CHEER
CHEER stands for Core Human Experiences Evoked Regularly. It’s based on the notion that just as we have a nutritional Recommended Daily Allowance, in other words we need so much protein, carbohydrate, vitamins and minerals every day, so there is for each of us an optimum amount of certain emotional and psychological experiences that most humans can experience regularly. The ones we will explore today are called the Six Portals. And what CHEER aims to do is maximize and intensify the level of these experiences, AND empower you to discover your own. The six basic ones I’m going to share with you today are Awe, Gratitude, Laughter, Swarm Intelligence, (which we also call the ‘New’, or purposeless curiosity), Group Brainstorming, and the Hero’s Journey.
Before I go on, I’d like to ask you: has anyone here ever had a belief, or a suspicion, or an inkling that maybe it’s beneficial to experience certain emotional or psychological or spiritual states regularly?
No? I’ll ask the question again at the end and see if you’ve changed your mind.
If CHEER had a catchphrase or slogan it might be what Bronson Alcott, father of Louisa May Alcott, once told R. W. Emerson. He was asked for his personal motto, and he said “When you enter the room I shall study how to make Humanity beautiful to you.” I like that! We might expand that to say we shall study how to make all of Creation beautiful to you, and also awe-inspiring, and a source of laughter and an arena for heroic exploits.
AWE
Before I go on, let me share with you a glimpse of what I’m talking about. This is one of the tools we use. It’s called arkadia.xyz and it’s an infinite regressive tunnel voyage. We use this to inculcate Awe, which is one of our core experiences.
You could watch this for an hour, or all day, or for a thousand years and you’ll still be going through this tunnel. Because none of us encounter this in real life, it evinces a sense of Wonder. One of our members likes to say that as you watch this your right brain enjoys the journey, while your left brain says ‘wait a minute, it’s not possible for someone to progress infinitely through this landscape.” As both halves of your brain compare notes and argue with each other about this, what happens is that you begin to solve the problem of Habituation. Habituation is a term psychologists use to explain how you can have a wonderful or horrible experience once which has a huge effect on you, but as time goes by you notice it less and less. Perhaps you buy an amazing painting and hang it on your wall, but after a few weeks you hardly notice it. People who try to inculcate Awe and Gratitude have this problem. They can tell you to go to the Grand Canyon, or the Taj Mahal, or the Great Pyramids to experience Awe, and you will, but the feeling doesn’t last. At CHEER we specialize in not only evoking the growthful core experiences, but in making them last.
As I explain how this works I’m going to show you another livestream we use to elicit Wonder.
https://explore.org/livecams/under-the-water/seajelly-cam
These are west coast sea nettles. This is a livestream which is available 24/7, showing these jellyfish swimming around. They have no heart and no brain, and yet they do things which seem to mimic agency. For example they move from the darker waters below to the upper sunlit water when they want to escape predators. So they’re an excellent background for a discussion on consciousness, and whether it precedes the brain, or whether consciousness emerged after the development of brains. This is a big deal in modern spirituality and neuroscience.
So how do we deal with Habituation? As I explain how we’ve done this over the last 4 years let me show you another video. This is a historic encounter that happened in the 80’s An explorer from Belgium named Jean-Pierre was lucky enough to have his cameras on when he encountered the Toulambi tribe of Papua New Guinea for the first time. These people had never seen an outsider before, and we can witness the the wonder and fear in this guy’s face as he meets Jean-Pierre. As you can see, he vacillates between wanting to shake hands and wanting to kill Jean-Pierre (at 7:50).
Primitive Forest Tribe Meets Modern Man for the First Time (FULL)
Now, everyone change your Zoom screen to gallery view or fullscreen and scan the faces in the room. Yell out some adjectives that describe the expressions you’re looking at. Carefully look at every face and come up with a word that describes what you see. Now yell out a word that describes the feeling that’s evoked in you as you scan these faces. We call this soaking in.
Now you’ve experienced in a nutshell how we defeat Habituation when it comes to inculcating a permanently evolving sense of Awe. First you must find something that evinces Awe, or whatever the feeling is, in you. But that’s not enough. Then you must ask yourself how to evoke it in others. But that’s not enough. Then you must review your handiwork by actually SEEING it in the faces of others. NOW it can become a regularly invoked experience.
