COMPLETING THE ENSO
ABSTRACT
This paper explores the fertile ground of language, and specifically metaphors, as it shapes the world we perceive individually and share in mutual exchanges with others. It examines the general domains of metaphor, archetype, embodiment, and voice as a means of sketching some of the features of the chaplain’s character and education. The chaplain’s worldview, or enso, and how he subsequently acts in the world, is a kaleidoscopic tumble of lenses that includes, among many others, general systems theory, Zen Buddhism, shamanism, and neuroscience. Each informs the chaplain’s embodiment and voice; his knowing, being, and doing. The construction of a metaphorical world precedes compassionate action and is subject to the dynamic parameters of systems theory and is reflected in the other lenses in the kaleidoscope. These lenses reflect one another and overlap in ways that reveal in general terms how a chaplain/elder acts in the world. The lenses focus on a sharper worldview seen in the moment.
Further exploration of the chaplain’s role probes a number of the constituents of wisdom, a commonly held distinguishing characteristic of the elder, and examines several perspectives on the expanded opportunities older people have for serving others as time and longevity offer multiple possibilities for continued creative work beyond the conventional workplace and retirement from it. In this more spacious place of knowing/not-knowing, being, and doing, the chaplain/elder becomes an agent for change by enlisting the power of language and metaphor to change a worldview and to change minds, especially at the end of life when the metaphors can be darkly limiting and the source of suffering. The transformation of suffering begins with a conscious metaphorical shift away from loss and hopelessness towards spaciousness and
wholeness. A specific example from the world of puppetry will be explored as a way of illustrating the power of metaphorical transformation.
INTRODUCTION
An idea isn’t responsible for the people who believe in it. Don Marquis
The challenges presented by this project are multiple. I approach the entire paper with the idea that it will be a departure from the usual papers I have written in the past, the many scientific papers I have read, and, perhaps, what might be the usual paper written for a masters-qualified program in chaplaincy training. My career as an anesthesiologist and the long training period leading up to it were filled with strict and prescribed goals and well-described outcomes that common parlance refers to as left brain (linear) activity—leaving my right brain (intuitive) dormant for much of the same period of time. It is, of course, understandable how it is that medical training cannot be overly creative because of the serious and significant outcomes for patients. However, the many long years of training are filled with analytical education and apprentice work once the formal educational experience ends. What passes for creative work in research is also encased in protocols and guidelines for experimentation and clinical trials. The intuitive inner life is subjugated to the exterior life of certainty and outcomes.
While I acknowledge the preeminence of left brain processing in the education and training of professional medical caregivers and in the formal educational process in most other disciplines, I also believe that nothing less than equal attention given to right brain functions and
their cultivation is required to promulgate a whole body/mind approach to how we interact with one another and how caregivers respond to those who suffer. I think the difficulties I face in describing and completing this project are indications of how difficult it is to incorporate and balance what are now understood to be right brain contributions to our thoughts and sensations: intuition, compassion, creativity, and vision, among others.
This initiative will attempt to incorporate various streams of experience and ideas that flow into what I hope will be an outline, if not an exposition, of the various aspects of what is necessary in the education of a chaplain. I consider this paper to be an “outline” because my plan is to paint in the broadest way what seems important to this subject as well as using this project to open up paths of inquiry that will lead to many destinations. Instead of confining my study to a narrow subject of interest and importance, as is the case with more formal project presentations, I hope to pull into consideration of chaplaincy education many of the influences and threads that interweave in my formulation of the topic. I see connections among the threads woven into chaplaincy training and into my own life. I hope to indicate to the reader how my own experiences and thoughts interweave with those of others. At some level, this project is an exploration of Buddhist chaplain pedagogy. Another layer is a more practical application of language to the role of the chaplain in the wider world of service. I have begun to think of this project more in terms of “The Beginning Project,” rather than as “The Final Project.” I want it to be the finger pointing at the moon, leaving the moon, the ground of being, as the cherished gem that it is—a presence in our lives, beautiful, and mysterious in all of its features and still evolving as we work with it.
I believe that my experiences in the chaplaincy program have primed me for this style of inquiry and one of the most outstanding impressions I have is that the education of a chaplain cannot begin in any deep way without first acknowledging and working with the experiences and biases that the student brings to the training. Memories and narrative memoirs are important to this process in the way that ingredients in a recipe make the final dish. This is the background work that is required and this project will try to reflect that by constructing a background for further investigations and work as I finish my training program and move along in my life. It may also be the road map for destinations that yield creative outcomes, outcomes that depend on a left brain/right brain interdependence, certainly not intentionally favoring one region or function over the other. Just as I once had a learning plan for my future livelihood that included college and medical school, so this project will be the next junction for another series of lifetime experiences and lessons.
One of the methods I plan to enlist is to explore my own biography with the hope that it will be the basis for my examination of factors that compose the life of the chaplain, but also to highlight those elements of chaplaincy that contribute to elderhood, the primary focus of this paper. It remains to be seen if my own life contains any of the common elements that are seemingly necessary for chaplaincy or if, as with each student, I bring to the discipline disparate elements that remain unique only to me. Each of us will begin where our individual biographies ground us, but we might also be defined in ways that resemble an archetype. Each of us might be able to model a chaplain for others in ways that are universal, thus removing the small self from being the primary actor in the work that we do. Another aspect of my interest in this subject of
elderhood has to do with my own aging process and finding myself on the cusp of old age. Facing the challenges of this time of life and taking on the responsibility of chaplaincy education have presented me with an opportunity to define more clearly the role of the elder. An important preliminary consideration will be to define briefly several terms that feed into the subsequent discussion. These are metaphor, archetype, embodiment, and “voice.” The concepts they represent reappear over and over again and help illustrate the final synthesis.
METAPHOR
Metaphor, or the concept of understanding one thing in terms of another, is an important tool in how we conceive of and communicate about the world in which we live and a tool that is laced throughout all human disciplines and activities. It lies at the origin of meaning and understanding. It is how lessons are taught and how we come to define ourselves as individuals and as members of groups. It is a tool used in systems theory, shamanism, Zen Buddhism, and even in neuroscience where comparisons are made between something complex (the brain) and something more accessible (the hand model of the brain used as an illustration by Daniel Siegel) (Siegel, 2010). It is the basis of storytelling and memoir and we become the metaphor when we study how we think about ourselves and, subsequently, how we act in the world (we are like ants in our social organization, for instance). We are living metaphors when we model behavior or when we imitate the behavior of someone or something else (using “mirror neurons,” mimicking coyote the trickster, or touching the earth in the way the Buddha did). We can mix metaphors and extend them and they can become the way we understand systems. A metaphor can create an
entirely new concept in a domain where information appears to change slowly or exceedingly quickly, thus making the use of metaphors another example of systems creativity in which the whole is conceived as more than the elemental parts. New ways of envisioning the world call upon us to use words that are familiar but often inadequately descriptive. When specific descriptive words fail us, then we can turn to illustrative metaphors for help, borrowing from more familiar experiential expressions. At one level, this project is an exploration of metaphors; of chaplaincy as metaphor, and of elderhood as a metaphor for chaplaincy. If we understand the world in terms of metaphors, then we also act based on the metaphors that inform our lives. Changing our minds is often a matter of changing metaphors and being changed by them. This reframing of concepts and acting on them is the basis for this paper and the proposition that the chaplain is an agent of creative change in the world.
George Lakoff, in his book Metaphors We Live By, makes important points about how we develop conceptual systems using metaphors. He says, as certainly as we develop a concept, we hide certain aspects of the same concept when we construct a metaphor (Lakoff & Johnson, 2003), that a whole system of concepts can be organized with respect to one another (many having to do with our body-based spatial orientation; such as health and life are up, sickness and death are down, our lives are containers with inner and outer orientations, etc.) in a single metaphor (Lakoff & Johnson, 2003), and that metaphorical orientations are not arbitrary entities, but are grounded in our physical and cultural experiences (Lakoff & Johnson, 2003). We know ourselves, the world, and ourselves in the world because of our experiences. Our values are interdependently related to the metaphorical concepts we live by (generosity and compassion are
up, for instance). Different cultures will develop different metaphorical systems to reflect their unique experiences in ways that support coherence within the culture (Lakoff & Johnson, 2003). A specific area of interest in metaphorical expression is in the personification of objects. This
particular aspect of metaphors will come into play later in this paper when we introduce a specific illustration of metaphorical use.
Perhaps the most obvious ontological metaphors are those where the physical object is further specified as being a person. This allows us to comprehend a wide variety of experiences with nonhuman entities in terms of human motivations, characteristics, and activities (Lakoff & Johnson, 2003, p. 33).
The point here is that personification is a general category that covers a very wide range of metaphors, each picking out different aspects of a person or ways of looking at a person. What they all have in common is that they are extensions of ontological metaphors and that they allow us to make sense of phenomena in the world in human terms—terms that we can understand on the basis of our own motivations, goals, actions, and characteristics (Lakoff & Johnson, 2003, p. 34).
Many metaphors are related to the concepts they refer to (metonymy) (using “new blood” to refer to new people, for instance) (Lakoff & Johnson, 2003) and come from personal and cultural experiences. Lakoff says this is especially true of metonymies that link everyday experiences with coherent cultural and religious systems. Metonymies grounded in physical
experience provide a comprehension of these cultural and religious concepts (the metonymy of “the dove for the Holy Spirit,” for instance) (Lakoff & Johnson, 2003). Metaphors help us structure our understanding of the world and our place in it as well as providing a basis for
communication. In addition to these very crucial roles played by metaphors, they also become the basis for how we choose to act. In other words, how we structure our concept of the world from our personal experiences in language impacts our interactions with it (thinking of the workplace as a war zone or pressure cooker, for instance). This is a very important insight into how we humans interact with one another, but it is also an important insight for the chaplain whose role as elder can allow him to reframe concepts and behaviors that are unskillful and cause pain and suffering for himself and others. For instance, conceiving of death as the “grim reaper” instills fear and aversion in people and prevents dealing with its inevitability in ways that are more wholesome and comforting. I submit that our culture has alternative metaphors embedded in its collective experiences that allow for a reframing of how death can be conceived and contextualized. The intriguing aspect of death metaphors is that they don’t develop from personal experience (as Lakoff defines them), but arise from how we might experience death without having any personal basis on which to make a metaphorical reference. In this sense, metaphors for death (and, hopefully, a more integrated acceptance of its mystery) present a uniquely fertile challenge to the elder/chaplain to explore deeper and less fearful common experiences, ones that insert death into our collective consciousness in ways that support and uplift. If it is true that we are able to mirror another’s experience as our own (dealt with later in the section on neuroscience), then it might be possible to replace the fear and terror we think we see in the eyes of someone facing death with a new metaphor that allows not-knowing and the
depths of mystery to energize what death can mean in the life cycle. The wonderful grace of a Kazuaki Tanahashi enso (a calligraphic circle or near-circle), for instance, can become the
metaphor for a birth into the organic mystery of death and thus transform the way we conceptualize and also experience the next phase of our miraculous existence.
