Working with the Soul in Counselling and Supervision Practice
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Insights from Neurobiology to (the) (S)oul Peter Bowes MBE BSc BD Dmin BACP Senior Accredited Counsellor and Supervisor BACP Cardiff November 2017 My experience and yours is interpreted and modulated by our brain/Mind. Before using our experience to derive natural history, To communicate theology, psychology, our experience the philosophy, perhaps we should understand more of brain appears to significance of relationship of brain and mind to construct myth experiences and metaphor and For example, we cannot understand spirituality we benefit from without understanding brain ritual and mind and vice versa Insights from Neurobiology to soul In the beginning In the beginning….. Mithen, Stephen, The Prehistory of the Mind: A search for the origins of art, religion and science. Thames and Hudson, London, 1996. Lewis-Williams, David, The Mind in the Cave, Consciousness and the Origins of Art, Thames and Hudson, 2002 http://lecerveau.mcgill.ca/flash/i/i_12/i_12_s/i_12_s_con/i_12_s_con.html Act one 6-4.5 million years ago . A long time of little action to be viewed in total darkness 4.5 – 1.8 million years ago . lit only by a flickering candle life begins in Africa then develops with a rush of actors with Act two tools for killing or savaging 1.8 million to 100,00o years ago . Lighting still poor but brightens towards the end . Homo erectus appears whose presence spreads widely including Europe and with more impressive hand axes Act three . Neanderthals appear who develop and hunt game with stone tools maybe some of bone but no carvings; brain size reaches modern dimensions With acknowledgements to Steven Mithen, Prehistory of the Mind Act four 100,000 years to present day . Four scenes with much more action than the whole of the previous play ▪ 100,00 to 60,000 homo sapiens appears apparently the same as Neanderthals but burying their dead with ceremony ▪ 60,000 years ago homo sapiens builds boats and suddenly blades appear as well as axes, bone and ivory are fashioned, dwellings are erected and cave walls are painted, figure are carved, clothes are sewn, necklaces worn ▪ Neanderthals try to imitate tool making and fail and die away ▪ Agriculture begins, animals are domesticated With acknowledgements to Steven Mithen, Prehistory of the Mind Development of the Mind…… Mind as sponge? Mind as computer? And if not then is it a …… Steven Mithen’s Mind as Cathedral and the development of cognitive fluidity….. https://threepointeightbillionyears.com/2016/01/29/two-evolution-cartoons/ The Mind in the Cave Lascaux Lascaux Why did the person who Somewhere around 20,000 created these images put years ago, homo sapiens them in such a cave? had knowledge to make lamp and tools Why did s/he believe it And also had a belief about important to put their this ‘irrational’ hands on this stone? underground activity What emotions did s/he How did evolution help experience? them make and What did this journey understand pictures? underground ‘do’ for her or What is intelligence and him? consciousness • Beyond the functional tool technology • Body adornments informed about personal • and group identity. • Elaborate burials of the dead • Modern language • Making of images Conceptions of an ‘alternate reality’ © Trustees of the British Museum. Art emerges…? Evolving intelligence and . Making visual images rationality . Becoming smarter and . Classification into brighter? classes . Using social intelligence to . Intentional read minds and predict communication behaviour . Current left hemisphere brain . Attribution of meaning operation? to images Mind in the Cave David Lewis- Williams thinking Shamanism . A universal human need to make sense of shifting consciousness . How might this have occurred in the hunter-gatherer societies 40,000 to 10,000 years ago. Are the cave paintings the archaeological remains that tell us? The Mind in the Cave, David Lewis-Williams The Mind in the Cave Shamanism A tiered alternative reality experienced visually, aurally, somatically by people with special powers who are believed to contact supernatural entities and who enable supernatural “The de facto source of potency (and often with the aid all revelation, and ultimately all religions” of other spirits and animals) The Mind in the Cave Shamanism and Community For many societies ‘dreams’ provide personal and incontrovertible evidence for the existence of the spiritual realms Shamanism portrays the framework of meaning making for a community and represents the effort to maintain that understanding and its values Shamanism and the Mind in the Cave Image and Metaphor and Imagination A reminder: I am focusing on the incredible rate of change in this period in art, religion, and development of society And proposing along with Lewis-Williams that cognitive fluency (the Cathedral metaphor) evolves to experience of altered states of consciousness In order to ‘see’ or ‘notice’ two or three dimensional objects in or on something else, you already have a mental map of it. It is something