The Thom Hartmann Reader

by Thom Hartmann

  And that result is impressive. When we stimulate the nervous system in this bilateral manner while calling to mind a persistent emotional distress, the emotional “charge” associated with that memory quickly and permanently dissipates. This isn’t a process of producing amnesia or forgetting; instead it’s a way of reframing the past, a way of re-understanding, of putting into context that which has been so “unnerving” for us. When we perform this bilateral process correctly, the pictures of painful past events in our memory transform from stark, scary, sound-filled color movies into black-and-white still pictures that are flattened out and lose their sound. The internal dialogue we have about the events—the “tagline” that we tell ourselves and actually hear in our own heads in our own voices—changes, usually from something like That was a painful experience that still scares me or I was victimized in that relationship to a more productive synopsis, such as Yes, that happened to me, but it’s well in the past now and I’ve learned some good lessons from the experience. I can let go of it.

  Inciting the movement of nerve impulses across the brain hemispheres helps people to come to terms with their past. They stop being frightened by their imagined futures and feel comfortable and empowered in the present. Walking while holding a traumatic memory in mind in a particular way can produce this result in a very short time.

  This is not new. Rhythmic bilateral activity as a healing agent has been known to aboriginal peoples for millennia, and in the past few hundred years the secret of using bilaterality to heal emotional and psychological wounds—particularly those that produced psychosomatic physical results—was most famously discovered by Franz Anton Mesmer in the 1700s (called mesmerism), refined by Dr. James Braid in the early 1800s (and renamed hypnosis by Braid), and brought into widespread and mainstream use in the late 1800s by Sigmund Freud.

  In an odd historical event in the late 1890s, however, the growing power of yellow journalism (sensationalized “news” by publishers such as William Randolph Hearst) merged with European anti-Semitism, and the synergy of those forces compelled Freud to abandon these techniques. Freud spent the rest of his life searching in vain for a replacement for hypnosis that actually worked, experimenting with cocaine, developing his early concepts of penis envy and the Oedipal complex, and finally promulgating his largely unsuccessful “talk-therapy” systems. When Freud committed suicide in 1939, he still hadn’t found anything that worked as well as the beloved bilateral therapies he’d been forced to abandon by the amazingly synchronous and unusual events of the 1890s.

  From the 1890s until the past few decades, hypnosis and the bilateral therapies on which it is based were for the most part ignored or shunned by medical and mental health professionals, in large part because of the uproar of the 1890s. Only with the development of neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) in the 1970s, the NLP development of eye-motion therapies, and the 1987 development of Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing by Francine Shapiro did bilateral therapies begin to make a comeback.

  There is now a whole spectrum of variations on these systems for integrating brain function and thus encouraging healing from emotional and psychological trauma. They all involve stimulating one hemisphere of the brain, then the other, then back to the first, then back again, and repeating this bilateral stimulation over and over. You can accomplish this same kind of stimulation using the simple process of walking. This bilateral stimulation gives you access to healing powers, creative states, and emotional and psychological resilience beyond what you may have ever thought possible.

  Why Bilaterality Is So Important

  Bilaterality is the ability to have the left and the right hemispheres of the brain fully functional and communicating with each other. It represents an optimal way of functioning for the brain, a way that reflects how most animals’ brains operate.

  Many people in our society are stuck in a groove of habitual emotional response, with only one hemisphere of the brain taking responsibility for much of the brain’s functioning. Even though they’re “normal” and “sane,” they’re carrying around a mind full of unresolved emotion and pain. Bilateral exercises have been demonstrated to encourage healthier brain functionality. Now we’re finding that walking can also perform this healing.

  As recently as 30 years ago, before the availability of sophisticated brain-imaging equipment such as PET, SPECT, and MRI scanners, it was widely believed that the left hemisphere of the brain—which controls the right side of the body—was responsible for logic and thinking, and the right hemisphere—which controls the left side of the body—took charge of emotions. Though we now know that it’s not quite that simple, we also know that there is a significant grain of truth in this longstanding belief.

