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Chapters 5, 6, 7

CHAPTER 5
REALITY

There is a complex, integral relationship
between emotion, consciousness and reality.
More specifically, the phenomenon of emotion
is intricately involved with the human
structures that perceive and interpret
reality. This is not an easy relationship to
grasp. One of the consequences of this
relationship, however, is that much of the
distress that you experience in your daily
life is simply the natural emotional
consequence of your misperceptions and
corresponding misinterpretations of reality.
This is less awesome when we look at
specifics of how this happens in everyday
life. I see two ways:

• In the first instance you suffer
because you have a misconception of what is
actually happening in a given situation: you
may misinterpret someone's intentions and
fear an attack, for example, where none was
intended.

• In the second, you suffer because you
have a misconception of the basic structure
of reality: you fail to realize how you
participate in its creation and the power you
have to change it. You see yourself and your
situation as the net result of forces
completely outside of yourself. This
paradigm, this state of ignorance, keeps you
imprisoned in your personal trap; because you
are blind to--or refuse to use--the exits.

You become aware of these aspects of reality
when you explore the realm of emotion
firsthand, because your perception,
interpretation and experience of reality are
altered in the process of developing
emotional intelligence. This happens as part
of your shifting paradigm.
In order to understand and facilitate this
process we need to develop some concepts and
terms to enable us to explore this vast
concept we call reality.

In the past three or four decades, the ideas
of a few people have come together and
ignited, giving birth to a comprehensive
theory of consciousness and reality that may
throw light on the nature of emotion and how
to relate to it.. Indeed, this theory has
profound implications for every aspect of
life. Because it is based conceptually on a
model of the hologram, it is referred to as
the holographic theory or holographic
paradigm. It may ultimately account for many
things that have until now defied
explanation. Already, many phenomena in the
subjective realm are beginning to make
sense--phenomena such as transcendental
experiences, time distortions, synchronicity,
clairvoyance and other psychic events. All
“paranormal" events may in fact be normal--if
not normal, at least natural. We simply label
those events paranormal which we fail to
understand.

Among the most noteworthy in the evolution of
this theory are: Gottfried von Leibniz
(1714), Albert Einstein (1905), Dennis Gabor
(1947), Karl Pribram (1969) and David Bohm
(1977).
HOLOGRAPHY
Dennis Gabor, a Hungarian-born scientist, was
influenced by the work of Gottfried von
Leibniz, who, in 1714, discovered integral
and differential calculus. In his work,
Leibniz was led to the conclusion that "a
metaphysical reality underlies and generates
the material universe. Space-time, mass and
motion of physics and transfer of energies
are intellectual constructs.”5 In 1947, using
Leibniz's calculus, Gabor derived a method of
lens-less photography, called holography,
which produces three-dimensional images that
can be viewed from all sides. The holographic
film, called a hologram, is a plate of glass,
usually from a few centimeters to a meter
square, covered with a photosensitive
material. The image can be no larger than the
hologram that produces it. To make a clear,
accurate hologram you must use coherent
light, such as that produced by a neon laser,
which means that the light waves must be of
the same wavelength and in phase (vibrating
in harmony) with each other.

The basic principles involved in making a
hologram are shown in figure 1. A beam of
coherent light from a laser is split by a
prism into two beams--a reference beam and an
object beam. The reference beam goes by way
of mirrors directly to the holographic plate
after passing through a spatial filter that
spreads it out--uniformly--large enough to
cover the holographic plate. The object beam
is directed at the object after a spatial
filter spreads it just large enough to cover
the object being holographed. The light from
the object beam then reflects from the object
directly onto the holographic plate.

The reference beam carries very little
information --namely the intensity, wave
form, frequency and phase of the light being
emitted by the laser; a sample, so to speak,
of the same light that is reaching the
object. The light reflected from the object
contains additional information --information
about the object which is encoded within the
waves reaching the surface of the plate. When
the two beams intersect, they create an
interference pattern, much like the
intersection of waves created by two stones
dropped simultaneously into a still pond.
This wave pattern is recorded at the surface
of the holographic film by a light-sensitive
material called dichromated gelatin--a medium
which stores a near-perfect record of the
wave pattern.

The hologram has a number of interesting
characteristics. Once developed, the film
bears no visible resemblance to the object
photographed. The interference pattern is
recorded as a "holographic blur," and has no
recognizable form. But when the reference
beam is shown through the hologram, the way
light shines through ordinary photographic
slides, the interference pattern acts as a
diffraction grating, bending the light by
diffraction and recreating a three
dimensional image of the original object,
beyond the film, suspended in space. This
method is called transmission holography.
Another method, which may provide a more
accurate model for the structure of reality,
called reflection holography, produces a film
that reflects, rather than transmits, light.
The result is an image that is reflected back
to the viewer's eyes, on the same side of the
film as the laser.

One of the most interesting aspects of the
hologram is that, should it be broken, each
fragment is capable of reproducing the entire
image. Thus each part of the hologram
contains information about the whole. This is
one of the qualities of holography that
attracted the attention of David Bohm and
Karl Pribram in their search for answers to
some puzzling questions about the structure
of the universe and the processes by which
the brain remembers and interprets reality.

HOLOGRAPHIC THEORY: .AN ENFOLDING-UNFOLDING
UNIVERSE
Einstein could never accept the idea that the
universe is composed of purely random,
haphazard events, insisting that God never
played dice with the universe. Like Leibniz,
he held that a metaphysical reality generated
the material universe. Einstein dreamed of
discovering a unified field theory that would
allow us to look beyond the probabilistic
view of reality and understand the inner
workings of the universe and the way in which
seemingly random events are generated at
their source. Bohm had worked with Einstein.
Sharing this vision, Bohm has continued to
search for evidence of such a unified field
and a model that would help us to grasp its
nature. Renee Weber, Professor of Philosophy
at Rutgers, describes Bohm's vision as
. . . a unified field theory undreamed of by
science, in which the searcher and what is
sought are apprehended as one. . . . That
unified field is neither neutral nor value-
free as current scientific canon requires,
but an intelligent and compassionate energy,
manifesting in an as yet unborn realm where
physics, ethics, and religion merge. For
human life, widespread awareness of such a
realm will be revolutionary, leading us from
information to transformation and from
knowledge to wisdom. (1978, p. 23)

Bohm (1978) describes a device consisting of
two concentric glass cylinders with a viscous
fluid such as glycerin between them. With one
of the cylinders held stationary, the other
can be rotated, causing the fluid to flow
very slowly between the cylinders. If you put
a droplet of insoluble ink into this fluid
and turn the cylinder slowly; so that there
is no diffusion of the viscous fluid, the
droplet will be drawn out into a thread that
soon becomes invisible. If you then turn the
cylinder back the same number of turns, the
droplet suddenly reappears. It could be said
that the droplet was enfolded into the fluid
in the way that the egg is enfolded into the
cake--or in the way that the three-
dimensional image is enfolded into the two-
dimensional hologram. While the egg cannot be
separated out of the cake, the droplet can be
unfolded out of the fluid in the cylinder--
and the image can be unfolded out of the
hologram--because of the nature of the mixing
processes.

Imagine now that you enfold a second ink
droplet in the same viscous fluid. The
droplets may look the same; and viscous fluid
looks the same whether it has one or two
droplets enfolded within it, since they are
invisible in the enfolded state. There
continues to be a distinction, however,
between the two enfolded ink droplets because
one is going to unfold into this droplet and
the other into that. This distinction is in
the enfolded order, which is invisible; it is
not in the unfolded order, which we see,
which is our ordinary conception of reality.

Now imagine enfolding a droplet by turning
the device a certain number of times, say n
times. You now put in another droplet in a
slightly different position and enfold it n
times; the first one is meanwhile enfolded 2n
times. Once enfolded, being invisible, they
look the same; but if you turn one of them n
times, you get this droplet; turn it another
n times and you get that one. Now suppose you
do it again with a droplet in a slightly
different position, so that it goes n times,
the second 2n times, and the original 3n
times. Suppose you keep this up until you've
enfolded a number of droplets, each adjacent
to the next in its initial position. Now, as
you turn the device backwards, one drop
emerges seemingly out of nowhere and becomes
manifest to your vision, then the next one,
and the next, and so on. If this is done
rapidly, faster than the time of resolution
of the human eye, you will have the illusion
of a single particle appearing out of nowhere
and moving continuously through space and
time.

MANIFEST AND NONMANIFEST REALMS OF EXISTENCE
In a similar manner, the unfolded order--that
which is perceivable to humans under ordinary
circumstances--is only a very small part of
the enfolded order. It appears, furthermore,
that these two orders are structured very
differently from each other and behave
according to different laws. Bohm introduces
the distinction between the manifest and
nonmanifest domains of reality. The manifest
behaves according to the unfolded or
explicate order; the nonmanifest behaves
according to the enfolded or implicate order.
The manifest may fold up and become
nonmanifest, and the nonmanifest may unfold
into the manifest, e.g., the way clouds
appear to form "out of nowhere" and dissipate
again "into thin air." Thus, the fundamental
movement of the universe is folding and
unfolding, rather than traversing space and
time, as in the Cartesian model. In the
latter, it is assumed that the particle
exists continuously; its essence is to be in
only one place at a time, then another, then
another. In Bohm's model, the particle moving
through space and time is quite literally an
illusion; it exists everywhere at once. This
idea is not new. It permeates the Book of
Changes and is central to the nature of the
Tao. It is discussed in the Eighth Wing, for
example, which antedates Confucius:

Heaven and earth determine the direction. The
forces of mountain and lake are united.
Thunder and wind arouse each other. Water and
fire do not combat each other. Thus are the
eight trigrams intermingled.
Counting that which is going into the past
depends on the forward movement. Knowing that
which is to come depends on the backward
movement. This is why the Book of Changes has
backward-moving numbers. . . .
When the trigrams intermingle, that is, when
they are in motion, a double movement is
observable: first, the usual clockwise
movement, cumulative and expanding as time
goes on, and determining the events that are
passing; second, an opposite, backward
movement, folding up and contracting as time
goes on, through which the seeds of the
future take form. To know this movement is to
know the future. In figurative terms, if we
understand how a tree is contracted into a
seed, we understand the future unfolding of
the seed into a tree. 6

Comparing the holographic model to the
structure of reality, we find a number of
similarities. The holographic paradigm
suggests that what is manifest resembles the
image produced by holography, while what is
nonmanifest resembles the hologram that
generates (with the help of coherent light)
the image. For this reason the manifest can
be referred to as the object/image domain and
the nonmanifest as the frequency domain (also
called the holographic domain). The term
frequency domain derives from the idea that
the hologram is a frozen record of the
interference pattern of frequencies (in the
form of light waves) at the surface of the
film.
Reality is in a constant state of movement
and change. Since the term hologram is used
to represent the film that projects a static
image, Bohm prefers the term holomovement to
describe the eventful, changing frequency
domain that underlies and generates the
manifest. I find this to be an awkward term
to use in everyday language; yet I have found
nothing to substitute in its place that
conveys the proper meaning.
THE HOLOGRAPHIC BRAIN
Where is memory stored? For years we believed
that specific memories were stored in
specific locations in the brain in the form
of "memory traces" of "engrams ." Brain
scientist Karl Lashley searched for 30 years
for the site and substance of memory in
laboratory animals. His approach was to train
the animals to perform some function,
then selectively damage certain portions of
their brains, expecting at some point that he
would "scoop out" what had been learned.
While removing parts of the brain worsened
their performance somewhat, it seemed that
nothing short of lethal brain damage could
eradicate what they had been taught. 7

Karl Pribram has devoted many years to
studying the processes and mechanisms by
which the brain apprehends the world of
appearances and stores memory. He had worked
with Lashley and was equally puzzled by this
unexpected finding. In the mid-sixties he was
introduced to the idea of the hologram. He
recognized an isomorphism or parallel between
the way the hologram stores images and the
way the brain stores memories: if a hologram
is broken, any piece of it is capable of
reconstructing the entire image; if a brain
is partially destroyed, the remaining part is
capable of reconstructing the entire memory.
It began to appear that memory was stored
throughout the brain, in much the same way
that information about the object is stored
throughout the hologram.

