Tao genius and Tao madness: a study

Tao genius and Tao madness

Tao neither supernatural nor mechanical - V

by Liu Bolin

On the other side, the antimaterialist claims “the power of mind over matter.” That quantity can determine pattern is a precise complement for the power of mind over matter, and both are nonsense. The belief that quantities can determine patterns is surprisingly pervasive and influential. It is, of course, a basic premise in contemporary economics and therefore one of the factors which determines international chaos as well as ecological disaster on the home front. I believe that this kind of ascription of the mental to the physical so that the physical becomes now the supernatural contains the ultimate in nonsense. It is now quantities that carry the divine onus of creating pattern – presumably out of nothing. Consider on the other hand the popular verbal cliché “the power of mind over matter.” This little monster contains three combined concepts, “power,” “mind”, and “matter.” But power is a notion derived from the word of engineers and physicists. It is of the same world as the notions of energy or matter. It would therefore be quite consistent and sensible to speak, say, of the poser of a magnet over a piece of iron. All three items – the magnet, the iron, and the power – come out of the same universe of discourse. The magnet and the iron and the power can meet each other in the same statement. But mind, since Descartes split the universe in two, does not belong in that world. So in order to give physical power to mind, we must give it materialistic existence. Alternatively, we might mentalize matter and talk about “the obedience of matter to mind.” One way or another the two concepts must be made to meet in one conceptual world. The phrase “power of mind over matter” does not bridge the gulf between mind and matter, it only invokes a miracle to bring the two things together. And, of course, once a basic contradiction is admitted into a system of explanation, anything is possible. If some x is both equal and unequal to some y, then all x‘s are both equal and unequal to all y‘s and to each other. All criteria of the incredible are lost.

In any case, the combination of the two ideas we have attributed to Descartes blossomed out into an emphasis upon quantity in scientific explanation which distracted men‘s thought from problems of contrast, pattern, and gestalt. The world of Cartesian coordinates relies on continuously varying quantities, and while such analogic concepts have their place in descriptions of mental process, the emphasis on quantity distracted men‘s minds from the perception that contrast and ratio and shape are the base of mentality. Pythagoras and Plato knew that pattern was fundamental to all mind and ideation. But this wisdom was thrust away and lost in the mists of the supposedly indescribable mystery called “mind.” This was sufficient to end systematic investigation. By the middle of the nineteenth century any reference to mind in biological circles was viewed as obscurantism or simple heresy. Notably it was the Lamarckians such as Samuel Butler and Lamarck himself who carried the tradition of mental explanation through that period of quantitative materialism. I do not accept their central thesis about heredity, but they must be given credit for maintaining an all-important philosophic tradition.

Already be the nineteenth century, the biological philosophers, like the engineers and tradesmen, were soaked with the nonsense of quantitative science. Then in 1859, with the publication of Darwin‘s On the Origin of Species, they were given a theory of biological evolution that precisely matched the philosophy of the industrial revolution. It fell into place atop the Cartesian split between mind and matter, neatly fitting into a philosophy of secular reason which had been developing since the Reformation. Inquiry into mental processes was then rigidly excluded – tabooed – in biological circles. In addition to his coordinates and his dualism of mind and matter, Descartes is even better known for his famous sentence, cogito ergo sum: “I think, therefore I am.” We may wonder today exactly what his sentence meant to him, but it is clear that, in building a whole philosophy upon the premise of thought, he did not intend that the dichotomy between mind and matter should lead to an atrophy of all thinking about thought. I regard the conventional views of mind, matter, thought, and materialism, the natural and the supernatural, as totally unacceptable. I repudiate contemporary materialism as strongly as I repudiate the fashionable hankering after the supernatural. However, the dilemma between materialism and the supernatural becomes less cogent when you discover that neither of these two modes, materialism and supernaturalism, is epistemologically valid. Before you jump from the frying pan of materialism into the fire of supernaturalism, it is a good idea to take a long look at the stuff of which material science is made. This stuff is certainly not material, and there is no particular reason to call it supernatural. For lack of a better word let me call it “mental”. Let me start as close to the material as possible and state categorically (and what is a category?) that there is no such thing as, for instance, chlorine. Chlorine is a name for a class and there is no such thing as a class. It is in a sense true, of course, that if you put chlorine and sodium together, you will see a reaction of some violence and the formation of common salt. It is not the truth of that statement that is at issue. What is at issue is whether the statement is chemistry – whether the statement is material. Are there in nature such things as classes? And I submit that there are none until we get to the world of living things.