ARCHETYPE
The concept of archetype seems very useful to me, especially in light of this project and its emphasis on the basics of systems theory and its applications to so many disciplines. Once again, I am treading very lightly in an area that I can only appreciate superficially and so what seems compelling about the idea of archetypes applies in only general terms. The archetype of the shaman and, by extension, the elder/chaplain is the focus of attention here. To the extent that many cultures incorporate the shaman into their cosmological views, it is helpful to examine the features that are universally present in the work of the shaman and which contribute to viewing him as an archetypal figure in a cultural context. Joseph Campbell refers to an archetype as “an elementary idea” (Campbell & Moyers, 1988) that appears transculturally and which is recognized as a container of wisdom and/or divine presence. In this context, the shaman and the chaplain share archetypal status.
EMBODIMENT
Embodiment is a notion that eluded me for some time at the beginning of the chaplaincy program. I couldn’t shake the analytical orientation that mind, body, and spirit should be
compartmentalized. My scientific training made the distinctions among them and, quite artificially as it turns out, segmented one part from the others. Specialization in medicine is
based on carving out areas and physiological systems of the human body and making each a world unto itself. My entire professional life has been devoted to a well-defined area of medicine and it seemed a “natural” approach to the human being. What patients hope for in terms of being
considered a whole person is just what caregivers are often untrained to offer. The gaps and schisms that result in dividing up the human body drive medical professionals to see themselves as less than whole, also, as they attempt to integrate their specialized knowledge into the care of the entire patient. When it was suggested in chaplaincy training that the chaplain was the person who would wade into the suffering of the world and embody it, I began to work with what it means to embody something. Many of the references to embodiment were symbolic or metaphorical in the sense that one being or thing was a representation of something else, the Earth as a suffering being, for instance. However, the true meaning of embodiment didn’t strike home with me until I took Laurie Leitch’s and Elaine Miller-Karas’ wonderful course on the Trauma Resiliency Model™ in which we came to experience the physiology of suffering, the possibilities of the resolution of suffering, and what mental and physical resiliency actually feel like. It was this linkage between the idea of a suffering mind and the body’s physiological responses that clarified the idea of embodiment for me. Learning to associate heart rate and breathing patterns with dread, fear, and anxiety, was part of this process. Daniel Siegel in his book, Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation (2010), echoes this same notion: “When I say that the mind is embodied, I mean that the regulation of energy and information flow happens, in part, in the body. It occurs where we usually imagine our mental life taking
place, in the circuits and synapses of the brain, inside the skull. But it also occurs throughout the body, in the distributed nervous system, which monitors and influences energy and information
flowing through our heart and our intestines, and even shapes the activity of our immune system” ( p. 54). Equally important to an understanding of embodiment was to see that making choices about how the mind perceives each of the traumatic elements could change how the trauma was viewed and how the work of transformation could begin. In the end, embracing the difficulty and
the fear without reliving it was not unlike how Zen Buddhists would approach the suffering of the world, embracing non-duality and not attaching to categories. Without the physical body’s participation, it remains an academic exercise. So, embodiment has come to mean sensing someone’s suffering as my own, just as it comes to me in interoceptive terms through my own body responses. It is concrete, physical, and what reality insists upon. The act of embodiment is the metaphorical basis for transforming experiential trauma and suffering. Embodiment is a process as characterized in general systems theory and subject to its definitional criteria, as we shall see in our consideration of systems theory in general. This has been one of the most important insights of my training.
VOICE
Of equal importance for me in the training has been the idea of finding a “voice.” Of course, this needn’t actually be the physical act of speaking out, though this is linked closely to finding the confidence to vocalize the words. I don’t claim to share any traits with those designated as elders or shamans, but I do think that the chaplain must get to the place where knowing, being, and doing coalesce and this is where one finds one’s voice. The “being” of life
is the system, if you will, that constitutes the patterns, structures, and processes of what it is to be human. The “doing” that we come to as a result of our systems interacting with the environment as they naturally do is finding our voice and how we act in the world is answering the call of that voice. The being we experience is our universally human anatomy and physiology and, in some ways, is our archetypal presence on the scene. Our individual uniqueness is the voice we find to address the world. Our voice is an embodied expression of our true selves.
Metaphor, archetype, embodiment, and voice all appear and reappear in the shaman’s world, in Zen Buddhism, in neuroscience taken in a wide context, and in chaplaincy. The confluence of knowing, being, and doing and our conscious processing of them enter our lives and contribute to how it is we are able to create. It seems to me that there is no corner of existence that we can perceive or imagine that doesn’t invite the enduring compassion of the chaplain. I return to the model of Leitch and Miller-Karas and its approach to dealing with traumatic events and I find that it contains the tools necessary for dealing with most fearful unknowns we humans experience. Later in this project, I plan to explore how these same tools can be useful as the chaplain guides others through the shoals of the final conscious experience of dying. To the Western mind, death is the ultimate traumatic experience and how this can be reinterpreted in light of a more expansive experience of life; its cycles, its internal narratives, its metaphors, archetypes, embodiments, and voices calls upon our abilities as chaplains to act creatively to change minds and, thus, hearts and spirits.
I find that using the metaphor of lenses serves very well when trying to understand just how one might define a chaplain. When an optometrist fits a person for glasses, she tries a
number of lens combinations to find the one that sharpens and clarifies. So it is with a variety of lenses that can be used to clarify how we see the chaplain as an elder. One of the lenses is biography and I think this could be considered the basic lens through which each of us looks to define the elder. This will deal with landmarks of the life cycle and some arbitrary division of life into decades that help define maturation and growth. This lens will allow us to answer the questions about how long one must live before becoming an elder and if it is possible to identify a future elder early in life and to cultivate the essential ingredients. This work will entail looking at shamanistic traditions of indigenous cultures to see if the 21st century can learn anything from another culturally embedded archetype. The lens of biography will also emphasize the importance of the experiential approach to understanding the role of the chaplain in contemporary society.
General systems theory, also called complex adaptive theory, will be brushed in as the background for all of the remaining canvas in this project. It will be the field viewed through the various lenses used to define the chaplain as an elder. My intention is to review how systems theory applies to the topic of elderhood in general and how its biological version is important to understand the being and doing of the chaplain. Concepts of autopoiesis, homeostasis, and feedback will be considered. It is also my intention to show how systems theory helps organize the understanding of this project’s elements, each of which reflects and informs the others. They are shamanism, Zen Buddhism, and neuroscience. Both the content and structure of the project will be considered in light of systems theory.
A second lens for viewing chaplaincy is that of shamanism. A general systems approach to understanding indigenous cultural practices highlights their universal characteristics and points out how we can see ourselves and our contemporary societal roles differently. Expansion of systems thinking has uncovered its universal context within ancient indigenous cultures. These cultures, then, are part of our own 21st century cultural context as well. It is one of the goals of this project to see if shamanism can contribute anything to the education of the Buddhist chaplain by way of referring us back to very deeply imbedded roots of spiritual and cultural belonging.
Another lens through which we can view chaplaincy is that of neuroscience. Here we use the information gleaned from numerous clinical experiments that link neural function and behavior. This is indeed a frontier of investigation and one can only think that our present level of sophistication will one day be seen as unsophisticated and preliminary. However, the information being collected and digested now is an exciting stream of scientific investigation and one that continues to grow as we ask more specific questions about brain function as it relates to our physical bodies as well as what we consider to be our minds and how we are led to act in the world. As I thought about this topic, it seemed that any concept of elderhood and chaplaincy inevitably incorporates wisdom and my curiosity led me to consider the ways in which wisdom as a philosophical construct and a cultural value could be translated scientifically into neural correlates and to ask if these neural circuits were shared in the work of the shaman, as well as that of the chaplain.
A fourth lens is that of the Buddha’s Precepts and how they help define the role of the elder. The Bodhisattva (a being committed to the enlightenment of all others) is the Buddhist archetype for the chaplain. As an archetype, the Bodhisattva becomes the model for the wise elder, just as the shaman is in other cultural traditions. What is there about Buddhist precepts that is shared by indigenous cultures and are they not also cultural archetypes in the same ways that individuals are archetypes—universal representations? Once again, looking at Zen Buddhist teachings in light of systems theory opens up the inquiry to consideration of its contribution to our evolving concept of chaplaincy and the role of the chaplain as elder.
All of the lenses contribute to the final image and it is a bit of a stretch to pick them apart to have each stand alone. In fact, taking them piecemeal is to take them linearly and analytically and this isolates them from the open and self-organizing general systems approach. Taken together, however, they help define the education and character of the elder and allow us to see how s/he is placed in our culture and society. This is also in concert with general systems principles of the evolving nature of systems and their unpredictability and creative instability at the edges of activity. Many of the sources used for this project referred to the concepts of linearity and cyclicality in describing the contrasting states of left brain/right brain, Cartesian (stasis)/Heraclitean (flux), and analytical/intuitive—implying the different ways of approaching the broader view of human thought and activity. It is the right brain/Heraclitean/intuitive aspects that suggest the cyclical character of relationships in nature and, thus, the metaphor of the enso. Though the enso is often drawn as an incomplete circle, it still illustrates the contingent model of relationships within systems. My thought was that our lives inevitably end in our deaths and that
this cycling into an unknown state or place was easily and simply represented by the enso and that what the general systems specialist, the shaman, the Bodhisattva, the neuroscientist, and the chaplain all do is to complete the enso as they complete their own lives.
It is a difficult task to merge all of the elements in this subject. Many of the teachings to which we have been introduced in chaplaincy bear on the subject of elderhood and chaplaincy and it is tempting to draw all of them into this project in one way or another. The risk is that the richness of the overlapping patterns will mesmerize rather than clarify. What makes this an important task is that how we come to be elders and chaplains in our lives and in our educations bears on how we will view what we do in our future lives, how we will act, and what we are able to accomplish. It is not inconsequential to see oneself as a participant in a long lineage of individuals committed to the task of shepherding others through life’s difficult passages and relieving the suffering that we all experience in one way or another. This task is also about asking difficult questions, facing dark shadows, and working with inherent human flaws, beginning with our own. Once again, this project will only attempt to sketch out in broad strokes some of the elements that bear on shamanism and chaplaincy. Any one of the lenses would serve as a topic for future inquiry. However, understanding better the complex heritage of the elder eventually requires some mixture of lenses and views.
