Okay, I had to post this, as I found it to be … weirdly fascinating. Google has a tool that allows you to search for terms and see how they have trended over time based on global search volume.  The service is called Google Trends, check it out.

Here is the result for the term “epistemology”:

Apparently interest for the term “epistemology” follows a strong yearly cycle, with two maximum values in October and Feb/March and one strong minimum in July.

Interestingly, the same basic pattern applies to the closely related term “ontology” (“close” if you are in philosophy, that is):

This of course prompts further research, for example, comparing searches for “chemistry”, “physics”, “biology”, “philosophy” and “ethics”:

This suggests that all of these terms, which are largely academic in nature, may follow the yearly pattern of research in academic institutions.

The same basic pattern of double peaks in October-ish and February-ish, with strong minima in July (summer break!), repeats for many “academic” words.

What is troubling/interesting is the clear decline from 2004 (the first year data is available) through the late 2000′s of ALL of these searches… except for “epistemology”, which seems pretty steady.

Questions:

• Why two distinct peaks at these times? Is this when all the papers are due?
• How do these results square with the fact that the data here is global? Are the academic calendars worldwide similar?
• Looking at the countries with the highest number of results for these terms shows that it is largely driven by searches in the US, India, Australia, east African countries and specifically Nigeria. Europe is prominently not prominent. What to make of this interesting spread?
• The downward trend in all the search terms has leveled off around 2008; but why did it decline in the first place and why has it been steady for the past 4 years?

Your thoughts on these mysteries are welcome!

Gregory Bateson (1991) famously said that we “cannot claim to have no epistemology. Those who so claim have nothing but a bad epistemology” (p. 178).  Bateson is calling for self-reflection in our epistemology.  He wants it to be recursive, so that in our production of knowledge we do not delude ourselves into thinking that the means of production is independent of what is produced.  The consequences of lacking a self-reflexive epistemology are dire, leading to real practical and ethical dilemmas.  The structure of the sequence often goes something like this:

• Knowledge is produced on the basis of a non-reflexive epistemology (Bateson’s “bad” epistemology).
• The knowledge produced is thus assumed to be “objective” and “true” (i.e. independent of the means of its production; ignorant of its genesis).
• This tends to have a psychologically limiting effect with respect to alternative knowledge and especially alternative modes of knowledge production.  One’s viewpoint becomes ossified.
• The unreflective assumption of the “truth” of the knowledge becomes justification for its projection, often forcefully, onto other people and processes in the environments surrounding the knower.  A sense of conviction that the world is “like this” leads to inflexible protocols in our institutions and in our modes of interaction with others.  In other words, outer processes are also ossified; they become sclerotic.

Calibration and Self-Calibration.

But what does it mean to have a self-reflexive epistemology?  The difference between the two types of epistemologies, non-self-relfexive and self-reflexive, can be described by the first and second order difference.  A non-self-reflexive epistemology is a first-order epistemology, a process of creating knowledge that operates in a linear fashion.  The knowledge it generates is not explicitly connected to the process of its generation, and thus does not act as a potential corrective to its mode of production.  Epistemology is a tool for knowing; but with a non-self-reflexive epistemology, the tool’s operation does not change the tool, so that no matter what job it is called to do, it re-instances any new creations in the manner and style of its past processes—regardless of what might be new in the situation it encounters.  The kind of newness that comes from a linear epistemology is innovative, but not radical.  It is well-suited to the kinds of knowledge domains that work towards technical, but not paradigmatic, advances.

To use a term from cybernetics, a linear epistemology is resistant to calibration (higher order feedback).  But this lack of openness to calibration is often not simply passive, but active: attempts at calibration are often either discarded or met with increasing rigidity, with a sort of “doubling-down” on the knowledge already produced by the epistemology, and an increasing unwillingness to change the process by which knowledge is produced.  We could therefore describe this kind of epistemology as willfully ignorant.  This can actually be quite beneficial in producing new knowledge (within the parameters already accepted by the epistemology), because it minimizes the recursive complexity and is more amenable to simplification.  Reductionisms of all types, where all phenomena, regardless of their complexity, are explained only in terms of more simple (and often more abstract) entities, are linear epistemologies.  Said differently, a linear epistemology allows one to ignore second-order alternatives.  Most of modern scientific thinking rests on the back of linear epistemology, to which it is well-suited.

On the other hand, a self-reflexive epistemology is a second-order epistemology (see the table at the end of this post for a comparison of qualities — with images!).  The process allows itself to be changed by the content it produces.  It is thus an open epistemology that operates on the basis of a recursion between process and content.  It is open to calibration, and not simply in a passive way, but actively: it seeks calibration of its own processes (not just its content) through an active monitoring of what it is generating.  Whereas a linear epistemology tends to minimize calibrative influences (changes in the way it operates at a second-order level), a recursive epistemology actively embodies them at its heart; it is not merely open to calibration, but is self-calibrative.  The linking of process and content in this recursive way is akin to the creation of a new type of sensitivity; we can metaphorically say that operating with a recursive epistemology is the development of a new type of higher sense-organ for a knowing system. This is another way of saying that what a system distinguishes distinguishes its distinguishing.  Recursive epistemology is open to self-revision not only at the content level (which is also true of linear epistemologies, although there may still be a difference in their relative inertia to this change), but also at the process level.  This means that the kind of newness it can potentially yield includes radical, as well as technical shifts.  Radical shifts restructure the further possibilities that are available to the knowing system; they are paradigmatic shifts.

What is important to consider is that the recursion between knowledge and knowing (between content and process) actually applies to all epistemologies, even first-order epistemologies.  It is simply that in the case of a first-order epistemology, the epistemology is not systemically inclusive of this fact; we could say that it is not sensitive to its own sensitivity.  A second-order epistemology is sensitive to its sensitivities: it includes processes whose content is the change of processes.  The most tightly recursive epistemologies have processes whose content is itself.  We will see later that differences in the level of tightness in the recursion has consequences for how we can think about esoteric practices such as meditative visualization.

The Unknown and Unknowing.

Every epistemology has its boundary, a place where it meets a kind of threshold of what it can so far distinguish to itself.  Here again we have a first and second-order difference.  The first-order level to this threshold is the possible content that could be revealed there, if only our knowing could continue across the threshold.  This is the unknown, as a content.  The second-order level to the threshold is the ongoing activity of the unknowing.

A first-order epistemology meets its boundary only by virtue of the loss of what is seen as its potential content.  The unknown is assumed to be a specific content that is just like the known in every way except that has yet to be brought to light, discovered, or found.  These metaphors work from the assumption that knowledge is somehow waiting “out there” to be had, and the protocols for knowledge production are thus geared towards the transformation of the unknown into the known, often with forceful manipulation and through maximization of control procedures. The unknown is precisely what needs to be minimized, and processes that generate unknowing are therefore seen as barriers to further knowing, leading only to confusion or obfuscation.  The unknown is valued only negatively, as the not-yet-known.  The not-yet-known is pulled through from the other side of the threshold and brought “down” to re-instance the same reality that the epistemology already operates within, as further proof of its existence.

A second-order epistemology meets its boundary also by virtue of what is not known, but in addition it values the unknowing as an active and potentially transformative process.  What for the first-order epistemology is only a potential new content is for the second-order epistemology a potential new way of being.  This is a higher-order content, and is not simply “out there” to be discovered but must be enacted to exist; it must be brought into being.  The unknowing is thus taken to be an invitation, a doorway, and instead of taking the unknown and making it known through the same epistemological patterns, it opens the door to more unknowing.

