3

“AND THE DOORKEEPER OBEYS WHEN SPOKEN TO”

 

Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness that will help us to stay alive. . . . Certain persons, however, seem to be born with a kind of bypass that circumvents the reducing valve. In others, temporary bypasses may be acquired either spontaneously, or as the result of deliberate “spiritual exercises,” or through hypnosis, or by means of drugs. Through these permanent or temporary bypasses there flows . . . something more than, and above all something different from, the carefully selected utilitarian material which our narrowed, individual minds regard as a complete, or at least sufficient, picture of reality.

ALDOUS HUXLEY

What one commonly takes as “the reality,” including the reality of my own individual person, by no means signifies something fixed, but rather something that is ambiguous—that there is not only one, but that there are many realities, each comprising also a different consciousness of the ego.

ALBERT HOFMANN

To know how cherries and strawberries taste, ask children and birds.

GOETHE

The door to the soul is unlocked; you do not need to please the door keeper, the door in front of you is yours, intended for you, and the doorkeeper obeys when spoken to.

ROBERT BLY

During early life, the sensory gating channels in every individual in every species find their own “default” setting. That is, as the organism ages, through experience with informational inputs and feedback from family and culture about what is relevant and what is not, the sensory gating channels themselves develop their own particular range of action. The amount of incoming sensory data that reaches conscious awareness is then held to some constant that does not have to be monitored. It becomes automatic. And within any animal species there is considerable variation among the default settings that occur. Some individuals will have very narrow sensory gating channels

Get off my lawn!

others will be widely open.

Oh, I like the blue streaks in your hair!

This directly affects the perceptual field that is experienced in day-to-day life and the amount of information they take in through sensory data. Widely open channels can be restricted to a single sense, such as smell, or they can cover several sensory mediums: feeling, seeing, and hearing for example.

Unfortunately, most researchers studying gating dynamics in children are, as with “schizophrenia,” focused on “normal” versus “abnormal” gating. And all children are expected to fit into the defined “normal” range of behavior. Sensory gating dynamics outside that culturally determined “norm” are defined as abnormal and researchers note that

Individuals with these characteristics have been classified as having sensory processing deficits (SPD). Such behaviors disrupt an individual’s ability to achieve and maintain an optimal range of performance necessary to adapt to challenges in life. The manifestations of SPD may include distraction, impulsiveness, abnormal activity level, disorganization, anxiety, and emotional lability that produce deficient social participation, insufficient self-regulation and inadequate perceived competence.¹

Those terms, if you look at them more closely, are exterior, “authority” generated terms; they relate directly to the paradigm in place in those authorities. They really don’t have much to say about the interior experience of the children so labeled. So, let’s reorient from exterior to interior.

“Distraction” then becomes boredom; “impulsiveness” becomes self-generated explorative behavior based on what captures interest; “abnormal activity level” is thus high-energy levels generating multiple task interests; “disorganization” is failure to follow rigid organizational regimens set by others; “anxiety”—well, we all know that one: what the hell kind of world did I get born into?; “emotional lability” is, in fact, a wide range of emotions that are accessed when adults or the exterior culture don’t want them to be. In other words, should you have ever read Mark Twain, what is being described is “Tom Sawyer syndrome,” a once common state of being in many if not most children. The more widely open the sensory gating channels are, the more the child’s behavior alters from what is currently held to be the cultural norm in the West.

On average, some 5 to 10 percent of all children in the West fall into this category. They are defined as having sensory processing disorders and the focus is on using medication to get them to maintain “an optimal range of performance.” Among gifted children the incidence of more widely open sensory gating channels is much higher, as high as 35 percent according to some. They possess, as a result, “a global heightened awareness to sensory stimulation.”²

In spite of the movement to label “a global heightened awareness to sensory stimulation” abnormal, it is, in fact, a condition natural to all of us. In infancy, gating is very widely open. At that time all of us experience a global heightened awareness to sensory stimulation. As we age gating tends to narrow, but not uniformly. While all gating narrows as we age, in each of us some gating channels remain more open than others. And this is true across the species as well, for some people the gating average across the whole sensory spectrum becomes very narrow . . .

i.e., people that used to be called “narrow minded”
(Pop quiz: in what year did the narrow minded take control?)

for others gating remains very open, especially among young children, artists, schizophrenics, specialists of the sacred such as shamans and Buddhist masters, and those ingesting psychotropics.