But in the world of living things, the Creatura of Jung and of the Gnostics, there are really classes. Insofar as living things contain communication, insofar as they are, as be say, “organized;” they must contain something of the nature of message, events that travel within the living thing or between one living thing and others. And in the world of communication,

there must necessarily be categories and classes and similar devices. But these devices do not correspond the physical causes by which the materialist accounts for events. There are no messages or classes in the prebiological universe. We have then to ask, what is a descriptive proposition? And to resolve this question it is reasonable to return to the scientific laboratory and look at what the scientist does in order to make descriptive propositions. His procedure is not too complicated: He devises or buys an instrument to be the interface between his mind and the presumably material world. This instrument is the analog of a sense organ, an extension of his senses. We therefore may expect that the nature of mental process, the nature of perception, will be latent in the instrument used.

This is trivially the case with the microscope. It is less obvious in the case of a balance. If we ask him, the scientist will probably tell us that the balance is a device for measuring weight, but here I believe is the first error. An ordinary beam balance with a fulcrum in the middle of the beam and pans at each end is not primarily a device for measuring weight. It is a device that compares weights – a very different matter. The balance will only become a device for measuring weights when one of the items to be compared has itself an already known (or defined) weight. In other words, it is not the balance but a further addition to the balance that enables the scientist to speak of measuring weight. When the scientist makes this addition, he departs from the nature of the balance in a very profound way. He changes the basic epistemology of his tool. The balance itself is not a device for measuring weights, it is a device for comparing forces exerted by weights through levers. The beam is a lever and if the lengths of the beam on each side of the fulcrum are equal and if the weights are equal in the pans, then it is possible to say there is no difference between the weights in the pans. A more exact translation of what the balance tells us would be: “The ration between the weights in the pans is unity.” What I am getting at is that the balance is primarily a device for measuring ratios, that it is only secondarily a device for detecting subtractive differences; and that these are very different concepts. Our entire epistemology will take different shape as we look for subtractive or ratio differences. A subtractive difference has certain of the characteristics of material. To the language of applied mathematics a subtractive difference between two weights is of the dimension weight (measured in ounces or grams). It is one degree closer to materialism than the ration between two weights which is of zero dimensions. In this sense, then, the ordinary chemical balance in the laboratory, functioning between a man and an unknown quantity of “material,” contains within itself the whole paradox of the boundary between the mental and the physical.

