Cultural-biology: Our human living in conversations and reflection

1. Origin of these reflections

The origin of cultural-biology began in 1998 from the following conversation:

“Doctor, I (Ximena Dávila) have realized something that I want to share with you. In my professional work as a speaker in public and private organizations, and in my relationship with people with whom I talk because they are living a situation that generates discomfort, pain and suffering, and in the course of these conversations, I made a discovery, I realized that the pain and suffering that people who consult live, and keep throughout their daily lives, is always of cultural origin.”

“From where do I distinguish that that pain is of cultural origin? Culture is our way of social living and the psyche of our culture is currently patriarchal-matriarchal, centered on relations of power, domination, submission and competition. In other words, we generate, carry out and preserve unconsciously as valid a network of conversations that surrounds us, from the moment we leave the biological womb to the cultural womb, as a natural way of relating to each other from mutual denial and submission, in the lack of reciprocal respect.”

“From this sensory-emotional-relational substratum, a person may live consciously or unconsciously some undeserved devaluation, feeling from his/her intimate sensoriality that he/she must always be fulfilling the expectations of others. And this is so because at some point in his/her history as a child he/she was criticized feeling a not deserved invalidation that led him/her to live feeling trapped in a devaluation lived as legitimate in this patriarchal-matriarchal culture, but not legitimate in the depths of his/her soul. This way of living generates in the person a pain that he/she keeps in his/her daily life feeling somehow that this devaluation is deserved. At the same time, I have also realized that the liberation from this pain only occurs when the person expands his consciousness and recovers the respect for himself or herself.”

The above conversation and others that we had were a reflective impact that revealed something to us that wasn’t present for us until that moment:

a) that we human beings are cultural-biological beings;

That meeting opened a space of reflective conversations between us that through these last 22 years have been taking shape in a recursive dynamic of many very productive reflective conversations, always generating new ideas, in which we realized that the understanding and comprehension in depth of the cultural-biological nature of human life, is essential to preserve our social and ecological harmony, and specially in times like those in which we are co-inhabiting as humanity in a health emergency.

When we talk about cultural-biology ¹ we are not talking about a theory, we are talking about the fundaments of the understanding of the nature of the living and the human: From where? From the scientific fundaments that allow us to understand that as molecular-autopoietic systems determined in our structure, in which the external that affects us does not specify what happens to us as living beings, and only triggers in us a process determined in our structure changing our physiology. Our human living does not occur in our physiology. It occurs in our relational living in the coordination of our emotions and doings in our existence as languaging beings in conversations and reflections in the sensory–operational–relational domains of our social coexistence (Dávila & Maturana, 2015; Maturana & Dávila, 2015).

2. Our cultural-biological living

Next, we will speak as people who reflect on living in general, the living of different kinds of living beings, and in particular on our human living by asking ourselves how happens living in general, and we will do so in the present that we are living in the year 2021, with recursive questions about what we are doing: how do we live as human beings?

3. Nature of language and languaging

The difficulty in understanding the nature of language lies in the fact that, in one way or another, we have treated it as an instrument we use to distinguish objects, to communicate information in the manipulation of both concrete and abstract entities that appear in the worlds we inhabit in our cultural-biological daily living. And we do not see it as a consensual way of recursive coordination of what we feel and do in the changing flow of what we wish to do or obtain in the continuously changing flow of what we want to do or to obtain in the continuous present of our daily coexistence.

Children learn in their families from the moment they are born the way they live, integrating themselves in the coordination of feelings, doings, and emotions of their coexistence in the process of learning to “speak,” coordinating in a recursive way their intimate feelings, doings, and emotions. It is to this manner of living together that which we wish to evoke when we speak of living in languaging. Thus, the different worlds we inhabit are different ways of realizing our daily living together languaging in the recursive networks of coordinations of our coexistence that we call conversations. We think that this way of living together that characterizes us as human beings must have arisen in our evolutionarily history in an ancestral family of biped primates in a lasting living together in bodily closeness, sustained by a loving sexual and sensual intimacy, in the gathering and sharing of food in the domain of daily chores. It is to this way of living together as languaging people, in networks of reflective conversations that characterize our human living and coexistence that we refer to when we speak of culture.

