Every culture is a kind of map of life and provides ways of interpreting and responding to experience. The maps vary in both detail and content: for example, the high technology on the Western map or the applied spirituality of some Eastern societies are not in other world views unless borrowed. However, the materialistic, mundane perspective that Western science presupposes clearly presents problems in understanding other peoples whose views of life are based on differing premises. 

     We focus on thinking in the West. Frequently we get so confounded that we cannot decide if reality is our thinking or our thinking is reality. It is a bit of a merry-go-round that reflects our training: we are unwilling and unable to stop thinking. This ride is the foundation of the Western sciences, but is just about as satisfying as a lifelong ride on a carousel might be expected to be. We are never here: we are always going up and down proving our point or disproving somebody else's. It gets very stale, and the mechanical, analytical, impersonal universe of Western science is reflected in the death-denying, materialistic mentality of Western society. It is not easy to imagine being more alone than when you are lost in your thoughts, and that is where we are. This isolation in thought seeks comfort in control and we try to manipulate our environment to serve and maintain our egos: to make ourselves happy.
     A way to highlight the nature of differences in perspective is to use the Javanese notion of understanding. They hold that the body is an instrument that receives information about itself and the world. It is a complex and subtle receptor and can exhibit varying degrees of sensitivity. The Javanese purport that the less perceptual breadth, the less of existence referenced in an observation. Conversely, the greater the sensitivity of a response, the more that an understanding based on it will be true, reflective of what is observed and reliable. 

     Of the levels of understanding, only the least receptive, narrowest and, consequently, the most contextually independent is based on thought (ngerti). We never get farther away from the world or one another than when we relate based on our thoughts. From ngerti, the levels of understanding become more profound and increasingly present, passing through mounting contextual sensitivity in ngakoni and ngrumangsani and then finally standing in the present in nglengganani, where the understanding and that which is understood join in rasa murni or "open reception".
     The Western sciences espouse objectivity, but this objectivity is attained and maintained by limiting input, by training the academic to relate from the experientially isolated realm of thought. It can be creative but is rigid at the same time, a posture established by controlling what is received rather than being based on "open reception". They hold that open reception is a universal human capacity that we all start out in when we are born, but that you must train before you can actualize it as you get older.
     It might be said that the worldliness and materialism of Western society are connected with the mechanical, statistical and impersonal universe science reveals as well as the isolation from direct experience the emphasis on thought presupposes. But if this is the science of the thought mode of understanding, what is the science that arises from non-judgmental receptivity and how does life appear from that perspective? How does such a perspective influence the view of other people, society, the world and the universe? How different are the different points of view? 

     To contrast the Western, ego and thought-centered orientation with the Javanese/Balinese emphasis on open receptivity, I will use a pair of broad descriptive terms: the Western perspective will be called "closed" or "ego" psychology and the Javanese/Balinese orientation will be termed "open" or "maturation" psychology. The gulf between the open and closed perspectives is illustrated by the difficulty those using one have in understanding people from the other camp. Three prominent studies of Javanese and Balinese culture will be discussed and an attempt made to illustrate the magnitude and nature of the difference between the two perspectives. 

     The first example comes from Clifford Geertz and concerns the nature of open psychology. It helps to recall that this fieldwork was done in the 1950s, back when Western science still deemed itself omnipotent. In The Religion of Java, Geertz describes the basic character of Javanese psychology and gives an overall impression of its central position in Javanese culture. However, Geertz gives an intellectual appreciation: had he tried the practice, he might have understood what the Javanese were doing better. One of the problems he did not see clearly was language. He tried to translate the terms of Javanese psychology directly into English. It cannot be done any more than the terms of Western science can be translated into Javanese without importing their theoretical context. If you want to understand the Theory of Relativity, you need rather more physics and mathematics than the Javanese information system has on hand. Technical terms are basically meaningless out of context: you must put them into their context or they will mislead and confuse.
    Predictably, the ideas Geertz had the most trouble with were the kernel concepts in this form of open psychology, precisely those that do not exist in Western psychology. For example, he defines tentrem ing manah (1960:310) as "peace (quiet, tranquillity) in the heart (the seat of emotions)," that results from a practice designed to "minimize the passions altogether so far as possible, to mute them in order to perceive the true feelings which lie behind them." Geertz then attributes a psychopathological character to this, while depicting its repressive nature (1960:241) as "flattening of affect." 

