SO WHERE IS ALL THIS GOING?

This is the path I trod so far, though “path” is not a good metaphor because I didn’t try to follow anything, it’s just that I often found footprints of those who were ahead of me.  But sometimes I do try to retrace the way.

The first thought I had this time was asking why all the books on worship, liturgy, etc. only considered the major “world religions.”  Who decided on which ones qualified?  By what standards? (One of the most recent explanations I’ve run across (it’s Karen Armstrong’s) was that these labels come out of the Axial Era (originally achsenzeit) which was retroactively defined by Karl Jaspers (1883 - 1969), a German psychiatrist and philosopher who thought that the years between 800 BC and 200 BC were great pivotal times.

I looked that period up in one of my key reference books:  “The Timetables of History”.  What Jaspers meant was that Rome was founded in about 800 BC and stopped expanding about 200 BC at Hadrian’s Wall across Britain.  (Hadrian was the Roman Emperor who said, "We won't go any farther than this."  So what Jaspers was really considering pivotal was Rome without the Greek pantheon of gods: the Roman Empire, the model for the Roman Catholic Church.  And what he implied was that the Germans (like him) belonged to this Roman “classical age.”  In fact, the Germans thought they were replacing Christian religion with science.  We know how that turned out.  (Personally, I prefer Greece.)

Hadrian's wall

Also, between 540 BCE and 200 BCE, Afghanistan was invaded by the Huns, a word sometimes associated with Germany in WWI.   Pivotal is right -- like one of those revolving doors.  Jaspers ended up exiled to Switzerland with other thinkers who shared his pigeon holes and categories, reinforcing each other.  But probably the times were too intense for them to step out of their assumptions.  Neither can we, but at least we know that our thinking is ALWAYS controlled by assumptions that might or might not be warranted with evidence.

Ironically (as always) only Freud and Jung saw that under all the rational introspecting and fancy language was the great Unconscious.  Not even they quite understood that the great bulk of our brains is NOT conscious, much less literate nor even speaking a national language.  

I think Freud would have reveled in todays’ neuroscience.  He was trying to get at those dark limbic repositories of dreams, drives, experience and madness.  That he failed was only the limitations of his times.  At least he recognized how limited words are, even arranged into the rules and images of “axial” religion, when the emotional undertow overpowers everything else.  At least it forced us all to look harder, devise instruments, keep looking for what happens in the dark subtext.

Anthropology did a lot better.  In the same time period, more or less, people like Van Gennep and Turner were beginning to understand the power of metaphor in performance: song, dance, mimesis of events, masks, games.   At least it was a lot more fun.  At worst they were cannibals and ate anthropologists as well as missionaries.  This dramatic material made anthropologists wonderfully popular at upscale dinner parties, which helped fund their explorations. Shrinks make people nervous.

The two-generation Turners (dad with the three-part explanation of liminal experience and son with the technology that could see on a screen the dancing connectome that shows shifts of thinking) are far more important than any religionists.  They made it possible to pull the conversation away from the small privileged educated elite and put it back into the hands of tribal people where it had begun.  Now we can talk about world religions that are indigenous, ecological, liminal. 

What I’ve been after all along is how to get the connectome to shift from the ordinary to the sacred.  What cues the brain to perceive the sacred, which presumably is there all along?  It’s not a matter of words or temples or who-was-your-mama.  It’s not a matter of virtue or how much of a donation one makes to the needy.  But neither is it so supernatural that no human can understand or control it.  Something happens in the human that is an attunement, a receptivity.  Chemicals and electricity are part of it, but still not the key.  Maybe it’s emotion.

There’s irony in this line of thinking.  It put me out of my print-centered denomination and sermon-centered Sunday services.  But it was the experience of UU Leadership School that awoke the non-print concepts I’ve been working through ever since.   Finally I begin to understand the Blackfeet Bundle Ceremony as well as its substrate of relationship to the land.  More than that, I begin to see how to design experiences that are meaningful without having any allegiance to a particular historical institution or book.

And finally that brought me to Cinematheque, a group that pulls in boys at-risk who might be adept at print, well-read, able to write well; but also includes the boys from the street who grew up like Topsy (the little girl in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” who grew up as a slave -- a trafficked African-American -- “every which way.”)  The common denominator has been the image, sometimes a conventional still photo but more often a kind of woven set of images, possibly moving in a video, often combining colors in an intense and suggestive way.  They are in the visual language of the boys which requires them to learn the technical grammar of producing computer images.  They do it as though it were easy, just soak it up. The other great lingua franca of kids all over the planet is music.  Matching music to image is an art they easily master, but with all my education I can’t do it.  

