It’s interesting how influential barriers and speed of communication are upon systems and their abilities to achieve goals.

With a brain, I observe dramatically different forms of consciousness exhibited depending upon varying degrees of communication between cerebral hemispheres.  Seamless communication suggests primary process, animal, autistic, nonreflective consciousness.  Inhibited communication compels self-conscious, self-aware, often confused, alienated and modern, reflexive frames of reference.  A single society may profit from both paradigms.  We need our artists, mystics, businesspeople and politicians.

In our society, I also observe dramatically different forms of consciousness exhibited.  Different individuals within a society may produce a balance, thus offering a society a multiplicity of forms.  Still, a society may produce tendencies describable by how influential barriers and speed of communication are upon societal systems and their abilities to achieve societal goals.

In an individual, seamless cerebral communication may prevent the emergence of individual-driven creativity with no relative experience of different times, different places or what a thing may be if a thing is not.  In a society characterized by massive barriers and poor communications, a disappearing of those barriers may have an opposite effect.  Instead of a diminution of self awareness, a society without barriers that follows a society with walls can be a society that experiences an explosion of creativity as far more combinations of information compel a dramatic increase in potential outcomes.

Homogenous consciousness evolved to our present mottled consciousness.  It seems our own peculiar, multifaceted, mixed-up consciousness, though unfathomably powerful at producing unique ideas and achieving goals, could use a little of that homogenous-consciousness ability to behave intuitively as part of a larger whole.  In other words, there is less compulsion to frame experience as me/other, ignoring other if me is not clearly identified with.  So, many individuals on the planet are exploring the possible advantages of having voluntary access to homogenous consciousness, what we might call a peace or universal self experience.  We would like to be beings with barriers with the choice to have an experience of the barriers gone away.

Society has evolved from small bands of hominids exhibiting, we assume, relatively homogenous behaviors across the species.  When we began to experience the world with nonhomogenous consciousness and split brains, society proliferated with varying cultures exhibiting tendencies to become quite baroque in isolation.  Geographic distance enhanced unique cultural productions.  Societal stratification congregated resources in the hands of those with skill, talent, luck, family connections, strength and the tendency to think of the self as more important than the other.  Stratification and geographic isolation were instrumental in the creation of variation.

Now the walls come down.  New communications technologies, globalization and the horizontalization of society are combining to offer vigorous hybrid ideas as the complete spectrum of human variation now blends colors in an almost infinite palette of concept procreation.

This massive creative surge would not have been possible without those barriers that kept resources and ideas segregated.  An individual’s return to an experience of consciousness characterized by Self or a transcendence of barriers would not have been possible without our experience of alienation.

These two trends, of course, are inextricably related.  As we as individuals achieve success experiencing peace, society at large is seeking to understand the power of homogeneity without transforming into some sort of cultural hegemony.  We would like to be integrated into the larger environment, not unlike our hominid ancestors, but without being clueless about our contributions.

The paradox is that there is no growth without destruction.  Individually or societally, we’ve had to experience isolation and angst to be able to experience union and insight.  The cycle must go on.  After the coming, unfathomably beautiful, subtle and sophisticated personal/societal integration, there must be barriers created again.  Without barriers, the homogeneity that birthed us will emerge again and we’ll have no ideas, no ability to self-reflect.

A painter, after creating for a while, often has to throw out his or her palette.  The colors become all blended with repeated use.  It becomes impossible to create without clear barriers between the constituent elements.

As we individually explore emergence with the all, as our society investigates a world without want, we might at the same time offer reverence for that which made it possible to merge.  Barriers are necessary for evolution.

Once we finally began to move away from kings and queens that were gods and goddesses, monarchs or emperors that were also deities, cults of individuality began to flourish.  It is no mistake that a cult of individuality thrives where there is hierarchy.  To deify an individual there has to be a social climb.

The U.S. exhibits one extreme form of an individuality cult; some would say it is a particularly virulent form.  We have worshiped an ability of individuals to transcend circumstance and achieve reverence and respect.  There have been positive and negative aspects of this social frame.  We have not had a thriving model of the commons or a belief that it is good for all if each citizen begins adulthood warm, fed, healthy and educated.  It has been relatively easy for status-quo Americans to choose selfishness while we’ve experienced the rich gains that come from offering attention and adulation to the individual.  It definitely makes for great stories.

It is not obvious yet, but the American cult of individuality is in decline.

Seamless communication destroys barriers.  Barriers enhance focus on those that control information or resources.  A cult of individuality extolling the successes of individuals requires stratification or the separation of coveted information or resources from the masses that seek a way to stand out from the crowd.

Polarities make it easier to understand the various ambivalences having to do with being alive.  One such polarity balances seamless communication with hoarded information, relaxation with struggle, creativity with control, anonymity with individuality.  It is not a question of one being better than the other.  Both are true, balances shift and a person’s experience is characterized by his or her position on this spectrum.

We are in the center of one such shift.

With the decline in individuality there is a boost in anonymity.  As information barriers drop and the amateur becomes respected by a larger and larger social network, it becomes possible to experience respect without having to pay the price of a license or obtaining certification that a series of tests have been taken and passed.  A person can experience elevation without being the person that controls information or resources.  With free information, an amateur can exercise expertise without having to pay the price of certification.

This is not unlike a person spending enormous amounts of time to learn to play a musical instrument, finding other musicians seeking to put together a symphony and creating a complete symphonic ensemble, performing online.  However, what is being performed are exclusively arcane 17th-century pieces.  The web offers no barriers to amateurs with unique interests; their work is spread across the world, exhibiting astonishing talent to an approving audience.  The rewards are multifaceted.  Accolades include community respect.

Creators of open-source applications that have a profound effect upon communications do so anonymously, but at the same time, they are members of a community that offers them respect.  Anonymity is relative.  Compared to the adulation offered individuals achieving fame, this new online, horizontal, social-media-driven, amateur-oriented, transparent, barrier-destroying model does not offer much in the way of humans standing on pinnacles of success.  What is achieved instead is an experience of feeling part of a vast community, important to many.  They are respected for contributions and encouraged to sacrifice apogee notoriety to achieve an experience of cooperation in the creation of community.

A feature of anonymity in a horizontal social model is that, as a member of a community, one is at the center, not the top.  With seamless communications in a barrierless world, the size of a community can be massive and/or spread over a great geographic distance.  In either case, the experience that the individual achieves is one of integration into a whole.

Free high-speed communication of quality information is destroying the post-monarch cult of individuality.  What is taking its place is a reverence for anonymity.  We are entering humbling times.  Consider what good things may result.

If changing the rates and timing of human maturation results in more or less self awareness or degrees of split consciousness when cerebral hemispheres and corpus callosums adjust to varying levels of testosterone and estrogen, then might there be a macro, universe version of this process?

Okay, this is WAY out there regarding an exploration of hypothetical biological processes and their possible application to universal processes.  Nevertheless, there is a website that explores the possible ramifications of evolutionary developmental biological theory as regards the ontogeny of our universe.  These folks posit that if you can apply the theory of natural selection to how the universe acquired its characteristics, then you can do the same thing with complementary theories of evolution that suggest that the environment can influence evolution in a single generation.

What I’m playing with here is the suggestion that each of us exhibits split consciousness, which is enhanced by having two cerebral hemispheres that are not the same size with a corpus callosum small enough that it inhibits communication between the two hemispheres.  I’m presupposing that consciousness already exists, consciousness evidenced by primary process, defined as awareness of only one time, one place and no negatives.  With the emergence of split consciousness, imagination appears, and we can be aware of more than one time, multiple places and what things are not.

Consider that the universe also exhibits primary process.  What if the natural state of the universe is consciousness characterized by one time, one place, no negatives?

Except that the universe is in constant movement.

Relative variation in velocity would engender multiple experiences of time.  At the moment of the big bang, there was but one time, because there was only one place and no variations in speed.  As the universe expanded, dramatic variations in relative speed emerged.  Whereas very early on there was but primary process, over the course of the expansion, relativity emerged.

In just the way that humans exhibit imagination and creativity with the emergence of split consciousness, a result of dissociation and variation in hemispheric communication, perhaps the universe reveals self awareness as a direct result of dissociation and variation in time that results from variation in velocity.

A young universe reveals relatively little self awareness.  A mature universe exhibits self awareness, imagination and creativity.

This would be an evolutionary developmental biological interpretation of universe ontogeny.

Obviously, a brain has synapses to work with when it exhibits split consciousness and imagination.  What does a universe have that would behave like a brain that could experience relativity of time?

Something would have to play the part of connecting all the parts.  Something would have to play the part of neurons.

Dark matter?

Then again, it has been hypothesized that a brain is an instrument that decreases an almost infinite number of ways to perceive experience, reducing the channels down to five.  It’s not a device that reveals, but constrains.  To manage a physical form requires targeted attention.  A brain limits attention to those avenues, the senses, that make it possible to focus on what is necessary to maintain a physical form.

I would expect that the universe is under no such constraint.  Then the question is:  Does variation in velocity itself compel relative experiences of time, encouraging reflexive consciousness?  Whereas we experience split consciousness, the universe would experience multiconsciousness, sort of like an individual having a gazillion brain hemispheres communicating to one another regarding varying interpretations of sense experiences.

Still, it would seem necessary for a sentient form experiencing an enhancement of that experience through variations of velocity, compelling multiple experiences of time, to have an efficient across-system communication matrix.  The communication system would not need to exceed the speed of light, but it would be useful if there were places where information could be stored and compared or if there were at least some fashion for the information to be synthesized and then used to inform future behavior.

Then again, communication faster than the speed of light would be useful.  Otherwise, the speed of the expanding universe would compromise an ability to absorb and synthesize unique and emerging information regarding velocity relationships at the periphery.

It still seems to come back to dark matter.

