I’ve sometimes wondered what a theory of human personality and psychotherapeutic intervention would look like if contemporary psychodynamic theory was based on a theory of human evolution that embraced sexual selection, Lamarckian principles and the influence of social structure on societal transformation. Freud was a recapitulationist. Freud believed in a threefold relationship between childhood developmental states, human evolutionary stages and a contemporary societal hierarchy of cultures. Freud hypothesized that a child recapitulates or re-enacts our recent evolution. For example, he estimated that there might have been an actual prehistorical event where a son killed a father that correlated with the oedipal stage in early ontogeny. Freud’s perspective was Victorian and male-centric.

Humans may have evolved according to a dynamic where females picked males for their ability to evoke an experience of feeling part of something larger than the self, part of a matrifocal, dance-driven tribal culture where a craving for this aesthetic drove the exponential increase in our brain size. Females picking neotenic or cooperative males choose maturational delayed males whose brains grow bigger over generations as infant features (such as fast growing brains) prolong into the characteristics of adults. Female brains capable of interpreting the nuanced exhibitions of males on aesthetic overdrive also experience selection for big brains. This process was runaway sexual selection in a matrifocal social structure.

The not particularly complementary opposite is patrifocal social structure evolution, which was Freud’s and Darwin’s world. Combative males partner with cooperative females. It has been estimated that this trend may have started as early as our departure from Africa, picked up speed about 25,000 years ago when the fossil record shows brains starting to decrease in size, accelerating 6,500 years ago with the advent of the Indo-Europeans (and brains grew even smaller) and peaking over the last 300 years. In the 20th century, mate choice began shifting back to the female, with a woman choosing a mate according to her personal criteria for what she seeks in a mate.

Developmental models, derived from Freud, have mostly been stripped of their evolutionary origins. The contemporary philosopher Ken Wilber integrates Freud’s developmental model with a more contemporary, recapitulationist frame, but a frame that still does not take into consideration the influence of social structure and sexual selection on human evolution. I am proposing that the examination of a runaway matrifocal sexual selection model for human evolution correlating with individual developmental stages reveals personality “disorders” representing stages in our recent (last ~100,000 years) evolution.

In other words, in the way that autism is an evolutionary condition, not a neurological disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, borderline personality disorders, obsessive compulsion tendencies, etc., may have far less to do with mental diseases demanding intervention than they may represent evolutionary stages or conditions demanding context re-orientation.

I’m re-orienting psychodynamic theory to accommodate evolutionary theory. Understanding ourselves outside the context of our evolution is a little like conducting psychotherapy without exploring a person’s personal past. Our evolutionary origins are integral to understanding our personal journeys. As we walk a person back through childhood to re-engage the resources left behind, we must also be cognizant of the resources natural to their social structure inclinations. Bridging a client to health involves knowledge of what health looks like for that particular person. A domineering, commanding female may fit all the criteria for matrifocal matriarch. Interpreting her behavior as borderline personality disorder may make less sense than seeking a context where her behavior complements her experience. It might be easier for a narcissistic male to achieve a less self-centered, more compassionate perspective if his experience is contextualized by an understanding of his evolutionary origins and an understanding that, for him, the narcissism is natural, not a defect.

Note that personal trauma compelling the freezing of assets in developmental states also manifests features of the correlated evolutionary stages in the behavior of adults. The thawing of the assets may release attachment to those evolutionary stages. In other words, the manifestations of evolutionary conditions may be contingent upon contemporary influences. That being the case, psychotherapeutic intervention might result in a radical shift equivalent to a 50,000-year jump in evolution–psychotherapy as time machine.

We need diagnostics able to parse out when a person is experiencing mostly an evolutionary condition in a society uncomplimentary to his or her neurology vs. a person suffering from an inability to ontologically progress because of threats in childhood. There are those that suffer both.

The diagnostics might include a complete hormonal work-up. High testosterone females and low testosterone males comprise the matrifocal social structure. High testosterone males partnering with low testosterone females fit the patrifocal paradigm. There are profound brain differences between these two groups that are only now beginning to be understood. Physiologies differ.

To my knowledge, there has been no comparison of dream theme differences between the two social structures, personality “disorders” and conditions characterized by maturational delay such as autism. That’s actually what got me started writing this essay. I want to know how people naturally adhere with one of the two social structures when they dream. How do the dreams differ? Dreams might be able to tell us where we are living in the larger arc of our evolution.

To understand Freud is to understand that he believed that understanding our evolution is integral to understanding personality and personality disorder intervention. Shifting from a patrifocal focus to a perspective that embraces both social structure orientations provides a deeper understanding of our origins. From this vantage point, we might discover that many human mental maladies may be less about defect, but about how to discover where we live in time.

In the same way that a dream reveals the private life and secrets of an individual, myths tell us secrets about society and our species. The secrets that myths reveal about our species are only beginning to be understood.

I am a practical mystic. I don’t consider something to be true unless I’ve experienced it personally, and even then I accept it on a relative basis. If it’s true for me, maybe it’s true for others. Maybe not.

A life characterized by terror and anxiety propelled me to search for comfort and integration. Studying Castaneda starting around 1971, I launched a nighttime career of lucid dreaming. Not particularly adept, I still established dream as a refuge and a resource that over decades has provided both solace and instruction about myself.

In the 1980s, I explored hypnotherapy after becoming a practitioner of Neuro-Linguistic Programming, concentrating on the work of Milton Erickson. Through a combination of deep dream exploration and hypnosis studies, I acquired an ability to shift consciousness fairly easily. Unconscious material would rise to the surface with relatively few barriers. As an artist, this ability is useful. As a mystic, this ability feels nurturing.

Dream themes have started and developed, unfolding over years or decades, established closure and then moved on, communication successfully imparted. I feel accompanied by my unconscious. I am provided these gifts of story and then often insight. Sometimes, while still dreaming, the meaning of the dream is offered.

In the last two or three years, I have remembered few dreams. My life has acquired a quality of dream that seems to make my remembering dreams less necessary. Awake, I feel I’m acting a role, dancing a dance, reading from a script provided me by the producers of my dreams, except the productions are unfolding in society. I’ve experienced a shift from receiving gifts from and engaging in conversations with my unconscious to receiving gifts and engaging in conversations with consciousness. It’s as if dream has expanded to occupy the everyday.

Dream themes have emerged in life. What formerly only occurred while I was sleeping now happens in the everyday.

In the way I used to face and embrace my dreams that resulted in discoveries about myself, I now listen, watch and feel for meaning in the productions of society. Joseph Campbell and C. G. Jung were pioneers in the interpretation of myth. Their teachings apply to our everyday. In contemporary society, we produce myth like the spring makes dandelions. We are hardly even aware that most of what we make is myth.

Having spent so many years traveling the corridors of dream and having stepped outside, I see that the same dynamic is engaged. So, I feel/listen to the world at large in the way I’ve grown used to listening to myself. The world feels the same outside as it feels inside. The world is filled with story, interpretations of experience, experience obfuscated by our unique culture, experience confused by the way our species has evolved.

Stories are everywhere. We bathe in stories when sleeping or awake. It fascinates me what life was like before the story when we were babies, when we were first learning gesture in Africa, when we were autistic. Stories are the mother’s milk of being human. Consider what we might be drinking when we are grown.

In 1971 in St. Petersburg, Florida, where I was attending my first year of college, I observed a lecture by a visiting academic. I went to a small liberal arts college, Florida Presbyterian, later to become Eckerd College. The lecture was in the chapel, the only venue large enough to hold several hundred students. Evidently, this outside lecturer was well known. He was a biologist.

The talk was about the growth and crash of biological and social systems. With charts he described an inevitable increase in the cost of petroleum until the price would make it unavailable for regular use. He showed a pattern across several systems of a line slowly inclining until, with surges, an almost vertical line results. Then the system crashes.

Lately, I’ve been the signs of acceleration. There is no end to places where this pattern can be observed. Noting how these various signs of acceleration connect suggest ways we might be able to more easily weather the crash.

I first noticed the acceleration in the gift trade where I was a sales rep for 19 years. When I started in 1980, unicorns were big, but fading. The trend had lasted several years. In Rockford, Illinois, they were still popular in 1980. The unicorns had by then abandoned the urban centers.

Gift trends started in cities and on the coasts, and then they worked their way across the country. In the early 1980s, a trend lasted about two or three years. I observed teddy bears, penguins, kittens, etc., getting introduced at trade shows; and less than three years later, they’d be dead.

