Humans are story tellers, metaphor makers, a species moved by symbol.  It’s not just that we invent mythologies or stories we believe to be true, stories occurring in another time or place.  It is the fact that these stories sit at the root of both what it is to be consciously conscious while at the same time entitled and clueless.

As creators of content where nothing before existed, we are an astonishing reflection of the greater consciousness that animates the all.  Yet, with an ability to disregard the larger interconnected web of the all, instead paying close attention to our own unique fabrications, we are also a bane of that subtlety and complexity that surrounds us.

Jared Diamond, in his book Collapse, describes several times over the last few thousand years that humans and their immediate environment suffered the consequences of the human gift with words.  Societies, unable to see the repercussions of their creations, engaged in destruction.  It’s a pattern we keep repeating.

We have an ability to make stuff up that doesn’t closely approximate the nature of the surrounding environment that is affected by what we make.  The cure for this uniquely human malady is directly related to…

I’m sympathetic to several mythological scale interpretations.  I believe that myths come in hierarchical levels, with layers based upon the evolutionary dynamic.  Evolution unfolds at biological, societal, ontological and personal levels.  So do the stories that signify the processes at those levels.

Jung can be right regarding species specific stories or archetypes that target shared biological experience.

Levi-Strauss might nail a mythology focused on trans-society shared cultural roots.

Freud might intuit the labeling of a symbol that significantly expresses a specific culture’s understanding.

One person’s dreams may reveal a symbol right for that person based on the associations that person has for a particular object or event.

The levels bleed into one another.  We often become chauvinists for the level that we fetishize.  That sort of goes with the territory of being human.

Associations or relationships circulating around a particular symbol elevate that symbol to a particularly powerful usefulness.  Still, it’s vital we not take symbol too seriously or statically.  It’s as fluid as language, as vital yet as insubstantial as art.

How symbol comes into play regarding personal transformation has to do with an individual’s ability to both allow himself or herself to offer allegiance to the proto language…

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

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

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

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

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

Being human, it’s difficult to imagine what we don’t have words for.

Benjamin Whorf proposed that language powerfully determined the reality that a society can perceive.  For example, some indigenous Americans communicate largely in the present tense.  In Hopi mythology, the future and the past converge in a mythological alternative present as if at the other end of a giant wheel or hoop.  Such an experience of reality could influence individuals and societies at a number of levels.

Our unconscious, our personal representatives of the infinite other side, provide us information based upon the stories we have made up about the world.  What fits our stories we can absorb.  What does not fit our stories we ignore.  The words we use to create our stories are stored with a myriad of associations.  Associations left outside our experience, outside our words, do not end up in our stories and are not available to makes sense of the world.

A society emphasizing a single tense may be wiser than one deeply sensitive to the increments of time, wiser because the information received is far often high quality, real time information.  Nevertheless, that wiser society may be vulnerable to the machinations of a…

Talking with my son Elia last night (Elia is an anthropology major at Loyola), I brought up a conundrum that I’ve been playing with for a few years.  It has to do with the origin of language, metaphor and god.

I presuppose or assume that consciousness existed before humans evolved and probably always existed.  I don’t go so far as to define consciousness, though Gregory Bateson’s interpretation of Freud’s primary process has been a useful foundation for me.  According to that definition (extrapolating primary consciousness to god), god consciousness is not unlike that of an infant:  only one time, one place and no negatives such as “no.”  This consciousness is much like that experienced during dream.  In dream, you cannot imagine something without it becoming true.  You cannot be two places at once.  You cannot think of the future without being in the future.  You cannot read, because if the words acquire meaning, you travel to what the words describe.

So, I assume consciousness exists and always existed, existing up to, and including, the appearance of human beings.

