The E-primitive Thought Experiment

Jus to let you know (from England), brambling is a good laugh. So is going on a scrumpy - pinching cultivated fruits.

A ‘bo’ loves hiphop and black culture (and generally racist POVs), and a ‘bo’ object brings them respec’. For example, bling and sensemilla are considered ‘bo’. Incidentally, I use the word ‘beau’ quite a lot!

I see no schizophrenia in animist rationalism, logical or lateral.

Oh yeah- and ‘shiny’ has meant good here, ever since the days of weebl and bob. Mmm, pie…

PS. Where do I find the sandbox? My wish is to converse in e-prim!

I have been trying to change my language to reflect my beliefs for while now. Given the nature of my believes i say e-primitive is seems like a natural choice. negating the word to-be and all forms of it, and words of ownersip (which i see as going in the same direction) is something i can do with a bit of practice. But how do i get rid of pronouns. Given my nondualist believes, reducing pronoun use is something i would like. How do i do this on an everyday level?

See i used ‘I’ so many times here. I already don’t use my or mine, or use it very rarely (as in only to describe things such as beliefs and emotions and likes etc). It’s usually i got it, or i bought it or something (i.e. not my magazine, magazine that i got). This came naturally to me. But I and Me i can’t do anything abt, any suggestions?

Get a load of this.

David Bohm, a physicist, wrote a book he called “Wholeness and the Implicate Order”, addressing quantum issues of non-locality, the vibratory nature of all phenomena, etc.

In one chapter he declares the need for a language that can speak entirely in verbs, an idea he calls “Rheomode” (rheo; from the latin, ‘flow’).

Yes. And even though he eventually gave up in despair (nouns kept creeping back in, apparently…), I give him props.

You can check the TUMBLR sidebar at mythic-cartography.org for some links I just dug up on all this. Pretty cool, really.

Willem, very interesting thoughts! Reminds me of Ludwig Wittgenstein, a 20-century philosopher who claimed that “meaning is use” (verbs!) and “philosophy is the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.” How language frames our thinking is a very important insight. Are you familiar with the Sapir-Whorf Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis?

AM I FAMILIAR WITH IT? AND HOW!

haha. I have Whorf’s book on my shelf and I love it - “Language, Thought and Reality”.

However, the hypothesis is a straw man neither dreamed up by Sapir or Whorf, but by some academics who wanted something easy to take down.

To this day, folks say “Well, I don’t agree with the strong version of the hypothesis, but the weak version gets more and more support”. Which is to mean, what Sapir and Whorf actually thought gets more and more support all the time.

Hell, in your first year of high school Spanish you can feel crazy shit going on. Duh.

In case of confusion:
Strong Version: “Language constrains your reality.”
Weak Version: “Language influences your reality.”

Willem and all,
Do you know of a list of languages that do not have a “to be” verb? It would be interesting to see a historic language tree that marks which branches have “to be”, and where and when the transition to “to be” structure occurred.

Nope. This is a complex question.

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

Some languages can be said to have a copula now (Tzutujil Mayan) but didn’t have it before Christian evangelicals transformed the culture. This is a common problem.

All Amerindian languages - Athabaskan, Iroquoian, Algonquin, Salish, and dozens and dozens of other language families - I believe have either none or “very weak” copulas - what might be better described as “non-copula” thinking. A modern linquist might be able to do contortions to make the case that they do indeed have copulas - but the languages being fundamentally verby it’s just not part of their language-world.

The correlating example would be Russian, which has extremely strong copula thinking, but technically rarely uses the copula in the present tense - “I student, you electrician.” So regardless of Russian being on the “zero copula” list, it is a strong copula thinking language.

Modern folks are particularly obsessed with who or what things “are”. Non-copula-obsessed folks are obsessed with what kind of tracks they leave.

Thanks! I love how you’ve expressed that Golden. “Spirit-based perspective”.

Hi everyone.

I was the Dickens who got into the arm-wrestling about this topic 9 years ago, in 2007, at the age of 18. I admit to the mistakes of my past, and the errors of my adolescent ways. I was just a teenager trying to figure out how the world worked, and not knowing really what was going on. A person also with autism, not understanding things the way that I should.

I have worked hard to attempt to re-read many of these past dialogues, so I can understand rather than Fight them. I still pains me to realize how harsh I was towards many here and my disagreements and struggles, but I am now trying to understand what the meant. And our final dialogue (when I was Dickens), I can re-read now and try to understand, even if I don’t agree with everything.