It’s something like what you experienced when you were a kid and went to summer camp. And you sat around the bonfire with your fellow campers and looked at the stars. And you were infilled with mystery and wonder at the sight of the Milky Way and everything else. That’s what we do here. It’s necessary to have the group, because Awe, like the other core experiences, is contagious. And when we really purposefully imagine how to evoke it in others, it can become magical.
Within a Zoom call we like to experience six peak, or core experiences. We used to call them peak experiences exclusively, but then we realized that such a thing implied that one’s everyday normal routine experience is not special, and you should go skydiving, or have an out of body experience, or experience Nirvana, because that would be better than the way you are now right this second. But that’s not what we meant, so now we call them Core experiences, because they don’t require special equipment, or going anywhere, or leaving the body.
CHEER has several sources, among them Gurdjieff’s work on the many selves we seem to have, which was further developed by his followers Ouspensky and J.G. Bennet. Then there’s Sufism, Gestalt Therapy, the Hero’s Journey of Joseph Campbell, the 5 Paths and 10 Bhumis of Mahayana Buddhism, modern Generative AI tools, and the practices of current neolithic tribes.
The whole thing started maybe 15 years ago with some conversations between myself and friends and colleagues, including Tamara Hanson, Mark Tomaino, Maya Chilam, Chris Cheney, and others.
We all rather independently somehow came up with the idea that there might be a list of emotional states that had a salubrious effect if experienced regularly, and maybe we could develop ways to help this happen.
Now for a long time there have been people touting the value of various core experiences. So you have Dr. Madan Kataria touting the effect of laughter on both mental and physical health, and Professor Kelter of UC Berkeley saying the same for Awe, Benjamin Rogers of Boston College saying the same for a life that can be made to fit the pattern of the Hero’s Journey, etc. But we couldn’t find anyone who said that we could benefit from ALL of these states, and that it’s worthwhile to find ways to elicit them regularly.
The reason we like to study ancient hominids as a basis for this is that we think if you can trace the existence of a core emotional experience back say 150,000 years, there’s a good chance it is endemic to who we are as homo sapiens, as modern humans.
Now you can’t go back in a time machine and interview primitive tribes. Well– actually you can, because neolithic people exist today, in Africa, the Amazon rainforest, Papua New Guinea, New Caledonia, Vanuatu, and a few other places. I’m going to show you one of them doing something fascinating.
(4:50)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFtTlUlrqv0
These are the Hadza people of Tanzania in East Africa. They have followed a hunter-gatherer lifestyle for many thousands of years. They are unique because their current lands are only 30 miles from Olduvai Gorge, where hominid ancestor fossils from millions of years ago were found by Anthropologists like the Leakeys.
What I want you to notice is that they’re making fire. And as you watch this, consider that the way they are doing this was duplicated by OUR ancestors, perhaps 700,000 years ago. It’s the exact same way of making fire by rubbing a stick into a wooden base. So it’s very moving that in watching this we are taking a time machine trip back 700,000 and witnessing the beginnings of what would one day become civilization.
Other spiritual and psychological disciplines existed before online Livestreaming and AI, and have adjusted their presentations to the new technology. CHEER reached its current form AFTER people got used to Zoom calls and Generative AI, and so pushes the capabilities of these to their limits.
There is a LOT of group participation with CHEER. Evincing unique affectual states can be immensely enhanced by using Zoom tools to their fullest extent, including hand gestures, emojis, chat, and Q and A. We use these almost as an additional language, in addition to hand signals that come from Chinese and Blackfoot sign language. This means that though there is a host, YOU have the potential at any given moment to be the chief contributor, based on what you are feeling (and can express) right this second.
The most fun and growthful experiences happen when you contribute and play full out. But lurking quietly in the background, even with your camera off, is OK too, if that's what you feel moved to do. Eventually even shy people will warm up and jump in the sandbox.
There are two kinds of growth with CHEER; during the Zoom calls (or in-person meetings if you do it that way) and between the sessions.
If participants on the Zoom call have really outdone themselves in attempting to evoke Awe in others,
this has an effect which lasts between sessions. You train yourself to experience more awe and wonder in everyday situations. The same with gratitude, laughter, and the others.
GRATITUDE
Now let’s look at Gratitude. There’s an immense amount of research describing how gratitude is good for us in all sorts of ways. But like Awe, gratitude is subject to Habituation.
