sensation,
perception, mental reaction, consciousness — are also like
this...
We commonly consider what we call ‘the senses’ as the
transports of cognitive and conscious connectivity because this
is our experience —and we consider the senses as something
like 5 machines, each one active in detection in a specific
domain of physical connectivity such as light to eye, sound to ear,
etc. Yet with all our complex language, we lack some essential semantic
tokens, or metaphors, whose natures and applicability are far more
general than we are used to.
Life itself is generally detective, and Nature tends to organize
in living systems, symmetries of hyper-relation which express themselves
at given scales of perspective as biocognitive unities. But this
is not proof of separation, and in fact is excellent evidence of
the opposite. Complex enough organisms are environmentally, metabolically
and cognitively hyperconnective, and that brings an entirely uncommon
set of options for survival, elaboration, and complexity-compression
into Life’s bag of survival strategies. The relation of individual
organisms and groups showing up as unified as specific scales of
relation means something profound. In essence, God — as a
cognitive collective of sentience — cannot fail to exist —
at least so long as there are living symmetries in which this connectivity
is embodied. Perhaps outside of that as well, but we don’t
have that universe, we have this one.
Speaking in terms of how we are cognitive and intellectual with
the constructs we call metaphor, the challenges I am pointing at
are linked to our how we psybiocognitively interact with terms and
systems of terms, and with what we might call their roots of source
and relation. I generally refer to this as tokenization, and consider
it a primary feature of ‘cached knowledge’, which requires
a a form of compression to travel across transports of any kind.
It is precisely the relationship between language and knowing that
prescribes the most elemental tools with which we may explore or
experience the realities of animal we are, because in much of our
waking lives, our inner and extrinsic relations with formal knowing
systems stipulate or inform the essential domains of meaning.
This has much more than a philosophical implication. It is the foundation
from which atrocity of liberty may equally proceed, according to
whether or not we are ruled by metaphor, or relate with it from
a position of general mastery.
From this perspective, mastery over the potentials and functions
of the circus of metaphors is perhaps more important than any possible
idea — for it not only implies, but very generally offers
access to a kind of exit window — a place in our
living experience where we can be liberated from the tyranny of
ideas, while retaining their utilitarian powers in a new relationship
— and thus we can begin to experientially explore the vast
and almost totally new garden of our real biocognitive
potentials, unityFeatures, and birthrights which lies largely imprisoned
in the labyrinthine halls of formalized knowing. Knowing, for biological
Life as we understand it, is active. It could be said to
be a meta-sense, in the same way that our cognitive natures have
created in human-beings a meta-creature: a creature capable of containing
and expressing many simluntaneous assemblies of creatures and potential
creatures.
The sensory modalities we experience seem to emerge together as
a sixth sense: Mind. Yet Mind is not a member of the set
of our senses — but rather a kind of membrane, a unityContext,
in which the senses are integrated, valued, and related to biocognitive
as well as intellectual templates. When something in our connective
or intellectual experience is general enough — in
its natures and applicabilities, naming it can be sufficient to
damage our own intellectual relationship with this thing, so we
must be sensitive in our explorations a healthy respect for this
emergent feature not only of Nature, but of our own cognitive and
semantic organization and activity, perhaps especially when speaking
about Minds. We generally conceive of Mind as a sort of semi-permanent
and changing container, itself contained in our body.
Science has specifically led us to the idea that our brain contains
our Mind, which is perhaps partially true, but this is far too primitive
and limiting to express what is actually occurring in organismal
experience. Here we see exemplified the problems of making a metaphor
for something that is, itself, already ‘meta’. The essential
flatness of the idea, implications, and token for Brain are vastly
primitive in comparisons to the nearly endless fields of scale that
a more useful metaphor would supply access to as well as explorative
opportunities.
We find that the constituents that emerge as Mind modify their container,
which in turn modifies them. We can also observe that ecosystems,
and even living worlds are expressions of this essential relativity
of unities and participants.Yet there is something going on behind
the scenes that we are not noticing about mind, and it has to do
with our fervor to locate it in the brain. It is not because we
failed to invent metaphors with which to explore or experience these
goings-on that we are not commonly engaged more deeply with them,
but because we failed to conserve the metaphors which were uniquely
created in ancient or indigenous civilizations across boundaries
of cataclysms which resulted in knowledge-loss as well as re-interpretation
of history. We re-metaphied our histories, and our sources, and
some of these remetaphication events were catastrophic because they
changed the nature of our relation with tokens entirely, and failed
to conserve elements of it crucial to organismal sustainance in
the process.
Each single human being uniquely and generally recapitulates the
entire history of the entire biological and cognitive development
of our species, but even more amazingly, this is happening at multiple
simultaneous scales, such that each phase of recapitulation occurs
in a sequence of similar ‘inward’ phases. Not linearly,
but simultaneously, across diverse scales of size, time, and organizational
structure. The result, a living human being, is a thing miraculous
beyond our definitions. But if we cannot touch or metaphy these
inward relations we cannot value or protect them, and experiencing
them directly becomes threatening, or confusing, at best.
