circumscribed in ‘perspectives of beliefs’ and in the midst of which such a mind struggles to maintain itself in existence, but a whole which is nevertheless ascertained by a process of deduction to exist.

So either you affirm God’s existence as a unitary being, or you do not. There is no in between: it’s ‘yes,’ He exists, and is a reality onto Himself and apart from the object that is His creation, or it’s ‘no,’ He does not exist (not that I know of), and the world is the ground of its own being and I myself, as all other organisms, am a manifestation of that being and of that ground.

The sum is either God AND reality, a duality, or reality WITHOUT God, a unity comprised of imbricated and interpenetrating processes, many of which are accessible to human discernment, manifesting varying degrees of ‘freedoms’ or ‘existential coherences,’ some of which humans have or can potentially objectify as though they were self-subsistent and unitary ‘things,’ as for example, that there is an ‘I’ that is not ‘you,’ and thus to some extent ‘evolves’ or ‘behaves’ in ways that are “independent” from the course of your own evolution or behavior, ways that are unaffected by some of the effects you concretely induce in the world that we both inhabit.

You write:

“The mainstream mafia frame their targets with ‘simple yes and no’ in order to reinforce their framing as the mind of the viewer.”

Really?

So what? Yes, God exists? But, no, He also does not exist? Or He sort of exists but not really? He sort of creates the world and all creatures in the world, but not exactly?

Or is it that you affirm and disaffirm the existence of God at the same time, Binra? Perhaps you do, and you are content with this mode of “reasoning.”

To me, as a member of the so-called mainstream mafia, something cannot both “be the case” and “not be the case.” Either God does or does not exist.

Yes, He exists. Or no, He does not exist. One or the other, Binra, but not both, objectively speaking, eh? Though it may be difficult to formulate in words what we take the nature of that existence to be, or not to be.

Otherwise, you waffle, are undecided, do not know in your own mind what you believe. Which is just fine. But then the situation comes down to these possibilities: God exists; God does not exist; I don’t know that He does or not, and so it remains an open question for me; or, I don’t know that He exists, can’t see how I could know that He does, therefore I do not affirm His existence, which is tantamount to disaffirming it, or saying, “no, I do not believe that He exists and thus live my life as if, to all intents and purposes, He does not exist.”

You write:

“There is no thing-in-itself but only a concept taken out of context that is given power AS IF it speaks for who we are!”

I agree. But there is a reality that exists independently of what I may imagine that reality to be, and whatever it is, it isn’t a world populated by self-subsistent entities in interaction with one another, but ‘processes’ that roughly cohere to a degree that permits us to metaphorically represent these seemingly distinct processes to ourselves in conceptual models, as poetic metaphors, as intergrated structures or unitary entities, as things-in-themselves, providing we keep in mind that the ‘things’ we ‘objectify’ conceptually as things-in-themselves are no such ‘things,’ though ‘conceptualizing in this fashion,’ as we model the world to ourselves in our attempts to comprehend it or aspects of it, is the mode of human thought.

So we agree, then, after all, that the ‘self,’ as an in-itself, as an object, as a ‘thing,’ is in reality no such ‘thing,’ but as such, as ‘experienced,’ is an ‘illusion?’

binra
binra
Sep 3, 2018 9:43 PM
Reply to  Norman Pilon

Your concept of ‘a god’ is not mine, Norman. I do not recognize it.
And concepts leave you outside and apart from awareness of existence as it is.
But despite that this ‘something apart’ is available in concept as an experience, is is not true that you can be outside and apart from the awareness of existence and so are experiencing what is not true as a private or subjective (and collectively private) version of only truth.

No blame or fault intended in this but I call this to illustrate that Human in his/her model of self existence is not IN the model. A proxy is part of the model. The model is IN and OF the mind of its creator – who is IN and OF Mind/Creator that is in no way separated or apart from all that is. Thoughts DO NOt leave the mind of the thinker – under any circumstances ever. But they can SEEM to be projected away from self and self can SEEM to project itself away and apart from its Source.

The concept of Infinity is of course un graspable finitely – but there is no ‘other’ or ‘outside’.
the creation of other and outside is of mind in image and concept.

In this sense the Grand Division we call the Self and World is a self-differentiation within the Indivisible just as your sense of conflicted self or purpose is a differentiation with your Individuality. You are not two of you – or legion – but you can have the experience of being split or compartmentalised within the freedom that Mind Is. Mind Itself is unlimited – but in accepting any predicate you are limited by its logical extensions or unfolding – while you hold it. This is your always your freedom to create but if you create at odds with your own Created Freedom you will imprison yourself in what you make/think/perceive/experience and act from as true for you. In the same way a fact is accepted reality until its status as fact is challenged and so in that sense, yes the past conditions and frames the present as an unfolding into future. But waking TO the predicates os such acquired and inherited belief is the freedom to release or revise the past so as to be released to a new perspective now. But no one can change what they are not the owner of. hence the attempt to dominate and possess others in attempt to change the outside without addressing the inner drive to do so.

So does existence exist?
Is reality real”
These questions are redundant.

That there is infinitely more to being than we are currently aware of is simply obvious is it not?
But that what we are aware of is a communication of the Infinite is less obvious.
But it is not a communication to something ‘else’.
God is total commune-ication and your life is integrally part OF – no matter what. But to know your belonging you must recognize your brother as yourself instead of

So the idea of the self as something else is a self-illusion or image of self taken ‘in error’ and acted upon (reinforced) as real. Not unlike a false flag attack. The basis upon which a protective sense became offensive was a mis-interpretation of reality.
Time and space become a basis in which there is time to get out of alignment – and reinforce the error.
But what God creates is timeless as is God – which is also to say that there is only Now – infinitely experienceable in self-differentiation. The creation of experience or the focusing within idea of unfolding and exploring meanings is necessarily polarised but all polarities are within you regardless your identification against one or for another.

Because your assertion of a God/Creation as a false dichotomy – as so called ‘creation’ is processes going on outside and far beyond any human capacity to encompass – you likely posit a world outside (any sense of) self that is forever unknowable – but which human thinking can model, and thus manipulate its ‘world’.

I cant go into other points you raise now. But I do not need anyone else to ‘believe’ any of what I put forth and anyone doing so would be foolish. The only wisdom is to live what you are the current appreciation of an grow it – regardless others sense of your being out of step with what they are thinking. Give them the freedom you appreciate having. But don’t join with what you do not hold or accept true.

That there may be a TOTALLY transforming perspective on everything that sin (hate, guilt and fear identified in) held true is not in the mind of self-protections and adaptations to hate guilt and fear etc. There is somewhere outside your thinking but not outside or apart from you that has been ignored or overlooked or ruled out by the ‘power struggle’ of survival under terror as the masking in personal dissociation from the intolerable.

binra
binra
Sep 4, 2018 11:01 AM
Reply to  Norman Pilon

“So we agree, then, after all, that the ‘self,’ as an in-itself, as an object, as a ‘thing,’ is in reality no such ‘thing,’ but as such, as ‘experienced,’ is an ‘illusion?’”

All experience is ‘illusion’ but illusions can reflect the extension of true or the blocking of the extension of true. Experience can be incoherent and dissonant or transparent to its source and nature – for underneath every experience is the definitional context of which it is an effect or result.
An awareness of thought at any level is witness to the creative nature OF thought as our own. We are no less ‘thought’ than our own creations. We are not self-existing awareness somehow encapsulated in a non-thinking universe, world or body. But a sense of private or hidden thought is implicitly part of generating such a hiding place.

An illusion is not a thing-in-itself but the result of mind or projector of non physical qualities to tangible and visible quantities. The representation is NEVER the true of what is being represented but can reflect is such that truth awakens from split identification in imaged forms to acceptance and expression of wholeness. In this sense mind is a mirror that holds no intent but functions as reflection. Creation prior to manifestation in psycho-physical terms is non physical and timeless and takes no time at all. But experience or feeling-knowing perspective of and within Creation is a Universal construct or Idea through which to create structure through all of which a total experience is shared through many interactive and complementary facets under one purpose of creating.

The capacity to experience opposition is a world of choice not unlike the story of Job and Jesus. It isn’t that Job was punished (any more than Jesus), but that the persistence through the temptation to self-illusion became a conscious choice and consciousness opening a direct awareness at a higher or more inclusive and embracing (non physical) Order, within which the sense of world as a separate thing from the Heavens above (symbol for non-physical) is undone and fades to an intimacy of being in which even ‘attackers’ are seen as thoughts that know not what they do. But Jesus did not lay down the body as a mere illusion, but undid the illusion of its capacity to pass off as if true from the bottom up. And the releasing of any sense of separate ‘will’ in the context of relational being, culminated in release of the body and the concerns of the body as a symbol of a cup given back to the source of its filling.

The many mansions of being are multidimensional relative to the physical dimension of a linear time space experience and any attempt to define them necessarily renders them in physical terms such as the light body or etheric body. These maps are maps, but they are pointers to a tangibility of existence at higher vibratory rates than our consciousness is generally or currently able to integrate. Higher is not ‘better than’ as if there is somewhere else to be or become or get to or away from. Contra to such beliefs it is by being exactly where and who you are now that your ‘vibration’ shifts to a more integrated and aligned expression of who you truly are – (which is inseparable from all that truly is). Learning to pay attention to the quality of our conscious appreciation is part of reclaiming the freedom to be and share in it. Relational being is the nature of self – there is no self outside or without relationship – even if the experience is of denying true relation by the intent or attempt to get something from them believed lacking in ourself.

binra
binra
Aug 30, 2018 11:15 PM
Reply to  Norman Pilon

No reply option box to your Ted Authority Norman.

