The Awesome Book of Genesis

It may be surprising, indeed, overwhelming, to recognize that everything which lives on our planet moves towards a single point.

It is even more amazing to realize that this point is spoken about through the Hebrew Bible, the first book of the Torah, BReiShiTh in Hebrew.

So holy - and other-worldly - is this book, that I cannot speak of it without a sense of humility. I write this post with that sense in mind, only to grip the reader with the same sense of "how the bleep did they know that" that I experienced when studying this book.

First, language matters. Reading the Bible in Hebrew is the utter opposite of reading it in English. You lose almost all the esoteric meaning in the latter example.

Take, for example, genesis 2 verses 21-25. If you look at my last thread, this is obviously what is being referred to: the state of order and coherence that once existed on our planet in the ancient past, but from which we fell.

But what about evolution itself? Would it surprise you to know that the Torah describes the evolutionary of Humanity to a T in Genesis 2 verses 10-14? Indeed, if you know Hebrew, the "Rivers" are understood to be processes, and the "from EDeN", refers to the Omega-point, the "whole" which records the motions. EDeN, in turn, is fundamentally related to the "mists" which arose from the Earth before man emerged - the mist of ED - the Hebrew word for "witness" - as in the witnessing consciousness we possess.

לְהַשְׁקוֹת אֶת-הַגָּן - the word here for "to water", is derived from the same root for Shekinah, the "soul" of the Earth. In short, the soul of the Earth 'stimulates' the context - or the "gan" - the garden, or setting, i.e. the context which manufactures the emergence of Humans.

1st river, פִּישׁוֹן , means "to scatter" - such as the scattering that ancient australipethecus did when it left the trees and moved along the ground. It is in the land of הַחֲוִילָה , which means to "run", i.e. when leaving the trees, they survived through endurance hunting. אֲשֶׁר-שָׁם, הַזָּהָב. Whenever the word Asher appears, think "fire" i.e. attraction. The word ZaHaV - gold, are the stones which attracted ancient man, used to bash in the skulls and bones for high calorie marrow and brains.

הוּא הַסֹּבֵב , the word here in this phrase and the next means to "encompass". It is describing the associative-processes that emerge when the organism (Human) begins to interface with its own body (its hands, in tool making) and a more complex representational system of relations can emerge for consciousness. Indeed, the second river "gihon" means to 'go forth" i.e. neurogenesis. As the anthropologist Daniel Lieberman notes, when apes moved from knuckle walking to bipedal movement, about 4 times less energy was needed, giving the brain-mind more metabolic resources to "burst forth".

I would write more, yet I feel the need to restrain myself. Another narrative, an even more important one (psychologically) will be posted next.

In many ways, culture and the human mind are two sides of the same coin, with culture determining the reflexive organization of meaning-making, from cognitive identity states to the feelings we want to feel, to the individual possessing the wherewithal within himself to be better than before, and being better, can “become the change” we want to see.

The most important factor here between the two notions is consciousness of. What does consciousness of mean? It means that the Human mind, at a very fundamental level, is constructed by what it knows about itself. Indeed, this idea is not new but central to the Hebrew Bibles depiction of Human thinking, feeling and being. It describes the psychology of the Human mind with reference to the various unconscious modes of being and experiencing that influence how we understand and know one another.

Without going too off topic, it bears to mention at this point that the Hebrew Bible appears to describe the creation of the Human being (Adam) as being in the same way and manner of everything else in the Cosmos (organized material complexity through the process of time). It’s said that “Adam” – commonly interpreted as the ego, consciousness or intelligence of a focused awareness – is made out of the same processes as organized matter, which is to say, that the processes occurring within our phenomenology – what we feel, think, and imagine - is reducible to a system of “referents”, seeking “correlation” with one another so as to maintain coherency within the processing of mind.
What is this “coherency”? In the realm of the purely physical, and as explored earlier, correlation between units perfectly timed with the larger field of the organism maintains the structure of the whole with reference to the world it exists within and seeks to keep itself dynamically attuned towards.

The same thing is happening in the mind between the intelligence of awareness and the feelings felt in the interpersonal process.

