Successo (6 di Bastoni)

Questa figura è chiaramente 'in cima al mondo' in questo momento, e il mondo intero sta celebrando il suo successo con una parata! Grazie alla tua disponibilità ad accettare le sfide più recenti della vita, adesso sei - o lo sarai molto presto - in grado di goderti un meraviglioso giro in groppa alla tigre del successo. Dai il benvenuto a quest'opportunità, godila e condividi con gli altri la tua gioia - ma ricorda che tutte le fantasmagoriche parate hanno un inizio e una fine. Se lo tieni a mente, e spremi ogni goccia del nettare di felicità che stai sperimentando in questo momento, sarai in grado di accogliere il futuro, quando verrà, senza rimpianti. Ma non farti tentare dalla voglia di aggrapparti a questo momento di abbondanza, né tentare di avvolgerlo nella plastica per farlo durare per sempre... La più grande saggezza da tenere in mente rispetto a tutti i fenomeni che accompagnano la parata della vita - che siano valli o vette - è che “anche questo passerà”. Certo, celebra pure, e continua a cavalcare la tigre.

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Osserva le onde dell'oceano. Più si elevano verso l'alto, più profondo è il riflusso che segue. Per un istante sei l'onda, l'attimo dopo sei la scia vuota che segue. Godi entrambe le cose, non assuefarti a nessuna delle due. Non dire: “Vorrei essere sempre sulla vetta”. Non è possibile. Cerca di capire questo fatto: non è possibile. Non è mai accaduto e non accadrà mai. È semplicemente impossibile - non è nella natura delle cose. Allora che fare? Goditi la vetta finché dura e poi, quando viene, goditi la valle. Che male c'è nella valle? Cosa c'è di male nell'essere giù? È un rilassamento. Una vetta è eccitazione, e nessuno può vivere in uno stato di continua eccitazione.

lungo le strade del Tao

Cut and Fold, Erik Johansson

Postcards from Google Earth

Vertical Turn, Erik Johansson

Postcards from Google Earth

Go on your own road, Erik Johansson

Postcards from Google Earth

Roadworkers coffe break, Erik Johansson

difesa del Tao - II

Piero della Francesca, Madonna col Bambino e quattro angeli, dettaglio, 1475-1482, Clark Art Institute