The self is an illusion … says who? Listens who?
Why should I listen to an illusion telling me it are not real. I have a tv for that 😉

I am not at all unfamiliar with a range of cultural perspectives on ‘self’. All intellectualisation is the unfolding of a core premise. And if that premise does not truly embrace you, it can only unfold a heartless world – regardless the seeming gift it offers.

The great ills unfolding on humanity are a direct result of the thinking that ‘self’ is dead (doesnt exist). Welcome to post truth technocratic system control. If you are a self – stand up and find your true will, because it is being engineered out of your range of permitted thought and experience. Illusions are either extended reflections of formless truth, or the freedom to believe you are who you are not – in disregard and defense against truth.

I am at peace with selflessness – but as I said the absence of the split and conflicted self IS SELF – or what I use Self and God and etc to point to as an all embracing giver of life. You can accept defining your life in terms of current thinking derived from neurophysics and explore that experience. The ego always speaks first (seeks its own validation and reinforcement) and so any new field tends to embody the current thinking and indeed flow of funding.

You do not have to justify or apologise for your being. You do not have to ‘question it’ – but once you do you believe you are questionable and uncertain and eventually as logical ad absurdum, prove that you do not exist. Enjoy the ride!

Norman Pilon
Norman Pilon
Aug 30, 2018 9:28 PM
Reply to  binra

BigB
BigB
Sep 1, 2018 3:16 PM
Reply to  Norman Pilon

[I have no idea where this reply will go. It is not meant as an interjection into the debate of binra and Norm: it’s my take on the Sam Harris and Bruce Hood videos posted.]

Hood ends with the injunction “Humanity is a super-social species that needs the self”: Harris ends with “When you lose your experience of unitary consciousness, it brings you into a closer experience of how we (neuroscientists) think things are” (both paraphrased).

What Harris does not say, yet can be strongly inferred, is that experience is epistemically, metaphysically and ontologically nondual. For me, these dispositions (of Hood and Harris) encapsulate the broader post-Kuhnian debate that cognititive neuroscience is forced to consider …that brings the very objective epistemological (logico-empirical) grounds of science into question. This, for me, begs the question: are scientists, philosophers, and psychologists – who, as elitist vested interest groups are monolithically Cartesian materialists – the ones who should be having the debate?

The outcome of such a debate is likely to effect the course of humanity for centuries: in the way that the Cartesian materialist (capitalist) values of the anglo-american Enlightenment Project already have. What is brought into question is the very foundationalism and essentialism of human knowledge: which is still strictly dominated by the Cartesian Absolute. This hard determinism has been softening – thanks to the likes of Kuhn and Nagel – who recognised the limitations of an ideologically funded, dominant culturally responsible (by those who owe their status, intellectual allegiance and moral responsibility to the dominant cultural power, that is) …who become, in effect, a socially censored and closeted elite vested interest group – ie ‘scientists’. This effects their ability to do socially responsible science (see also Lewontin and Jay-Gould). OK, I might have leveraged Kuhn and Nagel a little: but they did point out that science was unable to cope with the subjectivity of the scientist – so their science was not ‘pure’ (logico-posivitist) science – but relative to our psycho-linguistic theories and understanding of ourselves.

[I might have added the bit about power]

Notice that human subjectivity is still considered ‘impure’ (tainted by emotion). What Harris would not say, but can be strongly inferred, is that the first person experiential (subjective) viewpoint is a priori viewed unscientific. A science without humanity? And a science without humanity can become a dictatorial tyranny of scientism and technocracy?

So is science defunct as a liberational tool? Not at all. As Rupert Sheldrake has said: science freed from the tyranny of Cartesian objectivity is a humanitarian science liberated. (My words, his sentiment). Fortunately, not all scientists are Cartesian monoliths.

Growing out of the nascent cultural crossover of cognitive science and Buddhism are exciting developments such as ‘neurophenomonology’ …which are at least open-minded to interpreting the science as science: and not imposing outmoded 17th century interpretative conceptual paradigms and a dualist Absolutism upon it.

Neurophenomonology and embodied cognition require a new paradigm and Philosophy of Mind: which have profound implications for the coming millenium. Do we want an encultured disembodied mind; isolated from the pre-given ‘in-itself’ ( en-soi) objective phenomenological ground; incomplete and not fully knowable to Self or Other …because these are the consequences for a universal humanity that are being decided: not necessarily with humanities inclusion or consent.

I do not single out Bruce Hood, because his disposition is neo-universal (and not limited to scientists – it is the common Folk psychology). That we may be condemned to retain a self we no longer have an evolutionary utility for: and we ‘scientifically’ know is an imaginal illusion is illogical. Just as it is illogical for the Cartesian materialist ‘scientist’ to undermine their entire training and embrace the logic of freedom. This is the cultural antimony.

However much science is required to include the first person experiential (and the likes of Evan Thompson, Eleanor Rosch, and Anil Seth – to name a few – already are) …there is another long overlooked source of the first person experiential – ours.

Consciousness is ours to evolve. Science is a useful adjunct: which can, at the same time, unfortunately be leveraged into a dictatorial tyranny. Buddhist phenomonology is a non-partisan, anti-sectarian ‘science’ of mind to end all psycho-linguistic tyrannies. It is the liberational praxis of the non-conceptual, non-dual sate that Sam Harris can affirm as closer to the experiential: but cannot provide an enactivism for. The modern debate is, in fact, 2,500 years old …science is playing catch-up. The effects of a nondual non-conceptual universally humanitarian consciousness are profoundly non- and anti-scientific. Can it be left to vested interest groups whose very foundations of knowledge are being challenged to lead the debate? Or decide its outcome? I think not: there is too much at stake.

Norman Pilon
Norman Pilon
Sep 1, 2018 5:44 PM
Reply to  BigB

“That we may be condemned to retain a self we no longer have an evolutionary utility for: and we ‘scientifically’ know is an imaginal illusion is illogical. Just as it is illogical for the Cartesian materialist ‘scientist’ to undermine their entire training and embrace the logic of freedom.”

Indeed. Although in qualitative terms, we may be unable to substantially modify the pre-conceptual aspects of perception, that is, the manner of integrated sense perceptions as such, which may be, so to speak, hard wired into us, nevertheless, the cultural reflexive overlay that also and indubitably conditions the seeming ‘transparency’ of what appears to us to be the “direct revelation of reality” inherent to our perceptions can certainly be changed and deliberately so, as psycho-linguistic interpretation is accessible to ‘relfection’ and ‘critique’ and, therefore, to intentional cultural modification. In other words, self-consciousness, the experience of “me” and “I,” as “we” experience it under the influence of our cultures’ dominant ontologies and metaphysics is in fact modifiable to the degree that concepts or beliefs inform that experience. In other words, as Sam Harris and others aver, the subjective experience of humans is tunable on a scale that extends from hyper-egocentrism to a sensibility shorn the ego, of the “me,” of the “I.” And if that is in fact true and that these sensibilities are products of enculturation, then we can strive to educate ourselves into one or another kind of sensibility settling somewhere on this scale of possibilities.

More grist for the discussion so far:

Norman Pilon
Norman Pilon
Sep 1, 2018 5:47 PM
Reply to  BigB

And this:

binra
binra
Sep 2, 2018 10:46 PM
Reply to  BigB

The idea of unity has been centred upon a self set over and against not only others, but as a narrative continuity over its own minority reports. I refer to the rhyme of Humpty Dumpty as the idea of kings putting order over chaos.
That the identification of such a self set in reaction against a feared or unrecognised ‘otherself’ is already the loss of unified awareness to an attempt to unify an experience of chaos FROM unrecognised result of identifying in the illusion of power, and thereby forgetting the power of illusion.

The always already true is hidden by programming of reactions that operate so automatically as to seem beyond our power to challenge. Such a mapped out sense of ‘self’ survival becomes the human condition. Only the insane would question it… except the result of such ‘self-survival’ programming is an insane and insanely destructive world – that likewise seems overwhelming and ‘done to us’.

But all experience OF anything physical or of the physical sense is necessarily polarities of expression.
The recognition that this experience is within and of the Consciousness that beholds it, is the balancing of poles within the wholeness of a centred and expanded or embracing perspective.

And so the awakening or re-awakening to Consciousness in place of developing a segregative and coercive and conflicted consciousness, is the flip to a reintegrative movement of being.

Thinking how things are can be prompted and aligned to the desire of truth be known – and so any enquiry or endeavour of discovery can be a vehicle of opening to accept true and align in it by acting from what is recognised. But thinking how things are can also be directed and dictated by a wish to define, predict and control BORN of a fear of loss in lack (of power).

If Science looked at its active purpose instead of presuming to a be a ‘self’ outside and above and therefore a capacity to leverage and manipulate it mapped out life, it may see that much of what passes as ‘science’ is a scientism under technologism – owned and directed by the will to power over life and the world it sees as defining life. Human subjective thinking is our first ‘technology’ and is itself reinforced and developed by the tools of its expression.

True thinking is not a private agenda – but while we experience a capacity for private agenda we have created choice as to which purpose we are accepting by acting from alignment in. Until there is even the capacity to pause reaction and question as to what the act embodies the beliefs of – there is nothing but a living tool – which is another term for slave in terms of Plato’s cave.

The identification in the known is not what you/we think, and the abiding in the unknown is where self-revelation arises without or before a thought about it.

