In the United States, there have been three powerful democratization surges in the last 100 years.  Each featured an experience by participants of feeling part of something larger than themselves.  It continues to astonish me how the one we are experiencing now is almost invisible to folks I know.

In the 1930s, working people were provided a voice and power to affect their lives in positive ways.  The commons emerged as a political power as people were able to realize that the process of focusing on shared resources provided a new way of viewing influence.  Democratization was viewed as a feature of the commons.

In the 1960s, democratization acquired an almost spiritual dimension as peace and new interpersonal-communication protocols became integral to understanding how the commons operated.  Integration and feminization transformed the idea of how working together worked.  I felt part of something larger than myself.

Over the last 20 years, there has been growing a third wave of commitment to the commons.  Far more subtle than the other two waves, its influence has been exponentially more powerful.  Perhaps it makes no sense to separate them; they are all part of the same process.  The process features a horizontalization of…

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…

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…

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

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

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

In an individual, seamless cerebral communication may prevent the emergence of individual-driven creativity with no relative experience of different times, different places or what a thing may be if a thing is not.  In a society characterized by massive barriers and poor communications, a disappearing of those barriers may have an opposite effect.  Instead of a diminution of self awareness, a society without barriers that follows a society…

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

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

I’m having that feeling now.

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

Somehow, a part of me is convinced that physicist’s insights regarding the relative…

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

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

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

Great dancers often bridge genres and bring together, for example, contemporary and modern forms.  Physicists attempt to bring into single equations patterns evidencing themselves in seemingly separate ways.  Some politicians define themselves by their ability to bridge disparate social trends.  Often we…

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…

Evolutionary theory has been encouraged to grow in the direction of what society believes about itself.  When we in the West were committed to the mythology of the Judeo-Christian ethic, we concluded that life emerged as a direct result of transcendent intervention in a prescribed time period.  Darwin was heavily influenced by contemporary forces that included the belief that humans could observe patterns, draw conclusions and make predictions without the influence of a universal god.  Drawing upon Linnaeus, Paley, Malthus, Smith and Lyell, Darwin created a theory of evolution that seemed to integrate both a reverence for the subject and respect for enlightenment and intellectual independence.  In choosing among Darwin’s three theories, society embraced the theory of natural selection, which directly reflected a material, stratified, industrializing West.

A new paradigm is emerging.  Instead of “survival of the fittest,” we see a drifting in the direction of “transcendence of the interconnected.”  Cooperative communities are becoming recognized as integral to understanding how individuals and collections of individuals evolve.  For many evolutionary theorists, the environment is now a variable that influences the kind of progeny that are produced.  We need not be products of random variation any longer.

Still unexplored as a variable…

There are spiritual paths for which an economy of language, myth and metaphor are highly valued.  Often a heavy emphasis is placed on practice and community.  A result is lives lived with attention or awareness, respect and often compassion.

I have this compulsion to take patterns evident in one discipline or community and then seeing if it carries forward to another, not so contiguous area.  Right now I’m wondering if you can have the equivalent of a wordless science, an academic discipline with an almost Zen-like attention to that which is best expressed without language.

This sounds like mathematics.  Perhaps it is.

Science and spirituality are feeling closely tied these days.  I have been tracing back human split consciousness to the primary process, nonsplit consciousness of the ancient aboriginal, then going back further to our hominid forebears, continuing back to great ape consciousness and finally beyond our great ape roots.

In the hospital yesterday I was paradoxically returned to an aboriginal sphere.  Groin arteries were healing, and my penis was observed by several nurses, doctors and practitioners while they were examining the wounds.  Of course, it didn’t matter.  My body had become the property of the community.  Tubes exited arteries…

How evolution operates or unfolds has something to do with whether a person believes life has been engineered or designed.  An engineer seeks ways to make things work that will involve the least number of parts, the lowest cost and the greatest efficiency.  Efficiency is often defined as low maintenance and long life.

When an artist creates, the process is often characterized by a seeking to establish novel patterns using alternative or unique processes.  Efficiency is less important than what has not been done before.  There is a desire to break barriers and to apply principles established in one area to a new area unfamiliar with those principles.  The creative process is often characterized by suggesting connections where connections are not obvious.  There is often a deep desire to perceive and express universality.

