There are, in my experience, three thinking brains, at least potentially, in every human…
The first thinking brain
The first thinking brain, the mind, that is in cahoots, in collusion with the selfish gene, works against you. That is what creates a life of reactivity, full of fear, full of anxiety, full of sharp turns and devastating jerks. I’ve lived there… and I hated it.
The second thinking brain
The second thinking brain, the one that evaluates, reasons, figures stuff out, is slow and plodding, and is hard work. Creates real solutions, keeps you out of trouble… but is not fun, unless you love mental challenges.
The third thinking brain…
And then there is the third thinking brain… the work of thinking is done in the background, on the back burner, while the foreground is silent, resting, or busy learning something new..
That is where I live now.
I am getting a few questions about that, and I decided to tell you as much as I can see… the mechanism is largely hidden from my view… It is in the background…
I’ll use myself, and clients’ and students’ stuff as illustrations…
In the past month I saw more maturing, more ‘going to the next level’ than I had seen in all my career as a coach.
When observing the data for clues, I saw that the students that had the breakthroughs were either on vacation, or had an unexpected week or two of no interruptions, no demands on their time to do other things, social or otherwise.
Tai talks about integration of the different areas of your life, and he is onto something, although it isn’t quite clear of what he is onto… lol… Happens with anyone.
Military boot camps produce un-ordinary results for the young men in them: it causes them to become men, fully aware that it is them who cause their results… or if not: drop out.
If the same amount of abusive work were meted out INTERRUPTED with going home, watching TV, going out for a beer, or even work, the results would never be there.
I could call this ‘immersion’. When the work is a total environmental change… My 67-step coaching program works best if you do it as immersion… if you don’t even remember from step-to-step what ground you’ve covered, then your life is fragmented, and your results will be ordinary, as opposed to the epigenetic shift that an immersion would cause.
What happens is actually on the genetic level: the genes scramble to adjust to the new circumstance and negotiate a new evolutionary stable strategy, a new e.s.s.
Without immersion the genes would know it’s temporary, and would not bother.
The immersion needs to be long enough… so the genes believe this is the new world they need to adjust to.
A seamless life, inside the context of this work, the work of growth, is possible, but requires a person strong enough to not be pulled out of the context willy nilly…
For example, if you have a family whose self interest is to pull you out of your own life, of your own self-created equilibrium, only the strong can remain their own Self while being jerked incessantly by the family.
I haven’t tested myself… the thought of surrounding myself with ‘normal’ people makes me scared…
But most people, you, live in a normal world where the normal people in your life, colleagues, bosses, friends are not on the side of their growth… and unless the context of growth is stronger than your desire to fit in, to be liked, to be accepted by those people, your life will become fragmented and you don’t have an immersion experience: no new ess.
No real growth is possible without a new ess.
This can be seen with diets, with your cell hydration, this can be seen with starting a business, a hobby, a relationship. You taking a course and not immersing yourself in it. You signing up to the 20-day skill learning challenge, and doing it willynilly… occasionally, halfheartedly, just for show.
The world of people (selfish gene) is not on your side. The chicken coop isn’t on the side of you breaking out of it. The world acts as a huge crab bucket where the other crabs will pull you back when you want to become yourself, when you want to escape the crab bucket to do something worth doing.
Consider that unless you protect your new Self, your new Self-interest, it will be destroyed by the people in your life on short notice. FAST.
- Married men are the most vulnerable: wives hold the purse-string… or more precisely the panty-string, and men are too weak to let that go, even for a little bit of time.
- Married women can have a lot more freedom… but not necessarily enough character.
So when you consider this journey, some of the predictors’ of success is the environment you live in… will you have an opportunity to create an immersion experience for your genes for a new ess.
Epigenetic shifts do not happen without this immersion. They also don’t happen without some friction that forces the genes to consider a new ess…
One of my roles is to provide the friction… as a coach. Friction is friction… never pleasant… but without friction no ess, no epigenetic shift, no new inner reality born.
The genes have no reason to scramble for that new ‘setup’, that new ‘set of rules’, that new ess.
Growth, human growth, personal evolution, goes through these periods of friction that forces the genes to re-arrange themselves in a new ess.
Inside the genome, one of the results is the release on the lock of spiritual capacities… they become expressed.
