the two Truths of Tao

The search for the Self and Consciousness in the enaction perspective with consciousness and experience worlds without ground analyzed according to the Abhidharma contains within it a radical distinction between the ordinary, experienced and conventional truth and the ultimate truth, like the distinction between the expression of the Tao, the Te or The, and the ultimate  indescribable truth of Tao, a distinction between mundane and transcendental similar in many traditions, like the Ātman/Brahman duality in Hinduism and the Tonal/Nagual in Castaneda's reports:

WORLDS WITHOUT GROUND

The Middle Way

The Two Truths

The Abhidharma analysis of the mind into basic elements and mental factors already contained within it the distinction between two kinds of truth: ultimate truth, which consisted of the basic elements of existence into which experience could be analyzed, and relative or conventional truth, which was our ordinary, compounded (out of basic elements) experience. Nagarjuna invoked this distinction, gave it new meaning, and insisted on its importance.

The teaching of the doctrine by the Buddha is based upon two truths: the truth of worldly convention (samvrti) and the ultimate, supreme truth (paramartha).
Those who do not discern the distinction between these two truths, do not understand the profound nature of the Buddha's teaching.

Relative truth (samvrti, which literally means covered or concealed) is the phenomenal world just as it appears-with chairs, people, species, and the coherence of those through time. Ultimate truth (paramartha) is the emptiness of that very same phenomenal world. The Tibetan term for relative truth, kundzop, captures the relation between the two imagistically; kundzop means aU dressed up, outfitted, or costumed-that is, relative truth is sunyata (absolute truth) costumed in the brilliant colors of the phenomenal world.
By now it should be obvious that the distinction between the two truths, like the analysis of the Abhidharma, was not intended as a metaphysical theory of truth. It is a description of the experience of the practitioner who experiences his mind, its objects, and their relation as codependently originated and thus as empty of any actual, independent, or abiding existence. Like the Abhidharma categories, the description also functions as a recommendation and contemplative aid. This can be seen very clearly in the discourse of Buddhist communities. For example, many of the forms that Westerners take as poetry or irrationality in Zen are actually contemplative exercises directing the mind toward codependent emptiness.
The term for relative truth, samvrti, is also often translated as "convention" (within Buddhism as well as by academic scholars), which gives rise to much interpretative confusion. It is important to understand in what sense convention is meant. "Relative" or "conventional" should not be taken in a superficial sense. Convention does not mean subjective, arbitrary, or unlawful. And relative does not mean culturally relative. The relative phenomenal world was always taken to operate by very clear laws regardless of the conventions of any individual or society, such as the laws of karmic cause and effect.
Furthermore, it is very important to understand that the use of convention here is not an invitation to decenter the self and/or world into language as is so popular at present in the humanities. As the founder of the Gelugpa lineage in Tibetan Buddhism puts it, "... since nominally designated things are artificial, that is, established as existent in conventional terms, there is no referent to which names are attached which (itself) is not established as merely conventionally existent. And since that is not to say that in general there is no phenomenal basis for using names, the statement of the existence of that (conventional referent) and the statement that (all things) are mere nominal designations are not contradictory." Thus in Buddhism one can perfectly well make distinctions in the relative world between true statements and false ones, and it is recommended that one make true ones.
The sense in which the things designated, as well as the designations, are only conventional may be explained by an example: when I call someone John, I have the deep assumption that there is some abiding independent thing that I am designating, but Madhyamika analysis shows there to be no such truly existing thing. John, however, continues to act just the way a perfectly good designatum is supposed to, so in relative or conventional truth he is indeed John. This claim may remind the reader of our discussion of color. Although the experience of color can be shown to have no absolute ground either in the physical world or the visual observer, color is nonetheless a perfectly commensurable designable. Thus such scientific analysis can perfectly well be joined by the far more radical presentation of groundlessness in the Madhyamika.
Because this relative, conventional, codependently originated world is lawful, science is possible-just as possible as daily life. In fact, perfectly functional pragmatic science and engineering are possible even when they are based on theories that make unjustifiable metaphysical assumptions-just as daily life continues coherently even when one believes in the actual reality of oneself. We offer the vision of enactive cognitive science and of evolution as natural drift neither as a claim that this is the only way science can be done nor as a claim that this is the very same thing as Madhyamika. Concepts such as embodiment or structural coupling are concepts and as such are always historical. They do not convey that at this very moment - personally - one has no independently existing mind and no independently existing world.
This is a crucially important point. There is a powerful reason why some Madhyamika schools only refute the arguments of others and refuse to make assertions. Any conceptual position can become a ground (a resting point, a nest), which vitiates the force of the Madhyamika. In particular, the view of cognition as embodied action (enaction), although it stresses the interdependence of mind and world, tends to treat the relationship between those (the interaction, the action, the enaction) as though it had some form of independent actual existence. As one's mind grasps the concept of enaction as something real and solid, it automatically generates a sense of the other two terms of the argument, the subject and object of the embodied action. (As we shall discuss, this is why pragmatism is also not the same as thing as the middle way of Madhyamika.) We would be doing ii great disservice to everyone concerned - mindfulness/awareness practitioners, scientists, scholars, and any other interested persons - were we to lead anyone to believe that making assertions about enactive cognitive science was the same thing as allowing one's mind to be experientially processed by the Madhyamika dialectic, particularly when this is combined with mindfulness/awareness training. But just as the Madhyamika dialectic, a provisional and conventional activity of the relative world, points beyond itself, so we might hope that our concept of enaction could, at least for some cognitive scientists and perhaps even for the more general milieu of scientific thought, point beyond itself to a truer understanding of groundlessness.

