There are the interpretations of evolution that emphasize mutation.  Evolutionary developmental biologists are exploring ways life may be evolving that are unrelated to mutation, pathways influenced by the environment.  My work concentrates on how the rates and timing of maturation are influenced by hormones, with sexual selection or environmental changes transforming individuals and then species over time.

In the river analogy that preceded this piece, there is no explanation for how a species might leave the groove provided by the trajectories set up by maturational delay and acceleration.  This river chatters, making music as it flows downstream.  What might be the music of evolution?

A species could evolve over time, prolonging infant features into adult descendants, and then it could reverse that trend by withdrawing adult features into descendant infants.  Then repeat.  It would seem, like a teeter totter, that over great periods of time there would be no real movement, just variation between two polarities.

Indeed, in some cases this may be what occurs.  Nevertheless, unique variations keep emerging, species that have never been observed.

Some reasons for this come to mind.  What might these reasons sound like?

Species don’t just prolong infant features to adult descendants.  Aspects of embryonic stages can be carried into postbirth life.  This provides a constant source of new material as the highly responsive features of fetal ontogeny, appearing later in development, offer unique ways of behaving and being in the world.  We might look at fetal stages of development as a source of constantly new phenotypes and behaviors when manifested as the young and then adults of species.

When a mutation does appear, the feature or the behavior emerges in a specific ontogenetic position.  From there, neoteny and acceleration can introduce that feature or behavior to earlier or later ontogenetic stages.  In other words, the rate and timing adjustments staged by changes in hormones, hormones influenced by sexual selection and the environment, can carry exhibitions of mutations to new ontogenetic locations, thus transforming species.

Haeckel’s almost sole focus was acceleration, what he called recapitulation, the withdrawing of adult features backward over time.  When he declared that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, Haeckel was stating that evolution was driven by the embryonization of species, revealed by what he described as ancient adult progenitors appearing in descendants’ earliest ontogeny.  I would consider this half the story.  At the same time that adult features move backward, infant features move forward.  This may occur while taking turns or at the same time.  Perhaps some species’ lineages take turns; some mature and delay at the same time and some do both at different times.  How exactly this process unfolds, and the juxtaposition of this process with mutations, may have a lot to do with how unique new traits and behaviors emerge.

And then there are those species that exhibit two different sexes on two different maturational trajectories.  One sex may be accelerating while the other delays.  Then, they might switch.  An emerging mutation then could be sliding off in two different directions over the same period of time within the same species.

Consider that in early ontogeny, the period that the evolutionary developmental biologists emphasize, information is integrated from the environment that compels an individual to develop in a direction that his or her forebears have not engaged in.  If an environment is radically different from that which a species has been exposed to, that information may compel the emergence of features or behaviors that are unique.  These are characteristics outside the maturation delay/acceleration frames, features nonetheless adjustable by a genetic/environment interface with built-in flexibility.

One more thing.  Where does the feature content come from when a lineage accelerates without ceasing over time?  If adult features keep withdrawing, accelerating, recapitulating, then consider this effect on the adult stage of a lifetime.  Whereas in neoteny embryo features keep prolonging forward in species time, in acceleration the hormonal constellation that features high testosterone can keep growing more concentrated or intense, evidencing unique features perhaps only curtailed by the poisonous effects of steroidal hormones.  In the meantime, brand new features may be emerging in association with extreme endocrinological conditions.  The end of ontogeny may birth new features.

Both the beginnings and endings of ontogeny may be the source of new features and behaviors.  Add to that mutations.  Add to that new features formed from environmental impacts in the womb, features unrelated to maturation.  No doubt other sources of unique features have been discovered but are still not understood.

This stuff is complex, but not so complex that it cannot be made into a song.  This feels to me like music.  Perhaps we can describe an evolution of species by correlating impacts and trajectories with harmonies, melodies, rhythms and beats.  I am speechless.  Perhaps this is when we should choose to sing.

I’ve been playing with the idea of the Mississippi as a metaphor for a species’ life when it comes to understanding neoteny and acceleration.  It’s not a perfect fit, but it is an interesting one.

Imagine the Mississippi as representing changes in a species over time.  At the source, Itasca in Minnesota, clear water emerges from beneath the earth in a pristine environment featuring wildlife and virgin forest.  At first a trickle, the stream picks up speed and breadth, finally leaving the protected environment of the park.

The river grows wider as it meanders south.  Houses and, later, towns appear beside it.  Soon, industry emerges, and before too long, boats carrying the product of industry share river space with tourists and local boaters.

At the other end of the river, New Orleans, the river is girdled by cities on both sides, massive commercial and industrial activity and almost a million people.  Cities like Baton Rouge offer single corporate sites square miles in size, using the Mississippi as an opportunity for profit.

Driving down and up the Mississippi with my son, I am sensitive to the ways he is different and the same as I, as I am similar yet vary from my father.  We are not just part of a family line, we are a sequence in the unfolding of a species.  There are ways that our participation in a species transformation transcends our lives as individuals.  I feel aware of how deeply I have been influenced by my dad, in ways not unlike how I have influenced my son.  It sometimes feels to me that the thing we three represent, a species lineage, is far more powerful than the individual identity that we usually take so seriously.

A lineage has a life that transcends individuality.  Our commitment to time as a thing that has a past, present and future obfuscates the reality of lineage.  Remove time, and we that are related become the same.

Imagine Minnesota’s Mississippi River wildlife and protected trees reaching their way down the river, prolonging “infant” neotenic features to appear farther south with time.  If the Mississippi represents a species over time, a lineage of individuals, consider how the river would look and behave if nonhuman nature was to cascade its way down the river over time as factories closed, houses were abandoned and river boats retreated south.

In the way that human progenitor chimpanzee-like infant features prolonged and appeared in descendant adults over millions of years, the Mississippi River can reveal river source features in the way the river looks downstream.  After a long period of time, New Orleans becomes a pristine estuary with humans only visiting to observe nature.  The whole rest of the river has become a boat-free zone with trees and prairies hugging a thousand-mile bank.

This would be river as metaphor for how humans evolved.  We can go the other direction.  Instead of prolonging infant features into adults over time, bridging virgin forests to estuary endings, we could go backward and accelerate adult or estuary features so that they move north up the river, against the flow.  Larger and larger cities would appear farther and farther north.  The huge petroleum processing plants of Louisiana would expand into Arkansas, Missouri and, last, Minnesota.  Finally, factories would ring the source of the Mississippi as the forest would be removed.

Imagine the Mississippi as a species.  The evolution of features would radically differ depending upon the direction of feature evolution.  Though the flow of the river would always follow the flow of time, the river’s traits would reflect the direction of this trait trajectory.  The character of the source would flow downriver, or the features of the estuary would creep north.

This is an imperfect metaphor.  As humans have exhibited neoteny, they have revealed more sophisticated society until culture appeared and things went crazy.  If the accoutrements of culture are created by neoteny, then factories and fir trees are not opposites.

Nevertheless, species unfold or flow through time.  Grandfather, son and grandson can be alive at one time.  Humans are submerged in an experience characterized by identification with a body that has a limited awareness span.  Using the Mississippi as a metaphor for species allows an identification with evolution over time and an understanding of a species as a transforming entity with ongoing beginnings, middles and ends.

Beginnings and ends of species are the doorways to understanding directions that species evolve.

Sources and estuaries of rivers provide insight into how rivers can transform.

Rivers, sons and fathers can provide insight into species evolution.  The trick is to take the emphasis off of individuals and view evolution as an outcome of a longer time span, a lingering now.  Adjusting time as a variable when exploring evolution provides leverage as we seek to understand how species change.

Evolution flows.

This last August, my son, Elia, and I drove down, then up, the Mississippi, taking photographs for our respective projects.  Elia feels attracted to decaying industry.  He gathers images of nature’s return inside factories and old structures.  I was taking shots of various abstract forms to be used in the neoteny video, the section describing how neoteny operates at different scales.  At night, Elia worked on the music for the video, using his Mac.  We were driving a rented car.  Elia wouldn’t reach 25 until the following month, so I was doing all the driving.

About half the time we took the slow roads that went through small towns, lingering around old river cities to take photos.  We stopped in Chartersburg, Memphis, Vicksburg, Baton Rouge, New Orleans and Hannibal, Missouri, in that order.  A theme that quickly emerged was that in most sizable Mississippi cities there is gambling.  Elia got that out of his system early on.  This was the first time in his life he’d been in a casino.

On the way back up, on a Sunday in the middle of August, it emerged that Obama had concluded that he didn’t think he had the votes to get a public option through the Senate.  I remembered the trip I took almost 20 years ago, traveling by myself in a rented car up the East Coast, building sand castles in a different location every day.  Toward the end of that trip the radio revealed that the Soviet Union had fallen.  The elder Bush would later declare that the Soviet fall would lead to a new world order.  At the time, I wondered if in a new world order we would create an environment where there would be no starvation.  I wondered if health care would become available to all.

The diminution of the great polarity has not yet resulted in our feeling free enough to want to be free of want.  It seems we still prefer fear to feeling care.  The August Right Wing scream machine encouraged people to experience anxiety.  The net result was a wave of media attention on hesitation to change.  The intransigent senators, men representing those feeling frightened of difference, voted not to change.  And, of course, there was all the money dispersed by corporations to their campaigns.

Universal health care will come to America.  Will it be preceded by an economic collapse that drives a frightened middle class to behave in their own best interest instead of the interest of corporations?  Or, will there be an incremental disappearance of Republicans and conservative Democrats as their constituencies urbanize and grow younger?

As an activist, organizer and small business person, I feel depressed.  Marcia, my wife, met with Senator Durbin in August, declaring our desire for national health care in a press conference.  She was one of five local business people, picked by Durbin, to express deep dismay with the present system.  Marcia and I met with Durbin, along with four other activists, three years ago.  The net result was the immediate end of the Coast Guard practicing with automatic lead-based weapons on the Great Lakes.  Marcia’s meeting with Durbin this time did not result in celebration.

Perhaps an August car trip in the future will result in my turning on the radio and discovering, again, that the world has changed.  There will be universal health care.  Many will die unnecessarily before that happens.  When it comes, there will be celebration.

In the late 1960s and early 70s, I explored the work of Carlos Castaneda and Eric Berne as they explored the impact of internal dialog.  Castaneda sought to follow his guide, Don Juan, who gave advice to experience attention or perception without words.  Berne offered, in fascinating detail, the content of the internal dialogs we create.

