The Voice that Stills the Fear
Recently I wrote a blog post that mentioned that some people posit that humans have, in effect, two brains. We have a primitive “lizard brain” that reacts instantly to immediate danger. And we have a nice big rational brain, evolved later, that we use to make sense of the world. The lizard brain reacts more quickly than the rational brain in part because compared to the rational brain, the lizard brain is not very bright. The lizard brain is an animal brain that is designed to look at the world directly in front of one’s face and decide either “danger-yes” or “danger-no”. If the lizard brains sees “danger-yes” it responds with the overwhelming but purely automatic physical responses that we associate with the stress produced by an immediate and dire emergency.
It seems that in modern society we tend to have more lizard brain type stress reactions than are warranted by actual episodes where we immediately need to fight something to the death. So it may be that our rational brain takes real but distant negative possibilities and reframes these as immediate threats. It then feeds these to the lizard brain over and over again and this is why we find ourselves operating under so much adrenaline pumping stress all of the time. If follows that we may be able to train our rational brains, which we may be said to experience as our “inner voice” to learn how to “calm the lizard” by in effect reassuring our lizard brain that our problems are not in fact lizard brain type threats serious problems though they may be.
The question of what this rational internal voice itself is would seem to me to be the subject of 3,000 years of fascinating philosophical, psychological, sociological and artistic discussion. The mere existence of such a discussion tells me that there may be relatively good or bad rationalities; positive or negative sources for ordering the world; and potentially more or less successful ways with which to approach life with this inner voice.
But what fascinates me are all of the mystical discussions that, while very respectful of the development of moral reasoning, claim that regardless of what this inner voice is or where it comes from, there is another even more real world that cannot be accessed via the inner rational voice, but only by shutting this voice off and plunging into the Great Silence.
“It seems that in modern society we tend to have more lizard brain type stress reactions than are warranted by actual episodes where we immediately need to fight something to the death. ”
Unagidon —
You mean what appears on the internet when someone’s political position is criticized and immediately, the person’s lizard-like tongue flashes out at the aggressor, and he calls the critic a blind, lying fool?
“Calm the lizard”. What a great phrase. Meditation of various sorts, which work in apparently primitive psychological ways, are one way to do calm the beastie. One of the most effective seems to be the increasingly popular mindfulness meditation. It makes us acutely aware of the present but at the same time puts a psychological distance between our conscious self and whatever seems to be threatening us. It eliminates the frightening eyball-to-eyeball factor in threats. No doubt the usefulness of mindfulness is a main reason why the huge Asian religion section at Barnes and Noble (my cultural barometer) is now in a privileged place, and books on Christian religion are now stuck back in the farthest corner of the second floor.
You also say, “But what fascinates me are all of the mystical discussions that, while very respectful of the development of moral reasoning, claim that regardless of what this inner voice is or where it comes from, there is another even more real world that cannot be accessed via the inner rational voice, but only by shutting this voice off and plunging into the Great Silence.”
Indeed. But that inner Silence is not easy to find. The complexity of the inner self is becoming more and more apparent, and it seems to be a big reason why Buddhism is becoming so popular. Buddha was, I think, one of the greatest observational psychologist who ever lived. He saw huge regions in the inner self that play a part, often unconsciously, in our conscious lives and was well aware of the conflicts that go on in the inner battlefield. This complexity of the inner self is also why, I think, Zaehner’s works are so important — he realized better than anyone else how vastly complex and competitive and controlling these inner regions and operations can be.
Consciousness has been hot in philosophy since Descartes. Extremely acute analysis of it and the wider reality “mind” becomes the project of many Continental philosophers with Husserl’s “Logical Investigations” (1901) and his research into intentionality, The materialist psychologists (i.e., most anglophone psychologists) ignore such speculations. Their man is Gilbert Ryle whose “The Concept of Mind” (1949) was where the phrase “the ghost in the machine” was first used. American psychology seems bent on eradicating any notion of soul from Western culture and reducing mind/cs to the brain and its “epiphenomena”. (What a weasel word!_
Still the neuroscientists are doing a great deal of fascinating work on the brain. A specialized group of them are called “neuro-theologians”. They include people like Damasio and Andrew Newberg who study the brain during “mystical experience”. Unfortunately, they think (or thought the last time I looked) that there is only one kind of mystical experience, the kind the psychiatrists, and Zaehner, call schizophrenic’. They accept it as a legitimate sort of “intuition” — knowledge but of a very special sort which is legitimately contradictory, so they say. Enter Zen again.
