1

STABLE SAMENESS

Carlos Castaneda saw some young Mexican bootblacks eating the scraps off plates at a sidewalk cafe. He felt sorry for them, deprived as they were of education, opportunities, and cultural advantages. Don Juan was contemptuous of Carlos’s sentiment, however, and pointed out that any of those boys could become a Man of Knowledge. He further implied that they could do so with greater ease than Carlos, since their heads wouldn’t be filled with as much nonsense.

In my book The Crack in the Cosmic Egg, I examined the way our thinking enters into the structuring of our reality. I showed how transformation of our concepts about reality could change aspects of our reality. My contention, that “man’s mind mirrors a universe that mirrors man’s mind,” ran counter to the accepted worldview. Extreme as my claims were, though, they were only suggestive of the radical break implied by don Juan in his reply to Carlos.

In Crack, I wrote of an arbitrary nature to our “semantic universe,” but I considered this just the arbitrary nature of our reality. I didn’t realize that a “semantic reality” was a cultural artifice. I thought it our “given” or natural process. I accepted the necessity of such an artifice without question. Above all, it never occurred to me that culture as a necessary prerogative could itself be the real issue. For culture is so “axiomatic” that our minds respond to it just as our bodies respond to gravity. The most formative influences of our lives are beyond awareness and simply “happen to us.”

A statement from Alfred North Whitehead, used in Crack, is needed again, here: “There will be some fundamental assumptions which adherents of all the variant systems within the epoch unconsciously presuppose. Such assumptions appear so obvious that people do not know what they are assuming because no other way of putting things has ever occurred to them.”1

There is a creative and joyful anarchy inherent within don Juan’s reply to Carlos, but we can’t “hear it” because of fundamental cultural assumptions shaping our hearing itself. For who would question that culture represents the highest achievement of life? Or that civilization as practiced by us is not the “great goal of evolution?” We have been conditioned to believe this implicitly. We presume that without culture man would be only another animal, a creature of darkness without meaning or purpose.

To assert, then, that culture is not a necessary prerogative, nor indeed even the proper vehicle for man’s venture, seems preposterous. It seems more ridiculous to claim that language is more a tragedy than a blessing precisely because it does just what the academics reiterate: “gives to us our enormous heritage of acquired experience and knowledge.” Every war demonstrates anew that we never learn from such “acquired experience,” nor benefit from such “inherited knowledge.” Nor does sending men into space, and plunging ever deeper into a technological morass, assuage our inner despair.

Leslie White spoke of culture as an “organism” with life and death cycles of its own. But the cultural effect, by which we are conditioned, blinds us to a primary process that is our true source of communion and social being. Each of us is born with a “life scheme” that is masked, inhibited, and finally dominated by the process of acculturation. For all intents and purposes, this primary program, which is our birthright, becomes nonexistent through acculturation. Once our primary program is masked into noncognizance, culture emerges as the dominant meta program in our organism.

Once this meta program of culture becomes dominant, it shapes our experience into an arbitrary and parallel counterfeit of that which is real. Once this meta program takes over our perceptual apparatus, it is the only mode we then have for interacting with reality. Once that happens we can’t question our culturally conditioned state, since that is our only reality experience.

Our mental-physical organism unfolds from its germ as a leaf from its bud, without assistance from a word-built intellect. But this “natural program” is overlaid by the cultural one. The cultural meta program parallels, imitates, and intertwines with our natural process. Gradually it becomes the dominant force in our biological system.

Back in the 1940s, Harry Stack Sullivan made the following comment, which is apropos to don Juan’s contempt of Carlos’s sentiment and germane to this book.

The origin of the self-system [our ego awareness, JP] can be said to rest on the irrational character of culture. Were it not for the fact that a great many prescribed ways of doing things have to be lived up to, in order that one shall maintain . . . relations, or, were the prescriptions for the types of behavior in carrying on relations with one’s fellows perfectly rational [my italics, JP], then, for all I know, there would not be evolved, in the course of becoming a person, anything like the sort of self-system that we always encounter.2

In don Juan, Jesus, certain Zen and Sufi figures, we get a glimpse of what might be possible for a “self-system” not dominated by acculturation, and a reality not shaped by the cultural semantic. We then see most of the problems attributed to “human nature” as artificial results from acculturation.

