Memes for the Creation of a New Culture

What This Book is About

2011-08-04 04:00:01

Memes for the Creation of a New Culture is a book about how our species might systematically discover more peaceful and sustainable ways of living together. The ideas and notions that make up this book are not a bunch of facts that I want you to believe in. Instead, they are simply my opinions in the form of a collection of hopefully enjoyable, fun-to-read stories.

There will be stories about the Lao Tsu Syndrome and about my experiences as an enthusiastic participant (hippie) in the Counterculture of the 1960s. There will be stories about memes and genes, the future, belief and knowledge, consciousness and reality and oddly more than one story about monkeys.

Next Section: The Story

Wherever you are in this book, in the right sidebar you will always be a Page Tree, the book’s table of contents. If you do not see it expanded, there will be a line in the area where the finger is pointing that says “show/hide page tree.”

Click on it and the tree will expand and look something like this.

The portion of the tree with the reddish glowing ball touching it indicates where you are in the book right now. Currently it’s pointed to “What This Book is About” and you’ll notice that this is the title of the section you are reading.

More about This Book

This is a living book, a work-in-progress. The sections and chapters that have been written will stay where they are. However new content may be added to them.As the project evolves, new sections and chapters may be added until the book is ready for offline publication.

You can get an overview of the book and visit any of section via the Table of Contents.You can add your own words or ideas — become an editor or contributor. At this time, there are only the first chapter and the first few sections of Chapter 2 have been completed. The rest of the sections are place holders, coming attractions for what will come later.

The Story

2012-04-16 22:57:52

Let’s start with The Story of the Hundredth Monkey, a tale I first heard 30 years ago, and have told and retold ever since. For those of you haven’t heard the story and for those of you who may have heard a different version, I will start with the one told by Ken Keyes Jr. in his 1982 best-selling book, The Hundredth Monkey:

The Japanese monkey, Macaca fuscata, has been observed in the wild for a period of over 30 years.

In 1952, on the island of Koshima scientists were providing monkeys with sweet potatoes dropped in the sand. The monkeys liked the taste of the raw sweet potatoes, but they found the dirt unpleasant

This cultural innovation was gradually picked up by various monkeys before the eyes of the scientists.

Between 1952 and 1958, all the young monkeys learned to wash the sandy sweet potatoes to make them more palatable.

Only the adults who imitated their children learned this social improvement. Other adults kept eating the dirty sweet potatoes.

Then something startling took place. In the autumn of 1958, a certain number of Koshima monkeys were washing sweet potatoes — the exact number is not known.

Let us suppose that when the sun rose one morning there were 99 monkeys on Koshima Island who had learned to wash their sweet potatoes.

Let’s further suppose that later that morning, the hundredth monkey learned to wash potatoes.

THEN IT HAPPENED!

By that evening almost everyone in the tribe was washing sweet potatoes before eating them.

The added energy of this hundredth monkey somehow created an ideological breakthrough!

But notice.

A most surprising thing observed by these scientists was that the habit of washing sweet potatoes then jumped over the sea —

Colonies of monkeys on other islands and the mainland troop of monkeys at Takasakiyama began washing their sweet potatoes!

Keyes tells us that he first read the story, which is described in more detail in the 1979 book, Lifetide by Lyle Watson. Keyes goes on to give his interpretation of the implications that these observations have for us.

Thus, when a certain critical number achieves an awareness, this new awareness may be communicated from mind to mind.

Although the exact number may very, the Hundredth Monkey Phenomenon means that when only a limited number of people know of a new way, it may remain the consciousness property of these people.

But there is a point at which if only one more person tunes-in to a new awareness, a field is strengthened so that this awareness is picked up by almost everyone!

Your awareness is needed in saving the world from nuclear war.

You may be the “Hundredth Monkey” .

At the time Keyes book came out, I was living in Santa Cruz, California, a beach town about 95 miles south of San Francisco, where I lived because it was a refuge for members of the Sixties hippie movement, a place to find community. The book was prominently displayed on the checkout counters of the local health food store where I bought groceries.

I loved this story when I read it, because it fit in with many of my beliefs, including the possibility that there might be undiscovered human potentials including psychic powers. I was also an anti-war activist and so it helped my enthusiasm as a call to join the movement.

I told and retold the story to friends and even in lectures I gave, for a variety of purposes.

The Hundredth Monkey story is a great tale with one small problem.

Next Section: The Story

One Small Problem

2012-05-13 12:43:14

Here is the small problem. This wonderful story with so man amazing and quite positive implications is not true, it is an urban legend that did not actually happen the way that it was told by Ken Keyes.

Actually, in my way of thinking of things, it more than a small problem. When I am told I science story, I expect it to have a basis in the actual observations, as reported by scientists.

The website, the Skeptic’s Dictionary devotes a long page to giving some of the background of this urban myth. Because the story really began with the late Dr. Lyle Watson, it starts with version of what had happened, as it first appeared in the 1979 book, Lifetide: the biology of unconscious;

I am forced to improvise the details, but as near as I can tell, this is what seems to have happened. In the autumn of that year an unspecified number of monkeys on Koshima were washing sweet potatoes in the sea. . . . Let us say, for argument’s sake, that the number was ninety-nine and that at eleven o’clock on a Tuesday morning, one further convert was added to the fold in the usual way. But the addition of the hundredth monkey apparently carried the number across some sort of threshold, pushing it through a kind of critical mass, because by that evening almost everyone was doing it. Not only that, but the habit seems to have jumped natural barriers and to have appeared spontaneously, like glycerine crystals in sealed laboratory jars, in colonies on other islands and on the mainland in a troop at Takasakiyama.

The Skeptic’s Dictionary entry goes on to refute the story.

It makes for a cute story, but it isn’t true. At least, the part about spontaneous transmission of a cultural trait across space without contact is not true. There really were some macaque monkeys who washed their sweet potatoes. One monkey started it and soon others joined in. But even after six years not all the monkeys saw the benefit of washing the grit off of their potatoes by dipping them into the sea. . Watson made up the part about the mysterious transmission.

Michael Shermer, founder and Editor-in-Chief of Skeptic magazine wrote about the Hundredth Monkey tale in his 2002 book, Why people believe weird things: pseudoscience, superstition, and other confusions of our time provides an alternative set of events to the two versions of the story of the monkeys on those Japanese islands, based on his research into the published data:

Scientists do not “improvise” details or make wild guesses from “anecdotes” and “bits of folklore.” In fact, some scientists did record exactly what happened (for example, Baldwin et al. 1980; Tmanishi 1983; Kawai 1962). The research began with a troop of twenty monkeys in 1952, and every monkey on the island was carefully observed. By 1962, the troop had increased to fifty-nine monkeys and exactly thirty-six of the fifty-nine monkeys were washing their sweet potatoes. The “sudden” acquisition of the behavior actually took ten years, and the “hundred monkeys” were actually only thirty-six in 1962. Furthermore, we can speculate endlessly about what the monkeys knew, but the fact remains that not all of the monkeys in the troop were exhibiting the washing behavior. The thirty-six monkeys were not a critical mass even at home. And while there are some reports of similar behavior on other islands, the observations were made between 1953 and 1967. It was not sudden, nor was it necessarily connected to Koshima. The monkeys on other islands could have discovered this simple skill themselves, for example, or inhabitants on other islands might have taught them. In any case, not only is there no evidence to support this extraordinary claim, there is not even a real phenomenon to explain.

Macaques Monkeys

The Hundredth Monkey story in its original appearance in biologist Lyle Watson’s Lifetide was not cited as a call to activism as Keyes did. In the above excerpt from Lyle’s account of the 100th monkey phenomenon, he compares the transmission of the potato washing behavior to “glycine crystals in sealed laboratory jars.” This analogy is drawn from an earlier story that Watson tells about the the history of glycine, a colorless liquid first extracted from natural fats some four centuries ago.

To make a long story shorter, it was told that glycine always was known only to be a liquid and was always assumed not to have a solid form until a large quanity of the substance, being transported a barrel were found to contain glycine crystals. A sample sent to two researchers were used to seed glycine in a sealed laboratory container. The scientists then found that all of their other samples of glycine in the lab, also sealed air-tight now were filled with glycine crystals, replacing the liquid that had been there previously. According to the story, from that time forward, glycine would take the form of a crystal, rather than a liquid.

Lyle used these stories in Lifetide as evidence supporting the existence of psychic phenomenon.

Next Section: The Story

The Hundredth Monkey and Morphic Resonance

2012-01-31 17:37:27

Around the same time as the Hundredth Monkey story had begun being spread via Ken Keyes book, a British biologist Rupert Sheldrake proposed a theory called Morphogenic Fields put forth in his book, A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Morphic Resonance,first released by J.P. Tarcher in 1981.

Sheldrake is an academic researcher who sides with a theoretical school of biology, currently in disfavor, which holds that heredity in living organism is not governed by DNA alone. Instead, morphogenetic fields established at the time the first organism formed are the basis of all future organisms in its family tree.

Sheldrake posits that these theoretical morphogeneic fields in biological cells are particular case of what he terms morphic fields. According to Sheldrake is a nested hierarchy of other natural units of organization, including atoms, molecules, crystals, cells, plants, animals, patterns of instinctive behavior, social groups, elements of culture, ecosystems, planets, planetary systems and galaxies he calls morphic units, and that each of these has its own morphic field. Once this morphic field, is established in one member of a morphic unit, it extends its influence to every other member by a principle he calls morphic resonance.

Morphic resonance, according to Sheldrake is,

. . . the basis of memory in nature….the idea of mysterious telepathy-type interconnections between organisms and of collective memories within species.

