The masses want to avoid things, they want to get rid of things,
they want to gain things. They want to avoid half of life.
From what I can tell, and I'm sure that as I learn more,
this'll be refined, but
the first human beings that potentially lived on the planet
and I'm not going to, I have a five day course on how human beings came about,
so I'm not going to go into detail on that.
But the first human beings had what appeared to be low reflective
awareness.
And they were primarily in what we would call a lower brain
centers. They hadn't had a highly developed telencephalon,
which is the most evolved part of the brain,
and they were more kind of a animal behavior,
more of avoiding pain, seeking pleasure, avoiding predators,
seeking prey thinking.
We still have that area of our brain today, we call it the amygdala,
and it's a desire center,
and it is trying to avoid predator and seek prey even today,
avoid challenge seek ease. And we have now a more advanced part of the brain,
the telencephalon, that's involved in objective reason,
which allows us to create the sciences that we have today
and some of the philosophical thinking that we have today and more abstract
conceptualization, mathematics, and things of this nature.
But originally man had low reflective awareness and more
impulses for pleasure and instincts from pain.
And it was basically surviving. And out in surviving in the wild,
in nature, anything in nature that it didn't understand,
that was a mystery, and I'm gonna use the term mystery, to its awareness,
if it frightened it, it would try to avoid it.
And what they found is there's an area of the brain in the parietal
temporal frontal junction area,
that if you stimulate it with magnetic stimulation,
it gives people an experience that they're communicating with some sort of a God
or a communication with something that's satisfying,
and that area of the brain lights up when we're traumatized challenged,
oppressed, frightened, when we have torture, turmoil,
trauma, terribles anything that challenges our value system,
it lights up.
And we dissociate from that trauma and we create the opposite
content in the brain from our experience in order to survive.
And we know that that area of the brain,
we can do that electrically and magnetically and stimulate that and give
religious experiences to people. And,
but what has happened is whenever we're under trauma or tragedy,
that area lights up and gives us a religious experience.
So we now know literally the brain areas that light up when we're having what we
think are spiritual experiences, or religious experiences.
And it appears that our first fears,
very early fears were thunder, lightning,
rumbling of earthquakes, pounding of animals,
being eaten by animals, even before the animals and earth,
we were frightened about what foods to eat,
we know that alkaloids tend to be toxic and
sweets and sugars and carbohydrates tend to be edible.
And we had to learn from it. And what we found out in the religious development,
the very earliest religions,
according to Tylor and others is animism where we basically
project our agenticity and our idea that everything's alive onto things
and we talk to it and try to communicate with it,
to try and protect us from the things that frighten us.
So religion seemed to emerge as a compensation for phobias, fears,
and we would propitiate the things that we'd be frightened of by talking to some
sort of a animistic, you
might say agent that would then, we would pray to,
to protect us from that thing we were frightened by.
And the earliest religion is geomorphic and the earliest remnants
of religion are in caves, in symbolic drawings.
Neanderthals are supposedly the place where this is supposedly identified,
but I think it's much earlier than that. I think it goes back,
we have some indications at going back around 300,000 years,
but 50,000 years, we definitely have strong indication of it. And of course,
once we started having, we weren't nomadic,
we actually started having where we started plant things and live
in communities and things of this nature, we started having organized religion,
but prior to that,
we had sort of an animistic stage of religion and shamanistic stage of religion.
And we basically had gods that we made up to protect us from the things we were
frightened of. So we had geomorphic gods,
then we had zoomorphic gods,
which were plant-based,
based on the plants that would kill us versus save our lives,
then there was zoomorphic animal-based and we had animal
gods, because animals could kill us or frighten us.
And eventually when man became more frightening than the animals and the parts
of nature,
as we became solving these mysteries and eventually anthropomorphic gods,
and eventually astromorphic gods, which are basically things,
bigger suns, moon, stars and things of this nature.
So what we did is we have a tendency in our amygdala,
which is a primitive part of our brain, you might say,
or a sub-cortical part of a brain better said.
That area of the brain is involved in what is called false positives and
subjective biases.
