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 in these entries, I’m more than a little insecure about my ability to successfully communicate my evolution ideas and experiences in my life.  With time, I feel more facile with words and confident that what I experience I can share.  With the diminution of the feeling of isolation, the accompanying self-aggrandizement also fades, which is good.  Wrestling with putting into words five major lifelong dream themes and the hidden events those themes often represented is part of what I wrote Robbins about.  I recently put the whole thing into words, about 30 pages, but I neglected to accompany the writing with the lighter touch I used in writing the Robbins letter.  Getting the whole thing out of me felt more like excavating a mouthful of molar roots, a wrenching epiphanic release, not an attempt at providing a way for another person to share the experience.

Writing is not just getting the words out, but getting the words out in a way that allows another person to get in.  When writing about evolutionary theory, this means coming back again and again to the same material from different directions, seeking metaphors and narrative trails that allow easy ways to access the ideas.  This blog often comes back to the same themes as I seek effective ways to communicate the central issues.  Understanding maturation as integral to evolution involves understanding how different disciplines are actually studying maturation by a number of different names.

When it comes to describing what’s happened in my life, the challenge is yanking down those elevated experiences to make the wordless into words, while at the same time detraumatizing the horrendous to a degree that a visitor would be able to embrace it.  That involves my being able to embrace it.  That involves my writing from a position of compassion.  Compassion for self and the others that were involved.

I suspect these two different goals, making theory understandable and making my life accessible, are more than a little bit related.  The theory emerged in 1997, almost exactly five years after the dreams had begun to emerge that resulted in personal revelations about a year later.  Both were integrally tied to the relationships I was having with women at the time.  Love and loss of love, for me, has everything to do with whether the world makes sense or not.  The evolution theory emerged from a context where love, at last, felt integrated and understood.  I would not be exploring the origins of what it is to be human, a metaphor for an exploration of my self, without Marcia in my life.

The Tom Robbins letter that I just rediscovered gives me confidence that I can make my life into words that can move a person.  I’ll try again to turn the dental distress into something like a black, white and grey wedding dress.  There are ways to marry horror and love so that understanding and compassion result.

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

I’ve hypothesized that the transition from primary process consciousness to split consciousness was compelled by runaway sexual selection focused on dance, which eventually resulted in a unique brain structure exhibiting two hemispheres of unequal size and a smaller corpus callosum.  This process was perhaps encouraged by a bridging of language from gesture to speech, enhancing an ability to represent a thing with a sound instead of a sign and motion.  Nevertheless, at this point we identify with a condition described as self aware.  Strangely, maybe because of all the stories that accompany religion, we haven’t paid all that much attention to the differences between primary process and split consciousness, at least in the context of evolution.  What I mean is that we are directly connected to all that preceded us in the way we experience the world.  We can choose to notice.

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

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

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

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

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

It has now become clear that neo-Lamarckism has always been a reasonable theory, and it has stood the test of time for more than a century.  Once some misunderstandings and inhibitions are removed, the theory can be regarded as a more complete theory (than neo-Darwinism) in that it analyses the evolutionary process in terms of both the proximate and ultimate mechanisms, and in that it is especially suited for analyzing the origin of macroevolutionary change.  Through the analysis of the proximate process we come to know the cause of variation and the presumed initial stage of evolution of the structures upon which natural selection has worked.  In traditional neo-Darwinism natural selection is considered to be involved throughout the whole evolutionary process (of structures), which is indeed untrue, as Mivart (1871) already knew.  In practice obvious cases of over-extension of the theory of natural selection, which actually results from neglect of the proximate process, have often been criticized in terms of their falsifiability.  Yet the critics have never offered a solution for this dilemma.  Indeed, evolutionary biology has been in a state of constipation caused by the neo-Darwinian constraint that inhibits exploration of the proximate process of evolution.  It should now be realized that such a worry will be over once we accept the neo-Lamarckian approach.