The way of living together in the language, learned in childhood in an ancestral family of bipedal primates, being preserved by “boys and girls” from one generation to another as their daily living, constituted our cultural-biological evolutionary lineage as our manner of living together in language, in recursive networks of reflexive conversations. So when we speak of biology-cultural, ³ we emphasize the unity of the biological and the cultural aspects of our living and coexisting in an indissoluble operational and relational intertwining in the continuous realization of our molecular-autopoiesis in the UDEON that we integrate. All of which results in that, in our relational living intertwined with our molecular-autopoiesis, what guides the course of our epigenesis are at all times the configurations of intimate feelings, desires, and emotions that we live in the continuous changing present of daily coexistence as cultural-biological beings, from our conception in the maternal uterus, until our molecular-autopoiesis stops, and we die (Dávila & Maturana, 2015; Maturana & Dávila, 2015).

In these circumstances, the worlds we live as human beings and the molecular cosmos that emerges as our domain of existence when we explain the coherences of our living with the coherences of our living are necessarily cultural-biological worlds in a biological-cultural cosmos (Dávila & Maturana, 2019) that is always emerging in our daily life from our conscious or unconscious reflexive choice.

Perhaps it is worth insisting that in affirming that we exist in a cultural-biological cosmos what we are emphasizing is: that we do not have access to something independent of our operation as biological- cultural beings, which could reveal to us that we living beings are constituted of a transcendent essence that would only appear with our operation in the realization of our living. Nothing of the sort happens.

Something exists as long as there is an observer who constitutes it with what he/she does in his/her operation of distinction in the act of observing. And we human living beings find ourselves existing by operating as observers in the act that constitutes us when we explain the coherences of the realization of our living with the coherences of the realization of our living. It is in what we do as observer where we reveal the nature of the natural world, that is, what appears with what we as we observe.

4. Nature of the lineages

The reproduction of a composite unit occurs when this is divided in a systemic reproduction into two or more composite units that conserve their class identity by conserving in the epigenetic present that the organism was living in the moment of its reproduction. Although we biologists have not always understood this, the reproduction is a systemic phenomenon in which what is duplicated is the reproducing unity and the circumstances that make it possible (Dávila & Maturana, 2019). But there is something more that has to be said: as in the systemic reproduction of living systems what is conserved is the organism together with its ecological niche, in the form of the epigenetic present of the UDEON unity that they integrate.

Thus, when there is sequential systemic reproduction of a particular class of organisms, either that lineage is conserved without variations, or that manner of living is conserved with variations that may constitute the origin of a new lineage in a process of evolutionary diversification of ways of living. In us human beings the way of living that is conserved and defines our evolutionary identity in our lineage as human beings is our cultural-biological living and coexistence.

5. Nature of the nervous system

When we speak of the nervous system, we refer to a closed network of relationships of cellular and molecular elements that interact coordinating the anatomical and physiological dynamics of the organism in its internal operational and relational correlations, according to the form of its corporeality and its way of living in the organism-niche ecological unit (UDEON) that it integrates. As a result every living system being currently alive finds itself as a spontaneous result of the evolutionary drift of the lineage to which it belongs, living in sensory-operational-relational harmony, a relationship that as we have already seen we call structural coupling with its ecological niche, with a nervous system that continuously generates the behavior adequate to its way of living or it dies, and its lineage comes to an end.

In our evolutionary history as human beings, our ancestors possessed a nervous system that allowed them to live alone and together in coordination of feelings, doings, and emotions; in an intimacy that as it became conserved in the coexistence of the family could become recursive and preserved from one generation to another in the learning of children as the beginning and expansion of language.

The peculiarities of the evolutionary dynamics in the ancestral family of bipedal primates which gave origin tour human lineage were as follows:

(a) the loving prolongation of tenderness and sensuality in the intimacy of the family life and (b) that thanks to the fact that the nervous system operates by distinguishing configurations of relations, and not particular entities, it allowed different configurations of intimate feelings and emotions to emerge and be preserved, depending on what was happening in the living together.

