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 to go on no condition inhibiting drugs.

He is suggesting that the aneurysm is exaggerating the asymmetry, possibly encouraging the experiencing of unconscious content while awake, possibly leading to grand mall seizures. I have been prescribed a low dosage of Keppra XR (levetiracetam), decreasing likelihoods of seizures.

When I write mornings, often about evolutionary theory and autism, I wait for ideas to emerge from my unconscious, and then I record them. There now seems the possibility that my peculiar brain structure in combination with my cerebral aneurysm, meditation, and an artistic temperament have combined to encourage the emergence of my alternative evolutionary theory.

It is my experience that I work in cooperation with my unconscious to produce the words that explain human evolution and autism. I integrate direct communications from my unconscious to decide how and what to theorize. From what the neurologist is saying, there is the possibility this is a result of a unique brain structure that tends to plant unconscious content into daily life. A question, of course, is what I am experiencing only metaphoric or even totally unrelated to shared reality, or is there enough in common between my unconscious guidance and conventional perceptions to make my theory useful to people living in conventional shared reality.

Next, I meet with the neurosurgeon to evaluate an aneurysm surgical intervention.

Successful surgery may diminish my conscious access to unconscious creative states.

I’ve described two neurological archetypes in my work on human evolution, autism and current social transformations. There is the male, maturationally delayed, and the female, accelerated, and both are matrifocal, often left-handed, leaning toward autism, inclined toward primary process and inclined toward being simultaneous thinkers. The other neurological archetype includes the familiar male who is maturationally accelerated and the female who is delayed (neotenous), and both are patrifocal, narrative-thinking, split-brained, normal right-handers. I’ve recently been playing with the idea that each displays a unique form of imagination, with primary process individuals exhibiting abilities to perceive and integrate larger patterns contrasted with split-brain thinkers that can easily imagine what does not exist while establishing the steps to get there.

What I’m considering at this particular moment is what might be occurring when a primary process thinker is introduced in childhood to split-brain thinking conventions, or the opposite, when a split-brain thinker is guided or propelled into how a primary process thinker thinks. For me, there is something similar to the life work of an artist, who is seeking to integrate seemingly incompatible polarities. It strikes me that by understanding the world by the way the world is perceived and processed, and offering ways that these two basic paradigms can relate, we might be encouraging a healthy integration.

It may be often the case that those artists and theorists that achieve success in their chosen avocations or professions are those individuals that have accidentally or unconsciously found ways to perceive and interpret information considered from both a primary process and a split-brain perspective. I have hypothesized that our society evolved from a matrifocal to a patrifocal frame and is now headed back to matrifocal, though in many ways what we are experiencing currently is integration. I’m hypothesizing that one way to approach how unique thinkers think is to consider that some individuals experience and exhibit an integration of both primary process and split-brain thinking processes.

It is my guess the integration is often not without stress. In just the way the artist in the West often acts as an example or symbol of the difficulty of synthesis between community and self, or the other ways of describing the existential polarities that we as humans wrestle with, those individuals that discover an ability to live in both primary process and split-brain worlds probably often experience the relationship as a struggle.

An example of two forms of imagination integration might be aboriginal children with natural primary process thinking inclinations that are raised in a Western home by split-brain parents, except that the parents are artists, and the home features an extended family with a mother’s sister and a mother’s mother living in the house. A net result might be an environment somewhat neurologically (and socially) familiar, with constant exposure to what may feel like a complementary opposite neurological condition. The children may become adults with a facility to intuit big picture, simultaneous, interconnected understanding with step-by-step abilities to achieve goals by imagining something that does not yet exist.

A perhaps more familiar example might be one that approximates the artist paradigm in Western culture. Consider a primary process thinker, a left-handed person, with left-handed parents. Borderline autistic, an Asperger’s candidate, this person is traumatized in early childhood and finds himself or herself withdrawing, except the world that he or she withdraws into features an enormous number of words. This person discovers that words are effective at creating a security zone isolating personal experience from a threatening environment. The person becomes an avid reader and uses his or her global imagination to fill the world up with the images his or her words create. Nevertheless, as a primary process thinker, community feels essential, resulting in a vivid imagination devoted to an imagined community, a community featuring many interconnections.