The New Language is image and sound, but not necessarily words. That’s one barrier eliminated.  “Tell me about your life,” and you get a cascade of darkness shot with lightning; an Asian boy in a singlet dancing in a bare basement with a peeling radiator for a ballet barre; a skateboarder gliding down stairs across a plaza and somehow jumping a bridge to skate on the water.  I've watched some of these vids over and over.  A few of them are so indelible that I only need to watch a few times to have them etched in my memory.

The ones made in Europe were relatively conventional until a breakthrough during the Amsterdam days.  A boy said his mother, who had neglected and abused him, was a “cunt.”  One of the other boys, who was thrown to the street when his beloved mother died, objected to this.  

The argument continued through the making of a video that was not chronological, repetitive, emotion expressed in color changes, the spoken refrain (like a pop song) was “she was lonely.”  In fact, this vid took the group from Hollywood assumptions out into a kind of abstract expressionism.  The boys, who had divvied up the tasks among them, objected,  “That was way too hard!”  Pretty soon they were doing harder things.

By now the vids challenge comprehension with their tachistoscopic cascades, but the kids can understand them.  Their brains are trained in a way adults can rarely match.  I’m not sure an adult can really grasp the content either.  Should they?  

THE DYNAMIC UNCONSCIOUS

Freud’s notion of what went on in the mind was thus:

Based on introspection, he started with the conscious mind which he connected to the “ego” or one's general feeling of identity and then proposed a superego, which was one’s “best self,” something like a conscience.  But, held down by repression, there was below consciousness the “un-”conscious where there was a lot of stuff that couldn’t be known and a “pre-conscious” where stuff went in and out through dreams, jokes, drifting on the edge of sleep and so on.  The deepest unconscious is also called the “id.” “In Freudian theory, the part of the psyche associated with instinctual, repressed, or antisocial desires, usually sexual or aggressive. In its efforts to satisfy these desires, the id comes into conflict with the social and practical constraints enforced by the ego and superego.”  (online definition)  This is close to the prevalent notion of what society/culture was like.

Sigmund Freud defined libido as "the energy, regarded as a quantitative magnitude ... of those instincts which have to do with all that may be comprised under the word 'love'.  " It is the instinct energy or force, contained in what Freud called the id, the strictly unconscious structure of the psyche." (wiki)  Its shadow is thanatos, the wish to die.

This is invented.  There is no single brain-blob that can be identified as the ego or even the libido.  Freud was scribbling doodles to keep metaphorical ideas clear.  They were dynamic and theoretical, but they were not real.  Yet we have all talked and speculated so much about this little diagram that it seems real.  Esp. to the psychoanalyst, to whom these concepts are very useful and come to account for things otherwise inexplicable.

Since they are based on introspection, what one can think of consciously is the main category.  Then under that is the unconscious -- we are aware that sometimes we do what we didn’t intend, that we remember and other times forget -- sometimes conveniently.  This is Freud’s strongest concept.  It pulls back into the human mind things that to more “primitive” people might be projected out onto the world, so that “the devil made me do it” seems like a good explanation.  People might feel they are somehow under a spell or not really even know how they feel, deceiving themselves somehow.   "Jesus loves me."

Research now has undermined the idea that there is a "truth," something resistant to fantasy.  Memories are as unreal and fluid as everything else.  It appears that a memory is re-assembled every time it comes to mind and thus can accidentally include mistaken ideas. 

The superego was the attempt to keep the ego sorted.  The id was identified with the raw body and all its indecencies, childishness, craving appetites.  In 19^th century Vienna, the highest value was given to rationality, control, fitting one’s culture, staying clean,  being close and obedient to one’s family.  The result was a lot of suffering and an unending source of jokes, which are an effective way to frame ridiculous contradictions.

There have been many other systems since this “egg” was hatched.  Basically the division between the conscious and the unconscious has persisted, but always the unconscious was seen as an undeveloped source of energy, merely an emotional substrate for the refined mind, messy enough to require the ego and superego to keep a lid on it.  And yet psychoanalysis asks for access to all the steaming, roiling mess in order to straighten out misconceptions.  The old Greek mythology has been authentic and powerful enough to provide “pot handles” by which to grasp strong hot stuff.  At least in the Euro-American setting.  But that's NOT universal.

