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Structures as Interior Holism

      We can now briefly listen to the heart of structuralism itself: a structure. The elucidation of a structure is the fourth and last major step in the paradigm or social practice of adequate structuralism (first: pose a dilemma to groups and notice any classes of responses; second: check to see if those classes are stages; third: perform cross-group studies to see how widespread those stages are; fourth: attempt to elucidate the structures of those stages).

      For AQAL metatheory, a structure is simply a probability wave (in any quadrant). For the paradigm of adequate structuralism, the probability wave refers specifically to the pattern or agency of interior holons—their internality codes or coherence profile (the "wholeness" aspect of the whole/part holon), whether in an "I" or a "we." For AQAL, what all structures have in common is simply the probability of finding a certain behavior in a certain spacetime locale, and thus the safest orienting generalization is that an "interior structure" is a third-person description of finding a certain first-person reality in particular milieu of the AQAL matrix. Unless otherwise specified, in this section "structure" means "interior structure."

      The first and most central feature of a structure is that it is a dynamic holistic pattern; in fact, the simplest definition of structuralism is interior holism. The first major psychological structuralist was America's greatest psychologist, James Mark Baldwin, working at the turn of the century. Following in his pioneering footsteps was Jean Piaget (rather literally; Baldwin ended up teaching in Paris, where Piaget was paying very close attention). Although nobody imagines that Piaget's metatheory is adequate, even in the cognitive stream, nonetheless many of his contributions have endured among those doing adequate structuralism.

      In Piaget's book Structuralism, he summarized many points about structures that are still useful today. A structure, Piaget explains, simply means a self-organizing holistic pattern. All schools of structuralism, he notes, take their cue from wholeness: "For the mathematicians, structuralism is opposed to compartmentalization, which it counteracts by recovering unity through isomorphisms. For several generations of linguists, structuralism is chiefly a departure from the diachronic study of isolated linguistic phenomena... and a turn to the investigation of synchronously functioning unified language systems. In psychology, structuralism has long combated the atomistic tendency to reduce wholes to their prior elements."

      More precisely, according to Piaget, "The notion of structure is comprised of three key ideas: the idea of wholeness, the idea of transformation, and the idea of self-regulation." He continues:

     That wholeness is a defining mark of structures almost goes without saying, since all structuralists—mathematicians, linguists, psychologists, or what have you—are at one in recognizing as fundamental the contrast between structures and aggregates, the former being wholes, the latter composites formed of elements.... Moreover, the law's governing a structure's composition are not reducible to cumulative one-by-one association of its elements: they confer on the whole as such overall properties distinct from the properties of its elements [they transform parts into wholes, which is what structuralists mean by transformation²⁰].... The third basic property of structures is that they are self-regulating, self-regulation entailing self-maintenance and closure.

     The structure or internality pattern will almost always be some sort of holistic configuration, for the simple reason that the holon must hang together in order to endure; it must have some sort of unity or wholeness in order to exist as an entity. Parts of my dog Daisy cannot head in different directions when she decides to walk across the room. A holon is always a whole/part, and the "structure" of a holon refers to the "whole-ness" or unity aspect, which is why structures are always presented as holistic, transformational, and autopoietic patterns.²¹ As Piaget eloquently explained, structuralists of all varieties have historically been united in their attempts to honor and recognize the wholeness aspects of occasions: they were the first great interior holists.

      However, even though these structures or patterns tend to be stable, they are patterns OF things that are in constant dynamic flux. In a living cell, for example, not a single molecule remains in that cell over time; there is literally nothing concrete in that cell that remains unchanged—it is a constantly changing, self-renewing, dynamic flux. There is, however, one thing that remains stable and unchanged, and that is the pattern of the change itself. That pattern is the holistic, autopoietic, or self-regulating structure, which is why adequate structuralism is indeed marked by an elucidation of wholeness, transformation, and self-regulation. It is looking at occasions that already exist and asking, for example, how can some bacteria remain essentially the same for a billion years when all of their components change ceaselessly?

