Monday, March 18, 2013

the song of Tao

Tilopa (988 – 1069) was an indian mahasiddha of Vajrayana Buddhism and developer of the set of spiritual practices of the tibetan tantrism known as Mahamudra.
The Song of Mahamudra, addressed to his disciple Nāropā, expresses what is inexpressible - "beyond all words and symbols" - which represents the supreme understanding, where the subject which knows and the object which is known disappear and only knowledge remains:

Mahamudra is beyond all words and symbols,
but for you Naropa,
earnest and loyal,
must this be said:

The Void needs no reliance,
Mahamudra rest on nought.
Without making an effort,
but remaining loose and natural,
one can break the yoke -
thus gaining liberation.

If one sees naught when staring into space;
if with the mind one then observes the mind,
one destroys distinctions
and reaches buddahood.

The clouds that wander through the sky have no roots,
no home, nor do the distinctive thoughts
floating through the mind.
Once the Self-mind is seen,
discrimination stops.

In space shapes and colours form,
but neither by black nor white is space tinged.
From the Self-mind all things emerge,
the mind by virtues and by vices is not stained.

The darkness of ages
cannot shroud the glowing sun,
the long kalpas of samsara
never can hide the mind’s brilliant light.

Though words are spoken to explain the void,
the void as such can never be expressed.
Though we say “the mind is bright as light”,
it is beyond all words and symbols.
Although the mind is void in essence,
all things it embraces and contains.

Do nought with the body but relax;
shut firm the mouth and silent remain;
empty your mind and think of nought.
Like a hollow bamboo rest at ease with your body.
Giving not nor taking, put your mind at rest.
Mahamudra is like a mind that clings to nought.
Thus practicing, in time you will reach buddhahood.

The practice of mantra and pāramitā,
instruction in the sutras and precepts,
and teaching from the schools and scriptures,
will not bring realization of the innate truth.
For if the mind when filled with some desire
should seek a goal,
it only hides the light.

He who keeps tantric precepts, yet discriminates,
betrays the spirit of samaya.
Cease all activity, abandon all desire,
let thoughts rise and fall
as they will like ocean waves.
He who never harms the non-abiding,
nor the principle of non-distinction,
upholds the tantric precepts.

He who abandons craving
and clings not to this and that,
perceives the real meaning given in the scriptures.

In Mahamudra all one’s sins are burned;
in Mahamudra one is released
from the prison of this world.
This is the dharma’s supreme torch.
Those who disbelieve it are fools,
who ever wallow in misery and sorrow.

To strive for liberation
one should rely on a guru.
When our mind receives his blessings
emancipation is at hand.

Alas,all things in the world are meaningless,
they are but sorrow’s seeds.
Small teachings lead to acts -
one should only follow teachings that are great.

To transcend duality is the kingly view.
To conquer distractions is the royal practice.
The path of no-practice is the way of all the buddhas.
He who treads that path reaches buddhahood.

Transient is this world,
like phantoms and dreams, substance it has none.
Renounce it and forsake your kin,
cut the strings of lust and hatred,
and meditate in woods and mountains.

If without effort
you remain loosely in the natural state,
soon Mahamudra you will win
and attain the non-attainment.

Cut the root of a tree and the leaves will wither;
cut the root of your mind and samsara falls.
The light of any lamp dispels in a moment
the darkness of long kalpas;
the strong light of the Mind in but a flash
will burn the veil of ignorance.

Who ever clings to the mind
sees not the truth of what is beyond the mind.
Whoever strives to practice dharma
finds not the truth of beyond-practice.
To know what is beyond both mind and practice
one should cut cleanly through the root of the mind
and stare naked.
One should thus break away from all distinctions
and remain at ease.

One should not give or take,
but remain natural - for Mahamudra
is beyond all acceptance and rejection.
Since Alaya is not born,
no one can obstruct or soil it;
staying in the unborn realm
all appearance will dissolve into dharmata,
and self-will and pride will vanish into nought.

The Supreme Understanding
transcends all this and that;
The supreme action
embraces great resourcefulness without attachment.
The supreme accomplishment
is to realize immanence without hope.

At first a yogi feels his mind
is tumbling like a waterfall,
in mid-course, like the Ganges,
it flows on slow and gentle;
in the end it is a great vast ocean
where the lights of son and mother merge in one.


The experience of the ultimate is not an experience at all – because the experiencer is lost. And when there is no experiencer, what can be said about it? Who will say it? Who will relate the experience? When there is no subject, the object also disappears – the banks disappear, only the river of experience remains. Knowledge is there, but the knower is not.