Defenses of Faith

But to say that consciousness may make impossible some desired sequence of events is only to invoke familiar experience – a common substitute for explanation in the behavioural sciences. Credibility may thereby be established, but mystery remains.
The road to explanation lies first through abduction and thence to mapping the phenomena onto tautology. I have argued elsewhere that individual mind and phylogenetic evolution are a useful abductive pair – are mutually cases under similar tautological rules.
If you want to explain a psychological phenomenon, go look at biological evolution; and if you want to explain some phenomenon in evolution, try to find formal psychological analogies, and take a look at your own experience of what it is to have – or be – a mind. Epistemology, the pattern which connects, is, after all, one, not many.
I therefore shall analyze the flaw in the Lamarckian hypothesis and compare it with the problem of the Ancient Mariner. It is so that ―inheritance of acquired characteristics‖ would induce into biological evolution the same sort of confusion and blockage that sending the Ancient Mariner to the South Seas to find sea snakes would introduce into the process of his escape prom guilt? If the comparison be valid, it will surely throw light on both the evolutionary and the human mental process.
I am interested, at this moment, only in the formal objections to the Lamarckian hypothesis. It is no doubt correct to say that (a) there is no experimental evidence for such inheritance and (b) no connection can be imagined by which news of an acquired characteristic (say a strengthened right biceps brought about by exercise) could be transmitted to the ova or spermatozoa of the individual organism. But these otherwise very important considerations are not relevant to the problem of the Ancient Mariner and his self-consciousness In these respects there is no analogy between the Ancient Mariner and the hypothetical Lamarckian organism. There is plenty of evidence for the assertion that conscious purpose may distort spontaneity and, alas, plenty of pathways of internal communication by which such messages and injunctions may travel. I ask instead, what would the whole of biology look like if the inheritance of acquired characteristics were general? What would be the effect on biological evolution of such a hypothetical process?
Darwin was driven to the Lamarckian fallacy by time. He believed that the age of the earth was insufficient to provide time for the vast sweep of evolutionary process and, in order to speed up his model of evolution, he introduced into that model the Lamarckian hypothesis. To rely only on random genetic change combined with natural selection seemed insufficient, and Lamarckian inheritance would provide a shortcut, speeding things up by introducing something like purpose into the system. And, notably, our hypothetical procedure for the cure of the Ancient Mariner‘s guilt was likewise an introduction of purpose into that system. Should the Ancient Mariner go purposeless on his voyage, or should he deliberately search for sea snakes with the purpose of blessing them and so escaping from his guilt? Purpose will save time. If he knows what he is looking for, he will waste no time in scanning the arctic seas.
What then is a shortcut? What is wrong with the proposed shortcuts in evolution and in the resolution of guilt? What is wrong, in principle, with shortcuts?
In a large variety of cases – perhaps in all cases in which the shortcut generates trouble – the root of the matter is an error in logical typing. Somewhere in the sequence of actions and ideas, we can expect to find a class treated as though it were one of its members; or a member treated as though it were identical with the class; a uniqueness treated as a generality or a generality treated as a uniqueness. It is legitimate (and usual) to think of a process or change as an ordered class of states, but a mistake to think of any one of these states as if it were the class of which it is only a member. According to the Lamarckian hypothesis, an individual parent organism is to pass onto its offspring through the digital machinery of genetics some somatic characteristic acquired in response to environmental stress. The hypothesis asserts that ―the acquired characteristic is inherited‖ and there the matter is left as though these words could be meaningful.
It is characteristic of the individual creature that, under environmental conditions of use and disuse, etc., it will change. All right. But this is not the characteristic that is supposedly passed on; not the potentiality for change but the state achieved by the change is what is to be inherited, and that characteristic is not inherent in the parent. According to hypothesis the offspring should differ from the parent in that they will show the supposedly inherited characteristic even when the environmental conditions do not demand it.
But to assert that the man-made hypothesis of the inheritance of acquired characteristics is semantic nonsense in not the same as to assert that if the hypothesis were true, the whole process of evolution would be bogged down. What is crucial is that the individual creature would be inflicting upon its offspring a rigidity from which the parent did not suffer. It is this loss of flexibility that would be lethal to the total process.
So – if there be formal analogy between the case of Lamarckian ―inheritance‖ and the conscious purpose that might block the release of the Ancient Mariner from his guilt, we should look in the latter case for an error in classification that would prevent the desired change – error in which a process is treated as a state. It is precisely the conscious reification of his guilt in the Albatross that makes it impossible for the Ancient Mariner to get rid of his guilt. Guilt is not a thing. The matter must be handed over to more unconscious mental processes whose epistemology is less grotesque. (And if the Mariner is to solve his problem, he must not know he is doing so).
Consciousness is necessarily very limited. That it is so limited is perhaps best demonstrated by an example from a set of experiments on perception that were pioneered by an ophthalmologist, Adelbert Ames, Jr., now, alas, deceased. He showed that in the act of vision you rely on a whole mass of presuppositions, which you cannot inspect or state in words – such abstract rules as those of parallax and perspective. Using them you construct your mental image.
It is epistemologically inaccurate to say that "you see me". What you see is an image of me made by processes of which you are quite unconscious.
It would be nonsense, of course, to say that "you" make these images. You have almost no control over the making of them. (And if you had that sort of control, your trust in the images that perception displays before your inner eye would be much reduced.)
So we all make – my mental processes make for me – this beautiful quilt. Patches of green and brown, black and white as I walk through the woods. But I cannot by introspection investigate that creative process. I know which way I aim my eyes and I am conscious of the product of perception, but I know nothing of the middle process by which the images are formed.
That middle process is governed by presuppositions. What Adelbert Ames discovered was a method of investigating those presuppositions, and an account of his experiments is a good way of arriving at a recognition of the importance of these presuppositions of which we are normally unaware.
If I am travelling in a moving train, the cows on the embankment seem to get left behind while the distant mountains seem to travel with me. On the basis of this difference in appearances, an image is created in which the mountains are depicted as farther from me than the cows. The underlying premise is that that which gets left behind is closer to me than that which seems to go along with me or which is more slowly left behind.
...
The Ames experiments can be used to demonstrate two important notions, first that the images we experience are not "out there," and second that we are, perhaps necessarily, unaware of what is going on in our own minds. We think we see, but actually we create images, all unconsciously. What then is one to make of Descartes‘ famous conclusion, cogito, ergo sum?
The cogito is ambiguous. At what level are we to interpret it? What does it mean? What is it to think? What is it to be? Does it mean "I think that I think, and therefore I think I am"? Can I in fact know that I think? And are we, in reaching such a conclusion, relying on presuppositions of which we are unaware?
There is a discrepancy of logical type between "think" and "be." Descartes is trying to jump from the frying pan of thought, ideas, images, opinions, arguments, etc., into the fire of existence and action. But that jump is itself unmapped. Between two such contrasting universes there can be no ergo – no totally self-evident link. There is no looking before the leap from cogito to sum.
Parallel to the cogito is another deep epistemological generalization: I see, therefore it is. Seeing is believing. We might roughly Latinize this to include the other senses, even though sight carries the greatest conviction for most people, as percipio, ergo est.
The two halves of Descartes'cogito refer to a single subject, a first person singular, but in the percipio there are two subjects: I and it. These two subjects are separated by the circumstances of imagery. The "it" which I perceive is ambiguous: is it my image which I make? Or is it some object outside of myself – the Ding an sich of which I make an image? Or perhaps there is no "it".
In English the separation is forced upon us by the structure of our language, but the Latin makes no explicit cleavage between the event of thinking and the thinker. It does not separate the pronoun from the verb. That separation could come later, much later, and raises another set of epistemological problems.
The first miracle is the event of thinking, which can (also later) be named. The problems multiply as we explore further. Warren McCulloch long ago pointed out that every message is both command and report. In the simplest case, a sequence of three neurons – A, B, and C – the firing of B is a report that "A recently fired" and a command: "C must quickly fire". In one aspect the neural impulse refers to the past, in the other aspect it determines a future. B‘s report is, in the nature of the case, never totally reliable, for the firing of A can never be the only possible cause of B‘s later firing: Neurons sometimes fire "spontaneously". In principle, no causal network is to be read backwards. Similarly, C may fail to obey B‘s injunction.