When working with ritual, Victor Turner’s anthopological concept of the “liminal” has proven very useful.  The idea is that the inner life is more like a room than a pot with a lid --  and that one enters it through a sort of door.  A limen is the name of the threshold one steps over.  In this idea the liminal space is sequestered like the unconscious, but it’s like hypnosis in that it gives access to what is not usually conscious and throws off the superego nagging. It allows change.  No shame.

With this concept and some others, the consciousness is a much “smaller” state than "id/animal/flesh".  One might think of consciousness as the circle of light from a spotlight that can be moved around to reveal the dark stage.  Instead of being some kind of volatile animal to be contained, the unconscious becomes a potential to explore in the way an artist might develop a view or narrative.  What one doesn’t know about oneself becomes a potential discovery instead of some kind of inner monster.

But these are all fantasies, metaphors, poetries about a molecular structure interacting electrochemically, that somehow manages to throw up to "view" a small stage, a fraction of the busy city of transactions that supports it. A puppet show. Only recently have we been able to actually SEE things flowing busily around and to identify the organized, though sometimes very small, cellular structures of the body and brain that connect messages from outside the body, messages from the actual tissues and their orientation in the world (Where's "up", where's "North?") and messages about well-being or dysfunction in the gut, the eye, the lung, the heart.

A metaphorical illustration of a human connectome.

At the same time professors and their students have been resourcefully devising ways to reveal how the mind works, sort of parallel to the way cloud chambers can leave traces that imply what particles of the atom are like and what they do.  At first it was a bit of a shock to realize how much of our "rational" decision-making -- thought to be fact-based analysis -- was in fact being managed before it ever got to consciousness and sometimes that level did a much better job of evaluating choices.  “Zen” archery turns out to be a real thing, another way of tapping the knowing unknown, while “overthinking” complex problems can prevent good decisions.

It now appears that what we “feel” as the limen or threshold may be the instant of the connectome rearranging itself to address a new sort of task.  Say, going from writing a poem or even a shopping list, to playing a game of ping pong.  The information/decision flow will connect different points in the brain -- maybe more or maybe less.  Maybe not even in the brain.  But if the space/time is liminal, it will be protected without being secret.

It’s clear that the brain has evolved “consciousness” as we think of it when we use language, which must have been recently evolved.  But on the whole, brain evolution is not simply cumulative -- rising steadily up from fish to animal to human.  It may be that some new twist appears, but it’s possible and likely that sometimes it may be a dropped-out bit that has opened up possibilities by eliminating some blockage or sidetrack.  Clearly there are long nerve connections that go down into the legs, but also it seems that some of the newest and more powerful abilities are in individual cells, like mirror cells that enable empathy.  It’s likely that human beings will not evolve by growing wheels on their feet or by being patched in to iPods, but by finding new uses and connections for cells that are already there.  What is the autonomic nervous system up to these days?

Heather Berlin

Heather Berlin is a researcher who addresses these matters.  She’s VERY smart and quite beautiful, which means she is (and must be) meticulous in her thinking and carefully watched by others.  I’m going to spend some time today on an article she wrote for “Neuropsychoanalsis" 2011,13(1) called “The Neural Basis of the Dynamic Unconscious".  It’s so “sourced”, linked to previous research, that it’s hard to read, but I’ll see what I can do.  Freud’s unconscious, you notice, is still being used as though it were a unified entity, but “dynamic” is a good word: the unconscious is not just a junk pile -- it’s doing something, flashing along the connectome in electrochemical transmissions, jumping synapses, and -- only an hour or so ago making me dream.  

by Adolfo 1111

Dream.  “I had taken a train to Chanticleer, a medieval town with a stone wall along a river and some buildings that seemed to be small castles once but are now converted to business, so the nearest one had a huge sign advertising beer.  I was attending partly for a conference but was proud of myself for putting on a backpack and wandering the town.  One of the fellow attendees was trying to get my attention and called my name.  He was very fat and crouched behind the railing of an old stone bridge.  Then he threw a rock.  It was a black gritty one with tiny blue sparkling crystals embedded in it.”

