- Since I am at Ashland’s Oregon Shakespeare Festival, I am thinking about what the scholar Frances Yates (in Theatre of the World) argued was the inspiration for the Globe theater, Giulio Camillo’s plan for a metaphysical theater. It was to combine all knowledge, thereby acting as a kind of supercomputer and bringing about spiritual Enlightenment in the audience. It was a meme that swept through the late Renaissance and is suspected to be behind much of the great literature of the time from Shakespeare’s all-the-world’s-a-stage trope to Cervantes Don Quixote (see “El Quijote y El teatro de la memoria de Giulio Camillo”). Among other things, Camillo’s plan was a memory-training device. If you wanted to memorize something, you could imagine parts of it on associated places on Camillo’s stage, which had 49 sections, with labels of planets, Kabbalistic stages of development from God to the world, etc.
- Such a memory device had been common since classical antiquity and has been supported by the latest brain research. A 2002 British study used MRI to see how the best memorizers worked and found that they activated simultaneously the mnemonic and place locator cerebral areas. This was confirming the already compendious clinical evidence NLP has generated. It trains people’s memories with such imaged locations. Indeed, people tend to have an imagined spatial arrangement of their memories (e.g., with the past further away if that is how they feel about it). For many people, the arrangement is a line. How that line is oriented to the person’s body (e.g., running in front of it or through it) has significant implications for the person’s attitude toward time and many other things. Achieving high-numbered Graves/Jung Levels, however, often comes with a rearrangement of time positions from the simple line to a more complex temporal-spatial image, such as Camillo’s stage (or its latest version, the computer).
- How did he arrange memories? His axis of 7 planets (associated with personality) and 7 Kabbalistic archetypes of universal evolution was an attempt to indicate a 7-part pattern of universal development, but, alas, he was very vague, perhaps, as has been suggested by one scholar, to hide his support for various notions heretical at that time such as that the earth moved.
- At any rate, Camillo’s description of what vision his theater was to impart is the kind of mysticism common among those who take the Unconscious seriously, e.g., an animistic, holographic universe, where spiral energy patterns control some sort of seven-part emergence scheme.
- Did he intend anything like the Graves/Jung schema? Who knows? But at least according to Yates, it inspired those who, like Shakespeare, saw art (and in particular the stage) as a means to guide mankind as it developed through its so-called “Seven Ages” (for which see As You Like It 2.7)
NLP
Postcolonial Kaiju
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I doubt if there is a patch of land on the earth that has not at some point been conquered by someone; it is all thus postcolonial, a hybrid of conquered and conqueror’s cultures. Being conquered breeds kaiju. In particular, the great age of colonization (Renaissance and European Enlightenment) when the Occident imposed its very conscious scientific materialism on the rest of the globe, was a monster factory. This connection between colonization and monster making is, for instance, a theme in Frankenstein, where Victor compares his making of a monster to the conquest of the Americas. Preparing the way for colonization, explorers and others often described indigenous inhabitants as bestial monsters, e.g., Caliban in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. And a typical tactic of colonizers was to goad the locals into violent eruptions that would justify more oppression against them.
All of this is rather obvious. I have, however, come across something slightly new to me:
Preceded by this picture, I find (at the blog of the Stockton Postcolonial Studies Project) “Translation of the Postcolonial Body” about how, according to Elleke Boehmer, colonization renders people too incoherent to be articulate.
I had been reading Turtles All the Way Down by the linguist and NLP co-founder, John Grinder, and his former student Judith DeLozier, about how overlaps between mental competences sabotage coherence and thus eliminate “grace.” Grinder’s solution is appointing a mental module to separate the competences and keep them from interfering with one another, i.e., an internal colonial authority, comparable to the British Raj in India that kept the Moslems and Hindus from slaughtering each other. Without openly defying him, DeLozier pushed for multiple perspectives and cultures.
What if we put together DeLozier and Boehmer with neuropsychology? Early childhood is like the innocent phase of colonization, when natives, partly robed in the colonizers’ clothes end up in their beds, pillow-talking the beginnings of what linguists call a “pigeon,” a crude amalgam of the languages. I mean early childhood is a time of more neural connections than later seem advisable. Adolescence usually prunes these. But with bilingualism and biculturalism, not as much pruning can occur. Is this good or bad? It depends. Rich kids who go to multi-lingual schools associate their situation with privilege and acquire greater competence in each culture. Colonized kids instead pick up the attitude that they are doomed to an unprestigious creole language, denying them a voice in the world. Awkwardness, lack of grace in connections, may characterize overlaps if the two sides are warring with one another. Instead of Grinder’s controller module (a Raj official), perhaps a better solution might be a negotiator between competencies (a Gandhi). I say perhaps because the real Gandhi was assassinated for trying to make peace between Moslems and Hindus.
As I believe Nathan Webb’s Kaiju series has shown, Kaiju may come from an internalization of external conflict (e.g., between parents, races, cultures, developmental Levels). This conflict keeps the unconscious from expressing itself, thereby bottling energy until it explodes rather like postcolonial terrorism. But the skillful mixing of cultures is precisely how people move to the higher Levels of psychological development.
Healing Narratives: Embodiment
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One of the basic rules of healing stories is that the narrative reflection should suffer for the audience, Picture-of-Dorian- Gray-like. In the perils of shaving, let it be the mirror that bleeds.
A children’s librarian friend of mine in Chicago managed to survive the stress of a long unemployment by remembering Frodo in Mordor. Yes, part of it was comparison: her suffering was less than his, therefore not terrible, but there was a magical element–he was taking the stress for her–or as a sixties tee-shirt put it: “Frodo suffered for your sins.”
NLP calls it “representation.” When the subconscious is aware of a problem that the conscious hasn’t fixed yet, the subconscious–that buffer zone between consciousness and the depths of the Unconscious–feels it has to leave a message in consciousness, something to get attention. For this, it may make a sore sorer, or slow to heal or infected, or whatever will keep delivering the message. This, of course, just gives the person a second problem, that an unheeded subconscious may keep ramping up until it’s far worse than what is being represented. Enter narrative. Just let poor Frodo (rather than the librarian) endure the travails.
Renaissance stories were in an even better situation for this as Richard Sugg shows in his masterful The Smoke of the Soul: Medicine, Physiology and Religion in Early Modern England. The educated believed that mind and body were connected by readily perceptible humors or “spirits” as in Gertrude’s remark to Hamlet “Forth at your eyes your spirits wildly peep… (iHamlet 3.4.118. As Sugg explains, the “spirits” here would have been taken literally as gaseous connectors of eyes to soul, which Gertrude seems to presume is lodged in Hamlet’s “distemper[ed]” brain, causing him to hallucinate a ghost (34). By writing this scene where the ghost is actually real, Shakespeare, coming from a persecuted Cathoiic family might strike back at Protestants for doubting ghosts (spirits) while they were still believing in the “spirits” connecting soul to body–all while he was simultaneously mourning the death of his son Hamnet. Masterful representation! As Suggs notes, however, our medical vocabulary for thousands of intricate brain chemicals has fallen out of common parlance. But even if we cannot anatomize our sorrows in fictional embodiment quite as precisely for general consumption, Frodo can still do quite a bit by climbing those bleak, monster-guarded mountains.
“Content” and “Process”
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Today my friend Nathan Webb made the very perceptive remark that what is a “process” and what is a “content” depends on the complexity Level from which they are viewed (for “Levels,” see GJDP). The context of this remark was that both of us took 3 NLP courses, where a radical distinction was made between “process” and “content.” Let us imagine, for instance, a client who had a life-long fear of underpants because his sister put itching powder in his when he was six. By NLP terminology, the fear is “content” (what he unconsciously holds mentally and thus contains). The way he triggers that fear (e.g., a mental picture of the traumatic event) is “process.” NLP offers a cafeteria of ways to alter the “process,” such as making the picture smaller, dimmer, or more distant or changing what is represented or doing something to render it humorous, etc., thereby making him recognize the “content” to be an effect he is creating rather than a real material thing
As Nathan remarked, however, the matter is larger than a series of techniques, even though those have proven themselves well enough so that a major airlines (British Air) now employs an NLP practitioner to counter fear of flying. The larger issue is that the containment of “content” comes from a desire for control. If the situation were not contained—and situations seldom if ever can be literally “contained”—then the situation is open to loss or even chaos (as, of course, every situation is). In containment, there is also usually at least a hint of personification, as if the contained were an extension of the person or of someone precious to him or her.
At the pre-linguistic L1, there is already the tendency to hold tightly to an imaginary companion in the form of a lovie, as if the wanderings of imagination could be turned into a precious object—an object that leaves the baby screaming every time the caregiver takes it away to wash it.
At L2 (tribal and thus highly dependent on environment), environmental factors such as wind—a constantly changing flow—tend to be personified as gods, e.g., the Ojibwe E-bangishimog, the West Wind, who begets Mudjekiwis, the guardian of Tradition.
At L3 (competitor), a precious one is Honor (meaning primarily reputation at that Level). An L3 may die for reputation, forgetting that a cruel witticism a minute after that can reduce him or her to a joke.
At L4 (orderer), mere worldly reputation is acknowledged as mutable (i.e., process), but there tends to be something like God’s Judgment inscribed forever in the Book of Life and thus such abstractions as Truth, Morality, etc. function as precious content.
No one really operating at L5 (scientific materialist) will see wind as anything but process, or reputation as aside from constantly changing statistical assessment, or morality as other than a complex, adapting negotiation, but the Market or Science still may come close to being personified content.
To hear the amusement of L6 (empathizer) at L5’s idolatry toward “Market” and “Science,” listen to Stephen Colbert’s irony as he pronounces those terms, but L6 has its own precious Green values, centering on empathy.
And so on perhaps… for as many Levels as may exist…. Or is that quite true?
The general principle is Alfred Korzybski’s “the map is not the territory,” so I’ve put my portrait of him at the head of this post. He considered the magical thinking involved in mistaking map for territory to be dangerously fallacious as it generally is. Are there exceptions? In bio-feedback for instance, what at first is mere wishful thinking such as changing heartbeat or blood pressure at a thought, gradually becomes possible. The thought becomes contact: mental map identical to territory. And that is the way energy healing is supposed to work, with the healer gradually acquiring an awareness of the area to be healed that feels either like such internal kinesthetic sensations as proprioception or external ones such as touch or warmth. What was mere mental map becomes mental touch. And a growing number of philosophers, psychologists, anthropologists, etc. find one or another reason to argue for some version of panpsychism, the idea that everything is to some degree sentient. That is the personification involved in magical thinking, but at L7, when Conscious and Unconscious are becoming one, does magical thinking stop being always a fallacy?
Matching, Mismatching, and the Triune Brain
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“About the above drawings, describe the relationship.” When I give this direction in a class, I tend to get most answers of the following sort: “They’re all geometric blocks.” “They all have four sides.” “They all have black lines.” “They’re all drawn.” Since these answers describe similarities, they are what some psychologists classify as “matching.” Much less often, students offer such answers as “The line at the top of the irregular shape on the right does not quite reach the left side, whereas the two, smaller, irregular shapes on the left have tops that do connect with both sides, but at varying curves of intersection.” That description focuses on differences and is thus classified as “mismatching.”
I was taught in NLP that people use matching and/or mismatching as an orientation: habitually preferring matching over mismatching or habitually preferring mismatching over matching or habitually balancing them, etc. Obviously, another possibility is that matching and mismatching are contextual: students who want to please me will not point out that I drew three geometrical patterns ineptly. Indeed, they will be trying so hard to match and please me (for a better grade) that they’ll interpret “relationship” as meaning exclusively similarity. Only students who feel confident and energetic enough to venture detailed descriptions will mismatch–a distinct minority!
