How "real-making" changes the believer rather than reality, part deux

Part II of An Essay review of "How God Becomes Real," by T M Luhrmann

How "real-making" changes the believer rather than reality, part deux

Reduced to their bare essentials, the six hypotheses tested by the author and discussed in Part I, foreshadow the fact that in times of fear and stress, the imagination, under the weight of its own emotional logic, automatically creates a "faith-frame."

A faith-frame is a kind of emergency emotional frame of reference that allows the imagination space to take on a more flexible ontological stance in considering what is real and what is not during these times of fear and stress.

The author's six-part theory tells us that, with sustained practice, focused studies of narratives (preferably told and retold from canonical books of faith), and studied within the faith-frame paracosm, the imagination becomes stronger and more coherently focused. So much so, that when prayer is added to this "kindled" mixture, the imaginative threshold is crossed and gods begin to "appear more" real.

Dr. Luhrmann's is not the only anthropologist theory about how gods are made real.

Maurice Godelier's (The Imagined, the Imaginary and the Symbolic, 2015), found that to become real, gods had to be presented through "presentification rituals" rather than through "representational rituals" and icons alone.

In traditional religions, presentification is the step that allows the imagination to break through the threshold of resistance to bring gods forth where they can then answer for perceived maldistribution of rewards and punishments, etc.

The Christian sacrament of a sip of wine with bread crumbs, "presented" as the blood and body of Christ, is a typical example of calling god forth via "presentification."

But there also is Levy-Bruhl's initial findings in his book "Primitive Mentality" (1923), that one of the fundamental differences between traditional and contemporary religious practices is that the imagination of traditional religions tend to see reality as fluid rather than as solid. And, more importantly, they see a mischievous negative agency lurking in all living organisms. This called for more rather than fewer gods.

However in his penultimate book, "How Natives Think," 1975, these differences had vanished. The famous anthropologist had made a theoretical u-turn, adjusting his theory to fit his new findings that the ubiquitous negative power (within a fluid ontology) requiring an equally potent offsetting counter-power to keep these malevolent agents in check, was a feature of contemporary religions as well.

But what is neglected is the dirty little secret at the heart of all these anthropological investigations: the inconvenient incongruity that the god business ignores the question: Why are gods needed in the first place? Or, more to the point of Dr Luhrmann's analysis here: Even when gods are needed, why is there always the companion need to make them real?

At some point along this backpedaling chain of question begging, we must come face-to-face with the elephant in the room: which is how do sentient beings make anything real?

The answer of course is through assigning arbitrary symbols to ideas: The only reality we sentient beings are capable of creating, or of knowing, is the meaning we create synthetically by assigning arbitrary symbols to ideas that our brains generate.

From this fundamental axiom of human reality, that human meaning is created synthetically, we must accept the fact that our gods never start out as real. Always only as imaginary. This is of course because they are always fabricated from the universe of synthetically produced human meanings. Period.

Indeed, if they were not imaginary from the start, why would there be a subsequent need to make them real? (Why make what is already real, realer?)

Whenever gods "appear to be real," but are not real in fact, does this not leave the psychological back door open to consider the whole religious enterprise to be little more than a carefully orchestrated game of self-deception at the cultural level?

Is there a real world "out there" beyond what we make synthetically, or is it just a simplistic tautology to think so?

Somehow we inevitably arrived at the untenable and unsatisfactory point where everyone must answer this much begged question for himself.

But is not leaving these questions unanswered just self-deception (or colossal slight of mind) on a cosmic scale but through the back door?

" And into this unlocked back door, only Psychologists and Neuroscientists can rush in to tidy up a bit this philosophical muddle.

In even a samplings of the wider readings of the psycho-neurological and archaeological literature, "self-deception" and "real-making" not only share center stage, but also share a common but distance ancestor. This ancestry is one found deep in the evolutionary development of the mind itself.

And within this deeper and wider biological context, "god-making," "real-making," and "self-deception," all seem to lie on the same cognitive plane, and have arisen coextensively with consciousness and its use of self-deception as a pivotal component of the mind's survival strategies. There is ample evidence even that non-sentient beings used self-deception as part of their survival repertoire as well.

We know too that in the neurosciences, the mind is a combination of consciousness, idea production, imagination and meaning-making. And that they all evolved at a specific point in evolutionary time. After which they were gradually melded into a single cognitive unit deploying, among other things, self-deception as a key component in the strategy of servicing the body's survival needs from moment-to-moment.

Is it not possible that by failing to take this shared pre-history of the mind properly into account, that a great deal of the research without it, is little more than a special case of the researchers overlooking the brain's ability to deceive itself?

While admittedly this suggestion may seem quite a stretch to some, it nevertheless can be credibly argued that it was these same strategies of self-deception that evolved for eons along with brain architecture, and that it was a part of the tool kit that kept humans alive and in the game of living for many millennia throughout the chaotic void. Even well before gods or religion had yet been invented.

One story of the mind that reinforces and concretizes this suggested pre-history, is the following one.