Adam, or intelligence, needs to know Eve, or the feeling body (Eve, or Chavah in Hebrew, means ‘living one’) in order for the two to become one – that is, for the way and being of the Human to become relaxed so as to bring about states of positive experiences of Self with Other, it must properly represent what it is feeling – and not deny it to itself.
But this is precisely what the Bible is saying happens. The feeling body (or Eve) at some point becomes tempted by the “snake”. What is the snake and what does it mean? Many have wondered how the Hebrew bible could so successfully capture the “reptilian” nature of selfish action, which, as contemporary neuroscience shows, is indeed related to the self-organizing nature of the brainstem. The brainstem is called “reptilian” because it first emerged in reptiles, with more complex structures accruing over evolutionary time upon the brainstem.

Putting the whole narrative together, the feeling body (eve) interfaces with the logic of its lower selfish nature, the brainstem. The brainstem, or snake (Nachash in Hebrew) in turn offers Eve (the feeling body) the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. What is this? I see the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil as being what happens when you begin to focus upon yourself as a concept (pride), and what self-organizing in that way does to the Other. The dualism intrinsic and implicit in this narrative is pride and shame.

The ancient Hebrews demonstrated a deep phenomenological understanding here of how consciousness (phenomenological experience) changes as a function of how you relate to the Other. We all know what it’s like to see someone acting pridefully – there is a “nakedness” about their own motivational effort to present themselves in an idealized way. That is, the Self who acts in such a way seems overly concerned not simply with their “good”, but also, and at the same time, is unresponsive to the effect it produces in the Other. The tree in question then seems to be about the things we do when we become caught up in a pride-shame feedback loop, and the “fruits” being what we interface with – the egotism we feel and the self-concept we seek to protect – when we reflexively enact what we think we feel we need, in order to be happy and experience wellbeing. Interestingly, the Hebrew word for “to subdue it” in verse 28 Genesis 1, has the root word for shame, as if to say that the core problem in Human relations is fundamentally about fearing that the Other wont experience you well.

Again, self-consciousness, knowing that the Other has knowledge of us, and acting within ourselves to prevent the emergence of a negative evaluation, tilts us towards pridefulness as a defense against the feared-prospect of experiencing shame.

This situation, as the biblical text shows, leads to a dissociation of our conscience, which is described in the text as “hiding from the voice of God”.

This situation in turn leads to a struggle within the mind (Adam) about what its feeling (Eve), and the resentment that emerges toward the conscience - God – and the intelligence: “you’re the one who made me feel this way”, the intelligence (Adam) says to God – its conscience. Does not the phenomenology of our experience emerge in just this sort of way?

Indeed, because the context – the feedback loops operating through us from one moment to the next – biases how we reflexively see a situation, intelligence (Adam) and its feeling body (Eve) give birth to something new within the evolutionary dialectic – the creation of a desire to acquire – Cain – which marks the beginning of the agricultural epoch in Human history.

From Cain onwards, the Hebrew Bible appears to be describing a psychogenic history of increasing accumulation and a distortion of what is felt in the evolutionary process. Indeed, God later on tells Eve that the snake will “bite” at her heel, as if to say, that the new context generated by the shame-pride feedback loop will create a negative situation both for the feeling body, and more generally, for women, who depend upon a system of caring and sensitive relations for their biological enlivenment. Indeed, childbirth is also said to become “difficult” and unbearable as a consequence of this situation, perhaps intimating what contemporary perinatal psychology has discovered – that oxytocin levels in the mother help relax the sub-diaphragmatic muscles for birthing. Oxytocin, in turn, is regulated by how the mother feels with the Other’s she lives with.

a reply to: Astrocyte

Reading the Bible in Hebrew is the utter opposite of reading it in English. You lose almost all the esoteric meaning in the latter example.

I would imagine that is true. After that, your thread is troubling in many ways.

a reply to: Astrocyte

Genesis really is an amazing work.

a reply to: Astrocyte

Interesting write up....You make a reasonable case that the bible has more than just a lot of contradictory babble ......

a reply to: reldra

What's troubling? Oh yes, the 'jewish god is evil' thing.

If you let yourself follow your reason, I don't see how the verses mentioned above should bother you. Do you see me referencing the other more problematic instances of anger, bloodshed, in the bible etc? No, just what seems reasonable.

