la regola del Tao

Soap bubble nebula

Nel suo sesto libro Castaneda riprende e descrive più in dettaglio il modello della consapevolezza divisa in due parti, quella del lato destro - la prima attenzione o tonal -, la realtà ordinaria percepita e organizzata, e quella del lato sinistro - la seconda attenzione o nagual-, la realtà separata, visibili agli stregoni-veggenti come un uovo luminoso diviso a metà. In questo modello viene descritto un essere umano molto speciale, denominato il Nagual:

LA REGOLA DEL NAGUAL

Don Juan era stato avaro di informazioni specie sul suo passato e sulla sua vita privata. La sua reticenza era, fondamentalmente, un accorgimento didattico; per quel che lo riguardava, la sua vita cominciava da quando era diventato guerriero; quanto gli era successo prima aveva scarsissima importanza.
Tutto quello che la Gorda e io sapevamo sulla sua vita precedente era che era nato in Arizona, figlio di due indios yaqui e yuma. Ancora bambino, i suoi lo avevano portato a vivere con gli Yaqui nel Messico del nord. A dieci anni era stato travolto dalla marea delle guerre yaqui. A quell’epoca la madre fu uccisa e il padre fatto prigioniero dell’esercito messicano. Sia don Juan sia suo padre furono mandati in un centro di smistamento, una riserva nella zona più meridionale dello stato dello Yucatan, dove crebbe.
Quello che gli successe in quel periodo non ci fu mai rivelato Don Juan credeva che non ci fosse alcun bisogno di parlarcene. Io la pensavo altrimenti. L’importanza che davo a quel periodo della sua vita dipendeva dalla convinzione che i tratti caratteristici e l’efficacia della sua guida nascevano dal suo bagaglio di esperienze.
Ma non era questo bagaglio, per quanto importante, a conferirgli quell’immenso significato che lui aveva ai nostri occhi e a quelli dei suoi altri compagni. La sua assoluta preminenza si fondava sul fatto casuale di essere legato alla “regola”.
Essere legato alla regola può essere descritto come vivere un mito. Don Juan viveva un mito, un mito che s’era impossessato di lui e ne aveva fatto un Nagual.
Don Juan disse che quando la regola s’era impossessata di lui, era un uomo aggressivo, che viveva in esilio come migliaia di altri indios yaqui del Messico del nord. A quel tempo lavorava nelle piantagioni di tabacco del Messico del sud. Un giorno, dopo il lavoro, in uno scontro quasi mortale con un altro lavoratore per questione di soldi, gli spararono al petto. Quando tornò in sé, un vecchio indio era chino su di lui e stava frugando con le dita nella piccola ferita. La pallottola non era penetrata nella cavità toracica, ma si era fermata nel muscolo contro una costola. Don Juan svenne due o tre volte per lo shock, per la perdita di sangue e, secondo la sua stessa ammissione, per la paura di morire. Il vecchio indio rimosse la pallottola, e poiché don Juan non aveva dove andare, se lo portò a casa sua e lo curò per più di un mese.
L’indio era gentile ma severo. Un giorno, quando don Juan era abbastanza in forze, quasi guarito, il vecchio gli diede un forte colpo sulla schiena e lo fece piombare in uno stato di intensa percezione. Poi, senza altro preavviso, rivelò a don Juan quella parte della regola che riguarda il Nagual e la sua funzione.
Don Juan fece esattamente la stessa cosa con me e con la Gorda; ci fece mutare livello di consapevolezza e ci spiegò la regola del Nagual nel modo seguente:

Engraved Hourglass Nebula (MyCn 18) - Nebulosa Clessidra;
image taken with the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2)
aboard the Hubble Space Telescope (HST).
The image has been composed from three separate images taken in the light of ionized nitrogen (represented by red), hydrogen (green), and doubly-ionized oxygen (blue).

Il potere che governa il destino di ogni vivente è chiamato Aquila, non perché sia un’aquila, o abbia a che fare con un’aquila, ma perché appare al veggente come una immensa aquila nera come l’ebano, eretta come stanno erette le aquile, così alta da arrivare all’infinito.

