Transformation School intro draft

Introduction

This introduction lays a foundation of the exercises and practices I will present in later sections. I think it's important to have a conceptual underpinning to structure the work and why I prefer one exercise over another. As time allows I will add references and quotes.

I prefer modern cognitive research over ancient texts. I also prefer to speak from a framework of evolutionary psychology than spirituality for the simple reason that with evolutionary psychology it's possible to observe other living organisms as a way of understanding our own psychological and biological functions.

In this piece I'll describe some basics that will help define terms I'll use in later work. Please don't take these diagrams as the “truth” or my descriptions as completely accurate. This is a rough draft to get the ball rolling and after all the map is not the territory.

Levels of groundedness and being

Most of us think that we are aware of what we are doing and why but the fact is that we are unaware of most of what is going on in our lives. There are powerful uses for consciousness, its just that we don't usually know what they are or how to use them.

Our real power is in our unconscious mind and the best use of our conscious mind is to help our unconscious mind be successful doing what it naturally does. Modern mind research is revealing the ways we work as organisms and what works well to have a better life experience.

By 'groundedness' what I mean is how close our experience of life is to current physical reality. By 'being' what I mean is how we are when we aren't trying to 'do' something. Hopefully this will be more clear in a moment.

In diagram 1 I have drawn a pyramid that shows some important relationships in how we move through the world.

Physical Reality

This is what is actually happening physically in the environment. For our purposes this is the immediate environment you are in. This could be the room you are in, or the place you work or the people you are with or the place you are hiking or shopping. We will never know what is actually happening in reality or in the context we are in because our senses are limited. However, the environments you are in have the strongest impact on the overall quality of your life. This is because your environment determines the opportunities and challenges you will be exposed to. Most of what we do is respond to our current environment. Our bodies are part of our environment and the sensations in them is a constant part of the background of our lives.

Fast Sensory Awareness

We have eyes, ears, nose, taste, and skin for sensing the environment outside our body and many systems for sensing our internal environment. We can process 11 million bits of information a second – 10 million bits of this is visual. These senses are processed by cognitive processes that act like little organs. In other words, just like we have kidneys and livers, we have specialized brain functions. For example, our visual input gets split up to a variety of small parts of the brain that have specialized functions, one for recognition of shapes, one for distance, one for recognition of human or not and so on. milliseconds before you realize that you are noticing something your body/mind has already responded to it. Because our minds are processing the information very quickly the accuracy is lower than what we notice with our conscious awareness.

Adaptive Unconscious

This is the part of us that does everything behind the scene. When you drive down the road and are talking to a friend about something that happened yesterday and the radio is on and you notice a car that just drove by that looks like one you were thinking about yesterday and still you haven't skipped a beat in the conversation – that is your adaptive unconscious at work. it does much more than that but that is an example of what you are dealing with. The best use of your conscious mind is to put yourself in environments that support your adaptive unconscious in creating high quality experiences( I get the most writing done while having breakfast at Heidi's Pies – Hmmm I better choose my breakfast carefully). This adaptive unconscious was developed over millions of years and was what brought us to the point of consciousness. The adaptive unconscious however is pre-conscious, without symbolic language, without any sense of time or self-concept. It is very smart and still in control whether you like it or not. Its basic function is to bring all the systems in your organism into balance so that you will live long enough to reproduce and ensure your offspring's viability. Everything else is fluff(Ken Wilber would disagree). It does many balancing acts at once through muscle movement and pumping chemicals into the blood stream.

Often our adaptive unconscious is responding to our environment with a fixed pattern that was established long in the past. For example, I just found out I will be getting an offer for a job I want. I haven't been in a high tech position for four years. Without any rational reason why, my blood pressure shot up with my stress level and my mind has been racing. My adaptive unconscious is trying to prepare me for work by pulling up the patterns I had in that environment in the past. So I'm not grounded – my body/mind is not responding to current time – it's responding to the past. I need to retrain my adaptive unconscious to respond to my new environment in a way that is best for me instead of pulling up the old patterns from the past.

