The healthy human brain is no dummy. By the time it reaches adulthood, it knows a lot about what works and what doesn’t work. Where it gets in trouble is when things that it thought worked no longer do so, at least not well enough.

When that brain was much younger and in the body of a child, change was much easier. The child brain is quite malleable. When it wants or needs to do something different, doing that different something usually isn’t nearly as difficult as doing something different is for adults.

At one point in his widely admired book, Brain and Culture, Yale psychiatrist Bruce Wexler explains it this way:

“During the first part of life, the brain and mind are highly plastic, require sensory input to grow and develop, and shape themselves to the major recurring features of their environments. During these years, individuals have little ability to act on or alter the environment, but are easily altered by it. By early adulthood, the mind and brain have elaborately developed structures and a diminished ability to change those structures. The individual is now able to act on and alter the environment, and much of that activity is devoted to making the environment conform to the established structures.”

A brain that “backs” its way into maturity
A lot of what happens as the brain ages and matures on the long, arduous journey from birth to adulthood has been a career-focus of the husband-wife research team of Drs. Stephen Rushton and Anne Juola-Rushton at the University of South Florida Sarasota-Manatee. A couple of weeks ago, the Rushtons were sharing their views with parents in Mumbai, India.

My interest was immediately captured by Stephen’s comment (as quoted by an Indian reporter) that “The child’s brain develops from the back to the front.” The two Drs. Rushton took their child-rearing audience on a tour of just how the child brain develops beginning with the spinal cord and cerebellum and moving more or less sequentially over the years to the occipital lobes, parietal lobes, temporal lobes, motor cortex and finally to the frontal/pre-frontal lobes. This doesn’t mean that there are empty spaces where those later-developing organs are, but I understand exactly what the Rushtons are describing: an advancing “biopsychosocial” locus and focus—a forward-moving frontline—to a person’s cerebral capabilities.

While I’ve not had the opportunity to talk with the Rushtons about all this but hope to—we have family in Sarasota and are there often—what I’ve heard thus far sounds highly supportive and endorsing of many of Brain Technologies/Brain Me Up’s applications and explanations. This is particular true of those based on the late Dr. Clare W. Graves’ “biopsychosocial” model of human development. That is to say, our Dolphin strategy models and materials.

My colleague, Dr. Paul Kordis, and I wrote our first “dolphin”-based work more than 20 years ago. Other works on the Graves model followed. Thus far, however, none seems to have caught the attention of a globe-spanning audience with quite the magnetism and usefulness of our book, Strategy of the Dolphin™: Scoring a Win in a Chaotic World. This work appears to speak directly to the desire of its admirers for a better way to understand the marvelous, mysterious dance between brain and culture and for better ways to use that knowledge in their own self-development, organizing and relationships.

From ‘best ever’ lists to the House of Lords
The assignments with which Strategy of the Dolphin have been tasked and the list of its admirers continue to grow.

Just the other day, we learned that our dolphin strategy provided the Inspirational Forum for Organizational Health with the theme for its 31st annual conference at The Hague, Netherlands—in the late 1990s. We’d never have known had not a report on a speech delivered in England’s House of Lords by the organization’s president about a year after Princess Di’s tragic death been recently revisited by a blogger.

While we know of no parents who have named their newborns after the dolphin (or us) because of the book, more than a few organizations have put “dolphin” in their name or dolphins in their logo in the book’s honor. (Alas, our company lawyer has had to remind more than a few enthusiasts that “Strategy of a Dolphin” is one of our trademarks.) In one language and then another, the book is frequently reviewed; here’s a recent French language review—of the French language version of the book, natch—written by a Belgian blogger. Self-development writers can’t seem to stay away from the book and its compelling metaphor for very long, as this recent U.K. article confirms.

And business students who gave oral book reports on SOD years ago sometimes discover that their professors never forgot how moved they were by their students’ enthusiam for the book’s content.

Earlier this year, we learned that SOD is on the short list of “best business books ever” that management professor David C. Wyld maintains. Dr. Wyld has opined that “the authors’ insights are brilliant and so very relevant to the challenges most individuals and organizations faced through the nineties and still grapple with today: going for the elegant outcome; leveraging the wave; breaking set; being on purpose; seeing through the brain’s ‘time window’; releasing to a higher order; pushing the envelope; shifting in time. It’s deep and intelligent, but not intellectual. It’s a thoughtful blueprint and practical road map of useful insight.”

Thanks, Professor!

What keeps this book timely and relevant?
I was already mulling over Professor Wexler’s book and the Rushtons’ model of how children’s brains develop, along with some other ideas about how the brain deals with the need to change. Then came Wyld’s comment that the insights in SOD are still “so very relevant to the challenges most individuals and organizations face….” Why is that, I pondered? Eventually, I penned these thoughts:

To get the adult brain to change, you must work with the way that brain is already wired. It has a lot of beliefs, protocols, habits and practices already in place. It has a strong sense of how it thinks the world ought to be. The best way to make any head way changing all this requires helping people feel like they can use all that knowledge they already have but use it in exciting and productive new ways to do things differently.

The power of the Dolphin strategy is that it doesn’t require people to give up who they are. It simply asks them to take what they know and bring it into a wider, more productive context. Once they do that, then they often discover is that what they’ve added to the mix has not really been merely additive but also transformative. As the old saw puts it, the whole is suddenly more than the sum of the parts.

There’s a right time to think like a Carp (“self-sacrificially”). And a right time to think like a Shark (“controllingly”). And certainly, more and more times when it pays to think like a Dolphin (”situationally and pro-actively combinatorially”). You may need to think like all three in a short space of time. In today’s world, your audience or marketplace can change several times an hour. So at the moment, what people need more than anything else is a new comfort level for being more mentally and emotionally agile, versatile, competent.

