Religions And Their Source/2. Revelations And Conversions/Endnotes
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1. Recall that in Chapter One we defined memories to include such elements as facts, theories, opinions, personal experiences, emotions, past thoughts, ideas, etc.
2. Something like the following was once said by an assembly-line worker: “Everyday I comes in, and I switches on the machine. Then I marries the Duke. . . .”
3. Easier, but often less accurate. Over time, the accuracy and truth of any event held in memory can become unwittingly modified. Memories become erroneously linked (as witnesses’ differing statements make obvious). What we think happened may not in fact have happened at all. A wished-for fantasy (for example, that the girl or boy next door had a crush on you) can later be remembered as reality, and is a disorder that has been called the False Memory Syndrome. (See Elizabeth Loftus & Katherine Ketcham, The Myth of Repressed Memory: False Memories and Allegations of Sexual Abuse [New York: St. Martin’s Press, Inc., 1996] for a discussion of this syndrome.)
Severing the link between the left and right hemispheres of the brain can also cause false memories. The left hemisphere (which searches for and provides explanations of observations recorded primarily in the right hemisphere) when disconnected can be shown to invent reasons for witnessed events, because the mind needs to resolve the conundrum such unexplained events pose. See Michael S. Gazzaniga, “The Split Brain Revisited,” in the July 1998 issue of Scientific American, 50–55.
4. For example, any long-partnered individual can often predict how their companion will respond or behave, because many responses stem from a “hardwired” neural network chain.
5. There is an even higher cost to holding constructs: they are never accurate. The reality-depicting constructs that we hold in our minds are always incomplete, and therefore somewhat false representations of the real world outside. Our senses, our interpretations of what they are telling us, and the way we rebuild in our mind what we imagine exists in the external world, all distort the accuracy of the mental constructs we hold.
Plato believed the reverse. He taught that our minds can comprehend the ideal, and that the real world is only a poor representation of this absolute. In fact, our minds comprehend a (not-too-poor) representation of the true reality that exists outside of the mind. (Plato’s ideas gave rise to a science based upon religion and philosophy. This resulted in a millennium of science being used for little other than to “illustrate and interpret the scriptures.” See Middleton, The Scientific Revolution, 34.)
Interestingly, numerous scientists and mathematicians currently suspect that the basis to reality is mathematical and therefore abstract rather than concrete.
6. This, naturally, reduces our ability to be creative. (See Creativity, a postscript to Chapter Five.)
7. This implies that there are degrees of “valuing.” (See also Chapter Thirteen.)
8. Army “boot camps” regularly operate by enforcing a behavioural mode; after a while this becomes the soldier’s mind-set. In time, such conditioning can even create belief. (Pompous “Colonel Blimp” personalities believe that their way of behaving is the one-and-only proper way to behave, and many children are brought up possessing beliefs inculcated in this manner.) The kind of “reformation” we are discussing in Chapter Five occurs in the reverse order. It starts within the mind with a changed way of thinking, and behavioural change follows later. Either sequence of events develops mental constructs.
9. Much of what is being written here about religious conversions applies equally well to any kind of conversion (e.g., to fascism or communism).
10. The work of Sunday school teachers and missionaries illustrates this point. Each describes the background, the stories, the key features of their religion, and explains the significance of their rituals to their listeners. They are painting a picture that attempts to convey the reality and relevance of a religious environment to those who lack such an environment.
Once some of these details have been absorbed, once a store of religious information exists to draw from, the pupil may be ready to take the next step. Neophytes are encouraged to value the attainment of some goal that the leader has in mind. The leader’s zeal, obvious conviction, passion, and very presence as someone to emulate, all aid this process. What happens next depends upon how these ideas are perceived by the recipient. Often, in children, nothing visible occurs; the listener absorbs the speaker’s intention, but does not feel impelled to do anything more. On occasion, in adults, when mental conditions (i.e., constructs created by past experiences and learnings) are receptive, something very dramatic happens: the listener experiences a “conversion.”