I characterize human consciousness as split consciousness.  I hypothesize that when the right hemisphere began to reduce in size along with the…

In these blogs, I write about evolutionary theory, autism etiology theory, political activism and social change.  I discuss the web, business, the economy, politics, political organizing specifics, organizer conference structure, media, cosmology, society, psychology, social structure, sexual selection, neoteny, heterochrony, hormonal-driven evolutionary dynamics, transparency, diversity, hierarchy, hypnosis, spiritual experience, personal experiences, play, art, language, myth, story, the nature of joy and sources of love.

Friends have told me I cover a lot of subjects.  I often get the feeling I’m writing about the same thing over and over again.  I write about evolution.

I arrived at writing about evolution by tracing backwards the origin of dragon myths and then serpent myths.  Visit humanevolution.net for more detail on what occurred.  Over the course of a year and a half, I immersed myself in dragon and serpent mythology.  I went deeply, head over heels, down the rabbit hole of attraction.  What booted me off that abyss was the book Chalice and the Blade by Riane Eisler.

The book outlines a possible feminine foundation for human culture and explores implications of the work of archeologist Marija Gimbutas.  Exploring and recording details of several hundred myths, reading over 90 books…

Pattern recognition and exhibition form the essence from which we humans have evolved. Sexual selection usually involves a female choosing subtle variations on a pattern theme such as song, movement/dance or visual display. It can occur that males dramatically escalate the details while females exponentially increase their deliberative tendencies. You can get what Fischer called Runaway Sexual Selection.

What probably began the runaway loop were females selecting for superb dancers and sound makers with males responding over time with astonishing feats of endurance and acumen. Females become far more appreciative of the nuances the males could exhibit because females were being selected over time for acute judgmental abilities. Those females with subtle evaluative capacities mated with the most adroit male performers.

Somewhere along the line, females began selecting for males with talents for escalating pattern exhibition unrelated to any particular or specific stimuli trajectory.

Females selected for creativity.

There is no fiction in biology. Natural systems evolve within firm boundaries such as climate, food sources, natural disasters and competing peers. Now humans began operation in an alternative, complementing universe of pattern exhibition and recognition, having crossed a line where what exists, exists, but not in the biological world.

With imagination…

The metaphor of a cancer spreading has often been used to describe the unwinding of credit and the destruction of assets across the world.  Cancer is not the right metaphor.  I would suggest we’re in the midst of a wildfire conflagration.

Two things prepared the world for the unfolding we observe.

There has been a confusion of metaphor with assets.  Integrating a beautiful story with no boundaries into our commodities, options, derivatives, stocks, options, precious metals and currencies created a beautiful fiction of wealth.  Stories, financial vehicles, were designed to suggest little or no risk.  We chose to believe them.  Three of the last four administrations were placing at the head of agencies the very industries that those agencies were designed to regulate.  All four administrations purged accountability and transparency from these bureaus, allowing industries to write their own regulations.  When the beautiful stories of life without risk were peddled up and down the avenues of power, there were no grown-ups left to suggest that life does not work that way.  The risk of government interference was removed from the experience of the American corporation.  The adults were gone.

It’s been Lord of the Flies in Washington, but no one…

It seems we have crossed a line in the United States where a lie, if powerfully performed, is treated as truth as a reward.  Politics has always been about storytelling.  Nimble and effortless exaggeration makes up our everyday communication, self concepts and political big pictures.  Something has changed that now makes it possible to lie outright and expect to be rewarded with a prize.

In a Greek restaurant with friends Lee & Nancy maybe 25 years ago, John Coleman, the weatherman, walked in to have supper.  Lee asked John, “Will it rain tomorrow?”  John responded, “Somewhere.”

I saw Coleman being interviewed on Fox last year.  He’s about 80.  He’s a leader in the movement that broadcasts that global warming is a myth.  When John Coleman was a weatherman in Chicago, we’d watch him because he was the most entertaining.  Rainstorms were a potential deluge.  Tornados stalked most storks.  The Big Snow was an ever present winter possibility.  Ironically, his talent was exaggerating disaster.  Real disaster he cannot, or will not, see.  Or, perhaps he does see but is choosing to lie.