I hypothesize two neurological archetypes with few overt pathways toward integration of the two frames of reference. Some people, over the course of their life, experience various degrees of integration. Sometimes this occurs in an atmosphere characterized by love and affection. Sometimes this occurs in atmospheres featuring distress and misunderstanding. Both situations can result in individuals with enhanced abilities to serve society.

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Proceed to author’s FREE book download on this subject. 10 minute introductory video here.

Thirty years ago I studied with John Grinder and his colleagues, becoming a licensed practitioner of Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP). We integrated the insights of language theorist Noam Chomsky, hypnotherapist Milton H. Erickson and family therapist Virginia Santir to be able to understand how exactly people exercise imagination. We explored the exact sequence of senses that people used when processing information or using their imaginations. Specifically, we explored when and how internal senses of feeling, hearing and sight were engaged while either remembering or creating content while integrating old with new experiences.

Sixty of us went through the licensing program in a western Chicago suburb in 1981 and 1982. Learning how exactly people processed information, we learned a lot about ourselves. For example, I discovered that I began almost all imagination strategies by talking to myself, with almost no awareness that I was doing so. Almost all internal auditory experience was occurring outside of my conscious awareness. That was valuable information. Over time, as I became aware of how influential my internal dialog was to my emotional and cognitive experience, I learned to accompany that part of me that speaks. A result is that I feel less alone, less split.

Meditation, nonjudgmental self attention, was integral to that process.

Let’s consider the benefits of understanding that there are two different kinds of imagination. Let’s call them primary process and split brain. Are the two kinds of imagination associated with relatively unique cognitive strategies? For example, does a split brain imagination often begin by talking to the self, exercising internal dialog, with created imagery being integral to the result? Would a primary process thinker rely upon something visual that is remembered (as opposed to something visual that is constructed), with feelings inside the body being integral to conclusions that “connect”? I have no idea. But it would be interesting if the two kinds of imaginations were associated with specific strategies. If so, specifically learning the strategies of the other kind of imagination might result in an individual feeling like he or she has more choices in life. A society engaging in teaching children both forms of imagination might experience far less dissonance.

If, indeed, there are two different kinds of imagination with two different neurological foundations, we have a new way of understanding societal splits. Accompanying the understanding of how these splits occur are strategies individuals can use to integrate the splits. This could result in more peaceful societies. This blog’s new way of understanding how humans evolved is central to what we are discussing here.

Understanding imagination, we understand ourselves.

There is evolution and there are those theories we use to interpret evolution. It just so happens that many evolutionary biologists, creationists and members of the media don’t see a difference, or prefer we not see a difference. It seems to be in the interest of many individuals to muddy the difference between a theory and what a theory represents, to confuse a map and the territory.

When a metaphor seeks to represent not a particular experience, but an interpretation of an experience, the result is something like a metaphor of a metaphor. It is perhaps useful when we know that we are engaged in this particular process. A problem is that using metaphors to describe metaphors for experience is a whole lot of what being human is all about.

Maybe 4,000 generations ago, an eyeblink in evolutionary time, humans thought differently. Culture had not yet engaged. Language may still have been gestural. Our brains may still not have lateralized for speech. Most of us may have still been random-handed, like our great-ape cousins. Primary process consciousness may have been our night and day.

Primary process is a Freudian process, interpreted by Gregory Bateson to be the foundation animal consciousness, featuring one time, one place, no opposites. Primary process is the experience of an ever-present now, with little ability to estimate different times or to consider more than one location at any one time, and no ability to imagine something’s opposite. Trying to imagine something opposite results only in the appearance of that which is the thing you want to imagine the opposite of. Six different consciousnesses are associated with primary process: animal consciousness; human embryo and infant consciousness; human dream consciousness; the human unconscious; particular human altered states accessed through drugs and alcohol; and autism.

