Tami Simon: You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today, I speak with Dee Joy Coulter. Dee is a nationally recognized neuroscience pioneer with a master’s degree in special education from the University of Michigan and a doctorate in neurological studies and holistic education from the University of Northern Colorado. In addition to 14 years as a special education teacher and program director, she served on the faculty of Naropa University for 20 years.
With Sounds True, Dee has released a new book, Original Mind: Uncovering Your Natural Brilliance, and the audio program A Guided Tour of Brain Development.
In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Dee and I spoke about how to regain the ability to experience the world as a baby does, and why we’d want to do this. We talked about how the creative mind values emptiness and an open focus, and the importance for creativity in being able to tolerate ambiguity. We also talked about what we can learn from orality-based cultures that were pre-literate. Finally, how to enjoy thinking as a rich, multidimensional experience. Here’s my conversation on uncovering your natural brilliance with Dee Joy Coulter.
Dee, your new book is called Original Mind. To begin with, can you tell us, what do you mean by this term, “original mind?”
Dee Joy Coulter: Oh, that’s a very funny first question, because it is a mystery to me as well. It was a title by committee, in a sort of way. I had more guidance toward the subtitle. The title, Original Mind, I think originated because we begin with the blankness of a baby’s mind. It’s not that they’re a blank slate, exactly—but in terms of what their mind is doing, it’s fresh and empty. Then, at the very end, I’m asking people to entertain the possibility of dropping all of he wonderful skills they will have developed and cultivated and reclaimed to see what it’s like to have an empty mind once again.
So, it does have a beginning and an ending that is as empty as the original mind.
TS: Let’s talk a little bit about what a baby’s experience is like—and how do we know that? I mean, how do we know that a baby’s experience is fresh and empty in each moment?
DJC: Part of the way they do that is they look to see whether a baby fixes their gaze on something—even two, three-week old babies. They’ll rivet their eyes onto something that catches them, and then they’ll avert their gaze [from] something that’s distressing. The things that distress them aren’t images as we know them. They’re “motion paths”—is the best thing to call it.
Would you like to hear a couple things they’ve done?
TS: Yes!
DJC: One of the things that intrigued me early on was that they would take a black backdrop and somebody wearing a black leotard and darkened extremities so that everything was black. Then they’d put these little LED lights on the joints and have the person walk across the screen. So all you’d have on the screen would be these squiggly lines from the elbows and the wrists and the hips and the knees, and so on. They’d undulate like [a] musical score, in a way.
And the baby would be fascinated with that. But if you took that and messed up—let’s say, an elbow joint, so that it protruded forward and back—instead of backward and back to the midline—that would be very distressing and the baby would look away.
Now, that’s not an image. That’s just the energy field, you might say, of an image.
They could do the same thing with very, very young babies looking at pictures of coeds or fellows in college—where they’d pick, “Here are 100 pictures, and would you show me the 10 that you think are the most handsome or beautiful.” They’d ask the college students [this]. And they’d take those pictures that were extreme glamour or—we’d say—lacking in beauty, and they’d show them alternately on the screen. The babies would rivet to the ones that the college students thought were attractive and avert their gaze from the ones that weren’t attractive.
You say, “Whoa, they can already tell what the standard for beauty is.” But they can’t be looking at the face, because they can’t recognize faces yet. They’re looking at the configuration of light patterns bouncing off of the faces.
You could take a mask and put it in front of a baby. And [if] it had two eyes and maybe the mouth and [then] the nose below it? Very distressing. You put it in the proper proportions, and they’re fine.
So, we get it that they’re seeing the configuration behind the images. We then could say, “OK, there’s a way to process energy and there’s a way to process events.” Or: the field and the form. All of physics will say the same thing. Anything we look at—if we could return to just the vibratory information—which is what the brain takes in anyway—and catch it before it turns it into a perception, we’d have something pretty darn special.
The first part of the book begins with the story of a monk I encountered when I was teaching at Naropa. He was new to this country, young, and very interested in neurology. So he wanted to know what happened when he looked at a flower. And I thought, “OK.” He didn’t speak English—or at least he didn’t let on that he did. His translator was the one who was stuck with the job.
So, I tried to explain how the brain processes images. You could tell he got bored so fast that I couldn’t finish my sentences. He shook his head and he said, “No.” In Tibetan, he said again, “I look. I see a flower the first time.” Then he turned his head and said, “I look. I see a flower first time. What’s happening?”
And oh my gosh—he means every time he looks at the flower, it’s not there until it comes into form. So he could slow that process down from the energy field or the wave patterns and then watch it turn into an image. I think his biggest question was, “What’s the matter with us that we solidify things so deeply that we don’t get that what’s out there—at a very deep level—is just the energy field?”
How do you teach people that turn everything—it’s like King Midas’s touch. Everything we touch turns to gold. Well, everything we touch solidifies and has a name. And if it doesn’t have a name, we can’t see it. Pretty soon, we can’t see what we don’t already know.
Young children still have the capacity to see what they don’t know. They say, “What’s that? What’s that? What’s that?” But we don’t say that.
So the baby is teaching us—and if we go reclaim those skills, it’s teaching us how to see the world before it got named—before it took form. That’s what some of the great artists were trying to do, too—especially in the 70s. Visual artists that would have canvasses that were blank, black, or blue, or white. Three different artists choosing three different colors. But they just wanted people to stare until the color came to them instead of going out and saying, “That’s a nothing.”
They’d stymie them by taking away the images and see if we could begin to reclaim that ability to let something come to us instead of [going] out to get it all the time.