This is what we teach with the Dolphin strategy. First, we offer a new way to think about the main ways that people believe, act and respond. There are only a handful of major filtering and belief-formulating scripts that people everywhere follow in daily life. Our goal with the Dolphin strategy is to help individuals recognize those overarching scripts and the behaviors they trigger faster than ever before. When they spot these scripts in others and themselves, they have valuable clues as to how to respond appropriately. And we may be introducing them to a new script—the script of the Dolphin thinker. In today’s marketplace, the Dolphin thinker—particularly, the Dolphin thinking executive and the Dolphin thinking entrepreneur—is going to win or achieve favorable outcomes more often than anyone else, for three reasons:

1) He or she sees change coming quicker than others (because he or she has more perspectives, and a wider perspective, with which to watch for change).

2) He or she understands better than most which change will matter and which may not (because the Dolphin worldview offers a better sense of what lies behind and beyond change and how other worldviews or belief holders are likely to respond to it).

3) He or she thrives on making new things happen, old things better and the world a more competently functioning place (because the appearance of new technologies, new viewpoints and new configurations of people working together doesn’t spook Dolphins but, to the contrary, excites their innovative spirit and outlook).

Not everyone is equipped to think like a Dolphin. But all Dolphins are equipped to help those around them think better, with less fear and inner resistance because the world is changing and needs to change even more.

________

For more information about the Dolphin strategy book and the other Brain Technologies self-growth materials, go here. And you can arrange to take our online Yo!Dolphin! Worldview Survey™ here.

While getting him awake is not often a problem, his grandparents say, getting his feet on the floor usually is. He loves to lay in bed, eyes wide open, eyes very active in fact. Looking first in one direction, then another, though almost never at you. Ask him what he’s doing, and you are inviting a minor Vesuvius of emotion, they report. “You are interrupting my story!” they say he’ll protest. It is clear that their grandson does not like his story-making interrupted. And I’ve come to realize that few of us do.

I’m going to assume that most of the emotion is being generated by his right hemisphere, which is irritated that its understanding of what the left side of his brain is currently up to has been disrupted. That’s because for a lot of things, until the left side of our brain supplies an explanation, the right side is left pretty much without one. This, at least, is what neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga suggested years ago, and continues to suggest, with his theory of the interpreter.

Residing in the left hemisphere—or so “split brain” expert Gazzaniga concluded, as he explained (among many other places) in The Mind’s Past (page 174)—“The interpreter constantly establishes a running narrative of our actions, emotions, thoughts, and dreams. It is the glue that keeps our story unified and creates our sense of being a coherent, rational agent. It brings to our bag of individual instincts the illusion that we are something other than what we are. It builds our theories about our own life, and these narratives of our past behavior seep into our awareness.”

Ever since reading Dr. Gazzaniga’s theory of the interpreter, I’ve tended to tell anyone curious about what I do professionally that I’m a deadly serious student of the stories people tell themselves and others to explain who they are. You can notice this persistent thread running through nearly all of our models, books and assessment tools here at Brain Me Up. And few things interest me more than the “core” story people tell about themselves.

I’ve concluded that there aren’t very many core stories. And that understanding what your core story is and admitting to its realities, and constantly assessing when and where it makes sense to submit to guidance from your core story, are crucial to being an effective human. (Of course, not every core story equips its user to know or even to care whether they are an effective human as well as some core stories do.)

Any scholar or researcher who professes to be a “developmental” person, following how one person over time and how all persons over the generational expanses of time, assemble and enable and sometimes limit their personal qualities and skills, is hard at work seeking to understand the stories people tell themselves and others in an effort to explain who they are.

Years ago, I was introduced to the pioneering, self-described “biopsychosocial” theory of self-explanatory storytelling of the late Clare W. Graves, the American psychologist. I’ve yet to discover a better model. So I’ve spent much of my career seeking to make his model—which is sometimes called “the theory of everything” and can quickly overload anyone who comes to it just wanting to know a little bit about a few things—more accessible to ordinary souls.

I love all my model-children equally, but first among equals is the schematic that Dr. Paul Kordis and I put together a couple of decades ago and still continue to expand. That would be the water creatures model that was the focus of our book, Strategy of the Dolphin.

The users of the Carp story explain themselves to themselves as perennial victims. They see the world as being against them, and much of the time, they can be forgiven for thinking so. Life is hard. There aren’t a lot of opportunities to bootstrap one’s way upward economically, socially and culturally. There are more Carp storytellers on earth than any other kind. The Carp story reeks with vulnerability. Where it is heavily in use, there is often much resentment and anger and suffering. Can IEDs, suicide bombers, child and spousal abuse, public protests that turn bloody and political Tea Parties that turn shrill and accusatory be far behind?

Next comes the Shark storyteller. The user of the Shark story usually feels entitled. And often for good reason. They hold most of the cards and many of the marbles. The easiest way to learn how to tell the Shark story is to be the daughter or son of someone who told it well. In the 21st Century, the most formidable redoubt of the Shark storyteller is the major corporation and governments and other agglomerates (like universities) that act like one. It is important to the Shark story user to appear confident, in the know, on top of things, and really a pretty good Jane or Joe. Funny thing, though, how often Shark waters turn bloody, good Jane, good Joe or not.

Someone who isn’t forced by dire life circumstances to use the Carp story and who has the sensibilities to understand what a dead-end the Shark story tends to be often gravitates toward a much more fructiferous story. In fact, it sometimes seems to me like the brain has suddenly discovered itself when it arrives at the ability to tell this next story. That’s because, welcome improvement that it is, the new story and its user soon seem to be surrounded by wretched excess. Not by money, necessarily, although users of this story often do well enough. But a wretched excess of ideas, possibilities, symbols, connections and desires. Originally, Dr. Kordis and I called this the Pseudo-Enlightened Carp story. But we eventually came to realize that this was probably too harsh and an unnecessary diversion.

