evolutionary psychology

The core delusion

2007-06-12T06:42:00.000-07:00

The spiritual teacher J. Krishnamurti made continual reference to “time” (specifically “psychological time”) and states that the ending of the problems of dysfunction in the human race require the “ending of time”. This document attempts to explain and clarify what he was talking about.

In a nutshell, ego-consciousness (the common state of consciousness of modern man) is a deluded state. The root error derives ultimately from an error of inference deep within our psyche as to the physical nature of the universe, and specifically the thing we call “time”, and how we (as a consciousness) exist within it. Correcting this psychological error of inference (as a direct seeing psychological insight) has the potential to correct the delusion, moving the subject out of ego-consciousness and towards enlightened (or non-deluded) consciousness.

There are a few different theories on what “time” actually is.

A commonly held intellectual idea is that time actually exists as a separate dimension, a continuum through which the material universe passes.

By this theory, the universe is supposed to work a bit like a movie film – you have a spool of independent “still” universes which, if reeled past the lens (your consciousness), summons up the sensation of movement, and of course the sensation of your consciousness passing through time.

Some people disagree with this idea, and instead think that actually all we have is a single universe, and that there is no time as a separate dimension or continuum, and that we simply observe change of state directly. So what we call “time” is merely measured change of state (e.g. changed position of the clock hand).

Totally regardless of which of these theories you personally believe with your sensible “intellectual knowing” head, deep deep down inside psyche of virtually every human being there is only one of these premises that is actually acted from.

Unfortunately, the theory we actually act from is the wrong one – we act as if there really is a continuum of time and there isn't. And we have another little problem - against whatever you may merely intellectually believe, our deep inner psyche is structured as if it can actually live within this continuum of time, that our very existential essence can actually survive living spread out along it. In a sense, we are operating from the premise that we are not just existing within the instant of “now”, but also existing in a (psychologically) very real way in the past and in the future, all at the very same time.

Just to clarify - I am not accusing you of believing your mind is actually capable of living spread out along the dimension of time.

I'm not talking about what we believe, but about the premise from which we act.

As I'm sure you have noticed, these two things unfortunately don't always coincide. Sometimes we, with our sensible heads, know full well what we should be doing, but are then frustrated to notice that we are compelled to act in some totally different way, even so far as to doing things we may badly regret later. Before doing them we know we shouldn't, after doing them we regret them! It's quite easy for human beings to believe one thing (as an intellectual position) but actually act from a completely different position.

So how did it actually happen that, some time in our evolution, we made this mistake regarding the nature of time?

Over the course of our evolution, the consciousness of the human species has inferred the physical nature of our universe from the stream of sensory information that is constantly fed into it from our body. Its a very big job to work out what the universe actually is from this stream of basic sense information, but our species is now several million years old – that's quite a lot of sense data we have collected, and enough time to do an awfully large amount of inferring! Enough time in fact, to create by the process of evolutionary “philosophical extrapolation and inference” the amazingly detailed image and understanding we all carry within ourselves of the physical nature of things that allows us to live our daily lives.

But we have some other tools (memory and imagination) which, although they are not providing actual sense data from the real physical universe, are actually a bit like the senses in that they give us an “experience”.

We all know our memory of the past is extremely useful, and is an essential survival tool. Don't play with rattlesnakes! I remember what happened when my now dead friend was bitten by one! So too is our ability to imagine future states, since it allows us to plot scenarios in our mind and “try ideas out” mentally without actually having to physically implement them. This is the nature of our mental activity when we plan.

However, a deep danger presents itself when we use either of the psychological tools of past memory or an imagined future. To understand what this danger might be exactly, we need to examine closely how both of these mental tools actually work, and what experience they give us whilst we are using them.

The human mind records historical experience as sequential “frames of state” rather like a movie film does. When we think about the past, we are playing this mental “mind-movie” back to ourselves. (As an aside, do you notice that this is similar to how the flawed view of time outlined above operates?) Our understanding of our relationship with the data representing this “mind-movie” is derived from the feelings we get when playing it – these match the actual feelings we had at the time of the original experience. The feelings may be stronger when the actual experience takes place than it is when we re-play the memory of it, but there is not any actual difference in the very nature, the intrinsic quality of the feeling.

When I see a rattlesnake, I remember what a rattlesnake did to my friend, i feel horror, shock, fear and react accordingly in self-preservation!

We have imaginations about the future too – extrapolations and fantasies about what we think may come to pass. Noting how these possible future states make us feel allows us to understand our relationship with the possible future state scenarios that we are plotting.

And here is the hidden danger. As we have seen, there is not really any fundamental difference in the nature of the feelings we commonly experience in our daily reactions with the world and the feelings we experience when we replay mental memories of the past.

Feelings are sensations. And experiencing sensations of any kind gives our consciousness a sense of direct connection with the “thing” which is causing the sensations, imbuing it with a sense of actual existential reality.

And so here is the root error we are operating from. During the evolution of the human consciousness, our psyche has thus far failed to differentiate that there is any fundamental difference between recorded data (our memories) and absolute “happening right now” reality. It's an easy mistake to make – experientially, because from the data with which it has been provided over the course of our evolution, our consciousness has no direct way of telling the two apart.

Philosophically, if I have two “things”, both of which posses an identical basic intrinsic nature, without any extra descriptive information about them it is simply not possible for me as an “evolving consciousness” to tell one apart from the other.

So we have a fundamental quality of experience when we slide sequentially backwards and forwards through our memory and imaginations (in terms of the emotions we feel) that is qualitatively the same as the emotional experience we have in the real universe – the actual here and now. So our deep inner psyche acts from the premise that the past and future is a real “place” that actually exists “now”, and that we can actually “visit”.

We “know” it because we have “experienced” it. But this premise is completely wrong. Thinking about the past is not actually traveling back to the past, it's merely thinking about it “in the now”.

We re-live the emotions generated by things that have happened in the past and that might happened in the future by thinking about them – the feelings feel “real” and we therefore experience existential identification with them. But these remembered or imagined “things” have no existential reality, no actual existence beyond the historical data inside our brains. This means that when we think about the past and the future, we effectively become personally identified with abstract data - mere dry, lifeless information inside our memories.

The manifestation of this is that instead of living fully within the only time actually available for us to live and act – the “present instant”, the actual “here and now”, our psyche thinks it lives as a stretched out entity, smeared along some imaginary continuum of time, which it believes stretches right the way back through our past to our earliest conscious memories and forward into some imagined future ahead of us.

Please now think about this paradox: When did time begin?

The answer is that it didn't - There is no time.

If you don't “get” this, that is successfully “see through” the paradox of time (as a direct seeing psychological insight rather than merely following my argument), then it's no good. Following an intellectual argument is simply accumulating dry symbolic data in your memory.

