#64. Ritual's Biological Roots

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This is the sixth in a series of posts about the connections between religious ritual and evolution; it's also the second of three posts dealing with ritual's psychological, biological and cosmic roots.

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From an evolutionary perspective, it makes good sense that religious ritual should have roots in the human psyche which has been developing over the past several million years. But it's far less obvious, as I said in the previous post, that it also has roots in the living things of the Earth that existed long before we humans appeared.

Our knowledge about ritual's biological roots comes from two areas of modern science: the name of one is familiar, neurology; the name of the other, ethology, is not.

Neurology is, of course, the study of the brain and nervous system. 

Not just of humans, however. Neuro-science also includes the brains of primates, mammals and the less complex animals such as insects and mollusks. Even worms have a nervous system.

Most of us are familiar with this area of science, probably from high school or college biology courses, and perhaps also from relatives and friends who may have brain injuries or nervous disorders. 

Neurology began as a branch of medicine and the term "neurologist" still refers first to a medical doctor who specializes in brain and nervous system problems.

While the name ethology is much less familiar to most of us, its findings are quite familiar-- thanks to wonderful TV programs such as Planet Earth and NOVA.

Ethology is the study of animal behavior. Who hasn't watched in awe at pictures of male penguins sitting for months on their mate's eggs, or of female lions taking care of their young, or of the adventures of a humpback whale in its first year of life.

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Even though we know something about these scientific areas of neurology and ethology, we rarely make any connections between them and religious ritual. The still-strong rationalistic and anthropocentric biases in our culture keeps us from relating religious ritual to information about the brains and behavior of animals.

But there's one inter-disciplinary science area which does gives attention to those connections: Biogenetic Structuralism. I've mentioned it frequently in these posts.

To the best of my knowledge, the pioneering efforts of these scientists-- described in books such as Brain, Symbol and Experience (1990), and the earlier The Spectrum of Ritual (1979)-- still remain on the growing edge of the integration of science and religion.

If Biogenetic Structuralism is new to you, you might like to look at some of my early posts about it. I offer a background to it in post #8 and an overview in post #10.

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With its combination of insights from anthropology, neurology and ethology, the Biogenetic Structuralist understanding of ritual's biological roots is an especially significant contribution to the evolutionary perspectives of the New Cosmology.

As we move away from the static worldview of the past-- with its patriarchal rationalism and religious dualism-- and into the evolutionary perspectives of the New Cosmology-- where the emphasis is on our creative participation in the cosmic process-- we need a clear understanding of ritual's biological roots. It is ritual that empowers our participation in that evolutionary process.

In what follows, I hope to share enough of what I know about contemporary neurological and ethological findings to provide a basic understanding of ritual's biological roots. This post is a bit longer than most because the material is complicated, but it's easy enough to follow if you take your time reading it.

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Some thoughts about neurology first. As the study of the brain and nervous system, neurology helps us to understand just how human consciousness results from the workings of the brain. Here, it's important to keep in mind that even animals who lack a brain and nervous system have some degree of consciousness.

Several readers asked recently whether I thought animals are conscious. There's no doubt that they are-- although they obviously don't have that specific kind of consciousness, an awareness of their awareness, which we humans have.

Even single-celled animals have awareness. Amoebas, for example, are able to detect a damaging foreign substance in their liquid environment and move away from it.

They have no brain or nervous system, of course-- they have no organs at all-- but they obviously have an internal ability to be sensitive and responsive to their external environment.

Biologists call that internal self-organization "a within," but the non-scientific name for it is simply life.

Every living thing has a "within" by which it is to some extent both independent of, and yet sensitive and responsive to, its environment. That's what "alive" means.

Some will find it disconcerting that I'm using "consciousness" and "life" as synonyms. This shows how anthropocentric we still are-- that we're not yet comfortable with the thought that even one-celled animals have a "within."

We can be much less anthropocentric when we recognize that words like "sensitive and responsive," "alive," "aware" and "conscious" are all terms for the same internal self-organization-- for that "within"-- which defines any living thing.

