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.

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 unique form of imagination, with primary process individuals exhibiting abilities to perceive and integrate larger patterns contrasted with split-brain thinkers that can easily imagine what does not exist while establishing the steps to get there.

What I’m considering at this particular moment is what might be occurring when a primary process thinker is introduced in childhood to split-brain thinking conventions, or the opposite, when a split-brain thinker is guided or propelled into how a primary process thinker thinks. For me, there is something similar to the life work of an artist, who is seeking to integrate seemingly incompatible polarities. It strikes me that by understanding the world by the way the world is perceived and processed, and offering ways that these two basic paradigms can relate, we might be encouraging a healthy integration.

It may be often the case that those artists and theorists that achieve success in their chosen avocations or professions are those individuals that have accidentally or unconsciously found ways to perceive and interpret information considered from both a primary process and a split-brain perspective. I have hypothesized that our society evolved from a matrifocal to a patrifocal frame and is now headed back to matrifocal, though in many ways what we are experiencing currently is integration. I’m hypothesizing that one way to approach how unique thinkers think is to consider that some individuals experience and exhibit an integration of both primary process and split-brain thinking processes.

It is my guess the integration is often not without stress. In just the way the artist in the West often acts as an example or symbol of the difficulty of synthesis between community and self, or the other ways of describing the existential polarities that we as humans wrestle with, those individuals that discover an ability to live in both primary process and split-brain worlds probably often experience the relationship as a struggle.

An example of two forms of imagination integration might be aboriginal children with natural primary process thinking inclinations that are raised in a Western home by split-brain parents, except that the parents are artists, and the home features an extended family with a mother’s sister and a mother’s mother living in the house. A net result might be an environment somewhat neurologically (and socially) familiar, with constant exposure to what may feel like a complementary opposite neurological condition. The children may become adults with a facility to intuit big picture, simultaneous, interconnected understanding with step-by-step abilities to achieve goals by imagining something that does not yet exist.

A perhaps more familiar example might be one that approximates the artist paradigm in Western culture. Consider a primary process thinker, a left-handed person, with left-handed parents. Borderline autistic, an Asperger’s candidate, this person is traumatized in early childhood and finds himself or herself withdrawing, except the world that he or she withdraws into features an enormous number of words. This person discovers that words are effective at creating a security zone isolating personal experience from a threatening environment. The person becomes an avid reader and uses his or her global imagination to fill the world up with the images his or her words create. Nevertheless, as a primary process thinker, community feels essential, resulting in a vivid imagination devoted to an imagined community, a community featuring many interconnections.

I hypothesize two neurological archetypes with few overt pathways toward integration of the two frames of reference. Some people, over the course of their life, experience various degrees of integration. Sometimes this occurs in an atmosphere characterized by love and affection. Sometimes this occurs in atmospheres featuring distress and misunderstanding. Both situations can result in individuals with enhanced abilities to serve society.

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Proceed to author’s FREE book download on this subject. 10 minute introductory video here.

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 of what being human is all about.

Maybe 4,000 generations ago, an eyeblink in evolutionary time, humans thought differently. Culture had not yet engaged. Language may still have been gestural. Our brains may still not have lateralized for speech. Most of us may have still been random-handed, like our great-ape cousins. Primary process consciousness may have been our night and day.

Primary process is a Freudian process, interpreted by Gregory Bateson to be the foundation animal consciousness, featuring one time, one place, no opposites. Primary process is the experience of an ever-present now, with little ability to estimate different times or to consider more than one location at any one time, and no ability to imagine something’s opposite. Trying to imagine something opposite results only in the appearance of that which is the thing you want to imagine the opposite of. Six different consciousnesses are associated with primary process: animal consciousness; human embryo and infant consciousness; human dream consciousness; the human unconscious; particular human altered states accessed through drugs and alcohol; and autism.

Humans, like our animal brothers and sisters, lived and breathed primary process. Something truly peculiar happened and humans evolved split consciousness. We could still access primary process, but our everyday existence featured an experience dramatically different from our sleeping nights. Split consciousness gave us the ability to exercise imagination and simultaneously have more than one time and more than one place and conceive of opposites; moreover, split consciousness was accompanied by primary process. We became both split and nonsplit beings in our daytime waking lives. Imagination and dissociation were mated with a tendency to experience the world in a way that merged a thing and what a thing represented.