     Things look very different from the inside. Tentrem ing manah is the fundamental state of open psychology. In short, the aim of the practice is not to "mute" or "minimize" the emotions by denying or controlling them, but to increase sensitivity: the reception of what is here. Increased receptivity broadens perspective and puts experience in a calmer, more stable frame. A man in a small room may think he is big; a man floating alone in the middle of the ocean cannot. The practice involves recognizing and accepting that we are really all much more in the latter situation than the former. Maturation occurs when you expand the seeming walls of your "room" until you are where you are: here. Self-importance diminishes and with it go many self-centered emotions that look and feel very foolish and cannot be supported out in the open. In fact, tentrem ing manah is the solid, reality-graced experiential frame that arises out of this open reception -- the peace that comes from being here. Any form of open psychology necessarily includes something along these lines, because this is what happens when you open up. We will be discussing rasa murni at some length below.

    A second example concerning the individual and society is from Gregory Bateson (1972) who struggled to explain what he found on Java's island neighbor and kindred culture in "Bali: The Value System of a Steady State," and admitted to being perplexed by Balinese social reality. Bateson realized that the theories and analytic tools he brought with him did not work very well, and concluded that the problem rested in the appreciation of what a human being is in a social setting. He went on to examine how Western ideas about interaction, exemplified by von Neumann's games theory, fail to account for Balinese behavior.

     Two basic game-theory assumptions that did not fit in Bali were ego-centricity in social action and the maximization of partial goals (money, position, etc.) as the purpose of members of a society. That is, the model assumes personal gain to motivate most social interaction, but: "It is immediately clear to any visitor of Bali that the driving force for any cultural activity is not [emphasis his] either acquisitiveness or crude physiological need". (1972:116) 

     Bateson noted that the Balinese seemed better able to explain their behavior than he was. They saw the community as their defining unit and themselves as functioning primarily as participants in this group identity. For Bateson, Balinese character was a result of their childrearing techniques (1972:113) wherein "a continuing plateau of intensity is substituted for climaxes as the child becomes more fully adjusted to Balinese life." He then contrasts what he terms the "steady state" of Balinese life and the climactic emphasis of Western society by depicting attitudes about money and property, music, reward for service, the level of community identification and even imputes a lack of orgasm (1972:113) in Balinese sexual relations. "There are very few Balinese who have the idea of steadily maximizing their wealth or property; those few are partly disliked and partly regarded as oddities". (1972:116) 

     Open psychology focuses on experience, not on things that theoretically define particular reactions. You pay attention to what you deem important and for the Balinese this means paying attention to one another. This mutual attention is the fiber of community maintenance. The smallest unit that is a significant component of your experience is your community. 

     The shared experience in a community reflects the combined states of its members in much the same way that the music produced by an orchestra reflects the ability and cooperation of all the players. When your neighbors or out of tune, it influences your condition, and the discord affects the united experience of the group as a whole. Your miserable neighbors must be taken care of or they become a threat and can no longer be accepted as part of your community. For whatever reasons are in vogue, they become different from you and are not your concern. The walls of opinion and prejudice this implies cannot be tolerated in a community based on open psychology or else it will die. 

     The emphasis is on removing such emotional barriers as they arise. Self-centered emotions compromise communal experience: they impose your perspective on reality on those around you. Open reception depends on the acceptance of your total experience in its natural context and this requires recognizing your experiential interdependence with others. Experience is a shared phenomenon. The more sensitive a people are, the more apparent this shared quality becomes. Improving the quality of your experience does not result from isolating yourself in luxury: you are just alone with your inability to be with others. Quality arises in combining and cooperating as a group in identifying and ameliorating sources of disharmony. 