There seems to be a connection between physics and an understanding of how split consciousness emerges from consciousness in human ontogeny.  I don’t know the connection between a physicist’s insights regarding the relativity of time and the invention of the atomic bomb.  Still, if my conjectures are correct regarding the rate and timing of maturation (testosterone managing the rate and estrogen the timing), then we have in our hands a possible understanding of how split consciousness originates.

I presuppose that consciousness exists.  Consciousness is a feature of the universe and existence (and nonexistence).  Humans evidence split consciousness when, during early development and maturation, maturation is managed by changes in rate and timing.  If, indeed, we can observe testosterone and estrogen directly affecting maturation, then we are in the position to observe the emergence of split consciousness under varying ontological circumstances.

It is possible that we can control, adjust and modify self awareness.  That which we have identified as peculiarly human, that which makes us special and unique, may be understandable and manageable.

Without the presupposition that consciousness is a feature of the system, the emergence of split consciousness is instead the emergence of consciousness.  This suggests an existential crisis second to none.  We can then indulge in the belief that we can be our own creators, engaging in a depth of hubris that is unfathomable.  Thomas Kuhn talks about struggles between paradigms.  This would be the battle of the century.

A question that has popped into my head more than once the last few days is how exactly does the heterochronic testosterone-rate-and-estrogen-timing paradigm translate into nonhuman species?  David Brin in his Uplift series has explored some of the repercussions of humans managing dolphin, whale, chimpanzee and gorilla lateralization to the point that language-associated self awareness emerges.  If, indeed, humans evolved according to the Geoffrey Miller runaway-sexual-selection hypothesis based on aesthetic display, then encouraging other species to experience split consciousness won’t necessarily be accompanied by a compulsion to make things up, a vivid imagination.  Just because you have an imagination and can be in two places and two times at once, doesn’t mean you feel inspired to exercise your imagination.  There is evidence to suggest that in humans, we have sexualized experience to the point that our imaginations have become closely associated with behaviors that enhance our ability to find and keep a mate.  Evolutionary psychology, particularly Geoffrey Miller’s work, seems founded on this premise.

Miller’s model may prove useful as regards what humans do with split consciousness once it is achieved.  The question is how exactly might other species, if encouraged to experience split consciousness by a manipulation of rates and timing of maturation, respond to these “enhancements”?  It is not only a question of cerebral lateralization and corpus callosum size, the two zones hypothetically impacted by changes in maturation rate and timing, but there is that whole cerebral-synapse universe composed of the many unique parts of the brain that were sexually selected to be enhanced.

If it’s not obvious to you, it’s obvious to me that I am WAY out of my league attempting to play baseball in this ballpark.  When an amateur cites physicists, it is often a sign of extreme dissociation.  This piece may be no exception.  Nevertheless, consider the repercussions of understanding the how of how human consciousness emerges.  A result may be the discovery that we are not alone.

Over the last year, I’ve experienced an integration of society and biology as I’ve observed the dynamic whereby neoteny and acceleration influence biological and societal evolution in identical ways.  Barriers between several disciplines have come down as I’ve seen heterochronic dynamics merge formerly separate models, interpreting endocrinological, neuropsychological, anthropological, evolutionary biological and psychological processes as a single, seamless whole.

I am not particularly smart.  I’m a slow learner and have trouble with anything involving mathematics.  I’m technologically impaired, though I have some facility with certain pieces of design software.  I do have a relatively unique relationship with my unconscious, not uncommon among artists and mystics, but perhaps unusual in someone exploring biological and social models.  I often feel like I’m being led on a treasure hunt, guided by an impish, loving unconscious.

I’m having that feeling now.

Last night, I kept waking up with an idea that seems to want to be integrated into the biological/social model that I’ve been calling “The Theory of Waves.”  The recent addition to the model, estrogen controlling the timing of ontogeny, has been compelling me to turn my attention to physics.

Somehow, a part of me is convinced that physicist’s insights regarding the relative nature of time has something to do with the role that estrogen plays in controlling the timing of ontogeny and evolution.  I’m math impaired.  It’s not clear to me what insight lingers here, but a part of me behaves convinced that there is a connection that I am capable of making.  I understand some aspects of relativity theory, though not the math.  Perhaps this has something to do with two different people experiencing time differently and two different people experiencing consciousness differently.

If my estimations are correct that testosterone and estrogen control the rate and timing of maturation, then the degree of split consciousness evidenced by the autistic at one end (no split consciousness) and many schizophrenics at the other (extreme split consciousness) may be examples of relativity in human experiences of time.  Who we are as individuals may have an enormous amount to do with where we are in this spectrum of time or self awareness.  In other words, in just the way that a physicist observes relativity in time regarding its relationship with relative speed, there is this alternative or complementary way to approach relativity in time having to do with degrees of cerebral lateralization and the relative speed of communication between the hemispheres.

In other words, just as time adjusts to relative speed in physics, the speed of information exchange between the two cerebral hemispheres may have no small amount to do with degrees of self awareness.  And, if my conjectures are correct, the timing of the testosterone surges that impact lateralization and corpus callosum development have a lot to with estrogen levels in the mother and the self.

There may even be equations that show specific amounts of estrogen and testosterone conducive to particular degrees of lateralization and corpus callosum development.  I suspect adjustments would be a very bad idea, a little bit like taking off at the speed of light and returning home to discover that everyone you knew had passed away.  Because each individual exhibits features balanced by the features of individuals in society at large, our unique, societal-balanced polymorphism, selecting specific adult features by adjusting natal and infant hormone levels would inevitably result in a corrupted balance with serious consequences.

In just the ways that a physicist’s work resulted in the bomb, understanding how the timing of maturation results in specific degrees of consciousness offers possibility for deep mischief as we seek to leverage an ability to adjust our sense of time.

There is no difference between consciousness and relative sense of time.  There is no such thing as god as we have been taught to understand god.  There is only consciousness.  Time and consciousness are related.  As we become aware of time as relative, identity shifts and we become more than we thought we were.  Understanding how split consciousness is created, how time originates, we understand the biological/social source of what we formerly titled god.

There is this thesis that I’ve been playing with.  Like the experience physics theorists have described, it seems too beautiful to not be true.  Nevertheless, Stephen J. Gould has described the trap biologists sometimes get themselves into, the dogged pursuit of a beautiful thesis that turns out to be false.

The thesis I am now exploring has been developing since late 1997.  It has grown deeper with time.  Earlier immersion in works by William Irwin Thompson and Riane Eisler prepared me for what followed.  It started out as an exploration of how Darwin’s theory of sexual selection juxtaposed with Chris Knight’s explanation of matrifocal human evolution.  This insight was joined by Gould’s description of heterochronic processes, associated with Norman Geschwind’s studies of cerebral lateralization and Annett’s discoveries regarding handedness distributions.

Darwin, Knight, Gould, Geschwind and Annett each offered pieces that suggested an integrated whole.  Sexualselection.org describes the thesis, introduced in 1998.

I struggled to write a larger, cogent overview of the thesis but a combination of deep disappointment around failed attempts to start conversations with academics (many polite responses, little enthusiasm) and the need to make a living (my former business took a dive) propelled me to put my theorizing on hold.  I started a website design firm in 1999.  From the start, I focused on achieving high rankings for my clients’ websites and my theory site.  I discovered I had a talent for the kind of obsessive, focused puzzle-solving that search engine optimization entailed.  Search engine ranking is now a sizable portion of my living.  My four theory sites have received over a million unique visitors.

Last fall, I was diagnosed with a cerebral aneurysm.  I’d been writing every day since the previous January 1, with daily postings slowly turning back toward evolutionary theory after a hiatus of several years.  Over the course of the spring and summer, I kept finding societal applications of heterochronic theory with implications that felt profound.  Biology and society began to merge as I observed identical processes impacting both disciplines in predictable ways.  Changing maturation rates and timing (the foundation of heterochronic theory) had both biological and societal implications.

Discovery of the aneurysm seemed to concentrate my attentions.  The existence of the aneurysm is not life threatening, unless it ruptures.  Still, the chance of a rupture in a given year is 2.5 percent to 10 percent, depending on the surgeon being interviewed.  Life feels more precious.

The original thesis that came together in 1997 and 1998 offered a host of insights and one major anomaly.  The anomaly was that Asian patrifocal social structures produce neotenous features.  I rejected the “random” answer that different ethnicities produce different features based on unpredictable tendencies to focus on particular sexually selected traits.  In the back of my mind for almost ten years was the feeling that an answer to this riddle would lead to useful new directions.

In addition, I was aware that my theory focused almost exclusively on testosterone as a driving force in human evolution, with testosterone controlling rates of maturation.  It seemed to me that estrogen probably had an integral part to play, but it had not become obvious what that part was.  For ten years, that thought about estrogen bounced around in the back of my mind.

Then, last fall, shortly after the discovery of the aneurysm, I began to play with the possibility that estrogen worked in close cooperation with testosterone in a complementary opposite fashion.  This possibility could both explain the paradox of Asian neoteny and provide a balanced explanation of how maturation rates are adjusted by estrogen in the womb and in society.

That felt major.  The piece, “Introduction to the Theory of Waves,” described the dynamic.  What I had called “Shift Theory” in 1998 I now called “The Theory of Waves” to accommodate the integration of estrogen into the equation.

Last spring, a series of additional revelations regarding estrogen emerged.  The whole theory began to lean in the direction of an estrogen dynamic when it occurred to me that there was a relationship between my stepdaughter’s difficulty with entering puberty (her diabetes wouldn’t let her put on fat) and estrogen as a possible force that controlled the timing of maturation.  This implied that heterochronic theory, already deeply integrated into the thesis, might offer further illumination by interpreting testosterone as controlling the rate of maturation while estrogen controlled the timing.

A one-sentence explanation of evolution.

An immediate implication was that autism was impacted by the mother’s testosterone and estrogen level.  In addition, the child’s hormone levels would impact maturation rates once out of the womb, particularly as regards estrogen levels.  Synapse pruning results in a reduced left hemisphere in most normal right-handed people.  This may be managed by estrogen levels, just as fat levels in adolescents determine the timing of the testosterone surges that occur at puberty.  Autistic brains are often characterized by having had no pruning of synapses as young children.