observation of internal Taos

Vladimir Kush, Earth Well

After the description of the subsystems of the consciousness system, Charles T. Tart continues with the discussion about self-observation of its own consciousness internal states, a topic which  deeply involves the concept of "observer":

Observation of Internal States

Observation of internal events is often unreliable and difficult. Focusing on external behavior or physiological changes in useful, but experiential data are primary in d-SoCs. We must develop a more precise language for communicating about such data.
Observing oneself means that the overall system must observe itself. Thus, in the conservative view of the mind self-observation is inherently limited, for the part cannot comprehend the whole and the characteristics of the parts affect their observation. In the radical view, however, in which awareness is partially or wholly independent of brain structure, the possibility exists of an Observer much more independent of the structure.
Introspection, the observation of one's own mental processes, and the subsequent communication of these observations to others have long been major problems in psychology. To build a general scientific understanding requires starting from a general agreement on what are the facts, what are the basic observations across individuals on which the science can be founded. Individuals have published interesting and often beautiful accounts of their own mental processes in the physiological literature, but analysis of these accounts demonstrates little agreement among them and little agreement among the analyzers that the accounts are precise descriptions of observable mental processes. Striving for precise understanding is an important goal of science.
One reaction to this has been behaviorism, which ignores mental processes and declares that external behavior, which can be observed more easily and reliably, is the subject matter of psychology. Many psychologists still accept the behavioristic position and define psychology as the study of behavior rather than the study of the mind. That way is certainly easier. One hundred percent agreement among observers is possible, at least for simple behaviors. For example, in testing for susceptibility to hypnosis with the Stanford Hypnotic Susceptibility Scale, the examiner suggests to the subject that his arm is feeling heavier and heavier and will drop because of the increased weight. The hypnotists and observers present can easily agree on whether the subject's arm moves down at least twelve inches within thirty seconds after the end of the suggestion.
Behaviorism is an extremely valuable tool for studying simple behaviors, determining what affects them, and learning how to control them. But it has not been able to deal well with complex and important human experiences, such as happiness, love, religious feelings, purposes. The behavioristic approach is of particularly limited value in dealing with d-ASCs because almost all the interesting and important d-ASC phenomena are completely internal. A behavioristic approach to the study of a major psychedelic drug like LSD, for example, would lead to the conclusion that LSD is a sedative or tranquilizer, since the behavior frequently produced is sitting still and doing nothing!
If we are to understand d-SoCs, introspection must become an important technique in psychology in spite of the difficulties of its application. I have primarily used peoples' reports of their internal experiences in developing the systems approach, even though these reports are undoubtedly affected by a variety of biases, limitations, and inadequacies, for such reports are the most relevant data for studying d-SoCs.
I believe psychology's historical rejection of introspection was premature: in the search for general laws of the mind, too much was attempted too soon. Mental phenomena are the most complex phenomena of all. The physical sciences, by comparison, deal with easy subject matter. We can be encouraged by the fact that many spiritual psychologies have developed elaborate vocabularies for describing internal experiences. I do not understand these psychologies well enough to evaluate the validity of these vocabularies, but it is encouraging that others, working over long periods, have at least developed such vocabularies. The English language is well suited for making reliable discriminations among everyday external objects, but it is not a good language for precise work with physical reality. The physical sciences have developed specialized mathematical languages for such work that are esoteric indeed to the man in the street. Sanskrit, on the other hand, has many presumably precise words for internal events and states that do not translate well into English. There are over twenty words in Sanskrit, for example, which carry different shades of meaning in the original. Development of a more precise vocabulary is essential to progress in understanding consciousness and d-SoCs. If you say you feel "vibrations" in a d-ASC, what precisely do you mean?

