INTRODUCTION
This
is my story about how we come to know anything and why I think it's helpful to
know about that. If you think that knowing about knowing is difficult, wait till
we get to understanding understanding!
It's
a combination of cognitive science - about thinking and communicating, mind,
brain and so on - and other forms of knowledge - the spiritual traditions and
body energies - because it's about an 'embodied mind.' You could say it's a
theory of consciousness, but it's meant to be more practical than that.
Imagine
a huge crystal of universal knowing with millions of facets. They all sparkle,
but the vast majority sparkle with mystery; only a very few sparkle with any
sense of knowing for me. My first assumption is that the unknown is far larger
than the known and we seek ways of relating to the unknown even though it means
dancing with shadows.
The
seven facets that I know something about form a pattern. Sometimes they look
like steps or stages of knowing, one built upon the other, but then you realise
that the top step is the bottom one again and it is just as good to go down as
to go up - so they're not really stages. Each aspect is a slightly different
angle of view so the fun thing about them is that you can find your own blind
spots as you look at them. For me each aspect reveals a particular blind spot
that can limit my living in some way. I've found that knowing about knowing
affects my communicating and that these two affect my quality of life (not to
mention productivity, efficiency and the pursuit of happiness!) An organisation
or community can look at these seven aspects, too, because the blind spots we
grapple with as individuals are also evident in our institutions and
corporations.
An idea of the structure of my story
is given in
the star Figure above and in the accompanying Table of
Correspondences. This introduces my second
assumption, which is that all constructions of the human mind are limited,
particularly contrived tables and models such as this. They can be helpful for a
short time to orient yourself to someone else's line of thinking, but they soon
become a hindrance to progress, so I strongly recommend that all such schematics
be consigned to the rubbish bin as soon as possible after they are read!
Songs,
on the other hand, are terribly important. It is not so much the composing and
writing of the songs that has helped me - although I thoroughly recommend it as
a way of preserving your sanity when studying knowing - it is the singing of
songs together that I find most beneficial. What good would an exposition on
knowing be if we could not experience knowing? Finding these blind spots,
climbing steps backwards, dancing with shadows and the magic of knowing are
already there in this most ancient form of music, the song.
Is
this science or not? The answer is yes and no. All the details of my explanation
can be validated scientifically because they come from research and thinking in
the fields of biology, cognitive science, second-order cybernetics and an older,
but still less developed, science of wholeness. But science does not have a
monopoly on knowledge. It became predominant as we evolved from darker ages of
even more arbitrary forms of authority, but the age of information and
technology has also brought its own tyranny which seems to be associated with a
denial of the spiritual aspects of our existence. Both Eastern and Western
spiritual traditions have contributed much to the evolution of our knowledge.
Ways of knowing that cannot be scientifically explained play a large part in our
everyday living. My explanation is based in science, but also acknowledges the
emancipation of the human spirit. It blends what we know about the physical with
what we don't quite know about the spiritual in seeking quality of life -
balancing known and unknown.
What
is knowledge? How do I know? Are
we communicating poorly or well?
What
difference does it make anyway?
Quality
of life
is
a feeling of wellbeing, a sense of knowing
that
all is well.
Not
fragmentation (feeling alone, working apart)
and
monoculture (all doing the same thing in places that look the same)
craving
togetherness that
can't
be found.
If
work is a basic necessity of life, why isn't it thoroughly enjoyable?
What
makes the workplace happy, employees
love
the job, give their all?
never
resolved, despite all that we know?
Why
are people so damned unpredictable and unreliable?
Why
is fear and anxiety
endemic
when we all
prefer
loving, harmonious relationships?
All that
regretting,
feeling guilty, ashamed.
And people
who learn easily
and
remember things.
What
follows is essentially a spoken version - the bare bones - of my
story about Seven Aspects of Knowing:
The
first aspect is AUTONOMY - we are autonomous and connected.
This
seems all too obvious, but has a profound biological basis. We can't simply be
part of everything around or we would dissipate (that's entropy); in fact we
grow and organise against entropy because we are alive. The biological process
of living and being oneself is called autopoiesis - that is how we maintain our
organisation. Paradoxically, the only way to maintain one's organisation is to
be structurally connected to the immediate world - to get oxygen and food, use
our senses - but, at the same time, not be controlled by it. There is an
incredible internal control system that's been neglected in science because
everyone wants to talk about external control, not autonomy, e.g. simplistic
stimulus-response theory.
