Plumbing the depths

When they first meet the ocean most people walk along the shore and rarely enter more than knee deep. Some people dive in and stay near the surface while others use goggles, snorkel and flippers to immerse themselves for longer. A few people use skuba gear and stay deep for even longer. A very favoured few sit awestruck in a submarine in the great deep where ‘reality’ is wildly weird and sulphurous.

The unconscious is unfathomable like the ocean. Most people do little more than dampen their mental toes. They fear the psychological equivalents of killer whales and man eating sharks. They are the simple minded salt of the earth people who know ‘the truth’ and cling tenaciously to it. They are easily persuaded to kill and die for king, country and creed.

The persuaders educate and brainwash the masses to ensure that they act as efficacious workers, consumers and cannon fodder. There are four main groups of persuaders:

Sacred persuaders: Elders and priests (local, national and transnational) who are informed, inspired and directed by what is believed to be an omnicompetent God who works in mysterious ways. (eg John Knox and Scottish Presbyterianism).

Profane persuaders: Employers and their advertisers and propagandists who manipulate the perceptions of workers and consumers in small to medium enterprises and in transnational corporations.(eg Frederick Taylor and factory line production methods)

Princely persuaders: People who believe in the divine right of kings (eg Donald Trump as businessman rather than politician)

Outlying persuaders: for cultural evolution to work there has to be variation upon which selection operates. Tenured academics usually support the status quo so it is up to freelance philosophers to generate alternatives. (eg Karl Marx, and the communist manifesto as a paradigm shift).

SO – back to the ocean metaphor.

Most of the persuaders and persuadees remain close to the shoreline. They acknowledge only their self-conscious and are unaware of what happens in the 99% of the mindbrain which is the unconscious.

About 2500 years ago there was a busy period for a few outlying persuaders. They were the mystics who used meditation to still their monkey mind. They paid heed to their thoughts, feelings and moods and realised that their mind had a mind of its own and that it was vast. Note that scientists and engineers were also changing their minds but they did not get much beyond the myths and magic of those times.

… then a miracle happened …

Today’s sub-mariners are paradigm shifting outliers. The emerging perceptions draw upon a blend of (a) neuroscience which illuminates ‘how’ the brain works, (b) evolutionary psychology which illuminates ‘why’ it evolved in the way that it did, and (c) meditation as in mindfulness based stress reduction.

The ocean is like the unconscious in that their depth and complexity is vastly greater than the shoreline pundits suggest. Those who go deep come across amazing things. “Those who speak do not know!”

How many of us will make the shift? – and when?

Still a workaholic

I am still a workaholic. Despite being several years into retirement I need to be doing something useful and important. After all, the devil finds work for idle hands!

It is therefore cute to note that the mindbrain is busiest when it is not focused on doing anything specific. This is understandable given the need to see ‘patterns’ and ‘agents’ active in the interaction between three sets of data

1. new data arriving from the sense organs,
2. older data held in short and long term memory, and
3. ancient data that is hard wired as instincts, intuitions and various forms of bias.

For millions of years my ancestors lived by foraging (hunting and gathering.) We made a success of it. Go forth and multiply. Forage, fight and fornicate. Make a few tools and enter the lengthy old stone age. Emigrate from Africa. Populate the planet. Exterminate the big game. Exterminate the non human hominids. Homo sapiens rules OK. Farm, fight, fornicate, philosophise and factory-ise

The move from foraging to farming meant that some people were released to engage in tasks other than food production. These included:

1. Pragmatists - shopkeepers, traders, potters, joiners, bankers etc
2. Politicians - princes, priests and their policemen
3. Poets and philosophers - creatives - including story tellers and entertainers

During my working life I was an educator. In the early days I taught science and biology to students. In the middle years I facilitated senior educator’s appreciation of leadership, management and administration. In the later years I focussed on plain language editing of policy documents so that ordinary people would have a better understanding of the issues.

Common to all three phases was the concept of changing minds – mine and those of other people. There has been a paradigm shift based on new thinking about the evidence from evolutionary psychology, neuroscience and meditation.

This is a topic that fascinates me. I read books and journal articles, listen to talks by cutting edge thinkers, and keep in touch with their thinking on the social networks. Thus do I change my own mind; and I keep a blog to record my understanding and thus possibly encourage others to change their minds.

I am still a workaholic.

cosmic zoom

Wow 

biggest to smallest - our place in space

cosmic zoom

The self-learning rhinoceros

Everyone processes thoughts, feelings and moods (TFM) which are promoted by nature, nurture and serendipity (NNS). Individuals are unique in fine detail but are like others from their particular cultures and subcultures.

Man is a social animal and individuals have evolved to worry about what group members think about them (gossip). This means that most individuals are easily made to change their minds in tune with cultural fads and fashions

Various words are used to label the process:- enculturation, brainwashing, indoctrination, training, education, and enlightenment. The process is supported by advertisements and propaganda.

