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Everything an Indian does is in a circle, and that is because the Power of the World always works in circles, and everything tries to be round  Black Elk Speaks

Immersed in Form, but What Form?                 

 Authoritarians are everywhere... perhaps more true than one might want to believe. Western democracies are immersed in authoritarian forms, and what there is of a democratic process inevitably adheres to that form.  And maybe we can all look within, as well to find the source, for it could well be in that little voice of ego authority that we believe is so significant in shaping our lives and choosing our paths.  Unfortunately we may overlook the significant feature that the choices are already somewhat preconscribed, much like a Skinner Box.  Our "authority" can be in the very thoughts we create, and the forms around which we shape the words. The dogma, the certainty that corresponds to the embedded hierarchical forms of our culture that excels in its expressions of knowledge from the knowers, which we all tend to think is the best of all evolved life forms, and cultural forms. EuroAmericans know best. And the proof...? Just look at who's cultural form dominates the planet.

Look at how we are immersed in institutions that demand we ascribe to an orderly way that involves a hierarchy and obedience to their forms. The very nature of that creates a disconnect and a dogma in the language itself, by the nature of how humans use language to express their life itself. A language of certainty emerges, since it's not the person speaking "authentically" and from the heart, but from the position in a cultural form of some sort, perhaps the family, perhaps the school where one learns, the military, a church, a business. "Respect the position, not the person" we were told outright in boot camp, but is that not extended to nearly all Western institutions, not just the most blatantly authoritarian -- the military? We've all heard the notion about "being professional." Being professional is not about being intuitive, empathic, sensitive, emotion-based, affective in our behavior, it's about being technically proficient to fit into the techno-hierarchy that's evolved with our society. That's what my sense of rebellion informs me. I'm reading the literature on ecopsychology, and most of their attention to insanity is about what's lost with our society in that realm, and while it starts with nature, it extends to each other.

The conservatives laughing at the progressive idealists, taunting them for their foolishness about expecting to find humanity in the world are quite correct in their perceptions. Their taunts, their ridicule are not misplaced once their perspective of how the world must be is fully understood. Their way is the dominant way, dominance is necessary in hierarchy, that's how it functions. Extended out into the world it supercedes all others, that's it's inherent nature. The notion of the feminine in our society is of that non authoritarian, connective, affective and nurturing view, though even that is not allowed full realization, especially for the masculine, and it's always been viewed as the lesser form of behavior, for very real reasons in a hierarchically ordered world that judges and puts things in all the proper orders of that sort. They are proper because that's the way the world is, and anyone not willing to face it must therefore, quite rationally, be foolish and therefore lesser, no matter how personally enlightened or intelligent. Those who don't see the sense of that deserve their full measure of ridicule. And feminists who wish to adapt must put aside their femininity if they wish to join the order.

The following is an excerpt that give some sense of how a different exposure to the world from birth can result in very different sorts of experience for individuals than the sorts we experience in the dominant Westernized cultures today. It's from Preconquest Consciousness:

As detailed above, sociosensual child nurture spawned body language based on tactile exchanges of affect. Infants were quick to notice that the happiness of others made their own lives happier and richer, so they responded accordingly. Soon they realized that the more accurately and fully they conveyed their inner needs and interests, the more quickly rewarding responses were forthcoming. So they displayed true feelings without artifice, as openly and clearly as their tiny frames permitted. The more skilled they were, the happier they were; indeed, the happier were all.

Therefore 'tactile-talk' was 'affect-talk,' and 'affect-talk' was 'truth-talk.' It was so compelling that even after learning verbal speech children continued bouncing inner passions back and forth in 'affect-talk.' The messages were more emotionally rewarding. They moved more quickly and more accurately and were usually more deeply evocative. Spoken words did not have the same instant sensuality and were thus more remote from lives sentiently focused. Affect-talk was truth-talk because it only worked when personal feelings were above board and accurately expressed, which required transparency in aspirations, interests, and desires.

With body language based on full-time accurate truth, infants became candid and open, and remained so as they grew. When I first went into their hamlets I was astonished to see the words of tiny children accepted at face value—and so acted on. For months I tried to find at least one case where a child's words were considered immature and therefore disregarded. No luck. I tried to explain the idea of lying and inexperience. They didn't get my point. They didn't expect prevarication, deception, grandstanding, or evasion. And I could find no cases where they understood these concepts. Even teenagers remained transparently forthright, their hearts opened wide for all to gaze inside.

