The LPPC Model

(Page Update 12/10/25)

In 1968, I stood at a crossroads in Sunnyvale, California. College football offers on the table, adrenaline still humming from years on the field, and a television set that kept showing a country on edge: assassinations, protests, war, and a kind of public fever I couldn’t ignore. I asked a question that has steered my life ever since: What the hell is wrong with this crazy world of ours?

Anchor & Purpose

This page exists to present an essential tool I had worked up in two phases: (1) The possibility to simply live sanely with that question began during the time I was studying publications on the Perceptual Control Theory (2014). And (2) the necessary ingredient, the Hylozoic worldview, to help enhance my livelihood development (2022).

From my research, I have formalized a framework for my development, which I now call The Psychology of Lifespan Performance and Perceptual Control. Applying the LPPC model, one examines how perception develops, how performance embodies it, and how the whole cycle from research to activation maintains the loop's integrity in the real world, both contextually and circumstantially. It is the flow of potentiality to actuality that you can physically, emotionally, and mentally grip.

Note: This page belongs to the Anchor Story because it turns a lifelong question into a method you can apply today. The aspiration is simple: Develop higher consciousness without losing contact with reality. Act decisively without abandoning learning.

Why this page lives in Part II: Motion — The Serial Student

Part II on The Anchor Story page describes motion as rhythm, time, energy, will, and the sequence of learning. The example: What I call "my ten years of college with no degree period" cycling through majors, cities, and disciplines, testing programs, and discovering principles. That experience also contributed to the creation of the LPPC Model, which is the method that makes conflictive motion livable: it turns serial study into serial loops of research, development, performance, and activation. That is why this page links from The Anchor Story page (Part II) and carries its stance: learn by moving, refine by looping. The esoteric phrase: Energy ever follows thought.

Integrity — The Spiral and Its Four Movements

The loop repeats in context. Nothing floats free of the environment; everything is retested in the actual situation, circumstance, and setting. That is the LPPC promise: When Research, Development, Performance, and Activation are in harmony, you stay grounded while your consciousness grows.

1. RESEARCH — Ways to Notice What’s True

Research here takes on a perspective beyond academia. It is personal. Within the psychology of lifespan performance and perceptual control (LPPC), research projects are activated by life experiences and actual perceptions, being compared with intended (reference) perceptions.

A Bowling Example:

Set your question: “What changes my pocket hit more: speed or loft?”
Control one variable: Shift speed only; note outcomes.
Record what you see: Small notebook, short words, real numbers.
Check against context: New oil? Late league? Ankle sore? Note it.
Let data correct your pride: What you wanted to be true yields to what is actual.

By consistently running any conflicting environmental or objective data through your subjective intentions, you will build a personal knowledge base. In coaching, and more importantly, in one's life, nothing transforms a human being more quickly than the combination of honest self-awareness and conscious performance.

2. DEVELOPMENT — Result of the Upward Arc

The ascension to Livelihood Development starts with self-research, or attention to physical, emotional, and mental contact with the world. Research is the process of learning, level by level, to become "developed". LPPC articulates this hierarchy plainly: from objectivity to subjectivity:

Bowling Example:

1–3. Intensity → Sensation → Configuration: Weight, sound, color, edge. Two feet on the approach. Ball in hand. The lane has shine; the pins wait. Life has a shape.
4–6. Transition → Sequence → Event: One thing leads to another. Heel-to-toe becomes a 4- or 5-step approach; push-away invites swing; swing invites release. Sequences add up to events you can name.
7–9. Form Invariance → Relationship → Category: You recognize sameness across change (your “best shot” survives different houses). You map relationships—timing, tempo, line, speed, rotation. You form categories—what you adjust first, what you never touch mid-game.
10–12. Program → Principle → System Concept: You run programs (pre-shot routines), you hold principles (alignment over aggression, quiet head over hot hand), and you begin to see the whole—a system you can study, improve, and teach.

Note: Upgraded from 11 to 12 levels in Chapter 7 of the book Perceptual Control Theory, Living Control Systems IV (2020): How the brain gets a roaring campfire: Input and output functions, by Eling O. Jorgensen

The ascension from Research to Development is not a “once and done” project. The LPPC motion never ends; perceptual control is a cyclical, systemic hierarchy. Next, after your development (i.e., enhanced integrity), the process continues toward Activation, during which you can identify any perceptual errors (conflicts) that are blocking some of your performance intentions. This requires progressing through the descending Lifespan Performance-to-Activation phase.

3. PERFORMANCE — Downward Arc that Makes it Real

A model that never hits the floor is just a sketch.

Once you have entered the Lifespan Performance Activation phase, you begin to discover data: (1) how higher levels (subjective perceptions) earn their keep, and (2) by revisiting the lower levels (objective perceptions) strengthen the higher ones, it becomes clear that once you touch the whole, by ascending research-for-developmont, you can drill down into the details that make the whole real. Which means you also begin to better understand the need for performance activations to re-trigger the research-for-development phase.

Another Bowling Example:

System → Principle → Program: Carry the concept of efficient, repeatable motion into tonight’s match. Let the guiding principle be alignment over effort. Run your program: breathe, set, visualize the line, go.
Category → Relationship → Form Invariance: Pick a category of response (move 2 and 1 left). Manage relationships (speed down a hair, rotation up a tick). Watch that your form stays clean across changes.
Event → Sequence → Transition: Let the event (shot) register as clean or not—feedback you can trust. Tighten the sequence. Feel the micro-transitions in your approach.
Configuration → Sensation → Intensity: Finish where you began: in the body’s truth. How did it feel? Where was the ball placed at setup? What did the pins sound like?

Whether on the lanes, in classrooms, at work, or at home, the same descending arc applies: ideas are put into action, following a principle causes physical energy adjustments, and categories are placed into relationship choices under pressure.

