Toward a culture of awakening |
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Dear Reader, on these pages you'll find an assortment of articles, essays, stories, and poems exploring aspects of awakening: about what awakening means and how to help it happen. Many of these pieces raise more questions than they answer. The most fertile and appealing questions are, for me, those that lead to deeper questions. I've written these pieces in that spirit, and I hope the questions raised here will intrigue and delight you as they have me. Queries into the psychology of awakeningIn this section I explore questions about awakening in relation to topics such as conscious awareness, the nature of self, will, and emotion. In Experiments in everyday consciousness [in draft] below, I take a practical, experiential approach to awakening in everyday life by presenting techniques for cultivating an intuitive faculty that brings to attention what is "hidden in plain view." Some of the points raised in the book may have worthwhile implications for therapists, although I haven't written it from that perspective. Introduction - [in draft] Chapter 1 [in draft] - Title to come Chapter 2 [in draft] - Title to come Chapter 3 [in draft] - Title to come Chapter 4 [in draft] - Title to come Chapter 5 [in draft] - Title to come Chapter 6 [in draft] - Title to come Chapter 7 [in draft] - Title to come Chapter 8 [in draft] - Title to come The following short essays probe questions about intuition, consciousness, motivation, memory, and what awakening means in a contemporary, secular context. On awakening the intuitive mind as part of a modern lifestyle A few remarks on human motivation Drawn from memory How not to be held captive by the conscious mind Here are a few assorted essays through which I've explored some more general ideas about the mind and about relating to some of life's deeper issues from a perspective of awareness. No time but space Zen and non-zen A practical Zen Dreamleaper On how we end up where we've always meant to go The root cause of human suffering These are some very short poems inspired by my own practice of mindful awareness.
Values leading to a more vital societyI believe that awakening has as much to do with matters of society and culture as it does with an individual's mind and emotions. In these essays I look at a few of the issues related to developing a commonwealth that is oriented toward vitality and awakening. On the cultural roots of prosperity On personal identity and the effects of privilege A step beyond stardom Is there an ecologically beneficial alternative to natalism? On what space exploration says about the soul of a society Some may believe that awakening is purely a spiritual matter, but I believe economic factors play an important role in building a vibrant and creative culture that encourages openness and awakening. What makes the rats keep racing Mindstyles and the workplace in 2024 On the value of refinement The brick Research as small enterprise On strengthening the link between capital and value Political power is a poison, from the point of view of developing an open, vibrant culture of awakening. These essays look at some issues having to do with unenlightened power and politics. Deploying intelligent collaboration A case for making voting a legal obligation On the rise of the radical religious right and the breakdown of democracy in the United States A brief letter from the future to the United States Alternatives to using prisons On the creative effects of drift Lincoln's choice |
Contact info: Website updated September 2008 Communication artsAlmost nothing is more important for a culture of awakening than effective communication between people, especially when they have conflicting interests or differing points of view. I believe that communicating depends on more than just transmitting messages; it depends most of all on what goes on in the mind of the listener. The essays below are based around the simple idea that skillful listening is the cement for building a vibrant, creative culture of awakening. Eight barriers to effective listening From a listener's perspective Mindful listening Collaborative conversation Using interviews to think collaboratively Pi and the Plasmoids A serial eco-novelThe setting for this story is a place that has a culture that is fully oriented toward awakening and vitality. As I begin the story I have no idea what the plot or characters will be. I'm developing the story as I post each episode. I hope that adds spice to your experience of reading it. Show all episodes on a single page Episode 4 - Title to come Episode 5 - Title to come Episode 6 - Title to come Episode 7 - Title to come Episode 8 - Title to come Episode 9 - Title to come Episode 10 - Title to come Episode 11 - Title to come Episode 12 - Title to come Where Google won't be able to take usWhen I wrote the book below, titled Freedom beyond words, in the spring of 1992, many things that it mentions, such as wireless Internet, handheld multimedia devices, robotic Web search agents, Web-based software services, telecommuting from remote exurbs outside cities, and even the Web itself, were barely known. The book predicts that search engines will ultimately become irrelevant, as the digital flood that they unleash eventually overwhelms the capacity of symbol-based computation. It predicts that a digitally networked society will eventually choke on its own data, unless it develops self-evolving, non-symbol-based technology. The limitation lies in the nature of language itself, and cannot be overcome by using faster programmable computers or more powerful search algorithms. In the same way, the complexity of subject matter will exceed the communicative capacity of language itself. I explore the role that a future non-symbol-based technology could eventually play in helping reach across that barrier. The ideal of a generalist educationIn an age when there's too much to know, becoming an educated generalist seems impossible without being born a prodigy or having access to limitless time and educational resources. For most of us, a generalist education remains only a partially attainable, but still worthwhile, ideal. A generalist has a fair mastery of a few subjects, but has an incisive grasp of the panoramic meaning in much of what human beings have discovered about the world or created in it. On self-directed learning as an end and means for education How to learn a language Here are personal references that you might find interesting or helpful. Some books that have inspired me Fitness as meditation These are some short poems that I've written, just having a little fun with language. |
What makes living things alive?The essence of awakening is living awareness, but what is the essence of "livingness"? Here I use the idea of a self-evolving system as a thought-tool for framing more precisely the question of how living things differ from inanimate objects or machines. The self-evolving system is an abstraction for non-mechanical processes that would not only replicate and evolve, but would also design their own evolution, choosing and inventing the direction of their own development. Thinking about autocreative design leads us to seek a metric for the cost of design itself, and in particular, to ask how that cost is paid in biological evolution. A remarkable characteristic of life is its creativity. Although creativity is hard to define in precise terms, the biome taken as a whole seems to be much more creative than we might superficially expect that it would have needed to be.
