There are a couple of chapters on purpose—good ones, if you’ll pardon a little hubris—in my and David Neenan’s book Evergreen: Playing a Continuous Comeback Business Game.
Also, Brain Me Up! has a tool for helping you find what you are alive to do. It’s called PathPrimer®.
Tags: Alfred North Whitehead, Charles Birch, David Neenan, Evergreen, Ilya Prigogine, John A. Wheeler, life purpose, Norman Brinker, PathPrimer
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IN TIMES LIKE THESE, IT’S CRITICALLY IMPORTANT THAT WE DON’T LEAVE THE UNIVERSE EMPTY-HANDED. ONE OF ITS RULES IS THAT NOTHINGNESS BEGETS NOTHINGNESS
One puzzle has confronted wise people almost from the very first philosophical discussion: Why is there something rather than nothing?
In other words, how has so much complexity managed to appear in the world? Complex things like people, for example. You’d think that with the world like it is, chaos would always triumph over order, old stuff would always smother new stuff, complexity would always lose out to ponderous stupidity and inertia.
But it doesn’t. And therein lies the reason, mysterious as its workings are, why the best thing we can do for ourselves in almost every instance is simply to try something. Send up an idea. Initiate a movement. And see how the world reacts.
Or as I’ve pictured it in my mind a couple of hundred times, throw the life ring out in front of yourself and swim to it.
Amazing as it is, when you offer the world something, as often as not, it takes it and runs with it. In your behalf and to your advantage.
Early in my career as a writer and thinker, I decided to be what people in the media still call a free lance. No job, no salary, no safety net. Just you, the marketplace and a world teaming with things to be discovered, explained, portrayed.
As a young journalist in the 1970s, my family and I wanted to live in Texas. The challenge was that the big media centers were in New York and Illinois, among other places. So, throwing the life ring out in front of things, I got on an airplane. Flew to Manhattan and Chicago and made cold calls all over town. And came home with a brief case full of assignments and new relationships with editors who purchased my work for years afterwards.
That’s happened to me more than a few times. It’s nearly always better to offer the world something rather than nothing.
When things are as dicey and uncertain as they are today, it is understandable to think that this may not be possible. You may think that there are simply no resources, no energy, no opportunity available to you. And that may, in fact, be true. But to allow yourself to assume this, you are cutting yourself off from this mysterious force available in the world that has since the beginning of things, excelled at taking little of nothing and making it into something more.
The universe really can’t make something for you if you haven’t offered it anything.
Make the offer, though, and it can be a wonder to behold. It may be just the smallest toehold. And then there may be a little movement here. Or a door you hadn’t noticed before opening there. An ally appearing unexpectedly. An opportunity that exists only because you offered up a reason for it to materialize.
I can’t guarantee you a good outcome. There will be failures and forays that don’t produce so much as a flutter of progress or possibility.
But I can personally attest to this: There is more often something there rather than nothing when you offer the universe something to work with. Offer it an idea, an opening, a movement, a plan, a design, a surprise, all matched by a good faith effort and the kind of sensible judgment that pays attention to what’s happening, learns quickly from its mistakes and seizes its opportunities.
These are tough times. It’s important that you and I not let the times leave us with nothing. The way forward is to think as diligently as we ever have about what we can give the universe to work with in our behalf. We always need to be scheming to give it something.
Tags: chaos, complexity, nothingness, order
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THIS YO!DOLPHIN!™ CLIENT SAYS SHE HAS HIT A BRICK WALL AND WANTS ANSWERS THAT CUT TO THE CHASE
Posted on June 6, 2009, 1:17 pm, by admin, under Uncategorized.
From a Yo!Dolphin! Worldview Survey client in the U.K.: “I have trawled through some of the pages on my worldview survey and was pleased to know I am on the right track. However, I am struggling so much with my life that I desperately need more than just uplifting words. Are you in the businesses of helping someone who has imagination, a big creative spirit and lots of energy but has come upon a massive brick wall? Any feedback would be gratefully received.”—Stymied Sojourner
Dear Stymied Sojourner:
There’s a lot more to your Yo!Dolphin! report than uplifting words. There are pointed, plain-spoken suggestions for doing something different in your report, too. A lot of suggestions. So keep reading.
And here are other observations I often offer to people who feel that their nose has just run smack into an immovable force:
1. Avoid being alone. In most cases, being with others brings its own kind of healing. Choose your companions with care, putting companions who care about you at the top of the list. But you don’t have to bare your soul and your troubles to everyone around you. Simply being with others even in a casual setting can help push back the night.
