June 15, 2015

June 15, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

 

This writing will be my sixth response to “Zen and Behavior Analysis” (2010) by Roger Bass. I woke up from a dream in which I was walking in the streets of my old home town. The houses had been painted in a light shade green. I had to complete some dreadful task and was carrying a heavy bag. Upon seeing the streets I knew so well, I dropped the bag and told myself that I didn’t need to complete this task. It made me feel emotional, so much so that I almost cried, but then I woke up.  

“As Zen Buddhists often emphasize, all talk about Zen is done from the outside looking in, and is meaningless from a Zen point of view.” From the point of view of the distinction between Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), this is a typical NVB statement,, because, NVB is meaningless talk and  only SVB is meaningful.  Spiritual condemnation about talking is always about NVB.However, such condemnation shows as much a lack of skill as well as a lack of understanding. Since people, Zen masters included, don’t know how to have SVB, they condemn NVB, but, as this statement makes clear,, talking as such is abandoned. 

Yet, there is something inconsistent about this abandonment because masters still talk at and instruct their students. Also, it illustrates this talking happens fairly often, and that is why “Zen Buddhist often emphasize that all talk about Zen is done from the outside looking in.”  (underlining added).  It seems to me that these Zen masters were able to recognize that their own way of speaking was NVB , but since they didn’t know about SVB, they tried to limit  their speaking altogether, while they, the so-called authorities,, paradoxically continued to talk about Zen. In an attempt to create peace, Zen, like other religions, has perpetuated NVB. The statement “all talk about Zen is done from the outside looking in, and is meaningless from a Zen point of view of Zen” denies that public speech or “outside” environmental variables, cause a person’s private speech construed as the “inside.”  

Zen is based on a misunderstanding of the causation of behavior. Supposedly, the person is causing his or her own behavior and that is why he or she is instructed to work on his or her enlightenment by not talking, by looking at the “outside” from the “inside.” 

In SVB a speaker pays attention to what happens within his or her own skin. This is congruent with Zen’s focus on the “inside.” However, in SVB, we talk,, but in Zen talking supposedly has become meaningless. Zen can’t be an unexpressed nonverbal peaceful experience, of “things as they are", SVB teaches that, such peaceful nonverbal experience follows from verbal expression. Complete means congruence between verbal and nonverbal expression of the speaker. It means that in SVB the speaker is his or her own listener. 

Interestingly, in Zen jargon there are more references to looking in than to listening in, because talking is not considered to be an option. Yet, if we would begin to listen to our private speech,, we would figure out something about our public speech: if public speech is NVB,, it results in negative, non-meditative, endlessly chattering self-talk.

Bass who is convinced that both "share at least some  common ground” , acknowledges that for both “Zen and behavior analysis commonly held distinctions do not apply”, but then he goes on to make the silly claim that “Zen goes further because distinctions themselves don’t apply.”   From a behaviorist point of view he is absolutely wrong. Behaviorism goes further than Zen because it considers verbal behavior which operates on the environment on both sides of the skin. Moreover, in SVB this effect is such that the environment inside and outside of a person’s own skin is experienced and talked about as one. Zen’s wholesale rejection of verbal behavior,, indeed, of the verbal community itself, is eerily similar to the way in which sects indoctrinate and recruit new members by alienating them from their familiar environment. Zen may have led to some meditative nonverbal behavior, such as archery, music,, tea-drinking, walking and sitting, but it didn’t and it couldn’t contribute anything to enhancing our way of talking. "A verbal community’s distinctions are not applicable to Samadhis and Enlightenment.” This anti-social aspect of Zen is deeply problematic. 

Zen masters presumably “warn monks to ignore experiential sideshows produced by Zen practice.” Such warnings are verbal behavior and the Zen monk repeats these instructions to him or her self during his or her meditation.  Thus, public speech is affecting private speech. In behaviorism private speech is considered to be the same as thinking. Calling it “a sideshow” doesn’t explain anything. 

Behaviorism explains private speech,, but Zen isn’t  and can’t.  Moreover, behaviorists are not against private speech, which they consider to be part of verbal behavior. Furthermore, a behaviorist would be a bad behaviorist is he or she would have to warn those whom he or she instructs about the “sideshow produced by” their instruction. Plus, there is precision teaching in behaviorism. Rather than having verbal-less activity, they engage in enriched verbal behavior because in SVB speaking and listening behaviors are and remain joined. The processes Bass claims which are due to Zen meditation(generativity, stimulus equivalence, transformational functions and ultimately, stimulus equivalence singularity), nevertheless require involvement in speaking and listening. 