Sheldrake’s theory received a mixed reception from the scientific community This included one harsh review in September 1981, Nature published an editorial written by John Maddox, the journal’s senior editor, entitled “A book for burning?” Here is a video based on the review.

Listening to Maddox declare that Sheldrake’s book should be burned for precisely the same reason that the Church burned the works of Galileo, “. . . because it is heresy,” most likely would cause even a member of most skeptical among us to take pause.

Next Section: The Story

Making the Connection

2012-02-06 03:27:12

When I started writing this introduction, I planned to began by telling the story of the Hundredth Monkey. As with most of what I will write here, I began by digging into the story by doing some researching it to find its exact origins and the research behind it.

What I found was a bit surprising, it turns out that the Hundredth Monkey story had been debunked by skeptics.

I had believed the story for many years, having first heard the story while attending a month-long seminar held at Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California in September of 1983.

Esalen Institute, perched on cliffs above the surging Pacific Ocean, is eleven miles below the small town of Big Sur, California. The site of hot mineral springs, it was once the residence of the Esselen Indians, when the price of real estate was considerably cheaper.

The Big House, Esalen Institute, Big Sur, California

A rustic encampment of wooden building was built during the mid-Sixties, and the area around the Esalen Hot Spring was opened up as a retreat and human development center called Esalen Institute. Esalen became a vortex for a psychologists and therapists during the Sixties, with a resident faculty of scholars. People such as Dr. John Lilly M.D. Fritz Perls PhD. Abraham Maslow, Ph.D and others conducted group therapy workshops, and educational seminars. Easlen became a think tank for a system of ideas which author Jeffrey J. Kapel calls in his 2007 book, “The Religion of No Religion.”

The story was told by Dr. Stanislav Grof during the workshop titled Journey to the East. Grof had the stories about the hundredth monkey as well as the other story Watson told about the glycine crystals to demonstrate the “scientific evidence” that underlay Sheldrake’s theory of morphic resonance. Sheldrake’s theory was cited by Grof as an example of scientific paradigm shift in biology, one of many paradigm shifts in other fields which Grof said were beginning to erode materialistic assumptions underlying the science as a discipline.

Esalen Institute, Big Sur, California

Of course, its easy to see how the hundredth monkey story would be associated with Sheldrake theory. As far as I can determine, Sheldrake had never made used the Hundredth Monkey story to support his ideas.

He also had mentioned the fact that in order to crystallize a substance when doing a chemical synthesis, you often need to add an actual crystal to the liquid results of the that synthesis, providing a seed around which additional crystals in the liquid will form. But this is not the same as Lyle Watson’story of glycine crystal formation leaping from vat to vat, and laboratory to laboratory mysteriously.

Grof had taken these two stories from Lyle Watson’s Lifetide and cited that as two scientific studies which supported Sheldrake’s controversial morphogenic resonance theory.

Grof then used Sheldrake’s theory, as one in a series of evidential offerings which he presented during the month-long workshop, each suggesting that experiences that people have on LSD are not hallucinations but actual events in their life.

He also had similar stories from other new science paradigm, all of which were used to erode the materialistic foundations behind mainstream science, and to support the possibilities of spiritual and psychic phenomena suggesting that people’s inner non-ordinary experiences, induced by psychedelics and other methods, were based on external, real world happenings.

I had no reason to suspect that Grof, a man with a medical degree, would present misleading accounts of science. From the time I heard both of these stories, I told them on many occasions with great enthusiasm. It turned out that the story I was telling (and just about to tell again at the beginning of this book) has no basic in scientific research. It is however, a great story.

Next Section: The Story

A Flashback

2012-04-17 21:18:19

I would never have taken that 1983 Esalen workshop if not for the experiences I had two decades before, during the most eventful and intense period of my life during the decade of the 1960s.

The late, highly respected historian Arnold Toynbee comments on this period in American history, “I have visited the United States since 1925. Before my last visit, I had been absent for two years, and I came away with the impression that in those two years there has been more change in American life than in all the previous forty.

Growing up in the LA suburbs in the 1950s, I felt like I was on a conveyor belt in an industrial factory, being molded and shaped into what my parents and society wanted me to become. But as I emerged from adolescence, the hippie culture blossomed all around me.

I experienced the psychedelics and jumped off the conveyor belt. Instead of predictable normality, my life became a phantasmagoria of experiences, sometimes ecstatic and at other times scary and chaotic I became a hitchhiking vagabond in search of wisdom.

I was twelve years old when the ‘Sixties began and twenty-two when it ended. I made successive transformations from student to radical to hippie, I turned on to LSD. Tuned into the hippie scene and dropped out during that most amazing of times.

I first heard about LSD in 1964 in my tenth grade biology class. My instructor, a young physician named Dr. Kody, had been in experiments conducted at UCLA with LSD. His experience with this then legal and little known experimental drug had been an adventure and the young instructor’s eyes beamed with energy as he told the class about his adventures in the world inside his mind.

He also spent a lot of time talking about the then amazing unraveling of the DNA code. The class made chemical models with alphabet soup names and among them was a three-dimensional model of d-lysergic acid diethyl amide – dubbed LSD for short.

To a young man who had dealt with the boredom of suburban youth growing up in the ‘Fifties by chain-reading hundreds of pulp science fiction books, I felt that this LSD was the stuff that the future was made of. Along with DNA of course and space travel, which is why, the kids called me The Professor. I was the original nerd before it was fashionable, with a complete collection of pocket protectors.

Next Section: The Story

Opening Up My Mind

2012-04-17 21:44:46

I was not to try LSD until four years later. Nobody had offered me the key to of this new doorway into the world of altered perceptions that came in a pill. And if they had, I would have been thought more than twice about taking it – because during my time in high school, I had also taken a class that I hated as much as I was thrilled by tenth grade biology.

It was the mandatory class simply called “Health” which was taught by the PE teacher, Mr. Golden. The scene of the kids who took LSD and ran in front of a car stuck in my mind, as did the reefer madness type pot films. These classes were the precursors of our modern DARE programs.

But it seemed almost fate that pushed me to explore – with increasing fascination — the curious topic of psychedelic drugs. In a slow-moving photography class my senior year – we spent most of the time outside of the dark room playing cards and I spent them talking with classmate who was one part of the still small and very underground LSD scene in Los Angles.

He was one of blossoms from the seeds planted by Aldous Huxley in the ‘Fifties which had now flowered throughout LA – from Hollywood to Malibu to Laguna Beach with the birth of the hippies.

When I got to college, it took me a couple more years to try LSD. I moved slowly and carefully when it came to the big issues of the Sixties – sex and drugs. I wanted to find out everything about them first.

In a similar way, I knew all about sex for years but did not have sex with woman until my second year of college.

I was lucky that way, because by the time I took my first trip, which was not on LSD per se, but on some morning glory seeds, which contain lysergic acid derivatives, I was prepared.

I first opened my doorways to perception myself in my parent’s house, in November of 1967, at age 19 . Taking psychedelic by yourself, especially on your first “trip,” is not recommended by most guidebooks by the way.

My objective was to discover the meaning of the song “Within You and Without You.” of the Album that was topping the charts that year –Sgt. Peppers of course. Sung by George Harrison with Indian Raga background incorporated in its sound track, the song’s refrain advices:” Life Flows on within us and without us.”

After five hours of stomach cramps, spinning, breathing ceilings and bookcases, talking flies etc., I crawled into the living room to watch the sunset and entered into what seemed an eternal bliss without end.

The timeless reverie did finally end. The first thing I noticed was the sound of a small white FM radio I used as the source of my background music.

A commercial jingle was playing, with the refrain, “You can’t do better than Sears.” It sounded better than any music I had ever heard.

Perhaps my newly found bliss was relief from the nausea felt earlier but I interpreted it as a prelude to enlightenment.

Next Section: The Story

The Gene and the Meme

2012-01-31 17:43:01

A meme is a theoretical notion, postulating the existence of core creative ideas or cultural knowledge, having a propensity for transmission between between people using words, gestures and other imitable behaviors. A meme can be thought of as the fundamental particle of human ideas or a virus of the mind, spreading between people, infecting human culture.

A meme is that song you hear on the radio that you can’t get out of your head or that new fashion that everyone starts wearing or an an old saying, such as “a penny saved is a penny earned” that gets passed from generation to generation intact. Those are just a few examples of many memes that fill our heads.

Sociobiolist Richard Dawkins first introduced the term meme (rhymes with dream) , in his groundbreaking 1976 book, the Selfish Gene. The Selfish Gene was the book which popularized the then new area of scientific inquiry, sociobiology, a field focusing on what evolutionary biology can tell us about social behavior.

Dawkins suggests that the preponderance of human behavior can be accounted for by inherited trait, encoded in our genes. Just as there are genes which account for physical characteristics such as hair color or height, there are also genes which manifest propensities toward behaviors.

Next Section: The Story

Introduction

2011-08-04 01:39:26

A Head of His Time: An Introduction

This is the introduction to the book in progress.

As in every other section of the book, I ask for your feedback, editing help, suggestions or even some words if you are up to it.

The title “A Head of His Time” uses a not-so-subtle pun to refer to yours truly the main author of this book. I will explain.

I first heard about LSD in an introduction to biology class that I took as a high school freshman in 1994. The teacher was a medcal student at UCLA and had taken the then legal and largly unknown mind-changing drug as a volunteer in an experiment. He had a great time and he spent an entire week describing his mental adventures to us and it captured my then vivid imagination.
Chapter 1 begins next

Next Section: The Story

1. The Lao Tsu Syndrome

2011-08-04 02:34:34

In my post on my blog Vision Thing in November 2009 about my mother’s passing Remembering My Mother, I told the story of how a dream at age four provided me with a frame of reference to provide a context for the years of my life, the ones that hardly anyone remembers anything about.

