Mixed Mental Arts

Mixed Mental Arts


Ep 265 - Jenni Aguilar: Evolution is Smarter Than You

June 27, 2017

Ever since we had Jon Aguilar on the show back in Episode 251, Jon has been telling me I had to have his very brilliant wife on. And so, while driving back from a friend's wedding, I stopped by Casa Aguilar in Santa Barbara and started a conversation with Jenni Aguilar. Hours later, I understood why Jon felt so strongly that that I should talk to Jenni. Coming from an entirely different angle, she had reached many of the same conclusions as I had. For me, the arrival at evolutionary thinking and a desire to mix the mental arts had come from a desire to make sense of the cultures of the world. For Jenni, the emotional driver was something much more primal: her child was hurting. After a series of traumatic brain injuries, Jenni scrambled around the available science looking for anything that might help her son. In the tradition of Lorenzo's Oil, that tremendously strong emotional experience drove her to overcome intimidation, impenetrable medical jargon and assumptions about what was medically possible. The result is that today you would never know there was anything wrong with her son. In the end, what Jenni has done, what Katie and I did with The Straight-A Conspiracy and what many of the authors who have contributed to Mixed Mental Arts is to take pieces of fractured science and made kintsugi. They have filled in the cracks with gold. In the end though, the efforts of a handful of humans are nothing compared to what the evolutionary efforts of many Mixed Mental Artists can do testing these ideas against each other and against reality. Why? Because evolutionary processes are way smarter than individual humans. Once you accept that, then you approach evolutions' solutions with an appropriate humility, try to understand what evolution has done and figure out how to work with it. A prime example of that is aligning your body in a way that supports childbirth. For more on that, you can read Jenni's superb article Pervert Kings and Childbirth at MixedMentalArts.Co