That theory about Shakespeare and Francis Bacon etc creating a standardized literature to enact linguistic and perceptual uniformity across populations…

“The new state takes from people the words on which they subsist, and transforms them into the standardized language which henceforth they are compelled to use, each one at the level of education that has been institutionally imputed to him. Henceforth, people will have to rely on the language they receive from above, rather than to develop a tongue in common with one another. The switch from the vernacular to an officially taught mother tongue is perhaps the most significant - and, therefore, least researched - event in the coming of a commodity-intensive society”.

Here is a good link. It talks about Standardized language being the “consort of empire”

http://www.preservenet.com/theory/Illich/Vernacular.html#EMPIRE

There is somthing irriducible about humanity.

Breakdancing - development of proprioceptive/kinesthetic awareness
Graffiti - Re-writing sense impressions through act of will
MCing - Mastering the flow of linguistic thought
DJing - Manipulation of moments of perception

Those are really good. These are all these are all things that kind of evolve organically over time. Its pretty cool. Totally decentralized. Ebonics is interesting too. All language used to be like ebonics at one time all across Europe. Its sort of that way in India still somewhat with all the “vernacular” regional languages. I mean in the sense that it is a direct product of culture with alternate spellings and so forth. It was never formally taught. Language became “standardized” not until Christopher Columbus time. Two huge things happened at the same time, The standardization of language and the discovery of the new world. I forget the Guys name who wrote about this.

African American culture is in many ways countercultural. Its a folk culture. Most of western Culture is becoming increasingly machine like.

I think in western culture there is some strange interpenetration of people and machines. The machine gets into peoples minds and bodies.

Ted, have you or anybody else ever read David Abram’s excellent Spell of the Sensuous? I think he is tackling this same subject from a different angle, one which may be very compatible with what you’re looking for with regards to re-wilding, natural life, etc. And seriously seriously read Marcus Aurelius’ “Meditations.”

I own Spell of the Sensuous. I only got a third way into it. At the time I was a little turned off by what seemed to be a materialistic bias, But I’ll take another look at it. When I bought I was more interested in reading about animism from the perspective of an animist.

Subsequently, cardiologists long gossiped about a side effect they irreverently dubbed “pump head,” a decline in psychological and cognitive capacity associated with the procedure. It wasn’t until decades later, however, that this effect on what it means to be human started being taken seriously in scientific journals. A groundbreaking New England Journal of Medicine report was published in 2001.

Chemotherapy for cancer dates to the 1940s, but a psychological and cognitive deficit known as “chemofog” only recently has been getting serious attention.

“Science guys are not attuned to this. People slough it off,” notes Arthur Caplan, head of the department of medical ethics at the University of Pennsylvania. Their attitude is ” ‘You might be more distant? More cold? What do I care?’ People who evaluate the devices spin to positive measures, not subjective ones.”

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/health/2003843410_heart19.html

If you listen to him with a stethoscope, you don’t hear the usual loud tha-thump-thump pulse. What you hear is a whir. “Like a washing machine,” he says, in one of numerous telephone interviews….

No one really knows why Houghton has this trouble — whether it is the machinery, or the drugs, or depression, or advancing age, or the lingering effects of major surgery, or a lack of hormones secreted by the heart, or even that human brains have always been optimized by having their oxygen delivered in pulse-driven spurts, not constant pressure.

The reason his emotions are different is obvious: his proprioceptive awareness was formerly driven by the “pulse” of blood flowing in and out of his heart in almost juggling patterns (I felt this last night, the connection to juggling, but more on that later). Emotions come from MOTION, get it? Emotions are rhythmic responses. If you stabilize those pulses into an omnipresent “whir” no wonder you remove the rhythmic depth of emotionality. I don’t think there is much of a secret here at all.

Speaking of “white people being lame” I also have another direction I want to take all this, which connects ultimately back up to performance traditions, yoga, circus, etc. Hip-Hop: one of the elements of hip-hop is break-dancing, which is really nothing other than extremely heightened proprioceptive and kinesthetic awareness applied through motion to time and rhythm.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hip_hop

In fact, the four elements of hip-hop, if you wanted to be white and abstract about it, could be broken down into a sort of theory of the mind and self, not unlike the aggregates in Buddhism. A very tentative example which could be expanded and improved a great deal:

Breakdancing - development of proprioceptive/kinesthetic awareness
Graffiti - Re-writing sense impressions through act of will
MCing - Mastering the flow of linguistic thought
DJing - Manipulation of moments of perception

I also think the exercise I outlined for watching movies syncs up with this as well: as you watch a movie or television, mimic the facial and physical expressions of everyone who appears on screen. You should be able to get it to such a point as well where you can *almost* say with the actors their lines as they are speaking. Try to remove the lag time of your saying lines with them (even and especially when you don’t already know the lines) as much as possible. Just doing this for even a few moments is a tremendous mindfuck.

