Phase One: Secrets of Surviving

One of my favorite TV series is Will Trent on ABC.

Georgia Bureau of Investigation (CBI) Special Agent Will Trent always shows up in a three-piece suit and always uses his full title.

Despite his background, he has earned respect for his unique ability to solve cases quickly.

Special Agent Will Trent has a keen eye for reading crime scenes and solve cases with clues that others overlook.

No one can follow his ability to connect seemingly unrelated pieces, to the point that his team stands back while he works, and then asks, What do you see, Will?

But Special Agent Will Trent has a secret in his method.

No one notices that he doesn't take notes, but they do notice his extraordinary memory and sharp mind.

His perspective is unique, low to the ground and far sighted.

You start to wonder... how does he do it?

Special Agent Will Trent is actually working overtime, all day long... He struggles with dyslexia and abandonment issues.

Recently, I have been working with a woman who has suffered with dyslexia her whole life.

Eva (not her real name) relies on visuals and memorizing to overcome an inability to read as others do.

She admits that, growing up, she was angry most of the time,

frustrated by constant miscommunication, learning problems she could not identify, and confusion caused by guessing at words.  

To ease her stress, she would pull a community of friends and family around her with whom she felt accepted and understood.

In her job as an administrative planner in a national agency, Eva had to write instructions so people could follow her orders. 

She tells how it took years and much back-and-forth wrangling until her team figured out what her stumbling words meant for them.

Incredibly, the system that she worked out attracted regional attention for its unusual efficiency. Her system became the standard in her state. 

Eva was in constant survival mode, and like Special Agent Will Trent, she found herself at the head, not of at the tail end.

What Eva did is similar to chasing homeostasis.

Maybe it all began with the realization that her inability to read prevented her from having what others take for granted.

The shock of such a realization can stun the mind...

as if you turned a corner and ran straight into a wall. Suddenly, confidence in your capabilities vanishes, and in that moment, life looks hopeless.

The instant of that impact releases intuition, a spontaneous, unthought action whose sole purpose is to save you from dying, right at that moment.

That moment in the 12 Phases™ is like the moment during sex when conception occurs.

Your body and mind are engrossed in the distractions of your senses. You cannot feel it when sperm pierces egg. And yet...

Phase One of the 12 Phases™ is a microcosm of its own complexity. A seed is planted and immediately there is life.

A seed planted in the ground is the same. In the 12 Phases™, Phase One is the beginning of that seed's future.

In Nature, growth is growth is growth...

Personal growth is specific to one individual and is marked by changes in form and strength.

Growth begins in darkness and safety before the fragile sprout breaks into the surface.

For Eva - for each of us - the unexpected event that startled body and mind is its own solution; our organism starts pursuing homeostasis - the happy state of you.

 Naturally high

There's something of a natural high when life conforms to you. You want more of it, right?

The ability to perceive a perfect fit to you lies in having a fixation on the beyond...

Imagination plays with hope and despair, depending on the conditions around the seed.

But, optimal or dismal, life finds a way through obstacles to your happiness. This is the "imperative" of homeostasis; you have no choice but to live, happy or not.

As a human organism, you can process the sensations in your body, the reports of your internal condition.

Health (homeostasis) calls to your body when you're sick or uncomfortable. You are not inclined to accept being unwell, you want to return to wellness and comfort.

Imagine the separation between your conscious experience and the system within you that works in life in your favor ...

Even times of despair are temporary as feelings in the body become more insistent than your emotions. You may be forced to rest, or use what you need to get better - or grace may show up just before despair pushes you over the edge.

Shortcuts, tips, hacks... whatever you call them, we want them.

You want something that lets you move a little quicker upward on your life path, something that separates you from the masses

The 0.04% genetic difference between you and the rest of humanity makes it appear that your steps forward are too few and too far apart.

But you feel those small steps deeply because they are yours alone.

In homeostasis, you are at home in your universe.

Anything that disturbs your peace is perceived by your organism as a threat -

not usually a threat of bodily harm, but a threat to the borders that define you.

Your organism is on border patrol 24/7, protecting and restoring your inborn autonomy, defined by your DNA.

Phase One in the 12 Phases™ is a disturbance to homeostasis so great that, for a moment, your conscious mind is stunned.

Your consciousness relies on the world of your environment - what you learn to do to maintain body and soul in work and in relationships with others.

In that moment, the impact is actually a light dawning on your unconscious, in your organism.

You do not experience Phase One consciously because spontaneous behavior is instinctive, getting you out of trouble.

Wait - what?

This may seem wrong or startling to your mind right now because we generally believe we control our lives through mental processes and choice made from reasoning options.

This is partially true, and only when our environment is predictable and your chosen objectives have consequence in the physical reality. 