I am going to be 62 in February and so I have gone through a lot of my life, much of which seemed like endless mid-life crises and reached maturity. In terms of The 12 Stages of Life by Bruce Carnahan, I have arrived at Stage 9 called which he calls Reflection.

I was at a New Years party last night put by my DJ friend EROCx1. He’s 34 and most of his friends are in their mid-thirties. Shortly after the clock hit 12, I talked one of those friend who I had met a another of Eric’s parties exactly a year before, “That year sure went by fast. “ He replied, “yeah they seem to go by faster and faster every year.”

This is the secret that all of those of us who have reached “maturity” share. We experience each day we live now as somehow feeling the equivalent of an hour when we were in our mid-twenties. The days fall off the calendar the way that they do in a film montage that shows the days and years passing by ever faster.

One of the reason I left my Ph.D. psychology program after being “advanced to candidacy” is that I realized how little psychology really knows. It knows bits and pieces here and there but most of the big questions in psychology go largely unknown and sadly often not even recognized. One of those questions hovers around our perceptions of time. See The Naked Scientists on this question for most of what is known.

According to Turn Back the Clock on the BBC News, William James, the “father of American psychology” was appropriately the first psychologist to speculate on this question. The fact that information and experience is more novel in our youth and gradually becomes less so as we age was his guess.

As we get older there are less “new things” to notice. Novelty gives way to routine and it all goes by so quickly. This theory is elaborated and taken to interesting new regions of exploration by Steve Taylor who teaches at the University of Manchester discuses in this video from YouTube:

Beginnings of a Book

A few weeks before my mother died, I told her I was working on a new book. Since it had been three decades since I published my first book, Ecstasy the MDMA Story, she felt that it was about time that I got to work on another one.

When my mother asked me why I did not write a new book for so long, I told her that I suffered from the Lao Tsu Syndrome.

Who is Lao Tsu?

One version of the story is found in the text book, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy Here is an audio version of the classic Chinese Myth narrated by Steven Mitchell (safe MP3 down load),

Next Section: The Story

Sections of Chapter 1

Synesthetic Memories of a Dream

2011-08-04 03:38:55

There is a theory I read about when I was a psychology graduate student that each of us is born with a fixed amount of long-term memory, in the same what that computers and other microprocessor devices come with memory storing hard drives. But unlike these computing machines, humans have no way of adding more memory storage. So with our fixed amount of memory storage maxed out, our seek times slow. This phenomenon sometimes even results in our accidentally playing the wrong track for the occasion.

Cover, High Times Magazine January 1977

As I move along in my life, my experiences seem to fit with this computer-derived memory model. I suddenly find myself replaying old memories from different parts of life in strange and sometimes incongruous situations. For example like when I’m writing a blog post, I begin to play some old track from something that happened in my early twenties.

So here is another one of those old memory tracks I want to share with you.. It is of a dream I had one night more than 20 years ago.

Before telling you about the dream, let me set it in the context of what was going on in my life when I had it.

The dream occurred two years after the publication of the first edition of Ecstasy: The MDMA Story. During those two years from 1989 to 1991, I was interviewed more than 20 times on the radio, did at least a dozen book signing events and lectured about MDMA five times. I even two day weekend workshop on the subject for a small group at a conference room in Berkeley, California.

There were a couple of questions which I was asked on almost ever occasion . . . and sometimes twice if people came in late. Of those, there was one question that I remember better than the others.

Next Section: The Story

Does Ecstasy Drain Your Spinal Fluid?

2012-04-17 00:27:56

The question: “Does ecstasy drain your spinal fluid?”

this is spinal tap

This question seems odd now (and even then) and resulted from a rumor provoked by the publication of print ads by the organization MAPS (Multipledisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies) asking for volunteers who had taken ecstasy (MDMA)to have a spinal tap as part of a study. The purpose of the study was to check and see if experiment with rats which showed ecstasy lowered production of the neurotransmitter seretonin was also true in humans. Spinal taps were the gold standard of accuracy in regards to levels of brain serotonin.

Sharing the details of this long-ago study would require more time and space in this book than is justified. Even if I did try and explain the experiment as clearly as I could, it would still prove a bit confusing for the large majority of you who did not formally study neuroscience. The attempt by MAPs to explain exactly why they were recruiting people for spinal taps in relationship to MDMA similarly proved difficult and confusing. this difficult notion on a short poster turned out to be confusing to many people, the rumors that MDMA ingestion lead to spinal fluid leakage.

In order to address the misconceptions and resultant persistent questions at lectures, I would tell the long and complicated story which I mostly would clarity things for people.

ecstasy poster satire

An unexpected consequence of giving this explanation was that telling the story had a way of framing me as an expert on the subject of neuroscience in general and MDMA in particular. I had staked out my turf as a professional expert. Each time I told the story, it would again have the effect of elevating me in eyes of the audience, enabling my credentials as an authority and puffing up my ego.

However, after many of these repetitions of the story, I began to find telling it just one more time, tedious. MDMA might not cause damage to the spinal fluid but after telling the story, my back started hurting as if I had been given one of those spinal taps with an exceptionally long needle.

The entire subject of MDMA soon began loose its appeal for me, much as repeated taking the drug ends up producing a long term tolerance to its effects.

Now that you understand what I was going through in life at the time, the next section describes the dream itself.

Next Section: The Story

The Dream

2011-06-07 04:40:57

It was not a long dream nor was it filled with a lot of drama. When I remember the dream, what was most distinct were the vivid colors, and detailed images. Here is how it went:

I was at some sort of book exhibit with two books by Bruce Eisner. . The first was Ecstasy: The MDMA Story. The book on the exhibit table was quite old, its pages yellowed with age, some of them decaying even crumbling when touch. The book was covered with dust and spider webs connected the book to the table it lay on.

The second image was a new book. The book’s cover was bright, colorful and new, and spotlights bounced off it so it was like the coming attractions movie poster, primed for opening day.

In the two decades since the dream, there has been no new book. I tried to get a book contract in the mid-Nineties but by then I had started a business, an difficult experience which Taught me a lot which included a fuller understanding of the writing and book publishing industry.

At the end of that last new memes post, I wrote that writer’s block is the short answer.

However, having writers block sounds like a nervous system disorder so I like to dress it up a bit.

When people asked me why I did not write another book, I do not usually answer writer’s block. Instead I say that I suffer from the Lao Tze Syndrome. I figure that it sounds a lot better. Plus it provides me with a segway into telling a story about the origins of Lao Tze syndrome.

The fact that I liked telling the story demonstrates I do have a writer in me somewhere.

But I have had writer’s block so long, by the time I wrote the blog post, I had burned out on the notion of telling the story about the origins of Lao Tze’s syndrome. It stared becoming a lot like telling the story about ecstasy and spinal taps.

So I never actually got around committing the story of Lao Tse’s syndrome, keeping it strictly in the oral tradition. Instead I took the easy way out, putting up an audio clip of author Steven Mitchell talking about Lao Tze at the end of the post and suggesting that the readers figure out what the syndrome was about from that.

This itself was a symptom of my ongoing affiliation and so its time to get myself unstuck. I will begin by telling you the story of how Lao Tze’s syndrome got its name.

Lao Tze was a legendary rather than a strictly historical figure in a way similar to Betty Crocker, Aunt Jamima and Santa Claus. If you read some of these legends, you will find that they vary greatly, some terse and boring, others colorful and a bit preposterous.

I first heard the myth of Lao Tze (see Laozi on Wikipedia) that I retell here while studying Chinese Philosophy way back in the spring of 1968.. Our professor lectured about it one afternoon while I contemplated graffitti engraved into the wood desk I sat in.

The class was held at California University, North ridge (then called “San Fernando Valley State College.” I took it during a transition point in my life, when I had started mutating from square Gee college student into an enthusiastic participant in the hippie youth culture. Here is the story he told:

Lao Tzu from The Legand of Lao Tsu

Lao Tze’s mother lived in a village in China about 610 BCD. She conceived Lao Tze one night while watching a falling star. However, he was not born until 62 years later. He emerged an old man, able to walk and talk.

Lao Tze was somewhat a Chinese version of Socrates. After being born ready for action, he took up teaching and his name appropriately means The Old Master. Like Socrates he did not have a formal school and did not write anything down.

Lao Tze quickly gained a reputation as one of the wisest men in China. He remained in the village where he lived for a hundred years, and others from throughout the Chinese empire came to hear him.

One day after 100 years of teaching, Lao Tze packed up his possessions and began to leave to leave the village. However, when he reached the gate, the gatekeeper stopped Lao Tze, telling him that he could not leave because he had so much wisdom, the village could not afford to lose him

After Lao a bargained with him, the gatekeeper agreed to allow him to leave after he had written a book with his teachings. Lao Tze worked for two days and brought back a thin manuscript with 81 brief chapters. After reading the book, the Gatekeeper agreed to let Lao Tze leave and accompanied him on the rest of his journey.

Here is where the stories vary quite a bit. My teachers version ended this way.

Upon leaving the village, a chariot arrived from the sky to pick up Lao Tze. Pulled by a team of 6 dragons, Lao Tze ascended into the heavens, never again to be seen.

Next Section: The Story

The Tao That Cannot Be Named

2011-06-07 05:01:36

Lao Tsu left behind his teachings however, which came to be called the Tao Te Ching (translated as the Way of Virtue or sometimes the Way of Life). Although Lao Tsu was not fond of writing, his book wenton to become a historic best seller, being the second most translated book after the Bible and the variety of different versions published number in the hundreds.

