Edward T. Hall: Culture Below the Radar

John Zada | October 4, 2023

During periods of my adult life I’ve spent multiple sojourns living and working in the Middle East. Though I was raised at home in an Arab culture, I was born and grew up in the West, and thus have always considered myself more ‘Western’ than ‘Eastern.’ That’s why when I relocated to the Arab World for the first time, the culture shock I experienced was nearly as deep and unrelenting to me as to the non-Arab foreigners in my midst. The dense crowding, noise, pollution, relative poverty, differing social codes, politics, and pace of life hit you square in the face upon arrival and took adjusting to—sometimes repeatedly, albeit less so, as one comes and goes from the region over time.

Yet as overwhelming as those environmental and cultural factors were, I noticed over time that it was the smaller things, the much more subtle differences, that really made the most impression on me.

One thing I found odd upon my arrival in Cairo, and then later again during sojourns in Dubai and Beirut, was the strange (to me) habits of office culture among some company managers and businessmen. When you made an appointment to meet someone at their office, you sometimes did not arrive to a sacrosanct one-on-one meeting in which you were granted a private audience. Instead you stepped into a buzzing office environment in which the host would be holding court with others. It was like being the second or third guest on a late-night talk-show: you had to share the limelight with the other visitors at the periphery of the host’s desk. Your meeting was not always private.

Moreover, business was conducted with everyone simultaneously, in improvised piecemeal, and in no logical turns. But the juggling act didn’t end there. It wasn’t unusual for your host to also be fielding phone calls from his clients and associates. All office conversation would be put on hold to take calls from his wife on his mobile, to delegate tasks to his staff, and maybe greet a friend or acquaintance who showed up for a visit unannounced and who would be invited to sit with the delegation.

Office meetings were not invariably like this—and less so over the decades (this was 20 years ago, but these habits still exists in certain parts of the Middle East today). But often enough they were; and a certain efficiency stemming from uninterrupted focus and privacy naturally suffered.

It was a mystery to me as to why such practices existed until someone directed me to a book entitled The Silent Language—a work that examines how different cultures perceive space and time and how that affects their non-verbal communications and behaviour.

The author, an American cultural anthropologist named Edward T. Hall argued, among other things, that world cultures could be more or less divided between two approaches when it comes to how they order events in time. Western cultures, he wrote, especially in Northern Europe and North America, tend to handle tasks and events sequentially, linearly and individually. He termed those cultures “monochronic.” Others, like in the Middle East, South Asia, Latin America, and the Mediterranean, preferred to approach functions and events simultaneously. Hall called those cultures “polychronic.” 

The office phenomena I experienced fell into the latter “polychronic” category. But interestingly, the polychronic designation also explained other subtle discrepancies of culture that I experienced while living in the Middle East. For instance, lineups and queues in the more traditional quarters of the region were seldom single-file affairs as in the West, but rather more like anarchical mobs of humanity all vying simultaneously for the attention of the vendor. Social gatherings, especially among younger people, I noticed, tended to be more fluid and inclusive group affairs, in which participants’ friends, and even friends-of-friends could easily and spontaneously join. In the West, by comparison, social life, I felt, tended to be more rigid, appointment-like in formality, and fixed in terms of its participants.

Edward T. Hall’s contribution to the field of cultural anthropology was unique among his peers. Whereas many of his colleagues in ethnography studied what we would define today as the obvious pillars of culture: music, dance, language, food, clothing, worship, rites etc., Hall was fascinated with intangibles. He argued that some of the most important aspects of culture were those that were invisible to its holders, lying below conscious awareness, like the unseen mass of an iceberg below water. Hall devoted his life to revealing these differing aspects of “hidden,” “implicit” or “unconscious” culture as he called them. The most notable and recurring forms were our differing perceptions of space and time, our bodily movements and rhythms, nonverbal signalling, environmental impacts on perception, and implicit and explicit communication habits.

“There is not one aspect of human life that is not touched and altered by culture,” Hall writes in his magnum opus, Beyond Culture. “This means personality, how people express themselves (including shows of emotion), the way they think, how they move, how problems are solved, how their cities are planned and laid out, how their transportation systems function and are organized, as well as how economic and government systems are put together and function. However… it is frequently the most obvious and taken for granted and therefore the least studied aspects of culture that influence behaviour in the deepest and most subtle ways.”

Hall was turned-on to this hidden world of culture, after spending several years in the 1930s working as a construction foreman among the pueblo-dwelling Navajo and Hopi peoples in the Southwestern United States. This period as a young man helped develop his ideas, which eventually became his life’s work. His deeply humanistic memoir about this period, West of the Thirties, recounts his observations of the differences in logic, behaviour, and communication between these indigenous groups and the white European American community of which he was part.

Though Edward T. Hall became the first to explicitly articulate this notion that culture can manifest and fly below the radar of human awareness, there are scores of other books and authors that explore similar cross-cultural themes. 

The Forest People, by Colin Turnbull, chronicles the author’s three years living among the BaMbuti peoples in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, in which he contrasts the nuances in their way of life with his own. In Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches author Marvin Harris explains the seemingly inexplicable idiosyncrasies of numerous cultures around the world by way of local social and economic imperatives and conditions that have shaped them. And the Afghan writer Idries Shah’s somewhat tongue-in-cheek trilogy of works, Darkest England, The Natives Are Restless, and The Englishman’s Handbook, examines the strange customs and behaviours of the exotic tribe known to him as The English—thereby turning on its head the historical propensity for Westerners to Eurocentrically observe and judge foreign cultures.

Why is all of this important? 

Edward T. Hall argued that at a base level, harmony in intercultural relations and the avoidance of conflict depend on an understanding of our hidden cultures that influence one another. 

“In any encounter, particularly intercultural or interethnic, the correct reading of the other person’s verbal and non-verbal behaviour is basic to transactions at all levels,” he writes.

This goes beyond more practical matters, like how Americans can better do business with the French, Germans, or Japanese—all of which Hall wrote about in other books. Hall is more concerned here with existential challenges. The degree to which the West, for instance, can grasp the hidden cultural underpinnings of Chinese and Russian culture, and vice versa, for instance, the more likely we are to avert the phases of direct violence between great powers that loom over us and can stifle, or end, life on the planet.

Ultimately though, all of this comes back to ourselves, to self-knowledge, and to what the late brain scientist Robert Ornstein called “conscious evolution”—a willful effort at greater awareness that is now a survival imperative of the human race. Where Hall’s work is concerned, there can be no successful conscious evolution without our bringing into awareness the drivers of our action that lie below awareness. And that includes what he terms “hidden culture.”

Edward T. Hall’s supreme assertion in Beyond Culture, his most indelible legacy even, is that by deliberately exposing ourselves to the implicit culture of others, we see our own where it is otherwise invisible, and thus inconceivable. This is especially important at a time when our own culture has possibly mutated, overreached, and/or grown dangerously out of phase with our humanness.

“In order to avoid mass insanity, people must learn to transcend and adapt their culture to the times and to their biological organisms,” Hall writes in Beyond Culture. “To accomplish this task, since introspection tells you nothing, man needs the experience of other cultures. To survive, all cultures need each other.”  

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John Zada is a writer and journalist based in Toronto, Canada. He is the author of the books, In the Valleys of the Noble Beyond and Veils of Distortion.

The Half Brain Method

Hafeez Diwan | June 28, 2023

Here is something I read in Idries Shah’s The Perfumed Scorpion many years ago. I had read and puzzled many times over an Italian proverb quoted at the start of a section entitled “The Teaching Story – 1”. The quote reads:

“People who speak little need only half a brain.”

Maybe I am a lot slower than others, but I must confess that it has taken me over thirty years to understand why this quote was placed at the top of a section about teaching stories and how to work with them. It was only a few months ago that a thought came into my head about all of this, and then something clicked. Let me explain.

When reading a traditional teaching story, we tend to associate it with something else we know, or view it from a literary, sociological, psychological, cultural, or other perspective. We might also submit it to a detailed left-brain analysis. The left hemisphere of the brain, as Dr. Robert Ornstein put it succinctly, is interested in the more granular “text” than the bigger picture, intuitive takeaway. Of course, left-brain analysis is essential, but it is incomplete. It doesn’t yield the deeper dimensions of a teaching story. To get to that taste, that extra flavor, one has to engage the right brain, the hemisphere that sees the bigger picture or the “context” as opposed to the individual components or details.

