Why We Eat What We Eat

As a cooking teacher, who regularly meets people through my cooking classes, here on the sunshine coast, I get to see what a cross-section of society likes to eat and feels comfortable with on their plate. It is interesting to observe shared traits amongst the groups of people, who pass through my cooking school, and it gets me thinking about the whys and why nots. I wonder why most of us tend to eat from a similarly small selection of meals, despite the fact that we now have available in our supermarkets a far greater choice of ingredients than ever before. I think about what food represents, in terms of its psychological ramifications within our lives, and whether these settings can be adjusted.

It seems to me that many of us retain attitudes towards foods, which were garnered in the family home when we were children; and that the apple generally falls close to the tree. If mum and dad liked certain foods and cooked these foods more often, then for many people these influences remain strong throughout their adult lives. A bit like the children, who upon leaving the nest, build their own homes in the same street, suburb or town as mum and dad, keeping extended family close. Food like shelter is a primal need and is intimately tied up with our notion of emotional security.

As we expand the concept of family outwards and it becomes our cultural heritage, food choices again are inextricably linked to our regional and national identities. Here in Australia we can celebrate the rich diversity of our many multicultural strands and this happens most often through experiencing the foods and culinary dishes of these transplanted cultures, like Italian, Thai and Chinese foods – made available by the restaurants and takeaways, which have been created by the sons and daughters of foreign shores.

We are enriched by experience when we allow ourselves to move beyond the close confines of who and what we think we are. Just as our human species is strengthened biologically when we mate and breed outside of those whom we call our own. The cross fertilisation of genes, ideas and even recipes can make us all healthier, smarter and our lives definitely tastier. Our predominantly Anglo-Saxon backgrounds, have unfortunately, cursed many of us somewhat with limited culinary antecedents and if we do not break out of these restrictive walls, then we are condemned to eat poorly and to miss out on the more sublime flavours that life has to offer.

What and how we cook is often a bit like how we make love, we learn from experience a few things and then tend to groove these moves; somewhat unchangingly. Primal activities are a bit like that, not something that we muck about with too much, and what and how we eat falls into this category. We eat to refuel, to derive energy and sustenance from food, but eating is also a profoundly sensual activity. The nerve endings and taste buds inside our mouths feel every morsel as it slides about, and we experience our food in full technicolour, sensorama – if we are lucky enough to be in touch with our full five senses of taste, smell, sound, sight and feel.

So eating is a very personal activity, it is close to who we are, and yet we often eat in public, unlike other intimate activities like sex and going to the toilet. This sharing of the eating experience in communal structures, like cafes, restaurants and workplaces is a ritualised cultural activity. We bring our own mores, likes and dislikes, to this public performance of consumption. I am always reminded of the recounted experience of migrant children in the Australian school yard at lunchtime, as the contents of their lunch boxes were reviled by the Anglo kids because of their peculiar differences. As children we often fear what is not customary and uniform, and unfortunately many of us remain in this childish state, particularly around our foods and what we consider acceptable.

When people form intimate relationships, like marriage and close friendships, they are often confronted with the need to move beyond their culinary comfort zone in a bid to cement the stability of their relationship. The desire to share tastes and flavours is sometimes paramount to couples and their ongoing sense of emotional security. I regularly hear about the compromises being made by one partner or the other, and the effect that the changes to their diets has upon them, both positively and negatively. In fact this can be a major motivating impetus in getting people to come along to my cooking classes. A bit like going into relationship counselling I suppose, with both parties hoping that the inspirational influence of a neutral teacher may magically impart some shift in the culinary status quo of their relationship; and it sometimes does.

