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Autopoiesis and the Laws of Form with Terry Marks-Tarlow
00:54:35
Autopoiesis and the Laws of Form with Terry Marks-Tarlow Terry Marks-Tarlow, PhD, is a clinical psychologist. She is author of Mirrors of the Mind: Psychotherapist as Artist; Clinical Intuition in Psychotherapy; Awakening Clinical Intuition; Psyche’s V...
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I think that there's a real mystical. I mean, to me this system is profound in that sense that it points towards mysticism, towards the validity of that perspective, of just open boundaries everywhere and deeply underneath the world of appearances and the complexity that the observer builds after a lot of experience in the world.
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Keep watching to learn more.
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Book 4 in the New Thinking Allowed Dialogue series. Charles T. Tart, 70 years of exploring Consciousness and Parapsychology. Now available on Amazon.
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New Thinking Allowed is presented by the California Institute for Human Science, a fully accredited university offering distant learning graduate degrees that focus on mind, body and spirit, the topics that we cover here. We are particularly excited to announce new degrees emphasizing parapsychology and the paranormal. Visit their website at cihs. Edu. You can now download all eight copies of the New Thinking Allowed magazine for free or order beautiful printed copies. Go to newthinkingallowed.org thinking allowed conversations on the Leading Edge of Knowledge and Discovery with psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove. Hello and welcome. I'm Jeffrey Mishlove. Our topic today is Autopoiesis and. And the Laws of Form. My guest is Dr. Terry Marks Tarlow, a clinical psychologist. She is author of Mirrors of the Mind, Psychotherapist as Artist, Clinical Intuition and Psychotherapy Awaking Clinical Intuition, Psyche's Psychotherapy, Fractals and Complexity and Creativity Inside Out. She is also co editor of two Simultaneity, Temporal Structures and Observer Perspectives and A Fractal Epistemology for a Scientific Psychology. Terry is based in California. And now I'll switch over to to the Internet video. Welcome, Terry. It is a pleasure to be with you once again.
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A
And thank you so much, Jeff, for having me.
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B
Once again, last time we talked about the epistemology of fractals. I know that you are in love with fractals, if I may be so bold as to say that, and they are amazing. But we're going to take a slightly different topic today. I know interrelated autopoiesis is a term that was popularized by Francisco Varela and his partner Umberto Matarana.
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Exactly.
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B
So let's begin by defining that term. I think it's a very important term.
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A
Okay. Well, autopoiesis are living systems that maintain their own boundaries and are able to reproduce themselves and keep themselves alive, essentially.
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B
I've often imagined that it involved the idea that matter, just matter is able to evolve into living systems of its own accord.
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A
Absolutely. Matter is what Varela and Maturana were looking at. They started with single cells and that was the derivation from Spencer Brown's math, which I know you're also interested in us talking about, but they started at the level of single cells and very, very simple systems and how they maintain themselves in relationship to the outer world and the environment and through the outer world and the environment.
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B
So I'm presuming then it would be correct to assume that Varela and Madarana were basically biological materialists.
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A
Maybe, but I'm not sure about that because the math that they use to derive these ideas in the first place starts with consciousness. And so I don't think that Varalloa was a materialist, actually.
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B
Okay, well, all the better from my point of view.
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A
Point of view too. I'm not a big fan of.
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But it did seem to me that maybe I misunderstood the idea of autopoiesis. I thought it meant that even subatomic particles would come together. They'd form atoms, the atoms would molecules, the molecules would form complex chains of carbon molecules, and somehow life would evolve of its own accord.
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No, I don't think so. That kind of reductionist framework, I think, does not apply at all. It's the opposite, or not the opposite, but it's a different direction than a physicalist interpretation. So no, really, it starts with consciousness and it starts with observers being part of the system that they're observing. I mean, maybe it would be a good idea to start or introduce this math at this point of Spencer Brown and then how it differs from Varela's autopoiesis.
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B
G. Spencer Brown wrote a book called the Laws of Form. It was published in 1969. I remember I was a student at the time. And I remember many of the leaders of the then human potential movement, people like John Lilly and others were raving about this book, the Laws of Form. They seemed to think it had answers that they couldn't find elsewhere.