That has been the problem for all the mystics. They reach to the ultimate, but they cannot relate it to those who are following. They cannot relate it to others who would like to have an intellectual understanding. They have become one with it. Their whole being relates it, but no intellectual communication is possible. They can give it to you if you are ready to receive; they can allow it to happen in you if you also allow it, if you are receptive and open. But words won’t do, symbols won’t help; theories and doctrines are of no use at all.

The experience is such that it is more like an experiencing than like an experience. It is a process – and it begins, but it never ends. You enter into it, but you never possess it. It is like a drop dropping in the ocean, or, the ocean itself dropping into the drop. It is a deep merger, it is oneness, you simply melt away into it. Nothing is left behind, not even a trace, so who will communicate? Who will come back to the world of the valley? Who will come back to this dark night to tell you?

All the mystics all over the world have always felt impotent as far as communication is concerned. Communion is possible, but communication, no. This has to be understood from the very beginning. A communion is a totally different dimension: two hearts meet, it is a love affair. Communication is from head to head; communion is from heart to heart, communion is a feeling. Communication is knowledge: only words are given, only words are said, and only words are taken and understood. And words are such: the very nature of words is so dead that nothing alive can be related through them. Even in ordinary life, leave aside the ultimate, even in ordinary experiencing when you have a peak moment, an ecstatic moment, when you really feel something and become something, it becomes impossible to relate it in words.

Friday, March 15, 2013

every ghost in Tao is magic


Though I've tried before to tell her
Of the feelings I have for her in my heart
Every time that I come near her
I just lose my nerve
As I've done from the start

Every little thing she does is magic
Everything she do just turns me on
Even though my life before was tragic
Now I know my love for her goes on

Do I have to tell the story
Of a thousand rainy days since we first met
It's a big enough umbrella
But it's always me that ends up getting wet

Every little thing she does is magic
Everything she do just turns me on
Even though my life before was tragic
Now I know my love for her goes on

I resolve to call her up a thousand times a day
And ask her if she'll marry me in some old fashioned way
But my silent fears have gripped me
Long before I reach the phone
Long before my tongue has tripped me
Must I always be alone?

Every little thing she does is magic
Everything she do just turns me on
Even though my life before was tragic
Now I know my love for her goes on

Thursday, March 14, 2013

holarchies meta-Tao

The next metapattern studied by Tyler Volk and Jeff Bloom are Holarchies, a word coined by Arthur Koestler in The Ghost in the Machine, from a combination of the greek words "holos", meaning "whole", and "hierarchy". It is a hierarchically organized structure of units or entities that are called 'Holons' and "Clonons", elements which are both parts of a system and "wholes", useful to describe highly complex systems. A system or organization which has in its structure (or meta-structure) some holarchies it is also called holonomic or holonic.


Background

A holarchy is a nested system of layers in which the units (wholes) within one layer are parts for the wholes in the next larger, encompassing layer. Holarchic layers can be used to describe certain types of social, political, and institutional organizations, as well as structures in science and other disciplines. In holarchies the wholes at each level have particular kinds of relationships with the other wholes on that same level, and these relationships change as we move up the nested layers from physics to organisms to social systems. The relationships between layers in holarchies tend to be ambiguous and more difficult to describe.

Examples

  • In science: rose flowers, the Earth and atmosphere, atoms, bodies of organisms, holarchic layers of complexity in organisms (from DNA/RNA components to the whole), solar system, galaxies, etc.
  • In architecture and design: some building and community designs, etc.
  • In art: forms as depicted, etc.
  • In social sciences: communities (as described by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger), many tribal societies, democracy in its purest form, etc.
  • In other senses: mandalas, apprenticeships, etc.
A classical example of holarchy is the hierarchy of levels of entities which compose an ecosystem:
© copyright 2012 Marshall Clemens - Idiagram
The hierarchical structure of natural sciences and of knowledge domains is more precisely an holarchy, since it is a hierarchy but where the elements of the levels are themselves parts for the higher levels and wholes for the lower levels.
Example of holonic organization evolution in holarchic structures increasingly complex.
Example of an holonic organization community represented as a strategic map:
Lawrence Boys and Girls Club

© copyright 2012 Marshall Clemens - Idiagram
Holarchies may be also "abstract", for example a rule holarchy to determine specific results or behaviors. A relevant example are complex adaptive systems, like living systems  (if survived), where the system evolution is determined by an intrinsic holarchy of rules:
Complex adaptive system model. The evolution of the system from initial to final components, from left to right, is ruled by a central rule system organized as holarchy.
© copyright 2012 Marshall Clemens - Idiagram - NECSI

Metapatterns

The Pattern Underground

Tuesday, March 12, 2013

Tao subsystems - I


The system approach of Tart to consciousness and its states analyzes the characteristics and connections of the subsystems used as experiential criteria for its description: exteroception, interoception, input processing, memory, subconscious, valuation and decision-making, emotions, space and time sense, sense of identity and motor output:

Subsystems

We began this discussion of the systems approach to consciousness by describing the concepts of attention/awareness, energy, and structure. We defined a structure as a basic unit that can be assembled into larger structures or be analyzed into substructures. At present, our scientific knowledge is generally too rudimentary to allow the breakdown of structures into their components. We can, however, describe the assembly of multiple structures into major experiential and experimental divisions — subsystems — of consciousness. Ten such subsystems are described in this chapter. They are convenient conceptual tools for understanding the currently known range of variations in d-ASCs. They do not refer to localized regions of the brain. They are concepts I have developed by classifying the greatly varying experiences and behaviors reported in d-ASCs into clusters of phenomena that seem to hold together, on the basis of both their own internal similarity and other known psychological data. In their present form, I find these subsystems a useful conceptual tool for organizing the otherwise chaotic masses of data about d-ASCs. I also believe that further thinking can sharpen our ideas about the properties of these subsystems and their possible interactions with each other and allow us to predict d-ASCs in addition to those already known. Making these predictions and testing them should further sharpen our conceptions about the nature of various subsystems, and so further increase our understanding. This is the standard scientific procedure of conceptualizing the data as well as possible, making predictions on that basis, confirming and disproving various predictions, and thus sharpening the conceptual system or modifying it. The socialized repetition of this procedure is the essence of scientific method.
Figure 8-1 sketches ten major subsystems, represented by the labeled ovals, and their major interaction routes. The solid arrows represent major routes of information flow: not all known routes are shown, as this would clutter the diagram. The hatched arrows represent major, known feedback control routes whereby one subsystem has some control over the functioning of another subsystem. The dashed arrows represent information flow routes from the subconscious subsystem to other subsystems, routes that are inferential from the point of view of the ordinary d-SoC. Most of the subsystems are shown feeding information into, or deriving information from, awareness, which is here considered not a subsystem but the basic component of attention/awareness and attention/awareness energy that flows through various systems. A brief overview of a state of consciousness as a functioning system, as represented in Figure 8-1, can be described as follows. Information from the outside world comes to us through the Exteroception subsystem (classical sense organs), and information from our own bodies comes to us via the Interoception subsystem (kinesthetic and other bodily functioning receptors). Data from both sets of sense organs undergo Input-Processing (filtering, selecting, abstracting), which in turn influences the functioning of Exteroception and Interoception. Input-Processing draws heavily on stored Memory, creates new memories, sends information both directly into awareness and into our subconscious, and stimulates our Sense of Identity and our Emotions. Information we are aware of is in turn affected by our Sense of Identity and Emotions. We subject this information to Evaluation and Decision-Making; and we may act on it, produce some sort of motor output. This Motor Output subsystem produces action in the body that is sensed via Interoception, in a feedback process through the body. The Motor Output also produces effects on the external world that are again sensed by Exteroception, constituting feedback via the external world. Our perception and decision-making are also affected by our Space/Time Sense. Also shown in Figure 8-1 are some latent functions, which may be tapped in a d-ASC, but are not available in the b-SoC. In the following pages the basic nature of each subsystem is defined and the range of both quantitative and qualitative alterations that occur in its functioning over the range of various d-ASCs is indicated. Of necessity, these descriptions are somewhat sketchy. One of the major tasks of future research is to fill in the details about each of these subsystems, their change in d-ASCs, and their interaction with other subsystems.

