From the conversation with Professor Eleanor Rosch
Dept of Psychology
University of California
Berkeley, California
October 15, 1999

I was a non-reader, in fact a non-learner. And then magically I learned to read in about half a day…

What is universal, I argued, was the structure of categories and the processes by which category systems are formed. Categories have what I called a graded structure of better and worse examples, and many categories have unclear boundaries…

It struck me that that's what I would be doing for the rest of my life. And I said, so what is really important about it…

Mahayana Buddhism starts by talking about emptiness. One of the meanings of that is that you don't have independently existing selves or objects; they're interdependent, codependent…

Just saying that mind and world are not separate is only part of it. All those lists of attributes… actually all go together as one thing. That one thing is what some Tibetan Buddhism calls the natural state and what Taoism calls the Source. It's what is at the heart of the heart of the heart. There is this awareness and this little spark that is positive-- and it's completely independent of all of the things that we think are so important, that we think we need to have to get value…

… intention, body, and mind come together. And you start to be aware of perception happening as it actually does happen from the whole field, not from within a separated perceiver. … If you follow your nature far enough, if you integrate and integrate, if you follow your nature as it moves, if you follow so far that you really let go, then you find that you're actually the original being, the original way of being. The original way of being knows things and does things in its own way. When that happens, or when you get even a glimpse of it, you realize that we don't actually act as fragmented selves the way we think we do. Nothing you do can produce this realization, can produce the original way of being. It's a matter of tuning into it and its way of acting. It actually has a great intention to be itself (so to speak) and it will do so if you just let it…

Martial Arts teachers normally will pommel their student to tune into this aspect of the sense of panoramic knowing. The knowing that knows your whole team, the whole opponent team, your martial arts opponent…

The body is a kind of energy system that can actually serve as a bridge to wisdom knowing. The heart may be the best access through the physical system to this kind of wisdom. It's directly connected with channels through the eyes, so that's one reason why vision is a very important sense, and an important space sense…

Actually gazing into physical space can connect with that intuition. Sky-gazing is one of the things that helps that happen…

… but this little heart connection stays, and if organizations were allowed to do that, they could move mountains and nurture people at the same time.

Living being in Taoism is a highly experiential term; self-oranizing system is theoretical. Self-organizing systems, as described by Maturana and Varela, are really biological systems. … Taoism is very good about asking, what is this organism … the body changes into an energy system which then becomes empty, which then becomes part of the spirit, which then becomes… . So it's really quite a different approach.

The focus of Eleanor Rosch's more recent work is on how to broaden and deepen the analytical notions of cognition in the cognitive sciences by relating them to other ways of knowing that have been cultivated through various meditative practices in many cultures around the world. The following summary is based on her presentation at the 1999 Berkeley Knowledge Forum, where she had an astonishing impact, and on a paper that is still uncirculated and in draft form. All of the following quotes are from this paper.

Rosch distinguishes the two types of knowledge and knowing along the lines of the following eight dimensions (see also table below):

Table l: Two modes of knowledge and knowing (from: Eleanor Rosch)

The implications of this view for psychology and the cognitive sciences are so sweeping… Says Rosch: "Mind and world are not separate… We need a fundamental reorientation of what science is.… Our sciences need to be performed with the mind of wisdom."