Meta-Information

4. FROM LANGUAGE TO QUALITY, FOCUSING

Objectives:

(a) To introduce the idea of a progression of certain important cognitive terms.
(b) To show the close resemblance between the processes of "understanding" and "deception."
(c) To draw attention to the unreliability of "understanding" as a way of knowing.
(d) To indicate the likelihood of error in our consciousness.
(e) To introduce one of the most important methods or techniques of meta-information:  To question that which is most familiar, to question that which we are most certain need never be questioned.
(f) To suggest that Nietzsche's theory that consciousness evolved in a social or herd context, rather than from any individual perspective, has profound implications.
(g) To introduce a relatively simple process called "focusing" that can be used to handle personal problems or for "tapping the wisdom of the body," or just in order to feel better.

From Language to Quality:

The basic "elements" that will be dealt with in this section are:
(a) Human sound;
(b) Metaphor and meaning;
(c) Language;
(d) Understanding;
(e) Deception;
(f) Reason;
(g) Basic fear;
(h) Faith;
(i) Intelligence;
(j) Consciousness;
(k) Context;
(l) Creation;
(m) Quality.

The above "elements" constitute an evolutionary progression.  It started when groups of humans (or animals) assigned common, agreed-upon meanings to particular sounds.  Meaning and metaphor are closely related.  Metaphor can be described as "something" representing "something else."  A certain sound represents danger; this sound is a symbol or a metaphor for the source of danger and/or the danger itself.  If a group of humans (or animals) share a common set of meaningful sounds, then this set is called a language.

(Metaphor - there's that "meta" again - literally, means "to transfer.")

Sounds, metaphors, meanings, language, make understanding possible.  Understanding can be loosely described as a "feeling of familiarity."  We understand "something" when we can say, "It is like this or like that;" we compare it to something else; we use a metaphor to describe it.  Literally, we understand "something" when we can make "something else" "stand under" it.  In German, we say, "verstehen" ("forstand") - we understand "something" when we can make "something else" "stand for" it.  In French, we say, "comprendre" ("withtake") - we understand "something" when we can "with take" "something else."  (Actually, the "prendre" part of "comprendre" comes from the Latin "prehendre," which means "grab.")  If you consider your own process of understanding, you may observe the tendency to grab onto the first and most convenient similarity for the purpose of "understanding" any particular thing, datum, or phenomenon.  Of course, this tendency is even easier to observe in others than in oneself!

...an adequate theory of language as a game should distinguish between the two varieties of language, one which is intended primarily to convey information, and the other primarily to impose a point of view against a willful opposition. - Norbert Wiener ("The Human Use of Human Beings")

And deception?  Deception means to induce someone to "take something for or like something else."  But to understand, we have to "take something for or like something else."  So what is the difference between under-standing and deception?  A difference of degree?  A difference of inten-tion?  The crucial importance - and I'm afraid it's a "bitter pill" - is that the processes of understanding and deception are very closely related.  Understanding is very close to deception.  And if you reflect for a moment, you will see that both understanding and deception have tremendous survival value, and the most persuasive deception comes from the deceiver, who believes him(her)self.  Does all this have something to do with the human proclivity for deceit and self-deception?  In any case, can you see that understanding may be a rather primitive and not very reliable way of "knowing"?  (De we have any other way of "knowing"?)

Reason is the mental manipulation of metaphors.  Reason is a representative process.  Reason is prone to deception, and because reason cannot answer certain questions, basic fear results (Moreno - Section 22.)  To overcome basic fear, we resort to faith.  What we believe most ardently, we also fear most to question.  To the degree that we can muster the courage to question our own faiths and beliefs (particularly our most basic words and concepts), and to the extent that we can "step outside" our belief-and-behavior systems, we become more intelligent.  Intelligence is the quality of reason - the correspondence between our mental manipulation of metaphors and reality - to the degree to which our behavior produces the desired and predicted consequences.  

Deception and faith are obstacles to intelligence, and so is careless understanding.

And consciousness?  Consciousness stems from "seeing" how we under-stand; but because deception and understanding are so closely related, it is very easy to deceive ourselves about our supposed "consciousness."  That is why consciousness includes a self-model, a "self-metaphor," which makes it possible for consciousness to observe itself and to monitor and improve its mental functioning.  