Humans, like our animal brothers and sisters, lived and breathed primary process. Something truly peculiar happened and humans evolved split consciousness. We could still access primary process, but our everyday existence featured an experience dramatically different from our sleeping nights. Split consciousness gave us the ability to exercise imagination and simultaneously have more than one time and more than one place and conceive of opposites; moreover, split consciousness was accompanied by primary process. We became both split and nonsplit beings in our daytime waking lives. Imagination and dissociation were mated with a tendency to experience the world in a way that merged a thing and what a thing represented.

Primary process does not differentiate. With primary process, a thing that represents, and a thing that is represented, are the same. In the world of dream, symbol and symbolized are merged.

We live deeply peculiar lives characterized by both extreme dissociation and compulsion to merge. This unique consciousness is understandable when approached evolutionarily. Humans feature two kinds of consciousness, and one of those two consciousnesses is unique. Accompanying this experience is our usual tendency to not exercise an ability to accompany the experience, or observe how exactly we engage in two kinds of consciousness. The result is that we often confuse the map with the territory.

As theories of evolution develop, the theorists, critics of theorists and the media describing combating viewpoints seem to specialize in forgetting that theories of evolution are metaphors for evolution. When theorists purposefully confuse evolution with a theory of evolution, when myth-believers purposefully confuse a personal experience with information that transcends personal experience, when the media focus only on describing battles instead of how battles came about, we are encouraged to confuse a thing and that which a thing represents. In other words, both science practitioners and myth-believers are often lodged in primary process and do not know it, so effortlessly are they engaged in dissociation.

This is the paradox of being human. While fully engaged in our imaginations, we often don’t notice when we are confusing a thing and what a thing represents. Able to be in multiple times and multiple places while seeing opposites, we at the same time merge two things that are different, experiencing them as the same.

There is a solution to the paradox. Identify with that part of us which is aware of, observes and patiently embraces our experience of being both split and nonsplit beings. Accompany self.

For some reason, a rather strange and astonishing result of accompanying split and nonsplit selves is an experience of compassion, interconnection and not being alone. Consider theorizing from a position where everything is relative. Map and territory are understood in the context of consciousness location. There is no truth, no answer, no right interpretation. There are no arguments. There is only sharing of experience.

The idea of evolution is often confused with Darwin’s theory of natural selection. To understand evolution, we need to accompany ourselves.

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 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 that there is such thing as truth.  On occasion, biologists discuss the similarities between male primate procreation strategies and science community strategies and tactics for achieving idea acceptance.  There are ways that interpretations of what “truth” is and the specifics that seek to occupy that truth station behave like sperm that lust to occupy a position of respect in the womb of our academic institutions.

It astonishes me the amount of time that I spend concerned with definitions of “truth” or foundation premises that inhibit alternative understandings.  I feel like I spend a lot of time in basements with flashlights discovering that an extraordinary amount of information has more to do with dream, or the unconscious, than with waking.  I then realize that I myself am a figment of dreamlike imagination.

Then, with chills, I realize the imagination is not my own.

Lately, I’ve been focusing on the difference between art and science and my exact role while engaged in the theorizing process.  As an artist, I seek insight, often by relieving myself of conventions that act as barriers between the social and the transsocial self.  A scientist adheres closely to conventions in order to provide colleagues the information that conventional reality is what is being explored.  Scientists need to trust that the information shared and relied upon is information that will behave identically for everyone in the science community.  An artist is looking for alternative perspectives, ideally universal, often not describable with anything like language.  Whereas science relies upon language or mathematics, media for sharing of convention, art instead seeks any avenue that usefully or beautifully offers access to nonconventional, but real, points of view.

No doubt these distinctions keep coming to my mind because I am engaged in an artistic process as I am theorizing about evolution.  I struggle with how exactly I fit into a conventional theorizing community while offering reverence to nonconventional, artistic process.  The result of this acute awareness is my frequent examination of the differences between science and artistic processes at both the creative level and the logistical level, the how of how content gets created, and the how of how content gets accepted by the community.

This often feels fatiguing, in no small part because a foundation feature of my personality is the deep-seated belief that what I create is not acceptable.  Many of us carry around this unconscious belief that we are of little use to the community and have to work extra hard to make a difference.  In the back of my mind, at the bottom of my emotions, is a frightened, grieving being who believes he’s alone because of something that he is or did.  I know many people with these hidden feelings.  I feel like much of what I do while I write is accompanying this being.

Accompanied, I get creative.

Whereas a scientist makes sure his work is above reproach, an artist seeks to be accompanied.  Popper and Kuhn describe rules of engagement regarding conventional reality.  The artist simply seeks to engage.

Except the product of my engagement is theory, theory that seeks to be useful.  I keep finding myself bridging these two worlds.  I note few models of how exactly to build this kind of bridge.  Firmly recognizing that I engage in art seems integral to my experiencing comfort with what I do.

Except I’m not convinced comfort is useful in creating art.

“The prevalence of twilight-state thinking, our very susceptibility to the condition, argues for its evolutionary importance.  In extreme cases it results in pathology, derangements and delusions, persisting hallucinations and fanaticisms.  But it is also the driving force behind efforts to see things whole, to achieve a variety of syntheses from unified field theories in physics to blueprints for utopias in which people will live together in peace.  There must have been an enormous selective premium on the twilight state during prehistoric times.  If the pressures of the Upper Paleolithic demanded fervid belief and the following of leaders for survival’s sake, then individuals endowed with such qualities, with a capacity to fall readily into trances, would out-produce more resistant individuals.”  (J. E. Pfeiffer, The Creative Explosion (New York:  Harper & Row, 1982), p. 213.)

The power of art to inform culture receives relatively little attention in current times.  Any anthropologist studying aboriginal society finds art central to how a culture operates.  In that context, always, art and spirituality are closely tied.  Perhaps art feels separate from society today because religion has been contextualized as important, but not essential, to how we understand society.  So, art often finds itself ignored.

“Furthermore, drummers apparently know by intuition the most potent brain-stimulating rhythms.  According to Neher, the predominant drumming rhythm used in a number of African dances as well as in Haitian voodoo dances is a fast 7 to 9 beats per second—and that happens to be about the same rhythm produced naturally by “brain waves” in the auditory cortex itself, groups of neurons charging and discharging in electrical unison.  It seems that properly synchronized drumbeats drive the brain, force it into heightened activity.  They work in phase with brain waves, amplifying them the way timed pushes impart more and more momentum to a swing, creating hallucinations and intense feelings of dissociation.”  (Pfeiffer, 1982.)

This website describes a particular view of how human beings evolved.  I propose that art encouraged a particular ontological dynamic that compelled the growth of big brains because big brains more efficiently produce art.  We’re talking a sort of feedback loop, or what R. A. Fisher described as runaway sexual selection, whereby extravagant dancers chosen for their ability to evoke feelings of wonder resulting in copulation were (mostly) males that exhibited bigger brains and childlike features of cooperation and dependency, traits associated with neoteny.  Females kept picking big-brained, childlike dancers.  The women exhibiting the best  ability to form these evaluations, commanding and judgmental protohuman women, were making sure that they were the ones that got these men’s babies, and these women formed the other side of this feedback loop.  Big-brained dance performers got picked.  Big-brained dance evaluators did the picking.  Big brains evolved.

There are studies that conclude that the musically obsessed, composers and listeners with ability to note fine detail have bigger brains.  In addition, low testosterone males and high testosterone females seem to be the most talented composers.

“Creative musical behavior, musical intelligence, and spatial ability were investigated in relation to salivary testosterone (T).  In a cross-sectional study with 117 adults and in an 8-yr longitudinal study with 120 adolescents, composers, instrumentalists, and nonmusicians of both sexes were compared by analyses of variance.  Results indicate that an optimal T range may exist for the expression of creative musical behavior.  This range may be at the bottom of normal male T range and at the top of normal female T range.  In addition, musicians were found to attain significantly higher spatial test scores than nonmusicians, both in an 8-yr-period of adolescent development and in adulthood.”  (Hassler, M., “Creative Musical Behavior and Sex Hormones:  Musical Talent and Spatial Ability in the Two Sexes,” Psychoneuroendocrinology 17(1) (1992):55.)

