On a recent flight, I watched a mother across the aisle play peek-a-boo with her small son while next to me a grown man in a VR headset spent six hours ascending the levels of a video game. It occurred to me that what I was doing between them — reading — was also a game: a peek-a-boo of ideas advancing across levels of meaning. I thought of Newton, who reflected on his deathbed: “I don’t know what I may seem to the world, but, as to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore.”
We play games with the mind and call them science, play games with the spirit and call them art, play games with the heart and mistake them for love. Life itself may be, in the end, a game — not a closed game, the goal of which is winning (for the goal of life is death), but an open game, the goal of which is playing.
So argues philosopher Bernard Suits (November 25, 1925–February 05, 2007) in his uncommonly original and intellectually daring 1978 book The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia (public library), exploring the elemental question of what makes a good life through a parable, that ancient form infinitely more effective than polemics, for parables, as Suits observes “ought to come at the end, not at the beginning, of serious inquiry; that is, only at the point where arguments fail.”
Drawing on Aesop’s famous parable about the price of improvidence, Suits subverts the premise to depict the Grasshopper not as a fool but as “a working Utopian whose time has not yet come” and who exemplifies “the life most worth living.” The Grasshopper’s vision of Utopia is the supreme antidote to the cult of achievement — a way of experiencing life not as striving but as a game, of exposing workaholism as “no more than a ruse for avoiding living up to your ideals.” Suits writes:
Prudential actions (e.g., those actions we ordinarily call work) are self-defeating in principle. For prudence may be defined as the disposition 1) to sacrifice something good (e.g., leisure) if and only if such sacrifice is necessary for obtaining something better (e.g., survival), and 2) to reduce the number of good things requiring sacrifice — ideally, at least — to zero. The ideal of prudence, therefore, like the ideal of preventive medicine, is its own extinction. For if it were the case that no sacrifices of goods needed ever to be made, then prudential actions would be pointless, indeed impossible. This principle, knowledge of which I regard as an indispensable first step on the path to wisdom, the ants seem never even to have entertained. The true Grasshopper sees that work is not self-justifying, and that his way of life is the final justification of any work whatever.
At the heart of Suits’s investigation of games is “the attempt to discover and formulate a definition, and to follow the implications of that discovery even when they lead in surprising, and sometimes disconcerting, directions,” and within it “the attempt to define games as illustrating par excellence the futility of attempting to define anything whatever.”
Against the definition of work as a “technical activity… in which an agent seeks to employ the most efficient available means for reaching a desired goal” Suits pits the defining characteristic of games:
Games are goal-directed activities in which inefficient means are intentionally chosen.
[…]
While it is possible in a technical action to break a rule without destroying the original end of the action, in games the reverse appears to be the case. If the rules are broken the original end becomes impossible of attainment, since one cannot (really) win the game unless one plays it, and one cannot (really) play the game unless one obeys the rules of the game. In a game I cannot disjoin the end, winning, from the rules in terms of which winning possesses its meaning. I can, of course, decide to cheat in order to gain the pot, but then I have changed my end from winning a game to gaining money.
The rules of a game, Suits observes, are accepted for the sake of the play they make possible — we choose to act within the limitations they impose in order to partake of the game. He offers a definition:
To play a game is to engage in activity directed towards bringing about a specific state of affairs, using only means permitted by rules, where the rules prohibit more efficient in favour of less efficient means, and where such rules are accepted just because they make possible such activity.
A game has four elements: the goal, the means of achieving the goal, the rules, and — crucially — what Suits calls the “lusory attitude”: the psychological orientation necessary for entering into the play, at the heart of which is an acceptance of the arbitrary rules the game imposes. He writes:
The attitude of the game player must be an element in game playing because there has to be an explanation of that curious state of affairs wherein one adopts rules which require one to employ worse rather than better means for reaching an end… In anything but a game the gratuitous introduction of unnecessary obstacles to the achievement of an end is regarded as a decidedly irrational thing to do, whereas in games it appears to be an absolutely essential thing to do.
He simplifies the definition further:
Playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.
Because the goal always precedes the attempt to pursue it, it is inherently “prelusory” and at the same time inherently related not only to the game but to life itself. Suits writes:
The prelusory goal of a game… can be described before, or independently of, any game of which it may be, or come to be, a part. In contrast, winning can be described only in terms of the game in which it figures, and winning may accordingly be called the lusory goal of a game. Finally, the goal of participating in the game is not, strictly speaking, a part of the game at all. It is simply one of the goals that people have, such as wealth, glory, or security. As such it may be called a lusory goal, but a lusory goal of life rather than of games.
Suits identifies three types of pseudo-players who can ruin the game for others: triflers, who recognize rules but not goals; cheats, who recognize goals but not rules, and spoilsports who recognize neither rules nor goals. The true player is one who recognizes both goals and rules — that is, one who enters the game with the lusory attitude and whose reward is not winning but playing.
And so we return to the Grasshopper and his choice, deadly in Aesop’s parable but existentially triumphant in Suits’s, of play over work as the means to the good life. Structured as a Socratic dialogue, the parable pits the Grasshopper against his critical disciple Skepticus, who counters the core argument by pointing out that “people are not, and do not want to be, wholly grasshoppers or wholly ants, but a combination of the two,” seeing that “labour is valuable because it permits us to play.” To this the Grasshopper responds:
The only argument against living the life of the Grasshopper arises from the contingent fact that at present one dies if one does not work. The answer to that argument is that my death is inevitable in any case. For if I am improvident in summer, then I will die in winter. And if I am provident in summer, then I will cease to be the Grasshopper, by definition. But I will be either provident or improvident in summer; there is no third alternative. Therefore, either I die or I cease to be the Grasshopper. But since I am just the Grasshopper, no more and no less, dying and ceasing to be the Grasshopper are one and the same thing for me. I cannot escape that logic or that fate… Everyone alive is really a Grasshopper… Everyone alive is in fact engaged in playing elaborate games, while at the same time believing themselves to be going about their ordinary affairs. Carpenters, believing themselves to be merely pursuing their trade, are really playing a game, and similarly with politicians, philosophers, lovers, murderers, thieves, and saints. Whatever occupation or activity you can think of, it is in reality a game.