So that’s part of what they experience. And then we see what happens when people who have been blind all their lives are suddenly given an operation and now they can see. Great drama. And they take off the images, and they don’t see any thing. All they see is as they describe it, because they’ve got all their other senses going just fine. So they see motion, they see color, and they see light waves coming at them. But they don’t see objects. They have to link that up with their sense of touch and hearing before they can figure out which of those wave patterns consists of “flower” and which one is “chair.” They have to struggle to bring it into form.
If they’re beyond about 13, 14 years old, they usually hate the surgery, put on the dark glasses, and pretend they can’t see again because it’s so hard. So hard to bring that one sense up to even a secondary, backup strategy to match their other senses.
Yes. There’s things like that that help us to understand that the baby’s experience is a world of sensations that gradually, with the advent of language and with the ability to bring things into form—and re-cognize them or reform them—turns into perceptions. And then they have the language, which solidifies that.
So that’s what’s going on at first. And if we can go back and pick up sensations, we can look at nature in a new way, we can look at what’s happening with avalanches, we can look at systems. Everything we see has a freshness because we can go back to its true nature.
So, I love that. It was very hard to ask the reader to start with that. I was thinking, “Oh no! I want to take them through the reconstructing of their minds so they see how it happened, but here we are starting with the most complex idea of all.” To make it really simple—which was my goal. Yes, the science is there—and it’s really strong—but you don’t have to be a scientist to read this.
TS: Is part of what you’re saying, Dee, that perception—and we can just stick with visual perception for a moment—that it happens in a sequence and that we can peel back that sequence? So that when you were talking to the Tibetan monk—at first there’s not a label, not a form. There’s just vibration.
I know you’re a neuroanatomist, so maybe you could take us through what’s happening in the brain that this sequence unfolds.
DJC: Wow, that’s pretty tricky, because my commitment is always to make it really simple for folks.
When we take in any information from any sense at all, the first thing it does is take in wave patterns. So even though we could swear our eyes are seeing objects, we’re seeing a translation. The brain is translating the waves it takes [from] the retina, and the retina is set up in such a way that there’s a vote. All the different rods and cones—they’re waiting for information. Waiting for the wave patterns. [They] are waiting to take a vote.
And if it’s in the middle of the eye, where we see very clearly, then the vote is,every neuron that’s receiving that information will take it to the back of the head—where the visual cortex is—and tally it up. [It says], “This is what you just saw.” It’s a little bit slower. We’re talking nanoseconds here, but it’s slower than the edge of your eye—the periphery—which tallies right out of sight, because every single neuron is only carrying maybe 10 votes. It’s easy to do a quick tabulating.
If you were a birdwatcher, you’d kind of have a sore neck by the end of the day because you’re going to use the corner of your eye to see. It’s faster. You can’t see color, so once something catches your eye, you’re going to turn and look directly to get the full information. But you’re going to see best out of the corner of your eye.
Teachers know that. We’d say we have eyes in the back of our head, but it’s really that we catch the corner of our eye—and that we see things.
Or if you look at a sentry that’s patrolling the enemy lines. They always have them marching sideways across the terrain they’re trying to scan—because they want to catch the corner of their eye, and then turn their head to look to take a full tally and get all the details.
That’s part of what’s going on. What else would you like to know about that?
TS: Well, I think what I’m curious about is that it can be broken down in our own experience such that we experience this vibratory wave pattern before this next step occurs—of interpretation or naming. Correct?
DJC: Yes, and we might think of that as a little, tiny gap—the time that it takes to tally. If we’re saying that we have peripheral vision, focal vision, and then we can say that we have this “open focus” that just kind of drinks in what the artists were trying to say. Let black come to you. Don’t go to it. Receiving what’s out there without worrying about whether we understand it or not.
We can shift into that mindset, and then we’re catching it before it forms. I really do think that’s not that hard once we know it’s what we need to work on. It’s a skill we really want to have.
That’s what people have been trying to give people all along. It’s [to] stop that rapid translation.
The mind loves to chunk data. It doesn’t really want the amount of incredible chaos that the fresh information has. If it can chunk it into, “That’s a bird,” [or], “That’s a flower,” that’s so much simpler for the brain. It takes so much less work.
So, we have to fight our own brains’ laziness if we want to see like a baby does. The baby’s not being lazy. The baby hasn’t formed those options yet. But for us to reclaim those skills takes a bit of work. So, there’s some exercises in the book to give people a chance to try to get there. [Laughs.]
TS: Now, I can imagine someone saying, “Look, why do I want to see like a baby does and have this open focus? What’s the big value in that?”
DJC: Right, right. So that—the beginnings of the book are “The Skills We Lost.” That’s a controversial idea—that we actually trade one set of skills for the next. You don’t see that in neuroscience yet. So I’m bracing myself for somebody saying, “Oh yeah?”
But it is true. We lose skills in order to move on. We give up that focus on sensation in order to fix on perception. We’re going to give up perception in order to become abstract thinkers and become conceptual.
The same thing happens with memory. Originally, we have this iron-jaw sort of verbatim memory. Like you try to say something to a young one about, “We’re going to the circus tomorrow.” Then tomorrow, it doesn’t work out to go to the circus. “But you said!” And then they’ll give you verbatim what you said.
We also see with orality-based cultures—the indigenous cultures. Their memories are stunning—just stunning! They can just remember verbatim what they’ve heard and what they’ve seen.
But once you become literate, your brain changes. Then you have imagination, but man, is your reproductive memory getting weak—as any college student can tell you, because they don’t remember what was on that page. They start fabricating. “Probably, it said this or that.”
We give up that reproductive memory in order to have imagination. The intuitive, direct-experience skills that we would have had if we hadn’t learned to read so early. Once we learn to read, we give up our access to that.
