Most of my writing, like that of some others, is not addressed to what things mean, but to issues involved in the fact that no amount of clarity regarding what things mean can take one across the gap separating one how things mean from another how things mean.

Recently brought to my attention is an exceptional piece of research and writing by the Japanese scholar, Shigehisa Kuriyama working at the Nomura Institute for Studies in the History of Medicine located in Tokyo (apparently written in English, based on original sources in ancient Greek, Chinese and Japanese: THE EXPRESSIVENESS OF THE BODY and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine. N.Y.: Zone Books, 1999). In sections entitled Styles of Touching, Styles of Seeing, and Styles of Being, he explores the extraordinary differences in perception of the body, the world, and the selfhood in interplay with evolving medical models by consideration of medical palpation, presence or absence of symptom reference to muscles, and so on. The period of reference is about 400 BC to 200 AD in both China and Greece (including the Mawangdui medical texts unearthed in 1993 in a Western Han tomb which are the earliest known and date to the period before emergence of acupuncture in Chinese medicine).

Mostly, this book would be interesting particularly to those who are into studying details of Chinese medical model and traditional modes of thought and awareness. One of the footnotes, I found particularly interesting and confirmatory of suspicions I have voiced, but have been unable to document.

Quoting No. 102, p. 300: “Albrecht Dihle thus notes that the Homeric term menos comes ‘indeed very near to the modern notion of will,’ but adds that menos ‘does not belong to the normal or natural equipment of man according to Homeric psychology.’ It comes from the gods, as ‘an additional gift, provided only on a special occasion and not supposed to become a lasting part of the person…’ (THE THEORY OF THE WILL IN CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY [Berkeley: U.C. Press, 1982, p.34]). We may recall in a related vein, how Homer's Agamemnon blames his tragedy not on any personal decisions or actions, but on ate, a distinctly impersonal clouding of the mind. E. R. Dodds (THE GREEKS AND THE IRRATIONAL [Berkeley: U.C. Press, 1951, pp.15-16]) interprets this not as a self-justifying evasion, but as a reflection of the fact that the Homeric Greeks had no concept of a unified personality. Bruno Snell, to whom Dodds refers, famously argued, indeed, that the Greeks in Homer's time didn't even ‘yet have a body in the modern sense of the body’ did not, that is, ‘know it qua body, but merely as the sum total of his limbs.’ (THE DISCOVERY OF THE MIND IN GREEK PHILOSOPHY AND LITERATURE [N.Y.: Dover, 1982; German edition, 1948, pp.6-8]). [[Not surprising, a German author!]] For a critique of Snell's position see Bernard Knox, THE OLDEST DEAD WHITE EUROPEAN MALES (N.Y.: W.W. Norton, 1993, pp.37-41.)” [[Not surprising, author with a British name!]]

I would go further. This is not, for me, a mere matter of archaicizing “body image”, but whether or not IBEs (in-the-body experiences) were commonplace. Surveying history, not only was there little experience of “passing time” even in pre-Renaissance Western Europe (much evidence of this in medieval art, architecture, and early polyphony), the vast majority of human beings who existed on this planet never experienced a habitated physical body sensed as distinct from the non-body, distinct, that is, from the “other” or the “object”. In the right circumstance, there was no perceptual distinction makeable between “my” foot and “your” foot, between something happening to your foot as distinct from something happening to my foot. Your foot is my foot in immediate proprioceptive awareness (a suggestion of this actual awareness is had in inability to localize the limb in emergence from local anesthesia: which I first experienced at age 14 in surgery on my left big toe). There were “right circumstances” for every other imputed part of the imputed anatomy. When translators of treatises on Chinese medicine assume human physical body distinct from trees, streams, and winds, they undoubtedly error greatly, for in states of identity-transparency no such is actually registered (gardening, geomancy, chronomancy, and medicine were actually just one thing). The notions of “functional correspondences” of “correspondence between a macrocosm and a microcosm” misrepresent the case: the distinguished structures to which functional correspondences are mapped are distinct identities only after the Western or modernizing cultural fact of enculturated IBE habituation, and CORRESPOND to nothing in the actual case. The not-experienced distinction has later in history been imputed to be a correspondence. Perceptual-set determines even the structures experimentally identified. Perceive through the filter of an either/or logic and you will discover and verify 2-structures everywhere in the world around you, and within the physical body you consensually construct with your EMERGENT PROPERTY as being distinct from the “flow” the “mo” the Tao, the meeeeeeeow.

I think such imputations have not been mere matters of changing styles of touching and seeing. These imputations have proceeded by holocausts: the 30 million Chinese who died in the 8th century Tibetan invasion of China; the similar number who died in the 17th to 19th centuries North American holocaust; the 4 million Cambodians who died as a result of the 20th century American bombing/invasion of Cambodia: three particularly pointed thematically-related instances. The list of holocausts is a long one: there has been a cognitive (and accompanying neurological) implosion within the human species transpiring since collapse of the “Bicameral Mind”, which has removed more and more categories of subjective cognitive capacity. Even in the span of one lifetime, onset of major cognitive deficits can be “witnessed”. The truncation of the Japanese female voice-throw range in the lower register (indicating collective loss of certain categories of emotional and perceptual experience); the huge expansion of “minimal permissible distance” in Japanese personal space and associated changes in public touching conventions (indicating a diminished intersubjectivity): these are two instances of cognitive implosion which reached cusp essentially in a decade in Japan, the 1960s. The same type of transition is currently seen in Thailand, with displays of personal behaviors startling in their similarity to those seen in 1960's Japan. And there is little or no CONSCIOUS registration of the intergenerationally imposed cognitive deficit. This is globalization, folks!

Regarding the first question you raise: In the late-70s, I had lengthy discussions with a Japanese psychiatrist with much experience treating acute schizophrenics. Almost without exception, his patients, largely of urban experience, exhibited in their abreactions archetypal themes filled with Shinto reference: village shrines, sacred trees, totem animals, spirit entities of every sort. The generation under 40, it seems to me, may have little or no experience of traditional rural Japanese life, and they may have little knowledge of concrete detail concerning “how life was then”, but on a subliminal level the Japanese mind remains deeply animistic -- even if given individuals consciously deny such beliefs.

Western anthropology pretty much equates animism with spirit belief. I think this is mistaken. Spirit belief is not necessary to, and, when present, is only a superficial expression of, animism, which is more accurately viewed, I believe, as an expression of “identity transparency”. I prefer this term to “participation mystique” which has a connotation of primitivism not at all justified -- given that subject-subject and subject-object empathic fusion requires access to elaborate simultaneous awareness states of consciousness not easily experienced by the uncultivated awareness.

Urban versus rural may not be the real issue. Explicit animism in Japan has probably fallen into abeyance due mostly to the fact that the traditional arts, crafts, and inner disciplines are no longer being practiced as widely or as authentically as they were only one or two generations ago. The relative absence of analogical and metaphorical reference in contemporary Japanese architecture (compared to the traditional) may well be another factor promoting conscious abeyance of animism (which abeyance, I believe, has unconsciously been psychologically compensated for by the flood of highly fetishized pornography which came on the scene beginning in the early-1970s).

Regarding the second question you raise: I think Schrödinger must certainly have had quite elaborate experience of “identity transparency” (and thus of animism) and that this played a significant role in the production of his famous wave equation. I also think it played a role in his refusal to embrace the probability interpretation of his equation. Indeed, I view much of the problematics associated with quantum theory as being the result of an absence of animistic experience on the part of those doing the interpreting.

At the beginning of this 21st century, the monoculture use to which the evolving techno-base is being put is imposing a uniformization and subjective-intersubjective cognitive and neurologic deficit omniculturally on such an unprecedented scale, that, given the history of holocausts associated with this millennia-long cognitive implosion, one would have to be oblivious to human history to believe THE NEW WORLD ORDER will be imposed absent holocausts of unprecedented scale. It's a ridiculous notion entertained only by those with huge neurologic lacunae.

Being uninformed is not only a mark of distinction in America, it is a matter of national pride.

Cell phones will be to the present generation what cigarettes were to the WWII generation.

It has been a long time since there were students in American universities; now, there are only trainees.

Intergenerational memory of inner states is far poorer than the famed limitations of institutional memory: collective amnesia is endemic to the human species.

Anyone with a voice at this juncture is not doing any good. If the person were doing good, knee-jerk nesting instinct protecting the current institutionalization would not allow him or her a voice.

When U.S. officials responsible for causing the Cambodian holocaust were not held legally culpable for their acts -- indeed, one even received the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts -- who could possibly imagine U.S. officials being held responsible for their acts in the Waco deaths? They were not held responsible for the Hansford irradiation; the production of Agent Orange at a location on the waterfront in Alexandria, Virginia, at the time surrounded by a densely populated ghetto community, which, when gentrified to upper-middle class, the City Public Works Department required 12 feet of dirt removed, a plastic shield placed, 12 feet of new dirt installed before building could proceed; the testing of electromagnetic pulse weapons for well over a decade in upper-middle class suburban Virginia and Maryland, which, in all likelihood, was involved in triggering or inducing fulminations of SLE and other radiation-sensitive degenerative autoimmune and demyelinating diseases; and so on; and so on.

Nothing significant will be done until the wave moving from the periphery to the power centers begins to break. All sorts of interest will arise at that point, but only the most meager of undertakings will then be possible.

The current hiatus in physics, with its 100-year-long arguments about how many quantum angels can sit on the head of a nonlocal pinpoint, will not be resolved by any scientific discovery, experimental demonstration, or superlatively argued grand unification theory; it will be transcended by an act of intention in the area of monetary systematics. That is one of the hidden agendas of my proposal concerning m-valued currencies.

As I have been working on these ideas for over twenty years and have discussed them with many people of diverse backgrounds, your recent response has been valuable in focusing my attention. Perhaps you will permit me a brief second stab at a succinct explanation.

If we can agree that a price is a piece of economic information and that money in movement is information about the state of an economy, then we can agree that the basic properties of information are important to economic theory. In physics, information in systems that can be described with Newton’s laws of motion is fundamentally different from information in a quantum system like a superfluid which cannot be described with Newton’s laws of motion. The basic difference has to do with the “logical-value” of the information units involved. An information “bit” is essentially different from an information “q-bit” (quantum bit).

This bit versus q-bit distinction is fraught with emotional dimensions because most of us have never subjectively or objectively entertained the proposition that identity can have more than one logical-value. I am me and only me. That I could simultaneously be me and not-me simply doesn’t make sense. But this is precisely what a q-bit is; it is itself and not-itself simultaneously -- which is to say that it has more than one logical-value. The identity of a q-bit violates the rules of traditional Aristotelian-Baconian propositional logic.

The term “q-bit” was recently coined by those constructing quantum computers. The old term -- with origins in theory of mathematical functions and theory of logic -- was “m-valued”. How many times over an element of information is not-itself (not selfsame, not self-identical) is how many logical-values it can simultaneously represent.

Each logical-value, which a q-bit in an information exchange process represents, portrays some aspect of a system composite incommensurate with other aspects of the same system composite -- these other aspects being portrayed by other logical-values represented by the given q-bit. The fact that a q-bit can be itself and simultaneously not-itself many times over (m-times) means that it can carry many times more information, about the system composite of which it is a part, than can a traditional information bit. This is far beyond parallel processing, because each bit (indeed, each electron) moving in the processor circuitry would itself be massively “parallel”.

Now, if we regard a unit of monetary exchange as an element in an information exchange process, then the above described distinction between a bit and a q-bit could have application to economic exchange units. This became possible with the advent of electronic exchange. Were a monetary unit to take on the properties of a q-bit, it would become m-valued in the above described sense. It is my belief that such m-valued monetary exchange units would greatly enhance the self-organizing capacities of market mechanisms.

Extensions of Thomas Kuhn’s analysis of scientific paradigm shifts, such as that offered by Paul Feyerabend in AGAINST METHOD, argue that historical evidence characterizes paradigm confrontations as matters more in the realm of sociology (power dynamics and organizational adaptation) than that of the tabulation of experimental data in order to engineer consensus. If this is, indeed, the case, as it appears to be, then there is nothing to prevent an organizational shift in the realm of economics from imposing itself on the sociology of paradigmatic physics.

The thesis argued in my article “Echo of the Mockingbird” is that the physicists are the identifiable group most responsible for origins of WWII. Quantum mechanics was falsified in the 1920s when Born’s probabilities were chosen while m-valued logics were on the scene five years before this falsification transpired. Quantum theory has never recovered, and neither has the human species: world view transformations which are stopped dead in their tracks lead to enormous collective abreactions. The same is again happening today, and the hiatus in physics is once more at the forefront. I reckon the current situation in physics as an overtone to the fundamental tone of 1926 when Born’s proposal was put forth. Outcome of the Aspect Experiments has been largely ignored, e.g., in the research on DNA conductivity properties and in interpretation of “superluminal light”. Experiments demonstrating that atomic scale entities, not only elementary particles, can be in more than one place at a given time have been interpreted in relation to probable states rather then m-valued logics, even though the applications contemplated fall largely in the realm of computer science, artificial intelligence, and other logic-application fields.

The recent superluminal experiment is a most elaborate indicator. In THE MOON OF HOA BINH, somewhere in Derek's journals, you will find the statement, circa early-70s: “No-thing can move faster than the speed of light. If you are not a no-thing, then you don't have to worry about this.” There is a fairly long journal entry, written about 1975-76, devoted to the issue (pp. 292-93, Vol. II). Those physicists most committed over the last several decades to proving superluminal velocities have been amongst those most committed to ridding physics of all the “weirdness” quantum theory has given rise to (while others have wanted to use such velocities to provide “common sense” explanations of paranormal phenomena). In due course, I am sure, they will “prove” Newton was right after all: Einstein’s speed limit is infinity; Planck’s constant is zero. In my opinion, the whole notion of superluminal velocities is simply an intellectual retrogression which attempts to save the “common sense” understanding of (linear) time and the post-Renaissance Western notion of individual identity (even if that identity be of a wave-train). Prevailing interpretation of this light-traveling-faster-then-light experiment is an incredibly revealing reach. What this experiment demonstrates (i.e., that a simple-identity left a simple-location in simply-connected space “before” it got “there” in simply-connected linear-time) is that the physicists' notions of the properties of time and identity are wrong. Also obviously put at risk by this experiment (which is quite significant, I believe) is the validity of application of 2-valued syllogistic Aristotelian-Baconian logic to analysis of physical processes. I repeat, current interpretation: merely one more manifestation of the subliminally vectored impulse to save the traditional Western notion of identity! Since the human species has already fought two world wars over these issues (in psychological projection; in exteriorized metaphor), one can hardly be optimistic that actual insight will result from this experiment. The experiment should be a major lead-in to the notion of operator-time (which topologically acts on space at limiting values of dynamic variables like velocity), but it won't be. The physicists will, instead, make some technotrinkets with it. This magnitude in falsification of fundamentals has not transpired since the mid-1920s. Momentous events are approaching -- perhaps at a pace slower than onset of WWII, because the subliminal collective psychological dynamic is now truly globalized and thus more diffuse than during the run-up to WWII.

The central thesis argued by Shigehisa Kuriyama in his book THE EXPRESSIVENESS OF THE BODY, that prior to the Hellenistic period there was no sense of identity embedded in musculature (and thus anatomy), is relevant to this discussion of identity issues in the “transluminal light” experiment, because the prevailing Western concept of identity is rooted in what transpired during the Hellenistic period of ancient Greece. Kuriyama says (p. 262): “But there was an era [i.e., pre-Hellenistic classical Greece] when the body represented something quite different from the entity that we imagine now -- a discrete given, an independent and isolated object. Once upon a time, all reflection on what we call the body was inseparable from inquiry into places and directions, seasons and winds. Once upon a time, human being was embedded in a world. The decline of this awareness is a long and complex tale.”

The rise of the Western sense of selfhood, as rooted in the VOLUNTARY muscle system, came simultaneously with the rise of dissection of corpses and hence of the science of anatomy. This was the birth of the notion of individual WILL (and hence of individual identity). Contemporary manifestations of this identification with muscles prescribe interpretations in molecular biology. By way of illustration, I extract a quotation from THE RAINBOW AND THE WORM: The Physics of Organisms, by Mae-wan Ho, published by World Scientific in 1993. The author describes the process of muscle contraction involving energy release by the ATP molecule and shows how simply waving the arm involves coordinated splitting of 10²⁰ individual molecules of ATP. Then she asks the reader to imagine what must happen for a top athlete to run a mile in under four minutes. She next states: “It is truly remarkable how our energy should be available to us AT WILL (her emphasis) whenever and wherever we want it.” Identity in identification with the voluntary muscle system carried into interpretation of molecular biology! Quantum chemistry, submolecular biology, genetic holograms are not welcome because they would undermine this psychological identification as the basis of identity. Theory of self-organization does not go below the cellular scale-level and that of the molecule for the same reason. Given these self-imposed self-limitations, immunology is an infant science with little possibility of significant insight into degenerative disease. Though Mae-wan Ho herself goes well beyond these limitations, this is an accurate characterization of the prevailing state of biophysics.

