Suppose a slightly edited film (consisting of doctoring the film by removal of the ball) of a soccer match were shown to a person unaware of the game of soccer. Could the viewer perceive the rules of the game? It would depend on the viewer's syntactic awareness. To make it simple lets call syntax--the rules. It would depend on the viewer's native ability in guessing what was going on in the film. That the play had structure, reasons--that it had rules. Watch a film of cars at an intersection for a while and almost everyone can pick up on the syntax--the rules. Red light, stop--Green light, go. As syntax (rules) becomes more subtle our syntactical awareness is tested and then eclipsed. What rule(s) governs the mass of the sub-atomic particle called a Muon? Nobody knows. The best minds in the world have studied the equivalents of Muon/soccer films for decades and haven't a clue. So what's the syntax of a Muon's mass? At this point blind guessing is about as good as anything.

On a previous page we outlined sensory abilities. If our mental maps, our models of the world were sensorially based, then those among us with the sharpest sight, the keenest hearing would be the most knowledgeable. We believe that minimal sensory acuity is all that's required, because our models of the world aren't the result of sensory acuity. In this page we will attempt to define syntactic awareness, explain its domain, and describe methods by which it can be developed or strengthened.

For purposes of framing, we begin with what syntactic awareness ISN'T. Syntactic awareness is less an exact procedure and more an art. The methods we will describe are for the most part heuristic, that is, ones using rules of thumb. What we will describe ISN'T intuition, which is the ability to perceive or know without conscious reasoning. Conscious reasoning often is directly involved in syntactic awareness--doesn't have to be but quite often is. Syntactic awareness ISN'T pattern detection. Although it uses pattern detection it is more concerned with the processes subsequent to the detection of pattern. Syntactic awareness ISN'T concerned with the search for perfect knowledge but the process of ever increasing the reliability of one's knowledge.

Syntactic awareness results in the creation or discovery of a personal operating syntax for the world. The rules, laws, causes--how the world works. To be syntactically aware is to comprehend the ways of the world. To be syntactically aware in a particular situation is to possess penetrating insight into the 'whys' and 'wherefores' of that situation--knowledge of that situation. Syntactic awareness is the ability to see what can't be seen, hear what can't be heard, and feel what can't be touched--comprehension of the ineffable. It's to be aware of the PROCESSES of the world--the syntax we use to understand it--rather than the world itself.

For example, there is an important logical and conceptual difference between the objects of chess (the board and pieces) and the rules of the game (processes). Such rules can be described and demonstrated but, in fact, have no sensory basis. Further, individual styles of play have definite, but non-sensory, attributes which can also be described and demonstrated. Without syntactic awareness all the chess examples in the world are pointless, because, in the end, each of these descriptions or demonstrations is just a finger pointing at the (a) moon.

Lao Tzu, an older contemporary of Confucius, was keeper of the imperial archives at Luoyang in the province of Honan in the sixth century B.C. All his life he taught that "The Tao that can be told is not the true Tao"; but, according to legend, as he was riding off into the desert to die he was persuaded by a gatekeeper at Hangu Pass of the Great Wall in northwestern China to write down his teaching for posterity.

The essence of Taoism is contained in the eighty-one chapters of the book--roughly 5,000 words--which have for 2,500 years provided one of the major underlying influences in Chinese thought and culture, emerging also in proverbs and folklore. Whereas Confucianism is concerned with day-to-day rules of conduct, Taoism is concerned with a more spiritual level of being. Appropriately, first line of the book is "The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao."

Syntactic awareness is sometimes described as "second sight" or a "sixth sense" and understanding it necessitates a clear separation of sensation from insight--the separation of visualizability from visualization, verbalization from comprehension. Although, and this is a central point, syntactic awareness uses sensory modalities for the representation of insight, such a representation does not portray or consist of sensory input. We may draw a picture to represent a concept while the concept itself remains unseeable. So our mental models of the world are symbolic rather than literal. Paraphrasing Lao Tzu, "The symbol that can be fully reduced to a V-A-K representation is not the eternal symbol."