Pribram suggests further that, just as the
hologram stores the interference patterns
impinging upon its surface, the brain may
register interference patterns impinging upon
the cells of the brain from the frequency
domain:

Essentially, the theory reads that tile brain
at one stage of processing performs its
analyses in the frequency domain. This is
accomplished at the junctions between neurons
not within neurons. Thus graded local waxings
and wanings of neural potentials (waves)
rather than nerve impulses are responsible.
Nerve impulses are generated within neurons
and are used to propagate the signals that
constitute information over long distances
via long nerve fibers. Graded local potential
changes, waves, are constituted at the ends
of these nerve fibers where they adjoin
shorter branches that form a feltwork of
interconnections among neurons. Some neurons,
now called local circuit neurons, have no
long fibers and display no nerve impulses.
They function in the graded wave mode
primarily and are especially responsible for
horizontal connectivities in sheets of neural
tissue, connectivities in which holographic-
like interference patterns can become
constructed.
Aside from these anatomical and physiological
specifications, a solid body of evidence has
accumulated that the auditory, somatosensory,
motor, and visual systems of the brain do in
fact process, at one or several stages, input
from the senses in the frequency domain. This
distributed input must then, in some form,
perhaps as chance in the conformation of
proteins at membrane surfaces, become encoded
into distributed memory traces. The protein
molecules would serve the neural hologram in
the same way as oxidized silver grains serve
the photographic hologram. (1978)

Given, then, that the brain, like the
hologram, deals with interference patterns,
interprets frequencies and stores images
dispersed throughout the brain, how is this
accomplished? What mechanism is involved?
Pribram suggests that the brain may function
like a "mathematical lens," performing
mathematical calculations on the frequencies
of the data it receives. Describing this
process, Ferguson writes:
. . . It appears that in order to see, hear,
smell, taste, the brain performs complex
calculations on the frequencies of data it
receives. These mathematical processes have
little commonsense relationship to the real
world as we perceive it.
Pribram believes that the intricate
mathematics may occur as a nerve impulse
travels along and between cells through a
network of fine fibers on the cells. The
fibers move in slow waves as the impulse
crosses the cell and those waves may perform
the calculating function. In taking a
ho1ogram, light waves are encoded and the
resulting hologram that's projected than
decodes, or deblurs, the image. The brain may
similarly decode its stored memory traces.
(1978b)

Brainwaves, as measured and recorded by
electroencephalograms, have been partitioned
into four frequency ranges, in descending
order of frequency: beta, alpha, gamma and
delta waves. Beta waves are most active
during our usual, awake state of
consciousness, such as when we are holding a
conversation with someone or solving a math
problem. Gamma and delta waves become most
active during the sleep state, with delta
waves active only during the deepest sleep.
Alpha waves have been found to prevail during
states of relaxation and calm, such as during
meditation or biofeedback. Ferguson (1978b)
reports that some researchers have speculated
that the alpha brainwave frequency may be a
timing device necessary for the brain to
perform its mathematical computations. If
this is so, there is a remarkable similarity
in function between the alpha brainwave and
the reference beam in holography. Could it be
that we are simply tuning in to a channel of
pure, coherent energy devoid of information
from the holomovement when we achieve the
alpha state? Similar in effect to eliminating
the object beam in holography?

In summary, the brain, by means of its
"mathematical lens," appears to deblur
(decode) and interpret data from both the
manifest and nonmanifest domains. In the
manifest, the brain decodes and interprets
messages sent to it via long-fibered neurons
from the rest of the physical body. In the
nonmanifest, it decodes and interprets
impressions received from the frequency
domain via the synapses between neurons. All
interpretations, if the brain is functioning
properly, are subsequently communicated
throughout the body where each cell responds
according to its internal instructions
contained within its DNA.
Having accepted the thesis, more or less,
that the brain operates holographically,
Pribram began being troubled by new questions
which led ultimately to his present thesis
that not only is the brain holographic, the
universe is holographic as well. Ferguson
describes the dynamics that led Pribram to
this conclusion:
In 1970 or 1971, a distressing and ultimate
question began troubling him. If the brain
indeed knows by putting together holograms--
by mathematically transforming frequencies
from "out there” –who in the brain is
interpreting the holograms?
This is an old and nagging question.
Philosophers since the Greeks have speculated
about the "ghost in the machine," the "little
man inside the little man" and so on. Where
is the I--the entity that uses the brain?
Who does the actual knowing? Or, as Saint
Francis of Assisi once put it, "What we are
looking for is what is looking." (1978b)
Lecturing one night at a symposium in
Minnesota, Pribram mused that the answer
might lie in the realm of gestalt psychology,
a theory that maintains that what we perceive
there" is the same as--isomorphic with--brain
processes.
Suddenly he blurted out, "Maybe the world is
a hologram!"
He stopped, a little taken aback by the
implications of what he had said. Were the
members of the audience holograms--
representations of frequencies, interpreted
by his brain and by one another's brains? If
the nature of reality is itself holographic,
and the brain operates holographically, then
the world is indeed, as the Eastern religions
have said, maya: a magic show. Its
concreteness is an illusion. &8b)
If we accept the holographic paradigm as a
model for the structure of reality, we are
also accepting the existence of two basic,
interdependent realms of reality: the
unfolded, manifest, object/image domain; and
the enfolded, nonmanifest, holographic
(frequency) domain. What further can be
implied about these domains from the
holographic model? Specifically, what is the
substance of each realm? And what form of
internal order prevails within each realm
that allows it to exist as it does? That is,
what is the nature of the explicate order? Of
the implicate order?

SUBSTANCE AND ORDER Of THE HOLOGRAPHIC DOMAIN

The substance or contents of the holographic
domain--the holomovement, or frequency
domain, in Bohm's terms--appears to be
limited to (1) frequencies (energy
vibrations) and (2) events--noumenal events,
in Kantian terms (see discussion, page 111).
Space and time, as we usually conceive of
them, do not exist in the holographic domain.
It is said that the holomovement “transcends”
space and time. It would seem to me more
accurate to say that space and time are
enfolded or collapsed into the holomovement.
I'm suggesting that space and time continue
potentially to exist, in a collapsed state,
enfolded into the holomovement, just as the
three-dimensional image is enfolded into the
two-dimensional hologram. Perhaps the
addition of coherent energy (vital energy?)
is required to unfold space and time from the
holomovement, just as it takes coherent
energy to unfold the manifest image from the
hologram. This would be consistent with
Pribram's idea that the holomovement is "an
underlying web of connection, . . . an
invisible matrix that doesn't objectify
unless you do something to it."

It is extremely difficult for most of us to
imagine a realm of the universe filled only
with events and interacting vibrations,
devoid of space and time. Pribram has this
conception:

…[The holographic] domain deals with the
density of occurrences only; time and space
are collapsed in the frequency domain.
Therefore the ordinary boundaries of space
and time, locations in space and in time
become suspended and must be "read out" when
transformations into the object/image domain
are effected. In the absence of space-time
coordinates, the usual causality upon which
most scientific explanation depends must also
be suspended. Complementarities,
synchronicities, symmetries, and dualities
must be called upon as explanatory
principles. (1978)

In the manifest domain we ordinarily consider
each point in space to be separate and
distinct from every other point and to exist
continuously as it moves through time. The
holographic model, if it is an accurate
reflection of the structure of reality,
challenges that paradigm. Going back to
Bohm’s cylindrical device, when a droplet has
been enfolded into the viscous fluid, the
droplet is distributed throughout the whole,
and every part of the whole contributes to
the droplet. When two or more droplets are
simultaneously enfolded they become, in a
sense, mixed up with each other, interspersed
with each other, interpenetrating each other.
Distinctions between points are blurred, just
as distinctions between points on an object
are blurred in the hologram; waves reflected
from each point on the object are spread over
the entire surface of the film and thus
enfolded into the hologram. Pribram describes
this aspect of the holographic domain.
In the implicate, holographic domain, the
distinction between points becomes blurred;
information becomes distributed as in the
example of the surface of a pond. What is
organism (with its component organs) is no
longer sharply distinguished from what lies
outside the boundaries of the skin. In the
holographic domain, each organism represents
in some manner the universe, and each portion
of the universe represents in some manner the
organisms within it. . . . The perceptions of
an organism could not be understood without
an understanding of the nature of the
physical universe and that the nature of the
physical universe could not be understood
without an understanding of the observing
perceptual process. (1978)

Applying this model to consciousness, Bohm
sees but one consciousness--literally. As
evidence he points to the basic problems of
humankind, problems such as fear, jealousy
and confusion, suggesting that deep down all
our problems are the same. "We may say that
these problems originate in the consciousness
of mankind and manifest in each individual.
You see, each individual manifests the
consciousness of mankind. (1978)”

The question arises: what lies beyond the
holomovement? Beyond the beyond? What forces
influence the holomovement? Taoism may shed
some light on these questions. Taoism is a
philosophical system evolving out of the work
of Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu in the 4th century
B.C. Taoism is based on the idea that the
universe is generated by the interactions of
internal opposites called yin and yang.
Inherent in this model is the idea that
reality is at once the process and the
product of the interactions between yin and
yang forces; it is this interaction that
generates movement--perhaps the
holomovement?--and change.

