Tao cannot be mocked - III

Francois Xavier Fabre, Oedipus and the Sphinx, c. 1806-08, Dahesh Museum of Art, NYX

II Contradictory and Conflicting Themes

Another mental characteristic of larger systems can be exemplified from themes of Greek drama. In that complex corpus of shared ideas, there existed side by side with the Oresteia a second cross-generational sequence of myths bound together by the concept of anangke and starting from a specific act. Cadmus incurred the wrath of Ares by killing a sacred serpent, and this set the stage for repeated episodes of trouble in the royal house of Thebes. Eventually, the oracle at Delphi predicted that Laius, king of Thebes, would have a son who would kill him and marry his own mother, Jocasta, the wife of Laius.

Laius the tried to thwart the oracle and thus, in spite of himself, precisely brought on himself the working out of the tragic necessity. First he refused sexual contact with Jocasta to avoid the begetting of the son who would kill him. But she made him drunk and the child was begotten. When the baby was born, Laius commanded that he be bound and abandoned on the mountainside. But again Laius‘ plan failed. The baby was found by a shepherd and adopted by Polybus, king of Corinth. The boy was named Oedipus, or Swollen Footed, because the baby‘s feet were swollen from being tied together when he was exposed on the mountain.

As Oedipus grew up, he was taunted by the other boys, who said he did not resemble his father He therefore went to Delphi for an explanation and was condemned by the oracle as the boy fated to kill his father and marry his mother. Oedipus, not knowing that he was an adopted child and believing that Polybus was his true father, then fled. He would not return to Corinth lest he should kill.

Fleeing thus, he met with an unknown man in a chariot who rudely refused him right of way. He killed that unknown man, who was in fact Laius, his true father. Proceeding on his way, he encountered a Sphinx outside Thebes and answered her riddle: “What is it that walks first on four legs, then on two, and finally on three?” The Sphinx then destroyed herself, and Oedipus found himself suddenly a hero who had conferred a great benefit upon the city of Thebes. He became king of that city by marrying Jocasta. By her he had four children. Finally, plague struck the city and the oracle attributed the cause of the plague to one man‘s horrible action. Oedipus insisted on investigating this matter, although the blind sage Tiresias had advised him to let sleeping dogs lie. The truth was finally exposed. Oedipus, the king of Thebes, was himself the man who had killed his father and married his mother. Jocasta then hanged herself in horror and Oedipus blinded himself with a pin from her scarf.

Oedipus was exiled from Thebes and wandered the world, accompanied by his daughter Antigone. Finally, old and blind, he arrived at Colonos, outside Athens. There he mysteriously vanished in the groves sacred to the Furies, presumably accepted by them into their afterlife.

It is immediately interesting to note a formal contrast between this tale and the Orestes sequence, for Oedipus went spontaneously to the grove of the Furies, whereas Orestes was chased by them. This contrast is explained in the finale of Aeschylus‘ Orestes trilogy, where Athena lays down the law that Athens is a patriarchal society in which wives are not fully kin to their offspring, who remain in the gens, or clan, of the father. The mother is a “stranger” and matricide is therefore no crime. (After all, Athena never had a mother; she sprang fully armed from the head of her father, Zeus.) The Furies, on the other hand, matriarchal goddesses, will forgive Oedipus, the boy who kills his father and has four children by his mother, but will not pardon Orestes the matricide.

In fact, the culture of classical Athens carried two utterly contrasting mythological sequences, The Oedipus sequence, which is the nightmare of crime against the father, and the Orestes nightmare of crime against the mother.

I personally am dissatisfied with Athena‘s explanation, in which she dismisses the Furies as a bunch of old hags, obsolete survivors of a more primitive matriarchy. As an anthropologist, I do not believe that there ever existed any society that was one hundred percent matriarchal not any that was one hundred percent patriarchal. In many societies, kinship is asymmetrical, so that a different kind of relationship is developed on each side of the genealogy. The child has different obligations and privileges vis-à-vis his maternal uncles from those implicit in his relationship with paternal uncles. But always there are benefits and duties on both sides. The whole play, Aeschylus‘ Eumenides, is very strange, and also is the Oedipus at Colonos of Sophocles. I can only read the Eumenides as either extremely jingoistic Athenian patriotism, or, more probably, a caricature of that patriotism. The Colonos, on the other hand, is surely a very serious piece, no less patriotic than the Eumenides, since it, too, deals with the ancient history of the city of Athens. Strangely, the members of the audience are expected to understand the old, blind Oedipus is now a sacred figure and there is almost a war brewing between Oedipus‘ descendants in Thebes and Theseus, the founder of the new city of Athens. Both parties want Oedipus to die on their national territory and to become somehow a guardian spirit for that land.

