At Home In the Universe, page 1

No matter how high our thoughts can become, there is still something that must be said, that must always be said, about our place in the vastness of the Universe we live in: we only know what we personally interact with.

That statemenet is awesome, as it sets up one part of us against the other. The mystic, experiential, eternal being part, is clearly that part of us which can look back upon the world we interact with - the couch I sit upon, the carpet beneath my feet, the slippers my feet are in, etc - as banality, as meaningless changing states relative to the one true state, the one true fact, which bewilders and engrosses the mind in its terrifying power.

The World Is Empty

The world is empty from the perspective of my gut! So sayeth my gut after I suffered another bout of hyperemesis brought on by coffee drinking. My stomach is the word on what I am - it always defines me! How can anyone imagine that anything but their stomach determines their moment-to-moment beliefs?

This gut-brain connection is being explored by neuroscientists and physiologists seeking to understand how this strange symbiosis works. Our gut is filled with more bacteria than cells which make up our human body - over 100 trillion. Some of these bacteria are good - "pro", because they produce vital molecules that we need to function well. One of these molecules is serotonin, which is created by the secretion of products from bacteria that stimulate endocrine cells to secrete serotonin. The bacteria which are good seem to hold a "key" to our proper functioning.

I point this fact out because our culture demarcates the self at our bodies - ignoring the influence of the outside world. The reality, however, shows us to be connected in a fungus-like manner with the microbiotic world around us - and the connection is facilitated by a diet which properly feeds the pro-bacteria, so that they'll produce the molecules that are endocrine cells like to work properly.

The above comment is made to emphasize how structurally united we are with the material world around us. Laws of diet come into being because of the relationships that exist between us, bacteria, and a particular food which suits our bodies metabolic needs. But what are the metabolic needs of the body? In a human thinker, contemplating eternity could be a dynamic that spurs feelings of awe, and, if the person is not quite comfortable being "possessed" by a higher transpersonal awareness, may then descend into a dreading - a terrifying dreading made all the worse because of the powerful brain-gut connection. The experience of existential dreading, of feeling alienated and misled by the existence of an external changing world, is a mega-powerful force within the human condition over the last 5,000 or so years (from what can be archeologically gathered). The experience of patterning ourselves to our own conventions away from the naturalness of the continuity between self and the natural world, welded together by the magic of rhythms and cycles of renewal, generated within the human mind an "alien self", or what has been called the 'ego' - structured with wishes and ideals which are built around the material embodiments of such ideals. Our living-in-a-world-with-others puts us and others within the affectional attachments of the material culture. Once materiality began to take greater control of human awareness circa 12,000 years ago (although there were brief cultural spurs going back 30,000 years, and perhaps some at 100,000) the objects of interests were no longer intrapsychic and interpersonal - which indeed, was probably the most naturally occurring dynamic before the onset of a shift which led to todays world. Rather, "idols" formed, if 'idol' be defined as a way of being which is socially destructive that is valued above the need for social harmony, such habits naturally emerged as we became 'entrapped' by our own shifting engagements with the world.

These shifts are perhaps no more gruesome than in killing, murder, and the shrieking cries of existential loss. The words we speak barely capture the raw reality of what the first mauraders were like to the villagers who they blugeoned to death. Archeologists have noted that civilization began on just this sort of note: established sedentary centers, and on the periphery, pastoralist peoples led by warlords who, over time, would use horses to raid and terrorize the towns, until a sort of relationship could be established whereby they paid a due in exchange for not being bothered.

What kind of reality is this - and how has the "imago Dei" become so monstrously dysmorphed? If natural reality, and true happiness, entails being-one-with-natural-forms, than the world we live and narratives we carry with us are drastically out of touch with the reality of our own biological nature.

The nature of what we are is nearly impossible to see from todays vantage point. I am always seeking to extend my vision further, and more books and research on the very ancient past, past 100,000 years ago, with an emphasis on the Toba explosion 75,000 years ago, is just begging for a philosophical anthropological interpretation. From todays world, we find it hard not to fantasize about "transcending" reality, as if reality needed transcending. The stories we have - the religions we pay mind to - are created in reference to, and in dialectical tension with, civilization. Why aren't religious scholars more skeptical of the 6,000 year stories humankind has produced - fetishing the recent past as if there wasn't a 320,000 year history to be explored, made more interesting by modern cognitive science, and what it allows us to know about the nature of consciousness, and how it is shaped under what circumstances.

Traumatology shows humans are shaped by their meanings - each one being packed within the holographic brain matter in your skull. This world infects - and affects - all of us, mutating our conversations and our object relations in ways that are compatible with the reigning value systems. Very few people can think clearly in this environment. Indeed, in an ideal sense, all connection to tradition, to the past, should be cut, with only science in all its forms - physical, historical, social - guiding the question-answer process.

As a person who has met these credentials, I can only say this: gnosticism, in the sense of "intramundane" gnosticism, is a powerful misfortunate traumatologically induced idealization made against the traumatic feeling produced by a feeling of emptiness - that reality is meaningless.

You take your mind for you. Not your gut - as you should if you understood how you worked. Development - the meanings you absorbed - have shaped your brain-gut connection as well as the biota which inhabit you; your 'world-view' comes with a corresponding gut-community, whether "you" be a good thing needing to be preserved, or a bad thing needed to be corrected. How you are is an emergent property - but it is never, as the delusional intramundane gnostic imagines, a fundamental feature of reality. Reality is not destined to always be interpreted and felt as you think; you are generalizing a particular - your situation, and the situation of friends, to a whole.

The Universe is our Home. Eternity and temporality; ground of Being in God (Universe), and Being-in-Nature. These truths are not incompatible, but difficult to assimilate in minds with unresolved trauma.