Primal Mind Primal Games: Why We Do What We Do

By Paul H. LeMay and Hifzija Bajramovic

A mind-opening, game-changing dive into the origins and quagmire of the human condition. For most of us, daily life proceeds as though every thought and feeling arising in our head or heart is the by-product of our freewill beckoned by our soul's desire. But what if each of us, without conscious knowledge or consent, is, in reality, engaged in a far deeper and more complex bio-psycho-social game? One with origins stretching as far back as the dawn of life itself?

And what if the many conflicts continuing to arise among humans -- including war, and the wanton disregard for one another and our planet -- were also by-products of this game? Would it not be in our interest to understand the rules governing it?

Primal Process Theory offers a new lens that helps explain why we do what we do. In essence, it posits our use of three default mindsets -- Fighting, Defeated and Appeasing. These comprise the basis of our Primal Mind, while their social interplay generate the Primal Games vortex. This book offers a way to extricate ourselves from its many traps, allowing us to lead saner, wiser and more fulfilling lives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Apr 2, 2016
• ISBN: 9780993732027

Book preview

Parzival Press, E-book Edition

Copyright © 2014 Hifzija H. Bajramovic and Paul H. LeMay

All rights reserved under U.S. copyright law and all other international copyright conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher or both authors, except by a reviewer or educator, who may quote brief passages for a review or a classroom setting.

Every reasonable effort has been made to trace the authorship and/or ownership of copyrighted materials or to provide legally accepted citations consistent with U.S. copyright law. If any verifiable, unintended breach of this standard of care has occurred, please notify the publisher in writing at www.ParzivalPress.com.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Bajramovic, Hifzija, 1939-, author

Primal mind, primal games : why we do what we do / Hifzija

Bajramovic, MD and Paul H. LeMay.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-0-9937320-2-7 (ePub)

1. Bullying.  2. Bullying–Social aspects. 3. Bullying–Psychological aspects.

I. LeMay, Paul H., 1956-, author  II. Title.

BF637.B85B33 2014                          302.34’3                     C2014-902114-3

Full bibliographic references are listed electronically on the Parzival Press website.

Textual layout by Louise Beinhauer, Word Works

Cover Design by Paul H. LeMay

The chimpanzee depicted on our cover is a photograph taken in Gombe National Park in Tanzania’s western Kigoma Region.

Photographer: Michael K. Nichols/National Geographic Stock.

Chessboard and chess pieces by:

Rockwood Chess; its use gratefully facilitated by

The Chess Store, Hillsboro, Oregon, U.S.A.

Chessboard photo by Michael Berz, Vancouver, B.C., Canada.

Cover layout concept: Paul H. LeMay, Vancouver, B.C., Canada

Cover layout illustrator: Marlyn C. Collins, Vancouver, B.C., Canada.

eBook Reader's Note

If you are using an ebook reader that is unable to display color or if you have an ebook reader with a small screen (i.e. 6 or 7 inch) you can view the following figures on our website at www.primalmindprimalgames.com.

Figures 2.1, 3.1, 3.4, 3.5, 3.6, 4.1, 4.2, 4.7, 5.1, 5.2, 5.5, 6.1, 7.1, 7.3, 7.4, 7.5, 7.7 and The Eleven Markers chart found at the end of Chapter 8. Doing so will better help you visually grasp some of the concepts we are trying to convey.

Style Note

In terms of reference note style, we have decided to opt for the decimal date system in our dealing with endnotes, footnotes and bibliographic notes. The decimal date system involves placing the year as the first character followed by the month followed by the day as in 2014.03.20 to denote the date of the vernal equinox. Date information will be placed after author name rather than within the body or near the end of the reference as is common in many books and scientific journals. In cases where only the date appears after the author’s name and no further information is given, as may occur in a footnote from time to time, this is due to the fact that the fuller citation can be found in our bibliography.

Speaking of our bibliography, owing to the extraordinary number of pages it would consume to list it (over 35 pages), we have decided to place it on our book’s website rather than appear in the book.