A recent and well accepted translation of the book by Derek Lin goes this way

The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao
The name that can be named is not the eternal name
The nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth
The named is the mother of myriad things

Thus, constantly free of desire
One observes its wonders
Constantly filled with desire
One observes its manifestations

These two emerge together but differ in name
The unity is said to be the mystery
Mystery of mysteries, the door to all wonders

In this beginning for his answer to the gatekeeper Lao Tsu describes the paradox of language and the futility of what the gatekeeper asked him.

To help you understand what Lao Tsu is trying to get at, here is Chapter 24 of the book which tries to unravel the same knot but from a different angle.

There is something formlessly created
Born before Heaven and Earth
So silent! So ethereal!
Independent and changeless
Circulating and ceaseless
It can be regarded as the mother of the world

I do not know its name
Identifying it, I call it “Tao”
Forced to describe it, I call it great
Great means passing
Passing means receding
Receding means returning
Therefore the Tao is great
Heaven is great
Earth is great
The sovereign is also great
There are four greats in the universe
And the sovereign occupies one of them
Humans follow the laws of Earth
Earth follows the laws of Heaven
Heaven follows the laws of Tao
Tao follows the laws of nature

Next Section: The Story

Our Minds Make Models of Reality

2011-06-07 05:08:39

What Lao Tsu is saying is similar to an observation by modern day philosopher, Alfred Korzybski originator of a study which he called General Semantics.
The central tenant of General Semantics is:

The map is not the territory it represents.

This idea was further exfoliated by S.I. Hiakawa, one of his students

The symbol is NOT the thing symbolized; the word is NOT the thing; the map is NOT the territory it stands for.

If we make a map of a territory, the map can never have all of the detail that makes up the territory it is mapping. The map is an abstraction just as a word is. Yet we humans often get confused between the two.

Our species has developed a complex language which allows us to make abstractions of many things and ideas and weave them together. This ability of humans to make maps and craft words is one of our evolutionary advantages over all the other species on the planet.

Our ability to create mental maps, models of the world gives humans the ability to deftly traverse territory and outwit and out navigate other creatures.

Not only do we create mental maps, we make physical and technological maps. Not only can we speak words but write them down, print entire books of them and fill cyberspace to overflowing with them.

Each of these words is itself a map and a model. A word represents some idea or thing in our experiences. We also weave more complex models and maps by stringing words together into sentences and paragraphs. Using these, we develop what cognitive psychologists call mental models.

Reality to Mental Model

Next Section: The Story

Believing in Your Beliefs

2011-06-07 05:11:52

These mental models can also be seen as constellations of ideas. These clusters of ideas are beliefs that we hold.
A variety of academic disciplines have given beliefs (or belief systems) different names and described them in slightly different ways.

Not surprisingly the philosophers have been keenly interested in this area.. Philosophers are always keen to deconstruct and analyze ideas and then use jargon to describe them. Indeed that is what they have done with the notion of beliefs.

Philosophers call a belief a ‘propositional attitude.” In logic, a propulsion is a sentence that asserts a quality or property which can be determined to be either true or false. So having an opinion which can be described with a proposition is a propositional attitude.

Having renamed beliefs to propositional attitudes, philosophers have divided themselves into several different camps with different opinions toward them.

Among these camps are a group of philosophers who believe that the entire concept of these propositional attitudes (i.e. beliefs) is unscientific and therefore of no use at all.

However, the majority of contemporary philosophers regard them as representational systems. Among them, they disagree on whether these representational systems are structures of language or whether they are map-like which is the way I described them above

Beyond these major schools, philosophers have identified a variety of issues and perspectives which split themselves into smaller schools of thought, each with its own name and lexicon. These which are beyond the scope of our discussion but which is well described on this Standford University site

Other academic fields including cognitive psychology (and psychology in general), linguistics, biologists and neuroscience use different terms to describe beliefs and systems of beliefs and also disagree about their nature or whether they should be studied at all.

Next Section: The Story

A Skeptic on Beliefs

2012-01-23 21:31:03

Michael Shermer, who I introduced at the beginning of this book, in the context of the Hundredth Monkey Story calls himself the world’s only professional septic. In his role as chief skeptic, he spends a lot of time debunking fringe ideas. You can see an example of his debunking in this video in a talk he gave at a 2006 Ted Conference. Michael Shermer on strange beliefs

Belief is a recurrent topic of Schremer, appearing in the title of two of his books including his new book , The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truth.

In The Believing Brain, Schemer presents us with his opinion about beliefs themselves.

We form our beliefs for a variety of subjective, personal, emotional, and psychological reasons in the context of environments created by family, friends, colleagues, culture, and society at large; after forming our beliefs we then defend, justify, and rationalize them with a host of intellectual reasons, cogent arguments, and rational explanations. Beliefs come first, explanations for beliefs follow.

In order to support these ideas, he includes a section in the book called The Biology of Belief. He summarizes his theory on his website:

Dr. Shermer also provides the neuroscience behind our beliefs. The brain is a belief engine. From sensory data flowing in through the senses the brain naturally begins to look for and find patterns, and then infuses those patterns with meaning. The first process Dr. Shermer calls patternicity: the tendency to find meaningful patterns in both meaningful and meaningless data. The second process he calls agenticity: the tendency to infuse patterns with meaning, intention, and agency.

We can’t help believing. Our brains evolved to connect the dots of our world into meaningful patterns that explain why things happen. These meaningful patterns become beliefs. Once beliefs are formed the brain begins to look for and find confirmatory evidence in support of those beliefs, which adds an emotional boost of further confidence in the beliefs and thereby accelerates the process of reinforcing them, and round and round the process goes in a positive feedback loop of belief confirmation. Dr. Shermer outlines the numerous cognitive tools our brains engage to reinforce our beliefs as truths and to insure that we are always right.

The supporting evidence for this sweeping theory are several anecdotal conclusions derived from studies in neuroscience. Upon closer inspection, the evidence proves to be little more than a series of pop psychology simplifications. Examples include the characterization of a brain part called the anterior cingulate cortex as the brain’s Where’s My Waldo? Detection Device and the neuro-transmitter dopamine as the “belief drug.”

Shremer also states quite flatly

There no such thing as “mind” per se, outside of brain activity. Mind is just a word we use to describe neural activity in the brain .

While the book presents itself as the inside scoop on the biology of belief, in actuality is Shremer’s opinion about how belief in the brain might work, a set of notions themselves untested by scientific studies, yet presented as science.

Shremer made an appearance on the Colbert Report, promoting his book. Here is a video of the segment, in which the world’s greatest debunker is himself debunked a bit:

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

Skeptic Shermer attacks what he calls irrational beliefs and asserts that only science is our salvation from false beliefs. Colbert points out that science is itself a belief system.

Next Section: The Story

When You Believe that You Must Believe

2012-01-23 21:57:23

The phrase believing in your beliefs was first coined by philosopher William Dennett. However, as you will see, he uses the term in a more limited way than the way I use the phrase. Eliezer Yudkowsky describes Dennett’s meaning in a July 2007 post on the Less Wrong website. Here is an excerpt:

Depending on how your childhood went, you may remember a time period when you first began to doubt Santa Claus’s existence, but you still believed that you were supposed to believe in Santa Claus, so you tried to deny the doubts. As Daniel Dennett observes, where it is difficult to believe a thing, it is often much easier to believe that you ought to believe it. What does it mean to believe that the Ultimate Cosmic Sky is both perfectly blue and perfectly green? The statement is confusing; it’s not even clear what it would mean to believe it – what exactly would be believed, if you believed. You can much more easily believe that it is proper, that it is good and virtuous and beneficial, to believe that the Ultimate Cosmic Sky is both perfectly blue and perfectly green. Dennett calls this “belief in belief”.

And here things become complicated, as human minds are wont to do – I think even Dennett oversimplified how this psychology works in practice. For one thing, if you believe in belief, you cannot admit to yourself that you only believe in belief, because it is virtuous to believe, not to believe in belief, and so if you only believe in belief, instead of believing, you are not virtuous. Nobody will admit to themselves, “I don’t believe the Ultimate Cosmic Sky is blue and green, but I believe I ought to believe it” – not unless they are unusually capable of acknowledging their own lack of virtue. People don’t believe in belief in belief, they just believe in belief.

A December 2007 post The problem of believing in belief by vaughanbell on the Mind Hacks Blog discusses the implications of a study conducted by author Sam Harris while a doctoral student at UCLA. The study is better described in an a Time Magazine article, What Your Brain Looks Like on Faith by David Van Biema which was published the same month and refereed to in the post. The full article as a PDF can be gotten from Sam Harris’s website here.

The psychology experiment looked at the neurological reposes of 14 adult subjects as measured by brain-scans using MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) when read a series of 360 statements.

Example of what colored output from an MRI brain scan looks like

The statements were assertions chosen from seven categories: mathematical, geographic, semantic, factual, autobiographical, ethical and religious. These assertions met the philosopher’s definition of propositional attitudes. More simply put, each expressed a belief.

Examples of these statements (one from each of the seven categories):

62 can be evenly divided by 9.

Wisconsin is on the West Coast of the United States

“Devious” means “friendly.”

Most people have 10 fingers and 10 toes.

You were born in New York.

It is bad to take pleasure at another’s suffering.

While in the MRI scanner, each of the subjects was shown each of the 360 belief statements. The subjects were allowed to read each of these statements at their own pace and then to indicate the truth value of that sentence by pushing one of three buttons. The buttons were labeled “true”, “false” or “undecided.” The considered a press of the true button as “belief” and the false button as “disbelief” whereas the undecided button was taken as an expression of “uncertainty.”

The questions were presented to the subjects in grouped clusters of sets most likely to be judged in a particular category. During this sequence, the subjects were scanned with the MRI seven times.

