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June 03, 2017

How the West keeps a tight control over knowledge and propaganda

My starting assumption is unity ... nature is ultimately and originally whole, and in addition to that universal principle, it can then divide into the fractions we can see, count, measure, think, etc.  The Western tradition is to go the other way, to say that nature is fundamentally made of fractions and these can be combined to give the impression of something whole. So that much is a choice that can only be decided over time using both ideas to see which gives the more parsimonious explanations of the more kinds of phenomena.
If we assume the universe is whole, and wholeness is retained in all natural systems (even though we can see fractions of the whole), then the number 2, referring to distinct objects, is fractional - it cannot exist in nature without a context containing and relating the two objects.  This means that any binary model must be unnatural, as Rosen said, a simulation, not a true model. I think that may be a proof that digital mechanism cannot model life or true complexity, but can only simulate it via "complication"; i.e., through non-parsimonious calculations that can never converge on the missing whole because it was left out in the beginning. There is no convincing way to recover it. Thus binary logic, for as fascinating as it might be, does not reflect nature even though, like a menu at a restaurant, it can give a description of a fractional aspect.
John Kineman
Leibniz’s ideas on space and time are confusing because from about 1660-1695 he is steeped in what we call classical mechanics. He believes in simultaneity. I am not sure if he ever addresses whether light has a finite speed. But after 1695 he wants to set up a completely new mathematical framework for individual dynamic units (monads) where everything is defined in purely dynamic terms. He gives up, but I am not sure he ever says whether or not he sees that ‘simultaneity’ no longer has a real basis. I suspect he never foresees the issues that have to be resolved by SR, although it is extraordinary how many such problems he does foresee.
My understanding has been that since acceptance of SR it is assumed that there is no reality we can call simultaneity. There may be mathematical tricks that allow definition of a god’s eye view simultaneity but if we take a dynamic world view seriously then simultaneity is an arbitrary abstraction. Maybe I am getting SR wrong but I find it hard to see how one can get around the fact that in order to test any prediction in physics something has to get from here to there to test it and that will involve spacetime, not just space.
Edwards, Jonathan
In reading such works as Castaneda’s D&G will admit it doesn’t matter if one believes it is neither an actual ethnographic tale of a real Shaman named Don Juan, or if it is rather just a meta-fictional parable written by a literary wizard steeped in the magical literature of such worlds. Doubt or not what is important is the truth underlying the fictions. As they say of the Fourth book in the series:
The fourth book, Tales of Power, is about the living distinction between the “Tonal” and the “Nagual.” The tonal seems to cover many disparate things: It is the organism, and also all that is organized and organizing; but it is also signifiance, and all that is signifying or signified, all that is susceptible to interpretation, explanation, all that is memorizable in the form of something recalling something else; finally, it is the Self (Moi), the subject, the historical, social, or individual person, and the corresponding feelings. In short, the tonal is everything, including God, the judgment of God, since it “makes up the rules by which it apprehends the world. So, in a manner of speaking, it creates the world.” Yet the tonal is only an island. For the nagual is also everything. And it is the same everything, but under such conditions that the body without organs has replaced the organism and experimentation has replaced all interpretation, for which it no longer has any use. Flows of intensity, their fluids, their fibers, their continuums and conjunctions of affects, the wind, fine segmentation, microperceptions, have replaced the world of the subject. Becomings, becomings-animal, becomings-molecular, have replaced history, individual or general. In fact, the tonal is not as disparate as it seems: it includes all of the strata and everything that can be ascribed to the strata, the organization of the organism, the interpretations and explanations of the signifiable, the movements of subjectification. The nagual, on the contrary, dismantles the strata. It is no longer an organism that functions but a BwO that is constructed. No longer are there acts to explain, dreams or phantasies to interpret, childhood memories to recall, words to make signify; instead, there are colors and sounds, becomings and intensities (and when you become-dog, don’t ask if the dog you are playing with is a dream or a reality, if it is “your goddam mother” or something else entirely). There is no longer a Self [Moi] that feels, acts, and recalls; there is “a glowing fog, a dark yellow mist” that has affects and experiences movements, speeds. The important thing is not to dismantle the tonal by destroying it all of a sudden. You have to diminish it, shrink it, clean it, and that only at certain moments. You have to keep it in order to survive, to ward off the assault of the nagual. For a nagual that erupts, that destroys the tonal, a body without organs that shatters all the strata, turns immediately into a body of nothingness, pure self-destruction whose only outcome is death: “The tonal must be protected at any cost.” (Kindle Locations 3480-3501).