Researchers Michel Kisley et al. comment . . .

Before ten years of age, and as young as 18 months old, sensory gating measures are extremely variable from child to child. . . . A correlation between increasing age and stronger response suppression was uncovered, even within this restricted age range.³

The neural networks responsible for sensory gating begin to process data as soon as the child is born . . . and to some extent prior to birth (since both sound and light perception occur in the womb). The networks, in essence, begin responding to environmental cues (including those of the parents, culture, and exterior environment) and modulating sensory gating function based on those cues. And the hippocampus is perhaps the central organ in the brain responsible for processing sensory data and acting as a gateway for inflows. As Kisley et al. note: “The cholinergic innervation of the hippocampus, which is crucial for intact sensory gating, exhibits extensive remodeling during pre- and early postnatal development.”⁴ It displays a great deal of plasticity in response to incoming sensory flows; the more it works with meaning and the more sensory input it is sensitive to, the more it shifts its neural structure as it sensorally interacts with the world.

Because newborns have minimal gating, they tend to experience everything simultaneously as it happens. They take in nearly all the field of sensory inflows in which they exist, and from every sensory modality. They are literally immersed in a sea of meaning-filled sensory inputs. Because they don’t yet have language nor any presets determining what things “mean,” they work with meaning directly and learn, through experience, to determine the nature of the meanings they encounter. In other words, they are working with the metaphysical background of things directly, without prejudice. Or, as Eric Berne once described it . . .

A little boy sees and hears birds with delight. Then the “good father” comes along and feels he should “share” the experience and help his son “develop.” He says: “That’s a jay, and this is a sparrow.” The moment the little boy is concerned with which is a jay and which is a sparrow, he can no longer see the birds or hear them sing. He has to see and hear them the way the father wants him to. Father has good reasons on his side, since few people can go through life listening to the birds sing, and the sooner the boy starts his “education” the better. Maybe he will be an ornithologist when he grows up. A few people, however, can still see and hear in the old way. But most of the members of the human race have lost the capacity to be painters, poets, or musicians, and are not left the option of seeing and hearing directly even if they can afford to; they must get it secondhand.⁵

Very young children don’t have the intermediary of language—they don’t have a sign in place of the thing. They “see and hear in the old way.”

And that is what this book is about. It is recovering this ability, and using it intentionally, to interact with the metaphysical background of the world. It is about becoming aware. It is about giving up getting things “secondhand.”

As infants age, sensory gating processes develop, uniquely for each one of them. The older the child, the more sensory gating clicks into place. As Kisley et al. comment about their research: “The correlation between sensory gating and conceptual age was significant.”⁶ By age eight the gating channels begin to take on what will be the default state in adulthood. This further solidifies, narrowing more, at the onset of puberty and generally is in place by the end of adolescence.

Younger children, because gating is still much more widely open, are by nature more attentive to the sensory flows coming in to them, respond with greater attentiveness to stimuli considered irrelevant by adults, and generally have a greater sense of wonder about the world since most stimuli are novel to them. They have not yet learned to relegate the sensory inflows from the world to background noise.

The world is still filled with wonder and magic; they still see with glittering eyes. It is, in part, their openness to the touch of the world upon them, their sense of the livingness of everything they encounter, that so strongly affects all of us who encounter them.

Crucially, every developmental stage that we go through as we grow (including middle and old age) has a different gating dynamic. Thus, in each stage of growth we perceive different aspects of the sensory field in which we are embedded. They are, in essence, a series of lenses through which we can perceive different layers of the reality field through which we move.

Every developmental stage has a different function and thus what it is going to perceive from the field around it is directly related to that function. Each particular stage acts as a focusing mechanism that shifts gating in particular ways, thus altering the sensory data that is perceived. This acts at the unconscious level to affect what type of sensory inflows are considered important at that time in life and thus what makes it to the conscious mind. The functions of the different developmental stages are each interpreted as a distinct task set by the parts of the CNS that gate sensory inflows at the unconscious level.

I will get to task sets in a minute

So the sensory inflows are gated differently as ego states change, both during the developmental stages of life or when previous developmental stages are intentionally regenerated later in life.

