“The highest concern of all the mythologies, ceremonials, ethical systems, and social organizations of the agriculturally based societies has been that of suppressing the manifestations of individualism; and this has been generally achieved by compelling or persuading people to identify themselves not with their own interests, intuitions, or modes of experience, but with the archetypes of behavior and systems of sentiment developed and maintained in the public domain.”  (Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God:  Primitive Mythology (New York:  Penguin Books, 1959), p. 240.)

I know nothing about, yet am fascinated by, the differences in child-rearing practices of matrifocal aboriginal societies and modern parents.  Some matrifocal aboriginal societies are hunters, some herders, some agriculturally based.  Campbell notes agricultural communities with a focus on raising children with a social emphasis.  Hrdy describes how in matrilineal/matrilocal hunter gatherer societies children are taught to exhibit theory of mind.  I’m wondering what the nuances are between those societies and herder and later societies, and the differences between emphasis on social mind vs. individualism in matrifocal and patrifocal contexts.

Just as there is an evolution of society, beginning with hunter/gatherers moving toward agriculture around 10,000 B.C., followed by the emergence of towns and cities, I’m estimating, as Campbell suggests, that there is an evolution in emphasis on individualism accompanied by changes in child-rearing practices.  If we go back 2,000 to 4,000 generations, were parents using techniques that did more than just socialize the children and integrate them into the band or tribe?  Did they also individuate them enough to be independent social beings capable of theory of mind, or an ability to exercise compassion, and at the same time teach them to be more focused on the group than on the individual?

There is a paradox I’m trying to tease out here having to do with raising a child when we as a species were still largely lodged in primary process, the way an unconscious or dream self thinks, featuring one time, one place and difficulty imagining something’s opposite without focusing on the thing itself.  I’ve hypothesized that contemporary autistics are revealing forebear features, particularly brains not yet lateralized for speech.  I’m figuring that our evolutionary forebears, raising children naturally inclined toward primary process, were engaged in specific relational interventions that would propel them into a shared reality.

Animals across our planet successfully relate to each other while in primary process.  How exactly did we relate to each other during our primary process, prelateralized-brain evolution?  How did we prevent our children from careening off into autistic spaces featuring primary process but little ability to socialize?  How did we socialize our children before the development of postagricultural encouragement of individualism?

An answer to this question, I believe, offers guidance on how we can raise children with autistic tendencies, children of mothers with high testosterone, and possibly high estrogen.  This is the hypothetical prototypical matrifocal mother’s hormonal constellation.

I suspect this has something to do with band or tribal creation of constant access to shared tribal consciousness space featuring dance, song, performance and joint experience.  This may have something to do with Campbell’s observation of how agricultural societies raise their children to ally with shared priorities.

Modern times manifest an obsession with individuality.  Perhaps the increase in the numbers of those with autism is a direct response to a diminution in shared consciousness activities.

The program that Jacqui manages guides autistic children into more interactive relationships by blending performance with a sensitivity to the nuances of emotion.  An audio interview is located here, an article here, with CAPE documentation of her process located here and here.

The documentation describes a step-by-step process that guides children with deep difficulties intuiting the experience of others into a place where they can estimate another person’s emotion and respond in an appropriate way.

What has me thinking is the possibility of approaching autism with a blending of performance, rhythm and education around emotion, something that this program has been doing to a large degree for more than ten years.

If autistic children can be encouraged to dance to rhythms, dancing to the same beat in a group, experiencing the mirroring of each other’s experience in a performance context, then perhaps bridges can be built between beings with difficulty entering others’ worlds.

Mark Stairwalt, my colleague producing Shift Journal, reminded me of the power of mirrored experience…

“My wife and I have a family friend who once worked as an untrained volunteer with autistic kids, and she astounded the professional staff by achieving a communications breakthrough with one particularly hard-to-reach child.  When I asked how she had done it, she told me she had simply mirrored the body language, breathing pattern, facial expression, etc., of the child in question.  Empathy expressed via mimicry > instant breakthrough.”