“Zen, we are told, gets us to things in themselves (i.e. independent of distinctions we bring)” (underlining added).The fact that Zen masters say this, doesn’t make it  “an Eastern science, a distortion free means for, as Skinner said, “getting back to the original.”” There is no such thing as Eastern science. Likewise, there is no Eastern biology or physics. “Getting back to the original” as Skinner described it in Walden Two or Verbal Behavior always involves people talking with each other and making sense to each other. In fact Skinner was already referring to SVB. 

Let’s explore the Zen Koans from a SVB/NVB perspective. According to Bass,, the Zen master says “No” to the question “does even a dog have a Buddha nature?” because it “quells the unconscious flow of private, verbally influenced responses during mediation.” Rather than “stopping verbal activity” in the belief this will bring a person closer to enlightenment, in SVB speakers are given the full support to express themselves verbally  Moreover, the SVB knowledgeable, behaviorist audience would unequivocally answer to the question that a dog is incapable of verbal behavior.

As previously stated, Zen masters mostly give examples that deal with seeing. Thus, Master Baizhang answers that enlightened persons are “not blind to cause and effect.”  If Bass is “not blind to cause and effect” how come he insists on the impossibility of “verbally unmediated perception?” Skinner describes this blindness as “a fixation on imagined or fabricated causal chains,,” but Bass doesn’t realize perception is part of verbal behavior. 

The shoes the master placed on his head were another example of seeing. Presumably this demonstration shows we are using words as a tool in a wrong way “for achieving our ends.” There is a word for what Bass describes: reification, changing a verb into a noun.

Another great example of Zen’s overemphasis on the visual tricks was a master who pointed his index finger upward whenever asked a question. He even cut off of the finger of an innocent child, who might have been too talkative, but who presumably instantly reached enlightenment. It makes me sick to my stomach to read such a fanatical explanation about such an event that “the child had to lose the symbolic representation for Zen before Zen itself could emerge.”  

June 14, 2015

June 14, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

 

This writing will be my fifth response to “Zen and Behavior Analysis” (2010) by Roger Bass. In yesterday’s writing I ended with a sense of puzzlement about Bass who apparently sees no problem in describing the workings of Zen-tactics as a form of advertising. During Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) we find out that “behavior under control of vicariously established reinforcers”, with which we have “never had any direct contact,” leads to chasing phony needs and forgetting about our real needs. The spiritual goods are never delivered and talk which maintains belief in enlightenment is Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). 

Skinner described Zen as “extracting the essentials” and depicted a Zen archer as someone who “learns to minimize the particular features of a single instance.” The archer is said to “transcend the immediate situation” to become “detached from it.” His careful words describe Zen as a practice of “attenuated stimulus control.”Bass, however, insists that “Zen meditation does not minimize all features of immediate situations; it attenuates and eventually eliminates a class of controls: verbal behavior.” This is a ridiculous claim, but it seems to explain why Zen practice has led to good archers and calligraphers,, but not to great speakers. Tokusan, one of the greatest Zen masters, is reported to have said “There are no words or phrases in Zen.” 

Skinner’s attempt on the other hand, at altering verbal behavior was to avoid “distortion due to intervening verbal linkage.” This cannot be compared to Zen’s absurd goal of eliminating all verbal behavior. If we look at the workings of NVB, it is easy to see that Zen continues a lineage of hierarchical uni-directional conversation. Zen masters are never really talking with anyone,, they always speak at others, who are not allowed to speak with them. Zen is based on obedience and on coercion, which are the characteristics of NVB. 

“An entirely different matter is Skinner’s “Vocabulary with precise stimulus control” that is “used within a given universe of discourse”, which must be a “special scientific vocabulary” that is “relatively free of responses under other sorts of stimulus control.” Skinner’s version of “the original state of affairs” is not the same as Zen. His is a scientific language, which depicts how human behavior works, a language, of  attachment and oneness with what is happening. The language of Zen, by contrast, is authoritarian,, it has to be, because eliminating all verbal behavior doesn’t  tell us about how it works. Zen forces us into sensory deprivation and asks us to stick our heads in the sand. 

