We have all heard about the frog in the steadily warming pot, the Kermie that has no clue its legs are being prepared for dinner. What if a similar fate has befallen a critical mass of humans? What if our context has cooked us up into something quite different, and we have missed the import of these changes? What if we have already become the solution to the problems of our times and we don’t know it?
There is no shortage of reports about the growing complexity of our times. The weather is affected by the ocean temperatures, impacted by coal fired power plants, the outcome of political tradeoffs, influenced by corporate donations, which many are too poor and too hungry to challenge. We now watch TV programs with 5 or more plot lines, are married to an immigrant partner, have a gay sister, know about turmoil in 12 different countries, all of which we can point to on a map, or find the many details of thru Google, while we manage our personal and investment accounts, keep track of our triglycerides, and share comments with perhaps 1000 people through a dozen blog or social media sites, all using 2 or more languages. We know that we began speaking about 45,000 years ago, and have brains that are not laterally symmetric in either design or function, know at least 2 strains of bacteria that are healthy for us, have seen the earth from space, know the comparative financial stability of Brazil vs Argentina, and know each of the personalities and all their interrelationships on Downton Abbey, and every other show we watch.
I could go on, but the point should be clear: Our brains today handle a level of complexity that our context did not approach requiring just 50 years ago. We know the general action of epigenetics, that context greatly influences brain development. If we grew up inside this hugely more complex context, we wouldn’t notice how different we are, any more than Kermie would notice his becoming poached. And yet, both of our contexts, the water, and the information sphere, have changed their occupants. Unlike Kermie though, we’re still here.
We’re here. But where are we? Its surely not Kansas anymore. We have a nagging sense that being able to take the perspective of my Taiwanese daughter-in-law, and those of my mother, my sabre friend Vizer, my Palestinian friend Sabi, my gay friend Allan, and the schizophrenic artist down the block, is odd. We understand in a way that drives us to systems theory to try to make sense of the scope of knowing we are visited with. We have a whole new kind of experience when we engage with others in the absence of fear and while not activating our sense of personal identity. We put our identity aside with growing ease, and we see thru eyes that we know are not ours. Who or what is it that can do this? We have woken up inside of unnamed capacities while someone forgot to provide the Operator’s Manual for this new human.
I and 8 others addressed this unease in a class I guided at UW-Madison, Fall 2010, “Multiperspectival Thinking: Operating with all windows open”. In this class we experientially mapped out the developmental stages of our own Being, following the Gravesian Existential Stages model. We were able to isolate, emerge and study the highly complex cognition capacities at what this school calls, 2nd Tier. The conclusions from this collective experiment were helpful in sketching out the beginnings of the Operator’s Manual. Based on the premise, “Name it. Claim it.” the following is offered as a beginning list of what we can name, and thus claim; an early sketch of the Operators Manual for Human Being:
The high and endemic complexity we live in has grown cognitive capacities commensurate with the challenges of our times. These new capacities require an appropriate context to emerge and operate in. This context coemerges with these capacities:
1) Fearlessness – Maximum cortical activity and flexibility require the absence of threat.
2) Multiperspectival Cognition – Freedom from domination of perspective.
3) Transegoic Cognition – One of the perspectives that can be objectified.
4) Unitary Epistemology – Groking. Volumetric knowing. Getting it all at once.
5) Attunement – A feeling associated with a particular Grok. Translated per nature of the individual.
6) Radical Objectivity – Capacity to give up ANY perspective.
7) The Non-local Self – That non-objectifiable something that takes perspectives and is senior to ego.
We found that:
a) Each of us had experienced these capacities before, but because we did not have names for them, we had not taken note of them.
b) These capacities parallel the capacities that are achieved in the classic disciplines designed to emerge Enlightenment.
c) Nothing is fixed by realizing and taking ownership of these capacities.
d) Our experience of these capacities is episodic.
e) Practice enacting these capacities increases their integration into more of our lives.
f) We found these capacities, at least initially, easier to enact and articulate as a collective, vs on our own.
g) These capacities revealed new possibilities for solving our problems.
While Kermie’s destiny was as nutrition and sustenance for his predators, our destiny seems to be to own our enlightenment, not make too big a deal of it, and get on with being the critical mass of bodhisattvas that we are.