Heart Ethics:
The Indian Legacy and
Human Ecology After The Year 2000
by Antonio T. de Nicholas
By Way of Introduction
W.B. Yeats in the first song of the "Two Songs from a Play" abruptly summarizes the plight of human action, the scholar's included:
Dionysus, as you will remember, was the "twice born" son of Zeus. As Zagreus, born of Zeus and Persephone, he became his father's favorite and placed above all the gods of Olympus. The Titans envied him and planned his death. They waited for one of Zeus' absences and under the pretense of bringing gifts to the divine child, they entered Olympus disguised as ghosts, their faces painted white. Among the gifts offered to Zagreus was a mirror. The child fell for it and, at the moment of his fascination with the forms appearing therein, the Titans attacked him. Zagreus tried to escape by hiding under those forms, first a lion, then a tiger, a horse, a snake and finally a bull. By the time Zeus returned, the child was dead. Angry, he pulverized the Titans with his thunderbolt. From those ashes humans were born, but also Athena found the still- beating heart of Zagreus. Zeus took the heart, ground it up, put it in a drink, and gave it to mortal Semele to drink. Of this union Dionysus, the " twice born", the god born of the heart, the son of god, the god of death and resurrection, the child-god, the one that enters into Heaven ( Matthew l8, l-6), came into being. But the Titans came back and buried this heart under layers and layers of ethical simulacra. Who can rescue the original, beating, individual, immortal heart?
In trying to frame a context for human acting after the year 2000 a host of questions arise in view of the literature of the past, and the human desensitization of the present. Let's try some. Given the fact that Christianity, for example, the greatest propagandist of our current ethics, took literally from earlier literatures the god of death and resurrection, the immortal human-divine god of the heart, why did it not take from these earlier cultures also the literature of the heart as real but took it instead as a mere metaphor? And does it make sense that when the Jesus of Christianity is grafted to the mind set that invented the ethics of the head He had to be given a genealogy that in order to be legitimate had to link historically, in an uninterrupted line of sperm transmission, to another human, like David, or a God, like Yahweh? ( Was Yahweh the father of Jesus? And is this also the reason why in Christianity women were relegated because they have no soul- sperm?) And why did our head-ethics claim an original and exclusive Revelation in proclaiming the Ten Commandments as the fountainhead of our ethics when in fact these commandments are the creative summary of the earlier Law Code of Hammurabi, c. 1792-1750 B.C.? (Is there a connection between our ways of thinking and the ethics we proclaim as revelation?) And if we were borrowing from the mythic past why did we not go a lot earlier, to around 3.000 B.C. to the Egyptian Pantheon and borrow the 42 declarations, negative confessions, of an Egyptian weighing his/her heart against the feather of truth of Maat:
Compare again these heart confessions to the goddess Maat to those vengeful commands of the patriarchal gods of later on, like Deuteronomy 28:15-68. In view of the unethical behavior in history of the followers of the ethics of the head, in view also of the fact that our traditional ethics do not hold our human behavior in synchronicity with others or within ourselves, isn't it time to look at least once at the possible ethics of the heart? Isn't it the heart, love, the origin we claim, of our Religions, our families? There are, also, other more important questions we could be asking. What does this mythic heart have that it becomes the origin of the gods, from the Indic Rig Veda to Plato, the fire-pit (zagra) from where gods are born, the chamber where humans find again immortality, once they are reborn? And why, if the heart is the only door to immortality, of the path of the gods, do we, so often, choose the path of the fathers, as the Rig Veda chants, of the spiral of descent through that other door through which we chase form after form as we see them in the mirror of the mind-head? Is life a debate about which is the best play, or a reenactment of gods in death in the ground-up center of our own heart and head? Which is the story the writer tells, the story of the heart or of the head? But is the story of the heart real, or a is it just a simple, sentimental tale? Can the head tell the story of the heart without a heart? Where shall we go for help, outside, inside?
Our Present Predicament
It is not sufficient to realize that in our effort to disseminate head-ethics the center does not hold. The next step is to look for those responsible and blame some one. The strategy to be followed is to start with the realization that "ethics" is a mind set and that any solutions to our present predicament is to correct, enlarge, balance this mind set rather than blame any particular person or institution.
When we talk of Ethics our language and our habits of mind lead us directly to the Medievals first, Aristotle second.