Whereas Castaneda offered no dialog as an option, Berne preferred that we know what we are saying.

Eric Berne’s work focused on personal mythology, the stories we tell ourselves that we are so deeply, personally committed to that we neglect to inform ourselves that these stories represent choices we have made.  We seem to prefer the belief that we are not in control of the beliefs we embrace, leaving ourselves with stories that invest our lives with perspectives that determine our experience.

In addition to these dialogs and the content of the stories that we tell, there is the way we tell ourselves these stories.  Tone, timbre, intonation pattern, volume, emotional valence, vocabulary and even grammar contribute to the noncontent impact of an internal communication.  We manage our experience by describing the world in fashions that encourage particular interpretations and conclusions.  For example, if we speak to ourselves in loud, curt, short-sentenced exclamations, the results will likely be a polarity-based, burdened point of view.

Milton H. Erickson, the hypnotherapist, offered an additional perspective.  There is an internal, young part of us that grasps the world in the ancient language of primary process.  This aspect of ourselves is embedded in the present with only one time, one place and no opposites.  While dreaming, a person cannot imagine another time or place without actually being there.  In dream, an opposite of a thing cannot be imagined without the thing itself emerging as the focus of attention.  Erickson often communicated by using primary process language, the language of the very young, to speak to another person’s very young self, the self often at the root of a client challenge.  With Castaneda there is a choice to use no internal dialog.  With Berne there are scripts, stories or mythologies that manage content.  There are the noncontent affect ways that we talk to ourselves.  And, there is this aspect of different stages of our development manifesting different language conventions.

No internal dialog, specific internal dialog, internal dialog affect and developmental conventions.  Still, that’s not all.

Many of us run dialogs about dialogs.  We layer comments on comments.  These layers are closely associated with particular feelings, accompanied by scripts with emotional valences, which often weigh down the practitioner of the dialog with limestone like layers of world views.

I observe friends, family and folks I know expressing anger that they feel sad, expressing sadness that they feel angry, expressing fright that they feel sad, expressing anger that they feel angry, expressing anger that they feel frightened, expressing sadness that they feel frightened, expressing fright that they feel angry and expressing fright that they feel frightened.  I’ve experienced all these variations, including being frightened of feeling happy.  People have experienced themselves sad, angry and frightened about feeling happy and even happy about feeling frightened, sad or angry.  You can image how complex this becomes when you add in shame and guilt.

In addition, often it is not one feeling, but several, that share a space.  For example, I sometimes feel a mixture of sadness and frustration.  I might feel sad that I feel sadness and frustration.  When I was young, I often felt happy that I felt sad and happy.  In other words, I felt happy that I felt melancholy.

All of these two-level strata descriptions of emotions about emotions are accompanied by words.  Those words reveal Berne scripts, emotional valence when the words are used, words that often reflect developmental stages.  We are sometimes aware of these two-leveled dissociations.  Often we are not aware of the second level, just the first.  For example, we might note we are depressed, but not that we are angry that we are depressed.  Noting we are depressed, we usually are not aware of the words we use to maintain that state, let alone the second layer of words.

Finally, there are those that run multilayered internal dialogs with more than two layers.  Almost all of us do this some of the time.  A few of us do this a lot of the time.  These folks often have difficulty knowing what they are feeling because they are feeling so much at once.  Two layers are very challenging for most folks.  Multiple-layer personalities are not just confusing to themselves.  The outside world usually finds them difficult to understand.

There are those that seek, like Castaneda, a wordless world that offers gratitude and appreciation.  Exploring the world of words, for Westerners, seems necessary to be able to uncover what lies beneath.  We use words in many ways.  Letting ourselves be aware and offering attention to these pathways can create opportunities to gently let these customs go.

I’m not sure how old I was when I recognized that the person I was seeing or talking with was, or had been, damaged.  I differentiated between those that were “normal” and those exhibiting the existence of deep distress.  I recoiled from suffering.

It would be a while before I’d realize that these were brothers and sisters, folks whose insides felt familiar.  My compulsion to withdraw from these people was directly related to my being able to so easily see in them what I strove to not experience in myself or reveal to others.

At the same time I wanted to understand these darkest places inside a human.  Mental illness was familiar to me.  Close relatives had committed suicide, had been institutionalized and had exhibited deeply awry frames of reference.  While I strove to avoid contact with people I met that were intimate with this darkness, I drew it, studied it, read about it and wrote about it.  This was when I was in high school.

In the 1960s and early 1970s, I often hitchhiked around the country.  Road culture was filled with both an intoxicating optimism and the physically and mentally awry.  Traveling around the country by car, I picked up hitchhikers.  The wounded were everywhere.

In college I wrestled with getting my degree in psychology and becoming a clinician.  Two things stopped me.  While I felt a deep desire to positively intervene in the lives of people, I felt an abhorrence of people’s pain.  It felt too familiar.  Nevertheless, for a short time I practiced psychotherapy.  I then discovered that I was jealous of the attention I would give other people, attention I worked hard to not give myself.  I still preferred not to embrace that which was wounded inside me.

I’m not a young man anymore.  I’m not as frightened as often as I used to be.  Death has been transforming from an ogre to a friend.  To a degree, I feel like I’ve given up the battle to create distance between myself and pain.  The walking wounded seem almost everywhere I look.  They scare me less.  Part of my willingness to embrace their pain is my having chosen to be aware of, and embrace, my own.

I’ve been reading The Selfish Genius by Fern Elsdon-Baker.  The book feels like both a window into contemporary evolutionary biological theorist societal culture and a support of my feelings regarding Neo-Darwinism.  There are lots of fascinating historical tidbits.

One piece of the historical narrative I’ve found deeply interesting is the relationship between professionals and amateurs while the polarity between atheism and spirituality are in play.  In Darwin’s day, Thomas Huxley, Darwin’s bulldog, led the movement to place supporters of Darwin’s theory of natural selection in important positions in universities.  At the same time, he was bullying his way into establishing a professional, merit-based science community as opposed to science controlled by moneyed elites with leisure time.  Connected to this transition was the emergence of professional scientists with an atheistic point of view.

In the mid to late nineteenth century, there were several theories of evolution combating to explain patterns observed in nature.  Wallace contacted Darwin in 1858 with Wallace’s version of the theory of natural selection.  Darwin at that time had been working on three different dynamics of evolution.  Darwin had not discovered a way to integrate natural selection, sexual selection and Lamarckian selection, what Darwin called “pangenesis.”  He shelved the synthesis and proceeded with Wallace to publish a joint paper in 1858, releasing On the Origin of Species a year later after working furiously to condense the content to a single volume.

Darwin never found a way to integrate all three theories.

It is 150 years later and we seem to be circling back.  The only amateurs 150 years ago who were able to afford the time and resources required to make a contribution to science were the wealthy.  These were often religious men, deists, practitioners who believed both in god and in a material universe.  With the conversion of the science system to degreed professionals working through universities, men that often embraced no deity, society grew to rely upon a system that was both less elite based and deeply reductionist.  Less money and no god became allies.

There feels to me to be a connection between a professional community and those with a reductionist commitment that believe in no god.  This is in contrast to an amateur community characterized by a multiscale, multidiscipline, nonreductionist perspective, often with a spiritual component.

What feels particularly interesting to me right now are the signs that we are returning, after 150 years, to an amateur (Internet-based) theorizing community, one withdrawing from reductionist presuppositions to engage in multiscale, multidiscipline explorations.  Though I wouldn’t suggest that classic spirituality is returning, there are strong signs that the new nonreductionist zeitgeist features an openness to nonmythology-based spiritual interpretations of experience.

I was shocked to read in The Selfish Genius that Darwin was exploring all three theories when Wallace wrote his world-changing letter.  I’d always assumed that they were experienced in some succession related to the sequence in which the three main books were published.  Darwin was deeply aware of the anomalies that a theory of natural selection alone could not explain.  Those of you familiar with my work know that I believe that there is a way to integrate all three theories, addressing many of the anomalies that have emerged.  Yesterday, I typed text that summed this up…

If heterochrony is the study of the rates and timing of maturation, with testosterone levels impacting rate and estrogen levels controlling timing, then those environmental or social-structure adjustments that influence levels of testosterone and estrogen determine the speed, timing, features and direction of evolution.

The oroborus is a symbol I’ve found useful when exploring cycles in social change.  Some cycles seem to unfold over thousands of years.  Others unfold in a mere 150.  It feels to me like we have spiraled around to address issues in play 150 years ago.  Amateurism, reductionism, spirituality and theory synthesis all feel, to me, to be related.  Reading history can feel like reading about the present day.

This August, I drove with my wife and son from Chicago to St. Louis to visit our first grandchild on his first birthday.  Nils is the son of Marcia’s daughter, Katie, and her husband, Dave.  It’s a five-hour drive.  We left at a little after 6:30 a.m.

I’m a big fan of the long-distance drive.  I went to college in Florida and frequently drove straight through from Chicago.  The experience was often accompanied by an altered state characterized by elation and a making of connections.  When my son, Elia, went to college in Asheville, North Carolina, I adored the ten round trips each year bringing him down or picking him up.  I often made the 10.5 hour trip with one stop.

On this St. Louis trip, I was concentrated on the collection of patterns or shapes for the video Elia and I were about to start.  In the video, I will narrate an explanation of neotenous human evolution while connecting that to social evolution and evolution in larger scales.  Accompanying the narration will be Elia’s music and photographs, and videos and images from other sources.  Before the trip to St. Louis, I collected from free-content CDs maybe 100 images, sorted into different shapes.  Those shapes, sorted into folders, included circles, concentric circles, crosses, curves, dots, eggs, grids, layers, lines, mesh, points, S-curves, screws, spheres, webs, spirals, spires, stacks, stairways, stripes, and the letters “U” and “V.”  In the background of the video will be patterns shifting from scale to scale (i.e., microscopic > our scale > aerial photo > global > solar system > galaxy and back down again).  The shifting in scales, in the background, will accompany explanation of neoteny as neoteny operates at different scales.

I was using the drive to St. Louis as a practice run for Elia’s and my following week-long drive down the Mississippi taking photos and video for the neoteny video.

I was driving down Highway 55.  Elia and Marcia were asleep.  I was soaking up pattern.

