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#3704 -
Wednesday, November 4, 2009 - Editor: Jerry Katz
The Nonduality Highlights - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NDhighlights
Tickets for the Science
and Nonduality Conference 2010 are available for $295
until November 30, the lowest price they'll be, most likely.
http://www.scienceandnonduality.com/register.shtml
Martha Ramsey sent
the following. It's pretty cool. I love how people are dragged
through dirt and their clothes don't have a speck on them and not
one hair is out of place. The perfect 50s.
But that's not the point. Fifty years later, the question one no
one ever thought would be meaningful, makes The Blob, more than
ever, a classic film.
Here's the email sent by Martha:
Friends,
The link below takes you to a You Tube clip of the last 2:33
minutes of "The Blob" (1958). I never knew how
prescient the ending of that movie was! You might not remember
it, so here it is.
I think you can pick up the gist without any lead in, but just in
case-- Steve McQueen and his girlfriend are getting rescued from
the basement of the Diner where the Blob has been trying to get
in and devour them. Everyone's using CO2 fire extinguishers to
stop the Blob because it can't function in cold temperatures.
This clip could be very useful in the environmental efforts. I
wonder if Al Gore has seen it.
Have fun,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GEJgR-bX0w&feature=related
"...humankind
is undergoing a shift from hierarchy as the dominant mode for
structuring human reality to networks as the dominant mode. This
shift is as deep and as extensive a shift as humankind has ever
undergone, and it will change everything."
Enter the Rhizome: Non-duality
My good friend Dan Jaeckle introduced me to the concept of the
rhizome as first expressed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari
in their 1987 book A Thousand Plateaus, the second volume of
their two volume work Civilization and Schizophrenia. I do not
presume to be a scholar of French philosophy, nor do I presume to
understand Deleuze and Guattari very well; however, the rhizome
has captured my imagination as a marvelous description of the
structures that I have been calling networks. I have been writing
about networks for the past two years, and basically, I have been
contrasting them to hierarchies. The gist of my argument has been
that, in response to modern technology in general and information
technology in particular, humankind is undergoing a shift from
hierarchy as the dominant mode for structuring human reality to
networks as the dominant mode. This shift is as deep and as
extensive a shift as humankind has ever undergone, and it will
change everything.
However, I have for sometime felt an uneasiness with trying to
say all that I wanted to say about this new structure with the
term network. I've not been systematic enough in my thinking to
say what my uneasiness was all about, other than that network
didn't seem to capture just what I meant. Rhizome may be the
concept I'm looking for. Whether it captures it all or not, I
cannot yet say, but I'm already convinced that it will expand and
sharpen my ability to speak about the structures that are coming
to dominate the way people think, communicate, and organize their
affairs.
I have already corrected one error in my thinking: rhizomes (or
networks) are not the opposite of hierarchies, or as Chuen-Ferng
Koh says in Internet: Towards a Holistic Ontology, "It is
important not to see the rhizome in binary opposition to the tree
… The concept of the rhizome was set up precisely to
challenge dichotomous branching."
Rhizomes are inclusive of hierarchies. Hierarchies, however, do
not include rhizomes, at least not formally. I think it certain
that rhizomes have existed in the most rigid of hierarchical
structures throughout history, but on a clandestine, ad hoc,
submerged basis that is almost never recognized by the power
structure of the hierarchy and never sanctioned. Indeed, one of
the formal characteristics of hierarchies is that they are
exclusive of all that is not within the hierarchy, and they
invest great resources in marking the boundaries between the
organization and the rest of the world. Hierarchies are always
mindful of managing their entry and exit procedures, and they
tend to make the barriers to entry and exit rather high.
Rhizomes are not opposite to hierarchies so much as they simply
ignore hierarchies, cutting in arcs across hierarchical
boundaries and levels, connecting nodes at various levels within
the hierarchy to each other and to nodes totally outside the
hierarchy. Hierarchies find such connections and collaborations
highly disruptive and treasonous.
Rhizomes are indifferent to entry and exit barriers. Whoever will
can enter the rhizome, and whoever won't can exit. In either
case, the rhizome is largely unaffected. Its formal
characteristics persist.
from http://idst-2215.blogspot.com/2009/11/enter-rhizome-non-duality.html