Because in being censorious of the premature assumption by persons suddenly able to tell this story that they have arrived at enlightenment, we were probably steering people away from a realization that they are very close now—psychologically, operationally—to a radically new, fecund, competent kind of story that people on the planet increasingly needed to hear and to which they need to self-adapt.

And so we changed the name of this new story to First Dolphin. It is only a beginning, important as it turns out to be. Truth be known and acknowledged, the First Dolphin story is the story being told of themselves by many of the people who are now feverishly connecting through Facebook and Twitter, who are raising the alarums about global ecological injury, who are scanning the heavens for signs of other intelligent “beings” in the universe, who are protesting against the treatment of the Carp storytellers and the abuses of the Shark storytellers and propagating the desire for a fairer, safer, more peaceful world.

Users of the First Dolphin story are nowhere near being able to live up to all their precepts or deliver on all their promises. But their story is a great improvement. And a critical spawning grounds. Already, at Brain Me Up, we are tracking two additional stories that have grown from the First Dolphin’s: the stories of the Prime Dolphin and of the Deep See Change Dolphin. It is one of these stories that, if the audacious theories of The Singulatarians come to pass, is most likely going to be the leading candidate for implantation in the “mind” of the artificial intelligence that they are predicting is destined to exceed our own.

But enough for now. If you’d like to know which of these stories you currently use to explain to yourself and others who you are—well, that’s the intended function of our newest Brain Me Up assessment. It’s called the Yo!Dolphin!™ Worldview Survey. Go here to know more. Be assured, our purpose is helping you understand and put to good use your life-story-making, not interrupt it, whether you are lying in bed musing about it or have your feet on the floor.

Dr. Hawking, the world’s reigning black hole physics expert, says he also hopes to fly on Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic. Branson aims to take six passengers 70 miles high on flights, beginning in 2009.

Hawking’s adult life has been an almost unthinkable experience of bodily entrapment for the gifted mind it houses. As just about everyone knows, his is a brilliant brain housed in a body that, by all medical expectations, should have succumbed decades ago to Lou Gehrig’s disease. So I can appreciate the appeal that any opportunity to experience “feeling a little freer” might have for him.

But remember he’s spent his entire career envisioning what has happened, what is happening and what might happen in space. And he’s still at it.

Hawking now sees himself as a point man for an idea whose urgency may be accelerating much quicker than even an Arthur C. Clarke or an Isaac Asimov would have predicted a generation ago: the possible dependency of the future of the human species on the ability to get free of our own planet. Most likely to get away from our own solar system. To colonize space.

Why? Here’s Hawking at a Hong Kong news conference last year: “Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as a sudden global nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of.”

At Brain Technologies, my colleagues and I have been tossing around both this very unsavory prospect and this very extreme solution for a couple of decades now.

Ours has been what you might call “an extrapolation of the long view.” After a while, we concluded that much more will be required than scientific and technical answers to periods of prolonged zero gravity, the disruption of circadian rhythms, the effect of cosmic rays on the immune system, the psychological dangers of boredom and loneliness and homesickness and the social aspects of prolonged living in cramped quarters—to name a few of the biopsychosocial challenges sure to come with prolonged space travel.

We felt—and we continue to feel—that the brain will need to evolve a significant new “worldview” before there can be any likelihood that colonizing space can legitimately be seen as anything other than science fiction or scientific grant writers’ pipe dreams.

In our book, Code of the Monarch: An Insider’s Guide to the Real Global Business Revolution, Paul Kordis and I sketched an ascending spiral model of brain-arbitrated worldviews based in sizable part on the late Clare W. Graves’ brilliant model of human levels of existence. We called the worldview where most of the brain/minds currently alive on the planet reside “Homo sapiens gregarius.” Our name for the worldview where most Americans reside is, in our scheme of things, “Homo sapiens stabilus.” In our guestimate, not until “Homo sapiens extensus” are we—or more correctly, our descendents, if there are any—likely to have a real shot at colonizing space.

As scoped out by our model of brains and worldviews, “Homo sapiens gregarius” is Worldview No. 2. “Homo sapiens stabilus,” today’s most prevalent information organizer in developed countries and societies, is No. 4. And where is “Homo sapiens extensus” in the picture in terms of becoming enough of a critical mass on the planet to make crucial differences?

No. 9.

Will we make it? At the height of his 30-second arc into weightless flight on April 26, I would like nothing better than for Stephen Hawking to experience the mystical epiphany of his incredible mental and spiritual journey and return to earth with an answer.

Here’s the conundrum that Paul Kordis and my colleagues have understood with growing concern for the past 20-some-odd years:

On one hand, at the cutting edges of the brain’s experimental organizing of how the world can be viewed, millions of the planet’s citizens are increasingly at home with hugely promising and liberating new ways to think and create, share and cooperate—worldviews that can sustain and protect life on our planet. On the other hand, the technologies these fecund “points of view” engender are flowing largely unimpeded into the hands of those using worldviews that render them incapable of understanding and avoiding the dangers. And those worldviews are home to billions of us, not millions.

Talk about a black hole.

I suspect that Stephen Hawking understands the dangers of all this better than most. And that this is why he’s willing to put his disease-ravaged body through the rigors of weightlessness. Even as our earth-bound problems explode, we must acknowledge that we know little about how we might begin to make space the means of our species’ survival. Dr. Hawking seems to be saying, “Listen up! This is a topic worth paying attention to.”

You can read about Stephen Hawking’s anti-gravity exploits here: Stephen Hawking Plans Prelude to the Ride of His Life [Registration will be required and a payment to view the entire article.]

