" Ibelieve for all our precociousness as a power-wielding species, we are infants when it comes to understanding ourselves as beings in the world." p. 2 Lissa D'Amour,
From the preface...
"I encourage my readers to question the dominant misunderstandings and prejudices against secrecy that prevail in anthropology and the social sciences: that secrecy is generally a sham or hoax, rather than a valid means of establishing trust and interdependence in times of social and political instability, and that secrecy is a cursory social practice rather than providing the impetus for creating utopian cultural reality."
"An alternative approach is to view secrecy as one of the desperate tools of the human imagination for managing highly complicated—if not at times seemingly impossible—social relations. I must admit to my concern at being seen as an apologist for secrecy in taking such an approach."
"War Leaders are exactly like tribal shamans who cure group despair by exorcising bad spirits through healing sacrifices. Leaders can be disobeyed whenever they do not interpret and carry out the group-fantasy of the internal fearful alter. They must make real the growing paranoia of the nation, saying “Let me help you by naming your persecutors…evil is out there, in the real world. And you thought it was all in your head!"
- some leading theories of memory formation speculate that the hippocampus uses spatial setting as a triggering mechanism for the organization of memories. Pg. 112
"Childhood in much of India begins with the young child being regularly masturbated by the mother, “high caste or low caste, the girl ‘to make her sleep well,’ the boy ‘to make him manly…”‘ This practice has been said to be widespread by many reliable observers, including Catherine Mayo – whose extensive investigations in India in the 1920s led to the first child marriage laws(90) – a physician,(91) an ethnologist,(92) a religious scholar (93) and a sociologist.(94) As is the case with virtually all non-Western cultures, the child sleeps in the family bed for several years and regularly observes sexual intercourse between the parents. The extent to which Indian parents go beyond this and overtly have sex with the child cannot be determined. Rampal, the sociologist who recently did interviews modeled on the Kinsey studies about contemporary Indian sexual practices, concludes that “there is a lot of incest…It is hidden along with other secrets of families and rarely gets a chance to come out, like seduction at the hands of trusted friends of the family… To arrive at even a passable estimate of incest cases would be to touch the hornet’s nest.. no one will ever confess to such a deed, therefore, any attempt to collect statistics may prove to be futile at present.”"
"Because they have only recently moved beyond what I have termed the infanticidal mode of chiidrearing, whereby as much as half of the children born were killed by their parents,(89) the use of children for the emotional needs of adults is far more accepted, an attitude that fosters widespread incestuous acts along with other child abuse." - on why incest and child abuse is likely to be higher in non-western countries.
- "it can be said that symbolic structures are present in three schematic forms, each corresponding to one of three formulas: like produces like; like acts on like; opposite acts on opposite. They differ only in the ordering of elements. In the first case, we think primarily of the absence of a state; in the second, we are dealing first with the presence of a state; in the third, we are dealing with the presence opposite to that which is desired." Pg. 89 mauss
- it seems as if Fuchs underemphasizes the significant role others can play in helping people with mental illness, primarily by not seeking to fix the person's feelings, but to explore the possible causes - that is, by compassionately empathizing with the feeling state they're in. Pg. 262
"the basic problem of neurobiological research into consciousness consists, when all is said and done, in the reification of consciousness itself. It then no longer appears as an activity of living organisms, no long as a relationship between subject and world which transcends the boundaries of the body." 46
- quote Luke 7:28...pure masculinistic cosmology.