Anyone who behaves in that above described manner deserves ridicule and ridicule begins early on in life to assure maximum compliance to societal norms. It actually can be seen to begin in the Westerner's form of child rearing which sets patterns deep in their consciousness, even perhaps deeper than what proprioceptive awareness -- perhaps a more accurate term for it would be "liminal awareness" -- in the moment can see. In her Website, Jean Liedloff contrasts the experience of many non-Westernized children with the earliest, most formative experiences of children in "civilization":

According to Jean Liedloff, the continuum concept is the idea that in order to achieve optimal physical, mental and emotional development, human beings — especially babies — require the kind of experience to which our species adapted during the long process of our evolution. For an infant, these include such experiences as...

• constant physical contact with his mother (or another familiar caregiver as needed) from birth;
• sleeping in his parents' bed, in constant physical contact, until he leaves of his own volition (often about two years);
• breastfeeding "on cue" — nursing in response to his own body's signals;
• being constantly carried in arms or otherwise in contact with someone, usually his mother, and allowed to observe (or nurse, or sleep) while the person carrying him goes about his or her business — until the infant begins creeping, then crawling on his own impulse, usually at six to eight months;
• having caregivers immediately respond to his signals (squirming, crying, etc.), without judgment, displeasure, or invalidation of his needs, yet showing no undue concern nor making him the constant center of attention;
• sensing (and fulfilling) his elders' expectations that he is innately social and cooperative and has strong self-preservation instincts, and that he is welcome and worthy.

  In contrast, a baby subjected to modern Western childbirth and child-care practices often experiences...

• traumatic separation from his mother at birth due to medical intervention and placement in maternity wards, in physical isolation except for the sound of other crying newborns, with the majority of male babies further traumatized by medically unnecessary circumcision surgery;
• at home, sleeping alone and isolated, often after "crying himself to sleep";
• scheduled feeding, with his natural nursing impulses often ignored or "pacified";
• being excluded and separated from normal adult activities, relegated for hours on end to a nursery, crib or playpen where he is inadequately stimulated by toys and other inanimate objects;
• caregivers often ignoring, discouraging, belittling or even punishing him when he cries or otherwise signals his needs; or else responding with excessive concern and anxiety, making him the center of attention;
• sensing (and conforming to) his caregivers' expectations that he is incapable of self-preservation, is innately antisocial, and cannot learn correct behavior without strict controls, threats and a variety of manipulative "parenting techniques" that undermine his exquisitely evolved learning process.

Evolution has not prepared the human infant for this kind of experience. He cannot comprehend why his desperate cries for the fulfillment of his innate expectations go unanswered, and he develops a sense of wrongness and shame about himself and his desires. If, however, his continuum expectations are fulfilled — precisely at first, with more variation possible as he matures — he will exhibit a natural state of self-assuredness, well-being and joy. Infants whose continuum needs are fulfilled during the early, in-arms phase grow up to have greater self-esteem and become more independent than those whose cries go unanswered for fear of "spoiling" them or making them too dependent.

I don't really know how to go about answering questions of where one begins to address a deeply entrenched, enculturated experience that simply is the way someone is, and by all rights for anyone, the way it should be for everyone. This of course includes the question of addressing cultural insanity. I don't feel the question can be addressed in a purely rational manner, but I'm not at all confident that de Bono's six hat technique can do much good for someone whose affective, intuitive, and emotional sensibilities are barely developed, if at all, or at the very least deeply crippled by those important informative experiences above.

I guess my question is, even if we sincerely want to (and however the idea comes about in us), how do we come to be aware of what we are completely unaware of, and, for whatever reasons -- maybe not that different from being blind - cannot come to be aware of? As some of my friends in the therapy field have often pointed out, you can generally tell a neurotic from a psychotic because the neurotics can list all their neurosis for you and will be quite self conscious of how the mechanisms of them work in their lives. Actually, I've heard some of them express the notion that neurosis is the norm. The psychotics experience their psychosis as the way life is, not necessarily something they will view objectively. I've observed various schizophrenics seeming to be very much in that frame of mind. Generally speaking something needs to be done to change the chemical environment of their mind to change their awareness.

