As an activist, I frequently find myself coming in contact with the gypsies of the Left, those public speakers traveling from city to city presenting talks and workshops.  Organizations that I work with often host the events that these wanderers are brought into to embellish.  I find myself fascinated, not by what they say, but by how they say it.

Passing through the Chicago area three years ago were Stacy Bannerman, Cindy Sheehan and speakers from MFSO and Gold Star families, including friend Juan Torres.  I was working with AFSC and other organizations to help facilitate the rallies that these itinerants were leading.  I made it my job to make folks comfortable.  I brought folks coffee.  I scrounged lunches.  I gave people rides.

Stacy and I talked as I drove her to a rally in the far west suburbs.  She described some difficulties of what she does.  I watched.  I listened.

Fear is the filter I’ve wrestled with most of my life.  Discovering other ways to see/feel the world has taken time.  Talking with Stacy, Cindy and other casualties of the war and watching/listening to how they grapple with creating the change they seek, I observe a different alchemy at work.

Transforming grief seems a mission of the anti-war movement and the specific task of those whose husbands and sons have been killed or who have had their lives detoured or destroyed.  Listening to Stacy Bannerman and the other wandering souls, I am struck by how they seek to convert grief to anger, grief to action, grief to fear and grief to joy.  They seek any way to move their listeners to a different space.  They want to compel their listeners to feel empowered and to act.  They want their listeners to be moved.  The speakers want their listeners to feel inspired by the grief they still are wretched by, and they want their listeners to make decisions to make the world a different place.

It’s not the words they use but how they say them.  It’s not the issue but the path of havoc that the issue leaves behind.

The Left does not encourage them to work through their grief and become aware of the hidden ties that come with loss.  Instead, we use these people to motivate ourselves to action.  We use them to be the generals in this war.

The alchemy of peace requires the dark art of grief.  Experiencing loss, we can feel how we are all the same.  Perhaps these wanderers use us to grieve for them.  For them, this is not a fair exchange.

The succession of steps that form the double helix of our DNA is formed from four molecular components repeated over and over again in ways that drape chains of meaning that scientists are seeking to interpret.  Complete genomes are being uncovered this decade, but mysteries persist.  Evolutionary developmental biologists offer an insight that many genes are devoted to constructing a highly sophisticated feedback system that only decides what features to assign to their growing charge after information from the environment has been noted and interpreted.

Four emotions, like a four-chord folk song, sing their way across the arc of my 55 years.  They often pair up, forming temporary alliances and compelling me to dance through life to different ditties.  Fear, anger, grief and joy form the DNA of my emotions.  How they match up informs the dynamic of my day.

Last night, I woke up screaming.  It was the first time in several years.  Earlier, it was not infrequent that when fear had been stalking me during daylight, terror leapt up once I had lost consciousness.

It’s the same thing every time.  Having fallen asleep, a part of me wakes and is aware of the deep divide between consciousness and unconsciousness.  I feel very close to death.  I count how old I am in years.  I determine death is close.  Terror washes through my body like a tidal wave of razor blades.  I awake fully and scream.

When I was a child, I’d awake but squelch the screaming.  I was feeling death nearby.  Pounding my fist into the bed board, I would convert the terror first into rage, and then into pain.  Mastering the unmagic of emotion transformation, I grew adept at shifting away from emotions I was determined not to feel.  On rare occasions, I’d wake the next morning noting bloody knuckles where this dark alchemy had taken a longer time to work.

I remember that on one of those nights, I vowed to become a scientist and invent immortality so that I wouldn’t have to die.  Maybe I was seven or eight.  Consoled by that commitment, I could fall asleep.

Older, I began to explore the metaphysics of consciousness, looking for ways to feel frightened less, and maybe even feel joy.  I was encouraged to make anxiety my teacher.  I gave fear attention instead of driving it away.  Bridging terror to attention, I began to be able to embrace people and to relax with lovers.  The bed board and my fist met less and less.

Emotions pair up in a myriad of ways.  In my personal DNA, terror, fear and anxiety have been a link to joy.  The path between the two sides has not been particularly direct, but the bond is nonetheless powerful and long standing.  Having spent so much of my life feeling frightened, I have been deeply motivated to feel another way.

Accompanying myself with attention allows natural transitions in emotion.  A past master in deliberate emotion shift, this natural path leaves me far more open to what is occurring in my environment.  Offering myself attention paradoxically makes it more possible for me to be influenced by what is happening around me.  Facing fear engenders trust.  In this new world, anxiety can lead to joy.  I’m just not in control of where or when.

In just the way that evolutionary developmental biologists are discovering that the environment exerts enormous influence upon the unique unfolding of every being, the more we provide ourselves attention, the easier it is for us to navigate from emotion to emotion in response to a world that can bring us joy.

Writing these one-page, blog-format, daily entries, I find myself making a series of draping daisy chains.  Actually, when I was small, we used dandelions.  Perhaps a more exact metaphor would be the different colored construction paper chains we’d make for grammar school special occasions where we’d drape paper chains back and forth across the room.

With our little plastic scissors, we’d snip out a long rectangle from a sheet of heavy, colored paper.  Pasting Elmer’s on one side, we’d loop around the other end and hold the ends together until they stuck.  Then we’d slip the next chain inside the circle, paste one end, hold both sides firmly and continue the chain.

In each entry, I seek to take myself and the reader on a little journey.  Leaving home, I like to explore an idea, maybe note something new along the path, introduce the idea to another idea it may not have met and then carry the new relationship back home.

Having established a little circle, the next day I look for a starting place somewhere along the path of the previous day’s contribution.  Beginning the new circle within the older circle, I seek to carry myself and the reader to a new place, starting from an established idea, with formerly unrelated ideas getting to know each other once again.

Eventually, the chain runs its course and it’s time to drape it across the room.  Then we start a new chain that, when completed and hung, will touch other draped chains as they lean against each other when stretched from wall to wall.

Language is a peculiar medium with which to communicate the nature of evolution and transformation, the origins of humans and the dynamics of social change.  Creating our daisy chains of words and draping them across a conversation, we have few opportunities to alert the listener to the various ways the conversation creates interconnections over time.  Obama in his Reverend Wright speech accomplished a rare act of making connections between multiple societal threads while revealing their importance in his own life and society at large.  It was in making those connections that his words evoked the nature of the world we live in.  His words revealed a process, a spiritual insight, in the very way the words were put together.

Using words to construct a metaphor, creating a picture in the listener’s mind, is one way we transcend the limitations of a narrative, single-thread communication form.  When music makes a picture, we are experiencing both a narrative and a simultaneous presentation of pattern.  Experiencing both, we get close to the truth that both narrative and simultaneous are inextricably entwined and actually two facets of the same, out-of-time, experience.  Words can evoke this understanding.  With these entries, over time, I seek that goal.

As a child, I adored making chains of paper.  As a grown-up, I’m seeking the places where ideas merge.  Making daisy chains of essays that talk with one another through time, I come closer to transcending time.  The narrative chains get broken, the timeless emerges and the daisy chains of childhood and the present day embrace.

When the first stories were told, perhaps they were gestured as in charades. Maybe the stories were danced. At some point, the listeners or audience began to create pictures in response to the gestures, dances or words. From the start, it would have been vital to differentiate the possible from the real, the imaginary from the what really happened, what was desired from what occurred.

I expect those folks that had difficulty telling the imaginary from the sense-based world did not often live to procreate. The transition to a gesture or oral language that was grounded in a fertile imagination was no doubt difficult for many. Imagine a civilization of two- and three-year-olds.

In high school gym class, the boys attending the swimming unit at New Trier were all required to swim laps naked. We showered before class, jumped into the pool with no suits and proceeded to paddle back and forth with no clothes on. The school didn’t have to pay for suits and laundry. It was humiliating. It was what it was.

Mr. Robertson was the swim coach and the tyrant of the New Trier pool. Mr. Wolf was his assistant. Their barked commands echoed around the cement, glass-and-tile cavern. I was skinny and almost always shivering. Back and forth across the pool kept me warm.

A whistle alerted me to something different in the routine. Pausing, I noted every boy being commanded to line up by the wall. There was murmuring. We were yelled at to be quiet.

Almost forty naked boys standing, then sitting, were assaulted with a furious Mr. Robertson, screaming about the turd at the bottom of the pool near the diving board drain. The perpetrator was commanded to step forward or we all would suffer the consequences. Mr. Robertson was going off the deep end. I’d never seen an adult this upset that wasn’t on TV.