Bass declares Zen is not merely “attenuated verbal stimulus control “as in the “concentration on one single word or image” also known as mantra’s which are believed to originate in India. Likewise, our NVB is exclusive, because communicators get stuck with one word, one topic, one theory or one way of viewing things. SVB, however, is inclusive of all perspectives which are fluidly woven together. In NVB the speaker, sternly sticks to his or her topic and dominates listeners verbally and non-verbally. Compare that with Zen for a moment. In Zen we aren't even allowed to have one topic; Zen is really the ultimate form of oppression. 

 In Zen what they call “stationary” is not merely “weakened stimulus control”, but is said to be "verbally unmediated attention.” Bass describes a perception “which is very clear but is undifferentiated in the sense that it is devoid of verbal components.” As most of us probably know Skinner (1945) defined verbal behavior as mediated behavior, so if it is true that Zen clarity is “verbally unmediated” then Bass’s verbal behavior is not operant behavior. 

What is meant then by “verbally unmediated attention?” Skinner treated the issue of meaning as a matter of discovering the controlling variables of a verbal response (1945).  He refined his definition of verbal behavior “as the behavior reinforced through the mediation of other persons” by describing mediation,, that is,, the behavior of the listener, who “responds in ways which have been conditioned precisely in order to reinforce the behavior of the speaker.”(1957). If there is, as Bass claims,, no verbal response, then there are no controlling variables and there is no meaning.Thus, Zen is meaningless...

The aforementioned ties into Zen’s use of “unsolvable meditative riddles” called “Koans”. Presumably all verbal behavior is to be extinguished. Zen hammers on the fact that all talking or any kind of verbal mediation must stop,, as it aims to increase a person’s ability to “observe the world as it is.”   In terms of speaking and listening Zen presumably increases listening by decreasing speaking. This is an old and failed strategy, which has only perpetuated NVB. In SVB we listen while we speak, that is, our speaking and our listening behaviors are joined, but in NVB they are disconnected. 

Supposedly, in Zen we can become enlightened, totally conscious,, 100% listening, by ignoring the fact that we are speaking. The only speaker allowed is the master. He or she dominates the conversation with questions which can never get resolved and which stop the Zen student from asking. Why do Zen students even want to achieve a “verbally free, contingency-shaped” behavior?   Verbal behavior is experienced as a burden. Since we don’t know how to maintain SVB, we are imprisoned by words, that is, we have NVB. 

The following quote deserves careful attention. It gives directions on the use of the word “No” which one says to oneself, while meditating, in order to “eliminate verbal mediation.” Supposedly, one doesn’t say “No” to one’s feelings. “The basic form of abuse of “No” is to interpret and practice it in a negative way, using it to make the mind blank and shut out reality instead of using it to make the mind clear and open to reality” (Cleary, 1997) (underlining added). From a behavioral perspective we know that unobservable private mental processes don’t account for how we behave. Skinner often repeated that the problem with mentalism and those who believe to have a mind, is  that they think that their behavior is caused by what they feel or want,, when in reality it is always caused by environmental variables. Also the “verbal intruders” in the meditator can be traced to these environmental events. The fact that Zen masters resist describing Zen in an attempt to “minimize the effects of verbal behavior” has the same effect as when someone tells us not to think of pink elephants.  Supposedly, " Zen masters create a context in which Zen occurs if the monk is prepared “that is, not speaking. 

In SVB the speaker listens to him or herself while he or she speaks. In SVB, the listener hears the speaker’s sound and understands what he or she says because of how he or she sounds. The sound of the speaker in SVB has a special quality, which allows the speaker to speak as clearly as possible. Because the speaker listens to him or herself, he or she relaxes into his or her natural sound. The listener is pleasurably stimulated by the voice of the speaker. “A Zen Buddhist might say that the goal is to hear the sound, not the echo.” What such a master is saying is that the disciple should listen to him, but not to himself. This is another version of NVB in which other-listening makes self-listening impossible. In SVB, by contrast, self-listening includes other-listening. When we don’t or can’t listen to ourselves, how are we supposed to be able to listen to others? 

In Zen, the master talks at not with the disciple,, who is to eliminate his or her verbal behavior. In SVB we don’t fixate on the verbal, as that changes the sound of our voice. The listener reinforces the sound of the speaker as a meditative way of talking unfolds in which we say new things. SVB makes and keeps us conscious, but NVB is a mechanical  and unconscious way of communicating.

