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Pattern!
Human experience, thought and behaviour I feel that it is particularly important to be able to apply the pattern! model to the personal experience of being a human being, and to our observations of how other people behave. It is so much the practice in serious study to try to be objective that this area is usually ignored. Even in scientific or medical specialties which focus on the human mind and behaviour, such as psychology, psychiatry and sociology, the expert adopts the stance of the detached observer. And yet the subjects of ‘what it is like to be me’, and ‘what other people say and do’ are what we know most about.
In order to explain human experience and behaviour in terms of pattern!, I need to define this subject area as a pattern! ‘domain’. So I need to specify precisely what is within the domain, and what is excluded. I shall certainly include my own experience of being alive because I can describe that with confidence. I also have available to me considerable circumstantial evidence that my unique experience of life is similar to other people’s experience of being themselves. I cannot be absolutely sure that I have not created my entire experience, internal and apparently external, from my own imagination. I may be all that exists. Certainly I am the only one ‘in here’. But others tell me that they have similar ‘in here’ experiences, and I do not really feel that I have the imaginative power to invent all that I take in with my senses: all of nature plus the human artifacts of books, music, buildings and machinery etc. And why should I invent all the terrible destruction that is going on in the world: the hacking and burning of forests, the pollution of land, sea and air, and the multitude of wars and conflicts, famines and diseases, which plague the peoples of the globe? So I shall accept the evidence which suggests that I am just one human being, much like many others, and therefore include within this pattern! domain a generalisation from my own experience of life and other people in my culture: the ‘white’, Western European culture which now dominates virtually the entire world.
I shall also include within the domain, some of my own speculation concerning the history of the patterns! I observe to be present in human behaviour today. This is necessary because patterns! include their past as influences on their formation, continuation and change. However I shall try to avoid going into too much detail on the domains which are covered in later sections of this book, such as religion and civilisation.
I shall try to avoid making any value judgements on the experiences and behaviour I describe. The pattern! theory has its own definition of morality which I shall come to in the final section of the book which considers what difference it might make to the world if pattern! thinking were generally adopted.
Brain – like head piece for image of being inside computer model, like loop which makes us look inward, solitary confinement. Cuts us off from past.
Music – has to exist in time, not time sliced, especially for musicians – hence special sort of people.
Meditation – shut out brain -> cosmic experience
Reliving entire life at death
Individuation had survival value – grabbing chances rather than going with patterns! of ecosystem (no obvious ev. niche because late arrival), also for adopting specialised group roles
Sense of self is inner relection plus such patterns! as have been adopted
Athletes identify more with body than brain
Different levels of conscious through subconscious to unconscious – connected with habits
Berner – mind is repository of incomplete communications
7/1/92 – second try at starting: Human experience, thought and behaviour
One of the attributes of pattern! is the absence of well-defined boundaries between what we may choose to regard as separate entities. Everything influences, flows into, everything else. However, the fact that we generally believe that the world is built up of separate things is an influence in itself. Our belief in separateness creates separation.
However, as I mentioned in my introduction to pattern!, while belief creates the reality it sees, disbelief has no such power. Over the years when science was strongly ‘reductionist’, the belief was held that the universe is ‘nothing but’ collections of fundamental particles. But the disbelief inherent in reductionism had no effect on the influences which had evolved beyond and above the behaviour of individual particles and the summarised behaviour of collections of particles. But scientific thinking has moved away from reductionism and many branches of science study ‘systems’ which have emergent properties over and above the properties of the component parts of the system added together.
Applying the above to the domain of human experience, we can accept that human beings are separate entities, and recall as evidence our own personal experience of the loneliness of being enclosed within one’s body and mind, but being convinced that we are ‘just’ separate entities cannot make that the only truth.
In the chapter ‘Definition of the concept of pattern!’, I described how patterns! evolve as follows:
We can envisage it [a particle] as a local pattern!, a thickening in the single substance of the universe. It is aware of itself, and it is aware of all other particles in the universe. It recognises other particles as resembling itself to a greater or lesser degree. It behaves towards other particles according to their usual practice. The more often that behaviour is repeated, the more ingrained it becomes. The particles and their behaviour towards each other constitute a further pattern!, which is also aware of itself, recognising others resembling itself to various degrees, and behaving towards each other is the ways they usually do. And so on.
That model is sufficient to account for the evolution of the universe from some simple state through to the emergence of our species and the course of human history. We may choose to model the various stages of the evolutionary process according to the theory of various scientific disciplines, but this does not invalidate the underlying pattern! process. Pattern! and science are compatible: neither theory can deny the other because disbelief has no effect on reality.
I intend to cover the process of evolution in some detail later on, but for now I shall leave that subject and concentrate on the patterns! or habits which govern human thought and behaviour as we know them today. But we must bear in mind that, by pattern!, the past does not pass away, but is present in its entirety, and exerts a perpetual influence. So we can invoke any past pattern! to account for present behaviour without necessarily needing to trace how the past pattern! is passed on though the generations.
But before I move on to consider ordinary, everyday habits, I will say a little more about a very infuential habit I touched on above: our tendency to believe that human consciousness is separate and individual. I believe that this is a habit which evolved with our species, long before written history, and is a habit we may share with, and have copied from, some other recently evolved mammals.
In the discussion of ‘explaining’, I touched on the emergence of individuation as a development which proved useful towards flexible cooperative behaviour, such as hunting. Individuation involves consciousness of the self, as separate from what is external to the self. I think that it is possible that the main function of the cerebral cortex of the brain is to repeatedly reflect consciousness inwards, so that our dominant awareness is of an enclosed region which we identify with. So, far from giving us more consciousness than other life forms, our enlarged brain shuts out all but occasional glimpses of the wider universe. It acts in a similar way to those head pieces which come with ‘virtual reality’ computer systems, which give the wearer the view of walking around inside a model building, say, which is really held on the computer’s memory.
I am not sure what it would feel like to be fully aware of the wider universe. However, my own and others’ reports of the experience of meditation suggests that our brains may turn our consciousness inside out: what we imagine we see outside may be a projection of the limited inner self; to see what is outside, we need to go in the direction which to our ordinary senses seems to be inwards.
