by Ingo Swann

06 October 1998

from BiomindSuperpowers Website

Contents

• Part 1 - Preparing The "Mind" to Integrate with Superpower Functions

• Part 2 - Our Amazing Species as A Bigger Picture

• Part 3 - Attempting to Identify Some Dynamics of Smaller-Picture Formats

• Part 4 - Some Structural Characteristics of Smaller Pictures

• Part 5 - Social Groupings vs. The Individual vs. Margins of Awareness vs. Deprivations of Knowledge

• Part 6 - The Individual vs. Smaller And Bigger Pictures

PART 1

PREPARING THE "MIND" TO INTEGRATE WITH SUPERPOWER FUNCTIONS

One of the questions most frequently asked has to do with How Can One LEARN to be "psychic," or learn to manifest some particular aspect of Psi-Superpower phenomena.

This is the famous "How To" question. On its surface, it seems a perfectly logical one. And so in answer to it, people expect to be guided to some kind of tutorial studies that will present a learning process in some kind of organized, step-by-step fashion.

Thus, a Market for such kinds of tutorial studies comes into existence, with the result that entrepreneurs and opportunists design study and instruction programs that encourage people to variously invest time, effort and substance.

Types of the tutorial programs vary, but they range from rather long-term studies involving philosophic and metaphysical concepts to rather short-term efforts that might involve six easy steps.

The quality of the offerings ranges from quite high-minded sincerity down to and including some rather tawdry programs and not a few scumbaggy mishmashes.

As it is, then, beginning especially about the middle of the nineteenth century there has accumulated a large, multifaceted and continuous history regarding this kind of thing. However, that particular history is not recognized as existing by the mainstream, while the mainstream also does not recognize the real existence of the superfaculties involved.

In another sense, the history is also composed of variegated and eclectic factors. They range from proposed tutorial methodologies and approaches drawn from Western and Eastern mysticism, occultism, and spiritualism. Some are drawn from inspired and other-worldly sources, creativity and self-improvement studies, concepts established by esoteric and exoteric gurus, various cultic avenues, and so forth. Large portions of the history are quite complicated, while other portions consist of over-simplified pap.

Additionally, the whole is laced through and through by combinations of glamour, hope factors, charismatic sales pitches and high expectations, and it is not unusual to encounter pompous posturing and so forth. Thus, the history is quite dense and it is exceedingly difficult to work one's way through it and make any clear-cut evaluations.

But it is relatively safe to say that the number of such tutorial attempts that have COME along is equal to those that have GONE along -- and among the combined results of their coming and going is a somewhat obvious absence of achieved superpower activation.

This is almost the same as saying that a great number of efforts intended to produce positive results have only yielded something of an extended chain of empty ones.

The first and seemingly most logical interpretation of this is that the failure rate is high among various kinds of superpower tutorials -- because the fault is with the tutorials.

There can be no question that this is sometimes the case. But if one steps back from this accusative interpretation in an attempt to achieve a broader overview, it can begin to seem quite odd that ALL the tutorials seem mostly to demonstrate failure rates.

After all, why should all of them incorporate failure?

During the early 1960s, this writer was inspired to research the so-called "green thumb" phenomenon many demonstrate with regard to growing and nurturing plants. Although this phenomenon is usually considered beneath serious interest, it is none the less a quite remarkable one.

As it was, this green-thumb effort extended into a larger study of the intuitive aspects of farmers, and into the wisdom-lore of farming as well. Within that lore can be found the ancient axiom having to do with perfectly good seeds falling into inadequate or unprepared soil -- after which nothing will happen regarding any growing.

In this sense, the fault is not with the seeds, but rather with what they fall into.

By analogy, this ancient axiom can be transliterated with regard to all kinds of superpower tutorials. The tutorials can be likened to the seeds. It is expected that the tutorials will fall into "something" wherein they will "grow" and produce their products.

If the sense of this is grokked, then one might study How To configurations. But if the ground the configurations fall into is inadequate or unprepared, then nothing (or at least not much) will happen.

On average, most assume that merely learning about something will somehow result in a product. And if this does not transpire, then most also assume that the fault is with the learning.

But in better fact, learning has to fall into and interact with whatever it DOES fall into. If the desired result is not achieved, then the chances are quite good that the learning has fallen into grounds inadequate or unprepared -- fallen into grounds that cannot really accommodate or nourish the seeds.

One of the common traits found within Western concepts of the mind, as far as study is concerned, is that it accepts anything that can be presented to it in some kind of rote-learning, easy, step-by-step way.

In one way, there can be no doubt that this methodology is a proven process regarding many things. But in another way, it is like the process of painting a picture by the numbers -- and which processes may, but probably won't, awaken far more profound and powerful creativity that are known to exist in all specimens of our species.

In any event, the "mind-ground" that How-To tutorials are expected to fall into is an aspect hidden behind many kinds of tutorials and several learning myths, and often hidden behind the cognitive comprehension of the student as well.

To be sure, this is NOT at all to cast blame or criticism on this or that individual's mind-ground. Rather, it is to establish that a situation exists regarding superpower activation which has been left unexamined and unappreciated with regard to its actual importance.

The fact of the matter, though, is that this kind of situation is NOT all that unfamiliar. Indeed, many fields requiring operative functioning also require extensive preparation of the mind -- and only after which will the operative functioning begin to manifest.

If all of the foregoing is considered as calmly as possible, the question will ultimately arise regarding what a prepared mind actually might consist of.

For this, there is no easy How-To answer conveniently at hand. But it is quite easy to figure out how to make mind UNPREPARED for a great number of things, or to make it unprepared for anything at all.

In this sense, all one needs to do is figure out how to confuse mind, or to shape it so that it functions only in minimal ways -- especially with regard to those two composite cultural items sometimes referred to as "social norms" and "average intelligence."

Here we encounter a principal clue that probably has great relevance to the concept of preparing the mind to interact with the superpower faculties.

In examining the clue, it is important to admit that the concepts regarding social norms and average intelligence are of undeniable importance regarding most societal structures -- since the two combined incorporate the workhorses upon which the stability such structures depend.

But it can be demonstrated (as some of the better sociologists have done) that social norms and average intelligence are themselves incorporated upon or based in "smaller pictures" or "smaller realities."

Of course, one has to deal with and within smaller pictures all of the time. They exist, and so there is no shame in doing so.

But, smaller pictures can be socially engineered, as they sometimes are, so as to exclude, even to forbid, contact with bigger pictures or bigger realities.

The principal clue referred to above revolves around the idea that IF the superpower faculties belong within some kind of bigger picture context, then smaller picture contexts are too limiting and might act as unrealized cognitive barriers to their functioning.

If such would be the case, then minds prepared only with regard to smaller picture contexts might need to add bigger picture contexts in whose soil the seeds regarding the superpower faculties might better take hold and flourish.

The whole of this might at first seem slightly off the wall. But there is exemplary precedent for it, and which can easily be marshaled in support.

One of the longer-term knowledge fall-outs of parapsychology is that ESP, telepathy, etc., fail to robustly manifest in laboratory settings, but do manifest in real life situations.

Labs clearly constitute smaller-picture situations -- while real life situations almost always have some kind of larger-picture connotations.

The implication here is that while one might know a great deal about scientific methods in a laboratory, one might also not know much about real life phenomena. Therefore, examining real life phenomena might better prepare the mind to interact with them.

With regard to differences between smaller- and bigger-picture scenarios, there obviously would exist very many levels and strata between them. So, there are of course numerous complications that can arise in discussing them.

But as a general rule of thumb, in their first instance bigger-picture factors refer to whatever can be seen as universal to our species entire -- while most smaller-picture situations incorporate only what is local (non-universal) with regard to segmented parts within our species entire.

It has already been established in other essays that the superpowers of the human biomind are universal to our species. This understanding is based on direct and copious evidence that the superpower elements spontaneously manifest in all human civilizations, historic ages, and in all generations.

The superpower faculties therefore transcend all of the above, and in this sense they can do so only if they are universally inherent in our species itself.

IDEAS about the superpowers do form up in various cultures and societies, of course. But in the sense that the dynamic activities of the superpowers spontaneously manifest in ALL cultures and societies, well, this can only mean that the activities are downloading from the species-universal level.

If the above consideration holds water, then merely adapting one's mind-ground to local (and historically transient) socio-cultural ideas about them might not serve very well.

All one might end up with is some kind of understanding of the socio-cultural ideas, but perhaps very little by way of engineering activation based on any mix of the socio-cultural ideas. In any event, socio-cultural ideas about the superpowers come and go, and certainly do go if they don't bear fruit, so to speak.

If the foregoing is somewhat taken on board, one rather typical response might be to dissect and critique the socio-cultural ideas in order to discover what's wrong or amiss within them.

But the direction here is not to critique, but to suggest that on average smaller-picture understandings of the superpowers probably won't prepare the mind to integrate with phenomena essentially based in larger-picture perspectives.

The most probable solution here (or at least some full part of it) is to patiently identify and consider the bigger-picture perspectives themselves.

Otherwise, the mind prepared to interact only within smaller-picture realities will not become enabled to effect the catalysts and syntheses that are required to make dynamic transitions from smaller-to bigger-picture functioning.

Back to Contents


 

PART 2

OUR AMAZING SPECIES AS A BIGGER PICTURE

 (08Oct98)
 

PREAMBLE

As readers of this website will understand, the whole of its contents are based upon actual research and experience that have spanned at least forty years by now.

A greater part of this research involved endless experimenting and testing in laboratories, and which, at one point, yielded a tutorial-training program that demonstrated a good deal of positive results.

The reasons for achieving positive results need to be entered into and integrated within the line-up of the information contained in this website. In attempting to do so, however, one particular detrimental phenomenon must always be kept in mind.

As with everything that is wonderful, it is always detrimental to synopsize, shorten, and down-size whatever is involved into easy, how-to terms. The process of making things easy to understand has its valid place, of course. But this is appropriate only AFTER all that is involved has been made completely visible or brought to light.

The detrimental part of making things easy to understand is that via the reductionist process of doing so, any number of important factors and nuances usually have to be ejected from the down-sizing line-up. And this reductionist process is especially unrewarding in those cases where a bigger rather than a smaller amount of factors need constantly to be carried in mind.

In this sense, then, BEGINNING a study of something by depending on a down-sized, simplified version of it can easily end up locking the mental processes within the down-sized, simplified version. But this is approximately the same as becoming locked into the peripheries of a smaller picture of something.

In the past, this writer had the opportunity of personally knowing several "natural psychics" and also took the opportunity to study autobiographical out-pourings of others. In addition merely to satisfy my simple fascination with them, one goal was to discover what they had in common within their personality structures.

As I had encountered it during the 1960s, the general consensus in psychical research and later parapsychology was that they had not much in common -- since beyond certain similar egotistical manifestations, their personalities were extremely varied otherwise. Indeed, most parapsychologists had little interest in the personalities of such individuals -- somewhat because the parapsychologists were interested in Psi phenomena, not in people.

One excuse several times given to ME was that the psychics couldn't articulate themselves very well, and so it was impossible to understand what they were talking about.

Well, it is somewhat the duty of researchers to penetrate any surface problems of articulation, and attempt to perceive the person behind them.

The psychics had one important factor in common, and once it is pointed up it is not all that difficult to identify it.

They all demonstrated a wide or large overview of things -- each in their own particular way, of course, but none the less a factor rather consistently present within them as an identifiable group. (This factor will be fleshed out in other essays and chapters in this website. Here, it is only necessary to point it up within the contexts of smaller pictures versus bigger pictures.)

The implication was that their larger overview of things might somehow be associated with their Psi functioning, and might also contribute to understanding something as to why they were variously alienated from many aspects of the world around them.

As it turned out, the alienation aspect made things easier rather than harder, for it was quickly possible to associate it with a number of entirely respectable sources having to do with social alienation.

One of these, perhaps the enduring best one, was Colin Wilson's very remarkable and enormously acclaimed book THE OUTSIDER (1956). In this book (and with articulation so elegant it has seldom been matched), Wilson sets forth the "anatomy" of The Outsider.

But he does so not only from the point of view that the outsider is representative of the conventional idea of a misfit, but he also sets forth what the outsider won't and can't fit into.