11. Western accounts not infrequently also report the appearance of white-cloaked, Christ-like figures.
12. See later chapters (and the postscripts to Chapter Seven) for reasons why it is not possible to prove either that a god exists or does not exist.
13. I am indebted to Timothy Ferris for this insight. See “The Interpreter,” an essay in Ferris’s interesting book, The Mind’s Sky: Human Intelligence in a Cosmic Context (New York: Bantam Books, 1992).
14. Animals also transfer mental activities performed consciously into the subconscious. Analysis of the neural firing patterns of Australian zebra finches when singing and when asleep indicate that the birds rehearse the song during their slumber. (See Daniel Margoliash in Science, 30 March, 2001.) Similarly, the neural firing patterns that rats produced while negotiating a maze were repeated exactly when these rats slept. (See Kenway Louie and Matthew A. Wilson, “Temporally Structured Replay of Awake Hippocampal Ensemble Activity during Rapid Eye Movement Sleep,” in Neuron, January 2001, 145-156.) These subconscious activities may occur as synaptic knob growth transforms temporary memory loops into permanent neural networks, or they may be the brain’s way of strengthening memories and constructs by repeatedly retracing mental routes taken earlier. Alternatively, the neural firing may be induced as the animal’s mind attempts to reduce some kind of stress-causing primitive fear—fear of the consequences that might arise should they forget what has been learned, perhaps.
15. Stored emotions, with their accompanying tensions, anxieties and stresses, drive many of our dreams. By dreaming, the mind reduces the amount of energy it would otherwise have to expend when awake to handle the by-products of these anxiety-causing emotions. Dreaming achieves this by activating possible stress-relieving (although not necessarily logical) alternative networks to those creating the stressful emotions. In other words, to determine if a dream has any significance, its emotional content must be sought and explored.
Discussing dreams reminds me that my wife, every year or so, dreams that she has lost her purse. These dream experiences, although stressful when occurring, perhaps act cathartically to relieve pressures accumulating from a possibly continual minor worry about the safe whereabouts of her purse. (This happens to be an example where the context as well as the emotion is relevant; dreams are not usually this easy to interpret.)
16. Stress-produced chemicals may be released into the blood-stream during attempts to solve difficult problems; if so, then these might be the cause of “psychologically upset stomachs.”
17. To be read in a version edited by James R. Newman as a sidebar under the topic Creativity, in Microsoft Encarta, DVD-ROM Reference Suite 99 (Microsoft Corporation, 1999) originally printed in the August 1948 edition of Scientific American.
18. The Ottawa Citizen, February 26, 2001, B4.
19. Poincaré, in his essay Mathematical Creation, reports two daytime instances when (after days of prior thought) solutions suddenly presented themselves to him.
20. Robert Cooke, Dr. Folkman’s War: Angiogenesis & the Struggle to Defeat Cancer (New York: Random House, 2001), 242-243.
21. Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin, The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist (New York: Warner Books, Inc., 1991), 419-420.
22. A similar, but entirely unrelated, process is used by “data-mining” computer software. In this practice, vast amounts of information (for instance, the data banks of an insurance company, large retail outlet, or DNA-sequencing enterprise) are searched to find any qualitative or quantitative co-relationships or commonalties that may exist. By this method, even software that has been given absolutely no instructions about attributes to look for, can find new and often significant connections between various data. These new associations can then be used by forward-thinking individuals to develop new opportunities, products or lines of research.
23. A temporary but powerful surge in ion flow could occur when tortuous and resistant neural pathways are suddenly replaced by new, free-flowing ones. This sudden increase in ion flow could be the trigger that precipitates a break-through, from subconscious to consciousness, of the newly found solution. Such a surge could also cause a release of emotion-creating chemicals, as well as excite portions of the visual network generating lights and other images.
