In the EA book, at this point, I tell readers that in order to shorten the book I moved material from it to this site. So after a few excerpts, you’ll find that material.
‘ADDITIONS
241212 This is an excerpt from scientist and sci-fi author Simon Morden’s Bright Morning Star:
This novel is an allegorical tale about an alien probe being sent down to the Earth from the mothership. It is intelligent and programmed to seek, collect, and transmit back all the information it finds. It has no knowledge whatsoever about what it will find. It lands in a war zone where one side of a civil war is being sponsored by a nearby powerful state. It sees partisans being murdered by the invaders. It has no idea what to think about any of this. It meets and makes a few human ‘friends.’ Via the internet, it quickly learns many languages and much else as it scans the vast cyberspace of humanity. When the news of its arrival becomes public it turns into a massive media event and the inevitable conspiracy theories quickly multiply. About halfway through the book, in talking about our robots to he it states the following:
“Their makers-you-and my makers-who I couldn’t tell you a great deal about- seem to be very similar in some ways. You both had the urge to explore beyond the limits of your biological lives, to examine and weigh and measure, to compare and contrast, to record and preserve, to expand knowledge and understanding. My makers found you before you found them. That was all. You wouldn’t have sent one of your primitive, barely capable robots to learn about them. You would have sent something like me.
I was different from you. Clearly, very different. But I wasn’t different from the things that you made. I was comprehensible. My mission too. If I had landed some hundred years earlier, I would have been most probably attacked by everyone I might meet (look up, War of the Worlds, look up Orson Wells, look up H. G. Wells). NASA and the USSR and Hollywood had normalized me in the century between. I was, to some – most – people, something you took video of, rather than try to shoot.
Why, then, would some still try to destroy me? They had the same information as everyone else – a new friend had told me that this was part of the global information sharing system, and that claim appeared to be accurate. I wondered what would happen if I typed in her name. Then I did type in her name and discovered the media.
I found video and pictures of me standing with my friend in front of a hospital. That at least was true. But many of the words, the words written about me and the words spoken about me were false. Some of the things I categorically denied were being promoted as true. I was the advance party of an alien race bent on world domination. I was going to steal your air, your water, your women. Why would anyone claim I was going to steal your women? Women were free agents. They were not ‘your’ women in any proprietary way. I didn’t understand.
I tried to find out what role the media was supposed to play in your society. They were purportedly to disseminate factual information in a concise and timely manner. But as I read and watched more, their secondary function, to provide opinion – and I was unable to ascertain whose opinion or how it was derived, over a nebulous and ill-defined proposition of a position – appeared to dominate. The media were both presenting distorted facts and then telling people what to believe based on incomplete or inaccurate data, while maintaining that they were doing the opposite.
I have found this extraordinary. I couldn’t comprehend how such a situation had arisen, yet it was clear that the media, had a central responsibility for information distribution. They were allowed extra rights to gather information. They had a special position within society. Many of the people who appeared on the broadcast media were high status individuals. That I couldn’t quite work out what they actually did had to be down to my lack of awareness.
And that was where I started to understand. You were not rational beings. I had assumed that given the same information, each of you would reach the same conclusion. This was not so…..
Some people prefer to believe the fictions rather than the facts. Yet they manage to function within the broader society, interacting with each other and acknowledging that most people they met didn’t share their basis of reality. I was a logical creature. I believe my inputs. You were not, and you didn’t.
Or rather, you mitigated your inputs through a filter of your beliefs, and the more divergent or contradictory a particular fact was, the more likely you were to distort, misinterpret or disregard it. And some went further: seemingly widely accepted and uncontroversial facts were deemed part of a program of deliberate misinformation if they had the potential to undermine a rigid belief system.
You had landed on your moon, taken photographs, recorded short movies, collected samples of rock and left equipment there. Some of the men who left their footprints in the lunar dust were still alive. The rocks they had retrieved were still available for examination. Yet some insisted that none of these events had happened, that it was impossible for them to have happened, and for everyone involved – tens of thousands of people – were engaged in a conspiracy to prevent the truth from becoming known.
This was just an unimportant and relatively trivial example. Far more serious ones existed, where genuine existential threats were being ignored or argued against, simply due to primacy of opinion over fact. If you continue this way, you will inevitably do serious and possibly irreparable harm to your civilization, your biosphere, and your planet. That there were a great many of you multiplied the damage that you could do.
But you had made it this far, despite everything. Your constant wars, your lack of knowledge, your inadequate capacity to reason, your violent tribalism and your perverse individualism. Soon, you would be heading for the stars, if only you survive that long. I tried to calculate some probabilities of that, but none of my predictions showed any substantial chance for your species. Perhaps I was missing some factors that would improve the odds. I would have to talk to more of you, and not just those who appeared to benignly tolerate my presence. I would have to talk to those who saw me as an enemy. That would be interesting.
It goes on as he comes to understand his own processes and role in our world. He figures out how to manipulate the media and political systems for our own good. Like I said, a fun allegorical novel. He wonders if he himself was programmed by his makers.
241015 Steve McIntosh is one of my favorite integral thinkers and author. He wrote an excellent intro Integral Consciousness,. Then the wonderful Evolutions Purpose, then the Presence of the Infinite, then Developmental Politics, and as I write this there’w another one I know nothing about coming soonYou can find h9s material here https://www.stevemcintosh.com
Intelligence is the capacity to perceive the essential, the what is; and to awaken this capacity, in oneself and in others, is education.’
Jiddu Krishnamurti
This chapter will present some ideas, relationships, and practices that have informed my beliefs, thinking, relationships, and behavior. After some initial considerations, I’ll present the material discussed below using the Quadrants system from Ken Wilber’s Integral metasystem. These are the inside and outside of the individual and the collective.
The Integral Worldview — AQAL
Ken Wilber, in part, developed this system from the mindset that no reasonable thinker in a given field could be all wrong. He wondered if there was some way to fit them all into a matrix to understand the relationship between all significant areas of human endeavor and the thinking, concepts, and systems that go with them. Think law, education, psychology, art, spirituality, medicine, etc. In this quest, he took a sabbatical from his usual life and spent a couple of years isolated, during which he saw only four people. He had notes on some 200 different systems scattered around his house, up and down the stairs, covering tables, etc. As described below, he first came up with the quadrants.
I studied Ken Wilber’s extensive work on Integral Theory in the first decade of this century. It dramatically improved my understanding of what goes on in my internal and external worlds. I had read several of his earlier books decades before and was satisfied with that. Then, around 2000, I started hearing more about ’Integral’ and became curious. I picked up his A Brief History of Everything and was launched into quite the intellectual journey, for which I am ever so grateful.