Around 1986, Montgomery Wards, Sears, Osco and Walgreens (four chains with offices in Illinois that I served) became interested in contemporary trends and fads. What was formerly the territory of unique small stores was being focused on by the chains.

Over the course of my 19 years in the business, I observed the corporatization of trends such that a new fad didn’t just appear in the unique shops. Within three months of introduction, new trends were appearing in discount chains across the country. The location where trends used to die, discount chains, became part of the introductory campaign. Simpson-related products revealed this trend.

By the end of the 1980s, cycles were lasting maybe 1.5 years. By 1999, a new critter would catch fire and be ashes in less than one year. Trends didn’t start on the coasts anymore. They seemed to appear everywhere at once.

The stock market is finally crashing. The acceleration phase is evidently complete. Based on the biological principles explained to me in 1971, the Dow has several thousand points, down, to go.

Dramatic increases in autism are possibly being mirrored by a dramatic fall in the birth rates of males that are maturational accelerated. (Autistics are maturational delayed.) There are hidden accelerations, perhaps the most powerful being the disappearance of males with blustering, combative personalities along with the demure female ready to cooperate in any way. Traditional tough male/cooperative female social structure is disappearing.

There is that saying, “What if they gave a war and nobody came?” War as a vehicle to create the mass experience of feeling part of something larger than the self is dead. Societies are not producing children interested in that kind of sacrifice. They are not identifying with people in their culture as much as they are identifying with those that share online culture. Online culture has no boundaries. It offers an experience of being part of something larger than the self, without war.

Our craving for integration is leaving war behind. Risking death is no longer necessary to embrace life.

There is an acceleration of people living on the planet whose death did not occur because of war and disease. Perhaps a date for world peace could be plotted by mapping out that trend.

A dance of accelerations and crashes is occurring all around us, all part of the macro trend which is not difficult to see. Turn off the TV. A paradigm has peaked. A paradigm that feeds off oil.

In 1999 when I was winding up two years of research on human evolution, beginning to put in the hours to launch a new profession (web design), I was frequently frustrated by the number of papers unavailable on the web.

I could do abstract overviews and note the papers that I sought and go to the library and retrieve them.  I’d visit the University of Illinois Medical Library or a Northwestern University library (there are five) and spend a day pulling journals off the shelves and copying them.  I’d walk out with over 80 papers some evenings after spending hours pushing down on journal bindings against copier glass.  I have tens of thousands of these 8.5 X 11 sheets of papers that I paid top dollar for.

Things have improved in eight years.  Still, walls are up.  A professor friend lent me her password so I could jump in and out of her university access, and then I could engage in relatively unimpeded research.  Not the case.  Though things have improved, much of the research I crave is unavailable unless I make that journey to the library.

Conducting research across disciplines I still run into the barriers that exist among disciplines.  Evolutionary biology, anthropology and neuropsychology could be different worlds.

Visitors reading this entry, share with me your experiences if you’re observing these academic barriers coming down.

The acceleration evident in current society is not obvious in academia.  Not with the professors.  Societal acceleration is evident in the behavior of the students.  Almost anything to do with music is knocking down doors and speeding things up.  The web, while destroying the music production and delivery business, is building up a whole new way of creating, delivering and experiencing not just music, but experience itself.  Music is on the front lines of the acceleration of social change as hundreds of millions of young users ignore established/conventional forms of delivery, choosing instead to share.

Sharing is destroying our society.

No single act is as destructive of a society based upon hierarchy, stratification and control by elites than the act of not paying money for a product or service.  Sharing is the engine behind this societal transformation.  In other words, cooperation is back.  Yet, it’s different.  With the web mediating communications, sharing or cooperation is transparent.

Share goods and services.  Buying is the old paradigm.

Walk, bike or take public transportation.  Autos are the old paradigm.

Grow your own food and share or buy locally.  Buying processed food is the old paradigm.

Open-source programming nurtures human productivity and creativity.  Copyrights are the old paradigm.

The acceleration is happening all around us.  Government and business characterized by no transparency and no accountability, with mostly white men in control, are coming down.  They are being replaced at increasing rates of speed by a transparent, diverse and horizontal paradigm as hundreds of millions of users cooperate with one another to achieve common goals.

Consider the repercussions when the universities stop segregating knowledge.

Sharing is not just for children anymore.

I am not a scientist.  I was trained as an artist.  Unconnected to an institution, with no allies in academia, and a bachelor’s degree with an emphasis in art, I am not in a position to conduct experiments and publish papers.  My art form of late seems to be to create hypotheses derived from information available in the professional literature (published papers) without conducting proofs of what I hypothesize.

I talk in these blogs as if my theories are established because that is how they feel.  As an artist, not an academic, I am not burning allies if I’m wrong.  I’m not breaking academic rules.  I am not jeopardizing my career.  Tenure is not an issue.  The respect of my peers is not an issue.  Making sure I can continue to publish is not an issue.

I am playing.

I am playing and creating while engaged in the study of the nature of play and creation as it relates to human evolution.  Making believe while engaged in a study of make-believe is deeply congruent.  My methods juxtapose comfortably with what I explore.

Working outside of academia, I can ignore both the barriers between disciplines and the theory conventions that decide what gets published and what does not.  My theories receive no criticism and no respect.  Academics contact me with questions, but they have little or no contact with disciplines referred to in my work outside their area of expertise.  They abandon treads that lead in my direction, unable to evaluate the implications of my work without looking for allies in other disciplines. When you’re fighting for respect inside your discipline, who’s got time for battles in other disciplines?

Studying play and creation as it relates to human evolution frequently bridges over to explorations of awareness.  As a long-time meditator, I have experience of feeling part of something larger than myself and an awareness of the creation/appreciation nature of experience.  This informs my understanding of evolution.  I don’t have to be right.  It’s my experience.  Bridging spiritual experiences into biological hypothesis is academic suicide.  I’m not an academic.  That kind of death does not scare me.

These factors are balanced by an existential intimacy with feelings of terror and feelings of being alone.  When very young, something happened.  There were personality repercussions.  Thirty years of psychotherapy have allowed me an ability to experience compassion for the dark side. I have been intimate with the dark side. I feel no blame.

I write about the multiscale nature of evolution and the connections among the biological, social, ontological and personal.  My academic research has resulted in personal revelations.  Personal revelations translate into academic insights.  In my world of artist as theorist, barriers between disciplines, between evolutionary scales and between ideas keep reducing as I continue to refuse to honor the tradition that we keep things separate.

Lately, while in psychotherapy, I experienced a personal revelation that I deliberately shut down ongoing, deep affection for what’s around me, remembering when I did not do so.  A missing piece of the neoteny puzzle slipped into place.  Remembering the bottomless affection I felt for my surroundings when very small, I realized that affection is a feature of the infant that prolongs itself into the character of adults over the course of evolution.  Love is a neoteny-driven evolutionary development.

Last summer, driving across country in a convertible at night, I realized that programming models I’d developed for communication/cooperation online applications were directly related to the evolutionary biological model I’d developed eight years before, a model which places neoteny at the center of a runaway sexual selection/aesthetic/hormonal model for human evolution.  The revelation was followed several days later by my invention of an alternative programming protocol that potentially allows for exponential increases in creative uses of the web.  The personal experience of barriers coming down allowed an idea that was all about barriers coming down when the personal, the social and the biological all converged.

As an artist, not an academician, my work is personal.  As an artist, I merge science, art, spiritual experience and personal experience.  This merging is not just allowed but encouraged.  It sometimes feels like I am flying but not seen.  In fact, this theme is a common one in my nighttime dreams.  Yet, somehow I live a life characterized by health:  a wife I love that I feel loved by, deeply rewarding family, a profession that fascinates, interests that are fulfilling and friends that are challenging and nurturing.

I have been blessed with a life where I can play.

The economy is swooning. Assets are transforming into fertilizer, being plowed into the fields as we prepare for the next stage of our social evolution. The seeds are planted. What we’ll be eating will be different from what’s come before.

The age for the onset of puberty has plummeted. Diet has dramatically cut off cerebral neurological development by accelerating pubertal onset by four years or more. Early puberty testosterone surges in males and females has halted synapse production, curtailing abstract thinking, inhibiting the human, natural ability to make connections, to understand, to appreciate, to experience revelation.

This process will change with the radical diet changes coming in the near future. High-fat, high-carb, high-protein diets will be replaced by diets that our planet can support. Pubertal timing will adjust and our children will reach puberty later. As a species, there will be radical repercussions.