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A
That is true. That was the great claim that Spencer Brown made about this book. And the book is very. It's very interesting. It's a really, really unusual book in that the actual book is shorter than the footnotes at the end or the end notes, which is. I don't know if there's another book that is like that. But it's also unusual because although he was a mathematician, this book really included very poetic and sort of mythical aspects to it and mystical aspects to it, which is why I think as part of the human potential movement that you heard so much about it. But it's also why mathematicians, many mathematicians, completely disregarded it. But it's a much more embodied kind of mathematics. I mean, it's sort of the whole question of whether mathematics is discovered or invented, I think relates to the laws of form, in a sense. Because I think that mathematics both is discovered and invented at the same time. So it's something that comes from inside people's heads on the one hand. But the whole Wigner paper on the unreasonable effectiveness of math. And the fact that math winds up dovetailing with the outer world. And that's so many mathematical forms originally people think are completely irrelevant to life. And then later on, decades, sometimes later, there's the discovery of how they actually apply to the real world. And it's magical seeming. And I think the laws of form really bridge that area completely between the sort of abstract level of consciousness on the one hand. And the realm of living matter on the other hand. But because consciousness is posited as primary in this system. That's why I don't think that Varela was a materialist. Nor was Spencer Brown.
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B
A different view than either physicalism or idealism. The idea that consciousness is primary is sort of the Pythagorean view that there's something that underlies both the physical world and the world of consciousness. And that could be mathematics itself.
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A
It very well could be mathematics itself. And I would say Jung absolutely believed that mathematics provides the archetype of. Of order and how order arises out of chaos. But I also think that quantum physics. That the whole informational perspective of quantum physics dovetails with this idea as well. That there really could be a connection between consciousness and this informational substrate that the physicists are positing as well. So I'm not sure. I don't consider. I don't know, the idea of that being idealism. I guess it is. I guess it is. But I don't think of myself, when I think in terms of physics as an idealist. In that sense. I mean, I tend to think of matter and information, or matter and consciousness going all the way down. But I'm coming around to consciousness, information as primary.
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B
This will be a very interesting conversation, I have a feeling, because we're dealing with such fundamental issues. For example, the little bit that I know about the laws of form is that until you make a distinction or even a mark of some kind, then everything is united. There is no difference between the observer and the observed. Without a distinction of some sort.
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Exactly. That is the primacy. And that is the fundamental way that Spencer Brown's perspective differs from traditional Boolean logic is that everything is reduced to this primal act. And that act is making a mark, making a distinction. Distinguishing this from that or from the perspective of a cell, it would be distinguishing inside from outside. Or from the perspective of consciousness or higher levels of consciousness. It might be distinguishing day from night or rest from activity. Or just the different opposites that we cycle through all day long. That all have to do with drawing distinctions and with making boundaries. And in fact, boundary making is so important. That is the subject of the book that I and my co author are finishing up now about boundaries and about the openness of boundaries that come from systems like Spencer Brown. But going back to what you're saying about what's primary. So in drawing that first distinction, initially he would say, I think that that is the act of consciousness, the movement of consciousness that creates that first distinction is a movement in space. And it distinguishes marked from unmarked territory. And the marked, that would be like figure ground, let's say, in vision that we focus one thing that's figure, the rest is ground. That would be more like an unmarked space. But in this calculus, the really interesting thing happens when a distinction is made. And then initially he called it cancellation. It re enters the distinction, re enters itself by crossing or recrossing that boundary and that piece of it. The re entry term that is different from math, traditional math, and that is the special component of this, of his system, that relates to how consciousness works, how life works. Because the ability to re enter itself allows not only the observer in the observed, but it allows the observer to redraw and redefine the boundaries. And that's what living systems do all the time. That's what consciousness does all the time. And that's feedback as the most basic. Another really basic archetype is feedback. And everything works by feedback. And that's true at, at the quantum level. That's true at all scales of existence, consciousness, life, etc. Feedback terms, fractal geometry, chaos theory, all of it involves things looping back around and re entering themselves. And new things emerging as a result of that.
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B
Now, I do know that there are friends of mine who are scientists, who are materialists, who would say that it's that looping around that creates consciousness out of matter. That they use that as a physicalist way of explaining consciousness.
