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What it Means to Be A Neurohacker 15 Nov 2016 8:25 AM (8 years ago)

This post originally appeared on neurohacker.com

Dr. Zachary Stein, philosopher of education and a research member of the Neurohacker Collective, begins a series on the ethics of neurohacking. This series is part of our commitment to engage our research community on the challenges and opportunities in the space.

On Neurohacking

As a philosopher and educator I am sometimes asked about my work with NHC and about the word neurohacking in particular. To my mind neurohacking means using the best of what is known about how the brain and mind work from all fields and disciplines in the service of realizing humanity’s deepest potentials, starting with self-realization and moving outward. Calling this kind of endeavor neurohacking is putting old wine in new casks—adding modern neuroscience to the ancient philosophical practice of seeking self-transformation in service to humanity. What the neurohacker does is focus on actualizing the next logical step of including psychology and neuroscience in the pantheon of inspirations and tools for a life dedicated to wisdom, love, and service. At its best neurohacking involves some of the key tasks of philosophy, such as phenomenology, reflective self-authorship, and the exploration of human potentials in self and relationship.

My colleagues who are dialectal critical realists would group neurohacking under what they call, “totalizing transformative depth-praxis” – an intentional transformation of human self- consciousness– “depth-praxis” – based on a comprehensive critical philosophy of mind-brain and culture-society. Fans of integral meta-theory would call it Integral Transformative Practice. My former colleagues at Harvard called it Mind, Brain, and Education, or educational neuroscience.

Of course, neurohacking is a term that draws on a computer metaphor. It is also a term originating in a particular time (2000s) and a particular place (Silicon Valley). It comes pre- loaded towards reductionism, hyper-masculinity, technocratic, scientistic, and empiricist readings. The term implies instrumental control and even a kind of cheating or shortcutting, wherein the hacker somehow benefits from outsmarting the normal order of things. When understood this way it can be seen as an ideological outgrowth of the simplistic medical models that dominate the healthcare industry, which make us think that a magic pharmacological bullet can be bought and mechanically inserted into the body as a quick fix. I’d like to see these connotations drop away from the term, which is part of mission of the NHC—to define neurohacking. Personally, I prefer organismic metaphors to computer metaphors when thinking about the mind and body. But neurohacking has a much nicer ring to it than “totalizing transformative depth- praxis,” for instance. Who would join a totalizing transformative depth-praxis collective?

You either hack your own mind and brain or they get hacked for you…

Truth is that when it comes to the use of neuroscience and psychology to transform human consciousness the train has already left the station. I’ve written a book about how psychology and neuroscience have long been used in the service of social control in schools. Advertisers have been using psychology since the birth of the field and use it even more now, as they help build psychometric backends that track your social networking activity to customize ad delivery. The governments and corporations that control large swaths of the mass media are also not ignorant of findings from the modern sciences of mind regarding the malleability of human preferences and perceptions. Tomorrow’s pioneers in the technologies of virtual and augmented reality are already consulting neuroscientists and psychologist in the design of future computer-brain interfaces. So you either neurohack yourself into autonomy or you get neurohacked into conformity, by the media, schools, psychiatry, advertising, or the emerging technologies of augmented and virtual reality.

However, if you are neurohacking to become smarter, or get better at your job, or find happiness, you are confusing means for ends. These are all aspects of one’s full humanity, parts which can be “improved” in isolation, but which must ultimately hang together in some kind of coherence with the rest of you. Make one of these an end-in- itself and you are confusing a fragment of yourself for the whole. The result will be negative externalities and diminishing returns from efforts. Get smarter and you may quit your job. Get better at your job and you may become unhappy. Tinkering with parts in the short run backfires. The neurohacker has his eye on the whole and the long run, not some sort run gain like “productivity.”

All this talk of “increasing productivity” begs the question of what exactly one is working to produce. Too much of the conversation surrounding biohacking and the human potential movement is about how to “get the competitive edge” or “unfair advantage”—both terms that assume one is playing a zero-sum game. Knowledge and practices that “upgrade” our body and mind should be used to liberate our capacities, freeing us to create new and better kinds of value, new forms of work and life, new social systems. We must not merely seek to harden ourselves to better function as cogs within the many dysfunctional social systems that surround us. Neurohacking must include a critical discourse on the ethics of self-instrumentalization. At times we all feel compelled to make our own body and mind into a kind of tool fit for social utility. We can mistakenly hack ourselves into a shape needed to be of service to ideals we would not choose in our better moments. This is a kind of counter-revolutionary co-optation of neurohacking’s potential—something that through the creation of the NHC we are intending to end.

The neurohacker’s commitment to self-authorship expands outward from the self and eventually touches on all aspects of culture and society. When neurohackers get together, say to form a collective, they need to remember the root of what they are doing and create a self-authoring organization. Indeed, with its penchant for commodification, gadgetry, and expensive ingestibles, neurohacking itself could be readily co-opted by largely commercial interests, and become only a small quirky branch of the pharmaceutical and medical technologies industries. Instead we must adopt post-corporatist ethos and design and empower each other through the dissemination of knowledge and best practices. Importantly, the best things in neurohacking are free, starting with your own brain, which is simply a good child of the universe. Meaningful and transformative relationships, mediation, and the natural world are abundant free of charge. Nutrition and exercise are incontestably the most basic elements of brain health, learning, and emotional well-being. Those elements of neurohacking that can be bought and sold, such as nutraceuticals, bio-feedback machines, or quantified-self apps—these ought to be carefully curated in light of an ethos that emphasizes benefits and value over profit and appearances. The post-corporatist ethos of NHC is without a doubt one of its most important features because it assures that we don’t confuse the goal of businesses (making money) with the goals of neurohacking (liberating human potential and self-authorship).

The body is politics. This notion is as old as civilization. The most basic right a human has is to the integrity of their own body. Neurohacking is rooted in each person’s right to sovereignty over their essential organismic integrity. Neurohackers declare independence from deficient systems providing inadequate healthcare and food. Neurohackers declare independence from simplistic and stigmatizing medical labels and industrial-era ontologies of (dis)embodiment. Neurohackers declare independence from the grip of industries that profit from human disease and are thus disincentivized from promoting human wellness. Neurohackers are a diverse group of DIY citizen scientists who are finding ways to free humanity from its current regimes of bio-power. Neurohackers are reclaiming the brain and mind from its cooptation as part of the push towards an increasing politicization, bureaucratization, and commodification of humanity’s biological substrate.

Dr. Stein serves as Chair of the Education Program at Meridian University and Academic Director of the activitst think tank at the Center for Integral Wisdom. He sits on the board of the Society for Consciousness Studies and is a Reseach Member of the Neurohacker Collective. Zak is also Co-Founder of Lectica Inc, a non-proft dedicated to using the science of learning to redesign standardized testing infrastructures. His book Social Justice and Educational Measurement (Routledge, 2016) looks at the injustices of contemporary high stakes testing and has been called “original and powerful… a work of genius… philosophy at its best.”  Zak’s second book, Education in the Anthropocene: Essays on Schools, Technology, and Society will be published in early 2017. For more see: www.zakstein.org

Using Psychedelics to Increase Performance and Reprogram the Mind/Brain Interface 23 Aug 2016 11:14 AM (8 years ago)

(this post originally appeared on Neurohacker Collective)

In a previous post, we discussed the value of nootropics as a tool in the neurohacker’s toolbox. They can help get us dialed in with laser focus and get things done. They can aid with concentration, learning, and memory. But productivity isn’t the only context for the human experience, and it would be sad if we shaped ourselves solely for the purpose of being more effective cogs in a machine.  Neurohacking is just as interested in getting better at asking “why” and “what” as in building capacity around “how”.

Enter, psychedelics, empathogens, entheogens and ‘plant medicines.’ Though many of these chemicals are currently schedule-1 drugs in many countries, humans have been using them for thousands of years for healing, self-inquiry and visioning into the nature of reality. In fact, some propose that the evolution of human consciousness itself was catalyzed by the use of mind-expanding substances discovered or concocted by early man.  If neurohacking is about upgrading the hardware our consciousness runs on, we would be remiss not to mention these technologies of altered states.

The rose tinted days of “tune in, turn on” are long past. Contemporary Neurohackers are exploring these chemicals for everything from accelerated learning to healing major trauma, reprogramming underlying associations that lead to habitual behavioral or thought patterns, shadow work, paradigm engineering, and, of course, the continued exploration of the nature of reality itself.

Below are some introductions to the ways these substances are being used in the neurohacking community.

But first, check out this short video by Jason Silva introducing MAPS (Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies) and the concept of programming the psychedelic experience for therapeutic purposes.   

Microdosing and Performance Enhancement

Defined as being both both sub-hallucinogenic and sub-perceptual, microdoses of psychedelics (6-25 microgram LSD, 0.2-0.5 gram psilocybin) are being used by some neurohackers as part of a weekly routine to access higher levels of creativity, increased focus, and improvements in stamina, response time, and physical acuity.

Silicon Valley entrepreneurs looking for a creative edge, as well as extreme sports enthusiasts wanting to enhance athletic prowess, have reported experiencing these benefits without feeling negatively “altered.” Users have also reported success with microdosing to alleviate depression, cluster headaches, smoking cessation, and ADD/ADHD.

Dr. James Fadiman, Ph.D., is one of the leading researchers in microdosing today.  After collecting and reviewing user reports since 2010, he’s found that the overwhelming majority of people have reported overall enhancement of well-being, emotional balance, and spiritual awareness. His research to date has been synthesized in The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide, which provides guidelines for experimenting with microdosing. While further research is sorely needed, the potential is there for microdosing to become an alternative to addictive prescription antidepressants, anti-anxiety medications and mood stabilizers.