What is not usually seen is that the coordinations of bodily operations that are coordinated in the new sensorial, operational, and relational domains that are emerging in the recursions of languaging have a new meaning in interpersonal relationships beyond the task that is coordinated, as when we distinguish in our intimacy that we feel “good” when the other person gives us something we wanted, or that we feel bad when he or she does not do it. We can see this with our pets distinguishing in our reflexive language their emotional relationship with us, which we see when we realize that we not only coordinate with them our behaviors in the flow of what we do in our coexistence, but we also coordinate with them the intimate feelings of the closeness of a relationship that could constitute the beginning of a coexistence in the language in the recursive coordinations of the emotions that guide the doing.

Our difficulty in understanding what we are talking about when we speak of thinking, of ideas, of concepts, of the mind, or of the abstract is that we think that these are entities that would have their own existence in a mental world, and that we would manipulate or transfer to another in the act of communicating with language. And, moreover, for this very reason we do not see that language as our way of coexisting in recursive coordinations of feelings, doings, and emotions, and that words, in whatever form (sonorous, visual, or gestural), do not denominate entities and do not evoke things but operate as nodes in the recursive networks of coordinations of feelings, doings, and emotions that constitute the realization of our daily living and coexistence. Nor do we see that the configurations of intimate feelings, doings, and emotions that we live appear in the worlds in which they occur. These configurations do not exist before our living them. They just appear when we distinguish them in conversation and reflection as ways of relating to each other.

The words that we distinguish in the recursions of our languaging are configurations of feelings and emotions that guide the course of what we do in the course of our coexistence, and that we treat as discrete entities by giving them names that allow us to coordinate what we feel without having to describe it, the words abstract operational elements of our daily living and coexistence. And according to the different operations that we distinguish, we speak of the real if there is a tactile predominance because it is close to our doing, or we speak of the mental or spiritual if there is a visual and auditory predominance when coordinating our doings. And we speak of the magical if there is a predominance of silence and the “cold of mystery” that coordinates what we cannot explain.

The nervous system coordinates the coherence of our bodily dynamics in everything we do, but the meaning of what happens with what we do does not occur in the nervous system. It happens in the sensory, operational, and relational realm of our living and coexisting in the relational worlds we generate in the recursiveness of language in conversation and reflection.

Just as the sense of a ballet does not occur in the nervous systems that harmoniously coordinate the movements of the dancers, but rather in the intimacy of the sensory–operational–relational and the reflection of the spectators that contemplate it.

6. Nature of our living and coexistence

Let us remind us that what we call our daily living and coexistence is everything we do from one dawn to another, in the continuous realization of our molecular-autopoiesis according to the way of living and coexisting that we live in the organism-niche ecological unit that we integrate. As observers, we can say that an organism exists and conserves itself as a living being in sensorial, operational, and relational coherence in the UDEON that it integrates and that arises with it as the environment that welcomes it and makes it possible, in a spontaneous dynamic of harmonic interactions, so that when this harmony is lost, the organism-niche ecological unit disintegrates, and the organism dies. When several persons integrate together an organism-niche ecological unit in which they coordinate in a recursive manner their feelings, doings, and emotions in conversation and reflection, they change and transform together as a domain of continuous generation of a dynamic co-niche that includes all the dimensions of the conversation and reflection of its participants.

Languaging does not occur as an interweaving of abstract processes carried out by metaphysical entities as it may seem to us when we speak of ideas, of the mind, or of the mental. What happens in the flow of languaging is the recursive coordination of the processes of transformations and structural changes that we live in the joint realization of the tasks of our living and coexistence in recursive networks of reflective conversations in our cultural-biological coexistence.

Thus, when living together in an ancestral family in the coordination of domestic chores, our ancestors found themselves coordinating their attention not only toward the chores they were doing but also toward their act of doing, orienting their reflexive gaze toward what they felt doing what they were doing, “Do I want to do what I am doing? When that happened, our ancestors found themselves spontaneously in the very act of doing languaging. Language does not arise as the result of a special neurobiological mutation that would give origin to a new relational mode of operation of the nervous system that supposedly would generate abstract thinking. Rather our ancestors found themselves spontaneously in the relational doing that constitutes it as a coexistence in recursive coordinations of doings that finally guide us to look at our desires and where we are.