We are shaped by all we have suffered — by what harrows us — and in turn shape our lives by how we hold our harrowing. Harrow shares its Middle English root with harvest. It is by suffering, and by what we make of our suffering, that our personhood ripens in us, that we come to reap what evolution sowed long ago when mitochondria first set out to become mind — our capacity for empathy, for doubt, for art.
Harrowing may be the hallmark of our humanity — an AI cannot be harrowed because it does not have hopes, only directives. This may be why John Steinbeck considered hope “the tragic miracle of consciousness” — miraculous because it violates the laws of probability to consecrate the possible, and tragic because it is constantly colliding with the will of the world, constantly devastated by the impartial brutality of time and chance. Harrowing is the price we pay for hope, for being fully human.
And so, a poem:
HARROWING by Maggie Smith
This world is harrowing, harrowing, all harrow, as if harrow were what the world is made of, what we are made of, as if harrow were strings to be strummed, tendons and veins to be strummed, as if harrow could be snapped between the teeth, the word one letter from the white meal inside our bones, the meal we could make of ourselves, harrow, two letters from the bird who might strum with its beak what the body is made of, what the world is made of, and in that strumming become the song.
New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove Aug 9, 2026 Psychology and Psychotherapy Erica Lorentz is a Jungian Analyst with over forty years of clinical experience. She is a training analyst at the Jung Institute of New England. She is author of Body As Shadow: Jung’s Method of Embodied Healing. Her website is https://ericalorentz.com/ Erica explores Carl Jung’s understanding of the body as an essential pathway to the unconscious rather than a mere physical vessel. She describes how authentic movement, active imagination, and the subtle body can deepen psychological healing, transform trauma, and restore the connection between psyche, soul, and embodiment. Lorentz also examines Jung’s relationship to imagination, the feminine, spirituality, and the role of the body as a living expression of the soul. 00:00:00 Introduction 00:02:17 Body as shadow 00:07:24 Authentic movement 00:13:20 Witnessing the unconscious 00:18:22 Healing through embodiment 00:25:55 The subtle body 00:31:15 Active imagination 00:39:16 Archetypes and soul 00:49:16 Conclusion New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in “parapsychology” ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). He is also the Grand Prize winner of the 2021 Bigelow Institute essay competition regarding the best evidence for survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death. He is Co-Director of Parapsychology Education at the California Institute for Human Science. (Recorded on June 29, 2026)
When the dishes were done, and the lights were turned down low, Grandpa took me out onto the front porch, where the night air had a bite that was as sharp as green persimmons. He pointed to the Milky Way sprawled over the sky like a string of pearls carelessly dropped from above. His calloused finger traced the constellation of Orion and he declared, ”That’s Orion. That feller’s been huntin’ up there since before my great grandaddy’s time, and he’ll be there long after we’re gone.” I squinted at Orion’s Belt trying to count the Stars between the points.
”Will he ever catch anything?” I asked as I tucked my cold hands under my armpits. Grandpa chuckled. “Nope, And that’s the point,” he replied, some things ain’t about the finishing. They’re all about the doin’. Grandpa knelt beside me, the porchboards groaning against his knees, as he pointed toward a shooting star streaking westward across the sky, “See that? “ He asked. It had turned bright and stayed that way all the way down. “Even endings got glory.”
Inside, Grandma’s shadow crossed the window and she stopped to wind the old mantel clock. In the stillness of the country air, I thought I could hear its familiar ‘tick-tock’ through the window pane, but it was only the memory fooling my ears. The distant sound of Wise Willy, the old barn owl, wafted over the distance, mixing with the scuttle of leaves against the porch-steps, creating a lullaby older than the house itself. Grandpa stood slowly, knees popping like green wood in the fireplace. “Time for bed, Lil’Bit. Dawn comes early when you’re plannin’ to search for fox kits.”
10 brilliant essays by a Nobel Prize-winning philosopher challenge romantic mysticism and promote a scientific view of society and nature. Russell explains his theory of logical atomism in these witty, cogent writings, which include popular treatments of religious and educational issues as well as more technical examinations of problems of logic.
Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM, FRS, was a Welsh philosopher, historian, logician, mathematician, advocate for social reform, pacifist, and prominent rationalist. Although he was usually regarded as English, as he spent the majority of his life in England, he was born in Wales, where he also died.
He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950 “in recognition of his varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought.”
Internationally renowned leadership authority and bestselling author Stephen R. Covey presents a personal hands-on companion to the landmark The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People , which has become a touchstone for individuals, families, and businesses around the world. The overwhelming success of Stephen R. Covey’s principle-centered philosophy is a testament to the millions who have benefited from his lessons, and now, with The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People Personal Workbook , they can further explore and understand this tried-and-true approach. With the same clarity and assurance Covey’s fans have come to appreciate, this individualized workbook teaches readers to fully internalize the 7 Habits through private and thought-provoking exercises, whether they are already familiar with the principles or not.
Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.
Stephen Richards Covey was an American educator, author, businessman, and speaker. His most popular book is The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. His other books include First Things First, Principle-Centered Leadership, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Families, The 8th Habit, and The Leader In Me: How Schools and Parents Around the World Are Inspiring Greatness, One Child at a Time. In 1996, Time magazine named him one of the 25 most influential people. He was a professor at the Jon M. Huntsman School of Business at Utah State University (USU) at the time of his death.
“Mike Zonta, a citizen from District 11, invited all candidates and Nancy Pelosi to participate. 2 candidates accepted this bold and courageous invitation: Shahid Buttar and Bianca Krieg.”
Timothy Regan hosts and facilitates the second congressional candidate empathy circle ever, for our US House of Representatives, CA District 11, San Francisco, currently represented by Nancy Pelosi.
Mike Zonta, a citizen from District 11, invited all candidates and Nancy Pelosi to participate. 2 candidates accepted this bold and courageous invitation: Shahid Buttar and Bianca Krieg.
Shahid and Bianca sit down together and talk and listen to eachother with respect, civility, honesty, and depth, in a simple process of speaking and listening directly to eachother called an empathy circle.