     This is true for all structures (exterior or interior, although we are concentrating on interior). The game of chess, which we have been using as a typical example, is not dependent upon a particular set of material pieces. In fact, you can use 16 pieces of almost anything and still have a game of chess—it is the rules that define chess, not the material components, which, as in all structures, can be ceaselessly changed and renewed.

     In short, structures (in any quadrant—whether linguistic, psychological, mathematical, biological, sociological) are simply self-regulating holistic patterns. Maturana and Varela's concept of autopoiesis owes much to Piaget's structures. Unlike many early structuralists, Piaget believed that structures underwent development—that all structures were con-structed.²² He was thus one of the first great constructivists (and in that sense he was a healthy postmodernist, itself a rare accomplishment), which means: the world is not given, but constructed.²³ (Piaget is not often thought of as postmodern, because he believed in worldcentric or universal pluralism, a perspective that emerges with the yellow wave, and not ethnocentric pluralism, which emerges with the green wave and came to dominate postmodernism, and thus he was usually attacked by most postmodernists.) He also was one of the first to attempt to integrate synchronic (present) with diachronic (developed) structures, an integrative intent shared by all subsequent developmental structuralists.²⁴

     Piaget was therefore the first great evolutionary or developmental structuralist; he gave the first consistent and highly sophisticated account of genealogy (which he called "genetic epistemology"), backed by research and observation, of how different cognitive structures enact and bring forth different worlds, worlds which are then taken to be given by the percipient but are actually (tetra)enacted by structures of consciousness. This was much more than the mere rhetorical assertion, offered by other postmodernists, that intersubjectivity creates worlds and hence knowledge is socially constructed; this was a highly meticulous research into exactly why and how that construction of reality occurs. Whereas most green-meme postmodernists, flying under the jet stream of integral awareness, used a constructivist stance to fall into pluralistic fragmentation and incommensurable lifeworlds, Piaget's integral-aperspectival stance allowed him to see both universal deep features and pluralistic surface features—hence, universal pluralism—much as the rules of chess are similar for Malaysians and Manhattanites, even if no concrete or actual chess game is ever the same.

     This allowed Piaget to give the first constructivist developmental view of the world that was not a performative self-contraction. (All pluralistic views exempt themselves from the relativity claimed to infect all views, and present themselves as universally true for all cultures, something their own theory disallows; hence, they contradict their own claims and dissolve their own credibility. This is why Habermas uses the general Piagetian frame as part of any coherent discussion of the evolution of culture; as noncontradictory genealogy, it has no rival—which is to day, adequate developmental structuralism is a crucial ingredient of any integral methodological pluralism). All of these accomplishments were truly extraordinary.

      As it turns out with any great pioneer, the ongoing paradigms and practices of adequate structuralism have revealed phenomena that do not gracefully fit into the metatheoretical conceptions advanced by Piaget. Cognitive development, which Piaget believed to be the one central axis of development within which all other developments unfold, turns out to be merely one of at least two dozen developmental lines or streams (albeit a "necessary-but-not-sufficient" one); within cognitive development itself, there are levels or waves higher than formal operational thinking; development is not decalage as an exception but "levels and lines" as a rule; states of consciousness get little attention (and altered states, none at all); Piaget's biologism is unnecessary but mostly surprising (from one of his genius); and Piaget's actual definitions of the structures (such as conop) didn't quite work out, although his descriptions of the behavior of the psychological phenomena at those waves are amazingly accurate and still stand up to ongoing cross-cultural research.

      (Piaget adequately described the behavior of certain interior psychological holons but his theoretical model did not do them justice. In other words, the paradigm, injunction, or social practice of adequate structuralism brought forth a series of experiences or phenomena that Piaget then attempted, in an appropriately reconstructive fashion, to explain with a series of theoretical conceptions—since theories always arise within specific paradigms or social practices—and although his practice was adequate, his theories were not. But that is simply the definition of a great pioneer.)