See the problem? We can't tell you what we're trying to tell you. We can just hint at it and trust that as you practice Hawkeen Training your abilities at Syntactical Awareness will grow. Read on and you'll begin to get a sense of why we've recommended (by way of previous pages) some seemingly goofy exercises.

ELEMENTS:

Some of the following draws on material already presented in other pages of the Hawkeen Training site. We reproduce it here to keep the line of our thoughts uninterrupted.

Step 1: SENSORY

In an earlier page we added another category to the standard V-A-K sensory modalities--that of bandwidth. Our brains have distinct and separate neurological structures for processing what can be called broad and narrow sensations. It isn't a matter of degree, it's a matter of which parts of our brains we use for a particular activity. For example, the eye contains two types of light receptors: rods and cones. We use cones for narrow focused vision and rods for broad peripheral vision. Information from these two types of visual receptors is processed independently and in different areas of the brain. These are fundamentally different classes of perceptions thus different types of thought. Said another way, Vnarrow and Vbroad do not belong in the same class of perception. Again, it's not a matter of degree but of a functional difference. Each sensory modality (visual, auditory, and kinesthetic) can operate in two different bandwidths--wide and narrow.

Cameras focus and zoom, but this really isn't the same as the eye's broad and narrow ability. The camera is changing by degree, not the functional shifting of perception. For those with an uncontrollable interest in such technical matters the May 1991 issue of Scientific American contains an article on an optical device which can, in fact, shift from focused to peripheral vision.

Knowledge of and conscious control of sensory bandwidth is a first step to syntactic awareness, which operates most noticeably at the widest possible setting.

One method developed to increase wide visual abilities is NightWalking. It's a rather esoteric practice of fixating cone (narrow) vision in a context which favors rod (broad) activity--that of hiking at night while focusing on a small glowing fluorescent ball at the end of a thin metal rod about a foot in front of one's eyes.

A few references shed light on this type of 'expanded' sight and they vary from Taoists texts of early China through the books of Carlos Castaneda which speak of a certain kind of all-seeing gaze. It is difficult at times to determine whether the authors are speaking literally or metaphorically. The clearest and most insightful description of the powers of peripheral vision we have found was penned by Miyamoto Musashi, the legendary swordsman of 15th century Japan. In The Book of Five Rings Musashi refers to the two types of sight which he calls Ken and Kan. Ken registers the movements of surface phenomena; it's the observation of superficial appearance. Kan is the profound examination of the essence of things, seeing through or into. For Musashi, Ken is seeing with the eyes, Kan is seeing with the mind. While Musashi certainly didn't understand the biology of sight, he acutely was aware of the difference between cone and rod vision -- a master of syntactic awareness.

The science of vision delineates the retina as divided into two areas: the fovea and macula, both with high concentrations of cones, and the periphery where rods predominate. In short, cone and rod vision are responsible respectively for focused and peripheral vision. A quick way of understanding the extent of these two regions of vision is to extend your arms fully directly in front, bring your hands together and make them into fists side-by-side. Your fists cover the approximate area normally seen by cones, the rest of your visual field is largely rod mediated. Thus it's apparent that only a small percentage of our total visual field is clearly focused. Attending only to this region results in what is commonly called tunnel vision -- both figuratively and literally.

Darkness is a condition in which peripheral (rod) vision is far superior to focused (cone) vision. Night vision relies almost entirely on rods, which because of their neural connections and physical makeup are exceptionally sensitive to light. In the dark, cones are for the most part visually inactive, and so walking in the dark would force one to develop even stronger peripheral vision. For more detailed training information see the original NightWalking article.

A strong case can be made that without focused vision humans wouldn't have developed technology or, for that matter, civilization. Without the ability to focus sharply, humans couldn't have created the tools to make the machines we now possess. And so industrialized countries have become virtually addicted to the kind of focused vision required for reading, writing, office and manufacturing tasks. Most of our time is spent with eyes focused within just a few feet of our noses. Usually this is not the way to see the 'big' picture, nor enhance syntactic awareness.