If you can summon up any sense of personal identification with any thing, idea or event that occurred (or will occur) at any time other than the “now” you are currently occupying, regard it as proof you cannot yet completely “see through” this paradox.

When I say that time does not exist, I am not saying that the abstract human concept of "clock time" does not exist – it does, and actually it is very useful, but simply as a "reference change" against which all other movement or change may be measured. (Linear speed in meters per second, rotational speed in revolutions per second, evaporation in liters per hour and so on.)

Provided we use “clock time” merely as a “reference change” and nothing more, it adds great value to our practical life.

But maintaining belief in “clock time” does not in any way prevent us from letting go of the psychological premise that time represents some physical continuum through which we continually "pass" or, even more dangerously, actually live within?

But the question is, where does “living in time” actually place us, psychologically speaking?

We have all experienced those occasions when in a moment of stress and hurt, our minds churn over and over and over trying to resolve the problem. We experience this huge compulsion to think incessantly about our difficulties, and at the same time there is this vague awareness of the madness of what we are doing – on some level we are aware that however hard we think, the suffering never actually reduces, we never actually "fix" the problem with all our compulsive thinking.

What we actually say to ourselves in these situations is something like: “My life is this way but I cannot accept it, it's too awful! Things “should be” like this instead!

When we think like this, we are effectively avoiding facing the absolute reality of the present moment by the “mind trick” of imagining a future preferred state of “what should be” and psychologically identifying with it, e.g. operating from the premise at some level that we actually occupy this future imagined state in some real existential way.

Of course we cannot completely avoid our unpleasant here and now life situation in this manner because we cannot take 100% of our existential psychological essence into our imagined future. Our fantasy “as it should be universe” inside our head is convincing and quite satisfying to think about, but the sense data coming in from our bodies from the actual “here and now” universe keeps a certain part of our psychological identity trapped in the rather unsavory real universe, the place where we really don't want to be.

So (usually with much complaining and moaning) we start waiting for things to be “as they should be”, e.g. waiting for the actual universe to turn into our fantasy imagined future situation, without unfortunately bothering to question whether this is a reasonable expectation. Why should we question it? At some level, we believe we have “experienced the future”. We know it's possible because we think we have already “seen” it!

We are now walking down the psychological gang plank! Our strategy for resolving our problem is based upon fiction mistaken for fact.

So a typical human strategy for dealing with painful life situations is to fantasize about and identify with a future universe where the painful situation does not exist (or has been “corrected” in some way) and then expect and require the here and now universe to “become” that fantasy over time.

Our belief that our suffering can “become” fixed over time prevents us from facing it totally and absolutely 100% in the actual here and now. There is a huge irony here – any painful situation fully and totally faced in the here and now must be accepted and in the same instant will cease to cause suffering. But by failing to face it, by deferring the solution to some imagined future that can never arrive, the pain and suffering will be kept alive indefinitely, together with an attendant feeling of psychological incompleteness. We are left in a permanent state of feeling less than whole, relying on “becoming” psychologically complete and therefore free of suffering some time in the future.

There is a by-product of becoming identified with future states, of our need for things, people or events to be a certain way in the future in order for us to be able to feel “complete”. In accepting this way of being, our identity becomes attached to form. We in a sense no longer know that we are life itself, but rather we see ourselves in things we don't have but want, or the absence of things we do have but don't want.

Quite often, rather than just waiting for things to become “as they should be”, we actually add to our suffering by trying to force our outer situation towards “becoming” our fantasy image. Because change towards some fantasy future is completely out of alignment with the natural rhythm and flow of change within the real world, our actions will inevitably be counter-productive and therefore deeply frustrating. Furthermore, if directed towards other human beings, our acts will inevitably be perceived as acts of violence and aggression, because we will be trying to move people outside of their natural rhythm and flow (e.g, against their will).

When we act in the manner described above, we are using “psychological time” to separate us (subject, usually identified with a preferable past or a better fantasy future) from that on which we are working (object, e.g. our current here and now situation which we are usually judging negatively).

In fact, we notice that our life experience almost always consists of “me” and “everything else” - this is the root of the normal dualistic way of thinking that Buddhists tell us is a delusion. And as we have seen, this delusion of object and subject is supported by our error regarding the nature of time.

This perceived way of working with the universe is, philosophically speaking, inside out. We cannot actually leave the “here and now universe” in any shape, manner or form. Our psyche perceives that it has, but actually it hasn't. We are still fully within the universe, within the “here and now”, an actual part of what we are trying to change from the outside, deeply intrinsically coupled with the actuality of it.

The inescapable reality is that you are the very universe itself – we all are. Think about it, where did that matter from which your body is constructed actually come from, and what is it that completely encloses you, wherever you actually are? When Gandhi came up with his famous quote: “Be the change you would like to see in the world”, was he preaching from some moral high ground, telling us all what we should be doing in order to be better people? Or is it possible that the real truth of Gandhi talking was actually the opposite way round to that, pull instead of push? Perhaps an enlightened man was simply talking about maths and physics, inviting us to see the reality of the actual hard physical relationship we each have with the universe?

Hopefully then you will agree then that you cannot change any of your situations “from the outside” because you are never physically outside of them! So isn't our real option to cause change “from the inside”? Perhaps, on those rare occasions when we actually succeed in causing successful conflict-free change, each and every one of us are actually already acting in this manner because actually reality does not provide for any other possibility?

Because our mind fully believes in the idea of our problems "becoming fixed” or us “becoming complete” with respect to time, we are incentivized to work hard at it when we have to face a difficult life situation. This "incentivisation" is experienced as the emotional charge given to us as a reward when we think about our problem, and it is this emotional charge that causes the compulsive nature of our thoughts. If you find yourself compulsively thinking about how to resolve some painful situation in your life, take this thinking as proof that you psychological structures are based on a mistaken idea of the concept of time. All you are actually doing is neurotically running through the difference between "what is" and some fanciful hypothetical notion of "what should be", and all the while avoiding the required psychological transformation "in the now" - which is simple acceptance of the only real truth, which is always "what actually is".

When “somebody hurts us” with something they did, and then we resent it and take the position that they need to change in some way to make things “better”, can you see that this is what we are actually doing? By shouting at them, we are trying to act on reality from the outside, trying to move it towards “what should be”, which is the imaginary universe where it would not be possible for us to be hurt like that. Who says this “what should be” of ours is really how the actual (shared) universe “should be”? Us, isn't it? It's only our truth! No wonder then then that when we try to live our life by this principle it often doesn't work very well.

Because it's basic purpose is to help the organism survive, thought always moves in the direction of increased personal security. This may be real (e.g. planning your pension arrangements) or it may be neurotic (e.g. an attempt to avoid facing something). The difference between the two can generally be spotted by the amount of emotional charge and identification you experience when thinking the thought, which in turn will determine how compulsive you find the stream of thought to be.