The application of the neo-Lamarckian analysis appears to resolve some outstanding problems and riddles in evolutionary biology.  For instance, the problem of “inheritance of acquired characters” is now understood as the result of accumulation of genocopies.  The age-old riddle of ‘Which came first, the chicken or the egg?’ can now be answered from the evolutionary viewpoint (Sect. 3B2).  ‘Adaptive response’ now must be restored as a fundamental evolutionary concept, though it has been neglected.  All phenomena of abnormal metamorphosis (halmatomorphosis, neoteny, caenogenesis) resulting in macroevolutionary structural changes are now attributed primarily to environmentally induced alteration in the response of the genotype (alteration in gene regulation) during the proximate process.  The study of the Baldwin effect as special cases of genetic assimilation must be encouraged.

It should be realized that all the above problems can be more clearly understood by inquiring into the hormonal mediation that becomes involved.  Indeed, the environmentally induced hormonal intervention controlling gene action was the mechanism that was unknown to the nineteenth century neo-Lamarckists, and the lack of knowledge of such a mechanism might have hindered the acceptance of neo-Lamarckism.  (Ryuichi Matsuda, Animal Evolution in Changing Environments, with Special Reference to Abnormal Metamorphosis (New York:  Wiley Press, 1987), p. 53.)

Ryuichi Matsuda has now passed, but he has colleagues that still pursue a classic Lamarckian interpretation of how evolution unfolds, a seemingly anomalous approach in a world where even evolutionary developmental biologists often hesitate to cite Lamarck.  Matsuda was a giant among Lamarckians, an anomaly in the late 20th century.  We in the year 2010 still live in an epistemological limbo where leaders of evolutionary biology are also leaders in the atheism movement, binding together insights on evolution and deity.  This is all so very strange.  Matsuda, the Lamarckians and creationists all get lumped together as people believing in the power of nonrandom variables to influence evolution.

There are a number of Asian spiritual paths that explore levels of consciousness or identity scales, some offering levels within levels as the individual shifts further and further away from identification with the body.  I sometimes find myself wondering how these kinds of sciences, accompanied by a host of details, might inform evolutionary studies, where it seems that an ability to identify interconnection on different scales might make possible a reevaluation of what an individual is.  This is in the context of the individual within a community, suggesting a possible redefining of consciousness, depending on which community or scale is being examined.

Theorists such as Dawkins intuit that deity is integral to understanding evolution.  Dawkins concludes that it is essential deity not exist.  What interests me is what kind of deities, in the form of consciousness studies, best model interpretations of evolution that are not Neo-Darwinian.

I am fascinated by myth as a modeling process seeking to find pattern to the world.  The Dawkins crowd targets myth believers as creating unnecessary information which, in addition, poorly models reality.  I think Dawkins misses the point of myth.  Myth-making is model-making.  There is a process that humans engage in that involves the aesthetic of embracing reality while transforming it into something unique.  This aesthetic seems closely related to an integral feature of consciousness, to embrace and transform, that the atheists experience as random.

Reading science text, I see myth deeply integrated into “facts.”  How content is connected has everything to do with how process is understood.  Based upon the power of natural selection, there is this make-believe that connection suggesting larger wholes is arbitrary.  Matsuda described nonarbitrary connections between environment and evolution.  Slowly this paradigm is becoming respected again.  Perhaps soon consciousness will be able to enter the equation.

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 like I had entered the sense-based world.

Entering the sense-based world, I began to feel like the world could make sense.  That the world could be modeled felt fascinating to me.  Modeling felt to me like an artistic process.

My son was born in 1984.  I didn’t read much the next few years.  When I wasn’t working, I painted in watercolors, mostly metaphoric maps of states of mind, moving on to producing comic panels and strips for several years.  I placed the comics in almost 200 publications.  From there, I was consumed by puppet design, producing 60 commercial puppets, seeking to then make a living as a manufacturer of those puppets.  During the period I was designing puppets, I starting reading again after an almost 10-year hiatus.  I became consumed by reading about dragons and the origins of dragon mythology.  That led to my love affair with evolution.