Interpretation.  I free-associate to a long ago meeting in Halifax that looks rather like Bruges in my mind.  I had posted a photo of Bruges recently.  Also I ran across a photo from that Halifax meeting, which was chilly.  (My electric mattress pad had turned itself off.)  I suspect that Corky came over to look at my sink drain while I was still asleep -- I wrote between 3AM and 5AM, then went back to sleep) and called my name.  I have another friend who does this sort of work -- he's had surgery in Spokane that reduced his weight by a fourth or a third, but I haven't seen him since then.   (I'm trying to lose weight.)   I had read something about the imposingly big female knight, Briana, in "Game of Thrones" who was saved by the idea that she was from the Island of Sapphires.  The rooster was a little figure I'd torn out of a magazine for my painting morgue that keeps floating around on my desk without getting filed.

NO revelations of the future.  Just scraps.

FROM THE BEGINNING

Basic individual minds are developed by dynamic brain organization -- self-creation -- pushing against the environment through the use of the senses and muscles.  This happens according to the instructions encoded in the genome and annotated by the epigenome.  

Gradually the fetus assembles itself in the first environment, literally supported by the womb, which has its own separate genome+epigenome (the mother’s, not the father’s).  It gives the fetus what it can spare, while the fetus seizes what it can.  Once the infant emerges into the world, there are two environments: the sensate world which is presumed by interaction with whatever is outside the skin through the senses and the internal mental world which is partly unique to the person and partly “imparted” by the culture through other humans.

Environment provides the basics of food, shelter, and nurturing through whatever resources are there (animals, plants, minerals, temperatures, water).  Foods might be rice where there is shallow water, wheat where there are grasslands, marine animals at the north pole.  What is eaten, how shelter is formed, responses to weather -- all form the culture which encodes survival: boats, weapons, cooking, sexual relations.  Once internalized, the person becomes committed and finds it hard to change.

Certain ideas are valorized when they lead to success and weeded out when they cause bad things to happen.  “Thou shalt honor thy father and mother” is usually a good and “Thou shalt not kill” is usually preventing a bad.  But if father and mother are abusive and restrictive, one might want to kill them in spite of knowing there will be bad consequences.  These ideas are stored in the brain, generally behind the forehead.  We call them “ethics” or “morality” or “laws.”

At the same time the body is storing a different kind of thought which every living creature has, an accumulation of knowing that is not conscious.  The autonomic nervous system governs this knowledge, which does not normally become conscious unless it prompts noticeable reactions like panting, fast heart beat, or a clenched gut.  The autonomic nervous system is deeply involved in what is called the spiritual when practices or ideas trigger basic blissful or otherwise intense internal reactions.  These abilities form in the fetus as soon as the necessary structures have formed.  They are wordless.  They constantly adapt to new circumstances, maintaining homeostasis.  They are vulnerable to drugs.

Probably the experiences described by saints -- which involve basic binaries (hot/cold, dark/light, embraced/falling, distant/close) -- are perceived, like sex, through the autonomic nervous system.  This system is parallel to conscious nerve/muscle systems and not necessarily controllable.  At one time it was described as dyadic whole-body reactions that work in opposition: calm and resting (parasympathetic) versus alert and ready for action (sympathetic).  Now the enteric system, a mesh of nerves in the wall of the intestines, is considered part of this larger system.  In fact, even the colonies of microbes that live in the guts can influence mood.  These things are connected to the limbic mid-brain unconscious that every mammal has.

Freud realized that something "below" consciousness existed and tried to get at it with free association and by thinking about old stories like Greek drama, which are very close to being religiously valorized and which provide the idea of sitting together, focusing on some kind of performance.  The most distinctly and recently evolved human capacity is that for empathy, which allows us to experience second-hand what another person is experiencing.  Thus we can know strong emotions and deadly reactions without endangering ourselves.  These can prompt us to put felt concepts into words.  These functions are located partly in the pre-frontal cortex.  The arts can move unconscious ideas to consciousness.