Seafood is a commonly held culinary ‘no go zone’, among many of the people who attend my classes. I hear again and again the refrain, “Oh I didn’t know that seafood could taste this way!” Whether they had an unfortunate early experience with a bad cook or perhaps have actually never tried the said example of fish or shellfish, due to the fact that mum or dad likewise had avoided the experience and did not cook these critters at home, the fear based result was the same. We often work out who we are by declaring the things we know that we dislike, “Oh I don’t eat fish, or oysters, or mussels.” I may have made this decision when I was 6 years old but I unquestioningly stand by it today. The walls around this individual are close and in yours and their face, perhaps it makes them feel safe. Eventually however there comes a time when the individual feels somewhat cramped by their stated dislikes, and this is when they often find themselves in one of my cooking classes, either alone or with their partner.

I speculate that the adolescent or young adult who has consciously rebelled against the tastes and predilections of his or her parents, usually has developed a wider and more far-reaching culinary diet – they still may not be able to cook but they may consume more different foods. This individual has broken away from the invisible ties that bind the obedient child to the emotional strings surrounding mummy and daddy. We are all on variable time lines regarding this necessary rebellion, some do it early and some very late, but eventually we all need to break the moorings and swim free; and perhaps then taste the sea.

Sacred Chef Cooking School on the sunshine coast.

©Sacred Chef

House Therapy – Discovering Who You Really Are at Home.

Tagged Australian attitudes to food, children, consciousness, cooking classes maleny, cooking classes sunshine coast, cooking lessons maleny, cooking school sunshine coast, cooking teacher, cultural change, eating, food philosophy, health, humanity, maleny, nutrition, oral gratification, parents, psychology, psychology of food, sacred chef, spheres of influence, sudha hamilton, sunshine coast cooking lessons, weight loss

Jul 09 2011

Stages of Our Mental Journey

Heading: Stages and Phases of the Mental Journey.

Subheading: Exploring consciousness, linguistics and language.

“O, what a world of unseen visions and heard silences, this insubstantial country of the mind! What ineffable essences, these touchless rememberings and unshowable reveries! And the privacy of it all! A secret theatre of speechless monologue and prevenient counsel, an invisible mansion of all moods, musings, and mysteries, an infinite resort of disappointments and discoveries. A whole kingdom where each of us reigns reclusively alone, questioning what we will, commanding what we can. A hidden hermitage where we may study out the troubled book of what we have done and yet may do. An introcosm that is more myself than anything I can find in a mirror. This consciousness that is myself of selves, that is everything, and yet nothing at all- what is it?

And where did it come from?

And why?”

Excerpt from Julian Jayne’s book, The Origins of Consciousness In the Break Down of the Bicameral Mind.

This journey of mind we set out upon hopefully fearlessly, but invariably not, is unique to each of us. It has been indelibly influenced by our childhood and the love we did, or did not quite receive in the particular manner that we would have preferred. From the very beginning we start with a sense of our self, a nascent spark that will emerge in time like a sculpture quite unlike any that has ever been before. So defined by our life experiences and in turn our reactions and responses to them, that the twisting formless space that seems to be located behind your eyes might be beautiful art or something else again.

Does the aging process effect our thinking and feeling sense of self, and if so, how does it?

I once read, that according to a study conducted amongst a cross section of age groups, most people feel in their mind’s eye that they are twenty five years old, irrespective of their actual body age. That whether they be fifty, sixty or seventy years old, inside they see themselves as that bright, shiny twenty five year old. Perception and self image are powerful things, and perhaps we function best when we feel young at heart. It begs all sorts of questions, like what is wisdom, and how does one get it? Is it the stoic acceptance of the vicissitudes of life and the bearing of tragedy with uncommon grace? Is a flexible quality of mind something that we should foster in the hope of a life well lived?

The mental journey through life could be said to be the only real journey we take, as we modern folk don’t live much below the chin. We think ourselves through life, from a moment somewhere between conception and birth up until physical death takes us we are marching to the constant thinking, taking place in our brains. Rene Descartes’ old dictum, “I think therefore I am,” sums it up pretty well. A few qualifications are needed before we can continue. Is our mental journey the journey of consciousness, and what is the definition of consciousness? Is our beginning located in developmental psychology or in the actual origin of consciousness itself? Who am I? What is consciousness? Pretty heady stuff as you can see.