The world displayed itself as form.  Cruising down the highway, I experienced astonishment at the complex and ever-present variation in geometric pattern.  This was quite different from my drive down from Hayward, Wisconsin, a couple weeks before, a movement through a landscape featuring personality-filled characters and voices.  Nevertheless, in both cases, Hayward with characters, Highway 57 with pattern and form, I felt accompanied.  In both cases I was surrounded by the state of wonder.

Moving through an American landscape via highway, the various patterns that accompanied the road itself established a visual, musical cadence with the specific rhythms of dividing lines, road barriers, concrete road widths and automobile- and truck-design conventions.  Music, mostly rock, gently galloped through my mind’s rear.  At the same time, almost all accoutrements of civilization exhibited shape and pattern sortable by a number of different names, as in my list of folders.  Most powerful were the patterns emerging in nature as I whizzed by at 74 mph.  Rivers evidenced lines, circles, waves, curves, etc.  Clouds lined up in columns, clumps, stripes, dots and mesh.  Pattern seemed to be everywhere I looked.

At one point, I drove past a stack of abandoned truck chassis piled high along the road.  My attention was riveted.  I didn’t notice that the road was merging from three to two lanes.  I was about to merge into the car to my right.  I veered off the road and sped up, and then I merged back on the road, missing the car.  The car that was next to me was now behind me.  I looked in my rear view mirror.  He was giving me the finger.

I then realized there is no sign symbol for “I apologize” or “I’m sorry” or “I’m a doofas.”  The Sapir Whorf hypothesis came to mind, the thesis that a language controls cultural mental and behavior outcomes by channeling thought along the unique words and grammar that are that society’s convention.  In road sign language there is a very limited number of gestures, mostly reducing communication to expressions of offense.  I could have shrugged and held up my nondriving hand in the open palm, upward facing, universal across species as a gesture of placating.  But that could have been interpreted as “What’s the big deal?” or “Out of my control.”  Or, I could have used my nondriving hand to at first point at my head and then wave my index finger around in a circle.  This would have signaled that I was crazy.  That could have been interpreted as “I’m not a responsible individual” or “Don’t monkey with me.”

For years, I’ve been fascinated by how drivers with car horns attempt to communicate to each other with a single noise device.  Conventions have emerged.  A tap suggests the person in front be aware that there is a person behind him or her that he or she may not be aware of.  A longer tap expresses consternation.  A long leaning on the horn shares the honker’s anger.  Basically, with a car horn, we are reduced to the behavior of animals in a herd using a barely flexible modality to express emotion.

In cars, with gesture, it’s not much better.

I’d be curious to know differences in conventions around the world as regards the use of horns and gestures during driving.  Are there particularly articulate societies?

Back to pattern.  I’m an old hand at getting into altered states while driving.  I’ve never got into an accident on these occasions.  It is, of course, useful to stay aware of the driving community while occupying highway space.  Whether I’m soaking up pure pattern without symbolic overtones or I’m occasionally trying to express an idea or emotion to another driver that involves overlaying meaning on a symbol, in both cases I’m driving along playing with pattern.

Arriving in St. Louis, Marcia woke up.  Elia was still sleeping.  Marcia said, “Boy, that was a boring drive.”

I had no idea what to say.

I like paradoxes.  When I was in college, freshman year, a professor gave us an assignment of creating our own psychological model.  We were studying theorists that followed Freud.

Disappearing into the assignment, I came out the other side with a theory of psychology based on a succession of paradoxes.  I would later read Viktor Frankl’s work that would share several features of the model I’d put together.  The premise I was working with was that healing was located somewhere in the neighborhood of those things which don’t seem capable of being understood.  Embracing that which we can’t seem to understand, we can relieve ourselves of the burden of feeling compelled to find an answer.  My theory listed several paradoxes as examples.

Over the last few years, I’ve drifted in an opposite direction.  The theory emerging in this blog suggests a psychological model, particularly as it explores the nature and causes of autism, yet it is a model with both biological and transpersonal roots.  It is a model deeply influenced by the work of Milton H. Erickson, the hypnotherapist, as his work was interpreted by Richard Bandler and John Grinder.  Ken Wilber’s integration of human developmental states, personality disorders and Habermas’s principle regarding societal stages has also been integral to my understanding of human psychology.  Wilber’s view feels closely connected to Freud’s four-fold parallelism as interpreted by Stephen J. Gould.  How Gregory Bateson interpreted Freud’s description of primary process has also been instrumental to my understanding of human psychology.  And last, my psychology model has to do with, of course, the rate and timing of maturation.

So, who we are has to do with the nature of consciousness, human conventional split-consciousness, ontogenetic influences and an understanding of who we are as humans as a direct reflection and integration of who we are at other scales of evolution.  Our growth as individuals is directly related to how we evolve at other scales of experience, be it social, biological or beyond.  The self is informed by the Self.  There is no separating ourselves individually from our grounding context.

This does not feel paradoxical to me.  Still, some things remain so.

I believed, back in college, that maturation or healing was about the abandonment of that which feels burdensome.  I was convinced that if I could just free myself of what tormented me, I would then be healed.  I was not aware that I retained a particular paradigm for healing.  I often felt out of control of my emotions.  I often felt depressed, angry, frustrated and helpless.  In this paradigm, I was convinced “happiness” entailed being relieved of those experiences, having them removed.

One thing that has changed since my paradox model of 40 years ago is now I have an understanding that my growth psychologically is characterized by my embracing of that which I felt/feel tormented by.  Perhaps that in itself is paradoxical.  I now know that there is no growth without a grasping or cradling of that which is perceived to have caused and/or experienced the wound.  I don’t think this is about forgiveness, though the experience of forgiveness results from this experience.  What this is about is attention.  Offering compassionate attention to that which pursues us (often characterized by a particular kind of internal dialog), turning pursuer into partner, is central to healing.  It’s not about making anything go away.

It is perhaps paradoxical that to relieve ourselves of that which seems to cause anguish or hurt we instead deliberately make it central to our lives.

Having done so, paradoxically, that hurt and anguish is always with us.  So, we embrace this.

Often I awaken in the mornings, sit down at my computer and begin to write.  What I am then accompanied by is often sadness, grief and a deep alone.  At the same time I accompany myself with the sadness.  I am present.  My presence then produces the words I type.

Life is paradoxical.  Yet, it’s not.  Offering attention seems to be the bridge between the two.

Late in 1979, I published as greeting cards ten watercolor paintings that I’d created, metaphors for states of mind and relationship.  Several were exploring humanistic psychology models of personality transformation.  I relied upon the work of Rogers, Maslow, Pearls, and Janov as I was designing islands, continents and journeys across these seas and landscapes as ways to describe how humans change.

I found a sales rep in the Chicago Merchandise Mart to sell the cards.  In January 1980, impatient to see results, I walked from store to store in the Chicago winter.  I averaged about one sale per day, placing my line of greeting cards in stores.  I had no training as a salesman, but I was earnest and clearly willing to do whatever was necessary to make the sale (negotiate price, get them display materials).  Recycled Paper Products (RPP) was just taking off and the contemporary greeting card business was being born.  I was in the right time in the right place to make a living.  I was having trouble paying bills as a free lance illustrator.

Up to the late 1970s, there were three main greeting card companies in the U.S.:  American Greetings, Gibson and Hallmark.  RPP, largely as a result of the popularity of the illustrator Sandra Boynton, grew quickly into the 1980s.  In RPP’s wake, small, unique publishers emerged, companies like my own with fewer than 20 cards.  They quickly proliferated across the country.  Small specialty greeting card stores appeared, particularly in gay neighborhoods and in college areas.  These small shops specialized in these unique, tiny greeting card firms.

I fired the merchandise mart rep.  He made two sales, never having left the mart.  I started my own repping firm.  Other small greeting card publishers like my own company were looking for a rep in Chicago that would go from store to store.  In six months, I had almost a dozen lines.  In other states, I found new, small reps, like myself, who took on my line, selling my little Maplands greeting cards to mostly college town stores.

It is 30 years later.  I have worked with many thousands of store owners, selling them greeting cards, calendars, ads for a comic monthly I did for a while and now websites.  This is how I met my wife; she had a store.  I can’t say I was particularly proud to be a salesman as a profession, but I was good at it, and it allowed me the time to pursue the things that I adored.  I come from a long line of males starting and managing their own businesses, selling products to stores.  When I was going to college, it was never suggested that I go to graduate school.  What a male did after he grew up was start a business.

In my present business, web development, I’ve never had a rep.  When I sold greeting cards and calendars, I hired staff to cover the state of Illinois.  I mostly sold to the chains, such as OSCO, Walgreens, Sears and Montgomery Wards.  The folks I hired worked the individual shops.  I had a small firm.  There were three or four reps at any time.

Rosanna, who I brought on temporarily as a research assistant, is now my sales rep.  She is my first rep in this web development business, a business in its eleventh year.  Most new clients have come in through referral or my cold-calling Chicago and northern suburbs.  With the recession, business has fallen off.  Rosanna has stepped in, walking from store to store, encouraging people to allow us to design, maintain or market their website.

In more than one conversation with Rosanna, I find myself explaining how exactly I engage in sales.  That is the subject of this piece.

Sales is personality, philosophy, biology and common sense.

Describing to Rosanna how I sell, I find myself referencing biological and philosophical sources.  That, in addition to just emphasizing what a personality does best.  I have a rather earnest way of going about things, characterized by a persistence that some find unusual.  Persistence is perhaps what I emphasize the most.

Regarding personality, I show up.  I show up over and over again.  I walk into almost the same 1,500 store doorways once a year, year after year.  When shop owners see my face when I step into their space, it is a familiar face.  They grow to trust me.  They ask me questions.  Many, after these multiple exposures, ask me to perform the job that I specialize in, and I have a new client.

I am a shy guy.  I feel uncomfortable pushing people in a direction they don’t want to go.  Walking into a store, cold-calling, I find that people usually don’t want to have a conversation.  I respect that and don’t feel compelled to make them have a conversation.  I just want them to know what I do and that I am available to have a conversation regarding what they do, if they would like to talk.  Most of my cold calls are very brief.

I seek to cover as much ground as I can in as short a period of time as possible, visiting multiple stores, providing an opportunity for a person that wants my services to appear.  There are people who want what I have.  Covering ground, returning year after year, provides those opportunities.  So, as personality goes, I display persistence and respect.  I am not selling.  I am showing up in order to make myself available.