With this muscularly-fixated notion of identity governing assessment of virtually everything, there is no possibility transluminal velocities of light will be interpreted in such a way as to violate the fixation and the suborned notion of identity. Being is being embodied! according to this post-Hellenistic Western notion (with the exception of the risen Christ, and possibly a few others). The mere statement today that body is learned behavior is grounds for impeachment of ones sanity. Well, please impeach my sanity, if you will, but, for better or worse, I happen to know quite well that OBEs (out-of-the-body experiences) are merely a matter of unlearning IBEs -- though this has not been a matter of much interest to me since the 1970s, when I stopped hanging out in Southern Virginia and no longer felt a need to speak with the lady in Elmira.

Long-lived Edmund Jacobson, M.D., was for many years associated with the University of Chicago where a laboratory complex bears his name. He was a student of William James, co-inventor of the EEG, the electroencephalogram, and conducted electrophysiologic research for over 60 years on a largely unAmerican, Titchnerian-German model: his studies were based on the heretical conviction that subjective reports made by subjects of laboratory research highly trained in autosensory observation are of EQUAL importance to electrophysiological measurements. By simultaneously recording subjective reports and measurements, he made many important discoveries largely ignored by American biological science and medicine. His research was lavishly published from the turn of the century through the late 1960s in the scientific journals and in numerous books (see Jacobson’s BIOLOGY OF EMOTIONS, Springfield, C.C. Thomas, 1967, for an extensive bibliography). This research demonstrated that in the intact organism, not undergoing invasive electrical stimulation, “central nervous regions do not prevail over an allegedly subordinate peripheral region”, such that “in mental activities of all forms, there are no closed physiological circuits in the brain”. According to Jacobson’s findings, “the control of mental activity and of behavior has never been experimentally identified and will not be recorded in any portion of the organism, because it resides in the integrated totality”. Indeed, he found that in any form of mental activity, the physiological circuits include muscle contraction. Those muscles chiefly involved in mentation are the small muscles about the larynx and the tiny extra-ocular muscles controlling eye movement.

In 1929, Jacobson published a book entitled PROGRESSIVE RELAXATION which described techniques developed in his laboratory while training experimental subjects in autosensory observation. These techniques were first published in an article in 1911. The patient or subject was taught to progressively relax below the level of “residual tension”. The most relaxed the untrained individual ever becomes is still considerably above the level of residual tension as measured on the electromyogram. Residual tension is fluctuation just above zero action-potential. Jacobson experimentally demonstrated that mental associations are correlated on a one-to-one basis with fluctuations of residual tension of the extra-ocular and laryngeal muscles. Think about that. Think about the implications, for instance, relative to stopping “roof brain chatter”. Think about the implications concerning controversy over existence or non-existence of imageless thought, contentless awareness. Think about the implications in regards to IBEs and OBEs. Fifteen years before eye movement reprogramming came on the scene as a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder (without adequate explanation of the mechanisms of action), Derek Dillon arrived at similar techniques by contemplating Jacobson’s findings and the psychoanalytic structural theory of deautomatization (thus developing the techniques on basis of extrapolation from pre-existent adequate explanation). An elaboration of the technique of progressive relaxation, which Jacobson taught his experimental subjects and some few patients, was “differential relaxation”: the ability to tense only those muscles required for the given task at hand, the others remaining (at high accomplishment) below the level of residual tension.

Shigehisa Kuriyama says, “But there was an era when the body represented something quite different from the entity that we imagine now -- a discrete given, an independent and isolated object. Once upon a time, all reflection on what we call the body was inseparable from inquiry into places and directions, seasons and winds. Once upon a time, human being was being embedded in a world. The decline of this awareness is a long and complex tale.” (THE EXPRESSIVENESS OF THE BODY, p. 262.) The tale may be complex and long-winded, but the principle involved is elegant simplicity itself: the human species lost the capacity for differential relaxation in midst of the activities of daily life. Quite simply, by whatever means of yoga, meditation, contemplation, or martial art one might employ to achieve the state, zero action-potential of the extra-ocular and pharyngeal muscles is the fundamental physiologic pre-requisite of unlearning IBEs. The human species, through mastery of differential relaxation, once continually moved on the razor’s edge between OBE and IBE status: thus is animistic identity-transparency maintained in ongoing awareness. The buffalo boy sleeping on his ambling water ox, so relaxed he never falls off: there is no distinction to be made in awareness between boy-leg and oxen-flank. The yoganini adept teaching her consort how to sexually move on the OBE-IBE interface. Learn to stop at the interface! What does your Plexiglas separation separate?

An action-based theory of discrete identity, based on application of 2-valued Aristotelian logic, informed the rise of dissection-based anatomical thought and resultant medical and sociological models. Consider that immune system function is intimately associated with identity as a psychophysiologic property. Body is learned behavior. Disease is learned behavior.

The way in which HIV got through human anti-viral immunity involves quantum properties of the immune system which cannot be studied because of the requirements of national defense: an anti-personnel electromagnetic-pulse weapon is essentially the means used by the virus to penetrate human anti-viral immunity. Development of the premier weapons system of WWIII prevents further insight into immune system function -- so, it is not much of a reach to regard AIDS as part of that war.

The collective abreaction, which WWII was in its essential nature, is reappearing today because the physics hiatus involved in its origins continues as a hiatus. The abreaction did not end with V-E Day and V-J Day; the abreaction continued intrapsychically, psychosomatically, driving the crisis more deeply into the social marrow, there to fester. The nature of “identity” as a fundamental property of being is the basic issue in the physics hiatus. The world view transformation set in motion during the latter part of the 19th century, and stopped dead in its tracks by the physicists in the mid-1920s, involved not an “identity crisis”, but a paradigm crisis about the very nature of identity. This crisis went deeply into the human marrow, and by the early-60s began emerging as a gathering storm of autoimmune diseases moving to epidemic proportions. Immune competency disorders like AIDS are only a part of a very large pattern involving even rather ordinary autoimmune diseases like certain kinds of gingivitis: bleeding gums. None of this can be proven or even substantiated, of course, absent further insight into psycho-neuro-immunology, which cannot be developed because the critical areas of exploration involved fall into the regions of research reserved for the needs of WWIII. Autoimmune aspects of post-traumatic stress disorder put me on this thought tract in the late-60s.

A fundamental transformation of human patterns of organization -- which any transition to an authentic Post-Bretton Woods monetary system necessarily would consist of -- cannot transpire without dilemmas focused upon in the issues mentioned above being in reality transcended at the conceptual core of the new systematics involved in such a transformation. The only possibility for accomplishing this is the notion of an m-valued monetary unit.

The articles forwarded on m-valued monetary units and strategic planning were put together in Ho Chi Minh City while I was working as an editor at the Saigon Times. Returning to my 30-year-ago training as a “Green Beret” medic since reappearing in the U.S. two years ago, I have made my living reviewing medical records. This has given me familiarity with a Med-Legal System as poorly designed, perhaps, as the one created to lose the war in Viet Nam. These medical histories also provide an intimate portrait of prevailing conditions of the U.S. workforce, and of one of the primary means by which current productivity levels have been achieved. It is not a pretty picture. I have a tendency to look at factors such as these in projecting probable futures.

Are there, for instance, extra-economic factors which will significantly vector Japanese behaviors in response to their current situation? Here is an interesting indicator: Shigehisa Kuriyama has recently produced an exceptional book comparing ancient Greek and Chinese medicine entitled THE EXPRESSIVENESS OF THE BODY. This book was written in English with extraordinary scholarly erudition and verbal virtuosity. The level of English mastery is quite a shock to anyone who has spent considerable time teaching English in Japan. The author incorporates translations he made himself from ancient Greek, Latin, Chinese, Japanese, German, French, and Italian. An enormous range of classical and Hellenistic Greek medical literature is referred to, as well as a similar range of literature in the Chinese language. The foundations of Western thought are discussed with great subtlety and the contrary Chinese view is advanced with equal sophistication -- demonstrating that the two mutually exclusive world conceptions derive from fundamentally different experiences of identity as a metaphysical category. In effect, this book is an essay on the validity of the Eastern notion of selfhood. And it is extremely expertly done. The author worked at the Nomura Institute for Study of the History of Medicine in Tokyo. He is an Associate Professor at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies in Tokyo (which many American scholars of Japanese Studies regard as a nascent Showa Institute espousing right-wing perspectives). To me, this book is a significant indication that the Japanese will not indefinitely remain docile in face of what has been done to their culture and sense of selfhood.

What Shigehisa Kuriyama did not do in this book is draw parallels between traditional Chinese medicine and contemporary quantum biology. That task, I believe, will be performed by a German scholar. And it is not necessary at this point to look beyond the daily newspapers to find evidence the Germans, Russians, and Chinese will not indefinitely remain docile in face of what has been done to their senses of selfhood. It is by considerations such as these that I maintain m-valued exchange units are required to provide an alternative to the global monoculture being forced down everyone’s throats by the current economic regime. The resentments are deep, intense, and spread over the entire planet. Put that together with tens of millions of people who are perfectly healthy at the moment, yet know they have a 50% chance of prematurely dying of AIDS, and it is easy to see why I maintain WWIII has already begun. AIDS is only one among many factors on the scene, yet if there are tens of millions who will have a 50% AIDS survival rate, then hundreds of millions will know their odds fall off from there. This is literally a recruitment pool unprecedented in the history of the planet. None of us are capable of imagining the full political consequences of this. Only those deeply enough involved to understand the magnitude of security failure inevitable in places like Saigon, Beirut, Belfast, Colombo, Algiers can push their imaginations in the right direction. The present world war will not be like WWII, but move from the periphery toward the urban power centers of the post-industrial world as waves slowly gathering size and force. Out of Africa has the first wave already come. Nation-state may fight nation-state, but that will only be a secondary aspect of the conflict, which will cusp as a fight against the very notion of the nation-state and its supranational agglomerations.

A leading American business personality, Dee Hock, Founder of VISA, in his recent book on the need for new organizational paradigms (BIRTH OF THE CHAORDIC AGE: San Francisco, Berrett-Koehler, 1999) states he believes the monied leadership elite is going to support initiatives for the required organizational transformation. If that does, indeed, happen, it will be in itself a profound revolution in human behavior. There is absolutely no precedent for it. Moreover, even if it were to happen, it likely would be a matter of little or no real consequence. In the past decade, I have interacted about these matters with a fair number of members of that elite in various parts of the world. I have even been sought out by a few such people. Why a matter of no consequence? The methodologies they are willing to embrace have no realistic possibility of accomplishing the vaguely formulated objectives they purport to embrace. Not only can that which is required not be implemented from the top down; those at the top have no means at their disposal to identify those capable of implementing it from the bottom up (in a lifetime of active searching, I have been able to identify only about 20 such people). Sustained non-crisis-driven self-organization does not transpire without its prerequisites being fulfilled; getting those prerequisites in place requires knowledgeable people. Lots of money would certainly be required, but finding that money is actually the least of the problem. At every step, there are myriad difficulties to be solved that no amount of money can accomplish -- difficulties that prevailing personal and interpersonal and institutional algorithms, governmental and nongovernmental, absolutely will prevent solving. So the real problem is not finding sources of money, but finding sources of money that will not prevent accomplishing what the money is purportedly devoted to accomplishing. This mostly has to do with the psychological and cognitive capabilities of the source. On the other hand, acting from below, even if there were adequate financial resources, cannot accomplish the task either. Here is one example why: Local monetary exchange units will not be officially permitted by national governments in most countries of the world. This difficulty can only be overcome when action from below meets with exquisite timing specific initiatives taken from above. The chance of finding individuals actually capable of undertaking such a thing, I rate as virtually nil.

Having intensely studied revolutionary change throughout my adult life, beginning at age 18 as a student research assistant at Special Operations Research Office and Human Resources Research Office (both in Washington, D.C.), later, as a political analyst on the Middle East at the JFK Center for Special Warfare, and in a diverse series of contexts after that, I rate as approaching zero the current corpus of American expectations for the next 20 years. Even the capability to target smart projectiles from a satellite on radiating DNA quantum-wave genetic fingerprints will not be adequate to impose American monoculture globally; this will be so even when backed up with the ability to vector against cities high-energy particle beams generated by severe local storms -- vector, that is, with electromagnetic mirrors positioned by StarWars/ABM satellite systems. If this seems like science fiction, I would ask you to consider that it was before the Persian Gulf War that the Tofflers quoted a high ranking Pentagon official thus: “…surreptitious acquisition of DNA fingerprints”. How long has it been since the U.S. Army did away with dog tags? Has the technology stayed where it was then? Regarding the mirrors, consider that it has been well over ten years since Los Alamos gave its first press conference to dissimulate “hot auroras”. It simply stretches the imagination beyond the breaking point to believe the Chinese are intent upon stealing secrets to weapons systems 20 and more years obsolete. This is a rich environment for running diversionary disinformation operations.

Oh, I forgot to mention that “the infamous Scenario C”, like the other scenarios produced in the 1995 strategic planning exercise for the Thai Prime Minister’s Office, had a 25-year time-line: the initial currency crisis fell in the early years of this scenario. The Spratley War came later. This was written for Thai bureaucrats, so, much of the actual scenario brain-stormed over beer in the 3 years prior to the exercise could not actually be written into it. ((A similar thing was done to the analysis of the Tet Offensive produced in Spring of 1968 at Strategic Research and Analysis, MACV Headquarters: as the paper neared completion, with people editing it in a manner they thought gave it a chance to get past the Director of Intelligence Production, all the projections were stripped out. This was a useless editorial effort, as the DIP nonetheless ordered the paper locked in a safe [there to be destroyed when the Defense Attache’s Office underwent demolition in April of 1975: a reconstruction of the final version appears in the novel of my wife and I, and the judge’s decision in the Westmoreland-versus-CBS trial to not allow discussion of strategy issues was taken to conceal the actual issues involved in the strength estimates controversy and their connection to the actual causes of the Cambodian Holocaust]. One prediction stripped from the initial version of the paper came to pass 9 years later: If the U.S. expands the physical boundaries of the Vietnam War into Cambodia, the analysis projected, there will be a great catastrophe. Some of the reasons then identified were given along with the prediction.)) In the over-beer version of “Scenario C”, the Chinese, who are understandably intent on taking back everything taken from them in the 19th century, keep all parties off balance by stoking the seeds of conflict in the South China Sea, but never pushing it to serious physical engagement before certain prerequisites are met: integration of Hongkong and Formosa; unification of Korea; establishment of a special trade and transportation agreement economically integrating South China with the northern trade zone of Vietnam (Vinh-Hanoi-Haiphong: Vietnamese strategic economic planning is likewise vectored on this, with Saigon and the south being strategically linked via Vietnamese-Chinese to Singapore); establishment of a special trade and transportation agreement economically integrating North China with the Korean trade sector. When general war breaks out in Europe in the area Churchill wanted to invade (rather than Overlord), i.e., in the region between Iraq and Austria, and the U.S. becomes pre-occupied there, China initiates and rapidly finishes the Spratley War. Following domestic changes in Japan in aftermath of these events, the Japanese sign a series of special trade and defense agreements with Greater China (in no small measure to procure continuing access to oil), thus solidifying what is in essence a Mahayana Buddhist Trading Bloc. “Scenario C” would vector the Thais on a path similar to that followed in escaping colonialism and in avoiding warfare on their territory during WWII. Policy response to the currency crisis, under “Scenario C”, prescribed a focus on trade with its neighbors, regional tourism, provision of local amenity platforms, decentralization of administration, creation of local exchange units, and a provincial-town-based economic and cultural planning focus similar to that pioneered in Khon Kaen in response to the communist insurgency in Isan during the Vietnam War period. Actually, the Thais have integrated some of this into their post-currency-crisis domestic policy orientation.

There truly are many dimensions to m-valued local exchange units and why the human species, one way or another, eventually will again have something like them. If issues of Khmer Rouge hysteria deeply involve psychological identification with the way traditional economic exchange processes in Southeast Asia were synonymous with ritualized identity exchange (via sacred cloths, or tribal handicraft fabrics, for instance), then similar processes of hysteria can be identified relative to the WWII holocaust and the development of m-valued logic in the Warsaw Ghetto from the early work done on this “Polish logic” which was first explicated in aftermath of WWI. And I submit that knee-jerk reactions today against the notion of m-valued exchange units have very much to do with the unconscious psychological identifications expressed in the horrorific historical events associated with WWII: the logic of exchange is inseparable from the prevailing notion of the properties of identity. It is from this level of understanding that I have achieved a degree of certainty about the general character of future events (though particulars, of course, will always be surprising).

The President of Botswana says his country is at risk of total annihilation by AIDS: thirty-three percent of the population is HIV-positive (on a continent where the life expectancy is dropping below age thirty). I note that four years ago it was reported that twenty-five percent of the population of Chiang Rai Province, Thailand, was HIV-positive (ninety-plus percent of sex industry workers in the province being HIV-positive). I further note that the bulk of the population of Chiang Rai Province is composed of people with tribal ethnicity; the same is true of Botswana. It is well known in Thailand, and frequently observed amongst average people there, that a tribal person, once diagnosed with the disease -- not, that is, simply found to be HIV-positive -- dies very much faster than an ethnic Thai diagnosed with the disease: both having similar access to medical care, or lack thereof. I think these factors are not co-incidental and have great significance relative to the probable near-term future of the human species.