“Musical composers, instrumentalists, and painters were compared with nonmusicians from a student and from a nonstudent population on testosterone levels in saliva.  This steroid served as a marker for physiological androgyny.  The ANOVA showed a significant group by sex interaction.  Male composers attained significantly lower mean testosterone values than male instrumentalists and male nonmusicians; female composers had significantly higher mean testosterone values than female instrumentalists and female nonmusicians.  Painters of both sexes did not differ significantly from controls.  Spatial ability was assessed in the five groups.  Significant differences on spatial test performance were not reflected in differences on salivary testosterone.  Our results showed that musical composers of both sexes were physiologically highly androgynous.  Creative musical behavior was associated with testosterone levels that minimized sex differences.”  (Hassler, M., “Testosterone and Artistic Talents,” Int J Neurosci 56(1-4) (1991):25.)

Not only is testosterone related to musical inclination, so is handedness.  The left-handed often are more musically inclined.

“It seems possible that an optimal testosterone range exists for the expression of creative musical behavior and that exceeding this optimal range in the course of puberty may contribute to a stop of musical production in boys.  Such optimal testosterone levels may be lower than male average in adult men and higher than female average in adult women (Hassler, 1991; Hassler & Nieschlag, 1989). …  Handedness proved to be an important variable with respect to musical talent in boys.  Male left-handers attained significantly higher mean test scores than male right-handers on Wing’s Standardized Tests of Musical Intelligence (Hassler & Birbaumer, 1988) at each stage of the study.”  (Hassler, M., and Nieschlag, E., “Salivary Testosterone and Creative Musical Behavior in Adolescent Males and Females,” Developmental Neuropsychology 7 (1991):504.)

According to the thesis promoted on this website, it is the random-handed (left-handed), the high testosterone females, the low testosterone males (matrifocal social structure) and the big-brained dancers that are the folks engaged in the runaway sexual selection feedback loop just described.  The neurological literature is filled with examples that support this thesis.

Nevertheless, it is a story.  A story is art.  Art often has spiritual connections.  The question is:  Is this a story that offers opportunities to transform?

“The entire scheme represents a hierarchically organized system of increasing size, differentiation, and complexity, in which each component affects, and is affected by, all the other components, not only at its own level but at lower and higher levels as well.  Thus, the arrows in Figure12-2 not only go upward from the gene, eventually reaching all the way to the external environment through the activities of the organism, but the arrows of influence return from the external environment through various levels of the organism back to the genes.  While the feedforward or feedupward nature of the genes has always been appreciated from the time of Weismann and Mendel on, the feedbackward or feeddownward influences have usually been thought to stop at the level of the cell membrane.  The newer conception is one of a totally interrelated, fully coactional system in which the activity of the genes themselves can be affected through the cytoplasm of the cell by events originating at any other level in the system, including the external environment.”  (G. Gilbert, Individual Development and Evolution (New York:  Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 145.)

The article appearing in the 11/8/09 BBC News, “Early Life Stress ‘Changes’ Genes“, sent to me by reader Jon Gluckman, calls attention to evident changes in the genetic structure of mice genes as a result of stress just after birth.  The article wasn’t very specific except to note that changes were observed to occur at the molecular level by researcher Christopher Murgatroyd.  Watson and Crick’s Central Dogma has been adjusted to a less certain position of authority by a number of studies over the last 20 years.  Their discovery of the double helix was astonishing and beautiful, but not as easily understood as was first believed.  It’s looking like DNA is not the code of life, but the score.

When a current composer creates a symphony, he writes or types the notes to appear in a visual format to be provided to the various musicians by the conductor.  The composer does not “code” a symphony; he creates a score that then provides an idea of what the composer had in mind.  Musicians then marshal their assignment into existence by leveraging their skill with the instrument, paying attention to their own feelings, listening to their colleagues, watching the conductor and responding to the audience all at once.  There are at least these five variables impacting each individual performance.  Multiply that by the number of performers in a symphony and we begin to understand the subtlety, complexity and sophistication of DNA.  It’s as much about the environment as it is about the score.  That is the nature of art.

