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When I began writing this topic, my interest in the spiritual realm was close
to nonexistent. A compulsory school indoctrination into the worldview of the
Church of England had left me with the conviction that even geography, my
worst subject, had more going for it. But I was struck to find my cyberneticians
dragging me back into this realm in ways that I found challenging. Walter,
Ashby, Bateson, Laing, and Beer all, though in different ways, registered
spiritual interests and connections (and I suspect there is more to be said
about Pask than I have so far discovered). So what is it with cybernetics and
spirituality, especially Eastern spirituality? My qualifications to speak in this
area remain tenuous but, with that caveat in mind, here is a list of affinities
(which I cannot quite make into a unity, though they all hang together with a
performative understanding of the brain and the self):
(1) As just discussed, a cybernetic curiosity about the performative brain
leads naturally to an interest in the sorts of strange performances and altered
states characteristic of yogic traditions. (2) The performative brain is neces-
sarily a relational brain that responds to its context, including technologies of
the self that can evoke and respond to novel performances. We have seen that
some of these technologies were distinctly Western (flicker, LSD), but many
again made a direct connection to the East: meditation, yoga, diet, tantric ex-
ercises as practiced by Wizard Prang. (3) Cybernetic models of the brain, and
understandings of the self, point immediately to a decentering of the mind and
the self. From the tortoise and the homeostat onward, the cybernetic preoccu-
pation with adaptation has continuously eroded the modern understanding of
the bounded, self-contained, and self-moving individual. Instead, one has the
image of the brain and the self as constitutively bound up with the world and
engaged in processes of coupled becomings. And this image is not far from the
ontology of Buddhism, say, with its emphasis on undoing the modern self for
the sake of an awareness of being, instead, part of a larger whole (“yoga means
union”). (4) A corollary of the cybernetic epistemology with its insistence
that articulated knowledge is part of performance rather than its container
is, I think, a hylozoist wonder at the performativity of matter and the fact that
such performativity always overflows our representational abilities. I remain
unsure about the spiritual lineage of hylozoism, but we have seen how Beer
aligned it first with the Christian tradition and later with Eastern philosophy
and spirituality.
Beyond these specifics, what interests me most in this connection is how
thoroughly cybernetics elided the modern dichotomy of science and religion.
Since the nineteenth century, in the West at least, a sort of precarious settle-