      But as for those descriptions of the behavior of the psychological holons internal to the agency of the structure (i.e., the behavior falling within the probability space) of the first four major waves of the cognitive stream (sensorimotor, preop, conop, formop), Piaget is still right on the money according to those doing adequate structuralism. As we have seen, it is not necessary that a particular structure be cross-cultural—a structure can be held in common by only two people, or perhaps a family, or a tribe, or a culture, or a nation, or sometimes all humans as far as we can tell, and sometimes all sentient beings (as disclosed in Kosmic consciousness and Kosmic solidarity of a causal and nondual paradigmatic practice). In that continuum, Piaget's descriptors up to formop are impressively cross-cultural for humans wherever they have been tested by researchers adequately engaging the practice, showing up in Amazon Rainforest Indians, Australian Aborigines, and Manhattan yuppies.²⁵ Some of Piaget's descriptors are even cross-species (e.g., cats go through the first four stages of sensorimotor cognition). As one of the many developmental streams of consciousness, the Piagetian cognitive stream takes its rightful place with the Loevinger self stream, Kohlberg moral stream, Maslow needs stream, and Graves values stream as among some of the major currents of consciousness disclosed by zone #2 methodologies. This particular stream has been further explored by present-day researchers from Robert Kegan to Michael Commons to Kurt Fischer.

      Some people confuse "self-regulating" with "self-contained," which is not the case. All holons are agency-in-communion, or structures-in-exchange, where "structure" means the defining agency, the deep features, the internality codes, coherence profile, or the specific and enduring patterns of any self-organizing holon, and "in exchange" refers to the fact that all holons possess not just autonomous agency or closed self-regulating patterns, but also exist in networks of open communion, relationship, and embeddedness. This is why Maturana and Varela define autopoiesis a "a closed organization (or pattern) with open components." The " closed" part is the autonomy, stability, enduring pattern, Kosmic habit, or structure that allows a holon to continue to exist. The " open" part refers to the fact that, although the deep features or agency may be relatively autonomous (and hence self-regulating), the surface features consist of patterns of relational exchange with the surrounding environs, an exchange upon which every holon depends for its very existence. Thus, all holons are self-regulating but not self-sufficient, because all holons are always agency-in-communion (or coherence-in-correspondence, or being-in-the-world). Neither agency nor communion, neither autonomy nor relationship, neither coherence nor correspondence, are alone enough to define a holon.

The Structure of a Song

      We have been following the general "steps" in the social practice of adequate structuralism: (1) a hermeneutic (first-person-plural) interaction in search of third-person classes of responses to a set of conditions; (2) longitudinal studies to see if those classes are stages; (3) cross-group studies to see the applicability of those stages—whether they are more local or more universal; and (4): the search for the structure or coherence pattern of each of the stages.²⁶

      In this section, we focus on the fourth and last step. Once stages of interior responses have been identified, most researchers attempt to specify the coherence codes or structures of those stages—that is, the agency that governs the elements that are internal to that particular interior holon (individual or cultural, subjective or intersubjective, I or we).

     We have been using the game of chess as an example of a structure. A musical song is another good example. A song can be played on numerous different instruments and still be the same song (because structures are not defined by their material components but by their rules of internal relationship). Moreover, many songs have universal resonance: Russians, Croatians, Aborigines, and Hawaiians can all hum the same tune and respond to it. A song has holistic deep features that define it (its melody, tune, internal arrangement of musical notes), which are the same for everybody; yet no actual song is ever the same, since it is sung by different people, using different instruments, in different times and places (universal deep features, pluralistic surface features).

     Just so, there are many melodies, tunes, and songs in the human heart and soul, and structuralism is the study of those exquisite melodies. Whereas hermeneutics studies those songs from the inside, as they are being sung and shared, structuralism looks at them from the outside, not as pregiven ontological structures, but as unfolding, developing, and evolving patterns that emerge as human beings learn new and different ways to sing and dance. Some of these songs are so popular they become repeated over and over and thus settle into Kosmic habits, and some of the really great songs of evolution become universal or planetary Kosmic habits.

