Third part of initial pass of Pattern! – February 1992

Note on where I’ve got to:

First part was well structured and orderly: introduction, letter to Chris Clarke and ‘what is explanation?’. The intention was to go on to various pattern! explanations, starting with ‘human experience, thought and behaviour’.

Second part includes several attempts at beginning this, out of which came a structure centred on ‘stuckness’ (which was not developed!). I kept discovering aspects of the pattern! concept that I had not fully worked out, in particular ‘dimensionality’. There is also a short section in which I tried to get back to the structure, but got diverted into writing about the brain.

I have printed out the two parts, and this has led to the idea that I should aim to produce a ‘chunk’ of, hopefully useful, material each month. I am therefore behind on February, it being now the 13th.

I begin this part with the intention of getting back to human experience (too big a subject, can include everything), starting with thought: what is it, why do we do it?

Thinking in patterns!

It was a shock to Victorian self-satisfaction when Darwin went public on his theory that mankind shares common ancestors with the apes. The idea that human beings are animals was regarded as heretical by the Church, but this hardly mattered at a time when Christianity was being replaced as the dominant religion by science.

It is interesting that, when a religion is at the height of its dominance, it is not regarded as a religion at all, it is just the way things are, the ‘Truth’: unarguable, absolute. Science took over as the dominant religion, and became the way things are, the ‘Truth’: unarguable, absolute. But science now appears to be losing its hold, or is this wishful thinking on my part? The really dominant religion is now ‘economics’, and this is scarcely questioned at all. For example, even the most well-meaning, and least commercially-minded, people equate poverty with low income, and thereby lose sight of quality of life as a whole.

As you would expect by pattern! thinking, each new phase of religion, far from superceding the earlier phases, overlays them so that they all continue to have influence, often at a personal, rather than a publicly declared level. And this brings about some extraordinary examples of ‘double think’ (and often triple and quadruple think), which most people hardly notice, let alone worry about. I would rather not distort the point I am making by focussing on specific instances of this phenomenon, but I will cite two general examples: firstly, the coexistence, over the past two or three centuries, of a belief in a personal God, the human soul and immortality, with a belief in the mechanistic, deterministic model of the universe; secondly, 95% of people in the world adhering to one or another of the world’s organised religions, all of which have some rule of the form, ‘do as you would be done by’, whilst at the same time people obey the religion of market economics which insists we compete with and exploit each other as freely as possible, with the most evident cruel and pitiful consequences.

I do not propose to consider in detail each of these phases of dominant influence: the Church, science, economics. It is not possible to recapture a genuine sense of the assumptions which formed the backbone of a particular phase of human history. It is highly likely that the most intelligent and interesting writing during any period would be from people who were questioning those assumptions. Statements of the obvious would be very dull reading, even supposing anyone thought of making them. Most of the important and official documents kept carefully in archives would relate to the powerful and privileged people in the society. Much of the evidence of how the majority of people thought must have been lost. What does, however, interest me is how and why human groups acquire shared assumptions, or ‘social patterns!’. To understand this, we need to return to Darwin’s bombshell: people are (descended from) animals. We need to look, in particular, at the human attributes which we have tended to think of as special to humanity: mind and consciousness. I will begin with a consideration of ‘mind’, what it means, what it is.

In a pamphlet I wrote some time ago called ‘Cultivating Confusion’, I put forward an idea of what ‘mind’ is, the idea being that mind is something to do with the vital function of pattern recognition. This is an extract from that pamphlet:

Consider how it was during one of the earliest explosions of diversity in life 700 to 500 million years ago (the Precambrian and Cambrian periods). During these periods, multicellular plants and animals (metaphyta and metazoans) evolved from unicellular organisms. Their cells differentiated to become specialised in particular functions. It is not known how early a cellular specialisation with a function one could call ‘mind’ evolved. More is known of skeletal form because of the fossil record, so I suppose we can put a date on the earliest discovered brain case. But the first development of ‘mind’ may have been much earlier. That we can only guess at.