The hidden will become available. The subtle will become easily accessible. The obvious will become uninteresting.

Watch closely the trajectory of pubertal timing. After diet has changed and we are back on track toward achieving puberty around 16–18, we can estimate when this epoch of transition will be settling down.

Our brains developed as a mammoth appreciation apparatus with massive numbers of synapses able to make aesthetic decisions when performing and observing performers during our song-and-dance driven, sexually selected evolution. Our brains are waiting for the right conditions to do what they do best, create and appreciate.

As we withdraw from the collapsing consumer economy, with puberty coming later, we’ll develop the aesthetic economy.

Dance, music and art will become the currency of the realm.

It has been observed that a human baby displays many of the characteristics of an embryo in the womb. The infant is unable to slumber longer in the dark or he or she would not be able to depart. Their head would become bigger than the doorway. So, aspects of womb life are prolonged into infanthood. This process is neoteny in action. Earlier stages of ontogeny are prolonged into later stages over time.

We might consider where this process is headed.

The acceleration that we are in the midst of has most of us astonished by how fast things are changing. Little noticed is how we as a species are changing physically, dispositionally, integrally. Autism, an evolutionary condition, is blossoming across contemporary society. Social structure is radically adjusting to place woman in positions of authority, allowing them to choose their own mate, abort and compete with men. In just 100 years, we are taller, our brains are bigger (after a 25,000-year period of size decrease) and we as a species are becoming more gracile, fragile and vulnerable.

Infant features prolong into adulthood. Embryo features prolong into infanthood. With time, embryo features prolonged into infanthood themselves prolong into adulthood.

Features of early embryo ontogeny slowly work their way forward into the features of descendants over time. What would it look like if the moment of sperm/egg integration was itself neotenized and prolonged into later and later stages of ontogeny?

We are headed in a direction where speed accelerates with each passing decade.

Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, with hormonal developmental processes of our ancestor species being reproduced in our personal ontogeny. As earlier and earlier stages of our ontogeny manifest later and later in the features of our descendants, we are at the same time traveling back in species time, carrying forward features of ancestor species long extinct.

In other words, in our phylogeny and ontology, we are slowly traveling back toward our creation.

We are traveling back in species time as earlier stages of ontogeny are carried forward or prolonged into the adults of our descendants.

We are traveling back in ontogenic time as aspects of our personal origins are carried forward into the adults of our descendants.

Somehow, our life-on-earth and individual origins are both closely tied at the moment of our creation, a moment slowly being approached and prolonged into descendant adulthoods. A process accelerating as we speak.

It’s as if evolution is compelled to make creation conscious. It’s as if the goal were to make the origin the end.

For over 120 years, theorists have been aware of heterochronic principles in evolution. Stephen J. Gould has almost single-handedly kept the flame alive. Gould is dead. Evolutionists specializing in this area are relatively rare. As the bonfire of Neo-Darwinism continues to die down, perhaps we’ll see renewed attention offered to these alternative views. Evolutionary developmental biology is opening doors in this direction.

Humans have evolved as a result of neoteny. Neoteny is one of several heterochronic processes. Neoteny is that process by which the features of infants appear over time in the adults of descendants. Physical, behavioral and neurological features “prolong” over generations, manifesting later and later in ontogeny until specific characteristics of embryos, babies and toddlers emerge as full-blown adult characteristics.

Books discussing neoteny in detail, such as Gould’s Ontogeny and Phylogeny, concentrate on the physical features that transform when impacted by neoteny. Wesley Montague explored some of the emotional repercussions of bridging the child to the adult. Specifically, Montague noted the profound effect of carrying creativity and curiosity into the adult of our species, with the resulting societal repercussions.

Two additional features of the very young have been somehow absent from discussions of the influence of neoteny on the human species. Perhaps this absence is because it is mostly males writing on the subject. Maybe it is because these two features are obfuscated by the way we humans view ourselves in contemporary society. Nevertheless, observing closely the behavior and experience of babies, extrapolating these observations to a tentative hypothesis of the behavior and experience of our chimp-like ancestors, we might conclude that contemporary humans and contemporary human society may have no small amount to do with the dynamic of heart-felt affection and dependency.

In other words, the affection experienced by the young for other humans in their life is an integral experience, usually ignored as a governing principle, yet it is an experience having massive impact upon our society. The young feel affection and they experience a compulsion to connect, what we call dependency. Being small is to experience a nonstop attraction to other humans, animals, things and situations while at the same time experiencing the constant buffeting that comes with exposure to the barriers that prevent a reciprocation of that attraction. Human babies and toddlers are extremely dependent relative to the young of other species. As this dependency paradigm manifests in the adult of our species, the relative importance of affection and connection will grow as adults acquire these aspects of the infant.

The massive, multiscale interconnection of contemporary society, with exponential increases in connection characterized by at first email, then the web, then texting and now social networking, are manifestations of infant dependency proclivities prolonging into older states of ontogeny, driving society into a whole.

We are in the midst of as profound an acceleration of our society and our species as can be imagined. Differentiating between societal and biological evolution in humans is no longer possible.

We can understand the neotenous engine behind our biological evolution and observe the manifestations of neoteny in society as earlier and earlier stages of an individual’s ontogeny emerge in adults. We observe biology’s transformations manifest in culture, almost before our eyes. We are left reeling.

We are also left feeling. Affection and dependency are in our societal future and our ontological past. Neoteny is not particularly discriminating in what infant features are carried forward to adulthood. Love is inevitable. So is vulnerability. The future could not be brighter.

Designing and building websites that seek to encourage social change is more than a little bit like designing playgrounds for children with slides, ladders, jungle gyms and swings.  A difference is that when I am designing web applications about social transformation, I pay close attention to the principles of change; I seed the software with features that play upon the nature of biological, social, ontological and personal evolution.

When I was maybe nine years old, I went with my youngest sister, Gale, to the playground at the corner of the block.  Gale was four years old and had pink glasses with bluebirds at the temple.  New playground features had been added to the park.  One of them was a hefty plastic animal with a sort of saddle, embedded in a large, powerful, grounded spring that allowed for slow rocking back and forth.  Gale said she wanted to show me something and had me straddle a hippopotamus while standing on my feet instead of sitting on the hippo.  She stood in front of me and then slowly drew the plastic hippo to the ground, yanking the wooden handle coming out of its head.  She managed to draw it all the way to the ground, the hippo’s spring grunting with her exertions.  I stood where the hippo had lounged a few moments before.

“OK, watch!” said Gale.

And she let go.

After rolling on the ground for a bit, whimpering, hardly able to inhale, testicles temporarily destroyed, I shuffled home.  I remember Gale’s confusion and dismay.  That was not the outcome she intended.

A goal when designing web applications that are meant to enhance communication and cooperation is to avoid their accidental or deliberate use to offend and disrupt the work of others in the network.  The Left/Progressive community has a long history of frustrated attempts at cooperation.  This lack of cooperation has blocked forward impetus, particularly when ideological opponents on the right were well funded, well organized and had the support of the mainstream media.  There are several things we do to achieve our goal.

We seek to make the Left/Progressive networking websites fun to use.

The programming emphasizes what organizations have in common, not what they do not share.

The focus on commonalities is further encouraged by making shared issues an easy destination.

Facilitators concentrate on finding organizations allies, people they may not know.

Encouraging transparency, with everything in view, we seek to engender an atmosphere of trust.

We fill the activist playground, the website, with many options and provide guidance on their use.

Encouraging creativity by providing resources, a shared space and an experience of trust creates an opportunity for changes in behavior.  The behavior we most want to see engaged is that which comes with the confidence that an individual can make a difference.  Political empowerment comes with an access to tools, allies and an ideological framework that allows for growth in unique and unexpected directions.  Social evolution, like biological evolution, is filled with unexpected contingencies.  By nurturing an environment where anything can happen, anything will happen.

Our network websites are playgrounds where activists can practice social change.  Imagine children’s playgrounds connected by instant portals, so secure that parents wouldn’t have to fear for their child’s safety, and children could run from playground to playground, all across the world, exploring new things to play with and finding new playmates.  Imagine how much their experience would be enriched.

Eliminating barriers to change on a small scale by nurturing transparency, diversity and horizontal communication, we establish habits that can be ported to larger scales.  Noting that evolution unfolds by displaying increasing diversity and interconnection, we can design into our applications features that encourage the same experience.  We seek a neotenized society.  We are looking to manifest the features of the infant–trust, affection, dependency, creativity, curiosity, intelligence–into the society at large.  Biologically, neoteny has a lot to do with lowering male testosterone levels.  Societally, we can reduce hierarchical status confrontations, stratification and war by practicing the alternative in a safe environment.