These candidates met on May 22 , 2022 by Zoom for this unique dialogue, to answer one question: “Why should people vote for you?” and to speak to what is on their minds and hearts.
Check out this conversation – it’s inspiring! This is what is possible in politics these days! If you are caught by the dangerous illusion that people can’t talk anymore with respect and collaboration – listen up! This is what’s possible: listening, and being heard, and honest and civil dialogue between competing election candidates! This is a kind of leadership that is inclusive, collaborative, and actually interesting – because respectful dialogue brings the best out of all of us – and we need our best these days.
I love being a therapist. I love being present for people over time, listening for mystery and pattern. I also know that psychotherapy done well can bring emotional freedom and even authenticity, that precious feeling of leading one’s own life. But therapy needs a therapist of its own.
The profession has never been more self-assured. The old stigma has faded. Demand is high, thanks to nightmarish politics, digital isolation and TV shows like “Shrinking”and “Couples Therapy.” But the work itself — the actual practice, in the room — faces relentless devaluation.
Companies like BetterHelp try to reinvent therapy as low-paid gig work: DoorDash for emotional support. A.I. start-ups raise many millions of dollars to create therapy-adjacent chatbots, as if whatever a human therapist does can be replicated by an algorithm utterly devoid of feeling, much less embodied experience.
It would be nice to blame opportunistic entrepreneurs, but we wouldn’t be having this conversation if therapy itself were not a mess — or, rather, a Tower of Babel with hundreds of approaches based on contradictory theory and research, and no agreement on what even constitutes a good outcome.
To be fair, those hundreds of therapies mostly fall under one of three main tents — psychodynamic, existential humanist and cognitive behavioral (better known as C.B.T.) — plus a fourth that we might as well call influencer-driven because its unifying element is TikTok. But you would not believe the range of thinking underlying each.
Psychodynamic therapy, for starters, grows out of Freudian psychoanalysis, which remains the intellectual taproot of the entire enterprise. But it also hosts a bewildering diversity of thought. The psychoanalytic community alone churns with dialogue among classical interest in unconscious conflict, the attachment-theory concern with how patterns of childhood relationships influence adult lives, and the so-called ontological drift identified by Dr. Thomas Ogden, an influential writer who has been my own primary teacher as I have turned myself into a psychoanalytic therapist.
In Dr. Ogden’s framing, therapy’s power lies less in whatever knowledge it brings and more in the dreaming of one’s un-dreamt dreams — ways of feeling more fully the half-digested experiences that lie walled-off somewhere inside ourselves.
At the opposite extreme, C.B.T., which gets by far the most research attention, grows out of early-20th-century studies of how positive and negative stimulus can modify behavior. Applied to emotional behavior like a fear response, or cognitive behavior like the persistent thought that one is worthless, this can be enormously helpful. And yet, the most influential innovation in the C.B.T. camp has been Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, based on the idea that trying to modify thoughts often backfires and that we should focus instead on whatever we value most.
To make matters more confusing, most states require therapists to take continuing-education courses. New products sell better than old ones, so new therapies get branded on roughly the same cadence as soda flavors, with their own acronymic names. The biggest player in this space, PESI.com, channels Fast Eddy’s Discount Therapy Training Emporium with online seminars in, for example, Internal Family Systems, (I.F.S., naturally) a $1,319.78 value on special for $399.99.
2. The Problem With Therapy Research
Psychotherapy research is both helpful and not. Bruce Wampold, a co-author of “The Great Psychotherapy Debate,” told me that the most durable finding is that talk therapy works (whew!) at least as well as antidepressants but often with longer-lasting benefit and fewer side effects. But research has also found that some therapists — “super shrinks,” in the literature — were much better than others for reasons that did not correlate with whether they had a Ph.D. in psychology or a Masters in social work, their preferred theory of therapy, or even how long they’d practiced.
Still more confounding, studies repeatedly find that it barely matters for patient outcomes which of those hundreds of approaches a therapist claims to use. What matters vastly more is that a particular kind of relationship exist between therapist and client. This makes intuitive sense but may sound like saying that you shouldn’t care if your doctor treats your sore knee with Adderall or rhinoplasty so long as you like her bedside manner.
These findings, plus hundreds of therapies, are also the door through which BetterHelp and A.I. chatbots are stepping — a cultural and scientific moment in which therapy is somehow everything and nothing, infinitely deep and shallower than a dry lake bed.
Now for a big ray of sunshine. Therapy, at long last, may have a way out of its embarrassing identity crisis. It comes from a heady source:the neuroscience of predictive processing, which is perhaps best characterized as the study of how our brains construct reality. Throughout the psychotherapy community, in private seminars and articles like one by Daniel Villiger in The Journal of Contemporary Psychotherapy, there is audible excitement that predictive processing might give therapy its first unified field theory, a Rosetta stonefor explaining what makes talk therapy work and how to know if you’re getting the good stuff.
3. How Therapy Lost Its Way
The messy predicament of therapy dates back to the late 19th century, when the young Sigmund Freud became fascinated by physical ailments with seemingly psychological origins — like so-called hysterical blindness, in which sudden loss of sight could not be explained in terms of nerve or tissue damage. If Freud had his way, he would have studied these ailments by looking directly into patients’ brains.
That was not possible at the time. So, Freud observed what he could — patients’ speech and behavior. In so doing, he created the oddest of scientific beasts, psychoanalysis — a discipline dedicated to objective understanding of the human organism through methods not dissimilar to those of philosophy.
Because Freud came first and wrote so well, he gave the field its theoretical foundation, including core concepts like, to cite the most famous example, unconscious conflict between desire for a boy’s mother, murderous aggression toward his father and fearful inhibition against expressing either. Freud initially believed that bringing the unconscious to light would set us free. Over time, he noticed that even clients aware of their unconscious predilections kept manifesting the same lousy patterns in life.
Freud called this the repetition compulsion — or, alternately, the destiny neurosis. The entire subsequent history of psychotherapy can be viewed as one long effort to understand and disrupt this frustrating tendency. Why do we repeat harmful and hurtful emotional patterns even after we learn to recognize them? And how can we stop?