"In the Bella Coola region secret society members in one village could even intervene in another village's affairs to punish ritual transgressions." pg. 41
"Given such mutual participation in secret society rituals on a regional scale, it is not surprising that the masks and other ritual paraphernalia (rattles, staffs, feasting dishes) exhibit artistic similarities generally known as the Northwest Coast art style with regional substyles." pg. 41
- It took about 12 years to enter the third level of the cannibal (hamatsa) society. pg. 43
"Members of secret societies were reported to experience powerful feelings of superiority over non-members." pg. 43
- Hayden reports the views of Drucker who stated that the purpose of secret societies in the pacific northwest was to dominate society by means of violence and 'black magic'. pg. 43
- Hayden believes that the dynamics seen in tribal secret societies likely apply to the chavin horizon, the chaco canyon culture, and the Hopewell Interaction Sphere as well as other prehistoric manifestations. pg. 44
"What if that abominable horror, that long river of blood and tears, had been programmed, in the middle of the cartouche, in that appalling self-replicating automatic machine? And what if, on the contrary, I was lucid, and it was this that was our nightmare? And it was this that was our illusion of history? And what if we - hallelujah - had the freedom to fix the rudder anew, to change course on the rose of the legend, what if we could rewrite the program, another time in a completely different direction, renaissance?" pg. 31 Roem
"Just as the period at the end of this sentence turns out to be a teeming world of interacting particles when seen under sufficient magnification, my Now, under close examination, is a wonderfully complex, and meaningful phenomenon. Before physics can contribute anything to our understanding of it, neuroscience, which deals with cells and electrical currents at the classical rather than the quantum level, will have to weigh in." - Hans Christian von Baeyer, QBism: The Future of Quantum Physics; pg. 216-217, Harvard, 2016
"By that time, between 6000 and 4000 BCE, all the basic ingredients of structural inequality were already in place: numerous defensive structures that invoke competition for scarce resources and a need for effective leadership; secular public buildings that may be associated with governmental functions; house shrines and temples that speak to the importance of ritual power; signs of hereditary rank, exemplified by lavish child burials; and evidence of craft exchange between elite families in different settlements. Political, military, and economic development differentiated the population, and prominent position, control over economic exchange, and personal wealth went hand in hand." - pg. 40
"Meaning in the natural score takes the place of harmony in the musical score, which works as a conjunction or, more precisely put, a bridge in order to unify two natural factors with each other. " pg. 189 von Uuxkull
pg. 34, Cradle of Humanity; fossil evidence from lake Turkana indicates that the childhood period was extended in homo erectus, so that, at 12 years of age, specimens were already 5 feet 3 inches tall. This evidence coincides with changes in hip shape (for running) and shoulder shape (for throwing spears) as well as the appearance of more complex tools (Acheulean). Dan Liebermans has shiown that improved tools would have allowed homo erectus to slice meat and pound root vegetables and nuts which would have saved 40% energy in chewing. This reduction in chewing corresponds to the smaller jaw size observed in homo erectus fossils.
pg. 177-182 details how indigenous tribes have evolved a level of communication with local alpha predators. Safina describes the Ojibwe reverence towards the wolf - Ma'iingan - regarding it as sacred. Similarly, the Amur tigers of siberia are shown respect by the Udeghe and Nanai hunters, who leave a piece of meat for them after they kill. The San people of the Kalahari desert don't hunt lions, and when they interact with them, speak respectfully but firmly.
This intuitive level of awareness is imagined to be inexplicable, but from an embodied, ecological perspective, it is precisely the affective orientation and the attitude taken towards the above creatures which seems to function as a sort of 'syntax' - communicating and indicating, given the conditions of the situation at hand, that the humans, which are known to be a certain way by the above predators, 'honor' their capacities as alpha-predators.