The sources I have used for this project come from multiple disciplines and my background reading helped me view the grand landscape that systems theory describes. Because that landscape is so vast, it was necessary to limit the categories to those that contributed the most to the focus of the project. I have selected several main sources for each chapter to help
define the topic, but realize that they are introductions to further explorations of the topics. In one way, seeking organization from the almost numberless elements represented a systems process in itself. Just constructing this project represents an attempt to use a guiding hand in the mixture of what appears to be chaotic. When I first pulled together the ideas I wanted to include in this project I felt that I was on to something unique in outlook and outcome and that I was perhaps opening up a new path of inquiry. I don’t have any background in anthropology, but I realized that I was beginning to enter this broad arena as I began my reading. Many of the books I read gathered up some of the same themes that interested me and which I thought would be uniquely germane. Many of the books documented studies from long ago and many of them tied the themes into beautiful presentations. While I was initially disappointed that I hadn’t stumbled onto a new formulation of ideas, it occurred to me that this was really an example of how systems theory might work in the world of ideas and specific disciplines with one concept interacting with others to make a system with an entirely different set of parameters of existence. Joanna Macy (1991) addresses this as part of her description of systems theory and, in particular, what she refers to as “cultural paradigms.” “As thinkers, be they scientists or theologians, play ideas off each other, the freshly glimpsed perspective gains momentum, accelerates. Each thinker amplifies the intuitions, or deviations of the others, and frequently it is impossible to pinpoint the original originator of an idea” (p. 99). I decided that the authors of the works that have proven to be important to me and to this project would serve well as my guides and teachers and so I have concentrated on what they have to tell about the pieces in this collage. I have come to think of them as “bridging teachers,” because they have harvested multiple disciplines in the service of a larger concept. In many ways, I am grateful for the heavy lifting and clear insights they have
provided me as I stitched this project together. My hope is that, however each of us discovers the undercurrents that link us together in our common concerns and pursuits, we will celebrate our interconnectedness and add to the stream. The rediscovery of this spaciousness and depth will continue to give us life together.
In general terms, I have found that to study shamanism, elderhood, and chaplaincy is to be asked to consider the power of metaphors, the distinguishing characteristic of physical movement, energy and information flows, concepts of process versus stasis, bottom-up versus top-down neural processing, vertical and horizontal consciousness, and the nature of “voice” and embodiment. To study elderhood is to consider the many roles to be filled, including interpreter of dying and death and companion to those at the end of life. It is this last that challenges the chaplain at a level that is deep and cosmologically significant and that serves to illustrate the role he fills. Joanna Macy, in her book Mutual Causality in Buddhism and General Systems Theory (1991), addresses just this tendency to look for, and find, an underlying stream of being that applies to all that we know. Here is how she states it in her preface:
The contingent nature of the self—and the consequent spaciousness and workability of experience—is…grounded in the radical interdependence of all phenomena, set forth in the Buddha’s central doctrine of causality, paticca samuppada, or dependent co-arising. In this doctrine, which the Buddha equated with the Dharma, or saving teaching itself, everything arises through mutual
conditioning in reciprocal interaction. Indeed the very word Dharma conveys not a substance or essence, but orderly process itself—the way things work. (p. xi)
Above all else, I will endeavor to include in this project those things that seem to matter most to me. I will tie certain of those elements together in ways that may confound and maybe amuse, but I hope to indicate why I think they matter. I am at a stage of my life when I no longer panic about how the world will change as a result of my actions, but a place from which I can take a longer view of what possibilities might lie ahead. Most of all, I want to spend the time to put some pieces together in a single picture, though it be a snapshot, and to make it credible for those who might follow along and read it. All of the pieces included in this project are interesting to me and don’t constitute any attempt whatsoever to be exhaustive. In fact, this very selective process opens wide the possibilities for future inquiries, in whatever form they may take.
For the purposes of this paper, elder and chaplain will be used interchangeably because I don’t separate them in my own mind and also because what the chaplain becomes reflects a long tradition of cultural embodiment and the chaplain is an heir to that tradition. General systems theory is a description of processes that implicate not only building blocks and processes, but also outcomes in all that engages human beings, including how the mind works to define the processes themselves. The underlying universality of these processes links human cultures through time and offers a methodology of interconnection between the cultural traditions of the past and our present day versions of them. Let us begin this exploration by taking a look at the
grand landscape of general systems theory and highlight those points that bear most directly on the education of the chaplain.
LITERATURE REVIEW
PART ONE: GENERAL SYSTEMS THEORY AS THE FIELD OF STUDY
Our bafflement at the mysteries of the ages may have been the price we paid for a combinatorial mind that opened up a world of words and sentences, of theories and equations, of poems and melodies, of jokes and stories, the very things that make a mind worth having. Steven Pinker
My bridging teachers in general systems theory are Gregory Bateson, Fritjof Capra, Humberto Maturana, and Francisco Varela. What began as a model, or metaphor, for describing processes in biological systems has been adopted by other disciplines to describe how components of other systems interact. The biological version will be the model in this paper for describing the essential elements of systems in general and how they interact. What this system looks like will then be extrapolated to examination of shamanism, Zen Buddhism, and neuroscience by way of filling out the portrait of the elder. The hope is to carry over into each of the chapters the metaphor of the enso to show that these systems share similar characteristics and that the elder is the heir to the natural creativity of the many orders of evolving systems.
General systems theory was an outgrowth of the work of Ludwig von Bertalanffy, an Austrian biologist, and taken up later in cybernetics, where the concepts of feedback loops and other dynamic patterns were explored and exported to many other disciplines. My primary guide to the entire landscape of systems theory, its basic components, and its spawn is Fritjof Capra’s The Web of Life (1996), and it is to this source and other related ones that I will turn to help tease out the points that are most applicable to this examination. It is striking that discussions of
general systems theory and its applications are often couched in metaphorical terms and that the metaphors used imply organic growth. Capra refers to the new paradigm of “deep ecology” as a
“grass-roots” movement and contrasts this with a “shallow ecology” that is anthropocentric (Capra, 1996). The grass-roots reference and the organic process it implies call to mind James Austin’s delineation of neural processing as being “bottom-up” (allocentric) or “top-down” (egocentric) (Austin, 2009). It is really not a surprise that the terminology would be biologically based, since systems theory has grown from work in biology. It is a bit of a surprise to read how Capra (1996) immediately connects this whole field of study to a spiritual base:
Ultimately, deep ecological awareness is spiritual or religious awareness. When the concept of the human spirit is understood as the mode of consciousness in which the individual feels a sense of belonging, of connectedness, to the cosmos as a whole, it becomes clear that ecological awareness is spiritual in its deepest essence. It is, therefore, not surprising that the emerging new vision of reality based on deep ecological awareness is consistent with the so-called perennial philosophy of spiritual traditions, whether we talk about the spirituality of
Christian mystics, that of Buddhists, or the philosophy and cosmology underlying the Native American traditions. (p. 7)
The emphasis in systems thinking is on relationships among the components of the system and not on a dissection of the parts, one from the others. Thinking about systems in this way is to see them on a horizontal plane. Thinking vertically, systems can be described in layers
of complexity, “systems nesting within other systems” (Capra, 1996). Discussion of organization among the parts and on the various levels becomes a discussion about self-organization resulting
in a system with properties, both structures and processes, that none of the separate components possesses (Capra, 1996). Capra expands his thesis this way:
I shall argue that the key to a comprehensive theory of living systems lies in the synthesis of those two very different approaches, the study of substance (or structure) and the study of form (or pattern). In the study of structure we measure and weigh things. Patterns, however, cannot be measured or weighed; they must be mapped. (p. 81)
In general, the emphasis on relationships becomes a discussion of context and process, two additionally important aspects of systems thinking.
All the systems concepts discussed so far can be seen as different aspects of one great strand of systemic thinking, which we may call contextual thinking. There is
another strand of equal importance, which emerged somewhat later in twentieth-century science. This second strand is process thinking. …Systems thinking is always process thinking. (Capra, 1996, p. 42)
Capra also introduces the ideas that systems involve an element of homeostasis, the self-regulation of living systems that maintains their dynamic balance, and this, in turn, involves a
feedback process in which loops of energy and information constantly result in additions and subtractions from the components within the network pattern in a non-linear fashion. In addition
to the new structures and processes in the self-organization of a system, the system is also an open system operating far from equilibrium as well as one in which the components are interconnected in a non-linear fashion.
Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela are two of the researchers referenced in Capra’s work and their work on cognition has been based on systems thinking. Their work constructed a new model for neural processing and concluded that this processing was shared with all living systems. In addition,
The second conclusion Maturana drew from the circular closure of the nervous system amounted to a radically new understanding of cognition. He postulated that the nervous system is not only self-organizing but also continually self-referring, so that perception cannot be viewed as the representation of an external reality but must be understood as the continual creation of new relationships within the neural network….(Capra, 1996, p. 96)
In these terms, cognition as postulated by Maturana is not a representation of an external reality, as much as it is process itself. “The structure of a living system, by contrast, is constituted by the actual relations among the physical components. In other words, the system’s structure is the physical embodiment of its organization. Maturana and Varela emphasize that the system’s organization is independent of the properties of its components, so that a given organization can
be embodied in many different manners by many different kinds of components.” (Capra, 1996) Embodiment becomes part of how we view a system and its components and Capra (1996) goes on to explain: “The structure of a system is the physical embodiment of its pattern of
organization. Whereas the description of the pattern of organization involves an abstract mapping of relationships, the description of the structure involves describing the system’s actual physical components—their shapes, chemical compositions, and so forth” (p. 158). The link between pattern and structure in a living system is process and it is process that allows for what Capra refers to as the “continual embodiment” (p. 160) of structures within a pattern.
Capra summarizes the essential elements of a living system as autopoiesis (or “self-making”) as described by Maturana and Varela, dissipative structure as defined by Prigogine, and cognition as a process from the work of Gregory Bateson. The work of Prigogine was originally focused on thermodynamics and what happens to systems in which heat transfer occurs far from equilibrium. His work with dissipative structures showed that in open systems, dissipation becomes a source of order and this came to be accepted as another component of living systems in general. Thus, a living system is defined by the pattern of organization (the relationships that determine the system’s characteristics), the structure (the embodiment of the
system’s pattern of organization), and life process (the continual embodiment of the system’s pattern of organization) (p. 161).
Living systems are seen as autonomous in that their order and behavior are not dependent on the external environment, but are the result of internally ordered relationships among the components of the network. In most cases, components are not considered static but are relationships between processes of production of the components (Capra, 1996). The system is
closed to the components within (providing stability through its self-organization), but open structurally (allowing matter to flow through it). One of the more fascinating behaviors of a living system is what Capra refers to as a “bifurcation point” (Capra, 1996), a point in time and space in which the autopoietic activity and its feedback loops bring the system to the threshold of
stability. In the ensuing instability, newer and more creative forms of order appear spontaneously and make for development and evolution.
Living systems and their dependence on pattern and structure are linked to cognition, the process of knowing. “According to the theory of living systems, mind is not a thing but a process—the very process of life. In other words, the organizing activity of living systems, at all levels of life, is mental activity. … Mind—or, more accurately, mental process—is immanent in matter at all levels of life.” (Capra, 1996, p. 172) Gregory Bateson, Maturana, and Varela identified cognition with the process of life. Cognition, or knowing, is distinguished from thinking and it becomes more broadly applicable to all living systems. It was pointed out by Maturana and Varela that it was not necessary for a living system to have a brain to have a mind. Thinking, too, is not a requirement for a dynamic, living system. The mind is the process and the brain is the structure in those systems that resemble the human component.
