Lee Goodman has a talent for being present when my life takes a radical shift.  In high school, as we became close friends, Lee introduced me to the hippie protest movement.  In 2002, Lee brought me back into the protest movement when he invited me to a peace march in Northbrook.

Four days after returning from the United States Social Forum, Lee and I were in my living room discussing the commercial possibilities of an application my firm was developing when that underground aquifer of inspiration offered me a taste and then complete emersion of an idea.  Yet, it was more than an idea.  If felt like I was looking into a window of how the future would unfold.  Directly connected to the revelation in the convertible with Marcia earlier in the week, the idea was about interconnection, the neotenization of society, with an outline of specific features of the next step in the transformation of our species.  It hit me as Lee stood to leave to head back home.  I rose, my tongue between silence and stuttering as I watched him depart.  Later in the week, I called Lee to share the vision.

Integrated into the online campaigns being developed for the Actions Options Tool (AOT) was the ability for a user, through his or her social networking page, to note the user’s participation in an eletter, fundraiser, boycott or petition.  In addition to being able observe his or her own participation in a fundraiser, for example, and the amount of money contributed, the user could also observe how many people he or she brought into the fundraiser and the cumulative total for his or her contributions and the friends’ contributions.  When this idea came to me in December of ’06, I was not aware it was already being used by some donor software.  The unique addition to this process was our developing the AOT to make it possible for any user to observe multiple degrees of separation, indirect influence on friends of friends, friends of friends of friends, etc., providing the ability for the user to experience his or her vast indirect interconnection with the larger community.  The AOT seeks to provide an experience of empowerment by making the world transparent in a way that enhances our ability to intuit our connection to that world.  By providing a lineage chart displaying these cascading relationships, the AOT provided an instant snapshot of how we affect our community, and at the same time one sees how large that community is.

Standing there watching Lee depart, I realized that an individual using the AOT did not have to be limited to participation in an online campaign created by one of the participating organizations in the network.  The software could be designed to accommodate individual users creating their own campaign, their own idea, their own bit of gossip and then passing it on to friends and watching it disperse.  When an idea is created and sent on to a friend, that friend clicks on a link that carries him or her back to his or her AOT social networking page, where he or she can continue the chain by continuing to disperse the idea.

Any user can generate his or her own lineage tree of indirect influence based on any idea, file, resource, video, bit of news or revelation.

Programmer Dave Larson and I began working out the details and following the implications.  With a central database offering an environment for these lineage trees to grow, users could revel in the speed, breadth (how many other users were participating in their idea or campaign), depth (how many degrees of separation were engaged) and geographic span (tracking zip codes).  The programming could be designed to create reports at any user request that would offer an ability to run comparisons over time of various campaigns, thus allowing an ability to weigh the strength of different ideas.

Human hubs would emerge.  Those people at the center of idea dispersals, either as creators or prime disseminators, would become clear.  Those folks with the largest number of influential relationships would be rewarded by appearing on pages dedicated to revealing the ideas or campaigns with the most powerful metrics (depth, breadth, speed and span).

David and I concluded that this task would have to be done in a noncommercial environment.  We discussed how best to invest not only users with an experience of empowerment, but developers, so that the concept could grow organically.  We’d need to make it open-source.  We’d need a test environment where developers could experiment with new features.  And it strikes me now as I write this blog that we need an evaluative protocol that allows those ideas most respected by the developers to be then integrated into the application.

An alternative world would emerge, inspired by social networking, which would allow individuals to be creative, share what they created and then watch the creation’s dispersal through society in real time.  Observers could conduct searches of any subject and jump aboard the threads streaming through this alternative universe, making contributions, adding to and modifying them.

We will be able to watch the birth and evolution of ideas.  We will be able to run reports looking for patterns in the breadth, depth, speed, span, distribution and human hubs.  We will be able to seek, find, and understand the environments most likely to encourage ideas that lead to deep, lasting, positive social change.

The foundation programming architecture is completed.  We need volunteer programmers to make this network grow.  Readers, if you think this idea has potential, pass it on and have programmers contact me through this blog.

I’m not sure what it is about Lee that brings this idea generation out in me.  Like the mysterious elf in mythic stories when the youngest son needs assistance, Lee appears.  It’s possible that in this virtual tracker of gossip and concepts, idea-inspirers like Lee will be noticed, tagged and then deeply respected for their contributions to our community.

Early in July of last year, Marcia and I were driving back from the United States Social Forum (USSF) in a rented convertible, top down, at night.  Stars out, wind whizzing by, Marcia sitting beside me, an integration hit me as if in a desert landscape it started pouring and isolated lakes were linked by river flows.  Connections between different sections of my life were made.

USSF was a powerful, positive, difficult experience.  Over the period of its several days, we made numerous presentations from our booth and conducted a workshop.  We talked about the Actions Options Tool (AOT) web application and the network of networks using the AOT for free that was quickly growing across the country.  I thought we were about three months away from being ready to introduce the unique new features we were presenting at the conference, such as SNAPAP (see previous entry).

A number of organizations and individuals expressed interest in either the programming or the statewide networks going up that were using the programming.  We met and talked with national organizations, international organizations and local activists.  It was exciting, interesting and exhausting.  It had been a long time since I’d felt that immersed.

Ten years ago, I was deeply absorbed in the details of an alternative theory of human evolution that had grown out of my studies of the origin of dragon mythologies.  See humanevolution.net for details.  It had all started as an illustrated book of dragons I was writing and designing.  I got distracted.  Deeply distracted.  For almost two years, I consumed evolutionary theory, exploring evolutionary biology and then following trails into the connected disciplines primatology, anthropology, neuropsychology and language development.  Previous passions that had included communications theory, psychology, hypnotherapy, comparative religion and studies of spiritual experience linked up with my studies of evolutionary biology.  I was experiencing an integration of several disciplines with an accompanying cascade of insights.

During this intellectual bender, my twenty-year career running a sales firm came to its conclusion.  It had been a decade since I’d put much energy into it, and I was coasting on its ability to provide me many hours to peruse other interests.  I needed a new profession.  With both a design and sales background, I started a business that required both those skills, website design.  My tech skills were terrible.  I muddled through a couple years until I could afford to hire people that knew tech.

I did some writing on the relationship between autism and evolution.  I got a paper published in an obscure New Zealand psychohistory newsletter by an academic excited by my work. I drifted away from my intellectual inclinations.

I was devoting most of my time to getting a new business going.  I let my evolutionary studies languish.

Then, the Iraq war.

As the war grew longer, my involvement with the local anti-war movement grew to involvement with justice and environmental issues.  Marcia joined me as we focused on action design and execution.  Marcia and I were sharing the same passion.  A vast new variety of friends entered into our lives.  My curiosity began to seek an understanding of the dynamics of social change.  Then, my vocation merged with my avocation as I guided my firm to develop a web application that could encourage social change.

My wife and I were experiencing an attraction to the same devotion.  My business and my interests had converged.  Driving back from Atlanta, I was cruising through a Georgia nighttime living a life characterized by an unusual amount of integration. And then, the integration descended another level as if an isolated aquifer had burbled up and linked with the lakes and rivers where I lived.

What emerged was the realization that principles of evolutionary biology, specifically heterochrony and its evidence in humans as neoteny, were principles fully engaged in social transformation.  This connection was uncharted territory.  Having realized almost ten years before that autism was the manifestation of evolutionary biological principles, I realized in the convertible that night that the principles of societal evolution operated according to the same dynamics as biological evolution.  Specifically, during the process of working out how a web application could encourage social change, I had been unconsciously working out practical applications of the biological theory I’d developed the decade before.  This connection had not been clear to me until that night, sitting next to my wife, after a weekend of making human connections with activists from the world seeking ways to encourage transformation.

Then, four days later, I felt the future.

We’re two and a half years into a project that should have its first stage completed by about July1, 2009.  The Peace, Justice and Environment Project (PJEP) began with a single network of organizations in Illinois. Sixty-six organizations voted to participate in the Illinois Coalition for Peace and Justice (later to become the Illinois Coalition for Justice, Peace and the Environment) on April 1, 2006.  It was at that event that the Actions Options Tool (actionsoptions.org) web application was introduced.  At that time, it was just the Actions Grid (see http://icjpe.org/actions), a petition function and a communications message center.

Over the last two years, four online actions centers have been enhanced or added.  Participating organizations can now create online petitions, boycotts, eletters and fundraisers.  A robust resources library holds hundreds of documents.  The calendar reveals actions, events, meetings and projects across a state.

At this time, 32 states have been integrated into a national network of networks, with almost 1,000 participating organizations.  The national site, http://www.pjep.org, is being developed to present an overview of actions, petitions, boycotts, eletters and fundraisers across the country that are searchable by speed, depth, breadth and geographic span.  Activists seeking to view the position of their projects within a larger picture or desiring information on actions and online campaigns sorted by issue, effectiveness, degree of support, speed of growth, etc., can visit PJEP.org for a unique, panoramic perspective of Left/Progressive activity across the country.

PJEP has applied for nonprofit 501(c) 3 status.  PJEP is an all-volunteer organization with the exception of the programmers, who accept minimal pay.  Programmers Rod Homor and David Larson have been instrumental in the design of this extraordinarily unique, creative, powerful and flexible application.  David Larson continues to invest the project with nothing less than extraordinary capabilities.

Social networking specialized to encourage political action went live on November 11, 2007, in a satellite site, NSPIpeace.org.  When the PJEP upgrade was engaged this last May, social networking was integrated into the online campaigns for all the state networks.  We’ve called this tool Social Networking and Political Action Propagation (SNAPAP).  SNAPAP has several unique features.

SNAPAP offers what other social networking applications offer, such as file storage and sharing, a communications system and friends display.  SNAPAP, as a political action tool, offers an ability to store the phone numbers of friends for text message blasts to drive activists to events.  Unique to SNAPAP is the ability for individuals to refer friends to online campaigns and then trace their own direct and indirect influence on activists and individuals brought into the campaigns through their friends, out to several degrees of separation.  Lineage charts offer a detailed display of several generations or degrees of separation that an individual has had an effect upon, out past the people the individual knows directly.