For the Medievals Ethics --using the Mirror of Nature-- was a norm established a priori on the individual. This norm was a selection of universals imposed on individual behavior previous to their own birth and action as humans. Do not do this, do not do that, and if you do, you are no good. The Medievals claimed these laws of behavior had a foundation in the things themselves, that they were abstracted from things, or Nature. However, recent developments in neurobiology show clearly that with rare exception the left hemisphere of the neocortex -- our so called rational faculty-- has no direct access to things, the world. The left hemisphere of the neocortex --our propositional language center-- has access only to itself or to the right hemisphere of the neocortex. It has also established that it is not even a faculty, but a simple instrument of translation elevated to the category of kingship by the other inhabitant of that left region of the neocortex, the "interpreter module." This minute center of cortical activity is the center of rationalizations for anything we want. Name it, and the interpreter module will find a reason, any reason, to accept, reject, or elevate it to the realm of kingship over the other intelligence centers of our brain. Being blunt, no human ethics, can be based on the dictates of the left hemisphere of the neocortex. It is not only not ethical to do so -- after all this brain does not develop till after the age of seven in humans-- but it is not even rational and worse of all given its birth, its location, and its justification, this brain, this intelligence center, is so covered by layers and layers of ideology that it is impossible to bring out clearly the pure, uncontaminated ethical act. On this Aristotle was right. The field of head-ethics is the political. To try to act ethically in a political world makes it impossible to even clarify the ethical act given the massification of action that politics has in mind when taking control of a population.
When we move to the moderns our help from Philosophy is as limited as it was before.
Descartes' neurophysiological
error ( Damasio l994) of presupposing one mind, one brain, in
humans has led the global thinkers to cover the global village
with one universal metaphorical blanket: global ethics. For these
policy makers humans are defined by ethics, personal, social,
global. BUT THESE ETHICS ARE ONLY OF THE HEAD: HEAD- ETHICS, as
described above. You behave as the latest written rules demand.
Ethics is a movable feast. And if humans
dare to question this premise it is already too late. The ethical
standard becomes the political standard in the already printed
word, as a code of ethics or of legal behavior. The distinction
between head-ethics and legality blurs the closer one comes to
examine the actual human behavior of citizens. Political correctness
takes care of the massification of the gaps. Ethics has become
epistemology, a way of knowing and acting in every particular
context without doubts. (My students used to say with academic
pride that " ethics has become the epistemology of the stupid").
However, these are ethics one must learn from the outside. And
if not, one becomes disenfranchised, isolated, marginal or defiant,
violent, territorial, desensitized.
When I caught ten students, out of a class of three hundred and fifty, plagiarizing the final paper, and rewarded them with an F, two of them came to me to make their case. I should reconsider their grade for, while the other eight plagiarized the same paper by photostating it, they had taken the trouble to plagiarize it copying it by long hand, and this effort deserved a higher grade. Ethics had suddenly become legalism. Was this a symptom or the disease? Where did we go wrong? Let's go back to the beginning.
From the Gods of the amygdala to the God of the Heart
By which criteria does a man,
a woman, behave in the world? How does a man, a woman, stand on
free, solid land to perform free, not conditioned acts? What came
first, Ethics or chaos? The intelligence centers of the right
hemisphere or those of the left? Several brains or one? Reason
or heart? Is ethics, philosophy, human action possible without
a heart?
Contemporary discoveries in perceptual psychology (d'Aquili 1979),
brain-chemistry
Berlyne,l973), brain evolution(Laughin Jr. l974),brain development
( Routtenberg l980), ethology, cultural anthropology, the work
of MacLean on the structure of the brains (l986), the work of
Gazzaniga (l978) on the role of the "interpreter module",
have become the foundations of a new paradigm ( See Appendix 1)
on human cortical information processing, called by its discoverer,
Dr. M. Colavito ( l995), " the biocultural paradigm",
that sheds new light on the metaphorical use of brain and mind
by Descartes and subsequent philosophers and social scientists
and should shine an even brighter light on the ground of ethics
and human acting, not to mention on understanding the accuracy
of the Wisdom Literature of India and our own founding cultures
of Greece in pointing out and solving the same problem.