And when the world of reflective desires appears, as we have already said, our recursive living and coexistence begin in new sensorial and operational worlds such as mysticism, philosophy, and science and sooner rather than later we fall into the desire to understand how everything we feel and do occurs in the realization of our daily living in our living together. And finally, searching how to explain our living we invent the abstract operational domains that we have just called philosophy, mysticism, and science and we start to live in those doings. And we create relational worlds in which we are philosophers, scientists, politicians, holy priests, or bandits as different sensorial and operational modes of being people in the continuous realization of our molecular-autopoiesis in the dynamic organism-niche ecological unit that we integrate.

7. Nature of the abstract and the concrete

Currently, when we encounter the nervous system when observing and explaining our individual and social living, we generally treat it as an instrument to obtain information from an external world, as well as an organ of generation of ideas that operate both in the intimate domain of the mental as well as in the relational domain of the doings. And in this process of reflections, we come to ask ourselves: What is consciousness in our living? A relational or a neurobiological happening?

We think otherwise. We think (1) that if the organism as an autopoietic-molecular system operates as a closed system of production of itself, (2) that if the nervous system in its operation as a closed network of activity relations between its components, only distinguishes configurations of relations of activity between them, (3) that if given the structural determinism of the molecular space, the ecological niche in its encounter with the organism does not say anything about itself to its nervous system, and only triggers in it changes of relations of activity between its components in the historical moment in which it finds itself, then, (4) we have to realize that we people, in our relational operation as organisms, only distinguish classes of configurations of relations and not particular entities, and (5) finally, that the particular only appears in the distinction of a configuration of relations that arises in the intersection of other configurations.

In these circumstances, the particular entities that we distinguish as persons in the behavioral coordinations of our living and coexisting in language are neither concrete nor abstract in themselves; they are configurations of intersections of configurations of sensory and effector coordinations that define the singularity of what we distinguish and do in our relational living and coexisting. When we speak of the concrete, we deal with the coherences of what we do in our living together. And when we speak of the abstract, we deal with the coherences of the relationships of what we speak of in our living and living together. That is, in the concrete we attend to the nature of the doings, and in the abstract, we attend to the nature of the relations.

According with what we have said, our difficulty in speaking of the phenomenon of consciousness rests on the fact that we think of it as occurring in an abstract realm and do not feel that it occurs in the concreteness of our operational coexistence in encounters in which we direct our attention toward ourselves. And by doing this in an encounter with other person attending at where we are in a look at ourselves, we have the experience of realizing that we can ask ourselves whether want to be where we are or not, discovering that our consciousness occurs in the relational dynamics of our cultural-biological living as organisms and not in the intimacy of the operation of our nervous system.

8. Nature of our nature

In our cultural-biological living and coexistence, there is an aspect of the operation of the nervous system that is central to understand the generative character of the worlds that emerge in the recursiveness of language. And this is that the nervous system, as we have said, operates by distinguishing classes of configurations of relations in the sphere of its operation as a component of an organism, and not particular situations from which generalization would arise. The result of this is:

(1) that we see that every time that in our conversational operation a composition or a reflexive recursion takes place, the result is that we capture both consciously and unconsciously new kinds of configurations of relations; (2) that we see that the way the nervous system operates distinguishing kinds of configurations of relations in any operational domain is the foundation of the emergence of new networks of conversations as new worlds that we will live as abstract or concrete according to the sensory configuration that characterizes them in our living them; (3) that we see that language is not a neurobiological phenomenon but is a manner of living together in recursive coordinations of intimate feelings, doings, relationships, and emotions that gives rise to the spontaneous emergence of the infinitude of diverse worlds that we treat as abstract or concrete depending on the relational feelings with which we live them; (4) that worlds that we inhabit in the realization of our relational coexistence and not of the operation of the nervous system; and (5) we realize that it is our ability to distinguish similar configurations of relations in the operation of an organism outside the realm of its immediate sensoriality, what makes possible that we may coordinate the abstract relational domains that we distinguish in our cultural-biological coexistence.