One of the reasons that Luther Burbank could directly work with plants to co-create most of the food plants we now take for granted is that he routinely accessed earlier developmental stages, in essence, taking them on as a lens through which to experience the world. This shifted his sensory gating dynamics, opening the doors of perception much wider, allowing a much richer sensory perception to occur. It allowed him to work with the metaphysical background directly. As Helen Keller once remarked of him . . .

He has the rarest of gifts, the receptive spirit of a child. Only a wise child can understand the language of flowers and trees.

This capacity to moderate the doors of perception through the activation of younger developmental stages also points to one of the great lies of our time: human beings are not single egos but are instead composed of multiple ego states.

multiple personality disorder
is only a pathological expression
of a general condition

Different parts of the self—irrespective of calendar age—come to the fore at different times, depending on environmental demands. All of us know this, we just don’t know it. There is not a one of us that has not had an argument with ourselves about something we wanted to do but that another part of us felt we should not do.

Go ahead, eat the cake!
(No, I shouldn’t, I gained too much weight last week.)
C’mon, eat it. Look at it, can’t you just taste it right now?
(Stop it! Don’t make me.)

This kind of complexity in the psychological structure of the personality is a long-standing evolutionary innovation. It allows for extremely sophisticated responses to environmental challenges. One element of this is the deeper perception of meanings in the world that can occur through the alteration of sensory gating by a simple reorientation of internal consciousness from one developmental stage to another. As brain researcher Mark Kiefer comments: Consciousness is not the “simple result of processing in a single ‘consciousness’ module.”⁷ There are multiple “modules” or ego states that together make up the “us” that we know as our unique selves. Together these “consciousness modules” form something greater than the sum of the parts, though there is not a one of us who has not and does not tend to take on, from time to time, one of those modules or ego states to the exclusion of the others.

Policeman: Why did you run if you hadn’t done anything?

Suspect: Well, when I saw you a part of me said run.

Policeman: That part of you is an idiot.

Nevertheless, it is possible to form an alliance between all the various ego states or modules in which something much more than the sum of the parts comes into being as a synchronized whole.

this is what inner council work is

Then, when desired, any of the various ego states or modules can be taken on as the primary lens being used through which to see the world. This gives us sophisticated perceptual options through which to analyze the meanings in which we are embedded, which gives rise to a much greater range of behavioral choices.

The way we saw the world at infancy or at four or at eight is still an accessible capacity. Those developmental stages exist in one form or another in all life-forms;

there is a reason that puppies, and kittens, and young children, and newly emerging plants all have such a similar feeling to them. These developmental stages occur across genus and species lines—they exist for a purpose

they are evolutionary innovations. They allow for unique perceptions of the world, and unique types of interactions with environment. Each developmental stage or consciousness module allows different aspects of the layered complexity of the world within which we are immersed to be perceived. That is a primary part of their function.

It is an aspect of the emergent behaviors
that occur in all self-organized biological systems

Like cells into organs into organisms on the physical level, psychological and social organization shows the same sort of innovative development. In perceiving different layers of the complexity of the world, we are able to work with different meanings, meanings that themselves are shaping aspects of the world around us below the level of linear perception. This then allows for tremendous behavioral innovation in response, for we can then affect patterns of movement below the level of their gross behavior. As Tsuno and Mori note . . .

Mammalian brains have a remarkable ability to use sensory information about the external world and the interoceptive state to choose an appropriate behavior from among a wide range of repertoire of behavioral responses. Changes in behavioral state are accompanied by internally coordinated changes in the information processing mode of local neuronal circuits, including those in the cerebral neocortex and the hippocampus.⁸

We can intentionally alter how we process sensory data simply by an alteration in state: “Changes in behavioral state are accompanied by internally coordinated changes in the information processing mode of local neuronal circuits.”

It is very difficult to understand the language of plants if you cannot open sensory gating channels more widely. Many people who have learned to do so, as Helen Keller noted about Luther Burbank, begin to take on a unique kind of childlikeness, for that younger part of the self, to whom such behavior is natural, begins emerging into the world as habit.

