It is April 5th today. This evening Marcia and I see the neurosurgeon to discuss the operation. Normally I write a piece, it goes to editor Roger for review, and then I post it around 90 days after the piece was written. The last three days I posted without Roger’s editing, within three days of a piece being composed. I write, and then a day or two later it posts.

With it likely I will have the aneurysm operation soon, and with my writing about events leading to the operation without the 90 day delay, the time scales of my writing and then posting have gone awry. Life of late has become so peculiar that a time shift almost fits right in.

The book came out on April 1st. I emailed friends yesterday, on Easter. Many came by the site and many have sent me touching comments. The juxtaposition of the book release and the aneurysm reemergence has created an environment difficult to describe. I wake most mornings with an upset stomach. Fear feels familiar.

I’m still muddling through the neurologist evaluation of my asymmetrical temporal lobe brain structure that explains the occasional passing outs, and now the spontaneous emergence of unconscious content into a normal waking day. If, indeed, the content of my evolutionary theory is a partial result of a unique brain structure that encourages the emergence of hallucinatory content in the everyday, and the unique content emerging from my unconscious is not particularly hallucinatory but actually represents reasonable structural evaluations of how humans evolved (particularly brain structures), then I am in the midst of a deeply peculiar experience.

It’s just hard to say whether the story here makes my theory particularly remarkable because my theory’s origin is connected to anomalous brain structure or whether the story is that this has just been a truly strange life, unrelated to the usefulness of the theory because the theory actually isn’t useful. And then there is the aneurysm. The neurologist says the aneurysm is unrelated to my unique asymmetrical brain, but may be exaggerating experiences that my brain structure encourages. Will the operation diminish my frequent conversations with my unconscious? Or, because the intervention itself will exaggerate the asymmetries as doctors cut tissues on the side where the aneurysm sits, will I emerge from the operation with increased communications from my unconscious. And, if so, will those communications continue to be the kind that feel intimate and satisfying or the kind that brought me to the neurologist that involved either passing out or having dreamlike states superimposed upon waking actions?

The aneurysm operation feels terrifying. With these issues regarding my anomalous brain structure, and my having developed a theory of evolution revolving around an exploration of brain structure, the aneurysm operation feels like its happening in an almost cinematically mysterious context. This feels particularly so with the book having come out on the same day as I was told the aneurysm likely required immediate medical intervention. My brain is about to be operated on. It’s not clear who exactly I will be when I awake.

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

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

The neurologist said I exhibit an unusual highly asymmetric brain structure in sections of my temporal lobe, a particular structure featured by other people that exhibit unusually close connections to their unconscious, with unconscious content emerging in waking states, sometimes leading to a grand mall seizure or passing out. The doctor said that sometimes people with this condition value so highly the interactions with the hallucinations (many are fully functional people) that they choose…

The doctor ran tests. The aneurysm is growing. It’s twice the size it was a year ago.

I see the neurologist this afternoon to get details. From there, I connect again with the surgeon that explored my brain from inside my veins last summer. After those explorations he suggested I have direct surgery from the side of my head, as opposed to the planting of channeling devices through my blood vessels.

It looks like the question will be when will the operation happen.

Today is April 2. My book, Evolution, Autism and Social Change, posted for download and purchase yesterday. I’m a little confused about the timing of the online marketing schemes I’ve been designing. It is deeply odd that the book released yesterday, the same day I discovered the aneurysm was growing requiring intervention.

This week of book release and aneurysm Marcia has been in St. Louis taking care of grandson Nils while the usually day care person, his other grandmother, is gone this week. Marcia is leaving St. Louis early, coming back up to Evanston today (Friday) to accompany me to the neurologist appointment. This is good. This has been a deeply weird week. Accompanied by Marcia…

I shared with my therapy group on Tuesday the half dozen odd altered consciousness experience I had over a 2 day period about three weeks ago. They remind me of an extremely abbreviated version of the Dostoyevsky novel, The Idiot, where the main character, if I remember right, experiences a powerful smell, feels elation, and then disappears into an epileptic seizure. In my case, while sitting at my desk, I smell a powerful, sweet smell, experience a very brief 5-8 second dreamlike consciousness that also feels powerfully like a remembered experience, followed by powerful tingles or vibrations coursing up my left side bridging over into my whole body tingling. The dreamlike piece happens while my eyes are open simultaneously to what is occurring around the room. The whole thing, smell, unconscious experience and tingles, takes about thirty seconds. No one in the office noticed anything unusual. At one point I was asked a question while the tingles were going on and I was able to hear, focus and respond.