On the one hand it is a sense organ responsive to the nonmaterial concepts of ration and contrast, and on the other hand it comes to be used by the scientist to perceive something he thinks is closer to being material, namely a quantity with real dimensions. In sum, the weighing scale does to (shall I say) truth exactly what the scientist does to the truth of psychological process. It is a device form constructing a science that ignores the true nature of sense organs of any organism, including the scientist. The Negative purpose of this book is to brush away some of the more ludicrous and dangerous epistemological fallacies fashionable in our civilization today. But this is not my only purpose, nor indeed my principal purpose. I believe that when some of the nonsense is cleared away, it will be possible to look at many matters which at present are deemed to be as fuzzy as “mind” and therefore outside the ken of science. Aesthetics, for example, will become accessible to serious thought. The beautiful and the ugly, the literal and the metaphoric, the sane and the insane, the humorous and the serious … all these and even love and hate are matters that science presently avoids. But in a few years, when the split between problems of mind and problems of matter ceases to be a central determinant of what is impossible to think about, they will become accessible to formal thought. At present most of these matters are simply inaccessible, and scientists – even in anthropology and psychiatry – will step aside, and for good reason. My colleagues and I are still incapable of investigating such delicate matters. We are leaded down with fallacies such as those I have mentioned and – like angels – we should fear to tread such regions, but not forever. As I write this book, I find myself still between the Scylla of established materialism, with its quantitative thinking, applied science, and “controlled” experiments on one side, and the Charybdis of romantic supernaturalism on the other. My task is to explore whether there is a sane and valid place for religion, somewhere between these two nightmares of nonsense. Whether, if neither muddleheadedness nor hypocrisy is necessary for religion, there might be found in knowledge and in art the basis to support an affirmation of the sacred that would celebrate natural history. Would such a religion offer a new kind of unity? And could it breed a new and badly needed humility?

Tao neither supernatural nor mechanical - IV

101 Tao: 62

62. In the Hands of Destiny

A great Japanese warrior named Nobunaga decided to attack the enemy although he had only one tenth the number of men the opposition commanded. He knew that he would win, but his soldiers were in doubt.
On the way he stopped at a Shinto shrine and told his man, 'After I visit the shrine I will toss a coin. If head comes we will win; if tails we will loose. Destiny holds us in her hand.'
Nobunaga entered the shrine and offered a silent prayer. He came forth and tossed a coin. Heads appeared. His soldiers were so eager to fight that they won their battle easily.
'No one can change the hand of destiny,' his attendant told him after the battle.
‘Indeed not,' said Nobunaga, showing a coin, which had been doubled, with heads facing either way.

Tao components: interactions

Family Tree

Charles T. Tart goes describing the interaction between two system components: psychological structures and awareness:

Interaction of Structure and Attention/Awareness

Many structures function completely independently of attention/awareness. An example is any basic physiological structure such as the kidneys. We infer their integrity and nature as structures from other kinds of data, as we have no direct awareness of their functioning. Such structures do not utilize attention/awareness as energy, but use other forms of physiological/psychological activating energy. Structures that cannot be observed by attention/awareness are of incidental interest to the study of consciousness, except for their indirect influence on other structures that are accessible to conscious awareness.

Some structures require a certain amount of attention/awareness energy in order to (1) be formed or created in the first place (software programming), (2) operate, (3) have their operation inhibited, (4) have their structure or operation modified, and/or (5) be destructured and dismantled. We call these psychological structures when it is important to distinguish them from structures in general. Many structures require attention/awareness energy for their initial formation. The attention originally required to learn arithmetical skills is an excellent example. Once the knowledge or structure we call arithmetical sills is formed, it is usually present only in inactive, latent form. An arithmetical question directs attention/awareness to that particular structure, and we experience arithmetical skills. If our original programming was not very thorough, a fairly obvious amount of attention/awareness energy is necessary to use this skill. Once the structure has become highly automated and overlearned, only a small amount of attention/awareness energy is needed to activate and run the structure. We solve basic arithmetic problems, for example, with little awareness of the process involved in so doing.

Note that while we have distinguished attention/awareness and structure for analytical convenience and in order to be true to certain experiential data, ordinarily we deal with activated mental structures. We acquire data about structures when the structures are functioning, utilizing attention/awareness energy or other kinds of psychological energies.

Although we postulate that attention/awareness energy is capable of activating and altering psychological structures, is the fuel that makes many structures run, our experience is that affecting the operation of structures by the volitional deployment of attention/awareness energy is not always easy. Attempts to alter a structure's operation by attending to it in certain ways may have no effect or even a contrary effect to what we wish. Attempts to stop a certain structure from operating by trying to withhold attention energy form it may fail. the reasons for this are twofold.