I watched an Obama speech yesterday on Youtube. It was the speech he gave during the Rev. Wright blowup. Crying, I experienced myself deeply moved. This politician was giving a speech and I was being moved. I’m not a big Obama supporter. As a Leftist, this was an anomalous event. Speeches have never influenced my opinions.

Still, Obama lied. Hearing the lie, I let it lie, until thinking about it later. It being later, I’m trying to let the lie make sense.

Obama’s speech was unusual in that it sought to tell the truth by creating connections. He offered a historical arc that lined up a succession of influences over time while he described how separated groups in our society had integral issues in common. It was an astonishing display of nonmagical thinking–a rarity among politicians–where we were offered a vision of the world that unfolded in exactly the way that we as individuals compel it to unfold. Obama treated his listeners like responsible adults.

Yet, he said that Israel, the policies of Israel and the U.S. support of Israel had little to do with the radicalizing of Muslims in the Middle East.

There is wishful thinking and there is lying. The line between the two can be very thin. Our ancestors had to wrestle with the impact of having imagination. We are still grappling with our ability to make things up and then know when we have done so. Not being able to tell the difference can result in death. Not being able to tell the difference–or lying–can result in wars.

The shit in the deep end of the pool offers revelation. A completely transparent environment offers immediate repercussions. Imagine if our government and economy were designed to reveal inappropriate behaviors when they occurred. Granted, people would get upset. But it prevents people from swimming in their own, and other people’s, shit.

The shit in the pool of world affairs is the occupation of Palestine and the Israeli government policy toward Palestinians. Our politicians and media engage in magical thinking, convincing themselves that the Israeli government is almost always right. Obama has proved to me that he does not naturally engage in magical thinking.

An ability to follow long-term historical narrative arcs while noting the connections between the many competing and complimenting forces in the here-and-now demands transparency, or we are engaged in storytelling and in lies. Hundreds of thousands of years ago, enough of us survived to tell a story. It is now necessary that we learn to tell the truth.

The Rat is Back.

He’s burrowed a little hole into the leaves stuffed into the tortoise pen.  Marcia and I have been discussing whether to poison Rat, catch him in a have-a-heart trap (we have a big one that we’ve used for squirrels) or call pest control.  Rat comes out to eat the bird seed that gets sprinkled around the tortoise pen from the feeder suspended above the cage.

I’m drinking ginger tea to settle my stomach.

In the late 1980s, I was sure that the economy was coming to an end.  Everything felt fragile.  I intuited that the stock market was about to crash.  Then, on 10/19/08, it did.  With the financial world reflecting my internal state, I felt terrified.

Thirty eight years ago, I felt deeply that big change was on the way.  Then, it seemed like things just froze.

Things are thawing.  Not just the glaciers, but American certainty that life in America is good and will continue to get better, defining good by how much stuff we have.

This time I’m watching the market crash, but I’m not feeling frightened.

Just experiencing some dread.

………

We caught a possum in the have-a-heart trap.

My courageous wife held the trapdoor open for Possum since the door would not prop up.  Displaying open-mouth grimaces, hunched against the other end of the cage, the possum would not exit.  Pushing the door up with a stick, we withdrew.  From the kitchen window, I watched the possum flee.

The obvious metaphor is that fear can prevent us from making choices that would transform our world.  A relatively small amount of fear can be useful, providing impetus to gather resources to face an unfamiliar task.  An ongoing experience of terror, simply ceasing, can feel like a major change.

It seems like the media, both the corporate media and alternative media, are compelled to have us focus on our fear.  Cooperating with the government, the corporate media without much creativity can drive up viewership by passing on what the government would like us to feel frightened of.  Lately, the media and the government have not been sharing the same fear frame.  While Republicans still seek to scare us that Terror is close by, the media is working the story that our economy is on the brink.  Still, the media cooperates with the government by not revealing the causes of the circumstances behind what we should be scared of.  With the toppling economy, that is beginning to change.

By keeping us frightened, government keeps us in our traps, traps with doors wide open.  Unwilling to examine how we got where we are, we don’t make the choice to change the world.  In coverage of the economic mess, the media is starting to explore the repercussions of deregulation, lack of oversight, little accountability and, most of all, the absence of transparency.  As society starts to use these sleeping muscles, perhaps the mainstream media will allow us to see the way the U.S. policy has polarized the world, leading to horrors like 9/11.

What was the possum doing in the rat trap in the first place?  Possum was looking for garbage in the dark.  One way we can prevent ourselves from getting trapped is by making sure that we legislate that things be clear.  Transparency is vital to a healthy society.  A lesson of this recession is that from now on, we don’t allow government or corporations to hide their garbage in the dark.

Turn the lights on.  It’s time for transparency’s return.

Consider that a characteristic of awareness is that it is an integration of opposites.

Most humans are at least two distinct persons, or at least they feel or behave like that is true.  People argue with themselves, consider themselves their own worst enemy, are in internal conflict, have mixed feelings, feel torn, are of two minds, can’t make decisions, experience deep remorse, second guess themselves and often feel out of control of their own behavior.

Peace has been characterized by neither side winning, but both sides experiencing an embrace.  It takes two to be one, noting that when one arrives, the two don’t go away.

Observing/experiencing the dynamics of biological evolution, societal evolution, individual ontogeny and personal biography, I listen/feel for how awareness makes transitions.  As Darwin observed in his metaphor of many wedges, we are each always pushing against our boundaries, creating the opportunity for the environment to inform who we are and what we become.  This process of exploration, or play, occurs at all four evolutionary scales.  Awareness morphs depending on whether we are identified with many or the all, or a single, or as in the case of most people, a split twin.

This morphing of awareness might be a meta evolution or an evolution of the nature of awareness over time.  Probably not.  I suspect that in the same way that a child plays by demarking the boundaries of his or her world of make believe, or in the way that an artist picks his or her boundaries when making a choice of medium and how that medium will be exhibited, awareness only evolves in the context of the boundaries awareness has created.  Awareness makes the sandbox to play in like a child, staying within the boundaries of the box.  Awareness explores, like an artist explores, exploring the medium of existence.  But, awareness does not evolve.  Awareness plays.  Yet, like a parent, awareness revels in the discoveries of its children and its artists.  Awareness loves to see boundaries violated.  It loves new.

Exploring awareness, a kind of conversation between parent and child is engaged, passive and active, embrace and embraced.  There is a suggestion of two, but not a split.  Perhaps the seeming twinning is a vagary of language.

Awareness may or may not evolve but definitely seems to transform.  Human awareness emerges pure, gets bruised, splits and then seeks reconciliation.  We experience this individually.  This same process occurred on an evolutionary scale over the last several hundred thousand years.  A precursor human was not self-aware.  Over time, a split emerged.  Language blossomed.  We individually seek integration.

The riddle that I’m wrestling with is the difference between one and every, the individual and all.  As a split mind, when I look at nature, at the individual animal in nature, at a human embryo, at a severely autistic person, I am not sure how to parse out the single from the singularity.  Are they both the same?

The reductionist response is that the question makes no sense.  We’re not dealing with measurable quantities.  It is not relevant to a study of evolution.

But like awareness, I’m having fun while involved in play.

An equitable, robust educational system, voting integrity and widely dispersed media control are three long-term structural legs or foundations that encourage a transparent, diverse and nonhierarchical organized society.  These are infrastructure issues that empower the proponents or advocates of specific concerns by nurturing a society that offers its citizens high quality information and the resources and beliefs that they as individuals can make a difference.

Watching the not-so-slow-motion collapse of our economic system, I wonder how specifically we’re going to get from here to there.

The arc of societal evolution from the age of god kings to the present day can be followed by tracing the transformations of these three conceptual threads:  transparency, diversity and horizontal communication.  The path is clear.  Until recently, it might have taken more than one lifetime to see the unfolding of the pattern.  Where we stand now, one lifetime is more than enough to see the elements align and realign.  The transformation is happening all around us.

Focus on where the greatest tumult congregates and ask yourself how these deeply disturbing events can result in the ascendance of the opposite.  Individual and societal attention on those places where society has most gone awry can suggest the path to the transformative other side.  This path would be one characterized by transparency, diversity and horizontal communication.  Paying attention, we can see the passage or route, a snakelike trail, that this wax and waning leaves behind.

Implied in our economic implosion is an alternative economic paradigm that suggests/demands world oversight of national economies, transparency, communication systems capable of transmitting high quality information (a media that will share news bad for corporations), an education system that values integrity and encourages diversity and a voting system that allows noncorporate representatives an ability to legislate.

The play of balance and the play of evolution are the same play.  In the same way that the snake moves forward by pushing itself in opposite directions, society evolves by pushing against or exploring the limits of the medium of life.