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A
That's true. I mean, it depends what you take as primary, right? It depends what you take as primary. If you take matter as primary, then these theorists are. Are using feedback loops. And certainly the brain is an incredibly complex feedback loop between sensory input and motor output. And with evolution, the complexity gets higher and higher. You can argue, I think this is a philosophical matter, isn't it because it depends what you take as primary, then what is emerging from what. But Spencer Brown and Varela, they do start with consciousness. And the second order cybernetics people that you also, I'm sure remember from the human potential days because they were also very, very interested in this stuff, I think they also start with consciousness. So insofar as we are or this system is starting with conscious that Varela derived his work from, I would say let's take that as primary.
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B
Let's go back to this topic of re entry that you've brought up. So I'm under the impression, in G. Spencer Brown's way of thinking, the laws of form, if you make a mark and then you reenter, it's like you remove that mark, but you're now back into yourself again. But I would assume you have the memory that the mark once existed. You're now in time. You have before the mark and after the mark.
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A
Exactly. And so that cancellation then is a distinction that leads to no distinction. And now we're into the realm of paradox. And paradox has not been a friendly topic for mathematics in general because paradox actually brought down the grand illusion that absolute truth could be gotten through logical systems, through using logic as the base. And of course that Whitehead tried to do this and Godel proved this is impossible. And so paradox, that, that re entry bringing paradox is a vital, vital part of Spencer Brown's system. And it's a vital reason why it's so applicable to life. Because we're filled with paradoxes, reality is filled with paradoxes. And it's really only our reductionist minds that want to get rid of those paradoxes as opposed to the degree to which they're generative. And that was really Spencer Brown and Varela's perspective that paradox is generative. But coming back to what you're saying about this establishes time, the dimension of time in this system, you can see the difference. I mean, a really good physical way of understanding that is that in the realms of mathematics, which is usually considered outside of time and space, it's usually considered to be an abstract realm that does not have dimensionality. Having a mark and an unmarked state simultaneously present or true and false simultaneously present pretty much blows up the system. But if you add time, then a system can oscillate from one state to another. And a really good way of visualizing this is a light switch, right? I mean a light switch, the same switch will turn the system on and off, but they're not on and off at the same time. They have to be sequential in order for it not to be paradoxical. However, living systems tend to embody paradoxical elements, especially psychological systems. And as you know, Jeff, I'm a psychologist. And so dealing with the complexity of mind and the way that opposites coexist in our minds is just a sort of higher level manifestation of what also occurs at lower material levels in systems that may change their boundary conditions, completely reverse their boundary conditions from one to another. Or in fractal geometry, where the paradox is embodied in systems being both open and closed at the same time. And in fact, Varela's system has a sort of paradox as well. So one way of looking at autopoiesis is that the system is structurally open and functionally closed. And we can understand this very easily as human beings. Structurally, our bodies are completely open to the world. We have to eat, we have to poop, we have to, we bring information in from the outside, etc. And yet we remain intact in terms of identity. So there is a way that we're functionally closed, yet structurally open. And it's paradoxical, even though our minds want to sort of encase our bodies as if we're completely separate from the world, but we're not.
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B
No, I would think being structurally open does affect your functionality. I mean, people say, for example, you are what you eat, that people who are meat eaters tend to develop a different style of personality than vegans.
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A
That's true, that's true. And then a lot of contemporary researches is on the gut brain connection and how what we eat and what our biome is and the gut affects mood and radically.
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B
So I'd like to come back to this notion of re entry. While you were talking about it, I had a very distinct image that it might pertain and correct me if you think I'm off base here. The story of Plato's cave, where you have a prisoner inside the cave, but he exits the cave, he sees the outside world, he's blinded by the sun, and then he goes back into the cave and tries to explain it to everyone else. He's re entered the cave. It causes a lot of problems for him because nobody believes him. I wonder if is that in any way related to your concept or Spencer Brown's concept or Varela's concept of reentry?
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A
You know, I love that way of interpreting it. It's a sort of partially literal way and a partially metaphorical way.
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B
And.
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A
No, Varela used the Ouroboros as the mythical dimension, and the Ouroboros is the snake that swallows its own tail. And so that was the sort of mythical way of doing it. But I think what you said kind of works too, in a metaphorical way.
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B
The ouroboros is a fascinating symbol. I used it myself back in 19 when I promoted a symposium at the University of California called the Frontiers of Consciousness. We put out a big poster with the ouroboros wrapped around an egg as our symbol of consciousness. I know in one of your papers you write about the ouroboros as a very positive symbol, and yet I did an interview with a scholar of Renaissance literature who was telling me, no, the ouroboros is a horrible thing. The snake is feeding on himself and he's not getting any nourishment from the outside. The snake can't survive by eating itself. Furthermore, it's very unhealthy to become a hermit. Go up into the mountain and you've only got your own consciousness. You get no outside stimulation. You're going to atrophy.
