This is the current draft of Chapter ·2 (the reverse side of Chapter 2·) of Turning Words, a work in progress, as of 16 January 2012. Points here are not presented in linear order and may assume acquaintance with concepts introduced on the obverse side.
© gnusystems – send comments or questions to gnox -at- gnusystems -dot- ca.

·2     Intimologies

• A book like this can say a thing or two about ‘intimologies’, but what about intimacy? Try Walt Whitman, ‘Whoever You Are Holding Me Now in Hand’.
• A path is made by people walking on it; a path discovers itself by crossing with other paths.

  Reader, I beg you will think this matter out for yourself, and then you can see — I wish I could — whether your independently formed opinion does not fall in with mine.

  — Peirce, CP 4.540 (‘Prolegomena’, 1906)

• Once a person has escaped the cage of his own opinions by entering into the quest for truth, even the internal monologue, the stream of consciousness expressed as a train of thought, can be a dialogue, or even a dialog (for the difference, see the obverse of this chapter). What counts is the sense of mission, the spirit of inquiry. The logic of this, as Peirce saw it, is that each thought is addressed by the self you are now to the self you will be momentarily: past self addresses future self through present semiosis, and the former future self proceeds to test the received idea. A philosophical writer like Peirce will typically test an idea in this way, sometimes for years, before she considers it worthy to launch into the great conversation for further testing.

  The appearance of monologue, then, can be deceptive. The difference between an ordinary conversation and the reading of a text like this one is mostly a matter of medium (spoken, written, printed, electronic, etc.) and of time scale. The great conversation among authors is simply a macro-dialog, in which each partner can take years, or a lifetime, to consider and deliver his reply to what's been said before. Since a partner does not have to wait her turn, and can reply to any number of prior texts all at once, this conversation is ‘wired’ in parallel rather than series – it's a network rather than a train of thought. Even readers who never write are involved in this conversation, to the extent that their reading makes a difference in how they live their lives. True, the reader/author relationship is not symmetrical in ‘real time’ like the partnership in a face-to face conversation, because the text of a book does not change in response to the reader's contribution – but the meaning certainly does. A book on the shelf means nothing at all. Don't think that the meaning is all in the text, or all in your mind. The meaning is in the relationship, the intimate space, between you and me. Regardless of scale or medium, dialog is always talking through together.

• According to Clark (1996), ‘Language use is a species of joint action’ – not only in face-to-face conversation, which is ‘the basic setting for language use’, but also in reading and writing. Joint action between people is a species of structural coupling:

  { structural coupling { joint action { language use { reading }}}}

• On the word semiotics, and variant forms of it, as a term for the science of signs, see Deely (2004).
• Peirce laid the groundwork for (what is now called) biosemiotics by devising a diagrammatic model of logic which not only clarified human ways of meaning but also aimed to ‘represent every variety of non-human thought’:

  Thought is not necessarily connected with a brain. It appears in the work of bees, of crystals, and throughout the purely physical world; and one can no more deny that it is really there, than that the colors, the shapes, etc., of objects are really there. Consistently adhere to that unwarrantable denial, and you will be driven to some form of idealistic nominalism akin to Fichte's. Not only is thought in the organic world, but it develops there. But as there cannot be a General without Instances embodying it, so there cannot be thought without Signs. We must here give ‘Sign’ a very wide sense, no doubt, but not too wide a sense to come within our definition. Admitting that connected Signs must have a Quasi-mind, it may further be declared that there can be no isolated sign. Moreover, signs require at least two Quasi-minds; a Quasi-utterer and a Quasi-interpreter; and although these two are at one (i.e., are one mind) in the sign itself, they must nevertheless be distinct. In the Sign they are, so to say, welded. Accordingly, it is not merely a fact of human Psychology, but a necessity of Logic, that every logical evolution of thought should be dialogic. You may say that all this is loose talk; and I admit that, as it stands, it has a large infusion of arbitrariness. It might be filled out with argument so as to remove the greater part of this fault; but in the first place, such an expansion would require a volume — and an uninviting one; and in the second place, what I have been saying is only to be applied to a slight determination of our system of diagrammatization, which it will only slightly affect; so that, should it be incorrect, the utmost certain effect will be a danger that our system may not represent every variety of non-human thought.