Exteroception

The subsystem Exteroception includes the classical sense organs for registering changes in the environment: eyes, ears, nose, taste organs, and touch organs. The exteroceptive organs constitute a model of a whole system of consciousness. First, they are active organs. While all of them can respond to stimulation when they are passive, as when a light is suddenly shined in your eye, they normally engage in an active scanning of the environment. Your eyes dart about; you turn your head or perk up your ears to hear sounds more clearly; you reach out to touch things that interest you. Similarly, consciousness can be passively stimulated, but ordinarily it is an active process. Second, each of the classical exteroceptive sense organs has limited responsiveness. The eye cannot respond to ultraviolet light, the ear cannot pick up sounds above or below certain frequencies, touch cannot respond to exceptionally subtle stimuli. Similarly, consciousness can be passively stimulated, but ordinarily it is an active process. Second, each of the classical exteroceptive sense organs has limited responsiveness. The eye cannot respond to ultraviolet light, the ear cannot pick up sounds above or below certain frequencies, touch cannot respond to exceptionally subtle stimuli. Similarly, any state of consciousness has certain limits to what it can and cannot react. Third, you have some voluntary control over the input to your exteroceptive sense organs. If you do not want to see something, you can look away or close your eyes; if you do not want to hear something, you can move away from the sound source or put your fingers in your ears. In any state of consciousness, you have some voluntary control over exteroceptive functioning. But the control is limited: if the sound is intense enough, it is difficult not to hear it at all, even with your hands over your ears. Although many changes in perception of the external environment are reported in d-ASCs, these usually do not represent changes in the exterocepters themselves, except possibly in some drug-induced d-ASCs. Each of the classical sense organs is a masterpiece of engineering; it is already as sensitive as it can be. Thus its useful sensitivity is not increased, even if a person experiences himself as being in more contact with the environment in a d-ASC. AS we shall see later, practically all phenomena dealing with feelings of increased contact with the environment are related to changes in the Input-Processing subsystem. Sometimes when a drug is used to induce a d-ASC there may be some physiological changes in the exterocepters. LSD, for example, may actually cause pupillary dilation, thus allowing in more light (although one might quarrel whether this is a direct physiological effect or a secondary effect due to the increased attention being paid to the external environment). Similarly, since psychedelic drugs affect neural functioning generally, they may have some direct effects on the neural components of the sense organs themselves, but little is known of this now. So, in terms of present knowledge about d-ASCs, changes in the exterocepters seem of little importance. Input to the exterocepters is usually deliberately manipulated and patterned in the course of attempting to induce a d-ASC. Although most of the important changes resulting from these techniques occur in Input-Processing, some do start with direct effects on the exterocepters and should be noted. Input from the environment that, while varying, remains within a learned, anticipated range, acts as a source of loading stabilization. Thus, changing the input to the exteroception may interfere with the loading stabilization function and/or inject anomalous input that may destabilize a d-SoC. A major way of doing this is to reduce or eliminate sensory input. In the induction process for many d-ASCs, there is an attempt to make the environment quiet, to cut down the amount of sensory input a person has to handle. Consider, for example, the techniques of guided imagery or twilight imagery, where, while lying down with closed eyes, a person enters more and more into fantasy. A genuine d-ASC may develop in some cases, as fantasy intensifies, but it is clear the sensory input must usually be kept at a low level to both induce and maintain this d-ASC. I have seen people get into intense experiences through guided imagery techniques, but the simple act of opening the eyes and allowing visual input from the physical world to enter immediately disrupts this state. Reduction of sensory input to a level as near zero as possible is a potent technique for inducing d-ASCs. In the fifties and early sixties, there were many sensory deprivation experiments during which the subject lay comfortably in a dark, quiet room without moving. The findings were interpreted as showing that if the brain did not receive sufficient sensory input, the subject went "crazy." It is now clear that practically all these studies were severely contaminated, as were the contemporary studies of psychedelic drugs, by implicit demand characteristics that account for most of the phenomena produced. If you a person through a procedure he thinks will make him crazy, in a medical setting, he is likely to act crazy. That tells you something about suggestibility, but little about the effects of reduced sensory input per se. Traditional literature from many spiritual psychologies as well as accounts from people who have been trapped in isolation situations, indicate that sensory deprivation can be a powerful technique in affecting consciousness. But its effect is apparently always patterned by other factors. Changing the patterning of input to the exterocepters, and the subsequent processing of the information of Input-Processing, can also be a major way of altering consciousness. When the same kind of input is repeated over and over again, so that the exterocepters become saturated, all sorts of changes take place. For example, if, by means of special apparatus, an image is held absolutely still on the retina of the eye, it soon begins to break up and display all sorts of unusual perceptual changes. Even when we believe we are looking steadily at something, there are actually tiny saccadic movements of the eye that keep the image moving slightly on the retina. Like so many of our receptors, the eye actually responds to slight, continuous change and cannot "see" absolutely steady input. Overloading the exterocepters is another way of inducing d-ASCs. The principle is recognized by people who attend rock concerts. Even if they have not taken some drug to help induce a d-ASC, the light show of complex, changing patterns accompanied by exceptionally loud music overloads and fatigues the exterocepters, blowing their minds.

