As far as I can tell, things like rights, beauty, love, money, and all our notions of gods, good, evil and so on, are the various subjects (stories) we derive from the common object of (nature). We make maps as symbolic descriptions of nature as a territory, then use the maps as a means to perceive the meaning of the relationships between objects. In other words; nature is objects in relationship with each other, but these relationship processes also convey meaning – the same way the relationship between letters and words or sounds convey meaning.
Nature is the base line grammatical engine on which all meaning (language) is built. It is also a language in and of itself. The same way many verbal languages can emerge from a grammatical foundation like a limited set of syllabic sounds, we form our various maps of nature based on the context of the heritage of our experience communicated through our various local environments over time. Objects in relationship with each other over time is the essence of story as far as I can tell. We can not have one (subject) without the other (object). The need for a relationship between two or more entities in order for the birth of meaning to take place is perhaps the archetype of what we frame as male-female – yin-yang mother-child and so on. This meaningful aspect of nature we map out in our myths and also describe as process through our scientific lens is built on this universal grammar.
As meaning generators ourselves, we reflect the nature of nature, despite our occasional delusion that we are independent of the whole. This should perhaps come as no surprise even though it appears to for many of us. Specific order conveys coherent meanings, and to the degree we are ordered, we also convey coherent meaning. Nature conveys story through objects in relationship with each other over time and we interpret this objective dynamic process as subject.
The null hypothesis is a statistical test that suggests there’s no significant difference between specified populations or sets of things; that any observed differences are due to sampling or experimental error. It says we see things as an artifact of how we categorize them. Any truth that can be derived from any “object” in nature depends on that object’s relationship to other objects, even if that other object is the whole of nature. We examine facets – pieces- subsets of nature – that we classify by category, and out of that perception of object in relationship to other object we find meaning. The fact that we must divide nature in order for any facets of meaningful difference to emerge points to the fact that a relationship between two or more objects is necessary for meaning to exist at all. Without the relationship between two or more objects there is no “word” no meaning.
The fact that our organs operate as a community of objects that act to nourish and defend each other’s coherency is more than a process, it is a meaningful story of how coherent structures sustain themselves; whether we decode that message plainly by way of our abstract maps or not does not dismiss the fact it conveys meaning. The fact that we are not fulfilled as mature beings unless we find a way to contribute meaningfully in the context of the community we live in and depend on for life is rooted in the fact that we are unable to act against our nature as mature adults – with excessive selfish intent, taking from our community without giving back something that generates greater value in return – and also be satisfied. The fact that we become depressed when we’re not participating in something larger than ourselves is a statement by nature through our native drives that we hunger for meaning – for a larger coherency. We are simply not wired to be satisfied this without meaningful connections to a greater whole. These aspects of a satisfied life and unsatisfied life is clearly mapped in our biology, but also through the mythic story of Cain and Abel; where one was satisfied by giving his best, and the other was not due to doing the minimal. Are these people literally true? Maybe, maybe not, but they are metaphorically sound with the message conveyed through objective nature about who we are and what constitutes a pathway to a satisfied life. To deny this seems to me as incoherent as to deny gravity.
Our cultural myths (stories) throughout time and place are symbolic maps of the world and the cosmos. We use them to craft an image of our place in the context of this larger environmental womb of nature – as a way to reflect our understanding of this “almighty” womb of nature we’re in – that forms us of the dust of the Earth – that gave birth to all things – that nourishes and feeds us and will yield its strength if we cultivate fruitful outcomes, which are rendered through specific nourishing and protective actions along with a certain level of sacrifice and so on over time. This nature, to which we must sacrifice to in order to cultivate a more abundant life speaks of itself in and through the way objects relate to each other. These cultural myths we have formed over the years have embedded within them things like our objective need for a relationship with each other and our world because of how we have been defined (created) by this thing – this greater being; nature.