The Alexander technique Wikipedia entry mentions somthing about people in “western culture” not knowing how to move right.

By my observation that can be translated “white people” because really that would be more accurate and people in different ethnic groups that still live within western culture tend to move better.

I know I am treading on dangerous ground here But anyway, Tim mentioned that disconnecting from direct sensory input through ones body, frees up computational power for abstract thinking.

So let me insert autism. Its more common in certian ethic groups, the same ethnic groups like Jews and Europeans responsible for the bulk of all scientific discoveries.

There is controversy with the relationship between different genetic groupings and IQ. But one counter argument is that there is selection bias and that IQ tests don’t test for intelligence per se but for abstract thinking.

My conclusion is that most white people are slightly autistic an that these genes are present in the gene pool, probably are only partially expressed in most people, but somtimes in a continuum they are expressed more drastically and then you get autistic people, that have serious problems using their bodies correctly.

But there actually is therapy that that when caught early enough can correct a lot of these problems in autistics when caught young.

This drawback encourages people to feel convinced that whatever effort they now use for movement and coping with circumstances is necessary, even when it is far from normal. Forgetting about habits now automated and recognizing a problem developing, it’s easy to imagine the need to train an equally strong, opposing habit rather than subtracting the hidden habit. Loss of perceptual sensitivity encourages mistaken conclusions for a call to action, and can be driven by the imperative necessity for any response. In a panic, all opposing habits can fire off at once, pulling in all directions, sometimes without the person noticing they are doing it except by the immobility or pain it can cause.

How our kinesthetic sense becomes untrustworthy from adapting to needless over-compensating is built into many innocent situations. People create habits for themselves that are driven by goals that seem useful at the time. For instance, if a person often carries a bag on their forearm, he will later find himself holding up his arm when the bag is not on it. Misunderstanding a teacher’s directions, a student may repeat what the teacher knows is unnecessary, but the teacher forgivingly allows the mistake to go by; this causes the student to unknowingly adopt useless or later problematic routines. If someone experiences fear while learning, adapting can mean that person will most likely continue doing the skill fearfully. If someone has healed from a temporary injury, a habit of wincing in anticipation of pain can be automatically continued indefinitely, despite pain being healed. Due to rapid growth, teenagers often move their own bodies based on inaccurate assumptions of their size and structure, i.e. a rapidly growing 13-year-old may think ‘I’m getting too tall’ and stoops as the solution.

According to Alexander teachers, few adults in Western culture retain their ability to move freely without needless interference. As adults grow older and given an unceasing cumulative cultural demand of pressure to perform without a working knowledge of the body’s structural design, the cost to health can range from feelings of resignation to very real physical problems. Alexander teachers believe that many of these physical and psychological stresses could be avoided or mitigated by learning to stop outdated habits; these are usually useless habits that stand in the way of flexibility, insight and problem solving.

But I could tell it didn’t even occur to him that his pride over not having had any alcohol for so long was kind of meaningless in light of everything else he was still involved with - because his thought patterns were so solidified and habituated that he simply couldn’t see around them.

I don’t bring the point up to be like I’m better than him or something, but to point out that we all do exactly this on different scales with justifications in our lives to prop up irrational behaviors. The addict is only threatening to us because he highlights those hidden aspects of our own lives and hence we try to push him out of our awareness.

http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2007...ooting-so-called-irrational-behavior/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skandha
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/health/2003843410_heart19.html

I didn’t see your comments as off-topic at all Ted.

I heard that tanning a deer hide awakens fossil memories too.

I don’t think it’s too off topic, you just come at topics from an odd angle. It’s my understanding that semi-wild farm cats stockpile mouse carcasses, bones and skin in bizarre and highly individualistic ways, like little kitty serial killers. Both species do this for some reason, I just don’t know what that reason is.

I still like this. Plus I think there are unused parts of our brains that awaken when you track an animal and do different things. I heard that tanning a deer hide awakens fossil memories too.

But not to get off topic.

“That marvelous thing” is what I am interested in!

One thing I just realized about tai chi and stuff is that its silent.

Their processing power can now be diverted to other tasks.

Like reinforcing bad habits? The drug addicts I’ve met have always amazed me with the energy and creativity they put into their addiction. It seems so difficult. The chemicals and the lifestyle do destroy people but I’ve had a few tell me that their health fell apart after they stopped using. But, then I look at some negative things in my own life and say ‘it’s so difficult’. I think you’re really on the right track with this line of thought. When you take it out of a religious belief system it works better and for more people.