Visit PJEP.org and go exploring.  View the lineage of online campaigns and the depth (degrees of separation) that an online action inspires.

We are seeking to create opportunities for activists to feel empowered.  We are providing high quality information that reveals the effect of an individual on the members of his or her community and that reveals how interconnecting, concentric circles of influence naturally emanate from the choices that we make.  Seeing these connections provides us the opportunity to experience that we are all connected.  Noting the connections, we are empowered.  Empowered, we can engage in the process to transform society.

PJEP programmers and volunteers continue to load the programming with ways to enhance the experience of activists and organizers to provide them with ways to be creative while creating change.

Until now politics has been separated from our personal lives.  On the day we vote, there is an intersection that feels empowering to many people.  For most, that intersection has been enough.  Many people do not vote.  Many that do vote do not feel empowered or part of the process.  Activists engage in a process to achieve social and political change.  Many activists feel they are not empowered.

In this country, for many, there has been a deep disconnect between the management of government, the economy and society on one hand and an individual experience that he or she can influence those institutions.  The media make a clear and lasting contribution to an experience that the individual cannot make a difference.  It does so in several ways.  The media make few attempts to present root causes of situations, which would provide an opportunity for observers to hypothesize solutions.  The media emphasize the priorities of advertisers and their mission to sell products over the need of an educated electorate that can make informed decisions.  The media and politicians flatter the status quo rather than suggest that with knowledge and understanding, informed individuals can have the leverage to create change.

Observing that the resources and environmental crises demand deep and sudden change, and assuming that we are prepared to meet that challenge–albeit waiting until the last moment to fully engage–I look around the world for signs of that engagement.  The world is demanding radical change.  The ways that we have to adjust to make that change possible suggest what we have to become and the pathways of transformation.

In other words, if we are going to survive and transcend, certain things have to happen.  Where do we see evidence that the process is underway?

It takes little imagination to estimate how green spring will be when April rains begin.  When a sick child starts eating, we feel relieved because we know that health is on the way.

Observing the effects of online social networking and the resources that are engaged when a person participates in that process, I estimate the repercussions as being deep, vast, fast and long.  All the right elements are in place.

It is the young that embrace it.  It is from the young that change begins.

It is cheap, making it relatively free of class and ethnic barriers.

It is easy.

It is fun.

In the last two years, social networking has revealed its depth as a device for social and political change as activists have used the tool to create actions and drive people to specific events.  In the last year, social networking has been used by the Obama campaign to raise funds and drive supporters to specific events.  Facebook and My Space have built huge constituencies that communicate through their infrastructures.  Google has developed and is seeking to encourage a universal social networking programming paradigm that allows for a seamless experience across the varying environments.

What is on the way is a single, massive, social networking environment that is noncommercial, supported by the users and programmed by volunteers.  This result is as inevitable as spring.

It will be transparent.  We will be able to observe the emergence and distribution of new ideas, creations, gossip, rumors and news as they cascade through societies across the planet.  We will become familiar with the lightning-fast communication of unique information and the power that comes with many people demanding a very specific change from individuals and institutions that can make that change.

For the world to change, individuals have to feel personally empowered.  We can imagine the world we want if we believe we have the power to make it happen.  The experience of personal empowerment is being provided users of social networking, an experience that is bridging over to a belief that the world can change.

Friendster appeared and evolved into My Space and another variation, Facebook. Other forms are emerging and filling different niches. Linkses serves the business community. Change.org enhances the nonprofit world and empowers the individual seeking change. Google is seeking to create universal social networking software. Social networking variations are appearing overseas.

It is one of those unique moments not unlike when dinosaurs evolved feathers or when humans began to sing. Social networking has the potential to transform culture in several complementing ways, quickly, in a fashion that allows for deft adjustments to a changing environment.

First, it’s cheap. Second, it’s easy. Third, it encourages participation by those with time, rather than by those with money or resources. Entry level facility can be developed in minutes.

Anyone with specific interests can find others of similar inclination, empowering both by their being members of a group. Human hubs with many connections can thrive in an environment that exhibits this characteristic and offers ways to exercise the gift. The creative can share their creations. The shy can reveal the inner self. The curious can explore. Leaders can lead. The technologists can construct and modify.

Where is this networking headed?

Prepare for a cascade.

Power will surge in the direction of the young, marginalizing the advantages of age. Those adept at social networking will have access to allies and resources formerly reserved for those with decades of experience.

Social networking takes time. Traditional media will suffer. You can’t easily advertise to people not paying attention. Social networking will help take down traditional media.

We are beginning to see how social networking has contributed to the Obama campaign. Next is social networking that creates its own candidate. Once political action tools become integrated into social networking applications, we will see the spontaneous emergence of specialty candidates serving niche issues and social networking-created issue advocates consulting with social networking-created elected officials.

So far, Obama has harnessed social networking to raise funds and drive people to events. Soon, social networking will raise funds that drive elected officials to respond to particular issues without the cooperation of elected officials. Politics is about to change.

Political parties are founded on hierarchy. Social networking operates horizontally, with transparency, breaking down the barriers that prevent diversity. Political party and social networking are not compatible. The processes are diametrically opposed. The young are discovering that en masse, they can make a difference. Watch for the flexing of young muscle when it is discovered that anyone, anywhere can start a part of a movement, provided the action is specific enough to make it easy to jump aboard.

When it is discovered that masses of people can agree on a specific action to achieve change around a specific issue, political parties will begin to fall apart. The skills that come with a lifetime of negotiating nuances to be able to package change in the career of a single person will disappear. Instead, masses will jump aboard social networking-driven particulars that are created by a social networking user that fits the bill of the masses in that moment. Youtube politics.

Soon we will have a universal, world-wide social networking matrix allowing individual users the ability to track their exact indirect influence on the interconnected world around them. If a person has an idea, he or she will be able to observe the trail of that idea as it moves out of her circle of friends to multiple degrees of separation. We will be able to view the source of the ideas, their distribution patterns and the human hubs through which information circulates. We will be able to compare ideas over time, their relative speed of propagation, depth of influence and geographic spread. Patterns will emerge over time that will provide users astonishing perspectives on the dynamics of meme (idea) production and evolution.

Consciousness becomes transparent when ideas, their origins and their evolutions become available for all to view. Walls come down when people feel empowered, not the other way around. When influence moves to those with time, the advantages of hierarchy disappear. Control becomes less about relationships of influence formed from creating allies while climbing up. Mastery becomes about how to move or influence the influential people that you are connected to around a very particular idea, file, event, issue or date.

The technology exists now. The feathers have formed. Flight is days away.

First we sang, and then we spoke. Now we learn to communicate.

Autism researchers such as Simon Baron-Cohen have noted a pattern. The mother’s testosterone levels influence the likelihood of a child having autism. The higher the mother’s testosterone level, the more possible the child will be autistic. The work of the late Norman Geschwin in the early 1980s paved the way for this understanding. Still, the context in which the mother’s testosterone level makes sense is still not pursued by researchers seeking to understand the origins of autism. Neither Baron-Cohen nor Geschwin have backgrounds in evolutionary biology, which might have provided them an introduction to arcane nineteenth century alternative theories of evolution. We all suffer the effects of a century of obsession with Darwin’s theory of natural selection.

One of the patterns that a commitment to natural selection masks is that evolution can happen extremely quickly, in a single lifetime. Darwin was aware of single-generational change and struggled for an explanatory principle. He called his theory pangenesis. According to pangenesis, the body manufactures gemmules that can carry information informing the body of environmental change, which the body responds to, modifying progeny in response.

We call them hormones.

We live in a post-Mendelian age. When a cloned sheep emerges from the mother with fur exhibiting different patterns from her other self, we might take notice. This effect is not what was predicted. With the complete genome mapped and realizing that things aren’t exactly as easy as Mendel suggested, we might consider alternative paradigms.

A mother with high testosterone produces males with low testosterone and females with high testosterone. The child’s maturation speed is determined six weeks before birth based on the mother’s testosterone level. Imagine that the fetus reaches that point, six weeks before birth, and the individual’s lifelong maturation rate is set. Now imagine that it is not only the speed that the individual will mature in his or her own life that is calculated, but his or her position in evolutionary time. What is determined by the mother’s testosterone level is the child’s position in the evolutionary arc of our species over the last several tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of years.

This trend means, as Frederick Engels and several nineteenth century proto-anthropologists suggested, a return to matriarchal social structures: low testosterone males and high testosterone females.

Ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny. Stages of our ontogeny inform and reproduce the final stages of our social structure evolution.

Autism manifests that recent stage in our unfolding where split-brain modern consciousness emerges and language use bridges over from gesture to speech. The females were often the leaders of these bands. They wielded authority and were first to be adept with words. Their brains made the transition first from two lobes of the same size with a wide corpus callosum to brains with a smaller right lobe with less robust cerebral connective tissues. Split brains made them better leaders. They could toy with time. Males continued to be selected for their cooperative, artistic, neotenic tendencies to be dependent upon and comply with the directions of the band.

With the story we are telling, we’d expect our male and female autistics, our travelers to the past, to evidence complementary opposite features.

I would predict that autistic males (those from families of left-handers, families evidencing maturational delay, not the autism born of trauma) will evidence neotenous characteristics such as smaller jaws, big heads and a post-puberty lanky build (unless provided diets that would hasten the onset of puberty). The literature already suggests that autistic males have larger brains with two lobes the same size. The males, of course, should have lower testosterone relative to the autistic female and relative to the standard, nonautistic right-handed male.

The autistic female is relatively rare compared to the autistic male, because you have to go further back in evolutionary time to find females having difficulty with words, with brains not yet split. I would predict that the autistic female would show little neoteny as compared to a nonautistic female. The autistic female should evidence a larger jaw, stockier build and a more domineering disposition when compared to her contemporary sisters. She should reveal higher testosterone levels relative to the standard, right-handed nonautistic female.