"The alt-right have described their movement as reaction against establishment US conservatism, saying that there is a 'deep continuity' between the Buckleyite movement and the neocons. spencer has also said, 'The left is the right and the alt-right is the new left' and that 'were the ones thinking the impossible. Were the ones thinking the unthinkable.' On radix journal they draw on the idea of the "Fourth Political Theory", withe reference to the Russian theorist Aleksandr Dugin and the French new rights Alain de Benoist, an entirely new political ideology that integrates and supersedes liberal democracy, Marxism and fascism." pg. 66
"many nonscientists feel troubled when science demystifies nature, identifies the laws that rule it, and thus takes away from their feelings of wonder and awe about the world. In the words of the poet John Keats, the scientist is the sort of killjoy who would "clip an angels wings" and "unweave a rainbow". That sentiment was surely one reason why Darwin's theory met resistance, but an experiment like this shows us that we can have it both ways. Science can explain general principles of innovability even if it cannot predict any individual innovation. Understanding innovability can leave the magic of innovation intact. And that, by itself, is reason for wonder and awe." - Andreas Wagner, Arrival of the Fittest, pg. 135, Current, 2016
"If regulation matters because it avoids wastes, then it should be everywhere. And indeed it is. Think of a metabolism with its hundreds of reactions - lactase catalyzing only one of them - as a sophisticated inter-connected network of pipelines. Into this network flows nutrients, out of it flow biomass molecules. Each pipe has a dedicated pump, an enzyme that propels materials through it. A cell can regulate each pump according to its needs. It new nutrients turn up in a patch of soil - a fallen apples, a rotting carcass - the soil bacteria turn up the pumps through which these molecules flow. Once the nutrients are gobbled up, these shut these pumps down. And if more of some nutrients and less of others become available, cells can fine-tune the pumps to the right speed." - Andreas Wagner, Arrival of the Fittest, pg. 141, Current, 2016
Physics/Biology
Evidently, if the living organisms are not to succumb to the constraints of the physical world, their component parts and organs must be precisely yet flexibly correlated with each other. Without such correlation, physical processes would soon break down the organization of the living state, bringing it closer to the inert state of thermal and chemical equilibrium in which life as we know it is impossible. Near-equilibrium systems are largely inert, incapable of sustaining processes such as metabolism and reproduction, essential to the living state. An organims is in thermal and chemical equilibrium only when it is dead. As long as it is living, it is in a state of dynamic equilibrium in which it stores energy and information and has them available to drive and direct its vital function. - Ervin Laszlo, Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Everything, pg. 44-45, Inner Traditions
"We begin with the ecosystem as a level of organization, which we believe supercedes the importance of the organism for both the earliest stages of origin, and certain aspects of long term organization of the biosphere and constraints on evolutionary dynamics within it. We then consider the problem of how to classify kinds of biological order. A typological classification of metabolism reflecting their energetics and synthetic chemistry (as opposed to a cladistic classification reflecting historical paths of descent) captures constraints from reactivity and network structure in both organisms and ecosystems, and we believe reflects laws of composition that were central before the advent of genetics and the historical contingencies to which genetic systems are subject.
We observe that the universal features of biochemistry at the ecosystem level are contemporaneous with, or antedate, the oldest mineral fossils on earth. Whereas the rock record effectively vanishes acrosses the horizon to the Hadean eon, the profusion of life expressing the universals of metabolism provides a signature from antiquity that is the strongest it has ever been." - The Origin and Nature of Life on Earth: the emergence of the 4th
geosphere; Eric Smith and Harold Morowitz, pg. 38, 2016, Cambridge
Press.
"Our argument will be that affordances for less costly and more reliable error correction determine to a considerable extent the organization of life today, and there is good reason both empirically and theoretically to believe they also dictated some stages in its emergence" - The Origin and Nature of Life on Earth: the emergence of the 4th geosphere; Eric Smith and Harold Morowitz, pg. 22, 2016, Cambridge Press.
"Ultimately, however, all strategies that survive in the long term
must do so under competitive pressure. Strategies that deviate in core
metabolism from the paths of least resistance, even by small degrees,
take on fitne4ss costs either in energy demand, overcoming of
side-reactions, maintenance of enzyme specificity, or other basic
physiological functions. Because core metabolism carries such high-flux
as the source of all biomass, even small-costs per reaction are
amplified when they occur in the core-network." - The Origin and Nature
of Life on Earth: the emergence of the 4th
geosphere; Eric Smith and Harold Morowitz, pg. 201, 2016, Cambridge
Press.
"Perhaps the Yanomami, through centuries of trial and error, had
learned something about how compounds from both food and medicinal
plants provide specific signals, triggering effects on both our brain
and our gut."- Emeran Mayer, The Mind-Gut connection, Harper-wave, pg.