Psychedelics and Reframing the Past

Some of the foundational work done on the psychotherapeutic benefits of psychedelics for trauma healing comes from Stanislov Grof. He pioneered LSD-assisted psychotherapy in the 60s, showing how the appropriate conjunction of therapy with psychedelics could accelerate the rate of healing. He did a lot of early neurohacking experimentation as well, like using strobe light entrainment and psychedelics together to induce mystical experiences.

One version of therapy he developed concerns “reframing work” on past psychological traumas. Neuroscience has shown us that we don’t remember original data or events so much as we remember the way we remember it. And every time we recall something from the past, we actually change the memory. The idea of “reframing” is to take advantage of this fact and to deliberately go in and change the way we remember some event.

Visualize some event from your past, go into the feeling of that moment, and then visualize yourself doing it differently.  For example,  standing up for yourself when you hadn’t, saying no, etc. The more intensely you can recollect the event and the more real your visualization, the more powerfully you can rewire your brain.  Psychedelics can dramatically increase the intensity of your recollection – can bring the event right back into the present and give you authorship over how you want to respond to those events.  You can’t change an event from the past – but you can change the meaning of that event for your present.  

Empathogens and Changing Habits

For better and worse, one of the principle tools of the mind is habituation.  As we proceed through life, our brain is constantly compressing complex behaviours and relationships into simple habits that require little to no conscious thought.  This is true whether those habits and unconscious associations are healthy and desirable or not.  If some event in your past connected feelings of embarrassment, shame or disgust to some thing or situation, you will find yourself hard-wired to avoid that thing or situation – even if you consciously want to go there.

Using empathogens, we can deliberately rewire these associations. By taking a chemical that combines neuroplasticity with pleasure and then thinking about or engaging with things you have negative associations with, you can permanently change your associative state.

One of the places this was pioneered was MDMA-assisted shadow work. A person recalls an event in their past that makes them feel some strong negative emotion every time it comes to mind. They take MDMA, an empathogen that decreases aversion/fear responses and increases emotional openness and empathy, and can experience the memory with a different understanding. The next time they remember that event, they find that they simply don’t feel the same way, and that some psychological and emotional damage has been healed. This technique is so powerful that MAPS has demonstrated that MDMA-assisted psychotherapy is perhaps the best current treatment for the deep trauma of PTSD.

But this kind of hack isn’t just for deep trauma.  Thoughtful Neurohackers have used it to edit habits as prosaic as procrastination and fear of public speaking.  Always procrastinate around cleaning your house? Terrified of public speaking? It is currently possible (and someday it might be legal) to choose to take an empathogen, associate the resulting highly positive state with cleaning or speaking, and permanently reduce or eliminate the anxiety you used to associate with that activity.

Entheogens and Spiritual Experience

Of course, no discussion of these chemicals would be complete without discussing their use for exploring “the divine within.” After all, these are the substances that have been used in religious contexts by shamans for thousands of years. Here is Jason Silva again, on Entering Godmode.

There is no reason to be shy here.  Profound spiritual experiences are, well, profound and life-altering and, as a consequence, have played a rather important role in human history.  Yet, for a number of reasons, we have largely left them unexamined or languishing in woo-land.  Neurohackers know, however, that psilocybin mushrooms can reliably bring people to “the single most spiritually significant experience in their lifetimes” and some of them are using these technologies to dive purposefully into the big questions.

N,N-DMT for example is being used in studies of philosophy of mind and phenomenology. We know that, independent of their histories or backgrounds, many people who take N,N-DMT report similar, particular subjective experiences. What does this say about the nature of the brain?  What might it say about the nature of the mind?  Or perhaps of reality itself? We don’t know, but these are ancient philosophical questions that can be examined from a very different perspective using “mind altering” substances.

Conclusion

Psychedelics are powerful tools for transformation, and when used appropriately, can be powerful tools for good. But if you’ve been reading all of this skeptically and noting all of the potential for harm – accidental or purposeful – that these powerful chemicals can deliver, you are right.  These are extremely potent tools and are not to be taken lightly.  We’ve all heard the horror stories of bad trips, where things get too intense and without the right guidance or help, bad things happen. With great power comes great responsibility.

Unfortunately, for five decades society has chosen to try to avoid, ignore and repress these tools – rather than learn how to use them responsibly.  Things are starting to turn around, but we are still waiting for society to catch up and for more rigorous (and legal) research to be allowed to happen.

In the meantime, here are some organizations and individuals doing great work in understanding how to safely and effectively use these tools in conjunction with psychotherapies to probe one’s patterns, heal traumas and overcome fears that prevent us from getting the most out of our short time in this life.

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Resources

Early psychonauts (“sailors of the soul”)

• Stanislav Grof, Alexander ‘Sasha’ Shulgin, Aldous Huxley, Timothy Leary, Alan Watts and Terrence McKenna.

Organizations & People

• Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) – @MAPS – facebook
  • Founded in 1986, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit research and educational organization that develops medical, legal, and cultural contexts for people to benefit from the careful uses of psychedelics and marijuana.
• Rick Doblin – @RickDoblin – facebook
  • Founder and Executive Director of MAPS.

• Erowid Center – @Erowid – facebook
  • An educational non-profit working to provide a balanced, honest look at psychoactive drugs and drug use – to reduce harms, improve benefits, and support appropriate policies.
• The Lycaeum
  • volunteer organization providing information about visionary plants, fungi, and chemicals, as well as a virtual meeting place for members of the online psychedelic community
• Beckley Foundation – @BeckleyResearch – facebook – youtube – instagram
  • UK-based think-tank at the forefront of global drug policy reform and scientific research into psychoactive substances.
• Heffter Research Institute – @HeffterResearch
  • researching psilocybin for the treatment of cancer-related distress and addiction
• Psychedelic Research in Science & Medicine (PRISM) – @PRISMNews – facebook – linkedin
  • Australian non-profit research association supporting formal research into mainstream applications of psychoactive compounds
• International Center for Ethnobotanical Education Research & Service (ICEERS) – @NGO_ICEERS
  • bringing objective information about iboga, ayahuasca, & ethnobotanicals to the attention of the scientific community, policy makers & the general public
• Crossroads Ibogaine Treatment Center
  • ibogaine detox treatment program for chemical addiction
• Martin Polanco – @martin_polanco7
  • Founder of Crossroads Treatment Center
• OPEN Foundation – @FoundationOPEN – facebook – vimeo
  • an interdisciplinary organization which stimulates research into all aspects of the psychedelic experience
• James Fadiman – @jfadiman – facebook
  • psychology & psychedelic researcher; author of The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide
• Mendel Kaelen – @MendelKaelen
  • neuroscience PhD at Imperial College; Researching the use of music in psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy
• DrugScience – @Drug_Science – facebook
  • independent science-led drugs charity carrying out research into drug harm and effects
• David Nutt – @ProfDavidNutt
  • Chair of DrugScience; author of Drugs – Without the Hot Air; Edmond J Safra Prof of Neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial College
• Robin Carhart-Harris – @RobinCarhartHar
  • Head of Psychedelic Research, Centre for Neuropsychopharmacology, Division of Brain Sciences, Faculty of Medicine, Imperial College London
• Jason Silva – @JasonSilva – facebook – youtube
  • futurist, filmmaker, host
• Psychedelic Society – @PsychedelicsUK – facebook
  • advocates the careful use of psychedelics as a tool for awakening to the underlying unity and interconnectedness of all things
• Eugene Center for Ethnobotanical Studies (ECfES) – @EC4ES
  • A 501(c)3 grass-roots non-profit promoting global awareness of and local accessibility to organic, plant-based ethnobotanicals & psychedelics
• Entheogenic Research Integration & Education (ERIE) – @ERIEvision
  • provides support for entheogenic integration processes
• Nese Devenot – @NeseLSD
  • psychedelics researcher, postdoctoral fellow, University of Puget Sound
• Graham Hancock – @Graham_Hancock
  • writer and journalist, author of The Divine Spark: Psychedelics, Consciousness and the Birth of Civilization
• Dimitri Mugianis – @DimitriMugianis – facebook
  • drug policy activist, Bwiti N’ganga (spiritual healer), poet, and musician
• Katherine MacLean – vimeo  
  • cognitive psychologist; psychedelics research scientist & meditation practitioner

Events

• Horizons : Perspectives on Psychedelics – @HorizonsConf
  • an annual forum in New York City that examines the role of psychedelic drugs in science, healing, culture and spirituality
• Psymposia – @Psymposia – facebook
  • think up collaborative projects that have positive social impact, network community, and change perceptions of plants, psychedelics, and psychoactives
• Breaking Convention – @breakingcon
• World Ayahuasca Conference
• Beyond Psychedelics

Media

• Aware Project – @awareprojectorg – facebook – youtube
• Psychedelic Stories

Podcasts

• Psychedelic Salon Podcast – Lorenzo Hagerty – @PsychedelicLozo

Forums

• Bluelight
• r/Psychonaut/
• Lycaeum

 

Threads on Microdosing

• The LSD Micro-dosing experiment – reddit.com
• The Low-Dose LSD Appreciation Thread – bluelight.org

Blogs

• Reset.me – @resetmenews – facebook
• Psychedelic Frontier – @PsyFrontier

Books

• PiHKAL and TiHKAL – Alexander Shulgin
• The Shulgin Index, Volume One: Psychedelic Phenethylamines and Related Compounds – Alexander T. Shulgin
• The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience: The Classic Guide to the Effects of LSD on the Human Psyche – Robert Masters PhD

Book Publishers

• Psychedelic Press – @PsypressUK

Articles

• New Study Shows Ketamine May Regenerate Brain Cells, Relieving Depression with Lasting Benefit
• Psilocybin may be safe, effective for treatment-resistant depression
• A Manual for MDMA-Assisted Psychotherapy in the Treatment of PTSD
• First ever human trial Finds Magic Mushrooms Beat Severe Depression
• MAPS-sponsored research on Ibogaine therapy as treatment for drug addiction
• Conjoint Therapy: DEA Approves Study Protocol
• How Psychedelic Drugs Might Help Treat Mental Illness
• Benefits of Microdosing with LSD and Psilocybin Mushrooms
• 5 Ways to Harness Neurogenesis: Boost Your Brain
• Everything You Want to Know About Microdosing

Why the World Needs Neurohacking Now 25 Jul 2016 10:37 AM (8 years ago)

this post originally appeared on Neurohacker Collective

 

Let’s face it – as anyone who is paying attention knows, we humans are in a bit of an ‘emergence through emergency’ scenario. Every day the people and institutions that we used to be able to rely on are falling apart; failing to do even a little part of their job. Yet, at the same time, every day, the world is getting more complex and harder to make sense of. This is getting serious – staying the course and hoping to muddle through isn’t going to do it.