  — CP 4.551 (1906)

  If we identify ‘thought’ with teleodynamic process (as we do in Chapter 10), we would agree that at least the reference to crystals was ‘loose talk’, since the growth of a crystal is only a morphodynamic process in Deacon's terms. But Deacon (2011) shows that teleodynamic work can indeed be described in purely physical terms, so there is a definite continuity between Peirce on ‘thought’ and Deacon on emergence.
• There's no hard line between technologies and intimologies. We are not only social animals and expert manipulators but, as Andy Clark puts it, Natural-Born Cyborgs. Our lives are so thoroughly pervaded with ‘mind-expanding technologies’ that ‘it becomes harder and harder to say where the world stops and the person begins’ (Clark 2003, 7). Nothing is more natural for humans than these artificial extensions of ourselves.

  It is because our brains, more than those of any other animal on the planet, are primed to seek and consummate such intimate relations with nonbiological resources that we end up as bright and as capable of abstract thought as we are. It is because we are natural-born cyborgs, forever ready to merge our mental activities with the operations of pen, paper and electronics, that we are able to understand the world as we do.

  — Clark (2003, 6)

  And, of course, that same characteristic enables us to wreak untold damage on the biosphere; to enclose ourselves in a cocoon of denial as we do; and, perhaps, to break out of that cocoon by recognizing that we are the biosphere. We are extensions of it just as technologies are extensions of us.
• This book of mine documents an inquiry guided by the question How do you mean?. The question is not What do you mean? – although that is sometimes a good question for clarification purposes. The root question is how meaning happens, or how semiosis works.

  Writers, thinkers and scholars have been asking this kind of question for a long time, but their work tends to be ignored because most of us are either too busy committing our acts of meaning to reflect on how we do it, or don't see the point of thus reflecting. A century ago, C. S. Peirce and Victoria Welby were both looking into the nature of meaning, but they didn't learn of each other's work until near the end of their lives. The correspondence between them began in 1903, and parts of it are among the clearest explanations of Peirce's mature semiotics. Most of it was published in 1977 under the title Semiotic and Significs (cited as SS).

  In one of his earliest letters to Welby, Peirce explained why the study of what we mean, important as it is, should not be taken too far:

  I fully and heartily agree that the study of what we mean ought to be the … general purpose of a liberal education, as distinguished from special education, – of that education which should be required of everybody with whose society and conversation we are expected to be content. But, then, perfect accuracy of thought is unattainable, – theoretically unattainable. And undue striving for it is worse than time wasted. It positively renders thought unclear.

  — Peirce to Welby (SS 11, 1903)

  When a theorist like Peirce says that something is theoretically unattainable, he is not implying that it might be attained in practice (because theory is unreliable); he is saying just the opposite, that ‘perfect accuracy’ is unattainable because of the way meaning works. The very logic of meaning guarantees that all language is necessarily vague to some degree. Here's a fuller explanation of the point, written a year or two later (CP 5.506):

  No communication of one person to another can be entirely definite, i.e., non-vague. We may reasonably hope that physiologists will some day find some means of comparing the qualities of one person's feelings with those of another, so that it would not be fair to insist upon their present incomparability as an inevitable source of misunderstanding. Besides, it does not affect the intellectual purport of communications. But wherever degree or any other possibility of continuous variation subsists, absolute precision is impossible. Much else must be vague, because no man's interpretation of words is based on exactly the same experience as any other man's. Even in our most intellectual conceptions, the more we strive to be precise, the more unattainable precision seems. It should never be forgotten that our own thinking is carried on as a dialogue, and though mostly in a lesser degree, is subject to almost every imperfection of language. I have worked out the logic of vagueness with something like completeness, but need not inflict more of it upon you, at present.

  That last sentence has inspired scholars to look for a text among Peirce's papers that ‘works out the logic of vagueness with something like completeness’, but as far as i know, nobody has claimed to find it. And considering how well that final sentence works as a pragmatic ‘punchline’ to Peirce's argument, it would be at least a little ironic if anyone did find such a text.

  When Peirce says that ‘no man's interpretation of words is based on exactly the same experience as any other man's’, he is talking about what i call polyversity (see TW Chapter 2). In the earlier stages of writing this book, i collected quite a few examples of what i took to be statements of the same idea expressed in diverse ways. But there's a limit to the usefulness of that, just as there's a limit to how exactly you can say what you mean. Indeed, as Peirce said, ‘the multiplication of equivalent modes of expression is itself a burden’ (SS 20). ‘The exact logician holds it to be, in itself, a defect in a logical system of expression, to afford different ways of expressing the same state of facts; although this defect may be less important than a definite advantage gained by it’ (BD ‘Exact Logic / Copula’). I can't claim to be an exact logician but i can hope that the reader gains some advantage from the polyversity of this essay.