First, if the structure is (at least partially operating on energy other than attention/awareness, it may no longer be possible to change it with the amount attention/awareness energy we are able to focus on it. Second, even if the structure still operates with attention/awareness energy, complete control of this energy may be beyond our conscious volition for one or both of the following reasons: (1) the energy flow through it may be so automatized and overlearned, so implicit, that we simply do not know how to affect it; and (2) the functioning structure may have vital (and often implicit or hidden) connections with our reward and punishment systems, so that there are secondary gains from the operation of the structure, despite our conscious complaints. Indeed, it seems clear that for ordinary people in ordinary states of consciousness, the amount of attention/awareness energy subject to conscious control and deployment is quite small compared with the relatively permanent investments of energy in certain basic structures composing the individual's personality and his adaptation to the consensus reality of his culture.

Since the amount of attention/awareness energy available at any particular time has a fixed upper limit, some decrement should be found when too many structures draw on this energy simultaneously. However, if the available attention/awareness energy is greater than the total being used, simultaneous activation of several structures incurs no decrement.

Once a structure has been formed and is operating, either in isolation or in interaction with other structures, the attention/awareness energy required for its operation can be automatically drawn on either intermittently or continuously. The personality and normal state of consciousness are operating in such a way that attention is repeatedly and automatically drawn to the particular structure. Personality can be partially defined as the set of interacting structures (traits) habitually activated by attention/awareness energy. Unless he develops the ability to deploy attention in an observational mode, the self-awareness mode, a person may not realize that his attention/awareness energy is being drawn to this structure.

There is a fluctuating but generally large drain on attention/awareness energy at all times by the multitude of automated, interacting structures whose operation constitutes personality, the normal state of consciousness. Because the basic structures composing this are activated most of a person's waking life, he perceives this activation not as a drain on attention/awareness energy, but simply as the natural state of things. He has become habituated to it. The most important data supporting this observation come from reports of the effects of meditation, a process that in many ways is a deliberate deployment of attention/awareness from its customary structures to nonordinary structures or to maintenance of a relatively pure, detached awareness. From these kinds of experiences it can be concluded that attention/awareness energy must be used to support the ordinary state of consciousness. Don Juan expounds this view to Carlos Castaneda as the rationale for certain training exercises ("not doing") designed to disrupt the habitual deployment of attention/awareness energy into channels that maintain ("doing") ordinary consensus reality. And from experiences of apparent clarity, the automatized drain of attention/awareness energy into habitually activated structures is seen by meditators as blurring the clarity of basic awareness, so that ordinary consciousness appears and dreamlike.

Tao dance

Tao neither supernatural nor mechanical - IV

Thus, there are those who describe “out–of-body experiences”, in which a nonmaterial something (a something which is not a something) is supposed to leave the body in a literal spatial sense, to have percepts and experiences while out on such a trip (although lacking sensory end organs), and to return to the body providing the owner of the body with narratable information about the trip. I regard all such accounts as either dreams or hallucinations or as frank fiction. Similarly, the belief in anthropomorphic supernaturals asserts the existence and ability to influence the course of events of persons who have no location or material existence. Thus, I do not believe in spirits, gods, devas, fairies, leprechauns, nymphs, wood spirits, ghosts, poltergeist, or Santa Claus. (But to learn that there is no Santa Claus is perhaps the beginning of religion.) Some supernatural notions appear to be based in materialistic science but are not on examination, they prove not to have those properties that belong to the world of matter. Of all examples of physical quantities endowed with mental magic, “energy” is the most pernicious. This once neatly defined concept of quantitative physics with real dimensions has become in the talk and thinking of my antimaterialistic friends the explanatory principle to end them all. My position and the reason why so many prefer to believe otherwise may be clarified by an exploration of the relation between religion and magic. I believe that all spells, meditations, incantations, suggestions, procedures of sympathetic and contagious magic, and the like, do indeed work – but they work upon the practitioner (as does “psychic energy”). But I presume that none of these procedures has any effect at all upon any other person unless that other participates in the spell of suggestion or at least has information or expectation that such spell or procedure has been performed. But where these conditions are met and the other person is partly aware of what is being done and aware of its purposes aimed at himself or herself, I am sure that magical procedures can be very effective either to kill or cure, to harm or bless. I do not believe that such magical procedures have relevant effects upon inanimate things. So far so good. I accept no story of action at a distance without communication. But I observe in passing that when the target person participates, the procedure becomes not magic but religion, albeit of a somewhat simple kind.