The cerebral blinkers which take our consciousness into introspective loops also close us off from awareness of the past. We are left with the precarious sense of being carried from one moment to the next, leaving behind the roots of our growth. It is no wonder then, that we are able to wantonly destroy and lay waste to the diverse products of evolution on this planet. We can only see what we do, not what we have already done.
Another try, 9/1/92
Human experience, thought and behaviour
Pattern! postulates a universe consisting of awareness alone or, which amounts to the same thing, a universe consisting of a single, propertyless substance, which awareness gives form to. Since awareness is capable of the most complex, diverse and subtle forms, pattern! is not reductionist. We cannot define ‘awareness’ as some simple property governed by invariable laws. The only valid definition is tautological: ‘awareness is the universe and the universe is awareness.’
Although awareness is tremendously rich and varied, it is not hidden or remote. It is the most accessible quality that there is in that what we experience as ourselves is manifested by our awareness. Rather than focus on the inner churnings of his intellect, Descartes might have observed, ‘I am aware, therefore I am.’ or, perhaps better still, simply, ‘There is awareness.’
By extension, ‘everything is awareness’ leads to ‘everything is aware’. So the existential puzzle of ‘who am I?’ or ‘what am I?’ has no answer beyond the simple observation, ‘yes, I am’.
Each of us is a locus of awareness, but a shifting one. We all experience the phenomenon whereby we can be one moment a character in a book or a drama, the next moment the one called to the telephone, another moment a pain in the head, some other time part of a crowd, caught up in its emotions and movement. And yet we have a ‘home base’ of awareness, the ‘me’ inside this head and body. But I am going to offer to you the idea that the shifting awareness is the more ordinary state of being, whereas the ‘me in here’ state is a habit, characteristic of human beings, but possibly also manifested in some other social animals.
As I explained earlier, patterns! of awareness are habitual in that they tend to follow, or grow through time from, past patterns! that they closely resemble. So to say that the experience of ‘me in here’ is habitual means that the pattern! which constitutes a particular human being will have that experience because it has had it before in its own past, and because other patterns! like it, other human beings, have had similar kinds of experience in their past. The separation of the ‘me in here’ from other experiences of the universe is the process of ‘individuation’. Some psychologists have stated that individuation is learned in early childhood, it is not a state of awareness we are born with. So why have we developed this habit? I think it probably had survival value during the evolution of our species, and so persists for the same reason that any ‘physical’ characteristic has persisted.
Copied from previous page: In the discussion of ‘explaining’, I touched on the emergence of individuation as a development which proved useful towards flexible cooperative behaviour, such as hunting. Individuation involves consciousness of the self, as separate from what is external to the self. I think that it is possible that the main function of the cerebral cortex of the brain is to repeatedly reflect consciousness inwards, so that our dominant awareness is of an enclosed region which we identify with. So, far from giving us more consciousness than other life forms, our enlarged brain shuts out all but occasional glimpses of the wider universe. It acts in a similar way to those head pieces which come with software packages for architects which give the wearer the view of walking around inside a model building held on computer.
I am not sure what it would feel like to be fully aware of the wider universe. However, my own and others’ reports of the experience of meditation suggests that our brains may turn our consciousness inside out: what we imagine we see outside may be a projection of the limited inner self; to see what is outside, we need to go in the direction which to our ordinary senses seems to be inwards.
The cerebral blinkers which take our consciousness into introspective loops also close us off from awareness of the past. We are left with the precarious sense of being carried from one moment to the next, leaving behind the roots of our growth. It is no wonder then, that we are able to wantonly destroy and lay waste to the diverse products of evolution on this planet. We can only see what we do, not what we have already done. End of copied section.
Another try, 14/1/92 – using ‘stuckness’ structure
Human experience, thought and behaviour
1 Stuckness
The subject, ‘Human experience, thought and behaviour’ is vast. In a sense it covers everything in the universe, since even those things we regard as being external to ourselves are observed and understood by human beings. The scope of the theory of pattern! is also vast. It applies to everything there is, or has ever been, since it states that the entire universe in space and time is made up of clusters of awareness and influence recognising and interacting with each other.
Although I can restate my own belief that pattern! explains everything about everything, I cannot expect anyone else to adopt such a belief unless I can show how it is useful. The usefulness of pattern! lies in its capacity to explain any phenomenon which we find puzzling or undesirable. In particular, as I stated in the introduction, a major benefit of pattern! theory is that it helps to explain why human behaviour is so slow to change, even in response to urgent global problems which are now well understood, and for which sensible solutions have been put forward. For brevity I shall call this phenomenon ‘stuckness’, and I will use pattern! theory to explain why it occurs.
One example of ‘stuckness’ is the practice of hunting wild animals, just for the pleasure and thrill of it, which has already driven many species over the edge, or to the verge of extinction. Hunting was, for a period far longer than written history, one of the main ways that human groups obtained their food. By pattern! theory, it is only to be expected that such a long established habit is still influential: not because aggression or cruelty is ‘natural’ or ‘in our genes’, but simply because a lot of people have hunted before, and those people’s patterns! of behaviour are available in the ever-present past, and some people still tune into them.
To explain why a particular set of humans copy this pattern!, and others do not, one could look for other patterns! in their lives which provide a link; some family or community history, the influence of particular places etc. If pattern! thinking were to become respectable, hunting addicts could be helped out of their compulsion by having its source explained to them, in a similar way to psychotherapists helping their clients to discover the sources of the attitudes and behaviours which are holding them back in life. (Those who moralise against hunting, even by native peoples who need food and skins, may also need help in getting over the fixity of their attitudes.)
The allure of hunting is just one small example of ‘stuckness’, or inability to change our individual and social practices in response to altered circumstances. There is a great deal more that I need to cover in order to show how pattern! thinking provides a valuable framework for understanding human behaviour, and ‘stuckness’ in particular. But first I need to say more about what I mean by ‘pattern!’: what the theory is; what patterns! are.