We can get it—part of the book is trying to give you a chance to pick up the skills you never got because you went into literacy when you were a young child. Cultures that never did literacy have skills that we just don’t even believe.
But we can learn them. We can learn to sense sacred objects. We can learn to feel space. We can learn how to change our whole outlook on life if we have a deep sense of familiarity about something.
Some people do. Some tradespeople, some ship captains, some weavers, some artisans—who do things so long that they are so into the nuance of it that we can’t even imagine what their experience is.
There’s just stuff we’ve lost. Most of those things that we’ve lost engage a direct knowing—engage the body in some way. We’re looking at a culture now that is facing tremendous difficulties now because the issues—at a systems level—are in crisis.
We’re looking [on] our own, trying to explain to people that it’s a problem. We’ve got people trying to decide whether there is such a thing as, say, climate change, because they can’t understand systems because they’re just using their brains. They’re just using their minds in a mental way. They don’t bring their body to anything that they know. Therefore, they can’t really know systems.
We’re at a time when we’d better hurry up and figure out what a system is before they take us down. So, the only way we’re going to become systems-makers is to go back and claim those body skills. We have to bring the body and the mind together or we won’t get what’s out there.
TS: Help me understand, Dee—because when you talk about “systems thinking,” that seems to be the type of thinking that requires quite a lot of abstraction. How is the body part of systems thinking?
DJC: Right. And that’s what I’m hoping—by the time people are at the end of that book, there’s nothing in it that a high school student can’t understand easily. One of my readers was a high school graduate and would have struggled with understanding anything that I asked them to draw on with a college education. So I wanted it to be available to everybody.
People can understand systems without the abstract, scientific things that you read about. If somebody’s a really good performer, I’ll watch them work on things and I’ll ask them what they’re doing. They say, “Well, it’s just that there’s a lot of moving parts.” [Laughs.]
They’re watching all the issues that could be at play here. An electrician does the same thing. A good cook does the same thing. They make accommodations because they’ve changed something in the ingredients. So they look at the whole system in a new light. But they do it because they’re bringing personal experience to it. They’re bringing a felt sense.
You know when they drilled for those Chilean miners a year or so ago? One of the drillers actually is from Colorado. He was being interviewed by Anderson Cooper. Anderson Cooper said, “I understand that you put your feet on the top of where the drill is.” And he said, “Oh yes—because that’s how I know what the drill is going through, because the terrain is so irregular. I have to know whether it’s chewing up the bit or whether it’s going through rough rock and it’ll pop through.”
They went two miles down and missed their target by like a foot. It was unreal. But he did it not by mental analysis, but by a felt sensing. He understood the drill and all, but his body is what got him to do it right.
When you really look at anybody who’s gifted, if you ask them, they’ll tell you what they’re body’s doing.
Understanding anything that has a lot of moving parts—whether it’s baking a cake; getting that drill to behave properly and knowing when to pull it out and put a new one in; understanding the bio-field that you’re looking at and how the animals are interacting, or what’s happening to the bees right now; how to intervene on a system. You have to feel those moving parts.
TS: What if it’s a complex engineering problem? Am I feeling those moving parts?
DJC: They’re going to say the same thing. They have more intellectual abstraction. They have more mathematics they’re playing with. But if you really play with math—and that’s unfortunate that we’ve frightened people about math, because really, in order to think about math, we just have to be willing to feel a high-speed thing going on in our head. I could tell you what that is in a minute.
But if you can play with mathematics, it turns into moving parts. You’re watching the vectors and the transformations and the impact of titrating this and rebalancing that. They wouldn’t love it if they didn’t get a felt sense for it.
Anything they’re really doing, they bring their body to. If they’re really, really good, they’re bringing their body to it. And if people learn how to wake their bodies up, then they can add that to whatever their path might be. We can look at our problems.
And we get it! We get the cascades and we get the transformations and we get how to track change.
There’s lots of exercises towards the end [of the book] where we’re looking at how systems really work. The brilliant interventions that people come up with that are so small and so simple. They just cascade into changes.
It’s not hard. It’s just not hard. People that have been trying to explain it as a mental activity make it look so hard. It’s really hard if all you use is your mind. If you put your body-mind together, it’s not a hard job at all.
TS: OK—so you mentioned how at each stage of our development, there are skills that we’ve lost. We started by talking about this open focus and the skills that come with sensation—being sensation-based.
Tell us a little bit more, first of all, about how we reclaim what we lose when we move from sensation to focusing more on perception. How does that shift happen, and then what have we lost? And how do we regain it? Let’s just start there.
DJC: OK. So, I think that the primary way that it shifts is that we get overly invested in naming. And it’s inevitable, because the brain wants to chunk the data. If it can give it a name, then it simplifies the incoming signals. The signals coming in are pretty complex. If the brain can just say, “flower,” then it has an easier time.
So, we’re almost addicted to language. It’s going to happen if we can make it happen, because the brain wants it to.
What we end up having to do is peel off that chatter in our heads, [which] gets incessant by the time we’re adults. We run around and we’re inventorying our world. Seeing it again: yep, yep, yep. It’s almost like a little calculator in there or something.
We have to figure out how to favor a sense of wonder—a sense of radiance or curiosity or the glowing qualities that a baby has. You could go to, let’s say—right now, there are an awful lot of birds hanging out because it’s Spring. So, you can look at a bird. You can name the bird. You can see a cluster of birds. You can do all sorts of things with perception.
But every now and then, when the birds are filling up a tree or telephone wire—and all of a sudden they rise up together in the sky. You could feel that arising feeling inside instead of, “Bird, bird, bird.” You could go from the images to the wave pattern—from the object to the sensation before the object.
