Permaculture/Natural Brain Systems: "Eight Principles for Designing Natural Systems"

[Diane]

I'm doing clutterbusting this week, sorting through three decades of writing, collecting, hoarding, letters and cards. I'm burning an awful lot of stuff because it no longer pleases me or I've finally outgrown the need to cling to it, while saving some for some future purge.

One of my treasures unearthed is a photocopy of an article from Whole Earth Review, fall '85 (if you can imagine hanging onto something physical for that long...), called "Four Pairs: Eight Principles for Designing Natrual Systems," written by Dan Hemenway. The author edited The International Permaculture Seed Yearbook, a publication that explored sustainable agricultural practices.

I loved this article the moment I first laid eyes on it; maybe because of having grown up on a farm, or maybe because I went on to work with nature quite a lot in the form of the human organism. Either way, I decided to bring it here to share.

I'm not especially interested in designing natural systems, but I happen to be one myself, and I work to help restore others that are similar everyday, and, especially in light of the fact that each of us has a brain/mind that we are responsible for cultivating, I think these ideas are useful:

For more than ten years, I have struggled for a way to express a practical philosophy (perhaps "art" is a better term) for living according to the principles of nature, because I still use these principles in the work I do nowdays.

The philosophy I seek carries within it patterns for reconstruction, healing, and renewal. Stock design formulas and recipes ignore the uniqueness of every person, place, and thing in creation and diminish our power to resond to them. I've learned rather to seek guidelines, not rules.

While I borrow freely from any appropriate source, I owe a special debt to my friend and teacher, Bill Mollison, whose coined word, "permaculture" I use to describe much of my own work. Bill's emphasis on human participation in the design process of nature fitted together for me the pieces I was gathering.

Working with these guidelines, I found that the patterns I observed fit within eight principles of design. None of these four pairs is likely to surprise anyone familiar with the wisdom within the various grounded religions and philosophies our species has articulated. Nonetheless we, especially those of us who are North Americans, rather routinely fail to observe them in our daily lives. I find their articulation helpful in evaluating my own lifestyle and seeking to correct my course.

While each of the principles is familiar in sense, if not practice, there is value in stating them together as part of a whole. That is perhaps the ninth principle: Everything is part of the whole. Problems which occur together often have common solutions. Ecologies are efficient and durable when all parts support capture, transformation, and storage of energy by the whole. Each whole is part of a larger whole, to the point where there are galaxies of galaxies of galaxies of galaxies of galaxies. Probably the principle continues beyond that level, but at that point human comprehension, even aided with instruments and computers, is exhausted.

There is a sense, then, in which each principle is an aspect of the others. The appearance of the connections between them is a function of our vantage point, where we stand at the moment. Each of these four pairs contains the image of the others.

A system which thinks in terms of creating scarcity by withholding the gifts that must always move and destroying genuine abundance, of "cornering the market," holding monopolies, manipulating "supply and demand," is not merely an enemy of the people. It is an enemy of life itself.

To me, the best way to respond to such a system is to withdraw my energy from it insofar as possible (one step at a time). That's just the conservation principle, avoiding actions which are unnecessary. However, conservation goes further, and restores broken cycles. That is our real work: to design many pathways for this renewal, based on a design that connects us in our diversity of resource and perspective.

I. ECONOMY AND ELEGANCE:
1. Do only what is necessary. This involves humility in realizing that our understanding is limited. It means a respect for the natural way in which things happen.
This is what the radical farmer Fukuoka means when he says that his is a "do-nothing" philosophy and why he always questions the reason for every task. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."
Conservation is always the first resource of "doing nothing." In its simplest terms, it is putting on a sweater instead of turning up the thermostat. As a state of mind, that's a fair beginning. In the deeper application, conservation means honoring the naural cycles, not breaking them apart which results in "waste."
Conservation involves passive restraint from change or disruption of natural systems and active participation within them.

2. Multiply purposes. Never do anything for only one reason. "Stack functions" is the way Bill Mollison expresses it.
In nature, all design is elegant. My hand is clearly designed for grasping. But it also serves as a heat radiator for my body, a weapon (fist), a signal device, a bodily support surface (as in pushups), a sensory organ, a carrier of affection (caresses), and an implement of communication (fingers in sand).
If we perceive several functions of an object of decision, then many more will be present. If we perceive only one function, then fear, greed, or our egos are in the way.

II. BALANCE
3. Be redundant. "Repeat function," Bill would say. "Don't put all your eggs in one basket" is how my grandmother put it. Look at any nutrient cycle or watershed. There is always a variety of pathways by which an ecosystem can proceed about its business. In nature, this is done so that each organism occupies a unique niche in an ecosystem; yet if any one species is removed, everything it does for the whole will be accomplished by other organisms.
A system's capacity for storage and resilience stems from its redundancy. It is the understanding of this principle, for example, that reveals that growing our food in monocultures, where everything hinges on the success of one species, is stupid and self-destructive.

4.Check your scale. Design and act within an appropriate size frame. Or, as Granny said,"Don't bite off more than you can chew." This is why permaculture starts at the backyard and works out.. to keep on a scale commensurate with our understanding. We are only responsible for the next step in whatever we are doing, and that step is always right before us, within our reach.
Issues of scale are tricky and require continuous attention to the consequences of a chosen scale. Small may be beautiful, but smallest is not always optimal. Some things can be done well only on a large scale (e.g., manufacture of photographic film), whereas others rapidly deteriorate with increasing scale (e.g., food preparation). The only cultural tools our society provides for evaluating scale are economic; these often lead to the selection of scales that are counterproductive, inefficient, and destructive.

III. RESILIENCE
5. Work with edges. That is where the action is. Straight lines have far less edge than waves. You know this instinctively. People gravitate to the edges, like a beach, the forest edge, the side of the path, or the living room wall (where we put our furniture).
Nature amplifies edges, as in your lungs or kidneys, when it wants to amplify energy transfer; it reduces surface edges, as in a dewdrop or a turtle shell, when it wants to limit transactions. There appears to be no limit to the extent that knowledge and awareness of edge effects can improve on a design. Study of edges in nature will improve our understanding and ability to use this principle.