Language
I have complained earlier about the inadequacy of the English language (the only one I have available to me), particularly when it is used as a tool for describing an alternative cosmology to the one which developed hand-in-hand with the language. The forms of words one has available can be highly misleading. For example, if I make the statement, ‘everything is made up of patterns!’, some people may understand intuitively what I am trying to convey. But as the one with the responsibility to get my intended sense across by constructing meaningful sentences, I may notice that the form of words is similar to the statement, ‘everything is made up of atomic particles’. A possible interpretation of my statement about patterns! is that I am substituting pretty little shapes, like snow flakes, say, for the tiny spheres that early atomists preferred, but still conceiving the universe as being constructed of lots of little building blocks. However, I am actually making a statement which is very different to the atomic particles statement. I am saying that we do not need to envisage elementary components out of which the universe is built, instead we notice the complex and subtle shapes and habits which permeate the universe, and understand that they are the influences which form the world we observe and experience.
But as someone brought up and educated to think and communicate scientifically, that is to be narrowly focussed and accurate in the statements I make, I may still be unsure that I have conveyed the sense I intended. The doubt lies in my recognising that pattern! thinking and intuition have much in common. My pattern! statements are more easily understood intuitively than by deducing the meaning of the sentence by logically combining the precise meanings of the individual words. Intuitive understanding of a statement brings about a fountain of resonance between the words making up the statement, taken individually and in various combinations, and anything in the universe of one’s previous knowledge and experience that bears some similarity or relationship with the words in the statement. A burst of recognition flashes through one’s mind and draws out an impression, a state of mind, an emotional response, perhaps a verbal reply. Interestingly, that kind of reaction includes the experience we call ‘insight’, a word which may seem to be inappropriate for something which feels like a collosal sunburst of realisation, rather than the tiny inward glimse which the word ‘insight’ may suggest. There is much that I will say in due course about what is inward and what is outward in human experience, and the role of the brain in human interaction with the world. But I am digressing from the subject in hand: my language problem.
The anxiety I have when I anticipate my words being read is that neither intuition nor deduction will take my reader to the understanding I intend. I need to help my reader to aim for a form of understanding that lies between the two, and has some of the attributes of both. But I think that this is what we do naturally when reading something, unless we are reading some work of science or philosophy which insists on the deductive approach, where every word counts, and where, inevitably, there are an awful lot of words trying to tie down our intuition like Lilliputians pinning down Gulliver.
But intuition is unavoidable. We use it even in, and of, science. Every time one word is used as shorthand for a complex idea, or set of ideas, the intuitive process is invoked to call in the intended associations. The statement, ‘Everything is made up of atomic particles.’ is part of an approach to understanding the world which has been labelled ‘reductionism’. ‘Reductionism’ is the view that complex structures are made of small components which existed before the complex structures and whose properties can be summarised to account for the properties of the complex structures. And that is not all that the idea of reductionism will convey. Something which has had such an all pervasive influence on our culture will invoke an extensive and unpredictable reaction in the minds of many readers, especially at the present time when reductionist thinking is going out of favour, even in scientific circles.
Someone who understands the distiction between my pattern! statement, ‘everything is made up of patterns!’, and the atomic particle statement, ‘everything is made up of atomic particles’, might well agree that the latter is reductionist, but the former is not. But now we encounter the danger of falling into another language trap: the assumption that statements come in opposites; and that ‘not X’ implies ‘X’s opposite’. For many people, the opposite of ‘reductionist’ is ‘holistic’, or ‘wholistic’. ‘Holistic’ is intuitive shorthand for a big concept, and may draw up from a person’s experience a great variety of resonating ideas and experiences. There is one very popular conception these days which may be triggered by the word ‘holistic’, causing some readers to respond, ‘Ah, I recognise that: everything is interconnected; it’s all one Whole’. That’s true, at least I think so too, but, lovely thought though that is, it is not very useful when applied to pattern! thinking.
I cannot resolve the difficulty by putting in more words. I could really go to town and say, ‘in the universe there are many many shapes and habits (in space and time) within and around, and mingling with, many many other shapes and habits, which are interacting and influencing each other up and down, through and through, backwards and forwards, strongly or weakly according to how closely or slightly they resemble and recognise each other’. But I am not sure if this is any better than ‘Everything is made up of patterns!’.
I have made an attempt – laboriously, in order to make a point about the difficulty of getting one’s meaning across – to state the basic view of the world on which pattern! theory is based. But neither the long or the short version conveys the value of drawing on such a world view to derive ‘pattern! understanding’, which is a set of ideas more useful than the world view it is based upon; the parts being, in this case, greater than the whole. For pattern! understanding we need to go some way towards scientific thinking and dissect out systems of pattern! relationship in order to study them in detail.
Pattern! understanding
Pattern! understanding involves taking some area of thought, belief, or experience and seeing it from a pattern! point of view. For example, in the chapter ‘Definition of the concept of pattern!’, I took the model of the universe which the ‘atomic particle’ statement above typifies, and looked at it from a pattern! perspective. The following passage from that chapter is a reminder of the sort of view pattern! provides:
We can envisage it [a particle] as a local pattern!, a thickening in the single substance of the universe. It is aware of itself, and it is aware of all other particles in the universe. It recognises other particles as resembling itself to a greater or lesser degree. It behaves towards other particles according to their usual practice. The more often that behaviour is repeated, the more ingrained it becomes. The particles and their behaviour towards each other constitute a further pattern!, which is also aware of itself, recognising others resembling itself to various degrees, and behaving towards each other is the ways they usually do. And so on.
The perspective on the universe that the passage above illustrates is reductionist in that it begins with simple patterns! and combines them to arrive at complex patterns!. Thus one can take reductionist thinking into the embrace of pattern! thinking, thereby shedding the implication that reductionism is the best or the purest view one can take, but without abandoning that model altogether. But before I move on to an aspect of pattern! that is more useful for understanding our present area of interest, ‘stuckness’, there is a particular sort of resistance to change that the reductionist perspective on pattern! explains rather well.
The patterns! of chemistry
If we move one or two steps down the ladder of scientific standing from the lofty pinnacle of particle physics, we arrive at chemistry; the domain of the alchemical dabblers of past centuries. The reason no one succeeded in changing lead into gold is that the atomic arrangements which constitute the forms and properties of lead and gold are so ancient that they have become apparently unvarying patterns!, with habits so long established that they seem absolutely incapable of change. The properties of chemical elements and compounds are generally fixed by having so many previous examples for them to echo that they always follow the pattern! already set. Only newly synthesised chemicals vary in their behaviour, showing different rates of chrystallization and different freezing points for a short while until enough have behaved the same for a pattern! to be established. Chemists working with new chemical compounds generally ignore these anomalies, putting them down to experimental errors and inaccuracies in recording, since the chemists themselves are in the habit of regarding the properties of chemicals as fixed and subject to the laws of particle physics.