The fact that we need to tend this garden of living fire with enough intentional cultivation to sustain our collective body, our species, or there will be consequences is conveyed through the process. Our origins, and a projection of our destiny based on how we negotiate in the context of this relationship economy is also conveyed through the process. These subjective words we stitch together as symbolic maps of the territory are not mere descriptions of process alone, they also convey meaningful concepts. We make symbolic tokens that can stand for the territory we are in – this economy of “being”. These maps are how we negotiate our relationship with self other and the world whether we couch it in terms of governments and constitutions and laws, or in the form of mythic stories.
Along with being defined by nature, our maps can also define how we experience “being”. The same way nature creates by way of object within certain boundaries, we can create by way of subject. While I would agree the map is not the territory, and that the claims of literal truth made by certain religions could be argued as objectively untrue or unprovable, we simply cannot know from our perspective, which is why these things are the domain of faith, at the same time, money is not money unless we agree it is money. We shape our experience in objectively true ways through concepts – through meaning. Meanings themselves can take on the form of objects in relation to one another and create a nested architecture of meaning. The same way each language has it’s own word for stone, yet there is only one objective stone to which all these various concepts point, each mythos subject attempts to encapsulate the properties of nature in abstract terms. Each has a a unique map that conceptualized the same source – nature, which is both object and subject.
To suggest that anything not tied to a description of process, which is the domain of science, is valueless and incoherent misses the point as much as claiming subjective truths are objectively true. We can get lost in our maps by mistaking them for objects, but we can also get lost in process by mistaking that for subject, when it is the inseparable relationship between the two that defines what we experience as “being”. We can be the authors of our own poverty, or cultivators of our grandest success depending on how we relate to each other – how we participate in subject making process.
We generate meaning by the way we relate to each other. We also have the opportunity to generate more abundant meaning by how coherently we relate – how much we nourish and protect each other and the common body of life we depend on to sustain us as a single meaningful coherent whole in service of a greater whole. This nested architecture of meaning conveyed through the process of nature is a meaningful guide to a meaningful life if we have the ears to hear the message. Whether we understand it or not, the meaning is clearly conveyed: that objects in relationship with each other over time is the essence of how we experience every story, including our own.
We are social creatures far more than we are rational ones. The same way raindrops form on the backbone of a particle of dust, our abstract identities are an interpretive dance of interconnected values based on the particulate backbone of imperfect perception faculties coupled with what is communicated through our environment and the established cultural ideas we nurse from in youth. As social creatures, we’re wired to sacrifice accuracy on the altar of belonging. This isn’t because we’re more inclined to intentionally lie in order to belong to a group. Lies are a semi-irrelevant extension of our social nature. Our perception is geared to see what we need to see to cement the social bonds we depend on to live.
We ride aloft on the thermals of our innate social hungers, interpreting imperfect sensory data through a distorted cultural lens that was forged by environmental factors largely beyond the reach of our time, place and capability to influence. Once established, this lens becomes much more an inward projection of installed prejudices than an accurate interpreter of outward events. This is why what looks like common sense to one group looks completely insane to another. Our connection to ideas is an emotional one founded on the intimacy driven by the dependency of social hunger, it is not a rational one based on objective evidence.
We build our identity from the ideological breast milk of the culture we’re baptized in from youth. This ideological perspective is largely constructed at critical periods in development – prior to developing the potential to critically question the premises on which these perspectives stand, much less the discipline to do so. Along with an installed perspective forged on social dependency and how ideas serve as social glue, we also develop an ideological immune system to protect that same identity because, in so doing, we protect what it is we conceive of as our self. In aligning this ideological profile with how it serves to bind us to a group, we become an integrated part of a larger tribal body and thus historically more resilient, adaptable, and by extension, able to survive. An examination of accuracy is not as important as an evolutionary axiom of utility. It is what is useful and arguably essential to belong that trumps accuracy.