  A healthy person operates with both hemispheres of the brain fully engaged and able to hand off information to each other in such a way that we can think about our emotions and evoke feelings with our thoughts. Evidence of this dual-hemispheric functioning can be recognized by simply watching an able-bodied person walk or talk—both sides of the mouth open the same amount when the person speaks, and both legs and arms swing comfortably and reach the same distances when they walk. A person who is said to “speak out of one side of his mouth” is showing signs either of single-hemispheric brain damage (such as from a stroke) or of serious emotional or psychological illness. One hemisphere has taken over the brain’s functioning. Depending on which hemisphere has taken charge, such people often either are overly emotional (usually left-side-of-the-mouth speakers) or are lacking the ability to easily experience emotions (right-side speakers). Our culture has intuited this for hundreds of years—thus the old expression about a person “talking out of the side of his mouth.”

  Hemispheric dominance—one side of the brain controlling the functions of both—is no small matter, and it not only has an effect on individuals but, some scientists suggest, actually shapes society and culture itself. In a very real way, even though most of us talk out of both sides of the mouth, a cultural hemispheric dominance is reflected in societies that we call “civilized,” whereas indigenous/aboriginal societies (Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “noble savages”) are more bilateral in their overall cultural brain functioning.

  Just as a person with a severe hemispheric imbalance can be badly disconnected from emotions such as empathy, and thus sanction or even encourage actions such as the mass murder that is war, so too can an entire society. In the opinion of some researchers, societies that are hemispherically unbalanced are more likely to be patriarchal, hierarchical, and violent, whereas societies that are hemispherically balanced are more likely to be egalitarian and democratic and employ violence only in self-defense.

  What we now call civilization—the earliest example of an entire culture becoming left-hemisphere dominant—can be traced back to the oldest written tale, The Epic of Gilgamesh, a story set 6,000 to 7,000 years ago in ancient Mesopotamia (now Iraq) about the first ruler to defy the gods and seize control of others in the process. Gilgamesh was history’s first warlord. His epic tale, which predates the Bible, describes not only a hierarchical social order but a hierarchical religion as well: it tells the story of a good man named Utnapishtim who was told by his god, Ea, to build an ark and put into it two of every animal. By doing this, Utnapishtim survives a great flood that Ea brings upon the city of Shurippak because its people aren’t sufficiently worshipful of Ea.

  Gilgamesh’s culture established, in many ways, the prototype for later agriculture-based (and violence-based) social and political systems. A ruling king or queen with the power to remove the head of any person who dared defy him or her ruled every civilization from Gilgamesh’s Mesopotamia to today’s Saudi Arabia. Whether east or west, north or south, from China to Europe to the Inca, violent dominator societies have emerged over the past few thousand years. With millennia of this history as background, by the turn of the nineteenth century Charles Darwin and others of his era reasoned that Gilgamesh’s dominance-based model must be the way humans w
ere meant to live.

  In his 1871 book, The Descent of Man, Darwin summarized the notion, common at the time, that society is best held together by dominance rather than true democracy, by the elite few rather than the unwashed masses, by those most willing to wield force rather than those willing to compromise or sacrifice. Darwin was making the case that most humans are biologically predisposed to living under the dominance of others.

  The assumption of conquerors has always been that they are superior in every way to the conquered. How else does one justify the conquest?

  Darwin, however, had a problem making his view fit into what he was learning about the social models of the tribal peoples he and his contemporaries called “savages.” Reports were beginning to trickle in to the scientific and political communities from explorers and colonists in the New World and the African and Indian colonies that these so-called savages—tribal peoples from the Americas to Africa—weren’t the stupid, selfish, and violent characters they’d been portrayed as in European literature and philosophy. Instead they often displayed altruistic behavior and had social and political systems that were highly sophisticated and in many cases far more democratic than was England in Darwin’s day.