The Observer

In science the word observation usually refers to scrutiny of the external environment, and the observer is taken for granted. If the observer is recognized as possessing inherent characteristics that limit his adequacy to observe, these specific characteristics are compensated for, as by instrumentally aiding the senses or adding some constant to the observation; again the observer is taken for granted. In dealing with the microworld, the particle level in physics, the observer cannot be taken for granted, for the process of observation alters the phenomena being observed. Similarly, when experiential data are used to understand states of consciousness, the observation process cannot be taken for granted.
For the system to observe itself, attention/awareness must activate structures that are capable of observing processes going on in other structures. Two ways of doing this seem possible, which we shall discuss as pure cases, even though they may actually be mixed. The first way is to see the system breaking down into two semi-independent systems, one of which constitutes the observer and the other the system to be observed. I notice, for example, that I am rubbing my left foot as I write and that this action seems irrelevant to the points I want to make. A moment ago I was absorbed in the thinking involved in the writing and in rubbing my foot, but some part of me then stepped back for a moment, under the impetus to find an example to illustrate the current point, and noticed that I was rubbing my foot. The "I" who observed that I was rubbing my foot is my ordinary self, my personality, my ordinary d-SoC. The major part of my system held together, but temporarily singled out a small, connected part of itself to be observed. Since I am still my ordinary self, all my characteristics enter into the observation. There is no objectivity to my own observation of myself. My ordinary self, for example, is always concerned with whether what I am doing is useful toward attaining my short-term and long-term goals; thus the judgment was automatically made that the rubbing of the foot was a useless waste of energy. Having immediately classified foot-rubbing as useless, I had no further interesting in observing it more clearly, seeing what it was like. The observation is mixed with evaluation; most ordinary observation is of this nature.
By contrast, many meditative disciplines take the view that attention/awareness can achieve a high degree or even complete independence from the structures that constitute a person's ordinary d-SoC and personality, that a person possesses (or can develop) an Observer that is highly objective with respect to the ordinary personality because it is an Observer that is essentially pure attention/awareness, that has no judgmental characteristics of its own. If the Observer had been active, I might have observed that I was rubbing my foot, but there would have been no structure immediately activated that passed judgment on this action. Judgment, after all, means relatively permanent characteristics coded in structure to make comparisons against. The Observer would simply have noted whatever was happening without judging it.
The existence of the Observer or Witness is a reality to many people, especially those who have attempted to develop such an Observer by practicing meditative disciplines, and I shall treat it as an experiential reality.
The question of its ultimate reality is difficult. If one starts from the conservative view of the mind, where awareness is no more than a product of the nervous system and brain, the degree of independence or objectivity of the Observer can only be relative. The Observer may be a semi-independent system with fewer characteristics than the overall system of consciousness as a whole, but it is dependent on the operation of neurologically based structures and so is ultimately limited and shaped by them; it is also programmed to some extent in the enculturation process. Hilgard has found the concept of such a partially dissociated Observer useful in understanding hypnotic analgesia.
In the radical view of the mind, awareness is (or can become) different from the brain and nervous system. Here partial to total independence of, and objectivity with respect to, the mind/brain can be attained by the Observer. The ultimate degree of this objectivity then depends on whether awareness per se, whatever its ultimate nature is, has properties that limit it.
It is not always easy to make this clear distinction between the observer and the Observer. Many times, for example, when I am attempting to function as a Observer, I Observe myself doing certain things, but this Observation immediately activates some aspect of the structure of my ordinary personality, which then acts as an observer connected with various value judgment that are immediately activated. I pass from the function of Observing from outside the system to observing from inside the system, from what feels like relatively objective Observation to judgmental observation by my conscience or superego.
Some meditative disciplines, as in the vipassana meditation discussed earlier, strive to enable their practitioners to maintain the Observer for long periods, possibly permanently. The matter becomes rather complex, however, because a major job for the Observer is to Observe the actions of the observer: having Observed yourself doing some action, you then Observe your conscience become activated, rather than becoming completely caught up in the conscience observation and losing the Observer function. Such self-observation provides much data for understanding the structure of one's own consciousness.

Tao Paradoxico-Philosophicus 11-13

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

---

TRACTATUS PARADOXICO-PHILOSOPHICUS

11	Complex: consider paradoxical observers interacting with self-organizing, unpredictable, paradoxical, non-trivial environments that include the observers, thus eluding trivialization.
11.01	Interaction: any limit between the “distinguished” and its “background” vanishes for one or more of these observers interacting with themselves or socially.
11.1	Simple: consider logical observers distinguishing non-self-organizing, predictable, logical, trivial environments that exclude the observers, thus embracing trivialization.
11.11	Distinction: a clear limit between the “distinguished” and its “background”s in social intercourse.
11.2	Observers cannot trivialize organizationally closed unities.
11.21	Any attempt to trivialize them will either fail or destroy (loss of organizational closure) the organizationally closed unities (also a failure).
11.3	Observers cannot trivialize a complex environment without destruction.

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12	Mind: consider the activity of the nervous system that encompasses thinking, perceiving, emotions and feelings.
12.1	Consider emotions and feelings as the paradoxical activities of closed organizations (that cross and include the sensory and effector surfaces) inside and outside the nervous system of a paradoxical observer.
12.11	Therefore, emotions and feelings thoroughly escape the logical observer since the logical observer contemplates only inside or outside the nervous system.
12.2	Just as in the network of oscillators discussed in the Introduction, where external stimuli may drastically reduce the possibilities (number of choices available), so may suitable stimuli applied to the nervous system stunt, in different degrees, its potential for emotional, physical and intellectual expressions.
12.21	The resulting damage, temporary or permanent, often not obvious and sometimes desirable as in a hierarchical environment, where moderate or no thinking at all constitutes a requisite for membership.

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13	Language-games: imagine predictable and unpredictable games that observers play, logically, inside or outside and, paradoxically, inside and outside their nervous systems, thus defining their forms of life.
13.1	Meaning: consider the uses that observers give to words in language-games.
13.11	If the language-games change or vanish, so do the meanings of words used by observers.
13.2	Language: consider the language-games trivialized (made predictable) by logical observers, where the meanings of words soon evaporate.
13.3	Explanation: consider the attempts to trivialize a language, e.g., using it only to follow rules while striving for a “logically perfect language”.
13.4	Communication: consider any attempt to use a trivialized language among observers.
13.5	Thinking: consider the activities involving the nervous system of a paradoxical observer, including emotions and feelings, and thus offering new language-games to the observer.
13.6	Conversation: consider the activities involving the thinking of one or more paradoxical observers, thus offering new language-games to these and other observers.