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A
I have heard that, too. And that really only applies. I mean, that's a sort of a really literal definition of the ouroboros in my mind. And it's a little bit like the. You know, it's positing it as a completely cloaked system. And that's the opposite of what Varela and Maturana had in mind, or Varela and Thompson in later work, where they took the same ideas and brought them into cognition and higher order thinking. And there, too, it's embodied. It's an enacted meaning that the environment is continually part of the system. This is how the observed, the observer's in the observed and the observed is in the observer. And so it's an open system. It's really the opposite of how Varela and those folks used it. And it's a little bit like the metaphor of paradox being really destructive in the same way that a speaker and a microphone amplify and then the system blows up, or two mirrors that are facing one another have this infinite regress, and you can never escape from the rabbit hole of what's going on there. So those are all closed system interpretations of the Ouroboros. But, yes, to me, the Ouroboros is kind of the embodiment of paradox and open systems rather than closed systems. So, yes, I think it's a very positive symbol.
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B
Would it be too strong a statement to say that it represents a form of enlightenment?
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A
Yeah, no, I would. I think it's absolutely part of higher consciousness because the ability to hold opposites, to hold the paradoxical nature of the world. To, instead of villainizing one side of a distinction or a boundary versus the other Is a sign of enlightenment, I think. And. And the openness of the boundaries allows for mystical interpretations of the interconnection of all things. So, yeah, I think it characterizes higher consciousness as much as it characterizes recursive loops at the level of matter or quantum stuff.
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B
Recursive loops, when it comes to consciousness seems to suggest meta awareness. If you can see yourself seeing yourself, in effect, you're jumping up to another level.
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Exactly, exactly. So that now we're getting beyond the first distinction, and we're using these loops, these complex looping systems, to get to higher levels of complexity. And, of course, in consciousness, self awareness is exactly what you're saying. It's the self looking at being able to analyze the self. Psychology is a recursive loop. The very field of psychology is people using their minds to study the mind. And so with, I think, the evolution in science, the evolution in consciousness, we get more and more loopy in terms of these recursive dynamics going on.
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B
A person in meditation, for example, Would be endeavoring to very specifically see consciousness at work and at the same time doing it with consciousness written. You can only go so far doing that. That there's a limit to how much consciousness can observe of itself.
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A
Exactly. It's a little bit like the eye trying to turn backwards in the head to observe itself. There is a place where we'll hit a blind spot where it's not possible. And in terms of human psychology, we all have blind spots that we will never see. And part of enlightened relationships have to do with understanding that our partners have these blind spots that they will never address, and we can't make them do it. And we just need to live with these things Rather than try to change everything that appears unsavory to us. So I do think enlightened. The enlightened mind really embraces paradox, embraces ambiguity. What you're talking about is partly the place where the unconscious can never be conscious. And there is a fuzzy line where the unconscious shades into the body in such a way that the mind can't reach that. I mean, we can't reach the workings of our stomachs directly. We can only do it indirectly by going outside ourselves and using instrumentation that extends vision beyond what we have.
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B
Tell me more about the laws of form. After we get past the first distinction and we've now separated subject and object. Where does it go from there?
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A
Well, it's a whole system of notation that has not been picked up at all by mathematicians. But it's very, very similar to Boolean logic in the sense that once you get past that, that primitive now you've got opposite states and you can establish all the from the truth values, you can establish operators like and, or, or, or not. And you basically get into Boolean math, except for the things that we talked about, the fact that this reentry, the actual boundary making system. But it goes from this very primitive first act to these two states, to then building complexity and recreating the rest of math through this notation that you can then simplify. So going back to what you were talking about of cancellation or reentry was originally called cancellation by Spencer Brown. Because by going, making a distinction and then going back, you erase that distinction. It's like a cancellation, but when there's more complexity going on, reentry doesn't always erase distinctions. And you can build complexity from that ground. And one of the things that I recognized about it, about this system early on was that at the level of first distinctions, so at that very primitive level, which one way to look at it is, it's like blind movement because sight requires perspective, it requires more complexity. But touch is a sort of direction distinction between inner and outer. And one of the things I recognized is that there is at the level of this blind first distinction, you can't tell the difference between leaving, say in a circle. Imagine a circle leaving that circle and re entering it it versus leaving that circle and entering another circle, which you could think of self and other that way as two different circles. Or if you have a nested circle inside of another circle, you can't tell the difference between going in and then further in. And so to me this is a metaphorical proof is too strong a word. But representation or model of a mystical perspective where self, world and other are indistinguishable at the level of first distinctions. So I think that there's a real mystical. I mean, to me this system is profound in that sense that it points towards mysticism, towards the validity of that perspective of just open boundaries everywhere and deeply underneath the world of appearances and the complexity that the observer builds after a lot of experience in the world.