Readers may recall that according to neuroscientist, Dr. Richard Pico, in his 2011 book, "Consciousness in Four Dimensions," organisms that eventually became sentient beings were literally tossed out into a fearful, complex, chaotic void to sink or swim, with nothing. They were left to construct survival tools on the fly.

Evolution eventually armed them with a powerful ally, the unitary output of the brain, it's ideas. Ideas were produced neurobiomechanically, serially, involuntarily, and continuously, without fail every 200ms of brain processing cycle time. However, even with ideas churned out of a conscious neurobiological machine, survival from one minute to the next was never assured. Because for millennia sentient beings, like other organisms, survived on "reflex-actions-in-the-moment" alone.

We can only imagine that initially these reflex-actions were constantly being upgraded over vast stretches of time through trial-and-error, moving unsteadily from actions accompanied by "content-less ideas," to the next logical level: actions accompanied by "ideas loaded with synthetic meanings" constructed from symbols.

Invariably, they reached their evolutionary destination: a point where ideas loaded with survival-enhancing meanings were connected to imagination, which proved to be an evolutionary "sweet spot" for the survival of sentient beings.

This historical procession, from mindless to mindful reflexes, not only allowed humans to plan better fear-avoidance tactics, but when coupled with imagination, opened the human mind to a whole new alternative world: the meta-world of self-deception.

This new self-created imaginary meta-world, proved to be a cognitive game-changer. Because with it, the fearful malicious agents offered up by the void, could now be contained. And, sentient beings could act in an uncertain chaotic world with some sense of equanimity.

And, as far-fetched as this reconstructed pre-history may seem, something similar to it may indeed have been the proper forerunner to a mind capable of asking the question: How do we make god real?

But humans first had to get to a god. All the ingredients were there: fears and dangers lurking everywhere on a cosmic scale, and a meta-world capable of self-deception waiting to be deployed in survival-extending ways.

And this is precisely where Dr. Pico's theory begins to yield the contextual pre-historical stage to that of a clinical psychiatrist and neuropsychologist, Dr. John Schumacher.

Schumacher's research, in his 1995 book "The Corruption of reality," shows directly that the strategic use of self-deception (as an intentional way of corrupting reality so that a more orderly, less complex and less fearful world resulted), has been a part of brain architecture since sentient beings began to use their imagination.
According to Schumacher, this capacity for the brain to disassociate itself from itself, was the evolutionary improvement that lifted sentient beings out of the cognitive dark ages of being overwhelmed with disorder, complexity and fear, into the new more comfortable meta-world of self-deception.
Schumacher tells us exactly how the mechanism of self-deception works; that human brain architecture has the capacity to selectively perceive its environment, selectively process information, selectively store memories, selectively disengage from already stored memories, and then selectively replace disassociated memories with more "user-friendly" ones!
What he describes is one powerful self-deceiving capability.
In other words, the self-deceptive brain, can split the mind into distinct unified submodules, that to an outside observer may appear to operate in distinctly realities. Yet, within a single mind, or within a single cultural context, such as a faith-frame, these split-mind tendencies can be harnessed, normalized and culturally homogenized.
Put differently, within cultures, people's false conceptions of reality do indeed become real to them. This is so because the reality we see; the reality of the individual, is to a large extent the result of reconstructions fabricated through some form of self-deception propagated at both the level of the individual, and at the level of culture.
When the individual does it alone, the behavior takes on connotations of mental illness. But as part of respected cultural groups, such churches defending the need for a god, willful self-deception is easily rationalized as morally respectable and the very definition of sanity.
Schumacher ends by suggesting that through the mechanism of disassociation and self-deception, religion and psychopathology are merely different sides of the same reality re-construction project: a corruption of reality whose survival advantage is that it avoids being overwhelmed by complexity, fear, disorder and chaos.
Using hypnosis as a control, Professor Schumacher in fact demonstrates that religion, hypnosis, and psychopathology are all part of a single story, namely, the regulation of, and the corruption of reality through self-deception. Which makes Schumacher's analysis end at the same point as the others' began.
And if we read between the lines of Professor Luhrmann's findings: That by making gods real, we do not change the gods so much as we change our own thinking, so that the world appears to be less hostile to, if not consonant with, our beliefs. She then ends at the same point too.
Taking these findings into account. Inside the faith-frame we are more likely than not to also find a self-deceptive strategy lurking behind or even within that frame.
Thus, in summary, "meanings," as well as "gods" and the need for "real-making," can be said to have come into existence through a strategy of self-deception deployed to drive out fear, complexity, disorder, uncertainty and chaos on a cosmic scale.

The "faith-frame" in the end, is little more than a relic of the mind's own pre-history: a reconstructed modern day safe-haven, the preparation of a clearing within our heads and within our cultures, that provides protection from the hazard's of objects still flying at us from deep within the still chaotic cosmic void.

Schumacher's "corruption of reality" hypothesis seems to have solved the general problem of fear, complexity and universal chaos, by calling forth the god of self-deception to engage in hand-to-hand combat on our behalf against the invisible mischievous agents lurking around the edges of the universal chaos.