With no help from physiological brain science, that question could only be addressed through more hypotheses. By the 1930s, even as these hypotheses proliferated, therapists noticed that most approaches to therapy itself — regardless of which hypotheses those approaches were built upon — had similar effects. This came to be known as the Dodo Bird Verdict, borrowing from “Alice in Wonderland,” in which the Dodo Bird says, after a foot race, “Everybody has won and all must have prizes!”
Decades later, research emerged that supported the Dodo Bird Verdict by finding that different therapies get similar results on standardized measurement tools like the Beck Depression Inventory. This drove new research based on the premise that if all therapies are equally effective, that effectiveness must result from whatever all therapies have in common, not whatever sets them apart. This “common factors” research produced a stable list of key elements. These include a therapist who displays genuine empathy while holding the client in unconditional positive regard; a client with a sincere desire to change and confidence in the therapist; and, between the two, a spirit of collaboration.
The biggest objection to common-factors research has always been the Adderall-rhinoplasty problem. It defies common sense to believe that there is zero difference in impact between psychoanalytic exploration of childhood and C.B.T. work sheets for correcting, say, negative self-talk. One explanation has been that perhaps common-factors researchers, by measuring the benefit of therapy according to vaguest metrics, simply guaranteed a vague finding.
Still, the common factors might have gotten us moving in the same direction — if not for the collision with managed-care health insurance in the 1990s. Insurance benefit managers wanted scientific evidence in support of any treatment they reimbursed. So they looked for randomized controlled clinical trials based on what one might call the opposite of the common factors approach: as in, Yes, good research consistently finds that the specifics of different therapeutic modalities don’t matter, but let’s look for studies of specific modalities anyway.
In the way of such things, this insurance-driven quest for clinical trials supporting specific therapies encouraged researchers to conduct ever more clinical trials. This feedback loop led to an implicit Dodo 2.0 — namely, the widespread misconception that only C.B.T. and its variants are supported by scientific evidence. By the early 2000s, Dodo 2.0 was so pervasive that the term “evidence-based therapy” became synonymous with C.B.T.
This, too, might have gotten therapists on the same page — Oh well, C.B.T. wins! — if Dr. Wampold and a clinical psychologist named Jonathan Shedler hadn’t both started pointing out the remarkably poor fit between psychotherapy treatment and the gold-standard requirements of clinical trials. These include having a clear instruction manual for any treatment under study; all clinicians following this manual; all patients sharing a single diagnosis; all trials running for defined time periods that, according to Dr. Shedler, are typically between six and 12 weeks; and outcomes measured in terms of relief from clearly defined symptoms.
Sensible stuff, but no good therapist of any persuasion follows an instruction manual. So, as Dr. Shedler has observed, whatever happens in those trials bears little resemblance to what skilled therapists do with clients in the real world. Also, C.B.T. variants are, by and large, the only therapies designed around instruction manuals. So an overwhelming number of clinical trials have studied C.B.T.s and little else.
As for diagnoses, those all come from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition(better known as the DSM-5,), which has limited use for research because it classifies nearly all disorders based upon observable symptoms without regard to cause — as if everyone who limped into an emergency room got diagnosed with Limping Disorder instead of, say, bone cancer, or playing pickleball while stoned.
Worse, according to Dr. Shedler, other research shows, with regard to clinical trials that run from six to 12 weeks, that starting therapy brings a mood bump, but that real psychological change doesn’t begin until months later.
Finally, a study published in Lancet Psychiatry confirmed what almost anybody could have told you — that people don’t seek therapy solely for relief from D.S.M.-5 symptoms. They seek therapy for self-awareness and self-compassion, new perspective on their situation, adaptive new ways of thinking and better relationships.
This means that clinical trials of therapy conducted according to instruction manuals, with patients sharing DSM-5 diagnoses, for short time periods, with outcomes measured in terms of symptom relief, are a magnificent way to produce evidence in favor of brief, instruction-manual C.B.T. without studying anything of great importance.
Dr. Shedler pointed out to me that some of the most widely publicized C.B.T. trials had high dropout rates and often delivered meaningful benefit to small percentages of participants. Some studies have also found that after C.B.T. trials stop, benefits fade.
By contrast, according to Dr. Shedler’s analysis of the research, the benefit of psychodynamic treatment — that is, traditional talk therapy — in clinical trials seems to keep growing after termination. Still more curious, according to other recent papers, the overall effectiveness of manual-driven C.B.T. has weakened in trials since the late 1970s, when the first C.B.T. instruction manual was published.
None of this means that C.B.T. therapy as practiced by good clinicians is less effective than psychodynamic therapy. What it does mean is that we live in a fun-house therapy world where the term “evidence-based practice” is still widely used to imply the superiority of treatments for which the evidence is poor.
4.How Neuroscience Can Help
Predictive processing is a vast field that draws on more than a century of philosophy, cognitive science and empirical research into neuroanatomy and electrophysiology. My own understanding of it comes largely from conversations with Mark Solms, a professor of neuropsychology at the University of Cape Town and author of “The Only Cure: Freud and the Neuroscience of Mental Healing.”
It helps to begin with our shared confidence that our eyes and ears merely show us what is going on in the world. This confidence, it turns out, is based on an illusion. The truth goes more like this: Our brains maintain an internal generative model of the world and use it, in every instant of life, to predict the imminent future as the future becomes the present. Importantly, though, we do not experience these predictions as predictions. We experience them as reality.
The slightly longer version of predictive processing is that our brains must keep us alive despite having zero direct access to the outside world — just inbound nerve signals from the sensory surfaces in our eyes, ears, noses, tongues and skin. But these signals are ambiguous and caused by things we cannot see, so if we used only those signals to make sense, we would be slow and clueless.
As a workaround, living creatures evolved a pair of related tools: memory, so that past experience can inform our understanding of the present and future; and that internal generative model, in which memories get reconstituted and recombined to create our sense of whatever’s happening.
Let’s say you hear a cat’s meow behind you. As you turn to look, neurons fire in your brain’s visual cortex, and those are the prediction signals. This pattern will be composed of subpatterns associated with past experiences and will correspond to whatever your brain considers most likely to appear — your open back door, maybe, and your own tabby cat on the porch. This anticipatory pattern will then head outbound toward your eyes.
