Vanilla Essence’ing

“What do we mean by saying that existence precedes essence? We mean that man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world-and defines himself afterward.”

Jean-Paul Sartre

There is no ‘essence’

When we first built our house, we came to our empty block of land and there was a pile of lumber, cladding, roofing iron and stumps sitting on the ground. Over the next couple of weeks this pile of material turned into a house. The same material was now sitting on the block, in the same location, but now it’s ‘essence’ had been transformed from a pile to a house. When we look at a pile of timber, it is the same timber molecules that exist in a tree, and it can be the same timber molecules in a house. The material is the same but the arrangement is different. And the affordance and experience of that material varies profoundly and markedly. A pile of timber on the ground won’t keep you dry, warm and protected on a winter’s night. A tree won’t do that particularly well either, especially on a wild and stormy night. But arrange that timber into a house and you are kept warm, dry and safe. The ‘essence’ of house is not imbued in the timber molecules. You could take the same piece of timber and turn it into a house, a rocking chair, a kitchen spatula or even, if you were skilled enough, into a rose.

Let’s take the example of a rose. What is a rose? It’s a flower of the Rosaceae family. But this includes strawberries, pears, almonds and cherries. So what is a rose? We now have genetically engineered roses that are black! There’s even a rose that is rainbow colored.


With a bit of genetic tinkering magic we could create a black rose that smells of lavender. Would it still be a rose? If I took a nano-fabricator, a device that builds objects one atom at a time, and I took the atoms from a piece of lumber… atoms of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen etc. and built a rose one atom at a time, so that before you was a manufactured rose. But it was identical atom by atom to a ‘real’ rose, it looked identical, smelled identical and felt identical. I’d argue that if you didn’t know I’d ‘manufactured’ it, that you’d think it was a ‘real’ rose. That it had the ‘essence’ of a rose. And isn’t this just what the rose bush does, it manufactures (so to speak) the rose, atom by atom, molecule by molecule in the growth process, so that it can seed and propagate itself. In essence, it is ‘rose-ing’.

Looking deeper – arrangements of energy

So let’s look a little deeper into this idea of ‘essence’. We spoke above of atoms and molecules. So let’s use those to explore this notion. Elements like carbon, oxygen, copper and zinc etc. are made of atoms. Atoms themselves are made of arrangements of protons, neutrons and electrons. These in turn are made of sub-particles, all the way down to what physicists suspect are tiny multi-dimensional wiggling string like energy quanta. Indeed, the field of quantum physics has shown that at the smallest levels, particles are really just probability distributions of energy. And this is backed up by Einstein’s discovery that energy and matter are one and the same,

E is energy and M is mass. You can convert matter to energy and vice versa. So atoms are arrangements of energy!

Now with this insight under your belt, let’s take a look at ‘essence’. If you took a piece of carbon, a black lump of soot or graphite for example. It is relatively hard (indeed, diamond, which is a form of carbon is one of the hardest elements known to man), it tastes like carbon, it is black etc. And it is made up of 6 protons, 6 neutrons and 6 electrons. These components arranged together create a substance that appears to have a particular ‘essence’. But if we add another proton, neutron and electron to this arrangement, we get a very different result. We now have Nitrogen, the clear, odourless, invisible gas that makes up 80% of the Earth’s atmosphere and consists of 7 protons, 7 neutrons and 7 electrons. And underlying all this it’s just energy. So with the same component processes, rearranged in different amounts, we end up with a completely different apparent ‘essence’. It’s as if I was building a house and I added some extra timber and ended up with a very different result. The material is the same, it’s just arranged in a very different way and produces a very different result. And this is what we mistakenly call ‘essence’.

So I hope I’m convincing you that there is no ‘essence’. There is just arrangings of energy and process. And these arrangings, lead to propensities for action, interaction and the production of phenomena and affordance. And this is an incredibly powerful and profound insight that opens up new possibilities that you don’t get if you think things have fixed ‘essences’.