6. Encourage diversity. Diversity here is intended to be diversity of relations between things, and not just a bunch of different structures assembled. A garden with an assortment of different plants randomly arranged will not be nearly as productive as one in which the plants are arranged as co-productive companions.
Designed diversity is a concept I find difficult to discuss separately from its intimate relationship to redundancy and edge effects. Diversity of pathways is redundancy. Diversity allows both stacking and repeating of function.

IV. RECIPROCITY
7. Look both ways before crossing. Everything works both ways. If the bank gives you 30 years to pay for your home, you give the system (the bank) 30 years of your life in indentured servitude. If energy can come in through a window, it can fly out a window. If it takes a lot of heat and time to warm a mass, it can give off heat for a long time. Death of individual cells is necesary for the life of other cells. What goes up must come down. Got it?

8.The gift must always move. This is the universal law of gifts. To survive and be well and joyous, we must transform and give away all gifts which come to us. This is how species of an ecosystem coexist. I accept the gift of oxygen from the trees and other plants and return it as carbon dioxide. We violate this principle when we accept food from the earth and do not return our urine and feces, but instead use it to contaminate water. To return a gift without transforming it to your nature is to reject it - it is an affront to the love of the universe.

[nari]

I liked this post....permaculture is something that does not appear to be widespread in everyday encounters with the natural world.
We're too busy developing and making money....

Nari

[Diane]

1. Attentive Resonance

Thanks Nari.
The whole notion of permaculture I bumped into yesterday like serendipitously bumping into an old friend, is finding echoes in a book I'm rereading called Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind, originally recommended by Ian. In Chapter 11, "Paying Attention," the author Guy Claxton explores four different ways of 'slow seeing'. The first way is called attentive resonance. He writes:

The habit of attending closely and patiently to the evidence, even - sometimes especially - to tiny, insignificant-looking shreds of evidence, is characteristic of skilled practitioners of a variety of arts, crafts and professions, prototypically the hunter. From a bent twig, a feather or a piece of excrement the expert hunter can recreate and animal, its age and state of health; and he does so in an apparently leisurely fashion in which these scraps of information are allowed to resonate, largely unconsciously, with his mental stock of lore and experience. You can't rush a tracker. Each detail, slowly attended to, is allowed to form a nucleus, an epicentre in the brain, around which associations and connotations gradually accrete and meld, if they will, into a rich, coherent picture of the animal and its passage. As Carlo Ginzburg, author of a fascinating essay on 'Clues', has surmised, the hunter squatting on the ground, studying the spoor of his quarry, may be engaged in the oldest act in the intellectual history of the human race. Many other feats of vernacular connoisseurship - telling an ailing horse by the condition of its hocks, an impending storm by a change in the wind, a run of salmon by a scarcely perceptible ripple on the river, a hostile intent by a subtle narrowing of the eyes - are of the same kind. Each is an act of high intelligence, bringing to bear on the present a complex body of past knowledge, and accomplished by the eye, with little if any assistance from deliberate thought.

Later in the chapter he compares this gathering of hunting clues with the way medical diagnosis was once conducted:

It is interesting to observe.. the changing context to medical diagnosis over the course of the last two hundred years. The process of detection and identification of disease these days is often devoid of this leisurely resonance of attentive observation with the working knowledge of a person's lifetime's experience. The modern general practitioner makes a succession of snap decisions as to either the nature of the disorder with which she is confronted, or what further objective, 'scientific' tests to order. She is now so rushed, and so enchanted (as we all are) with technology, and technological ways of thinking, that she generally prefers to trust a read-out from a machine over a considered clinical judgement. An instrument gives us 'real knowledge' about the patient, whereas the poor doctor on her own can offer nothing more substantial than an 'opinion'. Reliance on informed intuition seems increasingly 'subjective', risky and old-fashioned.(...)

Yet through out the history of medicine, the doctor has functioned more like the tracker or the detective than a technician.

(emphasis mine)

I feel much like a hold-out here. I definitely use my tracker mind in treating patients. I find all the pressure in this profession to hurry up and use short-cuts annoying at best and insane at worst. I find them going against my grain in every way. I feel after 35 years of working that I've finally arrived to a place mentally where I can look at a problem, pay attention to it, and let my brain go to work on it without having to actively remember anything much at all. I've noticed that most "stuff" that causes people pain problems usually goes away all by itself, just by paying some close attention to it. I've called this "kinesthetic chatting" from time to time, thinking that everyone could/would get the point, but found that this concept was 'simple' to the point of being beneath contempt by certain highranking individuals in this baboon troop of a profession. So be it. "You be you and I be me and we both be working."
:thumbs_up

[Diane]

2. Focusing

Here is a bit more from Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind, re: the second way of "slow seeing";

The successsful detective trains her awareness on the outside world, in order to find meaning in the minutiae of experience.

I love this sentence. (Furthermore, I love that I will never again forget how to spell the word, "minutiae.")

The second fruitful way of paying attention is similar, except awareness is now directed inward, towards the subtle activities and promptings of one's own body. The ability to "listen to the body" is very useful in gaining insight into a whole variety of personal puzzles and predicaments. This ability has been dubbed focusing by the American psychotherapist Eugene Gendlin. Back in the 1960's, Gendlin and colleagues at the University of Chicago were involved in large-scale research projects designed to discover why it was that some people undergoing psychotherapy made good progress while others did not, no matter who the therapist was or what she did. After analysing thousands of hours of tape-recorded sessions, Gendlin uncovered the magic ingredient, which could be picked up even in the first one or two sessions, and which could be used to predict whether the patient would make progress or not. It was not anything to do with the school or the technique of the therapist, nor, apparently, with the content of what was talked about. It was the client's spontaneous tendency to relate their experience in a certain way.