June 13, 2015

June 13, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

This writing is my fourth response to “Zen and Behavior Analysis” (2010) by Roger Bass. What does “Zen’s central notion of the individual-inseparable-from-the-world” mean? And, what does this notion,, which presumably “is consistent with behavior analysis and evolutionary biology” mean for how we talk?  If, with this notion,, with this understanding, with this description, we still go on with our Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), it is just talk. 

However, Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) is not just talk. It adds a dimension to Buddhism as well as behaviorism, which was missing due to our NVB and which can only become visible while we talk with each other. Few people are still interested in talking. One must be interested in and willing to participate in talking to be able to embrace SVB. Those who can get away with their pretention of talking will continue their NVB, regardless of many years of practicing meditation or study of behavior analysis. 

This paper by Bass was written in the same vein as other behaviorists that wrote about the similarities between behavior analysis and Buddhism. Presumably Zen is different from other Eastern ways of thinking because it “matured in China, where a practical emphasis on techniques and outcomes whittled away the mysticism of its Indian origins, a process similar to behaviorism’s role in psychology.”   Bass's objective is to point out that behavioral analysis and Zen “share at least some common ground and that is the starting point for this discussion.” Here we have a vague reference to talking. This so-called “discussion” is only about what is written and what has already been written and has no implication for how we talk.

Like many other behaviorist authors,, Bass is trying to talk with himself, because, let’s face it, nobody is talking, with him,nobody is listening to him. In the same way, Skinner was also talking with himself, when he boldly stated that he was even ready to make over the whole field of psychology if that was what it would take to make it fit with the things that he was thinking and talking about. 

Since Zen practice, like verbal behavior, is about instruction, it makes sense for Bass to illustrate his case by following the experiences of a Zen novice after he or she first comes to a Zen master. Basically, the student is to learn a new language. “Beginners must be taught how to peel verbal behavior away from the rest of their repertoires, undoing stimulus control established and nurtured since infancy.”  

Supposedly, Zen “applies techniques “”to our normal –life worldview ““that develop a complimentary, verbally unmediated repertoire” (underlining added).  However, verbal behavior is behavior that is mediated by others. By Skinner’s standards Zen thus defined, is not operant,, not verbal behavior. 

It is interesting to notice that during Zen meditation no talking occurs. The “Zen instruction clearly indicates that verbal behavior [private speech] should diminish during meditation,, but that goal should be accomplished with minimally intrusive techniques.” (words between brackets added). In ordinary teaching learning occurs only if the covert speech of the student becomes more or less the same as the teacher’s overt speech, but is prevented when the student’s covert speech deviates from the teacher’s overt speech. In the latter case, the student is distracted from what the teacher is saying by his or her self talk. Bass describes that the teaching’s objective, to diminish a person’s private speech during meditation “should be accomplished with minimally intrusive techniques.”  However, these “minimally intrusive techniques” are derivatives of Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). Since our private speech is a function of our public speech, the best way to effect change in our private speech is to effect change in our public speech. If we have more Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) there will be no troubling NVB  private speech anymore. The objective in Zen meditation that a person’s verbal behavior should diminish is in and off itself aversive and it is no surprise that “Beginners often find meditation fraught with disorganized thinking that quickly jumps between topics.”

" The listener-Zen-student, who responds to the instructions of the Zen-Master-speaker is told that he or she “must avoid creating a verbal editor that simply exchanges one verbal intrusion for another.”   However, the Zen student is unable to match his or her private speech with the Master’s pubic speech, because he or she is not talking out loud, but is only quietly observing his or her private speech. 

In Zen as in NVB the link between private and public speech is broken. In NVB, our private speech is pushed out of our public speech as if it has nothing to do with it. How a person talks with him or herself is a function of how others have talked with him or her. Although it is our natural tendency to trace back our private speech to our public speech, NVB prevents that and thus creates enormous problems. In other words, the person who is told and inadvertently tells him or herself that he or she is responsible for his or her own thoughts is basically driving him or herself nuts. “The worst case scenario is becoming so upset with lack of control over verbal behavior that motivating operations like anger spiral into even greater disruptions.”  This “lack of control “is what the listener always experiences during NVB. The speaker in NVB feels that he or she is in control, because he or she can make others angry with his or her verbal behavior. Elicitation by the speaker of  negative feelings in the listener are antithetical to verbal behavior and always triggers counter control, that is, more NVB. 