Ancient Wisdom

Now these insights have been known about for thousands of years. This knowledge actually predates the erroneous Greek philosophies of Plato and Aristotle. Buddhism for example is closest to the scientific understanding of the nature of reality, in that it makes a strong and accurate assertion that all phenomena are empty of any essence,

“What is the reality of things just as it is? It is the absence of essence. Unskilled persons whose eye of intelligence is obscured by the darkness of delusion conceive of an essence of things and then generate attachment and hostility with regard to them.”

Buddhapālita

But along the way, we got derailed in the West by the assertions of what Edward de Bono calls the ‘gang of three’ (Socrates, Plato and Aristotle). Plato in his Dialogues propounded that the universe is made up of fixed ‘Forms’ which are eternal, unchanging and complete and that real concrete bodies are the imperfect copies or instantiations of these underlying essence forms. Aristotle moved the Forms of Plato to the nucleus of the individual thing and said that they made up its essence. But as we have seen, at the quantum level and above, there is no fixed essence, no platonic ideal Forms. There is just arrangings of energy and process and the arrangings lead to the behaviours and propensities. And this we naively and mistakenly generalize as the form of the physical entities. But the Buddhists had it right. Science has unequivocally shown that there is no fixed essence or substance, it’s all inherently empty of essence.

There is no ‘essence’ of You!

So there is no inherent essence. There’s no vanilla essence of ‘you’ deep within you, hiding like a platonic ideal. You do not have an ‘essence’. What you do ‘have’, (and this is powerful), is a current arranging of a huge myriad of complex processing that leads to certain propensities for action and responding. ‘You’ are an emergence from the processes that currently constitute your ‘being’. You are a human becoming. There is no ‘essence’ for you to find or discover. And this is the point of my book mBraining and the associated ‘mBraining Evolve your World‘ personal evolution workshop! It’s not about doing a re-birth to find your ‘true’ self. There is no fixed platonic essence you need to connect with and discover. It’s ‘Evolve your World’. It’s about evolving. About changing and creating.

As we teach in mBraining and Evolve, you are inherently creative! You are the author of your self’ing. The self is not fixed but is an emergent phenomena that comes out of your multiple braining. The intelligencing of your body/mind, of your distributed neural intelligences and other underlying processes, gives rise to your ‘self’. And this self-ing and the very neurons that generate it are adaptive, plastic and able to evolve and change. You can do conscious evolution. You can direct your ongoing creation, your evolving and your becoming.

So it’s not about essence. There’s no vanilla essence of you. In reality, there’s just the arranging of you’ing. And the insight of mBraining Evolve is that you are able to evolve yourself wisely to create a more generative way of doing you’ing!

Nothing is fixed, all is flowing

As the great somatic therapist Moshe Feldenkrais pointed out many years ago, “There is nothing permanent or compulsive in your system except what you believe to be so”. So throw away any notions of fixed essences. There is no vanilla essence of the human soul. That road leads to a dead end. You as a human are amazingly adaptive, creative and flexible.

"Every brain evolves in its ability to operate as a processor, as a receiver, as a user of information."

Dr. Michael Merzenich

We have yet to find the limits to what humans can aspire to. We can evolve new neural structurings. We can evolve our minds and bodies. With greater scientific understandings we are learning about the power of epigenetics and how it is influenced by thought and belief. We are learning to tap into the intelligence that exists throughout our bodies. We are gaining a power to become the highest expressing of the human spirit. Evolving your world opens up totally new possibilities in your life and your world. This is its gift and its power.

life enhancing thoughts

Grant

Using the mBIT Prime Functions of the Head, Heart and Gut Brains

If you follow this blog you'll know that over the last 2 years I've been productively busy researching and developing a new field of personal development called mBIT (multiple Brain Integration Techniques) and time-binding the models and distinctions from this field into a new book titled 'mBraining - Using your multiple brains to do cool stuff'.