Culture operates by “taking over” some and heavily influencing other biological functions in each of us. Equally, however, culture is the result of certain biological functions in “conflict” with other biological functions. For instance, we possess “new brain” processes that are essentially discontinuous with older brain functions. They are capable of operations for which none of our older brain systems seem “preparatory” in any way. Our newer brain processes are designed for symbolic representations, abstractions, creative logic, speech, and other aspects of “operational thinking,” as Piaget calls it. Our older brain systems, on the other hand, are more involved with “homeostasis,” survival, and well-being. These older autonomous systems work to keep a stable relationship between the various parts of our body and our “ambient,” or life sphere as a whole.

A tension between these diverse and apparently unrelated mental functions is inevitable. Culture is the end result of our outward “projection” of this internal dominance-conflict.*1 The cultural effect results from an “intellectual warping” of our survival system, on the one hand, and from our survival system “crippling” our intellect, on the other. And which effect “comes first” is a chicken-egg kind of riddle.

Thinking is an act, a process. To think is to react to, respond to, or interact with, reality. Much reality interaction takes place that is nonverbal and even “non-verbal.” We are consciously “aware” of only certain end products of thinking, even though thinking is an all-inclusive act. Any aspect of thinking tends to incorporate all other aspects of thinking. Homeostasis, for instance (a survival process to be discussed shortly), is as active a part of thinking as talking but takes place largely outside our ego awareness.

Our thinking apparatus is elaborate and mysterious. It involves our entire body and encompasses even more than just our organism. Charles Tart, of the University of California at Davis, relates an experiment in which a subject sat in a soundproofed room designed for sensory-deprivation studies. The subject was “wired up” for brain-wave recordings, skin resistance, heart rate, muscular activity, respiratory changes, and so on, all recorded on a “polygraph” machine. Down the hall, in a similar chamber, an “agent” or sender was electrically shocked at random intervals. The subject was asked to guess when the sender was being shocked. The subject’s polygraph reading indicated significant physiological changes at those instants when the agent was randomly shocked. But the subject’s conscious guesses at when the shocks occurred showed no relation to the actual events as related by his polygraph readings.3

We say the event did not register on the subject’s “conscious mind.” But obviously he was conscious of the event—on a fundamental, biological level. The subject’s body apparently knew of these happenings that his “roof-brain” or ego awareness did not know about. Tart’s experiment gives us a glimpse into what don Juan meant by “body-knowing.” Two mental modes of function are involved, as I outlined in my book Crack.

Tart’s example indicates a kind of “knowing” connected with our “environ,” or life envelope. The way Tart designed his experiment determined the nature of the subject’s temporary “environ” and determined the kind of data selected from the “flow” of that environ. In the same way, our primary program selects from the “flow” around it those aspects vital to our individual organism. But just as Tart’s subject had no ego awareness of his body-knowing’s response, so, as acculturated people, we suffer a “communication gap” between these fundamental modes of our mind. This gap leaves us feeling alienated from our life process, an isolation and despair that all the technologies of our creation cannot assuage.

Our newer brain functions give unique capacities for reflective thinking and creative logic, functions offering an infinitely open possibility. But because of our split of self, we suffer a “failure of nerve” when our creative thinking starts to move us beyond our known stable sameness carried autonomously within our older brain-body systems. These biological survival drives are too well ingrained for transformation. Yet the strength of our newer, intellectual-creative processes will not be denied completely. And culture’s “semantic reality” is the creative stasis resulting from these thinking dynamisms in conflict.

In the following chapters I will show how culture forces each of us to create this “pseudoreality” structured around the semantic effect of language, and how culture “substitutes” a semantic reality for a direct reality interaction. Culture’s word-built world acts as a stimulus substitute that replaces, changes, curtails, or mutates stimuli from a real world. What we experience as acculturated people is never the free interaction with our life flow, that for which we are designed by our “primary programming.” Rather, we experience a life flow filtered through an ideation scheme sharply altering our real world.

Culture arises from and rests squarely on what I call a “death concept.” This is a notion resulting from reflections on death, and a belief in a universal “hostility” toward life. This intellectually conceived notion confuses and disorients the intellectual and survival drives, the two apparently “opposed” modes of mind. The “semantic reality” results in an ideation scheme that serves as an intermediary between our senses and our percepts. This mediant effect interprets as a “buffer” between self and hostile world. Mediant means meditation, literally going between.*2 Since the semantic mediant is an imaginary creation, we can imaginatively change it within our heads. This gives us the illusion of prediction and control over our environment. This maneuver interprets as successful death avoidance.