Intentionally Shifting Gating

While gating channels normally operate at an unconscious level to process out irrelevant data, all gating channels can be intentionally opened further, and there are a number of ways to accomplish this. Simply having intent, the decision to consciously focus on some particular incoming sensory flow, is one of them.

For example, when you focus conscious attention on reading these sentences, the unconscious parts that are gating visual inflows allow your conscious intent to override their narrowing of the sensory gates. They no longer act to gate inputs as they normally do. In consequence the words on this page begin to stand out as individual identities. If, on the other hand, you happen to casually see a newspaper lying on a table as you pass by, you might see that it is covered with words, but you won’t necessarily notice the words themselves. At an unconscious level you have gated them out. Similarly, if you casually opened this book and glanced at a page, though you might “see” the words, you would not necessarily be actively attentive to them as individuals or to the meanings inside them. The incoming visual messages—in this instance, the meanings in the words and sentences—are “gated” because the unconscious parts of you have determined they are not, at that moment in time, important enough to pay attention to. This keeps you oriented to the surface of the visual world.

this same kind of gating, trained into us from childhood, is why it is often so hard to see the meanings in the sensory communications that come to us from the natural world around us, the reason why we can’t experience the metaphysical background of the material world—it’s why we remain oriented to surfaces, as a culture, as a people. It is why reading the text of the world is now so uncommon in the West.

All that it takes to change this is your decision to read, your intentionally focusing on the words as individuals. This creates a shift in gating parameters. The unconscious parts of you that gate both visual inputs and meaning open more widely in deference to the conscious mind’s intent.

Interestingly, attentional override can also occur without actually focusing the eyes on a single object; you can do it just as well with what some people call luminous eyes, or soft-focused (peripheral-like) vision. It is not necessary to look directly at something to see more deeply into it. As gating researcher Martin Eimer notes . . .

Attention can be voluntarily directed to specific objects and locations within the spatial field independent of overt eye movements. Stimuli at attended-to locations are detected with higher speed and accuracy as compared to stimuli presented outside the attentional focus.⁹

In other words, you can let yourself take in the visual field as a soft-focused field of visual experience and simply focus your attention, not your eyes, on something in that visual field and that will override gating. You will begin to take in more sensory data about that particular thing and it will then be processed at deeper levels of meaning by the hippocampal region. This particular kind of seeing in fact tends to gate much less of the visual field than focused vision. If you look at one thing closely, say the coffee cup on the table, the rest of the visual field tends to be gated out. But if you look at the whole visual field and simply let your attention focus on the cup a much greater range of visual input will be retained.

Irrespective of how you do it, it is always possible to override the automatic gating of sensory inflows by intentionally focusing awareness on incoming sensory data.

This is sometimes referred to as a “task set.” In essence, you have set yourself a “task”—e.g., learning music or reading—and that decision, and interest level, override the unconscious gating defaults that have previously been in place.

By consciously making the decision that certain sensory inflows are more important than others, your conscious mind increases their novelty against the background sensory inputs. This, nearly immediately, overrides previous gating settings.

The classical view of unconscious sensory processing

in other words, the previous definitive statements about the nature of reality that the majority of scientists proclaimed as true

is that gating is an unalterable automatic process once sensory gating defaults are set in childhood. It had been assumed that there could be little conscious control—or possible control—over the process. This perspective is, regrettably, still deeply ingrained within the work of nearly all neuroscientists and psychologists/psychiatrists. One of its problems, which becomes apparent when it is examined more deeply, is that an “autonomous” process should, by definition, be invariant within each individual. But studies of sensory gating show that it is never invariant . . . in anyone. Gating parameters tend to move across a spectrum in all people (and to be variant across populations as well). In other words, there are moments in our lives that all of us open our gating channels much more widely. The belief that gating is fixed flies in the face of the need for a species to be adaptable to altered circumstances; such inflexibility would place a tremendously powerful limit on cognitive responses to environmental perturbations.

What is more accurate is that unconscious gating defaults act in concert with environmental and cognitive demands and the needs of the cerebral cortex and thus are continually in flux depending on circumstances and environmental inputs. As researchers Kiefer et al. observe . . .