The Prime Functions of the Head, Heart and Gut Brains

One of the key insights from mBIT is that each of your brains (head, heart and gut brains) has its own 'Prime Functions'. Each brain has a fundamentally different form of intelligence; they utilize different language, have different goals and operate under different criteria. In other words, your head, heart and gut have different ways of processing the world, of communicating, operating and addressing their own concerns and domains of expertise.


mBrain Prime Functions

Heart Brain Prime Functions

·        Emoting

·        Relational Affect

·        Values

Gut Brain Prime Functions

·        Mobilization

·        Self-Preservation

·        Core Identity

Head Brain Prime Functions

·        Cognitive Perception

·        Thinking

·        Making Meaning

About the head brain…
 

In many ways the prime functions of the head brain are obvious, they involve the mental cognitive functions of logical thinking and include the processes of reasoning, perception and how we make meaning. Thought processes involve mental imagery, language expression, abstraction and symbol manipulation. The main job of the head is to intellectually make sense of the world and to provide executive control.

About the heart brain…

The heart is the seat of love and desires, goals, dreams and values. When you are connected to something you feel it and value it in your heart. When you hear that someone ‘wears their heart on their sleeve’ you intuitively know that this does NOT mean that they are too logical. Instead, this is saying that they show their emotions, desires and intentions too obviously and readily. 

If you say something is heartfelt, you aren’t saying it’s intellectually concise. And when you look at the language patterns of the heart, they express notions of love, connection, kindness and their converse. The prime functions of the heart intelligence involve salience, affection and relational issues such as a deep sense of moral rightness as compared to rule based ethics.

About the gut brain…

Due to its evolutionary history, the gut brain is responsible at a core level for determining what will be assimilated into self and excreted from self. It must determine what is required to maintain health and wellness in the system and decide whether molecules ingested into the stomach will be absorbed or excreted. Indeed, research has shown that more than 80 percent of our immune cells are located in the gut, and the enteric brain is intimately involved in managing immune function.

The prime functions of the gut are around protection, self-preservation, core identity and motility. Back when evolution was at the stage of complexity of sea cucumbers and worms, organisms only had a neural processing system of an enteric brain. This intelligence was used to detect threats and food in the environment and move away from danger and towards food. The gut brain maintains boundary detection and mobilization. In humans it is expressed as motivation, gutsy courage and a gut-felt desire to take action (or not).

Using the Prime Functions as life enhancing diagnostic tools

One of the most powerful and useful things you can do to gain more personal control in your life is use the mBIT Prime Functions as life enhancing diagnostic tools. Using the Prime Functions as a set of filters you can begin to track and change which of your multiple brains are operating in any given situation or context. Of course, all your brains and neural networks are operating all of the time, however, focus and control moves throughout your brains and knowing which brain is the prime controller at any point in time can really provide leverage for change.

Let me share an example from my own personal experience to make sense of this... I had been expecting an overdue delivery of the very first printing of my mBraining book, and contacted the courier to find out why the delivery was late and when I could finally expect to receive my books. I eventually managed to speak to a customer service representative of the global courier company used to deliver the books and was informed that due to various organizational issues, they would not be able to deliver the books to me for another 4 weeks. I got off the phone and found myself feeling both angry and incredibly turmoiled. The book was important to me and I had various commitments and timeframes that relied on having stock of the book on hand.

As I sat there fuming over the crap service of this big-named courier company, that promised swift and efficient service on their website and advertising, I realised that feeling angry and upset wouldn't help me or help resolve the situation. I stopped focusing on the issue for a second, and instead did an inventory through my body and noted where and how I was feeling and representing the issue. I noted that I felt anger in my heart region, tension in my forehead and shoulders, but most strongly and overwhelmingly, I felt the issue deep and viscerally in my gut. This told me immediately that I was representing the issue at a gut level and that it was a gut prime function that was driving my response. The gut is responsible for core identity and threat detection. I was obviously treating the book and the missing delivery as if this was a part of 'me' that was under threat. The gut brain was then communicating the message of threat to the heart and head leading to angering and repetitive negative cognitions and ultimately tension around the head and face region.