My suspicion – and it is to illustrate this that I have introduced the tales – is that each myth owes something to the other, and they are a balancing pair that is a product jointly of a culture divided in its emphasis on matriarchy or patriarchy. I would ask whether this double expression of the conflicting views is not somehow typical of the divided larger mind.

The syncretic dualism of Christian mythology provides a similar but more astonishing example. Jehovah is clearly a transcendent god of Babylonian times whose location is on top of an artificial mountain, or ziggurat. Jesus, in clear contrast, is a deity whose location is in the human breast. He is an incarnate deity, like Pharoah and like every ancient Egyptian who was addressed in mortuary ceremonies as Osiris.

It is not that one or the other of these double phrasings is right, or that it is wrong to have such double myths. What seems to be true is that it is characteristic of large cultural systems that they carry such double myths and opinions, not only with no serious trouble, but perhaps even reflecting in the latent contradictions some fundamental characteristic of the larger mentality.

In this connection, Greek mythology is especially interesting because its stories did not draw the line between the more secular and human gestalten and the larger themes of fate and destiny the same way as these lines are drawn among us today. The Greek classification was different from ours. Greek gods are like humans, they are puppets of fate just like people, and the interaction between the forces of what seems a larger mind and mere gods and humans is continually being pointed out by the chorus. They see that the gods and heroes and themselves are alike puppets of fate. The gods and heroes in themselves are as secular as our superman, whom indeed they somewhat resemble.

In mythology and especially drama, the eerie and the mysterious – the truly religious overtones – are contained in such abstractions as anangke or nemesis. We are told rather unconvincingly that Nemesis is a goddess and that the gods will punish the arrogance of power which is called hubris. But in truth these are the names of themes or principles, which give an underlying religious flavour to life an drama; the gods are at most the outward, though not visible, symbols of these more mysterious principles. A similar state of affairs exists in Balinese religion, where, however, the gods are almost totally drained of all personal characteristics. They (except for Rangda, the Witch, and Barong, or dragon) have only names, directions, colors, calendric days, and so on. In dealing with each of them it is the appropriate etiquette that is important.

Tao cannot be mocked - II

Tao and the selfish

The Sufi teaching story, "Bayazid and the Selfish Man", shows how difficult it is for an adult to free himself from the power of ordinary consciousness and consensus reality, even when he believes he wants to:

One day a man reproached Bayazid, the great mystic of the ninth century, saying that he had fasted and prayed and so on for thirty years and not found the joy which Bayazid described.

Bayazid told him that he might continue for three hundred years and still not find it.

"How is that?" asked the would-be illuminate.

"Because your vanity is a barrier to you."

"Tell me the remedy."

"The remedy is one which you cannot take."

"Tell me, nevertheless."

Bayazid said: "You must go to the barber and have your (respectable) beard shaved. Remove all your clothes and put a girdle around yourself. Fill a nosebag with walnuts and suspend it from your neck. Go to the marketplace and call out: 'A walnut will I give to any boy who will strike me on the back of neck.' Then continue to the justices'session so that they may see you."

"But I cannot do that; please tell me something else that would do as well."

"This is the first move, and the only one", said Bayazid, "but I had already told you that you would not do it; so you cannot be cured."

Shrine of Bayazid Bastami in Bastam near Shahroud.

Tao en-culturation

Kurt Wenner.com, Waterloo Station

Describing the ordinary state of consciousness Tart indicates the basic factors which bring to its individual training into a specific socio-cultural group, such the enculturation process - the training of the specific personal culture within a wider shared social culture - :

I have now mentioned several times that we believe certain things imply because we were trained to believe them. Let us now look at the training process by which our current "normal" or ordinary state of consciousness came about.