This new paradigm shows that biology ( Nature) and culture (Nurture)
act on one another as the conditioning parameters of neuro-cultural
in-formation. Through mutual interaction biology in humans becomes
bio-culture and viceversa, culture becomes hard wired biology
as culture opens and stimulates the neural passages of the brains,
accounting thus for the varieties of brains in humans and also
for cultural diversity. Culture conditions and stimulates biology,
while biology conditions and makes culture possible. Cultures
and brains may be distinguished from one another through identification
with certain functions or combination of functions that are exercised
habitually, or become neural hard-wire through repetition, or
habit. Our habits are literally habits of mind, depending on which
brain, intelligence center, has been formed or is activated by
them. However, the single fact that is most important for any
consideration of ethics is the fact that our human neural-cultural
activity begins with us even earlier than birth with the development
of the reptilian brain, to be followed immediately by the development
and formation of the limbic brain and only later by the right
neo-cortex. These developments coincide with the three brains
of the right hemisphere and their primary criteria for identification:
reptilian-kinesthetic, limbic- auditory, right neocortex-visual,
or as Dr. Colavito calls them: the maia, mythos, right-brain mimetic
types. Up to this stage of our human development, namely up to
the age of eleven, the brain and the faculty by which we create
reason and ethics of the type we have come to know today, has
not yet appeared in the human brain. Yet, by this stage of development,
if the child has been properly exercised he/she is already kinesthetically,
limbically-affective, and visually-imagisticaly linked to the
whole of creation, divine, social and individual. The child, if
his/her brains are developed through exercise, familial or social,
is already ethically linked to him/herself, and the world; the
child acts, has likes and dislikes, makes decisions. It is only
by age eleven, when these other links are already in place, that
the two brains of the left neo-cortex open up: the left-brain
mimetic brain, translating the right hemisphere's input into symbolic
language, or into the digital, logomaquic world of names and recognition
of such, introduced in the species through writing, and identified
as the "interpreter module," or, as Dr. Colavito calls
them, the left brain mimetic and the logos phase types. These
five brains, five intelligence centers, maia, mythos, right-brain
mimetic, left-brain mimetic and logos form five invariant epistemologies
on which all human acting and human knowing is based.
There are two other elements in
the formulation of the paradigm that are of the utmost importance
for understanding our thesis. One is the intelligence system of
the heart, the main intelligence system within the mythos- type
bioculture, and the other the amygdala, the most powerful element
in the maia-type bioculture. It is in the amygdala that we find
all the memories of the new born for the fist three years of his
/her life with the added corollary that it is only by the age
of three that the hippocampus, the sit of conscious memories in
each one of us, opens and begins to form, but this conscious seat
of memory does not have access to the memories and life of
the amygdala previous to its own formation. Only the heart
with its powerful electromagnetic force can correct this blind
spot, these previous lives, this conditioning of the mother, these
fears of other peoples' lives, this terror of our own face before
we were born (in our own consciousness), this fear of the vengeful
gods that are waiting to destroy us. (Carter, Rita l998)
In short, the ethics of reason we live under, based on a child
that becomes a reasonable human at the age of seven is, in its
own formulation, already unethical. It superimposes a shadow of
theory on an ethical reality already in existence. This theoretical
ethics is not imposed on a depraved world, or on ourselves with
no idea of what is right or wrong, but rather, it is imposed as
a program of ethics on the world and ourselves on the false assumption
that the criteria by which we previously judged, interacted, loved,
hated, did right, avoided wrong, etc. are false and we should
learn new ones. These new ones being not only of a different kind
to those we were accustomed to, but demand that we cancel those
we previously had and adopt the new ones, even if this means that
we become invisible, as individuals, to ourselves and others.
We are now ciphers of a theoretical world where only ciphers live.
We have ethics, but we have lost our heart and thus our individual
selves.
Recent neurobiological experiments
show clearly that what determines a human life is the beating
of the heart, separating in this manner a mass of living cells
from dead ones, defining thus a human life. Where a heart beats,
a human is already alive. And this heart has already an intelligence
system all its own, 45 to 60 times more powerful than the neocortex
and what we call the rational faculties. The heart, has been shown,
contains its own nervous system and nerve ganglia that process
information and send it to the neocortex. It is a hormonal gland
producing its own neurotransmitters, dopamine, epinephrine, norepinephrine,
the catechlomines, which affect the kidneys, the adrenal gland,
the circulatory system and the neocortex. The heart generates
from 45 to 60 times more amplitude electrically that what we call
the brain, plus the emotions alter the heart's electrical field.
Electricity emanating from the heart of person A can be detected
and measured in the brain waves of persons near or touching person
A. Cellular memory resides in the heart cells, as has been seen
in transplant cases. DNA can be altered in the hands of a person
practicing head/heart "entrainment" or what we call
yoga or meditation (Heartmath.com). These recent discoveries in
neurobiology are only confirmation that the sages of old, The
Wisdom Literature, India's in particular, was right, in neurobiological
modern terms, in proclaimed the heart as our primary guide for
action. This same Literature knew of the ways of the amygdala,
that we, each one of us, is the victim of memories stored in the
amygdala that do not belong to us and to which we have no access.
That is why Buddhism was born, and the ancients talked of the
laws of karma, of reincarnation, of life regression, of
the link between the heart and the amygdala, for it is only the
heart that if entrained can liberate us from the conditioning
of fear of the gods of the amygdala.