Information on Paul L. Kordis’s and my book is available here: Code of the Monarch

A first-hand account of surprising changes in the brain that allow astronauts to adapt to weightlessness is available in a book released by NASA after the June, 1998, Neurolab mission. It is available from the U.S. Government Printing Office: The Neurolab Spacelab Mission: Neuroscience Research in Space

Dudley, I read The Mother of All Minds over the past week or so. Obviously it struck many chords with me. I share many of your observations and perhaps have experienced some similar experiences. I am not so sure about the evolutionary aspect of Mind, however. I often feel that there are competing operating systems in the world running in parallel. Some people are simply programmed using an entirely different language and logic. The really interesting thing of course is the ability to reprogram, upgrade or switch, if the desire is there and the tools are made available. So choice becomes the operative word.

“I choose to change” was once described to me by a clinical psychologist as the most critical statement that a person can make (my sister is manic depressive bipolar and I was working with her to try and change self-destructive behaviour). This is a powerful statement and has echoes of Nietzsche—another section that resonated with me in your book.

I have replied to this independently spirited individual privately. First, to thank him for taking the time to read my book. Secondly, to encourage him to read it again, this time aware of just how much his own “operating system” may have filtered what he gleaned from the book on its first reading. A gentleman and a serious scholar, he agreed to do so.

He and I are in agreement, I do believe, that “there are competing operating systems [of mind] in the world running in parallel.” I wrote about such systems repeatedly in The Mother of All Minds. But if these systems aren’t evolutionary in their development, then it is my suspicion that they stand in repudiation of evolutionary theory, which is going to be upsetting to many scientists (including, I think, my U.K. correspondent, who has a Ph.D. in biology, once he thinks it through).

If those of us who believe we see plentiful evidence of mind taking a Darwinian “descent with modification” path are right (including one of my mentors, the late Clare Graves, who bequeathed us a powerful model of evolving levels of human existence), then that is hopeful news. But not, as the world demonstrates minute by minute, news as hopeful as, well, as we would hope. Because the number of the planet’s citizens whose minds have grown increasingly more—how shall we say it?—at home with complexity, diversity and possibility appears to be greatly overshadowed by the number whose minds are stuck.

How else do you explain, for example, the rising popularity of the savage sport of so-called “mixed martial arts”? In a lengthy article Sunday, a Los Angeles Times reporter described how “a spectacle melding ancient fighting tactics with those of a bar brawl” is poised to go mainstream as a new American economic and culture force.

The roots of the “sport” are traced to a Victorville, CA, seafood restaurant owner’s practice in the early 1990s of closing his establishment at 10 p.m. and then going at his employees and remaining patrons. He told the Times reporter: “I beat the hell out of them.” The resulting activity is also called “human cockfighting,” “extreme fighting,” “cage fighting,” and “ultimate fighting.” Fueled by promoters and pay-per-view (usually $39.95 per fight) cable television, the Times article reports, this brutal melange is about to be exported to Canada, Mexico and Europe as America’s latest contribution to the world entertainment industry.

It is further evidence that the mind is its own worst enemy and obstacle to its own evolution that mixed martial arts is already being blamed for thousands of America’s teenagers mimicking such fights in backyards and parking lots and then posting videos of their mayhem on YouTube. One of its aficionados calls no-holds-barred and no-rules-enforced fighting “the sport for these times.” Blood, says the LA Times writer, is the new black.

If so (and who can argue with the new sport’s success?), then times are grim. And, of course, they are grim. The world is awash in violence caused by minds calibrated to make poor choices. No fight happens without someone making a bad choice. No war happens without someone—usually, a lot of someones—making bad choices. No sport this gratuitously brutal takes root and flowers unless large numbers of humans are making bad choices. No one celebrates and/or augments the gratuitous pain and injury of another if they have developed a mind capable of making good choices.

Yes, I think the evidence is good at this point that the mind evolves. I read the evidence as suggesting that it generally evolves in predictable, increasingly understood stages.

But I don’t see most minds alive today evolving at nearly the speeds needed to equip their users with good choice-making skills. And I don’t see enough minds evolving to the extent that we can hope to avoid more 9/11s. More Iraqs. More Israeli-Palestinian conflicts. More Darfurs. More drive-by shootings. More made-for-YouTube backyard human cock fights. Or the runaway growth and popularity of a sporting event that brags about its savagery and tendency to make boxing look tame.

In 2,000 years, in its best moments, the human mind has evolved to the point where it has taken an almost universal stand against slavery, outlawed racism as an unseemly and unacceptable social attitude, steadily increased its questioning of war as a rational approach to problem-solving, activated sensibilities within itself to identify with the pain of most any pain-experiencing creature, questioned the global consequences of its own actions and routinely come to examine about what is desirable for the greater good of the greater number for the most foreseeable future possible.

Also in 2,000 years, the minds you often rub elbows, eyeballs or electrons with on the street, in the workplace, on the Internet, on the TV or computer or game console screen, maybe even at the dinner table, have evolved no farther that the gladiator’s fighting pit.

My valued reader in the U.K and I are fully in agreement on this point: the way upward on the mind’s evolutionary journey is a willful one. You go higher by making good choices. Providing humans with supportive environmental encouragement and critical thinking skills for making good choices can work wonders in speeding the evolution of a single mind. But can it ever be done so as to get a critical mass of human minds to the point where the celebration of violence is automatically viewed as the atavistic and inane “choice” of partially and poorly formed personalities and mentalities?