Habits and decisions
There is little likelihood that a group of lead atoms will get together and make a decision to shuffle around their atomic particles to make themselves into a few gold atoms, sloughing off any particles that are left over. It is a characteristic of habits that they leave little room for decision making. We see this in human behaviour as well as in chemical behaviour. Habits, or their mental counterpart, fixed attitudes, are so influential that we may not recognise that we have them, let alone be able to decide to go against them. This goes for useful habits, perhaps even more than for undesirable ones. So a pianist who habitually plays a particular note in response to seeing a particular pattern of blob and lines on his music manuscript, is not going to decide to go against that habit and play a wrong note instead. He would risk losing his good habit and picking up a bad one. Here though, we do have a difference between the habits of chemicals and the habits of people: the distinction between the way things are and the way we feel or believe that they ‘should’ or ‘should not’ be. And this leads on to the difficult area of values and morality, where pattern! has a perspective to offer which can resolve much of the controversy but, importantly, without relieving us of responsibility for our actions. Pattern! morality is the subject of a later section, but I will say a little about it here. And in preparation for that I need to introduce the subject of ‘pattern! lifecycle’.
Pattern! lifecycle
Although the patterns! of science are not exceptions to general pattern! theory, they are in many ways unusual, an example being the extreme longevity and persistence of the patterns! of chemistry. So I will now leave the domain of science and scientific thinking for later consideration, and look at patterns! in general.
In the chapter ‘Definition of the concept of pattern!’ I considered the three phases a typical pattern! goes through: creation, persistence and breakdown. I likened creation to evolution, rather than to the once-and-for-all ‘Creation’ of Christian and other religious mythology. I also observed that the creation, or coming into being, of a particular entity, is, on most occasions, a near-repetition of an already existing pattern!. The midwife who delivered my first child said to us, as she obviously did to all parents, ‘It’s a miracle every time!’ And so it is: a miracle of creation, since every child is unique and special. But it is also the persistance of a wider pattern!. Every child is a near-repetition of billions of others who have developed in the womb and been born before. By pattern! theory, a human foetus develops the way it does, not by obeying the genetic programming in the chromosomes of the fertilised ovum, but by tuning in to the pattern! of previous embryos. (This is not to deny the validity and usefulness of the genetic model, only its claim to be the explanation and cause of the development of an embryo.)
Evolution and creation are linked aspects of the process whereby patterns! repeat in inexact ways and so gradually change, and also combine to constitute encompassing patterns! of greater complexity. But this is not to say that the more complex patterns! are, in some absolute sense, ‘higher’ or more important, or that evolution is a process of improvement with a forward direction of ‘progress’ in time. The belief that progress or development are desirable and inevitable is a dominant attitude behind the ‘European empire’ of the past few centuries. Other human cultures have had cosmological perspectives based on repeating cycles of change, and morality and customs which ensure adherence to ancestral ways. The ‘Western’ cultural attitude has brought about a blind momentum in the modern world which, paradoxically, is destructive whilst believing it is constructive, so this is the belief we must question.
Pattern! theory offers two general grounds for questioning the fixed belief in the forward march of progress: one is concerned with the temporary and local nature of increased complexity, and the tendency towards breakdown of complex patterns!; the other is concerned with influences which act in the reverse direction to that of increasing complexity (Note: having problems with this later on. May need to change here). First of all, I will consider the limitations of complexity, and the tendency towards breakdown.
Local regions, in time and space, may exhibit surges of ‘evolution’ or increasing complexity, the most obvious example being certain periods of the history of life on earth, during which new species and ecosystems emerged. However, even here, there have also been periods of stagnation and of reversal. Over the past few centuries there have been major setbacks to the evolution of life, as the richness and diversity of natural wilderness have been destroyed by human activities. The undoing of an earlier complexification is also evident in human society in the tendency for complex human cultures to be broken up into isolated individuals or very small groups. And individuals are losing the many manual and mental skills employed by previous generations as a result of the modern tendency towards specialisation and automation of production.
By pattern! theory, such reversals are not inevitably ‘bad’. They may be instances of a tendency complementary to evolution, whereby patterns!, especially highly complex ones, persist for a while but then are apt to degenerate and break down. In fact, any complex pattern! generally traces a lifecycle of development, persistence and breakdown. The ‘shape’ of a lifecycle may be represented as resembling a cross section of TableMountain in Cape Town, with an irregular ascent during development, a long and fairly flat period of persistence, and an irregular descent during breakdown.
We might then be inclined to say of the present period of life on earth, ‘Oh, well, that’s all right then. We’re just in a period of pattern! breakdown.’ But somehow we know that it isn’t ‘all right’. There is so much pain and wretchedness in the world, we feel sure there must be something wrong. What pattern! has to offer here is the concept of pattern! disruption. Where a pattern! has been established by a lot of repetition, an expectation is set up of a typical lifecycle. If a pattern! is cut short in a violent way, pain and distress is produced which persists in time, just as everything persists, according to pattern! theory. The pain may be picked up by any other pattern! which has some resemblance or link with the pattern! which was disrupted.
Many people have experienced sensations which may be instances of their tuning in to disruption and pain from the past. A common experience is the shiver that comes over us in ‘spooky’ places; something awful has happened there and left a trace. Another is being unwilling to buy a highly suitable house which doesn’t feel right. I read recently of a woman researching ancient battles who found she was able to sense what had taken place there when she visited battle grounds. Such experiences are just what one would expect on the basis of pattern! theory. In fact, what is required here for pattern! understanding is an explanation of why such feelings are not more common, or are denied or disregarded. An explanation which I have explored and found useful is that the human brain draws our conscious attention away from such experiences. I shall be going further into this idea in due course. But first there is another reason besides the tendency towards breakdown of complex patterns! why they should not be regarded as ‘higher’ or more important than simpler patterns! This other reason may be called ‘reverse influence’.