For the past two years I have spent my time reviewing medical histories. On three prior occasions, I have had opportunities to study information culled from large quantities of patient histories: (1) for several years I surveyed on a part-time basis selected case records for a neurologist and worked accounts of them into articles ghost-written for submission to medical journals; (2) over a considerable period of time, I studied clinical histories in neuropsychiatry related to autogenic therapy and was able to discuss import of specific issues thus revealed with a leading practitioner in the field; (3) I was able to have extended discussions on a number of occasions with a Japanese psychiatrist -- who treated acute schizophrenics with autogenic therapy and approaches derived from Jungian analytical psychology -- regarding common features he saw in the voluminous patient histories he had occasion over the years to analyze. My ideas about the deeper aspects of the origins of WWII, as expressed in THE MOON OF HOA BINH, were significantly informed by these three periods of focus upon medical histories. I am, therefore, certain my current similar engagement is informing my present thoughts on the deeper aspects of origins of WWIII -- which war I maintain is already well in progress. This last remark likely will appear bizarre to the “average reader”. I maintain that this judgment on his part is due to the fact the “average reader” assumes that the next world war, if, as he sees it, there were to be one, would be very much like WWII, only with more sophisticated technologies in use -- when, in fact, WWIII currently resembles, and will continue to resemble, WWII about as much as AIDS resembles the WWII holocaust. Since the “average reader” includes editors of the world’s leading newspapers and other media, WWIII will not be officially ordained until well past the exordium. Nation-state, in my judgment, will fight nation-state at various times during WWIII, but these engagements will in retrospect be an incidental part of the global conflict and its associated unprecedented mass death.

Beginning in 1972, or thereabouts, well before AIDS was identified as a syndrome, I began arguing -- notably in letters to a leading practitioner of autogenic therapy -- that immune system competency could be seriously undermined absent a discrete pathogen, other identifiable specific physical agent, or a dietary deficiency. The examples I chose to address were systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE, a severe degenerative autoimmune disease where the immune system attacks the body’s own DNA) and mononucleosis (known to occur in a significant percentage of patients without the responsible pathogen, Epstein-Barr virus, being found on laboratory study). This idea was based on the notion, in present modes of expression, that DNA codons are multi-level ciphers, with the lowest level of encipherment involving nucleotide pairs, as is the basis of contemporary genetics, and the (1 + n)th levels of encipherment, genetic n-grams, that is, involving complementary quantum-wave properties of the discrete nucleotide pairs. Higher levels of the (1 + n)th genetic encipherment were thought to be involved with the exotic nonlinear-time characteristics of the quantum waves necessarily associated on a mathematical basis with the nucleotide pairs. A technical account of these basic ideas regarding quantum properties of DNA was published in the International Journal of Quantum Chemistry in 1979. The initiating inspirational ideas, relative to immune system function, SLE, and mononucleosis, however, were never fully published -- though some fragments were presented to two scientific conferences and in a public lecture at Tsukuba University.

Basic notions in contemporary immunology are based on a concept of identity peculiar to the West, and only in certain periods of Western history, which surely was not the initial, and will not be the final, word on the nature of identity. It is largely because of this concept of identity that geneticists have limited their notion of DNA codons to only single-level ciphers, thus ruling out the possibility of rule frameworks governing recombinant processes and their “environmental-fit” properties. The concepts I have argued, beginning in 1972, however, are based on a more elaborate notion of identity, a notion which makes multi-level ciphers obligatory. The fact that public key cryptography long ago abandoned single-level ciphers because “perfect secrecy” is not otherwise obtainable is significant in its implications for genetics, immunology, and neural codes; more significant, in my opinion, is the recognition that information exchange processes -- be they immunologic, genetic, neurologic, economic, or, indeed, monetary -- cannot achieve high levels of systemic functional integration absent multi-level encipherment or valuation. Involved in this idea is the understanding that immune competency disorders and autoimmune disease can result from the degrading of multi-level ciphers to single-level encipherment.

I will get around to discussing the fact that tribal peoples globally have typically experienced animistic states of multi-level identity and that this has a great deal to do with their particular susceptibility to AIDS. This, in turn, forecasts the characteristic holocaust pattern that can be expected to continue to accompany WWIII. I will make the argument that “Stone Age economics” was based on m-valued exchange processes which mirrored animistic states of multi-level identity. On principles of logical accommodation, alone, the structure of exchange processes always mimics the operative notion of identity. But before I go into this bizarre transdisciplinary confusion of any reasonable thought categories, according to the judgment of the “average reader”, I will say something more about my early correspondence regarding immune system function. I will do this not because my 30 years experience with these ideas convinces me they will suddenly be widely understood as a result of this effort (by this time, it is perfectly clear to me that people experiencing a given concept of identity, simply do not, cannot, and never will comprehend ideas arising from a concept of identity they have never experienced), but because causality relative to the real world of multi-level encipherment transpires largely through the power of an internal consistency which, in principle, never can materialize in viewable fashion on the level of mere single-level encipherment -- which fact is of considerable importance in assessing the utility of contemporary laboratory techniques designed to evaluate immune system function.

I was finally, with much trouble, able to get my hands on a copy of Christopher Bollas' THE SHADOW OF THE OBJECT: PSYCHOANALYSIS OF THE UNTHOUGHT KNOWN (N.Y.: Columbia U. Press, 1987). Thank you very much for drawing it to my attention. This is the best psychoanalytic tract I've read since Margaret Brenman's HYPNOSIS AND RELATED STATES. So, the definition of “normotic illness” is essentially the opposite of the psychoanalytic notion of animism: the condition of those whose mental activities constitute “a transfer of a subjective state of mind into a material external object that results in the de-symbolization of the mental content”. The all-day-long everyday state of the preponderance of Americans! Potential quotes attributable to Bollas are wonderful. “…someone who is abnormally normal… typified by the numbing and eventual erasure of subjectivity in favor of a self that is conceived as a material object among other man-made products in the object world… personalities characterized by deletions of the subjective factor… 'blank selves'… their effort to be rid of an intrapsychic life… who has been successful at neutralizing the subjective element in personality… annihilated the creative element by developing an alternative mentality… a mentality not determined to represent the object, but to be the echo of thingness inherent in material objects, to be a commodity object in the world of human production… normotic illness develops when the subjective meaning is lodged in an external object, remains there and is not re-introjected, and over time loses its symbolic function as a signifier… normotically disturbed persons successfully house varied parts and functions of their inner world in material objects, and even though they use these objects and collect them into a familiar space, they serve no symbolic purpose. Such an individual is alive in a world of meaningless plenty…” I think I may now get the energy to finish my piece on Americana Manifest Destiny Syndrome (incomplete on the MOON website): Our destiny has been to rid the world of animism and impose normotic illness on every last person on the planet.

“Doom lay dead ahead, yet they did not know it; they behaved as if this Indian summer would last forever.” This is William Manchester characterizing late-Wilhelmine Germany (in his book THE ARMS OF KRUPP, N.Y., Little, Brown, 1964). “America… represents in advance what the world must be like at some future time when, with the annihilation of time and distance through the genius of Zeppelins, Wrights, and Marconis, the world will be fused into one great whole, speaking one language, and pursuing but one ideal…” This is Manchester quoting Krupp heiress, Baroness Barbara von Wilmowski, speaking to the Chicago World Fair in 1910, just before the outbreak of WWI. She is summarizing for an American audience the ideology of cultural monism which, slightly modified, a decade later was to inform the rise of Nazism -- and which belief system is the dominant emotional commitment of Americans today, governing their personal aspirations, public and corporate planning, financial innovation, technological forecasting, and projection of U.S. power globally.

Understanding the psychology of this so thoroughly as to read it like a map, I see exactly where it is going. And I have seen it coming for a long time. There are complimentary individual-psychology and collective-psychology components which play off each other in a reciprocating evolution of regressive behaviors driven by imagined threats to purified (i.e., single-valued, not m-valued) identity.

The more I consider the metapsychology of “normotic illness”, the more certain I become that, had I the time, I could develop an elaborately documented argument that mass induction of normotic illness is inevitably followed by holocaust. In MOON there is a passage in Derek's Journals analyzing the psychology of mutilation behaviors like collecting ears as signifiers of the projected self-attributes “psychologically eaten” (i.e., introjected in countertransference) in the act of killing (compensatory activity demanded for simulated re-acquisition of the projected self-attributes). The passage in MOON states that the metapsychology of ritualized mutilation and that of collecting artifacts of vanquished cultures are essentially identical. Regarding the subtitle of Bollas' book, “…the Unthought Known”, Derek says: “It's not what people think they think, but what they think they don't think, that matters.”

Bollas leaves it to the reader as to whether normotic illness has always been with us, and has only recently gone into epidemic fulmination, or whether it is something new. My argument would be that the psychological processes he describes as normotic illness arose in nascent sub-clinical form for the first time with appearance of a monetarized economy and have become evermore elaborated as more and more aspects of life have become monetarized. Those with no interest in m-valued economic exchange units and the metareferencial possibilities associated with Musculpt, simply cannot be aware of the degree to which they suffer from normotic illness and have no actual insight into its processes, and the poverty of immediate experience incumbent upon it. Objects blank the self in (the subject-object level of) the transference to the degree they are single-valued, to the degree, that is, they have no metareferencial reach. When a rural barter economy is monetarized, objects of exchange that once were animistically infused with cosmological metareference, suddenly lose those references, and are reduced to the commodity value associated with economic simple-identity. Projecting attributes of self onto objects with economic simple-identity de-symbolizes the mental content transferred, because the object of transference cannot mediate the symbolic metareferences associated with the projected mental content. This is not the case with an object possessing animistic non-simple identity. Monetarizing a rural economy not only leads to tenantization, but, more fundamentally, is mass induction of normotic illness which creates “blank selves” of huge numbers of people. The processes involved are a reversal of “participation mystique” within the subject population group. The compensatory mechanisms of the collective unconscious Jung describes DEMAND that the libido vested in the single-valued object through projection, AND IRRETRIEVABLY LOST DUE TO DE-SYMBOLIZATION, be returned to the psyche, if only in regressed simulated fashion. This return can only be simulated by killing the object that has “killed” (i.e., blanked) the self. In this light, collecting ears or objects of a vanquished animistic culture is a simulation of re-capturing the libido (the psychic power, the chi) which has been irretrievably lost due to de-symbolization of mental contents in normotic illness. The same applies, of course, to contemporary piercing and tattooing behaviors. I say, with sufficient time, I could very well document the notion that when this process occurs in a large mass of people, holocaust is the INEVITABLE result. The Cambodian case is a wonderland for playing with these themes. Looking at the advent of globalized credit-card economies and single-valued e-money, I'd say the era of localized holocausts is coming to an end.

I find evidence that “compensatory mechanisms of the collective unconscious” are presently in control of human destiny in the widespread irrational rejection of four ideas that could reasonably be expected to facilitate the common welfare in face of probable substantial negative impacts of recent technological advances: (1) that the relative-state properties the quantum wave signature of a DNA nucleotide base pair maps the spectrum of environmental fit relative to the given base pair; (2) that mapping the thread-thin DNA frequency, intensity, and wave-form response windows characteristic of different tissues, organisms, and flora would permit re-design of electromagnetic appliances such that they stay out of biologically active windows; (3) that m-valued economic exchange units would allow economic globalization without forcing global monoculture; (4) that the return of metareference to artifacts of daily use would in large measure mitigate the deleterious effects of technologically-forced uniformization and facilitate processes of social self-organization, thus minimizing the so-called inherent need for coercion as a prerequisite of social order. Rejection of these ideas very strongly suggests that the actual collective agenda is quite different than that commonly believed to be the case. I argue that compensatory mechanisms of the collective unconscious have determined the actual agenda being followed. The question is: Why has this again occurred?

I am finding some real descriptive gems in Bollas' book, SHADOW. This, from a footnote in which he describes W. R. Bion's theory of mental function (SECOND THOUGHTS, N.Y.: Aronson, 1967): “Each person has sense impressions and emotional experiences. There is a specific function of the personality which transforms sense impressions and emotional realities into psychic elements which are then available for mental work, such as thinking, dreaming, imagining, remembering. This element of transformation Bion arbitrarily terms the ‘alpha’ element. ‘Beta’ elements are untransformed sense impressions and emotional experiences which are experienced as things-in-themselves, and which are operated on by projective identification.” Projective identification being the process by which the self is “blanked” by de-symbolization of the mental content projected onto the object. Hence, in normotic illness there is no transformation of impressions. MY INTEREST HAS LONG BEEN VERY FOCUSED UPON DISCOVERING THE DETAILS OF EXACTLY HOW DE-SYMBOLIZATION (REMOVAL OF METAREFERENCE) TRANSPIRES IN PROJECTIVE IDENTIFICATION -- VIA COLLECTIVE PROCESSES, NOT ONLY INDIVIDUALLY -- AND HOW A RE-SYMBOLIZATION (RE-METAREFERENCING) CAN BE ESTABLISHED IN CONTEXT OF CONTEMPORARY CIVILIZATION. Essentially, this is Derek's quest as portrayed in MOON.

First, I would note that Bion's theory is very Gurdjieffian, right down to word use. Gurdjieff developed a theory of “transformation of impressions” in a notion of elemental “hydrogens” -- the “beta” elements -- and their transmutation (into or via “alpha” elements). Gurdjieff essentially traces the origins of human warfare to a failure to transform these elemental “hydrogens” or impressions. My last e-mail about mass induction of normotic illness and origins of holocaust, essentially runs along similar lines, and Bion's theory could provide a great deal of detail to understanding of the metapsychological processes involved relative to single-valued versus m-valued objects, perception of these objects, intrasubjective transformation of these perceptions, and the relation between individual and collective transformation of impressions via symbolic processes like animistic metareference, monetary signification, and so on.

Bollas, in giving an account of onset of normotic illness within families by transmission from parent to child, quotes Bion, echoing my thesis, thus: “This state [which Bollas calls normotic illness] contrasts with animism in that objects are endowed with the qualities of death.” Whereas, in animism, of course, dead matter, the object, is endowed with life. Not surprising, therefore, that mass induction of normotic illness should be associated with origins of massed warfare and holocaust. When an American President declares a Monroe Doctrine applicable to all hemispheres on the planet, one does not have to look much further than the metapsychology of normotic illness for an explanation. Obsession with godless communism was merely a minor theme in a much larger and longer running pattern of obsessive behavior going back to the first American nation-extermination of 1635. I would be inclined to remind Bollas that families exist in contexts: economic, political, sociological, collective psyche. And that the processes prevailing in these contexts (e.g., signification in monetary value of commercial objects, based upon assumptions about the nature of identity of objects in general) in large measure set the terms of probable and improbable states of object transformation available within any given family dynamic.

Understanding of these matters for me was greatly facilitated by living three childhood years during the mid-50s in a small rural Japanese 12-family rice culture hamlet. Twenty years later, in Washington, D.C., I designed and made a Japanese garden for the man who was MacArthur’s Special Assistant for Land Reform during the American Occupation. While making the garden, we had long discussions of this land reform program. I had always thought it had been largely to forestall development of communism is postwar Japan. Not so, according to content of these discussions. The social engineering involved was primarily motivated by the intent to remove residuals of Japanese medievalism, collectivities, animism, and other such factors predisposing Shinto modes of thought and practice. Wealth redistribution and other tenantization issues were mere secondary considerations.

So, time permitting, I will have to find Bion's books (probably most particularly TRANSFORMATIONS, London, Heinemann, 1961) and investigate the relation of his theory to that of the automatization/de-automatization of mental functions which Brenman elaborated so elegantly in HYPNOSIS AND RELATED STATES. In the early-70s, I gained greater catalytic impetus for non-ordinary experience from insight into details of deautomatization then virtually anything else I can identify. Transformation of impressions MUST involve deautomatization as neuropsychological facilitation, so my suspicion is that Bion's psychoanalytic theory of transformation of impressions grew out of the psychoanalytic theory of automatization/de-automatization first formulated by Heinz Hartmann in the early-1930s, as the Nazification of Germany transpired around him.

For whatever reason, I never before had the occasion to look into the works produced by the British school of psychoanalysis. Your observations, as usual, raise a lot of interesting issues. I always thought G. was not actually attempting to explicate a real theory with his “hydrogens”, but merely trying to instigate a shift of perspective amongst his co-“conspiritors” of the inner work. At the time he introduced this “theory”, Western psychology -- even for a highly trained psychoanalyst of either Freudian or Jungian persuasion -- had nothing remotely similar in approach. In the Freudian branch, this emerged only with the “structural theory” which had it’s origins in Hartmann's mid-30s dissertation “Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaption”. But this orientation never came into its own until the mid-50s with people like David Rappaport, Merton Gill, and Margaret Brenman. And most importantly for our areas of interest, application of the structural theory remained exclusively understood relative to “object relations” as conceived within the therapeutic encounter: patient/doctor (or hypnotist) transference/countertransference: the “object” involved was the interpersonal other as object, not the subject/object object of perception considered by Husserl, Gebser, perceptual psychology, et cetera. I spent an intense evening of discussion with Margaret Brenman in 1975 and she was taken aback by my interest in her work of the 50s, which, by then, BIZARRELY, she seemed to place little value upon (in my judgment, because it had been neglected for 25 years through a general failure of comprehension: hers was a brilliant piece of work). As regards what is uniquely Jungian (not incorporation of Freudian insights into the Jungian context), the earliest attempts at a “structural theory” were again a decade after G.'s “hydrogens”: the work of Pauli and Jung to incorporate perspectives derived from relativity theory into the Jungian notion of the dynamics of the collective unconscious. This never really went very far; the best thing I've encountered on it being Maria Louise von Franz's NUMBER AND TIME. I think the reason why this Jungian attempt at a “structural theory” never really got off the ground is that the initial attempt involved an inappropriate leap in abstraction. Just as there are appropriate space/time scale-levels for given forms of organization (self-organization being short-circuited by application of a given organizational format on inappropriate scales), I believe there are appropriate levels of abstraction relative to given classes of processes. True, principles concerning information and energy surely apply to processes involved in transformation of impressions, but is this the appropriate level of abstraction within which to gain further insight into critical issues relative to the involved processes? I would note that in the mid-20s Pauli rejected the one physics idea most required for a relativity-theory-related treatment of Jung’s collective unconscious: the notion of operator-time. The other major factor required had not yet been created: the Regge calculus, which translates the field equations of General Relativity into n-dimensional lattices.