Among the many mental adjustments systems theory demands of us, one of the most curious is to reconsider our concept of equilibrium as being the most desirable state of existence. Capra would have us consider an organism in equilibrium as a dead organism (Capra, 1996). If an organism is far from equilibrium, then it is closer to complexity and that brings it closer to a state of “uniqueness, richness, and variety” (Capra, 1996, p. 181) —all desirable conditions for a living system in a healthy state of autopoiesis. Capra turns his attention from the historically
biological base of systems theory to a consideration of social systems in general and human societies in particular. “Human societies are a special case because of the crucial role of language, which Maturana has identified as the critical phenomenon in the development of human consciousness and culture.” (Capra, 1996, p. 210) “Because of the ‘inner world’ of concepts, ideas, and symbols that arises with human thought, consciousness, and language,
human social systems exist not only in the physical domain but also in a symbolic social domain.” (Capra, 1996, p. 211) He uses the human family as an example of a biological system defined by blood relationships, but also as a system of relationships that might have nothing to do with bloodlines.
It is worth including here Maturana’s ideas concerning mind as a process and, in one sense, how one can change one’s mind.
Now, the living system not only specifies these structural changes, it also specifies which perturbations from the environment trigger them. This is the key to the Santiago theory of cognition. The structural changes in the system constitute acts of cognition. …Cognition, then, is not a representation of an
independently existing world, but rather a continual bringing forth of a world through the process of living. The interactions of a living system with its environment are cognitive interactions, and the process of living itself is a process of cognition. (Capra, 1996, p. 267)
Varela describes cognition as “embodied action” (Capra, 1996, p. 268). The domain of cognition is the vast array of perceptions and emotions. For the complex human system, interactions occur with the external environment as well as with an inner one in which language, thought, and consciousness play roles. Maturana and Varela are emphatic that what results, what is brought forth is not the world but a world (Capra, 1996). Because autopoietic activity is occurring all the time, the world we know is not a representation of objects around us but a continually embodied
context resulting from multiple, coupled interactions. Meaning in this world of ours is a mélange of relationship patterns given linguistic distinctions, including metaphors, and all of this leads to reflection and consciousness (Capra, 1996).
The uniqueness of being human lies in our ability to continually weave the linguistic network in which we are embedded. To be human is to exist in language. In language we coordinate our behavior, and together in language we bring forth our world. (p. 290)
Having worked our way up in a grass-roots fashion from a description of the criteria defining a living system to the complex human system, Capra brings us to the special capacity we humans
have for language and how we define ourselves and our world by it. In no small measure, metaphor becomes part of this process of self-definition. Embodiment and metaphor are both integral to our own self-organization.
Varela hypothesized that there exists a form of primary consciousness that he referred to as “mental state.” These mental states are continually arising and disappearing but all are
associated with a dominant sensation. “Another important observation is that the experiential state is always ‘embodied’—that is, embedded in a particular field of sensation. In fact, most mental states seem to have a dominant sensation that colors the entire experience” (Capra, 1996).
Buddhist philosophy contains some of the most lucid expositions of the human condition and its roots in language and consciousness. …The Buddha taught that
all fixed forms—things, events, people, or ideas—are nothing but maya. …Out of ignorance…we divide the perceived world into separate objects that we see as firm and permanent, but which are really transient and ever-changing. (Capra, 1996, p. 294)
We will revisit the Buddhist connection a bit later in this project, but suffice it to say here that there is less of a separation between systems theory, shamanism, Zen Buddhism, and neuroscience than one might think. General systems theory and its theorists created a new model for life and consciousness and their work depended heavily on new concepts (autopoiesis, for instance) and new uses of words (positive and negative feedback) to make their case for its
universality. Concepts that emerge from these studies are equally applicable to all of the “subsystems” this project examines. Among them are the notions of interdependence, uncertainty (or unpredictability), non-self (no objects, just processes), impermanence (the idea of dissipative structures), and action without gaining goals (no “unseen mover” in the picture). These, too, are common threads in this tapestry and contribute to the context of chaplaincy education.
One way of exploring the universality of themes or threads in general systems theory and, more specifically, the complex human system is to refer back to a time and to cultures in which these same themes might have been embedded in indigenous traditions. If, in fact, systems can be said to share common properties, then indigenous traditions might be illustrations of and links to our present day educational heritage in chaplaincy. Perhaps their unique orientations have some lessons to teach us as we attempt to define the entire enso, or domain, of the chaplains’ world. This consideration has brought me to shamanism and another bridging teacher’s work.
PART 2: SHAMANISM
We all agree that your theory is mad. The problem that divides us is this: is it sufficiently crazy to be right? Niels Bohr
I didn’t know I was interested in shamanism when I was very young, but I was fascinated with the cultural traditions of the Navajo people. This part of my story goes back to a time when my Grandmother, Marthana, had converted her tuberculosis sanatorium in Boulder, Colorado, into a convalescent home for Navajo patients. Tuberculosis was a common disease before antibiotics were developed to treat it. It was a disease that was rampant among the Navajo people
long after it had been successfully treated in the general population. Marthana had initially received a contract to treat the Navajo children and when all of them had been treated and sent back to the reservation the adults came to Boulder. I spent a great deal of time with my Grandmother and got to mingle with the Navajo adults. Even though they were patients in a hospital setting, they maintained their native dress and styles and these had a great impact on my
young mind, as did their innate nobility and warm reserve. In my imagination, I became one of them. I played being a Navajo chief among the sandstone and shale cliffs that abutted my Grandmother’s sanatorium. I picked Navajo culture as one of my middle school writing projects and this interest was fanned by two trips with the sanatorium administrator to the Navajo Tribal Fair. As formative as these events were, I was awestruck when Annie Wauneka, the daughter of the Navajo’s revered chief Chee Dodge, visited the sanatorium as the tribal secretary of health and education. She was beautiful as only a regal chief’s daughter could be. She was physically tall but overweight. Her demeanor of generosity and warmth made her into a being of authentic
presence. She wore traditional regalia and was covered in turquoise and silver with a colorful dress down to the ground, a very exotic costume. I can remember all the patients lining up along both sides of a ramp leading from the kitchen to the dormitory and how she and they reached out and touched one another. I remember it was very quiet among the people gathered there. Annie walked gracefully and her movements caused her jewelry and dress to ring and murmur as she swayed and walked. At some level, I connected with the reverence of the occasion. To this day, I can still see her walking ever so slowly towards me and greeting me in much the same way she greeted everyone. I simply didn’t think of myself as different from them. I was probably 10 years old. She could have been Gandhi or the His Holiness the Dalai Lama or Mother Teresa.
I think this was the first time I made the connection between what my Grandmother meant to me and the idea of what an elder was. Annie and Marthana were sisters in elderhood. Neither was a shaman. Both had what Roshi Joan refers to as a “grandmother’s heart” and with this they were archetypes for the compassionate soul. This was my earliest association between elderhood and the context in which it emerged. I saw Annie through the eyes of her own people
and I knew her in just that singular way. How I felt about her was how I came to feel about the Navajo people. Even though the patients had been removed from their reservation, the context of their lives was reflected in what happened when Annie visited. I sensed that powerful connection in a way that wasn’t fully conscious or reasoned but was physically embodied.
Context, or domain, is important to systems considerations and equally so when exploring the world of the shaman. It is possible that at the beginning of the enso of the world, in the shadows of time and memory, a shaman lived among his people. This first shaman was the archetype of today’s chaplain. The methodology of selection for a shaman undoubtedly varied
from culture to culture, but the universal emergence of the shamanic traditions and the specific roles of the shaman were shared across many societies in ways that make some generalizations about them possible. A shaman in one tradition, then, could be said to be an archetype of shamans in other cultures. The archetypal roles speak to the contexts from which they arise. Michael Harner sketches out the context in The Way of the Shaman (1982):
Shamanism flourished in ancient cultures that lacked the technological innovations of modern medicine. In my opinion, the low technological level of those cultures compelled their members to develop to the highest degree possible
the ability of the human mind to cope with serious problems of health and survival. (p. 53)
Harner says the characteristic that distinguishes the shaman from others in his society is to use his personal power, granted by a guardian spirit—often an animal spirit, in an altered state of
consciousness (ASC) to restore lost beneficial powers or to remove harmful ones (Harner, 1982). Halifax underlines the power realm of the shaman in her book, Shaman: The Wounded Healer (1982):
The steps of the journey of shamanic initiation seem to have a patterned course. The call to power necessitates a separation from the mundane world: the neophyte turns away from the secular life, either voluntarily, ritually, or spontaneously through sickness, and turns inward towards the unknown, the mysterium. …Only
through the development of discipline will the shaman’s habitual ways of seeing and behaving dissolve, and the visionary realms open. Thus, the initial call to power takes the shaman to the realm of chaos, the limen, where power exists in a free and untransformed state. (p. 6)
Mention here of the pattern of initiation, the challenges of dealing with the habitual structures of behavior, and the “untransformed state” of the realm of the shaman’s greatest power call to mind characteristics of a system as defined by Maturana and Varela in which pattern, structure, and
process are present. This is the context in which the shaman is called, educated, and in which he acts to heal on behalf of those who suffer. Reference to shamans in this paper will be made in the male gender, as most ancient healers seemed to have been male. However, this in no way excludes women from the role of shamanic healer as proposed in this project. In fact, present day shamanic initiations include women as well as men. One might even say that the intuitive and
experiential aspects of ancient shamanic education were really the female components expressing themselves in the journeys made by men. This also supported the character of the power the shaman obtains through the initiation process, a power of authority and not control.