Once you have turned around and your eyes capture light reflected from that direction, your retinas translate that light into a new signal pattern that now heads inbound toward your brain. Along the way, this newer inbound pattern encounters the outbound predictive one in a hierarchical fashion: first, deep fundamentals like the basic outlines of the room and the glare of sunlight, then ever-finer details like the color of the cat’s fur.
If the inbound sensory pattern and outbound predictive patterns turn out to be identical, the brain’s original prediction becomes what you see. If an inconsistency appears at any level — the fur on the cat appears to be black, not tabby — your brain must decide which is more precise, its own prediction or this new information. Most of the time, your brain makes the right choice — my porch, not my cat — and uses the error to update its internal model and make better predictions going forward.
But now consider the combat veteran who, after months of terrifying night operations, goes home to his family. Asleep one night in bed, the veteran is awakened by a soft noise. Even before he opens his eyes, the veteran’s brain starts modeling, based on memory, whatever might be happening.
As Dr. Solms pointed out, our brains do this in part by favoring memories strongly associated with survival. The veteran’s brain, in choosing between memories of his beloved’s footfalls and a midnight ambush, favors the latter. A corresponding nerve signal heads outbound toward the eyes.
The veteran’s eyes then open and capture reflected moonlight in a pattern not dissimilar to that of his wife in her pajamas. This light becomes a second nerve signal. When the two signal patterns fail to match, the brain makes the safer choice by sticking with its prediction: ambush.
The veteran leaps out of bed, frightening not just his wife, but also his children. Once the lights come on, he realizes the mistake. This happens again the next night and the next. He takes to sleeping in the garage.
Ideally, in the interest of the veteran’s family and its well-being, the veteran’s brain would use all those repetitive errors — identical mismatches between outbound prediction and inbound sensory evidence — to update his internal generative model and stop constructing reality in the same mistaken way. But, again, survival: If we have had an extremely threatening experience in the past, our brains have good reason to keep using a memory of it as a predictive tendency, readily assuming that this terrible experience is now happening again.
We can think of PTSD as an extreme version of a slippage that we all experience every day, especially in our social lives. Dr. Solms pointed out that the memories informing our most fundamental understanding of reality get laid down in infancy, when we are tiny and so dependent upon others that abandonment for even a very short time could mean death.
This means that these deepest memories are at once highly social and associated with survival, making them powerful go-tos for modeling reality. Those earliest memories also get stored in forms unavailable to conscious thought.
For the rest of our lives, in every exchange with everyone who matters to us, our brains construct reality — by which I mean we quite literally see other people and ourselves — based on childhood experiences that we cannot even recall. Worse, we respond to the realities that our brains construct largely by repeating behaviors that worked for similar situations in the vanished world of childhood but that no longer bear any resemblance to the behavior of a sane adult.
Fear and stress in the present moment, whether at work or in love, cause further trouble by forcing our reality-modeling systems to favor their own predictions rather than incongruous new information. The more threatened we feel — worrisome day at work, painful conversation with a parent or child — the more we perceive everything through the lens of our most frightened childhood selves.
5. A Unified Field Theory of Therapy
As for how this can help therapy out of its identity crisis, it would start with that bit about why people seek therapy in the first place: for deeper self-awareness and perspective and for adaptive new ways of thinking, as I mentioned earlier. Put in predictive processing terms people seek therapy because something about their internal generative model keeps constructing reality in ways that cause trouble. Therapy, then, looks like a way of getting your predictive model to update. On the question of how, exactly, therapy does that, predictive processing theory tells us that model updates depend upon two key factors: safety and precision.
Safety, in this context, means an environment of such emotional and physical security that a person can let her guard down, stop defaulting to old ways of seeing things and start recognizing her predictive errors. Precision means a steady diet of new emotional experiences tailored to elicit precisely the predictive errors that are causing problems — Even my therapist will abandon me — and, more important, to let her mind register the error and self-correct.
Any competent therapist will have noticed that this notion of safety correlates exactly with the findings of both common-factors research and everything the best theorists have been calling good therapy for more than a century. I am speaking here of the unique therapeutic setting and relationship, defined by its privacy, predictability, confidentiality and the therapist’s empathy for the client.
More than 50 years ago, Dr. Donald Winnicott, a leading figure in British psychoanalysis, called this a “holding environment” and described it as the sine qua non of effective therapy.
The same goes for that notion of precision. Amy Wallerstein Friedman, a therapist with whom I consult on clinical cases, described a kind of going-toward, a deliberate exploration of whatever is most difficult in order to update the client’s understanding of self and world, as what every psychoanalytic therapist works to master.
Victoria Beckner, a clinical psychologist in San Francisco, gave a remarkably similar description of C.B.T., in which she trained. “The whole game in C.B.T. is predicated on the idea that people come in with their world model and learned behavior, and that it’s all stuck somehow — you were rejected by mom so you think you’ll be rejected by everybody, and we need to get you to step out, take risks and discover that this is not true.”
Perhaps most striking, whenever therapists have developed integrative approaches — blending traditions — they have typically done so along these lines. I co-wrote a paper last year with colleagues at the San Francisco Psychotherapy Research Group showing this to be true of control mastery theory, which holds that people seek therapy because they have a maladaptive belief, such as It is never safe to share my unpleasant feelings. That belief is making them miserable. They get into therapy to test — and ideally disconfirm — that belief in a safe setting. The therapist’s job, then, is to create that safe setting, watch out for the test and react in ways that support the client’s goal of shedding the problematic belief and forcing a model update.
It may be too much to hope that I will never see an advertisement for online seminars in Predictive Processing Therapy on summer sale for $99.99. But I am optimistic that predictive processing will someday guide empirical research updating the absurdity of our current Dodo Bird Verdict, in which all therapies win and deserve prizes. I also believe that in the short term predictive processing will provide a way for therapists to speak with one voice about what makes therapy effective. And yes, the specific work that a C.B.T. therapist asks of a client will doubtless remain very different from that encouraged by someone like me, working in the psychoanalytic tradition.
Here, though, predictive processing theory promises to be even more helpful. Michael Garrett, a psychoanalyst, pointed out to me that people gravitate to different ways of thinking about the human psyche and suffering. We also resonate with different rituals for healing.