Quando il veggente contempla il nero d’ebano dell’Aquila, quattro lame di luce rivelano quale sia il suo aspetto. Il primo, che è come il bagliore di un lampo, permette al veggente di individuare il contorno del corpo dell’Aquila. Ci sono chiazze di bianco che sembrano le penne e gli artigli di un’aquila. Un secondo bagliore di luce rivela un nero agitato e turbinoso che sembra simile alle ali di un’aquila. Con il terzo bagliore il veggente scorge un occhio acuto, non umano. E il quarto e ultimo bagliore gli rivela quello che l’Aquila sta facendo.

L’Aquila sta divorando la consapevolezza di quelle creature che un attimo prima vive sulla terra e ora morte si sono lasciate trasportare dall’aria come un interminabile sciame di lucciole, fino al suo rostro, per incontrare il loro padrone, la loro ragione di vita.

L’Aquila libera queste fiammelle, le spiana, come un conciatore stende una pelle, e poi le consuma; poiché la consapevolezza è il cibo dell’Aquila.

L’Aquila, quel potere che governa i destini di tutte le cose viventi, riflette esattamente e subito tutte queste cose viventi. Nessuno ha quindi la possibilità di supplicare l’Aquila, chiedere favori, sperare nella grazia. La parte umana dell’Aquila è troppo insignificante per smuovere il tutto. E solo dalle azioni dell’Aquila che un veggente può capire quello che essa desidera. L’Aquila, per quanto non si lasci toccare dalle condizioni di nessun essere vivente, concede a ciascuno di essi un dono. Ognuno, secondo i propri desideri e diritti, ha il potere, se vuole, di mantenere la fiamma della consapevolezza, il potere di disobbedire al richiamo della morte e della consunzione. A ciascun essere vivente è concesso il potere, se vuole, di cercare un passaggio verso la libertà, e di usarlo. Al veggente che scorge quel passaggio, e alle creature che lo attraversano, è evidente che l’Aquila ha concesso tale dono per perpetuare la consapevolezza.

Allo scopo di guidare verso quel passaggio gli esseri viventi, l’Aquila ha creato il Nagual. Il Nagual è un essere duplice a cui è stata rivelata la regola. Che abbia forma di essere umano, di animale, di pianta, o di qualsiasi altro essere vivente, il Nagual è spinto da questa sua duplicità a cercare il passaggio nascosto.

Il Nagual appare in coppia, maschio e femmina. Un uomo duplice, una donna duplice diventano Nagual solo dopo che a ciascuno di loro sia stata rivelata la regola e che ciascuno l’abbia capita e accettata senza riserve. All’occhio del veggente un Nagual, uomo o donna, appare come un uovo luminoso diviso in quattro parti. A differenza dei comuni esseri umani che hanno solo due lati, la sinistra e la destra, il Nagual ha il lato sinistro diviso in due lunghe sezioni, e il lato destro diviso nello stesso modo.

Tao cancrizzante

J.S. Bach, Musicalisches Opfer, Canone 1 a 2, 1747.
Animazione creata in POV-Ray da Jos Leys.
Musica eseguita da xantox con Clavicembalo fiammingo; manuale superiore.

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Canone cancrizzante

Una mattina, mentre stanno passeggiando nel parco,
Achille e la Tartaruga si incontrano per caso

Tartaruga: Buongiorno, Achille.

Achille: Altrettanto!

Tartaruga: Che piacere incontrarla.

Achille: Lei fa eco ai miei pensieri.

Tartaruga: Oggi è una giornata perfetta per una passeggiata. Penso che tornerò a casa a piedi.

Achille: Davvero? Credo che faccia molto bene passeggiare.

Tartaruga: Tra parentesi, lei sembra in forma smagliante in questi giorni devo dire.

Achille: Grazie.

Tartaruga: Di niente. Ma ecco: gradisce uno dei miei sigari? È un toscano, un po’ forte, ma…

Achille: Lei mi stupisce con questi suoi gusti! In questo campo i contributi olandesi sono di qualità decisamente superiore, non le pare?

Tartaruga: Non sono d’accordo con lei. Ma a proposito di gusti, qualche giorno fa, in una galleria, ho visto finalmente il Canone cancrizzante di M.C.Escher, il suo artista preferito, ed ho ammirato moltissimo la sua bellezza e l’arte raffinata con cui l’autore ha saputo intrecciare un unico tema con se stesso, sviluppandolo simultaneamente in avanti e all’indietro. Ma temo che continuerò a ritenere Bach superiore ad Escher.