   Plants acquire energy by absorbing sunshine. Animals have to ingest energy from other organisms: plants or other animals. Virtually the only sensing and responding a plant needs to do is to orientate itself in the direction of sun and water. But to an evolving metazoan, the ability to recognise food, predators, competitors, mates, hosts and habitats would be a tremendous advantage over taking a chance on being in the right place enough of the time to survive and reproduce. This requires some mechanism for sensing a pattern in the environment and comparing it with a data bank of remembered patterns and their associations. Our primitive ancestors must have acquired this ability very early on ....

At the time that I wrote this, I had realised that a capacity for pattern recognition has potent survival value, particularly for animals, and so is a fundamental component of what an animal is, or became during the course of evolution. I called this capacity ‘mind’, distinguishing mind from ‘brain and nervous system’, which I felt was a later development, a sophisticated outcome of the need for pattern recognition. I had assumed at this stage of my thinking that ‘mind’ is the capacity of an animal to carry out the function of pattern recognition, and that it is catered for by certain parts of the animal’s body, much as various other functions, such as locomotion or elimination of waste, are catered for by an animal’s limbs or organs. I no longer think that this is the case. I now think that ‘mind’ is best understood as being external to an animal, it is the influences on the animal from the outside world. The animal itself has various parts, organs and systems, for interacting with mind, each of those parts having the capacity to focus on a particular region of mind.

When describing new ways of understanding the world, one encounters the danger of tripping over one’s own insight. I have already looked at the question of what is inner and what is outer when I was considering the function of the brain. I said then that the perceptual images we have of the world are projections created by the brain of a partial picture taken in by our senses. The brain has become such a dominant organ that we have difficulty in getting in touch with any more comprehensive impression of the world than the one allowed by the brain. Meditation seems to provide a way of transcending the brain’s dominance, and the route to the kind of ‘insight’ meditation can, all too briefly, offer seems to lie in an ‘inward’ direction. I am also beginning to wonder whether the demand for alcoholic drink or other drugs, which seems to be universal in human cultures, ancient and modern, is a consequence of our need to find ways of transcending the powerful brain function which limits our consciousness to the restricted zone of present interests and threats to survival. The convoluted, inside-out, understanding I seem to be approaching is an almost complete reversal of everyday experience and conventional assumptions and values.

So, as a writer, I am confronted with some difficult choices. Do I refer to the external world as the projected images from our brains, or as the whole of reality, in time as well as in space, which influences (flows into) and very largely determines our thoughts and actions, or perhaps as either or both of these according to what ideas I am trying to convey? Do I conceive of my own mind as being the information content of my brain, or as being my inner doorway to experience of a more wholistic reality, or as being the section of reality which my being resonates with, and which influences my own development? Most importantly, what conception of ‘mind’, and all that it might mean, is going to be most useful for communicating pattern! ideas to my readers?

I have decided that, however important the insights I have had into what ‘mind’ may be, I have to stay with ordinary human experience as far as possible. So I shall accept that each of us observes a world ‘out there’, and has an inner sense of ‘me in here’, and that it is the inner person which has a mind and understanding which involves the brain in some way. However, I shall superimpose on that conventional picture the idea that there is more ‘out there’ than ‘meets the eye’, and that the inner mind is in intimate contact with the more comprehensive reality, such that the distinction between inner and outer vanishes.

We now come to the other supposedly special human attribute, consciousness. By ordinary human experience, it seems as if consciousness is something ‘in here’. Even when we have good reason to attribute consciousness to something external, in particular to another human being, we seem to be unable to experience that consciousness directly, but only through our senses. I have stated repeatedly the pattern! principle that everything is conscious: the universe is consciousness, and is created by consciousness. So, as in the consideration of mind, we have two levels of reality, the level of ordinary experience in which only the inner person is conscious, and a transcendent level where all is consciousness, and all boundaries vanish.

The two-level similarity between mind and consciousness is blurring the distinction between them, so let us explore their meaning further, both in ordinary usage and in pattern! thinking.