It wasn't always so. For people living out of doors, peripheral vision is critical for staying alive. It may be time to rediscover it, for peripheral vision can in a glance absorb tremendous amounts of information--a whole landscape for example, or an entire situation. As we've lost our knowledge and experience of this visual skill, our capacity of syntactic awareness has also been diminished. In terms of structure and process, the difference between focused and peripheral vision is the same as that between sensory and syntactic awareness.

"Understanding" in industrial cultures is usually synonymous with focused vision--an assumption that is losing credence as our world becomes increasingly complex. The brain processes used by focused vision aren't designed to gather massive amounts of ambiguous information and distill them into an "understanding". On the other hand, the eye's rods and the brain's rod circuits are ideally suited for this purpose. Wisdom is a province of unfocused rather than focused attention for "to see clearly" is not to see with the eyes but instead with the mind because what is "seen" isn't visible.

Hearing also is split into broad and narrow, differences which can be noticed in what's called the "Cocktail Party Effect". At a party we can focus our attention on the sound of a single voice or switch to hearing the entire room. Those of you who have attempted to record a speaker in a noisy setting know the result of this phenomena. Electronic manufacturers have attempted to design a device which has the capability of recording a single voice separate from a noisy background, but to no avail. At present we don't have any effective idea of how to get a machine to narrow its auditory focus, something that humans all do everyday, usually without conscious effort.

Turning from visual to auditory methods for enhancing syntactic awareness, we run into a simultaneous/sequential problem. Both visual and auditory senses involve space and time. Since we don't know a better way to say it, we'll just say it: Peripheral vision takes the time out of space and peripheral hearing takes the space out of time. Focused vision requires time to scan a scene, peripheral vision doesn't -- time vanishes. Focused hearing notes the character of sound, its 'space', while peripheral hearing doesn't--auditory 'space' vanishes and only the perception of auditory time remains. What makes music, for example, is that it unfolds in a certain sequence over time.

Many people while listening to music become annoyed when there is background noise. While focusing narrowly on music, background noise is being heard via the wide auditory channel. Since 'noise' by definition doesn't carry much information the listener's syntactic appreciation of the music amounts to the syntax of nothingness. We suggest the following exercise to improve syntactic hearing. Arrange two sound sources: music and noise (which might be a radio set between stations where there's plenty of noisy static). Then focus your hearing on the noise. Really LISTEN to the noise and HEAR the music peripherally. It may take some practice but once you can master this split attention you will hear music as, perhaps, you've never heard it before--syntactically. Further, you can use this technique any time you are bothered by 'noise'--just switch channels and listen to it closely, noting its texture and pulse, and you'll suddenly find it far less annoying. During lectures experiment by LISTENING to the overhead lights or distant traffic noise and HEARING the lecturer. Syntactic hearing is listening 'long' instead of 'hard'. It allows you to comprehend the essence of long strings of sequential information--deriving the syntax.

Each of the forgoing perceptual techniques has a common element: separating wide and narrow attention by fixating the narrow mode on something of relative unimportance. Don't attempt to suppress the narrow band, but instead give it a job to do which is outside your area of interest. With this common element in mind, you can create any number of syntactic perceptual techniques.

A final, but important, admonition during broad-band perception is to shut off the naming process. Resist creating and attaching names to perceptions and their sources--the name that can be spoken is not the true name. Free from names, wide-band perceptions can reveal their mystery. We wish to stress again that sensory bandwidth is a functional rather than metaphoric attribute of our neurology--literal rather than figurative.

Step 2: WELL-FORMED SPECULATION

Once the sensory component of syntactic awareness has been addressed we can proceed to the second step. After you can perceive with an extremely wide bandwidth then what? This second step has to do with preparing the mind to contemplate events in a certain way. The result of syntactic awareness is the formation of a particular causal theory which we use to explain the events of a particular situation. We need to be careful in addressing two issues: cause and effect. The syntax we operate with is our conception of how these two interrelate. When people have trouble understanding it is often because they lack a satisfactory causal theory. Before they can understand an event or situation they need to know what caused it. Oddly enough, people often refute, ignore or deny an occurrence if they lack a causal theory capable of explaining the reason. For most of us, reasons must precede understanding or belief. The formation of syntax is the creation of the reason.

"I don't understand what just happened."
"I just can't believe it."
"I can't believe she did that."
"I don't understand why he would say that."
"No way!"