The clinging to the devil we know is the too big to fail, because our investment in it is a fundamentalism.
The choosing of evils instead of the ‘unknown’ is the projection of our deepest (and therefore unconscious) fears set against a sacrifice that hateful as it is, ‘protects’ from total loss – in the framing of the thinking of the devil we know. There’s the rub!

BigB
BigB
Sep 2, 2018 12:38 AM
Reply to  Norman Pilon

Sorry Norm: I did post a longer reply, but it hasn’t shown up. I’ll try again tomorrow, if not, we’ll have to pick up the thread later. 🙁

BigB
BigB
Sep 2, 2018 2:31 PM
Reply to  Norman Pilon

[This comment was previously posted 01/09/18: this is a reply to Norm].

Thomas Metzinger frames the key question: “Will we be able to navigate through this, between cynical materialism and fundamentalism?” In the earlier video, he frames another key question: “Whose will is it anyway?” His conceptual thinking seems to come from very much inside the authoritarian Cartesian materialist ‘box’ …a ‘box’ or ‘container’ (conceptual structural framework) that a more radical interpretation of the same data set evaporates away.

He mentions Buddhism, but is clearly not a Buddhist: yet neither are the core teachings of Buddhism the sole intellectual property of the Buddha and Buddhists [that is a Western Cartesian capitalist ‘property rights’ categorisation] – they constitute and contribute to a universal humanitarian knowledge that cannot be ‘boxed’, still less ‘contained’ …or even less ‘controlled’. They offer a radically altered conceptual structural framework to interpret the same data set …from self to selflessness.

This brings me back to my key contention: do we allow a rigid scientific or philosophical determination of a potentially selfless humanitarian consciousness into something that may be alterable from the outside – a technochratic scientifically-designed Huxleyian dystopia – or do we take upon ourselves the (hallucinated) agency of our own potentially selfless-determination?

Metzinger seems well aware of the military or authoritarian capture of consciousness control (the consequences of which are unconscionable and need no further contemplation): but seems unaware that the seeds of a permanent solution to authoritarian capture – a universal humanity in a federated community of equals – are also predicated by the radical re-interpretation of the same facts. So, whose will is it anyway?

I cannot answer without referring to the core teaching of the Buddha – pratitya samutpada – as presented in the Mulamadhyamakakarika by Nagarjuna. The Folk metaphysic is that the object of my present consciousness is independently existing (en-soi or in-itself) and ‘my’ (pour-soi) consciousness represents both the object and my reflexive self-awareness back to me (Husserl’s ‘reflective arc’). Pratitya samutpada says object and consciousness are “co-dependently arising”. Cognitive neuroscience, at least when the likes of Francisco Varela interpreted it, agrees.

The philosophical implications are enormous: seemingly way beyond the ken of Metzinger …if followed through – there is no authoritarian box left to contain our common humanity. The absolutised structural framework of the hierarchical self-cage ceases to have its authoritarian rigidity; and loses its ontological containment possibility. Pratitya samutpada shows us that all ‘independent’ and Kantian ‘in-itself’ (en-soi) phenomena are in fact interdependent, inter-penetrative, and co-mutually existent. Which of course, includes Being – which Thich Nhat Hanh has beautifully reframed as ‘interbeing’ …I am that you are (and dialectically vice versa).

Expand from this foundation and we have the core philosophy of mutual aid and interdependence …a universal humanity and will to the people to end all categories of identitarian sectarianism, authoritarianism, and the instrumental agency over Nature: all the ultimate manifestations of the ‘hallucinated’ Cartesian will.

This is the briefest sketch of radical humanitarian interpretation of what the neuroscience seems to be confirming (to be clear, it does not matter whether science does or does not confirm Buddhist phenomenology – which is, in effect, a liberational heuristic conceptual system, that has stood the test of time with or without the scientific verification). To consider the interpretation from inside our common consensual Cartesian box – the capitalist recapture and recuperation, if you will: I must look at Metzinger’s key contention that the will (an aspect of the self) is “hallucinated” and therefore an ”illusion”.

I wish you had not picked a German, because other psychologist/philosopher’s are saying this (Hood and Harris’ interpretation alludes; Dennet’s, Pinker’s, Dawkin’s and Peterson’s are more explicit) …but here is a potential emergence of nascent consciousness eugenicism. To prevent this: we need to reclaim the language. We need to separate the conventional from the prajnaparamita perfection of wisdom: where the self is indeed illusory and ‘hallucinated’ experiential gestalt. Human will and agency can be said to ‘exist’ as part of our experiential wisdom: whether that is ultimately metaphoric or not.

To construct a conceptual framework of ‘no-self’, or the ‘self-illusion’, or still worse: the ‘self-hallucination’ – is dangerous beyond the extreme. It is the greatest tool power could ever create: which is why we need the humanitarian approach …an approach which Buddhism is founded on: which could be the transcendent (selfless) humanitarian cultural lens the neuroscience should be interpreted through?

In Cartesian semantics: the very nature of the language is binary – one polar concept is given meaning only by its binary opposite. The concept of ‘no-self’, for instance, is not the negation of ‘self’: but its perpetuation (Absolutisation)…certainly in the conceptualisation of Metzinger, Harris, and Hook et al. This is the same trap that phenomenology, philosophy, and science have been falling into for around a century now. To use one of Bruce Hook’s concepts: we realise we have come to the “neural edge” of our self-imposed limits of knowledge: an imaginal boundary our very way of conceptualising cannot cross. We rebound back into the Cartesian Absolute: and even contend that we are stuck with the concept of self we cannot seem to shed. Or worse, consign it to hallucinatory annihilation.

To evolve beyond the Cartesian ‘neural edge’ of our own self-limiting conceptualisation: Nagarjuna proposes the middle way …to free our universal humanity from the tyranny of polar absolutes. He proposes an alterity of consciousness that neither affirms nor denies the self: and recognises that it is neither fully objective, nor fully subjective (oppositional binary absolutism) but fully sunyata (‘empty’ or ‘selfless’), humanitarian and experiential. A true ‘self’ that is equally informed by its own subjectivity and relative objectivity – the experiential ‘selfless-self’ (though I must be incredibly circumspect in trying to define the non-conceptual and nondual …in this respect, ontology becomes absolutising metaphysical mythology).

From the secular point of view: Lakoff and Johnson have done the legwork in “Philosophy in the Flesh” …where they propose an ’embodied realism’ that uses the self as a conventional metaphor. This is a secular psycho-linguistic ‘middle way’. It makes little sense to say “I am you” and our realities are inter-penetrative and inter-dependent …even though that might be closer to the truth. Or to posit that there is neither time nor distance between us: true, but time and distance are damn good metaphors to explain your lack of proximity to ‘me’! The philosophical question is: “Do we control the language, or do we let the language control and define us”?

As for will: if not to the illusory self, whose will is it? A humanitarian interpretation would be that it is the peoples …if we ever develop a communal community consensus reality? If not the will to self: rather than treat it as ‘hallucinatory’ (with all the negative ramifications that entails) …the will to selflessness becomes the will to the community of mutual aid. Humanity inherits its own autonomous agency? It does not potentially ‘hallucinate’ it away (the potential ideological re-interpretation inherent in Metzinger’s viewpoint. To be clear, I am not saying that Metzinger himself is such an ideologue …but it is not hard to see how his views could be spun?)

Does that mean that ‘my’ identity is subsumed and ‘I’ am ‘lost’as part of the ‘Borg collective’: or am ‘I’ just socially conscious and radically responsible? If all experience is interdependent: just whose experience is it anyway …is it not in reality already shared and communal? It needs only to be interpreted in that way: not framed into nihilistic non-existence by the Cartesian Absolutist dictatorship of the scientific machine-mind?

As to the degree of ‘my’ autonomy: that rather depends on the collective community autonomy and self-determination and my participatory democratic rights within it? Do ‘I’ have ‘my’ full say? In this light, we’ve seen what cynical materialism can do; we know what totalitarian fundamentalism can do; but we have no real idea what mutual aid and collective communal social responsibility can do …yet? Given the ‘humanitarian bottleneck’, with which I fully concur with Metzinger we are already facing: it’s selfless mutual aid or barbarism.

I’d like to say it is the obvious solution: but we have shown little rational behaviour in the last 4,000 years …philosophy has a lot to answer for! At 57 minutes past the eleventh hour: can we evolve a radically humanitarian philosophy? Can militant Cartesian materialists – working in elite special interest classes – exchange dualism for the non-conceptual and nondual? Only if they/we are willing to interpret the neuroscientific data with the (nondual) radical openness that the data itself suggests. This requires a radically new humanitarian science. And a radically new universal humanity.

It is my hope the unconscionable consequences of a continued mechano-materialist-dualist dictatorship of mind will sway the debate toward a new selfless humanitarian Will and Reason …that sweep aside the evolutionary redundant Cartesian machine-age equivalents. From this juncture, it is hard to say that with any real conviction: but where there is the evolutionary universal humanitarian Will …there is a Way …

Norman Pilon
Norman Pilon
Sep 2, 2018 3:39 PM
Reply to  BigB

A lot to unpack and to think about and with which to familiarize myself in terms of the literature and authors to which you refer. Consequently, I can’t respond to all of the points and relevant implications you broach.

Pertaining to Metzinger, only a recent find for me, I agree — I think — with all of your contentions.

I certainly also perceive him to be part of what your refer to as the scientific “elitist vested interest groups who are monolithically Cartesian materialists [and, on account of their Cartesianism, implicit authoratarians].’

