Marcia and I sat down with the neurologist yesterday, April 2nd. Evidently the several events of fading from normal consciousness preceded by a strong smell might be connected to the two times I briefly passed out after eating a meal while in a restaurant. There are people that easily experience unconscious content while in a waking state, people that sometimes pass out. The neurologist said this is likely unrelated to the cerebral aneurysm in it’s origin, but might be being encouraged by the aneurysm.

The doctor behaved excited and delighted to have a patient that fit into this unique category. He was clearly grateful for the opportunity to work with me further. He gave me his email address expressed a desire to maintain an email connection.

The neurologist said I exhibit an unusual highly asymmetric brain structure in sections of my temporal lobe, a particular structure featured by other people that exhibit unusually close connections to their unconscious, with unconscious content emerging in waking states, sometimes leading to a grand mall seizure or passing out. The doctor said that sometimes people with this condition value so highly the interactions with the hallucinations (many are fully functional people) that they choose to go on no condition inhibiting drugs.

He is suggesting that the aneurysm is exaggerating the asymmetry, possibly encouraging the experiencing of unconscious content while awake, possibly leading to grand mall seizures. I have been prescribed a low dosage of Keppra XR (levetiracetam), decreasing likelihoods of seizures.

When I write mornings, often about evolutionary theory and autism, I wait for ideas to emerge from my unconscious, and then I record them. There now seems the possibility that my peculiar brain structure in combination with my cerebral aneurysm, meditation, and an artistic temperament have combined to encourage the emergence of my alternative evolutionary theory.

It is my experience that I work in cooperation with my unconscious to produce the words that explain human evolution and autism. I integrate direct communications from my unconscious to decide how and what to theorize. From what the neurologist is saying, there is the possibility this is a result of a unique brain structure that tends to plant unconscious content into daily life. A question, of course, is what I am experiencing only metaphoric or even totally unrelated to shared reality, or is there enough in common between my unconscious guidance and conventional perceptions to make my theory useful to people living in conventional shared reality.

Next, I meet with the neurosurgeon to evaluate an aneurysm surgical intervention.

Successful surgery may diminish my conscious access to unconscious creative states.

Western society’s reverence for art seems to have revolved around good stories. Individuals achieving entrance to the pantheon of great artists often had childhoods and adult lives characterized by extreme stress. In the West, this may be partly because the artist represents an individual struggling to integrate nearly impossible polarities: community sensibilities with the cult of individuality. An artist seeks to portray what unites us, walking a path seeking unities, while alone. The stories of an artist’s struggle are also a description of how each individual seeks both an allegiance to community and self. It can be argued that the great Western artist finds a way to integrate the two, at least in his or her work.

I’ve described two neurological archetypes in my work on human evolution, autism and current social transformations. There is the male, maturationally delayed, and the female, accelerated, and both are matrifocal, often left-handed, leaning toward autism, inclined toward primary process and inclined toward being simultaneous thinkers. The other neurological archetype includes the familiar male who is maturationally accelerated and the female who is delayed (neotenous), and both are patrifocal, narrative-thinking, split-brained, normal right-handers. I’ve recently been playing with the idea that each displays a…

The idea of evolution is often confused with Darwin’s theory of natural selection. This is in no small part because science representatives of evolutionary biology, such as Richard Dawkins, purposely confuse evolution with natural selection, usually linking Neo-Darwinistic interpretations of natural selection with evolution. This is further complicated by creationists or followers of intelligent design focusing exclusively on the theory of natural selection, interpreting the principles of that particular theory as identical with science’s understanding of evolution.

There is evolution and there are those theories we use to interpret evolution. It just so happens that many evolutionary biologists, creationists and members of the media don’t see a difference, or prefer we not see a difference. It seems to be in the interest of many individuals to muddy the difference between a theory and what a theory represents, to confuse a map and the territory.

When a metaphor seeks to represent not a particular experience, but an interpretation of an experience, the result is something like a metaphor of a metaphor. It is perhaps useful when we know that we are engaged in this particular process. A problem is that using metaphors to describe metaphors for experience is a whole lot…

One of the deeply peculiar things about being human at this particular point in history is our tendency to ally ourselves with split consciousness or self awareness, deeply identifying with an identity at a single level.  We exhibit little desire to shift scales by assigning identity to levels beneath or beyond that of our body.