Yin and yang are complex, multidimensional
ideas, and the implications of such a
universe are far-reaching. Perhaps nowhere
have these ideas been more fully developed
than in the Book of Changes, which grew out
of Taoist philosophy. Richard Wilhelm
describes the idea of yin and yang in terms
of nature:
The terms yin, the dark, and yang, the light,
denote respectively the shadowed and the
light side of a mountain or a river. Yang
represents the south side of the mountain,
because this side receives the sunlight, but
it connotes the north side of the river,
because the light of the river is reflected
to that side. The reverse is true as regards
yin. These terms are gradually extended to
include the two polar forces of the universe,
which we may call positive and negative.
Tao . . . is something that sets in motion
and maintains the interplay of these forces.
As this something means only a direction,
invisible and in no way material, the Chinese
chose for it the borrowed word tao, meaning
"way," "course," which is also nothing in
itself, yet serves to regulate all movements.
. . .
The primal powers never come to a standstill;
the cycle of becoming continues
uninterruptedly. The reason is that between
the two primal powers there arises again and
again a state of tension, a potential that
keeps the powers in motion and causes them to
unite, whereby they are constantly
regenerated. Tao brings this about without
ever becoming manifest. (1950, pp. 297-298)
SUBSTANCE AND ORDER OF THE MANIFEST DOMAIN

The substance of the manifest domain is what
we normally see and experience in our daily
lives: it is generated within and dependent
upon space and time; it is directly
perceivable by usual human faculties of
awareness under ordinary circumstances. We
sometimes refer to this realm as "concrete”
or "hard" reality. While the holographic
domain contains only noumenal events (see
discussion on p. 107), the manifest domain
contains only phenomenal events. In Pribram's
words, it is the product of an invisible
matrix that doesn't objectify unless you do
something to it.
The manifest domain is thus an illusion. What
appears to be a tangible, stable world is not
really there. Pribram offers an example of
the unreliability of appearances:
. . . An example from everyday life is the
immediacy of our awareness of a projected
three-dimensional acoustic image in
stereophonic high fidelity reproduction of
music. We know the sources of the sound to be
the speakers but we also know that by
adjusting the phase relationships between
acoustic waves generated by the speakers we
can move the sound away from the two sources,
to in between the speakers or in front of
them.
Our ears and acoustic nervous systems (re)
construct. the sound to be perceived in a
location we know to be incapable of producing
that sound. Which then is the reality of the
situation, the perceived appearance or what
we know to be the physical arrangement that
gives rise to the appearance? (1978)
Bohm suggests that every phenomenon in the
manifest domain may be a form of matter. Even
consciousness, in his view, is a material
process and is itself a form of matter, “a
more subtle form of matter and movement." It
is indeed possible that each of these
manifestations does consist of matter of
varying density, ranging from extremely dense
manifestations, such as diamond in the
physical realm, to extremely subtle, such as
thought in the intellectual realm. This view
is consistent with that of Thaddeus Golas,
philosopher:

We are equal beings and the universe is our
relations with each other. The universe is
made of one kind of entity: each one is
alive, each determines the course of his own
existence. . ..
The universe is made of one kind of
whatever-it-is, which cannot be defined. For
our purpose, it isn't necessary to try to
define it. All we need to do is assume that
there is only one kind of whatever-it-is, and
see if it leads to a reasonable explanation
for the world as we know it. (1971, p. 13)

This view is also consistent with Einstein's
findings in his search for a unified field
theory. Space, matter and time, according to
Einstein, are inseparable. Neither can exist
without the other two. "Space tells matter
how to move, and matter tells space how to
curve." Objects travel in a straight line
only in the absence of the curvature of
space, which can only happen in the absence
of matter. And the closer one comes to a
large body in space, the slower time
passes--not in theory, but in actuality. This
has been demonstrated by taking atomic clocks
to high altitudes in airplanes, further from
the mass of the earth, and measuring the
difference between the clock in the airplane
and its "twin" which is left on the ground.


FOUR PRIMARY REALMS OF THE MANIFEST DOMAIN
It is necessary in the process of developing
emotional intelligence to clarify the
subjective distinctions that exist between
physical matter, emotion, thought and
image--recognizing, of course, their common
source, the frequency domain. To accomplish
this I have found it useful to partition the
manifest domain into four primary realms:
physical, emotional, intellectual and visual.
The process I used to partition the manifest
into these particular component realms was a
matter of forming "piles of things" that went
together. The criteria I used to determine
whether things went together was the clusters
of natural laws that worked together, yet
differed from other clusters. The laws that
govern the behavior of events in the realm of
vision, for example, are far different from
the laws that govern the behavior of
emotional events. It should be noted that
physical matter, in this conceptualization--
in accordance with Einstein's unified field
theory --includes space and objective time
(since matter could not exist without space
and time) as well as the physiological
systems involved in the senses of hearing,
outer vision, smell, touch, pressure,
temperature, kinesthetic awareness, and
emotion.

Figure 2 is a symbolic representation of the
structure of reality--as I see it--implied by
the holographic model. This must be
considered only symbolically--and then only
as a crude approximation of reality. The
frequency domain, for example, is represented
by a finite space when, in reality, it is
boundless and not really a "place." Given
these (and other) reservations, this
representation may serve to reflect some
aspects of the relationships between these
primary realms.

Subjectively these realms appear to be
separate and distinct from each other; by
that I mean that the experience of physical
matter, emotion, thought and image are each
different from the other. Despite this, it is
important to recognize that each of them is
generated from a common source--the frequency
domain; and in the frequency domain they are
enfolded within each other like ink droplets
enfolded within the glycerin. It takes the
brain's mathematical analysis of the
holomovement to unfold them into their
manifest forms. It would appear that each of
the four realms requires a different kind of
computation to produce the experience of
perception and awareness characteristic of
that realm.

Since we will be looking primarily at the
subjective aspects of these realms, their
natures and characteristics will be more
fully explored when we look at them within
the framework of consciousness below.

INNER AND OUTER REALMS OF THE MANIFEST DOMAIN
I partition the same manifest domain--
orthogonal to the first partitioning--into
two different manifestations: inner and
outer. (Having sliced the orange into four
segments, so to speak, we now turn the orange
on its side and slice each segment in half.)
Each of the primary realms has now been
divided into two further realms--inner and
outer.

In the physical realm there is literally the
physical matter which is contained within
you, which comprises your physical body, and
there is physical matter which is not
contained within you. In the emotional realm,
there are your own emotional experiences, and
there are the emotional experiences of
others. Emotional energy, furthermore, can
flow in two directions--inwardly, aimed at
yourself or outwardly, aimed at someone else.
In the intellectual realm, there are your
thoughts, experienced within your own
consciousness, and there are the thoughts of
others, which exist outside of your
consciousness. And in the visual realm, there
is inner vision, also called visualization or
imagination, which produces inner images, and
outer vision, which produces images that are
experienced as being outside yourself.
Inner and outer phenomena do not exist
independently of one another. On the
contrary, they are in a state of continual
interaction with one another.

There are different ways to partition human
space into inner and outer, self and nonself.
One way, as described above, is to define the
skin as the boundary between the self and the
nonself, in which case we refer quite
literally to the space within and the space
without. This is the materialist view of
human nature, as proposed by William James
and others, in which physical matter is all
that exists. This view reduces human contact
to the "outsides" of people interacting with
each other, role-playing, with no one
acknowledging or revealing what's going on
inside.

Another way to partition human space is in
terms of subjectivity and objectivity. In
this partitioning, whatever you conceive or
experience becomes your inner space, or the
inner realm of existence--your thoughts,
images, tastes, smells, physical sensations,
moods, emotion --all awareness (conscious and
unconscious), all the ideas, dreams and
experiences that come through you or from
within you--the source of your vital energy.
Your physical body, other physical bodies,
all physical matter--whether inside or
outside your skin--become outer space, or the
outer realm of existence.
In the outer, material world, we experience
ourselves as being separated from each other
by space, by the physical distance between
us. If we are apart, we must move through
space to come together, which takes time.
These natural laws don't apply to the inner
realm. Inner space is made of lighter stuff,
is more fluid. Sometimes we are heavier and
more dense inside--when we are angry or
depressed, for example. When we are feeling
love, we are lighter, less dense, "spacier."
We expand. Given enough love, according to
Thaddeus Golas (1971), we expand to where
there is no substance, only space. In this
state we can blend together and occupy the
same space. (See pp. 278-282 for further
discussion of these ideas.)

When we use the skin as the boundary it is
easy to distinguish between self and nonself.
But when we partition ourselves in terms of
subjectivity and objectivity the boundary
becomes quite blurred. Perhaps it doesn't
even exist? Pribram raises this question in
examining the neurological mechanisms that
distinguish the objective from the subjective
world:
From the energy configurations which excite
some of our receptors we are able to
reconstruct an objective world. Sight and
hearing especially give us images which we
interpret as being distant from the receptors
excited. Touch, taste and smell do not
ordinarily allow this attribution of
distance; localization is to the receptor
surface. Yet even here the judgment is made
that one touches, tastes or smells something
other than one's own receptor reactions. But
there is another world, a subjective world of
feelings. We feel hungry or sleepy or sexy.
We feel happy or sad, contemplative or
assertive. What distinguishes the objective
from this subjective world?

The answer to this question becomes
especially tacky when one considers
neurological mechanisms. The naive realist
can easily state that, indeed, sensations
refer to things "out there" but that feelings
refer to "internal states." But clinical
experience with, phantoms produced by limb
amputation make it unlikely that our
experience of receptor stimulation occurs
where we are out to localize it. Images of
objects are formed in the brain--why then do
we locate objects where we do? (1970, p. 44)

To be fully integrated and self-directed you
must be fully awake in both inner and outer
worlds. Many people, in their attempts to
suppress emotion, have turned their backs on
their inner worlds to the extent that they
have little or no awareness of what's going
on inside themselves. I have encountered many
people in my therapy practice who reported at
the outset having no sense of what they felt
inside. These people live entirely in the
outer realm, relating only to the outsides of
other people. They are only half alive. Our
prisons tend to be filled with these people.

Other people, on the other hand, have turned
their backs on the outer world and live
completely inside themselves. These people
have little or no awareness of what's going
on around them. They live in a world unto
themselves. Most often they focus their
attention on thoughts, engaging the intellect
in endless analysis and internal debates
among their fragmented parts, searching for a
way out of the trap. These people, as well,
are only half alive. Our mental institutions
tend to be filled with these people.


INTERACTION BETWEEN THE MANIFEST AND
NONMANIFEST DOMAINS
The holographic model offers an alternative
to William James's model in which emotion is
purely the result of physiological changes.
In the holographic model each of the primary
realms is read out by the brain directly from
the holomovement, and each of the realms
interacts directly with the holomovement.
Rather than an event in one realm
precipitating events in other realms, in a
direct, cause-effect manner, we have an event
in one realm affecting movement in the
frequency domain which, in turn, is reflected
back into the other realms--often with a time
delay between the original event and the
reflected event. The primary realms thus have
synchronous, reciprocal relationships, rather
than linear, cause-effect relationships.

A physiological event, for example, can
induce--by way of affecting the
holomovement--an emotional response.
Similarly, an emotional event can induce--
again, by way of affecting the
holomovement--a physiological response.