  The ‘trust’ in dialogue includes a willingness to let most of the meaning process work implicitly – trusting that it can become explicit, can bear the spotlight beam of attention, if that becomes necessary. Genuine dialogue requires an exquisite sense of what needs to be explicated and what needs to work implicitly.

  Concerning the coinage polyversity: the latter (Latin) part of the word signifies ‘turning’. The nearest thing to a pure Greek equivalent would be the adjective polytropos, used in Homer's Odyssey as an epithet of Odysseus; but it's difficult to turn this into an English noun.

• Intimologies are mutual recreations.

  As we communicate in language and gesture, we interpret and understand each other dialogically. This dialogic dynamic is not a linear or additive combination of two preexisting, skull-bound minds. It emerges from and reciprocally shapes the nonlinear coupling of oneself and other in perception and action, emotion and imagination, and gesture and speech. In this way, self and other bring forth each other reciprocally through empathy.

  — Thompson (2007, 402)

• Learning to mean, or to think or to know, is an intersubjective process, as Vygotsky was the first to emphasize.

  The major theme of Vygotsky's theoretical framework is that social interaction plays a fundamental role in the development of cognition. Vygotsky (1978) states: ‘Every function in the child's cultural development appears twice: first, on the social level, and later, on the individual level; first, between people (interpsychological) and then inside the child (intrapsychological). This applies equally to voluntary attention, to logical memory, and to the formation of concepts. All the higher functions originate as actual relationships between individuals.’ … For example, in the learning of language, our first utterances with peers or adults are for the purpose of communication but once mastered they become internalized and allow ‘inner speech’.

  — tip.psychology.org/vygotsky.html

  See also Bogdan (2000, 26-34); K. Nelson in Terrace and Metcalfe (2005, 132); and of course the works by Vygotsky in the reference list.

  For an intelligence to function there must be another intelligence. Vygotsky was the first to stress: ‘Every higher function is divided between two people, is a mutual psychological process.’ Intelligence is always an interlocutor.

  — Lotman (1990, 2)

  But Lotman also stressed the role of ‘autocommunication’ in cultures. In ‘I-s/he’ communication, information coded in a text or message passes from one person to another or others; the text is a variable while the code is constant and shared between the interlocutors. But in the I-I mode of autocommunication, (including the situation where a culture addresses itself), the content of the text is constant while the code is variable, and actual variation leads to self-discovery or transformation. In this case the message is not only addressed to one's future self, as Peirce said, but the change to this new self is triggered by a crossing of codes rather than messages. The most viable cultures are those in which these two modes are in constant tension (Lotman 1990, Chapter 2).

  Human consciousness is heterogeneous. A minimal thinking apparatus must include at least two differently constructed systems to exchange information they each have worked out.

  — Lotman (1990, 36)

  Lotman (Chapter 3) finds a parallel between the organization of culture and that of the brain's two hemispheres: the difference is between discrete and continuous (digital and analog) coding systems, exchanging information by means of rhetorical tropes (‘turns’) such as metaphor and metonymy.

  The interrelationship between cultural memory and its self-reflection is like a constant dialogue: texts from chronologically earlier periods are brought into culture and, interacting with contemporary mechanisms, generate an image of the historical past, which culture transfers into the past and which, like an equal partner in a dialogue, affects the present. But as it transforms the present, the past too changes its shape. This process does not take place in a vacuum: both partners in the dialogue are partners too in other confrontations, both are open to the intrusion of new texts from outside, and the texts, as we have already had cause to stress, always contain in themselves the potentiality for new interpretations. This image of the historical past is not anti-scientific, although it is not scientific either. It exists alongside the scientific image of the past like another reality and interacts with it also on the basis of dialogue.

  — Lotman (1990, 272)

• ‘Identity is a phenomenon that emerges from the dialectic between individual and society’ (Berger and Luckmann 1966, 174).
• Gadamer 1960, 367: ‘The art of questioning is the art of questioning ever further — i.e., the art of thinking. It is called dialectic because it is the art of conducting a real dialogue.’ (Dialectic is a Hegelian term; ‘Hegel's dialectic is a monologue of thinking that tries to carry out in advance what matures little by little in every genuine dialogue’ (Gadamer, 369).)
• Dialog as intersubjective investigation is the sole path to enlightenment.

  Only a buddha together with a buddha can fathom the Reality of All Existence.

  — Lotus Sutra 2 (Kato et al. 1975, 52)

  Only a buddha together with a buddha can fathom the whole Dharma.

  — Lotus Sutra (Leighton and Okumura 2004, 112)

  Or as Steven Heine puts it: ‘The process of transmitting the Buddha Dharma is utterly dependent on the context of an “I and Thou” relationship’ (Heine 2001, 14).