This is the principle of biofeedback, mirroring or establishing rapport taught by the practitioners of Neuro-linguistic Programming, much of it derived from the work of Milton Erickson, the hypnotherapist.  It has been discovered that very effective therapists and hypnotherapists engage in mirroring to establish contact with a client’s unconscious.  The same principle applies when communicating with a person with autism.  Reflecting an autistic person’s experience by mirroring his or her biological rhythms, breathing, heartbeat and movements gives the autistic person purchase on the reflector’s experience.  They see you, in no small part, because you, at that moment, are reflecting them.

Engaging in the performance of rhythmic activities, activities that perhaps, as in the Jacqui Russell programs, offer information on how emotions work, also engages the experience of feeling mirrored that is integral to establishing rapport.  A group of people performing the same movements at the same time, dancing, are mirroring one another’s experience.

The autistic have trouble establishing rapport.  The foundation feature of establishing rapport is mirroring another person’s experience.  It is important that the mirrorer genuinely have the feelings that he or she is mirroring, or at least have access to those feelings.  Two people having the same feelings while at least one of the two people is mirroring the other’s experience is what makes a sharing authentic.

The performance of two or more people of a rhythm-based experience such as dance places that group into the same physical experience, one that reproduces and generates the dynamics of rapport.

Performance, rhythm, dance and mirroring are perhaps a combination that can leverage an autistic person into an experience that includes another person.  Principles of how an unconscious is accessed are combined with an understanding that how we may have evolved may be directly related to the performance of dance and rhythm.  If autism is an evolutionary condition featuring characteristics of our species’ ontogeny from a few thousand generations ago, then perhaps an intervention that features both a reproduction of an autistic indigenous environment, dance and rhythm, with a proven doorway to the unconscious, mirroring, can be the opportunity for an autistic person to behave in new and different ways.

Superb programs exist now, such as Jacqui Russell’s work in Chicago schools.  Let’s use the principles above to expand those programs.  To guide the autistic to have more facile access to their imaginations, it is necessary that we use ours.

The article describes an academic’s conclusion that there is a writing renaissance going on with astonishing increases in writing by students as they use communications technologies.  It has been believed by many that texting and social media are deprecating communication.  Professor Andrea Lunsford concluded the opposite.  New technologies are encouraging the young to share experiences by writing.

Several things come to mind.

First, texting is acquiring a number of unique conventions that are beginning to approach a different language.  I don’t speak text.  This is a function of my peer group, my age and the fact that I’m at my computer three-fourths of my waking hours.  Perhaps text is approaching another language as its conventions proliferate.  If that is the case, then maybe this is a good thing as regards the inculcation of flexibility of mind.  As youth text, they encourage an ability to experience the world through an alternative perspective.

Second, the day will come when voice translators advance to offer an effortless ability to take our spoken words and transform them into written text.  Gifted youth will find they can profoundly proliferate their productions by speaking instead of typing.  The Thompson article describes the emergence of performance as integral to text communications, with participating individuals able to broadcast to their unique collection of followers.  Thompson, with insight, observes the importance of performance to the new technologies.  Participants often speak with an attention to detail not obvious in communications up to now.  Consider the power of these technologies to enhance performance by letting people speak, instead of type, their minds.

What struck me most forcibly while I was reading Thompson’s article is the presence of yet another aboriginal feature emerging in modern youth, and the possible connection of this feature with autism.  In other pieces, I have described the relationship between neoteny emerging in contemporary society and the increases in autism.  Just as in biology, where ancestor infant features prolong to emerge in descendant adults, so it is in society, where ancestral societal-stage traits featured by aboriginal matrifocal societies emerge in contemporary times.  The dramatic horizontalization of society, with accompanying transparency, diversity, creativity and sharing, is evidence of this aboriginalization of culture.  I would add one more thing.  Performance during dance, song and mating rituals in aboriginal society are becoming embedded in our new technologies.  As each Twitterer and social-media user becomes more invested in communicating to a group, we are integrating ancient intuitions into the contemporary times, which offer an ubiquitous experience of performance, not unlike the way we communicated as our species bridged from a band society into culture.

