Joseph Chilton Pearce spoke and wrote passionately on the way medical-technological birth negatively impacts what was generally termed ‘bonding,’ the continued merging, shared meaning, and reciprocal dynamic imprinted during pregnancy and extended after. Bonding, in this primal meaning, is not simple affection. It is an identity-defining, and self-world view forming “experience,” not something abstracted by the intellect, as a name and social expectations. (see Pregnancy, Birth and Bonding and Bonding and the Intelligence of the Heart.)

A late lunch at the Getty in Los Angeles. “Enough with all the challenges, Michael. We want solutions,” lamented my brother and sister. Taking a breath, I stumbled, “we are colorblind to the source, and therefore how to get ourselves out of the mess we have made. Offering positive solutions demands seeing the problem clearly. But we are blind, as David Bohm notes;”

It is impossible to understand what happened in 2020, how it changed the world, and its continuing momentum, by looking at the headlines, any more than you can see the big picture of a large jigsaw puzzle by studying one piece, or two or three, especially when the pieces don’t fit together, intentionally.

Stepping Out of The Game

What Does Freedom Feel Like?

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Natural life will only remain viable if we collectively step out of the game and forge a path towards healing ourselves and the earth.

Alison McDowell

Abstract: What follows, Stepping Out of the Game, What Does Freedom Feel Like? defines culture and its function as a conservative set of relative and abstract filters or beliefs designed to limit and constrain human behavior. Implicit is a biological-cultural conflict between our authentic nature and those behaviors predetermined and accepted by the limited set of behaviors approved by culture. The primary role of enculturation is imprinting each new human being with the approved set of acceptable behaviors. This is accomplished by the child building an internal image of themselves, the social-ego, by comparing and mirroring their degree of conformity. Once created, most effectively with the unfolding and development of verbal language, the internal social image is updated, moment by moment, by parent approval or punishments, and by various cultural institutions, such as compulsory schooling, the church, and other social hierarchies. Understanding the reciprocal and mirroring dynamic between the outer culture and inner image, we discover that they are one process, viewed from two perspectives, inner and outer, micro and macro, and share the same essential function, to predict, limit and control human behavior, at the exclusion of humanity’s vast and unknowable innate capacities. The primary means of cultural control is through the image. Having an insight into the nature and function of the social image, or personal ego is like seeing behind the trick of a magician. The illusion loses its power. This translates into a quality of freedom that few ever experience. Complete attention is given to meeting the challenge de jure, rather than splitting attention between conforming to cultural expectations, winning, for example, or not failing, and pure learning and performance for its own, intrinsic value and pleasure, not prejudged by culture. Athletes call this state of freedom the Zone, researchers call it Flow and children call this state Play. The common factor is freedom from the limitations and constraints imposed by the cultural image. No longer being defined by culture, we reset our default state of consciousness to express our true authentic nature, which is nature in its vast, fullest potential. This fundamental reset to the natural order of the mind, how it redefines thought and imagination as tools in the service of our authentic nature, is now a matter of species survival.

Following, deepening and expanding the legacies of Ashley Montagu, James W. Prescott, Joseph Chilton Pearce, and many others, Darcia Narvaez, a Professor of Psychology Emerita at the University of Notre Dame, ranked in a 2020 analysis in the top two percent of scientists worldwide, launched The Evolved Nest. https://evolvednest.org/

My last post, Machines Can Never Love, explored how the current global crisis is not a spontaneous event, rather a snake-like constellation of dark forces that wind back in time for decades, even centuries. To understand what is taking place today one needs to see this continuity and how it is attempting to define our future, if we let it.

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Follow the money; control and power over people connect our World Wars, the Great Depressions, the murders of JFK and his brother, Martin Luther King, Jr., and many others, along with seventy-two orchestrated upheavals of other countries, 9/11, the invasions of Iraqi and Lebanon, the war on terror, the war on drugs, the sub-prime mortgage theft, twenty-one trillion dollars missing, unprecedented chronic illness of our children, and much more. The political and economic crisis called COVID is no different. Behind all of these, a common-core of forces stands in the shadows, slightly offstage. In 1983 Ashley Montagu wrote:

An invisible dis-ease, an affliction of the spirit, which has been ravaging humanity in recent times without surcease (without end) and virtually without resistance, which has now reached epidemic proportions in the Western World… this sickness of the soul might be called the “Fifty Horseman of the Apocalypse.” Its more conventional name, of course, is dehumanization… The realm of ideas and the world of affairs are joined in continuous and reciprocal interaction, and neither can be understood without reference to the other.

Presence, that invisible spark, spirit, or energy that permeates all living things, is like the broadcast frequency that delivers Game of Thrones to your device. Without presence, there is no show, no life. The full spectrum of human development might be viewed as the act of enlarging our capacity to decipher the hidden meaning in presence. Only a tiny fraction of our neural activity, five-percent, is invested in what is imagined; knowledge, cultural beliefs, all the things taught in school, and information. Some experiences, swimming in the natural world, for example, overflows with meaning, with presence. Others, relating to the digital and virtual world, or technology in general, is devoid of presence. The virtual-digital experience is a counterfeit. What’s missing is presence.

The very means by which we try to solve our problems is the problem. David Bohm

Allowing David’s insight to sink in forces a complete reexamination of our approach and our priorities - to everything. With this in mind, below are a number of concepts that may be new; attention is different from thought or cognition, knowledge, memory, and imagination are not intelligence, attention has different qualities and capacities that can expand, personal identity is reality shaping and defining, conditioned thought and associative memory represent a tiny fraction of our neural activity, personal identity, the social-ego and culture are two sides of the same coin, both emanate from a common source, there is a reality behind the appearances our brain creates, true self-knowledge involves exposing and facing misconceptions about ourselves and more. Some care may be needed as we proceed. Shall we?

The root of our personal and global crisis is a Bio-Cultural Conflict or, a clash between our true nature and our imagined and abstracted thoughts, images, cultural beliefs, and conditioning, which together express as our social ego and culture.

A colleague suggested I view a conversation with Deepak Chopra and Vananda Shiva; Seeds of Love.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WarbGqmMig8

I have had brief encounters with both. Deepak noted in the dialogue:

The environment is our extended body. The air is our breath. The sun is the source of life. The Earth is recycling as our physical body. The rivers and oceans, and even the puddles are our circulation. The trees are our lungs. So, we have a personal body; we have a universal body, and they are both equally ours. And, unless we have this emotional, spiritual shift, then the war will continue. What we need is a critical mass that can see reality as it is--that you, as a biological organism, are not separate from so called environment. In fact, you are a product of that; you are an activity of that.

Quite right. My collection of essays; Where do we go from here? linked below, addresses what Chopra is describing by revealing why we don’t live in the reality that we are not separate from the environment. Below is my correspondence to both.

mm

Deepak Chopra, MD and Vandana Shiva

February 7, 2020

Re: Seeds of Love, Extinction or not? Where do we go from here?

Dear Deepak and Vandana,

Time is short, a decade, perhaps two. If the attached; Where do we go from here? resonates, perhaps we can collaborate and meet this challenge together.