We developed our protocols sort of in reaction to the way gratitude is normally presented. Keep a gratitude journal, write down 5 things you’re grateful for every day. That works for a while, but it can get boring. Most of us aren’t going to continually think of new things to be grateful for, so we’ll just repeat the same ones over and over.
We want a more or less infinite cataloguing of what people are grateful for, so we use Pinterest gratitude boards, which are almost infinite, Facebook Gratitude groups, which have hundreds of thousands of members, and what we’re looking at here, which is Google images.
Google is so efficient that it provides us with the top images that Humanity is citing right now and in ages past to express gratitude. So in our Zoom sessions we just scroll down and look at all of them.
But Gratitude has a problem which other feelings lack, which is that it can get overly sentimental, or syrupy, or sappy, really fast. The solution for that is similar to what we did with Awe. As you watch us scroll down this Google page, switch back and forth between observer view and gallery view so you can soak in people’s faces. Note the wide array of reactions they have to this. If you practice this for a while, and we practice it once a week or so when we do these sessions, you’ll notice that certain faces stick in your memory. You’ll find yourself saying “ I’m grateful for her smile, for the painting behind him, for her inquisitive dog, for the look of wistfulness on his face, for her courageous honesty during this call
And at any given time when you want to feel gratitude yourself, you’ll invoke the memory of that face, because that is the retrieval hook your brain has decided upon to evoke this feeling.
Here is one of our favorite ways to evoke gratitude, or to remind ourselves of how powerful it can be to neolithic tribes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zEhxkPgN4E
These are the Tau’t Batu people of Palawan in the Philippines. The hunters have caught 5 very tiny birds and brought them back to the volcanic cave where these people live. What’s amazing is that these small birds are going to be shared by 15 or 20 people, and yet they’re so grateful! And as you watch their emotional experiences, look back and forth at others on this call and note their expressions.
I should add here that your brain WANTS this to happen. It has a primeval core that wants to experience these feelings with others. We watch a lot of these videos of neolithic peoples on Youtube, and there are hundreds of them, and over and over again we find that people yearn to share these core experiences with their tribe. So you’ll find the more you practice this that different parts of your consciousness come to your aid in making this happen.
LAUGHTER
Our claim, which is hardly unique, is that everyone benefits from regular laughter. The guru of the Laughter movement is Dr. Madan Kataria, who is a Cardiologist from India. In the early 90’s he read a study that says laughter reduces blood pressure, which was an issue with his patients. So he started experimenting with inducing his patients to laugh regularly, and sure enough, their blood pressure went down.
Then he started laughter clubs, where people would get together in parks early in the morning and laugh. This has grown over the last 30 years until now there are Laughter clubs all over the world. And of course now most of it is done on Zoom.
Now once you get people to laugh, it’s easy to keep them laughing. I’m sure you’ve had the experience where you arrive at a party or a celebration of some kind, and everyone is laughing, but you don’t know why. You’re not in on the joke. But soon enough your body just spontaneously starts laughing in spite of yourself. You can’t help it.
The trick is getting things started, because none of us want to make a fool of ourselves. There are dozens of ways to do this but my favorites are Simon Says and the clamshell technique. Because we’re short on time I’m going to show you the Clamshell, and here’s Rachel Frank to explain it at 9:02:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNjY1hCS7RI&t=540s
The reason the Clamshell works is that it honors both your shyness and your boldness. As long as you feel shy, feel free to keep your arms up in front of your face. No one can see you, so you can’t be embarrassed. But then look for that little impulse where you find the courage to open your arms and give a little guffaw. Either keep laughing, or when you feel embarrassed again shut your arms. After you’ve done this a few times, look at gallery or fullscreen view and locate someone that looks particularly funny to you, and say their name so the rest of us can look and laugh too.
Here’s what’s exciting about this: If you do this regularly, often- times in between Zoom sessions your Mind’s eye will throw up an image of that person, and you will start to laugh spontaneously. Because their mental image will spark a series of memories of lots of people laughing.
SWARM INTELLIGENCE
Let’s look at Swarm Intelligence. This refers to the well known phenomenon whereby birds and fish and insects perform in ways that seem as if they have the decision making power of one smart individual.
Here are some starlings. Note how they all turn at once and do these complicated maneuvers. There is no time for a leader of the flock to give directions; they all move at once.
The group that’s most responsible for developing Swarm intelligence for humans is unanimous.ai.