We are not commonly aware that the body is organized into many seemingly
discrete ‘minds‘ — though we have some metaphors
for this which have survived or even prospered. We have models of
multiple intelligence, but they are not enmeshed in our metaphor
the way their tenacious and separatist precursors are. We also have
colloquialisms that recall our organismal reality, but they appear
humorous and primitive as cognitive tools — to ‘fly
by the seat of one’s pants’ is one of the offspring
of which I speak. In this case, during the significant cognitive
challenge of learning to fly aircraft, pilots rediscovered that
there is a kind of brain in the gut, and they are literally referring
to this with this colloquialism. Specifically, they are referencing
the anus, and the inward organs to which it connects, namely, the
intestines.
We’ve heard many disparite experts or supposed masters speak
of a certain kind of knowing which is ‘in the guts’,
a belly-knowledge, as though positing an essential yet poetic certainty,
but no core of reality. There is in fact a very interesting
form of second brain in the belly. A recombinant organ comprised
of myriads of uniquely connective elements, much like the brain
in our head. But its elements move. Known as the enteric
nervous system, this second brain functions in a kind of synchronization
with the brain, and sufficient instability in either, can cause
reactive disease in either.
“The gut’s brain, known as the enteric nervous system,
is located in sheaths of tissue lining the esophagus, stomach,
small intestine and colon. Considered a single entity, it is a
network of neurons, neurotransmitters and proteins that zap messages
between neurons, support cells like those found in the brain proper
and a complex circuitry that enables it to act independently,
learn, remember and, as the saying goes, produce gut feelings.
The brain in the gut plays a major role in human happiness and
misery. But few people know it exists, said Dr. Michael Gershon,
a professor of anatomy and cell biology at Columbia Presbyterian
Medical Center in New-York.”*
*Complex and Hidden Brain in Gut Makes Bellyaches and Butterflies,
Sandra Blakeslee, The New York Times, January 23rd, 1996.
So there are structures in the body that we’ve neglected
not to notice, but to properly metaphy. And many of these
structures, as has been noticed by scientists, homeopaths, and some
philosophic traditions, are actually unique senses, which exist
in a scalar and ring-like relation with other sensory elements within
the body. It should also be obvious that the brain, as an example,
is not a discrete organ. The brain is a functional unity, at a given
perspective of scale, but in reality, the entire organism, and the
super-organisms to which it connects, form many scales of such activity.
The brain, and the Mind are both something more than we imagine,
but they are at the very least no less than the entirety of the
body, at the next scale of reference Mind is not, however, located
in the brain. We position it there, as a hypostasis, but that is
not its location, at all.
We can locate in our cognitive history many samples of the cognitive
artifacts of civilizations who were recorded in-process as their
inward spatializations arose. In doing so, we can observe that the
nature, shape and function — perhaps of metaphors themselves
— were undergoing radical involution across very short expanses
of time. One of these places we can look is back to the sources
of terms like psyche and cardiac. This is a realm of particular
interest to the late scholar Julian Jaynes, and he adeptly corrals
these metaphoric figurations into what he refers to as the preconscious
hypostases.
In his book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the
Bicameral Mind, he explores these forms as they arise, along the
timeline of the composition of the epic poem The Illiad. In
the Jaynsian model (a toy of knowing), The Illiad becomes
a window through which we can reconnoiter distinct changes in what
it meant to have and experience a human mind, and also in our relations
with metaphor, at least in the cultures, times and and terms examined.
Jaynes’ attentive scholarship traces four general phases
of linear change as the preconscious hypostases transform in meaning
across the timeline of the poem and its composition and retelling
— and he chronicles their relation to physical or cognitive
locations of sensation in the body or experience.
He presents this as evidence of a changing relationship with self
and metaphor as it relates to something almost corresponding to
specific real or imagined ‘organs of sensitivity’ in
the body. It is a story of multiple minds assembling themselves
and accruing pecking orders — as they emerge in a species
still struggling with the new acquisition of self-generated representation.
This unfolding of relations took place, according to Jaynes (whose
work I deeply respect) during our cognitive development as a species,
but specifically over the course of time during which The Illiad
was crafted. Whether or not his specific theory or timelines are
correct, his models are useful and fascinating lenses with which
we can explore and then expose some unexpected opportunities and
threats in the system of relational cognition we embody and articulate.
Let us examine a condensation of his work in table-form —
I’ve taken some liberty with interpreting his text into this
table.
Jaynes’ four general phases are relatively self-explanatory,
and represent changes in the meaning-uses of the terms within the
poem, a topic on which he’s well-versed. These changes occurred
over a period of a mere 250 years. By introducing him my goal is
merely to show that the peoples involved had common terms with which
to represent what they experienced as inward domains of reflective,
sentient connectivity, distinctly and in unities.
These recombinant inward spaces or organismal lenses of sensing
emerge as a ring whose unity is expressed in any moment as a collective,
or person. Their metaphor-model was one that evolved into a set
of intelligent spaces within the body, which corresponded to those
in other people, and perhaps other systems, such as gods. This experience
was one of character, and the infoldment of identity — and
not thing-ness. It was a far more poetic meaning that these terms
held than their adjuncts in my own decidedly reductionist language,
and rather than rob them of accuracy, I believe it credentials them
as markers of an historic and animalianly human experiential reality.