Mind is generally taken to refer to intelligence and knowledge or memory; whereas consciousness refers specifically to the sense of self. Consciousness may be taken to be part of the mind, or as another word for the entity or self which has a mind. The word ‘mind’ comes from the Old English word ‘gemynd’, and so, one may suppose, represents a very basic idea which was included in the language early on, rather than a relatively recent idea for which a word was cobbled together from other words. In contrast, the word ‘conscious’ comes from the Latin ‘conscius’ which means sharing knowledge, knowing together, which is almost opposite to the private sense we tend to attribute to it. I could well invoke the Latin derivation as the meaning of both consciousness and mind when they are used in a pattern! sense. As I stated in the introduction, many words suggestive of experience, knowledge or reality boil down to the same thing in pattern! thinking. They are all words for the patterns! which are the co-creators of the universe. We create our own reality by our mind and consciousness, but our choice of what world to create is very largely determined by the influences upon us.

The resonance from our own past and from others of our kind largely determines the reality we create. This is true of the reality of human experience, and it is also true of all animals (and other entities also). The development of embryos, the behaviour of species, such as the timing and routes of bird migrations, the interaction of social animals such as ants, and the shared beliefs and practices of human groups are all created by the creatures themselves, in conjunction with the patterns! established by their predecessors. There are many examples of development and behaviour for which satisfactory explanations cannot be found within the model of genetic inheritance from parent to child. By pattern! theory, these are achieved by each creature copying, more or less, other creatures similar to itself which are perpetually present in a universe where, necessarily, the past does not pass away, but accumulates in a process of growth.

Even the restricted experience of the world which is peculiar to our species is a pattern! passed on by tuning in to other humans in the past. Generations of humans have had the same kind of consciousness turned in on itself, blinkered against past and distant influences which act upon us only at an unconscious level. Ingrowing consciousness is a human habit, just as migration is a habit of some species of birds. The habit must have been useful in ensuring our survival, and it is not at all difficult to see how.

Homo sapiens is a social animal, with particularly flexible social behaviour. We are able to tackle different situations in different ways, take various roles in collective projects, and respond spontaneously to changing situations and alter our roles and relationships accordingly. In novel situations there are no established patterns! to follow. This means that we have had to have the ability to disregard the patterns! of the past, and be empty, receptive vessels capable of being given fresh instructions on each new occasion. If an individual is to be told what to do, he has to be able to distinguish himself from others. If an individual is to take the lead and instruct others he needs an even keener sense of his separate being in order to assert his authority.

The reason Homo sapiens was only able to survive by developing flexible social behaviour is that he was a late evolutionary arrival, and would not otherwise have found an environmental niche, all the usual roles being filled by other species.

18/2/92

Reviewed and revised above, and liked it, so what now?

Human values

In the chapter about ‘explanation’ I observed that, consistent with its Latin derivation of ‘explanare, to flatten’, explaining seems to have the effect of reducing something interesting and wonderful to some set of boring and unremarkable antecedents or components. I seem to have performed that sort of mean trick on humanity, specifically on human mind and consciousness: by observing that mind is a pattern recognition function common to all animals; that as a species we are peculiarly unconscious through the action of our looping inwards brains; and that we developed this handicap in order to become separated empty vessels, capable of giving and receiving instructions, in order to be able to be flexible enough to survive in a world in which there was no useful ecological niche for us. So much for Homo sapiens!

I have to confess that I have a spite against human beings in general because of the horrendous damage we have done to the natural world. I find it very satisfying to be able to take our arrogant self-satisfaction down, not just a peg, but to the lowest level imaginable, from which degraded position we should grovel with shame and penitance.

However, there is an advantage in being the lowest of the low in that from that position we can feel most awe and wonder at what is above us. The followers of various religions have often been directed to adopt a position of humility for a similar reason: it is the best place from which to worship God in Heaven above. But from the slot assigned to us by the Church, ‘a little lower than the angels but crowned with glory and honour’, we have trampled unheedingly on all the wonderful species and processes of the living earth, reducing them to dust and ashes from which there may be no resurrection, or none that we shall see in the millions of years it may take for evolution to create a new tapestry to replace the one we have destroyed.

So far I have identified two positions from which we can view the world: from the completely humbled level of the guilty destroyer of the beauty and diversity of the earth; and as the half humbled, below the world of spirit and above the world of matter. The scientific world view, which is now itself in a state of flux, gave us a position of no humility at all, with its ‘anthropic principle’ proclaiming that the universe must have been created so that we could experience it. The world view of the market adds another variant; a vicious struggle for position, with ‘every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost’, where it is presumed that he who wins is the best man, and deserving of the adulation of everyone else, which he generally gets. Of course, other species are not even in that race; a select few are exploited in revolting ways, so that even their genetic integrity is just grist to the engineering mill, the rest are heedlessly destroyed.

Of course, the discussion of position only has meaning in the context of human values. I doubt whether a bee bothers to consider whether its role in the bee community is right and just, or wrong and unfair, let alone whether bee nature is superior or inferior to horse nature, tree nature or worm nature. But my doubt about whether the bee ponders such things is not on the grounds that it is incapable of intellectual thought, but on the grounds that the bee is integrated into the enduring patterns! of bee society and ecological relationships, so it has no need to decide on its proper place.

Humans, on the other hand, have no proper place in naturally evolved ecosystems. Any place they have acquired has necessitated demolishing some of the structure of what was there before. Even the pre-historic hunter gatherers, popularly supposed to have lived in harmony with nature, are suspected of having used fire to drive out game, not only destroying forests but also causing the extinctions of many species of large mammals. Only in contrast to the bulldozers and dynamite-aided destruction perpetrated by modern man can our ancient ancestors be regarded as respectful and loving children of nature.

‘But, hang on a minute,’ I hear some people protest, ‘we are all children of nature. You said earlier that humans are (descended from) animals. What we do is part of nature too. And anyway, nature is not loving and harmonious, it is full of cruelty and suffering; look at predators and parasites. And there have been mass extinctions of species before mankind came along. And, in the course of time, it will all be destroyed anyway. Just as we all die, so the sun and the stars die, and scientists say the whole universe will run down into a ‘Heat Death’ and nothing interesting will happen any more, ever again – unless, of course, it all collapses by gravitation into a ‘Big Crunch’, which may be a new ‘Big Bang’ and it all starts over again. So what the hell!’

Fine. What I have got here is a summary of human values: the angry, deep ecological ones I have adopted; the Church, science and market ones I do not share; and the sort of values which pretend to be no values at all, a cynical kind of nihilism. How can we make pattern! sense of them all?

First of all I will restate what I said about bee values; the bee does not need any values because it follows bee community and ecosystem patterns! so it does not need to make any decisions; it just enjoys being a bee. And values come about from the need to make decisions.

Consider early man again: the conception I have put forward of an ape, with no particularly useful role in the ecosystem, which survived when it developed the trick of super-flexible team work. For this it needed to develop insensitivity to established ecosystem patterns! coupled with an ability to distinguish itself from other team members. The blinkering and inward-looping brain achieved both of these. Because it had little information coming in to guide it along pattern! lines, the ape was able to receive and act upon constantly changing instructions from the team leader. The team leader, of course, was the one who had to acquire the ability to make decisions; decisions based on an assessment of what was good to do and what was bad, in other words on values. The other apes, the majority, did what they were told and, by accepting the leaders’ values, would even be obedient in the leaders’ absence. By long repetition, this has become a strong human pattern!. It is more strongly developed in the male of our species because the male apes, who were unencumbered by young, were both better able to engage in the team-based survival tricks which necessitated pattern! blocking, and had less need to be receptive to the nurturing patterns! needed for child care.

Having played around for some time with my theory of the survival value of the blinker-brain, I am very satisfied with it as an explanation of human nature. It is consistent with so much of human thought and behaviour as they are manifested today. Less easy to confirm, but still interesting, is the particular values which we can guess might have been selected by the team-leaders of early man, and which still have relevance today. Team behaviour and choice of values are groups of human social patterns!. So before considering the particular behaviours and values humanity has acquired, it is useful to look at social patterns! in general; what they are and how they influence us and are passed on.

Over the huge span of time during which our species emerged, and developed as a social animal, the patterns! which make us and influence us have undergone great changes. The patterns! which bring about human behaviour have gone through a process of natural selection similar to the evolutionary process identified by Darwin. In the pool of possible behaviours, varients arose from time to time, and any which proved to be helpful as a survival tactic, and an improvement on ones which had a similar function before, tended to be passed on.

Pattern! theory does not, of course, deny genetic inheritance; it is an important principle of pattern! thinking that anything that is believed to be true is true. But pattern! thinking denies exclusiveness to any theory; disbelieving is out, no set of thought can insist on being the only truth, even within its own domain, although it may be the only truth in that domain if no one has, as yet, seen any other.

The domain we are considering here includes anything do with why human behaviour is how it is. This domain includes genetic inheritance, operating as Darwin and his followers say that it does, and other theories which question those ideas, such as models which include the inheritance of acquired characteristics. It includes all theories and studies into anthropology and history. And I am adding to all these my own theory of ‘pattern! inheritance’, which does not depend on genes or hinge on battles. Instead it depends on each human being tuning in to the patterns! of his or her own and others’ past, and tending to develop and behave similarly to the stongest patterns!, which are those which are most similar to his or her immediate past state, or which have been repeated most times.

One thing that distinguishes pattern! inheritance from genetic inheritance, as they apply to the generality of species, is that patterns! accumulate over time, whereas gene pools can shrink, and genetic diversity be lost. Another difference is that genetic inheritance is deterministic and reductionist, whereas pattern! inheritance is full of potential variability and is wholistic in its perspective.

But genetic inheritance is not strictly deterministic. It is full of chance and change, in particular in the set of genes a human individual inherits from his or her parents, and in the development of the human phenotype (the actual person) in interaction with the social and physical environment. These are similar to the uncertainties in pattern! inheritance, uncertainties about which particular patterns! will help to form the developing embryo, and which social patterns! will mould the growing child and affect the adult.

One can liken the patterns! which have receded as influences in favour of the currently dominant ones to the gene sequences which sit uselessly in chromosomes, and are never manifested as living characteristics. Indeed, so compatible are the two sets of ideas that it is pointless to regard them as competing with each other for the honour of being the ‘real’ influences on human behaviour. And, by pattern! thinking, genes and chromosomes are themselves patterns!, with two resonating sub-patterns!: the chemical sequences themselves; and the proteins, cell structures etc. which, by genetic theory, are created according to the chemical codes. The chemical encoding acts as a bridge between successive generations of the characteristics coded for, and the bridge may involve pattern! resonance, as much as it does chemical combinations.

Pattern! thinking has a big advantage over genetic theory in that it can include genetic theory as an influence on the development of single individuals, and be extended to encompass the social interaction between individuals. It operates in the same way in either sphere. Groups of individuals follow patterns! from the past, just as single individuals do, or for that matter, organs, cells and molecules do.

It is easier to envisage the same process of influence, pattern!, operating in a similar way at all the different levels than to see how a process of influence, the genetic one, operates at the lowest level only, and has to be summarised to account for the more complex levels. For example, it is a veritable feat of intellectual gymnastics to explain nationalism or tea drinking, say, on the basis of genetic inheritance. Some devotees of the theory would take on such a challenge, others would pass it over to some other discipline, such as social science. But segregating fields of study can create some strange anomalies, such as theoretical physics moving away from mechanistic reductionism whilst other sciences such as biology continue to invoke physics to support their reductionist approaches.

With pattern! thinking, levels and complexity cease to matter. Wherever there is a pattern!, it will develop and change by recognising and resonating with other similar patterns! in the past. There is no force which can determine any pattern!’s development absolutely, but there is a very powerful tendency for it to repeat what has happened before.