You could let nature’s natural movements become sensations for you. That’s easy. You can look at a field that’s—let’s say it’s wheat or something. You can see it. You can look at the particular grains, and you can look at the field and say, “That’s wheat.” Or you can watch the wind go over the wheat and see the movement or the motion path of the wind on the wheat. Now, you’re looking at a bigger phenomenon. You’re looking at the wave properties of nature giving you an invitation to back off.
I think that just taking a walk outside—I remember a great tap dancer who would go down to New York City and listen to the traffic. [He would] hear the frequency patterns within the traffic and invent footsteps, invent riffs. He was picking up not on the objects and the events that were happening, but on the wave patterns.
You just flip it. It’s almost like going from an AM to a FM station or something. Once you get the hang of it, you can do it everywhere.
TS: Now, you said a really interesting thing, Dee. You said, “The brain wants language.” Almost like the brain has its own agenda going on.
DJC: That’s right!
TS: So that’s curious to me. Is that really how the brain’s operating?
DJC: Yes! Yes, it really, really has very little tolerance for randomness if it can create order. In fact, the explanation with the monk we talked about at one point—when I had to explain what was happening when he was converging into “flowerness,” I was explaining that the brain has chatter. You know—random chatter.
When something organizes, it creates a signal instead of just a random array. Once there’s a signal, it can go through that chatter and it can be the tiniest signal that you can imagine. It becomes—because it’s what they call “coherent” because it comes together—it’s steady and the brain can pick that up really easily. It can only pick it up because the background is chaos.
The brain depends on chaos to create order, and he was riveted by that. But the translator had no idea what the word for “chaos” might be in Tibetan, so the monk was just staring at me and just trying to figure out what I was saying. There was something he wanted to have and the translator couldn’t give it to him. Then he said, “Zangizingi! Zangizingi!” [ph] And I said, “Yes.”
So that was the end of the interview, because he didn’t want to know anything else and I didn’t have to ask what “zangizingi” was, because those sounds [are] going [to be] chaotic.
And yes, chaos allows you have order. He was quite pleased that we’re so fixated on order, we won’t let the chaos have its turn. But if you can, it’s great.
When you talk to creative thinkers, they work on deconstructing how they have it put together. If they can bring it back to its parts and not have it come together yet, they have a chance to bring it together in a new way. Their “tolerance for ambiguity” is what I ended up calling that one. If it’s high, you’re going to be able to be much more creative. If it’s low, you’re going to come to closure, you’re going to nail this baby down, you’re going to call it something and be done with it.
So, cultivating this tolerance for ambiguity opens our mind up so we can see a lot more about what’s out there.
TS: I think of times when I’ve maybe been on vacation or retreat, or been in a beautiful natural environment—times when I spent a lot of time in this open focus state. It’s quite relaxing. It’s enjoyable. It’s fabulous. Yet, you’re saying at the same time there’s something happening in my brain that’s resisting that?
DJC: No! No! Because you’ve activated the meditative state that allows you to stay open.
No, we can override this. Our ordinary, everyday humming-along in what might be called “beta”—it’s a brain speed that’s real ordinary. It allows you to balance your checkbook and drive your car and do all these things. It’s very hard to overcome the need for order in that state of mind. But if we do have a meditative practice or a trade that requires that unbelievably refined attention to body awareness—dancers, people that realize that they have a body. They receive information from their bodies. They’re much more able to meet that drive for closure and let it go, and back it off—at least for parts of a day.
When we can stretch our tolerance for ambiguity—that’s what [is in] whole notion of, “In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities. In the expert’s mind, but few.” Because the expert is nailing it down, nailing it down, and nailing it down. But the beginner’s mind is backing off and opening up.
So we can cultivate that state. It’s just a different state. It’s like we don’t have to go on the AM channels all the time. We could flip to the FM ones and see what it looks like with that. It’s just another lens. But it’s not one that we’ve cultivated. We dropped it because we got so fascinated with naming everything. We let it go.
If we pick it back up again, it’s a very valuable tool to have. It’s a very valuable lens.
TS: Is there a certain age where you see infants [and] young children moving out of this open focus, sensation-based way of experiencing the world [and] into a naming perception focus?
DJC: They’re going to pick up the ability to name, but you don’t see them letting go of the sensation basis for a really long time.
You walk through a wind-block in a store—you go through two sets of doors to get inside so it doesn’t bring the cold air in. When you get into that wind-locked area, the little ones are going to go, “Woo! Woo!” just to check the echoes. They can’t resist the wave pattern of sound.
Or they’re going to get so excited about rainbows, because it seems to be about the only thing grown-ups can see that is a wave as well as an image. I think we radically underestimate what else they’re looking at because we assume they can’t see anything we can’t see.
They don’t drop it until they—you know, once you go to school, then nobody gives you any feedback for that kind of thinking. They’ll say the child finally learns to distinguish reality from imagination. And I think, “Oh my gosh, that’s not what’s happening at all! You’re asking them to let go of a way of seeing the world and only see it your way.”
So, they don’t let go of it as much as they’re told they have to buckle down and do this other thing. We accidentally or inadvertently shape that out of them. The culture of school is a culture of outward, event-based thinking.
TS: So right at that point, Dee—because I know you’ve done a lot of work with education—what would be, in your view, your recommendations for educators such that we don’t lose so much of this early ability—this early, open-focus ability? How could we be trained in schools differently?
DJC: For one thing, we have to give the teachers that experience themselves. They have to reclaim it and have a good time with it too. They have to be given the space—and that means the time-space—where their agendas for what they’re supposed to do with the children [are] much looser.