One problem, though, is that once one has an integral perspective, it’s harder to have meaningful conversations with those who don’t have it when talking about some sociocultural topic. Trumpism is a great example. From an integral perspective, I understand why many evangelical Christians could support such a dishonest, immoral man, while many of Bernie Sanders’ supporters couldn’t support Hillary Clinton. Traditional people need a strong leader to feel safe and tend to support them no matter what. Moderns hope for competence, and some wealthy could support him for the tax breaks they expected and received. His immorality and general idiocy put off Postmodernism. With their antipathy towards hierarchies and elitism, they tend to attack their leaders. They’re always looking for the perfect candidate, who never comes. This is all a lot more complicated, but hopefully, this gives you a sense of it.
The Integral metatheory is a brilliant original exposition of the comprehensive Integral worldview emerging in the mind of humanity. All areas of knowledge, experience, and academic disciplines fit into it. Here, I’m presenting a simple overview of it. It is the sixth major emergence of a new way of being in the human mind as we know it. For whatever reason, thru some mysterious process, radically new ways of being and perceiving the world have come into the sense of humanity. Each brings its gifts and strengths, as well as its shortcomings. These are discussed below.
There’s the phenomenon that things start to change when approximately 10 percent of a population reaches a new stage. When this percentage of Americans became Modern, we had our Revolutionary War. American history rarely teaches that the war’s harshest anger and violence was not between the Americans and the British but between the Traditional Royalists and the Modern Revolutionaries.
In the 1960s–70s, when 10 percent of Americans became Postmodern, we had a push for environmentalism, civil rights, feminism, etc. This doesn’t mean that everyone’s minds have changed. For instance, in the 1950s South, many people felt sure that Blacks were inferior. It was obvious to them. As the Civil Rights movement grew, they may have felt the same way, yet they would have known that many people didn’t believe the same thing.
In his book, Developmental Politics: How America Can Grow a Better Version of Itself, Integral thinker and author Steve McIntosh offers an Integral approach to reducing the problematic dichotomy in our culture. It would help if people at different stages could appreciate each other’s virtues rather than focus on their differences. Wilber talks about the Integral process of including the best of each stage and transcending it.
Compassionate Self-Care
This is the work of Stephen R. Schwartz. I learned about his teaching in The Sun magazine in, I believe, 1993. It really helped me engage in… well… compassionate self-care. The following quotes are excerpted from the transcript of one of his talks. More on the site. He begins with:
‘Compassionate self-care is a path of kindness and respect for ourselves. It offers a way of relating to our internal experience, which is not pushed, coerced, or manipulated. In this path, there are no categorical labels, no demands, no success or failure. There isn’t anything to achieve, get to, or make. No ideal state of consciousness is proposed that is any better than the one we find ourselves in right now. We allow ourselves to feel just what we are feeling, to breathe consciously, and to stay attentive to the body. We don’t let ourselves become confused by thoughts which suggest to us what our feelings mean.’
And later:
‘Emotional healing does not depend on the process of figuring something out. It does not depend on conceptual understanding but rather on a return of the feeling of life to a natural biological rhythm. Emotional healing involves allowing the feelings to enter into the basic pulsations of the body. This is accomplished in part by separating those feelings from the arrhythmic clutch of thought.’
Getting Real
This is the work of Susan Campbell, PhD, and has been particularly helpful to me in improving my relationships. Here’s a brief summation from her. More on the site.
‘The Getting Real practices help us free ourselves from the fears and limited thinking of the ego-mind so that we can meet each moment with our open, authentic, loving presence.’
To be honest with oneself and others is the foundational practice of living a genuinely mature life. I doubt that any of us boomers were raised in a family where being real was expertly practiced. It certainly wasn’t in the culture. There were better and worse families, times, and places to be raised, and those with more fortunate ones should be grateful and understand the deficits and challenges of those less fortunate. This writing is for those fortunate enough to survive and eventually prosper.
Susan’s books and workshops are most helpful. Her approach to teaching Getting Real skills is simple, straightforward, and pragmatic. I’ve been blessed to get to know her well enough to know that she ‘walks her talk’. She is as free a person as I’ve ever known. Free from inner insecurities, contradictions, and self-delusions and skillful in her relationship life in all spheres. You can watch her Zoom call on the occasion of her 80th birthday (search YouTube for ‘Susan Campbell 80’). It’s rich to listen to a wise person reflect upon their life and answer questions from their audience.
In 1980, she published The Couple’s Journey: Intimacy as a Path to Wholeness. And, while there are now many books on this topic, there’s a question as to whether or not there were any earlier such books. If you know of any, I’d like to hear about them. She’s published eight books, including Getting Real (2001), Truth in Dating (2003), Saying What’s Real (2005), Five-Minute Relationship Repair (2015, co-authored with John Grey, PhD), and Triggered to Tranquil (2021).
Energy Medicine
Energy Medicine: The Scientific Basis, Second Edition by James Oschman, PhD, is a revolutionary composite of biophysics research. Jim (I can call him that because he’s an old friend) is an influential scientist, not one of the popular pseudoscientists playing on the naivete of their listeners (Deepak Chopra and others of that ilk come to mind). Jim has done vital work. As the title says, he has developed a theory (not just a hypothesis) for how energy medicine works. This book is comprehensive, as he drew upon many scientific studies, especially in the fairly recent appreciation and exploration of biophysics. The book has hundreds of endnotes, chapter by chapter.
There’s much more in the book.
ADDITIONS
240905 Intergenerational Trauma
I didn’t discuss Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing trauma work in my book because I’ve only had one brief experience with it. That said, he is brilliant*, and his work is thought by many people to be uniquely effective for treating deep traumas. I’ve been reading his An Autobiography of Trauma: A Healing Journey. Among other things he talks about how valuable psychedelics and MDMA have been for his personal healing but that’s not what is of interest to me re this post.
He talks about fascinating research on intergenerational trauma. He cites a study by Brian Dias at Emory University School of Medicine, in which mice were exposed to the scent of cherry blossoms and given an electric shock. This was repeated until they were conditioned. When exposed to the cherry blossom scent later they strongly reacted with fear. This is normal Pavlovian conditioning. However what is very interesting is that they bred these mice for five generations and at the smell of cherry blossoms, but not to other scents, those later mice reacted with as much or more fear as their original ancestors Also of interest was the finding that the fear response was stronger when the original traumatized parent was male.
This further motivated Dr Levine to look into how to help his clients heal from such deep-rooted ancestral trauma. He mentioned this would be of special interest in dealing with traumatized groups.
* I read his Ph.D. thesis after hearing him talk at the Rolf Institute in 1978. It won the award for the best thesis in physiology that year. He had been studying the neurological responses of prey animals when threatened. Under extreme circumstances they went into a kind of death feint, lying still with their sympathetic and parasympathetic systems cranking. Besides what it did to their internal experience. it could also dissuade a predator who had attacked them out of instinctual hunting response rather than hunger, so it might wander away.
