The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning

by Jeremy Lent

When all under heaven know beauty as beauty, There is then ugliness; When all know the good [as] good There is then the not good.34

Wow. When there is good. There is no good. The ugly fact of comparison

the Tao Te Ching recognizes language as a fundamental step in the loss of human connection with the Tao: At the beginning of institution names come to be. Once there are names, One must know when to stop. One who knows when to stop does not become exhausted.

The language and names calling to start boundardies

Confucius agreed with the Taoists that there had been a precipitous decline in values from an earlier golden age, but, for Confucius, that golden age was defined not by absence of culture but rather by a more harmonious and morally upright culture that had since become corrupted.

Confucian And taoism

Confucianism focused on the individual's relationship with society, with the goal of attaining social harmony.

Social harmony

The Confucian framework of culture and society is embedded within the ancient belief in the emperor's crucial role of mediating the relationship between heaven and earth. Because of the dynamic resonance between heaven and earth, if something were out of harmony in one domain, this was believed to cause disharmony in the other. The emperor was viewed as the fulcrum within this setup, and, as such, his role was essential in maintaining balance between the two domains.

The confucianism. The use of emperors as harmonious support

Each family was seen as a microcosm of the entire empire, with every family member obliged to carry out his or her particular duties; otherwise, disharmony would arise and lead to misfortune for the entire family. Each member's role in the traditional Chinese family was far more structured than is conceivable to the Western mind, and it continues in this way to the present day.

Structure of family

This sense of knowing exactly where you stand within a complex network of relationships, rights, and obligations pervades the Confucian cultural framework. A person's identity arises from his or her particular cluster of connections within the network: being a son or daughter, a parent, a student or teacher, an official or an employee. An individual's moral responsibility is to reconcile and balance these relationships for the well-being of the entire nexus.44

Knowing where you stand.interesting

The roots of this Confucian emphasis on the importance of family go back to the ancient agrarian view of the family as a continuum spanning heaven and earth, with the ancestors in heaven holding the power to affect the lives of the current generation. The best way someone could look after their living family was therefore to pay their respects as diligently as possible to those who had passed on to heaven. Attention to the appropriate rituals for the ancestors was, indeed, a guiding tenet of traditional Chinese life and a core principle of Confucianism.

Very true. The respect of the dead as a duty for family

Those who succeeded in the lifelong task of applying themselves to cheng could attain a state of ren: the Confucian ideal of an enlightened person behaving authentically in every way. Ren is associated with a range of virtues such as filial piety, courage, and loyalty, but its scope expands to cover what we might call love.

Ren

Confucian Tao, according to their interpretation, is almost synonymous with culture. “The human being is not only heir to and transmitter of tao,” they write, “but is, in fact, its ultimate creator. Thus…the tao emerges out of human activity. As the metaphor ‘road’ would suggest, tao, at least for Confucius, is ultimately of human origin.”53

Confucianism as road

Only when Tao, te, and ren are all lost, it asserts, “then there is li. As to li, it is the thin edge of loyalty and faithfulness, and the beginning of disorder.” For the Confucians, li was the key to harmonizing with the Tao; for the Taoists, it was the last step of calamitous decline in the quality of human experience. For the Confucians, the goal was to integrate the artificial constructions of the human patterning instinct; for the Taoists, it was to deconstruct what the patterning instinct had forged.

Differences between confucianism and taoism. C intergrates. T decomposes

a language's grammatical structure corresponds to patterns of thought in its culture. “We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do,” Sapir suggested, “because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation.”

Main.language grammar influences behavior and cognition

When deep-rooted modes of cognition such as counting or spatial orientation are affected by language, this might cause speakers of that language to perceive the world in ways that become hardwired, unconscious, and inalterable by the time of adulthood, resulting in a “strong Whorfian” effect.

Strong whorfian

He gives an example of the word bachelor, which integrates four separate concepts: male, unmarried, never married, and adult. Without the word, we'd have to work hard to keep all four ideas in mind; once we've mastered the word, each time we use it, we effortlessly bring all four concepts to our conscious mind in one seamless whole.