     Balinese child-rearing techniques are connected with this, but not primarily in terms of the unconscious attitudes they impart. They are part of the training to be open and receptive that the community itself is based on. The emphasis is not on maximizing your own condition and the devil take the hindmost (the zero-sum game that Bateson is assuming), but on receiving reality accurately and participating in a kind of cooperative plural game, wherein the profit being maximized is the state of the community itself. When your neighbors are in a bad state it influences your condition, and the discord degrades the united experience of the group and will eventually destroy  community underpinnings if the situation defining the discord is not confronted and resolved. 

     Similarly, by its very nature, climax is catharsis, but such paroxysms often amount to oblivious ways of releasing pent-up energies not invested in the real context; since mature communities devote more energy to the real context, there is relatively less need for these escape valve climaxes. Sometimes climaxes are appropriate (as in sex), but the use of such gushes of feeling in Western movies and music and literature  stands out as strange: they often have nothing whatsoever to do with the real context. The participating viewer or listener or reader leaves here and floats off into imaginings; this is fundamentally at odds with open psychology. It is a dangerous habit. Community depends on receiving reality accurately, not on pretending and asserting some version of it at the expense of everyone else. It depends on paying attention and you must be here to do that. 

     Finally, for considering the individual, Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson's Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis (1942) provides a wealth of examples. The thing that stands out most in her depiction of the Balinese is just how strange they are. This very strangeness gives an indication of the profundity of the difference between the ego-based, closed psychology of Mead and the West in general, and the reception-based, open psychology of Java and Bali.

It is a character curiously cut off from interpersonal relations, existing in a state of dreamy-relaxed disassociation, with occasional intervals of non-personal concentration -- in trance, in gambling, and in the practice of the arts. (1942:47)

The primary characteristic of open psychology is being present. This is generally a calm, relaxed state; but it is spontaneous and demands the acceptance of all that inhabit the present with you as well as whatever reactions you have to them. This respect and receptivity imply a non-judgmental, noncontentious world view, at least in the perception of reality. The present is not merely the moment of your life: it is your life. There is nothing else but the present. It is not something you dispute, deny parts of, or impose your order on; it is experience you try to receive as accurately as you can. If you leave the present in constructed thought or emotion, in the short term you pay for it with experiential impoverishment; and in the long term, if you are unable to see reality clearly, it will increasingly disturb your articulation with your community and environment. 

     The "dreamy-relaxed disassociation" is this quiet, receptive state. You are always watching to see what happens next. It also reflects the lack of prolonged concentration or fixated absorption typical of open psychology in most situations. Your place is here in the present which means not being lost in pieces of it. You are not going somewhere to do something; you are here and now, like it or not. 

     This is obvious during cultural events in Java and Bali. Spectators at shadow plays, dance or musical performances pay some attention to the event but then their attention shifts and they talk to a neighbor or whatever. There is no hushed concentration: it is a performance, nothing more. Your primary responsibility is keeping track of your total condition and the performance is only a small part of that. The music expresses this. It is not climactic but continuous and more akin to the gurgling of a brook than to the engulfing movements of tension to climax and release in much Western music. This unhurried, relaxed attention to the present during artistic activities provides an example of the way emotional barriers are identified and released in an open community. Musical performances are relaxed and the players are free to shift from instrument to instrument as the spirit moves them.

In one of the modern dance forms the dancer in the center of the circle flirts with the musicians and adds piquancy to this flirtation by taking away the mallet from a leading metallophone player. Occasionally a very small boy, a five- or six-year-old whose musical virtuosity has brought him into the front rows of the metallophone players, will bitterly resent this temporary theft of his tool. He is too much absorbed in musical virtuosity to accept the notion that the hammer is another toy detachable from his body. (1942:29)

In fact, the incident illustrates a problem in perspective. The child was getting lost in concentration. He was forgetting that though the mallet and the music do have some importance, that importance is slight. You should not become so absorbed in an activity that you forget your place in the world. 

     Interpersonal relations also have this unstrained aspect which is connected with a very different appreciation of emotion. In closed psychology we manipulate emotion. We use it to try to control experience by supporting or opposing parts of it; to entertain ourselves by creating imaginary worlds; to maintain links with others by investing energy in them and giving them roles in these worlds; and, no doubt, for many other less obvious purposes. Mead's depiction of the Balinese as "curiously cut off from interpersonal relations" reflects the relative absence of emotional dependence and emotional activity in general in open psychology. Feelings are information just as sounds are information. If you constantly fill your ears with music and mask everything else out, you are doing much what the ego does with the feelings in closed psychology. You hear what you want to hear; you feel what you want to feel; you manipulate and ignore what is actually there to be heard and felt. 

