Wednesday, June 5, 2013

Tao subsystems - VI

Robert Plutchik, Wheel of Emotions

Subsystems

Emotions
The Emotions subsystem is one which I, as a typical overintellectualized Western academic, feel least qualified to write out. I share the intellectual's distrust of emotions as forces that distort my reasoning and are liable to lead me astray. And yet, like most people, my life and consciousness are strongly controlled by the pursuit of pleasant emotions and the avoidance of unpleasant ones.
Emotions are feelings that can be named but not easily defined. They are feelings that we call grief, fear, joy, surprise, yearning, anger, but that we define inadequately in terms of words: at best we use words to evoke memories of experiences that fit those names.
The Emotions subsystem is, in one sense, the most important subsystem, for it can exert tremendous influence. If you are experiencing the emotion of fear, it may very well control you evaluations and decisions, the memories you draw upon, how you see the world and how you act. Any strong emotion tends to constellate the rest of consciousness about it. Indeed, I think that while mild levels of any emotion can occur within the region of experiential space we call the ordinary d-SoC, most strong levels of feeling may actually constitute d-ASCs. If you talk about feeling mildly angry, somewhat angry, or extremely angry, you can imagine all these things occurring in your ordinary d-SoC. But if you speak of being enraged, the word evokes associations of changes of perception (such as "seeing red") and cognition that strongly suggest that somewhere in the anger continuum there was a quantum jump, and a d-ASC of rage developed. The same is true for other strong emotions. I shall not develop the idea further here, as strong emotional states have seldom been studied scientifically as they must be to determine if they actually constitute d-SoCs. The idea holds promise for future research.
Our culture is strongly characterized by poor volitional control over the Emotions subsystem in the ordinary d-SoC. Emotions can change with lightning rapidity; external events can induce them almost automatically. We have accepted this in a despairing way as part of the human condition, ambivalently regarding attempts to control emotions as either virtuous (since all emotions make us lose control, we should suppress them) or artificial (not "genuine"). Techniques from various spiritual disciplines indicate, however, that there can be emotional control that does not involve simple suppression or denial of content of the emotion. Don Juan, for example, stated that since becoming a "man of knowledge" he had transcended ordinary emotions, but could have any one he wished. In d-ASCs, people often report either greatly increased or decreased control over their emotions.
In addition to changes in the degree of control over emotions, the intensity of emotions themselves may also change in d-ASCs. Dissociation from or dis-identification with emotions also occurs: a person reports that an emotion is going on quite strongly within him, yet is not "his": he is not identified with it and so little affected by it.
In some d-ASCs new emotions appear, emotions that are never present in the ordinary d-SoC. These include feelings like serenity, tranquillity, and ecstasy. Because we use these words in our ordinary d-SoC we think we understand them, but those who have experienced such emotions in d-ASCs insist that we have only known the palest shadows of them.

Tao subsystems - V

Wednesday, May 29, 2013

Tao party















Golders Green Crematorium, Golders Green, Greater London, England
The ashes are buried under a rosebush, plot #39802. The rosebed is located at the far end of the crematorium complex,
next to the Chapel of Memory columbarium.

Monday, May 27, 2013

Tao Paradoxico-Philosophicus 3-4



    Un dieu donne le feu     
     Pour faire l'enfer;      
      Un diable, le miel     
       Pour faire le ciel.  
   



TRACTATUS PARADOXICO-PHILOSOPHICUS

3 Niche: an organizationally closed unity specifies a possible domain of interactions (shared processes) with its own and other organizations and processes such that without this domain the unity disintegrates.
3.01 Call this domain the niche of the unity.
3.02 The unity shares processes with its niche.
3.1 Cognitive domain: consider the niche and all other intersections of an organizationally closed unity with other organizations and processes.
3.11 The unity shares processes with its cognitive domain.
3.2 Interaction: consider the activity of the processes shared in the intersection of the cognitive domains of one or more organizationally closed unities.
3.3 Perception: consider the activity within the closed organizations that form part of the cognitive domain of an organizationally closed unity.
3.4 Distinction: consider the intersection of a closed organization with one or more processes, thus separating them from their background (other processes).
3.5 Cognition: consider the generation of new closed organizations that share processes with and expand the cognitive domain of an organizationally closed unity.



4 Observer: consider an observer as an organizationally closed unity that shares processes with its cognitive domain.
4.01 An observer perceives, distinguishes and knows within its cognitive domain.
4.1 The cognitive domain of an observer may share processes with the cognitive domain of another observer, such that:
4.11 The observer may perceive, distinguish and know the other observer, which may perceive, distinguish and know the first observer.
4.2 Two or more observers may interact through their cognitive domains forming open organizations, closed organizations and even organizationally closed unities, all made of observers.
4.3 Trivial: consider one or more observers that respond predictably to stimuli.
4.31 Non-trivial: consider one or more observers that respond unpredictably to stimuli.

Tractatus Paradoxico-Philosophicus

A Philosophical Approach to Education
Un Acercamiento Filosófico a la Educación
Une Approche Philosophique à l'Education
Eine Philosophische Annäherung an Bildung

Ricardo B. Uribe

Copyright © by a collaborating group of people including the author, editing consultants, translators, and printers. All rights reserved.