There is a thin wall between the religious practice of a communal experience and psychological or artistic sharing.  The crux of “religion” is survival, either survival of the group and species or survival of an individual.  When they support each other, the autonomic system runs along happily and the ordinary sensate world is enjoyed.  The opposite might be called evil and be felt as coming from the outside or seeping up from the inside -- something supernatural and uncontrollable.  If it IS controllable, it is merely sin or crime.

cucumber flower

Beyond empathy is rational thought like mathematics and, more recently, science which by observing certain rules (detachment, testing, repeatability, mathematical measurements) can offer shared concepts that don’t change as obviously as humanities ideas or art styles, what are called “memes”.  Through the use of instruments, we have extended our perception and understanding of realms never dreamed of: subatomic particles, virus codes that invade cells, how the neural networks connect.  These are real and provable, imperceptible without instruments but not unconscious.  When the attitudes of reflection and analysis are used on the problem of non-sensate but significant concepts, they become theologies -- theories of the sacred, which are felt through the autonomic system, translated into social assumptions and groups.  (If the system has no “theos” or concept of “God,” then it is called philosophy or sometimes anthropology.)

cucumber

Individual unconscious feelings (felt meanings) guide people into socio-economic groups provided by the environment and culture.  We call them “congregations” but could call them aggregations.  People group together spontaneously in a pluralistic society but can be forced into groups by a coercive culture.  (Schools, military)  Or they may simply have developed as genetically related people or people in a specific environment or of a certain age.  (Though I don’t know of any teenaged religious congregations, maybe a case could be made that fan groups count.)  When the business of the group is supporting a world-view that controls their behavior, then they are seen as religious by others and begin to be institutions.

Ancient grain

In the Middle Eastern lands around the Mediterranean, kingdoms and tribal groups spontaneously formed which defined themselves with theological dogma drawn from living in that place.  Gradually through the millennia, responding to war over territories, dwindling resources, the invention of agriculture allowing grain storage and domestic animals to accumulate wealth, and forms of government that developed into walled towns with focused resources, supported by a specialized priesthood who performed a kind of theatre of sacrifice -- all this formed into a few dozen theological stances and their members.  Then three “took off” in power and wealth, supported by written “books” that were said to be supernatural:  Judaism (Torah), then -- emerging from it -- Christianity (Bible), then -- using many of the same concepts -- Islam (Koran).

These three have dominated our idea of what a “religion” is: an institution.  As Christianity spread over Europe, piggy-backing on the Roman Empire, it became the Holy Roman Church and managed to convince the several governments that it represented “God” who was the Caesar of all Caesars.  It brokered peace, crowned kings, created a supernatural reality of heaven, saints, the devil, and so on that gradually became corrupt.  The reacting Protestant movement meant that many small subdivisions of Christianity formed, according to the environments, temperaments, and sources of success in different groups.  

The original Christian church, as expressed in the Catholic system, had many different styles and subdivisions that came out of spreading into new territories (like teachers learning from students, the Romans were penetrated by Celts), but they were strongly connected to Rome.  The Protestant church had no such restraint and often reached into “spiritual” sources as guided by the autonomic system, the mammal brain of felt meaning.  But also theology could build on rational ideas.  All these differing groups could then be called “denominations” or different "namings" of the basic idea of Christianity.  Denomination is a term usually reserved for Christian sub-groups.

Islam and Judaism are related but separate RELIGIONS, not denominations.  They are grouped with Christianity as the Abrahamic religions, since the holy books of all three say they descended from Abraham, who was asked by God to kill his son but was then spared, an emblem of survival.   Religions and denominations are both institutional: that is, they are organized, hierarchical, supported monetarily and with staff, housed in buildings, legally documented as corporations.  Spirituality continues parallel/beneath/overarching theology.  If the institution supports spiritual meaning in the lives of its people, it succeeds.  Survives.  As do the people.

Spirituality is immanent, an upwelling from within, a product of the limbic/autonomic brain and therefore unconscious except in physiological phenomena.  Theology is a way of unifying and empowering institutions.  What I want to understand is the path from a felt meaning to a power structure intent on perpetuating itself.

The dance of life

NATURE/NURTURE and ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE

MARY:

I just watched the BBC David Suchet version of Freud’s life and found it packed with ideas.  For instance, one of the criticisms of Freud's landmark work, "The Interpretation of Dreams," was that it was not scientific, but rather a "NOVEL."  This exposed the origins of our mania about what-is-truth in the over-respect given to science in the last century (the twentieth).  Now we have given medicine the weight that was once allotted to magic.  The man in the white coat is considered infallible, allowed to go anywhere, to meddle in people's lives, so long as he/she is doing "science."  

Freud had to fight hard to assert that "Interpretation of Dreams" WAS science.  It has been hard to dismantle that and reveal that even science is NOT infallible, but a constructed world as much as others.  Just the same, it is a VERY sturdy construction.

