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Buddhism. In
The Way of Zen
(1957, 57-58), Watts drew on cybernetics as “the
science of control” to explain the concept of
karma
. His models were an over-
sensitive feedback mechanism that continually elicits further corrections to its
own performance, and the types of logical paradox that Bateson took to illumi-
nate the double bind. Watts also discussed the circular causality involved in the
“round of birth-and-death,” commenting that in this respect, “Buddhist phi-
losophy should have a special interest for students of communication theory,
cybernetics, logical philosophy, and similar matters.” This discussion leads
Watts directly to the topic of nirvana, which reminds us of the connection that
Walter and Ashby made between nirvana and homeostasis. Watts later returns
to a discussion of cybernetics (135ff.), now exemplified by pathologies of the
domestic thermostat, to get at a peculiar splitting of the modern mind—its
tendency to try to observe and correct its own thought patterns while in pro-
cess—and he also mentions the double bind (142), though not in connection
with madness, citing Jurgen Ruesch and Bateson (1951). Here, then, we have a
very interesting instance of a two-way flow between cybernetics and Buddhist
philosophy, with the nonmodern self as the site of interchange.
Next, to understand Laing's extension of Bateson it helps to know that
Aldous Huxley had also evoked a connection between schizophrenia and en-
lightenment two years prior to Bateson (neither Bateson nor Laing ever men-
tioned this in print, as far as I know; Huxley cited D. T. Suzuki as his authority
on Zen, rather than Watts). In what became a countercultural classic of the
sixties,
The
Doors of Perception
(1954), Huxley offered a lyrical description of
his perceptions of the world on taking mescaline for the first time and tried to
convey the intensity of the experience via the language of Zen philosophy—he
speaks of seeing the dharma body of the Buddha in the hedge at the bottom
of the garden, for example. But he also linked this experience to schizophre-
nia. Having described his experience of garden furniture as a “succession of
azure furnace-doors separated by gulfs of unfathomable gentian,” he went on
(45-47):
And suddenly I had an inkling of what it must feel like to be mad. . . . Con-
fronted by a chair which looked like the Last Judgement. . . . I found myself all
at once on the brink of panic. This, I suddenly felt, was going too far. The fear, as
I analyse it in retrospect, was of being overwhelmed, of disintegrating under a
pressure of reality greater than a mind accustomed to living most of the time in
a cosy world of symbols could possibly bear. . . . The schizophrenic is like a man
permanently under the influence of mescalin, and therefore unable to shut off