     Community bonds are founded in open reception which implies an absence of the judgmental taint of emotional ties in closed psychology. You are not asking others to support your version of reality; they are here with you and that is all there is to it. There is a constant awareness of the limits of relationships -- age, change, death. You feel what you feel. You work to clear your being as much as possible but you leave it in its full context which you do not pretend to control. Sensitivity is your capacity to feel and be with others.

     The more open you are, the more information you receive and potentially understand. Unpleasant feelings are not to be denied or ignored. Nor are they to be overemphasized: they pass. Your job is to receive them as clearly as possible and hopefully learn from them.

The Balinese distinguish clearly between fear and the expression of fear, and it becomes commonplace to hear people say fiercely to cowering or crying children, "Da takoet" ("Do not act afraid"), and this is the only reassurance which is ever attempted. Nobody would ever say, "Da djerih" ("Don't be afraid"). No one even attempts to furnish enough reassurance so that the child's internal fear may be dispelled (1942:31).

Fear is fear. You do not deny it just because you do not know what is causing it. You bear it, pay attention and eventually find out what it is trying to tell you. At the same time, you try not to let it interfere with being here or discomfit those you are here with. 

     As in traditional Japanese culture (see Benedict 1946), the Western "personality" is missing in Bali. The essential difference between open and closed psychology is that the former emphasizes receptivity itself and the latter emphasizes managing the character of the reception. 

     Personality implies selecting a small part of your experience and promoting it into a "self." You pull back from direct experience and maintain a kind of control over what you receive by marshaling energy in support or opposition to how it makes you feel. The problem with this strategy is that it isolates the receiver from the reception, kills spontaneity and sensitivity, and leaves you alone with yourself". 

     In open psychology you are united with others in spontaneity. You are with them and maybe they are with you; however, only a "self" could pretend that existence can always be pleasant. The freedom to be with others and to be here in general come with the sacrifice of the illusion of control.

There is rarely any discernible relationship between the conversation of a group of Balinese and the activity which they are performing. . . One might listen at a spy hole for an hour to a busy group, hearing every word spoken, and still be no wiser in the end as to whether they were making offerings, or painting pictures, or cooking a meal. The occasional "Give me that!" is interspersed with bits of comic opera, skits and caricatures, songs and punning and repartee. As Americans doodle on a piece of paper while attending to the words of a lecture, so the Balinese doodles in words, while his body flawlessly and quickly attends to the job at hand. (1942:15)

This childlike spontaneity is a result of training and education and continual practice. 

     In open psychology, learning is a part of the process of keeping the channels of communication linking the community open. Learning to walk, learning the first appropriate gestures of playing musical instruments, learning to eat, and to dance are all accomplished with the teacher behind the pupil, conveying directly by pressure, and almost with a minimum of words, the gesture to be performed. Under such a system of learning, one can only learn if one is completely relaxed and if will and consciousness as we understand these terms are almost in abeyance" (1942:15). 

     This principle and philosophy of instruction is called tut wuri handayani in Java which means "leading" or "guiding from behind." The embroidered phrase decorates many homes and looks down on the behavior of parents and children. 

     A story often told to explain tut wuri handayani emphasizes the respect of the teacher for the pupil. A stranger, another warrior in the battle of being, comes to town and asks directions. You show him proper deference: you do not just say "Follow me" and march off in the lead. You indicate the direction and let him go first following behind and quietly letting him know when he should turn, never getting in the way of his sensing of the situation. 

     Your children are also strangers who have come asking directions. You do not dominate and mold them; you quietly guide them and help them to find their own way. A teacher does not authoritatively describe an activity and leave it to the student to master it independently. He demonstrates and is imitated until both the technique and the tone of its application are assimilated. A link of experience is shared by teacher and pupil: knowledge is given, not imposed or thrown out like feed for the chickens.