Primary process does not differentiate. With primary process, a thing that represents, and a thing that is represented, are the same. In the world of dream, symbol and symbolized are merged.

We live deeply peculiar lives characterized by both extreme dissociation and compulsion to merge. This unique consciousness is understandable when approached evolutionarily. Humans feature two kinds of consciousness, and one of those two consciousnesses is unique. Accompanying this experience is our usual tendency to not exercise an ability to accompany the experience, or observe how exactly we engage in two kinds of consciousness. The result is that we often confuse the map with the territory.

As theories of evolution develop, the theorists, critics of theorists and the media describing combating viewpoints seem to specialize in forgetting that theories of evolution are metaphors for evolution. When theorists purposefully confuse evolution with a theory of evolution, when myth-believers purposefully confuse a personal experience with information that transcends personal experience, when the media focus only on describing battles instead of how battles came about, we are encouraged to confuse a thing and that which a thing represents. In other words, both science practitioners and myth-believers are often lodged in primary process and do not know it, so effortlessly are they engaged in dissociation.

This is the paradox of being human. While fully engaged in our imaginations, we often don’t notice when we are confusing a thing and what a thing represents. Able to be in multiple times and multiple places while seeing opposites, we at the same time merge two things that are different, experiencing them as the same.

There is a solution to the paradox. Identify with that part of us which is aware of, observes and patiently embraces our experience of being both split and nonsplit beings. Accompany self.

For some reason, a rather strange and astonishing result of accompanying split and nonsplit selves is an experience of compassion, interconnection and not being alone. Consider theorizing from a position where everything is relative. Map and territory are understood in the context of consciousness location. There is no truth, no answer, no right interpretation. There are no arguments. There is only sharing of experience.

The idea of evolution is often confused with Darwin’s theory of natural selection. To understand evolution, we need to accompany ourselves.

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 bigger brains because a dance aesthetic requires a massive number of synapses.  In the process, those best at being obsessed made more babies.  A Fisherian runaway sexual selection encourages obsession, with one sex obsessed with display and the other sex obsessed with evaluating display.  Obsession became integral to who we were.

When our minds split and we emerged from primary process, we stayed obsessed.  Instead of obsessing over how exactly to leverage art into procreation opportunities, we instead obsess over how exactly to leverage anything we do, say or imagine into a procreation opportunity.  This obsession is often diverted into profession, hobby, recreation or even relaxation activities, with each of us engaged in behaviors that will draw us positive attention and respect.  At the foundation of these behaviors is our deep desire for physical union.  (See Geoffrey Miller’s Spent.)

So, we evolved in a manner that reinforced obsession, blossoming into self awareness, still obsessed.  The Hegelian synthesis to this primary process thesis, split consciousness antithesis, is an obsessed or deeply focused state of consciousness that provides an experience of primary process and split consciousness both at once.

One of the genuinely peculiar things about being a human is our connection to primary process that features symbol with associations displayed in places like dreams while at the same time we can line up a series of sounds that behave as signs associated with meanings that when displayed in a row over time collect more than one context so that together they compel imagination or an ability to be two or more places and times at once.

We maintain two very different awareness systems.  Primary process, the language of the unconscious, allows us to be in the present, with no multiplace perspective.  Split consciousness allows us perspective, multiple experiences, with little ability to be present.  Being human, we tend to obsess, regardless.

Back to Hegel.  Finding the synthesis requires some facility with both paradigms.  This is, of course, paradoxical insofar as one would think a person is either split or not split, not both at once.  There is a third way.  This involves being split while present to the split.

There are numerous paths that offer specific regimens that address this split.  What we’re doing here is a little different.  We’re defining the problem biologically as part of a hypothetical evolutionary dynamic.  We’re making believe religion or spirituality is biology, that consciousness is an evolutionary condition.

It was Gregory Bateson who described the human condition as an ability to focus on goals in a single-minded fashion, ignoring repercussions while achieving the goals.  What we are discussing here is blending together two separated consciousnesses, allowing the obsessed-with-goal portion of our nature to be embraced by the ancient, obsessed living-in-the-present portion of our nature, providing an ability to move through narrative time while sensitive to the relative nature of identity.