In general, magical procedures seem to bear formal resemblance to science and to religion. Magic may be a degenerate applied form of either. Consider such rituals as rain dances or the totemic rituals concerned with man‘s relationship to animals. In these types of ritual the human being invokes or imitates or seeks to control the weather or the ecology of wild creatures. But I believe that in their primitive state these are true religious ceremonials. They are ritual statements of unity, involving all the participants in an integration with the meteorological cycle or with the ecology of totemic  animals. This is religion. But the pathway of deterioration from religion to magic is always tempting. From a statement of integration in some often dimly recognized whole, the practitioner turns aside to an appetitive stance. He sees his own ritual as a piece of purposive magic to make the rain come or to promote the fertility of the totemic animal or to achieve some other goal. The criterion that distinguishes magic from religion is, in fact, purpose and especially some extrovert purpose.
Introvert purpose, the desire to change the self, is a very different matter, but intermediate cases occur. If the hunter performs a ritual imitation of an animal to cause the animal to come into his net, that is surely magic, but if his purpose in imitation the animal is perhaps to improve his own empathy and understanding of the beast, his action is perhaps to be classed as religious. My view on magic is converse of that which has been orthodox in anthropology since the days of Sir James Frazer. It is orthodox to believe that religion is an evolutionary development of magic. Magic is regarded as more primitive and religion as its flowering. In contrast, I view sympathetic or contagious magic as a product of decadence from religion; I regard religion on the whole as the earlier condition. I find myself out of sympathy with decadence of this kind either in community life or in the education of children. [The difficulty in all of this is to clarify the sense in which ideas and images do participate in certain kinds of causal chains, although they have neither location nor material being, and to related this to their embodiment in material arrangements, like ink on paper or synaptically linked brain cells. The idea of Santa Claus, communicated through appropriate material networks, can persuade the ten-year-old to clean up his room.]
It is becoming fashionable today to collect narratives about previous incarnations, about travel to some land of the dead, and about existence in some such place, etc. It is, of course, true that many effects of my actions may persist beyond the time of "my" death. My books may continue to be read, but again, this karmic survival does not seem to be what my friends want me to believe. As I see it, after death, the pattern and organization of the living creature are reduced to very simple forms and do not come together again. I can write words on the blackboard and wipe them out. When wiped out, the writing is lost in an entropy of chalk dust. The ideas are something else, but they were never "on" the blackboard in the first place. It must be remembered that at least half of all ideation has no referent in a physical sense, whatsoever. It is the ground that every figure must have. The hole in the bagel defines the torus. When the bagel is eaten, the hole does not remain to me reincarnated in a doughnut. Another form of superstition, exemplified by astrology and divination and by the Jungian theory of synchronicity, seems to arise from the fact that human opinion is strongly biased against the probability of coincidence.

