© Elliot Essman 2005. All rights reserved.

These pages contain the complete text of Human Action, public speaking trainer Elliot Essman's philosophy of human achievement.

Elliot Essman Public Speaking Training
Human Action Table of Contents
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• Why humans are the only creatures who can create something out of nothing.

• How to reach into your own sense of personal drama to move to new levels of genius in your life.

• How to reach heroic proportions in your thinking and acting.

• Exercises for “shocking” yourself out of damaging patterns and personal “re-runs.”

• The art of cleaning yourself out and filling yourself with new substance.

Genius all over the world stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round. (Herman Melville, 1850)

Mind-body medicine is getting a lot of attention lately. In terms of physical health, treating the mind and body together can prevent disease and even cure it. The same goes for emotional health; everybody knows that exercise and diet can help improve your mood. In many aspects of life, we can work with mind and body together to improve the whole human being.

But as the gulf between mind and body evaporates in our thinking, that other gulf, between animal and human, looms larger. Are human and animal just two sides of the same coin? Are they really the same thing looked at from different perspectives? Many thinkers say they are, that we are just highly complex animals. I disagree, stating that what is “human” and what is “animal” are different in kind and not just in degree. Humans have animal in them, but they are more than animal, more than nature. Humans are the only beings who can create something out of nothing, and this is central to my philosophy of Trans-Biological Kinesis.

In terms of physics and the law of conservation of matter, of course, you cannot create something out of nothing. But human beings constantly add meaning where no meaning existed before. Our factories manufacture products, for example. Our brains manipulate language into poems, songs, novels and jokes. Our composers use a handful of musical tones to create an unlimited number of melodies, and then they go further by harmonizing and orchestrating it all into numberless combinations. Many of the products of our creative energy are refinements, strictly mechanistic applications of our advanced skills. But many more represent leaps—however small—to new levels of thinking, living and creating.

We humans do have both human and animal sides. We don't always recognize the dividing line. But the sides are definite and inconsistent. Sometimes we are able to reconcile and harmonize them; sometimes we cannot.

Since, as far as our animal component is concerned, we are advanced animals, our mechanistic animal side can seem quite sophisticated. We have adapted this refined animalism, perfected it, and often made it useful to our civilization. It is because our animalism is so refined and sophisticated that it threatens our strictly human side. Sophisticated stasis is still stasis. If our animalism were no more than a collection of crude wants and lusts, we'd quickly put out the fire. But the effect of refined animalism is insidious. It makes us lazy and often unwilling to apply kinetic human solutions that call for us to leave comfort and shelter and walls.

Difficult problems require formidable solutions. I call the solution “Shock” —a radical jump between belief states. Shock is based on the Positive Matrix Interrupt we spoke of earlier. The theory behind Shock is that human progress and thought is inherently non-linear. The essence of being human is to create something out of nothing, a process of making Radical Jumps to new and different states of belief.

George Washington and The Radical Jump

Perhaps the Trans-Biological way of defining things is new, but neither Trans-Biological Kinesis nor the concept of Shock are new. It's time we introduced the real hero of Trans-Biological Kinesis. You know him in some ways, but you don't in others. His name is George Washington. We're not going to study Washington in some vague hope that some of his Washington-ness will rub off on us. No, we're going to look at Washington to find the common thread we already share with him.

Just a glimpse, for now, to see a radical jump in action. It is December 1776. Washington and his army have been soundly defeated in a series of disastrous battles around New York City. It is only a matter of time before the entire American cause simply evaporates. What's left of the army is ragged and hungry, huddling for warmth somewhere in northeastern Pennsylvania.

You already know what comes next, of course. Does George Washington consult a standard military textbook in an attempt to refine existing techniques so as to allow his starving handful of men to defeat the best army in the world? Of course not. The textbook says that no sane commander would mount an attack in winter. So Washington crosses the Delaware and mounts an attack on Trenton, New Jersey during a particularly harsh winter. Here is a man with imagination. Here is Shock in action.

When compact disks came out in the mid 1980s, the vinyl LP had just seen year after year of impressive development. LP records of 1985, for example, gave listeners much greater fidelity than even records of 1980, not to mention 1960. Did it matter? Not when they were faced with a true quantum leap. CDs were more than refined LPs; they were a jump ahead both in technology and in consumer goods marketing.

Sophisticated refined animalism may be seductive, but if we depended on it we'd still be driving buggies with horses. Oh, the buggies would be superbly comfortable and wonderfully efficient, of course. You would hardly feel the road and you certainly wouldn't smell the horse. But without some kind of human-oriented radical jump they would not be automobiles.

Imagination yields innovation. Imagination makes something out of nothing. Human beings alone in existence have imagination. Further, only the human side of the human being provides it. No refinement, no collective effort, no amount of precision engineering can ever replace imagination.

Exercise: Creating Something out of Nothing

Imagine something that is not and create it. Your mind can range to changing the world, but we'll stick to mundane examples here to show how pervasive is the human ability to create something out of nothing.

• Redesign and streamline your personal filing system.

• Write your next business memo in the form of an amusing poem.

• Go through an old joke-book and adapt some of the jokes to present day circumstances. Practice telling the joke, then tell it in front of an audience.

• Create a play on words.

• Begin a journal to write down your feelings about anything.