The power of the shaman is a culling of energy from sources at a deeper level of consciousness, an energy source, an altered state of consciousness, or “shamanic state of consciousness” (Harner, 1982), into which the shaman enters and within which he is educated to the traditions and expectations of his society, the “cosmic geography of nonordinary reality” (Harner, 1982) in order to return to the common world to heal the afflicted. This journey is characterized by entrance into another world (the “Lowerworld” of Harner), a series of explorations and trials, and
a return to the world of our shared daylight. Commonly, descriptions of this journey and the altered state of consciousness contain metaphorical references, often to gods and spirits resembling animals from the ordinary world. Halifax (1982) paints a darker and more troubling world of testing for the shaman:
The deepest structures within the psyche are found in the themes of descent to the Realm of Death, confrontations with demonic forces, dismemberment, trial by fire, communion with the world of spirits and creatures, assimilation of the
elemental forces, ascension via the World Tree and/ or the Cosmic Bird, realization of a solar identity, and return to the Middle World, the world of human affairs. The shaman, however, has a social rather than a personal reason for opening the psyche as he or she is concerned with the community and its well-being….(p. 7)
The shaman’s journey through the nonordinary world is a journey through chaos and violence (recall that this world is metaphorically down, dark, and dangerous) and his personal testing and the return is to a world reordered in a healed way (an ascent into a metaphorical world that is full of light and freedom). This could be the context for the trials that result in the acquisition of special powers that make the shaman an effective agent among his people. The common use of the word “power” implies dominance, control, force, and might, as used to describe a tribal chief or a head of state, for instance. It is important to distinguish this reading of power from the shaman’s power, which is an embodied energy and authority granted as a reward
for surviving the trials of his initiation. In a systems perspective, the “Lowerworld” (Harner, 1982), or “Realm of Death” (Halifax, 1982), is the domain of self-organization, where the pattern is shamanic maturity, the structures are the inhabitants of this nonordinary world, and the process is the dying to an old life and being born anew as an agent of creative change for others. The process of initiation for the shaman is one in which he experiences the dark trials of disease in all their manifestations in order to prepare him for what lies ahead with his patients. This is an experiential journey that begins inside his own body and biography, a place where he is educated and where his educational experiences provide him with creative energies to act as a healer. It is
important to point out the critical nature of embodiment in this process because it seems integral to the effectiveness of the shaman. His compassion and open heart are formed through his initiation.
The shaman as artist and performer utilizes the imagination to give form to a cosmos that is unpredictable. Even in the course of wild initiatory trances, the
mythological rendering of a chaotic psyche is essential. Order is imposed on chaos; form is given to psychic confusion; the journey finds its direction. The shaman also provides a diseased person with a language, by means of which unexpressed and otherwise inexpressible psychic states can be immediately expressed. And it is the transition to this verbal expression—at the same time making it possible to undergo in an ordered and intelligible form a real experience that would otherwise be chaotic and inexpressible—which induces the release of the physiological process.(Halifax, 1982, p. 18)
Tribal cultures over tens of thousands of years depended on the shaman for the only means of healing available to them. Our more recent technological and pharmacological advances have supplanted the apparent need for the shaman’s touch. While we are beginning to explore the potential contributions of herbal remedies, alternative therapies such as acupuncture, and ancient traditions such as yoga, and tai chi, they are seen as lesser contributions and certainly not usually the first line of therapy in Western-style medicine. Relegating them to a lesser status
of care isolates treatment of the body from its holistic context of healing and health. Present-day care of the sick and dying has something to incorporate from the indigenous cultures in which shamans exercised their healing powers. What is possible for us to learn is what chaplains can explore as they come to understand the deeper layers of consciousness and the complex relationships between mind, body, and spirit—all of which must be recognized in order for healing to occur. Shamans seemed to have understood this better than we do.
The shaman’s quest for special powers seems to connect him with the natural world and to connect him in a way that allows for the “bringing forth of a world,” as Maturana and Varela call the outcomes of autopoiesis and self-organization. Their reference was to the continual embodiment of cognition in a constantly changing environment or domain (Capra, 1996). Harner (1982) states it this way: “The shaman is forever trying to articulate his personal revelatory experiences as though they were pieces of a great cosmic jigsaw puzzle” (p. 57). Halifax (1982) says that the Cosmic Tree that appears in some cultures is a symbol for this concept of continual embodiment and renewal, springing as it does from the eternal waters feeding it (p. 21). Isn’t this concept of the changing character of the systems we experience in the ordinary world, our biological world, similar to what the shaman experiences? Doesn’t he continually reorder the
world around him based on how the components couple and uncouple? His success is said to relate directly to how his patients respond to his healing efforts. This is the feedback loop that is operative in his domain and echoes the systems approach.
The educational process of the shaman is experiential and lifelong. He is the agent of communication between the unseen world of spirit and the ordinary world of his patients. His energy and authority, combined with maturity and physical age, bring him to a place of wisdom
where he has completed all the phases of initiation, yet continues to participate in the rebirth of the energy that fuels him in his work with his people. His journey is one through chaos and danger and a return, having negotiated a path through the corridors of darkness and the terrors of death. This imbues him with humble power to assist everyone remaining in the ordinary world with the same terrifying and final passage. This is the work of the elder. It is also the work of the chaplain. It is completing the enso.
PART 3: ZEN BUDDHISM
This world is only in my imagination; the only reality is the imagining. Gyorgy Kepes
Gregory Bateson, Maturana, and Varela were instrumental in describing an expansive notion of mind and cognition that goes beyond thinking. For them, cognition is the process of knowing and it is identified with the process of life. For cognition to be present, mind is essential but a brain is not. Organisms that do not have a brain are still capable of cognition, as they perceive components in their environments and organize them according to the conditions of autopoiesis (processing the chemical milieu and responding to changes in the environment, for
instance). Mind and matter are interdependent dimensions of cognition. The important question for the shaman and for us is how does systems theory make cognition and consciousness part of our lives? Maturana and Varela in The Tree of Knowledge (1998) state:
The unique features of human social life and its intense linguistic coupling are manifest in that this life is capable of generating a new phenomenon, both close to and remote from our own experience: our mind, our consciousness. (p. 223)
…there is no self-consciousness without language as a phenomenon of linguistic recursion. Self-consciousness, awareness, mind—these are phenomena that take place in language. Therefore, as such they take place only in the social domain. (p. 230)
Language, then, is an essential element in consciousness and self-consciousness and it is what locates us in our ordinary world of suffering and service. Joanna Macy, in her book Mutual Causality in Buddhism and General Systems Theory (1991) bridges Buddhist practice and systems theory tenets and in that way links the worlds of the shaman and the chaplain through the unique ways in which consciousness is perceived. The ordinary, material world we know is not separated from mind in Buddhist thought, just as mind and matter are not considered separate in the domain of an autopoietic system. What is important for Macy and for us is that the perspectives that each of these not-so-separate disciplines brings to our lives is the power to act in ways that relieve suffering. With a broader understanding of the interconnectedness of the
parts and a deeper understanding of consciousness, we can emerge from the theories into practical effective action.
Macy contrasts the worldviews of Parmenides and Heraclitus to illustrate the linear mindset and the intuitive mindset, respectively, which have permeated how we in the 21st century
order our world. Parmenides saw reality as objective and fixed in relationships. Heraclitus saw reality as an ever-flowing stream into which tributaries flowed and exited, a system defined by fluxes and change. These contrasting versions of reality allow us to see the material world in two different ways and to make a choice about how the world works. Choosing the model of Heraclitus frees us from the constraints of a fixed and rigid world and allows us to participate in a more spacious and creative one. This latter world, the one modeled on that of Heraclitus, and the one reflected in the Buddhist teaching of paticca samupadda, or dependent co-arising, has implications for present-day chaplains. The shamanic initiation and rituals share methodological elements with Zen Buddhism, as they incorporate elements of general systems theory. General
systems theory is less a theory resulting from an experimental process and more a worldview based on process itself and its implications in living systems. As a worldview, it helps our human minds organize many of the chaotic subsystems that we encounter in our ordinary world. As process, it has applications to a wide array of physiological and psychological behaviors. Macy (1991) stakes out the ground for the Buddhist perspective this way:
Its [the Buddhist] vision of interdependence, presenting reality as a dynamic interaction of mutually conditioning events, posits no prime cause or unconditioned absolute to which occurrences can be traced in a linear fashion.
This causal vision, known as paticca samuppada, or dependent co-arising, underlies the Buddhist perception of the human predicament and of the liberation that is possible. It constitutes the intellectual content of the Buddha’s
enlightenment—that part of his transforming, intuitive realization that can be expressed in conceptual terms. It represents that character of reality, that truth about the universe, to which Gotama awoke. …It is hard to find another faith or value system where a doctrine of causality holds so explicit and so central a position.
In this doctrine, reality appears as a dynamically interdependent process. All factors, mental and physical, subsist in a web of mutual causal interaction, with no element or essence held to be immutable or autonomous. …We fabricate our bondage by hypostatizing and clinging to what is by nature contingent and transient. … Hence liberation entails a vision of the dependently co-arising nature of all phenomena. This vision, which amounts to a reorganization of personality, is made possible by the cleansing of perception (through meditation) and by moral conduct. (p. 18)
Buddhist awareness of mind is a disciplined way of acknowledging transient physical and mental phenomena and releasing them. Dichotomies and attachments disappear and are replaced with interdependence and impermanence. This is the process of discovering non-self and the freedom it brings.
Because the teachings of the Buddha represent a system of process, it is difficult to encompass the tenets and label them as a creed or a fixed body of belief. What we encounter in our daily lives affects how we organize the data of the world and the perceptions they engender in a continually shifting and shaping way. This flexibility and freedom is the ground for creative
engagement and action. Embedded in the concept of paticca samupadda is the potential for each Buddhist practitioner to achieve the liberation described by the Buddha. In many individual ways, this process recapitulates the initiation rites of the shaman as the individual practitioner enters a unique experiential trial in which impermanence, suffering, and no-self are experienced and embodied prior to re-entry into the ordinary world and the work of alleviating the suffering of others. This educational process is available to all, but certainly characteristic of the shaman and the chaplain. Macy (1991) emphasizes the extent to which this process informs human behavior:
Changing conditions…can produce a persisting mismatch between percepts and constructs. In this event, experience becomes anomalous with respect to preconceptions. In order to make the new data meaningful and usable, new constructs are evolved. By these the system alters and refines its map of the world. The mismatch and the search for new constructs or codes are understood in
terms of positive feedback, which corresponds to the process we call “learning.” This represents a reorganization or self-(re)organization of the system, which fundamentally modifies its internal structure….(p. 84)
In all cases, the interactions within the system, whether cellular biology or human psychology, are relational and continually changing. Systems are both closed and open. They are closed to their unique structural components and how they interact with each other, and open to energy
and information from the wider environment (and other subsystems) surrounding them. In more complex systems, such as those defining a human being, structural components may not vary, but the relationships among them may. Relationships among subsystems are, likewise, causally related and the internal interactions bring forth the new worlds of Maturana and Varela. This accounts for the diversity among us and provides the challenges to the Buddhist practitioner, the shaman, and the chaplain. If everything is in flux, then there really isn’t any fixed point of departure and no unyielding set of principles by which all problems of suffering and joy can be summarized and dispatched. The defining boundaries between student and teacher, between patient and caregiver, eventually blur and potentially dissolve. Just as “mind” is a process, so is
“self.” In the conceptualization of Maturana and Varela, process allows for a world (not the world) to come forth and this same view allows for a self (not the self) to be born anew as the conditions and relationships in its systems and subsystems constitute and reconstitute continually. “…we rely on this causal loop—the operation of feedback—to ensure meaning, the maintenance of intelligibility. The cognitive system finds satisfaction and value in the distillation of meaning, in extracting message from noise and making sense of the world” (Macy, 1991, p.