For the last dozen years or so, I have read several books at once, usually around four or five, but sometimes as many as a dozen.  The books are almost always nonfiction, each from a different discipline, often including subjects I can barely understand.  I underline and mark the pages I might end up citing.  Mostly I’m reading for pattern.  I read while feeling around for insights from out of left field, connections both deep and unique.  Mixing up disciplines while I read encourages the experience.

I had an interesting experience a couple nights ago.  I’ve been reading a book of Basque legends.  I was listening/looking for unique serpent or matrifocal myths that might offer insight regarding that ancient ethnicity.  There are lots of variations on the youngest son or daughter of three sons or daughters and the monster/serpent/witch that creates opportunity for wealth, mate, progeny and happiness.  I went from the Basque book to a book on theory of mind of chimpanzees and human children.  That would be followed by a book on the endocrinology of relationship, followed by a book on the failure of genetic models to explain the ontogenetic reality of environmental influence.

Turning from the Basque book to the theory of mind book, my mind did not shift from reading fiction, Basque legends, to reading descriptions of studies, what we call facts.  I very much read by reading aloud in my imagination.  I continued to subvocalize while reading the chimpanzee descriptions, except the studies became stories and the paradigm being promoted by the author was instead an ancient myth.

The book on endocrinology was clearly just the best story we have at this time for a larger story we barely understand.  The last book on genetics was a story about a story that seemed to be failing to perform its job as a story, which was to make clearer how things are deeply connected.

The process of reading nonfiction concepts as merely clues in a story, like the repeating motifs in ancient legends or myths, creates an opportunity for the unconscious to build theories in ways similar to how we dream a dream.  Elements that belong together start to congregate, whether or not there is an obvious connection, creating situations where potentially useful relationships can be made.  Integral to this process is a sense of excitement, like the hero or heroine leaving home to discover something new.  Also integral is a willingness to be involved in magic.

Reading nonfiction as if it were fiction may be more than an exercise of imagination.  It feels close to truth.  Interpreting “reality” as fiction makes me feel like I’m approaching models of reality as a form of play.  Differences between mythology and science may be fewer than we think.  Patterns in mythology are covert.  Patterns in science are overt.  Nevertheless, they are both seeking to model experience.

Having been fascinated by Freud, the humanists and NLP, I find that psychology feels relative to me.  Consider the potential usefulness of relating to all science, and all experience, on a relative basis, and then play.

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 concepts and ideas, sometimes feeling integrations during the process, but usually the stuff just disappears unremarked.  Probably numbering in the hundreds are the ideas discussed in this website that previously emerged in other places I’ve watched, listened to or read, but I have no memory of the exposure.

And then there are all those times I think I’ve thought of something new, and I discover later it was proposed by another person I have had no contact with.

Elia is studying mythology.  I feel like I’m deeply involved in a process that is resulting in my creating my own mythology, one that I hypothesize might be useful.  Whereas Elia is exploring societies and the stories those societies create, I feel a sensitivity to mythology and the nature of consciousness and identity in my own experience as I feel an opportunity to be part of the creation of something that is practical.

Last night, Elia and I talked about the nature of presupposition and how theorizing has a lot to do with one’s assumptions regarding consciousness.  I suggested to Elia that all we know, as Descartes proposed, is that we exist.  All else is surmised.  Living life aware of how little we actually know offers astonishing leverage to appreciate the moment.

Appreciation is a powerful place to theorize from.

Perhaps that should be considered when examining the power of presupposition.  If people are experiencing appreciation or gratitude when engaged in the process of understanding evolution, their chosen discipline or their experience, the results of the exploration will be influenced by their feeling state.

If Elia has discovered his profession and is feeling guided by an appreciation for what he studies, perhaps he is following Joseph Campbell’s footsteps, following his bliss by listening to the stories that people tell.

As always, I feel lucky to be his dad.

This alternative path features a world view that presupposes connection.  Studying ancient matrifocal society, I was introduced to an experience characterized by an immanent presence rather than a separated, transcendental god.  Interconnection is presupposed.  The individual is part of a larger process.

