Jacqui Russell is the artistic director of Chicago Children’s Theater.  My good friend Arnold April mentioned to me the unique program that Jacqui manages at Agassiz Elementary School in Chicago, encouraged into existence by CAPE (Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education).  Arnold is CAPE’s creative director.

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

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

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

If autistic children can be encouraged to dance to rhythms, dancing to the same beat in a group, experiencing the mirroring of each other’s experience in a performance context, then perhaps bridges…

We live in a society that believes that it is pragmatic to presuppose that consciousness is contingent upon evolutionary conditions that led to its emergence.  Self awareness occurred by chance.  Academics, of course, embrace the claim that consciousness is unique.  But because it is not measurable and seems connected to humans only, it has been concluded in many sciences that it can be usefully ignored.  The autistic provide an ability to notice.

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

I’d been studying Asperger’s and autism in connection to human evolution for maybe ten years before it dawned on me, after reading Michael Fitzgerald’s Autism and Creativity, that Asperger’s was a feature of my childhood.  As I was growing up, people seemed opaque to me.  I was in speech therapy almost all those years.  I had a strange sense of humor.  I was astonishingly gullible.  My closest friend was a boy that I later realized had Asperger’s.  He was also a math genius and a musician.  I was a collector and an artist.

Over time, it grew clearer to me what other people were thinking and feeling, particularly regarding how they were relating to me.  My obsessions grew integrated with my goals.  I became far less split or self conflicted.

The split that I experienced had perhaps less to do with my Asperger’s tendencies than with a childhood characterized by extreme stress.  But, I’m not sure.

People with autism aren’t generally understood to display classic personality splits featuring conflicts with self, self deprecation or a deep feeling of personal responsibility for what is wrong.  That split would suggest a developed theory of mind, with a mind in conflict, assigning responsibility…

I grew up in a household with literally no religion.  My father was agnostic, my mom sort of Jewish.  She’s since been Unitarian and Catholic.  Almost 20 years ago I was dating a woman who had been raised Catholic, who was converting to Judaism, while my mother was converting from Judaism to Catholicism.  How Jewish was I raised?  Just now I had to go to Google to figure out how to spell “Judaism.”  I had the “a” and “i” reversed.

Nevertheless, I was raised according to one of the most basic tenets of Western society, that the unconscious maintains an agenda separate from that of the conscious mind, one that often conflicts with conscious goals and aspirations.  I was raised a Freudian.  High percentages of my father’s income went toward my parents’ and their children’s psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.  We did not go to temple.  We went to therapists.

I am almost 57.  In high school, I was in therapy with a Rogerian for 2.5 years.  In Florida, I was the client of an eclectic psychoanalyst for six years.  He studied with many of the New Age luminaries at Esalon in California.  Chicago has connected me with another eclectic practitioner for…

Light moves at a speed of 186,000 miles per second.  Speed as a concept is also integral to biology.  I hypothesize that the speed with which information passes between the two cerebral hemispheres impacts consciousness, behavior and personality.  And, whereas the basic unit of speed in physics is the kilometer or mile, in biology that unit is a generation.  Though maybe not.

Bernard Crespi has written a paper, Psychosis and Autism as Diametrical Disorders of the Social Brain, which focuses on several neurological features as influential in the etiology of particular diseases and conditions.  Corpus callosum size (the corpus callosum is the primary brain bridge between the two cerebral hemispheres) and anomalous dominance (differing cerebral hemisphere sizes) are two of those features, aspects of cerebral lateralization.  I would consider that corpus callosum size not only influences the ease and speed of information transfer, but that corpus callosum size influences the experience of self awareness or split consciousness.

There are correlations between degrees of cerebral lateralization, how much the two cerebral hemispheres vary, and conditions characterized by maturational delay (autism, Asperger’s, stuttering).  Degrees of handedness are influenced by this variable.  Other diseases and conditions are associated with right cerebral hemispheres not…

In the late 1960s and early 70s, I explored the work of Carlos Castaneda and Eric Berne as they explored the impact of internal dialog.  Castaneda sought to follow his guide, Don Juan, who gave advice to experience attention or perception without words.  Berne offered, in fascinating detail, the content of the internal dialogs we create.

Whereas Castaneda offered no dialog as an option, Berne preferred that we know what we are saying.