I just want to offer this little passage from an anthropologist who became conscious of the difference between what he calls a "preconquest consciousness" and his own, and he describes what he thought had to occur for him in order to even become conscious of it being something different; notice in particular how he draws attention to our own societal norm of the dialectical approach and how he had to get past that in order for what he feels he became conscious of in a different way to occur; I feel like this is along the lines of what all the approaches we are exploring are seeking to awaken, whetheer Bohm's, Krishnamurti's, de Bono's, and many, many more:

Noticing Preconquest Consciousness

The cognitive gap separating preconquest and postconquest life may be responsible for conquerors not recognizing it for what it was. It seems to have similarly blinkered modernized observers. For years I considered such child nurture practices an anomalous product of the remote New Guinea jungle and for a long time remained steadfastly unaware of its implications. Deeper understanding emerged at a snail's pace. Without non-dialectic techniques, understanding probably would never have occurred. Two such techniques emerged: (1) phenomenological data records made at the time of early contact, and (2) in-close, cross-cultural, direct experience.

The undifferentiated phenomenological data on the film allowed analysis to by-pass the normal dialectics-based inquiry systems of our Western culture. When these are escaped, the raw pattern-recognition capability of the human mind has fuller swing. When these visual data records (research films) of New Guinea childhood were reviewed again and again, patterns of recurrence and association began emerging. Eventually they stood out clearly to reveal the sociosensual basis of New Guinea childhood nurture. With the basic patterns thus exposed, these same patterns could then be quickly recognized wherever they occurred. After sighting several similar cases in widely separated preconquest enclaves, it was clear such practices represented a widespread early norm.

With such understanding it became much easier to employ in-depth, direct experience, another non-dialectic technique. In the course of daily living in a variety of preconquest enclaves, a clear, though undefinable, commonalty of sensibility sometimes connected across cultural barriers, even in the absence of a common language. It required spontaneous, instinctive friendship beyond the level of ordinary discourse, as when a heart-felt liking for someone simply just arose15 As mystical as that might seem, the affect exchanges then made possible led to sustained, adaptive, experiential interactions much deeper than those enabled merely by conversation. Experiential depth is what eventually revealed the major role played by affect coordination in preconquest life. Without this nonverbal cross-cultural bridge, it would not have been possible to grasp why preconquest mentality was so vulnerable to anger, deceit, greed, and aggression. Nor would it have been possible to notice crucial subtleties of sense-of-name, sense-of-space, sense-of-number, sense-of-truth, and sense-of-emotion.

Two unorthodox procedures going beyond the dialectic approach to truth of our Western culture were required to bring an important type of nonwestern consciousness to light.

Another quote from Edward de Bono, this from I am right, You are wrong:

The argument process is central both to our traditional thinking system and also to such practical institutions in society as law, politics and scientific process. We need seriously to reconsider the effectiveness of the method. If argument is intended as 'exploration' of the subject, there are much better methods - and we can devise even newer and better methods of exploration.

One  more quote from de Bono:

Once we acknowledge that perception must come first, we must spend a great deal more time working on the logic of perception because this is extremely important

In light of that quote pointing towards something he calls "perception" I would like to recall this from the essay I drew an above quote I shared from Preconquest Consciousness:

With such understanding it became much easier to employ in-depth, direct experience, another non-dialectic technique. In the course of daily living in a variety of preconquest enclaves, a clear, though undefinable, commonalty of sensibility sometimes connected across cultural barriers, even in the absence of a common language. It required spontaneous, instinctive friendship beyond the level of ordinary discourse, as when a heart-felt liking for someone simply just arose1. As mystical as that might seem, the affect exchanges then made possible led to sustained, adaptive, experiential interactions much deeper than those enabled merely by conversation. Experiential depth is what eventually revealed the major role played by affect coordination in preconquest life. Without this nonverbal crosscultural bridge, it would not have been possible to grasp why preconquest mentality was so vulnerable to anger, deceit, greed, and aggression. Nor would it have been possible to notice crucial subtleties of sense-of-name, sense-of-space, senseof-number, sense-of-truth, and sense-of-emotion.

Two unorthodox procedures going beyond the dialectic approach to truth of our Western culture were required to bring an important type of nonwestern consciousness to light.