Deception and faith are also obstacles to consciousness and, in a way, deception and faith made it necessary for consciousness to arise.  Those prone to deception and faith are likely to find it more and more difficult to survive in a world that is rapidly becoming more complex.  Greater consciousness is probably becoming a vital necessity for human survival.  Deception and faith are the most important causes of consciousness - and there is an inverse ratio between deception and faith on the one hand, and consciousness on the other.  

Once we become aware of the need to evaluate and judge information as to its value content, we enter the domain of consciousness.  As we become aware of our mental functioning, including how we understand and reason, we expand our domain of consciousness.  

And as we become conscious of the delimiters, boundaries, limitations, and pervasive assumptions (holdcepts) of our consciousness, we acquire the ability to step outside that context and to create, freely and spontaneously, other contexts.  

That is also when we discover quality.

The notions of consciousness, context, creation, and quality constitute the upper reaches of meta-information.  

This section constitutes the crude beginning of the evolution of what I call the "fifth dimension," which will be explained in detail in Section 32.  Four major breakthroughs contributed greatly:

(A) The recognition of the close similarity between the mechanics of understanding and deception;
(B) Realizing the difference between understanding and consciousness;
(C) The discovery of "quality" in Robert Pirsig's excellent "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance;"
(D) The identification of "will-to-power" as described by Nietzsche.

Here is a preview of the "fifth dimension":

"Protest" (defined in Section 12) lurks in the lower regions of the "quality-to-nothingness scale" (fifth dimension).  Protest is, basically, a reaction to a threat to will-to-power.  Protest tends to be an inversion of will-to-power; will-to-nothing often manifests as protest.  Note that many a "morality," "religion," "politics," "psychology," and "philosophy" is largely based on inverted "values" from the nether darkness near nothingness - deception, faith, obedience, coercion (violence), destruction - the consequences are evident.  

The problem of consciousness (more precisely, of becoming conscious of something) confronts us only when we begin to comprehend how we could dispense with it; and now physiology and the history of animals place us at the beginning of such comprehension.  For we could think, feel, will, and remember, and we could also "act" in every sense of that word, and yet none of all this would have to "enter our consciousness" (as one says metaphorically).  The whole of life would be possible without, as it were, seeing itself in a mirror.  Even now, for that matter, by far the greatest portion of our life actually takes place without this mirror effect; and this is true even of our thinking, feeling, and willing life - however offensive this may sound to older philosophers.  For what purpose, then, any consciousness at all when it is, in the main, superfluous?

Now, if you are willing to listen to my answer and the perhaps extravagant surmise that it involves, it seems to me as if the subtlety and strength of consciousness always were related to man's (or animal's) capacity for communication, and as if this capacity, in turn, were proportionate to the need for communication.

Supposing that this observation is correct, I may now proceed to the surmise that consciousness has developed only under the pressure of the need for communication; that from the start, it was needed and useful only between human beings (particularly between those who commanded and those who obeyed); and that it also developed only in proportion to the degree of this utility.  Consciousness is really only a net of communication between human beings; it is only as such that it had to develop; a solitary human being who lived like a beast of prey would not have needed it.  That our actions, thoughts, feelings, and movements enter our own consciousness - at least a part of them - is the result of a "must" that, for a terribly long time, lorded it over man.  As the most endangered animal, he needed help and protection, he needed his peers, he had to learn to express his distres,s and to make himself understood; and, for all of this, he needed "consciousness."  First of all, he needed to "know" himself what distressed him, he needed to "know" how he felt, he needed to "know" what he thought.  For, to say it once more:  Man, like every living being, thinks continually without knowing it; the thinking that rises to consciousness is only the smallest part of all this - the most superficial and worst part - for only this conscious thinking takes the form of words, which is to say signs of communication, and this fact uncovers the origin of consciousness.

In brief, the development of language and the development of consciousness (not of reason, but merely of the way reason enters consciousness) go hand in hand.  Add to this that not only language serves as a bridge between human beings, but also a mien, a pressure, a gesture.  The emergence of our sense impressions into our own conscious-ness, the ability to fix them and, as it were, exhibit them externally, increased proportionately with the need to communicate them to others by means of signs.  The human being inventing signs is, at the same time, the human being who becomes ever more keenly conscious of himself.  It was only as a social animal that man acquired self-consciousness - which he is still in the process of doing  more and more.  

