SNAKES HAVE NO NIPPLES

 For every living thing that uses meiosis to reproduce, putting two halves of the spiral helix of DNA to make a whole, the end goal of getting them together is essentially the same but the means can be totally different.  Many more complex animals and even insects require a structure of ejection on the “male” side and a structure of collection and protection on the “female” side.  Mammals, of course, need the penis and the vagina+womb.  

What’s different about mammals is the period from conception to independence that requires care, usually from the mother.  The process of warming, nursing, cleaning, feeding, comforting, and teaching, which is often done face-to-face, results in the creation of a virtual “ground of being” between the incomplete infant and a walking, talking personality.  It is the sensory experience of the world formed by the tissue bag of development that holds the beginning that becomes the basis of a lifelong addition to and subtraction from the management panel of the brain to focus the tunnel of awareness.

Snakes have no nipples.  They neither nurse nor clean their babies.  They have no world view and no ability to attach to a place or another being.  Therefore, they cannot communicate nor project into the future.  Their minds amount to reflexes, reactions.   A person who is like that is often called “reptilian” or even “demonic.”  Nevertheless, before we were mammals, we were reptiles like snakes.

Evolution is cumulative, little DNA changes, as though bb’s of code added, gave us warm blood, fur, nipples, and a brain that guides the body through its enveloping skin until it has a living map inside of what’s on the outside of its skin.  One of the most recent developments has been the third vagus nerve that directly connects the brain stem to what I call the “window of expression”: the face, the voice, the neck and shoulders, the breath and the heartbeat.  When we look at this area — which we call the “bust” if it’s portrayed in sculpture, paintings, photos — we “read” it.  

If we are looking at another living person, we are able to tell how they feel and hear what they say, particularly through the little muscles around the eyes and mouth.  I once got called on the carpet and disciplined by my manager in the nuisance bureau because “you tightened your mouth while I was talking to you.”  She was being a baloney-filled bully as usual but I knew not to say so.  Sometimes just the tilt of the head will tell the story.

The animals we call “domesticated” can read this window as well, dogs better than all the rest.  We read their whole bodies, but esp. eyes and ears and tails — sounds, contact.  What is conveyed need not be words but concepts, desires, intentions, both praise and blame.

Our human world views are the skeleton for the tissues of our experience, guiding and emphasizing, denying and mistaking what happens to us.  But the work of the senses are what we make into habits, memories, and intentions in the world.  Alongside the senses associated with the “window of expression” (eyes, ears, taste, smell) are a host of tiny signals from inside the skin that monitor well-being and adjust the constant internal chemical flow that travels in the blood.  They tell you whether you are thirsty, tired or upside-down.

The whole of this inskin pushes against whatever outskin is present and sometimes draws it in with breath and swallowing.  Sometimes the inskin imagines a phantom outskin and reacts to it.  This is particularly true when the outskin is full of other people, esp. familiar or intense ones.  People who can focus strongly and exclusively on each other can reproduce the childhood-learned virtual “ground of being” between two people playing, creating, loving together.

It’s clear that though the status of every human being is morally equal, the abilities of each is different, sometimes radically.  As I’ve been working to understand what a moment of extreme bliss and harmony might be — whether for example it’s our reaching out to the cosmos that connects us to it or whether it is some feature of the universe that happens to intersect with us for moments — it becomes clear that not everyone experiences these events or understands what’s being discussed.  Others seem susceptible, feeling them more than once.  Will prayer call them?  Is it evolution to a better human being or a slide-back to a previous version?  Is there something in our lives that prevents them from happening?  Are some cultures more open than others — or do they just allow the epiphanies to be spoken about?

These are questions on the individual level.  How people organize into groups depends on the socio-economic  conditions that come from the ecology and the history of its use.  The worldviews of the people involved begin with child-raising practices that teach them how to understand what is around them.  To create a better culture means to employ child-raising practices that make better human beings.  The problem is that it take better human beings to raise better children.

Above is preamble to what ghastliness has been befalling us.  We are unique unfolding creations who somehow can sink into degradation we can only find evil.

War, depression, famines, distort the humans born and raised in these times.  The US practice of separating families at the border, taking even nursing infants, has hurt the parents — which was the goal — but also maimed the children spiritually and emotionally in ways that will be hard to overcome.  Fear, hatred, suspicion will always with them — associated with the USA.  Evil ghosts in a killing world.

Sessions and the others involved who made this decision did not believe that those attempting immigration were equal to themselves.  They had lost or maybe never had the experience of real contact with a caring person as infants and toddlers.  Sessions has a very long history of loyalty to the Confederacy, collusion with the Russians, hatred, harsh punishment, sexism, racism, and other dismaying attachments to lying and hiding.  His Wikipedia entry is a long indictment of a man who looks like a Keebler elf and acts like vengeance itself.  Removing children from people who have no other wealth is like amputating a limb.  Sessions was born in 1946 when triumphalism mixed with accounts of inhuman cruelty during WWII that amounted to scripts for monsters.

Identifying what distorting forces make people behave badly is not an excuse.  It is a call to figure out how to prevent such forces and how to divert people into less damaging ways of using their prejudices.  You’ll never convince some people that they are wrong and dangerous unless beginning with the tiny connection at conception, the capacity to grow into a loving and creative human being.  Snakes have no nipples.  Humans do.