The assumption that the universe is hostile to life is never clearly formulated. In fact, it would be denied by most of us, even with embarrassment. Yet this notion is manifested on every hand, by implication and inference. The assumption induces a cast of thinking in each of us that actually produces results accordingly. A kind of mass cultural projection mirrors this “judgment against life,” which is then seen outwardly as the universe’s “judgment” against us.

Culture as a paradigm of life couldn’t take place without the anxiety effect of this “death concept.” The anxiety effect of this notion is a large part of the fabric of our life sphere and is induced into each of us from infancy. The death concept becomes the principal influence in our interaction with reality. The concept mediates between our sense and percept, and a hostile universe is actually perceived to be the case.

For perceptions are end products of our thinking, final results of our mind’s acting on reality data.4 Our senses are exposed to and respond to vast amounts of reality data of which we are never “consciously aware.” An enormous amount of varied sensory activity goes on in the body at all times—and only selected items are processed as “perceived events.”

Our intellect acts on reality data through patterns called “concepts.” Concepts are rather “imprintings” by which we connect reality data into units for cognition, or awareness. Certain biological processes shape data according to our primary program, as suggested in Tart’s experiment cited earlier. Other processes shape data according to the semantic reality induced through acculturation—as witnessed by our ordinary, fear-filled, anxiety-ridden, consensus reality. Based on the assumption of a hostile universe, the semantic reality, acting as mediant between sense and percept, breeds a hostile reality. Our primary program, functioning always for unity or wholeness, is thus working in opposition to the semantic process. This gives some indication of our split within.

Since the reality out-there appears hostile to our conditioned minds—filtering that reality through the death concept, as we do—culture seems the proper medium for growth, our source of nourishment, our protective umbrella against the cosmic fallout, and our only “hope.” Nature is the grim adversary, while culture becomes the “surrogate mother,” a buffer standing between our frail lives and the blind uncaring universe.

This judgment against life is never stated so baldly. It is always cloaked as something else and couched with common-sense, rational observations. That such common sense always leads to chaos and discord is accepted as our “natural condition.” This is a breakdown of biological functioning. There is no need for ad hoc principles of a religious or philosophical nature to explain this “fall of man.” Studying the development of intellect in infants and children is more productive.

It was long held axiomatic, for instance, that conceptual thinking, and “abstract, logical thought,” were products of language. Without language we should be both dumb as beasts and incapable of logical action.

This seemed so self-evident that few questioned it seriously. Yet Jean Piaget and Hans Furth were led to question just this “axiomatic” position, and from different pursuits. Piaget studied the growth of intelligence in infants from their birth, before either language or logical development had begun. He followed their development through childhood, as logical ability unfolded. Hans Furth devoted ten years to a study of thinking in congenitally deaf children who had no linguistic ability at all.

Their work dovetailed. Each reinforced their common conclusions: that the infant begins logical thinking before he learns a language; that symbolic creation comes before word-thinking; and that the highest forms of “operational thinking” can, and often should, take place outside language entirely.5

In Crack I had placed logical thinking in opposition to “autistic” or what I now call primary process thinking. In this I was partially mistaken. The split of mind created by acculturation doesn’t follow any neat party lines (as suggested by recent “split-brain” research, for instance) but affects every aspect of our mentality.

Furth and Piaget, in giving us tools for examining conceptual and logical growth, have given us tools for examining the growth of culture. For culture is our set of concepts by which we interact with reality. Inter-acting through our cultural sets creates our cultural reality. Process and product are the same. We each, individually, create our own cultural concepts in keeping with our culture in order to survive our culture. Then, because these conceptual creations are our own biological responses, they are “below awareness,” the only way by which our consciousness can operate. The reality resulting is then not only ultimately valuable as our very life, but beyond the possibility for questioning. To think outside this mode of thinking is equivalent to lifting one’s self by one’s bootstraps.*3

Concept is loosely used, and I need to clarify my use of it.