Language is our human manner of living together in the recursive coordination of feelings, doings, and emotions that constitute the different worlds that appear as different operational, relational, and emotional domains in our cultural-biological living. And although we have said it many times, we insist that language is not a manner of operation of our neurobiology, although it makes it possible its occurrence and the abstract complexity of the concreteness of the worlds we inhabit: language is our behavioral manner of coordinating our psychic and operational living.

Everything that happens to us as persons living together occurs to us in the realization of our relational in daily living in the UDEON that we integrate in networks of conversations. We have seen that what we call concrete and abstract are different sensory configurations (tactile, auditive, visual, etc.,) that orient our trust or mistrust in our relational behavior in the moment of deciding the course we want to follow according to the intimate feelings that we live at the moment. Thus, in particular, notions such as honesty and responsibility, which reveal whether we feel the flow of our living together in harmony or disharmony, are so fundamental for the psychic and physiological health of our social coexistence. No doubt our neurobiology and what we feel in our relational living and coexistence in the UDEON unit that we integrate modulate reciprocally, but what guides the course of what we do in our living together are our intimate feelings in each instant in the relational circumstance in which we find ourselves, and not our neurobiology, although it participates. And this is so, because our existence as biped primates that live in language is cultural-biological, and our present existence as persons occurs in our coexistence in conversation and reflection.

9. The analogical and the digital in our living

The natural world, that is, what appears in the observer’s operation, occurs as a configuration of doings, feelings, and relations, in the daily living of the observer, and emerges determined by what he/she does when distinguishing what he/she distinguishes. In non-human living beings, if we let them appear, we see that their natural world emerges harmonious in what they do in their living without language in operational distinctions of analogical coherences. In us human beings, the natural world emerges in our cultural-biological living with what we do and choose according to what we want.

We live two fundamental ways of thinking according to the coordinations of doings that they evoke: (a) Analogical thinking that distinguishes and proposes the configurations of feelings, doings, and relationships that we want to live. (b) Digital thinking that refers to the ordering of the flow of linear logical operations that direct the realization of what is being built. These two ways of thinking are generally intertwined in our work without realizing it. But what decides what is done in our cultural-biological living is always an analogical thinking.

Example: “Son, please pass me the cup I left on the table.” “Mom, which cup, which table?” The analogical is in the distinction of the configurations to be manipulated.

The digital appears in the ordering of actions that perform what is requested.

The power of our cultural-biological life lies in the diversity of the worlds we generate by coordinating these two ways of thinking in what we do in our living together and our daily conversation:

-In digital intelligence we order what we do, and in analog intelligence we order what we want. In digital intelligence, discrepancies end with obedience that leads to unhappiness.

The cosmos that emerges when we explain the coherences of our living with the coherences of our living is analogical. The digital world arises when we describe what we do in our cultural-biological living in such a way that our doing is repeatable. When we want a certain cultural-biological doing to be in fact repeatable, we must be able to describe and realize the operation of all its analogical and digital dimensions.

The digital intelligence is a central instrument for the technological design in our cultural-biological coexistence, but all use of the technological occurs from the action of an analogical intelligence. In the course of our biological drift does not participate the digital operation, it only participates in our cultural-biological drift with the appearance of the technological that is an instrument of our cultural-biological doing, but the path we choose, consciously or unconsciously, always arises from an analogical operation.

10. Epistemological reflections

The great questions of human history have been what are we? What is natural? What is real? Where do we come from? What is living? And what is dying?

We have to answer these questions from the present we live in, and the meaning of our living will depend on how we answer them. Now we propose to answer them in an orderly fashion according to what seems to us to have been the historical order of their appearance in our cultural-biological human evolution.