Tao Paradoxico-Philosophicus 1-2

Tao for airports



Thursday, May 23, 2013

meta-Tao centers


The next metapattern introduced by Tyler Volk and Jeff Bloom are centers, structures which outline the centricity characteristics of a system:

Background

Centers act to stabilize the whole, provide resistance to change, and provide for organization of the whole. They can act as attractors for autopoietic (self-generating, self-sustaining) systems. In a more general sense, they can imply importance or significance and a sense of centricity. As such, centers can radiate relations to other centers, information, and so forth.
Milann Dobrojevic, Psihodelic Style 2

Examples

  • In science: nucleus, strange attractor, queen ant or bee, fulcrum, dominant male in primate societies, center of gravity, heart within circulatory system, brain within nervous system, etc.
  • In architecture and design: main office, central meeting places, central structural supports (such as elevator shafts in skyscrapers), etc.
  • In art: the central figure or object as subject; the organizing principle or emotional focus of a piece of art, etc.
  • In social sciences: president, governor, major, dictator, leader, teacher, principal, central physical site of specific types of activity, heart as center of individual in many indigenous cultures, organizing principles of societies and other groups, brain as center of individual in most technologically developed cultures, focus of life or activity (e.g., individuals may consider self, family, work, sport, hobby, or spiritual efforts as center), ego or self centric, anthropocentrism, conceptual prototype, conceptual defining characteristics, etc.
  • In other senses: altar in a church, shrine in a temple, a deity or deities, sacred sites (Mecca, Bodhgaya, Jerusalem), shopping center, etc.













Metapatterns

The Pattern Underground

sofTao


Roy Babbington (bass), John Etheridge (guitar), John Marshall (drums), Karl Jenkins (keys)

the Tao Book: inside information - II


INSIDE INFORMATION

This feeling of being lonely and very temporary visitors in the universe is in flat contradiction to everything known about man (and all other living organisms) in the sciences. We do not "come into" this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean "waves," the universe "peoples." Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe. This fact is rarely, if ever, experienced by most individuals. Even those who know it to be true in theory do not sense or feel it, but continue to be aware of themselves as isolated "egos" inside bags of skin.
The first result of this illusion is that our attitude to the world "outside" us is largely hostile. We are forever "conquering" nature, space, mountains, deserts, bacteria, and insects instead of learning to cooperate with them in a harmonious order. In America the great symbols of this conquest are the bulldozer and the rocket—the instrument that batters the hills into flat tracts for little boxes made of ticky-tacky and the great phallic projectile that blasts the sky. (Nonetheless, we have fine architects who know how to fit houses into hills without ruining the landscape, and astronomers who know that the earth is already way out in space, and that our first need for exploring other worlds is sensitive electronic instruments which, like our eyes, will bring the most distant objects into our own brains.)(1) The hostile attitude of conquering nature ignores the basic interdependence of all things and events—that the world beyond the skin is actually an extension of our own bodies—and will end in destroying the very environment from which we emerge and upon which our whole life depends.
The second result of feeling that we are separate minds in an alien, and mostly stupid, universe is that we have no common sense, no way of making sense of the world upon which we are agreed in common. It's just my opinion against yours, and therefore the most aggressive and violent (and thus insensitive) propagandist makes the decisions. A muddle of conflicting opinions united by force of propaganda is the worst possible source of control for a powerful technology.
It might seem, then, that our need is for some genius to invent a new religion, a philosophy of life and a view of the world, that is plausible and generally acceptable for the late twentieth century, and through which every individual can feel that the world as a whole and his own life in particular have meaning. This, as history has shown repeatedly, is not enough. Religions are divisive and quarrelsome. They are a form of one-upmanship because they depend upon separating the "saved" from the "damned," the true believers from the heretics, the in-group from the out-group. Even religious liberals play the game of "we're-moretolerant-than-you." Furthermore, as systems of doctrine, symbolism, and behavior, religions harden into institutions that must command loyalty, be defended and kept "pure," and—because all belief is fervent hope, and thus a cover-up for doubt and uncertainty—religions must make converts. The more people who agree with us, the less nagging insecurity about our position. In the end one is committed to being a Christian or a Buddhist come what may in the form of new knowledge. New and indigestible ideas have to be wangled into the religious tradition, however inconsistent with its original doctrines, so that the believer can still take his stand and assert, "I am first and foremost a follower of Christ/Mohammed/Buddha, or whomever." Irrevocable commitment to any religion is not only intellectual suicide; it is positive unfaith because it closes the mind to any new vision of the world. Faith is, above all, open-ness—an act of trust in the unknown.
An ardent Jehovah's Witness once tried to convince me that if there were a God of love, he would certainly provide mankind with a reliable and infallible textbook for the guidance of conduct. I replied that no considerate God would destroy the human mind by making it so rigid and unadaptable as to depend upon one book, the Bible, for all the answers. For the use of words, and thus of a book, is to point beyond themselves to a world of life and experience that is not mere words or even ideas. Just as money is not real, consumable wealth, books are not life. To idolize scriptures is like eating paper currency.
Therefore The Book that I would like to slip to my children would itself be slippery. It would slip them into a new domain, not of ideas alone, but of experience and feeling. It would be a temporary medicine, not a diet; a point of departure, not a perpetual point of reference. They would read it and be done with it, for if it were well and clearly written they would not have to go back to it again and again for hidden meanings or for clarification of obscure doctrines.

"AlanWatts was not a buddha, but he could be one day. He has moved closer to it. THE BOOK is tremendously important. It is his testament, his whole experience with Zen masters, Zen classics. And he is a man of tremendous intelligence; he was also a drunkard. Intelligence plus wine have really created a juicy book."





the Tao Book: inside information - I