Bohm, influenced by the ideas of J.
Krishnamurti, Indian philosopher, contends
that the origin of the chaos that pervades
our everyday lives is in our thought--in the
intellectual realm--in untruthful,
fragmented, atomistic thought, in untruthful
ways of thinking. "It would not produce chaos
unless it were untruthful, right? If it were
truthful it would produce order." Bohm and
Krishnamurti share the view that thought is
the source of disorder in the holomovement,
rather than the means by which one can become
free of disorder. The way to deal with such
disorder, according to Bohm, is not to think
about it; the solutions to problems of
disorder lie in the realm of awareness and
insight, not thought. Bohm stresses that

. . . we have got to be aware of this
disorder, being careful not to imagine we are
beyond it, and to observe it as it happens,
as it goes on around us and in us, the point
being that we have to bring about order in
this limited field of thought because that is
the source of the disorder which prevents
this larger field from operating. Ultimately
it takes insight to bring that about, as I
said, and a state of high energy. (1978, p.
39)

It has been demonstrated through biofeedback
practice and creative visualization that an
image held in awareness long enough--and
invested with enough positive energy--may
become manifest. Hip joints destroyed by
rheumatoid arthritis have been rebuilt
through visualization by a patient of Arthur
Gladman, a Bay-area physician8 who has been
conducting research in biofeedback for years.
The patient, in her eighty's, was taught to
visualize her hip joints in a completely
healthy state. Visualization has also become
a common tool in the treatment of cancer--
especially among children, who often have
more fully developed powers of visualization.
Shakti Gawain, who conducts workshops on
creative visualization, describes the law of
radiation and attraction:
This is the principle that whatever you put
out into the universe will be reflected back
to you. "As you sow, so shall you reap."
What this means from a practical standpoint
is that we always attract into our
1ives.whatever we think about the most,
believe in most strongly, expect on the
deepest levels, and/or imagine most vividly.
When we are negative and fearful, insecure or
anxious we will tend to attract the very
experiences, situations, or people that we
are seeking to avoid. If we are basically
positive in attitude, expecting and
envisioning pleasure, satisfaction and
happiness, we will attract and create people,
situations, and events which conform to our
positive expectations. So the more positive
energy we put into imaging what we want, the
more it begins to manifest in our lives.
(1978, pp. 19-20)

The brain appears to serve a unique function
in the universe. Constructed of physical
matter it exists in the manifest domain. Yet
it appears to monitor and process information
from both the manifest domain and the
holographic domain. The question arises, from
which domain does the brain evolve? That is,
does the brain create consciousness? Or does
consciousness create the brain? Keith Floyd,
a psychologist at Virginia Intermont College
suggests that "contrary to what everyone
knows is so, it may not be the brain that
produces consciousness--but rather,
consciousness that creates the appearance of
the brain--matter, space, time and everything
else we are pleased to interpret as the
physical universe,"9 Pribram has this to say
about it:

. . . Perhaps the most profound insight
gained from holography is the reciprocal
relationship between the frequency domain and
the image/object domain. Re-call that the
fundamental question that is under
consideration is whether mind results as an
emergent property from the interaction of an
organism with its environment, or whether
mind reflects the basic organization of the
universe (including the organism’s brain).
Images are mental constructions. . .
The answer to the initial question as to
whether mind, consciousness and psychological
properties in general are emergents or
expressions of some basic ordering principle,
rests on which of two reciprocally related
domains is considered primary, the
image/object or the implicate holographic.
Scientists are, as yet, only barely
acquainted with the implicate order which
has, however, apparently been explored
experientially by mystics, psychics and
others delving into paranormal phenomena.
Perhaps if the rules for "tuning in" on the
holographic, implicate domain could be made
more explicit, we could come to some
agreement as to what constitutes the primary
basic order of the universe. (1978)
MULTIPLE VERSIONS OF REALITY
Anyone who has experienced a major paradigm
shift becomes acutely aware of the
simultaneous existence of multiple realities.
You never forget how the universe appeared to
you before the shift. You know that nothing
"out there" has changed, that the change was
within you. This awakens new issues with
which to deal.
Such a shift also leaves you with the
realization that it could happen again; that
your new paradigm, your present paradigm, may
yet have other areas that are distortions of
reality, just as your previous paradigm had.
After a few such shifts you begin to question
how you are ever going to recognize "reality”
if you ever find it!
For each of us, reality is limited to that
which we perceive and interpret it to be. A
wider reality always exists. Once we lock
onto an interpretation and vest it with the
authority of a belief, we become blind to the
wider reality. We believe our interpretation
to be the only interpretation--at least the
only “correct” interpretation. In this way
each of us lives in a separate, unique
reality. We can discover new dimensions of
reality only if we are open to the
possibility that they exist.

Ruben Nelson describes the process by which
each of us creates our own reality; it
involves the process of establishing a
conceptual orientation (remember that I am
equating the terms "conceptual orientation,"
as used by Nelson, and "belief system”):
... We can begin to understand that the
process of establishing a conceptual
orientation is a process of the construction
and maintenance of our reality. The process
is necessarily a social process--it can only
occur with arid among other persons. A
conceptual orientation shapes what we take to
be knowable, and, therefore, the "knowledge"
we live by. It follows from this that,
insofar as [people] or cultures have
different conceptual orientations, they in
some important sense do not live in the same
world. Our conceptual orientation determines
fundamentally both the world in which we live
and our way of being in that world. (1975)

Each of us thus creates our own reality--from
instant to instant. Most of us do this
without awareness and, therefore, feel
helpless and victimized by the world "out
there”; we have lost contact with our own
creative powers.

It is only when you understand (grasp) the
reality that you are causing (or contributing
to) your own pain that it comes within the
range of your power to change your reality
and solve the problem creating the pain. As
long as you believe, are convinced, that you
are right--despite your pain-- then you will
never see how you can change anything. You
will continue to blame the world for your
pain.
When you are struggling with a difficult and
pressing problem, you are subject to a flip-
flop in attitudes and moods in which you soar
to the heights of heaven, when it seems you
are going to win the struggle, and plunge to
the depths of hell when it seems that you
will never solve the problem, This
oscillation between two such opposite
experiences brings into awarenss the
simultaneous existence of positive and
negative interpretations of the same ultimate
reality. Nothing changes in the flip-flopping
except your own interpretation of your
situation along the way.

Is there an "ultimate reality?"--a reality
that we would all come to agree upon if we
were totally open, resisting nothing? Perhaps
this is what truth is? I see a relationship
between the ideas of paradigm and ultimate
reality: every paradigm is a subspace of
ultimate reality. Each paradigm is thus a
limited view of ultimate reality, or truth,
not taking into account all the infinite
dimensions of ultimate reality. It is
possible, under these conditions, for people
to become attached to opposing paradigms--
with each paradigm being "truth," or a part
of the truth.

Nelson suggests that the primary source of
trouble in the world today is our investment
in an inappropriate paradigm:
. . . One of the ways to read the concern
about paradigms and the literature of crisis
and transformation is to read it as saying
that an inappropriate paradigm is the primary
source of our troubles, and that that
paradigm is losing its grip on the life of
the people in Western countries. As a result,
we suffer first from the crisis of the
inappropriate paradigm; second, from the
deepening of those crises caused by the
inappropriateness of our responses shaped in
terms of that paradigm; and third, from
increasingly random action from people who
sense that the paradigm and its intentions
can no longer sustain life.
Such a situation, of course, is necessarily
painful, but not necessarily fatal. If the
paradigm which is causing our troubles is
losing its grip on our consciousness and
imagination, and if we are not too thoroughly
flustered, there is the possibility of
undertaking those thoughts and actions which
would contribute toward the transformation of
ourselves and our situation in terms of a new
paradigm which is more deeply grounded in
reality and, therefore, which can sustain us
and lead to a long and humane future. The key
to that future, as we have been saying, is a
keen, powerful, multi-leveled and multi-
dimensional understanding of ourselves and
our situation. (1975)


CHAPTER 6 FACULTIES OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Among the most sophisticated works in the
field of consciousness we find the terms
"consciousness" and "mind" being used, often
interchangeably, with neither of them being
defined. This is probably unavoidable, given
the complex, multidimensional nature of these
ideas. It is sometimes necessary in the
evolution of knowledge to label a phenomenon
or an idea before we truly understand its
nature; we can only agree that the phenomenon
being labeled appears to exist. As we come
closer to it and gain experience with it, we
begin to make out its characteristics.
Out of the vague cloud emerges a clearer
image of its nature. We can then begin, in
Pribram’s words, to “unpack it” Because of
its complexity, consciousness, or mind, can
be unpacked in many different ways. For our
purposes it is most useful to examine
consciousness in terms of its capabilities or
faculties. That is, looking at the behavior
of this thing we call consciousness, what do
we find it capable of doing? I have
identified and explored four faculties of
consciousness that have particular relevance
for understanding and developing emotional
intelligence: awareness, memory, imagination
and intelligence.
AWARENESS
I propose that we have faculties of awareness
in each realm of the manifest domain. Each of
these faculties involves qualitatively
different kinds of awareness:

FACULTIES EXAMPLES OF AWARENESS

Inner physical hunger; thirst;
full bowel;, full bladder; kinesthesia;
physical pain; subjective time
Outer physical space;
temperature; touch; pressure; sound; smell;
taste; objective time
Inner emotional fear; pain;
desire; pleasure
Outer emotional fear, pain,
desire or pleasure in others; compassion
Inner intellectual concepts;
thoughts ; beliefs ; relationships between
ideas; arguments
Outer intellectual others’
thoughts, beliefs, relationships between
ideas, arguments
Inner visual inner images;
visualization; imagination; visual memories
Outer visual outer images;
ordinary vision

Faculties of awareness have common
characteristics, regardless of the realm in
which they operate. I will present a brief
sketch of these characteristics here and
expand on them later as needed:

CHANNEL (FREQUENCY) SELECTION

I am suggesting that there is but one basic
"receiver" of impressions within your being.
This receiver may be compared in ways to a
television receiver: each qualitatively
different faculty of awareness may be
received on a different channel, that is,
within different frequency ranges. Unlike a
television receiver, however, you can, under
certain circumstances, and among certain
channels, receive simultaneous inputs from
more than one channel. Indeed, some
experiences are incomplete without the
simultaneous input from several channels,
such as hunger, taste, smell, vision and
touch in the experience of eating.
ATTENTION

While input is coming into each faculty of
awareness at all times, you choose (with or
without awareness) those channels which will
receive your attention at every moment in
your life. I refer to this process as
engaging and disengaging attention. Your
hearing, for example, may be more or less
disengaged while you're focusing your
attention on these printed words. As soon as
I mention it you engage that channel and
become aware of sounds around you.

Once engaged, your attention has mobility
within each of the realms. For example,
sitting here at the typewriter, with my
vision engaged, I can choose where the focus
of my attention will be--on the paper, on the
blackboard or out in the street. Similarly,
if I engage my hearing, I can focus my
attention on the sound of the typewriter, or
I can hear voices and cars out on the street.
If I engage inner physical faculties I can
place my attention on my hunger or I can
shift my attention to the temperature of my
feet--which always get cold when I'm writing.

Little is understood in the West about
attention. Eastern philosophies and religions
have contemplated the characteristics of
attention for centuries, although seemingly
without labeling their preoccupation as such,
and have learned much about controlling its
quality and placement. This is apparent in
Transcendental Meditation, Yoga, Hinduism,
Buddhism and I Ching.

Researchers in the field of biofeedback have
been searching to identify the underlying
mechanisms responsible for the events and
phenomena encountered in the biofeed back
process, such as learning to control bodily
systems that are not ordinarily subject to
voluntary control--such as raising skin
temperature, altering blood-pressure levels
and blood distribution selectively throughout
the body, controlling brainwaves emitted by
the brain. Pribram and others have come to
believe that the quality of attention may be
more important than the actual learning of
physiological self-control.10 I would add
placement of attention as well. Recall that
the control of placement and quality of
attention was suggested in chapter 2 as one
of the primary means of suppressing emotion.

