Go into your heart and see if you find what I find... That all the hurts of the world are Wounds of Division.

We were made to live in and express the profound Unity that ancient wisdom traditions tell us and now the new science is confirming–that we are connected to all of humanity and to all of life at the most fundamental level. We can't bear separation, but not understanding our Wounds we go to extreme lengths to numb the pain, spend all our efforts trying to escape it, and inflicts horrors on each other thinking they are justified by what we've suffered.

Apart from physical discomfort, the pain of separation is the first pain we experience early in life. It is a profound pain, and it grows steadily. It is an intra-psychic wound. And the cruelest irony is that we unknowingly re-inflict it and live in social structures that deepen it.

How can we heal the Wounds of Division? Again, go into your heart and see if you find what I find... That we encounter divisiveness outside us in response to divided-ness within. The wound is within us before it becomes between us.

The heart heals this pain, a thousand times a day if we let it, if we go there and see what we find..

Or take two and a half minutes and watch this:

The above is the title of my new e-book, available free upon request (like the gifts of your authentic self).

Here is what you can find in the Jewel Tree:

An Invitation from your heart of hearts to live in the freedom of who you are.

"What's Wrong With Me?" looks at why there is so much misery in the world, and the truth we need to know about ourselves.

The Dream of the Tree illuminates the simple way of authenticity.

Identity and Authenticity helps discern the difference between what we think about who we are and the experience of our truth.

Attachment and Connection helps discern the difference between what has a hold on us and what we hold in love.

The Neuroscience of a Whole New World informs the experience of authenticity and offers a glimpse of a more human global civilization beginning to take shape.

Strengths, Weaknesses, and Vulnerability takes us to the heart of opening up to our authenticity.

Judgment and Understanding, The Tree in the Garden moves us through the last and perhaps greatest barrier to living in the freedom of who we are

Wisdom, The Heart's Fix-it Shop brings us to living the promise of the dream

An Afterword brings it all together.


To receive your free copy, email me <frank@appliedcreativethinking.com>

It's a common experience that when we're stressed, we don't think clearly. We forget things because we're rushing or make impulsive decisions because we're anxious. After someone says something upsetting, we either say something we regret later on, or afterward we think of what we wished we'd said. If only we'd had the presence of mind in the moment, but we didn't, because we were stressed.

Brain scrambled
The technical term for how stress impairs our thinking is "cortical inhibition." Stress interferes with the brain's ability to synchronize sensory input and distribute it to the cortex, the area of the brain that controls the functions of conscious deliberation. In a real sense, when we are stressed, our brain gets scrambled.

Foresight
The part of the brain most affected is the frontal cortex, where we get our ability to exercise foresight. This is the home of what are called our executive function skills, things like:

• Self-reflection
• Problem resolution
• Planning
• Goal setting
• Abstract reasoning
• Impulse control

Because these mental functions are complex, they require a greater degree of neural synchronization. It's just not available when we're stressed.

Fight, Flight, or Freeze
Negative emotions that underlie our stress response put our system into a Fight, Flight, or Freeze response. Survival mode, it's put up your fists or run. Either way, evolution decided long ago that we don't need to think when something bad threatens us. Either use teeth and fists or run away.

If neither of those is a good response (your boss said something harsh to you and is waiting for a reply), nature provided another protective reaction: we freeze. This also made sense in evolutionary terms. If a predator threatens, and you can't fight it or run away, you can sometimes survive by playing dead. You may live to think about what to do next time. In the case of your boss, you probably have just enough brain cells left to mutter something sheepish and slink away to stew over the injustice or rework the conversation. Not pleasant, but maybe it means your job survives.

Who's in charge here?
The cortex, the conscious, rational part of the brain that comes back online after we calm down is a thin layer on the outside of the brain. It's an evolutionary newcomer, not always well-connected with the established old-timers in the neighborhood: the emotional and instinctive centers. They're the ones with clout. The circuits going from the emotional centers to the thinking centers are much stronger and more numerous than the circuits going the other way.

It has been a harmful delusion for hundreds of years that we can control unpleasant emotions by just being rational. Reason dances to their tune. They win this struggle, every time.