(emphasis mine.)
So far, this is just like the situation we find ourselves in as manual therapists. We have people in pain, no really slick way to catalogue them or differentiate them, it barely matters what we do to them, what matters most is how they respond. To continue:

The successful clients were those who spontaneously tended to stop talking from time to time; to cease deliberately thinking, analysing, explaining and theorizing, and to sit quietly while, it seemed, they paid attention to an internal process that could not yet be clearly articulated. They were listening to something inside themselves that they did not yet have words for. They acted as if they were waiting for something rather nebulous to take form, and groping for exactly the right way to express it. Often this period of silent receptivity would last for around 30 seconds; sometimes much longer. And when they did speak, struggling to give voice to what it was they had dimly sensed, they spoke as though their dawning understanding was new, fresh, and tentative - quite different from the tired old recitation of grievance or guilt which frequently preceded it.

Wow. For those of us who've been to Barrett's workshop, with a couple of details changed, e.g., substitute moving for talking, does this not seem like a description of ideomotor movement?

Claxton continues:

Gendlin called this hazy shadow which they were attending to and allowing slowly to come to fruition, a felt sense, and it was quite different both from a string of thoughts and from the experience of a particular emotion or feeling. It seemed to be the inner ground out of which thoughts, images and feelings would emerge if they were given time and unpremeditated attention.

How about this? Does this not sound like ideomotor movement?

More:

It appeared that many people lacked the ability, and perhaps the patience, to allow things to unfold in this way. Instead they would, in their haste for an answer, pre-empt this process of evolution, creating a dipiction of the problem which told them nothing new, and which gave no sense of progress or relief.

Lucky for those of us who have an intact nervous system, we can all at least move. Somehow. Not so for treatment cultures however.

[Diane]

3. Poetic Sensibility

The author goes on at some length with focusing. Then:

.. the third way of paying attention that I want to consider, poetic sensibility, has the ability to reset or create our agenda; to uncover issues and reveal concerns, perhaps in unexpected quarters, or surprising ways. By allowing ourselves to become absorbed in some present experience without any sense of seeking or grasping at all, we can be reminded of aspects of life that may have been eclipsed by more urgent business, and of ways of knowing and seeing that are, perhaps, more intimate and less egocentric. As we gaze out to sea or up at a cloudless sky, listen to the sound of goat-bells across a valley or to a Beethoven quartet, we may sense something that lies beyond the preoccupations of daily life. We feel perhaps a kind of obscure wistfulness, a bitter-sweet nostalgia for some more natural, more simple facet of our own nature that has been neglected.(..) In some moods it is possible to gain glimpses of what seems to be knowledge or truth of a sort - of a rather deep sort, perhaps - which is not an answer to a consciously held question; and which cannot be articulated clearly, literally, without losing precisely that quality which seems to make it most valuable.

I suspect this is the metaphoric mind, or the metaphor making mentation aspect of the association parts of the cortex. (I think my own mind must be just one large, snarled up association cortex. It cringes at the very thought of anyone coming along and trying to foist categories into it, even me.)

He goes on.

There is a kind of knowing which is essentially indirect, sideways, allusive and symbolic; which hints and evokes, touches and moves, in ways that resist explication. And it is accessed not through earnest manipulation of abstraction, but through leisurely contemplation of the particular.(...) For a person whose apprehension is under the spell of this attitude, the immediate context commands his interest so completely that nothing else can exist beside and apart from it... One slips away from self-concern and preoccupation into the sheer presence of the thing, the scene, the sound itself..

....The part one is palpating. The quality of response one perceives in the tissue one palpates. A sense of when to lighten, when to go further. The dance of that very moment.

More:

When the ego is in control of the mind, we act, perceive and think as if a wide variety of things - reputation, status, style, knowledgeability - mattered vitally, and as if their antitheses - unpopularity, ignorance, and so on - constituted dire threats.

Sounds like the entire PT profession to me.

When we are lost in the present, these conditioned longings fall away, and anxious striving may be replaced by a refreshing sense of peaceful belonging.

I've noticed this happening a lot more since reaching middle age.

Unskewed by hope or fear, perception is free simply to register what is there. As Hermann Hesse wrote in his essay, 'Concerning the soul' in 1917: "The eye of desire dirties and distorts. Only when we desire nothing, only when our gaze becomes pure contemplation, does the soul of things (which is beauty) open itself to us."

I'd call that good advice on how to palpate/treat.

[nari]

Did ian recommend the hare and tortoise book? I saw it in the library yesterday and thought 'that sounds familiar' but didn't get it out. Bother..

From your excerpts, it sounds remarkably dissimilar to the practice of physiotherapy as we see it often - technical expertise; certainly clinical reasoning, but still technical in application and thought. The adage "if this bit doesn't work, then if it is fixed, the whole will work better" is still around and healthy. Can't see it dying out in a hurry...and in some cases it is true. Jump on a vertebra and all seems much better. But it doesn't hold water for a lot of pain conditions.
I did not think some years ago that the physiotherapy profession is laden with egos as the prime driver. Now, standing right back from the intima layer, and looking at our Association journal..it's chock full of breast-beating egos.

Away from that vein, back to Glaxton:

The 30 second silence caught my attention. How often do we give patients that right to be silent? and vice versa...How often do we interrupt what might be a potentially useful, take-on-board silence with the assumption that they don't understand and it all needs repeating?

I am a supporter of the need for silence...but there are uncomfortable silences as well as the perfectly content or ruminative silences. Both need to be distinguishable in order not to label people as shy or whatever.
Actually, Barrett is one of very few people who allow silences during their courses. Years ago, I read about the need for cogitation (read silence) about every 20 minutes during extended lecturing/talking/listening. Just 30 seconds sounds about right......and yet, for some, that creates a tension and is seen as an indication of a breakdown in communication. With a talker who does not stop except to draw breath....I turn off. Can't track.

Reminds me of that little graphic on a PC which shows pieces of paper (files)flying across to be dumped into a drawer or tray. The brain (well, mine doesn't) doesn't soak up like that. The little synapses need filtering time.

geez, maybe it's old age....