Storytellers are entertaining.  Liars are dangerous.  It seems pretty clear that in America today, the distinction is viewed as…

One of the less becoming features of a big chunk of American society is a tendency to revere achievement over the path taken to that success.  Honor in action or behavior is often portrayed as quaint.  I’ve observed this attitude among many of my competitors.  I run a web design or web development firm.  There are many younger males in the web business that behave like Darwin’s theory of natural selection is a business model, not a theory of evolution.

On the other hand, perhaps the left hand, there is strong movement toward exploring and manifesting transparency in the processes and actions of organizations, corporations and personal relations.

In my opinion, these are not two arbitrary societal trends slugging it out.  Long lineages trail behind them.  It’s looking like the patrifocal-dominance model has become self-corrupting as it takes a step away from a Goldwater honorable path conservatism and catapults itself over the philosophical abyss claiming targeted ends justify any means.  In the U. S., we’ve achieved a kind of Zen conservatism where everything is relative; morals are useful when cementing constituencies and ethics are only relevant in relation to how you are perceived.  Whereas in Zen one shifts identity to…

In the same way that a dream reveals the private life and secrets of an individual, myths tell us secrets about society and our species. The secrets that myths reveal about our species are only beginning to be understood.

I am a practical mystic. I don’t consider something to be true unless I’ve experienced it personally, and even then I accept it on a relative basis. If it’s true for me, maybe it’s true for others. Maybe not.

A life characterized by terror and anxiety propelled me to search for comfort and integration. Studying Castaneda starting around 1971, I launched a nighttime career of lucid dreaming. Not particularly adept, I still established dream as a refuge and a resource that over decades has provided both solace and instruction about myself.

In the 1980s, I explored hypnotherapy after becoming a practitioner of Neuro-Linguistic Programming, concentrating on the work of Milton Erickson. Through a combination of deep dream exploration and hypnosis studies, I acquired an ability to shift consciousness fairly easily. Unconscious material would rise to the surface with relatively few barriers. As an artist, this ability is useful. As a mystic, this ability feels nurturing.

Dream themes have started and developed,…

There is a five-step evolution continuum that begins with natural selection and then moves to the next step to where sexual selection, usually by the female, focuses on a specific pattern when they choose a mate. Step three transitions to human sexual selection, where adept practitioners of novel pattern creation (beginning with dance) are selected as procreation partners by mates with sensitivity to these nuances. The fourth step is taken when novelty itself becomes desirable outside the partner selection process, and society is compelled to embrace in its productions the infinite nuances of new. In the fifth stage, awareness of evolution’s stages attended by an awareness of the awareness that accompanies evolution provides an identification with the five-stage creation continuum.

The fifth stage loops around to stage one, what we think of as competitive evolution, accompanied by awareness.

1) natural selection
2) sexual selection (selecting for pattern when seeking a mate)
3) human sexual selection (selection for novel pattern when seeking a mate)
4) art (selecting for novel pattern outside of mate selection)
5) awareness of the selection or creative process

Story has structure. Lifted from the infinite associational matrix of experience, a story allows the…

We don’t just think in stories, but in layers of stories, stories nested up and down a continuum of stories from the personal, familial, societal and even to the biological.

I had several favorite stories when I was a child. Yurtle the Turtle convinced his colleague turtles to allow him to achieve a greater and greater height by standing on the backs of his shelled associates. Disaster at the end. But not before the reader got a bird’s eye view of Turtleland. It reminds me of Newton’s suggestion that his accomplishments were achievable only because he was able to stand on the shoulders of his predecessors. In science, there are still moments of “all fall down.”

Our stories stack, back to back, not unlike an almost infinite pile of turtles. The philosopher Ken Wilber uses a stacking-turtle metaphor to describe how evolutionary scales nest and stack. There is a mirroring between the nested stages of social evolution and the stories that accompany those stages. The impact of competing societal stages can be experienced by stories that are told.