My reason for posting his ‘findings’ is that the results of the investigations he discusses confront us with strong reasons for accepting the thesis of the inseperabality of mind and body, for discarding both the Cartesian duality of the mind and body, and its crass materialism, which, by the way, also happens to be the same (billiard-ball) materialism to which most so-called and self-identifying “believers” or “spiritualists” subscribe.

As for the ‘hallucinated will,’ the experiment that “proves” or demonstrates that human intentionality can in fact be hallucinated, also “proves” the reality of a human intentionaltiy that is in fact not hallucinated: namely, that you could not conduct such an experiment unless the ‘set-up’ was itself “intentionally” contrived.

The upshot of the ‘hallucinated will’ experimen (as well as the others Metzinger brings to our attention), for me, then, isn’t that ‘human intentionality’ is ‘always hallucinatory,’ but rather that ‘phenomenoligcal transparency‘ is often not what it appears to be.

And yes, of course, these investigations underscore a human vulnerablility that we must collectively learn to guard against: that we are subject to being manipulated in our ‘intentionality’ in ways more subtle than previously imagined.

Knowledge can be liberating, but it can also (as we all know and as is always the case in societies ruled by a power elite) be leveraged in the service of, to borrow your very apt phrase, authoritarian capture.

I’ll must read and re-read your comment to absorb it further, and to follow up on your references. On these particular issues, you are light years ahead of me. I’ve a lot of catching up to do . . .

binra
binra
Sep 3, 2018 7:27 PM
Reply to  BigB

Descartes said “I think therefore I am.”
I hold this wide open to misinterpretation. Because any who think they are thinking take it as a witness to their existence – while they are effectively blanking their mind of any true presence to maintain a sense of private self – at odds with others and set against the whole. Is this thinking of is it mind-capture by deceit? It is the surface currency of society as illusions of joining that never actually do. Identities of belonging that are framed by what is excluded or focused in exclusive terms.

What is the ‘I’ that believes it ‘thinks’?
Is it in any sense whatsoever separable from the thought?
What is the nature of such ‘thinking’?
Is it in fact a cause of anything or a reinforcing after effect.
Did I type this or am I claiming a power that I do not in fact have alone, believing it and acting as if true?
How much of our lives is under the control we cling to as power or protection, and how much is it in a sense given us.
The mind seeks to maximise its sense of control as a sense of security. Is it in fact real or a demanded illusion.
Is a demanded illusion different from self survival?

The thought we focus in or hold and give or live from is the determiner of the nature of our ‘I’ sense.
the term ‘I’ or self can mean any of many shifting levels of focus and experience.
When enough people get stuck in the same place they call it reality.
Or rather when ideas are mutually reinforced to be a dominant theme it operates as a current reality.

If the term ‘we’ is used with regard to human cultural developments of unfolding trend in to the future, is it a ‘we’ in the sense of a presumption of plurality and of consensus or collective beliefs? How much of current belief has been socially engineered by those who align in and seek to maintain a sense of power over future outcomes?
Does social engineering work past a short term? Or does the manipulation of denied fear bring it to the surface awareness so much that the function given them by those who desire unconsciousness (protected from deeper fears) is no longer being maintained and so more of what was unconscious is being exposed – along with the devices by which it was hidden?

Part of my sense of humanity is that the surface reality is made as a denial of the undercurrent – although the undercurrent remains active , it is effectively denied or suppressed by the intent to enforce order over feared chaos which includes any sense of potential threat to that which aligns in the idea of power and protection against dispossession. No one wants to lose and so many elect to sacrifice some in order not to risk losing all that then becomes a basis for the few to capture the system of collective distribution under state social law enforcement.

As for mutual cooperation, consider loving Life as the Source and Nature of your existence perfectly – that is embrace your existence instead of trying to reject and control part of it as your private or secret life.
And love another as yourself in that as you give so shall you strengthen and grow in yourself, so give only what you would in love receive. If you do not give freedom – how can you have it? If you don’t extend a sense of worth how can you know your own?

To get a sense of worth from others deemed less worthy than yourself or to steal from those considered more worthy than yourself is to worship self illusion while storing up your treasures in ‘hell’.
I see that ‘we’ have been doing so for a few thousand years at least – but not without leaks from a deeper quality of being that can be noticed, honoured and given welcome.
But the healing phase of human development cannot be enacted by unhealed healers who seek to work out their own conflicts upon others or their world.
The dissonance has to be owned and investigated where it truly is – rather than being outsourced or projected away from self and this has to be in a context of shared willingness or indeed a real relationship – instead of the stubborn persistence of an ignorant arrogance in destructive futility. No one else can accept love, FOR me. But of course we can extend what we have accepted – in fact we can only let love in on the basis of willingness to share it – because that is the nature of our being. This is a brick wall to the self-special who can see what is wrong with everyone else at a glance, but have forsaken the ability to see what is ‘right’ and have to relearn what was once a given nature. If they choose to embrace life on Earth rather than choose the power to save themselves alone in fear of losing even the little they have. Choices are mostly lost to habits that run as defaults. If you truly desire something you are also given the means to align in taking steps toward fulfilment.

While much spirituality has focused in the need to free our mind of false desires – this is only preparatory to the movement of truth that is our true will and in which we are identified perfectly and of which perhaps we are more afraid than the terrors that effectively guard it. ‘Many are called but few are chosen should read” all are called but few choose to listen – yet. What is the call to Joy? Is it not your freedom?
Is the world all of the ‘reasons’ why you cannot align in the true of you now and every now of noticing you have a choice?
Are challenging events reason not to look at our own involvement, correspondence or participation?
Is inspiration our responsibility to stay open to and connected with so that dis-inspiring thought can be recognized and no longer given backstage access all areas?
Are we worth opening such a transformative direction f active and persistent willingness?
If we are not – can we then extend that worth to our fellow beings, our children and generations yet to come?
A sense of sanctity for the life of another is also the way to open and allow this in ourselves.
Whatever we in fact accept, act from and thus believe, will find reinforcement in our experience and relations of our world. Would it then be sane to accept and act only from what we would both give AND receive – regardless of priesthoods of ‘expertise’ whose claim to know is your own invalidation and dependency?
Is conviction then a matter of being whole in our decision rather than externally bolstered by ‘authority in the world’.
Standing in what we consciously accept to be aligned with integrity is also a step n which new perspective arises that of course can lead to stepping forth with a refined, revised or even recanted position – but it is not stuck on a fence!
getting something moving instead of feeding a sense of stuckness is not about activism in the ‘morally guilted sense’ but aligning in living presence or joy in being, (including an honest enquiry as to ‘blocks’) as simply but not less than living this day well. No it doesn’t start tomorrow. Nothing starts tomorrow!

Big B
Big B
Sep 3, 2018 11:41 AM
Reply to  Norman Pilon

Norm:

We both agree that Thomas Metzinger inadvertently finds himself the victim of his Cartesian machine-age training. His schema is of a “transparent avatar (Self-Model) that you find yourself looking through, and that is how you appropriate acts of will”. That is about as diffuse as you can rationalise the Cartesian will, without it actually disappearing …into an immaterial substanceless essence that is neither fully embodied or disembodied, or both (he is ambiguous on this point: at one point suggesting that the audience are not really in touch with their bodies [around the 18:20 mark], they are aware of the model of the body: before going on to talk about “Cardio Visual Signalling” (?) and being grounded in interoception?)

He is even willing to contemplate of his Self-Model as an analogous computer-age ‘soul’. Such is his thinking is grounded in the Western, so called, ‘ontotheological’ tradition: because each time we try to radicalise our metaphysics/ontology – for instance with Heidegger’s Destruktion of ontology – we keep perpetuating the very same ontological tradition by apotheosising the self …in this case as a transparent avatar-soul-thingey that is integral to itself (a consciousness that can separate from body as in Outer Body Experience); yet remains indistinct from body (the bodies idea of itself); retains causal efficacy for body; a causal efficacy that can be extended artificially beyond body (exo-somatically) through time and space as an artificial will. What we have here, I suggest – and to extend Ryle’s axiom – is the avatar-ghost of the ghost in the machine?

You can see where I think this is going from my earlier comment. In the hands of an elite vested interest philosopher/psychologist/neuroscience collaboration: we are headed from the extended Cartesian machine-age ‘humanism’; into a computer-generated AI-Cartesian ‘post-humanism’ …without ever bothering to become human!

To be fair, Metzinger is aware of the risks (even posing the question: do we want to go there?). My thought process would be: do we want to know ourselves via the vagaries and anomalies of consciousness (phantom limb pains; out of body experience; hallucinations; optical illusions; tricks of consciousness (such as the ‘phantom hand’ or Hook’s ‘invisible square’); etc): to create the virtual capitalisable experiential ‘fairground of the future’ …or do we want to know ourselves fully and directly via the first person experiential of waking consciousness?

If so, we need to tear up the Cartesian machine-age rule book (before it turns consciousness into an e-circus act): and start with a fresh premise of nondualism. For that, we need a substantially less transparent phenomenology: we need an embodied phenomenology. Our abstract conceptualistion ability is substantiated and instantiated in our neural networks: the sensorimotor architecture of the CNS. It is nor so much the mind in body: as the body in mind …consciousness is inseparable from it embodiment.

[The progenitor text is the “Embodied Mind”: Varela, Thompson, and Rosch. A quick reference would be Anil Seth’s presentation, widely available on GooTube. Here is the short version, where he does at least recognise the inability to upload a biologically embodied consciousness.]

The paradox is: the conceptualisation and categorisation of nondualism into ontology necessitates its dualisation. Ergo, we have a cultural aporia we try to reason away by extending the Cartesian Known and its foundational and essential Knowability. Well, it’s wearing pretty thin: just how transparent and immaterial can the ghost of the ghost in the machine get before we are finally are done with it?

