Ep. 7 Our Reptilian Brain

The fear inside of us is one with that of the fear of colts of buffaloes and chicks of hawks. We are being led by our past terrors.

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Speaker 1  0:02  
You are back in my company don eagrán seo don phodcraoladh for this edition of the podcast, the bog shaman Manchán on Moriarty is Misha man Khan naman Khan. Man Khan Gan AGAS, and today we're diving into our animal nature. Melach on annavi Lag doing our reptilian brain.

Speaker 1  0:32  
Moriarty has some big thoughts on this, and I don't mean to spoil the surprise or anything, but he's got a hunch that there's a fair amount more of our former reptilian selves left deep inside of us than we normally imagine. You do know who John Moriarty is? Now, don't you? Like don't make me back up and explain all that I've told you over the last episodes, me and the producer, Ronan Coleman, have gone to such trouble to lay all this out, you're just going to have to listen to some previous episodes and clutch up. Can I just tell you a story like that? Will put this in a kind of context. I think it was in Chicago where one of the professors having wanting something to do, decided he'd have an experiment, and he got chicks, ordinary chickens, which were hatched under an infrared lamp, and when they were hatched out, he and they were on his floor. He made a model of a hawk, and he moved the hawk over them, and they scurried in terror. The moment the hawk shape moved over them, they scurried in terror under anything they could get to. He had chairs and little low tables, and they scouted as if they were scoring under their the mother hen. Then he slightly deformed the the hawk shape, so that it was beginning to look a little bit more like a pigeon. And now he moved, but it was still hawk. The wings were still sufficiently far forward, and he moved it again and again. They scored it. The reaction was literally quite terrifying. The third time, it now looked like a pigeon, he moved it across it, and there was no reaction whatever. Now the conclusion to be drawn is that the chick was born with an image of the Hawk in its psyche, so that the psyche isn't a clean slate. We are born with very ancient fears, with very ancient terrors inside of us. And supposing a time came when hawks had disappeared from the world, all hawks had disappeared from the world, and someone, quite innocently, one day, made a model of a hawk and moved it above these chicks, and the chicks behaved in this very strange way. It would be quite inexplicable, wouldn't let no How can we explain the terror of this? Why are they so terrified of this toy? We wouldn't know like that, that little chick's brain has been programmed like to be in terror of the hawk. It's an intriguing idea that our behavior may not just be influenced by events in this lifetime or even intergenerational trauma from our forebears, it could stretch right the way back to Long, long ago. Moriarty posits here that we are being haunted by ancient memories within ourselves, in the very core of our DNA. He continues on with another way of describing it, this time in terms of colts and buffalo hides, the colt that is born in New England that never heard of Buffalo, saw buffalo, never heard the roar of a buffalo, never heard the thunder of buffalo across the prairies. Yet all you have to do has no knowledge or experience of buffalo in his particular lifetime, yet shake a buffalo robe behind him, and he falls into frenzies of a fright. Now he too is carrying, within his mind, within his psyche, you know, some very ancient memories. Now, supposing we are all carrying those ancient memories, and not just not just mammalian memories, not just the memories of human the human species, but of the mammal order, not only that, supposing we are carrying memories of the Mesozoic terrors inside of ourselves, of Paleozoic terrors inside of ourselves, whatever terror any creature ever experienced like is somehow still there as a memory inside of us. Now, how can this be, you'd say, but the point is that it is, does that feel right to you, that there are these ancient fears within us that are dictating how we behave and react to things on a daily basis. Moriarty goes on to equate this idea to something Nietzsche said, and to assert his hypothesis that we may even have the memories of our horseshoe crab ancestors and even of dinosaurs living on inside of us. If that grabs you as a theory or as a supposition, then stay. With me here, as there's nowhere else on your bland poultry pod feed, your repetitive, introspective pod bubble