After the two first times this happened where I was feeling some anxiety, the other times I just let myself relax. The tingling then was powerfully experienced as my feeling accompanied…

I started journaling when I was about 16. Over the decades, that evolved to my just recording dreams. My handwriting was (and is) terrible, so trying to figure out what I was saying at any time was so much work that I mostly only just recorded my thoughts and feelings, rarely revisiting them.

Nevertheless, on those occasions when I tried to glean some feelings from the past, I was struck by how few metaphors I used to explain a thought or feeling. Mostly, I just described my experience by writing down my feelings. Not only did this make it very difficult to read, but it seemed to provide the raw emotions that were expressed in a way that made them more difficult to absorb. Without metaphor, access seemed difficult.

Through the years, I’ve encouraged myself to use metaphor and graspable images to enhance my ability to communicate what I want to say. At first, it felt very forced, so deliberate were the efforts to make what I had to say understandable. Over the last ten years, it has become easier. Starting this blog two years ago pushed me further in the direction of writing to be understood at the same…

In ways not unlike my compulsion to find integration in the theorizing I engage in, I search for ways to integrate the differing aspects of my life.  Still, removing boundaries when seeking to theorize an interconnected theory of evolution is not the same as blending life pathways.

Three usually separate aspects of my life nevertheless take up portions of almost every day.  I run a small web development firm with six staff members that designs, maintains and markets websites.  We have over 400 clients, mostly small businesses.  Portions of every day are devoted to what’s involved in co-directing a 1,500-member organization, concerned with peace, justice and environment national communications and an action-initiation network.  Early mornings and weekends, I theorize and seek to explain my theory of evolution.

Though my design and technical staff assist me with building the national network and theory sites, there is relatively little traffic among these three areas as regards the people I’m in contact with, my colleagues and allies.  Most folks I am in contact with about my theorizing have no contact with my design or activist connections.  The people in each of the three areas tend to stay in that area.

Not so when…

I’m just finishing this ~140-page work, Evolution, Autism and Social Change, which summarizes most of the principles I’m playing with.  It skips all the political commentary that is scattered throughout this blog.  The work also does not spend numerous pages exploring the presuppositions behind the principles of, and the presuppositional differences between, a maturational theory of evolution and the Neo-Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest frames focusing on mutation and adaptation.  Explaining differences between evolution theories ended up requiring a need to explain integral differences between paradigms by detailing how theory is created.  This felt like too much for a 100-page piece.  I’ll save it for the larger work if I ever write it.

A larger work would also describe a short history, most influential theorists and currently accepted theories in the disciplines being explored.  Most of my writing falls within anthropology, neuropsychology and evolutionary biology.  Still, I discuss primatology, psychology, consciousness, medicine and endocrinology.  It is impossible in a short work to offer a several-discipline context.  It’s even unwieldy in a longer work, particularly one that seeks to communicate with a lay audience.  There is also the fact that though I am somewhat familiar with what I am talking about in anthropology, neuropsychology…

I’m considering mating image with text in the book-length piece I’m posting, Evolution, Autism and Social Change.  I thought I’d lost or given away the more than 100 comic art pieces I’d assigned color to back in 1999.  I just found them this morning, beneath a pile of papers, not 18 inches from the back of my head in a shelf behind me.

Some of the image/word combinations, what this culture calls comics, align themselves well with the themes and content of sections of Evolution, Autism and Social Change.  These comics were all from the early to mid-1990s, from before I disappeared in the late 1990s in studies of serpent mythology, ancient matrifocal societies and then evolutionary theory.  Some of the metaphors carry over.  I often use music, children and water images to evoke concepts, but many of the subtleties of the theory are not suggested by the comics.

I have no idea where accessible original digital files are, and they are now 11 years old.  Locked inside of jazz discs are most of the images, but jazz discs are just about inaccessible these days.  My discs are corrupted by a common defect that makes retrieval almost impossible.  I may…

It is December 4.  Preparing to write this entry, I considered describing the process of working with Lee Goodman to create the video describing the December 1 and December 2 Afghanistan escalation protests occurring across the country.  Those of us working as facilitators with PJEP kept 1,500 local organizations across the country in touch with the other small organizations across the country conducting protests.  We then requested video and photos of their events.  That stuff poured in.  On December 3, Lee and I cobbled the content into a five-minute video.