I wrote Simon Baron-Cohen.  On 6/25/09 he replied that I ask a bunch of great questions but that he doesn’t think researchers have the answers yet.  Baron-Cohen said he’d discuss my conjectures with his colleagues.  Dr.  Baron-Cohen had responded positively to an emailed introduction to my work last autumn, providing me permission to quote his positive response.

In the meantime, having been in the middle of the slow accumulation of a number of ideas that have suddenly snapped together into an integrated whole, I continue to wonder how something so beautiful might not be profoundly useful.  And, if not so useful, are there portions of the theory that might be useful?

A major hurdle is that heterochronic theory is not applied to human diseases and disorders.  It is a rather arcane, evolutionary biological backwater.  Getting theorists to pay attention to the rate and timing of maturation as regards evolution, ontogeny, epigenesis and endocrinology is a challenge.

A second problem is that autism is not looked at as an evolutionary condition.  With Darwin’s theory of natural selection still the default frame of reference, it’s very difficult for people to note the potential usefulness of alternative, complementing evolution theories.  Looking at autism as a heterochronic condition is a foreign concept to literally every academic or theorist I have proposed this idea to.

One last thing.  Sensitivity to the preciousness of life seems to encourage a lifting of veils.  If some of these conjectures turn out to be useful, if the central thesis offers physics-like leverage to open doors to additional useful theories in the future, then perhaps specific forms of spirituality might be useful when it comes to science.  If, instead of rejecting mythology as a prerequisite to engaging in science, what if we instead embraced an eastern inclination to live in the present, with no mythology?  Awareness of our own mortality may be integral to understanding that which transcends individual identity.  Feeling our not existing may offer insight into that part of us that transcends individual self.

Sensitivity to mortality may offer leverage when exploring the structure of interconnection.  Experiencing self and Self may allow us to experience evolution over time, and in the now.

Healing hearts can take a lifetime.  For many of us, it seems like a central responsibility in life is paying attention to our selves, mirroring our selves, listening to our selves in ways that we can finally feel embraced.

This can take a while, particularly if our personality structure tends toward self obsession.

For me, forgiving myself, being present to myself, respecting the feelings that I experience has been necessary to be able to be open to others, or at least to feel myself feeling open to others.  I suspect I love more often than I am aware of, engaging in stealth affection, hiding my attraction to others from myself.  I can’t imagine how it is that so many people love me if they haven’t experienced that I, at least to some degree, love them back.

Where am I going with this?

When I am aware of what is going on in my chest, where affection seems to center itself, it is usually asthma.  I have been pumping adrenaline into my system through inhalers, on and off, for 50 years.  It is no big surprise that I tend to dissociate from chest experiences, feeling like every hit of albuterol is a failure in my ability to fend off ill health.

After asthma, longing seems to lodge itself with little effort in the middle of my body.  Younger, I longed for female.  Older, I long for embrace of my ideas.  Mostly, I seek passionate, animated conversations with specialists in the disciplines I explore.  I feel like a jazz musician in a world of classical performers.  I long to make music with others besides myself.

Third, I’m learning to linger where appreciation sits.  Experiencing gratitude seems central to my next step.  Having spent a life focused on the details of my own desires, I’m looking to shift identity some, redefine what exactly I might be, allowing my chest to feel attracted to what I experience in the present.  I’m seeking to let myself be aware of what it is like to feel loved.

This has been an astonishing spring and summer.  It seems to rain every third day.  July was as green as April.  In our teeny, cement-covered backyard we are visited constantly by all manner of birds and critters.  Evanston is absolutely beautiful.

The brain aneurysm nudges me that life is short.  I can make it sweet.  I engage in far fewer internal-dialog disempowering games.  It feels far clearer that this is life, that there is no outside intervention that will change my life, and that how I talk to myself, how I feel, is my responsibility.  If I want my heart to be fully engaged, I can choose to speak to myself with compassion.  Then, maybe, my heart will open.

I can be in the present.

Or, as the Kung Fu Panda says, “They call it the present because life’s a gift.”

Physicists maintain a reverence for process that transcends deity, the metaphors that deity is associated with and the battles that sometimes result from deep commitment to metaphor.  Physics is a relatively nonmetaphoric undertaking.  Reverence for process connects physicists across the world.  There is evidence that this state of reverence, this respect for the awe-inspiring mathematics of the universe, often results in the practitioners of physics having an experience of everything being connected.  Transcendence without mythology.

In the biological sciences, most practitioners are still enamored of the implications of Darwin’s theory of natural selection.  Evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo), studies revolving around epigenesis and the work of heterochronic theorists such as Matsuda have not been integrated into a general understanding similar to that engaged in by the practitioners of physics.  In biology, interconnections are viewed as contingent upon random circumstance leading to complexity.  In physics, interconnection is often viewed as evidence of an integrated whole.

In biology, a central focus is natural selection’s insistence that the variation of progeny produced by a coupling is random, unrelated to environmental effects.  Alternative theories (evo-devo, epigenesis and Matsuda) suggest that there may be little that is random in the proliferation of life upon earth.  Physicists are not embroiled in this controversy.  There are clear patterns that seem to govern universe ontogeny, how the universe unfolds.  Physicists don’t assume that the birth of a universe has nothing to do with the environment that incubated that explosion, and they don’t assume that the features of a universe were randomly assigned.  There is still enough mystery around the genesis of our universe that we don’t assume that everything occurred by random chance.

Biological theory has a way to go to catch up with physics.  Physics often presupposes integration.  Biology still mostly presupposes random contingency.  Perhaps an understanding of society can help biologists think like physicists.

Society is at the beginning of a nonrandom, technology-enhanced proliferation of matrifocal features.  Social-structure shifts are integral to species transformations.  Stephen J. Gould offered both the theories of punctuated equilibrium and heterochronic theory (changes in the rate and timing of maturation and development) as influential in the transformation of species.  The kind of transformation our species is experiencing qualifies for both.

Chris Knight, Riane Eisler, Marx and Engels, Lewis Henry Morgan and many others have posited that humans evolved while relating in matrifocal bands.  Gould suggested that neoteny (click here), where the infant features of ancestors appear in adult descendants and maturational delay is prolonged, characterized human evolution for millions of years.  Consider that matrifocal social structure drove neotenous evolution, bringing the features of our forebear’s children (upright stature, large head-to-body ratios, large eyes to head, curiosity, playfulness, sociality) to the grown-ups of the present day.

For at least 10,000 years, we’ve been on a detour.  Brains grew smaller as men slipped into positions of authority, with women cooperating instead of sharing band and tribe command.  Those days are ending.  Hierarchy is ending.  A huge surge of horizontal, transparent and diverse forces are leveling thousands of years of male domination.  Women are on the pill, using abortion, choosing their mate, demanding divorce and becoming the breadwinner of the family.  Globalization is making enemies into trading friends.  Social media and the Internet are breaking down geographic, monetary, academic, media, ethnic and brand barriers, offering people access to people in ways unimaginable a decade ago.

This is nonrandom biological evolution.  This is what occurs when a highly social species able to manipulate space and time through language transforms, following classic social-structure precepts, from a male-dominance to a female-authority frame of reference.

Imagine a chimpanzee-like forebear evolving into a bonobo.  Consider violent chimpanzee-male-hierarchy conflicts transforming into sex-obsessed, female-led bands of horizontally structured bonobo.  Except, we’re not doing so in hundreds of generations, but with the aid of communications technologies and language, it’s happening in maybe five generations.  There are repercussions.  With the huge surge of maturationally-delayed males, we’re getting males so delayed that for some, split brains (a reduced left hemisphere) and language hesitate to ontologically emerge.  The autistic are appearing as a direct result of this matrifocal surge.

Biology has often bowed down to physics as physics has offered an integrated set of principles that make predictions about how our world works.  Biology has its own integrated set of principles.  Giving up the belief that the most important things are random, a belief that leaves the world to the survivors that can procreate, opens the door to an integrated set of principles that elevates females as major players in evolution.  Observing the interplay between social-structure and maturation-rate changes, we can see our world change.  We can make predictions regarding social change.  A window into biology is society.  We can understand how biology evolves by observing ourselves, right now.

There is a process that we engage in that is characterized by our observing changes in information over time, noting trends and estimating where we will be in the future.  Our lives are filled with charts that provide an image of where we may end up at some particular point.  Usually what is implied is something scary.  Gore’s pictorial representations of greenhouse gases are an example.

I engage in a similar process, focusing on patterns that reflect both personal experience and my social environment.  What interests me are evolution, transformation, consciousness and interconnection.  The news might suggest some specific thing is bound to get worse because there is an evident pattern to support the conclusion, and then it focuses on that thing because it drives viewers to return.  I also have a criterion for what I focus on.  My criterion is that what I follow has to be interesting.

So, reality has little to do with what the media choose to share.  Reality has little to do with what I choose to focus on and write about.  Still, whether a song describes reality isn’t as important as whether the song succinctly expresses feelings and a point of view.  That is what I am seeking to achieve:  a grounded, cogent, emotional slice of real, in the now.

Twitter is such a tiny slice.  I’m seeing it as a crack between the worlds, not unlike that described by Carlos Castaneda.  There were times in the Castaneda books when Don Juan would behave in ways that resulted in Carlos’s perceptions being transformed.  A world characterized by hidden interconnections would emerge.

Twitter is opening a crack that is providing vast numbers of interconnections among people, establishing a routine characterized by a sharing of massive amounts of information at lightning speeds.

Meditating since 1972, in psychotherapy for over half my life, I’ve observed a trend in my perception, my self consciousness, which is characterized by an increasing sense of trust and confidence.  The confidence isn’t exactly in myself but is confidence in that which is unconscious, my conscious or normal self, and people in my life.  I’m not a particularly heart-driven person.  Yet, over time, I’ve experienced a slow growing of trust.  In other words, I can chart out my own personality transformation, nurtured by an environment designed to encourage such transformations, and estimate where my self is headed.

