Zero: The Happy State of You
As you read the following descriptions, imagine the inner workings of your body and mind. Imagine the iceberg which consists primarily in what is below the surface of the water.
The system described in the 12 Phases™ is the part of you that is deep, while what you choose consciously is relevant in the environment we live in - the physical world.
Your ability to move through life from the autonomy of your DNA is biological, first.
As thinking and reasoning creatures, we also create strategies to advance priorities held in our hearts and minds - the truest, most powerful motivation we generate.
The 12 Phases™ and the Theory of Unconscious Response™ describe a deep, bio-psychological system that protects you as a distinct individual.
Although my studies began in 1998, current research about the brain and functions of the mind supply varied scientific bases that support my observations.
Most influential is the work and writings of prominent neuroscientist Antonio Damasio at the University of Southern California, along with Hanna Damasio’s discoveries in brain imaging.
A close second to neuroscience is the innovative work in devising a method for identifying life on other planets by chemist Lee Cronin and astrophysicist Sara Imari Walker. This team focuses on physical evidence of living systems.
Beginning at Zero
This blog will be a journey that begins at “zero” - a state of equilibrium in your whole organism, before the not-unusual disruptions you will encounter in life.
We will follow the biology of your non-conscious organism as it prepares conditions that prepare the mind to make choices conducive to your survival as an individual.
Behavior in your organism occurs before and independent of your conscious intention because of the biological mandate to survive.
Professor Damasio thoroughly explains the function of this mechanism, called homeostasis, that is common to all living organisms. In humans, homeostasis demands action to address personal discomforts, both physical and emotional.
Everyday equilibrium
To understand the state of you at “zero,” look closer at your life on a typical day.
Zero is the state of normalcy; all is as you expect it to be.
This allow you to consider what direction to take, or to refrain from acting.
It also allows conscious deliberation of your priorities in any given situation.
Conscious deliberation can happen in an instant when the background of your life is constant but may be moving in some direction.
There are two flows in your life: one is the trend of life rising in the community around you; the other, is the living flow of growth and development in you as a distinct person.
At any point in time, the flow of life in the shared environment around you may move toward your personal priorities or away from them.
The efforts you make to turn situations toward your priorities can be slight, or may require focused attention and engagement with others, maybe to set forth the merits of your preferences over the status quo.
As long as you are at peace with the daily grind, even with its challenges, you are in a homeostatic state - a happy equilibrium.
You confidently manage the developments in your life and are able to make satisfactory gains toward your intended goals.
So, homeostasis is not an external experience where nothing is required of you, and you spend your days sitting under a beach umbrella. Homeostasis is the drive that keeps you alive and advancing as an individual, from your DNA and into the world around you.
Zero also means that autonomy is in place; that is, that the world according to you is not in jeopardy.
The autonomous world is within you, and it is the engine that drives your autonomous motivation as you live and work.
Damasio observes that, neurologically, our organisms behaves the way bacteria do, moving about freely in our environments, evaluating the contents.
Like bacteria, we also look for what would increase our strength and health, and acquire various elements as benefits - or reject them as having no advantage.
Damasio further explains that, in the human organism, body and mind are one and the information is received and translated to your mind in a way that is useful you.
In the 12 Phases™ and the Theory of Unconscious Response™, evidence of strategies in your organism can be found in physiological and unconscious responses to the processes of survival.
Storms, mild and turbulent
The state of equilibrium - Zero - is not being a listless body at rest; it is dynamic and active.
At Zero, you manage change well, and the stresses of living are not unusually taxing, manageable by your natural abilities and initiative.
All things considered, you are content and not distressed.
This is Zero. This is homeostasis in humans. This is the calm before the storm.
When your personal state of equilibrium is disrupted, it could be something typical, like a difference of opinion with a coworker, partner, or a disobedient child.
A typical disturbance in our lives can upset your equilibrium briefly or it can ruin your day, to the point that you lose your ability to manage your emotions.
Levels of stress vary by your perception of and response to mental or physical discomfort.
Your ability to rise above everyday disturbances probably has everything to do with past successes or failures and how deeply your organism is affected.
How your organism is affected is a matter of quality of life. But again, living organisms, human and otherwise, are compelled to return to homeostasis - optimal conditions for your particular body and mind.
This is the most important consideration: you alone retain the entire history of your life experiences. You alone are the sole judge of what aligns with priorities unconsciously formed in your history of personal successes and failures.
The 12 Phases™ in the Theory of Unconscious Response™ describe the process by which your organism moves beyond disruption toward homeostasis.
Your non-conscious organism moves with the mandate of homeostasis, and your unconscious response to that movement is felt in your experience - body and mind.
It's a long way from body to mind
I highly recommend you read Damasio's books to help your imagine the paths of communication between body and mind. These are features of your organism, apart from consciousness.
Damasio is especially eloquent and comprehensive in his book, The Strange Order of Things.
Much of the understanding represented in the 12 Phases™ and the Theory of Unconscious Response™ came from introspection, and Damasio explains the neurological facts of my observations.
Until subjective experience can be tested scientifically, Damasio says we have to move forward by the plausibility of hypothesis - what is intuitively sound to you, without scientific study.
In other words, as a fellow human, you can judge whether what I describe as inherently human seems to be true in your experience, and you can accept my reasoning.
While it is true that there is a physical manifestation of each phase, a test of the 12 Phases™ is a test of the system and its specific sequence.
Subjectively reporting that the twelve phases actually occur in your own internal experience must depend on what I define in my discovery and observations.
As an experience common to humans, our organisms carry the kind of physical data that can eventually be verified because of the parallel description in Damasio’s explanations.
From Zero, through disruption, to homeostasis
The route from body to brain to mind, according to my observations is this:
1. The vital force of life is present; you are alive.
Your organism is active, exhibiting specific qualities you were born with.
