We, or at least I, often rationalize violence. After all, it is normal to pound a fist or scream when frustrated and angry. Anger is normal. Einstein’s protégée, David Bohm, defined violence as any excessive use of force. Slamming a car door when one could gently close it. Violence is natural. Or is it?

Applying Gabor Mate’s insight into addictions: The question isn’t why the addiction. The real question is; why the pain?

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We are alive and we know it. What an amazing gift that is. Of all the matter in the universe an infinitesimal speck is alive and of that, a minuscule, ever so tiny layer has evolved the capacity to be aware of the miracle being aware is!

For better or for worse this gift of being aware involves imagination. Yes, we can imagine. This magical elixir of the gods bestows the ability to participate in creation itself, to participate in the ontological nature of our own being, our own becoming, existence, what we call reality, and is what friend and mentor Joseph Chilton Pearce calls Evolution’s End.

Look up. Yes, I see. They are doing it again, and in plain sight. No one seems to care. No one looks up and screams. Yesterday the sky was deep blue. Not a cloud from horizon to horizon. This morning, early, the sky was filled with long chalk marks. Very high, six or more tiny arrow heads, large jets belching chemicals crisscrossed the sky. For several hours I watched as these long straight chalk marks spread into artificial clouds. As the day went on the sparkling fall light became dull. I’m a photographer. I notice the light. I notice when something artificial, unnatural destroys the composition. They are doing it again.

Not having health insurance I sat in the waiting room of the local ‘tribal’ clinic waiting for my annual routine blood work to be drawn. Sitting across the room was a Native or Hispanic mother with her daughter, who is just becoming a woman. She watched the television and got up a few times to answer a question or help her mother with a form. I was struck by her natural beauty, her chiseled face, large doe-like brown eyes, her body mid-way transforming from a child to a woman.

Life is relationship. There is me, my authentic nature with its needs and curiosities and the cosmos expanding infinitely beyond me. What happens in the gap defines my life.

Children are sponges. Their rapidly changing brains and bodies compulsively seek new and different relationships that match the nova of neural connections exploding inside. We adulterated adults are in the Stone Age compared to the exponential brain growth found from the moment of conception to age eleven. Indeed the brain continues its expansive reach beyond eleven, but not as radically. The earlier in life the more profound and pronounced the changes, which means the greater the need for ever-changing appropriate things and relationships to engage.

The weaver becomes the web. The more we relate to dead things the less alive we become. Emerson made this simple observation as the industrial revolution was pouring across the globe. The environment shapes development. Development shapes perception. Perception shapes reality. Reality projected outwardly shapes the environment and round and round we go.  Resonance….

Joseph Chilton Pearce made a profound and critical observation about virtual reality and the devices that produce them; they are dead, meaning they have no intrinsic resonate meaning, something all life forms share. They represent counterfeits of the mental imagery the most highly evolved regions of the brain evolved to generate. Exposure to counterfeits as the brain is developing (most importantly during the early stages and decreasing in importance through age eleven), retard the development of the capacities the counterfeit mimics.

One is bathed in living resonance sitting in the lap of a storyteller, hearts beating, nonverbal emotions, body contact, movement, temperature, order, touch and many other subtle fields of meaning. Holding a tablet or phone with a screen in your lap one is bathed in toxic microwave radiation. Yes, the senses are stimulated by lifeless counterfeits of living experience, startling bursts of sounds, moving colors, often frightening by design. Nature’s agenda is clear. We become the models we are given. At the turn of the century Emerson said: The weaver becomes the web. Joe’s insight is brilliant. Life and its meaning are defined by ‘resonance.’ Resonance is life itself. But we forget.

Prenatally the developing human is bathed in resonance. The first two years after birth are extremely sensitive. Attunement is the norm even if the adult is not tuning in. The developing brain is exploding with new and boundless possibilities all defined by resonance, that is, the nonverbal meaning of the model’s state. Nature assumes this model is a sensitive, available, attentive and attuned mother supported and nurtured by a father and extended family.

With the unfoldment of spoken language the child’s attention shifts to new internal imagery now generated by symbols and metaphors. As this new field of internal imagery expands attention shifts from the nonverbal meaning found in resonance to the play of words and relationships defined by words. The meaning of resonance slips in the background and is often forgotten, a tragic and unnecessary loss. What happens if the child’s models  are lost and absorbed in virtual reality and its counterfeits. If they, the models, are not sensitive, available, and attuned to resonance - what value will the child find in maintaining and developing this subtle capacity?

Imagine a developing human being interacting with a stimulating but dead technological environment. The model imperative and Epigenetics are lawful. They don’t care. Give a child dead counterfeits of living resonance and that is what you will develop in that child.

And down the slippery slope we go, bonded to dead virtual reality, increasingly unaware of what we have lost.

A philanthropist asked: "With so many worthy nonprofit organizations and such need, what would you do? Where would you invest ten thousand or ten million dollars, and why?"

The answer, I maintain, depends on depth; treating symptoms or root causes. A person bleeding after an accident needs immediate attention. Stop the bleeding. Preventing the injury is more complex, more challenging. We need to do both.

Culture is the cause. Self-inflicted suffering and violence is the bleeding. Yes, self-inflected. In a recent interview the Dali Lama observed that we create most of our problems. Physicist David Bohm, protégé of Einstein, put it this way:

We are faced with a breakdown of general social order and human values that threatens stability throughout the world. Existing knowledge cannot meet this challenge. Something much deeper is needed, a completely new approach. I am suggesting that the very means by which we try to solve our problems is the problem. The source of our problems is within the structure of thought itself.

Collectively what Bohm calls thought expresses as Culture. Culture is our semantic-reality, the conditioned memories triggered by words, mental, emotional and physical images and our identification with these images. The culturally induced inner image we believe we are and the outer image we call culture emanate from the same root. Both are images. Both are, at close examination, the same. This insight is both obvious and profound. The difference between our personal image of self and the outer image we call culture is defined only by which end of the telescope we are viewing, near or far, inner or outer. The root of our personal and global conflict emanates from this image.

My intent (whim) has been to awaken parents from the spell and implicit trap created by our cultural identity. I would not have described it as such twenty years ago, but that is an up-to-date and accurate description.

By encouraging adults to become more aware of our self-generated trap we might free the children who come under our spell and with that, culture, or at least lessen the entrapment produced by the enchantment. After all; kids are not the problem. Child development is dependent on adult development.

This spell or enchantment is the normal and natural function of the relatively new neocortex, the 3rd brain using Paul D. MacLean’s triune brain model.

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice symbolizes our immature mastery of the image making power generated by this 3rd brain complex. The imagery produced by this center is so vast and so new biologically that we simply get caught, again and again, in the images we create, forgetting that we have created them. Not a good thing given the creative power these images represent, which is what the Sorcerer symbolizes.

Human development is ‘model dependent.’ Every generation stands upon the shoulders of the previous. Nature assumes that the adult model, each individual and the collective culture, is sane, intelligent and wise. She could not do otherwise.

Unquestioned acceptance of the given was Piaget’s observation. That is nature’s agenda.  And it worked perfectly for billions of years until the neocortex evolved and with it the capacity to imagine. Imagination is the most powerful tool in the known universe.  Ah, but what if the user hasn’t a clue what it is or how to use it – sanely, consciously? We all then become the Sorcerer’s Apprentice.