This process may take some time, as experiences accumulate and things fall into place. Shah’s teaching story “Time and Pomegranates” in The Dermis Probe, about a lesson imparted by a physician and teacher to his impatient student, demonstrates this. The physician teaches his pupil that it can take time for a lesson to be learned. The student, upon seeing a patient who requires a pomegranate to be cured, blurts out the diagnosis. The patient becomes infuriated and stomps away, annoyed that an ailment as serious as his could have a diagnosis as simple and straightforward as pomegranates. The teacher then demonstrates to the student how to gradually build up to the same diagnosis, this time by speaking to another patient, providing the sufferer much-needed time to absorb the diagnosis.

It can take time for context to become evident. Perhaps the right hemisphere of the brain takes a certain amount of time to read, or size-up, the situation, thereby helping us respond more appropriately when it’s done its job. 

The last sentence of Dr. Robert Ornstein’s book, The Right Mind, provides a favorite quote: 

“And given the right hemisphere’s focus on the large elements of our lives, it provides…’the right mind’ for different situations.”

The importance of context and time is woven into many experiences from my professional career. Here is one example:

As a skin pathologist, I rely heavily on the right brain and the right mind. I look at skin biopsies under the microscope to give a diagnosis. This helps the dermatologist, or whoever did the biopsy, give the correct treatment to the patient. 

Many years ago, I saw something I incorrectly thought was a deadly fungal infection growing inside the blood vessels of the skin. Once I learned more about the patient and got more information, I suddenly recalled something I had seen in scientific literature. It led me to the correct diagnosis. The patient had another serious disease, but not the immediately life-threatening fungal infection. But what I saw under the microscope did look almost exactly like a fungal infection. 

I later showed the biopsy to my friends at the Texas Medical Center. These were some of the top skin pathologists in Houston with over sixty years of combined experience. They all made the same mistake. Informed of the context—the complete clinical picture—they instantly made the connection and arrived at the correct diagnosis. 

The importance of context in my field, or indeed in any, cannot be overstated. But it can take time for the context to be gathered and reflected upon. 

I thought I was looking at a fungal infection. Everything pointed to it. My left brain poured over the evidence and concluded that it was most definitely a fungal infection. My left brain was wrong, however. I needed the context. And the contextual information allowed my right brain to make the correct connection.

In simpler terms, the talky left brain can do its thing but then must shut up so that the right brain can work its magic. This may seem overly dramatic. But over the years, as I have grappled with making different diagnoses, I can tell you that the “Aha moments” come when things click with the right brain. The same is true for working with teaching stories, when an insight suddenly appears seemingly out of nowhere. 

Which brings me back now to one meaning of the quote: “People who speak little need only half a brain.” 

People who speak little (don’t engage the left brain too much and only for a short, limited time when trying to make sense of something) need only half a brain (the right brain needs a bit of silence from the left brain’s chatter to be able to discern the subtle voice that can only be heard when the louder left brain is taking a time-out). 

I’ve started calling this the half brain method, and I use it on an almost daily basis in both my professional life, and my personal life as I work with teaching stories and all the other bewilderments that life routinely throws at me. I simply take a time-out from left brain thinking and let the issue bounce inside the right half of my brain, and often, clarity emerges (thankfully, typically much quicker than thirty years!).

I am reminded of the following Iain McGilchrist quote from The Master and the Emissary. It highlights the critical importance of the right hemisphere of the brain, the half of the brain that is engaged in the half-brain method: 

“If the detached, highly focused attention of the left hemisphere is…not…resolved into the whole picture by right hemisphere attention, which yields depth and context, it is destructive.”

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Hafeez Diwan is Professor and Director of Dermatopathology at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. He is the author of a number of books including How to Love Obnoxious People—and Why?: The Life-Saving Art and Science of Loving Truly Horrible People. His most recent work, co-written with his daughter Sara Diwan, is the middle-grade/young adult novel The Great Lion Escape: The Same Different Place, Book One.

‘He Who Tastes Knows’: Contemporary Sufi Studies and the Work of Idries Shah

By Steven Nightingale | June 16, 2023

Today, June 16th, marks the birthday of the late Afghan author and thinker Idries Shah. His seminal works both inspired and informed the work of The Institute for the Study of Human Knowledge (ISHK), including one of its cornerstone initiatives, which you are reading from: The Human Journey Project.

Among a great many other things, Shah collected traditional Eastern Teaching Stories and transmitted them in book form to the West. Those traditional tales encapsulate centuries of Sufi thought aimed at developing a latent capacity within us all—an intuitive capacity for recognizing truth.

A major focus of our work has been to diffuse these traditional psychologies, to see how and where they intersect with modern research on the mind and brain, and to find ways to apply this important part of the human legacy to solving the most urgent needs of our contemporary culture.

To commemorate Shah’s work, we have chosen to republish an essay about his ideas written by American author Steven Nightingale. The piece first appeared on the Idries Shah Foundation website.

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We must look at the world we have made: the crudity of our politics, the menace of military force, the threat of oblivion from atomic weapons; the destruction of earth’s life support systems, the fundamentalism that corrupts religious faith.

What resource we might turn to, if we are to confront with wisdom and sentience so lurid an array of challenges? We stand in the most urgent need of examining the texts we study—the ways of life offered us in language—in search of authentic understanding, of insight into the working of our minds and the redemptive dreams of our spirit.

There is no resource like a good book: one born of long study, beautifully conceived and mindfully composed, with the most potent mix of learning, intuition, and instruction. Where, among the welter of volumes, the annual cascade of prizes and promotions and citations, might we identify such volumes, ones that speak to the life of the times and to the life of each of us?

My own recommendation to everyone is the oeuvre of Idries Shah, whose collective work I hold to be one of the foremost accomplishments of the last century—perhaps of the last few centuries. Beginning in 1964 with his publication of the seminal work, The Sufis, and in the more than thirty books of stories and short essays that followed, Shah set forth the literature, teaching, principles, and history of Sufism, adapted to the needs and qualities of our present day.

The books, as they were published, earned worldwide interest and study, and were justly celebrated for their usefulness, intuitive configuration, and beauty. The work gives itself with grace and openheartedness, in a way that builds a bond of trust with the reader.

Shah presents a tradition of life, thought, and study, and taken as a whole offers the reader an introduction to a way of life with ancient roots, centuries-long practice and refinement, and contemporary relevance. Some central facts are easily stated: the Sufis hold that the revelations of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism have a common source. Those original revelations were configured into their respective forms of worship, ritual, and belief according to the constraints of language, place, time, and historical circumstances. But the core experience—the radiant transformation of a man or woman by love, understanding, and study—remains a possibility, if we might seek to be worthy of such a birthright.

In the technological, materialistic, and pessimistic era in which, especially in the West, we live currently, such a claim is likely to be dismissed out of hand. Allow me, therefore, to state it again, in different terms: each of us may be capable of a conscious evolution that gives rise to singular capacities of mind, and a prescient sense of the workings of the world and purposes of history. Such knowledge makes another life possible: one of potent intuition, generosity, and transcendental helpfulness. It is as if the Sufis offer a way of love within history, because it is ready within the mind.

If any of this sounds fantastical, it is worth stating that such a description is meant, on the contrary, as plain fact. A modern smartphone would, not so long ago, have been seen as fantastical, but every such device works because of the verified science that underlies its functioning. We might think of Shah’s work as an initiatory course in the technology of the mind; it is as if he were presenting to us a science for comprehensive understanding. Look at the technologies now present and accepted: heart transplants, supercomputing, the modification of the genetic code, the design of machines meant to explore other planets in our solar system. Is it so outlandish to entertain the idea that in the course of human history, there might have been developed a science of the mind that has its own relevance and usefulness? And that, as with any of the fields that produced the breakthroughs mentioned, to learn such a science requires preparation, study in prescribed circumstances, knowledgeable oversight, and all the proper conditions of, as Shah puts it, “right time, right place, right people?”

Now, the claim of having such a technology to offer raises from its ugly lair the spectacle of cults, some of which make analogous claims. Such cults have been present, it seems, always and everywhere, and may be identified by the way they enslave their adherents, and offer little more than emotional release and gratification, excitement about mysteries, and ordinary social fulfillments. The Sufis as a whole, and Idries Shah prominently, have stood firmly against such organized deception, however well-meaning such groups take themselves to be. Sufism is not about entertainment. It is about effectiveness.

Allow me to touch upon a few of the ideas in the field of Sufi studies, which I pray the reader might take as a few drops thrown off from the clear stream of offerings in Idries Shah’s books.