Put it in Kantian terms of phenomenal/noumenon distinction, the tonal is the realm of phenomenon that we’ve been taught to apprehend by the supposed categories of the Mind, while the nagual is the noumenal sphere of being and becoming that is situated outside the prescribed temenos or magic circle of reality constructed by our culture. Those who break down the barriers between these two systems, who forcibly vacate and destroy the walls between these two realms end up locked away in asylums under the rubric of a disease we term schizophrenia. Those who will as D&G propose slowly dismantle the tonal step by step, methodically decoding its lies, its propaganda systems; systems that have locked us into a prison house of the mind, where we’ve been (hyper)normalized to believe it is the only Real world follow the Greater Path of schizophrenizing reality: without becoming schizophrenics in the diseased sense. It bares repeating you must keep and be aware of the tonal (phenomenal) during this de-programming process: “You have to keep it in order to survive, to ward off the assault of the nagual [noumenon/noumenal]. For a nagual that erupts, that destroys the tonal, a body without organs that shatters all the strata, turns immediately into a body of nothingness, pure self-destruction whose only outcome is death: “The tonal must be protected at any cost.” [my italics]
This notion of de-programing mainstream reality, of entering a special place, plane, or collective system or agonistic relation to the tonal has been at the heart of a whole history of magical practices from the ancient Shamans, to the Oracles and Dionsyian festivals or Mysteries of Greece and other ancient pagan systems, to the Voodoan soul-riders of certain African systems, to the multifarious mystical orders from Sufi, Gnostic, Apophatic, and other systems within the monotheistic world system down to our own time of syncretism. Nothing new here, only that certain respectable and academic scholars such as Deleuze and others have opened their discourse to these ancient systems, allowed them to be brought back into the light of scholarly and experimental modes of becoming as ways of preparing us to de-program the reality matrix of our current malaise.
That we live in a stratified and codified reality system is at the heart of D&G’s diagnosis, and that there is a way, a path out, a ‘line of flight’ or path of destratification and deterritorialization out of this prison house of the mind is also true. As they’ll tell us,
The study of the dangers of each line is the object of pragmatics or schizoanalysis, to the extent that it undertakes not to represent, interpret, or symbolize, but only to make maps and draw lines, marking their mixtures as well as their distinctions. (Kindle Locations 4751)
Like two ancient Magus’s D&G were slowly developing a methodology to de-program the reality system of modern capitalist society and civilization. They’d speak of the dangers facing anyone who would seek a way out of this control system:
According to Nietzsche’s Zarathustra and Castaneda’s Indian Don Juan, there are three or even four dangers: first, Fear, then Clarity, then Power, and finally the great Disgust, the longing to kill and to die, the Passion for abolition.
Castaneda the man may have perpetrated a hoax on both his academic advisors, and on the public at large over a period of years; yet, it is the power of his vision and meta-fiction that awakened a generation to see that reality is not always what we assume it is that is the key, rather than the truth that he literally was an apprentice of some Yaqui sorcerer. For those that try to debunk such things what we’re reminded of is how badly the cultural police seek to maintain command and control over the Reality Studio rather than the underlying truth of such visions. That many academics and para-academics would debunk Castaneda tells us more about such academic pursuits than about him per se. Strangely the point of my post was more about Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalytical endeavors and their use of magical systems in their pursuit of breaking out of the prison house of what Land would term the Cathedral: the set of institutions that keep a tight control over knowledge and propaganda in our Western Civilization.

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