Some of us love the ornate and yet somehow penetrating language of psychoanalysis. Others much prefer the no-nonsense pragmatism of C.B.T. Every therapy is also unique for the simple reason that therapy done right is a fundamentally human endeavor undertaken by two unique human beings in a spontaneous, ever-evolving relationship over time.
Predictive processing theory allows us to say that, so long as a given therapist and client have a genuine human relationship, emotional safety and a reliable method for generating — and resolving — flawed ways of modeling the world and self, they are probably on the right track. And if we can get it to work for the guy who keeps hearing an ambush when his wife stirs in the night, we can certainly be of use to people who want to understand themselves better, break free of whatever problematic beliefs hold them back, and enjoy lives that feel more authentically their own.
Daniel Duane, a writer and therapist who lives and works in San Francisco, is the author of the forthcoming memoir “Yosemite Falls.”
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** Class, Meetings, & Activities – save the dates! ** (see below feature article)
The following is the text of a Sunday Meeting talk given on August 2 by Pam Rodolph, H.W.,M., a longtime Prosperos studemt and instructor. It was well received, and suggested as a feature article. We think you will be intrigued and inspired by what Pam has to say. _______________
Abstract Ideas Teach Us How to Fly
by Pam Rodolph, H.W.,M.
For the past 50 years, I’ve been part of a school on the cutting edge of transformative thought and methodology.
Pam Rodolph, H.W.,M.
I didn’t learn facts, figures and histories in this school. I learned to interpret those facts, figures and histories into a cohesive unit and meaning for my life.
In this school, we look at the histories of nations, mathematical proofs, pure logic, science, physics, and the Bible. We learn to see hidden connections among seemingly disparate bodies of knowledge, tying all man’s understanding into one integrated whole.
And starting with the idea of man as a whole being, wrapped and packaged in celestial light and delivered to your doorstep as a baby, our capacity to conceive of a cohesive and orderly universe expands beyond measure. It’s only when we start with the idea of wholeness that all these connections fall into place and make themselves known.
Just that one shift in assumption, that man is already whole, and lights begin to turn on from cloud to cloud, from rain drop to rain drop, from abstract to the relative. We find Jesus in hell, the devil in church, and the Big Bang in every awakening mind.
There are two kinds of people in this world. Those of one kind, when looking up at the stars and galaxies and this fathomless universe, swell with exhilaration, expand with the thought of it, and feel connected to something vast. The other kind scuttle away, back to their particular den of comfort, and pull the cover of ignorance up around their necks once again. Oppression weighs heavy on the souls who conceive of themselves outside of everything.
And it is utterly heartbreaking. Living like a scared rabbit, never knowing what is coming at you next. Trying to keep your head down so life doesn’t find you.
There is no hell more agonizing than a life stripped of meaning. No torment greater than drifting through existence as scattered fragments, with no thread of continuity, and no fear more chilling than believing yourself cut off from all that magnificence.
There is absolutely no worse hell worse than that. So if that kind of existence is okay with you, welcome home. You might recognize the frivolity of life as seen in the present age, along with its brother, violence in the name of “no regard for humanity whatsoever” — we’re not even going to hide it anymore ’cause we never did see what was wrong with hate and violence ’cause we live in a floating fragmented world and can’t see past our toenails.
Too often, we see man as less than he truly is. We try to mold him into a polished product for polite society, hoping to save his soul in the process. Yet, in doing so, we treat a jet airplane as if it were nothing more than a horse and buggy.
What I have discovered is that man is already complete, already whole, already the finest version of himself at the most fundamental level. He cannot be improved upon — he is already there, brimming with limitless potential. Nothing can up those stakes.
He cannot be saved. There is a saving action. It is called enlightenment, and enlightenment is waking up to the fact that one is already WHOLE. “Whole” cannot be saved. It is already there.
What happens to a person who suddenly realizes, “God/Consciousness does not make mistakes”? He didn’t send some half-ass product to Earth to be saved by man’s ego.
Why would God or Consciousness ever create something less than whole? The Consciousness I know cannot even imagine a broken leg. All God knows, all God is, is the wholeness that heals that leg. But pathologies do not heal — they disappear. Inherent wholeness quietly pushes out imperfection, revealing itself as the one enduring reality in all of man’s being, knowledge, and experience at a basic level. Consciousness does not act; it simply holds the line that was always there, and imperfection disappears, and consciousness never even knew it was here.
If you ever get a cut, observe how it heals. The blood dries; the life part of it, the truth of it is withdrawn, and the flesh, cut loose from its source, turns into a scab, a lifeless flake of misperception, and disappears into nothingness, revealing the wholeness below.
I’m after the absolute lies, the universal, earth-splitting, wipe-out-the-universe lies. I don’t care that Billy lies about stealing 10 cents or that Wall Street steals billions and lies. I want the truth, and lies that could shatter a solar system, crash planets, disrupt a cosmos, for only they let me see the truth or lies of all else.
By the way, the cut, the scab is real, and you can die from a cut. Their basis for existence is what is false. It is in our limited awareness that we create the things that are less than perfect, because we do not have the vision necessary to see all the way to perfect. Doesn’t mean we always will lack the vision. I think it’s a healthy goal to shoot for. But we try to make reality into something less than whole, because we have this crazy little belief from childhood that we can’t seem to shake, that we ourselves are less than whole and that’s just the way it is, we believe. So the uphill battle?… It’s the best kept secret in town. Even when someone knows the words and concepts, they don’t know, and won’t until their entire being knows it.
If you need tangible proof that you are whole, what happens when you go to a doctor? He checks you out to see what is wrong with you, with the belief that he can return you to wholeness. What is wrong is often hard to find. Why?
Because compared to what is right in you, the wrong is very hard to find, since it is the exception. The only state of being your doctor can diagnose with absolute certainty is when you are whole. When you are well is when it is easiest for your doctor to diagnose you. And so is it for you. Most of us don’t even go back to the doctor when we heal; it is so recognizable to us. Because that is our natural state. However, we take it for granted, and don’t even think about it.
Also, you cannot separate what is invisible in us from what is physical. There is no strict dividing line.