Secondary Sensations – emotions, moods, muscular tension

As a result of the actions of our adaptive unconscious we experience sensations such as moods, emotions and muscular tension. Our moods and emotions are actually the sensations that are the after effect of the adaptive unconscious pumping different chemicals into our brain and blood. Part of our adaptive unconscious is wired to produce more positive sensations and avoid negative sensations and all of this without any conscious awareness.

To follow the previous example, the results of my adaptive unconscious preparing me for the new environment are my blood pressure shot up, my mind is racing, my neck muscles are tight, my digestion is uncomfortable, I feel tingling and rushes of energy in my legs and although I rationally think I should be more relaxed and celebrating my good fortune, my adaptive unconscious is putting me in fight/flight to help me be safe.

Core consciousness

As we developed bigger brains, our capacity to identify patterns in experience increased. We make patterns out of external and internal sensations. Because internal sensations are always in our experience regardless of our external environment we had many more opportunities to make patterns of our internal experiences. Over time we identified those sensation patterns as 'us' or 'I' and self awareness was born. We developed core consciousness. It's a little more complex than that, Its actually not the sensations we experience as ourselves but a comparison between our current sensations and mental patterns of prior sensations. Basically the best we can do at understanding ourselves is to remember an experience that are the sensations that resulted from the actions of our adaptive unconscious doing it's thing under the covers about 20 milliseconds ago. None the less this is a great advantage and the beginning of great changes in our mental capacity and functioning. It is the beginning of conscious awareness.

By being aware of the sensations in my body I am putting conscious focus and clarity on my internal environment. I help my adaptive unconscious by comparing my current reality to how it is responding to it. This simple act of noticing my sensations helps the adaptive unconscious adapt to present time instead of the past and I will learn to maximize the quality of my experience at my new job. There are also simple ways to communicate with the adaptive unconscious to offer it some alternatives to how it is responding now. For example with awareness I can recognize that the high energy in my body is not as much anxiety as it is excitement. Like a dog hopping around and barking in anticipation of going for a walk in the woods, my unconscious is ready to take a walk in the high tech woods. I am in process of making new meaning of the intense sensations I feel. Processes like this are called re-framing and these can be very powerful but will require much more description than I can provide here.

Autobiographical self

Like little frames in a movie, our memory stores these snapshots of our core self over time. Our memory is wired to store the most emotionally charged events. We develop a little story of ourselves based on how we string these snapshots together. When we think about ourselves this is what we are accessing. Not how we actually are in the present moment. This is the basis of our self-concept and self-esteem. By improving the core self awareness, the autobiographical stories we tell ourselves about who we are will start to change. With some simple principles in place and practiced daily many things can improve about the way you think of yourself and automatically act in the world.

I have an autobiographical story that includes very high stress in a high tech environment while the telecom industry was failing. I lost a lot of money, was burnt out and needed out. As I am reentering the high tech workforce my adaptive unconscious does a memory search to find out what the environment was like so it can prepare me. By being present with sensation in the present moment I can update the story to include how I learned to be relaxed and focused in my new environment. I will update this before I ever go to my first day of work.

Symbols and Logic

At some point things got so complex in our memory that we needed labels on mental boxes we stored things in so we made up the idea that this symbol stands for that object or idea. Think of a door knob – out of the thousands of door knobs you made a symbol that stands for them. How about a tree, or a chair or neighbor. We even make symbols of processes as if they were things (because we think in object language), love, power, addiction, safety – these are all processes that we think of as things. Anyway this led to symbolic thinking and exo-somatic communication (communication outside our bodies) leading to language and eventually Playboy magazine and romance novels (see... the adaptive unconscious is behind it all).

In the fast paced and consumer focused society we live in we are constantly distracted from our own sensations in current time to something else, a beautiful girl holding a beer, a new weight loss plan, the features of a new car. All of this is to convince us we will be more happy if we just part with some money to buy someone's solution to our perceived problem. There is a competition between advertisers telling us what we want and need and us being aware of ourselves. It is important to learn to put your own commercials in your mind and to make them stronger than what's on tv or billboards you see driving down the road. Learning to manage the symbols and logic in your mind will change your life, I promise.