Nari

[Diane]

>Did ian recommend the hare and tortoise book?

He did indeed, a number of years ago. To me at least. I'm way behind Ian. But I'm in the right place for me.

Totally agree with your perceptions on PT Nari, as usual.

As for silences, I find myself craving them. And I find I most appreciate the company of others, including patients, who crave them too.
..........

More from the Hare Brain Tortoise Mind book:
Kafka, from 'Reflections':

You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even wait, be quite still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

I love that as a treatment approach!


Rainer Maria Rilke, from 'Letters to a Young Poet':

If you hold to Nature, to the simplicity that is in her, to the small detail that scarcely one man sees, which can so unexpectedly grow into something great and boundless; if you have this love for insignificant things and seek, simply as one who serves, to win the confidence of what seems to be poor: then everything will become easier for you, more coherent and somehow more conciliatory, not perhaps in the understanding, which lags wondering behind, but in your innermost conciousness, wakefulness and knowing.

A great addition to the above treatment approach: simply hold nature, especially with a mind to serve the "poor" bit (the bit perceived as painful?), be accepting, and let nature help you figure out what you need to know or be awake for in that moment. With any luck, the nature/world you hold will "freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet."
:thumbs_up

About old age, Claxton has some offerings on that topic too.

[Diane]

4. Mindfulness

All the slow seeing in the world won't get us to the truth of a perception if we allow ourselves to be deluded, or delude ourselves, about what we see or perceive. The antidote is to practice mindfulness, to observe and come to know one's own observations over time, come to know one's-self as carefully as one seeks to observe and know not-self.

Claxton:

The fourth manner of paying attention which I want to describe in this chapter is a way of seeing through one's own perceptual assumptions. It is called mindfulness.

(John Barnes/Barnes-ians, are you reading this?)

The extent to which the world-as-perceived is a mirror of our preconceptions and our preoccupations.. is easy to underestimate. It takes an effort to see what is happening, because our beliefs are dissolved in the very organs we use to sense.

He follows with an example of tasting saliva that is in your mouth, noting its pleasant quality, then spitting some into a glass and retasting it, noting how one's perception of it immediately changes into something less positive.

The spit hasn't changed, only the interpretation.

He goes on to discuss some of the figure/ground examples, visual puzzles etc., that have been demonstrated by experimental psychologists to show the "theory-ladenness" of perception.

He has this to say about age and mindfulness, about the mindfulness of age. I include it here for Nari's and my own benefit. (His use of the word "image" is now being interpreted by me in the light of Damasio's careful deconstruction/reconstruction of the term):

Being 'old' is not just a biological phenomenon; how one goes about 'being old' depends on one's (largely unconscious) image of what it is like, what it means, to be old, and this in turn reflects a whole raft of both cultural assumptions and individual experiences. Ellen Langer and colleagues at Harvard U. have examined the effect on elderly people of their own vicarious experiences, as children, of ways of being old. They reasoned that children may unconsciously pick up images of old age from their own grandparents - which they might then recapitulate as they themselves get older. Specifically, they surmised that the younger their grandparents were when children first got to know them, the more 'youthful' would be the image of old age that the children would unconsciously absorb, and the more positively they would therefore approach their own ageing. (...) ..it was found that those elderly people who had lived with a grandparent when they themselves were toddlers were rated as more alert, more active and more independent than those whose first experience of living with a grandparent had not occurred till they were teenagers...it looks as if the ways in which different people age depends quite directly on the assumptions and beliefs they have picked up in their own childhoods about what it is to be old.

And on pain:

The unconscious assumptions that people stir into their experience are often hard to alter, but sometimes they can be changed just by a suggestion, especially if it comes from some kind of an authority figure. The experience of pain, for instance, can be dramatically altered, in normal conscious subjects, simply by telling them to think of it differently. When a group of people who had volunteered to suffer some mild electric shocks were told to think of the shocks as "new physiological sensations," they were less anxious, and had lower pulse rates, than those who were not so instructed. In another study, hospital patients who were about to undergo major surgery were encouraged to realise how much the experience of pain depends on the way people interpret it. They were reminded, for example, that a bruise sustained during a football match, or a finger cut while preparing dinner for a large group of friends, would not hurt as much as similar injuries in less intense situations. And they were shown analogous ways of reinterpreting the experience of being in hospital so that it was less threatening. Patients who were given this training took fewer pain relievers and sedatives after their operations, and tended to be discharge sooner, than an equivalent group that was untrained.

This is familiar territory for those of us familiar with Lorimer Moseley and others.

Claxton says:

These experiments demonstrate how other people may be able to rescue us from what Langer refers to as 'premature cognitive committments' - help us become aware of the assumptions that we had dissolved in perception, and contemplate alternative ways of construing the situation.

(In a sharp tangent away from the book and its subject matter for a moment, but keeping in mind the discerning capacity that mindfulness can offer, I'd like to say that when we are handling the human body alive with its own neural activity, it behooves us to be mindful and not fall prey to assumptions or perceptual fantasies about what we think we are doing or feeling. In view of the other qualities of slow seeing and of at least handling if not actually designing natural systems, we must allow things (like desireable changes) to reveal themselves in their own way and in their own time. If we teach others, it particularly behooves us to not pass on any "premature cognitive committments" we may have dreamed up/accepted implicitly.)