I
heard about this from my 5 year old nephew when I was looking after and
organising him and some other boys. After a while he said to me: "There is
something about me that you need to know. I am the boss of myself!"
Autonomy
and autopoiesis are aspects of wholeness. Being complete in ourselves is what
facilitates connectedness. This is the base chakra - our physical connection
with the world. In organisations, it's about survival.
When
we think of ourselves as autonomous unities we're more aware of the value of
connecting. Not only would we die if we weren't connected, but our quality of
life depends on how well we connect. For example, if you were here today simply
because everyone else was here, it wouldn't matter much whether you connected
with anyone; knowing you are here because this is exactly where you choose to
be, you will probably say: it's important that I do connect with someone else
while I'm here.
The
Blind Spot is that we become accustomed to being steered by outside influences
and other people and yet we still feel alone. We tend to lose ourselves in
co-dependencies. We don't really behave autonomously and we don't feel
connected, either. Feeling insecure and craving security, we worship reason and
science and religious dogma above our own knowing. Feeling separated, we go
about trying to make everything the same in a hideous monoculture, which is a
false togetherness, instead of respecting diversity and the connectedness that
it provides.
Songs which are particularly associated with this idea (and with all aspects
of knowing combined) are the Song of Autonomous Unities and I Produce Myself.
The
second aspect is CLOSURE - we are operationally-closed and self-organising -
closure meaning shut in, not finished.
Because
we are autonomous, the first things our senses need to tell us is who we are -
not what everything else is. To know one's self is to be a cognitive system, so,
by definition, it has to be operationally closed - it can't be told by something
else what it is or what to do. Therefore, outside stimuli cannot dictate a
response; they simply trigger the next operation of our self-organising system.
It may seem that things outside us have informed or instructed us - we'll come
to that later - but they were only the triggers or perturbations; our internal
autopoietic process determined what resulted from the triggers. If we think of
what goes on in our minds as a series of iterations and what we do and say as a
series of perturbations, then, my words will perturb your mind, but what you
think next is the next step in your iteration, not mine. Meaning cannot be
transferred. New meaning is created through the interaction.
This
closure condemns us to an intensively private world unless we connect with other
people. It shows that we need relationships for meaning as well as for survival.
It's the belly chakra - the power of relationships - the sacred truth to honour
one another. In organisations, it's about communication. By honouring
relationships we do more than just exist. Through relationships we find out who
we are - we validate ourselves. Sexual intercourse is the most basic physical
connection and, at the same time, an opportunity for a higher level of
communication - recognising that there is more to human awareness than just the
physical.
The
Blind Spot: that we go around assuming our meaning is transferable and, while
people very close to us might seem to confirm this at times, we also find that
people misunderstand us. We belittle the fundamental need to connect sincerely,
not just casually, and go around thinking that everybody else should know what
we're thinking and we know what they're thinking. It doesn't work very well.
One song I associate with this idea is Make the Connection.
The
third aspect is PERCEPTION - we bring forth our world - not create it, but bring
it forth, as observers.
What
is this autonomous, closed, cognitive system (which is us) actually doing? We're
not only experiencing, but also observing, everything that happens to us. We're
constantly exposed to extremely complex, ever-changing stimulation, so we need
to stabilise all this, give it order. This process is called eigenbehaviour for
iterating, self-referential systems generally.
Much
of the history of psychology and philosophy deals with two wonderful processes
for achieving this. One is forming images, which are basic bodily patterns
arising from visual, auditory and kinaesthetic connections, upon which we can
then create a special kind of order by means of the other, which is language.
Language also enables us to reflect on the past and plan for the future, but
that is secondary. We live in sequential present moments and perceive this
experience as a series of images which we partly process using language. This
language may be read in our bodies as well as in our words.
Images
are an essential pre-condition to knowing, but they exist largely in the
unconscious so cannot be entirely expressed in language. Nevertheless it is
vital that we can create objects, events and issues by naming them in a
reasonably consistent way. This is the way of the observer. The unconscious
component of our flow of images plays another role in knowing because it shapes
our emotions (see later). Verbalising our 'feelings' - bringing into language
some of the hitherto unknown parts of our images - is a constant task that we
may or may not relish, but which may have important implications for our health.