Attention

With all this going on we developed the ability to focus attention on some things to increase our sensory awareness of them over time. Imagine walking down a path somewhere and seeing something out of the corner or your eye that looks like a snake. Your adaptive unconscious has already reacted to it before you recognize consciously that it looks like a snake. One of the things your adaptive unconscious did was point your eyes to focus on it and evaluate the situation. Of course you think inside that you decided to look at the object but in truth your adaptive unconscious is running the show and it directed you to 'want' to look. The benefit of your attention is that you can focus on a narrower part of the environment and get a richer sensory impression. On the occasion you realize it was a stick that looked like a snake and depending on your conditioning your adaptive unconscious will restore your body to a balanced state by releasing the tension in your muscles that it had put there to be ready to jump as well as flush the stress chemicals from your system so you can digest your food again. People that have been exposed to war or abuse or other traumatic experience may have blocks to recovering from this easily and returning to balance. This re balancing is what the adaptive unconscious does so well. It's called self-regulation and our ability to self-regulate determines our flexibility in having a happy life. For most people the ability to self-regulate can be improved and communicating that to others is what inspired this work for me. Whatever you pay attention to you will organize around. This is huge. I have a whole section just on this.

Will

Will is the part of us that developed to focus our attention. If our attention is like a flashlight for the adaptive unconscious to use, will is the part that points the flashlight when the adaptive unconscious isn't already pointing it somewhere else. Will can be very useful but it is very weak in itself for making things happen. There are tools for maximizing the effectiveness of will but for now consider this.

On very large ships there are huge rudders to steer the ship. It takes massive amounts of power to push the rudder over because of how much water it displaces. So some tricky folks made a rudder to turn the rudder. It's called a trim-tab and it works like this. At the very end of the rudder is a small section of rudder that is much easier to turn. By moving the trim-tab it creates a low pressure area that makes it easier to move the huge rudder over. It would be useless to try to turn the whole ship with the trim tab, but it's excellent for helping the big rudder and the big rudder turns the ship. In the same way your will-power is a trim tab to your unconscious goal orientation which in turn changes your way of being. The famous inventor R. Buckminster Fuller often talked about the trim tab factor in this way. Start by noticing what oceans you sail in and what the weather is like. Sure a ship has a destination, but first it's a good idea to know how to float.

Being – Reflective Being

On the left side of the triangle diagram are a couple arrows showing that from the adaptive unconscious down is how you are being in the present moment. The upward arrow is a reflection or memory of how you were. The best you can do is see a reflection of how you were. This is why sometimes other people see us more clearly than we see ourselves. If we were artichokes, each of us would see ourselves as a picture of an artichoke but see other artichokes as they are (Jumbo Artichokes 3 for $2.99 at Bob's Market this week) – see, those advertisers are at it again.

Groundedness – Illusion

On the right side of the triangle are another couple arrows. The farther down the triangle you go the closer you are to physical reality and the fundamental way you work the best in the world. I am calling this groundedness. you have your feet on the ground so to speak. To be more accurate, you have your experience in current sensation. Going up the triangle is moving up into more symbolic and illusionary experience. The power of imagination is possible because people aren't burdened by the reality of the present moment, and for some people unburdened by the thought process as well. We can imagine anything and believe it is real. If we don't ground ourselves in experience it's easy to float off into la-la land and lose ourselves in abstraction. Anxiety is a good example of this. Magical thinking is another example (if you build it they will come).

We are complex organisms evolved from primates

A long time ago (around 100,000 years ago) our ancestors were running around in groups of about 100 to 150 and were already the most adaptable large animals on the planet. We would eat anything we could, we walked upright and could cover more ground than our tree dwelling cousins. We owe all of what we are to these folks.

We had a peculiar adaption that most other animals didn't. We had an enhanced ability to recognize and remember patterns. Many other animals learn patterns but we did this really well. This pattern recognition ability helped us survive and develop even more astounding abilities. This is the work of the adaptive-unconscious mind. And guess what, this is what makes up most of who you are today.