Full citations for endnotes, as denoted by numbers which appear in superscript on the page, will appear at the end of the book, organized by chapter. Footnotes, which appear at the bottom of each page as one is reading, are denoted by an asterisk.

Please also note, we have chosen to use a more traditional punctuation style in reference to quote marks. Where such marks are used for emphasis only, but occur at the end of a sentence, we position the quote marks before the period or semi-colon. Where a person is quoted verbatim, we position the quote marks after the punctuation, as commonly occurs in newspapers.

Curio

For those of you who are fans of the game of chess, you may have noted the arrangement of the chess pieces on the board featured on the cover. It represents the state of the board in game #15 at the World Championship in Reykjavik, Iceland in 1972, when American Bobby Fischer (playing black) faced Soviet chess master Boris Spassky. That game ended in a draw. The board arrangement is typically called the ‘Sicilian Defense’. This strategy is used to defend against the Richter-Rauzer Attack.

Aside from the fact that the 1972 World Chess Championships saw a face-off between players from opposite sides of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union at the time, we had additional reasons for choosing this sophisticated chess play arrangement. Chess is a game emblematic of a battlefield waged in the mind, as such it is an ideal visual stand in for the notion of a Primal Game. Yet despite the game’s much touted sophistication, its foundational origins ultimately reflect our own Primal Mind at play, a mind whose origins derive from our ape ancestry, here symbolized by a chimpanzee in the wilds of Tanzania, Africa.

Content Note

As this book has been written by two authors, and although much of its content represents a collaborative effort, in some cases, one author has been more responsible for generating a given idea than the other. For example, most of the core concepts attributable to the Primal Process Theory (PPT) were developed by Hifzija Bajramovic over the course of his four decade career as a psychiatrist. He is also responsible for the ‘master who doesn’t care’ phrase, the REAL model, comparison patterns, eleven markers and the primary biological functions concept. Other core concepts, such as the orientation function, the linking of the Primal Process Theory to the Fight/Freeze and Flight instinct, the terms used to denote the primary biological functions, the Integrating Self Function (ISF) term, and the material outlined in Chapter 7 of our second book were largely developed by Paul LeMay. In such instances, or when there has been a slight divergence of view, we have occasionally opted to denote this with the phrase ‘one of us’ and then bracket the last name of the author in question, a convention used in Scientific American. In most other instances however, the content presented uses a combined authorship voice.

In some instances, our editor assisted us with the presentational order of the material. Such was the case for our chapter ‘On the Origins of the Primal Mind’. Owing to its more scientifically technical nature, it was moved to the rear of the book to allow readers to become better acquainted with the concepts central to Primal Process Theory first, and the implications these hold to how we think and by extension, how we organize ourselves socially.

Two chapters on science were added to the second book, chapters 5 and 6, which were not reviewed by Kirkus nor some of our other pre-release readers.

Finally, we wish to point out that our original book was 14 chapters in length, which was deemed to be too long by some of our early review readers. Though the book was reduced to 12 chapters with an additional science supplement appended at the end, it was still deemed too long by some of our later reviewers. Thus we decided that our first book would only constitute eight chapters.

Reader Reviews

This book is a very valuable addition to society’s knowledge as to how to confront and probe deeply into the machinations that unfold within the human mind so as to more effectively cope with the countless challenges of a modern society.

– The Hon. R. Roy McMurtry, O.C., O. Ont., Q.C., L.S.M., Chancellor of York University (2011-2014); Chief Justice of Ontario (1994-2007).

Primal Mind, Primal Games is a highly original, intricate and deeply thoughtful systematized exploration of the human psyche and its behavioural manifestations, in both the personal and social realms. A challenging and invigorating read, it is theory with a practical dimension.

– Gabor Maté, MD, author, In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction.

I just have to tell you that the book is tremendous ... engaging, readable, brilliant, and, for those who chose to allow it, life altering. It is so needed in this weary world!

I am forcing myself to read slowly, eking out installments and giving myself time to think.

It has given me, and will likely give countless others, an opportunity to live better, richer, happier lives.

This is a colossal work. It can change the world. Let the magic begin.