Our options: evolve or die.

If we want to stay in the game, we’re going to need to seriously level up.

There are a lot of different ways that we could examine our situation. We can look at our energy infrastructure and the way that it interfaces with our ecology. We can look at the relationship between education and exponential technology. We can look at radically empowered individuals and their tension with legacies of injustice and oppression. Each one of these is a deep, rich challenge and they combine into a set of problems that is, well, above our current capacity.

To understand our perspective on this, we have to take a look at a bigger (and older) picture.

For all of our evolutionary history until very recently, we lived in relatively small geographic areas with a relatively small number of people, and our technological / industrial capability could only affect a relatively small portion of our world.

We evolved to be able to process at this kind of scale. For example, there is something called “The Dunbar Number” that reflects what appears to be the fact that our primate brain is only able to handle quality relationships with around 150 people. We evolved to live in bands and small tribes – and when we have to deal with more people than that, we are out of our element.

What this means is that we broadly seem to be limited to having empathy for people that we actually see and for taking responsibility where we can actually see and feel the effects. Where the consequences of our actions are distant – like where we can make purchases and then throw stuff out, or we don’t see the open pit mine where the stuff came from, or the landfill that it goes to, then we struggle to connect the dots.

In our modern world where many issues have profound complexity between many different financial interests and nation-states and cultures, we are really daunted. Yes, we have access to a level of information and technology that would have seemed like pure magic to folks even a few centuries ago. But as useful as it is, our contemporary technical prowess is a double edged sword.

Our always-on connected info lifestyle immerses us in a barrage of demands on our attention and processing power. Social media overwhelms us with the daily realities of war, brutality, and climate change – not to mention the demands of a social graph that is orders of magnitude larger than our Dunbar number. Put simply, our poor hominid brains are overwhelmed by the rate of information coming in and the level of stress it produces. Even at our best, we can’t make use of all this power.

And, of course, we are not positioning ourselves to be at our best. Consider nutrition. Our tool using hunter-gatherer ancestors had access to food that provided a diversity of nutrients without really any toxicity in the environment – or at least a level of toxicity that we had been adapting to for millions of years. These days most of our food is produced, processed and transported in a in a complex soup of chemistry that we don’t come close to fully understanding. And even if we have the time and resources to try and only “eat healthy” – even this food is grown in minerally-depleted soil that leaves many of our known nutritional needs unmet.

Or consider pollution and our toxic lifestyle. High frequency EMFs are generated by all our wireless devices causing pollution-induced stress. We spend much of our time indoors, not getting enough vitamin D and breathing in a host of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) from all of our modern building materials. Going back even farther, consider that the average mother in the United States has 136 different carcinogenic and neurotoxic petrochemicals in her breastmilk. We are born in struggle against the environment that our own power and desire has brought into being and, as a consequence, most of us end up living our day to day lives far below even our hunter-gatherer baseline.

So our situation is this: we need to seriously level up. We need to modify ourselves and our inputs to be able to respond effectively in the current environment. We need to ameliorate the downsides of modern technology and add more capacity to use that technology without creating even more “side effects”. This requires, at a minimum, coming to understand how to resource core nutrients; how to improve the functioning of our immune and detoxification systems; and how to improve our ability to deal with and process environmental and psychological stress.

And then we need to meaningfully improve the full spectrum of our information processing capabilities.

Like we said: evolve or die.

We call it Neurohacking.

The Neurohacker’s Toolbox: Nootropics 7 Jun 2016 8:27 AM (8 years ago)

this post originally appeared on Neurohacker Collective

Nootropics. You might have heard of them. The “limitless pill” that keeps Billionaires richer than you. The ‘smart drugs’ that students are taking to help jack up their hyperfocus (Vice). The cognitive enhancers that give corporate executives an ‘unfair advantage’. (Harvard Business Review). All very exciting. But as always, the media are way behind the curve. Yes, for the past few decades, cognitive enhancers were largely sketchy substances that people used to grasp at a short term edge at the expense of their health and wellbeing. But the days of dropping Adderall and Ritalin to pull an all-nighter are so 2010.

These days, nootropics are beginning to take their rightful place as a particularly powerful tool in the Neurohacker’s toolbox. After all, biochemistry is deeply foundational to neural function. Whether you are trying to fix the damage that is done to your nervous system by a stressful and toxic environment or support and enhance your neural functioning, getting the chemistry right is table-stakes. And we are starting to get good at getting it right. What’s changed?

A big part is that we are finally starting to apply complex systems science to psycho-neuro-pharmacology. The neural system is awesomely complex and old-fashioned reductionist science has a really hard time with complexity. Big Pharma spends hundreds of millions of dollars trying to separate the effects of just a single molecule from placebo – and nootropics invariably show up as “stacks” of many different ingredients (ours, Qualia, currently has 42 separate synergistic ingredients). That kind of complex, multi pathway input requires a different methodology to understand well.

But, thanks to the efforts of a number of remarkable scientists, researchers and plain-old neurohackers, we are beginning to put together a “whole systems” model of how all the different parts of the human brain work together and how they mesh with the complex regulatory structures of the body. It’s going to take a lot more data and collaboration to dial this model in, but already we are empowered to design stacks that can meaningfully deliver on the promise of nootropics “to enhance the quality of subjective experience and protect the brain from injury while having extremely low toxicity and possessing very few side effects.”

Even the best of today’s noots only just barely scratch the surface. You might say that we are in the “Nokia 1100” phase of nootropics, and as better tools and more data come along, the leading thinkers in the space see a powerful future. For example, they are already beginning to look past biochemistry to the epigenome. Not only is the epigenome the code that runs much of your native biochemistry, we now know that experiences in life can be recorded in your epigenome and then passed onto future generations. There is every reason to believe that you are currently running epigenetic code that you inherited from your great-grandmother’s life experiences. And there is every reason to believe that the epigenome can be hacked – that the nootropics of the future can not only support and enhance our biochemistry, but can permanently change the epigenetic code that drives that biochemistry and that we pass onto our children.

We’ll dive into the possibilities in future posts, but for now, here are just a few resources to get you started in exploring this domain of neurohacking:

People

Steven Fowkes – quora – facebook – google+ – youtube – linkedin
* Organic chemist who co-wrote the foundational book on Smart Drugs
* Founded the Cognitive Enhancement Research Institute
* Founded Project Wellbeing
* Related interests: Nutrition, Neurohacking/ Biohacking, Human Performance, Nano-tech

David Pearce – @webmasterdave – facebook
* Wrote the online bible of nootropics at nootropics.com
* Founder of The Hedonistic Imperative, a project outlining how bioengineering and nanotechnology will abolish suffering in all sentient life
* The Hedonistic Imperative Facebook public group
* The Abolitionist Project
* Related Interests: Philosophy of mind, Ethics, Transhumanism, AI

Joe Cohen – @Selfhacked – facebook
* Authors the blog SelfHacked
* Embodies much of the neurohacker ethos; taking responsibility for his health & wellbeing and upgrading his experience through research and self-experimentation

Forums

Longecity: Brain Health – @imminst – facebook
* Forum for discussing nootropic stacks and mental health
Reddit Forum Groups – Forum for discussing nootropics and cognitive enhancers
* r/Nootropics/ – @CognitvEnhancer , @Smart_Drugs, @Nootropix
* r/CognitiveEnhancement/
* r/DrugNerds – @DrugNerds
Bluelight
* Forum for discussing nootropics and psychedelics

Informational Resources & Scientific Literature

Examine.com
* An independent encyclopedia on supplementation and nutrition.
PubMed
* Citations for biomedical literature
ConsumerLab.com
* Independent testing of health and nutrition products

Educational Blogs & Websites
Nootriment
* Research-backed content & reviews of effectiveness of supplements
Smarter Nootropics

Self Tracking Apps & Brain Training Programs
Cambridge Brain Sciences
TrackMyStack
StackDB.net
NootDB
Dual N-Back
Quantified Mind

Vendors / Suppliers
Ceretropic

What is Neurohacking? 17 May 2016 10:07 AM (8 years ago)

this post originally appeared on Neurohacker Collective

The term ‘hacker’ has its origins in computer programming subcultures from the ‘60s, and was used to describe people who wanted to take on hard problems in a spirit of playful exploration and a resistance to ‘unearned’ authority. Although the methods, means and intentions of hackers varied widely, all seemed to share a unique ethos that mixed a deep commitment to individual autonomy and agency with an equally deep commitment to collaboration and co-creation.

Over time, the concept of hacking has traveled far from its origins, finding its way into a number of domains like Biohacking, Consciousness Hacking, Flow Hacking and Life Hacking. Each is a kind of hacking because each shares this ‘hacker’s ethos’ and a commitment to using it to find the most effective ways to optimize the human experience.

We call the common thread that links these hacking communities together, ‘empowered responsibility.’ This notion expresses the dual recognition that we are no longer able to rely on external authorities to take care of us (in any domain) but through a combination of ubiquitous information, individual experimentation and open collaboration, we are increasingly empowered to take responsibility for ourselves.