The quality of the reality you experience,
that is, the kinds of events that occur in
your world, is primarily a function of the
placement and quality of your attention.
Attitude, for example, is a crucial factor in
determining how you feel in a general way.
Your attitude, in turn, is determined in part
by the placement of your attention (and in
part by your paradigm). Placing all your
attention on negative possibilities, for
example, limits your view of , possibilities
and leads to pessimism.

Another way in which your personal reality is
influenced by attention: that which receives
attention-- whether inside or outside
yourself, whether good or bad-- grows,
expands, becomes stronger and, if
nonmanifest, becomes manifest. It is
precisely this attribute of attention that
makes creative visualization possible. This
attribute is of paramount importance in the
process of developing emotional intelligence.

When a particular area of the body receives
attention, it undergoes changes in the
distribution of blood throughout the body. A
parallel process takes place in the brain.
When your attention is focused primarily on
channels of vision, for example, additional
blood flows into the occipital lobe, which
analyzes and interprets impressions received
through visual faculties of awareness.

Bohm talks about the need physicists have
(like the rest of us) for acceptance among
their colleagues and how this need is
translated into pressure to conform to the
accepted paradigm--without awareness on the
part of the physicists--the minute an idea
enters awareness that is not in harmony with
the accepted paradigm:
. . . Let's take a physicist. If he's been
subjected to all these courses in quantum
mechanics and pressures to think in this way:
he'll be approved of if he does, disapproved
if he doesn't, he gets a job if he does, not
if he doesn't, and so on and so on. The
minute the idea occurs of thinking in another
way, there will be an intense pressure which
will blot it out. So, therefore, that isn't
reason anymore, it's unreason. . . . He'll
say it's reason because he's blotted out all
this pressure. It all happens very fast and
automatically. (1978)
FOCAL AND PERIPHERAL AWARENESS (SCOPE OF
AWARENESS)
All faculties of awareness have the ability
to vary the breadth of field of attention.
This is most readily apparent in the domain
of vision. W. H. Bates (1940) describes the
increased sensitivity of the center of your
field of vision, resulting in maximum vision
at the center:
The eye is a miniature camera, corresponding
in many ways exactly to the inanimate machine
used in photography. In one respect, however,
there is a great difference between the two
instruments. The sensitive plate of the
camera is equally sensitive in every part;
the retina of the eye, on the other hand, has
a point of maximum sensitiveness, and every
other part is less sensitive in proportion to
its distance from that point. This point of
maximum sensitiveness is called the fovea
centralis. . . .

. . . The eye with normal vision, therefore,
sees one part of everything it looks at best,
and all other parts worse, in proportion to
their distance from the point of maximum
vision; and it is an invariable symptom of
all abnormal conditions of the eyes, both
functional and organic, that this central
fixation is lost. (pp. 50-53)

What Bates is talking about, of course, is
central fixation of attention. As in the case
of a camera lens, your attention can be
focused very narrowly on a small, central
area, as in a telescopic lens, or it can be
spread out widely over the peripheral field,
like a fisheye lens. The function of central
fixation is to see clearly the details of
what is looked at. The function of peripheral
vision is to open to new, unfamiliar
impressions and experiences, as well as to
put the details into perspective. The kinds
of information received, as well as the
quality of the experience, varies greatly
between these two modes of seeing.

Bates has also observed that when we are
confronted with either a crisis or an
unfamiliar situation we lose central
fixation. Our usual modes of perception, our
usual interpretations and our usual responses
have already failed to resolve the
uncertainty. Our attention spontaneously
leaves the center of the field of vision and
expands out into the periphery. In these
situations we are forced to open to new
possibilities, to look in new places--in the
periphery--for clues to help us to understand
and interpret the situation. As soon as we
get a glimpse of something in the periphery
we turn spontaneously and examine it with the
precision and resolution of central fixation.
This process, so familiar to us in the realm
of vision, operates in every realm of
awareness. It is important in the process of
tuning in, described in chapter 14.
META-AWARENESS
I introduced the term meta-awareness in
chapter 2, page 34. Among other things,
meta-awareness is awareness of awareness. It
is a higher form of consciousness; it views
the world from a "higher altitude or vantage
point than ordinary awareness.”

The Flontsano display in Disneyland consists
of a giant "microscope" designed to create
the illusion that you and the open car in
which you are riding shrink in size as you
move through the "scope." You appear to
emerge from the scope into a world where you
are smaller than atomic particles. The
illusion is created by suspending models of
atomic particles around the tracks steering
your car and by darkening everything in the
room except the "particles"- -which are
well-lighted. The illusion is quite
effective. A friend discovered that if you go
back immediately for a second ride you can
see how the illusion is created. Your eyes
having adjusted to the dark, you now see the
tracks that guide your car as it winds
through the maze of wooden structures holding
the "particles" in place. You can also see
the people operating the display, off in the
background, watching you as you become caught
up in the illusion.

Using this display as a model of some aspects
of consciousness and reality, it could be
said that ordinary awareness is represented
by the experience the first time through the
Montsano display, in which your awareness and
understanding of the manifest aspects of
reality is limited to surface impressions.
Meta-awareness is represented by the
experience the second time through, in which
you see not only the surface impressions of a
given situation but the underlying structure
(of reality) that creates the experience of
your ordinary awareness.

Meta-awareness operates in the realm of
wordless, timeless space associated with the
right brain.
AWAKENESS AND ASLEEPNESS
We ordinarily think of ourselves as being
either awake or asleep. Granted, there are
those periods during which we are falling
asleep and waking up. But once awake,
especially while we go about our usual daily
activities, we generally think of ourselves
as being fully awake. While we do allow for
varying degrees of "asleepness," as for
example, when we speak of a "light sleep," it
seldom occurs to most of us to consider
degrees of "awakeness."

People who are severely depressed appear to
me, in a sense, to be partially asleep.
Indeed, they often report feeling stupid, or
with dulled senses, or only partially "here"
in some sense--very much as if they were not
fully awake and responsive to their
environment. My repeated observation of this
phenomenon has led me to suggest that
consciousness does not behave according to
Freud's simplified model in which one is
either conscious or unconscious of something.
Rather, as shown in figure 3, it appears that
consciousness exists in the form of two
continuums-- representing degrees of
"awakeness" and degrees of "asleepness'--
separated by what we might call the sleep
barrier, a veil that allows us to maintain
the illusion of separation between our awake,
conscious state and our asleep, unconscious
state.

Under ordinary circumstances our conscious
awareness is limited to one side or the other
of the sleep barrier. By that I mean that
when you are sleep in the physical domain you
are awake in metaphysical domains--and,
perhaps, vice-versa, although I'm not sure
about the latter. We do have occasional
breakthroughs in which we become
simultaneously aware and awake in both
realms, such as when we wake up inside a
dream, in the sense that I have discussed
before.

One can speculate on how the sleep barrier
works, i.e., how it accomplishes this
separation between the realities we
experience in the sleep and awakened states
of consciousness. I suggest that this can
best be understood if we use the model
introduced earlier of "channels of
perception." If such channels exist--and all
the evidence suggests that they do--one could
imagine that both of these "separate
realities” co-exist at all times. They are
separate only in the sense that they can be
compared to channels of reception on a
television receiver. We could assign the VHF
channels, for example, to this physical
reality--and none to metaphysical reality.
The VHF channels, on the other hand, could be
assigned to metaphysical reality--and none to
physical reality. This is, of course, a gross
oversimplification.



Figure 3. A model of consciousness reflecting
degrees of awakeness and degrees of
asleepness separated by a sleep barrier.

In this model I see intelligence as a
function of awakeness. This is in harmony
with the axiom that movement is inherent in
the very act of seeing clearly; the more
awake you are, i.e., the more alert you are,
the more intelligent your actions will be in
response to what you see.
MEMORY
The Random House dictionary defines memory as
"the . . . faculty of retaining and reviving
impressions, or of recalling or recognizing
previous experiences.'' This is clear and
useful, as far as it goes. Such impressions
and experiences come from all quarters of the
universe, however, and the kinds of
impressions stored vary a great deal
qualitatively, depending upon the realm in
which the impressions are registered--
physical, emotional, intellectual or visual.

My experience with "body therapies," that is,
therapies that include the release of energy
blocks throughout the body, such as Reichian
therapy, bioenergetics and gestalt therapy,
leads me to speculate beyond Pribram's idea
of how memory is stored and suggest that, not
only is it stored holographically throughout
the brain, memory is stored holographically
throughout the body. I'm suggesting that the
complete history of each cell's experiences
is recorded holographically in the structure
of the cell-- possibly, as Pribram suggests,
in the distribution of protein in the cell
membrane. However it is stored, the memory is
ultimately registered in each DNA molecule,
which is housed in the nucleus.

If I may speculate even further, it seems
that each cell specializes in the kinds of
impressions it stores. Some cells are more
sensitive to certain impressions from the
frequency domain than others. Nerve cells are
the most sensitive; much more information is
stored in a nerve cell than, say, in a bone
cell.

INTELLECTUAL MEEIORY
Intellectual memory involves the storage and
retrieval of all that exists in the realm of
the intellect: concepts, thoughts, beliefs,
relationships between ideas. All, for
example, that is based on words and Cartesian
logic. We know the most about this realm of
memory; it is the most accessible to our
awareness and, accordingly, our traditional
methods of scientific investigation. This is
an area that has been quite amenable, for
example, to the methodologies developed in
the field of experimental psychology.


PHYSICAL MEMORY
Manifestations of physical memory are most
apparent in body therapies that focus
attention primarily on the physical body and
physical sensations at the outset. As unusual
or painful sensations begin to emerge,
memories of the events associated with the
sensations are brought into awareness as
well. Take Lydia, for example. Lydia was a
young woman addicted to barbiturates.
Whenever she would lie down and focus her
attention on her pain, she would slowly form
a fist with her right hand and begin pounding
the floor next to her, very slowly. Her left
hand would lie motionless in a relaxed
position. She had no awareness of what her
reasons were for doing this; she would not
even be aware of it until it was pointed out
to her. When I suggested that she continue
the movement mechanically for a time, she
began to put more and more energy into the
movement, hitting the floor harder each time
and with increasing frequency. She finally
let go and began screaming at her father,
begging him to stop! This quickly shifted
into deep sobbing which lasted about five
minutes. She reported that she had realized
the significance of the pounding: as a child,
she had stood pounding on her father's back
with her fist as he knelt over her mother,
trying to strangle her. Although this new
awareness (remembrance) brought up many other
painful issues with which she had to deal,
Lydia never pounded the floor again after
that. I suggest that the memory of this event
had remained stored in her fist, in a
repressed state, until it was released by
paying attention to the physical
manifestations of the presence of the memory.
When we chronically suppress emotion we build
up what Reich refers to as character armor
(see pages 38-39). This armor is the result
of muscular rigidity maintained over a period
of years. Such rigidity can create physical
distortions in your body that throw it out of
proper alignment. Ida Rolf's process of
Structural Integration involves a deep
massage in which the muscle fascia, the outer
sheath of connective tissue that binds muscle
tissue together, is separated from the muscle
itself, allowing the muscles and skeletal
structure to realign. This is an extremely
painful process. Practitioners of this art
often work in conjunction with gestalt
therapists, or are therapists themselves, in
order to facilitate the integration of the
painful physical and emotional memories that
are released in the Rolfing process.
EMOTIONAL MEMORY
James insisted that emotional memory, if it
existed at all, was not revivable:

The revivability in memory of the emotions,
like that of all the feelings of the lower
senses. is very small. We can remember that
we underwent grief or rapture, but not just
how the grief or rapture felt. This difficult
ideal revivability is, however, more than
compensated in the case of the emotions by a
very easy actual revivability. That is, we
can produce, not remembrances of the old
grief or rapture, but new griefs and
raptures, by summoning up a lively thought of
their exciting cause. The cause is not only
an idea, but this idea produces the same
organic irradiations, or almost the same,
which were produced by its original, so that
the emotion is again a reality. We have
"recaptured" it. Shame, love and anger are
particularly liable to be thus revived by
ideas of their object. (1890, p. 124)

It shouldn't surprise us that James would
hold this view of emotional memory. It is
consistent with his belief that emotion
exists only as a combination of other things,
namely, physiological changes. Besides, James
was at a disadvantage. He had not had the
benefit of observing and experiencing the
reality of recalling emotional memories the
way we have today, particularly since Reich
and the various body therapies that have
evolved in the last twenty years. If James
had observed or experienced firsthand the
force behind blocked emotional energy in the
process of recall, he would know that
emotional memory exists.