We do seem to have a long way to go, and few really good ideas as yet on how to get there. One small step that any of us can take to encourage further evolution of the human mind in an evolving number of humans is act to choke off the feed stocks of violence. You and I can help do it with our vote. We can do it with how we spend our dollars. We can do it by how we spend our time. We can do it with what we allow to be aired on our TV or computer screens. We can do it with our musical selections. We can do it with the toys and games and other entertainment we choose for our children and grandchildren. There are many ways to do it. But violence is so pervasive and so elemental in today’s money-is-the-guiding-ethic global market economy and thoughtlessness-is-the-preferred-state-of-mind entertainment environment that we have to choose not to augment violence or it will sneak right past us.

Read Scott Gold’s Los Angeles Times article here [may require registration]: Knockout marketing

For more information about my book, go here: The Mother of All Minds

Mind Level No. 1.4 (the Loyalist or Absolutistic thinker).
Philip Rieff died on July 1 at age 83. He was a sociologist and expert on the writings and theories of Freud. (For eight years, he was also the husband of Susan Sontag, whom he married after a ten-day courtship when she was a 17-year-old sophomore at the University of Chicago and he was a 28-year-old teaching instructor.) As I interpret matters, Dr. Rieff didn’t care a whit for what mindsets beyond Level 1.4 have done to morality and Western culture, and he especially didn’t warm to what he believed Freud’s ideas had done. In his book, Freud: The Mind of he Moralist (1959), Rieff suggested that the Viennese’s idea of the “psychological man” had corroded Western morality and culture because it encouraged the individual to depend not on traditional communal moralities but on “himself and his own emotions.”

Seven years later, he was back at his theme with The Triumph of the Therapeutic, suggesting all the postmodern therapies aimed at “better living” were not helpful in living healthier lives. And again in 1973 in Fellow Teachers, arguing that the “psychosocialism” being taught in higher education “may destroy what remains of our received culture in order to replace it with permanent therapies.”

Mind Level No. 1.6 (the Involver or the Participative thinker).
Dr. Denice Dee Denton was a hero to many, particularly women. And she deserved to be. At one time, the only female dean at a top-tier research university, Dr. Denton kept climbing, and at her death, at age 46, was chancellor of the University of California, Santa Cruz. She had arrived at the campus at a controversial time in town-gown relations, since UCSC was on the grow. There was more. For example, someone had thrown a parking barrier through a plate glass window of her home last summer. “She was a gay woman who was a chancellor and an engineer,” a sister chancellor told The New York Times. “You know that she came through some pretty difficult times, as many people who are breaking down barriers did.”

Dr. Denton apparently jumped to her death from a San Francisco skyscraper. In The Mother of All Minds. I wrote this about the dangers of living from Level 1.6:

“Feelings have this positive feedback, roll-over-on-themselves quality. They can start small and keep reinforcing themselves, until suddenly they are overwhelming. High suicide rates are an all-too-real concern for Level 1.6 users. It’s easy to despair about how unfair life can be, and how little impact your ameliorations can have for those who suffer the most, yourself included.”

Mind Level 2.0 (the Choice Seeker or Beta thinker).
Arata Kochi is a public health doctor. A very visible one, since he’s head of malaria at the World Health Association. He got his current job because of his success in the 1990s as head of WHO’s tuberculosis programs and then its HIV department. At each stop, he roiled the waters of established policy and diplomacy since at both stops, he decided that established policies and diplomatic niceties were costing large numbers lives needlessly.

No surprise, then, that he immediately came to similar conclusions at the world’s malaria-fighting programs. A key conclusion was that the public health community was kowtowing to the pharmaceutical industry. So he launched a full-frontal attack on world drug makers. He wanted them to quit producing and marketing single-drug pills when pills containing multiple malaria-fighting drugs were needed. He was soon publicly castigating big companies first and then smaller companies for making monotherapy pills. And at each step along the way, he’s emerged the winner. “Things have got to be done right,” says the Japanese scientist. About the value of being diplomatic, he says, “I don’t have the patience.”

In the above-named book, I listed these qualities of the Beta thinker:
• You work with the world you find.
• You aren’t easily spooked.
• You don’t have a lot of patience for shirkers or persons who refuse to learn.
• You mostly evaluate yourself.
• You can’t be bought.
• You don’t take power trips.
• Hype, buzz and other forms of manufactured drama generally turn you off.
• You can be jarringly quick to say “no.”
• When it matters to you, you want to be in play.

From what I can see of Dr. Kochi, he’s made the leap to Beta thinking.

It’s not at all unheard of for the individuals who permit me an unusual degree of access to what they are thinking and feeling and doing to be articulate and introspective—and very good writers. And write they often do. What follows is excerpted from a long e-mail (one of many I’ve received from this person over the years) that narrates the travails of an individual I’d judge as “stuck in Mind Level 6.” Level 6, for any of my readers not conversant with the Clare-Gravesian-based model I’ve explored in a number of books, is the Big Kahuna of Healing stages, where one gets one’s psychological act together, or one doesn’t. I have the writer’s permission to invite you to my ringside seat, believing that there is much in what she’s experienced and experiencing that will strike a familiar chord to many. And that her travelogue will be as fascinating to others as it was to me.

I’ve been on the most interesting adventure. I wrote you some of it, midstream, the processing of the end of that disastrous [love] affair. But that was a component of a larger search for the answer to the question: what’s wrong with me?

Years ago, when I came to the training, you looked at some of my scores and said, “If some of you could just get your left brain working as well as your right brain, you could change the world.” And that statement, as well as so many other of your writings and comments, has stayed with me. When I started the company, I had to learn how to protect it so I could pay all my salaries, and that was a left-brain stimulating experience. In fact, in owning the company, I became more comfortable with the whole idea of ruthlessness, taking responsibilities for risks, for what you might cost other people in getting something accomplished, for taking responsibility for action on the material plane in general.