that you're likely to find hot takes such as these, at least not delivered in such a rich molasses, melodious curry, bro. I mean, Nietzsche has said, I have discovered that the old human and animal life, indeed, the entire prehistory and past of all sentient being thinks on, loves on, hates on, dreams on and me. Now this is an astonishing discovery. Will you just listen to it again? I have discovered that the old human and animal life, indeed, the entire prehistory and past of all sentient being, lives on, works on, dreams on, hates on loved one and me. Now he is saying that the trilobite that lived in the Paleozoic, that the horseshoe crab that lived in the Silurian seas, that the dinosaur is still thinking in me, that the ape is still thinking on me, that the little nocturnal animal from which the apes have derived like or have evolved with a smell brain, the crocodile brain inside in me, is still thinking of me. Now that is astonishing to wake up, that discovery. Now, can I make that a little bit more explicable, like I mean, won't explain it, but haykal, in the last century at Darwinian he was a great embryologist, and he came to the conclusion that we undergo the whole of evolution in the womb. That I to begin with was a little single celled animal, just as you know, in the Paleozoic seas, you know, life began with single cell, began with proteins, I suppose, and acids and what have you. But, you know, at some stage it was a little paramecium, kind of animal, and I was a kind of little paramecium. Then I became a fish, like animal. I had gills, I evolved into an amphibian, then I became a reptile, then I became a mammal, and finally I became human. Now supposing that I obviously transcended the fish stage and the amphibian stage and the reptile stage, but supposing that they all remain there, and the psychic correlative of all those stages, that the psyche of the fish remains, and the psychic fears and the psychic terrors of the fish all remain, so that there's a part to me that are still terrified of sharks and big fish in the sea, like if I've gone through the whole of evolution in the womb. Now modern embryologists will dispute that, but I mean, there's a case to be made for it. So supposing the karmic correlative of all of that remained in me. Now mostly it is not activated. Do you not mean the trilobite stage in me, the reptile stage in me, are not activated. But all that has to happen is that a war should break out, you know? And I can turn my I can put a balaclava down over my face and turn myself into something worse than a reptile, you know. I can go out and shoot and kill people. I mean, you can talk about what has happened in Europe and our century. We do things that animals won't do at all. Shot yield yet, my friends, suddenly he gets very real and relevant. This may have been recorded 30 years ago, but it couldn't be more apt. The instinct to go to war, to return to our dog eat dog past is just as close by as the instinct to move forward towards a future of universal compassion and global peace to copper fasten the point. He reads a quote from the great mythologist and folklorist, Joseph Campbell. Before I go to it, maybe I would read a thing from Joseph Campbell. This isn't anything much, but, I mean, this is one thing. It's only it's only going over what we're saying again, each and every one of us is, in other words, a New England coast. We've grown up within civilization, and we don't very often know that these immensities of ancient life, of archaic life, of archaic impulse and energy are still within us. Campbell draws our attention to the now well proven fact that the human nervous system was the governor, guide and controller of a nomadic Hunter, foraging for his food and protecting himself and his family from becoming food in a very dangerous world of animals for 600,000 years of its development, where as it has been serving comparatively safe and sane farmers, merchants, professors and their children for scarcely 8000 years, who will claim to know what signs stimuli smote the releasing mechanisms when our names were not homo sapiens, but pitocantanthropus and plasianthropos are perhaps even millenniums earlier dryopithecus, and who that has knowledge of the numerous vestigial structures of our anatomy surviving from the days when we were beasts. I. Would doubt that in the central nervous system, comparable vestiges must remain, images sleeping, whose releases no longer appear in nature, but might appear in art. Like do you get the point there? Like that. This human nervous system has been around for a long, long time, a