Interoception

The subsystem Interoception includes the various senses that tell us what is going on inside our bodies — the position of our limbs, the degree of muscle tension, how our limbs are moving, pressure in our intestines, bodily temperature. It is a way of sensing our internal world, as opposed to our external world. Many of the output signals from our interoceptors seems to be permanently excluded from our awareness; many of our sensing systems for governing the function of internal organs seem to have no representation in consciousness, regardless of conditions. For example, the functioning of our kidneys is regulated, but I know of no one who claims to have a direct experiential feel for what his kidneys are doing. We should, however, be careful about setting any ultimate limits on what aspects of Interoception can never reach or be affected by consciousness. The modern technology of biofeedback enables us to focus attention on and to control many bodily processes formerly thought to be completely incapable of voluntary control. Many other interoceptive signals not normally in our awareness can be put in our awareness by turning our attention/awareness to them. For example, you may not have been thinking of sensations in your belly a moment ago, but now that I mention them and your attention/awareness turns there, you can detect various signals. With practice you might become increasingly sensitive to signals from this area of your body. Thus, as with our exterocepters, we have some voluntary control over what we will attend to, but this control is limited. We can also control interoceptive input by doing various things to our bodies. If you have an unpleasant sensation from some part of your body, you can relax, change position, take a deep breath, and change the nature of that signal, presumably by changing whatever is causing it. This is an ability we take for granted and know little about, but it is an important way of affecting interoceptive input. Some techniques for inducing d-ASCs, such as hatha yoga procedures, have a highly sophisticated technology for affecting one's body and how one perceives it. This is the reason biofeedback technology is sometimes said to have the potential to become an "electronic yoga," a way of rapidly learning about various internal conditions and using them to affect consciousness. We are still a long way from attaining this, however. As is the case with exterocepters, there is little evidence that actual physiological changes take place in the interoceptors during various d-ASCs, except possibly in some drug-induced d-ASCs. Also as in Exteroception, the learned, anticipated range of constant input from Interoception acts as a source of loading stabilization for maintaining the ordinary d-SoC. The pattern of input from interoceptors can be subsumed under a useful psychological concept, the body image. You not only have a real body whose actual sensations are picked up by the interoceptors, but, in the course of enculturation, you have learned to perceive your own body in learned, patterned ways, just as you have learned to perceive the external world in socially learned ways. The degree to which your body image corresponds to your actual body may vary considerably. My own observations suggest that people's internal images of their bodies can differ amazingly from what an external observer sees. An individual's body image may be very stable. An intriguing example of this is the phantom limb phenomenon. When an arm or a leg is amputated, the patient almost always reports he can still feel the limb, even though he can see and otherwise intellectually know it is not there. Sensations coming in from the severed nerve tracts are nonconsciously organized in the learned, habitual way so that the patient perceives the limb as still there. Most patients soon lose perception of their phantom limbs as they are subjected to considerable social pressure to do so. In some, however, the phantom limb persists in spite of all attempts to unlearn it. The sensations may or may not be painful. The primary things to note are that the body image can be very rigid and may or may not show much correspondence to the actual body contours and what actually goes on in the body. I am convinced that as Westerners we generally have distorted images of our bodies and poor contact with sensations that go on in them. Since body sensations often represent a thinking about, or data processing of, experience, and a way of expressing emotions, our lack of contact with our actual body sensations puts us out of contact with ourselves. This is considered further in connection with the Subconscious subsystem.

People's experiential reports from d-ASCs indicate that enormous changes can take place in Interoception. The body may seem to get larger or smaller, change in shape, change in internal functioning, change in terms of the relationships of its parts, so that the body may not "work" in the usual fashion. Most of this range of experience probably represents changes in Input-Processing, rather than changes in the interoceptors themselves. As with Exteroception, changing your body image is a common technique for inducing d-ASCs. Reducing interoceptive input, overloading it, or patterning it in novel ways have all been used. The primary effects are on Input-Processing, but the techniques start by affecting the interoceptors themselves. Let us look at some of these techniques briefly. Immobilizing the body in a relaxed position is a major way of causing the output from Interoception to fade and, consequently, causing the body image either to fade or to change, since it is no longer stabilized by actual input from the interoceptors. The discussion of the induction of hypnosis, going to sleep, and meditation mentions the importance of allowing the interoceptors to adapt out so the input from the body disappears. In sensory deprivation techniques it is important to relax the body and at the same time not move at all. Even a slight movement can stimulate large numbers of interceptors and reestablish the body image readily. Overloading interoceptors is an important technique for altering consciousness. A good massage, for instance, or sensory awareness exercises that make you aware of bodily stimuli normally overlooked, have been known to induce d-ASCs. At the opposite end of the continuum from this pleasurable kind of manipulation of Interoception, pain and torture are some of the surest ways of inducing d-ASCs. Patterning interoceptive input in unusual fashions is another way of inducing d-ASCs. Mudras, gestures of symbolic significance used in yoga, consist of putting the body into certain positions. I suspect that the actual bodily posture has a definite patterning effect on interoceptive input and can affect consciousness if you are sensitive to input from your own body, the patterning of interoceptive input may occur, but since not much awareness is gained, posture does not pattern attention/awareness energy in a way that would affect consciousness. Another way of patterning interoceptive input is the altered states of consciousness induction device (ASCID) developed by Masters and Houston on the basis of medieval accounts of the witch's cradle. This is an upright frame into which a person straps himself. the frame is hung from a short rope, so slight motions cause it to rock in erratic patterns. This produces anomalous patterns of input for the occupant to process: some interoceptors tell him he is standing up and therefore needs to exert certain muscular actions to maintain this posture, but other interoceptors tell him he is standing up and therefore needs to exert certain muscular actions to maintain this posture, but other interoceptors tell him he is relaxed and not making these muscular actions. Other interoceptive sense indicate that he is moving and must do things to maintain his balance, but there are in conflict with other interoceptive sensations that he is passive. Since he is not used to such an anomalous, conflicting pattern of stimulation, it can greatly disrupt Input Processing.

