John Grinder & Judith Delozier.

Turtles all the way down Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient evidence. Isnt that exactly the difference between homeopathic medicine and traditional Western medicine? Homeopathic medicine uses substances, , to stimulate natural body processes which have the ability to produce those same beneficial substances internally externally introduced substances so that the body becomes autonomous of the external stimuli. What is the relationship between addiction and acclimation? The body has a position that it wants to maintain and then if it doesnt get the external stimulus it has to adjustwhatever it can do in order to get back to its equilibrium. It wants to maintain that homeostasis the body is basically a conservative unit. The addict is pushed, like the altitude pushes the person undergoing acclimation, to maintain the new homeostatic levels. A constant supply of some externally introduced element is requiredin this case the drugjust as a constant environment of reduced oxygen level typical of high altitude is required to maintain the homeostatic level that is finally achieved through acclimation eighteen months after youve acclimated or become addicted to altitude. Certain somatic changes occur which the body will try to maintain because a somatic investment has been made over time. There is no autonomy to self in acclimation and theres no autonomy to self in addiction. Both of them depend on the continued presence and introduction of contextual features, in one case reduced pressure at altitude, reduced oxygen content in the air, and the other case cocaine, heroin , whatever drug is involved; once a somatic investment has occured overtime, whether by altitude or by drugs, the body, being conservative, will want to maintain that homeostasis. The basic unit of inventory in a nonliving physical system is energy, and the basic unit of inventory in a living system (or mind) is difference. Configurations of difference are patterns. And so the next logical level in understanding the world of mind is pattern and redundancy, which are nearly synonymous terms. There is an inherent conservativeness in the body that says if its going to all the trouble to make the adaptation by change of altitude or change of chemical environment then its only common sense to constantly seek increased or sustained stimulation from the class of variables that got you the adaptations. Im going to claim that there are two dimensions to understanding. Horizontal or first-attention understanding: retrieving sensory data in a congruent way; by vertical understanding I mean that you take this coordinated experience which youve achieved with first attention and you discover its depth you do not understand it until you can relate it to context.Were proposing that contextualization is the beginning of wisdom. Curiosity, like play, is a larger framea higher logical level. Logic of the second attention: All men are mortal. Men die. Socrates is a man. Grass dies.Socrates is mortal. Men are grass. The difference between the poet and the person whos locked up for using syllogistic second-attention forms is the difference between understanding contexts. The poet creates perceptions of the world that are not available to first attention.But the poet knew behaviorally what the rules were and chose to break them in a specific way even though he or she may not be conscious of the mechanisms. Whereas, someone who is now locked up has lost the context in which those syllogisms were a primary tool of their performance, thats all. There are two minimum requirements to achieving the stopping the world state (Carlos Castaneda).

Remember the discussion about understanding and how you understand by relating experience to what you already know? Thats one way you sustain your world. If every new input is receded especially before reaching the central nervous system and consciousness into something you already know, theres no disturbance of the homeostatic levels on the one hand and on the other hand, you dont learn anything new. So ongoing verbal description of the world is one way that you sustain the world that you already know, categorize it, and recede it. The second thing is foveal (central) vision. You know, there are 160,000,000 cones and rods in the retina. There are magnitudes less tracks in the optic nerve. And as you move back in the optic nerve to the optic chiasma and then further back, at each level, at each synapse, theres a reductionistic mechanism being employed. Transform, transform, transform, transform You do not see me; you see events on your occipital lobe. The periphery of your eye is built to detect movement. The foveal vision is built to detect color. Changing foveal to peripheral vision and changing internal dialog to silence, become extremely important as ways of establishing access to second attention i.e stopping the world state. Don Juan says that after stopping the world, the next step is seeing which he defines as responding to the perceptual solicitations of a world outside the description we have learned to call reality. Incompleteness Theorem for Representation: There exists no pure reflexive first-attention state in humans such that for any particular moment in time all the neurological activities of the organism are represented. In particular such reflexive first-attention states will fail to include a representation of the representer of that class of representations in the representations although they may include the representation of the previous representer. Note that for information to become human knowledge it must necessarily be filtered through some human neurology and then be represented. Both the neurological filters and the bias of the representational codes used guarantee that human knowledge will always be a product of whats out there and all the distortions of our neurology. It would be interesting if the definition of civilized was understood in terms of how we responded to difference. If you can recognize difference without making the automatic leap to an evaluation the world will open itself to you offering you riches. Difference is what were built to detect and to work with. Not evaluation. Evaluation is an overlay by certain kinds of social systems, certain kinds of socialization processes, certain kinds of physiological mechanisms to protect homeostatic centers. The straight manipulation of physiology will change state, which changes filters, which is a very direct way of changing a persons experience. Its a more profound way than any words. Every organizational model, every homeostatic model you achieve, is a trap if its perpetuated beyond the wisdom of the context in which it was originally generated. Therefore it becomes necessary for us to build in, as part of our personal ecology, a renovation cycle, a seasonal cycle of change which updates our personal organization with respect to the contexts were presently operating in. If a variable is not exercised, connected variables will tend to eat up the flexibility thats not used. Perception and meaning are contributions from the organism not from the environment. The experience, the raw experience itself, the environment has a great deal to do with. But what it means to the organism is within your control to an extent which would surprise and delight you.