Allegiance to local sports teams is one of the recent manifestations of tribal instinct, as is allegiance to organizations, scientific and religious ideologies as well as abstract notions like property and nationalism. So powerful is this social currency that an abstract idea can form the basis of membrane to distinguish an in-group and out-group so powerful that people will fight and die over it. This tribal social attribute has served us well in a world where we needed to navigate some almost impossible adversity over the years. At times, without these kinds of uncompromising bonds to our local tribe we would have literally died off. Social currency is the coin of the realm that outwardly symbolizes the innate values that have been structured into our human cognitive frame over the years by nature to increase our potential to endure.
Along with every advantage conferred by some innovative structure born out of nature comes a potential downside. Our emotional-social attachments to abstractions along with our social hungers can become manipulated such that they are cemented to destructive things by the same engine that once drove our survival. Our innate traits can and have been exploited in some cases to drive emotional attachments to such things as corporate brands and causes which are in opposition to our best interests. People now routinely back causes that are destructive to our individual and collective well being because of ignorance, accidental appropriation and the deliberate and artful massaging of these natural social traits to serve narrow agendas.
The wealth of any local tribe has always come from it’s capacity to cultivate its people such that they lived within their means and continually cemented the bonds of unity and awareness of that which sustained their future. Each member carried the torch for and passed it to the next generation. Finding a harmonious equilibrium with the environment while cultivating and maximizing the fruits that nourish the community is the foundation of wealth. While desperate times have called for desperate measures, from the larger perspective, tribal wealth is a byproduct of how much the members of the community give to the community, not from how much power and resource they extract from it. A vested interest in the entire social and environmental ecosystem, including each other, is the life blood of the tribe.
Over time the sharing of resources and ideas is what led to our current capacity to no longer be bound as tightly to the whims of nature’s irregular bounty. We have the capacity to steer with far more intention and have far more impact through technology, but that does not mean that we have always chosen to steer wisely. Technology has provided the capacity to greatly enrich our lives, but only if it is appropriately applied. Our technological sword comes with two edges. We now have the capacity to greatly improve our lives, but we also have the capacity to destroy our future on the altar of now. Because of overpowering tools, we are faced with the new proposition of needing to apply our capacities judiciously and from a global community perspective to ensure our survival. We cannot afford to leverage our capacities capriciously without risking the destruction of the very channels that we depend on to nourish us.
Our local success now depends on the success of the many interconnected entities that collectively form our global body. We are no longer capable of operating as separate entities – different bodies. Each of us is a vital organ in the collective body. Together we are a singular whole. To strangle one part of the body for the sake of another is not only not effective, but can only be justified on a foundation of ignorant or wanton destructiveness. It is now a matter of self interest and sustainability to have, and actively cultivate, a stake in each others success and to cultivate the environmental channels that nourish us. Each of us is individually limited to the confines of that which we collectively decide we are. A world where we nourish each others potential, instead of exploit each others weaknesses, is a world that maximizes its capacity to unlock the fruit it has to offer itself. To strengthen our voice to its full potential we must strengthen each other. To effectively raise the experience of life we have as individuals, we need to recognize how contingent each of our success is on the success of the entire tribe.
A strategy that serves well in one context can be disastrous in another. We once lived in a world where local tribal unity was essential for survival -a world where we could leverage every tool at our disposal without concern for the backlash. The environment was the primary influence that shaped our ideologies and culture. If we didn’t listen to and change with the message delivered to us through the environment, we dissolved back to the soil from which we came and no longer have a voice. We now live in a world where technology has erased the need to bend to as many aspects of the environment. Along with this capacity we have effectively eliminated the protective membrane of local geography. We now all swim in the same pond and it’s a whole lot smaller than it used to be. What we do affects us all, and to survive and thrive, we need to shift our tribal perspective from the narrow set of ideological anomalies that are metaphoric echoes of a local people’s relationship to local environments over time to see the entire earth as our tribe.
The whole world starts the lens through which we see it. Charles Swindoll once said; “I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me, and 90% how I react to it.” Some of us look for happiness on the outside, some expectation we overlay on our world. While the outside is of some consequence, it it the inside that shapes most of what we see and experience. The same way a seedling must first develop in the darkness of the soil before developing the strength to show itself to the rest of the world, the soil from which our public identity emerges largely determines what we experience. Happiness is an inside-out journey.
