HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

The video linked below addresses “wild” religion which is an anthropological concept to account for non-literate belief systems. It is premised on the Euro idea of the Big Three which were theoretical genetic systems that supported the origins of institutional constructs that have persisted, even dominated ever since.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6BVkzKXhcA

In fact, since the categories were millennia-old, they just extended apologetics for the way we already are. This has always been the fatal flaw of the Templeton enterprise, honorable as it is. In the end it can’t help being condescending because the concept system shapes everything. They can’t think outside the words they know or even the concepts that the words stand for, let alone the possibility that the concept itself may be invented with no evidence.

My attention has been to development patterns of humans which can eventually become “religions” if they are taken into cultural norms and giving institutional bodies.

All life forms include DNA, which is the operating system for a creature or plant. As far as we know, humans are the only living creatures who can separate part of that incredibly detailed and electrochemical business into what we call “consciousness.” The “sub” conscious is the main brain work, while what we call the main consciousness is in fact a emerging fraction. Consciousness means the ability to know we are building our brains because of a body of content. It is a higher level of awareness than the “gut feeling” which is the sense of the holy.

At birth the brain is neurocellular potential, beginning to build itself through sensations, which takes a couple of years. By the time we are able to walk and talk, we have created many connections of the little filaments between neurons and are barely beginning to have enough consciousness to remember moments. The filaments that went unconnected wither and die.

By the kindergarten years we can control excretions, we can learn to read and write and participate in groups, and we have years of “play” in which we form basic concepts like gravity or size. It will take another three or four years to realize that other human beings do the same things but their concepts may be different. In the pre-adolescent years a person constructs a self-image while realizing there’s a lot more happening out there that’s unknown. This is the beginning of what we call “religion”, but it’s a potential. The culture tells you what to think about it.

What we call religion is a big mess, a society-wide collision between what the culture says is true versus how the person figures out how to adapt. There’s a lot to do because the emotions, the bodily operation of attraction, danger, empathy, attachment and arousal are concepts that develop from experience — not some logical system. These bodily electrochemical records and abilities need to be firmly developed by the time the adrenals kick the generative organ processes into powerful action. As one’s body becomes fertile, one’s persona needs to prepare for parenthood.

Mammal generations are now relevant because what the parents know can be a bridge to what the children need to know, like how to manage an infant. Much of this will be transmitted in stories and lived experience. Now one needs to know how to find work, create a structure, find and cook food, and all the basic songs and dances of one’s people.

By the time a person is working on an anthropology degree, the brain has been wired and rewired for many years. Now the person is aware of being conscious and can critique one’s own consciousness according to the expectations of others. He or she is no longer “wild,” a condition not easily remembered. Simple observation of others is not enough to recapture it. Even deductions about what others in entirely different contexts might be thinking are not valid — only guesses.

Going to the place that seems to them “wild” is helpful to a scientist, but it still means making mistakes by bringing one’s own brain with all its assumptions to the lives of others. This is what minorities try and try to tell those who study them or who claim to be coming to understand and join them. Everyone is imprisoned in the years of skin-experience and thought-clouds.

This uniqueness as shared in a culture is what scholars think of as “religion.” Non-scholars or those committed to one version of reality or those who never reflect are doing something related to separating into tribes. That’s when the dogmas and ceremonies begin to appear, but at first they won’t be justified by logic and writing.

It might work better to think of religion as a system for holding everything into an order for the sake of survival. The wild are adaptive, accepting circumstances as they come and finding ways to survive them. As soon as people became able to change their environment — planting food, irrigating, constructing — they were post-wild. Humans are equipped to be “post-wild” due to the evolution of the lobe of the brain behind the forehead bulge of the skull. When that is inoperative or damaged, the result is a newly “wild” human who can act and react, but cannot manage consciousness, much less reflecting about their own thinking, or preparing for what might happen.

For a while we used to separate that part of the brain that distinguishes humans from other hominins. Now we don’t. Re-wilded people needed to be institutionalized but I don’t know what records were kept. It was quite like the Nazi fascination with sadistic experiments which likewise was kept secret. Who knows whether the victims were “spiritual”? We only know that the scientists were “religious.” They believed in the Big Three entitlements to own the world, to fence their own lives against outsiders. To control.

It is possible for diseases — which are electrochemical at the cell level — to destroy the human ability to think, to lobotomize a person. Something like this is what has made Trump into a sub-human, remnants of a former human, a sociopath. Something is making this happen throughout our culture, but our culture doesn’t know what is doing it or what to do about it.

I remember when I was serving in Bozeman in 1982, we had two persons in the fellowship who were slipping into dementia. No one said “Alzheimers”. It was not comparable to lobotomy because it was a malfunction of the cells of the entire cortex. It can be seen as “tangles” and so on. Eventually it kills at the animal level, stopping the basic functions. Animal existence is dependent on the unconscious and global ability of the brain to manage the body.

Human existence is dependent on animal existence, but it is an extension through the abilities of the frontal lobe. “Religion” as it is studied is only considered through human existence, but that means that animal existence is foundational below that. Animal existence is embedded in the relevant ecosystem. These concepts are not operative in most studies which try to separate bodies from minds from ecosystems. The implications are enormous.

“The frontal lobes are involved in motor function, problem solving, spontaneity, memory, language, initiation, judgement, impulse control, and social and sexual behavior.”