Archive for the ‘Form constants’ Category

Aristotle’s Error

Monday, March 15th, 2010

From Aristotle’s Error:

[C]ells in early-processing brain areas are each sensitive mainly to changes in just one visual parameter, not to others. For instance, in the primary visual cortex (V1, also called area 17), the main feature extracted is the orientation of edges. In the area known as V4 in the temporal lobes, cells react to color (or, strictly speaking, to wavelengths of light, with different cells responding to different wavelengths). Cells in the area called MT are mainly interested in direction of movement.

That’s relevant because a few years ago I came across (in here, I think) the easily-offended aboriginal anthropologist Alice Beck Kehoe trying to refute the idea that primitive cave-paintings of form constants had anything to do with the perceptions in altered states of consciousness, by bringing up an artist-friend of hers who had drawn similar images, but explicitly with no spiritual origins—rather, he was just exploring the edges of objects in his paintings.

Why did the suggestion that cave paintings are accurate transcriptions of forms seen in altered states of consciousness bug Kehoe so much? Simply because she thought it meant that (esp. white) anthropologists were saying that such primitive people couldn’t distinguish between reality and their drug/dancing-induced (primary visual cortex) hallucinations. She’s utterly wrong about that, of course: It’s precisely because people such as the Jivaro can distinguish between hallucinated form constants and their daily lives that they take the former as being the archetypal basis of the latter.

Posted in Form constants, Neurology, Shamanism | 1 Comment »

The Faith Instinct

Sunday, November 8th, 2009

John Derbyshire:

Nick Wade’s new book The Faith Instinct comes out next week. I’ve been reading it for review, and it’s excellent. He seems (I’m only 60 pages in) to plant himself firmly in the religion-is-adaptive camp. This puts him in a minority among people who write about the natural history of religion. Most take religion to be an accidental by-product of cognitive processes—hair-trigger “agency detection” modules etc. Nice to see the other point of view (and group selection, too) get an airing.

I’ve got that book on order from amazon, and am quite looking forward to reading it, given the caliber of Wade’s previous writings.

But, religion is (evolutionarily) adaptive? In the sense that the belief that an Imaginary Friend in the Sky is watching you and can reward or punish you for your behaviors, no doubt it will usually result in people treating each other better than they otherwise would. And that would indeed provide a survival advantage for members of the group, and provide a converse out-group of sinners/infidels, which will further bind the in-group community together, in both war and peace. That is, there is indeed probably something to the “group selection” side of that—where the culture establishes firm group boundaries for gene flow and selection for particular traits, with marriage/reproduction happening primarily within the group—especially if it encourages women to be baby machines (cf. Catholicism, Islam). But of course that doesn’t mean that it’s an environment which anyone should be brainwashed into living in, even if, when you’re looking just at the widely-embraced, watered-down versions of “religion,” it can be “adaptive” in the sense of producing more surviving offspring.

None of that negates the by-product view, but it does provide a valid “other half” which has previously been missing from these one-sided analyses.

And yet, those two halves do not make a whole. Not even half a one. Because, what about esoteric spirituality? What about all mainstream religions beginning as Scientology-like cults, generally with a charismatic leader? (Of course, the fact that Jesus probably never even lived, but was still the “charismatic founder” of Christianity, pretty much blows the whole “charismatic founder” necessity out of the water.) What about yogis retiring to the Himalayas to live their lives in silent meditation, producing no offspring? Is that behavior also “adaptive”? If not, how do you get from a maladaptive, isolating cult, to an adaptive, community-cohesioning religion?

‘Cause Yogananda (et. al.) was right about one thing: Exoteric religions are degenerate, popularized, misunderstood (i.e., symbols being taken literally) versions of esoteric, meditative experiences. What he and others like him didn’t understand is that those experiences themselves are a product of human neurology, and get connected with the natural world via sympathetic-magical similarities in patterns—e.g., the migraine scotoma looks like a jagged lightning strike, or (in its closed-circle form) a snake about to swallow its own tail.

(I hadn’t known this before, but migraine auras can also look a lot like the Northern Lights—e.g., the souls of one’s ancestors, dancing around the North Star. ["The Cree people call this phenomenon the 'Dance of the Spirits.'"] There are some other amazing animations here—all of which are glimpses into the “other world.” That is, there are tribes [e.g., the Jivaro, IIRC] which, quite “reasonably,” take these forms and form constants as being the archetypes upon which the physical world is based.)

You can’t explain where exoteric religion comes from without understanding esoteric spirituality, with techniques of content meditation originating as internalized shamanic rituals (e.g., the believed path of souls along the Milky Way to the North Star—the “still point of the turning celestial world,” and “doorway” to the world beyond—being sympatically imitated in the climbing and descent of a pole, which was then internalized as the simply visualized climbing and descent of the spine to a point/bindu in the brain and the escape of consciousness through the brahmarandhra, cf. in kundalini meditation). And neither the by-product viewpoint nor the adaptive one can begin to account for the specific, widespread symbols which form the core of all religions. For that you need neurology and sympathetic-magical thinking. And I’d bet dollars to donuts that the latter, in particular, gets barely a mention in Wade’s book.