We are new at this.  On occasion with these new tools, we will accidentally knock the wind out of an ally or ourselves.  The letdowns are lessons.  Even spring-loaded plastic hippos can be fun.

I like to play with my life.  This is not particularly obvious to some people that know me as they observe the enormous amount of time I spend indoors at my laptop conducting business, talking to clients on the phone, emailing activists around the country, talking to activists on the phone….  I spend a lot of time emailing, reading emails and talking and listening on the phone.

Play follows trails while allowing itself to be led.  Wondering into the forest of an interesting idea, I occasionally come to the end of a small dirt path and have to either backtrack or just stroll into the underbrush.  These daily essays feel like just such a stroll.  I can’t see my feet because of all the foliage, but I feel the ground is firm, so I keep on going.  After a bit, I realize there happens to be a footpath where I am walking.  It just wasn’t evident at first.

When I say I play with my life, I mean that I pay attention to what feels interesting, what I feel attracted to.  I explore what feels neat.  A neotenous aspect of my personality is that I reflexively like and trust people.  I feel affection for people.  And I spend a lot of psychic energy hiding this experience from myself and the folks I know or come across.  The net result is that to many I seem somewhat removed.  Often I am feeling moved.  Maintaining the constant barrier between my affections and those toward which my affections are directed, my attentions divert toward what seems interesting in my life.  I focus on ideas or the making of things, instead of people.  This dam I create between folks I know and me generates energy used to understand how things work, how new things get made, how things connect.

Play seems to unfold in pathways or threads that lead to new and increasingly more interesting threads with time.  Illustrations drawn in the 70s led to paintings that led to a greeting card publishing company I created in 1979 to exhibit my works.  That led to a career as a sales rep specializing in greeting cards.  I picked up The Far Side as a greeting card line.  My focus turned to cartooning.  I published a cartoon strip.  I began a cartoon syndicate to distribute my strip and the strip of eleven other comic artists.  I published a comic arts monthly in Chicago and Ann Arbor to exhibit our work.  I founded a puppet manufacturing firm (a puppet is a 3-D cartoon) with almost 60 characters.  Then, the several threads faded and I needed work.

I looked for business for my new, one-person, website design firm by cold calling over 1,500 independent retailers once a year starting in 1999.  I decided to collect the information in a series of online village retail directories.  My son Elia or I took photos of every shop.  Each shop got its own free page.  I also created directories by category, not just village.  My clients got prime positions in the directories.

By chance, I had needed a tenth search engine to run comparisons and the name Google jumped out at me off of a list of hundreds.  It was back when Google was unknown.  With time, I noticed that the ways the directory pages interlinked provided some of the directories top spots in Google for their key phrase.  Having accidentally uncovered Google’s linking criteria for high rankings, as Google grew I was able to achieve top ten positions for phrases like “airline tickets,” “lingerie” and “mortgages.”  I wondered if I could channel this insight into money for the environment.  I raised over $20,000 for environmental organizations using affiliate agreements, generated by getting high rankings for key phrases using directories similar to what I’d created for local stores.

Around 1997, I grew interested in dragon mythology.  My studies of dragons led to an exploration of serpent myths and their matrifocal culture of origin.  Investigating matrilineal social structure, I hypothesized an alternative human evolution model based on female sexual selection.  That work led to studies of the relationship among evolutionary biology, anthropology and neuropsychology.  Autism and conditions characterized by maturational delay emerged as neurological conditions supporting the new model.  Recent revelations on the relationship between society and biology place autism as central to understanding how humans evolved.

With the war, I became politically active again.  I found ways to integrate my activism with my firm’s programming capabilities.  Specifically, Rod Homor applied for a job and offered a deep intuition for how to integrate programming with political action.  Then Dave Larson came aboard and revealed a universe of understanding for how to integrate the world of the activist with online action execution.  I discovered I was not playing by myself.  I was involved in a creation process with gifted colleagues who loved to create and participate in change.

When one plays with life, life unfolds in threads in a journey filled with joy.  As time goes on, I find more playmates.  The play grows deeper.  Play seems to not know how to end.

Evolution has been unfolding for billions of years.  In addition to length, evolution has depth.  Evolution is perhaps deeper than it is long.

In evolutionary theory, there are arguments focusing on the specific place in the hierarchy of scale that evolution actually occurs.  Richard Dawkins emphasizes the reductionist position that just above the molecular level, genes are the center of the evolution universe.  The late Stephen J. Gould had been an advocate for multilevel evolution with selective processes engaged in many levels whether they were gene, individual, species or larger groups.  The human genome has been mapped.  Conservative political reductionists such as David Brooks concede that the gene offers little depth of understanding without embracing the gene’s relationship with the environment.  The alliance between Neo-Darwinians and neo-conservatives is showing strain as a reductionist point of view, whether it is evolutionary theory or geo-political theory, gives way to an understanding that transformation is not about the individual, but about the whole.

This work examines four chords, symphonic sections or scales while exploring evolutionary process:  biology, society, ontogeny and individual experience.  Within each of these four sections are additional levels, nesting hierarchies not unlike different sections of an orchestra carrying a theme at different musical scales, with each note within each scale representing a transformational focus point.  For example, within biology there are the many levels through which selective processes influence the transformation of populations, species, individuals and genes resulting in evolution in the present and over time.  Natural selection, sexual selection and Lamarckian selection are the selective processes we are aware of.  There are more.  I suspect Lamarckian selection can be broken down into a number of selective processes in the same way that a condition like autism can be broken down into several etiologies or causes.  Evolution is deep.  We’ve a ways to go.

Society, like biology, is another evolutionary scale that reveals many levels where transformation occurs.  Burdened by the theory of natural selection, theorists have been hesitant to detail how exactly society evolves.  Habermas, Wilber, Gebser and Thompson approach this problem from a philosophical perspective.  I argue that understanding the impact of sexual selection and Lamarckian selection on human biological evolution opens the door to understanding societal evolution.  Stepping through the door, we again see evolution operating on several levels.

Societal evolution operates at the level of the individual, the community, society and the world community.  Like biological evolution, there is constant violation of these levels with numerous other intralevels that are engaged and passages between levels that are traveled that we just don’t have facile words for.  For example, evolution at the level of people that get from one place to another while wearing headphones doesn’t exactly constitute a community but impact, and are impacted, in a number of ways that influence the environment and social change.  There is a not so subtly different community of cell phone users that commonly text message.  Texters are a community, a community with deep impacts on society.  Texters massing to protest have compelled governments to change in Asia.

Dawkins created and encouraged the idea of the “meme.”  Revisited when we are using an explanatory model that embraces a multilevel perspective for societal evolution, a meme as a concept experiences a transformation.  Memes nest as evolutionary scales nest, with memes within memes within memes characterizing the transformation of society.

Evolution on the scale of biology unfolds on several levels.  Evolution on the scale of society also occurs on several levels.  Boundaries between levels are porous.  Following the path of evolution is not just tracing a journey over time.  Understanding evolution requires an ability to note the multileveled characteristic of evolution in the present, whether it is biological or societal.  If that weren’t subtle and complicated enough, consider that during ontogeny, at any moment, the environment is impacting, modifying and evolving physical, behavioral and unseen features of the individual, as many levels are ontologically informed.

Evolution is not only long.  Evolution is deep.  In the present, evolution is so deep as to be immeasurable.

It has been said that LBJ was a politician that loved legislative trench warfare, political struggle and the step-by-step combat that precedes the achievement of political goals.  There are those politicians that seem to love the fight.  Tom Delay was one that evidently relished vanquishing foes and dancing on their grave.  For these elected officials, it was not so much about the issues, but about the conflict.  Finding creative ways to work the rules and achieve goals seems to bring these (mostly men) satisfaction.

The more I read about Obama, the more I am concluding that this man is a politician, similar to LBJ, for whom issues are not the main event.  Yet, struggle is not Obama’s focus.  I suspect that for Obama, politics is about something different from what it was about for many movers and shakers of the past.  I’m thinking that for Obama, politics is about process.

There are implications.  Some of them are good.  One of the implications is that Obama is not an ideologue.  He’ll make decisions based upon the information available at the time and will be flexible to the process of give and take.  This characteristic makes him impressionable, and it forces the Left to make an impression.