First, the notion of virtue among the Sufis: often, in our culture, the development of the virtues of, say, honesty, generosity, patience, humility, and so forth, is held to be an illustrious goal, and a person in possession of such virtues is valued accordingly. Among the Sufis to have such virtues represents the bare minimum of qualities necessary for useful study—baby steps that precede a fuller range of capacities that cannot be imagined beforehand. And as to the virtue of generosity, the Sufis do not tire of pointing out that material generosity is often a form of self-adornment, a fuel for self-esteem. Real generosity may occur when the giver is hardly conscious of giving at all—“the right hand does not know what the left hand is doing”—and the recipient thus does not know the giver, who remains anonymous.

And as to that clear stream of offerings: the teaching is of such variety, on so many levels, and addresses so many dimensions of mind, that it might be useful to have a saunter through some of the ideas and phrases in the work.

—The way ritual, doctrine, ceremony, and repetition put the mind to sleep.

—The incompleteness of the perceived world, which we take to be whole and finished.

—The way that people talking of any subject may be talking principally of themselves.

—The manner in which the essential nature of a person, no matter how well concealed, is inevitably shown forth.

—How we must in learning seek “the content, not the container; the wheat, not the measure in which it is contained; the meaning, not the man.”

—The need to move from belief to knowledge, from concept to experience. “He who tastes, knows.”

—The need to see into the world, and to live in the world, beyond obsession, attraction, desire, and appearance; to learn, that is, to be “in the world but not of it.”

—The presence in the world of invisible chains of cause and effect—in essence, a design—to which we may sensitize ourselves, so as to live life more fully.

—The way perfection “exists in a dimension other than its own; its local form leads us to it.”

—The reality of many forms of communication, including a direct bond of “heart to heart.”

—The need to study and work in a certain sequence, and not think of “making the bread before the flour is milled.”

—The need to seek “the truth for the sake of the truth, and not for the sake of ourselves.”

—The central importance of being able to distinguish the literal from the figurative, and the relative from the absolute.

—The way a teaching must work as an organic whole, which cannot be disassembled without destroying its function; no more than a bird can be disassembled, if we would have it live and fly.

—The need for deeply inclusive thinking, when we learn how to see an event or a problem from a host of different angles, putting together pieces and perspectives until we can see it whole.

—The means to set aside rigidity of mind, in favor of flexibility and suppleness of perception and action.

—The way jokes illuminate the working of the world and of our minds. Shah has introduced us to the brilliant world of Mulla Nasrudin. In hundreds of stories we read of a man of knowledge who teaches by the way he lives, and makes us laugh and learn not just about the world’s absurdities, but also about our own.

—The way a story can correspond to or evoke a deep structure in our minds, and, with time, reflection, and instruction, enrich our understanding and show us ways our work might be more beneficial to the human community.

This last sentence brings me to the myriad stories themselves, now in circulation around the world. They are literature, and more than literature. Idries Shah never tired of pointing out that the stories, however beautiful, durable, or enveloping, are not valuable by reason of such qualities only. Rather, they have instrumental value. That is, they are valuable to life, to life itself: to our chances for understanding, for our attunement to objective reality. Surely, this claim is in concord with our own best hope to have in our hands books that have transcendental value, because they are so eminently practical.

Few of us can escape the sense that daily life is often enslaved to assumptions about appearance, to a deep pessimism and a persistent idolatry. In Shah’s books we may find ways to break our shackles and learn to walk with a freedom that promises a way to peace.

Few of us can read the news in our era without the sense that misunderstanding and confusion poison our world. Yet we may with high confidence look for the antidote in the books of Idries Shah: they hold for us, and offer to us, a whole lucid work of love, clarity, and trustworthy counsel.

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This essay originally ran on the Idries Shah Foundation website.

Steven Nightingale is the author of twelve books: novels, sonnets, long essays on cities, lyrical meditations on nature, haiku, and short stories.

“They Saw a Game”

By David S. Sobel, MD | April 13, 2023

I must confess: I have gone a bit crazy over watching ‘March Madness’—the annual NCAA college basketball tournament in the United States. Not that I have watched every game as the teams compete through the brackets whimsically named “Sweet Sixteen,” “Elite Eight,” “Final Four,” and so on. Apparently, I am not alone. Employers find their workers missing in action as a third of the workforce admit to watching March Madness during the workday. Employers report an 11-percent increase in sick days or tardiness during March Madness. 

While watching one game I went kind of berserk when a foul was not called against one of my favorite players and teams. Clearly, the refs made a mistake. Can’t they see what’s going on right in front of them? Are they blind? Even after viewing the replay, I was convinced a foul was committed. The refs blew it!

All this got me thinking about a classic 1954 study performed by psychologists Albert Hastorf and Hadley Cantril following a Princeton-Dartmouth college football match. Okay, it’s not basketball but the findings are relevant for all sports and, in fact, for many domains of life including politics as we will see. Within a few minutes of kickoff, it became apparent that the game was going to be a rough one. In the second quarter, Princeton’s star player left the game with a broken nose. In the third quarter, a Dartmouth player was taken off the field with a broken leg. Tempers flared both during and after the game. 

For weeks after the match accusations were traded between players, coaches, and alumni of the two schools. Writeups of the game in the schools’ newspapers were diametrically opposed. There was disagreement between sides as to what had actually happened during the match. This presented a great opportunity for a “real life” case study by psychologists Hastorf and Cantril. 

The researchers interviewed the two groups of fans and recorded their opinions of the game on a questionnaire. The Princeton fans said that Dartmouth had been unduly violent and aggressive toward their quarterback. The Dartmouth fans reported that the game was rough but fair. What a football game looks like depends on whether you are from Dartmouth, or not—even when you don’t see the match live but watch a replay of the game later. Hastorf and Cantril discovered a few things.

• Princeton students watching a replay of the game saw the opposing Dartmouth team make over twice as many infractions as their own team made.

• Princeton students saw the Dartmouth team make over twice as many infractions as were seen by the Dartmouth students who also watched the game replay.
• When Princeton students judged these infractions as “flagrant” or “mild,” the ratio was about two “flagrant” to one “mild” for the Dartmouth team. For their own team, Princeton students judged the infractions as one “flagrant” to three “mild.”

• When Dartmouth students watched the replay, they saw both teams make about the same number of infractions.

• Dartmouth fans saw their own team make only half the number of infractions the Princeton students saw them make.

• The Dartmouth supporters’ ratio of “flagrant” to “mild” infractons attributed to Princeton was about one to one. When they judged their own infractions, it was one “flagrant” to two “mild.” 

The authors of the study conclude:

“It seems clear that the ‘game’ actually was many different games and that each version of the events that transpired was just as ‘real’ to a particular person as other versions were to other people… The ‘same’ sensory impingements emanating from the football field, transmitted through the visual mechanism to the brain, also obviously gave rise to different experiences in different people. The significances assumed by different happenings for different people depend in large part on the purposes people bring to the occasion and the assumptions they have of the purposes and probable behavior of other people involved.”

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Though we assume that we perceive reality directly, this is an illusion; perhaps better termed “a virtual reality” or “a personal construction” of reality. Our sensory systems filter and limit the information transmitted to the brain. From this greatly reduced flow of information, we construct our personal version of “reality.” 

This construction is fundamentally shaped by our biases, assumptions, and personal experiences. In the case of a football game your perception would be influenced by many factors including what school you went to, what town you live(d) in, which teams your parents supported, or even, whether you like the mascot of the team. (As I write this, I am watching a Final Four college basketball game. When I asked my wife who she was hoping would win, she replied, “I guess Florida Atlantic. I don’t know much about the team, but I really like their mascot… an owl!” Me? I prefer the Aztec Warriors of San Diego State University.) So, we are really watching or experiencing different “games.”   

Of course, our construction of a personal reality plays out in all domains, not just sports. Psychologist Robert Ornstein explores the fundamental way our mind shapes reality in his book The Psychology of Consciousness. In one example, he describes a 1985 Stanford University study of the perceptions of two groups of politically juxtaposed students:

“Pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli students were shown the same news filmstrips pertaining to the massacre of Palestinian refugees by Christian Lebanese militia fighters in Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War. Although they were identical news clips both sides found that the film was slanted in favor of the other side. Pro-Israeli students reported seeing more anti-Israel references and fewer favorable references to Israel in the news report, and pro-Palestinian students reported seeing more anti-Palestinian references and fewer favorable references to Palestine. Both sides said a neutral observer would have a more negative view of their side from viewing the clips, and that the media excused the other side where it blamed their side. Subjects differed along partisan lines on simple, objective criteria such as the number of references to a given subject.”

‘Why can’t other people see the world like I see it?’ we might ask. Whether it be in the context of a family disagreement, a partisan political squabble, or a piece of news reporting on a divisive issue, each of us selects certain features and screens out other details due to individual and cultural biases.  