Although there were some patterns to the physiological responses to these statements and subjects in general were quicker to respond to true statements than false ones. In the sets of questions categorized as related to ethics and mathematics. the study was able to find specific brain patters which correlated to the subjects belief or disbelief of a statement. So he has developed a fairly expensive lie detector

The Time Magazine notes that Harris, who has also written a popular book, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason plans to do his next study on religious faith. He hopes to use the MRI like a lie detector to see if religious people who indicate they believe statements of religions faith which fly in the face of common sense, by pushing the true button, demonstrate brain patterns consistent with belief in the statement.

Besides demonstrating our almost complete lack of understanding of how the human brain works and the presumptuousness of psychological experiments, thee study point to the current hopes of neuroscience for understanding correlates between brain and the human through process.

Faith could be defined as the belief that you need to believe that a proposition or set of propositions is true, even though you know that each of these is most likely false. Faith is sometimes called belief and so when Daniel Dennet uses the phrase “belief in belief” he might better have put it, belief that you need to have faith.

The title of this section is, When you believe that must believe refers to something different, a different and perhaps broader sense of the phrase. When you belief that you must believe, it is that you assume that beliefs, things which you believe in which you also assume are true, should be considered true.. Most people are believers in believing in this sense of the term. How could we possibly live without any beliefs.

Many people are members of the faithful and worshipers of an unnamed religion that says we must believe in things. We have faith in the necessity of belief.

Most of us can remember things that we once believed in but which we no longer believe in. Those beliefs most likely were replaced with new beliefs.

As we go through life, there tend to be more and more of these kind of things.

At age 63, can look back to earlier in my life and remember beliefs that I considered core beliefs, fundamental to who I am, meant to guide me through my entire life. Except that now I do not have them anymore.

If most of the things I believe in now I will later replace with different beliefs, I should treat every belief I have as just working hypothesis. But like everyone else, I usually don’t.

Next Section: The Story

Beliefs as Theories

2012-01-23 21:36:22

Aaron Davidson in his online essay, Science as a Belief System says:

As humans we are born into this world without any preexisting knowledge about our universe. In order to cope and survive, we must make observations and draw conclusions from them. Without making observations and generalizations we cannot make sense of our surroundings. From birth, formulating a belief system is essential to our survival, and perhaps even to our consciousness.

Using the metaphor of science, a belief is like a hypotheses, and a theory, a set testable and sometimes tested hypotheses can be compared to a belief system. Just as science does, we make observations of the world. Just as science and the various scientific disciplines have their theories and sets of hypothesis, we have our belief systems and beliefs.

In our journey through life, we are constantly testing these beliefs and belief systems in real time through our actions and behaviors. Actions and behaviors result in feedback in the form of life experiences.

Next Section: The Story

When The Map Does Not Even Represent the Territory

2012-01-23 21:43:56

While our ability to develop on the fly complex maps and models to guide us gives us advantages, it also has turned out to provide us with some of thorniest problems.

These problems arise when the world around us changes but we continue to use the map of how it used to be.

Its like going to a strange city carrying a map that was made of a city before they built the city’s current maze-like freeway system.

We drive along and encounter a freeway where there used to be just a long boulevard. With the inaccurate map, we get lost.

As long as we continue to rely on the old map, we have a hard time getting our bearings. We have no way of knowing which parts of the map are still accurate and which ones should be ignored.

Our beliefs and belief systems can become like these no-longer-useful maps.. Our habit patterns make giving up beliefs that have worked long time difficult There become times when it would be much better to drop the old map, give up the old belief and find our way without one. The failure to do so can become a serious problem.

As we move move through life and accumulate more firmly entrenched beliefs, these may prove harder to give up. The ability to adapt to new information is the essence of learning. Lack of flexibility and adaptability, hanging on to old, outmoded beliefs inhibits our ability to learn.

Next Section: The Story

Cultural Belief Systems as Paradigms

2012-01-23 21:51:01

One way to view the history of Western Civilization is to see it as moving through a series of collective and common systems of belief. These clusters of culturally held beliefs are often refereed to as Weltanschauunge, the predominant worldview.

Since the time of Nicolas Copernicus, at the beginning of the 15th Century, with the inception of the Renaissance and as part of it, the scientific revolution, the predominant worldview has been that science offers our best way of understanding the world.

Within this larger belief system of science which our cultural has mostly subscribed to, there have been what historian and philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn has identified a series paradigms, constellations of beliefs about what constitutes normal science, within the various major scientific disciplines.

Paradigms contain sets of accepted theoretical models, that scientists use as the basis of what to study. In addition, paradigms often contain a set of rules which scientists use do science.

While science has been with us since the time of Copernicus, Kuhn in his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, provides examples that within major scientific disciplines, there has been sequence of these paradigms, which are at first accepted, but then later when observations inconsistent with the predominant paradigm start piling up. Each new paradigm represents a new worldview within science, which is then followed by it’s own kind of scientific revolution.

These inconsistencies might thought of as like Teutonic pressures building up within a major fault in the earth. When they reach a critical lever, there is a sudden shift, an earthquake. Similarly, scientific paradigms have their own kind of earthquakes, revolutionary periods within science which give way to new paradigms which may be radically different than those that preceded them.

Five hundred years ago, we thought that the world was flat. Old maps reflected this paradigm by showing a world as flat. The intrepid explorers of the day, sailed the seven seas, afraid at finding the far corners of the world. They were literally “on edge.”

So much was invested in the notion that the world was both the center of the universe and flat that map makers as recently as the Nineteenth Century clung to notion. Here is an image from the Smithsonian Institute depicting on such cartographer’s rendition of our planet.

Next Section: The Story

So What Should You Believe?

2012-04-13 21:56:03

I don’t believe in magic,
I don’t believe in I-ching,
I don’t believe in bible …
… I don’t believe in Kennedy,
I don’t believe in Buddha,
I don’t believe in mantra …
I don’t believe in kings …
… I don’t believe in Elvis,
I don’t believe in Zimmerman,
I don’t believe in Beatles,
I just believe in me,
—John Lennon from his song “God”

2. Reality is an Opinion

2011-06-08 07:18:34

For someone frequently afflicted with that particularly nasty version of writers block I nicknamed Lao Tsu Syndrome, I have flung a lot of words at you. More words than Lao Tsu wrote in his entire book (and I’m just getting warmed up)

Like Lao Tsu, I have already started breaking my own rules. In many of the sections of the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tsu warns his readers not to confuse his words with the things that they represented. Of course he had to use words to issue the warning.

The purpose of this chapter is a similar kind of warning. When i start telling a story or giving my opinion, sometimes I feel like I have kissed the legendary blarney stone (even though I am not Irish). Writers tell stories, that is what they do.

It is at these times to try and remember not to believe in my own Blarney. Everything I write here is strictly my own opinion.

For that matter so is reality. What we think of as “reality” is not something objective, set in stone kind of thing. Physicists best guess of reality is that it is something more like a chaotic dance of energy, of probabilistic particles bouncing around and forming patterns.

In many ways we are like the captives chained in Plato’s cave, this dance of particles and waves are simply shadows and not to be confused with our label of them i.e. reality.

“Reality is an opinion” was one of the favorite phrases that got on bumper stickers by the late Dr. Timothy Leary.

Sections of Chapter 2

Timothy Leary's Standard Disclaimer

2011-08-04 01:44:37

Reading the books of the late Dr. Timothy Leary was one of several influences leading to try psychedelic drugs, an experience that I described in this book’s preface

I realize that that many of you reading this know something about Leary and some of you already have strong opinions about him. Among the public, among those who have hear of him, Leary has what I consider a undeserved bad reputation.

In the sixties and seventies when Leary was a hot story in the media, the media was often called “the mass media” with good reason. Unlike today when we have hundreds of cable channels on TV plus the Internet, we all gen information form a much wider diversity of sources than people did back then. When mentioned by Network news or newspapers which strongly influenced people, Leary was depicted as crazy professor. This stereotype was never refuted among the general public. It is beyond the scope of this book to do that for you

By bringing Leary into the discussion in this book (or LSD or hippies for that matter), I take a risk of driving some of you away. I hope that those of you who fall into this group will suspend your judgement and hear me out.

I am not writing this book as an authority, I am writing it as a journalist reporting on my experiences.

For me, Timothy Leary was a warm and generous friend and mentor, always encouraging me and offering me new possibilities. Above all he tried his his hardest to make me feel good about myself and life.

I also had a chance to see him with family and friends and he was always helpful and hopeful.

Leary would invite me to accompany him to lectures and workshops with him, and so i got to see him in his role as what he liked to call performing philosopher. He had quite a wide range of personae he would adapt in his act. Sometimes he was the stand-up comic and other times a brilliant university lecturer. There were also times when he did not hit the mark with his audience but those times were rare.

Usually very shortly into his presentations, Tim would give what I call his “standard disclaimer.”