Observing my own personal transformation, I observe society following a similar path.  Twitter is a window to that transformation.

At this time, Twitter mostly seems a game to accumulate followings by offering interest in another person’s life.  That interest seems often feigned as players seek opportunities to share personal experiences with many people.  Nevertheless, in an effort to encourage others to pay attention, there is a tendency to pass on interesting information that has been received, to behave with some authenticity and to be funny or entertaining.  I’m observing a number of interesting patterns that are emerging.

Twitter users grow higher-value microblogging personas by finding and passing on information that their community respects.  Individuals are being evaluated by their access to information and sorting criteria for what is passed on.  Who we are is becoming characterized by how connected we are.  In this horizontal, interconnected, information world, information is valuable.

Suddenly, we have access to worldwide real-time information on what individuals are concerned with in this moment.  Using Google to find blogs that specialized in a particular interest was the last derivation of this trend.  We can now search within Twitter to find people anywhere that share our particular interest or point of view.  Arcane passions can find reflection half the world away.  In real time.

Discovery of a person with astonishingly similar interests can lead to a treasure trove of information.  Simply exploring the list of people that the new person follows can lead to interconnections hidden because websites weren’t achieving high enough rankings or the information was not easily accessible on the web.

Each individual becomes a hub in the universe of his or her interests.  Leaping from hub to hub, exploring followers and followings, I am astonished by the almost infinite variety of connection.  In addition, many personal connections are being made as personal messages between connections encourage trust.  As time is dispensed in the form of messages, relationships are being formed.

Where is this going?  What does this trend line suggest?

This is a massive, incomprehensibly quick realignment to a horizontal, nonhierarchical, nonstratified point of view.  The commons is growing at an incalculable speed as shared resources emerge and disperse both efficiently and at no cost.  Our deep desire to feel respected is transforming into information-sharing behavior, not unlike the aboriginal potlatch.  Instead of seeking conspicuous consumption and hierarchical control, he or she that accumulates seeks to share.

What is occurring is profoundly aboriginal yet astonishingly modern as we each behave as part of a massive, interconnected whole with no mythology, no deity and no rituals that confuse the metaphor with that which the metaphor represents.  We are each reveling in the benefits of life lived with a small band or tribe with no hierarchical barriers to communication, except we are doing so with thousands.  Each individual is in his or her own customized community, with deep shared beliefs that could be described as a reverence for process.

God, now, truly has no name.

Where is Twitter heading?  We are speeding toward behavior that takes into consideration the wider community, a wisdom of the masses that makes understanding available at no cost.

Twitter is the crack that is splitting open an individual’s belief that he or she is alone and can have little effect or influence on the world.  Mainstream media’s reality that life is frightening and we are helpless to intervene will feel strangely anachronistic.  Frames of reference that engender change and transformation will feel familiar.  Don Juan showed Carlos how to shift perception.  Our perception is being shifted by Twitter and what follows.  The trend is clear.  With Twitter we are focusing on the now.

The Peace, Justice & Environment Project now covers 50 states serving over 1,400 organizations.  Our first fundraiser on July 4th was a success.  Where do we go from here?

I began working on this project over three-and-a-half years ago.  It started with my seeking a way to flip Moveon’s model by supplying local activists an ability to create actions and develop powerful lists with the potential to propagate those actions across wide areas from the bottom up.  Marcia and I experimented with Moveon techniques locally.  We were effective, quickly building an 1,800-person activist list, driving people to events, getting media coverage.  Would it be possible to develop a system where the lists were shared by all participating organizations in a state?

Programmer Rod Homor and I worked out a web application that we were able to test statewide in Illinois with the new Illinois Coalition for Peace & Justice.  It was well received.  It was an online commons offering participating organizations an ability to form ad hoc coalitions with other organizations around the state.  Organizations shared network resources (a central email list) when enough organizations voted support for one another’s projects.

I took the show on the road.  First Minnesota, then Florida, then Pennsylvania came on board.  I added states one by one.  There was an average of 28 organizations per state.  California came on with almost 100, Missouri with six.  More and more activists joined us, conducting research, emailing local activists, answering questions and teaching local representatives for organizations how to use the system.

States without a facilitator, a person taking responsibility for keeping in contact with the locals by posting their actions and projects when they are overwhelmed, tend to lie fallow.  The system needs encouragement.  The community needs people that are engaged.  A dozen of us are in phone and email contact with these 1,400 organizations.  Still, the original goals of the project need adjustment.  Finding volunteer facilitators has been difficult.

According to the original concept, these websites were designed to encourage local organizations to enlist support from other local organizations to receive access to a shared database of email addresses to be used to promote actions.  When a 55-percent support level was achieved, a blast to all people in the database would occur.  This has worked well in Illinois, the founding project, but it has not worked in other states.  There seems to be three reasons for this.

First, to build the email list, it is necessary to have online actions such as petitions or eletters.  Marcia and I design online actions to build the list.  One petition got 1,800 signers.  A boycott achieved 1,000 signatures.  Those signers end up in the website database and receive email when another, different action, sponsored by a different organization, receives 55-percent support by other participating organizations.  In no other state were there activists focused on utilizing online actions to build communal lists.  Evidently, Marcia’s and my passion for the concept was integral to this aspect of the project.  In other states where there were no local advocates for this frame of reference, local organizations continued to think in a noncommons, separated point of view.

Second, local organizations tend to keep thinking in a local way.  There seems relatively little reflexive tendency to make available what they themselves are doing to organizers and activists across the state.  Local organizations don’t tend to think in terms of allies for projects if other organizations are very far away.  Many local organizations look at these websites as calendars, not as organizing systems or as places where they can develop online actions, build lists and drive media to events.

Third, over the last three-and-a-half years, there has been a profound empowering of activists across the country in the form of online social networking.  The foundation premise of the PJEP project was to provide opportunities for local activists to feel empowered, offering them vehicles to accomplish goals.  Many activists are taking advantage of Facebook to create and drive activists to actions.  Facebook’s horizontal features offer much of what we were seeking to achieve with PJEP.  Facebook has made the social-networking (see our social networking vehicle, SNAPAP) aspects of the programming we’ve developed relatively unnecessary.  Though SNAPAP offers features not available in Facebook, the average age of the members of these participating 1,400 organizations is relatively old.  At this time, it’s still mostly young people that live and breathe social media.  Across the country, I observe young people behaving empowered by new media.  Older folks, not so much.  Nevertheless, they older folks are now using Facebook.

Working with Moveon as a volunteer national coordinator, I observed firsthand the power of numbers of protesters and cameras to make activists feel like they were having an effect.  When a sizable number of activists attended an action and cameras and reporters arrived to chronicle the event, activists behaved like they felt their goals were being achieved.  Building lists enhanced this process.  Powerful actions helped build lists.

Seeking to plug this list building process into PJEP has not worked out.  Building a commons that encourages activists to use one another to achieve their goals has worked only in Illinois.  The fact that it’s working in Illinois has had a lot to do with Marcia’s focus on the concept.

So, where do we go from here?  We continue to program new features into this network of networks.  David is now programming online access to over 10,000 peace, justice and environmental organizations, access to alternative media from all pages of the sites and an ability for any participating organization to get its own free, robust, multifeatured website.

We seek funds to create support for local organizations.  That support can come in the form of a person on staff that responds to every action with an offer to develop a media advisory and transmit the advisory to the local media.  If we can help drive cameras to local events, we can help empower the local activist to make a difference.

We’ve come a long way, but we have a long way to go.  I seek to empower the individual, encourage his or her creativity and make it easier for that individual to change the world.  As each of us feels we can make a difference, creativity is enhanced and we transform.

“As emphasized throughout this case study, Zapotec women hold strong roles economically, socially, and in the kinship system.  The father is almost always living in the Zapotec matrifocal household, and relations between husband and wife tend to be highly egalitarian.  It is not only acceptable for women to exercise… authority in their everyday lives, it is currently expected and encouraged.”  (The Isthmus Zapotecs: A Matrifocal Culture of Mexico, Beverly Newbold Chinas, 2002, p. 87)

Comedy can offer insight not easily accessed through other cultural venues.  Growing up, I noticed that the main male characters in The Honeymooners, The Flintstones and in my own home exhibited a decidedly nondominant male exercising a belief in male dominance.  This seemed to be essential to the joke.  Males behaved like they were in control.  They weren’t in control.  This seemed funny.

For several years, I worked with a Feng Shui master.  I drove out to his home in a far southern suburb of Chicago a couple times a month.  We drank tea.  He occasionally made recommendations.  I don’t remember him talking much.  Mostly he offered the perspective or position of not taking seriously something specific that I was at the time taking seriously.  Tom offered, “Don’t know mind.”

While working with Tom, I again began practicing Ti Chi Chuan, renewed meditation and withdrew from media exposure.  Tom suggested I not drive with NPR on.  In his opinion, the less news, the less media exposure, the better.

I watch no TV.  I don’t often listen to the radio.  I read the NY Times and various blogs off the web.  I receive newsfeeds from Truthout.  I watch the occasional John Stewart or TV comedy piece when on a website.

I’ve entered a sort of no-TV/Radio zone that provides a unique experience.  This experience is often characterized by enhanced appreciation of a moment.  Media often encourage fear, disappointment and judgment.  Opting out of media that interface by using sound and moving images, I am less moved by these calls to feel helpless or frustrated.

It also makes it a little easier to notice what might be going on.

When I was a child, watching TV, with eyes still relatively clear, I kept noticing differences between what I was being told to believe and what comedy was suggesting was just a belief.  One thing that kept appearing, that kept nudging me, was the evidence that supported the conclusion that males were not in control.  It was pretty obvious on shows like The Honeymooners and The Flintstones.  It was ubiquitous in the comedians my parents liked.  Males were supposed to be the dominant sex.  I suspected not.