There are gaps in this process, which make the sequential firing of neurons unsure; and there are multiple such gaps on the way to propositions like the cogito that are at first glance "self-evident". In the aggregates of propositions that are called "faiths," or religious creeds, it is ultimately not the propositions that assert indubitable and self-evident truth but the links between them. It is these links that we dare not doubt – and indeed doubt is comfortingly excluded by the logical or quasi-logical nature of the links. We are defended from doubt by an unawareness of the gaps.
But the jump is always there. If I look my through my corporeal eyes and see an image of the rising sun, the propositions "I look" and "I see" have a sort of validity different from that of any conclusion about the world outside my skin. "I see a sun rising" is a proposition that indeed, as Descartes insists, cannot be doubted, but the extrapolation from this to the outside world – "There is a sun" – is always unsure and must be supported by faith. Another problem is that all such images are retrospective. The assertion of the image, qua description of the external world, is always in a past tense. Our senses can only tell us at best what was so a moment ago. We do in fact read the causal sequence backwards. But this fundamentally unreliable information is delivered to the perceiving self in the most convincing and indubitable form as an image. It is this faith – a faith in our own mental process – that must always be defended!
It is commonly thought that faith is necessary for religion – that the supernatural aspects of mythology must not be questioned – so the gap between the observer and the supernatural is covered by faith. But when we recognize the gap between cogito and sum, and the similar gap between percipio and est, "faith" comes to have quite a different meaning. Gaps such as these are a necessity of our being, to be covered by "faith" in a very intimate and deep sense of that word.
Then what is ordinarily called “religion,” the net of ritual, mythology, and mystification, begins to show itself as a sort of cocoon woven to protect that more intimate – and utterly necessary – faith.
By some admirable and mysterious skill, some miracle of neural circuitry, we form images of that which we see. The forming of such images is in fact what we call "seeing." But to base complete belief upon the image is an act of faith. This faith is, in a healthy mind, involuntary and unconscious. You cannot doubt the validity of your images when these are accompanied by that extra tag of information which says that the material for the given image was collected by a sense organ.
How lucky we are, how good is God – that we cannot perceive the process of our creation of our own images! These miraculous mental processes are simply not accessible to tour conscious inspection.
When you are dizzy and the floor seems to heave up towards you, only by the exercise of trained determination can you act upon your "knowledge" that, of course, the floor is remaining stationary, as it should. Indeed, that greater faith accompanied by will, whereby we resist the response to dizziness, is I think always supported by a conscious scepticism regarding the visual-kinesthetic imagery. We can say to ourselves, "I know that this swirling floor and walls is a misleading product of my processes of image formation." But even so, there is no consciousness of the processes by which the swirling images were made – only a consciousness that they are indeed artefact. We can know about the processes of perception, but we cannot be directly aware of them. [Even at this level, however, consciousness opens the door to tinkering.]
If we had continual awareness of our image-making processes, our images would cease to be credible. It is indeed a merciful dispensation that we know not the processes of our own creativity – which sometimes are the processes of self-deceit.
To be unconscious of these processes is the first line of our defense against loss of faith. A little faith in perception is vitally necessary, and by packing our data into the form of images, we convince ourselves of the validity of our belief. Seeing is believing. But faith is in believing that seeing is believing. As Blake said of the "corporeal", which we believe we know, "It is in Fallacy, and its Existence an imposture."
Still, all of this is familiar. It is platitude to assert that every perception and every link between perception and motion is made possible by faith in presuppositions. Hamlet reminds his mother, "Sense sure you have, else you could have no motion."
The links between sense and motion are indispensable to living, but the links depend always upon presuppositions that are commonly either absolutely inaccessible to consciousness, or momentarily left unexamined in the immediacy of action. There is no time for more than a little consciousness.
The matter becomes more subtle, more coercive, and somewhat more mysterious when we ask formally analogous questions about larger systems, such as groups of organisms, and particularly about families, communities, and tribes, constellations of organisms who (partially at least) share what anthropologists call "culture."
One of the meanings of that overworked word is the local epistemology, the aggregate of presuppositions that underlie all communication and interaction between persons, even in dyads, groups with only two members.
[It is at this point that our discussion of perception links up with the discussion of inheritance, for in each case the fact that many presuppositions are inaccessible to examination or alteration results in a certain conservatism, since that which is outside of awareness is also unquestioned. It may be useful, then, to examine the conservatism characteristic of all such systems of presuppositions and the mechanisms by which such systems are maintained and kept stable.]
Young men-in-a-hurry may be impatient of such conservatism, and psychiatrists may diagnose conservatism as pathological rigidity, etc., etc. But I am not concerned at the moment to reach judgements of value, only to understand the processes and their necessity.
Of all interactional conservative devices, undoubtedly the most fundamental – most ancient and profound, and most instructive as providing a diagram of what I am talking about – is sex.
We forget so easily – and by forgetting we preserve our presuppositions unexamined – that the prime function of the sexual component in reproduction (literally the production of the similar) is the maintenance of similarity among the members of the species. And here similarity is the necessary condition for viability of communication and interaction.
The mechanism and its goal become identical: that compatibility which is necessary for interaction is maintained by creating a test-tube trial of similarity. If the gametes are not sufficiently similar, a zygote formed from their meeting cannot survive. At the cellular level every living organism is the embodiment of a tested sharing of biological presuppositions.
Tests against the outside world will come later – many of them. At the moment of fertilization – fusion of gametes – each gamete is a validating template for the other. What is surely tested is the chromosomal constitution of each, but no doubt the similarity of the whole cellular structure is also verified. And not that this first test is not the meaning of the chromosomal message, the process of epigenesist and the later outcome in the developed individual or phenotype that will be tested by the need to survive in a given environment. The test is just a proofreader‘s trick, comparing the format of one text with that of the other, but ignoring the nature and meaning of the message material which is being tested. Other tests will come later and will not be exclusively conservative.
Samuel Butler famously asserted that "the hen is an egg‘s way of making another egg." We might amplify that to say that the hen is the proof (the test) of the excellence of the egg; and that the moment of fusion between two gametes is the first proof or test of their mutual excellence. Note that excellence is in some sense always mutual; the conservatism whose mechanics I am discussing is always interactive.
From these very elementary generalities, it is possible to proceed in several directions, which can only be suggested here. There is the undoubted truth that the relations between presuppositions (in some widest sense of that word) are never simply dyadic. We must go on to consider a greater complexity. It is not a matter of simple dyadic comparison as my reference to sexual fusion might seem to suggest. We can begin by considering a pair of gametal characteristics that meet in fertilization. But always each must exist in the context of many characteristics, and the comparison will not be a simple yes-or-no test of similarity but a complex fitting or wrestling together (in real time) of related but never totally similar networks of propositions, which must combine in a coherent set of injunctions for the epigenesist and growth of the organism. There is room for – indeed there is benefit from – a little variation, but only a limited amount.
That‘s one component of the picture – the increasing complexity as we go on from dyadic to more complex relations between the items of presupposition. (We could use an alternative term that is virtually synonymous and speak of "preconceptions" – in a literal, prezygotic sense!)
The second pathway of increasing complexity we are invited to follow by the infinitely complex and systemic biosphere is a spin-off from the way systems are nested within systems, the fact of hierarchical organizations. For instance, as natural historians on the family we face a more than dyadic constellation of persons. To the nondyadic tangle of related presuppositions, we must add the nondyadic tangle of persons in which the family is the mechanism of cultural transmission. In looking at human beings we deal not simply with genetics, the digital names for settings of the bias of the system, but with another order of change – the facts of learning and teaching. (And do not forget that in what is called "cultural transmission," parents learn from and are as much changed as their children!)
The complexity of the phenomena is beginning to run away with us and whenever that happens, the correct and orthodox procedure is reductionism – to stand off from the data and consider what sort of simplified (always oversimplified) mapping will do least damage tot eh elegant interconnections of the observed world.
We must take care, however, to preserve in our theories at least the biological nature (cybernetic, hierarchic, holistic, nonlineal, systemic nature – call it what you will) of the world and our relations to it. Let us not pretend that mental phenomena can be mapped onto the characteristics of billiard balls.