It also helps to see that our human consciousness isn't so much different from animal consciousness as it is an especially complex version of it. While the idea may sound unfamiliar, it's helpful to think of humans as having more "self-organization"-- more "within," more "awareness"-- than our animal relations.

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Especially important to keep in mind here is the idea that the most fundamental aspect of the evolutionary process is the drive toward increasing material complexity. And that that drive results at every level of the process in the emergence of new characteristics.

From amoebas to humans, consciousness emerges from the complex organization of a living thing's physical, chemical and biological components.

We can get some idea of why human consciousness is so special when we realize that, while our brain is made up of living cells much like those of the one-celled amoeba, it's made of billions of them. And they're all inter-connected.

If one-celled amoebas can be conscious, imagine what a billion inter-connected cells all working together can be. That's the human brain.

It's more complex than the brains of any other living things we know of. But we really don't need to imagine it (as I just suggested). We know what it's like-- from our personal experience of it.

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The findings of neurological science help us understand that experience of being aware of being aware.

In animal brains generally, sense-data is received into the brain and dealt with by being compared to information already present in the brain's structures.

In non-human animals, this happens in somewhat specific parts of the brain called association areas. And in the more complex human brain, even those association areas themselves are inter-connected and working together.

It's this great complexity-- so great that it is difficult to imagine-- which allows us not only to be more sensitive and responsive to our environment than any other animals, but also allows us to be aware of things not present in our environment.

I described these ideas in a very early post: #12 (The Cognitive Extension of Prehension). Their main point about the uniqueness of human consciousness is that, unlike other conscious creatures, we are not totally dependent on sense-data coming into our brain from the external world. We are aware of our own "within."

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That's what makes us human. In philosophical terms, it's described as "open-ness" or "transcendence." In psychological terms, we call it "freedom" or "autonomy." And in religious contexts we use the familiar words, "spirit" and "soul."

One especially significant idea about this neurological understanding of human consciousness is that it allows us to see that we don't need to interpret our human uniqueness in dualistic terms. For many centuries, the human "spirit" was thought to indicate that we are aliens on the Earth and that we really belong some place else.

It's understandable that 0ur ability to be aware of material things even in their absence-- and also to be aware, as well, of our own "within"-- was attributed to something other than the matter of the universe, in earlier times.

People just didn't know in those days about the evolutionary process. And so they had no way to understand that conscious awareness emerges from the complexity of the physical structures of our brains.

Today, neurological science allows us to see that the human "spirit"-- the fact that we have a "soul"-- doesn't separate us from the rest of the biological and physical world. Indeed, it helps us to better understand our place in that world.

We have come a long way in the last half-century in our self-understanding! I often mention in these posts our need for a bigger picture. We regard to our self-awareness, we've got it.

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When we look at that big picture, what we see is life on Earth extending back about 3.5 billion years, and we see that a "within"-- self-organization or consciousness-- was present in the earliest ancestors of contemporary living things.

Those earliest life-forms are our ancestors, too. We owe our human spirit-- our inner awareness-- to them.

You may be thinking, Well, yes, that is indeed a pretty big picture of consciousness. But what's it got to do with ritual?

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This is where ethology comes in. To have a good understanding of ritual's biological roots we need to know not just about the brains of our animal ancestors but also about what results from the workings of their brains: their behavior.

As I mentioned above, it's thanks to the various TV shows about nature that we generally know much more about ethology than we do about neurology.

And those nature programs do such a good job showing animal behavior! We watch them in awe, sometimes puzzled, but often delighted-- especially at things like the mating rituals of birds.

And sometimes, if we're lucky, we see similar mating rituals in nature.

However, even though we use the same word in both cases, we usually don't make a connection between the ritual behavior of animals and our own religious rituals.

You may be asking whether you are understanding me correctly. Am I'm saying that things like Tibetan monks chanting in a mountain monastery or a family celebrating the Passover Seder have their roots in the behavior of birds and animals?