Creativity takes root in this interplay between the known and the unknown. We
know more than we realise, but this is not necessarily what we call knowledge
(see later).
So
we don't passively receive whatever is out there; we grasp hold - make a
connection (a sensory-motor coupling) and actively use this to construct a
pattern. This pattern is not a representation of what is out there. It's a
combination of two things: one we can call our organising
idea, which is
essentially a pre-existing image, with or without its accompanying language. The
other is the set of external stimuli available at that time. Together these form
a new image which is a variation of the image that preceded it (the previous
organising idea). This image is the fundamental unit of our knowing in that it
stands for the connection we've made at that point in time, which is also who we
are (it defines us in terms of our relationship with everything else). Language,
however, is the indispensable product of our perception which enables us to
describe the world we bring forth, our relationship to it, and therefore, who we
are. This is the fundamental concept of the observer, living in language, that
Maturana has proposed.
The
proactive nature of cognition is evidenced by the fact that there are not only
afferent nerve fibres from our sense organs into our brain; there are also
efferent fibres running from the brain which tell the eye (or ear) what to be
aware of. We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are (the Talmud
said). We bring forth our own world.
(There is a picture illustrating the organising idea.)
This
is not solipsism - it's an alternative epistemology. This science says nothing
about whether the world exists independently of us, but it suggests that I don't
have to pit my "objectivity" against yours - I prefer to hold
"objectivity-in-parentheses" because it frees me from arguing about
reality and opens space for experiencing the reality of our living together.
The
solar plexus chakra is to do with honouring oneself. What we call self-esteem
and our individual personality arise with this aspect of knowing along with a
wonderful further freedom: the freedom to choose to live in the world of our own
spirit instead of the illusory world of our physical circumstances. People can
be happy living in a shack or unhappy living in a mansion. In organisations,
it's to do with efficiency, productivity and best practice as the basis of
organisational self-esteem, which is the level that most organisations have
reached at present and from which many now desire to move on.
A
major Blind Spot is that we often blame the world for how we see it. Assuming
that the world I bring forth is precisely the same as the world everyone else
brings forth is also a serious Blind Spot. When it's different, we're always
trying to prove it one way or the other instead of simply connecting our
differences. There's a big Blind Spot about learning - the idea that we are
accumulating information. Facts equally available to two people appear to be
accumulated at a different rate. I prefer to think that what is happening when
we learn is our organising idea is changing so that we see things differently -
it has little to do with how closely that corresponds to some objective reality.
Heinz von Foerster said "objectivity is the delusion that observing can be
done without the observer - it's a way of abrogating responsibility, hence its
popularity." It makes us Pontius Pilates - innocent bystanders; it wasn't
my fault.
The song which is associate with these ideas is The Second-Order Song.
The
fourth aspect is LOVE - connection is emotional.
Living
in our highly individual worlds, using language to express our conscious
awareness, how is it that we can connect so closely with one another at times,
or, for that matter, seem so separated at other times? As we interact, we're
changing inside - our stream of images, our organising idea, the ebb and flow of
all the hormones and other chemicals, which Pert called "the molecules of
emotion." Our whole body is a seething flow of emotions for which the
biochemistry and physiology is very complex, but which is essentially the stream
of moving images that shapes our proactive perception. Jung thought the psyche
was nothing but images and that their pattern of flow (as in archetypes) shaped
our personal experience.
So
the flow of emotion is intertwined with the flow of our language and our
behaviour. Emotions are difficult to get a handle on, but it helps greatly to
define them as bodily predispositions to actions. For example, if we are fearful
there are certain words we can't say and things we can't do, just as a car in
reverse gear is predisposed to go backwards - can't go forward, in that state -
and there are certain things we are predisposed by fear to do. So the words we
speak come from those to which our 'body shape' predisposes at that time and the
words we hear next perturb or trigger the next change in our emotions - and so
it goes around. This is where the quality of our communication must be explored.
The fundamental connection between us is some kind of emotional congruence.