You have a nice photo of a guy hugging a woman, from the walking dead I believe. This is what I'm mainly getting at: just be nice to people and "let them be" i.e. do what you can not to disturb their existence, and vice versa.

Very simple creed if you ask me.

a reply to: randyvs

I never noticed your signature before.

A lot of truth to that!

I kind of like this interpretation but am having a hard time following it. If you could write this interpretation of a chapter or series of verses in Genesis as you think it is supposed to be and list how it says it in the bible to compare it against it would be nice.

I interpreted water or Na as spirit....not soul when trying to decipher the primordial language. Na means Graceful like water, spirit of nature, calm or tranquility. Hu was the power of god, nature, the turmoil, maybe wild water. Mu as chaos. Ma meaning blend or mix, prepare.

So human would actually be Hu Ma Na and would basically mean the power of god or turmoil -blended or mixed-with the spirit of tranquility. A combination that kind of relates to humans. That is what I got from trying to research it, some people who's research I read were obsessed with this translation of the primordial language for half their lives, being able to read and incorporate their research into my making of a list was shortened by many years. I only had to study this for about two months instead of years. Hebrew is an offshoot of this languages, some Island languages are actually closer yet to the premordial language than Hebrew is. Latin seems to have been changed and complicated but still has a lot of it in it.

fascinating
bump to read gtg

While I really appreciate the correlations you've made, and I think that what you've written accurately describes those psychological tendencies in humankind -

- ll seems much too complicated and 'information' dense to have been the meaning 'intended' by those who wrote it...

From my understanding, the Hebrew bible was first written down sometime around the 5th or 6th century BC while the Israelites were captive in Babylon?

How could information such as you describe have:

A. been learned in the first place? and

B. survived over thousands of years as oral tradition?


Now, if you were to say that what the Hebrews wrote was understood by them only to be 'literal' (i.e. the stories as generally translated in modern bibles),
and that the metaphoric meanings were in some way 'inspired' by some higher 'intelligence' for the use of far future generations -

- well, that would make more sense to me...because prior to the 'study' of evolution, psychology, & etc., there just couldn't be any possible context for humans to be able to understand those writings in the way you've outlined..

a reply to: lostgirl

Unless evolution / science are a rediscovery for mankind

Astrocyte: you also can't forget the numerology in the original texts, it is embedded and important.

a reply to: Astrocyte

Doesn't Asher mean Who, as in Eheyeh Asher Eheyeh?

It's also the name of the Goddess wife of El if you add a or ah at the end.

And the name of the son of Jacob, supposed Patriarch of the Assyrians.

Genesis is the Hebrew version of a Babylonian and Sumerian creation myth as Edin was a literal place in Sumer.

Even the H.S. hovering over the water is in the Babylonian version as is the story of Noah as Utanapishtim in the Epic of Gilgamesh.

So there is nothing divine about it. It's actually a polytheistic account of the Gods creating man in their image and ancient Hebrews had many gods and goddesses being Canaanites and all, the source of the name of God or El, Baal and Asherah.

It might seem like it's divinely inspired until you get to the mass infanticide and terrorism commited by the ''God of mercy.''

a reply to: Malocchio

Asher

Its a transitive verb coming from the root for fire AiSH (Aleph, Shin). So for instance, that above phrase from Exodus has the connotation of "I will be..[that which attracts what]..I will be". A strange and esoteric name for God indeed, associated with the highest sephirah Kether.

Genesis is the Hebrew version of a Babylonian and Sumerian creation myth as Edin was a literal place in Sumer.

If you read Hebrew, the connotations explained in the above post are entirely justified. EDeN, has the root Ayin Daleth - "witness". The mist which 'goes up', mentioned before the creation of Adam (intelligence), is made of the same root.

Just because there seems to be derivations here and there does not mean that the writers of the Hebrew Bible weren't advancing a metaphysical doctrine of their own.

Just as each of do what we do to make our life and experience within it coherent, same thing with ancient man. The Hebrews - IVRI in Hebrew, coming from the word EVeR, meaning "to cross over", were obviously mystic-philosophers.