Transliterating Wilson's observations into the concept-lingo of these essays, the central problem encapsulating outsiders is that their overview of things is bigger than the smaller social pictures they otherwise would be expected to fit into.

Wilson postulated, with some degree of accuracy, that most social environments don't really contain much in the way of visionary elements. He describes this visionary lack as largely down-loading from average mainstream social reluctance to deal with factors that might upset conventional social balances. Wilson's "visionaries" won't and can't fit into the conventions, and thus achieve the status of "Outsider."

Wilson's book was one of the first to focus not only on the so-called psychological "maladjustments" of visionaries, but also to quite thoroughly examine the limiting psychological maladjusting processes of social groupings. It is clearly "suggested reading" for anyone truly interested in the superpower faculties.

Although Wilson didn't employ the concepts of smaller and bigger pictures, these two analogies are interchangeable with his visionary and non-visionary ones.

While the conceptual characteristics of visionaries and psychics might not be exactly the same, they do overlap, and both involve the same problems attendant upon smaller pictures versus bigger pictures.

Here, then, is uncovered the somewhat invisible background noise involving,

(1) what does and doesn't fit into what; and

(2) distinctions between smaller and bigger pictures, and their fall-outs.

By now is uncovered a fatal flaw in the modern, Western concepts of Psi.

Many parapsychologists themselves have acknowledged that the modern evolution of the concepts of Psi and etc., compartmentalized them too narrowly away from the general category of life processes.

But as one might interpret, this is almost the same as saying that the compartmentalization resulted in smaller pictures -- perhaps really tight ones, and which became really up-tight as their overall failure ratio became more and more evident.

In any event, and with all the foregoing now having been stated, if one attempts to utilize a smaller-picture module to train and develop something that actually needs a bigger-picture module, it is possible to say that the handwriting regarding failure is already on the wall.

This can neatly be put another way by invoking the analogies of SYSTEMS, SYSTEMS WORKABILITY, and SYSTEMS FAILURE. (NOTE: A separate set of essays on the topic of systems is forthcoming.)

As a passing observation here, it is not unusual to find topics being dealt with in a certain context -- when, in a bigger reality they actually belong in another context.

For example, in the cultural West, and by broadly accepted definition and understanding, Psi factors have been dealt with as "mental abilities of gifted individuals." Attempts by designing training to trigger the Psi-mental abilities into functioning have not succeeded very much, if at all.

Since such efforts have almost a total failure rate, there is no harm suggesting that Psi factors are not mental abilities, but are systems functions regarding modules of awareness.

If this would be the case, then the situation has to do with identifying and activating the proper module of awareness.

Indeed, mental abilities cannot produce products that download from awarenesses which the same mental abilities don't conceptualize as existing.

This can be put another way. Mental abilities are, of course, wonderful. But that they and their products are based on modules of awareness is quite clear. After all, mental abilities can process only to the degree that various modules of awareness are actively on-going.

Other modules of awareness that have never been activated, or somehow have been stupefied and deadened, cannot contribute anything at all.

All of the foregoing has been discussed in order to help construct a bigger picture regarding the superpowers, and which picture has somewhat to be in place before training in superpower details can proceed toward a success potential. (This particular concept is henceforth to be restated in several ways so as to locate important different nuances that go along with it.)

Returning now to the topic of the natural psychics, it was pointed up that they tended to have wide or large overviews of things.

It was THIS that they had difficulty in articulating, especially if required to do so within the confines modernist psychical and parapsychological concepts and lingo. To my knowledge, no Psi researcher EVER ASKED a psychic to write out their worldviews.

One aspect that downloaded over time from most (but not all) of the psychics I talked with was that they felt that the superpower faculties existed within everyone, but that the faculties did not develop into activity in most.

This was not merely fashionable, democratizing chit-chat on their parts -- in that they could SENSE-FEEL as much in most people they encountered. Their convictions along these lines emerged from their bigger worldviews, not from mere intellectual conditioning.

In the sense that "EVERYONE" was expressed, this of course refers not the vast conglomerate of all people, but rather to Our Species out of which each of us downloads. Indeed, if everyone has the faculties, either deadened or active, then the faculties are inherent in our species.

And so it is within the greater context of our species that we will find the bigger-picture systemic contexts for the superpower faculties.

And thus, we FINALLY arrive in the proximity of the central topic of this essay -- and which is a centerpiece of some kind that reflects through all the contents of this website.

Our Species
As to the topic of this essay itself, although one can easily have an assumption that a great deal is understood about our species, the more basic fact is that what is NOT understood looms like a gigantic fog filled with unexplained mysteries.

For a number of reasons, the existence of the fog is often minimized, one reason being that people don't like to think in terms of fogs. Even so, complications descending out of the fog are real enough.

In order to help penetrate at least a short distance into the fog, one can discern three initial reasons for making the attempt to do so.

(1) A double question can be considered:

(a) whether enhanced understanding of the superpowers (and their functioning) can be found within the contexts of smaller pictures
(b) whether the superpowers belong, so to speak, within the contexts of a bigger picture that is commodious enough to include ALL aspects of the human species entire

(2) It can easily be established that neither the existence nor the phenomena of the superpowers are officially incorporated into conventional, modern conceptualizations of our species.

Indeed, without too much effort, it can be brought to light that various forces modulating the conventional concepts work not only to diminish FUNCTIONAL knowledge of the superpowers, but to disenfranchise them as meaningful species attributes.

(3) As already mentioned, modern conceptualizations in large part tend to focus on awful, sicko and unfortunate aspects of our species -- with the result that these are over-emphasized and end up negatively suffusing a larger cognitive understanding of what our species actually consists of otherwise.

By comparison, although the higher, more astonishing attributes of our species are sometimes referred to in some idealizing manner, active pursuit and enhancement of them is rare. One obvious reason for this might be that idealizing might not be completely and effectively based on its real processes and functions.

With the foregoing having been more or less preambled, it can be mentioned that most efforts to describe our species usually begin by rehashing what is conventionally known and/or accepted.

This approach is not without its merits. But in several ways it rather tends to plunge one into limited smaller-picture concepts.

Indeed, if one is up to identifying (or admitting) what is NOT understood (or even known) about our species is quite large compared to what is known, then what is known obviously must constitute some kind of smaller rather than larger possible picture.

Various dimensions of this can best by grasped by considering the following.

One of the unique factors of our species is that it possesses both intelligence and mental faculties sufficient enough to make attempts to explain not only itself, but to explain existence per se.

Many might miss the utterly remarkable nature of this unique factor, especially if their awareness is fixed into lower-order levels where it has little meaning.

But, to the extent that all Earthside species are so far understood, ours is the only one that possesses this quality, and possesses it on a species-wide level.

Furthermore, our species is the only one that has built enormous, even fabulous societal and cultural edifices in this regard.

This unique factor takes on even greater amazement by virtue of a secondary but none the less astonishing fact: that where and when our existing is not really understood, our species entire anyway proceeds to invent or imagine this or that kind of "understanding."

It is possible to consider that ALL invented or imagined understandings along these lines are smaller-picture ones, and this no matter their status otherwise. If this would be the case, then WHAT makes the understandings is a bigger picture than the understandings themselves.

By far and large, conventional pictures regarding the nature of our species usually first focus on the bio-bodies that are thought to comprise it.

There can be little doubt that human bio-bodies are an astonishing example of biological engineering, whether this be natural, evolutionary, artificial, or the achievement of some otherwise unknown something.

Our species also possesses one rather astonishing factor that is seldom identified, much less discussed, but which can easily bring into question all conventional explanations of our origin.

Our species is endowed with elements and faculties far, far beyond what are needed merely for survival Earthside, and even for mere survival of the species itself within Earthside environments.

This is explicitly to say that in its greater collective sense at least, our species is thus strategically over-endowed for the purposes of mere survival. And this aspect lifts our species out of the line-up of all other species which are precisely, directly and brusquely endowed for survival.

This single factor establishes that there is some kind of very great distance between our species and all other Earthside species, and this clearly opens up the question of the actual origin of our species.

Of course, many smaller picture answers to this question have been provided, have had their day and their smaller histories. But, as will be partially discussed in the next essay, all of them have been provided by negating the fact that there is an enormous distance between our species and all others.

For some possible clarity here, most efforts to comprehend our species focus on our similarities to other species, not on how utterly different our species is from them.

In any event, as a result of being over-endowed merely for survival, our species possess a great number of faculties that it hardly uses. But the essentials of them are none the less replicated from generation to generation, and in each of which signature elements of the essentials spontaneously flare-up, and are experienced.

The real existence of these essentials can easily be determined not only by their spontaneous flaring up.

Not only do the extraordinary essentials spontaneously flare up, but many social subsets of our species recognizably put dampers on varieties of these faculties -- or at least many social workings refuse to endorse and support their functioning -- and which is the same as admitting the existence of what is being denied support and development.

One hypothetical way of conceptualizing the above is to speculate that our over-endowed species could activate 100 per cent of its powers. In fact, thought, many societal norms only encourage utilization of only about less than 10 per cent of them.

But this factoid only heightens what is perhaps one of the greater of all human mysteries.

• Why would a species possess faculties that, on average, it doesn't use?

• In other words, why would the species basis for those faculties have become installed in the first place -- IF they were never meant to be activated and used in the same first place?

Here it must be mentioned that the panorama and peripheries of the above are made somewhat hard to discern and articulate -- because our same remarkable species possesses a number of rather influential small-picture-making attributes that can easily get in the way.

For example, consider the triple penchant for societal reductionism, uniformism, and conformity. Additionally, one might consider the social stabilizing mechanisms having to do with erecting LIMITS regarding proper and improper formats of consciousness, awareness, experiencing and thinking.

All such pseudo-formats of course refer to how human intelligence is to be managed within this or that smaller-picture framework.

As it is, though, the immediately foregoing somewhat serves as small introduction to what is obviously one of the chief and central elements of our species.

This central element has to do with the rather mysterious fact that our over-endowed species does exist on Earthside. But it is principally and unmistakably existing not simply as a biological organism, but completely and unquestionably existing as a quite remarkable, even elegant intelligence-system.

Indeed, if this aspect is SUBTRACTED from the marvelous bio-bodies, then not only is mere survival of the latter brought into serious questioning, but one can well wonder what would be left over after the subtraction might somehow be effected.

There are, believe it or not, some indications of what might be left over -- in that certain societal systems make efforts to erode and suppress intelligence, thus enabling us at least some insight as to what could be left over.

There is, of course, some confusion as to whether body-system or intelligence-system is the prime factor of the human species.

The human body-system is undeniably astonishing. And it is true that its elements are more clear-cut than the human intelligence-system.

But, it is also quite obvious that both somehow fit within each other, and this factor obviously has some fundamental kind of importance.

However, the nature of the fitting cannot really be achieved via over-emphasis only on the physical body-systems. Even if the physical emphasis would be expanded to its largest degree, still the only thing that would result is one-half the picture -- and one-half a picture is smaller than the full picture to be sure.

Within this confusion, however, the evidence is quite good that human body-system subtracted from human intelligence-system leaves the former flopping about and usually in deplorable, disgusting and sad ways.

Thus, it is possible to assume, hypothetically anyway, that our species intelligence-system attributes constitute its prime principle.

This can be put another somewhat more personal way -- in that it is possible to suggest that WHATever specimens of our species might think, it is most likely that they CAN think that is our species prime principle.

But here we indeed run into the first of a series of major problem-situations -- in that our history demonstrates that it is difficult even to approximate what a biomind intelligence-system consists of.

Even to begin getting into this topic, it is necessary to distinguish between:

(1) the inherent existence of the human intelligence-system per se, and,
(2) whatever descends out of it as thought-products.

This distinction is to suggest that the human intelligence-system is a THINKING THING out of which, and because of which, thought-things are produced. In this sense, then, the intelligence-system is greater than what it produces, no matter how much the products are held in esteem.

One important factor that can be noted regarding the above is that many maps have been made of what the intelligence-system produces. But the actual nature and basic configurations of the intelligence-system itself has more or less remained unmapped.

Moving briskly along beyond the above quagmires combined, it is now meaningful to make a distinction about our species which has not been made in the past with any enduring clarity.

This distinction is a subtle one, and has to do with the differences between,

(1) what our species IS, and

(2) what our species CONSISTS OF.