So if we're out in the wild and we think we see some pattern or
something moving in nature,
we automatically animate it and give it an agent as if it's alive to
protect us. We create pareidolia,
which is the imposition of images that we think are alive,
just like if you look at wood or marble,
you'll see images of faces of animals or humans in it.
And that's a protective mechanism for,
it's better to err on the false positive and assume something's there
that's not there,
to assume that a predator's there because he could eat us if we had a false
negative, which means that we thought it wasn't there when it really was there,
better to err on the false positive where it's there,
even if it's not there and that way we're prepared for it.
So we had false positives and we have subjective biases and we had agenticity
and we animated things,
assuming it was alive to protect us from something that might move,
that might be a predator. And we had,
we saw patterns that we saw patterns in behavior that we then assumed with
pareidolia that was animated to protect us from something that might eat us or
protect us from something that might harm us.
And then we had also the same thing for prey. We had a pareidolia which is the,
seeing the faces and images of animals that we think are edible.
And we would agenticity them and make them animated and alive. And this animism,
this agenticity is the first stage of religion from what we can tell.
So basically in a summary,
anything that frightened the earliest human beings that lived,
anything that frighten them,
the brain would dissociate from it and create content in the brain
from to experience,
to counterbalance that phobia in order to survive,
to keep the brain from going into full reaction.
And then we would create false positives to assume that it's something that
could harm us to prepare for it or something that would save us from it.
And we now carry that forward into our religions today.
The lowest level of religious development that we have today
is a reward and punishment religions.
It's the bottom of the barrel.
So we blame something on the outside that we think is frightening us.
We personify it with agenticity. We create an image on it,
which we may call the devil for instance.
And then we have this other side that we have agenticity on and pareidolia,
we'll personify that,
and we'll give it a title that saves us and we'll put a father figure on it,
or we'll put a, some sort of a savior figure on it,
a prophet figure on this or something that takes away our fear. And then we'll,
because we'll subordinate to that thing that we think is going to protect us,
we'll inject those values and we'll try to live by those values that we project
that we've made in our mind.
And then we've end up creating these kind of pseudo gods or false gods,
there's anthropomorphic deities that the world has been basically infested with
for God, thousands of years now.
Many of them have risen and many of them are gone. In the Mayan
culture for instance, there was a rain god, when you were frightened of thunder,
they had a thunder god and rain god,
because they could flood and they could be hit by, striked by lightning.
And so they would appease the gods by talking to the agent of that
god, to,
to appease it and try to give things and support its values so it wasn't be
angry because they were perceiving these things as being angry gods and they
were frightened to these gods.
But eventually we realized what thunder came from and what lightning came from
and when we did those gods disappeared.
And so these anthropomorphic and zoomorphic gods and geomorphic
gods are pretty well,
most of them are gone except in undeveloped countries today,
because we pass through that stage of development.
And we now have solved mysteries with our questioning and reasoning and
reflective awareness.
And we realize that everything out there that frightened us has had nothing to
do with what's out there and had everything to do with our perception of what's
out there.
And that's why I can take somebody who's frightened about something in the
Breakthrough Experience for instance,
and take it and dissolve the fear out of it, the phobia out of it,
by finding the upsides to it,
and instead of having to pray to a something to protect it,
there's nothing to protect.
And so you don't need to have this artificial anthropomorphic deity to protect
you from this artificial phobia that you have.
So religion came as a protection for people that didn't know how to govern
themselves, didn't have a higher brain function,
that didn't know how to neutralize and balance their phobias and their philias,
they had to create these constructs and it was a
necessary construct for the average person.
There was not a lot of reason and a lot of understanding initially.
So we we had to migrate through these stages of moral development and spiritual
development. But the lowest level of moral development is avoid predator,
seek prey, avoid punishment, seek reward, avoid negative, seek good, positive,
avoid evil, seek good, avoid the devil and seek the savior kind of thing,
or the hero figure in mythologies,
and that's the lowest level.
The highest level of religious understanding as we go up in the brain
development is the realization of objective reason.
It's a mathematically equation that's balanced,
the positives and negatives aren't imbalanced.
You don't have prey that's all positive and predator that's negative,
you have them integrated. And that's what objectivity is,
is you see the balance of both.
