SEVEN

NATURE’S PLAN AND CULTURE’S CONNIVING

The Breakdown of Nature’s Plan: Conflict of Old and New Evolutionary Structures of Brain

This book defines “culture” as a negative force that confines, constricts, and limits humanity. Nature’s positive and intelligent intent as given through evolution has been overwhelmed and short-circuited by a negative culture’s intentions.

Nature’s intent for culture is to give the grounds for a creative ability arising from the mind’s capacity to imagine—to create internal images not present to the sensory system, and then actualize such images, giving them a presence in our sensory world. A natural flowering of our social instinct and the bond that nurtures and fosters creativity could bring a new order of social reality transcending the limitations and constraints of this present one, wherein the heart would find its next level of evolution.

As an analogy to the negative culture we find ourselves in, consider the culturing of an organism in the laboratory, as when a medical researcher comes across a microbe he wishes to study. Determined to separate his specimen from any unwanted influences, he makes a culture for and/or of the specimen. Putting it into a beaker or test tube, he adds a solution suitable to feed and keep it alive, controls the temperature of this arbitrary and restricted world, and observes and draws conclusions from what he terms the specimen’s actual, that is, natural, behaviors.

In a true sleepwalking manner, we humans are specimens caught up in an elaborate cultural test tube or beaker of our own making. As Gregory Bateson pointed out in his book, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity, we are Nature, and what we are doing is what Nature is doing (if at second hand, once removed).

Thus, any and every effort we make toward a “new order” of our condition is but a different mixture of the same old materials. We watch wearily as, one after another, our brilliant inventions, hailed with such excitement and hope for the better world they promise to bring, end as fatal traps wherein we are again and again hoisted by our own petard. So culture, with its mad-scientist servant-master, tightens its stranglehold on the spirit as well as the body, leaving a reign of madness and a dying world in its wake.

Of course, the word “culture” has its equally powerful, meaningful, and positive definition, summarized (above) as a shared social coordination that stimulates and fosters development of creative pursuits over and above ordinary, instinctive survival skills. In this positive aspect of culture arise our great arts that can transcend all present levels of knowing: the musical works of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven; the paintings of Michelangelo, Raphael, Leonardo; the altruistic efforts of St. Francis and of the Knights Templars and Cathars, who gave us so great a work as Chartres Cathedral; the great poetry of Nemerov, Whitman, Blake, Milton, Shakespeare—any of which are, in this author’s opinion, far greater achievements of humanity than walking on the moon or building atomic bombs.

We might define a creative culture as a balance of Simone Weil’s “grace and gravity,” wherein grace arises from creative expressions of the human spirit, gravity from the necessities of physical existence. These two polar effects are graphically played out in our own head, as displayed in the conflict of our “reptilian” hind-brain functioning automatically for survival and the new prefrontal cortex, avenue and translator for creativity and freedom, struggling for expression and ascendancy, with our sense of self at stake.

The Neural Tube and Our Sense of Self

Our sense of self is linked, even entangled with, mind, but they are not identical in actual usage. Self is also entangled with the word-concept soul, a far more controversial issue than mind; all three—self, mind, and soul—are entangled, arousing different connotations and subtleties. (Infusionism, for instance, was a theological term for the theory that the human soul is “infused” into us at our conception or at birth.) Self has vast connotations in our usage and references to it, but is nowhere near as elusive and loaded a term as soul, a slippery issue I leave hanging here on behalf of the word self, which has an immediate, intimate, and near-ultimate meaning to us; as pointed out earlier, for most of us it is that which we mean by me.

The following proposes that self, apparently indigenous to humans, originates in the neural tube of earliest embryonic development, a hypothesis that takes on meaning and strength as we follow through. Just as growing a liver in our gut is inherent within our genetic system, and all “liver components” congregate in the same locale in embryonic growth, so does a sense of self grow in its respective initial locale and “matrix,” the neural tube. This hypothesis is borne out in physical development, as that very early forming organ, the neural tube (inherited from an early vertebrate embryo), gives rise to a fundamental trinity of heart, brain, and spinal cord, in quite distinctive ways.