I know we all like to think of ourselves as consciously in control and a big step above other animals on the planet and we are, but fundamentally the way we work inside is the same as our short hairy ancestors. The difference is that we recognized sensation patterns within ourselves and at some point recognized the pattern of 'knowing' something. A chimpanzee will recognize a banana but he doesn't 'know' that he recognizes a banana. This primal 'ah ha' moment made possible by our bigger brains is what lead to advanced human learning.

Modern brain research (within the last 10 years) has exploded in the understanding of how our minds work and we've still just scratched the surface. There is already enough to understand how you can improve the quality of your own life. And the research is pointing directly to becoming friends with your adaptive-unconscious, non-verbal cave person bad self.

Exercise: Preconscious Hominid Walking in Woods

Take a walk in the woods – the farther out the better. As you walk imagine you are one of our short hairy ancestor friends(ok, you can be good looking but you are still hairy). This will be tricky because They didn't have language – so they couldn't talk to themselves or others. They were smart but they didn't know that they knew anything – they didn't recognize their own intelligence. There were no concepts such as time or money. You would have to eat whatever was available within the range that you could walk. You can use rocks to kill things and sticks to pull termites our of mounds and such. If you are lucky enough to run across a dead animal you would have to scare off the animal that killed it so you could pick it's bones. You don't understand how to start fires or build shelters. Hair was a good thing. Got it? What have you got to work with? You don't even have conscious choice – consciousness hasn't developed yet. You are a very smart and adaptive animal but on automatic. Get the idea, O.K. now take at walk and get far enough into the woods to get away from all signs of modern life. Can you feel those ancient sensations as you walk? Concerns are simple – what will I eat, where is my pack(tribe), where do I sleep, what is my sexual status, what in the area can eat me, will the children survive? None of these questions are put into words of course. You don't have words or even scratches in bone yet. Just sensations. If you are walking with someone else doing this exercise notice who is stronger or more dominant, Hmm... You can grunt, screech, point, stroke and preen each other. You can display dominance and playfulness and such. The important part of this is to feel the primitive sensations you experience.

If you want extra credit, notice the changes in sensations when you walk from forest to field or field to forest. Notice when you are on top of a hill or in a gully. What happens to your peripheral vision and hearing?

These primitive sensations are the foundation of who you are and key to having more of the life you want.

If you have done the “preconscious hominid walking in the woods” exercise you have a sense of what we might have been like before we crossed the line into consciousness. this is an introduction to your adaptive unconscious. It is most of who you are today but you are less hairy, taller, live longer and are likely to have more hang-ups than your wordless ancestors.

We are organisms

We are organisms and no matter how smart we are, there are basic organism aspects of us that we are fundamentally organized around. I have drawn a diagram of a basic organism to highlight some points.

This is important because our healthy psychology has developed to support and enhance these basic properties and our psychology that interferes with these properties is unhealthy. So in the back of your mind realize that there are psychological equivalents to these biological functions.

Boundary layer:

we have skin – keeps the environment outside from infecting us and our insides from leaking out. With cells it is salty on the outside and oily on the inside – it took a billion or so years for this to happen at all and without a membrane that likes salt on one side and oil on the other we wouldn't be here. We have an advanced version of this called skin.

Genetic instructions:

you can think of us as vehicles that genes use to reproduce themselves. we are less useful than plankton in this sense because plankton are more prolific. when we are conceived our genes take over and we start to develop according to the pattern that is the combination of mom and dad's genes. Of course when we become more mature and our biological imperatives aren't as important we can decide what we want to do with ourselves. We can all proudly stand up and declare to our genetic codes – Your Not the Boss of Me!! Well, maybe.

Reproductive behavior:

We have sex, choose mates, compete for attraction and status. Because reproductive behavior supports replicating genes our reproductive behavior is a principle part of our lives.

Adaptive maps:

over time we develop intuitive maps of our environment. We remember the landscape and context of our environment and develop special behaviors cued by the environment. We grab apples differently than we grab snakes. This is important because environmental cues are effecting much of your behavior as we speak (actually as you read) but anyway it's important.