When the listener has no way to trace back his or her NVB private speech to the environment, that is, to the speaker, he or she is inclined to accept the also culturally promoted belief that he or she is him or herself responsible for his or her private speech and this why our “verbal tactics” become themselves such a problematic interference. 

No Zen techniques can undo the consequences of NVB. No matter how much a Zen student practices, “the problems with negative motivating operations (e.g. ruminating)” continue. That it became accepted that some presumably enlightened people transcended these NVB consequences, simply signifies that we haven’t looked into how we actually talk with each other. Once we have SVB, we realize that our talking makes us quiet and meditative and that NVB, which is hierarchical and uni-directional continues our inner turmoil.  Meditation as a way in which we are trying to get away from talking is ineffective and self-defeating as at the end of the day we still need to talk with each other and must deal with the consequences of how we have talked at others or how others have talked at us. 

 

Zen masters and therapists have “noted the problems with aversive control”, but didn’t yet differentiate between SVB and NVB. Shakespeare is still relevant today as he gave talking a prominent place in the lives of his characters. “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” 

Presumably, the “several ways” that “advances a monk’s preparation for enlightenment” have something in common with how “scientific communities attract and assimilate young, unrecognized researchers.”  Bass may have a point if he means that the strict Zen discipline is similar to writing scientific papers. “Talking about it” and “honoring those who achieve enlightenment “is NVB as it is talk between people who are believed to be unequal. Besides,, the only talk accepted by a Zen master is the talk he or she prefers, to hear, that is,, the Zen student doesn’t really talk with the Zen master,, but gives him or her whatever he or she wants to hear. What Zen and science have in common is that they diminish the importance authentic conversation. . 

In SVB there is fluid turn-taking, in which, at any time, the speaker becomes the listener or the listener can become the speaker. Moreover, in SVB, the speaker is his or her own listener. In science, however, more importance is given to the written word than to the spoken word. This is to enhance our understanding, but it diminishes the experience of our natural way of talking. Both in Zen and in science we underestimate the importance of normal interaction. Normal conversation is SVB, but what we have invented and claimed as something better than that is NVB.  


Rigid Zen practices are “interpreted as necessary for becoming not just to an observer of, but rather continuous with, a marvelous world,”, How marvelous can a world without talking be?  “Collectively these tactics my function like advertising.”Indeed we are being sold on NVB, but SVB  is not about buying into something. 

June 12, 2015

June 12, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

This writing will be my third response to “Zen and Behavior Analysis” (2010) by Roger Bass. When I am reading a paper like this I am catching up with things from my past and my response is often my private speech which is triggered by these public words. Other behaviorists have also tried explain Zen from a behavior analytic point of view. According to Bass, however,, they all got it wrong as “Zen is “the outcome of Zen practices.” This kind of argument, that Zen is like this or like that, is Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). In NVB disagreements are never properly addressed and cannot be dissolved . As long as NVB  continues there is no room for Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB). 

Papers like this are written to disagree and my  point is: why don’t we have an actual conversation in which we disagree, because that would speed things up. Obviously, when much disagreement is to be expressed no conversation will be possible. To have more conversation, not only must we focus on what we agree on, but also, we must stop limiting our conversation to what was written and read. Let’s say we do that, but we find disagreements again stop our conversation and make the conversation impossible. My suggestion is:, let’s talk about this in a slightly different way than we are used to. NVB  makes SVB impossible. NVB stops SVB. SVB is authentic talking in which we take turns as speaker and listener, but NVB is the pretension of talking, in which our roles as speakers and listeners are fixed.Once we understand that NVB will be much easier to stop. NVB has to be stopped for SVB to begin. If  our SVB can continue, we will eventually extinguish  NVB. 

Much writing, which is a function of NVB, will also come to an end when we engage in SVB. I claim that most of our talking is NVB and therefore most of our writing is unproductive and endlessly beating around the bush. If the conversation stops, it is very obvious,, but in writing the illusion is created that a conversation still continuous, but all that is going on is NVB. I want you to know thatBass’s writing is in support of NVB and not of SVB.  