The domain of our human existence in the cosmos and the worlds that we generate by recursively explaining the happening of our living and coexisting with our living and coexisting is closed as a cognitive and explanatory epistemological domain of our living. Yet it is open to the infinite expansion and transformation of the worlds that we generate in the dynamics flow of conversations, doings, and recursive reflections that we live do in the continuously changing present of our experience in the intertwined network of conversations in which we realize our existence. The domain of changing processes in which occurs our continuous realization as autopoietic-molecular systems in the UDEON that we integrate constitutes the foundation and possibility of the occurrence of all knowing and explaining in the cosmos that arises when we explain our living with the coherences of our living. We call the epistemological foundation of the way of thinking about our existence as cultural-biological beings unitary epistemology (Dávila & Maturana, 2015; Maturana & Dávila, 2015).

What are we? We are as living beings molecular-autopoietic systems and we can see that as our answer unfolds, its epistemological character emerges: Our existence involves everything molecular, and this means that we are in our operation structure-determined systems. This means that everything that happens to us arises as a result of the operation of our structure, of how we are made. And that as we say that something is real when it appears as an aspect of what we do when we distinguish it. In the same way, we also appear into existence when we distinguish ourselves with what we do as we distinguish ourselves showing that we are real. And since nature appears with what we do, we are also natural entities. And, when we answer the question “where do we come from?” we find that we are living beings that arose in the spontaneity of the operation of the natural world in the integration of closed networks of molecular transformations that produce themselves together with the UDEON that they integrated as it arose with them as a discrete dynamic system at the moment of its appearance.

What is natural? Natural is all that appears with what we do with our hands, with our conversation, with our reflection, and what we distinguish with our sensoriality in the immediateness of our living it. This means that everything that appears as a result of our operating from the coherences of our making without resorting to the possible action of some outside agent in our daily life is natural. The physical is natural because it occurs as what we distinguish from the coherences of our structure. Sometimes it seems to us that we live an experience that we cannot explain with what we know of the coherences that we know of how we are made and we try to see if there are dimensions of it that belong to what we do and we had not observed, or we do not find them, and we are left with what we know of the harmony of our coexistence, hopefully without falling into the temptation of using that mystery to justify the invention of something metaphysical as a divinity to reassure us. Or, wisely, we dig deeper into our making looking for its natural character, and we expand our gaze looking for some deeper dimensions in our making.

What is real? We say that something is real when we accept it as natural because it arises with what we do, but we cannot always easily satisfy the sensory doubt that other observers or ourselves may have without broadening our reflective gaze.

Where do we come from? This is a natural question that arises when we accept that we are molecular-autopoietic systems, because if we are, our origin must have occurred in the spontaneity of the dynamic molecular architecture of the molecular cosmos that appears when we explain the operational coherences of the realization of our daily living with the operational coherences of the realization of our daily living. By accepting that we are autopoietic-molecular systems, we can understand how is it that the external that impinges upon us without telling us nothing about itself, and how it is that our operational harmony in the UDEON that we integrate is the continuous result of the structural coupling of the organism and the locality of the dynamic architecture of the cosmos in which it exists.

What is living: Living is the natural thing that happens to us in every moment of the continuous now of the continuous changing present of the continuous realization of our molecular-autopoiesis by feeling what we feel in the locality of the cosmos in which we occur, whether as bacteria or humans. That is, living is the continuous realization of the dynamics of the molecular-autopoiesis of an organism in the world that it generates and that makes it possible. Each living being or organism generates in its living a world of which we humans can speak if we let it appear in our observation by distinguishing it.

What is death? Death is the natural thing that happens to us when our molecular-autopoiesis disintegrates, and we disappear together with the world we generated, and of which other people we knew can only talk about by constructing a story according to what they remember to have lived in the changing now of the present of their living. Life and death are indissoluble unities that began with the spontaneous appearance of the first living beings some 3,800 million years ago. And in us individual persons’ death begins as a possibility when we learn about it as an unavoidable future happening.