The word consciousness is used in a multitude of circumstances to mean:

a. awake in the literal sense (as in not asleep or in a coma).

b. general awareness of things happening around you.

c. the totality of a person’s thoughts & feelings.

d. a spiritual merging of your awareness with God/s.

I think we will take c. here – the totality of a person’s thoughts and feelings – to be our definition in this instance. Looking briefly at the development of consciousness in the individual we need to understand its beginnings in our infancy.

Developmental psychology begins its inquiry with the conceptual sense of self. When the child is born, and first breathes its breath separate from the mother, and perhaps even earlier as a foetus inside the womb, it is that sense of self that we know that defines us as truly us. When a baby first begins to smile in response to its parents’ gaze at the age of two to three months it is due to an altered subjective experience within the baby. It is the beginning of a pre-designed sense of social awareness that all babies are born with and which Daniel N Stern, infant psychologist and author of The Interpersonal World of the Infant, views as the beginning of the development of the core, separate self. He states, “the subjective experience of union with another can occur only after a sense of core self and a core other exists. Union experiences are thus viewed as the successful result of actively organising the experience of self-being with another, rather than as the product of a passive failure of the ability to differentiate self from other.” So we begin with a sense of the self. As that sense of the self, within our own mind, grows with age we continue to differentiate what is us, and what is not. The child later begins to understand that its inner thoughts are not automatically known by those around him or her but that he or she can still convey that information by facial expressions and the like.

Our minds and in particular their use of language is what really sets us apart from other animals on this planet. It has indeed been posited that our experience of consciousness is in fact a result of metaphorical language and the constructs this has caused. Put simply we do not just see, hear, touch, smell or taste something, we immediately place that experience in the context of our own unique reality or story. We name it according to our rules and define its reality in line with our wishes. There is no true objective reality but only our mental interpretation of it. Everything is interconnected in a web of language that explains something by referring to it in comparison to something else. For example words like ‘heart of the matter’ or ‘bring to a head’ are all words that have been taken from our bodies to describe situations. Metaphors have created our languages and perhaps language has created our consciousness.

In this quoted passage from Julian Jayne’s book, The Origins of Consciousness In the Break Down of the Bicameral Mind, we can grasp the essence of the mystifying question that has plagued us down through the ages – what is consciousness?

“We are trying to understand consciousness, but what are we really trying to do when we try to understand anything? Like children trying to describe nonsense objects, so in trying to understand a thing, we are trying to find a metaphor for that thing. Not just any metaphor, but one with something more familiar and easy to our attention. Understanding a thing is to arrive at a metaphor for that thing by substituting something more familiar to us. And the feeling of familiarity is the feeling of understanding.

Generations ago we would understand thunderstorms perhaps as the roaring and rumbling about in battle of superhuman gods. We would have reduced the racket that follows the streak of lightning to familiar battle sounds, for example. Similarly today, we reduce the storm to various supposed experiences with friction, sparks, vacuums, and the imagination of bulgeous banks of burly air smashing together to make the noise. None of these really exist as we picture them. Our images of these events of physics are as far from the actuality as fighting gods. Yet they act as the metaphor and they feel familiar and so we say we understand the thunderstorm.”