Why did humanity step back into the ethics of the neocortex when
we were so close to liberating our selves from the panic of the
amygdala? The discovery of a new brain and its technologies took
over .We formed religion based on this new technology. Where entrainment
of the heart was the aim of all education, the new technologies
of the left neocortex introduced in the species the split of the
mind/mind, and also the mind-body split, right brain- left brain,
and thus they bypassed the heart intelligence and behaved with
all the immaturity of a new born, proclaiming this new technology
as the supreme brain with the power of control and dominance over
the rest (Colavito, l995). It is no accident that the first code
of head- ethics dispensed on humans came by the hand of those
who discovered and introduced writing and the left brain, who
proclaimed external gods, and who started their laws by the denials
of the world already existing: " Do not do this!, Do not
do that!" It must have been an extraordinary epiphany when
those who introduced into the species the technologies of the
left brain discovered its operation. We are still intoxicated
by the power of its abstractions. We were so intoxicated that
in its name we annihilated most of the environment and each other
to the point that we proposed to remedy the situation by becoming
ethical.
It is, however, true that not all our brains develop equally in all of us and that even in us we are not always in love with the surrounding environment or ourselves. Thus, on occasion we forget our hearts, or our hearts are silent. Therefore, we need rational ethics. Not as a substitution for the heart, but only for those moments when the heart is not functioning, or asleep, or simply silent. But the ethics we formulate cannot be theoretical, that is following mathematical models that in no way include the human, biological element. We need a model based in bio-cultures, the family being the largest unit of abstraction, taking into account human bio-cultural interconnections. In other words, our models must be grounded in the concreteness of our bio-cultures and must include human bio-cultures. But then, again, in order to accomplish this we must forget the intoxication of theorizing and bring thought back again to "experience", human or divine. For after all, the gods of the amygdala are blind, the left brain has access only to the right hemisphere and to its own substitution systems, not to the world, or the God of the heart, as neuroscience has confirmed. Why sustain the fear of the gods of the amygdala? And why sustain those gods, give them life, with fear?
The Wisdom Literature
The Classical texts of Asia, India's in particular, the Wisdom
Literature, composed at a time when the humanity that composed
those texts gave primacy to experience over reading, had not yet
developed the faculty and technologies of the left hemisphere
of the neocortex, that is the faculty of reason as we know it
since the seventeenth century, and who knew the Sanskrit manas,
the mind, as one more of the senses, shared with modern science
the knowledge of how the brains worked, though not the language
of laboratory experimentation by which they came to the same result.
It is only when the texts of ancient Asia, India in particular,
were written down that the interference of the left brain became
visible. External gods, like Indra, are introduced, ritualism
and priesthood freeze the moving world of Rita and external laws
substitute for the inner laws of love and charity. In fact, the
texts at our disposal show clearly that they were composed by
the first primary brains of the right hemisphere: the Rig Veda
(2.500 B.C.) being kinesthetic-auditory, the Upanishad, auditory-limbic,
the Gita and Early Buddhism, mythos- right-brain mimetic-visual.
It is only with the arrival of the Sutras or commentaries that
the left brain makes its appearance, and even then the left brain
is used with a corrective capable of leading it back to experience.
One clear example is the Indian great philosopher Sankara ( A.D.788-820).
For Sankara Reality is One, indivisible,
unknowable, let's call it Brahman. The world, since it is not
one, is false. All atomic entities, like souls, bodies, subjects,
objects, are non-differentiated Brahman (the Real). As One, Bhrahman
is not knowable, but may be experienced as an intuition. It is
not therefore within the scope of philosophical inquiry but it
is rather the origin and end of all philosophical inquiry. ( It
is beyond philosophy, not the philosopher). For the wisdom Literature,
philosophical inquiry, as well as for Sankara, is concerned with
the logical multiplicity of linguistic superimpositions (adyasa)
between the subject and the object. Superimposition, for Sankara,
is the apparent presentation to consciousness, by way of
remembrance, of something previously observed in some other thing
or context. Thus, the subject is superimposed on the object in
such phrases as "That I am," or "This is mine,"
whereas, when we say " I suffer," or I wish," the
object is superimposed on the subject. For, according to Sankara
"Reality" is non-dual, that is, is not many, though
he does not say it is One. This unity is not the object of philosophical
inquiry, but philosophical inquiry may lead to the perception
of unity in some intuitive-experience caused in the acts of philosophically
inquiring. The games we play with language today, Sankara would
call them ":pragmatically real," which means, illusory
or self deceptive.
It is on this hermeneutic background that the literature of Asia
must be read and interpreted. The Upanishadic experience of I
( conscience) and the experience of That (consciousness) are (almost)
simultaneous. The Rig Vedic One (Tad Ekam) has many
names; the One and the Many follow different paths.
