The "cultural heritage" group neurosis 7: synchronicity in the mountains

Alberta's mammal: bighorn sheep ewe spots me walking
toward her on a mountain backcountry road

Some readers might have wondered why my last two episodes featured videos that focused on synchronicity, the psychophysical world (Unus Mundus) and the relationship between Jung and Pauli. What has this to do with "cultural heritage"? I knew of one connection and that will be covered soon, but my Friday trip to the mountains with an old friend was to get some photographs of grizzly bears and had (or so I thought) nothing to do with this series.

Bearberries along Goat Creek Trail. Most of the ripe berries
on these bushes had already been eaten by the bears but
some had ripened later.

Arriving at Canmore, it soon became apparent that I was unlikely to get any photographs of grizzly bears: it seemed that if a grizzly had been sighted, a vast amount of the surrounding area had been taped off to visitors. The reason for this was that there was a bumper crop of bearberries which had brought a number of grizzlies to the area to feed and a woman cycling along a trail had surprised a grizzly and the bear had attacked her. Fortunately, her friend had a can of bear spray and the woman's injuries were minor because the bear was driven off after being sprayed. Grizzly bears mostly stay away from people but can be surprised by the sudden arrival of someone on a bicycle. If you surprise a grizzly, it will tend to attack. Goat Creek Trail is further back and was not closed even though it is both a bicycle trail and a route for grizzly bears between Canmore and Banff.

Trail leader Tristan on long leash at Goat Creek Trail

In addition to making plenty of noise and having bear spray, my coyote hybrid Tristan was on a long leash with us. He hears any nearby animal and alerts us to its presence at once. Our hike along that trail was for exercise and not to find grizzlies. I was hoping to do the latter at a greater distance!

Abandoning the hope of seeing some grizzlies in the open in the heat of midday, I thought it would be great to visit the summit of Plateau Mountain south of the Highwood Pass along the Great Divide. I had not been there for more than twenty years. I did not know that the road had been closed by a locked gate partly "To prevent vandalism to natural gas production facilities and to lessen impact on the area's natural features" (You really have to start wondering why an "Ecological Reserve" would be a suitable place to drill for gas especially as that activity can release deadly hydrogen sulfide gas. There were litmus paper posts all over the top of that mountain. Many Albertans do not buy the hype and Husky Oil, who closed Plateau Mountain to traffic is mentioned in this article: Kananaskis is a Gas. It is really best to drive quickly away if you get the faintest whiff of that gas. Most people are not going to walk too far from a vehicle in such an area.

I might have found the right road but I saw a locked metal gate and noticed. also, that a small area of forest had (curiously) been clear-cut which had resulted in the fall of quite a number of rocks along the road. These would not have been good to drive the Land Rover over, but would have been no problem for big gas-company trucks. In the same area, I saw permanent signs which had a phone number whereby you could report any sightings of grizzly bears or cougars. I wondered, at first, why anyone would do that. Then it dawned on me: so areas could be closed off.

This is where cultural heritage comes in, or with these examples, "cultural property": groups of people sharing a cultural frame such as park wardens, gas companies and archaeologists adopt a proprietary and exclusive right over the public interest. Often using subterfuge, they "strike their claims" for various motives: these might be profit; to encourage more jobs and higher wages; to avoid law suits for damage they do by restricting the number of witnesses and for many other reasons. Public or environmental protection are frequently given to give the illusion that it is all for the good.

Right now, the Alberta government is about to launch a caribou protection plan that has environmentalist up in arms.* The government is apparently unfamiliar with the cycles of wolf/caribou interaction published in Scientific American decades ago which clearly demonstrated that high wolf predation caused caribou herds to split up and migrate to other herds guaranteeing genetic variability and decreasing inbreeding which then reduced, naturally, the excess numbers of wolves (this cycle has been working successfully tens of thousand of years longer than there has been people in North America) and is also apparently unfamiliar with the Inuit proverb: “The caribou feeds the wolf, but it is the wolf who keeps the caribou strong.”

Unspoiled. There was even a sign to that effect. Pehaps
there was no likelihood of gas reserves or hydro-electric
development.

Almost everywhere we went I saw damage done by industry: reservoirs that had once been lakes (and were still called such) with water levels that were changed so frequently that there was no shore but a band of rotting vegetation where life still kept trying to take hold. I kept Tristan out of that water because of the danger of parasites; really wide gravel roads into the backcountry to facilitate future industrial development; and areas closed off so that no one would be tempted to learn, first-hand about the environment: what to do and what not to do. The public consists of representative of multiple cultural frames and many of these, "accidentally" or "acausally" can bring new perspectives to everything else. These are all examples of Wolfgang Pauli's "potential being", which once realized, can then develop along predictable lines of cause and effect. Pauli was able to see what most others could not:

"In the early 1930s, Pauli began to have strange dreams showing that certain physical terms had a deeper meaning he first called ‘physical-symbolic.’ Such a statement, hardly understandable to a natural scientist, isolated him more and more from his colleagues. On the other hand, because of their lack of mathematical/physical knowledge, he was not able to discuss the concerning problems with Jung and his collaborators either. Therefore Wolfgang Pauli suffered from deep isolation and loneliness during the second half of his life."

Remo F. Roth, Return of the World Soul: Wolfgang Pauli, C.G. Jung and the Challenge of Psychophysical Reality - Part I: The Battle of the Giants (Kindle Locations 2123-2126). Pari Publishing. Kindle Edition.

"I have opted for the third road…in interpreting the unconscious (as well as the characteristics of the electron and the atom) as ‘potential being.’ It is the legitimate description by man for potential occurrences in the conscious and as such belongs to the genuine symbolic reality of the ‘thing in itself.’ Wolfgang Pauli to C.G. Jung, 1953."

Remo F. Roth, ibid (Kindle Locations 539-542). Pari Publishing. Kindle Edition.

"Pauli goes on describing the potential being by using an important paradox of quantum physics:

'The complementary characteristics of the electron (and the atom) (wave and particle) are in fact ‘potential being,’ but one of them is always ‘actual nonbeing… That is why one can say that science, being no longer classical, is for the first time a genuine theory of becoming and no longer Platonic.'

"With this statement Pauli introduces the so-called complementarity of quantum physics, which is the basis of Niels Bohr’s Copenhagen interpretation. The term complementarity means that it is impossible for our consciousness to find out what matter really is. It depends on the instrument of observation used whether we see its particle or its wave aspect. Therefore, when we observe it as particle, this aspect is being and the wave aspect nonbeing, and vice versa. If we do not observe, there exists a state of potential being. It is the same state as described by the now famous Schrödinger’s thought experiment; the cat in the closed box is considered to be neither totally living nor totally dead until we open the box for the purpose of observing it."

Remo F. Roth, ibid  (Kindle Locations 771-780). Pari Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Pauli did not live long enough to discover the reason why evolution could take place even though he knew that "natural selection" through mutations was mathematically unjustified, and it also strikes me that the solution: epigenetic switches within the formerly-called "junk DNA " are also examples of his concept of "potential being" and expressions of a greater "natural process" we cannot possibly understand: that of which both matter and psyche are mere expressions.

Tomorrow, I will explain something of Celtic symbology that is invisible to the scientistic practices of archaeology and even beyond the sight of modern science which will also demonstrate that restrictive "cultural property" laws where only certain interest-groups are allowed free access is doing more harm than good and increasing ignorance. We are all thinking beings, not sheep.

*Additional information: Alberta slaughters more than 1,000 wolves and hundreds of other animals.


John's Coydog Community page