Total recall--perfect recall--of any
experience includes the emotion fitting such
an experience, regardless of whether you
allowed yourself to experience and express
the emotion the first time through. If you
allowed full expression in, the original
experience, your recall of the memory soon
fades in emotional color. If you suppressed
expression in the original experience, your
initial recall (total recall) involves the
full emotional intensity of the original
experience—exactly what you would have felt
at the time had you allowed yourself to (or
were allowed to)--no matter how long the
memory has been stored. Time appears to have
little effect on the intensity of the
experience of total recall.

Emotional memory is involved in the
phenomenon of "time regression," which is
discussed on pages 147-153.
VISUAL MEMORY
Visual memory is the ability to reconstruct
within the field of inner vision something
seen earlier--whether through inner or outer
faculties of vision. Some people have
difficulty visualizing anything. Inner vision
is a basic human capability, however, as much
as outer vision, and can easily be developed
by most people with a little sustained
practice. It's simply a matter of becoming
aware of something that's already happening
within you. Numerous books are available that
offer practical guidelines to develop your
ability to visualize.
Some images are stored as originally seen,
nearly perfect replicas of the original image
in remarkable detail. Other images are stored
in the form of symbols which capture only the
essentials of the idea contained within the
original image.

A visual memory is often the catalyst that
precipitates the release of emotional energy
previously blocked through suppression. Two
kinds of images may enter the field of inner
vision in the process of tuning in to the
realm of emotion. The first is a replica of
an object or a scene in the manifest realm
that you have seen before. Acknowledging such
an image and allowing yourself to be moved
emotionally by it can precipitate perfect
recall of the event or situation in your past
associated with the image. It may be
something as simple as seeing the face of a
person you love who is absent or dead. Or it
may be a traumatic event in your past that
continues to generate pain in the present. In
either case surrendering to the emotional
energy accompanying the image can release the
blocked emotional energy associated with the
image.

The second kind of image is a symbol of some
aspect of your present emotional state. You
may or may not grasp the meaning of the
symbol until you allow yourself to
contemplate the image openly, become one with
it, and surrender to what it is suggesting
emotionally. Examples of both of these kinds
of images can be found in my description of
the phenomenon of "time regression," pages
147-153.
SPIRITUAL MEMORY
There is a great deal of evidence to suggest
that all living beings come into the manifest
domain at birth with something akin to an
already-existing memory, which I refer to as
spiritual memory. This phenomenon is most
striking when we observe the behavior of
lower animals at birth. They come into the
manifest domain knowing a whole lot about
survival here. Already encoded within the DNA
of the female egg and male sperm are all the
instructions necessary for the embryo to
divide and subdivide in just the manner
necessary to form the complete living
organism. And once the organism is formed
physically and makes its debut in the
physical world, instructions are also encoded
within the DNA, now located in the nucleus of
each cell of the organism, about what the
organism needs to do to survive, such as
obtaining food and other needs.

How do we account for this? I propose that
the DNA molecule of each organism has encoded
within its structure the memories of every
direct-line ancestor that preceded it
throughout the historical evolution of the
species. This view, incidentally, would also
account for the changes we observe in the
process of evolution: each organism adds its
unique experiences and memories to those
passed on to it by its ancestors. Its
descendant, then, inherits a slightly
augmented memory of what is needed for
survival, modified according to the
conditions encountered during its life time.
It may, for example, develop resistance to a
pollutant that its parents were exposed to
but survived prior to its conception.

One major piece of evidence which appears to
support this view of evolution is the outcome
of experiments in which flatworms that had
learned a particular maze were ground up and
fed to other flatworms--which subsequently
were able to learn the same maze in much less
time than the original flatworms.

TIME REGRESSION
It often happens in the process of perfect
recall that a person becomes so completely
immersed in the experience of the memory that
he or she has the sense of being in another
time and place. I refer to this phenomenon as
time regression.

My first exposure to time regression left me
in shock--to say nothing of Norman. This
happened ten years ago. Norman was a
sixteen-year-old boy who was brought to me by
his mother for help with a nearly constant,
over-whelming fear. He had "flipped out" on
mescaline and hadn't "come down" for several
days. I had been involved with psychedelics
over the previous five years--personally and
professionally--and had by then come to see
such crises as opportunities for growth and
enlightenment if related to in a healing way.
Norman was bright, sensitive, and desperate
for help. I felt his immediate trust in me.

I had been experimenting with energy over the
past few months, as a result of various
therapy workshops I had been attending--
gestalt, psychodrama, bioenergetics, yoga,
and dance movement. I was particularly moved
by Jack Downing, a gestalt therapist who had
been exploring such things as Khundalini
yoga, Sufi and astral projection. I was ready
to take my experimentation to another level
of formality and subject my developing
methods to a test in a crisis situation. I
described to Norman the exposure I had had
recently to working with people in the realm
of energy I described the experiments I had
been trying with others and the outcomes of
those experiments--as observed by me and as
reported to me by the participants. Norman
was in so much distress that he was eager to
try anything that might bring ultimate
relief. I also sensed in him an advanced
maturity in his ability and willingness to
assume full responsibility for the
consequences of his own actions. Indeed, his
mother granted him full emancipation soon
after we began working together.
Early on, Norman came in in an unusually
fearful state. I suggested that we try an
experiment, and he readily agreed to try it.
I suggested that he lay on his back on the
floor with his feet shoulder-width apart and
arms out slightly to his sides. I sat on the
floor next to him, near his knees. This
position was chosen intuitively as a result
of my previous experimentation with myself
and others. I had by then established for
myself that a per-son's physical position had
a direct bearing on what happened
emotionally. I also had a sense that opening
to emotion involved a kind of vulnerability
to the world; assuming a vulnerable position
might help precipitate the plunge.
I coached Norman on how to breathe, a
modification of the full breath in Hatha
yoga, and allowed him to breathe quietly for
awhile. As with the others I had tried this
with, he began to vibrate throughout his
body. (I've since learned that this is due
physiologically to an excess of carbon
dioxide in the blood.) His teeth began to
chatter as if he were in freezing weather. As
the vibrations grew, he started to squirm as
if in physical pain. His left arm touched the
leg of my desk, and he grabbed hold of it
tightly. He continued to squirm, and his
right arm touched the leg of a chair. He
grabbed it tightly. As he did, his breathing
changed immediately into deep, convulsive
sobbing and his knuckles turned white under
the pressure of his grip.

Without warning Norman lunged toward me from
the floor, doubling over, clutching his
stomach with his arms, eyes open, and plunged
head-first into the wall six feet behind me.
He collapsed in a heap and broke into heavy
sobbing. This lasted for about five minutes.
I sat there in silence, trying to make sense
out of what had happened. Norman finally sat
up and told me that when he grabbed the legs
of the furniture he discovered that he was a
small child in his crib, clutching the bars,
wanting desperately to get out! He had
memories of being forced to stay in his crib
by his mother. "This time I got out!"

We sat there for awhile, in awe of our
discovery, wondering what it was that we had
discovered. Whatever happened, it had had a
very positive, dramatic impact on Norman's
subjective state of being. He was euphoric!
He left my office free of fear--for a time,
anyway. And I was euphoric! This was perhaps
the key I had been looking for?

One of the most dramatic examples of time
regression occurred about six months later--
again with Norman. We had been meeting once
or twice a week in the basement of the mental
health center, continuing to explore this
method of opening to emotion. During one of
our sessions on the floor, Norman had an
image or vision of a deep, black pit, which
he compared to a deep well. I suggested that
he allow himself to sink into the well. He
expressed fear of dying, but allowed himself
to sink into it anyway. As he sank, he
regressed spontaneously to an age we both
estimated later to be about nine months old;
whatever age it was, it was before he could
walk or had the faculty of speech. From there
I lost verbal contact with him for about ten
minutes. He began convulsing and gagging with
heavy waves that began at his toes with each
wave. He started choking and gurgling as if
he were under water. He quit breathing and
began to turn blue. He started pressing his
chest upward as if against some unseen force
holding him down. He braced himself on his
elbows. I don't know how to describe what
happened next, because I'm not at all sure.
From this position, on his back, pressing
upward with his elbows and shoulders, he
hurled himself (or was hurled?) across the
room, about 6-8 feet, with enough force that
he slid on the inlaid carpet for the last few
inches, slamming into the door at the end of
the room. I can show this best by a sketch.

Figure 4. Spontaneous movements in time
regression.
We began with Norman in position (a). He then
catapulted to position (b), having rotated
180' in the process. When he came to a stop
with his feet against the door he was gasping
and screaming like a baby, kicking the door.
The noise of his kicking was very loud, so I
got up from my position on the couch at (d),
hurried over to him, grabbed him by the
ankles and pulled him far enough away from
the door so he couldn't kick it. (Other
therapists were doing therapy upstairs.) I
went back over to my original position on the
couch and sat down again. Norman then flipped
over on his stomach, still crying like a
baby, and crawled on his elbows and knees
very quickly to position (c), where he
slammed into the wall and col1,apsed in
roughly the position shown. He lay there
motionless for perhaps a full minute. It
seemed like an hour. I studied his chest;
there was no sign of life. He finally opened
his eyes and said in a neutral way, "My
mother tried to drown me." He immediately
plunged into heavy sobbing characteristic of
profound sadness and grief. When he recovered
from this he described what he had
experienced. When he allowed him- self to
sink into the well, he found himself in a
bathtub, lying on his back, pressing upward
with his chest against his mother's hands
which were holding him under the water. His
mother then suddenly picked him up and threw
him on the bathroom floor; he slid across the
floor and slammed into the wall. His mother
left him there and walked out of the bathroom

Time regression has become a common
occurrence among people who journey into
their emotional past. Arthur Janov's primal
therapy precipitates such time regressions.
So what is it? Perhaps we are beginning to
find experiential evidence to support what
the physicists have been saying for years:
time--as we usually conceive of it--is an
illusion. The past, considered to be behind
us, is actually present in the form of
memory; and the future is a continuation of
the present. Perhaps all time is accessible
through the present? Not only in theory, but
in actuality? Your guess is as good as mine.

