The Yin and Yang of understanding - Michael Brechtel Upon seeing a chart of the ‘Evolutionary Tree of Religion,’ I was struck by several things. First, all religions of all nations had as their ultimate historical origins, Animism, followed in succession by pantheism. Now Animism is the idea (as reduced by Wikipedia) that “non-human entities possess a spiritual essence.” Pantheism is the belief that “everything composes an all encompassing, immanent God.” Thus in these worldviews, the spiritual permeates everything and is present in our day-to-day experience. The major religions of the east and the west evolved through additional stages to arrive where they are today, with expansive written narratives, stories of people and Gods (anthropomorphically personified as people). In most of these, ‘advanced’ religions, the spiritual is not with us, but in some transcendent place outside our normal experience. Yet throughout the world, in quite diverse places, cultures that remained isolated or “undiscovered” until recently, still held to beliefs that were largely animistic or pantheistic, often without personified deities or at least with minimal “story” surrounding these deities. Likewise, these aboriginal or ‘first peoples,’ at the time of their ‘discovery’ and interaction with more complex ‘civilizations’ did not have a written language. They often had a rich, complex and highly nuanced verbal language wherein many levels of meaning existed for essentially the same words. Meaning occurred on multiple levels simultaneously, having much to do with the process of oral tradition and direct interaction with the speaker. We could say that meaning included gestures, intonation and all such other non-verbal cues, but this is itself limiting and incomplete. Meaning, it can be said, included a largely energetic component, a direct transmission of the experience being shared, unreduced and unabstracted into the verbal components of the language. From our western perspective, we tended to think of such societies as primitive, in part for the absence of a written language. From our perspective, written language is the most efficient way to share ideas across vast geographical areas and across great expanses of time. Yet the abstraction and concretization of ideas when reduced to written language and divorced from the tradition of oral transmission, flattens and impoverishes communication, particularly as it relates to esoteric concepts such as our experience of the divine, our experience of the self (as opposed to the ego), and the subtle connections that underlie life and consciousness. It is as reasonable to assume that cultures that maintained a rich oral tradition without resort to writing until quite recent times (the past two or three centuries) did so not because they were incapable of or insufficiently advanced to employ written symbolism, but because they chose not to. There is in such cultures a great respect and reverence for the ‘lineage’ of knowledge, that is the specific route of transmission, person to person, over time that brought this knowledge to those who now possess it. Rather than flatten experience into abstract story divorced from the experience of those who share it, such knowledge, or wisdom, traditions revere the expansion and embellishment of knowledge as it is transmitted from one speaker to the next. This distinction reflects the dichotomy of Yin and Yang. The Yang principle values efficiency and speed in the transmission of experience, at the expense of the integrity and richness of the experience. This principle rules in the west and dominates in the east. It is a function of our highly abstracting forebrain, the prefrontal cortex. It is also a manifestation of the masculine. The use of written language allows us to create ‘experts’ through our universities in a matter of a few short years. The Yin principle, values the richness, completeness and full sensory aspect of the original experience being transmitted, at the expense of efficiency and widespread transmission. Time is of no consequence. Apprenticeships and the study of a cluster of phenomena become the work of decades, the commitment of a lifetime. Depth and oneness with the experience itself are the sought after outcome. Titles are not necessarily conferred or claimed, but arise almost spontaneously in community, as deferential respect to the specific wisdom an individual has accumulated about particular aspects of life and existence. These systems of knowledge and transmission need not be mutually exclusive, but tend to manifest this way out of the bias of a particular society. It is difficult to say which comes first, the reliance on written transmission, or the abstraction and flattening of experience into a form that lends itself to written transmission, but it seems that the driving energy of the Yang principle tends to usurp, dominate and ultimately eliminate the Yin, wherever it is given much focus or attention. Thus in patriarchal society, we see heavy reliance on written knowledge, highly abstracted and disconnected thought, isolation and competition between individuals, regardless of whether conditions are of scarcity or abundance. In matriarchal society, we see a less abstracted, more concrete experience rooted in direct experience of phenomena, derived from deep and complex interconnections with nature, other individuals, community and the universe itself. The way this dichotomy tends to manifest in our experience of the divine, the supernatural, and our immortal souls, is that western religions, while offering a path to direct experience, tend to create a reliance on story, an intellectual ‘belief’ without a visceral sense of reality. First people’s practices often offer little or no avenue for the mind to engage, but employ highly experiential rituals including full engagement of the body and senses, a deep commitment of the individual, even to the point at times of enduring great pain, possible lingering injury and nearly always inviting deeply altered states of consciousness. These states open us to broader paranormal or supernatural experiences, not as story or metaphor, but as actual personal sensations and experiences for which we must personally derive our own meaning. They also engage very different parts of the brain and rely on vastly different brain chemistry. In pursuit of the altered states of consciousness, visions and dreamstates that result in direct experience of connection and divinity, hormones and neurotransmitters are employed. Most often these are endogenous naturally occurring in the body, stimulated by breath, fasting, meditation, physical activity, pain, sensuality or other interaction with the body to excite it’s production of these substances far beyond that of our normal experience. Yet we have also found many exogenous substances that either stimulate production of our own neurotransmitters and hormones, or mimic their effects. Ayahuasca, Peyote, Psilocybin mushrooms, Kava root and others are used in ceremony as plant medicine to bring about altered states and stimulate those parts of the brain that connect us, rather than separate us, both from one another, nature and the universe, and from experience itself. This duality of separation and connection, as with all dualities in our paradoxical universe, is meant to be a movement, as of a pendulum, between times of separation, isolation and introspection, and times of connection, openness and experience of the phenomenological space time we appear to participate in. It is this movement that informs our understanding of self and purpose. If we cling too closely to one or the other, we lose depth of participation and understanding, and we either become too ‘grounded’ in the ‘material’ world, or too flighty and detached, appearing to our fellows as delusional. In our culture, there is often little danger of the latter state. If anything we are too grounded, too abstract, too intellectual and too detached from phenomena. As we experientially explore first peoples practices, we add depth and visceral connection to our intellectual understanding of ourselves, of divinity, the universe and our purpose in it.
Posted on: Sun, 26 Oct 2014 14:28:06 +0000
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