If you take principles of the structural theory as cultivated by Rappaport and his associates (a function automatized is a structure, which, in adaptation, can be deautomatized once again into a function, in preparation for adaptive re-automatization) and apply it, not to the therapeutic encounter, but to the subject/object object of perception, then, I believe, there is an appropriate level of abstraction within which to analyze transformation of impressions. Maybe Bion did this, but I would bet against it (and certainly will be looking at his publications to find out) because it would fundamentally violate some of the sacrosanct assumptions of psychoanalytic theory: the “reality principle” in particular. When you apply principles of the transference/countertransference, not to interpersonal “objects”, but -- shifting the level of abstraction in application of transference/countertransference -- to objects on the more general level of subject/object perception (interpersonal “objects” are a subset of the class of subject/object objects), then both the subject and the object (in their most general senses) are mutually reflective infinite regresses eternally passing images between each other in Plato’s cave. I have applied these principles in this fashion for my own edification since the early-70s, and this was something of the subject of my paper “Deautomatization and the Autogenic Discharge” delivered to the Kyoto Conference in 1977. Transference/countertransference on the subject-object level is all about multiple selves and multiple object-images and their RELATIVE STATE (to appropriately, I believe, borrow the term from the multi-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics which interprets superposition in Schrödinger’s wave equation). Now, this takes us right into Ignacio Matte Blanco's THE UNCONSCIOUS AS INFINITE SETS (and less directly into G. Spencer Brown's LAWS OF FORM). Subject/object occasion as a fractal hall of mirrors! What happens to a percept (Bion's “beta” element) TRANSFORMED in this hall of mirrors? What happens to a percept (Bion's “beta” element) TRAPPED in this hall of mirrors? What comes “out” (into consciousness awareness) of this hall of mirrors would be Bion's “alpha” element. In terms of the cognitive neuropsychology and biophysics (here consider information-energy!) of these “mirrors”, what is a transformation? Indeed, what is a mirror? Is it a bioplasma bottle? An electromagnetic mirror? Holographic standing waves in cytoskeleton? A liquid-crystal interface? A neuronal superconductant DNA blackbody absorber-emitter? I believe these questions cannot be adequately addressed without m-valued logics interpreted in terms of identity relations. One is immediately in the full realm of COLLECTIVE AND CRITICAL quantum neuropsychology -- whether one considers an individual's attention cathexes vis-à-vis objects of perception or the social structure of attention cathexis. As an aside, I would compare the “reflections” in this hall of mirrors to G.'s transmutational “hydrogen” pathways.

Given G.'s objectives, his attention was primarily focused on what issues from the full measure of reflectivity in the hall of “transformation of impressions” mirrors: shifts (via deautomatization and re-automatization) to higher and higher levels of being and consciousness. Bollas, in THE SHADOW OF THE OBJECT, however, looks at a small slice of what happens when a percept gets trapped in this hall of mirrors and is not transformed, but engages in “blanking” (undermines the perfect efficiency of blackbody absorption and emission in some way?): normotic illness. Small slice, because, again, the “object” considered by Bollas is virtually exclusively the interpersonal other as object (considered etiologically, within the family dynamic; therapeutically, within the patient-therapist transference/countertransference).

I find all such considerations absolutely pertinent to arriving at adequate notions of political action, for instance. The etiology of normotic disease is not only within the family dynamic, as the above indicates. Without succinct notions of etiology there is no possibility of efficient actions on behalf of, say, promoting self-organization. One can only use a kind of wide-bore shotgun approach hoping that some of the pellets will fortuitously bounce off one another in such a manner as to create a new social order. This is basically how I would characterize 60s-style approaches to political action. No focus is ever made on the critical factors which determine everything (the fundamental autopoietic operators), and all the effort is placed on trying to leverage secondary and tertiary EFFECTS: a very poor strategy. Whereas these sorts of considerations lead one to, for instance, a notion like implementing m-valued exchange units (basic class of autopoietic operators), which would set in motion a whole cascade of “determining tendencies” impacting an enormous range of processes on many levels of abstraction.

In Bollas' account, the “blank selves” of “normotic illness” in adult life arise -- through habitual projective identification and resultant de-symbolization of the mental contents projected -- largely as a result of dysfunctional mothering during infancy. The mother is described as a “transformational object” in that she is the agent of transformational experience for the infant. If she does not adequately discharge this responsibility, the infant does not learn internalization (as symbolization) and does not become the agent of his or her own transformational process. Internalization of the transformational object having failed, the child, and later the adultchild, must throughout life seek transformational experience not through internal resources, but through projective identification with a variety of substitute transformational objects, which creates in cycles more and more “blank selves” in the corpus of selves composing the individual. Hence, normotic illness. Bollas does not consider identity properties of transformational objects and he does not give much detail regarding how healthy internalization occurs, except to treat the emergence of symbolization as a process which transpires by creation of “transitional objects”. Failure to create transitional objects is how selves are blanked. Transitional objects, in Bollas' account, are subjective objects wherein actual processes are displaced to symbolic equations, which, if supported by the mother, facilitate internalization and development of ego autonomy.

These two neglected areas interest me greatly. I am going to assert that the IDENTITY properties of the transformational object in large measure determine the LOGICAL properties of the symbolization process which emerges. Piaget's research into the logical properties of sensory-motor intelligence, and their emergence in early childhood, particularly as re-formulated in terms of the psychoanalytic structural theory by David Rappaport, is extremely relevant here. I will also assert that the whole of MOON is an abrasive assault on the premise of functionality of single-mother mothering and it’s consequences, via the processes referred to by Bollas, across the full spectrum of cognitive, social, political, and economic life. People cannot understand MOON, not because it is conceptually more difficult than the many textbooks they have mastered, but because the specific nature of its abrasive assault is too emotionally threatening to the sufferer of normotic illness. The reader does not consciously register the emotional threat as threat, but registers the threat via self-justification in experiencing the text as “This is incomprehensible!” Liana, one of Derek's “inner figures”, is very upsetting to many readers and quite a few people have stopped reading the book a few pages into Derek's journal entitled Studies for Liana. In the full Bollas sense, Liana is a “transitional object”. She also has multiple identity. Derek's mother is described as -- after having eroticized him -- actively sponsoring over a period of years transfer of libido from herself to the Liana multiples. Where this description begins is where many people stop reading the book.

In Thailand, I have a British friend who is the son of a well-to-do university professor in London. Several years ago, this Brit married a Thai girl from a poor rice farming family and moved into the family compound when their first child was born. About a month later, I visited them for three hours one late afternoon and early evening. Probably ten parts of nuclear families live in the compound, which has several buildings and something like a communal long-house. As I went up the stairs of the long-house, the one-month-old child was receiving a bath in a barrel proffered by six or seven people dunking, tossing, tickling, and giggling the infant. I sat in the upstairs communal room drinking rice wine, meeting everyone, and talking with my Brit friend. About two hours into the occasion, the friend became very pensive and I asked what was preoccupying him. He explained that, though he had lived in Thailand for most of the past ten years, he had not yet managed to emerge from the culture shock induced by his one-month residence in the family compound. I asked him what was so unsettling. He pointed at his child bouncing on the knee of an “uncle” and asked me how many pairs of hands the baby had passed through in the last hour. Close to 20 people were sitting in the room and there was much traffic in and out. The child was in virtually constant movement from person to person. “A damn lot of them,” I exclaimed. “That kid passes through more hands in one hour,” he announced, “than I did in my entire childhood. For the life of me, I cannot figure out what that means for how different we will be. I am certain there is no possibility I will ever be able to understand my own son.” Significantly, immediately after this, he talked of the daily rituals engaged in to service the family ancestral spirits at various critical points around the compound and surrounding rice fields, and how the behavior of the dogs was always peculiar when passing near these locations, most of which did not contain a shrine or other type of marker.

Bollas' account of the mother as “transformational object” is obviously highly culture bound. His conception of mothering is single-mother mothering within the monogamous nuclear family setting. With single-mother mothering, the identity of the transformational object must be singular, not multiple. In early infancy, the mother is not experienced as known other, but as transformational “environment-mother” object. She is in large measure the infant's environment, and her properties define the nature of that environment. The ego complex is understood by Bollas as an unconscious FORM that organizes subjective/objective contents conveyed by “transitional objects” in process of internalization and symbolization. (Consider the relevance of G. Spencer Brown's LAWS OF FORM here, in which he proved Sheffer’s postulates for Boolean algebras and made reference to Post’s m-valued logics.) Formation of the healthy ego complex is regarded as a result of good mothering. I ask: Would the singular transformational object in single-mother mothering impart the same unconscious ego-form as would the multiple transformational object in multi-mother mothering? I think not.

The logical properties of the unconscious ego-form which organize subjective/objective contents (processed by Piaget's logical-structures of sensory-motor intelligence, which solidify in the early stages of childhood development) would have to be secondary, according to Bollas' account of their emergence, to the identity properties of the transformational object. Single-mother mothering imparts logically single-valued ego-form; multi-mother mothering imparts logically m-valued ego-form which organizes subjective/objective contents via the logical properties of sensory-motor intelligence ANIMISTICALLY. If normotic illness -- habitual projective identification and resultant de-symbolization of the mental contents projected -- “…contrasts with animism in that live objects are endowed with the qualities of death”, to quote Bion, then the advent of single-mother mothering, in and of itself, even more fundamentally than the virtually concurrent advent of single-valued monetary economies, can be identified with origins of normotic illness. Given that monogamy (as opposed, for instance, to “frequent movement between several life partners” which some anthropologists maintain was characteristic of rural rice-culture communities in many parts of Asia -- if not all animistic communities) is normally associated with single-mother mothering, then monogamy, too, must be identified with origins of normotic illness. Normotic illness would move to epidemic fulmination as extended families fragment to nuclear families (in part under forcing functions derivative of single-valued monetary economies), nuclear families become dysfunctional and decompose into single-parenting social fragments and no-parenting institutional surrogates of the state.

I certainly had no intention of stigmatizing Gurdjieff's teachings. By the mid-70s I had bought every book related to G. that Samuel Wiser's bookstore had until then ever had on the shelf, so far as I knew (50+?); so, obviously, I greatly valued everything about that teaching. I made my first purchase in October of 1963: the single copy Wiser then had of Nicoll's 6 volumes (big expense for me at the time, but I later devoted 50% of my total net worth in 1969 to purchasing the Asia Society silk-bound version of Aurobindo's 20+ volumes of collected works); in December of 1963, I bought the only two volumes of J. G. Bennett’s DRAMATIC UNIVERSE Wiser then had (including the volume with the appendix on skew-parallelism). A NYC classmate at American University took me home in the fall of 1963 for two visits and that's how I got into Samuel Wiser's on Broadway, THE esoteric bookstore in America at the time (it later lost its storefront and moved to Maine and became a publisher). I was also stopped on the street one-half block from Wiser's bookstore after purchasing Nicoll and asked if I was interested in joining a Gurdjieff group (Orage group at that time in NYC?). A little personal history… But I think that G. had absolutely no interest in creating scientific theories. Had he had such an interest, he certainly would have done something quite different than the “hydrogens”. “Hydrogens” was perfect to achieve the goals he had in mind. He achieved those goals, and the subsequent scientific theories that exhibit similarities are evidence thereof (seeds sown in the collective unconscious, by change of perspective, do not require book-person-book contact for transmission). Scientific theories are really not very useful tools, if your objective is to alter the quality of being of large numbers of humans.

Molecules of meaning (MMs) strongly relate to the “generative semantics” the Chomskyan linguists were never able to create, because all their attempts were based on recursive generation (Aristotelian male creation: EXTENSION generated by repeating a basic algorithm over and over) rather than decomposition through the action of autopoietic operators (Platonic female creation: BIRTHING from within by unfolding the enfolded). As the comment on Huynh Sanh Thong's theory of the onomatopoietic origins of language (Vol. 2, p.767, bibliography to MOON) in the root (mother) homonym MA (Japanese for “sacred space”; Chinese ideograph for which is “a gate holding the moon”) indicates, he does not understand these linguistic issues, as he retains the male notion of recursive generation (root) in giving an essentially female generative account of the origins of language. I would add that infinite SEQUENCES are apropos of recursive generation; infinite SETS, of that acted upon by decomposition operators.

The point you make about “levels” and abstraction is absolutely at the core of molecules of meaning (MM) issues. The MOST powerful idea that EVER came into my awareness is precisely focused on this. And I do not believe I have ever been able to convey it to the understanding of another. The commentary on the geometrical patterns on the bronze drum tympanum of the Moon of Hoa Binh (given in the discussion in Volume 2 of MOON set in the Kabuki dancer's bar) is an attempt to convey understanding of the basic idea involved. Though I was privileged to receive tutorials in symbolic logic, topology, and foundations in high school from a reclusive university professor who had dropped out to Alaska in the early-60s, I did not learn of m-valued logics until the mid-70s. But I had started to think in the rudiments of m-valued logics by 1964! American University, at least at that time, was largely a Jewish campus (except for the School of International Service). Elspeth Rostow, from whom I studied American Intellectual History, with her discourses on the relation of Newtonian physics to the foundations of Anglo-Saxon political economy, drove me into the library -- which was my late-night haunt. There, I met a lovely black-haired girl totally absorbed with Kabbalah. She, it was who taught me to think in m-valued algorithms; otherwise, when first encountering Post's 1921 paper on the subject, I might never have seen its gist or recognized its profound import. An aside: Emil Post was born in Warsaw, but moved as a child to NYC and Cornell; the first non-binary (3-valued) logic was developed by another Pole, Jan Lukasiewicz, also in Warsaw in 1921; m-valued logics were most developed in and around the Warsaw Ghetto immediately prior to, during, and after WWII, the leading figure being a woman logician.

At that time, while at AU, I read a book entitled THE ANATOMY OF THE BODY OF GOD that was basically a commentary on a complex series of projective drawings of internally nested Platonic polyhedra: basically, a highly complexified 3-D maze projection version of the gematria compass-and-straight-edge transliteration of the Parable of the Fishes, with image sequences of the net being generated to the side of the vesica pisces (taken to represent the boat). When you analyze the equilateral triangular net tiling pattern, LEVELS are defined simply by dropping interior points out of view in the appropriate manner such that a new equilateral triangular network is generated with all the resultant triangles being larger than those of the preceding network. (It only takes a couple of minutes of draw a bunch of linked triangles, in interconnected hour-glass shapes, and then visualize dropping the inner points and connecting lines out.) This operation can be imagined to be repeated over and over in an infinite sequence (from a most-dense network) thus creating a stack of network sheets. This nesting image (used in ikat weaving all over Southeast Asia) fascinated me and several years later I saw it in temple ornament and tribal costume everywhere I went in Vietnam. In Saigon, I started studying cryptanalytic techniques (relative to analysis of the self-organizing properties of the underground Viet Cong 3-member cellular infrastructure) and began imagining factor-type number patterns mapped on the nested equilateral triangular gridworks. Later, in the very early-70s, I read Sir John Woodroffe's translation of the Agama Shastra, with commentary (the title of his book being: THE WORLD AS POWER). One late night, while reading this book, I got defocused enough in allowing the Sanskrit terminology to wash over me, that suddenly I saw that the meanings of the full spectrum of terms he was discoursing upon -- bindu, tanmantra, aditi, marud-gana, rupa, sabda, gandha, and so on -- could be mapped on this nesting model without in anyway doing violence to the metaphysical meanings he was attributing to them. It was in midst of the awe of this sudden recognition that the concept of operator-time slammed down on me with enormous power. A few years later, when I read Post's paper on m-valued logics, I immediately knew that the number factorials (I now know to be the fiber bundle arithmetics essential to fuller elaboration of pencils of skew-parallels) I had been attempting to map onto the nesting equilateral triangular sheets were secondary to the nested m-logical-value factors. At that point, confusion about the meaning of superposition in Schrödinger's wave equation evaporated. Not surprising, when you consider that Schrödinger, a life-long student of Hindu thought, was practicing Tantric yoga with two of his female graduate students at a remote cabin in the Austrian Alps during the time he wrote the equation (as his biographer has recently informed us).