We know in what direction we are evolving.  A fair and equal educational system, voting integrity and media control returned to the people are signposts that will tell us when we’ve turned the corner on another winding of this road.

Watching movies since I was a kid, I’ve noticed an escalation in the fearsomeness of cinematic monsters.  Things like quicksand and skeletons were all it took to scare the bejesus out of me in the 50s.  Granted, I was a kid, but flicks for adults weren’t much more ambitious in what they used to frighten.  Though we had the atomic bomb in our lives to invest emotion into the latest film creations, what appeared on screen hardly competed with the kinds of silver screen horrors available today.

And so, perhaps, we might trace an evolution of those things we use to scare ourselves, beginning with the myths and legends from the past.

Obsessive person that I am, twelve years ago when I reviewed all the myth and legend literature I could find on dragons, I created a database with 428 incidents of dragon contact over the course of several thousand years on six continents.  Noted in the database is the dragon appearance, country of origin, date of conflict, dragon’s lair, his or her weak spot, weapon used if there was a fight, assistants used if the hero required help, and the nature of the treasure the dragon might have been protecting.

Searching “bow and arrow,” I learn that eleven dragons were killed by an arrow (34 by sword), seven dragons lived in lakes (36 in caves), and that dogs assisted in the harassment of dragons on nine occasions.  More dragons were killed from blows to the head and throat than any other part of their bodies.  One dragon’s vulnerable spot was his butt.

One of the things that jumps out at me when clicking through the entries is how easily these “monsters” were dispatched.  Back when you could get bubonic plague, when half the children died before adulthood, when there were constant wars, disease, starvation, major dental issues and extended families living at home, stories of relatively easily vanquished monsters were no doubt appealing.

Not so today.  We live in a golden age of monsters.  They don’t go without taking lots of humans with them.

I’ve always thought Gene Roddenberry was best when a danger was diffused by taking the Enterprise and its heroes directly into the mouth of the beast instead of fighting or withdrawing.  Star Trek loved third options.  In myth and legends, humans either slew or withdrew from dragons.  I’m sure that on Star Trek, some third choice would have been uncovered.

Taming dragons, embracing the monster, is a storyline that has emerged more with time.  E.T. championed the concept.  That scripting keeps evolving.  And so now twin monster concepts accompany us on tube and screen: terrifying, civilization-eating titans balanced by the other as ally.

We are deep into the conceptual transition that involves each of us individually facing the truth that we ourselves, and our societies, are our own worst enemy and our best friend.  Monsters evocatively fleshing out both polarities help us to exercise our imaginations.  Imaginations exercised, we are empowered to make the choices and develop the strategies to make the changes necessary for a peaceful world.

If life were a movie, the monster has arrived.  The scientist has just told us she is pregnant.  Next move, ours.

Transparency is not much embraced by the economic powers that be. Corporations and the agencies of government that represent their interests have been pushing hard for opaque economic governance for more than 30 years. It’s easier to perform the tricks of the trade when you control the stage.

“Deregulation” is the word used to suggest the benefits of letting corporations make money without the burden of accountability. We’ve gone about as far as deregulation can carry us. The federal government has been replaced by corporate representatives. Having legislated that corporations can do what they feel is best for corporations and the country, corporations have decided what is best for them is to control the country. Not a big surprise there.

Having deregulated transparency, we’ve obfuscated the reality that more knowledge is a good thing. Watching the dissolution of the economy, we’re realizing again the benefits of keeping government and corporations separate. We went through this struggle early in the preceding century.

My colleagues and I design network and coalition structures. This work goes with the territory of preparing web applications that manage the business and communications of networks and coalitions. One of the blessings of the new online communications technologies is how easy transparency is to design. Much has been made of the phrase “paradigm shift.” I would suggest that the use of new technologies to encourage organizational transparency is part of a deep shift working its way through out society.

This transition is characterized by both our observing the horrifying results of a lack of transparent practices while at the same time experiencing the profound benefits of complete transparency. At the top, we are observing a slow-motion train wreck as our economy does an accordion collapse as confidence in what we can’t see disappears. From the bottom, new practices emerge, championed by the powerless–our children–that demand that everything be seen.

Transparency is not the natural ally of the American cult of individuality. That everything possible be “personal” has been a hallmark of the way corporate interests encourage our not noticing the profound importance of what is not personal, but communal. Communal interests demand transparency. Suggesting that anything that is not personal in nature is an attack on liberty and independence continues to allow those making such claims to continue to perform their services in secret, serving their personal interests.

By successfully demonizing the communal, socialist, the commons, shared interests and high taxes, the corporations continue to control the stage and keep the processes used to create wealth a secret. Secrets are not good for an economy. For corporations, it was never about the economy. For corporations, it was about short-term gain.

Perhaps I was six or seven years old. I’m not sure. It was at the Standard Club in downtown Chicago around 1960. There was a magic show for the children while the adults socialized. I was sitting on the floor with the other kids watching the magician pull rabbits out of hats. I was terrified. I was terrified I’d be called upon to assist after it became clear he was picking kids to help. I’d made a strategic blunder by sitting toward the front. Show over, I was deeply relieved I’d made it through without having to stand in front of all the sitting kids and risking being laughed at for being stupid.

I loathed front rows. My goal in groups was to be invisible.

My grandparents were members of country clubs and the downtown Standard Club. My mother’s mom and her husband lived in Hyde Park on Chicago’s South Side and so traveled to Ravisloe in the southern suburbs to relax with friends. Dad’s parents lived in the northern suburb of Glencoe and frequently took my sisters and me to Lake Shore Country Club farther north down Sheridan Road. Lake Shore Country Club had a swimming pool and a hay ride near the golf course. The very hairy pool guy, named Mr. Panther, taught me how to swim. They made cheeseburgers at the cabana by the poolside. Sometimes there were fireworks. Members of the club were exclusively German Jews. The help were Polish, Latino and black.

I was provided a front row seat on how this subset of the wealthy thinks and lives.

Sitting in my best clothes for some event, my grandmother in hushed tones would whisper the names of CEOs and their corporations as dour, balding, overweight men paraded by. I was encouraged to be awed. Didn’t I want to follow my dad, build the family business and be a corporate head?

In hushed tones on numerous occasions, when my parents weren’t around, I was guided to consider sharing Grandma Myrla’s unique world view.

“Jews are the worst anti-Semites.” She whispered this opinion while describing her distain for the bearded, what she perceived as darker-complexioned, Russian Jews. I was invited to share her prejudice while she noted that it was, indeed, a prejudice.

“We respect old money. New money we don’t pay attention to. We are old money.” My grandmother’s father became wealthy printing flyers for Sears and Roebuck and other Chicago firms. My grandmother was old money because it was money she had inherited. The distinction made little sense to me until later, when I realized that the Chicago area’s German Jewish population arrived about a generation before the Russian Jews. In the 1950s, most Russian Jews hadn’t been here long enough to inherit wealth.

My father was a real maverick Republican. He adored westerns, bowling, camping, gadgets and TV–loved Reagan and Goldwater–and worked six days a week running the small, half-floor, West Side family girdle and bra factory. He refused to join the country club. He consciously and unconsciously rejected much of what his parents represented for him. He spurned those things that had to do with respect for arts, religion, liberal politics, flaunting status and wealthy friends. My dad pretty much withdrew from anything his mom embraced. I was not encouraged to think much of what happened at the clubs. I was not encouraged to listen to his mother.

So I focused on the food. Almost all my fond memories of my grandparents’ country clubs revolved around the meals. I remember gold brick sundaes, lobster, shrimp, cheeseburgers on the cabana and homemade potato chips.

We all sit in the front row of our own lives, observing the unique show that is the culture that we live in. Having witnessed family and strangers playing wealthy, I am struck by how difficult it is to perform the role. I don’t mean it is difficult to be rich. What I mean is, like the magician finding rabbits in hats, the wealthy derive astonishing benefits standing on the stage of their society while behaving like their actions don’t have repercussions for those without the benefits of country clubs and lobster.

Indeed, things are often not what they seem. Two years ago, I learned that Myrla’s mother was a Russian Jew, a fact hidden from the family her whole life and for almost twenty years after her life had ended. Truth is a casualty of class war.

We are experiencing a shift. Watching the wealthy on TV, we’ve experienced astonishment and awe. Those emotions are transforming into anger. As a child, I had my father’s support to not pay attention to the show. Soon, watching the collapse of our economic system, it will be revealed how the tricks were done.