In the Biohacking community, the spirit of empowered responsibility drives the process of optimizing one’s biological health and performance. Biohackers learn from each other how they can modify their nutrition, exercise, sleep, movement, and mindset to achieve the specific kind of well-being that they individually desire.

The Consciousness Hacking community takes empowered responsibility in using technology as a catalyst for psychological, emotional and spiritual flourishing. They utilize mindfulness techniques and biofeedback tools for self-exploration, taking personal responsibility for their conscious experience in this most individual of journeys.

Emerging from within and alongside these movements, we are observing the coalescence of a new and important domain: Neurohacking.

Whereas biohacking concentrates on the body, and consciousness hacking explores the inner experience, neurohacking is somewhere in the middle, focusing on the mind-brain interface – the intersection of neurology and consciousness. Specifically, neurohacking involves applying science and technology to influence the brain and body in order to optimize subjective experience.

The desired outcomes of neurohacking cover everything from focused productivity, to expanded creativity, more restful sleep, reduced anxiety, enhanced empathy, and anything else that contributes to the psychological well-being and emotional health of whole, thriving human beings.

The technologies of neurohacking run the gamut from chemical technologies like nootropics and entheogens, probiotics to support the gut-brain connection, bioelectrical technologies like neurofeedback and transcranial stimulation, photic therapies like low level laser therapy and all the way to embodied practices like somatics and meditation. So long as there is a scientifically accessible biological mechanism for effecting subjective experience, it belongs in the domain of neurohacking.

Of course, like all emergent phenomena, neurohacking didn’t just come from nowhere. For years there have been many movements and communities out there, playing in and pioneering some aspect of the neurohacking space.

Some of these domains include:

• Nootropics
• Entheogens
• Microbiomics
• Neurotechnology
• Experiential Technology
• Biohacking
• Consciousness Hacking
• Flow Hacking
• Quantified Self
• Transformative Technology
• Calming Technology
• Transcendence Technology
• Positive Computing
• Neuroethics
• Transhumanism
• Futurism
• Positive Psychology

We propose that it is now timely and useful to perceive the commonality among these different movements and communities as shared aspects of Neurohacking. And in an effort to make these commonalities more visible and legible to each other, in the upcoming weeks we will take a deeper dive into each, highlight some notable people and projects in each space and explore the frontiers of the community from the point of view of Neurohacking.

In our next post, we will begin this exploration with the domain of Nootropics.

when the mind hijacks my flow state 23 Feb 2015 11:54 AM (10 years ago)

excerpt from field notes: “the battle of slave and sovereign is underway. what is this – day three of hell? i lost my focus, my muse, my creative edge. i’m stuck in an addictive pattern, my mind is spinning and traveling down well-worn pathways. i can feel that i’m no longer in flow. the curiosity & joy that was underlying this activity has been replaced with a burdensome drudgery. i’m “trying” to say the right thing, i’ve lost the thread of purpose underlying it. there was something that used to feel exciting about this….. what was it? i was in a position of self-authority, of creative flow. things felt effortless. now i’m running on some script, caught in a repetitive loop of thinking and/or behavior. even writing this now feels false. i feel a fear and panic that everything i’ve written so far was delusional. exposed, foolish. i need to switch gears. i need to disrupt the pattern. i need to relax. but the mindset that’s even trying to “figure out” how to break the pattern is the same one that’s creating it, so that won’t do. i need to transcend the mind’s limited viewpoint. i’m trapped in a limitation, and any logic within this frame is not going to work. 1/ the mind that got me here is not the mind that’s going to solve this 2/ move to a view that opens the possibility space i can actually feel the feeling of tunnel vision like a pressure on my temples that’s squeezing my view of reality into a narrow slice. i no longer feel connected to that spark, that essence, that feeling of “wholeness” that made things seem effortless. i’ve entered a state of separation. i can feel when it’s authentic creativity, being generated moment by moment, and i can tell when i’m forcing it, and it feels stale, regurgitated, uninspired. the mind that “tries” to be creative is slightly embarrassing. it wants to be clever & impactful, but its approach has no heart, and no matter how clear its message, it somehow doesn’t ring true. it despairs and feels frustration, & seems to hang on even tighter even as it acknowledges its own inefficacy. there’s a control pattern at play that’s preventing spontaneous creativity. the mind has an expectation of what it wants to do, and what the result is supposed to look like. it wants to manage the process. there can be no self-governance if the mind lays down those control structures.” ***

what happens when i go from flow to not flow? in flow, my perspective shifts beyond the constrained viewpoint that comes with self-identification. all of the energy expenditure typically associated with analyzing and judging my mental constructions of my self and the world gets freed up. i am temporarily released from participating in the drama of who i think i am and how that person needs to prove their value and worth in the world and what others might think about her. those indulgences get set aside, and my awareness focuses on directly experiencing the current reality moment-to-moment, which paradoxically, feels totally expansive. instead of thinking about my mental construct of the experience of reality, i’m actually having the experience. in that state, i am creative, enthused, and spontaneous. i’m completely present in the moment, fully here in my body, totally relaxed. life feels erotic. my heart feels open, my mind is clear, my body is coursing with vitality. my writing is flowing out of me effortlessly, and i feel purposeful and fulfilled. there is no endpoint i’m focused on. it’s a process-orientation over a results-orientation. i feel tuned in to an inner source of inspiration that has a flavor of being both infinite and yet highly personal. it channels through me and then out of me as a unique creative expression. it feels like perfect harmony, like flow, like me and reality are dancing together. and then . . . then what happens? the thieves creep in, ever so quietly, through the back door of my consciousness. their movement is subtle, their capacity for imitation masterful. they slowly take over my morning creative routine. it’s fascinating, really, the way the mind works. as soon as it notices a wild, creative energy flowing through me, it wants to harness it, optimize it, and then claim the fruits of its labor as its own. it does such a good job at pattern recognition. it notices the behaviors i’m engaged in, and wants to optimize those behaviors so that my creative activity might lead to more impressive output. the problem is that it mistakenly believes that it is those behaviors alone that lead to the output. it doesn’t seem to realize that the underlying force influencing and motivating my behaviors is heart. mind somehow by its very nature seems unable to detect heart. it doesn’t understand things that are subtle or energetic. it understands what it can see and what it can control. and so it does what it can do, and begins to take over the process, capturing that which was alive and spontaneous, and tries to control it through top-down directive. one of the first indicators of capture is the creation of a false energy source. when in flow, the energy that fuels my action feels like it’s unfolding from within me as i take each step moment-to-moment. it’s like a blossoming, and there is a sense of mystery and adventure to it, because i don’t know what it will inspire me to do. by definition i can’t possibly know, because it is a raw creative potential. it doesn’t have form yet. it doesn’t have an expectation of what the form will be. it just is. it is up to me to receive that energy and then transform it into something, but it can’t be planned in advance. i have to trust that if i let it flow into me and through me, raw and unadulterated by any projections of what it should be, something surprising and novel will happen. and it does, and it is delightful. the mind, however, doesn’t appear to understand the concept of letting something novel emerge from nothing. the entire notion of nothingness or emptiness terrifies it, because if there is nothing, then it itself will cease to exist. and the mind’s greatest fear is to be irrelevant and to die. and so it tries to create a situation that necessitates itself. it creates a simulation of a motivating energy source. this energy by its nature could never produce the same results as that indwelling creative energy it is attempting to imitate. the false energy doesn’t carry the frequency of open possibility. it is pre-loaded with expectation and specific ideas about the types of things that should happen as of a result of this energy. it is not an invitation to create – it is a demand.

i experience this shift viscerally, as the energy moves from within me to behind me, now driving me forward. i begin to feel a restlessness to “do.” it is there at my heels and at my back, urging me on, wanting to see an outcome. i feel forced, and pressured. the sense of magic that had accompanied the writing before, when it flowed out of me and i was both surprised and delighted by what came out, because i had no expectations, is dissipated. in its place is a low-level anxiety, and a panic. now i’m “trying.” it’s not flow. it’s posturing. my sense of self and identity reconstructs itself around the false energy source. the society of personalities have begun to hijack my flow state. i can feel the texture of their voices in the back of my mind. there’s a grasping quality to them. a kind of resentful desperation. deep inside, there is an awareness that they can’t create the same level of work “on demand” as what emerges when i just surrender to the creative process. but they’ll lie to themselves and try anyway. there’s a pressure to control, to finish something, to be congratulated, to be validated. the pressure starts waking me up earlier every morning. the typical wakeup time is 5:30am, accompanied by a sense of curious anticipation of what will happen. a relaxed presence in the face of the total uncertainty of creation. but today, it’s 5:15am, or maybe 5am, or even 4:30am. and i can feel the mind already racing before i’ve opened my eyes, accompanied by a clenching around my heart. i’m gripped. and i already feel a sense of defeat before i’ve even thrown off the covers, because i know that this energy does not deliver the results i want. i get up anyway, kind of pretending like i don’t know that i’m already out of flow and getting pulled into a mental construct. i have my morning coffee, because that’s part of my creative routine, and the mind knows it, and so it takes me through the motions. but it doesn’t work the way it did before. when in flow, i have a serious, and dare i say, sacred, relationship with caffeine. i treat it as an ally. it has a predictable effect for a predictable duration that enhances my focus and clarity. i enter into a partnership with it for a few hours, and together we engage in an inspired creative process. but when i’m hijacked, the starting energy is all wrong, and just as i don’t feel right when the energy is coming at me with an expectation, the caffeine doesn’t like to be bossed around either. instead of clearing my mind and giving me a boost of that unreasonable enthusiasm that i so appreciate when i’m in flow, now it makes me edgy and angry. it does nothing to enhance my creativity. just the opposite, it feels like i’ve just given more ammunition to the thieves that have me hijacked. now instead of them just wooing me gently into action, they have daggers in their hands, and they’re spurring me on with impatient demands, jabbing me in the backs of my thighs to hurry up and be creative already. i’m jittery. i feel more anxiety.