– Holly Larocque, Canadian singer/entertainer

The authors tear down the barriers between science, history, politics and psychotherapy to offer penetrating insights into the unconscious behaviour that rules our lives. An absolutely original, challenging, maddening, and ultimately enlightening book.

– Roy MacSkimming, author of Laurier in Love, Macdonald and other novels

This hefty debut explores an all-embracing theory of evolutionary psychology. For their first book, Bajramovic and LeMay attempt to forge a theory of social psychology, evolutionary biology, spirituality, politics—in general, all the activities of the human race. This sounds ambitious—and the scope of their explanation certainly is—but the theory Bajramovic and LeMay expound is (once it’s parsed out) surprisingly basic, focusing on the interplay of three Primal Mindsets: fighting, appeasing, and defeated—three factors Bajramovic derived from his work on victimization. The pair believes that these states—in addition to the Primal Games they engender, the Integrating Self Function, and the four force factors (i.e., recognizing needs and the possibility of fulfilling them)—have sufficient explanatory power to cover the whole spectrum of human behavior.

Bajramovic and LeMay recognize that, of course, human behavior is complicated; yet they describe systems emergent from these simple factors, including the development of life on Earth and major historical moments. To prove the primacy of these mindsets, the authors use a range of sources, mining neuroscience and psychology on brain function and finding examples of the three Primal Mindsets in history and pop culture. Some of this data rests on shaky foundations—the brain is mysterious even to top-tier neuroscientists—but the authors, gripped by their theory, are capable of seeing it wherever they look, so that no loose strand compromises the whole. Ultimately, their purpose is in self-help: Understanding the process can help us more fully ‘humanize’ our environments. It can help transform how we operate our institutions, how we educate children. It can help us conduct politics and the affairs of business in a more humane fashion. If nothing else, it can help an on-going evolution of our consciousness by opening doors to ourselves. Though this theory involves some reduction of higher-level cognitive processes—for instance, it’s hard to imagine where the pursuit of aesthetic pleasure fits in—Bajramovic and LeMay present an extensive, if occasionally jumbled, case for the pervasiveness of victimization in social and personal spheres and how we might harness and refocus that energy for good. Not the whole story, but the psychology discussed here could aid many in evaluating their places in the world.

– Kirkus Review

Reader note: like most of our reviewers, Kirkus reviewed an earlier Preview version of our book which contained 12 chapters and our science supplement. While all of the material contained in this volume was  indeed reviewed by Kirkus, some of their comments no doubt also refer to material that appears in our forthcoming second book. Hence their comment hefty. However, our second book also contains two updated science-related chapters – Chapters 5 and 6 – which appeared in our original 14 chapter book. These were not reviewed by Kirkus.

Foreword

This is a fascinating book, drawing on psychology, anthropology, sociology, history, and spirituality to hold up a mirror for us as human beings. Why do we do the things that we do?

This is also a passionate book! Some of us may get a little bit overwhelmed by the thoroughness of the explanations and the careful precision of the states of mind and their role over the course of our evolution as a species. Within all of this, there is something profound being said. As human beings, we are frequently caught in a game of seeking success, power, and strength. We move through different mindsets, we draw on different behavioral strategies, we react as best we can to the REALity that we live in. But this game tends to be one where the vulnerable must put up hard walls of protection, where the weak are crushed, where the broken are pushed aside. This is a game where everybody loses.

Primal Mind, Primal Games is a call for each of us to wake up. It is up to each of us to learn to live in harmony, to develop the self-awareness that liberates us and others from our primal games. Bajramovic and LeMay describe Integrating Self Function as a way for the mind to operate with greater openness. It is a path of growth in humility, in presence, and most importantly in openness to others. It is listening to the vulnerable that we discover our own vulnerability. It is in reaching out to the weak that we discover our own weakness. It is in welcoming the broken that we discover our own brokenness. It is together that we can grow in greater love.

This book is a challenge and an invitation. If we dare to look at the reflection it offers, we will discover that each of us is responsible and integral in this evolution of humanity, an evolution of peace.