We are a species extremely well endowed with the capacity for faith. For the purpose of clear communication, faith is defined here as believing without necessary and sufficient evidence to hinge a particular position to reality. Instead of objective evidence, faith is defined here as being supported with things like authority, popularity, wishful thinking, charisma, trust and force. Faith is sometimes a blend of reality and these other things, but the portion that is faith is defined here as the portion that is unhinged from objective reality. Along with the ability to dribble abstractions out of our face and other appendages to describe what’s real, we also use these abstractions to craft images that aren’t real, or that are so distorted they barely have a toehold in reality.
Even greater than our ability to craft unhinged ideas, we’re able to believe them with ease depending on circumstance. We may have the illusion that our senses produce a fairly accurate rendering of reality, but far more of our biological wiring is dedicated to produce a “useful” image than is dedicated to produce an accurate one. Accuracy is a surprisingly expendable commodity in the human biological framework.
To illustrate the useful rendering factor of our biology we can look at this image; square “A” and square “B” are identical in color, but our brain renders square “B” lighter in color. Our brain doesn’t render things as they are, it interprets information and conjures up what it thinks will be useful for us to navigate. Our senses are notorious among those that study them closely for filling in the gaps. Accuracy is not a priority, useful is the priority. The fact that our brain renders useful, and not accurate, images has profound implications when it comes to what we can reliably believe with certainty. This is especially true when we consider how socially useful it is to believe the things our in-group does. It is also significant when we consider the social currency we gain from the ability to be influential in getting social traction for our own notions in the social economy.
This “useful over accuracy” aspect of our biological senses is not confined to the relationship we have between the internal and external world. It is also true of the relationship we have within ourselves. For most of us, accuracy is a shadowy afterthought even when it comes to understanding ourselves or at best, a hard fought and tenuous discipline that requires extreme vigilance.
Faith can be seen as a one of the “useful” renderings of the mind. Faith and subjectivity are far more powerful players in the global social economy than is objectivity. Although we have many a trinket produced by technologies that are inseparably grounded in reality, faith still dominates our everyday lives. Most humans believe some set of ideas with no empirical grounding. One common faith based belief is that we are separate from the rest of biology, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Somehow we see ourselves as far superior. We support our superior notions with various abstract special endowment qualifiers such as we are of divine origins, or use our capacity for symbolic language as a means of generating distance between us and the rest of biology. The bottom line is our conversation with the unknown is a fertile spawning ground for magical thinking.
Maybe it’s a cosmic irony that the most essential questions about life are also the most elusive to answer with tangible evidence, but here we are, mining the dark for illumination. “Why are we here? Why do we die? Do we have a purpose, and if so, what is it?” As questions like these come into focus, we attempt to put some structure on them. So far what we’ve been able to extract from beyond the horizon of our senses are various flavors of abstract bubblegum – wordy wads we can chew on and blow a few abstract bubbles with, but that lose their flavor when exposed to the direct light of reality. The fact that reality doesn’t agree with and/or support our ideas doesn’t seem to deter us from believing them. A few of us attempt to brave the unknown using what’s real as the measure of truth, but globally speaking, our most common relationship with the unknown is to sacrifice the darkness on the alter of false certainty.
Our penchant for faith could be a quirk of evolution formed on a backbone of contradictory needs; one being able to respond rapidly and the other to gain the advantages that careful rational thought has to offer. This internal competition between the reactionary and the carefully considered may have set us up for a shadowy relationship with ourselves. This could have been the spawning bed for our love affair with the mystical.1
Any exploration we attempt on the parts of ourselves that defy analytic dissection would naturally bring about a litany of guesses. There is an inverse relationship between the level of rational insight we are capable of using and the perceived level of urgency with which we see a given situation. The more urgent we perceive a situation, the less useful the higher functions of our brain. Higher functions essentially shut down or are significantly diminished when we are under perceived threat.