This model predicts complementary opposite characteristics of male and female autistics that mirror the matriarchal social structure that is their society of origin. When we understand that social evolution, biological evolution and ontological transformation are all about different time scales of the identical process, we can better interpret what we are observing in the now.

There is a principle in hypnosis that suggests that a patient’s ability to achieve a targeted change is enhanced when the patient is unaware of the details of the intervention.

The hypnotherapist is not trying to hide anything from the unconscious. It is through the therapist’s forming a pact with the unconsciousness that the change is engaged. The hypnotherapist is hiding what is happening from the client’s conscious mind.

The targeted change is further encouraged if the patient does not notice that a change has taken place.

American conservatism is chock-full of blind spots. With media reflecting and promoting the agenda of corporations, which form an important pillar of the conservative tribunal (corporations, neo-cons, social conservatives), media do not focus on the problems that many in society would like to change. The Left notices. Society, in a sense, has hauled itself to the hypnotherapist. The therapist has put society into a trance. Media, or what society is aware of, are asleep and deeply focused elsewhere.

Massive changes are underway, changes that are connected, and it is important that we not notice these changes.

Twenty-five countries in Western and Eastern Europe are closely uniting into an integrated whole providing health care, social protection and peace to its citizens and visitors from other countries. This group is almost 15% of all the countries in the world. Not incidentally, the American government concluded that it was in America’s best interest to encourage this process by contributing billions of dollars in the 1940s and 1950s toward European reconstruction and integration.

There is a huge increase in autism. Several variables suggest that autism’s origins have to do with our evolution as a species. Evolutionary developmental biologists are theorizing that natural selection may have far less to do with the details of evolution, particularly human evolution, than has previously been proposed. The biological repercussions of human sexual selection practices in combination with environmental influences are changing the way we look and behave. Autism is the most obvious evidence of these changes.

The youth we are sending off to war make poor soldiers. Few want to face this fact. We are poor at killing and poor at taking orders. Our fighting men and women are suffering psychological repercussions for their actions to degrees never observed in the past. Our young people, specialists in forming connections with people they know and don’t know through new technologies and the web, make terrible perpetrators of the connection-severing characterized by war and occupation.

Capitalist democracy has failed. A grass roots re-democratization of society is underway. Older activists can’t figure out why youth aren’t protesting in the streets. Young people are burning up bandwidth, sowing society with transparency, horizontal communications and organizational structures, and they are destroying ethnic and cultural boundaries. While activists mull over why youth aren’t protesting and corporations seek ways to advertise on the net, young people are becoming empowered in ways that older activists barely understand. The young are learning to actually get what they want while older activists still believe we should get what we want. Helplessness, encouraged by the media and deeply embedded in the Left, is being purged from our youth.

With media eyes focused on other places, society has the freedom to evolve. In just those ways that our conscious minds inhibit our natural tendency to transform, too much attention by the media on the dynamics of societal transformation would discourage those changes. When half the world’s countries are living in political union, when autism is embraced and understood, when youth are not sent off to slaughter, when grass roots democracy has been engaged, the media will still be focused on what advertisers want us to notice.

When world peace comes, we won’t be told. That’s how things get better.

As an activist, I experience a kind of love/hate relationship with the news.  I am both attracted and repulsed by what appears through the various avenues of information distribution.

The news drives protesters into the street.  Protests draw cameras.  What cameras see affect public opinion.  Public opinion can change an elected official’s vote.

I am attracted to the news because it offers organizers leverage to frame debates and compel the population to get involved.  Modern organizing is partially about lists and relationships.  Email lists provide access to many people at one time.  Social networking–real time and online–drives friends and colleagues to respond to a single event at once.  A news story can be the beginning of a chain of powerful connections over time that, when strung together, create a movement of people creating change.

A news story is not just about the response it causes and the change that it can help bring about.  The story is also about the relationships created between activists that will form the foundation for future action around future items in the news.

An organizer watches and listens closely to the news, observing the response of media and allies to the news, intuiting what will move activists and local residents to action.  I know activists that engage almost exclusively in this media surveillance, doing little else.  Their contribution is essential.  It is consuming.  There are people with a talent for this monitoring.  I’m not one of them.

Watching and listening to the news, I become caught up in the parallel world of nonstop horror accompanied by voyeuristic complicity.  Viewers are encouraged to feel helpless in a number of different ways, guided to not respond to what they see on screen.  I feel angry at what the editors have chosen to reveal to me about the world.  I feel appalled at the conclusions that the professional opinion holders suggest to us are a reasonable response.  I feel distressed by the underlying assumptions or presuppositions that encourage us to feel helpless.  I feel disgusted by how little attention is given to underlying causes, suggesting that having an effect is outside our power to make a change.

I watch the commercials.  Watching commercials is like observing a list of human biological compulsions accompanied by recipes for how to motivate people to change.  People are being called to action, to spend their money.  It’s the only place on radio and TV where people are being asked to do something.

I respect the activists that can tolerate frequent exposure to what the media create.  I’d be a better organizer if I could pay close attention to what’s happening in the news.  For now, I’ll continue to listen to my friends.

This last week we observed repercussions of a clash between a quickly integrating world and a financial elite seeking to enhance its wealth and power by legislating minimal regulation with no transparency. Corporations wished to experience no accountability by their behavior. The result, in this new integrated world, is the beginning of the end of American Capitalism.

What happened between Monday and Friday of last week happened over many months earlier in this century. On Monday, the elites realized that by creating financial vehicles whose sole purpose was to generate exponential wealth, they had manufactured a mythology that had crashed. By Friday a run on 3.4 trillion dollars of money market funds had begun, the equivalent to the savings deposits withdrawal dynamic that occurred in the 1930s. The Government decided to do what governments do – shield the interests of private institutions – to protect the corporations whose behaviors were destroying savings.

The integration of the financial world has exponentially decreased the time that the crises of confidence had spread across the planet. It is now understood that with no transparency, regulation or accountability the elites had created fictitious wealth and hid the location of fiction in the system.

It is time we, the left/progressive movement, integrate in response.

My Space and Facebook-like tools will become the avenues of popular uprising with countless ideas emerging from angry people who demand change. Through these new social networking technologies, populations are becoming horizontally integrated across the world. Powerful ideas/actions will emerge among the working population, ideas that will be date-based with a single focus that require no negotiation, coalitions, or managing bodies. This will occur in the same way that word of the toppling of the corporatist cornucopia mythology ran rampant through the financial community last week,.

We are entering the age of integrated anarchy.

If the American Left is to have a profound influence over the next few years it will be through its ability to articulate our priorities, communicate and cooperate through these social networking vehicles.

I urge you to sign up for Facebook, and then SNAPAP. SNAPAP is a Social Networking and Political Action page available through the Peace Justice and Environment Project network. Already almost 1000 peace, justice and environmental organizations are integrated into a single left/progressive social networking, political action environment now operational in 32 states. Visit PJEP.org to view the national hub. ICJPE.org was the founding network in this network of political action networks now integrated to include social networking.

Go to ICJPE.org and set up your SNAPAP page. If you’re not under 25 it will not be an intuitive process. Be patient. Contact Marcia or me for personal guidance.

Make yourself conversant with the language of transformation. Online tools to empower the powerless exist. The era of deep and lasting change is here.

Starting in 1980, I began building a sales firm specializing in greeting cards, calendars and gifts.  It was one of those accidents of profession.  Seeking to make a living as an illustrator, I was working part-time as a vegetarian cook, as an assistant to a teacher working with autistic youth and as a child day care worker.  I’d published a selection of my illustrated maps of consciousness as greeting cards and placed them in 20 shops around Chicago the first month I carried them around.  Other small greeting card companies asked me to carry their lines with mine when making presentations.  With time, I was paying my bills by selling the works of other illustrators, in the form of greeting cards.

I have no gift of gab or compulsion to talk to strangers.  My success in sales was predicated almost entirely on persistence.  I don’t easily give up.

By 1990, most of my income was based on the sales of The Far Side page-a-day calendar to national chains located in Illinois, such as Walgreens, OSCO, Sears and Montgomery Ward.  One product in one of my lines was allowing me to pursue interesting creative projects.  In the 1990s, my wife and I created a puppet manufacturing company.  I started a comic strip and panel syndicate representing 12 alternative cartoonists, including my own work.  In Chicago and Ann Arbor, I published Comics Arts Chicago and Comic Arts Ann Arbor, exhibiting the works of alternative comic artists from across the country.

It worried me no small amount that such a large part of my income was based on a single source, The Far Side page-a-day calendar.  When Montgomery Wards went chapter 11, there were several hundred thousand dollars of calendars on their shipping dock that were never distributed to their locations.  That commission was debited from future checks.  Success led to more and more precarious a position as larger and larger portions of my income came from a single product sold to so few stores.

It lasted almost ten years longer than I thought it would.  When, after nineteen years, I found myself looking for a new profession, I determined not to be so vulnerable again.

Almost ten years now I’ve developed websites.  I look for small, local clients that can use the services that I offer long-term.  There are seven communities on the North Shore of Chicago and almost 1,800 retail outlets.  More than 1,000 are independent businesses, locally owned.  Every year I walk into the door of each of those thousand businesses, providing information on what I do.  I am persistent.  I am considerate.  I offer my experiences, seeking to provide owners guidance that is in their best interest.

In my last profession, I sold fewer than a dozen items to mostly four chains.  Though the companies I represented listed tens of thousands of products, and my reps and I served several hundred stores, it was not a healthy business.  There were too few connections.  The community I served was too small.  Chains are notoriously fickle, and they lie.  I don’t even want to get into that.

In my present profession, I seek as large an interconnected webbing as is easy to maintain with as many small, local customers as I can find.  Income has been stable the last four years, and the business is healthy.  I experience far less anxiety than in my last profession about whether future orders will be there.  I feel part of a community.

