Ximena Dávila Yáñez studied human and family relations, specializing in work relations at the Instituto Profesional Carlos Casanueva (IPCC). In 1998 she was a student of Humberto Maturana at the Faculty of Sciences of the Universidad de Chile, graduating under him in experimental epistemology. Following this theme over the last eleven years, she has developed her vision of the biological-cultural nature of humanness as a foundation of all that we human beings do as languaging reflective beings, which she calls “unitary epistemology.” She has worked for various companies as well as for the Chilean government. In particular, her preoccupation in the domain of human relations has been to understand how relational pain and suffering arises and how a person can come out of it. Following this path and based on the comprehension of the biology of cognition and biology of loving, she has developed the understanding and praxis of liberating conversations. In 2000, together with Maturana, she founded the Instituto Matríztico, now Escuela Matríztica de Santiago, as a center of research and reflection on the biological-cultural nature of humanness. There she works as researcher and as a professor.
Context: The cultural worlds that we generate in our living are worlds in which we frequently live in a self-depreciating relational pain. This arises when we feel that we do not deserve to be loved and respected because we think that we are intrinsically incapable of satisfying what we think are legitimate cultural expectations about how we should be. Problem: Can we find an answer to the general question, “How is it that our life is so frequently painful?” Hypothesis: The pain for which a person asks for relational help is always of cultural origin, and arises from some experience in which she has not been loved and has accepted that she deserved not being loved because as a result of that experience she began to feel that she is intrinsically deficient. I propose that that person will come out of her pain – and will recover her self-love and self-respect as she reconnects with her fundamental loving nature as a biological-cultural human being – when she becomes able to realize that she is not intrinsically defective and that the expectations put on her are only arbitrary cultural demands. Results: I show (a) that the recovering of self-love and self-respect occurs as a result of a conversation that opens a relational space for the interplay of the conscious and unconscious reflections in which the person in pain finds that she is an intrinsically loving biological-cultural human being; (b) that this occurs through the reflexive evocation of the inner feelings of self-love and self-respect in the consulting person as she reflexively contemplates her life while she is revealing it to a caring reflective listener in a conversation that flows without expectations, demands or judgment. In such reflective “liberating conversations,” the consulting person finds herself in self-love and self-respect, not through a rational argument but through her spontaneous connection to her unconscious constitutive human inner feelings as a loving being. Implications: We do not need to suppose any reality independent of the operational coherences of our living to explain and understand the different worlds that we generate in the realization of our living.
Dávila X. Y. & Maturana H. R. (2007) La gran oportunidad: Fin de la psiquis del liderazgo en el surgimiento de la psiquis de la gerencia co-inspirativa. Gestión Pública: Revista Chilena de Administración Pública 10: 101–124. https://cepa.info/714
The essay proposes to replace the leadership, as a way of managing organizations, for a co-inspiring management. The authors propose we are living in a post-post modern era, whose main characteristic is that we, human beings, know what we know we know and understand what we understand we understand. This situation leads us to an ethical action-reflexion in which human beings can not run away of the consciousness and responsibility of their behaviors. In this context, human relations such as leadership are meaningless. Thus, the concept of co-inspiring management arises. This concept allows people to participate in an active and creative way in the creation and accomplishment of common projects and in the fulfillment of well-being.
Dávila X. Y. & Maturana H. R. (2009) Hacia una era post posmoderna en las comunidades educativas [Towards a post-postmodern era in educational communities]. Revista Iberoamericana de Educación 49: 135–161. https://cepa.info/723
In this essay, the authors invite us to take a different look at the fundamental phenomena of today’s education, imagining a flow of events that can orient us into following a drift that results in a reflexive transformation by the year 2021. This invitation is assumed with gravity, responsibility and boldness. Gravity, because of the reflexive precision that the authors use in their analysis; responsibility because they encourage to assume generationally the consequences of understanding education in this zero-time; and boldness because this is a proposal that allows us to shift our look into the comprehension of the cultural and biological foundations of human living. This proposal is undertaken from an unitary epistemological foundation that consciously avoids all dualistic temptation, broadening our understanding of our constitution as living creatures and as human beings, inviting us to reflect and to broaden our possibility of living in individual and social welfare, as naturally ethic and autonomous beings, capable of assuming the responsibility of being conscious of the world the we produce with our own living.
This essay is the result of our reflections over the course of many recursive conversations in the space of our collaboration at the Matriztic Institute in Santiago, Chile on the interplay of biology and culture on human living. We propose these Systemic and Meta-Systemic Laws (or Laws of Conservation) well aware that what we are saying with them also applies to the entire cosmos (from everyday living, to biology, to quantum physics and cosmology), which arises through the operational distinctions we make as human beings in our operating as observers explaining our living in the course of our living.
Dávila X. Y. & Maturana H. R. (2015) Reflexiones biológico-filosóficas: Los mundos de nuestro vivir biológico-cultural [Biological-philosophical reflections: The worlds of our cultural-biological manner of living]. Boletín Museo Nacional de Historia Natural 64: 81–99. https://cepa.info/7623
The aim of this article is to refect around biological and epistemological explanations in an interlaced manner about the nature of the generation of the world that we live in languaging-conversation as the human manner of living. This article is presented in three main themes plus and introduction and an epilogue that evokes in recursive manner different operations and processes as human living beings, many of the ideas presented were published in different articles and some are new.
Maturana H. R. & Dávila X. Y. (2003) Biología del tao o el camino del amar [Biology of the tao or the path of love]. Revista Philosophica 26: 125–144. https://cepa.info/690
The notion of Tao constitutes an invitation to live in the psychic and bodily well-being, a living without effort in the unity of all existence that arises as the manner of living in the present with the expansion of vision that occurs when one lives without attachment and expectations. As such the notion of Tao has lead many people to the reflections and actions that attempt to find or to reveal the that manner of living in the domains of philosophy, mysticism and religion. Where that manner of living leads us?, to the divine or to the biological? We think that the manner of living to which we are invited by the notion of the Tao, is the basic living of livings systems in their biological nature as this takes place in a continuously changing present. In us human beings that manner of living occurs as we do not become alienated in explanations as we live in the detachment and absence of expectations of the biology of love. This is why the path of Tao is the path of the biology of love.
Maturana H. R. & Dávila X. Y. (2006) Desde la matriz biológica de la existencia humana (Biología del conocer y biología del amar). Revista PRELAC, Los Sentidos de la Educación Proyecto Regional de Educación para América Latina y el Caribe. 2: 30–39. https://cepa.info/711