I realize now that it was the fact that my identity is tied to the written word that was causing me to have an emotional response, which Blinded me to actually read and understand what you were talking about. I realize now that I do acknowledge that perception-based understanding. I do agree about the illusions of “to be.” But I still identify with writing nonetheless. I thank you for helping me understand that other perspective.

In addition, I come from a single-parent household whose income is tied to the written word. My mother is an author and book editor, and my family wanted me to become an author when I grew up. Animals fight for their survival, and do often act irrationally when they perceive their survival as being threatened. That’s why I wrestled and challenge Jason, who argued the unsustainability and “deadening of senses” with writing, since I felt as if my survival was threatened.

I know I have said this before, but Jason, I deeply apologize for how I treated you and bombarded your blogs and forums on Anthropik 9-10 years ago. I am a different person now, and I thank the Rewilding forum for acknowledging and allowing me to move on from the mistakes of my past. It’s a shame that some of your best work, which you published on Toby’s People, was eventually removed from the Internet, especially your piece “my walk spot,” about tracking the groundhog. That work resonated with why I developed an interest in Rewilding in the first place–to reconnect with the Living Earth any way I was able to.

Back then, I was a kid with autism, dependent on my parents, who do believe and enjoy and worship Civilization for my continued survival. Now I am 27 and things haven’t changed much. I’m still very much dependent on them, and have little opportunities to spend money to learn any Rewilding skills or attend any Rewilding camps. My parents and I live in the heart of Civilization, in the large Midwestern metro area of Chicago, and they refuse to move anywhere else.

But accepting this reality has set me free and enabled me to mature from the “sock puppetry” and horrible behavior I displayed as a teenager. Now that I realize that I must die in this culture, I can spend the rest of my life learning the philosophy of Rewilding before our culture collapses.

I fought so hard because I thought I was fighting for survival. My “liking” civilization and challenging others was based on knowing that I could never survive outside civilization. I thought I was fighting for my life–that’s why I went mad, since I realized that I could not survive due to lack of abilities my autism had brought me. I could not accept that at this time. But now I am older, and I can. I have also concluded something that I have not seen directly addressed on these forums–that if the collapse inevitably requires the deaths of billions of individuals, then the choice of death should not be frowned on. Just as many here are working to survive, I myself can now agree and support many of the ideas on the website (though not 100% of them), yet choose to die with the awareness of the Rewilding future, and not have the ignorance that many others will have during the collapse. A lot more people, after all, have to die than can survive and Rewild due to the carrying capacity of the Environment.

One thing I have been able to do is become active in a Native American community in the nearby state of Wisconsin (where many Natives were sent to from Illinois due to past treaties). I have cultivated relationships with this group for the past 9 years as an extension of my autism work, where I have indeed seen that much of the philosophy of this group is shared by their cultural values. I admire the established cultures that they have, that bridges the gap between the conjecture of “rewilding” and the possible values that they bring.

I thank you and others for working hard to Rewild and create a viable future. But now that I am no longer fighting to survive, I have spent 2015, and now, the year 2016, trying to learn the truth of what I fought. So I can at least die knowing that I had some level of understanding rewilding and the future of humans, even though I will never be able to live to see that future. Not fighting to survive and accepting my death has cleared my mind, and enabled me to resolve the breakdown. Now I can learn without any biases of needing to survive, and be willing to respect others here. Thank you.

I couldn’t help but think of my sweater when I read this, Willem of December 2007 (pre-dad Willem! weird!). What does this big lumpy gray mass of yarn do? For starters, she can’t contain me—doesn’t even try—just kind of hovers in slow waves, folding and unfolding accordionlike with the movement of my arms, and seems too relaxed to stay buttoned much. She likes to stretch out and take it easy, especially on the floor without me, sometimes beneath a cat.

Lovely! Who brought the yarn into the sweater shape? If you did, how did the yarn tell you what it liked to become? Did that work similarly to the stone or wood telling the sculptor?

Reading back the first couple of posts, made me wonder if “re-localizing” language might come more easily on local topics? How would I, as someone from the Low Countries, talk about high peaks and valleys where the land around me offers none of the kind (although artificial indoor ski slopes can be found here)?
So, as a first step, my personal challenge now has become to try and “naturalize” my language - talk in terms of nature rather than from civilization’s arsenal larder of words. I don’t want to drive run this too far, and give lots of concrete tangible examples, but I guess these illuminate what I mean.