I have no goals.  No targets.  My philosophy of sales carries no sports or war metaphors.  I just walk in.

When I share the space of the person who I am seeking to make a client, it is the context of we both sharing the space in the context of my seeking to make him or her a client.  I feel amused.  I feel amused by the part that we each are playing.  I express this amusement or delight in a subtle fashion.  I feel present to serve.  I experience that person and myself sharing a space and context characterized by my being present to offer services.  Usually the person I’m relating to is in a distracted state.  I allow myself to respond to wherever they are.  This usually means that I withdraw quickly.  They usually feel compelled to pursue whatever it is that they are in the middle of at that moment.  My supporting them in that pursuit feels right.

At the same time that I am exhibiting persistence and respect while experiencing amusement at the situation, I am mirroring their experience.  This is the biology of sales.  Thirty years ago I studied and became a practitioner of Neuro-linguistic Programming, following that with an exploration of Ericksonian hypnotherapy.  I became adept at biofeedback.  I developed sensory acuity for biological process and learned to reflect back a person’s rhythms, his or her breathing and heartbeat, using my intonation patterns and body sways.  Listening to a person talk, I’d reflect back his or her speech patterns, rhythms, tones and vocabulary.  I’d acquire the same posture.  Noting the speed of the person’s metabolism, heart rate and breathing, I’d mirror back the individual’s physical state.

I walk into a proprietor’s shop and enter his or her world.

I was trained in these techniques in the context of psychotherapeutic intervention.  I practiced therapy for a very short time.  A part of me revolted against so deeply offering myself to another person, particularly because I spent so little time accompanying myself.  I felt like I was letting myself disappear into another’s soul while still frightened of my own.  Nevertheless, in the context of short contacts, establishing relationship, this is not a problem.  As a salesman, mirroring another’s person’s internal, biological experience, establishing rapport, I feel deeply responsible to respond to that person’s needs.  I am not there to sell.  I am present to consult.  The question is:  Are there services I offer that can help the person I am relating to, a person whose internal experience is, at that moment, feeling so familiar?

On occasion, the person I am talking with is having an exaggerated experience.  The person’s heart rate is fast, with demeanor manic, with agitation deeply established in the personality.  I find myself trying to pull out of his or her space.  It feels uncomfortable, and it is difficult.  I find myself having to accompany myself, while with that person, to not feel overwhelmed.

The biology of sales means both entering into the physical space of the person I am with while at the same time finding a solution to that person’s needs.

My personality of sales involves persistence and respect.  Philosophy suggests being in the present, amused.  Biology involves mirroring experience and seeking ways to serve.  Common sense means knowing how to do the job.

One of the many deep-seated insecurities I carry with me as a personality is that I’m dumb, that I am a slow learner and that I may fail to do what I’ve committed to do.  The common sense part of sales is that what I say I can do, I can do.  I mostly don’t exaggerate.  I state things as clearly as I can, outlining what I am capable of, my limits and the limits of what a person in my profession can do.  In other words, common sense dictates that what I say is true.  So, I make sure that I can do as I say.  Common sense in sales demands I be honest and predictable.

Persistence, respect, humor, attention, a desire to serve, honesty and predictability.  That is how I engage in sales.  I hate to feel ashamed.  There have been rare occasions where I or someone on my staff screwed up.  I use those times to renew attention on how specifically we can get better at what we do.  Learning from our mistakes is integral to our becoming better.

Rosanna is now out there every day, talking with strangers, making our services available.  Communicating to Rosanna how I engage in sales is a challenge.  Sales is a reflection of my life.

There are several ways that children play.  They imitate adults, using costume or pantomime to reproduce a different time and place.  They engage in games that seek to achieve competition or cooperation goals.  Children will initiate or participate in an activity that engages the senses in a fashion that feels good and seems interesting, such as dancing, looking through a telescope and making music.  Children also like to play with scale.

Shifting scale is often engaged in while exploring the other three forms of play:  mimicking, games and pattern exploration.  A child might imagine that he or she is in a spaceship while cruising through a room.  Flashing by light fixtures, the child imagines passing galaxies.  Marching soldier figures through forests of grass blades, the child might also see himself or herself as a giant above the battlefield.  A child might invent a game with specific scenarios that game pieces represent.  Playing dress up, a child might imagine that he or she is grown.

Much play presupposes an ability to be two places at one or two times at once.  Not all play.  Early play simply involves an exploration of the senses, the mechanics of the body and the mirroring of expression.  Later play conventions that show little exercise of two times/two places are conventions involved with pattern reproduction.  Dancing, lining up plastic characters in rows, drawing patterns and beating rhythms can be play with no inference of time or scale.  Down’s children, autistic kids and the very young often do not embrace an awareness of multiple times or place.

There are many ways that scientists are just big kids.  One way is their reveling in scale.  In many specialties, practitioners are spending enormous amounts of time at one of the many different scales that make up existence.  Some scientists travel among several scales.  Occasionally, a scientist specializes in the traveling, devising instruments through which to travel.  Like the child traveling past light fixtures in the living room, a scientist might be designing devices to perceive what’s far away.

Physicists can do a lot of this kind of traveling, exploring both the miniscule and the macroscule.  Traveling through both space and time, jumping from super strings to congregations of galaxies, physicists seem to know how to play.

So, what is it with the biological sciences?  Why is there hesitation with shifting scales?  With physicists reveling in finding patterns that cross multiple levels or scales, why are biologists so inclined to stick with as few as possible?  Why are they so hesitant to play?

Evolutionary developmental biologists are loosening up a bit.  They seek to find reflection of ontological processes in the soma and behavior of individuals and species.  Why stop there?  How might ontogeny be related to cosmology?

Evolution theorists tend to focus on derivations of natural selection as an explanation for what happens at specific scales.  Stephen J. Gould led forays into multiscale biological interpretations of evolution.  That man knew how to play.  Who are the great players today?  Which evolution theorist toys with theory in ways that make us want to ask a lot of questions?  What men and women are good at evoking wonder?

Isn’t that what it’s all about?  Isn’t wonder at the root of play?  When children are exploring their world, isn’t play a child’s tool for uncovering wonder?  Or, are play and experiencing wonder the same thing?

Consider this.  If a theory does not evoke wonder, maybe it is not a useful theory.  Darwin’s theory of natural selection has had all the wonder beat out of it by scientists that insist it shouldn’t integrate with other theory.  Darwin was obsessed with finding a way to integrate several theories.  Natural selection was only his first idea, the one that worried him the most.  Where today are the theorists playfully obsessed with this kind of integration?

Where is the wonder?

“In a 5-year longitudinal study, we examined the effect of disrupting the neonatal activity of the pituitary–testicular axis on the sexual development of male rhesus monkeys.  Animals in a social group under natural lighting conditions were treated with a GnRH antagonist (antide), antide and androgen, or both vehicles, from birth until 4 months of age.  In antide-treated neonates, serum LH and testosterone were near or below the limits of detection throughout the neonatal period.  Antide + androgen-treated neonates had subnormal serum LH, but above normal testosterone concentrations during the treatment period.  From 6 to 36 months of age, serum LH and testosterone were near or below the limits of detection.  Ten of 12 control animals reached puberty during the breeding season of their 4th year, compared with five of 10 antide- and three of eight antide + androgen-treated animals.  Although matriline rank was balanced across treatment groups at birth, a disruption within the social group during year 2 resulted in a marginally lower social ranking of the two treated groups compared with the controls.  More high (78%) than low (22%) ranking animals reached puberty during year 4.  During the breeding season of that year, serum LH, testosterone and testicular volume were positively correlated with social rank.  Thus the lower social rank of treated animals may have contributed to the subnormal numbers of these animals reaching puberty during year 4.  However, of those animals achieving puberty during year 4, the pattern of peripubertal changes in serum testosterone and testicular volume differed between control and antide-treated animals.  The results appear to suggest that the disruption of normal activity of the neonatal pituitary–testicular axis retarded sexual development, but that social rank is a key regulatory factor in setting the timing of sexual maturation in male rhesus monkeys.  The effect of neonatal treatment with antide and low social rank on sexual development could not be reversed by neo-natal exposure to greater than normal concentrations of androgen.”  Abstract from Sexual maturation in male rhesus monkeys: importance of neonatal testosterone exposure and social rank by Mann, Akinbami, Gould, Paul and Wallen.

Today is August 4th.  The pieces that appear in this blog are usually written two to three months before.  My writing skills demand an editor, hence the delay.

Nithya Krishnan and Elia Lehman are developing aspects of the theory presented on this blog.  Nithya is completing a paper on matrifocal social structures and breast cancer.  Elia is working on a paper that explores correlations between matrifocal society language structure and primary process (no time, no place, no opposites) in the context of child-rearing practices and autism.  Rosanna Schatzki has nearly completed a piece on the influences of testosterone on maturation rates.

Nithya is also writing a paper that details the dynamics of heterochronic theory as it influences human evolution and potentially biological evolution in general.  We are running with my hypothesis that testosterone influences the rate of maturation, estrogen the timing, and that environmental influences (in the womb and in all stages of ontogeny) and sexual selection (from within social structure) impact those two hormones, thus influencing evolution.

I feel that this hypothesis, if true, has ramifications in several disciplines.  If the principle of heterochrony transcends its hormone dynamics, for example, if physics evidences neoteny and acceleration, then it’s not clear to me what may not be influenced.  If the rate and timing of maturation are integral to growth across all scales, then the discovery of this dynamic by Darwin’s contemporaries (Mivart, Cope, Haeckel and others) may rival Darwin’s theory of natural selection.  Clearly, the two theories complement each other.  I also posit that Darwin’s theory of sexual selection is essential to my interpretation of heterochronic theory.  In other posts, I have noted that Darwin’s theory of pangenesis was an early attempt to understand environmental effects on evolution, using what would later be called “endocrinology.”

A sidebar.  Darwin’s The Variations of Animals and Plants under Domestication, his second to last great work, was an attempt to integrate observed anomalies that didn’t fit into his theories of natural selection or sexual selection.  Thomas Kuhn in his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions noted a particular pattern when a new scientific paradigm becomes embraced by contemporary theorists.  Anomalies that had not been integrated into former paradigms, anomalies also not addressed in the most recent paradigm, disappeared from textbooks and were not taught in class.

What Darwin was seeking to understand in this second to last work was how lightning-fast evolution occurred in situations where natural selection or sexual selection was not in play.  Darwin observed anomalies all around him.  His two-volume work wrestled with what might be necessary to explain these anomalies.

