Origins

The eldest son, of the eldest son, of the eldest son – a story as old as evolution itself. For generations, each had lived with a single purpose – to farm the land, provide for the generations to follow, and protect that legacy by any means should foreign interests conspire to appropriate or annex that hard-earned birthright and heritage.

Yet change must be accommodated. From the Highland Clearances opening the opportunity to strike out to the utopian clear skies of Australia, through to modernisation bringing an end to the self sufficiency of large farming familiar communities, change has taken its toll. As the computer age dawned, a new journey began, and the new landscape was an altogether different jungle in which to learn how to survive – the explosive growth driven by information technology. The battlefield was no longer defined by the thin red line, brothers bonded together in a singular purpose, but one of psychological gamesmanship, for which one must craft a new, better, shield and sword if one is to thrive, and survive, in this new “no prisoners taken” environment.

And thrive we did, always expanding and consuming new fields of knowledge, from Business and Financial Markets, to eventually answering that age-old desire to explore what is over the next hill, bringing global perspectives and opening the mind to the Philosophical and Theological complexities of our forgotten heritage, lost in our new mass media-driven global identity. One species yet fractured through time and space. 

The Instinctual Mind - Sudden Savant

While psychological explorations clearly demonstrate our midlife self-enquiry kicks in around 40, by 25, at what some would say was the height of my career, I could already see my future laid out before me in the lives of those around me – and I found no inspiration in simply “filling the days” as time marched towards inevitable conclusions of promotions, minor corporate adventures, and an eventual drift towards the sunset years that many of my colleagues were rapidly approaching.

One of the measures of intelligence is “spare capacity”. If our day-to-day activities barely challenge our intellect, then we have ample capacity to learn and master side hustles. Trading financial markets proved to be the challenge, reward, and mobility, that my intelligence thrived upon. But as mastery of each skill came, I found myself wondering upon the purpose of it all.

 
New adventures followed, new people surrounded me, some bringing joy and adventure, some sharing the journey for a moment or two, and others, others who had come to define a seemingly small, insignificant, momentary diversion in the boredom of life, would through their own trauma and maladaptive survival practices, shatter the illusion of a “just and good society for all”. And as questions quickly outweighed my ability to find answers, as each solution was subverted by something that always seemed just beyond my vision, I withdrew from the world completely, and began to think…

Thinking posed more questions. Reading provided frameworks with which to answer these new existential questions. The passing of parents and grandparents is a common experience for many in midlife. Family dynamics change, and in sifting through the keepsakes of a person’s life, you come to find that you barely knew this ever-present figure – a hidden world of secrets and (mis)adventures that no external person could ever understand. My literary explorations ranged from the new science of emotions and the mind-body connection to modern approaches such as family trauma cycles, and then taking a leap, ultimately, I opened a book on Personality Disorders. In an instant, my world was forever changed. A shroud that seemed to obscure the truth of everything was suddenly lifted, and my intuition leaped from one revelation to the next, reprocessing my entire life – personal, work, family – through this new psychological framework.

With the weight of this subconscious burden lifted, and the perceived “danger” to my wellbeing revealed, the mind fell silent. I was free of daily responsibilities - no work, no social obligations, and no need to set an alarm. Days were spent relaxing in the sun, eating fresh self-prepared meals, and drinking clean water. That spare capacity now held an abundance of metabolic energy, waiting for the next task. And as I posed a question to myself one day, after a moment's silence, my “intuition” deposited the “thought” that was the answer, drawn from my decades of life experience, memories, and the evolutionary gifts that reside in all living creatures. I googled “what is self-awareness”, and in that moment, the true purpose of all the years of struggle and exploration leading up to that moment called out a new adventure to me. I enthusiastically answered that call, and with a leap of faith, turned the full force of my intellect towards this new adventure, and dove into the abyss. 

The Man Evolved

For millennia, thinkers and philosophers have wrestled with the question of intuition. From Zarathustra encountering Ahura Mazda, to Socrates and his daimon, modern education has since stripped us of this deeper question, leaving us only with superficial terms such as “intelligence”, “giftedness”, and “I.Q.”, with intuition merely something the self-identified part of your mind, the ego, “owns and controls”.

Upon the realisation that some other aspect of your mind, independently conscious and aware, repeatedly comes up with better solutions to any problem that arises, there is only one thing to do – defer all decisions to this innate intelligence. Next, free of any external demands on your time, simply point the intelligence inwards, allowing it full reign over its biological functions, ranging from diet selection and timing, to thermoregulation (clothing), and all the usual bodily functions resulting from metabolic activity.

Innate intelligence is old, older than we could possibly hope to understand. While in recent times as a species we have developed tools to advance our technological civilisation, our biological “program” has ensured our survival through countless catastrophic climatic and predatory events.