  Face-to-face interaction is obviously the prototypical situation of togetherness, but it also tends to be entangled with what Goffman (1967) called ‘interaction ritual’: the need to maintain the respective ‘faces’ in some kind of equilibrium can interfere with intimacy of transmission.

  The classical Zen dialogue is an asymmetrical master-student interaction, a mutual effort often compared to pecking at an eggshell from inside and outside simultaneously in order to liberate the young bird. ‘Yet the master invariably finds that his own level of enlightenment is refined as well through participating in the dialogue’ (Heine 1999, 136).

  The primacy of one-to-one dialogue also applies to philosophy, which necessarily incorporates critical thinking. In this respect a book is a poor substitute for a living dialogue, as Peirce indicated in a letter to Welby, 2 Dec. 1904:

  My aversion to publishing anything has not been due to want of interest in others but to the thought that after all a philosophy can only be passed from mouth to mouth, where there is opportunity to object and cross-question, and that printing is not publishing unless the matter be pretty frivolous.

  — SS, 44

  Peirce was a very systematic thinker, and we know that he planned some very large writing projects which never came to fruition because they were rejected by publishing or funding agencies. His ‘aversion to publishing anything’, then, has to be seen in that context. Perhaps it represents a refusal to compromise: the kind of book he envisioned would have anticipated all sorts of objections and ‘cross-questions’ and given each its due attention, and he was not willing to settle for a less complete presentation of his system. Or perhaps he felt (sometimes) that even the kind of huge book he had in mind would not suffice to publish his ideas, because even he could not anticipate all of the ensuing interpretants that would be worthy of notice. Hence his aversion to casting his bread upon the waters …
• A Dharma Hall Discourse of Dogen, Eihei Koroku 3.217:

  Yunmen asked Caoshan, ‘Why don't we know that there is a place of great intimacy?’ Caoshan said, ‘Just because it is greatly intimate, we do not know it is there.’
  Suppose this were Eihei and someone asked me, ‘Why don't we know that there is a place of great intimacy?’ I would just hit his face with my whisk and ask him, ‘Is this knowing or not knowing?’ If he tried to answer, I would hit him again with the whisk.

  — (Leighton and Okumura 2004, 225)

  Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer every one.

  — Colossians 4:6 (RSV)

• When you bear witness to an experience by talking about it, you are really bearing witness to a way of talking. (In this respect the medium is the message.) It is your listener who, through the medium of empathy, really bears witness to your experience. As Baba Ram Dass put it, ‘Only that in you which is me can hear what I'm saying.’
• Gospel of Thomas 100 (5G):

  They showed Jesus a gold coin and said to him: ‘Caesar's people demand taxes from us.’ He said to them: ‘Give Caesar (the things) that are Caesar's. Give God (the things) that are God's. And what is mine give me.’

  All Jesus asks of you is your full attention. But what greater gift could you offer to anyone? Caesar (‘the empire,’ ‘the world’) has no use for your attention, since it is unaccounted for in the imperial economy. God, on the other hand, is by all accounts inaccessible to your attention. That leaves your dialogue partner, the Second Person of the trinity, speaking here as Jesus.
• Even the mystical experience, which is quintessentially private, takes the form of a dialogue. As described by Sufi masters such as Najm Kobra, the experience seems to involve the perception of a mirror image of the First Person in purest form, but appearing (at least temporarily) as an Other. This ‘perfect man’ or ‘man of light’ is not merely theorized or fantasized about, but actually perceived (with a ‘suprasensory’ perception) as existing in a higher realm; then this ‘third person’ or subject is realized as the subject himself divested of all the ‘lower’ qualities which have interposed a veil of darkness between the higher and lower self. With this realization the subject-object distinction (and the third-person perspective) disappear.

  What the mystic, by virtue of his ardent desire, pursues and experiences is not a collective relationship shared by all alike in respect to a singular object, is not a relationship identical for all to which everyone has an equal claim in respect to one and the same object. No, this relationship is unique, individual, unshareable, because it is a relationship of love. It is not a filial relationship, but rather a marital one. An individual, unshared relationship of this nature can only be manifested, represented, and expressed by a figure which attests to the real presence of one alone to one alone and for one alone, in a dialogue unus-ambo.