125). Macy adds that the Buddha wasn’t so much interested in congealing doctrine as he was in emphasizing trust in processing experiential data. Accepting that mind is essentially process and not an object or a compartmentalized entity of any sort makes the distinction between mind and body unnecessary in a general systems world where the domain under consideration contains components in relational flux, deriving transitional identities from interacting energies and feedback.
Maturana and Varela made a special case for human societies in their consideration of systems by introducing the human capacity for thought, language, and consciousness, in the creation of a symbolic social domain. Macy (1991) also makes a special case for humans in their unique capacity to make choices:
While in the Buddhist view all the world and planes of existence teem with consciousness, human mentality presents, in contrast to other realms of life, a distinctive feature: the capacity to choose. Only the human possesses the power to choose and change—hence the rare and priceless privilege of a human life; hard to win, it brings both responsibility and the possibility of enlightenment. Such a
notion is analogous to the perception of general systems theory, which sees the self-reflexive consciousness of the natural cognitive system as evolving from, and consisting in, its evaluative, decision-making functions. The challenge this kind of consciousness constitutes is, for the Buddhist, repeatedly brought to mind by meditation on the rare opportunity which a human existence presents. (p. 153)
Macy highlights the fluid nature of human being and doing and how thought and memory merge into identity. Being and doing, present thought and memory, are all changed creatively by mutual causality and systems interactions. Choice for Macy is not an objectified behavior, but a process of selection, of intention. “Indeed because intention is seen as so important, and choice so determinative, the opportunity provided by human existence is considered in the Buddhist view
to be incomparably precious” (Macy, 1991, p. 173). Making choices is part of the overall participation in multiple systems, of our inner consciousness, and of our doing and being in the ordinary world. We are not identified by our choices so much as we are molded by them in their results. “For in mutual causality, whether viewed religiously or scientifically, the views we hold are not distant from us in time or space, but present realities, unfolding out of the core of our existence and capable of transforming it in the present moment” (Macy, 1991, p. 210).
PART 4: NEUROSCIENCE
During Seclusion:
All that’s visible springs from causes intimate to you.
While walking, sitting, lying down, the body itself is complete truth.
If someone asks the inner meaning of this:
“Inside the treasury of the dharma eye a single grain of dust.”
Dogen (Dogen, 1985, p. 219)
Capra, Maturana, and Varela have been our bridging teachers in providing us with a very broad canvas with the colors of general systems theory brushed in. Joanna Macy has been the
bridging teacher that placed human beings on this canvas as processing systems through the practice of Buddhist precepts. Roshi Halifax and Michael Harner helped us understand the passage of the shaman through his initiation rites in order to resurface into the ordinary world as a healer. This passage was a process through an embodied altered consciousness not unlike the
Buddhist’s meditation practice. As I considered the human agency in the general systems worldview, I became curious about the components of personal power and authority that establish a person as a healer. If mind is a process and embodiment is another (are they the same process?) and they exist within the human biological system, then what are the discernable neural connections that account for our precious abilities? Can our present-day technological sophistication shed any light on, say, wisdom? If wisdom is a process and not a place or a thing, then can it be detected on a functional M.R.I. (functional magnetic resonance imaging) scan? Does wisdom depend on age, maturity, or memory? Is wisdom being or doing?
To help answer some of these questions and to make some valuable connections with the other pieces of this project, I picked Stephen S. Hall as a bridging teacher for this chapter. His book, Wisdom: From Philosophy to Neuroscience (2010) is my main source for this information and insight. Here Hall introduces wisdom:
Let me sketch out a few general principles that often seem to be associated with wise behavior. Wisdom requires an experience-based knowledge of the world….It requires mental focus, reflecting the ability to analyze and discern the most important aspects of the acquired knowledge, knowing what to use and what to discard….It requires mediating, refereeing, between the frequently conflicting
inputs of emotion and reason, of narrow self-interest and broader social interest, of instant rewards or future gains. Moreover, it expresses itself through an insistently social vocabulary of interactive behavior: a fundamental sense of
justice…, a commitment to the welfare of social…units that extend beyond the self, and an ability to defer immediate gratification in order to achieve the greatest amount of good for the greatest number of people. (p. 17)
Can we see the shaman, the Buddhist practitioner, and the chaplain/elder in this picture? If wisdom is really a process, then we might expect it to contain all the elements of those described by general systems theory, that is: autopoiesis, relational interactions and couplings (homeostasis), feedback loops, and closed and open communications with internal and external elements. As a human process, it also includes choice, thought, language, and consciousness. Mind as a process gives way to wisdom as a process in this construct. In the ordinary world of human agency, one must have the intention to be wise and to experience its acquisition in a deeply personal way. Wisdom as a process corresponds nicely with the Buddhist concept of awakening and this is the spaciousness that opens up to the practitioner through meditation. The
possession of wisdom, however, implies its usefulness among those for whom it is not manifest, those who suffer. This is the return on investment expected of the wise elder. Hall points out one aspect of this relationship and uses terminology that relates directly to what neuroscientists now identify as different modes of neural processing.
To some degree, the natural history of wisdom can be seen as a never-ending battle between the forces of theology and those of secularization, between top-down, benevolent, dispensed, and divine form of wisdom and a bottom-up, organic, hard-earned human form of wisdom.(Hall, 2010, p. 34)
The bottom-up mode is metaphorically pictured as a grass-roots process and implies a system whose components are elastic and changing in ways that living systems are described. It is often associated with more intuitive and non-linear activities. The top-down mode, in contrast, is the executive function and enables the brain to make real-time assessments that lead to survival behavior. The brain areas involved in these actions include limbic, parietal, and frontal regions (Siegel, 2007). Memory and planning are located in these areas, whereas more primary sensory experiences of the core self inhabit the bottom-up realm. Siegel (2007) outlines the “eight senses” involved in this “grass roots” circuitry.
Each of our eight senses has primary neural circuitry in which we (1) perceive the outside world through our first five senses, (2) have interoception of our bodily sixth sense, (3) achieve mindsight for the mental processes of our own and others’
minds in our seventh sense, and (4) have a direct sensation of our resonance with something larger than our day-to-day adaptive self in our eighth sense. Living within the directness of these eight senses enables us to be grounded in the physical world, the body, our mind, and our relationships. (p. 137)
Bottom-up processing seems to activate the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the initial activation can begin within the body, with the physiological processes that are most present to us; our breath and our pulse. Recruitment can eventually activate circuitry associated with all senses and keeps us centered in the present, with connections to our bodies. In the terminology of
Leitch and Miller-Karas, this is the grounding, the physically based connection between us and the world. Grounding is the gateway to greater mindfulness (and what Leitch and Miller-Karas call “resourcing”) and it is through this portal that we can move away from the grasp of the controlling top-down circuits.
What Siegel describes in The Mindful Brain (2007) is coupling of general systems concepts and formulations with what is known about neural processing based on scientific data. General systems theory has given medical science a new paradigm (and new metaphors) of explanation and the terminology that Bateson, Maturana, and Varela used to describe their domain seems perfectly suited to neuroscience. In its own way, this terminology is a bottom-up processing of information. How we think about systems theory shapes concepts of neural function, and the other way around. If we accept the applications of neuroscience to formulations of consciousness, intuition, and mindfulness and see them in the Buddhist practice of zazen (meditation) as well as the work of the chaplain, then it doesn’t seem like much of a stretch to
imagine that they would apply to the altered consciousness of the shaman. Everything about the shaman’s behavior, from his initiatory passages, his emergence from the Lowerworld, and his return to the work of the ordinary world, speaks to a bottom-up process where physiological responses and embodied cultural memory merge. Return to the ordinary world and its changing vicissitudes and demands, as well as the uniqueness of symptoms of each of his patients, calls
upon autopoietic processing to match the shaman’s gifts to the patients’ needs, thus creating a resilience of action.
Hall turns to the work of Erik Erikson to show how old age as a stage of life came to be associated with wisdom. Erikson postulated that the lifelong acquisition of wisdom was a way of
saving against the despair of old age. Wisdom has come to be associated with a deep personal experience of adaptation, memory, special knowledge, and intuition wrapped in the cloak of social responsibility. Old age, on the other hand, retains the dismal associations of being abandoned and of being disabled. Mary Catherine Bateson, in her book Composing a Further Life (2010) paints a landscape of life’s stages and refers to Erik Erikson’s work, but inserts what she calls “Adulthood II” between Adulthood and Old Age. She focuses on the block of time many older people have after retiring from a career but before they enter the period of disability and decline. This time period might be as long as thirty additional years made available by increased longevity and the advances of medical science to treat many diseases that in previous decades killed individuals at an earlier age.
Bateson also tackles the commonly held perceptions about elders as being decrepit or out- and-out sponges on society, but she also challenges seniors to divest themselves of the stereotypes they themselves have of aging and of youth (Bateson, 2010).
What is critical in our era is recognizing that longevity creates both the need and the possibility for the growth involved in readdressing these issues, especially the reexamination and reaffirmation of identity. (p. 90)
In the landscape she paints, Bateson mentions the value of seeing life’s events in a different perspective, especially by way of folding into the perspective personal cross-referenced elements that refocus topics and events in a more integrated way (Bateson, 2010). She stresses how important it is to teach the young and to be willing to be taught by them (Bateson, 2010). She
discusses how spirituality can become a new realm of exploration in Adulthood II and brushes against the reality of death by implication in her discussions of the stages of the life cycle and their inevitable permutations. However, exploring the stereotypes and metaphors of life’s stages might also involve a more direct look at those that veil death (“a good death,” death as the grim reaper, etc.). In facing the many visages of death, we are better able to interpret them to the young and to defuse some of the fear that all of us have of them. Could we perform any greater service to our youth—or ourselves?
More and more, wisdom has come to be thought of as a process and less an attribute and this can free it from the prison of objects, compartments, and dichotomies. One’s sense of time and its passage makes old age the place to repose, as this is the time when introspection and broader themes replace the knowledge acquisition of earlier years (Bateson, 2010). There is more bottom-up processing of neural information as sense experiences activate emotions and they, in turn, interact autopoietically with thought processes. How we act to maintain emotional balance is a complex systems function based on physiology and biochemistry and the streams that feed
one another in our brains. Hall presents the results of investigations that highlight how entertaining “mixed emotions” becomes a new way of processing input for older individuals. This mixing balances out the swings of emotion that can characterize youth. Daniel Siegel (2007, 2010) deals with emotion regulation in his books and details the neural correlates that help us
understand better how the processing of stimuli in our ordinary lives is related to the processing of our brains. This reinforces the embodiment of self within brain structures such as the amygdala and the anterior cingulate cortex. This embodiment helps the elder sort out what matters most and to make determinations of what is most valued within the culture. This broad
perspective is what the shaman and the elder offer others. Finding those places in the brain where values are established is apparently still beyond the frontiers of present-day neuroscience, but the day when these can be defined is much closer. The neurotransmitter dopamine is an element in this complex process of learning, learning from failures, establishing values, and making judgments (Hall, 2010). Moral choice implicates the anterior cingulate gyrus, the insula, and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. The processes of mind, thought, consciousness, emotional balance, and moral choice will someday give up their interconnections and sub-layered systems and we will all know more about how our lives become what they are and, especially, how we grow into elderhood. Until the time comes when wisdom and its subsystems can be accessed technologically, we are left to mix philosophy and neuroscience as we are able. We will fall back on our available resources to account for other elements of wisdom: compassion, humility, gratitude, altruism, patience, dealing with ambiguity and uncertainty, constancy, mediation and education—important elements in the life of the shaman, the elder, and the Buddhist chaplain.