Coming from a blue zone in a blue state, Obama may be as left as he is going to get for a while.  As a politician consumed with process, he would be expected to mirror his surroundings.  With a change in constituency, a change in position can be expected.  But this attention to process also means he can change with the times when the larger environment transforms.

Our environment is transforming.

Bill Clinton was a politician in love with the process of governance.  For Clinton, this love seemed a defect.  Provided opportunities to take a stand, over time he withdrew to negotiate with the varying forces that demanded attention, seeking compromise instead of clear positions that accompany vision.  There are similarities between Obama and Clinton, but we have moved into a very different time.  In this case, the times will make the man.

I’m fascinated by what specific forces compelled Roosevelt to fight for and achieve the radical positions staked out by the New Deal.  How was Roosevelt leveraged to act?  How will today’s environment be different from the 1930s paradigm?  Today, the unions are weak.  What forces will step into the vacuum?

Consumed with process, Obama is vulnerable to process interventions.  I suspect that social networking and its allied technologies are going to be big players influencing Obama’s game.  From what I observe in the American Left, it’s the young Left that will be the players.  The old Left does not seem to understand.

Earlier this year at the Green Convention where I was tabling/exhibiting, I made a pitch of our networking web application to Cynthia McKinney’s campaign manager.  She seemed to understand a little about what we had to offer and said I would have to talk to her web person.

Basically, I was telling a story, an abbreviated version.  The story focused on winning elections by empowering people, doing what Obama has learned to do.

McKinney’s web person was her web designer.  They had no one making web policy decisions other than the person actually designing her website/online communications system.  Not a good thing.

I talked to the web person.  Though seemingly impressed by what he described as our web 2.0, social networking political action integration, he said that personally he had been unable to convince Cynthia and her staff to move in that direction.  It seemed to me that a subtext of the conversation was that if he recommended to McKinney our application, he’d be recommending himself out of this area of his responsibilities.

This two-conversation communication is a microcosm of a difficulty of social change on a larger scale.  Good-intentioned people make decisions in their best interest, the kind of decisions you can expect them to make, and the net result is their honoring a barrier to change.  How does change get made when even those striving for change feel so constrained?

When I explained to McKinney’s web person that Obama’s campaign was inspired by such a set of tools, he understood.  He expressed dismay that he was unable to make McKinney understand.  Slowly the power of this alternative paradigm will become self evident.  How exactly it will become clear to agents of change like Cynthia McKinney will be interesting.  Examples of this paradigm continue to manifest in the news.  Will there be a single event that makes the direction we are going too obvious to ignore?

There is a five-step evolution continuum that begins with natural selection and then moves to the next step to where sexual selection, usually by the female, focuses on a specific pattern when they choose a mate. Step three transitions to human sexual selection, where adept practitioners of novel pattern creation (beginning with dance) are selected as procreation partners by mates with sensitivity to these nuances. The fourth step is taken when novelty itself becomes desirable outside the partner selection process, and society is compelled to embrace in its productions the infinite nuances of new. In the fifth stage, awareness of evolution’s stages attended by an awareness of the awareness that accompanies evolution provides an identification with the five-stage creation continuum.

The fifth stage loops around to stage one, what we think of as competitive evolution, accompanied by awareness.

1) natural selection
2) sexual selection (selecting for pattern when seeking a mate)
3) human sexual selection (selection for novel pattern when seeking a mate)
4) art (selecting for novel pattern outside of mate selection)
5) awareness of the selection or creative process

Story has structure. Lifted from the infinite associational matrix of experience, a story allows the traveler to follow a single strand from a beginning through a middle to an end. Whether the story is a joke or the history of a civilization, the story’s pilgrim arrives at the destination a changed person. Somehow, experience has been enhanced.

Besides a beginning, a middle and an end, a story also provides a circle. A convention that is almost a compulsion is a theme or feature of the beginning of the story that is repeated at the story’s end. This story-telling device is used across cultures across the world. This technique could be looked at as a signal that the tale is about to halt. Perhaps, like the hero’s journey, it grew from ancient myths and legends where the protagonist returns home with gifts. It could be said, when telling stories, that the destination is where the journey started.

I would suggest that deeply embedded in our personal, social and biological psyche is the circle, the ouroboros, the transforming of a single narrative thread into a round. With spoken language so deeply constrained from communicating the non-narrative nature of reality, this simple device creates a simulated whole. A larger sphere is suggested by the connecting of the end to the beginning.

In other words, the five-step principle of evolution is reproduced with many of the stories, communications, jokes and messages transmitted from one person to another. This reproduction is one way, as a species, that we pray. It is secular homage to our origins, our evolution and our awareness of this process. Telling these stories, we participate in the creative process that the stories themselves, through their construction, describe.

There is a five-step evolution continuum that begins with natural selection and ends with consciousness becoming self aware. Only, it was always so. We have been accompanied from the start.

We don’t just think in stories, but in layers of stories, stories nested up and down a continuum of stories from the personal, familial, societal and even to the biological.

I had several favorite stories when I was a child. Yurtle the Turtle convinced his colleague turtles to allow him to achieve a greater and greater height by standing on the backs of his shelled associates. Disaster at the end. But not before the reader got a bird’s eye view of Turtleland. It reminds me of Newton’s suggestion that his accomplishments were achievable only because he was able to stand on the shoulders of his predecessors. In science, there are still moments of “all fall down.”

Our stories stack, back to back, not unlike an almost infinite pile of turtles. The philosopher Ken Wilber uses a stacking-turtle metaphor to describe how evolutionary scales nest and stack. There is a mirroring between the nested stages of social evolution and the stories that accompany those stages. The impact of competing societal stages can be experienced by stories that are told.

Perhaps the most classic tale of clashing societies is how the now lost stories, rituals and traditions of the prepatriarchal goddess cultures were demonized by their Indo-European conquerors. Snakes and serpents were integral to the symbology of the ancient, matriarchal societies. The victor writes history, in this case rewriting herstory, so that serpents morphed into dragons killed by heroes rewarded with an adulating wife.

During the Carter Administration Iran Hostage Crisis, I observed a political cartoon showing Khomeini, head of Iran, as a giant octopus with tentacles snaking out past Iran’s borders. Not noted by the cartoonist was that 25 years earlier, in 1953, the American government overthrew the Iranian democracy to install a head of country that would allow American and British petroleum corporations to do business there. Yesterday, while talking to a client in a hot dog stand, I noted on the restaurant TV CNN doing a history of the conflict between Iran and the U.S. As background for the present conflict, CNN’s history started in 1979.

Where we choose to begin and end the stories that we tell has everything to do with the message we assign them.

Carl Sagan has suggested that humans’ negative focus on serpent/dragon tales have biological origins in our fear of being poisoned over the course of our evolution. I would agree that there are biological informants to the stories that we make. The most profound biological imperative is that stories require a single narrative stream of information with a beginning and an end. As we know from dream, this structure is not the only way of receiving or imparting information. Very close to the language centers of the brain is the place where we process rhythm. Quite possibly, as language bridged over from gesture, with information being communicated by a combination of expression and hand movement, language transformed into speech in our brains, where we were making and listening to music. What would be the effect of how we tell and listen to stories, informed by a part of our brain that evolved making and listening to music? In music, there is a single, over time, thread of information with a limited number of complementing subthreads. In other words, a story is a song. A story is not reality, not even close. Yet we use the stories we tell to deeply inform how the world works.

I read yesterday that a couple generations ago, someone said that all models are wrong, but some models are useful. Models are wrong because they are stories. Some stories are more useful than others.

Perhaps the most useful story of all is the story we can tell ourselves that suggests that a story is a lie.

I almost graduated with a degree in psychology as I considered a profession as a therapist.  I couldn’t quite withdraw from that ambition as I took workshops and courses after graduating.  Neuro-Linguistic Programming, Ericksonian Hypnotherapy and neuropsychology were subjects that I paid to continue to explore.  Nevertheless, I’ve spent over 30 years of my life with three therapists, mostly in a group therapy format, plumbing my psyche and my soul.  This therapy has contributed to a process perspective when I am observing the words and behaviors of myself, my friends, my family and my colleagues.  Observing the patterns that emerge in myself over time and recognizing the nature of the internal sources that lead to those behaviors, I form hypotheses on what drives the behaviors of those around me.