These themes are, of course, reemerging in contemporary times through a number of avenues, including Eastern practices, drugs, group art/aesthetics such as dance and chanting, and aboriginal spiritual paths.  I was exploring the origin of dragon myths, discovering the cultural heritage of societies that had their myths and familiars demonized by conquering patrifocal societies.  I found myself exploring origins of culture from a very non-Western frame of reference.  Studying the origins of dragon mythology led me to a study of the earliest origin of myth.  Serpents were some of the first carved images that emerged, which led to an exploration of what exactly happened when culture exploded just before, during or after the African diaspora.  Studying serpent mythology led directly to a study of consciousness and the origin of culture.

I was immersed in a different presuppositional matrix from that which characterizes most contemporary theorizing.  Presupposing that everything is connected, assuming that human evolution featured our thriving in a matrifocal context until the emergence of proto Indo-Europeans, herding societies and the larger agriculture-based communities, I found myself asking questions that I wasn’t sure had been asked before.

The question which broke things open was:  If brains had been growing smaller for the last 25,000 years and if we had been transitioning from a matrifocal to a patrifocal frame, then might there be remnants of those ancient matrifocal aboriginals featuring a larger brain and difficulty with language?  The answer was that many autistics have larger brains, their right hemisphere never having diminished in size, and they often have a neurological difficulty with speaking.

I had presupposed that humans had evolved while living in matrifocal societies.  I had also presupposed that seemingly noncontiguous disciplines might be directly connected, particularly the sciences studying mythology, consciousness, evolution, neuropsychology, anthropology and social transformation.  Perhaps most importantly, I presupposed that integrating the immanent goddess of the ancient aboriginals, featuring an experience of all things being connected, with the narrative, often split, consciousness of the patrifocal societies that followed offered a useful synthesis when seeking to understand how humans evolved and how to describe this evolution.

Those that are good with children can often think/feel like children.  To be good at theorizing human origins, I am suggesting that it is useful to experience those early evolutionary states.  This work seeks to offer useful interventions in a number of different areas.  I am hypothesizing that it is useful to presuppose connection and matrifocal origins when seeking to understand how we came to be.

Like a child, I presuppose that what I am exploring, I can understand.  Engaging, I intuit and experience connection, and I estimate that my participation will be rewarded with my having learned something I didn’t know before.  Many themes carry through this work, but perhaps the core idea is that everything is connected and that those connections can be understood, or at least intuited, by a nonacademic.

I maintain a deep reverence for what might be called “fun.”  When I feel attracted to something, I take that as important information that the particular thing I feel attracted to deserves my attention.  My wonderings through the themes and patterns in this blog are the wonderings of a person following a body’s desire to share what feels good.  I describe this as a sharing because the experience can best be described as a form of dance suggesting union, in this case a union between my conscious and unconscious self.  The process of writing, experiencing connections and exploring pattern is a process characterized by my enthusiastically following along behind a playful unconscious while at the same time translating that process itself into the structure and content of this work.

Dance, playful movement to music, is a central metaphor.  So are water and the power of the movement of water to inform an understanding of evolution.  I also explore dance, not just as a metaphor, but as an influential variable in human evolution.

Evolution is happening in the present.  It is an ongoing process influencing the moment we are in through specific channels.  My work discusses those channels in detail.  Evolution is a multiscale process manifesting in a species, a society, an individual’s ontogeny, or growth, and the peculiar and particular experience of each unique person.  That is a four-scale biological, societal, ontogenetical and personal experience.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there was an allegiance to the idea of threefold or fourfold parallelisms.  Many theorists from Freud to Piaget paid close attention to how there seemed to be intimate relations between patterns at different scales.  Freud believed developmental stages reflected societal stage transformations.  Piaget intuited that a child’s changes in consciousness reflected our species’ changes in consciousness.  This work often returns to the idea that evolution is a multiscale process.

At the same time, this work explores a model that proposes that our species evolved along a five-step continuum, a progression that can be explained by how we’ve been impacted by sexual selection.  I believe that sexual selection was instrumental in our evolving our unique form of consciousness.