Buddhism makes great points about the damaging nature of "grasping" and "aversion" (namely, trying to force reality to provide what we like and trying to avoid things that we don't like).

The reason for this is that grasping and aversion are both examples of "psychologically becoming". The point at which we start to experience grasping or aversion is the point where our image of "what should be" has separated from the nature of "what actually is" through the psychological device of “time”.

Witnessing this moment of separation in yourself is witnessing your mind sliding into a dualistic view of the universe. Not all of our daily experience is dualistic - when we are totally absorbed in what we are doing, when the activity we are engaged in has our full attention, then there are no judgments of the present moment and hence no dualism.

It's important to realize though that grasping and aversion are not in themselves the root problems, and so should not be addressed directly – this just becomes grasping for a state of non-graspingness! The root problem is the delusion that allows our mind to think it's a sane idea to support grasping and aversion as sensible psychological rules of behavior for use in our daily lives. Instead of fighting grasping and aversion, see through the root delusion and both grasping and aversion dissolve automatically.

In addition to prolonging suffering unnecessarily, our belief in time actually generates large amounts of suffering all by itself. Imagine for a minute someone who feels (as many do) that it's completely impossible for him to be happy and fulfilled when he is single, e.g. when he doesn't have a life partner.

Someone who believes this, and who is currently single will clearly experience suffering, and will see obtaining a partner as the sole route towards finding resolution of their suffering. Just as soon as they find a partner, they believe they will be “complete” and the suffering will be over.

Looking at this psychological position, we can see that it contains the concept of “psychological becoming”, e.g. “I am not currently complete, but I will become complete just as soon as I have a partner”.

So what happens when he does have a partner? Because he knows that he cannot be happy without a partner, and he also knows that his partner might die or leave him, he is now terribly unhappy from the constant worry of loosing his partner!

Actually, this worry is just the mirror image of the same suffering that he experienced whilst single. The actual root cause of his suffering in both circumstances is his unquestioned belief that he requires a partner to be happy, and until he questions this belief, this “attachment to form”, he will always be experiencing distress at some level, regardless of his situation.

Why can't he see this directly? Because the contradictions inherent in “requiring a partner in order to be happy” are kept apart by his sense of time, and belief in the possibility of “becoming”.

The two related states of suffering are never allowed to touch inside his mind, it is only possible to "move from one to the other" through psychological time, which is experienced by the person as thoughts, moving from one psychological state through “time” to "become" the other state.

So instead of connecting him with the paradox his need for a partner presents him with (and therefore allowing him to look for other options for happiness - such as letting go of his perceived absolute need for a partner), his deluded thinking actually smooths over the cracks so that he is in no way conscious of the horrific contradictions taking place inside his head.

Our mind consists of a very large number of similar contradictory beliefs all existing inside our mind at once. We only "occupy" (personally identify with) one of a set of conflicting beliefs at any one moment. We move between them through use of a made up sense of time, through the vehicle of thoughts thinking about "becoming" or “not becoming” (which is exactly the same as “becoming” - requiring things not to change in the future is still attachment to form).

In other words, our psychological structure is fragmented into contradictory but temporally separated sub-structures, and the reason the contradictions are never allowed to meet (and therefore be challenged and dismantled by our psyche) is that we only ever allow ourselves to “psychologically inhabit” one particular psychological time frame, or “temporal reality”, and therefore only experience identification with one particular psychological sub-structure at any given moment.

Because our internal contradictions are effectively isolated by the continual operation of our thought processes (thoughts are the manifestation of our belief in “becoming” through psychological time in action), if we were to stop thinking for a second all of our internal contradictions would start to collide. And whilst (should this happen) our minds would have no other option but to “see” the contradictions and therefore transform to a supreme state of sanity, sadly we view this as a huge threat to our very existence (otherwise why should we have kept them apart in the first place?). This is why we cannot stop our compulsive thinking. This is why, until we choose to look at it deeply we will each and every one of us continue to go on peace marches and then come back home to our personal wars with our neighbors, and this is the paradox of our current state of consciousness.

These contradictions and the constant thinking that keeps them all suspended in isolation inside our mind causes a constant sense of "becoming". In fact, this sense is the single common factor in all of our experience - the one thing that must be there in each and every one of our waking hours is some sense of becoming, sometimes very faint, sometimes very strong.

It is therefore not such a huge leap of faith for a “trying to work life out” sort of consciousness (such as each human possesses) to assume that this "constant factor" is it's actual identity. If you remove everything in your experience that's "sometimes there and sometimes not", what you are left with is surely what YOU actually are, isn't it? It seems this is precisely what we do, and since we all become personally identified with “a sense of becoming", our identities are constructed from ideas, ambitions, belongings, successes, wants, aversions and other deluded fixed states of being.

This ever-present background sense of "becoming" in our minds therefore is fundamentally what we experience as the "I", the so-called ego identity. So ironically the very basis for our chosen identity is in fact just our own neurosis! Our proudly chosen identity, “that which becomes”, is paradoxically also our suffering and our unhappiness with “what is” - otherwise, if we were really that happy with it, why would we ever need to “become” something else at all? We don't like suffering but we, the actual “ego I” is the very nature of suffering, so we cannot let it go because that would mean death of the “I”, yet we continue to struggle against suffering whilst fighting to hold on to it. We want more, but because we need to constantly “become”, more is never enough. Little wonder there are so many wars in the external world, when we are so fundamentally, intrinsically in such a total state of all-out war with ourselves! Our chosen identification is with fixed temporal states (those 'things in life' we need to be happy), yet fixed states are only possible in a universe where a continuum of temporally separated alternative realities actually exists. But we can never really get and keep these 'things we need for happiness' because our universe is a process in action, constantly morphing into something new, nothing here ever exists in a fixed state. It seems we are not merely at war with ourselves, we are at war with the entire universe! Do the writers of science fiction horror ever actually stop to question the ultimate source of their material? Could the stories they are telling possibly occur to them, as even an imagined possibility, unless there was not already the seed of it as a reality in their very own consciousness? It would seem that the brutal all-destroying monster in the film 'Alien' may be somewhat closer to home than we realize. What will happen to the universe if we invent space travel before we realize this?

So we can perhaps see the danger of thought, but does this mean all thought is neurotic? Not at all - thought put man on the moon and gave us antibiotics. Neurotic thought can be noticed as thoughts which amplify a separate sense of "I" by temporally separating ourselves from any life situation which we are averse (or attached) to.

This amounts to a neurotic action of trying to inflict some arbitrary "should be" on the reality of what actually is. Direct realization of this madness enables a different psychological possibility for dealing with life's ups and downs that actually works – namely we work from a position of relationship and interconnectedness, meaning that when facing a difficult reality we start by fully coming to terms with and accepting the problem, up to the state of being totally totally OK with it (e.g. psychologically transform to fit the reality of the world) and only then start looking for ways of improving things. Doing things this way, our thinking will not be imbued with a separate sense of "I" and therefore will not be neurotic. It might be about improving your life, but you will be able to look at it as dispassionately as some impersonal logistics problem you are working on at your job, because it's about improving an already completely acceptable life, rather than fixing a life which is currently “broken”.

It is a total mistake to try to "stop" neurotic thought though, because that's just more of the same - your ego trying to inflict "what should be" on "what is". Effectively, trying to stop neurotic thought through will is just more neurosis coming in through the back door. The key to correcting your behavior is to actually see the root of your delusion, not intellectually as some meaningless abstract idea, but as "direct seeing" – through psychological insight.

J. Krishnamurti make great use of the phrase “to inquire into the nature of things”. What he is saying is that you must forget trying to “be” enlightened, because that is an act of will and therefore an act of ego. The best thing we can do is to simply deepen our understanding of the actual essential nature of life and the paradoxes it presents us with and hope that eventually our consciousness “gets it”.

What happens when we “directly see” that time does not exist?

The less we resist and separate from reality by moving into a different (but non-existent) temporal place inside our psyche, the more our consciousness is free to follow the infinitely subtle texture of reality as it actually unfolds. Separation reduces the connectedness of our consciousness with the true nature of reality - 'smooths over the ripples' rather like plastering removes the contours in a wall built out of brick. This means that all we see is a dim blur of what is really there. We are conditioned to believe this "dim blur" is the full extent of reality – having no other experience, why would we ever question it? You will know when you have got the insight – you are likely to experience the moment as a huge visceral wave of color, beauty, sound, texture, smell and sense of aliveness sweeping in to your consciousness, accompanied by an unimaginably deep and still sense of inner peace as your compulsive thinking stops, the ego-castle in the sky collapses and is replaced by a deep and profound sense of wonder of “what actually is” in the eternal here and now. Can you imagine that we daily miss all of this wonder, due to our grasping for pleasurable experiences and trying to “become” something? We continually fail to spot (and therefore completely miss out on) the hidden, unimagined gems that are ours for the taking in a fresh, pristine, and totally unimagined normal everyday reality of the moment.

Correcting one's delusions regarding time also exposes and corrects a key mistake of identity of being. It is possible to hold the belief that our psychological identity is based on form (e.g. our bodies, our material possessions and our life situations) only when operating from the premise that we can ever be “incomplete” in the “now” - in other words when we are waiting on some future situation or event in order to be happy, or “psychologically complete”.

Realizing that our memories and fantasies are mind-movies, not the actual separately accessible realities we had taken them to be causes us to discover that the content we experience in our life is impermanent – it comes and goes (and when it's gone it's gone)! This in turn causes us to see that it lacks the permanence needed to provide us with the absolute identity we inherently know we have.

Our true identity is therefore revealed to be the single remaining common factor in our experience – the process which knows form rather than the form itself. “I” am pure, abstract consciousness without the arbitrary content.

Moving from content to process implies a shift from “problem” to “solution”. You are not your physical body, which without anything else in the picture is clearly just so much organic matter. Move away from identification with the physical matter on which the process of evolution acts to being the very process of life and evolution itself, and you'll find that “working on” becomes "growing", and “finished” becomes "fruition". A desire for separation and division transforms into a realization of interconnectedness and relationship. Battling for survival against the universe becomes actually being the very universe itself, and a universe that, whatever it's current state is, is always totally OK with you. Do you want someone else to do something for you? “Making them do it” becomes “Acting through them with the power of your inspiration”. Don't wait for “a separate them” to do it - you as a “process” can actually inhabit someone else's body by taking responsibility to inspire them with your vision and passion of the truth. What happens, if before their death, somebody, without making, forcing, pushing, even without any words whatsoever inspires someone else sufficiently with their life's vision for the seed of it's truth to take root in the earth of a new body? When the old body dies, in what real sense can the “life” have said to have died, when the passion of the process that previously made the corpse act upon the earth still lives on in a different body? How many people still live inside of you? How much of your life's passion is due to the inspiration of other people's example, your “life heroes”, people currently living and perhaps people who have now died? Can you sense their passion, their love, as an actual living process inside of you? How do you think those persons came to become so inspirational – who may have previously inspired them that they were able to walk so tall as to be able to inspire yourself? Isn't perhaps the definition of inspiration “that which works on us from the inside”? Isn't this simply because, deep within us all, we already know we hold an inner, absolute truth? You may not be able to articulate the specifics yet, but don't you sense a feeling of deep inner truth deep within the core of your being? There may be obscuration in the way which makes it a bit hard to see sometimes (especially on days things “go wrong” in your life), but who really doubts it's reality within themselves? Don't inspirational persons always operate by connecting our consciousness with the the actuality of our own inner truth, by helping our consciousness illuminate (which is distinct from actually specifying) whatever unique path we ourselves as unique individuals need to take to get there?

Identification with process has a further significance for humanity. Process is abstract, so by identification with an abstract something you suddenly find the core of your identity moves entirely outside not only time, but also outside of space and matter. Perhaps a more traditional term for this abstract “process of life” is simply the word “Spirit”.

So identification with process creates an immortal, timeless identity. It's not that you never die, rather it's that you realize that you were never born in the first place, because “birth” is just yet another example of “becoming”. That most uncomfortable paradox our ego consciousness confronts us with becomes fully resolved:

"If I am a real, true, separate identity, existing absolutely, now in time, as indeed it feels as if I am, how can I possibly conceive of the time after my death, when it appears this absolute, real, and true 'I' will no longer exist in any manner. Doesn't this amount to truth and false co-existing? Isn't this impossible?".

The answer, as with all paradoxes, comes from the unimaginable, and is simply that the “I” that poses the question of life and death, the ego center of our consciousness, is a castle in the air, a delusion, and therefore already does not exist.

The apparent paradox of birth and death is just one more example of how the human consciousness keeps two independent but contradictory dualistic “truths” separate from each other by the use of a non-existent temporal continuum (e.g. the perceived time between birth and death).

The operation of our individual ego-consciousness will by their very nature constantly work at splitting “the truth” into more and more dualistic entities, each of which by themselves are part of, but in a sense always a step further away from the bigger truth. Nowhere is this more visible than in the world's religions, where the human race at large seems to be pursuing a continual expansion of different beliefs.

Even the beliefs themselves eventually split and separate. How many “Christianities” were there at the time of Jesus? How many are there now? If it's genuinely an all-inclusive, all-pervading total truth we are talking about here (isn't that what religion is supposed to be?), why do we ever need more than 1 truth? Is it possible that there might simply be an error of perception, which, if corrected, suddenly makes all religions seem to be pointing back inwards, all spatially separated like the spokes of a wheel but pointing back in towards a single central kernel of truth? Perhaps we are just looking along the spokes in the wrong direction! We have got the world's religions the wrong way round, we are seeing divergence when the actuality, if we care to correct our view is convergence? When looked at from this perspective, from the existential truth of human unity rather than the delusion of ego-separation, the multiple differing and contradictory spiritual paths in the world are not in any way divisive - they are each just helping to add further detail to a bigger overriding picture, and show the possibility of a different path towards it.

Hopefully it's obvious to you that what I have written so far has large associations with Buddhism and Hinduism, but how about Christianity? These days it's quite popular to sneer at Christians, but have you ever reflected on the meaning of “original sin”, perhaps interpreting the meaning of the word “sin” as mere “psychological error”, rather than the more common (but arguably rather un-Christian) judgmental statement of value or worth regarding the sinner? Is there any significance in the Adam and Eve story where it is indicated that our separation from God was related to “our use of knowledge” (which is always stored in our memory, isn't it?). What “psychological device” might man have used to separate from God? We are told that this “separation” resulted in our “learning” of the opposites of good and evil. Can you see that the concept of “the opposites of good and evil” is a dualistic entity of thought, which we have seen can only exist in a consciousness that believes in psychological time? Is it possible that unenlightened persons who conceive of God as an entity, extrinsic to the universe, are actually just projecting their own inner ego-God nature? And that for the historical Jesus, God was actually seen as intrinsic to the universe? Is it possible our “separation from God” was really just our psychological separation from the universe, our perceived loss of intimate relationship with it, through the birth of dualistic thought?

Is it possible that “atonement” merely means intellectually acknowledging an error in our understanding regarding the physical nature of the universe, and that “redemption” merely means “putting right”, as a direct seeing psychological insight by our consciousness? And that “revelation” is the direct perception of the actual nature of the physical universe that must follow? If the historical Jesus was really enlightened, what do you imagine he might have been trying to explain to us, perhaps in terms of physics and psychology? Is there a sense of some sort of “deeper eternal truth of life” implicit in what must be regarded as the most profound inspirational act in history, that of freely offering one's life via the most grizzly death imaginable for the “sin” of humanity? In what hard logical way, in terms of an evolving human consciousness, might the “sin”, (or “error”) of humanity possibly be “corrected” by this inspirational offering?

Did you know the exact same strands of thought regarding our use of “psychological time” exist within the traditions of Islamic Sufi mystics?

When will we start waking up to the ultimate paradox of the human race? Of our deep internal contradictions - our desperate need for relationship, community, love, connectedness combined with our (always temporally separated) needs of individuality, separation, uniqueness, individual power, and selfish control of our environment?

Why not think about where all this actually comes from inside yourself?

Extrapolating future states of consciousness

2007-02-27T08:04:00.000-08:00

It seems unlikely that our current state of consciousness is 'final', rather that it is more likely to be just another evolutionary stepping stone.

How might future consciousness be? it is clearly impossible to experientially know how it might be without actually possessing it (a dog can no more guess at how the reflective consciousness possessed by humans “might be”), although if it is possible to describe future psychic states in some way, perhaps it is possible to plot a course towards them?

Characterizing psychic development in life
A means of describing likely future states of consciousness might be to characterize the process of psychic evolution through time and extrapolate this descriptive function forwards into the future.

A key characteristic of evolution is acceleration. That is to say the more life evolves, the faster it evolves. 4,000 million years ago, basic single celled life appears on earth, it took most of this time between then and now (3,000 million years) just to move from single celled to simple multicellular life. 600 million years ago, platyhelminthe (flatworms) appear - the earliest animals to have a rudimentary brain, only 300 million years later and already complex beings are starting to evolve lungs enabling them to move out of the sea and colonize the land. 180 million years ago, conscious mammals with highly complex behaviors have appeared, 0.5 million years ago self-conscious man is starting to appear, and in the last 0.0001 million years man has moved though the age of enlightenment and fundamentally changed the face of the planet.

When plotted with respect to time, evolutionary rate of change would doubtless look like a smooth exponential curve, 4 billion years ago things barely changed in the space of a million years, this compared with the last 500 years which have seen the face of the planet fundamentally change due to the technological evolution of the human race. However, focusing specifically on our need to characterize the development of consciousness, I think it's possible to look at the evolution of life and find paradigm shifts - points where a distinct step was achieved towards the direction of where we are today, and where the rate of change of evolution can be seen to have stepped up another gear.

The points on the evolutionary curve where psychic paradigm shifts seem to be visibly established are highlighted by examining the following 4 stages of evolution:

Stage 1:
Primitive forms of life including plant life was, (and in the case of plants, still is) at the mercy of the elements. Generally lacking sensory organs and the power of movement, such life forms are unable to meaningfully direct their reaction with their environment. Their "strategy" for finding nutrients and an agreeable environment is almost non-existent, the organism simply has to "be lucky" and have the elements (e.g. wind, rain and water currents) provide them through chance. Despite the fact that the ability to move around and direct their reaction with the environment would offer huge benefits, there appears to be a reason that plant life has never (with few exceptions) evolved this ability. It would seem likely that the issue is simply one of power – for a plant to “pull up it's roots and go for a 30 minute walk” would likely require many months of sitting stationary, collecting solar energy (it's ultimate power source) before it would have accumulated sufficient energy to enable it to do so. Whilst there is nothing theoretically stopping it from doing this every so often, the action of moving would be so expensive for the organism that it is somewhat unlikely that even in an entire lifetime, a situation would arise where such movement would add more survival value than the huge cost of the investment needed to make it take place. This factor alone removes almost all evolutionarily pressure for plant life to develop movement – the rare exceptions to this are generally carnivorous plants such as the Venus fly trap (and where there is obviously a direct energy boost pay-off related to the act of moving).

Stage 2:
Simple animal life with the beginnings of a brain (e.g. platyhelminthe flatworms) no longer require "luck" to locate nutrients and an agreeable environment, they have basic sensory organs with which to analyze their environment, they have the ability to move and therefore the ability to choose and effect their environment. And most importantly, a basic brain is programmed with a set of evolutionary selected strategies for doing so successfully. This evolutionary step, where interaction with the environment becomes directed and driven according to a “likely to be successful” strategy is a huge evolutionary improvement, and has been reached by the fact that the organism has evolved to consume plants for fuel. It's ability to do this gives it ready access to a sufficiently high concentrations of energy that the issue of cost to the organism of movement becomes irrelevant. As a “predator on plants”, an animal's ability to move gives it a huge advantage over them, but in rather the same way as cows are unlikely to ever go extinct due to humans eating them, animal life can never actually over-consume plant resources without threatening it's own survival. This fact protects plant life, and allows them to occupy a secure niche despite very clearly having been “out evolved” by animal life. Returning to the platyhelminthes, the brain of such a basic organism is likely to be "hard wired", meaning that whilst the organism possesses complex behaviors, it is unable to learn new complex behaviors within the lifespan of a single generation. However, the fundamental interaction between the organism and it's environment can now be evolved just by selecting new behaviors – something much easier to arrange than fundamentally changing the physical structure of the organism itself over time (for more simple life-forms, virtually the only means of significantly altering the interaction between the organism and it's environment), and therefore allows a much more adaptable organism. In a sense, what has happened in this evolutionary stage is that processes beneficial to life (such as facilitate the intake of nutrients or perhaps escape from dangerous environments) have been identified through “evolutionary groping” and moved from a fulfillment system of random chance (single celled organism or plant being fed by or moved about by wind or currents in the water) into a directed behavioral system causing movement driven by strategy which increases the chance that it's needs are reliably met.

Stage 3:
Conscious life - it's quite obvious when observing many higher mammals (such as a pet dog) that they are extremely aware of their environment and are analyzing it intently. And, if there is a trick to be learned that might help them find food or advance their chances of survival in some other way, it will very rapidly be picked up and integrated into their survival repertoire. This differs fundamentally from platyhelminthes who are unable to reprogram their complex behaviors within a single generation, and can only identify and incorporate new strategies into themselves by the process of “evolutionary groping” over many generations. To use a computer parallel,the behaviors that are hard wired in the case of the platyhelminthes are in the case of a conscious organism now stored as re programmable "software", with a fixed overriding process engaged in the function of self-programming the organism, thereby allowing the organism to learn. The organism is able to consciously recognize successful outcome (the dog enjoyed the biscuit) and rapidly learn the behavior which lead to it (the dog had done something that pleased it's master). This confers a huge evolutionarily advantage on the animal – any organism that possesses consciousness will almost inevitably be higher up the food chain than more simple forms of life such as the platyhelminthes for the simple reason that there is an extra order of complexity to their behavior which in a 1 on 1 situation will lead to rapid dominance by the conscious organism. Lower forms of life have therefore been completely out-evolved by conscious life, although are protected in a similar manner to the plant kingdom by their place in the food chain. In a sense, what has happened in the evolutionary stage of conscious life is that a higher level process beneficial to survival (the ability to identify and incorporate new behavioral strategies) which had been previously fulfilled by “evolutionary groping” through generations has been identified and implemented within the organism as a directed system, increasing the chance that new beneficial behaviors are reliably identified and rapidly incorporated into the organism's survival repertoire. The process which provides for identification and learning successful strategies gives the organism a subjective experience of consciousness – the top level object for it's psychological analysis has become it's own reaction with it's environment.

Stage 4:
Self-conscious life emerges - human beings have pre-programmed strategies like the platyhelminthes, we have the ability to reprogram our behaviors on the fly like all higher mammals. But we also have a further higher level psychological process which manages and adds strategy to how and when we reprogram our behaviors. Animals such as dogs do not direct their learning, their strategy for picking up useful new behaviors is as random as the strategy used by plant life for finding nutrients – to happen across them by chance. Human beings on the other hand do apply strategy to their learning - I did not accidentally learn electronic engineering and find it to be an improved means of making a living, rather a higher level strategic process identified a desirable skill-set and directed my learning processes towards it. This creates huge evolutionary advantage – despite the fact that the rates of pay for working as an electronic engineer are considerably higher than what may be obtained running around a field rounding up sheep by barking at them, it will never occur to a dog to start the process of learning because it has no conscious visibility of the eventual benefits. Clearly our self-consciousness puts us at the very top of the food chain, all other life below us now depends upon us recognizing some value that it has to ourselves, if none is seen it is rapidly out-competed and forced into extinction. Our higher level strategic management process is to “programmable behaviors” rather like a dog's “programmable behaviors” are to platyhelminthes “fixed behaviors” – they both give drive, direction and strategy to a process that was previously fulfilled by “evolutionary groping”. The human being subjectively experiences the interaction of his top level control process and his second level control process as an awareness of his own consciousness – self consciousness. The top-level object for our psychological analysis has become our own consciousness.

To re-cap and re-frame in terms of a mathematical progression which will allow us to extrapolate future states of consciousness, platyhelminthes are programmed with behaviors – defined here as the ability to identify and select a strategically advantageous state towards which it should move from it's current state. This amounts to a process driving a “change in state versus time” for the purpose of maintaining the identity (existence) of the organism. Expressed mathematically the total effect is called a first order control system.

A dog does this but also has an extra, higher level process – it has the ability to identify and select (learn) strategically advantageous behaviors it should move towards having in the future. This amounts to a process driving a “change in state of change in state versus time” , for the purpose of maintaining the identity (longer-term existence) of the organism. Expressed mathematically the total effect is called a second order control system.

A human does all this, but also has an extra, higher level process - it has the ability to identify and select strategically advantageous learning it should undertake in the future. This amounts to a process driving a “change in state of change in state of change in state versus time” (think about that last statement for a minute!), for the purpose of maintaining the identity (even longer-term existence) of the organism. Expressed mathematically the total effect is called a third order control system.

If you are having difficulty understanding the idea of control systems, try and understand them thus:

You feel your finger burning, so you:

(a) Rapidly move your hand away from the point of heat. Problem solved, but there is still a risk it might happen again – this is called a first order response, and is the kind of way a platyhelminthe will live out it's entire life.

(b) Instead of the above, you become aware of the fact that the burning is due to someone following you around with a cigarette lighter trying to burn your finger! You react by destroying the lighter. Problem solved, and with no more lighters in the room it won't happen again for a while – this is called a second order response, and is the kind of way that a clever dog will live out it's life.

(c) Instead of the (better, but still not optimum) second order response, you decide to speak to the person in order to attempt to understand why they are trying to burn you. You discover that they are irritated at you for something you have done, and therefore a simple apology from yourself is all that is needed to ensure that the problem stops and will likely never occur again. This is a third order response, and clearly generates the most elegant solution to the problem described. Reacting to problems in this way is something only human beings are fully able to do.

Sometimes in life, a simple first order response is all that is needed to resolve the problem, the more complex the problem is however, the higher order of solution will be required to resolve it conclusively.

Returning to the subject of evolution, it seems that each time a paradigm shift is reached where the evolutionary rate of change accelerates, an attribute of the organism(s) who are experiencing evolutionarily acceleration is that they always possess a yet higher order psychic information control system.

Is this higher order control system the root cause of increased evolvability in the organism, or merely a by-product of a deeper reason? There is good reason to believe that it is the former. It is apparent to anyone who cares to study control theory that a correctly designed higher order control system has the potential to react in a far more decisive manner in it's efforts towards preserving system state when compared to a lower order control system (in our case, 'preserved system state' represents the continued existence of the organism in the face of the need to adapt or react in some especially complex way).

Furthermore, a new higher order control system can be created from the previous lower order system through a process of natural evolution and selection.

The conversion of the organism from an Nth order control system to a N+1th order system can be achieved by adding a new top level control process, whose function it is to modify and adapt the previous top level control process. The required function for this new top level control process is identified in the pattern of experience created by successful “evolutionary groping” through time of the current top level psychic control process.

Therefore, as a new order is added to an organism's control systems, evolution is effectively “discovering“ another facet of it's own action on life, and implementing that knowledge into future generations as a new top level active strategic psychic process.

In other words, the new top level process is in a sense a description of an higher order facet of the overall process of evolution. So that “Evolutionarily groping for new behaviors over many generations” in the case of platyhelminthes evolves to “actively learning new behaviors in a single generation” in the case of the dog's higher order control process.

In a dog eat dog world, it is easy to see the evolutionary pressure which guides the construction of higher and higher order psychic control systems, arriving with some inevitably at the human race. Charles Darwin made the following point: "it's not the strongest nor most intelligent of the species that survive; it is the one most adaptable to change". In other words, adaptability is THE key survival trait. By definition, the organism possessing the highest order control system will always be by far the most adaptable, the forces of evolution will therefore provide a continual pressure on life to build higher and higher order psychic control systems as organisms bid to out-compete each other.

As each new order is added, an organism acquires a “strategic vision” that extends further and further into the future. This enables strategies with large (but long term) payoff to be successfully identified and pursued, it enables consequences of behavior which may have a short-term payoff but a long term danger to be avoided.

It is surely clear that by the action of successively embedding itself as an active psychic process within the organism it is causing to evolve, evolution will necessarily accelerate it's own fulfillment in an exponential fashion that appears to match exactly what we see when looking at the time-line of evolution of life on earth.

The above train of thought leads to the following major conclusion:

Evolution inevitably causes higher and higher order psychic control processes to form, thereby accelerating it's own fulfillment. Using evolution versus time as a frame of reference (arguably the ultimate frame of reference of all organic life, including ourselves), evolution can therefore be said to be progressive and have a direction, and crucially a direction which we can now predict.

This argument is visibly supported by a predictable exponential increase in the rate of change of life on earth.

Extrapolating future consciousness
What is the likelihood of life developing a fourth order psychic model? Given that evolution has already successively developed a first, then a second and with humans a third order system, and that there is obvious evolutionary advantage towards continuing the progression, what reason(s) if any do we have to suppose that it won't happen?

In the case of humans, we are by our planetary changes (for better and for worse) increasing the levels of uncertainty which each of us have to deal with in our futures – “future uncertainty” is always grist for the evolutionary mill, tending to generate evolutionary pressures for yet more complex control networks to form, so we ourselves are likely to be increasing the pressure which may drive our own psychological evolution towards a forth order system.

If all of the above does in fact hold water, we now have at least some sort of basis from which to extrapolate the attributes of the next stage of psychic development:

Humans to eventually develop a fourth order psychological control system
A new top level psychological process, responsible for managing and directing the development of our current top-level process (the latter is that which currently gives strategy to our learning and discovery)
The new process brings an increased sense of meaning and purpose, because that which was previously reached unconsciously by “evolutionary groping” is now integrated into the psyche's active manner of operation
Total psychological structure has become a bigger, more complete reflection of evolution itself, as another facet of evolution is “self-discovered” and added to our psyche
Psychological structures we currently regard as “fixed and given” instead become programmable within the lifetime of a single generation
Changes in our being of a magnitude that we currently associate with evolutionary timescales become possible within the lifespan of a single generation
Evolutionary rate of change dramatically accelerates – those possessing of the new consciousness to become by far the dominant organism on earth perhaps within a few tens of generations

If our current top level psychic process gives strategy to our learning and personal development, it seems that a higher order process would be concerned with giving us top level strategy regarding the actual direction where increased personal development is ultimately taking us, because this is the function which is needed to add a further order of vision and strategy to our overall behavior. We know when we have achieved successful intellectual development mainly because we then notice the benefits of it, although the process by which we uncover these little moments of personal enlightenment tend to be by blind “evolutionary groping”. A higher level psychic process would give us definitive guidance as to the actual direction which we should be trying to develop ourselves.

Just as the acquisition of a third order process allowed our consciousness to perceive 'self', the acquisition of a new top level process directing our self-consciousness must be subjectively experienced as becoming “conscious of our self-consciousness”, implying an awakening to a much larger total reality we currently cannot experientially “know” but must already exist within.

With humans, our current third order system is capable of giving strategy which extends for the duration of the lifetime of an entire generation (e.g. a young man paying in to a pension fund). Because adding further orders to a control system will increase the timescales over which it is developing strategy, it seems likely that an evolved human possessing a fourth order system would feel a strong conscious connection with events that took place far in the past (potentially long before their birth) and with events that might take place far in the future (potentially long after their death).

Because it seems a new higher order control system is always arrived at as an evolutionarily “conclusion” of the pattern visible in blindly acquired “knowledge” built up over time as a function of evolutionary groping by the old top level control process, if we are to look for sign of a new order of psychic processing emerging, we should be looking for a “sense of process that describes our own selves” within the accumulated output of the conclusions reached by blind “evolutionary groping” of our current top-level psychic processing.

Because our top level psychic processing is effectively manifest as our scientific research and philosophical reflections, the discovery of raw knowledge which are output as a result of it in effect represents the very coal-face of evolution itself.

And in fact, there painted in the coal face of emerging human knowledge, we can see just such a picture of a greater process emerging, and one whose integration as an active psychic process would fully fulfill all of the requirements that are outlined above – namely that of the very process of the evolution of life itself.

It seems at least possible therefore, that what we are talking about is nothing less than a shift in the point of “I” in human consciousness away from the individual organism and instead towards a center which includes the entire process of life on earth changing through time. In other words, evolution becoming conscious of itself, amounting to nothing less than the next “I think, therefore I am” moment for organic life here on our planet, as the colossal supra-personal organism we call “earth” finally stumbles into a state of full experiential self-consciousness inside our own collective heads!

This evolutionary psychic transformation that is seeded from our intellectual output, the hard work of our own third order psychic processes, would fully fulfill the criteria of “an awakening into a much larger total reality we currently cannot experientially know but already exist within”, it would also completely fulfill the criteria of adding an extra order of vision and strategy to our movement through time. For where else are we already going, other than exactly where evolution is already taking us? It also gives us a scope of vision that is supra-personal, over durations of time that extend forwards and backwards beyond the lifespan of a single generation. Finally, as we have seen, “consciousness of evolution” also completely fulfills the condition of a bigger overriding process becoming visible within the accumulated knowledge built up by the “evolutionary groping” of our current top level psychological processing.