Unlike classical theories, refined theories assume that automatic processes are critically dependent on higher-level, top-down factors such as attention, intentions, and task sets that orchestrate the processing streams toward greater optimization of task performance. Given this dependency on the precise configuration of the cognitive system one might as well speak of conditioned automaticity.¹⁰

As they continue . . .

Attentional influences originating from task sets enhance task-relevant unconscious processes while attenuating task-irrelevant unconscious processes. Much as conscious perception is influenced by attentional mechanisms, unconscious cognition is assumed to be controlled by top-down signals from the prefrontal cortex that increase or decrease the sensitivity of processing pathways for incoming sensory input. Processing in task-relevant pathways is enhanced by increasing the gain of neurons in the corresponding areas, whereas processing in task-irrelevant pathways is attenuated by a decrease of the gain. Gain is a parameter in neural network modeling, which influences the probability that a neuron fires at a given activation level. Single cell recordings in non-human primates have shown that the likelihood of a neuron firing, given a constant sensory input, is enhanced when the stimulus dimension that is preferentially processed by the neuron is attended to.¹¹

In other words, it is possible, simply by deciding to do so, to increase the “gain” of your perception, to alter the automatic gating presets that we have habituated. We can learn to increase our sensory sensitivity at will, to open our sensory gating channels more widely when we wish to do so, to engage directly with the meanings held within those sensory inflows. We can alter our programming, even at the unconscious level. In fact, every door in the neural network that gates sensory inputs can be altered if desired. We can, in fact, open the doors of perception if we wish to do so, as widely as we wish to do. The ability to alter unconscious sensory gating at will, as Kiefer et al. comment, “ensures the adaptability of cognition even in the unconscious domain.”¹² And, the more we practice intentionally opening the doors of perception, the more easily and more fully we can do so. As Kiefer et al. comment . . .

Attentional amplification of sensory awareness in any sensory medium is achieved by top-down signals from prefrontal cortex that modulate activity of single neurons in sensory brain areas in the absence of any sensory stimulation and significantly increase baseline activity in the corresponding target region.¹³

Increased sensitization in a sensory neural network, once initiated, is sustained by the synchronization of the rhythmic activity of the enhanced neural group within and between other neural groups in the central nervous system (CNS). In other words, the new functional state creates, in essence, a small biologic oscillator in the CNS to which other neural groups in the CNS synchronize, thus enhancing and stabilizing the new state that has been initiated in that particular neural pathway. Neuroimaging in the brain shows that once the areas of the brain that process incoming sensory data are sensitized to incoming data, that is, once the gating channels are opened more widely, the sections of the brain that gate that particular type of sensory data stay open. The baseline gating level increases even if the degree of sensory stimulus is not increased. The metaphysical background of the world begins to emerge into sensing on a regular basis.

We can’t solve problems
by using the same kind of thinking we used
when we created them.

Or as Albert Hofmann once put it . . .

All attempts today to make amends for the damage through environmentally protective measures must remain only hopeless, superficial patchwork, if no curing of the “Western entelechy neurosis” ensues. . . . Healing would mean existential experience of a deeper, self-encompassing reality.¹⁴

The opening of sensory gating channels beyond the current setting parameters dictated by our culture is a necessity. To think differently, we must actually think differently. And in this, intent is important.

What you intend when you approach something in the world determines, to varying extents, the degree of sensory gating that occurs as you perceive that phenomenon. Intent, task demands, cognitive template, and gating defaults all affect what you sensorally perceive when a part of the exterior world and you meet. More colloquially, all of us see what we expect to see.

and this is true even of scientists . . .
just because they know how to use a hammer
does not mean they can use it well
it is not the tool that is crucial to the art
but the ability of the craftsman

Nevertheless, the perceptual frame can be changed. The amount of sensory input that is being gated can be altered simply by the desire to do so—though specific actions are necessary to carry out that desire.

Altering sensory gating parameters are most easily accomplished in one of three ways, and we’ve already talked in some depth about the first one: 1) having a task that demands a greater focus on incoming sensory data flows. The others are: 2) regenerating a state similar to that which occurred during the first few years of life, or 3) by altering the nature of the gating channels themselves by shifting consciousness (which is somewhat different from re-generating developmental stages).