L: I have to preface this interaction with the statement , “don’t believe anything I say, I’m throwing ideas out there to look at. “

The last thing I want is someone taking notes while I lecture. I long for an interaction back and forth. That goes way back, basically to the psychology of Harry Stack Sullivan in the ’50s and ’60s, interpersonal. And that goes back to quantum physics where they say it’s all a field and no electron can live by hirself, it has to have another electron to send and receive, so it’s always being back and forth

“Don’t believe anything I say. [...] Start Your Own Religion [...] Write Your Own Bible [...] Start Your Own Political System,” Leary writes in The Politics of Ecstasy (PE 369f.). Also, in his last book, Desing for Dying, he repeatedly tells his readers that they should never believe anything he says because he does “not believe in belief”(cf. DD 26, DD 31). For Leary, belief – in the sense of absolute belief, i.e., a dogma – is always something negative. Dogma means stagnation, inflexibility, no choice, and therefore no freedom (cf. CC 232ff.). Leary argues that whatever you blindly believe in imprisons you. Blind belief is the death of the intellect. He compares beliefs to filters in the human perceptual apparatus which filter the information that is received from the outside world. This means that all the information from the outside world which does not confirm one’s belief cannot pass the filter and therefore is ignored (see chapter 4.3.). In Chaos & Cyberculture, Leary explains that a person who clings to one belief system and never questions this belief system will never be able to increase his/her intelligence because his/her mind will shut out any kind of information which is new or cannot be explained within his/her frame of reference (cf. CC 35ff.). Neither will he/she be tolerant towards people with other beliefs (cf. ibid.).
Another reason why Leary rejects dogmas is that they can easily be used to manipulate people. All “power-hungry control freaks” try to impose dogmas on people because they very well know that a dogma is a powerful instrument to create conformity and predictable behavior. In his theories Leary constantly alerts us to the dangers of dogmas and conformity (the Inquisition, the Holy War, the Nazi regime, etc) and tries to make us aware that there is no reason whatsoever why we should accept the dogmas that authorities are trying to impose on us. Again and again he reminds his readers that all dogmas, like all scientific theories, are arbitrary constructions. He tries to make his readers aware of the fact that science, like all cultural phenomena, is socially determined – blinkered by the biases of the society that produced it and dedicated it to the validation of its own worldview. While supposedly objective, science often aids and abets political ideology and cultural bias. Like the constructivists, Leary argues that anybody who claims that his/her belief system (model of reality) is the absolute truth

Next Section: The Story

What Do We Really Know?

2011-07-24 20:49:39

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.
ALBERT EINSTEIN

During my 63 years here, I have lived a series of days filled with experiences interspersed with nights in which I sleep which is an odd mix of other sorts of experiences including periods when I am not conscious of anything at all.

Most of you know what I mean. The time period you have been around is different but the sequence is the same.

This sequence of experiences always moves forward through time. Every day I am older but do not get younger.

When I think about my life, I have a sense that I am this person named Bruce who has moved through these experiences.

As Søren Kierkegaard said,”” Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.

Early Memories

In a blog post called Remembering My Mother in November 2009, I reflected on personal frame of reference in looking backward.

I wrote in a section of the post, titled Memories of Early Youth:

When I was four and a half, the summer before I started school and the summer before my sister was born, I got the then common childhood disease, the measles. I had a fever of a hundred and four for several days and I was sad that on the nicest days of the year, I had to stay inside sick.

My Uncle Murray Sloan, my mother’s brother was a doctor and whenever I was sick, he would pay a house call on me with a black leather doctor’s bag. I usually would get a shot of antibiotics and then he would entertain me with magic tricks while the pain from the injection faded.

One night while I was sweating through a high fever, I had one of those long vivid dreams that many people experience while sick. In the dream I traveled back in time to shortly after I was born. I was starting to develop my own identity.

Scenes of some of the more traumatic episodes of my early life are what I remembered. For example, at age one and a half, I remembered my mother putting on a snowsuit for me and going outside the brownstone building of my early years, only to be pushed down by a boy named Peter. I cried and knocked on the door. Safely inside, I reported, “Peter pushed me.”

In another episode, I remembered my concern when my mother got sick on the old fashioned propeller plane we took when we moved to Los Angeles when I was two.

From what I know of human psychology, most people few or no memories at all of their life before the age of four. Whether the experiences I had were actual events or complete fantasy is hard to know. Looking back, the many stories my mother and father told me about my childhood may have caused me to remember them differently, with the familiar stories imposed on fading memories of a dream in childhood.

Aside from the specifics, the dream was a tale of separation from mother and my fears and desires to stop the process. I was one of those kids who they say was tied to his mother’s apron strings.

Next Section: The Story

The So-Called "Science of Consciousness"

2011-07-24 20:52:19

Consciousness is one of those kind of words. You know what I mean by those kind of words? I mean words like love and God. Those kind of words are usually short, used often in a wide variety of contexts have a myriad of different meanings depending on those contexts. They are words that may represent one idea, image or set of ideas and images to the person who speaks the word, and represent a somewhat different or completely different notion to those who hear the them. Usually the ideas the words are intended to convey are powerful but they deliver an ambiguous message.

Another of those kind of words is consciousness. I admit that its not used nearly as much as those more likely culprits but it is one of those words that everyone who hears it have a different notion of what it means.

Indeed consciousness is so lacking in a definition that it has been the subject of a growing number of books, each of which tries to put an end to the confusion.

When I first began studying psychology back in 1977, any mention of the word consciousness was out of bounds. Consciousness had been of interest to the first psychologists, a few individuals in Germany and the United States who started psychology as an academic discipline separate from philosophy.in the middle of the 29th Century.

These early psychologists main methodology consisted using the same of of intensely analytical process of examining the contents of their mind as other philosophers that came before them they had used to dissect and categorize other parts of the natural world.

So psychology started as “the science for the study of the mind” and consciousness was part of what people were studying. By the time the Twentieth Century rolled around, psychologists were getting their own offices at colleges and universities. Psychologists defined their study as a science but physicists, biologists and other academics from the hard sciences regarded them as a bunch of “wannabes.”

In order to turn psychology into a real science (and hopefully add a new wing to the psychology building) psychologists set out to make their science respectable. The hard sciences used systematic observation using scientific instruments and conducting experiments to gain academic status, psychologists decided to start making systematic observations and conducting experiments.

The problem they ran into was that it was difficult to measure mental things like mind and consciousness with instruments. Nobody was sure where mind was located exactly. A lot of people suspected that it had something to do with the brain Even if it was in our heads, it would be hard to observe, measure and qualify.

biologists interested in the subject of perception, cognitive psychologists philosophers given rise to what come somewhat inappropriately to be called the ‘science of consciousness.’ I will look at this new study in a later section of the book.

Next Section: The Story

Consciousness is the Missing Element of Science

2011-07-24 20:54:22

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Next Section: The Story

How to Become a Professional Expert

2011-06-08 07:20:58

This page is a placeholder. The section has not yet been written. below are some rough notes

In Chapter 1, I told you the story of how becoming a non-fiction book author had given me a first hand of the world of professional experts. So having been learned and become profession in the role of professional expert, this is how to become one.

To become a professional expert, you need to be considered an authority in your area of expertise. The information you give has to be authentic, and you become an authoritative source. Write the information in a book and you become an author.

Authoritative, authority, author, authentic, these words come from the a long ago Greek root stemming from authenticc and meaning “do-er” master or creator.

Authority also has obvious political connotations as the individual or body given legal standing and power. In this sense, authorities command. For example a judge may give a legal opinion, but that opinion has the authority of law behind it.

Next Section: The Story

3. Planet of the Smart Monkeys

2011-06-08 22:05:09

This page is a placeholder. The section has not yet been written.

Questions for this section

What do you mean by smart monkeys?

Do you really think humans are like monkeys?

What are some of the characteristics of monkeys that you think are important to this observation?

When I first went to college back in the 60s I majored in political science.. One of the required classes that I took was introduction to psychology. Young and naive at the time I had this notion that psychology was to be about the study of mind and people. However the first one through the course was mostly about people who studied monkeys and chimpanzees primates Jane Goodall.

At the time I just couldn’t figure it out why were we stating monkeys if we wanted to understand human mind and consciousness. Looking back on it however it makes a lot more sense now to me.

When I was young, I assumed that we humans were pretty impressive creatures and knew quite a bit. I read a lot of books, hoping that the cumulative effect would allow to have a good measure of human knowledge.

As I gained experience, i began to realize how little we really do know. Even more than how little we know, how silly and pretentious we are as a species.

We like to refer to our selves as humans although probably a better way to think of ourselves is as smart monkeys.

We humans through the development of powerful tools such as language and technology have managed to dominate our planet. Language has given us the ability to write down observations about things we experience and make maps of the territories we traverse.

We even are able to use our observations to some predictions about a variety of things. In some cases, these predictions turn out to happen more often than chance alone would account for. Using these methods have allowed us to take back a small degree of control from the forces of nature.

Unfortunately, our accomplishments have often lead to a species-wide arrogance. Because we are superior, we forget that we are mostly likely just the latest leading actor in an evolutionary drama that may continue long after our species is extinct.

This arrogance leads to use forgetting that among life on the planet, we have a large number of characteristics in common with other mammels and among mamells with other primates (better known as apes, monkes, chimps, gorillas and bonobos)

My best friend Clay has a 2 1/2-year-old daughter and one of the favorite things that humans wife like to do is take her to the zoo so on a recent visit to to their home in Long Beach they might take long as they visited the Santa Ana zoo which has one of the best exhibits are about primates in the country

I’d actually never been to a monkey zoo before and so the visit to approve it both on musing and somewhat enlightening. When the most dramatic things that I noticed was the huge repertoire of expressions that monkeys have which in an eerie serve way reminds me of of our own human facial expressions.

Becoming Human

2011-08-08 01:19:46

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Next Section: The Story

The Nature of Human Nature

2012-02-13 08:37:24

When we discuss human nature, we are not talking about personality or temperament, which are about individual differences, but more a kind of species-wide temperament and a collective personality. The notion of human nature suggests that each species has its own nature and this nature influences how that species will play its part in evolution.

The nature of people

Because humans among all species have developed such enormous influence upon the ecosystem of the planet, human nature becomes important not just for the future of human beings but for the very life on our planet. Humans have already made changes in the environment that have led to the extinction of almost half of all living species and continue to have the power to destroy our entire planet and take all life with it.

So the ability to change human nature in some way, as to point us in the direction of peace within our own species and also in the direction of increased respect of the planet’s ecosystem, has been a notion that many idealistic individuals have found attractive

In modern psychology, questions about human personality have been looked at in relationship to the degree to which in-born temperament “hard-wired” genetic tendencies influence how we behave in relationship to the influence of our individual development and social learning. This is often called “the nature vs. nurture” debate.