Enacting a second-order epistemology is to allow one’s way of knowing to change, not just the content of what is known.  Unknowing is thus valued as a transformative agent, as a source of not only new knowledge but new ways of living forward.  For a second-order epistemology, unknowing is a feature to be actively worked with, even developed, rather than a bug to be squashed. Said another way, a linear epistemology does not know that it does not know, while a recursive epistemology does, and makes of this something new of itself.  The active incorporation of processes that yield states of unknowing is a primary way that a recursive epistemology self-calibrates.

Validity.

[[This discussion is meant to provide a re-orientation at a process level of what is meant by the terms thinking, thought, world, and reality.  Following Gendlin (1991), the terms mean how they are used in the context of these sentences, and the sentences are formed to indicate what the words mean.  If the words are taken to carry only their old, habitual meanings, then the passage will not make any sense; new meanings are being brought forth in their usage in this way, here in these sentences.]]

First-order epistemology focuses on the content of what it produces, and derives from this content the very justification for its truth; it invests its validity in its facts.  This is an important but subtle and difficult point: a linear epistemology generates facts, and then projects them onto “the outer world” (which is created for us in this projection) so that when we perceive the world we derive a sense of certainty about our epistemological relationship to it.  The world seems simply to be that way—the projection of our thoughts onto the world obscures our thinking.  We ask the world to tell us what we can know, without realizing that we have given the world the ability to speak to us when we dissolve our thinking in it, leaving only thoughts behind as a kind of corpse.  By investing the world with our thoughts, we give it the power to reflect back to us—as if independently of our activity—“the known.”  Thus the validity of a linear epistemology is felt when we discover its results in the facts “out there,” because for such an epistemology the facts mark the epistemological end-point, the place where thinking is no longer required, where it dissolves itself in the projected object of its knowing.  What is left behind is a thought-content, which, divested of its genesis, seems to exist independently of us, providing a powerful sense of certainty.  Linear epistemology thus often perceives the world as intrinsically dead, not living.  It is objective, and has existence only as objects, independent of any subjects.  But when dead objects are taken to be fundamental, this kind of view tends to produce deadening and objectifying modes of interaction with the world.  We need only look to any of the innumerable modern crises in the environment, in politics, in education, in medicine, and elsewhere to see the kinds of effects the adoption of this kind of epistemology produces.

A critic will respond to this by pointing out that the truth of the knowledge discovered by a linear epistemology is not dependent on the knower, because it can be utilized to achieve the production of technological objects that work independently in the world.  Technological devices—cell phones, transistors, steam engines—are taken to demonstrate the veracity of the epistemology because the technologies work.  If the epistemology was in error, technologies could not successfully be developed from the principles it discovered (it is assumed).  All standard scientific prediction follows this same epistemological pattern: the test of knowledge is found in its empirical demonstration, in whether it yields some particular configuration of “outer events” vs. another.  If our theory predicts that we observe state A in the world, and then we look at the world and observe that it is in state A, we feel justified in assuming that our theory of state A actually applies to the world.  What could be wrong with this?

The more subtle view of recursive epistemology sees that we project our thought about state A onto the world through the activity of our observation of it; this is why “outer events” had to be put in quotes in the previous paragraph.  The activity of observation ceases, but the thought content left behind now makes “reality” appear for us as such.  If reality is taken to be a piece of glass, our thoughts form the silver coating on its back that reflects the activity of thinking back to itself, so that it can perceive a world, and itself in that world. Thinking thus perceives its thoughts in the world, but it does not perceive its own activity, to which it is asleep (at first). We could say that the world—the world in which we actually live forward, not an abstract world-without-us—is the perceiving of our thoughts projected there by, and reflected back to, thinking. When the process is non-recursive, the result leaves us with the sense of a world that just “is” that way; allowing us to take it for granted as such.  Thinking’s projection of itself as thoughts into the world allows itself to forget itself as thinking; it sees itself only reflected in its thoughts. Thus the “discovery” of the properties of the world is also the discovery of our thoughts in it, but not necessarily the discovery of thinking: something more is required for that.  Recursive epistemology is a way of describing this something more, and an invitation to enact it.

With this background, the argument about technology demonstrating the truth of the knowledge derived from a linear epistemology can be seen in a different light.  When we create a new technology or empirically test a scientific theory, we are actively involved in the linking of a thought-content to the world (remembering that the world arises for us in this activity).  When this linking is hidden by the very process of the linking itself, it seems as if “the world” validates the underlying principle in question.  Nothing more seems required; state A was predicted, state A occurred, case closed, further thinking can be avoided, and the process can now be given over to the engineers for implementation.  This is a dangerous tendency for linear epistemologies, because it covers over its assumptions with a profound feeling of the correctness of the thought.  Good science already knows that correlation is not causation; but the point here is that even causation is not causation.  This is another sentence that is meaningless unless it is taken from a perspective that can distinguish between first and second-order meanings.

Hume, of course, raised a similar point using a very different set of concepts in his An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1938), where he notes that “nothing is more usual than to apply to external bodies every internal sensation which they occasion” (p. 57).  Hume understood projection, and the problems it raises for inductive thinking and causation, but from a first-order level.  When we recognize the second-order relation between the activity of thinking and the thoughts that precipitate out of thinking as its product, the door is opened for a different kind of relation between thinking and the world, based not upon the linear polarities that result from a first-order epistemology (I/world, subjective/objective, illusion/reality, etc.), but which rest on a recursive foundation in which such polarities are always parts of larger circles.  This is what Jung (1972, pp. 72–73) identified, in his own way, with his psychological conception of the enantiodromia, a term which goes back to the process-philosophy of Heraclitus, concerning the union of opposites; more on this later.

When considering the source of its veracity, a recursive epistemology walks a delicate middle line.  It does not project itself onto the products of the stopping of its own activity (the dead object), but it also does not move to the extreme of pure solipsism, where the world becomes somehow ‘simply’ my creation.  It rather works with the arising of truth out of the relating between process and content, between a first and second-order recursion.  It takes neither the world nor the knower for granted as such, and seeks a phenomenologically oriented integration of knower and known through their recursive relating.  In a linear epistemology truth is taken at a first-order level.  Indeed, the very strength and power of first-order epistemology is its self-enclosing of truth within processes that yield first-order content amenable to the kind of projection that is only noted from a second-order level, as just discussed.  Looked at from the second-order perspective, truth for a linear epistemology is limited to what can be adequately projected outside the processes that yield it (another basis for its willful ignorance).

A consequence of this is that linear epistemologies tend to produce knowledge in piecemeal form.  Truth occurs in bits, the veracity of which is not intrinsic to the bits, but only supported by the truth of other, immediately adjacent bits.  This conception has led to the development and continued reduction of knowledge into specialties, sub-specialties, and sub-sub-specialties.  Although alternatives to this trend have always existed (notably in some “esoteric” and aesthetic domains, including anthroposophy), it is only relatively recently that its limits have been increasingly recognized from within the various disciplines.  The recent rise of transdisciplinary thinking (“Ngram for the word Transdisciplinarity,” 2012) is in part a result of this recognition, and is an attempt to frame debate about these limits in a transformative way.  Transdisciplinarity is a seeking of a way forward that does not require a wholesale break from past knowledge and processes of knowledge construction.  It wants to carry forward the vast amount of knowledge they have produced, but in ways that do not recapitulate the epistemological and ontological blindnesses of their second-order processes.