  My idea is, as you see, that consciousness does not really belong to man's individual existence but, rather, to his social or herd nature; that, as follows from this, it has developed subtlety only insofar as this is required by social or herd utility.  Consequently, given the best will in the world to understand ourselves as individualistic - to know ourselves, each of us will always succeed in becoming conscious only of what is not individual, but "average."  Our thoughts, themselves, are continually governed by the character of consciousness - by the "genius of the species" that commands it - and translated back into the perspective of the herd.  Fundamentally, all our actions are altogether incomparable personal, unique, and infinite individual; there is no doubt of that.  But as soon as we translate them into consciousness, they no longer seem to be.  

This is the essence of phenomenalism and perspectivism as I understand them:  Owing to the nature of animal consciousness, the world of which we can become conscious is only a surface-and-sign world, a world that is made common and degraded; whatever becomes conscious becomes, by the same token, shallow, thin, relatively stupid, general, sign, herd signal; all becoming conscious involves a great and thorough corruption, falsification, reduction to superficialities, and generalization.

We simply lack any organ for knowledge, for "truth;" we "know" (or believe or imagine) just as much as may be useful in the interests of the human herd, the species; and even what is called "utility" is ultimately also a mere belief, something imaginary, and perhaps precisely that most calamitous stupidity of which we shall perish some day.

...then I asked myself:  What is it that the common people take for knowledge?  What do they want when they want "knowledge"?  Nothing more than this:  Something strange is to be reduced to something familiar.  And we philosophers - have we really meant more than this when we have spoken of knowledge?  What is familiar means what we are used to so that we no longer marvel at it, our everyday some rule in which we are stuck, anything at all in which we feel at home.  Look, isn't our need for knowledge precisely this need for the familiar, the will to uncover under everything strange, unusual, and questionable, something that no longer disturbs us?  Is it not the instinct of fear that bids us to know?  And is the jubilation of those who attain knowledge not the jubilation over the restoration of a sense of security?

Here is a philosopher who fancied that the world was "known" when he had reduced it to the "idea."  Was it not because the "idea" was so familiar to him and he was so well-used to it - because he hardly was afraid of the "idea" any more?  

How easily these men of knowledge are satisfied!  Just have a look at their principles and their solutions of the world riddle with this in mind!  When they find something in things - under them, or behind them - that is unfortunately quite familiar to us, such as our multiplication tables or our logic, or our willing and desiring - how happy they are right away!  For "what is familiar is known;" on this they are agreed.  Even the most cautious among them suppose that what is familiar is at least more easily knowable than what is strange, and that, for example, sound method demands that we start from the "inner world," from the "facts of consciousness," because this world is more familiar to us.  Error of errors!  What is familiar is what we are used to; and what we are used to is most difficult to "know" - that is, to see as a problem; that is, to see as strange, as distant, as "outside us."  

The great certainty of the natural sciences in comparison with psychology and the critique of the elements of consciousness - one might almost say, with the unnatural sciences - is due precisely to the fact that they choose for their object what is strange, while it is almost contradictory and absurd to even try to choose for an object what is not strange. - Friedrich Nietzsche ("The Gay Science")

Focusing:
The ability to shift one's focus, to adjust one's perspective, is vital to perception.  Optical instruments have to be focused for clear resolution.  In "Gulliver's Travels," Jonathan Swift first describes the visit of his hero to Lilliput, whose inhabitants are one-twelfth the size of normal humans.  Thereafter, Gulliver goes to Brobdingnag, where the inhabitants are twelve times the size of normal humans.  Swift uses these perspectives in order to perceive the inhabitants of Lilliput and Brobdingnag "from the outside," as it were.  Lewis Carroll uses the same technique in his "Alice" stories.  This technique is a jumpcept; it enables one to escape from the usual viewpoint.

In "A Voyage to the Houyhnhnms," Swift uses another technique.  In Houyhnhnmland, there are intelligent Houyhnhnms resembling our horses, and stupid Yahoos resembling our humans.  This perspective gives Swift great freedom in describing the characteristics and habits of Yahoos (which he does in sparkling prose).

Shifting your focus is a jumpcept.  Another example is the "Martian viewpoint:"  You imagine how a Martian (who has concepts totally different from ours) would view what we might take for granted.  