In the deregulated, unregulated, nonaccountability environment created by Democrats and Republicans alike, there has been lip service paid to the advantages of competition while protecting the wealthy and their corporations through legislation from the competing demands of health care, unions, consumers, day care, safety, etc.  Instead of creating healthy interconnections serving society at the many levels that a corporation influences in its environment, corporations have sought the dollar and nothing else.  They are vulnerable.  It doesn’t seem clear to them that connections are a sign of health.

When the American business milieu gets the growing paradigm that it’s not about survival of the fittest and destroying the competition, but about integration into the environment and serving in as many ways as is useful, then health in business and health in society will be the same.

Watching TV and observing media, one notes that different ideals of beauty are exposed. From the orientation of social-structure representatives of the two primary paradigms, media offer a unique perspective of matrifocal and patrifocal beauty points of view.

Neoteny is physically represented in specific facial features. A matrifocal social structure encourages the selection of males exhibiting neotenous characteristics, which would include smaller jaw, bigger eyes and possibly a more lanky build. The male would be altogether more gracile than robust. Females would tend to be less neotenous than their patrifocal counterparts, with a more square jaw and stocky presence.

In a patrifocal social structure, macho men are choosing demure women for their neotenous tendencies. Western female beauty frames are engaged. The woman has smaller jaws, seemingly bigger eyes, a more petite frame and features of the young. Blonde hair and blue eyes are often characteristics of infants that fade with time. As a neotenous feature, blue-eyed blondes are classic patrifocal female beauty markers. But for hair and eye color, Asian females exhibit many of the features of a beautiful patriarchal woman. The classic handsome patrifocal man has a square jaw and robust build, which are non-neotenous characteristics.

Media expose us to actor examples of these two paradigms, often staging stories that provide the facial/body types the opportunity to represent the orientations of these two social structures.

Facial symmetry has emerged as a variable that suggests where beauty reposes. It has also been hypothesized that facial asymmetry reflects cerebral asymmetry. For example, extreme right-handedness may reflect a left hemisphere more exaggerated and larger than is normal relative to the right hemisphere. This exaggeration may also be reflected in two sides of the face diverging more in look than a less extremely right-handed person. For women, where the two brain hemispheres exhibit less difference in size than a right-handed male, there would be less facial asymmetry. Normally, women would exhibit less facial asymmetry than men and so seem more beautiful.

In a patrifocal society, the characteristics of male extreme right-handedness–hierarchical orientation, status consciousness, male control of female procreation–are more engaged. Perhaps male facial asymmetry is a marker for a desirable mate in patrifocal social structure.

In a matrifocal social structure, where the features of left-handedness are positive characteristics in the males–males perform, males cooperate, females control their own procreation–both male hemispheres are closer together in size with an exhibition of relative male facial symmetry.

Autistic males, the extreme representatives of matrifocal social structure males, males that are often left-handed, are often noted as particularly beautiful as children. This appearance may have a lot to do with the autistic brain featuring two hemispheres that are the same size, the right side never having been pruned by testosterone surges in early childhood. Same-sized hemispheres produce facial symmetry, which is a marker for beauty if you are a matrifocal female seeking a mate (or a patrifocal male searching for a patrifocal female).

Convention suggests it’s a mystery what attracts us to our mates. Behind mystery is pattern. Pattern reveals connections that make our origins clear. Observe media for how the entertainment structure represents beauty and the social structure archetypes that beauty portrays. Because these representations of beauty are all unconscious–beauty is determined by how beauty “feels”–media is almost oracular in the quality of its constructions. Oracular in that media interpretations of beauty are true, subtle and far deeper than what they seem.

I use an image to explain the relationship between different activists’ intervention philosophies. The image is the teeter-totter. On both the left and right, political activists engage tactics that are part of strategies for change. They seek to move the center, the status quo, the conventions of society located in the present, in the direction of the past or the future. The Right seeks that we withdraw to behaviors society threatens to abandon. The Left works to seek to achieve changes that have not yet been engaged.

At present, with the Right in America having so successfully brought things backward eighty years or more, what with the dramatic increase of stratification and corporate control, it seems like the Left is seeking to go backward to the 1970s when there was some obvious forward movement. Right backward. Left forward. However far back the Right succeeds in pushing back conventions, the Left keeps seeking to place its weight on the teeter-totter in a way that changes the center of gravity, forcing the center to move in the Left’s direction, forward in time.

This competition is a might confusing because our societal convention has time marching from left to right as we read from left to right. With this metaphor, imagine the Right Wing on the left side of the teeter-totter and the Left Wing on the right. With this switch in orientation, time flows in the direction of our political nomenclature.

Arguments over strategy and tactics, where on the teeter-totter we should push, has a lot to do with resource control, age, demographics, proximity to power, talents and friends. For the young radical with few resources, the best place to push down is on those locations on the board farthest from the center. When all you have is your person, few connections to the center and no resources that can be threatened, leverage that weight to the farthest point possible. There is where a young person will have the most effect.

Contrast that radical with an older activist who has connections to politicians, connections that provide occasional conversations with a representative and the opportunity to be present at events where elected officials can be approached. For that activist, pushing down near the center, nearer the fulcrum, seems intuitive. These activists seek to leverage their access to power to engage in conversation, which is an opportunity unavailable to youth. The older activist could move farther out from the center, where their weight could have more of an effect, but then they could lose their connection to elected officials and the potential influence that connection affords.

Where activists choose to put their weight has to do with where they feel comfortable on this moving platform, their personality, their access to wealth and their access to free time. Each seeks a place that provides leverage with the variables that accompany his or her station in life. Clearly, if every moderate/progressive moved toward their leverage-left extreme, the center would lean quickly in the direction of where the weight is.

That is not what is happening today. Instead, a vast number of people are inching their way in the Left’s direction, moving the center in the direction of change. There is an understanding that the corporate elite so successfully threw their weight to the extreme edge of the right side of the teeter-totter that the gilded age arrived with no announcement or suggestion that things had changed. Controlling media has that benefit. It’s now slowly becoming clear to the status quo that the war, the redistribution of wealth and the de-democratization of society are closely related.

Forces greasing the teeter-totter platform compelling this slide in the direction of change are the web and communications technology. We are witnessing society on a subtle yet pervasive slide in a left direction as individuals experience themselves empowered by the transparent, communication-enhancing, diversity-inducing features of the web. Weight makes a difference when exerting change. So does friction. By making it effortless to slide to the left, technology is encouraging change.

The greased board is inclining in the left direction.

The steeper the incline, the faster the center will slide.

Natural selection encouraged the transformation of dinosaurs into birds.  Though much attention in this age of Neo-Social Darwinism focuses on how natural selection makes it possible for the strongest to survive, it is often some other feature (speed, small size, agility, cleverness) that natural selection chooses if the feature serves to keep the individual alive until he or she can procreate.

There is that myth that mammals took over from the dinosaurs after the asteroid impact filled the air with debris that blocked out the sun.  The story has changed.  After the impact, the dinosaurs took to the sky that killed the plants that fed their larger brethren.  Unable to easily rule the earth, birds became kings and queens of heaven.

A huge maple tree in our back yard is slowly losing a major limb.  A twelve-foot crack running parallel to the horizontal appendage threatens to crack the branch and topple it into our neighbor’s yard.  Eventually, the big trees fall.  When they do, other life can emerge.  Little grows in our back yard because the shade created by this tree is so dense.  When it goes, I will grow strawberries.

There is a place for corporations in our lives and in the media, but not the place they hold.  An asteroid in the form of the web has slammed into commercial sphere, creating a haze of chaotic democratizing forces that will inevitably encourage the emergence of new life forms.  The sky is changing.  Global warming compels cooperation and a shift to an understanding of the commons.  These two forces will destroy the corporations we now know.  What heaven-bound creature will emerge?

Imagine the evening news and the productions of our media as the dreams emerging from a troubled patient or the myths that linger around a culture in distress. I’ve considered that the tools of comparative religion might serve best to parse the meaning of these cultural constructions, but it feels like a societal perspective provides more play. Ad agencies make commercials, production companies create shows and political observers/editors design the news. Produced by these institutions of enterprise, the product feels like the fever dreams of corporations lying half asleep in a sweaty bed after overeating.

Pace and lead is the foundation of psychotherapy, salesmanship and communication theory. To establish rapport and provide guidance, it is necessary to mirror or reflect the target’s behavior and beliefs until the person trusts that they are understood. Once the person believes what the practitioner is saying, because the practitioner is saying what the target believes, that target can be guided to what the practitioner wishes the target to understand. The practitioner can be acting in the best interests of a patient when a psychotherapist practices pace and lead. The practitioner might not care what is in the best interests of a consumer if it’s a corporation that seeks a specific goal.

In this media fever dream we are all constantly exposed to, information emphasizing sex and the importance of status mirror our ubiquitous hormonal primate heritage that informs our thoughts, our feelings and our self esteem. These themes keep emerging, often together, in commercials, shows and the news. These motifs pace our deep experience, leading quickly, once we are engaged in the story driven by sex and status, to what they want us to buy. Whereas in dream and myth a tale has been composed to offer insight, the media design communications to lead us to outsight. We are guided to view things we could have that we don’t have that we could buy. We are guided to participate in the stories that will guide us to feel compelled to watch or listen to the story. It is not necessary that we be introduced to understandings within.

Seeking to understand us so that we can be led, media reflect back to us who we are and what we seek.

As has been noted in other entries in this blog, the unique way that humans engage in sexual selection deeply informs how we live our lives. We have evolved to a place where the performance/evaluation feedback loop characteristic of some species has become invested in almost every aspect of our daily existence. We don’t just evaluate or perform to achieve a mate; we evaluate and perform as part of our basic thought process, our very ability to use language to usefully recreate the world in words. Language, the choices we make and our compulsion to evaluate are all the results of sexual selection. We are peacocks and peahens gone wild. We see compelling feathers everywhere we look. We preen, almost without pause.