We can return now to the specifics of human social patterns! or habits. I have put forward a theory of how Homo sapiens became a social animal with the capacity to be particularly flexible in his team interaction. We were only able to survive at all by being adaptable, and by being destructive, because, as a late evolutionary arrival, there was no ecological niche for us, so we have always had to displace other species and disrupt ecosystems to make space for ourselves.

Through natural selection we developed a blinkered and ingrowing brain function which made us blind to past patterns! and also self-aware. This blindness and selfishness helped to make us capable of destructive behaviour. Because we ceased to be able to see the past, we were insensitive to the pain caused by pattern! disruption although, since everything is actually conscious, I believe that we are aware of the pain we have caused at another level of consciousness which we think of as unconscious. Delve below the surface of the unconscious of any human individual and you will find anguish and guilt and despair at what humanity has done to the living earth, and to each other.

Ironically, the damaged earth can provide a source of relief for our guilt. We have done so much damage to the earth that degraded land is plentiful, and people can assuage their guilt and despair by engaging in the work of regenerating a bit of that land. I will come to the path of regeneration in the last section of this book which considers the subject of pattern! morality. But the task in hand is to consider what social patterns! may have resulted from the survival strategy we hit upon in our earliest years as a species.

During the course of evolution species undergo physical changes. Concentrating on the animal kingdom, the next generation of a species tends to be very like the previous one. Aeons may pass and, particularly if the environment remains fairly stable, the species retains the same characteristics. Varients occur occasionally, most are probably useless defects and do not survive. Occasionally a varient happens to give an advantage over the normal animal, the animal survives longer and produces more young, enough of which may copy the parent rather than others of the species for a new pattern! to become influential. In times of environmental crisis, either the species dies out, or a varient occurs which happens to be well suited to the altered or altering situation. It is at times of crisis that the greatest changes occur.

Our ape-like ancestors may have hit a climate change crisis which altered their environment from forest to prairie. Out of that selection process early man emerged with upright gait, binocular vision, the opposable thumb and the ‘blinker brain’. He could see about him to the horizon, he could manipulate things and he was selfish and isolated. He was aware of himself and others of his kind as distinct entities, but he was relatively unencumbered by influences from the past. So he was flexible and adaptable, not in the slow and chancy way of evolution, but in the short term and in the here and now. He could destroy and instantly forget that he had done so. He dealt with every situation according to his needs at that moment. He was as heedless of the future as he was unaware of the past. At least, that was how it seemed to the blinker brain. At another level of his being, in what we now call the unconscious, he was as sensitive to patterns! as any other species. Unfortunately for the integrity of his environment, the blinker brain often dominated his behaviour.

Comscius and solscius

It is difficult for us to envisage the two levels of consciousness: the isolated cerebral level, and the widely aware pattern! level. In order to describe how we experience and are influenced by these two kinds of consciousness I find myself reluctantly driven to inventing special terms for them. I have adapted the word ‘conscious’ itself for universal pattern! consciousness, to give the term ‘com-scius’ (or comscius) meaning ‘knowing together’ as per the Latin derivation of ‘conscious’. To complement that, I will use ‘sol-scius’ (or solscius) for the isolated cerebral consciousness of thinking man. I will use these words both as nouns and adjectives, rather than adding ‘-ness’ to make the adjective into a noun. ‘Comscius’ also resembles the word ‘conscience’, which is useful because it draws in the sense of the guilt and pain that we are aware of at the wider level of consciousness which we think of as ‘unconscious’.

Roughly speaking, ‘solscius’ equates to what we normally think of as ‘conscious’ and ‘comscius’ is ‘conscious’ and ‘unconscious’ combined, making ‘solscius’ a part of ‘comscius’. I welcome the confusion this may initially cause, because it may help me to break down some of the dangerous assumptions about human superiority and importance which have led us to assume the right to dominate the rest of the world.