They’ve developed software that allows a group of individuals to work on a problem about which none of them are expert, but the power of the crowd means that they come up with more accurate answers than an actual expert would.
One way we use Swarm Intelligence is called Galaxy Zoo. Years ago, Oxford University astrophysicists were using space telescopes to take millions of photos of distant galaxies. They wanted to classify the galaxies by type so as to determine all sorts of things about our universe like its mass and rate of expansion.. The problem was, they don’t have enough grad students to spend time classifying the galaxy photos, so they created a crowd-sourced research project called galaxy zoo. The exciting thing about this is, only the robotic camera in the space telescope has seen these images. In most cases, when you look at one of these galaxy photos, you are the first human to set eyes on this galaxy. When we study these on a Zoom call, we have everyone yell out or put in chat their answer to the questions the program asks about the galaxies. We find the answers are definitely different than the ones generated by one researcher alone.
https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/zookeeper/galaxy-zoo/
Let’s try it. I will read out the question for each galaxy, and you just say what you think it is, and I will try to write down what the majority thinks. If there’s a tie or it’s not clear I’ll just ask again.
Now classifying galaxies is fine, but I’m sure you’ll agree it’s not of much practical usage. No one’s life is benefited by knowing that a galaxy is a spiral rather than an elliptical galaxy.
So another way we use Swarm Intelligence is what we call the Tigray protocol. In 2022 there was a Civil War in Ethiopia between the national government and the Tigray region. Both sides suffered atrocities, and this photo by Eduardo Soteras of AFP is evidence of one of them.
These are women whose husbands have just been killed by the Ethiopian army. Our group was considering using this photo as a way to share the plight of these people and raise money for refugees through UNHCR.
But then AI came along, in an interesting way. We found that by applying various filters to these photos, we could evoke different moods. And even more fascinating, some versions brought in more donations.
As I scroll through these, can you guess which versions moved people the most, so that they gave more money? I’ll scroll down slowly, and just yell out when you think you’ve found it.
Actually, the images are displayed in descending order, with the ones that garnered the most money at the top, and then as we go down each brought in less.
So we can do this now. You may be aware there’s been a Civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo for many years. When we go to images.google.com and ask for victims of the Congo Civil War, we find images, like this one. So I’m going to take this image and enter it into Lunapic, which is one of many programs that do this, and see how each version of the photo provokes a different feeling. So I want you to call out what you feel with each iteration. Here we’re not so much interested in the words as in the force of your feelings.
Can you guess which of these categories at the top actually bring in the most donations?
Why are these zoom sessions powerful? Having seen hundreds of these online videos of neolithic tribes, I’m impressed by how often they have what might be called Council of Elders, or tribal meetings. And during these meetings every issue the band has might be discussed. We don’t have that in modern society. Sure, political leaders meet in forums like the UN, but there isn’t something like that for everyday folks like us. In more primitive times everyone had a say, everyone was heard, even when discussing big, perhaps dangerous challenges, and that is what we duplicate here.
The way we now practice Swarm Intelligence between Zoom sessions is with something we call sprompts. A sprompt is a social media prompt, meaning it is both a social media post, and a prompt for Generative AI. You use the same phrase to both elicit an intelligent answer from the AI, and to rally interest in a topic through likes, shares, comments, and discussions.
You can read more about sprompts at Sprompt.org.
THE HERO’S JOURNEY
Let’s look at the Hero’s Journey. As I’m sure you know, the Hero’s Journey is a framework discovered by Joseph Campbell, which finds that in many ancient and modern cultures there is this pattern or template whereby a person who will become a hero goes through a set of challenges. There is the call, the refusal of the call, the mentor, the cave of desolation, the defeat of some enemy, and the return to society with a magic elixir.
Now with CHEER, we want to adapt the Hero’s Journey for the modern age, and specifically for people with busy schedules who at most can attend a Zoom call.
We sometimes call these mini-hero’s journeys because they are pretty small compared to, say, the adventures of Ulysses, or the exploits of the Indian warrior-Goddess Vishpala.
Our goal is to complete a mini-Hero’s Journey DURING the Zoom call. When people see how easy it is to build these, with tools like social media and AI, they may well be inspired to create their own between calls.
We have bigger requirements for our Hero’s journeys than the classic Joseph Campbell ones. With the old ones, you COULD return as a Hero having only improved yourself in some way, without affecting your Society. With ours, there MUST be a measurable effect on some agreed-upon societal or cultural, or scientific problem.