Achille: Non so. Ma una cosa è certa: non do peso a questioni di gusto. Disputandum non est de gustibus.

Tartaruga: Oh! Ma guardi questo fiore, le piace? Mi sembra una strana margherita.

Achille: Ad essere precisi appartiene alla famiglia delle viole.

Tartaruga: A me sembra che sia più o meno la stessa cosa. Mi faccia capire meglio, per favore.

Achille: Viole no? C’è una bella differenza.

Tartaruga: Capisco. Ma mi dica, lei suona la chitarra?

Achille: È un mio caro amico che qualche volta l’ha suonata. Ma lei non riuscirebbe a farmi toccare una chitarra neanche con un toscano lungo tre metri.

(Improvvisamente, come dal nulla, appare il Granchio, saltellando tutto eccitato e indicandosi un occhio vistosamente nero)

granChio: Salve, salve, che succede? Che cosa c’è di nuovo? Guardate qui che botto, quest’occhio tutto rotto, che mi ha fatto un iroso giovanotto. Hoo! E in una giornata così bella. Vedete, io stavo ciondolando per il parco, quando s’avanza questo gigante toscano, un buttero d’aspetto animalesco che suonava lento il liuto. Era alto tre metri, se non ho le traveggole. Mi dirigo verso il giovanotto, mi impettisco quanto posso, il mio occhio arriva appena al suo ginocchio, e gli faccio: “Mi scusi signore, ma perchè s’aggira per il nostro parco attoscando l’aria col suo suono lutolento?”. Oh, non l’avessi mai detto! Un essere completamente privo di spirito; o forse era ubriaco, chissà! Perde il controllo e… pah! mi colpisce giusto nell’occhio. Fosse dipeso dalla mia natura, avrei accettato volentieri di sgranchirmi un po’ le ossa, ma nel rispetto dell’onorata tradizione della mia specie, ho indietreggiato. Dopotutto quando noi avanziamo, indietreggiamo. È un vizio incallito, non posso farci niente. Guardate pe esempio come scrivo il mio nome: prima scrivo la seconda sillaba, poi torno indietro per scrivere la prima! Vedete infatti dove metto la maiuscola? È nei nostri geni, sapete, girarci in tondo. Io mi sono sempre chiesto – ora mi torna in mente – “Cosa è venuto prima, il granChio o il Gene?”, vale a dire “Cosa è venuto dopo il Gene o il granChio?”. Io muovo ogni cosa in un eterno girotondo, sapete. È nei nostri geni, dopotutto. Quando indietreggiamo, avanziamo. Ahimè, ohibò! Io devo andar per la mia via felice, come un simil giorno inver s’addice. Cantate “Hoo” per la vita di un granChio! TATA! Olè!

(E scompare così come è apparso)

Tartaruga: È un mio caro amico, che qualche volta è un po’ suonato. Ma lei non riuscirebbe a farmi toccare un toscano lungo tre metri neanche con una chitarra.

Achille: Capisco. Ma mi dica, lei suona la chitarra?

Tartaruga: Violino. C’è una bella differenza.

Achille: A me sembra più o meno la stessa cosa. Mi faccia capire meglio, per favore.

Tartaruga: Ad essere precisi appartiene alla famiglia delle viole.

Achille: Oh! Ma guardi questo fiore, le piace? Mi sembra una strana margherita.

Tartaruga: Non so. Ma una cosa è certa: non do peso a questioni di gusto. Disputandum non est de gustibus.

Achille: Non sono d’accordo con lei. Ma a proposito di gusti, qualche giorno fa, a un concerto, ho ascoltato finalmente il Canone cancrizzante di J.S.Bach, il suo compositore preferito, e ho ammirato moltissimo la sua bellezza e l’arte raffinata con cui l’autore ha saputo intrecciare un unico tema con se stesso, sviluppandolo simultaneamente in avanti e all’indietro. Ma temo che continuerò a ritenere Escher superiore a Bach.

Tartaruga: Lei mi stupisce con i suoi gusti! In questo campo i contributi olandesi sono di qualità decisamente inferiore, non le pare?

Achille: Per niente. Ma, ecco: gradisce uno dei miei sigari? Non è forte come un toscano, ma…

Tartaruga: Grazie.