A great advantage of having the term ‘comscius’ is that I can avoid the confusing and, by pattern! thinking, false notion that there is a mental domain which is ‘unconscious’. Nothing and no one is unconscious, because the entire universe is conscious and is made from consciousness. What does happen is that the focus of consciousness shifts and changes, in a similar way to looking at a window with a net curtain, and shifting your focus from the curtain to the garden outside and back again, and away from either to listen to a bird or wonder what to have for dinner.

In adopting the word ‘comscius’ I am addressing the need to draw attention to two aspects of pattern!: the pattern! forms extending in space and enduring in time; and the experience of being in and part of a pattern! universe. Since the patterns! are formed from consciousness, ‘pattern!’ and ‘comscius’ are two words for the same thing: the universe of patterns! of consciousness in time and space. The two separate words are only needed because I need a communication bridge to reach people who have been used to thinking of a universe consisting of matter and consciousness, or matter and spirit, ‘spirit’ being another word for ‘consciousness’ in the sense I am using it.

The word ‘solscius’ replaces ‘consciousness’ in the sense of human self-awareness, which has been thought to be a special attribute giving us superiority over other species. But it is actually a restricted consciousness, a handicap which other life forms are generally free of, because they have not needed it for survival.

Human self-awareness includes the sense of the human looking out to observe his surroundings, identifying alternative actions and anticipating their outcome, and making choices based on his judgement of the most advantageous course of action. That process involves the intellect: a logical figuring-out mental function which formalises the decision-making process. There are other styles of decision-making: those based on instinct, or long-established habit; and those based on intuition, which involves a rapid, unstructured scanning of associations, often apparently unconscious, out of which a ‘hunch’ or a flash of inspiration emerges. ‘Solscius’ includes the intellect which uses the blinker-brain, but not instincts, habits or intuition which involve accessing the wider consciousness, or comscius.

The solscius is a restricted view of the pattern! universe. The main focus is inwards, emphasising the centre of the human individual, which becomes the place from which the ‘external’ world is viewed, responded to and acted upon. From this internal focus, only the present state of the world is seen clearly, the past is faded out, only selected ‘useful’ pieces of it being remembered. The human brain, whose function is to give the human individual his restricted view, developed during the course of evolution because the type of behaviour it encouraged enabled us to survive in a ecosystem in which our species had no essential function. Although it was partially an aid to flexible team-work, it also enabled us heedlessly to destroy our environment, and made us selfish, competitive and capable of violence against our own kind.

To clarify my use of the new terms:

comscius includes: the subconscious and the unconscious; instincts and habits; conscience and guilt; intuition; memory; all patterns! including past and distant ones as well as the dominant near and recent ones; social patterns! as well as individual ones; spiritual/mystical experiences; the consciousness that survives the death of an individual; the solscius;

solscius includes: the ‘me in here’ conscious self; the intellect; individuality and the attitudes associated with it; individual experiences of social patterns! associated with team behaviour.

The comscius and the solscius are not separate, distinct states. They overlap, meet and merge. Many experiences of the comscius, in particular accessing memory, take place from a solscius state. It appears that one is accessing one’s own personal memory, which we are told is stored in the brain. By pattern! thinking, we are interacting with patterns! from the always-present past. These may leave traces in the brain (why not?) but things which have happened in the past still exist, solid and real, and exert their resonating influence on us. We remember by actually seeing them, but our solscius state obscures that vision. (By ‘seeing’ I mean the contact which is independent of the senses; as blind people still use the word.)

Consideration of less ordinary experiences of accessing the comscius from the solscius can be helpful in clarifying what I mean by the terms. Telepathy, memory of past lives, near-death and out-of-the-body experiences are often dismissed as coincidences, hallucinations, wishful thinking etc. They are all perfectly credible instances of the solscius veil being briefly lifted to reveal areas of the comscius: the thoughts of another person in the present or in the past; the comscius state that survives death, which is the permanent lifting of the solscius; and a shift of awareness to outside the boundaries of the solscius.