He observed that in such situations there would be waves of energetic muscular discharge through their bodies as they returned to homeostasis. With us humans, given our memories and self-reflection, traumas are not so easily resolved. He mathematically modeled how when one’s sympathetic and parasympathetic are both active there’s a point where it’s like falling over and edge and it is extremely difficult to return to a healthy homeostasis. His SE work is, in part, about how to deal with such situations. He has many talks on YouTube, etc.
240902 As you’ve seen in the book, I’ve found Susan Campbell’s Getting Real work to be one of the most useful bodies of knowledge and practice for living a better life. Being able to be real with oneself is the most fundamental skill set or attainment or however one thinks about it. I’ve subscribed to her substack.
240820 I listened to this two hour conversation this morning and feel so inspired and empowered. One will need to some moderate familiarity with Ken Wilber and Integral. I’ll be incorporating things I got from this into my various forms of outreach.
This is Steve discussing some important distinctions about polarities as related to socio-political conflicts.
240613 This is a brief talk by integral thinker Steve McIntosh giving an Integral perspective on the current college campus anti-Israel / anti-American protests.
A Digression
Mathematician Ilya Prigogine is known for his theory of dissipative structures regarding complex structures. As stated, he posits that all kinds of systems, as they become more complex, reach an unstable stage, which causes them to some degree regress or collapse or reform at a higher level.
If the catastrophic chaos wins, whether from, in our case, devastating climate change or nuclear war or whatever, civilization as we’ve known it will no longer be sustainable. What that would look like is a common meme in science fiction. I highly recommend The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson, who combines facts, reasonable predictions, and fantasy. There’s more about this book in the following Lower Right quadrant. Then there’s Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and many more.
If a more enlightened humanity arises, there’s science fiction of a positive nature. There’s Aldous Huxley’s Island, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Pacific Edge: Three Californias, Starhawk’s The Fifth Sacred Thing, and more. I can only speculate on all this, so I’ll leave it to others. However, it is fun to think about all of this if one can do it without becoming depressed.
For thoughtful people, paying attention, knowing the sad truths, and not getting down about them is challenging. That doesn’t do any good and can be psychologically harmful. Many therapists have encouraged clients to go on a news fast.
This quadrant is our subjective realm, the internal aspects of our lives, including our feelings and thoughts, and all that goes into them. Some of these are related to our anatomy and physiology, as discussed in the Upper Right Quadrant. Others have to do with the external influences on our lives, as discussed in the two lower quadrants. I’m proceeding in a way that may help inform you in a manner that serves the overall purpose of this material.
Signs of Self-Actualized People
This is a most relevant topic. An internet search brings up multiple systems. Abraham Maslow’s approach is the most commonly cited. He has a list of characteristics and practices. It gets humorous when you find he has lists of 9, 10, 12, or even 15 different characteristics. I assume that’s good because his thought was evolving. He got his initial insight from Kurt Goldstein. Carl Rogers also has a version of these.
Here’s the 9-characteristic list: Self-actualized people are purposeful, accept themselves, live in reality, accept their limitations, are self-starters, put their strengths to work, don’t get influenced by others, have a problem-solving mindset, and dare to venture into the unknown. This list is fine, but a little pedestrian for my tastes. There’s nothing about spirituality, love, etc., in it. Moving along:
Howard Gardner, in his Frames of Mind book, proposes these as human intelligences:
-
-
- Musical-rhythmic and harmonic
- Visual-spatial
- Linguistic-verbal
- Logical-mathematical
- Bodily-kinesthetic
- Interpersonal
- Naturalistic
- Existential
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He says that IQ tests only measure the third and fourth ones. He describes intelligence as the ability to learn or solve problems, a bio-psychological potential to process information. He says there is only a weak correlation among them. I found it interesting to review the list, thinking about mine for better and worse.
Fluid and Crystallized Intelligences
These categories are especially useful in understanding how our intelligences shift with age. They develop together through adolescence, and fluid intelligence strengthens until midlife when it decreases and crystallized intelligence increases.
Fluid intelligence is flexible. It involves processing new information, reasoning, problem-solving, and understanding the relationships between things. It helps us deal with complex data. It isn’t dependent on experience or education. It drives creativity and accomplishment. With aging, it decreases. If a person’s life has been driven by their competence in this intelligence, they may become frustrated as their abilities in these areas decrease. Entrepreneurs, engineers, scientists, mathematicians, etc., are most competent when they are younger.
Crystallized intelligence develops as we have life experiences gathering information and understanding. It enhances different skills, such as teaching, mentoring, and philosophizing.
IQ tests aren’t very useful in measuring these kinds of intelligence. Fluid intelligence can be improved by engaging in challenging problems, seeking novelty, engaging in creative activities, and stimulating socialization. Crystalized intelligence can be enhanced by studying and acquiring new helpful information.
Being able to comfortably and competently make this shift is an essential life skill. It took me a while. As I aged and noticed my decline in fluid intelligence, I thought I was becoming senile and stupid. Why couldn’t I do arithmetic in my head? Why couldn’t I figure out how to move some crypto from an exchange to a cold wallet, etc.? Coming to understand this shift in intelligence reduced that stress. Among other things, I now get younger associates to help me with some of these kinds of activities and use my calculator more. I now have a greater appreciation for the processes through which I have become wiser. I discuss this more in Chapter 8, The Nitty Gritty of Aging.
Kegan’s Stages of Development
Many schemas for this have been proposed. Here, I’ll paraphrase psychologist Robert Kegan’s system. He points out that, ideally, individuals transition to higher stages of development, through which we gain increased awareness of how we are and operate in the world. We develop more effective levels of competence in our activities and relationships — increasing maturity and, over time, wisdom.
He describes this progression as a transformation through five stages. Many variables exist, such as genetics, family origin, and physical and social environments. Most people don’t develop past the middle stages, which is okay. There’s no obligation. We all have stories; those doing well should remember the benefits we received as acts of grace or random complexities.
Kegan put it so elegantly simply:
Personal growth occurs when that which is subjective becomes objective.
By ‘subjective’, he means the things that form our personality that we aren’t aware of: motivations, behaviors, assumptions, and ingrained stories about ourselves and the world. For something to be objective, you must see it as a separate entity.
Everyday examples of this are uncountable. Imagine someone triggered as some unhealed psychic wound has been activated. If a mate had cheated on someone and they haven’t healed that, their jealousy button could be pushed as they see a current partner interacting with another attractive person. Someone who was criticized a lot as a child might be hyperreactive to criticism as an adult. When one can objectively see these kinds of triggered episodes as an ‘Oh right — this is my old conditioning coming up’, they are reduced and perhaps finally eliminated.