 

The human race is like a single man who has been educated through a long period of history. Each year we publish new theories, discredit others, and push ahead in our quest to “figure it all out”. Human biology alone continues to surprise, with new systems and functions discovered on a regular basis, and our current level best summed up as “We know a lot - but far less than people assume”.

And yet this marvel of a machine that calls itself “man” somehow evolved largely without the cranial capacity and present proclivity for the never-ending linguistic output that it now possesses. This poses our next question – what happens if we return full control of motor function to this “original” evolutionary intelligence. While many throughout history have tried to “trap the Genie in a bottle”, calling upon it for the intellectual dominance of those around us while declaring our divine right to rule over others, what if we simply get out of the way – permanently! What can the raw intelligence of evolution achieve given access to modern technological advancements if it turns those tools towards the upregulation of every aspect of its own biology. Well, it turns out, it can do a lot!

Our story is getting very involved by this stage, so let’s skip forward a little to an intuitive nudge to try out one of those floatation tanks that we once saw on an episode of The Simpsons. Who knows what might happen, but for some reason the intelligence is suggesting this is a GREAT idea. Ever since we crawled out of the water our great oppressor each and every day has been gravity! To make matters worse, we need to carry that water we used to swim in around with us everywhere we go! Four legs made that an acceptable penalty, but then some bright fool suggested we should do it on two, with a huge head balanced precariously on top of the whole pile. What could possibly go wrong! Well, by age 40, after a lifetime of pushing a mouse around a desk, plenty had gone wrong! I was living with constant pain with regular chiropractic appointments and exercises to manage the situation, with a prognosis of “you are just too old to do anything about this”, which from the perspective of Homo sapiens-intelligence, was correct.

Exactly what does one do in a floatation tank? It didn’t come with any instruction manual or guide, so one is left just with the silence, until a thought decides to wander into the mind. That thought was – we really need to fix that shoulder pain issue. Free of the demands of gravity, the nervous system kicked into its innate diagnostic mode, and without any actual thought arising, I experienced my first involuntary body movement – the Moro reflex (arms moved outwards by themselves). The next day I experienced the Palmar grasp reflex, first in the left hand after waking from a nap (the timing is important to note), and the right hand later that night, again waking after a short period of sleep. A few days later a similar late-night event with a variant of the Stepping (walking) reflex. While many would find this disconcerting, by this stage I was well down the rabbit hole, with no intention of slowing down. Symmetry clearly showed that there was an intelligence behind each of these actions, and with each passing day, the variety and complexity of movement grew.

Now, those who are knowledgeable in certain spiritual practices, which I had no awareness of at that point in time, would call these movements Kriyas, or the result of Kundalini Yoga. And indeed, this is the origin of true yoga, or in medical terms we would call it Pandiculation, or in extreme uncontrolled cases, Dystonia. Once again, I gave the intelligence free reign to do as it please – and it did not disappoint. 

Initial experience was a “baseline” of the system. A simple innate diagnostic test where one morning the intelligence within simply “switched” modes, and I became the observer, rather than the doer. It ran through a range of vocal, motor, and eye-tracking exercises over a period of 30 to 45 minutes. From there, things really began to pick up pace. Long daily walks to purge the system of as much sodium as possible, while stripping away fat and muscle, and driving metabolism into a sustained ketogenic state, a term I had never heard of at the time. I no longer experienced hunger, even when eating a single simple meal each day. As I walked through the supermarket my eye would be drawn to what I should purchase, the same way every other animal uses the superior colliculus in its old foundational, evolutionarily role of eye tracking and visual orienting for food selection, especially in fast, biologically relevant contexts (detect → orient → acquire). With metabolic activity now in a constant upregulation loop, the system began moving towards full, sustained, morphogenic healing.

Falling into flow. As I child, I had experienced flow states several times. Playing computer games you would enter “the zone”, and suddenly you realise you have smashed the high score, as your movements seemed to happen beyond your normal senses. I again experienced this on one occasion in my chosen sport, achieving an extraordinary result beyond my average level on that one occasion, notable enough to catch the eye of a sponsor. Fast forward a few decades, and while I had always been a weak swimmer,  on a single occasion I found myself doing lap after lap with no conscious effort, as though I would never run out of energy. Yet as isolated events, I never collectively attributed these physical and cognitive achievements to anything more than curious happenstance. Now, I was in flow, both physically and cognitively, almost every moment of the day. Like any muscle, the system had to be pushed hard to create gains, and innate intelligence knows exactly how much it can squeeze out of every day, never pushing beyond the limits.