But this love affair challenged me on a different level. It surfaced all my identity weakness, my need to obtain outside validation to know I exist, my uncertainty about my own value on so many levels. I think he was a sociopath. That’s a tough thing to say about someone else. But with everything I’ve read, I think it’s true. And he targeted me because I had money, was nurturing, trusting, and almost pathologically without defenses. And I got what you get from people like that — the big charming seduction and then, when you’re locked in, the relentless denegation and remorseless exploitation. The thing is, I couldn’t get out of it. I had some kind of addictive connection with him.

Well, when I finally found the wherewithal to get him away from me after five years, I was a kind of husk. No trust in myself anymore. No self-esteem left at all. I’d been listening to all the reasons I was unlovable for five years. And the truth is — I don’t even know if he was as bad as I remember, because something about just completely whacked out my perspectives. There was some element I desperately needed from a relationship that I wasn’t getting, and something in me just dropped down into the red zone and stayed there.

So when he left, I just made up my mind to figure out what’s wrong with me. I’m two years into it. One year I did on my own, the second with a therapist. In just the last few months, we’ve finally gotten down into the incest stuff, where it becomes clear that this guy was just a kind of molded plastic wrapper around my father. And I’m facing the reality that something happened to me, someone did it to me, and that person didn’t care about how it came out for me or how much of my life was being destroyed.

It sounds awful, and it is. But from the first time in my life, I’m standing in my own shoes and seeing what’s outside me as clearly outside me. Things happened that are not about me. They affected me but I didn’t cause them. There are people who, whatever they are when they’re not monsters, are monsters sometimes. And if I’m dealing with a monster, it doesn’t who matter who they are otherwise. It’s not my job to fix them or understand them or do anything at all but protect myself and get away. Does all this makes sense?

My boundaries were so blown that I didn’t know the difference between outside and inside. It made me incredibly open and interactive and intuitive and perceptive. It made me a kind of saint. (And I might have been just fine as a saint, if I’d never owned anything.) But I had no grounded sense of being inside myself. No firm identity as separate from everything else.

I was reading your questions in the first chapter [of The Mother of All Minds]. I’m learning all the left-brain levels at once. Survival, Fastest Gun, Entrepreneur. It’s so weird to have all of this emerge at my age (57). I’m learning anger. Resistance. I’m tossing people away. Sometimes I’m so self-centered in my viewpoints that I don’t know if I should be celebrating or trying to shrink myself back to size. And I fear that I’m losing some of that lovely New Age airiness of mind I used to have, in favor of something a lot harder and more grounded. I feel the loss, but hope that it will all settle down eventually.

The really peculiar part of this, Dudley, is that I read my old journals and letters, and I discover that there is nothing I’m learning that I didn’t know. Nothing new in me. It’s just that it’s moving from words to belief to action. I’m still in the interstice between belief and action, emerging slowly from two years of solitude and relative inaction. I even quit working for six months from last spring until shortly after Christmas. Now I’m just gradually re-entering the marketplace.

It’s very hard starting over again. I knew when I began this that I had to excavate my way down to where it began with my father, when I was 13. And I suspected that when I got there, I would uncover a part of myself that had been deeply buried. That I would have to pick up from there, as a teenager, and somehow grow it up to work in my life now. I had faith that it would grow up quickly, because I have so much experience to feed it. I also thought it might be hard. And it is much harder than I thought it would be. There’s an adolescent quality in my thinking, a rigidity to my idealism combined with a social awkwardness. It may always have been there, but I feel it now very sharply.

In all of this, there is a odd sense of not becoming anything new, but becoming myself. That in the end, there will be nothing that wasn’t there before, but I will not be constantly stumbling over the knots in myself. I didn’t realize how much of a presence depression and anxiety were in my life. And how much of my life was dedicated to managing around them.

I’m trying to write a book about it. I’ve written reams of letters to people during the process. Sometimes I thought that I wouldn’t live through it, and would just die of sadness. But at least I would leave the letters behind. I think what I’m writing about is recovering from what incest does. But I’m also writing about a journey that started with the realization that, if I didn’t change my life, I was going to die never having owned it or done what I really wanted.

I think I’ve gotten pretty well along in the process of taking my life back, owning it finally. Now, I have to figure out what I really want. And that’s a process in itself.

I am surrounded by the material environment of the way I was. I own so much stuff, bought to make myself feel better. At least I’ve learned now that pain is just a messenger, and what needs to be cured is the source of the pain. I live in a house with a $2200 a month mortgage payment that I bought to house my various human appendages, now all gone. I love the house, but the mortgage is an albatross. My work in PR is intrinsically dysfunctional, if I can put it that way, dealing with massive egos who barely understand what I do and regard the attention I bring them as merely their just due. Just clearing it all away is a task like Hercules cleaning the stables.
Overwhelming, and I sometimes think of just burning it all down and beginning life again with whatever I could stuff in the back of my car.

I wish, I wish, I wish I could find a way to just teach people to think and speak and write, aligned with who they are and what they want. People who really want to learn, to accomplish something in their lives. I watch for clues about the direction I should go. And I keep working on this project of mine, because I’m still not quite ready for prime time. Still too easy to anger, too defensive and untrusting. It will settle down.

For an author, what’s not to like about such a request?

So I sat my guest down in front of my computer screen. I summoned some hopefully evocative Power Point slides to help illuminate the way and plunged with gusto into a “straight from the horse’s mouth” explanation.

Apparently, the slides and the explanations were evocative and illuminative. Because there came a moment when my visitor suddenly performed a physical maneuver that writers of action books would probably describe as “she whirled around like a dervish” or some such and said, “But this is evolution! You’re saying that people’s brains are evolving!”

It was not a thought that pleased her, because the tone of her voice was a couple of notches off the accusatory scale.

