Different mediums demand different investments by the creator.

Building sand castles, the medium requests that the creator be in touch with wonder.  Designing comic panels and strips draws out my disappointment, skepticism and sensitivity to incongruity and hypocrisy.  When making music, I’m almost always in minor key as sadness seems to be what most easily is exposed.

Like making my way through a plate of poorly filleted fish, writing constantly demands I stop and remove the bones of bad grammar and poorly formed ideas.  Still, as difficult as the journey to satiation always is, the medium encourages me to show how things not obviously connected are.  Writing compels me to build bridges, draw connections, find the hidden harmonies in ways that sand art, comic creation and music making do not.

Building structures in sand, drawing and making music feel effortless to me.  I’m not suggesting that the results of my creations are particularly satisfying to anyone else (though I am pretty proud of my sand castles).  I’m just saying that the process is an easy flow.  Writing, that’s a totally different thing.

The process of trying to find words to bridge the chasm between another human being and me feels to be a recreation of the mysteries I seek to understand.  I track hints to how/when/why humans began to use words.  I listen to how consciousness emerges in children as they grow.  I seek understanding of how society transforms the relationship between the individual and the whole as that process unfolds.  I want to cradle the parts of me still feeling separated, with a greater consciousness embrace.

It’s personal.  I didn’t begin talking until I was three.  Exploring the origins of humans feels like looking for the origins of me.  Discoveries while exploring evolution, societal transformation and ontogeny inform how I understand myself.  Self explorations suggest how I study the other scales.

I seek to understand and be intimate with creation and evolution by engaging, by writing about the process of creation and evolution.

This engagement is difficult for me.  Still, not all the fish are boney.  Occasionally, the fish eat me.

I’m a sand castle purist.  I use only my hands, drip/pancake style.  How I let the wet sand fall from my hand has everything to do with what takes form.  A hot sun, 85 or higher, is necessary to bake the sand quickly.  Having almost no wind is important to keep the tower detail intact.  Fine-grain shell sand is essential.  Rock sand will not do.

Engaged in the process of creating sandcastles, I’ve noticed a pattern in the emergence of new ideas.  New architectural forms rarely emerge in a day or three.  It takes all day devotion for almost a week before new kinds of towers start to spontaneously form.  When the novelty begins to flow, it’s not one interesting unique construction, but several.

Often, the surge of creativity follows an emotional low in the form of boredom/depression/disappointment.  I’ve noticed this effect in other times in my life.  The lows seem to release or hollow me out of present infatuations.  The space created allows the growth of something new.

There has been an observation among developmental biologists studying early human ontogeny on the repercussions of testosterone surges in embryos, infants and toddlers.  These surges “prune” brain growth.  It has been estimated that one particularly powerful surge compels the left brain lobe to grow slower, resulting in right-handed, “normal” children.  It is thought that this pruning is a good thing.  It has been hypothesized that autistic children don’t experience this surge.  Without the surge, the child can have a larger brain with two hemispheres similar in size.  It seems, according to this analysis, that some destruction is necessary to achieve the split consciousness familiar to most of us that are not autistic.  Destruction creates imbalance that compels self reflection.

The worst war in human history, WWII, has been followed by a voluntary currency/political alliance of 25 countries.  At the center of this remarkable development is Germany.  More than 6 million civilian innocents died in death camps during the social madness of WWII.  Most of my relatives disappeared.  That sacrifice has resulted in a devastatingly powerful national shame.  Germany is working out the grief of what its people participated in.  Unlike the Israeli government, they seem serious as they seek to practice “Never Again.”  The EU is the most powerful political creative force in the world today, providing an insight into what the future looks like.  The sacrifice of those innocents was not in vain.

Gould & Eldridge’s theory of punctuated equilibrium notices the gaps in the fossil record and suggests that destruction and speciation may go hand in hand.  Death and creativity may be more than cousins; they might be the same person on different days.  Ninety-five percent of the world’s species were destroyed when the asteroid hit earth 63 million years ago.  A major portion of our Western hemisphere got pruned.  Mammals flourished.