Enculturation

Figure 4-4 illustrates the concept of the spectrum of human potential. By the simple fact of being born human, having a certain type of body and nervous system, existing in the environmental conditions of the planet earth, a large (but certainly not infinite) number of potentials are possible for you. Because you are born into a particular culture, existing at a particular time and place on the surface of the planet, however, only a small (perhaps a very small) number of these potentials will ever be realized and become actualities. We can think of a culture as a group of people who, through various historical processes, have come to an agreement that certain human potentials they know of are "good," "holy," "natural," or whatever local word is used for positively valuing them, and should be developed. They are defined as the essence of being human. Other potentials, also known to the culture, are considered "bad," "evil," "unnatural." The culture actively inhibits the development of these potentials in its children, not always successfully. A large number of other human potentials are simply not known to that particular culture, and while some of them develop owing to accidental circumstances in a particular person's life, most do not develop for lack of stimulation. Some of these potentials remain latent, capable of being developed if circumstances are right in later life; others disappear completely through not being developed at an early, critical stage. Most of us know how to do arithmetic, speak English, write a check, drive an automobile, and most of us know about things, like eating with our hands, which are repellent to us (naturally or through training?). Not many of us, though, were trained early in childhood to enter a d-ASC where we can be, for example, possessed by a friendly spirit that will teach us songs and dances as is done by some cultures. Nor were most of us trained to gain control over our dreams and acquire spirit guides in those dreams who will teach us useful things, as the Senoi of Malaysia are. Each of us is simultaneously the beneficiary of his cultural heritage and the victim and slave of his culture's narrowness. What I believe is worse is that few of us have any realization of this situation. Like almost all people in all cultures at all times, we think our local culture is the best and other peoples are uncivilized or savages. Figure 4-4 shows two different cultures making different selections from and inhibitions of the spectrum of human potential. There is some overlap: all cultures, for example, develop a language of some sort and so use those particular human potentials. Many potentials are not selected by any culture. We can change the labels in Figure 4-4 slightly and depict various possible experiences selected in either of two states of consciousness. Then we have the spectrum of experiential potentials, the possible kinds of experiences or modes of functioning of human consciousness. The two foci of selection are two states of consciousness. These may be two "normal" states of consciousness in two different cultures or, as discussed later, two states of consciousness that exist within a single individual. The fact that certain human potentials can be tapped in state of consciousness A that cannot be tapped in state of consciousness B is a major factor behind the current interest in altered states of consciousness. Figure 4-4, then, indicates that in developing a "normal" state of consciousness, a particular culture selects certain human potentials and structures them into a functioning system. This is the process of enculturation. It begins in infancy, possibly even before birth: there has been speculation, for example, that the particular language sounds that penetrate the walls of the womb from outside before birth may begin shaping the potentials for sound production in the unborn baby.

Figure 4-5 summarizes the main stages of the enculturation process. The left-hand column represents the degree to which physical reality shapes the person and the degree to which the person can affect (via ordinary muscular means) physical reality. The right-hand column indicates the main sources of programming, the psychological influences on the person. The main stages are infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and senescence.

Tao metapatterns

Kybernetes, Vol. 36 No. 7/8, 2007

The concepts and metaconcepts of pattern, pattern which connects and metapattern - pattern of patterns - developed by Bateson in the context of the epistemology metascience, in his words outlined as:

It is the Platonic thesis of [this] book that epistemology is an indivisible, integrated meta-science whose subject matter is the world of evolution, thought, adaptation, embryology, and genetics – the science of mind in the widest sense of the word.
The comparing of these phenomena (comparing thought with evolution and epigenesis with both) is the manner of search of the science called "epistemology."

In my life, I have put the descriptions of sticks and stones and  billiard balls and galaxies in one box , the pleroma, and have left them alone. In the other box, I put living things: crabs, people, problems of beauty, and problems of difference. The contents of the second box are the subject of this book.
I was griping recently about the shortcomings of occidental education. It was in a letter to my fellow regents of the University of California , and the following phrase crept into my letter:
"Break the pattern which connects the items of learning and you necessarily destroy all quality."
I offer you the phrase the pattern which connects as a synonym, another possible title for this book.
The pattern which connects. Why do schools teach almost nothing of the pattern which connects? Is it that teachers know that they carry the kiss of death which will turn to tastelessness whatever they touch and therefore they are wisely unwilling to touch or teach anything of real-life importance? Or is it that they carry the kiss of death because they dare not teach anything of real-life importance? What's wrong with them?
What pattern connects the crab to the lobster and the orchid to the primrose and all the four of them to me? And me to you? And all the six of us to the amoeba in one direction and to the back-ward schizophrenic in another?