Wednesday, March 6, 2013

double Tao helix

Letter

Direct Imaging of DNA Fibers: The Visage of Double Helix


Nanostructures, §Neuroscience and Brain Technologies, and Nanochemistry Departments, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Via Morego 30, 16163 Genova, Italy
BIONEM, Bio-Nanotechnology and Engineering for Medicine, Department of experimental and clinical medicine, University of Magna Graecia Viale Europa, Germaneto, 88100 Catanzaro, Italy
IMEM-CNR, Parco Area delle Scienze 37/A, 43124 Parma, Italy

Nano Lett., 2012, 12 (12), pp 6453–6458
Publication Date (Web): November 22, 2012
Copyright © 2012 American Chemical Society

Abstract
Direct imaging becomes important when the knowledge at few/single molecule level is requested and where the diffraction does not allow to get structural and functional information. Here we report on the direct imaging of double stranded (ds) λ-DNA in the A conformation, obtained by combining a novel sample preparation method based on super hydrophobic DNA molecules self-aggregation process with transmission electron microscopy (TEM). The experimental breakthrough is the production of robust and highly ordered paired DNA nanofibers that allowed its direct TEM imaging and the double helix structure revealing.
SEM image of a tightrope of DNA between two silicon nanopillars. marker: 1 μm
TEM direct image of DNA double-helix structure.

Tuesday, March 5, 2013

a legacy for Tao - II

Tree Mind, Storm Thorgerson
Angels Fear Revisited:
Gregory Bateson’s Cybernetic Theory of Mind
Applied to Religion-Science Debates

Mary Catherine Bateson

Bateson as a Scientist
Today I want to discuss these issues in relation to Angels Fear, the volume that I completed after Gregory’s death, which he saw as his most daring approach to the conventional limits of scientific attention. I inherited the task of dealing with Gregory’s intellectual legacy, as well as the intellectual legacy of my mother, Margaret Mead, and several other scholars for whose work she became responsible along the way, so I have had considerable opportunity to think about how to treat such material. It may be that having a multiple responsibility has shaped my approach – but I decided very early on that I was not going to accept the position of Anna Freud, a woman of undoubted brilliance and conscientiousness, who became protector and arbiter of orthodoxy for the work of her father, Sigmund Freud. The creation of an orthodoxy around Freud’s work was a misapprehension of the way he wove ideas and of the way he developed and expressed them, which has had a negative effect on psychoanalysis. Nowadays in the United States, Freud’s writings seem to be read primarily in literature departments, free from the pressure to maintain an orthodox interpretation, but with little concern for their ongoing scientific usefulness.
Our responsibility, I believe, in reading Gregory Bateson as a scientist, is to avoid the impulse to orthodoxy that is antithetical to science and to find a pathway through the unorthodoxy of his expression. Gregory’s writings offer a way of looking at phenomena that is grounded in science and suggests interesting and important questions. He hoped that he might address some of the ways in which scientific explanation inspires technological exploitation but fails to inspire behaviors that might, for instance, preserve species diversity and slow climate change. The “pattern which connects  proposes not only similarity but identification – even empathy.
At the same time, unearthing the value in this work and integrating it with ongoing thinking in anthropology, biology, and psychiatry can be daunting. Often what we see in Gregory’s work is an uncompleted process, where he himself was still groping for the next step in his phrasing. The challenge is not so much to stand guard over the exact words but to continue to develop and test the thought. This is the challenge I had to deal with in putting together Angels Fear, selecting from a stack of manuscripts that only vaguely fit together and did not reach the goal he was searching for, so that it was important, as I wrote additional material, to preserve the tentativeness of it. For instance, I am convinced that Gregory’s “metalogues” gave him a literary device for exploring ideas without committing himself to the structured exposition that a more usual form of essay would have required. The metalogues, by their fluidity, proclaim the search that was still in flux. Although some parts of the metalogues did actually happen, and although I imitated them sometimes in actual conversation with Gregory and have written some since, they are a form of fiction.