Conceptual thinking can be considered an “internalized form of sensory-motor action.” Just as a child will fit building blocks together according to some “plan” of physical movement, so the concept is an internalized plan by which intellect acts on the “building blocks” of reality data.6 For we can act on data only according to some schematic. Conceptual thinking is a “transactive movement” by which our intellect puts together those reality components we entertain or respond to.

None of our senses “stand alone.” All must “cross-index,” in what is called synesthesia, to be shaped into a perceived event. The child blind from birth and given sight through an operation “sees” only a sea of color blotches. These blotches must undergo conceptual structuring, modification by all the other senses, to finally emerge as “cognizable” shapes. Cognition must fit the new sense into the criteria developed from birth, a combination of sound, taste, smell, touch, and perhaps other subtle sensings. Older persons given sight through an operation find the new visual stimuli intensely disorienting. They must close their eyes to reestablish their identity with reality. The newly seeing child still identifies the tree by feel, smell, touch, and even taste. It is only then that she notices “the tree has lights in it.”

Our conceptual patterns form from birth, but the process of acculturation can’t “induce” such patterns into the mind. Rather, our concepts are our personal, biological creations. From our beginnings we created such patterns as our response, or “reality adjustment,” to the world. We interacted with the real world in our first six years or so through transactive movements of primary processing. Culture, however, is a set of imaginative expectancies. To interact with the world of our culture we had to create the necessary concepts. Cultural concepts are abstract creations. Abstract logic and creation is a later development of intellectual growth, unfolding somewhere after our sixth year.

To be acculturated, then, is not to be handed a specific set of concrete ideas concerning reality. Each of us creates culture anew. The demand that we make this creative response comes about in many ways, predominantly through fear. The flexibility and tenaciousness of the cultural effect lies in its lack of clarity. (Subtle doubt can create far more havoc than dogmatic condemnation.)

The building of concepts is a total biological process, not just a “head trip.” Conceptual thinking is a homeostatic function. The word homeostasis means “stable sameness,” the title of this chapter. Homeostasis is a term given our biological functions building and maintaining a stable worldview. Our “flight-fight syndrome,” for instance, is a warning device that “rings the bell” of alarm when our stability is threatened. Homeostasis means what the system does—organizes our body senses to keep a stable identity for our awareness.

“Stable sameness” operates on three interlocking levels: 1) communication between the myriad cells and organs of our body; 2) our overall cognitive system perceiving reality as whole events; 3) our relationship between our cognizing organism and our ambient, or life envelope, in which we live.

In our strange, dissective cultural view, we have recognized only the interrelating that maintains a stable relation in the body as our “homeostatic system.” By and large we have ignored, by selective inattention, our equally important symbiotic relation with our environment and the “life-flow system” as a whole. At best such a function is suggested only in esoteric ways that fragment it. We speak of “altered states of consciousness,” telepathy, clairvoyance, and so on, to refer to the fragmented bits of the function breaking through our fixed notions. In the example of Charles Tart’s work, we were given a glimpse of the subtle ways we relate with a “life flow,” and I hope to clarify the process further.

Our biological functions of homeostasis and “flight-fight” are incorporated into and trained to respond to cultural concepts. Equally, however, these functions both give rise to, and provide a basis for, our cultural response. Our selective blindness concerning our symbiotic relations with the life flow is itself a product of acculturation. Culture views our life system as a potential hostility and trusts only that which we intellectually construct and manipulate. This means that we learn to trust and use only certain limited acts of mind, and inhibit all other mental modalities. The mirroring effect between our thinking and our reality then gives us a reality isolated from our life-flow system. Our concepts shape our percepts and we “see” accordingly.*4

Here are four widely varying examples of “homeostasis.” The first example is taken from an experiment in cognition studies. The second example is (to be kind) psychosocial by nature, an example of keeping one’s social image of self stabilized. The third example is rather a combination of the first two. The fourth example is taken from animal life and shows how homeostasis relates with the life-flow system, and how the “flight-fight system” is any disruption of homeostasis.

In studies of perception, subjects were fitted with goggles that turned their visual image upside down. The goggles were worn constantly, the subjects having to adjust to an upside-down world as best they could. After several days, however, the visual process suddenly righted that upside-down vision of the world. After a time the goggles were removed. And immediately the world was seen upside down again. After about the same period of adjustment time, however, the inordinately complex relationship between eye-brain-mind again reversed the reversal and turned that world viewed back upright.