- [37:12]
B
The ultimate implication is that all distinctions are arbitrary and created by the observer.
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A
Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's really important because traditional math does not take that point of view. Traditional math distinguishes truth from falsity in a way, in a stronger way than any other science can or does. But I think that by reducing this all to this first distinction.
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B
It is.
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Completely arbitrary, what is marked and what is not.
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B
Let's talk a little bit more about Varela and Madarana. I know you think highly of them in terms of their ability to describe life itself. Why did they gravitate towards the laws of form?
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A
That I don't know, other than I'm guessing. I mean, I don't know the story of how they got into it, but I suspect that for whatever reason, Varela read it and recognized its relevance to embodied forms. I can't tell you why he was drawn to it, but it was an idea that was fairly, I would say a number of different people around the same era came up with similar things like Hofstadter also did with his idea of strange loops. And the model there is the Moebius strip, right. And for people that don't know what that is, it's very simple. If you take a long strip of paper and cut one end and give a single twist and then reconnect it, you wind up with an interdimensional shape that only has one side and one edge to it. So it goes from being, you know, flat two dimensional thing to being an interdimensional object. The way fractals are interdimensional objects. And the way that the levels that Varrell and Maturano were interested in, that they intersect, and so that's often where the paradoxical things are, you can find them, is kind of in between levels. And that's certainly true for fractals, that the edges are where the complexity is and where systems where boundaries are dynamic and open and closed at the same time.
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B
With the Mobius strip, the inside surface is the same as the outside surface.
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A
Exactly. And then if you take that up a dimension, you get a Klein bottle, which is a similar kind of thing, which is a self intersecting bottle. And the inside and the outside are continuous as well. And this really does model the strange paradox of life and the openness and the closedness at the same time.
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B
So.
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A
Yeah, I wish I knew. I actually haven't read sort of personal accounts or anything of Varela's, the origins of these ideas.
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B
Well, you did point out a few things in your paper on Varela, which I read, amongst other things, you mentioned that he was a student of Tibetan Buddhism and in particular of Chogyam Trunpa, who is known for being a master of crazy wisdom.
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A
Oh, okay, good. I should have. I wrote that paper a long time ago, that second, the one that was the tribute to Varela, who had a really strange life imitating work, kind of Thing at the end of his life. Actually, we wrote that paper that was Robin Robertson and Leslie Combs or Alan Combs. And I wrote that paper after Varela died and his liver failed and he had a liver transplant. And the last thing that he wrote was his own examination of his own sort of dying process as his liver, it failed. He had a donor liver that failed. And he either anticipated it was a bad fit because he was going through hell in the process. And he just. It was not something he was welcoming into his body. And so this sort of outside, inside thing or bionic, you know, the bionic man that is happening today, where outside things are getting incorporated in, or robots are part of human brains and this sort of thing are examples of these very fluid boundaries between inside and outside. But unfortunately, Varela, it didn't take, and the liver didn't take, and he did wind up dying. And that was the last paper that he wrote for the Journal of Consciousness Studies.
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B
In other words, even though he was in agony, he was able to observe himself and report on it.
- [43:56]
A
Exactly, yeah.
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B
Which seems to be in some way an embodiment of the idea in Spencer Brown of erasure.
