‘The River as Mind’

In December 2019, as I stood looking down a valley at a river in the mountains of Cyprus, I had a flash of insight drawing a parallel between nature and mind:

“The flow of water over the rocks becomes a fast repetitive pattern and, if we were to zoom out, at some point it looks like a fixed image…… From fluid to fixed. The first water molecule that ever passed over the first rock began the process of information exchange between the two elements.

The water begins to ‘perceive’ the rock and the rock ‘perceives’ the water. Each creating a ‘meaning’, ‘belief’, ‘opinion’ and ‘judgement’ about what the other will do, behave or look like next.

The creation of this dynamic between the elements seems like the process of transforming the conscious in to what is unconscious. Naturally becoming an automatic, repetitive and fixed pattern. Every next water molecule now has an expectation of the position, shape and size of the next rock and next rock, and vice versa, and so on. The water now creates its own path based on its now unconscious, automatic, conditioned expectations (its filters) of the elements outside of it; no longer paying attention to the life force flowing through it.

This is somehow analogous to our human experience which is created by the meanings and beliefs we already have or give about things, people and circumstances; and not by the actual facts themselves.

Is nature creating its own reality just as we are creating ours?

Being part of nature, are we maybe just a part of what is creating its own reality?

Is nature, along with us, projecting outward the world?”

This was an aha moment of understanding. Basically in the same way that organisms, from the smallest bacterium to the largest of animals, self-generate biologically by way of autopoiesis (Varela and Maturana, 1972), so does the mind psychologically by way of feedback loops and patterns at many stages of the mental process.

From Capra & Luisi’s book, The Systems View of Life;

Gregory Bateson developed a concept of mind based on cybernetic principles, defining “mental process” as a systems phenomenon characteristic of all living organism. He emphasized that mind is manifest not only in individual organisms but also in social systems and ecosystems. In his own words (personal communication to Capra, 1979), “mind is the essence of being alive.”

The central insight of the Santiago theory of Cognition (Maturana & Varela) is the same as Bateson's – the identification of cognition, the process of knowing, with the process of life. Cognition, according to Maturana and Varela, is the activity involved in the self-generation (autopoiesis) and self-perpetuation of living networks. In other words, cognition is the very process of life. The organizing activity of living systems, at all levels of life, is mental activity. The interactions of a living organism – plant, animal, or human – with its environment are cognitive interactions. Thus life and cognition are inseparably connected. Mind – or, more accurately, mental activity – is immanent in matter at all levels of life. 

Cognition 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. In the words of Maturana and Varela, “to live is to know.” Capra, Fritjof; Luisi, Pier Luigi. The Systems View of Life (A Unifying Vision).

I vividly then recalled the Ladder of Inference (a mental model) by Chris Argyris, presented in Peter Senge’s book ‘The Fifth Discipline’; and understood why it was the first model presented to us in our MBA mindful leadership course. It was about how the mind selects from a pool of observable data and experiences, interprets the data (by adding meaning, making assumptions and reaching conclusions), then adopts beliefs; and then we take action based on the beliefs we have adopted. The key then is the reflective feedback loop that shows how the data we select from then on is the data that reinforces our already adopted beliefs (which we deem as true even if they are not). Highlighting the power of our beliefs; because they generate our perceptions, affecting our thoughts, feelings and meaning about our lives.

And this may well explain why:

- We do not necessarily believe what we see, but rather we see what we already believe,

- The law of belief says that whatever we truly believe, with feeling, becomes our reality, and

- When we search, we find.

How can this article be complete without the mention of Carl Gustav Jung?

“Now I knew what it was, and knew even more: that man is indispensable for the completion of creation; that, in fact, he himself is the second creator of the world, who alone has given to the world its objective existence – without which, unheard, unseen, silently eating, giving birth, dying, heads nodding through hundreds of millions of years, it would have gone on in the profoundest night of non-being down to its unknown end. Human consciousness created objective existence and meaning, and man found his indispensable place in the great process of being.” (C.G.Jung, MDR 240-1).

“Thus Jung’s psychology became also a cosmology, for he saw the journey of personal development towards fuller consciousness as occurring in the context of eternity. The psyche existing sui generis as an objective part of nature, is subject to the same laws that govern the universe and is itself the supreme fulfilment of those laws: through the miracle of consciousness, the human psyche provides the mirror in which Nature sees herself reflected.” Stevens, Anthony: Jung (A Very Short Introduction).

And last but not least, from Markides’ The Magus of Strovolos;

In the cosmology of a spiritual healer, he talks about how ‘we cannot know the Universe unless we get to know ourselves. When we reach that point our own self will become the mirror which, through reflection, will enable us to know the Universe. Our small consciousness will become awakened inside the superconsciousness. The Absolute is everything, a multidiversified entity in One. it has the urge, call to manifest itself. It vibrates within it self. It is the nature of the Absolute to express itself, to create universes. Mind was created. Mind is the supersubstance that makes possible the Divine Expressiveness of the Absolute. Everything is Mind but Mind is not the Absolute. “The Absolute manifests itself through Mind”. Markides, Kyriakos: The Magus of Strovolos (The extraordinary world of a spiritual healer) (Adapted).