Achieving goals in the context of a larger whole.

Integral to this notion is not taking the split self so seriously.  What might be some techniques, rituals or games useful for learning to accompany our obsessed selves?

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 identify with a condition described as self aware.  Strangely, maybe because of all the stories that accompany religion, we haven’t paid all that much attention to the differences between primary process and split consciousness, at least in the context of evolution.  What I mean is that we are directly connected to all that preceded us in the way we experience the world.  We can choose to notice.

Evolutionary biology is described as a science, but as regards human evolution, it is far more than just science; it is also art.  It is art in that how we experience consciousness informs how we understand evolution.  The differences between prehuman consciousness and human consciousness are integral to how we understand evolution.

Most humans indulge exclusively in experiencing the world as a split consciousness being, evaluating the world based upon the dissociative constructs developed by an ability to be two places at once, two times at once, and to intuit something’s opposite.  A net result is we spend relatively little time allied with primary process or with that synthesis of the two forms of consciousness that has had a kazillion names, but which we’ll call epiphany.

In the context of understanding evolution, indulging in the experience of split consciousness, one of three choices of consciousness that we are aware of, we make it very difficult to understand what exactly happened when we humans evolved.  Perhaps most obvious is that as humans, we intuit that every separate individual animal, insect and plant exhibits individual consciousness with individual motivation and individual agendas.  We intuit that because that is how we humans experience the world.  I suspect that if we encouraged in ourselves and one another an ability to identify with both primary process and epiphany states (epiphany states being states that exhibit both primary process and split consciousness), we’d be far less likely to conclude that all life reflects this peculiarly human split perspective.

One might hypothesize that an individual’s genome is but part of the skeleton of a structure, each person’s genome but a single bone in a massive skeleton that covers the world with a trillion-bone being.  All that nongenome flesh, blood, weather, rocks and water are playing the bones of the skeleton like some mad timpanist beating into existence a music that has little to do with individuality and everything to do with alternative consciousness.

The more I study evolution, the more I feel like I’m exploring consciousness.  Alternative consciousness feels necessary to understand evolution.  I guess that’s why as an artist I feel qualified to theorize.  Shifting identity is where an artist feels at home.

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 almost 24 years.  That makes 32 years of my life that I’ve been in psychotherapy.  I’ve already passed in and out of those years where everything in the world seemed to unfold according to psychodynamic processes.  Nevertheless, I have been deeply affected by having spent so many years seeking a satisfying and productive relationship with my unconscious.

In a sense, the religion I was raised with has not changed.  I still revere the unconscious as central to experiencing access to hidden resources.  Some things have changed.  My relationship with my unconscious has evolved.

When I was younger, I was encouraged to think of the unconscious as that which maintains the barrier between me and those things which would seem to enhance my life.  I was acutely aware of a split between what I craved and my ability to achieve that desire.  I was critical of myself, particularly that part of myself that seemed compelled to withhold from me what I wanted.

That split has flipped.  Over the years, a slow realization has spread across the hours of my days.  That realization is that my unconscious withholds nothing from me.  My unconscious accompanies me every moment of my life.  My unconscious is me.  That which makes it difficult to achieve my goals has nothing to do with my unconscious.

It is my conscious mind that confuses and distracts me.  How I choose to direct my consciousness is what affects my life.

In other words, there is now an emphasis on being present and trusting the outcomes of my words and behaviors.  Feeling accompanied, I suspect less what I cannot intuit.  I can choose to trust.  The challenge becomes being in my body, in the present, experiencing the unique moment I might be part of.

Barriers feel not to be anything related to my “unconscious,” but something related to my consciously choosing to not offer attention to what is happening.  I often choose to concentrate on some other time, on some other place or on imagination.  My conscious mind has become the location of that which creates barriers between me and what I seek to achieve.

Enhancing the paradox is my changing definition of the unconscious.  Its boundaries have become less familiar.  As my heart slowly heals and I can trust people in my life and I can trust my experience, the separateness of things feels less relevant than how things are connected.  It has become difficult to characterize my unconscious as a feature of my own separate body and identity.  My unconscious feels to be part of something larger than my self.

