Comprensione (Fante di Coppe)

L'uccello raffigurato in questa carta guarda verso l'esterno da quella che sembra essere una gabbia. Non c'è una porta, e di fatto le sbarre stanno scomparendo. Le sbarre erano un'illusione, e questo tenero uccellino viene invitato a spiccare il volo dalla grazia e dalla libertà e dall'incoraggiamento degli altri. Egli sta per aprire le ali, pronto a volare per la prima volta. L'alba di una nuova comprensione - e cioè il fatto che la gabbia è sempre stata aperta, e il cielo è sempre stato presente, perché lo esplorassimo - all'inizio può farci sentire un po' scossi. Va bene così, è naturale essere un po' scossi, ma non lasciare che ciò oscuri l'opportunità di sperimentare la leggerezza e l'avventura che ti viene offerta, proprio insieme alla trepidazione. Accompagnati alla dolcezza e alla grazia che questo momento ispira. Senti dentro di te il palpito, schiudi le ali e sii libero!

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Sei fuori dalla prigione, fuori dalla gabbia; puoi schiudere le ali - tutto il cielo ti appartiene. Tutte le stelle e la luna e il sole ti appartengono. Puoi scomparire nell'azzurro del trascendente, devi solo smettere di aggrapparti a questa gabbia; escine e tutto il cielo è tuo. Schiudi le ali e vola oltre il sole, come un'aquila. Nel cielo interiore, nel mondo interiore, la libertà è il valore più elevato - ogni altra cosa è secondaria, perfino la beatitudine, perfino l'estasi. Ci sono migliaia di fiori - un numero infinito - ma tutti quei fiori esistono in un clima di libertà.

Tao bianco e Tao nero

«Una lacrima di marmo ferma sulla guancia del tempo»

(Rabindranath Tagore)

Narra la leggenda che il mausoleo fatto costruire nel 1632 ad Agra dall'imperatore moghul Shah Jahan in memoria della moglie preferita Arjumand Banu Begum, in origine prevedeva la costruzione di un complesso identico dalla parte opposta del fiume Yamuna decorato con marmo nero invece che bianco. Esisterebbero prove archeologiche che ne attesterebbero l'inizio della costruzione: nel progetto iniziale questo doveva essere il mausoleo dell'imperatore. I due Taj dovevano poi essere collegati con un ponte in marmo o in oro. Suo figlio, tuttavia, preoccupato per le ingenti somme di denaro già sborsate per la costruzione del primo Taj, costrinse il padre agli arresti e ne prese il posto sul trono nel 1658. Questa tesi sarebbe rafforzata dalla recente scoperta di un giardino sull'altra sponda del fiume. Se questa teoria fosse vera, in origine l'imperatore aveva intenzione di realizzare una costruzione con un asse di simmetria anche lungo la direzione est-ovest e che comprendesse anche il fiume Yamuna, che doveva divenire parte integrante del complesso.

 Se il progetto fosse stato compiuto non c'è dubbio che ne sarebbe risultata una delle maggiori meraviglie mai costruite.

Inner Beauty,  Thomas Barbèy

il lascito del 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.

il lascito del Tao - I

Taoship

Anni fa, prima che tanti treni su linee secondarie venissero soppressi, una donna dalla fronte alta e lentigginosa e una matassa crespa di capelli rossi, si presentò in stazione per informarsi riguardo alla spedizione di certi mobili.

L'impiegato faceva sempre un po' lo spiritoso con le donne, specie con quelle bruttine, che sembravano apprezzare.

- Mobili? - disse, come se nessuno avesse mai avuto prima un'idea simile. - Dunque, vediamo. Di che genere di mobili stiamo parlando?

- Un tavolo da pranzo con sei sedie. Una camera da letto completa, un divano, un tavolo basso, alcuni tavolini, una lampada a stelo. E anche una cristalliera e una credenza.

- Accidenti. Una casa intera.

- Non direi proprio, - ribatté lei. - Mancano le cose di cucina e ci sono mobili per una sola camera da letto.

Aveva tutti i denti ammucchiati davanti, come se fossero pronti a litigare.