What is to reflect? As observers, we can say that the act of reflecting occurs as an arrest in the living that a living system is living when it faces an alternative in the flow of its living and expanding its attention in a broader domain of possibilities and adopting one of them continues what it was doing or changes it according to what it feels at that moment to be more opportune. Every living system finds itself in the flow of its living with some situation in which it stops what it was doing in front of a sensory alternative, adopting one course or another according to what it feels at that moment. This happening constitutes a reflective situation of greater or lesser magnitude according to the way of living of the organism that lives it. But only living beings that live in language as we do can reflect on their reflecting and talk about it because language is the recursive mechanism that makes it possible to observe one’s own observing. However, all living systems live, consciously or unconsciously, guiding all the time the course of their living as they find themselves unavoidably always choosing what to do in the continuously changing present of their living.

The cosmos we generate: As we describe and explain the coherences of our living together in our conversations and reflections with what we do in our daily living, alone and together as human beings, appears the cosmos in which we live founded in our cultural-biological living without any transcendent assumption. Cosmos that does not exist when we do not exist, and that only comes into existence when a being like us appears that in its cultural-biological living makes it appear with what it does and its reflections about what it does.

We human beings in our cultural-biological coexistence generate an analogical cosmos, not a digital one, which occurs as a field of structural determinism generating living beings that exist as non-repeatable historical individuals. Cosmos will exist only as long as there are cultural-biological human beings that inhabit it, and can describe it in their conversation, but that does not have its own existence independent of what we human beings do when we describe it because we are the referent to validate everything we do. We human beings can generate in our cultural-biological living different worlds or modes of existence that can generate in us well-being or relational pain. But, when we become aware that we do not want to conserve that pain, we can ask ourselves: How did that relational pain originate in me? And how can I come out of it?

11. Cultural pain and liberating conversation

We are living beings that as human beings exist in language. And it is a biological fact that as living beings we are structure-determined systems, and that, as we have said in this writing, we cannot specify what the other hears, feels, reflects, or what happens to him or her with what we say. And that it is due this why we are not responsible for what the other hears of what we say, but we are responsible for what we say and the moment we choose to say it.

The art and science of the conscious generation of the liberating conversations (Dávila, 2011) arise in the understanding of the harmonious conversation that takes place when we live together, attending to each other without prejudices, expectations, or demands. And this can happen only in the non-competitive harmonious relational environment that appears in the relational flow of the harmonious coexistence that takes place when we let it appear in our living together. Manner of living together that we want to evoke when we speak of love, in our cultural-biological living.

A liberating conversation does not arise from a method or a technique, it occurs in the flow of the processes that constitute the central aspect of the harmonization of our living that happens in it, and whose foundations are in the understanding of our cultural-biological coexistence. And for this expansion of understanding to occur, and that in the long run could be experienced as a “yes, I realize that I am liberated because I feel lighter,” there are several dimensions of understanding that we have to consider:

1. That you don’t help anyone because you don’t know what another person wants, desires, or feels that needs.

Now we can ask ourselves:

How do the worlds we live arise in all their diversity, complexity, and splendor as spheres of sensory–operational–relational coherences, different and independent at the same time? How do the worlds we live in appear as independent spheres of existence if they all arise in the same relational operational domain that is the realization of our living? What do they have in common? What is the origin of the coherences in our operating together that arise in our coexistence in conversation if we do not specify each other reciprocally in our encounters?

The recovery of self-love and self-respect occurs without mystery in the liberating conversations, and the possibility that this be so is in our human cultural-biological constitution. Love and willingness to listen in the domain in which we are because we care about the well-being of all people is all that is needed. To love and listening with sensitivity and openness to understand what is happening in the relational domain in which we are and which in our human coexistence is always unpredictable. And it is so because our human living courses always guided by inner feelings, desires, and purposes that can be contradictory unpredictable domain of human coexistence that is always guided by intimate feelings, desires, and purposes that can be contradictory when they arise from theories that are not based on the understanding of our cultural-biological human existence. We know that when we ask a person a question, we trigger a change in him or her that we cannot predict. And that strictly speaking we never know what will happen, and that is why a conversation that takes place as a transformation in our coexistence that generates harmony in our living together is an art, the art of human coexistence in the harmony of love.