Jean Vanier,

L’Arche à Trosly,

Breuil, France 

November 21, 2014

Jean Vanier founded L’Arche in 1964. It is an international network of communities where people with disabilities live and work together as peers. Vanier discovered that those who society typically considers the weakest enable the strong to recognize and welcome their own vulnerability, thus being transformed by the encounter. There are now 147 such communities operating in 35 countries. For this work, Vanier was awarded the 2015 Templeton Prize.  The prize is intended to serve as a catalyst for discoveries on what scientists and philosophers call the big questions of human purpose and ultimate reality. This vision derived from its founder, John Templeton, and his optimism about the possibility of acquiring new spiritual information and his commitment to rigorous scientific research and related scholarship.

Table of Contents

Foreword

Introduction

A Quick Overview

CHAPTER 1 – Enmeshed in an Unconscious Game

1. Glances in the Mirror – Beset from Every Angle

2. Empires of the Mind – Chessboards in the Making

3. Dawn of an Idea – Elements Emerge

CHAPTER 2 – Primal Process Unfurled

1. The Fighting Mindset – You Can’t Handle the Truth

2. The Appeasing Mindset – You Can’t Always Get What You Want

a) Needs, Wants, We, Me, and…Whatever

b) On Your Mark! – The Appeasing Mindset Rocks the Personal Cradle

c) Getting Set! – In the Appeasing Mindset Way

d) Go! – The Appeasing Mindset Spawns New Mental Capabilities

3. The Defeated Mindset – Gimme Shelter…So I Can Avoid the ‘Helter Skelter!’

4. The Art of Cusping – Transitioning Among the Mindsets

CHAPTER 3 – Evolutionary Origins of The Primal Process Mindsets

1. How Mindsets Are Linked to the Physical Plane

2. Biology-Anchored Dynamics – The Case of Fight, Flight and Freeze

a) How Primal Process Mindsets Arose from Instinct

b) Computer-generated Physical/Behavioral Ties

c) Fight, Flight and Freeze Across Human Behaviors

CHAPTER 4 – The Orientation Compass – Global Positioning in The Primal Mind

1. The Orientation Function Makes It REAL

2. How We Compare Inside and Out – Our Standing in the World

a) Comparison Pattern Processing from the Existing Psychology Perspective

b) Comparison Pattern Processing from the Primal Process Theory View

c) Comparison Pattern Processing – Three Case Studies

3. How Comparison Patterns Generate Conflict

CHAPTER 5 – Synergies at Work – Let The Primal Games Begin!

1. Primal Process ‘Game Dynamics’ – Inside and Out

2. Task Specialization – Behold the Law of Unintended Consequences

3. Masters Emerge

a) Here Comes the Judge! – An In-Depth Look at the Judging Process

b) Masters Who Care and Those Who Do Not

c) Token Homage to Masters Who Don’t Care

d) When Separate Means More – More Markets, Wants, and Troubles!

e) Bond(aged) or Banish(ed)