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 9-10

Tao Paradoxico-Philosophicus 9-10

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

---

TRACTATUS PARADOXICO-PHILOSOPHICUS

9	Nervous system: consider one or more closed organizations that intersect with a living organism and its cognitive domain, expanding it.
9.1	A logical observer distinguishes the nervous system only within the living organism and interprets sensory surfaces and effector surfaces as “inputs” to and “outputs” from the nervous system that match “outputs” from and “inputs” to a world “out there”.
9.2	A paradoxical observer interacts with and tentatively distinguishes the activity of the nervous system as “nerve” impulses that encode only “how much” not “what” the living organism “perceives”.
9.21	Since everything “perceived” translates into nerve impulses, the nervous system does not discriminate (distinguish) between impulses coming from an “outside” world and those originated “within” the nervous system (“inside” or “outside” blend into “inside and outside”).
9.22	For this same observer, the encounter with other observers triggers the invention of a tentative world “in and out there”.
9.23	While some of these observers adjust, share, and thus “confirm”, tentatively the invention, others do not.

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10	Environment: logical observers distinguish the intersection of their cognitive domains as a common dwelling and call it their environment.
10.1	The distinction of an environment appears to these observers as an invitation to extract or deduce further distinctions.
10.12	These further distinctions appear to these observers as processes (events in time) that produce components (objects in space) forming open networks of processes and components that exclude these and other observers.
10.2	Language and communication emerge in this way from the activity (of processes) in the nervous system and thus, the logical observer invents a world “out there” independent of the observers.
10.3	Since processes, components, open networks of processes and components, and an environment neither define nor maintain themselves, logical observers may only distinguish (extricate or deduce) them from organizationally closed unities (paradoxical context), which will appear open and no longer organizationally closed (nor paradoxical) for these observers.
10.4	Paradoxical observers interact with and tentatively distinguish an environment as a world “in and out there”, through which they may, with some difficulty, relate to logical observers.

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 7-8

Tao subsystems - IX

The last subsystem of the consciousness system discussed by Charles T. Tart after extero-interoception, input processing, memory, subconscious, the processes of evaluation and decision, emotions, space/time and identity is motor output:

Subsystems

Motor Output

The Motor Output subsystem consists of those structures which we physically affect the external world and our own bodies. In terms of conscious awareness, these structures are primarily the skeletal, voluntary musculature. If I take a minute out from writing to pet my cat, I am using my Motor Output subsystem with full awareness. The Motor Output subsystem elements that primarily affect our own bodies are glandular secretions and other internal, biological processes. These latter, involuntary effectors are controllable not directly, but through intermediates. I cannot directly increase the amount of adrenaline in my bloodstream, for example, but if I make myself angry and wave my fists and shout and holler, I will almost certainly increase the amount of adrenaline secreted.
Two kinds of inputs control Motor Output: input from the Evaluation and Decision-Making subsystem, conscious decisions to do or not to do something, and input from a series of controlling signals that bypasses the Evaluation and Decision-Making subsystem. The latter includes reflexes (jumping at a sudden sound, for example), emotional reactions, and direct control of Motor Output from the Subconscious subsystem. Subconscious control in the ordinary d-SoC includes qualities added to otherwise conscious gestures that reflect nonconscious mental processes: you may state, for example, that a certain person does not make you angry, but an observer notices that your fists clench whenever this person is mentioned.
Motor Output operates with almost constant feedback control. By monitoring the environment with the Exteroception subsystem and the body with the Interoception subsystem, you constantly check on the effect of your physical actions and on whether these are desirable and make adjustments accordingly.
Many voluntary movements are quite unconscious in terms of their details. You decide to lift your arm, yet you have little awareness of the individual muscle actions that allow you to do so. In d-ASCs, greatly increased awareness of particular aspects of the Motor Output subsystem are sometimes reported. Greatly decreased awareness has also been reported: actions that are ordinarily subject to conscious awareness, via feedback from the interoceptors, are done with no awareness at all. During my first experience with a psychedelic drug, mescaline, I told my body to walk down to the end of the hall. Then my awareness became completely absorbed in various internal events. After what seemed a very long time, I was surprised to notice that my body had walked down the hall and obligingly stopped at the end, with no conscious participation or awareness on my part. To some extent this occurs in an ordinary d-SoC, especially with well-learned actions, but the effect can be much more striking in a d-ASC. We should distinguish lack of sensory awareness of body actions from awareness of them but without the sense of ego added. The latter also creates a different relationship with motor actions.
Deautomatization of motor actions is another sort of altered awareness of motor output that can occur in a d-ASC. Either you become unusually aware of components of automatized actions normally inaccessible to consciousness or you have deliberately to will each of these component actions to take place because the whole automated action will not occur by itself.
D-ASC related changes in the way the body is experienced via the Exteroception subsystem and in awareness of functioning of the Motor Output subsystem can alter the operating characteristics of voluntary action. You may have to perform a different kind of action internally in order to produce the same kind of voluntary action. Carlos Castaneda gives a striking example of this in a drug-induced d-ASC. His body was completely paralyzed from the "little smoke" in terms of his ordinary way of controlling it. Doing all the things he ordinarily did to move produced zero response. But if he simply willed movement in a certain way, his body responded.
Changes in the awareness of the functioning of the Motor Output subsystem may include feelings of greatly increased strength or skill, or of greatly decreased strength or skill. Often these feelings do not correspond with performance: you may feel exceptionally weak or unsure of your skill, and yet perform in a basically ordinary fashion. Or you may feel exceptionally strong, but show no actual increase in performance. The potential for a true increment in strength in d-ASCs is real, however, because in the ordinary d-SoC you seldom use your musculature to its full strength. Safety mechanisms prevent you from fully exerting yourself and possibly damaging yourself. For example, some muscles are strong enough to break your own bones if they were maximally exerted. In various d-ASCs, especially when strong emotions are involved, these safety mechanisms may be temporarily bypassed, allowing greater strength, at the risk of damage.
In a d-ASC the Subconscious subsystem may control the Motor Output subsystem or parts of it. For example, if a hypnotist suggests to a subject that his arm is moving up and down by itself, the arm will do so and the subject will experience the arm moving by itself, without his conscious volition. If a hypnotist suggests automatic writing, the subject's hand will write complex material, with as much skill as in ordinary writing, without any conscious awareness by the subject of what he is going to write and without any feeling of volitional control over the action. This kind of disassociated motor action can also sometimes occur in the ordinary d-SoC, where it may represent the action of a disassociated d-ASC.
This ends our survey of the main subsystems of states of consciousness. It is only a survey, pointing out the major variations. Much literature already exists from which more specific information about various subsystems can be gleaned, and much research remains to be done to clarify our concepts of particular subsystems. Particularly we need to know exactly how each subsystem changes for each specific d-ASC. So we must know our parts better, although I emphasize again that it is just as important to know how these parts are put into the functioning whole that constitutes a system, a d-SoC.