A child exhibits characteristics from both parents. The parents’ features in their children can complement each other in ways that reinforce and even encourage specific maturational trajectories. For example, pairing two musician parents not only increases the chance of a musically inclined child, but also increases the chance that the child will be maturational delayed. Maturational delay is a hallmark of creativity, encouraging a child with an infatuation for pattern and form. Keep boosting the maturational delay and a line gets crossed where infatuation with pattern eclipses a facility to communicate internal experience. How the environment affects the parents can determine how this line gets crossed.

“Disorders” characterized by maturational delay, such as autism and Asperger’s, are encouraged by the choices we make when we fall in love, in addition to what we expose ourselves to as we live our lives. The previous two entries outline the influence of mate selection on the origin of autism in our children. Working in cooperation with sexual selection are environmental influences that compel how children’s social and mental lives unfold.

Since the death of Darwin, little thought has been given to how the environment might influence human evolution in a single lifetime. Politics has informed what we consider to be true as Russian theorists emphasizing Lamarckian evolutionary theories (effects of the environment on single generation change) have been ignored in the West. Marx and Engels were proponents of a matrifocal origin of society, polarizing the West to emphasize a patrifocal hypothesis and ignore the power of sexual selection on societal change. Environmental and mate-selection origins of autism have been obfuscated by a science influenced by politics. Reductionist natural selection focusing on random selection supports a social Darwinist/neo-conservative perspective. A belief that society should reflect a natural world where only the strongest and cleverest should thrive supports a society where resources remain in the hands of very few.

In other words, we are not encouraged to notice how what we are exposed to and how we live our lives affect our children. This perspective is heresy, according to the fundamentalist sociobiologist and Neo-Darwinist. Those scientists would say that Lamarckianism is dead. There is no way that evolution influenced by the environment in a single generation could cause autism. Evolution occurs mostly from mutation and results of random variation! The environment cannot cause autism because evolution does not respond to the environment in one lifetime.

We are discovering that not only are our genes programmed to take into account a parent’s environment when deciding how to assign features to our kids, our genes are designed to take into consideration information from the environment when deciding how to modify themselves.

There is very little about a human that is random.

There are (at least) eight environmental variables influencing changes in our evolution by modifying testosterone levels. This modification is most obvious in the mother, where the child’s maturational speed is determined by the mother’s blood testosterone levels the sixth week before birth. (See http://serpentfd.org/3-neuropsychology.html) There are almost no studies tracking the influence on estrogen in these matters. No surprise there. There are almost no studies tracing changes in the father’s testosterone levels in a single lifetime as it relates to features in the children.

Exposure to light, changes in diet, percentage of body fat, alcohol and drugs, tobacco, amounts of touch, physical activity and stress all vary testosterone levels in humans. They do not necessarily do so in the same way. For example, increased body fat raises female testosterone levels but lowers it for males.

Increasing the testosterone levels in the mother compels an increase in maturational delay in her sons and in increase in maturational acceleration in her daughters when, at six weeks before birth, lifelong maturational trajectories are set based on mother’s testosterone levels.

Do we in our heart of hearts, in our unconscious minds, know the profound effects that we have upon our unborn children as we live our lives? Are we aware of the path we walk and what happens when we cross that line that influences our kids? Are we purposefully going about the business of creating a society populated by the male maturationally delayed: autistics, borderline autistics, artists, abstract thinkers, gifted ambidextrous athletes, dancers, musicians, gays and males inclined to competitively perform as opposed to dominate and subjugate?

By what we eat, breathe and imbibe and who we choose to mate with, are we unconsciously creating a world that is considering peace?

Though little discussed, the ability to send our children back in time is an ability all of us have. This ability has to do with how we choose a mate.

It has been estimated that our lineage of homo departed Africa around 50,000 years ago. From there, the various branchings of humanity began. There is evidence of overlap with Neanderthals in Europe, but there is no certainty of conjugational relations. Regardless, as bands then tribes grew separated by greater geographic spans, the last common descendant between diverging lineage threads grew further apart in distance and in time.

Academics have hypothesized several reasons that humans left Africa. I would suggest that robust language facility had no small amount to do with the compulsion to explore. We might conclude that language was well established because across the planet, most cultures display a relatively small number of left-handers, anywhere from 2-12 %. This number suggests that those that left Africa used the same brain we right-handers have today–larger left lobe with smaller corpus callosum–as opposed to the alternative, earlier left-hander model of both lobes being similarly sized with larger corpus callosum.

We might also consider whether those myths and stories that seem to have roots in cultures all across the world might have been carried from their continent of origin. In other words, we might call those bands and tribes of Africa the serpent people.

Charles Darwin was a pigeon fancier. He tracked in detail the lineage of breeds, concluding that the human-dictated evolutionary trajectories of these birds satisfactorily informed an understanding of how nature compelled an evolutionary transformation. Breeders selected specific pigeon traits and watched them blossom into unique characteristics, features often deeply debilitating if the birds were allowed to return to the wild. Nature, Darwin concluded, would select traits with survival utility, not a human predilection for what was visually unique, unless sexual selection was in play.

Over 50,000 years, humans found homes and proceeded to breed and play. As concepts of the ideal mate changed with time, lineages diverged as fashions for different looks and behaviors modified with the latest fad. Some peoples in the North preferred the light-skinned mates that stayed healthy soaking up the vitamin D. Other peoples in the North preferred a chubby mate that stayed healthy with reserves of energy. Skin color, body types, personality characteristics, behavior variations modified like the pigeons bred by fanciers seeking novelty. The less contact societies had with one another, the more unique these variations could become.

Humans have been breeding pigeons for over 2000 years. It has been almost 2000 years since some pigeon lineage threads have last had contact with one another. Darwin made an observation. When two pigeons were bred from widely diverging strains, the chicks revealed features of the last ancestor that the parents had in common. In this case, the rock pigeon, which is still a common breed today.

Parents with diverging ethnic threads with little or no lineage contact for tens of thousands of years send their children speeding off into the past. When they return, emerging from the womb with characteristics of both parents, they often carry with them additional features retained by the last common ancestor of the breeding pair.

It is a fact that breeders often encourage this process of cross-breeding as they seek robust features from the past. Breeding separate lines, threads too long divergent, sometimes demands some old genes to provide strength and balance.

Enter the autistic. Misinterpreted as a disorder, autism is a reservoir of human features reappearing at just the right time to be integrated into a culture deeply in need of strength and balance. Consider which features of the autistic we need most desperately today.

There are many ways to kill a dragon. I counted several hundred strong-man dragon interventions in the almost one hundred books I read when I was snake-charmed by the subject. Courage, strength and cleverness were the qualities looked for in a dragon vanquisher. Many battles led to happy endings where the victor gained a wife.

Myths and legends are a little like spring garden catalogs, offering pictures of the ways a man can gain a mate along with instructions to society and its women on how to best encourage the man’s strong features. Our catalog of stories for the last few thousand years have offered guidance for the families of the women on how to pick strong, protective men for their grown-up little girls. When women began to pick their own husbands, they sought men with qualities that society respected, men with strength and streaks of independence, men who could be relied upon when dragons reared their heads.

Gilgamesh slew a dragon-like creature, a stand-in for the goddess, when records of these stories first emerged. Not just the Indo-Europeans, but Semitic, Asian and aboriginal peoples revel in these tales of acts of courage in gaining honor and a wife. Not incidentally, dragon slayers were crushing symbols of the old societies, the demonized serpent and the social structures that these symbols represented.

In goddess cultures, children were often raised by mothers and mothers’ brothers because they frequently had no idea who their father really was. Women controlled procreation. The exchange rate for acts of valor was depreciated by the fact that the man received no family in exchange for his courageous actions. To achieve the opportunity to have children, men had to impress the women in other ways. Women were not looking for the high testosterone guy who could fend off other tough guys, collect lots of stuff and make sure his wife did not dally around while she took care of the kids that he was sure were his own. Women were not looking for providers.

I am suggesting that before the Indo-Europeans, if a man sought a mating opportunity, he would have to dance his way into her heart. It is back when the women were strong and the men were good looking.

Well, those days are back again.

In just a little more than a single generation, there has been an extraordinary transformation in the criteria that a woman uses to pick a mate. We’d have to go back 6500 years, before the Indo-Europeans came barreling out of Southern Russia, to see anything like what has emerged of late. A host of factors have contributed to the transformation, including high divorce rates, high percentages of women employed in the work force, women with higher educations, increased leisure time, fewer children, children not dying of diseases, women not dying in childbirth and having children later in life. These are all factors contributing to a resurgence in an autonomous, self-assured female population confident that goals can be achieved without relying upon a dragon-slayer husband.