In my work, I hypothesize that performance, the performance of dance and song, was integral to our evolution as a species.  I have also hypothesized that the autistic are embedded in this earlier artistic mode, compelled to experience the world through dance, rhythm and sound but few words.  In the previous piece, I suggested that perhaps performance could be a bridge experience that provides the autistic ways to cultivate split consciousness or a theory of mind.  It strikes me now that as performance emerges as a common communication form among youth in contemporary society, we are perhaps glimpsing the ways humans communicated back in the dawn of language.

In other words, I believe there is a connection between communications technologies enhancing performance consciousness characterized by the broadcast of information to large groups and the increases in autism, perhaps featuring a consciousness evolved to perform, less so to communicate.

This is the seminal issue.  If humans evolved by growing big brains and facile bodies, dancing up a storm to mate with discriminating members of the opposite sex (see Theory Summary), then perhaps performance consciousness is integral to who we were and what we are becoming.  If that is the case, providing the autistic performance contexts may be necessary to provide them an ability to gain some purchase to connect with other humans.

Lunsford’s discovery that our youth are writing far more than anytime in the past combined with Thompson’s insight that performance is integral to the process offers a bridge to understanding how autism is understood.  Once again, our youth seem to have the answers.  Observing how the young experience the world, we have a chance to understand how our world came to be.

Over the course of human self examination there have been relatively few that have differentiated between the two most obvious kinds of consciousness that exist.  There is aware and self aware.  There is conscious and self conscious.  There is being present and there is the awareness that you are present.  This is a significant distinction because it can be suggested that the first kind of consciousness, presence, is not just a feature of human consciousness but a feature of that which is alive.  To be present to the fact that you are present seems peculiarly human.  We can call this split consciousness.  This is unique insofar as this ability for a single consciousness to experience a split evidently creates facility with being two places at once, being in two times at once, and having the power to imagine something’s opposite.  To be split creates what we call imagination.

So, we use our imagination to explore this world we live in.  While doing so, we often choose to ignore the ubiquitousness of that which is merely “present.”  Even if split consciousness emerged randomly as a result of contingent circumstance, how is it that the ground from which that split emerged so often goes unexamined?

If feels to me that we live in a social milieu featuring three immediately accessible levels of consciousness.  We are so steeped in these three conditions that we are only vaguely aware that we swim in all three waters at once.  This is somewhat like Freud’s Id, Ego and Superego, but they are separate only insofar as there are words we use to describe experience.  They are all the same.

There is the unconscious, also called primary consciousness.  There is split consciousness, or our being two at once.  There is social consciousness, featuring the wisdom of the crowd, the zeitgeist of our “times.”

Nested hierarchies are a feature of the way that structure builds as differing scales reveal structure at different levels.  Atoms make up molecules that make up cells that make organs.  Nested hierarchies are also how consciousness embeds.  The unconscious makes up the split conscious which makes up the social conscious.  There is an identity ladder that we can purchase at the consciousness hardware store.  You don’t buy just one stair at a time.

My point is that consciousness can be studied.  It exhibits characteristics.  An unconscious behaves differently from a split consciousness, and a split consciousness behaves differently from a social consciousness.

Piaget observed the growth of children closely.  Piaget, a follower of Freud and, like Freud, a believer in fourfold parallelisms, believed in close connections among species evolution, individual ontogeny and societal transformation.  Piaget was particularly interested in consciousness changes as children matured.  Children begin in a state of primary process or one time, one place, no opposites.  There is no split consciousness.  They are only present.  With time, children acquire features of split consciousness, one by one, as their brains reproduce the last several hundred thousand years of our evolution, ontogeny reenacting phylogeny.  All this time each individual is integrating community communications so that individual consciousness and then split consciousness are not just influenced by the larger community, but the individual is part of the larger community consciousness.

Simon Baron-Cohen bridged the work of primatologist Sue Savage-Rumbaugh to humans having difficulty walking the ontogenetic ladder.  Savage-Rumbaugh hypothesized that chimpanzees exhibit an ability to intuit the motivations of other chimpanzees and humans, though there are limits.  Baron-Cohen suggested that the autistic are mind blind, unable to understand that there is an other.  Autism is a condition featuring anomalies in consciousness.  Individuals are experiencing minds that don’t split.  They are locked in primary process.  They seem to be following the evolution of our ancestors to a certain point, up to the time when imagination emerged.