What I am conveying here, is that much of what we trust in our shared realities is in fact complete delusion – we do not really know what happens inside a thunderstorm but we have a story that we all agree upon. Our mental worlds are all uniquely different, and we share tenuous imaginary links that hold our communities together – that perhaps stop the sky from falling in. Our minds are magical things that have been directed to think in certain ways by the adherence to traditions. We have an innate ability to believe in things and thus make them appear real. Religions are a great example of this, when you do a little investigating into many of the religions of the world, you find an incredible willingness to believe things based simply on tradition & the handing down of beliefs from generation to generation. In the Christian tradition, Mormonism, a relative late comer to the field, has an extraordinary tale to tell of solid gold giant tablets inscribed with the words of the angel Moroni – that nobody except the profit Joseph Smith Junior ever saw. Far fetched fantastical stories that apparently only occurred a couple of hundred years ago in the United States of America, and yet now several generations down the line, these things are solemnly accepted as true by bicycle riding missionaries around the world. Now I don’t wish to merely pick on Mormonism, as the stories in Catholicism and the other bands of Christian faith are equally unrealistic with virgin births and the raising of the dead. We have an inordinate faith in anything that has been written down or passed down to us as true by our forefathers. Even when faced with incontrovertible evidence of the impossibility of these things, we hold them near and dear to us – in fact we place them as the very bedrock of all our civilising institutions – myths that we swear by in justice, in love and in government.

Our minds are malleable and impressionable, and our consciousness is very likely a construct of excerpts of our sensory reality, which are glued together by the lie of language. No wonder there is a lot of pain and suffering in the world. Socrates was apparently a very ugly looking chap, and every day he would go into the city square and challenge the truth of various statements made by his fellow citizens. He would not back down and would not accept the little white lies that we all share in, and as if peeling back layers of the onion he sort out the truth. Of course it all ended badly for Socrates. We are all so conditioned to accept lies, untruths and tall stories that it is a very hard road if one chooses to seek the truth.

Develop a healthy aptitude for doubt in your life and mentally this will take a great deal of the bullshit out of everything. As we age be vigilant for the desire to take ‘short cuts’ and to limit the size of your world – remain open to the mysteriousness of life in all its strange and varied nature.

Following ideals in your life can be a two edged sword – it can inspire and motivate you to reach for things and states that are seemingly beyond you, but it can also make you immune to the spontanaeity and passions that mark our existence as well. As we get older the attachment to certain ideals can cause us to become rigid and inflexible. Compassion and the ability to truly say you are sorry are the hallmarks of a great soul.

In returning to the question of what is wisdom. Is it knowing that you are right? Or is it knowing that you don’t know the answer to any of the really important questions in life? Or perhaps it is having experienced the very real pain of losing someone that you loved forever? When I meet much younger people than myself, I notice that they have an almost bullet proof idea of optimism in the future and I sense an absence of depth that only tragedy can truly provide.

Releasing control over your life or rather letting go of the illusion that you have any control anyway will free up a great deal of your mental faculties. You are going to die and people close to you and loved ones are also going to die – accept these facts with good grace. The compulsion today to always have a fantastic time and to avoid any pain or discomfort, has created in many of us a vacuum where the other side of life’s experience once resided. Without the fullness of sadness in our lives we cannot scale the heights of ecstasy and we will be forever in the shallows of ‘searching for happiness.’

Age can give us perspective on things, allowing one not to get all ‘het up’ over the details. Having experienced the ups and downs of a life well lived; we can refrain from being so quick to judge things at any particular juncture in time. I am reminded of a hundred clichés and truisms that point this very fact out.

Of course our minds are not able to live in isolation; they are a part of our monkey bodies and they will not function at their highest level without being exercised. A healthy body – a healthy mind, the interconnectedness of our brains with the other major organs and our autonomic nervous system really places our mind throughout our body. For peak mental performance, lots of stimulation – physical, emotional and intellectual – is desirable.

New research into depression and Alzheimer’s disease is now seeing inflammation within the body as a cause for these very serious conditions and imbalance in our diet and lifestyle is a strong contributing factor. Feeding our brains a diet rich in Omega3 essential fatty acids will improve their functioning ability and re-dressing the imbalance in our diets by reducing the intake of foods rich in Omega6 fatty acids will further this.

