Reciprocating Bill
Posts: 4265
Joined: Oct. 2006
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| Quote | | Were I forced to categorize myself as SOMETHING, it would be as an "apa-theist". I simply don't CARE if there is a god or not. |
Excellent.
Although I first read it as "ape-theist," acknowledging that, whatever spirituality there may be, it is embodied, and never detachable.
Let me share this essay, which I wrote perhaps 15 years ago:
The Chordate Self
I.
I was brushing my teeth, or doing something else as ordinary, when suddenly struck: I am arches of experience emerging from the workings of my body, a transparent structure of color and action, transacting with an environment that is itself built of both awareness and physicality. A reality that includes body and experience. I am a tower of mental and physical homeostasis and balance, built of many rooms of knowing and behavior, a structure of self.
We are bodies that make consciousness. Bodies like our own, in turn, may be fashioned by evolution only because such a body can make consciousness. Not spirits dwelling in bodies, able to fly out, but a di-polar reality that rises and falls as one. This single self has, as one pole, the matter/energy/message that comprises body; as another, the consciousness/volition/memory that comprises self. Self is something aware body does.
I am saying that our bodies are spirits. Our spirits are bodies.
Identity requires memory, and memory is information-in-context that requires, in turn, form and complexity and temporality. The emergence of life, consciousness and identity in history have therefore both required and resulted from the capacity of matter and energy to support and retain complex form. It is the compartmentalized physical transactions of matter and energy, and the capacity of matter and energy to accumulate information over contingent history, that permit natural selection to construct, among myriad other things, bodies and conscious selves. In doing so, matter becomes as much like spirit as it is like clay or ash.
Why do we resist the inclusion of matter/energy in our vision of soul? Because spirits constructed as bodies cannot be built to last. That I am conscious-body now, body-spirit now, and later will not be, packs both fear and poignancy into finite experience. From that fear emerges empathy and caring, because I know that you share the same untenable predicament.
In return, by accepting that awareness emerges from bodies, we fully share the history our of bodies across deep time, and the strange and evocative structures of our human bodies and brains remain our own, rather than something merely inhabited. I fold the natural history of biological structure into my own experience, and rejoice that my soul arose in nature.
Viewed in this way, the experiencing self is grounded in evolutionary history, a structure of experience that is both individual and "transpersonal" in nature, a transpersonal experience rooted in history.
II.
Each of us partakes of a variety of levels of self-sense. Ordinarily, human experience is existentially social and verbal in nature, experience that is shaped by the "location" of personhood in an historical and cultural context, built from that person's unique history of environments, experiences, behaviors and relationships, through interaction with one's care-givers and the embracing culture they convey. Further, the biology supporting this experience in "cultural space" is unique to the extent that it originates with the genetic and historical particulars of that individual's life. These are the social and biological considerations of psychology, and are the most frequent referents of the Western concept, "self".
There are deeper, much older strata of self that have identity in all human beings, because rooted in structural features of the human brain that are deeply invariant across individuals. Some aspects of this deeply invariant human neurological organization are "recently" evolved and, therefore, organize experiences unique to human beings, while other structures are almost unimaginably ancient, organizing a base stratum of subjectivity that is common to all vertebrate animals, a transpersonal stratum that is vastly more ancient than the neurological powers that originated with the evolution of hominids.
Evolutionary biology tells us that the essential axis of vertebrate organization, the axis of brain, spinal column and associated deployment of senses, reflects a body plan established something over five million centuries ago. This axis defines the absolute core functioning of the vertebrate life-machinery, a core responsible for governance of the internal living milieu, regulation of respiration and heart action, and the expression of drives and appetites.
Similarly, the integration of sense information and the coordination of volitional behavior follow neural pathways that are organized through a biology of awareness and behavior that is equally ancient, having originated with this 570 million year old body plan.
These ancient platforms of experience and behavior lay down in each of us a deep stratum of experiencing self that I call the "chordate self", a structure of awareness that originated with the evolution of the chordate body plan.
In short, underlying the psychological self is a deeper, more ancient chordate self in which we all silently partake, a self that is profoundly other-than-human, utterly non-verbal and shared with countless other vertebrate species. The Chordate Self.
Spiritual endeavors, those that invite widened awareness as a means to understanding, direct attention away from the inherently limiting particulars of individual history and away from the talkative narration of recent brain structures, to an essence of human awareness and human circumstance that is independent of personal history. The resulting profoundly transpersonal experiences, experiences that are fundamentally "neurohistorical" in nature, are in reality an experience of an ancient, transcendent non-verbal chordate self, refracted through the "enchanted loom" of more recent neocortical self-awareness and verbal narration that initiate and guide the spiritual effort.
It is interesting to consider some aspects of eastern discipline in this light, such as Yoga, with its interest in the deployment of energy and experience throughout the spinal column, essentially an exploration of one's phenomenological roots in chordate neural organization. Meditation of all varieties tends to place one's experience more in synchrony with transpersonal elements of self that are irrelevant to personal history, equating these neurohistorical transpersonal experiences with experience of divinity. In a sense this may not be mistaken, finding in these experiences a record of contingent evolution over very deep time, our true "creator".
Similarly, LSD and similar substances become an occasion for a kind of neurohistorical sacrament. Whatever consciousness is, and whatever new ontological and phenomenological dimensions are drawn into existence through the addition of LSD to the human brain, nothing could more clearly demonstrate the neural basis of consciousness than its profound alteration through the insinuation of tiny amounts of such a simple substance. Thus altered, one possesses a brain of a new kind, capable of experiences associated with this new sort of brain. As a new individual, one is free to directly experience one's neurohistorical, chordate self apart from the vagaries of individual personal history, then re-enter that familiar psychological self able to refract everyday experience through the lenses of memory of this neurohistorical sacrament.
(and so forth)
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Myth: Something that never was true, and always will be.
"The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you."
- David Foster Wallace
"Here’s a clue. Snarky banalities are not a substitute for saying something intelligent. Write that down."
- Barry Arrington
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