It is not a question of whether one or the other epistemology is “right” – at least in the sense carried by this question when asked from a first-order perspective. A consequence of recognizing the importance of the role of second-order recursion in epistemology is that it re-orients the focus of epistemology in a profound way.  A recursive epistemology loses its ability (derived from first-order thinking) to keep itself separate from the bigger picture, through which it integrates itself in a transdisciplinary way with other fields, such as ontology, cosmology, aesthetics, and so forth.  Recursive epistemology is not merely about knowing and how we think, but also about how we act, how we feel, and how we live ourselves forward with the world, in recursive relationship with it.  This is what allows the knowledge it produces to be not just about parts (although it is also about parts), but about wholes.  It understands that knowledge is never separate from a knower, and that a knower is never separate from all the wider contexts in which knowing occurs.  Thus a very important question for a recursive epistemology is what are the wider contexts?  But that phrasing is old, and still carries the assumptions of linear epistemology, and we are looking for something else.

It is enough at this stage to note these major differences between first and second-order epistemologies.  Table 1 adds gesturally-oriented images to the differences between linear and recursive epistemologies.  Many other images could be made to indicate the same differences.

Linear Epistemologies	Recursive Epistemologies
L – Linear	R – Recursive
L – Non-self-reflexive	R – Self-reflexive
L – First-order	R – Second-order
L – Process kept independent of content	R – Process changes in response to content
L – Unknown as potentially known content	R – Unknowing as potentially transformative process
L – Truth as objective and “out there”	R – Truth is a way of relating process and content
L – Tends towards technical innovation	R – Can yield paradigm shifts
L – Content focused	R – Process focused
L – Validation reflected by content	R – Validation as ongoing content-process recursion
L – Knowledge produced as pieces	R – Knowledge produced as wholes
L – Observer split from environment	R – Observer and environment are mutually constituted in one process

References

Bateson, G. (1991). Sacred unity : Further steps to an ecology of mind (1st ed.). HarperOne.

Gendlin, E. (1991). Thinking beyond patterns : Body, language and situations. The Focusing Institute. Retrieved April 18, 2012, from http://www.focusing.org/gendlin/docs/gol_2159.html

Hume, D. (1938). An enquiry concerning human understanding. Forgotten Books.

Jung, C. G. (1972). Two essays on analytical psychology. (G. Adler & R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). Princeton University Press.

Ngram for the word Transdisciplinarity. (2012, June). Google Books: Ngram Viewer. Retrieved from http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=transdisciplinarity&year_start=1900&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=3

Introduction

Video games are a huge global phenomenon, driving well over $70 billion dollars in sales in 2011—a number that is only rising year by year.  For comparison, global music sales in 2011 was about $16 billion, while global theater tickets was about $33 billion.  This has consequences—largely unexplored—for people that are interested in spiritual development.  It is thus important to look at the phenomenon of video games from a spiritual perspective, because almost no one growing up today can avoid them.  The time in which human beings could develop spiritually without the presence of modern technologies is essentially over, and video games are now deeply integrated into the fabric of modern society.  Their ubiquity means that human beings who wish to undertake spiritual development will often do so in contexts that are not devoid of video games.  We can thus ask the question, how might video games impact spiritual development?

The perspectives put forth here are developed from an anthroposophical perspective, and thus I use the language of anthroposophy to some extent.  Readers not familiar with this language can follow along with the main points but likely questions will arise with respect to the meaning of the terms such as astral and etheric body.  Such readers are referred particularly to the first chapter of Rudolf Steiner’s book Theosophy (available free here).  Additionally, some context for this post is laid out in another post, on Sleep, Dreams, and Video Games, in which I explore the basic phenomenon of sleep in connection with video games and spiritual development.  The current post goes much deeper and more directly into the spiritual background of video games with respect to the makeup of the human being. I also suggest supplementing this post with more “standard” research on video games.  The graphic at right is particularly interesting and highlights some areas addressed in this post.

A one-two endocrine punch

Right now video games—despite having come quite a long way—are still almost totally oriented towards stimulation of the astral body, and pay no real attention to the spiritual reality of the ego, let alone the ego’s task of transforming the astral body into a more pure state (spirit self).  Video games are even more devious, however, in that the particular mode by which they call to our astral body such that they utilize the parts of the astral body that connect with the etheric body’s life processes.  This is seen most directly seen in the way that games are designed to arouse particular endocrine responses through intense imagery sequences—and this is done in a very skillful way, utilizing a sort of one-two endocrine punch.  On the one side is the fight/flight response and the release of tiny amounts of adrenaline (epinephrine), which is very stimulating and gives us a greater sense of being alive and capable; on the other is the reward response triggered through power-ups, leveling, treasure, and so forth, which stimulates the release of dopamine (involved in all reward-learning).

Epinephrine

So here’s the thing: the release of adrenaline in a more natural setting occurs when you need to mobilize your body for potential and immediate action (often involving gross motor movement and the large muscle groups, i.e. running).  In the case of a video game none of this gross movement actually will occur, because you are basically just sitting in one spot.  You consciously know that your body is not in danger (so you don’t actually run away), but your etheric body can’t make a distinction between real and false danger: it preps itself for action in both cases.  Your ego has enough control over your body to keep it in front of the TV (more on this later), but not enough to keep it from releasing adrenaline, which up-regulates your heart rhythm, dilates your pupils, down-regulates your immune system and digestion, and increases oxygen and glucose absorption in the brain.  The ego is then left with the residue of this activity, given to it through the astral body as it rides on the back of these powerful etheric processes.

And then comes the second punch: it is just at this moment, when the action comes to a momentary pause and there is no immediate cause for the continued release of adrenaline, that the game presents you with a reward of some kind, triggering a dopamine release and the activation of the reward-learning system in the brain.  It is the timing of this one-two punch that is so powerful: by following at just the right moment, right when the (false) danger is removed, the activation of the reward centers has a correspondingly larger impact than were the response to occur without the previous fight/flight mobilization.  In other words, the contrast between the activity of adrenaline and dopamine in the brain, when sequenced just so, yields a subjectively greater sense of the value of the reward than would otherwise occur; we overvalue the reward.

Dopamine

This overvaluation gives the ego a hit, and makes it seem like all the intensity that accompanies the fight/flight response was not only “worth it,” but is something to repeat.  The loop of attention is closed, and we are drawn forward to the next game conflict, having learned now to anticipate activation of the reward centers of our brain without ever having to actually meet any real danger, while having the sense of the danger, because your etheric body can’t say “no” to the effects of adrenaline.  It is the rhythmic oscillation between these two sides of the endocrine response system that is problematic for spiritual development, because the rhythmic oscillation works in a way that could almost be described as ego-enslaving.  The rhythm has power to it that the ego is not very capable of dealing with (because of the etheric nature of this rhythm), so it slides into the pattern and has a difficult time regaining its rightful place with respect to the astral body in particular, which is where the spiritual knot is in this case.  The ego is meant to develop so as to be the initiator and dissolver of astral activity, but because this activity gets linked to a rhythm in the etheric body, the ego loses its hold and gets swept up in the drama of the etheric body.  It becomes more of a passive spectator and relinquishes its potential to be a creatively free with respect to the astral body.

To take it further, the important thing about video games is that all of this activity takes place through the linking of two very important phenomena, both significant when thinking about this question in the context of spiritual development: imagery and fine motor control.  Let us look at images first.