CHAPTER 6 – The Primal Process Vortex – Reaping The Whirlwind

1. Stop, I Want to Get Off!

2. This Ain’t No Linear Ride

3. Spotting Mindset Facets in the Vortex – Two Case Studies

a) The Case of Role Playing as an Aspect

b) The Story of Mark as an Individual

4. Truth, Anyone?

CHAPTER 7 – The Integrating Self Function (ISF) – Taming Those Wild Horses

1. Slowing Down the Ride

2.The Yearn for Connectedness – Lessons from Einstein’s Brain

3.The Integrating Self Function’s Experiential Nature

a) ISF Peek-a-boo

b) Catching ISF Glimpses on the Long Primal Process Trail…

c) The ISF Moon in All its Phases

d) The ISF Moon in its REAL Entirety

e) Integrating Self Function Figures within Our World

CHAPTER 8 – Cultivating The Integrating Self Function

1. IMAP

a) Practicing Mindfulness, Western Style

b) When IMAP Gets REAL

2. ISF Relating – Three Conditions at Play

a) The Open Invitation

b) Being Comfortably Capable

c) In my Favor as Well

3. Applying the Integrating Self Function Relating Tool Socially

4. Forgiveness – An Old Prescription for a New Society

5. Keeping It All Together – Optimal Concentration and Balance of Stimulation

6. The Eleven Markers

Epilogue – Some Concluding Thoughts

Our Thanks

Acknowledging the Web of Connectedness

Appendices

Bibliography

Endnotes

About the Authors

List of Figures

Figure 2.1: The REAL Matrix of A Few Good Men

Figure 2.2: Sheepish Grin – Close-up of Mixed-breed 8-year-old Bonobo/Chimpanzee

Figure 2.3: The Range within the Three Primal Process Mindsets

Figure 3.1: The Bio-Psycho-Social Complex System

Figure 3.2: Harvard University Physiologist Walter Bradford Cannon in His Lab in 1915

Figure 3.3: Something Fishy Going On Here

Figure 3.4: Child Temperament Model

Figure 3.5: Behaviors Tied to Fight/Freeze/Flight Instincts

Figure 3.6: Origins of the Primal Mind

Figure 4.1: Half a Brain

Figure 4.2: How the Primal Mindsets Likely Correlate With the Three Primal Functions of the REAL Force Factors

Figure 4.3: When a Chess Pawn Imagines Itself as a Queen

Figure 4.4: The Figure/Ground Effect

Figure 4.5: The Multi-Component Working Memory Revision

Figure 4.6: Just Who Do You Think You Are? Comparison Pattern Processing Tells the Tale

Figure 4.7: Comparison Pattern Defaults

Figure 4.8: That’s One Mean Carrot

Figure 4.9: Dethroning of the One-Time King or Hero

Figure 5.1: The Primal Process Complex System

Figure 5.2: Mandala of the Five Aggregates: An Echo of the Primal Process?

Figure 5.3: External and Internal Judges

Figure 5.4: Carrots, Sticks, and Carrots on Sticks

Figure 5.5: Masters Who Don’t Care Have Us Eating Out of Their Hands

Figure 5.6: Charlie Chaplin Modern Times 1936

Figure 5.7: Klondike Miners

Figure 6.1: The Eight Eriksonian Stages as per Primal Mindset Bandwidths

Figure 7.1: The Integrating Self Function and the Three Primal Mindsets

Figure 7.2: Learning to Run With the Pack Can Be a Matter of Survival

Figure 7.3: White Matter (Glial cell) Connections Obtained with MRI Tractography.

Figure 7.4: The Visible and Near-visible Light Spectrum

Figure 7.5: Biophotonic Emissions from Human Hand

Figure 7.6: Cilia within the Ear

Figure 7.7: For Whom Does the Bell Truly Toll?

Figure 7.8: No Time Like the Present

Figure 7.9: Taming the Fires

Introduction

Introduction by Paul LeMay

When I was growing up during the 1960s, my mom would periodically remind me about how life was a school of hard knocks. She would often deliver this wisdom after I did something risky or foolish that resulted in some sort of minor injury. When I showed up with my sobbing complaint, she was not one to apply syrupy ‘poor baby’ phrases. Rather, she’d more often say: That’ll teach you.

Although not what a wee aching lad wanted to hear, they were the kind of words I needed to hear if I was to be readied for a world filled with challenges. My folks already knew that first-hand. Each had grown up in a poor working class family during the Great Depression, when our land of plenty had been anything but.

Still, my mom was slightly luckier than most. Her dad actually had a job as a manual laborer for the Canadian Pacific Railway, painting railway bridges, repairing track and more, before becoming a brakeman on freight trains. Yet despite having a job, wages were low, so low in fact that my mother’s mom apparently needed to take in laundry from other people’s homes to make ends meet. And as this was in the days before washing machines or dryers became common home appliances, doing someone else’s laundry meant doing it manually in scrub tubs with brushes and soap in water heated on a wood-fired stove. No wonder Mondays were called ‘wash day’. It took an entire day to get it done.

The other way her mother contributed to the family’s income was by growing some of their own food in a garden around their house. And to help get through the long winter ahead, this meant learning how to store and preserve every manner of edible plant they could in the cellar under the house.

So not only was life simple for my mom and her sister and two brothers, it was a daily life routine jam-packed with the life lessons that came from long hours of manual toil and the need for frugality, namely sacrifice and moderation.