Media, reflecting back to us this compulsion, lead us easily to what they would have us evaluate and buy, purchase and preen with. Again, corporations intuit our deepest biological drives, mirror them back to us and lead us to where they want us to go. They are not leading us to any understanding. They don’t understand themselves. They think that what they are about is achieving goals.

Sex, status and sexual selection. Three things the media use to pace and lead.

Next channel on evolution’s dial is social structure. This one is more difficult for media to mirror. There are the two primary polarities, patrifocal and matrifocal, with hybrid subcultures within societies that exhibit characteristics of both. Whereas the news takes clearly patriarchal positions that side with hierarchical authority demeaning horizontal, compassion-based, democratizing orientations, commercials and shows will take either frame, sometimes both at the same time. Critical of the extremes (polygamy and marriage less communes), one show might encourage serial relations while another might honor long-term bonds. Commercials emphasize both the need for a woman to showcase her beauty and for a man to display/exhibit.

In a patrifocal frame, a man seeks to communicate his high status by his close proximity to the accoutrements of wealth. For the matrifocal man, commercials are created that appeal to the male desire to satisfy the woman by appealing to her aesthetic side or making her the center of his world.

The patrifocal man climbs high, gathering stuff and showing off the stuff that he has gathered. The matrifocal man shows how much better a performer he is than the competition and that he understands what it is that a woman wants.

“Look at my stuff,” says the patrifocal man and his new, gas-guzzling car. He can afford this powerful vehicle. He can afford to waste the money that goes into paying for the gas for this vehicle. He can be trusted to provide.

“Look at me paying attention to you,” says the matrifocal man, showing off the stereo with speakers throughout the apartment. He knows how to provide a positive experience.

We the dreamers often don’t know the import of our dreams. Societal myths operate at several levels, at depths unexplored by most experiencers of the words. The popular productions of our culture pour from the devices advertised on those devices, creating a loop that ensures little conscious control or understanding of the process. Like dream and myth, there is evidence of deeper or larger awareness. Like dream or myth, there are signs of compassionate intent. Though news programs, shows and ads often seem like some psychotic corporate Yurtle the Turtle/King Midas/Saudi King shared-hormonal hallucination, there is sense to this madness.

By becoming experts in compelling us to buy, corporations have become exquisitely trained at reflecting the human experience. Exploring corporate productions, we can find ourselves. Like the myth of Narcissus, we have the media to serve as the mirror to discover the reality, and beauty, of who we are.

But, as the myth suggests, there is the danger of falling in love with our reflection. De-enamoring ourselves is a good place to begin.

Jung wrote extensively on the relationship between myth and culture and how that relationship reveals a dynamic similar to the association between dream and the individual.  Joseph Campbell offered four primary purposes of myth.  Researchers have posited many ways that dreams keep us healthy.  It has been suggested that dream and myth are but stories along a single continuum, not unlike the continuum of practitioners seeking to interpret these stories, arcing from counselor to psychotherapist to spiritual guide.

Our times are not characterized by the sharing of universal myths, though some do surface during holidays.  Our culture is becoming powerfully informed by a universality of story, compelling “news” that commands the airwaves for days or months.  In just the way that dreams reveal, wrestle with and heal the divisions that emerge while experiencing life, these media stories act as windows for interpreters to view the forces that society is seeking to face, assimilate and transcend.

A therapist does not live with the person whose dreams are being interpreted.  The practitioner addresses the client’s distress from a position or context somewhat removed, with clear boundaries.  There is a suggestion that when interpreting the news or stories broadcast by the media, the practitioner can best perform his or her translation from some distance.  Media commentary that I observe reads like psychotherapist interpretations written while living with the patient, commenting constantly on the relationship.  Professional boundaries have disappeared.  We need a discipline devoted to media production interpretation, a discipline with some distance.

Just as there are numerous developmental and intervention models to guide a psychotherapist on a treatment, there are conventions used by specialists in comparative religion when exploring the meaning of myths.  I’m not yet seeing similar techniques being applied to what emerges from the evening news.  What we are offered by the news and media is clearly arbitrary when evaluating what information would best inform a populace to provide a context to make decisions about the world.  News is not about news.  News is about a combination of what news creators believe we want to see/hear and what news creators want us to see/hear.

I’m suggesting that viewing and listening to the news, shows and commercials is like viewing and listening to the dreams in a patient living a life filled with conflicting emotions in difficult times.  It’s time we developed some interpretive tools.

A place to begin is by exploring the battling neurologies, psychologies, physiologies and mythologies of the converging and merging social structures of modern times:  patriarchal and matriarchal.  Viewing content from those two perspectives provides insight, for example, on the difference between Fox and Moyers.  We would also do well to consider the influence of sex, status and sexual selection on what we experience when exposed to news, shows and commercials.

Jung and Campbell only indirectly addressed the influence of biology on society.  To understand modern myth, biology would be a good place to begin.

In ancient cultures across the world, there are myths describing a time when women controlled society with a magic more powerful than men’s. These stories go on to describe that there is a loss of the women’s power. Yet the stories also express that there still remains an awesome strength tied to female menstruation; the monthly moon blood is to be feared and respected.

Not unlike the experience of traveling to little-visited, far-flung corners of the earth and finding surprisingly similar myths describing origins of local culture; we find ourselves filled with a similar wonder upon traveling to little-visited academic sub-disciplines. Just as two far-apart aboriginal cultures might have no contact with each other, the heterochronic practitioners of evolutionary biology have little traffic with the neuropsychological theorists who may be located less than a hundred yards away in another building on the same campus. Strangely, we find these different scientists discussing identical processes in different terminologies with almost no published awareness that they have much in common.

How might two different scientific disciplines be discussing the same natural dynamic and not know it, like two aboriginal societies fearing menstrual blood half a world apart, unaware of another culture with the same belief?

The followers of heterochronic theory, tucked within the discipline of evolutionary biology, follow the influence of the relative rate and timing of development and maturation on species transformation. These theorists believe they have discovered a shortcut in the process by which Darwin’s selective processes, natural selection and sexual selection, cajole and curtail the way species transform and go through metamorphosis. The concept is elegant. Instead of waiting for chance mutations or unusual random variations, the selective processes act to retain specific useful features characterized by changes in maturation. A simple variation in, for example, the speed with which an individual can reach maturity, could mean that this faster-growing individual could defend himself or herself against a threat to which another, slower-developing individual might yield to. By passing on this ability to grow faster, this individual’s progeny would also have an increased chance to survive.

This example is one of several ways of manipulating the development and maturation process. Growing smaller is an advantage in many situations, as is growing slower. For example, spending more time at a specific maturational stage, the stage when brain size increase is the most rapid, might result in a far larger brain when that individual reaches adulthood; for example by having a more prolonged early infancy, some species might attain a larger brain size. All that changed may have been the rate of maturation at a specific age for a specific or extended period of time.

Stephen J. Gould suggests that the prolongation of the stages of infant growth into adulthood, since our divergence from chimpanzee-like ancestors five million years ago, would result in many features we identify as human. Human adults look like chimpanzee infants; in this case, a human’s ancestral infant stage prolongs its features into its descendant’s adulthood. An awareness of the rates and timing of maturation leads to an understanding of how humans evolved.

So how do rate and timing changes in hominid evolution relate to the studies of neuropsychologists?

Evolution is not just a record of the processes of the past leading to the present. Evolution is the process by which life unfolds in the here and now. The biggest block to understanding the connection between these two disciplines is the belief by many evolutionary theorists that the genes you pass on to your progeny cannot be revised once you have been conceived. The confusion has to do with the belief that our genes are randomly dealt according to a randomly created sperm impregnating an egg randomly created by the female’s parents. Overlooked is that long, long ago, embryos and animals were genetically programmed, naturally selected, to respond to changes in their environment, passing on these adaptations to their progeny in a form that their progeny could use to revise the rate and timing of their development and maturation to conform with what their parent’s bodies had learned.

Changes in diet influence the onset of puberty. The onset of puberty has been dropping for 100 years, with teens now starting their changes three to four years earlier. It has been suggested that increased high fat diets, non-meat fats, carbohydrates, hormone-infused meats or even plain protein trigger earlier puberty, which generates a change in the body’s environment that gets communicated to the next generation genetically when eggs and sperm are produced. Eggs and sperm are produced from the body’s hormonal constellation at the time of egg and sperm creation; for the woman, her eggs are created when she herself is an embryo; for the man, sperm creation is within days of ejaculation. The parent’s body knows hormonally that there has been an increase in specific elements of the diet. The message is passed on through genes that were naturally selected to be able to discriminate hormonal changes. It is an important message. It is a message that, over the course of several generations, can mean a huge difference in the number of descendants walking the globe. Early puberty means early procreation. A message that higher dietary reserves exist accelerates puberty, increasing the potential for more offspring to take advantage of the increased resources. Puberty has been dropping for 100 years as each generation has passed to the next the information that those resources still exist.

This is evolution in the here and now–individuals making it possible for their progeny to flourish in a changing environment. They are creating progeny prepared for the specific world they are entering. We pass on the information that directs our children into appropriate maturation rates based on how our hormonal systems fluctuate with the environment we live in. It is our hormonal systems that guide the creation of the egg, the sperm and the uterine environment that guide our children to a fertile adulthood.

Many neurological conditions and diseases are a direct result of hormonal messages guiding the rate and timing of development and maturation of individuals in circumstances that convention does not view as useful for survival. Extremely maturationally delayed individuals can evidence autism. Heterochronic theorists and neuropsychologists are both describing the effects of environments on the rate and timing of maturation. Both are describing the identical processes. Neuropsychologists see the effects of rate and timing changes on a time scale of the present–fast time. Evolutionary biologists have difficulty speeding up enough to see it. Without the perspective across time–slow time–characteristic of an evolutionary biological point of view, neuropsychologists behave unaware that a condition may have an evolutionary foundation. Observing autism, they don’t see its evolutionary origins. In both cases, because nonrandom changes can lead to single-generation changes, theorists trained to note only random changes do not see them.