The Way We Work
So work with the emotions. When we are feeling positive emotions, we experience "cortical facilitation". It feels good, our body likes it (boosts the immune system and balances the hormonal system) and now the emotional centers synchronize the brain as they're designed to do, and the cortex functions smoothly. The result: we think more clearly.

Sounds great, but how do you handle those moments when negative emotions shut down your brain? Army training has a saying, "Under stress, we do not rise to the level of our aspiration. We revert to the level of our training." You have to train yourself in a way of handling stress, so that when you're under stress, you have something to revert to other than Fight, Flight, or Freeze.

Create a positive feedback loop
I like the HeartMath system because it is designed to be used in the moment to stop Fight, Flight, or Freeze, to change your physiological stress response. A quick way to take the edge off stress is to find something to appreciate. Then watch how your thinking starts to light up, and then appreciate that. And then watch more good things happening inside...

Next up: Stress, "Smarts". and the Heart.

ASAP - As Soon As Possible - the mantra that rules people's lives, even as overused short-term thinking is wrecking our world. Maybe we could catch our breath and gain clarity if we focused on a new ASAP - As Simple As Possible - as a way to manage the fire hose of life coming at us.

Simple, But Not Easy
Easy to say, but finding Simplicity is not easy in the mad complexity of accelerating life. It's especially difficult because of a serious limitation in the kind of critical thinking we rely on to make sense of complexity.

I like the explanation of this offered by Dr. David Hawkins in his model of the levels of consciousness in Power vs. Force: The Hidden Determinants of Human Behavior. According to Dr. Hawkins, Reason is a marvelous gift, and a high level of conscious, but not among the highest.

Reason Alone Cannot Discern Essence
"Intellectualizing can become an end in itself. Reason is limited in that it doesn't afford the capacity for the discernment of essence or of the critical point of a complex issue.
Reason does not of itself provide a guide to truth... All philosophical arguments sound convincing on their own... Reason itself, paradoxically is the major block to reaching higher levels of consciousness. Transcending this level is relatively uncommon in our society."

That's a problem. But there is a solution.

The Level Above Reason
According to Hawkins, the level of consciousness above Reason is Love, not as depicted in the mass media, but Love as a state of being...

"...a forgiving, nurturing, and supportive way of relating to the world. Love isn't intellectual and doesn't proceed from the mind; Love emanates from the heart. It has the capacity to lift others and accomplish great feats because of the purity of its motive.
At this level of development, the capacity to discern essence predominates; the core of an issue becomes a center of focus... This ability, often ascribed to intuition, is the capacity for instantaneous understanding without resorting to sequential symbol processing. This apparently abstract phenomenon is in fact quite concrete; it's accompanied by a measurable increase of endorphins in the brain."

And, as we know from HeartMath research, Love and other positive emotions are also accompanied by measurable beneficial changes in heart rhythms, cognitive facilitation, hormonal balance, and immune system function.

Accessing Intuition
More important for the sake of finding Simplicity, HeartMath research also shows that, in a measurable way, the heart, through positive emotions, is our channel for tuning into intuitive information. Intuition is "a process by which information normally outside the range of conscious awareness is perceived by the psychophysiological systems." This is the instantaneous understanding Hawkins was talking about. HeartMath research shows that "the heart and brain, together, are involved in receiving, processing, and decoding intuitive information." But the heart receives the signal first and is the key to developing our intuitive insight. (See "Electrophysiological Evidence of Intuition" at heartmath.org under Research.) 

The Heart, Intuition, and Simplicity
The Heart is the faculty of discernment, our intuitive guide to what's essential, the way to find Simplicity, the new ASAP.

And Simplicity is just the beginning. In Hawkins model, Love is the gateway to the highest levels of consciousness, to Joy, Peace, and Enlightenment. Simple, once you know the way. And easy to access, once you realize the Heart is the key.

A friend who lives in rural NH has a gravel driveway on a steep hillside. Visitors, he told me, try to drive up the slope quickly so they won’t slip on the gravel. But it never works. They spin their wheels, lose traction, and go nowhere (and he has to shovel gravel in the bare spots later). He tells them to slow down, be deliberate, and drive up the slope s l o w l y. That way they get traction and have no trouble getting to the top.