- Le servirà il furgone, - fece lui.

- No, voglio spedirli per ferrovia. Vanno a ovest, nel Saskatchewan.

Gli si rivolgeva a voce alta, come se fosse sordo o scemo, e c'era qualcosa di strano nel modo in cui pronunciava le parole. Un accento. Olandese, pensò lui - c'era parecchio movimento di olandesi in quella zona -, anche se, delle donne olandesi, a questa mancava la stazza o la bella carnagione rosea o i capelli biondi. Poteva essere sotto i quaranta, ma che importanza aveva? Miss bellezza non doveva esserlo stata mai. 

L'uomo si fece molto professionale.

- Prima di tutto le ci vorrà il furgone per trasferire la roba qui da dovunque si trovi. E poi, sarà meglio controllare che in questo posto nel Saskatchewan ci passi il treno. Se no, dovrò farla venire a prendere, che so, a Regina.

- E’ Gdynia, - disse. - Il treno ci passa.

Lui prese una guida cincischiata che stava appesa a un chiodo, e le chiese come si scriveva. Lei si servì della matita a sua volta legata a una corda e scrisse su un pezzo di carta estratto dalla borsetta: GDYNIA.

- E che razza di nome sarebbe?

Disse che non lo sapeva.

Le prese la matita per scorrere rigo a rigo.

- Un sacco di posti da quelle parti sono pieni di cechi, di ungheresi e di ucraini, - commentò. Mentre lo diceva gli venne in mente che la donna poteva essere una di loro. Be', e allora? Stava solo esprimendo un dato di fatto.

- Eccola qui. Tutto a posto. C'è la ferrovia.

- Sì, - disse lei. - Voglio spedire la roba venerdì. E’ possibile?

- Possiamo spedirla, ma non posso prometterle che arriverà in un certo giorno, - fece lui. - Tutto dipende dalle priorità. Ci sarà qualcuno a occuparsene quando arriva?

- Sì.

- E’ un treno misto, merci e passeggeri, quello di venerdì, delle quattordici e diciotto. Il furgone passa a ritirare la roba venerdì mattina. Lei abita qui in paese?

Annuì, mentre scriveva il suo indirizzo: 106, Exhibition Road.

Era da poco che in comune avevano distribuito i numeri civici, perciò lui non riusciva a immaginare il punto esatto, pur sapendo dove si trovava Exhibition Road. Se lei avesse fatto il nome di McCauley, in quel momento, l'uomo avrebbe forse mostrato maggior interesse, e le cose avrebbero magari preso una piega diversa. C'erano abitazioni nuove in quella zona, costruite dopo il conflitto, anche se la gente le chiamava le «case del tempo di guerra». Immaginò che si trattasse di una di quelle. 

- Pagamento alla spedizione, - le disse.

- Voglio anche un biglietto per me sullo stesso treno. Venerdì pomeriggio.

- Stessa destinazione?

- Sì.

- Può viaggiare sullo stesso treno fino a Toronto, ma poi dovrà aspettare il transcontinentale che parte alle dieci e mezza di sera. Vuole un vagone letto o regolare? Nel vagone letto avrà la cuccetta, in quello regolare dovrà stare seduta.

Disse che seduta andava bene.

- A Sudbury dovrà aspettare il Montreal, ma senza scendere: smistano solo le carrozze, e le attaccano alla motrice del Montreal. Lo stesso a Port Arthur, e poi a Kenora. Lei resta sul treno fino a Regina; lì invece cambia, e prende il locale.

Annuì, come per dirgli di non farla lunga e di darle il biglietto.

Rallentando, lui disse: - Ma non le assicuro che i mobili arriveranno insieme a lei, anzi, credo che ci metteranno un paio di giorni in più. E’ questione di precedenze. Qualcuno viene a prenderla?

- Sì.

- Bene. Perché è probabile che non sia granché, come stazione. Da quelle parti, i paesi non sono come qui. Sono posti abbastanza rudimentali.

Pagò il suo biglietto, sfilando il denaro da un rotolo di banconote in un sacchetto di tela che teneva in borsa.