Ontogenetically paused, the autistic are also in species limbo, living in a society with far fewer features.  An autistic person lives in the fourfold parallelism in a different location from the one lived in by those with split brains.  He or she climbs a narrower ladder.

Piaget studied children.  Baron-Cohen studies the autistic.  Let’s consider exploring autism as a condition that can make far clearer the features of consciousness as we study in detail those that wrestle in every moment with those things that the split conscious has a difficult time even noticing.

The autistic are our deep-sea divers, our journeyers into the dark.  We need to rediscover how to think like the autistic think.  Then maybe we can understand who and what we are.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It just struck me that there may be a biological basis to the evident fact that creoles across the world exhibit similar features.  If the societies that are being intermingled are from across the world, as is often the case, with people mating with no lineage in common for over a thousand generations, then the same dynamic in play that creates hybrid vigor may be bringing into contemporary times features of their last common forebear.

This would suggest that creole peoples would exhibit other features characteristic of their ancestors, not just ancient language structures.  If the merging peoples were separated by perhaps 2,000 generations, we might expect to observe an increase in conditions characterized by maturational delay, such as autism, stuttering, Asperger’s and left-handedness.  We might also see a talent for dance, gesture and performance.  (See “Introduction to the Theory of Waves” for details on this hypothesis.)  In some creoles, only the languages blend.  In others, there is a blending of ethnicities as peoples half a planet away meet and form families.  When genetics separated by many generations blend, according to Darwin, common ancestor characteristics emerge.

Might creole societies display features that we would associate with primary process (one time, one place, no negatives)?  In other words, might there be a cognitive withdrawal to an earlier societal evolutionary time?

There are other variables in play.  In the piece Aboriginal Primary Process and Contemporary Autism, I noted the possible effects of specific child rearing practices that could encourage children not to maturationally delay but to stay engaged.  Specific tribal child rearing conventions may have been necessary to create the shared identity characteristic of ancient tribal culture.  If those conventions were not used, it may have not been a question of the child acquiring individuality, but of the child withdrawing to a place of nonidentity, not unlike autism.

So, there are not two new themes I am exploring in this thread.  Creoles may evidence the biological principle observed by Darwin whereby divergent lineages when combined display features of the last common ancestor.  Regarding creoles, such a feature may be the language grammar and structure.

Second, the hypothetical aspects of primary process displayed by some aboriginal societies may be evidencing an alternative identity formation, one that requires specific child rearing practices to encourage participation by young minds.  I might suggest that particularly ancient aboriginal societies, matrifocal cultures, for example, might display earlier stages of biological/neurological/hormonal evolution.  If those particular child rearing practices are not engaged, then the repercussions might be withdrawal or a form of autism.  The new thing to consider is that some aboriginal societies may be exhibiting group identity, which is far from the cult of individuality that characterizes the contemporary United States.  I’ve never explored this, though I have a vague memory of studies exploring the differences in personal identity between aboriginal and modern individuals.

In the back of my mind is the question of whether contemporary autistic children are hard wired for the kind of group identity characteristic of the biological/neurological/hormonal constellation of ancient aboriginal societies and whether they need the specific child rearing practice necessary for that biological/neurological/hormonal type?

This piece started by positing that creole language structure peculiarities might signify evidence of a biological process.  This led to the conjecture that group identity characteristic of some aboriginal societies might be connected to primary process, which suggests connections to autism.  In some ways, it seems to come down to identity.

Autism has been described as a condition characterized by a lack of theory of mind.  Perhaps another way to view the condition is that children with autism are displaying difficulties acquiring identity.  Different societies offer different ways to display identity.  Maybe we need to examine whether modern society should explore alternative group identity options as it relates to children with a nonconventional neurology.

A small, isolated island nation may experience the opposite effect.  When only children are required to learn the language, the language, in both sounds and grammar, tends to proliferate novelties.  Children, without the inhibiting convention of adult habits, get creative.  Those adult conventions that are extremely challenging to outsider adults are things that children learn effortlessly.