I hypothesize that music is not only a better metaphor than machinery or code for communicating how the genes and the environment relate, but music itself approaches the actual structure of the womb or egg environment engendered to produce an individual.  Art is a peculiarly human undertaking.  Its origins are explored far less often than language or culture, it being assumed that art is a contingent result of language or culture.  Even though art as it manifests in female sexual selection proliferates across the planet in the form of (usually) males displaying features that females like, art is not often explored as that which compelled humans to evolve.

The reason I state that art (in this case, music) was not only instrumental in how humans evolved but is a direct reflection of how evolution operates is because neoteny, the prolongation of ancient ancestor embryo features into the adults of descendants, not only made contemporary adult humans more like our chimpanzee-like embryo progenitors (as in large head, big brain, small jaws, hairless skin, head back on shoulders) but made humans behave like an embryo behaves.  Human adults make art and revel in environmental information to inform inspiration to create.  This is exactly what I hypothesize embryos do.  Embryos take their DNA score and proceed to proliferate growth based upon instructions from the environment.  Just as an audience informs production, the environment guides growth or ontogeny.  Art is not only integral to what it is to be human but is perhaps the most integral feature of what it is to be human.  In addition, art may be also how humans, and life, grow.

In other words, art may not only be the best way to represent those subtle and unique experiences that make life make sense, art may be the best way to understand how life actually unfolds.  Science, seeking to make an experience reproducible by making the number of variables so few that the outcome can be controlled, may be doing the opposite of what life actually engages in if life is to be understood.  Audience and performer, gene score and environment may be central to understanding not only evolution but ontogeny, individual experience and social relations.  Maybe it’s time science allies itself with art and makes itself part of an ensemble.

DNA’s Central Dogma, a great name, created with sensitivity to religious lines that science, with awareness, seeks to cross, needs a new name.  I would suggest Immanent Nature.  DNA’s Immanent Nature instead of Central Dogma suggests porous boundaries with continued awareness of the spiritual connotations.

If what makes humans human is that we directly reflect the processes engaged during earliest ontogeny, and our reflection of those processes compels us to create, then perhaps the unique self awareness also evidenced by humans is a feature of earliest ontogeny.

Immanence may be a feature of the system.

I’m finishing the over 100 piece that seeks to provide a less-stressed introduction to this theory than the earlier “Introduction to the Theory of Waves.”  First, the theory is now called “The Orchestral Theory of Evolution.”  The name changed when I hypothesized that estrogen manages the timing of maturation.

That, by the way, was a bizarre realization.  Bizarre for two reasons.  First, it came to me without my being aware that it had come to me.  I just found myself working with that premise, not having noted when it became part of my thoughts.  Second, for more than 11 years, I’ve been working with testosterone controlling the rate of maturation without it having ever crossed my mind that it would be interesting to know what managed the timing.  It just never struck me that it was relevant or knowable, even though I’d been discussing rates and timing of maturation for 11 years.  At the same time, for 11 years, I’d been wondering how specifically estrogen might fit into the theory that was coming together.  I sensed that the theory was out of balance.

Since 1998, I’d been wondering how estrogen was relevant at the same time that I was totally not paying attention to the relevance of timing to maturation, even though I talked of timing constantly in the context of timing being the other half of the time frame of maturation, integral to heterochronic evolution.  Then, late last winter, estrogen slipped in, and I didn’t even notice the integration.

Okay.  Pretty weird.

Finishing the new introduction, I’ve been refining different sections of the work.  Describing the contribution of the artist, it hit me that the definition of “artist” embraces two very different sensibilities with paradoxically opposite implications.

There is the Occam’s-razor worshipping, male, Neo-Darwinian, reductionist, materialist, programmer’s creativity that seeks an elegant solution with the fewest number of steps possible.  Integral to this view is a compulsive rhythm implying step-by-step behavior with little awareness of a larger picture.  This reflects a particularly patrifocal, hierarchical social paradigm with every level in the hierarchy obsessively protecting that which is observable and controllable in contiguous positions.  There are ways that this also reflects the male protohuman character that is far less interested, artistically, in relationship than in the obsessive performance of evocative rhythm.

