Proseminar of theoretical philosophy
Group leadby the philosopher Esa saarinen at spring 1992?
My own text (Kaisa Hari, nowadays Kaisa Tervola), my translation from the Finnish language to English
Background
Carlos Castaneda travelled 1961 ri Mexico in order to collect material for his anthropological research about the use of medical plants amiong the indians of northern Mexico.
He got to know an old indian called don Juan Matus who was supposed to provide information for him, but who instead begun to teach him "witchcraft" which meant the ability to sense in ways which are different from the usual sensory perceptions.
In his books Castaneda describes his experiences as the student of don Juan. The theory of witchcraft gets described mostly through the speeches of don Juan.
Witchcraft is foremost a practical skill, and its theory is just a tool. The truths of withcraft are not based on reasoning, instead they can be "seen", in other words observed with certainty when one senses the world in a certain way which is different from the ordinary way.
The meanings of many central concepts have to be deduced from the way that they are used. And the same things get described via many different terms - the words are clearly just a tool in an attempt to reach something which can be understood only by "seeing". The truthfullness of Castaneda's experiences has been doubted, but the theory of witchcraft is in any case worth getting to know.
Because the terminology of Castaneda and the picture of the world of witchcraft are foreign to me, I will not represent the theory of witchcraft itself, but only my own interpretation of it. And I try to translate trhe terminology to the language of my own picture iof the world.
Picture of the world
Castaneda dascribes the world in the following way:
The world consists of something which cannot be described by words but which out of the lack for a better name, is called the flows of an eagle.
Each living being consists of a bunch of flows which have been shut inside a shell.
In sensory perceptions a group of flows inside the shell gets tuned with flows outside the shell which are like them.
The tuning of flows is guided by a point in the shell. That point is called the point in which the sensory perceptions get assebled, the assemblypoint.
The flows do not correspond atoms, but more nearly ways of looking at things, charachteristics of the world or some kind of processes.
The shell is formed by our ability to notice things, or more widely our whole mind.
The assemblagepoint
"World is what it looks like and still it isn't. It isn't as concrete and real as our ability to perceive has been lead to believe...
We observe. That's a fact. But what we observe isn't a fact like it, because we learn what we must notice. Something otu there is affecting our senses. That is true. What is not true, is thre things that our senses say that are there."
Our picture of the world determines what we observe. It determines which sides of the reality we pay attention toand how we unifie our observation to a picture of the whole. It tells what exists and what not, and so determines how we interprete our observations.
Castaneda's uses to the description of this the concept "the location of the assemblagepoiint", by which he means the way in which we collect our sensory perceptions to a whole. The concept is wider and includes at least the following things:
- how the observations are assebled to form a whole
(I imagine that I know that my life will end after two or three seconds and that those seconds are lenghtened to last hours or even years. I am without a possibility to communicate with other people. All the meanings connected to navagating in the ordinary everyday world disappear and there are new personal meanings born. Based on these I can get a grasp of how different would be a world where the ways of interpretation accepted by the society would be very different from ours.)
- which sides of the world one pays attention to
(Examples:
1. My first drawing class: a white pyramid and a ball on a white table. Teacher commands to describe the different shades of white but I cannot see them. I try some time and succeed at last. I turn my head and the whole world is full of lights and shadows which I have never before seen.
2. As a beginner on a dancing course I notice that the way that I used to conceive my body isn't enough. I need to learn a totally new language in which there is no room for words.)
- momentary picture of the world
- dominant mood (intellect/feelings/concentrating on the senses)
(An example: mathematicssnooze. I am reading for an examination on the last evening just before I go to sleep. In the morning I wake up in the examination, trying to proof mathematical things. I get out and the whole world is bright and clearly seen. But I cannot get along with people like ususal. I answer only "yes" and "no", wait for more information, claims to judge.)
- state of mind
In the language of my own picture of the world, the place of the assemblagepoint tells the momentary mode of the human brain, which mind processes (both conscious and nonconscious, from simple perceptions to abstract thinking) are happening at each moment.
Making the way to perceive a habitual one
Our picture of the world is based on us always sesing things the same way. If our way to sense would change all the time, we would have no means to figure out what the world is like. So we have to fix the assemblagepoint in order to understand the world. Ineer speech is a way to do that.
A cild doesn't yet have a habituasl way to see the world. her/his assemblagepoint moves freely.
Each adult who associates withthe child teaches her/him how to conceive the world. The adults teach the child to talk to oneself and that inner talk fixe3s the assemblagepoint, the way to sense.
When we are adults our picture of the world has become so habitual that we cannot imagine it being just one of very many possible ways to perceive the reality.
(Examples:
1. If a child gets amputated a leg, the child gets adabted in a couple of days. But often adaults feel that the amputated leg still exists.
2. A child learns just the language which is spoken around the child. An adult recognizes the phonems of one's mother tongue but not necessarily those of foreign tongues.
3. Conceiving ´distances is a learned thing: those people who have lived all their lives in a rain forest may conceive distant things as small ones.)
If a human being manages to stop one's inner speech, the assemblage point gets freeed and one can sense in unordinatry ways.
About how to not get stuck to one partial picture of the world at a time read my text Increasing intelligence. In short: spend time in admiring nature landscapes.
Links
Easing pain
Sexuality and learning
Increasing intelligence