The Original Self, Part I

Returning To Your Original Architecture

By Michael Haydon

You began in quiet.

Not silence—quiet. The inner kind. The soft, undisturbed interior where imagination stirred before language, where perception is raw and unfiltered without interpretation or conditioned reactivity, where the self is not yet shaped by showmanship, false comparisons, or cultural pressures. Developmental psychology confirms that infants—long before they acquire speech or social scripts—operate from an inward-focused mode of attention characterized by sensory absorption, attunement, and exploratory reflection^{(Stern, 1985; Trevarthen, 2001)}. 

Attunement ə-ˈtün-mənt noun  ^{(Merriam-Webster, n.d.)}

Attune at·​tune ə-ˈtün verb

attuned; attuning; attunes transitive verb

1: to bring into harmony: tune

2: to make aware or responsive

1. attune businesses to changing trends
2. after years spent in academia, he's finding it difficult to attune himself to the corporate culture

Neurocognitive research on early childhood experiences underscores the same truth: the brain’s default mode network, or DMN—the circuitry associated with imagination, introspection, and internal meaning construction—is active years before th…