THE MOMENT EVERYTHING CHANGED ABOUT EVERYTHING FOR ME
I was exactly 50 years old and one month when it happened. It was easily the most dramatic experience of my life. But the drama was inside me. For you see the day was a typical day in the life of an Adaptive Physical Education instructor. The instructor happened to be me. The day happened to be a Thursday in early May. And the setting happened to be the 5th/6th grade football field on Bainbridge Island, an island 30 minutes west of Seattle. My students and I were playing kickball.
There was one difference about this May day however. It was unseasonably hot. And when I say hot, I mean 80 degrees, no clouds, no breeze to speak of, and an out of the ordinary touch of humidity.
Now this would be no big deal for you midwesterners or southerners. It wasn’t a big deal for the native Ohioan I am. For pacific northwesterners, forget about it! Once it hits 80, pacific nor’westers hole themselves up inside their homes. They are actually afraid of heat. When it comes to humidity, their fear turns to terror. They simply aren’t used to humidity because it rarely surfaces here despite all the rain.
Had it not been so hot with a touch of humidity and no clouds in the sky, I would likely be living my old way of life, anxiously second guessing my every decision, forever on the brink of divorce, forever working doggedly to ‘BECOME’ the person I believed I was ‘SUPPOSE’ to become. I cannot fathom being stuck back in my old way of understanding myself and my old ways of indirectly and skittishly interpreting and evaluating the world around me. I shudder to think I could be still pouring through every self-help book ever published to help ‘ME’ do a ‘BETTER’ job of being ‘ME.’ It was miserable.
“So what happened to you on that typical except for being so hot Thursday in May?” you ask. “Was it a mystical, spiritual, soul-driven, extra-sensory, crystal-infusing, angel-summoning, energy-healing, self-help imploding kind of experience?” you wonder. Were Oprah Winfrey or Doctors Phil or Oz involved?”
No. ‘It’ was none of those kinds of things. ‘It’ involved no celebrity, self help expert, guru, or wisdom tradition of any kind.
‘It…’ was my observation of a boy with special needs who felt hot and then figured out what to do about it. He figured out how to solve his state of being uncomfortably hot from his own point of view without first referencing what I would allow him to do in the context of our class time because he did not have the cognitive capacity to call up my thoughts on the matter and consider my thoughts at the same time as he evaluated his own thoughts. Many of us have the cognitive capacity to consider the point of view of an observer (or an ideology) before, during, and after we evaluate information and make decisions. Many of us have never engaged in a direct experience of ourselves in our environments because we have been taught from birth to first and foremost consider how our decisions might impact the thoughts and nervous systems of those observing us. We learned how to make our decisions as if we were detached from the process. We learned to rely on the cues other people were giving us in order to make decisions. And we learned how to ignore the cues coming from our own sense organs and brain so as not to factor them into our decision making.
The way in which my student figured out how to solve his problem caused him to break my rules by leaving our outdoor kickball game before class was over and running back into the cool of his home room. This boy was considered to be oppositional and defiant by way of our current psychologically based labeling system. However, I realized my student had to know what my thoughts were in order to exist in opposition to them or defiance of them. This was impossible because this boy did not have the cognitive capacity to conceptualize my thoughts in order to think and behave in opposition to them. He could not have a firm grasp of my thoughts because he needed to use every bit of his own personal cognitive efforts to think and process his own thoughts. He did not have the cognitive capacity left over to figure out what my thoughts were while he was thinking his own thoughts. He did not have the cognitive capacity to make his decisions in terms of how the outcomes of his decisions would affect me, my thoughts, and my nervous system. In a nutshell, he was using his brain the way we are all suppose to be using our brains. We are suppose to be making sense of information in the ways we are able to make sense of it. We are supposed to make decision in terms of how our personal nervous systems will be impacted by the outcomes of our decisions. We are not supposed to be making decisions in terms of how the outcomes of our decisions will impact the personal nervous systems of other people. (But we are taught to interpret the nervous systems of others, not our own, in order to make our decisions. And we are taught to ignore the cues coming from our own personal nervous systems).
My student solved his problem so cleanly and directly that he caused a crack to form in the way I had always understood myself and the world around me. My student’s direct engagement of himself in the world precipitated a world class ‘aha’ moment for me. I hit the mother lode on this one.
My observation of this boy with a wide array of thinking and behavioral differences occurred at precisely 12:21 p.m. on that Thursday afternoon. At 12:25 p.m. my brain was set on fire. At 12:35 p.m. a confluence of all my idiosyncratic life experiences converged in my intellect to allow me to form a completely new and unique inference about how humans are wired to biologically integrate their thoughts, behaviors, and emotions. At 12:45 p.m.I identified a number of glaring inconsistencies in our collective and tacitly accepted psychological definition(s) of the human personality.
By 12:55 p.m. I had escorted my students back to their classrooms and had put away my teaching gear. It was my last class of the day so I sat down in the middle of the football field and began drawing up an outline for what was to become a three year project to develop a brand new scientifically verifiable biological definition and theory of the human personality.
I also began what was to become a year long process of re-evaluating the relationship between me and the world outside of me. My orientation to my own nervous system underwent what Gregory Bateson would call a third order change. I started to interpret information, form conclusions, and make decisions categorically differently than I used to. I changed how I interpreted, concluded and decided because I understood for the first time my own nervous system was my own personal GPS. I understood for the first time I was biologically loaded to be really good at being a human, and to be particularly good at being me. And I understood for the first time I could formulate and apply a concrete definition for ME, my SELF, my PERSONALITY, my BRAIN.
Me, myself, and I consisted of a brain that took in information, evaluated, synthesized, and interpreted that information, formed conclusions based on the information, and then made decisions for ‘what to do next.’ What I am inside of every moment of every day is a decision for ‘what to do next.’ Every single one of my physiological processes is set up for me to be able to interpret internal and external information in order to make decisions for ‘what to do next.’ Jeffrey Hawkins, neuroscientist, summarizes his research on the neocortex up in his book, On Intelligence. Hawkins has mapped the sequence of steps the brain engages every time it takes in information, associates it with previously learned and stored information, and ultimately formulates a prediction for what to do next.
After my aha moment and my research I understood for the first time I was supposed to be relying upon my thoughts, instincts, drives, and emotional cues to help me interpret information and form conclusions. I was NOT suppose to be ‘overcoming’ my thoughts, emotions, instincts, and drives as I had been taught. I understood that my brain not only worked for me, it was me. I wanted to shout from the roof tops of my neighborhood, “I have a brain, and I know how to use it.” This seems stupid on paper, but the fact is, I previously did not understand how to use my brain the way it was meant to be used. I was using it totally backwards. And I did not understand previously that I don’t just use my brain, I am my brain.
I had been taught since birth directly and indirectly, formally and informally, that my thoughts, due to my sinful nature, my subconscious mind, and my animal instincts, would make me do all kinds of things I didn’t really want to do. It was drilled into me that my subconscious mind and my animal instincts would make be thirsty too much, hungry too much, lusty too much, avoidant too much, lazy too much, angry too much, sad too much, intense too much, overly comfortable or overly awkward too much, etc. I had been taught to assiduously disassociate myself from my drives, instincts, and errant subconscious directives lest they cause me to lose all control of myself. I was taught if I wanted to be all that I could be, all that I was ‘SUPPOSE’ to be, I had to reign in and silence the information and cues coming out of my nervous system.
Jonathan Haidt recently summed up everything most of us have been taught since birth in his book, The Happiness Hypothesis. A year before my ‘aha’ moment I read, The Happiness Hypothesis, with the elephant swimming on the cover and the hapless human riding on its back, and ate it up, happily reveling in his ‘accurate’ portrayal of our odd human condition. Haidt made the claim many before him have made that our so called conscious mind is merely a puny rider on the back of our elephant sized animal drives and mysterious but all knowing subconscious that really runs the show of this organism we call a human being. Haidt then gave ten examples of wisdom traditions throughout history that can help us humans overcome our ‘terrible fate’ of being mostly controlled by our drives and our subconscious. To paraphrase Haidt’s book, if we humans try hard enough, with daily and life long efforts to learn as much traditional and modern wisdom as we can possibly stuff into our heads, then we will have a slight bit more control as the weak willed and mostly clueless rider that is our conscious mind cursed to ride atop the much more powerful and ‘in control’ elephant that is our subconscious mind. It never occurred to me to question the narrative that humans have to learn to override their biological cues and urges in order to gain even the smallest amount of control over their lives, until it did…
After observing my student with special needs allow his thoughts, instincts, sensory and emotional cues to help him interpret and synthesize the internal and external information in his environment in order to form a conclusion and make a decision for what to do next, I stopped understanding myself as the hapless puny rider, and started understanding myself as a brain that was absolutely running the show that was me. All I had to do was start taking the cues from my brain and applying those cues towards my decision making in ways that made sense to my sensory, motor, and nervous systems in order to be the driver of my own brain instead of its victim. I stopped trying to ‘overcome’ the cues from my brain and started actually using the cues. What a concept?? To use my thoughts and emotions from my brain to help me think in ways that make sense for how I am able to think…
Originally published at medium.com on October 14, 2014.