There was a time when teachers could decide what to teach, but somebody told them how. And then they decided, “Well, you can decide how to teach but this is what you have to teach.” Now, we’re in an era where not only what you have to teach is set out, but how you’re supposed to do it is set out. So, teachers are losing the art of teaching and [have] to do just the technical aspects of it.
Restoring their ability to awaken their artfulness in teaching would be a piece of it. Re-infusing the arts themselves into the curriculum is another piece. Music, for instance. Music is so insubstantial, it is nothing but waves. It really is that realm! It’s as close as we can come to it.
The more there is music—the more children are using their larynx to sing instead of just to talk—the better. Trying to bring music back into the schools. Trying to even bring the visual arts. Certainly the movement arts. Elocution. Gosh, there was a time when people were doing—what did they call it? It was poetic reading, and you would read these poems as a performing art. It was just marvelous. “Choral reading,” they used to call it. Probably 50 years ago.
They never [do] it anymore. Yet, what you were doing was listening to the power of your larynx to evoke states, and the power of key words—because a poet isn’t going just for the meaning. They want the sound. They would hear that “zangizingi” is of course a chaotic sound. They’re looking for a sound to convey the meaning so that those two go together—the sense and the sound, and the sense and the meaning.
So, there’s a way to give children that capacity again. We’ve got an awful lot of kids who have written off their minds entirely, so we have to engage them again in loving to think.
TS: Do you have a sense of when the right age is—in your view—to introduce reading? And the right way to introduce reading?
DJC: It is so varied that I almost would have to say that we have to look at the child’s lineage so that—if there are other skills that they’re trying to work with that have to be in place first—then that should take precedence.
So, if you were to take a child who has an orality-based background—who has been taught to learn by transmissions within his or her culture—that is so precious that you don’t want to supplant that at an early age if you can help it.
I would say that reading ought to be an oral practice until maybe fourth grade or fifth.
TS: Now, that’s pretty radical. That’s not—
DJC: Well, they can read! You can even give them the same darned textbooks if you have to. But they could read out loud so that there’s a bridge between the wisdom of their culture and the culture you’re asking them to enculturate into.
I think fourth grade is a critical time. This is when there are books with African American children that are not doing well—books of, “What have you done to my fourth-grade child?” and they’re furious because at fourth grade, all of a sudden these kids drop off. They drop off because they’re coming from an environment where it isn’t that it’s lovely and they’re paying attention to their environment—it’s perhaps risky. So they have to pay more vigilant attention.
And you’re asking them to shut down their awareness of the outside world and use their inner speech to read. Give them a couple more years with the out-loud reading so they can get their orientation to their world straight. And they’d be fine, but when you rush them like that, they can’t do it yet. Then they fall behind; they’re labeled as not able to do it. Then you have to overcome their sense of negative self-worth.
There’s something about fourth grade that is probably the earliest for some children. You’re going to have others who are going to read when they’re three. OK! With them, you might want to say, “Gee, how can we give them the magic of the world?” because they’ve already got the science down. [Laughs.]
So it is almost how do we give them the fullness of the inner and the outer life, and the oral giftedness and the literate giftedness. How can we do the whole thing instead of only [catering] to the ones that can abandon that child’s world and become literate early.
TS: Help me understand the difference between reading out loud and reading silently. You seem to emphasize that.
DJC: Yes! It’s even an evolutionary thing. When we look back to when people first started to read, there’s a—oh, my gosh. When was it? About 300 AD? A quote where Saint Augustine is commenting about his mentor, who is Saint Ambrose. He said, “He looks at the book,” (it would be the Bible), “but he’s looking and his mouth isn’t moving. Only his eyes are moving. But he seems to be understanding what’s on the page.”
And that made no sense at all. So, it wasn’t until about 600 years later that people could do that silent reading. Out-loud reading really precedes the silent by quite a long time. Somebody might know how to read, and then they would read the flier in the village square to everybody else. Everybody would listen as that person read it out loud, and when that person was reading it out loud, that was the first time that person knew what he was reading either. Without reading out loud, he didn’t know what it was.
When we’re under high stress, we sometimes revert back to reading it out loud because we realize, “I just read a paragraph and I have no idea what it said.” So we go back and we read it out loud so that it’s almost like recapping that oral tradition. Now, I’m giving myself an oral teaching.
Yes. So that’s the relationship. Sometimes we used to have these devices that children could talk into so that—they’d have headphones—and they’d read out loud. The headphone then would come into their ear with their voice. Then they could understand it. Even reading out loud didn’t make sense if it’s in the air. They had to have bone conduction to get it.
The oral tradition is quite fundamental to reading. When we go to where we’re only using what we call our “inner speech,” it’s a totally different region of the brain. It’s very cool—except when it starts chattering like a monkey on us when we try to meditate and we wish it weren’t there.
But once you can go inside—and by nine, it’s silent then. By nine, a kid can look at a page and—just like Saint Ambrose—their mouth doesn’t move, their eyes move, and they know what the page says. That’s a huge thing. We go from learning to read to reading to learn.
Historically, there was this huge rush toward literacy when the Bible became available for people to read. That was learning to read. But it wasn’t until the next major book—the encyclopedia—came out that people read to learn. Then they had the full measure of what it is to read.
And it’s great. It’s very exciting. There’s lots that we can do because we’re literate.
TS: So, Dee, in this conversation I think I feel pretty clear on what potentially we’ve lost from the baby’s experience of sensation and open focus. Then you moved on and you talked about these orality-based cultures, and that we’ve lost some of the skills that they had in our emphasis on this silent reading—potentially at too young an age for some of us.