Achille: Tra parentesi, lei sembra in forma smagliante in questi giorni, devo dire.

Tartaruga: Davvero? Credo che faccia molto bene passeggiare.

Achille: Oggi è una giornata perfetta per una passeggiata. Penso che tornerò a casa a piedi.

Tartaruga: Lei fa eco ai miei pensieri.

Achille: Che piacere incontrarla.

Tartaruga: Altrettanto!

Achille: Buongiorno, signorina T.

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Percorsi Strani

il senso comune del Tao

Max Bill, Endless Ribbon, 1953

La ricerca di una via di mezzo per la descrizione della coscienza nella prospettiva enazionista porta a riconsiderare la prospettiva del senso comune:

Enaction: Embodied Cognition

Recovering Common Sense

The tacit assumption behind the varieties of cognitive realism (cognitivism,emergence, and the society of mind) has been that the world can be divided into regions of discrete elements and tasks. Cognition consists in problem solving, which must, if it is to be successful, respect the elements, properties, and relations within these pregiven regions.
This approach to cognition as problem solving works to some degree for task domains in which it is relatively easy to specify all possible states. Consider for example the game of chess. It is relatively easy to define the constituents of the "space of chess": there are positions on the board, rules for movements, turns that are taken, and so on. The limits of this space are clearly defined; in fact, it is an almost crystalline world. It is not surprising, then, that chess playing by computer is an advanced art.
For less circumscribed or well-defined task domains, however, this approach has proved to be considerably less productive. Consider, for example, a mobile robot that is supposed to drive a car within a city. One can still single out in this "driving space" discrete items, such as wheels and windows, red lights, and other cars. But unlike the world of chess playing, movement among objects is not a space that can be said to end neatly at some point. Should the robot pay attention to pedestrians or not? Should it take weather conditions into account? Or the country in which the city is located and its unique driving customs? Such a list of questions could go on forever. The driving world does not end at some point; it has the structure of ever-receding levels of detail that blend into a nonspecific background. Indeed, successfully directed movement such as driving depends upon acquired motor skills and the continuous use of common sense or background know-how.
Such commonsense knowledge is difficult, perhaps impossible, to package into explicit, propositional knowledge - "knowledge that" in the philosopher's jargon-since it is largely a matter of readiness to hand or "knowledge how" based on the accumulation of experience in a vast number of cases. Recent examinations of how skills are acquired appear to confirm this point.1 Furthermore, when we enlarge the task domains from artificial microworlds to the world at large, it is not clear that we can even specify what is to count as an object independent of the type of action that is being performed. The individuation of objects, properties, and events appears to vary according to the task at hand.

These points are not new to the field of cognitive science, although their full import has only begun to be appreciated. Indeed, it is fair to say that by the 1970s, after two decades of humblingly slow progress, it dawned on many workers in cognitive science that even the simplest cognitive action requires a seemingly infinite amount of knowledge, which we take for granted (it is so obvious as to be invisible) but which must be spoon-fed to the computer. The early cognitivist hope for a general problem solver had to be abandoned in favor of programs that would run in local knowledge domains, where small-scale problems could be solved and where the programmer could put into the machine as much of her background knowledge as was necessary. Similarly, the current connectionist strategy depends either on restricting the space of possible attractors by means of assumptions about the known properties of the world, which are incorporated as additional constraints for regularization, or, in more recent models, on using backpropagation methods where learning resembles the imitation of an external model. Thus in both cognitivism and connectionism, the unmanageable ambiguity of background common sense is left largely at the periphery of the inquiry, with the hope that it will somehow eventually be clarified.
If, however, our lived world does not have predefined boundaries, then it seems unrealistic to expect to capture commonsense understanding in the form of a representation-where representation is understood in its strong sense as the re-presentation of a pregiven world. Indeed, if we wish to recover common sense, then we must invert the representationist attitude by treating context-dependent know-how not as a residual artifact that can be progressively eliminated by the discovery of more sophisticated rules but as, in fact, the very essence of creative cognition.
This attitude toward common sense has begun to affect the field of cognitive science, especially in artificial intelligence. We should note, however, that the philosophical source for this attitude is to be found largely in recent Continental philosophy, especially in the school of philosophical hermeneutics, which is based in the early work of Martin Heidegger and his student Hans Gadamer.





















