STAF FORD BEER - The Cybernetic Brain - page 290

as discussed so far. If one balks at any reference to the spiritual, then one can
see Beer's hylozoism as an extension of cybernetics proper, adding something
to the secular part that we have focused on elsewhere. Then we could say:
This is how one might extend cybernetics into the realm of the spiritual if
one wanted to; this is the kind of direction in which it might lead. On the
other hand, if one were prepared to recognize that there is a brute mystery of
existence, and if one were willing to associate that mystery with the spiritual
realm, itself defined by that association, then one could say that Beer's hy-
lozoism just is cybernetics—cybernetics taken more seriously than we have
taken it before. Beer's spirituality can thus be seen as either continuous with
or identical to his worldly cybernetics—a situation very different from the dis-
continuity between the modern sciences and the crossed-out God of moder-
nity. Once more we see that ontology makes a difference, now in the spiritual
realm—the cybernetic ontology aligning itself with Eastern spirituality rather
than orthodox Christianity and, at the same time, eroding the boundary be-
tween science and spirit. 55
Tantrism
yOgA MEANS UNION, WHETHER OF SELF AND COSMOS, MAN AND WOMAN, THE DIF-
FERENT CHAMBERS OF THE MIND. . . . IN THE LIMIT, THEREFORE, OF THE
A AND THE NOT-A.
STaFFORd BeeR, “I SAID, YOU ARE GODS” (1994 [1980], 385)
The second spiritual topic I need to discuss has to do with esoteric knowledge
and practice, and here we can also begin with Beer's 1965 essay “Cybernetics
and the Knowledge of God.” One might think that having named existence as
the ultimate mystery and having defined God as its explanation, Beer would
have reduced himself to silence. Instead, the essay opens up a discursive space
by thinking along the same lines as Beer did in his management cybernetics.
In the latter he insisted that the factory's economic environment was itself
ultimately unknowable, but he also insisted that articulated models of the
economy were useful, as long as they were treated as revisable in practice and
not as fixed and definitive representations of their objects, and the essay fol-
lows much the same logic in the spiritual realm.
Just as the factory adapts to its economic environment in a performative
fashion without ever fully grasping it, so it might be that, while our finite
brains can never rationally grasp the essence of God, nevertheless, the spiri-