And what of the universal humanity denied?

The solution is simplicity itself: too simple for the Reason of the Western machine-age metaphysics. We accept our Beingness for what it is: nondual and non-conceptual …but realise that does not a priori negate its Knowabilty. Or negate science, or anything else for that matter …it enervates, enables and extends it into a universal humanitarian science.

You never know, we might get some Humanities that are actually human! Or socialism that is actually social!

Who we are is profoundly Knowable, with a different way of thinking. That we only know ourselves as body-independent minds; in a mind-independent world is the essence of our deepening psychoses. The core anti-humanitarian problem that besets the Cartesian mindset is the unkowability of the objectified Other …with whom we are always inter-connected in a common humanity …only to be separated by the transparency of the ghosts of ghosts?

BigB
BigB
Aug 28, 2018 3:22 PM
Reply to  bevin

Bevin: if getting rid of ‘America’ would end Empire, fine. But globalisation means ‘Empire’ went offshore and transnational years ago. We can infer a transnational superclass. That superclass are not really resident anywhere, they are largely non-doms for tax …you know, a transnational jet-set to give them an old fashioned name. Their TNCs operate in maybe 60 countries, so where are they situated? Creative accounting and offshoring among the group means little or no tax is paid anywhere, let alone ‘Head Office’. Its not just tax, they are not subject to any nation state laws, operating in Free Trade or Special Economic Zones …that are also effectively offshore. They are bigger than many national economies and can influence or buy governments, they effectively have a supra-national sovereignty.

Towards a broader theory of imperialism seeks to recognise the super-exploitation of corporate credit imperialism, which is not only limited to the military. People die just the same.

Despite the internet myth of de-dollarisation; the dollar is still the dominant imperial currency; but any of the superclass has offshore access to unregulated Eurodollars …so is the dollar ‘America’ or even ‘Western’. Perhaps you have not noticed the intra-state apartheid that has laid the vast proportion of ‘rustbelt’ America to waste? Yet the dollar is doing fine (for the moment, in a systemically fragile global economy) …so the dollar is effectively transnational too. As I pointed out above, the BRICS banks are sub-imperial dollarised capital institutions, that extend the credit and influence of the IMF and World Bank Group …not challenge it. Where is the anti-imperial economic paradigm arising from? Is it not just a new horizon for the same old capitalist imperialist hegemony becoming, perhaps multipolar …perhaps imperialism amplified by sub-imperialism?

As usual, you have to employ invective against those who do not agree with you (as in last time I posted the link to Bond) …does this really bring anything to the debate? Is it “handwringing” to seek a more holistic schema that allows the resistance to all oppressions? Or do we just identify the visible oppressions: and ignore the ‘invisible’?

So, with a broader definition: ending the Western Empire will indeed allow the unidentified oppression to continue. Identifying it allows a broad based anti-capitalist, anti-war movement to coalesce. The worlds capitalist elite are the common enemy of a universal humanity. In your naive representation of the ‘West’ against the Rest: do you really expect imperialists and sub-imperialists to get on? Did you miss the imperial wars of the 20th century? Imperialism and capitalism grow from the seed, as you can see. Identifying one side as imperial does not make the other anti-imperial: as grown from a different seed. Your idea of pruning just makes space for the next crop to develop into? As does comrade Vltcheks West v East ‘analysis’? How about, toward a broader theory of (corporate credit) imperialism?

If we cannot identify the problem; how do we formulate the solution?

Norman Pilon
Norman Pilon
Aug 28, 2018 4:27 PM
Reply to  BigB

Aye and Aye!

BigB
BigB
Aug 29, 2018 12:55 PM
Reply to  Norman Pilon

Norm: if you haven’t already, check out Nick Shaxson’s “Treasure Islands”. He charts the rise of the ‘Euromarkets’ centred on the City of London (Corporation). This is an effectively de-regulated ‘offshore’ trade in ‘Eurodollars’ (and other currencies); and later ‘Eurobonds’ (‘Bearer Bonds’ like the bad guys use in movies …only in real life!) …which has become the biggest pool of (invisible) liquid capital in the world. From its rise in the 50s (it burgeoned out of the hiding of illicit Soviet dollars – hence ‘Londongrad’), it was the progenitor of of the de-regulationary neoliberalism.

The Euromarkets function as a virtual plebiscite on national laws: bring in capital restrictions and your trade will disappear offshore. It skews analysis of trade wars etc – as capital can be re-routed (through ‘secrecy jurisdictions’) into and out of Iran, for instance, via Asia. I’d like to tell you more, only it is deliberately impossible to get past the veil of secrecy. Apart from Shaxson, Tax Justice Network, UK Uncut and a few others: there is little information available. Virtually no analyst has built this into a World Systems theory. Which is why analysis remains at the nation state level: which I believe is misleading.

The worst excesses of American ‘Western’ capitalism are not centred in America (though Delaware is now ‘offshore’) …they are centred on that part of London (700 sq acres) that are designated ‘offshore’. The unregulated capitalist Empire is stateless: America just provides its military (and intelligence – CIA: Capitalism’s Invisible Army) capability. All those patriotic Marines (except Smedley Butler) do not realise they are fighting for a stateless state to destroy the American economy and way of life. If they woke up, as many are, perhaps peace would have a military, or at least disarmed military, capability at its disposal!

Norman Pilon
Norman Pilon
Aug 30, 2018 12:02 AM
Reply to  BigB

Got it. Will read it. (As if I hadn’t enough to read already! But now that I’ve promised . . . It’s on the list . . .)

Many thanks.

binra
binra
Aug 30, 2018 1:52 AM
Reply to  BigB

“Virtually no analyst has built this into a World Systems theory.”

Excepting those who design and run it.
What else is globalism but a system of control run on the basis of scientific developments applied to humans as units in a system of energy flow?

Once the system is set up – all energy exchange will be monitored in ‘real time’.
To set it up is any and every means employed.

Robbobbobin
Robbobbobin
Aug 30, 2018 5:09 AM
Reply to  BigB

“that part of London (700 sq acres) that are designated ‘offshore’”

The 700 acres are “designated” as an administrative county in England. It is only the politico-economic superstructure of conniving shits and their City of London Corporation, squatting on the land, that have floated themselves offshore. And, after a century of persistent Labour party efforts to float (or sink) the conniving shits themselves offshore too, it was only Tony “Shitlicking” Blair, Disenfranchiser of the Left and Committed Scourge of Socialism, who legislated that international corporations be accorded equal voting rights, based on the size of their UK-resident workforces, along with the natural persons and small business owners previously comprising the, even so, businees-skewed City Corporation electorate.

BigB
BigB
Aug 30, 2018 3:22 PM
Reply to  Robbobbobin

Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, Goldman, Deloitte, etc have the only public lobbyist in Parliament – the ‘Remembrancer’ – who sits behind Bercow …and voting rights in a UK election, I believe? Part of the “votes for carpet squares” scandal if I remember correctly?

Norman Pilon
Norman Pilon
Aug 29, 2018 6:54 PM
Reply to  bevin

BTW:

Compare:

““The issue is only and always “Western” imperialism. Get rid of that, and capitalism will really come into its own in the East and deliver on its promises by, I presume, magically transforming itself into the ‘socialism’ that it already is.”

With:

“And that is why we talk of western imperialism. Get rid of it and the possibility of renewing the world will exist.Do nothing and it will continue to expand, devouring all in its way.”

Is there a substantial difference between the two? So,remind me again of your initial objection . . .

As for hand wringing, while I implore a complete break with capital, aren’t you the one counselling an alliance?

Who, then, one might wonder, between you and me, is the one making excuses on the grounds that, “evil as the enemy is?”

Voytek Pavlik
Voytek Pavlik
Aug 27, 2018 7:41 AM

Oh, poor Jews and Romas. Oh yeah, and f… Polish people, because they’re white…

Barrie Jones
Barrie Jones
Aug 28, 2018 7:09 PM
Reply to  Voytek Pavlik

And the 20 million Chinese, they never get a mention either. The Japanese proved themselves to be every bit as brutal as the Germans.

rilme
rilme
Aug 28, 2018 9:41 PM
Reply to  Barrie Jones

That was after US terrorism hit Japan’s shores in the form of Commodore Perry’s black ships. USAmericans are the gold standard for brutality.

Harry Stotle
Harry Stotle
Aug 27, 2018 6:18 AM

Interesting documentary on the colonisation of Namibia including the brutal and extreme methods employed by German occupiers when doing so.

Needless to say the German press did their bit to support imperialism – some things never change (from 16:20)

Antonyl
Antonyl
Aug 27, 2018 5:59 AM
Jen
Jen
Aug 26, 2018 11:42 PM

‘… Do you recall the official Western line about a ‘peaceful Germany, a land of scholars and philosophers; a nation which shocked itself and the world, by suddenly turning to extreme violence and mass murder, abandoning its noble traditions?’ Such reasoning would stand only if the Others (non-white, non-Europeans), were not considered as human beings …

Part of the answer as to why Germany, long considered a land of culture and philosophy, became a barbaric country in the late 1890s / early 1900s and then later during Adolf Hitler’s years of rule is actually here in this sentence and in the excerpt from Andre Vltchek’s post above.

It was scientists, academics, philosophers (or, in the case of Friedrich Nietzsche, his sister who gained control of his writings after his mental breakdown) and other people considered to be cultural leaders who led the way in propagating and disseminating the notion that humanity could and should be sorted into racial hierarchies based on physical appearance and apparent behaviours, to justify colonial / imperial expansion into and taking over other people’s territories.