While so much of life was tough, there were times for a measure of play as well, only it too carried within it a streak of severity. How severe? One example has always remained with me. On several occasions, my mom told me how her father taught his kids to swim. He piled them into a borrowed row boat, rowed to the middle of the river that ran through their town, and then tossed them in saying: "Now swim!" trusting nature (i.e. fear) would take care of the rest. And it did, for what choice did they have? It was swim or drown trying.

Of course today, teaching techniques like these would likely be considered a form of abuse apt to traumatize many a child. But back then it was simply the way many simple folks raised their kids. And the reason was plain for all to see: life was struggle. Learn that lesson early and you’d be mentally prepared for life. Compassion was for sissies… that and for the dead. It was a world in which Conan the Barbarian himself would have felt at home. Nor is it surprising he would for this was a fictional character that sprung into existence in the fertile imagination of a young writer living in rural Texas at the time, Robert E. Howard writing during the Great Depression. The sword Conan wielded was a symbol of the kind young men nearly everywhere had to forge in their minds if they hoped to not just survive, but triumph.

And yet, sandwiched between the harsh terms life was more than capable of dishing out, something more was being taught: A devotion to making sure everybody in your own immediate family circle and social sphere had enough to survive. Yet in exchange, most everybody was also expected to do his or her part to contribute to the effort. Such was the ethic and perspective that ingrained itself deeply into both my mother’s and father’s psyches, for these were their formative times.

With this in mind, it isn’t surprising then that my mom might have applied herself at school, and because she did, she did well academically, certainly well enough to qualify for university where she dreamt she might become a nurse, one of the few professions society thought women could fulfill at the time. But her dream was not to be. Her family was simply too poor to pay for university education.

The best she could do was attend a post-high school business college, a place where women were trained to become secretaries and stenographers, largely in preparation for working in the Canadian federal government. And so she did, finishing just in time to get a government job during the Second World War. Yet while things had improved financially for my mom, it only came about when the world around her had become harsher still.

This was the world in which her phrase: Let that be a lesson to you was really forged, because life was an on-going series of harsh lessons. For her, it was more than a phrase. It was a wisdom mantra for her generation.

Of course compared to the ‘dirty ‘30s’, growing up in the ‘60s was an entirely different ball of psychological wax. Though the winters were still just as cold, the era was nowhere as harsh, particularly in Canada, where, like Britain and many other developed world nations, the government embraced socialized medicine.

Still, life lessons learned in the schoolyard could be pretty brutish. One often came in the spring soon after the snow had receded. This was the time when boots were no longer wanted, although they were often still needed, owing to the slush and copious amounts of salty ‘melt water’. But boys being boys in their hurry for spring to come, often wanted to wear their new spring sneakers to school. Anyone foolish enough to come to school wearing a new pair of white ‘canvas-tops’ soon learned an unfortunate tribal lesson. It was like coming to school with a sign hung around your neck that read: Pick on me. And the boys did. And they had only one thing on their mind: Put that show-off back in his place. This often translated into the unfortunate tradition of having one’s feet deliberately stomped upon with the clear objective of sullying anyone’s new white sneakers, to say nothing of anyone dumb enough to wear blue suede shoes to school.

And sneaker etiquette among boys was just one of the hundreds of unwritten rules upon which life was governed and one was expected to know if you hoped to gain acceptance by one’s peers. Yet from just where did rules for such a primal game emerge? It is not as though there is some sort of survival guide every primary school-aged child can read before showing up at school. Rather, it is this funny sort of situation where everybody is expected to learn this stuff on-the-fly, like a blind man stumbling through a densely treed forest without even a cane. So it’s no wonder they call it ‘the school-of-hard-knocks’. Falling down and getting knocked over seems like some inescapable part of the learning process.

In fact, no matter whether we’re talking about the hard-knocks that come out of the schoolyard, the manner in which people coped with suffering and hardship during the Great Depression, or how we might eventually come to grips with so many of the macroscopic social problems with us today, it is difficult to imagine that any common, let alone discernible, form of overarching process could possibly be behind the shaping of such events, let alone the rather disjointed course of lessons that they bring.