While (1) and (2) can easily be intellectually collapsed into each other and be taken as meaning much the same thing, there are in fact some important nuances between them.

For starters, in the past the concept of our species was assumed to consist of, and be defined by, all physical bodies that could interbreed with each other -- or at least had the potential if not the preference to do so.

This is to say that all human bodies WERE our species in its greater collective sense.

However, an important and concept-shifting nuance regarding this has entered into the overall picture, due to advances in the genetic sciences.

In a more strict sense, and in the first instance, our species is no longer really comprised merely of all physical human bodies, but of the genetic pool out of which each physical-body specimen emerges.

This might be put another way. Our species IS the genetic pool (the GENOME) of our species, of which each individual is a manifesting, down-loading intelligence-system encased, as it were, in its particular bio-format. The particular bio-format is referred to as a GENOTYPE within the GENOME (the entire gene pool).

Technically speaking, and specifically with regard to the genome, each manifesting biomind individual is a quite small part -- if compared to the greater genetic whole which incorporates billions of smaller parts.

As a somewhat grumpy aside here, it bruises the ego of many to consider themselves merely as a manifesting smaller part of the greater on-going genome. However, this psycho-factoid might explain something as to why many biomind specimen members of humanity seldom care to consider humanity as a whole.

Indeed, it can be noted, with some factual accuracy, that the concept of humanity, as traditionally mounted, has always been more idealizing and abstract than functionally meaningful.

One understandable reason for this is that the individual biomind specimens that descend out of the generic genome of our species are not exact duplicates of each other. Each is different in any number of outer surface aspects, and which range along a scale of lesser-to-greater differences.

The differences are more obvious than the species sameness aspects -- since the samenesses (and their extent) are sort of cloaked behind the differences.

Throughout recorded human history, some few astute observers have noticed that the samenesses are probably more important than the surface differences -- if only in that the samenesses are enduring and transcend the generations.

But in large part, the differences are what people deal with on a day-to-day basis, whether these are natural or artificially encoded in social behavior.

Because of this it is not too much to say that the matter of the differences has frequently been elevated (or inflated) to the sometimes giddy heights of philosophical, theological, scientific and sociological importance.

Indeed, in the past this author was told by three important scientists that the study of differences was the principal path toward accelerating progress in understanding the human framework -- and FURTHERMORE, that the study of the samenesses was merely a study in redundancies.

Differences clearly have importance and meaning. But this is no real reason for not undertaking, or for culturally suppressing, in-depth studies regarding the samenesses upon which the backbone of our species is clearly founded.

Here again, if one over-emphasizes the differences, one is dealing in one-half the human picture -- and one-half is a smaller picture than the whole shebang is.

As an aside, though, there does exist one-behind-the-scenes reason why the matter of human differences achieves over-emphasized importance.

Most social structures depend on differences with regard to a number of factors -- one of which is that differences contribute to social stratification, and to the ease the stratification can be maintained even if only artificially so. This may be one reason why our species sameness factors are marginalized, if not completely ignored altogether.

If one delves into the sameness factors of our species, one can easily begin to comprehend that the difference factors are, so to speak, the frosting on the cake while the sameness factors are the cake itself.

At the individual level, one can expect to encounter various kinds and designs of the frosting. But the deeper one goes into the sameness factors, one can begin to discover the central frameworks upon which the species is built, and which ALL specimens of our species directly share in.

A central clue here is that the sameness factors can and do differentiate into various kinds of differences. But by far and large they do so mostly because, as it were, of cultural-social nurture rather than because of all-encompassing nature. There is a saying I read somewhere now forgotten, but easily remembered:

"Nature provides; men demarcate among what is provided."

Another clue is that if one begins to become somewhat knowledgeable about our species sameness factors, it is possible to begin comprehending that those factors trend toward the awesome, toward the amazing and the utterly remarkable.

As but one very significant example, all human specimens of our species are born with the language factor. This language factor is operative and ready to function from birth, and infants aggressively begin coping with at some point quite early during their first year.

To speak language is clearly taken for granted, and is usually assumed as representative of one of those "redundant" samenesses that are of little interest.

However, the inherent, or indwelling, language factor is present in all specimens of our species, and thus must be assumed as representative of one of our species prime backbones contributing to the vast distances between ourselves and all other Earthside species.

For additional clarity here, within all social contexts, as different as they might be, the language factor is universally considered as the ability to communicate.

This is obviously the case -- but with one important proviso. The ability to communicate is down-loaded FROM the language factor. It is not the factor itself, and this is now scientifically understood beyond any doubt.

There is quite an awesome story involved here. But little of it depends on what had been understood about languages before rather recent times.

The July 1993 issue of LIFE magazine featured a write-up regarding "The Amazing Minds of Infants." The magazine's cover announced in bold print that,

"BABIES are SMARTER than you THINK. They can ADD before they can COUNT. They can UNDERSTAND a hundred words before they can SPEAK. And, at three months, their powers of MEMORY are far greater than we ever imagined."

The article itself consisted of a brief overview of what had recently been learned about infants in the research fields of memory, mathematics, language, and physics.

The article is quite short, but liberally laced with thought-stopping statements. For example, in the physics category, Cornell University researcher Elizabeth Spelke,

"is finding that babies as young as four months have a rudimentary knowledge of the way the world works -- or should work."

Furthermore,

"Researchers speculate that even before birth, babies learn how physical objects behave by moving their body parts, but Spelke believes the knowledge is innate."

The concept of "innate knowledge" pre-existing within infants is touched upon with regard to each of the four categories -- even though the modern idea of knowledge refers to having acquired it by experience and study AFTER birth, and then only by kinds of logical reasoning that start concretizing later in childhood.

Indeed, in the modern cultural West, the working definition of KNOWLEDGE is given as,

"the fact or condition of knowing something with familiarity or understanding through experience or association."

Thus, there is a nervous discrepancy between,

(1) the definition of knowledge acquired through experience or association, and

(2) the concept of innate knowledge.

The discrepancy centers on the definition of INNATE, the first definition of which is "inherent: belonging to the essential nature of something."

A second definition is also usually provided -- "originating in or derived from the mind or the constitution of the intellect rather than from experience or association."

The subtle magnitude of this nervous discrepancy has two major parts, both of which can become visible only to those somewhat familiar with the serious denial, during the modern twentieth century, of innate KNOWLEDGE.

During this epoch, the possibility of innate human instincts was occasionally, although usually grudgingly, admitted. But the concept of innate KNOWLEDGE was a topic too close to the forbidden topics of inspired, received, clairvoyant, telepathic, intuitive or extrasensory knowledge -- all of these tending to manifest in the absence of experience and association, and even in the absence of logic and reason.

Second, the concept of innate KNOWLEDGE arouses the tremendously complex problem of how and why KNOWLEDGE, of all things, should have been innately installed in the human species in the first place.

Returning to the LIFE magazine article, the squib regarding LANGUAGE was short, but quite a show-stopper.

First, it must be established here that the origin of human languages has always been a very great mystery. During the modern scientific period, it was often pictured that language originated from cavemen grunts and gesticulations -- followed by the concept that over longish periods of time these gradually evolved differently in different parts of the world into many different language formats.

However, according to the LIFE magazine article, something else is involved that can strategically alter the above picture if one takes time to consider it.

The "something else" is that psychologist Patricia Kuhl of the University of Washington in Seattle indicated that from birth to four months, babies are "universal linguists" capable of distinguishing each of the 150 sounds that make up all human speech. (NOTE: UNIVERSAL in this sense means present in everyone.)

During this period, and before they begin learning words, babies are busy sorting through the jumble of the 150 sounds in search of the ones that have meaning. By about six months, they have "begun the metamorphosis into specialists who recognize the speech sounds of their native tongue."

This process of "sorting through the humble of 150 sounds" sounds something like a language analyzer or decoder more than it sounds like a language learning process.

To get at the import of the above, one needs to consider the following with some attention.

That all human languages (Earthside) are made up of 150 sounds has been understood for some time. A fair share of these sounds are utilized to build up the speech sounds of a local language system.

The long-held conventional idea then has it that the babe learns (in-takes, acquires) the sounds by repetitive exposure and practice and begins to duplicate them. The babe is thus seen as learning from external local language factors -- and in this sense languages are local affairs.

Now, from a superficial viewpoint this explains why there are and have been so many different local languages. But it doesn't really explain why language is a universal principle within all specimens born of the human species.

Different local languages constitute smaller-picture aspects of great and awesome language penchant of our species. The information that all languages are made up of 150 sounds helps enlarge the picture. Thus, if the language formats are indeed different in different sectors, the sounds of which they are made none the less constitute a universal language factor that is neigh on identical throughout the species.

That all babies possess some sort of a system that is capable of distinguishing each of the 150 sounds literally means that babes are not principally learning language from external sources, but rather are merely distinguishing which arrangements of the sounds are being spoken external to them.

This is almost the same as saying that babes don't LEARN a language system, but merely recognize which language system is going on about them.

The language factor within the species entire could thus be described as a system of sound recognition that is recombinant regarding at least the 150 sounds all human speech consists of.

It now needs to be emphasized that while languages are different, each human specimen possesses in a same way one of these recombinant sound-recognition systems. Furthermore, in each specimen the system is automatically active at birth, perhaps even before (as some researchers are beginning to suggest.)

One neat way of putting this is that each language is but a software program installed into the built-in hard drive language system that is innate in each individual. The hard drive language system is the same in every one, or at least relatively so.

For the purposes of this series of essays, it could be said that all software programs are smaller-picture kinds of things -- whereas the hard drives that they get installed into constitute rather larger pictures.

Another grumpy observation: regarding this, it rather has to be admitted that all social systems tutor their inhabitants to think in terms of their different smaller software pictures -- and thus it is easy enough to be oblivious to the rather majestic nature of our hard drive capabilities.

Analogous to this, it does need to be understood that smaller pictures ARE smaller not because of what they contain, but what they DON'T contain.

The "universal language" factor of our species is some kind of a example lesson in point here -- in that it is capable of containing and dealing with ALL human languages (including dialects, etc.) of which there have been many, many thousands. The languages are smaller-picture components of the larger-picture universal linguistic system.

In any event, for the purposes of these essays, it is apparent that our species, in its hard-drive sense, universally is made up of an intelligence system, and which in turn clearly functions in tandem with a universal language system.

However, if we conceptualize an intelligence system, it is possible to conclude that it would need at least two other universal, hard-drive systems in order to be more completely functional: a system of sensing mechanisms, and a system of meaning recognition.

These two additional systems could not possibly be composed only of software programs locally decided upon, but, in some kind of fact, would need to consist of hard-drive factors that incorporates both the species entire as well as all of its down-loading individual specimens.

The REAL universal existence of the (hard drive) meaning recognition thing has been deduced by virtue of studying language in babies.

As psychologist Patricia Kuhl pointed up in the LIFE magazine article,

"long before infants actually begin to learn words, they can sort through a jumble of spoken sounds in search of the ones that have meaning."

How meaning recognition works in the pre-verbal level is not as completely understood as is the universal sound thing. This is to say that while all languages might be composed of 150 sounds, the same can't really be said about all meanings.

None the less, the implication is that each specimen of our species has some generic kind of hard-drive meaning-recognition system.

This system functions in tandem with the hard-drive intelligence system, the sensing mechanism systems, and the language system. All four of these supersystems (as it were) can be seen as universal to the species, AND to each individual born of it. And these are very astonishing samenesses, indeed.

The whole of this is quite awesome -- if one can grok it. But the grokking can sometimes be difficult in this regard -- because of smaller-picture interference patterns.

These not only lurk about just about everywhere in societal force-fed kinds of ways, but are sometimes mistaken as big pictures, even if unthinkably so.

If one is interested in learning and development, it is not unusual to suppose that whatever seems to be interfering should be deconstructed and gotten rid of.

Indeed, if the superpowers of the human biomind belong to the universal supersystems and not to some local, smaller-picture concept, then one might undergo the urge to reject, abolish or demolish the latter.

But there is a problem here. Rejecting some smaller-picture thing is itself a smaller-picture phenomenon. It might stretch some mental muscle to consider it, but it can easily be demonstrated that smaller-pictures can universally be identified by what they reject, don't include, omit, jump over, rationalize away, or simply by what is not known within them.