This is the clearest example of our biological function called homeostasis. Keeping intact our known world identity or “stable sameness” is a survival function that our body carries on without any help from our ego “roof-brain” activity.

Thinking in any form is always related to such an internal, organized structure. The goggle subject’s ego awareness had nothing specific to do with these visual reversals. Rather, ego thinking plays on the surface of a rich backdrop of stable conceptual patterns. These patterns function below awareness and are locked into the very fiber of our body.

Once one’s worldview has formed in this way, it does not lend itself easily to change. And the worldview formed contains far more than a simple orientation to up and down. Our ego thinking can rearrange some of the given fixtures on the surface, and even create novel effects, but we can do little to alter the conceptual framework built from infancy.

Again, I was giving a talk for one of those weekend seminars. Afterward, as I was having lunch, a dear little lady sat down to express her appreciation of my talk. She had understood me so clearly, she reported, because her Spiritual Guide, Brother Lawrence (The Practice of the Presence of God Brother Lawrence, mind you), had been right there in her right ear translating and explaining everything to her.

The dear little lady proceeded to relate to me Brother Lawrence’s interpretation, which lasted about the same hour’s time as my talk. At any rate, from beginning to end I could not find one toehold of recognition in her discourse. Off we went into astrology, spiritualism, reincarnation, astral projection, Madam Blavatsky, dream interpretation, Edgar Cayce, you name it. All of which was my talk—the one I thought had been on perception, cognition, and so on. (I knew then it made little difference what one said in a speech, as it may not make much difference what one writes. Listeners hear as they need to hear.)

The little lady’s homeostatic drive served her criteria system of social-self. “Brother Lawrence” was her mediating device by which she acted on her “incoming data,” converting it as needed for service to her worldview. Her prism of prejudice acted on her data just as effectively as the image goggles in the visual experiment.

Through acculturation, there is little difference in function between biological and psychosocial. Each supports the other to maintain the self-system. Only in early childhood might our sensory-perceptual system move as a unified, unbroken act.

From studies in cognition again: subjects were placed before a screen and shown a picture out of focus. The subjects were asked to study the blurred image until they could begin to perceive the original form. After sufficient time, the subjects did, indeed, begin to “see” what was there.

Once the visual image “formed” for them, and their strained sensory-perceptual system relaxed with its created image, the experimentor would then bring the blur into focus. The actual picture never related to the imagined constructs and the point was for the experimentor to time the subjects’ adaptations to the picture as it actually was. An average of forty-five seconds elapsed before the subjects became aware that the picture had “changed.” (Try forty-five seconds and you will find it to be quite a while.)

Even more intriguing was a variation of this experiment.

When the subject finally began to “see” what the blur was, the experimentor, without changing the blur, challenged the rightness of the subject’s construction. This threatened the self-system’s hard-won orientation. The more the subject’s “seeing” was challenged, the more tenacious and firm his “seeing” became.

On bringing the image into clear focus, these subjects took not forty-five seconds to shift and adapt but up to three minutes for their visual process to perceive the new sensory data. (You might remember this in your next heated argument.)

Here are some of the aspects of homeostasis. If only a “blur” is offered, and the demand is made for accommodation to and identification of that blur, the cognitive system transacts according to the pattern of one’s background. We fit that which is unknown into our known reference scheme, both as a way of clarifying the reality in which we move and of keeping our known background stable.

Do not underestimate this power for keeping the world intact and familiar. That it operates largely below awareness is its strength. That it incorporates our social self is its subtlety. Further, suggestiveness, which needs our subjective clarification, as found in the blurred image experiment, is one of the most effective of all influences. Through such suggestive demands for response we create our reaction, so to speak. Since we are then reacting to our own creation, we are doubly convinced of the validity of our response.

All of us have a Brother Lawrence in our right ear, interpreting and explaining; just as we all wear goggles inverting the image of reality, whether we are aware of it or not. The blurred images resulting must be given shape and then defended by our rationale, for our survival system is at stake.

Our goggles and Brother Lawrence in the ear are culture. This metaprogram shapes every aspect of our lives. It is a force that we are so conditioned by that we are not aware of its action. No other way of being seems conceivable, nor is any other way of transacting with reality ordinarily employed within our experience.