Help me understand what skills we’ve lost from being an oral-based culture and how we can regain those skills.
DJC: Right. And maybe we even have to go from “lost” to “never gained” because—just as the driller was able to guide that drill because he had guided drills all his life, so he was refined, if you are non-literate for an entire lifetime and so were your ancestors—and you’re receiving the teachings from them as well as from today—[you] don’t have literacy altering your brain yet. And you’re now 20. That’s different from, “What if we wait one more year?”
Then we have to look at: Well, what is it that indigenous and orality-based cultures in general are doing that we aren’t doing? There’s a whole chunk in the book that’s just looking at all of the skills they have that—we didn’t lose them. We never gained them.
Their ability to sense land that’s sacred versus land that isn’t, or pick up sacred objects. We can do some of that. We don’t think about it. We can kind of sense which objects in somebody’s living room are heirlooms or sacred objects.
They have direct contact and communication with their ancestors, and many of us don’t. Some of us do, but we don’t run around talking about it because it’s probably too strange.
There’s a way in which they work with the land and work with nature that’s hard to convey if you haven’t worked with it as a deeply familiar practice.
So, they’re ending up trying to claim those responsibilities back. Even though they have literacy now, they have not let go of their orality traditions. Instead of being taught, they have transmissions. Their memories are like steel traps. If something is taught to them, they have it. They don’t have to hear it again.
I had a chance to talk to some Fijians who were, strangely, over here trying to help promote some visits from the public—just sort of commercialism. But it didn’t really work, because they had a civil war right after that. But they were here for a little while.
So, they’d done a performance for a small group and I got to go to it. Two of them spoke English. I was asking them what they could see, essentially, because a colleague from Naropa University had asked about why some people in the Solomon Islands—where she’d done her doctoral studies—could look at the sand—and the people would have walked barefoot—they could look at the sand and see who had gone there earlier in the day. And she said, “How could they tell?”
I probably assumed at that time we were talking about holograms. It just seemed like, well, they must be able to see the form. They could go from the energy field to the image, so they could rematerialize “flower”—only in this case, it was “person.”
I remembered her question and I asked them, “Now, [if] somebody from your village walked along the sand and they were gone, you could look at the sand and see who that was, couldn’t you?” And he said, “Yes.” And I said, “So, what is it that you see?” I think if I had said, “How do you do it?” he would have caught himself and not talked to this strange Anglo lady.
But he just said, “Well, you see the form and the structure rising above the footprint.” Then he was a little bit taken aback that he’d told me that. But we went on to talk about other things.
The other day, I was talking to these Tibetan painters who were painting the wall in my house. The one fellow was talking about his daughter, who is seven years old and in school. He was kind of concerned that she was going to lose her culture. And he said, “You know, I never went to school.” And I said, “Then can you read?” And he said, “Well, maybe 30 percent.” And I said, “Well, can you see the light around people?” “Oh, yeah!” He didn’t see any problem with that.
I was surprised. I mean, I thought he probably could do it because if you’re not literate, you should have a lot of skills that we don’t have. To have it be so validated so quickly was almost—I almost wanted to say, “You can? What’s it like?” But I didn’t.
TS: But now, Dee, I imagine someone listening who’s thinking, “Well, look: I want to have those skills. I want to see the light around people. I want to connect to the land. I want to be able to know the sacredness of objects and space. But I also really enjoy the benefits of literacy and the critical thinking that it gives me. Et cetera, et cetera. I want it all!”
DJC: Good! That’s exactly what I’m trying to give people. I see no reason why it has to be either/or, because we can reclaim or learn for the first time all of these things. For years, I’ve been teaching that and I thought, “Yes, this is easy.” I look forward to finding out if a book can do it.
They can’t just read the book and have it happen, but if they did the practices in the book, I really do think they’d have all those skills.
TS: What would be some of the practices that would help me claim for the first time or—in some cases, I guess, reclaim some of these skills of orality-based cultures?
DJC: OK. Well, let’s [maybe] think about sacred objects. If you were to—there’s so many ways to get at it. If you talk to somebody who’s lost a loved one, and now they’re stuck with all of these objects that person had. The clothing and the tools and the special objects that that person had collected. They’re trying to figure out how to deal with it. The best recommendation is [to] relinquish them in layers.
The ones that don’t have any energy for you? Go ahead. Give them to Goodwill or give them to relatives or whatever.
But some of them are still going to have energy. Keep them. Over time, some of those will lose their charge. Give them away. When you’re done, you will be left with essentially sacred objects—essentially the heirlooms that are always going to have energy for you for that person.
We do these things. We just don’t think about it. When you go into somebody’s house, you can look at all the knickknacks all over the place. One of them catches your eye and you ask for the backstory—and you’re right. That one has a history.
At Naropa, we used to sometimes want to get to know each other quickly in a group that was going to travel for the whole semester on a project. So, they’d bring in objects that represented them and tell the backstories of those particular objects. Or they’d bring in a piece of jewelry that had a particular energy. You can hold that in your hand and have somebody see how strong your muscles are in your other arm. Sure enough, some things have a charge and some things don’t.
So you could begin to become sensitive to that again. The same thing’s true around space. Anybody’s who’s visited the Vietnam Memorial would say that they could feel it long before they got there—that the field of energy built up around that monument is getting larger and larger. If we paid attention to the fact that we can do this, we’d do it more often.
It’s just another lens. Every now and then, you want to flip over to the other lens and see what it sees. It’s not that you have to give one of them up. When you want to understand the complexities of a really complex system, you have to go back and forth between the two. You have to go from the pattern—it goes from the field to the form. Back and forth, and back and forth. We even know how the brain’s doing that. It’s really very nice.
