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PREDICTION AND CONTROL

The thrust of any culture, archaic or contemporary, is to predict and control the flow of nature. Prediction and control in this sense are intellectualized forms of our survival drives, and misuses of our capacity for transformation. Prediction and control could be potent, logical tools. In their acculturated form they set us against, and split us from, the flow of life and defeat us in our very attempts to understand our nature and respond intelligently.

In archaic cultures man controlled his own acts, through myth, ritual, and taboo, to mirror his concept of nature. By this he tried to ensure himself a nature of predictable order.

Contemporary culture attempts to predict and control a nature conceived as hostile. In turn, each of us, lest we be “natural,” and thus hostile, must be predicted and controlled for the sake of the social body. Potential hostility underlies our interaction with both our reality and our self. In the (hostile) reality resulting, our homeostatic system can never relax, nothing is stable, and our “flight-fight,” or “startle” system is on a perpetual alert; everything seems threatening.

Ordinarily our “startle system” should be activated only by actual disruptions of our homeostatic system. Homeostasis is like an electronic burglar-alarm circuit. So long as our feeling of stability and security is undisturbed, our startle system is quiet. A break in our sameness or unsureness of outcome rings the alarm.

Our “startle system” retains its natural function but gets overlaid by cultural conditioning. For instance, I am walking back to my car, arms loaded, and must squeeze past a recently parked station wagon. Suddenly, inches from my face, a huge German police dog lunges, fangs bared, slaughter sounds roaring forth. Immediately, every fiber of my being is alerted, my heart plunges, and my leg muscles fire into propulsion.

As quickly, my scanning devices note the “thank-God safety glass” twixt me and the beast, and I stop trying to push my molecules through those of my car. The entire procedure takes the flick of an eyelash. I was a “bit startled,” is all.

Actually, that is never all. I will check station wagons in the future before getting too close, at least until the incident fades. All too often I will carry the incident over in “tape looped” imaginings, structuring up a rich fabric of resentment toward owners of police dogs and station wagons. This is my reflective intellect’s acculturated response—to an experience in which it played no part. For my conscious thinking is too slow for decision making and action taking of this sort. Conscious thinking can only follow this ‘‘body-knowing.” (The “knee-jerk reaction” of a singed finger is “un-thought,” in this sense, but we generally dwell on it quite a bit after the fact.)

Acculturation links our homeostatic system to our social-ego thinking in disruptive ways. This slower-minded me, here in my “roof-brain,” is designed to be informed by my startle system. Acculturation rather reverses this natural order, and my “roof-brain” starts informing my startle system. And the natural, one-way street of the startle effect gets its traffic snarled when ego-me tries to take over the whole operation, rushing backward as well as forward.

Survival learning and “body-knowing” depend on remembering “traumas” and making comparison evaluations with new experience. This homeostatic process operates below roof-brain awareness. Through reflective thinking, however, we remember, compare, then try to pre-construct events before they can happen. This is a perfectly logical and practical way to avoid trauma and even death. Culture is based on this perfectly logical assumption. And entering into an event to restructure it is one of the uses of operational thinking. (In Crack, for instance, I used fire-walking as a most extreme and dramatic example of this kind of restructuring.) The problem lies with the proper use, or “biological phasing,” of this form of creative logic. In what way do we “accept the given without question,” or transform the given? What are the criteria for transformation?

Intellectualizing the flight-fight performance converts the rare startle experience into a chronic anxiety. This conversion largely defeats that for which the system was designed.

Rabbit, for instance, would have avoided the station wagon in the first place. He would have known of the dog before getting there.

Since my reality is semantic, constantly reinforced by the chatter in my “roof-brain,” near disaster must break upon me full force to penetrate the artificial “stable sameness” churning around in my word-filled head.

Intellectualizing the homeostatic and flight-fight system places a past-future grid on all present-moment reality. Prestructuring events becomes the pattern for transactions with reality. We start conceptually putting our present reality data together according to prestructured notions of what the future should be. Body-knowing, no longer trusted or heeded, seems to atrophy, and as pointed out, our possibilities for creative interaction get sharply curtailed.

The mind-body system has a natural division of labor. Culture disrupts this scheme. The homeostatic system gets intellectualized, and the intellect gets locked into homeostatic reactions to any proposed break in “stable sameness.” The “semantic reality,” sustained in our roof-brain activity, then mediates between our senses and our percepts. Such mediation creates the illusion of predicting and controlling an infinitely contingent universal system.

To the culturally conditioned mind, any other way of dealing with the world seems madness. Trust is impossible to the conditioned mind. For instance, don Juan attempted to get Carlos to trust his “body-knowing” and run in unknown wilderness in the dark. This kind of “surrendering” runs counter to every facet of acculturation—as don Juan well knew. It involves the complete opposition of prediction and control.