Now notice that this quote is from an essay in the book, Tribal Epistemologies: Essays in the Philosophy of Anthropology, published in 1998, a very expensive book for professionals in the field I presume, and it follows some thirty to forty years after Claude Levi Strauss brought tremendous clarity to the rational purpose behind this project known as "anthropology," which nearly destroyed itself as a discipline though self reflection after Levi Strauss, because it found itself in contradiction with Western traditions of science and rationality in looking at the variety of human culture. You might even think about that process as a neurotic effort bordering on a trip into insanity of a discipline trying to understand itself and its own possible pathology within the possible pathology of a culture that has become so extreme in its rational approach to the world that it has divorced itself from an integrated sanity that may have been lost as Western Societies evolved -- and something which its participants, going out into the field for over a hundred years, doing some of the most exotic fieldwork of any Western tradition in that period, experienced, perhaps fleetingly, and then brought back in only barely noticed scraps, then to become pieces published in their hundreds of ethnographies that were hammered together into their rational Phd theses as required by the discipline. In the process, some of those anthropologists "went native" and never came back! That which they observed is perhaps a sanity of some kind, whatever sanity might mean, not the Rouseauian "Noble Savage" ideal, but an empathic, perceptual based awareness of the sort de Bono seems to be reaching for.

I'd like to put this descriptive blurb about the Anthology of Essays here:

This collection of ten essays transforms our understanding of both the role of philosophical anthropology in modern world philosophy and the origins of tribal knowledge in their relation to contemporary assessments of cognition and consciousness. Ethnographic data from geographically distant cultures such as the Maori of new Zealand, the Fore of New Guinea, the Sea Nomads of the Andaman, the Cowlitz of North America, the Maya, Australian Aborigines, Siberian Shamans are carefully crafted toward an empirical basis for discussing a variety of phenomena traditionally labeled in Western thought as transcendent or metaphysical. This anthology is a valuable source of information relevant for any theories of knowledge and a solid challenge for reductionist models of consciousness. The essays enhance our recognition and appreciation of fundamental similarities as well as differences in world views and cultural perspectives related to knowledge claims.

I'm out, back from the Andaman where I've just been through an experience I'll not soon forget. Only by pure chance did I happen to be there when their extraordinary intuitive mentality gave up the ghost right in front of me, in an inconceivable overwhelming week. I'm almost wrecked myself, in a strange anomie from having gone through that at too close a range, and from staying up all night too many times to try to understand just what was going on. I never was much good at keeping research distance, always feeling more could be learned close in. And I'd come straight into the Andaman from two months of tantric philosophical inquiry in a Tibetan monastery. Perhaps that tuned awareness up a notch too much.

There really was no way to have predicted that, just after I arrived, the acute phase of their ancient culture's death would start. To speak abstractly of the death of a way-of-life is a simple thing to do. To experience it is quite another thing. I've seen nothing in the lore of anthropology that might prepare one for the speed by which it can occur, or for the overwhelming psychic onslaughts it throws out. Nor does my profession forewarn of those communicable paroxysms that hover in the air which, without warning, strike down with overwhelming force, when a culture's mind gives way.

Yet this is just what happened when the traditional rapport of those islands was undone, when the subtle sensibility of each to one another was abruptly seared away in a sudden unpredicted, unprecedented, uncognated whirlwind. In a single crucial week a spirit that all the world would want, not just for themselves but for all others, was lost, one that had taken millennia to create. It was suddenly just gone.

Epidemic sleeplessness, frenzied dance throughout the night, reddening burned-out eyes getting narrower and more vacant as the days and nights wore on, dysphasias of various sorts, sudden mini-epidemics of spontaneous estrangement, lacunae in perception, hyperkinesis, loss of sensuality, collapse of love, impotence, bewildered frantic looks like those on buffalo in India just as they're clubbed to death; 14 year olds (and others) collapsing on the beach, under houses, on the pier, in beached boats as well as those tied up at the dock, here and there,into wee hours of the morn, even on through dawn, in acute inebriation or exhaustion. Such was the general scene that week, a week that no imagination could have forewarned, the week in which the subtle sociosensual glue of the island's traditional way-of-life became unstuck.