The flexible body of the dancing pupil is twisted and turned in the teacher's hands; teacher and pupil go through the proper gestures, and then suddenly the teacher springs aside, leaving the pupil to continue the pattern to which he has surrendered himself, sometimes with the teacher continuing it so that the pupil can watch him as he dances. (1942:15)

Teacher and pupil surrender to the activity and the activity is independent of them both. They are united in the relaxed performance and this relaxed, neutral condition is the basis of communication in the community. It is a living legacy that teaches how we are here together and unites present and past, teacher and pupil, parent and child, down the generations.

The Balinese learn virtually nothing from verbal instructions and most Balinese adults are incapable of following out the three consecutive orders which we regard as the sign of a normal three-year-old intelligence. The only way in which it is possible to give complex verbal instructions is to pause after each detail and let the listener repeat the detail, feeling his way into the instruction. Thus all orders tend to have a pattern like this. "You know the box?" "What box?" "The black one in the east corner of the kitchen." "In the east corner?" "Yes, the black one. Go and get it." "I should go and get the black box in the east corner of the kitchen?" "Yes." Only by such laborious assimilation of words into word gestures made by oneself, do the words come to have any meaning for action. (1942:15)

Balinese learn the content as well as the form; they are given the quiet tone of mastery and maturity, and the activity itself is secondary. While it is most obvious in the arts, this principle is applied universally and provides the basis of communication within the community. The criterion for determining the success of any moment is open reception -- being here. When a contact with someone wanders from the present, the learning process comes into play to expose and examine the problem blocking reception, and return here. This is a spontaneous reaction to being you know not where, and wishing to come back from the confusion to the present where your friends and loved ones are. 

     Thus, from Mead's point of view, the Balinese were amazingly dense, but what they were trying to do was simply to relax in her presence: to be with her. They were in the process of exposing and learning about the emotional frame that was interfering with communication and the sludge, as it were, that was clogging the connection between them and her. Having experienced Mead's strong, positivist personality myself, I can sympathize with the problem.

During our first months in Bali, before I had learned to understand the Balinese preference for theatrical emotions, I was at a loss to explain why my rapport developed so slowly with the people of Bajoeng Gede. Mothers whose babies I had medicated, although they returned for more medicine, remained so unwon that the babies screamed in terror in their arms whenever they saw me. The few days it takes to win over the women and children of a New Guinea tribe lengthened into months, and still the mothers smiled false anxious smiles, the babies screamed, and the dogs barked. Then I had the opportunity to study the behavior of other Europeans who had come to Bali as they might go to the theater, and saw how much more easily the Balinese responded to their exaggerated interest than they did to my affection for individual babies. Readjusting my cues, I gave up the communication of real emotion, upon which I had depended in all my other field trips and learned to exaggerate and caricature my friendly attitudes until the Balinese could safely regard them as theatrical rather than real. Mothers who had not loosened one tense muscle when I expressed my real feeling for their babies, relaxed with relief when I cooed and gurgled in tones which no longer had any relation to my real attitudes, their arms relaxed, the babies stopped screaming, the dogs barked less. (1942:31-32)

Once again, the main issue is respect. Infancy is considered a singularly clean, open, receptive period. Mead's "real emotions," on the other hand, are a coloration that is not valued, and, in fact, are potentially dangerous and contagious to the baby. They are highly charged, selective positions that are constructed irrespective of context. A baby sees clearly. It is this clarity that is fostered and is the basis of community. 

     Closed, constructed emotion is a defensive coloration that is escapist and provides pleasure and self-seeming control by distorting reality and asserting your version of it. The hormonal disturbances and pathogenic aspects that result from this sort of emotional addiction have become clearer since Mead's time, but we still do not pay much attention to them (unless suffering from a heart condition or the like). The Balinese and Javanese do. 