One of the components of wisdom is compassion and it seems to involve neural activity in several different areas of the brain. The initial tracking that occurs when one enters the domain of one who is suffering is mediated through the tempero-parietal area. The necessary physiological embodiment of someone else’s suffering (taking someone’s suffering “to heart”) draws on the insula (and its nest of mirror neurons) and the active response to the suffering
implicates the basal ganglia (Hall, 2010). Compassion and its neural connections bring together the “noticing” that engages us in our recognition of a compassionate need and also in the motor activity that constitutes the response to that need. Compassion without the motor response is empathy. Perceiving suffering in the first place seems to rely on “mirror neurons,” areas of
neural processing that reflect, as in a mirror, the responses other beings have to their environment. These are located, not surprisingly, in the visual cortex, but also in other brain locations that tie together the emotional component to the motor component of compassionate responses. If mind is a process, then the possibility exists that the autopoietic interactions involving the embodied nature of compassion could enhance compassionate action. The shaman could be demonstrating this important enhancement of compassionate action through the tracking phase, the embodiment phase, and the action phase not only of his educational preparation, but also in the work he finally does when he emerges from the Lowerworld into ordinary life and ministers to those afflicted with disease. And isn’t this the mission of the engaged Buddhist practitioner as suffering is perceived and then addressed with action? Chaplaincy training is designed to enhance mirror neuron processing as it incorporates the pain and suffering of others and leads to relief of the suffering. This could not happen as successfully without embodying the distress of another and filtering it in a way that makes subsequent action
skillful. Imitation by way of the mirror neuron system bolsters individual healing relationships and social cohesion, as allocentric (bottom-up or grassroots) processing occurs and others are considered as valuable and worthy as one’s self (Austin, 2009) .
The wisdom of the elder is also characterized by the somewhat elusive notion of humility. From the Zen Buddhist perspective, humility springs from the realization that life at its
foundation is defined by uncertainty, by not-knowing. It is the acknowledgement that what we know is limited in its scope and this results in seeing any one person’s role in life as tentative, yet allowing for an expansion of opportunities for learning. “…sagacity refers to a suite of behaviors we typically associate with humility: considering advice, learning from other people, admitting
mistakes, reflecting often, being a good listener, and acknowledging multiple perspectives on an issue” (Hall, 2010, p. 144).
Hall points out how neurologically complicated altruism and social justice are and points to the evolutionary benefits of each (Hall, 2010). Evolution has placed a high premium on cooperation among individuals and groups and this social cohesion depends to a large extent on altruism and its enforcement. He points out that neural circuits are often shared for opposite impulses and this occurs in the reward center of the dorsal striatum for both reward and punishment. He also points to how simplistic our knowledge is when we locate the end-point of a neural track in the brain (in this case the dorsal striatum, insular cortex, and anterior cingulated cortex) that depends on many complex cognitive steps to completion; such as the dependence on discernment, short-term vs. long-term benefits, minimizing self-interest and maximizing group benefits, and exercising patience for altruistic goals to be realized. The evolutionary rationale for
favoring these neural tracks has everything to do with securing the social bonds that attach one person to another and many people in groups in which cooperation provides for survival.
Patience is another pillar Hall describes in the edifice of wisdom. The philosophical roots of patience implicate such considerations as temptation, delayed gratification, reward in general, the perception of time, and the necessity of securing a short-term gain over one that might be expanded in the long-term. It also involves discipline and willpower, characteristics never in
great supply in the consumer society in which we live. Empirical studies of patience tend to light up the reward circuitry, also important in the study of altruism: the dorsal striatum, the insular cortex, anterior cingulated cortex, the lateral prefrontal cortex, and the posterior parietal cortex.
The final pillar supporting wisdom is the ability to deal with uncertainty and change—not always the same experience. Not only is this pillar important to the exercise of wisdom, but it is also an influential factor in healthy aging and emotional resiliency at any age (Bateson, 2010; Siegel, 2010). In some ways, this pillar and all the others are dependent on a balance between the older, more emotionally centered, part of the brain located in the deep recesses of the brain above the brain stem and the thinner outer veil of cortex. The success of evolutionary survival once depended more on the elemental neural functions that allowed our hunter/gatherer ancestors to flee, fight, or freeze. With the passage of time, however, a more nimble approach to threat and challenge has made it important to ally the emotional tracks with the ones that allow for slower and more nuanced cognition, the prefrontal cortex. Dealing with uncertainty and change is important at any age: the infant learning to manage without the constant companionship of the mother, the youth coming of age, the adult bound to conformity and security, and the elder swimming in the shoals of a shortening life. Coping with change and ambiguity is important for the practicing Buddhist no less than the chaplain or the shaman.
The excitement of neuroscientific research is in how much we are learning about what it means to be human, yet it remains very descriptive in many ways and echoes the relatively primitive state of neuroanatomy so many decades ago. What we know now about brain functions seems very sophisticated, but years from now all of neuroscience will have been transformed in ways we can only imagine. The intricacies of the brain and mind will yield up more and more
secrets, but the philosophers may still be our best guides to what ought to be in the face of empirical evidence of what is. Asking the deepest questions may remain the most formidable tool of researchers and philosophers alike.
SYNTHESIS
The other Buddhist image for giving no fear is the wooden puppet, a very different kind of symbol for compassion. The puppet simply responds to the world as it is. There is no self; there is no other. Someone is hungry; food is given. Someone is thirsty; drink is offered. Someone is sleepy; a bed is made. For the wooden puppet, the world is the puppeteer to which she seamlessly responds without strategy, motivation, or thought of outcome. She can always be counted on because her front is soft and open; to be a wooden puppet is to bear witness and respond to suffering with a tenderness that knows no bounds. (Halifax, 2008, p. 26)
I have always been captivated by what Ralph Waldo Emerson referred to in his journals as croisement, a word he used to describe the result of combining multiple threads of thought into a new idea and observing the newly formed entity as having characteristics of its own; a hybrid, if you will. This is not unlike the notion Maturana and Varela proposed for a biological system in which elements with their own characteristics combine to form a new ecology that is internally consistent but substantially different from the original elements. “Mixing metaphors”
has been a creatively fertile pursuit and one that has resulted in a reframing of ideas that has had impact not only on my view of the world, but also on how I have been drawn to act. Allow me to lead you through my labyrinthine thoughts as a way of bringing together the disparate elements
of this paper and a way of illustrating what I refer to as “closing the enso.” In doing so, I am introducing a new metaphor into the discussion—the puppet.
The puppet’s history is also an ancient one that tracks our own evolution from hunter-gatherers to 21st century dwellers in a technologically sophisticated world. The puppet has been an entertaining being, but it has also had a more nuanced relationship with audiences. The puppet has been our surrogate in the worlds of light and darkness. It has been the conduit through which we have spoken and it has been the subversive outlier that has been able to speak its own voice (our voice?) in the face of authority. The relationship with the puppeteer is one of mutual definition and life. Without the puppeteer the puppet dies. Without the puppet, the puppeteer dies in this unique relationship.
Whatever the end result, puppets are not little men, women, or animals. A puppet must always be more than his live counterpart—simpler, sadder, more wicked, more supple.
The puppet is an essence and an emphasis. For only in this way does a puppet begin to reflect the truth. When puppeteers try to copy the human animal, they fail. Live actors do it much better. The mechanical copy of life may be amazing, curious, or even frightening, but it doesn’t live, whereas the suggestion contained in a puppet may be full of life. (Baird, 1973, p. 15)
The ecology of the puppet, the puppeteer, and the audience is also a neuroscientific entity with its own dynamics, not unlike the ecology of the shaman and the sufferers he treats. But how
much do they share? And is the neuroscience of the shaman and the puppet the same for the Zen Buddhist practitioner? Does the altered state of consciousness of one help describe shared characteristics with the others?
The puppet, above all, is a metaphor. As a surrogate living being it resembles something we can recognize but which has a persona all its own. The story of Pinocchio, by Carlo Collodi, is all about this process of a mechanical being becoming a human, of an object becoming a subject, of a puppet “learning,” as it were, how to be a compassionate and loving being. The story is a metaphor for the education of the chaplain, the Bodhisattva, the subversive outlier who wades into the suffering of the world after a transformation through the dark realms of existence. Isn’t this what the shaman does as well? Doesn’t he go into the Lowerworld and suffer the dismemberment that afflicted Pinocchio and become transformed in the initiatic process? Collodi need not have intended such associations for us to entertain greater meaning from his darkly disturbing tale turned right. Pinocchio is a metaphor and his story is also a metaphoric tale from which can be derived elements of meaning that add to our understanding. In fact, would we come to the same conclusions about chaplaincy and service without the stories of Pinocchio and other
puppets? If the puppet can say what the puppeteer cannot, isn’t that evidence of something new coming from familiar elements and isn’t that a role a chaplain can play?
A belief in the life and agency of all things, including the dead, originated with early humans in Africa, from whence it spread to and became part of many religions across the world. This belief in agency is deeply engrained in our psyches. Just as the brain of
modern humans has grown on top of our older, reptilian brain, so our contemporary religions and belief systems have grown on top of (and continue to utilise) our original animist beliefs. We are still animists at heart, even though science and scientific materialism have usurped earlier ways of explaining to us the world and the way things work and function. (Taylor, 2009, p. 255)
In its role as animated spokesperson, the puppet is an archetype of the embodied individual, one given life by another, one made to come alive by the spirit of the puppeteer, and one whose animation brings a life separate from the master. As the puppet is transformed from object to subject, it is inspired, literally breathed, into a physical existence we know as our own physiology and biochemistry. This is not unlike the metaphorical story about St. Martin of Tours (316-397), our archetypal chaplain and the first historical figure designated as a conscientious objector, and the beggar. The story is told like this: Martin of Tours, a Roman soldier, offered half his cloak to the cold beggar and presumed to be on his way. We see this as the lesson of generosity as well as self-care, but the story continues when the beggar continues to plead for aid
in his cold nakedness. He pleads three times to St. Martin and finally St. Martin dismounts and lies upon the beggar to give him warmth from his own body. In a final act of compassion, St. Martin breathes his own warm breath into the mouth of the beggar and the beggar is transformed into the person of Jesus. The breath, the warm life, makes no distinction between the beggar and Jesus or St. Martin. It is the embodiment impulse that connects. The mixing of breath, the exchange of molecules and the substance of life, is an illustration of the interdependence, the “interbeing” of Thich Nhat Hanh, which characterizes the field of existence in which we live.