Of course, there are constraints on our construction of reality. There are facts and rules which limit us in how far we can take our own interpretation. No matter which sports team or political candidate you support, there is a final score, or vote count. Even if you imagine you can walk through walls, you might want to test it before fully committing to that illusion. 

As Ornstein vividly describes, each of us lives in a different world. 

“Each person is a unique individual, with a certain family history, training, profession, interests. These background factors deeply influence the differences in our personal consciousnesses. Any given event is infinitely rich in itself; but the richness will be perceived variously, depending on the perceiver. Consider a scene in a park on a Sunday afternoon. An artist walking through may note the quality of the light, the colors of the leaves on the trees, the geometric forms of the landscape. A psychologist might notice the people present, their mannerisms, interactions, speech patterns. A physician, looking at the same people, might notice not their interactions, but their body structures and their health. A botanist might ignore the people, to focus on the flowers. One woman may remember words, another gestures. One man may be fascinated by a particular smell in the air, while another may be too immersed in his own thoughts and fantasies to register anything about the external environment.”

Bridging our different worlds requires a Step 1: that we understand and accept that each of us selectively constructs our reality. And yes, that can be a bit humbling. But it prepares us for Step 2, in which we attempt to learn about, and from, the differences in others’ life experiences. Not easy, but that is the way the ball bounces whether an Owl or an Aztec.

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David S. Sobel, MD, is an Adjunct Lecturer in the Department of Medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine. He is coauthor of ten books including three with Robert Ornstein, entitled The Healing Brain, Healthy Pleasures, and The Mind & Body Health Handbook.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Enlightenment

Andrew Boden | March 21, 2023

“The arrival of a good clown exercises more beneficial influence upon the health of a town than twenty asses laden with drugs.” – Thomas Sydenham, 17^th century physician

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I have an irreverent friend, older than me by a generation. His wry perspective on the world is often unique, hilarious and socially illuminating. I never know what he’s going to say or when. An example: after neurosurgery that saved my life, my friend strode into my hospital room, glanced down at me in my bed and said in a loud voice to everyone gathered there, “Some people will do anything to avoid a dinner invitation!” As much as I could, I laughed. I certainly felt the heavy mood in the room lighten and my spirit lighten, too.

There are good reasons I felt that way. In Mind and Body Health Handbook authors David Sobel and Robert Ornstein describe the demonstrated health benefits of humor, which include raising pain thresholds, reducing stress and helping our immune responses. Sobel and Ornstein go on to prescribe various ways that you can increase the amount of humor in your life. In fact, their whole chapter on humor is a bit of a comedy routine in itself. One of their suggestions is to keep around a pair of Groucho Marx glasses to wear when you feel that you’re taking yourself too seriously to help give yourself a sense of perspective.

It’s no laughing matter. I mean, it is—but in a very helpful-learn-about-your-self sense, it isn’t. Afghan author, Idries Shah, renowned for his collections of rollicking Mulla Nasrudin jokes and tales from the Land of Fools, dedicated an entire book to the subject, entitled Special Illumination: The Sufi Use of Humour. Shah underscores not only how humor can be used as a “shock-applier and a tension releaser and an indicator of false situations,” but also, in Sufi usage, as a means to help tell the false from the genuine mystic. It’s the indoctrinating leader who is very likely to lack the inner flexibility that comes with cultivating a humorous perspective on the world and one’s selves. Try to picture cult leaders such as Jim Jones or a Reverend Moon voluntarily wearing Groucho glasses and you’ll see what Shah means.

Shah does make very clear, however, that he’s writing about a very specialized use of humor. Humor not just to get a chuckle or a belly laugh, but rather to help us momentarily see something about ourselves or a situation that impedes our ability to have certain perceptual experiences. Special Illumination goes on demonstrate through jokes and hilarious stories, just how this process operates. An example:

Nasrudin was sitting at a café table gazing at two men by a hole in the road.

“What are you thinking, Mulla?” asked a passerby.

“How lazy people are. I have been sitting here for four hours, and I’ve never taken my eyes off those men. Can you believe that during all that time, neither of them has done any work?” (1)

Reading Special Illumination, I grew astonished at the many ways humor can be used as an inner tool. Narrow-minded attitudes, for example, towards religious life; obsessions, being unaware of one’s motivations, can all be, not only elucidated, but accepted by the perpetrators through humor.

It’s the incongruity often inherent in the joke that Shah encourages us to think about. He writes in Knowing How to Know:

“First consider the little-recognised fact that exposure to deliberate incongruity enables one to become used to new and unfamiliar things rapidly. New things often seem incongruous, however important they ultimately prove to be. The capacity to see beyond incongruity can be equal to the ability to adjust. Second, realise that incongruity, if you can become accustomed to encountering it, may stimulate your inner senses, and help them to work on a higher level. Most people do not allow themselves to face incongruity when it appears at random in their lives. They avoid it and thus rob themselves of the stimulating effect which it can have.”

My friend’s incongruous joke helped me realize just how much my friends, family and I were in the grips of social convention and expectation. As if we’d been handed a film script, we were expected to conform to certain roles: me to play the part of the patient who’d just had a brush with death; and my friends and family to play the parts of my relieved supporters (assuming, of course, that they were all relieved that I lived…). My friend’s joke not only upturned this script, but revealed there was in fact one in use. His joke also showed that there is a sense in which we’d unconsciously agreed to play our parts, rather than choose them over perhaps other more important roles. There was a lot less freedom in how we thought and behaved in my hospital room than we might have assumed.

Back to Ornstein and Sobel again and humor as an antidote to taking ourselves too seriously. One of the dangers of learning something new is that we can grow conceited and self-important. Our insights into ourselves, for example, can prompt us to think that we’re better than others, since we have an insight that they don’t (or that we think that they don’t). The snare that arrogance and self-conceit can be is a dynamic that Shah also addresses in numerous passages and jokes as well: get the joke, experience the insight, but don’t let it go to your head.

Fortunately, when I came out of the hospital with my insight into my friend’s humor, I had my young nieces to help me with any lingering arrogance.

When I went to visit them a few weeks after my operation, my sister-in-law explained to her three daughters that I’d been in the hospital for neurosurgery.

“What’s neurosurgery?” they asked.

“Well, your uncle had an operation on his brain.”

My nieces howled, “We always thought that there was something wrong with Uncle Andrew!”

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(1) Shah’s other Mulla Nasrudin tales, collected in multiple volumes, are often a brilliant illustration of the Sufi’s instrumental use of humor.

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Andrew Boden is a writer and novelist based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. He is the author of The Secret History of My Hometown and co-editor of Hidden Lives: True Stories from People Who Live with Mental Illness.

Finding the Right Way Home

John Zada | March 1, 2023

In the mid-1990s, a friend and I attended the gathering of an obscure Christian sect held at an empty warehouse across from the end of a runway beside Toronto’s international airport. Our presence there was as detached observers: the local media was reporting that the group were experiencing strange and unusual phenomena during their weekly musical worship. Church leaders told reporters that God was entering the bodies of their members during services. The result was a panoply of paranormal experiences. Worshippers, the church leaders said, “were being slain in the spirit.”

Up until then, I had always had a fascination with arcane religious sects and cults. One of my earliest childhood memories in front of the television involved watching news coverage of the Jonestown Massacre in Guyana. Another was seeing a 60 Minutes story about the criminal sleights of hand of the Indian guru Bhagwan Rajneesh in Oregon (who later changed his name to “Osho”). I was compelled to see for myself what all of the fuss was about at the warehouse.

My friend and I arrived there to find what seemed to be a regular and informal gathering of music and singing. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary at first beyond the “cliquey” attitude and entranced demeanour of the congregation. But then a switch flipped. The preacher-singer-leader heading the jamboree suddenly announced that it was “carpet time.” As the next song tore through the crowd, and as the music crescendoed, worshippers began falling to the floor in fits of intense euphoria. Some were engulfed in what they called “holy laughter.” Others wept consolably for joy. A few members writhed around like snakes, some barked liked dogs, and others roared like lions. One member even woke up from his euphoric stupor claiming that he had magically received gold fillings in his teeth, when before he had none.

We left the gathering scratching our heads. The church’s weekly meetings soon became daily and went on for many years, strangely becoming the most-visited local “tourist destination,” even beating out Niagara Falls.

Yet the experience, for all its strangeness, left me with one overriding question: was this really and truly a cult? Yes, the congregation displayed in-groupishness, utopian ideas and a strong and charismatic leadership. But there also weren’t any of the deep scandals or illegal controversies and exploitation, à la the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, for instance, that necessitated the intervention of law enforcement. It seemed to me that something “bad” or “ugly” had to be going on, above and beyond self-delusion, for the group to earn the taboo moniker of “cult.”

It wasn’t too long after that I picked up a book called The Wrong Way Home, written by Dr. Arthur Deikman, a clinical psychiatrist who taught at the University of California in San Francisco and was an authority in cult thinking. I had read other generalist works about cults, but Deikman’s writing, it seemed to me, touched on psychological aspects that were more core and fundamental to the phenomenon.

Deikman identified four main pillars of cult thinking. They are:

1. Dependence on a leader
2. Devaluing the outsider
3. Compliance with the group
4. Avoiding dissent

There were two other unique insights that Deikman contributed. First, people are drawn to cults by what he called a “dependency wish” or fantasy—of wanting to be taken care of by powerful, parent-like authority figures that can render everything “okay.”

Just as importantly, Deikman argued that designating cultish behaviour was not an either/or proposition, as I had regarded it when considering the church group I had witnessed. For him, the question was less often: ‘Is this, or isn’t this a cult?’—but more ‘how much cult behaviour is present in any group dynamic?’

“We need to understand the cult behaviour that operates unnoticed in everyday life,” Deikman writes.

Cult-thinking, he adds, is ubiquitous in normal society, and has the effect of obfuscating reality—preventing us from seeing more clearly how things really are, on a case-by-case basis, and in contrast to the fixed views of the group.

After reading his book, I began to see these elements of cultish behaviour in some of my past and present workplaces, in groups I’d been part of, in friendships and family dynamics, and even in my own thinking. These habits can still manifest on occasion. While on a recent work trip to the remote and mountainous border area along the Idaho panhandle and Washington State, a region known for its far-right militia groups, I was divested of my generalized judgements of the area’s people that I held as a more liberal northeasterner. My mind automatically imagined the folks in rugged backwater Republican areas to be low-brow, insular, and hostile to big city people. That didn’t bear out at all. The people I met there were friendly, thoughtful, and generous in the extreme (although, as far as I know I also didn’t run into any militia types).

Larger mainstream political movements, and even whole nations and cultures, it also seemed to me, were just as prone to cult dynamics as individuals. Author Timothy Snyder explores this in his 2017 book, On Tyranny, which looks at the totalitarian movements, the “political cults” that wreaked havoc throughout the 20^th century—and which many of us still don’t consider as cults. Even the polarized ideological duelling we see across society nowadays easily falls into Deikman’s catch net of cult-thinking criteria: whether between Democrats and Republicans, Brexiters and Remainers, or Sunnis and Shia.

A society needn’t be in the throes of a historical demagogue, like a Stalin or Pol Pot, to qualify for the cult-like designation. Even what are seemingly well-meaning and “progressive” social movements, can overreach, and become cultish in their pursuit to banish the world’s ills and those deemed responsible for them. Eric Hoffer, in his 1951 classic work, The True Believer: The Psychology of Mass Movements, writes: “Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a god, but never without a belief in a devil.”

Our human vulnerability to cultishness make sense given we are intensely social creatures, are group-oriented, and fundamentally seek the collective’s approval. Our propensity for group trance, for wanting to sometimes lose ourselves in the emotional throes of the collective, what American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt calls “The Hive Switch”—whether at a football game or at a musical church meeting like the one I attended—is also a deep motivator. Togetherness feels really good.

To be sure a dose of groupishness is needed for the type of cohesion required to bring a collective effort to successful fruition. But the line between a more or less healthy social cohesion on one hand, and tribalism and clannism on the other, is often finer than we realize. We need to remain vigilant and aware of when we may be crossing that boundary into the more dangerous groupthink territory, with all of its diminishing returns.

A dose of self-awareness, too, might be required to better prevent us from falling prey to the more heinous movements we’d more readily call “cults.” Recognizing and thwarting our deep desire for simple, easy, answers about the world that give us a false sense of certainty from an authority figure, is one tranche of work. The other is making sure that our own lives are sufficiently in order, that our emotional needs, are met, so that we aren’t coaxed into situations whereby the cult wrongly provides for those needs for the hefty price they levy in return: our agency.

Author and psychologist Robert Ornstein, in The Psychology of Consciousness, writes:

“If someone is unfulfilled in marriage, in work, in self-concept, they are much better off trying to get the fulfilment and stability they need, rather than term it spiritual or conscious development. If you’re hungry, you will seek food in any environment, and if you need recognition, praise, et cetera, you will do so as well.”

Were we to understand ourselves, our minds, and our human nature better in this regard, there would be less compulsion to enter into those Faustian bargains that results in what Deikman, astutely calls “diminished realism.”

Indeed, if there is a ‘right way home,’ it would start with moving away from this diminished realism—the fixed, cookie-cutter view of the group—and towards a more flexible and less constrained outlook onto the world that is each our own.

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John Zada is a writer and journalist based in Toronto, Canada. He is the author of the books, In the Valleys of the Noble Beyond and Veils of Distortion.

Time and Self

Hugh McGilvery | February 22, 2023

A few months ago, at a holiday lunch, someone remarked how fast the year had gone by, and how the older we get, the quicker time seems to pass. All of us there were 50-plus and affirmed that weeks and months had flown by leaving barely a trace. I recall the Ezra Pound verse: “And life slips by like a field mouse/Not shaking the grass.”

Coincidentally, I came across two separate articles in the news feed on my iPhone in the last two days. One of these was entitled Researchers say time is an illusion. So why are we obsessed with it? The other one was Time flies by faster as we get older. Here’s why. The former is based on the space-time theory of Einstein and the latter is a neuropsychological analysis. The point both make is that our perception of time is subjective. Time is a social construct, according to physicist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein quoted in the “time is an illusion” article.

It’s difficult to wrap our minds around a statement like ‘time is an illusion,’ but it seems to me it all stems from our inherently self-centered view of life and experience. And while it may not be a simple thing to free ourselves from the shackles of (illusory) time, there are some things we can do to gain a less me-centered perspective—and that brings its own benefits.

Our normal consciousness is time-centered and gets us into trouble, composed as it is by what Robert Ornstein calls “a squadron of simpletons,” a multitude of small minds, each of them ‘me-centered’, that evolved thousands of years ago. They were ideal when our survival depended upon fighting, fleeing and reproduction, but are inappropriate for solving today’s problems.

We subconsciously know that. How often have you read or heard the news and thought: Why couldn’t we just collaborate across borders and come up with solutions that actually address our global problems? After the devastation of two world wars, international institutions, such as the United Nations and later the European Union were created to address the common good in a less me-centered way. Today our leaders often seem to advocate the reverse, giving lip service to these institutions while resolutely sticking to me—or nation—or party-centered responses.

Our subjectivity is built into us. What we perceive is a me-centered view of life. I remember this amusing joke of two people on opposite banks of a river. The person on one side shouts to the guy across the river: “How do I get to the other side?” And the guy answers, puzzled, “But you’re already on the other side.”

In God 4.0, Dr. Robert Ornstein and Sally Mallam Ornstein make important observations on how our perception of space and time is neurobiologically linked to our sense of a separate self. They explain how being constantly “in self” leads to a narrowing of vision and less compassion. In contrast, being “out” of this self, or not being confined by it, allows one to be more tolerant and kinder. With practice, this open and liberal attitude develops into a second system of cognition, and we become a little wiser, too.

But how do we “practice” this?

The Ornsteins suggest a number of possibilities; among them, how experiencing awe can help loosen the grip of the usual self:

“…awe slows our personal sense of time, and as a result, increases our perception of how much time is available, a step in the direction of believing in eternity. It can result in a diminishment of the individual self and its concerns, and an increase in prosocial behaviors such as generosity and compassion. It also reduces impatience, which can lead to more prosocial behaviors, such as the willingness to volunteer our time. The opposite—feeling pressed for time—has a negative impact on people’s willingness to stop to help others in need. Experiencing awe causes a change in brain function to release a more selfless, transcendental consciousness.”

They recommend the works of the Afghan savant and author Idries Shah. I’ve been reading Shah’s books for a number of years and his work does indeed cultivate a more flexible, multidimensional appreciation of situations. Shah describes his corpus of works as “instrumental”– that is to say, absorbing the teaching-stories, narratives and anecdotes he has selected for contemporary society develops this alternate consciousness. The material encourages a more comprehensive worldview, one that facilitates more productive action.

As the authors point out in God 4.0, this expanded consciousness can now be understood neurobiologically. It is a uniquely human capacity that is latent in all of us. Our prophets and spiritual teachers – Hillel, Jesus, Muhammad, Rumi, El-Ghazali etc. have all addressed this potential, emphasizing service and virtues as a means of accessing it.