Students who pay for the activation of spiritual capacities but don’t generate friction are wasting their money: the new capacity needs to go back into ‘unexpressed’ because no new ess, evolutionary stable strategy is needed…
Self-trust is a great example. Self-trust, the capacity, is the attitude of ‘I know myself. I can handle anything. Good or bad, well or poorly, but I can handle it. So I can experiment, I can risk, I can go down the unfamiliar path, because I can trust myself to handle whatever comes up.‘
Nice idea. But you don’t need it unless you keep on going down paths that are unfamiliar and scary. If you always move sideways from a challenge, then you are just doing lip-service… capacities don’t respond to good intention, only to the friction… ugh, right?
No scary path? No need for self-trust.
Clear?
The Universe is not prepared to give abundantly to a bunch of undeserving people… I am paraphrasing what Tai quotes… but if you hope that you can be undeserving and pay for the kind of stuff that need to be earned: you surely didn’t earn your money either. You haven’t become a man yet. You have unearned riches, and you’ll lose them as surely as that the sun gets up on the East…
Now, onto the third thinking brain:
Once you managed to cause an epigenetic shift or two, you have less urges and less attempts from the genes to pull you out… and your brain can deal with more pieces of information at the same time, much like a plate-spinner circus performer: your brain can keep more spinning plates in the air than before.
The spinning plates will be the foundation of the third thinking brain: they can keep on spinning and doing work while you are doing other things, the kind of things that don’t force you to drop the plates. Drama, all selfish genes! will force you to drop the plates.
Looking back at the past five years of my life, I can count on one hand the number of times I dropped the plates.
I set the direction of the work, and my team: the third thinking brain, does most of the work. I supervise it, can observe it working, and have to present it to the world with my second brain, but otherwise my experience of my life is that I am never under pressure, never in a hurry, never late…
And in the foreground I can work on new stuff… as long as I manage to integrate it through context into my seamless life.
Integrating is not easy and not instantaneous… it takes work, it takes thought, and it is like any new learning, not pleasant.
The genes protest. Because every piece of new learning upsets the ess…
I am learning marketing. The genes want me to stop it… My job is to tread lightly… increase the discomfort slowly… like in the story of cooking frogs you raise the temperature slowly.
Even talking about it here the genes want to strangulate me… I need to tell them to relax, there is no danger.
The genes don’t like changes.
Anywhere I talk about genes, you can replace the word with another word: ego. It will be more familiar: ego wants you to stay the same.
So you need to trick the genes/the ego into a false sense of security.
Goal-setting, affirmations, campaigns tip the genes off about your intention, and they will kill it as sure as that it takes breathing to live.
Your diets: one step forward, two steps back…
Your income
Your happiness…
All fall victim to your careless following the current teaching: go boldly, loudly, and stupidly… I would laugh if I thought that’s funny. But I think it’s tragic.
People crowd around, rally for, and idolize teachers who teach that path… But what part of the people is so happy? The selfish gene. The selfish gene is happy, while people, the vehicles for the selfish gene, aren’t.
I watched a video and then read the book by ‘Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends On It’ by Kamal Ravikant.
My first clue was that he was invited to the Awesomeness Fest of Mind Valley… anyone Mind Valley likes is a prophet of the selfish gene, pouting lies.
As I was reading the book, I was connected to the author who was obviously suffering from the guru syndrome (impostor syndrome) of being fully crap and knowing it… His vibration is 170, and what he is teaching is harmful. Much like all the other Indian gurus…
This is why I was hit in the stomach when a student of mine labeled me as ‘guruji’ Sophieji… and Indian guru. I am anything like that, but if you find that I am… please kill me.
OK… I have been all over the place in this article… so let me pull it together for you:
- You can live fully in the first brain, and a full 99 percent of humanity does. The selfish genes call all the shots in your life.
- You can start using your conscious, thinking, problem solving brain at least some of the time… and start upsetting the apple cart, the dominion of the genes.
If you manage to create immersion experiences that are unpleasant, challenging, the genes might be willing to consider a new evolutionary stable strategy to adjust to the requirements of the requirements of the immersion, and make you a new man.
These immersion experiences plus an integrated life (integrated through context) will enable you to spin more plates than before, to activate spiritual capacities that are needed… and you activate the third thinking brain that does most of the work.
This is the pathway to the evolutionary stage of Human Being… less doing and more being.