      The structuralist, after spotting a song of consciousness—or what appears to be a Kosmic habit followed by a particular interior holon (or group of holons)—moves from descriptions of that habitual behavior to possible definitions or elucidations of any underlying patterns, codes, or regularities—that is, from a description of the Kosmic habit the holon is following to a possible definition of the agency or internality of this habit.

     The structure of a song is its melody, tune, or pattern. A person is singing that song when his or her vocal actions produce notes that are internal to that melody (or internal to the nexus of relationships among notes that define that song). Likewise, the structure of chess is a set of rules that the 16 chess pieces or tokens must follow; two people (or compound individuals) are in a game of chess (or compound network) if the behavior of the 16 tokens that they both use are internal to the game (i.e., follow the rules of chess)—the individuals are in the game, or inside the "we" situation, if the intersections of their 16 tokens are internal to the nexus-agency or rules of the communal holon. The structuralist is interested in those rules, rules that express the Kosmic habits or enduring patterns of the particular holon (and rules that therefore display wholeness, transformation, and closure or autopoiesis).²⁷

      The game of chess has a structure, a bacterium has a structure. The major differences between them is that the former is an artifact, the latter, a sentient holon; and the former involves a compound network, the latter, a compound individual. Nevertheless, both have a structure in the broad sense, which represents the enduring patterns or Kosmic habits of its reproduction in spacetime. As we were saying, a structure in the broad sense is a song, not a material thing; it is a flow pattern, not a fixed entity; it is a melody that can be played by many different instruments but is not the instruments themselves. There are important differences between individual, communal, and artifactual, but what their structures all have in common is that they are like songs.²⁸ A song does not exist apart from some sort of instrument (human voice, bird voice, violin, piano, etc.), but neither is it any actual instrument or combination of instruments, nor can it be captured in any sense by a description of the instruments playing it.

      Thus, once structural holists have spotted a song (in an individual or cultural holon), they generally attempt to elucidate its melody or identifying pattern. Different structuralists have approached this task in different but useful ways. Some structuralists, like Piaget, have attempted mathematical definitions of these Kosmic songs and patterns. Other structuralists, like Erik Erikson, offered more literary descriptions of psychosocial patterns. Some focus more on the third-person side of the structural street; these are generally known as the formalists (e.g., a brilliant pioneer here, and still one of my favorites, is the incomparable Roman Jakobson). Other structuralists stay closer to the first-person side, the intuitional and hermeneutic side of the street (e.g., Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes). Many have attempted a strong synthesis of both the first-person and third-person aspects of structures (or the semantic and syntax of songs)—an early pioneer in this integrative endeavor (and easily one of the most gifted) was Paul Ricoeur. And, as we just saw, Michel Foucault attempted his own synthesis (of first-person interpretation and third-person structuralism) to arrive at an "interpretive analytics."

      Special mention, however, must be made of Jean Gebser, who comes to mind as perhaps of the greatest of the postmodern structuralists (not postmodern poststructuralists, who crash-landed). All adequate structuralists today are in fact postmodern structuralists, which I would call post/structuralism, except nobody will get it. (Still, every now and then, I'll dust off that phrase, as in the title of this excerpt). Adequate structuralists or post/structuralists cover both sides of the street (3p formalism and 1p interpretation); recognize the relativity of surface features; are alive to numerous different levels and lines; and rest their claims only on careful research. Gebser was a wonderful exemplar here, outlining various structures of consciousness with wonderful lucidity and keen insight, often combined with literary greatness, making room for both the insides and the outsides of interior holons. Reading such genius as Gebser always humbles one in the extraordinary generosity of a spirit willing to make so much room for so many radiant realities.

      Earlier I gave a sampling of various types of structures that have been suggested by competent researchers (for convenience, here is the list):

     Carol Gilligan's three stages of selfish, care, and universal care in female moral development; Robert Kegan's five orders of consciousness; Spiral Dynamics' elucidation of the blue meme, orange meme, green meme, turquoise meme, etc.; Jean Gebser's famous archaic, magic, mythic, rational, and integral structures; Jane Loevinger's symbiotic, conformist, conscientious, individualistic, and integral self-identities (etc.); formal operational cognition, the relativistic-pluralistic value structure, the construct-aware self, fourth-order consciousness, moral-stage 2, the participatory stage, preconventional stage, the conscientious self, sensorimotor cognition, and so on.

