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| quote: | Originally posted by nefardec
I actually read a book about this called "Shamans, Sorcerers, and Saints", by Brian Hayden.
Basically it is written from the viewpoint of a cultural ecologist with a keen interest in anthropology. As a cultural ecologist, he always asks the question, what environmental factors influenced people to do this or begin behaving like that?
The author sees the evolution of emotions as an ecological response: basically early human ancestors had a pretty shitty existence, scavenging carcasses, eating nuts and berries, and getting mauled by saber tooth tigers all the time. In order to survive, they had to band together in close knit communities, not unlike nomadic communities such as the bedouin. Those early humans with more emotions felt more strongly for one another and as a result they stuck together, cared for one another and were able to survive. Those who were anti-social and had poorly developed emotions died off. He claism this was the origin of the soul.
Later on, he describes larger tribal communities, so called traditional socities. These communities were similar, but were larger due to technological advances and different climates. Survival was still based on emotional development. With more emotions and larger groups of people, violence between men became very widespread and typical. As a result, emotional bonds within tribes/clans were strengthened almost to an unreal level (eg celtic berserkers, although they came much later). The author claims the extatic and psychedelic experiences gained from psychoactive plants, extended dance, rhythm, pain, sleep deprivation, etc were able to create unbreakable emotional bonds between people. (once youve tripped or blazed with some guy you're great friends, etc) Shamanic behavior begins here, people who had traumatic experiences in life, near death experiences that made them more sensitive to visions and ecstatic states became healers, medicine men, etc. They would take drugs and go into the deepest caves and trip balls and then tell people about it.
This was the basis of traditional religion, which is more about a kind of universal life force than anything, the idea that the material world and the spiritual world are the same, like water and ice, merely different forms of the same matter.
Then as people began to settle down and cultivate shit, they got a little testy and cocky and overprotective of their stuff. Some people started to get powerful and wanted to protect their position and prestige. Animals were basically the ferraris of the prehistoric world. (to this day we use "stock market" coming from livestock of course) In order to preserve their status, the powerful people would throw huge parties, feasts, in which people would give each other gifts. The person who was able to give the most gives was the richest and most powerful. traditional socities like this still exist in southeast asia. That person would also get the most gifts back as others tried to be his best friend, and so he was able to consolidate his power.
Besides doing this, however, the emerging elite class started form cults, secret socities. Whereas in more basic societies, the shaman is the only one who has the mystical experience, in these more complex societies, the elite cults, usually based on ancestor veneration were also able to share in the mysteries. This sort of cult extended well into recent history - the roman religion for example is a prime example of an elite cult (cult of isis, etc) As city states developed into empires, these empires began to accumulate all sorts of different cult followers and the romans for the most part let people do whatever they wanted. It is said that a lot of the roman and greek deities are borrowed from all around the region. The larger empires' pantheistic religions were more of a kind of pork barrel cult system meant to appease different factions and constituencies, and some gained fashionable status while others died out.
Christianity is another classic cult. It was a judaistic cult for the poor and disenfranchised - it gave out food to those in need, and for the first time in cult history it allowed minority groups and women in its ranks. this made it a potent force. that combined with its strict 'there is only god but god' mantra and militant attitude, made it extremely potent and it spread like wildfire. eventually it became fashionable among some elites of rome and they started holding masses in their basements (basically like loft parties or raves lol) in so called 'house churches'. It was highly illegal for a while, but then one day emperor constantine decided to make a deal that if he won a tough battle he would convert to christianity. He won, and it became the official religion of all the empire. yet the empire was very heterogeneous and so the religion adopted all sorts of strange practices from different peoples - from the celts we have astrological practices such as the celebration of the winter solstice (christmas was not when jesus was born, sorry), and from the germanic peoples we have the christmas tree (the world tree, as in scandinavian myth), etc, etc ,etc by this time the soul was an academic subject already discussed for hundreds if not thousands of years by people
the rest is history
you can also read a book called 'the god gene' which basically says that humans are hard wired for spirituality. (again this doesnt mean god, but could be thought of more as a universal force of life, vibration, which could be the essence of quantum physics, of grand unified theory, of yaweh, and allah, and monistic idealism) (the idea that everything is made of consciousness) |
Very good post! Nice work.
I have red the "god gene" hypothesis as well, in which the "feeling of spirituality" is hard-wired in the brain. It has probably evolved due to its substantial social-bonding capabilities, large quantites of people would unite under shared metaphysical beliefs.
There is even some evidence from cognitive neuroscience and neuropsycholgy for this, most work done by "neurotheologist"(fancy title/category isn't it?) Michael Persinger, although the field is still very young (or even practically non-existent since only about a bunch of people are active researchers).