Shah, in his book, The Way of the Sufi, points out that “All religious presentations are varieties of one truth more or less distorted. This truth manifests itself in various peoples, who become jealous of it, not realizing that its manifestation accords with their needs. It cannot be passed on in the same form because of the difference in the minds of different communities. It cannot be reinterpreted, because it must grow afresh.”

But we are back considering time again. How fortunate we are to have access to a way to develop this mindset now, when it is most obviously needed; to join with others for more productive action.

I’m reminded of another short anecdote from the same book:

THE CELESTIAL APPLE

 Ibn-Nasir was ill and, although apples were out of season, he craved one.

 Hallaj suddenly produced one.

 Someone said: “This apple has a maggot in it. How could a fruit of celestial origin be so infested?”

 Hallaj explained: “It is just because it is of celestial origin that this fruit has become affected. It was originally not so, but when it entered this abode of imperfection it naturally partook of the disease which is characteristic here.”

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Hugh McGilvery is a retired high-altitude test pilot for the US Air Force and is the author of several monographs on the physics of windblown sand. He lives in a small town in the Green Mountains of Vermont.

Escaping the Either/Or Thinking Trap

John Zada | February 14, 2023

A 2016 article in Outside magazine entitled “Everything You Know About Surviving Rip Currents Is Wrong” looked at research that challenged longstanding wisdom about what to do if you find yourself caught in a deadly current while swimming at the beach.

The traditional advice has long been that if you find yourself being pulled out to sea, you should not swim head-on against the current back towards shore. To do so, we are told, is largely futile because the rip is often too powerful. Battling it will increase the risk of fatigue and drowning. Instead, swimmers are advised to move parallel with the beach until they escape the narrow band of current coming off the shore. From there you can more easily return to land.

The Outside article brought attention to newer research by Jamie MacMahan, who, at the time, was a rip current expert at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. His data, as well as countless hours he spent as a test dummy in the ocean, showed that rip current dynamics were far more complex than previously understood.

MacMahan claimed that swimming parallel to the shore to escape rips only worked sometimes. By swimming sideways, he said, you might just as often find yourself going inadvertently against the rip. Your chances of escape using that method, he estimated, were somewhere in the range of 50/50. Not exactly fool proof.

He argued that a more successful strategy to employ in a rip current situation was, actually, to do nothing. Your best odds, he alleged, lie in giving yourself up to the current.

MacMahan asserted that because 80% to 90% of rips he studied flowed in huge circles, by floating, a caught swimmer will usually find themselves back in the shallows in just a short time.

Given that rips account for many dozens of drownings, as well as thousands of beach rescues, each year in the United States, it was an important new discovery.

Yet, what fascinated me—just as much as this discovery—was the odd response to MacMahan’s findings, discussed in the Outside article.

Though his claims were supported by strong research and data, MacMahan met with rancorous and irrational resistance among his American colleagues and from beach safety officials. Many insisted he was flat-out wrong and a fierce polarizing debate arose in rip current circles about which survival technique—the old or the new—was the ‘correct’ one. This was especially odd given MacMahan wasn’t necessarily trying to overturn the previous advice to beachgoers (unlike what the Outside story’s misleading title suggested). He admitted swimming sideways sometimes worked.

As I read the piece, I wondered why both survival approaches couldn’t be accepted together as part of a toolkit for how to respond in such circumstances. Instead, they were regarded as at odds and irreconcilable.

Part of the issue is that MacMahon’s advice runs counterintuitive to our primitive evolutionary survival instincts. But this episode, I think, also illustrates, if on a smaller scale, a deeper cultural problem that is worsening by day: our growing penchant for simplistic, dualistic thinking that is black or white, right or wrong, and either/or.

Humans are not especially adept at responding to situations flexibly and on a case-by-case basis. We seek simplistic templates, formulas and solutions that we can automatically repeat. Yet, there are far fewer one-size-fits-all approaches than we like to imagine.

“Circumstances alter cases,” the writer Idries Shah once wrote.

The great English mathematician, Alfred North Whitehead, mirrored this when he wrote that it’s not so much a question of whether something is ‘true’ or ‘false’, but rather, “In what circumstances is this formula true, and in what circumstances is it false?”

Our natural inability to think more often along these lines, a kind of handicap, is amplified now by the fact that we’re caught in a deeply combative and polarized moment in our history, where disparate ideas, varying perspectives on any given subject or issue, are unable to be synthesized or even considered together. It’s as if we’ve suddenly lost an ability to see subtle shades and larger wholes. We can only recognize the parts, and we cling to them for dear life.

We see this in many polarized issues. Immigration, a deeply divisive issue in many countries, for instance, is sometimes considered either simply just ‘good’ or ‘bad’—something to be stopped outright, or to continue with few, or no, limits ad infinitum. The question around mask efficacy during Covid-19, rather than being, ‘Do masks work, or not?’ might have been more usefully framed as: ‘Which masks are more or less effective and under what circumstances—if at all?’ And the oft-cited conflict between science and religion, as clichéd a duality as there ever was, may constitute one of the deepest either/or traps of our modern times, when in fact, both fields might be better seen as complimentary wellheads of literal and metaphorical truth. The two can operate in tandem towards the common goal of helping us understanding the world better.

To be sure, black-and-white thinking has its place and function, if only because once in a while things are more cut-and-dry. Dualistic thinking is a product of the left-brain: the hemisphere that, among other things, is charged with seeing the world explicitly, via categories, and in parts, so it can better manipulate it (whereas the right hemisphere sees the world holistically and in-context).

At another level, ‘either/or’ evolved as a survival mechanism. When finding ourselves feeling threatened it allows us to ignore any ambiguity that could confound our survival decisions. We save precious moments otherwise spent in calculation by shortcutting straight to an assumption of threat. That might have sometimes saved us being eaten by a tiger hidden in the trees. This sort of ‘fast’ thinking, as author Daniel Kahneman writes, is one of the main systems of human mentation.

Similarly, this dualistic thinking is also appealing because it provides easy and simple answers and explanations that give us that cozy feeling of certainty—another preoccupation of the left brain.

But it can also backfire, as we see frequently now in our polarized politics.

Human survival, writ large, I think, requires retreat from these black-and-white postures. That means being better at seeing the forest from the trees. It also means being more receptive to the many sides of an issue, since, as author Iain McGilchrist says in The Matter with Things, those truths “may be truths on different levels, truths of different kinds, or, since all truths can be partial only, may both be needed to see a fuller picture.”

Returning to the rip currents debate mentioned earlier: since the Outside piece appeared in 2016, MacMahan’s research has been widely accepted in the United States—due likely, in part, to the growing publicity around his work. The advice now to swimmers in most places is to be ready to apply either, or both, survival strategies in a rip current situation (because each rip is different, neither approach alone is entirely fool proof).

I’ve cited this example also because it is illustrative of our ability to overcome this kind of primitive either/or thinking mechanism, given time. In this specific case it took over a decade for MacMahon’s findings to be accepted and synthesized into the whole. Some lives were likely lost in the interim until that new knowledge was assimilated. Given the scope of our black-and-white thinking habits at a societal, macro, level, change at scale will take even longer. Do we have that kind of time, given the types and multiplicity of problems that are bearing down upon us?

It is for this reason that thinkers such as Robert Ornstein with his idea of ‘conscious evolution,’ and Idries Shah by way of traditional Teaching Stories he introduced to the West, both tried to introduce faster-track processes to achieve the sort of mental nimbleness needed to be as fixation-free as possible. The flexibility of mind they espoused, and the ability to synthesize differing viewpoints, may be the key to escaping not just rip currents, but the many larger ‘either/or’ traps that endanger our societies.

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John Zada is a writer and journalist based in Toronto, Canada. He is the author of the books, In the Valleys of the Noble Beyond and Veils of Distortion.

Looking Up, Looking Out

By David S. Sobel, MD | February 8, 2023

I recently saw some amazing photos of our galaxy, and some galaxies beyond, taken from the NASA Hubble Space Telescope orbiting the Earth. I was stunned. It even inspired me to go outside and gaze at the stars at night. Of course, the hazy interference of the earth’s atmosphere coupled with urban light pollution, made what I saw not quite as dramatic as the Hubble images.

What I realized is that I don’t look up often. Most of the time, I am looking down—at a book, a phone screen, tablet, or computer. Just observe people at an airport or even walking down the street. We have become a species of bowed heads, not as a posture of prayer or humility, but of worshipping screens. I’m sure our ancestors spent more time examining the skies and heavens—looking for guidance, perspective or just what was coming next in the weather.