Rabbit-in-the-wilds will hop right over sleeping fox who is well fed, but rabbit will give hungry fox, sleeping or no, a wide berth. How does rabbit know? (The Zen swordmaster cannot be caught unawares. Don Juan always seemed to know when Carlos was coming to visit.)

Carlos tried to trip don Juan with “what-ifs.” What-if a man with a high-powered rifle with telescopic sight were lying in wait to kill him, what would don Juan do then? Why, he simply wouldn’t be in such a place. But what if the man were hiding, in secret, with a long-range rifle, how could don Juan . . . ? Carlos argued from the grounds of one separated from his natural communion with life.

But even the slowest will point out, rabbits in the wild do get caught—that “well-fed fox” probably fed on one. True, and that is as it has to be, for rabbit and fox. There is, however, a qualitative, functional difference between rabbit and man. What this fundamental difference is can’t be grasped, however, much less developed by man until that larger relationship with life, as displayed by rabbit (and don Juan) is regained by man.

(The romantic sentiment that the death of rabbit to fox is “woodland tragedy” is an outgrowth of our cultural death concept in one of its guises, mixing memory, sentiment, and death into its treacly substitute for life. The event of death is not a tragedy—to rabbit, fox, or man. But the concept of death is a tragedy for man, and indirectly, for poor fox, rabbit, bush, bird, just anything and everything in man’s path.)

In the first chapter I listed several examples of homeostasis. There are many subtle aspects of the system. For instance, the body apparently has a “memory system” that is not directly cerebral, or “in the head.” Various parts of the body seem to act as “memory banks” for other parts of the body. The life experience of one’s leg, for instance, may be sustained as a memory in other parts of the body. There are evidently hundreds of nexus points, cross-indexing between the parts of the body. A low muscle-tone vibration, stilled only in the deepest stage of sleep, may keep the interlocking information continually active, give a stable unity to the diverse body parts, and make available to the “startle system” the material needed for those lightning-quick sensory evaluations.

Consider that a toe suffers some injury. The trauma is “registered” in the body for comparison with future data. Should a similarity in incoming data appear, the body acts to ward off a repetition. Suppose that thumb, rather than toe, meets a similar condition. Thumb doesn’t have to send a dossier to toe or brain to await computation and eventual reply. Toe’s report of the trauma is filed in other repositories, quickly available throughout the network.

Should a limb or portion of our body be lost, its memory-bank deposits continue to register as data in the cognitive scheme. The homeostatic system keeps its stable unity intact as well as continuing the availability of the experience carried therein.

In phantom-limb pain, for instance, a previous trauma occurring to toe might start causing discomfort months after one’s entire leg had been amputated. Many amputees continue to “feel” their lost limbs, and this was long a medical mystery. Acupuncture can relieve such pain by locating the point in the body in which these particular “memories” are stored or, if the “gate theory” is correct, are relayed on to the brain.1

Ida Rolf ’s system of massage seems to break up some traumas attached to “body” memories. Often nerve-muscle hang-ups that curtail areas of the body can thus be eliminated. Sam Keen wrote of an area of his chest that was affected by a trauma. When this area was “Rolfed,” Keen found himself “reliving” a painful experience from childhood in which emotional catastrophe had been linked with a specific injury to his chest.

In the body’s homeostatic procedures, other muscles partially take over the functions of an injured area to promote healing. On reactivation of the injured area, the trauma of the experience may tend to reactivate as well, bringing on anxiety. As a result it happens occasionally that the “relief ” function of the other muscles never completely relinquishes the “emergency role-playing.” Over the years there might be, for example, a slight “hitch” in the way the shoulder is carried.

John Lilly gave a similar report on the “Rolfing” of scar tissue from an injury received from an axe in his college days. As the “Rolfing” broke down the tie-up within his foot, he relived the entire experience in a “sensory-perception replay.”2

(Through the extremities of Rolfing, these complexes are broken up, apparently cleaning house. Purgative but not preventive, periodic repetitions of the performance seem necessary. I am reminded of Jesus’s parable of the demon being exorcised from a body and wandering about the countryside with no place to stay. Quietly he crept back to his old abode and found it swept clean. So he rushed out, gathered all his kin, and took over the body again. Which body, of course, was then worse off than before.)

Any interaction with reality is “thinking” on some level. Much thinking takes place below conscious awareness. The few examples given here and in the first chapter indicate the depth and tenacity of the body’s homeostatic drive. Once developed, this can no more be easily changed than can any other aspect of our physique. Recent studies suggest that the “minor hemisphere” of the brain might be directly connected with such non-aware or “unconscious” processes, a matter to which I will return. Enough for now to point out that the desire for a stable sameness of the known and familiar acts on the entire organism, including our conscious processes. Many “rational” decisions, apparently reached through logical processes, are reactions to this “non-aware” dynamism. Surface cognition is intricately tied with autonomous function.

As I outlined in Crack, we used to think of our cognitive sys tem, with its elaborate sensory apparatus, as a kind of telephone switchboard, bringing in messages from out-there and assembling them into a reasonable facsimile within. We know now that our cognitive process is hardly so passive. Our notions of what is “real” function as an “editorial hierarchy of mind,” deciding which data, among all available, is “fit to print” as perceptual events. This conceptual frame-work even “sends out orders” to its sensory reporters for the kinds of material desired by the current newsroom synthesis policy. This policy is our “worldview,” the result of the preprogramming of culture, organizing our cognitive system along set patterns of response.

Cultural conditioning disrupts the division of labor between intellect and survival. Then cultural logic brings about an artificial kind of “verbal agreement” between these basic functions so split. The result is a concept of general threat that embraces every aspect of reality.

Much of our “body-knowing” is lost to us through this intellectual overlay. In the first chapter I described an experiment by Charles Tart that indicated what “body-knowing” might encompass. Rabbit and don Juan also give tangible examples and offer insight into our original “communion state.” This state of early childhood should have been vastly enhanced, expanded, and creatively entered into through the development of operational thinking. Instead, our natural communion was thwarted and driven underground. As we get isolated from our childhood relation with the Flow, our homeostatic system, designed for survival in a living process, gets converted to our ego-image survival in a world of semantics. The more the homeostatic drive is channeled into the cultural process, the greater the loss of communion.

The child rejects hostility, if possible, and projects his fear outside himself as best he can. To project his fear outwardly he erects barriers to that fear. A barrier or ‘‘buffer” to fear insulates the child from the real world as well as from the nonreal abstractions of fear. Isolated and fragmented, intellectual attempts to predict and control are substituted for the security and “knowing” of being one with the flow of life. Thus our semantic prism, standing for the world, acts as mediant between our senses and our percepts.

The semantic universe resulting is “logically coherent” within its own logic. This logic is a response to the death concept, however, based on avoidance of death. A permanent, ceaseless undercurrent of threat-without-known-cause, or threat from hypothetical future cause, keeps the homeostatics drive anchored to the social semantic. This alliance is “below the limen of awareness” and simply happens to us.

“Reality-adjusted” thinking is cultural thinking. Our accepted concepts define our common-sense reality, and common sense means sensory responses held in common. And the only way we know in which responses are so held is through our language structure. To mature culturally is to learn to see, taste, touch, hear, smell, according to a verbal consensus.

A literate culture such as ours is preserved by a verbal flexibility unknown to archaic cultures. This flexibility in no way changes the underlying function of prediction and control. Instead, our fearful desire is offered an endless new array of illusions that it can predict and control.

Archaic cultures organize around perfectly remembered myths and legends that outline the actions sustaining the culture. Variations of the given are extremely limited. The Trobriand Islander is confused when challenged with “obvious contradictions” in his cultural logic. He resorts to the best rationale of which he is capable or goes blank. But he keeps his worldview intact. Questioning his ontological constructs never occurs within his closed society. No flexible system of rationale is developed, since none is needed.3

In literate societies this is not the case. A written language grows increasingly ambiguous. The flexibility of our current semantic reality is extensive. Endless metaphoric mutation can occur within our process without in the least disturbing the function of culture. To be acculturated to a literate world is to develop an infinite capacity for rationalization. (Rationale is our cultural parody of reversibility thinking, perhaps.) Writing down our abstractions gives an increasingly flexible rationale.

Functional change, however, is not possible for any aspect of culture. The sound and fury of our current metaphoric mutation gives the illusion of newness and change, but the function of culture remains the same. In our culture, the priests are continually being overthrown, changing vestments and creed, proclaiming new ages to the excited audiences. But this eternal game of “king-of-the-wood” changes culture not at all.

Our cognitive system, with its complex sensory network, is a great synthesizer. Not infallible, it can be tricked or trick. In one sense, we have no cognitive process, as acculturated people, but only a re-cognitive one. I believe that poet Blake had learned to cognize. And I suspect that Carlos Castaneda was being trained by don Juan to cognize as well as re-cognize. To cognize may require a relinquishment of those most tenacious drives for prediction and control.

Academic assumptions have convinced us that we have survived by intellectually outwitting the forces of nature. This assumption perverts every facet of that which makes us human into “economic-adaptive necessities” and is not the case. We have survived, in fact, in spite of such cultural channelings of intellect, channelings that have consistently turned our Eden into our hell.

Our enormous brain is not a “survival mechanism.” The cockroach is far older than man, is obviously “better adapted,” and will probably be around long after we are gone. Life has developed our “oversized brain” for the same reason we probably “overdeveloped” our sexual parts—simply for the joy of exploring the capacities suggested therein.