Again, the idea of wholeness is abstract. It cannot be seen, drawn, or contained. It only makes sense to regard all life from that vantage point. Because if it is so about our physical being, which we have shown it to be, it has to be so about that part of us that is not physical, that is invisible.
And to begin all thinking, all problem-solving, from the vantage point of wholeness is a game-changer — and yet, we fail to take this incredible process seriously, and try to solve problems the same old, familiar way.
To begin with, wholeness creates new categories, new solutions, flexibility, and movement.
It changes how we do everything. For example, because we do not see or feel connected to everything, each part of what we know seems separate and only about itself, apart from other knowledge. As a result, solving a problem in one situation often causes problems in another situation that we do not realize is connected.
But when we think from the idea of wholeness, problems must of necessity, incorporate systems. The only smart way to solve problems is to widen our narrow view to include all related situations — the “whole” scope of the problem. Solutions for whole systems find answers that work for all the parts, and are much different from, and better than, solutions for just one personal situation.
Fragmented thinking cannot reach true vision. It lacks the power to elevate thought beyond itself and connect to higher mind where all connections are located. And worst of all, it has no power to inspire. And to live without inspiration is psychological death, the very death the Bible refers to.
Here’s a little insight that fragmented thinking misses. Without fail, humanity solves its problems in the same way as it relates to God or Consciousness. For that part of humanity that regards itself outside all that is, thinking is fragmented, and solutions apply only to problems that affect that individual personally or that personal situation. Fragmented means “something broken into separate pieces or divided into disorganized, disconnected parts.” Most of the time, the limited solution produces mediocre results. Big dreams, crap life.
Those who use systemic problem-solving seek out abstract connections between related elements. Abstract ideas spark higher creativity and inspiration, opening the mind to novel connections and greater mental flexibility. While concrete ideas keep us grounded, abstract concepts like wholeness, justice, or freedom ignite the brain’s centers for complex thought and emotion, fueling deeper, more lasting inspiration.
Abstract thought enables “conceptual blending” — the ability to take a principle from one area of life and apply it to another. For example, understanding the abstract concept of wholeness allows a software engineer to design more cohesive user interfaces, an architect to build more integrated community spaces, and a psychologist to treat trauma. Because abstract concepts are fluid, they easily travel across professional and personal boundaries, sparking lateral thinking and breakthrough innovation.
In short, if concrete ideas are the bricks of our reality, abstract ideas are the architecture of our potential. One keeps us steady, but the other teaches us how to fly. The real problem solvers are those who have mastered abstract, holistic approaches to solving problems posed by whole systems.
Translation®, as taught by The Prosperos, is designed to do exactly that. It is the application of divine perception to human experience by working entirely in consciousness/ awareness, not attempting to change external conditions. The external is where all those concrete ideas exist. We don’t try to change those. We don’t tell our sister about a better way to live. We don’t try to change our husband into the perfect boy toy.
Years ago, after joining the Prosperos and learning about Translation®, I doubted its logic. The expansion of the first step seemed like a stretch, contrived, as if anyone could make anything resemble anything else.
But Translation® uses the same logic found in mathematics and taught in college classrooms. It is the logic that leads to success, solves practical problems, soothes troubled minds, and builds a stairway to an elegant universe. It is natural, but it is not supernatural.
It was my level of awareness that could not make the connection that Translation® is the very heart of logic. THIS is the real logic, the pure logic. This is the logic that should be used everywhere, for all problems. If a problem refuses to reveal itself, this will expose it. It is a universal technique that can bring answers in any and every field of knowledge.
This is the logic capable of handling hundreds of thousands of pieces of information within complex systems.
Every scientist who does not know Translation® is encumbered. His creativity will reach far, but perhaps it could have reached farther or sooner or broader.
Translation®’s logic is infallible, and clearly shows how little man understands his own abilities — clop/clop. Here comes that horse and buggy.
Despite its risks, AI will accomplish the unimaginable. Artificial Intelligence is set to reach new cognitive heights, spark economic revolutions, and drive scientific breakthroughs, transforming how we work, heal, and learn. No longer just a rigid tool, advanced AI is becoming an autonomous collaborator, ready to tackle the world’s most complex challenges, global challenges. Here comes that jet airplane. AI mirrors the qualities of “being” most closely, capable of handling thousands of pieces of information within intricate systems.
We stand on the edge of a journey that could spiral beyond our control. That is why every fear must be translated, every problem faced with pure logic, beginning with the purest idea of all: Consciousness. We need watchdogs, people who are watching our backs.
Thane says to translate until you feel a sense of well-being. Suzanne Deakins used to say that the beast must be made beautiful. It’s not enough to just subdue the monster. You must make him beautiful, starting with the expansion of the statement of being in Translation®. And yes, I think scientists, all problem solvers, should expand the first step right along with the rest of us. Doesn’t matter if the problems are practical or theoretical or spiritual. Expansion of the first step is one of the things that sets Translation® apart as a problem-solving tool. It clears out the pipes.
I sense more and more people are evolving to a higher level, just as AI begins to gain ground. I believe this because of other groups I’ve been involved with, and because recently we gave a class to new people, and right from the get-go, they were very sophisticated when it came to knowledge about Consciousness. Personally, I think we will rise to the occasion overall with an awareness capable of handling what an unleashed imagination will bring us. And we will more and more make intelligent decisions. Precautions are being taken as we speak.
I believe the earth has been undergoing its own childhood. And that childhood is us. As humans go, so goes the earth. But we need adults now.
That outdated image of manhood — marked by violence and a hardened mask of masculinity — is having one final gasp. But perhaps this is to reveal just how obsolete those identifications have become. We need to witness the conflict, to see vague fears come into sharp focus as childish and unworkable. We have to see, think about, and grasp the implications of our violent tendencies, and stop giving them respect. To see them as anemic patterns of behavior means we are no longer caught in them.
We are outgrowing those patterns. Competing, winning, losing, blaming, and grasping for control are the games of children. The new era is about cooperation, community, solving problems wisely, and embracing sanity. Those whose souls resist these changes are already going mad.