i slog through the writing. it feels disingenuine. i’ve forgotten why i wanted to say anything at all, or what the point was. there’s no joy of discovery. there’s no meaning. the words are circular, hollow. there is no real heart behind them. after all, i’m disconnected from heart. the energy of the words can only be as good as the source they’re coming from. the current source has expectations without originality. it wants something, it is afraid of failure. i’m trying to satisfy its fears with my writing, instead of drawing from that truly creative source at the heart of me. i feel like a fraud. my energy begins to deplete. i’m massively burning through resources to keep this hijacked state going. energy is being spent to keep the simulation of the false energy source going, and energy is being spent in convincing me that source is real. i can’t remember what it felt like to be connected to my creative essence, or who i was then. i only know that i have become a society of personalities. i am exhausting myself maintaining the dynamics between them. the tyrant and slave, the victim and abuser, the oppressor and oppressed, all playing out their parts. one faction mercilessly berating me for my failures, the other trying to survive the onslaught. i keep trying to “push through,” hoping that there is a hump somewhere in the not too distant future, that if i can just get over it, things will right themselves. this of course is not true, and no matter what output i produce, i’m dissatisfied with it, and furious and disappointed with myself. every day i get more and more frustrated, more and more depleted. the mind sees that things aren’t working. it begins to panic, terrified that whatever it was that had me in flow before is lost forever. it sees that its false energy source, as well as caffeine, are not having the desired effect. but it is not ready to give up control, and so instead, it changes tack. what other distractions or addictions can we immerse ourselves in that might fool us into creativity again? perhaps an afternoon beer or two to open the gateway back to flow. or some other creative ally. or maybe if i pretend i’m engaged in my sketchbook or in appreciating nature, i’ll get inspired. or maybe i need some good lovemaking to get me going. or i’ll ask a friend to help me get unstuck. or, or, or. at some point the mind finally has the realization that the jig is up. it deviously tried to capture and imitate every behavior it has seen associated with spontaneous creativity, and it failed to get the results it so wanted. (ultimately, the results it wanted was its own glorification. the creative output was simply a means to that end.)

it is raging and despairing. i am breathing. it feels itself losing its grip. i forgive myself for letting my mind’s arrogance take me out of flow yet again. it admits it doesn’t have any idea how to get back to flow. i admit i don’t either. we surrender. the illusion shatters. i break down. i cry. darkness. i wait. silence. i wait. stillness. i wait. i listen. i wait. something breaks open. a signal. a stirring. a remembering. i rejoice. oh thank you. i hear it. i feel it. i start the journey back from my head to my heart.

what mental slavery looks like: repressive & reactive patterns 10 Feb 2015 7:29 AM (10 years ago)

a big part of my work over the past year has been to transition from an emotional and intellectual dependence on external authority to a strong sense of living life from an inner authority.

this was a challenge.

it was unclear to me what it would mean to not rely upon something outside myself for guidance or validation. frankly, it seemed like more accountability than i was prepared to handle. who could i blame for things not working if i was responsible for all my choices? what would it mean when i inevitably failed?

when the concept of responsibility was reframed for me as “response-ability,” a sense of enthusiasm and resolve began to replace what otherwise felt heavy and overwhelming.

in the simplest language, to be “response-able” is to have the ability to choose the way you respond to a situation.

seems straightforward enough. or is it?

i thought about my typical attitudes and behaviors, and noticed that many were well-worn unconscious patterns, like a footpath trampled into an otherwise grassy meadow, carved in after many tranquil afternoon strolls.

i didn’t choose those responses anymore, i just did them because i’d been doing them and hadn’t thought about how else they might be done.

i thought about the society of personalities in my head, the cast of characters that embodied those unconscious attitudes and behaviors as they spoke to (or as) me. i could see how tricky they were in their ability to pull my potential responses into themselves, masterfully distorting them into one of two flavors of energy: reactive or repressive. (psst: hey! hey you! come down this footpath….)

every time this happened in my life, it was accompanied by a deep sense of being out of harmony with myself. some response that my self wanted to make had been captured, and resulted in a choice that “i” wasn’t really making.

for example, a pattern i’ve struggled with a lot in my life is the way i manage my energy and maintain personal boundaries. my early upbringing taught me certain things (“deny your needs and help others”, “a woman’s job is to serve”) that led me to suppress the choices i might have made in order to fit into some mold of expectations. as a result, one of two things would happen when someone would make a request for my time or attention, and my true response would have been “i’d prefer not to”:

in the repressive version, it was like taking the footpath that led underground.

the energy of my potential response would collapse in on itself, turning inward and sabotaging my authority. on the outside i might reply to that request with, “sure, what do you need?” – on the inside the society of personalities was activated:

the Critic would roll its eyes at me, mercilessly beating me up: “why don’t you ever stand up for yourself? you’re so weak. you deserve to be exhausted.”

the Servant would shoot back with, “i’m a good person, and i’m capable, so why wouldn’t i help?”

the Slave Driver would crack its whip and laugh, “you’re not good until i tell you you’re good. which i won’t. so just keep your mouth shut and keep pushing through.”

the Victim would hunch its shoulders and sigh in resignation, whispering “this is my duty.”

in the reactive version, the footpath led to a megaphone and a pile of dynamite.

the energy of my potential response would get channeled through to some kind of outward expression of rage or aggression. i might balk at the request in disgust or incredulity. “are you seriously asking me that right now? don’t i ever get a chance to just relax??”

the Critic would cluck its tongue, “tsk, tsk. look at you. totally out of control. way to keep your shit together.”

the Servant would apologize, “ugh, i didn’t mean it. i’m a horrible person.”

the Slave Driver would spur me on, “be more self-righteous! remind them of all the ways you do more than your fair share!”

the Victim would be both helpless and indignant, “everyone’s always trying to use me, and i guess that’s what i deserve.”

at the end of the day, neither of these patterns was what i actually meant to say or do. they were the result of pathways laid down long ago by the desire to meet the expectation of family or cultural conditioning. and apparently they were still calling the shots.

how response-able was that?

i understood that part of the process of claiming my inner authority would be to disentangle myself from these old patterns, quiet my mind from hearing their influence, and listen deeper for my own truth.

the issue here, if we return to the footpath metaphor, is that i was more familiar with being a dayhiker than a trailblazer.

i’d need some basic tools to become effective at choosing my own responses, most of mine were as yet unhoned.

one was my capacity to listen in to all my body’s signals.

i’d relied heavily on conceptual frameworks and my thinking mind as the primary tools for making sense of the world for a long time. i’d dismissed physical and emotional signals as something to be kept under control, and as a result many of those signals were muted or altogether silent.

a second was my capacity for intuition.

just as i wasn’t paying attention to my body’s signals, i also wasn’t developing my intuition. my preferred method of understanding something was to use the mental process of intellect, and any information that didn’t come to my attention through logic and reason made me suspect. the phrase “trust your intuition” always seemed dangerously imprecise, hand-wavvy and magical. i was not aware that intuition is a muscle to be developed just like intellect, and practice builds discernment.

a third was my capacity for perceiving an optimal path.

because of the disconnection from the body’s signals, it was quite a challenge to sense what the best choice for me might look like, and how to coordinate that with the situation at hand. paraphrasing the cheshire cat – ‘if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.’

 

while each of these capacities are simple, building them was not easy. the process of connecting to an inner authority felt like being a toddler learning to walk: awkward with a lot of fumbling and falling down. i started taking baby steps to build the practices that would strengthen the capacities needed to be more effective, creative and free.

in the next post, i’ll describe the three practices that are proving most useful.

Constructing the New Narrative 5 Feb 2015 10:08 AM (10 years ago)

Constructing a New Narrative

We are in the process of trying to cultivate a new world. This is a daunting process and oftentimes it seems absurdly ill considered. Yet, reflection consistently indicates that it is our task whether we like it or no. And so . . .

The discussion thus far has identified the central importance of “sensemaking” to the formation of effective communities. In a (potentially futile) effort to break this massive task into bite sized pieces, I’ll try to separate it into a series of “smaller” posts. In the present post, I’ll try to quickly sketch out more fully the nature of sensemaking, how it develops and how it fails. In the next post, I’ll attempt to map out the parameters of what an optimal (or at least “much better”) sensemaking environment might look like. And then in the third, I’ll begin proposing concrete initiatives that have a reasonable chance of implementing some of this optimal sensemaking environment in the near term.

The Nature of Sensemaking

More or less from the time that we are conceived, our developing bodies are absorbing experience and assigning it “meaning”. For example, as a newborn, we map the various sensory qualities of our mother (her smell, her voice, the outlines of her face and body) to the various feelings that her presence evokes in our developing body (safety, comfort, fulfillment) and “make sense” by cohering these different phenomena into a singular notion: mom.

This sense making is pretty much the primary content of development. It includes everything — even stuff that we would ordinarily not consider “sense,” like wiring up the connections between hands and eyes that allow for hand-eye coordination. But the portion of sensemaking that we are interested in here is focused on the “maps of meaning” that we construct as we are developing in and navigating our world.

Every experience leaves some trace. Some traces reinforce each-other and “cohere” while others interfere with each-other and inhibit or break-down connections. The result is an increasingly nuanced set of maps that we use to simplify the “blooming, buzzing confusion” of life and to help us navigate our world effectively. Touch a hot stove once and you will quickly craft a map that reminds you that anything that resembles a hot stove is not for touching. Get bit by a neighbor’s dog and you might edit the map “dog” to differentiate between the friendly, loving ball of fluff that you grew up with and this other, much more dangerous thing — thereby updating and “improving” the maps that you use to navigate, parse, evaluate and judge experience. Taken as a whole, your set of maps is your personal “sensemaker”.

