“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right doing there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” ― Rumi

The parts of the brain circuitry that activate our survival instincts, creates procedural memories and defines our orientations are the same parts that are activated when we are thinking linearly. We can think of these circuits as hardware. To run on that hardware, we have created a worldview (software, if you will) that separates subject from object, leading to abstract thinking and ultimately linear perception and thinking. As a result, we now experience ourselves as independent, separated from the living network. We therefore attempt to protect our separated self from the rest of the universe. Linear thinking ends up being self-defensive, self-protecting, self-assertive, short-term oriented, and sensitive to violent events and negative news.

The latest neuroscience research indicates that, as a defense mechanism, our brain shuts off extraneous sensory neurons in order to devote full attention to what is moving or changing. This mechanism, along with the power law distribution principle (which says that just a few elements dominate any event) shaped humanity’s linear thinking in such a way as to focus only on the dominant causes and to ignore the seemingly insignificant web of factors that contribute to any given event. The result is that we overlook the randomness that is a part of the real world and reduce it to orderly and linear events. When we respond to the dominant element and get the desired result, it reinforces our belief in the linear model. This reinforcement leads us to believe that cause and effect are proportional. This worldview leads to expectations that are predicated upon predictability, determinism, and certainty. Certainty provides a deterministic tool to make judgments that lead us to abstract belief systems and values. Since our linear logic is based on the proportionality of cause and effect, the chaos and uncertainty in the natural world highlights the non-proportionality of cause and effect and inconsistency of our linear judgment system, including our values and beliefs. Linear thinking with its defense mechanisms, codes our judgment system with fear, guilt, blame, anger, negativity, violence, hopelessness, and liability management, lowering the quality of information processing in the brain. We implement linear thinking in our daily activities and typically receive expected results. But when we recognize its limitations, we become uneasy. Still, linear perception is not useless. We use it successfully in all of our routine activities. We used it to create the reductionist science that led to the creation of the digital world. It has given us tremendous tools for observation that have led us to nonlinear theories that show us that our universe is alive and helps us to understand how it behaves. 

Neuropsychologists call linear thinking the “default state of mind.” It is our brain’s automatic mode. According to the brilliant explanations of health psychologist Kelly McGoinigal in her work The Neuroscience of Change, in the default state of mind, we hold a critical opinion about the present. By time traveling in our minds we create an alternative reality, regretting the past and projecting it as a negative liability onto the future. This robs us of being fully aware of and present in the current moment. The default state of mind also creates a self-referential identity, or ego, separate from others, which we feel compelled to defend. To this end, we judge others and wonder what they think about us. 

On the other hand, we have another state of mind called “mindfulness.” When we are mindful, we experience events with our senses rather than our judgments. We are fully aware of the present moment. When we meditate or have a spiritual experience and intuit information from the living universe, different brain circuitry activate than when we are in the default state of mind. The regions of the brain that activate when we are mindful or having spiritual experiences are the same areas that we use when we think nonlinearly. That is why most nonlinear theorists have a degree of spiritual awareness. As a matter of fact, spiritual thinkers are already nonlinear thinkers.

Our brain, like any living system, is a self-organizing cognitive open system based on feedback, which seeks its optimum hidden potential. As we become passionate and nonjudgmental observers of our thoughts, feelings, and actions, we create positive feedback that helps the self-organizing process achieve its universal potentials. The effectiveness of this feedback is directly related to the quality of our observations. Meanwhile the qualities of observations are directly related to the long-term goals and the values that derive from those goals. When we set our goals to achieve the spirit and intelligence of the living universe and start observing our thoughts, words, feelings, and actions with the values of the living system (which we have defined earlier), our observations become nonjudgmental, accepting and passionate toward ours and others thoughts and actions. As we observe our brain function with this quality of feedbacks, which are flexible, adoptable, and, holistic, we allow our brains to start the self-organizing process to achieve its ultimate capability, which Rudolph E.Tanzi calls the “Super Brain”. In this way, we open ourselves to the network of life, synchronizing with and receiving information intuitively from the living universe. Similarly, on the social scale, when we define our long term goals and values to be consistent with the behaviors of the living universe and start observing our plans and actions the human living network will start its self-organizing process. Fortunately we are living in a digital world that is behaving nonlinearly; therefore, all that we need to do is participate in it with our renewed perception’s goals and values.