The 12 Phases™ is what happens when a new fact enters your life and will probably stay, altering what you prefer toward what life is; such as...

the impact when someone close to you dies; a chance encounters with a person who will become your life partner; getting unexpected news that you're pregnant at age 16 - or 47.

The conscious mind, with all that it knows of the world of your life experiences, has no precedent for the unexpected.

Life interruptions of this sort cannot be brushed off; your mind must find a place to put them.

Unexpected events do not overwhelm your organism - it processes them.

That process has twelve phases, from absorbing change to recovering autonomous motivation - the will to initiate.

In the normal rhythm of everyday life, we feel in control of our successes and endure our failures.

When something out of your control impacts your mind, there is nothing between you and the crisis.

In the absence of intellectual dominance, you are actually set free in a more powerful and basic way.

Intuition "thinks" for you and acts spontaneously to protect you.

Intuition, as viewed in the 12 Phases™, is a natural, primitive ability to use latent strengths with the kind of confidence you normally built through thought and conscious intention.

The snap of electric life force ensures actions that manage to keep your body afloat through the impact.

Your unconscious response comes straight from the accumulated wisdom of your life, even from childhood.

Whatever your response is, it is true and honest, without the interference of values that have to do with life in the physical world.

My first experience with Phase One was an unexpected event that revealed the generative life within my life.

It happened, and energy appeared in a mundane situation that awakened my body to abruptly speak a perfect - unminded - response to the situation.

Something caused the silver tether between life and me to vibrate. Something significant had awakened in my listless body and mind.

This development was not to be ignored, and I began an investigation in 1998 that continues to this day.

Discovering a life's work

The first experience was an anomaly, so I watched and waited for such a thing to happen again.

I wasn't looking for circumstance; I wanted that instant surge of energy behind what erupted in words.

To anyone else, a simple explanation from known psychology would suffice.

But I wasn't interested in explanations. I needed more of that natural, raw energy that moved my body, basically without my intention - without, even, my willingness.

When people ask me to give an example of unconscious response in Phase One, no example I make for them has worked.

This is for one reason: Phase One is something that can only be described from direct, firsthand experience.

When it does happen to you, you are unaware of it because it is an unconscious bodily response.

But later, of course, you know what you did, just not why. By following the trajectory from your unconscious response, you can see that in the impact, a seed was planted that grew into your future.

Your Phase One response to impact is good information about yourself...

When you behave intuitively in a crisis, or at the moment of an epiphany in the mind, the way you are startled into action shows your heart's mind.

Your heart is comfortable receiving information from your heart's mind, otherwise, you would believe that every decision you make is the rational working of your brain.

In your "heart of heart" you know that you know what is true - at least, what is necessary and relevant to your natural life purpose.

Having a deadened heart, my reasoning mind had found no good thing in my life history.

The outcome at 46 proved only how many times I had worked by hope and fantasy, not reality.

This surge of unthought power had moved me from heart to body. Mind and emotion played no part in what I blurted out.

For all that fumbling, what came from heart to tongue was pure truth, known in my heart's mind and conveyed outwardly from my heart.

Your heart's mind is logical, and its nonconscious reasoning is sound, the result of 9,999 failed trials of imagined truth.

The 10,000th conclusion bypasses reason and arrives at full comprehension, delivering the stores of your unconscious directly to your heart and moves body and mind to make truth self-evident.

The 12 Phases™ follows the development of the seed encased in the unexpected as it moves up and out into your life.

And yet, there is no need for you to study this self-regulating system any more than it is necessary for you to study the physiology of your organs - unless you're interested.

Having written this, I can now review my explanations to sort all that streamed from my subconscious to the keyboard.

Unpacking the twelve phases, in the end, has to fit together as one system, the way it occurs in life.

These descriptions must have an order that can be translated into a research protocol, and we will need examples from many lives to gather the kind of proofs science requires.

Antonio Damasio's neurology and the idea of our organism is, so far, the best indication that science might discover the twelve phases apart from my observations.

Your conclusions ...

It remains to be seen whether you will recognize the twelve phases as a natural phenomenon; you have to recognize it in your own experience.

There are too many questions raised here, which makes fascinating occupation for the kind of minds whose life purpose is to find answers to unanswered questions about Nature.

Placing my reasoning here in the blog is as close to a test of my work as I can manage with my limited qualifications and resources.

I emulate Professor Damasio's way of reasoning in steps to examine the parts of the system, still retaining the whole.

The connection between Nature and the 12 Phases™ is in how your creativity and initiative can be explained by autonomous motivation, the process and product of the 12 Phases™.

Please stay with me.

_____

Referenced in this blog:

The established authority of Antonio Damasio in describing the intertwined physiology of body and mind.