There are over a hundred instances in the Hymns on how to travel
the path of the heart. We humans have a problem and a decision
to make in every act of perception. We may decide in favor of
That-I-Am, and view the "I" as a shadow of That, a corrective
to be exercised as a life program of liberation through the many
yogas. Or we may decide in favor of the formula I-am-That, a life
long superimposition of a conceptual That on the shadow "I"
that we inflate to the size of an empty globe covering the vibrating
reality of That. The choice we inflict on ourselves has nothing
to do with the world, or God, or other humans. It is always an
internal choice of inner technologies we decide to use, most times
one inner technology against the others and at their expense.
The gunas act against each other and against the wisdom
and harmonizing role of the heart.
The Mahabharata brings us, in its initial and closing chapters,
face to face with the problem we are facing today. Are we going
to follow the head or the heart, the legitimacy of sperm or that
of the heart? The field of the Kurus is where Arjuna and
Krishna meet and teach/learn the path of the many yogas to open
the heart. And it is here also that the battle between Pandavas
and Kauravas takes place. What few realize is that it is in this
same field where those families of Pandavas and Kauravas were
once cursed and no matter what the outcome of the battle narrated
in the Gita is, both families will be destroyed, that is, will
remain mortal. The reason for this curse was the presence of a
dog, Sarama's son, at the snake sacrifice taking place in the
Kuru field. (The Snake sacrifice was a repetition in ritual
of the primacy of semen over heart (the dog) in the continuation
of the family). So, Sarama's son complains to his mother and his
mother curses the participant in the snake sacrifice and their
descendants. While this story prefaces the Mahabharata,
the end of this same narrative has a similar twist in the scene
where Yudhisthira is about to enter into heaven. When Yudhisthira
was ready, according to Krishna, to enter into heaven, the noble
warrior refused to do so without bringing with him his faithful
dog. Krishna consents and Yudhisthira becomes immortal, in his
own earth-body without having to die as it had happened to the
others of his family, because he brought with him his heart, his
dog. Plato would formalize this later on by adding that only what
is imprinted in the heart determines our mortality or immortality.
Little did he know then that this was literally true.
Buddhism took a different path.
It knew of the heart and the dismembering of images as it was
chanted in the Rigveda, but it also knew that the visual images
used in ritual and the forms of the culture were conditioning
activities and not conducive to nirvana-moksha, at the hands of
the
priests. The priests did not realize that all life is conditioned,
including their rituals, since images are an activity of the visual
neocortex, that is, a holographic summary of the previous vibrational
languages of the reptilian and limbic brains. Furthermore Buddhism
realized that the greatest conditioning begins even before we
can identify ourselves in and through memory, that is, before
the hippocampus is developed in us. Therefore, Buddhism focuses
all its attention to overcome conditioning in the life we have
before we become conscious of ourselves, that is, our life in
the amygdala. Of the twelve preconditions, or dependent origination,
samsara, eight of them deal with life in the womb: vijnana,
the birth of individual life, nama-rupa, name and form
as differentiated by the khandas, perception as discreet;
sad-ayatana, formation of six sense organs; sparca,
concomitant sense of individuation in sense experience; vedana,
individuated sensations; trishna, the birth of desire;
upadana, individual life in the womb; and bhava,
life as an individual feat. Then comes rebirth and life, decay,
death: the wheel of samsara grounded on the ignorance, avidya,
of how our conditioned lives work.
We have to travel through the many paths of Sufism, Pythagoras and Plato to come up with these insights again. Why did we bury them and based our religions on the conditioned and conditioning amygdala of the mother, our Holy Mother Church? Nor can Mother Church bring the Christian mystics as her witnesses, Teresa de Avila, Ignatius de Loyola, Juan de la Cruz. They were Christians, it is true, but rode the free ride of the Spirit with the Inquisition at their heels up to the eve of their canonization.
The Return to the Heart Through Yoga or Plato
The Philosophical Tradition
Whitehead might be a good lead to Plato. He said: " The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato." Plato, naturally, is himself a footnote to previous cultures. Thus the reader should be prepared to include as Philosophical Tradition, other earlier cultures, like Buddhism, Hinduism, the I Ching and so on. But what about Plato, does he contribute to our possible return to the practice of Philosophy in such a way that we retrieve our heart? This is exactly where Plato fits in the practice of Philosophy with his five epistemological pillars upon which his methodology stands. In the Seventh Letter Plato writes:
And which are these five steps
according to Plato? : They are names, as in the Cratylus or
The Euthydemus, definition or description, as in Charmides,
Laches, Euthryphro, Statement, Symposium, Republic, image,
to make worlds visible, as in the Timaeus, contemplation,
as in the Apology, Crito, Gorgias, Critias or the Ion,
Phoedrus, Philebus, and finally equilibrium
or the use of the four classes of previous objects to arrive at
the fifth, as in The Republic, Sophist, Symposium, Laws.