Raised in a nonreligious home, encouraged to feel that the unconscious is in control, committing 32 years of my life to psychotherapy, I’ve somehow come back around to something that some might associate with religion.  This doesn’t feel to me to be about god.  It’s an experience, not a mythology or a world view.  My experience suggests to me that we are all connected.  But it’s not religion.  It’s just the experience that I feel accompanied by that which is me, yet it is far greater than what I am consciously aware of.

I feel humbled.

Identifying with that which we call the unconscious, embracing that unknown, offers a strange benefit.  It becomes less clear what we really are, while discovering what really is.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 viewer that there is a communication occurring within a nonarbitrary boundary.  Art is about nonarbitrary boundaries allowing a settling of perception into deliberate perspectives.  Whereas life is rife with attempts to communicate particular points of view, art allows a context where this can occur while the observer is aware that this is the case.  Perhaps artists take themselves too seriously, believing the content of their communication is the point.  For me, what art is about is the awareness that we are aware.  By continually adjusting our perception to different frames, we can become aware of the relativity of experience and perception.

The primary way that humans fashion or frame experience is through language.  We take language very seriously and so often forget it is only a frame, a system that suggests where we put our attention.  The relativity of words are forgotten, their associational properties neglected as we instead embrace the concepts they seek to only represent.  We take words very seriously.  We forget we are practicing art in every moment.

Chomsky hypothesized that language emerged as a selected cluster of grammatical structures that showed evolutionary fitness and survived.  Consider that language, a framing mechanism that seems to somehow accompany split awareness (split because one is aware, and one is aware that one is aware), is a direct reflection of embryonic epigenetic relationships between an ontogenetically growing individual and an environment supplying information regarding particular ways to grow.

There are two shifts in understanding how we grow and evolve that contribute to this alternative way of understanding how language may have emerged.  First, consciousness always existed.  There is the big consciousness that characterizes the whole, and there is the consciousness featured by every individual.  Individual consciousness is not self aware.  Life is not lived in frames.  A dog is not aware of its dogness in the context of a larger world.  The dog is just aware.

When we become aware that we are aware we embrace the frames.  We are choosing our perspectives, our world views.  Our minds are split with a characteristic sensitivity to different time, place and personhood.  We can experience empathy because we can understand a time and place different from the time and place we occupy right now.

The first of the two shifts in understanding is characterized by split consciousness as opposed to consciousness.  Pure consciousness or nonsplit consciousness is where we mostly spent our time perhaps as recently as 50,000 years ago, when in the womb, or when last dreaming.

The second of the two shifts in understanding has to do with a reappraisal of what we think our boundaries are.  Classic evolutionary theory has us slowly adjusting over generations to environmental contingencies that prune those of us with less talent for achieving procreation opportunities.  Consider that as only a fraction of the story.  Arguments among theorists for over a century have revolved around understanding how exactly the features of individuals are generated for an environment that then determines who survives.

Variation is not random.

A place to look to discover nonrandom feature proliferation is in the human womb, where the environment is having a profound effect upon the individuals that emerge.  Consider that language, the way the split consciousnesses have found to communicate with each other, is a direct reflection of the epigenetic conversation between heredity and environment in the womb.  Seeking the structure of language, we need go no further than discovering the particular ways that environment and heredity converse.

Consider that the language of language is deeply similar to how an individual listens and responds to the world while in the womb.  We prolonged the womb experience into the post-birth world, introducing society to our ability to converse.

Split consciousness emerged with humans acting out the role of both heredity and environment, having learned to both speak and listen.  Having carried the womb experience into adulthood, we have brought with us the language of the womb.

In other words, human society with its constant shifting of frames is acting out an ancient womb environment of infinite growth contingencies.  Every looking out a window is a natal balancing of incoming information in preparation for another ontogenetic shift.  Who we are as human adults is deeply informed by our experience in the womb.

It requires a shift in position to view split consciousness as integrally tying together natal epigenetic (womb environment/heredity) conversations and language.  Viewing things in different ways is what being human is all about.