The
heart chakra lies midway between the base and the crown. It introduces emotional
power - the power of love. The curious thing about this is that we are now
dealing, in our knowing, with effects of the unknown or subconscious part of our
being. Kugler said that psychic images signify something beyond consciousness;
point to the unknown - are a "bridge to the sublime." If we
acknowledge that cognition involves forces we don't completely understand - that
knowing is partly under the influence of the unknown - we are approaching the
spiritual domain. The influence of the unknown is often called the divine. The
heart chakra is said to connect the physical with the spiritual - it's the
marriage of body and soul. The peculiarly human characteristic of creativity
arises where the energy of love prevails.
The
most original thing about Maturana's biology is his explanation that, without
love, we humans would not have survived to this point in our evolution. He
defined love as the interaction between us which allows the other to be the
legitimate other. Love is not simply fulfilling one another's emotional needs -
trading needs. It is the most unconditional interaction and the most genuine of
connections. Love is not a feeling - feelings are commentaries on our emotions.
It is the most expansive emotion in that it predisposes to the utmost generosity
of spirit and openness to the world, in contrast to fear, for example, which is
so much more constricting.
In
evolution many things happened. We rose onto our hind legs exposing our
vulnerability, developed opposing thumbs and hands into the most highly
developed organ of caress - or, for that matter, manipulation - refined sexual
intercourse for pleasure as well as procreation, grew larger brains etc., but
perhaps most important of all was the development of our language-emotion
braiding which made it possible for us to generate new levels of meaning as
required. Thus we began to experience an awe of some greater power than
ourselves. The quality of our connections is the crucial determinant of what new
meanings we generate. Compare an open, honest conversation with a fearful or
controlling one - one can be creative, the other can't. Loving one another
implies each of the previous aspects - recognising our autonomous unity,
honouring one another and honouring ourselves - and it adds the power of the
heart which empowers us and through which we can empower one another. Thus
forgiveness and healing become possible due to emotional connections.
If
you want to connect with someone, try laughing with them, or crying. These
behaviours tend to be ignored by cognitive scientists, but they are at the heart
of the matter. Love and laughing and crying have to do with escaping the curse
of appropriation or ownership. There are some lovely stories about how we humans
changed from a wonderful matristic civilisation, in which feminine ways of
knowing prevailed, to the fundamentally terrible, patriarchal, competitive
civilisation that we have today. At some point, ownership came in -
appropriation of food perhaps - and gradually, through talking about them, such
concepts as not sharing, trading, stealing and so on. Appropriation that was
highly inappropriate spread over the years. Think of ownership of land, for
example - Aboriginal people would say it owns us. Eventually we got
appropriation of people and of knowledge.
When
we laugh (or sing or say whee!), because it's in the present, there is a
moment's respite - a release of appropriation - nobody owns it. Humour is
essentially a trick with our organising idea. A well-told joke leads it one way
and then gives it an unexpected twist. For adults this twist needs also to be
coherent, but for young children the surprise alone will make them laugh - as in
playing boo. Animals, too, play by tricking one another in a thoroughly benign
way. This sort of loving behaviour puts us in the present moment, here and now,
where connections flourish, not in the past or future or the somewhere else. So
presenters (and nervous dinner guests) try to get a laugh, but it's a tricky
business! The way to travel together is to be in the present together. Our
appropriations hinder us in this respect because they carry a fundamentally
unsavoury history.
If
we talk about appropriated knowledge - something that belongs in a book, but not
to us, personally - we are less centred, less passionate. When we feel good
about what we are saying and speak from our heart, we feel warmly disposed
towards ourselves and others. If you like me we'll connect better and understand
one another because understanding is essentially an emotional state.
Art
binds chaotic impressions into form as images. When modernistic technology burst
onto the scene, some 100 years ago, the moving picture was invented and we love
films, perhaps because they recreate the process that we use in knowing - a
sequence of visual images that tell a story. We love music, which is a sequence
of tonal images - the very motion that is knowing. Paintings augment or reveal
images that are both conscious and unconscious.
Many
organisations today are seeking the level that Barrett calls transformation
where creativity and collective learning can occur in work groups and people
feel the joy of genuine participation, the expression of their own spirit rather
than its oppression through so-called best practice and efficiency. This can
only happen when a more spiritual or humble attitude to knowing manifests itself
through love and respect in the workplace.