This neural tube morphs, through stages, into our functioning heart beating away in our chest (see figure 7.1). At the same time, this same neural tube is equally the matrix for birth of those neurons from which the brain in our head is fashioned (thus the term neural tube). This neuron-birth out of the neural tube continues along with the formation of the heart. These neurons formed in the neural tube must migrate out of that neural tube matrix and its incipient heart, into that locus for an emerging brain, in our equally incipient cranium. Heart and brain thus have a common original matrix, the neural tube, which is, I propose, to be the matrix of self as well.

This sense of self, endemic to humans, is expressed through heart and brain equally, even as heart and brain develop in their separate locales later on, in order to do their “separate” jobs. These two locales of self—heart and brain—serve both functions of self, without self losing its singularity as simply self. Eventually self expresses its universal aspect in our heart, and its individual aspect in our head, these two functioning as a mirroring strange loop. Brain and heart, having given rise each to the other, cannot be without one another. Yet neither is identical with the other, nor could they be, if the twofold system is to work. Strange loops are reciprocal processes within creation, and within that created, not one-way streets or singular, isolated functions. No man is an island, nor is a single cell, or a function, or anything else.

Figure 7.1. Neural tube. (Line drawing by Eva Casey)

That the neural tube is the matrix of both brain and heart, both of which contain or express and are equally centers of self, is the issue. We can speak of a self in the heart and a self in the brain as a single self, since heart and brain are themselves “twin expressions” of our singular genetic neural tube system, playing their respective roles of specialization. Self will be, or is designed to be, a heart-brain affair. We have seen how this perfect symbiosis of self-heart-brain gets derailed into two essentially separate and, on the surface of things, even antagonistic systems. This schism leads to a long parade of disasters plaguing humans, which results from just such an induced, unnatural, and arbitrary “civil war” between heart and brain. This inner-body conflict may be the final state of a divided self—before it self-destructs.

The Splitting of Self

As originally designed, the heart-brain, in its twofold locus and structure, is the means by which our concept of self can be expressed as both universal and individual, each giving rise to the other. The unfolding of their strange loop is the story of human development—or failure. For here is the site of an eventual breakdown of this dual interaction, a split of that singular universal-individual self that brings about the proverbial fall of man, leaving us a species in constant free-fall, in fact, with “no place to lay our head” (such as even animals have).

That heart and brain are a single reciprocal unit “separated” according to usage has a direct correlation of right-hand and left-hand specialties. The ancient Rig-Veda refers to the “two hands of God,” each with its “specialty,” yet functioning only in sync with each other. Some Christian texts refer to Jesus “sitting at the right hand of his God” (which of course places his God in that left-hand bracket, which fits the picture before Paul and his Greek mythical-glosses over the original Jesus took place). There are other ancient references pointing toward this singular creative process that requires a dual means of expression, all reflecting the fact that there are no “one-way streets” in creation, no isolated, self-sufficient phenomena having no connection with anything—not even minds, souls, psyches, or what-have-you. All phenomena are reciprocal on some level, since only movement exists.1

Earth’s Pathology: Reciprocal Relations Gone Awry

Cellular pathologists Scott Williamson and Innes Pearse spent some three decades at the Pioneer Health Clinic in London, observing six families followed through three generations. Looking for what constitutes the general nature of health or wholeness, this husband-wife team, after years of insights and discoveries, were led to the unexpected conclusion that the Earth is a living sphere, a single living body (or, as poet Blake might say, the living body of a single great human).2 The surface life-structure or “skin” of this single Earth-being consists of plants and animals as intimate, critical parts of the total planetary life—rather as our body and skin are an interdependent unit. And we, as the most advanced of all species, most profoundly affect the living body of Earth, a body we are born to serve and be served by. (Williamson and Pearse’s proposal of Earth as a living being predated the similar Gaia theory.)