The stories we tell ourselves have an enormous amount to do with how we experience our lives.  In the old half-full/half-empty aphorism, our attention is called to the effects of our stories upon our perception.  We live in a world of stories layered at several different scales, sometimes nesting comfortably, sometimes dissonant in their conclusions.  There are our personal stories, our family-of-origin tales, societal stories and stories that are grounded in the perceptual apparatus that we experience the world through as a species.  When you start unraveling the yarn, the knitting leads down from the personal to the societal to the biological.  In this blog/story of how stories are made, the witch in Hansel and Gretel (where the crumbs were laid) or the Minotaur of Knossos (where Theseus followed the golden thread) are monsters that can represent the power we have to inform our own perception by the ways we frame the world.

At these different scales (personal, familial, societal, biological), the different stories have different valences or effects.  Some stories are like the operating system of a computer, informing how all the installed software relates.  Other stories behave like specific instructions, engaged at a particular time or circumstance, ignored during other situations.

Stories are often accompanied by nonverbal features that influence the outcome of the description.  For example, the voice tone, speed or intonation patterns of the internal voice narrating a particular dialog can jar or console, depending on the particulars.  The way that a story is told can have as powerful an effect as the story’s words.

Stories operate at different scales, with different valences, at both verbal and nonverbal levels.  To understand how we as individuals travel through our lives or how our society transforms, we can choose to understand the stories that we tell at these three levels of personal, societal and biological perception.  Understanding this process is integral to intuiting who we are and where we are.

I’ve started collecting gestural communications.  When a particularly adept practitioner of hand language appears before me, I take note and pay attention to what he or she is doing.  So far, most of those people have been left-handed and male.  There are exceptions.

In college, about midway through my sophomore year, I had a girlfriend for about ten days.  It so happened that we hooked up about three days before my mom came to visit.  I lived in a single in the men’s dorm.  Dorms had 32 units on two floors and didn’t exactly stay sexually segregated.  There was no monitoring, so by January there were a lot of girls living in boy’s dorms and vice versa.  It was 1972.

I’d achieved the golden ring of dorm living by happening upon the strategy of asking guys to be my roommate who were registering but knew they weren’t coming back the next term.  They’d not show, and the school would offer me a single.  When Mom came to visit, delighted I had a girlfriend (to her knowledge, the first girlfriend I’d ever had), Mom proposed she stay in my room during her visit and I live with Gaia in her girl’s dorm.

Capable of being gregarious, Mom hobnobbed with all my buddies in the dorm.  I slept with Gaia.  Gaia’s roommate seemed willing to tolerate the arrangement.

Gaia was a gesturer extraordinaire.  She was like a character out of a Tom Robbins novel, working passionately on mastery of an arcane aesthetic skill.  Gaia would perform hand dance.  A friend would exclaim “Gaia dance!” and music would be issued while Gaia executed a digital mastery far beyond her 19 years.  Gaia was also a witch, which was a novelty to me.  I don’t think I knew what Gaia meant.  I was unfamiliar with the pagan movement.  I was 20.

Mom stayed about a week.  She bought some weed through me from a guy on campus, sowed it into the hem of a dress she’d designed for my sister and sent it to my sister as a gift.  Mom was unique.  Having spent several years in mental hospitals in the 60s, she’d become intimate with drug culture and radical chic.  It was my mother that introduced me to the Berkeley Barb and Herman Hesse.  Some of Mom’s buddies were only a little older than I.

After Mom headed north, I moved back into my single and broke up with Gaia.  The physical intimacy of relationship was more than overwhelming, it was terrifying.  Gaia was gorgeous.  I was scared.  I was unable to appreciate her hands dancing across my body.

Watching the gesture of friends, people I meet and the politicians on Youtube, I don’t come across masters of the genre very often.  Still, left-handed presidents or presidential candidates often stand out as talented in this second language.  Reagan, Bill Clinton and Obama are all lefties with a touch for hand communication.  The senior Bush is left-handed but not particularly deft.  McCain is left-handed but injured.  It shows.  McCain’s verbal capabilities are negatively impacted by his gestural deficiencies.  One hand is almost literally tied behind his back.

Left-handers often emphasize the most important points of their communications with deft encouragements to understand from their left hand.  Consider that these gestures are experienced deeper than a right-hand gesture.  A gesture from someone’s left hand is a communication directly from his or her unconscious to your unconscious.  I’ve noticed that when I seek to communicate something of particular importance, I look with both my eyes into that person’s left eye.  There are many ways to talk directly to a person’s soul.

So, I watch for skilled artists of the hand, robust nonverbal communicators.  Finding these folks, and listening closely, I often discover that their voice doesn’t just say words, they make words into lyrics.  It seems that hand-dancers often also know how to sing.

Laurel, Marcia and I continue to discuss the most effective way to build the PJEP 50-state network of networks.  There are about 15 of us working hard to research and facilitate the state networks as they go up.  At this point, almost 1,000 local organizations and chapters of national organizations are working through 33 states within 26 networks.  (There are several two-state networks and one three-state network.)

Visit PJEP.org to investigate the central site where state and local actions, calendar items and online campaigns (petitions, boycotts, eletters and fundraisers) are collected and collated so that grassroots activity across the country can be explored in detail.

Two logistical issues come up fairly frequently.  Programmer David fixes bugs and enhances features that already exist, or Dave creates new features.  David, Marcia, Laurel and I talk frequently about which of these three areas should be emphasized at any given time.  All three of us feel that for us to achieve our mission, it is vital to empower individuals and local organizations by providing them access to resources and connections to other individuals and organizations so that they are able to accomplish their social-change and political-change goals.  Decisions are made daily on whether bugs, upgrades or new features get attention.

The second logistical issue revolves around whether we place our attention more on new, existing state networks by maintaining frequent contact with new, local organization administrators, making sure they post their actions and use the websites to their best advantage vs. researching and setting up a new state, getting new administrators established and moving on.  Both nurturing established networks and creating new ones are essential to our goal.

Regarding nurturing vs. creating, each PJEP volunteer does what he or she prefers.  Most PJEP volunteers, men and women, are facilitating or helping states to network.  It’s mostly me setting up new states.

Florida and Pennsylvania were the first two networks to go up after Illinois and Minnesota, which are coalitions.  No other coalitions have gone up since Illinois and Minnesota.  (A coalition has a governing body or policy board and can usually endorse an issue, person or project.  A network has no governing body and no endorsement capability.)  When Florida and Pennsylvania went up, there was no person facilitating, no activist making sure everyone got his or her actions posted, no person taking responsibility for the sites being used.  The sites were rarely used.  Local administrators needed reminding, and they needed someone to post for them if they were overwhelmed.  We concluded that an ongoing presence by a responsive individual was important.  That’s the model we’ve developed.  Florida and Pennsylvania lay fallow for about six months until we figured this out.

Still, every time I set up a new state, there is less time I spend with the administrations of established states.  We have far fewer facilitators than we have states to facilitate.  One of my jobs is to maintain some kind of contact with those administrations in states we don’t have a facilitator for.  That’s almost 250 administrations.  I’m in phone contact with those folks every 2.5–3 months, far less than the once-a-month contacts most administrations receive.  I place a priority on setting up new states, which takes up most of my time.

It is my estimation that a year from now, when all 50 states are up and crises emerge that demand immediate response, states that are relatively fallow without a facilitator will be able to be engaged because a communications infrastructure with a resource delivery system will already exist.  I am hopeful that facilitators will emerge in such a situation.

For two years, we’ve been plowing fields and planting seeds.  Some fields are plowed but have few seeds planted as we wait for a farmer to come along.  Not too far into the future, the shit will hit the fan.  More than one kind of crisis is on the way.  When shit starts flying and landing in our prepared fields, that fertilizer will be the boost we need.  At that point, we’ll introduce a facilitator to an environment ready for growth.

The societal habits, trends and self-destructive behaviors that lead to crisis often get no attention until a crisis occurs.  Heinous situations go unmarked until they hit the news.  Crises are the fertilizer of the activist.  An activist can turn a crisis into a change advantage by leveraging what is being revealed by the media onto the desks of elected officials.

When the shit hits the fan, it is time to start planting seeds.

As an activist with an evolutionary focus, there is a particular way I go about engaging in intervention.  Evolution is all about connection.  Experiencing unfolding at multiple levels (personally, societally, biologically), I don’t feel a compulsion to make something happen, to cause change, to struggle for an equality.  I am not wrestling with opponents.  What I feel is an attraction to contribute to those places where my efforts can have an effect.  I experience relationship in the places where I intervene.  Like engaging in art or writing, there is an experience that I’m part of a process larger than myself.  An idea, an action, a strategic arc with related tactics draws me in as if it were seeking my attention.  Just as there is that ongoing conversation between my conscious and unconscious mind, there is an identical conversation between my conscious/unconscious and my environment that murmurs to me, like an always present river, about what it would be fun to do.