Speaker 1  10:18  
long, long a time. I love it when he does that repetitive thing. It gets me every time. So basically, we're still nomads, still foragers with just a veneer of something new or laid on top, but often our nervous systems haven't quite caught up, at least that's what Moriarty wants us to consider, or should I say, it's what Joseph Campbell proposes. Campbell might be a bit out of fashion at present, but at his best, he's still fairly impressive. Okay, moving on. Moriarty now wants us to consider this deep time thinking to the vantage of the Grand Canyon. It's more or less the same idea as the chicks and hawks and the Colts in Buffalo, just from a different vantage point. And I looked it up, the cliffs of Moor are about 155 meters high, whereas the Grand Canyon is 1857 meters deep. That's like 10 times to be tentative somewhere, stacked on top of each other wouldn't even reach the depths of the Grand Canyon that might help you in this piece. So the Grand Canyon, you know, is a canyon scooped out by the Colorado River. I mean, geologists have different ways of explaining it. The old way was, and it is still a way that's not quite abandoned by some geologists, but it's the easiest way to explain it. I just want to advert the fact that there are other ways of explaining it. But imagine that the earth was rising, and this Colorado River was running across a rising land mass, but it was, it was rising at three foot as three foot every, every million years, or whatever you know. But the Colorado River was cutting it at three feet every, every period of time, whatever that period of time would be. So that as it rose, the Colorado River was cutting at exactly the same rate. So eventually it had cut down into the Paleozoic strata, into almost the shifts and the magma and magmas of the earth. And so patchoua are left with is cliffs of mohor on top of cliffs of MOHR, on top of cliffs of MOHR, on top of cliffs of mohor. Now just, let's imagine that the Grand Canyon actually it is mostly Paleozoic strata that are there. There's only a few vestiges of the Mesozoic. But supposing that the whole history of the Earth, like the whole all the strata of the Earth, were there, now it is down to the floor of the Grand Canyon that Jesus goes and Jesus stands there and kneels there, Grand Canyon, deep in the world's karma to be in Gethsemane is to kneel Grand Canyon deep in the world of karma, all the old sea floors, not just of the Earth, but all the old sea floors of your own psyche,

Unknown Speaker  13:13  
are above you. Now.

Speaker 1  13:15  
There you go. After six episodes, I finally let some of moriarty's Christian philosophizing and his obsession with Gethsemane slip in, I've actually done him a disservice by avoiding it all up until now. It's a key tenet of everything he stands for, but I've carefully steered my way around it, which wasn't really fair to him. You know what Gethsemane is, don't you? It's that moment when Jesus is facing up to his imminent crucifixion, when the shit is finally about to hit the fan, and everything gets very wobbly and uncertain for the Son of God. Moriarty has written reams about it, but you're not going to hear very much about it at all here. Maybe someone in the future will do Moriarty as a radical Christian podcast, but not me anyway. Let's wrap it all up for now. Moriarty is clearly trying to make a wider point here, and he does eventually sum it all up in a beautiful, succinct few sentences, which I'm going to leave you with. Megron Shaw, thank you so much for listening to this episode of the bog shaman Misha er Moriarty, manacon on Moriarty. It was written and presented by me mancon, and produced and edited by Ronan Coleman. There may be some more episodes in the future, and there may well not be, but on the website of Lilliput press and John moriarty.ie you're going to find many more books, recordings, lectures, and also to do La La about this great bouffant haired Doctor Who of North Kerry, the oddball eccentric of Irish philosophical thought. In the meantime, let's leave it to Moriarty to bring all these ideas home and remind us what we've. Been reflecting on here. One final note is that the Kidron, or the Kidron or the Cedron, it's a biblical term. It refers to a valley that's just east of Jerusalem. It's this dark, cedar, wooded place that lies beneath the walls of the city of Jerusalem and the Mount of Olives, son live. Hoga bugger. Take her handy now this, these are the terrifying possibilities of being human. You don't own you don't need to cross the Catron in order for these desperate and terrible energies to awaken in you. They awaken in people. During wars, they awaken Christ. Every day we read the paper we hear about, I mean, what possessed we talk about what possessed that man to do those things, or what possess that woman, what possessed that person? I mean by what was that person possessed? We were possessed by ancient, archaic life in us.