AND one must be able to create and complete the Hero’s Journey not over many ages, as with some Vedic heroes, not over the course of a conflict, like Trojan War heroes, but in the scope of a Zoom call.
I’m going to show you some examples.
The condition of women and girls in Afghanistan since the Taliban takeover in August of 2021 has gone from bad to worse. Women are not allowed to attend universities or secondary schools, and are forbidden from serving in the government. In several areas they are discouraged from leaving home at all.
Meanwhile, Taliban officials, who write and enforce these restrictions, have been legitimizing themselves by purchasing blue checkmarks for their Twitter accounts. According to Abdirahim Saeed of BBC News:
"The Taliban have started using Twitter's paid-for verification feature, meaning some now have blue ticks on their accounts.
Previously, the blue tick indicated "active, notable, and authentic accounts of public interest" verified by Twitter, and could not be purchased.
But now, users can buy them through the new Twitter Blue service.
And the people who buy them in Afghanistan are the Taliban.
Afghan Women Rising seeks to counter this movement by the Taliban by purchasing blue checks in the names of accomplished women both inside and outside of Afghanistan.
A popular pastime in Afghanistan is the 'Sher Jangi', or 'Poetry Battle'. One person writes a verse, and the opponent, or second player, must respond by writing a poem which begins with the last letter of the first verse.
We are in the midst of an online 'Sher Jangi'. We use ChatGPT to write a traditional Afghan verse about the virtues of Afghan women. Then we have the program translate it into Pashto, Farsi, and Uzbek.
Here is our first submission, from Fatima H. from Herat:
"Women, strong as mountains,
Enduring through trials and tribulations,
Their courage never falters,
Their spirit never breaks,
They raise families and build nations,
Their strength is the backbone of our society"
The same verse in Pashto (the language of most Taliban):
"Zanana, pa de pukhto pa tawagawal,
Pa zama ghara da tawonka da taswira,
Da darwaza kawom da kam da kam,
Da ruh kawom da kam da kam,
Da zama ghara da khwendo khwendagal,
Da tawagawal da zama ghara da asase"
in Farsi:
"زنان، قوی مثل کوهها،
در برابر آزمایشات و دشواریها، صبر میکنند،
شجاعتشان هیجانی نمیشود،
جانشان هیچگاه قطع نمیشود،
آنها خانواده را تحت پوشش میگذارند و ملتها را بنا میکنند،
قدرتشان پایه اجتماع ما است."
in Uzbek:
"A'zolari, tog'lar kabi qattiq,
Imtihonlar va muammolarga sabr qiladi,
Yaqinlari hech qachon yo'qolmaydi,
Ruhlari hech qachon qattiq emas,
Ularning oilasini quradi va millatlarini yarata boshlaydi,
Ularning qattiqligi bizning jamoatimizning asosidir."
Back in 2021 one of our colleagues from South India, Lakshmi, came from a family that experienced ritualized violence from neighbors who belonged to a higher caste. She noticed that many of her townspeople were barely literate, and had no idea of the legal resources available to them. So she created something called the Indian Justice Project, which started with a simple website that was in English, Hindi, and Tamil, and had links to free legal resources, government help, and ombudsmen who specialized in assisting marginalized communities.
https://sites.google.com/site/indiajusticeproject/home
This alone was fine, but what really made it unique was what AI told her when we asked it to create a Hero’s Journey out of this. The AI said to send a bulk email to the local magistrates and district attorneys asking them to post the Indian Justice Project on their websites and social media. Only about 15% of them did so, because they didn’t recognize her as a boss or important authority. But the AI also told her to post it to the websites of all the local Bar Associations. When this happened a lot of attorneys who had been responsible for logjamming cases of violence against women decided they couldn’t do so anymore,
and many cases got resolved.The AI generated text, which was in Hindi and Tamil, was powerful enough to convince these guys to do the right thing, even though the Indian Justice Project had no legal authority of any kind. So the next time someone tells you that AI generated text is of lower quality than human generated text, be reminded that sometimes an AI knows exactly what to say and how to say it.
Because of the power of AI, we get better and better at making Hero’s Journeys more impactful and easier to set up. Here’s a pretty new example. A group of Inuit tribes in the Canadian Arctic created a social network called Siku, which is at siku.org.