Yes, I do believe I am saying that. That was also the assumption, I do believe, of the gifted brain whose work underlies great amounts of my lifework, the brain of the late psychologist Dr. Clare W. Graves.

My guest then added: “And you’re saying some people’s thinking is better than others!”

Oh, there’s no question of that. As more than a few very wise persons have observed, “Common sense really isn’t very common.” Most certainly, there are poor thinkers, average thinkers and superior thinkers. And many shades in between.

But that isn’t really the issue here.

What my visitor found offensive is the idea that some brains are equipped to improve their ability to perceive the world and do competent, suitable things in it and others aren’t. And that the flowering of this faculty is developmental, incremental and temporal. It happens, if it happens, over time. Later stages are more diverse and contemporary than earlier stages. If one becomes marooned at an “earlier” stage, it can make trouble for an individual or a whole society.

We talked at length about all this. I’m not sure how much she finally bought into the idea. I am sure that she’s close to being ready to consider that all this is possible. “Being close” is closer than many will come, and perhaps as close as this person will come. It is not for me to say, or her, for that matter. What will be(come) will be(come).

If I get another chance and if I sense that she may be ready for the next installment, I’m going to trot out polymath Otto Neurath’s Ark. It’s the best way I know to convey the idea that whatever “stage” your brain happens to be thinking at, there’s enormous room for humility. While one stage, or kind, of thinking can be demonstratively be said to be much better suited for coping with the times in which a person is living than other stages, no brain can explain precisely any of this (the universe, or our presence in it, or the presence of our brain in it) and how it all works.

That was the point of Neurath’s boat example.

He likened science to a boat that, if it is to be rebuilt (improved, perfected), must be rebuilt plank by plank at a time while it is also keeping us afloat. There’s no way ever to dry-dock the boat. There’s no external place to plop it down and examine it objectively and start over from scratch, making it better.

I think of all our brains as being like Neurath’s boat. There’s no value in arguing that one brain is better than another because there’s no place where we can park any of our brains and get off and stare at them from a distant to gain a better perspective. There’s no getting out of our brains, taking a totally objective view and being able to get back in them, no matter how much yoga we practice or how much we slow our breathing rate. We can improving our understanding of our boat/brain. We can infer that we’ve got a more durable, responsive, better-equipped-to-cope boat-brain that we had before. We can encourage ourselves and others to make better choices and choices that encourage our brains to shift their wiring and wiring usage to produce more suitable ourcomes. But we have to accomplish all this while still in the boat.

So is the brain evolving, at least in the way it utilizes its information-processing capabilities? I think so. Dr. Graves thought so. Others think and have thought so.

That still doesn’t explain away the fact that no matter which of Dr. Graves’ levels of existence or Dudley’s mind levels or someone else’s belief/value systems you now appear to be operating from, we are all still in the same boat, trying to improve it without sinking and without understanding how it really looked “first” and without all that good a sense—to be honest about it—of how it looks now.

One of the morals of this story: when you rock the boat, be prepared for a mutiny. You can make educated guesses, but there’s really no way to tell how others are going to respond to the boat-rocking until the action starts.

(The first time I ever heard of Neurath’s boat was in a book by philosopher Ellen R. Klein. You’ll seldom find a philosopher who writes more clearly on the topic of what we can know and what we can’t. For a copy of the book of hers that I read, go here: “Feminism Under Fire”.

But the Republic’s then managing editor was an unusual guy, a nationally respected figure in American journalism, J. Edward Murray. As a foreign correspondent for UPI, Murray once had Christmas dinner with Winston Churchill and his family. He later was associate editor of the Detroit Free Press and publisher of the Boulder (CO) Daily Camera. Murray said, “Come on, we’ve got some interesting people for you to meet out here.”

One of the most interesting was a lanky, sideburned-and-mustachioed guy given to wearing Western shirts and bringing instant charisma to any room he walked into. That was Robert Theobald, the futurist. He lived in Wickenburg, Arizona, with his horses and family. Because the Sunday magazine was kind of a haven for radicals and misfits at the newspaper, Theobald often stopped by when he was in town.

I’m writing this because I ran across Theobald’s book, Beyond Despair: Direction’s for America’s Third Century the other day. Written in the mid-1970s, the book raised many of the same questions that we’ve raised in our seminars and books at Brain Technologies.

Mainly, what do we do with what Theobald called “the condition of amondie, or the lack of a world in which we can live effectively”? This is the central issue addressed in our latest work, The Mother of All Minds and the condition that we believe produces the arrival of Dr. Clare Graves’ 7th mind system, the one we call Beta.

Theobald advocated a number of things:
• “Strong chaining.” This is linking to other people who are prepared to act cooperatively.
• Letting new myths about how things work emerge from each of our already existing, if submerged, consciousness of a new kind of world.
• Applying new patterns of behavior within our own lives, families and communities.
• Understanding and accepting that we cannot make our bureaucracies honest “because this form of institutional organization is incapable of accurate movement of information.”
• Encourage people to “wear faces and destroy their masks”—that is, quit changing their outer personas as they move from setting to setting, moment to moment, in their daily lives. Instead, be strong selves and be just themselves, nearly all the time.
• Quit assuming that those who think they know how the world works know how the world works; quit electing them, quit listening to them, quit venerating them, quit following them, quit empowering them.
• Accept the need for large-scale change. Find others who share that understanding. And then—in today’s popular argot—network, network, network.

Rereading Beyond Despair, I find Theobald both prescient and naïve. Perhaps it was simply that he was early. He was sensing much that was to come but his understanding was too early and too incomplete to offer a very concrete and compelling plan of action. But to an impressionable thirty-something mind in the early 1970s, he was a forerunner of importance. I’m glad I had the chance to know him.