Claxton:

Mindfulness involves observing one's own experience carefully enough to be able to spot any misconceptions that may inadvertently have crept in. There are a number of ways in which this quality of mindfulness towards the activity of our own minds can be cultivated, though all involve slowing down the onrush of mental activity, and trying to focus conscious awareness on the world of sensations, rather than jumping on the first interpretation that comes along and hurtling off in the direction of decision and action. Mindfulness can be taught directly, as a form of secular meditation, for example. (...) "The essence of the state is to 'be' fully in the present moment, without judging or evaluating it, without reflecting backwards on past memories, without looking forward to anticipate the future, as in anxious worry, and without attempting to 'problem-solve' or otherwise avoid any unplesant aspects of the immediate situation. In this state one is highly aware and focused on the reality of the present moment, 'as it is', accepting and acknowledging it is its full 'reality' without immediately engaging in discursive thought about it, without trying to work out how to change it, and without drifting off into a state of diffuse thinking focused on somewhere else or some other time.. The mindful state is associated with a lack of elaborative processing involving thoughts that are essentially about the currently experienced, its implications, further meanings, or the need for related action. Rather mindfulness involves direct and immediate experience of the present situation."(Jon Kabat-Zinn)

This seems like a good treatment approach to me..

[Diane]

It really is all about the same thing

So: From Hemenway's article on permaculture we have the basic principles, combined into four pairs:

I. ECONOMY AND ELEGANCE:
1. Do only what is necessary. Conservation involves passive restraint from change or disruption of natural systems and active participation within them.
2. Multiply purposes. Never do anything for only one reason. "Stack functions"

II. BALANCE
3. Be redundant. There is always a variety of pathways by which an ecosystem can proceed about its business. A system's capacity for storage and resilience stems from its redundancy.
4.Check your scale. Design and act within an appropriate size frame. The only cultural tools our society provides for evaluating scale are economic; these often lead to the selection of scales that are counterproductive, inefficient, and destructive.

III. RESILIENCE
5. Work with edges. That is where the action is. Straight lines have far less edge than waves. You know this instinctively.
6. Encourage diversity. Diversity here is intended to be diversity of relations between things, and not just a bunch of different structures assembled. Diversity of pathways is redundancy. Diversity allows both stacking and repeating of function.

IV. RECIPROCITY
7. Look both ways before crossing. Everything works both ways.
8. The gift must always move.

From Claxton's book we have the four slow ways of seeing:
1. Attentive Resonance
2. Focusing
3. Poetic Sensibility
4. Mindfulness

I would say they resonate all together in my mind like this, at least they do just now:

1. "Economy and Elegance" with poetic sensibility ("reset or create our agenda; to uncover issues and reveal concerns, perhaps in unexpected quarters, or surprising ways");

2. "Balance" with focusing ("awareness" (like that in "attentive resonance", see below).."is now directed inward, towards the subtle activities and promptings of one's own body");

3. "Resilience" with attentive resonance ("The habit of attending closely and patiently to the evidence, even - sometimes especially - to tiny, insignificant-looking shreds of evidence");

4. "Reciprocity" with mindfulness ("seeing through one's own perceptual assumptions", not fall prey to "premature cognitive committments").

I have openly toyed with these attitudes and concepts to see if deeper truths/ fertile ground to nuture them can be found in our approaches and strivings as manual therapists. I think so. I think so. My storehouse of felt images, little sonic echolocation devices, tells me that yes, there is, if not exactly "solidity," at least some kind of congruence, way below. Somewhere way deep everything connects to everything.

[Diane]

Exploration of "wisdom"

In Claxton's book he writes,

The exploration of 'knowing better by thinking slower' eventually brings us to a consideration of wisdom. The dictionary tells us that wisdom is 'the capacity to judge rightly in matters relating to life and conduct; sound judgement especially in practical affairs; making good use of knowledge'. But that does not get us very far. What does it mean to 'judge rightly', or to have 'sound judgement'? Who is to decide what is right or sound? What sort of knowledge does one need, and how does one learn to make good use of it? All the interesting questions are begged. Our study of the complex and tortoise mind can help us to get a better handle on this most elusive, but most important, of concepts.

What follows is a precis of most of the rest:

1. Above all, wisdom is practical, dealing directly with 'matters relating to life and conduct'; with 'practical affairs.' It is also creative and integrative, skilfully avoids taking sides. "Where the protagonists are stuck in a world-view in which one must 'lose' if the other 'wins', the wise counsellor finds a perpective that intgrates and transcends opposing positions."

2. Wisdom "often involves seeing through the apparent issue to the real issue that underlies it." (Makes total sense to me as a treatment approach..)

3. Wise people are able to act and judge 'rightly' because they see through the complicated intermediate layers of value in which people sometimes become enmeshed to simple common levels of needs: to feel safe, to express oneself without fear, to understand one's place and purpose in the world, to act with integrity, to belong somewhere, to love and be loved.

What makes the artist, the poet or the scientist wise is not expert technical knowledge in their respective domains but rather knowledge of issues that are part of the human condition. Wisdom consists.. in one's ability to see through and beyond individual uniqueness and specialisation into those structures that relate us to our common humanity.

(Gisela Labouvie-Vief, French psychologist)

4. Wise judgements consider ethical depth and also social and historical repercussions that may ensue. "An expedient solution may follow from a partial analysis of a problem that represents only one point of view, or excludes a long-term perspective" (tunnel vision). Wisdom works with 'the big picture', that accurately incorporates the moral, practical, interpersonal detail however inconvenient, and tries to find a solution that respects complexity and fits as well as possible reconciling "as many of the constraints and desiderata as possible."

5. "Wisdom is uncompromising about fundamental values, but flexible and creative about the means whereby they are to be preserved or pursued." A wise action may seem to disregard convention or rationality.. in desperate situations, where all other avenues are blocked, it may be wise to do something apparently absurd.

6. "If a predicament can be solved by d-mode, it does not need wisdom." (More about d-mode in future posts. It can be summarised for now as "swift thinking" as opposed to slow thinking.) Save wisdom for the hard cases. "Hard cases are those where important descisions have to be made on the basis of insufficient data, where what is relevant and what is irrelevant are not clearly demarcated, where meanings and interpretation of actions and motives are unclear and conjectural, where small details may contain vital clues (see attentive resonance above), where the costs and benefits, the longterm consequences, may be difficult to discern, where many variables interact in intricate ways." In other words, conditions that require slow ways of thinking.