The most complex languages in the world tend to be those of isolated aboriginals or a people not impacted by their neighbors for many centuries.  When you leave a language to be learned by only children, there is a multiplication of the unique.

What would it be like if that period of time characterized by the linking of countless associations with specific sounds, and the joyous experience that accompanies the learning to produce those sounds, was to prolong into the adult of our species?  Imagine this ability of children to learn language effortlessly drifting forward into older ages.

Neoteny is the prolongation of infant features into the adult of a species with ancestor embryo, infant and toddler features emerging over time in later ontological stages, eventually to emerge in the adults of descendants.  Our chimp-like progenitors had babies with big head-to-body ratios, large brain-to-head ratios, small chins, big foreheads, an ability to amble around upright, creativity, affection and a compulsion to connect.  In other words, our chimp-like forebears had infants that looked a lot like and behaved like contemporary adults.

Biology is not the only scale of experience that evolves.  Society is also influenced by the dynamic that compels biology to prolong the features of infants into the adults of descendants.  Society today reveals neotenous dynamics when new behaviors are invented or embraced by our youngest and carried with them as they age.  Texting, initiated by youth, is becoming ubiquitous across many age groups.  Social networking, at first only used by students, is now engaged in by half the nation.  In just the way that Rock ‘n’ Roll was played at first by mostly high schoolers, today Rock is the soundtrack of our lives.

Over the course of our recent history, many fads and trends emerged with low-income ethnic minorities and fanned out into mainstream culture.  With cell phone and social networking technologies becoming cheap enough for everyone to have, watch for unique and creative uses of these new technologies.  Societal neoteny evidences surges of creativity both from the young and from the disenfranchised.  Those closest to being aboriginal, those in poverty, the artists and the fringe–those furthest from the conventional center–are sources of the creative impulse, that which is newest that can prolong its way up the social tiers.

It is no mistake that there is a dramatic surge in those with autism and Asperger’s, mostly males that are maturational delayed.  We are observing the neotenization of society, the same as biological neoteny, with individuals taking longer to mature, with infant features emerging later and later, particularly the ability to speak.  Those with autism and Asperger’s are the white crest of the wave.  Massive numbers of males are taking longer to mature.

Keep in mind small, little-visited island nations with complicated languages, where children are the only ones to learn those languages.  Then, in world culture at large, consider the additional years that children are taking to absorb the world and develop their communication interface.  The neotenization factor is giving kids in the world at large a longer time to have that special ability to learn language.  It’s as if the astonishing lingual creativity obvious in an island culture is now manifesting in world culture at large, with our children embracing new technology and making new stuff up at a rate unfathomable even a generation ago.

And, in the way that formerly a culture could be isolated, the whole world is becoming integrated, allowing the incubation of creative novelties in the midst of the cacophony of societal interconnecting and combining.

We are members of this island nation with the children growing older while retaining the ability of the very young to create, integrate and understand.

As this child’s ability to make and manifest language creativity emerges in the adult of our species, observe a society that will explode with novelty.

Laughter will become the language of us all.

“My fear is that these technologies are infantilising the brain into the state of small children who are attracted by buzzing noises and bright lights, who have a small attention span and who live for the moment,” said neurologist Susan Greenfield.

Social networking applications do seem to be changing consciousness, and it may be the case that the changes do exhibit some features of early childhood, but I would suggest that living in the moment, a moment characterized by massive amounts of incoming information offered in a fashion that makes integration of that information possible, is a good thing.

There have been other studies that concluded that there are correlations between watching TV and autistic behavior.  That may be the case.  Still, comparing social networking to watching TV is like suggesting a hike through nature collecting butterflies is equivalent to vacuuming the living room for dust mites.  I think professor Greenfield is confusing the two.

Getting up from watching a movie last weekend in a theatre still dark, I stood up and turned around and saw cell phones being flipped open and examined across the room, little glowing butterflies in the dark.  Some texting immediately ensued.  I was aware that I’d been away from my laptop for several hours, knowing I couldn’t go straight to bed with emails that were waiting when I got home.