I discovered a related antidote to everyday stress: it’s a photo of our galaxy with a tiny arrow pointing to one tiny speck of light immersed in a thousand stars. It has a caption that says, “You are here. “

This image provokes me to consider how small and insignificant my daily concerns are in the total scheme of the universe. Whether I like to admit it or not, I spend most of my time focusing on a rather small world, notably one which has me as the center of its universe. What am I going to eat? Where should I park? Do people like me? What’s in it for me? and on and on. Feeling insignificant in the face of an awesome universe, even for a moment, can recalibrate us for the better.

For example, looking towards the heavens during an awe-inspiring celestial event like a total solar eclipse can apparently trigger less self-focus and even alter our Twitter entries. A study published in the journal Psychological Science reports that eclipsers (people who watch eclipses) used the words “I,” “me” and “mine” less, and more words like “we,” “our,” and “us” more. The researchers concluded: “We found that the eclipse inspired awe among people in its path of totality and, in turn, increased humility, collective focus, affiliation, and pro-sociality—tendencies that enable people to form into collaborative social groups.”

The value of looking up and outward may be rooted in how the human brain evolved. As neuropsychologist Robert Ornstein, and Sally Ornstein, observed in the book God 4.0: On the Nature of Higher Consciousness and the Experience Called “God”:

“There is considerable evidence to indicate that human beings, more than other animals, have evolved the ability to see well beyond the self and, in the process, to take a longer view and connect at a deeper level with others. It’s likely that these changes were precipitated by our shift from moving around on all fours to standing and walking on two feet. We could then routinely look outward or upward, rather than just straight ahead at a low level or downward, and this enabled a huge change in perspective. It formed a basis, in due course, for a more encompassing awareness that extended beyond the immediate locale.”

Looking upwards and outward can make us feel both smaller and yet, more connected. Yes, I am but one tiny being on a tiny planet, but I am part of the whole human journey, and that planet is part of a larger system.

So how else might we enlarge and connect to a larger world view besides looking at the stars? Well, certainly traveling the world can enlarge our view, but it can be expensive and time-consuming. I have found another way that works: I can take a quick look at human history and the diversity of our planet by scrolling through the topics on The Human Journey website. Within seconds, and from the convenience of my own home, I can read about important watersheds in the long story of the evolution of the human mind; from fascinating in-depth writeups about our early origins to how we can bring about a more connected and sustainable future for all.  Just viewing a few of the entries on the website stretches my small world and invites me to look well beyond myself.

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David S. Sobel, MD, is an Adjunct Lecturer in the Department of Medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine. He is coauthor of ten books including three with Robert Ornstein, entitled The Healing Brain, Healthy Pleasures, and The Mind & Body Health Handbook.

Conditioning and the Gendered Brain

By Denise Winn | January 25, 2023

A friend was telling me about how she had managed to get herself completely lost one day in an area she was familiar with. “I have a terrible sense of direction!” she trilled, and then stopped and made a gesture that encompassed the two of us. “Well, obviously,” she added, with a rueful smile.

I realised she was referring to what she thought likely to be a shared affliction, seeing as we were both women and that I do have a rather unhelpful default position of wanting to turn left on leaving any building. However, the concept, enthusiastically popularised by the media, that women generally have poorer spatial abilities than men is much more likely to be based in conditioning, rather than innate, biologically determined differences.

I interviewed cognitive neuroscientist Gina Rippon a few years ago, on the publication of her book The Gendered Brain: The New Neuroscience that Shatters the Myth of the Female Brain. She describes in the book how findings from what were at the time (early 1990s) relatively new and comparatively unsophisticated brain scanning techniques ‘confirmed,’ at brain level, beliefs that, for instance, women are more emotionally articulate than men (they showed better connections between the left and right hemispheres of their brains); and that males have more spatial awareness (enlargement in the cortical areas associated with visuo-spatial processing). Visiting such studies retrospectively, however, has thrown serious doubt on their findings.

Most recently, in 2021, neuroscientist Lise Eliot, Professor of Neuroscience at Chicago Medical School, and colleagues at Chicago’s Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science, published in Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews a comprehensive synthesis of three decades of human MRI and post-mortem data. They focused most particularly on meta-analyses and large studies, which, they found, “collectively reveal few reliable sex gender differences and a history of unreplicated claims.” The undisputed fact that male brains are larger than female brains right from birth apparently accounted for the brain sex differences such as a higher white/gray matter ratio. And when identifiable structural and lateralisation differences were found even after accounting for brain size difference, sex or gender explained just one per cent of the variance.

This is not to say that scientists have stopped looking, although the emphasis may be different. For instance, at the Shah Laboratory, housed in Stanford’s Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and the Department of Neurobiology, the goal is “to understand how the brain, seemingly indistinguishable between men and women, generates sex differences in behaviors.”

Perhaps a key element is the neuroplasticity of the brain; its wiring can change according to circumstances and experience. Rippon quotes a study which involved scanning girls’ brains before and after three months of playing the puzzle video game Tetris for an hour and a half a week, and comparing the images with those of girls who didn’t play Tetris. The researchers found distinct enlargement of those cortical areas associated with visuo-spatial processing, leading to the conclusion that visuo-spatial processing ability likely depends on how much practice it gets.

As Rippon comments, “Understanding any kind of differences between the brains of different people means we will need to know more than what age or sex they are; we will need to consider what kind of lifetime experiences are embedded in these brains. If being male means you have much greater experience of constructing things or manipulating complex 3D representations, it is very likely that will show up in your brain. Brains reflect the lives they have lived, not just the sex of their owners.”

So what this seems to mean is that most of the behavioural differences between the sexes are likely to be attributable to conditioning. In most cultures, boys and girls are treated differently from the outset—or even before. There was, perhaps still is, a dreadful vogue for ‘gender reveal’ parties, held around 20 weeks of pregnancy (by which time sex has been determined by scan). The invitations to these events commonly contained a teasing come-on of a question, such as, “A bouncing little ‘he’ or a pretty little ‘she’?” “Guns or Glitter?” “Rifles or Ruffles?”

Rippon gets annoyed when accused of claiming that sex differences are all down to culture and not to biology. As she told me in our interview, “The social, cultural aspects I mention in the book are all processes that will change the brain. I think it is all biology. It is a matter of where those differences in the biology came from, and it is not necessarily from some biological template we inherited but maybe because of continual exposure to cultural expectations of our social world.”¹ As she points out, from a very young age we are looking to fit into a social network, which will welcome and care for us, and thus ensure our survival. The brain is geared to pick up on the social rules that bring approval, and if those rules are gendered, so be it.

We see this kind of conditioning too, of course, in other human drives, such as the need to belong to a group, to be part of ‘us’ rather than ‘them’, effortlessly absorbing the ideas that the in-group (representing race, religion, culture or whatever) generates to make the outgroups seem undesirable, lesser, dangerous or even subhuman.

Conditioning which keeps the human spirit trapped within restricting expectations is impossible to break if it remains unconscious. It is so insidious because, initially, we are unaware of it. We think we are dealing with truth, instead of circumstances, and it is a shock to be confronted by the possibility that it is not so. We may even tie ourselves up in knots in order not to see it.

Psychologist Robert Ornstein has written extensively in his books about the many different ‘sides’ that make up our selves and overcoming the unhelpful conditioning that makes us think we can’t do anything to change. Most recently in his book God 4.0, he explains that the key is “to observe yourself as if you were another person. Under the stimulus of self-observation, the mind begins to change, and the links between action and reaction loosen.”

Because, fortunately, as said, the brain is neuroplastic. As Ornstein shows us, however deep the conditioning, it is possible to reverse it, if we put the work in by opening ourselves to the kind of seeing and reading and learning that sets us off down new, more liberating paths.

¹ Rippon, G, (2019). “Not so gendered brain.” Human Givens Journal, 26, 1, 28–33.

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Denise Winn is a writer, journalist and psychotherapist. She is author of The Manipulated Mind: Brainwashing, Conditioning and Indoctrination, editor of Human Givens Journal and a human givens practitioner.

New World, Same Mind?

Andrew Boden | January 18, 2023

Watching the Worldometer population clock online can be a staggering thing—how fast the numbers climb, never appearing to slow, always rising. Two weeks ago, the United Nations announced that the earth’s human population had hit eight billion. By 2050, there’s slated to be almost ten billion of us on a planet increasingly facing a procession of what Robert Ornstein and Paul Ehrlich called in their 1989 book, New World New Mind “slow-motion disasters.” Like watching the Worldometer, it’s easy to feel that those disasters are coming faster and faster.