difesa del Tao - I

Tao di fuoco

FIREBIRD BURNT A NAUTILUS SNAIL b, Igor Eugen Prokop

Cimitero di San Michele, Venice, Italy

Tao Paradoxico-Philosophicus 23-25

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

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TRACTATUS PARADOXICO-PHILOSOPHICUS

23	Searching for “Reality”: consider logical observers forming hierarchies to reach for “reality”.
23.1	However, these hierarchies make any decision from the “top” seem appropriate, since it elicits no resistance or criticism from “below” due to implicit or explicit intimidation from “above”.
23.2	Hierarchies stimulate irresponsibility, arrogance and slave holding towards the top and diligence, obedience and slavery towards the bottom.
23.3	Foresight, creativity and imagination vanish at all levels, making of these hierarchies a population of ants in an anthill, predictable creatures, and humans no more.
23.4	“Reality”, chosen (distinguished) towards the top of the hierarchy and accepted towards the bottom remains a firmly adopted delusion as any other unquestioned belief.

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24	Tentative realities: consider paradoxical observers that choose (invent) many complex (self-organizing, unpredictable) environments that include the observers.
24.1	Tentative realities correspond to as many or more flexible, unpredictable environments as paradoxical observers involved.
24.2	These observers interact through the processes shared by their paradoxical contexts, defined by the observers and their cognitive domains.
24.21	They interact through tentative environments and playing tentative language-games.
24.3	Since organizationally closed unities define and maintain themselves, they appear to these observers as the only possible unities.
24.31	All the rest appears to these observers as a mere consequence of their activity: tentative environments, with all their tentative distinctions and interactions, offered by paradoxical observers to themselves and to others through education and rejected or adopted by logical observers through instruction.
24.32	All originates and ends in the observers (organizationally closed unities).

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25	Propositions and distinctions: while using language, logical observers make distinctions, thereby attaching specific possibilities of truth (true or false), of value (good or bad), of inclusion (included or excluded), of logic (logical or paradoxical), etc., to propositions (including this one) and to sets of propositions (such as books, texts, etc.).
25.1	These observers explain and communicate among each other adopting or rejecting propositions about objects and events, morality, aesthetic, beliefs, etc., as if propositions mirrored a world “out there” (“reality”) separated from the observer of the world.
25.11	These observers adopt a language and theorize.
25.12	This leads to knowledge inspired by logical reasoning alone, to information, to certainty and to scientific understanding alone, to incomprehension and to dogmatism.