      The simple point is that each of those structures is like a song; each has a unified wholeness that defines the types of phenomena that are enacted and brought forth by those structures; each represents the way a world is co-created and co-constructed by the structure of consciousness perceiving/enacting that world; each has a melody or identifiable structure (or internality code), which means, for an individual structure, that any phenomena within the structure are following that melody (are internal to its rules or patterns), and, for a collective structure, that any compound individuals are inside the structure when their intersections are internal to it; each structure or melody has deep features that represent the common elements of the song wherever it appears, as well as surface structures that are always different wherever they appear; none of these are pregiven ontological structures but rather the results of creative and emergent novelty that eventually settled into evolutionary habits (that are therefore, nonetheless, independent of particular individuals, and thus preserve the "trans-individual" features of metaphysical levels or planes but without their ontological baggage).

      In this section, we have covered a few of the great pioneers and profound gifts of the zone #2 approaches of indigenous perspectives of being-in-the-world. But there is one last group of structural pioneers we would be remiss not to honor, and they were in some ways the greatest of them all.

The Original Structuralists

      The earliest structuralists were, of course, none other than the great metaphysicians of the spiritual traditions, as they outlined and codified the higher levels of being and knowing, the higher Songs of the Self Supreme.

     Through unexcelled growth into the further reaches of human potential, they saw, heard, felt, touched, and realized deeper and higher realms of the Divine. When they returned from their journeys, they described what they felt and saw, and often outlined maps of these higher territories, for the benefit of those who had not yet taken the journey. They created third-person stories and maps (or a knowledge by description) of realities they saw first-hand (in a knowledge by acquaintance). In other words, they were the first great structuralists.

     Classic premodern structuralism included the descriptions of journeys taken to the higher and lower worlds given by the great shamans, some of which (e.g., African, Tundra) reach back before history began, and possibly represent interior realities glimpsed by Eve herself (or the common ancestor of all humans now believed to have lived around 175,000 BCE). These pioneering shamanic maps, like all maps, were actually a four-quadrant affair, and thus their terms, structures, and symbols were embedded in particular cultural backgrounds and contexts; which is to say, their songs were part of an enacted worldspace expressing Spirit in its own unfoldment at that time and place.

     As the cultural background continued to evolve and develop, and as red (magical-animistic) value contexts evolved into blue (or mythic-membership) contexts, structuralism began to take the form of a Great Chain of Being, an understanding of a Great Holarchy of nests of being within nests of being, endlessly. The higher worlds and the underworlds were related in a great continuum of consciousness, and it was said that a human being could operate at any of these levels of awareness, depending upon his or her own spiritual realization.

     The Great Nest of Being (like the shamanic maps before it) was simply a third-person map or description that the great saints and sages of that era often used to interpret their first-person experiences and realizations. The spiritual realizations were as authentic as authentic can be (just as the shamanic were); but the interpretations expressed the four-quadrant realities of that time and place (and particularly a blue-value intersubjective cultural context).

     The two great currents of classical structuralism were, in the East, the authors of the Upanishads; and, in the West, the Pythagorean/Parmenides/Platonic stream. So widespread, so influential, so similar were these currents during that general epoch that they have been viewed as a type of "perennial philosophy," which perhaps obscures more than it elucidates.

     (The "perennial philosophy" is simply a set of abstract features that describe a few of the structures of the four-quadrant interpretation of being-in-the-world that was common to some, not all, of the cultures of that era, but that were not common features before that era, nor after it. The perennial philosophy is neither universal nor perennial, but simply an abstracted statement of a form that the AQAL matrix took in a few highly evolved philosopher-sages of that particular era.)