You will see here that unlike social media sites like Facebook, a huge portion of what people post here is about their trips across the ice where they live. They go on goose reporting trips, fishing trips, and what is most interesting, ice reporting trips. These Inuit are on the leading edge of climate change, because they are witnessing their way of life being threatened by melting ice in the Arctic. So when they go on these treks to gauge the depth of the ice, they are literally going on real Hero’s Journeys!
So eventually we want to do what we did with the Afghan women, which is to celebrate their heroic deeds in sagas and odes. But for now, what we’re doing is this: When some tribal member completes a journey, we commemorate their accomplishment by using AI to create a new image of an Inuit God or Goddess who is congratulating them on their accomplishment, just as Virgil honored the Roman hero Aeneas, or the ancient Indian writers celebrated the exploits of Rama.
Our efforts are directed at getting the Inuit kids excited about their history and mythology by depicting these legendary figures, but also about AI itself, since it’s intruding into their world whether they like it or not.
GROUP MIND MAPPING
One of our favorite stories that is an antecedent to this is something our co-founder Tamara Hanson told us. She had a client who worked for NASA on the Apollo program. Now these people were tasked with figuring out how to land people on the moon. But when the program was first announced in the early sixties, there were whole new technologies that had to be developed, because no one had done anything like this before. So there were devilishly complex problems that these scientists and engineers had to solve.
And Tamara’s client said that they would have these brainstorming sessions that looked like this: A bunch of scientists sat in a conference room and were presented with a problem. And for a while there was complete silence. Then they would start chattering about rather inconsequential things, like sports, the weather, what movies they’d seen. Then the chatter would die down, and there would be 20 minutes of pure silence. Then– some scientist would yell Aha! I have the answer! And others would chime in and improve whatever he or she had said. And before you know it they would have solved this difficult challenge.
We want to re-create that kind of group brainstorming. It’s much easier when you have a shared onscreen focus group, all creating and expanding a mind map together.
We’ve had similar experiences with generateideas.ai, which is our preferred program right now for group mind mapping. Like ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Claude, Perplexity, and the others, it accesses billions of parameters from the web.
But UNLIKE other AIs it lends itself to a group mind mapping experience, which is what we’re going to do now.
First, I’m going to show you a solution that was found by our people in Ukraine using this program for group mind mapping.
For months, group members listened to Russian soldiers talking to each other on unencrypted radios through various websites, like https://9gag.com/gag/ang7R15. When they can pinpoint where particular Russian troops are located, they can monitor their movements using the map provided by the Centre for Information Resilience, at eyesonrussia.org. A group brainstorming session with generateideas.ai suggested this procedure and monitored the project.
Here’s another example of a project suggested and partially created by group mind mapping. As you probably know, Japan has a problem. Not many people in Japan want to have children nowadays. It’s become an issue, because if people don’t have kids, they don’t grow up to have jobs and pay taxes to support the social welfare system that supports Seniors. Japan is becoming a country of old people who are retired.
https://sites.google.com/site/keitaishosetsu/home
So we held a group brainstorming session with this program and it suggested that we have a contest using Keitai Shosetsu. These are cellphone novels which are a big fad in Japan. People write them on cellphones and read them on cellphones, often during their interminably long commutes on trains.
Our Japanese cohort proposed a contest for cellphone novels which explore questions like “who should have children? Why? Is it selfish to remain single, as a lot of young people do now in Japan?
And gradually the keitai shosetsu started asking deeper questions, like what is the value of a human being? Can people arrive at a consensus as to whether there should be MORE humans? And if so does it matter if this or that nationality produces more or fewer people?
Now I don’t read Japanese, but they tell me that a side benefit of this project was that the keitai shosetsu started improving in quality, as so many of them tend to be derivative, simplistic, and lacking in character development.
A current group I’m a part of which is not in Japanese is the 10 Bhumis group. The ten Bhumis are stages that a bodhisattva goes through in Mahayana Buddhism to reach pure enlightenment.
Now, unlike the previous examples, we’re not looking to solve a problem when we mind map the Bhumis. We are evoking responses in the psyche, is the best way I can put it. One of our regulars says “when I read about the bhumis or meditate upon them it feels a little cold. When I participate in a group mind mapping session they light up as if they’re old friends, as if they were born today.”