Or as Plato himself writes in his Seventh Letter 344c-d:
In case we still have doubts about the Tradition, remember what Diogenes Laertius wrote repeating Phythagoras:
It is here, at this juncture of what the reader understands by reason that one must exercise caution. We inherited the name reason from the Medievals who swore they were following Aristotle who was the most famous disciple of Plato. Well, the Medievals were wrong and the Social Sciences that followed this Tradition were also wrong. Aristotle writes in his Physics, Book 11, Ch. 3:
We all know that this `why' are the four causes that constitute a substance, material, formal, efficient and final. These four causes are the epistemological bases of the universals, so important in science, in the justification of moral behavior, in the standards of the "normal" in Social Sciences. But, according to Aristotle, there are causes that do not fall within the sphere of this universal knowledge, and this is precisely the individual human:
The methodological difference
between Plato's and Aristotle's followers as to what each
understands by reason is essential to enter any discussion or
any form of therapy. And though this might appear evident, it
requires pause and discrimination, and if this is not done our
talk becomes one more ideological tool. For even according to
Aristotle, those who use universals for the knowledge and therapy
of an individual human, as it happens in the Social Sciences and
even in the Humanities, are doing so by forcing the individual
to fit a conceptual, universal norm pre existing and pre dating
the individual. This disqualifies ideologies like Marxism, Theology,
Psychology etc. from dealing with individual therapy or care.
And thus the need to return to Plato.
What I am suggesting here I already
developed in my book Habits of Mind, a program of education
where all the brains are kept active and developing and where
decisions are based on finding a balance, a harmony, among the
competing brains. This, by the way, was the original meaning of
philosophy coined by Pythagoras and later on developed by Plato:
a search for the knowledge of knowledge, based on the knowledge
of one's self. For how can I know if I do not know the subjective
biases through which I know? However, the more we talk about these
things the more we are prone to follow the path of the substitution
systems created by the left brain. Instead, what I will do now
is use some examples of the Wisdom Literature and its methods
hoping to bring the reader from thought to experience, or at least
to the desire to open his/her heart.
From the Rig Veda down, the earliest texts of humans confirm
that perception is a most complex activity in humans. It can activate
the hidden memories of the amygdala, it can bring conscience and
consciousness to balance in every act of perception, it can discard
the above and go for the substitution systems of the left hemisphere,
or it can resolve the whole problem by focusing on the "I"
that appears in perception. Well, modern neurobiology has confirmed
that the "I" we call ourselves, is a shadow without
a substance, an illusion, for this self, this "I", is
no more, as the ancients knew, than a delayed mechanism in the
act of perception itself. We perceive holistically with the right
neocortex, first, then the left neocortex selects what to focus
on and what to reject. This is the "I" shadow sitting
on perception and it may be corrected.
Consciousness as witness is as old as the Rig Veda.
Then, suddenly, liberation:
The individual- self does not submerge with the witness- Self. They follow different paths. The individual-self wanders, lost in thoughts. The true Self is in the heart. When one is active the other is canceled out. And this insight is as well known to the Christian mystics as to the Hindu Upanishads:
The firmness of this activity is what we know as the discipline of yoga, or the modern entrainment of head and heart, or the meditation of the mystics.
Many Westerners have tried this path, yoga in the morning, yoga at night; they have found it too long, too arduous. They forget that even a god, Indra, took one hundred and one years to learn this secret at the hands of another god, Prajapati, as narrated in the Chandogya Upanishad. (Did you ever wander what was wrong with his mother?) Never mind! One can always meander into Zen. The method is gentler and directed to a different brain center.
It is not easy for us in the West
to see the difference between enlightenment or simply
an exercise in moving thought from the left brain to its origin
in the right. I used to tell this story to my students:
It was easy then to pass from " the duck in the bottle" to the story of the two monks and why my students could not understand why I would wear a tie to teach Buddhism.