Come una vecchietta. Contò anche il resto. Ma non come avrebbe fatto una vecchia. Passò in rassegna rapidamente gli spiccioli sulla mano, ma era chiaro che non le stava sfuggendo un centesimo. Poi girò sui tacchi e se ne andò senza salutare.

- A venerdì, - le disse lui.

In quella tiepida giornata di settembre, la donna indossava un soprabito lungo e semplice, su scarpe sfondate coi lacci, e calzini alla caviglia.

L'impiegato si stava versando del caffè dal thermos quando lei tornò indietro e batté sul vetro dello sportello.

- I mobili che spedisco, - disse. - E tutta roba buona, come nuova. Non vorrei che si graffiassero, o si ammaccassero, che si danneggiassero, insomma. E non vorrei neppure che arrivassero puzzolenti di carro bestiame.

- Be', senta, - disse lui. - Qui in ferrovia siamo piuttosto esperti in fatto di spedizioni. Tendiamo a non usare gli stessi vagoni per mobili e maiali, ad esempio.

Marc Chagall, Io e il mio paese, 1911, MoMa, NYC

fattori mentali del Tao

© Igor Morski

La proposta degli autori del modello di emergenza co-dipendente senza Sé per l'analisi della coscienza è ulteriormente approfondita attraverso la discussione degli elementi mentali di base:

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.

il dilemma del Tao attuale oggi

il dilemma del Tao sempre attuale 2011 - 1978

gerarchie meta-Tao

La quarta metastruttura introdotta da Tyler Volk e Jeff Bloom sono le gerarchie (dal greco ἱεραρχία, ierarchia, derivato di hierárkhēs, composito di hieros "sacro" e árkhō "presiedere" o "essere capo", quindi - complessivamente - "presiedere i sacri riti"), strutture concettuali che definiscono relazioni tra strati, fogli, gruppi di elementi o livelli di un sistema; il tipo più noto e comune di struttura gerarchica è la piramidale, in cui i livelli di descrizione e i flussi di informazione del sistema sono convenientemente rappresentabili in una struttura verticale, tipicamente utilizzata nelle organizzazioni.

Nel caso dei sistemi socio-culturali, nella misura in cui una gerarchia piramidale viene percepita dai soggetti coinvolti, si stabiliscono dei miti quali "controllo" e "potere":

e concetti relativi quali quello di leadership:

Le gerarchie di tipo piramidale normalmente considerate hanno la caratteristica che i livelli posti in relazione verticale hanno elementi omogenei, ad esempio contengono sempre persone, anche se con ruoli e funzioni diverse. La gerarchia Russelliana dei tipi logici illustra invece una discontinuità logica tra livelli e metalivelli, applicata ad esempio da Bateson alle categorie logiche dell'apprendimento e della comunicazione, e presenti anche in gerarchie di descrizione dove tra i livelli vi sia una disomogeneità logica, ad esempio nel caso di passaggio dai livelli fisico-chimici delle scienze naturali a quelli superiori della vita e dei fenomeni emergenti in sistemi complessi. Le gerarchie piramidali non sono le uniche possibili; per la descrizione di diversi sistemi concettuali categorizzazioni di tipo trasversale o laterale possono essere convenienti.

Background

Hierarchies tend to be depicted as pyramidal arrangements of sheets. Hierarchies are identified as the relationships between layers become evident. In most cases, hierarchies are exemplified by power or control moving downward. In other cases, the top layers may indicate greater importance or significance. Information, materials, or energy move upward. They tend to create stratified stability. However, this stability may depend upon the types of binary relationships and other patterns that are created within the overall structure.

Examples

• In science: trophic layers, phylogenetic trees, animal societies (bees, ants, chimpanzees, wolves), etc.
• In architecture and design: pyramids, building design and layout, etc.
• In art: as form, etc.
• In social sciences: governmental and organizational structures; classrooms, schools and schooling; some learning theories; etc.
• In other senses: information trees, branching decision trees, etc.

Metapatterns

The Pattern Underground