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What a beautiful reply, James. Thank you.
Sandy
Mid-Mojave
 
 
In a message dated 9/9/2008 1:49:22 P.M. Pacific Standard Time,  
Clansgian AT wmconnect.com writes:

>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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