The term hermeneutics originally referred to the discipline of interpreting ancient texts, but it has been extended to denote the entire phenomenon of interpretation, understood as the enactment or bringing forth of meaning from a background of understanding. In general, Continental philosophers, even when they explicitly contest many of the assumptions underlying hermeneutics, have continued to produce detailed discussions that show how knowledge depends on being in a world that is inseparable from our bodies, our language, and our social history - in short, from our embodiment.
Although several cognitive scientists have recently turned to these discussions for inspiration, the spontaneous philosophy of cognitive science continues to resist such a nonobjectivist orientation. The varieties of cognitive realism are in particular strongly tied to analytic philosophy, which tends to view folk psychology as a tacit theory in need of either reduction or replacement. Indeed, it is fair to say that analytic philosophy in general resists this notion of cognition as embodied understanding.

Thus as Mark Johnson notes in a recent work,

The idea that understanding is an event in which one has a world, or, more properly, a series of ongoing related meaning events in which one's world stands forth, has long been recognized on the Continent, especially in the work of Heidegger and Gadamer. But Anglo-American analytic philosophy has steadfastly resisted this orientation in favor of meaning as a fixed relation between words and the world. It has been mistakenly assumed that only a viewpoint that transcends human embodiment, cultural embeddedness, imaginative understanding, and location within historically evolving traditions can guarantee the possibility of objectivity.

The central insight of this nonobjectivist orientation is the view that knowledge is the result of an ongoing interpretation that emerges from our capacities of understanding. These capacities are rooted in the structures of our biological embodiment but are lived and experienced within a domain of consensual action and cultural history.
They enable us to make sense of our world; or in more phenomenological language, they are the structures by which we exist in the manner of "having a world." To quote Johnson once more,

Meaning includes patterns of embodied experience and preconceptual structures of our sensibility (i.e., our mode of perception, or orienting ourselves, and of interacting with other objects, events, or persons). These embodied patterns do not remain private or peculiar to the person who experiences them. Our community helps us interpret and codify many of our felt patterns. They become shared cultural modes of experience and help to determine the nature of our meaningful, coherent understanding of our "world."

Although these themes are derived from Continental philosophy, most of the Continental discussions have proceeded without taking into consideration scientific research on cognition-the major exception being the early work of Merleau-Ponty. The challenge posed by cognitive science to the Continental discussions, then, is to link the study of human experience as culturally embodied with the study of human cognition in neuroscience, linguistics, and cognitive psychology. In contrast, the challenge posed to cognitive science is to question one of the more entrenched assumptions of our scientific heritage-that the world is independent of the knower. If we are forced to admit that cognition cannot be properly understood without common sense, and that common sense is none other than our bodily and social history, then the inevitable conclusion is that knower and known, mind and world, stand in relation to each other through mutual specification or dependent coorigination.
If this critique is valid, then scientific progress in understanding cognition will not be forthcoming unless we start from a different basis from the idea of a pregiven world that exists II out there" and is internally recovered in a representation. In recent years, a few researchers within cognitive science have taken this critique from the philosophical level into the laboratory and into specific work in AI. These researchers have put forth concrete proposals that involve a more radical departure from cognitivism than is found in the emergence approach, and yet they incorporate the ideas and methods developed within this context.

for unto us a Tao is born

Sir Colin Davis conducts the London Symphony Orchestra
Susan Gritton, Sara Mingardo, Mark Padmore, Alastair Miles and the Tenebrae choir
Recorded in December 2006.