Perhaps the most classic tale of clashing societies is how the now lost stories, rituals and traditions of the prepatriarchal goddess cultures…

I almost graduated with a degree in psychology as I considered a profession as a therapist.  I couldn’t quite withdraw from that ambition as I took workshops and courses after graduating.  Neuro-Linguistic Programming, Ericksonian Hypnotherapy and neuropsychology were subjects that I paid to continue to explore.  Nevertheless, I’ve spent over 30 years of my life with three therapists, mostly in a group therapy format, plumbing my psyche and my soul.  This therapy has contributed to a process perspective when I am observing the words and behaviors of myself, my friends, my family and my colleagues.  Observing the patterns that emerge in myself over time and recognizing the nature of the internal sources that lead to those behaviors, I form hypotheses on what drives the behaviors of those around me.

The stories we tell ourselves have an enormous amount to do with how we experience our lives.  In the old half-full/half-empty aphorism, our attention is called to the effects of our stories upon our perception.  We live in a world of stories layered at several different scales, sometimes nesting comfortably, sometimes dissonant in their conclusions.  There are our personal stories, our family-of-origin tales, societal stories and stories that are grounded in…

Imagine the evening news and the productions of our media as the dreams emerging from a troubled patient or the myths that linger around a culture in distress. I’ve considered that the tools of comparative religion might serve best to parse the meaning of these cultural constructions, but it feels like a societal perspective provides more play. Ad agencies make commercials, production companies create shows and political observers/editors design the news. Produced by these institutions of enterprise, the product feels like the fever dreams of corporations lying half asleep in a sweaty bed after overeating.

Pace and lead is the foundation of psychotherapy, salesmanship and communication theory. To establish rapport and provide guidance, it is necessary to mirror or reflect the target’s behavior and beliefs until the person trusts that they are understood. Once the person believes what the practitioner is saying, because the practitioner is saying what the target believes, that target can be guided to what the practitioner wishes the target to understand. The practitioner can be acting in the best interests of a patient when a psychotherapist practices pace and lead. The practitioner might not care what is in the best interests of a consumer if it’s…

Jung wrote extensively on the relationship between myth and culture and how that relationship reveals a dynamic similar to the association between dream and the individual.  Joseph Campbell offered four primary purposes of myth.  Researchers have posited many ways that dreams keep us healthy.  It has been suggested that dream and myth are but stories along a single continuum, not unlike the continuum of practitioners seeking to interpret these stories, arcing from counselor to psychotherapist to spiritual guide.

Our times are not characterized by the sharing of universal myths, though some do surface during holidays.  Our culture is becoming powerfully informed by a universality of story, compelling “news” that commands the airwaves for days or months.  In just the way that dreams reveal, wrestle with and heal the divisions that emerge while experiencing life, these media stories act as windows for interpreters to view the forces that society is seeking to face, assimilate and transcend.

A therapist does not live with the person whose dreams are being interpreted.  The practitioner addresses the client’s distress from a position or context somewhat removed, with clear boundaries.  There is a suggestion that when interpreting the news or stories broadcast by the media, the…

In ancient cultures across the world, there are myths describing a time when women controlled society with a magic more powerful than men’s. These stories go on to describe that there is a loss of the women’s power. Yet the stories also express that there still remains an awesome strength tied to female menstruation; the monthly moon blood is to be feared and respected.

Not unlike the experience of traveling to little-visited, far-flung corners of the earth and finding surprisingly similar myths describing origins of local culture; we find ourselves filled with a similar wonder upon traveling to little-visited academic sub-disciplines. Just as two far-apart aboriginal cultures might have no contact with each other, the heterochronic practitioners of evolutionary biology have little traffic with the neuropsychological theorists who may be located less than a hundred yards away in another building on the same campus. Strangely, we find these different scientists discussing identical processes in different terminologies with almost no published awareness that they have much in common.

How might two different scientific disciplines be discussing the same natural dynamic and not know it, like two aboriginal societies fearing menstrual blood half a world apart, unaware of another culture with the…

I’m playing with the idea that through birth comes creativity and through death comes wisdom, and that this idea is an evolutionary biological principle, not just a folklore insight. Following this thematic exposition with two strong, opposing, yet complementing ideas through several sections of the orchestra offers opportunities for understanding how evolution works.

In previous entries, I’ve discussed what I call the principle of waves or heterochronic theory and its best known feature, neoteny. It is a foundation thesis of this work that there are patterns that operate across several scales of experience–academic disciplines–and that an examination of these cross-scale connections provides insight into biology, society, ontogeny and personal experience.

In the 19th century, evolutionary biologists cobbled together names for the processes they observed in several species as they became aware of the influence of changing rates and timing of maturation. Many biologists believed that the environment and/or experiences of individuals could effect the features of their progeny by accelerating or delaying maturation. They observed that the variation of features in a brood were not random. Darwin posited that all variation is random in his Origin of Species of 1859, a conclusion he retracted in 1866 in his work The…

These blog entries explore several related subjects having to do with evolution and transformation, how those subjects are interconnected and more specifically evidence of the evolutionary principle of neoteny in contemporary times.  For me, evolution is at least a four-fold structure that reveals patterns that jump from level to level.  Those four levels are evolution, society, ontogeny (individual maturational and developmental unfolding) and personal experience.

We are a species that uses words to describe experiences.  A word derives its meaning by the other words used to define it and the experiences we have in association with that word.  By writing or speaking, we are magically weaving a four-dimensional web or tapestry that intimates or suggests a meaning amongst a cloud of associations.  Like a locomotive, we trail a narrative of words, billowing out our smokestack, more or less following the track lines of our intended communication.  Unfortunately, what we build with words, like a locomotive, often cuts the world in two.

The first comment made by a visitor to these postings, Carl Davidson, suggested I read Robert Pirsig’s Lila.  Early in its pages, I was presented with an astonishing author insight.  American Indian behavioral personality characteristics were modeled by American…

There is this strange way that the abandonment of all rules, ethics and morals is featured by both the enlightened, spiritually accomplished master and neo-conservative, capitalist elite. We as a society are walking both paths. It has to do with an understanding that everything is relative.

Several years ago I ended up at a Leo Burnett executive’s Christmas party in the home of the head of that agency. Our daughter was part of a small high school choral ensemble with the CEO’s son, Phil. Marcia and I had known Phil for maybe ten years. A high school student, Phil was training me in his spare time to design websites. I was starting a business in web design. Marcia and I were offered the opportunity to listen/watch the performance. The music was charming and beautiful.

Still, it felt creepy. But as is usually the case in social situations where I feel foreign to the scene, I concentrated on the food. In the room were some of the most creative people in the United States, artists dedicated to the craft of message-making to accomplish corporate goals. The chorus began singing, beginning with the number “Let It Snow.” At the conclusion of the…

Never has society been so capable of changing quickly as it is now.

Twelve years ago, I spent over a year cave-crawling the corridors of dragon mythology, reading many books on the subject.  That adventure evolved to a study of the cultures that were connected to the ancient serpent myths that spawned later dragon tales.  The serpent/dragon cycle of myths and legends began long before recorded time and extends to the present day.  China is the society perhaps most committed to the dragon as metaphor, a society famous for its hesitation to transform.

Clearly, that is changing.

Up until the present day, the stories a society would tell itself anchored that culture, offered solace to its citizens, informed an understanding of experiences society could not easily explain, providing cohesion and a clear sense of community.  Science has usurped much of the power of myth, but our compulsion to use myth or story to make sense of our world continues unabated.  Whereas the serpent/dragon stories retained power to comfort and explain for thousands of years, the stories we tell ourselves now change with economic cycles, news cycles and youtube fads.