The lack of a causal theory (a reason) plunges many people into disbelief and denial instead of stimulating their syntactic awareness.

To understand anything, we must begin from a known (and personally accepted) fact in order to find its cause. The first and most critical conceptual step is to acknowledge the obvious--the particular "something" that did occur. We must separate, in our minds, the reason something happened and the fact that it did happen. Cause and effect must be separated in order to begin to understand causes. Until an effect is accepted, its cause will never be known and understood. Once this occurs, confusion only exists about causes not effects, the reason something happened instead of the fact that it did.

Often the facts of events or processes are so simple and profound as to be spellbinding. We find ourselves asking why this or that occurred and miss the fact that it did occur. We may find ourselves thinking along these lines: "I can't believe a camel can go long periods without water." We tend not to accept the fact because we don't understand what causes it or how it could be. However, if we turn the logic around and reason backwards we can direct our mind in a way that leads to understanding. "The FACT that a camel can go for long periods without water implies certain things about camels and/or water." Once we accept this fact about camels the likelihood of discovering certain other facts becomes more probable, whether they concern a camel's unusual anatomical features or water itself.

Syntactic awareness rests directly on the logic of the following statement: The fact of B implies some A or some set of A's.

1. Accept the obvious occurrence even though we don't yet understand what caused it.
2. Search for "What must be true about camels which allows them to go for extended periods without water?" The fact that camels can survive for long periods without water implies something unique about them.
3. Direct curiosity toward the part we don't know instead of the part we do know. We know B; what caused it to happen?

"B implies what A?"
"What must be true in order for B to happen?"
"What must be the case in order for B to occur?"
"Because of B what must be the case?"

Syntactic awareness proceeds with a clear distinction between what we know and what we are struggling to understand. It is also based on the knowledge that B in some way contains or reflects A, and that the simple fact of B implies definite possibilities of A.

This conceptual part of syntactic awareness is simply the ingrained habit and enjoyment of speculating on possible causes and it appears that the more speculations we generate and consider the better things proceed and the richer our syntax becomes.

Perhaps the most mysterious aspect of speculating is deciding which hunch to follow. What mental compass can we use to give us some measure of guidance? How do we decide? Central to the creative process (and syntactic awareness is a creative process) is the matter of deciding among an unlimited set of possibilities. Of all the attributes of syntactic awareness this is the most difficult to describe. Almost universally the answer seems to be one of aesthetics. In a certain light, syntactic awareness is just the perception of beauty. In any event, a well developed sense of aesthetics and beauty is indispensable. At this juncture it can become a circular kind of problem: How can one sense beauty if he or she has little sense of what beauty is? What are the attributes of beauty? The following is just a list of fingers, not moons. Balance, harmony, order, congruence, impeccability, simplicity, relevance, expansiveness... It's what makes Bach Bach. Citizen Kane Citizen Kane. Mona Lisa Mona Lisa. Fibonacci numbers Fibonacci numbers. The Hope Diamond The Hope Diamond. The Grand Tetons The Grand Tetons. Tiger Woods Tiger Woods. It's what makes something pleasing to us. The important point is to make distinctions based on aesthetic considerations and to develop a firm sense of a personal aesthetic.

We won't, in this page, attempt to describe a thorough method for aesthetic development but we will encourage you to begin asking the question: "Is it beautiful?" pertaining to the innumerable events, actions and objects in your life. And we're talking bone deep rather than skin deep.

In the end, we arrive at personal syntax by guessing and we can become better guessers by separating and reversing cause and effect and using a refined aesthetic sense to guide us.

Step 3: TESTING

Before adopting a new piece of syntax we need to have some idea of its robustness and this is accomplished by testing. The single and all encompassing test for the degree of syntactic robustness is the accuracy or degree to which a prediction of action or activity is met. Greater accuracy requires and is evidence of greater syntactic awareness. To really understand someone is to able to predict his/her behavior. Interestingly, prediction isn't confined to the future, one also can predict the past. One can predict the past behavior of another as accurately as the future.