This is the maturation process. It is an increase in awareness process. It is a becoming more conscious process and less attached process. It takes practice. Remember that the boundaries between the stages are fluid as you go through this. One will have characteristics of neighboring stages. There will be advances and setbacks as we stagger through our life stages.
Stage One is the unconscious, reactive, impulsive mind of young children. I heard a fun story on a Sam Harris podcast about a couple of neuroscientists who were about to lose it over how their two-year-old was acting out. Their irritability disappeared when one almost hollered, “But she has only four neurons in her amygdala!” They laughed, being reminded that when a young child may seem to be intentionally tormenting you, it is an immature unconscious response and not a planned attack.
Stage Two is the imperial mind of adolescence. Given their higher level of cognitive development, it can be harder to recognize that while they are intentionally being obnoxious, it is still out of their control. One of those is a 14-year-old girl in my extended family right now. I talked to my partner about it, and she said, “I was awful at that age. It wasn’t a good day if I hadn’t made my mother cry at least once.” At this adolescent stage, subjective self-interests drive the person. They tend to want what they want and want it now. They often have strong feelings and can’t understand the efforts and issues required to get what they want, which can leave them frustrated and blaming others. Becoming objective means knowing your needs. A Stage Two mind may be very self-conscious and deceptive in relating to others.
Stage Three is the socialized mind. It is the most common stage of adult maturity. It’s about half of the adults. The subjective involves relationships, while the objective owns our needs, life choices, and desires. Stage Three people can work with and care about others more than earlier. It is a conformist stage, where they adopt the external values and ideologies of the greater society’s family, friends, social groups, and elements. They don’t want to alienate those whose opinions they care about. They seek external validation and can be easily swayed by group pressure.
Stage Four is the self-authoring mind of about a third of the population. The subjective is our sense of ourselves as the creators of our lives. The objective is to see our relationship dynamics for what they are. People can question their earlier understandings of themselves and their world and create and manage their views and behaviors. They take responsibility for their feelings and actions. Their beliefs can be more fluid.
Stage Five is the interconnected mind, which is rare, perhaps 2–3% of the population. This is a stage of more enlightened awareness. The subjective still identifies with a fixed sense of self. We are more fluid in the objective, creatively acting in each moment as appropriate. We can hold multiple perspectives.
Telepathy
Yes (depending on what one means by that). Is it reading thoughts, perceiving images, sensing feelings, a gestalt of these, etc.? This is an interesting topic that is outside the purview of this manuscript. There have been many good studies, e.g., where one person would look at a playing card or an image, and someone in the next room or continent picked up the image far beyond random chance. Mostly, mainstream scientists don’t want to believe this kind of research, so they don’t. I was told a ‘letter to the editor’ stream in Science or Nature magazine some years ago raised the question: If a study was done correctly proving this kind of telepathy, would you believe it? Many respondents said they wouldn’t because it was too outside their belief system and would cause too much consternation or something.
Many people, mainly couples, have found themselves thinking about the same thing at the same time when there was nothing in the previous conversation or moment that had any relationship to what came up. There are many documented stories of situations where a parent had a dream, waking vision, or strong premonition about their child in some awful situation.
One of those happened in my family. I was burning a brush pile in my yard and had been told to use kerosene. This time, I was out of it, so I used gasoline. I poured it on the pile, stepped back, and lit a match, and BOOM, the gasoline vapor cloud ignited with me in it. I got quite the flash burn on my face and arms. As the neighbors came and I waited while they called an ambulance, my mother called to see how I was doing. That was the only time she ever did in all the years of that part of my life. I can’t prove that it wasn’t just a random occurrence.
Millions of us know firsthand that psychedelics can enhance telepathic experiences of various kinds. Once again, language is inadequate for the task. For me, it has only rarely been that I’ve clearly gotten someone else’s actual thoughts. It’s more of a feeling that almost has the senses in it. It is very specific to what and who the other person or persons are. Everyone has their own ‘flavor’. This itself is on a continuum. You may be very aware of a person in the room being there/here.
The Hedonic Treadmill
This is the term for how humans generally remain at the same relative level of happiness independent of changes in circumstances. We each have a range of our usual sense of well-being. What’s so interesting is that whether we get something we think is really good — winning a lottery — or something terrible – going to jail or becoming permanently disabled —, except in exceptionally negative experiences, we return to our original range. All the more integrated person can do is keep themself at the higher end of their range more of the time.
That said, another given is that in almost every moment, while our life could be somewhat better, it could almost certainly be much, even much, much worse. It doesn’t seem fair somehow, but there it is.
Once an individual has their basic needs met, it is essential for their sense of well-being to also have appropriate levels of challenge and novelty in their lives. Novelty and challenges that permeate our daily lives help satisfy our deepest longing for fulfillment.
Buddha’s Brain and Just One Thing are books by neuropsychologist Rick Hanson, PhD Buddha’s Brain is a good title in that it is about how to have a clearer, better-functioning brain, and a poor title because it could put off people who are not interested in Eastern religions. Nonetheless, it is an excellent primer for enhancing one’s psychological skill set.
Just One Thing contains a series of 52 short essays worth contemplating. Under ‘Be Mindful’, it says:
The movement of energy through our nervous system — which is what I mean by “mental activity,” most of which is unconscious — can create lasting changes in brain structure: neurons that fire together, wire together. In particular, this rewiring is accelerated for what’s in the field of attention. In effect, attention is like a combination spotlight and vacuum cleaner: it illuminates what it rests on and then sucks it into your brain.
I like thinking about this in my intimate relationships. In the ‘Love’ essay, Hanson says:
When you focus on the love you give rather than the love you get, then you’re at cause rather than at effect; you’re the cue ball, not the eight ball — which supports your sense of efficacy and confidence, as well as your mood. And it’s enlightened self-interest: the best way to get love is to give it.
There are many more gems in the book.
The Spacious Body
This is a fascinating and unusual book by the brilliant philosopher and Advanced Rolfer Jeff Maitland, PhD. More on the site.
The body is not a thing that we somehow mysteriously inhabit, like a ghost in a machine. The body is the living shape or form of the self. The manner in which we have become the unique person we are is very much a matter of how we move through space and bodily come to presence as this living space we are.
What we call consciousness is not something non-bodily and private, but very much a spatial, bodily orientation toward and engagement with the worlds. Intentionality is a way of being present: a way of occupying space and a way of spatializing intentions, purposes, energies, and desires. Self and body cannot be separated and the very nature of our being-in-the-world is directing-itself-forward.
The Neglected Middle Child of Mental Health
One of the New York Times’ most-read pieces is called, ‘There’s a Name for the Blah You’re Feeling: It’s Called Languishing’.
