PACIFIC WORLD - The Institute of Buddhist Studies

Studstill: Cybernetic Approach to Dzogchen 323constructivism (or contextualism). Both approaches have been subjected toextensive critiques in the philosophical literature on mysticism; both have beenshown to be fundamentally inadequate. 11 In this context, new, even controversial,approaches deserve serious consideration, especially when they may avoid orresolve the very issues that render other approaches problematic. 12Before addressing the details of the cybernetic model itself, it is best tobegin with a few stipulative definitions of terms central to any psychologicaldiscussion: awareness, consciousness, and mind. 13 The term awarenessis used here to connote sentience itself (or “sentience-as-such”). Consciousnessis awareness constrained by a system of cognitive and emotionalvariables or events. This system as a whole may be referred to as mind orthe cognitive system. Consciousness, then, refers to a specific mode ofawareness (i.e., a state of consciousness) supported by an interdependentnetwork of cognitive and affective factors or events (the cognitive systemor mind). In slightly different terms, awareness is constrained by mind,creating a particular state of consciousness. Note that these definitionsmake a distinction between sentience-as-such—awareness as “primaryand irreducible” 14 —and sentience as it is expressed according to specificsensory, neural, cognitive, and environmentally conditioned constraints(i.e., a state of consciousness).A state of consciousness (what Charles Tart calls a d-SoC, “discretestate of consciousness”) is not to be confused with the immediate andchanging content of consciousness but represents an overall pattern ofstabilized psychological organization that abides regardless of fluctuationsin psychological subsystems or environmental input. Though a stateincludes such fluctuations, a state of consciousness is the abiding frame ofreference that constitutes the implicit, semantic background within whichsuch fluctuations occur. For example, the essential characteristic of thestate of consciousness identified with ordinary experience is duality,which is expressed on two levels: perceptual and spatial (a self situated ina world of apparently real and distinct objects) and evaluative (the contentof experience viewed as either attractive, i.e., “good” or repellant, i.e.,“bad” 15 ). This duality, as an abiding context of experience, persists withgreater or lesser degrees of intensity regardless of whether or not onehappens to be angry, joyful, distracted, etc.The mind is the entire system of mental, emotional, and behavioralvariables that construct and defends such a state, both at the level ofunconscious cognitive processes and conscious, fluctuating phenomenalexperience. In the case of ordinary experience, these variables include: (1)a ceaseless, self-oriented, and only partially controllable internal narrative;(2) the absorption of attention on this internal narrative (phenomenologicallyexperienced as an “abstraction” of experience out of the stream of feltsensation or perception); (3) distraction-seeking and addictive behavior;(4) both unconscious and conscious concepts and beliefs encompassing