Reverse influence
One of the attitudes we have inherited from the past few hundred years of the influence of scientific rationality is the feeling that we ‘ought’ to seek logical consistency and certainty in our systems for understanding the world. On such a basis we are led to prefer mechanistic, deterministic models which we cannot observe directly to explanations which draw on our own experiences.
In my discourse above on the lifecycle of patterns! I used a model which resembles the human lifecycle, on the basis that this is something we know, and therefore it is not necessary for me to invent some proof or experimental evidence to support it. That seemed to me a good enough reason for trying out the human lifecycle as a model for other phenomena in the world. The nearest this approach can get to formal logic is, ‘Everything is made up of patterns!; therefore human life is a pattern!. Human life has a lifecycle of creation, persistence and breakdown; therefore other patterns! have such a lifecycle.’ Which is, of course, not good logic. However, life is not logical. Human thought is not logical. For example, as I pointed out above, we persist in believing in progress in the face of the reversal of evolutionary progress which has been brought about by human activities. We believe in progress whilst knowing that each of us will die. Which would be fine if we pursued progress altruistically, building a better future for coming generations for the satisfaction of knowing that they will find life richer and more enjoyable. But that is not what is happening, even if it is present in some people’s wishful thinking.
The reason for this preamble on the subject of logic and consistency is to provide an opportunity to state that pattern! theory is not logically consistent, and it is unhelpful to try to make it so. Pattern! becomes less useful if we select from the theory only those possibilities for understanding which hang together logically. So having explored a model which resembles human experience, illogicality and all, on the basis that we will understand it because it is like what we know, I will now work my way towards an alternative pattern! model which is quite different from human experience. I call this other model ‘timeless pattern!’. The subject of this section, ‘reverse influence’ serves as a bridge to the timeless model.
Pattern! understanding involves taking a particular area of, or perspective on, the world, and looking for patterns! in it which seem to be typical or influential. When we identify patterns!, we create them; if we see them they become real. By pattern! theory, the universe is made of thought, belief, influence, awareness, recognition: all these being ways of expressing our experience of participation in a pattern! universe. Different minds, different consciounesses, see, and so create, different patterns! in the single, propertyless physical substance of the universe. But the various minds influence each other, so there is a strong tendency for there to be bunches of consensus on what is present in the universe, as well as different views which see, and bring about, different realities.
There can be areas of agreement even between contradictory perspectives. I highlighted in the discussion of pattern! lifecycle, a dominant cultural belief in progress, coexisting with the recognition that human life involves breakdown and disruption, and that life on earth is experiencing a reversal of evolutionary progress. These two persectives contradict each other (which by pattern! theory does not make either of them wrong) but they also have a powerful belief in common. This is the belief that influences go forwards in time. Associated with that belief is the assumption that time passes, and that the past cannot be influenced by the present or the future.
One of the few certainties in pattern! theory is that time does not pass. Even conventional science is in partial agreement with that. If time were to keep passing away entirely, no influence would be possible: every moment would be entirely random or, perhaps, perpetually unvarying. What science does is to postulate a few eternal laws, which transcend time, and so are capable of holding the universe together from one moment to the next. By pattern! theory, time remains present for everything, and what determines change is the influence of what has occurred previously, which is always there to be recognised and tuned into. Everything copies, more or less, something that it resonates with that has happened before, which is very often its own immediate past state, which results in two common types of change which we recognise as growth and decay.
That conception of time suits both ongoing evolution and the ‘lifecycle’ model. But what about the region of time we call the future? Why should that not be around also, in the ever-present past, and in the growth surfaces of the present? For those who believe in purpose and destiny, the future is influential, and so at least some part of the future must be present, and must always have been present.
The idea of purpose and destiny is not one I feel comfortable with. The source of this discomfort is my intuitive rejection of determinism, either in the form of a clockwork universe going through the paces set by its initial state and the eternal laws, or in the form of a universe drawn towards its irresistible fated end. And my dislike of those models derives, I freely admit, from not wanting personally to be condemned to being some sort of puppet, from whichever direction I were being operated.
I have two choices here, as a student of pattern! theory. I can either reject the ‘presence of the future’ from my personal reality, in a similar way to my having rejected the idea of God. That, of course, allows the believers in purpose and destiny to have the presence of the future in their truth. Alternatively, I can aim to widen my own truth as widely as possible, and consider whether I have had any experiences which suggest the reverse sort of influence to that brought about by the presence of the past alone. What I need to consider if I want to explore that possibility is, firstly, ‘Are there any changes which evolve in a different direction to the one I think of as normal?’ and, secondly, ‘Do any of these suggest that it is the future which is influencing that change?’
Comment on this material:
I am getting bogged down in theorising on pattern! when I am supposed to be discoursing on ‘stuckness’. I need to move on to another section in the structure.
27th January – observation: opportunity here to go deeper into pattern! and time.
Although this section is supposed to be about human experience and behaviour, it is a favourite human passtime to speculate about something we call ‘reality’, which we conceive of as existing independently of our own experience of it. Although we can, and many people do, speculate about phenomena which have no obvious influence on our lives, there is understandably most interest in exploring the supposedly objective reality of phenomena which affect us in direct and important ways. Such a phenomenon is time.
In the modern world we go to extreme lengths to mark the passage of time. We have watches, clocks and radio announcements so that we always know ‘what the time is’, and calendars, diaries, and audible and visual reminders of the date so that we know where we are in the days, months and years. We all know the date, if not the hour, of our birth, and the number of years of life we have had up to now. We mark those years with anniversaries; of our own and our relatives’ births, of our marriages, of historic and religious events, and so on.
It appears that we are marking something absolute and unalterable, external to ourselves, marching on whether we will it or not. We are helpless victims of its inexorable passage. It drives us through the routines of our days, it measures our achievements and swallows them in its unreachable, over and done with, dark and dreamy past. In the end it will get us terminally; it will all be over for us, but time will march on for everything and everybody else.
But is it necessarily like that? There are many familiar experiences of time not passing in a regular, clock-like way. What we are doing alters our experience of time. Very sound sleep removes a chunk of time completely from our normal experience, but may take us into a dream realm where time hardly matters, or where events disregard the logic of its passage. Delays and waiting seem to slow time down, enjoyment often causes time to fly by, ecstasy can hold it in suspension in a timeless, eternal moment. Rather than time controlling us, we often control it; we waste time, save time, make time, have spare time, and also catch up, fit in, spin out and all sorts of other manipulations, to deprive time of its supposed power over us.