Add to that how few dragons there are left to slay. Strength and cunning are little needed in modern society, certainly far less than when life was arbitrary, short, cruel, brutal, etc. Many of the most successful men today are dancers of the mind, pattern manipulators, technical specialists, men that can find ways to be paid to encourage cooperation. Women are rejecting macho, seeking mucho. Mucho attention. What women want now is a man that offers a better quality of life in the form of a man that can contribute to her feeling loved and strong.

Hence the emergence of the autistic.

High testosterone females mating with low testosterone males created the foundation for matrifocal society, the goddess cultures. Vanquished for several thousand years, this societal hormonal constellation is making a major, sudden comeback. High testosterone males mating with low testosterone females, though still a powerful current in contemporary culture (visualize Republican), is a current on the wane. Three forces are converging, creating an environment where the autistic is returning, except that the world is not exactly prepared for his and her return.

High testosterone females produce maturational delayed, low testosterone males and maturational accelerated, high testosterone females. Maturation rate is determined on a day six weeks before birth, ~230 days after conception, based upon the mother’s hormone levels. Male decelerating maturational delay, in combination with other variables, can lead to autism. For females, maturational acceleration can have the same result.

Choosing our mates in an ancient fashion draws from the past, favoring types of individuals with physiological/neurological features born perhaps over 100,000 years ago. Our challenge and opportunity is to provide an environment where those features can mature

The symbol of our earliest known religions, back when goddesses ruled the world, was the serpent. The goddess had several familiars or manifestations. The serpent was unique.

“The snake is life force, a seminal symbol, epitome of the worship of life on this earth. It is not the body of the snake that was sacred, but the energy exuded by this spiraling or coiling creature which transcends its boundaries and influences the surrounding world. This same energy is in spirals, vines, growing trees, phalluses, and stalagmites, but it is especially concentrated in the snake, and therefore more powerful. The snake was something primordial and mysterious, coming from the depths of the waters where life begins. Its seasonal renewal in sloughing off its old skin and hibernating made it a symbol of the continuity of life and of the link with the underworld.” Marija Gimbutas, 1989

Over tens of thousands of years, the snake transformed into the dragon. The Western dragon is the serpent demonized by Indo-Europeans who conquered goddess culture. In India, Indo-Europeans demoted serpent deities to a lower caste, suppressing the serpent gods in myth and story. Farther East, the serpent was deified and made magical by the Chinese, yet stripped of its matrifocal origins. Destroyed, subjugated and assimilated, serpent-worshipping goddess peoples live on in their symbol’s transformations.

There is perhaps no better symbol for our species evolution than this symbol of ancient culture, a symbol that has experienced an evolution of its own.

Still, there are other ways to trace the meandering path of our societal history than by the stories and symbols that those peoples leave behind. You can explore those ancient people themselves, the original serpent people. These are the people we call autistic. We are going back in time to before the African Diaspora, when language was still an unfamiliar art. Unfamiliar to the males. It was the females that learned to speak first.

There are four times as many autistic males than autistic females. This disparity is a riddle that has stumped investigators for many years. Approaching societal evolution as a winding serpentine path of physiological/neurological transformations, we can trace changes in hormonal constellations that reveal a history of our species. That history suggests that autistic females are even more ancient than autistic males. To find females not yet facile with language requires further windings back in time.

Autism is the evidence of our evolutionary origins, back when language was brand new. I’m not suggesting autistic people are less evolved than contemporary, normal people. It seems to me that our evolutionary future has more than a little to do with the gifts that the autistic bring us from the past. I am suggesting that our bodies are riding a roller coaster, serpentine time machine that is bringing into contemporary times peoples from the past. Autistic males from perhaps 75,000 years ago, autistic females from maybe 150,000 years ago. There are four times more males than females because the further back in time you go, the less frequently those people can emerge.

Three powerful factors have converged to draw these people to us from ancient times. 1) In the past 25 years, there have been radical changes in sexual selection as our concept of the ideal partner has transformed. Western females now select for characteristics that an autistic male features to an extreme. 2) As racial and ethnic barriers dissolve, the children reveal features closer to the last time the divergent branches were the same. 3) Environmental factors are compelling massive maturational delay.

We have not evolved down any kind of straight path but have wondered back and forth as criteria for the perfect mate has changed. That pathway has been indelibly etched within our genes. These three factors have sent us tumbling into the past to create babies with long histories before they’re born.

Our stories tell us much of how we were created. The symbols, like maps, reveal the path. Our oldest stories and images go back to Africa. But now, like the aboriginal stories, our past and our future are feeling like they are converging. It’s as if we are entering mythic times where the brand new is also, literally, the unutterably ancient. The ancient Ouroboros, as a symbol, makes sense again.

It crossed my mind yesterday that individuals with autism are not likely to be superstitious. This conclusion would also suggest that autistics are not magical thinkers. If this generalization has some truth, then this characteristic would not only make them unique in today’s society, but unique going back through multiple societal transformations past bands and tribes.

There are those folks that exhibit obsessive-compulsive disorder behavior as they seek to exert some degree of control over the world by performing personal rituals. OCD is not uncommon with people that are autistic. But OCD that features an obsession with pattern and a compulsion to participate in pattern replication is not the same as OCD linked to event control. The latter, which is more a robust expression of a superstitious frame of mind, suggests someone deeply fatigued by magical thinking. I am estimating that autistics are not magical thinkers. Autistics don’t easily intuit how they might change the world.

In the 1960s, I had two friends, brothers, who exhibited unique behavior. One had, at the time, undiagnosed Tourette’s syndrome, and he exhibited bizarre ritualistic behaviors, astonishing physical strength and a powerful intelligence. His brother retained unique thinking processes characterized by his seeing himself in any picture that he imaged, from a vantage point outside his body. Not just in his dreams, but in his thoughts, he was not “in” his body, but observing. Both men were/are brilliant.

In myself, my friends and the people I meet, I look for clues. Often the answers feel to be just around a corner. Sometimes, arriving around the corner, I feel like I’ve made my way back home.

There is a relationship between OCD, abstract thinking, magical thinking, autism, Tourette’s, facility with pattern recognition and perfect pitch, maturational delay, left-handedness and evolution.

Autism is an evolutionary condition. Before we were facile with language, we lived in a world of ritual dance and music. Pattern recognition and exhibition was/is the world of the autistic person. The reason that our contemporary autistics often exhibit uncanny facility with pattern, perfect pitch and familiarity with the abstract is that this was the world before language, split consciousness, single narrative compulsion and magical thinking were engaged.

Our autistics are the bridge consciousness to the ground consciousness from which we, split-mind, magical-thinking language users, so recently emerged. We wonder where we came from and the path we walked to get to where we are today. The answers sit inside the maturational delayed. The random-handed, big-brained (with both lobes similarly sized), slowly maturing, language-challenged autistics are our mentors in the way of nonduo thinking, the thinking we are all familiar with from when we were babes.

The way autistics process the world is the way we all thought when we were all group dancers and musicians gesturing our encouragements to the dancing band. The me/every had not differentiated into the me and the other. Story had not yet emerged. Abstract thinking was still so abstract that metaphor had not developed into a thing and what a thing represented. For example, a dancer representing thunder was thunder. The world had not yet broken down into parts. There was only everything, connected, and a compulsion to recognize connection, to acknowledge connection and to reproduce connection.

Hence the pattern obsession that has little to do with control.

Consider that the exploration of cause-and-effect relationships, the hallmark of good science, is a direct result of magical thinking characteristic of the ancient religions. Science worships gods no longer but continues to practice ancient religious rites. No practice is as ancient as that which strips complex, interconnected experience of its interrelations by focusing on single narrative threads. Magical thinking reduces magic to thinking by making believe that we influence events by arbitrary actions.

Push a doorbell and hear the thunder sound. We immediately estimate that another push might compel another roiling of the sky.

Science seeks to influence events by nonarbitrary actions. With wild success.

Nonetheless, science still follows the ritual format of making believe the world can be understood and influenced by exploring these single threads. Ignored is the notion that all the threads connect.

There are seven million stories in the Naked City. We can only tell them one by one. We would not presume to suggest a single Dragnet adventure is the same as all Los Angeles that day. Nor would we suggest that the reproduction of a single story is the same thing as what actually happened to those people.

Science does not presume to be able to explain the universe by the experiments it runs. Science does behave like the universe is no more complicated than the results of an almost infinite number of experiments. There lies the rub. An infinite number of stories do not add up to a single thunder clap, the sound of one sky clapping.