Languishing is the neglected middle child of mental health. It’s the void between depression and flourishing — the absence of well-being. You don’t have symptoms of mental illness, but you’re not the picture of mental health either. You’re not functioning at full capacity. Languishing dulls your motivation, disrupts your ability to focus…. Languishing is a sense of stagnation and emptiness. It feels as if you’re muddling through your days, looking at your life through a foggy windshield.
WeSpace
There is increasing talk about WeSpace in my wider integral spiritual world. I don’t know much about it and have yet to find a community to practice it. Still, it’s an encouraging prospect.
The book Cohering the Integral We Space, edited by Olen Gunnlaugson, PhD, and Michael Brabant, PhD, has a series of essays by WeSpace teachers on various aspects of this. One reviewer put it this way: “The term describes a practice, a type of group process, and a state of consciousness that points to a potential collective stage of consciousness in human evolution.” There is a whole underpinning of this in the field of Integral Consciousness. We’ll see where it leads. Online
The Lazy Man’s Guide to Enlightenment
This is a fun little book by Thaddeus Golas. This is a 1971 flashback. I’m imagining that some old hippies will remember this book. From the Foreword:
I am a lazy man. Laziness keeps me from believing that enlightenment demands effort, discipline, strict diet, non-smoking, and other evidence of virtue. That’s about the worst heresy I could propose.
He goes on, and the basic idea is that at any moment, we can expand or contract.
Expanded beings are permeative; contracted beings are dense and impermeative.
At the end of this small-format 70+-page book, he has the Even Lazier section of excerpts:
We are equal beings, and the universe is our relations with each other. What am I doing on a level of consciousness where this is real?
No resistance. .
Love it the way it is.
Love as much as you can from wherever you are.
Whether I am conscious of it or not, I am one with the cause of all that exists.
Whether I feel it or not, I am one with all the love in the universe.
Go beyond reason to love: it is safe. It is the only safety.
All states of consciousness are available right now.
It’s always in us to relate this way.
Enlightenment doesn’t care how you get there.
Whatever you are doing, love yourself for doing it.
There is nothing you need to do first to be enlightened.
This, too, can be experienced with a completely expanded awareness.
I wouldn’t deny this experience to the One Mind.
What did you think it was that needed to be loved?
When you learn to love hell, you will be in heaven.
Thank you, brothers and sisters, for letting my consciousness be in this place.
Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art, by James Nestor, is a fascinating and valuable book. He refers to correct breathing as the brain’s killer app.
9 Hz — The Healing Pulse
This frequency is uniquely important. It is the frequency of energy produced by healers when they do their healing work. It is the frequency going through a salamander’s limb when it is being regenerated and turned off when that is complete. It is the frequency used in medicine to stimulate bone healing. (This came from Robert Becker, MD’s work applying what he learned from the salamanders to a patient of his with an unhealed fracture. See his books, The Body Electric and Cross Currents.) It is the alpha-theta border of brain waves. It is the average of the Schuman frequency generated by lightning that bounces around the Earth. In Chapter 4, I talk about a profound experience I had while drumming at that frequency. It would be interesting and possibly useful to investigate the healing potential of this more widely.
Body Awareness and Self-Consciousness
This is the name of an article by Robert Schleip, a German Advanced Rolfer and pioneer scientific researcher into the structure and function of fascia. He was integral in founding The Fascia Research Society with its International Fascia Research Congresses. I got this from him years ago and found it very interesting:
There is a recent research article about monkeys that I find very fascinating and relevant…. As probably most of us have noticed, there has been a considerable boost of research on “consciousness” among scientists in the last few years. After chaos theory and complexity science, this seems to be the “hottest” subject currently, with new scientific conferences, books and cover articles popping up all around, and an atmosphere at related conferences that Daniel Dennett describes as “like in Woodstock.” Some of this new research promises to measure the physiological difference in the brain between a non-conscious mental act and a conscious thought or perception. The scientific study of consciousness is not only of interest to those of us who are personally engaged in spiritual and consciousness-related practices but also to all somatic practitioners who emphasize conscious somatic perceptions (body awareness).
Apart from neurologists, psychologists, and philosophers, now also biologists have become engaged in the question of “how come our human brains developed this amazing quality of being consciously aware of ourselves and of our interactions with the environment?” (Well, at least sometimes.) I found an inspiring article by one of those biologists, Daniel J. Povinelli, who at the age of 32 had already won several international academic awards and the directorship of the largest primatology (monkey) research center in the United States. The article from him (and his colleague J.G. Cant), titled “Arboreal Clambering and the Evolution of Self-Conception,” was published in The Quarterly Review of Biology (more info on the website); I will give a brief summary here.
What most people call consciousness or awareness, Povinelli calls “self-conception,” which for him encompasses an awareness of the self as (1) an object of knowledge, (2) the subject of experience, (3) an entity that exists through time, and (4) a causal agent. He studies in this article only the last one of those four aspects, since there is considerable support for assuming that this (maybe most primitive) aspect of self-conception — the ability to conceive of the self as a causal agent — evolved relatively recently in evolution. It seems restricted to humans and some of the great apes. Only humans usually develop this ability, at 18–24 months when they can recognize themselves in mirrors, etc. Apart from us, only orangutans and chimps (plus one abnormally reared gorilla) have been shown to recognize themselves in mirrors.
One of the most favored explanations for the biological evolution of this cognitive capacity was the “social intelligence hypothesis.” It stated that the ability for self-awareness developed as a basis for better social communication, i.e., if I know that I exist, I will show even better empathy with my peers and will be better at predicting their behavior — certainly a theory that appealed to me. Yet Povinelli showed that there are several primates (e.g., pavians) who have an even more complex social life than chimps or orangutans, yet they are not capable of self-recognition. He thus speculates that it must be linked to something else.
Together with a team of scientists, he videotaped and studied the locomotion of different primates in the jungle of Sumatra. They found that, while all other primates move mostly from tree to tree by applying several stereotyped movement patterns, chimps and orangutans have a very different way to move. Because of their large body weight and the fragility of the canopy for them, they move with non-stereotyped, very creative, and variable ways from tree to tree (several illustrations in the article demonstrate this nicely). Povinelli’s suggestion now is that this change might be linked with the evolution of a conscious body concept. These monkeys (or, better, their and our common primate ancestors in the Miocene period) probably developed the first internal body concept in evolution in order to move more safely through the fragile canopy — which means that the newly acquired body awareness of our clambering ancestors might have been the basis for the evolution of self-awareness in general. (I am tempted now to assume that those body-smart monkeys — as opposed to my cat — knew that all their body parts belong to themselves.) Of course, human self-awareness can be much richer and encompass such aspects as being aware of one’s history, character, plans, emotions, or even — e.g., in meditation — the process of perception or cognition as such. Yet the neural and evolutionary basis for all awareness, according to Povinelli, lies probably in the development of body awareness.