In other words, it is difficult to achieve bigger-picture awareness by following the pathways that lead to smaller-picture constructing.

And here we encounter a somewhat amusing, but none the less great oddity of our species.

Our species is awash in smaller pictures, and many piss and snarl because of it. And so many make rather invidious efforts to trash whatever this or that they consider a smaller picture.

The oddity here is that smaller-picture trashing can be akin to jousting with windmills -- IF one doesn't know much about the criteria for smaller-picture constructing. This is to ask WHY IS a smaller picture a smaller picture -- and how can a smaller picture be recognized as one.

After all, if one wants to escape from anything, one needs somewhat precisely to know what one is desiring to escape from.

Back to Contents


 

PART 3

ATTEMPTING TO IDENTIFY SOME DYNAMICS OF SMALLER-PICTURE FORMATS
(08Oct98)

If one is to conceptualize any kind of tutorials or training with regard to activating superpower faculties, one has to consider almost from the outset that "reality shifts" are going to be involved.

Two general assumptions in this regard are to be found, and both of them are usually left unexamined and thus not understood very well.

• The first assumption revolves around the idea that if the student is presented with organized information regarding the superpowers, then the needed reality shifts will occur within the student.
   

• The second assumption involves the idea that if the needed reality shifts do not occur, then the difficulty lies within the responsiveness of the student.

In observable fact, the two assumptions can be appropriate in most cases where,

(1) delivery of the organized information is the key step and issue of the training, and

(2) IF the organization of the information first and only pertains to factors external to the student.

In other words, adjustments among the student’s inner realities (and mental equipment) will somehow take place with regard to incorporating the organized information about the external factors—and needed reality shifts, if they are required, will more or less occur without much further ado.

The whole of this particular concept is centered on the idea that in-take of information alone will result in learning. As mentioned elsewhere in other essays, this type of teaching methodology has without doubt demonstrated its effectiveness. But, it might be added, only within the particular criteria as given above.

This is the dominant concept of teaching-learning in the modernist cultural West, and as such is composed of three aspects:

(1) teacher

(2) delivery of organized information about outer factors

(3) student

However, with regard to activating the superpower faculties, the principal basis of what is involved is, in the first place, NOT external to the student.

So, whereas the existing condition and extent of the student’s inner realities can be minimalized in the Western concept, the status of the student’s inner realities now takes on essential importance—and does so as a first order of business.

The principle goal of activating the superpower faculties is, so to speak, to ENERGIZE or AWAKEN faculties that already exist within the inner realities of the student, but remain latent or deadened, and thus are non-experiencable within the scope of the student’s concretized awareness margins.

The faculties remain latent or deadened because the student’s awareness peripheries and inner realities are somehow structured so as to exclude direct cognitive contact with them.

As long as this excluding structuring remains in place, no amount of organized information about the superpowers will serve to go very far.

It is clearly to be realized that there are strategic differences between the concept of inner awakening and the concept of rote learning via organized information regarding outer factors.

It is also to be realized that EACH individual possesses some kind of concretized inner reality structure—and by even superficial observation it can be realized that each individual’s inner reality structure is different. And as everyone discovers sooner or later, everyone tends to cling to their concretized realities—and often do so come hell or high water.

One direct meaning here is that each individual WILL process all information through their existing mental information processing grids. Thus, information of any kind, whether external or internal, will be reconfigured to fit within those grids, and what doesn’t fit will be excluded and disposed in a wide variety of ways.

Now, one might at first consider the foregoing as alien to all concepts of human learning. But in fact it represents a situation that has been familiar in Asia since antiquity. This is the guru-chela relationship, and which has been translated into Western languages as teacher-student.

But a more exact rendering is guru-awakener, chela-awakenee. The interactive dynamic between them is founded on the understanding that it is very difficult for the chela to self-awaken since the chela is encapsulated within the limits of his or her concretized realities.

Such concretized realities include various kinds of excluding mechanisms that inhibit activation of awareness of WHAT IS outside of the excluding mechanisms. As long as the excluding mechanisms remain in place, what it outside of them will remain non-experiencable and thus invisible.

In the Eastern context, the principle function of the awakener (the guru) is two-fold:

• to present information about WHAT IS, and

• to aid the awakenee to become cognizant of his or her particular inner excluding mechanisms and thus transcend them.

In this sense, there is almost always a one-to-one, and somewhat time-consuming relationship between guru and chela. So how-to presentation of information meant to be in-taken "by the millions" is not really workable in this regard—although such information can serve as extensive background considerations.

One factor that is important in this regard is that in the classical sense the guru clearly recognizes the importance, meaning and value of the chela as an individual entirely capable of awakening to and attaining bigger and more extensive peripheries of awareness.

The express and well-advertised purpose of doing so is to enable the chela to in-take and participate in larger realities—with the important proviso that if the mental excluding factors are not identified and transcended then any "knowledge" of the larger realities will merely remain superficially intellectual.

There now downloads from the foregoing the question involving where and how the mental excluding factors are to be found and identified.

A careful study of Eastern literature in this regard establishes that the major source of the excluding factors is the mental adaptation to local social factors, and which social factors do not take much cognizance of bigger realities.

The essence of this can be transliterated to the concept of smaller pictures versus bigger pictures—in that if the individual is oriented majorly within smaller pictures, then in many a sense the mind oriented in the smaller pictures is not prepared to access into bigger ones.

Indeed, a smaller picture can be identified by what it excludes, and so it is of little wonder that individuals who adapt to them erect inner mental exclusion factors appropriate to whatever smaller picture is involved.


PICTURE
To now begin to get deeper into this, it is worthwhile establishing the definitions of PICTURE. Beyond identifying that a picture is an illustrations of something, most dictionaries give the following:

• As a noun—"A portrayed description so vivid or graphic as to suggest a mental image or give an idea of something"

• As a verb—"To form a mental image" or, as might be added, to form a mental concept

• It is also worth noting that PICTURESQUE is defined as "evoking mental images."

• In turn, EVOKE is defined as "to call forth or summon up; to re-create imaginatively."

Moving a bit beyond the established definitions, a picture is also a FRAME OF REFERENCE:

"A set, format, formulation or system (as of facts or ideas) serving to orient or give particular meaning."

A frame of reference also has a FRAMEWORK, this defined as:

"A basic structure (as of ideas); a skeletal, openwork, or structural frame."
 

AN EXAMPLE OF A BIGGER PICTURE UNIVERSAL
Any even minimally competent assessment of the superpowers throughout the world easily establishes that the faculties are found world-wide, species-wide, and as having a transcultural basis.

This transcultural basis implies that the superpowers are existing in both a generic and a universal sense. And indeed, via comparative cultural studies, some researchers and writers have partially undertaken to examine and account for them in this light.

The concept of "universal" carries a connotation that seems rather consistently to be missed or ignored. "Universal" implies bigger, even the biggest picture. By implication, therefore, the functional basis of the superpowers would seem to belong within that bigger picture.


DESCENDING FROM BIGGER INTO SMALLER PICTURES
At first this might sound like some kind of gobbledygook—until it dawns that something that essentially and dynamically belongs within a bigger picture might not manifest very well, or at all, into smaller-picture contexts.

One perfectly logical reason for this might be that smaller picture activity doesn’t actually NEED bigger picture phenomena. This reason has a good amount of evidence behind it.

And so (as will be elaborated throughout this series of essays) it can be shown that bigger picture phenomena are usually EDITED OUT of smaller picture contexts, so as to protect the supposed integrity of those smaller contexts and realities.


SMALLER AND BIGGER PICTURE FORMATS
OF AWARENESS AND CONSCIOUSNESS
In any event, one can wonder, for example, how well the superpowers might activate or function in a mind, awareness, or consciousness that is centered or locked into smaller picture contexts.

This kind of thing has something to do with how one’s mind has been prepared or set to function.

Out of this, of course, comes the idea of MINDSET—which refers to a mind or a group of them centered or locked into a "picture" which is different from what other minds are locked into.

It is to be noted that the concept of mindsets has positive AND downer connotations, somewhat depending on which mindset is inspecting other mindsets.

Now, it can be said that our species, in the face of its many truly astonishing wonders, is quite excellent at setting up and nourishing small, limited mindsets of various kinds.

It is true that these are somewhat recombinant with each other. But the sum of the recombining still ends up Small and Limited—with the result that it is difficult to fit Universals into them.

Elaborating slightly, from a purely sociological overview, the proliferation of smaller, limited, or local mindsets accounts for the cultural sectoring of our species.

The cultural sectoring accounts, in turn, for the various different and usually conflicting societal formats one tends to encounter if one ventures into something so near as the next county or the next street.

All specimens of our species live within some kind of societal format, while the format in turn has something to do with how the specimens’ awareness, consciousness and mind-configurations end up being basically formulated.

How the mind thenceforth functions is probably quite consistent with the basic formulation (often referred to as mental programming.)


THE NATURE OF SMALLER PICTURE
SOCIETAL FORMATS
By far and large, from within itself any societal format seems a bigger picture.

But it can also be shown that societal formats are mostly centered in local realities rather than in universals. And thus the formats usually have more to do with local social set-ups and local environmental factors rather than with species-wide or other generic kinds of universals.

And indeed, not a few social structures are somewhat notorious for expunging generic universals if they don’t fit into their particular societal configurations.

If one takes time to reflect on the above commentary, it would thus seem that our species possesses the ironic universal capability of formulating different local societal formats—but that the formats are selective reductions emanating from the universal capability.

This is to say, then, that the reductions are smaller local pictures formulated because of and within the universal capability of formulating them. Grok THAT!

Indeed, anthropological and archaeological studies clearly establish that our species has, during its known Earthside history, formulated hundreds of thousands of smaller picture societal formats.

Most of these have come and gone, as is the on-going case today. The only really permanent aspect of this is our species, and which has the capability of formulating, and eventually disposing of, smaller societal pictures.

Put another way, it might be said that everyone has the capability to manufacture, craft, or construct SMALLER pictures. The reasons for the smaller pictures be might numerous, and indeed sometimes necessary. None the less, smaller IS smaller.

Individual specimens of our species are then formatted (or brought up, as it were) to fit into the smaller local societal formats, not into the larger universals that are generic within our species entire.


RELATIONSHIPS OF SMALLER AND BIGGER PICTURES
If the above can tolerably be considered, at least for theoretical discussion, it would then follow that ALL societal formats, no matter how bigger picture they seem, are actually smaller pictures—including the state, extent and content of their knowledge systems, whatever those might consist of.

Indeed, it is easy enough to demonstrate that knowledge systems can be characterized equally by what they DO NOT CONTAIN as by what they do contain.

Having said thus far, it would then be obvious that smaller pictures might be fitted into a larger picture. Many people are prepared to accept this, especially if they are humanitarian types.

In this context, it’s worth pointing up that some of the historical tutorial modalities referred to in Part 1 have consisted of transcultural and metaphysical efforts to mentally or intellectually orient students within bigger pictures that refer to universals.

And it is from within those "enlargement efforts" (so to speak) that increases in the frequency of at least spontaneous superpower phenomena are often reported.

The reasons for this might not be quite clear. But in some sense, it is possible to speculate that bigger picture does have something to do with bigger mind, and bigger mind in turn seems to have something to do with increases in superpower functioning.

In any event, bigger and smaller pictures exist. While we can think that smaller pictures might (somehow) be somewhat fitted into bigger ones, the reverse seems unlikely. It is true that big feet won’t fit into small shoes without wrecking the feet and/or the shoes.

To over-emphasize a little, it does seem a universal that small might fit into big with space to spare, but not the reverse. Thus, it could become obvious that bigger pictures won’t fit very well into smaller pictures.

There are, of course, many simple and complicated reasons for this—one being that smaller pictures are in the first place usually set up to exclude bigger picture elements. And indeed, the boundaries of many smaller pictures might vaporize if they would be required to integrate universal elements.

Beyond the implications of the above, it is easy enough to comprehend that at various social levels many have interests seriously vested in maintaining the contours of their local smaller pictures—if only to remain, as it were, big frogs in the ponds the smaller pictures represent.

If and where this might be the case, it is understandable that the introduction of universals into smaller picture situations could be seen as troublesome and undesirable.