Eric Berne’s work focused on personal mythology, the stories we tell ourselves that we are so deeply, personally committed to that we neglect to inform ourselves that these stories represent choices we have made.  We seem to prefer the belief that we are not in control of the beliefs we embrace, leaving ourselves with stories that invest our lives with perspectives that determine our experience.

In addition to these dialogs and the content of the stories that we tell, there is the way we tell ourselves these stories.  Tone, timbre, intonation pattern, volume, emotional valence, vocabulary and even grammar contribute to the noncontent impact of an internal communication.  We manage our experience by describing the world in fashions that encourage particular interpretations and conclusions.  For example, if…

This August, I drove with my wife and son from Chicago to St. Louis to visit our first grandchild on his first birthday.  Nils is the son of Marcia’s daughter, Katie, and her husband, Dave.  It’s a five-hour drive.  We left at a little after 6:30 a.m.

I’m a big fan of the long-distance drive.  I went to college in Florida and frequently drove straight through from Chicago.  The experience was often accompanied by an altered state characterized by elation and a making of connections.  When my son, Elia, went to college in Asheville, North Carolina, I adored the ten round trips each year bringing him down or picking him up.  I often made the 10.5 hour trip with one stop.

On this St. Louis trip, I was concentrated on the collection of patterns or shapes for the video Elia and I were about to start.  In the video, I will narrate an explanation of neotenous human evolution while connecting that to social evolution and evolution in larger scales.  Accompanying the narration will be Elia’s music and photographs, and videos and images from other sources.  Before the trip to St. Louis, I collected from free-content CDs maybe 100 images, sorted…

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

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

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

Driving back from Hayward, Wisconsin, where I was fishing for Muskie last July, I had an interesting experience.  I took back roads for the first two hours, watching the transition from northland to farmland, paying close attention to roadside retail, building construction, trees, foliage, birds and cloud formations.  I was by myself.  The window was down.  No radio or tape was playing.

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,…

In the work of scientists, and specifically evolutionary psychologists, there are two unstated presuppositions that make their often elegant, jewel-like conclusions less valuable or useful.

The first presupposition is the usually unstated position that regarding consciousness, a larger consciousness can be assumed to be not present.  This potentially influences theorizing outcomes.  There is a heavy negative emotional valence assigned to theories that presuppose a grounding consciousness.  Some of these theories, for example creationism or intelligent design, are associated with irrational, nonscientific, mythological, constituency-based belief systems.  It is assumed that choosing a nonconsciousness position enhances theorizing capabilities and that a consciousness position is associated with mythology and a respect for non-sense-based conclusions.  Dawkins’ evangelical atheism is an example of evolutionary psychology’s tendency to lump together mythology-based faiths or beliefs with nonmythology, trans-consciousness hypotheses.

The second presupposition revolves around evolutionary psychology’s unstated presupposition that patrifocal social structure is the default social frame of human evolution.  Matrifocal social structure is rarely rejected; it is just ignored.  David Buss has done sterling work exploring mating conventions among people living in patrifocal social structure.  Studies cited in many works by evolutionary psychologists ignore matrilineal or matrifocal examples.  If it can be assumed that matrifocal social…

In evolutionary theory, what is central to the thesis and what is a contingent result of the central-thesis dynamic have everything to do with the society that the theory seeks to serve.  That very sentence can be interpreted in two ways depending on whether the theorist believes in a natural-selection-reductionist or an epigenetic-cooperative-grounding frame.  Either the most useful theory survives to become the zeitgeist paradigm, according to a survival-of-the-fittest point of view, or the community forms conclusions based upon information from a variety of sources, with conclusions reflecting a larger whole.

At this time, evolutionary conjecture often suggests that human self awareness, consciousness or split consciousness, however you say it, is a contingent outcome of prodigious synapse production.  Exponential brain growth has been hypothesized to be connected to the demands of unique environments, the demands of unique social environments, or, according to Geoffrey Miller, the demands of aesthetics.  Because the productions of culture didn’t emerge until long after the creation of a brain size that made culture fashionable, it’s been a mystery why a brain would grow that big.

And then there’s the issue of dramatically different brain sizes in contemporary humans resulting in an almost universal experience of self…

My father was a collector.  He maintained a stamp and coin collection.  He also had a large collection of tools, including the various gadgets and accoutrements targeted to achieving something useful around the house.  Dad had different scissors for different uses, different kinds of tape, different measuring instruments, various ways to bind things together, assorted glues, etc.  Each little intervention had a firm location in his various drawers.