I feel like this has been what I have been wrestling with for the last 12 years.  Only in the last few months, with the discovery of the possibility that estrogen controls the timing of maturation, and integrating that with the premise presented in “Introduction to the Theory of Waves,” have I felt that a whole theory has been formed.  All three of Darwin’s theories now make sense.  Anomalies observed 150 years ago feel integrated.

Nithya discovered the paper quoted at the beginning of this posting.  It is significant in that it reveals evidence that testosterone influences maturation rate in rhesus monkeys in the context of hierarchy within social structure.  There are other studies that suggest that testosterone influences maturation rates in humans.  A question is:  How ubiquitous is the influence of testosterone and estrogen on the rate and timing across species?  How instrumental are heterochronic processes to evolution?

Studies conducted by Matsuda and his colleagues made clear that there are amphibians that exhibit variations on this theme, maturation rates managed by specific hormones.  To my knowledge, no one has done research suggesting that estrogen controls the timing of maturation.  Gould’s great Ontogeny and Phylogeny offered little in the way of an explanation of what hormones underlay heterochronic processes.

I hope that Nithya, Elia and Rosanna will continue to help me find ways to make this whole thing make sense and to make ancient anomalies feel relevant today.  Their assistance has felt deeply nurturing.  I really like working on this with other people.  Then again, folks have been working on this stuff for 150 years.

As we are transitioning out of magazine presentations of Left or Progressive news, news analysis and societal observation and into Internet exhibition of similar content, it looks and feels like we have been presented with several paradoxes.  Paradoxes can seem to disappear once a transition is complete.  The old world view just seems quaint.  Nevertheless, at this point in the process, many print vehicles are experiencing struggle.

Old Model
• Print
• Insight and Erudition
• Professional
• Older Demographic
• Well-researched, articulate, unique content
• Visionary individual
• Community is defined by those that share common values (alliances are with those you respect)
• Hierarchical, segregated, secretive (content is hoarded and shared for money)
• Measured delivery expecting respect for a calm and reasonable presentation
• Unique content

New Model
• Web
• Insight, Erudition, Commentary, Editorializing, Entertaining, Linking, Aggregating
• Amateur
• Young Demographic
• Aggregated, articulate, shared content
• “Wisdom of the crowds”
• Community is defined by those that share common anything (all alliances are ad hoc)
• Horizontal, diverse, transparent (content is distributed to all for free)
• Bombastic presentation expecting traffic for a unique and controversial exhibition
• Combination of unique content, experienced amateur submissions and aggregated current events

Paradox #1:  The medium is the message.  When committing to the web as a vehicle for distribution of content, an organization or community finds that the web process deeply influences the identity of the organization or community engaged in that process.  When content is at least partly user-generated, it reflects the disposition of the users.  When content grows to rely upon experienced amateur and aggregated sources, content reflects process.

Paradox #2:  A Progressive magazine readership community defines itself by its values, beliefs, insights and deep desire to encourage positive social change, engaged in with a combination of compassion and intelligence.  The web process itself is characterized by a dynamic or process that exhibits an egalitarian, horizontal, diverse, transparent, integrated world community but without a focused emphasis on individuals exercising compassion and intelligence engaging in social change.  Again, the medium is the message.  How can we integrate the Left/Progressive message into a medium that behaves in a democratic fashion but often makes it difficult (as regards generating income) to share words that depict the details around the process?  In other words, Left/Progressive content focuses on profound systemic change.  Web process is profound systemic change.  Web process does not easily integrate with strategized, deliberate content.

Perhaps 20 years from now there will be no paradox.  Left/Progressive managed content will have been replaced by Left/Progressive anarchistic process.  Insight and erudition will be integrated into society in the way that information access is being integrated into society through Google and cell phones.  Right now we search for information.  Consider the implications of conducting reports in additions to searches, reports that offer automatic synthesis of the larger patterns made available by all information barriers coming down.  In addition to reading editorials and stories that exhibit insight, we call up reports that offer high quality presentations that reveal patterns concerning what exactly is happening in the world.

For example, I want to know how many people are starving around the world relative to percentages of starving people in the past correlated with how high a tax on beef would have to be to reduce consumption enough to free up land to grow vegetables and fruits to feed the starving that remain.  In addition, I’d like to know the cost of distribution of these foodstuffs.  A person would ask for an answer in the way that we now conduct a Google search.

Transitioning to where we’re headed presents several paradoxes.  Some paradoxes will fade with new technologies.  A result will be institutions that disappear.

The Peace, Justice & Environment Project (PJEP) has over 1,400 organizations participating in 40 online networks in 50 states.  A basic premise of the project is that by making available powerful online resources such as petitions, eletters, boycotts and online fundraising, it can allow small local organizations to have more choices when seeking to accomplish social-change goals.  PJEP seeks to enhance creativity, empowering local activists to facilitate change.  In addition, PJEP seeks to put into the hands of local activists powerful email lists, built from these online resources, providing access to allies to accomplish goals.

There is a sleeper issue regarding health care that only occasionally gets much play in the media.  My wife and I have been running small businesses for 30 years.  Good staff is integral to a healthy business.  Health care benefits are too expensive to provide to staff in a business as small as Marcia and I maintain.  This is particularly true in our case because we have a daughter with diabetes, a condition which closed off options regarding health care.

After our daughter contracted diabetes, our insurance was doubled to $30,000 a year.  We then contracted with a staffing firm to handle payroll in order to be part of its group insurance.  We do not need a payroll firm to handle four employees.  We pay thousands of dollars a year for them to do this for us in order to get on a group plan that will cover family members with preexisting conditions.

We do not offer full health care for employees.  This plan we are on is very expensive.  Even splitting the cost with staff, something we have tried, has not worked because the other half is so expensive that no employee has wanted to keep it past half a year.  It constitutes a sizable percentage of their paycheck.

Over the years, we have offered jobs to excellent prospects only to have them take an offer elsewhere that included insurance.  Many times we have lost staff to another firm that offered health care.  The net result of our present health care system is that talented people often go to work for a large firm that offers health care.  I get and keep talented people for a time by hiring exclusively young folks out of college.  I have been the employer of many people in their first job.

Imagine a health care system that doesn’t propel people to work for larger firms, firms that charge more for their services to help cover those higher costs of staffing.  The net result would be lower costs and an astonishing surge in productivity and creativity.

A level playing field for health care would, without doubt, result in my keeping talented young people.  Those looking for jobs could choose smaller firms that provide the kind of job that they are looking for.  Hundreds of thousands of people could quit jobs that they keep only for the health care.  Instead, they could work for a smaller firm or for themselves.  Creative people working in a hospitable environment would flourish.

I could drop the services of a payroll company I don’t need and use that money to keep good staff.

As an organizer, I look for ways to empower activists.  As a business person, I seek to get and keep good people to provide good service.  There would be no better way for the government to empower small business than to insure employees of small businesses.  The stranglehold that large firms have had on their staff would disappear.  There would be a surge in the direction of small business productivity.  Home businesses would flourish.  New, small start-ups would proliferate.

Social change can come through protest or the kinds of interventions becoming common on the web.  Social change can also come through a halting of tacit support of big business by providing health care to the employees of small businesses that provide local services.  This single intervention could have a huge effect.

In the 1960s, there was the “Generation Gap.”  Youth were perceived by themselves, their parents and society at large as feeling alienated from their parents and society.  Several new forces had emerged that were embraced by youth, forces that felt foreign to older folks.  Nonmonogamous premarriage behavior was reveled in.  Promiscuity was respected.  The Pill and an emerging woman’s movement made this possible.  Drugs were embraced as techniques to acquire insight about the self.  Music grew to become an opportunity to realize and reveal far more about the self than a desire for a mate.  The draft was vilified.  Both “small is beautiful” and a new holism emerged that embraced both immediate community and global community as necessary to a balanced whole.

Still, most of the population was not above a good story.  Reagan was elected on the premise that lower taxes meant more government services.  Reagan proclaimed that empowering the wealthy would result in increasing the resources of those with no money.  The Generation Gap seemed to decrease as Americans almost universally focused on the more and more difficult task of maintaining an established lifestyle as resources congregated with fewer and fewer people.

In the 1960s, there was a gap between generations as young people struggled to find a way of living life that would result in a healthy world.  Most middle-aged and older adults viewed themselves as members of a nation.  What is emerging now is a generation abyss where young people have found a way to feel that they are members of a world.  Adults in their 50s and 60s, who were youth in the 1960s, are struggling to find that feeling.

There are ways that the psychic spread between youth and established adults is more distant now than the distance between youth and grown-ups in the 1960s.  In the 1960s, when the draft ended and young people began creating families, most returned to a monogamous, middle-class, relatively drugless, possession-based existence.  What we are observing now is young folks embracing wholly new ways of relating to one another and the world.  They are using communications tools and protocols that feel deeply unfamiliar to those that embraced change in the 1960s.

Some things are the same.  Important things.  Promiscuity, drugs and music that reveals information about the self have become so ubiquitous that they have become associated with being young.  Sex, drugs and beats have become integrated into modern culture.  There is no gap here.

Where the abyss lies is in our concept of community.  Conversation with old hippies from the 60s reveals that most feel deeply disappointed regarding a healing in the world.  Whereas in the 60s and early 70s it felt to youth like profound transformation was imminent, these same people, who are now becoming grandparents, don’t see the change.

The abyss is in the embracing of the process.  Young people, no matter what their political persuasion, are becoming deeply integrated into the new communications technologies.  It is not uncommon for a single person to form alliances, shared communications, with hundreds, if not thousands, of individuals.  In the 1960s, we imagined connection to those in our immediate area while at the same time we wanted to take into consideration the necessities of the world.  Youth today are doing exactly that.  The abyss between generations is characterized by older folks being frightened of cell phone and online technologies that offer massive numbers of horizontal, many-to-many connections with folks near and far away.

The transition away from traditional frames of reference that burst out in the 1960s has continued unabated.  Sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll never faded.  The former Soviet Union and Communist China have become our economic allies.  The dream of an interconnected, integrated world is becoming a reality.  It is our youth that are experiencing this truth.  It may only be with the passing of the 60s generation that a united world will be perceived to be at hand.