Friday, March 1, 2013

Tao mental factors

© Igor Morski
The proposal of the authors of the codependent arising Selfless model for the analysis of consciousness is further deepen through the discussion of the basic mental elements:

Basic Element Analysis
We have already seen how a moment of consciousness is analyzed into subject, object, and mental factors that bind them together. This schematization was present in the earliest Abhidharma but was greatly elaborated in a technique called basic element (dharma) analysis, which reached its peak of eloquence in the Abhidharmakosa of Vasubandhu. (It is from this work that we have taken the classification of mental factors.)
The term for basic element in Sanskrit is dharma. Its most general meaning in a psychological context is "phenomenon" - not in the Kantian sense where phenomena are opposed to noumena but simply in the ordinary sense of something that occurs, arises, or is found in experience. In its more technical sense, it refers to an ultimate particular, particle, or element that is reached in an analytic examination. In basic element analysis, moments of experience (the dharmas) were considered analytically irreducible units; they were, in fact, called ultimate realities, whereas the coherences of daily life that were composed of these elements - a person, a house - were called conventional realities.
This idea that experience, or what the phenomenologist would call the life-world, can be analyzed into a more fundamental set of constituents was also a central element in Husserl's phenomenological project. This project broke down because it was, among other things, purely abstract and theoretical. Basic element analysis, on the other hand, was much more successful because it was generated from an open-ended, embodied reflection: it arose as a way of codifying and interpreting the results of the mindfulness/awareness examination of experience. Therefore, even when basic element analysis received certain kinds of devastating criticism from philosophers such as Nagarjuna, it could nonetheless survive as a valuable practice, though seen in a different light.
On a more theoretical level, philosophers might recognize some parallels between basic element analysis and the analytic, rationalist tradition in the West as exemplified by Leibniz, Frege, Russell, and the early Wittgenstein. In both traditions there is a concern with analyzing complex aggregates of societies-whether these be things in the world, linguistic or logical descriptions, mental representations, or direct experience-into their simple and ultimate constituents. Minsky, for example, upholds this analytic tradition when he writes that his "agents of the mind could be the long-sought 'particles' that ... theories [of mind] need." Such reductionism is almost always accompanied by realism: one adopts a realist istance toward whatever one claims as one's privileged basis, one's ultimate ground.
Here, however, we come upon an interesting difference between Western rationalism and the rationalism embodied in the Abhidharma. In the latter, the designation of basic elements as ultimate reality, we are told, was not an assertion that the basic elements were ontological entities in the sense of being substantially existent. Surely this is an interesting case study-we have here a philosophical system, a reductive system, in which reductive basic elements are postulated as ultimate realities but in which those ultimate realities are not given ontological status in the usual sense. How can that be? Emergents, of course, do not have the status of ontological entities (substances). Might we have a system here in which the basic elements are themselves emergents?
This question is all the more interesting because basic element analysis was not simply an abstract, theoretical exercise. It had both a descriptive and a pragmatic motivation. The concern of the meditator is to break the wheel of conditioned origination and become aware, wise, and free. She is told that she can actually experientially catch herself (within this emergent society of the wheel of the twelve links) at the moment of craving and can begin to undo her conditioning. Will a basic element analysis provide clarity that will help in this task?
We may remember that in basic element analysis each element, each moment of consciousness, consists of the consciousness itself (called, in this system, the primary mind) and its mental factors. The (momentary) mental factors are what bind the (momentary) object (which is, of course, always in one of the six sense fields). The specific quality of each moment of consciousness and its karmic effects on future moments depend upon which mental factors are present.
The relationship between consciousness and the mental factors seems remarkably similar to the relation between Minskian agencies and agents. The contemporary Tibetan scholar Geshe Rabten puts it thus: "The term 'primary mind' denotes the totality of a sensory or mental state composed of a variety of mental factors. A primary mind is like a hand whereas the mental factors are like the individual fingers, the palm, and so forth. The character of a primary mind is thus determined by its constituent mental factors." A hand is an agency of which the fingers, palm, etc., are agents; it is also an agent of the body. These are different levels of description; neither agent nor agency would exist without the other. Like the hand, we could call the primary mind an emergent.
We would do well to look once again at the five omnipresent mental factors: contact, feeling, discernment, intention, and attention.