201, 2016
"On these grounds, cancer is the unscheduled reactivation of an
embryonic mechanism in a normally differentiated cell" - Corrado
Spadafora, from "The Paradigm Shifters" - Suzan Mazur. pg. 141 2015
"Molecular composition influences the appearance of field solutions
which define particular morphologies so that organisms become entities
which are defined by both fields and particles, or more accurately, some
combination of the two since they are not separable". Brian Goodwin,
The Intuitive Way of Knowing: A Tribute to Brian Goodwin, pg. 57, Floris
Books 2013
"In summary, genes do play an important role in development
and evolution. But there is no genetic program: genes do not have agency
or cause phenotypes. Instead, they select and stabilize developmental
processes based on morphogenetic fields, and contribute to adaptation
through learning" - Johannes Jaeger and Nick Monk, The Intuitive Way of Knowing: A Tribute to Brian Goodwin, pg. 169, Floris Books 2013
"What is it that constitutes a whole or an individual? It is a domain of coherent, autonomous activity. The coherence or organisms entails a quantum superposition of coherent activities over all space-time domains, each correlated with one another and with the whole, and yet independent of the whole. In other words, the quantum coherent state, being factorisable, maximizes both global cohesion and local freedom. Its that which underlies the sensitivity of living systems to weak signals, and their ability to intercommunicate and respond with great rapidity. Within the coherence volumes and coherence times of energy storage, there is no space-like or time-like separation, and that is why organic space-time can be non-local.
The organism is, in the ideal, a quantum superposition of coherent activities over all space-times, this pure coherent state being an attractor, or end state towards which the system tends to return on being perturbed" - Mae-Wan-Ho, The Rainbow and the Worm: The Physics of Organism, pg. 286, World Scientific, 2008
Developmental Psychology - Psychoanalysis - Cognitive Science
"I would suggest that the baby has the all important first task of
learning the non-verbal basis of social interaction upon which language
will later be built. And this primary task takes several years" - Daniel
Stern, Diary of a Baby, pg. 52, Basic Books 1990
"Instead of using sensing to get enough information inside, past the
visual bottleneck, so as to allow the reasoning system to "throw away
the world" and solve the problem wholly internally, they use the sensor
as an open conduit allowing environmental magnitudes to exert a constant influence on behavior". Sensing
is thus depicted as the opening of a channel, with successful whole
system behavior emerging when activity in this channel is kept within a
certain range." Andy Clark, Surfing Uncertainty: prediction, action and
the embodied mind. pg. 247-248, Oxford Press, 2016
Sociology - Philosophy - Politics/Economics
"Everything turns upon how we understand the social promotion of autonomy" - The I in We; Axel Honneth,pg. 46, 2014, Polity
"The natures that neoliberalism has produced operate within the epochal nature of historical capitalism, and perhaps even a sort of civilizational nature of humankind since the Neolithic revolution. " - Jason Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life, Verso, pg. 164, 2015
"At once humbled and ennobled by our discoveries, we are gradually coming to see ourselves as part of a vast and continuing process; as though awakening from a dream, we are beginning to realize that our nobility consists in serving, like intelligent atoms, the work proceeding in the Universe. We have discovered that there is a whole, of which we are the elements.We have found the world in our own souls." Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Future of Man, pg. 7, image press, 1959
"The people who make it their business to study or order human society (politicians, political economists etc) do so in practice as though Social Man were virgin wax into any shape they choose. They do not seem to have noticed that the living substance they are manipulating is, by reason of its very formation, characterized by certain narrowly defined lines of growth; and that these, although they are sufficiently supple to permit the architects of the New Earth to make use of them, are also strong enough to disrupt any arrangement that does not respect them. -Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Future of Man, pg. 237, image press, 1959
Research
Post-mortem count of locus coeruleus neurons in 3 American veterans with PTSD.
http://getit.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/getit?ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&ctx_enc=info%3Aofi%2Fenc%3AUTF-8&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Fsummon.serialssolutions.com&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Ajournal&rft.genre=article&rft.atitle=Postmortem+Locus+Coeruleus+Neuron+Count+in+Three+American+Veterans+With+Probable+or+Possible+War-Related+PTSD&rft.jtitle=The+Journal+of+Neuropsychiatry+and+Clinical+Neurosciences&rft.au=H+Stefan+Bracha&rft.au=Edgar+Garcia-Rill&rft.au=Robert+E+Mrak&rft.au=Robert+Skinner&rft.date=2005-10-01&rft.pub=American+Psychiatric+Publishing%2C+Inc&rft.issn=0895-0172&rft.eissn=1545-7222&rft.volume=17&rft.issue=4&rft.spage=503&rft.externalDocID=953689681
The 3 men studied with probable (extraordinarily probable! So much so as to be treated as an almost inevitable fact of warfare) war-related PTSD
1) A white Man, dead at age 68; an alcoholic; suffered from major depression and chronic schizophrenia; he had a spouse up until his death. He had 15,177 neurons in his right locus coeruleus, and 14, 252 in his pendunculopontine nucleus (PPN). 35 years of mental illness.