I didn’t attempt to reproduce his organizational obsession, but I did find solace in collections.  I had rocks, insects, stamps, coins, miniature dinosaurs, comics, all manner of boyhood hobbies.  None lasted past a couple years, except for my comic and dinosaur affections.  I never acquired Dad’s propensity to store and immediately retrieve everything he owned.  Nevertheless, I seem to retain a certain amount of Dad’s ability to focus.

I have friends, relatives and clients who are into sports.  Their memory for statistics is often astonishing.  I fish for muskie in Wisconsin most summers.  The ability of passionate muskie fishermen to remember the length of fish caught with particular lures in particular places in specific lakes under unique weather conditions over several decades borders on the ability of savants.

I’ve described two possible…

There seems to be at least two evolutionary processes that, at best, are tangentially referred to.  They are so simple as to often feel irrelevant.  I’m wondering how many more of these processes are floating around out there, unremarked.

One process is the back-and-forth dance between homogeneity and heterogeneity.  Over time barriers are built.  Life on the two sides of the barrier unfolds uniquely.  With time, the barrier comes down and there is a proliferation of the new as what was formerly separate builds unique hybrids.  Eventually, a new homogeneity sets in.  Then new barriers are built.

This paradigm is integral to explanations of natural selection.  Populations have to segregate to form varieties and species.  With each new species, the larger system transforms.  The dance of homogeneity and heterogeneity compels an almost infinite variety as it unfolds on many scales and at many locations over time.

The process of homogeneity and heterogeneity compels new forms upon separation and new forms upon combination.  Each new form compels the emergence of its complementary opposite, a process that operates, hypothetically, at all scales of existence.  Socially, the separation of nations encourages unique cultures.  Barriers come down and unique hybrids are encouraged.  Personally, the…

Thomas S.  Kuhn in his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions describes the way that science textbooks are written that results in the destruction of student abilities to understand how science evolves.  Textbooks are written from the perspective of the current paradigm.  The history of a discipline is told as if all discoveries unfolded along a path leading to contemporary insights.  Left out of textbooks are the unique world views retained by the succession of paradigms.  Past unresolved, nonintegrated anomalies get discarded as the story of the current paradigm is told.  Anomalies are the doorways to revolutions.  With old, unintegrated anomalies ignored, science students are inducted into a society with secrets.  Disciplines become amnesiac.  Individuals within a discipline don’t know what they don’t know.

A very peculiar thing is happening to time and space.  We are experiencing an elimination of time and space in societal relations.  As individuals, we are experiencing a shift in identity.

Several hundred years ago, we had no watches.  In Western society, a vague sense of linear time accompanied those with access to resources.  They could tell the time.  For the rest, church bells bonged out the hour.

Fifty years ago, we all had analog watches that…

It’s interesting how influential barriers and speed of communication are upon systems and their abilities to achieve goals.

With a brain, I observe dramatically different forms of consciousness exhibited depending upon varying degrees of communication between cerebral hemispheres.  Seamless communication suggests primary process, animal, autistic, nonreflective consciousness.  Inhibited communication compels self-conscious, self-aware, often confused, alienated and modern, reflexive frames of reference.  A single society may profit from both paradigms.  We need our artists, mystics, businesspeople and politicians.

In our society, I also observe dramatically different forms of consciousness exhibited.  Different individuals within a society may produce a balance, thus offering a society a multiplicity of forms.  Still, a society may produce tendencies describable by how influential barriers and speed of communication are upon societal systems and their abilities to achieve societal goals.

In an individual, seamless cerebral communication may prevent the emergence of individual-driven creativity with no relative experience of different times, different places or what a thing may be if a thing is not.  In a society characterized by massive barriers and poor communications, a disappearing of those barriers may have an opposite effect.  Instead of a diminution of self awareness, a society without barriers that follows a society…

If changing the rates and timing of human maturation results in more or less self awareness or degrees of split consciousness when cerebral hemispheres and corpus callosums adjust to varying levels of testosterone and estrogen, then might there be a macro, universe version of this process?

Okay, this is WAY out there regarding an exploration of hypothetical biological processes and their possible application to universal processes.  Nevertheless, there is a website that explores the possible ramifications of evolutionary developmental biological theory as regards the ontogeny of our universe.  These folks posit that if you can apply the theory of natural selection to how the universe acquired its characteristics, then you can do the same thing with complementary theories of evolution that suggest that the environment can influence evolution in a single generation.