Once built into the organism, this process of culture will not be rooted out. Yet the notion that it can be rooted out, that it can be “corrected” and put in proper order, is also a part of our cultural conditioning and vital to cultural preservation.

For my final example here of homeostasis, consider Rabbit—not rabbit-in-the-wilds, but very Urbane Rabbit. I watched him for weeks one semester of graduate school. We shared a secluded, sunny little flower garden each afternoon. Surrounded by high, thick hedges, our little island world was private but very noisy—for it was situated at a crowded, busy intersection, filled with car honkings, squeals, slammings, and the incessant chatter and clatter of pedestrians on the sidewalk.

Since I kept very still, Rabbit ignored me completely. He also ignored the traffic noise, which I found an abrasive intrusion. No flicker of recognition reaction ever came from Rabbit over any of the background din, only feet away from us. Even the big, unexpected crisis noises brought no reaction from those long ears, calmly lying in repose as he ate flower blossoms at leisure.

All I had to do, however, was scratch on the lawn with my fingers, no matter where in the garden Rabbit was, and instantly those long ears flicked to attention and he froze to alert. I repeated this many times and was intrigued that while I could never hear the scratchings myself (the decibel overlay of traffic was considerable), Rabbit heard, though twenty feet away.

Rabbit’s homeostatic system had long since identified all the forms of traffic noises and cataloged them as needing no further attention. The scratching in the grass, though, was not of the known and familiar. This sensory item was admitted to his cognitive system and relayed on into that final act we call a percept. Rabbit filtered out the powerful but extraneous and attended only the subtle though meaningful. His performance indicates the nature of our life-flow connection lost to us through acculturation, and the nature of the “threat syndrome” act resulting from this larger frame of reference.

There is a strange reversal of Rabbit’s order of things in our acculturated system. We use the reversal for certain transactions, but an equal function and possibility needed by us is filtered out and lost thereby.

Let me outline this loss briefly, though prematurely, and return to it later. Our sensory perception system is trained to attend the noisy background, while a scratching-in-the-grass kind of signal is screened out. The subtle signals are screened out both by selective inattention training and sheer decibel drowning-out from that background we are trained to attend.

Rabbit’s homeostatic set of stable familiarity acts as a mediant between his sense and percept, in that it stops the useless at that point. Acculturation assures us that our sensory perceptual system will lock in on that source of traffic, so to speak, since that is culture. To be acculturated is to lock out the natural world and attune the thinking apparatus to cultural products. The social semantic then acts as the mediant between our sense and percept in a way opposite to Rabbit’s. We are then “reality adjusted” to the semantic reality, not to the world as itself. The mediant effect works equally on our interaction with people as well as things of the world. Once acculturated, we act on data with our conceptual sets, rather than interacting with data in creative ways.

I am in no way suggesting a “back-to-nature” romantic revolt. The “nature” to which I refer is our natural, given state of communion, which is as operative and effective in the heart of a metropolis as in don Juan’s desert or Jesus’s Galilee.

Later I will outline how homeostasis enters into language development and how language development then influences the homeostatic system. This interplay is the way our organism is shifted from reality orientation to a semantic orientation, so that semantic feedback becomes the issue of “flight-fight” survival maneuvers, and word data substitutes for reality data as the mind’s material for interaction.

Homeostasis is such a commonplace effect that it is unnoticeable. We overlook the extensive and continual adjustments we make as stability-seeking creatures. It isn’t so much that we “have” a homeostatic system as that we behave “homeostatically” on very fundamental levels.

Paradoxically, through acculturation we seek stability by trying to change things according to semantic conceptions. In this way we maintain a “semantic reality” supposedly amenable to our homeostatic drive. This creation of a metareality is a misuse of a logical capacity and fragments our possibilities afforded by logic as a cocreative effect in reality. The first half of this book explores the formation of culture as a circular effect between homeostasis and creativity. For culture is itself an expression of the homeostatic drive in conflict with creative thinking. At the same time, culture is itself creative thinking, oriented to, warped by, and in service of, this fundamental biological process.

We think of culture “fostering” creative thinking, as found in art and science. Consider instead that creativity is moving from the known to the unknown and always must emerge in spite of culture. Culture immediately warps any creative product to some extent, changes its thrust, and utilizes it for culture. Were it not for creativity, culture itself would not be created.