Perhaps the more recent arrival on our biological scene of rational thought means this system is as yet undeveloped, therefore gets easily swamped by emotion. It may also be that the slower speed of our rational capacities is the reason they’re so easily overwhelmed by the older, more quickfire and far more established portions of our biology.2 It could be that our slower functions cannot grasp the chaotic rapidity with which our reactionary functions operate. Like the particle trying to understand the wave, we cannot know the position and the velocity at the same time so we are left with generalized pointers and probabilities.
We’re also biologically equipped to focus on novel events. When we face novel things we’re triggered into a heightened state of awareness. It’s not difficult to see the survival value of this, but this heightened state is not a fertile environment for processing new things using our thin and questionable capacities for critical thought.
When we are young, we are highly plastic. The need to adapt to new environmental conditions specific to us is thought to be the foundation of this early developmental plasticity. The same way a fight or flight situation diverts energies away from immediately unnecessary functions to the ones that serve our urgent needs, we adapt to the perceived relationship climate during our developmental stage. If the environment is stressed, our biological faculties will be more inclined to be reactionary. As we age, in mass the generation takes hold of the social narrative and uses the established channels to react. The general aversion older adults have to the new could explain the mechanism by which traditional ideas and rituals are preserved. Because that segment of the population operated the controls, perhaps it strives to maintain relevance. This can also cause a situation where the ante to get in the game is to lay claim to observing the status quo.
No matter the cause, we use faith to defend against the fear that comes with dawning awareness. Faith stands in when evidence is lacking, or is inconveniently destructive of what we’re emotionally invested in. We may find the idea of expiring into nothingness upon death unbearable, so we invent abstractions as a coping mechanism. Our compulsive tendency to explain the inexplicable overwhelms our capacity to be rational. The irony is that the things we use to defend ourselves may become the enemy of clear vision. We become emotionally attached to ideas that we then defend as we would any other part of our person.
Perhaps the faith based ideas that crop up from the soils of the unknown initially caught on as a means to reassure our young somewhere back in time. Children by nature are profoundly inquisitive. Parents are inclined to give them some kind of grounding so they can function in the world. Quenching fears would be one of the priorities. Couple this parenting drive with a dim awareness of cause and effect and we can see how comforting lies and misperceptions could eventually morph into widely accepted and largely unquestioned facts.
The way ideas take root in both individuals and cultures is like the campfire that crosses a threshold from unviable without direct support to one increasingly hungry for fuel. It can be difficult for an idea to catch on, but once it does, we tend to embrace and spread it. After it’s well established it becomes part of the social currency. We generally accept the ideas we are bathed in from youth as fact. If threatened, our ideological identity is social flesh, we protect and defend it as we would our body. Tradition is only one of the ways false ideas are transmitted and perpetuated; authority, popularity, among other social pressures are mechanisms that propagate and perpetuate myths.
An “availability cascade”3 is a social phenomena where a self-reinforcing communication loop causes certain kinds of collective beliefs to take root in a culture. When an idea is expressed simply and seems to explain something complex, it rapidly gains social momentum. The more popular, the more it generates a feedback loop of further spreading and acceptance within a culture. After it reaches critical social mass, people adopt it because other people have already adopted it.
The reason it spreads is due to a combination of its unique nature and new found popularity. We are genetically prone to pay attention to new or unusual things. We are also prone to do things to fit in with our group. Availability cascades cause widespread acceptance of ideas regardless of whether the people in fact fully believe in the idea they now express. The need for social acceptance overwhelms our critical thinking capacities.
It’s possible we cling to unfounded ideas out of a need for axioms by which to navigate. We act on ideas we believe are true, not necessarily those that are true. This can make the skill of persuasion an extremely valuable social currency. As a result we may have developed the skill to deceive a means of protection or establishing an elevated more secure place in the world.
If our goal is to avoid the hazards that arise when we drive blind through life we might want explore why we feel so compelled to fill in the gaps in our awareness. We might also want to explore what weakness in our sensory faculties enables us to so readily confuse words with reality?