The “most dense network” I call the multi-valued reference space, MVRS, as all the numerical and logical factorials associated with points on the transfinite set of less-dense sheets are stacked on their corresponding network points on the most-dense sheet (“There exists” and “Axiom of Choice” and all the controversial Cantorian Universe stuff are involved here). Every-thing, all “possibilities” that are ALL THAT IS and can be DECOMPOSED are already always there on the MVRS. (I am choosing my words carefully.) Action is any operation that drops points out of view (decomposition: unfolding what is enfolded: for any given point, like generating distribution factorials via the binomial theorem: Pascal's equilateral triangle used to array the factors). Out of view of what? Out of view of ALL THAT IS (not the POINTS of view of little ol' you and me with our consciousnesses trapped on the single-valued decomposed sheets: unable to self-remember our ALL THAT IS identity-transparent selfhood due to lack of adequate mindfulness).

Categories of action relate to the classes of entities generated by the autopoietic operators: i.e., the manifold of decomposed sheets; the classes of point sets on the sheets; the lattice structures connecting the activating and de-activating points, et cetera (there are specific Sanskrit words for each of these). The Tzog-Chen of Tantric thought is the whole of this model as best explicated in the Agama Shastra. The “base state of Tzog-Chen” is the MVRS and all it represents and the associated state of satchitananda. No-thing ever happens on the MVRS (they have just experimentally demonstrated that no-thing can, very well, if you please, go faster than the speed of light). Every-thing is nothing but happenings on the decomposed single-valued network sheets. No-thing ever happens = Every-thing is nothing but happenings: there is no difference between these two statements (which is not contradictory in 3-valued logic: a “This statement is false” type proposition). Happening every-thing is just timeless no-thing “looked at” such that points drop out of view. Physicist, Julian Barbour, in his 1999 popular-science-type book, THE END OF TIME: The Next Revolution in Physics, calls the domain of timeless no-things “Platonia”. Princeton physicist extraordinaire John. A. Wheeler speaking in 1962 in GEOMETRODYNAMICS: “Matter is nothing given shape.” Matter and movement is amnesis, Abfall; being no-thing is Plato’s anamnesis, Afebung. Consciousness in its active aspect is the set of all topological operators on the MVRS (amnesis); conscious in its passive aspect is the MVRS operated upon (anamnesis): the EcherForm Dance of operator-time: Turangalila. Operator-time is the only topological operator on the MVRS. MMs is an alternative phrase for what tanmantra once designated: classes of lattices connecting classes of activated (rupa, sabda, gandha) points on and across the decomposed single-valued sheets (with their arrays of numerical and logical-value factorials stacked on each such point). I would note here that the Regge calculus is relevant to these lattices. Particle physics, with its equilateral triangular quark symmetry patterns; the architectonics of the cerebral cortex, with its equilateral triangular and hexagonal networks; and so on are levels of decomposition of the MVRS: the cosmic code, the language of the brain. “Molecules” of meaning is apt: the lattice of connections which the tanmantra consists of; meaning, arising from connexion. Again, the Cosmic Laughter inversion: not only is what we call consciousness actually amnesia, but what we call meaning is actually connection between various forgetfulnesses. Woodroffe's other very important translation, THE GARLAND OF LETTERS, which treats Sanskrit as a universal generative semantic (similar to how Hebrew is so treated in Kabbalah), is also very suggestive regarding this way of interpreting tanmantra (MMs).

I must add, however, that I find Bollas’ clinical analyses ludicrous. And the whole project of taking a person who has from infancy exhibited “abnormal normality”and carrying him or her to “normal normality” is somehow less than inspiring. I, personally, would much rather be translated to “abnormal abnormality”. Moreover, just as learning bird song or how to read the star map has a critical phase wherein the bird can learn it, and never thereafter, no matter what the exposure to stimuli, so too, it seems very likely, learning to create “transitional objects” likely has a critical phase, and, no matter what the later exposure to regression in clinical transference, can never authentically be learned thereafter. This will be regarded by most people as nihilistic. I think it is a realistic assessment expressive of the fact that societies pay the price of their obsessions and institutional pathologies, as is clearly borne out by history. One can, of course, have a successful normal career at the business of transforming the abnormally normal into the normally normal, whereas it is much more difficult to have a successful normal career while trying to treat pathological institutions.

As you probably already know, taking a leadership position in a “bad war” or a psychotic society hellbent on psychological self-immolation is not exactly a mark of intelligence.

I was actually recapping and commenting on Bollas. Bollas put a desymbolization twist to the traditional notion of projective identification as it evolved in classical psychoanalytic theory. Projection is the unconscious process of perceiving a self-attribute in an “other”, while consciously believing that the self-attribute perceived actually belongs to the other. Projective identification involves becoming identified with the self-attribute thus projected onto the other: the identification makes the projector compulsively attached to the other in an unconscious attempt to regain the attribute projected (which, before and following projection, the projector had no conscious access to). A long time ago, I extended, for my own edification, this notion of certain properties of the self-other interlock to the more abstract subject-object interlock. In so doing, I became very much more aware of the nature of animistic objects of perception. Now, Bollas carries it a step further (without, it appears, looking very deeply into the nature of the animimistic object) and says that self-attributes can be unconsciously projected onto physical objects (as well as an “other”, who, depending on the particular class of “other”, is also called one or another kind of “object”) and that the projector inevitably becomes identified with the self-attribute projected onto the physical object, and, further, that when this unconscious process occurs it “blanks” or desymbolizes the self-attribute thus projected. For Americans, a classical example of this physical-object-type projective identification is the unconscious psychological relation the average person has with his automobile. Whether you buy a BMW or a Mercedes “depends on your self-image”. How many times have you heard it said? Well, if you live in LA or Bangkok.

By single-mother mothering I did not mean the single-parent. My mistake. I meant mothering by a nuclear-family one-mother with a single husband, rather than the many mothers of an extended corporate social unit, like still exists to some degree at quite a few places around the planet. Maybe I should have chosen the term “one-mother mothering”.

In my judgment, it is not the person who becomes a one-mother mother who is at fault relative to normotic illness, but the whole societal framework forcing one-mother mothering. Which point takes one off into larger issues.

To me, “extractive identification” is just a new term for an old idea: projective identification always changes the transference figure (the receptacle of the projection). The positive qualities the dysfunctional mother covets in the child are those she projects on the child, becomes identified with, and, by unconsciously-mediated compulsive behaviors, attempts to retrieve. The self-attributes projected are projected because there is no conscious availability of those psychic functions. That which is inherently given, but, for whatever reason, not consciously available, is always automatically unconsciously projected. Sociological factors of many sorts are of great importance in determining availability and non-availability of inherently given self-attributes or psychological functions. The woman, the mother, the dysfunctional mother has been victimized in many ways long before she engages in projective identification with her child. The Japanese mother-son relationship is a veritable wonderland for exploration of these issues. Psychotic societies create dysfunctional mothers before dysfunctional mothers make their small contribution to perpetuating psychotic societies. We are only discussing here a very small part of an enormously complex multidimensional puzzle.

My position is that there is a big difference between voluntary and involuntary dissociation. In voluntary dissociation there is no “lost time”, as the multiple “I’s” are consciously stacked in a consciousness consciously realizing its capacities for simultaneous awareness and auto-piloting of one or more levels of functioning. This can happen automatically on superficial levels of functioning. How many I’s are simultaneously involved in driving your car on any given cross-town trip -- simultaneously smoking a cigarette, drinking a cup of coffee, and dialing the cell phone all the while? It can also happen intentionally on profound levels of functioning. In our earliest discussions of this issue in the mid-70s, when I was more focused relative to post-traumatic stress disorder, I used the term “spontaneous directedness” rather than “auto-piloting” in an attempt to get across the same notion. Trauma (among quite a number of other things) induces deautomatization and momentary conscious engagement with the organism's inherent capacity for simultaneous awareness and functioning (which is the way the organisim at the quantum level orchestrates and integrates growth and repair processes). The uncomprehending individual, suffering post-traumatic stress, recoils from the subjective content of the deautomatized state -- spinning, spinning, spinning, let me tell you, down a tube looking the wrong way through a pair of binoculars -- into involuntary dissociative reaction, loss-of-time-type hysteria reactions, flashbacks and other abreactions, psychogenic hypoesthesia, and so on. I believe that the phenomenology of involuntary dissociation is a caricature of the phenomenology of voluntary dissociation. It is a guideless tour, in metaphor -- a guideless tour of the multi-sheet universe analogically embodied in landscape architecture of human consciousness and cortical morphology. I believe the “unified self-identical self” is nothing more then mere pretense, which is in violation of a fundamental law of nature: quantum relative-state. There is only one“real I”: All-That-Is.

My notion of integration is based on relative-state, which is animistic and quantum in nature. As long as there is pretense of a self identical to itself, there can be no psychophysiologic integration. The distinction one wants to draw between the self and the object world is drawn simply because one wants to draw it, or one's parents wanted it drawn and one acquiesced to enculturative induction. The distinction is a social convention. In fact, I believe that the physical body is a learned behavior. This, of course, goes off into other domains of discourse relating to the nature of consciousness and what, exactly, it is a subject-object occasion might be.

The Combined Document Exploitation Center distribution lists for CDEC Logs and CDEC Bulletins in paper copies were quite long: outside Southeast Asia there was DIA, NATO, CINCPAC, CIA, Fort Rucker, Fort Holabird, the Canal Zone, several units in Japan, and quite a few others, meaning that hardcopy of the bulk of the CDEC output existed at multiple locations. Different types of documents, by content, had different distribution lists. In researching MOON, I found most of what I was interested in locating in boxes at the U.S. Army Center for Military History. I even found specific documents I went in search of.

I think almost no one ever seriously tried to use the microfilm, and anyone who tried to use the FMA Filesearch machines didn’t stick with it long, for many reasons. Most of the original Vietnamese language documents could not have lasted until 1975, because the paper they were on was of extremely poor quality and much of it barely survived handling in the translation process.

Regarding non-official beginnings of CDEC, there were clearly several dozen places in the Saigon area alone where documents were collected and evaluated for their intelligence content at any point in time during the 1950s and early 1960s. The problem in 1965 was one of unifying the activities and overcoming duplication of effort. This problem was never solved, partially because they changed horses in the middle of the stream by throwing out McChristian’s orientation and replacing it with Komer’s as a result of the sort of subterfuge Sam Adams pointed to in the Westmoreland versus CBS trial.

I think the account McChristian provides in his book is more than a little an idealized version of how things were, especially regarding the computer end of it. The Intelligence Data Handling System (IDHS) was virtually useless and the simplest searches relative to document content so time consuming as to be valueless. Marginally more useful was the computerized name list of Viet Cong AKAs and bio-data. Of course, most people were interested in tactical military intelligence and never imagined that document analysis could have, for instance, predicted with considerable advanced notice major offensive activities. They most relied on agents and interrogation of PWs and Chieu Hoi, and used the documents primarily for public information propaganda releases.

Letter Box Numbers (LBNs) were major intelligence and studied intensely. LBNs were changed frequently and re-organizations of the apparat’s bureaucracy (which re-organizations forecast patterns of future military activities) often were first detected by analysis of LBNs. Geographical distribution of LBNs was also studied and, for instance, predicted (but was ignored) that the Lam Son incursion into Laos would run into big trouble. Their “postal system” was an enormously complex clandestine operation and LBNs were more like “dead-drops” monitored by “cut-outs” than what people think of by “postal system”. The same can be said for their personnel transport (liaison) system.

I never saw a master distribution list. The number 400 is probably a list of all the locations that were ever on the list. This large number is a good indication that hardcopy of most CDEC output existed lavishly outside Vietnam. The thing of it was! virtually nobody read this material. Ask them and they will all tell you how seriously they took the documentation. But this was not the actual case. Very few people actually studied these documents. Sam Adams kept saying that over and over at the Westmoreland versus CBS trial and his statements were put down to exaggeration or myopia or the weirdness of an obsessed personality. But Sam was speaking the simple truth.

The “separate building of the combined facility” in 1968 was just a large storage of the leftover copies after distribution was sent out, not an archive where you could go and actually find something. I know; I tried. After 1972, DIA may have created some sort of document library, but there was no building in that compound big enough to organize the CDEC document cache, except the Combined Intelligence Center (CICV) itself. I don’t think DIA would have created such a document library, because document analysis had wound down to nothing by 1972. I’ve read a fair amount of output from that period and it was very deteriorated by then. At no time were the people on the top floor of the Embassy and in the famed “Norodom complex” of temporary buildings inside and adjacent to the Embassy compound deeply into document analysis. Public evidence of this is provided by Snepp. As his book well reveals, their fixation was on the information provided by their agents. I think this “separate building” in the CICV compound and the CDEC building itself still exist, as you can see their roofs looking across the still present soccer field while standing today on the adjacent street currently named Nguyen Van Troi. In 1975, all the CDEC documents were probably taken to the nearby Defense Attache’s Office, earlier MACV-HQ, before it was blown up and burned to the ground by the departing Americans. The long analysis I wrote of the Tet Offensive using many CDEC documents as references was surely burned at that time.

The Intelligence Subject Codes (ISC) were produced during WWII, were little modified since, and, therefore, had only limited applicability to the situation in Vietnam. No one at Strategic Research and Analysis, MACV-J2, or earlier at Political Order of Battle, CICV, after the first flush of discovery, ever bothered with the IDHS or the FMA Filesearch because: (1) the searches were incredibly slow; (2) the ISC prevented you from learning what you needed to know. The ISC were created at other times and elsewhere by library-science-trained people who picked up the Army intelligence manuals and applied their expertise to them. Once the ISC were minted at CDEC, CICV, and MACV, it took an act of God to change them. The ISC were basically irrelevant to the analytic task at hand and any engagement with them prevented you from doing that task. And this approach was so “successful” in Vietnam that the same approach was later used to computerize the whole U.S. library system.

The statement by that colonel that he read every document produced during his tenure is typical. The man was functioning in an administrative capacity; he had no responsibilities for document analysis. No one at CDEC analyzed documents; they translated. Several Vietnamese there, overseeing the translators, amassed large volumes of factual information (unit designations, code names, AKAs, and the like) readily available off the top of their heads, and this was extremely valuable to those with personal relationships with such people, but this was unanalyzed data. So, the American administrator of CDEC would have had no cause for such reading. All the high muckamucks “looked” at the stuff, maybe even looked at every document during their tenure, but if they were not seriously engaged with analytic tasks, they didn’t seriously read it, because after an hour with such material it simply became visual white noise.

General McChristian’s account of how things worked is not merely idealized. Even if things had been as he describes, they would not have worked for the purposes he had in mind. Your account is that the CDEC archive doesn’t serve the needs of historians because it was set up to be effective on a quick-turn-around basis and that meeting this requirement precluded meeting other requirements, such as those of future historians. But, in fact, McChristian’s system didn’t do what he says it did; it was lousy at producing quick-turn-around intelligence useable to units in the field. And Komer’s system was far worse than McChristian’s! The system was not effective at anticipating enemy intentions, which is the ultimate purpose of any intelligence effort. The information necessary to do this was in the system, but could not be adequately accessed or assessed for several reasons having nothing to do with the microfilm or its accessing problems.

The people who created the system were not those who analyzed the documents. Prior experience, primarily in WWII, created the parameters of the system and those parameters never underwent significant modification as a result of experience in Vietnam. Ideally, as one analytically engages the material, one learns from it. One learns that some of the selection criteria are wrong for the present case. And so ones criteria would be changed. This never happened in significant measure. The people selecting which documents to translate were not actively engaged with analysis. Those who were rapidly entered another world from that occupied by those who weren’t. Those who weren’t couldn’t understand what those who were were talking about. A community of practice emerged. And this community found that the system set up to assist it prevented it from accomplishing its assigned task. So the community of practice began to subvert the system in order that the community could do its job properly.

Any group of selection criteria and any indexing system is the expression of a mental set, of presuppositions, of a tacit theory of practice. In this case, the criteria for selecting which documents to translate in order to arrive at a prefigurative reading of enemy intentions involved tacit assumptions about how that enemy made its decisions, what that enemy’s critical decision-tree variables were. The ISC were based on WWII and how we Westerners make decisions and what we think war is, and so on. So, the Vietnamese in the Government of Vietnam military services, making the decisions about which documents to translate and which not to, learned very quickly what their American sponsors wanted to see, what the Americans thought was important and what they thought was unimportant. This was tacitly informed by the ISC mindset, and the notion that the laws of war are the laws of war, and so they will be making their decisions, if they are smart, based on consideration of the same variables we consider, and so on. But this was incorrect. They looked at it very differently from how we looked at it, and made their decisions based on consideration of variables that never entered our decision makers’ awareness.

If one were analyzing the right decision-tree variables for their decision tree, one could not get the relevant information, because much of it until late 1967-68 wasn’t even being translated. Getting it translated involved starting a veritable war inside CICV, part of which eventually emerged into public awareness under the good offices of Sam Adams at the Westmoreland versus CBS trial. The rest of the war against itself inside CICV even Sam Adams never really understood, even after days of walking around his Leesburg cow pastures talking about it. The types of information translated at CDEC changed greatly over time.If one assumes that the military makes the decisions about what the military does on all but the strategic level, one is not too inclined to look at non-military categories of information as indicators of enemy military intentions. If one were to closely study the VC/NVA Terminology glossaries produced during the war, one would discover how these books were created. The translators did not compile lists of words drawn over time from communist documents and then find English equivalents, even though this is the way the books are set up. They took lists of American terms, mostly military in category, and found VC/NVA and/or standard Vietnamese equivalents. This is why there are so few political words in those glossaries. Most of the critical words habitually used in VC/NVA documents never got into the VC/NVA terminology glossaries. The most accurate predictors of VC/NVA military activity were patterns of political infrastructure behavior, which all had to do with political words. It was literally AGAINST THE LAW of South Vietnam for the people of South Vietnam to use or print these political words. The translators did not know these words. The best translators were at the Combined Military Interrogation Center (CMIC) and the National Police Interrogation Center (NPIC), and even they did not know them -- all the words relating to party organization and functions and changes thereof.