In addition to playfully exploring evolution, this work explores the influence of play on evolution.  Neoteny and the processes allied with neoteny wind all through this blog.  Neoteny is the process that carries or prolongs embryo or infant features forward through generations so that ancient ancestor early ontogenetic traits appear in the adults of descendants.  Some have surmised that the hairlessness of progenitor human embryos made current human adults mostly hairless as that ancient embryo feature was carried through to contemporary adults.  Neoteny is also closely associated with a hypothetical compulsion to play as this ancient forebear infant feature emerged in the adults of the present day.

There is no difference between biology and society.  Until now this has been difficult to discern.  Sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists have attempted to show how Darwin’s theory of natural selection could be leveraged to explain social transformation.  I suggest that a more powerful and useful social model emerges when biological evolution is explored using all three of Darwin’s theories and the work of Darwin’s contemporaries, the Neo-Lamarckians.  This theory is not as simple as a “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” melody of a current reductionist hypothesis but instead seeks to offer the depth, symmetry and elegant complexity evident in a work by Bach.

Evolutionary selective processes evolve.  The very dynamics of evolution change, as if the physical laws of the universe adjusted over time.  By exploring the nature and sequence of the transformation of the evolutionary processes themselves, we offer ourselves additional leverage when it comes to searching for and finding hidden selective processes, a little like seeking to fill in the blanks on the periodic table.

This work represents a feminine theory of evolution insofar as what is not dominated by male frames of reference is often looked at as feminine by comparison.  I would suggest that this theory of evolution offers a balanced male/female perspective, even though the female often feels to be in control.

I presuppose connection, which encourages a tendency to notice patterns that suggest interconnection.  This is an often overlooked founding presupposition that reveals an almost totally different world, a world that the reductionist presupposes does not exist.  It is useful that people with different presuppositions notice that they do not share the ability to trade information, information only valid when examined in the context of a shared presupposition.  The question is:  Do the fruits of a theory grounded on wholly different presuppositions offer benefits?  Is the theory useful?  Trying to decide if something is true or not is a nonuseful discussion.

It is not fun trying to decide who is right.  I prefer exploring what is beautiful or useful.

Last, consciousness and identity are reframed as split consciousness or self awareness.  This work presupposes that consciousness predated humans.  Humans emerged from primary process, the unconscious, with our twin awareness, featuring a consciousness that was split.  By presupposing that consciousness is part of the system and that everything is connected, a number of patterns are revealed that are less obvious without those presuppositions.  The question is:  Are these patterns useful?  Clearly the presupposition is controversial.  I make a number of predictions that allow members of this community to determine if these conjectures are useful.  I focus on autism in particular.

This work focuses on autism as a social condition featuring anomalous consciousness.  I describe how specifically autism emerges and ways to cushion the confounding effects.  And I describe how by understanding autism, we understand ourselves.  In addition, I propose that by understanding the processes that lead to autism, we understand the etiologies of a number of related and seemingly unrelated diseases and conditions, etiologies currently unknown.

Changing our theory of evolution makes it possible to have a different understanding of ourselves and the physical and mental difficulties that accompany us.

This is a work of conjectures.  In the past, I have called this interlocking network of conjectures “The Theory of Waves” and, before that, “Shift Theory.”  I now refer to my theory as “The Orchestral Theory of Evolution.”  When I write, or theorize, I seek to share beauty or observe patterns in ways that may be useful.  Beauty and usefulness are my focus.  Whether something is true or not just doesn’t make sense to me.  Patterns are just too vast, interconnected and overwhelming to conclude that my interpretations of those patterns are anything but stories.

I follow what attracts me.  Playing with evolution, I have fun.

Imagine the Mississippi as representing changes in a species over time.  At the source, Itasca in Minnesota, clear water emerges from beneath the earth in a pristine environment featuring wildlife and virgin forest.  At first a trickle, the stream picks up speed and breadth, finally leaving the protected environment of the park.

