Mashup: J.Brian Hennessy's Learning to Evolve model and Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey

Intro

?? Sadly Brian lost his battle with cancer just over a week ago.

He is the first close friend I have lost and I miss him. He was a huge personality, a generous soul who gave of himself in service to others. A profound heart-mind and complete one off. A visionary ahead of his time. ?? ?? ??

Brian could also be a the cause of frustration to those who tried to help him develop his ideas. He was a stubborn mule ?? with a singular focus on his Learning to Evolve model expressed in 1994, the culmination of personal research, visionary dreams, thought experiments and workshops held with athletes and kids. He resisted mash-ups and recasting of his work for the most part while at the same time doing mash-ups and recasting of his own through the development of product prototypes and business ideas. These sometimes helped but also obscured the essence of what the man was trying to convey.

His verbal and written explanations were often profound—and profane—and very entertaining but also fragmented and incomplete. A scattering of puzzle pieces from more than one jigsaw box. And this is true of many great thinkers—the struggle of attempting to make sense of everything all at once within the straight jacket of our human imperfection. He had a consistent and rich as chocolate cake way of interacting. He was not Juror Number Eight (though he did once describe himself as a chameleon so perhaps he had other styles I did not see) :

Brian was also that rare type, the neurodiverse extrovert. He was diagnosed with ADHD in his youth, so perhaps some of his challenges (and gifts) stemmed from this.

Yes he was certainly an visionary and an original thinker. We also need to remember our Ecclesiastes:

The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.—Ecclesiastes 1:9

In this article I will recast Brian's Learning to Evolve (LE) model with reference to one that came before, Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey, and will argue that LE with a little tweaking provides a useful extension. I'll then discuss Brian's thoughts about Secular Moralism and the Human Singularity.

There are also relationships between LE and Boyd's OODA loop to explore but will leave that for another day.

Note: I am fortunate enough to have some long recordings of myself and Brian in conversation on a range of topics. Before he died he granted me the honour of access to his archive. These provide invaluable source material for making sense of the man and his life work.

Postscript Note2: As his friend Lou pointed out, another frustration was that Brian gave of himself too much—helping and connecting with others rather than investing in himself. Though his brother Kevin reminded us that his social media presence and the connections and friendships that resulted were a boon to him.

The Hero's Journey

(Adapted from my earlier blog on story-telling)

Storytelling works. Why? Because as humans we are predisposed to learning this way. In a story, we enter the persona of the hero as they start on their quest. We take their call to adventure and see what they see (and sometimes what they don't), feel what they feel and live what they live. We suffer their joys and their heartache. And in this magical process, we along with the hero are transformed.

Joseph Campbell in his book, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, showed how all stories awaken powerful forces in the human psyche to do with our journey along this mortal coil, this tree of life, explaining stark similarities between story evolution in distinct cultures. He called it the Hero's Journey, used by storytellers the world over. As Campbell himself recognised, it's also a powerful metaphor when talking about transformation.

Campbell created this famous image to go with the book:

A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.—Joseph Campbell, the Hero with a Thousand Faces.

The first Star Wars film correlates well to the Hero's Journey, and indeed George Lucas is fan of Campbell:

1. Luke crosses the threshold of adventure into the unknown when he discovers the message from Princess Leia hidden in the droid, R2D2
2. He is helped by mentor, Obi Wan Kenobi where he learns about the mysterious Force and the art of the Jedi
3. With his compatriots Han Solo and his crew, he goes off in search of Princess Leia and the Rebel Alliance and undergoes challenges and temptations (to avoid trusting his intuition) along the way. He falls into the Abyss of self-doubt
4. He emerges from the Abyss a Jedi Knight, does battle with Sith Lord Darth Vader and destroys the Death Star
5. And returns to some semblance of normality celebrating the victory with his friends at the rebel base

Learning to Evolve

Learning to Evolve (LE) is J.Brian's self-evolution model from I believe the mid-late 90's. He describes it in a series of articles and product concepts here.

It's part of his vision for human evolution that he wanted to realise as a company. Something he was not able to achieve in his lifetime:

And I have had a few goes at unpacking LE in past blogs, most recently here. But though I teased an idiot's guide to Brian's work I failed to deliver, so let me try again.