As soon as I realized that I was representing the book as if it was part of me, I was now immediately at choice. Did I really want to see the book as 'me', was it really part of my core identity, or was it just something I valued highly as a process and an artefact of the production of my creative abilities? Naturally, the book is not 'me', it's just something I produced. And as soon as I acknowledged that, and breathed the message of that from my heart, into my head, and down to my gut, everything shifted. I belly laughed, with a big smile of inner realization on my face. The anger in my heart dissolved immediately. And I was able to get a much more useful perspective on the situation. With a light-hearted attitude, I was then able to track down someone within the courier company who really wanted to help and delightfully my books were delivered within the week. Problem solved and done in a compassionate and creative way. By using the Prime Functions as a diagnostic tool and thereby realizing I was treating the book as 'me' I enabled a wiser choice in how I responded to the exigencies of life and that truly is life enhancing.

So I trust that from the above example you get a sense and idea of how to use the Prime Functions as filters and diagnostic tools. Start to notice where and how in your body you are representing and reacting to each situation. Are you fundamentally processing the situation with your heart? Your head? Your gut? And what prime function(s) are thereby being expressed by the neural network that has prime control? Once you've gained meta-awareness of how you are processing and creating your awareness and reality, you can then use the mBIT Foundational Sequence and Highest Expressions techniques explained fully in the mBraining book to produce a more generative and wiser response. 

So start now to notice how you are mBraining your life, which of your brains is operating in which sequence with the others, which is in control, which can provide the leverage point for change, and what prime functions are operating as you respond to and create your world.

with appreciation and smiles,

Grant

I give a shit! -- Scatalogical Marking and the Enteric Brain

“The world is not a problem; the problem is your unawareness”

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh

I trust and hope that you find today's blog post fascinating, edifying and entertaining in equal measure :-) and I also hope you aren't easily offended by swearing or scatalogical language, as it's going to form the basis for what we are exploring here today...

Scatalogical Marking

In ethology (the study of animal behavior), scatalogical marking is the act that animals undertake to mark out or define their physical or spatial boundaries -- the space they consider to be 'theirs', that they own. To do this they 'scat' around their boundary by depositing their shit or by urinating. This marks out their territory and sends a clear olfactory message to other animals or rivals of their own species.

In mBIT (multiple Brain Integration Techniques) terms, scatalogical marking is an obvious manifestation of the prime functions of the gut brain. The gut (or enteric) brain is deeply involved in protection, threat monitoring and control, in spatial motility and in maintaining core self. In a sense, the spatial territory that an animal controls is like an extended part of itself and is crucial to both its foraging/food control and its threat/safety control. So the gut brain naturally uses the parts of the anatomy it controls (the bowels and bladder) to deposit strong messages about its domain. Notice also that the gut brain is strongly linked to the senses of taste and smell, so it's part of the language of the gut brain to speak and communicate with strongly smelling substances, and all animals (including humans) are attuned to this. [BTW, if you haven't already, grab a copy of my new book 'mBraining - Using your multiple brains to do cool stuff', and you'll learn all about the prime functions and core competencies of the head, heart and gut brains and how they communicate and how you can align and integrate them for wisdom and success.]

Who gives a shit?

Now this is all very interesting, but really, who gives a shit? (so to speak) -- What has this got to do with you and with enhancing your life???

Well, as we evolved higher functions and more complex brains, our gut brain not only became responsible for physical territory maintenance, it was also co-opted for 'semantic' territory maintenace. With our complex head brains and advanced language centers and frontal lobes, we have evolved to be semantic and meaning binding creatures. We live and create our lives and sense of self through the processes of abstraction, symbol manipulation and linguistic meaning. We construct our complex world views through language, beliefs, values and the semantics of identity. And all of this forms our 'semantic territory'. So guess what... when someone transgresses your semantic boundaries, when they 'shit' all over your values or beliefs, when they act like 'turds' or 'assholes' and threaten the meaning you are making in your life, it typically 'pisses' you off and gives you the 'shits'. Indeed, if they piss you off enough, you are likely to haul off and beat the 'shit' out of them, either physically, emotionally or intellectually.