24. Mystical experiences are only mystical because we do not understand how they might be produced. Our understanding of such phenomena is progressing, however. Experiments that induce oxygen starvation of the brain (i.e., a biochemical event) can replicate similar perceptions. Subjects reported seeing bright lights, colours, landscapes and people; hearing noises ranging from roaring to screaming; having out-of-body sensations; and feeling emotions of peace, detachment and pleasure—all of which made the subjects resist returning to consciousness, and all clearly fabricated within and by the brain or mind. (This investigation was carried out by doctors from the neurological department of the University Clinic Rudolf Virchow, Berlin, reported in 1994 in the British medical journal, The Lancet [and reviewed in The Ottawa Citizen on 24 September, 1994].)
M. A. Persinger and the Neuroscience Research Group at Laurentian University in Canada, have induced “near-death” and “mystical” experiences (with subjects reporting images of tunnels, lights, faces and figures) by subjecting volunteers to weak, transcerebral magnetic fields. As we learned in physics class, a changing magnetic field creates electrical currents in conductors, and neurons (which contain electrically charged chemical ions) act as electrical conductors. Thus, changing magnetic fields around the brain will induce random biochemical flows through neurons, activating stored memories but in distorted fashion. These are then interpreted by the mind to be the events as reported.
See also “A qualitative and quantitative study of the incidence, features and aetiology of near death experiences in cardiac arrest survivors,” Resuscitation, Vol. 48 (2) (2001) 149-156, for a clinical discussion of experiences similar to those described above.
(“Out-of-body” and other sensations formerly considered to be mystical, can also be repeatedly induced by electrically stimulating the right angular gyrus; see Olaf Blanke, et al., “Stimulating own-body perceptions,” Nature, 419, 2002, 269-270.)
25. The feeling of “being one with the universe,” such as reported by some mystics, artists, scientists, religious persons, and individuals after meditating, also suggests that first-level impressions can be accessed at the conscious third-level of thought under suitable conditions. Cassirer, in Language and Myth, provides the clue. Pre-linguistic awareness, or mythic understanding, occurs when the brain receives stimuli from our senses with no interpretation. The whole appears just as it is, to the best of our senses’ receiving capabilities. No pre-conceived, language-derived interpretations add to, or subtract from, the awareness. However, this un-analyzed impression hardly ever penetrates through to our consciousness, because we use words in third-level thinking, and words represent what we think to be true, not what is actually true (see Chapter One). When we feel “united” with the universe, we are actually united with our brain’s impression of the universe (although even this is filtered through our senses and limited by their sensibilities). Feelings of grandeur, exultation, immense joy and certainty are all likely to accompany this uncommon and profound experience. The conscious mind cannot in retrospect explain what happened, but it does perceive its significance. (Emotionally strong experiences are often extremely important, particularly those that re-route significant construct linkages.)
26. I write from experience. See A Revelation, a postscript to Chapter Five.
27. The cone, pyramid, sphere, cube, cylinder and prism analyzed in a branch of mathematics known as solid geometry.
28. Max Caspar, translated and edited by C. Doris Hellman, Kepler (London and New York: Abelard-Schumann, 1959), 65.
29. A solution to any problem clearly cannot come to a mind not prepared to receive it. A prepared mind knows something about the problem’s environment and is ready to notice that a problem exists. For example, a new scientific understanding can never be actualized by a non-scientific person, no matter how brilliant he or she may be, because, even if such a solution somehow did arise, the event would pass by unrecognized for what it was. For the same reason, an uninitiated member of an isolated tribe, for example, could never experience a conversion to a missionary’s religion: whenever conversions occur, they follow, never precede, indoctrination.
30. If belief can arrive only through an instance of surrendered rationality (see Chapter Three), then this explains why many intelligent men and women have trouble believing in a god or accepting the dogma of a religion. Intelligence and rationality are intimately linked, and the mind invariably resists onslaughts to its rationality.
This also suggests that many people professing “belief” must actually be relying upon “faith.” Faith is weaker than belief because it can be shaken. In other words, the construct built by faith retains ties to the rational world, whereas the construct that harbours belief has severed all such ties. It is faith’s ties to rationality that create the need for periodic boostings; true believers have no such requirement.