     Although the structures they presented were burdened with ontological and metaphysical accoutrements that are, by today's lights, unnecessary and outmoded, the higher realizations themselves were not, and the descriptions of these higher states are extraordinary, exquisite, and still as awe-inspiring as ever. The Great Nest, in virtually any of its many interpretive forms, was one of the first profound realizations that Spirit manifests in a series of dimensions, grades, or levels of complexity (which also represent levels of care, compassion, and consciousness, to which human being can align themselves in greater circles of love and awareness). This morphogenetic scale of increasing unfoldment would reappear in the modern era as the theory of evolution (although shorn of its upper or transpersonal reaches, which AQAL metatheory analyzes as the "disaster of modernity," but only alongside the "dignity of modernity," which escaped much of prepersonal nightmares inherent in earlier eras.)

     The greatest of these classical structuralists in the West was, no doubt, Plotinus; and in the East, Nagarjuna and Shankara stand out; but they are simply first in a very long line of geniuses: Maimonides, Luria and the Kabbalah, St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila, Chih I and T'ien T'ai system, Fa-Tsang and the Hwa Yen, Abhinavagupta and Kashmir Shaivism, the anuttaratantra or Highest Yoga Tantra in Tibetan Buddhism: all are breathtaking descriptions of interior phenomenal states and stages of higher consciousness (disclosed by the paradigm of meditation and codified by the paradigm of classical structuralism), higher levels that are third-person descriptions that can only be known by first-person transformation (using the paradigm or social practice of contemplation or meditation).

     The best known of these great systems, and in some ways still the most compelling, is that of the 7 chakras, which are 7 structures of energy and consciousness. (In Excerpt G, "Toward a Comprehensive Theory of Subtle Energies," we will return to the chakras and attempt to reconstruct them in a post-metaphysical or AQAL fashion.)

     But what all of the versions of the Great Nest had in common was an understanding that levels of consciousness generate levels of reality (i.e., a hierarchy of knowing is also a hierarchy of being)—which means that these pioneers were, in their own way, the premodern postmodernists; and a few of the greatest—Nagarjuna in particular—give a more accurate, more profound constructive postmodernism than anybody before or since. But the weight of background cultural contexts made a clean post-metaphysics impossible to come by on any sort of large scale, and the vast number of less gifted souls took "levels of reality" as pre-existing structures. Still, the thundering wonder of it all is that these great metaphysicians accomplished what they did, which was breathtaking. Even Bertrand Russell, archetypal rationalist and anti-spiritual theoretician, said that the most beautiful philosophy ever conceived was that of Plotinus.

The Emancipatory Power of Structuralism

     Those are some of the great, classic, premodern zone #2 approaches—zone #2 approaches that, as always, demand first-person transformation to finally disclose the referents of those third-person descriptors. But those approaches also exemplify what is perhaps the primary incentive of using zone #2 approaches, both yesterday and today: their emancipatory power.

     For all the reasons we outlined earlier, it is almost impossible to construct any sort of reliable map of higher states or stages using merely phenomenology, or hermeneutics, or systems theory, or any other conceivable approaches. Rather, you have to back up a bit, look at interior development not just in yourself but in others over a long period of time, and codify the various paradigms and practices that can be used to enact these higher domains. A great pioneer—such as Gautama Buddha or St. Teresa—might be able to traverse many higher levels of consciousness in a single lifetime and describe these higher domains to us, the less evolved. But even then, they are using structuralism—or a third-person description of higher first-person realities—in order to help emancipate us, liberate us, and free us, by pointing to higher dimensions that move beyond the narrowness, pain, suffering, and torment of less developed states and stages. They are using structuralism as part of the path of liberation: third-person maps that can only be realized by first-person spiritual practice.