Toddlers are the asteroids of the sand castle worlds my helpers and I assemble.  Having not yet developed hand/eye skills or self reflection, these little, mostly speechless, beach demons can offer little but their ability to destroy.  And so they do.  What follows the destruction is inevitably unique.

I lived in St. Petersburg, Florida, for six years in the 70s.  It was there that I discovered that fine shell beach mixed with water contained the perfect properties for erecting four-foot towers of sand.  Sand castle construction is one of my passions.  I find it deeply satisfying at several levels.

In this blog, you’ll note my joy at shifting scales.  I travel biological evolution, societal transformation & political activism, ontogeny and personal change, observing the connections and correlations that emerge along the way.  This traveling is how I have fun.  Herman Hesse called something like this, the glass bead game.

I don’t imagine there has been a better period in history to watch the dynamic of change or transformation than this era that we’re living in.  Interesting times have ended.  Astonishing times are here.

Fascinated by evolution and transformation, I find myself in the web development profession.  Attracted to the crest of the wave of change, I am a social change/political activist.  I feel lucky to be living now when vast, raw patterns of creation are exposed and seemingly different disciplines or studies (biology, society, ontogeny, the self) are revealed to be playing the same melody in different scales.

Because I play in the sand when I go on vacation, we choose beaches made of fine-grain shell.  Myrtle Beach and Pensacola are perhaps the two best I know.  St. Petersburg Beach is outstanding.  Wherever you go, bring or find children.  Without children, this might become exercise, not play.

If there are children around, they’ll find you.  When they linger, invite them in.

I begin by digging, sometimes for hours.  This initial hole is beyond high tide, so sometimes it is a couple feet before I reach water.  This first stretch is the hardest.  My nails and fingers are sometimes pretty sore by the time I reach water.  Reaching water, I only dig through sand while beneath the waterline, parallel to the surface.  Here it is soft and cool. Eventually, sand caves in above me.  I haul it out and continue digging below the waterline.

By the time I’ve dug a hole big enough to crawl inside, children have arrived.  My hole goal is often a circle or moat, 10 or 15 feet in diameter.  Sometimes I dig a straight line or chasm.  I don’t usually dig it all at once.  Once the children start arriving, I stop and build a tower or two to provide a hint of coming attractions.  One tower is often all it takes to seal the deal and get assistants for the day.

And the play begins.  I estimate one hour is equal to about 200 years.  Civilizations crumble in a day.  Toddlers like giant Cyclops destroy with no awareness of repercussions.  The girls lament.  Little boys leap to rescue towers still left standing.  Dogs charge in, tails wagging, children screaming, more towers fall.  Society is forced to rebuild once again.

Building sandcastles, I am accompanied by several ages of me, inside myself.  I watch the many ages of children relating from their varying ontological perspectives.  I watch civilizations rising and falling hourly.  I play with time.  I play with children.  I play at play.

Like cops with water cannons at mass protests, we’re seeking to sweep the streets of prophets, hoping those that want the future now will go away.

Television offers few visions but its own:  be afraid, buy now, be skeptical of change.  If there’d been TV before the Civil War and woman suffrage, the pundits would have scoffed at the end of slavery and a women’s vote, until they arrived.

Do we really think that the United States is not going to follow Europe?  National health care is coming.  Secular humanism is our future.  A politics of peace is on the way.

Our prophets are not the people on TV, but ourselves.  We know what the coming changes look like.  We know the way we want the world to be.  Some of us are in the streets holding signs up.  Most of us are grumbling to our friends.  Still, it doesn’t take a psychic to see what’s coming.

Turn off the TV.  Protesters are expressing mainstream, deep desires.  Prophets are being transformed into pragmatists as the impossible becomes the probable, and the probable becomes the truth.  Change is not the future; change is now.

Nature practices art.  When humans practice art, it is a manifestation of consciousness.  Evidence of art in nature is interpreted as chance.  Much art in nature results from the selective process, sexual selection.  Individuals compel the transformation of their descendants by selecting only mates with very specific variations on a sensory theme.  Many sounds and sights in nature were deliberately designed by discriminating spouses seeking mates with features more unique than the competition.

Modern society is sexual selection or art gone wild.  Enhanced faculties, formerly dedicated toward picking a mate, target just about everything in our experience.  We can’t stop discriminating.  We are compelled to pick out that which is most unique, and own it.