Becoming aware that this essay would not be published until March (after sending it to an editor), I considered what the view of these events would be from a season in the future.  Then, I became aware of myself conducting a dissociation to achieve an alternative perspective.  This was followed by my being aware of my being aware of my conducting a dissociation.

There is a difference between debilitating dissociation that leads to an experience of feeling removed or separated from an integration with the environment and the kind of dissociation that offers an ability to achieve both an experience of integration accompanied by a grasping of the relationship of…

Occasionally I write a letter to a writer whose work I respect and/or adore and share what I have been working on.  Four years ago, I wrote Tom Robbins, my favorite novelist, a long letter describing my life in a style I don’t use here.  I was being light.  I was trying to get a handle on a series of events, events I haven’t yet described in this blog.  The letter to Robbins was not only my way of communicating appreciation for his work but was also an attempt to put into words something I’d never tried to put into words before.

Tom’s response, “Your fascinating letter of 16 December caught up with me yesterday in this distant outpost, and I have to say it (your epistle) was more interesting and compelling than any novel I’ve read in the past few years.  Banks of thanks for “blabbing” about your life (and quite a life it’s been) in such a richly rewarding manner….”  He went on to ask about one of the studies I cited regarding a percentage of the population exhibiting left-handedness with features a lot like the characters in his books.

As I have noted perhaps far too often…

I was a professional artist, making portions of my living painting, cartooning, designing and illustrating over the years.  I am now a professional web developer, making my living managing a firm that creates and maintains websites, markets websites and designs unique applications for online communication.  I am also an amateur evolutionary biological theorist, perhaps the world’s only expert on the application of nineteenth-century heterochronist principles of maturational delay and acceleration to human evolution and social change.  In my study, I integrate recent neuropsychological brain-structure discoveries and the influences of testosterone and estrogen on the brain and physiology, along with how social structure and the environment impact these adjustments.

I know.  This sounds complicated and arcane.  It’s not.  It takes less time to become familiar with these concepts than it takes to learn to drive a car.  What it boils down to is the exact principles behind the way that we as individuals mature, species change and societies transform.  This is deeply intuitive.  It’s just that until recently we didn’t have the information that could tie it all together.  In addition, our obsession with natural selection obfuscated patterns more complicated than “survival of the fittest.”

A problem is that although I…

“The fact that value judgments influence my proposals does not mean that I am making the mistake of which I have accused the positivists–that of trying to kill metaphysics by calling it names.  I do not even go so far as to assert that metaphysics has no value for empirical science.  For it cannot be denied that along with metaphysical ideas which have obstructed the advance of science there have been others — such as speculative atomism — which have aided it.  And looking at the matter from the psychological angle, I am inclined to think that scientific discovery is impossible without faith in ideas which are of a purely speculative kind, and sometimes even quite hazy; a faith which is completely unwarranted from the point of view of science, and which, to that extent, is ‘metaphysical.’”  (Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (New York:  Basic Books, 1959), p. 39.)

Popper goes on to say that no matter how you come up with an idea, if it is not proved, it is not science.  In addition, falsifiability is central to the truth.  Thomas Kuhn focuses more on the process whereby science accepts a thesis and the repercussions of believing…

Last night was another one of those nights where I dreamt evolutionary theory all night long.  It was the same thing over and over.  My dreams were outlining a sequence of processes involving estrogen and testosterone influencing behavior and physical features in progeny.  Estrogen and testosterone were impacting children when those hormone levels changed in parents, influencing the parents’ daily life in numerous ways.

In the dreams, I wasn’t observing the situations as much as I was writing descriptions of the process, pathways of influence.  Occasionally I’d see something from an auto window while the car was moving, as if what I was seeing was an example of what I was seeking to describe.  Getting the text right and the sequences correct seemed the main focus of the dreams.  The main communication seemed to be that humans are heavily impacted by events in their lives.  The environment informs our experience, changing not only ourselves but our children.

This operated at three scales.  I awoke unclear what those scales were, though while dreaming I had understood.

A big issue in the dream was that these things were easily explainable.  A main focus was on communicating the principles in a way that…

When I was a boy, I went for two years to a summer camp in Bemidji, Minnesota.  It was almost all Jewish boys, many from Chicago’s North Shore.  My second year, I was put back into the cabin with the kids from my first year.  I requested that I be put back with younger kids.  The kids from my first year had all reached puberty.  I wasn’t close.