For reasons that might be obvious, one certainly does not want to antagonize whatever are the pictures set up by any segmented portion of our species—and which anyway is a stressful waste of energy.

But the notion might be entertained, hypothetically, that our human history is the history of its societal and social SMALLER pictures within which all specimens of our species are some kind of disposable and replaceable players.

It is true, of course, that the players are usually arranged along lines ranging downward from the powerful to the powerless. But the "identities" of the powerful and powerless tend to change if the picture configurations that contain them starts shifting about.

This may be one reason why the powerful of course don’t like the picture configurations to change—while the powerless sometimes tend to view such shifts with interest and bemusement.

As an aside, this is an hypothetical situation that emerges in other contexts at various points in this Website. But here it is worth noting that power is usually considered bigger picture. However, whatever is passing for the power is only relative to the size or dimensions of the picture within which it is being "played."


ONE ASPECT OF THE SOCIOLOGY
OF PICTURE-MAKING
The usual, even standard, way of dealing with pictures is to attempt to concretize those wanted, and to try to trash those not wanted—and usually by any means possible.

The concretizing and trashing seem laudable within the mindsets locked into the pictures involved. But by far and large, this somewhat reeks of pismire proclivities randomly adrift in the hostile mildew of useless lower order illusionisms. And indeed, as many ultimately discover, any conviction that smaller pictures will maintain for very long is clearly an illusion.


SUMMING UP SO FAR
In attempting to sum up so far, it seems quite clear that big and small pictures do exist, and that there are important distinctions to be made among them.

Roughly speaking, it can be considered that bigger pictures probably refer and relate to universals.

In many a possible sense the smaller pictures refer only to local factors that are not universal in nature, but with one exception. It seems a rather vivid universal factor redolently incorporated into our species to be able to erect smaller pictures—and this could explain why there have been and are so many of them.

Indeed, it is possible to guesstimate that EACH specimen of our species is actually some kind of an individual and individualizing smaller picture, and this in a number of ways. And indeed, the concept of THE individual has its exceedingly important connotations in this regard.

As already mentioned, the usual way of managing WITHIN smaller pictures is to concretize the one desired and to trash others—this at the individual, group and cultural levels, and even at the philosophic, sociological and scientific levels.

The assumption here seems to be that the concretizing will enlarge the one desired and diminish the others. Thus, one can observe, rather frequently, a lot of attempted concretizing and attempting trashing.

The whole of this might be referred to as the Wars of the Smaller Pictures, this whole in turn being a rather stinky, lower-order enterprise that can trickle down into pismire stink replete with scumocracy and slimeocracy phenomena.

To now link back to the contexts of superpower tutorials, the world-wide evidence is quite strong that the superpowers "belong" to some kind of faculties universal to our species.

This seems to place the superpowers within some kind of bigger universal picture. However, the contours and formulations of this have NOT been adequately mapped.

Among the evidence along these lines that can be located and analyzed, it would appear that those individuals who can access, so to speak, universal bigger pictures tend to experience some kind of automatic enhancement or elevation in superpower functioning.

One of the tentative observations regarding the whole of this is that smaller pictures might at first seem far distant and not relevant to the case for superpower activation. Yet, their mindset effects or by-products might easily function as exclusion factors and inhibitors, especially if they are active in some kind of mental sub-awareness levels.

Whether this is the whole case or not, elements of it have obvious relevance to the entire theoretical contexts of any possible activation of the superpowers.

If this is understood for what it might represent, then the spontaneous urge is to reject and escape from the smaller pictures whose limitations might be thought of, and can actually constitute, mental blockages to increases of superpower activation and functioning.

However, long experience has taught this writer that smaller pictures are everywhere, and that it is virtually impossible to ESCAPE from them. Indeed, as was earlier the case with little Moi, one might merely make efforts to jump from one smaller picture to another one, based on the illusion that the latter SEEMS bigger.

Well, who knows for sure. Any motion is better than none at all.


THE STRUCTURE OF SMALLER PICTURES
Some years of study and reflection regarding this Situation suggest that escape from smaller picture confines does not mean avoiding them. Rather, entrapment (so to speak) in smaller pictures is possible largely because one doesn’t understand what a small picture consists of in a structural sense.

After all, if one wants to escape a "prison," one needs first to know that it IS a prison, and then to know its layout, its construction, and its ways and means—and possibly even to know HOW and WHY it can and does exist in the first place.

In any event, there are NO studies regarding the topic that might be entitled "Recognition of Smaller Picture Characteristics."

Some few of these structural characteristics (or anatomy) that can easily be recognized without too much intellectual stress will begin in the following essay.

But before jumping into the structural characteristics of smaller pictures, a particular factor now really needs to be pointed up, somewhat bluntly.

On average most people already have some kind of idea about the superpowers—and those ideas are almost certainly derived from within some kind of local, smaller picture concepts.

Back to Contents


 

PART 4 

SOME STRUCTURAL CHARACTERISTICS OF SMALLER PICTURES
(14Oct98)

As alluded to in earlier essays, quite compelling evidence indicates that the superpowers "belong" within a bigger picture that incorporates the whole of our species. The evidence is historical, anthropological and archaeological in nature, although the field of archaeology tends to avoid and smooth over much in this regard.

Additionally, if the existence of genetic memory is entertained, then certain kinds of evidence that otherwise cannot be explained could possibly be acknowledged.

This bigger picture evidence somewhat flies in the face of modernist conventional ideas that the superpowers are merely representative of various social or mental artifacts, and as such have little authentic existence.

However, while it is true that different social formats assign different nomenclature to the various types of superpower faculties, the structural functioning of the superpowers is remarkably consistent on the world-wide species basis.

As but two examples, what we call intuition and future-seeing are found world-wide, even if they are dressed in different local social metaphor, terminology and lore.

The unavoidable implication is thus quite clear: that the superpowers belong not within finite, smaller-picture social collectives which can be so different in many ways; rather, the superpower faculties belong within the bigger-picture supersystems that demonstrate FUNDAMENTAL or CORE samenesses throughout our species.

Here it is useful to reprise the most convenient definition of the superpowers as those human faculties that transcend the known "laws" of physicality including space and time, and matter and energy.

By far and large, the superpower faculties have to do with information-transfer—and as such they are found well within the bigger-picture aspects of our species intelligence, awareness, and meaning-recognition supersystems, and which are shared world-wide across time and the bio-physical generations.

As it is, though, the universal Human World (as its called) is a very big world quite overloaded with all kinds of natural, artificial and local social differences.

Because of this, the differences tend to assume often overwhelming importance—with the outcome that the universal human world is observed and studied within the confines of the differences that are NOT universal.

Anything that demonstrates the existence of confines can be assumed to constitute some kind of smaller picture—and this even if the picture looms large from within the confines.

As it is, the human world contains many confines (i.e., frames of reference.) Thus, the human world has a rather vivid abundance of smaller pictures. So, by the nature of all things, most specimens of our species are more or less forced to accustomize and operate within the local smaller pictures in which they dwell.

As mentioned earlier, many recognize this aspect of the human world. If it thence seems important to do so, many try the tactic of escaping the confines of the smaller pictures.

But this often results merely in taking on the trappings of other smaller pictures that seem alluringly bigger, but in fact might not be. This tactic can have something in common with escaping a local set of ordinances and replacing it with another local set.

If one studies the nature of the superpower faculties, an important clue to their activation and development can emerge.

By their TRANSCENDING nature, the superpowers faculties don’t care very much for confines and sets of ordinances. And so, when they spontaneously emerge, they stubbornly transcend those, too.

One of the important implications of this particular clue is that escape from smaller picture confines can actually be quite meaningless IF the transcending superpowers remain inactivated.

Thus, escape might be a perceived duty in some cases, but there are important distinctions to be made between mere escape and the processes of transcending.

As a general rule of thumb, however, one can neither escape nor transcend unless one comprehends the nature of whatever is being escaped or transcended.

In the case of smaller pictures, it is easy enough to escape their cultural or social CONTENT. But smaller pictures also have a STRUCTURAL aspect that almost always remains invisible.

One possible metaphor for this is that the CONTENT of a smaller picture consists of the decor and furnishings of a room. The decor and furnishings can be changed in fashionable or trendy ways.

However, the room is in its building, and the building can be referred to as STRUCTURAL.

In any event, smaller pictures have to hang together upon and because of something. Otherwise, their content would soon dissipate into the non-structured ethers.

The question thus before us here has to do with how smaller pictures are structured in a fundamental sense, and what are some of the characteristics of the structuring.

As earlier mentioned, a smaller picture is most identifiable not by what it contains, but by what it DOESN’T.

In this sense, then, the smaller picture is STRUCTURED so as NOT to contain something or whatever.

This aspect of smaller pictures, however, is broadly understood—and is one of the reasons many opt to escape from them. The picture doesn’t contain whatever one wants or is searching for (bigger knowledge, for example), and so one attempts to go elsewhere to try to find the whatever.

There are a number of anatomical structural elements regarding HOW and WHY smaller pictures become formulated.

Four of these particular structural elements (or dynamics) are discussed below, with others discussed elsewhere.

The two most familiar structural elements regarding smaller pictures have to do with various modalities of REDUCTIONISM and CONFORMISM.

Although these modalities, in different formats, are recognizable from antiquity onward, they also became glowing hallmarks of the twentieth century sciences, most of its major philosophies, and overall sociological adventures and experiments.

A full part of the world drama of the twentieth century centers on the arising of and escapes from modernist reductionism and conformism, and a rich literature was produced in this regard.

Lurking just behind reductionism and conformism, however, are two additional smaller-picture-making factors that are seldom identified and examined.

These are:

(1) UNIFORMISM (so unidentified, indeed, that the term doesn’t exist)

(2) DEPRIVATION OF KNOWLEDGE.
 

UNIFORMISM
The term UNIFORMISM is not found in any dictionary, and is also not considered as a thing-in-itself in any philosophical or sociological context.

However, the term UNIFORMIST does exist, albeit only in the OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY, wherein it is defined as "an advocate of or believer in a uniform system, especially in respect of religious doctrine or observance."

As an aside here, why the Oxford Dictionary singles out religious factors in this regard is a complete mystery—in that one can discover uniformists of all waters everywhere pounding away whether subtly or stridently.

In any event, in that ISM is defined as "a distinctive doctrine, cause or theory," then wherever ISTs are found their ISMs are not far behind. Indeed, it is questionable that an IST could exist in the absence of the ISM to advocate or believe in.

Since they have different contexts, it is worthwhile reprising the definitions established for UNIFORM to help provide for increase of clarity:

• Having always the same form, manner, or degree; not varying or variable.

• Of the same form with others; conforming to one rule or code; consonant.

• Presenting an undiversified appearance of surface, color.

• Consistent in conduct or opinion.

Two slight, but temporary, difficulties surface in seeking to utilize the term UNIFORM.

First, the term is most popularly aligned with styles of dress, costume, or body decor, and not only of the military or ceremonial kind.

Second, the term UNIFORMITARIANISM has been claimed on behalf of geology as,

"the geological doctrine that existing processes acting in the same manner as at present are sufficient to account for all geological changes."

(In this sense, a UNIFORMITARIAN is "a believer in uniformitarianism; an advocate in uniformity.")

To help sort through the latter definition, it should be noted that uniformitarianism as a geological doctrine is more or less defunct today. But the doctrine seems to have had its origins in a kind of pre-modern period when, in defiance of evidence otherwise, it was assumed that nothing fell from the sky to Earth’s surface. The doctrine also held that all significant geological changes were SLOW ones, and that the changes proceeded within this slowness within averaging uniformity.

The above slight discussion has relevance to the nature of philosophical and scientific UNIFORMISM—which, of course, would have to be somewhat intolerant of any change at all, whether slow or fast. SLOW, however, is a major construct within UNIFORMISM, since slowness is least likely to "threaten" any brand of the ism.

As it is, outside of the concept of "making the fast buck," it is difficult in the human world to find any other context that has vested interests in FAST change. Indeed, if things change quickly all of the time, then the changes tend to become redundantly meaningless—and boring.

If the foregoing comments are slowly considered, then it can become apparent that, on average, there exists within the multifaceted human world some kind of general predilection for slow uniformisms.