A martial artist practices many moves many times until he or…

We are so deeply steeped in story it’s hard to tell which layer of fiction we were last swimming in when it comes time to come up for breath. It’s like we’re deep sea divers that don’t keep track of how many fathoms we’ve descended. Come up too fast and we maybe get the bends.

When I was training to practice therapeutic interventions, one tool was the “As If” frame. I was encouraged to guide a client to access difficult-to-integrate personal resources that could be leveraged to achieve a specific change goal. The idea was to offer a client a novel story. Framed as a story, this alternative point of view was one the client could choose to resist less. Basically, we were making sales pitches, except the therapist was speaking both to the client’s conscious mind and an unconscious that had been engaged in a particular way of doing things for particular reasons. The “As If” frame allows someone that feels like they have limited choices to have additional ways of looking at the world.

Many things did not come easy to me during training. Creating stories was not a problem. Years of relying upon comic books as a…

In 2006, Steven Johnson came out with a unique little book called Everything Bad is Good for You. In this book, Johnson explores the possible positive repercussions of constant exposure to specific elements of popular culture, including gaming, reality TV, online experiences and film. His conclusion is that there might be powerful positive effects from these peculiarly self indulgent endeavors that include increased IQ, sensitivity to associational understanding and an ability to defer satisfaction to achieve long-term goals.

Counter intuitive, indeed. Fascinating, nonetheless.

When I was young, I did not often eat sweets or candy. My eyes were on a different prize. Before I could read, I was “reading” comic books. All my allowances and other monies went toward DC and later Marvel hero comic magazines. On Saturday mornings, I would walk, usually by myself, almost three miles to Winnetka, to the only comic book store in the region. In the 50s, a seven-year-old could wander miles in many suburbs with no concern.

Able to buy perhaps a third of the titles I adored, every week I was faced with a decision. With a quarter, I could buy two comics. Justice Leagues of America was my favorite followed by Superman,…

When the first stories were told, perhaps they were gestured as in charades. Maybe the stories were danced. At some point, the listeners or audience began to create pictures in response to the gestures, dances or words. From the start, it would have been vital to differentiate the possible from the real, the imaginary from the what really happened, what was desired from what occurred.

I expect those folks that had difficulty telling the imaginary from the sense-based world did not often live to procreate. The transition to a gesture or oral language that was grounded in a fertile imagination was no doubt difficult for many. Imagine a civilization of two- and three-year-olds.

In high school gym class, the boys attending the swimming unit at New Trier were all required to swim laps naked. We showered before class, jumped into the pool with no suits and proceeded to paddle back and forth with no clothes on. The school didn’t have to pay for suits and laundry. It was humiliating. It was what it was.

Mr. Robertson was the swim coach and the tyrant of the New Trier pool. Mr. Wolf was his assistant. Their barked commands echoed around the cement,…

The Rat is Back.

He’s burrowed a little hole into the leaves stuffed into the tortoise pen.  Marcia and I have been discussing whether to poison Rat, catch him in a have-a-heart trap (we have a big one that we’ve used for squirrels) or call pest control.  Rat comes out to eat the bird seed that gets sprinkled around the tortoise pen from the feeder suspended above the cage.

I’m drinking ginger tea to settle my stomach.

In the late 1980s, I was sure that the economy was coming to an end.  Everything felt fragile.  I intuited that the stock market was about to crash.  Then, on 10/19/08, it did.  With the financial world reflecting my internal state, I felt terrified.

Thirty eight years ago, I felt deeply that big change was on the way.  Then, it seemed like things just froze.

Things are thawing.  Not just the glaciers, but American certainty that life in America is good and will continue to get better, defining good by how much stuff we have.

This time I’m watching the market crash, but I’m not feeling frightened.

Just experiencing some dread.

………

We caught a possum in the have-a-heart…