The Human Function Curve
There’s a valuable lesson there for managing dis-traction, or spinning our mental wheels. The human function curve shows there are gravel slopes on both sides of peak performance. (By definition the peak is a place without distraction, if we can get there.)



The human function curve is based on extensive research, much of it in military training. The curve shows that performance increases with increased challenge and arousal, but only up to a point. At that point, we are in maximum efficiency for a while. Push beyond that point, and every increase in challenge decreases performance, ultimately leading to system breakdown.

Performance deteriorates before we notice it
The size of the curve varies with persons and circumstances, but we all live somewhere on this curve. And we all have a similar blind spot to the early stages of deteriorating performance. The peak has turned to a gravel covered slope, our mental wheels are losing traction, and we didn’t notice. My friend’s visitors (most of them) wouldn’t want to speed down a steep gravel slope, but in life we do this all the time.

Stuck on the Slopes
Dis-traction is the mind racing ahead of the body and the emotions. We have to slow down and be deliberate (from the Latin word libra, balance or scales). We gain traction by getting in touch with our at-traction, the emotions that keep us in balance, replenish us, and draw us back toward our goal.

Gaining Traction Up-hill
Dis-traction also keeps us from getting up the slope in the first place. There is loose gravel in the challenge ahead until the challenge is embraced. For a highly distractible mind it doesn’t seem worth the effort, so why bother? The remedy is not will power (unless the challenge level is really low).  Will power is just another form of gunning your engine, a guaranteed way to start spinning wheels of dis-traction. Go slow, be deliberate, get in touch with the emotions that at-tract you to your goal, and then choose to engage rather than be driven by dis-traction.

Emotional At-traction
The root of trac means to draw: dis-tract is drawing away; at-tract is drawing to. Emotions do all the drawing. Managing emotion is managing attention. It is the way to hit more peaks and spend less time on Dis-traction's slippery slopes.

To optimize means to make the best of anything. In a business sense, it means to plan and carry out an activity with maximum efficiency. But in some situations, the planning/goal setting process in optimization itself is not only inefficient, it creates problems.

The Optimization Paradigm is simple and elegant:

1.    Formulate clear objectives (usually expressed as SMART goals: Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic, Timely)

2.    Prioritize the goals

3.    Order tasks according to:
       How much they contribute to the priorities
       How much resources they take

4.    Focus on high priority, low resource tasks

Optimization has worked well often enough; it has demonstrable benefits over lack of planning, and it certainly has a devoted following in management thinking. But it doesn’t work always, and the times when it doesn’t work seem to be increasing as the world accelerates.

When Goals Go Bad
In fact, there is a growing backlash in business literature against the whole culture of goal setting and SMART goals. “Goals Gone Wild” (according to Max Bazeman of Harvard Business School) will have a negative impact on other unmeasured outcomes. “When we factor in the consistent findings that stretch and specific goals both narrow focus on a limited set of behaviors while increasing risk-taking and unethical behavior, their simple implementation can become a vice.”  (see "Goal-setting Gone Bad" and "Goals Gone Wild: The Systematic Side Effects of Over-Prescribing Goals." HBS Working Papers)

When Optimization is a Good Thing
Goals work, according to Bazeman, when you know exactly what behaviors you want,  aren’t concerned about 'secondary' behaviors, and there is no risk of people cutting ethical corners to meet their stretch goals.

Basically, the Optimization Paradigm works in stable situations, that is, where there is a given range of possibilities, you can choose the best one, and you have team players. So, when you have all the information you will need to know, things aren’t changing very much,  and you can expect collaboration, optimize away!

Goals, Optimization, and Knowledge Work
What about the rest of the time, like in everyday knowledge work? From one day to the next, are your priorities and resources stable and unchanging? Or is it more likely that they are ill defined and change constantly? If that is the case, optimization will be an exercise in frustration. It will create more stress than it relieves: it will increase worry as our priorities keep shifting, and guilt and disorientation because we can’t follow our own plans. Plus more stress every time our plans bump into other peoples plans. Too many changes are coming at us for planning to manage it all.

