Picture a Hungry God. Picture Moloch, who was believed to consume children in fire. Hunger is a human trait. Why would it be a trait of gods?
The more I grow as a person, the more important I feel is the “gut brain” (the Vagus Nerve and Dorsal Vagal System, in my understanding of Peter Levine’s taxonomic description) in human life.
We are animals, are we not? We share large segments of our DNA with mammals in particular, and we evolved from more primitive forms. As I have often said, it is my STRONG contention that the overwhelming evidence favors a field theory of life, which clearly played a role in directing evolution, which is in important respects intelligent (this article, because it is able at least to guess at a materialistic solution, discusses the problems with the orthodox narratives), but the truth still remains that we are animals.
We evolved to eat, to survive, to enter into conflict, to bond. And in my view, Moloch is a projection of a primal gut instinct to eat. There is something insect-like in us, something worm-like, something dis-gusting (look again at that word) in us, which is in our gut. It is almost like an intruder, if we choose to treat it that way.
And this is the problem with modern life, in my evolving view: we have taken the anger, the violence, the primal ENGAGEMENT with life out of it, and an important part of us, a primal, unthinking, unspeaking, completely unnuanced part of us misses it.
One could perhaps think of sacrifice, particularly human sacrifice, as war waged within a civil order, a managed, staged, ritualized war, but a war nonetheless. Lives are lost. Carthage was an advanced civilization for the time, but they seem to have immolated children, in what most today would view as a sort of Satanism.
And speaking of war itself, do we not constantly invoke SACRIFICE (which I note periodically means “act of the sacred”)? Can we perhaps speak of those thrown into battle as human sacrifices of a sort?
I tend to believe America tends to wage wars not based in primal anger, primal violence, but I know from firsthand accounts that many of our soldiers develop a taste for it. They like it. I remember talking with a couple of West Point graduates at my bar, and they kept volunteering to go back. They said it got in their blood.
I would argue this tingling of anticipation, this sense of not knowing where some large emotionally charged event is going to go, FEEDS our gut brain. Combat is in some respects exhilarating for some. It is a rush they can’t get any other way. And many of these people are otherwise psychologically normal. They are not sociopaths, who would get off more on the death and destruction part of it, that they can feed by torturing small animals or serially seducing and abusing women.
War plays an important role in the human psyche. We (most Americans) have not seen war on our soil in well over 100 years. Not in the lifetime of anyone. And how have we reacted? Go look at your local Red Box, and see what people are watching.
Horror movies feed this beast, just like sacrifice does, just like war can.
I was in Napa a month or two ago, St. Helena to be specific, and there was a giant poster of a demon king of sorts posted in the window of one of the Main Street businesses, a design firm if I’m not mistaken. It was the sort of thing you would expect on the wall of a Satanic temple.
And I thought: this is logical. I am in a Sybaritic Paradise, the place where pleasure and congeniality reign. Why wouldn’t dark, deep spirits come to be needed? We NEED to feed this beast. It will not be ignored.
And to get to the purported topic of this post, I woke up yesterday thinking about all the apocalyptic thinking and imagining going on: Mad Max, Hunger Games, Divergent.
Add to this Biblical imaginings: an End Time, a reign of fear for the unbelievers, chaos on the face of the Earth: Left Behind.
And I think this myth, too (we need not fall into chaos; death and destruction need not be our collective fate), serves to feed this beast. ON THE OTHER SIDE OF TIME, the pious, the calm, the bored, the sybaritic will face demons worth fighting. They will activate their core, abusive, indefensible, violent, protean selves and fight to live or die trying (add hip-hop to the drama of war, and the gangster mythos).
This, I am convinced, is Freud’s Thanatos. It is deeply biological.
At the same time, I view we are animal spirits. We are mired in the mud of unfreedom, of instinct, of emotions based on biological heritage. At the same time, we are SPIRITS here. We have free will, a little bit. What our freedom is, is to choose within a range of options what direction we want to evolve. We hve perhaps 10%, perhaps 1%, perhaps 99% freedom. Who can know? But we counter the gravity of heritage with what I like to call “Non-Statistical Coherence”, which is to say, we have the power to negate our programming, to some extent. We can defy expectations, and go in new directions. And it is likely the more we exercise our free will, the more of it we get. It is like building flexibility in your body. You may not start with much, but change happens gradually over time.
And how do we tame this restless spirit? How do we tame this primal pit into which we have always thrown unwilling sacrifices violently?
I feel the answer is engagement. Ponder the image of the Wind-Horse, the Tibetan symbol for Goodness. It is a racing horse with a radiant jewel on its back. Become this horse. Feel the wind blowing by you as you race across a high plain. Feel the thrill of motion, the engagement, being fully in the moment.
Or put yourself on a catamaran, at full speed, racing on the ocean. Every sense is engaged, every emotional pore is open. You are excited, thrilled, successful, and finally rested. You feed the beast, then you rest.
This is living well.
The sense of flow, of excitement, of engagement: these feed the beast, in my view. It can’t be just intellectualism. It can’t be thought alone. This in fact suppressed the beast, which will then come out in ugly ways. You become a Communist. You become a Nazi, like a famous and ugly director recently admitted.
You cannot not feel. Our bodies see to that. If we remove some part of our body–our SELF, to be clear–from conscious awareness, it intrudes in disturbances in our thought. It is like a rock in a stream. It disrupts the flow of water. The water still flows, so you may not notice. But what might have been–the beauty or clarity that might have been–is not, and you neither notice it nor correct it, if your destiny is to be in the thrall of ugly emotions, as for example von Trier seems to be.
These are in my view deep thoughts, that are getting close to the root of the human condition.