Yes. That's exactly what I'm saying.

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Human speech has its biological roots in the same kind of brain activities as bird calls, the barking of dogs and the roar of a lion; they are information-transmitting sounds made by animals. Ritual is like that; its roots, too, are in the kind of brain activities that result in animal behavior which conveys information.

We need to keep in mind that the over-all purpose of animal behavior is simply the survival and continuation of individuals and the species. And that's the purpose of ritual behavior, too: the survival of life.

The key here is the idea that ritual activity generates cooperative behavior.

It's most obvious in mating rituals. Male birds act out plumage displays, for example, to get the females' attention and convey the information that they are well-qualified for producing young with high survival qualities.

The point is that just as the ritual behavior of a robin empowers it to participate in the cosmic process at a robin-level of awareness, so our religious ritual similarly empowers us to participate in the evolutionary process at our level of awareness.

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To tie these thoughts together we need to look back at neurology once again.

When a female robin becomes conscious of good survival qualities in a potential mate, what's going on in her brain is described in the neurology perspective as the recognition of information in terms of previous experience.

That experience is said by the neuro-scientists to be stored in the association areas of the brain, and her experience has what they call "an affective component." To put it simply: If the female robin doesn't feel good about what's being communicated to her, she says, "No, thank you." Otherwise, the mating process proceeds.

This understanding makes it fairly easy to see that ritual behavior in animals is oriented to cooperative activity on behalf of the survival and thrival of life.

But it's less easy to see, at least at first, that the same thing is going on in the human brain during our religious rituals; our brains, too, have an "affective component" oriented toward social cooperation for life's survival and thrival.

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To understand this well, it's important to remember that the human brain isn't totally dependent on sense data coming in from the external environment. Our consciousness is less stimulus-bound, more open, more free.

And because of that openness, we can be conscious of new things. We can be aware of future possibilities, of what is not yet. Our human "within" generates novelty.

The name for this newness-generating ability is, of course, creativity. I shared some thoughts about its connections with ritual in posts #59 and #61.

It's our understanding of creativity that lets us put all these thoughts about the biological roots of ritual together. Creativity is the very essence of the evolutionary process. And the very purpose of our religious rituals is to empower us for creative participation in that process.

Our understanding of creativity also helps us to see that religious ritual is not about myth or story-telling, as it's sometimes said to be; it's not about education in any sense. In practical terms, ritual is simply physical activity.

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Two summary thoughts:

From ethology we can see that just as the robin's mating behavior empowers it to participate in the cosmic process at a robin's level of awareness, so in the same way human religious ritual empowers us to participate in the evolutionary process at our more much complex-- and creative-- level of awareness.

From neurology we can see that just as the purpose of ritual behavior in animals is to generate cooperative behavior for the individuals' and species' survival, so too is our ritual behavior concerned with the survival-- and the flourishing-- of life.

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A closing observation:

We now understand what "survival" involves much better than we did in even the recent past. Ecological awareness has dawned on global humanity, and-- in a way people could not, previously-- we know that "survival" means ecological sustainability.

We are also coming to see, although somewhat more slowly, that environmental sustainability isn't something different from what in past times was called social justice. With our bigger picture, we easily recognize that peace, justice and equality are rooted in the 
Earth itself. And so we can see, as never before, that the environmental degradation of the planet results from a lack of social justice for the peoples of the Earth.

As I see it, the greatest value of knowing about the biological roots of ritual is that it so wonderfully clarifies our creative role in the cosmic process.

sam@macspeno.com

PS. For a fascinating bit of information about the contemporary importance of awe, see The New York Times article FINDINGS from Feb 9, 2010.

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#60. Symbol, Myth & Meaning

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This is the second of several posts dealing with an understanding of religious ritual in the context of cosmic evolution.

I'm aware that the very idea that there might be a connection between religious ritual and the evolution of the universe sounds strange to many readers, so it's important that we keep in mind that humanity is in the midst of an Immense Transition-- from a static to a dynamic worldview-- and that we are now at a new religious moment in the history of the world.