One of the five predictions based on this model that Povinelli and other scientists worldwide will test “predicts that performing non-stereotyped movement should induce states of objective self-awareness in humans, chimpanzees, and orangutans [in much the same way as mirrors do)…. Forcing subjects to cope with locomotor situations in which their stereotyped action schemata are no longer sufficient should induce a state of inward assessment and evaluation….”
So, to make a long story short: Some biologists are now supporting the existence of a strong linkage between the evolutionary development of body awareness and other states of “awareness” in general.
Genetics
I’ve already mentioned the benefits of good genetics. It’s more complicated and subtle than hair color or male pattern baldness. One of my favorite pieces of science trivia comes from an old article in Science News magazine. Somehow, the researchers were on to a particular gene and our mental health. We each get a turned on or off version from each parent. A group of adults who had suffered emotional trauma in their youth had mild to moderate to severe depression as a result. Scientists compared the activity of this gene being turned on or off to how it related to the group members. It worked perfectly. Those with both genes turned on had only mild depression. Those with one turned on had moderate depression, and those with neither turned on had more severe depression. Apparently, having this gene turned on helps protect the brain in cases of abuse. There is no known way to turn it on.
Breathing
Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art, by James Nestor, is a fascinating and valuable book. He refers to correct breathing as the brain’s killer app. Here are some ways to improve your breathing and life: Quit breathing through your mouth. With nasal breathing, filters warm, moisten, and condition the air so that one can absorb 20% more oxygen, increasing efficiency. Mouth breathing overworks a person and stresses their system. Lung capacity can be improved by using calm, rhythmic breathing, improving your posture, and inhaling and exhaling slowly — and exhaling more slowly than inhaling. Nestor says doing these activities regularly enhances all aspects of our lives. His talks are on YouTube.
I was surprised that he didn’t mention ‘vital capacity’. It is the percentage of air one can expel from a deep breath. In the Rolfing section in this quadrant, I note that an article on aging said that this measurement is the best predictor of longevity and good health. It also stated that there is no known way to improve it. Exercise doesn’t do it. Rolfing does; it’s a simple measurement to take. Rolfing improves vital capacity by loosening the fascial sheathing wrapping the torso.
From Steve MacIntosh’s Evolution’s Purpose
From the above, hopefully the following will make sense:“Stuart Kauffman called for a ‘reinvention of the sacred”—a new agreement about what is real that will help us better acknowledge the awesome significance of the universe’s boundless creativity and the unmistakable influence of values within the evolutionary process. Traditional worldviews recognize the sacred but often are at odds with w science. The modernist worldview has fought the good fight against myth and superstition and has brought us the power of science, yet in doing so, has lost touch with the immanent and transcendence present of the sacred, which our spiritual traditions understood. So just as traditional religious concepts of reality have become outmoded in the course of history, we are now witnessing the relative exhaustion of modernist scientific conceptions of reality. Of course, this does not mean that we must completely discard the enduring truths of either traditionalism or modernism. We need to evolve beyond these previous value systems by using evolution’s own technique of including the best aspects of those worldviews in a new conception that simultaneously transcends their limitations.”
“How a culture defines progress is crucial to its ability to solve problems and improve conditions for its members. As we now attempt to remedy both the problems caused by the rise of modernism and the preexisting problems that modernism has been unable to resolve, our philosophical understanding of progress becomes very important. In order to achieve the further cultural evolution that is urgently needed, our civilization requires a new definition of progress that transcends the limitations of both modernism and postmodernism. (The author proceeds to discuss what’s needed in detail.) See site for more on his work.
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- Sam Harris’s Waking Up meditation app is a rich, diverse collection of resources regarding insight and practices.
- Andrew Huberman has a number of helpful neuroscience-backed practices regarding meditation and other practical mental health practices on YouTube.
- Will Johnson has developed what is, as best as I can tell, original work in meditation. He calls it the Hollow Bamboo path. It is not just a mental awakening but also an awakening of the body. He sees this as the Fourth Turning of the Wheel in Buddhism as it evolves in the West. You can find some of these talks on YouTube. He also had the audacity to assert that the appropriate use of cannabis and psychedelics can aid meditation practice and that this use does not violate the Buddhist injunction against inebriation. He’s caught some backlash over this. From my experience, I know he is correct when these substances are used wisely.
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Honorable Mentions
This list could go on, so I’ll leave you with these in random order. Personal growth and wisdom: The Entire Buddhist canon — Chogyam Trungpa is a favorite, as is Die Wise by Stephen Jenkinson. Also see: The Power of Regret by Dan Pink, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Made Simple by Seth Gillihan, Against the Pollution of the I by Jacques Lussesyran, The Elephant in the Brain by Simler and Hanson.
A few of my favorite autobiographical and related resources for embodied wisdom are A Heart Blown Open by Junpo Denis Kelly Roshi, And There Was Light by Jacques Lusseyran, The Reason I Jump by Naoki Higashida, Tales of Wonder by Huston Smith, Grace and Grit by Ken Wilber, Gifts of Unknown Things by Lyall Watson, and When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut.
The Ministry for the Future
This book by Kim Stanley Robinson is important, and I don’t say that about many. It has received rave reviews from Barack Obama, Ezra Klein, and the American Scientist. The New York Review of Books said, ‘One hopes that this book is read widely — that Robinson’s audience, already large, grows by an order of magnitude. Because the point of his books is to fire the imagination’.
While KSR is known as a science fiction author, this book is much more than that, as you’ll see below. It has a narrative taking place in the near future when catastrophic climate change really lives up to its name. The Ministry for the Future is a transnational organization working on the issues. It has its cast of characters, etc. The book is information-heavy about not only the problems but also approaches to a better future. He has also inserted these two brief, more didactic sections.
Chapter 20 The Gini Coefficient, devised by the Italian sociologist Carrado Gini in 1912, measures income or wealth disparity in a population. It is usually expressed as a fraction between 0 and 1, which seems easy to understand because 0 is the coefficient if everyone owned an equal amount. At the same time, 1 would obtain if one person owned everything and everyone else nothing. In our real world of the mid-21st century, countries with a low Gini coefficient, like the social democracies, are generally a bit below 0.3, while highly unequal countries are a bit above 0.6. The US, China, and many other countries have seen their Gini coefficients shoot up in the neoliberal era, from 0.3 or 0.4 up to 0.5 or 0.6, with barely a squeak from the people losing the most in this increase of inequality, and indeed many of those harmed vote for politicians who will increase their relative impoverishment. Thus, the power of hegemony; we may be poor, but at least we’re patriots! At least we’re self-reliant, and we can take care of ourselves, and so on, right into an early grave, as the average lifespans of the poorest citizens in these countries are much shorter than those of the wealthy citizens. And average lifetimes overall are therefore decreasing for the first time since the 18th century.