Interdependence is one of the characteristic descriptors of a system as defined by Maturana and Varela. Others include uncertainty (unpredictability), non-self (just process), impermanence (just change), and action without gaining goals as we know them. The puppet metaphor also helps us understand how each of these other descriptors translates into the world we think of as reality. In fact, the general system theorists, Zen Buddhists, neuroscientists, and shamans alike would find something to relate to and share in the puppet world. For instance; interdependence, uncertainty, non-self reference, impermanence, and action without gaining are all shared elements in the domains of the Buddhist, the neuroscientist, and the shaman. The puppet/puppeteer/audience ecology is described by its interdependence, unpredictability, non-objectivity, and physical movement not necessarily associated with any defined outcome. The puppet metaphor is a perfect tie-in to the domains of the others.
Let us look closer at the world of the puppet and see how understanding that world can illuminate the role of the Buddhist chaplain. In doing this, it is instructive to explore what is referred to as altered states of consciousness. One of the earliest dissertations on puppetry and its magic is by Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811). In his little essay, “On the Marionette Theatre”
(1810), the narrator hears from his companion the following conclusion to the story he tells about the marionette theater and the fascination it has for him:
"Now, my excellent friend," said my companion, "you are in possession of all you need to follow my argument. We see that in the organic world, as thought grows dimmer and weaker, grace emerges more brilliantly and decisively. But just as a section drawn through two lines suddenly reappears on the other side after passing through infinity, or
as the image in a concave mirror turns up again right in front of us after dwindling into the distance, so grace itself returns when knowledge has as it were gone through an infinity. Grace appears most purely in that human form which either has no consciousness or an infinite consciousness. That is, in the puppet or in the god."
"Does that mean", I said in some bewilderment, "that we must eat again of the tree of knowledge in order to return to the state of innocence?"
"Of course", he said, "but that's the final chapter in the history of the world." (Von Kleist, 2001)
That “final chapter in the history of the world” is what we call death, the individual’s final chapter in his own history, and returning to it returns us humans to the very beginning of man’s time on the earth, a time when we emerged from the apocryphal Garden of Eden, having eaten of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Von Kleist describes the enso in his metaphors of innocence and knowledge, no consciousness and infinite consciousness, and the puppet and the
god. The miniscule point of contact of one end of the enso is the beginning of the other. The enso is a metaphorical fractal of lived events. Bateson points out that Erikson believed that the primary challenges of development in each stage of the life cycle reappear or are implied in every other stage (Bateson, 2010). There is a certain symmetry to the irregularity of the particulars in all of our lives, a concept that systems theorists would find consistent with their ideas of internally integrated ecologies.
In the world of the puppet, the puppeteer disappears or is at least subsumed or breathed into the life given to the puppet. The world is reconstituted in a different way when the puppet is animated. It is no longer the world of the puppeteer and the audience responds to this
transfer of energies and attention. This act of surrogacy, of the willing transfer of focus from puppeteer to puppet, breathes life into another being and, not unlike the courage of St. Martin with the beggar, transforms the resuscitation into a sacred act. Our notion of transformation is meant to include all possible dimensions of life, from the ridiculous to the sublime, from the most evil to the most transcendent. It is this mirroring of one’s life in terms of another’s that represents an altered state of consciousness that probably varies by degree and not by kind from the state experienced in Buddhist meditation and the shamanic states of soul-flight or out of body experiences. This seems to be the case in neuroscientific studies in which the “mirror neurons” are activated in their various loci throughout the brain. The mirror metaphor is appropriate not only to meditation practice, where we mirror our thoughts in training our consciousness, but also in the aforementioned shamanic rituals where mirror neurons play a significant role along with integration of visual and proprioceptive cues as the shaman
incorporates the suffering of his patient. Mirroring is a neuroscientific metaphor to illustrate how we enter the world of another, just as the audience mirrors the animated puppet.
The engaged Buddhist, the Bodhisattva, the chaplain, and the shaman are governed by the neural tracts that describe the loci of loving kindness, empathy, and compassion. These include the tempero-parietal junction and the mirror neurons in the frontal lobes (reaching, touching), the insula (facial expressions), and the anterior cingulate (empathy to pain). In the case of the shaman, there is integration of vestibular information in the form of cues from body position and
tactile cues to coordinate body movement; in other words, tracts that manage imagery regarding one’s own body. It is possible to postulate that the output from these activated circuits varies along a continuum from feeling with the puppet and experiencing compassion at one end, trailing
through shamanic exhaustion (the state of physiologic depletion from ritual overstimulation, such as rhythmic drumming or chanting or Sufi dancing), to PTSD at the other. What happens along the way is that neurochemicals as well as motor and autonomic nervous system outflow tracts are awakened and the response is calibrated by individual, environmental, and cultural parameters and what results varies from our nervous, self-conscious laughter at a puppet, to the open generosity of St. Martin, to shamanic healing (sympathetic system exhaustion), to the terrors and rages of the stricken trauma victim. Just as it is possible for the Buddhist to train his mind and for the shaman to guide his patient through the fires of disease and for the chaplain to minister to those who suffer in many ways, it is not inconceivable that those on the farthest edges of the continuum might also be trained to neurally attenuate their demons in ways we don’t employ at the present time.
To the extent that the surrogacy of the puppet (this out of body experience) is a sacred transfer, the puppet reframes our concept of death. If von Kleist’s protagonist was correct about
grace appearing in the continuum of the human form that has no consciousness (the puppet) and one that has infinite consciousness (the god), then we might guess that this cycle describes another enso in which grace is that point between the in-breath and the out-breath, in the touch- point between birth and death, and in the intimate connection between clay (when the Buddha achieved enlightenment upon touching the earth) and transcendent spirit (pneuma, the breath of St. Martin and those who resuscitate). The animated puppet stimulates a neural cascade and we
in the audience see in the puppet the contiguous presence of alpha and omega in a way that allows life to inhabit death, and death life, each equally transformed. Completing the enso is:
Creating new metaphors for death in the circle of life; embodying the full continuum, especially the acceptance of death,
Pointing the way to meaningful coherence in Adulthood II,
Feeding back to youths the fearless realms of death, modeling an embrace of the completed circle in the work of the chaplain,
Trusting what emerges from not-knowing and from the shadow realms of the Lowerworld, and
Finding joy in puppet play and seeing that puppetry is as serious or light-hearted as life in all its marvelous dimensions.
The chaplain is the metaphorical puppet. He is the archetype of transformation and, as a subversive outlier in the human realm, he is the agent of change at the edges of the cultural stew.
The chaplain is a Bodhisattva and a servant to all. He is a shaman and a guide to healing through biological and spiritual dimensions. The chaplain is a metaphor for elder and healer and in these
roles can, in turn, reframe the metaphors we use to gain comfort with death in the context of meaning and purpose in our lives. Because death as we can’t possibly know it holds the approaching mystery for all of us, a single metaphor would not likely be satisfactory for all. Because each of us brings an infinitely varied context of experiences and memories to the end of life experience, death challenges us to consider the basis on which we might all participate in newly formed metaphors. Changing our minds by adapting our personal experiences in the
formulation of new metaphors is a potential heuristic technique and a very fertile field of Buddhist pedagogy, to say nothing of the benefits to be reaped by those of us (most of us) who experience the incomprehensibility of death as a fearsome weight. It is not inconceivable that
future neuroscientific investigation will be able to pinpoint the neuroanatomic locus where the dark and terrifying thoughts of death are transformed into comforting and hopeful ones. It is not
impossible to imagine that tools and techniques of brain stimulation and feedback will be developed that will make such a transformation readily accessible. Until that time, however, we must rely on our creativity to pick from the infinite array of metaphors that connote death as a new beginning, as a mystery to be explored, as a point on an enso, as yet another experience in an endless cosmos of rich encounters; in other words, as part of the life we live now, which is the only life of which we can be at all sure. If metaphors are able to change how we think and how we act (as I believe they do), then these death metaphors will play among the neurologic circuits and channels and release the neurochemicals that now give us a sense of wholeness and well-being. If our lives are reflections of our neurologic functions, then the metaphors that elicit the
dopamine surges will eventually reside within our bodies as physiologic sensations and we will act in ways that make us capable of doing unto others what we want done for ourselves. We will
have embodied death as a part of life and we will have allowed it space within to transform us every day. Fear of death will have become a deeply rich curiosity, a beginning rather than an end. Is poetry the portal through which we can travel to this newly transformed understanding of our lives and deaths?
Does knowing the neuroscience of compassion help us? Will we be able to refine our concept of altered states of consciousness to cultivate more fully how we are able to serve? In the
final analysis, that place where the beginning and the end (which is which, after all?) of the enso come together (grace), it is about relationships, about mirroring, about reaching out to be the one to complete the enso in the life of another. Puppets invite us to ask universal human questions
about such things as self/other, impermanence (death), and how our energies serve best. They are metaphors for inquiry and engagement. They are archetypal, embodying, and the wells from
which “voice” emerges. Their presence provides an unsettling coherence to the suffering of sentient beings and things. They instruct by inviting us to mirror their animated lives and they stir within us the necessary joys and sorrows, peace and anger that make us human beings and thus capable of just about anything and everything. The chaplain/puppet/elder gathers into its core everything from the grit of the street to the luminous spaciousness of mind.
It seems the chaplain is the repository of cultural DNA inherited from an ancient lineage and possesses no more or less than the skillful means required to wade into the streams of contemporary life to relieve suffering. The Buddhist chaplain, the shaman, and the elder complete the enso. Anyone else can do the same. Puppetry is used here as a metaphorical
illustration of what is sometimes referred to as “cross-modal” connectivity, Emerson’s croisement. It is used here because its implications are fascinating to consider, but there are
countless other metaphors that could serve to define the role of the chaplain. Mary Catherine Bateson suggests that we think of wisdom as a process (Bateson, 2010). Maturana and Varela refer to mind as a process (Capra, 1996). But, isn’t puppet theater also a process? The chaplain/elder is characterized, in part, by wisdom and the notion of mind that informs consciousness. So, is “chaplain” being or doing, a metaphor, an archetype, an embodiment, a “voice”, a verb, a process, a state, or a neural ecology? The general systems landscape painted at
the beginning of this project allows for all these components to seek their own autopoietic balance, in language as well as deeds. Indeed, the internal dynamics in the world of the chaplain
constitute flows of information and energy that define the life we experience, from personal and cultural memories and Lowerworld dismemberment to conditions of revivification, healing, and
joyful play. The Buddhist chaplain, who becomes a metaphor in many ways, is an agent in the world of metaphors with which he is so familiar, and as an outlier at the edges of process and a creator of new worlds, he becomes the energy source for saving all sentient beings and completing the enso of birth and death. May it always be so and may it always be transformed.
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