And it's a realization that that there's a hidden order,
a mathematical hidden order in the universe.
And you could personify that and call it,
like the panpsychics have done throughout the ages,
where you imagine the whole universe is intelligent and the universe is trying
to assist all living organisms to evolve and the moment we see both
sides, we maximally evolve.
We know that maximum growth and development occurs at the border of support and
challenge or prey and predator. Imagine if you got prey without predator,
you get fat and sluggish and you'd end up being out of fitness.
And if you had predator without prey, you'd get skinny and starve.
But if you had prey and predator together,
you maximumly keep your fitness and you continue to grow.
So the highest level of the brain is more objective.
It's not frightened by negatives, without positives.
It's not philic and fantasizing by more positives without negatives and praying
to some anthropomorphic deity to protect it.
It integrates the two and it realizes that it's not out there, it's inside you
and it's your perceptions.
And the highest religious understanding is the realization that
all pairs of opposites that are supportive and challenging are paired
synchronously and that you realize that there's a hidden order in the apparent
chaos and you actually have a feeling of love for that and an
embracing of the order that's there.
And so religion goes from the most polarized, avoid pain,
seek pleasure to the most synthesized where you embrace both in the pursuit of
some cause, some purpose in life, something deeply meaningful.
The Stoics referenced this and many philosophers have said this,
but religion is got through different stages.
The most basic religion is basically avoiding trauma or something that
frightens you and seeking something that saves you from that fright.
That's why praying to a God to protect you from your fears is still carried
over. It's kind of a childish development, but it's used.
I always say that the highest prayer at the top,
is not protecting you and asking for things to change. It's asking,
it's basically acknowledging the hidden order that's there that you have been
denying.
I tell people those that are searching for a God the most are the ones denying
the presence of the divine, the order of the universe the most.
But when you actually see the order of the universe,
there's nothing to protect yourself from,
there's nothing to run from or seek or avoid.
And whatever you're trying to change others to live in your values or you're
trying to change you to live in other people's values,
you're going to have frustration and unfulfillment.
You're going to want to kind of pray that something is going to change the
repercussions of that frustration.
So the highest prayer, if you will, is thank you, I love you,
and I see the order and there's nothing out of order,
and I appreciate the way it is as it is.
Om Tat Sat as the Gita used to say. But the bottom line is our
religion developed anthropologically from our fear of nature and our
evolution of what we were frightened of through time,
from geomorphic to zoomorphic plants, zoomorphic animals part animal,
part human, you can see this in Egyptian writings and some other cultures,
the Mayan cultures and other cultures.
Eventually anthropomorphic that you see in the Abrahamic religions and
eventually you honor the hero, but the real hero and the villain,
when you're actually merge them together, you get the true divinity.
The true divinity does not build without destroy or does not destroy without
build, but transforms.
I always say the master lives in the world of transformation,
not the illusions of gain and loss. And the masses want to avoid things,
they want to get rid of things, they want to gain things,
they want to avoid half of life. And so I'm not a promoter of that,
it's a stage of moral development, as Kohlberg said,
but Kohlberg said that you live avoiding pain, seeking pleasure,
then you live by subordinating to mothers, fathers, preachers, teachers,
and you live subordinating to convention and tradition of people in your
neighborhood, community, city, state, nation, and then world.
And eventually you transcend that and realize that you transcend those moral
things of good and bad and avoid and seek,
and you realize that both are necessary in the journey,
there's no hero and villain except what you have inside,
and they're always together as a pair. When you finally embrace that,
you've got the true religiosity. As Einstein said,
he's not interested in anthropomorphisms, he's not interested in artificial
God's made in the image that create these moralities that were supposedly come
from the gods,
but actually come from humans made up and then they make artificial gods to
promote the ideals that they're living by.
I'm interested in exploring the magnificence of the universe,
seeing past the avoiding seeking model and seeing the synthesis
and synchronicity of all things at the same time,
and I think that's the highest religiosity we can obtain.
And many times people dissociate and think that they're going to get somebody
saving them and somebody,
as long as you're giving credit to something outside you and blame something
outside you, you haven't gotten to true religiosity yet. That's my experience.
[Inaudible].