From a Hegelian point of view, we’ve emerged from a present tense consciousness characterized by no self awareness.  We used to be locked into a single time and single place, with no ability to intuit something’s opposite.  Before language, we lived in primary process.  This is the consciousness of animals, very small children, the unconscious, the severely autistic and hypnotic trance.

Acquiring split consciousness, we obsess on our peculiar station in existence, featuring existential isolation and an ability to view everything as separate.  We not only focus on our own self interest, but we do so in a step-by-step, focused, goal-oriented fashion that often fails to notice the direct, indirect or larger repercussions of our behavior.

That ability to obsess is integral to being human.  I’ve proposed that we sexually selected each other in the context of choosing the best dancers as copulation partners, growing…

Strip religion of mythology and the discussion revolves around consciousness, awareness and identity.  Darwin was sensitive to his theory being received in a context that it would be used to support or deny the existence of god.  Darwin himself struggled with how exactly he understood god. After150 years, discussions of evolution often still focus on the battle between the theory of natural selection and Judeo-Christian myths.

The particular kind of consciousness that a normal human experiences and displays is what I’ve been calling split consciousness.  This understanding is premised on primary process consciousness–the one time, one place, no opposites consciousness of infants, animals, dream, the unconscious and the autistic–being what we evolved from and still retain while sleeping, while small or while in hypnotic trance.

I’ve hypothesized that the transition from primary process consciousness to split consciousness was compelled by runaway sexual selection focused on dance, which eventually resulted in a unique brain structure exhibiting two hemispheres of unequal size and a smaller corpus callosum.  This process was perhaps encouraged by a bridging of language from gesture to speech, enhancing an ability to represent a thing with a sound instead of a sign and motion.  Nevertheless, at this point we…

I grew up in a household with literally no religion.  My father was agnostic, my mom sort of Jewish.  She’s since been Unitarian and Catholic.  Almost 20 years ago I was dating a woman who had been raised Catholic, who was converting to Judaism, while my mother was converting from Judaism to Catholicism.  How Jewish was I raised?  Just now I had to go to Google to figure out how to spell “Judaism.”  I had the “a” and “i” reversed.

Nevertheless, I was raised according to one of the most basic tenets of Western society, that the unconscious maintains an agenda separate from that of the conscious mind, one that often conflicts with conscious goals and aspirations.  I was raised a Freudian.  High percentages of my father’s income went toward my parents’ and their children’s psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.  We did not go to temple.  We went to therapists.

I am almost 57.  In high school, I was in therapy with a Rogerian for 2.5 years.  In Florida, I was the client of an eclectic psychoanalyst for six years.  He studied with many of the New Age luminaries at Esalon in California.  Chicago has connected me with another eclectic practitioner for…

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…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My laptop is down.  It sits at the left side of my desk.  At the right side of my desk is the older unit I used until three years ago.  That is where I sit until Bob arrives and figures out what’s wrong.  When that’s fixed, I’ll have access to all current projects and I’ll be able to start my day.

Just now, sitting in my chair three feet to the left of its usual location, leaned back in the chair with my head cocked to the side, I was startled into noticing a particularly powerful combination of visual elements outside the window of the office.  The way that the oak tree, banister, stop sign, distant foliage and apartment building across the street arranged themselves was a uniquely powerful congregation of composition, color, contrast and depth.  When I untilted my head, the arrangement was still there, but I’d never noticed it before.  All it took was an unexpected adjustment in my viewing angle from an unusual position behind my desk to recognize beauty that had always been there.

It’s all about the frame.  The window “frames” the world to allow a particular point of view.  A framed painting cues the…

In Nicaragua in the 1980s, deaf children were collected in schools where they could be taught together in one location.  They had developed individually various sign conventions, and a language spontaneously emerged where they were gathered in one place.  The oldest children learned this language slowest.  The youngest developed lightning fast sign fluency in this brand new nonverbal creole lingo.

One of the things that makes humans unique is this ability to play with time.  Language, by prying apart the present into a future and past, offers an ability to imagine being in two places at once.  Language lets you realize that the person you are communicating with is a different person, with the rather astonishing insight that the world is not just here and now.

There was a time when we were animals, experiencing the world through an infinitely lingering present, unclear on the boundaries between self and others, where dream was not only night but the every day.

Animals may not have developed humor exactly, but they have fun.  Animals don’t generate and participate in symbolic language, but they play.  Animals that have fun and play are mostly young animals.  Consider that human humor and language, two things…

In a dream many years ago, I was in an ancient city.  It is night and it is quiet.

I am standing by the great wall that protects the city.  It is more like a mound.  It does not rise straight up from the ground.  Still, the wall is high enough to protect the citizens.  Then, in the dream, I am viewing the city from the air, noting the great embankment making a circle around the buildings, castles, streets and homes.  In the dream, I am noticing a feature of the stones that make up the protecting walls that reminds me of dragon scales.  Looking closer at those walls, I am realizing that those are scales.  Suddenly it becomes clear to me that the great circular wall surrounding the city is a mammoth serpent, asleep, protecting the city as she dreams.

That which we seek protection from, that which frightens us most, by its very nature is the very barrier that protects us.  Our armor and the weapons that seek us are the same.  What keeps us separate is also that which most terrifies us.  Those edifices that provide us our identity are the very things that can take our…

In meditation, I sometimes have an experience of an underlying consciousness characterized by a twin identity:  creation and perception.  It’s sort of a pitcher-catcher relationship, like a basketball player that plays superb offense and defense.  It is also called yin and yang.  There is the cosmic artist and the cosmic appreciator.  Each moment is filled with a seemingly infinite intelligence and vast humor engaged in deep play.

I’ve wondered if this dichotomy is a vagary of human split consciousness with our physicality deeply informed by estrogen and testosterone.  Probably so.  Regardless, with the body I have and the instrument of perception that I was granted, that is how the music sounds.

As we have observed the evolution of the web and the dissolution of our consumer economy, it seems as if that music is growing louder.  There is an emergence of creativity and appreciation in purer, less hindered forms as the Internet encourages the pairing up of performers with audience.  Without the barriers of money, geographic distances or even language, new venues have emerged, such as Youtube, that allow a profound proliferation of creative content while training visitors to see and listen with new eyes and ears.

The line between…

A child of the 60s, a younger brother in the baby boom family of several million, I was born in 1952. I became politically aware after the 1968 Democratic convention. I was driven more by the desire for social change than political revolution, though of course, the two were allied. Hippiedom seemed divided into political revolution, social transformation and drug use streams. One could easily ally with one of the three and not the others. Some allied with two or three of these social currents. The younger the hippie, the more likely only drugs were the center of the orientation. This effect seems related to the draft becoming less threatening over time.

A colleague organizer mentioned last night the experience many of us had in the 1960s that revolution was just about to happen. For Joe, it was the sense that the political process was about to change. My experience was that social structure was transforming. The feeling of imminence was encouraged by most of us political and social change advocates spending no small amount of time in altered states characterized by revelatory experiences in the now focused on the nature of now. Castaneda’s “crack between the worlds” was opening…

When I was a cartoonist, a comic artist seeking to come up with a new piece every day, I used a variety of techniques to generate useful ideas. One technique I often used was that in my mind’s eye I’d create a column of words representing or associated with something specific and sit that column next to another column of words representing or associated with another concept. Then I would run the columns up and down like a slide rule. I was looking for complementing concepts or associations with patterns that mirrored each other. Goofy incongruities would emerge. Showing how things seemingly unrelated had connections, with the connections seeming arbitrary, led to humor.

Gary Larson, who created The Far Side, was a master of this technique. For example, placing a clown in one column with various associations, such as using a cream pie as a weapon, compared to a criminal in the other column creates a panel with a clown in an alley with a cream pie about to mug a citizen. The caption “When clowns go bad” completed the bridge. This kind of humor is all about connections.

How, you might ask, would this technique have anything to do…

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

We might consider where this process is headed.

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

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

Features of…

As far back as I can remember, I’ve seen images in the bathroom floor. While sitting on the toilet, I have noticed that the cracks, blemishes and patterns resolve themselves into mostly faces. Sometimes I see faces with bodies. Often I see cartoon-like faces, and sometimes realistic pictures emerge. It happens that the same images pop out over time like friends saying hello, occasionally over periods of years.

While looking out the window, I see these faces in leaves and trees. The wind invests the characters with life, sometimes with moving jaws as if they’re talking. Usually, I’m thinking of something else when I notice that I’m observing a character that my mind has constructed out of the foliage. It’s rare I just decide to find the faces. I’m usually seeing them, and then I abandon the thoughts I have so that I can offer them my attention.

When I was a child, the dark green-speckled bedroom wallpaper would resolve itself into snakes and other creatures that I’d feel scared of when the pictures began to form. I remember whole walls vibrating with chattering animation, soundless yet alive. Mesmerizing, terrifying.

I discovered, maybe twenty years ago, that I can suggest…

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

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

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

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

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

Science does not presume to be…

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

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

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

An immanent goddess preceded the Indo-Europeans and exists today in the third world and in the East. Characteristic of the ancient immanent…

Slowly I grow better at letting opposites be true.

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

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

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

Stephen J. Gould, the evolutionary biologist, was a pluralist among reductionists. He didn’t subscribe to science theology, which demands that simpler means…

They were difficult days and nights after my son’s mother and I separated almost 20 years ago. I was cartooning then, preparing weekly comic panels and strips for perhaps 50 publications around the country. I felt compelled to inject humor into the fear/depression that pretty much had me nailed that first year. The drawings that emerged were perhaps more often bitter than funny. So it goes.

The sales firm I managed specialized in gifts and greeting cards. The best company I represented produced comic-character books and calendars. Twice a year, trade shows left me the samples to be able to bargain with other exhibitors. During one show’s slow stretch, I came across a gaggle of large, quasi-concrete garden fountains gurgling away in a trade show booth with a green Astroturf motif. Nights were hardest during this period on my own. The sound of fountains generated a calm I deeply craved. I opened negotiations with the exhibitor, a local rep. He made it clear that one less fountain to haul back to his garage would be a blessing. I offered him Calvin & Hobbes and Far Side books. I got the fountain at wholesale in exchange for books I had hundreds…

Different mediums demand different investments by the creator.

Building sand castles, the medium requests that the creator be in touch with wonder. Designing comic panels and strips draws out my disappointment, skepticism and sensitivity to incongruity and hypocrisy. When making music, I’m almost always in minor key as sadness seems to be what most easily is exposed.

Like making my way through a plate of poorly filleted fish, writing constantly demands I stop and remove the bones of bad grammar and poorly formed ideas. Still, as difficult as the journey to satiation always is, the medium encourages me to show how things not obviously connected are. Writing compels me to build bridges, draw connections, find the hidden harmonies in ways that sand art, comic creation and music making do not.

Building structures in sand, drawing and making music feel effortless to me. I’m not suggesting that the results of my creations are particularly satisfying to anyone else (though I am pretty proud of my sand castles). I’m just saying that the process is an easy flow. Writing, that’s a totally different thing.

The process of trying to find words to bridge the chasm between another human being and me feels…

Exploring the evolution of the unconscious is perhaps the same as asking how consciousness emerged. Fossil excavations don’t offer much in the way of information. We are left with perhaps three windows into this journey: individual ontogeny (observing children); exploring the consciousness manifestations of disorders characterized by developmental or maturational delay; recalling personal experience.

In many ways, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. The unfolding of an individual from conception to adult reproduces the physical manifestations, genetic triggering mechanisms, and hormonal processes characteristic of ancient precursor species. We might assume that ontogeny also recapitulates consciousness. Hence, the three pathways noted, all ontogenetically related.

A fourth path is available, but this path offers mysteries and is little understood. Hypnosis is a tool hypnotherapists use to form alliances with a person’s alternative decision-making center, the unconscious. A hypnotherapist can suggest to a person’s alternative mind that the subject feels hot on one side of the body and cold on the other. Measurements confirm the changes. A hypnotherapist can suggest welts appear at particular places, and so they do. Suggestions can be made to modify the physical form in specific noninvasive ways, and form modifies.

What are the limits to how an unconscious, subconscious or alternative…

Paleontologists are able to map out branchlike trails of evolution from fossil remains of individuals embedded in the earth. Flesh, organs and behavior are not so easily disinterred. There is one feature of being human that is hardly ever considered in these excavations, perhaps because it’s so little understood. There are very few researchers exploring the evolution of the unconscious.

How has the unconscious evolved over the last 5 million years? How has the unconscious/conscious relationship transformed?

I’ve lived a life characterized by a succession of passions and professions. It is far easier for me to track how my conscious experience has evolved than changes occurring at the unconscious or subconscious level. I note profound differences in my dreams and changes in feelings but successfully tracking what is out of conscious awareness offers paradoxical results because becoming aware of what I’m not aware of brings the hidden to the light of day.

Decades of study and meditation have shifted my awareness to trust and identify with what formerly I would refer to as my unconscious. Identifying with my unconscious, consciousness changes. What was hidden is experienced as present. At this experiential level, I’ve noted a transformation of the unconscious/conscious split.…