Interesting.a word for four concept. The cluster meaning

Once a word has become attached to this new concept, it becomes embedded and is henceforth stored in the brain for effortless access, freeing up the PFC's working memory for new activities. This is likely the way in which language influences a person's pattern of thoughts.

The working of words.thats why it could be blcok or barrier

The more complex and abstract the set of ideas attached to the word, the more difficult it is to come up with a competing set of ideas not associated with any word. The reason why the broadest, most intangible words of a language—qi or Tao, atman or soul—are often the most difficult to translate is that they are the result of so many different levels of conceptual building blocks, each of which has been assembled from a unique set of more basic concepts combined over generations by the speakers of that particular language.

Wow.difficult to create new concept for old words

He reports that biculturals, more than monoculturals, would feel “like a different person” when they spoke different languages, and they accessed different mental frames depending on the cultural context, resulting in shifts in their sense of self.

Interesting. Dual sense of self?

The Greek emphasis on debate likely contributed to the kind of thinking that led to the “Greek miracle.” Greek society, with its relative lack of hierarchy, didn't offer much in the way of political patronage, so intellectuals with ideas to communicate had to be entrepreneurial and find pupils ready to pay them for instruction. This led to a competitive intellectual climate, with each luminary trying to persuade others that he was the one worth following.

The birth of university

Chinese science achieved different insights than the Greeks, who focused more on objects isolated from their context. When Aristotle tried to explain why a stone would fall, he speculated that it had a property of “gravity.” The Chinese, by contrast, viewed everything as existing in a field of forces and achieved a deeper understanding of topics such as magnetism, acoustics, and gravity—recognizing, for example, that tides were caused by the influence of the moon, something that even Galileo could not explain.

Differences in research

If the mind is believed to exist in the head, it's easy to conceive of a split between reason and emotion. However, if the mind exists in the heart, an organ that beats faster when strong feelings arise, there would be no reason to conceptualize this split.

The mind exists in the head or the mind

“You do not yet know about life; why do you concern yourself about death?”

W

These cultural differences lead to divergent views of how we ought to live our lives. In the individualistic culture of the West, there is high value attached to being talented, taking care of yourself, and competing successfully in the marketplace. In East Asia, a “good” person may instead be seen as someone attentive to her own weaknesses, motivated by self-improvement, and emphasizing the values and needs of those around her.

Values east and west

Some of these habiru were enslaved and forced to work on the new capital of Pharaoh Ramesses II around 1250 BCE, but they escaped and made their way to Canaan. There, they settled down as sheepherders and farmers in isolated hill-country villages, accepting the name habiru for themselves, which eventually metamorphosed into the name they have been known by ever since: Hebrews.

The hebrews were immigrants

Prior to Israel's collapse, each nation had maintained separate versions of the ancient legends of their ancestors. Now, in the cultural ferment of a burgeoning Jerusalem filled with refugees, priests from both nations joined together to systematize the worship of Yahweh in alliance with a powerful faction intent on centralizing religious and economic control over the countryside.9 This alliance, referred to as the “Yahweh-alone movement,” prohibited worshipping any other god than Yahweh, and even Yahweh had to be worshipped in specific ways controlled by the priesthood.

Alliance and the centralistion of worship

Perhaps the greatest breakthrough generally attributed to the Old Testament is the conception of a god so great that he is beyond form, beyond name, beyond human perception.

Old testament.god with no form

This is where the Hebrew conception of God departs from other religious traditions. For the first time, the source of all that is sacred is up in the heavens, unreachable for humanity except through the mercy and goodwill of God. The rest of the universe loses its divinity, becoming dead matter. This is the great dualistic divide accomplished by the Old Testament, detaching the source of meaning and value from material existence and placing it in a separate dimension. This dualistic conception applies equally to morality. The determination of whether something is good or bad comes not from one's own experience but from whatever God has decided.