As Williamson and Pearse also explained, cellular health depends on a cell’s integration into and cooperation with the overall coherent functioning of the body of which that cell is part. Cells continually wear out and are replaced, while some simply lose their frequency-coherence, or ability to function as part of the coherent whole. Those incoherent cells continue to absorb nutrients, while contributing nothing to the whole and taking no part in body maintenance (again, since incoherent systems cannot mesh with or “communicate” with coherent ones, as explained in chapter 5).

Meanwhile, these incoherent renegades divide and multiply, as all cells are genetically programmed to do, thus increasing both incoherent cells and the uptake of nutrients, while adding nothing to the whole except more incoherence. This breakdown happens continually among any creature’s cells, and is ordinarily handled with skill by the body’s immune structure, dispatching these breakdowns as they occur.

Missed by the immune system—not excised and got rid of—such an incoherent cell functions only for its own survival or maintenance, since that singular survival reflex or instinct is all that is then available to that cell, having lost its reciprocal frequency relating it to the intelligence of the whole. This intelligence of the whole, which is its well-being, functions through (or as) the heart, but the incoherent cell—analogous to our incoherent human being—has lost its resonance with that intelligence. So that single incoherent cell survives at the expense of the cellular web to which it belongs (or did belong). The maverick cells can seriously disrupt this web, absorbing energy while contributing nothing other than reproducing more and more of their incoherent kind.

Williamson and Pearse rightly called this type of disruptive cell, acting only for its own well-being at the expense of those around it, a cancer, and concluded that the human species has itself become a cancerous growth on the body of the Earth, with each “human cell” of that “larger body” of man-Earth functioning only for its own survival. (Any similarity to unbridled capitalism as practiced this past century and elevated to near sanctified status in our pathological society, is well intended.) And, as these two cellular pathologists concluded half a century ago, we can expect this incoherent derailing to spread exponentially until destroying the whole body of man-Earth, as a cancer gone wild tends to do. (I mourn both for the body of Man, my body, and for Earth, our body—and their reciprocal life-processes.)

Sophia’s Service or Its opposite?

Robert Sardello speaks of Sophia, the Spirit of our living Earth, to be served by us as good stewards; Sophia, in turn, as our matrix, nurtures us. This is a cosmology and awareness shared by the Kogi, a remarkable, almost totally unknown civilization occupying a huge mountain on the coast of Colombia, South America; they have deliberately isolated their culture for four centuries or so, since the Spanish invasion. The Kogi voluntarily revealed themselves recently to explain to us our destruction not only of their civilization, but of the living Earth herself, warning us, of course, to cease and desist from our destructive policies. The Kogi described how we moderns no longer serve the Earth and her Spirit, but rather, by destroying her will die with her. And the Kogi, several thousand of them, are indeed being eliminated from our planet today, by our contemporary mind-set and technologies, even faster than we are eliminating ourselves.

Instructive at this point—and consonant with the Kogi’s warnings and Sardello’s Sophianic view—is our earlier concern with strange loops and the resonant merging of fields within fields: fields of people with Earth and the field of Earth with Sun. These show a reciprocation between the forces that power both planet and, indirectly, each of us. But our particular “part” of the holonomic totality, rather than becoming more focused, resolved, and coherent, is growing ever-more fuzzy and chaotic. Incoherent action on the planet, brought about by its corresponding reciprocal action, is reflected in a variety of ways—continually more unpredictable earth-and-sea changes and their parallel in the rise of incoherent personal and communal patterns of behavior. Behavioral changes are displayed in the mounting irrational anti-survival and destructive actions against each other as well as our Earth, gaining ever-greater momentum. (One recalls the Orwellian prediction of a war of all against all, as we read of American families arming to the teeth to protect themselves against their armed-to-the-teeth neighbors.) Such negative behavior enters into the mounting incoherence that has seized the reciprocal balances of our life and planet and feed back in ever more powerful reciprocal reactions, affecting us creatures on the surface who then affect the coherence of Earth itself, round and round.

