Getting "IT" Done ...

'afternoon,

(I'd have said "Good Morning" but I'm getting started later than usual today with this - I'm presenting a free teleseminar tomorrow at 2:00 PM - EST and I've been busy getting the word out so to speak - if you're interested go to: Beyond Hypnosis ...(tm) you can get all the information there.)

So anyway ... here we are again in (not so) sunny NJ and I'm still contemplating the same things ... essentially how the world works, how people fit into the overall scheme of things ... and like so many others where's my slot?

Yet none of this has the dreadful lugubriosness of most existentialists ... it's not "dreadful" to me that life is unfolding without checking in with me first. For me this is in fact exciting. My questions are really more about: "What going on that I could be paying attention to that I haven't yet ... that will open up more of what unfolding to me?"

So it's about adventure for me (another theme of mine ...).

How to get onto the merry-go-round not off it ... see I think being human is about being in the game not out of it.

Yet this is of course how so many "play" at being human ... they look to see how they can get off or out of the game ... how they can build nice comfortable lives ... how little they can rock the boat. Yet there's no precedent for this behavior in the rest of creation. "Life" is about risk ... taking risk and moving forward. And not moving forward just independently as an individual, but moving forward as a species. It's the whole species that jumps when an individual moves themselves forward ... the risk is often individual, but the boon is shared!

This you can see is an excellent biological strategy ... spread the risk over the population by limiting the impact to a small a sub-population as possible (a single individual if that's possible) and then spread the boon out as far into the population as possible. This is about as well engineered a strategy for evolutionary development as you could design.

Then add in "transformational" potential - i.e.: a "pop" in the system that's not purely evolutionary ... a literal jump over a number of intervals, or across a theme that can't be accounted for linearly. Now you've added a quantum element to the strategy.

An example of this could be language ... a "pop" that occurs when sounds go from expressing emotion or even intent to representing abstractions. This can't be processed linearly ... it's a quantum movement. Yet of course once any quantum movement has occured it's obvious that the potential for that quantum movement was always present in the system.

This is not to say that the system doesn't also have to "evolve" to a prepared state capable of accessing the non-manifest potentiality. There has to be the capacity in the system for the potentiality that pre-exists the extant form to become manifest in that particular system.

This is a critical distinction - that the system has to have evolved the capacity for the potential that pre-exists the extant from to become manifest in that particular system.

We could compare the "evolution" of humans and chimpanzees here by example. We are much more similar than we are different. Yet there seems to be little capacity for chimpanzees to use the abstractions of "society" or "civilization" that we use by default. For instance their inability to desensitize the territorial aggression they display. We too have a default imprint for territorial aggression, and we've displayed it with disasterous results more than once as a species - in fact it's much more quantifiably evident in our history that this is more the norm than not. Yet, we have been able to build societies of such density as to be unimaginable - regardless of resource levels - for any other primates. We do this largely by conscious and societal choice to desensitize our imprint to territorial aggression.

However, I go astray ... I said I was going to discuss Clare Graves "Emergent, Cyclical, Levels of Existence" model. Let's just call it the "Grave's Model" for simplicities sake. This model suggests a form of human evolution that is outside of the ordinary thinking about human physiology and the capacity indicated by physiological evolution. Rather what Dr. Graves was exploring was a theory about how humans evolved culturally ... not just in terms of "what happeded in terms of "cultural history" but more so in terms of "cultural evolutionary capacity." These are very different things.

It will take some number of posts to get it all down so I will not attempt to devalue that process by trying to do it all at once. Instead I'll take just this one point, the difference between what happened as cultural history, and what happened as a result of cultural evolutionary capacity.

"What is cultural evolutionary capacity?

Simply (for now) what I'm going to suggest is the capacity to access a more complete simultaneous utilization and integration of brain functionality. That the various physiological designs present in the human brain are specifically evolved for specific applications. There is an obvious anatomical difference in the various brain structures, e.g.: medulla oblongata vs. cerebellum vs. cerebral cortex vs. corpus collusum ..., and that these are designed to perform different functions. Yet they may not all be processing at the same level of effectiveness, efficiency or priority in any given brain system. However, how specifically they process in terms of effectiveness, efficiency and priority may in fact be the key to what is processed and what the result of that processing is or is not.

What Grave's research suggests to me is that part of human evolution has been to "learn" how to access more of the totality of the brain's structures in greater synchronicity and integration ... and therefore over the various evolutionary epoches to process differently and by so doing learning how to create different results. Yet this is not universally, nor equally spread among the total species population.

While there could be and most likely are a million variable as to why or how this has come to take the specific and unique form it does now on the planet the evidence seems to suggest that we are in the midst of another cultural evolution of titanic proprotions and as a result of this movement we are experiencing the clash of existing positions as the system resorts itself in preparation for this next quantum movement.

This to me is the essence of what I mean when I refer to social ontology ...

The system (i.e.: the entire human species population) as a whole disseminating the potential within the system to the individual members contained within it. In this case preparing the systems and the members within it for a new cultural evolutionary development - which I propose will have no less of an impact on the planet than the argicultural or industrial revolutions of the species did in the past.

This new "revolution" is way, way beyond anything that was suggested by the "technology" or "information" revolutions ... they were just passing phases in the larger "scientific revolution" that itself was and is an adjustment within the "industrial age" we're still living in and contained by today.

Now we're seeing a new "age" being birthed an age of "biology" ... the previous epoches of human history have been based in mechanical paradigms, i.e.: linear, local, temporal, causal. I propose that this new age will be based in a dynamical paradigm that is, non-linear, non-local a-temporal and a-causal. This will reflect the potentiality in the system for not just "evolutionary" change but also "transformational" change.

As a result the species will quickly need to 're-program' its basic skill sets to deal with a dynamical system.

The pre-agricultural age was dynamical as well and the skill set used there to cope with this dynamism in the system was largely "magic" or "magical." However, this will not and does not work in a post-scientific age like the one we are now living in. What we'll need to do instead is update our "sciences" to adjust for and cope with the realities of the total system as a whole, not just the disparate dissected sections around which our sciences have in fact evolved to date.

This is another kind of revolution - that will usher in an "age of biology." Moving the species beyond the boundary conditions established by science as we've known it will take a larger mind-set than the one that spawned science as we now know it to be. This will require a larger social ontology than the one we've been living inside of since the start of the industrial age as well.

I'll pick-up next time on what the Grave's model can do to help illuminate the "jump" that seems to be looming for the species ...

Until then ...

Best regards,

Joseph


PS - Remember to reserve a space in my upcoming teleseminar, "Beyond Hypnosis ...(tm)" at:

Beyond Hypnosis ...(tm)