A lot depends on where you stand.  I also remember thanking God I was not a girl.  Girls seemed to be always getting the short end of the stick.  Clearly, they were second-class citizens in most ways.  Which sex had and did not have control, which sex was dominant, seemed to depend on which convention was being examined and the social context.  Still, it seemed to me as a kid, when it came down to the question of which parent had the power in the home, it was not dads.

Much of the economy of the Zapotecs takes place in the home or in the markets where the women are distributing home-produced goods and services.  A net result is that the strength of female home-based authority becomes dispersed into the society at large.  In our society, men exhibit much control outside the home, but among Zapotecs, women share command across society.

Amongst all the other things transforming society, there is an expansion of the home into the workplace.  Home businesses are proliferating across the society.  The Internet is providing an ability to work from home in increasing ways.  As relationships continue to form through networks grounded in Facebook and Twitter, emphasis is taken off what occurs at work, where men have dominated, to be placed upon the horizontal world where women excel.

Comedy, the medium that seems to revel in the exposure of the inauthentic or hypocritical, is receiving a profound boost as Youtube, Twitter, blogs and other online venues provide opportunities for the comedians among us to produce content.  That chuckle-generating content often has a lot to do with exposing hierarchies that don’t perform.  In a world becoming horizontal, misanthropic male hierarchies become easy targets.

Comedy encourages us to see the truth.  In this new matrifocal world where women can exercise authority across society, acquiring a child’s eyes may be easier than in the past.  New communication technologies encourage us to live in the present.  Laughter is becoming common in the new media environment where the leverage of levity makes it possible to be seen.

It’s happening so fast that all we know for sure is “don’t know mind.”

Slowly my mind is moving in the direction of a video presentation.  Yesterday, my son Elia and I discussed some features of a video that would outline this multiscale, multidiscipline theory of evolution.  Elia composes music and is a photographer.  Listening to some of Elia’s compositions yesterday, I could feel shifts in scale while in my mind’s eye I was watching visual shifts in scale as a narrator described multiscale evolutionary theory.

For example, there is the classic circuit board blending into a city street, or leaf veins becoming a river system becoming a path of stars.  I’m seeking to layer these visual images/metaphors, superimposing similarities of structure while changing scale.

I read somewhere that there are 22 scales or levels between tiny super strings up through atoms to molecules to genes, individuals, species, up through ecosystems and solar systems all the way to galaxy clusters and our universe.  I’m now imagining Elia’s music taking a listener/viewer up and down the scales of experience, leaping from one scale to the next through imagery that metaphorically connects the levels, sometimes pausing to describe a particular process.  Patterns that I specialize in that operate on several levels will be described.

A fundamental pattern that I’ll explore will be orthogenetic evolution, evolution that unfolds along encouraged pathways.  This is heterochronic theory, specifically neoteny and acceleration, described as transformations manifest in biology, society, ontogeny and individual experience.  Conjectures regarding their impact on cosmology and molecular biology can be brought in.

Central to this interlocking series of theories is the premise that perhaps at all scales there is a process, neoteny, which is characterized by a prolongation of ancestor infant or early features into the adults or later stages of descendants.  The reverse, acceleration, is characterized by the withdrawal of ancestor adult or later-stage features backward so that those features appear in the infant or early stages of descendants.

At the foundation of this ebb and flow, waxing and waning, is the tendency to take that which is characteristic of creation and bring it forward, over the course of time, into later stages of particular processes within a scale.  At the same time, it will be revealed that the reverse occurs.  That which we call experience, what has been learned over time, will move backward over the course of a particular process, within a scale, to appear earlier and earlier, approaching creation.  In a sense, what exists is attracted to two polarities manifesting those attractions in particular ways.  There is that which is new, just created.  There is that which is experienced, before transition, its transition (death) to be reintegrated into that which ends up appearing as the new.  The two great attractors.

This is a cosmic, biological, societal, ontogenetic, personal, molecular, teleological interpretation of evolution based upon a particular pattern of multiscale evolution and transformation.

Beck, who is producing a Flash video showing how this occurred in our species, is using the chimpanzee as a stand-in for our approximately five-million-year-old progenitor.  Forebear infant features will be animated to appear later and later in the ontogeny of descendants until five-million-year-old infant features appear in the adults of modern humans.  This Flash production will be integrated into our video with visually changing scales, Elia’s music, my narration and various examples of the processes that I’ll be describing.  Beck has been working on this particular piece, on and off, for several months.  There is literally nothing like an animated explanation of neoteny on the web.

Perhaps, finally, my decade of experience as a comic panel and strip artist will come into play.  This video will involve my thinking in a narrative format, combining pictures and words, searching for ways for language to complement imagery and imagery to complement language over a period of time in a narrative frame.  Comics are like story boards to the video I want to produce.  Only the words will not be written; they will be spoken.

Last weekend, I finished a 30-page piece describing how a series of dreams revealed hidden childhood events.  This weekend, I begin a presentation of my theory that concentrates on the social aspects of the processes.  That may take a while, because I’ll be writing only weekend mornings.  I’ll be considering also which narrations may serve the video presentation.  When this piece is completed, I hope to begin work on the video.

I am seeking to integrate a unique integrated theory of human evolution into a multiscale, multimedia presentation.  This sounds like a fun winter project.

“The classified ads (and stock-market quotations) are the bedrock of the press.  Should an alternative source of easy access to such diverse daily information be found, the press will fold.”  Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, p. 207, 1964.

Marshall McLuhan studied the effects of speed and time on social change.  One of his seminal insights was that media mold how we perceive the world, not only by the content that is distributed, but by how specifically media enhance our ability to access information.

It has become evident that the media are about politics.  How we communicate influences the distribution of power and authority.  More powerful than any political manifesto is the way that the words might be conveyed.

There are three foundation, democratizing power centers.  Education controls the ability for an individual to synthesize information.  Voting integrity empowers an individual to act upon the information.  Media enhance access to information.  With fundamental transformations in media, education and voting integrity get a boost.

What we are observing now is an exponential increase in the speed and quality of information distribution.  Everything is changing as a result of this transformation.

Theorists Shirky, Rheingold and others describe the result of barriers coming down with the placement of high-quality resources, such as cell phones and information access, with the formerly disempowered.  A staggering upsurge in creativity results with the belief that an individual can make a difference.  High-quality information can become ubiquitous when it is observed that a system can encourage an egalitarian distribution of high-quality information.  When information stops congregating in the hands of the few, the many feel empowered.

But it’s also the speed.  Information grows stale.  The fact that information becomes available in real time to anyone who can profit from its availability means that the horizontal feels natural.  Why believe in hierarchy when authority is informed by access to information, and information is quick and free?

Eliminate distance and collapse time and we redefine a foundation principle of human nature.  That principle is that there is a difference between being human and being god.  We still mostly believe that the difference between being human and being god is important enough that whether god exists or not, or what stories we have assigned to god, are integral to understanding our place in the universe.  This is changing.

There are no atheists in aboriginal society.  To be a member of the community is to share community beliefs.  We are quickly headed in an aboriginal direction, where society will be characterized by a universality of process.  This is a process not unlike a prehistoric band where each individual has access to all community resources.  A result is deep systemic integration, not alienation, resulting in an experience characterized by synthesis, not stratification.

If “the media is the message,” then the elimination of space and time does away with defining ourselves by what we do or don’t have access to.  Which stories we assign to god or whether he or she exists becomes secondary to the experience that we are not separate.  Eliminate space and time and you eliminate most conflict.  We are talking about the de-alienation of society.

It will take some time for education to catch up with information distribution and provide an ability to evaluate and form conclusions.  Voter integrity will perhaps come faster as it becomes relatively easy to generate double checks by a grass-roots system that combats those places where authority still seeks to congregate.  In the meantime, prepare for the wildest ride a species can engage in.  After having achieved an ability to be alone, be separate, feel alienated, think thoughts and question authority, we are now being introduced to the equivalent of social hallucinogens.  We are being introduced to no time, no space.

This has also been called the eternal now.

I’m working with Nithya and Elia on two separate but related projects.  Nithya is exploring the possibility that there is a correlation between breast cancer and matrifocal society.  It looks like she’ll be concentrating on Dravidian communities in India.  I hypothesize that many matrifocal societies are characterized by high-testosterone, high-estrogen woman, and I am estimating that certain diseases and conditions will be more common among that hormonal constellation, including breast cancer.

About a week into conducting research, Nithya noted that an unusually large number of matrifocal societies are island communities.  She suggested Founder Effect, or an ability for unique features to proliferate in the absence of competition.  I told her to explore whether mountainous communities possibly show a similar propensity.  The Basques would be an example.  Both islands and mountains have shown unique language structures.  I’m wondering if islands and mountains might harbor ancient social structures, relatively unmolested because of unique geography.  It would not be farfetched to consider that matrifocal social structures mainly inhabit terrains that are difficult to attack.  This would support a hypothesis that matrifocal social structures are precursors to patrifocal social structure.

We also talked of creoles.  Nithya noted many matrifocal island societies in the Caribbean.  I asked if they were creole, as Caribbean societies often are, and Nithya said yes.  I told Nithya that this was a potentially confounding variable because of Darwin’s observation that pigeons that had been bred separately for over 2,000 years in China and Europe, when mated, revealed features of their last common progenitor, the roc pigeon.  Humans might also reveal features of common forebears if separated by over 1,000 generations.  If creole peoples are encouraging sexual unions between Africans and Asians, for example, then the children may sometimes be revealing neurological, hormonal and social structure features of their distant ancestors.  Those features might be matrifocal.

In a separate discussion, I talked with Elia about his research, which focuses on possible unique language structures among matrifocal societies.  We are attempting to see if there is a larger pattern after noticing that the Hopi and Trobriand Islanders, both matrifocal societies, show strong tendencies to observe the world largely through the present tense.  Might this suggest a tendency toward a primary process (one time, one place, no negatives) point of view?  If so, might a connection between primary process and matrifocal social structures enhance our understanding of autism and contemporary society?  These are the kinds of questions we are asking.