In somewhat more depth then: 1) Focusing on a specific task that demands greater sensory sensitivity, say for instance if you go out into the backyard and sit next to a plant, and then focusing on the color of its leaves in the minutest of detail, to the exclusion of all else and, in the midst of that experience, asking yourself

How does it feel?

will significantly increase both the visual and feeling inputs that are normally gated for you by your unconscious. This will immediately begin allowing you to access the deeper metaphysical background of the world as it pertains to that particular plant growing in that particular ecorange. In essence, focusing on tasks that demand greater sensory inflows enhances the sensitivity of the neural pathways that are involved in that particular sensory flow, reduces gating, and activates more relevant neurons in that pathway. The deeper meanings in the sensory flows are then more accessible to your awareness.

Alternatively, 2) if you should take a minute to sit quietly, breathing deeply the while, until you are very calm, and then if you were to

see the little child you were standing in front of you

and notice how that child that you were looks to you, how they feel to you, and if you were to then begin to talk with that part of you, your sensory gating of visual, auditory, and feeling stimuli will begin to change. The gating channels will begin to open more widely. If you should take it further, should you then imagine your grown-up body as being similar to those chocolate bunnies, the ones that are hollow inside, the ones whose hollowness follows the shapes and patterns of the exterior body, should you see your grown-up body from the back of itself as hollow and

should you then ask that little child to step around behind you and to, very carefully, place their face just behind your face, until it is snugly in place, their eyes right behind your eyelids. Should you then slowly open your eyes and let them see the world through your eyes, the entire perceptual field will shift. The amount of incoming sensory data will increase—immediately—in all six sensory mediums. Most especially will the feeling, seeing, and hearing senses become more sensitive. This is the experience of fully reinhabiting your interbeing with the world.

And of course, the more closely you get to reactivating a newborn, infant state in this way, the less sensory data that is gated and the more inflows you have access to, inflows that can become nearly infinite in their richness and complexity. From this place, with this habituated skill, you can begin to directly access the metaphysical background of the world. You can fully reinhabit your interbeing with the world.

Or, finally, 3) if you wish, you can shift consciousness itself more directly by directly increasing the apertures of your sensory gates, by opening the doors of perception themselves more widely. You can do this a number of ways,

hallucinogens are one of them
meditation is another
habituation to constantly feeling
the touch of the world upon you is another

for there are multiple ways to open those doors of perception, both directly and indirectly. The doors exist for a reason . . . and our ability to narrow or expand them at will exists for a reason. It is a natural capacity that all organisms have, intended by structure and ecological function, to open the doors of perception.

Repression-Driven Gating

The sensory stimuli we encounter do not, in and of themselves,

except under unusual circumstances

determine whether or not we pay attention to them; we, ourselves, do. In fact novel stimuli of great intensity (which usually are not gated) will be gated if they do not conform to the nature of expected sensory inputs. In other words, we notice, in the visual field around us, those things that fit into our paradigm, our template. Those things in the fields around us that are not deemed relevant to the “template” we are using are not noticed.

For instance, if the paradigm in which you are immersed has as a primary assumption the belief that there is no feeling sense (in the way I am using it in this book) then, to a greater or lesser extent, that feeling sense will be gated. Those who have lost, as James Hillman put it, the response of the heart to what is presented to the senses, are sometimes so trained to believe that the objects outside them have no “feeling reality” to them that all feeling inflows of that sort are gated entirely.

Specifically: Studies of the individuals who attribute living or nonliving status to exterior objects have found that how those things are perceived is completely dependent on the search template that is in place at the time. In other words, the template itself determined whether one could “see” living and nonliving attributes in exterior objects. The researchers noted, in the usual convoluted wording, that

These findings suggest that action intentions sensitize congruent and desensitize incongruent unconscious processing pathways. We propose that an attentional top-down signal enhances unconscious processing of the stimulus dimension that matches the current intention. This attentional sensitization mechanism results in subliminal priming effects on responses to visible targets only for stimulus dimensions that are congruent with the current action intention.¹⁵

In other words, what you believe—that is, the descriptions of the world around you that you received in childhood—act much like software; they program what is perceivable by your conscious mind.