As fast as we adults are making the transition to a simultaneous society, one where massive amounts of information is being shared and integrated, imagine what it will be like for our children.  Our kids are being trained in the technologies of “now” at so young an age as to suggest that they will speak the language of simultaneity fluently.  We olders will have only some idea what will be going on.

We are headed toward an integration of the unconscious and conscious minds.

Much like Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End, we are experiencing a species transformation.  Having struggled with our ability to manufacture metaphor and story for hundreds of generations, we are finally coming to a place where we’ve developed technology that can provide massive amounts of high quality information so that the metaphors and stories we create can approximate the world we are surrounded by, instead of the internal world we’ve been wrestling with to understand.

This requires an integration of our conscious and unconscious selves.  Watch for a surge in reverence for associational consciousness.  Listen for evidence of dreams in the everyday.  Feel for opportunities for information to be communicated by touch.

Soon cell phones will be tapping our wrists with content, Morse code messaging directly to both our conscious and unconscious selves.  We’ll be able to receive information while in discussions, in movie theatres, while half asleep.  Touch is the vast, untapped territory of multitasking.  Watch for games that speak to children through their skin.

Neurologist Susan Greenfield has expressed reservations.  I believe she’s comparing apples and oranges.  There is no way to compare the world of our grandchildren and the world that my grandparents were born into.  Humanity is passing out of childhood.

To think and link like our parent Nature, we need both our minds.

The American philosopher Ken Wilber attempts to take this issue head on, repackaging the 100-year-old four-fold parallelism that equates human evolution, societal evolution, individual ontogeny and an individual’s psychology.  Wilber does not frame the differences between an individual in an aboriginal society vs. an individual in modern society in negative terms, but seeks to unpack the features of various stages of growth and show how these stages manifest on a number of different scales.  Growth, transformation, evolution, all these aspects of how life manifests over time, display pattern.  Those patterns can be described.  Ken Wilber seeks to describe how those patterns manifest in human society.

My personal focus is the influence of sexual selection on social structure mediated by changes in the rates of maturation.  The patterns I focus on are very specific.  Still, I focus on biology, society, ontogeny and personal experience, the four-fold parallelism.  Wilber is more general in his approach, preferring to show THAT there is a connection rather than HOW the connection operates.  Wilber also focuses heavily on religion and spirituality.  I pretty much stick with Zen.

I’ve written a little bit on similarities between Hopi and Trobriand Islander language structures.  Both have a heavy emphasis on the present tense and both are matrifocal societies.  Two societies a pattern does not make.  So, my research assistants, Rosanna and Elia, are conducting a survey of almost one hundred matrifocal or matrilineal societies across the world, looking for patterns.  The variables we’re tracking are not often studied or noted in the societies we’re exploring.  I want to know rates of left-handedness, twinning percentages, disease and condition proclivities and languages with tense anomalies.

It would also be interesting to know their mythological motifs, myth structures, rituals, societal bans, morays and varying idiosyncrasies.  That’s how I got into this almost 14 years ago.  Fascinated by the origin of dragon myths, I ended up studying ancient serpent myths, finding myself studying ancient matrifocal societies.  Seeking to understand the nature of the transition to our contemporary patrifocal societies from our hypothetical matrifocal roots is how I ended up studying human evolution.  It was through our stories that I began that journey.

At this point in my studies, I’m thinking there IS a major difference between the humans living in our still existing, ancient matrifocal aboriginal societies and what we would call modern humans living in the industrialized world.  I suspect these differences have a neurological, physical and behavioral foundation.  I also suspect that an exploration of the relationship between primary process, which might also be called dream consciousness (one time, one place, no negatives), and autism might be useful as we seek to understand autism and conditions characterized by maturational delay.

If our matrifocal aboriginals experience waking life in some ways like we experience dream, if primary process is familiar to their waking experience or at least very accessible, then perhaps these aboriginals can offer us some wisdom and perspective regarding the surge of individuals familiar with primary process in waking life in the modern world, what we call autism.