I’ve spent much of my life unconsciously sensitizing myself to these river whisperings as I’ve sought ways to transcend conventional barriers.  If in college I could convince two professors to allow me to keep a journal as part of the requirements for a course, I’d make notes for both courses in a single narrative.  For example, I merged two independent studies, children’s literature and clay sculpture, in one journal for two grades.

I typically read at least six nonfiction books at the same time, usually from several different disciplines, jumping from book to book, letting ideas rub up against each other, revealing patterns not normally related.

Over the course of 30 years, I’ve looked for ways to make a living from passions and turned vocations into something I adore doing.  Back and forth between work and play, I feel compelled to interconnect what feels compelling with what I need to do to make money.  I’ve made nine different career attempts over those three decades, seeking ways to make making money fun.

As a cartoonist, one way I went exploring for comic ideas was to run mental comparisons of two seemingly unrelated things or concepts, find a specific bridge and juxtapose similarities where none would intuitively exist.

This process can be difficult on relationships.  My wife and kids end up working in my businesses.  Boundaries become blurred as husband, wife and kids, wearing different hats at different times, are required to behave in cooperation with different frames, depending on the circumstance.

Clearly, much of this blurring of boundaries is more neurotic than artistic.  Professional intervention is sometimes required to sort out the various overlapping waters as attention is paid to keeping rivers within their banks.  When cooperation transforms into symbiosis, the benefits of boundary blurring disappears.

Still, the act of blurring boundaries and removing barriers seems to be a reflexive urge.  Over the course of a lifetime, examining the tinker in tinker toy, the connections between the nodes of our existence, I’ve become sensitive to change and the boundaries between the scales of our experiences.

I experience science, evolution, politics, art and spirituality as connected.  I experience deity as secularized by specific processes of evolutionary transformation while at the same time I feel science spiritualized when observing/feeling that there is no such thing as alone.

When we let barriers disappear, the world around us becomes clearer.  As an activist, this means I am not fighting for change.  I have no enemies.  I’m listening for those words the river makes.

All my life, I’ve doodled.  On Sundays, my dad would hand out pens and pencils to my sisters and me when we sat down to eat at our local Big Boy or other joint.  We’d draw stuff.  Terry ended up getting a degree in design; mine was in art.  Gale became a bookkeeper.  Maybe we should have given Gale crayons.

Through the 70s I collected a mounting accumulation of scribbles collected from waiter pads, late night stoned sessions, parties, placemats and napkins.  After graduating college and quitting the job working for my dad as the vice president in a girdle and bra factory, I took the money I’d saved and published ten of my illustrations as greeting cards.  I called the company Maplands.  Each card was an island metaphor with images (many former doodles) illustrating an idea.  Several cards explored models of psychological transformation, as if these personal evolutions were journeys through a mapable landscape.

I sold some.  I looked for patterns in what sold best.  Slowly, the themes and images of greeting cards I continued to release evolved toward those themes and images I sold the most.  In that first collection, there was one tiny heart in ten greeting cards.  Within two years, hearts were multiplying across a sizable percentage of maybe fifty greeting cards.  As the line grew, the images kept tilting in the direction of what sold.  Suns, moons, rainbows and hearts proliferated across the line.

Inevitably, I crossed a boundary where what I was producing was not satisfactorily representing what I wanted to say.  The consumer environment encouraged my image evolution in a direction that reflected an established iconic vocabulary.  I lost the desire to speak in that language when I could not connect it with my message.  It was evolutionary dead end.

A little over ten years later, I tried a different evolutionary pathway.  Having established a comic strip first called “Off the Deep End,” later “Lehman,” I played with a number of different concepts in panel and strip format.  Almost 200 publications picked it up, mostly inconsistently.  I wasn’t feeling engaged enough just trying to be wry and funny.  Also, I wasn’t terribly good at it.  I began pushing the boundaries of the medium, chancing being more personal and exploring various philosophical positions in comic format.  When I finished exploring that creativity thread, about a dozen publications were still offering my work in print.  I had reached another evolutionary dead end.

Except that it’s hard to know whom the comics influenced while walking those pathways.  One iconic piece drifted into the popular culture.  Others ended up getting published in other authors’ books.  This one is my favorite.

Noting the influence of the environment on my creative work and on my life, I keep finding relationships between the biological, the social, the ontological and the personal tied together in ways both subtle and vast.  Society encourages us to see evolution as an extremely slow process.  Paying attention to only the effects of natural selection causes dissociation, not only dissociation of the observer from the now, but of the scientific from the spiritual.  Evolution is fully engaged in every moment as the environment constantly informs every individual, every moment, in every decision that we make.

If my father had handed Game Boys to my sisters and me at every Sunday supper, my sisters’ and my lives would have been radically different.  What if we hadn’t gone to restaurants on Sunday night, but had gone to concerts?  Instead of handing us pens and pencils, what if he had passed out paints?

My wife, Marcia, has two daughters, and I have a son.  Blended family.  My first wife has a son, now 36 years old, who just had a daughter.  Katie, Marcia’s first daughter, is about to have a son.  Marcia is traveling down to St. Louis for the baby shower tomorrow.

I had my second root canal on Monday.  I called my dad and found out he’s had four.  My son just asked me if getting a root canal is related to how frequently he brushes his teeth.  I’ve noticed a pattern.  I ask my dad questions having to do with what I can expect in 25 years.  My son asks me questions about what he can expect when he’s my age.  I’m experiencing life as this little four-car train, with four generations connected, chugging along evolution’s pathway.

My father’s wife just died about a month ago.  I see his engine beginning to disappear into the tunnel.  It’s a saddening experience to watch that train car you’re directly connected to start to disappear.  I can feel the vanishing as if it’s happening to me.  And so it is.

Facing the other direction, babies are emerging from the other tunnel.  Still, the wind feels to me to be coming from where we’re headed.  Watching the women, the wind seems to be in their face where they are turned toward where the young are coming from.  It’s odd that the wind comes from two directions with males, but females are mostly noticing only one.

In this ridiculously brief period of time, four generations long, which stretches between these two tunnels in two mountains that seem to have no end, we make our observations about the universe we’re in.  I feel surrounded by clues.  I feel terrified.  I feel accompanied.

On a journey only four train cars long, we somehow have just enough time to see the world.

The relationship between politics and science has emerged as an issue in the news as it has become clear that scientific conclusions that don’t support the agenda of an elite money/social conservative/neo-conservative agenda can be pruned as much else is trimmed when a power is seeking to control society’s idea environment.

The American Right Wing has deliberately adjusted conventional reality.  A conscious, pre-Enlightenment, post-Zen position that reality is relative permits the Right Wing to say and do whatever seems useful.  Carl Rove’s childhood was characterized by an intimate, ongoing exposure to a morally ambiguous, boundaryless world.  Rove grew up interpreting that experience to mean that we live in a world with no ethical boundaries or constraints.  No morals can characterize spiritual experience.  No ethics is the mark of a sociopath.  Having confused the two, exclaiming they subscribe to both when they adhere to neither, the American Right has transversed a line crossed in Germany in 1939.  Noted, this is a line dance engaged in by governments across the world.  It is rare that this line is totally ignored.

Politics and science are closely allied in many ways, more connected than either science or politics would have us know.  Science would have us believe that academia is above the political fray.  The politicians often suggest to us that laws just follow the direction of the citizenry; science tells us what is real and tells us that politicians don’t seek to legislate the truth.

The truth is that there is a war going on.  I don’t mean the Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, South American drug wars, or wars fought by private contractors we don’t see.  I’m talking about the struggle between social structures, the ancient battle between matrifocal and patrifocal, the collision between procreation paradigms.  It’s a conflict so deep it informs the language we use to describe evolution.  For example, the words “war,” “battle” and “struggle,” which are used to describe this encounter, represent patrifocal views that serve the belief that this is a relationship that demands a winner.

The truth is that there is not a war going on.  A relationship is evolving.  Transitions can be difficult.  You know, we live in interesting times….

The truth, war or no war, depends on which social structure you view the world through.  Then there is the evolving third position characterized by elements of both, with additions.

Politics have a dog in this race.  Science bets on winners.  What gets researched depends on what gets funded.  Scientists, educational institutions, corporate funders of those institutions, elected officials funded by corporations and their religious institution allies have opinions.  Bets are placed to encourage their dog to win.  In the world of science/politics, placing bets increases the chances your dog will come in first.

