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INTERDISCIPLINARY THINKING

by Jose H. Cedillos

I Thought She Was Wonderful

ABSTRACT: I spent nearly 20 years as a professor of graduate Interdisciplinary Studies. Students in our graduate program were highly diverse and came from many backgrounds. They designed research projects in many complex areas by combining at least two major academic disciplines. Student proliferation of very different types of research projects led me to develop a template for sorting the projects into one of six types of interdisciplinary research (see previous posting.) The most challenging research design was Type 6, Radical Interdisciplinarity. This design required the ability to work in conditions I referred to as "maximum conceptual ambiguity in unstructured field of information." The ability to conduct research in these conditions, in turn, rested on three objectives:

1. Developing an awareness of Theta state dynamics (shift in consciousness from Beta-centric awareness);
2. Understanding the role of ego reduction (restructuring of cognitive maps) in data identification and collection; and
3. Integrating instinctual reasoning (Theta) with logical ordering (Beta).

Type 6 Interdisciplinarity is called "radical" because all definitions come unhinged from their epistemological moorings in Theta state, that is, in a state of extreme connectivity everything is in flux and up for reconceptualization. These conditions maximize the hybrid connectivity of data and information, the essential practice of Interdisciplinary Studies.

I was particularly interested in ethnic students because they typically came to the program already natural practitioners of Theta state awareness. My job as their mentor was to guide them toward discovering the navigational coordinates for integrating their radical Theta states with the requirements of earning a PhD.  I have many fond memories of these students and others of all colors who came to this program because they were non-traditional and couldn't experience success in traditional institutions without "giving up" what felt to them as their true nature. I learned so much from this array of graduate students that when they praised my instructional work I responded with, "I am at my best teaching when I am most learning" as a way of returning their compliments. And it was true, I learned from non-profit executive directors; Native American social workers; Appalachian poets and laboratory scientists; from artists and art instructors; from elementary, secondary and college teachers; from a bus driver; from jazz musicians; from college deans and from CEOs and many business men and women. We had a ball.

I present this section on Interdisciplinarity in three parts. Part I is a general discussion of "field-dependent perception" as key to Theta state awareness. Part II talks about brainwaves, also in a general way. In Part III, I have included a fragment of work from a previous student, a self-described "mulatto" (Japanese, African American, Native American). Chiyuki Shannon (shannon@multicentricinstitute.com, PhD, 2001) is a multi-racial, multicentric practitioner of Theta state awareness and creativity. ■

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PART I - THETA STATE AWARENESS

Crossing Under Light

Imagine you are on a walk at about the time of
a glorious sunset. Imagine that your senses are
flooding you with high degrees of stimulation. You
"float along without a thought in your head." But,
Theta state wants to go further and say you can
engage the floods of stimulation to know more than
you now know and to move purposefully and wisely
in that flux of stimulation without waiting to think
about what you are doing, analyzing where you are,
and deciding what actions to take or not to take. In
the information flux of the spectral environment you
must be able to move along visual action pathways,
you must have an "actual discovery program" for
finding pathways without losing consciousness and
reverting to thinking about things.

                             — from sabbatical proposal
                                1997

With a doctoral education in educational anthropology I remained a "feral" naturalist and then became a bio-genetic Structuralist anchored in the natural world. I believed not just in the "natural mind" but I also believed, somewhat dramatically, that only the natural mind can adequately deal with human realities, including paradoxical ones like finding yourself biting the hand that feeds you or the times when you must leave your heart on the world's altar and walk away. These things in fact happened when I initiated an economic crime investigation of municipal officials who had employed me and the times when I walked away from the podium after speaking sincerely to an academic audience. I knew from my own studies (I research the very institution that would hand me my doctoral degree) that the educational institution doesn't educate the natural mind, even taking into account the meager efforts to utilize the Arts. The omission of the natural mind in Education made everything off-kilter for me.

I stumbled around a lot in the university but it was clear to me I preferred to search in the institution's junkyard of ideas. I spent half a year studying the eidetic image, considered by experimental psychology to be a "will-of-the-wisp." I decided that this "figment of the imagination" was actually the holographic effect of the natural mind when it is fully active. I wanted to know why sitting in Inferential Statistics class my mind suddenly flashed an "eidetic image" of the Central Nervous System complete with white cords. Suddenly, I understood the entire system of Inferential Statistics as a mathematical replication of our CNS and thought, "Of course." I then spent weeks in the campus physics lab observing laser setups and holographic images. I would learn that the holographic effect is considered the active synthesis of the four major brainwaves into Gamma brainwaves. But my search for a natural mind capable of forming itself whole petered out here and there. In spite of the many shortcomings of this path my search seemed be fated, that is, beyond my control. The more I insisted in finding my natural mind—even though I couldn't put my finger on its definition—the more I felt I was encountering my fate by searching in the largely ignored margins of educational institutions.