we/they learned to do and wanted to do. The experience comes first. There is a primary consciousness we share with animals and a higher order consciousness evolving in homo sapiens Primary consciousness alone leads to the tyranny of the ‘remembered present’. Higher order consciousness leads homo sapiens out of that limitation by the evolution of symbolic and metaphorical ‘thinking’. (the function of the right hemisphere – McGilchrist) Shamanism and the Mind in the Cave ‘Seeing’ the tool in the material for a particular kill; and seeing a meaning for decoration, ritual, burial As language develops so dreams are shared and therefore the meaning of dreaming is socialised. And in the Cave the paintings ‘float’ independently of any natural environment. They are representational in that they represent mental imagery and not things in the material world The Mind in the Cave “The cave art could be thought of as the “So connecting link between the ‘above ground and below ground’ binary opposition” “So entries such as this are indistinguishable from the entry to the mental vortex of altered states of consciousness” The Mind in the Cave So what might be the occasion for these handprints? The were created there by putting a hand on the roc k and blowing powder onto the hand which disappears in the process. The human being breathes into the rock transforming him or herself into “A complex interaction between persona and spirit, the horses for artist and image, viewer and image” example. Mind in the Cave In altered states of consciousness all the senses hallucinate not merely the visual Many sounds within a cave system must have been awe inspiring. Resonant areas are more likely to have images than non- resonant ones. Mind in the Cave The ‘big bang’ of the Neanderthals without the evolution of consciousness in evolved right hemisphere were homo sapiens, which almost there, but not quite. did not appear in Neanderthals Neanderthals could not conceive of a spirit world Without fully modern consciousness and language with its developed handling of past, present and future, there can be no gods. Mind in the Cave Spectrum of Consciousness How is it that homo sapiens developed two hemispheres and not a unified brain? Both are involved in every brain activity but they do facilitate and inhibit one another Each hemisphere could support what we think of as consciousness But the world we experience phenomenologically is determined by which hemispheres’ version comes to predominate McGilchrist, Iain, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, Yale University Press, London 2010 Mind in the Cave Spectrum of Consciousness Master and His Emissary Right hemisphere for getting and feeding Left for vigilance awareness Right for social functioning, emotional expression, breadth of attention Inhibited by the left which focuses attention, breaking into parts to reconstruct a whole Attention changes Is the mountain a what kind of thing landmark for comes into being for us navigation Our attention changes Wealth for the our world prospector A many textured form to painter The dwelling place of the gods Changed by the attention we give to it? Right hemisphere . Curious about what is new . Pays attention to the edge of awareness Left hemisphere . Once familiar retention . Predictability and passes to the left selectivity . Can bring us other than . Preference for what is what we already know actively known (not so efficient at revision) . Efficient at revision and prediction . Denial of discrepancy . Greater myelination . Suppressing meaning not meaning faster transfer relevant between cortex and below Grasping; local short term Recognition of broad or view; dopamine regulation complex patterns, ‘the Broken up into parts in our thing as a whole’; serotonin attempt to know it and noreprinephrine When speaking about the (noradrenaline) regulated experience we do so to The Gestalt experience account for the whole Inclined to the exploratory Greater integration overtime and space with less degradation H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H Spectrum of Consciousness Altered States of The ‘robots’ take over our lives but Consciousness Beneath the thin veneer of our consciousness . day dreaming . Sleep and dream states . Hypnotic trance . Sensory deprivation . Hysterical states of dissociation . Pharmacologically induced states . Depersonalisation . Psychosis Recognised by the person, by you, as deviation from general norms during waking consciousness for that individual Arnold Ludwig, in Altered States of Consciousness, Charles T. Tart, 1990 Altered States of Consciousness Production of Altered Reduction of stimulation: high States of altitude airline pilots; Kayak disease Consciousness Increase in stimulation: brainwashing; mobs; religious conversion, healing; rites of passage; dervishes; traumatic neuroses; acute psychotic states Increased alertness: fervent prayer; prolonged vigilance on lookout; involvement with a charismatic speaker Decreased alertness: passive meditation; day-dreaming; trances; Arnold Ludwig, in Altered States of Consciousness, Charles T.