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Studstill: Cybernetic Approach to Dzogchen 365and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,1991), pp. 24–5.39. Pope and Singer point out that the demands of perceptual processing“can monopolize channel space and severely attenuate if not interruptentirely, the processing of private material” (Pope and Singer, p. 113). Iwould argue that the general predictability of our routine external environmentsmakes this kind of interruption rare.40. Miller, Living Systems, p. 123. See also pp. 61, 121ff, 149, and 152. ContraMiller, I would argue that in many cases, stress is not caused by theinformation overload itself, but by anxiety created by dissonance betweentask performance and self-image.41. Gilbert, p. 36.42. See Tart’s discussion of attention and self-awareness (Tart, p. 15) as wellas Deikman’s distinction between the “action mode” and “receptive mode.”The action mode specifically overlaps what I have described as objectorientedattention. As Deikman points out, the goal of such attention(manipulating the environment) makes the “reference point” of suchattention “the experience of a separate, personal self” (Deikman, pp. 261,267). To some degree, these processes also correspond with what Tart callsloading stabilization, i.e., “keeping attention/awareness and other psychologicalenergies deployed in habitual, desired structures by loading theperson’s system heavily with appropriate tasks” (Tart, p. 5). My emphasisis not on the “task,” but on the objectifying mode of attention itself, whichmay be internalized as well as externalized.43. As Varela, et al. observe, one of “the first insights of the meditator who beginsto question the self [is] the discovery of total egomania” (Varela, et al., p. 62).44. Perry, p. 238; see also p. 239.45. Hunt, p. 24.46. Hunt states that, if “we are willing to entertain the idea that consciousawareness in itself is a ‘system,’ and that that system can be selectivelyimpaired, we ought to be prepared to consider the possibility that it can beselectively enhanced and developed as well” (Hunt, p. 34).47. Laszlo, Introduction to Systems Philosophy, p. 127.48. Ibid., p. 130.49. Ibid., p. 132; see also Fenner, p. 104; Perry, p. 224.50. Inputs are not innately threatening, but become threatening by contradictingsystem conditions. Letting go of conditions therefore involves a reintegrationof formerly repressed or denied aspects of the self and environment.Perry seems to make the same point when he explains that as thecognitive system evolves, “That portion of the environment which per-