Comments on Forever Becoming: The Larger Mind

There is a Power greater than the self Cybernetic...

2010-01-09T17:45:18.344Z

There is a Power greater than the self

Cybernetics would go somewhat further and recognize that the "self" as ordinarily understood is only a small part of a much larger trial-and-error system which does the thinking, acting, and deciding.

The "self" is a false reification of an improperly delimited part of this much larger field of interlocking processes.

A favourable relationship with this Power is discovered through "hitting bottom" and "surrender."

By resisting this Power, men and especially alcoholics bring disaster upon themselves. The materialistic philosophy which sees "man" as pitted against his environment is rapidly breaking down as technological man becomes more and more able to oppose the largest systems.

[The Twelfth Step of AA] enjoins aid to other alcoholics as a necessary spiritual exercise without which the member would relapse. [...] the relationship between man and his community parallels the relationship between man and God. "AA is a power greater than any of us."

In sum, the relationship of each individual to the "Power" is best defined in the words is part of.

If we deeply and even unconsciously believe that our relation to the largest system which concerns us - the "Power greater than self" - is symmetrical and emulative, then we are in error [...] It is not asserted that all transactions between human beings ought to be complementary, though it is clear that the relation between the individual and the larger system of which he is a part must necessarily be so.

[Gregory Bateson]
Steps to an Ecology of Mind ('The Cybernetics of "Self": A Theory of Alcoholism'), p.331-3

[...] in no system which shows mental character...

2010-01-09T17:15:17.772Z
[...] in no system which shows mental characteristics can any part have unilateral control over the whole. In other words, the mental characteristics of the system are immanent, not in some part, but in the system as whole.

[A] computer is only an arc of a larger circuit which always includes a man and an environment from which information is received and upon which efferent messages from the computer have effect. This total system, or ensemble, may legitimately be said to show mental characteristics. It operates by trial and error and has creative character.

Similarly, we may say that "mind" is immanent in those circuits of the brain which are complete within the brain. Or that mind is immanent in circuits which are complete within the system, brain plus body. Or, finally, that mind is immanent in the larger system - man plus environment.

In principle, if we desire to explain or understand the mental aspect of any biological event, we must take into account the system - that is, the network of closed circuits, within which that biological event is determined. But when we seek to explain the behaviour of a man or an other organism, this "system" will usually not have the same limits as the "self" - as this term is commonly (and variously) understood.

Consider a man felling a tree with an axe. Each stroke of the axe is modified or corrected, according to the shape of the cut face of the tree left by the previous stroke. This self-corrective (i.e., mental) process is brought about by a total system, tree-eyes-brain-muscles-axe-stroke-tree; and it is this total system that has the characteristics of an immanent mind.

But this is not how the average Occidental sees the event sequence of tree felling. He says, "I cut down the tree" and he even believes that there is a delimited agent, the "self" which performed a delimited "purposive" action upon a delimited object.

[...] popular parlance includes mind in its utterance by invoking the personal pronoun, and then achieves a mixture of mentalism and physicalism by restricting mind within the man and reifying the tree.

The total self-corrective unit which processes information, or, as I say, "thinks" and "acts" and "decides," is a system whose boundaries do not at all coincide with the boundaries either of the body or of what is popularly called the "self" or "consciousness" [...]

[...] if we exclude the unconscious processes from the "self" and call them "ego alien," then these processes take on the subjective colouring of "urges" and "forces"; and this pseudodynamic quality is then extended to the conscious "self" which attempts to "resist" the "forces" of the unconscious. The "self" thereby becomes itself an organization of seeming 'forces."

The popular notion which would equate "self" with consciousness thus leads into the notion that ideas are "forces" [...]

[Gregory Bateson]
Steps to an Ecology of Mind ('The Cybernetics of "Self": A Theory of Alcoholism'), p.316-20

I have a premonition that such a new science, cove...

2010-01-04T12:35:15.978Z
I have a premonition that such a new science, covering the whole without making distinctions between things and human beings, will emerge, and that it will be infinitely closer to religion than the old (modern) science.

At such a time, ideas from Buddhism [...] will become useful.

[Hayao Kawai]
Buddhism and the Art of Psychotherapy, p.140

Dr Izutsu suggests thinking of Jung's Collecti...

2010-01-03T22:25:08.762Z
Dr Izutsu suggests thinking of Jung's Collective Unconscious as the consciousness of such a Collective Unconscious [if the Collective Unconscious were a thing, then it would be that thing's consciousness].

Jung chose that name because he was viewing it from the ego's perspective. If, in contrast, we start from the complete nondivision of Mind-Suchness [Buddha Mind, all things, the whole], we would then consider the Collective Unconscious also as conscious but at an extremely deep level where it is transpersonal, expanding to the whole of humankind.

This sort of transpersonal, total-consciousness field in The Awakening of Faith sutra is called "Shujo-shin," or "Collective Mind."

This Collective Mind has two aspects. It has the expansion of cognitive total-unity, which contains every kind of existence, including Jung's Collective Unconscious. At the same time, it has our ordinary daily consciousness.

That is, it is constantly swinging back and forth between ordinary consciousness and the transpersonal, cosmic cognition.

[Hayao Kawai]
Buddhism and the Art of Psychotherapy, p.126

And last, there is death. It is understandable th...

2010-01-03T16:33:41.739Z
And last, there is death.

It is understandable that, in a civilization which separates mind from body, we should either try to forget about death or to make mythologies about the survival of transcendent mind.

But if mind is immanent not only in those pathways of information which are located inside the body but also in external pathways, then death takes on a different aspect.

The individual nexus of pathways which I call "me" is no longer so precious because that nexus is only part of a larger mind.

[Gregory Bateson]
Steps to an Ecology of Mind, p.471