The composer Richard Wagner, his wife Cosima and their son Siegfried (also a composer, and conductor and artistic director of the Bayreuth Festival from 1908 to 1930) come to mind as anti-Semitic. The philosopher Martin Heidegger also comes to mind as an academic who supported Nazism and did little to help his former mentor Edmund Husserl when the latter was being harassed by university administrators at the University of Freiburg because of his Jewish background.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Husserl

These examples are the most outstanding because of the legacy they have left but doubtless they were few of very many in academia and the arts who believed in, promoted and passed on ideas and opinions supporting colonialism, imperialism and conquering and transforming lands belonging to others who could either conform to the new regime or be exterminated.

mikael
mikael
Aug 26, 2018 9:35 PM

Did you write this to provoce people, genocide and ethnic cleansing prognomes, yeah, and of course, Germany, yeah, why dont we talk about lets say South Africa, and the ones claiming the rights to the land, the Bantus, and again do enlighten me if I am wrong, they have no more rights to the region than Boers, the Only indiginous people is the Pygmees, witch is to day slowly wiped out, and is confined to an desert region.
The Maoris cleansing of the native NZ isnt widely known is it.
I could go on for f… days.
Yeah.
I wounder, when some writes like that, why did this happen and whom made this possible, morons, it was what was considered as Science those days, yeah, science, you call it racism, to day, yes, but this days, as you looooove to refere every God dammed thing on the Germans, makes one wounder how f…. ignorant are you.
huh
I am from an people whom knows what that is, and I am white, oh….. I forgot, white people cant be natives cant they.
Do you know what it is to been labeled, scurn and riddicouled, do you, do you know how it is to be denied speaking your native tung, do you, do you know how it is to be the last in line just because you are an “mongol”, do you.
I know it all.
And I know also you have no idea of what I talk about.
Do you.

What facisnates me is the narrov image served when all western countrys was under the same infulence, from one of the most murderous crimes even comitted, invented by the so called science comunity, why do we never place the issue where ot belongs, on what was those days common knowledge pimped all over the bloody globe, aka “Good old fasion” Social-Darwinism, survival of the fitest, the numbero uno killer of humanity we ever have encountered but you f…. are dead silent, yeah, not even an f…. pip.
Invented by Jews and their storm trops the militant atheists and so on.
This ao called knowledge eh…… of we can call it that, this, social darwinism rules even to day, “brliliantly” displayed by our MSM, where the Leftis whines about Me been an nazi, and the right, whom by some obscure reason suddenly drools something about, rape, an issue they never have been the slightest intrested in as long I can remember, along with the leftards whom rpretend to care about the sick and poor of our society, another fake shit, they have never ever cared, and now, they continue with their screaming and we end up reading shit like this.

Let it be crystal clear, I take Norway as an ex. why the f…. do we debate thing as this happened an century ago, all tho I fully agrees on the premisses I am still pissed, why dont we debate the NorDick countrys and their race hygien program, given to us by the Jews and the so called science.
Why dont we debate that, it was ended in the midd 80s, for f… sake.
The scars are still there since some of them survived.
All due to me and others been labeled as an Sub-class of “humans”, since they considered us as “mongols”.
Yeah f….. why is it so f…. silent.

I am not defending any of this actions, but to single out one nation, is an intellectuall tripp into the outdoor shit house, an insult to intellegence.
And instead of me drooling for hours, I just gave you people an sniplets of the crimes comitted,against people like me, Romani, Kvens, Finns, “sami”, etc etc, the Sweds where the same, and they even slaughtered Finns, among others.
The hate for us runns deep, and I know you dont grasp that, because you are f….. blind and ignorant, they hate me just because I am an Native Nordic, something most of the Norwegians are not.
Etc, etc, etc.
My ex. is from ZeroH, an big alt- uh….. site in the UssA, the wurst killers of them all.
And read what they say about Yemen, how they gloat and scurn the Yemen children, and having an bal.
Do tell me, what is the mechanism, what is the thinking behind this.
huh
Got the balls, creeps.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-08-24/yet-another-us-saudi-massacre-yemen-un-condemns-airstrike-killing-22-children
WHY dont we debate THAT.
YOU wanna know what makes this happen, I wounder, do you really see it, in real time what I see, murdering sick scums running an entire nation, the biggest killing machine humanity have ever invented, the UssA, and still we whine about uh….. racism, I dont think you get it do you, what the ugly truth is about the Americans.
I am so f…. it hurts.

Do you have any idea of why, the Jews hate us, we crushed them the last time an millenium ago, and now they have crushed us.
I am from an people whom isnt even mentioned any more, even in the Genetics, even when they know we are the ancient ones, the first born, and few are we left on this planet, the closes relatives we have is the Basque, and then the Berbers, Corsicans, Sicilians, Merovingians, etc, and did you know why the PooPs Crusades also went to the North, and do you know why.
I know, but dont bother to go deeper than that, ask the f…. PooP.
There is more, but stops for now.
Even to day, 2018 we are not acknowledged what so ever, completely ignored, and crushed by the NorDick countrys Gov. whom have done what they could to hide our history and have faked everything, aka the so called Sami scam.

I give you the benefit of been an idiot, dont do that again.

peace

Frankly Speaking
Frankly Speaking
Aug 27, 2018 8:03 AM
Reply to  mikael

You make some valid points but your main complaint as to why focus on Germany’s cleansing rather than that inflicted upon your people is “what about me?”

Both cleansings are wrong. All cleansing is wrong. The reason this one is being written on about now is that a court case came up in New York.

Thanks for bringing your views and history to our attention, it would help your case if you elaborated your specific point about your ethnic group more fully and calmly.

binra
binra
Aug 27, 2018 6:13 PM

Why for a moment would you call the killing or expulsion of peoples from their homes ‘cleansing’?

Until we wake up to know the word and meaning that we share de we blindly support the doublethink of deceit?

Whoever ‘started it’ someone else retaliated to fuel it. It has been going on now since the god-kings – as a rule-bound mind.

I see that the excluded are not in fact excluded but are denied to light of acceptance to a split off sense of self that is centred around the idea of control. The unseen power of denial is that of the undermining, sabotage or blocking of fulfilment or joy in being.

This is not recognized for what it is but is projected out upon the world and attacked.

Running away from our own shadow is effectively being ruled by it and of course it includes all of whom you have denied and used for light given to fantasy of self-specialness or self-superiority.
The feeding of self-image while plea for help falls on deaf ears is part of the nature of ‘surviving’ as a confusion of mind and body. Whereas the body’s survival reflex is a temporary expedient, a sense of psychic-emotional vulnerability effectively shifts the mind and body into a persistent fight or flight conditioning that ‘sees’ threat and enemy everywhere and yet is more afraid of peace in which its adaptation or armouring in strategy of dominance would be undone.

Why use the term ‘holocaust’ for genocide or mass fratricide?
The religion of ‘sacrifice’ underlies human thought and behaviour until we change our mind about our minds. No one can change what they are not the owner of.

The attempt to change others uses guilt of shame and blame – perhaps after luring with self-inflations of self specialness to invite the power of the lie to usurp their own thinking.

Whatever has gone before does not persist unless we persist in it. What is sown now determines what we reap. Because this works beneath a surface thinking, we have no awareness of what we do because we know neither ourself truly – nor recognize our brother. Such recognition of life in self and another of like kind is not sentimental or wishful but the basic law that as you see yourself so MUST you see others, and if you deny your own self-judgement in self-illusion, the reflection of your thought remains faithful to your actual beliefs.
The focus in the masking over of denied self is a search for self validation and reinforcement because it is not true and thus must be constantly defended against true.
The apparent freedom from consciousness of conflict, dissonance, guilt, fear and all their progeny is a temporary sense of power over life that comes at cost of truth – which is a trade of Everything for nothing under the wish to be more than as a result of believing in lack. This is a sense of obstruction at a spiritual level – at the level of purpose by which all else aligns.
The systematic thinking of technological development operates the replacement of a real relationship – which is not what you think.

Broken relational communication is the ‘separation trauma’ over which a masking personae looks out from and yet is scripted by what it thinks thereby to have escaped. In larger degree this is terror and rage, shame and heartbreak. Heartreak is generally nearer the surface and can be felt and somewhat abided. The others perhaps less so. The re-enacting of a hidden past is fed by grievance, blame and hate. As if such a ‘war’ could ever result in victory – but for the fantasy of the lure and it moment of coming that is already gone. And so the search for ‘life’ in self gratifications upon the body of others, or our world and of our self. Addiction is whatever can be used to NOT see what is too fearful to see. Power addiction is power for its own sake without any purpose or fulfilment excepting as defined negatively – in terms of getting rid of or eradicating the judged unworthy – without the recognition that judgement is really feedback for our selves to use for our own self-awareness. Until that recognition is accepted, judgement excludes, rejects, denies and kills. Hence it is associated in the Bible with an exclusive sense of rejected denial and death. (The Fall).

JJ139
JJ139
Aug 27, 2018 8:58 AM
Reply to  mikael

When it comes to a pissing up the wall contest as to which western colonial state committed the worst atrocities, there are plenty of candidates, including ‘plucky little’ Belgium in the Congo, the Dutch Boers, the British in South Africa, India and elsewhere, the Opium Wars with China, the ethnic cleansing of natives in America – North and South, Australia, New Zealand. I can also imagine the Swedes didn’t treat the Finns or Russians with kid gloves on their foreign adventures.
But ultimately, a pissing up the wall contest is futile. The entire history of western colonialism everywhere was and is evil. No need to single out any one offender as the worst. they should all be condemned and made to pay compensation. Compensation not to be paid by the man in the street, who gained little benefit from these atrocities. No, compensation should be paid by the likes of David Cameron, whose family fortune is based on foreign colonial enrichment.

padre
padre
Aug 27, 2018 11:10 AM
Reply to  mikael

I like the peace part!And, yes, poor white people, nobody stands up to defend them!