The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins subscribes to Occam’s razor, proclaiming that the simplest solutions are those that will naturally emerge.  Systems will reduce themselves to the easiest ways to accomplish goals within the confines of their environment, and those are the ones that will most likely survive.  Wikipedia notes that Occam’s razor reflects a “hypothesis that introduces the fewest assumptions and postulates the fewest entities.”  Less is…

On weekends over the last two months, I’ve been writing down the story of a series of dreams I had that began 17 years ago and lasted almost a year.  The dreams were referring to events I’d forgotten that happened to me when I was very small.  It wasn’t until the last dreams in that series that it was revealed that there had been something hidden.

Making clear what the dreams unearthed has been requiring my describing the main characters of my childhood and events in my adult life leading up to the dreams.  The writing has involved my being honest with myself and candid about the behavior of close relatives.  I’ve also discovered that there are only so many synonyms for terror, the emotion that seems a theme throughout the piece.

Sixteen years ago, after the primary dream revelations, I sat down with friends and family to describe what had likely happened.  A particularly odd second set of revelations proceeded to emerge.  Somehow, over the course of my adult life, I’d picked as close friends people that had been sexually abused as children, friends that never shared with me those experiences.  Upon my telling them what happened to me,…

I have barked up a lot of trees as I have been trotting blindfolded through the forest of possibilities that have had me so captivated the last twelve years.  I seem to have a natural inclination to shut myself off to conventional interpretations.  Instead of using my eyes, I’m feeling, smelling and listening to what’s around me until I get a taste of what it is I seek.

Finding powerful ways of explaining what I’ve found becomes as important as what I’ve discovered in these forests.  Sometimes the metaphor itself feels as significant as the process the metaphor seeks to represent.

Alford Korzybski famously noted, “A map is not the territory it represents, but if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.”  From my Zen evolutionary perspective, the territory is constantly in flux, representing an infinite number of constantly shifting relationships.  My art seeks to be part of a process that creates theories that can usefully represent these constantly changing relationships, and then I want to devise metaphors to make the theories feel accessible.

The proofs part is a challenge.

So, while I develop a repertoire of metaphors, proofs elude me.

I use…

I wrestle with ways to communicate my theory of human evolution.  It is necessary I translate a non-narrative paradigm into a narrative format.  Human beings happen to experience the world narratively.  This seems a result of two related developments.  The first is our having developed language as a function of the narrative art forms dance and song (part of my hypothesis).  The second is a result of our having evolved split consciousness, which allows an ability to manifest imagination, which is an exercise involving being two places at once, two times at once, with an ability to consider what does not exist.

Narrative is essential when communicating with humans.  If a species from another planet only communicated in fashions characterized by simultaneity and sent us a string of signals designed to be aggregated into a single piece, we’d probably have no idea how to begin to interpret the communication.  For example, maybe Martians communicate in a form like an abstract painting, embedding deep and thoughtful messages in color variation, location, contrast, intensity, size, framing conventions and context.  We’d be clueless.

Narrative communication is a human convention.  We are a species obsessed with time.  It is difficult considering language without time.…

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…

Marcia noticed it before I did.  In deep thought, seeking answers to difficult problems, I tap out intricate percussive patterns by clicking my fingernails or by tapping my fingers, often to subtle swaying of my body.  I think thoughts by making music, percussive music, tying together the different mental threads.  I seek assimilation of the feelings in my body, the sounds that those feelings make and the words in my mind representing ideas mating to create unique progeny solutions.

My son, Elia, noticed that he and I both unconsciously, constantly, tap out on the steering wheel percussive riffs that seem to reflect unconscious mental activity.  Marcia has noticed how often he and I engage in evidently unconscious rhythm patterning.  She’ll observe us both quietly standing and tapping fingers to a hidden dance, occasionally both of us listening to the same invisible tempo, unaware that we’re both moving to an identical flow.

There was a point in my life when I practiced sensory acuity.  I was training to become a practitioner of Neuro-Linguistic Programming.  I remember sitting in the back of a bus headed down Broadway in winter Chicago.  I placed myself in a trance while observing the shoulders of maybe…

I have an old compulsion.  It’s not clear when it emerged.  This constant urge is characterized by my seeking ways to make two or more things not obviously connected, connected, in as few steps as possible.