I see giving our attention, at this time, to the place of religious ritual in the evolutionary worldview as a creative activity on the growing edge of the immense Transition.

My main point is that religious ritual is how we humans plug into the energy of the cosmos; it's the means by which we are empowered to participate in the evolution of the universe.

A major problem in talking about all this is that most of the words we have available only have meanings left over from the static worldview. 

In post #59, I listed six of them.

Three are familiar: symbol, myth and meaning. I'm sharing my thoughts about them in this post. The other three-- wisdom, cosmology and creativity-- are much less familiar and I plan to talk about them in the next post.

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One of the main difficulties with all this is that the more familiar terms are often used in less than precise ways in everyday life. And the first two ("symbol" and "myth") are commonly used with meanings which are the very opposite of the ways we need to understand them in order to make sense of the links between cosmic evolution and religious ritual.

An added difficulty is that all three terms are frequently used in confusing pairs; examples include "myth and symbol," "symbolic ritual" and "meaningful symbols." And Myth and Meaning is the title of one of the most significant books for contemporary religious studies.

Of that first group, the word "meaning" offers a special challenge. I think it's the key to sorting out all the other words. My experience has been that it's only when we're comfortable with what "meaning" means that "myth," "symbol" and "ritual" make good sense.

So I'm going to tackle the meaning of "meaning" first.

But a caution: It's important not to get lost in words here. My intention is not philosophical or linguistic analysis, but simply to clarify the meanings of these words in order to share my thoughts about the connections between religious ritual and cosmic evolution.

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MEANING. As I said in the previous post, "Of course, we know what 'meaning' means. At least we feel that we do." In that post I asked readers to think about how they would describe the meaning of "meaning" for an intelligent high school student. (I received one anonymous comment in response that was quite good.)

The best understanding I have of "meaning" comes from Claude Levi-Strauss, the "father of modern anthropology" and author of the book Myth and Meaning I mentioned above. His name is familiar even to many who've no idea what he may have been saying. (He died only recently, in October, 2009, at age 101. The New York Times has a good obituary.)

Essentially, Levi-Strauss says that what we mean by "meaning" is how we understand anything-- that the meaning of something is our understanding of it.

At first hearing, this sounds simplistic-- or maybe even incomprehensible. But the more we think about it, the more good sense it makes.

Whether we're talking about a physical object, an event, or a story, what makes something important to us is the depth of our understanding of it.

Note that what's being said here is that things do not have meaning in themselves. We tend to think they do, but when we reflect on it we can see that it's our understanding of something, not the thing in itself, which gives us its meaning. And we can also see, then, that the more ways we understand anything, the more "meaningful" it becomes for us.

The classic example is a wedding ring. It's not the gold or silver but our understanding that makes a wedding ring meaningful. In our rationalist patriarchal culture-- still preoccupied with money and afraid of relationships-- the best we can do in expressing "meaning" in this case is to say that the wedding ring has "sentimental value." It's almost a dismissal.

Patriarchal cultural does a bit better with its use of the term "significant other." What makes a person "significant" is our depth of understanding of them. Although you won't find CEOs and politicians talking about relationships with "significant others," it is precisely our understanding of our relationships which makes persons "meaningful" or "significant" for us.

Both tribal peoples and traditional religious language offer some good terms for expressing the meaning of "meaning." Plains Indians use the word "wakan," for example, to say that the buffalo is of great significance to them. And in English we have familiar religious words like "sacred" or "holy" to say the same thing.

In a dualistic religious context, such words are usually reserved for "spiritual" (non-material) things; but most people probably wouldn't give you an argument if you referred to something as sacred as a photo of your long-dead mother as a "holy" picture.

In any case, we need to keep in mind that whether we say "holy," "sacred," "wakan," or use a less religious-sounding term such as "important" or "significant," the "meaning" of something isn't in the thing itself but in our understanding of it.

