The HPA Axis, Metaphysical Objects, and Religion

It seems strange to me that so much of the emotional problems we experience today have to do with a bad diet, abuse of drugs like coffee, tobacoo, alcohol, and increasingly, cannabis, and a poor sleeping-waking schedule.

Your Gut Bacteria Partly Control You

It's actually funny when you think about it: gut bacteria release serotonin and or toxic anti-inflammatory substances, and in both situations, it triggers either positive or negative feelings.

Our tummies - and yes, I insist on this childish terminology! - are populated by more bacteria than there are cells in our body. That is, hundred plus trillion of these little suckers play a big role in converting molecules from foods we eat so that we can liberate some energy for maintenance.

Our gut flora - the very things we inadvertantly killed of when we gotg carried away with our antibiotic usage - are an astonishingly relevant part of what we mean by "feelings". Our gut flora tell us what were eating and whether or not its good for us.

The gut flora interacts with the autonomic nervous system through whats called the 'enteric nervous system' - where a few dozen million or so neurons communicate with the molecules produced by the bacteria - and the resultant "feeling" is what it senses.

The stress response system of the mammalian nervous system extends from the hypothalamus, to the pituitary gland, and finally to the adrenal gland which juts out from the liver. The hypothalamus is that part of your brain which produces major hormones, whereas the pituitary gland is the intermediary between the neurons of the brain and the glands of the body. The adrenal gland, where both cortisol and adrenaline is synthesized, is a major organ when it comes to the amount of energy we feel we have and so, any substance which induces a "fatigue" of the adrenal glands i.e. by overproducing or interfering with the proper production of cortisol (which is subsequently carted off by insulin molecules to fat cells, which use the cortisol to stimulate the stored up energy from a stable state to an unstable i.e. energized state.

The funny thing about the HPA axis is that it is a negative feedback loop, so that the last molecule of the process - cortisol - when it interacts again with the cells of the hypothalamus, actually turn it off. An interesting paradox of bodily functioning: the very molecule which elicits energy is also the very molecule which stops the stress response. This means the fidelity and integrity of the body's stress response - which is registered by your feeling-states - has everything to do with how it is you eat, sleep, and live.

Metaphysical Objects

Lets say your under-nourished and feel like $hit. Now lets say you happen to be a person interested in mysticism, and come to contemplate metaphysical object associated with the 'highest divinity'. What are you likely to feel?

I'm going to assume that the body is the ground - which it is in my experience, and since we are all built to be the same sort of creature - probably yours as well.

Do you like reading complex and abstract philosophy when you're feeling gut rot - lets say, after drinking 3 XL Coffees, two of which you jad later in the day.

The coffee has given you gutrot because coffee is a bean; and beans are seeds; and seeds, of course, are designed to resist digestion. Coffee drinking thus has an inevitable antiinflammatory effect on the gut bacteria that can't make use of it, but since it is usually a "small one", its not yet represented in your feeling states.

But with three XL's, lets say you crossed the threshold and now your acidity levels are pretty high, which is now being represented by your gut bacteria at a high level: the brain is representing what the bacteria are saying to you, and that is: stop eating and living this way!

Anyways, the issue this thread seeks to raise is what happens when you contemplate abstract and profound things when you feel like $hit. The result, of course, will not be good - but bad: it - or reality - will seem deeply wrong, so much so that representing, or thinking about, a profound metaphysical object like the Godhead can easily provoke a way-of-thinking that is antinomian. You could, in effect, totrture yourself simply because you aren't aware that your body - or gut bacteria - are "commenting" on what that object means. It is, in other words, a measurement of the difference between what you're thinking about, and where you are.

Religions

I can't hep but note that so many Abrahamic forms of religion - but no at limited to Abrahamic religion - unnecessarily antagonize others - particularly those who abuse their bodies, eat like # and consume lots of drugs, by forcing them to interact with an object - a thought - which is frankly inevitably going to produce a negative perception in the mind. Is it not obvious that the idea of the 'demiurge' arises from the fact that the Hebrews or Jews didn't get that the warrior Greeks were structured to inevitably experience the religion of the Jews as a problem?

In any situation, warriors - or people who have killed and been exposed to ungodly trauma - the last thing such a person needs to interact with is something which lies not merely beyond his ken, but is downright antagonizing to his narrative-making system and therefore, stands as a bulwark between himself and reality.

Representing and deifying reality so that "God" became more important than the person, or understanding of the person became less important than understanding God, because had taken over the psychological focus of the minds-relation-to-reality, produces a consciousness that is always criticizing - always disliking - because his particular - and imo, overly valued metaphysical object - is so high, and therefore, the idea, concept, narrative and reality associated with the God of the Jews created the demiurge.

Now, i'm not saying there isn't any truth to being; but I do think there is a carelessness and an attitude of "alienation from" when some chooses to identify with a perspective that ignores and causes us to dissociate the actual real-life structural background conditions that make people how they are.

Don't Polarize Other People

In this sense, and I know I am by no means a perfect exemplar of this, we need to be patient with the way we seek to help other people, lest we overlook the conditions which intercede between our own sense of whats "real" and what the person were interacting with takes to be real.

People who exaggerate their feelings, which I take to be exemplified by making assertions when your underslept, addicted to drugs, eating poorly or insufficiently, are doing themselves and everyone else a major disservice.

Such statements exaggerate the perspective you experience, and, as seems to have happened, a whole theological or mystical tradition can be erected on the basis of this sort of experience of the world.

But then you change state, and feel good again. Your nihilism now seems inappropriate insomuch as you seem to really take pleasure in reality. Reality is good; not bad. And therefore whatever so-called "demiurge" can be said to exist is not so much an apparent reality. Unless, of course - as has happened - you theologically reinterpret reality in such a way as to maintain a hatred of conventional 'morality' while maintaining the view that you worship a higher God.

But this higher God is merely posited to justify the Selves indulgence in reality - since it can be as good as it can be awful.

This is how it happens, but I don't blame people for not getting the complex dynamics that are at work here: gut bacteria have a "symmetry" or desired state of connection; and if we don't realize that, we put our gut-flora out of sync with reality.

When this happens, don't think. Or rather, use your thinking to remind yourself of the illusory nature of the present feelings -which merely record the absence of what is needed i.e. a diet that our gut-flora prefer.

In any case, we needlessly confuse ourselves because we do not recognize how important diet, sleeping and drug-taking is to feeling.

a reply to: Astrocyte

Religious texts have some usefulness - water fasting for example.

Try it to get rid of parasites, alien parasites and angels and demons.