We are tickled by the unknown, unable to stop responding unless we do something to scratch the itch. Maybe comforting delusions provide protection from primal fears that would otherwise distract and cripple us. Once we’ve established illusory control with our words we seem to feel better. In the absence of evidence, we build mental castles fortified with abstractions to maintain our sense of safety and right.
Another function of abstractions in human culture is that they serve as a means of persuasion. Social construction is a phrase used to describe how people are grouped into categories using the language a culture uses to communicate. This categorization trait of linguistics has an enormous impact on lives and relationships of the people within a culture. While classifications can be descriptive of existing realities, they can also have a prescriptive power when fueled by faith. We use language to describe reality, but we also use it to prescribe it. The more people believe in and evangelize a particular stereotype categorization, the more influence it has to shape attitudes and behaviors within a culture. Social constructs can do things like confer artificial privilege to certain segments of a population while oppressing others, all powered by faith in the ideas.
Learned helplessness and false entitlement alike can emerge as social constructs in a culture. Once established, the faith process can sustain itself without the participants being aware of the drivers undergirding their experience. This can lead to something called “pluralistic ignorance” where a majority of group members may privately reject a particular view, but they incorrectly assume that most others accept it, so they go along with it.
While physical wealth might be measured by the amount of resources within the control of individuals or groups, social wealth can be measured in terms of the capacity of individuals or groups to influence the culture. The two are often intertwined, but like length and width are to the area of a rectangle, one cannot exist without the other. There is a largely unspoken social contract based on faith that keeps notions like property and class in vogue.
Character could be measured by the nature of what we spread with our capacity to influence. Money is social construct as is the concept of leaders. Leaders, without the currency of social influence are nonexistent. Social constructs may not be strictly the domain of faith because we could objectively describe the real world implications, but this impact is built on a foundation of faith.
One of the more serious downsides of embracing ideas unhinged from reality is their stagnating effect on developing greater awareness. If we operate with the belief that we’ve arrived at the truth, it comes with a side dish of “no reason to explore further”. The illusion of a complete view of reality can be rendered by virtue of the vision limiting capacity of an ignorant perspective. We can be unknowingly locked in a prison of self induced self perpetuated ignorance.4 Our current beliefs can act as projector onto reality rather than a lens through which to see it clearly. As a result, many, if not all of us live in a world of our own making, blind to the one that is.
Cultures and persons with ideological positions that are significantly detached from the fairly glaring realities of everyday life also tend to be the ones that produce more elaborate webs of ritual display. Maybe the fact that faith based ideas have such a tenuous hold on reality is the self same reason they must be elevated from mundane to sacred – to protect them with shrill emotions from the jaws of reality which would otherwise devour them. Elaborate ritual display is also related to how much a particular ideology is perceived to be under threat from outside influences. The greater the perceived threat, the more social energy goes into demands for oaths and other symbolic commitments to the faith.
Once we develop an established baseline of beliefs about the world, any additional perspectives we’re bathed in can only influence us from the frame of reference we already hold. As a consequence, evidence that counter our belief systems tend to be dis-confirmed by that same belief. Belief can be a powerful anchor for delusion because our vision is shaped by ideas we already hold true.
The ideas we pull out of the dark can start their lives as known symbols and later morph into a perceived reality. We can begin confuse the map we once drew in our minds with the actual landscape. We can then live in a world of partly our own making, semi-detached from the realities that persist despite our inabilities to see them.
Another of the unpleasant side effects of believing ideas unhinged from reality is our tendency to defend them with more passion than ideas that are solidly planted in everyday evidence. Generally speaking, we don’t rush to defend the ordinary if it’s challenged. If someone makes the argument that the earth has no water, it doesn’t typically draw a sharp defensive reaction. We can see touch taste and experience the water for ourselves. When a faith based idea we hold is challenged, we’re far more likely to unsheathe a fat roll of theological duct tape and begin the process of spinning a dogmatic cocoon to contain the heresy.