It is not an exaggeration to suggest that sex drives almost all of our behavior.  Our consumer economy relies upon our thirst for novelty and status.  These are ancient, hormone-driven dictates.  Advertisements goose our inclinations to note interesting differences and embrace them to draw attention to ourselves.  Our biology is deeply evident in this economy driven by a compulsion to devour nonrenewable resources while making art.

About five million years ago, human ancestors branched off from the species that led both to humans and chimpanzees.  It’s not clear when we started dancing, but once we started, we never stopped.

Sexually selecting the best dancers, people picked partners with physical (and neurological processing) capabilities far in excess of what was needed to hunt and survive.  Predators have far bigger brains than prey.  The requirements of hunting demand way more grey matter processing than running away.  Wives and husbands for the night selected mates able to create vast subtleties in movement.  At the same time, they were picking mates able to discriminate between these subtle variations.  Runaway occurred.  The best artists and best discriminators of art–those with bigger brains–emerged more and more frequently and with deeper and deeper talents with every passing generation.  Massive brains were required to exhibit the sensitivity required to perform and pick performers that would do these things that bodies were not designed to do, and do them for very long periods of time.  Prey had brains.  Predators had bigger brains.  Artists/dancers had massive brains, brains designed to appreciate.  Our brains had evolved into monstrously sized appreciation machines.

Modern culture is the climax of this process of runaway sexual selection.  Having sandblasted our environment with our discrimination/appreciation sensibilities, we are finally awakening to the havoc we are wreaking.  At long last, appreciating nature’s art, as artists ourselves, we have decided to let the consumer economy end.  Let the dancing begin.

Tracking patterns as they emerge on several levels, across multiple disciplines, floats my boat.  In this case, a boat filled with the reproducing parents of all the animals and plants that have existed.  This boat would be a Noah’s ark filled with all the passengers of time.

Species evolution, societal transformation, individual ontogeny and personal lives unfold in waves.  One current lifts that which is newest and most creative and carries that new item into the later lives of species and individuals.  We call this wave neoteny.  The other wave embraces what we’ve learned and draws the new experiences backward, informing descendants of the changes that have occurred.  We might name it new experience, environmental influences or the effects of time.

We’re talking two kinds of new.  There is the New Year’s baby. There is the passing year’s old man before the old year disappears at midnight.  Infant and ancient trading the briefest of embraces.  One brings the newness of creation, with no experience.  The other offers vast new and unique experiences as it prepares to fade.

Manifesting as waves, these two kinds of new rock the dance of evolution, cultural change and individual growth.  When storms come and the boat rocks hardest, we have interesting times.

Living in interesting times, we stand at the abyss.  Over the next 10-20 years, our leaders, like anti-Noahs, will vote present as countless species file past them and pass away.

We linger at the chasm where experience and new ideas can trade places, where wisdom and creation merge.  I’m starting to get the two confused.  Endings and origins are feeling the same.

Exploring the evolution of the unconscious is perhaps the same as asking how consciousness emerged.  Fossil excavations don’t offer much in the way of information.  We are left with perhaps three windows into this journey:  individual ontogeny (observing children); exploring the consciousness manifestations of disorders characterized by developmental or maturational delay; recalling personal experience.

In many ways, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.  The unfolding of an individual from conception to adult reproduces the physical manifestations, genetic triggering mechanisms, and hormonal processes characteristic of ancient precursor species.  We might assume that ontogeny also recapitulates consciousness.  Hence, the three pathways noted, all ontogenetically related.

A fourth path is available, but this path offers mysteries and is little understood.  Hypnosis is a tool hypnotherapists use to form alliances with a person’s alternative decision-making center, the unconscious.  A hypnotherapist can suggest to a person’s alternative mind that the subject feels hot on one side of the body and cold on the other.  Measurements confirm the changes.  A hypnotherapist can suggest welts appear at particular places, and so they do.  Suggestions can be made to modify the physical form in specific noninvasive ways, and form modifies.

