For about a week I've been reading two books during my morning pre-meditation time. To most people they'd seem incompatible. Or at least, pointers in divergent directions of reality.
But I happily read some of each, using a highlighter and pen (thanks for blank back pages, publishers) to note what I like, and sometimes don't like, about "The Way of Wonder" and "The Systems View of LIfe."
Here's a blog post that includes links to other posts I've written about Haas' books; I haven't finished The Systems View of Life, which is a fascinating, but quite technical, undergraduate textbook that covers a lot of different topics -- as befits its title.
As I put one of the books down and pick up the other, sometimes I do wonder about how I can like the very poetic and mystical "The Way of Wonder" while also enjoying Fritjof Capra's and Pier Luigi Luisi's scientific exploration of the meaning of it all.
Well, for me it relates to what knowing means.
Superficially, Haas is really down on knowing. His book is filled with paeans to wonder, not-knowing, mystery, darkness, giving up words, concepts, abstractions. That stuff can get annoying, especially since Haas is using well-written words and sophisticated concepts to get across his point.
One would think that if he really meant what he says, he'd just do a dance, grunt a lot, or otherwise communicate his message non-verbally and non-conceptually.
But I see Haas as downplaying the ordinary sense of knowing in two ways that are compatible with some central themes in "The Systems View of Life." I'll know more about this, of course, after I finish that book.
First, wonder is an entirely appropriate -- inescapable, even -- response when we ponder the limits of existence. The very small of the quantum world. The very large of the cosmos. The beginning and end of the universe. Where everything in reality came from and where it is going.
Nobody knows the answers to these enigmas.
Not science, not spirituality, not religion, not mysticism, not philosophy. So I read Haas as mainly denigrating false knowing such as religions thrust upon us, the offering up of answers which please us, even though they are untrue, because not-knowing is uncomfortable.
For example, Haas writes:
What generally happens, however, is that when finally we begin to courageously divorce ourselves from the habit of interpretation, and we stick our heads out of our limited understanding, we suddenly see what we should have been seeing all along -- the great Enigma waiting to engulf us.
And because we have hidden behind the cowardly walls of interpretation for so long, we cannot now bear the vision of infinite mystery, and therefore we quickly spin about on our heels and crawl back into understanding.
...Interpretation, then, is a covering over the great bewildering immensity; a shell the turtle constructs around itself, to hide and blind within; a blanket, pulled between the child and darkness, blocking out the ubiquitous unknown.
These words are a much more powerful indictment of conceptualizing than a passage in "The Systems View of Life," but connections can be drawn between them.
As human beings, we not only experience the transient states of primary consciousness; we also think and reflect, communicate with symbolic language, make value judgments, hold beliefs, and act intentionally with self-awareness and an experience of personal freedom.
...The "inner world" of our reflective consciousness emerged in evolution together with the evolution of language and of organized social relations. This means that human consciousness is inextricably linked to language and to our social world of interpersonal relationships and culture. In other words, our consciousness is not only a biological but also a social phenomenon.
So not only are we unable to look into the mystery of what lies beyond our capacity to know, our view of what we can comprehend occurs through the limited lens of human language and consciousness. This is just how things are, not a problem.
Thus a love of Wonder and Science both support a realization that what we know is not all there is, or exactly how reality is. Human knowledge is in part a human invention, while also in part an accurate reflection of the world that is not us.
I'm reminded of Ken Wilber's pre-trans fallacy.
There is a difference between an infantile pre-rational, pre-language state, and a trans-rational, trans-language state. Meaning, as I said in a recent semi-serious post, I can instantly and intuitively marvel at a dark small shape zooming just above a creek bed and also soon after think "duck."
The wonder of the experience, which I'd never had before in my 24 years of living on our rural Oregon property, wasn't at all diminished by the subsequent cognition that what our dog had startled out of a muddly pool of water was, indeed, a duck.
So when Haas decries "knowing," I take this to mean a certain kind of knowing to the exclusion of all other kinds. I can know all kinds of things about the world, while also knowing that I don't know about a whole lot of other things.
My knowing and not-knowing are two sides of the same experiential coin of consicousness. I can appreciate what I know through science, reason, experience, and language, while embracing the mysteries that lie beyond both my ability to know, and the ability of every other human being.
I'll briefly mention another commonality between these two books. Each stresses that knowing in isolation isn't genuine knowledge. Nothing in existence stands alone, separate unto itself. A duck would be nothing without the world in which it is born, lives, and dies.
Neither would we. This is the essence of a systems approach to life, according to Capra and Luisi.
Systems thinking means a shift from material objects and structures to the nonmaterial processes and patterns of organization that represent the very essence of life. We should also add that the emphasis on relationships, qualities, and processes does not mean that objects, quantities, and structures are no longer important.
When we talk of shifts of perspective, we do not imply that systems thinking completely eliminates one perspective in favor of the other, but rather that there is a complementary interplay between the two perspectives, a figure/ground shift.
...The first, and most general, characteristic of systems thinking is the shift of perspective from the parts to the whole. Living systems are integrated wholes whose properties cannot be reduced to those of smaller parts.
...The systemic conception of reality as an inescapable network of relationships has important implications not only for our view of nature, but also for our understanding of scientific knowledge. In Cartesian science, scientific descriptions were believed to be objective -- that is, independent of the human observer and the process of knowing.
Systems science, by contrast, implies that epistemology -- the understanding of the process of knowing -- has to be included in the description of natural phenomena.
Which isn't all that different from what Haas says in a different way in his book.
Which is to say -- what happens to 'what is,' when we tangle our multifarious verse into the uni-verse, creating a multi-verse, and then attempt to collate our manifold symbols (which are not reality) into a 'way' of seeing -- what happens is that we end up with a version of life 'veiled' through lifeless symbols; life becomes a collage of dead, separate, 'things,' instead of a singular, flowing, living, wholeness.
This is why our term 'cata-logue' ('cata-': destruction, and 'logos': the 'word) literally refers to the disaster that arises from collecting and organizing symbols, which is what happens when we compart-mentalize our understandings, and make closed, separate boxes, and so destroy the natural whole.
...when finally we begin to courageously divorce ourselves from the habit of interpretation, and we stick our heads out of our limited understanding...
This is a good example of the idiocy "spiritual" people don't realize they're advocating. Sticking your head outside of your head is like pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. It can't be done, but if pretending it can makes you feel better, The Supreme Court upholds your right to be a nitwit.
Posted by: cc | August 20, 2014 at 05:46 PM