The rest of the universe became dead matter except transcendence and heavenly presence. Or commercialism?

These sects saw the physical world as inherently evil and believed the immortal soul could achieve enlightenment (gnosis) through liberation from the body. The Gnostics shared with the Essene and Pharisee sects an extreme loathing for the body, which was seen as nothing more than a jailhouse preventing the soul from reaching salvation.

Dualist. The combination between christianity and platonicm. Salvation and transcendence from reality to reach purity. Body becomes evil

After his conversion, Augustine embraced the Platonic conception of Christianity developed by Clement and Origen, adding a new element in the form of original sin: it was because of Adam's disobedience in eating from the tree of knowledge, he explained, that God had condemned the entire human race to damnation.

It is almost impossible to overstate the profound impact Descartes has had on modern cognition. Along with Plato and Augustine, Descartes was a prime architect of the structures of thought so pervasive in the modern world that they are frequently viewed as self-evident truths: that our thoughts constitute our essence and that the mind is separate from the body and is what makes us human.

Descartes

Religious intolerance, as we will see, may indeed be the predictable by-product of monotheistic belief, which, by definition, posits that there is only one true explanation of the cosmos, and, consequently, any other interpretation is necessarily false and at odds with the sole source of spiritual meaning.

Religious intolerance and monotheism

Prior to the emergence of monotheism, the idea of forcefully imposing your religious beliefs on another group was unheard-of. It was generally agreed that divinity existed in every aspect of nature, whether in a river, tree, animal, or territory. People worshipped their own deities, but they never contested the legitimacy of foreign gods. Rather, they felt it more prudent to cover their bases by respecting the gods of others.

Interesting

The ancient world was certainly not a haven of peace and harmony. The values and practices of agrarian societies frequently led to brutal massacres of populations defeated in war. However, when these conflicts took place, they were about wealth and power, not about the imposition of one ideology over another. For this reason, when one nation conquered another, the gods of the conquered nation were treated with deference. Instead of smashing the images of their gods, the victors would carry them away to weaken their enemies’ power.

The smashing of foreign gods?

It is a grim irony of history that the first exemplar of genocide carried out in the name of ideology came from the holy book of the Jewish faith, the very people that the Nazis tried to wipe out with their racist ideology.

wow

The rise of Islam opened a new avenue for religious fanaticism. This burgeoning faith was as certain in its conviction of truth as Christianity. Like the monotheistic creeds before it, Islam's holy text, the Quran, is filled with exhortations of vengeance and slaughter of those who don't share its beliefs. “Slay them,” it demands, “wherever ye find them and drive them out of the places whence they drove you out, for persecution is worse than slaughter.” The promise of an eternal soul living an afterlife in heaven is frequently used to encourage holy war.

And then the rise of islam

Although Buddhism had emerged as an alternative to Vedic thought, it had also absorbed some properties of the Vedic dualistic paradigm. Among these was the concept of nirvana, a state of peaceful bliss available through prolonged meditation in which bodily sensations dissolve and sensual desires disappear.

Buddism monotheism part of thoughts. Nirvana

Along with this emphasis on transcending the physical world, some schools of Buddhism continued to teach the core Vedic principle that the phenomenal world was only an illusion and that once practitioners became enlightened, they would recognize the emptiness of all things. A visitor to a Buddhist temple might hear endless chants of “empty, empty, empty” echoing eerily through the hallways.8

The true meaning behind empty empty empty! Dualistic

Buddhism had arrived in China with a comprehensive explanation of the cosmos, complete with the principle of reincarnation—another Vedic concept that had hitched a ride from India. Its Chinese critics lacked an equivalent systematic worldview to offer as an alternative. The Confucian and Taoist traditions provided elaborate descriptions for how the manifest world worked, but they had rarely ventured to describe the ultimate ground of reality.