In more sophisticated cultures there is also (a) facilitated self-learning and (b) the promotion of study skills in support of evidence based critical thinking. These days this involves taking account of social, evolutionary, cognitive, positive and behavioural psychology and their links to neuroscience.

Many of the above words carry a heavy emotional load. For cultures to survive they must address the psychological impacts of change. This includes (a) grappling with the implications of the illusory nature of the mind-made ‘self’ and, (b) planning beyond the elegant duplicity of stage managed heurism (ie facilitated self-learning ie enabling a person to discover or learn something for themselves).

Although this is easier said than done it is do-able - especially when individuals belong to a group of like minded people - which may or may not include a specialist teacher eg an enlightened guru, a trained therapist or a wise granny.

Arguably our ancestors were accustomed to life in relatively small groups of foragers. But in recent times foraging gave way to settled agriculture and then to more sophisticated forms of cultural organisation ie city states, empires, nation states, and so to globalisation with wealth and power in the hands of transnational corporations.

Evolutionary psychology suggests that we have stone age brains struggling to survive in the internet age. There are the concepts of ME, US and THEM. There is one set of beautiful rules and regulations governing behaviour for ME and US and another belligerent set for US and THEM.

There are few absolutes and the boundaries between the categories have been and can be significantly reworked. On one side are suicide bombers, genocide, the holocaust, Hiroshima, the trenches in WW1 and consumption of commodities. On the other side is the United Nations, the trade union movement, social activists, art, music, and stamp collecting.

We now live as greedy and competitive individuals with boundaries close to a selfish ME. But this is not inevitable. We are also hard wired to be generous and cooperative amongst US but, in many people the gene has not been switched on so we demonise and slaughter THEM. But this is not inevitable. By paying attention to our TFM we can flick a variety of epigenetic switches and awaken culture patterns better suited to environmentally friendly post capitalism.

SO – how to make the changes? Change minds. Notice what you feel and let the feelings go.

AND - Let it begin with me; and with you (?)

Some form of Buddhism lite (please specify) might be preferable to the hard line approach as outlined in the Dhammapada (300 BC):

Turning your back on pleasure and pain,
as earlier with sorrow and joy,
attaining pure equanimity,
tranquillity,
wander alone
like a rhinoceros.

neoliberal non-sense

Thoughts inspired by George Monbiot in the Guardian

Neoliberalism (new freedom) is an economic theory based on the thoughts of Frederick Hayek.

The theory is that human nature is competitive but some people (entrepreneurs) are more creative and hard working than others.

In a free market cream rises to the top where the elite becomes obscenely rich and some of the wealth trickles down to the relatively impoverished masses. 

Neoliberal objectives include:

• ·         massive tax cuts for the rich
• ·         crushing of trade unions·          
• ·         reduction in public housing
• ·         deregulation
• ·         privatisation
• ·         outsourcing and competition in public services

·          

Some notable variations on the theme:

• ·         Washington consensus – the same agenda but for the third world poverty reduction strategies
• ·         The Third Way – half way between neoliberal (right wing) and social democrat (left wing)
• ·         Austerity - cut back on public spending

There is the concept of the undeserving poor. The masses are work-shy, wasteful and need to be kept in their place. The fact that the rich are rich is a sign that God approves of what they are doing. There is an invisible hand that ensures that market forces result in neoliberalism. There is no alternative.

So what is to be done?

• ·         Promote and increase neoliberal agendas – promote globalisation and transnational corporations.
• ·         Promote the more centrist social democrat agenda
• ·         Promote a socialist agenda with more power to the people. (subsidiarity)

·          

OR!!!

“Those who tell the stories run the world.

Politics has failed through a lack of competing narratives.

The key task now is to tell a new story of what it is to be a human in the 21st century. It must be as appealing to some who have voted for Trump and Ukip as it is to the supporters of Clinton, Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn.

A few of us have been working on this, and can discern what may be the beginning of a story.

It’s too early to say much yet, but at its core is the recognition that – as modern psychology and neuroscience make abundantly clear – human beings, by comparison with any other animals, are both remarkably social and remarkably unselfish.

The atomisation and self-interested behaviour neoliberalism promotes run counter to much of what comprises human nature.

Hayek told us who we are, and he was wrong. Our first step is to reclaim our humanity.”

Yoh

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/14/neoliberalsim-donald-trump-george-monbiot?CMP=share_btn_fb

Brown leaves bobbing

Thoughts, feelings and moods (TFM) present themselves like brown leaves bobbing on an autumnal stream. They emerge from the unconscious where they were created. They are the result of new stimuli being compared with memories of similar stimuli that have been stored in long term memory modules.