Driving back from Hayward, Wisconsin, where I was fishing for Muskie last July, I had an interesting experience.  I took back roads for the first two hours, watching the transition from northland to farmland, paying close attention to roadside retail, building construction, trees, foliage, birds and cloud formations.  I was by myself.  The window was down.  No radio or tape was playing.

At Osseo, I got back on the highway and started paying closer attention to the sky.  About two months earlier, my attention had turned to trees and clouds.  I have been examining these two things in more detail than has been my custom in the past.  The clouds above Highway 94 north of Madison were extraordinary.  My attention became riveted starting about 3:00 in the afternoon.

The clouds were mostly very high, and the horizon was relatively free from nearby tall trees or buildings.  Several kinds of clouds were on display, appearing in several shades of gray and white.  A rain front was to my right and rear as the front moved from Minnesota toward Illinois.  Patches of blue sky mingled with dark clouds, wispy clouds, puffy clouds and distant, flat fields of clouds.

In front of me, above me and to my left were the kind of puffy clouds that were easy to imagine as various beings.  Dogs, bears, pigs, dragons, fish and salamander creatures were quite common.  As the minutes rolled on, I let my imagination play.  Beings proliferated.  Maybe 80 cloud formations suggesting personalities lingered in the sky, all at one time.  I was stunned by the sheer number of unique arrangements.

As I transitioned into a relaxed state capable of allowing my unconscious to run amok, clouds across the sky acquired personalities, sometimes creating local tableaus of several relating characters.  In the meantime, the wind and highway artifacts suggested voices.  There was the sound of the wheels on pavement, the sound of passing road barriers, the sound of passing under bridges, the sound of passing cars and trucks, the occasional sound of a machine in the environment.  Sounds began to feel like voices whose words were just about to begin articulating sense.

The sky was filled with faces with expression, beings with bodies, cloud personalities relating to one another; the air was chock-full of voice tones and intonations.  Suddenly, the ground, my horizontal plane, burst with personality as trees, plants and buildings reached upward to engage in relationship with the sky.  I was embedded in the center of a world that was alive, an environment communicating by using the conventions of a human.  Everything was reaching, expressing, communicating, being.

I did not feel like I was in an exaggerated altered state.  It felt natural.  I was having fun.

Driving down the highway, still above Madison, it felt clear to me that spiritual experience is deeply informed by our origin as primate social beings and our way of often regressing to early childhood states when embracing understandings characterized by connection.  When we feel loved in the world, that world often looks and feels like the world when we last felt deeply loved, when we were toddlers and infants.  The environment acquires personality as we shift to interpersonal frames and focus on loving eyes and gentle smiles.  When we were infants, our parents’ expressions told us we were loved.  We emerge into the world with personality, and those close to us mirror our experience.  The world becomes interpreted as filled with personality.  What we are becomes also what we perceive.

On many occasions in my life, I have been presented with revelation.  I define revelation as a time when barriers between my conscious and unconscious come down and my conscious is offered new and useful information.  In perhaps the two most intense or condensed experiences characterized by revelation, there was a second message embedded within the first.

In the first experience, I was also on an expressway, driving in the afternoon.  I was passing from Champaign Urbana to Normal, moving across central Illinois on a partly cloudy day in August.  Hay bales were bundled along the roadsides.  Listening to NPR, I realized that Gorbachev was sincere.  World peace in my lifetime was emerging as a possibility.  The sky became filled with rainbow rivers cascading down the sides of clouds.  I felt loved.

The second message embedded within the overt communication was that truth is relative.  Although I was experiencing a revelation accompanied by hallucinations, the truth that underlay the revelation was that all truth is relative.  I was experiencing a second insight that however anything feels or seems, there is an astonishing amount that can be lost in translation, particularly when it comes to revelation.

Five years later, a second revelatory experience was accompanied by the same tandem communication.  Whatever “truth” seems to be relevant in a communication, deeper yet is how vastly unimportant is the meaning.  Transcending the importance of the content and the meaning of a communication is the connection between the imparter of the message and the receiver of the message.

I believe this is what a former guide meant when he instructed me to maintain “Don’t know mind.”

The deepest communications are those where the instructions can be ignored.

Driving down Wisconsin 94 last July, I realized that there is a level of understanding characterized by not knowing.  It felt to me like experience before birth, before the dynamics of personality are engaged.  While I reveled in being surrounded by an environment infused with animated characters, I also felt that there was a part of me prepared to experience my surroundings as an embryo experiences its surroundings, epigenetically, with divisions between the environment and the personal being far less clear.

We each carry with us many ways of knowing.  Knowledge characterized by womb experience offers a not knowing kind of knowing.  Interestingly, this mode of knowledge offers a deeply adult world view, characterized by a profoundly relativistic perspective.  With all truth as relative, we are free to observe behavior as behavior, not that which behavior purports to represent.  Things stop representing other things.  Story and metaphor lose their impact.  Instead, everything is actually what everything is, connected to everything else, not just associated by shared word meanings.

“Don’t know mind” is not ignorance.  It’s the experience that not knowing can be profound.

In the work of scientists, and specifically evolutionary psychologists, there are two unstated presuppositions that make their often elegant, jewel-like conclusions less valuable or useful.

The first presupposition is the usually unstated position that regarding consciousness, a larger consciousness can be assumed to be not present.  This potentially influences theorizing outcomes.  There is a heavy negative emotional valence assigned to theories that presuppose a grounding consciousness.  Some of these theories, for example creationism or intelligent design, are associated with irrational, nonscientific, mythological, constituency-based belief systems.  It is assumed that choosing a nonconsciousness position enhances theorizing capabilities and that a consciousness position is associated with mythology and a respect for non-sense-based conclusions.  Dawkins’ evangelical atheism is an example of evolutionary psychology’s tendency to lump together mythology-based faiths or beliefs with nonmythology, trans-consciousness hypotheses.

The second presupposition revolves around evolutionary psychology’s unstated presupposition that patrifocal social structure is the default social frame of human evolution.  Matrifocal social structure is rarely rejected; it is just ignored.  David Buss has done sterling work exploring mating conventions among people living in patrifocal social structure.  Studies cited in many works by evolutionary psychologists ignore matrilineal or matrifocal examples.  If it can be assumed that matrifocal social structures have little relevance when it comes to human evolution, then this omission makes perfect sense.

Scientists, as liberal as they may seem, are often chauvinists when it comes to spirituality and sexuality.  Usefulness is the foundation of science and technology.  A theory or intervention is evaluated according to how well it potentially serves when it comes to offering useful solutions.  Nevertheless, science often behaves as if compelled to treat certain classes of information as not worth evaluating according to the usefulness criterion.  At the root of rejecting both the spirituality and sexuality presuppositions is the male transcendental god.

Most Western contemporary theorists are living in the adolescence of their science.  Science was raised under the wing of men believing in a single, male, omniscient being.  To adequately map the reality they discovered, god, as they knew him, had to be removed.  The stories were obviously stories.  Every time god was referenced to explain something unexplainable, theorists could reveal a nongod solution.  A belief in a male, transcendent god with motivations and intentions was not useful.  He was rejected.

But when they threw out the baby and the bathwater, they failed to note that the bathwater was evidencing qualities that might be useful.

It was not that spirituality or religion without the accoutrements of spirituality or religion (mythology, non-sense-based conclusions) might explain the unexplainable.  The issue was whether presupposing interconnection among presupposed unconnected parts might offer useful theories and useful interventions.  The reasonable compulsion to reject the transcendent male god was accompanied by a compulsion to reject the potentially useful presupposition of connection.  Yet, while rejecting the male god, we retain the social orientation that placed the male god in that position.  Many scientists behave in an astonishingly patrifocal manner.  Scientists, like adolescents, can reject the behavior of their parents while at the same time embracing the parents’ presuppositions.  Rejecting a male god, they still stratify, separate and withhold.  Hierarchy, segregation and secrecy are hallmarks of a patrifocal society.

It will take time before we realize that there is an integral connection between social structure and theorizing or the stories we tell.  Right now we are still reeling from the often toxic environment engendered by a patrifocal god.  Pecking orders, separation and confidentiality are not the default frames of a religion or a society.  The alternative is coming at us fast.  With the arrival of a horizontal, diverse and transparent society, not only will the female be elevated to equal status, but theorizing will acquire a feminine perspective.

The bathwater will be investigated for its potential usefulness, bathwater illustrating a premise that presupposes flow.

In evolutionary theory, what is central to the thesis and what is a contingent result of the central-thesis dynamic have everything to do with the society that the theory seeks to serve.  That very sentence can be interpreted in two ways depending on whether the theorist believes in a natural-selection-reductionist or an epigenetic-cooperative-grounding frame.  Either the most useful theory survives to become the zeitgeist paradigm, according to a survival-of-the-fittest point of view, or the community forms conclusions based upon information from a variety of sources, with conclusions reflecting a larger whole.

At this time, evolutionary conjecture often suggests that human self awareness, consciousness or split consciousness, however you say it, is a contingent outcome of prodigious synapse production.  Exponential brain growth has been hypothesized to be connected to the demands of unique environments, the demands of unique social environments, or, according to Geoffrey Miller, the demands of aesthetics.  Because the productions of culture didn’t emerge until long after the creation of a brain size that made culture fashionable, it’s been a mystery why a brain would grow that big.

And then there’s the issue of dramatically different brain sizes in contemporary humans resulting in an almost universal experience of self awareness, consciousness or split consciousness.

Consider that children, humans with smaller brains, also evidence self awareness, consciousness or split consciousness.

Brain size is not the only issue.  Different portions of the brain evidence different relative sizes compared to our great-ape cousins and different contemporary human populations.  Different brains exhibit different degrees of cerebral lateralization, related to different degrees of early ontogenetic synapse pruning.  Brain mass, distribution and balance all contribute to variation among individuals and populations.

Evolution theorists posit that consciousness is an accident of our evolution.  With Darwin’s theory of natural selection, features are often explored and analyzed that do not seem to fulfill an evolutionary niche.  Contingent explanations are offered, answers that emphasize that accidents in species characteristics often happen when some connected or related, specific, different feature has been selected.  Consciousness qualifies as such an accident according to this point of view.  This is because culture is such a recent addition to our species and consciousness is intuited to be closely related to culture.  Consider that an exploration of evolutionary explanations concentrating on whether they presuppose or do not presuppose that consciousness already exists may offer a new way of addressing this conundrum.