Like this:

Don’t try and tell me that any (esp.) agrarian culture wouldn’t have seen that as an attempt by the spirit of the crescent moon to communicate with the person experiencing the aura.

Posted in Agents, Form constants, Milky Way, Origins of Christianity, Shamanism, Sympathetic Magic | 4 Comments »

The Woman Who Mistook Her Visions for God

Monday, June 15th, 2009

The subtle state is a type of deity mysticism (where individuals report an experience of being one with the source or ground of the sensory-natural world; e.g. St. Teresa of Avila, Hildegard of Bingen).

—Ken Wilber, Waves, Streams, States, and Self

Contrary to prevailing tendencies of realism in European art, there has been a sporadic Western “tradition” of mystical and visionary painting over the last nine hundred years. Early evidence of this visionary symbolist art can be found in the twelfth century in the work of Hildegard of Bingen. She was a powerful abbess who created a major text explaining the symbols of her visions and had the visions illustrated or illuminated. These beautiful works are surely forms of transcendelia.

—Ken Wilber, Collected Works

And yet, from Oliver Sacks’ fascinating and entertaining The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (p. 166-70):

The religious literature of all ages is replete with descriptions of “visions,” in which sublime and ineffable feelings have been accompanied by the experience of radiant luminosity (William James speaks of “photism” in this context). It is impossible to ascertain, in the vast majority of cases, whether the experience represents a hysterical or psychotic ecstasy, the effects of intoxication, or an epileptic or migrainous manifestation. A unique exception is provided in the case of Hildegard of Bingen (1098 to 1180), a nun and mystic of exceptional intellectual and literary powers, who experienced countless “visions” from earliest childhood to the close of her life, and has left exquisite accounts and figures of these in the two manuscript codices which have come down to us—Scivias and Liber divinorum operum (“Book of divine works”).

A careful consideration of these accounts and figures leaves no room for doubt concerning their nature: they were indisputably migrainous, and they illustrate, indeed, many of the varieties of visual aura…. Singer (1958), in the course of an extensive essay on Hildegard’s visions, selects the following phenomena as most characteristic of them:

In all a prominent feature is a point or a group of points of light, which shimmer and move, usually in a wave-like manner, and are most often interpreted as stars or flaming eyes. In quite a number of cases one light, larger than the rest, exhibits a series of concentric circular figures of wavering form; and often definite fortification-figures are described, radiating in some cases from a coloured area. Often the lights gave that impression of working, boiling or fermenting, described by so many visionaries…

Hildegard writes:

The visions which I saw I beheld neither in sleep, nor in dreams, nor in madness, nor with my carnal eyes, nor with the ears of the flesh, nor in hidden places; but wakeful, alert, and with the eyes of the spirit and the inward ears, I perceive them in open view and according to the will of God.

One such vision, illustrated by a figure of stars falling and being quenched in the ocean … signifies for her “The Fall of the Angels”:

I saw a great star most splendid and beautiful, and with it an exceeding multitude of falling stars which with the star followed southwards … And suddenly they were all annihilated, being turned into black coals … and cast into the abyss so that I could see them no more.

Such is Hildegard’s allegorical interpretation. Our literal interpretation would be that she experienced a shower of phosphenes in transit across the visual field, their passage being succeeded by a negative scotoma. Visions with fortification-figures are represented in her Zelus Dei … and Sedens Lucidus … the fortifications radiation from a brilliantly luminous and (in the original) shimmering and coloured point. These two visions are combined in a composite vision (first picture), and in this she interprets the fortifications as the aedificium of the city of God.

Great rapturous intensity invests the experience of these auras, especially on the rare occasions when a second scotoma follows in the wake of the original scintillation:

The light which I see is not located, but yet is more brilliant than the sun, nor can I examine its height, length or breadth, and I name it “the cloud of the living light.” And as sun, moon, and stars are reflected in water, so the writings, sayings, virtues and works of men shine in it before me…

Sometimes I behold within this light another light which I name “the Living Light itself” … And when I look upon it every sadness and pain vanishes from my memory, so that I am again as a simple maid and not as an old woman.

Invested with this sense of ecstasy, burning with profound theophorous and philosophical significance, Hildegard’s [migrainous] visions were instrumental in directing her towards a life of holiness and mysticism.

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Beauty and the Brain

Monday, June 15th, 2009

From Beauty and the Brain:

In the 1920s neurologist Heinrich Klüver documented the hallucinations he experienced while under the influence of mescaline, using four categories: grids, zigzags, spirals, and curves. Noting their similarity to the hallucinations experienced in various conditions, such as migraine, sensory deprivation, and the hypnagogic state that occurs in the transition from wakefulness to sleep, he named them “form constants.” These motifs do indeed seem to be constant—they recur throughout history and across cultures, and can be seen, for example, in prehistoric cave paintings, in the girih patterns of the tile mosaics decorating medieval mosques, and in the repeating tessellations of M.C. Escher’s impossible figures or the rectangular forms of Mondrian’s Compositions. Underlying those patterns, at least in part, are the intrinsic properties of the visual nervous system.