What I’m playing with here is the suggestion that each of us exhibits split consciousness, which is enhanced by having two cerebral hemispheres that are not the same size with a corpus callosum small enough that it inhibits communication between the two hemispheres.  I’m presupposing that consciousness already exists, consciousness evidenced by primary process, defined as awareness of only one time, one place and no…

There seems to be a connection between physics and an understanding of how split consciousness emerges from consciousness in human ontogeny.  I don’t know the connection between a physicist’s insights regarding the relativity of time and the invention of the atomic bomb.  Still, if my conjectures are correct regarding the rate and timing of maturation (testosterone managing the rate and estrogen the timing), then we have in our hands a possible understanding of how split consciousness originates.

I presuppose that consciousness exists.  Consciousness is a feature of the universe and existence (and nonexistence).  Humans evidence split consciousness when, during early development and maturation, maturation is managed by changes in rate and timing.  If, indeed, we can observe testosterone and estrogen directly affecting maturation, then we are in the position to observe the emergence of split consciousness under varying ontological circumstances.

It is possible that we can control, adjust and modify self awareness.  That which we have identified as peculiarly human, that which makes us special and unique, may be understandable and manageable.

Without the presupposition that consciousness is a feature of the system, the emergence of split consciousness is instead the emergence of consciousness.  This suggests an existential crisis second…

Over the last year, I’ve experienced an integration of society and biology as I’ve observed the dynamic whereby neoteny and acceleration influence biological and societal evolution in identical ways.  Barriers between several disciplines have come down as I’ve seen heterochronic dynamics merge formerly separate models, interpreting endocrinological, neuropsychological, anthropological, evolutionary biological and psychological processes as a single, seamless whole.

I am not particularly smart.  I’m a slow learner and have trouble with anything involving mathematics.  I’m technologically impaired, though I have some facility with certain pieces of design software.  I do have a relatively unique relationship with my unconscious, not uncommon among artists and mystics, but perhaps unusual in someone exploring biological and social models.  I often feel like I’m being led on a treasure hunt, guided by an impish, loving unconscious.

I’m having that feeling now.

Last night, I kept waking up with an idea that seems to want to be integrated into the biological/social model that I’ve been calling “The Theory of Waves.”  The recent addition to the model, estrogen controlling the timing of ontogeny, has been compelling me to turn my attention to physics.

Somehow, a part of me is convinced that physicist’s insights regarding the relative…

There is a process that we engage in that is characterized by our observing changes in information over time, noting trends and estimating where we will be in the future.  Our lives are filled with charts that provide an image of where we may end up at some particular point.  Usually what is implied is something scary.  Gore’s pictorial representations of greenhouse gases are an example.

I engage in a similar process, focusing on patterns that reflect both personal experience and my social environment.  What interests me are evolution, transformation, consciousness and interconnection.  The news might suggest some specific thing is bound to get worse because there is an evident pattern to support the conclusion, and then it focuses on that thing because it drives viewers to return.  I also have a criterion for what I focus on.  My criterion is that what I follow has to be interesting.

So, reality has little to do with what the media choose to share.  Reality has little to do with what I choose to focus on and write about.  Still, whether a song describes reality isn’t as important as whether the song succinctly expresses feelings and a point of view.  That is…

“The classified ads (and stock-market quotations) are the bedrock of the press.  Should an alternative source of easy access to such diverse daily information be found, the press will fold.”  Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, p. 207, 1964.

Marshall McLuhan studied the effects of speed and time on social change.  One of his seminal insights was that media mold how we perceive the world, not only by the content that is distributed, but by how specifically media enhance our ability to access information.

It has become evident that the media are about politics.  How we communicate influences the distribution of power and authority.  More powerful than any political manifesto is the way that the words might be conveyed.

There are three foundation, democratizing power centers.  Education controls the ability for an individual to synthesize information.  Voting integrity empowers an individual to act upon the information.  Media enhance access to information.  With fundamental transformations in media, education and voting integrity get a boost.

What we are observing now is an exponential increase in the speed and quality of information distribution.  Everything is changing as a result of this transformation.

Theorists Shirky, Rheingold and others describe the result of barriers coming down with…

In physics there is the phenomenon where the closer a traveler comes to the speed of light, the more separate one’s “time” becomes from the traveler’s place of origin.  Einstein imagined time while riding a beam of light as if it were a train and concluded that time is relative.