Watching the assault on the Capitol, I saw only chaos — like mad cows bleating and circling, desperate for someone to lead them, to explain why they were there, was it okay to kill seven people? Did any of them feel even an ounce of remorse, or were the capital’s finest somehow to blame for all the ills plaguing humanity?
That was madness on full display — mad cow madness.
The challenges of this new age are meant to carry us into uncharted territory—the most thrilling place imaginable, a realm of pure potential. You can shrink from it and use it sparingly, or you can recall the roller coaster at its peak, engine humming, anticipation mounting, until the thrill almost eclipses the ride itself.
The first rush of infatuation. The first time behind the wheel. The first glide down a snowy slope. Our senses are never more alive than at the beginning of anything, when anticipation of the unknown becomes a living experience.
It will seem like I’m making a shift here, but I’m not. I want to come at this from the symbology of the third eye. I’ve never given it much thought, but I do know this: In the Bible, the two thieves on either side of Jesus on the cross represent our two eyes, believers in appearance, assassins of reality.
They are on the cross with Jesus to cross out their influence on what Jesus perceives, leaving him with the ability to only see with the third eye.
If you look in the mirror, the third eye is in the middle of the forehead between the two thieves. You can’t see the eye because it does not look out on the world. It faces away from that world, inwardly. It represents the seat of intuition, inner wisdom, and higher consciousness. Located in the center of the forehead between the eyebrows, it acts as a bridge between the physical senses and deeper cosmic or psychological insights.
The Prosperos teaches that we are far more than we imagine — captains of the universe, equipped to tackle colossal problems. As such, the world needs us, the solar system needs us, and ultimately, the universe calls for us.
We did not simply wander by and decide to camp on Earth for a while. We were sent here to awaken and do a job. The universe may have been created in seven days, but among all creation, God seeks those who can fulfill his dream. We bring the life, the spirit, the essence — the conscious spark of Consciousness itself — establishing conscious awareness here on earth.
Even the man wasting his days on a barstool holds the same courage as Gandhi, the same fortitude as Alexander the Great, and the same benevolence as Jesus. That’s because he has the same Consciousness. Awareness happens in degrees, but there are no degrees in Consciousness. We are exactly the same. Consciousness, fully and totally.
What happens as awareness increases? We simply become more aware of ourselves as Consciousness. Every fascinating discovery changes us. And once that game starts for you, you won’t have time for life’s mischief. You will be too busy bringing Heaven to Earth. Too busy becoming something you never dreamed possible.
Consciousness floods the earth with our species, hoping that some of us will awaken to our true nature — and begin building a world founded on Conscious Awareness.
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Translation® is one of the Foundation Classes developed by Thane of Hawaii and taught by The Prosperos.
We are sorry to announce that Assembly has been postponed……until next year
Alas, due to a convergence of difficulties, we are unable to present Assembly this year. We hope you will join us for other activities in the coming months, and that you will…
plan to attend*** Assembly 2027!*** Coming Events
** Classes **
– Lucid Dreaming– with HughJohn Malanaphy, H.W.,M. Saturday, August 22
Release the power of your dreams! Learn to bring the conscious mind to awareness that we’re dreaming (while we’re in the subconscious mind), and amazing things can happen.
Releasing the Hidden SplendourTM with Heather Williams, H.W.,M. Saturday/Sunday, September 26-27
In this class, you will learn a simple technique that helps us to free ourselves from old patterns, to know ourselves Truthfully, to LOVE ourselves unconditionally, and to more fully live our unique, individual life purposes.
“Group Dynamics” with Mike Zonta, H.W.,M. Sunday, August 9, 2026 – 11:00 AM PT Come learn about an important skill for Prosperos Students: the use of Group Dynamics,and how it helps us with our studies. Dare to be there!
“Your Dream Surprise!” with HughJohn Malanaphy, H.W.,M. Sunday, August 16, 2026 – 11:00 AM PT Our Dream Self will morph and transform during dreams, it’s always us, or some new/old sense of self emerging. It can be startling, and may bring opportunities for growth and understanding.
“Exploring Cosmic Intention: Part 1” with Richard Hartnett, H.W.,M. Sunday, August 23, 2026 – 11:00 AM PT Come join Richard Hartnett’s exciting new Sunday Meeting series as he explores the question, “Is there a Cosmic Intention?”
“Transcendentalism” with Thane of Hawai’i Sunday, August 30, 2026 – 11:00 AM PT “[Ontology] understood will bring true individuality where the other kind of individuality is a veneer. In other words, there’s a difference between individuality and personality.” Come find out about that difference!
High Watch Translation® ServiceThe High Watch Translation® Service is supported by our High Watch members, who will use their training to address any situation presented here. All requests made through this link or via our website are confidential, unless submitted otherwise. You may add additional information, or inform us of any changes or requests for further Translation® in your situation, at any time through the link below.
—Translation® is our form of prayer. It is used to get to the Truth of any situation or dilemma, and access the Unpredictable Good. —Did you know that you can request Translation® from the High Watch Translation® Service for any situation going on in your life? This is the primary purpose of the High Watch –- To hold the High Watch for you and with you.
FOR MORE INFORMATION…We invite you to visit our websites for information about the School, as well as for descriptions of our wide selection of printed, recorded, and online resources (many are free; others are available for purchase).General Information – For our calendar, class descriptions and blog, as well as other articles and information, please visit https://TheProsperos.org.
Audio Center – This site offers free podcasts, talks and lectures, plus a wealth of other recorded material for our students and friends. To see what’s available, please visit https://TheProsperos.com.
Prudential actions (e.g., those actions we ordinarily call work) are self-defeating in principle. For prudence may be defined as the disposition 1) to sacrifice something good (e.g., leisure) if and only if such sacrifice is necessary for obtaining something better (e.g., survival), and 2) to reduce the number of good things requiring sacrifice — ideally, at least — to zero. The ideal of prudence, therefore, like the ideal of preventive medicine, is its own extinction. For if it were the case that no sacrifices of goods needed ever to be made, then prudential actions would be pointless, indeed impossible. This principle, knowledge of which I regard as an indispensable first step on the path to wisdom, the ants seem never even to have entertained. The true Grasshopper sees that work is not self-justifying, and that his way of life is the final justification of any work whatever.