Like it or not, at least within the current mode of human understanding, if you want to be able to make sense of your experience, then you must use — and can only use — your sensemaker. It is the tool that you use to convert undifferentiated experience into something that you can deal with, make decisions about, act on. It determines what gets and holds your attention. It resolves your disposition to experience. What is going on? How should I respond? Should I explore? Is it a threat and should I prepare to defend myself?

As a consequence, the quality of your sensemaker — the degree to which your sensemaker provides good, effective means to action — is one of the most important elements of your ability to navigate the world. So, what influences the quality of your sensemaker?

Your Experience of the World

At the core, of course, is you and your direct experiences. The kind of being you happen to be (e.g., your genetically inherited tendencies) and how that interacts with the kinds of experiences that you happen to have. Every experience leaves a trace. A coarse example might be simple physical trauma — a severe blow to the head in infancy is going to result in significant, long-term effects on your sensemaker.

More subtle, of course, are the more lightweight details of everyday experience. Since your sensemaker plays such an important part of how you attend to and dispose yourself towards experience, there is a lot of self-reinforcement going on. Perhaps your mother sang you to sleep when you were an infant. So you have mapped a connection between certain kinds of sound and deep, comforting nurturing. As a consequence, when you experience similar sounds, they might get your attention and you might be disposed to interact with them. Perhaps this is the first step towards a more discerning ear for music and a lifelong engagement with that slice of experience. Every experience leaves a trace. Enough similar experiences leave a mark. Enough similar marks leave a groove.

There are two real challenges at this level: bad mappings and supernormal stimuli. A bad mapping is commonplace — when you are first mapping some experience to another, you literally have no idea what you are doing. As a consequence, you might include some extraneous, unnecessary or just plain wrong material in your mapping. For example, perhaps the family dog has a red collar. And it is the only dog you experience for years. You might map “red” to “dog” — and for years later any time you see just that color of red you get a certain fuzzy feeling.

Most bad mappings are immaterial. Little hiccups in our sensemaking that matter little. But many bad mappings are the cause of real challenge in the world, particularly when they are deep and tied to strong emotions like being loved or feeling safe. A big part of maturing and becoming capable of effectively navigating the world is the process of identifying and resolving your inherited set of bad mappings. This isn’t easy and most people will live their entire lives with numerous bad mappings.

A major part of reinventing sensemaking is having the courage and capacity to find and remove your bad mappings. This can be a slow, painful and frightening challenge. And finding a way to catalyze it at enough scale to matter will be a significant undertaking.

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Supernormal Stimuli

If some mapping is quite effective for a very long time — say the association between the taste of fructose and the fitness of mammals — then the resulting mapping will be very deep indeed. All the way down into your genes.

And this usually isn’t a problem — after all, the mapping got that deep only because it worked and worked for a long time. But a real problem arises if some change occurs in the environment such that the signal (“sweetness”) is disconnected from the thing that is really sought (“nutrition”) and can be provided at an intensity that is “super” normal. In the wild, this is relatively uncommon. But we human beings have become masters of supernormal stimuli. And this is a fundamental problem for contemporary sensemaking.

In a previous post, I discussed the specific challenge posed by advertising (Advertising is Culture Pollution). But, of course, advertising is only a particularly intense example of the broader problem: our ability to give ourselves what we want has far outstripped our ability to sense what we need.

Up until about thirty thousand years ago, equating “sweetness” with “healthy” was a useful error. It worked. If you equated sweetness with “good, healthy, nutritious, desirable”, then you survived and passed on your genes. But as human beings began to take over from raw nature and more and more of our lived environment was a human constructed environment, the gap in this error between what you really need and what your sensemaker is tuned to make you seek became an exploit.

It turns out, it is possible to refine the sensation of sweetness away from the context that associated it with nutrition and have the signal without the thing that it is supposed to deliver. Not just possible, but incredibly profitable — because a spoon full of sugar makes everything go down.

This deliberate use of supernormal stimuli is a kind of black magic because it gets in behind your conscious sensemaker to lead you into all sorts of bad (self destructive, fitness diminishing) behaviours. And it is the sort of thing that is very hard for individuals to overcome, if left to their own devices. Alcohol, cigarettes, sugar, television, Facebook. All are examples of painstakingly crafted supernormal stimuli that wreak havoc on our wellbeing unless and until we overcode our default sensemaker with new habits and new intuitions.

But how do we come to craft these new habits? Occasionally, through personal experience. Hit rock bottom, have a moment of clarity and you can begin the process of recoding your personal sensemaker away from the supernormal stimuli of alcohol, for example. But that doesn’t scale. Our ability to hack our sensemakers far outstrips our ability to learn from personal experience.

Fortunately (and as we shall see, unfortunately) we human beings have evolved a very powerful sensemaking technique: we are capable of learningfrom other people’s experience.

Narrative

For almost all humans, the fraction of their sensemaker that is formed entirely from their own direct personal experience is rather small. I don’t have to actually touch a hot stove to craft some sort of useful map around it. I might watch my older brother touch a hot stove and then witness his pain. My map won’t be as intense as his map — but it will be good enough to keep me away from hot stoves!

Moreover, I don’t even need to directly experience him touching the hot stove. In many cases, a story is adequate to the task.

“There I was walking through the woods. The night was cold and so dark I could barely see the trees around me. The woods were absolutely silent. And then I felt it . . . a presence. The hair on my neck stood up. My stomach clenched. I saw yellow eyes glowing in the darkness and then a low growl. Before I could even breathe, the wolf was on me. If your father hadn’t come, it would have killed me. As it was, I was left lame and without my eye . . .”

Fables, tales, stories, even simple directives (“don’t touch, hot!”) are all different forms of narrative. We humans have adapted the capacity to share experiences in imaginal form — and, therefore, to construct our sensemakers as a result of our interaction with narrative. This innovation has proven so powerful that narrative is almost as important to human beings as sensemaking itself.

Depending on how much time you spend alone in the wilderness, it is likely that the vast majority of your sensemaker has been constructed by narrative. Spiraling out from your closest family, your friends and associates, your community, your society — your culture.

It can sometimes be surprising how very much of our sensemaker has been constructed entirely though narrative. So much so that it is reasonable to suggest that “our” sensemaker is not really ours. Rather, narrative has become so overwhelmingly fundamental to our sensemakers that it is often useful to think of human beings as the agents of stories, rather than the other way around.

Regardless, it is clear that in an increasingly complex world where your personal experience can account for only the tiniest sliver of potential experience, it is only through narrative — and its ability to allow individuals to benefit from the experiences of other individuals — that we can hope to collectively make sense of our world and become individually capable of navigating that world successfully.

Herein lies the problem. By necessity in the contemporary environment, the vast majority of our sensemakers are constructed by and for human created experience. But, for a variety of reasons, we humans haven’t yet gotten good at helping each-other co-create effective sensemakers. In fact, a big chunk (perhaps the most important) of our current problem can be found in how often we do precisely the opposite and the consequences thereof.

Malware

Anyone who has used a computer in the last decade is well aware of the problem of malware: be careful installing 3rd party software on your system. Oddly, we are vastly less circumspect when installing 3rd party narrative into our sensemaker.

The sad fact is that an enormous amount of the narrative that circulates through our various cultural environments was devised by tyrants for the purpose of tyranny. Since the dawn of civilization, and the beginning of both the possibility and the necessity of large-scale hierarchical organization of humanity, those on the top of the social pyramid have been faced with a serious problem: how do we keep the masses in order? To be sure, the carrot and the stick played a very important role in keeping everyone in their place and pulling in (more or less) the same direction. But when it comes to really keeping people corralled, nothing beats a well crafted narrative.

Consider, for example, the narrative of the “great chain of being” and its connection to the “divine right of kings”. For more than a millennium, this set of stories kept most of Western Civilization believing that it was entirely right and natural that, simply by virtue of their birth, some people should rule and others should serve. To push against that fundamental truth of nature was both futile and immoral. It wasn’t by accident that the Founders of the United States kicked off their Revolution with a new narrative:

Narrative is strong stuff and it doesn’t matter whether it was actively cultivated or the result of passive adaptation. Narratives like “don’t rise above your station,” “defer to authority” or “women are the weaker sex” have been introduced both overtly and subtly to developing sensemakers for thousands of years.

Woven into the fabric of civilization they become self-fulfilling prophecies and self-reinforcing structures. Powerful, omni-present and extremely difficult to shake-off, our cultural legacy of malware is one of the principal generators/reinforcers of the “scarcity mentality.” Consequently, the individual and collective practice of liberating ourselves from malware narratives and constructing new narratives adequate to the Great Transition is one of the great tasks of the present moment. For an excellent example of this process in motion, I suggest the ongoing work by Venessa Miemis, here.

Of course, as I discussed in this post, much of our contemporary sensemaking landscape is pushing in precisely the opposite direction: confusing, confounding and demoralizing us. Analgous to the challenge of supernormal stimuli, we have simply gotten too good at “shaping the narrative”. Where PR, propaganda, marketing and spin, were once relatively blunt and shameful instruments, they are now table-stakes for any professional endeavour. The result as been an evolutionary arms racebetween the forces of manipulation and our collective ability to make good sense of the world.

Nowhere is this battle being fought more fiercely than on the shape of the battle-ground itself. Perhaps the most important influencer of both narrative and sensemaking: the architectures of experience.

The Architectures of Experience

McLuhan was right. At the end of the day, your sensemaker is a result of your experience. And both the nature and content of your experience is deeply influenced by the “architectures” that shape your capacity to experience.