I, eventually, found a Saigon University law student who worked part-time as a translator at CDEC, and with the help of a number of people intensely trained him as my translator. The critical terms in most interrogations were not accurately translated, and even if reasonably done, there was no analytic insight into the relation between the things or processes or procedures that the terms signified, such that the total information the interrogation produced was gibberish relative to what the person being interrogated actually knew. Many documents translated at CDEC, even, were on a similar level. A real analyst, a member of that small community of practice, had to find back-channel ways to the information he needed for the analytic task he had undertaken. That meant cultivating relationships with document translators, carrying a given document back to the guy who translated it and challenging him, which leads to further insight on his part, and back and forth and back and forth. Creating a wider and wider network of such back-channels and continuously bird-dogging them was a major aspect of the whole analytical process.

Why POLITICAL infrastructure changes were the best predictors of enemy MILITARY intentions was the crux of the war against itself inside CICV, and later inside MACV-HQ itself. McChristian’s system was based on the assumption that good intelligence is produced by logical step-by-step methods and reliance to a large extent upon the results of quantitative analysis of particulars. For this specific war, that assumption was wrong. What produced the best results was qualitative analysis in bulk. The patterns that were significantly tied to their decision-tree variables were extremely complex having to do with timing, organizational thresholds, effectiveness or non-effectiveness of attempted innovations over a broad spectrum of variables (techniques of recruitment, forms of taxation, effectiveness of this as opposed to that proselyting method as a read on the probable utility of certain other activities, and so on: these more concrete variables were evaluated relative to the second order abstractions of a heuristic model of transition derived from Marxist-Leninist and Maoist theories, as well as comparisons between the contemporary circumstance, historical experience, and the accepted prerequisites of the prototype transitions). They decided on the basis of the “feel” of it.

So, the analyst trying to read VC/NVA intentions had to do total immersion QUALITATIVELY in the information and DEFOCUS so that the patterns significant to their decision processes could begin to emerge into awareness. The critical variables were all bureaucratic phase transitions relative to the heuristic model. They thought of an offensive as a total surge of the movement on all levels, hamlet to international, and within all categories of activities, military being only one, and certainly not the critical one. McChristian’s system was in significant measure an obstruction to such analysis.

An archiving system based on by-subject retrieval assumes: (1) specific documents are important, i.e., contain uniquely valuable information; (2) the important information in the document is there in a way that can be identified as present by a keyword or combination of keywords. If, however, the important information is in traffic analysis on bureaucratic variables, neither (1) or (2) is correct. The CDEC documents registered the internal workings of a large-scale human organization with an extraordinary level of transformational dynamism. There is no comparable corpus of documentation in the history of human organizations. Relative to this dynamism and the problem of useful archiving, there is even the case that some very important documents don’t have words and can’t be transcribed into words. The most important CDEC document I ever saw contained no words; it was a list of old LBNs and new LBNs and the alphanumeric codes of the associated bureaucratic functional elements. Before late 1967, this would never have become a CDEC Log; it would have gone to the Army Security Agency, which would not have known what it was. The document had the highest security classification in the VC/NVA system and provided 6 months prior to Tet 1968 hard evidence of a large-scale bureaucratic reorganization of the area surrounding Saigon. In the system, but not accessed or assessed on a timely basis. “Bureaucratic reorganization” sounds benign, not a matter of much interest except to intelligence people with their acetate overlays. This could not be more mistaken. No Western, indeed modern, government has ever undergone such a large-scale, ordered, systemic reorganization. Constitutions and such are created to prevent such things. But natural systems adapting to changing environments frequently undergo such transformations. This is studied in chaos theory, catastrophe theory, non-equilibrium thermodynamics, modeling of autopoiesis, and so on. A pity the Soviets never learned about this. A pity those Western scholars counseling, and those Western foundations financially underwriting, democratic reform in post-USSR Russia never learned about this.

Why is this important? For one, there is little or no real understanding of the Cultural Revolution in China, because these sorts of political transformational processes have never been understood in the West. No studies of the Chinese communist political infrastructure during the revolutionary period were ever made, as there was no available documentation, except to the Japanese army of occupation and the KMT, and if such studies were made by these two, which is unlikely, they have not found their way into translation. The closest there was were studies of party chapter organization in the PLA done in Korea, but this is far and away from what I am talking about. An administrative civil bureaucracy in a continuous state of large-scale dynamic transformation relative to the changing task environment imposed by exigencies of warfare is what Mao created and what triumphed in 1949. The Cultural Revolution was a failed attempt to re-create the dynamic transformational fluidity lost in the next decade. Since the pre-1949 transformational dynamic was never understood in detail, it is not possible to understand what Mao attempted in the Cultural Revolution. People with psychological limitations committing them to static hierarchies have simply stigmatized the attempt as some kind of craziness. But the fact remains that the inability of our governmental systems to fluidly adapt to a changing task environment like natural systems adapt to environmental changes is responsible for a large array of human problems on the planet at the present moment and may ultimately be responsible for our collective self-immolation. Insight into an actual human organization that possessed fluid adaptability could have considerable contemporary importance across a broad spectrum of concerns.

One of the disappointing aspects of the work produced by the contemporary collection of Vietnam scholars is that they almost never pose truly fundamental questions in political science, anthropology, economics, sociology, linguistics, or whatever, and then approach their studies with a view to seeing what the available material contains to shed light on the fundamental questions posed. They piece things together to tell a good story, not to investigate fundamentals. This is one reason why so little postwar engagement with the CDEC archive has been undertaken. The material in that archive is the sort one would use to investigate fundamental questions, not tell good stories -- though one can certainly find stories in the diaries the archive contains, and this is where most of the contemporary interest has been directed. Close study of this archive, for instance, would demonstrate that some of the sacrosanct assumptions of strategic contingency theory of organizational adaptation and the more fundamental theory of biological autopoiesis are incorrect, or, at the very least, do not have universal applicability. But most of the major Vietnam-related scholarly works are so very thin on truly primary documentation. Most of the literature of the revolutionary movement relied upon by contemporary Vietnam scholars was produced by principals of that movement for public consumption, even if written while in prison, and, therefore, has quite a different character from actual internal literature of the movement. When internal documents are used by contemporary scholars, they are generally drawn from pre-selected collections (with the exception of those few scholars who have made extensive use of the French archives). The selection criteria, as mentioned above, were off the map with regard to investigation of fundamentals. The whole scholarly assessment of the Vietnamese revolutionary movement is based on extremely thin document exposure.

This is not to say there is no value in this work; but is to say that this work cannot be, as it is by many regarded, definitive. Doug Pike’s book on the Viet Cong was produced from documents assembled before the effort a CDEC was seriously underway. If I remember right, his total primary documentation for that book was about 800 captured documents. In the 9 months I was at Strategic Research and Analysis (SRA), MACV-HQ, I personally closely analyzed somewhere near 1,000 documents, closely read many thousands, and skimmed tens of thousands. During this period and while earlier an intelligence advisor in the field, I debriefed/interrogated 50-60 well-selected PW’s and Chieu Hoi of all ranks and backgrounds, some of whom joined the movement as early as the early 1930s. One whole series of debriefings after the Tet offensive involved only people who had been stay-behinds in 1954. These are pretty accurate figures, as I logged everything I read along with the capture coordinates and date of capture as part of my analytic decoding efforts, and, therefore, have good memory of it. One fellow in SRA in 1968 had come over on the boat in 1965 with the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion, and his exposure to the documents was five times mine. He was the person in CICV/MACV-HQ Sam Adams most interacted with in Saigon and in Washington, D.C., when he went back there as the MACV expert.

Conley’s Department of the Army/CRESS book on the Viet Cong infrastructure, by far the best book on the subject, was also based on documentation assembled before CDEC was seriously underway. Conley left Vietnam in early 1966 and went to American University to write at CRESS (Center for Research in Social Systems). American University is where Doug Pike studied Mass Communications. I went to the School of International Service at AU and spent an enormous amount of time at Special Operations Research Office (SORO) during 1963-65, which later was renamed CRESS. I clipped FBIS’s there and researched a long anthropologically-focused comparative analysis of the Briggs Plan used during the Emergency in Malaya with the Strategic Hamlets Program initiated in Vietnam during the very early-60's. I also while at AU spent a great deal of time in Bernard Fall’s office at Howard pouring over his personal library. Professor George Harris, the anthropologist who headed up the SORO team who wrote the U.S. Army Handbook for Vietnam, and for whom I wrote the paper on the Strategic Hamlets Program, was a close friend of Professor Fall. SORO and the Fall library between them had more impossible to find manuscripts than anywhere else at that time.

So, the public has never had real exposure to what was learned about the Viet Cong from the CDEC archive. What the public knows about the Viet Cong was produced from extremely limited exposure to primary sources. Pike’s and Conley’s accounts, as valuable as they were at the time of their appearance, are very largely drawn by generalizations from the body of literature on communist movements in general, with no real effort made to see whether or not those generalizations actually applied to the post-1954 Southern Viet Cong case. In significant measure they did not. When I got to SRA in early January of 1968, following recovery in Japan from wounds sustained in the field, and they found out I had read Pike and Conley while an intelligence analyst at Special Warfare Center, Ft. Bragg, they told me it would be a struggle unlearning everything I had read before I would be able to see what the documents had to say. They were right. Moreover, the Viet Cong was not just an updated version of the Viet Minh. What emerged in the South after 1954 was a horse of a very different color from the Viet Minh. The degree to which the Southern apparat was insistent upon decentralization and spontaneous processes was unprecedented and, according to my belief, emerged due to a unique confluence between the strong anarchist and anarchosyndicalist modes of thought prevalent in the Southern wing of the party back into the early 1930's and the age-old consensual animistic conventions governing the village voluntary associations which were subverted and amalgamated into a national front organization against the will of the Hanoi government in the immediate post-1954 period. This penchant for decentralized self-organization was overthrown and purged by the Northern apparat in the period during and immediately following the 1968 Tet Offensive. Until it was suppressed, never before in human history had a large-scale human organization exhibited such a degree of fluid adaptability and decentralized self-organization. It was by this means, this exceptional animistically-guided organizational genius, that the enormous disparity of available force was overcome and the American military was beaten into submission. If you doubt this thesis of military defeat, I would recommend you read the commentary on Clausewitz and “time as a factor of forces” offered in the VIRFUT Q-PRO article. The involved issues are far from being so simple as the historians and lecturers at the Command and General Staff College would have us believe.

There was, as I mentioned before, a community of practice amongst those who intensely studied the CDEC documents. But the results of those studies never had any significant positive influence on American decision makers. The decision makers at MACV-HQ and at the CIA and higher up in the U.S. government did not like the policy orientation indicated by the studies produced by members of this community of practice based on the information in that archive. Nobody at MACV-HQ who participated in the community of practice fundamentally disagreed with Sam Adams, but the decision makers at MACV-HQ disagreed with Sam Adams. Those members of the community of practice located in Saigon were better informed than Sam Adams, who was quite well informed, for several reasons. First, there was the back-channel personal relationships with the translators at CDEC, mentioned earlier. Second, ability to conduct debriefings/interrogations in the field greatly facilitated the successful pursuit of hunches. When you can sit down with the man who wrote the documents you have been analyzing, which happened to me several times, and quote to him from his own letters, the depth of the resulting discussion is magnified enormously. With Col. Tran Van Dac, the highest ranking Chieu Hoi of the war, I had closely analyzed approximately 200 pieces of his correspondence, which contained well over a year of historical memory cataloging the year-long large-scale political reorganization preparatory to the Tet attacks on Saigon, and could quote extensively off the top of my head verbatim from this correspondence, before I spent the better part of a full week with him spread over a two-week period. Third, though Sam Adam’s orientation to the CDEC material was very close to that of those in the community of practice in Saigon, there were few in the CIA who shared Sam’s orientation, so he did not have advantage of the continuous ongoing analytic debate give-and-take banter where he was at Langley as existed in Saigon. Four, he did not receive all the raw data documents that were available in Saigon, not the least because he could not go out and physically bird-dog the sources. In Saigon alone there were over thirty independent distinct intelligence collection entities. At SRA, the country was split up into geographical areas and each analyst had one of these areas for which he was the sole person responsible. I was the Saigon-Bien Hoa person. I started scouring the city for intelligence collection entities and made a list; by the time I left nine months later, the list was up to something like thirty-six.

Some of the analysts who really got into these studies also developed secondary subject areas of expertise. Sam Adams was in a different framework, but he focused on the province-level Intelligence Section and wrote the definitive study of it. I specialized in VC/NVN grand strategy. One of my co-analysts specialized on COSVN and its documentary history. A classmate of mine, from the School of International Service at AU, who also managed find a way into SRA (known to be a pivotal point for learning about the war: everyone assigned there had quite a saga to relate upon arrival), specialized in the disbanding of the Southern-apparat-created NFLSVN and its replacement by the Northern-Bo-Doi-created pre-governmental post-national-front organizational format, i.e., the disinformationally-named Autonomous Administrative Committees -- the transition to which began in earnest, primarily in Military Region 5 which encompassed Hue, during the early summer of 1968. After awhile, when the word got around about your special research interest, people from all over the place would be bringing you captured documents, interrogation reports, agent reports which they ran across related to your area of expertise. The archive was accessed in all sorts of informal ways such as this. So, what I am suggesting is that it may be unfair to assess the success or failure of the archive as an archive qua archive relative to the effectiveness of U.S. policies at achieving the stated goals of those policies. Unfair, because there was a kind of lateral mental severance -- in part generational, in part mindset-temperamental, in part related to divergent political orientations -- within the American Command which prevented assimilation, let alone application, of what was learned from the CDEC documents.

And, to use contemporary parlance, there was a subtext to the community of practice’s practice. Those who were really into it (less than a dozen people in the whole history of the war!) were all all over fundamental questions and there was a constant undercurrent of discourse on a wide spectrum of issues related to the theory of self-organization: from replication of DNA to animal societies to group mind to tonari gume to pao chia to collective phenomena to Schrödinger’s equation to information theory to phase boundaries to cryptanalytic algorithms to theory of biological adaptivity to meta-perspectives on theories of planning to quantum systems to theories of political transition to axioms of logic to what is now called econophysics to… This discourse, too, was well served by interaction with the CDEC archive. A pity the press and the scholars never learned a thing about it. For those who had esoteric monographs on the logical methods of ancient China stuffed in their hip pocket while standing braced in formation at Group on Smokebomb Hill, Ft. Bragg, however, there should be little surprise in this.

I protest! The Vietnam War intelligence commentary is not a discontinuity in this train of thought. One of the curious features in discourse of leading Vietnam scholars is the oft-repeated leitmotif wherein the American intelligence officer is criticized for his reliance on map overlays. This criticism is uttered over and over, over-impugning the over-rationality experienced as having been a characteristic feature of the American military-industrial patriarchy responsible for the war. Why over decades is this particular image repeated and repeated and repeated? The military officer bent over his acetate overlays. Is this an evocation of the “wise old man” archetype? Of course not. So this officer cannot be the transference figure receiving the projected “animus” of the female Vietnam scholar, and even if he were such a figure that fact would not explain the male scholar's fondness for this same image. It is the overlay itself at issue, not the military officer.

The acetate-overlay stack is a “substitute transformational object” in the processes of projective identification engaged in by the Vietnam scholar. Scholars fond of this image are Left-leaning on the political spectrum, have embraced post-modernist deconstructionism in significant measure, and have identified with past and present causes of the Vietnamese peasant. Why does the acetate-overlay stack become a substitute transformational object for persons with this personal profile? Because these persons have never experienced the states of consciousness associated with the animistic identity transparency characteristic of the world-view construct of the Vietnamese peasant they have identified with. Identity transparency for the Vietnam scholar is an UNCONSCIOUS inherent psychological capacity, hence automatically projected. For the Vietnam scholar, the transference figure is the Vietnamese peasant. But he or she does not experience the peasant's experience; he or she, by virtue of being in transference, experiences a regressed caricature of the peasant's experience. Fixation on the acetate-overlay stack is a psychological “displacement”, in that the consciousness-state identified with, but not experienced, is analogically modeled by this substitute transformational object.

Marxism is quintessentially Newtonian. Post-structuralism and deconstructionism of Marxist origins is a subliminally-orchestrated “spoiling operation” designed to sustain Newtonian orientations in a new guise: “Other and Same” is anything but animistic identity transparency. Superposition in the Schrödinger wave equation, however, is animistic identity transparency. Acetate-overlay stack is a good analogue of quantum superposition, the most fundamental threat to quintessentially-Newtonian Marxism, hence the Left-leaning Vietnam scholar's oh-so-appropriate substitute transformational object.