Don’t think that the Gini coefficient alone will describe this situation, however; this would be succumbing to monocauseotaxophilia, the love of single ideas that explain everything, one of humanity’s most common cognitive errors. The Gini figures for Bangladesh and Holland are nearly the same, for instance, at 0.31, but the average annual income in Bangladesh is about $2,000, while in Holland, it’s $50,000. The spread between the richest and the poorest is an important consideration, but when everyone in that spread is pretty well off, this is a different situation than when everyone across the spread is poor.
Thus, other rubrics to think about inequality have been devised. One of the best is the ‘inequality-adjusted Human Development Index’, which is no surprise, because the Human Development Index is already a powerful tool. But it doesn’t by itself reveal the internal spread of good and bad in the country studied. Thus the inequality adjustment gives a more nuanced portrait of how well the total population is doing.
While discussing inequality, it should be noted that the Gini coefficient for the whole world’s population is higher than for individual countries, basically because there are so many more poor people in the world than there are rich ones, so that cumulatively, globally, the number rises to around 0.7. Also, there are various ways of indicating inequality more anecdotally (perhaps we could say in more human terms) than such indexes. The three wealthiest people in the world possess more financial assets than those in the 48 poorest countries. The wealthiest one percent of the human population owns more than the bottom seventy percent. And so on.
Also, note that these disparities in wealth have been increasing since 1980 to the present, and are one of the defining characteristics of neo-liberalism. Inequality has now reached levels not seen since the so-called Gilded Age of the 1890s. Some angles of evidence now suggest this is the most wealth-inequal moment in human history, surpassing the feudal era, for instance….
Thus, inequality in our time. Is it a political stability problem? Perhaps in a controlocracy backed by big militaries, no. Is it a moral problem? But morality is a question of ideology, one’s imaginary relationship to the actual situation, and many find it easy to imagine that you get what you deserve, and so on. So, morality is a slippery business.
So it is that one often sees inequality as a problem judged economically; growth and innovation, it is said, are slowed when inequality is high. This is where our thinking has been reduced to: essentially a neo-liberal analysis and judgment of the neo-liberal situation. It’s the structure of feeling in our time; we can’t think in anything but economic terms, our ethics must be quantified and rated for the effects that our actions have on the GDP. This is said to be the only thing people can agree on. Altho those who say this are often economists.
But that’s the world we’re in. So, people invent other indexes to come to grips with this issue. We have seen a proliferation of them.
Recall that GDP, gross domestic product, the dominant metric in economics for the last century, consists of a combination of consumption, plus private investments, plus government spending, plus exports-minus-imports. Criticisms of GDP are many, as it includes destructive activities as positive economic numbers, and excludes many kinds of negative externalities as well as health, social reproduction, citizen satisfaction, and so on.
Just as we are all subject to some perceptual errors due to the nature of our senses and physical reality, we are also subject to some cognitive errors built into our brains through the period of human evolution, and unavoidable even when known to us.
The perceptual illusions are easy. There are certain patterns of black and white that when printed on a paper circle and the circle then spun on a stick, the paper will flash with colors in the human eye. Slow the spinning down and the pattern is obviously just black and white; speed it up and the colors reappear in our sight. Just the way it is…
Everyone can accept these optical illusions when they are demonstrated; they are undeniably there. But for the cognitive errors, it takes some testing. Cognitive scientists, logicians, and behavioral economists have only recently begun to sort out and name these cognitive errors, and disputes about them are common. But unavoidable mistakes have been demonstrated in test after test, and given names like anchor bias (you want to stick to your first estimate, or to what you have been told), ease of representation (you think an explanation you can understand is more likely to be true than one you can’t). On and on it goes – online there is an excellent circular graphic display of cognitive errors – a wheel of mistakes that both lists them and organizes them into categories, including the law of small numbers, neglect of base rates, the availability heuristic, asymmetrical similarity, probability illusions, choice framing, context segregation, gain/loss asymmetry, conjunction effects, the law of typicality, misplaced causality, cause/effect symmetry, the certainty effect, irrational prudence, the tyranny of sunk cost, illusory correlations, and unwarranted overconfidence – the graphic itself being an example of this last phenomenon, in that it pretends to know how we think and what would be normal.
As with perceptual illusions, knowing that cognitive errors exist doesn’t help us to avoid them when presented with a new problem. On the contrary, these errors stay very consistent in that they are committed by everyone tested, tend toward the same direction of error, are independent of personal factors of the test takers, and are incorrigible in that knowing about them doesn’t help us avoid them, nor to distrust our reasoning in other situations. We are always more confident of our reasoning than we should be. Indeed, overconfidence, not just expert overconfidence but general overconfidence, is one of the most common illusions we experience. No doubt this analysis is yet another example: do we really know any of this?
Oh dear! What do these recent discoveries in cognitive science mean? Some say they just mean humans are poor at statistics. Others assert they are as important a discovery as the discovery of the subconscious.
Consider again the nature of ideology, that necessary thing, which allows us to sort out the massive influx of information we experience. Could ideology also be a cognitive illusion, a kind of necessary fiction?
Yes. Of course. We have to create and employ an ideology in order to function, and we do that work by way of thinking that is prone to any number of systemic and, one might even say, factual errors. We have never been rational. Maybe science itself is an attempt to be rational. Maybe philosophy too. And, of course, philosophy is very often proving we can’t think to the bottom of things, can’t get logic to work as a closed system, and so on
And remember also that in all of this discussion so far, we are referring to the normal mind, the sane mind. What happens when, starting as we do from a shaky original position, sanity is lost? We defer to another discussion. Enough now to say just this: it can get awful.
Beauty, Goodness, and Truth
These three universal categories include everything and cannot be reduced. Beauty (art) is first person. Everyone has the right to their tastes and their esthetics. It doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks about theirs. Goodness (ethics) is second person. You have to consider the ‘other’. You don’t get to make up your ethics without consideration of other people. We can also include the ethics towards all sentient beings and life. Truth (science) is third person. You have to consider what is all around and inside of us. This is elaborated on in the following discussion. Steve MacIntosh, in his book Evolution’s Purpose (I can almost hear the scientific materialists scream at that title), posits that evolution’s personal and universal purpose is to develop evermore and enrich the realms of Beauty, Goodness, and Truth. May it be so.