     Further, in presenting maps of higher dimensions of awareness, they are pointing out—and making conscious—the restrictions, limitations, and binding power of lesser dimensions. By pointing to a higher wholeness of higher structures, they are exposing the lesser wholeness of lesser structures. We can think of these as maps of higher realities, or, alternatively, as maps of illusion. These great pioneers, by virtue of realizing a deeper or higher reality—by virtue of getting out of the cave of shadows—could give us a map of the cave itself. That has always has been one of the main driving forces of zone #2 methodologies: by giving us maps of the prison, make emancipation more likely. (AQAL, for example, is a map of the prison, not a map of Suchness.)

     What do you think Foucault was doing? Same thing. He was describing how webs of unconscious patterns were limiting and narrowing our awareness. "Look at how these networks of power-knowledge control you," he is saying, "and rise above them, be free of them to whatever extent you can." It is only through zone #2 methodologies that such emancipatory interests can be effectively engaged and enacted, and that is as true today as it was in the time of the first shamans who pointed to higher realities not bound by the torments of lesser domains.

Short sidebar on Michel Foucault: I spent several years studying everything written in English by and about Foucault. It is always interesting that so many theorists, who have a genuine interest in various forms of emancipation, have gotten that interest by way of mystical, spiritual, or transcendental experiences, and Foucault was no exception. He had a life-long, deeply serious interest in "limit experiences," particularly mystical experiences, as manifested in everything from the "mad poets" that he loved—Artaud and Nerval in particular—to extreme states of consciousness induced by sadomasochistic sexuality, which he believed pointed to an entirely new "economy of pleasure," or new and liberating modes of distribution of sexual pleasure throughout the body. Combined with his own homosexuality (which was harshly judged by the human "sciences" of his time as being pathological), his interest in mysticism, which was also harshly judged by conventional discourse, kept Foucault keenly aware of the ways that "normal" society actually marginalizes, represses, and oppresses not just human beings—the ultimate injustice of slavery—but, in lesser yet still devastating ways, aspects of interior potentials of human beings—the miniature injustices committed daily in the name of "conventional truth," which is nothing but thinly disguised power.

     It was also fascinating to read Foucault in light of his deep and lifelong interest in mystical states, and then read his American "interpreters," who made virtually no mention of any of this. (I constantly had a déjà vu experience, similar to the one I had about Gustav Fechner, another profound theorist whose deeply transcendental roots have been expunged from college textbooks.) The green-meme postmodernists, driven by new left agendas, ended up marginalizing, ignoring, or actively repressing some of the absolutely crucial components of Foucault and his work, thus inadvertently displaying exactly the exclusionary and rarefication rules investigated by Foucault; and they presented their results as "pluralistic diversity" when it was, Foucault would say, largely power. As Foucault would point out, their discursive networks had exclusionary rules that screened out any discussion of transcendence from the official, legitimate, and legally sanctioned realms of discourse. This marginalization of Foucault is something Foucault himself would definitely wish to emancipate us from.

     Emancipatory interests have never been far from structuralism in its many forms. Emancipation: to be Free of limitation by finding a greater Fullness. Shamans could offer a greater Freedom in a greater Fullness, as likewise could the great saints and sages of the traditional or axial period. None of this depended upon the existence of pregiven higher levels, only the emergence of levels higher than those presently existing. Anytime that any pioneer pushes into higher, wider, deeper domains and returns to tell us about it, they are in effect using structuralism, or third-person descriptions of first-person realities. And anytime that we believe that we have a higher, wider, deeper, freer, or fuller view of the world, we are using structuralism to tell others about it, and encourage their own emancipation by a transformation of their own consciousness, so that they are not merely translating third-person descriptions but are immersed in first-person realities, finding thereby a greater Freedom and a greater Fullness (in the I, we, and it domains).

     (It amounts to the same thing to say that, just as structuralism is our only access to interior holism, it is our main call to interior emancipation, in that greater Freedom and Fullness always amount to the discovery of ever-greater wholeness....)

      All of the great structuralists or interior holists—premodern to modern to postmodern—are testaments to the richness and vitality—and emancipatory power—of the zone #2 approaches that can be brought forth by our own indigenous perspectives. And anytime we are involved in the call to emancipation, we are involved in the noble goals and ideals supported by structuralism in its many guises.