Naked and Invested

Humans do have instincts. Conceptually, it’s probably useful to think of them as part of your lower brain at the bottom of your spine, what I jokingly call the “butt-brain”. It’s the center of your body consciousness and the functions that don’t require reasoning to work as God intended. It’s not that reasoning about those things is a problem, but that we are designed to connect to those instincts in moments when they aren’t needed so that we know what to expect when we do need them.

There’s a lot more in that part of us than mere instinct. One of the things anchored there is the collection of impulses that result in those powerful emotional responses. Part of our need for conscious connection to the butt-brain is to keep track of what triggers the emotions, and what enables us to act appropriately in the context when those impulses send their priority message to the mind. The emotions were not intended to rule, per se, but we are supposed to keep a tight link to them so we can use their power for things that require an extra boost. It also prevents foolish actions.

Yes, in the big mix of things we also have to peel away our Western mythology that places bogus value assignments on things. For those born and raised in the Western social structure, it’s a lot of work untangling false moral signals.

For example, anger — the majority of the time, anger comes as result of loss that some part of us believes was unjustified. Keep in mind that I preach and teach quantum reasoning, the absolute necessity of grappling with complexity. Despite what you may have heard from a bunch of idiotic Euro-centric heathen babblers, we have an instinct to avoid being naked in certain contexts. The most obvious is when we face inclement weather conditions. There are other contexts that affect us the same way, so we do have an instinct to stay covered when something tells us there is a measure of uncertainty. It’s a part of our sense of privacy, that getting inside the barriers requires earned trust. People with no sense of propriety about exposure are either deeply conflicted internally or they retain a childlike lack of wariness that isn’t fitting for adults. Anger often results when we sense that someone else has stripped us of our protections, exposed us to threats.

Our sense of comfort and protection includes a lot of things for which most folks carry no conscious awareness. If you invest a lot of time and effort in something, having it stripped away brings a sense of loss. If some part of us can imagine an agency that did it to us unjustly, we get angry. If we sense that our situation is hopeless and that justice is simply never going to happen, it quickly shifts into sorrow and depression. Again, it’s complex; the anger may well still be there, but not in the forefront of awareness. It gets even more complex when we include heavy layers of social conditioning that defy our wiring, in the sense that the social conditioning is inconsistent with God’s character.

It helps to keep a conscious accounting of our sense of investment. Be aware of the sense of moral gravity you impute to things that may not really matter. Most of us suffer from competing value systems in the first place, but striving to learn God’s own character as He revealed it in an alien intellectual environment really complicates things. This is the reason for the Bible promoting prayer and contemplation. What Westerners consider a dangerous waste of time and as inefficiency of human resources is something God says is precious and carries a high priority. What we accomplish in terms of standard human measures is ephemeral vapor in the eyes of God. What He wants us to value most is internal progress that brings us closer to what He intended.