The river grows wider as it meanders south.  Houses and, later, towns appear beside it.  Soon, industry emerges, and before too long, boats carrying the product of industry share river space with tourists and local boaters.

At the other end of the river, New Orleans, the river is girdled by cities on both sides, massive commercial and industrial activity and almost a million people.  Cities like Baton Rouge offer single corporate sites square miles in size, using the Mississippi as an opportunity for profit.

Driving down and up the Mississippi with my son, I am sensitive to the ways he is different and the same as I, as I am similar yet vary from my father.  We are not just part of a family line, we are a sequence in the unfolding of a species.  There are ways that our participation in a species transformation transcends our lives as individuals.  I feel aware of how deeply I have been influenced by my dad, in ways not unlike how I have influenced my son.  It sometimes feels to me that the thing we three represent, a species lineage, is far more powerful than the individual identity that we usually take so seriously.

A lineage has a life that transcends individuality.  Our commitment to time as a thing that has a past, present and future obfuscates the reality of lineage.  Remove time, and we that are related become the same.

Imagine Minnesota’s Mississippi River wildlife and protected trees reaching their way down the river, prolonging “infant” neotenic features to appear farther south with time.  If the Mississippi represents a species over time, a lineage of individuals, consider how the river would look and behave if nonhuman nature was to cascade its way down the river over time as factories closed, houses were abandoned and river boats retreated south.

In the way that human progenitor chimpanzee-like infant features prolonged and appeared in descendant adults over millions of years, the Mississippi River can reveal river source features in the way the river looks downstream.  After a long period of time, New Orleans becomes a pristine estuary with humans only visiting to observe nature.  The whole rest of the river has become a boat-free zone with trees and prairies hugging a thousand-mile bank.

This would be river as metaphor for how humans evolved.  We can go the other direction.  Instead of prolonging infant features into adults over time, bridging virgin forests to estuary endings, we could go backward and accelerate adult or estuary features so that they move north up the river, against the flow.  Larger and larger cities would appear farther and farther north.  The huge petroleum processing plants of Louisiana would expand into Arkansas, Missouri and, last, Minnesota.  Finally, factories would ring the source of the Mississippi as the forest would be removed.

Imagine the Mississippi as a species.  The evolution of features would radically differ depending upon the direction of feature evolution.  Though the flow of the river would always follow the flow of time, the river’s traits would reflect the direction of this trait trajectory.  The character of the source would flow downriver, or the features of the estuary would creep north.

This is an imperfect metaphor.  As humans have exhibited neoteny, they have revealed more sophisticated society until culture appeared and things went crazy.  If the accoutrements of culture are created by neoteny, then factories and fir trees are not opposites.

Nevertheless, species unfold or flow through time.  Grandfather, son and grandson can be alive at one time.  Humans are submerged in an experience characterized by identification with a body that has a limited awareness span.  Using the Mississippi as a metaphor for species allows an identification with evolution over time and an understanding of a species as a transforming entity with ongoing beginnings, middles and ends.

Beginnings and ends of species are the doorways to understanding directions that species evolve.

Sources and estuaries of rivers provide insight into how rivers can transform.

Rivers, sons and fathers can provide insight into species evolution.  The trick is to take the emphasis off of individuals and view evolution as an outcome of a longer time span, a lingering now.  Adjusting time as a variable when exploring evolution provides leverage as we seek to understand how species change.

Evolution flows.

At Osseo, I got back on the highway and started paying closer attention to the sky.  About two months earlier, my attention had turned to trees and clouds.  I have been examining these two things in more detail than has been my custom in the past.  The clouds above Highway 94 north of Madison were extraordinary.  My attention became riveted starting about 3:00 in the afternoon.

The clouds were mostly very high, and the horizon was relatively free from nearby tall trees or buildings.  Several kinds of clouds were on display, appearing in several shades of gray and white.  A rain front was to my right and rear as the front moved from Minnesota toward Illinois.  Patches of blue sky mingled with dark clouds, wispy clouds, puffy clouds and distant, flat fields of clouds.