Let me start again. The parts of a crab are connected by various patterns of bilateral symmetry, of serial homology, and so on. Let us call these patterns within the individual growing crab first-order connections. But now we look at crab and lobster and we again find connection by pattern. Call it second-order connection, or phylogenetic homology.
Now we look at man or horse and find that, here again, we can see symmetries and serial homologies. When we look at the tow together, we find the same cross-species sharing of pattern with a difference (phylogenetic homology). And, of course, we also find the same discarding of magnitudes in favor of shapes, patterns, and relations. In other words, as this distribution of formal resemblances is spelled out, it turns out that gross anatomy exhibits three levels or logical types of descriptive propositions:

1. The parts of any member of Creatura are to be compared with other parts of the same individual to give first-order connections.
2. Crabs are to be compared with lobsters or men with horses to find similar relations between parts (i.e., to give second-order connections).
3. The comparison between crabs and lobsters is to be compared with the comparison between man and horse to provide third-order connections.

We have constructed a ladder of how to think about – about what? Oh, yes, the pattern which connects.

My central thesis can now be approached in words: The pattern which connects is a metapattern. It is a pattern of patterns. It is that metapattern which defines the vast generalization that, indeed, it is patterns which connect.

have been further developed mainly by Tyler Volk and Jeffrey Bloom, specifying a number of metapatterns applied in several fields:

Complicity, An International Journal of Complexity and Education

1 Spheres: maximum volume, minimum surface, containment; grapes, domes.
2 Sheets: transfer surface for matter, energy, or information; fish gills, solar collectors.
3 Tubes: surface transfer, connection, support; leaf veins, highways, chains of command.
4 Webs or Networks: parts in relationships within systems (can be centered or clustered, using clonons or holons, see 8, 11, and 12); subsystems of cells, organisms, ecosystems, machines, society.
5 Borders: protection, openings for controlled exchange; cell membranes, national borders.
6 Binaries: minimal and thus efficient system; two sexes, two-party politics, bifurcating decision process.
7 Gradients: continuum of variation between binary poles; chemical waves in cell development, human quantitative and qualitative values.
8 Centers: key components of system stability; DNA, social insect centers, political constitutions and government.
9 Layers or Holarchy: levels of webs, in which successive systems are parts of larger systems; biological nesting from biomolecules to ecosystems, human social nesting, engineering designs, computer software.
10 Emergence: general phenomenon when a new type of functionality derives from binaries or webs; life from molecules, cognition from neurons.

11 Holons versus clonons: parts of systems as functionally unique versus interchangeable; heart-lungs-liver (holons) of body versus skin cells (clonons) of the skin.
12 Clusters: subset of webs, distributed systems of parts with mutual attractions; bird flocks, ungulate herds, children playing, egalitarian social groups.
13 Arrows: stability or gradient-like change over time; biological homeostasis, growth, self-maintaining social structures.
14 Breaks: relatively sudden changes in system behavior; cell division, insect metamorphosis, coming-of-age ceremonies, political elections.
15 Triggers: initiating agents of breaks, both internal and external; sperm entering egg, precipitating events of war.
16 Cycles: recurrent patterns in systems over time; protein degradation and synthesis, life cycles, power cycles of electricity generating plants, feedback cycles, educational grade levels (cyclic design within an arrow of overall educational progress.

The metapatterns outlined by Volk and Bloom have been correlated to several characteristics of chaos and complexity:

by Anukriti Verma, M.Des student at Industrial Design Centre (IDC), IIT Bombay; site: Ravi Poovaiah

Metapatterns

The Pattern Underground

in a glass Tao

Looking through the window can you tell me what you see
You're sure you're really seeing what is meant to be a glass
A mirror to reflect what I conspire a vision, image I desire

Standing on the ice believing all I'm searching for
Close your cloudy eyes and chase all that you did before
Standing on the ice believing all I'm searching for
Close your cloudy eyes and chase all that you did before

Living in a glass house shielding all that's meant for me
Can you clear the shade and can you tell me what you see?