In his book, "Focusing," Eugene T. Gendlin describes a technique for resolving personal difficulties.  It is based on the notion that each individual is her or his own authority, and that in the human body, there is a great deal of wisdom that can be unlocked.  In my opinion, the most important concept of "Focusing" is what Gendlin calls the "felt sense":

A felt sense is not a mental experience, but a physical one.  Physical.  A bodily awareness of a situation or person or event.  An internal aura that encompasses everything you feel and know about the given subject at a given time - encompasses it and communicates it to you all at once rather than detail by detail.  Think of it as a taste, if you like, or a great musical chord that makes you feel a powerful impact; a big, round, unclear feeling.  

A felt sense doesn't come to you in the form of thoughts or words or other separate units, but as a single (though often puzzling and very complex) bodily feeling.

Since a felt sense doesn't communicate itself in words, it isn't easy to describe in words.  It is an unfamiliar, deep-down level of awareness that psychotherapists (along with almost everybody else) have usually not found.   - Eugene T. Gendlin ("Focusing")

When you allow yourself to experience the felt sense of a difficulty or situation, the felt sense changes, tension or blocked energy is released, and you see the difficulty in a different light or from a different perspective.  This is a shift.  Focusing enables you to identify where your life is stuck, cramped, hemmed in, or slowed down; and you can use focusing to change and to move out of the restrictions.

These are the six steps of the focusing process:

(A) Clear a Space:Be comfortable and relax; stack all your problems to one side ("step outside" your problems).

(B) Felt Sense: Select one problem; ask, "What does all of the problem feel like?"  (Elicit the felt sense.)  At first, the felt sense will be an unclear, vague, fuzzy, murky sensation/feeling from deep inside the body - it almost never comes with a convenient label.  

(C) Handle: Find the word, phrase, or image that represents the quality of the felt sense.  This could be a word like "tight."  It is the crux, or essence, of the felt sense.  When you get the handle sufficiently accurately, you experience a "body shift" (a change in felt sense), which always feels good (relief of tension; "ah-ha!" experi-ence).  

(D) Resonate: The purpose is to find a perfect match between the felt sense and the handle.  To do this, you alternate between revivifying the felt sense and honing the handle.  You alternately focus wide on the complete felt sense and narrow on the crux, essence, quality.  More body shifts (changes in felt sense) occur during this step.  

(E) Ask: "What about this whole problem makes me so tight?" (if "tight" is the handle).  You elicit all about the problem that makes the quality or crux.  You use the handle to revivify the felt sense.  The questions of this step are open:  You are willing to receive whatever comes up.

(F) Receive: In a friendly way, receive whatever comes up.  It could be an important need from deep inside, a major realization, or a new insight abut the future course of your life - accompanied by further body shift (change in felt sense and release of tension).  It always feels good.

This is the procedure, in a nutshell.  Of course, there is a lot more to it, particularly relating to difficulties that may occur during the process.  I highly recommend Gendlin's "Focusing" (both the book and the process).  For the latest information on focusing, write to:  E. T. Gendlin, Ph.D., Dept. of Behavioral Sciences, University of Chicago, 5848 S. University, Chicago, Illinois 60637, U.S.A.  Send a stamped, self-addressed envelope.
Nietzsche wrote that only a small portion of our "thinking" rises into consciousness.  This is relevant to focusing.  What we attempt to do in focusing is to let a lot more "thinking" rise into consciousness.

For the longest time, conscious thought was considered thought itself.  Only now does the truth dawn on us that, by far, the greatest part of our spirit's activity remains unconscious and unfelt.  But I suppose that these instincts which are here contending against one another understand very well how to make themselves felt by, and how to hurt, one another.  This may well be the source of that sudden and violent exhaustion that afflicts all thinkers (it is the exhaustion on a battlefield).  Indeed, there may be occasions of concealed heroism in our warring depths... - Friedrich Nietzsche ("The Gay Science")

Nietzsche also wrote that our consciousness developed in a herd, or social, context rather than from an individual perspective.  Can we speculate that herd concepts (or groupcepts) are predominant in surface consciousness, while what is individual is buried deep down?  Does this have something to do with "flock notions" apparently being far more pervasive and influential than individualistic concepts?  Is this why many people seem to find it extremely difficult to question the validity of concepts like "government," "nation," "state," "Big Brother," and "the law of the flock"?  