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 20-22

illustrazione del Tao

Caseggiato, Roberto Innocenti

Nutckracker, Roberto Innocenti

Pinocchio impiccato, Roberto Innocenti

illusione del Tao

Illusions Point.com

Il secondo argomento trattato da Charles T. Tart nella seconda parte di Stati di Coscienza riguarda lo stato di illusione della coscienza ordinaria descritto da diverse tradizioni:

Speculation

Ordinary Consciousness as a State of Illusion

A belief common to almost all spiritual disciplines is that the human being is ordinarily in a state of consciousness described by such words as illusion, waking dreaming, waking hypnosis, ignorance, maya (Indian), or samsara (Buddhist). The realization of this unsatisfactorily nature of one's ordinary d-SoC serves as the impetus for purifying it and/or attaining d-ASCs that are considered clearer and more valuable. This chapter considers the nature of samsara [I use the Buddhist term samsara in a general sense to indicate a d-SoC (ordinary or nonordinary) dominated by illusion, as detailed throughout this chapter, rather than in a technically strict Buddhist sense. I express my appreciation to Tarthong Tulku, Rinpoche, for helping me understand the Buddhist view.] (illusion) form the viewpoint of a Western psychologist. This interpretation does not present a full understanding of the concept of samsara or related concepts, but is simply a way of expressing it that should be useful to other Westerners. This understanding flows partly from the systems approach developed in previous chapters.
Consciousness, as we ordinarily know it in the West, is not pure awareness but rather awareness as it is embodied in the psychological structure of the mind or the brain. Ordinary experience is of neither pure awareness nor pure psychological structure, but of awareness embedded in and modified by the structure of the mind/brain, and of the structure of the mind/brain embedded in and modified by awareness. These two components, awareness and psychological structures constitute a gestalt, an overall interacting, dynamic system that makes up consciousness.
To most orthodox Western psychologists awareness is a by-product of the brain. This primarily reflects a commitment to certain physicalistic concepts rather than any real understanding of what awareness is. In most spiritual disciplines, awareness is considered to exist, or have potential to exist, independently of brain structure.

Figure 19-1. Development of samsaric consciousness.