1 Contact
Contact is a form of rapport between the senses and their objects, a matching of sensitivity between a sense and an object in the sense field. It is a relational property involving three terms: one of the six senses, a material or mental object, and the consciousness based upon these two. There is evidence to suggest that this sensitivity was conceived as a dynamic process giving rise to emergence: the evidence is that contact, as a process, is described as being both a cause and an effect. As a cause, contact is the coming together of three distinct items--a sense, an object, and the potential for awareness. As an effect, contact is that which results from this process of coming together-a condition of harmony or rapport among the three items. This rapport is not the property of either a sense, an object, or an awareness per se. It is a property of the processes by which they interact, in other words, an emergent property. Because of one's conditioning, one thinks that contact-sense organ, sense field, and sense consciousness--implies a self; in this analysis it may be seen in a neutral, "scientific" light as an emergence.
This conception of contact strikes us as quite remarkable. It could be applied almost word-for-word to our discussion of vision as a unitary phenomenon. In a culture that did not have access to scientific notions of circular causality, feedback/feedforward, and emergent properties, nor to logical formalisms for handling self-reference, the only recourse for expressing an emergent may have been to say that a process is both cause and effect. Early Buddhism developed the idea of an emergent both at the (relatively) global level of codependent origination and the (relatively) local level of contact; this development was of central importance to the analysis of the arising of experience without a self. This suggests that our current formulations of emergence are not simply logical tricks soon to be replaced by some other way of conceptualizing phenomena; rather, our modem forms may be the rediscovery of a basic aspect of human experience.

2 Feeling
We have already discussed feeling as the second aggregate and the seventh link in the circle of codependent arising . Normally feelings lead instantly to reactions that perpetuate karmic conditioning. Bare feelings, however, are neutral; it is one's response that is, in the language of mental factor analysis, either wholesome or unwholesome. Normally we never actually experience our feelings because the mind jumps so quickly to the reaction. Even a neutral feeling (often even more threatening to the sense of self than a displeasurable feeling because a neutral feeling seems less self-relevant) leads quickly to boredom and to the finding of any possible physical or mental occupation . Meditators often report that they discover for the first time, in mindfulness practice, what it is like actually to experience a feeling.

3 Discernment
Perception (discernment)/impulse was discussed as the third aggregate. It normally arises inseparably with feeling. Through mindfulness, however, the meditator may recognize impulses of passion, aggression, and ignoring for what they are - impulses that need not automatically lead to action. In terms of mental factor analysis, one may thus be able to choose wholesome rather than unwholesome actions. (Eventually , when sufficient freedom from habitual patterns has been obtained, perception/ discernements can - according to some later formulations - automatically give rise not to self-based impulses of passion, aggression, and ignoring but to impulses of wisdom and compassionate action.)

4 Intention
Intention is an extremely important process, which functions to arouse and sustain the activities of consciousness (with its mental factors) from moment to moment . Intention is the manner in which the tendency to volitional action (the second link ) manifests itself in the mind at any given moment . There are no volitional actions without intention . Thus, karma is sometimes said to be the process of intention itself- that which leaves traces on which future habits will be based. Normally we act so rapidly and compulsively that we do not see intentions. Some schools of mindfulness training encourage meditators to spend periods of time in which they slow down activities so that they may become aware of the intentions that precede even very trivial volitional actions such as changing position when one becomes uncomfortable. Awareness of intention is thus a direct aid to cutting the chain of conditioned origination at the craving link.

5 Attention
Attention, the final factor of the five omnipresent mental factors, arises in interaction with intention. Intention directs consciousness and the other mental factors toward some general area, at which point attention moves them toward specific features. (Remember the interaction of agents in Minsky's description of the agency Builder.) Attention focuses and holds consciousness on some object. When accompanied by apperception, attention serves as the basis for the object-ascertaining factors of recollection and mindfulness, as well as the positive mental factor of alertness.
These five factors, when joined with various of the object-ascertaining and variable factors, produce the character of each moment of consciousness. The mental factors present at a given moment interact with each other such that the quality of each factor as well as the resultant consciousness is an emergent.
Ego-self, then, is the historical pattern among moment-to-moment emergent formations. To make use of a scientific metaphor, we could say that such traces (karma) are one's experiential ontogeny (including but not restricted to learning). Here ontogeny is understood not as a series of transitions from one state to another but as a process of becoming that is conditioned by past structures, while maintaining structural integrity from moment to moment. On an even larger scale, karma also expresses phylogeny, for it conditions experience through the accumulated and collective history of our species.
The precise nature of the lists and definitions of mental factors should not be taken too compulsively. Different schools produced different lists of factors. Different schools also disagreed (and disagree to this day) about how important it is for practitioners to study such lists (they were traditionally burned in Zen), about the stage of development at which the individual should study the Abhidharma in general and such lists in particular (given that he should study them at all) and about whether and how such lists should be used in meditative contemplation. All schools of mindfulness/awareness meditation, however, agree that intense mindfulness of what arises from moment to moment in the mind is necessary if one is to start to undo karmic conditioning.
We have achieved two main goals by this analysis: First, we have seen how both a single moment of consciousness and the causal coherence of moments of consciousness over time can be formulated in the language of emergence without the postulation of a self or any other ontological entity. Second, we have seen how such formulations can be both experientially descriptive and pragmatically oriented. This latter point bears further discussion since the notion of pragmatics may take an unfamiliar cast in a system that aims to undercut volitional (egocentric) action.