"Natural Mind" refers to the basic consciousnesswarts and all, fissures, hair, the wetware- which all living persons possess by the messy fact of birth.  A natural mind does not model itself on a sanitized ideal of consciousness, or a clean architecture of the Mind, or as a humanly perfectible and sacred task taken up through meticulous behavior, or as a lofty Science complete with Rose Window illuminated by divine light—rather the natural mind occupies itself with Theta awareness, with noticing spectral shifts in conventional baseline consciousness, with structural orientations toward light spectrums and with perceiving creativity everywhere as an environmental property. The natural mind is a heightened awareness not dissimilar to forms of being "high," as Dr. Andrew Weil clarifies in The Natural Mind,

Stoned thinking is the mirror image of straight thinking.  When we step into nonordinary reality even for a moment, we experience things directly, see inner contents rather than external forms, and suddenly find ourselves able to participate in changing things for the better.  This other way of interpreting perceptions comes first as episodic flashes, unpredictable, discontinuous.  But the more flashes of it one has, the easier it becomes to maintain.  And stoned thinking is not something foreign to be learned; it develops spontaneously as we unlearn habitual ways of using the mind.

The deconstruction of our assumptions of social reality, cultural foundations, myths and personal illusions while unnerving to the conventional mind yields new connections, new pathways, for replacing "habitual ways of using the mind." If you can stand outside Culture while you are still in it, a case of stoned thinking, or what Arthur Koestler called Bisociation, a Theta state, one sees that any single culture has no higher claim to rationality than others, none, or even over Nature. In Theta state awareness, we can see a spectral shift take place toward active perception in the entropic realm. We can see this shift in the changing light in our eyes. In Theta state we can become oriented to perception as a way of knowing.

In the British Virgin Isles fieldworkers usually go out to work carrying nothing more than their tools (this was shared with me by Charles Wheatley, BVI native). As midday approaches someone sets a pot with water over a cooking fire. Whatever edibles are around are brushed clean and tossed into the pot. Sometimes the pot fills with roots, vegetables, or nuts, eggs, fish, herbs, fruit, in whatever combinations to produce the legendary Mon Soup, the midday worker's meal, and "something" out of apparently nothing except for some "found" things. Made from whatever is lying around and transformed through Bricolage (easy, quick, nonjudgmental) composition into a serviceable item. Today's Mon Soup emerges from its methods of inclusivity, of feral appreciation for what appears marginal or is invisible to the world.

The trick? Field-dependent perception. Let Levi-Strauss give us an anthropological view of this "trick" of finding by not looking, doing by not acting, seeing without focusing:

Thus it is never, properly speaking, the eagle which the Osage invoke. For, according to the time and circumstances, it is eagles of different species which are in question: the golden eagle, the spotted eagle, the bald eagle, etc., or eagles of different colours: red, white, spotted, etc; or finally eagles at different stages of their life: young, old, etc. This three dimensional matrix, a genuine system by means of a creature, and not the creature itself, constitutes the object of thought and furnishes the conceptual tool.

Thus a tuber is picked out where one was hardly detectable, found nesting in its matrix as if laying attentive to its fate. This is seeing without looking. This is Don Juan again. This is the coyote of Natural Mind living in a world of spectral continuity, or as Lovejoy put it in The Great Chain of Being,

And such a series [of classes], Aristotle observed, tends to show a shading-off of the properties of one class into those of the next rather than a sharp-cut distinction between them.  Nature refuses to conform to our craving for clear lines of demarcation; she loves twilight zones, where forms abide which, if they are to be classified at all, must be assigned to two classes at once.  And this insensibly minute gradation of differentness is especially evident at precisely those points at which common speech implies the presence of profound and well-defined contrasts.

Seeing in counterintuitive ways, outside precision, looking without intent, floating left, right, left, right, eyes independently and simultaneously seeing in disinterestedness while hands work free-floating through precisely imprecise routines in a sense of unfolding, we stay  tuned into, in harmony with, the aesthetic fuse of a distributed environmental surround. This field-dependent awareness yields new supersensible perceptions by including the circumstantial temper and the fundamental connectivity of human ecology and its texture of environmental expression. Call it the neurology of place.