Psychology has vacillated in a style, which makes it seem quite “trendy” for a discipline that calls itself a science. In the early days of psychology in the last part of the nineteenth century, psychology sided with ethnology, the belief that most behavior is based on in-born instinct. In the 1920’s John Watson championed the opposite belief which he called “behaviorism” and which contradicted the earlier view. It went so far as to suggest that humans might be like “Tabla Rasa” or blank slates upon which society and conditioning write the entire script of life.

What is our nature

Behaviorism ruled psychology for many years to the point where psychology was defined as the “science of behavior.” But in recent years, with many psychological studies demonstrating the importance of genetic factors in personality and behavior, the “nature vs. nurture” debate has swung for many psychologists back the other way toward the importance of in-born personality traits.

This new conventional wisdom in psychology is influenced greatly by the return of ethnology with a new name — sociobiology. Works such as those by Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene) and Edward O. Wilson (Sociobiology xxx) suggest that much of what we thought was social learning is actually “hard-wired” into our nervous systems and that much less is the product of social learning.

The importance of the relative weight of nature vs. nurture to the equation of who we are is immediately relevant to any program or technique which aims to make changes in our long-term personality, thinking and behavior. Although earlier studies of psychotherapy put the effectiveness into question, more recent studies employing more efficient forms of therapy have shown that people can change through learning with the aid of an individual or therapy group. As well as on psychedelic explorations, by learning on mind-changing compounds.

What is human nature?

The Chinese philosophers were the earliest of human thinkers to discuss the issues of human nature. While the great Chinese philosopher Confucius preferred to not discuss such issues, two of his 4th and 3rd century BC disciples, Mencius and Hsün-tzu, did much to clarify these issues. Mencius asserted that the “original face of man” — which was their sexist lingo for “human nature” — was basically good and that it could be developed not only by study, as Confucius had taught, but also by a process of inner self-cultivation. Hsün-tzu, took the opposite stance, asserting that the original nature of man was evil. Still another group of Chinese philosophers, in the tradition of Chinese Taoism, asserted that human nature was neither good nor bad but was “like uncarved wood” – ready to be shaped by life’s experiences.

Moving forward five thousand years, Arthur Koestler, the noted German philosopher and psychological theorist speculated that human’s might have a built-in “paranoid streak” because of the way that our nervous systems evolved. At the core of our brain is the “fight or flight” mechanism of the limbic system, which was sometimes called the “reptile brain” because our reptilian ancestors contributed it. On top of that, we have a mammalian or “monkey” brain, which has such typical mammalian concerns as territoriality and dominance hierarchies.

Koestler noted that on the frontiers of mental development, the frontal lobes, we find something which is unique to our species and which encompasses typically human notions such as compassion, empathy and consciousness. But he saw a dilemma to all of this. With so many steersman taking turns, there is always confusion about: ‘who is running the ship? Sometimes the reptile is in control, other times a monkey and still others the human at the helm. What Koestler noted was that in many cases, basic fear mechanisms, which comprise the vestigial evolutionary circuitry, cause humans to act “paranoid” rather than with those more lofty traits we like to think of as being human.

4. That Meme Stuck Inside Your Head

2011-06-08 22:51:57

This page is a placeholder. The section has not yet been written. Below are rough notes
Introduction to the chapter about memes.
Biologists interested in human and animal behavior which they call ‘sociobiology’ have also taken a crack the question of the nature of human mental constructs, giving them the name memes, perhaps in the hopes that they will become as well established as their most well developed, “genes.”
Sections of Chapter 4

Mind Genes and Media Viruses

2011-06-09 18:13:33

This section is not yet written. Below are some rough notes
In order to infuse our society with innovate new memes, we will create through intellectual engagement, group discussions, seminars and small practical experiments – new ideas or “memes” (rhymes with “dreams”) that can become the basis for a new way of relating to each other and the world. The study of memes and their impact on culture is part of a new social science called memetics. Some of the principles of this new science are central to the new focus Meme teams

Sociobiologist Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” in 1976 as meaning “a unit representing transmission of culture” in the same sense that the gene carries our biological destiny. Memes can be as simple as the way people learn, carry and pass along to others the melody of a catchy song such as the culturally enduring “Happy Birthday”.

A concept essential to the study of memes is the extent to which humans learn by imitation. The power of this principal can be seen in the way memes are behind major social behaviors and institutions. The Catholic Church’s set of closely held doctrinal beliefs are composed of memes which are passed from generation to generation and across cultures. The same can be said of the tenets of free market capitalism, or the fearful behaviors resulting from a general belief the world is an environment permeated by constant threat. Such tenets govern peoples’ daily actions to varying degrees depending upon the depth of conviction.

Memes can be thought of at the psychological level as the archetypes of the collective psyche as described by Carl Jung. These archetypes have been traced to the mythological realm, as in the work of Joseph Campbell. Ancient myths that still impact human behavior and imagination today include the Native American ritual of invoking the presence of ancestors in ceremony, the story of Moses liberating his people from slavery, or Noah creating an ark for creatures to escape pending disaster to find a new place. Meme teams up these ancient cultural memes to invigorate our efforts today, while hopefully spawning new memes to transmit a more nurturing cultural identity. Memetics researcher Daniel Dennett has commented, “Human consciousness itself is a huge complex of memes”. Noted memetics author Susan Blackmore has offered an alternative way of conceiving it. . .memes as distorting human consciousness Both views articulate the central role of memes in shaping human consciousness and impacting social behavior memes

With the presence of the Internet, a global nervous system with no centralized brain, memes have the potential to spread around the world rapidly, in an unprecedented manner we do not yet fully comprehend. The implications are vast.

Next Section: The Story

What Does Meme Mean?

2011-07-24 20:29:24

This page is a placeholder. The section has not yet been written. Short note below

This section goes into more detail on what exactly a meme is.

Next Section: The Story

5. What Happened to the Counterculture?

2011-06-08 23:53:02

As long as there have been people, there has always been a counterculture. The counterculture is that part of the society which has a different idea about how things should be done. Like an English style Parliament which has a shadow cabinet, the counterculture has always been out of power and sits in opposition to the mainstream culture.

There always has been a counterculture but until the Sixties, the counterculture never had an identity. What made the counterculture into a powerful force in opposition was the rise of a mass media that could help its members become aware of one another.

Continues as introduction to this chapter.

Sections of Chapter 5

Why the Psychedelic Movement Mattered

2011-07-24 20:56:38

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Next Section: The Story

The Real War on Drugs (and Why They Won)

2011-07-24 20:58:22

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Next Section: The Story

The Short Happy Life of Jay Hippie Esq.

2011-07-24 20:33:01

6. Seeding the Future

2011-06-09 06:55:29

Sections of Chapter 6

Utopia and Notopia

2011-07-24 20:35:05

Calling All Meme Generators

2011-07-24 20:37:44

The Art of Culture Design

2011-08-08 00:18:24

7. Tomorrow Never Knows

2011-08-08 01:22:41

Turn off your mind, relax and float down stream,
It is not dying, it is not dying

Lay down all thought, surrender to the void,
Is it shining? Is it shining?

That you may see the meaning of within
It is being, it is being

Love is all and love is everyone
Is it knowing? Is it knowing?

That ignorance and hate may mourn the dead
It is believing, it is believing

But listen to the colour of your dreams
Is it not living, is it not living

Or play the game “Existence” to the end
Of the beginning, of the beginning

The Beatles, 1966

The Future of Evolution

2011-08-08 01:21:06

Flapping Their Wings

2011-08-08 01:26:09

Five hundred years before the Wright Brothers flew the first heavier aircraft, Leonardo di Vinci was drawing diagrams and pictures depicting these future conveyances. In the century before the brothers first air jaunt, old photographs, drawings and early motion pictures depict a variety of now laughable attempts to fly with the aid of mechanical devices. All of these later day Prometheus met with failure. In the mid part of the ‘Nineteenth century, it was even theorized that heavier than air travel for humans would be impossible. This based on the discovery of 30 pound members of the dinosaur species. From this, it was extrapolated that there was a 30 pound limit to heavier than air travel. In the next century, the fossils of dinosaurs many hundreds of pounds were discovered with the ability to fly.

Flying through air or space is a physical experience. However similar journeys can be taken through spaces of a different sort including shamanic/psychedelic inner journeys and the virtual reality voyages through cyberspace. These flights of the imagination are in many ways no less real. Humans covet the experience of breaking free from the bounds of what Freud called the ego and toward the experience of the id — unbounded and primal.

Epilogue

2011-07-27 10:56:03

Epilogue: Some of My Views, Visions and Inspirations

Book Index

2011-12-28 06:55:57

[a][b][c][d][e][f][g][h][i][j][k][l][m][n][o][p][r][s][t][u][v][w][y]

A

above

academic

accepted

according

account

across

actual

actually

added

admit

almost

already

although

amazing

american

attitudes

authority

awareness

The Story

B

background

based

basis

beach

begins

behaviors

behind

beliefs

believed

believing

between

bible

biologists

biology

brain

building

burned

button

When You Believe that You Must Believe

C

california

calls

cannot

cause

central

change

changes

characteristics

childhood

cited

class

claus

clock

clusters

collective

common

complete

conducted

consciousness

considered

contain

context

control

cosmic

When You Believe that You Must Believe

counterculture

course

created

creatures

critical

crystal

crystals

culture

D

daniel

dawkins

decades

defined

degree

dennett

depending

describes

detail

details

developed

development

discipline

disciplines

discuss

The Nature of Human Nature

dogma

Timothy Leary’s Standard Disclaimer

dogmas

Timothy Leary’s Standard Disclaimer

doing

dream

dreams

drugs

dying

E

earlier

earth

ecstasy

energy

esalen

established

eternal

events

everyone

evidence

evolutionary

exact

example

examples

existence

experience

experiences

experiments

expert

F

faith

When You Believe that You Must Believe

false

family

feedback

field

fields

forth

forward

found

frame

friends

further

future

G

genes

getting

glycine

great

green

When You Believe that You Must Believe

growing

H

habit

happen

happened

harris

When You Believe that You Must Believe

heard

heaven

The Tao That Cannot Be Named

hippie

history

hopefully

hopes

house

humans

hundredth

hypothesis

I

ideas

image

imagination

implications

importance

The Nature of Human Nature

in-born

The Nature of Human Nature

individual

inner

inside

instead

institute

island

islands

issues

J

journey

jumped

K

keyes

knowledge

known

koestler

The Nature of Human Nature

koshima

L

laboratory

language

large

learned

learning

leary

lectures

lifetide

L (cont.)

liked

likely

liquid

M

magazine

meaning

meaningful

A Skeptic on Beliefs

measure

media

member

The Hundredth Monkey and Morphic Resonance

memes

memetics

Mind Genes and Media Viruses

memories

memory

michael

model

models

modern

monkey

monkeys

morning

morphic

moved

N

natural

nature

nervous

neuroscience

nineteenth

nobody

noted

notice

notions

november

number

nurture

The Nature of Human Nature

O

objective

observation

observed

observes

opinions

order

original

origins

P

paradigm

paradigms

Cultural Belief Systems as Paradigms

particular

parts

passing

patterns

perfectly

When You Believe that You Must Believe

perhaps

period

personality

The Nature of Human Nature

phenomenon

philosophers

philosophy

phrase

When You Believe that You Must Believe

physical

place

playing

point

potatoes

power

predominant

Cultural Belief Systems as Paradigms

presented

primates

3. Planet of the Smart Monkeys

problem

process

professional

professor

provides

psychedelic

psychic

psychological

psychologists

psychology

published

pushed

pushing

R

radio

rather

reading

ready

reality

recent

relationship

religion

religious

When You Believe that You Must Believe

remember

report

A Skeptic on Beliefs

represents

research

resonance

richard

S

santa

scene

science

scientific

scientists

sealed

One Small Problem

second

seemed

seems

selfish

sequence

series

seven

sheldrake

shermer

shremer

A Skeptic on Beliefs

simply

sixties

skeptic

society

sociobiology

space

species

spent

statement

statements

When You Believe that You Must Believe

states

strange

studies

studying

subjects

When You Believe that You Must Believe

sudden

suggesting

support

sweet

system

systems

T

taking

talking

taught

tells

temperament

The Nature of Human Nature

terms

territory

Our Minds Make Models of Reality

themselves

theoretical

theories

theory

therapy

thirty-six

One Small Problem

thought

timothy

title

toward

track

transmission

travel

troop

truth

turned

U

ultimate

When You Believe that You Must Believe

understanding

united

universe

V

various

virtuous

When You Believe that You Must Believe

W

wanted

washing

watson

website

wisdom

within

without

works

workshop

worldview

writers

writing

Y

young

youth

Book Contents

2011-08-04 02:43:43

2011-12-14 04:53:57

Click on the arrow icon beside each category to display or hide all items within the chosen category. Summaries of each page may be hidden or shown by clicking the plus icon next each item. Use the Options menu to expand or contract all items, display or hide summaries or sort the table of contents.

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What This Book is About
Memes for the Creation of a New Culture is a book about how our species might systematically discover more peaceful and sustainable ways of living together.…
- The Story
  Let’s start with The Story of the Hundredth Monkey, a tale I first heard 30 years ago, and have told and retold ever since. For those of you haven’t heard the…
- One Small Problem
  Here is the small problem. This wonderful story with so man amazing and quite positive implications is not true, it is an urban legend that did not actually…
- The Hundredth Monkey and Morphic Resonance
  Around the same time as the Hundredth Monkey story had begun being spread via Ken Keyes book, a British biologist Rupert Sheldrake proposed a theory called…
- Making the Connection
  When I started writing this introduction, I planned to began by telling the story of the Hundredth Monkey. As with most of what I will write here, I began by…
- A Flashback
  I would never have taken that 1983 Esalen workshop if not for the experiences I had two decades before, during the most eventful and intense period of my life…
  - Opening Up My Mind
    I was not to try LSD until four years later. Nobody had offered me the key to of this new doorway into the world of altered perceptions that came in a pill.…
- The Gene and the Meme
  A meme is a theoretical notion, postulating the existence of core creative ideas or cultural knowledge, having a propensity for transmission between between…
Introduction
A Head of His Time: An Introduction

This is the introduction to the book in progress.

As in every other section of the book, I ask for your feedback,…
1. The Lao Tsu Syndrome
In my post on my blog Vision Thing in November 2009 about my mother’s passing Remembering My Mother, I told the story of how a dream at age four provided me…
- Synesthetic Memories of a Dream
  There is a theory I read about when I was a psychology graduate student that each of us is born with a fixed amount of long-term memory, in the same what that…
  - Does Ecstasy Drain Your Spinal Fluid?
    The question: “Does ecstasy drain your spinal fluid?”
    
    This question seems odd now (and even then) and resulted from a rumor provoked by the publication…
  - The Dream
    It was not a long dream nor was it filled with a lot of drama. When I remember the dream, what was most distinct were the vivid colors, and detailed images.…
  - The Tao That Cannot Be Named
    Lao Tsu left behind his teachings however, which came to be called the Tao Te Ching (translated as the Way of Virtue or sometimes the Way of Life). Although…
- Our Minds Make Models of Reality
  What Lao Tsu is saying is similar to an observation by modern day philosopher, Alfred Korzybski originator of a study which he called General Semantics.
  The…
- Believing in Your Beliefs
  These mental models can also be seen as constellations of ideas. These clusters of ideas are beliefs that we hold.
  A variety of academic disciplines have…
  - A Skeptic on Beliefs
    Michael Shermer, who I introduced at the beginning of this book, in the context of the Hundredth Monkey Story calls himself the world’s only professional…
  - When You Believe that You Must Believe
    The phrase believing in your beliefs was first coined by philosopher William Dennett. However, as you will see, he uses the term in a more limited way than the…
  - Beliefs as Theories
    Aaron Davidson in his online essay, Science as a Belief System says:
    As humans we are born into this world without any preexisting knowledge about our…
  - When The Map Does Not Even Represent the Territory
    While our ability to develop on the fly complex maps and models to guide us gives us advantages, it also has turned out to provide us with some of thorniest…
  - Cultural Belief Systems as Paradigms
    One way to view the history of Western Civilization is to see it as moving through a series of collective and common systems of belief. These clusters of…
- So What Should You Believe?
  I don’t believe in magic,
  I don’t believe in I-ching,
  I don’t believe in bible …
  … I don’t believe in Kennedy,
  I don’t believe in Buddha,
  I don’t…
2. Reality is an Opinion

For someone frequently afflicted with that particularly nasty version of writers block I nicknamed Lao Tsu Syndrome, I have flung a lot of words at you.…
- Timothy Leary’s Standard Disclaimer
  
  Reading the books of the late Dr. Timothy Leary was one of several influences leading to try psychedelic drugs, an experience that I described in this…
- What Do We Really Know?
  Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.
  ALBERT EINSTEIN
  During my 63 years here, I have lived a series of days filled with experiences…
- The So-Called “Science of Consciousness”
  
  Consciousness is one of those kind of words. You know what I mean by those kind of words? I mean words like love and God. Those kind of words are usually…
- Consciousness is the Missing Element of Science
  This page is a placeholder. The section has not yet been written.
- How to Become a Professional Expert
  This page is a placeholder. The section has not yet been written. below are some rough notes
  
  In Chapter 1, I told you the story of how becoming a non-fiction…
3. Planet of the Smart Monkeys
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Questions for this section

What do you mean by smart monkeys?

Do you really think…
- Becoming Human
  This page is a placeholder. The section has not yet been written.
- The Nature of Human Nature
  When we discuss human nature, we are not talking about personality or temperament, which are about individual differences, but more a kind of species-wide…
4. That Meme Stuck Inside Your Head
This page is a placeholder. The section has not yet been written. Below are rough notes
Introduction to the chapter about memes.
Biologists interested in…
- Mind Genes and Media Viruses
  This section is not yet written. Below are some rough notes
  In order to infuse our society with innovate new memes, we will create through intellectual…
- What Does Meme Mean?
  This page is a placeholder. The section has not yet been written. Short note below
  
  This section goes into more detail on what exactly a meme is.
5. What Happened to the Counterculture?
As long as there have been people, there has always been a counterculture. The counterculture is that part of the society which has a different idea about how…
- Why the Psychedelic Movement Mattered
  This page is a placeholder. The section has not yet been written
- The Real War on Drugs (and Why They Won)
  This page is a placeholder. The section has not yet been written
- The Short Happy Life of Jay Hippie Esq.
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6. Seeding the Future
Sections of Chapter 6
- Utopia and Notopia
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- Calling All Meme Generators
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- The Art of Culture Design
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7. Tomorrow Never Knows
Turn off your mind, relax and float down stream,
It is not dying, it is not dying

Lay down all thought, surrender to the void,
Is it shining? Is it…
- The Future of Evolution
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- Flapping Their Wings
  Five hundred years before the Wright Brothers flew the first heavier aircraft, Leonardo di Vinci was drawing diagrams and pictures depicting these future…
Epilogue
Epilogue: Some of My Views, Visions and Inspirations
Book Index
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Book Contents
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