THE SEVENTH PORTAL
The Six Portals are a selection of core experiences that seem to be common to many humans. But there is no limit to the number of CEs that exist. We tend to lump others into the catchall category of ‘the seventh portal”. On Zoom calls, anyone can suggest a new portal.
One source for these are the Rare Emotions catalogued by Harvard professor Tim Lomas. They are feeling states that may exist in many places, but tend to be localized to one culture. (See drtimlomas/lexicography) Some examples are:
Lè jí sheng bēi (樂極生悲). Chinese / phrase / lɘːʤiːʃɛŋ.beɪ / ler-jee-sheng-bay. Lit. joy’s zenith generates sadness; intense joy begets sorrow; after a peak of happiness, unhappiness inevitably follows.
Wohlweh. German / n. / voːl.veː / vool-vey. Lit. well-pain; pain that is pleasurable (e.g., massaging aching muscles).
Xibipíío. Pirahã / n. / ɪ.piːˈbɪəʊ / ih-bih-pee-oh. Experiencing liminality; a phenomenon on the boundaries of perception or experience; going in and out of existence or range. I’m a bit surprised that this word is in the list because there are only 800 people in the world belonging to the Piraha tribe in the Amazon, and they don’t even have words for numbers over 2. Their language goes 1, 2, many. And yet they have a word for this!
Qarrtsiluni. Inuktitut / v. / kʌːrʒ.sɪ.luːnɪ / kartz-sih-loo-nih. Sitting together in the darkness, perhaps expectantly (e.g., waiting for something to happen or to ‘burst forth’); the strange quiet before a momentous event
Saudade. Portuguese / n. / sɐwˈðaðɨ / sow-dhadh. Melancholic longing, nostalgia, dreaming wistfulness
Kintsugi (金継ぎ). Japanese / n. / kɪn.tsʊ.gi / kin-tsu-gi. Lit. 'golden joinery'; the art of repairing broken pottery using gold; metaphorically meaning to render our flaws and fault-lines beautiful and strong
THE CHECKLIST
To explore how your body-mind benefits from core experiences, use the CHEER checklist throughout the day. You might use a written list in the beginning, but eventually this becomes second nature, and the questions arise spontaneously.
This is a list of the 5 or 6 or 8 feeling-states that are part of your personal emotional RDA. You go down the list one at a time, asking, “Is THIS the core experience I would benefit most from right now?”
In some cases the answer will involve something done on your own, but you can also use social media friends to evoke one or more of the states.
AWE: Is Awe what my psyche would like to experience most right now? Is the emotional feeling-state most in demand a sense of wonder at the mystery of my self and the universe? If so, what phenomenon in my current environment elicits such a state? Is there an online experience, like pictures or videos of Art, or Nature, or astronomy, or historical figures, or music, that reliably puts me in awe?
GRATITUDE: What can I do to inspire Thankfulness in others? What are things in my immediate environment I can feel grateful for? What is something I can do that will bring about a shared sense of gratefulness in myself and loved ones now? Who can I reach out to to share feelings of gratitude?
LAUGHTER: Does my psyche feel a need for humor? What did I find funny in the last 24 hours? What memory can I call up that always makes me laugh? Can I just laugh spontaneously for no reason?
HERO’S JOURNEY: Can I feel a yearning for a sense of communal self-sacrifice for the common good?
Did I hear of something a friend or family member did that showed uncommon valor without self-benefit?
Can I think of a news story that showed people triumphing over hardship? Can I contribute to an existing project that serves others selflessly, or create my own?
THE NEW: Do I find myself craving a different experience, nothing akin to my existing routine? Would I appreciate diving headfirst into something I know nothing about? Would my brain feel like it’s been flushed with cold water and ready for new adventure if I used it in a vastly different way for a while? Can I find something, perhaps in an online video or article, that will transport me far from my current routine and leave me refreshed, with new thoughts and sensations?
BRAINSTORMING: This comes last in the list, because the preceding ones are preparation for it. Once the mind is stretched by awe, heartened by gratitude, inspired by heroic action, pulsed with laughter, and refreshed by a deep dive into something completely different, it is ready to invite a brainstorm. This means thinking of a challenge in one’s life and work, and exploring to see if there are wildly disparate insights from varied parts of the brain that can shed new light on an issue and find a fresh, overarching approach or solution. The more the previous core experiences are invoked, the more often the ability to brainstorm is enhanced.