Those ancient myths describing the power of women, the magic of menstruation, may be grounded in those same processes that make up the world of the evolutionary biologist and neuropsychologist. Aboriginal myths may be describing the power of the female womb to determine the specific nature of the child within. It has recently been discovered by a neuroscientist that a mother’s hormone levels while her child is in the womb dramatically influence that child’s maturation rates. Artificial and environmental interventions change an embryo’s maturation speed by changing the mother’s testosterone levels. The blood of a woman carries a heavy magic.

Ancient peoples across the planet have myths grounded in a magic we are only starting to understand. Scientists in different disciplines may be actually exploring the same aboriginal territory, unaware that they have colleagues mere feet away in the very same jungle.

Watching the wind stir leaves and branches as it flows around and through the trees, I often wonder what conclusions we could come to if we could not feel the wind.  It would be clear that something was influencing the movement.  We might conclude that all the leaves and limbs somehow know to respond together, motivated by an identical impulse.  Because branches have no muscles, we would posit that a force was in play that we could not see or feel.

It is impolitic among academics to suggest that evolution evidences an awareness that connects and encourages the existence and behaviors of species across the planet.  We still suffer the repercussions of an interventionist deity that demands that society conform to his alpha male point of view.  We’re throwing out the messiah baby with the Abrahamic bathwater, not having stopped to notice the baby is a girl.  We’re committing female deity infanticide.  All to make absolutely sure that myth and science don’t mix.  Reasonable.  Beside the point.  There are the Eastern myth-less studies of awareness.

Imagine that awareness informs biological, societal and personal evolution.  The paradox I come back to is how is it that evolution unfolds in a manner that suggests chance or happenstance while at the same time we experience evidence of awareness?  This paradox is a biological variation of the individual within society facing the conundrum of free will vs. fate.  Biological chance vs. awareness.  Individual free will vs. fate.  Two riddles that demand that a choice be made.  How can both be true?

In science, an anomaly is the clue and, with time, the doorway to the next paradigm.  A paradox, such as free will vs. fate, is the societal version of an anomaly.  Paradox provides a clue to where a synthesis or alternative paradigm is hidden.  Wind would be a mystery to us, except we feel its touch.  Without a sense of touch, we’d have no clue.  Clearly, grounded sensibilities can offer anomaly or paradox resolution.

An answer can be a sense or perception.  An answer does not have to be in words.

Indeed, the ancestor of all senses is touch/feel.  As in everything else, there is a sequence in an evolution of the senses that may inform an understanding of where we want to go.  Another Ouroboros is emerging as we turn to the first sense, the sense of touch, to suggest a guide to simultaneous experience, associative understanding and a bridge to an awareness that transcends paradoxes.

Feeling has no imagination.  Touch is not two places at once.  This first sense completes the cycle to the sixth sense.  Feeling and awareness meet up in the ever-present now.

To understand the wind, we must be able to feel.  To solve the riddle of conflicting chance and awareness, we can be aware.  Free will and fate are both a fiction.  They both rely upon the future.  In the present, the future fades.  In the present is our body.

Home, in our bodies, the contradictions disappear.  Feel the winds of change.  They lead us home.

Sasha the cat lived with us five years.  Five years of allergy hell for me.  Five years of furry heaven for my wife.  Sasha seemed thimble-sized when she arrived.  She was billed as hypoallergenic.  Not so.  Even when she was teeny, she had me wheezing.

It was maybe a year before we realized that Sasha thought she was a squirrel.  The neighbors had dogs, so she wasn’t too inclined to go exploring much past our little cement back yard, where she might have met others of her kind.  So, watching out the windows, she saw squirrels.  Wandering about the back yard, she saw squirrels.  And, as noted in the previous entry, it was not infrequent that she happened upon squirrels inside the house.  Squirrels were everywhere.  And so on occasions, Sasha would be seen gamboling back and forth across horizontal branches in the front or back yard, as she’d watched the squirrels do.

We noticed that the squirrels were growing familiar with Sasha.  I’d interpreted Sasha’s hiding and then pouncing on the squirrels as evidence of predatory behavior.  Yet, the squirrels always got away.  Slowly, I realized she was playing.  The squirrels understood.  Eventually, Sasha would sit and watch the squirrels.  The squirrels would come right up to her, looking for morsels.  Everyone was relaxed.

The squirrels were way too intimate with the insides of our row house.  One squirrel, Other Mama, would come in a third story window, go down two flights of stairs, wiggle underneath the dining room door and wander into the kitchen to look for treats.  One morning, I walked into the kitchen to see Sasha in one of her customary positions, sitting by the refrigerator, waiting for it to open.  Patiently sitting next to her was Other Mama.

Humans have tamed each other over millions of years by selecting neoteny as a desired feature in a mate.  Humans have tamed dogs by selecting those that effectively evidenced puppy behavior as adults.  It seemed that Sasha was exhibiting neotenous behavior as she played with squirrels that her contemporaries would prefer to slay.  Still, Sasha was very selective about whom she would play with.  With the squirrels, evidently she kept her nails in when pouncing.  With me, nails were always out.  It didn’t feel like she was playing when I observed long, red streaks upon my forearms.

Sasha now visits when her new human goes on a vacation.  It takes five seconds for her to feel at home.  Departing from her carrying case, rubbing against Marcia, scratching me, she goes to the window to see which of her buddies are close by.

I’m a squirrel trainer.  I don’t do this work professionally, which is a good thing, because I’m not a very good squirrel trainer.  But because I have little competition, this fact seems not to have mattered.  I began this avocation fifteen years ago when I grew intimate with Amber and Chunky, two squirrels that thrived on my block in Chicago.  Amber grew tame with time and eventually ate peanuts out of my hand.  The kids thought this was pretty nifty.  I put more attention into it.  Amber and Chunky eventually came when I whistled.  When Amber had babies, she brought them to our yard and introduced us.  The kids and I took to keeping all the neighbor cats out of our yard to keep the baby squirrels safe.  It was fun to see Amber swinging through a tree.  I’d whistle from the 3rd floor and watch her swing her head around to where I’d be leaning out a window.  She would make her way toward us, where I’d throw her a peanut, and she’d catch it.

We had to move from that house, taking up residence in the middle unit of an ancient British-style, five-unit row house with no air conditioning and few screens–not unlike the children’s home in C S Lewis’s Narnia books.  A unique aspect of the row house in the Narnia books was that all the units were connected by a hidden corridor that the children could transverse, and in this corridor they could uncover glorious adventures and fascinating treasures.  In our row house there was a hidden, abandoned wooden gutter system that served as a squirrel warren and superhighway.  The squirrels and five human families shared the same space–the squirrels within the floors and walls–we between them.  And for the squirrels, in our house there were treasures.

Squirrels like chocolate.  The matriarch squirrel, we called her Mama, adored the stuff.  Before we made this discovery, Mama would hop through our office window and scamper up to a friendly face where she’d take a peanut from anyone who offered it.  She’d place the peanut in her mouth and trot off out the window and head for the hidden gutter superhighway to store her bounty.  Sometimes she’d bring one of her kids (she had three or four each spring), so we’d have a pair of them running around the office.  Then she discovered a bag of truffles I had stashed in a shelf behind my desk.  Evidently, she discovered them some time before I discovered she’d discovered them, because they were mostly gone when she came into the office and jumped up into the shelves behind me, grabbed one and took off.  I wrapped up what was left–a large, grapefruit-sized half egg of chocolate that had been holding the truffles–and jammed it into another shelf far off the floor on the other side of the room.  A couple days later, when no one was in the office, I heard a crashing of books and miscellaneous items.  I stepped into the room and found that the chocolate egg had disappeared.

I’ve heard the stories of Eskimo men loaning their wives to visiting men to express a form of deep hospitality.  I expect that the visiting male receiving this gift would be familiar with the limits.  For example, it would be considered inappropriate to just move in and let the husband find another bed or to force him to reside somewhere else.

To a squirrel, a gift of chocolate means:  “Welcome to my house.  My home is your home.  Do as you like.”  Shortly after the huge chunk of chocolate disappeared, Mama would come bounding in through the office window (always accompanied by a child) and scamper out the office door, into the hallway, up the stairs, through the third floor corridor, into the study and out the study window.  She had saved herself the work of going up a tree and over the house.  She just went through the house.  And she was teaching her kids the same trick.

Marcia was not amused.  We bought a $100 Wal-Mart one-room air conditioner and now the office window stays mostly shut.

But my squirrel training days were not over.  I had observed a pattern that squirrels only entered windows that they’d been fed from.  They’d exit any window, but if I left an exit window open, they would never come in through that window unless they’d received food in that room.  Last winter, every morning, I spread sunflower seeds and peanuts on my windowsill in the third floor study.  Every morning, one of Mama’s grown daughters (we called her Other Mama) would come by and have breakfast.  I was angling toward having her infants come by my study window so I could tame them while they were still young.  Every spring, baby squirrels would gambol across the vast roof of our row house until their mama would permit them to practice in the trees.  I was hoping to fill them full of sunflower-seed wonderfulness while they were still itty-bitty.  Tiny squirrels are very skittish.  I was seeing if I could tame a little one, which I’d never done, and get him or her to eat out of my hand.

My wife was not thrilled by my ambitions.  We compromised and she put a latch on my study door that remained always closed.  This way the tame babies or their mothers could come into my study but no farther.  They had always entered only through windows where they had been fed.