That raises the question:  Can we use focusing to elicit the individualistic concepts from wherever they are buried within us?  (The issue of "selfishness" will be discussed in Section 8.)

Also relevant to focusing is some data from transactional analysis (see Section 6).  The "ego state" called "child" contains pre-verbal recordings of impressions, sensations, and feelings (inter alia).  Prior to learning words and forming concepts, the brain (and the rest of the body?) was already recording what was going on inside and around the child concerned.  That means there are recordings in the child for which there are no corresponding words or concepts.  Because our consciousness is based on words and concepts, it is very difficult to become aware of these pre-verbal recordings.  These early child recordings, if left unconscious (and repressed?), may be an important factor that keeps us stuck in problems, in "feeling bad," and in unhappiness.  

Focusing was developed out of asking the questions:  "What do successful clients in psychotherapy have in common - or 'do' in common?"  "Is what the therapist does important, or is the action of the client the determining factor of success or failure?"  Gendlin found that what the client does inside himself or herself is the key to success.  This internal action of the client is focusing.  Gendlin also found that focusing is a spontaneous process that many people do naturally.  It was very interesting for me to recognize in focusing, essentially the process that I have been using on myself for many years (albeit in a crude and intermittent manner).  My process I had called "Let it pour out!"  

Focusing...is optimistic.  It is based on the very positive expectation of change.  It doesn't envision a human being as a fixed structure whose shape can be analyzed once and for all.  It envisions a person as a process, capable of continual change and forward movement.  The "problems" inside you are only those parts of the process that have been stopped, and the aim of focusing is to unstop them and get the process moving again.  When you are focusing correctly, you not only expect change; you create it in the very act of focusing. - Eugene Gendlin ("Focusing")

It is also interesting how closely related focusing is to the basic notions of meta-information:  You "step outside" the problem in order to gain a bird's-eye view; you focus wide (examine a great deal of information); you narrow your focus to home in on the crux of the matter; you ask questions; you "open up" yourself in a receptive attitude to whatever may "come up."  Felt sense is akin to context ("all about the problem"); body shift is like a contextual change; that we can't easily express the felt sense in words may be a holdcept; and the handle is the jumpcept.

In fact, while I was writing about the context in Section 3, I became aware of a vague feeling that something was missing.  "What's missing?" I asked myself.  A fuzzy idea about "stuck" came up.  I tried to get the whole feeling of it.  The, I looked for a handle.  Eventually, I came up with the word "holdcept" after trying and discarding several other words.  I couldn't define it at first; it was simply too vague.  Over a period of several days, the concept of holdcept crystallized with clarity.

Some time after that, I again had a confused feeling that there had to be something to go with holdcept, but what?  In coming up with "jumpcept," I went through a similar process; anyway, that was the story of how two of the most powerful concepts of meta-information were generated.

Focusing is part of a wider philosophy...

Since this crucial internal act can be taught, and is not taught by therapy, people need not be therapy patients to learn it.  What follows from this fact is a kind of revolution.  No longer need this change process be in charge of therapists.  People can do it for themselves and with each other. Of course, they are not "therapists" or "doctors" or "authorities" with each other, but the authority aspect of the medical doctor never has really fitted the human process of personal change at all.  Human problems are, by their very nature, such that we are each inherently in charge of ourselves.  No authority can resolve our problems or tell us how to live; therefore, I and others have been teaching more and more people to help themselves and each other.

Thinking in the usual way, alone, can be objectively true and powerful; but, when put in touch with what the body already knows and lives, it becomes vastly more powerful.

When felt sense is the touchstone, one can try out all kinds of different concepts without being locked into any one set.

One can keep whatever each set of concepts or assumptions shows; in that way, one can emerge with something else that those concepts could never arrive at and make new concepts.

A new basic model, a new way of understanding experience and nature, is involved.  Experience and nature are not like our concepts.  Our concepts are each just so, and not otherwise.  Truth does not lie in thought alone.  It lies in how various thoughts relate to experience, whether they bring something into focus from experience or not.