I have already suggested that the inward-looking awareness of the individual, which I am now calling the solscius, is a function of the human brain, adopted as an aid to a team based, flexible survival strategy. But it is possible that forms of individuality existed before humankind evolved, in other social animals and, perhaps, in a primitive form in any entity having its own being and distinct behaviour. Solscius could include every particle or body state and comscius the waves of resonance between particles or bodies. So solscius and comscius could be the two universal tendencies of patterning! However, the solscius is so dominant over the comscius in humans that I am going to continue to refer to them as specifically referring to the human condition, and go on to consider the effect of the dominant solscius on individual and social behaviour.

One thing to make clear is that it is not possible for the solscius to over-ride the comscius altogether. The comscius includes all patterns!, even though their influence varies from very powerful to practically no influence at all. And solscius-dominated behaviour will generate its own patterns!, which exert their influence from the comscius. What started off as a spontaneous, original behaviour, which may have disrupted established patterns!, can become, after several repetitions, a powerful comscius habit. This is the tragedy of human behaviour: in order to do something novel we are able to ignore the disruption we cause because our comscius is suppressed, but then we carry on doing the new thing until it is no longer new and no longer helpful for our survival, while still suppressing the comscius, and never waking up to the consequences of what we are doing, to ourselves and to our environment.

I have said that the solscius evolved as a characteristic of early man because it proved useful for working in teams in order to take advantage of any opportunities which arose in an ecosystem in which humans had no regular role. Let us consider the behaviour of the primitive human as if he has solscius alone. Each team member is aware of himself as a distinct individual, and is aware of the others of his kind. He is unaffected by the patterns! of the ecosystem, and can trample and burn with impunity. He has no knowledge or habitual behaviour to help him find food, so he is constantly tasting and experimenting. Working with the others he can corner an animal, kill it and share out the meat. He is constantly trying new tactics, he discovers ways of extending his power using branches, stones and bones. He devises ways of signalling to others in the team and interpreting others’ signals.

We are already seeing how impossible it is to exclude the comscius altogether, the edible foods and useful tricks have to be stored in the memory. But the solscius acts as a filter, allowing in selected memories, but leaving the individual uncertain and on his toes, observant and receptive.

A particularly alert individual, who was usually the first of the group to spot any opportunities, might often find himself leading the others. He would need to tell them what to do. They would need to react quickly. A social pattern! of leader and led resulted, with the leadership role a permanent one for the group.

Excursions to seek food would be full of risks, even for several people together. Ceremonies might be devised to build up the team’s courage and group bonding. There may have been other ceremonies to celebrate successful kills, to confirm the leader in his power over the others and so on.

What about the women? As I have said earlier, I see them as less (what we are now calling) solscius. They would need to be comscius of the patterns! of child care. Probably they would have engaged in plant food gathering rather than in hunting, and needed to remember where various plants were often found. By pattern! memory, this means being aware of the past occasions when they went to those places so that they could retrace their steps.

It has been surmised that women were the first farmers. This could have been because they were aware of where plants grew and were able to encourage favoured plants and discourage others, which is weeding. Noticing the patterns! of plant growth may have led to the idea of collecting seed and planting it in some soil scatched clean of other growth. Women may have reared orphaned animals, which led to the idea of keeping animals for food, rather than hunt them. The practices of cultivation or animal rearing required an awareness of longer-term patterns!, rather than an ability to respond in novel ways to take advantage of new opportunities.

I freely admit that all that I have said about early man is supposition and guess work, based on what I have picked up from popular books on the subject and applying pattern! understanding to it. But one does not need to be an expert anthropologist to get a general idea of how early human groups probably behaved. There may well have been a great deal of variation between different human groups. Certainly, the ‘natives’ who were written about by European travellers over the past few centuries varied enormously from place to place. However the detail is not important for pattern! understanding. The simple picture that I have drawn will be justified if it proves useful as an explanation for some of the main characteristics of humankind as they have been passed down to the present day.

Two areas: leader/follower behaviour & values

Novelty/progress, creativity regardless of destruction, heroism, loyalty, power, leadership, protective structures, interferance with and control over nature, monuments to the powerful dead, impressive ceremony to confirm leaders, property, group cohesion and symbols of,

[this old document ends here; must look up printout...]

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