Video games, imagery, the astral body and the ego

The astral body is the symbolizing body.  When thinking about spiritual development, the most important thing is to make sure that the images that the astral body encounters are spiritually nourishing.  Without getting into too much detail, an image is spiritually nourishing when it can be penetrated by the ego, and when in so doing the ego can find something in the image that coherently connects it beyond itself to the parts of the universe that support the development of the human ego.  (Yes, this definition has a circularity in it.)  In other words, when an image becomes meaningful with respect to how the ego needs to bring itself forward for that particular individual, the image is nourishing.  Such images are symbols, and can even become healing symbols when the ego uses them for spiritual development.

Video games are largely devoid of exactly these kinds of images.  They are symbolically empty with respect to the development of the ego.  But the real issue is that the combination of the fight/flight and reward activation pathways in the endocrine system is linked to images that give a false sense of development to the ego.  The specific images that trigger the reward centers are almost invariably linked to the idea of advancement—but do not carry the reality of advancement.   This is played out differently in different styles of games, but is a near-universal feature of all games: higher scores, in-game achievements, item drops, new character skills, gold pieces, unlocked content, and so forth.

All of the advancement that occurs in the context of the game stays within the game.  Your ego does not get any spiritual traction in this kind of situation; the game challenges are not (with perhaps a very very few exceptions, and I’m not including, for example, Deepak Chopra’s game Leela here) the sort that help the ego develop itself spiritually.  In other words, the rewards are spiritually vacuous, even while the physical, etheric and astral bodies undergo an experience as if there was some kind of advancement occurring or immanent.

There is an important caveat to note, having to do with multiplayer games, particularly multiplayer games that require cooperative problem solving and communication for successful in-game advancement (many MMOs are like this).  In this sort of game, even though the explicit in-game rewards and challenges are spiritually vacuous, the need for cooperation and communication with real human beings provides the ego with potential avenues for development.  However, these are only the same avenues that are present in situations of normal everyday life when coordination with other human beings is required; the game does not add anything significant for potential ego development that is not already present in normal life.  In both cases, it is all too easy to ignore the potential paths that help develop the ego and simply repeat to ourselves (and project on to others) whatever stage of development we are already at.

Fine motor control and the aesthetic sense

Now on to fine motor control.  The reason why this is a significant issue is that fine motor control of the kind that most video games require for success, mostly in the form of highly coordinated movements of the wrists, fingers, and thumbs (and we could include the eyes as well) is the same type that is needed in the development of our aesthetic sense.  This point requires some elaboration.

From a spiritual perspective, there is an important link between fine motor control and the development of the will in such a way that it is capable of furthering spiritual development.  Most aesthetic arts utilize this connection, such as painting, calligraphy, drawing, dancing, sculpture, and music (many other arts also work with this link to some degree or other).   The way that fine motor control helps further spiritual development is when it gets linked to the will through the intermediate realm of the feelings.  It is not enough for spiritual development to simply develop good hand-eye coordination, to gain a general dexterity.  What is needed is a regulation of this activity through a corresponding engaging of one’s feeling life.  The life of feeling here is meant not in the sense of gross emotions (or even subtle emotions), but in a way that can be illuminated with the following situation.

Imagine that you are a swallow, flying through the air.  Imagine your wings stretched out, catching the wind.  Imagine your legs tucked back, your neck stretched out, your muscles straining.  Imagine the speed and maneuverability as you chase after insects or slow yourself to a stop as you approach your nest.

A swallow

Now imagine that instead of being a swallow you are an owl.  Imagine your wings as you fly, the position of your ears and eyes, the extent of your feathers and the strength of your feet in gripping your perch.  Imagine your sensitivity to light, the quietness of your flight, the stillness of your body when watching for prey.  Let yourself imagine what it is like to be an owl as deeply as you can.

A barred owl

Now inwardly sense what is different about these two imaginings.  The difference between these two imaginings, of the swallow and the owl, occurs as a feeling.  There may be an emotional resonance with the feelings, and this may be different for the case of the swallow versus the owl, but even that difference takes place in your wider life of feeling.  We cannot easily extract all emotional content (we are emotional beings), but we can see that the emotions that may occur in this situation cannot carry the difference between the two imaginations.  You can still have a sense of their difference, and you can have this sense only because of what is possible in your feeling life.  It is your feeling life that can sense something of the inner difference between a straight line and a curved line, or the rational and irrational numbers, or the colors red and blue, or the difference between walking and sitting.

In this way our life of feelings is like a palette that colors how we can be in the world, and what the world can be for us.  Spiritual development of the feeling life involves the conscious extension and complexification of what our feeling life is capable of integrating: we can call this aesthetic development—it is an expansion of our feeling palette.  This is part of spiritual development because the aesthetic sense, working as it does between our willing and our thinking, can act as a powerful integrator of human experience.  It can lift and ennoble our willing impulses by bringing them into contact with more subtle possibilities of how the world can be, and thus how we can be in the world.  It also serves as a basis upon which the thinking can bring itself forward in ways that are also commensurate with an expanded range of how we meet the world and how it meets us.  The aesthetic sense gives thinking traction and allows it to make new distinctions that were previously unavailable to it.  These two results of the developed aesthetic sense are really two sides of the same movement.  They are in a recursive relationship, building off of each other to open new options for both thinking and acting.  This takes place through the integration that occurs in the feeling life as it develops itself aesthetically.

Color scheme from Seurat

When we utilize fine motor control in service to the developing of our aesthetic sense, we are utilizing a tight feedback loop that takes place between the will and our thinking that is exactly the same loop that is important for developing spiritual perception.  To perceive spiritually, we must develop our ability to sense in ways that are commensurate with the phenomena that we will encounter in the spiritual world.  If our senses are capable only of the most gross distinctions, the world we live in will be correspondingly gross; if they are fine, then the world we live in will be fine.  The spiritual world is supremely delicate and subtle with respect to this point.  To become capable of noticing the difference between one type of spiritual event or being and another requires the ability to perceive the difference between them, and if this difference is subtle, we must have developed our feeling life in such a way as to be sensitive to this subtlety.  The arts are a training, in the physical world, of what can become capacities for perception in the spiritual world.  This is not all that is required, of course, but we can’t underestimate the value of artistic training for spiritual perception.

How does this link back to fine motor control and video games?  Once we understand that the aesthetic sense is developed strongly through the link between attention and fine motor control as it occurs in the feeling life, which constantly monitors the state of the soul as we act on the world and allow it to act back on us, we can see how this link is co-opted in a very limiting and deadening way with respect to video games.

The primary motor cortex

The dexterity required to control modern video games is not linked to motions that help develop the aesthetic sense.  The possible motions of the fingers, thumbs, and wrists is reduced to a very small set that is locked tightly to the particular control devices (console controllers, keyboards, and mice or trackpads).  These control devices only respond to direct presses (binary activations for all buttons and keys) or planar movements (the mouse), and within very limited ranges designed for efficiency of execution (I’m leaving the Wii, Kinect, and Move controllers out of the discussion for now, but they don’t vastly improve the context being developed here).  In real-time strategy games, an important measurement for elite players is actions per second, which requires exquisite efficiency in the coordination of fine motor impulses.  But what is sacrificed for the sake of efficiency is precisely what can be developed when the feeling life is not thusly bound, i.e. art.  The entrainment of fine motor movements within the context of the already-mentioned astral power of video game imagery, its spiritually dessicated meaning, and the one-two etheric punch of the endocrine pattern oscillation, all while the ego keeps the body in an essentially locked position, all combine to reduce the ability of the ego to utilize video games for spiritual development.

