An extract from the second recursive reflection on “the tree of life”

Citation

Maturana, H. and Dávila, X.P. (2013), "An extract from the second recursive reflection on “the tree of life”", Kybernetes, Vol. 42 No. 9/10. https://doi.org/10.1108/K-10-2013-0224

An extract from the second recursive reflection on “the tree of life”

Article Type:

Viewpoint

From:

Kybernetes, Volume 42, Issue 9/10

Non-human living beings do not live in competition with each other, although it may seem so to us from our cultural viewpoint. Often, we human beings live quite oriented to gain advantage upon others, and this guides our acts, justifying our behavior with theories we designed consciously or unconsciously with this purpose, sustaining that they are rational theories.

Thus, our human world tends to justify competition, discrimination, ambition and struggle; arguing that they represent relational values that are fundamental for our biological being, leading to evolutionary progress. Much in our cultural history for the last 20,000 years has occurred around the conservation of such “values” as a way of living. The result has been that the different worlds in which we live evolved around the unconscious and conscious maintenance of such way of living in their physiological, psychological and operational dimensions, causing a cultural way of living that produces pain, frustration and unhappiness. What to do?

The answer seems simple. All that is required is a psychic emotional change that gives rise to a change in our relational attitudes. If we abandon competition, collaboration appears. If we abandon discrimination, integration appears. If we abandon ambition, cooperation appears. If we abandon craving for progress, creative harmony appear. If we abandon fighting, conversations and agreements appears. If we abandon the vanity of owning the truth, love appears […]. And if love appears, effort disappears.

Non-human living beings, as non-existing from the start in languaging and explaining, have moved in an effortless conservation of living, giving birth in the biosphere to all sort of worlds that seem to us beautiful and pleasant, as well as others which do not seem to us either pleasant or desirable. We human beings as languaging beings that can reflect and choose, knowing that whatever manner of living we choose live, the sensory, operational, psychological and relational dimensions through which we realize our living, will spontaneously define at any moment in a recursive systemic way, the operational, psychological and relational dimensions of the world that we generate in our living in all its systemic, recursive and multidimensional extension.

Yogananda says in his autobiography: “If we think that God is far away, God is far away. If we think that God is near, God is near.” No matter what we believe; no matter what we accept as valid or invalid; no matter if we invalidate what we considered valid at a given moment: at any moment the way of our living will be determined by what we unconsciously accept at that moment from our intimate feelings. As human beings we do what is typical of human beings, which is to reflect and choose. The realization and conservation of our existence and autonomy as human beings Homo sapiens-amans amans, resides in the fact that we can reflect on what we do and want to do according to what we want to do, and thus consciously choose what we want to conserve in our living. If we conserve this manner of living by living it, our children will spontaneously learn to live in mutual respect and collaboration which is the democratic coexistence, which in turn is the only manner of coexistence in which we can live as ethical conscious responsible persons.

Ximena Paz Dávila and Humberto Maturana
Matríztica – Research, Santiago, Chile