It is important to point out that “knowing” about evolution (as most of us already do) is not enough. To be a fully conscious fourth order being, a person would have to internalize this knowledge as an active psychic process, allowing them to have experiential consciousness of the fact that they ARE the totality of life on earth, extending back to the very beginning.

How would this actually feel? Because the new top level control process is adding very long term strategy, it would not be subjectively experienced in immediate, intense and compulsive day to day urges (which are always the product of lower order psychological responses). Rather it would be experienced as a slight sense of detachment from the selfish wants, interests and emotions of the merely self-conscious being, combined with a sense of “bigger picture” which makes the trials, tribulations and even death of the self-conscious being feel somewhat less important. Such people would feel less defensive of their third order intellectual positions and much more able to respect differing opinions in others, often preferring to view a difference of opinion as their own “inability to understand” the other's intellectual position as a result of having different third order psychic processes, rather than taking the stance that the other person has “got it wrong”. The experience of a group of fourth order beings who happen to meet each other might be that they are all individually “looking in at” their separate self-consciousness from the exact same shared central point of consciousness, giving them a deep sense of unspoken mutual connection and trust which they would instantly recognize in one other.

It may be a concern to some that what I am talking about here, this “shared common purpose”, amounts to humanity becoming no more than an ant-hill, resulting in a loss of individuality and resultant lack of creativity in society.

This is because the stifling of creativity and individuality as an outcome of a shared common purpose is exactly how my conclusions will appear to anybody attempting to understand my words from the perspective of a third order consciousness.

Sadly, (although completely obviously to a mathematician!) it is not possible to fit the concept of the fourth order model I am trying to describe into a third order consciousness, so unless somehow by wrestling to understand my words, the transformation in the individual is suddenly made from a third order consciousness to an infant fourth order consciousness, they are doomed to re-map the new fourth order I am trying to describe back on to their third order process when attempting to model and predict it's effects.

And in that context, their conclusions are correct - were we all to share the same common third order process, we would indeed be an ant-hill, a community of psychological clones, stripped of any sense of individuality!

But it cannot be stressed enough, individuality at our current highest psychological level (the third order level) is and always will be ESSENTIAL for the evolution of life - without it, evolution itself would stop. Today, “individuality” of our third order psychic processes are the miners at the coal face of evolution, expanding our science and understanding of the universe by an un-directed process of blind evolutionarily groping as we search for new ideas and understandings.

A new fourth order process does not add some new common purpose that smothers our third order psychic processes and turns us all into psychological clones as in some science fiction horror story, for the very simple reason that the “common purpose” I am talking about is actually already there and has always been there, for every one of the 4 billion years of evolution of life on earth. All I am talking about in this paper is becoming psychologically awakened to it.

It is my personal belief that anyone who chooses not to become conscious at this level dramatically increase the risk (with respect to those that do) that their third order process – mere self consciousness - is progressing down an evolutionary blind alley, dooming their psychological processes to future evolutionary irrelevance, because effectively they are choosing to continue perusing a “blind evolutionarily groping” strategy towards developing their third order process even though we now see in this document that man has access to an improved process, and one which has stood the test of time to the scale of 4 billion years of resounding success!

They also risk failing to spot and exalt key individuality and creativity in their colleagues, because they will be unable to recognize the long term evolutionary strategic benefit of some “crazy sounding” idea someone close to them might have, which has no pay off for perhaps several generations but a colossal pay-off when it does finally mature. Far from stifling individuality and creativity as some might think, possessing a fourth order psychic process imbues the owner with the vision and foresight to ensure they are never guilty of stifling genuine creativity in others.

Evolutionarily outcomes
In what ways would humans benefit from this extra order of psychological processing? The benefits could not already be more apparent! In the impossible event that the entire population of earth to acquire it overnight, a fourth order psychological process giving shared strategic vision as to our evolutionary direction would not merely align the entire world's population to a common purpose, it would be a purpose which would also be aligned with the interests of the biosphere at large on which the future of humans so obviously depends:

Common vision and resultant complete and total collaboration of the entire planet causing a colossal explosion of global economic power and scientific development
Reduction in dysfunctional destructive personal behavior (crime, violence, addictive drug use etc)
Reduction the amount of global starvation and suffering wealthy nations would accept
No wars
No unsustainable levels of global resource consumption
No unsustainable levels of environmental pollution

Of course, fourth order consciousness of every person on the planet will not happen overnight, but I believe the current state of earth is a direct symptom, or “premonition” that humanity is in fact poised this very moment to collectively make the jump.

The huge explosion of knowledge and scientific output that we have witnessed in the the last few hundred years since the start of the aptly-named age of enlightenment indicates evidence of our current perfection and mastery of our third order psychological processes.

But if for a moment we view the entire planet as a single organic being, and ask it to lie on the psychiatrist's couch, we can see very clearly a high level of deluded and self destructive behavior present in it's unified action, represented by the sum of our combined actions.

We as individual third order consciousnesses depend upon the integrity of the biosphere for our very existence, and yet we see ourselves degrading and polluting it in an unsustainable manner – this clearly amounts to the deluded behavior of an intravenous drug addict, who in a sense realizes his own self destructive behavior but lacks the long term strategy and vision (e.g. Higher order psychological model) to realize that an action which may give him instant gratification is poisoning his greater being and therefore counter to his long term interests.

The reflective self-consciousness of men on earth is now at it's absolute peak, and the “destructive behavior” we observe is a direct result of the colossal power our third order consciousness gives us (science, engineering) combined with a total lack of the long-term vision that could ensure this immense power is used solely for our collective long term betterment.

As any engineer will know, when a dynamic has become too complex to model and contain with a control system and therefore has become unstable, he needs to move to a higher order of control to solve the problem.

What are direct examples of fourth order strategy in action?
This paper, my own use of a “sense of process” within evolution to extrapolate future states of consciousness that in turn might have strategic significance for mankind is the first example I have seen of myself using it.

Do we have to stop there?
Some time in the distant future when planet earth has become a “fully self-conscious evolutionary process”, it may start to glimpse the sight of an even higher level process in the data that it collects as an output of the “evolutionary groping” of it's top level fourth order process. If such a higher order exists, it would define a bigger overriding process that the evolution of life itself is engaged in fulfilling, so incredibly, it seems as if a fifth order psychic process would in fact be giving strategic vision of what we might call the “ultimate question” regarding the meaning of life. Of course, this answer is only “ultimate” to us because we are only just starting to glimpse the possibility of a fourth order vision. In much the same way that stone age man was not conscious of the process of evolution, it is totally impossible for our current state of consciousness to apprehend what anything further up might possibly mean :)