Or so we might think. But what if such an overarching process did exist? Would it not be in our very survival interest to understand it?

Each limited set of unwritten rules that have come to populate the landscape of our minds and our culture, and that have risen to become veritable domains or empires of thought onto themselves, are themselves the products of a complex series of subtle interactions. And no matter whether we see ourselves as the commanders of such ghostly empires of the mind, or their subjects, or a bit of both, there is little doubt that we must all still abide by the rules that govern such realms. Insofar as this is the case, we say it is better to know than not know how such a process might work so as not to become its victim, but rather, possibly its apprentice, and eventually its master.

Yet how much of this do we understand? It’s as though we too have simply been thrown into a river into which we are expected to swim without first having been told how. It is hardly a way to live on a planet, let alone run one.

So this book is about laying plain the intricate and largely unconscious bio-psycho-social rules that underlie and govern the unconscious patterns of thought and behavior that still drive too much of our modern world at a price that still causes much too much suffering.

As you might imagine, assisting in the research and writing of this book has been an intrinsically enlightening journey of discovery. I hope the same will hold true for you the reader.

Introduction by Hifzija Bajramovic

I am in awe of people and always have been.

I’m in awe of people’s minds, emotions, creativity, and their ability to survive under the most difficult of conditions, and still grow – with head high, looking forward.

I was born and raised in the former Yugoslavia. As a middle child among seven, I was left to my own devices. I did my own thinking. I created my own games. One of those was my fascination with how people walk together – sometimes in perfect harmony, each with left foot forward; yet, at other times, bumping into each other.

In this I saw no predictability. I too experimented. Walks with people I liked were long stretches of good rhythm and harmony; to my red-faced embarrassment, those I really liked I would collide with many a time. Those I didn’t like, I’d walk apart from; they really didn’t count anyway.

I remember too how my father, who had fought in two World Wars – and who had been imprisoned in Italy for three years during the first one – saying to me: Your value as a person can be measured by how many languages you speak. In passing, he also mentioned how, while in a concentration camp, he had traded his medal for bravery for a loaf of bread. He and his friends were starving.

In my teens I became curious about Sigmund Freud and his notions of ego, id, and superego; and how people think; and how everything in the world has its opposite. Then how they were not really opposites but somehow circular and sequential and eventually spiral. And then there was this mystery of quantum physics – what I call my uncertain partner – incurably infecting me with singularity, never leaving me. For a time, while at the Medical University of Sarajevo, and under the spell of my physiology professor Dr. Aleksandar Sabovljev, I found myself intrigued by the ‘why’ around just about everything. Everything had to have its own reason for existence and its purposeful place in the universe, with a clear beginning and ending.

I had watched, and contributed to the rise of the former Yugoslavia as it emerged from near total destruction during World War II into a modern country able to match most European states. And with pride too, for this we accomplished in but 45 years, an historic blink of an eye.

Then, in the 1990s, disaster rushed back in, defeating the whole country – its nations and its spirit – in three and a half years. And the many big ‘why’ questions it spawned had many an answer, yet none at all. Couldn’t we learn from history, and after so many similar tragedies in our past?

But by the time events began to unravel in my native country, I had immigrated to Canada in 1968 and completed my studies in psychiatry at Dalhousie University in Halifax and at the University of Toronto.

Much later, while vacationing in Costa Rica, I did some body surfing. It’s the kind of sport where you are the board; your body catches a wave that carries you to shore. Once, as I was heading out from the beach, I observed how, if I went flat and got parallel to an incoming wave, it would hit me – and push me back.

But, if I dove into an incoming wave at 90 degrees to its direction, both the wave and myself would go through each other as if we did not actually coexist. Yet if I caught a wave by matching its speed and angle, we became one and the same on our way to the shore. Once again, nearing the beach, my body became my body again; the water went back to being water, and the wave returned to the sea from whence it came.

So what had carried me to shore? After all, water molecules in a wave really only go up and down, with very little movement forward or back. That’s when I started to wonder.

What dawned on me was that all three – the wave,