One of the cabin counselors, the cabin I requested I be removed from, was a middle-aged cartoonist named Pogo.  All the other counselors were college students.  Needing a summer job was not a surprise for someone seeking to make a living as a cartoonist.  I was fascinated by his craft but didn’t understand his humor.  He specialized in dirty jokes on cocktail napkins.  Still, I was in awe of his ability to create a spontaneous likeness.

My first year, I had been placed in Wild Thing’s cabin.  Each counselor had a nickname.  Wild Thing was a 19-year-old.  All the 19- and 20-year-old counselors felt to me to be some other species.  I had no older siblings and so had nothing to compare them to.  Music, alcohol and sex were on all their…

The rat returned to the backyard this October.  This time she made the tortoise house her home.  It was hibernation time for the box turtles and so they were doing their autumn disappearing act.  They were digging down into the dirt beneath their multilevel home, a wood structure inside an about 6′ X 4′ X 4′ pen.  Rat, in the meantime, was collecting dirt and making dirt mounds to seal off the open walls, making a nest, I figured.

The tortoise house is right below the bird feeder.  I was not feeling comfortable with the rat coming out in the daytime to eat birdseed with the squirrels.  It finally got to the point where my opening up the back door of our row house and stepping outside was not driving the rat back into the house.  Like the squirrels, Rat continued to eat the birdseed.

Our home and yard are 17 feet wide.  It was only a matter of time before the row house neighbors noticed we were housing and feeding rats.  Our yards are all contiguous.

So, I tried putting out mouse poison and stood and watched.  I had to watch because if a squirrel approached the poison, I…

One of the most challenging things about producing unique theory in an amateur context is the necessity of embracing the amateur milieu.  The academic and hobby environments are very different on several levels.  As an amateur, it is easy to believe that your audience is at least partly academics if what you are producing is the kind of product, unique evolutionary theory, for example, that an academic would produce.  That is a nonuseful perspective.

The academic and amateur environments operate on different premises and come with different appropriate behaviors.  I have relatives, friends and colleagues that are professors, so though I don’t speak from the experience of being an academic, this is not an unfamiliar world.

In academia, though the concept of the commons is integral to the idea of a learning community, knowledge sources are closely associated with individual contributions.  Struggles for recognition or for being a knowledge source are integral to institutional and discipline respect.  There are very specific conventions for how knowledge is shared and contributions are made, beginning with getting a degree in the area where you are seeking support for your ideas.  Criticism and analysis of contributions are part of the system, so it is…

I have a friend whose dad was a famous guru and whose brother was a mathematics professor at a prestigious college.  My buddy chose a profession that surrounded him with art.  That’s how I met him.  I provided him illustrations.  Thirty years ago he made it to an endocrinologist to discover that he didn’t have schizophrenia as diagnosed.  He needed his hormones adjusted.  Pills taken, life settled down.  He was always going to be obsessive-compulsive, but the terror and paranoia went away.

Every autumn, my diabetic stepdaughter goes through endocrinological hell as her auto-immune system goes haywire.  Most years she spends some time in the hospital.  Doctors don’t know what to do other than to address the symptoms.  Gwyn is an artist of the palette, inventing new tastes and flavors and sharing them with those that visit her in her restaurant.

Where I live in Chicago, one of the most common topics of conversation is the weather.  When we ask each other how we’re doing, we respond with the conventional answer, fine.  Yet, somehow, discussing the weather is also a way to discuss how we are doing, but it is done in such a way that we aren’t getting sidetracked…

I read pretty much nothing but fiction until I was 30.  I’ve read almost exclusively nonfiction since then.  Whereas when I was younger I’d enjoy reading to feel the impact of a complete story that I could immerse myself in, these days I jump from book to book, tracking the larger story of evolution, a story I feel surrounded by almost all the time.

With each book I read I feel I’m exploring this evolving world.  I’ve developed reading habits that encourage that experience.

I often refer to Freud in evolutionary theory.  Freud was a recapitulationist, paying close attention to how the different scales of evolution interrelated.  I spent much time studying Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP), hypnotic therapeutic intervention and the humanists, such as Fritz Pearls, Rogers, Maslow, Janov and their contemporaries.  From 1980 to about 1984, I studied and read everything published by the NLP School of psychology and communication, becoming a licensed practitioner in 1981.  My artistic sensibilities were deeply influenced by the sense-based model.  I learned to interpret and understand relationship dynamics by observing behaviors.  Interconnection became a reality rather than just an intuited possibility.  Studying NLP, exploring how modeling worked and how models were developed, I felt…

I’ve been experiencing some frustration communicating difficult-to-explain concepts and experiences.