In other words, features of the hypothetical low estrogen, obsessive male are evident in patrifocal society and its creative impulse.  Perhaps high estrogen, patrifocal, creative males have creative impulses similar to low estrogen matrifocal males.  Focus on detail characterizes both milieus.

The emerging artist’s impulse is one that features a high estrogen male, far from the kind of male I am hypothesizing was common while we were growing big brains.  We are now seeing the “feminine” male, the male that fits the newer of the two matrifocal paradigms, a male with an artistic sensibility that seeks productions that reflect a larger whole.  Relationship is closely observed.  Wider connections are respected.

In other words, the protoartist paradigm is not the same as the emerging artist paradigm, even though both operate in matrifocal context

What began as a creative exercise several years ago has evolved into an unconscious routine.  I used to make believe, or run an “as if” frame, that said that if society is changing according to a hidden yet overarching dynamic, the future could be intuited or predicted by patterns or trends observable in the present.  I’d place myself in a meditative space and listen.

The deepest, most impact-filled presupposition that I live with is Descartes’ conclusion that because I am aware, I’ll accept that I exist.  Next in importance is this presupposition:  Because I experience feeling part of something larger than myself, I will accept the experience as valid, even though I began meditating almost 40 years ago with that experience as a goal.  In other words, I accept spiritual experience on a relative basis, based upon the fact that by seeking spiritual experience I assume that it exists.  As a student of Ericksonian hypnotherapy and as a follower of the work of the psychoanalyst/dolphin researcher/altered-state specialist John C. Lilly, I can relate to Lilly’s basic premise, “What I believe to be true is true or becomes true, within the limits to be found experientially or experimentally.”

Although there is a suggestion here that truth is relative, there is also a suggestion that our mind/self is so powerful a creative force that truth can be designed.

Listening for patterns, I sit in a deeply relativistic place, aware that my unconscious presuppositions deeply inform the patterns I can be aware of, and I am aware that my choice to believe that there is overarching pattern impacts what I perceive.

I theorize that there is primary process consciousness (the one time, one place, no opposites consciousness displayed by protohumans, small children, animals, the unconscious, dreams and the autistic), split consciousness (normal waking consciousness) and a third consciousness that features aspects of the other two.

So, when I engage in the exercise of seeking understanding, I use “as if.”  Placing myself in “as if,” also called “don’t know mind,” I encourage the emergence of patterns.  I get wet.  I’m playing with the notion that this kind of getting wet is becoming common.  I’m playing with the idea that grasping human origins and social change is best conducted outside an academic environment and inside the Internet, where the process of communication is showing signs of primary process, split consciousness and the unnamed transcendent third position all at once.

One of the current default beliefs among academics is that art was a contingent, accidental, emergent feature that resulted from the evolution of our unique large brains, language and self awareness.  Geoffrey Miller has suggested that perhaps we’ve got that direction reversed.  Miller writes that art drove our evolution.  I agree, and I would go a step further.  That which we experience as art is a direct reflection or manifestation of very early ontogenetic embryonic epigenetic process.  Art was encouraged to emerge in the adult of our species via neotenic runaway sexual selection, which emphasized song and dance.  Human adult consciousness in no small way reflects the actual creative process of life on earth.  Art is a direct reflection of that process.  We think like life creates.

Right now we are creating the Internet.

I’m thinking that the best way to understand ourselves is to share.  Giving our conjectures to the Internet, an automatic citation system embedding idea lineage into its very fabrication, we can relieve ourselves of the academic compulsion to father or mother every idea into a peer-reviewed journal, with every parent knowing exactly where every child is.  Yes, there is anonymity and loss of identity when words or works of art emerge and proliferate without it being obvious who might have been an “owner.”  This is the wet world of the Internet.  Boundaries are far less distinct.  Ownership is less important.  Control is not possible.

If we are going to understand human origins and societal evolution, we have to give up control.  The third consciousness that provides an understanding of the other two is one that presupposes that former boundaries can disappear.

For many, the question is:  How can we understand something if we don’t draw lines?

It’s OK to draw lines.  We just draw them with our temporary minds.  And, observe.