If you live in a world where most people get around by walking, your field of experience will tend to be limited to a pretty small territory. You will share a lot of time with the people who live nearby. Your narratives will be constructed out of much of the same stuff as theirs (the same woods, the same rivers, the same crazy old man in the mountain) and, naturally, will tend to be shared and reinforced with them. As a consequence, your community will tend to develop a relatively parochial and homogenous narrative.

When the railroad comes through and suddenly it becomes as easy to ride one hundred miles as it used to be to walk ten, everything changes. Suddenly you encounter new people with new stories. And, if you are so inclined, you can travel to new places that generate new experiences — reshaping your sensemaker in complex ways. Perhaps your sensemaker will tend towards cosmopolitanism. Or, perhaps your sensemaker will react negatively to this novelty and will tend towards a more reactive conservatism – “the old ways are best”.

The architectures of experience are like fitness landscapes for sensemakers. Some architectures (like newspapers and broadcast television) are amenable to certain kinds of stories and story-tellers and will select for them. Other architectures (like the Internet) present a very different landscape and will select for different kinds of stories and story-tellers.

Broadcast media, for example, are characterized by an “author / audience” relationship. One person has the megaphone and many people listen. The implication, of course, is that one person’s set of narratives will get a lot more adoption than everyone elses. The strategy, then, is simple: be the person who controls the megaphone.

Of course, nothing is ever that simple. There are a lot of forces at play. By example, the Soviet Union’s overall narrative landscape was all too happy to take advantage of broadcast’s ability to have a monopoly on Pravda. In contrast, in the United States of the same era, strong legacy narratives like “the freedom of the press” and “the informed citizen” were an important part of the overall narrative ecology and tended to counteract the “natural” centralizing tendencies of broadcast.

Nonetheless, the shape of the architecture of experience is a uniquely powerful influence on both narrative and sensemaking and will generally “win out” over enough time.

Understanding this fact helps explain a lot about both the opportunity and the challenge of our effort to compose a new narrative. On the one hand, the world-historical emergence of “the Internet” (including its mobile aspects) presents a radical departure from the centralizing broadcast architectures that dominated the past several centuries. The almost instant emergence of a global, nearly costless (once the infrastructure is in place), largely decentralized communication architecture connecting almost everyone in the world to almost everyone else is arguably the biggest disruption in a fitness landscape since a certain meteor sent the Age of Dinosaurs into oblivion.

Yet while the success of the Internet at challenging the dominant narratives has been much lauded, the actual results have been more mixed. While the rise of the Internet has crushed the power of some of the old media (see Record Companies, Newspapers, News Magazines), much of the thus liberated power has been re-cohered around what Bruce Sterling calls “the stacks.” Record companies have been replaced by iTunes. TV networks seem to be in the process of being replaced by YouTube, Netflix, etc. It seems that wherever you look, the liberating energy of the decentralized Internet has been broadly captured by gigantic, centralized platforms like Facebook, Google, and Apple. Platforms whose scale, resources and access to “big data” gives them the power to shape the Narrative at a level that would have brought a tear to Old Goebbels’ eye.

This is unacceptable and untenable. We cannot have our sensemaking structures hacked and manipulated by the cynical abuse of supernormal stimuli and malware that leaves us utterly disoriented, demoralized and divided. We cannot have our sensemaking architectures owned and controlled by opaque forces over which we have little influence. The world is far too complex and we humans are far too powerful to long endure this kind of stupefaction. The collective challenges of the 21st centry are far too significant. This trajectory will doom us all.

On the other hand, if we take ownership of the conditions of our sensemaking and take care to craft narratives and architectures that are optimized for truth rather than control, we really have no idea of what we are capable. What I feel I can say with confidence is this: through this keyhole lies our best hope for a desirable future.

Next: The Parameters of an Optimal Sensemaking Architecture

A Note on Method

i am a consciousness with a society of personalities 2 Feb 2015 7:16 AM (10 years ago)

i used to identify with the competing voices in my head. i used to think the seat of my consciousness was in my thinking mind, and therefore that insane asylum of characters must be me. they represented all the conflicted forces within me.

some more in charge, others cowering and obeying. some told me what to do, some mercilessly beat me up, some sat in a defeated pile in the corner, some were children wistfully dreaming.

as i’ve traveled through the process of awakening, i started to bring sharper awareness to these entities. i wanted to get very clear about their patterns of behavior, the principles and beliefs they ran on, the emotions they triggered within me. i wanted to see who was in there running the show.

the more of “them” i was able to name and distinguish, the more of “me” i noticed was still in existence outside of them. i could see that they were my mind’s own creations, the roles and personas and scripts that i wore like masks throughout my life. i could feel that there was some essential piece of me that existed independent of all those archetypal patterns.

beyond them was something else – a kind of “pure” consciousness, an essence, a quality.

that thing doesn’t have a feel of being “me” in terms of having a sense of identity, though. i relate to it and acknowledge its existence, but it feels distinctly different than the personalities. if i had to personify it, for the sake of conveying the flavor of it, i’d say it feels like a Compassionate Observer.

it feels to me like a field of “unconditional love” and acceptance. and by that i mean it is absent of a comparative, judgmental thinking aspect to it. that is not to say that it is simply good at withholding judgment. rather, it in fact does not have a mode in which the notion of “judgment” can occur. it simply holds the space for witnessing and being.

it has a tenderness to it akin to what my nostalgia towards “mother” feels like. it’s like a warm presence that envelops you, cradles you, protects you, and makes you feel totally safe. you can let your guard down in this presence, and have full trust that you never have to be afraid that it will push you away or lead you to believe you’re not enough. it doesn’t have that capacity.

and while it doesn’t judge, it does appreciate and marvel.

no matter what it’s encountering, even the seemingly mundane is looked upon with a sense of childlike awe. like noticing the way the morning sun reflects off a drop of dew on a leaf. innocent and profound at the same time.

as i went through the process of being deeply honest with myself, i would bring those challenging pieces of myself into this loving field for scrutiny. it was a heartbreaking relief to do the work in that place. i could look at all the ugly parts of myself, the parts i’m not proud of, the parts i’m quite ashamed of, and feel that this presence was there to witness it in a way where all of it was accepted. these aspects of me didn’t have to be hidden, because their existence didn’t lessen me. they are real, and by acknowledging them, they are honored and respected as being equally true as all the parts of myself with which i’d prefer to be associated.

in this way, i saw i had the capacity inside me to enter this “essential” field and look at my pantheon of inner characters, know that they were all loved equally (love not meaning approval… since there can’t be judgment, there can’t be approval….. but loved as in simply accepted for the truth of what they are), and begin to decide which aspects could be healed, released, or transformed.

i noticed that each of these personalities was like a script, a subroutine, a piece of software. they were coded to think and feel and act in a particular way.

some had come pre-installed on the operating system that is my body.

science has begun to show us that the emotional traumas and memories of our ancestors are genetically passed down through our DNA. and so in a very real way, there are parts of us that are adapted to respond in ways that have nothing to do with our actual lived experience today, but instead are vestiges of patterns that were developed in response to threats that look different today. like the mistrust of ‘other,’ those that are not of my tribe. like the ‘survival of the fittest’ drive, the need to compete in order to win. like fears of being isolated or separated or outcast from the tribe, which in the past meant certain death.

some of these personalities are clearly malware – either intentionally designed to limit me in some way through family or cultural conditioning, or are running on assumptions and a context that are simply not the current environment in which i live.

in the former case, they might be a control structure that i was taught to accept in my childhood, like the necessity of obeying outside authority, or the belief that i was of the weaker sex.

in the latter case, it might be a coping strategy or adaptive response that i myself had put into place as a child, when with the limited life experience i had and limited context of what the world was, did the best i could to develop a way to handle some particular experience.

i may have kept that pattern as part of my foundation, and built my adult behaviors and patterns upon that core one, not realizing that it is fundamentally the strategy developed by a 5 year old, bless her heart. but the way it operates no longer serves the best interest of me as an adult.

for example, maybe i had a traumatic experience as a child where i really got my feelings hurt, and it caused me emotional pain and suffering. in response to that i developed a strategy to shut down my feelings when they got hurt, to repress them and ignore them and let myself go numb so i couldn’t feel them anymore. a reasonable adaptive response for a child, but now as an adult, i don’t want repression or denial to be my response when my feelings get hurt. (on the other end of the spectrum, i also don’t want to react with aggression or violent outbursts.) i want to be a grown-up, who can allow herself to feel her feelings, whatever they may be. i don’t have to then react to them unconsciously, playing out some variation on the pattern i created as a child. i can choose to respond to them, by allowing them to be what they are, allowing myself to feel the way i feel (even if it’s painful or uncomfortable), and then freeing myself from a limitation by becoming the author of my response.

i can actually be responsible for all my thoughts, feelings, and actions in this way. looking at all the personalities within me, all the subroutines and processes i’m running, and imagining myself as the creator that can choose which way i’m going to redesign this vehicle’s programming.

it’s like realizing you’re running an old version of windows ME, when you could choose to adopt an open source software infrastructure that’s highly flexible and adaptive. that way, you could write in new software, written and coded from the perspective of a mature conscious adult, who can experiment and play with new thoughts, feelings and behaviors that just might be more optimal for the current environment and state of affairs.

this was a highly liberating point of view to come to, helping me have a sense of compassion and forgiveness towards myself for any of the ways i thought that how i am or who i am is “wrong,” and instead see that a lot of my code was simply installed slightly outdated, corrupted, or that a child had written the other parts that i was still using. so, i could run a scan, see what was actually happening, start running some anti-virus software, and upgrade to a more effective version.

it was fun to personify these patterns, making them into archetypes that helped me enter an imaginal space where my life could become a mythology, and i could picture these characters as foes i must battle on my quest, or allies i wanted to draw closer to me for help. these archetypes represented attitudes, behaviors, and embodied principles for living. by being able to name them, describe how they worked, what they believed, and their magical aspects, i felt empowered to embody them, test them, see what it would feel like if i wore them like a new skin.

i might have felt incapable otherwise to meet the challenge of transforming some shadows in myself unassisted. but the idea that i could call upon these avatars that represented the most aspirational characteristics that i wanted to see in myself made it less scary, and i could experiment and play with it without being afraid of failing.

i was just playing a new game with a more interesting and better equipped set of characters.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

next ……… reimagining archetypes in the domains of energy management and establishing inner authority

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

“society of personalities” via Yasuhiko Genku Kimura

vehicle/operating system metaphor via conversations with Jordan Greenhall

on the forcing of willpower & the art of relaxation 29 Jan 2015 2:07 PM (10 years ago)

When embarking upon a journey to the unknown, it is wise to equip oneself with the tools to face the unexpected. To dig deep and locate the source of one’s inner strength, so that when a challenge arises, we may respond from our core: open, flexible, relaxed, and present.