IMAGINATION
Most dictionary definitions of imagination
can be distilled down to three concepts, in
my terms : (1) the action of forming inner
images of what is not actually present to the
senses; (2) the action of forming ideas and
concepts; and (3) the faculty of
consciousness capable of such actions.

Einstein insisted that imagination was more
important than knowledge. Knowledge is
limited to the past: only imagination can
explore the future. Imagination gives you the
ability to conceive of new ideas and new
relationships between ideas. Einstein
indulged freely in gedanken experiments,
experiments that can be conducted only in
one's imagination, such as standing in an
elevator suspended in outer space and being
accelerated at the rate of 32 ft/sec2, or
riding a photon of light being reflected off
the hand of the tower clock.
Through imagination you can allow yourself to
be fulfilled in ways that you've never
experienced in the manifest domain. This is
an extremely effective and efficient way to
expand your awareness of yourself and your
hidden desires.

Imagination allows you to consider and
explore in great detail possible outcomes of
any conceivable situation, simply by asking
yourself "what if?" It is often possible to
nurture the outcomes you desire, clearing the
way for them to become manifest, and become
midwife to your own vision.

Imagination is an important faculty in the
problem-solving process. When you are able to
form an image of a problem, it is immediately
subject to a host of processes in your brain
that specialize in analyzing and interpreting
spatial relationships. The solution to a
problem expressed in visual terms often
appears itself in the form of an image. An
example of such a process from my journal:
I'm discovering that my attitude is a
function of where I place my attention. I
find myself fluctuating between optimism and
pessimism, getting energy from my work and
being drained by it. This has been confusing
to me. This fluctuating had brought me to the
point where I didn't know how I felt about my
work. In talking with Neal this morning,
expressing fear and pain connected with the
work I'm facing today, I spontaneously
shifted vantage points of an image I was
holding.
This began as I turned my attention to my
pain in order to describe it to Neal. I saw
my pain as a simple ball of bright energy
radiating in all directions. I felt my
confusion at that point because my pain was
connected with my attention being on my
writing, and I know there are times when I
look at my writing and feel energized, drawn
into it. As soon as I posed the question (not
in words, but by placing my attention on the
experience of my confusion) the image I was
holding suddenly rotated 90' and thus
revealed the answer to me. The shift in my
image was from figure A to figure B:


Figure A. The question

Figure B. The answer
This discovery was a tremendous relief to me.
With my mood changing so abruptly and
intensively over the past few days, and my
sense of optimism or pessimism toward my work
shifting in phase with these mood swings, I
couldn't grasp how I felt about myself or my
work. When the image rotated I recognized
immediately that had been looking at a subset
of the problem space. Due to a
misinterpretation of the problem, I . . . was
trying to attribute my feelings about many
different ideas to one. [This is an example
of the kind of error described on pages 67-
68.]
I was then able to see that my work is made
up of many different. projects involving many
different kinds of jobs. That is what figure
B represents for me. And I feel differently
about each project, depending upon the
particular jobs involved. If I focus my
attention on a job that is easy and
rewarding--perhaps even fun-- and narrow the
focus of my attention to where all else is
excluded from my awareness, …I will feel
elated, energized, euphoric... But when that
job ends I must turn my attention to the next
job, And if it's one of those biggies that
has thrown me over and over in the past, and
if I narrow the focus of my attention to that
alone, excluding all else, I will feel heavy,
drained, depressed.

Imagination is a very powerful instrument in
the healing process. It is being used
extensively as an adjunct in healing cancer.
Sheldon Ruderman is a man who cured himself
of cancer in 1970 through the use of what he
calls "mental power," such as developing
positive attitudes and expectations,
visualization and imagination.11 Since that
time he has worked with a number of children
with terminal cancer, teaching them to cure
themselves in the same way. One six-year-old
boy, for example, with whom he began working
five years ago, had advanced lung cancer, was
emaciated and very weak. The boy imagined
himself under attack by a big monster, with
big feet and holes all over his body. He drew
a sketch of the monster that was something
like this:

Figure 5. A child's image of a "cancer
monster"


The holes, with the double circles inside,
were the monster's breathing holes. The boy
spent six months imagining that he was
squirting a sticky substance into the
monster's holes until he finally "suffocated"
the monster. He predicted at the outset that
it would take him six months to kill this
monster--because it was so big. He was
totally free of cancer in six months.
Now eleven years old, this boy is in
excellent health and works out in gymnastics.
He still goes through a nightly ritual in his
imagination that he developed while curing
himself of cancer. Once in bed, he imagines
going to an elevator, counting from 20 to 0
as the elevator descends to the bottom. At
the bottom he walks over to a big tub, jumps
in, turns into a sponge and "squeezes all the
bad emotions out." Then he walks over the
elevator, counts from 0 to 20 as it ascends,
goes back to bed and calls for his dad to
come say goodnight to him.
There are limits to the power of imagination.
You sometimes must experience a phenomenon
before you can truly know how you feel about
it--whether you want to repeat the experience
in the future or avoid it. Until you have
this information stored in your memory your
ability to predict possible outcomes in a new
situation is limited. Tasting a new food can
be like this, although an adult usually has a
fairly reliable sense of what to expect from
the sight, smell and texture of the food
based on many memories of foods with similar
sight, smell and texture.






CHAPTER 7
INTELLIGENCE

The Random House dictionary defines
intelligence as "the capacity for reasoning,
understanding, and for similar forms of
mental activity; aptitude in grasping truths,
facts, meanings, etc.; . . . the faculty of
understanding." This is a workable definition
if we modify it a little. Omitting the word
"mental" and making other minor adjustments,
I suggest the following definition: the
faculty of understanding; the capacity for
understanding, reasoning, and gaining
insight; aptitude in grasping facts,
meanings, truths, relationships, etc.;
aptitude in solving problems.

The traditional view assumes implicitly that
intelligence--the faculty of understanding--
is “housed,” so to speak, in the intellect,
while the intellect, in turn, is housed in
the brain. The intellect is defined as "the
power or faculty of the mind by which one
knows or understands, as distinguished from
that by which one feels and that by which one
wills [italics mine]." Clearly, in this
paradigm, emotion is considered to exist
outside the realm of the intellect. Emotion
is believed to be "irrational," not
understandable; it exists apart from that by
which one knows or understands. The intellect
(intellectual intelligence) is thus accepted
as the only faculty by which one can acquire
knowledge and understanding. This belief has
blinded us to the existence of other
faculties of intelligence--beyond the scope
of the intellect.

In this chapter I will present an alternative
model of intelligence in which
intelligence--as defined above-- is found to
exist not only in the realm of the rational
intellect, but in the physical, emotional and
visual realms as well. (Fly research in the
area of visual intelligence is incomplete; it
will be included in the next edition.) Before
looking at similarities and differences
between intellectual, physical and emotional
intelligence, I want to say some things about
the process of reasoning, since it is
generally agreed that intelligence includes
the capacity for reasoning. I also want to
look briefly at some of the principal
instruments or components of intelligence.

What is reason? David Bohm sees two entirely
different kinds of reason: one flowing from
insight, the other deduced from memory :
Reason may have two sources. One is the
memory, which is mechanical, rather like a
computer. . . We may reason from there, and
that is subject to all the irrational
pressures which are also in the memory:
emotional pressures, fears, all those
experiences and so on, and so that kind of
reasoning is very limited. It can very
quickly get caught in self-deception. . . .
But then there may be a reason which flows
from insight and a reason which is operating
as an instrument of intelligence. That is an
entirely different kind of reason. (1978)

Bohm seems to imply that, of the two kinds of
reason, only one of them is "operating as an
instrument of intelligence," the other being
deduced from memory. I see reason a little
differently. I see both form of reason--that
based on memory and that flowing from
insight--operating as instruments of
intelligence, each serving different
functions in the overall process of knowing
and understanding.
I see three principal instruments or
components of intelligence; that is, three
components which must be integrated
holgraphically by the brain to create
insight: memory, awareness and imagination,
corresponding to activities in the past,
present and future respectively. All three
are needed to gain insight and to guide us in
our actions in the present. Without memory,
every situation would be novel; we would be
unable to learn from experience. Through
memory we thus have access to information
about the past; through awareness we have
access to information about the present; and
through imagination we have access to
information about future possibilities.
If we accept that memory, awareness and
imagination are instruments of. intelligence,
it follows that intelligence--like its
instruments--exists in the physical,
emotional and visual realms as well as in the
realm of the intellect. We are confronted
daily with evidence of intelligence beyond
the intellect. We even give it names, such as
"female intuition," or "psychic phenomena."
But we tend to ignore it, for the most part;
it only confuses us. We prefer to busy
ourselves with the things that we do
understand. If, however, we accept the basic
idea of intelligence as the faculty by which
we know, understand, make decisions, and
solve problems, we must expand our idea of
intelligence to include ways of knowing and
understanding beyond those of the intellect.
Evidence demands it.

INTELLECTUAL INTELLIGENCE

Intellectual intelligence is, of course, the
only faculty of intelligence with which we
have concerned ourselves until now. It is
involved primarily in analyzing and
synthesizing data. It is the exclusive focus
of public education. It is the only form of
intelligence we have recognized thus far.

There has been a long-standing debate over
the validity of standard IQ tests, such as
the Wechsler and the Stanford Binet tests.
There have been charges, for example, that
they are culturally biased, are inaccurate,
or that they measure irrelevant information.
A study recently conducted by a team headed
by Hans J. Eysenck of the University of
London, a leading British psychologist,
revealed that intelligence can be measured
directly by recording brain waves, and that
these measurements closely match scores
obtained on the commonly used Wechsler IQ
test. Eysenck concludes that the standard IQ
tests are not culturally biased, but appear
to measure "true intelligence," and IQ is
largely inherited. The test seems relatively
simple. A random sample of 250 British school
children, ages 14 and 15, were given standard
IQ tests. Then they were connected to EEG
machines and administered a sudden visual or
auditory stimulus such as a flash of light or
a click heard through ear phones. Researchers
measured the resultant flurry of brain waves
in the cortex, the outer layer of the brain,
about a quarter of an inch thick, the area
associated with intellectual intelligence.
Eysenck reports, "You get a complex wave for
bright children, a bland wave for dull
children, and an almost straight line for
mental retardates.”12
This raises a number of issues. Perhaps
intelligence is largely a function of one's
level of “awakeness” or "alertness?" Such
varying levels of brain activity may be a
basic phenomenon in all forms of
intelligence. It is possible that brain
activity will be uncovered in other areas of
the brain, areas that correspond to physical
and emotional intelligence, such as the
physical motor centers and the limbic system,
which appears to play an active role in
emotion.