In the physics of biology and social change, identity is a variable that, like time, can change.  What is necessary to be able to trace transformations in identity is a model of biological and social evolution that embraces consciousness or awareness as a default feature of the system.  This is quite different from our present predilection to presuppose that the underlying system does not exhibit consciousness or awareness.  Note the works of contemporary, respected evolutionary psychologists Dawkins, Dennett and Miller.  There is an assumption built upon an allegiance to natural selection being the only necessary process to drive evolution.  That assumption is that because god is not necessary for evolution, god does not need to exist.  All three are atheists.

Identity is changing.  And, like the rider on a light beam, we have a difficult task to evaluate the relativistic nature of our experience without access to an alternative landscape. …

I can’t exactly remember when the chills first started.  When I was in summer camp when five or six, I remember concentrating on placing my right hand over my left side to be able to say the Pledge of Allegiance.  I then felt chills, vibrations up my back, because I was feeling part of something I did not understand but I knew was good, something larger than myself.

Over time the chills or vibrations would come and go.  The feeling always accompanied the experience that I’d been moved.  From what I can tell, this is universal.

In 1980 and 1981, I went through a Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) trainers program to become a practitioner of NLP.  I was fascinated by the communications model.  Fifty-eight psychotherapists, psychoanalysts and psychologists, one businessman and I went through the training.  The focus was on addressing and achieving patients’ psychological goals.  There was a secondary emphasis concentrating on communicating directly with another person’s unconscious.

The work of Milton H. Erickson was integral to NLP insights.  Erickson was a hypnotherapist who developed a number of new techniques, wrote books describing those techniques and taught many therapists how to use hypnotherapy to advance patient goals.  Erickson died in…

During work or life, I don’t generally write down ideas when something occurs to me to write about.  It’s so clear that my conscious self has so little influence on what I do that I just give in to what emerges.  I continue to be astonished at what comes out.

Just now, seeking to find one of those ideas that have been floating around in my mind for the last few days, I realize it is the shape of the idea that I am looking for.  I’m not trying to remember the words but the form.  If I can grasp its form, the words follow.

I’m one of these people that remember phone numbers by the way they look, feel and sound.  The keypad on the telephone has a shape when I punch the numbers.  I recall the pattern, the motion I make and the beeping melody.  The number sequence is the result of other sense interventions.

I go to the brain surgeon today.  He will tell Marcia and me which intervention he recommends for the cerebral aneurysm behind my left eye.  All interventions have risks, but supposedly fewer than 10% of the operations result in stroke.  I’m wondering how…

Evolutionary theory has been encouraged to grow in the direction of what society believes about itself.  When we in the West were committed to the mythology of the Judeo-Christian ethic, we concluded that life emerged as a direct result of transcendent intervention in a prescribed time period.  Darwin was heavily influenced by contemporary forces that included the belief that humans could observe patterns, draw conclusions and make predictions without the influence of a universal god.  Drawing upon Linnaeus, Paley, Malthus, Smith and Lyell, Darwin created a theory of evolution that seemed to integrate both a reverence for the subject and respect for enlightenment and intellectual independence.  In choosing among Darwin’s three theories, society embraced the theory of natural selection, which directly reflected a material, stratified, industrializing West.

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…

As society transforms, nations integrate and hierarchy becomes less efficient than barrierless transparency, our idea of how evolution operates will evolve.  Darwin’s theory of natural selection will feel strangely lacking as an explanatory paradigm.  Complementing theories will take center stage.  The process has begun with the emergence of evolutionary developmental biology.  It includes an understanding that genetics and the environment work together to impact how individuals develop.  It also has an understanding that genes are programmed to interpret and integrate environmental cues when guiding growth.

We will become savvy to the understanding that how humans treat humans within society determines how we believe that evolution operates.  Capitalism enhanced by horizontal communications technology will encourage evolutionary biological pluralism.

Still, there is something awry, something missing.  There is little talk of single theories that integrate biology and society within a single evolutionary paradigm.  How would you even begin to do so?

In these strange times that we live in, the political Left, those heralds of societal horizontal innovation, has Darwin’s theory of natural selection as the default metaphor for how humans treat humans as its most basic metaphor.  Only the far Left, the anarchists, have some intuition for evolutionary alternatives when they…