What are the limits to how an unconscious, subconscious or alternative consciousness can transform in the physical sphere?  Can different enzymes be produced?  Evidently, yes.  Can suggestion change the color of a person’s hair?  Can more or fewer sperm be made?  Can the genetics of those sperm be modified?

Can mind modify genetics?

Which begs the question:  What is mind?

If the consciousness of a therapist asking the mind of a person in a trance to change bodily function succeeds in change, then that person without suggestion from an outside source, on his or her own, no doubt, can have the same effect.  The connection between mind and health is now well documented.  Mind or the unconscious have the ability to transform health, change the body, modify ways the physical form displays.

Can that person modify his or her own genetic template?  If that is possible, then how do we define consciousness if animals might do the same?  We’re not talking about animals consciously causing these transformations.  Animals don’t have a conscious mind.  But they do have an unconscious mind.  Or maybe it would make more sense to say that they have a mind with no consciousness split.  That is what makes them animals.  Can an animal’s unconscious mind or nonsplit mind modify its own genetics?

I am suggesting that evolution and consciousness might be so closely tied as to be indistinguishable.  If that suggestion is reality, then maybe science and spirituality are the same.

Paleontologists are able to map out branchlike trails of evolution from fossil remains of individuals embedded in the earth.  Flesh, organs and behavior are not so easily disinterred.  There is one feature of being human that is hardly ever considered in these excavations, perhaps because it’s so little understood.  There are very few researchers exploring the evolution of the unconscious.

How has the unconscious evolved over the last 5 million years?  How has the unconscious/conscious relationship transformed?

I’ve lived a life characterized by a succession of passions and professions.  It is far easier for me to track how my conscious experience has evolved than changes occurring at the unconscious or subconscious level.  I note profound differences in my dreams and changes in feelings but successfully tracking what is out of conscious awareness offers paradoxical results because becoming aware of what I’m not aware of brings the hidden to the light of day.

Decades of study and meditation have shifted my awareness to trust and identify with what formerly I would refer to as my unconscious.  Identifying with my unconscious, consciousness changes.  What was hidden is experienced as present.  At this experiential level, I’ve noted a transformation of the unconscious/conscious split.  My experience is that the division is slowly disappearing.  Much less conflict.  More trust.  An experience of conscious delight with what emerges from out of consciousness.  A growing expectation of good things on the way.

One of the paradoxes of meditation is that the unconscious becomes experienced as larger conscious.  What was out of reach, formerly feeling out of control, is experienced as intimate and present.  The nature of control becomes redefined.  Formerly, I felt controlled by forces I was not aware of, feeling forced to behave and feel in ways that felt frightening, enraging, depressing.  Over time, I grew confused about what was and wasn’t my unconscious as I experienced that the choices I make, that I thought were unconscious, were not.

What exactly the unconscious is has a lot to do with how much responsibility we take for our choices and our experience.  Awareness expands in direct proportion to experience.  Our experience grows with discovery of what we can or cannot influence.  Even a growing awareness of what we cannot influence can result in consciousness awareness.  Paradoxical.

If there is this much fluctuation in the unconscious in a single person in a single lifetime, what might be the protocol for tracing the evolution of the unconscious over time?  How do we record evidence of the unconscious, let alone evidence of unconscious change over time?

Biologist Maynard Smith has noted what many academics have observed, that politics seems closely tied to science.  Neo-Darwinists, sociobiologists, evolutionary psychologists and reductionists in general seem inclined to identify with the conservative or the right wing of the political spectrum.

Scientists don’t often experience themselves within a larger arc of societal transformation or social evolution.  Scientists are warriors battling for space on journal pages and struggling for the respect of their peers.  Their perspective can be surprisingly limited by the time and effort it takes to carve out a sphere of influence in sub or sub sub-disciplines visited only by others that speak their arcane lingo.  These intellectual athletes are often testosterone obsessed, wearing metaphoric jockstraps on their heads to protect vulnerable ideas.  The environment itself selects for the competitors, not cooperators.  It is no mistake that there are, for example, so many women doctors but so few women academics in the biological sciences, though that ratio is changing.

I’m wondering if the conservative proclivities of the Neo-Darwinists and the reductionists are evidence of biological evolutionary principles in societal evolution.