What you can perceive is also affected if you are trained to concentrate on a single sensory modality over all the others. If this occurs, all the other modalities decrease in importance and are subsequently more strongly gated. This often makes it difficult to access other sensory modalities. For instance, if you are sensorially trained to concentrate on didactic sound, that is, words

William F. Buckley

then an environmental pressure or external demand for you to move into visual processing or feeling processing presents difficulties since you, while in verbal didactic, are strongly gating those modalities at an unconscious level. Being confined to a single modality, habituated to it by schooling or culture or environment, is tremendously debilitating.

It is a form of ecological reclamation of the self
this learning how to perceive through all the body’s senses

For example, during studies focused on interpreting meaning it was found that continued focus on the meaning in words (which uses visual, auditory, and feeling senses) enhances the future ability to determine meaning irrespective of the medium conveying it. However if the focus is shifted to classifying letters by shape (which restricts the sensory modality to the visual only), the ability to determine meaning decreases. In other words, focus on form inhibits the ability to determine the meanings that underlie form. The effect takes place at the unconscious level, at the level of gating. Long-term focus on the exterior of things, as a habit, reduces the capacity to find meaning—at all. It inhibits the ability to work with the meanings that are held inside the visual sensory inflows. Meaning becomes strongly gated while form perception is not. Or as Gregory Bateson once put it . . .

The human being, depersonified in his own talk and thought, may indeed learn more thingish habits of action.¹⁶

This finding is consistent irrespective of the type of study. As another example, researchers have found that if people are asked whether a word refers to a living or nonliving thing (tree, rock, ball, girl, plant), they become subliminally primed to attend to the meaning of things, in this instance livingness. But if they are asked to determine whether a series of words end in a vowel or a consonant (garden, bottle, ocean, leaf ) they become subliminally primed to focus on forms of things, not their inherent meanings. In the first case, they become subliminally primed to look for livingness in subsequent interactions; in the second they are primed to look at the exterior shape or surface of things. Long-term training in one perspective or the other actually creates a long-term template that automatically gates incoming sensory data. It becomes increasingly more difficult, with age, to alter the settings.

This is what Charles Dickens was writing about
when he wrote his book A Christmas Carol

Another study, in which participants were asked to determine whether or not a capital letter in a word was a vowel or consonant (jewEl, fAble, oRacle, breaTh) found that it strongly disrupted subsequent semantic processing of unconsciously encountered words. In other words, the ability to determine the meaning in words, at an unconscious level, was inhibited. In a similar way, the focus on the form of an object: which leg is larger on that chair, on that table, on that bed—which leaf shape is more oval among those three different plant species—disrupts subsequent meaning processing.

This is why taxonomists know so very little about plants
and why physicians are so often terrible healers

People trained in such an exterior focus get stuck on surfaces and can no longer find depths, can no longer experience the metaphysical background of matter. Their unconscious simply gates it out. As Kiefer et al. note, again in an insult to clear languaging, “The capture of visuo-spatial attention by unconscious stimuli likewise was shown to depend on the match between the stimulus feathers and a fitting top-down search template.”¹⁷ In other words, some things have to be believed to be seen or, another way of putting it: if you assume something is not there, then, to you, it won’t be.

In substantial ways, the reductionistic science that has been practiced since the mid-twentieth century has programmed all of us, to varying extents, to gate the meanings that flow into us from the world. For some of us, so strongly, that life indeed feels meaningless. This is what Vaclav Havel was talking about when he said . . .

The relationship to the world that modern science fostered and shaped now appears to have exhausted its potential. It is increasingly clear that, strangely, the relationship is missing something. It fails to connect with the most intrinsic nature of reality, and with natural human experience. It is now more of a source of disintegration and doubt than a source of integration and meaning. It produces what amounts to a state of schizophrenia, completely alienating man as an observer from himself as a being. Classical modern science described only the surface of things, a single dimension of reality. And the more dogmatically science treated it as the only dimension, as the very essence of reality, the more misleading it became. Today, for instance, we may know immeasurably more about the universe than our ancestors did, yet it increasingly seems that they knew something more essential about it than we do, something that escapes us. The same is true of nature and of ourselves. The more thoroughly all our organs and their functions, their internal structures, and the biochemical reactions that take place within them are described, the more we seem to fail to grasp the spirit, purpose, and meaning of the system that they create together and that we experience as our unique “self.”¹⁸

We can change this if we wish, but it does involve intent, the decision to actually do something different, the decision to in actuality change the self. It takes work to begin developing, then using, another type of thinking entirely. Or as Luther Burbank put it, “It is repetition, repetition, repetition that habituates the skill.”