However, the desired uniformity (whatever it might consist of) can be achieved only by lopping of whatever can’t be made uniform.

It thus would follow that if what is lopped off doesn’t exactly go away, but persists in flopping about anyway, then active measures need to be designed so as to discredit it and its meanings.

In the overall contexts of the on-going human world, this means that the work of uniformists is never done—because it takes careful work to keep things uniform.

Lopping of what doesn’t fit into this or that ostensible uniformity is, of course, one of the all-time greatest and most popular ways to commence small-picture construction.

For whatever the reasons, the energies of our species for such kinds of projects are considerable, and so our history is appropriately littered with monuments to this or that kind of uniformity.

In the hypothetical sense of the foregoing, then, reductionism, conformity, and deprivation of knowledge are vehicles via which uniformists seek to achieve their lopping off goals.

But here we reach something quite difficult to articulate and grok.

On the surface of the uniformism issues, one might at first think that the goals of uniformists are to achieve the greater glories of the particular uniformism in which they are indulging themselves.

If this would be the case, then there are often various kinds of pride and ennobling purposes involved.

However, this is certainly only one side of the coin regarding all kinds of uniformism. If any given uniformism is to succeed and prevail, the obverse side of the coin has to be become vigilantly aware of whatever might disrupt or threaten it.

It then follows that whatever any disruption might consist of (such as facts and phenomena inconvenient, for example), it is fated to undergo attempted extinguishment—even if knowledge is cast askew and suffers as a result.

Now, as already pointed up, the concept of uniformism is unfamiliar—and so its workings and mechanisms are left unidentified and unexamined. In partial explanation of this, anyone can look around and perceive much that is not uniform.

Another reason is that the concept of conformity gets so much limelight attention that the conformity itself is taken to constitute THE problem. However, conformity always exists in regard TO something, and the TO something is almost always some kind of uniformism.

In this sense, any given conformity consists of a smaller picture of some kind.

None the less, concepts that are unfamiliar always at first tend to be imprecise and thus to become surrounded by fogs of ambiguity until the functioning dynamics concealed in the ambiguities are more clearly identified. The concept of UNIFORM itself is a good example of this.

The first recorded usage of UNIFORM in English dates from 1623 when it was utilized as IN UNIFORM—this defined as "in one body or flock." IN UNIFORM seems to have been utilized in the context of "Our sheepe shall fear no Wolfe, or suddaine storme; But goe and come all safe in uniform."

The above is indicated as obsolete in the Oxford Dictionary—which is astonishing, largely because the activities of going and coming in one flock are redundantly present everywhere.

In any event, the above usage was obviously intended to refer to a major sociological premise-cum-model, in that the sheep members of the flock were to be herded in inform ways—while at the same time those ways included the protection of the sheep from Wolfes and suddaine stormes, presumably by eradicating the former and guarding against the latter.

This sociological model has indeed produced a large number of very impressive social structures and institutions (some not all that beneficent on behalf of the sheep). Thus, the concept-premise of IN UNIFORM really should be dredged up and considered in some depth and seriousness. Here, however, it’s possible only to reconstruct a nut-shell examination, expanding piecemeal in other essays.

For starters, the metaphor of sheep always directly implies the existence of herders. So at first take, the nature and character of the herders assumes limelight importance, and a good deal of fuss and bother of various kinds has always gone on in this regard.

However, at the bottom line of this sociological model, the herders haven’t much to herd if, in the first instance, there are not sheep to go and come in uniform.

Thus, if this sociological model is to be workable, the sheep FIRST have somehow to be provided or acquired so that not only will the herders have something to do, but also live up to their job of eradicating Wolves and guarding against suddaine stormes that might cast the sheep-flock asunder.

If the internal dynamics of this model are groked, it can easily be diagrammed envisioned as a self-contained social system with the sheep and herders inside the perimeters and all else outside of them.

Even so, inside the perimeters the sheep remain of central importance. Attendant upon, and intimately integrated into, this importance is the matter of how and wherefrom the sheep are not only to be provided or acquired, but how their on-going population is to be maintained AND guaranteed.

At first sight, THIS factor seems very complex, indeed. But it can speedily be illuminated by the sheep metaphor itself.

Sheep are universally considered as dumb animals, and hence the sheep metaphor serves not only as the universal symbol of dumbness, but its archetype, too.

In this regard, it is not too much to say that the sheep metaphor cuts like a meat clever through ALL of the implications of the second essay in this little series—in which it is posited that the chief characteristic of our species has to do with the fact that it is, by any measure, a superlative intelligence-system.

In any event, where sheep are required, ways and means have to be undertaken to guarantee their existence and on-going presence.

At first glance, how their existence and on-going presence is to be achieved might seem as if it needs some kind of monumental and intricate solution.

However, IF this intricacy was the case, then many of the ostensible herders might find themselves inadequate to the purpose and quickly beached on its complexities.

The major solution is far more simple and easy to effect, and is neatly enunciated in the concept having to do with the deprivation of knowledge already mentioned.

In this sense (and as almost anyone can self-discover), it is far more easy to effect various kinds of deprivation of knowledge than it is to erect any kind of it. Thus, the task of the herders is not all that taxing and arduous.

It now would follow that sheep, in order to be and remain as sheep, need only to be deprived of the specific kinds of knowledge that would shift their sheep status to something else—specifically with regard to the overall IN UNIFORM context upon which this kind of social edifice is mounted.

Indeed, it’s not too much to say that sheep can be identified not by what knowledge they have, but by the knowledge they are deprived of.

If this would be the case, then it would follow that there can be various echelons of sheepness through and through this kind of social structure, including up and through the top of it. Even the topmost herders can stand more completely revealed by virtue of the knowledge they are deprived of.

The foregoing attempted nutshelling of course leaves much unaccounted for. But one of the more astonishing (if revolting) factors of this has to do with the apparent fact that deprivation of knowledge can be managed IN UNIFORM kinds of ways, and that the entire social structure can conform to the deprivation.

At this point, it is worth mentioning the nuance distinctions between,

(1) the absence of knowledge, and

(2) the deprivation of knowledge

On average, and in some aspects, these two contexts might amount to the same thing.

• But ABSENT is defined as "not present or attending; missing."

• DEPRIVE is defined as "to take something away from; to withhold something from."

Thus, deprivation of knowledge has to do with something that is knowledgeable, but which is none the less taken away or withheld FROM."

Obviously, a deprivation of knowledge cannot be effected unless there is already a good idea of what the knowledge consists of.

Equally obviously, then, deprivation of knowledge is effected and engineered mostly because it is UNDERSTOOD to have direct negative implications regarding the supposed integrity of this or that uniformism.

The broader social contexts of all of the foregoing are, of course, entirely complex and complicated—so much so that at best one can only attempt to wobble one’s way through them.

But with regard to all of the foregoing, it can at least be hypothetically established that the largely unexamined dynamics of uniformism, reductionism, conformity and deprivation of knowledge can be engineered so as to work in tandem with each other.

Of these four societal workhorses, the dynamics of conformity are best understood broadly, with reductionism as close runner-up in this sense.

But, as already established, the concept of IN UNIFORM (and hence, its UNIFORMISM fallouts) fell into obsolescence and has thus remained largely unidentified since, and certainly not examined.

It is easy enough to see why—in that the CONCEPT of uniformism is a keystone with regard to great parts of the so-called human condition. Such keystones usually have something to do with power, how it is to be maintained, and how it is managed and partitioned in sheep-cum-herder social structures.

In the line-up of these four great societal workhorses inter-functioning in tandem, REDUCTIONISM usually plays a role somewhat akin to greasing the machine or system in fail-safe kinds of ways.

However, before briefly going into this, it seems necessary to point up that reductionism has achieved a rather bad reputation with regard to the sciences, in that the sciences have been accused of being "too reductionistic."

This may or may not be the case within the vast panorama of the sciences. But it is far more likely that the sciences internally suffer, when they do, more directly from unscientific deprivations of knowledge than from their reductionistic research methodologies—even though the latter can result in the former.

In the broader perspectives of the human condition, the formal definition of REDUCTIONISM is given as "a procedure or theory that reduces complex data or phenomena to simple terms."

At first sight, this definition seems sensible enough. But the definition is somewhat astonishing with regard to whether complex data or phenomena can or should be so simply reduced.

Indeed, much naturally existing data or phenomena ARE and REMAIN complex by their very nature. And so in this regard this particular ISM and its formal definition clearly trend toward the oxymoronic—an OXYMORON consisting of "a combination of contradictory or incongruous words (in this case REDUCTION + ISM).

However, the history of our species clearly demonstrates that the concept of reductionism has had enormous appeal, and this even long before the term was coined.

One possible reason that might account for this appeal is that the erecting of "simple terms" need not necessarily be preceded by any given complexities of data or phenomena. Indeed, such terms can easily be "arrived at" without anything of the kind.

REDUCTIONISM is one of those terms that definitely need to be examined within the contexts it is being employed.

The appeal of this term is more pronounced within societal contexts than any other ones.

Since most societal contexts contain an over-abundance of sheep-cum-herder social systems—and since these are largely dependent upon ubiquitous presence of sheep deprived of knowledge—it is somewhat logical to assume that the sheep at best can only deal with "simple terms."

Another way at stating this is that ANYTHING other than simple terms might react among the sheep as the Wolfe and suddaine stormes might—thus upsetting the desirable balance of deprivation of knowledge shared by the sheep.

After all, it is easy to grok that no proper herder wants a nervous flock (even a science-oriented one), and which nervousness anyway would make the herders’ jobs more complicated and stressful.

The contexts of this essay stand in direct conflict with the contexts of the preceding essay having to do with our amazing species as a bigger picture.

The central premise of that essay is that our species, in a bigger picture way, consists of a superlative intelligence-system, and which downloads into each specimen of it.

In this sense, then, the central bigger-picture confusion more or less involves a stressful dichotomy that can be described as follows:

(1) a species-wide, superlative intelligence system—which is distorted and diminished by
(2) such superficialities as socially engineered deprivation of knowledge and various uniformisms (no matter how elegant THEIR macro and micro managed surfaces might appear).

The struggle of (1) above to exist and flourish in the face of (2) above is awesome indeed.

To move rapidly on into next part of this small series of hypothetical considerations, the inherent mandate of our species as superlative intelligence system now needs some elaboration with regard to the individual level—for believe it or not the contexts highlighted in this essay can be reflected down into the individual level.

All things do trickle down, you know.

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PART 5 

SOCIAL GROUPINGS vs. THE INDIVIDUAL vs. MARGINS OF AWARENESS vs. DEPRIVATIONS OF KNOWLEDGE
(10Nov98)

The action of considering anything at length can become tedious and boring unless provision is made for two important factors that assist cognitive processes.

The first has to do with establishing why the consideration should be undertaken in the first place. The second has to do with establishing some kind of graphic format that encapsulates the whole of what is being considered.

As will become apparent to different readers, a consideration of smaller pictures vs. bigger ones has to do not with the pictures themselves per se, but with expanding margins of awareness about them.

Although awareness is not usually considered a superpower function, it is easy enough to grok that it serves as the basis for all other superpower faculties. If taken this way, then awareness could actually be thought of as a meta-superpower something or other.

As to a graphic format that encapsulates the whole of the central topic of this set of essays, it is easy enough to DO the following:

Draw a large circle on a piece of paper, and give it the label of OUR WONDERFUL SPECIES with all its amazing powers and attributes.

Inside the large circle, sketch a number of smaller circles numerous enough to fill up the larger one. Label these as social groupings. Outside of the larger circle, note that each of the social groupings can be characterized by elements of uniformism, reductionism, conformism, and deprivations of knowledge.

Now fill up each of the smaller circles with dots, and call these the individuals within the social groupings.

If one is inspired enough to do so, one can now make a list of social groupings world-wide, and make an effort to identify the elemental characteristics regarding their formats of uniformism, reductionism, conformism, and deprivations of knowledge.

However, while constructing this graphic representation, be pleased and contented to bear in mind that the point of doing so is not to wax critical of any of the social groupings. Waxing critical usually one results in becoming emotionally embroiled within the smaller-picture confines of the social groupings. If this embroiling happens to any great degree, one usually ends up participating in some kind of pismire activity.