4. ACTIVATION — Ways to Move When You’re “Not Ready”

You could say activation is the courage to apply what you think you know. But really, you have no choice but to act; it's just a matter of which intentions you choose to activate that determine your life's consequences. The difference between unconscious and conscious performance is measurable.

One change per rep: Don’t rebuild your life in a day; you have 12 levels of intentions. Select one that appears to be in conflict with the other levels and resolve it today.
Friction design: Make the new perceived action more conscious than the old habit.
Time-box the test: Try it in two different contexts, then re-assess.
Ship the shot: Take it in public. Pressure teaches the last 10% no drill can.

After a bit of development comes performance-to-activation, the embodiment of development through conscious performance. Here, based on those newly learned reference perceptions, the flow toward activation is intentional, from which you can identify any perceptual errors (conflicts) blocking a precise performance activation. Then, with this need to adjust identified, you re-trigger and begin the research-for-development phase again. And that is the way of human development.

Note: Living organisms are systems of control systems that use their actions to control their sensed perceptual input. The human system, the research to activation loop, operates at 12 subsystem levels of PCA loops, which guide our actions. At each level, the motion of the loops begins from the sensed Perceptual input; ascends to the Comparator, where conflicts with reference perceptions are calculated; then descends to activate the error adjustments as the subsequent adapted Action.

Perception guides action. Action reveals conflictive perceptions. Behavior is the control of perception. Activation keeps you out of theory-land and squarely in your life, under your control.

The Hybrid Coach–Play Perspective

Your Dual Stance:

You'll notice, as shown on the diagram, that I take a simple, sustainable stance to keep the LPPC loop authentically integral to humanity's existence: the hybrid coach-play perspective of conscious performance.

Play (Learn): Act in the arena. Sweat, miss, score, repeat.
Coach (Know): Step to the rail. Observe, name, and choose the next experiment.

A highly developed person reflects the hybrid coach-play perspective of causal intuition. However, most of us, less developed beings, are sometimes more of a player than a coach. Then, at other times, more coach than player. For livelihood development, the roles of student (learning) and teacher (knowing) are inescapable. However, since conscious performance requires both, your focus must remain on a fully attentive life and learning to embody both. When the player in me is hot-headed, the coach in me slows my breath and keeps to the game plan. When the coach in me becomes a critic or a cynic, the player in me reminds him that we learn by doing first, then developing.

Experience — Why 1965–1985?

In hindsight, my mostly intentional, perceptually informed experiences over those 20 years can now be clearly seen as the signal-dense environmental backdrop that energized my research-for-development. First, a significant consequence that materialized in 1968 marks a hugely pivotal point: I leave my obvious athletic path and enter a serial study-work dichotomy. Also, by being fed the happenings of the late 1960s through the early 1980s, constant televised events created weekly feedback: pressure, anxiety, and adaptation became strong memories. When I finally began to form the LPPC model (2014), I could still hear the mantra of that era: "The times they are a-changing." What initially were the ramblings of a weak intuition; however, as my lifespan of performance activations progressed ever higher through the dimensions of being human (from physical to emotional and to mental), I continued to develop consciousness, and the final design evolved intellectually. I now recall with joy the freedom during those years: Life was my classroom, Energy was my teacher. Being a coach was the result.

1965–1973: Vietnam dominates the news; “outcomes” have visible human costs, such as teenagers being drafted to kill.
1968: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy are assassinated; my anchor question takes root.
1969: The moon landing shows what a coordinated system can accomplish.
1970: Kent State shootings; the danger of misaligned perception and state action.
1973–1974: The Watergate scandal exposes the failure of principle in high office.
1979–1981: Iran hostage crisis; patience and pressure share the same stage.
Early 1980s: Recession and recovery; households become laboratories of adaptation.

These were not trivia points; they were perceptual inputs that penetrated deeply, forcing reference perceptions to update and, in action, adapt. That is the LPPC loop at work when the world presses in. If you consciously notice, you act with courage, you learn, and you loop again and again, naturally forever.

My Serial‑Student Years (1968 - 1985)

Institutional Studies: engineering, environmental design, business, cultural history, and photography. Five majors plus two years of credit for each equal what I call my ten years of college, no degree period.
Geographies: multiple college towns and university cities; learning diversification and integration in motion.
What stuck: the programs that worked under pressure, principles that generalized, and with blind intuition, I formed the habit of looping.
Early coaching: tutoring teammates (1967–1968) and classmates (1975–1981); discovering the Coach–Play stance.

Why LPPC Matters To Me Today

LPPC has proven to be my answer. The LPPC energy guides one's livelihood development and lifespan performance into a harmonic state of consciousness. The hybrid teacher-student pulling on each other like tides is how I’ve worked the same cycle in bowling centers, classrooms, family rooms, Fortune 500 corporate meeting rooms, and now all-day writing sessions.

It gives you a way to handle the “crazy” without becoming it. You can grow up in the arc toward whole systems, and still come down the arc into practice that holds under pressure. You can research your life without becoming a cynic, and you can act decisively without becoming reckless. The loop protects you, and as a consequence, protects those who share your environment, from both your naïveté and paralysis.

Link Back to the Anchor Story

This page is part of the Anchor Story because it shows the method I used to live with the 1968 question: What the hell is wrong with this crazy world of ours? The technique is not of a mystic's imagination; it is consumed by daily matters, consciousness, and motions of existence, while working through the physical, emotional, and mental dimensions of being human. It is how I kept my feet on the approach, and my senses locked on the whole lane of life.

Please note: The Anchor Story is the foundation of the 2025 Iteration, which I am utilizing as the form and scaffolding for the creation of the Optima Bowling 2026 Iteration.

Back To: The Anchor Story