Tao subsystems - VIII

Tao Paradoxico-Philosophicus 7-8

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

---

TRACTATUS PARADOXICO-PHILOSOPHICUS

7	An observer observing itself: this leads to the following dilemma:
7.01	From a logical perspective, an observer may observe itself, either at the same location but at different instants (emergence of time), or at the same instant but at different locations (emergence of space).
7.1	An observer observing itself at the same instant and location (a paradoxical, unpredictable observer) reveals a paradox with no logical solution.
7.2	This observer offers a paradoxical context from where the same or other observers, adopting a logical perspective, may extract or deduce distinctions, and then more distinctions from those distinctions treated as new paradoxical contexts so that the world “out there” for these observers slowly emerges.
7.3	The logical observer: consider an observer that adopts only a logical perspective and hence only extracts or deduces distinctions from a paradoxical context and allowed by the logic chosen, such as considering other observers as paradoxical or logical.
7.4	The paradoxical observer: consider an observer that adopts a paradoxical and logical perspective and makes tentative distinctions in a paradoxical context considering all possibilities, such as considering other observers as paradoxical and logical.

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8	Living organism: consider an organization that produces and maintains itself as an organizationally closed unity that defines its cognitive domain and that:
8.01	as a paradoxical observer interacts with, and makes tentative distinctions in its own paradoxical context (the living organism and its cognitive domain).
8.02	as a logical observer distinguishes itself from its own cognitive domain as a processor whose space and time emerge together with this same distinction and from which it extracts or deduces further distinctions.
8.1	A living organism, as a paradoxical observer, interacts with and tentatively distinguishes the self-producing organization of a living organism maintaining its organizational closure through a closed network of processes (tentative events in time) that produce components (tentative objects in space) and that continuously regenerate the network of processes.
8.2	A living organism, as a logical observer, may extract distinctions from a paradoxical context, but may not act as a paradoxical observer.
8.3	A living organism, as a paradoxical observer, may act as a paradoxical observer and as a logical observer.
8.4	A living organism, even without a nervous system, defines and supports its own cognitive domain and cognition.

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 5-6

the Tao Book: inside information - IV

INSIDE INFORMATION

"The Ultimate Ground of Being" is Paul Tillich's decontaminated term for "God" and would also do for "the Self of the world" as I put it in my story for children. But the secret which my story slips over to the child is that the Ultimate Ground of Being is you. Not, of course, the everyday you which the Ground is assuming, or "pretending" to be, but that inmost Self which escapes inspection because it's always the inspector. This, then, is the taboo of taboos: you're IT!
Yet in our culture this is the touchstone of insanity, the blackest of blasphemies, and the wildest of delusions. This, we believe, is the ultimate in megalomania—an inflation of the ego to complete absurdity. For though we cultivate the ego with one hand, we knock it down with the other. From generation to generation we kick the stuffing out of our children to teach them to "know their place" and to behave, think, and feel with proper modesty as befits one little ego among many. As my mother used to say, "You're not the only pebble on the beach!"
Anyone in his right mind who believes that he is God should be crucified or burned at the stake, though now we take the more charitableview that no one in his right mind could believe such nonsense. Only a poor idiot could conceive himself as the omnipotent ruler of the world, and expect everyone else to fall down and worship.
But this is because we think of God as the King of the Universe, the Absolute Technocrat who personally and consciously controls every details of his cosmos—and that is not the kind of God in my story. In fact, it isn't my story at all, for any student of the history of religions will know that it comes from ancient India, and is the mythical way of explaining the Vedanta philosophy. Vedanta is the teaching of the Upanishads, a collection of dialogues, stories, and poems, some of which go back to at least 800 B.C. Sophisticated Hindus do not think of God as a special and separate superperson who rules the world from above, like a monarch. Their God is "underneath" rather than "above" everything, and he (or it) plays the world from inside. One might say that if religion is the opium of the people, the Hindus have the inside dope. What is more, no Hindu can realize that he is God in disguise without seeing at the same time that this is true of everyone and everything else. In the Vedanta philosophy, nothing exists except God. There seem to be other things than God, but only because he is dreaming them up and making them his disguises to play hide-and-seek with himself. The universe of seemingly separate things is therefore real only for a while, not eternally real, for it comes and goes as the Self hides and seeks itself.
But Vedanta is much more than the idea or the belief that this is so. It is centrally and above all the experience, the immediate knowledge of its being so, and for this reason such a complete subversion of our ordinary way of seeing things. It turns the world inside out and outside in. Likewise, a saying attributed to Jesus runs:

When you make the two one, and
when you make the inner as the outer
and the outer as the inner and the above as the below ...
then shall you enter [the Kingdom]....
I am the Light that is above
them all, I am the All,
the All came forth from Me and the All
attained to Me. Cleave a [piece of] wood, I
am there; lift up the stone and you will
find Me there.

Today the Vedanta discipline comes down to us after centuries of involvement with all the forms, attitudes, and symbols of Hindu culture in its flowering and slow demise over nearly 2,800 years, sorely wounded by Islamic fanaticism and corrupted by British puritanism. As often set forth, Vedanta rings no bell in the West, and attracts mostly the fastidiously spiritual and diaphanous kind of people for whom incarnation in a physical body is just too disgusting to be borne. But it is possible to state its essentials in a present-day idiom, and when this is done without exotic trappings, Sanskrit terminology, and excessive postures of spirituality, the message is not only clear to people with no special interest in "Oriental religions"; it is also the very jolt that we need to kick ourselves out of our isolated sensation of self.
But this must not be confused with our usual ideas of the practice of "unselfishness," which is the effort to identify with others and their needs while still under the strong illusion of being no more than a skin-contained ego. Such "unselfishness" is apt to be a highly refined egotism, comparable to the in-group which plays the game of "we're more-tolerant-than-you." The Vedanta was not originally moralistic; it did not urge people to ape the saints without sharing their real motivations, or to ape motivations without sharing the knowledge which sparks them.
For this reason The Book I would pass to my children would contain no sermons, no shoulds and oughts. Genuine love comes from knowledge, not from a sense of duty or guilt. How would you like to be an invalid mother with a daughter who can't marry because she feels she ought to look after you, and therefore hates you? My wish would be to tell, not how things ought to be, but how they are, and how and why we ignore them as they are. You cannot teach an ego to be anything but egotistic, even though egos have the subtlest ways of pretending to be reformed. The basic thing is therefore to dispel, by experiment and experience, the illusion of oneself as a separate ego. The consequences may not be behavior along the lines of conventional morality. It may well be as the squares said of Jesus, "Look at him! A glutton and a drinker, a friend of tax-gatherers and sinners!"
Furthermore, on seeing through the illusion of the ego, it is impossible to think of oneself as better than, or superior to, others for having done so. In every direction there is just the one Self playing its myriad games of hide-and-seek. Birds are not better than the eggs from which they have broken. Indeed, it could be said that a bird is one egg's way of becoming other eggs. Egg is ego, and bird is the liberated Self. There is a Hindu myth of the Self as a divine swan which laid the egg from which the world was hatched. Thus I am not even saying that you ought to break out of your shell. Sometime, somehow, you (the real you, the Self) will do it anyhow, but it is not impossible that the play of the Self will be to remain unawakened in most of its human disguises, andso bring the drama of life on earth to its close in a vast explosion.
Another Hindu myth says that as time goes on, life in the world gets worse and worse, until at last the destructive aspect of the Self, the god Shiva, dances a terrible dance which consumes everything in fire. There follow, says the myth, 4,320,000 years of total peace during which the Self is just itself and does not play hide. And then the game begins again, starting off as a universe of perfect splendor which begins to deteriorate only after 1,728,000 years, and every round of the game is so designed that the forces of darkness present themselves for only one third of the time, enjoying at the end a brief but quite illusory triumph.
Today we calculate the life of this planet alone in much vaster periods, but of all ancient civilizations the Hindus had the most imaginative vision of cosmic time. Yet remember, this story of the cycles of the world's appearance and disappearance is myth, not science, parable rather than prophecy. It is a way of illustrating the idea that the universe is like the game of hide-and-seek.
If, then, I am not saying that you ought to awaken from the egoillusion and help save the world from disaster, why The Book? Why not sit back and let things take their course? Simply that it is part of "things taking their course" that I write. As a human being it is just my nature to enjoy and share philosophy. I do this in the same way that some birds are eagles and some doves, some flowers lilies and some roses. I realize, too, that the less I preach, the more likely I am to be heard.

the Tao Book: inside information - III

Tao subsystems - VIII

M.C. Escher, Butterflies, 1950

After extero-interoception, input processing, memory, subconscious, the processes of evaluation and decision, emotions and space/time sense Charles T. Tart introduces the eighth subsystem of the consciousness system, the sense of identity:

Subsystems

Sense of Identity

We noted earlier that an extra informational "This is a memory" quality is either explicitly or implicitly attached to data coming from the Memory subsystem and that this quality is sometimes attached to non-memory information in consciousness, producing interesting phenomena. The primary function of the Sense of Identity subsystem is to attach a "This is me" quality to certain aspects of experience, to certain information in consciousness, and thus to create the sense of an ego. Presumably semipermanent structures exist incorporating criteria for what the "This is me" quality should be attached to. However, the functioning of the Sense of Identity subsystem varies so greatly, even in the ordinary d-SoC, that I emphasize the extra informational aspects of the "This is me" quality rather than the structures underlying it.
Any item of information to which the "This is me" quality is attached acquires considerable extra potency and so may arouse strong emotions and otherwise control attention/awareness energy. If I say to you, "The face of someone you don't know, a Mr. Johnson, is ugly and revolting," this information probably will not be very important to you. But if I say to you, "Your face is ugly and revolting," that is a different story! But why do you react so strongly to the latter sentence? True, under some circumstances such a statement might preface more aggressive action, against which you want to defend yourself, but often such a remark prefaces no more than additional words of the same sort; yet, you react to those words as if to actual physical attack. Adding the ego quality to information radically alters the way that information is treated by the system of consciousness as a whole.
At any given time only some of the contents of awareness are modulated by the ego quality. As I sit writing and pause to glance around the room, I see a large number of objects: they become the contents of my consciousness, but they are not me. The ego quality has not been added to them. Much our experience is just information; it does not have a special ego quality added.
Another major function of the Sense of Identity subsystem is the exact opposite of its usual function: a denial of the sense of self to certain structures. Because certain of our personal characteristics and mind structures are considered undesirable and/or evoke unpleasant emotions in us, we create blocks and defenses against perceiving them as parts of ourselves. Many of these interdicted structures are culturally determined, many are specific products of personal developmental history and are not widely shared in the culture. So we deny that we have certain characteristics or we project them on to others: I am not quarrelsome, he is!
I mention this function only in passing, in spite of its enormous importance, for it leads into the vast realm of psychopathology, and is beyond the scope of this book.
The functioning of the Sense of Identity subsystem is highly variable in the ordinary d-SoC, much more variable than we are ordinarily aware. There are many transient identifications, many short-term modulations of particular information, by the ego feeling. When you read a good novel or see a good movie and empathize with one of the characters, you are adding the ego sense to the information about that character. Empathy is the ability to take in information about another's experiences and treat it as if it were you own. However, a person's degree of control over, and self-awareness of, empathy is highly variable. Lack of control over ability to identify with particular things can cause psychological difficulties. For example, if a shopkeeper treats you brusquely, you may feel hurt and upset about it all day long, even though you know intellectually that he is a brusque person who treats everyone that way. Your ego sense was attached to that particular information and is difficult to detach. Thus, various kinds of stimulus patterns can catch the ego sense and are difficult to disentangle.
To illustrate the high variability of functioning of the Sense of Identity subsystem, consider how it can be invested in possessions. Suppose you are in New York City, having a "sophisticated" discussion with a friend about the breakdown of social values and the consequent rebellion by young people. Through the window you see some teenagers across the street trashing a car, and, with detachment, you point out to your friend that these unfortunate teenagers are what they are because their parents could not transmit values they lacked themselves. Then you notice it is your car they are trashing, and your feelings of sympathy for those poor teenagers vanish rather quickly!
Each person has a number of relatively permanent identifications, well-defined experiential and behavioral repertoires that he thinks of as himself. His role in society gives him several of these: he may be a salesman in one situation, a father in another, a lover in another, a patient in another, an outraged citizen in another. Often these various roles demand behaviors and values that are contradictory, but because he identifies strongly with each role at the time he assumes it, he does not think of this other roles, and experiences little conscious conflict. For example, a concentration camp guard who brutalizes his prisoners all day may be known as a loving and doting father at home. This ability to compartmentalize roles is one of the greatest human dilemmas.
Some roles are situation-specific. Others are so pervasive that they continue to function in situations for which they are not appropriate. For example, if you take your job concerns home with you or to a party where other kinds of experiences and behavior are desired and expected, you have overidentified with a particular role.
One of a person's most constant, semipermanent identifications is with his body, more precisely, with his body image, the abstract of the data from his body as mediated through the Exteroception, Interoception, and Input-Processing subsystems. This body image he identifies with may or may not have much actual resemblance to his physical body as other people see it. The degree of identification with the body may vary from time to time. When I am ill I am very aware of my physical body and its centrality in my consciousness; when I am healthy and happy I am aware of my body more as a source of pleasure, or I forget it as I become involved in various tasks.
On the basis of this mass of transient and semipermanent identifications, with various degrees of compartmentalization, each of us believes in something he calls his ego or self. He may assume that this elf is a property of his soul and will live forever. He may vigorously defend this self against slights or other attacks. But what is this ego, this "real" self?
This difficult question has long plagued philosophers and psychologists. I am intrigued by the Buddhist view that asks you to search your experience to find the basic, permanent parts of it that constitute the essence of your ego. When you do this, you find it hard to identify anything as being, finally, you. You may discern certain long-term constancies in your values, connected sets of memories, but none of these qualifies as an ultimate self. The Buddhist view is that you have no ultimate self, thus you need not defend it. Since it is the ego that suffers, realization that ego is an illusion is supposed to end suffering.
In terms of the systems approach, we can characterize ego as a continuity and consistency of functioning to which we attach special importance, but which does not have the reality of a solid thing somewhere, which is only a pattern of operation that disappears under close scrutiny. I believe that this view is congruent with the enormous changes that can occur in the sense of self in various d-ASCs. The ego or self is thus a certain kind of extra informational modulation attached to other contents of consciousness. It is not a solid sort of thing, even though there must be some semipermanent structures containing the information criteria for controlling the functioning of this subsystem. A change in the pattern of functioning changes the ego.