- Is the spontaneous emergence of design in nature quantifiable by analogy to thermodynamics?
The distinctions between living and non-living systems are difficult to describe without turning to human-centered criteria. The implication that living systems are more highly evolved than lifeless ones, and that some living things are more highly evolved than others, poses the dilemma of a qualitative arrow. Thinking of living things in contrast to mechanisms, it is useful to more precisely understand what machines are in the context of natural processes. The distinction between machines and biology is in certain ways more difficult to draw than what might be casually expected. - In what significant ways is information processing in biological systems not functionally equivalent to digital, algorithmic computation?
- How can theory of computation be generalized beyond algorithms and syntax to include information processing occurring in biological systems?
- In what crucial ways does software based on genetic algorithms differ from biological evolution?
- Why is a Turing machine an inappropriate abstraction for representing a self-evolving system?
Another characteristic of living things is their ability to step outside a deterministic framework and reorient operational objectives. The biome as a whole, and to an extent also an individual species or organism, can design and create itself or parts of itself. That is a process that we could call self-evolution. - What information does a system need about itself in order to self-evolve?
- How would a self-evolving system construct its own selection framework?
Self-evolving systems require the emergence of new form to nourish their development. They thrive at the edge of formlessness, where the potential is high for surprising changes in direction. At the same time, self-evolving systems also require connection to other islands of form. Tension between the void and connectedness is part of what propels self-evolutionary processes. - Are boundaries that distinguish one system from another more than merely semantic?
- What does it mean concretely for one form to merge with another?
- How does diffusion of form relate to emergence and novelty?
- To what extent must systems be open, and to what extent closed, for self-evolution to occur efficiently?
- Does a system depend on greater openness in order to self-evolve?
- Can considerations regarding the theoretical feasibility of self-replicating automata be extended and applied to self-designing systems?
- What particular types of protocol are necessary for self-evolution?
Self-evolving systems have a kind of intelligence, but not an intelligence based on mechanically processing symbols as programmable computers do. The paradox of self-evolution implies that self-evolving systems subsume symbols. - What does it mean for information to reside entirely in the dynamics of a system rather than in any explicit representation?
- Can a digital space be rich enough to embody cognition?
- If the synthesis of concepts is not fundamentally sentential or reducible to abstract grammar, how can concepts be synthesized by cognition that is embodied in digital space?
As biomolecular technology verges on fusing life with non-life at the most fundamental level, it may be interesting to reflect on how information technology might someday look. - Does evolution require an ergodic source for novelty, or does evolution in fact involve extracting implicate structures that are subtly embedded in randomness?
- Can software be used to provide selective pressure for ultra-rapid in vitro molecular evolution?
- Can quantum uncertainty pertaining to structures within macromolecules serve as an adequate source of novelty for evolutionary selection in self-evolving systems?
- Can self-evolving simulations, which are themselves complex systems, be used as instruments for studying other complex systems?
- How can self-evolving simulations be cultivated and queried?
- What uses do self-evolving systems have with respect to digital, programmable computers?
Reflecting on the self-evolutionary qualities of living things leads to questions about the precise nature of selfhood, particularly in the case of conscious living beings such as ourselves. - Can self-evolution happen apart from consciousness?
- Are self-evolutionary processes essential to consciousness?
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