All individuals in the human species, like all living things, are continuously responding, in any given moment, to stimulus of all kinds in accord with a given genetic heredity. Its nature and character is embedded in a neurological matrix which signals everything that defines a human being…how our bodies function, grow, look, respond and behave.
Our neural condition and character is constructed and composed of the totality of the history of our organic past. Even the concepts that arise in every individuals mind are generated by those particular nerve synapses that signal the necessary hormonal chemistry that then result in outward physical reactions and psychological feelings and images. This includes emotions, ideas, images and physical reactions unique to each, but common in all humans generally. There is also the uniqueness that characterizes the species of the animal.
The totality of the characteristics of what defines human behavior is based on this genetic neural composition derived from a long trail of our genetic journey from the past, as well as what continues being expressed in the present (sacred ancestors). This is also a true principle of all species. It is what identifies the character, identity, behavior and nature of all life, plant and animal. It identifies each species and each member within any given species, ie; a cat behaves and looks like a cat and a dog behaves and looks like a dog. Not only does the physical reflect this identity, but also its behavior. No living thing is independent of this evolutionary construct.
The neural matrix changes, alters, evolves according to the genetic composition of its particular matrix together with its experience and circumstance, past and present.
The human vision of itself generally is not of a biological origin and like all living things, more often than not, as a unique happening separated from biological life. The mythologizing of human self-identification is unique and generally illusory. (There may be other beings that do this but we thus far have no means of interpreting their ‘language’) This is the result of a long history prior to scientific knowledge and discovery that was based primarily on speculation and ignorance in an uninformed understanding of the biological life process. Unfortunately much of this continues right into the present where most of humanity are not yet exposed to this knowledge. There also seems to be a kind of denial based on an angst of feelings about being ‘animal‘ rather than something divinely ‘special’.
There is something in the subconscious self that seeks to ‘bond’ itself with more than just the mundane existence in its family, tribe, community…wanting something beyond. This yearning has been exploited and propagated from early on when humans first became more able to be conscious than other species in their feeling the mystery of it all. Someone clever began ‘defining’ what it was all about from a mystical fantasy. This filled the emptiness.
Most seem unable to simply accept their existing without this fantasy because of feelings of isolation, emptiness, and loneliness. They create images that provide relief through belief. Rational knowledge and thinking wasn’t and isn’t available to them. It is more comfortable to be enabled with an invented answer than to accept the ambiguity of a life of not knowing.
The long, long history of the development of self-consciousness based on rational thinking, knowledge, and an understanding of the totality of the functions of the thought process, has come into the collective mind only recently, perhaps the last 400 years or so. This has come about for many reasons, including the development of our capacity to record and share information that could and can be tested and measured. Present human beings generally forget the condition of literacy and consciousness prior to the stage of enlightenment that continues to penetrate the mysteries of life.
Prior to this development, illusion, mythologies and images were created in the unproven fantasies and imagination of the human mind, continuing with their influence into the present. It is a primitive path for guiding the ignorant unlearned majority who still dominate societies in a fantasy of self illusion.
Hundreds of thousands of human generations in over 200,000 years of embedded experience remain within the human’s inherited behavior, both good and bad. This is biologically given and has been the foundation of the behavior and success of our kind.
It is a good thing to duck automatically when necessary and the same for self-defense, but both can be wrong in new and different contexts. Bad timing of a primitive response can create a negative outcome. Evolution has given humanity the power of examination, reflecting on some of these responses, seeking to alter them to our advantage.
Many unexamined primitive neural responses are still holding humanity in a reactive paradigm of the past that are ill-suited for our time, ie; anger, violence, passion, uninformed judgment, etc..
The most pervasive is the belief based fantasy that characterizes religious and spiritual history. Not to disparage religion because it has and continues to serve to ‘guide’ and define ethical values and behavior for the majority of human beings worldwide. The ethical truths of religious doctrine are pretty much universal. The irony being that they are also often the base cause of tribal and cultural judgment, polarity, quarrels and warfare, ie; “I’m right. You’re wrong.”
Literally, the ‘business’ of creating and embedding divine self-importance via fantastic ‘God’ images into the identity of the minds of ignorant masses is psychologically offensive. It has caused innocent people to transfer their individuality and identity to this illusory image, thus releasing them of personal responsibility for their own knowing. They traded this for an ‘entity‘ of its mystical imagination. This seems to be a universal vulnerability originating in something embedded previously in its neural response matrix. It is still out of reach for most people’s development towards rational thinking.
There have been points, junctures in time in the last thousand years or so, where someone or something was able to penetrate the historical and cultural illusions with more and more revelation in fact. Sailing ships, maps, inventions, etc., all continued bringing more and more knowledge to light. The telescope had a profound impact on the larger concept of Earth and the solar system because people could see the actual planets with their own eyes. This expanded their concepts and awareness instantly.
Enlightenment, at least in Europe, altered the path to consciousness as a paradigm shift in the availability of individuals in general to have access to writing, documents and study of available world knowledge through print. Printing took knowledge from the cloisters of the wealthy and the Church to become available to anyone who could learn to read.
Obviously it took many millennia of being embedded in previous cultural circumstance to develop language that could record, compare, collect and share knowledge. As recently as 1,000 years ago there was little knowledge available to humans in general. Most written knowledge was housed in churches and castles of the wealthy. In our vision of past conditions of life, such as the geographic confinements of travel, food sources, and knowledge, one can see how the many, many stories and myths that were created throughout the biographies of past life experiences, of the many different human tribes from the very beginnings of reflective thinking, not necessarily rational thinking, which is a more recent evolution of consciousness, have influenced and brought about these conclusions.
The belief based ‘reality’ was, and remains, the common basis of self verification. This construct of concept having become embedded in the DNA neuro-matrix since the earliest times of the human experience, continues to this day even though its irrational foundation is known, but still not accepted because it is not in the interest of those who continue to be sustained by it, as well, their reality concepts are bound up in it. They do not want to question their personal thinking process or their personal relationship with belief based concepts. They are not interested in objective observation or verification of their beliefs. Most of humanity remains stuck in the denial of the methodologies of rational thinking about themselves, their concepts, and the world around them.
This is a long standing neural trap in thinking and appears to be leading the human species into extinction because it is unable to respond rationally with what is needed to survive, especially when it contradicts the belief based reality. And like all other species who do not respond appropriately to nature’s demands for accommodating reality, it finds itself and its kind in jeopardy of its survival.
I would describe this as an illustration of one example of a deficit of consciousness embedded in a primitive aspect of the neural matrix inherited as a ‘habit’ from the irrational past.
Current psychology is shifting more from psychological experimental pathology to origins in neurological chemistry and constructs. It holds more promise in creating a healthy neural matrix by a more directed functioning.