But, you may argue, those things are just personal experiences. They are illusions which distort our perception of time, which is ‘really’ passing regularly, and providing a universal scale against which everything moves, whether we see it clearly or not.
As I see it, we have a choice. Either we accept the conventional belief that time exists externally to our life experience, that it passes linearly and inexorably, and that any personal experiences that seem to deny that are illusory distortions. Or we find an explanation for our personal experiences of time, which reconciles the variety of those experiences, and shows how we are able to come together in agreement on the ‘clockwork’ version of time’s passing. Pattern! can provide such an explanation.
Remember that pattern! says that the world is brought about by thought, consciousness and belief (which are not the exclusive prerogative of human beings, but it is human experience of reality we are considering at present). This means that what we think is so, is so; we bring about our own reality by our conception of it. However, this does not happen for each of us independently. We influence each others’ thought. Like all patterns! we recognise and tune in to other patterns! which resemble our own. There is one interesting example of this that I have read of, whereby women who share accommodation, but who otherwise lead independent lives, tune in to each others’ menstrual cycles, which then come to coincide. So the tuning in to each other that we do seldom happens through what we think of as our conscious awareness. (By pattern! theory, everything is conscious, nothing is lifeless and unaware, but consciousness divides up into areas and levels, and the focus of consciousness of any pattern! shifts and changes. One person’s conscious self or ego is just one of many foci of consciousness which he or she participates in.)
By the pattern! conception of reality, to the extent that we agree about the reality of time, we bring that into being as a collective truth. The collection of human beings, past and present, who share a belief about time, in effect make up a joint pattern! which includes their truth about time within it. But that truth about time is not absolutely binding on any individual who tunes into it. This may be partly because human groups have not always conceived time in the way our current culture sees it. Certainly, the ubiquity of clocks is a fairly recent development, as is the need to coordinate and measure our participation in industry and administration. In days gone by, the weather and the sun, rather than the calendar, dictated what people needed to do. In a rural situation, the cyclical nature of time predominates over its forward passage. In a community based, rather than individualistic, culture, one person’s life is one turn of a cycle, rather than a singular entity with beginning, middle and end. The fact that there are these two contrasting cultural patterns! probably serves to weaken the influence of either over an individual’s experience of time, leaving each of us free to create our own, as well as tuning in to our culture’s sense of time, and without being disturbed by the inconsistencies.
So far I have identified two kinds of sources of time: shared group or cultural beliefs or assumptions; and individual conceptions and experiences. This may suggest that time does not exist other than through our experience of it. By pattern! theory, nothing exists other than by being conceived (interesting the dual use of this word); time would be no exception. But that is quite a difficult idea to get one’s mind around, with all the historic beliefs in a material universe influencing our thinking. Pattern! understanding allows and encourages us to devise mental pictures to help to bridge the gap between the old, materialistic, mechanistic and deterministic model and the organic, flexible pattern! alternative. We may, therefore, consider what pattern! time might be like if we suppose it to be an independent phenomenon.
One picture which is useful is provided by quite basic applied mathematics. The path of a projectile, a stone thrown by an underarm swing, for example, can be represented by a graph of distance along the horizontal axis and height along the vertical axis. What is interesting in terms of pattern! thinking is that the resultant curved line is a picture of what we would see in the real world if the past positions of the stone did not disappear with the passage of time. If the stone were lit up against a dark background, a camera set at a long exposure could record the entire trace on a single photograph. The graph and the photograph provide a representation of pattern! reality. Time only takes part in the picture while the stone is travelling; it marks where the stone has reached. Once the entire path has been traced, it just exists, no longer affected by time. But, by pattern! thinking, its existence would be an influence helping to ensure that another stone makes a similarly shaped journey.
Another picture which may be used to illustrate pattern! time is based on a conception called ‘Flatland’. Flatland is a country which only has two space dimensions. None of the inhabitants has any experience of height, but only length and breadth, and their combination, area. But Flatland is actually travelling through the third space dimension and occasionally encounters three dimensional objects, which are able to pass through the surface of Flatland without damaging it. How would a Flatlander experience encountering, for example, a cone? It would see the edge of a circle which would grow from a point to the size of the base of the cone and then disappear. But in the third dimension, the whole cone is present, and does not vanish. The cone represents a pattern!, which seems to the Flatlander who experiences it to alter over time: to be created, to grow and to die.
7/2/92 – thoughts arising from letter from Kenneth Walch
The dimensions of space and time
A letter from a friend has sparked of a train of thought which has at last clarified pattern! time for me. He suggested that there are three dimensions of time, as there are of space, and indicated how that would ‘work’. And this led me to wonder, ‘Why three?’
The development of chaos theory has introduced the idea that there may be more than three space dimensions, and in particular that the number of dimensions is (usually?) not an integer. The study of coastlines and the earth’s surface, for example, using fractal geometry, reveals that naturally occurring lines have between one and two dimensions, and surfaces have between two and three. This is because, however closely you look, there are more and more wiggles or bumps, which almost, but never quite, join up. Introducing fractional dimensions makes the number of space dimensions effectively infinate or, perhaps more realistically, indefinate.
If we combine my friend’s idea of multi-dimensional time with fractal geometry’s discovery of fractional dimensions, we get the interesting possibility of an indefinate number of time dimensions which, nevertheless, fit inside the universe of our experience.
My descriptions so far of pattern! reality have suggested that conscious entities create various patterns! in the universe which can coexist even when, by human logic, they contradict each other. One way of envisaging this coexistance is by supposing the differing realities to occupy different space dimensions, those space dimensions often being only very slightly, or fractionally, different from the dimensions of other similar patterns!.
The notion of time that I have put forward so far to accompany my conception of pattern! reality in space is of a single direction of growth or decay, but with the changes accumulating in present space, rather than falling away as time passes. But, just as there are apparently contradictory patterns! in space, so there are different experiences of time. By allowing these to occur in a multiplicity of inter-influential time dimensions, we achieve a satisfying symmetry between pattern! space and pattern! time.