Persinger has applied a weak magnetic field on the temporal lobe of subjects (Trans Magnetic Stimulation or possibly direct In Vivo magnetic stimulation to persons undergoing open-head surgery for severe epilepsy) and sometimes discovered that subjects felt "an ethereal presence in the room".
That result was by no means new though. It was actually known from the early-20th century pioneering studies of neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield (who as a neurosurgeon was "wilder" than the others). Penfield was one of the firstss (if not the first)scientists who tried to unveil the functional topography of the human brain cortex by directly applying small electric currents to various cotical areas. The procedure was performed on conscious individuals who were usually undergoing brain surgery for the purposes of alleviating severe epileptic attacks.
The results were fascinating and crucial. The functional organization of various brain areas such as the primary somatosensory cortex of the frontal lobes was revealed. An interesting aspect was that, whilst most stimulated brain areas resulted in simple sensations/perceptions ("i see a light", "i hear a sound", "i feel something in my arm") or no sensations or perceptions at all (and strangely enough the absence-rather than the presence-of sensation was the most usual phenomenon), the stimulation of the temporal lobe sometimes (rarely truth is) resulted in complete full-blown experences. Subjects re-lived past experiences and witnessed vivid episodic memories, although some of these experiences seemed to be "blurry" or "incomplete". Some of them also seemed to resemle memories, but in reality they were imagined experiences which contained some mnemonic information. These results made perfect sense since temporal lobe areas (and the hippocampus embedded within them) are known to play an essential role in memory formation/consolidation and storage.
An interesting phenomenon described by Penfield was the "mystical" quality that some of these experiences had. These results also make sense if they are considered in relation to "temporal lobe epilepsy". Before the onset of an epileptic attack-which usually begins in temporal areas (hence the name-temporal lobe epilepsy doh),the subject usually reports what is known as the "aura", unusual tactile sensations running through-out the body, disembodied experiences and sometimes even hallucinations, full-blown mystical experiences and "visions". The symptoms are also similar to various paraesthesias and hallucinantions occuring after temporal lobe damage.
One woman suffered substantial damage to her temporal lobes after a car-crush. She eventually became well. Psychometric testing revealed that she didn't have any lasting deficist in her cognitive functions, intelligence and/or personality. In some situations though, the woman would experience a strong hallucinatory experience in which she would see a novel human figure dressed in red whilst experiencing an intense metaphysical fear/terror of that presence, before "observing the figure dissolving into pieces like a puzzle breaking apart" . Interestingly enough, people have told her that she weared a red shirt during the car-crush, although we canno't know for sure if this is a true fact. Another woman suffering from epilepsy would report strange experiences everytime she saw herself in front of a mirror whilst applying make-up (and only at those circumstances!). The mirror would gradually expand and "dominate" her followed by a vivid experience of a lively childhood memory mixed with feelings of sadness, happyness and sexual arousal.
Note that most of these experiences have an emotional aspect and this makes absolute sense since temporal areas are emotional centers as well.
Weird experiences such as the "deja vu" and "jamais vus" seem to also occur in temporal lobe activation/damage/epileptic onset.
Hence those temporal lobe experiences were currently certified by means of artificial magnetic stimulation (by Persinger as described before) and as far as im aware by Brain Imaging as well. People would experience relligious experiences and the temporal lobe would be activated.Some very interesting areas situated in the temporal and parietal lobes such as the Superior Temporal Gyrus and Infero-Parietal Lobule (STG, IPL) seem to play a crucial role in binding cross-modular information into complete Gestalts. For everyone wandering wtf this means, in simple words, those temporo-parietal areas are "high association areas" in which information coming from various modalities (other cortical and sub-cortical areas)-visual, auditory, tactile and emotional is bound together into complete perceptions.
It has been demonstrated that when those areas are interrupted by stimulation, subjects usually report disembodiment and out-of-body experiences. Some subjects have reported a sensation of floating in front or even behind (!) their bodies, whilst others seem to experience a loss of limb location in relation to peri-personal space and various egocentric and allocentric spatial distortions in geenral. It seems that LSD seems to act in the serotoninergic synapses of those areas but further research is needed.
So, i found this to be some interesting scientific information to share with you. IMO some of these results are very puzzling in respect to how the mind works and remind us of how little we know of about function of the human brain-mind.
Damn thats a long response for the CoR 
CoR version: Temporal Lobe and the Soul seem to like each other but sometimes you can read more than two lines you lazy bastards  
(i mean this is what a forum is for, although TA in most of the times resembles a chat-room rather than a forum lol)
Last edited by PETRAN on Dec-03-2008 at 16:11
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