What went wrong was that Other Mama, a second or third generation of the squirrels we’d been friends with, made up new rules.  At first there was no problem.  After winter passed, she’d come into my study for peanuts and sunflower seeds, bopping around the room while I’d be writing and meditating.  To my chagrin, she would not permit her toddlers to enter the room.  They had to stay outside, and they’d always scamper away if I approached.  It became clear that she didn’t lead them in because she wanted dibs on the bounty.  Clearly, Other Mama was not as big-hearted as her mother.  Unable to get to know her kids, the goal of this experiment, I was getting to know their mom a little too well.

She came to expect her 7:30 a.m. breakfast.  It was always there.  But evidently she liked her breakfast earlier.  What followed, to Marcia, seemed inevitable.  I didn’t see it coming.

Our third floor bedroom window is very large and has no screen.  It remains open all summer to catch breezes, being far enough from the ground that mosquitoes rarely enter.  I was utterly surprised when at 6:00 a.m. mama squirrel came jumping in over our heads where we’d been sleeping beneath the oversized window in our third floor bedroom.  Trotting across the covers and out the door, mama squirrel then proceeded down the stairs and nonchalantly visited each room, one by one, down to the first floor, finally leaving by whatever egress seemed convenient.  It became a pattern.  Early in the morning, we had a squirrel in our bed.

It gave us both the creeps to fall asleep wondering if a squirrel would be jumping over our sleeping heads, so I stopped feeding her in the study.  As a result, she stopped coming in through the bedroom window at 6:00 a.m.  This change was good for my marriage.

The original mama squirrel is dead now.  We watched her hair grow thin and then mostly fall out one spring, and wrinkles appeared across her torso.  Then one day she was gone.  Still, occasionally, in the middle of the day, someone in the office will note the clipping noise of squirrel feet in the hallway and see a squirrel pass by the office door on its way deeper into the house in a search for the mythic giant chocolate egg.  We’re glad that the neighbors all have air conditioning and keep their windows shut.  Mostly.

When I was a kid, my mom worked part-time in the local toy store, Wienecke’s.  I would stop there on the way home from school.  In the early grades, I’d stop and look at dinosaurs, seeking new ones to add to my collection.  Wienecke’s had a chemistry supply department.  When I was in sixth grade, the toy store ladies wondered at what experiments I was conducting that required so much saltpeter, sulfur and carbon.  I had a bomb-making laboratory in my basement. Creative ways to make loud noises was all the craze among my friends.  I was a poor chemist.  An arms manufacturer or terrorist I would not be.

I dreamed of when I would be old enough to work at the toy store as the gopher fix-it boy whose job it was to put together tricycles and wagons, run up and down the stairs and price inventory.  Finally, I achieved 16 and was offered the job after passing the grilling by the store matron, Ruth.  It was 1968.

My mom had been placed in a mental institution for a third time for manic-depression.  My parents’ divorce began.  The playful part of my personality was subdued.  One of the two older, hippie cashier girls introduced me to Ayn Rand, and I became a fan.  Proceeding to read every book she wrote, I found that the Rand cult of individuality didn’t feel contradictory to my soon-to-emerge hippie ethic.

Identifying with the artist architect in The Fountainhead, I remember encouraging my businessman father to read the capitalist anthem Atlas Shrugged.  He liked science fiction.  He didn’t like thick books.  I was unaware that it was a virtual manifesto for the Social Darwinism branch of Republicanism.  I loved the heroes.  I wrestled with the idea that altruism was a dirty word.  If he’d read the tome, it would have been something my dad and I had in common.  The moment passed.  My hair grew longer.  A friend introduced me to some of his older sister’s weed.  I joined a high school anti-war organization.  It would be almost 25 years before I would feel that Dad and I were on the same page.

My mother was introduced to lithium, fell in love with Bernie Christianson and moved to Washington State.  I left to go to college in St. Petersburg, Florida.  In 1971, Florida Presbyterian was one of three institutions in the country where you could pretty much show up and take the courses that you wanted.  If the course was not offered, you could design it.  I adored school.  For decades after graduating, I’d have dreams of going back.  This desire would be during difficult times in my life.  I’d awaken confused that I wasn’t back in college.  I was confused that I wasn’t having fun.

First semester, in November, I lost my virginity to a girl who, after the culminating moment, opened up her bed bolster to reveal her dinosaur collection.  They were the exact same dinosaurs that were my first passion when I was small.  Except these were painted in pastel, girl colors.  If ever there was a sign that she was for me, this was it.  Then she told me she had a boyfriend.  I was ushered out of her dorm room and out of childhood by a girl with pastel dinosaurs.  It could have been worse.

Coming home from Christmas break while at college, I’d work a week at Wienecke’s during Christmas rush and then participate in inventory.  Returning to the college dorm with many toys, my room filled with the accoutrements of childhood.  It became the play room.  Students would do a drug, regress and come to my room to draw in coloring books, play a musical instrument or explore the toys.

Once I returned to college with two dozen squirt guns.  I distributed them to the guys in the dorm.  The melee escalated.  By evening, students were filling three-foot garbage cans with water, ringing buzzers and dousing friends.

At graduation, I got the idea to pass out bubbles to the graduates as they arrived to be seated for the ceremony.  My buddy Martin, the student association president, had a couple hundred dollars left in the account.  Bubbles burst against the brows of graduates and administrators for two hours.  It was a jubilant event.  Thirty years later it’s the tradition.

I met my first wife as I was drawing her son’s portrait while sitting on the city’s summer sidewalk in 1978.  I met my second wife when I walked into her toy store to sell her the greeting card reproductions of my watercolor maps of places that don’t exist.  In time, I was again working Christmas rush and conducting toy inventory.

Life being a dream:  love, toys, sex and childhood are all themes that keep resurfacing through the years.  Neoteny is not just a scientific principle.  Neoteny is a lifestyle.  Whether it’s playing with dinosaurs, playing with political ideologies or just playing, neoteny recognizes wonder in the everyday.

In psychotherapeutic dynamics, attention offered to the presenting problem goes a long way toward providing an opportunity for the problem to transform.  Clients or patients are guided into an experience of accompanying themselves rather than engaging in a battle.  A paradox is revealed.  It could be concluded that the “problem” was not the person’s unconscious, but their conscious.  Once the patients deliberately choose to not confront or battle the part of them that they feel victimized by, but just let themselves be aware of that part, change is engaged.  The clients learn they can exercise choice.  Then, the clients learn to play.

The same principle is in play on the spiritual path.  Practitioners are provided opportunities to choose to observe rather than engage.  Students are encouraged to be watchful.  If there is struggle, there is the choice to be aware of the struggle.  An emphasis is placed on the ability to choose and the choice to choose to be aware.

Awareness is integral to an understanding of psychological and spiritual models of transformation.  It is also a major factor in social change.

The activist compulsion to bring media to an event is about bringing awareness of an issue to individuals when their focus is on other things or places.  At this scale of societal transformation, we’re still talking about individuals choosing awareness that provides an opportunity for a healing of what has gone awry.  A difference is that the paths of information distribution in a society like ours is controlled by an allegiance to free market philosophy, also called Social Darwinism, which allows those with the greatest resources the ability to manage messages in a direction that will encourage a continuation of their control of resources.  On a societal scale, to provide opportunities for an individual to become socially self-aware, activists seek to bring media attention to their events.

Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene  hypothesizes that all biological evolution necessarily begins and ends at the level of the gene, not at the scale of the individual, the species or beyond.  Dawkins suggests that selection forces cull out useful genes, genes that engender features or characteristics in an individual, and that selection operates at no other scale.  This hypothesis is reductionism at its most extreme.  Usefulness is jettisoned as Occam razor elegance is elevated to the highest tier.  Sociobiological reductionism is an aesthetic where the ideal becomes far more attractive than the real.

I would suggest that the gene is not the overriding super factor of evolution.  In fact, choosing any scale or scales as the location of evolutionary intervention may be too limiting a concept.  Observing how individuals and societies transform at the psychological, spiritual and societal scale, one should consider that awareness might be at the foundation of how biology evolves.

Clearly, this argument does not mean that natural selection is not the foundation of evolution.  But it does mean that evolution is also play.  In just the way that a child plays with the toys or elements he or she has been provided to explore, evolution plays within the confines of natural selection (provided that variation is not random but informed by environmental influences).

I can’t shake the idea that the human experience and society inform our understandings of biology and ontogeny.  Reductionist scientists tend to see it the other way around.  Consider that awareness is not just a cherry on the milkshake of the meal made of several courses but is also the edible table that the complete feast rests upon.  It is unclear where dinner begins and ends.

There is a synthesis in our future.  The thesis is creationism or the belief that there is no evolution and that the Jewish god made the world in seven days.  The antithesis is natural selection in its present form and that there is no god and all life unfolded according to contingent happenstance.  The synthesis has to do with an awareness of awareness.

There is a place where god and contingent happenstance meet and merge.  When deity and chance converge, I call it play.

Activists crave cameras.  It just sort of goes with the territory when seeking social change.  Publicity moves public opinion.  Public opinion informs the behavior of elected officials.

This Memorial Day there were five television stations on hand to observe the services for the fallen, hosted by Veterans for Peace and Iraq Veterans Against the War.  Two years ago there were no cameras.  This year there were daily stories on military suicides as May was coming to an end.  Two of the speakers at the event were parents of children that died in the military.  Both parents had been told their child died because of suicide.  In both cases there was evidence the military was lying.

On August 18, 2005, Cindy Sheehan worked with Moveon to create a nationwide anti-war vigil.  Dickelle Fonda and I worked together to create a powerful Evanston event.  Dickelle received permission from the city.  I contacted and recontacted the press, using Moveon’s online tools.  Observing on the Moveon website that the number of Evanston residents planning to attend was growing larger than any vigil in the country, I transmitted advisories touting the numbers to the media.  Four cameras recorded over 600 people gathering in the square.  For many Evanston and North Shore activists, that gathering was felt to be a politically-empowering experience.  The North Shore Coalition for Peace and Justice grew directly from that action when representatives of twelve North Shore peace and justice organizations participated, met and decided to work together.

Cameras have positive effects.