In order to show the cultural effect I will briefly outline the growth of logical and creative thinking in the child. This will entail outlining the parallel effect of the use of mediation in thinking. Then it will be clearer why the homeostatic-cultural effect moves to block our creative capacity and orient us to semantic channels through the use of mediation in thinking.

Mediation is one of the great logical tools available to mind. Through it we can create reality spheres for adventurous interaction. Through mediation we can “mutate the metaphors” by which we represent a reality situation, and so change that situation. Through acculturation, however, mediation becomes a buffering device, or an insulator, designed to shield us from a “hostile universe.” That this buffer effect succeeds only in isolating us from the life flow, and so creates the “human condition” of anxiety, fear, and alienation, is just a bad joke we bring on ourselves.

My intent is not to “condemn” culture (condemning gravity for a skinned knee would be more fruitful), nor is my intent to suggest “correctives” for the cultural process. We stagger under a landslide of such suggestions continually. I do hope to suggest that no aspect of culture is in any way correctable, and I further hope to show that negative attention strengthens culture as fully as positive. And just to round it out, I hope to show that you can’t ignore culture and survive it.

The protest, the antiwar rally, the sit-in, the moral outrage, the mass righteous indignations, the countercultural enthusiasms act as vital escape valves for the cultural process. Excess frustration boils off thereby, in order that the culture might continue unhindered doing just as it is going to do. (The great apathy following the Vietnam protest movement was intuitive recognition of this fated fact.)

Culture and its “civilization” is don Juan’s World of Folly; the world of illusion in Indian metaphysics; and Jesus’s Mammon World, in which we apparently must be, but of which we do not have to be.

To ask “what then” is proposed for man’s world is pointless, for that world is culture, always has been, and always will be. As to what the world might be through orientation to a Jesus or a don Juan, such questions could only be answered by being that process itself, a process in which these kinds of culturally motivated questions would not arise.

Man’s history has been the continual attempt to deal with the irrational aspects of his cultural function. So I will explore this function in the hopes of showing the futility of trying to “escape” it or change it. My concern will be to strip away hope, the cultural “ace-up-the-sleeve” seduction game. For only at a point of genuine bankruptcy of hope can we glimpse beyond our cultural conditioning and sense a possible turning.

Our acculturation conditions us to do: to strive for, earn, compete, win, seize, scheme, design, ensnare, overcome, make up, mock up, structure up, invent, and kill for if need be. This is doing. This is the modern cultural desire to change things. (Don Juan tells Carlos: you can change nothing.)

A secondary concern of this work will be the raft of meta-metaprograms clamoring to be a way, or the way, out of the cultural bind. Culture is the metaprogram. No variation of the cultural metaprogram can simulate the primary program, nor can any combination of the metaprogram remove that metaprogram. The cultural process is self-replicating, designed to reproduce its own process-product circularity.

Every action from our culturally conditioned thinking only enhances the cultural position. And through acculturation, we are left with no other way of thinking. Each variation of metaprogramming may afford novelty, entertainment, and temporary relief from despair, but all of this is simply a shift of mediation device. The stakes are far higher.

We can’t, by taking thought—or doing in the cultural sense—increase our stature by a cubit. The acorn doesn’t become an oak by such “doing.” It is simply programmed to become an oak—as we are programmed to become fully human. Unfortunately we are also metaprogrammed. This word-built conceptual scheme parallels and imitates the development of the Primary one and finally wins out as the system of dominance in our organism.

The only way around the dominance of the metaprogram is not-doing in the don Juan or Eugen Herrigel “Zen-sense.” Doing is the metaprogram. So long as we think we can change things, we are holding to “doing.” Even “changing ourselves” is generally only another variant of doing, a meta-metaprogram number. There is nothing we can do to return to the initial or primary program any more than a leaf could return to its bud.

“Not-doing” opens our percepts to that which has unfolded within us right along, in spite of the metaprogram.

Hints of the primary process abound, as exemplified by don Juan, Zen, Jesus, bits from the Sufi, Buddhism, and the Tao. Each is covered with nonsense sooner or later, and even the glimpses afford us, at best, only secondhand access. They are signs only, and to grasp a sign (doing) is to lose its signification.