  At the time there were about as many indigenous peoples living tribally around the world as there were “civilized” people. They were living the way all humans had lived for most of human history (and thus were often referred to as “Stone Age people”), and yet their societies were troublingly democratic. Pesky Americans such as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin had written and spoken extensively about the lessons to be learned from the democratic forms of governance of the savages of North America. And the savages of Asia and Africa often lived peacefully, cooperatively, and with elaborate and sophisticated—but egalitarian—social organizations, as well.

  Presumably, Darwin’s ancestors had once been savages, too. Why, Darwin wondered, hadn’t the modern-day savages being found in the Americas and elsewhere developed into “civilized” societies, as Darwin’s fellow Englishmen had?

  “It is, however, very difficult to form any judgment,” Darwin wrote, “[as to] why one particular tribe and not another has been successful and has risen in the scale of civilisation. Many savages are in the same condition as when first discovered several centuries ago. As Mr. Bagehot [the economist and political writer Walter Bagehot] has remarked, we are apt to look at progress as the normal rule in human society; but history refutes this.”2

  Why did modern tribal peoples of the time live the way they did, even when offered an opportunity to become “civilized”? The stories of Native Americans brought up in white communities who later escaped back into the “savage wilds” were legendary; similarly, Africans fiercely resisted being taken into white communities as slaves, even though it represented a “civilized” improvement over their tribal conditions. As well, it was not uncommon during colonial days for Europeans to escape to Indian communities to live among them, becoming “white Indians” and never returning to “civilized” society. This intrigued Thomas Jefferson, who began a detailed analysis of Native American peoples and societies. As Jefferson wrote in his autobiographical Notes on Virginia:3

  Founded on what I have seen of man, white, red, and black, and what has been written of him by authors, enlightened themselves, and writing among an enlightened people, the Indian of North America being more within our reach, I can speak of him somewhat from my own knowledge, but more from the information of others better acquainted with him, and on whose truth and judgment I can rely…. [H]e is brave, when an enterprise depends on bravery; education with him making the point of honor consist in the destruction of an enemy by stratagem, and in the preservation of his own person free from injury; … also, he meets death with more deliberation, and endures tortures with a firmness unknown almost to religious enthusiasm with us; that he is affectionate to his children, careful of them, and indulgent in the extreme; that his affections comprehend his other connections; weakening, as with us, from circle to circle, as they recede from the centre; that his friendships are strong and faithful to the uttermost extremity, that his sensibility is keen, even the warriors weeping most bitterly on the loss of their children, though in general they endeavor to appear superior to human events; that his vivacity and activity of mind is equal to ours in the same situation; hence his eagerness for hunting, and for games of chance….

  They raise fewer children than we do…. It is said, therefore, that they have learned the practice of procuring abortion by the use of some vegetable; and that it even extends to prevent conception for a considerable time after…. An inhuman practice once prevailed in this country, of making slaves of the Indians…. To judge of the truth of this, to form a just estimate of their genius and mental powers, more facts are wanting, and great allowance to be made for those circumstances of their situation which call for a display of particular talents only. This done, we shall probably find that they are formed in mind as well as in body, on the same module with the “Homo sapiens Europaeus.”

  As suggested by Jefferson’s description of Native peoples and their character and customs, there had to be something Darwin was missing in the theory of why “savages” didn’t want to become “civilized,” but Darwin couldn’t figure out what it was. A theory suggesting that “savages” had actually begun as “civilized people” but had deteriorated or degenerated over the eons was put forth by the duke of Argyll, although Darwin found that wanting. “The arguments recently advanced by the Duke of Argyll and formerly by Archbishop Whately, in favour of the belief that man came into the world as a civilised being and that all savages have since undergone degradation, seem to me weak in comparison with those advanced on the other side,” Darwin wrote in The Descent of Man.4 And yet he had no way to account for the apparent nobility and quality of life among the savages.