In high school, I wrote papers that sought to integrate subjects or themes at best only tangentially related.  In chemistry, I wrote a piece on motorcycle engine engineering.  In English, I penned a short play using characters from three books I was supposed to be writing a book report on.  I sought to push the boundaries of what intuitively seemed related.  My teachers criticized me for a seeming inability to follow directions and write a paper on a single subject.

I remember creating a drawing in art class with a middle-class man’s head on a T-Rex body, and I titled it “Alfred K. Prufrock.”  That drawing summarized what I was seeking, a way to integrate opposites so the world made sense.

I longed for a world that revealed integration.  Seeking relief from anguish and self-recrimination, I often dissociated to a degree that allowed a matching of opposites in my imagination that refused to ally themselves in my emotions.

I felt torn.  I sought unification.…

There is a paradox of government-funded arts in the West.  We in the West don’t believe we should encourage failure.  Too often art reveals where we don’t succeed.  Why would government support those that don’t agree with the ideology of success?

Ostensibly, government supports “free markets,” or the cult of the entrepreneur, by allowing the imaginative cutthroats to cut throats imaginatively, resulting in the financial debacle we observe today.  Americans revere the man that makes money, seeing the vibrant corporation as a symbol of independence, liberty and freedom.

Then there are the artists.  The Western artist also depicts the American obsession with independence, liberty and freedom.  Only the artist through his and her very life and work depicts the repercussion of a desire to integrate the artistic default experience of feeling-part-of-something-larger-than-the-self with the American experience of separation, monetary stratification, independence, liberty and freedom.  The Western artist is presented with a paradox.  How does he or she manifest interconnection, or connection to that which transcends normal experience, in a society that deifies the alone?

Art often calls attention to this paradox, what might be also expressed as a cultural incongruity.  The Left does not see a problem with paying people to…

I’ve been viewing this work as that of an artist that plays with ideas.  As an artist, I change or modify my perspective on a sweep of data until I acquire a position (have an experience) that suggests beauty, subtlety and complexity.  I then evaluate those ideas based on how potentially useful they are.

In other words, I am looking for useful stories.

I am coming to the conclusion that the world is so complex and so gorgeously constructed that any theory–that is what I specialize in, creating theories–can only be a temporary, partial explanation.  It feels obvious that the universe was created by god as artist.  It is while deeply engaged in the artistic process that the universe feels most understandable.

So, I look for patterns.  If I had been trained in music, I would be composing and playing tunes.  That not being the case, I compose and play the patterns evident in the world around me.  Theory formation is so like music because those patterns I draw out from my environment are so deeply influenced by my culture, the information available, my sense structure (sight, feeling, hearing, taste and smell) and my personal experiences.  The theories I come…

Attracted to making music during portions of my life, I’ve never given in to the desire to learn an instrument.  Instead, I’ve made music by learning a single key on an instrument and then played that instrument for a particular feeling, usually revolving around one song or two.  A flute makes a sad song, a harmonica offers encouragement, piano suggestions of wisdom, the recorder joy, kalimba sociality, drumming earnestness and sexuality, and the bouzouki loss.  Never having learned an instrument except for these brief visits, my fingers and lips are familiar with these evocations of feelings as if I lived in several foreign countries for short times, never having learned the language.

I approach theorizing in a similar manner.  I feel attracted to particular disciplines and the theories in those disciplines based upon the feelings that those theories awaken in me.  In the same way that I don’t learn an instrument, I don’t become any discipline’s adept, but I become somewhat proficient in those portions of the discipline that evoke powerful feelings, feelings of reverence.

I am guided by wonder.  My journeys across the fret boards/keys of instruments and the relationships evoked by theories in different disciplines are explorations characterized…

During the several years I created comic panels and strips, I would lie down on my couch, sketchbook in hand, and run comparisons or associations between not obviously related categories or themes, seeking incongruous connections.  If I found the kind of matching-up that I was seeking, humor with some insight would result.  Disappointment and bitterness often accompanied these comic strip and panel productions.  Humor often serves to reveal and share hidden feelings.  Talented humorists tease out the universalities in situations, allowing us to feel disappointed, frustrated and sometimes relieved and appreciative all at once.

