Larsen: The thing I was going to get to is just naming the organs of the brain. The brain is split into two hemispheres. The splitting is throughout; it’s there in the two branches of the autonomic nervous system and it’s there in the two hemispheres of the brain that are connected by a slender bridge called the corpus callosum and the information doesn’t always get from the left to the right. And we think the right hemisphere is just wonderful, because it’s creative, and imagistic, and kind of ADD, and it’s not linear, and systematic, and verbal, and calculating like the left hemisphere is supposed to be. But actually, the right hemisphere is also a natural pessimist as Richard Davidson’s work has shown, and if it’s activated, people can get a very black view of the world. So I think this is what happens in certain variations of fundamentalist Christianity. The world is a contest between god and the devil and if you’re not with us, in the same way that we are and say the same things that we say, then you’re in the hands of the devil. And oh, you don’t want that because in the Middle Ages they use to summon these horrible scenarios of eternal torture and then Judgment Day. Rob, I have a whole chapter on Judgment Day mythologies, really, and the whole millenialist Armageddon kind of scenario. That’s a very, very dangerous thing, to think the end of the world is coming. That’s what Joseph Campbell called “ the great non-event”.
Kall: Well, but there are sure enough tens of millions of people who base their lives on expecting to not die a normal death; to be raptured away or to find the messiah.
Larsen: Yeah. This whole idea of 'The Rapture' actually is a kind of an artifact of, I think, of 19th Century, about 1840's, Darbyite thinking, in which he really... people were inflamed, in the mid-1800's, with the idea of the 'Second Coming of Christ,' in England and in America. You look at the cults that arose in America, the Jehovah's Witnesses, they were expecting the end of the world; the Seventh Day Adventists, they were waiting for that seventh day; the Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, that's all about apocalyptic thinking; and the end of the world is coming, so, by God, you'd better shape up or you're going to be in a lake of fire, or eternal damnation, or you...
Kall: And not only that, but it doesn't matter what you... whether you take care of the world or not. It doesn't matter whether you act responsibly and leave it better than you got it from your parents.
Larsen: Yeah, that's a little scary. In other words, that leads... that one mythical belief leads to social irresponsibility and ecological irresponsibility.
Kall: Yes, it does. So, the brain lateralization, the right and left brain, when people succumb to right brain dominance, which tends to be negative and depressive, they find themselves more receptive to this kind of negative, end-of-the-world, evil-is-in-the-world, simplistic thinking and maybe they drop down into their lower parts of their brain, their mammalian or reptilian brain. Is that the kind of thing that happens?
Larsen: Well, you know, as Joseph Campbell used to say, and he wasn't a neurologist or neuro-psychologist or anything, but he was pretty hippy, said, "Look, mythology is the software, neurology is the hardware, and if you put bad software into the hardware, it's going to kind of mess it up."
The right hemisphere, if it's tutored, let's say, in creative thinking, optimal performance, the human potential idea, the thing's a beautiful performer. It helps us dance, act, play the piano beautifully, many things, be expressive in our lives. But if it's fed a constant hash of stuff about 'the end of the world is coming, it's coming right now, you better be prepared, and you're a bag of sin,' this whole idea, 'so you're condemned and it's only by Christ's sacrifice for you that you all have a chance and let me tell you about because I'm the one who knows.'
Thank kind of thinking, that Conversionist thinking, was rife in the 1800's, and it's scarcely less rife now. If you listen to the televangelists and stuff like that, they really do scare people. Jerry Falwell was fond of saying, "I don't need an undertaker, I'm waiting for the uppertaker." He was expecting The Rapture to happen in his own lifetime and he said that kind of stuff publicly.
It seems to me, once a guy has said things like that in public and then he really does need the undertaker, as was revealed by Jerry's death a couple of years ago, God bless him, he really needed the undertaker, but he got lots of people whipped into a frenzy of expectation that the end of the world was coming in their lifetime. Ronald Reagan evidently believed, and he spent time with Falwell and Robertson, believed that the end of the world was coming. And, so, well, maybe it is, but if you start thinking that way, you're going to behave really, really strangely and impractically.
Kall: Your next chapter is "Authority, Ritual and Dissociation?"
Larsen: Yeah, isn't that cool?
Kall: How does dissociation fit into all this?
Larsen: Well, the three things, authority, ritual, and dissociation....
The brain, the primate brain, is geared to alpha males in the primate societies and so our attention is always directed upward.
Ritual is very, very efficacious psychologically with animals, all animals are ritualists, they know how to dance, the facial expression, the mask, the types of cries. With human beings, religionists have monopolized this. When you walk in a sacred space and you take off your hat, and maybe your shoes if you're a Buddhist, and you walk into this silent, vast cathedral or shrine or mosque, and you bend down and you touch your forehead to the floor, or fold your hands and pray, and you smell the incense, man, you've been through ritu... you've been ritualized and you're in a different state of consciousness already.
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