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Twilight of the Clockwork God

Sunday, June 14th, 2009

From Twilight of the Clockwork God, p. 82, wherein Lynn Margolis provides a very good, concise definition of the scientific method:

Is it not ironic that in order to do anything at all in science one must hold the rest of the world constant and concentrate intensely on some tiny detail? One must control the variables one at a time.

Separately (p. 172):

The great German anthropologist Leo Frobenius, in his still untranslated book Unknown Africa, gave an account of a hunting ritual he witnessed one morning amongst the pygmies. Three men and one woman went out to a clearing before dawn and drew an image of an antelope on the ground. When the first rays of the sun struck the drawing, one of the men stepped forward with his bow and shot an arrow into the neck of the antelope as the woman shouted something in her native tongue. Then the men went off to hunt and came back later in the day with an antelope which they had shot through the neck in exactly the same spot as in the diagram. They returned to the image and poured some of the animal’s blood on it, then erased it, lest its unpropitiated ghost take vengeance on them and cause a hunting accident.

It seems to me that I read a while ago that the idea of cave paintings (e.g., at Lascaux and Les Trois Freres) being made as part of hunting rituals hasn’t been taken seriously by anthropologists for quite some time. But if so, why the heck not? (The book didn’t give a reason.) From what Frobenius observed, that’s a completely reasonable interpretation of the animals drawn in caves—the only thing that’s different is that they obviously weren’t erasing the cave-wall images afterwards. Not that there aren’t form constants involved, too, in the non-animal pictures—e.g., ladders-to-heaven as subsets of lattices, in San (!Kung, i.e., Bushman) cave paintings. But how can scholars have ruled out hunting-magic for the others (assuming I’m remembering that accurately)?

Again separately (p. 164), there’s this:

The Jains [of India] envisioned the cosmos as a single, gigantic Goddess from out of whose protoplasmic substance all of creation had come into being. The earth had grown from her navel, and below her waist were stacked various levels of hell, while the heavens rose above like the tiers of a wedding cake. The inside of her skull was thought to be the world ceiling, within which the souls of the released hovered like bubbles of liquid metal in zero gravity.

That was also a common medieval Christian conception—i.e., of the universe being the body of God.

If the star-filled hemisphere of sky visible to us is the inside of the skull of God (for having a similar shape), then the North Star—the stationary “hole” in the night sky—would correspond to the fontanelle in the human body. And what would correspond to the human spine? The Milky Way, of course. (The Milky Way is just how our galaxy appears, from our position in it, when we are looking along the galactic plane, at all the stars in our galaxy. Because the axis of the Earth’s rotation is nearly parallel to that same plane, the Milky Way always passes reasonably near to the North Star, and in some epochs actually appears to “touch” it.)

Are you beginning to see how early “spiritual cosmologies,” in which the “visible universe” was literally the “body of God,” and where the Milky Way was the road used by (shamanic and deceased) souls in traveling to the North Star, became internalized as techniques of kundalini meditation?

Just as the North Star is the only stationary point in the heavens (for viewers in the north hemisphere), each of our heads is the center of our sensory experience of the world: every experience in which we see, hear, smell, or taste anything places us, phenomenologically, at the “center of the universe.” (Touch does too, but it’s not confined to our heads.) Even visually, when we are standing out in the middle of a vast plain, or atop a mountain peak, or even in having climbed a tall tree, the horizon is equally far away from us in all directions; so again, were we paying proper attention, we could not help but be struck at how we appeared to be, visually, “at the center of the world.”

When shamans climbed poles, they were thus not merely engaging in a sympathetic-magical imitation of the flight of souls along the Milky Way to escape through the “hole in the roof” of the universe; rather, in reaching the top of their pole in any environment where the horizon was visible on all sides from that position, they were visually experiencing themselves as being “at the center of the world.” In pre-scientific societies which had no idea of how geometry or perspective works, and spent far less time “living in their own heads” than we do, that must have been a powerful “spiritual” experience. These were people, after all, who genuinely believed that they could secure a good hunt by magically acting it out on drawings of animals beforehand.

Further, since our heads are “at the center of the Earth” just as the North Star is at the “center of the heavens” (i.e., all the stars rotate around it, once per day, just as all of our sensory experiences “rotate around” us), that similarity should have provided another reason for pre-scientific people to expect a “magical correspondence” to exist between our microcosmic human bodies, and the macrocosmic universe.

(These are my original explanations, by the way: You won’t find them anywhere else.)

The sinuous Milky Way also resembles a River, a Cosmic Sky-Serpent, or a Tree trunk growing out of the horizon. But them’s a whole ‘nother set of symbolisms, derived from the same astronomy….

Posted in Form constants, History of Science, Milky Way, North Star, Rituals, River, Serpents, Shamanic Flight | No Comments »