TIM:

Yes. But HOW is knowing this relevant to WHAT. Let us pretend people become aware of this which they will not. But let us pretend. HOW does knowing this change what. The man in the white coat still has all the power. 1.) He's a man. 2.) The white coat is a version of the suit. Up one rung on the ladder. HOW is knowing that suits are disguises change the power structure. It doesn't. When the man in the white coat says take your clothes off everyone (well, not everyone) does. Or the power structure says: you can't play the game.

"We are only trying to help you," will be the structure's first response. The second response will be: "There are consequences."

It is a patriarchal culture in extremis. AWARENESS is, too, a game of words.

It assumes that if everyone is AWARE, then...

Then what.

Change will come -- how.

I'm not buying it.

Awareness is not enough. It is a spinning of wheels. In fact, it is reinventing the wheel.

By settling for AWARENESS (I so remember the arguments over safe sex education) we delude ourselves that awareness is part of the construct of human behavior.

The evidence does not support this.

The issue is not awareness. Awareness changes those already aware.

Behavior is the issue.

Awareness is like trickle down. In theory, it would seem that it should work as an agent of change. This theory is as misguided as Freud ever was.

Pavlov was on to more truth than Freud.

What changes human behavior. Other human behavior. And the issue does not end there. The evolution of the brain is very clear. One layer on top of another because it gives us advantages over other species.

What changes an entire cultural power structure.

Accidents and mutations.

Not awareness.  

MARY:

I’m also reading Harold Bloom’s “The Global Brain,” which pulls in many more ideas than Freud, mostly biological and historical.  He gives a detailed and amusing answer to the question of evolution.  The sequence goes "pain > awareness > communication (story/image) > common cause > alternative structures > new contexts present new opportunities.  Then there is an upwelling that overturns the status quo.

What everyone has neglected has been shifts in the environment which are mostly what compel evolution.  The climate changes and everyone must adjust -- possibly by evolving physically and mostly by evolving behaviorally (memes).  Nature and nurture interact always.

The subtext of this conversation is AIDS, a virus from a sequestered jungle in Africa that is undetectable for a long time, but ineradicable without huge changes in both nature and nurture, physical state and behavior.  So far we’ve made too little medical progress -- people can go on with life but only at great expense -- and behavior is deeply resistant even though countries and families are gutted.

TIM:

Who has AIDS.

He’s not gay and white and upper-middle-class.

He’s black and he’s incarcerated. He was already vulnerable. So were Africans with no health care because colonialism still lingers.

I think I got what I came seeking.

Am still seeking and getting what I seek. It is no longer awareness. No one in a million years of evolution can explain to anyone what I am aware of. It doesn’t mean anything.

What I do does. It’s behavior that counts.

If I tell the boys I work with that I love them, they will call me on it. It’s what they do.

It doesn’t matter what I say. They will hold my feet to the fire. It’s about what I do and what I do NOT do.

How is this advantageous for me. Easy.

It’s not that I sexually desire them or even that they keep me young. No one and nothing can do that. Nature or nurture.

Nature.

MARY:

Meaning homosexuality or at least atypical behavior that puts them at risk in a culture that does not want anyone to be atypical, because typicality is the basis of commodification.  Of course, gay, white, middle-class is a good “type” for sales but black, incarcerated, infected is not -- except to the degree that their involuntariness is a route to commodifying them: prisons and monitoring are major businesses.  Standards are low and no one minds the suffering of inmates except their relatives.  Until the day the incarcerated are released and carry AIDS, hepatitis C, tuberculosis and paranoid aggression into the community.  This could be addressed by awareness.

TIM:

Gestalt therapy focuses more on process (what is happening) than content (what is being discussed). The emphasis is on what is being done, thought and felt at the moment rather than on what was, might be, could be, or should be.

I was so glad to see that they actually used the word: awareness.

It doesn't work as awareness is hocus pocus.

If we were ALL just AWARE...

Right.

There are short term gains when I use this stuff but it all has to do with the individual getting some attention.

It's like addiction -- people lapse. It is a constant stream of what is advantageous to the individual. Here and now. I am most amused to see a lot of writing on the human brain that speaks of evolution as something that was a dynamic ten thousand years ago. Phooey. A hundred thousand years ago, we had the brains we have now.

What we were aware of was what was advantageous for us to be aware of.

When it comes to ideas, it was Darwin who actually had one. The rest of it is entertainment.

MARY:

We have created an AIDS sub-culture.  To cure the virus we must change that culture.  Men in white coats can’t do that.  People who write novels can.