Reports from d-ASCs indicate that the sense of ego can be disengaged from a wide variety of kinds of information and situations to which it is normally attached. Memories, for example, may come into your consciousness accompanied by the feeling that this is your memory, as just information pulled from memory. This can be therapeutically useful for recovering information about traumatic events from a patient who is unable to handle the emotional charge on the events. The sense of ego can also be detached from the body, so that you are associated simply with a body rather than your body. Reaction to pain, for instance, can be altered this way. You may feel a stimulus as just as painful as ordinarily, but you do not get upset about it because you are not being injured. Situations that evoke particular roles may not evoke such roles in d-ASCs. For example, all the necessary stimulus elements may be present for automatically invoking the role of teacher, but in the d-ASC the role does not appear. The sense of ego can be detached from possessions and responsibilities, and even from actions, so that things you do seem not to be your actions for which you are responsible, but just actions.
Sometimes the sense of ego is detached from several or all of the above concepts so that you feel entirely egoless for a while. There is experience, but none of it is "possessed" by you in any special ego sense.
The converse effect can also occur in d-ASCs: the sense of ego may be added to things it is not ordinarily attached to. A situation, for example, may call for a certain role that is not important to you ordinarily but which you come to identify with strongly.
This detachment and addition of the ego sense that accompanies d-ASCs may result in actions that are later regretted when the ordinary d-SoC returns. In our culture, the classic case is the person who behaves while drunk as he would never behave sober. A certain amount of social tolerance exists for drunken behavior, so while some people have profound regrets on realizing what they did, others are able to compartmentalize these experiences and not be particularly bothered by them.
These large shifts in ego sense in d-ASCs may later modify the ordinary d-SoC functioning of the Sense of Identity subsystem. When things you firmly identify with in the ordinary d-SoC are experienced in a d-ASC as detached from you, your conviction of their permanence is undermined and remains so when you resume your ordinary d-SoC. You are then receptive to other possibilities.
Since attachment of the sense of ego to certain information greatly increases the power of that information, these large shifts in Sense of Identity subsystem functioning can have profound consequences. For example, if the sense of ego is used to modulate most information about another person, you may feel united with that person. The usual ego-object dichotomy is broken. If your sense of being an ego separate from other things is greatly reduced or temporarily abolished in a d-ASC, you may feel much closer to another person because there is no you to be separate from him. The other may be a perceived, real person or a concept religiously respected person, a saint, or god, you may have a mystical experience in which you feel identified with something greater than yourself.
It is important to note, however, that the expansive or contractive change in the Sense of Identity subsystem that allows identification with something greater than/or outside oneself can have negative consequences and can be used to manipulate others. Group procedures at some religious meetings or political rallies, such as the Nazis held, illustrate how an intense emotional state can be generated which disrupts the stabilization of the ordinary d-SoC and leaves it vulnerable to psychological pressure to identify with the cause being promoted. Whether the cause is that of the Nazi party or of Christian salvation, the method is manipulation, playing on a subject's ignorance to disrupt his d-SoC and then reprogramming him.
These negative aspects should be emphasized, for too many people who have had good experiences in d-ASCs tend to think d-ASCs are inherently good. Consider, therefore, one more example, that of the berserkers. The English word berserk, meaning "violently running amuck, killing and slaying at random," comes from the Scandinavian word berserker, referring to groups in medieval times who took a psychedelic drug in order to become better killers. Tradition has it that these Vikings, to whom raiding and killing was a respectable way of life, ingested Amanita muscaria, a mushroom with psychedelic properties, under ritual conditions (patterning forces) to induce a day-long d-ASC in which they became exceptionally ferocious killers and fighters, carried away by rage and lust, supposedly impervious to pain, an possessed of extra strength. Such a d-ASC experience hardly creates "flower children."
Additionally we should note that the semiconstancy of the consensus reality we live in imposes a fair degree of consistency on the kinds of experiences and contents of consciousness to which the Sense of Identity subsystem attaches the ego quality. Every morning you awaken with an apparently identical body; people call you by the same name; they have relatively fixed expectations of you; they reward you for fulfilling those expectations; you are usually surrounded by a fair number of possessions that reinforce your sense of identity. As long as these consensus reality conditions remain relatively constant, you can easily believe in the constancy of your ego. But if these props for your Sense of Identity are changed, as they sometimes are deliberately as a way of destabilizing the b-SoC in preparation for inducing a d-ASC, your sense of ego can change radically. An example familiar to some readers is induction into the army: you are stripped of personal possessions, including clothes; all your ordinary social roles are gone; your name is replaced by a number or a rank; and you are "reeducated" to be a good soldier. Induction into the army and induction into a d-ASC have much in common, but because the army is a well-known subset of consensus reality it is not considered odd, as hypnosis or dreaming are.
Finally, because of its enormous ability to control emotional and attention/awareness energy, the Sense of Identity subsystem can at times constellate the entire structure of consciousness about particular identity patterns, just as can archetypes (in the Jungian sense) arising from the Collective Unconscious can.

Tao subsystems - VII