A liberating conversation operates as an intimate observation and vision of the unconscious processes of congruent transformation of the participants in any conversation, but in particular of those human beings who are trapped in pains of the soul. Conversations of the latter kind are generally called therapeutic because they are intended to alleviate the pains of some illness. Liberating conversation in no way replaces therapeutic work with a psychologist or psychiatrist, but it helps to see oneself where one does not see oneself.

Language occurs as a recursive flow of consensual behavioral coordinations in living together (Maturana, 1988). How this occurs in a recursive flow of coordinations of coordinations of intimate feelings and consensual emotions, that are what ultimately guide everything we do, alone or with others, whatever the networks of conversation in which we happen our living together. What also discovered in her work, and called liberating conversations, is that language, as a cultural-biological process, does not designate objects or conceptual entities in themselves (Dávila, 2011). But without describing it evokes what happens in the flow of our congruent intimate transformations while we intertwine our coexistence in conversations that generate the worlds we live in a changing unity with what we feel and do in the flow of the congruent transformations of our bodies and our souls.

In these circumstances, what is now revealed in this essay are the processes that occur in our intimate feelings as we move from a painful living without self-respect and self-love, to one in which both, self-love and self-respect, are recovered as a natural way of living alone and with others.

The understanding of the operation of living beings as molecular-autopoietic systems, and of the nervous system as a closed network of sensory-effector configurations that generate the relational behavior of the organism, and the comprehension of that understanding, liberate our thinking in our thinking, as Gregory Bateson said so that we can realize: (a) that the pain for which relational help is requested is always of cultural origin, and it originates in a cultural denial lived in childhood in a not having had presence, not having been seen and loved; (b) that in the persons that consult for a relational pain and the configuration of their intimate feelings of “unhappiness” are consciously or unconsciously active in every moment of their continuous changing present, shaping their living in all that they do and in their relational living; (c) that the people who ask for relational help have conserved and conserve as valid the self-depreciation that evoked in them by the pain of the denial of love lived, denial validated by the culture in which she/he lives; (d) that they have conserved and conserve that pain all the time as a configuration of intimate feelings of self-deprecation culturally validated that shapes in every instant of their relational living; and (e) finally that pain disappears only with the recovery of self-respect and self-love, in the harmony of detachment of that pain that arises when he/she realizes that the cultural devaluation lived is not valid.

The conversation that liberates appears almost as a spontaneous happening, as it takes place in the silence of the intimate harmonization of oneself in the reflective poetics of loving and loving oneself.

12. Fundamental conclusion

It is from understanding our living as cultural-biological beings that we realize that the understanding of our human existence and of the cosmos we inhabit in the UDEON that we integrate requires an epistemological change. A change that requires:

1) that we abandon the idea that there is an external reality that sustains us and makes us possible, and that until now has been the epistemological fundament for understanding and explaining everything we do and happens to us in our lives;

Finally, unitary epistemology, as the domain of the realization of the cultural-biological human living and coexistence, shows us how it is that all explanatory and creative domains have a single operational fundament that is the domain of the cultural-biological human living.

We cannot ignore that the domain of the realization of our cultural-biological living constitutes the space in which all the relational doings, feelings, desires, purposes, theories, philosophies, arts, and religions happen because we generate them in our living. This is how the understanding and comprehension of our cultural-biological living have presence in the daily human living as a change in the way of thinking and of the fundamental explanatory attitude that constitutes our humanness as the new epistemological fundament that permits us to understand the cosmos that we generate in its diversity and beauty with our actions and reflections in our living.

And this understanding occurs in the recognition that the human being by operating in language, conversation, and reflection is the foundation of all explanation and justification of any human activity, and of any distinction that the observer brings into existence. We human beings intertwine with the natural world by the actions we generate in our daily living, according to what we want to conserve, as a creative or destructive dance of our living and living together.

How do we want to live together?

Something is insofar there is an operation of distinction that constitutes it. And we find ourselves existing in our operation that constitutes us when we explain the coherences of the realization of our living with the coherences of the realization of our living.

We are a product of nature and at the same time nature appears in our daily living as we distinguish it.