Working closely with Moveon for a little over a year, I learned that two variables powerfully informed the experience of participants at a Moveon-sponsored event.

Were there more than a handful of people present?  The more people at an event, the more positive the experience was felt to be.

Was there a media presence?  Even one TV station or print reporter made it easier for activists to feel that they were having an effect.

Late in March, six young folks engaged in a demonstration in the Holy Name Cathedral in Chicago during Easter services.  In a short, staged piece lasting less than one minute, they sprayed fake blood upon themselves.  Fake blood got on the carpet.

The six youths were charged with destruction-of-property felonies.  A protest was called for later in the week.  Activists were urged to congregate in front of the cardinal’s home to urge him to withdraw felony charges against the Holy Name Six.  It was on a weekday, on an evening my 23-year-old son and I go out to eat.  I suggested he might be interested in this protest.  He had never attended a political event.  We arrived at the cardinal’s home at 6:00 p.m. in dimming light, a cold drizzle and a brisk wind.  The protest was to begin at 6:00 p.m.

There were four media vans from four TV stations, WGN radio, five police cars, my son Elia and myself.

The story had received national and international coverage.  Media attention was focused on the repercussions of the convergence of war, church and youth.  The blunt, heavy clubs of church and state were seeking to make those that would protest atrocity suffer for their courage and conviction.

Elia and I stood there in the drizzle that was toying with the idea of becoming snow.  We were two blocks from Lake Michigan.  Wind whipped around our shoulders.  The cops, cameramen and reporters sat inside their cars.

In ones and twos activists began arriving.  We huddled in a clump to block the wind.  After perhaps fifteen minutes, twenty of us had gathered.  One of the cameramen departed from a van and approached us.  The other vans sent their representatives.  John Volkening volunteered to speak.  Kathy Kelly said a few words.  A couple of the young folks talked.

Trying to keep their lenses dry, the cameramen draped raincoats and other protective devices over the electronics.  Swooping in and out of the cluster of hunched-over activists, they looked for images that might play well on TV.  Four cameras tucked up into twenty activists, fetching images for the evening news.

Elia was mesmerized.  Shivering in only a windbreaker, we stayed until the cameras left.

And so now Elia thinks when an activist holds a protest, several cameras appear.  He likes this protester stuff and now volunteers frequently for things that need to get done.

I personally am not a big one for speaking to a camera or the radio microphone.  I can do it, but I feel I have little to say.  Others speak to issues far better than I do.  I’m so focused on process that words on issues do not come easily to my lips.  At events, I count people and cameras.  I look for evidence that an action has had an effect.  Activists feel empowered with growing numbers and media presence.  I feel my job is to help encourage the experience of empowerment in the people that so desire deep and lasting change.

In this culture, change often follows the path of the camera, particularly on a stormy day.

There are fairly obvious differences between the young folks and my contemporaries, differences that seem far deeper than the dissimilarities between generations in the past.

This comes to mind as I seek facilitators for the Peace, Justice & Environment Project, activists that work with activists around the country.  I find myself compelled to look for people that I have met in person.  I find it hard to feel certain that I know someone unless I’ve watched emotions play across their face while listening to their voice.  On more than one occasion, going by voice only, because I’ve only been in contact over the phone, I’ve asked a person to join our project as a facilitator.  They came aboard, but no real cementing of relationship occurred, and the verbal commitment was not reflected in congruence of behavior.

I’m wondering if this preference for face-to-face communication is an archaic characteristic of my generation.  We older folks have trouble trusting what’s not flesh and blood.  I’m observing that younger people find it easier to form relationships over phones, and of course, through the web.  Is it possible they have heightened sensibilities when it comes to detecting the subtle cues that come with nonflesh/blood communication, and so they are able to establish firm trust bonds in this new environment?

When I worked with Moveon, staffers picked coordinators for regional and national positions from their conversations on the phone.  After being assigned to nationally coordinate based on the work I was doing as a regional coordinator and a phone conversation, I was given the job of picking out state coordinators across the country by reading their applications and talking by phone.  This task was easily one of the most difficult things I’ve ever had to do.  I had only a voice to draw conclusions from.  The 24-year-old that picked me to nationally coordinate used only my voice to pick me.  Coincidentally, he lived eleven miles away.  (There are Moveon central staff members that live and work as far away as Japan.)  He didn’t feel compelled to meet me in person to pick me for the job.

I reflexively trust people.  I have a vivid imagination and can join people in the pictures they create of the good work that they will do.  Still, my incongruity detectors are damn good.  If a person is not being straight, my body knows it.  My detectors are almost all based on real time, nonverbal information.  I’m feeling like the young folks have senses in an additional dimension providing information where, for me, there is no information to perceive.

The intelligence and creativity exhibited by the young with their ability to multi-task, learn quickly, navigate technology and intuit how things work is extraordinary.  I’m coming to believe that there is a qualitative difference between people in their 20s and people 50 and older.  The generation gap has never been so wide.

A dentist that collects scrimshaw, antique carved whale teeth, seems to have a reasonable passion, considering his profession.  A politician that loves reading books on history in his spare time makes sense.  What is interesting me at this moment is how, where and when interests surface that bear no obvious relationship to the life in which the passion interrupts.

It interests me what interests me.  I’m curious about what makes us curious.

On Tuesday, eating my cereal, preparing to drive the mile to where my doctor practices to get my yearly check-up a year late, the phone rang.

(If a doctor only practices, what kind of medical person engages in the actual main event of healing?)

The person at the other end said he was Paul Jean’s stepfather.  I thought it was Paul goofing because the Georgia accent sounded like his.

“Hi, Paul! How are you doing?” I excitedly greeted the caller.  I hadn’t talked with Paul since last summer.

“No, this is not Paul.  This is Paul’s stepfather.  Paul died a month ago.  We just now found you through the web.”

Paul was my first close friend.  We were inseparable starting in sixth grade through junior high.  Grown up, we would visit each other every few years.  My father’s wife had passed the week before.  Driving to the doctor, I was feeling mortal.

I feel mortal a lot.  I know this feeling has some connection to creativity.  It may have something to do with where the ideas come from that enamor me.  I suspect that there is a high correlation between the experience of mortality and availability for creative inspiration.  I wonder if there are patterns in what interests us and our relationship with the doorways.

Those doorways, birth and death, swing open and reveal content that is compelling.  Sitting close to the death door is an anxiety-producing experience.  The door sways open and part of me disappears.  Very disconcerting.

Hanging around the birth door is also often an anxiety-producing experience.  You know, that womb/tomb thing.

I’ve been catapulted into fascination on more than one occasion in my life.  I’ve been obsessed with (in the order of their appearance) dinosaurs, comics, maps, lucid dreaming, neuro-linguistic programming, hypnosis, dragons, evolutionary theory, autism and political activism.

At the point that a deeply distressing, long battle for custody of my son finally ended, creative energies flowed through me, not unlike water through a flash flood canyon.  I developed a card/board game based on maps.  I fell head first into an infatuation with dragons.  I designed a line of almost 30 puppets.  I drew.

Looking for patterns, I experienced that the most intense, creative period of my life directly followed the death of someone I felt particularly close to, my maternal grandmother (see humanevolution.net).  Then, about three months later, a six-week stretch of nonstop, unremitting anxiety abruptly halted and transformed into another, even more powerful creative surge that lasted months.

It seems the cessation of something long unpleasant can propel a person into a creative space.  Familiarity with death can open creative doors.  Anxiety can be a creative catapult.  In an earlier entry, I noted how depression can act as precursor to invention.  I’ve also noted that the release of long repressed rage can transform into creative acts.

I’m not seeing any patterns here except that powerful emotion can rend the fabric of convention, allowing new experiences to emerge.

I see no clue as to the relationship between the content of what feels compelling and the time, place and person that the passion comes to.  In my own experience, there is a lineage connecting those things I’ve been attracted to, deep commonalities of structure that those passions share.  Why any particular facet faces outward at any time seems to have something to do with environmental prompts.  There is some kind of square dance going on between my unconscious and the environment as I do-si-do amongst all the attractive-concept ladies and what they represent.

Perhaps a study of people’s passions in connection to life experiences, birth, death, strong emotions and outside influences, would be study that would engage someone’s passion.

Society is shifting to three dimensions.

Our great ape heritage could be represented in a line.  Each individual deferred to a next above and a one below.  This was one-dimensional existence.

Pyramids have been our paradigm for several thousand years.  We share levels with more or fewer fellow travelers or associates, depending on how high up the pyramid we sit.  The structure of these relationships is easily represented in two dimensions.

Two-dimensional pyramids are becoming two-dimensional, associational, horizontal social networks.  Still thinking in two dimensions, all of us can view ourselves as hubs and observe the links to our associates and their associates and their associates in a flatland landscape of hubs, nodes and lines.  We are in the midst of a horizontalization of society as pyramids become contextualized within the webbing of relationships made evident through social networking and the web.

We feel empowered by participation in a process that encourages creativity as each individual is provided an audience.  Resources to be creative are readily available, further flattening the pyramids of authority.  We are in a stage where all seems possible, and we experience a shift from struggling up the pyramid to instead communicating through the webbing of interconnections.  Pyramidal barriers topple, releasing energies unavailable until now.  No more hauling large stones to the top.

Graduating to matrix spheres or orbs of interconnection, we experience a world in three dimensions.

The shift to three dimensions is the next stop on this dimensional express.  Many of the young have boarded and are on their way.  We feel ourselves to be the center in a world of individuals empowered by the feeling of being surrounded.  We experience what it is like to feel humble.  In a three-dimensional society, each person feels both authority and, at the same time, his or her minute, exact position in the larger picture.  We can sense the whole while experiencing our part.

Interconnection becomes experienced as immanent or ongoing.  In addition to feeling defined by the relationships we are part of, we also become everything we’re not.  Finally, time, the fourth dimension, begins to feel relative as we touch the next step of societal evolution, the stage where we can choose to let identity disappear.