We’re actually going from very slow—let’s say you have a puzzlement, a problem, and you don’t know how to solve it because it’s got so many moving parts. Either people whose needs are there [or] stuff you’re going to take in a business—you mull each of the variables and you ask yourself, “Have I considered all the variables?” Maybe you haven’t yet, so then you say, “Well, I’ll think about it again tomorrow.” At some point, you’ll say, “Yes, I’ve got all the variables now.”
At that point, you might have found what you can do. Some people, at that point, take a nap. At that point, they walk in nature. At that point, they take a shower. They do something that clears the palate, in a way. They’re holding on all of these pieces in a very dreamy, slow brainwave state called Theta.
When they’re ready, there’s a way that we may have discovered how to do this—we just say, “OK, hit it!” We’re asking for a core of cells that can link up to these random Theta neurons that are located in different parts of the brain. This is not necessarily a local pod. And it spins it almost like a centrifuge. It goes like—instead of four to eight cycles a second like Theta, or 14 to 18 cycles per second like Beta, which is the ho-hum rational thinker. It goes at 100 to 300 cycles per second. It acts like a centrifuge and brings coherence. We get this, “Ah! I just had an idea!”
It happens in a flash because the spin pulls it all together. Then it can take you a half an hour to explain what you just got, because it wasn’t in language. It wasn’t even in thought. It was just in an impulse that then had to be unpacked.
We can do that. As long as we know that’s what the brain’s trying to do, we know how to help it do it.
TS: Now, Dee, one of the things I’m curious about is: with the advent of learning via technology and interfacing with technology so much of the time. Seeing young children wanting cell phones and copying mom and dad at very young ages. How do you think that impacts our ability to experience life and thinking in the kinds of deep and enjoyable ways you’re describing?
DJC: I’m not sure. It’s sort of seems to me that [with] each transformation, we see the downside first. Like, let’s suppose we go from an oral-based culture to books. Then we say, “Well, there goes memory.” Because now they’re not going to remember anything that’s going to be in the book. That’s true, but here comes reasoning, because the book is organized logically.
Along came computers, and they said, “There goes reasoning,” because it’s in the program. Yes, but here comes patterns.
So they start seeing patterns. The patterns allow us to see things that we couldn’t see with just the reasoning.
So I’m not sure yet. It’s obvious that it’s creating a brain that has different skill sets and different potentials. If we learn to use it well, that’s great.
As long as we know we have a full array. I would just love to see that full spectrum be cultivated so we choose when to use which skill instead of only [having] the current what’s-up. In and of itself, it’s narrow. So is reasoning. But as a tool for enriching our ability to see big patterns—an ability to tease out coherence that our brain can’t even do yet because we can’t take in enough data at once.
Some of this stuff with big data—it’s not doing so well by the NSA things, but it is incredible when it comes to trying to do something like the Genome Project. Oh my gosh! We’re putting in staggering amounts of data from hundreds of researchers around the world and we’re coalescing that. We’re seeing patterns that we couldn’t have generated [in our lifetime] manually.
It’s not bad or good. It’s a neutral capacity that can take its place with everything else. We just have to use it with some sort of—if it’s our tool, it’s great. If it runs us, it’s not so great.
I think when a child is really young, what’s happening is that they’re not getting to log enough time with that beginner’s mind gift and it’s going to be harder to bring back when they’re older. You look at the people who are the most creative and you listen to their childhoods, often they spent their life in nature. Then, gradually [they] went to school. They logged a broad base of beginner’s mind tools, and then they went on to do their abstract thinking. Then they pulled them in with it to become brilliant.
I don’t think it’s bad. I just think that we need to make sure that we augment it. [For instance], nobody’s learning handwriting anymore, so they’re finding kids can’t read handwritten notes. They can’t write them. They can’t communicate if they can’t put it on a keyboard. Well, that kind of went too far.
What you might want to do is introduce the art of calligraphy. Now you’re looking at handwriting in exquisite slow motion. So yes, you have the form—but you have that opportunity to get the grace of a motion path instead of just the mechanics.
So, OK. Don’t teach handwriting. Just teach calligraphy, all right? Then they’ll have it, but they’ll have it as an art form. I think we can do it all if we just realized that there’s more that we could be doing.
TS: You know, Dee, before you and I began this conversation, you talked about how part of your purpose in the book is reintroducing this idea of how enjoyable thinking can be. Creative thinking, thinking. I do think sometimes people have an experience of like, “God, I’m just so sick of my mind. It’s just turning over the same stuff. Thinking is enjoyable? Eugh! I’m just so sick of it. I wish I could turn it off.”
I’m curious to know what your view of what would make thinking enjoyable for people.
DJC: Some of it is understanding the logistics. One of the things that we’ve discovered recently—and my mind is going on to another thing that is parallel to it, which is funny.
I was in a gym once, and there was only one other woman in the gym. She had a back brace on. We’d been swimming, and I was kind of mesmerized by that. She didn’t know me at all, and I didn’t know her. She said that she was wanting to exercise because she was going on a bike trip in Vermont, then she was going to go scuba diving in Australia, and something else on top of that.
I was just stunned, because I’m a fairly phlegmatic sort of person. So, she looked at me and she said, “Yep! I’m a doer, not a thinker.” Then she thought a minute and she said, “Well, I think when I have to. Everyone does.”
So I didn’t tell her what I was, because I’d almost have to say the opposite. I’m a thinker, not a doer! I do things when I have to. I take my body to the gym and so on.