We may start out with SVB , but we get stranded with NVB. This is very common. Bass actually talked with Skinner about this concern. He admits that he was nervously "struggling to find good answers for epistemological questions.” Many people have struggled like him. Skinner’s answer to his questions was: “I don’t care much for isms.” He said he didn’t care for any “dualism, epiphenomenalism, monism or materialism.” Take note of the fact Skinner here directed Bass’s attention to “verbal behavior of which philosophy is a subset.”  He didn’t speak to Bass like someone would do who is trying to calm someone down, to the contrary, he gave him an ultimatum: either we talk about verbal behavior or this conversation ends. Although, generally speaking, Skinner has more SVB repertoire than other behaviorists, in this, instance, he spoke not with ,but at Bass and thus expressed NVB.   


This example is significant because anyone can imagine being in Bass’s shoes. Skinner has a different status than Bass, just as a Zen master has a different status as a disciple. Bass’s puzzlement is about to get bigger as he writes “Digesting his remarks led me to the giddy epiphany that Verbal Behavior (1957) was the unified field theory of academe – Skinner’s analysis accomplished for human behavior what Einstein had sought for physics. And then came along Zen.” It seems to me that Bass perhaps, even unknowingly, was having questions about how his own experience, which (due to his involvement in Zen practice became confined to and limited by his Zen verbal behavior), could be better explained by behavior analysis.   Although he was nervous to speak with such an important person as Skinner, Bass was probably as open to receive instruction from him as he would be to Zen master. 

Bass thought he wanted to talk with Skinner about the relation between Zen and behavior analysis,, but what he really wanted to talk about was of course how his own experience could be explained by behavior analysis. However,, this focus on his own experience took the backseat over his knowledge about and indoctrination byZen. Bass wanted to talk with Skinner about his own experience, but because he didn’t know how to do that,, he talked in Zen jargon. It seems to me that way back, Skinner too wanted to talk about his own experience.

Skinner apparently wanted to talk about his own experience so strongly that it made him discovered how to do that. His ability to manipulate environmental variables, allowed him to express himself scientifically.  He would talk with Bass only in such a way that he could have his say. Thus, Skinner didn’t have SVB , but NVB, because he coerced Bass to adhere to his view. Bass on the other hand, tried to be true to his own experience, so he stuck to hisZen jargon and by doing so, he also maintained NVB. 


What is also easy to recognize in the relationship between Skinner and Bass that NVB is a function of hierarchical relationship. SVB, by contrast, would be the conversation in which Skinner is no longer predetermined by his radical behaviorism and Bass is no longer preoccupied with his Zen philosophy. Such a conversation is both possible and necessary, but it will only happen if we recognize how our knowledge can get in the way of our talking. 

When Bass writes that "Zen took me outside not just culture-bound distinctions,, but also distinctions themselves”, he refers to his Zen   experience, which doesn’t involve much talking. Only, if “everything you know is wrong”, a different way of talking, SVB is possible.

How else but with SVB are we going to “discover what grows in the estuary made by Zen and behavior analysis”? NVB  keep us stuck with “aboutism” about “Zen and behavior analysis.” Bass believes that "Mentalism is uniquely ill suited for dealing with Zen’s extreme’s parsimony”, but since the rates of NVB are about as high among Zen Buddhists as among behavioral analysts, I conclude that  mentalism is still very common in both groups. 

“To step back from agency accounts ” (Vargas, 1996) and explanations “that appeal to events taking place somewhere else, at some other level of observation, described in different terms” (Skinner,, 1950) is not, as Bass seens to believe, “a step toward Zen”, but a step toward a new way of talking: SVB. Skinner’s words refer to the often overlooked fact that what is written and what is read cannot “appeal to events taking place somewhere else at another level of observation, described in different terms,” that is, to what is said and listened to.  Spoken words are not the same as our written words.  

It is so easy to gloss over the troublesome fact that for some strange reason written words have become more important than spoken words. We read that “Behavior analysis and Zen preserve no subject-object distinction”, but it is individual people who preserve such distinctions and who in one way or another, verbally or non-verbally act accordingly. Behavior analysts think they agree when they read “When contingencies are the units of analysis, the individual is part of an interactive context,” but only in SVB, can they actually experience each other “as part of an interactive context.”  It is interesting that Bass uses the word “individual “and doesn’t specify “interactive context” as being another human individual.  The statement would then read: “When contingencies are the units of analysis the individual is part of another individual.”  The latter is SVB, but the former is NVB. In NVB  the speaker and the listener are separated and the listener is treated by the speaker as a a thing. If “the interactive context” is not  another person, the speaker is talking at the listener who is either above and very important or below and completely irrelevant. Only in SVB do we come off of our theoretical high horse and do we rise out of our ignorance.