2. Keep things simple, at least for now. Don’t try to fix everything at once. And don’t spend a lot of time trying to forecast the future. Brick-wall times in our lives are when things come apart. Our first instinct is to attempt to mend them, using what we know, what we have left, what we are comfortable with. What we try may work immediately, but often it doesn’t. Right now, think survival, not perfection. Think one step at a time, not the whole race.
3. Assign a small part of yourself—that is, your conscious, rational, thinking being—to monitor what is being felt as opposed to what is being thought out. So much of what we think we think isn’t thought out at all. This is “felt” information that comes to us from deep in our brain. The “felt” stuff causes us to believe we know all kinds of stuff, even when we are staring at evidence that what we are sure we know is dead wrong! It is entirely possible that the need to challenge some of your “felt” knowledge is a major cause of your brick-wall feelings. Write down your suspicions about feelings that aren’t right, aren’t true, aren’t helpful.
4. Take care of yourself from the bottom of the food chain up. That is, look after your Carp nature first, then your Shark nature, and only then your Dolphin natures. If any of these personas of yours feels (there’s those feelingsagain!) threatened, it will sabotage realities for the personas “higher up.” Your Carp nature needs stability, family, security, the day-to-day stuff. Be sure it has it. Your Shark nature needs to feel some autonomy, some input into decision-making, a chance to win. Look for ways it can do so. Your higher Dolphin natures need you to heal, once and for all. And stay out of the shark pool. And grow more comfortable with changes in your life and world. But remember: ironically, a bold Dophin first requires a bold Shark and a bold Carp, all in the same brain/mind: yours!
5. Do things. Really do them. In the early stages of dolphin-hood, there is an Achilles heel quality to our thinking. As our brain/mind rushes to embrace an expanded new sense of enlightenment and empowerment, it fools us into thinking that all we need to do to make something true and real is to imagine that it is so. And that can be so very, very destructive. So misleading. So wasteful. So untrue. So personally dangerous. The world is mysterious, yes. The world is amazing, yes. But the world is still the world, and it has its ways and its rules, its priorities and its requirements. You will ignore them to your peril. If you want to walk on fire, you better be dead-sure that you first take the laws of physics into account.
6. Be careful of your gurus. Your personal coaches. Your therapists. Can they be useful? You bet. Can they also hurt you? They can. Use the caveat emptor rule of consumerism: if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. If your potential professional helper doesn’t appear to be walking the talk, she or he probably can’t help you do it either. So choose with care. Let the Dolphin part of your brain/mind make the choice by asking to see the evidence that the coach, therapist, clergyperson or whomever you are considering as a guide and sounding board seems … well, the best word I can think of is “competent.” People who are going to help you get your act together should pretty much have theirs together.
7. Understand that brick-wall times usually pass quickly, so we need to put them to good use. When you feel that your world has come apart, accept that it probably has. Who you are has once again become an open question. There will be no better time to ask yourself, “Is who I have been who I really want to be?” “Is who I have been who I was aiming to be?” “Is who I have been who I am really intended to be?” At first, such questions can seem impervious to answers. But they’ll come if you keep asking. And if it seems overpowering, remember that all you are doing is asking. You aren’t committing. Not yet. And if you choose not to, not ever. So don’t accept the fear. Embrace the spirit of the inquiry and see where it can lead.
8. You described yourself as “someone who has imagination, a big creative spirit and lots of energy.” Wow! That’s a lot of expectation to lay on a wounded, frightened soul. Let me suggest this: Be content for a while (for how long is your call) at being someone who doesn’t require that her imagination be on duty 24/7. Give it a break. Just be in the moment (I know that as a First Dolphin worldview user you know how to do this!). Forget changing the world, as big creative spirits are always see themselves doing. Find little things you can change now. Changes that can be useful to you. Changes that will bring you some stability, some solace, some leverage. And turn down the energy level. For the moment, run low-key, low voltage. Feel what it is like to let the universe run itself. Then, over time, ramp back up in all these areas to a point where it helps you feel confident, on purpose, ready to resume the journey at the pace and toward the goals you were created to pursue.
So what’s the first thing I’d suggest you do: Go eat. Not at home. Go out. Nourish yourself with good food, competently prepared. If you can find someone to share it with, do. If you can’t, then enjoy yourself as your own company. Be sure to do it in an exciting location. Why? Simply to remind yourself that there’s an amazing world out there. And that you are an amazing part of it. It is a world that never ceases to change. Hitting brick walls is merely a remainder that the world is moving on and that we don’t want to be left behind.
All best wishes to you!
Tags: Carp, Dolphin, feelings, gurus, healing, Shark, simplicity, survival, Yo!Dolphin!