7. To be wise is to possess and know how to use several ways of knowing and know when to use them appropriately. Clear and logical thinking is valuable, but not enough by itself; many unwise decisions have been made by clever people. "One needs to be able to soak up experience of complex domains - such as human relationships - through one's pores, and to extract the subtle, contingent patterns that are latent within it." To do that. "..one needs to be able to attend to a whole range of situations patiently and without comprehension, to resist the temptation to foreclose on what the experience may have to teach" ( no premature cognitive committments!)

8. "Allowing oneself time to be wise is vital in the context of caring professions." Courage to wait and let understanding emerge.

9. The way of knowing that generates wisdom can transcend dualities. "It is at once subjective and objective, both involved caring and affectionate yet dispassionate and unclouded by personal sentiment or judgement." .. the object of attention is known intimately, even 'lovingly', but without projection. No hopes or fears (that might obscure clarity) are allowed in. "..the wise counsellor is touched, yet untouched" by someone's predicament. A wise person is mindful not just of the other's world but of his own as well. "As in focusing, he needs to be able to tune in to his own inner state to ensure that no judgements or projections are slipping unnoticed into his interpretation of the situation. Only if his perception is clean and full will his judgement be subtle, fair, and trustworthy."

The majority of men are subjective towards themselves and objective towards all others - terribly objective sometimes - but the real task is to be objective towards oneself and subjective towards all others.

(Kierkegaard)

10. A wise individual "listens to others, knows how to weigh advice, and can deal with a variety of different kinds of people. In seeking as much information as possible for decision-making, the wise individual reads between the lines.. can make clear and fair judgements, takes a long-term as well as short-term view of the consequences, is not afraid to change his/her mind as experience dictates, solutions offered to complex problems tend to be the right ones.

11. Wisdom presupposes that one learn to see one's knowledge, as well as that of others, as a personal and social construction, capable of being interrogated, reframed, reconstrued - this ability is something not easily developed nor does it come without cost.

(to be continued)

[Diane]

Wisdom (cont.)

11. Wisdom presupposes that one learn to see one's knowledge, as well as that of others, as a personal and social construction, capable of being interrogated, reframed, reconstrued - this ability is something not easily developed nor does it come without cost. Giving up the belief in certain knowledge requires considerable sense of personal security. Also requires
- admission that there is always more that one could consider
- recognition that knowledge itself is essentially unsure, equivocal, open to question and reinterpretation
This perspective is gained only at the cost of 'a human wrenching of the self from its cultural surround' (Robert Kegan); a reflective critical ability derives from a change in the whole way self and world relate to each other.. can feel like a mutiny.

12. Wisdom requires that the mind "accept the relative nature of knowledge without tipping into rampant subjectivity or solipsism."

..doubt is an uncomfortable condition but certainty is a ridiculous one.

(Voltaire)
Yet, despite doubt, there must be freedom to act and sometimes act quickly and decisively. A wise person "walks a narrow line between the twin perils of rigid dogmatism and paralyzing indecision."

..one abandons both the hope for absolute truth and the prospect that nothing can be known; in wisdom, one is able to act with knowledge while simultaneously doubting.

(John Meacham)

13. Wisdom arises from a friendly and inimate relationship with the undermind. 'It comes to those who are willing to expand their sense of themselves beyond the sphere of conscious control to include another center of cognition to which consciousness has no access, and over which there seems to be little intentional jurisdiction.' Theistic religious traditions tend to maintain external sources of authority (external source can operate through one's own being, e.g., mystics), do not place any value on the undermind. Buddhism is an exception: " .. it is Buddhism that most clearly and consistently identifies the source of wisdom with the undermind. Indeed, Buddhism goes so far as to say that wisdom resides in the recognition that all activities and contents of consciousness are merely manifestations of unconscious processes." (consistent with Damasio's conclusions) "In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities; in the expert's mind, there are few."

[Diane]

D-mode or Hare Brain

I started at the back of the book, like I often do, and have now worked my way to the front. I want to examine and precis the D-mode as Claxton has described it, just so that this thread is complete. "D" stands for "deliberation." Read through this list and see if it doesn't sound like PT business-as-usual to you.

D-mode is defined as the sort of intelligence that figures matters out, weighs up pros and cons, constructs arguments and solves problems, all reason and logic, deliberate conscious thinking. Someone good at this is deemed 'bright' or 'clever.' Here is a list of its attributes:

1. D-mode is much more interested in finding answers and solutions than in examining the questions. (Is the 'primary instrument of technopoly', is primaily concerned with problem-solving, treats any unwanted or inconvenient condition in life as if it were a 'fault' in need of fixing.)

2. D-mode treats perception as unproblematic. (It assumes the way it sees the situation is the way it is.)

3. D-mode sees conscious articulate understanding as the essential basis for action, and thought as the essential problem-solving tool. (Tries to gain a mental grasp, figure it out with everything from impeccable rationality with equations and flow charts to just weighing up pros and cons, taking things through, making a list, jotting down thoughts, making a pitch, etc.)

4. D-mode values explanation over observation (Is more concerned about why than what. The need to have mental grasp, to be able to offer an acceptable account of things is integral. Assumption is that it is normal to be intentional and proper to offer explanations. "..when this purposeful, justificatory, 'always-show-your-reasoning' attitude becomes part of the dominant default mode of the mind, it then tends to suppress other ways of knowing, and makes one sceptical of any activity whose 'point' you cannot immediately conciously see.")

5. D-mode likes explanations and plans that are 'reasonable' and justifiable, rather than intuitive. (Doubt in the sense of lack of conscious comprehension, becomes stultifying, a trap rather than a springboard.)

6. D-mode seeks and prefers clarity, and neither likes nor values confusion. (Likes to move along 'a well-lit path' from problem to solution, preserving.. as much mental grasp as it can...while some learning may proceed in this point-by-point fashion, much does not.)

7. D-mode operates with a sense of urgency and impatience. (Yeah, that's got to be real relaxing for patients..)

8. D-mode is purposeful and effortful rather than playful. (Always a sense of being under time pressure, being intentional, purposeful, questing, needing to have an answer to a pre-existing question, misses the fruits of 'relaxed cognition'.