Absolutely! I agree with that.

Also, now that I have matured more, I soon realize the paradox of my battle as Dickens–the very things that caused me to defend the verb “to be,” actually, I now realize, actually referred to the very things that people disliked about the verb. I resented the “god-like” proclamations that I perceived many people on the Rewilding forum speaking about because of that very verb. The basis of my argument came from what I felt consisted of an inconsistency–that people opposing the verb “to be” used it for their very arguments against civilization. And I resented many of those “god-like,” absolute ideas, not realizing that they were not absolutes, but that due to my autism, I took them literally (as absolutes) due to the very verb that they probably had to use to communicate things that probably had nuance and not the absolute ideas that I thought existed.

I actually agreed all along with that sentiment, and was too ignorant due to my adolescence at the time to realize it. So thanks!

A continuation. There’s something that has frustrated me on this forum for almost 9 years, and I need to get it off my chest, and “let the cat out of the bag,” so to speak.

When I grew up, my career goal was to become an author and presenter. Being an author and writing books was my dream. I wrote extensively as a child, and wrote several novels in adolescence.

But I also struggled with many social rules in civilization, and came to rewilding initially as an adolescent as the byproduct of a fear of death. I then wanted to explore the idea and learn more about hunter-gatherer cultures. But I’ve always had a passion for the written word.

During the debate I had here on this forum, Jason asserted that “writing deadens your senses.” When I asked him why, he told me that “writing deadens your senses the way a fire burns,” which I could not understand at the time. I grew up with writing, and writing was how I communicated with the world as a child, when I suffered from speech delay. I learned how to read and write before I could speak, and I feel best when I am writing.

To be told by someone I’ve never met in person that something “deadens my senses” when writing makes me feel more alive shocked me, since I have felt stifled and hurt when I feel unable to write. I used to write books but have not been able to since Jason made that claim, feeling I have to “stop writing” in order to live in harmony with the Earth and to be a natural, “wild” human. My passion is writing, and I want to keep writing. How can I write and still live in harmony with the Earth, and live according to being human? My body and soul want to write, and need to write.

In contrast, not writing has “deadened my senses,” in my experiences of life.

Writing makes me more alive and more active and more in balance with myself, and my body and soul want to write, and I want to keep writing until I die. I have so many books that are in my brain. Jason’s comments have compelled me to stop writing, yet I have this urge to write.

I have nothing against Jason and others, but that debate and those comments led me to breakdown, as if my identity and who I identify with as a person had been taken away from me from people I do not know. I really want to write, and have decided to start writing again, since I cannot escape how my mind and soul wish to function, even if it sentences me to a domesticated existence.

A question should be asked: as rewilders, how do we come to terms with these differences?

Good to hear you picked up writing again, James. What feels true to one person may totally upset another. And that even when it was said with only good intentions. And indeed, it may take many, many years to recognize that what seemed true to someone else, does not work at all for yourself. So my congratulations on discovering and reclaiming what fulfills you.
It wouldn’t surprise me if many of us have such “undermined” talents or interests. I do, for sure. Recently, it made me wonder if another skill to rewild might involve reactions to others…

Thanks, Anneke. I was scared to admit how I felt for a long time. I needed to make peace. And in doing so, I continue my path of rewilding.

There’s something else I feel I need to share that frustrates me on this forum. I write this hoping to look for guidance here as I share this, and please don’t take this as criticism. I’m just trying to make sense of some logic I see on this forum that I personally fail to understand. I have concluded in life that when something appears to you as “illogical,” it probably has logic, but you just don’t understand the logic in what someone else has written. Right now, I’ve read a lot of stuff on this forum, the College of Mythic Cartography, and other rewilding forums, and I’ve noticed what I perceive as an inconsistency that doesn’t make sense to me. However, it clearly makes sense to many of the authors and admins here, so I’m going to ask them honestly to clarify this inconsistency, so I can learn and understand people here rather than eternally spend my days puzzled by it:

I find an inconsistency on this forum regarding the verb “to be.” I have grown to agree with much of the wisdom of “E-Prime” as I have matured, yet I have noticed many people on this forum constantly use that verb in order to argue many claims regarding the inherent unsustainability of civilization and its facets, alongside hierarchy, agriculture, and other things. How can we announce that “civilization is sustainable,” or “x is y,” even if that statement reflects Truth, if the word “is,” a part of the verb “to be,” does not truly reflect the nature of the world with its unchanging, godlike statements? It confuses me that, despite the realization of the limitations of the verb “to be,” I see it used by many people who acknowledge those limitations to make many absolute claims. In my opinion, if the verb “to be” truly reflects the flaws that people have mentioned here, then arguments using such terms should have inherent limitations as well.