I did most of my comic production at the end of a marriage, during the divorce, dating, and then remarriage.  A lot of the comics revolved around relationship, the nature of relationship and the brutal challenges of connecting with another human being.  This comic creating period lasted about five years.

At about the same time I was producing comics, I rediscovered music.  As a teenager and as an adult before my first marriage, I listened to and created music.  That faded as I grew older, disappearing from my life during the twelve years of that relationship.  Music re-entered my life as I turned toward dating a…

We humans experience consciousness as a two-way split.  This offers us an ability to toy with time, space and storytelling while often suffering from a misinterpretation of what we perceive.  We can also commit deceit.

Our experience of the split gets interpreted in a number of different ways.  There is right and wrong, evil and good, left and right, yes and no, me and not me, and us vs. them.  There is also what we are aware of and what we are not aware of, which can be framed as what is conscious and what is unconscious.

In psychotherapeutic intervention, there is what is called the “reframe.”  Faced with a client or patient with a conscious mind deeply polarized from an unconscious, the therapist will seek common ground in the form of an unconscious intent that the conscious can agree with.  The conscious may feel powerless to influence unconscious processes that seem to generate behaviors or experiences contrary to conscious goals.  Still, the conscious can learn to trust that the reasons behind the frustrating behaviors or experiences make deep sense.  From this new perspective, the therapist’s third position outside the polarized personality acts as a model for how two seemingly…

There is a pattern to pattern.  When and how pattern emerges in connection to what it is to be human can suggest more than a little bit about what we are all about.

If there is an original art, and that art is rhythm, dance and sound, then who we are as humans perhaps can be discovered by an exploration of that art.

There are patterns to those things that don’t fit patterns in academia, pieces that don’t fit into the puzzles of established paradigms.  Like an archipelago of volcanic islands suggesting a tectonic rift, patterns of things that don’t fit patterns can reveal hidden meta patterns not observable in other ways.

Looking for patterns within patterns, we seek answers to mysteries.  Having created a category of humans called autistic, we observe these people that often reveal difficulty using language, exhibit nonmetaphoric play conventions, display obsession with pattern replication and struggle making social contact.  The unique ways that the autistic person confronts pattern suggests that pattern is at the root of understanding autism.

Observing changes in pattern and hypothesizing the nature of underlying structures based upon those changes again emphasizes the importance of pattern patterns.  Societal evolution does not display…

The Obama Administration is seeking to wrest the economy away from a depression while addressing several interconnected and growing crises.  Borrowing and taxing, we are creating jobs.  Redistributing assets, we are seeking health care for all, a reduction in greenhouse gases and an effective educational system.

And we’re seeking to do this in the midst of a profound transformation of society.

Old conventions are crumbling as our traditional vertical, hierarchical institutions are coming down.  The consumer economy and its evil twin, the free market, are greatly diminished.  The Obama Administration, as it seeks jobs and engages in crisis management, is not concentrating on what institutions might replace those that are disappearing.  At this point in the process, a little vision and a little money might go some way.

Global horizontalization is being driven in part by the rise of the Internet and cell phone technologies.  Conventions have emerged that allow the most visited sites to achieve the most visibility.  The most popular videos, blogs and presentations achieve success in part because there are web applications that allow those presentations that receive the most attention to be rewarded with an elevated status in the form of prime positioning.  At this time,…

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…

My experience of art is often the way I experience activism.  My goal is to engage and then let myself be guided.  This engenders trust of my unconscious and of the times.

In art it is often the case that I am the observer of what emerges from my fingers.  Theory formation, for me, is art.  I expose myself to information, often feeling led to read the books that I absorb in the same way that I feel led to play with or explore various idea avenues.  When I’m scooping up ideas and information, the concepts realign to reappear as art, in this case, a story or theory.

I was a watercolor artist when I was in my 20s, a comic artist when I was in my late 30s and 40s.  When I was involved with watercolors, I was usually inclined to express internal feelings characterized by distress, shame, frustration, remorse, yearning and feeling alone.  Performing comic strips and panels, I trended toward bitterness, disappointment, frustration, annoyance and anger.

When writing, I feel drawn toward melancholy, reverence, respect, delight, disappointment and awe.  I’m feeling more rounded in my expressions using words.  And, I more often feel the role of the…