In my own experience I have found the strategy of making decisions about things highly effective – don’t dither or procrastinate over choices in your life, trust in your instincts and make a decision. If it turns out in hindsight to be the wrong choice then review and be flexible enough to change tack. There is no value in over identifying with your life choices. We are in my view travelers through life and there are no prizes for getting everything right first time. I used to be very fearful of making mistakes as a young man and found parallels for this in my father’s attitudes to life. That whole thing of only attempting things that you know that you are good at and avoiding everything that may embarrass you. At a certain point, as a young adult, I needed to confront and make conscious this aspect of myself and let go of this life strategy, as it was not aiding my journey. I remember someone sharing with me the story of how an aeroplane reaches its destination by continually correcting its course.

Life is a mental journey and it is far more interesting than many of us acknowledge. Thinking techniques based on fear avoidance and pain avoidance severely limit your life experiences. Drop the mental barriers and go fearlessly where you have not gone before. Start conversations with people – from whom you cannot predict replies – and relax into a sense of unknowingness because you will never know everything anyway. Smile at the sky sometimes and encourage gratitude for the showering flowers in your life. And if you cannot see those flowers look a little deeper.

©Sudha Hamilton

Appeared in WellBeing Magazine.

www.wellbeing.com.au

Midas Word

Tagged ageing, Alzheimer's disease, beliefs, brain, Christianity, consciousness, happiness, how we think, illusions, inner universe, language, life, linguistics, living well, mental journeys, mind, Mormonism, omega 3 essential fatty acids, psychology, religion, Socrates, sudha hamilton, therapies, thinking, wellbeing

May 29 2011

Imagine If You Will…

Imagine if you will, that you lived in a world where every day you were told that you had no influence on the really important things in your life. Imagine that you were born to parents, who likewise, believed that they, and you, had no power to affect the way life was; and that they also had been born to parents, who were very sure, that they too, were powerless in this manner. Generations of firm belief and concomitant proof, through life experience, that this was true. That reality was operating outside of you and that you had no noticeable effect upon it, it would go on doing what it would do, whether you were there or not. The sun would come up in the morning and set in the evening; the rain would fall from the sky when there were precipitating circumstances; people around you would live and die – and all of these things would happen, pretty much without your direct input making a world of difference. Imagine what effect this would have upon your sense of self worth and attitude towards your existence.

Well, welcome to the real world, and to the psychological basis of your life and the lives of the majority of the six billion people living on this planet we call Earth. Newtonian science has for the last four hundred years firmly placed us outside of reality, as spectators in our own life, able to measure things but not much else. We have been taught and told, as were our parents, that life and matter happens independently of us. We can of course engage in transmutation of substances, if we follow strict rules for doing so, in a laboratory under controlled conditions and with the appropriate levels of technological education. Our subjective consciousness, our sense of who we are and how we process the sensory experience of our lives, however, cannot directly interface with existence. It can bear witness and it can measure, and oh what pleasure can it be to measure, everything. Science has measured and identified and named much of the fabric of our known universe, we know a hundred different names each for a billion different things we have never experienced; and most likely never will. I suppose it is a bit like that old Islamic idea of there being 999 names for God. Our Western scientific heritage has set us up as the ultimate arbiters of measurement and not so much good taste.

For the taste of powerlessness is one reason why, I think, that we have massive levels of depression in our modern cities and why we are medicating, or sedating, vast numbers of their inhabitants. Now smarties can put up their hand and say well Newtonian physics is dead, it died in 1904 with the discovery of Quantum Mechanics, but I would reply, that this fact is a well kept secret, culturally speaking, and that the greater majority of human beings are untouched by its revelations. Even Einstein struggled with accepting Quantum physics basic premise and resisted its outcomes for decades. The uncertain nature of The Uncertainty Principle does not lend itself to the delusional controlling proclivities of generations of white coated lab assistants and the population at large. We are all in love with the idea that we can benignly go about life, if we stick to the rules as Science has laid out for us, derived from all that measuring, and, like a good anti-depressant, avoid the lows by sacrificing the highs.