  Darwin was a scientist, and he knew that meant sometimes bringing forward unpopular views. Flipping Argyll’s theory upside down, Darwin began to consider that perhaps civilized people had once been savages, too. But if civilized people had once lived as savages, why didn’t we remember those times?

  The Cultural Dissociative Barrier

  In his brilliant Ishmael books, Daniel Quinn popularizes the idea of a memory barrier between modern civilization and what Darwin called the “savage” state.5 Quinn calls this “The Great Forgetting,” a cultural amnesia so strong that we’re unable even to imagine how our ancestors lived.

  For example, when we think of another “civilized” country, we imagine our stereotypes of people in full color: Greeks dancing like Zorba, or French women and men sipping wine, or Italians eating pasta in a café in Venice. Even if we don’t speak their language, we can hear fragments of it and can easily imagine them speaking the language. We can bring to mind the smells, tastes, and even the feel of their world because on the whole it is so culturally similar to our own.

  But when we think of our own ancestors’ preliterate history, our mindscape often turns to black-and-white. Our ability to imagine language or other sounds from that time is minimal. (Indeed up to the past decade, some anthropologists speculated that our “savage” ancestors were mute, suggesting that the development of civilization coincided with a recent evolutionary mutation that increased the size of the nerve bundles that control the human tongue.) Most people have never tried to conjure up a sense of what the food of our prehistoric ancestors must have tasted like; what sorts of herbs, seeds, and pollens they used as spices; how their living areas smelled; or what brought them joy.

  We all have a collection of different “selves,” or roles, that we necessarily play in life: parent, teacher, employee, spouse, friend. Each role requires us to move slightly different skill sets and personality attributes front and center when engaging one of these selves. When a person loses the ability to remember that he or she carries the same identity when acting out various roles, that person is said to have developed a dissociative disorder. Multiple-personality disorder
is the most well known of these.

  Collectively, it appears that we’ve erected a cultural dissociative barrier that is so complete that we believe Darwin was right in his assumption that a dominance- and violence-based culture is biologically based and has grown and thrived because of natural selection.

  Whether bilateral walking therapy in and of itself is enough to cure many of the violent ills of society is doubtful but conceivable. The Indians of North America were pedestrians before the introduction of the horse from Europe in the 1500s, and available anthropologic evidence indicates that their societies were rarely violent.6 With the widespread use of nonwalking forms of transportation in Europe and the Middle East 7,000 years ago (primarily the horse and the horse-drawn carriage and chariot), it’s possible that the loss of walking made society more violent.

  Even glimpses we get today of societies that still depend entirely on walking for transportation—such as the San of southern Africa, who were featured in the movie The Gods Must Be Crazy—find that “walking” people are rarely as violent or as hierarchical as “riding” people.

  Although all of it is speculative at this moment, the evidence is accumulating that both social and personal mental health depend on people’s having regular bilateral stimulation and that we are evolution-arily designed to derive that from daily walking.

  From Walking Your Blues Away by Thom Hartmann,

  © 2006, published by Inner Traditions International.

  PART III

  Visions and Visionaries

  WHEN THOM HARTMANN WAS 17 OR 18 YEARS OLD, HE AND TWO friends set out to spend the summer living in a tipi on the shores of a lake in Michigan’s Chippewa National Forest. During the period he relates in “Life in a Tipi,” he learned to identify edible plants, swam in the lake daily, and walked for miles through the forest, communing with the lush voices of nature. Welcoming the silence and the solitude, the three friends went days without speaking, communicating by chalkboard when necessary. He’d brought a stack of books with him: Ram Dass, his grandmother’s Bible, several books on Hindu and Christian mysticism, and the works of Thomas Merton. Heady stuff for a teenager, and Hartmann later admitted that he couldn’t make heads or tails of the Hindu Vedas, but he spent hours studying or sitting under a tree and meditating. For the first time in his life, he cultivated stillness instead of activity, and, slowly but surely, he began to find the inner anchor that would sustain him for decades to come.