There were 5.4 billion of us in 1991, the year that I read Ornstein and Ehrlich’s call to a new way of thinking about ourselves, our minds, and our world. The central idea in New World New Mind struck me as a crucial one: our minds were adapted not for the modern world we find ourselves in, but rather the small tribal groups we lived in tens of thousands of years ago.

The mental tools that we depended on back then (our limited perceptions and quick reflexes to handle sudden threats) have remained essentially unchanged to this day. We can react swiftly to a twig snapping behind us as a cougar stalks us, but we don’t see the slow rise of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere or notice the gradual depletion of a freshwater aquifer.

More locally for me, it’s not until I’m on a ferry leaving my home city of Vancouver that I see that its skyline looks as if someone smeared it with a nicotine-coloured highlighter. And yet, every day, I walk out into that same pollution smog, glad for the “fresh air” in a local mountain park.

Ornstein and Ehrlich argue that the human race will never evolve naturally in time to be able to cope with its increasingly complex and runaway circumstances. What humanity requires, they write, is a rapid change-of-mind process they call “conscious evolution.” They define that as a willful shift towards a greater perceptual and cognitive faculty that allows us to see solutions and take appropriate actions that will move us out of this danger zone.

Thirty-two years after I first read Ornstein and Ehrlich’s astute book, I wondered: are there any signs that our minds are evolving? Catching up to the new world in which we find ourselves? If you’ve been watching media reports about the climate dramas across the planet, it’s hard not to feel pessimistic. There’s a frightening parade of ecological problems that seem too large and complicated to even begin to resolve.

Lost in all the disaster reports, however, may be clues that our minds are starting to adapt. If our perceptions are so limited that we don’t notice gradual changes around us, that may also include not catching slow adaptations in our mindset.

One sign for me is the increasing availability of mainstream information about human thinking and human consciousness. Books like Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow and Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. It seems more than ever that there’s a proliferation of ‘thinkers on thinking’ appearing on our best seller lists.

Information is one thing, of course, but appropriate, thoughtful action is another. That’s where I like to look locally for clues that our thinking may be changing for the better.

Near where I live in the greater Vancouver area sits Stoney Creek Elementary School, which borders a Pacific salmon bearing stream fit once again for salmon, after years of remediation efforts. Each spring, the children, their teachers, and the local Stoney Creek Environment Committee celebrate the Great Salmon Send-off. The front of the school has a large wooden mural made by the children in honour of the salmon. The students also write and draw what they’ve learned about the life cycle of this vital species. The annual send-off culminates with the release of salmon fry into the nearby stream.

Yes, I too learned about the life cycle of the salmon as a kid. But now there’s a greater sense that that information isn’t just an abstract something that has little bearing on our lives.

As American author and journalist Tony Hiss wrote in his 2021 book, Rescuing the Planet, “To save nature and to save ourselves, we must reconnect nature to people’s daily life…” and “…Protecting nature that’s ‘just outside the back door’ focuses people on a viable goal with personal value. It’s easier to save a town’s open space than it is to save an abstract percentage of land area.”

The key question, of course, are local efforts like the ones in my community rolling up into broader change, as a result of a gradual change in mindset?

One global sign could well be the recent landmark deal negotiated at the COP15 biodiversity conference held last December in Montreal, in which over 190 countries agreed to halt the decline of species ecosystems. The deal includes a goal to conserve at least 30 percent of the world’s land and oceans by 2030. It also includes a commitment by wealthier nations to triple financial aid for conservation measures to $30 billion annually by 2030.

While the deal isn’t binding and, yes, while the global community doesn’t have a great track record of fulfilling climate commitments—the deal is still historic. In fact, so historic it likely wouldn’t have happened even a few years ago. It can be argued that we are making strides in changing the way many of us think about some of these issues.

Hiss himself is inspired by what one reviewer of his book describes as “…otherwise ordinary people who are forging new protections for magnificent and vital expanses of wilderness,” and who are often unaware of each other’s work. There is more happening on this front than meets the eye—and what is reported in the news.

Hiss writes that we just might—finally—be able to forge a new ability to safeguard the biosphere and its species.

That ability, of course, will have begun with our own evolving mindset—in our local classrooms and on the broader world stage.

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Andrew Boden is a writer and novelist based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. He is the author of The Secret History of My Hometown and co-editor of Hidden Lives: True Stories from People Who Live with Mental Illness.

One Small Word

Sally Mallam | January 12, 2023

Yoko Ono’s Ceiling Painting/Yes Painting was shown in a London gallery in 1966. Viewers were invited to climb a white ladder, where, at the top, a magnifying glass, attached by a chain, hung from a frame on the ceiling. When viewers looked through the glass they saw one small word in tiny block letters: YES. John Lennon apparently met Yoko Ono, his future wife, through that piece.

Saying “YES” has been very lucky for me. It’s propelled me through a marvelous, if not quite conventional, life. One could say, I think, that each life is composed of the opportunities we get and our response to them. But recently I’ve been reflecting on the difference between the YES that I understood and responded to when I saw that artwork all those years ago—a YES that describes an uncluttered and open-minded positive intention—versus a deliberative and logical YES that governs so many actions, but sometimes seems too often directed by defined expectation and self-interest.

Thinking about it, we all admire and can recall stories of people whose actions stem from a positive mindset, seemingly without a thought for themselves. These are the stories we remember. For instance, the Sudanese lady who came to the United States as a refugee, and, after much struggle, started a restaurant in her neighborhood. When the place was burned down by rioters, her first act was to ensure that her staff were taken care of, using the last of her savings. To her it was normal—how could she not do that? Her second consideration was for the perpetrators of the fire. What made them act in this way and how could they be helped?

Then there is the young boy I met in juvenile detention who risked his own life to save his niece from drowning and had no idea he’d done anything brave or unusual.

Yet another is the mother of my local bank teller who regularly takes sight-impaired children to the zoo. To augment their experience, she carefully creates exquisite models of the animals, paying particular attention to the way each species feels to the touch.

These actions all start with “YES”—an affirmation. It’s their obvious response. And why not?

While working with my late husband on his last book, GOD 4.0 – On the Nature of Higher Consciousness and the Experience Called “God” which was published posthumously, I came to understand both the neurobiology behind this approach and the importance of cultivating it today.

This receptive mindset indicates the beginning of a potential continuum of expanding perceptions and understanding; a latent capacity that all humans share and that anyone of us can develop.

Neurobiologically, the mindset stimulates a different brain activation: one that bypasses the left hemisphere’s “ME-first”, step-by-step, moment-by-moment, way of dealing with the world that is our normal every-day consciousness, and switches to the right hemisphere triggering a spontaneous, wider, more comprehensive intuitive understanding of a situation and our role in it.

This expanded activation exists on a continuum. It ranges from an initial intuitive YES action, or the solution to a frustrating problem suddenly arriving in the mind, to the creative acts of poets, writers, artists and scientists (Tupac, Wordsworth, Einstein, Ramanujan, Mozart, Ellington, and on), and finally to the world-transforming intuitive insights of Reality, Love and Truth that our prophets and spiritual teachers (Hillel, Jesus, Muhammad, and so many others) experience and speak of.

So, how do we develop this ability and do so without disrupting our very busy lives? One way offered right now is to expose our brains to a body of literature designed specifically for this task. The strange thing about this literature is that it mainly consists of hundreds of entertaining stories—folktales, but with a difference. They were collected by the writer and savant, Idries Shah, who having developed this latent capacity himself, was able to select those tales appropriate to the further development of it in our modern minds.

Reading and re-reading these tales and narratives, allowing them to become familiar and easy to recall, encourages this different awareness—a skill to develop—as we go about our daily lives. It’s a gentle process and one that requires “ME-first” to get out of the way. The first step, of course, is to recognize this ME. Many of the stories in this corpus help with this, particularly those that take place in the ‘Land of Fools,’ or concern the Eastern folk hero, Nasrudin.

As this capacity becomes stabilized, it functions in parallel to our normal consciousness. We intuitively take productive actions and develop an ability to connect to others in a way that addresses our real shared situation. With practice we can cultivate a selfless wider perception of our problems and an understanding that leads to positive action in the knowledge that we are all one.

We might theoretically know this, but need to develop this heightened perception to experience its reality. Once we do we will be better able to address not only our own problems, but the global dilemmas that so badly need to be solved today.

For anyone who’d like to see what these stories are like, The Idries Shah Foundation lists all the author’s titles and each book can be read online for free. I recommend starting with Tales of the Dervishes. You’re in for a treat.

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Sally Mallam is the current executive director of The Institute for the Study of Human Knowledge (ISHK) and executive editor of The Human Journey project.