9. D-mode is precise.

10. D-mode relies on language that appears to be literal and explicit (Sound like anyone we know?) Claxton:

..tends to be suspicious of what it sees as the slippery, evocative world of metaphor and imagery. If something can be understaood, it can be understood clearly and unambiguously, says the intellect. An intimation of understanding that does not quite reveal itself, that remains shrouded or indistinct, is, to d-mode, only an impoverished kind of understanding; one that should either be forced to explain itself more fully, or treated with disdain. Poetry does not capture anything that cannot ultimately be better, more clearly rendered in prose, and rhetoric is a poor cousin of reasoned explanation.

11. D-mode works with concepts and generalizations (like to apply rules and principles, favors abstraction over particularity, works with generics or prototypicals, even individuals are treated as generalizations.)

12. D-mode must operate at the rates at which language can be received, produced, and processed. (maintains a sense of thinking as being controlled and deliberate, not spontaneous or wilful.)

13. D-mode works well when tackling problems which can be treated as an assemblage of nameable parts.

It is in the nature of language to segment and analyse. The world seen through language is one that is perforated, capable of being gently pulled apart into concepts that seem...self-evidently 'real' or 'natural', and which can be analysed in terms of the relationships between these concepts. Much of traditional science works so well precisely because the world of which it treats is this kind of world. But when the mid turns its attention to situations that are ecological or 'systemic', too intricate to be decomposed in this way without serious misrepresentation, the limitations of d-mode's linguistic, analytical approach are quickly reached. Any situation that is organic rather than mechanical is likely to be of this sort. The new 'sciences' of chaos and complexity are in part a response to the realisation that d-mode is in principle unequal to the task of explaining systems as complicated as the weather, or the behaviour of animals in the natural world. Along with the rise of these new sciences must come a re-evaluation of the slower ways of knowing; of intuition as an essential complement to reason.

I can't think of any better argument than the one in that box for why a PT treatment culture that ends up in the hands of people who persist in applying this mode and only this mode, of thinking, will be doomed.

[Diane]

The Oppression of Undermind

From the final chapter of the whole book:

The voices of philosophy, poetry and imagery are relatively weak in a world that largely assumes that only science and reason speak with true authority. Thus, paradoxically, it is only science itself that can bring credible tidings of unscientific ways of knowing. One must speak to d-mode in its own language if it is to entertain the idea that it may itself be limited. The empirical research on the slower ways of knowing, and on the cognitive capacity of the undermind, can contribute significantly to the creation of the much-needed shift in our understanding of the mind. As this research gains further momentum, it will, it must be hoped, seep into the culture at large, and encourage educators, executives, and politicians to use mental tools more suited to the intricate jobs that confront them. The hare brain has had a good run for its money. Now it is time to give the tortoise mind its due.

Well, in all fairness I think throughout the history of physiotherapy the situation has actually been the other way round.. I think PT started off with slow thinking, plenty of undermind, and only lately has been taken over by D-moders. I think the water table is lower than it used to be, but we can still access undermind by going a bit deeper. And yes, it IS important to keep continually raising science-based arguments to maintain ourselves/improve ourselves as a profession that is not about fixing people's problems as if they were automobile problems.

There are other issues, like peer inhibition. From earlier in the last chapter:

It is not just that people are bolder about trying things out when they feel relaxed and secure; threat creates a mindset of anxiety and entrenchment in which awareness is constricted and focused on the avoidance of the threat, rather than on the spacious, open attitude that the slow ways of knowing require to work. People need to feel that they can say 'This may sound silly, but...' ; or 'Can I just think aloud for a minute...' Where half-baked ideas are immediately torn to shreds, people rapidly learn to wait until D-mode has delivered a position that is polished and watertight (but quite possibly over-cautious and already out-of-date) - or not to contribute at all.

How well can patients come to know themselves if their own narratives/subjective histories (over parts of which they may stumble) are not allowed space to be fully heard? That's where the bulk of the clues are to be found.

Time itself can be such a hurdle, not just to narrative listening but to actual treatment contact time/kinesthetic listening:

..slow ways of knowing will not deliver their delicate produce when the mind is in a hurry. In a state of continual urgency and harrassment, the brain-mind's activity is condemned to follow its familiar channels. Only when it is meandering can it spread and puddle, gently finding out such uncharted fissures and runnels as may exist. Yt thinking slowly, paradoxically, does not have to take a long time. It is a knack that can be acquired and practised. The mind needs to be given time; but its ingenuity also depends on the cultivation of a disposition to take one's time, as much as there is. One can learn to access and use these other ways of knowing more fluently. One might even suggest that managers - and their workforces - might try meditation; though, as a preliminary they would need to understand what that means and how it helps.

The practice of PT has become such that it rarely encourages any "slow ways of thinking" in patients. Seems to me that not only is it desireable, but mandatory for patients, especially pain patients, to experience a treatment container that not just permits but enhances/reflects to them their own experience of themselves, kinesthetically, non-verbally. In their brains is where the patients' changes need to occur if they are to become painfree. Why is this such a difficult concept for the profession to grasp?

[Diane]

Undermind

Maybe it's because I've been living in my own undermind over the holidays, - looking at bits and tokens of the past, remembering what they once signified, then chucking them into either the fireplace if they seem embarrassing or into the recycle if they don't - that I am busy examining "undermind" as a category/concept. Here are various references from the Claxton book, incomplete and in no particular order, just so anyone reading this will get a sense of what it is and why it's important.

1. A sense of cultural amnesia exists around the concept, certainly in the way PT is considered and practiced and promoted: (p.7)

Modern Western culture has so neglected the intelligent unconscious - the undermind, (...) that we no longer know that we have it, do not remember what it is for, and so cannot find it when we need it. We do not think of the unconscious as a valuable resource, but (if we think of it at all) as a wild and unruly 'thing' that threatens our reason and control, and lives in the dangerous Freudian dungeon of the mind. Instead, we give exclusive credence to conscious, deliberate purposeful thinking - d-mode.