What Can We Do?
If optimization can make difficult situations more difficult, what can we do? What’s better than optimization? There is a shift in thinking that will help us, and it starts by looking the meaning of another word – intrinsic – and applying it to motivation (which our goals are supposed to provide) and the environment (which our goals are supposed to order).
Intrinsic means belonging to a thing by its nature, the inherent or essential nature of a thing (see my blog article “The New ASAP – As SIMPLE As Possible” about discerning the essential point of a complex situation)

Get Intrinsic
Intrinsic motivation (Bazeman again) trumps performance goals. “Research shows that an even stronger effect than goals is intrinsic motivation, having individuals do an activity because they find the work rewarding in and of itself. Given that goals can undermine this intrinsic value of work, sometimes the best solution is no specific stretch goal at all or at the very least mastery or learning goals.” Make the goals personal, make them matter to the person who is to achieve them.

What about the day-to-day environment? How can we restore a sense of control to that? Get intrinsic. Structure the environment so that the intrinsically difficult mental functions – information processing, reminders, and action triggers – are delegated to the environment. The environment is a reliable place to store information, stimulate new actions, and provide feedback about how effective you are. It is more reliable than our brains for these tasks. Having the environment function as an “extended mind” allows us to sustain and coordinate a whole complex train of activities toward our goals (which should be learning or mastery goals that tap intrinsic motivation).

To Optimize, or Not to Optimize?
This kind of intrinsic functioning is very robust. It is supported by cognitive science and current management research. Is there any place left for optimization? Bazeman thinks so, “…I see the creating of optimal systems as a key leadership function.” Optimal systems are intrinsically oriented toward uplifting practices, those that tap intrinsic qualities. Create goals for the system. Get intrinsic for the people and the environment. Optimization, in this systemic sense, may be the best strategy.

It seems like the world is spinning out of control: wars, tsunamis, the threat of meltdown–nuclear, financial or environmental, or all of the above and more. It certainly can look like the worst of times, But there are also signs that out of the chaos a new era is being born, a more human era.

Humanism was the inspiration for the Renaissance, where it meant the study of Classical Latin and Greek literature and the ethical philosophy behind it. In the social sciences, Humanism means the affirmation of a human nature.

"The New Humanism" is the title of a recent op-ed piece in the NY Times by David Brooks <http://nyti.ms/h8tLdZ>

Brooks believes that a number of policy failures he's covered over the years stem from a single failure: "reliance on an overly simplistic view of human nature. We have a prevailing view in our society–not only in the policy world, but in many spheres–that we are divided creatures. Reason, which is trustworthy, is separate from the emotions, which are suspect. Society progresses to the extent that reason can suppress the passions.

This has created a distortion in our culture. We emphasize things that are rational and conscious and are inarticulate about the processes down below. We are really good at talking about material things but bad a talking about emotion."

The New Humanism that Brooks wants us to know about comes from research in fields like psychology, sociology, behavioral economics, and others. He cites some of its key insights. "First, the unconscious parts of the mind are most of the mind, where many of the most impressive feats of thinking take place. Second, emotion is not opposed to reason;  our emotions assign value to things and are the basis of reason. Finally, we are not individuals who form relationships. We are social animals, deeply interpenetrated with one another, who emerge out of relationships."

Many more useful insights if you read the article. If only the policy makers of the world could begin to use these insights.

I used the term "New Renaissance" for this entry, because that is how Edward de Bono describes the new way of thinking he has proposed, a way of thinking based on understanding how neural networks in the brain actually function (de Bono was an MD with a PhD in psychology and physiology). This new way of thinking corrects the one-sideness of the over-rationalized view of human nature (the Old Humanism) we inherited from the Greeks and that dominates our traditional thinking culture.

The essence of de Bono's thinking system is a new kind of logic that he calls Water Logic, the logic of perception and creativity. You can see elements fo these perceptual and creative elements in Brooks article, and I'll be exploring the topic of Water Logic in further blog entries.

L. Frank Baum wrote long before we knew how neural networks in the brain actually work, but in The Wizard of Oz, the beauty of creative insight revealed something essential about the "inner working" of judgment thinking, something  that science would confirm decades later.