In order to specifically delineate what my reservations are regarding Terence McKenna’s very interesting discourse, I will quote him in italic and comment on the selected quotations in standard type (unfortunately, you did not give a bibliographic reference).

“In other words, it’s possible to imagine a virtual reality that was driven by a speech-operated synthesizer where the various parts of ordinary speech, adjectives, modifiers, subjects and objects, were interpreted by the cybernetic environment as topological manifolds of various shapes, so that speech would then generate a visibly beheld topology, and it’s possible to imagine a future world where, in setting up marriage contracts or in negotiating corporate takeovers, in areas where clear communication, clear expression of intentionality was very important, that people would actually go into the virtual reality to use the visible language because its capacity for conveying intent would be much greater than ordinary spoken language.” Here is where we can really see how differing orientations to research and development would emerge. The main distinction between drug-induced and non-drug-induced access to visual language is a matter of semantic and ontological precedence relations. Terence could be speaking a line here directly out of Chomsky's textbooks relative to the great linguist's placing of grammar and syntax logically prior to semantics, which notion was based, in Chomsky's case, on uncritical acceptance of recursive generation as a definition of calculability, à la Church's hypothesis (in the mathematical theory of logical semantics), which continues to be mistakenly dictated to us by the likes even of a Roger Penrose. It was because of this error that generative linguists never arrived at a viable concept of a universal semantics -- and continued to wallow in Newtonian political conceptions as vehicles of anti-Newtonian transformational sociopolitical “grammars”. In a very real sense, Terence simply takes all this into technopsychedeliclalaland, as his familiarity with and commitment to the fundaments of contemporary linguistic theorizing was surely carried into interpretation of his psychedelic-drug-mediated visual-language experience. When you leap into the drug experience of visual language, it is revelatory! Overpowering! The realreality! When you step by step over years waltz into Musculpt, it is not that adjectives and modifiers are seen visually, but that visually presented topological-manifold configurations are seen as universal semantic gestalts with m-possible iinntteerrpprreettaattiioonnss. True, it is immediately recognized that, in a given culture-bound, culture-determining natural language, a given topological configuration (with its always-present [astral sound] tonal accompaniment, not present in Terence's presentation or MIT's architecture-machine prefiguration), correlates not with grammatical or syntactical structures, but with semantic gestalts. The clear implication of Terence's above given statement about marriage contracts, and so on, is that natural languages transliterate uunniiqquueellyy to a topological metalanguage which is in the form of realreality. There are many assumptions behind this proposition for which there are many reasons to believe they are incorrect. Not only the mistaken assumption that grammar and syntax logically precede semantics, but also the mistaken assumption that the relationship between a semantic element (and for that matter a meme) and a syntactical structure is single-valued (not m-valued). More fundamentally, and most mistakenly, Terence (tacitly, again) assumes realreality is selfsame, which is a widely accepted (unconscious) assumption at the source of most cultural conflict.

“Meaning goes public and the differences between people then decline toward being insignificant.” This is one version of what John Allen calls “the coercive 'we'”. The idea here is that there is only one real meaning complexus and that once people see this one real meaning they will all agree that it is tthhee one real meaning and they will further agree that the one real meaning is so important that anything that might have appeared to differ from it will become insignificant by comparison. The idea that there is only one real meaning is based on, not only a tacit generalization of monotheistic orientations, but the unquestioned assumption that realreality is singular, selfsame, the same as itself, single-valued. Since realreality is selfsame, there can be only one correct account of it -- one meaning complexus, that is. The realreality cannot be m-configurations in contradiction with each other (in contradiction according to the conventions of single-valued Aristotelian-Baconian-Boolean logic). Under this assumption of a selfsame realreality, each culture and each religion claims it has the one and only true account of realreality. Selfsameness dictates one meaning: no confusion in the marriage contract. (Vedic thought is the only body of thought I know of that radically departs from the assumption of a selfsame realreality.) But clearly, realreality is not single-valued; it is m-valued. And the topological language to which Terence refers is a universal semiosis where each semantic element is m-valued -- meaning that meaning logically precedes grammar and syntax (not the opposite, as Chomsky assumed), and that there are no unique one-to-one correlations between meaning and topology. Such correlations are m-valued. If this is the case, as it appears to be, one would not start Musculpt R&D by translating natural languages (English presumably) into topological-manifold configurations (this is parallel to teaching dolphins English, rather than humans trying to learn Dolphin), but rather start by trying to develop-through-use the metareferential aspects of Musculpt in as many cultures (of prejudicial understanding) as possible, and attempt to discover what invariants, if any, can be identified, and whether or not these semantic invariants can be seen to devolve to a universal grammar (in the Chomskian sense). This is a very different program from the one Gregory Bateson brought to John Lilly's human-dolphin communication project. Were one to proceed, as Terence suggests, by translating English or some other natural language to Musculpt, then one would attribute to Musculpt the metalinguistic properties of English and natural language in general (as opposed to other language forms like those of music, plastic art, architecture, mathematical metaphor, and so on). In doing so, one would simply create a visual analog of all the linguistic attributes of enculturation Terence regards as separating human cognition and feeling from direct contact with realreality (which he mistakenly treats as selfsame). For these reasons, the R&D strategy I would choose would be the inverse of that suggested by Terence.

I appreciate being sent this material on projective identification and will try to find the book, THE BORDERLINE PERSONALITY, by Nathan Schwartz-Salant, as I would like to see his thoughts on Winnicott’s notion of a “third area” where these phenomena “take place”, even though the notion of “location” is inadequate, according to Schwartz-Salant’s reckoning. I must say, however, that his commentary on Jung’s PSYCHOLOGY OF THE TRANSFERENCE and his commentary on Jung’s commentary on THE SECRET OF THE GOLDEN FLOWER are superficial, and in some respects purvey misinformation by omitting mention of critical aspects of Jung’s thought on the subject, which he apparently does not understand -- notably Jung’s work with the physicist Wolfgang Pauli on origins of the “synchronisity” concept, and how these explorations were related to issues of the “location” of projective identification phenomena. The best treatment of this is Maria Louise von Franz’s NUMBER AND TIME.

In this material you sent, there are names I am unfamiliar with, but no new ideas. In fact, I would say that Jill Scharff, in PROJECTIVE AND INTROJECTIVE IDENTIFICATION AND THE USE OF THE THERAPIST’S SELF, really isn’t familiar with relevant literature regarding this area and doesn’t have a good understanding of the phenomenon she is writing about. Quoting page 44: “Crisp (1986) writes that ‘an element in the recipient must exist that can receive the projective identification’[p. 66]. She explores this by considering factors that influence object choice, but finds little in the literature other than Klein’s suggestion that projective identification occurs on the basis of similarity or difference between projector and projectee.” I must say: This is pitiful! This comment indicates very little understanding of the parameters involved in the process or the various levels upon which it transpires. There is a wealth of literature relevant to this specific topic: everything written about Jung’s theory of psychological types and how underdeveloped functions (intuition, sensation, feeling, thinking in their introverted and extroverted modalities) are always automatically projected upon complementary transference figures; Jung’s commentaries on Wilhelm Worringer’s turn-of-the-century Ph.D. dissertation FORM IN GOTHIC on the nature of abstraction and empathy which was read by Kandinsky and Marcel Duchamp (much of their art being about this very subject) and was important in the genesis of modern abstract art; throughout the literature on art stylistics, particularly that on classifying Greek and Roman sculpture, is interspersed much commentary on types which is of considerable relevance to issues of object choice in projective identification -- given that the art object is in many respects a product of projective identification; the whole body of esoteric, psychological, and art-related literature concerning the “Dopplegänger” phenomenon (even the recent Czech film: The Double Life of Veronique); the whole body of Indian literature on types, i.e., Sattva, Raja, Tamas, et cetera; the literature on temperamental and physical types, i.e., ectomorph, mesomorph, endomorph -- I personally happen to be a 7-7-5; the Chinese literature on physiogamy; also relevant is the literature on astrology and tarot. This is an enormous body of material, all highly relevant to issues of “object choice”, so rich, in fact, as to profoundly affect our understanding of the historical process, if adequately assessed. In 1973, I wrote a long analysis of periods in Roman sculpture stylistics for a Roman Art History seminar, where I based the proposed classificatory system on Jung’s theory of psychological types (some years later, I learned that the art critic Herbert Read had also developed thoughts along these lines). I was moving with this into Gibbon’s account of the Decline and Fall about the time I was swept into studies of tornado genesis. But it was this analytic experience of sculptural objects as artifacts of projective identification that gave me the basis for a re-thinking of the origins of World War Two. There are elaborate classificatory systems here involving dozens of sub-categories. And much of esoteric and alchemical and Kabbalistic and Gurdieffian literature is devoted to analysis of how these factors are involved in determining unconscious choices of transference figures and projective objects. There are large blocks of Tantric literature devoted to similar aspects of the yogi-yoganini syzygy.

All of Jung’s discussions of the interlock between the alchemical adept and his female soror mystica (mystic sister) are infused with commentary relevant to issues of object choice (belying Schwartz-Salant’s false comment that “The alchemical tradition, like Tantrism, with which the imagery of the Rosarium has important similitude, was primarily concerned with the union of opposites within the individual; interpersonal interactions would have been, at best, a tool along the path.” (p. 101) This is not true. Interpersonal and intrapsychic integration of opposites are completely interconnected, cannot be radically separated, and failure at one sets limitations on the other. This is explicit in both bodies of literature. There is a lot of ancient Greek, Gnostic, and Manichean literature related to the type problem which is relevant to factors determining object choice. Denis de Rougemont’s book LOVE IN THE WESTERN WORLD explores Renaissance era thought on the matter. Two other premier sources of relevant reflection on issues of object choice are Kierkegaard’s DIARY OF THE SEDUCER and Nizami’s LAYLA AND MAJNUN. Virtually every culture throughout history has devoted considerable effort to understanding what Freudian psychologists call issues of object choice in projective identification. Most of the literature mentioned above is referred to in one way or another in the MOON OF HOA BINH. Liana and I conducted a 9-year-long letter exchange on the subject, some of which found its way into Derek’s Journals and Studies for Liana.

Scharff’s statement, “…apply it to the marital relationship…” is ridiculous. It applies to every relationship, regardless of gender, regardless of person or physical object. I would even argue along with esoteric Shinto animistic sects that it applies between any two physical objects. Just because the terminology of Freudian psychology is not being used in most of this literature does not mean the same phenomenon is not being discussed.

In Jung’s THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE TRANSFERENCE there are diagrams of the Conjugio (the syzygy or “yoking” of the adept and his female soror mystica) which are described as “stages” of the transference. But these are not stages of the transference per se; they are stages of the alchemical adept’s learning of the parameters or processes of the transference. These process-parameters are always there, even if the adept has to learn them, make them conscious that is, by steps. Jung used the form of the heuristic alchemical text as the basis of his essay and therefore talked of “stages”. Introjective or extractive identification is illustrated in those diagrams along with projective identification, the two taken together being referred to by Jung as the transference. But there is great complexity in the always-there process-parameters, and hence there are stages of learning those parameters. The most complex diagram, illustrating the last “stage”, portrays eight aspects of the transference, not only two, i.e., projective identification and introjective identification. And eight is actually a simplification of the case.

The adept, intrapsychically, has contrasexual aspects: male and female aspects of his psyche identified with conscious and unconscious standpoints. Projective and introjective identification can take place intrapsychically between these contrasexual aspects of the adept (without involving an exterior physical object or an other). This transpires via intrapsychic “objects”. The soror mystica is an actual other person. Within her psyche there are contrasexual aspects complementary to those of the adept. Intrapsychic projective and introjective identification takes place within her person independent of the adept.

When the adept and soror mystica become psychologically intertwined, enter syzygy, “fall in love”, drink the “potion”, become “yoked”, a multiplicity of unconscious engagements transpire, the sum total of which Jung called “the transference”. Each of the two persons has four things going on in and of themselves: two contrasexual components, each engaged in two processes. That is, male and female aspects, each engaged in projective and introjective identification. When the adept and soror mystica “drink the love potion”, two 4-processes interact such that eight things are happening between them. But this is actually a simplified version, for if you look closely you will see that there are minimally sixteen (actually 24) combinations. This is clinically relevant, according to the Jungian model of the psyche, because projection, identification, projective identification, introjective identification each transpire because of imbalance of the four basic psychological functions (intuition, sensation, thinking, feeling) each with introverted and extroverted modalities, thus making eight basic functions. (The whole rejected field of mathematical metaphor, i.e., numerology, is thus highly relevant to issues of object choice in projective identification.) Factor this across the 16-fold treatment given earlier and there are minimally 32 dimensions to the transference (actually, by factorials, considerably more). The full spectrum of theories of types and temperaments is relevant here in accounting for unconscious object preferences. Imbalance of the four functions in their two modalities is genetic and environmental: everyone has functional imbalance and attaining complete balance is an unattainable ideal. Psychological development mainly involves attaining higher and higher levels of balance. Clinical manifestations, according to this perspective, are rooted in inadequate perception, processing, assimilation, and so on, due to the functional imbalance.

This is the Jungian model. The Freudian picture is quite different, the difference being largely due to different notions of the nature of the psychological complex. For Jung, the complex is an essential, healthy, necessary basic building block of the psyche, which, even theoretically, cannot be removed. For Freud, the complex is the root element of neurosis, having origins in repression and similar processes. The complex, according to the Freudian perspective, can theoretically be removed through therapeutic abreaction induced and structured by patient-therapist transference and countertransference. Enormous complexities are proffered in volume after volume by the adherents, with all the commitment, and much the same logic, obtained by theosophy and Marxism (often all in the person of the same authority). Given this fundamental divergence, the Jungian and Freudian discourses on the subject are quite different, giving rise to a lot of confusion. I, personally, long ago dismissed the Freudian orientation, particularly the Melanie Klein variety, as being hopelessly limited and largely lacking in insight. The one exception to this is the general framework of “ego psychology” and the structural theory issuing largely from Heinz Hartmann and those who later developed the theory of deautomatization: Rappaport, Gill, Brenman, Deikmann, and so on.

But, I personally have also come to reject a good bit of the Jungian orientation, largely because Jung’s thought founders on the level of metaphysics and physics. Having foundered there, he never gained much insight into animistic experience and disparaged it by embracing Levy Bruhl’s negative account, termed “participation mystique”, and by integrating this notion into his conception of the goal of the therapeutic encounter: “individuation”. I personally regard this foundering as part of the origins of World War Two: Jung was guilty of much he charged others with.

Given that “others as objects” are a sub-category of objects in general, it is highly probable that the principles of interpersonal transference are at the very minimum analogically related to principles of the subject/physical-object level of the transference, which would in turn be at the very minimum analogically related to principles of the cosmological level of the transference. Indeed, this is the central message of the alchemical metaphor “changing base metals into gold”: the alchemists analogically derived principles of the interpersonal and intrapsychic levels of the transference from principles governing the cosmos, as embodied in the metareferences of medieval cathedral architecture, via the intervening step of applying the very same principles analogically on the subject/physical-object level in such a manner as to gestate the science of chemistry (which later lost contact with its originating metaphor: Shame on you! chemists who deny metaphors of origin, for in so doing you wallow in the mud of an ignorant hubris and damage integration of the whole, which is mediated by metaphorical reference between governing principles, i.e., laws of nature).

I use the terms intrapsychic transference, man-woman transference, interpersonal transference, subject-object (meaning physical object) level of the transference, cosmological transference throughout MOON because I understand that the same principles apply on all these different levels. With the “virtual reality” interpretation of quantum theory, in some respects an approach is being made to deal head-on with the cosmological transference. Husserl’s reductive phenomenology is our most elaborate attempt to understand the subject-object level of the transference. Gebser, in analyzing Analytical Cubism, provided instruction on another major attempt to penetrate this level of the transference. Marcel Duchamp’s whole artistic career was devoted to it -- from the “found object” to the “Large Glass”. The “8-Fold Way” in elementary particle physics, with its matter/anti-matter, self-duality/anti-self-duality, is, in principle, the “final stage” of the Conjugio diagramed and analyzed in Jung’s THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE TRANSFERENCE. The zero-infinity Brownian-cross wave statement (given on p. 340, Vol. 2 of MOON) is an expanded 32-fold cosmological version of the 32-fold treatment of the Conjugio earlier referred to. The upward and downward Brownian crosses represent m-valued decomposition elements devolving to psyche and soma.

But all of this (particularly Freudian, but also Jungian) discourse, from beginning to end, in my judgment, is of far less than great value because the very idea of projective identification is predicated on the mistaken notion that there exists actual objective objects (be they physical, psychologic, “found” or otherwise). The psychoanalytic logic of the clinical encounter is overdetermined (to use a Freudian term) by the predication of objectivity to objects that are judged to be repositories of projected subjective contents secondary to their inherent objectivity. The negative treatment of animism is based on this predication of objectivity to objects. The more subtle, but just as potent, mistaken notion underlying the very idea of projective identification is that there exists actual subjective subjects. Neither actual objective objects or actual subjective subjects actually exist. Look at the word act-ual. The predication involved is action-based, an action-based physics, metaphysics, sociology. Act-ual, act-ion, act-or. The referential point of departure is me-me-me. Animism isn’t like that; there is no actual objective object and no actual subjective subject. Prakriti-Purusha is simply the vanishing point of involutory/devolutory intersection in the larger context of Atman. One inevitably lapses into Hindu terminology, as the Hindu actually have the terminology for the non-act-ual. Atman (of the “third area”) is not just the same-old me given eternal status as so many seem to suppose. A consciousness organizing experience via single-valued logic can only experience multi-identity as fragmentation. But a consciousness organizing experience via m-valued logics can experience multi-identity as a transparency of state (as a “Large Glass”) with the whole of its context, an identity transparency simultaneously experienced on many levels across the concrete-to-abstract continuum.