The mindbrain is active 24/7. There is a churn of everchanging TFM linked to special purpose modules and to the links between them. This allows the mindbrain to integrate the various sources of information and build a holistic and pragmatic model of ‘reality’. The model includes the assumption that there is an individuated ego that makes decisions about what to seek, avoid or ignore when foraging, fighting and fornicating in social and physical environments.

I have been a sporadic meditator for many years. I have learned how to switch to non-judgemental witnessing of whatever the unconscious throws up. There are still many awkward mentations but, these days, they seldom totally commandeer the attention centre.

On the negative side the mentations include anxiety, panic, depression, lust, anger, shame, low self-esteem, and fear of what the neighbours think. On the positive side they include gratitude, calmness, bliss, focus (singlemindedness) and generally being non-egoic and in Flow (in the athlete’s zone, in the musician’s groove). From the evolutionary perspective the various positives and negatives are evolved adaptations

On a personal whim I have given up being totally in control of what ‘I’ get up to. When I am doodling there is no grand plan. I just sit with paper and pens and the drawing begins. There is no ‘ego’ and no thoughts of the past and future. The mindbrain is focused on the ‘now’ and the overall state is of calm.  The phenomenon is similar to the recent craze for colouring books.

My blogposts use the same process except that the output is words and sentences. Many fiction writers operate in a similar non-egoic way. It is as if the characters dictate the words and the author simply writes them down.

I have a niggle about this art/craft in terms of quality. The unconscious is constantly churning in a search for patterns and agents. It is capable of parallel processing and it is hierarchically structured to integrate the contributions from the reptile, mammal, hominid and human mindbrain areas.

The unconscious is a mess of interlocking stories. It has been evolving for millions of years and has an almighty stockpile of TFM many of which are hard wired as instinct, reflexes, intuitions and biases. Note in passing that neural plasticity can soften the edges of the hardwired features.

The self-conscious is recently evolved. It is linked to the pre-frontal cortex and is concerned with the executive functions of situation analysis, prioritizing, planning, implementation, monitoring and evaluation.

And so to the niggle. I want the unconscious to be omniscient and omnipotent. When the stories are dictated to the author there should be no need for editing. This brings to mind the myths and magic of the long gone iron ages where the causal agent of change was usually a male, grey bearded, master planner who works in mysterious ways and demands sacrifices (austerities?)

But let us remember that evolution generates models and systems which are functional rather than elegant. There is no central planning committee. Rather than wiping the slates clean and beginning again new uses are found for the innumerable older units. Nature, nurture, and serendipity begat variations upon which natural or man-made selections are made and thus generate the mind-made, brown leaves briskly bobbing on a fast autumnal stream.

A rich inner life

Susan Cain uses the phrase ‘a rich inner life’ when talking about the quiet power of introverts. Logic suggests that there must also be middling and poor inner lives, and rich, middling and poor outer lives.

So there is a nine box matrix:

	Inner	Middling	Outer
Rich	1	2	3
Middling	4	5	6
Poor	7	8	9

1. A rich inner life. Sitting quietly doing nothing, Spring comes and the grass grows by itself. ‘You’ can be a non-judgemental witness to the thoughts feelings and moods that well up from the unconscious. The mind has a mind (intention) of its own. ‘You’ are blissfully non-egoic in the Oneness. Practice mindfulness. Flow.

3. A rich outer life. Not enough hours in a day. Busy-ness within the family, and at work and play. Happiest when mixing with many people.

7. A poor inner life. ‘Makes no time to stand and stare.’ Monkey mind. Zombie on auto pilot. Caught up in the unconscious churn. Anxiety,depression etc

9. A poor outer life. Limited social life. Lonesome.

5. A middling middling life. The condition of most people. The manner of being depends on the social context. Shades of grey. Sometimes I sit and think and sometimes I just sit.

I studied psychology at university and was rated as a submissive introvert with some extrovert tendencies. I was uncomfortable being my ‘true’ social ‘self’ but could be active when playing a part such as Mr Clark the School teacher or a character on the stage or in a folk club.

My work/study/play pattern has been episodic. Contract work financed the rest of the activities. Study has been ongoing in small doses when working, and in heavy doses during several lengthy retreats. There is a tendency to ignore play – life is short and the mind needs to be observed and controlled (by the mind(?)) such that there are limits on sex, drugs, rock and roll, politics, religion and ICT.

ICT is cute. It decentralises command of the socio/cultural agenda. It enables those with a rich inner life to share their experiences in the blogisphere.  I note that I do not seek out or follow like minded souls. I remain wary of subjective ramblings – including my own. But there is a fruitful fascination with ‘stuff’ that passes through the attention centre.

My blog gets about 30 page views each day and they come from many countries. There are graphics in each post. Some time back there were photos from the garden and, recently there are doodles. But - there are very few comments and they come mostly from people that I have physically met. So – it has not gone viral. But – this is not a problem. The intention and associated behaviour is non-egoic and thus blissful most of the time – I have a rich inner life (?)