So the good news is, that on the most basic level we can perceive matter, the sub-atomic level, we actually do effect whatever we attempt to observe or measure, our consciousness of it changes it; and so the deadening spectator sport, that was Newtonian physics, is now obsolete. The bad news is, that the reality of this over the last hundred years has failed to bite, or be taken up by us, the masses, and that our lives continue to be mired in the complacency of our previous understanding of the workings of reality. Which means, that while we live in a truly wondrous world of modern scientific genius, the greater majority of us only get to experience it, as consumers, as if we are watching it on TV- and I reckon, that discovering ground breaking shifts in human evolution, via the Discovery Channel, years after they happen, is not an individually deeply rewarding experience. As populations in our cities, have grown and grown, we have replaced concern with the direct experience of the individual with statistical concern for the majority percentage of the many. Which is why so many people can still be unhappy or depressed, despite the fact that their lives contain less death, hunger, poverty, disease, and numerous other positively indicated quality of life evaluation measurements. Western medicine is a statistical science in practise and theory and concerns itself ultimately with the individual only as a unit of population. The pharmaceutical industry, which funds the medical behemoth in part and provides it with its tools for healing, is predicated on the double blind testing of its drugs and their ability to work on the greatest statistical percentage of people with as few side effects as can be managed.

“Over the last 30 years, rates of depression have been steadily increasing in Western societies. In the last ten years, consumption of antidepressants has doubled in the most advanced Western countries. Today, more than 11 million Americans are taking antidepressants. The estimated number of people in Britain taking antidepressants is two million. In Australia, 66 percent of those seeing a GP for the first time about depression have a chance of being medicated – in most cases with antidepressants. These data are so stark that most of us and our institutions prefer not to think about them.”

Dr David Servan-Schreiber, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Pittsburgh University School of Medicine

Author of Healing Without Freud or Prozac, 2004, Rodale.

So we live in a world, where care and concern, is officially monitored in terms of our per unit participation in demographic data for various population studies. We read in the newspaper, or online, about rates of unemployment, rates of breast cancer, rates of life expectancy, and rates of mortgage defaulting etc. We learn that if something affects the many then it must be powerful and have substance – it must be real. An example of this is the many chronic health conditions, which began under clouds of suspicion, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome began as this shady condition affecting bludgers and other weak and lazy people; Bulimia and Anorexia were likewise considered examples of neurotic women’s problems; ADHD is still doubtful in many people’s minds – but once weight of numbers builds up, then democracy grants acceptance for these diseased manifestations into the canon of medical reality. Pharmaceutical companies then go into overdrive to come up with a drug to cure them – often recycling ones that did not work out for other diseases, like Ritalin, now the drug of choice for ADHD and ADD.

Common sense is most people’s strongest definer of reality, meaning if the largest number of fellow citizens consider something to be so, then it must be so. The term common sense also has many subtle strands of meaning: its common sense! Can be exclaimed to mean that something is so manifestly obvious, that its truth cannot really be questioned. For something to be of common sense, it must appeal to a primary indicator of what is true, which is shared by the greater majority. We school our children in institutions made up of hundreds and sometimes thousands of pupils, we encourage socialisation and the herd mentality that goes with it. Common sense must survive the sometimes brutal testing of the mob and therefore have the appeal of being the lowest common denominator. Common sense is very often paraded as a decidedly uncommon virtue by those wielding it in argument.

I question whether common sense is the most apt indicator for the understanding of truth and also whether capitalism – the so called ‘free market’ and selling things – is the best distributor of truth. How will we, the masses, discover the changing nature of humanities perception of physical reality? Through our consumption of product, which has been created in light of the technological changes made possible by subatomic particle physics, and through the consumption of media informed by it. It has been over a hundred years since the first experiments baffled and perplexed physicists like Nils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, before ultimately turning them 360 degrees around in a new direction. Yet most people have no idea about this reality shaking, new awareness and the consequences to our culturally accepted perception of what existence is made up of and our consciousness of it.