Immanence is an ancient concept. The archeologist Marija Gimbutas explored in detail excavations of ancient goddess cultures in Eastern Europe. She and others have concluded that the spiritual foundation of these people involved experiences of the gods and goddesses as always present, or immanent. This is in contrast to the later Indo-European interventions and subjugations that included the introduction of the transcendental god.

Science reasonably rejects this transcendental God. God comes with lots of baggage. Modernity, after devoting lots of time to sorting through God’s luggage, gave way to this post-modern era where we’ve decided to just store it in museums. God’s dirty underwear is on display in climate-controlled, beautifully lit exhibitions in the West’s museums and learning institutions.

Also on display are the remnants and revelations of the ancient goddess religions. Though later raped, tamed and domesticated by the Indo-Europeans, the ancient goddess was no shrinking violet. Excavated cities with no walls suggest that warfare was relatively rare. Yet, human sacrifice was not uncommon. The goddess was immanent. Life was not gentle. The serpent was her familiar.

An immanent goddess preceded the Indo-Europeans and exists today in the third world and in the East. Characteristic of the ancient immanent religions was magical thinking, or the belief that powers can be manipulated by adjusting personal behavior. The Indo-Europeans performed sacrifice, exhibiting aspects of magical mind. In contemporary times, most of us carry with us remnants of these ancient orientations as we unconsciously withdraw from taking responsibility for our lives as we wait for outside intervention to make our lives better. Many of us make quasi-conscious deals with the deities–or our unconscious–that if we do such and such we should be rewarded with thus and thus. It doesn’t matter what the powers are called, we negotiate with them as if they control our lives.

We behave like we’re invested in being powerless like the ancient immanence believers and the more recent worshippers in a transcendental God. Behaving like we’re powerless, we often similarly offer homage to the Freudian trinity and the humanists that followed.

I would suggest that science, an Indo-European invention, get over its transcendental self and consider exploring consciousness instead of making believe we humans acquired it as an accidental result of evolution. This change would also involve withdrawing from magical thinking and our constant mind dance with the deities we’ve evidently not rejected.

Immanence has its origins in magical thinking. Stripped of this skewed, cause-and-effect, co-dependent relationship, immanence emerges as a not unreasonable way to explore the ground of evolution’s unfolding. Immanence plus interconnection, minus magical thinking and compulsion to see things in single-thread, cause-and-effect relations, offer alternative ways to explore societal transformation, human development and evolution.

It is not beyond consideration that the web is beginning to exhibit emergent characteristics that would suggest how intelligence evolves. Online, we can assume that consciousness exists. Hundreds of millions of consciousness derivations are behaving, invested in specific personal outcomes. Unexpected synergies are beginning to surface. Observing this online evolution, we might form tentative hypotheses on how earth’s biological infrastructure evolved.

Developing theories of biological evolution that presuppose that consciousness exists is not the same thing as presupposing that a mythological god intervened to both start the process of evolution and makes sure that the process unfolds to his or her satisfaction. Presupposing that consciousness exists, thinking outside the box of not considering god as a variable that you cannot isolate and weigh, you offer space for alternative conclusions. We tend to constrain our thinking by not taking into consideration the very thing that makes our thinking unique, consciousness, and the possibility that consciousness in not an emergent feature of evolution but the very instrumentation with which evolution plays, the ocean that the fish is unaware of.

In other words, instead of beginning your evolutionary theorizing by presupposing that god does not exist nor have influence on biological evolution, we begin our theorizing by designing your god or assigning god features that best suggest a theory that offers in its results features of the world we live in. This may seem ass backwards. We begin with the answer, our experience, and seek a theory that suggests the obvious conclusion. If this process offers no useful outcomes, we’ve composed a story. If the process offers useful outcomes, we’ve composed a useful story. Let’s not fool ourselves into thinking that we are discovering reality. We are simply seeking to create a useful map. We are playing.

If you’ve been following this blog, you know I have a dog in this race. I’m partial to a god that loves to play. I’ll bet on Play to finish first, though the other dogs fascinate me only a little less. For example, a god of mischief manifests joy by encouraging the unexpected. I, for one, am prepared to be totally confused.

Which brings us back to the web. I’m suggesting that the web is offering a more than robust, real-time, in-your-face manifestation of evolution in action with the emergence of unexpected, profound, synergistic change. Focus on where features or locations characterized by subtle and complicated interconnections compel a following of passionate adherents. There is a good chance that these places have something to do with having fun. Is it possible that complexity is emerging as a direct result of play?

In the next few years, we will be honored to observe the dissolution of nation states, the conversion of traditional elite democracy into a flattened, online, horizontal electorate, the integration of the web and social networking into our lives, the facing and embracing of world hunger and disease and the conversion of the consumer economy to one based on choice and aesthetics.

Teach a man to fish and he can feed his family. Encourage a person to play and he/she can feed the world.

I run a small web development firm. There are seven of us specializing in html design, website maintenance, PHP MySQL programming, email marketing, pay per click (Google Ad Words), tech support, server maintenance, email consultation and search engine optimization. Where possible, we try to spread the specialties around.

I’m the search engine optimization specialist. I have little tech facility but have skills in pattern manipulation and recognition. Engaged in search engine optimization (SEO), I weigh the specific variables the search engines use to decide how to rank a website and then design the site and provide links to the sites in ways that encourage search engines to give them higher rankings.

About seven years ago, I sort of fell into this portion of my profession as a result of creating high quality local retail directories for Chicago and local towns. I created the directories, loading them with links to local business websites to funnel traffic to my client websites. I’d give my clients free ads within the directories. The program worked well.

Over time, the directories themselves achieved higher and higher rankings in Google. They commonly ranked #1 in Chicago, making my clients happy, but they were also ranking in the top 10 in the United States. For example, when Googling “Chicago crafts” or “Chicago catering,” my directory pages would rank #1 or #2. Googling “crafts” or “catering” would also bring top 10 spots.

Late one night, unable to sleep, staring at columns of information on my monitor, the obvious jumped out at me. The sites I’d created with the most incoming links, linked in very specific fashions, were achieving the highest rankings. It was perhaps seven or eight years ago that I received this revelation, a rather prosaic insight today. Still, the SEO information services that I subscribed to hadn’t yet noted what I discovered.

Assigning links in clusters and focusing on specific pages, I was soon achieving top 10 spots in Google for terms like mortgages, airline tickets and lingerie. Creating a directory of directories, Greentithe.com, I was able to siphon traffic to directory pages stuffed with commercial affiliate agreements that generated over $20,000 for environmental organizations. I was having fun.

On November 15, 2004, Google changed their algorithm. Google began to heavily penalize for deliberate link manipulation using the techniques I had grown to rely upon. I was encouraged to be less overt and instead focus on the most effective techniques to simulate random linking behavior.

In evolutionary biology, an astonishing amount of professorial attention has focused on the degree that variation is random when progeny proliferate. Darwin famously proclaimed in his Origin of Species that variation is random, laying the foundation for the fundamentalist polarity of evolutionary theorizing populated by Neo-Darwinians, sociobiologists, evolutionary psychologists and their allies, the social Darwinists. If the genetically inheritable features of offspring that a bonded pair creates are not influenced by the environment, then we can ignore the interconnecting subtleties of life. We are born by chance and survive if we are strong or clever. Relationships don’t matter, unless they manage to help you to survive.

Google has evolved. Originally, the variables Google used to determine rank were relatively transparent. Specialists like me, uncovering the patterns, used the knowledge to provide benefits to our clients. Google now seeks to offer enviable rankings to only those sites that don’t obviously rely upon the skills of a professional to achieve high positions. Google rewards websites that reveal that they are popular (many incoming links), with that popularity derived from seemingly random assistance from many sources. Signs of nonrandom intervention from a professional are rewarded with a penalizing drop in ranking.

In the world of the web, high rankings are achieved by websites simulating random interconnectivity. Patterns in interconnection are interpreted by search engines as deliberate, nonrandom intervention.

In the world of fundamentalist evolutionary theory, evident random variation in the features of progeny is assumed to be evidence that the environment (characterized by profound interconnectivity) has no influence on the features of individuals during their own (or their parent’s) lifetime.

As the cat-and-mouse Google and optimizer game unfolds, an evolutionary trajectory has been established. There are, of course, intelligences at both sides of this debate. The nature of this relationship drives the optimizer to simulate random connectivity when in reality the connections, the links, are becoming more and more deliberate. Optimizer intelligence has discovered that it is far more effective at achieving its goals if there is no intelligence interpreted in its actions. One intelligence simulates random to achieve success. The other intelligence penalizes evidence of deliberate behavior. In evolutionary theory, there is what has been called runaway sexual selection, where a unique feature becomes heavily reinforced by both selection for a very particular target feature and selection for those that have a taste for that target feature. We are observing runaway random selection where exhibition of the deliberately created display of simulated random behavior has become a highly valued trait, driving the behavior of both the selector and the selectee.