     Mead was trying to get her feeling answered and her world view validated. The mothers did not like the feeling and probably feared the loss of their children to this addiction to pleasure and pretended control. It may be that the reason the theatrical approach was more acceptable was that it was not presented with the same confusing conviction of its reality, and did not call for agreement or disagreement. The responsive sensitivity in a baby's innocent receptivity can easily be manipulated. So the lessons of respect and membership in the community begin immediately after birth in Bali. The midwife holds the baby up and says:

I am a poor little newborn baby, and I don't know how to talk properly, but I am grateful to you, honorable people, who have entered this pig sty of a house to see me born. (1942:13)

The speech states the baby's position but, at the same time, reminds everyone else of theirs. 

     Mutual respect and acceptance are the foundations of an open community but they must be learned and earned. The respect expressed for the baby and given to the baby are part of the process of teaching him to be with others. The respect gives the baby room to experience what comes to him, pleasant or unpleasant, and prevents experiential imposition. This involves not trying to force others to perceive or feel other than the way their own experience actually is. You do not shower a baby with pleasant emotion to generate a pleasant emotional contagion. The danger is the temptation to habituate this into emotional dependence and use it to try to control the child's perspective and behavior, thus creating two confused, uncaring monsters: the manipulated and the manipulator. 

     There is an old saying in Java, "Serve the harmony of the world; serve the harmony of the universe." (Mamaju hajuning pawânâ; mamaju hajuning djagad) How do you serve anything? You pay attention to it and see what it needs first. This is the "dreamy-relaxed disassociation" Mead observed -- guards on duty keeping watch on everything they can apprehend, and trying to open more to see our problem more clearly.

     In closed psychology we defend our opinions with emotion and draw on our energy resources to defend our right to feel as we do, our right to be separated from reality. Events connected with these opinions are not allowed the freedom to release and sort themselves out openly as long as the emotional defense is maintained. The event excites the emotion to protect the opinion and avoid an unprejudiced examination of the issue. 

     Open psychology confronts this by watching and waiting and being patient: eventually things get sorted out. A closed system that uses its energy this way cuts itself off from reality and exhausts itself defending its errors rather than learning from them. 

     The Balinese were a people Mead could not "win over." No doubt they could not fathom her closed psychology, goals, aggressiveness or values. She in turn could not understand their open psychology, apparent fatalism and lack of emotion.

No appeal has ever been made to him (the Balinese) to achieve in order to validate his humanity for that is taken as given. . . Life is without climax and not the ultimate goal but the first impact of experience, the initial ping of startle, is the only stimulus that has real power to arouse one's interest. (1942:48)

The "initial ping" is what the Javanese call rasa murni and is simply open receptivity. It is the beginning and end of open psychology, and is indeed the only true stimulus because it is the only open, uncensored reception. The selection of percepts to form a version of reality takes time, and the accurate reception of what is here takes place only in the pinging present. 

     As for achievement, the Balinese like each other, they like their tradition, and they like being here the way they are. Is that not an achievement? 

     An example of the nobility of their feeling for one another and their maturity itself was expressed in 1906 when the Dutch started active colonial administration of Bali, there was no war. However, the royal family of Bandung expressed their sorrow and protest in another way; they committed ritual suicide by walking into the fire of the Dutch guns: an act to be remembered. When you can do nothing else for those you love, sometimes dying is of some service. At least they will know something of how you love them, and during the coming confusion it may help them to remember to be what they are. 

     In her petulant fashion, Mead succeeds in touching on virtually all of the main characteristics of a mature open community, and also manages to communicate how profoundly different their open and her closed psychology are. In fact, she and Bateson attributed a schizoid element to Balinese personality, which further witnesses both to the stunning receptivity underpinning this community and to the estrangement Bateson and Mead suffered (neither of whom spoke fluent Balinese) during this field trip. 

     If anything, the self-destructive character of closed psychology has become even more obvious since Mead wrote during World War II. When you are unhappy with the way you and the world are, you change things to keep busy and call it progress. With the fury of our efforts to "progress" and find the ultimate hedonistic thrill, this planet is likely to be a good deal quieter soon.

BATESON, GREGORY. 1972. Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology.
BATESON, GREGORY and MARGARET MEAD. 1942. Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis. New York: Special Publications of the New York Academy of Sciences.
BENEDICT, RUTH. 1946. The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
GEERTZ, CLIFFORD. 1960. The Religion of Java. Glencoe: Free Press.