Let us now take a Western, psychological look at how ordinary consciousness can be a state of illusion, samsara. Figure 19-1 represents the psychological processes of a person we shall call Sam at six succeeding instants of time, labeled T1 through T6. The vertical axis represents stimuli from the external world received in the six succeeding instants of time; the horizontal axis represents internal, psychological processes occurring through these six succeeding instants of time. The ovals represent the main psychological contents that are in the focus of consciousness, what Sam is mainly conscious of, where almost all the attention/awareness (energy) is. The arrows represent information flow; labels along the arrows indicate the nature of that information flow. The small circles containing the letter A represent internal psychological associations provoked by the external stimuli or by other internal associations: they are structures, the machinery of the mind.
Figure 19-1 is a flow diagram of what happens in Sam's mind, how information comes in to him and how this information is reacted to. Some of the effects are deliberately exaggerated to make points, so Sam appears psychotic in rather paranoid way. As is discussed later, this example is not really so very different from our own ordinary consciousness.
In terms of the external world, a stranger walks up to Sam and says, "Hi, my name is Bill." For simplicity, we assume that this is all that happens of consequence in the external world, even though in everyday life such a message usually accompanied by other messages expressed in gestures and bodily postures, modified by the setting in which they occur, etc. But the defined reality here is that they stranger says, "Hi, my name is Bill." This utterance occupies the first five sequential units of time.
At time T1 the oval contains the label Primary Meaning, indicating that the focus of conscious awareness is the word Hi. Although this is shown as a simple perception it is not a simple act. The word Hi would be a meaningless pattern of sounds except for the fact that Sam has already learned to understand the English language and thus perceives not only the sound qualities of the word Hi, but also its agreed-upon meaning. Already we are dealing not only with awareness per se, but with relatively permanent psychological structures that automatically give conventional meaning to language. Sam is an enculturated person.
The straightforward perception of the meaning of this word in its agreed-upon form is an instance of clear or relatively enlightened consciousness within the given consensus reality. Someone says Hi to you and you understand that this is a greeting synonymous with words like hello and greetings.
We can hypothesize that a relatively clear state of mind in the period T1 through T5 consists of the following. At each instant in time, the stimulus word being received is clearly perceived in the primary focus of consciousness with its agreed-upon meaning, and there is a sufficient memory continuity across these instants of time to understand the sequence. Information from each previous moment of consciousness is passed clearly on to the next, so that the meaning of the overall sequence of worlds is understood. For example, at time T2 not only is the word my perceived clearly but the word Hi has been passed on internally from time T1 as a memory, so Sam perceives that the sequence is Hi, my. Similarly by time T5, there is primary perception of the agreed-upon meaning of the word Bill, coupled with a clear memory of Hi, my name is from the preceding four instants of time. This simple message of the speaker is thus perceived for exactly what it is.
Figure 19-1, however, shows a much more complex process than this clear perception of primary stimulus information. my own psychological observations have convinced me that this more complex process takes place all the time, and the straightforward, relatively clear perception described above is a rarity, especially for any prolonged period of time. So, let us look at this diagram of samsara in detail.
Again, we start with the primary meaning reception of the word Hi at time T1. At the T2, however, not only is there a primary, undistorted reception of the word my, but internally an association has taken place to the word Hi. This association is that PRICES ARE HIGH. This is deliberately an illogical (by consensus reality standards) association, based on the sound of the word and involving some departure from the primary meaning of the word Hi used as a greeting. In spite of our culture's veneration of logic, most of our psychological processes are not logical. (Ignore the label DEROPP'S "WATCHMAN AT THE GATE" ENTERS HERE for the time being.)
The association PRICES ARE HIGH is not obviously pathological or nonadaptive at this point. Since prices on so many commodities have risen greatly, it is a likely association to hearing the word Hi, even though it does not strictly follow from the context of the actual stimulus situation. The pathology begins, the mechanism of samsara begins operating, in the fact that this association is not made in the full focus of consciousness but on the fringes of or even outside consciousness. Most attention/awareness energy is focused on the perception of my and the memory of Hi, so they are perceived clearly, but some attention/ awareness energy, too little for clear consciousness, started "leaking" at T1 and activated an association structure. The primary focus of consciousness at time T2 is on the stimulus word my. The association PRICES ARE HIGH, operating on the fringes of consciousness, is shown as sending some informational content or feeling about money in general into the primary focus of consciousness at time T2, but it is secondary content, with too little energy to be clear.
If associational activities decay or die out at this simple level, the state of samsara will not occur. But psychological processes that operate outside the clear focus of consciousness tend to get out of hand, acting much the same as implicit you are totally controlled by it as it does not occur to you to question it.
Let us assume that the association PRICES ARE HIGH triggers a further association during time T2 because of the word HIGH, and this is an association of the sort I NEVER GET HIGH. This second association then connects up at time T3 with emotionally charged concerns of Sam's, represented by the arrow as PREPOTENT NEED/DRIVE #1. Given the particular personality and concerns of this person (he worries because he never gets high), this is a constant, dynamically meaningful preoccupation with him and carries much psychical energy. In colloquial terms, Sam has had "one of his buttons pushed," even though there was no "good" reason for it to be pushed. Uncontrolled attention/awareness energy activated a structure to which other psychological/emotional energy was connected. Now we begin t o deal not just with simple information but with information that is emotionally important. In this particular example, this information is activating and has a negative, depressed quality. At time T3, when this prepotent need is activated, psychical energy flows into the main focus of consciousness. Also, the activation of this prepotent need/drive activates, by habit, a particular chain of associations centered around the idea that PEOPLE TAKE ADVANTAGE OF ME. This kind of associational content also begins to flow into the main focus of consciousness at time T3.
Now let us look closely at time T3 in terms of the primary focus of consciousness. In terms of how we have defined relatively clear functioning of this system of consciousness, the information Hi, my should be and is being delivered from the previous moment of consciousness at time T2 to provide continuity. However, the relatively irrelevant association of money and the price of things, represented by the dollar sign, is also being delivered as if it were primary meaning, coming from the preceding primary focus of consciousness, even though it actually represents associational meaning that has slipped in. Because it was not clearly perceived as an association in the first place, it gets mixed up with the primary perceptions as memory transfers it from T2 to T3. A general activation energy of negative tone is flowing in from the prepotent need that is active at this time as well as the associational contents that PEOPLE TAKE ADVANTAGE OF ME. Because of the highly charged energy that goes with these associational contents, the primary focus of consciousness at time T3 is labeled semidelusion; the primary focus of Sam's consciousness now begins to center around associational material while under the mistaken impression that it is centering around actual information coming in from the world. By identification with this associational material and the prepotent need activated, Sam begins to live in his associations, in a kind of (day) dream rather than in a clear perception of the world.
Psychologists are well aware of the phenomenon known as perceptual defense, of the selectivity of perception, of the fact that we more readily see what we want to see, tend not to see what we do not want to see, and/or distort what we do perceive into what we would to perceive. What we would "like to" perceive may often seem unpleasant, yet it has secondary advantages insofar as it is supportive of the ego structure.