Everyone knows the climactic scene when the four friends come back with the witch's broomstick, and yet the terrifying wizard won't grant their wishes. Toto, sensing that something else is going on, pulls back a curtain to reveal that the real wizard is just a "humbug", a man throwing levers and switches and hollering into a microphone.

In the same way that Dorothy and her friends were awed and intimidated by The Great and Powerful wizard, we are awed and intimidated by judgment thinking--by logic, argument, and critical thinking that has a strong tendency to become adversarial. It is "I'm Right, You're Wrong" thinking, and it rules our legal and political cultures, scientific and educational establishments, and our language. It is, as far as most people seem to be aware, the essence of what thinking is.

Now here's where we get to pull back the curtain and reveal the secret about the neural under-pinning of judgment thinking. It is based on emotion. Critical reasoning is often the rationalized working out of what belief and desire have determined beforehand. That is why people are rarely persuaded to change their mind on the basis of logic. They are persuaded by emotion. The intellectual fireworks of judgment thinking are set off by feelings and needs (often unrecognized or denied). Judgment thinking works to satisfy those needs, but in tragic or dysfunctional ways when it is disconnected from what's really happening inside us.

It is possible that we can look at evidence in a new way and be persuaded to adopt new conclusions, but critical thinking rarely takes us there. It is creative thinking that opens up new neural pathways and new perceptions. Judgment thinking reinforces old pathways. However, it is very good at making those old tracks look inescapable, at over-awing and intimidating, at creating an impression of being all-seeing and all-knowing, of being "right".

Dorothy calls the man behind the curtain "a very bad man." He answers that he is in fact a very good man, just a very bad wizard. That is true about judgment thinking: it is a very good servant, but a really bad master. And we are ingrained in our culture to serving this master of illusion, to believing that being right is all important, and that bowing down to this domineering authority is how we will get what we want.

What we want from life is not what wizards offer as rewards or punishments for our compliance; it is what we get and give as equals.

When the real man behind the curtain granted the wishes of the four petitioners, he only gave them a way of seeing that they already had what they were seeking. His methods were creative, not critical. He helped them escape from self-judgment, from self-critical belief that they were deficient, lacking in an essential part of themselves that some "wizard" could give them. They had to escape the influence of the bad wizard before they could receive the free creative gifts of the good man.

Perhaps you can remember when you are afflicting yourself with negative self-judgment: home is who you are, and there is no place like home.

How the HeartMath System for stress reduction and emotional balance is different from traditional stress management focused on relaxation.

Examples of coherence in Finding Nemo

Dylan Thomas wrote his best-known poem, "Do not go gentle into that good night," when his father was dying. Thomas was 39 and would himself die a year later. It is a powerful poem, perhaps Thomas' masterpiece.

I can't touch the artistry, but I don't share the sentiment of the poem, the rebellious, defiant attitude toward the extinction of life. To me the anticipation of death seems a time of fulfillment. As I contemplate my own father's imminent passing over, I have been "tweaking" the words of Thomas' poem, and I offer here the original and, in love to my father who shares this faith in what awaits us on the other side, my own "alternative ending."

Do not go gentle into that good night, by Dylan Thomas

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rage at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightening
They do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright their frail deeds
might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight
And learned, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.


Do not go fearful into that good night, by Frank Medlar, with apologies to Dylan Thomas

Do not go fearful into that good night,
Old age should learn and be sage 'til close of day;
Be sage, sage, because undying is the light.

The wise ones to the end know dark and light,
Therefore their words are unforced and enlighten;
They do not go fearful into that good night.

Good mien, a last wave goodbye, crying how light our frail knees
Alight and dance along the green way;
Be sage, sage because undying is the light.

Wild love, that taught with sanguine sudden might
And turned to bade all grief be on its way;
Do not go fearful into that good night.

Great then, near death, who leads by kindly light
Kind eyes now raised in meeting eternal day;
Be sage, sage because undying is the light.

With you, my father, on the stair to the glad height,
In verse I bless the vows of these feast years, and we pray,
Do not go fearful into that good night,
Be sage, sage because undying is the light.