In front of me, above me and to my left were the kind of puffy clouds that were easy to imagine as various beings.  Dogs, bears, pigs, dragons, fish and salamander creatures were quite common.  As the minutes rolled on, I let my imagination play.  Beings proliferated.  Maybe 80 cloud formations suggesting personalities lingered in the sky, all at one time.  I was stunned by the sheer number of unique arrangements.

As I transitioned into a relaxed state capable of allowing my unconscious to run amok, clouds across the sky acquired personalities, sometimes creating local tableaus of several relating characters.  In the meantime, the wind and highway artifacts suggested voices.  There was the sound of the wheels on pavement, the sound of passing road barriers, the sound of passing under bridges, the sound of passing cars and trucks, the occasional sound of a machine in the environment.  Sounds began to feel like voices whose words were just about to begin articulating sense.

The sky was filled with faces with expression, beings with bodies, cloud personalities relating to one another; the air was chock-full of voice tones and intonations.  Suddenly, the ground, my horizontal plane, burst with personality as trees, plants and buildings reached upward to engage in relationship with the sky.  I was embedded in the center of a world that was alive, an environment communicating by using the conventions of a human.  Everything was reaching, expressing, communicating, being.

I did not feel like I was in an exaggerated altered state.  It felt natural.  I was having fun.

Driving down the highway, still above Madison, it felt clear to me that spiritual experience is deeply informed by our origin as primate social beings and our way of often regressing to early childhood states when embracing understandings characterized by connection.  When we feel loved in the world, that world often looks and feels like the world when we last felt deeply loved, when we were toddlers and infants.  The environment acquires personality as we shift to interpersonal frames and focus on loving eyes and gentle smiles.  When we were infants, our parents’ expressions told us we were loved.  We emerge into the world with personality, and those close to us mirror our experience.  The world becomes interpreted as filled with personality.  What we are becomes also what we perceive.

On many occasions in my life, I have been presented with revelation.  I define revelation as a time when barriers between my conscious and unconscious come down and my conscious is offered new and useful information.  In perhaps the two most intense or condensed experiences characterized by revelation, there was a second message embedded within the first.

In the first experience, I was also on an expressway, driving in the afternoon.  I was passing from Champaign Urbana to Normal, moving across central Illinois on a partly cloudy day in August.  Hay bales were bundled along the roadsides.  Listening to NPR, I realized that Gorbachev was sincere.  World peace in my lifetime was emerging as a possibility.  The sky became filled with rainbow rivers cascading down the sides of clouds.  I felt loved.

The second message embedded within the overt communication was that truth is relative.  Although I was experiencing a revelation accompanied by hallucinations, the truth that underlay the revelation was that all truth is relative.  I was experiencing a second insight that however anything feels or seems, there is an astonishing amount that can be lost in translation, particularly when it comes to revelation.

Five years later, a second revelatory experience was accompanied by the same tandem communication.  Whatever “truth” seems to be relevant in a communication, deeper yet is how vastly unimportant is the meaning.  Transcending the importance of the content and the meaning of a communication is the connection between the imparter of the message and the receiver of the message.

I believe this is what a former guide meant when he instructed me to maintain “Don’t know mind.”

The deepest communications are those where the instructions can be ignored.

Driving down Wisconsin 94 last July, I realized that there is a level of understanding characterized by not knowing.  It felt to me like experience before birth, before the dynamics of personality are engaged.  While I reveled in being surrounded by an environment infused with animated characters, I also felt that there was a part of me prepared to experience my surroundings as an embryo experiences its surroundings, epigenetically, with divisions between the environment and the personal being far less clear.

We each carry with us many ways of knowing.  Knowledge characterized by womb experience offers a not knowing kind of knowing.  Interestingly, this mode of knowledge offers a deeply adult world view, characterized by a profoundly relativistic perspective.  With all truth as relative, we are free to observe behavior as behavior, not that which behavior purports to represent.  Things stop representing other things.  Story and metaphor lose their impact.  Instead, everything is actually what everything is, connected to everything else, not just associated by shared word meanings.