People are commonly surprised by coincidences that are not improbable, for coincidences are much more common than the layman expects. Few coincidences justify the pleased surprise with which they are greeted by those who want to find a supernatural base for them. If things turn out to coincide with our desires, or with our fears, or with other things, we are sure that this was no accident. Either “luck” was on our side or it was against us. Or perhaps our fears caused things to be as they are. And so on. But indeed the efficacy of prayer and/or meditation as a technique for changing ourselves would seem to give an experiential basis for superstitions of this kind. People do not easily distinguish between changes in the self and changes in the world around them. For the rest, I find it hard to be interested in coincidence. It is of interest that harbouring superstition of one kind may lead to another, notably, for example, Arthur Koestler, starting from Marxism, achieved a repudiation of that metaphysical belief and progressed to a belief in synchronicity. Facilis decensus Averno; the descent to hell is easy. Koestler then progressed to arguing for the inheritance of acquired characteristics in The Case of the Midwife Toad. To believe in heredity of this kind is to believe in the transmission of patterned information without a receptor. It is notable also that belief in certain kinds of superstition moves rapidly to a willingness to indulge in trickery to reinforce that belief. [Indeed, the ethnography of shamanism is replete with examples in which the shaman, genuinely believing in his or her magical powers, still uses elaborate and practiced sleight of hand to help out the supernatural. There is sometimes a confusion between different kinds of validity,] as when right brain notions, which have their own kind of validity, are treated as if they have the validity of left-brain thinking. To repudiate the established ways of thought and control is, however, a very different matter from criticizing elements in the counterculture. I can make a list of items in the counterculture with which I do not agree, as I have done here, because a lack of tight integration or consistency is one of their principal characteristics. To quote Kipling, “In the Neolithic Age!": "There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays, And—every—one—of—them—is—right!” But my objections to the established system are of a different order. I cannot make a list of the pieces. My objection is not to pieces but is a response to the entire way in which many otherwise sensible components of culture such as money or mathematics or experimentation have been fitted together.

More important than all the species of supernaturalist superstition listed above, I find that there are two basic beliefs, intimately connected which are both obsolete and dangerous, and which are shared by contemporary supernaturalists and by prestigious and mechanistic scientists. The mass of superstition now fashionable even among behavioural scientists and physicists springs from a combination of these two fundamental and erroneous beliefs. It is a strange fact that both of these beliefs are connected to the same giant of philosophic thought, René Descartes. Both beliefs are quite familiar.
The first is the idea that underlies the whole range of modern superstition, namely that there are two distinct explanatory principles in our world, "mind" and "matter". As such dichotomies invariably must, this famous Cartesian dualism has spawned a whole host of other splits as monstrous as itself: mind/body; intellect/affect; will/temptation; and so on. It was difficult in the seventeenth century to imagine any nonsupernatural explanation of mental phenomena, and at that time it was already apparent that the physical explanations of astronomy were going to be enormously successful. It was therefore quite natural to fall back upon age-old supernaturalism to get the problems of “mind out of the way”. This accomplished, the scientists could proceed with their “objective” inquiries, disregarding or denying the fact that the organs of sense, indeed our whole range of approaches to study of “matter,” are very far from being “objective”. Descartes‘ other contribution also bears his name and is taught to every child who enters a scientific lab or reads a scientific book. Of all ideas about how to think like a scientist, the idea of using intersecting coordinates, the so-called Cartesian coordinates, to represent two or more interacting variables or represent the course of one variable over time, has been among the most successful. The whole of analytic geometry sprang from this idea, and from analytic geometry the calculus of infinitesimals and the emphasis upon quantity in our scientific understanding. Of course, there can be no cavil at all that. And yet, by the pricking of my thumbs, I am sure that it was no accident that the same man who invented the coordinates, which are among the most materialistic and hard-nosed of scientific devices, also dignified dualistic superstition by asserting the split between mind an matter.
The two ideas are intimately related. And the relation between them is most clearly seen when we think of the mind/matter dualism as a device for removing one half of the problem for explanation from that other half which could more easily be explained. Once separated, mental phenomena could be ignored. This act of subtraction, of course, left the half that could be explained as excessively materialistic, while the other half became totally supernatural. Raw edges have been left on both sides and materialistic science has concealed this wound by generating its own set superstitions. The materialist superstition is the belief (not usually stated that quantity (a purely material notion) can determine pattern.

Tao neither supernatural nor mechanical - III

Tao in D major

Mount Pleasant Cemetery, Toronto, Ontario, Canada