I asked Elia to run some additional explorations regarding the use of voiced and nonvoiced consonants in aboriginal matrifocal societies.  I recently saw reference to a study that concluded that autistic people have only one, not two, kinds of laughs.  Evidently the autistic do not offer nonvoiced laughs.  When they laugh, there is always only vocal chord activity, no laughing without vocal chord contribution.

What this suggests to me is that nonvoiced consonants may reveal more theory of mind.  A nonvoiced laugh may suggest self reflection or awareness that one is laughing while one is laughing.  If this same dynamic applies to nonvoiced consonant communication in general, then this may be a marker for a predilection to primary process and/or an aboriginal matrifocal tendency.

In the July Scientific American (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=being-more-infantile) there was an article by Charles Q. Choi describing a study conducted by Philipp Khaitovich and colleagues that concluded that there is genetic evidence that supports human neoteny.  Khaitovich compared almost 8,000 genes in the brains of 39 humans, 14 chimpanzees and 9 rhesus monkeys.  Choi observed, “Analysis of the 299 genes whose timings had shifted in all three species revealed that almost 40 percent were expressed later in life in humans, with some genetic activity delayed well into adolescence.”

I’m not exactly clear why Stephen J. Gould’s 1977 Ontogeny and Phylogeny didn’t lead to decades of work exploring neoteny as the primary engine behind human evolution.  Perhaps this was because there was no suggested reductionist conclusion.  Nevertheless, there seems to be some renewed attention in this area.

Thomas Kuhn in his Structure of Scientific Revolutions notes the power of an anomaly to tease out useful new directions when one is seeking to understand how the world works.  I’ve been exploring patterns in neotenous features in contemporary social structure for about ten years.  I’m not aware of anyone else showing interest in these same kinds of things.  A particular anomaly that has plagued me for that decade was tentatively resolved last fall when I estimated that the differences between Asian and Scandinavian neotenous characteristics were differences that could be explained by taking into account both testosterone and estrogen.  Estrogen had not been part of my equation.  By making estrogen part of the equation, I was finally able to grasp the relationship between matriarchy, patriarchy and their particular hormonal constellations.  I was then able to make predictions regarding how social structure would change in response to different social and environmental influences.

Since then I’ve adjusted my “equation” by playing with the possibility that the neoteny implications run deeper than I thought.  Neoteny is one of six heterochronic processes.  Heterochrony observes fluctuations in the rate and timing of maturation and development and traces their effects.  The deeper insight revolves around the possibility that as testosterone regulates the rate of maturation, estrogen manages the timing.  The implications are profound.  If true, this conjecture heralds an increase of attention on the epigenetic patterns researched by evolutionary developmental biologists.  This means that the environment becomes a prime influence on human ontogeny and evolution over the course of a single generation.  We will be able to see the direct effect of diet, light, exercise, stress, drugs, etc., on human evolution as we observe their effects on testosterone and estrogen levels as testosterone and estrogen adjust the rate and timing of individual ontogeny.  The science of endocrinology will become an integral part of evolutionary theory.

Evidence for my conjectures emerges with the work of people like Nithya and Elia, who are exploring patterns that integrate with the larger whole.  It feels like I’m sometimes occupying the body of a being that is conducting an invisible orchestra, with players now occasionally sitting down, picking up an instrument and toying with a tune.  I hear music.  Do you?

The American Left, divided on many issues, maintains one deep division not often talked about.  Many in the American Left despise business.  Doing so, they alienate supporters, making it more difficult to accomplish goals.

In high school and in college, I harbored a deep prejudice against business.  I’m not talking about just corporations but small businesses run by a single person or a family.  My father ran a girdle and bra factory on the west side of Chicago, on the fourth floor of a factory building that is now art studios for the University of Illinois.  The factory had maybe 50 employees.  My father was passionately dedicated to achieving respect by running a successful business.  His whole life revolved around the factory’s health.  He worked six days a week.  When business was good, my dad was relaxed.  When business was bad, he was preoccupied and irritable.

Dad’s politics revolved exclusively around his business.  What he perceived as good for the factory was good for him.  He would never consider voting for a Democrat.  He concluded that Republicans wanted him to succeed and Democrats wanted to use him to support those that didn’t have the resources or ambition to have their own business.  Dad saw the world through what he did to make a living.

Dad was not some Dickensian employer.  Several attempts to unionize failed, with Dad seeking to provide enough that employees would trust him.  Dad hated the union.  He saw several apparel businesses disappear after unionizing, unable to compete with foreign competition.

When I was about 16 years old, he and I polarized.  This was 1968.  A view that I acquired was that business people in general were enemies of egalitarian democracy as they trumpeted selfishness as the most important thing in life.  I didn’t differentiate between institutionalized, corporate Social Darwinism, which strategically sought to undermine challenges to an established, wealthy few, and local business people seeking to make a living without having to be someone else’s employee.

My father is in his 80s and is more open minded.  Part of this is mutual respect for each other’s perspective.  He still has never voted for anything other than a Republican.  Yet he listens when we discuss politics.  Listening is not something either of us used to do.

There is a lot of not listening on the left.  One of the things that many on the left fail to pay attention to is that an enormous number of small business people support Left/Progressive legislation, even when it negatively impacts their small business.  I work with hundreds of these little firms.  Yes, they are usually preoccupied with what is going on inside their business and their personal lives, but they are often deeply friendly to single-payer health care, withdrawal from war, strict environmental intervention, corporate accountability and civil/woman/gay rights.

I live in Evanston, a mixed-raced community with many blended marriages.  Almost 90% of the population voted for Obama.  Yet, many businesses in the heart of some of the most affluent communities in the world, Lake Forest, Highland Park, Glencoe, Winnetka, Wilmette, support the work I do in empowering local peace, justice and environmental organizations across the country.

Over 70 of the almost 350 businesses that I work with made product or service contributions to a silent auction to raise money to help the Peace, Justice and Environment Project.  An emailed 20% response for contributions is an astonishing figure.

The Left, small and larger organizations across the country, would do well to consider this often abandoned support.  The independent streak that makes up many small business people can be understood as citizens tired of listening to conservative calls to cooperate with a top-down agenda without question.  Many are looking for a way to make a difference.  The Left needs resources.  Many business people are seeking a way to know that they have had a positive effect.  Let’s get creative.  Let’s give small business an opportunity to be involved.

It may be possible that we are approaching a way of looking at social and biological evolution that provides us a synthesis perspective or integrated discipline.  Its name might be something like “Evolutionary Endocrinology.”  This new perspective might be characterized by an exploration of evolution in the present, not just over time.  This would integrate evolutionary developmental biology with social structure theory.  It might even provide a place for evolutionary psychologists by framing their contributions as the human dynamic evidenced by patrifocal social structure.  With the new paradigm we’d be encouraged to integrate the biological now with the arc of evolution over time.

Thomas Kuhn described and framed the evolution of science in his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.  He started off by presupposing that there was structure to the way that science transformed over time.  To presuppose that something is possible it is necessary to recognize that the something exists.  I presuppose that everything is connected and awareness or consciousness is a feature of the system.  A benefit of this presupposition is that I look for connections in places where a reductionist model suggests they are unnecessary.

The questions are:  What useful outcomes does a presupposition offer and can mutually exclusive presuppositional models coexist?  Are your assumptions useful?  Can users of these presuppositions tolerate noncomplementary models?

In physics you have noncomplementary models rubbing up against each other all the time, seeking resolution through mathematics.  On occasion, two seemingly incompatible models are forced to coexist as model proponents recognize usefulness in both perspectives.  Pluralist perspectives are not uncommon in the hard sciences.  Competing paradigms find ways to coexist.  One of the reasons that this occurs is that many practitioners of the physical sciences seek a unified theory.  There is often a presupposition of all things being connected.

In the biological sciences, particularly evolutionary theory, there is usually no such overriding perspective.  There is often no innate pluralism.  It is not often expressed that everything biological is connected with underlying principles suggesting a subtle yet complex, interrelated, nested hierarchy of process.

Biological evolution’s followers have trouble integrating the several established models.  In physics, different models seem to explain different phenomena.  In evolutionary biology the usefulness of the conclusions are often in dispute.  Whereas in physics there may be battles of ego, in evolutionary biology it feels more like hubris combat.  There seems an almost self-destructive compulsion not to recognize the potential usefulness of another subdiscipline’s maneuvers.  Several celebrated evolutionary psychologists write in a fashion that is mean spirited, with an evident desire to diminish the work of other schools.

Endocrinology explores the structure of disease and anomalous conditions.  Evolutionary developmental biology traces the effects of the environment on ontogeny, mapping the epigenetic aspects of early development.  Social structure evidences the hormonal constellations at the root of human behavior.

What useful outcomes might be available by presupposing that these disciplines are all connected?  Like the physicists, we can embrace the power of conjectures put forth by seemingly incompatible models by assuming they are all interrelated in the end.  Even the evolutionary psychologists have contributions, though many would have to give up refusal to integrate.

Many physicists manage to believe that everything is connected without a mythological construct.  Some believe in a larger consciousness, no stories attached.  In exchange, they are provided opportunities to intuit connection where connection may not be obvious.  Sometimes they are rewarded with integration.

Biologists would do well to begin with a similar presupposition.  We might begin by exploring evolution in the now.

I’m still trying to grasp the concept that testosterone and estrogen and their associated hormones are together managing ontological, social and biological evolution by adjusting to changes in the environment by moderating the rate and timing of ontogeny.

We always knew that sex governed our lives.  There is now the possibility that we can understand how exactly this is done.

In both sexes, entering puberty is characterized by a surge in testosterone that, among other things, halts most synaptic growth.  If fat levels are not high enough, puberty is delayed.  Certain levels of estrogen are required for testosterone surges to occur.