But for her, thinking was unpleasant. What we now know is that we’ve got a very embarrassing discovery, called “the default network.” They’ve been studying what the brain did when it looked at this and looked at that, and did this and did that. Somebody once said, “You know, just before we ask it to do something, another part of the brain goes dim.” They tried to catch what went dim as soon as you started to pay attention. What was going on before you started to do anything? Which they then decided to call the default network. Where does the brain go when it’s not doing anything?
Well, it turns out there’s this massive network that is operating when we’re not doing anything. It happens to be identical to what goes down with Alzheimer’s, which is an interesting side piece to it.
It’s got different turfs. One of the turfs allows us to do the meditation. That’s toward the back. Toward the front, there’s a wonderful, exciting turf on the left side—kind of in between the two hemispheres on the canyon wall there. It allows us to do reflection on creative information. So, if we can take things in and let it chew on [them]—and if we can move back and forth from the frontal lobes that are taking it in and over to that region that’s for creative thinking—it doesn’t do anything emotional. Just thoughts.
And if we can get that thing going ya-ta-ta-ta really rapidly, flipping back and forth, that’s what we have when we have a peak performance. It’s really a kick.
On the other hand, there’s another turf toward the front that you could almost look at as a whirlpool, because it sucks you into emotional lament. Around and around. It’s self-reflective, and it’s so addictive. It so loves the adrenaline that goes with it that it’s very hard to pull out of that if it sucks you in. So it’s hard to get out.
When they were looking at that—and with schizophrenia, you’ve got one foot on the inner stuff in the default network and another foot in the outside. So they’re trying to figure out what’s real—outer or inner. They realize, “Wait a minute. There’s another system that must be out there called a “switching mechanism.” Where’s that?”
They found that and realized that it can faulty (for the schizophrenic), it can be stuck shut (for the depressed person), and it can work lickety-split tremendously well for the creative thinker—who’s going in and out, in and out, in and out. If the switching mechanism is really well-oiled, it’s a kick. It’s a peak performance state.
So, some of these qualities of a young child must have something to do with lubricating that, because it’s always part geared up in a creative thinker.
And meditation plays a big role, because meditation keeps you from getting stuck in that depression cycle. It can help pull you back out of it so that you can just use the creative aspects. It’s almost like we’re understanding some of the mechanics now.
It does help to have a picture—what am I trying to do here? Is it just a psychological, “Poor me. I’m terrible. I just keep doing this or doing that?” No—it’s just stuck. So, just unstick it and do some of the beginner’s mind things.
Find a way to be playful with your mind. Have a good time with it. Do some artwork. Sing some songs. Get back into the world of waves and motion paths, and not so much into the details that you’re ruminating over.
There’s certain tolerances that are just wonderful to have. Ambiguity we talked about. It’s nice to have a tolerance for what I would call “boredom.” To be able to do something frequently and not get bored by it, but get deeply familiar with it.
Someone could say, “Well, I already drilled a hole. I don’t want to do that anymore.” But Jeff Hart didn’t say that! He got really good at drilling because he had a deeply familiar relationship to it. So that’s the boredom stuff.
Tolerating complexity is another thing. People hate it because they get overloaded with it. But if you had enough rest and enough contentment within yourself, then the complexity is just pattern. It’s OK. Then you learn to share that with other people and you’re permeable—you’re open to someone else. You see how you can match and care about them.
Then, armed with all that and letting yourself have a lot of ambiguity tolerance, you get to go into the novelty stuff. That’s where things are just hopping all the time. Of course, that can get addictive too, so you have to learn to drop it, satisfy yourself, and sit down and do nothing again. You know? Go back to meditating or go back to the rhythm of a frequent practice of some sort so that your boredom settles you back out and allows you to go around it again.
TS: Dee, just finally: Your book, Original Mind: Uncovering Your Natural Brilliance. It covers so much ground and I know that it’s the culmination, in many ways, of decades of work that you’ve done in this field. So, I’d love to know: if you had to just narrow it down to the three biggest takeaways that you hope readers will have from the book—I’m forcing you here, just to narrow it down to three. What would you say would be the three biggest takeaways that you hope people will get from the book?
DJC: That’s actually easy, because I was supposed to have a dedication. Then I couldn’t think of anything. So I said, “Well, I don’t want to have one.” They said, “You have to, because it messes up the page numbers if you don’t.” [Laughs.]
So I go, “Oh my gosh.” I finally realized that there are three things that I would like to see happen.
I want people to love their minds. Just totally enjoy their minds.
Then I really want them to deeply appreciate others’ minds. Not say, “Oh, it’s nice that you have it.” No—savor it and appreciate it as if it were something that you would love to have too, and that they’re giving you a taste of their minds. The Fijian or the Tibetan painter gave me a glimpse of what their mind could do, and it was wonderful. So—appreciating other people’s minds so that we don’t think that everybody has to think like us.
Then, I kind of think that this will put together a sense of creativity so that we can come up with fresh possibilities for the world. I don’t know what the possibilities are. They have to be fresh. We need a lot of solutions. We’ve got a lot of problems. But I think if people knew how to awaken their own creativity, they’ll come up with all kinds of possibilities.
We don’t really have to worry about that. We just have to make sure they have a good time and know how to play with their minds. Then, who knows what could happen? I think we’re all right.
TS: I’ve been speaking with Dee Joy Coulter, someone that I’ve known here for what, Dee, is it? Twenty-five years? Something like that?
DJC: It’s more than that, young lady. [Laughs.]
TS: More than 25 years. She’s written a new book with Sounds True called Original Mind: Uncovering Your Natural Brilliance. Dee, it’s always great to talk to you. I always learn so much.
DJC: Thank you. I liked it too, Tami.
TS: SoundsTrue.com. TSMany voices, one journey. Thanks for listening.