Evolution’s Response

At the core of this dilemma lies that tired and ancient issue, our fear of death, the adverse side of life, which may underlie our equal fear of both life and death, as so nakedly shown in Sigmund Freud’s writings. Lower species express many gradations of survival-fear, but, having no “mind” like ours (we assume), probably do not face the daunting and haunting problem of eventual death as we do, a fear arising from late childhood on.

Subsequent pages here will explore an evolutionary “work in progress” which has been in process as long as we have been around. This work in progress is evolution’s response to this most overwhelming of all limitations and constraints, which is not so much personal death as our crippling fear of it. Death as itself has no evolutionary challenge, but a life lived in fear of death sets up a constant incoherency that limits us severely. In this light, we can now revisit our earlier perspective: evolution is the transcendent movement to go beyond limitation and constraint. Now, we are considering limitations and constraints that affect the whole planet.

Creation and Evolution: A Mirror-to-Mirror Strange Loop

To understand our own life-creation is to understand all creation, and to understand our evolutionary makeup is to understand the evolutionary makeup of the cosmos. Evolution and cosmology embrace both the broad universal and the purely personal, showing them to arise from and as the same function. The cosmos and I are of the same creative process: a mirroring loop of potential in the process of realizing itself.

Creation takes place through an evolutionary process, just as evolution is that creative process. They, too, are a strange loop. The endless expressions of creation, spreading out from us universally, are essentially of the same order as our self and its searching within. We are the only way creation can be, but we are not identically that creation. As Meister Eckhart expressed it some six centuries ago, “Without me God is not,” recognizing that without God, Eckhart was not, while in no way assuming that he, Eckhart, was God—or vice versa. Eckhart and God were a strange loop, each giving rise to the other, as is the case for each of us.

There can be no creation without a creator, nor creator without creation, for the two phenomena, like self and universe, give rise to each other—neither possible without the other, and so essentially a single phenomenon with two aspects or faces—rather like our initial heart-brain as a singular self.

Stepping Out into Nothing and the Strange Loop

Creation is an endless process stochastically exploring every possibility of being (stochasm meaning purposeful randomness). Evolution is an ever-present urge within all created event-phenomena to move beyond the limitations or constraints of any created event-phenomena. So evolution is the transcendent aspect of creation, creation the response to evolution. And every phenomenon, every event, has its eventual limitation and constraint. There could be no creation that is final, since even the concept of finality would indicate limitation against which evolution, as is its nature, would perforce move creation to rise above and go beyond.

To move beyond limitation and constraint is a twofold process: first, to generate such movement itself, and second, to create that which lies beyond. And that which lies beyond the limiting constraints of something created comes about and is realized—made real and actual—only by the movement of transcendence or “goingbeyond” itself. “Where” transcendence might go in “moving beyond” is determined by the going itself. (“We walk by falling forward, and go where we have to go . . .” as poet Theodore Roethke spoke of it.) Our “going” enters into the nature of that which we enter into and brings about by our going—the very definition of a strange loop. And herein lies the central thesis of this little argument of mine, as it did in my first work over half a century ago.

By its nature, evolution reveals all “points of constraint-limitation” in creation, and creation takes place stochastically, in a process of random profusion and a purposeful selectivity from that profusion, according to what works. Like water, evolution seeks out, through means, which come about through this seeking-out, a level that lies beyond its present state—the “present state” being all of creation at the moment of the stochastic movement to go beyond.

Thus, the cosmos expands-evolves, moves beyond itself, as does the evolving person; wherein lies the key to our evolution’s move to overcome the apparent final limitation and constraint of death, or the fear of it—or both. Cosmos and person are of the same order, the same essential creative function, regardless of “scalar” difference (light-years or micrometers). And we are that creative function on its micrometer scale, or were, until we invented electron microscopes that call for a yet finer gradation or scalar measurement. No crowding down there (or here)—plenty of room for yet further stochasm and evolution.