Now isn't that fascinating. Our common parlance reflects the scatalogical marking we do within our semantic territory. And this is a direct example of cognitive linguistics, of how the metaphors we use in our every day language are deeply embodied and reflect our underlying unconscious processes.

The reason I share this with you is to begin to attune your mind and ears to mBIT Predicate Tracking -- to noticing and listening for words that indicate heart, gut or head processing and the prime functions of each of those neural networks. Knowing which brain is functioning within any element of human behavior puts you at choice and control for leveraging generative change. And that is certainly life enhancing!

I give a shit!

Courtesy of my good friend and colleague, exquisite cartoonist, corporate speaker and organizational leadership guru, Colin James, I'd like to share the following cartoon that Colin drew for this blog post.

It highlights the idea that each of us has things that we give a shit about, and that we metaphorically mark our semantic boundaries with respect to. And based on this idea, here's a little exercise that I'd like you to play with...

So I'd like you to take a moment, and think about something that you 'really don't give a shit about', something that you could care less about, that really doesn't affect you in any meaningful way. For me its football and other organized sports. I really don't give a shit about them at all. If football was outlawed tomorrow, I wouldn't lose a jot of sleep over it. Wouldn't care less. It's neither a value for me, nor part of my identity. Once you've thought of something you don't give a shit about, I'd like you to get a sense of how that feels within your body, what your visceral experience of it is, in your heart, chest, gut, torso etc.

Now moving on with the exercise... I'd like you to think of something you value, something that's important to you, you care about, but is not part of your identity. In other words, something that you like, but if you weren't able to get it anymore, or if you lost it, then it wouldn't particularly rain on your parade. For me its my drive day car. I like it, I value it, but you know, if something happened to it and I had to replace it, I wouldn't be bothered. A car is a car. No probs. So take a moment, reflect and come up with something you value but that isn't vitally important to you. Once you've done that, notice your felt sense around it. Where do you feel and represent this within your body? For most people, it will be in your heart region. Notice this.

Now, think about and focus on something you really give a shit about, something that is vital to your sense of self. Something that defines you. For me, an example would be my motorbike. As I've written about in this blog, I believe motorbikes are Life Enhancing Devices (LEDs). So for me, my bike is like an extension of my self. I love it. It's linked to my core values. So think of your equivalent, and as you bring it fully to consciousness, notice where in your body you feel and represent the meaning of this. For most people this will be felt viscerally in the gut. You may also feel some heart response due to the values and desire for this person/place/thing/process. But the core feeling will be in the gut.

When you experience something as core to self, the gut kicks in. Your enteric brain has a prime function around core selfing and protection of core self. The ability to notice this and become mindful and aware of where and how you are representing things is key to being able to shift and control your life. I'll speak more about this in upcoming blog posts, and of course, the mBraining book teaches you cool techniques for powerfully utilizing this. But for now I really wanted to bring to your attention the notion that semantics and meaning are embodied and that various functions and aspects of these are processed preferentially and differently in each of your brains.

You can begin now to notice over the coming days, where in your body you are feeling and processing each experience and work out whether you are representing something as core self or just as a value. Notice what figuratively (and sometimes literally) gives you the shits, pisses you off or impacts you viscerally. Notice what stinks in your life (so to speak) or conversely smells sweet. And start listening for scatalogical marking in the conversations around you and in your own internal dialog. Mindfulness is life enhancing, as is choice and control. And control starts with awareness!

“Every human has four endowments- self awareness, conscience, independent will and creative imagination. These give us the ultimate human freedom... The power to choose, to respond, to change.”

Stephen R. Covey

with life enhancing appreciation and smiles,
Grant