Summary

Video games thus work themselves into something of a sweet spot with respect to the way that they insert themselves into the potential developmental space that the human being could otherwise utilize for spiritual advancement.  This sweet spot is formed from the meeting of aspects that address the human being only from the ego downwards (the higher potential members of the human being are not integrated into the experience):

1. The general desiccation of spiritually symbolic meaning;  (ego-oriented aspect)
2. Intensely engaging and stimulating imagery and scenarios; (astral-oriented aspect)
3. Rhythmic, oscillatory triggering of fight/flight responses (adrenaline/epinephrine) and reward-learning pathways (dopamine); (etheric-oriented aspect)
4. Utilization of attention to develop fine motor control in service to mechanical outcomes (physical-oriented aspect)
5. Suppression and restriction of other forms of bodily movement by the ego (keeping the body still), in service of the sense as if one is advancing or developing, without the actuality being realized; (closing the loop from the physical body to the ego, to keep the cycle going)

This preliminary analysis of video games from the perspective of spiritual development is not complete, but is only a first-pass look; the situation is rather more complex than presented here.  In particular I’m not commenting on the specific content of different video games, for example their generally high level of violence, the way in which women are treated in video games, or even their potential utilization for inducing healthy behaviors.  The human being is resilient and creative both with respect to how we encounter video games and also how we create them, and not all games are alike.  There is much more to consider with respect to the role of video games today, and why they are so globally popular, when we take a spiritual perspective.  However, the addition of more subtle analysis does not greatly change the basic structure of what is presented here.

The upshot is that, with the way things stand presently, there is very little spiritual nourishment to be found in video games, and because of the particular ways that games involve the different aspects of the human organism, they can even work to wither potential avenues for spiritual development.  As just mentioned, the larger context for this situation bears greater scrutiny, but at the moment it is enough to point out that the healing for this situation lies in the arts.

If you don’t know about the discovery of the Chestahedron, a volume with seven faces of equal area, you should check it out at New Forms Technology (shameless plug: I’m the webmaster).

I have been experimenting with the form in its sculptural capacity, and have come up with some interesting designs that are featured on the site, which you can see here.

Below are a few samples of my work, click for larger:

do not think about this
it is not here for your pleasure
not waiting self-less
for some deathly embrace
as if it were not already perfect
and rising starkly, gently behind you
perusing the pages of your eyes
passing no judgment

straighten your back
and fly into the sunset
as you were meant to –
objectless, void, unsundered
by the sheer presence of its wings
will you be lifted
footprints trailing clouds
into what has always known you

pulling the threads of your heart
it makes your fists close hard
about what you can never grasp
the light to your shadow
a silence around your music
forgeless and forging
you become its thoughts
it is no it
I AM

All epistemologies are observer-dependent; i.e. there is no single epistemology that applies to all possible observers, because every observer is unique in some way.  The necessary inclusion of the observer in any description of the world is a deeply obvious and yet profound principle.  It was neatly expressed in Heinz von Foerster’s article Cybernetics of Cybernetics, where he builds off of Humberto Maturana’s phrase “Anything said is said by an observer,” by indicating that “Anything said is said to an observer” (2003, p. 283) (figure 1).  This is in contrast to the view that anything said is simply… said, as if into a vacuum.  This older view, championed by the scientific revolution, took up the principle that statements could simply be true or false, and were about the world but not really of the world (the roots of these two views can be traced back to Plato and Aristotle).  Cybernetic epistemology modifies this assumption by re-introducing the observer as a part of the world.

Figure 1. A cybernetics of description following Heinz von Foerster. There are two different observers involved in any description; observer 1 is the describer, and observer 2 is the one to whom the description is directed.

(Side note: it is important to indicate that perspectives on just what this word “observer” might mean can be helpfully explored also through esoteric methods.  In an significant way a central—perhaps even the central—aspect of esoteric practice involves the closing of the loop of observation.  Esoteric practice in general (always with caveats) can be thought of as the experiential exploration of the cybernetic epistemological injunction that no description of reality can be complete without an integration of the describer in the description.)

While von Foerster links the principle explicitly to the social realm (2003, p. 284) by distinguishing the observer of Maturana’s phrase (a self) with the observer of his phrase (an other), it is important here to point out that it is also possible for these observers to be the same (figure 2). In this case, the observer that initiates the activity of describing is also the one to whom that activity is directed, forming a closed loop.  Of course this is just a way of pointing out that in some sense all description is also a description of the observer, a fact which can be noted—and more importantly, utilized—when the loop is closed and the description is not given only to another, but to one’s own self.

Figure 2. (Self) description. In this case the two observers from figure 1 are constituted by the same system.

The situations depicted schematically in figures 1 and 2 are simultaneous and not mutually exclusive. The observer that initiates the activity of describing is also one to whom that activity is directed, generating a closed loop, but the second observer is not obviated (a path that would lead to solipsism):

Figure 3. A cybernetics of (self) description. Observer 1 simultaneously describes her self in every description to Observer 2, who remains a key part of the complex web of relations unfolding.

It should be noted that the relation between levels of order N and N+1 [see this series of posts for more detail] is active in this case of the Observer (1,2), where the self (1), perceiving itself as other (2) in its own description (importantly, regardless of the content of the description), is a kind of boundary crossing that opens up the possibility of a second-order recursion, indicated by the dotted arrow from Observer 2 (in red) to the 2 of Observer (1,2) (in blue).  This line is dotted because the link is implicit in the nature of the self as other, indicated by the 2 of Observer (1,2). This is all to say that the self as self is also implicitly self as other.

It is precisely this link that is utilized in the Goethean phenomenological method.  In Goethean beholding, the nature of the other as other is incorporated directly into the self, both as self and as other.

Figure 4. Goethean beholding. The other as other becomes incorporated into the self of the observer, simultaneously as self and as other.

But the fascinating result of carrying out this kind of procedure is that the very distinction between self and other undergoes a complex transformation.  The recursive web operationally linking the two observers as self and other is mirrored, such that each observer intrinsically participates both in their own self creation and the creation of the other:

Figure 5. The recursive web of self and other. Each observer participates directly in the becoming of the other and in their own becoming.

In this way the constructed duality between the self and the other is experientially transformed.  It is not simply dissolved in a mystical sort of oneness or obviated outright, but is rather complexified: the distinction (first order, N) is utilized for its own reorganization and transformation at a higher level (second order, N+1) by virtue of a recursion between those two levels.  Thus the original Observer 1 (simply as self) now complexly includes Observer 2 (self as self-other), while the original Observer 2 (simply as other) now recursively includes Observer 1 (other as other-self).  The whole set of relations recursively crosses the boundaries erected implicitly by the original distinction, but now explicitly; that crossing is the transformation of the original distinction through higher-order self-relation.

How you use your attention in waking life has definite effects in your dreaming life.  The following is my distillation of some insights from anthroposophy in this regard, which I offer as one way of looking at this phenomenon, specifically around the issue of video games and dreaming.  This post should provide an appropriate background if necessary.

If people are comfortable with the terms, we can talk about how the astral body (the subtle body that allows something outside to become something for us inwardly; i.e. the sense-body, which we share with animals) gains its content in large part by reflecting itself off of the etheric body (the less subtle body that keeps your body from becoming a corpse, which we share with the plant realm).

When you spend hours of time focusing your senses on particular stimuli (i.e. a video game) your are patterning your etheric body through physiological repetitions: the movements of your eyes, hands, breathing, etc., and more importantly in the endocrine responses and other physiological changes that go along with the particular game experience.  Knowing why this is important needs a little background first.