The
principal Blind Spot is that men, far more than women, have come to value the
rational above the emotional - to worship reason and put down feelings - thus
disconnecting ourselves from our environment and from one another. We tend to
put more resources into science and technology than into the arts. Basically, we
do know we're connected deep down somewhere. But we forget that it's not the
'facts' we espouse or the learned nature of our advice - it's the quality of the
connections we make that promotes learning or helpful change. Good teachers love
their pupils and vice versa. Friendship is the most powerful healing force. The
greatest virtue is love because it makes the connection.
Songs associated with this idea are Love is for the Giving and The World in You.
The
fifth aspect is SURRENDER - we are our history of connections.
This
picks up on the sense of a divine (or other) influence felt at the previous
level and addresses the way we try to impose our will on the world. It's about
the integration of self will with something else (divine will) through a
surrender which reveals the true power of will and the folly of simplistic cause
and effect.
The
biology of this is the recursive process of continual emotional re-connection
according to the flow of possibilities created by our changing organising ideas
and the changing external stimuli - not accumulating knowledge of the world per
se, but accumulating a history of connections with our world. That is how we
have defined ourselves. What we attend to we become more like. Every moment of
connection steers us into the realm of possibility of the next. No step is
trivial; little things count a lot. Always we are no more or no less than the
precise product of our history of connections - even though we may fantasise
otherwise.
The
conventional stimulus-response theory is unhelpful here because it wrongly
attributes a cause and effect as Jarvilheto has pointed out. A stimulus exists
only because there has been a history that defines it as a stimulus and has no
simple causal relationship with subsequent behaviour because it is only one
element involved. To say that would be like saying that the last piece in a
jigsaw caused the picture to happen - whereas it merely completed a long process
that realised the picture and it was, by then, the only piece that could do so.
The
power of will is not what we commonly call willpower. It's the realisation that
who we are and where we are at this moment is exactly where we are meant to be.
In the surrender of self will to the unknown we develop the power to trust. That
is what gives us the freedom to choose - not choices based on guessing at grand
outcomes, but choices based on trust that all we need to do (and all we can do)
is the next right thing.
The
debate about free will versus determinism is another pervasive red herring. Our
thought tells us that it precedes action whereas any neuroscientist can show
that the brain reacts unconsciously some half a second before we decide to do
something. We cannot choose outcomes, our body and its path of connections does
that, but we can choose our orientation (and therefore opportunities for
connection) at any moment, provided that we accept precisely where and who we
are at that moment.
It
is the throat chakra, between the head and the heart, balancing and uniting
those two great powers. This is where we feel doubt and fear so it provides the
next aspect of cognitive freedom and power which is the ability to trust. The
essence of this aspect is faith which includes confession - accepting judgement
and mercy - accepting ourselves as we are. In organisations, a truly shared
vision and values can only arise where there is profound honesty and acceptance
of what we really are as an organisation.
The
Blind Spot is that we think mostly in terms of cause and effect. We find,
however, that we cannot impose our will on the world because there is no simple
cause and effect. We try to link complex outcomes to our good or bad decisions,
not realising we run in a channel created by millions of tiny connections - so,
therefore, we can choose a new direction at any moment. The famous serenity
prayer links our acceptance of all the things we cannot change with the courage
to change things we can and the wisdom to know the difference. Paradoxically,
only surrender brings genuine freedom. What we accept no longer binds us to it.
What we face moves with us; what we deny or resist opposes us; only the truth
sets us free.
Drifting and Making it Happen are songs I associate with this.
The
sixth aspect is KNOWLEDGE - we know as we do, in conversing.
If
we are accepting our state and closed to instruction from the outside world per
se, how can we claim that someone has knowledge? And how do we seem to
communicate so effectively about our knowledge? A common history is the key. If
you and I have a similar history, the words I use, arising from my understanding
and my meaning, will trigger similar meanings for you, which beguiles us into
the comfortable thought that we both know the same thing. It also tricks us into
believing that some information passed between us and that the objects and
issues must be independent of us because we can so readily agree on what they
mean. But it also reveals the huge benefit that our evolving powers of
languaging have bestowed upon us.