  — Corbin (1971, 84)

  A third-person ‘observer’ of this process (if such is conceivable!) might say that the mystic is seeing a projection of himself, and then realizing his unity with it, and thus attaining complete closure of consciousness. Najm Kobra himself describes the experience this way:

  At that moment, before you, before your face, there is another Face also of light, irradiating lights; while behind a diaphanous veil a sun becomes visible, seemingly animated by a movement to and fro. In reality this Face is your own face and this sun is the sun of the spirit that goes to and fro in your body. Next, the whole of your person is immersed in purity, and suddenly you are gazing at a person of light who is also irradiating lights. The mystic has the sensory perception of this irradiation of lights proceeding from the whole of his person. Often the veil falls and the total reality of the person is revealed, and then with the whole of your body you perceive the whole.

  — Corbin (1971, 85)

  The ‘heavenly partner’ who guides the mystic in his aspiration appears as a face and/or voice above and beyond the aspirant because it personifies and embodies that self-transcending aspiration itself. ‘He carries the mystic up toward the Heavens; thus it is in the Heavens that he appears’ (Corbin 1971, 85). The conversation thus engendered is a ‘type of individual initiation whose fruit is reunion with the Guide of light’ (1971, 11).

  To speak of the polar dimension as the transcendent dimension of the earthly individuality is to point out that it includes a counterpart, a heavenly ‘partner’, and that its total structure is that of a bi-unity, a unus-ambo. This unus-ambo can be taken as an alternation of the first and second person, as forming a dialogic unity thanks to the identity of their essence and yet without confusion of persons.

  — Corbin (1971, 7-8)

  This puts a whole new perspective on ‘polarization’ – as does Finnegans Wake, which refers to a mysterious pair

  as were they isce et ille equals of opposites, evolved by a onesame power of nature or of spirit, iste, as the sole condition and means of its himundher manifestation and polarised for reunion by the symphysis of their antipathies.

  — Joyce, Finnegans Wake (92)

• How do you look through a looking glass? We see through the mirror (transparently) when we see self as an other to others and see others as ourselves. A perfected vision, though, would see neither others nor self, but only members of the one body in the mutual part/whole relationship. A fully ‘objective’ vision would know the universe as a mirror in which the whole cosmos appears to itself precisely as it is, ‘face to face’ as Paul has it; see 1 Corinthians 12 and 13.

  Remember the Glory, the humpty dumpty English aircraft carrier of Chapter 2? The knockdown argument of WWII was followed by the standing argument of the Cold War. Some accounts place the beginning of this new kind of conflict on or about that same day, when a Russian cipher clerk in Ottawa was hiding in a compassionate neighbour's apartment as his own was searched by Soviet agents. The day before, Gouzenko had decided to reveal to Canadian authorities the existence of a global spying operation, in which he had a role in Ottawa. Incredible as it seems in hindsight, the first authorities he went to didn't believe him, so he didn't get the immediate protection due to a whistle-blower (as we now call a revealer of corporate secrets). Or perhaps they didn't understand him due to language barriers; but in any case, his revelations marked the beginning of an era when international relations were dominated by mutual suspicion. American culture was pervaded with paranoia, which was duly spread around the world with the growth of American Empire.

  Growing up in this milieu certainly had an effect on the author's sensibilities and thus on the idiom of the present text. But so did the specific texts with which i crossed paths at that time. When habits cross and stay crossed, we can call it weaving. The texture of truth is determined by this weaving. I come across texts all the time now which could have turned me into the way i now follow, if i hadn't been turned by other texts already. Accidents of a sequential order have certainly had a hand in determining the idiom used here, and so has historical coincidence.

  The text you are now reading crosses with many others, the crossings marked as quotations and citations. The author, as reader, first came across some of these others many years ago, some while drafting this work, some after the first draft was complete; but the historical order of these crossings is largely accidental and of no importance for the reader.

• What are we here for? We are here to bear withness.

  To be a consciousness or rather to be an experience is to hold inner communication with the world, the body and other people, to be with them instead of being beside them.

  — Merleau-Ponty (1945, 111)

• And why do we engage in this kind of inquiry? Thomas Metzinger's Being No One offers this answer:

  At least in principle, one can wake up from one's biological history. One can grow up, define one's own goals, and become autonomous. And one can start talking back to Mother Nature, elevating her self-conversation to a new level.

  — Metzinger (2003, 634)

  ‘Successful research’, according to Peirce (CP 6.568), ‘is conversation with nature; the macrocosmic reason, the equally occult microcosmic law, must act together or alternately, till the mind is in tune with nature.’
• A dialogue reaches its consummation, or summit of intimacy, when each partner recognizes the authentic truth of the other's words as well as her own, and recognizes the point at which their discourses diverge. The effect of this is to liberate both parties from bondage to their own discourses without sacrificing their guidance function. Once you see the truth of both discourses, you can dispense with both (or hold the basic assumptions behind them in ‘suspension’, as David Bohm put it). The more you practice this kind of dialogue, the more freely you can engage in various discourses, using them as reliable guides without being bound by any of them. In this way the meaning cycle becomes a positive feedback loop in which meaning enhances itself.