When you go to sleep, and you are no longer imposing your astral body on your etheric (i.e. choosing where to direct your attention and what sensations you will seek and avoid) your etheric body starts to “digest” all this activity that happened during the day.  This digestion is like a reverse-engineering, it is a sort of inversion of the processes that occurred during the day because of what you did while you were awake.

From this perspective, what sleeping is has to do with the way the astral body (along with the “I” or “ego) detach from the physical and etheric bodies (although not completely, which is what death is).  Dreaming occurs when the astral and ego dip back into the etheric a little, but not all the way back into the physical (in which case you wake up).

Because the content of the astral body is primarily supplied by reflecting itself off of the activity of the etheric body, what the etheric body is doing changes what becomes available as sensations for the astral body.  This is true all of the time, but there is a difference in this relation when awake and when asleep, and when dreaming (and also lucid dreaming) as well.

In waking life the etheric and physical bodies are directed, even “used” (or used up!) by the astral and ego, and the close links between these two groups means that almost all sensations (via the astral body, directed more or less by the ego) are directly linked to purely physical events or etheric processes (hunger, elimination, and so forth are the most obvious).

But when sleeping the astral and ego are no longer directing the show back in the physical and etheric bodies; the etheric body is free to do its work of getting everything ready for the next day (repairing tissues, cleaning the blood, glycolosis in the liver, etc.).  The wisdom of the physical and etheric bodies is such that a lot of this building-up activity happens earlier in the night.  This can be seen as an esoteric “reason” for why non-REM sleep is greater earlier in the night and REM sleep increases later.

The point is that how you structure your attention during the day (and what activities you therefore engage your etheric body in) has definite effects during sleep.  Much of the effects can be dealt with by your etheric body in non-REM sleep, but it can’t do it all in one sleep cycle, so when your astral body and ego dip back down into the etheric body (resulting in a dream), and the astral body uses the etheric body to reflect itself to the ego (for conscious experience), whatever the etheric body is doing at the time changes (to continue the metaphor) the shape of the mirror, which modifies the reflected image of the astral body to the ego.  In other words, some dreams (most, actually) are the kind where the astral body is having to deal with what is leftover in the breaking down of patterns that got imprinted on the etheric body during the day.  You literally then “dream your body-processes”.

But your astral body is a sense-making body; it builds sensory images, or what is poorly referred to in cognitive science as “representations” (it is way more than representing; it is creating, synthesizing, organizing, filtering, elevating, discarding…).  So when your astral body dips into the etheric and uses it to “see” itself, it forms sensations (in the dream) out of the etheric activity that is going on at that time.  Basically your astral body gets to peek in on the activity of the etheric body and turn it into imagery.  This is why it can be really hard to predict what dream images actually form on the basis of day-waking activity.  The more structured and repetitive the attention in daily life, the more likely the dream imagery will be a working through (a digestion) of this activity, a dismantling of it, a “dealing with” it.  The term “images” means visual images, yes, but is also much wider in scope: sensory images can include all senses, it is also the feeling of what an experience is “like”.

The astral body has its own patterns (protocols for avoidance of and seeking for particular sensations cascades).  And it will generate imagery that is derivative of the day-waking sensation patterns.  If the astral body meets the etheric body, which is digesting the patterns associated with playing a video game in waking life, the astral body is more likely to generate sensory images in the dream that fit that activity, and this MAY take the form of actual game imagery, but may not.  The root is not the image itself but the activity upon which it rests in the etheric body; many possible images can be formed when the astral body meets the etheric in a dream (this is why any book that claims to be able to interpret your dreams by telling you what each symbol means is likely false; this is, however, an issue that needs a separate discussion).

The upshot of all this is that you can utilize the relationship between the physical, etheric, astral, and ego bodies in skillful ways.  To begin with you can simply see for yourself how structuring your attention in the day can change your dream life.  In more extreme cases you can even see the effects of this _before_ sleep onset.  If you play a game for three hours just before bed, then when you get into bed you will likely find that as soon as you relax the conscious focusing your attention, game imagery will fill your mind without your bidding.  You may even find it very difficult to NOT experience the continuation of game imagery as you are lying in bed, trying to fall asleep.  Whereas normally you may be able to direct your attention in a focused way to this and then that idea or sensation, now you have to spend all that effort just to not experience game imagery, and it creeps back in as soon as you relax your attention at all.  You have created a pattern in your etheric and astral bodies that continues without any effort now on your part; now you have to “deal with” the consequences of this patterning.  This is important because there is a whole lot of other things that could occupy your attention, but they are literally drowned out by the large amplitude of the patterns in the etheric and astral.  All that is subtle (other aspects of your day that might present opportunities for deeper reflection) still takes place, but you don’t notice it anymore.  You have to work through the biggest and most obvious stuff first, and because you just sat down for three hours of really focused time, concentrating on a game, you essentially have told your etheric and astral bodies that this must be super-important!

These effects continue during sleep, but the difference here is that what can potentially occur during sleep is even more subtle than what happens during the day when sensations are linked so strongly to whatever the physical body is doing.  This is where the “spiritual” realms come to the fore, and THIS is what makes a difference for people interested in spiritual development, and who also happen to play games (I am one of these people — Skyrim, oh, Skyrim!).  A real tension is set up between being able to utilize sleep as a sacred space for spiritual work and the day-waking desire for fun and escape.

But recognizing this means that we can take steps to be wiser about how we structure our attention, rather than simply letting the physical world and your etheric needs lead our attention around, so that our astral body and ego spend all their time reacting and playing catch-up with the world.  Meditation is the archetypal training for this, and is superior to video games by orders of magnitude in the sense of its ability to create a free capacity for directed attention.  We can sensitize ourselves to the effects of the habits we have around structured attention in the day by monitoring our dream life, which then is like a tableau upon which our spiritual work of the day gets played out in sensory images.  Recognizing this link opens the door to more subtle and complex and transpersonal use of dreams and sleep life, which can be of great use for those on a path of self-development.

All the qualities of the physical world exist through the interrelations of things to each other. What Moleschott says is correct for physical existence: ‘All existence is an existence through qualities. But there is no quality that does not exist through a relation.’ Just as everything of a soul nature contains something in itself by which it points to something outside itself, so conversely, a physical thing is so constituted that it is what it is through the relation to it of something outer.
(Rudolf Steiner, Riddles of the Soul, Mercury Press, 1996, p. 69.)

For such a philosophy, the relations that connect experiences must themselves be experienced relations, and any kind of relation experienced must be accounted as ‘real’ as anything else in the system.
(William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism, Cosimo, Inc., 1912/2008, p. 20)

In aesthetic epistemology, notions of “reality” are replaced by “patterns in process.”  ”Things” are (ontologically) patterned processes.  We mistake the nature of the universe when we presume that “things,” to be, must “be” from the bottom up: on the basis of some “substance,” which THEN interacts in processes to yield what we experience (the first coherent expression of this began with the atoms in the void hypothesis of Leucippus and Democritus in Ancient Greece).  We assume that it is silly to speak of patterns of process without some kind of “thing” that we can point to as an indicator that the process is proceeding.  Because of the way our senses are involved in cognition, we tend to count as “real” only what can be made apparent to us through our senses (or their extensions via instruments). This is a huge presumption on our part.  What if we tried to conceive of “substance” as a secondary phenomenon?  What if process (thing-less process) is more primary?  In this view, things are precipitates (momentary nodes, relatively ‘still’ areas of patterned processes) of higher-order relations… not relations between THINGS but relations qua the activity of relating.  This may sound abstract, but this is because we are trained to think of reality in terms of substances (sub-stances: the “underneath-standings,” the bits from out of which a universe gets built).