The evolutionary fundamentalists have been fooled into thinking that evidence of random suggests absence of deliberate intent. It’s the same scale of mistake that religious fundamentalists make when they conclude that a mythology, deliberate intent, is not random. Intelligence naturally simulates random behavior in the same way that intelligence naturally makes a metaphor that is not the thing that a metaphor represents. At the root of both processes is a deep compulsion to play. Play is a central feature of neoteny.

Random and incomprehensibly subtle and complicated are not the same things. When incomprehensibly subtle and complicated achieve a successful reproduction of random, one might say, “Let the play begin.”

There are more and less effective ways to organize online.  It is extremely difficult to work with activists exclusively online and by phone without any real-world contact.  Handling web and other communications for a budding national organization with over 30 coordinating committee members, Marcia and I became intimately familiar with how things can go awry.

The communication system was begun by two well-intentioned older males with many years of experience organizing on the Left, and they proceeded to seek to reproduce the positive results they’d achieved in the past using organizing methods they were familiar with in the world of flesh and blood.  The put together a group, the Coordinating Committee, that then granted the founders the authority to make executive decisions.  With no committees other than the Administrative Committee itself during the important early period when founding issues and logistics were established, the Administrative Committee did its best to make things work efficiently.

Transparency, hierarchy and diversity issues emerged quickly, characterized by arguments over what these three founding principles actually meant or how, in the context of the forming organization, these three processes should be interpreted and addressed.  The well-intentioned older males didn’t get what the issue was.  In their world, you proved you were credible in a position of authority, and then you made decisions.  They behaved in ways that kept as much authority as they could in as few hands as possible.  Things got done.  Some coordinating committee members quit.

How might an organization creating itself online via emails, conference calls and a website best empower the people in that process so that communication is enhanced, authority is spread among as many people as possible from as many backgrounds as possible and decision-making processes are transparent, not opaque?

What are the best practices for putting together a national political organization online?

• If the idea for the project came from one person or very few people, and it was those people that brought their allies to the project, then efforts need to be made to embrace their ideological opponents.  Representatives from all three Left waves (soft Left, hard Left and tech Left) offer important resources to be relied upon to build the project.  Exclusion of any one or two of these groups reduces diversity and encourages nontransparency.

• Create and solicit volunteers for committees very early in the process.  Divest the center of authority and give it to where project details can be explored.  A committee of committee chairs can coordinate information and action directions.  The chairing of the coordinating committee can revolve among the chairs to keep authority from lodging with specific individuals.

• Minutes can be kept for all committee conference calls and posted centrally.  The person taking minutes for the coordinating committee can change as the chair changes.

• Each committee can have its own listserve set up to archive all communications.

• Place available information on all committee conference calls on the website in real time with no delays.  Minutes can post within 24 hours.  Make sure listserve archives stay current.

• Allow interested organizations and individuals access to committees through the website.  If there are officers, they too can allow website access.

At some point, the budding organization will require a structure.  Creating a conference and moving from online to real time offers communicative deep relief.  Yet, codifying process into a tentatively permanent form–structure–offers deeper challenges.  Conference structure informs the organization structure that emerges from the conference.  Moving from online to off-line real time communications brings in a host of additional variables to address.  Establishing principles of transparency, horizontal communication and diversity among the folks working online, preceding a real time gathering, encourages the emergence of these principles in the organization that results.

Fundamentalists and pluralists are in disagreement across the political, academic and societal relations landscape. There is a tendency for a pluralist to agree with some or all of what a fundamentalist believes to be true, with additions. Sometimes the fundamental beliefs get reframed, as Newtonian physics has been absorbed into contemporary physics. Fundamental beliefs sometimes are reinterpreted. For example, Christian origin myths are embraced by pluralists as stories, but not as fact. Often fundamental beliefs remain true or useful but become part of a larger pattern or perspective that suggests or includes far more. Patterns can keep widening.

Even pluralists can discover that their interpretations have been reframed.

There are struggles on the American Left between fundamentalists and pluralists, usually over process and/or strategy, sometimes tactics. Leftist fundamentalists retain a commitment to change and to empowering the disempowered, but they are often utilizing a process almost identical to those that they would replace. Organizational structures are astonishingly nontransparent and are characterized by several levels of hierarchy with limited diversity. White males are usually in control.

For example, many U.S. labor organizations are usually run by elected white guys with an executive’s prerogative to make top-down decisions. Focus in parochial. Jobs shouldn’t go overseas. American labor only limitedly integrates into the American Anti-War movement. Labor is fundamental to the American Left while behaving with a fundamentalist’s tendency to obsess around its own constituency.

Pluralist Leftists embrace the union’s call for workers’ rights while suggesting that the movement of jobs overseas is not a bad thing if those workers are provided rights and receive respect. American pluralist Leftists often focus on process, urging transparency while organizing, engaging in horizontal communications instead of relying upon hierarchical structures and encouraging women and minorities to participate in the decision-making processes. Struggles between Left pluralists and fundamentalists are often over process, but the most vociferous conflicts are over strategy and tactics. Lost in these battles between fundamentalist and pluralist Leftists, also called soft Left and hard Left, is how much they have in common.

Traditional Leftists, the fundamentalists, are comfortable working with established power structures. Many arguments that emerge between fundamentalists and pluralists are over what degree members of the Democratic Party should be supported or endorsed. Party politics are not exactly bastions of transparency, horizontal communication or diversity. Fundamentalist Leftists integrate well with political party structure. Not so the pluralists.

This lack of integration with party structure is often where communication breaks down.

Though committed to transparency, diversity and horizontal nonhierarchical communication, the pluralists are often opaque to that aspect of process communication that offers nonverbal and verbal signs of respect to those with which they disagree. Fundamentalists, frequently framing the world as Us vs. Them, will often assault the “them” verbally in disrespectful fashion. Same with the pluralists. Wars of words characterized by online flaming, are not uncommon between these two groups.

Though there are many ways that the pluralist perspective builds upon fundamentalist foundations, clashes emerge, particularly when competing visions strategize noncompatible tactics or techniques for bringing in new people to the movement.

This clash often boils down to whether a Democrat is allowed on stage. Fundamentalists estimate they can influence the established power structure by establishing rapport and providing assistance. Pluralists often prefer to exert pressure from outside an established party, calculating that large numbers, an attentive press and a clear message will offer incentive to modify behavior.

This competition is ongoing, occurring locally, regionally and across the country. The battle is distracting. Many on the Left express dismay that the fundamentalists and pluralists don’t get along. Particularly confusing is that a third wave, let’s call them perspectivists, are quietly intervening and influencing the direction the Left is taking, often without the fundamentalists or pluralists aware that they are there.

Perspectivists are bypassing the streets and taking process directly into the beating heart, the communications infrastructure of society. Embracing the century-long triumphs of the fundamentalist and pluralist Left, the perspectivists seed transparency, diversity and horizontal communication into the way people share information. This style is the culture of the online young. They communicate through email and the web, relying upon social networking and cell phones. Friedman has referred to the flattening of the planet. The young are reconstructing how culture communicates, instilling the founding principles of the Left into its very core. The young are flattening, integrating and making things clear.

Outframing both the old Left and the relatively new pluralist Left, the young Left is so Left that they don’t even think in Left/Right terms. They embrace the old Left perspectives without battles over strategy and tactics. And, perspectivists add something astonishingly new.

They respect no borders. Perspectivists are citizens of the world.

Slowly I grow better at letting opposites be true.

There is evolution where processes can be explored in detail and there is spiritual experience informed by an understanding that consciousness or a deep sense of play informs all levels or all scales of experience. They seem to be opposites when viewed from a post-modern, reductionist point of view, which maintains that consciousness is an emergent, contingent feature of evolution.

The three P’s: pattern, process and paradox seem to keep me dancing to the music while I’m moving through the day. Pattern is about recognizing connections. Process is about learning to view the world from the present, which means honoring behavior over words by focusing on transparency, horizontal communication and diversity or integration. This view is the activist’s process perspective. Exploring paradox is to examine the transition between world views. Surfing societal transformations reveals paradox like a sudden sandbar demanding immediate attention to two not thoroughly integrated perspectives.

Things can be connected, things can be offered attention and more than one thing can be true at the same time.