PHYSICAL INTELLIGENCE
We tend to think of the brain as being the
seat of intelligence. Indeed, the brain does
monitor the functioning of the entire body;
and it sends electrochemical messages to
every organ and cell, informing them of
current or pending circumstances that warrant
their attention. But the knowledge of how to
respond to those messages is stored --not in
the brain--but within each cell. Lawrence
Elson, physiologist, describes the role of
the cell in the living organism:
The cell is the fundamental unit of all
living things. Its activities constitute what
is called life or the living process. It is
generally held that anything less complex
than a cell (that is, incapable of
reproducing, metabolizing, and adapting to
changes in environment) is not a cell and is
not alive; anything more complex than a cell
is a collection of cells. The human body is
made up entirely of cells organized into
tissues and organs, connective tissue fibers
(the product of cells), and fluid. It is
cells whose individual functions are
magnified in the overall functioning of the
body. Breakdown in the proper functioning of
cells (whether caused by microorganisms,
inherited defects, or injury) is the basis of
disease. (1977, p. 2)

The DNA holds all instructions (intelligence)
for all cell activities, including the
contractions of muscle cells, conduction of
electrochemical impulses by nerve cells,
secretions of epithelial cells, and the
formation of connective tissue fibers by
fiber-producing cells. In this way, much of
our knowledge is stored throughout our
bodies, at the level of the individual cell.
Much of my knowledge of the process of
typing, for example, is stored within the
cells of my hands and forearms. My brain
doesn't have to concern itself with the
mechanics of typing. It needs only to send
clear messages to my arms and hands of what
needs to be typed.
There is also strong evidence that direct
communication exists between cells, groups of
cells and organs that bypasses the brain
altogether. At the level of the cell, for
example, a heart-muscle cell removed from a
living heart will, in the laboratory,
continue to beat for a time. Two such cells,
side by side, will beat to their own rhythms,
pulsing at different rates. As soon as they
touch each other, however, they synchronize
immediately and begin to beat together.
A striking example of communication between
groups of cells was reported by Darwin:
. . . A vast number of complex movements are
reflex. As good an instance as can be given
is the often quoted one of a decapitated
frog, which cannot of course feel, and cannot
consciously perform any movement. Yet if a
drop of acid be placed on the lower surface
of the thigh of a frog in this state, it will
rub off the drop with the upper surface of
the foot of the same leg. If this foot be cut
off, it cannot thus act. "After some
fruitless efforts, therefore, it gives up
trying in that way, seems restless, as though
. . . it was seeking some other way, and at
last it makes use of the foot of the other
leg and succeeds in rubbing off the acid.
Notably we have here not merely contractions
of muscles, but combined and harmonized
contractions in due sequence for a special
purpose. These are actions that have all the
appearance of being guided by intelligence
and instigated by will in an animal, the
recognized organ of whose intelligence and
will has been removed. (1872, p. 36)

These observations suggest that intelligence
is not isolated in the brain. On the
contrary, physical intelligence--like
memory--is distributed holographically
throughout the body. The next question is
whether all intelligence might be
holographically distributed throughout the
being?

EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE

Given our working definition of intelligence,
how are we to define emotional intelligence?
To begin with, emotional intelligence has all
the characteristics we attribute to the basic
concept of intelligence, pages 158-161.
However, the facts, meanings, truths,
relationships, etc., are those that exist in
the realm of emotion. Thus, feelings are
facts--as concrete in the realm of emotion as
words and numbers are in the realm of the
intellect. The meanings are felt meanings;
the truths are emotional truths; the
relationships are interpersonal
relationships. And the problems we solve are
emotional problems, that is, problems in the
way we feel.

We can send space ships to Mars, yet we
remain essentially ignorant of ways to solve
problems inside ourselves. Why do emotional
problems so often defy solution? Emotional
intelligence appears to have little
correlation with intellectual intelligence.
We find many people who are bright
intellectually and, at the same time,
stupefied when confronted with emotional
distress or conflict in a relationship;
People visiting mental health centers who
have been labelled “obsessive-compulsive
neurotics" tend to be trapped in this state,
i.e., intellectually bright and emotionally
dull. Often by the time they turn for help
they have read everything there is on the
nature of their problem. They know more about
it than the therapist--in the realm of the
intellect. They can often point to the
traumatic events in their lives which led to
their present conditions--and they are often
correct in their analysis. Interestingly
enough, this intellectual knowledge changes
nothing. They go on suffering. The reason for
this is the problems are emotional in nature
and not completely accessible through the
channels of the intellect alone. We can not
solve an emotional problem outside the realm
for emotion any more than we can solve
mathematical problems outside the realm of
the intellect.

A team of scientists has reported evidence
that the quality or faculty we call "female
intuition” actually exists; and that--as one
would expect--women tend to have more fully
developed faculties than men:
The scientists call the phenomenon . . .
nonverbal communication. Their tests show
that women are more visually attentive to
other people than men.
The tests, in which men and women were shown
silent film clips representing various more
or less complicated emotional situations,
confirmed that women consistently scored
higher than men 75 per cent of the time.

The researchers went so far as to speculate
that "a mother's nonverbal sensitivity may,
in our fore-bears, have substantially helped
her child's survival chances. She may have
been alert to signs of distress in the
infants, or to signs of external danger or
disorder within the group."l3
The conclusion drawn that "women are more
visually attentive," although true, may be
superficial. I would suggest that what is
actually being measured here is emotional
intelligence: the variable being sampled and
measured is the ability to interpret
emotional expression through visual channels
of awareness alone. I would expect the women
who scored high in this test to reflect
emotional sensitivity and intelligence in
other ways as well, if tests were devised to
measure them. Such tests might, for example,
measure one's ability to resolve emotional
conflict in personal relationships.
Emotional intelligence can be developed much
faster and much later in life than either
intellectual or physical intelligence. The
first few weeks, months and years in the life
of any living being have a dramatic impact on
the ultimate level of intellectual
intelligence. Some things, it seems, must be
learned early on or they are never learned,
such as the use of symbols, language and
space relationships. Animals reared in
laboratories under conditions of nearly total
sensory deprivation never learn to navigate
in the physical world once released. They
forever fail to learn from experience in
certain areas. A dog, for example, raised
under such conditions, became friends with
the laboratory workers and stayed on as the
laboratory pet. He never ever learned to
avoid bumping his head on a water facet that
protruded from the wall as he wandered around
the lab. We have evidence that humans suffer
in a similar fashion when deprived of
intellectual challenge. Every few years
society discovers children who have been held
prisoners in their homes, under conditions of
nearly total sensory deprivation, in
isolation in attics or basements, throughout
their growing up years, some into adulthood.
These people, if deprived sufficiently, fail
ever to develop a normal use of language.
Emotional intelligence, on the other hand,
can expand at any point in life and the
movement can be rapid and dramatic. Given the
opportunity and the means, many of us who
have been emotionally suppressed can
experience a transformation in a relatively
short period of time from a state of
emotional ignorance to a state of emotional
intelligence. The reason for this is the
sudden acquisition of expanded faculties of
awareness and comprehension that were
formerly lying idle. This transformation is
awe-inspiring to witness, much less to
experience.

Another way in which emotional intelligence
differs from intellectual intelligence is in
its variability. Intellectual intelligence,
while it can, under certain conditions, vary
by extreme amounts over long periods of time,
tends to be more stable than emotional
intelligence, which fluxuates widely and
rapidly. I can see a couple of reasons for
this. First, most of us are not accustomed to
relating directly with emotion. We feel more
comfortable looking at the world through the
intellect: we are more familiar with it, and,
being one step removed from direct
experience, we feel much safer with it. Being
born into a world that places so much
emphasis and importance on the intellect, and
attending schools that create an atmosphere
of intellectual competition, we tend to
operate throughout our lives toward the upper
limit of our intellectual ability, developing
and expanding our intellectual intelligence.
Second, one's emotional intelligence goes out
the window when emotional awareness is
suppressed. Awareness, after all, is a
primary instrument of intelligence. Remove
emotional awareness and you are partially
blind to what's happening when you make your
decisions. Again, it is only when you have
insufficient data that you are sometimes
forced to "make a decision." When all the
information is in, you know what must be
done; no decision is involved. You move with
intelligence.









PART 3 WHAT IS EMOTION?



INTRODUCTION

You do not know what an emotion is. I do not
mean that you have never had one, or that
yours are very weak. I mean that you think
about them the wrong way. You are not just
mistaken about one or the other. It is deeper
than this. You have altogether the wrong
picture of them. You misconceive their
structure and the ingredients of which they
consist. They are not the sort of things that
you expect, but entities of a completely
different order.
--Frithjof Bergmann (1979)
The primary question that has guided me in my
research has been "how should one relate to
emotion?" rather than "what is emotion?"
There is, however, a kind of cross-
fertilization that occurs between these
questions: consider either of them and one is
led naturally to the second. If someone were
to hand you a beaker of clear liquid and ask
you to describe how humans ought to relate to
it, you would immediately be confronted with
important questions about the characteristics
of the liquid; you would probably set about
trying to determine these characteristics--
particularly as they relate to humans and
other living things. In a similar way, the
more we know about the nature of emotion, the
better prepared we will be to know how to
relate to it.
In this section I will present some aspects
of my paradigm of emotion, focusing on those
ideas that may offer insight into the
question of how to relate to it--and why. I
have drawn on three primary sources of
information in forming these ideas: (1) my
firsthand observations of emotional phenomena
in others during my attempts to help them to
resolve problems involving emotional
distress; (2) my own experiences with
emotional problems; and (3) the observations
and speculations of others as reflected in
the literature.
After reading the classics on the subject of
emotion, William James said he "would as lief
read verbal descriptions of the shapes of
rocks in a New England field." Little has
changed in the past century; only the number
of rocks has grown. It is tempting to try to
sort the rocks into piles, placing similar
rocks together, in order to grasp the essence
of what lies in the field. This becomes a
very difficult task, it turns out, because of
the multi-faceted nature of the rocks. The
partitioning of the rocks --that is, the
outcome of the sorting process--is a function
of the facets considered to be significant in
the sorting process. For example, I may
choose to sort them according to color or
size or density or chemical makeup. K. T.
Strongman (1978) at the University of Exeter
has made one of the few noteworthy attempts
to provide such an overview of the field of
emotion, although he views the field through
the eyes of a behavioral psychologist, which,
he admits, necessarily limits and colors what
he sees. He addresses this problem of the
multifaceted nature of emotion:

Emotion is feeling, it is a bodily state
involving various physical structures, it is
gross or fine-grained behavior, and it occurs
in particular situations. When we use the
term we mean any or all of these
possibilities, each of which may show a wide
range of variation. Different theorists have
taken different starting points. Any theory
of emotion or any empirical research on
emotion deals only with some part of the
broad meaning that the term has acquired.
Some theorists stress psychological factors,
some behavioral, some subjective. Some deal
only with extremes, some say emotion colors
all behavior. There is no consensus of
opinion; at present emotion defies
definition. It is impossible to make
conclusive statements about the whole subject
merely from ideas or research in only one of
its aspects. And these aspects are often too
disparate to attempt more than the slightest
synthesis. (1978, pp. 1-2)

Given the global aspects of emotion--and its
overwhelming complexity—I choose to focus my
discussion here on the following, which have
relevance for developing emotional
intelligence: (1) the language we use to
express and talk about emotion; (2)
dimensions of emotion recognized thus far in
everyday usage and by researchers in the
field; (3) speculations about the role and
function of emotion in our lives; (4)
physiological correlates of emotion; (5) the
function and process of crying; and (6) a
holographic theory of emotion.

Chapters 8-11