Over ten years ago I hypothesized that a mother’s uterine testosterone levels would influence the likelihood of her child exhibiting autism.  I estimated that the rate of maturation would be determined by the amount of testosterone.  A mother with high testosterone would feature maturationally delayed sons and maturationally accelerated daughters, both vulnerable to autism.

This last season I’ve been applying the pattern of how estrogen controls the timing of testosterone surges at puberty to early childhood when testosterone surges prune the right hemispheres of most normal right-handed individuals.  Might estrogen levels in these infants, toddlers and children be determining the timing of these testosterone surges?  What if estrogen levels were so low in boys that testosterone surges did not occur?  The result would be an unpruned right hemisphere, a larger brain with two cerebral lobes that are the same size.  This is a common feature of autism.

If a mother has both high testosterone and high estrogen, what I estimate to be an archetype of one of two forms of matrifocal social structure, then, according to the principles that I’ve been playing with, she would birth a low-testosterone, low-estrogen son; high-testosterone, high-estrogen daughter.

The implication is that we might predict that autism would be relatively common in cases where the rate of maturation and the timing of maturation combine to engender brains, mostly male brains, which are maturing slowly with little variation is hemispheric size.

Regarding female infants and children with high estrogen encouraging pruning still drifting in an autistic direction, click here.  That is a little more complicated.

Right now, I’m wondering if breast milk vs. infant formula might be an influence on this process.  If a mother’s body is able to modify her embryo’s maturation rate and timing based upon the various environmental influences that impact testosterone and estrogen levels, then does a mother’s milk also adjust to environmental influences in ways that her child’s ontogenetic timing is modified?

Does what a new mother eats, for instance, a high-fat diet, influence her breast milk to increase the estrogen levels in her sons and daughters?  Could a high-fat diet increase the chance of an autistic child?

High-fat diets increase testosterone and estrogen levels.

How much influence does what we eat have upon our children?

In physics there is the phenomenon where the closer a traveler comes to the speed of light, the more separate one’s “time” becomes from the traveler’s place of origin.  Einstein imagined time while riding a beam of light as if it were a train and concluded that time is relative.

In the physics of biology and social change, identity is a variable that, like time, can change.  What is necessary to be able to trace transformations in identity is a model of biological and social evolution that embraces consciousness or awareness as a default feature of the system.  This is quite different from our present predilection to presuppose that the underlying system does not exhibit consciousness or awareness.  Note the works of contemporary, respected evolutionary psychologists Dawkins, Dennett and Miller.  There is an assumption built upon an allegiance to natural selection being the only necessary process to drive evolution.  That assumption is that because god is not necessary for evolution, god does not need to exist.  All three are atheists.

Identity is changing.  And, like the rider on a light beam, we have a difficult task to evaluate the relativistic nature of our experience without access to an alternative landscape.  We need someplace to place our feet.

“Instant speeds abolish time and space, and return man to an integral and primitive awareness.”  (Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1964, p. 152)

The shift in awareness is not just a shift backward as McLuhan proclaims.  Yes, a powerful feature of this identity shift is one where the commons becomes highly valued and contribution to the community is revered.  A feature of aboriginal consciousness is a definition of one’s self as a member of a community.  Yet, something new is being engaged.  The communities of our youth are far more than the few people in a local tribe.  Hundreds, if not thousands, of self-selected individuals, folks connected to massive self-selected networks of their own, are coming together.

“At present the mechanical begins to yield to organic unity under conditions of electric speed.  Man now can look back at two or three thousand years of varying degrees of mechanization with full awareness of the mechanical as an interlude between two great organic periods of culture.” (p. 152)

Speed transforms.  Eliminate space and time as we are doing now in our massive, horizontal, transparent, barrierless social media relationships and we eliminate features of our own identity.  At the same time that we are individually selecting the participants in our unique social universe, we are also universalizing our experiences by propelling individual experience into a shared space.  We each are becoming artists of our individuality, relying upon the medium of our friends.  We are painting that which makes us unique with colors characteristic of the features of electronic allies.

“As the speed of information increases, the tendency is for politics to move away from representation and delegation of constituents toward immediate involvement of the entire community in the central acts of decision.” (p. 204)

We are moving at the speed of light away from the society of alienation toward an online community characterized by integration.  Whereas before we featured an identity that focused on the separateness characteristic of an experiential model that emphasized only arbitrary interconnection, we are moving into a new presuppositional matrix that is characterized by shared identity.  Everything changes.  Politics will transform to reflect a populace that assumes an ability of individuals within communities to effect outcomes.  Evolutionary theory will adjust to embrace features of life and society characterized by environmental influence, integration and systemic wholes.

“A newspaper headline recently read, ‘Little Red Schoolhouse Dies When Good Road Built.’  One-room schools, with all subjects being taught to all grades at the same time, simply dissolved when better transportation permitted specialized spaces and specialized teaching.  At the extreme of speeded-up movement, however, specialism of space and subject disappears once more.” (p. 346)

That feature of society where professionals control information is an aspect of society that is coming down.  From academicians to traditional media practitioners, the proliferation of the horizontal impetus demands that information be free.  Eliminate barriers and you eliminate the comodification of information.  As personal experience features shared experience, our identity shifts to both an aboriginal and transaboriginal space.  In effect, each of us, reengaging our inner aboriginal, also becomes the god of aboriginals with access to almost infinite information.

Einstein discovered time is relative.  So is consciousness.  It is necessary to presuppose that consciousness exists to be able to observe it changing.  Our children are transforming before our eyes.  Identities are shifting.  We’re going to need a new word for god to be able to understand what we are seeing.  There is no longer a need for mythology to illuminate.  We only have to believe our eyes.

I’m finding myself drifting in the direction of not having the operation to prevent the rupture of my cerebral aneurysm.  It’s been a week since meeting with the surgeons.  They told Marcia and me that a cranial intervention made the most sense.  The choice was between an arterial approach, operating from inside the aneurysm, strengthening its walls, or opening up my head and addressing the problem from the outside, where it is possible to see the tiny arteries (peripherals) that, if damaged, could cause a stroke.

They conducted a procedure (described here) about three weeks ago to gather information that would tell them the best route to go.  They discovered that if they were prevented from adjusting the aneurysm in the way that they wanted to during the cranial intervention, they could shut off my left carotid artery, relieving the pressure on the aneurysm.

The chance of rupture is about 2.5% in any given year.

So, this is not a matter that requires an immediate decision.  The aneurysm has no symptoms, though it could be related to headaches.  They’re not sure.  If I choose an operation, there is about an 8% chance of stroke.  The doctors recommend intervention.  I have a 50/50 chance of surviving a rupture with a 25% chance of surviving without damage.  It’s clear the doctors hate operating on rupture victims.  They don’t like to talk about it.

I was hoping for the arterial intervention.  Out of the hospital in two or three days.  Back to work almost immediately.  Cranial, out in four or five days, effects for months.

I was planning to have an operation.  Then the doctors recommended cranial, noting that shutting off my carotid was a possibility.  They shut off my carotid artery during the procedure while I was awake and aware so that I could answer questions and indicate whether I was having a stroke.  I experienced a powerful beating of my heartbeat in my neck, an experience that reproduced a symptom of anxiety, though I was not experiencing great anxiety at the time.  The doctors weren’t sure if it was a result of the shutting off of the carotid or not.  In other words, I could spend the rest of my life with an elevated heartbeat as my heart struggles to get enough blood to my brain through a single channel.

I have choices.

If I continue to experience my life as special, unique and limited, and I’m feeling gratitude, then maybe the operation is unnecessary.  The aneurysm becomes a boost toward making it easier to live life experiencing appreciation.  If I drift in the direction of not feeling gratitude, then the operation will become more appealing because it will seem to address the fear that comes with living life in some other place than love.

This is very odd.  I have the threat of an operation forcing me to pay attention to an aneurysm that could kill me.  I am responding by feeling appreciation for feeling alive.

Just after the Iran election, Twitter emerged as news.  It seemed not only to be able to share information about what was happening in Iran with folks following events around the world, but Twitter was also encouraging the ability of protesters to congregate spontaneously and keep each other informed of developments in real time.

I work with Left/Progressive organizers across the country, talking with maybe six to ten out-of-state activists each week. In a week I’m in email communication with several dozen. In Illinois, far more.  Over the course of a three-month period, I cycle through communication with almost 600 organizers in 30 states, trying to touch base with each four times a year.  In addition, I consult with In These Times, a revered Left/Progressive print publication.  I mostly work with In These Times as a local expert on the Internet and social media.

So, I have a pretty broad view of ongoing American Left strategies and tactics to accomplish specific goals.  Regarding my area of expertise, the Internet, the independent Progressive movement is at the very beginning of becoming aware of the power of horizontal, online social networks.

Right now, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and the others are enhancing communication by increasing the number of people we are in contact with every day while seeking to make those communications clear enough to be useful.  We are provided more and more effective sorts, functions and information enhancement features.  Youth trained in multitasking transition quickly to new applications.  Older folks aren’t seeing the advantages of letting go of what they experience as a more intimate, personal experience characterized by fewer contacts.

Developments using Twitter in Iran underline the difficulties of the medium when it comes to integrating or synthesizing information.  The wisdom of the crowds is marginalized when the crowd is looking for high quality information, and all it has is agreement.  Twitter and social networking media are failing to offer insight.  The reason for this is that the applications are not tracing the movement of information in real time, tracking the lineage of ideas as they move across the medium.  The applications are not noting when ideas evolve nor are they paying attention to the identity of the individuals who are present when a new idea emerges.  Furthermore, they are not indicating the individuals who are instrumental to an idea’s propagation.

This is not science fiction.  Now that memes or words representing specific thoughts or concepts can be traced as they spread across a network of users, those memes can be followed in just the way that in biological evolution we can track the evolution of species over time.  With Twitter or a Twitter-like application, we can not only trace the evolution of ideas, we can put into the hands of users an ability to conduct searches for these ideas and their particular evolution trajectories.  In other words, users can request reports like we now conduct a Google search, reports that track the speed, span, depth and breadth of ideas as they move across the web.