Stephen J. Gould, the evolutionary biologist, was a pluralist among reductionists. He didn’t subscribe to science theology, which demands that simpler means better or elegant is more likely to be true. Darwin’s theory of natural selection has been described as a tautology. “Whatever survives survived because they are better at surviving” is how Darwin’s theory has been denigrated. There is truth in the criticism. A principle can be so elegant that its meaning evaporates. Gould and others have sought meaning in evolution anyplace that suggested something new, useful, interesting and fun.

As a proponent of neoteny, Gould was also neoteny’s practitioner.

In evolutionary theory, there are reductionists and pluralists. Reductionists, like fundamentalists, hold to very specific words or points of view. Pluralists, like mystics, are comfortable with unanswered questions, using them as maps to hidden insights.

By demanding that a theory or story be elegant or simple, the reductionist or fundamentalist honors a principle by ignoring what the principle represents. There is what is called honoring the meaning but not the word. The reductionist/fundamentalist honors the word but not the meaning.

Mystics, when crossing the line to understanding, cross into a wordless world. One moment, you are in a place characterized by questions with no simple solutions. The next moment, you experience resolution with no answers and no words.

There is nothing simple about evolution. Imagine 100,000 music prodigies, six-year-old geniuses, teaching each other melodies, harmonies, instrument-making and recording technologies while devising as many ways to break the rules as they make up music schools to represent the overriding patterns in their productions. Then imagine the kinds of choices they’d make if they all went deaf.

You would get evolution.

The world is so profoundly complicated a place that words, particularly few words, can’t serve to reproduce its nature. Go beyond words, where simplicity exists.

Paradoxical. Opposites, both true.

We live in Evanston, twelve blocks from Chicago. Northwestern University is about six blocks north of us. Loyola is about two miles south. We are in the middle unit of a 5-unit, antique row house. Our backyard is cement, like a largish carport, surrounded by a maybe 3-foot band of dirt. An astonishingly large maple tree covers our backyard, making it almost impossible for grass or garden to grow.

Still, the animals find us.

We have possums, squirrels, birds, mice, a rat, chipmunks, crows and the occasional raccoon. Down the street we happened across a skinny fox chasing a local squirrel. Coyotes cruise up the canal banks or along the lagoon. Deer bop through on occasion. We harbor tortoises year-round in a large turtle pen sunk perhaps two feet into the dirt.

There are several bridges to an awareness of interconnectedness and evolution. A necessary feature of these unique bridges is that they abandon language. As language users, we habitually think in single-narrative threads, intuiting cause and effect as the way of the world when it’s the only path our words are capable of walking. We think narratively in a non-narrative world. We make the world a story. Our lives are scripts. Beyond the words, past the sequential viewing of nonsequential experience–is the simultaneity. One bridge to that world is our backyard.

I didn’t start talking until I was three. My dog slept with me every night. Jigger smelled bad. He had bad breath. Still, we communicated. Jigger and I were in communication long before I started to use words.

I adored cartoons. On Saturday mornings, I’d wake to watch the first one to go on, Heckle and Jeckle, at 6:00 a.m. In the early 50s in Chicago, there were cartoons from 6:00 a.m.–11:00 a.m. Saturday mornings. That was it. Almost all the cartoon characters were animals. The cartoon people talked to the cartoon animals, and the cartoon animals talked to one another. Some of my favorite cartoon animals didn’t talk at all.

Like aboriginal origin myths around the community fire, the cartoons deeply informed a world view guided into existence by my teacher, Jigger. The world was alive, pulsing with a community of animal informants. I knew them and they knew me. This world had nothing to do with words.

Steeped in the tail end of a reductionist zeitgeist, academics compare cause and effect stories about the past that were invented to explain a narratively reconstructed, interconnected present. Evolution is hypothesized to be gradual, random and long ago.

Five-hundred years ago, whatever wasn’t understood was assumed to be known by God. Now, much of what is not understood evolutionarily is assigned to have a random nature. The reductionists say variation is random. Interconnectedness doesn’t easily fit into a reductionist evolutionist’s stories. Random was devised to fill that space. Evolutionary developmental biologists, a new breed of evolutionary theorist, are beginning to understand. Random is being challenged.

Facing my backyard, carrying with me the teachings of my dog, Jigger, I know that random is not in the world that has no words. There are many bridges to this world of simultaneous understanding. Smelly dog words are perhaps my favorite.

It’s a little creepy, the rat in back.

The tortoises are still in hibernation with March about to begin.  The bird feeder is posted above the tortoise cage, where the squirrels and birds scatter seeds on the leaves and snow that cover up the turtles.  I watch the sparrows and squirrels eating seeds, and I watch the rat eating seeds.  Just one rat.  He seems as comfortable in the daylight as the others.  I worry there will be more.

In a month, when the weather turns, I’ll have to reach deep into the turtle pen and haul out all the leaves stuffed in to keep the turtles warm.  These are Missouri/Arkansas tortoises transplanted to Chicago, hence the extra padding–they don’t dig deep enough.  I’m not excited about this task.  I hope that once I’ve cleared the refuse, the rat will go away.

About five years ago–after my October stuffing of leaves above the turtles after they’d dug themselves into the ground–I noted that my wedding ring was gone.  I figured the ring was in a leaf bag.  Maybe the ring was somewhere in the yard.  I couldn’t find it.  Marcia and I went and bought another.  I had my 800 number engraved inside the band.

That April, digging out the leaves and saying hello to sleepy turtles, I found my ring.  Evidently it slipped off while packing in the leaves.

Golden ring one year.  Rat this year.  Spring is eternally a surprise.

Life is full of rats and rings.  This combination of pleasant and disturbing surprises is good.  If there were no variation, we’d have no evolution or transformation.  Without oscillation, there would only be flat line.  No change, no life.  Death, from a Westerner’s perspective, is boring.

Perhaps change is the pattern that most obviously emerges at the four levels of evolution explored inside this blog.  Variation produces novelty in the biological, societal, ontogenetic and individual scales of experience.  In Chicago, we have a saying. “If you don’t like the weather, wait a bit.”

It’s almost March.  I love March because it precedes April, the most excellent month of all.  April in Chicago is a sensual feast, rats and rings and growing things, wind, warmth and thunderstorms.  The smell of dirt.

OK.  The rat can stay.  Well, philosophically, he can stay.  Come spring, he’s going to have to find new friends.  The sparrows and squirrels seem to like him, but the sparrows and squirrels don’t have to explain Mr. Rat to our row house neighbors as he gambols about in the leaves and snow.

Change is good.  Making the rat go away would be better.

It’s difficult to explain the certainty that we experienced, the confidence we had that times were changing fast.  In the late 60s and early 70s we could see the confusion in our parents’ eyes.  We were not confused.  Radical change was underway.  I felt lucky to be alive.

When I cut my hair to go to work for my father in his Chicago girdle and bra factory, I was choosing to go underground.  I wanted business skills.  I wanted the skills to build.  So I withdrew from pastoral, coastal St. Petersburg, Florida, and became a spy in an urban, consumer economy.  Not feeling a part of the world of buying and selling things, I had a talent for it.  So I chanced a dance with this bottleneck to change, the American compulsion to consume, and entered into a 19-year career as a sales rep.  I quit working for my dad and started a gift and stationery sales firm.  I was a foot soldier, as McCain would say, for the consumer economy.  It was surreal.

Almost 40 years later, what felt immanent then is now visibly unfolding.

A couple years ago, walking past the living room of a friend, I noticed his dog lying peacefully on her side.  Her eyes were closed.  I noted to my friend how comfortable she looked.  Tom told me she had died just before I came in the door.  I was stunned.  She looked alive.

Our economy has passed.  Though heat still rises from the body, the heart has stopped beating.  Bush/Cheney still seek to encourage an early 1900s corporate elite.  The Left is still fighting the results of the Depression.  It is 2008.  The dog is dead.

Kids have been experimenting with transitioning away from a consumer economy for a decade.  An automobile is no longer the symbol of new adult independence.  The cell phone and the laptop have stepped in.  The music industry is imploding as young people exercise their ability to make their own choices.  The emphasis is not on having and consuming but on choosing.

We are entering the choice economy.  We display who we are by the choices we make and the relationships we establish.  Departing from keeping up with the Joneses, it’s become about exhibiting how we are unique from the Joneses.

Advertisers seek desperately for venues they can control.  Young people are deriving entertainment from Youtube, Facebook, websites and their friends.  Music has splintered into a hundred subthemes, dragging fashion out of the hands of the corporations.

We’re training ourselves and each other to exercise discernment.  Focusing on unique, we are letting go of what is the same.

We are entering the age of the neoteny economy.  Radical has arrived.