It may not be politically correct to equate aboriginals with autistics, but consider that if there is a relationship, then the relationship suggests that a portion of modern society is drifting back to where we started mere tens of thousands of years ago.

Consider that modern times may be crossing a line whereby our future may have much in common with our past.  This might suggest our evolution may be more characterized by a spiral than a linear pathway.  We may be swooping around to a position with much in common with the last time we rounded this bend on the spiral highway.

Our aboriginal colleagues may be in a position to teach us some important things about autism, beginning with:  How do you raise an autistic child?  If a society facile with a landscape characterized by primary process might be integral to a child’s feeling at home within autism, then perhaps we should be observing tribal society closely.

Estimating which society is more advanced becomes an odd notion in our unique, transforming world where time seems in some ways to be changing its direction.

Last week, I was exploring some unique language structures of two matrifocal societies, the Hopi and the Trobriand Islanders.  The languages display a unique attitude toward tenses, reminding me of Gregory Bateson’s interpretations of Freud’s description of primary process.  It seems that aspects of dream consciousness and primary process thinking are characteristic of these two languages.  This included only one time or tense (you can’t imagine another time without being there), one place (you can’t imagine another place without being there) and no negatives (you can’t image what something is not without imagining the something).

Stephen J. Gould would sometimes write of three-fold and four-fold parallelisms.  He was alluding to late nineteenth century and early twentieth century hypotheses that there are equivalencies between different scales of experience:  biology, society, ontogeny and personal experience.  Regarding Sue Savage-Rumbaugh’s “Theory of Mind,” Simon Baron-Cohen’s mindblindness, Hopi/Trobriand present tense orientation, and conventional Western dream consciousness, we possibly have an example of a pathway that evolution uses to travel across time and space.

Biology:  Great ape behavior
Society:  Hopi/Trobriand Islander language structure
Ontogeny:  The autistic
Personal Experience:  Dream

The reason that the autistic are assigned to the ontological level of this four-fold parallelism is because  those with autism often feature extreme maturational delay, by definition an ontological experience resulting in the prolongation of infant or young features or characteristics into later developmental ages.

The American philosopher Ken Wilber has explored in detail a hierarchy of individual and societal developmental stages, equivalencies that he believes inform each other.  The works of Jean Gebser and Jurgen Habermas were influential in guiding Wilber to his conclusions.  Wilber proposes that evolution naturally unfolds through seven stages on its way toward achieving a Pierre de Chardin-like Omega Point fruition.

In other places on this website, I have detailed why Omega Point teleological interpretations of evolution seem unnecessary if heterochronic (neoteny and acceleration) processes are presumed to unfold on societal scales.  Let me make an addition to that sense-based rather than religious interpretation of history.  Consider that the near future will be characterized by a return of dream time to society, the proliferation of matrifocal aboriginal primary process thinking and the integration of autistic associational present moment thinking with conventional consciousness.

I’ve been experiencing a powerful feeling that we’ve re-entered the mythological age.  In ways that an individual can have a dream that powerfully informs that person’s life, we have entered a period in our societal unfolding that will serve as both cautionary tale and heroic cycle for perhaps the time that remains to our species.  In the way that an unconscious informs an individual life, the collective unconscious is molding the zeitgeist.  I feel like we are living in a story, a mythic story, with the future chapters not impossible to intuit.

Having hierarchialized for several thousand years, informed by patrifocal social structures, we are now quickly horizontalizing, neotenizing, with society prolonging the features of youth and the aboriginal into society writ large.  Along with surges of creativity, narcissism, associative thinking and cooperation on massive scales with the advent of the web and global commerce, we are also seeing changes in neurology with the maturational-delayed emerging more and more often as the neurology of choice.  In addition to our society reflecting features of our youth, dream consciousness in the everyday is being prolonged into the adult of our species.  Primary process is appearing in waking life; aboriginal intuitions are manifesting in the way our teenagers think.

In other words, the past is becoming the present, dream is bleeding into waking, biology is emerging in society and the natal is manifesting in the adult.

The future is also the past.  The tenses are blending.

What we are becoming is also what we were and always have been