The best example of one way that this can look is given in the field of mathematics.  Mathematics has no atoms, not even metaphorical atoms; it is entirely substanceless.  Rather, mathematics has, at its base, processes and their relations.  Even numbers aren’t the basis of mathematics, where numbers would form the “things” that various logical operations “apply to.”  Rather, the numbers themselves fall out of, are like precipitates out of, the field of logical relations themselves.  The drama around this showed up millennia ago in the Pythagorean school.  The Pythagoreans thought that the primal ground of the universe was number (specifically, whole numbers and their ratios). All being owed itself to number, which formed the ontological core of the universe.  But they quickly ran into something that seemed to defy their understanding of what was meant by the very concept of number in the relationship between the diagonal of a square and its side.  Indeed, the (possibly apocryphal) story is that Hippasus of Metapontum, a Pythagorean, when he announced to his fellows on a boat ride of his discovery that the ratio of a side of a square to its diagonal was incommensurable, was thrown overboard and drowned in order to try to keep this information from spreading.

Today we have a shorthand for this concept: we say that if the length of the side of the square is unit in length, then the length of the diagonal has a length of the square root of .  But in this shorthand we gloss over some very profound potential insights.  First of all, we must note that the “number” is formed by a ratio between the sides of a square and the diagonal.  It is more correct to say that  ”is” a process rather than a number.  This is embedded in the very form of the number itself: it is irrational, meaning that is it literally incalculable.  The number requires an infinite number of digits to express, and there is no ratio of whole numbers that yields the number.

Thus Louis Kauffman, former president of the American Society of Cybernetics and a professor of mathematics, rightly states that

There is mystery here. What are the actual digits in the decimal expansion of the square root of two? We can use a computer program and find more. At the end of any such calculation there are three proverbial dots, and no hint of a pattern in the digits. We have only pushed the difficulty forward and hidden it behind a thicket of chaotic digits.
(From: Virtual Logic — The Square Root of Two, by Louis. H. Kauffman, Cybernetics and Human Knowing, v17, n4, pp.81-88)

Why does this “pushing the difficulty forward” happen?  Because thinking is self-obfuscating. In its normal progression, thinking precipitates thoughts.  But then it takes these thoughts (first-order content) and uses them to obscure itself (as second-order process) by trying to substitute the thoughts for thinking–for itself.  Thinking thus misidentifies itself with its own objects; it loses itself in its creations. It is very difficult for thinking to reverse this process (of itself becoming), and so in the case of the square root of two, it is much easier to continue with the confusion by externalizing it in a way that allows us to forget it.

For this reason we create a shorthand to indicate the process of this ratio: the square root sign.  But we get lulled by this sign into treating the process as a still fact, a “bit” to be used in calculation.  This is, of course, very helpful, because it allows us to work at a more abstract level with the process of the  relation; we literally abstract (draw out) the symbol from the process in order to use it, but in doing so often forget all the activity that is embedded in the symbol.

The important thing to note is that it is not only square roots which are at their root processes; ALL numbers are like this.  To say it directly: all numbers are becomings, patterns of relations. All the arbitrary symbols that designate numbers are a short-hand by which these processes can be “fixed” and thus more easily manipulated.  Even the number “” is short for an ongoingness, a never-ending process, expressed in decimals as the infinite number of zeros that follow the decimal point: . Mathematicians are the people who have chosen as their profession the re-enlivening of the fixed symbols back into their process-nature, so that they can form new, free, creative relations with other relations, which can then be symbolized and fixed into new symbols that can be of use in calculation, closing the circle.

Why is this all important?  It shows an example of how it is possible to think relationally in an exact way.  One of the big fears of moving away from a substance ontology is the feeling that without some kind of static anchor, we lose predictability, control, precision, and clarity.  If approached wisely, a process reality need not result in any such occurrences.  Indeed, just the opposite is true: embracing patterns of processes as the deepest ontological level of the universe can yield far greater precision and clarity — but it is a precision and clarity that can only be had by doing the hard work of training our attention to move in resonance with the patterns that make up the “things” of the world.  We always fail at this, and at some point we give up and “fix” a process with the use of a symbol.  The symbol thus represents the cessation of the process.  But just as we have the capacity to form symbols, so too we have the capacity to render what became abstracted and fixed (through our activity!) back towards its process-nature.  What has precipitated can be dissolved.  We can both fix and render back into solution.

Together these two tendencies form a basic polarity, a pattern, that describes the unfolding of other patterns; it is a meta-pattern.  It illuminates how other processes happen.  The symbolizing, fixing, cessation pole can be archetypally described as centric, while the re-enlivening, dissolving, rendering back into motion of the complementary pole is archetypally peripheral.  This polarity forms a sort of primal archetypal recursive unity.  The universe can be thought of as the play of this polarity in all its endlessness; the continual unfolding of the tension between centers and peripheries, at all levels.  There are no true “things” here (meant in the old, substance-way), only relations between patterns in process.

Abstract

This essay outlines connections between the Elemental Cycle as an archetype of transformation, transdisciplinarity, and  cybernetics.  A number of questions are addressed: the nature and importance of connecting these fields, an examination of resources and the dominant disciplinary discourses for the associated fields, and a critical examination of my assumptions, beliefs, and position.

Introduction

How often do we find ourselves in a position of not being able to see something unless it is first pointed out to us?  This happens all the time with the visual and other physical senses, but of course also occurs in our thinking; certain concepts seem to hide in plain sight, and unless we are cued into where and how to look for (or to think about) them, they slide on by as a part of the undifferentiated background of conceptual life.  Usually we are introduced to these sorts of concepts just like we are to new people, through a third party who is already familiar with each of us: “Seth, I’d like you to meet Recursion; Recursion, this is Seth.”  Often with this sort of introduction comes an experience: “Oh hello Recursion!  You know, I feel like you must hang out at some of the same coffee-shops as I do, but we’ve never been formally introduced.”  And so a relationship begins with a concept, and just as with human beings, you can become more intimate and familiar, get into fights, seek new levels of understanding, and go on adventures.

I was introduced to the Elemental Cycle over 10 years ago: an archetypal pattern of the process of transformation, situated in the four alchemical elements of Earth, Water, Air, and Fire, and we have been journeying together ever since.  This pattern seemed like the kind of concept (although archetypes are much more than merely conceptual) that Goethe called an “open secret”—invisible to cursory examination, but completely out in the open and obvious once you know how to recognize it, and have some familiarity with its style.

Phrased more simply, the Elemental Cycle concerns how transformation occurs.  What I’m interested in is the extent to which there are lawful patterns that describe how transformation really happens in the world, both in personal experience of one’s own transformation and as a way of describing more ‘objective’ processes that do not explicitly have to do with humans.  Are there patterns to transformation, or does transformation occur through a wide variety of processes which have little or no relationship to each other?  How do we know that transformation is occurring, or has occurred?