External environment:

all organisms are subject to their environment. They can respond to their environment but they cannot escape from it (we have the ability to change our environment but we ultimately can't get off the earth – yet). everything outside your skin is your environment. in the same way you are part of everything else's environment. There are millions of really small organisms on your skin and in your body right now. After you die your body will be some thing's dinner. your job is to hold that off as long as you can and have fun doing it. Later we'll talk about 'Highest Quality Experience for the Longest Period of Time” - HQEFTLPOT – but for now just keep breathing in and out and notice your environment.

Self organizing system:

that's you in so many exciting ways. I know I just said keep breathing in and out. But just for fun hold your breath and notice how your body responds to get you to take another breath. one of the ways you are organized is to breath in and out and when you interrupt that pattern you become organized to breath again. O.K. start breathing again – oh yeah, have a drink of water while you're at it. Water is good for you.

Environmental sensors:

we have little feelers that tell us if what we are bumping up against is good to eat, have sex with or protect ourselves from. out of this we developed eyes, ears, tastes, noses and senses of touch.

Self Sensors:

we have other little feelers that tells us if the termites we ate off the end of that stick were easy to digest. we have ways of telling blood sugar and thirst and muscle soreness and all kinds of nifty stuff like when we are running out of oxygen and need to breath again.

There are important holes in our skin:

we need to take in nutrients like termites and ho-hos and eliminate waste (its a good thing that these are at different ends of our bodies). and the most vulnerable and important activity of any organism is some way to replicate genes.

this is your purpose in life – you are a big tube – you put stuff in one end so you can send it out the other and because this process wears you out, you need to make other tubes to replace you before you can't do it anymore – not very complex after all – just remember to go for HQEFTLPOT.

Context horizon:

imagine being a smart little germ growing in a petri dish. everything outside the dish is spiritual.

now imagine being one of our hairy ancestors again and you are with your pack in the valley – God lives in the mountains – especially the ones that spew fire and cause floods. A hero is someone that goes to the mountain and comes back with fire. People that do this used to be mostly priests and now they are mostly scientists. A person in a battering relationship has a hard time understanding how to get out, someone stuck in poverty in the inner city has a hard time understanding how to get out, many people with strong religious convictions can't imagine having any other point of view. This is because we experience life in a context and beyond the boundary of our context are angels and demons.

Having a reason is more important than knowing the truth

If we understand it we make it a tool, if we don't we blame or credit God or luck for it. As long as we have a reason for it. We hate the idea that life is random, We work very hard to create contexts where we are in control and chaos is far away. We prefer predictability over randomness but enjoy a surprise now and then. Somewhere over the mountains are demons and angels – in today's terms it's terrorists and allies but that's just today's terms. The big reality is that we have only 4 billion more years to get off this planet and establish camp someplace else or all the genes that have been feverishly replicating will be wiped out without a trace. Oh, my God we better hurry.

The next section will be about brakes and bumpers – In order to go into sensation – It's important to know you can come out. You already know how to do both in some degree but I will make it clear in the next section.

Things to remember:

One of the best use of consciousness is to create or move to environments that help the adaptive unconscious thrive. This includes people, rooms, jobs, ideas and thoughts, communities.
Thriving can be viewed as Highest Quality Experience For The Longest Period Of Time (HQEFTLPOT) – clumsy but memorable eh? This requires self-regulation.
To know the quality of your experience you will need to make friends with your sensations in the present moment. This is not something you can do in a weekend workshop. There are practices and exercises I will give you to help with this. But it depends on you doing it.
As you increase your capacity to have sensations in your present experience, you increase your adaptive unconscious' ability to respond to real time more usefully and increase your capacity for HQEFTLPOT.
Whatever environments you are in, your adaptive unconscious is learning to organize itself around and developing automatic patterns of behavior. By focusing attention in specific areas we enhance this self-organization. Self-organization is not good or bad, it's just what we do. Choosing what to organize around is very important. Remember the trim tab?