Seeing ecologically in Theta state awareness is stimulated by experiencing variations in texture, contrast, line and color, differences leaping here and there into recognition as obvious as blackbirds in the shiny fabric of cattails or as visually edgy as pixels streaking across construction sites. Or, as in Mon Soup, the olfactory colorized sense triggers the perception of yellow in the environment in which squash and fruit shapes and their spectra become emergent, creating visual sensitivity to properties pixeling like Cézanne's apples. And then while in a sustained Theta state awareness, the holographic world lights up and becomes perceptible. We have entered an induced Gamma brainwave synthesis in harmony with a natural order that Sydney Perkowitz calls an "Empire of Light."

This harmony and synthesis as properties of the natural mind made sense to me. The natural mind lives in an empire of light but first a person has to "unlearn habitual ways of using the mind" and see the light in ordinary things. All of which means returning to a natural Theta state, to a feral state of mind, and then to go from there to study the world around you. In Academia, this is a radical departure from the canons of objectivity. ■

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PART II - GAMMA BRAINWAVE SYNTHESIS

El Amigo Sierra

 

Theta state awareness? 

Four kinds of brainwaves zigzag out of the brain: The rapid Beta (13-60 pulsations per second), the slow Alpha (7-13 pulsations per second), the really slow Theta (4-7 per sec), and the almost stopped Delta brainwave (1-3 per sec). Together they constitute the electrical activity of the 24 hour brain. I used meditative practices, including walking meditation, guided imagery and active imagination, to "feel" my brain. I wanted to know my brain as well as I might any organ or any part of me. The brain doesn't have pain receptors and doesn't feel but it does hum and move. Karl Pribram's laboratory research on a holographic model of memory has recorded that the neocortex and the micro-electronic network of the brain do indeed light up and hum when active.

Beta brainwaves dominate our waking state and are quickest to jump to new levels of alertness. Beta brainwaves cycle from13 to 60 pulses per second, more if we look around with anxiety, more if we experience fear. The more fear we feel the more rapidly Beta waves spike and pulsate the more alert and alarmed we become. People strive to reach ecstatic levels of Beta pulsation through danger, risk and thrill. As it is said, it sharpens the mind.

In our waking state we generally go back and forth between Beta brainwave states and the slower Alpha brainwave states. We usually take on as much high Beta excitation as we can stand before needing a break from being active. Alpha brainwaves are a relaxation response to high Beta arousal activity and are emitted at a slower half-rate of 7 to 13 pulses per second in a kind of shift-down relief from nervous Beta. We can't be at high alert constantly without feeling physical and emotional stress and the brain avoids wearing levels of stress by easing into the Alpha wave range which in turn allows the body to relax. Dropping into the Alpha zone we sometimes stretch out, kick-back, put our hands behind our heads and think sexy thoughts about whatever. Sometimes we doodle on our deskpads or shoot rubber bands or text message.

In a fifty percent drop from Alpha pulsations and down one hundred to three hundred percent from Beta rhythms, Theta brainwaves pulsate slowly in the range of 4 to 7 cycles every second. I can count these pulsations using my finger as a metronome. Theta brainwaves pulsating slower than Beta and Alpha are longer, wavier, more flow than spikes. These slower pulsations mean you are in a Theta state flow and probably daydreaming, or perhaps deeply absorbed in a creative process or just slipping off the edge of waking or falling asleep. A Theta brain state floods awareness with the free flow of image-based perceptions and ideas, of metaphoric thoughts and images. Psychoanalysts call this flow of unconscious content "primary process thinking. Ebbing and surging, Theta brainwaves emanate through the unconscious, subconscious and consciousness without censorship. All ideas, fragmentary and whole, familiar or strange, are welcome and invited in Theta state. Non-resistance to inclusivity, as opposed to the critically selective awareness of Beta, is characteristic of a sustained flow of Theta state awareness.

At times Theta state is experienced accidentally, more as a flash. The Eureka! effects of Theta state and its insights are well known to happen while showering or in other automatic and habitual activities in which the Beta state is defocused, such as being mentally disengaged while in strongly habitual routines or in meditative practices. These come, as Weil points out, in "episodic flashes." A sustained Theta state, on the other hand, is a feel good state with "light bulb" ideas accompanied by a sense of enjoyment occurring everywhere.

The last brainwave, Delta, is sleep, deep sleep and other forms of unconsciousness so deep the brain begins to hum down into its disconnective zones or toward portals of waveforms other than our known life.  It's as if our brain goes for a walk without taking us along. Yet Delta is always an active part of the total brainwave field emitted by the brain.