There is a tendency in life, however, to lose touch with this place. We inadvertently take on other people’s stories, and behave as if we were a supporting character in their drama, instead of the lead in our own. In so doing, we lose our center of gravity.

It behooves us then to identify those stories and their origins, to understand the parts of us that are running on someone else’s script. When we can shine a light upon that, we create the possibility of moving past it and reclaiming ourselves.

***

on the forcing of willpower and the art of relaxation

Somewhere in my childhood, I internalized the story that life is struggle, and that we must force our will and ignore our needs in order to survive.

This message was influenced by my parents, the immigrant culture of our heritage, the religion I was raised in, and the power games that played out based on gender, roles, and legacy. It became a thread woven into the fabric of my reality.

Consequently, my adult approach to life took on similar flavors: repressing my needs and desires, feeling driven by outside forces, pushing myself to exhaustion, and embodying an almost complete inability to relax. In addition, “work is struggle” had become a variant of the “life is struggle” theme, and so the notion of a fun and creative career was also out.

When I finally arrived at the moment of truth where I could no longer live like this, I began to retrace my steps, turning a critical eye toward my own conditioned attitudes and behaviors.

I thought of the many times throughout my upbringing that I was nudged in a direction that was not mine. Typically done with the best of intentions, influenced by the projecting of unfulfilled dreams. In elementary school I loved art, but was pushed to play violin. In high school I wanted to pursue photography and architecture, but was directed toward orchestra instead. In college I was drawn to psychology and philosophy, but was urged to choose something that would make me more successful, like business or pre-med.

At some point I must have given up on trying to follow my heart, and began choosing a harder path. I decided my desires were unimportant, and that someone other than me knew what was best to do with my life. Rather than simply accepting that hard work was sometimes necessary, I’d begun to take it as a virtue. Unless it was hard and unpleasant, it was suspect. If it came easily or I liked it, it was probably wrong.

My first job out of college was as a regional manager of a large grocery chain, and though I was making nearly 6 figures, the work was physically exhausting, spiritually soul-sucking, and I was running myself ragged. My energy was managed with coffee, cigarettes, and alcohol, instead of self-care.

An irreconcilable tension settled deep into my body, as externally I displayed strength and a fierce independence, but internally needed validation in order to feel a sense of confidence and self-worth. As a friend pointed out to me, “You exhibit a lot of authority-seeking behavior.”

I developed a knack for creating situations where I bit off more than I could chew, enabling the cycle of self-flagellation and disempowerment to continue: a voice inside me laughing at how ill-equipped I was to make good decisions in life, reminding me that this is why I required outside authority, and telling me to just push harder and stop complaining. My response was anxiety, resignation, and exhaustion.

It became an addiction, emotionally isolating myself and getting lost in work and checking boxes. I’d push myself constantly, hoping to grant myself the feeling of deserving a pat on the back, but no amount of checked boxes ever gave me a lasting sense of self-worth. i’d get a fleeting hit of dopamine, then feel like I should have been able to accomplish more. It didn’t matter how herculean my efforts for the day, the bar of worthiness was always just past the reach of my fingertips.

Which brought me to the present.

I surveyed this historical narrative, and asked myself:

When did these stories originate in my life?

What were the drivers behind them?

What underlying value assumptions were attached to them?

stories from the old country

I thought of the stories my immigrant grandmother told me, of sleeping in the barn with the horses as a little girl on the family farm in Yugoslavia, of being forced to spin wool until her fingers bled, of urinating on her feet in the cold of winter to warm her toes. She explained to me how life was hard, a constant struggle to be endured. How you don’t get to do what you want to do – you do what needs to be done. There was no time for the luxury of relaxation when survival was at stake.

She reminded me how she had to learn to be strong after her husband had passed away, leaving her alone with a three year old son, my father. How she came to this country to give him a chance at a better life, not knowing the language, working several jobs at a time, sleeping in broom closets in between shifts. In her later years, she liked to show me how her knobby arthritic hands could barely make a fist anymore, a result of thirty years of working on a car manufacturing assembly line in Cleveland.

She would look at me with steely eyes and say “Ja sam vrjedna,” – “I have worth.”

In my teenage years, when I’d complain to my father about some unpleasantry I didn’t feel like doing at work, he’d reinforce the above message with “Well Venessa, sometimes you gotta eat shit in life.”

The message I received was to expect that life would be struggle, and the appropriate response was to struggle back. Strenuous work and self-denial were not just means to an end, but a moral imperative.

 

a catholic household & the virtues of martyrdom

I thought about the stories that were conveyed about the virtues of self-sacrifice and dutiful service. I watched the women in particular deny their needs and give of themselves tirelessly, asking for little in return, and often being abused as reward for their service. Their husbands and children would walk all over them as they toiled. Not maliciously, mind you. In more of a blissful ignorance that this was just what their role was to do, so no need to really overthink it. The wives would justify their exhaustion with platitudes like “Well, God never gives us more than we can handle!” and “Sometimes you just have to settle in life.” or “God has a Divine Plan.” Every once in a while I’d hear my mom say “I’m so tired I’m nauseous,” as she’d prepare a cold compress for her forehead and go lay quietly on the couch for a few moments of peace.

What was presented as “trust in a higher power” I interpreted more like “have no self-respect.” An inability to say no. An actual shame in saying no. Duty and obligation came first. Taking care of yourself was selfish.

When I thought about it, really all the members of the family were victims to this pattern in some way. There was a fundamental disconnect between themselves and the capacity for inner listening and self-nurturing. Relaxation was seen as a luxury instead of a need, and as a result, vital energy leaked out at the seams, leaving everyone drained at a number of levels.

The message here was clear. Keep your inner guidance quiet. Whether it was the expectations of your husband, your culture, or your God, someone other than you was the prime influencer of how you directed your energy. Do this long enough, and you really do lose the ability to know and meet your needs, leading to a loss of trust in yourself. And so the need for external authority becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, and the enslavement ensues.

 

contemplations and insights

As I stepped back and tried to interpret all of this from the broadest perspective, I could actually appreciate how these patterns had for a long time been both useful and necessary.

No culture or society or family sets out to extinguish itself. It does what is necessary to survive and even thrive, passing along the strategies, rules and behaviors that have proven themselves to be effective thus far.

In the case of a society that is dependent upon obedience to external authority to hold together, it only makes sense to create circumstances that undermine people’s capacity to make their own choices.

A people who are deeply tuned in to themselves are dangerous.

If they are connected to their source, aware of what they need in order to be whole and fulfilled, and confident in their ability to voice those needs and get them met, a conflict with authority is certain to arise eventually. And, for much of history, disastrously.

In the case of my own life’s experience, it’s not to say there is something inherently wrong with having an immigrant work ethic, being in service to your family, or having a belief system you look to for guidance. Where things go astray is when we lose touch with our inner authority, and let those systems or frameworks replace our own human agency. Before we know it, our tools become our masters.

We are born with a vital energy, and granted the gift of willpower to put it to use.

We can allow ourselves to become self-tyrants, abusing or misusing this energy, pushing it against the grain. We can dishonor ourselves by ignoring our own body’s signals, shrinking our capacity to respond.

Or we can reimagine ourselves as stewards of this energy, and treat it and ourselves as precious gifts. We can see that by giving permission to care for and nurture ourselves, we build inner strength, trust, and core stability. By learning to listen to ourselves, we become aware of a larger spectrum of information available to us, expanding our range for decision-making. We become less driven by fear and anxiety, and slowly the tension in the body is replaced with a rootedness and relaxed presence.

Think of it as claiming a piece of your sovereignty.

From this place, challenges in life can be met from a deep-seated sense of self, a way of being that is more fluid and more effective.

In Taoism there is a concept called “wu wei,” which translates as “without action” or “effortless doing.” The idea is that there is a way to go about approaching life that does not feel like struggle. That we could let go of the need to force or control, and instead have a yielding nature, like water. Do not fight against life, but rather flow with it.

This concept was hugely useful to me as I began to imagine a different state of being.

I realized that there will always be a multiplicity of forces at play. The world, after all, is an irreducibly complex place.

A better way to navigate it would be to engage in a game of inner exploration and discovery. To find out what my particular energy was really all about. To understand it so well that I could begin to live my life artfully. To become masterful at the everpresent dance between myself and the world around me. To become open, flexible, relaxed, and present.

I would have to learn to listen to my body, to set boundaries, to get more familiar with my true nature. To make it an ongoing practice to align with the path of least resistance.

I realized that I am the master of my domain. It is up to me to choose to be in relationship with it and partnership with it, and to assume responsibility for my health on all levels. I realized that I do know what it feels like when it feels right, and that no one outside myself, no matter how benevolent or well-intentioned, can know it better than me.

We are born with the capacity to be sovereign beings.

Our world enslaves us.

If we want freedom, we have to claim it.

 

next ………….. Reimagining Archetypes,  & Practices for Sovereignty

 

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contemplations on 40th gene key, sphere of life’s work