HUMAN TRAJECTORY

OUTLINE OF THE INDIVIDUAL HUMAN TRAJECTORY

Conception

Unfolding the fetus

Experience begins the sensory when it penetrates the skin

Specialized organs

One-celled base

Pre-existing categories:  scaffolding paradigm

Participation of the person

Not everyone is the same, not everyone goes to the same level

LIMINAL VIRTUAL SPACE develops while a human forms

A new kind of map held in the brain connector

Unseen, made and remade, interpersonal, enabler of empathy

mother/infant

container of meaning

This account of creating a human person is not scientific so much as it is conjectural but informed by science.  There are assumptions that could probably be defended by research.

This section addresses how the tumult of the out-skin world is brought into the patterns of the individual in-skin.

An animal is a collection of one-celled creatures that have assembled into a cooperation made possible by first a skin to separate it from the environment and then circulating systems to distribute nutrition and directions.  The in-skin world is dependent on homeostasis, which is the directional flow of existence in time between two parameters: too much or too little.  This movement produces experience of two kinds, that which is in-skin and that which is out-skin.  The two are in dialogue with the out-skin pressing against the in-skin from the moment of conception.

At first the single cell and then the increasing number of proliferating cells is dependent on two sources of information: that from the blueprint nucleus and that from the placenta which conveys both nutrients and chemical information to the new cell-ball.  At this point there is no vascular system or nervous system.  Both develop in the context of what the mother is sending.  It must be the birth mother rather than any caretaker because it begins in the womb.

The first sensory information is a combination of rhythm and sound, both of them from the mother.  A womb is a noisy place: breathing, heart, digestion, and the mother’s voice.  It is also a mobile place so the new fetus builds its brain around her sitting, standing, lying down, walking (another rhythm) and macro-movements  like lifting or throwing.  If one thinks of movies of tribal dancing in either Africa or America (most commonly)  they are often stepping rhythmically while chanting, singing, drumming, in this pre-birth kind of experience.

Experience builds the brain from the nutrients meeting the capacities of the fetal sensing cells and organs. Amniotic fluid and the flesh of the mother cushions and muffles some sensory information, but the molecules managed by the mother’s brain and organs in reaction to her out-skin environment come directly and internally to the fetus.

When first born, an infant must learn to use its unfocused  eyes, its flailing limbs, to create the capacity of the brain to manage them along with the other senses.  The point of focus that’s needed to organize all of this comes from the mother, especially her face, and now includes other caretakers.  The “theos” notion of an overlooking larger caretaker may come from this early experience of being cleaned, held, stroked, fed, and talked to in a familiar voice.  The mother looks in the face of the infant while relating to it and the infant brain learns how to relate back with kicking and cooing.

This is the beginning of relationship between the in-skin and out-skin, whether it is comforting or distressing, and the extent to which the two relate.  This context creates the paradigm in the brain that structures whatever happens for the rest of life.  It also creates something “virtual,” meaning unseen, not factual and concrete but felt, though it is described in terms of a “space,” an area of experience that includes creation, play, and attachment.  It is a “place” of potential and imagination that develops in the brain and reaches out to the other person.  This is liminal space that contains ceremony/ritual.

Most of this is expressed and recognized in what I call the “frame of communication”:  the face, the breath and heartbeat, the ears and the oral/pharynx voice creation. Speech comes out of this formation.  Stephen Porges discovered a third autonomic nerve system that is myenilated so capable of carrying more information, and that comes directly from the brain stem to this “frame.”  The thought-world the brain has created is expressed and understood directly by variation in muscle movement or tension, breathing, heart rate and speech or singing or exclaiming.  The nerve carries information both ways.  What the person feels is both conscious and unconscious, relating to the homeostasis of the body.  The conscious part, which is much smaller than what is never conscious, is recognized as emotion and is recognizable to others.  We learn from experience to separate what should be brought up to consciousness and what should become habit, taken for granted and never examined.  “Instinct” is part of this.

(This far was posted on my blog on 4/10/20

WHEN THE WORLD TAKES HOLD OF US.

I’ve needed an example to make these abstract ideas more real and yet not all about myself.  Along came the perfect example:  Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Living with a Wild God.”

We have a little biographical overlap:  she’s a few years younger than myself. Reed is where I used the library when a high school kid, where I took a National Honor Society scholarship test with a room full of cheeping chicks in the next room (meant for some experiment), and where as a county animal control officer I searched in vain for an errant goat on the campus.  As Unitarian clergy, I felt related to its founding and nature, which combined a poet’s free spirit with a scientist’s prestige.  It is a persisting experiment that I applaud.