Shadow fills the light until the glass house becomes the night
Dark is gleaming or am I dreaming? Running everywhere, seeing clearly when I dare
Is it today or is it your way and the moon must fall
Inspiration waits for your call for you to get a silhouette

Narrow the field aim in any direction
Do what I feel just to see my reflection

Any turn I know disappearing everywhere I go I look to you for what I do
And only then I see that the glass house is just for me
And any time is never mine

Narrow the field aim in any direction
Do what I feel just to see my reflection

Shadow fills the light, until the glass house becomes night
Dark is gleaming or am I dreaming?
Running everywhere, seeing clearly when I dare
Is it today or is it your way and the moon must fall
Inspiration waits for your call for you to get a silhouette.

Tao aggregates of the Self

© Igor Morski

After the cognitivist description of the Self and the mind and its crititical discussion from a phenomenological-experiental point of view, Varela, Rosch and Thompson integrates for the first time in the cognitive sciences terms and concepts taken from the eastern traditions which - for millennia - have studied and described in a experiential way the entities of Mind, Consciousness and Self; particularly the authors introduce for the description the five aggregates of the Abhidharma canons of the Buddhist tradition:

Looking for a Self in the Aggregates

We now tum to some of the categories in the Buddhist teachings called the Abhidharma. This term refers to a collection of texts that forms one of the three divisions of the Buddhist canon (the other two are the Vinaya, which contains ethical precepts, and the Sutras, which contain the speeches of the Buddha). Based on the Abhidharma texts and their later commentaries, there emerged a tradition of analytic investigation of the nature of experience, which is still taught and used in contemplation by most Buddhist schools. The Abhidharma contains various sets of categories for examining the arising of the sense of self. These are not intended as ontological categories, such as one finds, for example, in Aristotle's Metaphysics. Rather, these categories serve on the one hand as simple descriptions of experience and on the other hand as pointers toward investigation.

The most popular set of these categories, one that is common to all Buddhist schools, is known as the five aggregates. (The Sanscrit term translated as "aggregate" is skandha, which literally means "heap." The story goes that when the Buddha first taught this framework for examining experience, he used piles of grain to stand for each aggregate.)

The five aggregates are

1. Forms

2. Feelings/sensations

3. Perceptions (discernments )/impulses

4. Dispositional formations

5. Consciousnesses

The first of the five aggregates is considered to be based on the physical or material; the remaining four are mental. All five together constitute the psychophysical complex that makes up a person and that makes up each moment of experience. We will examine the way in which we take each of these to be ourselves and will query whether we can find something in the aggregates that will answer to our basic, emotional, reactional conviction in the reality of self. In other words, we will be looking for a full-blown, really existing ego-self-some lasting self that would serve as the object of our emotional conviction that there really is a ground underneath the dependent, impermanent, everyday personality.

Forms

This category refers to the body and the physical environment. It does so, however, strictly in terms of the senses-the six sense organs and the corresponding objects of those organs. They are the eye and visible objects, the ear and sounds, the nose and smells, the tongue and tastes, the body and touchables, and the mind and thoughts. The sense organs do not refer to the gross external organ but to the actual physical mechanism of perception. The mind organ (there is debate in the tradition as to just what physical structure that is) and thoughts are treated as a sense and its object because that is how they appear in experience: we feel that we perceive our thoughts with our mind just as we perceive a visible object with our eye.

We might point out that even at this level of analysis we have already departed from the usual idea of an abstract, disembodied observer who, like a cognitive entity parachuted into a ready-made world, encounters matter as a separate and independent category.

Here, as in Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, our encounter with the physical is already situated and embodied. Matter is described experientially.

Is our body our self? Think how important our body and possessions are to us, how terrified we become if the body or important possessions are threatened, how angry or depressed we become if they are damaged. Think of how much effort, money, and emotion we spend on feeding, grooming, and caring for the body. Emotionally we treat the body as though it were ourself. Intellectually we may do so also. Our circumstances and moods may change, but the body appears stable. The body is the location point of the senses; we look at the world from the vantage point of the body, and we perceive the objects of our senses to be related spatially to our body. Though the mind may wander, sleeping or daydreaming, we count on returning to the same body.