When buddism brought dualism.neo confucianism

Einstein had transformed physics with his famous equation, E = mc2, which states that the energy of a body is equal to its mass times the speed of light squared. Energy and matter were recognized as transmutable. The traditional Chinese notion of qi as an all-pervasive force of energy and matter could now be related to the findings of modern science.

Li and qi. And einstein e=mc2. As accurate as it predicted, but it was the PIE region that figured it out though.

Niels Bohr, one of the founders of quantum mechanics, saw the complementarity of yin and yang as a powerful representation of the dual characteristic of subatomic matter as both wave and particle. Bohr was so impressed by the Chinese conception of the universe that when he was knighted and had to design a coat of arms, he incorporated the yin-yang symbol as its central motif.

Interesting.bohr and the coat of yin yang

Researchers from specialties as diverse as mathematics, climatology, and neuroscience have come to understand the natural world as a complex of different systems continually interacting with each other. They have identified universal features of these dynamical systems that remain valid across the entire natural world, from systems as vast as global climate to as small as a living cell. A common feature of these systems is that they self-organize to create a cohesive whole that cannot be completely understood by reducing the system to its elemental parts.

A cohesive whole that cannot be understood by reducing to parts

A characteristic feature of a self-organized system is that it remains stable even while the physical matter making up the system changes. A simple way to understand this is to consider a candle flame. As the flame burns, every molecule that originally comprises the flame vanishes into the atmosphere. Each moment, the molecules making up the flame are different, yet the flame remains an ongoing entity.

The relationship between material (parts) and system

This raises the question of what it actually is that forms the intimate connection between you and that child. The answer is the li. The qi has all changed, but the li remains stable: growing, evolving, but patterning its growth on the child's original principles of organization.

What is the connection between you and the child in the photo (the younger you).li. Or the patterning

“li of consciousness” thus: “A dynamic core [of consciousness] is…a process, not a thing or a place, and it is defined in terms of neural interactions, rather than in terms of specific neural location, connectivity, or activity.”

wow.Li of consciousness. process.

Prominent biologist Carl Woese touches on this implication when he describes organisms as “resilient patterns in a turbulent flow—patterns in an energy flow.” He adds, “It is becoming increasingly clear that to understand living systems in any deep sense, we must come to see them not materialistically, as machines, but as stable, complex, dynamic organization.”

As dymanic system

Zhu Xi insisted on one crucially unique characteristic of the Supreme Ultimate: it consisted of all the li without any qi. The difference, then, between the Supreme Ultimate and the Tao was that the Supreme Ultimate represented the underlying patterning of the universe conceptually prior to its actual existence, whereas the Tao represented the tangible manifestations of the ever-changing, infinitely complex interactions between li and qi that comprise the cosmos.31

Tao. Taiji

The Neo-Confucians, on the other hand, came to this understanding of the universe by way of a systematic exploration of the implications of a cosmos consisting entirely of li and qi. “When we speak of heaven, earth, and the myriad things together, there is just one li,” wrote Zhu Xi. “When we come to humans, each has his or her own li…. Although each has his own li, each nonetheless emerges from a single li.”

Li

Whereas the Europeans were propelled by the desire to understand natural laws and thus take control of nature, the Neo-Confucian Investigation of Things was intended to discover the ethical principles naturally arising from an understanding of li.

Differences between western and asian intention

The Neo-Confucians approached their investigation of things with the realization of the fractal nesting of their own consciousness within the greater patterns around them. They recognized that their very perception of reality became part of it and could never be separated from it. “If one wishes to know the reality of Tao,” wrote Zhu Xi, “one must seek it in one's own nature.”

Within oneself

Focusing on the heart-mind, xin, as the locus of human experience, Cheng's core observation was that “li and xin are one.” For Cheng, the exploration of xin was not a purely intellectual exercise but rather a deep investigation of the different aspects of human consciousness.

Xin. Understand with heart. Understand oneself

Mencius: “For a person to realize fully one's xin is to realize fully one's nature, and in so doing, one realizes heaven.”