To indicate distortion of perception, a partial misperception of the actual stimulus is shown (the word name at time T3) in that the a gets dropped out of name as it enters primary consciousness. While much of the original stimulus gets through and provides materials (in this case the other letters) for later processing, some of it drops out. This process of filtering perceptions, rejecting some things, distorting others, is a major characteristic of samsara. We tend to perceive selectively those elements of situations that support our preexisting beliefs and feelings.
Having reached a state of semidelusion, we now see that instead of the real information Hi, my name, a distorted mixture is being transmitted, consisting of some of the actual information hat came in plus some of the associations and emotional energy that have come via the associations. Some fragments of stimuli coming in are being distorted to fit in with the beginnings of delusion brought about by the prepotent need and associational chains. Thus the S quality of the dollar sign $ becomes more an S, and the Hi turns into a HIS, and the my then becomes opposed to the HIS in a classic dichotomy. The letters m and e from name now stand in isolation, affected by the emotional charge of the dichotomy HIS and my, so it becomes HIS and ME. Because of the intensity added by the flow of energy at time T3, all the components of stimuli may be arranged to spell the word ENEMY, further reinforcing the HIS-my dichotomy. Elements of the situation are automatically reworked by the Input-Processing subsystem to fit the emerging theme of consciousness.
Thus at time T4 the primary focus of consciousness may be considered fully delusional in the sense that the internal, charged processes, the associational and emotional processes, distort perception so greatly that we can truly speak of Sam as being deluded or out of contact with the world. We now not only have selective perception in the sense of filtering and rejection, shown as the fourth stimulus word is being totally rejected here, but we now begin to get the psychological process known as projection, where internal processes become so strong that they are projected onto the environment and wrongly perceived as actual perceptions. Internal processes and memories are fed back into Input-Processing and reemerge in awareness with the quality of perception added. In this case the feelings about the conflict between HIS and my and about ENEMY and about PEOPLE TAKE ADVANTAGE OF ME now begin to be experienced as stimuli coming in from the environment, rather than as internal associations. Other associational chains dealing with DANGER are triggered by this process, including one, discussed later, that keeps out competing associations that do not fit it with the delusional scheme.
By the time the stage of projection of delusions with the negative content of ENEMY and PEOPLE TAKE ADVANTAGE OF ME is reached, we tap into Sam's general energy sources and get an overall activation. It is not only that he has some specific need to think that people take advantage of him, he has now become so convinced that someone is actually taking advantage of him that he gets generally activated, generally uptight, in order to deal with this danger! this general up-tightness not only pours a great deal of energy into the specific focus of consciousness, it also acts as positive feedback, reinforcing the prepotent need to blame others for not getting high that started the whole chain in the first place. The fact that Sam now clearly feels himself getting up-tight as this general energy flows into him acts as a justification for the need to worry about people taking advantage of him in the first place, further reinforcing the whole delusion. He would not feel so up-tight unless something were wrong, would he?
Thus by time T5, when the real stimulus is simply the name Bill, Sam's primary conscious awareness is more a picture of a dangerous warrior attacking, with the whole dichotomy of HIM versus ME in the fore. This is not a simple "cognitive" content, but is charged with energy and emotion, as represented by the spikes on his shield and helmet. Further rejection and distortion of actual input occur to enhance the delusional system. This is shown as t he B being rejected from Bill and the internal processes adding a K, so that Sam in real sense hears this stranger say the word KILL. This again is projection of a delusion that is mistaken for actual sensory input.
The same DANGER associational chains triggered off in time T4 continue to be triggered off. A pair of associational chains that were separate are shown linked up to represent a tendency for the delusion to further draw together internal structures and so consolidate itself.
Now at this point we would certainly be tempted to say that Sam is a paranoid psychotic, so out of touch with reality that he should be institutionalized (unless is particular culture values that sort of thing and instead makes him president). But this might not actually true in social terms: there might be strong, built-in inhibitions in the structure of his mind against expressing hostility, and/or such strong conditionings to act nicely, that Sam would make some sort of socially appropriate response even though he was internally seething with fear and anger and hatred.
At this point Sam is clearly in a state that can well be called samsara or waking dream.
The fact that conditioned inhibitions may keep a person from acting in a socially inappropriate way should remind us that this process is not an exaggeration that has no application to you and me. Some of our own processes may be just as distorted and intense. Although processes have been intensified to a paranoid, psychotic level in this illustration to make points clearer, my own studies of psychological data, plus my own observation of myself, have convinced me that this is the basic nature of much of our ordinary consciousness.
The presentation of samsara so far has been oversimplified by assuming there is only one prepotent need or drive that motivates us. Most of us have many such drives. Let us add a second drive to produce a state of conflict and further show the nature of samsara. Suppose after the activation of the prepotent need to blame others at time T3, these associations themselves activate further associations to the effect YOU'RE BEING PARANOID, and this in turn activates a need not to be paranoid. This latter need might arise from a healthy understanding of oneself, or it might arise from the same kind of mechanical, social conditioning that governs the rest of the process. We need not consider the source of this need at the moment, but can simply say that it activates some further associations on the order of DON'T TAKE PARANOIA SERIOUSLY, along with energy from the second prepotent need.
Figure 19-1 shows these associations of not taking paranoia seriously trying to affect the primary content of consciousness in time T4, but, because Sam is already in a highly delusional state and his consciousness is completely filled with highly energetic paranoid associations, this conflicting associational message cannot influence his consciousness. The particular route by which it tries to enter is blocked by the associations triggered off by the primary, delusional consciousness. There is no conscious conflict. [Note an implicit, quantitative assumption here that in the competition of two processes, whichever has the greater energy (both attention/awareness energy and other kinds of energies) wins, subject to modification by the particulars of the structures involved. Certain structures may use energy more effectively than others. This line of thought needs development.]
The same association DON'T TAKE PARANOIA SERIOUSLY continues to be put out at time T5 and, by coming into the focus of consciousness by a different route, actually gains some awareness. There is now a conflict situation: Sam "know" that this very dangerous person may be threatening to kill him, and another part of him is saying that he is being paranoid and should not take this kind of paranoia seriously. Time T6 is shown as a question mark because we do not know what the resolution of this conflict will be. If the bulk of energy and contents of consciousness are taken up by the paranoid delusion, the thought DON'T TAKE PARANOIA SERIOUSLY may simply be wiped out or repressed for lack of energy to compete with the delusion.
This, then, is a picture of samsara in six consecutive instants of time. The process, of course, does not stop with six instants of time; it continues through one's lifetime. The consensus reality in which a person lives limits the reality that impinges on him: the physical world is generally known; people generally act toward him in "normal" ways. The internalization of consensus reality he learned during enculturation, his "normal" d-SoC, matches the socially maintained consensus reality. so culturally valued experiences continue to happen to him. This is shown schematically in Figure 19-2.