In some of the more seasoned and gentle organized faiths, the overt intent of spinning verbal cocoons around heretical thoughts and behaviors is to “correct”, “evangelize”, or at least to protect the believer from evil thoughts. Should the theological cocoon be effective at containing the target, it enables a metamorphosis of the wayward to believer. In the absence of a successful conversion, some alternative approaches include demonizing the offender, punishing and/or expelling them from the social circle.
Certain brands of faith come wrapped in a particularly harsh variety of intolerance. In more extreme cultural mindsets, there is no evangelistic step, the expectation is ideological purity and the move is from recognition of “heresy” to expelling the heretic from their own life. Many a squabble and war have been catalyzed or powered directly by ideological fuel. This might stem from the fact that the cost of holding a faith based idea requires a certain denial of reality in the first place. Although denial almost always a factor in supporting all forms of faith, there’s more to it than denial alone.
One reason we’re intolerant of perceived heresy might be found by looking at how our communal social bonds are built. Our integrity as a community is built on a framework of similar entities that collectively nourish each other. Shared symbols are part of what communities are built on. We use shared ideas as social DNA to bind our community identity into a coherent order. If faith is part of the social bonding process, we share and replicate faith. Whatever the social currency is, that’s what people tend to trade in. Acceptance and rejection of the shared ideas define who’s in and who’s out of the tribe – what is “self”, and what is “other”.
The fact that we distance ourselves from, assimilate and/or destroy faiths outside our own may be a cultural echo of the fact that we must devour other forms of life to survive. Our lives depend on sacrificing the “other” so that the “self” may live. We may have unconsciously ritualized our understanding of our nature by crafting myths that we then use to consume each other, expelling some waste farming others as food and so on. Culture may be essentially participating in an interpretive tribal dance that expresses our understanding of our environment and nature.
Unconscious ritualization could explain why cultures that developed in environments that require male dominance to survive tend to produce masculinized rituals, myths and patriarchal bellicose social norms.5 This may also be why hunter gatherer cultures with a variety of food sources tend toward polytheism and pastoral cultures with a narrow band of food options tend toward monotheism. Ritualization could be the outward expression of necessary things like population control for an island nation. The occurrence of feast and famine, seasons geography and so on would also impact the nature of the myths, the language and the rituals that define a culture.
The ideas we hold as “true & false – good & evil” may be symbolic stand ins of our unconscious understanding of our natural biological drives. Drives like food, water, relationship and reproduction are strong themes in this natural mix, and show up in our cultural rituals and surrounding myths. With this in mind, we might be destined to be in conflict with each other as a kind of unconscious acting out of our drives.
Intolerance may be part of our cultural immune system. Our language words and behaviors may be a cultural echo of the various relationships we must have with the environment and the rest of biology. Consequently we may ritualize the devouring and digestion process of “other” in relation to the cultural “self” on our social landscape. The irony here is that we would need to spread a set of pluralistic values in order to craft a sustainable equilibrium that involves the peaceful coexistence of differing cultural ideologies.
The fact that we lack tangible evidence for the questions we find so essential to life may be why we make more frequent ritual displays of our faith once it’s established. Rituals may be the mechanism by which we express our understanding of what is real, but they may also be how we reify the unreal. Because our faith is made real in our minds through ritual, we subsequently defend our cultural traditions as if they are vital organs. Perhaps it’s because they are vital social organs, perceived as necessary for the cohesion and survivability of a particular group.
Religion is by no means the only domain of faith. We make solemn pledges to national flags, ritualize patriotism, take oaths, hold parades, join clubs, fraternities and organizations with shared faith as part of the social equation. Some of us have attachments to political parties with the same fabric of faith and the same levels intolerance, the same evangelical fervor and the same dehumanizing dichotomy between “us” and “them”. We also develop many forms of personal faith. Some of us use the ritual of getting other people to believe a story as the impulse to count that same story as real. Addicts are notorious for this type of propulsion into chaos, as are their counterparts, the enablers. Even though the paint job is different in these two cases, the same underlying engine is based on faith – belief without tangible evidence.