"Veteran HB25 (probable WR-PTSD) was a combat WW-II, Pacific Theater
veteran who was later stationed in Hiroshima and served during the
Korean War and was 68 years old at the time of death. Chart information
suggested at least one episode of severe depression treated 24 years
prior to his death. Collateral information from the veteran’s wife
strongly suggested that the veteran had a history of exaggerated startle
response, combat–related nightmares, avoidance of war reminders,
avoidance of crowds, restricted range of affect, difficulty
concentrating, chronic dysphoria, suicidal thoughts, little to no
interest in any social activities, and chronic irritability resulting in
difficulties on the job and arrests for fighting. Episodes of
rage/violence were also frequently directed towards his family. He had a
past history of alcohol dependence; however, it was in remission for 15
years at the time of death. There was no history of panic attacks.
Two years before his death, he was admitted to a VA nursing home
following a left hemispheric cerebrovascular accident suffered during
lung resection due to adenocarcinoma of the lung. No metastases to the
brain were noted at autopsy. The presence of a large, old infarct
involving most of the left cerebrum in the territory of the middle
cerebral artery was confirmed by postmortem examination. There were
also scattered old microscopic infarcts in the right cerebrum. He was
taking no medication at the time of his death."
http://neuro.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/jnp.17.4.503
This description correlates quite well with the very low (about 8 thousand less) neuronal count in this mans locus-coeruleus - an area that generates a molecule (norepinephrine) important to the regulation of a human beings feeling of coherency - and thus - a low amount would refer to a very low capacity to regulate consciousness. With reference to the "energetic" norms of human-human (or Self-Other) engagements, a human brain-mind with this low a number would have difficulty existing within the human world in a normal way. Thus, the man spent much of his time dissociated, or afraid, likely "oscillating" along such a dual attractor.
2) A white man, dead at 68. Benzodiazopine addict. Alcoholic, and a diagnosis of "generalized anxiety disorder" since the 60's. Unipolar depression. He had 10,566 neurons in his right locus coeruleus and 8,099 neurons in his PPN. 29 years of mental illness.
Veteran HB12 (benzodiazepine abuse and probable WR-PTSD) was 68 years of
age at the time of his death. He was a combat veteran and served for
four years in WWII. This veteran had a diagnosis of benzodiazepine
abuse at the time of his death and a history of alcohol dependence that
had been in remission for 20 years. He had been hospitalized on several
occasions for recurrent unipolar major depression and, as noted in his
chart, for “possible panic attacks.” This veteran had a chart diagnosis
of Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) dating to the 1960’s, which was
identified as combat-related on his VA medical record. His anxiety
disorder diagnosis was made more than a decade prior to the recognition
and DSM formulation of PTSD. It is likely this four-year WWII combat
veteran’s combat-related anxiety and other symptoms are misdiagnosed
manifestations of WR-PTSD.
3) White male, 78 years at death. 11,322 neurons in his right locus coeruleus. 6,924 neurons in his PPN.
Veteran HB23 (probable panic disorder and possible WR-PTSD) was 78 years
old at the time of his death. History from this veteran’s wife
indicated the frequent occurrence of typical spontaneous panic attacks
in this veteran (which started in his teenage years preceding his
military service). The panic attacks occurred at a frequency of roughly
two per week or more and manifested by flushing, profuse sweating,
shaking, dyspnea, sudden weakness, and feeling faint. There was a
positive history of panic attacks in the veteran’s family. The veteran
had a history of alcohol abuse that had been in remission for at least
five years at the time of his death. He served as a cook in WWII; and
while there was no chart documentation that he experienced severe trauma
during the war, he manifested extreme avoidance of war reminders and
intense distress when faced with war reminders. In addition, the
veteran frequently exhibited insomnia and other symptoms of anxiety.
Since this veteran met core PTSD symptoms from each of the three
DSM-IV-TR symptom clusters, his postmortem consensus diagnoses were
probable panic disorder and possible WR-PTSD.
Very Important!!!! --> http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25154707
http://www.nature.com/articles/srep22021