This philosophy leads to a new method of human thinking. - Eugene Gendlin ("Focusing")

Earlier, I have stated that the only real problem in the world is ignorance.  Now, I want to go a step further and suggest that there are only individual problems in the world:  My problems and your problems.  Apparent "world problems" (such as "war"), will cease to be problems when a large enough number of individuals in the world have become sufficiently responsible, powerful, and free not only to handle their personal lives with mastery, but also to transmit their expertise to others.  In my opinion, tools, techniques, and methods like focusing, the option process, and Po, can be major factors in the acceleration of such an evolution.

To what extent are "world problems" (such as "war") caused by powerless individuals unwittingly, even by default, conferring their potential power to politicians who, through ignorance, will abuse that power?  How likely is "war" in the absence of obedience?

"You really don't believe in political solutions, do you?"

"I believe in political solutions to political problems.  But man's primary problems aren't political - they're philosophical.  Until humans can solve their philosophical problems, they're condemned to solve their political problems over and over and over again.  It's a cruel, repetitious bore."  - Tom Robbins ("Even Cowgirls Get the Blues")

Points to Remember:
(A) How language probably came about.
(B) The importance of metaphor and meaning.
(C) The mechanics of understanding.
(D) The mechanics of deception.
(E) The close similarity between understanding and deception.
(F) Why deception made consciousness necessary.
(G) The mechanics of reason.
(H) Faith as an obstacle to consciousness.
(I) The relationship between communication and consciousness.
(J) Nietzsche's idea that the portion of our thinking that we become conscious of is very small (and is the worst part of our thinking).
(K) We don't have an organ for knowledge or truth.
(L) The relationship between familiarity and what we call "knowledge."
(M) Our motives for tending to grab the first "explanation" or "description" that we come across as the "gospel truth."
(N) In order to improve the quality of our information, it is advisable that we start with what is most familiar, what we are most certain that we "know" - these "answers" (or fixed ideas) are probably the biggest block to quality knowledge.  (This is one of the most important methods or techniques of meta-information:  To question what we are certain doesn't have to be questioned.  Nietzsche did this relent-lessly.)
(O) The profound significance of Nietzsche's theory that consciousness originated in a social, or herd, context rather than from an individual perspective.
(P) The meaning of unicept and groupcept.
(Q) A felt sense is a complex physical experience, difficult to describe in words.  It is usually a vague, inner impression/sensation/feeling.
(R) The six steps of the focusing process:

• Clear a space;
• Feel the felt sense;
• Get the handle;
• Resonate between the handle and the felt sense;
• Ask;
• Receive.

Clarity Check:
(A) How and why do you think language came about?
(B) How are familiarity and understanding related?
(C) What is a metaphor?  An analog?
(D) What do you think of the idea that deception and understanding are closely related?
(E) What is the difference between understanding and consciousness?
(F) Do you think it is possible to understand without being conscious?
(G) What do you think of Nietzsche's idea that very little of our thinking enters our consciousness?
(H) Could it be that, in evolutionary terms, our consciousness has only begun to develop very recently and is still at an infantile level?
(I) If we don't have an organ for knowledge, how can we possibly know anything?
(J) Is the brain an organ for knowledge?  If so, how?
(K) How do we reason?
(L) What are the motives behind our tendency to grab the first "descrip-tion" or "explanation" that becomes available and to regard it as "gospel truth"?
(M) What is intelligence?  What are obstacles to intelligence?
(N) What is the significance of context, quality, and creation?
(O) Should we question what is most familiar, what we "know" best?  If so, why?
(P) What do you think is the most important method or technique of meta-information mentioned so far in this paper?
(Q) Nietzsche's theory that consciousness evolved in a social, or herd, context rather than from an individual perspective:  What do you think of this?
(R) Could it be that the implications of the above theory include:

• That it would be very difficult for most humans to grasp concepts related to individuals?
• That most humans would regard "herds," "families," "flocks," "tribes," "nations," etc. as good and individuals as evil?
• That most humans would be incapable of questioning the validity of groupcepts like "family," "flock," "herd," "tribe," "nation," "state," "government," etc.?
• That humans would tend to develop a "herd morality," injurious to individuals, hence also harmful to "humanity" at large?
• That most humans would tend to manifest a predilection for individual sacrifice in favor of imaginary "herd ideals"?  (Like "the public interest" or "the greatest good for the greatest number"?)

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