The down side of the way we develop and sustain culture is that it is slower to adapt than the the technological climate we now live in demands. We have been quite used to using everything at our disposal to tame nature and each other. We have now crossed the threshold of development where we need to ask more than “Can we?”, we must now ask “Should we?”. The side dish of aggression that comes with cultural hegemony threatens the network of cooperative relationships we now need to sustain a global culture. We could destroy ourselves with our attachment to ideas that no longer serve to strengthen us, but threaten to destroy us. Faith may have been the womb that protected us through our early development, but like any other womb, it nourishes development to a point, then strangles its inhabitants if they don’t break free of it’s confines.
2Two parts of our nervous system are especially significant in taking command whenever it sees fit; the limbic system and the autonomic nervous system. The limbic system is a group of forebrain structures including the hypothalamus, the amygdala, and the hippocampus among others. These are heavily involved in motivation, emotion, learning, and memory. The autonomic nervous system is a control system that acts largely unconsciously and regulates things like heart rate, digestion, respiratory rate, pupillary response, urination, and sexual arousal, but it is also the primary mechanism in control of the fight-or-flight response. When we react, these systems are at work.
3For more information read “Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman or
4For a deeper perspective on how this happens from a historical perspective read “Confirmation Bias: What is it, why is it important, and what can we do about it?” thewisdomoflife.wordpress.com/2012/06/09/confirmation-bias-what-is-it-why-is-it-important-and-what-can-we-do-about-it-2/
5For more information on this perspective look up the term; “Cultural materialism”.
In order to experience our life, we must dismember and rearrange minuscule bits of biology and other morsels of matter, energy, space, and time to compose them into this nebulous cloud that we call “I”. Using a wide-angle lens to gaze upon our collective state of being, we see a compulsion on the part of biological creatures great and small… Indeed a mandatory obligation, to selectively suckle from the breast of this larger reality we are simultaneously baptized in and contributors to.
By this same token, we must break apart and rearrange specific forms of structured energies to sustain ourselves, eternity itself must be dismembered for us to experience even the tiniest moment in time, the slightest of registration of awareness, passion, or agency… Without brokenness we cannot yearn for intimacy, nor experience it if it comes. It is both a grand and monstrous truth that our experience of life is a product of brokenness. Our deepest pleasures and most exalted experiences flow from shattered rays of brokenness in one form or another. The same is true for the deepest depths of our sorrows or the slightest response to the most mundane snapshot of experiential paint conjured by our mind – conjured out of broken symmetry.
Not a single moment of our lives can be experienced, much less cherished, unless it also passes. It is in brokenness that we can find the means to re-member the fragments of joy and through which we can cherish those moments as they echo, ever paler with the passing of time. Just as night gives rise to our capacity to recognize the day, forgetting builds the foundation for the value of remembering. Without brokenness, we would be unable to distinguish anything from the monotone singularity that is the only alternative to this brokenness which we share. Meaning itself stems from membranes of abstraction that differentiate one thing from another – yet another chorus of brokenness emerging from the crucible of contrasted unions that shape our wonderfully splintered reality.
When we see from this distance we might appreciate the shattered womb of brokenness we are and share because it is the mother of all that is. It is our mother and without her, there would be no relationships and no experience at all. By understanding the simultaneous unity and separateness of that which we are – in relationship, and that from which we come to relationship, brokenness, we can also understand that if it were not for this division, there would be no discovery, no unity of being, nothing to share with each other, because it is out of this boiling sea of shattered divisions that “being” itself is born.
The gift of brokenness compels us to travel on this journey on which we find ourselves, ever hungering for balance and intimacy – and when we see the depths from which we come with clarity, we realize the paradox that we cannot be separate at the same time we are broken, for we are children of the cosmos, stardust – secure in our mother’s womb, for all eternity and basking in the greatest gift that brokenness has to offer – this garden of living fire that is us and always has been.
“A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP” – Leonard Nimoy
The Wisdom Of Life 