Those specific qualities are fully present in your organism at birth, and the process of development and maturation is the process at work while you live, with a potential lifespan of 120 years.
If this force of life leaves you, it is the end of your life in the physical reality.
2. The vital force has an effect on your organism according to the imperative of homeostasis.
Let's say that the first state of homeostasis is the instant you were born.
Even if you arrive with defects, the moment you pass into the world as an individual, you are a perfect example of a human.
We know from many accounts of people who live with disabilities, that better definitions of "normal" and "able" are made by a state of mind, not body.
Athletes who compete in the Paralympics demonstrate superior minds and strength of spirit and will.
Rudy Garcia-Tolson. Born with several birth defects, including a club foot, webbed fingers, and a cleft lip and palate, Garcia-Tolson is a four-time Paralympic medalist and accomplished runner, swimmer, and cyclist. He became the first double above-knee amputee to complete an Ironman triathlon in 2009.
Katie Holloway. Born without a right fibula and with the lower part of her leg amputated before age two, Holloway is a former U.S. Women's Sitting Volleyball player. She was named Best Spiker at the 2012 London Paralympics.
Trischa Zorn-Hudson. Born with a genetic eye condition that left her blind, Zorn-Hudson is the most successful Paralympic athlete of all time, winning 55 medals over seven Paralympics.
Simone Barlaam. Born with coxa vara, a hip condition, and congenital hypoplasia in his right femur, Barlaam is an accomplished swimmer who competes in the S9 category for athletes with limb loss.
Blake Leeper. Born without legs, Leeper is a multi-record-holding Paralympic track-and-field champion.
Zheng Tao. Known as the "armless swimmer", Tao won a gold medal in the 100m backstroke S6 at the 2012 London Paralympics.
3. The effect of the vital force of life is felt in the body.
This is a physiological effect of the nervous system and body information instantly transmitted to the brain.
Damasio traces this neurological activity through the body to the brain which processes experiences of the organism in its environment.
Damasio makes it clear that feelings, as signals from the brain back to the body proper, are different from emotions.
The body then uses specific resources that can address malfunctions, and these are applied in a self-organizing, orderly, and timely manner to promote healing.
4. Damasio describes how the brain then delivers to the mind images that can specify the exact location of a physical disorder and what that disorder feels like.
In the hippocampus, the integration of these images and the subsequent experiences in mind and body result in memories.
I have experienced this neurological process as impressions of messages from my gut that matched symptoms and concluded that, if I were to stop eating cheese, years-long affliction in my skin would stop.
There was no scientific evidence available to me at the time to create the confidence in this unproven fact that I felt in my mind. The power of autonomous motivation carried me through months adjusting to this perceived fact.
One day, I caught myself smiling, feeling the warmth of the sun on my skin. I took a deep, full breath of fresh air, and was surprised to discover that I was in perfect health.
Conscious intention results in change to our experience in the physical reality.
Damasio's explanation provided scientific fact to undergird my autonomous, unverified experience.
Likewise, you are convinced of the facts in your autonomously motivated direction. You do not need external verification to pursue goals imagined in your autonomous world.
This is where free will is powerful and active, whether the choice is to take on or decline to engage in the challenges presented by this subconscious conclusion. Your own mind will defend or convict you.
To recap ...
This was a journey from a state of equilibrium in your organism - homeostasis before disruption -
toward the way your organism gauges the level of threat in a disturbance,
to an analysis of the path from body to brain to mind,
ending at the comprehensive picture of personal autonomy expressed in free will.
Unconscious autonomous motivation follows the pattern of the biological system and the psychological strategies of the mind,
and functions solely according to the DNA design of the owner of the organism.
It is a "program" of sorts that selects those bits from your life experience that enhance you as an autonomous entity.
The development from birth to death based in DNA is a critical factor in proving the 12 Phases™ as inherent in human nature.
Retrospection allows you to see the logic and natural fact of development.
It is a self-evident fact that if you are of an age capable of conscious intention,
the origin of your life is in the moment of conception - the biological event that initiated your development to this point in your life.
This is irrefutable.
Based on this origin of a unique human being, one that cannot be replicated, the 12 Phases™ describes the process
that returns your organism to that comfortable state of being yourself.
This seems very much a condition described by homeostasis.
The state of being yourself is not attained through efforts of the conscious mind and intention; rather, you grow according to your DNA, and then you display uniqueness in words and actions.
Being yourself is a continual transformation as a function of your biological and psychological development over your lifetime.
The condition of being individual is not hypothetical; what is hypothetical is the process by which autonomy is maintained, as described by the 12 Phases™.
These terms are are synonymous in the Theory of Unconscious Response™: Homeostasis, a comfortable state of being yourself; the static definition of each individual by DNA; and autonomous motivation -
all these are assumed as the basis upon which 12 Phases™ operate, just as they are assumed as surrounding the function of your organs.
The 12 Phases™ attempts to show that DNA of your organism dictates how the state of you is preserved and continues to develop
while you roll and toss about with change, yet stable in your organism.
Your organism responds with a very basic form of natural selection:
it selects what benefits it can acquire out of experience that fit with your DNA in such a way that you become more of yourself.
The natural phenomenon of twelves phases, described in the 12 Phases™ and the Theory of Unconscious Response™, is a living system that assimilates change to your advantage.
Next, we'll look at Phase One of the 12 Phases™ - what happens when homeostasis is disrupted.
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Referenced in this blog:
“Qualitative Study of the Theory of Unconscious Response™”
Antonio Damasio, The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Culture.
Assembly Theory, Lee Cronin, Sara Walker, et. al (to be discussed in future blogs).
Paralympic Games. An AI overview in answer to search phrase, "famous Paralympic athletes and their physical conditions".