The point is only to establish the graphic representation in order to provide one’s cognitive powers with a short-form concept format regarding smaller pictures vs bigger ones.


THE INDIVIDUAL vs AWARENESS MARGINS
Here we now encounter a topic having considerable dimensions, but whose dimensions are seldom considered within most social contexts.

Indeed, most social contexts establish uniformistic configurations that specify what kinds of awarenesses are to be tolerated and not tolerated.

In fact, it can easily be shown that most social frameworks permit only those kinds of awareness that (1) cohere the framework parameters of the group, and then (2) fit the individual into the framework, and THEN only in keeping with the individual’s place within the social whole.

In this sense, it would be clear that the awareness margins of the socially powerless (the sheep) needs to be cut back and limited in order to keep the powerless in, as it were, the condition of being powerless. Only by managing the social group this way can the powerful (the herders) identify and define themselves.

Something regarding the on-going reality of this can be uncovered by taking note of the absence of schools and special training activities the specific purpose of which would be to enhance and enlarge awareness margins in wholesale kinds of ways.

Everyone knows that awareness exists, of course, that it can become empowered and thus powerful, and that it is a hallmark trait of our species to the degree that it is one of its most fundamental essences.

Since this IS the case, it then goes almost without saying that control of margins of awareness is one of the major fulcrums of almost all social groupings.

One of the most direct implications in this regard is that inhabitants of any social grouping must be deprived of knowledge about AWARENESS itself, and especially with regard to THEIR individual awareness systems.

If this would be the case, then one could expect to find very little information about the nature of awareness, and this especially with regard to training and mechanisms that might enhance and expand it.

And indeed, if any care to make the effort, readers of this essay might themselves now undertake to discover what is known about awareness, whether it has been studied and researched, and if the results of such are available for downloading into individual cognizance. Well, good luck at this.

Awareness is most clearly and without any question one of the chief survival functions of our species, and thus of each of its downloaded specimens.

It can also be established that awareness is so much and so close an intimate adjunct of our species as an intelligence-system that it is almost impossible to separate the two factors.

But it is possible to hypothesize that awareness faculties innately exist in our species hard drive mechanisms - after which, like languages, it undergoes specific modulating and formatting according to what different socio-cultural sub-units establish for its tolerable margins.

After undergoing this kind of degrading and downsizing, the general topic of awareness becomes a very sensitive issue - to the degree that anyone hoping to become acceptable within the confines of their local social grouping explores the topic at their peril.

It is thus, regardless of their other stunning achievements, that the modern twentieth-century sciences, philosophies, and sociologies have managed to arrive at a lesser understanding of awareness than was the case in most pre-modern societies. It is not improbable that this was by socio-cultural design, rather than because of modernist ignorance.

Indeed, it is in this sense that the double dominant uniformisms of the modern age, scientific and philosophic materialism, were broadly seen as highly desirable.

After all, it is difficult to see how MATTER can have awareness. And if matter was considered as the basic be-all-end-all aspect of everything, then there was no need to enter into discussions and research regarding the nature of awareness.

Thus, even if awareness is a fulcrum regarding human survival and the struggles of existing, it could be removed or at least marginalized as anything of substantial concern - with scientific dignity left neatly intact.

Likewise, there is no general entry for AWARENESS in the all-inclusive Encyclopedia of Philosophy (1967), while that Encyclopedia’s index lists only five brief references to it. The Encyclopedia is well over 4,000 pages in length. So only five brief references to awareness is exceedingly brief, indeed.

This situation is a rather amusing one - in that it can be presumed that philosophers of all waters have awarenesses at least sufficient enough upon which to found their particular philosophical versions.


DEFINITIONS OF AWARENESS
The concept of HAVING AWARENESS is clearly a very old one - and as such has been represented by an enormous terminological assortment through the ages.

The English term AWARE is derived from A + WAER, and is found in Old English at about the year 1000 as AWAER, and which apparently meant "watchful." Earlier derivations of the term into Old English are apparently not known, and there does not appear to have been much interest in tracking them down.

There are only two principal definitions of AWARE:

• The first definition is: "Watchful, vigilant, cautious, alert, on one’s guard." This definition is given as OBSOLETE - although WHY it should be considered obsolete is at first sight a complete mystery.
   

• The second, non-obsolete, definition is: "Informed, cognizant, conscious, sensible; to have experience; to know; to be aware of (that)."

The above two definitions, as given, are the beginning and end of the definitions and meanings of AWARE. If the ultra-importance of awareness is considered, this is ridiculously short treatment.

But even so, there are strategic nuances between the first and second definitions. These differences might escape notice if they are not pointed up.

In the first place, the first definition is ACTIVE, while the second one tends toward the PASSIVE, the receptive. Specifically put, "informed, cognizant, conscious" require an "of something" because there is no condition of "informed" unless it is of or about something.

In terms of the dynamics involved, the second definition portrays nothing like the first, which specifies being watchful and on guard.

The distinctions here become somewhat more clear in that, for example, social programmers of all waters would tend to view the first definition with some alarm - because if the social-sheep were to be watchful, alert, on guard, then it would be more difficult to inform them about what they should and should not be cognizant of.


In any event, the two definitions as given above represent the beginning and end of information about AWARENESS within our mighty Earthside civilizations.

So, the term is seldom really utilized with any seriousness, and in recent times had tended to be subsumed into the concept of CONSCIOUSNESS - and which is taken to represent a larger category and more general principle.

And here it is possible to uncover a peculiar factoid. It is possible to become conscious OF, for example, uniformism, reductionism, conformism, and deprivation of knowledge, and of smaller-picture social constructs as well.

But per se consciousness OF something and being watchful, alert and guarding against something consist of two dynamically different sets of responses.

In any event, it is well understood in the greater sociological sense that consciousness can better be manipulated and managed than can awareness - IF the obsolete definition of awareness is recovered as alert, watchful, vigilance, and being on one’s guard.

Now arises the wonderment as to whether AWARENESS MARGINS refer to the first, obsolete definition of awareness, or to the second definition in which the concept of awareness is subsumed into that of consciousness.

Discussion along these lines must be undertaken in tandem with the concept that our species, and all of its downloading specimens, are intelligence-systems. One can then wonder what the intelligence-system would be like without the active definition of awareness.

Beyond the brief foregoing considerations, there is clearly much to be considered regarding awareness and awareness margins. But these discussions will benefit more if they incorporate additional bigger- picture phenomena of our species.

And so the theme of awareness margins will be unfolded more with regard to, for example, essays having to do with biomind SYSTEMS.

Meanwhile, it is now perhaps possible to grok something of the essence regarding the following: When grouped together, social groupings, the individual, awareness margins, and deprivations of knowledge do comprise something of a Mess of smaller-picture frameworks.

On average, though, many are not all that much aware of the existence of the mess, what it consists of, or its various impacts at the individual level.

One reason for this unawareness is that individuals are often locked into the frameworks of their local smaller pictures.

If the locking is strong enough (i.e., concretized solidly enough), individuals tend to project their local smaller pictures onto the world at large - and then to assume, often in an unexpressed sense, that the whole world can be explained and understood in the terms of their local smaller-picture frameworks.

The inverse of this is often the case. For example, individuals can encounter other kinds of smaller pictures, or at least some elements of them.

The tendency then is to interpret the other smaller-picture frameworks in ways that make them consistent with the ones the individual already has.

Another way of putting this is that individuals can modulate other realities to make them consistent with their own.

If certain factors at home in the other realities cannot be made to fit, then those factors are reinterpreted (altered) so that they can fit. If the fitting is not really possible, then the other factors are usually discredited or in some form done away with.

As will be discussed in the following essay, this kind of situation is of extraordinary importance in the case of any kind of tutorials or training regarding activation of the superpower faculties.

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PART 6 

THE INDIVIDUAL vs. SMALLER AND BIGGER PICTURES
(10Nov98)

What is simply referred to as THE INDIVIDUAL is, in actuality, a very complex affair—so complex indeed that efforts to generalize too much are doomed to becoming bogged down with regard to whatever might be their purpose.

The above having been stated, it is incumbent on this writer to identify some kind of a basic starting point for the elaborations to follow.

On average, discussions about The Individual usually focus on differences—perhaps because the differences are most visible on the surface of the topic as it is usually first conceptualized.

The assumption that goes along with this is that the individual is an individual because of differences with regard to other individuals, and whom, of course, are different, too.

This has led many to assume that the differences among individuals appropriately DO constitute the central and most logical approach regarding whatever else might be involved.

Thus, the central concepts of The Individual and Individuality are closely related to the concept of Differences.

However, if one consults the established definitions of the term INDIVIDUAL, one will find no mention of differences among them. Rather, the central concept has to do with SEPARATE and the quality of being separate.

And indeed, the individual needs to be separate in the first instance of existing as an individual. And so it would transpire that only AFTER being separate would differences have much bearing on anything.

If this is reflected upon, we can illuminate a strange and contradictory factor that lurks somewhat invisibly just behind the common concepts of The Individual.

The factor is this: if individuals are majorly judged and demarcated by their differences, then they are all too often conceptualized as belonging within sets of differences that can indiscriminately and ambiguously comprise a great number of individuals.

When such is the case, the individual then loses the identity as a discrete individual or a separate entity.

One can think of many examples in which people are NOT conceptualized as separate, but are identified by the sets of differences into which they can be fitted—and this as other people see them or are taught to see them.

This leads into those situations where the individual is supported or condemned in much the same fashion as the sets of differences themselves are supported or condemned, or are tolerated or not tolerated.

Thus, depending on the circumstances involved, the individual can quite quickly suffer a loss of individuality by being ignominiously subsumed into a set of differences—within which the idea of The Individual becomes ambiguous, even unimportant and meaningless, and in which the idea of The Individual is NOT supported.

There are two important implications that descend out of this kind of thing.

The first is that the concept of The Individual might be representative of some kind of idealism. But as regards practical life and matters, the idealism can quickly fall by the wayside in a rather tattered condition.

The second implication revolves around the concept that individual-as-separate constitutes the bigger picture of the individual, while any differences constitute smaller, or at least, secondary pictures.

This latter concept might seem rather murky at first. But it become more clear if one considers that:

• Differences are ALWAYS perceived and mediated via some kind of local societal framework.

• All societal frameworks are set up and managed via various types of uniformism, reductionism, conformism, and deprivations of this or that kind of knowledge.

In this sense, then, although individuals may live among the social frameworks and adapt to their uniformisms, etc., the differences belong to the frameworks, not to the individual per se.

In this sense, if The Individual is to be fitted into any kind of uniformism, etc., then the fact that The Individual is a separate life-force-carrying entity must become downgraded and of hardly any interest except in some vaporous philosophical idealizing, if even that.

But the worst here also needs to be pointed up. If The Individual is to be fitted into any given, smaller-picture social framework, then The Individual is susceptible to the viruses of the mind that uniformism, reductionism, conformism, and deprivations of knowledge can possibly bring into existence.

(NOTE: A larger background for this possibility can be found in the book daringly entitled VIRUS OF THE MIND (1996) by Richard Brodie, who was the original author of Microsoft Word and personal technical assistant to Bill Gates.)

In any event, and because of the foregoing considerations, it is worthwhile digging deeper into the contexts of The Individual.


SAMENESS FACTORS OF INDIVIDUALS
While differences among individuals obviously have some kind of meaning to the concept of The Individual, each individual possesses certain sameness factors, and some of these are of extraordinary importance.

Over-emphasis on individual differences, and differences individuals have in common, has apparently served to almost completely occlude the fact that individuals also possess sameness factors.

First of all (and it IS a first of all) each embodied individual downloads from the generic intelligence-system attributes of our species. As such, no matter how different each individual ultimately is, each is first and foremost a replicated, downloaded intelligence-system incorporated as a separate and independent specimen of the species.

Incorporated into each independent intelligence-system are arrays of biomind sensors and awarenesses equipment, and a number of pre-installed hard-drive attributes—some of which were partially described in part 2 of this series of essays.

One of more obvious mainframe functions of the sensors, awarenesses, and hard-drive attributes is to permit the intelligence-system to experience phenomena and to grok meaning regarding them.

In this sense, by essential nature the individual is FIRST an experiencer of phenomena—AFTER WHICH, and to be sure, both positive and negative nurture can play significant roles with regard to ultimate differences.