Butte is a bit of rebellious Europe based on mining copper, which puts them in the category of resource empire where work is done at the bottom and wealth resides at the top -- often someplace else.  It was accumulated by immigrants from Europe who brought their assumptions, values, and aspirations with them.  That is, at their time they were in the same position as the older white men who have now lost their jobs, but found a place to go, until they could do better, an assumption of Empire. 

According to her own account, Ehrenreich’s family went from mining in Butte through some years in Lowell, Massachusetts, (also closely related to Britain) to her own education at Reed, trying deliberately to find new ways based on the old ways.  She was emotionally strapped to a mother who insisted on female virtues as defined at the time, who demanded that Barbara admit she was arrogant but unworthy, and enforced the notions with violence, mostly slaps.  Her father, elusive and enticing, was handsome, brilliant, and able to rise in the world through science to management in California, which had a dark side.  Both parents became alcoholic and eventually divorced.  Both were examples of the formation within the Middle Class of an educated management category that grew with the suburbs and the cities that anchored them, as well as the necessary bureaucracies trying to keep order, like corporate employment with anodyne relief. 

This family history is remarkable in traveling up the classes in what we had thought was the American way.  From one point of view it represents success but from another it is close to madness.

B. (I’ll designate her) was miserable until she discovered service to the growing women’s movement that shifted the balance of gender power in this class.  Women took up vocations and men resisted.  No longer was B. considered arrogant or too powerful  She was now part of an educated, managing, writing class; neither bureaucratic nor capitalistic.  Like her father, B. went to the top of her scientific academic surroundings and excelled but ran into problems.  Then marriage and motherhood, plus feminism took her into social reform. She “found her people” in a role that sounds much like Butte activism in her family’s early years.  

This discussion is not about religions, which are systems that support behavior in the world, generally developed by communities as they respond to their ecosystems and hierarchically described as classes.  They are stabilized by stories and rules, leaders and edifices, that agree on one point of view.  Much of this has been challenged and discredited by the new scientific knowledge, which requires new systems of thought.  This change is freeing and allows new thought about about the unaccountable, the individual, the Sacred and Holy which is like “lightning seeking ground.” It may come from outside any human skin, but then vividly perceived by the human inside the skin.  Like lightning, it may be a huge burst of energy.

B.’s intense experience of a flaming world was entry into liminal time/space powerful enough to have deeply affected her in-skin, sensory access to it, and burst on the circuits of the brain.  Not thought but felt. The day of skiing may have put her in touch with her first experience of the world in Butte, which is built on top of a mountain. Skin, oxygen level, and a kind of subliminal recovery of a primal world may have prepared her for what happened. 

A day of skiing on that high mountain was a meeting with the Other that went directly along the primal pathways inside the forming body that had developed in the fetus when it felt the movement of the mother’s body.  B. opened psychologically and in terms of brain paradigm to something engulfing, the speed of moving fast in a whitened atmosphere.  Then brief sleep in a protected space overnight in a state she likened to the Blackfeet vision meditation high on a mountain with no food, no water, little sleep, hoping for a vision.  Next walking, as in a “walking meditation”, led her senses to the world in a way that is normally dimmed.  She was feeling existence more directly than is usual.  She had swallowed the mountain.

When in later years B. tried to puzzle out the event, the driver of the borrowed VW becomes a literary or maybe psychological dimension.  The young man was very much in the style of her father -- handsome, brilliant, and angry to the point of having hidden decomposing nitroglycerin in the trunk of the car for later explosions.  These details are not part of the sensory vision, but part of a later attempt to account for that liminal time/space.  It was familiar and the young man made a reference to her father who represented — to her — safety, deliverance and approval which she never got, but never separated from.  Now she did separate by “walking away”.  

It was a worry that she had gone crazy since this seemed like such a bizarre and unaccountable experience.  But she was far from being “mentally ill,” a concept often used to deny the reality of people who are disobedient.  In Russia this was made concrete by incarceration of dissidents on grounds that they were insane.  A cop friend of mine told about being trained by an older “bull” officer who came down hard on a defiant character by taking him for mental observation for a few days as allowed by law.  My friend protested that the character didn’t seem psychotic -- just ornery.  The officer said mildly, “If someone defies me, they’re nuts.”

The other side of a culture reacting to such an unexpected and striking experience is to define it as “religious,” as breaking through to a different supernatural world and giving it authority over the earthly world.  This idea was not possible for B., raised to be atheist.

But B. was defying no one, breaking no social code, turning against nothing.  Her perception was simply expanded.  No one spoke from a burning bush, no one wrote on the walls, because language is a theological tool as demonstrated by Holy Books, but this was pre-language, conceptual, undefined or labeled.

So we’re back to the issue of the intense and unique experience, but with an entirely new way of looking at it that is neither about sanity or religion, but as a natural recurring human capacity that may signal some kind of future mutation that evolves us, some new relationship with the planet from which we emerge — but not completely, just as we come out of our pasts.