- [44:10]
A
Exactly, yeah. And I think it's interesting how he moved over the decades of his work. He moved his. The thinking from the very, very, very primitive level of single cells, which, by the way, there's a man in the genetics and I think pediatrics, perhaps department at UCLA named John Torday who believes consciousness starts with the single cell. And he. I think it's a very similar kind of idea that you need. Once you start making a distinction between inside and outside, then very special things start to happen. I don't think John winds up starting with consciousness as primary. He's more along the lines you were talking about. But anyway, Varela moved from this single cell type of focus to looking at higher order cognitive processes in the very same way. And how, I mean, I think that's really interesting in that how embodied. And so the idea of cognition or thought being embodied, fully embodied, that it's actually, it's not abstract, it's not separated from how our bodies move in the world at all. And if you look at human development, then it appears that we start off blindly in a way. The baby starts off with its body and moving its body in the world in order to activate sight. And if babies don't get to move their bodies freely, or any other mammal don't get to move their bodies freely, they won't learn to see. So this blind drawing of distinctions, first through the body in a simple way. And then that allows a map, an internal map that allows vision to operate and perspective to develop, which allows us to appear to be outside of, you.
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B
Know.
- [46:55]
A
Sort of outside of ourselves in what we see is something we build up slowly over time. But people who are born blind, if they have vision not restored but established later in life, many of those people go kind of crazy with it. The world looks chaotic and they want their blindness re established. They just can't make sense. They can't make meaning of experience without this kind of bodily interaction. And the same thing is true of interpreting experience in any way that it's embodied and really only works through this kind of interaction, through moving through the world and moving through the relational world as well when it comes to other people in relationships.
- [48:02]
B
So would you say that what you have just described is related to either autopoiesis or the laws of form?
- [48:12]
A
Yeah, absolutely. Because again, it's the openness to the outside world that allows for the drawing of, of boundaries. So yeah, I mean, that was the evolution of Varela's thinking. And it's. I mean, I don't think the book that he wound up writing about that I don't think goes back to Spencer Brown, but I think the idea is absolutely, absolutely stem from those origins and are a higher level of it. So yeah, that's Varella, Thompson and Roche in 1991 wrote the embodied Mind. And it basically moves these ideas from biology to cognition, essentially.
- [49:19]
B
The idea then is once you've established the first distinction between the inside and the outside, that you've initiated an evolutionary process which will continue, or can at least continue to the point where you get human beings.
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A
Exactly, exactly. That's the idea. That's the idea. And that's the place where mind and matter meet.
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B
But at the same time you're suggesting that there's a mystical underpinning to all of this, which is that the first distinction itself is arbitrary. At some point the reentry process will be one in which you realize you're one with everything.
- [50:09]
A
Exactly, exactly. Yes. This is the place that I think I intuitively agreed with Spencer Brown that this idea is really profound. Really simple, but really, really profound and very much like Buddhist Cohen's and you know, this and that, or just some of the language that mystics use resembles this about distinctions and the idea that people, that what our ordinary experience is sort of illusory at this level that we're talking about, but necessary for survival. So it's sort of a fiction in that respect.
- [51:07]
B
Well, Terry, Marx Tarlow this has been a fascinating conversation about important people and important works that have to some degree been a little bit forgotten. So I'm very grateful to be able to share your wisdom and your insights with the New Thinking Allowed audience. Thank you so much.
- [51:31]
A
I'm so moved by what you're saying and it's such a pleasure. I too have not been thinking about these ideas recently that much. It's been a pleasure to dive back into them and how relevant they are today. Although we didn't get to this topic, they are relevant for whether AI could ever become conscious. I hope people start to revisit the work of Spencer Brown, although it could make for some scary adaptations to AI that if AI became self conscious in a way that it could move its own boundaries, it certainly could take over the world if it wanted to. But fortunately this is not a how to. This is more sort of like a calculus of self awareness. So anyway, thank you so much for inviting me and having me on again. It's truly been a pleasure.
- [52:44]
B
Thank you Terry. And for those of you watching or listening, thank you for being with us because you are the reason that we are here.
- [53:17]
A
Book four in the new Thinking Allowed dialogue series is Charles T. 70 Years of Exploring Consciousness and Parapsychology, now available on Amazon.
- [53:31]
B
New Thinking Allowed is presented by the California Institute for Human Science, a fully accredited university offering distant learning graduate degrees that focus on mind, body and spirit, the topics that we cover here. We are particularly excited to announce new degrees emphasizing parapsychology and the paranormal. Visit their website at cihs. You can now download all eight copies of the New Thinking Allowed magazine for free or order beautiful printed copies. Go to newthinkingallowed.org Sam.