Oxford Press has added a little book on consciousness/inner self/mind/ego/whatever to its sometimes excellent “short introduction” series. The writer obviously belongs to the materialist school and, therefore, oversimplifies pitifully. But if anyone is interested, some of her explanations and the short bibliography give a good entry into what’s hot right now. It’s Susan Blackmore’s “Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction”. She is herself a Buddhist practitioner.
(When will the Vatican catch up to the importance of all this?)
Great Ann. Thank you.
One thing that complicates the picture is that meditation is also a technique (even if the form of meditation we use is prayer) that we can adopt as rationally as any other technique to calm the lizard, including drinking, the taking of drugs, and other things. Moving behind the “inner voice” and the rationality requires something else, whether we call it grace or satori or whatever. There was a book I read years ago whose name I forget that claimed to be a compendium of solutions of all known Japanese Zen Koans; sort of an answer key for people who wanted to get themselves some of that satori stuff. I was never sure whether the book was a joke or not, because the answers themselves also resembled koans.
The proliferation of sects shows that the human mind can get deceived very easily. The problem and the solution is that everyone believes that there is this magic way or book that can be the answer to all. The solution is right there in the Beatitudes. Happy are they indeed.
“One thing that complicates the picture is that meditation is also a technique (even if the form of meditation we use is prayer) that we can adopt as rationally as any other technique to calm the lizard, including drinking, the taking of drugs, and other things.”
unagidon –
Uses of the words “technique” and “method” are anathema to many Christian writers about Christian contemplative prayer, no doubt because there are some techniques/methods of mental practice, also called “contemplation”, which are automatic in producing their intended effects, and Christian theology of mysticism claims that truly religious mystical experience is not automatic in any sense, that one of the essential characteristics is that it is a gift of God, a grace that cannot be produced automatically.
Mindfulness and concentration meditation (which are typically used by Buddhists) have the effect of putting the meditator into the so-called “alpha” state of consciousness (in which brain waves are measurable by the neuroscientists). It calms the lizard or “stops the chatter” as the Buddhists put it which is a pre-requisite for the higher levels of their kind of practice. But the Buddhists themselves tell us that their practices are not in themselves *prayer*. They do not address God, nor do they establish a special spiritual relationship with God. They’re just tools to quiet the lizard, and, for some people, to improve their blood pressure. It is these practices which have become so popular, not the higher level ones which produce even deeper states of consciousness. The Hindus have a practice, nirodh (sp?), that stills the mind of the mystic so deeply that it has been described as the next best thing to being dead — there is an almost complete absence of brain waves in the practitioner as he meditates!
Nevertheless, it is also true that *religious* contemplation whether Christian, Jewish, Muslim, whatever, also typically *begins* with the contemplative entering alpha state by some method or other, whether chants or closing their eyes. (The latter automatically puts one in alpha state.) But the state, no matter how pleasant it is or how deeply the contemplator enters it, is not of itself, at least according to the Christian theologians, the grace-filled contemplation of those mystics who somehow meet with God in that state.
For anybody interested in doing the sort of contemplative prayer that might eventually lead to true mystical experience, if you’re a Christian let me suggest starting with Karl Rahner’s tiny little book for us everyday folks called “Encounters with Silence”. It’s an introduction to contemplative practice, but it’s also about the relationship between active life and prayer. Great little work. And there are all the works of Fr. Thomas Keating, especially “Open Mind, Open Heart” for beginners. He writes about how to do Centering Prayer.
Bill:
Amen, brother!
As our brains evolved, we added a new layer to the reptilian core: the mammalian brain, capable of emotion.
Sad story this morning of fellow mammals — elephants in India — who were killed by a train because they stayed to protect infants stuck in the middle of the tracks.
http://www.google.com/#sclient=psy&hl=en&site=&source=hp&q=elephants+struck+by+train&btnG=Google+Search&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=elephants+struck+by+train&gs_rfai=CXgfqHwGdTMmPAY6EygSWm6idBQAAAKoEBU_QGRdd&psj=1&fp=24e010b90ac1eaad