I have actually changed my writing style based on the ideas challenging the verb “to be” on this website and the College of Mythic Cartography’s website. I’ve worked hard to avoid it as much as possible, though sometimes, I cannot write what I feel or say without using that verb because of the limitations of the English language as we know it.

I may be wrong, but I have concluded that making any claims regarding the inherent unsustainability of any entity don’t seem to mesh with the ideas against the verb “to be,” which argue that the absolute, factual, unchanging way of seeing the world meshes with the true reality of the world. Maybe this is just my own perception, and I am not understanding something. Can someone help me with this paradox that I seem to have observed?

Willem has written other amazing pieces on the “College of Mythic Cartography” regarding “the grave of right and wrong” and living in a “perceptive, observational” mode versus a “factual” mode. I agree with so much of what he shares in the College of Mythic Cartography. Yet I then see by so many Rewilders absolute assertions regarding Civilization that they claim as absolute Truth, yet so much of Rewilding represents abandoning that way of thinking. Probably I just cannot understand the Logic that people have shared here, but it has been hard for me to Agree with what I perceive as a Paradox.

I have grown to agree that asserting concepts of right and wrong, and consistent facts, represent flawed, Civilized modes of thinking. Willem has helped me understand these concepts. But to agree with these ideas has caused a paradox to emerge in my brain regarding many ideas on this website:

How can we assert so many facts about Civilization, hierarchy, agriculture, and other ills, if the factual mode of thinking represents a flawed way of thinking? How can we claim to assert that a mode of thinking represents a flawed one, yet then use it extensively to justify many of our other beliefs? Wouldn’t that mean that those beliefs themselves have limitations and flaws?

Can someone help me understand this logic? Thank you. I’m not trying to oppose or disagree with anyone, just trying to learn more at this point.

Congratulations James! If writing is your passion, it will be the vehicle to empower you and your contribution to humankind. Listen to others with an open heart but don’t let their opinions dictate your life. Follow your passions and everything (even death that you mention often in the previous post) will be fine.

Writing is my passion. And although rewilding is beyond my abilities due to my own limited means, I still enjoy much of what is read on this forum. Yet so much of what is written here puzzles me.

I know I have said this before, but it has been buried in other thoughts, so I am just going to specifically write about it here, and hope that someone tries to give me an explanation. This is meant to be a request for understanding, not a criticism or challenge. (My adolescent self would have thought it as a criticism.)

So much beauty has been written about the limitations about the verb “to be,” and how they represent an idea related to domestication. And as a person with autism living in the autism community, I have grown to truly value this idea, since so many “non-autistic” people often use that verb to make “god-like” statements (to quote others in this forum) about people with autism, in my work as an autism advocate.

Yet so much of the basis of this forum, I have felt, is based on “god-like” statements using that verb. The mere phrase: “Civilization is unsustainable,” is a statement that uses the word “is,” a version of the verb “to be,” to make a god-like statement about civilization, and many god-like statements have been made regarding that many things “are” unsustainable, such as cities, hierarchy, etc.

I find myself puzzled in a paradox–to truly be a part of this forum, I must accept these “god-like” statements regarding civilization and its “ills.” Yet part of rewilding also means shedding the concepts of “god-like” statements. Can anyone help me understand this paradox more? How do the people who have created these “god-like” statements reconcile the idea that “god-like” statements are part of being domesticated, yet god-like statements appear to be needed to justify the issues related to civilization.

“Civilization is unsustainable.”

Shall we try and apply the e-primitivization process to this one? And does that even help?

“In many Rewilder’s opinions:
…civilization builds upon unsustainable practices”
…civilization cannot co-exist with sustainability"

Yet again I think it comes down to most of us having a foot (or half of our brain) planted in each view of reality. We try to rewild our thoughts and beliefs and language, but our thoughts and beliefs and language were formed within civilization.

How do you paint a picture of a green tree and a blue sky, when your culture of origin only provides you with black and white paint, (and which typically cannot even see green or blue should you go out there and find some color to paint with?). Or else you just sigh and paint in black and white anyway–and endure the criticisms of those who do see in color.

Indeed it does help. Your post also helps me understand some of the inconsistencies I have felt with the tone of Rewilding.