“Don’t know mind” is not ignorance.  It’s the experience that not knowing can be profound.

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 in evolution is a feature of existence considered inappropriate for study.  As we assimilate the power of the concepts of interdependence and environmental influence on biological transformation, that aspect of experience will likely emerge as a variable to be treated with respect.  Right now that aspect of experience is associated with mythology and religion.  The variable with potential to deepen our understanding of how biology, societies and individuals transform is awareness.

Modern science mostly has concluded that because awareness is not measurable, it should be ignored.  Though perceptible by an individual, consciousness is usually assigned to that basket of features of human beings that arose due to contingent circumstance.  Consciousness, along with other human characteristics, was useful, so it appeared.

Consider the possible benefits of a theory of evolution that integrates awareness or consciousness as a characteristic of existence that has structure and features and changes over time.

I have found it useful, when theorizing, to presuppose that consciousness has always existed.  This is not about storytelling and assigning mythological motifs.  The issue is whether the presupposition is useful.  Does it provide any leverage to form explanations that offer an ability to predict the future or make connections between formerly unrelated concepts?  In other words, does presupposing universal awareness usefully deepen our understanding of our world or ourselves?

Regarding evolution, I believe that assuming that awareness or consciousness exists as a ground or foundation beneath biological evolution offers theorizing benefits.

Assuming that consciousness is embedded in biology, I look for subtlety, complexity, elegance and uniqueness as features of the overriding system.  Consciousness is characterized, from a human perspective, by a conversation between creativity and appreciation, yang and yin, proliferation and nuance, rate and timing.  By presupposing that consciousness exists, we look for interconnection, intuiting relationship, assuming a tendency to balance.  Instead of looking for hierarchy, we look for nested hierarchy (each level embracing the one below) with hierarchy violating interconnections.  If there are barriers to be broken, we search for evidence of breaches.  Anomalies are not just suggestions of broken models but are themselves evidence of a thriving system.  Integral to understanding how things work is how they play.  Novelty is a desired outcome.

Unlike our traditional, transcendent god with a desire to intervene, this is an immanent force with a compulsion to play.  This may be a force totally without certain features of human awareness characterized by split consciousness, which we might describe as the ability to be two places at once, two times at once, with an imagination capable of intuiting an opposite.  Prehuman biological awareness may feature what Freud called primary process:  one time, one place, no negatives.  This may not be creative consciousness as humans understand creative consciousness but something far simpler, yet unfathomably more powerful.

How does this apply to evolution?

What if the consciousness featured by our great ape cousins and early hominids is a form of consciousness equivalent to an individual’s manifestation of the overall general awareness, similar to sleep?  Then, brains split.  The two cerebral hemispheres grew to communicate poorly with each other, with one hemisphere having developed something wholly unique, an ability to assign gestural communication to speech.  With the split, a separation characterized by one cerebral hemisphere growing smaller than the other and the brain bridge corpus callosum accepting less traffic, each human became two humans.  This provided an ability to exercise personal imagination, featuring a knack to be two places at once, two times at once and an ability to imagine something and its opposite.  At night, when dreaming, we return to primary consciousness, great ape consciousness, when we can only be in a single place or time, unable to imagine another place or time without actually being there, along with an inability to imagine something not being.

This is a story.  The question is:  Can useful stories or theories be derived from a shift in presuppositions?  By making believe that awareness is not important when theorizing about biological and human evolution, we constrain our results to include only those conclusions that do not support consciousness as an unimportant variable.  Perhaps we should consider the alternative.  The benefits might include our being able to detect patterns in experience not obvious if we believe certain patterns can’t exist.

With the emergence of evolutionary developmental biology as a theorizing framework that offers interdependence and environment as variables important to understanding evolution, we have a bridge concept that clears the way to embracing the idea that interconnection and environment are features of a model that include additional concepts such as consciousness and play.

Perhaps with time, embracing play, we will become like children.  Maybe it is by playing that we can only truly understand.