Forever Young
Forever Young
Aug 26, 2018 8:35 PM

It’s overwhelming when we contemplate deeply, the staggering scale of the murdering and pillaging by the rapacious spirit which lives in the depths of the dark human psyche.

Compensation should be offered as a sincere token of acknowledgement to these tribes in Namibia… But how to even begin to communicate with the Europeans who have inherrited the vast wealth and massive estates there, so as to get them to understand and accept what their privledge is founded upon, so that they may pause and then offer to share what they have inherritted with the indigenous people of the land, and to begin the healing within the relationships, so they can co-exist with respect and reverence for each other, beyond superficial difference.. I can only hold that as a vision of hope.

It’s also true in what has been mentioned on this thread, that so many nations have engaged in genocidal aggression towards ‘the other’ for so many centuries now.. Germany is the obvious example from the last century, but it’s the same spirit which has been working through different tribes/nations for millenia now… The mantra that ‘only the strong survive and thrive’ is twisted… Strong people are the ones who do the inner work and transform the tendencies of the mind which inflict violence upon other people, animals and the environment….

We can learn from history if we truly take a look at what has played out so as to illustrate the dark archetypal energies which we must all confront within us.. Trouble is, we lost touch with the wisdom keepers and way showers so long ago, and it seems to be that the psychology of people who strive for political power, do so, so as to avoid looking at their own shadow, which is then projected onto the world…. A shadow in the collective consciousness which has been getting bigger and sprouting many heads.

Thank you for the article as my knowledge of this chapter in history was vague…. As you say it hasn’t been widely taught, in relation to it’s connection with WW2.

vierotchka
vierotchka
Aug 26, 2018 5:50 PM

Then there is the genocide and concentration camps in what is western Ukraine today, perpetrated by the Austro-Hungarians and the anti-Russians, against the Russian-speaking people and the Russophiles there. I don’t have the numbers of victims and I cannot find the short article I copied years ago from a Facebook page that stated them. If I do find it, I’ll post it hear. There were cases of people locked into Russian Orthodox churches which were then set on fire, as I remember. This happened at the very beginning of the 20th century.

George Cornell
George Cornell
Aug 26, 2018 6:04 PM
Reply to  vierotchka

One predictable consequence of highlighting any of the many genocides in the last century or so is the inevitable attempt by some to claim that their own disaster was somehow more egregious, more numerous, move heinous than all the others. Any comment section of the NYT, even if tangential to the article, illustrates this. It is time not to compete on perceived or promoted heinousness but to recognise all of these have much in common and understanding them is best viewed in their more general context.
American television always has at least two channels which are “Nazi” channels, sometimes more. How exactly these channels like the Smithsonian, the History channel, AHL, all get shanghaied into one monothematic focus is beyond me but surely it would be more productive to make the focus on genocide in general.

Maggie
Maggie
Aug 26, 2018 7:21 PM
Reply to  George Cornell

@ George Cornel

”American television always has at least two channels which are “Nazi” channels, sometimes more. How exactly these channels like the Smithsonian, the History channel, AHL, all get shanghaied into one monothematic focus is beyond me but surely it would be more productive to make the focus on genocide in general.”

Not only in America but in England too. The reason being that ALL media is owned by Jews who have a vested interest in keeping the ”Holocaust” at the forefront of every agenda.

Frances
Frances
Aug 27, 2018 1:07 PM
Reply to  Maggie

Rupert Murdoch, the billionaire media mogul behind News Corp and 21st Century Fox isn’t Jewish.

George Cornell
George Cornell
Aug 27, 2018 9:59 PM
Reply to  Frances

He should change the name to 5th Century Fox, more in line with his ethos.

Barrie Jones
Barrie Jones
Aug 28, 2018 7:19 PM
Reply to  Frances

Indeed he isn’t, however he does have potentially very lucrative business interests (oil in the Golan Heights) that coincide with Israel’s ambitions in that area. What serves Israel, also serves Murdoch (not to mention a pack of the predictable US gangsters).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genie_Energy

binra
binra
Aug 27, 2018 6:47 PM
Reply to  George Cornell

As long as we use our suffering to get something we (think we) want – so long will it persist. And to the degree or intensity of our wanting – so will it be fed.
This can also use the suffering of others as a proxy. Or the taking of offence as the basis for the right to behave offensively under guise of vindication.
The mind can be a deceiver to the wish that truth be different than it is- or that untruth be true. (These are two sides of one coin).

Technological superiority (not least a result of war-driven plunder) coupled with the masking in ‘divine right’ as a manipulative identity (followed by scientific discoveries used to validate eugenics), all structure the logical outcome of dissociated thinking given acceptance and allegiance.

Natives have not found the way to deal with an alien agenda – and I mean this firstly in terms of an inhuman or anti-human agenda that finds agency through human willing to turn us against our Self, each other, and our self. Perhaps Job found the way to stand in an integrity of being no matter what. The idea that ‘Satan’ is let loose as tares within the wheat is also the idea of a choice for life rather than a blind obedience of automata. Everything born, dies, but killing is an intent that makes the mind of power over life – and fear of retribution. Is it true that we carry those we denied life within us? Is our psyche whole, on purpose and in light of true desire? If not – why not?
Are we hiding in lies that demand ever more sacrifice to ‘feed’ in belief they protect us in return?

George cornell
George cornell
Aug 29, 2018 1:55 PM
Reply to  George Cornell

The third channel is not AHL but AHC, which stands for American Heroes Channel. One could imagine who started it, who runs it and what its aims are or visit its website and get a feel.bRemarkable similarity to the “History” channel, and how the Smithsonian, a publicly funded institution has its name behind a transparent propaganda effort is worthy of some investigation.

vierotchka
vierotchka
Aug 26, 2018 6:48 PM
Reply to  vierotchka

Here, not hear. What is wrong with me? 😀

Philip
Philip
Aug 26, 2018 5:42 PM

Yes, they deserve some compensation but where do we stop? Do we sue Norway and Sweden for the Vikings? How about Italy for the Romans or Greece for Alexander? Sad but true the strongest wins – by fair or foul means. Perhaps we’d do better stopping wars today in Yemen, Syria etc.etc.?

Maggie
Maggie
Aug 26, 2018 7:30 PM
Reply to  Philip

@ Philip,
I think the point is that compensation is sought for surviving VICTIMS and their immediate families.
So the American Indian and the Aboriginal people should definitely be compensated.
They are still non people in their own land.
And yes.. make way for all the claims from Iraq/Afghanistan/ Syria and Yemen. And rightfully so.
The Military Industrial Complex believes itself to be above the law, and it is time they were made to face their crimes.. all in the name of profit for a few.

Starac
Starac
Aug 26, 2018 9:43 PM
Reply to  Philip

“To draw the line in the sand”. Then work from there.

Kaiser Mike
Kaiser Mike
Aug 26, 2018 5:26 PM

Sounds like a lot more anti european bashing to me. Nothing about Belgium tho…barely anything about England….
Baaaad old “nazi’s”. Pfffft. Whatever.
Africans trying to scam something else out of Europe because they cant do a damn thing for themselves.

The ONLY advances Africans have made in the last 1000 years have been due to outside influence. Most of that being European. Bless their hearts. Still think they can cure aids by screwing a virgin.

With Jews and their bolshevik progeny running New York, they might win this court case.

George Cornell
George Cornell
Aug 26, 2018 6:10 PM
Reply to  Kaiser Mike

I once asked a group of national scientific representatives of a dozen West African countries why no continental leader had emerged from Africa. Their answer? Because every time one begins to emerge, the CIA bumps him off. They started with Lumumba and rattled off a dozen more , none of which were familiar. I find your post offensive and I am surely not alone.

intergenerationaltrauma
intergenerationaltrauma
Aug 26, 2018 6:32 PM
Reply to  George Cornell

George Cornell – Gaddafi as leader of what was at the time the most prosperous nation in Africa serves as the most recent example of what you reference. His plan for a pan-African currency based upon some massive gold reserves would have allowed African nations some bit of respite from the clutches of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Those reserves are referenced in Hillary Clinton’s leaked emails, and the pan-African currency plan was of course an important reason for his assassination by the Western supported jihadists.

Maggie
Maggie
Aug 26, 2018 8:06 PM

True Intergenerationaltrauma,

And where is that gold now?

”Sidney Blumenthal, in his email to Hillary Clinton confirmed, “Qaddafi’s government holds 143 tons of gold, and a similar amount in silver. During late March, 2011 these stocks were moved to SABHA (south west in the direction of the Libyan border with Niger and Chad); taken from the vaults of the Libyan Central Bank in Tripoli.”
He went on to say the gold and silver was valued at $7 billion and was one of the reasons Nicolas Sarkozy embarked on a French attack of Libya.”
https://www.africanexponent.com/post/new-evidence-the-real-reason-gaddafi-was-killed-2706

For further insight into the vilification and demonising of Gadaffi, read here:
http://www.finalcall.com/artman/publish/World_News_3/article_7886.shtml

George Cornell
George Cornell
Aug 27, 2018 10:06 PM
Reply to  Maggie

How would Blumenthal have known?