On the first day of class on Buddhism a student raised his hand to ask me why was I wearing a tie to teach such a hip subject. The silence that followed this question from the rest of the class of three hundred plus made me realize the question was important to them. I promised the student then that I would give him an answer the last day of class, provided he reminded me of the question and reminded himself if the question continued to make sense to him as the course proceeded. To no one's surprise the question was raised in every class till we came to the last day. The expectation awaiting the answer seem to grow with the passage of the course. The whole class took up the question in chorus:
"Let me preface my answer with this story about two monks and a beautiful woman." I started. The students had never been so attentive. " Two Buddhist monks, one old one young, came to the banks of this river when a flood had destroyed the bridge and made it very difficult to cross. As they were getting ready to wade across, this woman, young and beautiful, approached them. "Sirs," she said, "I must cross to the other side where my family is waiting for me. Can you help me?" The old monk approached the young woman. Lifted up her skirt, held her in his arms and made his way through the muddy waters to the other side. The young monk followed them at a distance lost in his own thoughts. When the old monk arrived to the other side, put the young woman down of firm ground, bowed and continued his journey followed by the young monk. Twenty miles down the road the young monk let out a cry and stopped the old monk. " How could you do that!" he said. " What," replied the old monk. " Take that woman semi-naked in your arms and carry her across the river. You are a monk, have vows of chastity, promised never to touch a woman and now this... How could you do it, at your age?" The old monk stared at the young one, shook his head and addressed him with infinite compassion. " My young brother," he said " What did I do? I took the woman with me in my arms across the river because she had no other means of transportation and I left her there... If I left her there, why are you still carrying her in your arms?" The class seemed to understand by their nods and sighs and side commentaries. " And now," I continued " about my tie." I addressed the student who asked the question originally : " If I wear my tie and it bothers you, then..." I could not answer him. The whole class took up the chant: " why are you wearing it?"
And finally, is it not this revelation of the heart that Christ taught in the New Testament hoping to bury for ever the Old Testament's gods of the amygdala? Who can sustain an open heart in today's life and not recess to the darkness of blind fear?
Concluding Remarks
We have traveled a long journey
within our own brains. Five intelligence centers define our potential,
not just one. But the key to this potential is defined primarily
by the beating of our heart and this heart is supreme in balancing
the five brains, unless we substitute its intelligence system
for the less powerful and blind left brain, plus the fears of
the unreachable amygdala. Within these options of seeing and acting
we make our lives, either authentically through the heart's intelligence
system, or in authentically through the ethics of the head-left-brain.
Modern neuroscience has confirmed the options we have which the
Wisdom Literatures of India and the New Testament already voiced
earlier. We know in the heart, we are lost and groundless in the
substitution systems of the head. These basic truths, that we
already knew through the studies of earlier cultures, and of which
Plato is a footnote, have been now verified by the sacramental
language of neurobiology, laboratory experimentation. And it could
not be otherwise for the left brain can only verify what is already
experienced in the right brains, either as vibrations in the reptilian,
limbic brains or images in the right brain of the neocortex. The
left brain has no direct access to the world.
Philosophers should take up this challenge, leave the Cartesian
inertia, and tread new paths in the style of Pythagoras, Plato
and even Aristotle, who reminds us in his Posterior Analytics
and in the Metaphysics 11,5 that his categories are not
to be superimposed on particular humans, for they do not apply
to them. And they should read Plato's Phaedo,107d again
where he summarizes the scope of Philosophy as being an imprinting
of structures on the soul, the only thing we carry with us into
eternity, if we are lucky to enter there. And that these same
structures
produce in the soul the taste of knowing, or knowing itself as
we may read in The Seventh Letter. And they should also
remember that is this same Plato who excludes Trasymachus from
the conversations in the building of the Republic. How can you
analyze language if you are not aware of your own self structures
that biases the whole analysis? How can you study, describe, give
language to the world (Aristotle) if you do not know the subjective
structures through which you know, describe, give language ( Plato)?
Thanks to the clear and complete description of "biocultures"
as the subjective structures of knowing it is now possible to
do philosophy with all its implications. It is a time to make
language, not to analyze it blindly, to discover its origin, not
to presuppose it. To make images, and dismember them, not to freeze
them in eternal rituals. This is a time when analysis, systematic
thinking and phenomenology should discourse together to build
the city-soul, not to destroy one another. For any effort of one
group to impose itself on the others is not only cultural imperialism
but of its very nature it is un ethical. All knowledge is mediated
through subjective structures. Know thyself first, then do philosophy,
or do philosophy so you may know thyself. Thus you will not confuse
or substitute geometries for forms, images for concepts, experience
for definitions. For as Plato reminds us let no one who is ignorant
of geometry enter here. For it is now, in our century when geometry
(Nature) and forms (Nurture) interact and give life one to the
other; when thinking in concepts is not enough and the philosopher
is asked to think in paradigms, or at least be aware of them as
the source of his/her multiple discourses. This is the time to
be a philosopher and rescue the Virgin from the hands of priests,
social scientists, New Age gurus, and logomachic "trashers."
There is always the temptation, however, when it comes to policy making, of going to the extremes. Right brain dominant cultures would have us suppress all desire to reach liberation, nirvana:
Similarly, there are those left brain dominant cultures asking us to suppress all desire by silencing the heart and letting our lives be lit only by the neon lights of concepts and names sacrificing the flesh at the altar of ever shifting theoretical gods. We live in vain. Theories live through us at the expense of family, friends, love, memory, body and will. The answer is somewhere in between. It is up to each one of us to find the way to open the heart. We need to cultivate those technologies that open the heart in the style of the Philokalia, or Phythagoras/Plato, or the mystics, or the rishis of Ancient India, and experience knowing from the inside. Only then can we build an ethics of the heart we can all recognize, even when our hearts are deficient or lost in silence. The rest is just a matter of discipline, education and the various options of the frontal lobes.
