The sun lowered itself below the horizon, bringing an end to another relaxing weekend at a lake resort. I left the convenience store and walked to my car, and within an instant a man with a rifle shoved an older woman and me into a boathouse. Looking into the man’s crazed and maniacal eyes, I understood immediately that he was tripping on drugs, probably cocaine. My first response, once my mind grasped the situation, was to plead with the man, telling him that he did not want to be holding us at gunpoint. The woman next to me had sunk to her knees and was rocking back and forth and whimpering. Her actions appeared to irritate him more, and he yelled for her to be quiet, as well as other things that my mind had difficulty processing. I grappled with the only image I can now remember clearly—a bullet going through my head and exiting out the back. This image paralyzed me.

 

Joseph Chilton Pearce, scholar, scientist, and author on human development, describes the process that my brain encountered in this situation as the “fight-or-flight” modes of survival. These processes occur in a lower part of our brain called the “reptilian,” part, located directly above the spinal column. Even though the brains of human beings have developed a frontal lobe that can perform the highest neocortical functions, when a person is threatened, the reptilian brain has incorporated into its service the higher functioning ability of the frontal lobe. The person is operating from their brain’s lower capacity, as the higher functioning frontal lobes are limited in their capacity by being under the control of the reptilian part of the brain. The lower system is able to integrate the higher functioning system because of human beings’ thousands of years of fight-or-flight responses to situations and because it is difficult to transcend this pattern of reactivity.

 

In the hostage situation that I encountered, I was only using the reptilian part of my brain. In a life-and-death situation, transcending a fight-and-flight response is almost impossible, as humanity has yet to establish a good foundation and practice of other responses that issue from higher brain functions. In essence, I had not developed neuron pathways to the frontal lobes of my brain in situations that were not life threatening. As an example, if I encountered a challenging work problem that brought up feelings of low self-esteem and I did not respond in fight or flight reactivity to threat modes but transcended this typical response to threats and engaged my frontal lobe part of my brain, then I would have had access to many creative solutions.

 

In the hostage situation, I am reacting from flight or fight mode, and the only options I had were from the power and control structures of survival. Typically, coming from a control scenario, this would involve thoughts of how I could manipulate this situation or this man into giving me what I wanted, which was to walk out of there alive. Yet he would perceive my moving toward power as an act of having power over him, leaving him vulnerable in his powerlessness. His only action at this point was to counteract my attempt to have power over him, and that would mean he would react from fight-or-flight responses. Since he had the gun…my guess was he would react from a fight response. 

 

Movements toward power are fight scenarios. I want to be in a position of control and power and will fight to restore myself to that position. A flight scenario involves turning and running in order to withdraw from the scene, or becoming helpless in a situation, such as the action taken by the woman next to me. In both cases of flight and fight, I would have effectively cut myself off from many different creative and intelligent solutions that the situation called for.

 

The Role of Culture

While the fight-or-flight response is well known and documented in psychological literature, what is not discussed or even identified is the role our culture plays in keeping humanity stuck in the survival aspect of evolution that we have maintained for thousands and thousands of years. This fight-or-flight response mechanism is a sensory-motor, instinctual pattern that has existed since primitive times, when what was of the utmost importance was the ability of our species to survive attacks from predatory animals. 

 

Since we rarely encounter animals and predators that threaten our lives today, there would be little reason to use the fight-or-flight response from the reptilian parts of our brain. But many of us continue to activate such responses. Many people operate from a flight-or-fight reaction even when engaged in a simple conflict such as a decision-making process at work or a challenging issue that threatens a personal relationship, or even, for some people, when driving to the grocery and being cut off in traffic. These situations rarely involve an aspect of threat to one’s physical life.

 

Facing physical death is not something we face on a daily basis in our modern world, so what would give our brains the indication that a fear exists, to mobilize the fight-or-flight response? Somehow our brain is reacting with the same response that was generated to ensure the population of the species survived, and is not tapping into a higher functioning brain response to allow a transcendence of fear for the evolution of the species. More of what the evolution of the species would look like in section 2, but for clarifying this point, evolution of species is to have inner silence, little internal conflict and certainly not have reactivity from an illusion of fear of survival.

 

Pearce believes the block to transcendence of fear is our culture. Culture is defined here as a set of belief systems that embody religious, political, economic, and social constructs that we use to structure our existence and our relationship to life. Our identity with the culture, such as how we attach value to having material possessions, the areas in which we garner approval and love, how we interact with others as we go about our day, how we define our values and morals, and how we engage in our creative endeavors are defined by the culture into which we are indoctrinated before the age of four.

 

If we each explore what defines our existence and how we go about our day, we will discover that much of what lies below these beliefs and actions is a fear-based philosophy. We obtain a high-level position in a corporation, and we feel good about this achievement because it may bring accolades from our colleagues, more money, and the illusion of importance and power, and safety from self-destruction. We have created a situation that separates us from feeling a fear of unworthiness, a fear of not gaining approval, and a fear of not having power. These types of fear are far from the fear of physical death, and many Eastern philosophies believe transcendence of the higher levels of brain functioning can exist here also. 

 

While we may have a slight experience of the illusion of safety when we achieve that corporate position, the safety (or power) we feel is actually nothing more than a defensive mechanism of control. If we should lose the job or a receive a demotion, then depression and anxiety return once again…our power is gone. When the “thing” outside of ourselves disappears, then we have again encountered no real safety. We are still operating out of the “fight-or-flight” reptilian part of our brain and have not evolved into using the frontal lobes of our brain and the greater aspects of creativity.

 

Considering that we are indoctrinated into our cultural belief systems that form our neural pathways in our brain, then culture is the problem that blocks transcendence. Transcendence, as defined by Pearce, is “the ability to rise above and go beyond limitation and constraint.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c37nIv1GaLk  Pearce sees our culture as a “counterfeit of transcendence.” We believe we have finally transcended when we have the position, the relationship, or the house. But again, these are illusions of transcendence, as we see these things as important to keep us from feeling our fear.

 

The culture assists in maintaining and promoting these beliefs. One can easily see this dynamic play out within a smaller system, the family system. When one member of the family begins to act differently from the other family members, such as having different religious views, political opinions, belief systems, or a different lifestyle, the family tries various ploys to bring the “acting-out” family member back into the fold. If the ostracized member tries to change or convert the family system to his or her way of thinking or behaving, then this family member will suffer the consequences from the family system, which could mean estrangement from the family. These consequences contain varying degrees of a form of violence, such as the withdrawal of love.

 

Humanity is making an attempt at evolution…to move into the more highly developed functioning of our brain that requires us to perceive situations in ways that are not out of the fight-or-flight responses of primitive man. But our inability to rise beyond our cultural constraints (because culture rejects transformation and transcendence) leads us to violence, as violence arises out of fear and the constructs of power and control. 

As a people, we are in relationship with violence, power, and control through our wars, fights, arguments, and destruction of the planet.

 

We have been lulled to sleep, and our culture has sidetracked the human growth process away from our transcendent nature and into defensive ways of interacting. In our ability to transcend the reptilian functions in the frontal lobe of our brain lies our ability to transcend power and control structures based on  fear and, finally, to develop the ability to engage higher levels of functioning and expressions of creativity. Then breakthroughs can occur, and humanity can finally achieve its next phase of evolution. 

 

Next Blog

Part 2: What is the next phase of evolution, how can each individual engage it, and what occured in the hostage situation? How does violence in our culture and our culture’s need to maintain that violence, lead to transcendence and enlightenment?