In just the way that a musician-songwriter writes and composes pieces that describe his or her experiences, the theorist seeks ways to make embraceable ideas that feel foreign at first exposure.  I heard Paul Simon describe his having left Bridge Over Troubled Water in a drawer for over half a year, unaware that the piece could be effective.  It finally crossed his mind that the lead voice didn’t have to be his own, but Garfunkel’s, and the composition clicked.

I’m trying to cross that bridge that achieves the goal of describing a holistic theory in a way that the audience experiences the theory as a whole.  I adore blog format, the over-time narrative, with its small chunk introduction of concepts.  It makes possible an experience of the audience accompanying me, the theorist, as ideas emerge and are expressed.  By accompanying me on this bread crumb journey, the visitor to these pages may sometimes experience the “Aha!” that the author feels.  This is wonderful.  This is one of the things that makes this medium special.

Nevertheless, it seems to often feel to the visitor that there are many ideas that are…

Elia is in his last year of getting an undergraduate degree in anthropology at Loyola.  Tuesday evenings we often meet over supper and talk.  He shared with me last night his feeling that he’d like to specialize in mythology and what mythology suggests about a society and spirituality.  I could relate.  After evolutionary theory, I’ve probably read more mythology and spirituality texts than anything else.

It amazes me how little I remember of what I read.  I’ve conducted three book purges over the course of my life, getting rid of hundreds of volumes each time.  I’ve read hundreds of science fiction books, maybe 150 books on mythology, dozens of books on spirituality and dozens of books on psychology.  I’ve read many books I’ve barely understood.  I’m reading a book now on the endocrinology of relationship, another called The Ontogeny of Information, and in both cases most of the concepts are going over my head.  I’m approaching 1,000 lectures watched, put out by the Teaching Company, while exercising.  I remember almost nothing of maybe 100 lectures on philosophy.  Nevertheless, I expect my own ideas have been influenced by those hours.

I guess the point I’m making is that I vacuum up…

I went to my grammar school’s 42nd year reunion this last October, the first one my class has had.  It was at the Cubby Bear in Lincolnshire.

I’ve kept in touch with several friends from that period in my life, but when I walked into the party room I saw none of them.  There was a room of about 60 people.  None of them looked familiar.  Dozens of strangers I had supposedly spent a sizable chunk of my life with.

Before driving there, I resolved to keep conversations on the present, and to some degree, away from profession.  I wanted to stay away from hierarchy posturing and the successes we’ve had in life.  It worked.  It worked in no small part because that seemed to be the frame of reference adapted by most people in the room.  These were people humbled by life.  They were nearing retirement age, and there were few signs of people seeking struggle.

We talked about our kids, their finishing college and the professions they were choosing.  There was some talk about the difficulty of the economy.

Posted on the wall were pictures of each student at eighth grade graduation, and at one point I closely…

I’m a search engine optimization (SEO) specialist by profession, in addition to running a web development firm.  This is in no small part due to the fact that SEO requires little technical expertise.  I’m one of those people that never did figure out a VCR, has trouble with cell phones and is easily stymied by unfamiliar technology.  My running a successful web development firm is based on my having a superb staff and a solid business model based upon serving very small businesses.

In 2002, I figured out Google’s algorithm, long before the competition, pretty much by chance.  I was immersed in creating web directories.  My firm’s website achieved position #1 for “web site design” and maintained that position for over a year.  I was getting top ten spots for items such as “lingerie,” “mortgage” and “airplane tickets.”  By achieving such high positions, the firm was bringing in many clients.  At the time, I had a two-person firm, minuscule compared to my competition.  On November 15, 2004, Google made a dramatic adjustment in its algorithm, penalizing what it had been formerly encouraging.  My expertise dramatically diminished.  To reproduce what I had accomplished would take resources a two-person firm did not…

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

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

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

In the 1960s and early 1970s, I often hitchhiked around the country.  Road culture was filled with both an intoxicating optimism and the physically and mentally awry.  Traveling around the country by car, I…

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…

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

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

Over the last few years, I’ve drifted in an opposite direction.  The theory emerging in this blog suggests a psychological model, particularly as it explores the nature and causes of autism, yet it is a model with both biological and transpersonal roots.  It is a model deeply influenced by the work of Milton H. Erickson, the hypnotherapist, as his work was interpreted by Richard Bandler and John Grinder.  Ken Wilber’s integration of human developmental states, personality disorders and…