Head Ethics, on the other hand,
are not enough and no one will keep them or feel joined to the
rest of us, if the ethics of the heart are buried before they
can become alive and not given legitimacy in our society. Besides,
without the heart and the other cognitive centers of our biocultures
philosophy as a practice lacks epistemological foundation and
therefore it lacks its own reason for being. Furthermore, the
repository in culture or in us of those other cognitive centers
of knowledge besides the left brain mimetic are to be found exclusively
in myth, and therefore the need to study other cultures. The "other"
is "we", "I", the individual or the community
sharing the same biocultural pilot. Meanwhile we can freely associate
in exercises and pass from one chamber of the brain to the other
while celebrating our enormous human potential for freedom. The
Law of charity and love, rather than the dehumanizing rules of
external global behavior, might then be the living ground of our
human relations, down to the walls (membrane ) of every living
cell in our hearts. They are, after all, our only passport to
a joyous immortality.
And for those of us disheartened by the sorry condition of the
world and ready to give up on heart ethics as a hopeless enterprise,
please, look around, a new generation of new born babies is waiting
in the wings. All we need, to start with, is one mother at a time
to open the heart of that little child. Hopefully, an educational
system will follow that will allow the adolescent to open his/her
frontal lobes to be able to make rational, heart-balanced, ethical
decisions for themselves and for the rest of us.
References
1. Berlyne,D.E. and Madsen,K.B. eds.(l973) Pleasure, Reward, and Preference: Their Nature, Determinant, and Role in Behavior. Academic Press.
2. Blackemore, C. (l977) Mechanics of the Mind. Cambridge University Press.
3. Carter, Rita (l998) Mapping the Mind. Un. of California Press.
4. Colavito, Maria M. (l995) The Heresy of Oedipus and the Mind/Mind Split: A Study of the Biocultural Origins of Civilization. Lewiston,N.Y.: The Edwin Mellen Press.
5. Children, Doc and Martin, Howard (1999) The HeartMath Solution. Harper San Francisco.
6. Damasio, Antonio R. (l994)
Descartes' Error: Emotion,Reason and the Human Brain.
New York: G.P. Putnam' Sons.
7. d'Aquili, E.G., Laughlin Jr.
C.D., and MacManus, J., eds. (l979) The Spectrum of Ritual:
A Biogenetic Structural Analysis.Columbia University Press.
8. de Nicolas, Antonio T. (l976) Meditations Through the Rg Veda. Maine: Nicolas-Hays.
-- (1976)Avatara: The Humanization of Philosophy through the Bhagavad Gita.: Maine: Nicolas-Hays.
-- (l982) "Audial and Literary Cultures." Journal of Social and Biological Structures 3:2l9-225.
--(1989-2000) Habits of Mind. An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education, with Edited Texts.New York: Paragon House. And iUniverse.com
(l994) The Bhagavad Gita.
Introd. Trans. Maine: Nicolas-Hays.
(1998) "The Biocultural Paradigm: The Neural Connection between
Science and Mysticism." Experimental Gerontology,
Vol.33, Nos. ½ , pp. 169-182. Elsevier Science Inc. New
York.
9. Gazzaniga, Michael S. (l978) The Integrated Mind. N.Y. Plenum Press.
-- (l987) " Cognitive and Neurological Aspects of Hemispheric Disconnection in the Human Brain," Discussions in Neurosciences. FESN.
--(l992) Nature's Mind:The Biological Roots of Thinking, Emotions, Sexuality, Language, and Intelligence.New York: Basic Books.
10. MacClean, Paul )l986) "On
the Evolution of the Three Mentalities of the Brain,"
Origins of Human Aggression.Ed. Newman, G.N.Y. Human Sciences
Press.
11. Olds, J,. (l977)Drives and Reinforcements: Behavioral Studies of Hypothalamic Functions. Ravens Press.
12. Pearce, Joseph Chilton (l992) Evolution's End. San Francisco: Harper Collins.
13. Uttal, William R. (l978) The Psychobiology of Mind.New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
14. Yeats, W.B.(l983) The Poems of W.B. Yeats. Macmillan Publishing Company. New York
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| MAIA |
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dance ritual asceticism |
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| MYTHOS |
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| R. BRAIN MIMETIC |
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| L. BRAIN* MIMETIC |
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arithmetic grammar logic |
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| LOGOS* |
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opinion formation, ideology, fundamentalism, agnosticism |
| MYTHOS* |
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* secondary biocultures (adult only)