Maggie
Maggie
Aug 26, 2018 7:55 PM
Reply to  George Cornell

@ George Cornell,
Not forgetting Nelson Mandela who they hoped would die in prison, and Gadaffi, who was elected head of the African Union two years before they assassinated him. GADAFFI was embarked on a programme to create the United States of Africa and proposed using their own currency, of which they have billions, in Gold dinars. This would have cut the Vampire Bankers and their cronies out of the picture… so he had to go. And now we have leaders installed who are paid by the CIA and MI6 to keep their people sick and subjugated to open the gates to robbers and thieves, called ‘investors.’
The Bush family being the prime example with their Barrick Gold Mine????
http://members.tripod.com/~american_almanac/bushgold.htm

George cornell
George cornell
Aug 29, 2018 2:00 PM
Reply to  Maggie

Certainly not forgetting Mandela who was more of a world leader than a continental one, in my opinion. Gaddafi fits the mold well.

Bernie Holland
Bernie Holland
Aug 26, 2018 8:38 PM
Reply to  George Cornell

George Cornell – you certainly are not alone – I share your repulsion of the perverted views of others who care not for the dignity of human life.

binra
binra
Aug 27, 2018 7:20 PM
Reply to  Bernie Holland

Why not correct the ignorance rather than engage in moral superiority?
Educate – whilst being firm.
You are right – I feel – to dissociate yourself from what you hold untrue and destructive. But this is undermined by resorting to taking offence as if you are a perfected one calling down penalty on the unworthy and invalid. Their view may of course be unworthy of them as well as of oters and so is in need of correction – not support. But the person is a being capable of learning given the conditions for learning. That hatred brings forth a like reaction is not to say that that is its correction – even if all such ‘haters’ were put in camps and killed. I am not suggesting that that is your intent – but I see how the ‘liberal’ movement has lost itself in a bubble of self-entitlement that has rudely popped and revealed a more sophisticated form of hate.
Hatred in the human heart tends to do as it was done to, while believing its act justified – at least in the moment of its projection.
By the way – correction as I use it is something we accept in ourselves and not something done to others. Relating from the same error that we would ‘correct’ out there is to persist in in different forms. If the buck stops here – for me – then I have to own my own reaction as part of not only NOT feeding the troll – but of disinvesting in what I say I do not want and then giving witness to a firm but unconflicted communication.
The re-education of all who are willing to accept self-responsibility as a current relational capacity and demonstration is the correction of blame-dumping a sense of resentment.
Of course we may feel the hate all the more intensely when we cannot mitigate it by outsourcing to others, and that is the nature of the territory of releasing what doesn’t work in willingness for what does.

Jen
Jen
Aug 27, 2018 12:16 AM
Reply to  George Cornell

The same was done to Iraqi academics, scientists and engineers in the years following the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.
http://www.iraqsolidaridad.org/2013/docs/List_of_Iraqi_academics_assassinated_abr_2013.pdf

Palestinians in the Occupied Territories have the same problem: as soon as a person gifted with leadership qualities appears among them, that unfortunate gets picked off by the Israelis in an arrest or a targeted assassination.

intergenerationaltrauma
intergenerationaltrauma
Aug 26, 2018 6:19 PM
Reply to  Kaiser Mike

Kaiser Mike – “Sounds like a lot more anti european bashing to me.” “The ONLY advances Africans have made in the last 1000 years have been due to outside influence. Most of that being European.” – your comments.

said the man sitting on 500+ years of pillage from around the entire planet. Between the British Empire and its successor the current American empire the poor non-white populations of planet earth have had little if any respite from our rapacious pillage. The mayhem has been non-stop. Of course brief lights like a Lumumba had to be assassinated as quickly as possible, should they dare challenge your (and West’s in general) self-deluded notions of racial superiority.

Vltchek speaks the historical truths quite unpalatable in the West by simply reflecting upon our history. The white world is appalled by the Nazi’s not because of genocide, but because that genocide was of fellow “white people.” Genocide had been Europe and her colonies “hobby” for centuries prior to both World Wars. Genocide was nothing “new” to the European sensibility. Repeating your “white man’s burden” nonsense today is hardly becoming of an adult, so I’m hoping you’re a child who was somehow given access to your parents computer.

P. Lewis
P. Lewis
Aug 26, 2018 6:24 PM
Reply to  Kaiser Mike

Mike, nobody cares what the alt-right thinks about anything. Stay in your mom’s basement and keep wanking to Tomi Lahren.

Yarkob
Yarkob
Aug 26, 2018 7:21 PM
Reply to  Kaiser Mike

@kaiser mike i think i you typed the wrong letters into your address bar and arrived here by accident

it’s M-A-I-L-O-N-L-I-N-E.C-O-M

you’re welcome

Maggie
Maggie
Aug 26, 2018 7:40 PM
Reply to  Kaiser Mike

@ Kaiser Mike

What a bigoted, ignorant, porcine cretin we have here..

Clearly you have never read a book or you would know that from the inception of the British Empire, and even before, Africa has been plundered from coast to coast and it’s people murdered, for it’s resources.

Try reading one book ”The Confessions of an Economic Hitman by John Perkins” and see how primitive countries are plundered, and why.

.

George Cornell
George Cornell
Aug 26, 2018 4:19 PM

Several informative points. Don’t forget the Congo and Leopold where the death toll (in the 12 million range) was easily double that of the WWII Holocaust not to mention systematic mutilation, and competitive with the number of slaves sent to the US by mainly English slavers, many of whom were “owned” by the Church of England. And Lord Kitchener was viewed as a hero in England.
One of the great ironies in all of this was Kitchener’s inaugural concentration camps for Boer women and children did not impede the renaming of Berlin Ontario to Kitchener, a name it bizarrely retains today.

Antonyl
Antonyl
Aug 27, 2018 5:49 AM
Reply to  George Cornell

So Kitchener murdered black AND white: not a racist but a totalitarian mass killer of civilians as well as armed opponents (be it spears against machine guns). Quite a hero….

Antonyl
Antonyl
Aug 27, 2018 8:00 AM
Reply to  Antonyl
Barrie Jones
Barrie Jones
Aug 28, 2018 7:32 PM
Reply to  Antonyl

I understand that there were events in the Sudan during Kitchener’s time there, (late 1890’s) that are still secret and the files stored at the Foreign and Commonwealth Offices. Considering his reputation is well known, it’s hard to imagine what other horrors might be contained in those secret files.

George cornell
George cornell
Aug 29, 2018 12:32 PM
Reply to  Barrie Jones

The groundbreaking contribution of the English to human villainy ones not end with concentration camps and slavery. I paste below the initiation if not invention of biological warfare from Lord Jeffrey Amherst’s wiki entry but one which is not as well known as it should be.

<One of the most infamous and well documented issues during Pontiac’s War was the use of biological warfare against the Native Americans. The suggestion was posed by Amherst himself in letters to Colonel Henry Bouquet.[24] Amherst, having learned that smallpox had broken out among the garrison at Fort Pitt, and after learning of the loss of his forts at Venango, Le Boeuf and Presqu’Isle, wrote to Colonel Bouquet:[25]

Could it not be contrived to send the small pox among the disaffected tribes of Indians? We must on this occasion use every stratagem in our power to reduce them.
Bouquet, who was already marching to relieve Fort Pitt, agreed with this suggestion in a postscript when he responded to Amherst just days later on 13 July 1763:[1]

P.S. I will try to inocculate [sic] the Indians by means of Blankets that may fall in their hands, taking care however not to get the disease myself. As it is pity to oppose good men against them, I wish we could make use of the Spaniard’s Method, and hunt them with English Dogs. Supported by Rangers, and some Light Horse, who would I think effectively extirpate or remove that Vermine.
In response, also in a postscript, Amherst replied:[1]

P.S. You will Do well to try to Innoculate [sic] the Indians by means of Blankets, as well as to try Every other method that can serve to Extirpate this Execrable Race. I should be very glad your Scheme for Hunting them Down by Dogs could take Effect, but England is at too great a Distance to think of that at present.>

Finally The name Amherst, found in numerous place names and institutions is being reconsidered. I am uncomfortable taking people out of the context of their times but this one takes the genocidal cake for North America until Americans decided they wanted Indian lands.

binra
binra
Aug 30, 2018 1:44 AM
Reply to  George cornell

Does that give you pause when considering global medical interventions as healthcare?
Do you notice that a large number of humans have been normalised to regard human beings as a virus on the Planet?
The forms change shape the intent masks in new guises.

My personal appreciation of ‘eugenics’ is not in regard to other beings but in regard to the thought I permit to be acted from, shared and thus strengthened. Evil thought or rather false thinking that makes evil or destructive perception is the condition out of and upon which evil agenda finds support.

I understand it is possible to hate human existence but I also understand that this reinforces hate rather than heals.
Getting is a misidentification. Giving and receiving is the nature of reality. So watch the meanings YOU give for you cannot escape them.

There may be no limit to our capacity for ignorance and arrogance excepting tolerance for pain. Projecting it onto others (outsourcing) is a way of seeming to profit while others pay for the gratification that only serves an appetite for more. If we be the change we want to see in others, then we have a congruency or power of witness in our communications. Not so as to impact or force them to change – but to witness a quality of presence in which darkness cannot hide. Or of course we can hide in darkness and so give it power as our protector.

People throughout history have lived and died under all kinds of extremity – including such subjections and perpetration as many commenters have referred to. There is a horror to the human condition. But is there not also a human Spirit?
That is not a question for the mind as for the spirit that is within us no matter how covered over – for do we not have life?