Look, this is not so mysterious. In presence of moral compromise, one can assimilate information, perhaps even some knowledge, but not understanding. It’s quite simple, really. Contrary to popular belief, attainment of understanding has as much to do with moral clarity and emotional purity as with intellectual perspicacity, regardless of the area of human endeavor involved. And wisdom, I feel certain, must involve even more elaborate inner faculties, the existence of which we barely suspect, and which surely involve emotional and perceptual concomitants of m-valued modes of cognition and associated ethical repercussions. Wisdom must involve living in direct m-valued perception of non-selfsame realreality. When I quit college, one of the central considerations was awareness that the moral compromise imposed by performance of the duties associated with any professional position in this society is absolutely lethal to the inner life, thereby playing a significant role in induction of what is now called “normotic illness”. Once reaching this awareness about contemporary professional life, it took me two years to arrive at the decision to abandon higher enculturation, but at age 21 I took that decision and have never looked back, never since contemplated seeking a position of responsibility in the somehow-still-persisting Cartesian-Newtonian institutionalization.

There is strong analogical correspondence between your notion of the dynamic structure of polarized multilayers of cell water and A. Sakharov's multi-sheet model of the universe built of Novikov dust structured by self-organizing gravitational fields. Sakharov's theory was the culmination of his work on the “metric elasticity of space”.

I have long been thinking about this multi-layered framework as a model of Emil Post's m-valued logics (1921). In standard single-valued logic, any proposition must be either true or false. Fuzzy logic is an interpretation of m-valued logics, such that the undistributed middle is removed from the axiom system and is no longer considered a fallacy. The m-values are regarded as shades of grey between true and false. Truth-value remains an axiom, and, hence, the fallacy of contradiction remains a valid notion. An unadulterated interpretation of Post's m-valued logics, however, would also remove truth-value as an axiom. The m-values of the proposition then would refer to something more fundamental than yin-yang/true-false polarity. I think that what you call “association” is deeply involved with this implied more fundamental logical category. I have come to think of the order of logical-value of the given proposition as the “within” of a statement, i.e, the “within” being a given regime of identity-transparency (and involved with what the physicist David Bohm called “enfolded” or “implicate”). Differing states of associativity, in this conception, are not so much a matter of interactive forces propagating through space over time between discrete entities temporally and spatially removed, but of changing regimes of identity-transparency amongst the component processes of an integrated systemic whole. Spacetime interaction maps “within” logic as identity-transparency -- the “implicate” being within logic, which the physicist John A. Wheeler once regarded as the “pregeometry” of the geometry of spacetime.

One factor distinguishing between A. Szent-Györgyi's alpha and beta states, from this perspective, is single-valued logic (Boolean) versus m-valued logic (Postian). The living state would be an m-valued state -- and, therefore, one essential property of life would be logically and ontologically prior to geometry of spacetime. Were this the case, it would be a significant change in the prevailing conception.

In cooperative behaviors at CRITICAL states, such as those at the Curie temperature, correlation lengths go to infinity. At infinite correlation length, identity of component processes is perfectly transparent. This, of necessity, needs be the understanding of such states, as no amount of propagation will achieve infinite lengths -- correlation lengths or any other type of lengths. This is a definition, not of an ideal gas, but of an ideal superstate (fluid, conductor, plasma). Correct propositions relative to component process behaviors of the ideal superstate would be fully m-valued, as statements in m minus n orders of logical-value could not accurately convey ideal transparency. States of lesser criticality would be characterized by propositional calculi in lesser orders of logical-value. It is in this fashion, I believe, that outcomes of the Aspect experiments on non-locality can be considered in evaluating utility of analogies like falling dominos in imagining the nature of electron transport processes in biological systems.

In 1977, at a medical congress in Kyoto, I presented a co-authored paper on autogenic discharges in biological systems. In briefly sketching a model of DNA helix-coil transition as a superconductant process (later published in detail in a co-authored article for the International Journal of Quantum Chemistry, Vol XV, 333-341, 1979), I relied strongly on the concept of structured water I had encountered in the books of A. Szent-Györgyi (unfortunately, for all the reasons you describe, I had not run across your much more elaborate work in this area). There was a group of “young Turks” at this conference, mostly from Eastern Europe, who fixated on these ideas, which became a vehicle promoting association and providing an inductive springboard for intense interaction over the 5-day-long conference. The firebrand in the group was an Austrian medical doctor who was trying to create an ANTI-NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES. He had developed an elaborate strategy to subvert the peer review process on a global scale and had sophisticated arguments as to why it was impossible to do this except by starting on a global scale to INFORMALLY leech allegiance of young scientists and M.D.'s away from the prevailing Cartesian-Newtonian institutionalization. His inspiration for this strategy was derived from the manner in which the academy system was brought down by early 20th century avant-garde artists through informal association, movement manifestos, independent group exhibitions, and so on. He was 3 months through a year-long schedule of going from one scientific conference to the next around the planet, trying to recruit adherents to this idea. He had saved enough money to devote a year to this, and hoped something would open up along the way. I kept in contact with him for about two years and as far as I know the Anti-National Academy of Sciences never got off the ground. If a philanthropist's money were to become engaged with this aspect of the issues you raise, it is my belief that the greatest impact of this money would be achieved by supporting activities such as those this Austrian medical doctor attempted to undertake 23 years ago. No scientific discovery, as you well know, is seriously going to disturb the system -- no matter how much we may have believed it long ago.

From an analysis of p-electron parcel temperature oscillations between reference level and critical (Curie) temperatures (i.e., infinite correlation lengths) in the molecule's p-stacks, a canonical DNA wave equation was derived. It was stated that, during helix-coil transition, all the genetic information contained in the base pairs is radiated into the DNA environment by a coherent wave phenomenon (as described by the equations). Several experimental approaches to verifying the quantitative model were described, as several direct measurables could be used to substantiate or deny validity of the equations. These experiments have never been done. According to the canonical equation, the p-electron parcel temperature oscillation rate is critically coupled to the rate of helix-coil transition. We therefore speculate that the p-electron parcel oscillation rate is the bottom line on the intra-cellular Zeitgeber. But this parcel oscillation rate varies with changes in the radiational environment of the molecule, thus providing some insight into exogenous modulation of the endogenous Zeitgeber. The superconductant process beats down through a frequency funnel the energy density of the ambient radiation such that the frequency response window is very narrow. We speculate that the frequency response windows of DNA of different histological types vary one from the next. We further speculate that these frequency windows are immunological signifiers of self-identity. There are quantum properties of the coherent DNA waves propagating the information carried by the nucleotide pairs (we consider here the relative requirements of functional specificity and functional integration) which are logically m-valued in character. These m-valued properties of the immunological signifier for self-identity are the same m-valued properties relating to multi-layered structured water and multi-sheeted models in general: meaning that the associativity, or to use the quantum physics term “relative state”, of intracellular structured water is fundamentally involved in immune response. Immune system function is cast in a different light from consensus models when m-valued properties are considered. Related to DNA, the higher-valued attributes of the propagating quantum-wave phenomenon GOVERNS, according to this notion, topology of folding configuration.

One of the main topics of argumentation in Kyoto in 1977 amongst the “young Turks” was the idea that this quantum-wave modulation of folding topology, as an expression of radiation-induced change of immunologic competency, vis-à-vis a given disease vector (with its own quantum-wave modulated folding topology: e.g., RNA- and DNA-type viruses), could become the vehicle for immune system collapse. Radiation-induced modulation of the vector or the frequency response widow of a given DNA histological type would radically alter the prevailing relative-state of vector virulence versus collective immune competency by virtue of making the vector sufficiency immunologically invisible as to allow it to get by anti-viral immunity in quantities adequate to establish a beachhead. Chemical- and/or radiation-induced shift of the natural frequency of a DNA molecule would make it immunologically alien, setting in motion anti-nuclear, ultimately anti-DNA, antibodies (e.g., systemic lupus erythematosus). More subtlely, repeated radiation-induced shift of the p-electron parcel oscillation outside normative parameters (the function of autogenic discharges being to return these altered parameters to their normative state) would constitute chronic stress, leading to slower-onset DNA frequency window shift. These discussions were held in the days before AIDS was identified as AIDS.

According to the reckoning of our model, the collection of DNA frequency response windows falls full across the microwave spectrum. These windows, however, are thread thin, due to the superconductant status of the molecule (IF NOT SUPERCONDUCTANT, GOD HELP US!), so it would be possible, had we a frequency response map, to design appliances so as to stay out of the biologically active windows. We might still be able to have our common carrier frequencies in the valley of minimum sky noise (microwave spectrum). As regards epidemiology, rather than etiology, of autoimmune and immune competency disorders, it appears that DNA frequency anomalies would be inheritable diatheses. If so, then a radiation-induced shift would have a means to preferentially select given population groups as a beachhead for epidemiologic fulmination, say Haitians and sub-Saharan Africans. So, who is it we shall choose to trust with the following information: (1) Nucleotide-pair map of human genome; (2) Frequency [wave-form, intensity] response map of histological spectrum of human genome; (3) Genealogical maps of inherited human-genome frequency-response anomalies?

Very well put response you made to that article concerning Norman Finkelstein's book THE HOLOCAUST INDUSTRY. What do I think? I think that the only relationship legal prescriptions (such as those establishing financial “compensation” for acts of war) actually have to warfare is: (1) to sustain the false notion that “moral war” is possible, thereby supporting legitimacy of war as a policy option of nation-states; (2) to prepare psychological ground for the next war.

Regarding recent events in Israel, people would be well advised to view the Sharon election in its full context, rather than merely through the lenses of local and regional equations: not only the Palestinian issue; not only Arab-Israeli conflict. And not only blow-by of psychological issues derivative of events which transpired in WWII. Issue of control of Jerusalem was very likely behind the so-large margin by which Sharon was elected. This is not only a several-thousand-year-old issue, it is very much a contemporary issue: the same issue being fought over in the Balkans, for instance.

Control of Jerusalem is control of a site and its cultural artifacts, a site infused with metareference to cosmology, worldview construct, and religious belief. The nation-state has been the psychological projection of the Umwelt “magic circle” persons and peoples have used to establish confirmation of their claim to possess absolute separateness, self-identity, and choseness in having been given privileged access to what they believe the only true account of reality. This “magic circle” is the ego-sphere around which stability of psychological functions have been organized in the psyche ever since the nation-state replaced animistic tribal self-organization. The present planetary monoculture agenda of globalization threatens foundations of this whole psychological regime of peoples all over the world. As globalization proceeds -- in large measure by proliferation of uniformizing technologies unadapted by metareferential features to persons and peoples -- functionality of psychological constructs sustaining integrity of the ego-sphere crumble and a sense of panic arises from deep within: the previously prevailing structure of the psyche is being dismantled and with it the very sense of self-being. Outward signs (sacred sites, cultural artifacts, shared cherished beliefs) of the previously functional psychological construct become objects of obsession, rather than taken-for-granted elements of a well-oiled system within the psyche. Persons and peoples experience themselves as existentially dead and therefore are more willing to risk physical death in gratuitous acts relative to the outward signs (sites, artifacts, beliefs). This is the arising of the psychological foreground of warfare, the arising of a collective will to war, the beginning of a wave of raised heads and ears prickling across the whole herd at faintly audible sounds of future events. What is unprecedented about the present circumstance is that herds of the whole human species are raising their heads simultaneously from the feeding ground, having heard the same sounds, planetary sounds of crumbling psyche offering not the slightest intimation as to what will replace the lost structures upon which the immediate sense of self-being depends. Never before has there been so elaborate a foreground of warfare as this.

I must say, it certainly is reassuring that someone as knowledgeable as you certainly are, about all the issues concerning culpability for the Cambodian holocaust, is covering for a major newspaper the attempt to mount a Khmer War Crimes Tribunal -- though it is a bit mystifying that such a well-informed person, to whom words so easily come, should have but one sentence of commentary to offer on my “Who Caused the Cambodian Holocaust, Anyway?” piece: “Frankly, doesn’t make any sense.” Given that I worked at CICV-Targets, where B-52 strikes on Cambodia were sited, this assessment of yours is rather like the time at the beginning of the Westmoreland-versus-CBS trial I sent to National Review a detailed analysis of the military strategy, political theory, general systems, and bureaucracy paradigm issues underlying the Strength Estimates Controversy and the editor told me they had decided to go with an article by an ex-Foreign Service Officer. Given that, besides being at CICV-Targets, I later worked in Political Order of Battle where the Strength Estimates Controversy originated, and no FSO had any direct exposure to the involved events, it is not surprising my response to the whole affair was inability to see connection between the public record and what actually had transpired -- at least as far as those directly involved were concerned.

The most common evaluation of the “Who Caused…” article has been, essentially, So what? SIDESHOW said all that long ago! This general response illustrates how little capacity people actually have to read words placed on the page when those words constitute a personal psychological threat, however subtle. The point of “Who Caused…” is not the bombing per se, but the real motivations of the bombers, and what those real motivations had to do with actual causes of the holocaust. The man at Harvard who formulated the concept and coined the term “forced-draft de-ruralization”, which was used as strategic justification for the tactic of free fire zones, is still offering oh-so learned commentary on world affairs, but I have not seen much from his pen about Cambodia. When one looks at the history of Harvard, at the religious beliefs, the attitudes and behaviors toward animistic peoples of the society which created that learned institution, it is not at all surprising that “forced-draft de-ruralization” should have issued from the likes of Harvard. Form interrogatories, if complete, from the asking party, the plaintiff, humanity as represented through good offices of a Khmer War Crimes Tribunal, and the responses from the answering party, the defendants, the Khmer Rouge authoritarian personalities, would clearly reveal in the B-52 free fire zone, also known as Cambodia, not only negligent USAF management of place, person, and object causing proximate results in bodily injury and mental suffering on an extremely large scale, but willful intent and defective design in the strategy of “forced-draft de-ruralization” causing the proximate result of a compensatory Khmer Rouge policy of “forced-draft de-urbanization” -- the policy most immediately identified with Cambodian holocaust.

“Who Caused…” is an essay -- in the derisive language of those Yossarians ordered against their will to choose locations for B-52 strikes in Cambodia -- on the metapsychology of a people whose oldest and most learned institution of higher enculturation came up with a strategy like “forced-draft de-ruralization”, which strategy was clearly more anti-animistic than anti-communist (not least because of how effective the strategy was against animism and how ineffective it was against communism) and, in contemporary parlance, how this anti-animism, long cultivated at Harvard, is an expression of the anti-animism in the technical clinical definition of “normotic illness” and associated collective manifestations of projective identification.

Given the fact that “forced-draft de-ruralization” is a characteristic outcome of the intervention of market capitalism into any rural subsistence economy (contemplate the fact that 80% of all South Koreans moved in one decade, and 60% of that 80% moved to Seoul), consideration of real culpability for the Cambodian holocaust might have more significance for the future of humanity than the mere passing interest of historians would indicate. When one looks at holocausts throughout history, including the very recent ones in the Congo, Indonesia and the Balkans, one sees that the perpetrators are always the psychologically vanquished, those whose mode of inner and outer life has been taken away from them against their will, leaving them without meaningful connection to their past or their present. This trauma to the core of being induces a collective psychosis not unlike the individual psychosis of a person who commits suicide by taking a rifle to the top of a tower with the intent to kill as many people as he can before he himself is slain.

This pattern of behavior has considerable contemporary relevance, given that market capitalism, in globalizing, has undertaken “forced-draft de-culturization”, a strategy extremely well designed to psychologically vanquish, to take away meaningful connection to the past, to remove inner and outer patterns of life considered by the dominant economy to be obstructions to trade. The holocausts thus caused, as we have so recently seen, are not likely to be perpetrated by peoples of the dominant economy who formulated “forced-draft de-culturization”, but by those who have been psychologically vanquished by said deculturization. But there is another factor in the current globalization equation suggesting that the biggest holocaust of all will eventually be perpetrated by peoples of the dominant economy. The Cartesian-Newtonian institutionalization and supra-nationalizing, multi-nationalizing political economy -- promulgated in a strategy of “forced-draft de-culturization” -- is being globalized by what? Come on, my dear dear international correspondent! It’s right there at the tip of your tongue. Why, why, technologies, of course! Technologies created on basis of principles of a quantum mechanics antithetical to fundamentals of the Cartesian-Newtonian institutionalization which is being so aggressively globalized one could easily see how globalization could be regarded, not only as deculturizing, but as a process of politicoeconomic and military aggression. Eventually (soon, perhaps), the quantal subversion of Cartesian-Newtonian institutionalization will lead to peoples of the dominant economy being psychologically vanquished. When this vanquishment matures, those who cause the holocaust will at the same time be those who perpetrate it.

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