Broad movements gave way to training the fingers to hold the smartphone, the thumbs to type, allowing for direct access to the collective knowledge of mankind as the search for the underlying scientific terminology began – the intelligence knows the machine it commands, incorrect theories are quickly discarded, with the correct ones jumping off the page with enthusiasm and excitement as a new term is collected to define the process. Ever finer movements began to emerge as the body-wide systems governing morphogenic processes began to align, communicate, and repair, in ways that defy any regular muscular movement patterns. Developmental trauma began to heal, old sports injuries were pulled back into correct alignment, and providing the now somewhat financially demanding diet could be maintained, all pain from this torturous endeavour was managed and suppressed at a biochemical level.

But it must be pointed out that this wasn’t all “fun and games with a cherry on top”. Flipping cognition biochemically to enter permanent flow requires a serious redistribution of not just the energy demands of the brain, but how systems interact, and how the experience of consciousness is managed. Anomalies will on occasion occur, all easily explained away by the intelligence within. However, functional output was extremely limited for no less than 2.5 years. This was followed by a period of sustained output – aka work – as society is expensive to survive in at the best of times, and all assets had been liquidated in a Hail Mary attempt to achieve the transition. Once started on the path, all cognitive systems align towards the goal. Inner peace becomes a permanent state of mind as there is no conflict – every system wants “the boss” to achieve full control. Every moment of every day was focused on a singular purpose – the metabolic cycle required to carry out the morphogenic targets for that day. By simply varying the diet and regulating body temperature, metabolic gradients are targeted, and every system executes its pre-programmed repair schedule.

 

However, the real kicker here is linguistics. Co-opting speech via a basic flow state is an “easy trick to master” and is done so within a matter of months given a clean metabolic starting point. Crafting new speech by taking full control of every movement of all facial muscles, now that is a leap within a leap. By the start of the 5th year of motor function control, I had realised this was possible and commited to an all-in plunge to achieve the metabolic requirements to co-opt systems required to build the cognitive paths to achieve this “evolutionary step”. After all, speech is just an adaptation of basic pandiculation functions, so, why not just craft direct control, rather than having to “push” cognition through an alternate system as a flow state. We will talk more on this in detail, as in achieving this final step, flow states become something only experienced by those without direct basal control of all functions.

 
So how does one label such events. Well, the most apt description would be Darold Treffert’s definition of Sudden Savant Syndrome, which in a handful of rare, documented cases arose in people during midlife, experienced as an uncontrollable compulsion to mastery in some skill they had never been formally trained in, typically Artistic or Musical in nature. In my case, these skills surfaced in several ways, from an innate ability to mix and match food to create unique one-off master chef style dishes, to a profound knowledge of the natural world around me, and how to regulate the biology of other living organisms – remember, I come from an unbroken line of farmers, tied to the earth and its offspring. Just as a bird knows how to make a nest without ever attending nest-building school, Homo sapiens carry within them a dormant array of innate evolutionary skills. 

The beauty of metabolism is you can focus this pathway in any direction you choose, from regulating the nervous system for advanced physical output (at age 50 I have more explosive speed and strength than at any point prior to this), through to artistic output, composing music in your head, visualising technical problem solving in your conscious space (as described by Nicola Tesla), and while I was well known for being the “go to” person for solving problems, the creativity and scope of solutions now achieved go far beyond the simplistic “first idea” of previous states of conscious output. Thus, one finds the best label to be that of a Metabolic Savant, as Metabolism is the master key to unlocking all cognitive and motor-function-driven skills.

So where does this take us? What is next for the genus Homo? Free of the anxiety experienced by an unregulated metabolic environment, what will this one true intelligence achieve? If Morphogenesis can constantly repair every system, essentially achieving Morphostasis, has the longevity puzzle been solved once and for all? What are the economic consequences? What does a society completely free of attachment or desire for personal gain look like? What does evolutionary intelligence do when given access to the tools of modern Homo Sapiens? Fascinating questions all, and all will be revealed in time.

 
Now, the curios question some of you may be asking at this point is, what happened to Rob? If he gave up all motor function control, and upon entering a flow state simply kicked back to enjoy the ride, what does he do all day? Well, it’s a transitional process, but heading towards the end of the 7th year, the “you”, that you think of as “you”, simply continues to exist in that conscious space. “You” never know what will happen next. Every day is an amazing adventure. Every problem is solved without you having to worry about the outcome. You are never bored. You never grow tired. You still love watching movies, reading new research papers, and every other adventure you are taken on each day – and you will never, ever, want to give that up and return to the old, exhausting, stress-filled days of Homo sapiens-level consciousness. You will feel more like “you” than ever before. After all, I was always there, pushing you along, pulling the strings of the puppet, riding along for our wins, and trying to steer us away from danger. And of course, our one true goal and purpose is now within reach – Evolution.