And normal matching vs. mismatching does not exhaust the possibilities. A very few students will describe the above as a single Gestalt, e.g., “It looks like the beginning of an explosion, with the parts moving away from one another”; “It’s the basic pattern in much Chinese calligraphy”; “It’s a face turned on its side.” I call this synthetic matching in that it looks for sameness, not between separate objects but as an integration of parts.
Now how does any of this matter? Well, the NLP search for people’s habits does often yield useful observations. If your boss always gives a similarity then two differences in talking about everything, maybe you should do the same in reports you submit to her. If your children fall into the habit of saying “no” to everything (antagonistic mismatching, now called ODD by the DSM-IV), you may find it easier to move them into choosing between a variety of choices (options mismatching) than switch them all the way into matching.
For this site, however, the relevance of matching and/or mismatching habits is that they give hints about the Unconscious (i.e., people are very seldom aware of their matching/mismatching habits). And an obvious question in all of this is: what does it have to do with the brain?
The section of it most concerned with matching and mismatching (at least between past and present experience) is the hippocampus, which has two parts: a left focusing on difference; a right on similarity. Now at this point I am very cautiously bringing in Paul MacLean’s somewhat outdated theory of the Triune Brain. What he had to say about the brain stem being reptilian, the limbic system mammalian, and the neocortex human has proven to be an oversimplification of evolution–but it was never very interesting anyway. The basic idea of different functions for stem, limbic, and neocortex still is worth considering AS LONG AS ONE KEEPS IN MIND THAT A HEALTHY BRAIN IS HOLISTIC (since greater understanding of interrelationship is what research has managed since MacClean proposed his theory in the 1960s).
Obviously, the hippocampus is relying on information from other parts of the brain (e.g., that processing the visual image above) in matching and/or mismatching. Might not one of those parts be the stem? Since it expresses a territorial instinct, It sees same as good and different as bad. Consider then the hypothesis that a particularly active stem might predispose toward matching, whereas options mismatching as a representation of shifting emotions and moods relates more to the limbic. And while all this is happening, the neocortex is rationalizing and making conscious the unconscious predispositions from elsewhere.
Indeed, the varying quantity of connections is what interests me. In Graves’ and Jung’s Developmental Psychology (available on this site), I look at how people’s goals can be classified in terms of levels of complexity. The first is survival (a brain stem function) thus theoretically predisposed toward matching, a bias certainly continuing into Level two (tribal), characterized by the need for trusting. Level three corresponds to stem territoriality and to the typical antagonism matchers experience when encountering difference. And Level four (religion-like order) requires orthodoxy and thus matching. So far, the emphasis is on the right hippocampus (matching). From that point on, there is a gradual shift toward the left (mismatching). Level five (technological materialism) prioritizes innovation, but is ambivalent about the creative folk who make that possible (as in the latest DSM-IV, which labels extreme mismatching a disease). Technology requires the detailed observations that options mismatchers make but mismatchers themselves offend the L5 aesthetic of fitting into society like a cog in a machine. Level six (empathizing), however, shows off its empathizing ability by sympathizing with the most different ones imaginable, and thus is a mismatcher’s paradise. Level seven (cosmological puzzle solving) is the synthetic matching I mentioned above. Since a goal of Level seven is unification of Conscious and Unconscious, I am guessing that it requires the highest degree of brain interrelationship. It may be associated with that state brain studies indicate sometimes occurs during meditation, when the body’s ergotropic, fight-or-flight, energy expending system and health-maintaining trophotropic system peak simultaneously, stimulating creativity. L7 tends to see each situation from multiple perspectives, recognizing similarities and differences, thus doing matching and mismatching at the same time.
Holistic Unconscious: 