Yet do we really think of the body as the same as the self? As upset as we might be at the loss of a finger (or any other body part), we would not feel that we had thereby lost our identity. In fact, even in normal circumstances, the entire makeup of the body changes rapidly, as seen by the turnover of one's cells. Let us take a brief philosophical excursion on this point.

We might ask, "What do the cells that make up my body now have in common with the cells that will make up my body in, say, seven years?" And, of course, the question contains its own answer: what they have in common is that they both make up my body and therefore make up some kind of pattern through time that is supposedly my self. But we still don't know what that pattern qua the self is; we have simply gone round in a circle.

Philosophers will recognize this little vignette as a variation on the example of the ship of Theseus, which, every so often, has all of its planks replaced. The question is, Is it the same ship or not? And philosophers, being more sophisticated than most of the rest of us, deftly reply that there really isn't any fact of the matter one way or the other. It all depends on what you want to say. In one sense, yes, it is the same ship, and in another sense, no, it isn't the same ship. It all depends on what your criteria of identity are. For something to be the same (to have some kind of invariant pattern or form) it must suffer some change, for otherwise one would not be able to recognize that it had stayed the same. Conversely, for something to change there must also be some kind of implicit permanance that acts as a reference point in judging that a change has occurred. So the answer to the quandary is both yes and no, and the details of any specific yes or no answer will depend on one's criteria of identity in the given situation.

But surely the self-my self- can't depend on how someone chooses to look at it; it is, after all, a self in its own right . Perhaps, then, the ego-self is the owner of the body, of this form that can be seen in so many ways. Indeed, we do not say "I am a body" but "I have a body." But just what is it that I have? This body, which I seem to own , is also the home for numerous microorganisms . Do I own them? A strange idea, since often they seem to get the best of me. But who is it that they get the best of?

Perhaps the most definitive argument that we do not take our body as our self is that we can imagine a total body transplant, that is, the implantation of our mind in someone else's body (a favorite theme in science fiction), yet we would still count as ourselves. Perhaps, then, we should leave the material and look to the mental aggregates for the basis of the self.

Feelings/Sensations

All experiences have some kind of feeling tone, classifiable as pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral , and as either bodily feeling or mental feeling. We are very concerned about our feelings. We strive endlessly to seek pleasure and avoid pain. Our feelings are certainly self-relevant, and at moments of strong feeling we take ourselves as our feelings. Yet are they our self? Feelings change from moment to moment. (Awareness of these changes can be made even more precise in mind fulness/awareness practice: one develops firsthand experience of the momentary arising of feelings and sensations as well as their changes.) Though feelings affect the self, no one would say that these feelingsare the self. But what /who is it , then, that feelings are affecting ?

Perceptions/Impulses

This aggregate refers to the first moment of recognition, identification, or discernment in the arising of something distinct , coupled with the activation of a basic impulse for action toward the discerned object.

Within the context of mind fulness/awareness practice, the coupling of discernment and impulse in a moment of experience is especially important . There are said to be three root impulses - passion/ desire (toward desirable objects), aggression/anger (toward undesirable objects), and delusion/ignoring (toward neutral objects). Insofar as beings are caught up in habits of ego clinging, physical or mental objects are discerned, even at the first instant, in relation to the self—either as desirable, undesirable, or irrelevant to the self-and in that very discernment is the automatic impulse to act in the relevant fashion.

These three basic impulses are also called the three poisons because they are the beginnings of actions that will lead to further ego grasping. But who is this ego who is grasping?

Dispositional Formations

This next aggregate refers to habitual patterns of thinking, feeling, perceiving, and acting-habitual patterns such as confidence, avarice, laziness, worry, etc. We are now in the domain of the kinds of phenomena that could well be called cognitive in the language of cognitive science or personality traits in personality psychology.

We are certainly heavily self-invested in our habits and traits—our personality. If someone criticizes our behavior or makes a favorable comment about our personality, we feel that she is referring to our self. As in each of the other aggregates, our emotional response indicates that we take this aggregate as our ego-self. But again when we contemplate the object of that response, our conviction falls apart. We do not normally identify our habits with our self. Our habits, motives, and emotional tendencies may change considerably over time, but we still feel a sense of continuity as if there were a self distinct from these personality changes. Where could this sense of continuity come from, if not from a self that is the basis of our present personality?