“I think it would be misleading to call particles, the entities involved in the most primitive events of the theory (quantum topology) because they don’t move in space, they don’t carry mass, they don’t have charge, they don’t have energy in the usual sense of the word.

Q – So what is it that makes events at that level?

A- Who are the dancers and who the dance? They have no attributes other than the dance.

Q- What is they?

A- The things that dance, the dancers. My God! We’re back to the title of the book.”

Physicist David Finkelstein & author Gary Zukav

The Dancing Wu Li Masters, 1979, Hutchinson & Co.

So the nature of matter, at the most fundamental level known to humanity, is a dance of energy and barely understood as matter. We have gone on, since the publication of this book, to comprehend that much of our known universe is in fact empty space and that we could fit all the actual particles or dancing energy, which make up the six billion people who inhabit the Earth, into a small suitcase. So perhaps Mother Earth is travelling light after all and cataclysmic disasters, like that which wiped out the Dinosaurs are not such a big deal, sub-atomically speaking anyway.

The most important aspect of this to understand, is that how the universe is perceived by those who make it their business to care, has had a filtering down effect upon humanity since the beginning of time. It may seem so much irrelevant bumph to those firmly rooted in the here and now of survival and making money, but once those, who wish to lead and control the rest of us, get hold of this information; they then utilise it for their own ends. In the West we are still greatly influenced by the thinkers and early scientists of the classical world, from ancient Greece and then Rome.

“Every domain of post-classical life and thought has been profoundly influenced by ancient models. True, these models have not always been interpreted in ways that a sober modern scholarship would consider correct. On the contrary: it has often been creative misunderstandings that have preserved the ancient heritage and made it useful.”

Edited by Anthony Grafton, Glen W Most & Salvatore Settis

The Classical Tradition, 2011, Belknap Press

Our very language, the meaning of our words, comes from those who thought in Ancient Greek and Latin. Homer the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, who was alive anywhere from 1200BC to 850BC, is a great example of where we can see the changes in consciousness, in the development of the words used to describe these states. Terms like thumos, phrenes, noos and psyche, which are the first recorded words referring to places within an individual where inner life is happening. There were no words for ‘mind’ or such as we would understand, and in the Iliad everything happens outside of the hero, through the directions of the gods. Achilles is directed by the goddess Athene in his actions against Hector, during the Trojan War, and the Iliad relates similar control over the other players into the hands of the gods. Thumos originally is used as a term in the poem to indicate spirit of life, as in it ceases to exist when a warrior is slain, it then evolves to incorporate the aroused pre-battle state experienced by a warrior; and then if it is not a god urging a man into battle it is his thumos. Julian Jaynes goes on to say:

“All these metaphors are extremely important. Saying that the internal sensations of large circulatory and muscular changes are a thing into which strength can be put is to generate an imagined ‘space’, here located always in the chest, which is the forerunner of the mind-space of contemporary consciousness. And to compare the function of that sensation to that of another person or even to the less-frequent gods is to begin those metaphor processes that will later become the analog ‘I’.”

Julian Jaynes

The Origin of Consciousness In the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976, First Mariner Books, pp 263.

Noos of course becomes nous, and this term is still used as a slang colloquialism in English to mean intelligence or smarts. It began in the Iliad as a term referring to perception or seeing, or a sight or show, as in for a warrior there is no better noos than hand to hand combat. Noos was then located in the chest and began to mean heart or spirit. Words in all languages evolve and often come to mean different things over time, but in these early recorded examples it can show us the development of how these people were thinking. These are the first recorded examples of the internalisation of consciousness in human beings.

This process obviously continued over time and grew and grew until we had such a strong sense of an inner subjective consciousness, and this was reflected and emphasised in our languages, that we separated mind from body; mind from matter. Dualism was born and came to flourish into Aristotelian physics, which really lasted from Aristotle’s time 384BC-322BC right up until Isaac Newton in the seventeenth century. It continues today as commonly held belief – that our minds are separate from our bodies. And most of us live inside our heads, within those 20cm from chin to the top of our skull. Well that is where we perceive ourselves to reside – to be floating somewhere inside our craniums; as we sit slumped on our couches at night staring at flickering screens and wondering why we are depressed. So our imagined space, where we consider our consciousness to reside, has moved from chest to head over the last couple of millennia.