However, there is still an aspect of dimensionality that troubles me. Why have we still a basic framework of three, in space if not, as my friend suggested, also in time? My inclination is to get rid of it, not as a conceptual pattern! with its own reality, created by human geometers from Euclid on, but as an essential part of the underlying pattern! model upon which all else rests. In the process, another concept which is so common in human thinking that it is taken to be obvious and inevitable needs to be questioned. That concept is number, and particularly whole numbers or integers. And, once numbers are put in their place, we can deal with three-dimensional ‘space in a box’.
Our assumption that the number of (space) dimensions must be an integer: three or some other whole number, is just one example of the dominance of the idea of integers in human thinking. We learn it from a very young age. I remember when I was teaching my small son the numbers, seeing latent genius in him when he made the profound observation, ‘Mummy, I can tell five without counting.’ Little did I realise that, far from giving him an important life skill, I was condemning him to a lifetime in a donga of human thought so deep that we usually never see out of it.
The numbers 1, 2, 3 etc. are real, but they are a pattern! reality, a habit, which is shared by all humans who have been taught it. I remember reading some time ago of some tribespeople whose language only had words for ‘one’, ‘two’, ‘three’ and ‘plenty’, presumably because that was all the notion of number they needed in their culture. And that was only needed because they had to have some measure of the extent of various people’s property, in particular head of livestock.
It is worth considering what notion of number or quantity other animals might have. An anecdote I heard recently is a good illustration of another conception which is possible. In Norway there are sheep farmers whose livelihood is threatened by wolves which they are not allowed to shoot or trap because they belong to a protected species. The wolves are a threat, not because they kill an occasional lamb, but because they take bites out of, and grievously wound, as many animals as they can get at. The theory has been put forward that the wolf, being at the top of the food chain, has an idea, built up over generations of its kind (a wolf pattern!, in effect) of the right population levels of its prey. Because of the specialised land use practices which are typical of agriculture, whereby parcels of land are dedicated to specific products, there is an unnaturally high concentration of sheep on the sheep farmers’ (and the wolves’) land. The wolf is trying to do his job in the ecosystem, and cull the surplus sheep. He does not need actually to count the sheep to do this. He just inherits from his forebears a sense of the concentration of sheep which is right.
Modern human culture is becoming progressively more and more number driven. We quantify everything, often in ways which bear little relation to human welfare. Numbers, particularly in the form of money, can exist independently of anything for them to enumerate, and can create distortions, both in our understanding of what is happening in the world, and in the divisions of worth and wealth in society.
Associated with number obsession we have separation: of human culture into collections of self-interested individuals; of human potential into narrow job skills; of land masses into separate nation states; of diverse ecosystems into parcels of land for specialised uses, such as intensive monoculture; and so on.
Number obsession and separation are real and unavoidable aspects of the experience of human life today. They are not illusory, we have made them real. But they are not the only reality, and we do not have to continue to be driven deeper and deeper into the cultural patterns! that have created them.
The particular example of number obsession we have been concerned with in the exploration of pattern! time and space is the number three as applied to space, and my friend’s innovative idea of extending that to time. But do we have to count the dimensions of space at all, let alone decide upon three?
As I mentioned above, three dimensional space is a convenient framework for geometry. I know little about early civilisations, so I do not know how people came to build rectangular buildings, but such constructions echo the space dimensions of geometry, and I have no idea which came first. But not all human cultures construct rectangular structures, nor are square shapes necessarily the most satisfactory. Having slept in a mock-Zulu hut in a hotel complex, I found that round rooms have a better ‘feel’ than oblong ones. And geometry does not have to have a framework of three dimensions at right angles to each other, extending to infinity. Terrestrial geometry has curved dimensions which circle back on themselves. And the minds of mathematicians can conceive any number of dimensions.
Having developed a resistance to having to accept that space has three space dimensions as part of its own intrinsic nature, I prefer to think of space simply as being spatial. See a child rush into an open space, such as an empty beach, and you may see what ‘spatial’ is. She will rush down, fling out her arms, spin around, and seem to be trying to occupy as much of that space as possible. So, rather than use the idea of dimensionality for arbitrary directions in space, I prefer to use it for the differing conscious experiences which create everything that exists in space. In the domain (sub-set of pattern!) consisting of you and the child, there are two space dimensions: her experience and your own. These two dimensions have much in common, they coexist, overlap, and do not conflict, they differ fractionally. In this domain they number two, only to the extent that the participants think of themselves as being two.
Were we to envisage the universe as consisting of a very large number of distinct entities, all of them, of course, by pattern! thinking, being conscious creators of the universe, there would be that number of interrelated space dimensions. If we allow the boundaries between entities to melt and merge, the dimensions melt and merge also. But let us keep the notion of distict entities for a while, because that is, after all, the way human beings generally think: of ‘things’, rather than of processes or patterns! What then is the distinction between an individual entity and its space dimension? It could seem from what I have said so far that they are one and the same.
The distinction is that the individual entity, or pattern!, has a time dimension as well as a space one (and remember that ‘oneness’ is something we have a habit of seeing, and is not essential.) In its space dimension the entity has its sense of itself and its surroundings. In its time dimension the entity has recognition and relationship. In a universe of pattern! in time, or ‘habit’, recognition and relationship is what determines development, growth, change, unchangingness and decay. A simple way of putting this is that, while space is being, time is becoming: which is, indeed, what we experience in life.
There is also the sense that space is inner and time is outer. But the outer, the influences from which growth and change arise, curl into the inner state of being like a toroid. And remember that the strongest influence on an entity is usually itself in its immediate past: we grow from our own past form. But we can also grow by recognising and resonating with a pattern! whose space and time dimensions are remote, compared with our own immediate past state. So pattern! space and time echo our own experience of life, and also remind us of our power to choose which influences to respond to, and to take charge of the direction of our own and, through our influence, humanity’s development.
To return to the subject of the number of dimensions in the pattern! universe: there are two kinds of dimension, in that there is space and there is time. But there is an indefinate number of space dimensions, which could be thought of as lying between the bounds of empty space and saturated space, in a way that calls to mind the non-integral dimensions of fractal geometry. The distinction between each space dimension and the others is a reflection of how separated the entity which has that dimension senses itself to be. There is also an indefinate number of time dimensions, each containing the recognitions of similarity which influence the growth and change of a particular entity.