Robert Theobald died surrounded by friends in Spokane, WA, on Nov. 27, 1999, two years after having a cancerous esophagus removed. For details about his life and work, go here: “Robert Theobald Home Page”.

It is my belief that it is not all that remote from a journey that most all who have ever lived participate in.

The road map that I like best, and one to which I’ve devoted a substantial part of my lifework, is that provided by the late Dr. Clare Graves, the  psychologist. He traced the route as a spiral, with well-defined stops. In my most recent book, I shared the view that much of the time I’m now experiencing “life its own self” at Graves’ Stage 7 or, as I renumbered it in this work, Stage 2.0.

From the perspective of the 2.0 mind, one of the key understandings that I keep butting my nose into—like a door jam in the dark—is this: Everyone who has ever tried to explain why the world is, what humans are doing here, and the totality of how it all works has been guessing. Once you are armed with this insight, then it is both fascinating and sometimes a little fear-provoking to see just how many guesses have been put forth about what’s happening and how and why, and how much influence even very bad guesses can have.

A question then: Which of those guesses deserve to be labeled the best guesses ever made, even if they are no longer attention-attractors except for serious scholars, and sometimes not many of these?

Somehow, I have always intuitively suspected that the cultural mentality most likely to take such a question seriously, and attempt to answer it, would belong to a citizen of the United Kingdom. The question itself just sounds very…British.

And so it was a vindication of sorts to come across British critic, biographer and poet Martin Seymour-Smith’s book, The 100 Most Influential Books Ever Written. Published in 1998, this work was just such an attempt—to define the guesses in history that have had “the most decisive influence upon the course of human thought.”

I can’t imagine anyone ever reading Seymour-Smith’s book from cover to cover. At least, I don’t have this kind of ocular or intellectual stamina. But this is one of those books that prompts me to get it down off the shelf every once in a while, open it at random and marvel anew at the origins and consequences of all the guessing that has been going on.

This time, 100 Most Influential fell open to book No. 83, Italian intellectual Vilfredo Pareto’s The Mind and Society. I have always thought that Pareto was an economist, because of what has come to be called “Pareto’s 80/20 Principle.” (Seymour-Smith calls it “Pareto optimality,” and says it was unpopular from the first because of its “the trival many—the critical few” character. In other words, that an economy is best off when the largest proportion of its participants are badly off.) But what do I learn? That Pareto, a congenital sourpuss of a thinker, is consider one of the fathers of sociology. And that The Mind and Society puts forth one of the best guesses for why, to use T.S. Eliot’s notion (as Seymour-Smith does), “Mankind cannot bear much reality.” Pareto’s ideas of the early 20th Century are very much in vogue again in the early 21st Century: that the foundations of the social system are very much anchored in the nonlogical, not the rational, actions of humans.

So Pareto’s best guess is, by other names and because of other systems of inquiry, back in town. I suspect that if I ever summon up the stamina to read this entire work, I’ll find that this is true again and again. That there can only be so many guesses of sufficient quality to be considered very good guesses about what’s happening here even though they all remain just that—guesses—and that most of them have already been fleshed out at one time or another by a very fine, if now perhaps largely ignored if not totally forgotten, mind. But good or bad, they remain mostly that: guesses.

Seymour-Smith died on July 1, 1998, at the age of seventy. For a list of Seymour-Smith’s Top 100, go here: “100 Most Influential Books Ever Written”.

If you are into the (Clare W.) Gravesian spiral model of people’s portals on the world, state fairs are authentic places to observe mind levels 2 through 4 (and sometimes 5) at work and play. And since the State Fair of Texas is a genuinely outsized event, it offers a genuinely boggling array of people living out those worldviews.

The cookware demonstrations and the homegrown tomatoes quickly get old for me, so on those rare occasions when I go to the big Texas fair, I soon find myself in my favorite building, the Creative Arts hall. Again, using the Gravesian model as a reference, this is decidedly a level 4 kind of place. Level 4 is the worldview that Graves called absolutistic and what I’ve often called the Loyalist portal of the mind.

At Level 4, the human mind is not expected to be a paragon of creativity. And most of what is on view in the Creative Arts hall is as uninspiring as the acres and acres of unimaginative new Level 5-inspired cars on display a few yards away. But on all my visits there, I’ve eventually stumbled on unmistakable evidence of just how alive and well the creative instinct is at all levels of the mind, including this one.

This year, I found what I was looking for in a display case housing the winning entries for the Glue-A-Shoe Context.

The assignment had been to take an old shoe and transform it into a piece of art. I think even the late Andy Warhol might have been intrigued with the tennis shoe that had been splayed and metamorphosed into a manta ray. There was a dismembered high-heeled shoe whose parts were artfully rearranged in a salad bowl and labeled chop shoey. Two scale model sumo wrestlers were going at it on a discarded beach sandal. Another sandal had somehow been refashioned into a magical wagon in which a Tinker Bell-like character held the reins to a pair of dragon flies. And those were merely the blue-ribbon winners.

However, these were not the most captivating displays I saw at this year’s Creative Arts hall. That distinction went to a top winner in scale model dioramas. The scene depicted a Texaco gasoline station, circa the early 1950s. The scene was stunning in its imaginative completeness. Right down to the bottles in the miniature, battered vertical-door Coke machine inside the office, the electric clock on the wall (it read 10 ’til 2) and the outside trash barrel filled with empty, Chiclet-sized motor oil cans. Creating this had to have required several hundred hours of riveting, loving, creative attention to detail.

Of course, you can’t wade through 7,000 examples of Level 4 creativity without eyeballing a lot of kitsch. This year’s kitschiest display was also its largest. A bigger-than-life-sized, guitar-pounding young Elvis Presley and three hound dogs. Carved in butter.