LE is a meta model for self-development based on uncovering and living our innate dispositions. Before I attempt to explain it, let's hear from the man himself in conversation with me in Autumn 2020:

• I'd climb the fucking tree
• Gnomes on ladders
• Uniqueness and service (I'm being a bit arrogant here to get Brian to laugh)

Many of us don't get to be our authentic selves

LE posits that for many of us, our innate dispositions are not fully expressed, like the diamond in the rough in my cover image. This lack of expression leads to limitations in terms of our health and vitality, personal and moral development, goal achievement, relationships and ultimately direction and purpose.

To achieve this authenticity of being we must cultivate and express our embedded uniqueness

Resulting from:

• Genetics
• Epigenetics

Constrained and filtered by our development ...

• Understanding of self
• Knowledge and experience
• Level of consciousness

... and our environment

• Safety
• Relationships and network
• Nurturing
• Schooling
• Social context—self discovery and expression is harder for the working classes
• Economy—what we are good at and what the economy needs may be at odds. E.g. more people want hamburgers than want poems

To move in the direction of authenticity is to notice what resonates

This is a full body visceral thing—our gut feelings and embodied intuition.

Cf. Chemotaxing, Sue Borchardt the Sea of Yuks and Yums:

We will move through stages of self-development according to this cycle

Required because, critically, evolving is different from learning.

1. Ask yourself
2. Let go
3. Aha
4. Do it
5. Be it

Flow—this cycle repeats, leading to the discovery of purpose

Aligning our authentic inner-self and allowing our potential to shine out.

Mashing them together

I first attempted this back in April but when I shared it Brian wasn't keen, or perhaps he was distracted with his illness or something else:

After learning of his passing barely a week ago I created this:

It's still not quite right, but does confirm my April insight that the models were in fact closely related.

And today I produced this more comprehensive mashup also incorporating Brian's Gnomes on Ladders analogy:

Hopefully this is self-explanatory—feel free to ask questions. The journey of Self(n) through Self(n+1), Self(n+2) etc. to Self(m) is what Brian called the path of Aha.

Postscript Note: Re-reading this a fortnight later I realise that the four quadrants can also be labeled and the whole thing laid out on a Cartesian :

Ouroboros added for chart junk - though the metaphor fits well. Innovation e.g. Lean Startup MVP works this way also.

And as final MVP iteration for now here is another piece of chart junk showing a Nautilus shell to get us into the golden spiral:

Aha moment: ask yourself what if we could prove mathematical relationship between Joseph Campbell's hero's journey, reverse entropy of information, machine learning, the golden ratio and Hoffman's model of conscious agents? This would then align to my insights from 2020 that the universe evolves according to the Fibonacci sequence in a zero sum simulation, this would seem to unite Art, Science and Spirituality. Food for though and one I will leave for another day.

I see the Aha moment (Death/rebirth in Hero's Journey) as:

• A one bit change of base network information - story/self kernel if you like
• A fold and dimensional expansion (or contraction)
• A twist
• A bifurcation
• A flow reversal inc from implosion to explosion etc.
• Collapse of a quantum waveform and the creation of a parallel addressable universe

(and yes the Mandelbrot Set will figure here too)

I posted on this topic but the editor is not letting me embed.

And a further iterations superposes Crossing the chasm showing this as due to a DNA split at the snake's mouth meaning the new path is a tighter circle at a lower information entropy according to latest theories:

This would also seem to chime with Bejan's constructal law, No doubt Constuctor theory also as well. Indicating that a closed system story archetype is common to both the organic and inorganic domains. Etc Etc.

Hmm - perhaps time to plan for a PhD by publication?

And for an encore we can see that proximity from the centre equates to closeness to archetypal knowledge, spiritual progress, growth of consciousness etc. And yes the Taoist cosmology model:

Giving us this:

Ockham's Razor indeed :-)

A name came to me, Achilles

His flaw was his heel that remained undipped when his mother lowered him into the Styx. - how else would the universe keep hold of him?

The dipping is a Pelastration from Dirk Laureyssens' Big Tube theory.

This dipping creates a new cosmic cycle at a particular point in the network. If it doesn't shift then flows circulate, when it does - in or out then the topology of both local and global flows changes cf. the butterfly effect. The grey man may be just changing the temperature of his shower but some grey men may be Juno. We can only speculate.