The
great store of common history, generated through language and guiding our living
together, is our culture. This culture is being re-created all the time by means
of conversing networks, which consist mostly of talking and listening, but could
include any other co-sensing as well. It's an awesome responsibility to think
that we generate all our issues and resolve them the same way. Our various
cultures were created by nothing other than conversing and this is how they
change every day - by small groups of people conversing.
What
we refer to as knowledge is something we grant to one another in the process of
conversing. We attribute it to others whenever we deem their behaviour - be it
an explanation or an action - to be appropriate for that situation. They may
claim this by their own observation, but if nobody else agrees, it doesn't count
as knowledge. What we do or say is what we know to do or say at that moment; in
the next moment we may know differently and act accordingly. As we do our
thinking changes - thus our next doing and our next thinking - and so on.
Advocates
of pure reason claim that knowledge exists independently of us and may be
stored, transferred or lost like other commodities - even appropriated, but the
constitutive epistemology described here suggests that we needn't reify
knowledge (or any other 'thing') if we have an explanation for the process that
brings it into being. In my opinion, choosing any one explanation over another
is a matter of personal preference. The truth always remains "in
parentheses" because there is so much we cannot know. We like and need to
connect with people who know. Unfortunately, whole cultures of people who know
can be lost.
What
we find in libraries of books and on the Internet is not knowledge, but
meaningless information. What converts that into knowledge is the act of
choosing some of it to make our meaning, for which we must take personal
responsibility. Knowing arises from doing and the fundamental doing is
conversing because it unleashes the creative capacity of our languaging process.
This is where verbalising dimly-lit images can be so helpful. The most striking
difference between humans and other living things is our creativity which arises
at the interface between the known and the unknown. I don't think it's our
larger brain or language per se that makes us human. I think it's our spirit -
our interaction with the unknown.
The
brow chakra introduces the power of the mind, which is mental and reasoning
ability, along with the third eye or our intuitive sight. To seek only the truth
is a spiritual path in which all attachments, such as adherence to any one
person's viewpoint, are obstacles to progress. It is through detachment that
consciousness expands. Truth does not lie in any individual knowledge, but we
may perhaps glimpse it for a moment in what is created as we engage in genuine
connecting. Employee fulfilment in organisations comes with a sense of community
in which the truth may be fearlessly sought, but will never be written in stone.
The
Blind Spot is that we don't notice how important our conversing is. In a way
it's the penultimate aspect of knowing. We rarely give credit to conversing for
the way it changes our culture so we unwittingly help to perpetuate negative
drifts through idle talk and we tend to underestimate the value of persevering
with positive, or at least respectful, conversation. We don't make much effort
to create the conditions that promote conversing as distinct from other forms of
social intercourse (arguing, discussing, debating, dialogue etc). We tend not to
notice that we change what we think by what we do - we know as we do - in the
process of conversing. The success of the Open Space phenomenon and things like
Alan Stewart's MultiMind Solutions and Conversing Café provides striking
evidence of the underrated power of conversing.
Songs associated with this are Talking Up, Talking Down and The Conversing Café.
The
seventh aspect is UNITY - love is all - the natural state of everything.
By
our knowing we want to control the world and we want to live in the world.
Throughout the age of reason the progress of science has focused our attention
on the former. It isn't one or the other - we need both - but where we
concentrate our attention is where we are and who we are and what we are
becoming. Our many problems are fundamentally emotional or spiritual problems
concerned with not loving one another or caring about our living world, and we
can't solve emotional problems with technological solutions. Technology may be
of assistance, but can also make the situation worse, because it doesn't address
the fundamental processes of knowing and communication or acknowledge our
essentially spiritual journey.
The
crown chakra is the connection with our spiritual essence, our entry point to a
world entirely beyond the physical in which all power may reside, an awareness
of the "cloud of unknowing" where prayer and meditation are the forms
of expression and where grace may be experienced. When we make this kind of
connection it often seems that we make all other connections as well. The
long-term contribution of our organisations to society will depend on how
spiritually aware they become.
The
Blind Spot is that we settle for inferior forms of love, worshipping romantic
attachments and pleasurable experiences, so many false idols, rarely
acknowledging that love is already here and now in its perfection. In prayers of
gratitude and praise for its glory we are acknowledging it. It is the ultimate
experience of who we really are - which leads back to being autonomous and
connected, the first aspect.