 

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, Harvard nueroanatomist, in her account of her full-blown stroke (My Stroke of Insight), became aware of her body lying on the floor of her apartment in a Theta state because her logical brain, the left half, had been almost completely impaired by a massive stroke. Alive in only the right half of her brain, she discovered Theta state awareness and for the first time she knew what it was to feel happy, even ecstatic. Can you imagine? And now restored and able to freely be in a Theta state Dr. Taylor has decided after her healing to live life differently, more naturally, more imaginatively and more flexibly. This is the definition of "creativity."

Raised as agricultural fieldhands, we, my older brother on his battered alto saxophone and me in my erratic drawings on torn papers, defined creativity by our feral activities. My brother and I tramped freely into Theta states by improvising and for a moment felt happy and often ecstatic before returning to sharpening our knives and hoes and reentering the darkness of our labors. The Theta state became our substitute Beta awareness, our usual and then preferred way of seeing and thinking while our brainwaves slowly pulsed like a car idling. We gazed on water running in irrigation ditches and it looked like music to us. We loved Mexican songs even as my brother patched and mixed them with jazz fragments. Theta became the natural world playing its music from the brass of hard demands and the strings of agrarian worlds we heard softly strumming around us. This was the music of the natural mind, gamma brainwave synthesis, the music of holographic light.

I exposed students to Theta state awareness through residential seminars and weekend workshops. By the second day students would report that they began having lucid dreams and making exciting connections among disparate ideas and information. In this way I prepared them to maximize connectionist dynamics during their academic studies. I wrote this little aphoristic verse for them:

At first we think, we think, and we think
But the power to conceive
Is to see again. ■

 

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Part III
'M' is for metaphor; 'a' is for aphorism

 

Red Night

When Chiyuki Shannon entered the doctoral program, we immediately recognized our Theta orientation. I agreed to be her academic program mentor at our first meeting. I came to think of Chiyuki as a Sayer, a person who could speak directly from a Theta state in its aphoristic language. As it was, Chiyuki was deeply interested in the magical properties of language.  More accurately, she was interested in "languaging," how speaking creates realities. Her childhood stories of her Japanese mother were stories about languaging across cultures caught in states of war. I recognized that Chiyuki was particularly adept at speaking while in Theta state awareness. This was why I understood that she was, like my brother, a Sayer. She begins:

In Zora Neale Hurston's mystical book, Their Eyes Were Watching God, a hard-working mule underwent a change in conditions when it was sold to a new owner who tied it to a shade tree and gave it plenty of food and water, then it died, laying on its back, feet pointing to heaven. I wondered why it died after such good treatment, and I also wondered why its feet pointed to heaven. When the preacher and other people came and went at its funeral, then the animals had their ceremony. The animal persons said:

"What killed this man? Bare, bare fat."
"What killed this man? Bare, bare fat."
"Who'll stand his funeral? We!!!!!" 

But I wanted to know more, in large part because I relate with the mule as a metaphor for my own experience as a mulatto…

My father always called himself "colored" or "negro." My mother's ancestry is Japanese from Okinawa. I was their first child, born in 1948, then came my sister Chiyaki in 1949, next my brother Walter Daniel Shannon Jr., in 1951. We were born in Naha, Okinawa. My father returned from the United States, married my mother, adopted us, and brought us all to the United States near the end of 1951. We lived in Fort Ord, California for a year, then moved to Hanau, Germany. While waiting for army quarters, we lived in the town of Hanau. During this time, I started school and I remember my first day of school: I was excited to be going to school. My mother prepared me very well – she taught me the ABC's, she taught me how to count, she showed me how to read from left to right. She dressed me up in a pink dress starched with ruffles, put Dixie Peach hair pomade and water on my wavy black hair, braided it into two mitsami's (braids), and curled my bangs, using her finger as a roller. She handed me my lunch, put a white handkerchief in her hand that had three fingers left over from the war, and we walked through the hall in the big, eighteen-room house with the upstairs closed off that Giesla, a neighbor said the Nazi occupied during the war – and out the front door. We walked through the front garden, opened the gate and stood outside the tall black wrought iron fence. I stood next to my mother, on her right side, in front of the hand holding the handkerchief.  We waited for the Army bus to come take me to the American army school for American army dependent children. The dark green army bus rolled up the cobble stone street from the left and stopped in front of me, I got on the bus, my mother handed me my lunch, telling me to sit next to sensei (teacher), " everything be dijobu, everything be OK." At school, I still don't understand what the other children are saying, but that's OK, they didn't understand me either, and we all wore circles with names on them. Happy sounds all around. Lunch time comes and I do what my mother says, I sit next to sensei, who sat at the head/end of the long cafeteria table on my right. I take out my lunch from the shoebox turned obento turned lunchbox: I take out my lunch, my omosobi / my rice ball. I take out my mayonnaise jar of ocha / tea, and start to eat my lunch. All of a sudden, it gets quiet in the room. I look around for the source of the disturbance and noticed that everyone had a square thing to eat – and I had a round one. After that, everything looked dark, and I don't remember the rest of the school day. When I got home, I was upset and told my mother what happened. When my father came home, he found us both upset, and my mother told him something about everybody had square things, but Chiyuki had a round one. My father listened, then he laughed, then he went to the commissary and bought a loaf of bread. After that, I took square things to school, just like everybody else. They tasted good too. But sometimes I wanted to take round things. I knew I couldn't eat my round foods comfortably at school and I wondered why we couldn't mix round things and square things at school…