It may seem subtle, but almost everything that we do has a guiding aesthetic.  The aesthetic of reductionism demands that we seek solutions that offer the fewest complications.  All things being equal, the simplest answer is the best.

There is an alternative aesthetic, one might call it a feminine aesthetic, which demands that we seek solutions that offer a reflection or mirroring of the most number of processes as is possible, making possible a greater integration.

There are nonreligious or nonspiritual definitions of god, ways of approaching the subject that don’t come with mythological baggage or reliance upon non-sense-based origins of information that provide explanations for unexplained phenomena.  Such a nonreligious/spiritual definition of experience is based on an aesthetic different from our reductionist milieu.  This is the aesthetic of connection/cooperation sensitive to the compulsion of integration.  Experience is evaluated in the context of context.

In modern interpretations of Darwin’s theory of natural selection, there is a heavy emphasis placed upon an individual’s ability to survive to procreation age with individual features that have been randomly assigned.  There is little emphasis placed upon the power or ability of constituent parts of a multiple-individual, multiple-species environment to perform.  This is performance that is useful to the surrounding community so that the community can continue to thrive.  This is a survival of the cooperative.

A question is:  Does observing nature and society from a cooperative frame vs. a reductionist frame offer more useful outcomes?  I would suggest that presupposing connection creates an enhanced ability to observe connection.  The extreme of presupposing connection is to presuppose consciousness as a foundation that operates beneath, within and all the way through experience.  The benefit of such a presupposition is that it becomes more possible to intuit features of experience that evidence system-wide manifestation.

Physicists, at least some of the time, seem to walk this path.  Why not biologists and societal observers?  What would happen if theorists that explored how human beings evolved walked a path characterized by connection?  What if those struggling to determine when consciousness evolved instead sought to understand how human split consciousness evolved?  What benefits would this alternative model provide?

Presupposing universal connection is not the same as having a religion.  There is no evangelical imperative, no mythology, no right or wrong.  Each moment can be lived “as if” something were true in order to observe the benefits of this perspective.  What could be more powerful, more reductionist, than to consciously and deliberately adjust one’s own presuppositional foundation to enlist consciousness as a theorizing tool?

Reductionist perspectives don’t actually take things down to their smallest constituent parts.  Deciding how exactly we use consciousness is where theorizing begins.  No matter how you cut it, all theorizing begins in the here and now.  In evolutionary theory, what is central to the thesis and what is a contingent result of the central-thesis dynamic have everything to do with how we theorize.  It may seem like consciousness is contingent to evolutionary theorizing.  Consider that how we choose to exercise consciousness has everything to do with what kind of theory that can be made.

My father was a collector.  He maintained a stamp and coin collection.  He also had a large collection of tools, including the various gadgets and accoutrements targeted to achieving something useful around the house.  Dad had different scissors for different uses, different kinds of tape, different measuring instruments, various ways to bind things together, assorted glues, etc.  Each little intervention had a firm location in his various drawers.

I didn’t attempt to reproduce his organizational obsession, but I did find solace in collections.  I had rocks, insects, stamps, coins, miniature dinosaurs, comics, all manner of boyhood hobbies.  None lasted past a couple years, except for my comic and dinosaur affections.  I never acquired Dad’s propensity to store and immediately retrieve everything he owned.  Nevertheless, I seem to retain a certain amount of Dad’s ability to focus.

I have friends, relatives and clients who are into sports.  Their memory for statistics is often astonishing.  I fish for muskie in Wisconsin most summers.  The ability of passionate muskie fishermen to remember the length of fish caught with particular lures in particular places in specific lakes under unique weather conditions over several decades borders on the ability of savants.

I’ve described two possible sources for human obsessional tendencies.  There is my story revolving around dance, song and gesture being the central focus and social matrix of Homo erectus and earlier hominid societies.  Geoffrey Miller in his The Mating Mind describes a runaway-selection feedback loop whereby hominid males and females select each other for features that compel procreation opportunities.  He and I have written about dance and song generating an exponential increase in brain size.  I have hypothesized that the Henry Jerison thesis of predator physical abilities always compelling a bigger brain than their prey applies to a dance-driven, sexual-selection feedback loop where adroit dancers are being reinforced to exhibit massive synapse production with no ceiling in escalation.  The brain mass created would be far more than is necessary to acquire food.  In other words, only aesthetics has the power to compel the kind of increases in brain size we’ve seen over the last three million years.  Only aesthetic-based obsession and compulsion, reinforced by a runaway-sexual-selection  feedback loop could evolve our species with such speed.  (Click here for more detail)

There is a possible second connection among aesthetics, obsession and evolution, a possible additional reinforcing factor contributing to the social, dance-driven dynamic.  Consider that at some point the proliferation of synapses and increased brain mass resulted in the emergence of self awareness.  The rituals of dance resulting in procreation opportunities probably also featured a relative loss of self awareness, not unlike the elation characterized by mass dances today.  As nondance, nonritual portions of experience became more and more frequently accompanied by an experience of separate self, early humans may have experienced ritual dance as deep relief.  The more dance, the more brain mass produced, the more existential individuality.  The more individuality, the more compelled an individual would be to engage in mass dance to experience loss of self.  In other words, we may have evolved partly due to a split consciousness/mass consciousness feedback loop.

A feedback loop we are still obsessed with today.

The obsession of addiction might be described as an exhibition of a deep desire to experience mass or shared consciousness.  That twelve-step programs succeed with various kinds of addictions makes perfect sense in the context that a shared community with a binding center achieves the goal that an addiction seeks, a goal that drove our very evolution.

My father is agnostic.  There seems no connection between his obsessions and religion.  When young, he did collect locks of hair and photographs of a succession of lovers, and he spent no small amount of time dancing and singing while on dates.  Nevertheless, religious mythology did not and does not cross his mind.

I was not a hair collector.  Singing and dancing were not my things.  Nevertheless, I would suggest that obsessional thinking is closely related to how we evolved and to rituals of dance closely associated with spiritual experience.

After I outgrew my boyhood hobbies and finished experimenting with drug-induced altered states (often characterized by feeling part of something larger than myself), I slipped into the routines of adulthood.  Some things that have emerged over time are the various obsessions that resulted in my feeling part of something larger than myself.  In my life, obsession and spiritual experience are closely tied.

Over the last three or four weeks, I’ve been paying closer and closer attention to trees and tree trunks.  I look for girth and beauty in local oaks, maples, elms and other giants of the suburbs.  As I find the most beautiful specimens, trees I never even noted in the past, I acquire a larger and larger collection that brings me joy.  I find myself driving suburban roads I’ve never driven before, looking for possible new examples to admire.  This is not an obsession.  But it is related to a family of experiences in my life that have been filled with this type of focus, sometimes crossing the line into obsession.

When crossing that line, my obsessions have almost always involved art.

Evolutionary theory is perhaps my deepest obsession.  I revel in the journey to uncover how we came to be.  If you’re familiar with these websites, I don’t have to go into more detail.  The line between science, art and spirituality has disappeared.

In my 20s, I trained myself to become a portrait drawer.  I didn’t want to paint portraits, only draw them.  I practiced often.

In my 30s, as a comic artist, I also focused on facial features.  This focus on faces compelled a detailed exploration of specifics.  When I ran a sales firm, I’d stand at trade shows and spend a day looking at and evaluating noses.  Another day it would be only ears.  By narrowing my attention to something extremely specific, I would absorb detailed information, which provided avenues toward integration.  The integration sometimes was accompanied by elation.

There was a time when I was focused on people’s breathing, observing the ways that shoulders moved when people inhaled and exhaled.  There was almost a year when the sound of leaves in trees had my attention whenever wind was near.  I experience waves of focus on bird chirps and song.

For a while I focused on billboard design and the integration of billboards with surroundings.

These are not unconscious compulsions.  I consciously choose a particular focus after some incident arouses me.  I then proceed to immerse myself in the detail.  Something captures my attention, and I dive in.  It happens that I discover an author and then read everything that author has written.  I’ll discover a drawing technique and then practice it until it becomes integrated into how I draw.

I am estimating that this tendency has an evolutionary and spiritual etiology.  Compulsions to engage in attention to detail, often in a fashion where the same action is repeated over and over again, may be directly connected to the peculiar and particular way that we evolved.  I suspect it is no accident that people with autism, Asperger’s, obsessions and compulsions often have both larger brains characterized by little downsizing of the left cerebral hemisphere and a deep focus on rhythm and repetition.  (Our species had a larger brain, but it began growing smaller about 30,000 years ago.)  The experience of isolation expressed by many with Asperger’s may be related to there being so few post-youth rituals of community integration, rituals offering a union of repetition, elation and copulation.

Spirituality, obsession, sexuality, repetition, evolution and art feel closely tied.  Discovering how a theory of human evolution could explain how these six things are related is a deeply satisfying obsession.

There seems to be at least two evolutionary processes that, at best, are tangentially referred to.  They are so simple as to often feel irrelevant.  I’m wondering how many more of these processes are floating around out there, unremarked.

One process is the back-and-forth dance between homogeneity and heterogeneity.  Over time barriers are built.  Life on the two sides of the barrier unfolds uniquely.  With time, the barrier comes down and there is a proliferation of the new as what was formerly separate builds unique hybrids.  Eventually, a new homogeneity sets in.  Then new barriers are built.

This paradigm is integral to explanations of natural selection.  Populations have to segregate to form varieties and species.  With each new species, the larger system transforms.  The dance of homogeneity and heterogeneity compels an almost infinite variety as it unfolds on many scales and at many locations over time.

The process of homogeneity and heterogeneity compels new forms upon separation and new forms upon combination.  Each new form compels the emergence of its complementary opposite, a process that operates, hypothetically, at all scales of existence.  Socially, the separation of nations encourages unique cultures.  Barriers come down and unique hybrids are encouraged.  Personally, the ontogenetic split between conscious and unconscious often creates isolation and distress, but at the same time, the process proliferates unique individuals.  When unique individuals find common ground, art and culture benefit.  When an individual finds ways to bridge the barriers between his or her unconscious and conscious, the integration offers unique and useful experiences of healing.

Barriers going up compel uniqueness.  Barriers coming down compel discovery.

A second process unfolds at the same time as the first process, across all scales, but from a different direction.    While barriers go up and down and proliferate uniqueness, the second process exhibits two tendencies across generations that are called neoteny and acceleration.  In neoteny, embryo and infant features of ancestors appear in the adults of descendants.  In acceleration, features of adult ancestors appear in the embryos and infants of descendants.  There is the possibility that this same dynamic operates at all scales, like the homogeneity and heterogeneity relationship, proliferating variation and unique features into generations over time.