  Most of the time, though, we have to settle for convergence of language, or consensus on the pragmatic outcome of the dialog.

• If this book is to justify the energy dissipated in its dissemination, its readers will be inspired with a vision like that of Thomas Berry (1988, xiv):

  … the vision of an intimate earth community, a community of all the geological, biological, and human components. Only in recent times has such a vision become possible. We never knew enough. Nor were we sufficiently intimate with all our cousins in the great family of the earth. Nor could we listen to the various creatures of earth, each telling its own story. The time has now come, however, when we will listen or we will die. The time has come to lower our voices, to cease imposing our mechanistic patterns on the biological processes of the earth, to resist the impulse to control, to command, to force, to oppress, and to begin quite humbly to follow the guidance of the larger community on which all life depends. Our fulfillment is not in our isolated human grandeur, but in our intimacy with the larger earth community, for this is also the larger dimension of our being. Our human destiny is integral with the destiny of the earth.

  While the ancients had much more highly developed sensitivities regarding the natural world in its numinous aspects and in its inner spontaneities, we are not without our own resources that, properly appreciated, can lead to our own mode of intimacy with the natural world, and even to a renewal of the earth in the new ecological community.

  — Berry (1999, 26)

  From cosmologies to intimologies:

  The final benefit of this story might be to enable the human community to become present to the larger earth Community in a mutually enhancing manner. We can hope that it will soon be finding expression ... on a universal scale. Such expressions will sensitize people to the story that every river and every star and every animal is telling. The goal is not to read a book; the goal is to read the story taking place all around us.

  — Swimme and Berry (1992, 3)

  The book you are now reading shares this hope, but does not offer a cosmological story in the kind of detail provided by Swimme and Berry. Rather it looks into the universal intimacy of reading itself, in many of its myriad forms, and its role in guidance systems.
• Real teaching (teaching that triggers realization) relies not on preformulated propositions but on the spontaneous construction of meaning. A genuine dialog flows like a mountain stream, carrying its names and forms forward. When particular symbols are treated as fundamental, the stream is troubled and turbulent, and flow turns to fluctuation, in the terms used by Hui-neng in his commentary on the Diamond Sutra:

  The Realized One's speech and silence are both spontaneous; the words he utters are like echoes responding to sounds, occurring naturally without deliberate intent, not the same as the ordinary man preaching with a fluctuating mind. If any say that the Realized One preaches with fluctuation in his mind, they are slandering Buddha. The Sutra of Vimalakirti says, ‘Real teaching involves no preaching, no giving orders; listening to the teaching involves no hearing and no grasping.’ You realize that myriad things are empty, and all names and words are temporary setups; constructed within inherent emptiness, all the verbal expositions explain that all realities are signless and unfabricated, thus guiding deluded people in such a way as to get them to see their original nature and cultivate and realize unsurpassed enlightenment.

  — (Cleary 1998, 134)

  A ‘fluctuating mind’ here the very opposite of what Csikszentmihalyi (1990) called flow, because it has a ‘hidden agenda’, an ulterior motive, a preconceived message which it is trying to ‘put over’ on others, rather than giving itself wholly and spontaneously to the dialog.
• Consciousness itself, though appearing as a serial narrative or monolog, is in fact a dialogue within the brain. Various models which differ in other respects nevertheless agree on this point. According to Dennett (1991), the narrative line is continually selected from ‘multiple drafts’ proceeding in parallel; the selection is part of the interaction among these drafts. In Damasio's model, core consciousness emerges from the brain's representation of body-states, of ‘causative’ objects interacting with those states, and (above all) of their interaction. Essential to Edelman's theory of consciousness is reentrant mapping or simply reentry, which is ‘the ongoing recursive interchange of parallel signals among brain areas’. This is one of the features of the brain which makes it different from a computer: it has no CPU among its components.

  No superordinate map is necessary to cooordinate and bind the activities of the various individual maps that are functionally segregated …. Instead, they coordinate by communicating directly with each other, through reentry.

  — Edelman (2004, 41)

• Heraclitus: Although the Logos is common, the many live as though they had a private understanding.