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MY NOMINEE FOR WORLD’S WISEST BRAIN: EDWARD O. WILSON, WHO KNOWS A BOTTLENECK IN AN ANT COLONY WHEN HE SEES ONE
Posted on August 20, 2007, 1:19 pm, by admin, under Uncategorized.
I think I had my gallbladder removed the other day. My surgeon says he took it out but instead of bringing it to the office afterwards as “proof of extraction,” he says he sent it to the lab. I don’t know what the lab did with it. But then where gallbladders are concerned, it doesn’t appear to matter because it is hard to document that gallbladders matter at all. At least, I’m not wearing a gall collection sack on my belt now that it is gone. I told the surgeon, “If there is an Almighty and if I ever get to have a one-on-one with her, my first question will be, “Why a gallbladder?’”
He replied, “My first question will be, ‘Why an appendix?’”
Edward O. Wilson, the great biologist, ant expert and polymath on many other topics, would probably not be pleased with our flippancy on such matters.
In an interview by Psychology Today’s Jill Neimark that I turned up on a New York University web site, Dr. Wilson was characteristically blunt when talking about the paucity of “accidents” in nature.
He observed, “One thing is that natural selection is brutal. It is brutal to see strong, beautiful ant queens and males go forth and realize that they’re all going to be devastated, that one out of 10,000 queens will make it into the ground to start a new colony. Every little advantage that an organism has can make an enormous difference. The other thing is that natural selection grinds exceedingly small. Natural selection doesn’t allow for foul-ups in an ant colony any more than in a hunter-gatherer society. Real biologists who actually do the research will tell you that they almost never find a phenomenon, no matter how odd or irrelevant it looks when they first see it, that doesn’t prove to serve a function.”
Please consider E.O. Wilson to be one of today’s greatest living minds. In my opinion, his might just be the wisest one. Maybe it’s the richness of his background combined the reach of his curiosity and, of course, that world-class intellect. Raised a Southern Baptist, he’s now a self-described secular humanist—with a surviving great respect for Southern Baptists. Reared in the South, he quickly wowed them in the Ivy League (tenured Harvard professor at age 26). Impeccable scientific credentials but one of the popular writing world’s most gifted scribes (two Pulitzer Prizes). Listen to him for a couple of minutes and you would wish every child could have him for a grandfather—and every university student for a professor.
I went looking for other interviews with Dr. Wilson on the Web and offer this collection of his wisdom and witticisms:
On what big evolutionary trigger produced the human brain: “That’s the mother of all questions. The paleoanthropologists put a lot of emphasis on climate change. I don’t believe that for a minute, because geological history is full of vast climactic changes, and large numbers of animal species that lived through them unchanged. I think evolution came up with a fairly big animal, primates, with a fairly big brain, and then this animal somehow got on its hind legs. And once it were erect, it had the freedom of hands. It could carry things. It could try out tools. This was the takeoff point. Nothing like that had ever happened before. Climactic change could have speeded the process, but was not critical.”
On how the brain creates a sense of self: I’m aware of you, you’re aware of me. There’s a sense of self. But there is no transcendental center of the brain somewhere that is in control of the machinery, pulling the levers and possessed of the capacity to float free of our mortal coil when that moment comes. You’ll hear the voice of the neurobiologist emerging from me on this. It’s natural we feel there’s a self because of the body that we’re in. The brain is mapping the world. Often that map is distorted, but it’s a map with constant immediate sensory input. The brain is organized heavily around sensations coming from the body, and that is so intense, so much at the center of conscious experience, including all the input coming from our body, and so it’s seen as the principal protagonist. That’s what the self is.”
On what Wilson meant in his book, The Future of Life, when he spoke of a bottleneck for the human species: The bottleneck is what I believe humanity’s in right now. We all, or most all, realize that humanity has pushed its population growth pretty close to the limit. We really are at risk of using up natural resources and developing shortages in them that will be extremely difficult to overcome, and yet we have this bright prospect down the line that humanity is not going to keep on growing much more in population, that it is likely, if we can use the United Nation’s projections at this stage, to top out at perhaps nine to ten billion, fifty percent more people than exist today, and then begin to decline.”
On what the result will be if humanity doesn’t get “through the bottleneck” in reasonably good shape: “Impoverished, biologically. I mean in the sense of having wiped out a large part of the rest of life. I think that if we continue to encroach on the natural ecosystems, you know, the dwindling rain forest, the rivers that contain around the world so much diversity, as we are doing and continue present trends, then we will have without abatement, we keep this and this rate, we will have eliminated as many as half the species of plants and animals on earth.”
On what humans will lose if they allow mass destruction of the remaining species: “Here’s an easy way to remember it. We get from nature scot-free—so long as we don’t screw it up and destroy it—approximately the same amount of services as far as you can measure them in dollars as we ourselves produce each year. It [is] about $30 trillion a year. T. Trillion. And these creatures, they have built in them, in their genes and then in their physiology an endless array of defenses, many of which we could use and we have used, like producing antibiotics we never heard of using chemicals that we never even dreamed existed. And so we have already benefited immensely from wild species in that way. But, you know, let me get to the bottom line as far as I’m concerned. Isn’t it morally wrong to destroy the rest of life, you know, in any way you look at it—for what it’s going to do to human spirit and aesthetics?”
On why he thinks humans deserve to be called “the crown jewel of creation”:
Well, you know, I sort of think we are, in one sense. That is to say we are the brain of the biosphere. We are the ones that finally, after 4 1/2 billion years of evolution—that’s what it took to get to where we are—actually developed enough power, reasoning power, to see what’s happening, to understand the history that created us and to realize almost too late what we’re doing. So in the sense that we are something new under the sun and on the Earth…we have an enormous…we’re the ones that can destroy the world. No other single species ever had anything like that power. We have the power to destroy the world, the living world. And we also have the knowledge to avoid doing it. And it’s sort of a race, a race to the finish line that we will develop the intelligence and the policies and the decency to bring it to a halt, not just for life itself but for future generations before, you know, the juggernaut takes us over.”
If I ever get into a one-on-one conversation with Edward O. Wilson, my first question will be, “Why a gallbladder?”
The above quotes were taken from these interviews with Dr. Wilson:
By Jill Neimark of Psychology Today: Edward O. Wilson is On Top of the World
By Ben Wattenberg on PBS: Edward O. Wilson and The Future of Life
By Bill Moyers on PBS: Bill Moyers talks with E.O. Wilson
Tags: brain change, E.O. Wilson, endangered species, evolution, natural selection,population growth, the self
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OF COURSE, THE BRAIN CAN CHANGE ITSELF. BUT IT’S GOING TO TAKE SOME TIME TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO TALK ABOUT THE FACT … AND WHICH “FACTS” ARE REALLY FACTS
Posted on July 20, 2007, 2:50 pm, by admin, under Uncategorized.
Before we wade into the topic that “we each create our own realities, ergo, we can each recreate the actual working materials of our brain,” you need to know a bit about my own self-created reality.
Basically, I’m a skeptic on most matters in the so-called “woo-woo” department of human inquiry, ranging from religion to UFOs to telekinesis to, yes, even the chiropractic theory. But I’m not a ragin’ Cajun on such topics. It’s true that I once refused to permit a renter of our conference center to do a firewalk because I feared liability for injury to her participants. But I also defied advice from friends in the medical community for years and chose as my personal physician a Doctor of Osteopathy over an M.D. because (1) I thought him to be a better healer than any M.D. I’d ever sought out and (2) he was a whiz at “popping” the pain out of my back with his hands-on manipulative techniques.
Thus when a dear friend insisted the other day that the wife and I just had to watch a movie called What tнe⃗ #$*! D⃗ө ωΣ (k)πow!? (also variously known as What the #$*! Do We (K)now!?, What the Bleep Do We Know! or WTFDWK?) with her because the flick had literally reordered her personal reality, my reaction was, “What the heck—why not?”
My viewing of WTFDWK? lasted approximately four minutes, and then I had to bail before I barfed. This is definitely woo-woo stuff, and in my opinion, nowhere near very good woo-woo stuff. I apologized to our friend and mumbled something about a long-standing pathological need for structure, especially in the story lines of films I’m viewing.
But then no sooner was WTFDWK? receding in my memory than another of my favorite people urged a new book on me called Evolve Your Brain: The Science of Changing Your Mind by Joe Dispenza. A quick check of Dr. Dispenza’s credentials (he’s a chiropractor) indicated that he was one of the interviewees in WTFDWK?. With that discovery, I surrendered. It appeared that God was sending me a sign that I ought to take a closer look at this, and I have.
Now, the idea that we each create our own reality is at least as old as the first onlooker to report a miracle, but it is an idea that seems to wax and wane, cycle-like, in human affairs.
If we were doing an documentary called What tнe⃗ #$*! D⃗ө ωΣ (k)πow!? and not the psycho-spiritual propaganda piece that WTFDWK? is, the story line for this latest recycling could very well begin with an invitation made by the Dalai Lama in 1992 to a Harvard-trained neuroscientist named Richard Davidson. When Davidson got a close look at the renowned Buddhist spiritual leader’s monks at the Dalai Lama’s home in Dharamsala, India, he quickly invited them to his own digs—the W.M. Keck Laboratory for Functional Brain Imaging and Behavior in Madison, WI.