Tao cannot be mocked - II

I Tragedy

It seems that the dramatists of classical Greece and possibly their audiences and the philosophers who throve in that culture believed that an action occurring in one generation could set a context or set a process going which would determine the shape of personal history for a long time to come.

The story of the House of Atreus in myth and drama is a case in point. The initial murder of Chrysippus by his stepbrother Atreus stars a sequence in which the wife of Atreus is seduced by Atreus‘ brother Thyestes, and in the ensuing feud between the brothers, Atreus kills and cooks his brother‘s son, serving him to his father in a monstrous meal. These events led in the next generation to the sacrifice of Iphigenia by her father, Agamemnon, another son of Thyestes, and so on to the murder of Agamemnon by his wife, Clytemnestra, and her paramour, Aegisthus, brother of Agamemnon and son of Thyestes.

In the next generation, Orestes and Electra, the son and daughter of Agamemnon, avenge their father‘s murder by killing Clytemnestra, an act of matricide for which the Furies chase and haunt Orestes until Athena intervenes, establishing the court of the Areopagus and trying Orestes before that court, finally dismissing the cases. It required the intervention of a goddess to conclude the sequence or anangke, or necessity, whereby each killing led irresistibly to the next.

The Greek idea of necessary sequence was, of course, not unique. What is interesting is the Greeks seem to have thought of anangke as totally impersonal theme in the structure of the human world. It was as if, from the initial act onwards, dice were loaded against the participants. The theme, as it worked itself out, used human emotions and motives as its means, but the theme itself (we would vulgarly call it a “force”) was thought to be impersonal, beyond and greater than gods and persons, a bias or warp in the structure of the universe.

Such ideas occur at other times and in other cultures. The Hindu idea of karma is similar and differs from anangke only in the characteristically Hindu elaboration which includes both “good” and “bad” karma and carries recipes for the “burning up” of bad karma.

I myself encountered a similar belief among the Iatmul of New Guinea. The Iatmul shamans claimed that they could see a person‘s ngglambi as a black cloud or aura surrounding him or her. The Iatmul are a sorcery-ridden people and it was quite clear that nnglambi followed the pathway of sorcery. A might sin against B, thus incurring the black cloud. B might pay a sorcerer to avenge the first sin, and nnglambi would the surround both B and the sorcerer. In any case, it was expected that the person with black nnglambi would encounter tragedy – perhaps his own death, perhaps that of a relative, for ngglambi is contagious – and the tragedy would probably be brought about by sorcery. Ngglambi, like anangke, worked through human agencies.

The present question, however, does not concern the detailed nature of anangke, ngglambi, karma, and other similar conceptions that human individuals attribute to the larger system. The question is simply: What are the characteristics of those mental subsystems called individuals, arising from their aggregation in larger systems also having mental characteristics, that are likely to be expressed by generating such mythologies (true or false) as those of anangke, etc.? This is a question of a different order, not to be answered by reification of the larger mental system nor by simply evoking motives of the participant individuals.

A piece of an answer can be tentatively offered, if only to show the reader the direction of our inquiry.

Anangke, karma, and ngglambi are reified abstractions, the last being the most concretely imagined, so that the shamans even “see” it. The others are less reified and are perceptible only in their supposed effects, above all in the myths – the quasi-miraculous tales that exemplify the workings of the principle.

Now, it is well known in human interaction that individual beliefs become self-validating, both directly, by “suggestion,” so that the believer tends to see or hear or taste that which he believes; or indirectly, so that the belief may validate itself by shaping the actions of the believers in a way which brings to pass that which they believe, hope, or fear may be the case. Then let me chalk up as a characteristic of human individuals a potential for pathology arising our of the fact that they are of a flexible and viscous nature. They clot together to create aggregates which become the embodiment of themes of which the individuals themselves are or may be unconscious.

In terms of such a hypothesis, anangke and karma are particular epiphenomena brought about by the clustering of flexible subsystems.

Tao cannot be mocked - I