il Libro Tao: dentro l'informazione - III

INSIDE INFORMATION

We do not need a new religion or a new bible. We need a new experience—a new feeling of what it is to be "I." The lowdown (which is, of course, the secret and profound view) on life is that our normal sensation of self is a hoax or, at best, a temporary role that we are playing, or have been conned into playing—with our own tacit consent, just as every hypnotized person is basically willing to be hypnotized.
The most strongly enforced of all known taboos is the taboo against knowing who or what you really are behind the mask of your apparently separate, independent, and isolated ego. I am not thinking of Freud's barbarous Id or Unconscious as the actual reality behind the façade of personality. Freud, as we shall see, was under the influence of a nineteenth-century fashion called "reductionism," a curious need to put down human culture and intelligence by calling it a fluky by-product of blind and irrational forces. They worked very hard, then, to prove that grapes can grow on thornbushes.
As is so often the way, what we have suppressed and overlooked is something startlingly obvious. The difficulty is that it is so obvious and basic that one can hardly find the words for it. The Germans call it a Hintergedanke, an apprehension lying tacitly in the back of our minds which we cannot easily admit, even to ourselves. The sensation of "I" as a lonely and isolated center of being is so powerful and commonsensical, and so fundamental to our modes of speech and thought, to our laws and social institutions, that we cannot experience selfhood except as something superficial in the scheme of the universe. I seem to be a brief light that flashes but once in all the aeons of time—a rare, complicated, and all-too-delicate organism on the fringe of biological evolution, where the wave of life bursts into individual, sparkling, and multicolored drops that gleam for a moment only to vanish forever. Under such conditioning it seems impossible and even absurd to realize that myself does not reside in the drop alone, but in the whole surge of energy which ranges from the galaxies to the nuclear fields in my body. At this level of existence "I" am immeasurably old; my forms are infinite and their comings and goings are simply the pulses or vibrations of a single and eternal flow of energy.
The difficulty in realizing this to be so is that conceptual thinking cannot grasp it. It is as if the eyes were trying to look at themselves directly, or as if one were trying to describe the color of a mirror in terms of colors reflected in the mirror. Just as sight is something more than all things seen, the foundation or "ground" of our existence and our awareness cannot be understood in terms of things that are known. We are forced, therefore, to speak of it through myth—that is, through special metaphors, analogies, and images which say what it is like as distinct from what it is. At one extreme of its meaning, "myth" is fable, falsehood, or superstition. But at another, "myth" is a useful and fruitful image by which we make sense of life in somewhat the same way that we can explain electrical forces by comparing them with the behavior of water or air. Yet "myth," in this second sense, is not to be taken literally, just as electricity is not to be confused with air or water. Thus in using myth one must take care not to confuse image with fact, which would be like climbing up the signpost instead of following the road.
Myth, then, is the form in which I try to answer when children ask me those fundamental metaphysical questions which come so readily to their minds: "Where did the world come from?" "Why did God make the world?" "Where was I before I was born?" "Where do people go when they die?" Again and again I have found that they seem to be satisfied with a simple and very ancient story, which goes something like this:
"There was never a time when the world began, because it goes round and round like a circle, and there is no place on a circle where it begins. Look at my watch, which tells the time; it goes round, and so the world repeats itself again and again. But just as the hour-hand of the watch goes up to twelve and down to six, so, too, there is day and night, waking and sleeping, living and dying, summer and winter. You can't have any one of these without the other, because you wouldn't be able to know what black is unless you had seen it side-by-side with white, or white unless side-by-side with black."
"In the same way, there are times when the world is, and times when it isn't, for if the world went on and on without rest for ever and ever, it would get horribly tired of itself. It comes and it goes. Now you see it; now you don't. So because it doesn't get tired of itself, it always comes back again after it disappears. It's like your breath: it goes in and out, in and out, and if you try to hold it in all the time you feel terrible. It's also like the game of hide-and-seek, because it's always fun to find new ways of hiding, and to seek for someone who doesn't always hide in the same place."
"God also likes to play hide-and-seek, but because there is nothing outside God, he has no one but himself to play with. But he gets over this difficulty by pretending that he is not himself. This is his way of hiding from himself. He pretends that he is you and I and all the people in the world, all the animals, all the plants, all the rocks, and all the stars. In this way he has strange and wonderful adventures, some of which are terrible and frightening. But these are just like bad dreams, for when he wakes up they will disappear."
"Now when God plays hide and pretends that he is you and I, he does it so well that it takes him a long time to remember where and how he hid himself. But that's the whole fun of it—just what he wanted to do. He doesn't want to find himself too quickly, for that would spoil the game. That is why it is so difficult for you and me to find out that we are God in disguise, pretending not to be himself. But when the game has gone on long enough, all of us will wake up, stop pretending, and remember that we are all one single Self—the God who is all that there is and who lives for ever and ever."
"Of course, you must remember that God isn't shaped like a person. People have skins and there is always something outside our skins. If there weren't, we wouldn't know the difference between what is inside and outside our bodies. But God has no skin and no shape because there isn't any outside to him. [With a sufficiently intelligent child, I illustrate this with a Möbius strip — a ring of paper tape twisted once in such a way that it has only one side and one edge.] The inside and the outside of God are the same. And though I have been talking about God as 'he' and not 'she,' God isn't a man or a woman. I didn't say 'it' because we usually say 'it' for things that aren't alive."