One way to play with this two-facet dynamic is to presuppose that consciousness is an inherent feature of existence and nonexistence.  One can identify with the greater consciousness, a homogeneous existence, or the productions of the greater consciousness characterized by the various barriers that feature the forms matter acquires during existence.  The homogeneity and heterogeneity dynamic can be viewed as an existence reflection of a foundation nonlife/life, nonexistence/existence dynamic.

Consciousness intervenes through that which exists over time by proliferating features of creation, that which emerges from the homogeneity, into later and later stages of ontogeny.  Consciousness also intervenes while integrating that which is nearing the doorway out into nonexistence, that same homogeneity, into earlier and earlier stages of ontogeny over time.

In existence, it seems the case that homogeneity evolves.  Various homogeneities emerge over time as different barrier/nonbarrier constellations compel different homogenous solutions.  If, upon examining the neoteny/acceleration engagement, we would conclude that nonexistence is also homogeneity, then we might also posit that nonexistence manifests change over time.  In other words, consciousness evolves at both the existence and nonexistence levels.

What is implied, of course, is that there is no such thing as nonexistence.  We just have no word for the concept of consciousness as it relates to what does not exist.  What is also implied is that the larger consciousness itself transforms and evolves.

So, we have two complementing concepts, each composed of two complementing concepts.  I began by building a barrier between the concepts.  Then I proceeded to take the barrier down.  It seems to me a fun and potentially useful way of playing with reality.  It may also be the way that reality plays.

Thomas S.  Kuhn in his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions describes the way that science textbooks are written that results in the destruction of student abilities to understand how science evolves.  Textbooks are written from the perspective of the current paradigm.  The history of a discipline is told as if all discoveries unfolded along a path leading to contemporary insights.  Left out of textbooks are the unique world views retained by the succession of paradigms.  Past unresolved, nonintegrated anomalies get discarded as the story of the current paradigm is told.  Anomalies are the doorways to revolutions.  With old, unintegrated anomalies ignored, science students are inducted into a society with secrets.  Disciplines become amnesiac.  Individuals within a discipline don’t know what they don’t know.

A very peculiar thing is happening to time and space.  We are experiencing an elimination of time and space in societal relations.  As individuals, we are experiencing a shift in identity.

Several hundred years ago, we had no watches.  In Western society, a vague sense of linear time accompanied those with access to resources.  They could tell the time.  For the rest, church bells bonged out the hour.

Fifty years ago, we all had analog watches that told time within a couple of minutes.  Periodic synchronization was required.  Digital watches emerged popularly in the 60s.  Synchronization was still often periodically required.  Nevertheless, time had become more linearalized, digitalized, refined.

With cell phones, time has become exact.  Everyone is on the same time.  In addition, space is collapsing.  We call each other while approaching rendezvous, experiencing each other’s presence before sensory confirmation.  Being on time at a particular place becomes a relative concept because we can communicate from any place as we seek to share the same physical space.  An exact meeting place is not required when both have phones.  We just talk as we get closer.

We are moving back toward an aboriginal condition characterized by relative time and place as technology breaks down the barriers of identification with a physical form.  Not only have our senses been expanded by technology, but so has our experience of time and space.

Marshall McLuhan describes the effects on individuals and societies when media encourage seamless communication.  A result is the breaking down of barriers and a shift in personal identity.  It becomes more difficult to experience life as isolated and alone.

Thesis:  Aboriginal experience of time and space as nonlinear, relative and socially centered.  Antithesis:  Modern experience of time and space as linear, exact and individually centered.  Thesis:  Emerging experience of time and space as nonlinear, relative and trans-socially centered, mediated by technology.

Tracing changes in sense of time and space and shifts in personal identity are difficult to do when the current paradigm mostly chooses to exclude consciousness from discussions.  Consciousness is not measurable, so we will not include it in equations.  Consciousness, defined as identity shifts in space and time, goes unremarked as consciousness transforms.

In perhaps every way that matters, the future and the present are also the past.  Unknown patterns become understandable when we trace their history.  Shifts in consciousness begin to make sense when we return from explorations of the past.  An adult is informed by childhood, technology by aboriginal relations, a science discipline by a study of its roots.

When Kuhn described how the transformation of science disciplines are inhibited by textbooks and teaching protocols that hide seemingly unrelated anomalies transcended by current paradigms, he also described how we hide from ourselves features or patterns in the evolution of biology and society.  Whereas biology textbooks don’t note many of the several competing biological evolution paradigms of the nineteenth century, making invisible alternative ways to view the world, in society we don’t note changes in consciousness or identity because these changes do not seem to have social or economic repercussions.

Milton H. Erickson, the hypnotherapy innovator and theorist, observed that it was often far easier to achieve a targeted change for a client coming to him with a specific distressing symptom if the change was made without the client being aware that the symptom had been addressed.  Erickson would work out a contract with the client’s unconscious and make a deal that the client’s conscious would not be aware of, which would result in the presenting problem going away.

Erickson was intimately aware of levels of identity and the robust power that a model of consciousness could afford.  Presupposing unconscious awareness and intention, Erickson was able to negotiate transformation.  Erickson communicated with a person’s unconscious, using the rules that the unconscious was fully engaged in, primary process, with one time, one place, no opposites.  This was Freud’s discovery regarding how very young children, animals and the unconscious experience the world.  This is also the ancient human aboriginal’s world.  One time, one place, no opposites.

It seems that changes in science and society are accompanied by an Ericksonian-like amnesia.  Transformations occur but they seem to be characterized by an almost deliberate choice to not note what has been left behind.  Perhaps it’s time we become our own hypnotherapist and contract with the past to not only reveal connections to the present, but to find out what is necessary to make it possible to be aware of what has been left behind.  No more secrets.  Let the anomalies be revealed and discussed along with the discarded paradigms.  Let society’s changing relationship with itself, its evolving sense of time and space, be the subject of conversation.

Our identity is shifting.  We have the opportunity to be aware of that shift.  There is structure to the personal, societal and biological shift we are in the middle of.  It begins with discovering they are all the same.

I recently read that six percent of scientists consider themselves Republicans.  Geoffrey Miller, in his recently released book, Spent, observed that a very small minority of evolutionary psychologists support a conservative agenda.  Miller takes deep exception to the disparagement of the disciplines of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology as the science representatives of contemporary, conservative social movements.  Miller targets Stephen J. Gould as a prime fabricator of what Miller sees as this inappropriate fiction.

Frankly, I was shocked to have it proved to me that evolutionary psychologists were not almost universally conservative.  The foundations of evolutionary psychology and conservative politics seem so alike.  In both cases, the prime mover of the system is reduced to the simplest premise with an emphasis on individual or gene motivation, not relationships or the impacts of larger systems.

I can easily see how these scientists don’t share many beliefs of social conservatives.  Evidently most scientists are atheists or agnostics.  This makes them liberal compared to a fundamentalist or evangelical Christian.  However, to me, atheists like Richard Dawkins seem as close-minded as any ethnocentric, Bible-thumping minister.  I don’t really get the evangelical atheist frame of reference.  The strident atheist is still aggressively claiming he or she has a better belief.

For better or worse, Dawkins has ended up as the representative of sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists, which is probably partly why I was confused to find out most of those in his discipline are liberals.  Dawkins is a classic “true believer.”  He behaves like he has little respect for competing theories of evolution and seems to expect that behaving like he has little respect should result in his beliefs being accorded more respect.  He is an aggressive reductionist fighting opponent theories as he is an aggressive atheist fighting belief structures that evidence reliance on an interconnected whole whether or not that belief structure is accompanied by a mythology.  Dawkins is an opponent of overt or covert belief in connection, religious or scientific.

Aggressive true believers occupy both ends of the political spectrum.  There are the poor listeners on both sides.  They often only have friends that agree with them, a passionate devotion to a particular point of view and a difficulty recognizing that subtleties in context have everything to do with the conclusions that are drawn.

Context is everything.

I assumed that a narrow-minded scientist must be conservative just as a pluralistic scientist must be liberal.  It’s all relative.  Scientists view themselves as astonishingly pluralistic relative to society as a whole.  Generally, they are highly intelligent, according to scientific definitions of intelligence.  They form conclusions based on evidence, and the gender and/or ethnicity of another is irrelevant if that person shares their ideas.  Many receive funding from government institutions, so they don’t have a problem with reliance upon, and making contributions to, the commons.

It confuses me that scientists subscribing to reductionist models (like evolutionary psychology) that place almost all focus on the behaviors of individuals (or genes) in the context of procreation opportunities oppose social reductionist models that heavily focus on the support of corporations or wealthy individuals.  In science and society, one can find those who have a belief in “survival of the fittest.”  Evidently, in science they are liberals; in society they are conservatives.

Personally, I find evolutionary psychology a very powerful and potentially useful model in the context of a larger whole of evolutionary theories that take into consideration evolution at scales higher up than the gene or the individual.  Evolutionary psychologists, for the most part, eschew larger contexts.  To me, this has felt conservative.  Liberals, for the most part, embrace larger contexts and exercise, almost compulsively, a desire to examine context, thus proliferating possibility.  I imagine evolutionary psychologists must feel particularly isolated as behavioral conservatives within this liberal group.  Geoffrey Miller evidences frustration when describing his experience of being assigned conservative tendencies.  In Spent, Miller offers no explanation of why evolutionary psychologists are believed to be conservative except to say that such opponents as Stephen J. Gould are wrong about their science and thus poor judges when discussing related issues.

As someone with the deepest respect for Miller and Gould, it feels a little bit like parents arguing, though Gould, dead for several years, has little to say.

It feels paradoxical that evolutionary psychologists are liberal.  They believe they are on the cutting edge of behavioral science.  From where I sit, they mostly offer highly refined explanations of a significant and important slice of biological and societal evolution.  It’s a slice that’s been used to explain the fact that genes, individuals and social elites control all resources.  Evolutionary psychologists share their experience of being so profoundly open-minded that they are willing to countenance this offensive-to-liberals idea:  selfishness is central to existence.

There is a difference between being open-minded and being in love with an idea.  Aggressively in love with an idea, evolutionary psychologists have difficulty seeing past their liberalism.