On a cold December night we found ourselves in a crowded hogan on the Navaho reservation, halfway between Chinle and Second Mesa. Everyone sits on untreated sheep skins covering a packed dirt floor. Wagering takes place, then a ball fashioned from yucca root is hidden in one of four shoes buried in the floor which, in turn, are covered over with dirt. The game is on! For the next seven hours two teams (Day and Night) attempt to accumulate all of the 102 scoring counters by means of correct guessing, inspired hiding, pointing, faking, gesturing, yelling and an immense amount of dirt digging. The play is accompanied by singing, confusion, dust and general excitement.

A strange run of luck by an intense player on the Day team is matched by an 81 year-old great-grandmother who remained silent throughout the evening, rising only twice when her Night team is confused, majestically stepping forward and with a single finger pointing to the correct shoe.

It's well after midnight before we begin to get the general drift of the game. Strategy, tactics, hexing, patterns, attempts at distraction. What we are playing is Moccasin Game or Shoe Game, the Navaho gambling ritual.

Since the fall of 1990 we have been investigating a branch of Native American gaming called Hand Games. Hand Games are widely distributed, having been found among 81 tribes belonging to 28 different linguistic stocks. The name is descriptive, referring to lots held in the hand during play. In various places it is called Grass Game, Bone Game, Stick Game and so on. All of these games are similar, in that marked objects are hidden in one of the hands which then are outstretched to be guessed by an opposing team. There are regional variations of rules and scoring but the games have the similarity of hiding one or more marked object in hands or containers. In Shoe Game a ball is hidden in one of four shoes, at Hopi or Zuni it may be hidden in wooden cups. The object of play is to correctly guess the location of a marker and then keep the opposing team from finding it. You are to actively deceive your opponents, trick them, lie to and disorient them. When we tell friends of these games they often become uneasy. Gaming isn't a proper pursuit in our culture and few conceive of the possibility of it having spiritual lessons and qualities.

These games aren't contemplative; they're active, high-speed affairs which figure prominently in Native American myth, ceremony and religion. Over time we've come to realize these games are really about taking the step from sensory to syntactic awareness. They certainly can be played on a sensory level but there comes a transition when one's comprehension shifts from sense to syntax, from tactics to strategy, from the finger to the moon and the game takes on a decidedly different dimension. The beauty of the game becomes apparent; it is a training ground for the development of syntactic awareness, something prized among Native Americans of the Southwest. We include Hand Game as a beautiful example of a testing method which gives nearly instant feedback--any number of other methods can be developed.

CLOSING

We've attempted to create the straightest, most direct finger we can--believe it or not. With syntactic awareness we move from sensory processing to principles of the relationship between causes and effects. This 'knowledge' we keep hinting at is syntactically based. Any method which will identify and separate sensory awareness into its natural wide and narrow bands will suffice to prepare one's sensory equipment for syntactic awareness. Appreciation and use of aesthetic criteria is central to the perception or creation of useful (beautiful) syntax. Testing is just kicking the tires of new syntax and driving it around the block before upgrading.

In terms of Hawkeen Training, the object of syntactic awareness is to study and understand how all subjective experience arises from well-formed or ill-formed relationships with cause and effect. All well-formed behaviors, concepts, beliefs, maps, models, etc. have an aesthetic component--that of congruity (beauty) or the lack thereof. Once one has the "eyes" and "taste" for it, it can't be missed.

As a final note we reject any implication that there is a single correct "moon" or syntax. We state merely that there is a clear and important difference between finger and moon and that our mental models of the world are based on "moons" rather than "fingers".

Although standing on its own in delineating the elements of syntactic awareness, this page also serves as a foundation (syntax?) for organizing the whole of this training. Let's switch to an art analogy. Is Hawkeen Training's intention to create art, artists, art dealers or art appreciators? We're trying to say (in the terms of this ongoing 'art' metaphor) that there is such a thing as art. And we know that full participation in any area of 'art' (both in this analogy and literally) requires syntactic awareness. When we "Get It", the "it" we "got" was the result of syntactic awareness.

Your task is to begin to contemplating the world with syntactical awareness. Find the beauty.

More: Homo Aestheticus by Ellen Dissanayake

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