Aion mosaic, Glyptothek Munich

"God is the Self of the world, but you can't see God for the same reason that, without a mirror, you can't see your own eyes, and you certainly can't bite your own teeth or look inside your head. Your self is that cleverly hidden because it is God hiding."
"You may ask why God sometimes hides in the form of horrible people, or pretends to be people who suffer great disease and pain. Remember, first, that he isn't really doing this to anyone but himself. Remember, too, that in almost all the stories you enjoy there have to be bad people as well as good people, for the thrill of the tale is to find out how the good people will get the better of the bad. It's the same as when we play cards. At the beginning of the game we shuffle them all into a mess, which is like the bad things in the world, but the point of the game is to put the mess into good order, and the one who does it best is the winner. Then we shuffle the cards once more and play again, and so it goes with the world."
This story, obviously mythical in form, is not given as a scientific description of the way things are. Based on the analogies of games and the drama, and using that much worn-out word "God" for the Player, the story claims only to be like the way things are. I use it just as astronomers use the image of inflating a black balloon with white spots on it for the galaxies, to explain the expanding universe. But to most children, and many adults, the myth is at once intelligible, simple, and fascinating. By contrast, so many other mythical explanations of the world are crude, tortuous, and unintelligible. But many people think that believing in the unintelligible propositions and symbols of their religions is the test of true faith. "I believe," said Tertullian of Christianity, "because it is absurd."

il Libro Tao: dentro l'informazione - II

layla Tao

Eric Clapton, David Sanborn, Joe Sample, Steve Gadd, Marcus Miller, Montreux Jazz Festival


Live Aid 1985


The Royal Albert Hall, 1988

binari meta-Tao

La successiva metastruttura discussa da Tyler Volk e Jeff Bloom sono i binari, la struttura più semplice per modellare una relazione complessa tra elementi e tra le parti e il tutto di un sistema:

Background

Binaries are the simplest form of complex relations. More complex relations involve increasing numbers of components (e.g., trinaries, quaternaries, and so forth). Such binary relations are the most economical (in a variety of senses) way to generate complex wholes with significant new properties. Binaries involve senses of separation and/or unity, duality, and tension. They also provide for a synergy between parts and wholes.

The Red Square Nebula (MWC 922) is a bipolar nebula appearing as an orange square in its center with red bowl-shaped gas and dust toward the top right and bottom left of the image. The infrared image was taken using the Mt. Palomar Hale telescope in California and the Keck II Telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii, and released in April 2007. According to Sydney University astrophysicist Peter Tuthill, this nebula is one of the most symmetrical celestial objects ever discovered because of its unique shape. There is no clear explanation of how the central star could produce the nebula's shape, but one possible explanation is that these two outer faint radial spokes are shadows cast by periodic ripples or waves on the surface of an inner disk close to the central star.

Examples

• In science: bilateral symmetry (including two eyes, nostrils, ears, appendages, etc.); positive and negative particles, ions, electrodes, etc.; male and female; opposing forces; diurnal and nocturnal; dorsal and ventral; space and time; acid and base; DNA with component pairs and paired helices; inhale and exhale; respiration and photosynthesis; mass and volume; high pressure; low pressure; perception as the recognition of difference; form and function; acceleration and deceleration; etc.

• In architecture and design: inside and outside and the associated dynamics between them in buildings; entrance and exit; up and down passages; etc.

• In art: light and dark; monotone and multicolored; tensions between parts; attraction and repulsion (emotionally); etc.

• In social sciences: report talk and rapport talk; leader and follower; positive and negative attitudes; consumer and producer; active and passive; aggressive; trust and distrust; unity and disunity or separation; etc.

• In other senses: distal and proximal; all or nothing; night and day; open and closed; on and off; asleep and awake; old and young; love and hate; etc.

Metapatterns

The Pattern Underground