  From a third-person, observer's perspective, we can affirm that each individual does have a ‘private understanding’; hence the privacy of the first-person view. But from the primal (and more direct) perspective, the logos is common: conscience is one all-encompassing process speaking with a single voice – a voice that bids us listen to the many voices branching from it, and to act as if guided by it alone. The individualistic concept of conscience conceals its true nature as a manifestation of the shared social mind, of knowing together. No one develops a personality or a human consciousness without interaction with others, and no one develops a conscience without engaging in authentic dialogue in a moral context. ‘Following the common’ in this way is relatively uncommon. But only what creates the sense of self can free you from it.

  In the experience of dialogue, there is constituted between the other person and myself a common ground; my thought and his are inter-woven into a single fabric, my words and those of my interlocutor are called forth by the state of the discussion, and they are inserted into a shared operation of which neither of us is the creator.… In the present dialogue, I am freed from myself, for the other person's thoughts are certainly his; they are not of my making, though I do grasp them the moment they come into being, or even anticipate them.

  — Merleau-Ponty (1945, 413)

  Even after it has been internalized, conscience is not really conscience if it is merely my conscience. Decisions guided by intuition alone are impoverished compared to those developed and tested through an authentic dialog in which each speaker articulates the voice of conscience as he hears it, and hears the other speakers as other voices of that same conscience. You might say that conscience is the internal dialogue of the human species. Dialogue is mutual recognition and exploration, not a struggle toward a fixed goal or between competing positions. It is grounded in respect for all beings because diversity of experience and expression is our greatest common resource.

  To become open to multiple layers of vision is to be both practical and empathic, to practice the presence of God or gods and to practice wilderness. Learning the paths of human culture, we are attentive as well to the undomesticated outdoors and the essential wildness spinning on in subatomic spaces, forever generating new patterns.
  … the rise of fundamentalism within any tradition is always a symptom of the unwillingness to try to sustain joint performances across disparate codes – or, to put it differently, to live in ambiguity, a life that requires constant learning.

  — M.C. Bateson (1994, 12-13)

  Mary Catherine Bateson has here carried forward the deep insights into cultural dialogue achieved by both of her parents, Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson (see M. C. Bateson 1984 and 2004). Gregory, always questing for underlying form and pattern, also described the essential form of dialogue and relationship in terms of learning:

  Learning the contexts of life is a matter that has to be discussed, not internally, but as a matter of the external relationship between two creatures. And relationship is always a product of double description. … It is correct (and a great improvement) to begin to think of the two parties to the interaction as two eyes, each giving a monocular view of what goes on and, together, giving a binocular view in depth. This double view is the relationship.

  — Gregory Bateson (1979, 147)

  Each of us is lost without the Other. This doesn't mean that we have to make all decisions consultatively – if we did that we'd never have time to enact any of them. When there is no time to engage in public dialogue, we call upon the voice which we have internalized by engaging in previous dialogue.

  As the child masters the linguistic symbols of her culture she therby acquires the ability to adopt multiple perspectives simultaneously on one and the same perceptual situation.

  — Tomasello (1999, 9)

  However, ‘adopting multiple perspectives simultaneously’ is a parallel process, and therefore beyond the limits of conscious thought, which is serial. Just as conscience is bigger than self-interest, it is also bigger than consciousness. The ‘pinnacle of human distinctiveness’ is also the realization of more-than-human mind.
• Those who have read deeply in scriptures (religious or otherwise) may of course find that conscience speaks to them in a scriptural voice. But consider that the scriptures themselves are products of dialogue. Given the vague and often conflicting evidence, it is by no means easy to find out what was actually said and done by a figure like Jesus or Gautama Buddha. If these revered teachers thought that their actual guidance could be extracted or abstracted from the living context of their words and deeds, would they not have written it down themselves? Surely they could have done so, and surely if they had, their followers would have preserved these texts; but instead, we have their discourse only as reconstructed by their followers, sometimes long after the ‘fact’. These scriptures are substitutes for the living, responsive presence of the teacher – only in his absence would it even occur to the learner to write down his words. What these learners wrote can serve as a headstone to mark the passing of a learning process. To reconstitute the actual guidance, readers have to resurrect or recreate not only the words of the guide but the dialogue and the context which made them meaningful. If these scriptures are keys to the kingdom, they are skeleton keys, and it's up to the reader to fit them to the lock.
• Here's a microdialogue about dialogue:

  Good men do not argue; those who argue are not good.

  — Tao Te Ching 81 (Feng/English)

  Two people must first contradict each other if they really wish to understand each other. Truth is the child of argument, not of fond affinity.