When Darwin first proposed his theory of natural selection, the theory was considered audacious and maybe even useful.  (Theories can’t be true.  They can be useful.  Asking if a theory is true is like asking if a story is true.  A story is a story, a sliver of reality told from a particular point of view.)  Darwin’s colleague and co-discoverer of natural selection, George Russel Wallace, was a liberal of his time.  For example, Wallace assigned equal social and intellectual status to both aboriginals and western academics.  I’m wondering if these early reductionists, originators of natural selection, were political liberals.  Intellectuals with laboratories were often men of means, suggesting Tory rather than Whig associations.  Still, I’m wondering if adherents of new theories tend to be embraced by the political Left.  Those clinging to old theories would be, or course, conservative.

Were the reductionists/conservatives of our times liberals 150 years ago when these ideas emerged?  New species are formed when flexibility is evidenced and taken advantage of by fitting a new feature into a changing environment.  Flexibility is a liberal quality.  It takes flexibility of mind to embrace new ideas.  Neo-Darwinism was once new.

These days, like their might-makes-right, neo-conservative, ideological cousins, the Neo-Darwinists are failing to spin their stories in ways that satisfactorily explain.  Victorians both, Neo-Darwinists and social Darwinists are disappearing, but they are by no means yet extinct.

Paradoxically, perhaps the most serious thing we do is play.  The Left is filled with activists that aren’t that serious.

A hallmark of the American Left is inflated self importance.  I observe a near compulsion to express no joy while embracing outrage.  Frequent faction fights are encouraged by a Left/Progressive culture frightened of flexibility.

Anathema to creativity is an atmosphere of gloom and anger.  Yet, there have been some playful pioneers.  Billionaires for Bush performs satire.  Codepink has offered an antidote: the warrior woman with a big, light heart.  Still, there are not near enough jesters on the Left.  Codepink and the work of Medea Benjamin have been integral to a Left identity by offering buoyancy, audaciousness and spunk.

Choosing to exhibit playfulness is to perhaps choose that which is most unique about being a human being.  It is characteristic of those features we identify with our uniqueness:  language use, tool fabrication, idea manipulation, art and science.  Only when we are deeply into playful, accessing our creativity, does our humanity robustly emerge.  Neoteny is central to being human.

One Codepinker, Marcia, ran a toy store for 22 years.  This unique establishment inspired the Dustin Hoffman film “Mr McGorium’s Fantastic Emporium,” where the film’s author worked.  Saturday’s Child was legendary.  With dozens of Chicago toy stores to choose from, every Christmas the Chicago TV stations visited to interview Marcia and to film kids playing.  Marcia was a professional specializing in play.  A professional specializing in play she still is today.

As a full-time activist, Marcia brings her professionalism to the business of social and political change.  She plays with everybody.  She’s done sound and media for Voice of Creative Nonviolence.  For the North Shore Coalition of Peace and Justice, she cooks supper every two weeks while also offering her skills as facilitator and leader to create great events.  For the North Suburban Peace Initiative, she directed the annual dinner of several hundred people, manages the website, drafts all communications and brings in speakers from across the country.  She works with UFPJ on regional events, setting up sound for the bi-annual conference and helping organize mass actions.  Marcia has organized and sponsored Moveon events of several hundred people.  She manages websites for an anti-Blackwater group, a Department of Peace chapter, networks, coalitions, etc.  She prepares handouts, mailers, postcards and posters for countless organizations.  Marcia prepared all the legal documents and modified the text for the Peace, Justice and Environment Project going 501c3.  She helped write the structure for the Illinois Coalition for Peace and Justice, handles their media and co-chairs the communications/technology committee.  She fed 100 veterans for peace, cooking for days for their big event.

Marcia is my wife.

Marcia plays with peace by working with everyone.  She is a one-person boundary buster.  Where she speaks, there is often laughter.  Where she facilitates, the Left’s signature seriousness loosens up.

Being the change she wants to see, Marcia shows by example how to engage in change.  Marcia seeks Left/Progressive unity by working for the many groups she seeks to see unified.  Her years of selling toys to children was perfect preparation for teaching activists to play.  Marcia is a serious activist.  She never stops playing.