And another: quadrant 2 coincides with the entrance into old yin yang (the ones that are quantum and can go either way). And this 1/4 probability is identical to that which you get if you cast the I Ching using coins. Coincidence? I think not :-)

And a week later I have debugged some elements and added in Taoist cosmology model, the Fool from Rider Waite Tarot and Schr?dinger's Cat:

So is an Aha moment the transition between old yin and new yang? For a bit of fun, if I flip it, Cynefin slots in also:

Secular Moralism

Here's Brian's words from the transcript of the Uniqueness and Service recording:

Brian: Yeah, I love your super theory -ness. I mean, I'm surprised at people's ignorance. The degree, the degree of people's ignorance.

Me: Yeah. Yeah.

Brian: Listen, I'm a smoker. So I'm an idiot, right? I'm an absolute idiot.

Me: Yeah, exactly. So I think the safest, the safest model is to understand, look, we're all ignorant. So let's try and, but we're all, we all have our, is it HU-unique-ness, one of your neologisms.

Brian: And by the way, when uniqueness delivers, the uniqueness is a secular form of moralism to me, because once you know that, you're, you then know why you're here to, how you're here to serve.

For me, Brian's Secular Moralism point is related to Frankl's Logotherapy

Logotherapy, or the Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy, was developed by Victor Frankl following his formative experiences of surviving the Nazi death camps. This extract from the Wikipedia page:

The notion of logotherapy was created with the Greek word logos ("meaning"). Frankl's concept is based on the premise that the primary motivational force of an individual is to find meaning in life. The following list of tenets represents basic principles of logotherapy:

Life has meaning under all circumstances, even the most miserable ones.

Our main motivation for living is our will to find meaning in life.

We have freedom to find meaning in what we do, and what we experience, or at least in the stance we take when faced with a situation of unchangeable suffering.[2]

The human spirit is referred to in several of the assumptions of logotherapy, but the use of the term spirit is not "spiritual" or "religious". In Frankl's view, the spirit is the will of the human being. The emphasis, therefore, is on the search for meaning, which is not necessarily the search for God or any other supernatural being.[2] Frankl also noted the barriers to humanity's quest for meaning in life. He warns against "...affluence, hedonism, [and] materialism..." in the search for meaning.[7]

What Brian adds to Frankl is that Purpose is related to our authenticity, as a function of expression of innate dispositions, our #Younique.

The human singularity

Brian's big picture was that all this collective evolution of self would lead to what he called the Human Singularity. Here is his graphic:

So synergy within at the individual level leads to synergy without at the collective level and this is the human singularity. Secular individualism leading to spiritual collectivism.

It's a pretty cool and radical idea and intuitively it makes sense.

Conclusions

Brian believed passionately in the individual and the collective. And that living an authentic life through the free expression of innate dispositions was crucial to a healthy individual and society. He straddled Western individualism and Eastern collectivism with his radical philosophy. His ideas are also wonderfully counter-intuitive: the collective good is served by individual optimisation. The improvement of Brian's thinking over Adam Smith's (he of the Invisible Hand fame) is that these benefits (synergy without) only come about when the expression of innate dispositions is the focus (synergy within).

And of course many of us do not discover our talents. And if we do many of us do not self-actualise. Indeed to do so would be a revolutionary act since our current economic models do not reward authenticity of expression. This is why only 5% of artists make a living out of art. And indeed we have other priorities, commitments and obligations—families, friends, biological needs. I might be born to juggle tennis rackets but I also have to eat, sleep and crap. And even if I am not born to sprint I should probably run away when I see a tiger. Maslow talked about this.

I recently finished Donald R.Hoffmann's 2019 book The Case Against Reality where he introduces his Conscious Agent Theory. An interview here:

His theory says that what we perceive as objective reality, incl. spacetime are icons on the desktop of conscious agents whose subjective perception is optimised for natural selection. He even has some maths to prove it.

I think Brian's (and Campbell's) visionary work is aligned to this and Ask Yourself, Let Go, Aha, Do It, Be It and Flow will be seen in years to come as part of the Standard Model of Conscious Agent evolution helping us to explore the intersection of science, consciousness and spirituality and the divine spark of Aha that unites them all.

J.Brian Hennessy RIP. The ageless child, ever curious, ever evolving. Wherever you are now, shine on you crazy diamond.

...

(Written in homage to Syd Barrett, a founding member who left the band after struggles with mental illness)

Postscript

Brian in conversation with Ryan:

A good Boyd OODA post I may use later:

.

And yet another Yin Yang mashup with Carp: