The Tao Of Science, Wholeness Seminar

The Tao Of Science

40 years The Tao of Science and beyond

by Heiner Benking

with excerpts from the works of
Ralph G. H. Siu

When it comes to wholeness in my eyes, Ralph Siu is one of these persons
embodying and living a form of completeness I only saw a few times in my
Life. He is one of the deep, integral and synthetic thinkers and practical
transformers who never cared about having an audience, but to develop individually
and within the society.

In respect to this seminar, his Volume 10, the UNIFYING THEORY OF THE HUMAN ORGANISM AND BEHAVIOR, stands out,
but needs to be seen in the light of all his works forming a greater unity.

Ralph's work is subsumed under the title: THE QUANTUM AND THE TAO
- An Unified East-West Psychophilosophical Synthesis toward Harmonious Living.

As he never cared to have any of his 12 Volumes published
(he was invited in 1957 by MIT Press to publish his first Volume of the 4 Trilogies:
THE TAO OF SCIENCE. An Essay on Western Knowledge and Eastern Wisdom .

You find in the annex the titles of the 4 Trilogies and 12 Volume titles as
examples of coherence and completeness which I try to mention as examples of
the rare unifying man-made artifacts, as I also see the penultimate Information
Coding and Classification scheme ICC of I. Dahlberg, International Society
for Knowledge Organization - ISKO.

In this text I quote from personal letters and some unpublished Volumes,
which Ralph Siu allowed me to share with friends. My intent with the collage
below is to help you anticipate the whole, the width and depth of his works,
particular in regard to the seminar theme.

Before I excerpt some appetizers from his 10. Volume, I feel it needs
to be explained that Ralph Siu studied bio-chemistry, but never ventured
into academic spheres, instead starting in career in 1950 as director of
research and technologies for mission driven agencies. According to his
tradition he formed with his private and personal studies a pleasing whole
of endeavors. The unique blend of the bicultural polarity, with traditional
Chinese upbringing and professional western training has led to a widely
unknown unified intellectual East-West psychophilosophical synthesis, intended
for persons of practical affairs . His periods of reflection became lengthened
as time went on and gradually coalesced and evolved into a serious steady
avocation, helping him to carve a synergistic path.

Excerpts form:
UNIFYING THEORY OF THE HUMAN ORGANISM AND BEHAVIOR

PREFACE

The humanities and the behavioral disciplines have made impressive advances
over the last century. The search for a satisfying framework to integrate
the discrete findings into an organismic whole and functioning human is
moving into high gear. But a comprehensive conceptualization remains elusive.This
book offers such an unified scheme. It appears to provide an approximation
to the following:- Integration of the "physical", "chemical",
"animate" and "human"manifestations into a single compatible
vocabulary.- Basic theoretical "elements" and standard rules for
theircombinations and transformations into successively largercompositional
"structures" and "higher" behavioral expressions.

- A coherent, embracing set of relationships for all human phenomena
and dynamics, both physical and mental.
- "Elucidation" of a range of heretofore "unexplained" observations
from music and management to pain and schizophrenia.
- Prediction of human conduct.
- Broadened basis for mutually useful cross-talk among natural
scientists, psychosocial scholars, humanists and societal
operators.

Some of the basic elements of our suggestion may be novel, controversial,
and even a priori unacceptable for various good reasons to the leading and
most respected authorities of the day.

It was only natural that I could not help but reflect from time to time
about the possibility of an unified intellectual East-West psychophilosophical
synthesis for persons of practical affairs. This periods of reflection became
lengthened as time went on. They gradually coalesced and evolved into a
serious steady avocation.

Whether or not this notion or even pieces of it would be adopted and
used by psychologists, psychiatrists, behavioral thinkers, socially responsible
leaders and other probing for a deeper appreciation of the wholeness of
the human being is, of course, not for me to urge or forecast.
I do believe, however, that every person of genuine endeavor will sooner
or later point to the same centroid of synergistic enlightenment, even after
having followed quite different and often idiosyncratic paths.

I hope this somewhat unusual point of departure might contribute
a lumen or two to the dialogue leading to an ever more beneficent empathy
among humankind.

R. G. H. Siu
Washington, D. C.
February 1987

CHAPTER 1. THE MELD

Thinkers may be divided into two classes: the lumpers and the splitters.
The former emphasize unity and harmony in the universe. They perceive the
interconnecting strands and permeating diffusions. So they tend to lump
concepts together with adaptive compatibilities and people with
magnanimous accommodations.

In contrast, the splitters focus on distinctions and cleavages. They
search for the special features that separate one from another. So they
tend to split concepts apart into this and that school and people into this
and that camp.

In following the inclinations of the lumpers, I sense an underlying congruence
between the scientific approach to enlightenment and the religious, between
the rationale of academicians in the humanities and that of executives in
the marketplace, and between the heritage of the East and the West. All
human should be cross-relatable, so I have come to believe, if for no other
reason than that it originates within the same human mind. It should not
be too difficult to develop a common language on human behavior beneath
the specialized differentiations of the splitters.

We might even venture the opinion that an explanation is primarily an
expression of how the mind functions within the cultural setting of the
moment and only coincidentally is it a description of how the phenomenon
under scrutiny actually takes place. The same trackings of the human mind
can be seen through whatever subject matter it happens to be examining.

The quark-antiquark of the American physicist of the twentieth century
AD repeats the yang-yin of the Chinese peasant of the twentieth century
BC. The thermodynamic principle of the nineteenth century that "heat
cannot flow from a colder body to a warmer body" recalls the theological
dictum of Thomas Aquinas of the thirteenth century that "an inferior
angel cannot advise a superior angle". The holographic process of regenerating the
complete encoded message from any part, however small, of the hologram reflects
Aristotle's assertion of the fourth century BC that the soul is present
in it's entirety in every part of the body and William Blake's
poetic vision of the eighteenth century as he wrote:

To see the world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower.......

The intellectual integration of the wide array of ideas and data on human
behavior into a unified and internally consistent theory, therefore, may
not be too formidable a task. We might be approaching such a unity of sorts
in the overall theory laid out in the succeeding pages.

I am not so certain, however, that we have added much of another desirable
quality of harmony. The harmony of which we speak is not theoretical consistency
within the world of knowledge but harmoniously within the world of human
effects. Whether our theory will turn out harmonious in this beneficent
sense is difficult to say. At times, one tends to be pessimistic in the
face of mounting historical evidence that all knowledge has so far been
exploited for evil, often with far greater gusto than for good.

But I would like to imagine that even Sisyphus has hopes. (end)

Other Chapters:

2. Virtual Presences
3. Mass-energy, Qi, and Qimass
4. Events and Episodes
5. Metabolic Operators
6. Organities
7. Heredity and Psychological Evolution
8. Laws and Rules
9. Dynamics
10. Case Studies, A. Pain, Schizophrenia, C. Poverty
11. Prediction and Freedom
References, Index

LIST OF CONTENT OF R. G. H. Siu's:

THE QUANTUM AND THE TAO
An Unified East-West Psychophilosophical Synthesis
toward Harmonious Living

I. Tao-Time Trilogy

Volume 1. The Tao of Science.
An Essay on Western Knowledge and Eastern Wisdom.
MIT Press, 1957.

Volume 2. The Man of Many Qualities. A Legacy of the I Ching.
(Paperback: The Portable Dragon).
MIT Press, 1968.

Volume 3. Ch i. A Neo-Taoist Approach to Life.
MIT Press, 1974.

II. Management Trilogy

Volume 4. The Craft of Power.
Wiley Press, 1979.

Volume 5. Transcending the Power Game. The Way to Executive Serenity.
Wiley Press, 1980.

Volume 6. The Master Manager.
Wiley Press, 1980.

III. Panetics Trilogy

Volume 7. Less Suffering for Everybody. An Introduction to Panetics.
The International Society for Panetics, 1994.

Volume 8. Panetics and Dukkha. An Integrated Study of the Infliction of

Suffering and the Reduction of Infliction.
The International Society for Panetics, 1994.

Volume 9. Seeds of Reflection. Word Clusters for Meditation on the
Infliction and the Relief of Suffering.
The International Society for Panetics, 1994.

IV. Harmony Trilogy

Volume 10. Unifying Theory of the Human Organism and Behavior.
Unpublished

Volume 11. Cheerfulness.
Unpublished

Volume 12. Shaping One s Own Life. A Socratic Anthology of
Perennial Questions.
Unpublished

One final remark (Heiner Benking):
The author learned personally a lot from Ralph Siu and is deeply indebted
due to Ralph s ability to create cheerfulness and acknowledge his fellows,
furthering step by step to achieve results and find contemplation.
By the way, Ralph G. H. Siu is one of the few Americans who immediately knew and
have read the works of Jan C. Smuts, even when it was before his. As I see
all his volumes as treasures, I want to point out, that the III. Trilogy PANETIC,
is central to making use of the scaffolding, the author called PANORAMA.
The unites, values and scenarios of Panetics can be communicated,
summarized and shared, even when involving time-spans of generations and
individual or group suffering. Such cognitive scenarios, when embodied and
visualized might help complex decision making processes and imagining the
whole.
The authors sees PANETICS and the reception of societal interconnectedness
and governance as one of the key issues to be addressed. In the forthcoming
study of the American Council for the UNU, the status of such wider issues
can be seen on the overall priority list of experts .

Please see: http://nko.mhpcc.edu/millennium/Domain_6.html -

GLOBAL LOOK-OUT DOMAIN 6.
The IV. Trilogy in particular is waiting to help us thinking in a steady
coalescence of Wholes and Values.