It's this thought that we need if we are to make good sense of the terms "symbol" and "myth," and-- eventually-- of the connections between religious ritual and cosmic evolution.

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MYTH. In the fitness center where I attend tai chi classes several times a week, a large poster recently appeared advertising a "Workshop on Cardiac Myths." It wasn't necessary to explain that the topic was "commonly held but incorrect ideas about heart-related exercise."

We need a more positive understanding of "myth" if we are to make sense of religious ritual and its connections with cosmic evolution.

While most of us are familiar with the classical Greek myths (stories about Zeus and Athena, for example), many of us are only vaguely aware that every cultural group-- from the tribal peoples of Tierra del Fuego to 21st-century North Americans-- has such stories.

One of the best known myth-stories, found throughout all the world's cultures, is that of a Great Flood. In the western world we know it, of course, as the story of Noah and the Ark; it is included in the sacred scriptures of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

When early anthropologists first began to study mythology back in the 1800s, they made several unconscious assumptions about the stories of the tribal peoples they were studying.

One assumption was that the myth-stories of these "primitive" peoples were attempts at what today we would call "scientific" explanations of the workings of the world. These 19th-century scientists assumed that tribal myths are descriptions of the behavior of stars and planets and especially of the animal herds on which the people's lives depended.

They also presumed-- in their rationalist arrogance-- that they were superior to the primitive peoples they were studying. As typical products of their time, the early anthropologists saw tribal stories as attempts at primitive science on the part of people who lacked the skills, talents and superior intelligence which those 19th-century scientists assumed they had.

Today, we know better. For a start, we know that "primitive" people weren't all that primitive: we know that human beings who lived five or ten thousand years ago had exactly the same kind of bodies, brains and mental ability we do today. We also know, now, that their attempts to make sense of the world by way of stories wasn't so far off the track.

While tribal myths are indeed about the behavior of stars, planets and game animals, we can see much better today that humanity's myth-stories are also-- and primarily-- about the workings of the human mind. 

Their central concern is psychology and social life.

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If you are interested in these ideas, you might like to read Levi-Strauss' Myth and Meaning. It's readily available in libraries, short (only 50 pages!) and quite easy to follow.

It's comes from a series of radio talks he gave for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in the 1970s. In them he expresses such a wonderfully broad, human, concerned viewpoint and depth of understanding that he leaves most talk along those lines-- from church people and politicians, for example-- in the dust.

It's so impressive to see a person like this actually talking to real people. 

He is able to be not only clear but quite precise about the results of our attempts at understanding ourselves and the world. I can promise that if you're interested in religion or science, you'll like this book.

For a more difficult challenge, there's Levi-Strauss's earlier 1958 work, Structural Anthropology. If nothing else, I urge you to look at the Wikipedia article about his significance with regard to those perspectives in the human sciences known as structuralism.

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Structuralism is defined as "the search for the underlying patterns of thought in all forms of human activity." Levi-Strauss was one of the first to see that humanity's mythical stories have an underlying structure that in fact makes good sense, even though that underlying structure isn't obvious on the surface. It's that underlying structure that we understand.

The Biogenetic Structuralism perspective I've mentioned many times in these posts is a similar structuralist understanding, but it's a further advance, in that its context is the neurologically-informed evolutionary worldview that was not yet available to Levi-Strauss.

When we see ourselves as part of the naturally evolving world, we can see that even our minds are a part of the cosmic process, so that our myths are not just stories about our understanding of the workings of the world but also about our understanding of ourselves.

It's easy to lose track of the main points here, simply because most of these thoughts are so unfamiliar. For the record: my main point is that the world's myth-stories are precisely about meaning. Myths are the expressions of global humanity's self-understanding.

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In the New Cosmology's dynamic-evolutionary context, that self-understanding is quite rich! When we ask, What is the cosmic process about? ("What is the Universe Doing?" as I put it in post #17), we can see that the universe is making persons. We know ourselves as nothing less than personal and unique expressions of the universe become conscious of itself.