Where do we reside inside ourselves? Do you know where your consciousness, spatially, has its abode? When you speak of your self, and your awareness of your self, where is that self inside you located? Where does the watcher live? What do you imagine when you refer to these things? How do you calibrate your own levels of self? Do you have a soul and is your mind separate from it?

Religion has made great use of this split between body and soul, and flourished in the crack like a healthy weed. For once you remove the necessity of having a corporeal presence, then you are unfettered by any physical limitations like material reality, you can bend truth any which way you like. God, in my opinion, is an invention based on our own inner reflections of mind space, and, seemingly, can float like a butterfly and sting like a bee (apologies to Muhammad Ali). Has there ever been a bigger fib than the one about there being a god? An all seeing, omnipresent , omnipotent and omnificent being, who, just like Santa, knows when you are good and definitely knows when you are bad. The thought police were invented by the Church and still exist in many people’s minds today, because if you are brought up with these fairy tales about good and evil, God and Satan, Jesus dying for your sins etc – then you have been brainwashed at an early and very vulnerable age to believe in fantasy. If your mummy and daddy believed in these things and their mummies and daddies also believed in all of this, then it becomes solidly fixed as a reality; a traditional lore established over generations. People stop questioning things like this and act out of deference to the past. It takes much greater strength to question and overcome tradition, to break away from the beliefs of your tribe. Because once you believe in things that have no verifiable relationship to reality, and are simply asked to have faith, then you are lost in Maya – an illusion of ancient parentage designed to control you within the flock.

“One facet of the many faces of religion is intense love focused on one supernatural person, i.e. God, plus reverence for icons of that person. Human life is driven largely by our selfish genes and by the processes of reinforcement. Much positive reinforcement derives from religion: warm and comforting feelings of being loved and protected in a dangerous world, loss of fear of death, help from the hills in response to prayer in difficult times, etc. Likewise, romantic love for another real person (usually of the other sex) exhibits the same intense concentration on the other and related positive reinforcements. These feelings can be triggered by icons of the other, such as letters, photographs, and even, as in Victorian times, locks of hair. The state of being in love has many physiological accompaniments, such as sighing like a furnace.”

John Smythies, Neuropsychiatrist, 2006 - http://wn.com/John_Raymond_Smythies

Ask yourself how many assumptions, about reality and existence, you hold among your most valued truths? How many untested beliefs live inside your consciousness? Is there a god? Is there good and evil? Do you believe in sin? What about love, what is love? What is the purpose of your existence?

Do you have any proof, any discernable evidence that would stand up in a court of law for your answers to the above questions? Why do you believe the things you do? Where did these beliefs come from? Who was involved in their transference to you?

The reality is, that just because something has been passed down to you by family, does not make it true. And just because something has been written in a book, and published, similarly does not make it true, even if it is a really old book, which has been accepted as the gospel truth over hundreds of years. Truth is something we all need to seek out ourselves, in our own lifetime, and see it put to the test by experience. At some point in time, we all need to put aside, the desire to be liked and to belong, and use our time on earth to find out what is really what. Don’t take my word for it – find out yourself!

Who are you? What are you? Beyond the roles you may play of wife, husband, partner, mother, father, daughter, son, and far beyond the work you may perform. Who are you really? Deep inside your consciousness, what are you? Go beyond the pat answers you may have read in some book and answer the question from your own true knowledge and experience. Nobody knows you as well as you know yourself! So who are you?

Are you an accident of nature? A dribble of sperm and some egg, that has grown into a human being and been given your name? If you don’t know who you are, then why are you here? What is your real purpose? Why are you alive this day? Why do you have consciousness?