Figure 19-2. The wheel of an individual's life rolling through consensus reality.

The horizontal axis represents the flow of time, bringing an ever-changing succession of events, people, interactions, things. The wheel rolling along the axis of time is you. The culturally conditioned selectivity of your perceptions and logics and actions is like a set of selective filters around the periphery of the wheel. If the right filter is activated (perceptual readiness) when a corresponding event occurs, you perceive, experience, and react to it in accordance with your ordinary d-SoC structure (which includes your personality structure). If the current interplay of your prepotent needs and associated structures does not produce a perceptual readiness to notice and respond to the way reality is stimulating you at the moment, you may not perceive an event at all, or perceive it in distorted form, as in the example of what can happen to "Hi, my name is Bill." In terms of Figure 19-2, you have the appropriate perceptual category built in, but the dynamic configuration of your mind, the position of that category on the wheel, is not right.
Some kinds of experiences are actively blocked by enculturation, not simply passively neglected: these are represented by a pair of bars between some categories within the wheel and the rim of the wheel. You will not experience certain kinds of things, even if they are happening, unless you are subjected to drastic pressures, internal or external.
Similar structures inside the wheel are shown is interconnected. Recall from the earlier discussion of loading and other kind of stabilization that attention/awareness energy is constantly flowing back and forth, around and around in familiar, habitual paths. This means that much of the variety and richness of life is filtered out. An actual event, triggering off a certain category of experience, activating a certain structure, is rapidly lost as the internal processes connected with that structure and its associated structures and prepotent needs take over the energy of the system. Thus, the word Hi triggers such processes in our hypothetical person, Sam, as do similar words like HIGH whenever they occur. His dynamically interacting, energy-consuming network of structures and needs insulates him from the real world.
Similarly, if your cultural conditioning has not given you any categories as part of the Input-Processing subsystem to recognize certain events, you may simply not perceive them. Thus real events are shown on the time axis that have no corresponding categories in the person; so the wheel of your life rolls over these events hardly noticing them, perhaps with only a moment of puzzlement before your more "important' internal needs and preoccupations cause you to dismiss the unusual.
Figure 19-2 depicts cracks in the continuum, following Pearce's analogy of looking for cracks—ways out—in the cosmic egg of your culture. A crack may be a totally uncanny event, something for which you have no conditioned categories, a chance to see in don Juan's sense. If you experience such an event, though, the cultural pressures, both from others and from the enculturated structures built up within you, will probably force you to forget it, to explain away its significance. If you experience something everybody knows cannot happen, you must be crazy; but if you do not tell anyone and forget about it yourself, you will be okay.
Shah records a Sufi story, "When the Waters Were Changed," that illustrates this:

Once upon a time Khidr, the Teacher of Moses, called upon mankind with a warning. At a certain date, he said, all the water in the world which had not been specially hoarded, would disappear. it would then be renewed, with different water, which would drive men mad.
Only one man listened to the meaning of this advice. He collected water and went to a secure place where he stored it, and waited for the water to change its character.
On the appointed date the streams stopped running, the wells went dry, and the man who had listened, seeing this happening, went to his retreat and drank his preserved water.
When he saw, from his security, the waterfalls again beginning to flow, this man descended among the other sons of men. He found that they were thinking and talking an entirely different way from before; yet they had no memory of what had happened, nor of having been warned. When he tried to talk to them, he realized that they thought he was mad, and they showed hostility or compassion, not understanding.
At first he drank none of the new water, but went back to his concealment, to draw on his supplies, every day. Finally, however, he took the decision to drink the new water because he could not bear the loneliness of living, behaving and thinking in a different way from everyone else. He drank the new water, and became like the rest. Then he forgot all about his own store of special water, and his fellows began to look upon him as a madman who had miraculously been restored to sanity.

Finally, in Figure 19-2 time's arrow is shown as turned back upon itself to form a closed loop. This illustrates the conservative character of culture, the social pressure to keep things within the known. Events from outside the consensus reality are shown as deflected from entering it. This does not mean that no change is tolerated; it indicates that while outward forms of some things may change there is immense resistance to radical change. Fundamental assumptions of the consensus reality are strongly defended.
Fortunately we do make contact with reality at times. There are forces for real change in culture so the conservative forces do not always succeed. I have great faith in science as a unique force for constantly questioning the limits of consensus reality (at least in the long run), for deliberately looking for cracks in the cosmic egg that open on to vast new vistas. But, far more than we would like to admit, our lives can be mainly or completely tightly bounded wheels, rolling mechanically along the track of consensus reality.
This is a brief sketch of the way one's whole lifetime in a "normal" d-SoC can be a state of samsara. I cannot yet write more about it. I recommend Pearce's book, Exploring the Crack in the Cosmic Egg, for a brilliant analysis of the way our culture can trap us in its consensus reality, even when we believe we are rebelling.