Beauty and Attractiveness
The world we live in is so heavily invested in promoting the ideal of beauty almost exclusively as only young people or older people who still look young. There have always been standards of attractiveness concerning fertility. For most of human history, we could compare ourselves only to our neighbors. Now, we have the obsessive inundation of photos and videos of near ‘perfect’ bodies. I understand indigenous cultures and know what many of my peers know: Healthy, mature lovers are better.
It is understandable why some people who don’t approach the ‘attractive’ ideal may have extra issues in their relationship experiences.
Pamela Madsen wrote an excellent brief piece about Pleasure Anxiety for the Huffington Post. She quoted Jack Morin from his book, The Erotic Mind, where he wrote:
It should come as no surprise that children who are taught to mistrust their bodies grow up feeling uneasy with sensual pleasure. Similarly, those whose bodies have been violated through severe corporal punishment or sexual abuse learn to think of their bodies as sources of pain rather than enjoyment. Others believe it is selfish to receive too much pleasure and deflect touch away from themselves. Men and women who are self-conscious about their physical imperfections — and such feelings are difficult to avoid given the constant parade of perfect bodies in the mass media — may feel they’re not sufficiently attractive to deserve extensive pleasuring or that no one could genuinely enjoy touching them.
She talked about how people with this condition find it difficult to relax and open their minds and bodies to pleasure, altho they may be able to give a pleasurable touch to others.
Research has found that women, more than men, may have sexual problems because of not feeling good about their looks. This can be true even when the men in their lives are hot to jump them. By now, libraries full of books have been written about the manifold varieties and nuances of all this.
There’s so unfathomably much about romantic relationships in literature, songs, plays, and movies. Was any of that about more-evolved relationships? So much romanticizing and OMG the drama; the drama and as much sex as could be put into any media at any time in any culture. I learned in college that romantic love in the West was first known in Tristan and Isolde in the 12th century. That started what has become quite the run!
So much Wall Street criminality has led to multimillion-dollar fines with little to no mention in the mainstream press. Most Americans have little or no idea how pervasive and often brutal covert American activities have been. We’ve destroyed democratic governments over and over again to put in dictators who work with our political and business interests. Anyone willing to do a little research can verify the veracity of these kinds of statements.
The boomer generation is particularly interesting. They were a relatively sizeable affluent cohort. They came of age as the Postmodern worldview was coming into the world. This gave many members a new understanding and filter into seeing the world unknown to its predecessors. This created a broad social transformation. Many young people yearned for a new life that differed from their parents. This greatly confused and agitated many of their parents’ generation. From their point of view: Why? Hadn’t they risen from the Depression and saved the world from fascism? How could their children not appreciate, even celebrate, their lives in the 1950s and 1960s? We were living in the most prosperous society in history. Never before had so many people had so much. A solid middle class is when a single average income earner can comfortably support a family of four. Many, usually Caucasian, of course, could afford nice homes, cars, and medical care and had time off to travel or recreate however they wanted. What was wrong with that? — especially for a generation who had lived through what they had. I go into more detail about the social dynamics in Chapter 5. For now, let’s listen to Dylan’s ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’, Hair’s anthemic ‘Age of Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In’ medley by The 5th Dimension, and Jefferson Airplane’s ‘White Rabbit’.
It’s now 50-plus years later, and quite a lot has happened. There’s been far more change than our naive young hippie selves or anybody else could have imagined. When talking about these kinds of things, I often share a story that usually gets some laughs: A group of futurists (yes, it is an academic discipline) were hired to present a paper in 1975 predicting changes in the US in the last quarter of the 20th century. They missed the advent of the personal computer (the Apple II in 1977) and the internet (1980s and 1990s). The rate of change now is far beyond what it was in the last century, and that went from the Model T to spacecraft, the telegraph to the internet and web, full-body female bathing suits to bikinis, and so much more or, in the last case, less.
I hear predictions from knowledgeable people about the rapidly approaching changes coming with brain-machine interfaces driven by AI, Deep Machine Learning, the rapidly evolving neuroscience (I hope the cyborgs are friendly), the dominance of finances, information flow by blockchain technology, and the breakup of nation-states. Many boomers may live to see much of this. It’ll certainly be interesting to see what happens in our nation and the world. Fascinating and unpredictable things will come, no matter how long we live.
I know there are genuine threats to our continuous, relatively comfortable existence personally, socio-culturally, and as a planet. The number and magnitude of our world’s serious challenges are staggering and evident to anyone paying attention. We face the epochal challenges of catastrophic climate change and the vulnerability of our computer and internet systems to cyberattacks and the collapse of society that would bring. Nuclear war is still a possibility, along with an insect apocalypse decimating the food supply, new virulent treatment-resistant disease vectors, unbridled capitalism with the worsening of income inequality and social mobility, fascism, AIs deciding the planet would be better off without us humans, etc. You can make your list.
And yet, as a society, we have so much knowledge and so many tools at our disposal. There are means available for prevention and remediation. The options and opportunities are immense. Yet, we need to implement them better; we are not doing well. Why are we doing so poorly when the threats from failing natural and societal systems are terrifying? Our sensations, mobility, emotions, thoughts, self-reflection, and the motivation driven by our most profound ancestral drive to survive and flourish give us the ability to move in the world with great power. We can Act! We can learn from Netflix’s Don’t Look Up and Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future and more to come.
The thing about growing more mature, how to grow more mature, is that the simplest is the most important thing to do. Pay attention, and for this endeavor, really pay attention to your thoughts about your life, some stories, and your feelings. Get quiet and watch your flow of thoughts. Giving it a few moments or minutes to wander, where does it go? How many different paths? Thinking about your current situation and relations, which ones get the most attention? By now, healthy maturity will naturally have become more finely attuned to feeling the esthetic qualities of thoughts. There is a rich spectrum of Beauty, Goodness, and Truth that sort of flavors thoughts. We all know this. Genuinely deep, honest, more-integrated people’s thoughts feel better than the other kind, and here’s the thing: we feel other people’s thoughts. We can’t not feel the quality of other people. We’re constantly feeling the thoughts of others; it is just that the vast majority of it is unconscious, which it has to be for sanity and social progress.
The Anthropic Principle
In my philosophy period, I read John Barrow’s seminal work on this. There are two major and many minor versions of it. Overly simplified, we have the Weak version, which sees that in a Multiverse statistically, given they see no reason why gravity, the strong force keeping neutrons and protons together, and all the rest have to be any specific value, that eventually a Universe even if it is one in gazillions and gazillions will arise with the correct values. We can only have this conversation because we’re in one of those.
The Strong version, as supported by Professor Barrows and others, believes that the Universe is somehow compelled to have the conditions that eventually allow life and conscious life to arise. On a heroic dose of LSD, I was able to answer with certainty that consciousness underlies the physical and energetic Universe, the goal of which is to create greater love and consciousness. Despite the problems we see around us, it is doing precisely that.