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[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

>Your thoughts on this take on the thread?

>Nope. Not created, just evolved. "Underlying" implies a 'born-with'.

No.  It implies 'conditioned'.  Just as you pick up the language of your 
cluture and use it skillfully no matter how complex it seems to someone who 
must 
lean it otherwise, you also pick up certain undelying mindsets from the 
culture 
you find yourself born into.  Just as it is necessary to quit translanting 
and ride the wave of a language you want to learn, it can be very difficult 
to 
step outside the mental paramaters of our overall culture.

If you take an infant from China and drop them into Appalachia (which is 
often done), that child grows up with Appalachian speech, mores, and mindset.

Make no mistake though, I am an earnest diciple of Jung.  I believe in a 
cultural memory, racial memory, a species memory, and a univeral biological 
memory.  But for humans, the cultural memory itself is not genetic, only the 
predispositon to adopt whatever culture one finds onceself born into.

> 
> >We are part of the planet, and merely at the top of the food chain. If we  
> >happened to end up with 'superior' thought processes, I see that as an  
> >obligation to our 'inferiors' to do a kind of 'noblesse oblige' thing, and 
> now  we 
> ?venture into the arena of ethics and philosophy.
> 

I've raised a lot of pigs.  It is supposed that pigs are one of the most 
intelligent animals and I find good reason to think this is so.  But their 
intelligence is geared 100% toward getting as much food as they can.  In that 
they 
are genius.  But when it comes to anything else they are as dumb as a box of 
rocks.  The trouble comes with athropromophism - attributing the 
characteristics 
of people to animals (or plants or rocks for that matter).  So I don't see 
humans as superior at anything other than being humans.  A carrot is much 
better 
at handling the idea of carrot-ness than we can ever understand.  It is not 
inferior to us, it is just being a carrot while we are not.

Out here in the wild backwater where we can be as odd as we like, I once 
conducted an experiment.  It was just after talking to one of the VP's of a 
company for whom I did work, the VP was Irish and said that when he was a 
boy, they 
only spoke Irish on the farm and he found it difficult to that day (he was 70 
at the time) to think about farmwork and farm management in English.  At the 
time I had been studying the linguists guesses at the proto-language of all 
the 
Iriquoisian languages (which includes Cherokee).  The structure they proposed 
was that there were no nouns in the language at all, everything was a verbal 
construct.  There is ample evidence in Seneca, Mohawk, Haudenosouni, etc. 
that 
this is likely.  

Therefore where we think of say, a pumpkin as being a concrete concept, here 
is one, you can see it and touch it and so it is a real thing, an alternate 
linguistic device is to view it as a "verbal construct".   So it is refered 
to 
as 'it-is-vining-itself-along'.  Later 'it-is-beginning-to-fruit-itself'.  
And 
finally 'it-has-accomplished-pumpkining'.  

So that summer I paused just before the garden and tried to shift my 
linguistic mindset and view what I was doing by the proto-iriquoisian terms.  
 In June 
what I found in the corn patch was 'it-is-pushing-up-green'.  When the 
windstorm broke a section of the walnut tree down, I had to remove 
'it-once-was-branching.'  In order to plow I had to fetch So-qui-li 
(It-carries-things, or 
it-bears-burdens).

It messes with your mind to not have the familiar linguistic handle on 
things.  In fact, you can drift into a sort of revelry where you don't view 
your 
surrounding as things at all, but processes, events, happenings.  If this 
were 
the way one thought all the time from birth, that everything around them was 
referred to by their process, why would you need the concept that anything 
must 
needs be 'created' to exist??

Yup.  Best toke I ever took, best trip I ever was on!


James
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