…and so I set out to try to find answers. First, I asked the professor (a microbiologist, Dr. Willie Parson) who assigned the Hurston reading in class. I asked him questions about the symbolism in the story like, "Why did the mule die when it stopped getting treated badly, and finally got good treatment? Why did its feet point to heaven? What was the meaning in the bird's sermon?" He suggested that it was not his work to give me answers, so finding answers was what I needed to do. I contemplated for a long time, noticing more similarities between myself and the mule person, but still, I didn't feel like I was getting answers to explain the meanings in the metaphor of Zora's mule.

I realize now my experience moving among and through various cultural frames as a mulatto (mule) naturally included a perceptual experience through angles and slants within conterminous, cultural boundaries. I have been migrating through this dynamic environment of Black, Japanese, Native American, and White cultural ancestry and experience. I didn't know how to talk about these experiences of living in more than one of these cultural frames at the same time without confusion because I could not describe in linear, static terms my experience with these bits and pieces of cultural information, these experiences in dynamic flow. I couldn't talk without using a tongue tied up inside a narrow, linear tunnel-view of reality, a view obstructed by the executive processor in me building barriers for interfering with change, aiding a slowing momentum to linguistic inertia. I therefore lacked a means of expressing sensory and cognitive experience as a field of motion within a field of motion.

The mule metaphor as a compositional process arose from the following: By focusing on moving through visual tunneling, treating it as a structure or "body," a shield, of a visual field of bits and pieces in motion, I developed the capacity to consciously notice: (1) angles of peripheral bits and pieces of information in motion that coalesce and like both the eye that sees less than a one-degree circle sharply, and the dark adapted eye that can see a photon, my tunnel/dark adapted eye picks up the quick, a flash light of vibrating fibers formed through conterminous boundaries touching in contact; (2) the spinning of the vibrating fibers generate layers of activity through discontinuous leaps forming and distributing bundles of spinning fibers or photons. The spinning photons behave like pixels or surface reflections mirroring the information content compressed in a black hole. By focusing on the mirror reflections, I am reducing the expanded role of ego in directing cognition, and I am removing the blind spot of vision using only the macular and foveal vision in coordinated shifts to see by darting around and painting in the details of the visual world, excluding vision at the periphery of motion in order to maintain the illusion of Euclidean space. (3) I wasn't able to say what I was seeing by looking at information reflected by hierarchical and linear forms of communication inside the black hole structure because the experience I was having with bits and pieces of information flowing everywhere from the black hole structure was not occurring in linear, hierarchical sequence. As I continued practicing conscious seeing I moved through the field tunneling bits and pieces of information in motion and picked up fragments of information reflected in the flow and collect them in field notes. These notes result from the action of motion through fluid similar to the medical description:

While watching Bill Moyer TV series "On Our Own Terms", on death and dying, I see a doctor prepare  a family for a death by describing breathing at the end of life as air passing through a thin coat of fluid surrounding the throat, making a sound, like rattling.

I listened to the sounds in the surround as preparation for the work of separating the ego and cognition. In this way I have created space for expanding perceptions. I wrote down the notes as I heard them. I used these notes in written form as practice, as a learning environment for getting practice in perceptually describing what I was seeing. These notes are collected as fragments created through their action of motion coursing through a medium, like wind through a tunnel, air through the throat, and making a sound.

I am learning to see Escher-like images generated by conterminous boundaries as I move around in this zone. Doing these perceptual exercises is practice for seeing images form through the action of conterminous boundaries touching and quickening into motion; then into vibrating frequencies connecting through boundaries touching in motion. It is as if these vibrations form a bundle, a quantity of something, or quanta. I am becoming conscious that how I naturally see is through a continuous process of picking up information while moving through a visual field of changing environments, or (cultural) fields of visual action. As I move through this field, I interact with it. I generate sound memes, personal units of cultural transmission, evolving a linguistic consciousness in what I am seeing. ■

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INTERDISCIPLINARY DESIGNS:
A Typology

by Jose H. Cedillos

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