My feeling about this can be made clear through a metaphor.  There are many paths up a mountain, and if you ask each person to describe the specific details that they observed on their way, you’ll get a unique description from each person.  This is complicated by the fact that even if two people travel the very same path, they will likely pay attention to different features and give diverse accounts.  Nevertheless, with some probing you can find certain aspects which begin to coincide and link from story to story; for example, the fact that no matter what path you take, an overall directionality is apparent: from low to high elevation.  Other patterns exist, but this serves to illustrate the point that even though “transformation” can happen in an extremely wide variety of contexts and through a number of seemingly diverse processes, it is my understanding that certain patterns continually inform how transformation unfolds.  In particular, my research has brought me to an understanding of some of these patterns, which, borrowing from the language and tradition of alchemy (where everything is about transformation) I call Earth, Water, Air and Fire.  These four elements are manifestations of the archetype of the pattern of transformation.  Each element describes one qualitative stage of the process through which any transforming situation unfolds, and they fit together in a cycle (or rather, a vortex, which is always a spiral), moving from an initial (often unconscious) Fire, onwards to Earth to Water to Air, then to Fire again, and back to what we could call a New Earth.  The details of each elemental stage and the building up of the underlying theory constituted the subject of my master’s thesis.

Future inquiry needs to explore more fully the application of this archetypal metaphor to human transformation.  Central to this inquiry is simply the desire to become more familiar and fluent with how the pattern works, where it works (and where it doesn’t), and the extent to which consciousness of the pattern can be of practical help in regards to work that attempts to bring about, make efficient, or to simply understand transformative processes.  The Elemental Cycle has clear potential applications in therapy, counseling, spiritual practice, dialogue and communication, planning, management, education, personal growth, and scientific realms; as an archetype it necessarily crosses boundaries such as these with ease.  The linking factors between all these areas are processes in human consciousness.  As there is almost no published literature that deals with this particular way of dealing with the elements and transformation, my work will be primarily to remedy this gap, and to make the strongest case for the applicability of the Elemental Cycle through specific examination of transformative situations.

I believe this work is important for a number of reasons.  My experience with the Elemental Cycle has shown me that it can be a reliable guide for the deepening of consciousness around transformative processes.  It helps clarify and complexify understanding, it responds flexibly to a variety of situations and can be applied across scales, and it actively helps lead one through transformations by providing contact with and context within an archetypal, lawful, process that transcends the potentially limiting and blinding nature of personal (subjective) patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving.  This kind of understanding and approach to transformation, which has transpersonal roots and implications, and which builds on a view of the human being and cosmos that is normally ignored by the majority of academic discourse (as it lies outside any academic discipline), is simply missing in the literature.  By studying the application of the Elemental Cycle, and framing it through the more modern languages of transdisciplinarity, complexity theory, cybernetics, and general systems theory, I hope to provide a strong foundation for its theoretical basis and practical potential.  Ultimately, I aim at bringing to a larger audience an entryway into a different way of thinking and perceiving, which can adaptively move between self and other, operates fluidly on multiple levels, includes the full complexity of the human being, and which recognizes and employs the transpersonal.  This way of thinking is compatible with the three principles underlying the paradigm of complexity laid out by Edgar Morin (2008): 1)  the dialogic, which “allows us to maintain duality at the heart of unity, [associating] two terms that are at the same time complementary and antagonistic” (Morin, 2008, p. 49), 2) organizational recursion, where “the products and the effects are at the same time causes and producers of what produces them” (Morin, 2008, p. 49), and 3) the holographic principle, where “the part [is] in the whole, [and] the whole is in the part” (Morin, 2008, p. 50).

This inquiry has always presented me with a number of difficulties (but many more successes and insights).  First of all, what I’m after is very, very difficult to work with directly, because of its intrinsically wily nature.  Archetypes cannot be pinned down and captured like a butterfly on an etymologist’s display board.  You can’t even capture transformation by pinning down each successive stage of the caterpillar-to-butterfly process; you only end up with the death of the very thing under scrutiny (this is a manifestation of an Earth-type approach to transformation).  Working with an archetype–particularly an archetype of transformation–requires a different way of working. (A treatment of what I mean by the word archetype follows the discussion of Jung below.)

Transdisciplinarity

Transdisciplinarity, luckily, has run into and attempted to deal with many of the very same problems that I face in my inquiry.  Basarab Nicolescu, one of the founders of transdisciplinarity, points out that disciplinary processes of knowledge creation—the dominant mode through which most knowledge in the Western world has been constructed for the past few centuries—is only one arrow shot from the bow of knowledge (Nicolescu, 2008, p. 3), the others are multi-disciplinarity, inter-disciplinarity, and finally transdisciplinarity. Disciplines have a tendency to form specialized knowledge on the basis of assumptions and methodologies which are unique to the individual discipline.  Indeed, many disciplines are initially formed in and by the very process of distinguishing themselves from other disciplines in just this way.  While allowing for extremely specialized forms of knowledge, such disciplinarity can lead practitioners into the situation, described by Brue Wilshire (1990), in which “missing is any sense that anything is missing” (Wilshire, 1990, p. 12).

Disciplines keep their purity by engaging in what Wilshire calls veiled purification rituals: “the refusal to mix a stance with other views (and evidence) which are palpably relevant to it.  Mary Daly calls it methodolotry.  Each field’s formalism defines and guards its boundaries” (Wilshire, 1990, p. 161). Lewis Gordon (2006) identifies a similar pattern:

The emergence of disciplines has often led to the forgetting of their impetus in living human subjects and their crucial role in both the maintenance and transformation of knowledge-producing practices.  The results are special kinds of decadence.  One such kind is disciplinary decadence. Disciplinary decadence is the ontologizing or reification of a discipline.” (Gordon, 2006, p. 4)

Form and Content

Understanding change is a very difficult task. No aspect of our world, either experienced outwardly through our senses or inwardly through our feelings and thoughts, seems exempt from the paradoxical rule that the only constant is change. It is possible to examine the way change occurs at many levels. At the “lowest” level of examining change, we generally tend to focus on what can be called the “content.” The particular identified content (we’ll see in a minute why it is important to note that this content is “identified”) depends upon the arena in which the transformation is being studied. Generally, however, the content is the “thing” that is undergoing change, and is usually the overt focus of our attention. For example, in a chemical situation, the content would be the physical elements, such as hydrogen and oxygen in electrolysis. In a therapeutic setting, the “thing” might be one’s thoughts and feelings (in psychology), one’s bones (in chiropractics), or a family system (in family therapy).

The content level is always present; it is always a part of the way that we encounter change. Yet in addition to looking at the content-level, we can also examine change in a different way: we can examine patterns of change. That is, we can place our attention on the way that changes in content unfold, and seek to identify similarities and differences in such patterns in order to get a deeper understanding of the “rules” that inform what happens at the content level. Paying attention to this level of change is paying attention to the process of change, rather than just its results.

This way of examining change takes place one level removed from the content level, and can thus be understood as a “higher” level. It is more abstract than the first, and because it provides the contextual rules that inform the unfolding of the processes as they appear at the content level, we can call this second level that of “Form”, or even better, “Forming”. This is spelled with a capital “F” to distinguish it from “form”, in the sense of a static outer shape or configuration. A given quadrilateral has a definite individual form, and there are an infinite number of quadrilaterals, such as the square and trapezoid. But every possible quadrilateral shares the same Form. This is the same relation between a set and an element in formal logic. The Form is a way of indicating patterns of becoming shared by forms.

When examining the facts of change, we are talking about the content level; when examining the how of change (the process), we are talking about the Form(ing) level. In daily life, it is usually much easier to become aware of the content level than the Form level; we must actually practice to become awake to the context and patterns that operate on the level of Form. There is an important reason for this, but it takes a little unraveling, having to do with thinking and feeling.

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