  — Gaston Bachelard, La Philosophie du non (1940)

  And here an attempt to steer a middle way between those two poles:

  Conversation combines conviction with a willingness to be challenged, a valuing of rational dissensus as well as consensus.

  — Jerome Stone in Zygon 38.4 (December 2003, 790)

• The way to regenerate language is to recognize its polyversity and learn to live with it. Dialogue is perhaps most fruitful when the participants are trying to talk through a mutual misunderstanding. Thomas Kuhn gives an apt description of how this happens (or should happen) in science, when advocates of competing views are in the process of resolving their differences; something like this could just as well happen in matters of conscience.

  Briefly put, what the participants in a communication breakdown can do is recognize each other as members of different language communities and then become translators. Taking the differences between their own intra- and inter-group discourse as itself a subject for study, they can first attempt to discover the terms and locutions that, used unproblematically within each community, are nevertheless foci of trouble for inter-group discussions.… Having isolated such areas of difficulty in scientific communication, they can next resort to their shared everyday vocabularies in an effort further to elucidate their troubles. Each may, that is, try to discover what the other would see and say when presented with a stimulus to which his own verbal response would be different. If they can sufficiently refrain from explaining anomalous behavior as the consequence of mere error or madness, they may in time become very good predictors of each other's behavior. Each will have learned to translate the other's theory and its consequences into his own language and simultaneously to describe in his language the world to which that theory applies. That is what the historian of science regularly does (or should) when dealing with out-of-date scientific theories.

  — Kuhn (1969, 202)

  This is the sort of thing i have tried to do with ‘out-of-date’ scriptures such as the Gospel of Thomas – though of course when this kind of reading is successful, the text in question no longer seems to be out of date, at least not in the same way.
• If words have no meaning apart from use in context, then no text is sacred unless consecrated by the user's investment in it. If your spiritual life is primarily religious, then it is collective use (for purposes such as worship) which invests the text with sacred meaning. Any collective use requires members of the collective body to conform, to stay within a given framework. Generally this means conformity with a belief system as well as a code of conduct. In a context where it competes with other organizations for commitment, a religion is unlikely to succeed in providing benefits for the group which adopts it (and thus to be self-sustaining – see D.S. Wilson 2002) unless group members believe that it is destined to succeed.

  On the other hand, if your spiritual life is primarily one of dialogue across the boundaries between groups, then your relationship with others is mutual rather than collective, and your recognition of sacred meaning in the text invites and includes recognition of other uses and other acts of meaning. Dialogue entails responsiveness and empathy rather than conformity.

  In a true dialogue, both sides are willing to change. We have to appreciate that truth can be received from outside of – not only within – our own group. If we do not believe that, entering into dialogue would be a waste of time. If we think we monopolize the truth and we still organize a dialogue, it is not authentic. We have to believe that by engaging in dialogue with the other person, we have the possibility of making a change within ourselves, that we can become deeper.

  — Thich Nhat Hanh (1995, 9)

  Communication does require some novelty, which ought to arise from the authentic expression of experience; but in dialog within a group unified by consensus, certain semantic constants must be maintained, in order for the variables to take on appropriate values. In dialog outside the group, those constants must be treated as default values of variables; occasions can always arise in which other values are more fitting. (This cross-group dialog will tend to gain in consensus-building what it loses in precision. The precision can be recovered as the new consensus matures and specifies itself.)

• If God is the Creator, the Author of all events, then a human life ought to be a dialogue with God. Thomas Merton elaborates:

  Every moment and every event of every man's life on earth plants something in his soul.… every expression of the will of God is in some sense a ‘word’ of God and therefore a ‘seed’ of new life. The ever-changing reality in the midst of which we live should awaken us to the possibility of an uninterrupted dialogue with God. By this I do not mean continous ‘talk’, or a frivolously conversational form of affective prayer … but a dialogue of love and choice.

  — Merton (1962, 14)

• If we can view humanity as a single organism, then we can say that the real dialogue from which its consensual behavior emerges is in the language of practice. (Just as the real dialogue from which thoughts emerge into consciousness is in the language of neural interaction.) The fact that you and i are inside this dialogue entails that our conscious understanding of what the Human Organism is up to, no matter how consensual it may be, is not an overview or god's-eye view of that activity; it is merely a lower-level contributor to it.

  In any case, the more individuals act as participants in a group mental process, the less likely they are to be consciously aware of the process.

  — Wilson (2002, 77)

  However, when you turn from participation to contemplation of the process as if you were outside of it, the perspective you gain may help to guide your subsequent participation over the long term of the meaning cycle.

Next chapter: Apocalypse: Opening Time →