Meanwhile, viewing the race from an integrationist’s point of view (integrating matrifocal and patrifocal frames of reference), there is no race.  The dogs are running.  In a world with no beginnings and no ends, there are no contests.  Reality is not punctuated by finish lines.  There are no periods at the ends of sentences is a post-patrifocal/matrifocal world.

Which makes it difficult to discuss using narrative forms.

Because I can’t dance this communication, I’ll do my best to get across the point that I’m not making.  The corporate advertisers almost got it right.  It’s all about sex and status.  It’s all about making babies that will succeed in making more babies.  At the center of this almost truth are perhaps an infinite number of central leverage points determining the way that humans evolve.  At the center is social structure, mother’s testosterone levels at six weeks before her child’s birth, pubertal timing, maturation rates, diet, dance, war or not war, media, art, politics, the cause of autism, environmental influences on ontogeny, music & rhythm, abortion & female infanticide, creativity, narcissism, time, death and taxes.

So many centers.  So little time.

No-time being central.

Doorways to our origins dog our everyday.  Abandoning the races, we are the goal.

Male control of the female body is a hallmark of a patrifocal society, the Right Wing and hierarchical societies. It is no mistake that the contemporary Republican Party has its roots in the anti-abortion movement. Traditionally, in a patrifocal society such as China or the Yanomamo of South America, society seeks the death of girl infants. If a child is killed while still in the womb, there is no guarantee the male will survive.

In a highly patrifocal society, it is vital that the pool of potential wives be repressed. With few child-bearing females, only the males considered most ideal as husbands will be chosen by the fathers or families of the available woman. In a warrior society, or a very competitive, highly hierarchical society, the males that fail to perform will go mateless. Aggressive, competitive males will procreate and bring higher testosterone warriors into society.

The abortion battle is not over whether killing babies is moral. The abortion battle determines the social structure of society. If females can kill an unborn infant, then future mate selection also reverts to female choice. Females can choose to abort and they can choose their husband according to criteria that support her personal point of view.

Female infanticide is practiced widely in China and India. Targeted female abortion has become a problem with the new technologies. Until the last century there is evidence to suggest that Europeans widely practiced female infanticide. I know of no studies in the United States that track the percentages of males and females born to Right Wing and Left Wing families. With the availability of sex-determining technologies in the first trimester, there is a good chance that even today in the United States it could be observed that social conservative Republicans give birth to more males than members of the Green Party. Every generation that lacks Right Wing control over a woman’s ability to bear children is another generation in which the Right Wing observes the dissolution of male dominance of the society at large. The more females that can choose a mate, the more nonideal males (from a patrifocal male point of view) become fathers.

Among those fathers now easily finding mates are those maturational delayed, noncombative pattern manipulators and creative types. “Wimps”, “nerds” and sensitive males are marrying in greater numbers than in the past. They are giving birth to maturational delayed sons and maturational accelerated daughters, thus introducing to society greater numbers of the autistic (characterized by extreme male maturational delay) than have ever appeared before. Not only has an increase in abortions contributed to a plummeting in crime, abortion has resulted in an increase in autistics as women choose males that would have less problem with her having an abortion. These are nonpatrifocal, relatively female-centric males.

In just the way that Darwin observed humans breeding pigeons, pruning features not desired in an evolutionary thread, humans prune themselves by killing embryos and babies in order to guide society in the direction of matrifocal or patrifocal points of view. There may be few differences between Republicans and Democrats in foreign policy (or domestic policy, in many cases) but there are major differences when it comes to death. How life is trimmed, when the young are killed, has everything to do with how aggressive the future society will be. As long as Democrats struggle to preserve abortion, providing choice for woman whenever possible, the future will be far less aggressive than the past.

(Click here to review now female foeticide effects these issues.)

In patrilineal societies, the males often stay close to home as the girls marry those relatively far away.  In matrilineal societies, the opposite is usually, but not always, true.  Primates other than humans establish patterns revealing that either the males or the females seek mates outside their little society of origin.  It would be interesting to observe the differences between Republican and Green Party, families with many left-handers and those with none, those that are wealthy and those in poverty and it would be interesting to look for different patterns based on ethnic origins.

I suspect that the societal subgroups that reveal clear patterns showing one sex traveling farther to achieve a mate will also reveal differences in testosterone levels with suggestions of matrifocal vs. patrifocal societies of origin.

Profoundly complicating the exploration is the acceleration of girls achieving college educations.  They often find mates while in college.  Both males and females often find mates in college and settle down far from home, making cross-society patterns harder to detect.  It would be interesting to note what percentage of males and females return from college to settle down near their original families and how that correlates with the other variables noted above.

It would be interesting to note how far females travel to go to college vs. males, and if there are differences based on political party, families with left-handers, etc.  Of course, the less wealthy will send their children to local institutions.

A study over several hundred years may reveal clear patterns devolving into a recent breakdown of the whole concept, social structure-oriented exogamy in modern societies.  With the recent strong surge of matrifocal tendencies in modern society and a convergence of matrifocal and patrifocal frames, maybe the patterns are too deeply buried to exhume.

Hypothesizing that humans evolved in a meandering fashion oscillating between high testosterone (T) females and low T males in matrifocal societies and high T males and low T females in patrifocal societies we might estimate that the skeletons of our ancestors would reveal those tendencies with gracile (matrifocal) vs. robust (patrifocal) remains.

I’ve referred to the feedback loop. Mother’s testosterone level > maturation speed > social structure > mother’s testosterone level. The environment intervenes at all three levels of the loop, influencing maturation rates and timing, modifying the trajectory of human evolution, creating a pendulum that swings back and forth between the two social structure paradigms.

Females picking males most adept at dance select those males with the most neotenous characteristics. Particularly important are those males with big, neotenous brains. Just as a predator needs more synapses than its prey, a dancer that needs to capture a mate has no ceiling in the synapses required to manifest the most astonishing moves. Brains grew bigger exponentially to achieve mating opportunities while males were competing with other high-stepping, big-brained fellows.

Big brain growth was not a seamless, single line of exponential increase. Different ancestral species, such as Homo erectus, exhibited different speeds of cerebral increase in different regions of the world. Rates varied as matrifocal and patrifocal paradigms competed. Matrifocal trends encouraged bigger brains as the result of female aesthetic choices, which resulted in more neotenous, big-brained males. Patrifocal tendencies resulted in bigger brawn and little brain growth as intramale competition determined progeny characteristics. Rates of increase varied with geographic location, social structure, and perhaps other variables, such as more or less hospitable environments, the proximity of other humans, technological innovations and the influence of altered states.

A premise of this model is that we can travel backward in time by becoming more maturational delayed (if we are males) and more maturational accelerated (if we are female), propelled by the mother’s testosterone levels at six weeks before birth. Moving backward, we move in a matrifocal direction. The autistics among us have traveled back to when language was bridging from gesture to speech, back before we departed Africa.

Consider that maybe 50,000 years ago a male ancestor, maturational delayed, traveled back in maturational time to a male ancestor that was maturational accelerated. Go far enough back into matrifocal-male maturational delay and backwards in time becomes a period when there were maturational-accelerated, patrifocal males with high T, not low T. Remember, we did not evolve in a straight line.

Maturational-delayed males may be propelled so far back in time that they exhibit maturational acceleration. For females, the reverse would be true. A maturational-delayed male might also get boomeranged or propelled further back in evolutionary time by arriving first in the position of an ancestor that was himself propelled back in time, piggybacking onto that ancestor’s acceleration or delay.

Stored in our genes is memory of ancestors’ hormonal states. Our half-billion-year ontogeny is the re-enactment of that journey. How we walk that path is determined by our mother’s testosterone level, six weeks before our birth.

I hypothesize that Tourette’s syndrome is a male or female propelled into the past, beyond where the autistic originates in time, further back to where sometimes both patrifocal and matrifocal social structures coexist, depending where you are in geography, perhaps back to where patrifocal preceded a matrifocal surge.

If Tourette’s exhibits the same dynamic as autism, an exhibition of an ancestral hormonal constellation, then perhaps medical conditions with hormonal markers reveal etiologies characterized by the physiological and neurological emergence of the past.

There is the obsession with rhythm and pattern of the autistic. There are the stylized grooming rituals exhibited by those with Tourette’s.

Observe those unique individuals with autism or Tourette’s and consider what kind of society they’d call home.