I think that the PT culture has made this error simply by chasing after the medical model habitually/unthinkingly.

2. How it operates without our conscious integration of it: (p. 37)

The undermind is acquiring knowledge of which consciousness is unaware, and by which it is unchanged, and using it to influence the way people behave. Consequently a schism develops between what people think they know (about themselves), and the information that is consciously driving their perceptions and reactions. The views that they espouse about themselves, we might say,become at odds with the ones that their behavior in fact embodies.

(Sound like anyone we might know from an old board?)

3. Undermind and its relationship to creativity: (p 75)

Sometimes ..resonating of data and experience - perception and cognition - happens quickly. (...) Very often though, when the predicament is more intricate, the undermind needs to be left to its own devices for awhile, and then the need for patience - the ability to tolerate uncertainty, to stay with the feeling of not-knowing for a while, to stand aside and let a mental process that can neither be observed nor directed take its course - becomes all important. Someone who cannot abide uncertainty is therefore unable to provide the womb that creative intuition needs...creativity is enhanced when people are forced to slow down.. the willingness to think slowly.. makes possible broader cognitions, more abstract thinking.. and consequently greater flexibility.

4. What undermind does that's useful: (p. 13)

The 'slow ways of knowing' are, in general, those that lack any or all of the characteristics of d-mode. They spend time on uncovering what may lie behind a particular question. They do not ruch into conceptualization, but are content to explore more fully into the situation itself before deciding what to make of it. They like to stay close to the particular. They are tolerant of inormation that is faint, fleeting, ephemeral, marginal, or ambiguous; they like to dwell on details which do not 'fit' or immediately make sense. They are relaxed, leisurely and playful; willing to explore without knowing what they are looking for. They see ignorance and confusion as the ground from which understanding may spring. They use the rich, allusive media of imagination, myth and dream. They are receptive rather than proactive. They are happy to relinquish the sense of control over directions that the mind spontaneously takes. And they are prepared to take seriously ideas that come 'out of the blue', without any ready-made train of ratuonal thought to justify them... The undermind is the key resource on which slow knowing draws, so we need new metaphors and images for the relationship between conscious and unconscious which escape the polarisation to which both Descartes and Freud, from their different sides, subscribed. Only in the light of new models of the mind will we see the possibility and the point of more patient, receptive ways of knowing, and be able to cultivate - and tolerate - the conditions which they require.

(I like how this ties back once again into the ideas of permaculture and working with nature instead of against it.)

5. Undermind and psyche: (p 116)

The undermind is a layer of activity within the human psyche that is richer and more subtle than consciousness. It can register and respond to events which..do not become conscious. We have at our disposal a shimmering database full of pre-conceptual information, much of which is turned down by consciousness as being too contentious or unreliable. Conscious awareness decides what it will accept as valid - and thereby misses dissonant patterns and subtler nuances. While in d-mode, consciousness tends to present to us a world that is somewhat cautious and conventional. Sometimes this is appropriate, but if we get stuck there and lose the key to the twilight world that subserves it, we mothball valuable ways of knowing which can find sense and weave meaning out of a collection of the faintest threads and scraps... one way of expressing this disparity between conscious and unconscious is in terms of two thresholds, a lower one, above which the undermind becomes active, and a higher one, above which information enters consciousness. The closer together these two points are, the more 'in touch' with the unconscious we are, and the more complete is our conscious awareness of what is happening across all the mental realms. The further apart they are, the more our conscious perception is impoverished. This quantitative notion of thresholds is rather crude, but it enables us to formulate an important question; what it it that determines how near or how far apart the two thresholds are? More generally, is the relationship betwen conscious and unconscious forms of awareness a dynamic one, subject to change, and if so, what forces control it? (...) Perhaps it is specifically things that are threatening that cause the conscious threshold to shoot up.

(There follows pages of info on studies to do with 'perceptual defence', amnesiacs who can 'remember,' the effects of "self-consciousness", effects of hypnosis, measuable visual perception by anger, blindsight, that all generally point to the idea that pressure, stress, being threatened or over-eager, lead to coarsening of perception and to narrower less functional minds.)

6. Undermind and wisdom (see earlier posts).

7. Rediscovering the undermind: (p 203)

..it is all the more significant that cognitive science is currently drawing our attention to the curious fact that we have forgotten how our minds work. As we have seen, the modern mind has a distorted image of itself that leads it to neglect some of its own most valuable learning capacities. We now know that the brain is built to linger as well as to rush, and that slow knowing sometimes leads to better answers. We know that knowledge makes itself known through sensations, images, feelings, and inklings, as well as through clear conscious thoughts. Experiments tell us that just interacting with complex situations witout trying to figure them out can deliver a quality of understanding that defies reason and articulation. Other studies have shown that confusion may be a vital precursor to the discovery of a good idea. To be able to meet the uncertain challenges of the contemporary world, we need to heed the message of this reearch and to expand our repertoire of ways of learning and knowing to reclaim the full gamut of cognitive possibilities. This will not be easy, for the grip of d-mode on late twentieth century culture is strong..

(Wow, he can say that again.. especially the way it has managed to get its claws on PT and its self-image lately.)

[willowsofsaturn]

Just wanted to give a profuse thanks for taking the time to post this stuff. :thumbs_up
I really enjoyed it, especially the sections on the Undermind, although I prefer the word "subconscious" myself. I found a lot of similarities between the descriptions here and how it is to enter and weave around in states of trance. From what I understand from what I've read concerning cognitive science, an important factor in determining that what we're consciously aware of is motivation - a certain motivation tweaks what enters into our attention, shifts the way we interpret it... it definitely seems easy for a normal flow of sensory input into higher processes to get bottlenecked or otherwise directed inefficiently or counter-productively simply by getting stuck with the wrong set of motivations. Intention is the catalyst to how everything else arranges itself, it would seem.