To pass through the disintegrating social enclaves was to undergo a rain of psychic blows, a pelting shower of harrowing awarenesses that raised goose flesh of unexpected types on different epidermal sites along with other kinds of crawlings of flesh and skin. There were sudden rushes, both cold and hot, down the head and chest and across the neck, even in the legs and feet. And deep inside, often near the solar plexus, or around heart, or in the head or throat, new indescribable sensations would spontaneously arise, leave one at a loss or deeply disconcerted.

Such came and then diffused away as one passed by different people. Sensations would abruptly wash in across the consciousness, trigger moods of awe, or of sinking, sometimes of extraordinary love, sometimes utter horror. From time-to-time nonspecific elemental impulses arose just to run or dance, to throw oneself about, to move. All these could be induced and made to fade and then come back, just by passing through some specific group, departing, and then returning, or by coming near a single friend, moving off and coming back. That this was possible so astonished me that I checked and checked and checked again.

Such awarenesses, repeatedly experienced, heap up within the brain. Eventually the accumulation left me almost as sleepless and night-kinetic as they had become. I did discover that with body motion, mind becomes less preoccupied within itself, therefore less distressed. With kinetic frenzy mind-honor lessens very much. But it left them exhausted during the day, somnambulant, somewhat zombie-like. When night returned, the cycle would re-begin, as if those nocturnal hours, when they would otherwise be sleeping, were the time of greatest stress.

Though the overt frenzied movements could be observed by anyone, the psychic states that so powerfully impelled them were not easily detectable to outsiders. It seemed as if one had to have some personal rapport within the lifeway before the mental anguish could be sensed. Then it would loom, sometimes overwhelm. One Westerner looking casually on said, 'How exotic to see these uneducated types staying up throughout the night, dancing strangely, relating to each other in nonproductive ways. This place must be an anthropological paradise: Tourists happening on the scene thought it a fillip to their holiday. Intimacy and affection seem prerequisite to connecting with these inner surges of human psyche, even overwhelming ones.

Eventually I retreated, mentally exhausted, cognitively benumbed, emotionally wrung out. I tried to thwart that siege (when I finally recognized it for what it really was) by getting key people out. A useless foolish gambit; for no one would leave the spot, as if they were welded to it, as if it held some precious thing they very greatly loved, which they neither would nor could abandon.

When the mental death had run its course, when what had been was gone, the people (physically still quite alive) no longer had their memory of the intuitive rapport that held them rapturously together just the week before, could no longer link along those subtle mental pathways. What had filled their lives had vanished. The teensters started playing at (and then adopting) the rude, antagonistic, ego-grasping styles of the encroaching modern world, modeled after films and then TV. Oldsters retreated into houses, lost their affinity to youngsters, who then turned more to one another, sometimes squabbling (which did not occur before).

It seems astonishing that the inner energy of such passings is so undetectable to minds not some way linked to the inner harmonies and ardors of the place. Research-distance yields abstractions like 'going amok,' which could have been easily applied that week, or 'revitalizing movement,' which also could have been (in a perverse kind of way). It seems that only by some mental coalescence with the local lifeway can one access its deeper psychic passions, not just those of adolescence, but graver ones like those which for a time were released in inconceivable profusion, when the collective subtle mind of the islands, built up over eons, was snuffed out.

In line with this thread of thought, "rationality" is just a part of a whole of our thought process, very integral to language and certain structures that language reflects. In Western tradition we can trace it back to the Greeks, at least, the the dialectic reasoning brought out by such philosophers as Plato. It's not necessarily something transcendent. Looking for a "rational" explanation is not necessarily equivalent to looking to find truth. What I see being suggested by de Bono is ration may be a very fragmentary process that seperates the conscious awareness in some way from a whole experience. Hypothetically, if truth is whole, then a rational process would not be about truth. Only a part of it, and the fragmenting could lead to distortions. That may be more relevant than trying to see the process as "truth" seeking. Truth seeking then would be a red herring. Most knowledge is presented as "rock" knowledge, static, in a rational paradigm. That's the conceptual "center" of a binary opposition, from which a "that/not that" process of reason begins which is tied to itself like a looping line, a dialectical spiral. It appears to me that de Bono is attempting to introduce a notion of ongoing process away from that rational dialectic, with his "water" logic.

Give this little snippet some thought:   Language is not life; language gives life orders. -Deleuze & Guattari