For example, in Iran let’s say the conversations that citizens are having regarding the exact kind of administration they would like to see are integrated with where in the country people are congregating with those opinions, who the individuals are that are instrumental in the distribution of those ideas, how fast the ideas are spreading and how many degrees of separation are being generated at what rate.  Imagine anyone being able to issue a report collating that information, using that information to draw conclusions, conclusions fed back into the idea distribution network to be able to be traced for their effect.

The result would not be the kind of chaos observed just after the elections but an automatic, lightning speed, dramatic realignment based upon high-quality, real-time information available to anyone who wants it.  This is the equivalent of nature conducting its usual healing in an area devastated by catastrophe.  With countless species in close communication with one another using the information-sharing channels characteristic of natural systems, unique integrations can emerge as a result of adjustment to new conditions.

For this to work in society, as in nature, there can be no hierarchy.  Every person in the system gets access to the reports that offer insight into the nature of the information.  Whereas now each of us uses “search,” with the direction we are going there will be a second level, a meta level, where each of us uses “report.”  At this level the wisdom of the crowd can become conventional wisdom, investing every individual with enhanced understanding, not just enhanced communication.

There is a not so subtle change that accompanies this shift in perspective, this embracing of the meta level of systems operations.  This change is a change in identity.  As we as individuals begin to understand and embrace a viewpoint characteristic of the way many individuals experience the evolution of information, the identity shift that the young in our communities are experiencing will receive an exponential boost.

Observe that the young are now members of communities, online social networking systems, several orders of magnitude greater than anyone not online.  This is having a profound effect upon how we experience ourselves as individuals.  Our peer groups are now far larger, more unique and often self-selected; they are not inhibited by geography.  Our identities are shifting.  We are voluntarily participating in that process.

Consider this ability to romance the wisdom of the crowds so that this understanding becomes easily accessible with the possibility of being further influenced.  Now consider this effect upon individual identity.  The commons will become common.  We will not be able to think of ourselves without considering others.  We are talking about a feminization of society.

As I was observing Twitter in Iran this June, these two things came to mind.  Social networking does not just have to be only about communication.  Social networking can also be about integration.

Where there is integration, there is a shift in identity.  Social networking can change who we think we are.

I’ve noticed that when I start to write, sometimes there is more than one thing I want to write about.  Often, the two or more things are quite different, and it would seem that I would have to choose between them.  But what happens is that I feel compelled to find a way to tie the two things together, connect them, even when there is no obvious relationship.

It’s not like this is in my mind.  I start writing about one thing and end up writing about both things.  The music my fingers seek to play usually has two or more melodies.  It seems that a feature of my participating in this integration is my writing while letting go.

The structure of these essays is in some ways more important than the content.  The structure can evidence my seeking to guide myself and the reader toward an understanding that seemingly disparate principles or ideas are actually the same.

Great dancers often bridge genres and bring together, for example, contemporary and modern forms.  Physicists attempt to bring into single equations patterns evidencing themselves in seemingly separate ways.  Some politicians define themselves by their ability to bridge disparate social trends.  Often we interpret an experience as being valuable by how elegantly the practitioner of a discipline ties together seemingly uncomplementary forms.

As Hegel proposed and Kuhn made clear, what we can integrate has a lot to do with where we sit in space and time.  Each epoch and society struggles with different polarities.  Each artist wrestles a different muse.

There is a way that I personally engage in this process that has less to do with what I am integrating than with my act of engaging in the integration process.  Writing, I am encouraging a new routine.  I am engaging in dance, moving to music, exercising consciousness to experience seamless connection, doing so over and over again in order that I feel personally that we are all connected.

Ideas are opportunities to feel wholes.

I do not sing and I do not dance.  Since early childhood doing either brought me an experience of shame, self consciousness and a fear of humiliation.  On rare occasions I sing when totally alone, in the car, in pouring rain, when I’m certain no one can hear or see me.

Instead I feel compelled to sing and dance with what I draw or write.  All that craving for integration gets channeled into pictures, words and pattern observation.

I’ve just finishing reading Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media and am starting Geoffrey Miller’s Spent.  Both are focused on patterns in societal transformation, influenced by individual biology.  Whereas Understanding Media seeks to communicate through a combination of unique social pattern observations combined with multiple interpretation prose impressions, Spent revels in an almost cynical evolutionary psychological reductionist interpretation of society as a collection of human compulsions to charm one’s way to personal achievement.

McLuhan challenges the reader to treat his communication as literature and draw from it a personal conclusion.  Miller suggests that there are only a few reasonable conclusions that one could draw from an evolutionary interpretation of culture–Miller’s focus being that almost always whatever it is we do, it is to have babies.

Whereas McLuhan sees society informed by its avenues of communication, Miller views almost all communication as driven by an individual’s desire to procreate.

It feels to me like two white men having difficulty dancing.  Both writers are tapped into the music, but their movement is constrained by a compulsion to make things make sense.  McLuhan often seems loathe to come to a firm conclusion, perhaps burdened by a modern reflex to make everybody right.  Miller feels constrained by his allegiance to a single, elegant conclusion, the reductionist manifesto, Occam’s razor.  Miller writes like he knows that it’s simple, and yet he seems to believe that all the simplicity-inspired connections are arbitrary, the result of sexual selection.

McLuhan dances like an awkward teenager seeking to integrate every nuance of impression.  Miller moves in a slow, stately waltz, except he doesn’t have a partner.  He’s made his movements so elegant that his partner in love has disappeared, gone searching for subtlety and complexity.

I revere both men’s work.  Their passion for integration is that of an artist or mystic.  But they, like me, have difficulty dancing.  Both men seem to want to give from a distance, avoiding touch, keeping their hands clean.  But if our profession or avocation is the integration of ideas, we have to do more than make things make sense.

We have to let go.

I can’t exactly remember when the chills first started.  When I was in summer camp when five or six, I remember concentrating on placing my right hand over my left side to be able to say the Pledge of Allegiance.  I then felt chills, vibrations up my back, because I was feeling part of something I did not understand but I knew was good, something larger than myself.

Over time the chills or vibrations would come and go.  The feeling always accompanied the experience that I’d been moved.  From what I can tell, this is universal.

In 1980 and 1981, I went through a Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) trainers program to become a practitioner of NLP.  I was fascinated by the communications model.  Fifty-eight psychotherapists, psychoanalysts and psychologists, one businessman and I went through the training.  The focus was on addressing and achieving patients’ psychological goals.  There was a secondary emphasis concentrating on communicating directly with another person’s unconscious.

The work of Milton H. Erickson was integral to NLP insights.  Erickson was a hypnotherapist who developed a number of new techniques, wrote books describing those techniques and taught many therapists how to use hypnotherapy to advance patient goals.  Erickson died in 1980.

Over the course of the training we developed a sensitivity to the unique ways an individual’s unconscious signals “yes” or “no” to the inquiries of the therapist or person communicating with that patient’s or client’s unconscious.  Sometimes it is the classic lifting of a hand to signal yes.  Sometimes it is an obvious head nod.  This has been called an ideomotor effect.

I discovered over the course of the training that if I asked questions of my own unconscious, my unconscious would signal “yes” by offering chills up my back, and “no” was signaled by no chills.

Placing myself in a trance was easy.  I’d been meditating for almost ten years.  My unconscious felt trusting enough of my conscious to communicate clear responses to my inquiries, as long as what I was asking was in my best interest and was personal.

From around 1980 to 1984, I studied NLP and hypnotherapy with a passion and dedication that was, for me, unusually intense.  I was interested primarily in learning about my self and the structure and processes characteristic of the human unconscious.  At the time, I was painting watercolor metaphors for states of mind and publishing those paintings as greeting cards.  I read everything the NLP authors had published, some books several times.  I immersed myself in tapes of lectures.  I explored the books of hypnotherapists and therapists cited by the model.  I attended workshops.

Conversations with my unconscious continued.  I would fairly frequently experience affirmation shivers up my spine when I had a thought that my unconscious wanted me to pay particularly close attention to.  I found myself adjusting my behavior according to the direct messages that I would receive from my unconscious.  Over time, a “no” signal emerged that I could read.  Instead of a shiver signaling “yes,” the “no” would be signaled by a feeling not unlike an elevator about to go down, a sort of pause, difficult to describe.

Almost always I paid close attention to the signals, but often I would not let myself relax enough to make it possible for the communications to occur.  They didn’t just break through at any time.  I had to be listening.  Listening involved letting my mind clear and being relaxed.  Months at a time I noticed no communication.

Sometimes, driving from one place to another, talking to myself, the chills would shiver their way up my spine.  I would then revisit the thought, realizing that the specific words I had been saying had been singled out as significant by the part of me that wants for me only the very best.

The signals from my unconscious offer me an experience of feeling accompanied and feeling loved.  When I feel the guiding suggestions, I feel loved by something greater and wiser than my isolated, conscious self.

Over the years, there has been an integration of my unconscious and conscious, resulting in my often not even noticing that I’m receiving these communications.  My conscious unconsciously adjusts to the communications from my unconscious.  Often, there is a certain seamless way I go about my life, guided by an unconscious that I feel loved by.  I feel accompanied.  Not all the time.  I indulge in the experience that I am insecure.  But, a lot of the time I am in silent communication with a part of me whose boundaries are not clear to me, but I suspect this part of me crosses lines to experience an identity outside the confines of my body.

One of the unique aspects of this experience is that over time I simply have fewer questions to ask myself.  I just trust that things will be OK and that I am behaving in my own best interest.  Over the course of my life I have shifted identity from that which I used to define as conscious to that which is both unconscious and conscious.  A result of this shift in identity is what you see emerging in this blog, a dancing through a number of disciplines guided by a playful unconscious.  My unconscious seeks that I experience union.  This blog is the evidence of that guided dance.