Unconscious Overrides

Interestingly, studies have found that there is often a very deep conflict between the gating imposed by schooling, culture, and parenting and the gating that the evolutionarily innovated living system you know as yourself would actually prefer. The parts of the brain that determine gating settings respond to imposed parameters as the child develops however . . . deeper than all those are the evolutionary dynamics that underlie our species emergence. One of the simplest is the drive for survival, in other words, your very deep sense of self-protection. If, in the field of sensory inflows in which you are immersed, the parts of the self that gate inflows pick up sensory-encoded meanings that can affect your self-organizational integrity, they will have a very deep evolutionary drive to signal your conscious attention. However, if the paradigm or lens through which you view the world around you does not allow you to receive those signals consciously,

this can be thought of as repression-driven gating

then the unconscious parts of the self may begin to override the conscious programming. In response your emotional state or behavior may change, sometimes significantly. You just won’t know why.

Let’s not go to the movies tonight.

Why not?

I don’t know, it just doesn’t feel right.

In essence the pre-attentional parts that gate sensory flows, in assessing the meanings in incoming sensory data, have determined that what your conscious mind has decided to do is a threat to system integrity. This tends to activate responses from both the hippocampal regions, which includes the amygdala. The amygdala functions, as researchers comment, to detect the emotional “salience” of incoming sensory data and to relate the proper emotional value to each input. In other words, the meanings in sensory inflows always create an emotional response in that part of the brain. For most people in the West, these kinds of emotional responses are usually gated because the conscious mind has accepted a paradigm that discounts their importance. However, if the pre-attentional parts of the self determine that it is important enough, they will let the emotional response through to the conscious mind. You will feel funny, you just won’t know why.

The emotional response to each tiny incoming sensory bit can tell the conscious mind

if you pay attention to how you feel
in the same way that musicians pay attention to sound

a considerable amount about the meaning inside every particular sensory input that you experience. We may not have yet identified the nature of the meaning inside a sensory inflow, for instance

the dog we see lying on the path we are about to step onto.

But our ( fear) or our ( joy) tells us a great deal about the intent of the dog, even if we don’t know why we are having that particular, nearly instantaneous, response in the moment of visual input.

It is possible, just as it is with the auditory training of musicians, to begin using the feeling sense actively. This will increase neuronal development in the hippocampal and the cardiovascular (heart) system and with practice, over time, increase sensitivity to tiny modulations in that sensory flow. Sensitivity to the tiniest shifts in feeling will develop, just as they do in musicians with sound complexes. And, with experience, the ability to determine the meanings inside those feelings will become a reliable skill. In other words, it becomes possible to immediately know the intent of the dog as soon as it is seen/nonkinesthetically felt.

Communicatory inputs from the world can occur through any of the six primary sensory modalities at any time. The important thing is to first develop the capacity to feel the deeper meanings inside any of the sensory modalities, second to seek their meanings, and third to craft congruent responses.

We move through a sea filled with currents of sensory stimuli every waking moment of our lives. What we normally perceive of that rich sensorial input is incredibly tiny. More to the point, the meanings within those sensory flows are as numberless as the sensory inputs themselves. And we perceive only a tiny amount of them. Nevertheless, we can increase the gating channels that reduce those flows and thus take in increasingly large amounts of meaning-filled sensory stimuli.

we can become sensitive to the touch of the world upon

We can begin to directly interact with the meanings that flow into us from the world every minute of every day of our lives. Those meanings are directly related to what is happening in the world around us, in the communication between plants, the intelligence of animals, the functioning of Gaia.

and every organism on this planet has sensory gating, and the ability to increase it when needed, we are not alone in this

Once sensory gating channels are expanded, the organism can take in more meanings, and the increased knowledge opens up significant new avenues of behavior, response, and innovation. That is the reason that mechanisms exist in every organism (and throughout the ecosystems of the Earth) for the expansion of sensory gating channels; the reason why there is no “normal” setting for gating channels in a population; the reason why some people have gating channels so tremendously open. The very functioning of the world depends on it.