I think it’s clear that this is an example of (one generally
more accurate model of) our species’ early attempts to organize
the metaphors of mind, self and sensation in accord with a system
of relatively new (to them) figurative constructs. By early,
I do not mean primitive, but formative. Implicit in Jaynes’
model is an inspired envisioning of very different social and personal
relations with Mind and Self in previous civilizations. It was one
in which identity, a kind of psychism, and connectivity were foreground
elements of moment-to-moment experience. This experience constantly
or frequently included relations with various species of cognitive
assembly-entities: gods. Some were local, some personal, some social,
and there was also a class that was universal, or sovereign. These
were not imaginary experiences, but instead the cognitive realities
of such people, in ways we cannot yet clearly model or recall. We
can, however recall and perhaps even re-experience many aspects
of this lost reality in our own assemblies and persons.
Jaynes strong implication, which I agree with, is that our modern
relationship with language and metaphor is really very new. Much
newer than we suppose. We could clearly be seen to still be in the
early throes of this process, even in the modern moment. One glance
at our world and its stories reveals a startling fact: language
and animals do not play nicely together, at least, not in the container
we can currently or historically examine.
Not incidentally, we find in Jaynes’ excavations from
The Illiad, many references to gods putting energies into,
speaking into or speaking through these inward containers which
seem to sometimes have distinct lives of their own, within their
person-container. It is as if a person ‘carries’ each
of the hypostases like a specific instance of a generally templated
cognitive bag — and this bag is connective, in almost every
instance and phase.
If we were to look at this process in an animation-model with very
simple symbols, we could begin with a person in the center of a
blue circle. Looking down on this as though it was drawn on paper,
we would at first see a small green circle outside the big blue
one in which the person is. This green circle would be approaching
the membrane of the blue one, en-route to our center-person.
As the green circle meets the blue membrane, the membrane bends,
accommodating the incoming novelty of the green circle in its path
toward the person in the center. Eventually, dragging a sock-like
portion of the stretching blue membrane with it, the green circle
penetrates the person in the center, and there is a flute-like conical
indentation in the blue circle which leads into the person, and
contains the green circle. Then, in the last phase, the blue circle
would return to wholeness, and inside the person would be a green
circle, with a small blue circle around it, denoting features of
context preserved during the penetration.
This somewhat wordy model (which should be animated, rather than
described) gives as a fascinating glimpse at an element of how we
came to interact with and experience knowledge, and the source-features
of our language, perhaps even the general enlanguaging of our species,
and our persons. Seen very generally, it can describe a map of the
process of language acquisition during childhood. It is a toylike
vision of our early relations with language and metaphor, and not
all of these things events were gentle, in any sense of the word.
Encountering metaphor is a penetrative sort of event in the human
biocognitive organism, which could be seen to represent the cognitive
analogue of a world being penetrated by a planetismal, comet or
asteroid. Perhaps not unexpectedly, it is also a model that likely
describes the evolution of complex cellular organisms. Early organisms
were likely simple, but there was a great diversity of connectivity
through predation, gene-exchange, and communal or adaptive endeavor.
Early cellular forms were constantly being invaded, and their invaders
were in some cases eventually rendered into the status of valued
symbionts. In this way simple organismal participants combine over
time to accrue and embody new potentials.
The organism we refer to as Mind has undergone a similar series
of invasions, and they come not in the form of microbial or sub-microbial
organisms, but instead as what we refer to as metaphors. This family
of metaphor-invaders is not unsimilar to a biosphere in the organization
of its constiutents, it is a cone-like affair, with different scales
of unity inhabited by different organisms. All metaphors have an
evolutionary tree which leads back, in a virtual sense, to their
origination events.
By this I mean to say there are different general classes of invaders,
and different scales of perspective in which we can see them organizing
their own structure, resources, terrain and activity. Some of the
species of metaphor are far more ammenable to symbiosis
with our species and world, than others — and the specific
ways in which we struggle with those that are not as fexibly integrated
is often deadly not only to humans, but to a living planet.
What we see in Jaynes work that is so valuable is the presence
of a proces of inwardly reflective recapitulation of imaginal complexity.
In the world of the before — when our experience was consistently
overseen by deities — the imagination was a fully inhabited
niche. Only the departure of the gods could empty it sufficiently
for the oncoming formation of the hypostases. By the time of Christ,
the first real potentials for re-integration were arising. The complexity
accrued during their departure had created an entirely new inward
space — one in which the human cognitive animal could exist
in co-creative enstasy with its hypersystemic sources and consorts.
Interestingly, before and since then, anyone found commonly suggesting
this as an open path of ascension has been nailed to a tree, or
worse. Understanding why is not as complex as we might imagine,
but it does require we bend and sometimes even oppose the models
and ways of knowing that have become our common stock in trade.
We must cease to take for granted that we know what talking is about,
then we can better determine if we know what we are talking about.