It is important to point up here that the context elucidated in the above paragraph can become more easily visible if one considers the individual as a downloaded specimen of our species.

Achieving this visibility is made much more mushy and swampy if the individual is considered merely as a dweller within the labyrinthine complexities that clog the veins and arteries of local social frameworks.

It is also worth pointing up at this juncture that if an individual is basically an intelligence-system completely equipped to experience phenomena, then The Individual, in this sense, would frequently be viewed with abject alarm within sheep-cum-herder societal frameworks.

The reason is easy enough to deduce. Such societal frameworks much depend on this or that kind of uniformism, etc.

But in the case of all types of uniformisms, their parameters are to be maintained and safeguarded.

In this sense, individuals incorporated into the parameters can hardly be permitted to run around and willy-nilly experience phenomena that might put cracks into the uniformism—or, as well, disturb the desired balances of deprivations of knowledge.

Thus, arises the great specter regarding tolerance and intolerance of human experiencing, the specter having special importance regarding THE INDIVIDUAL LEVEL.

Having to deal with this specter, however, is usually circumvented by establishing stringently enforced uniformity with respect to certain levels of deprivation of knowledge—especially with regard to what The Human Individual actually consists of.

THEN, if individuals experience stuff outside the boundaries of the uniformism, it is likely they won’t really want to tangle with the greater prevailing-wisdom (so-called) forces always stringently on guard within the uniformistic parameters.

As discussed elsewhere in this Website, this particular aspect is entirely relevant to any consideration of the superpowers of the human biomind, and pointedly so with respect regards any significant activation of them.


THE PHILOSOPHIC IDEA OF INDIVIDUALISM
Moving onward now, it needs to be pointed up that most concepts regarding The Individual download from the centralizing philosophical concept of INDIVIDUALISM.

This is essentially a modernist concept, in that most pre-modern societies didn’t incorporate it—and certainly not in the ways it has flourished in modernist times.

In tracking down the origins of the philosophic idea, it is surprising and interesting to learn that it somehow arose in the United States where it was early encountered by Alexis de Tocqueville, the French traveler, observer and writer.

In his 1835 book, DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA, de Tocqueville noted that "Individualism is a novel [American] expression, to which a novel idea has given birth."

De Tocqueville gives the working definitions as of 1835:

"Individualism is a mature and calm feeling, which causes each member of the community to sever himself from the mass of his fellow creatures, and to draw apart with his family and friends."

From this was drawn the first formal definitions of INDIVIDUALISM:

"Self-centered feeling or conduct as a principle; a mode of life in which the individual pursues his own life and ends or follows out his own ideas; egoism."

However, the concept of INDIVIDUALISM made very rapid progress, philosophically speaking. For about five years later (at about 1840) it was being defined in England as no less than a,

"social theory which advocates the free and independent action of the individual, as opposed to communistic methods of organization and state interference."

By about 1877, the theory of INDIVIDUALISM had been embellished with, of all things, metaphysical contexts and had made a metamorphosis from theory into a doctrine:

"The doctrine that the individual is a self-determined whole, and that any larger whole is merely an aggregate of individuals which, if they act on each other at all do so only externally."

The "metaphysical" context of the above doctrine might not at first be visible today. As of 1877, the "whole individual" was still being thought of as some kind of life force "principle" that animates the material physical aspects of what we today would think of as the physical genetic body.

This life-force was considered the central principle of VITALISM, while the life-force principle itself was considered as meta-physical in source and origin.

As it transpired, this metaphysical doctrine quickly ran afoul with those particular Western societal trends intent on doing away with any kind of METAphysical stuff so as to cause the uniformism of materialism to emerge supreme and universal.

The foregoing definitions were about the only somewhat clear-cut description of what individualism was thought to have referred to. Thereafter, with its possible meanings, implications, inferences, and interpretations, the term was dragged into one of those hyper-dichotemizing swamps that clutter various intellectualizing aspects of The Human Condition.

Another enhancement to the swamp occurred as the twentieth century geared up—in that the proponents of HOLISM felt obliged to criticize and attack the proponents of INDIVIDUALISM, and vice versa.

Thus, because of the democratic processes of equal time, equal consideration, neither of the two isms could be discussed without the other, at least at academic levels.

Shortly, the individualism-versus-holism conflict took shape as a major philosophical conundrum, the nature of which can be found described in THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY (1967) under the entry for "Holism and Individualism in History and Social Science."

With apologies, part of the introductory paragraphs are quoted below.

"In most recent philosophical discussion, the contrast between holism and individualism in history and the social sciences has been presented as a methodological issue.

"Stated generally, the question is whether we should treat large-scale social events and conditions as mere aggregates or configurations of the actions, attitudes, relations, and circumstances of the individual men and women who participated in, enjoyed, or suffered from them.

"Methodological individualists say we should. Methodological holists (or collectivists, as some prefer to be called) claim, rather, that social phenomena may be studied as their own autonomous, macroscopic level of analysis. Social ‘wholes,’ they say, not their human elements, are the true historical individuals.

"This issue obviously bears directly upon the way we are to conceive the relations between such social sciences as psychology and sociology, and between these and historical inquiry."

The entry for this dual topic now continues for several double-columnar pages. The interested reader is now referred to those pages—albeit with the warning that ANYTHING to do with The Individual per se has disappeared from considerations so momentous they don’t really need to acknowledge the existence of individual specimens of our species.

We are thus left in a condition of wonderment about What The Individual IS.

Hot on the track of ANY answers here, most dictionaries define INDIVIDUAL in of the following ways:

• A particular being or thing as distinguished from a class, species, or collection

• A single human being as contrasted with a social group or institution

• A single organism as distinguished from a group

• Being an individual or existing as an indivisible whole

• Existing as a distinct entity

If one wants to grasp what the individual IS, the above definitions are only of minimal help—because they establish hardly anything about what the individual IS, but only focus on the PLACE of individuals among other factors around.

However, it’s worth noting that definition 3 above is particularly odious, if contrasted to the established definition of an ORGANISM:

"A complex structure of interdependent and subordinated elements whose relations and properties are largely determined by their function in the whole."

In this sense, the term "single" in the definition should be amended to read "separate."

Furthermore, in this particular context, it’s worth entering here the definition for yet another ism, in this case ORGANICISM:

"A theory that life and living processes are the manifestation of an activity possible only because of the autonomous organization of the SYSTEM rather than because of its individual components [emphasis on SYSTEM added].

WHY the above should be considered a theory is somewhat mysterious—since the definition seems more or less to describe self-evident facts.

In any event, by tracking our way through the above definitions, we at least get into the proximity of the concept that whatever else the individual might consist of, it is in the first place some kind of indivisible SYSTEM.


THE INDIVIDUAL AS AN INDIVISIBLE
INTELLIGENCE-SYSTEM
At this point, it is well worth while wondering WHY in the first place the term INDIVIDUAL took on common understanding as referring to ONE or to SINGLE, or even to SEPARATE or to DIFFERENT.

The term INDIVIDUAL is taken from the Latin INDIVIDUUS—and which meant: "One in substance and essence; not separable; that cannot be separated."

One of the problems here is that while the definitions just above MAKE SENSE, all of them have been declared OBSOLETE in most modern dictionaries. Even so, the obsolete definitions remain perfectly good and useful ones.

Indeed, those definitions were being carried into English as late as about 1650 at which time INDIVIDUAL was still being taken to mean "existing as a separate indivisible entity."

At about the same time, however, the term was also began to be utilized in the context of "distinguished by attributes of his own," and eventually this concept trended toward wider usage over the earlier ones.

And thus The Individual became thought of as individual because of having particular different attributes—not because of being of one in substance and essence.

One of the on-going fallouts of this is that people sometimes think of themselves as an individual because of their attributes different from those of others.

In this way, the very important idea of "an indivisible one in substance and essence" tends to get lost in the miasma of everyone’s different attributes.

The small nomenclature discussion above is extremely important to how the superpower faculties have been perceived in modern contexts.

Those contexts generally held that the superpowers emanated from a particular and uniquely special form of "giftedness" and/or set of attributes not shared by all individuals.

This meant that expressed forms of Psi, if they existed at all, would involve only a very small "gifted" percentage of the populations. And if this could be established as the case, then the small percentage was not a troublesome threat to any number of established societal uniformisms.

Any other troublesome threat would be further minimized almost to extinction if the "gifted" percentage could also be identified within the contexts of hallucination.

Thus, both the gifted small percentage and evidence for Psi could be reduced to a quite smaller picture—while attaching the label of "hallucination" would cause that smaller picture to be viewed with social disgust and horror.

Today, one might think that there were never any organized social measures undertaken that would result in the above scenario.

However, in 1889 the then quite socially powerful International Congress of Psychology meeting in Paris urged that a Census be established and conducted. This activity was ultimately titled the "International Census of Waking Hallucinations in the Sane."

In the mainstream societal sense, the Census was thereafter thought to have "furnished ample and trustworthy data" with regard to the fact that less than 7 per cent of the "sane" experienced hallucinations.

By lumping psychic phenomena into hallucinations, this was taken to mean that less than 7 per cent of the population would experience Psi perceptions, but which anyway were to be interpreted as hallucinations. Hence, nothing to worry about, percentage-wise.

(The interested reader is referred to HALLUCINATIONS AND ILLUSIONS: A STUDY OF THE FALLACIES OF PERCEPTION by Edmund Parish, published by Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1897, and in which the Census and its findings are reviewed.)

In any event, some did not "buy" the anti-psychic hallucination concepts, and these opted to speculate that the psychic individual was psychic BECAUSE of special giftedness.

This pro-psychic "explanation" then became a dominant idea that floated within early psychical research and later parapsychological overviews. One of the results was that the modernist Western social systems have not fully recovered from its negative knowledge impacts.

Through the intervening decades until now, many ostensible psychics were also quite partial to this "explanation."

Of course, the "explanation" didn’t actually explain very much. But it did tend to bestow on psychics a status of "specialness" among all other presumably non-special people, and which special status tended to puff up not a few "psychic" egos.

From the whole of this, there occasionally descends here and there the idea that the superpowers cannot be tutored or trained because they are naturally special only to the few who "naturally" posses the (unspecified) endowments—and as such the special but unspecified endowments cannot be artificially installed in others.

Alas, whether this is the case or not depends on what one possesses as basic concept configurations regarding what the superpowers ESSENTIALLY consist of—especially if such configurations are based on traditional smaller-picture misinformation.

Such concept formations might indeed limit how the superpower faculties are perceived not for what they are, but only in accord with the marginal limits of the concept configurations.

Alternative concept configurations are possible. For example, if the superpower faculties principally involve the matter of awareness margins, then our species has a long history of expanding them (as well as contracting them in accord with societal uniformisms.)

It is also quite well understood (in the performing and mechanical arts, for example) that perceptual boundaries can be expanded by tutoring and training designed to do so.

More fundamentally, however, if the notion is entertained that each specimen of our species is an individual intelligence-system, then that system has to possess arrays of sensors replete with awareness equipment that goes along with them.

The fact that the awareness equipment can be cropped back and downsized to conform to this or that set of smaller-picture social realities would not alter the species bigger picture in any enduring way.

What might occur, though, is an on-going conflict between downsizing and upsizing of awareness margins—this conflict sometimes being referred to as the on-going conflict between the individual and society.

Further consideration of the individual as an intelligence-system now requires two forthcoming series of essays.

The first involves SYSTEMS in general.

The second involves two essays regarding the topic of MAPS OF THE MIND with special reference to catalyst and synthesis qualities of prepared and unprepared mind situations.

If one has the patient desire to do so, the contexts of this present set of six essays can now be integrated with previous essays already entered into this Website.

For example, it would be obvious that certain smaller-picture configurations can act as "noise" within bigger-picture ones, and so the essay regarding the signal-to-noise ratio can now take on wider awareness perspectives.

It would also be obvious that various mental information processing grids might be littered or clogged up with smaller-picture configurations.

The nature of smaller-picture versus bigger-picture phenomena can also be integrated into the contexts of the following essays (also on this website) entitled:

"Non-conscious Participating in Social Consensus Realities"
"Information Processing Viruses and Their Clones"

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