I have put forward this conception of dimensionality, as being part of the inherent nature of the pattern! universe, in order to include as many experiences and observable patterns! as I can within my model. If people were to adopt the pattern! model, this would give us the opportunity of allowing in varients on the conventional framework of three space dimensions and one of time. But it should not surprise us if human thinking generally still continued to adhere to the conventional belief, that being a very well-established cultural habit. Because it has been so influential, that model exists in its own, very accessible, dimension of pattern! time. Variations which human beings are capable of envisaging or experiencing, such as change and growth being backward directed by the influence of some future destiny, or repeating and circular, or inconsistent combinations of these two varients with the conventional linear, forward, progress-oriented belief, exist in their own time dimensions.
(As an afterthought, a way has occurred to me of resurrecting the integers, and reinstating them in my pattern! universe. When we count, we are recognising and enumerating things that are similar. Thus integers are like time dimensions. I am not sure what to do with that thought!)
1.1 Habits and patterns!
I discussed in an earlier section the lifecycle of a typical pattern!, and the stages of creation, persistance and breakdown. Probably as a result of the influence of the science and philosophy of recent centuries, there is a commonly held assumption that things stay the same unless some force changes them. There is something of male authority about this really rather unrealistic notion. Any woman, and it is still generally the priviledge of our sex, who has care of home and young children, knows that anything left to itself for a while wanders off or gets messed up. If things are orderly, it is because someone has worked really hard to keep them so. From such a common sense perspective, the interesting stage of the pattern! lifecycle is the persistence. What on earth could it be that keeps things the same, or makes them happen over and over again?
The phenomenon which achieves this miracle is habit or, to continue the domestic theme, routine. And it is no coincidence that I have named the entire theory I am propounding after the middle stage of the lifecycle: unchanging or repeating pattern. I do not remember considering calling the theory ‘habit’, or even ‘habit!’, although I have thought about the fact that I might have done. The reason I would have rejected ‘habit’ as a name for the theory is that it is so often associated with ‘bad habits’, and it also has a strong association with time, rather than with space. ‘Pattern’ lends itself both to spacial repetition and to ‘habitual behaviour’, which means patterns in time. The only problem with ‘pattern’ is its link with prettiness and such things as wallpaper and tiles. So I have added the exclamation mark to emphasise that the word has a special conceptual meaning, and I have explained that ‘pattern!’ is about repetition, rather than geometric regularity.
However, for considering the persistance of patterns! of human behaviour in particular, the idea of ‘habit’ is very useful. It has a common sense meaning which is very close to the phenomenon under discussion. But I do need to make clear that most habits are good and useful, or in the past have been so. The fact that we often think that they are not good is that the enduringly good ones remain in our unconscious, we do not know that they are there, only the bad ones become conspicuous, especially to other people who find them irritating.
Good habits being unconscious is interesting in itself. It helps to explain why we have an unconscious mind. Freudian psychology has given us the idea that the unconscious is a nasty dustbin, full of childhood frustrations and conflicts to do with sexual desires we would rather that children, and our own childhood selves, did not have. I would not dispute that the unconscious mind has such things in it, but pattern! gives it a more useful function.
Here I must break off from the current train of thought because I can see a difficulty coming up and I need to anticipate and deal with it. There is a difficulty with formulating pattern! explanations which is almost unavoidable. The problem is that there is much in pattern! thinking that is consistent with common sense, so it is tempting to take for granted the reader’s common sense and speak to that. Unfortunately, it is no exaggeration to say that most people pay little attention to their common sense, and a lot more to the common non-sense which has grown up with our culture and its philosophical basis. Some of this non-sense, or bizarre and really rather unlikely stuff, which is nevertheless widely accepted, concerns the mind and brain. So I will make a diversion at this stage and offer an alternative account of what the brain does, which also means that we need not bother with the idea of ‘mind’ at all.
First of all I will consider the experience of sight, and describe what the brain does to enable us to see. Now, because by pattern! thinking, belief (or any other word for awareness or experience) creates reality, I will accept as valid what the experts say that the brain does, in spite of the fact that their model is rather different from what we think is happening when we see.
You may have seen in books or museums an Egyptian wall painting showing a god or a pharaoh looking at something. The act of vision is represented by arrows going out from the observer towards the object. There was such a picture in my physics text book at school, and its purpose was as a butt for the teacher’s and our mockery. What silly and ignorant people to think that light comes out of the eyes to illuminate the object, when we know it is the other way around! But such a picture could well be used to illustrate what science tells us the brain does.
For the first stage of vision, the brain acts as a receiver. Some of the light given out by, or reflected off, the object comes in the direction of the eye and enters through the iris. The light is focussed onto the retina by the lens, the changes in the retina are communicated by the optic nerve to the brain. Then we come to the interesting bit. The brain uses the data collected to assemble an image of what is ‘out there’ and projects it onto our consciousness so that it appears to be back outside where it came from. A simple test proves that the image is in the brain rather than out in the world. You need two helpers about the same height as each other. Get one to stand about five yards away from you, and get the other to stand about ten yards in the same direction. If you were seeing what is actually there, simple geometry dictates that the more distant person would be half the height of the nearer one. You will find that they appear nearly the same height, because you know they are the same size so your brain adjusts the image accordingly.
That is not to say that the world ‘out there’ is not transmitting light that the eye can take in. There is much circumstantial evidence that it does, for example images produced by cameras, where a device without a brain to adjust the data produces an image more or less as we would expect, but with geometrically correct perspective.
What is important to grasp here is that we believe that we are seeing what is there in the world external to ourselves, whereas what we are seeing is an image in our brains. This does not mean that the image we see is an illusion, the camera evidence suggests that it is not, but it does open up the possibility that we are not seeing all that is there. By pattern! theory, what we fail to see is the past states of the world, the ever-present history and growth of all the patterns! that are around us, which we only sense visually in snap-shot form. To extend our awareness to include past and distant patterns!, we have to turn our attention in a direction which feels like inwards, which we call ‘mind’ and ‘memory’, and which we conceive of as being in the brain. There we discover a gateway which actually leads outwards, and to contact with the whole of the universe in time as well as in space.
‘Mind’ is reality, ‘reality’ is projected by the brain. |