We can also recognize that there is much in us that has not yet become conscious. While we can "phenomenologically apprehend" many of the patterns of the way the world works-- in terms of cause and effect, as Dr. Jakob Wolf, whose ideas I discussed in post #53 (Bridging the Gap), helps us so well to understand-- it is also the case that many of those patterns of the world's workings remain unconscious to us.

What psychologists call the "unconscious psyche" is nothing less than the entire universe other than our conscious awareness. C. G. Jung says that the unconscious world within us is even bigger than the physical world outside us.

Jung and Freud were the first in modern times to recognize that the cosmic process shows itself in our dreams and unconscious waking behavior-- that the patterns of the way the world works seep out, even if barely, into conscious expression-- and that that is where our myth-stories come from.

Far from being "commonly held but incorrect ideas," humanity's myths are meaningful-- important, significant, sacred-- because they are expressions of the underlying patterns of the way our minds work. And it's because our myth-stories allow us to understand ourselves as unique expressions of the evolution of the universe that "myth" and "meaning" go together.

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SYMBOL. The word "symbol," too, is often paired with "meaning" (as in "symbolic meaning" or "meaningful symbol"), so that at first glance there seems to be little difference between myth and symbol. It's confusing because we have two different kinds of things we call "symbols." Some occur in nature, while others are the inventions of human culture.

Culturally invented symbols are like myths in that their meaning is our understanding of them. The arbitrary arrangement of letters and numbers in the symbol "H₂0" is a good example. We culturally agree to understand it as standing for water, just as we do with the sequence of the five letters w, a, t, e, and r.

But water itself-- the stuff that falls from the sky, that we swim in, wash ourselves with and drink-- can also be a symbol. So can food. So can fire.

It's these naturally occurring symbols that we need to understand if we are to make sense of ritual. What's so special about things like water, food and fire is that they grab our attention.

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People have known for many thousands of years that naturally occurring symbols like food, fire and water are "attention-grabbers." But it's only in modern times-- thanks to our understanding of natural selection at the primate level-- that we know how they work.

We know today that the minds and brains of our animal ancestors evolved to continually scan their environment; their very survival-- both as individuals and as a species-- depended on their finding food and water and avoiding danger.

We are not the descendents of those animals who, for some genetic reason, lacked that scanning ability; they didn't live long enough to pass on their genes to us. We are the descendents of the ones who survived because their attention shifted every few seconds.

We know from experience that our attention, too, is constantly shifting from one thing to another-- just like that of our primate ancestors. We also know that we can help ourselves stay focused-- to be "mindful," as Buddhists say-- by practicing meditation exercises.

Those things in nature which powerfully grab our attention also make it easier for us to be mindful. Think of how water in almost any form-- a heavy rain, a stream, a river, a lake, a pond, or the ocean--holds our attention. And how we are fascinated by flames and fire-- from the smallest birthday candle to a burning building or a glorious sunset.

Note that such natural symbols are different from myths as well as from the kind of symbols we use in math and science: while myths are expressions of our understanding of ourselves, these natural symbols are tools which help us to focus on our self-understanding.

In religious ritual we use the psychological, attention-grabbing power of natural symbols to counteract our brains' constant scanning activity. 

Calling them "tools" doesn't demean them. The reverse is true: they help us to consciously enter into the very meaning of our existence.

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If you're thinking that none of this sounds much like the religious rituals you have recently experienced, you're right. Ours is still a patriarchal culture-- alienated from the world and seeking escape from it-- so most of our conventional religious rituals involve only minimal use of these powerful natural symbols, and some church services omit them totally.

But we are now at a new religious moment in the history of the world: we're coming to see ourselves as belonging to the evolutionary universe and called to creatively contribute to it.

That's why creativity and cosmology are the topics of my next post. They are as essential as symbol, myth and meaning for understanding the relationship between evolution and ritual.

Meanwhile, you might like to share how you feel about what I've had to say in this post.

Do these thoughts about symbol, myth and meaning make much sense? Any at all?

Send me a note!

sam@macspeno.com

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