Davidson was soon reporting that the Dalai’s monks, each of whom had meditated on compassion and love for more than 10,000 hours, were demonstrably and permanently altering their brain when given meditative assignments. (A control group also altered their brains—or at least their brain waves—while meditating but only temporarily.)
Davidson published his research findings in 1994 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and by 2006, TIME was naming him one of the ten most influential people of the year because of his research.
But research into what?
Neuroplasticity!!! That’s really what all this is about. Finally, after nearly a century, we have Santiago Ramón y Cajal on the run, Nobel Prize or no Nobel Prize. This Spanish neuroanatomist froze reality in brain research labs for much of a century with this sentence: “In the adult centers the nerve paths are something fixed, ended and immutable.” Translation: the adult brain is hardwired and not susceptible to change. Ever.
Now, we know that’s nonsense. New discoveries are being made every day of just how neuronally plastic the brain really can be. The Dalai Lama is so excited by evidence that the mind can change the brain to some extent that he’s now apparently sponsoring yearly meetings of Buddhist monks and leading neuroscientists to discuss the latest changes in neuroplasticity. The Dharamsala conferences so excited Wall Street Journal science columnist Sharon Begley that she’s now written two books on how the mind and the brain interact. Her latest—Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain: How a New Science Reveals Our Extraordinary Potential to Transform Ourselves—barely made it out before an even better book by New York research psychiatrist Dr. Norman Doidge called The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science.”
So can the mind actually do things like “will” the brain to grow new nerve cells when old ones get damaged? The sources we consulted say the current evidence for neurogenesis is restricted to the olfactory bulb and the hippocampus. While I’m not a brain scientist or even a science writer who follows this field closely, I suspect that the field of neuroplasticity is just now taking baby steps. There are some wonderful anecdotal triumphs, as book writers like Begley and Doidge recount, often inspiringly. People with damaged inner ear nerves getting relief from dizziness. A stroke victim again able to walk. People rechanneling serious compulsive urges by actually altering their brains’ neuronal circuitry.
Throw them a little evidence, and you just had to know that the people featured in WTFDWK? would not be able to resist mixing in quantum mechanics, transcendental meditation, alternative realities, water crystals and channeling with the 35,000-year-old warrior spirit Ramtha. (Dr. Dispenza, the chiropractor, incidentally, is a teacher at Ramtha’s School of Enlightenment.)
Baby-step times are nearly always heady times. (In our Brain Technologies seminars, we usually call this the “naïve enthusiasm” stage of the discovery process.) There is absolutely nowhere near enough evidence to suggest, as aNew York Times’ book reviewer (an M.D., no less!) put it, “the electronic circuits in a small lump of grayish tissue are perfectly accessible, it turns out, to any passing handyman with the right tools.” That’s simply far too great a leap to be made at this point.
And the claims made in WTFDWK?—judging from numerous reports by film watchers with less sensitive barf calibrations than mine—are even more outlandish. But this much is believable: one more time, the brain, and nature, and the reality of all realities has proven much more interesting and much less limited than we have imagined for most of history, modern scientific history included.
Go here to check out various titles on brain neuroplasticity and related topics:
By Norman Doidge The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science
By Jeffrey M. Schwartz and Sharon Begley The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force
By Sharon Begley Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain: How a New Science Reveals Our Extraordinary Potential to Transform Ourselves
By B. Alan Wallace Contemplative Science: Where Buddhism and Neuroscience Converge
By Joe Dispenza. Evolve Your Brain: The Science of Changing Your Mind
Wikipedia has a lengthy entry on the WTFDWK? movie: What the Bleep Do We Know!?
Here is Wikipedia’s entry on the new science of “brain malleability”:Neuroplasticity
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Author
Dudley Lynch stepped off the curb of normal expectations some years ago and has never managed to get back on the sidewalk. He observes, opines, writes and sometimes lectures (usually the dog) on the serious consequences of being alive in the 21st Century from Gainesville, Florida, where he is president of Brain Me Up.
My Twitter Updates
GRUMPY OLD BRAIN: As the day wears on, the brain's willingness to say yes takes a distinct turn for the worst.http://t.co/qVHuGk9N #2011/11/16
NO WAY, JOSE! Your brain doesn't like being wrong. Ever. Here's 5 ways it tries to convince itself it isn't when it is.http://t.co/1Q8ybO2j #2011/11/15
New book on Schelling's game theory ideas good decisions due shortly.http://t.co/Z9XyCU8f Here's 2005 NPR interview.http://t.co/IUKF1aEZ #2011/11/13
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