MoShE, in turn, means "to draw out", i.e. to take something 'out'.

The Hebrew Bible is a deep book, albeit, not every ones cup of tea, but certainly not random and arbitrary as the documentary naively and ignorantly imagines.

So there is nothing divine about it. It's actually a polytheistic account of the Gods creating man in their image and ancient Hebrews had many gods and goddesses being Canaanites and all, the source of the name of God or El, Baal and Asherah.

We need to get away from this sort of naivete. It isn't fair, it seems to me, to regard Hindu myths as possessing a "vendatic" or esoteric interpretation, but not the Bible. Granted, the Hebrew bible is so well known that it is easy to see it as 'arbitrary and derivative'. But the people who say this are oftentimes people who don't read Hebrew (and so don't know the Bible in its original language) and who, it seems, simply don't want to believe that the bible has any deeper meaning (perhaps because of a prior commitment to a different viewpoint).

It might seem like it's divinely inspired until you get to the mass infanticide and terrorism commited by the ''God of mercy.''

I agree, it seems intensely harsh. It's not an easy thing for the Human being to read about that - to hear a God which describes Himself as merciful, to create a situation for His creatures such that one group is encouraged to kill another group, all-the-while the people growing up in either group can't help but seek the coherency of their earlier familiar knowings.

a reply to: fatkid

Unless evolution / science are a rediscovery for mankind

That's my sense as well.

a reply to: lostgirl

- ll seems much too complicated and 'information' dense to have been the meaning 'intended' by those who wrote it...

Do you think its possible that no one "wrote" it?

MoShE means "to draw out". Out of what? It seems to me that the Torah was not so much 'thought up' in a dialectical, or logical way, but extracted from the "mist" - the akashic field? - by an ancient Hebrew mystic named Moshe (Moses).

Don't be so naive to think that only eastern traditions have mystic understandings of their texts: just as they 'extracted' their knowledge in the same sort of manner, it seems plausible that Moses did as well.

If you read Hebrew, its EVERY SINGLE WORD. Indeed, I am involved right now with secular matters and so don't need the obsessive distraction - of which the Torah can become - of becoming enlivened by studying it.

There's a reason why Isaac Newton (and countless others) were riveted by this book - in the Hebrew.

Trying to understand it in English, let alone, trying to interpret it esoterically in English, is a failed effort. Hebrew is an ecological language - like the rising of the sun, moving from right to left. And like ecology i.e. the world we exist within, each word defines the meaning of the words it appears with, just like every living organism becomes defined by the living and non-living chemical and natural forces around it.

A. been learned in the first place? and

Have you ever heard of the concept of the omega-point? Read Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and then contrast Chardins notion with the Genesis 2 verses 10-14. The river that "goes out from Eden", is the omega point - the "integrative meaning" of the entire planetary process - with the Human at the top, and all that lives perfectly unified in some way and manner with the being of the Human.

It's an intense and overwhelming concept for the 21st century mind to digest - given that its true (Harold Morowitz last book, his 2016 magnum opus "The Origin and Nature of Life on Earth: The Emergence of the 4th Geosphere") and what it means for our phenomenological reality (nature of our lived consciousness).

Eden is that point, and so, MoShE appears to have been a person who "dipped" in to the Akashic records and extracted from it a language that today's claim to be the "language of the unified reality", whether that be true or not, there are profound ideas in this book.

- well, that would make more sense to me...because prior to the 'study' of evolution, psychology, & etc., there just couldn't be any possible context for humans to be able to understand those writings in the way you've outlined..

Oh absolutely. That's the acme of sane and reasonable thinking. The book could not have meant to them what it means to us - or can be made to mean to us.

I'm still mystified by Genesis 2 10-14: how the hell can it so plausibly contain the outline of the evolutionary process of man, from the trees, to scattering, running, becomin excited by stones, to neurogenesis, to the discovery of fire - and then, forward.

A part of me doesn't like it at all - the scientific part that likes the mystery of discovery and resents the "handing down" of knowledge from a mysterious source - God.

I guess only the future will tell.

a reply to: Astrocyte

I might have been a little harsh saying that Genesis is not divinely inspired but I will stand firm that its origins are polytheistic or if you prefer the term henotheistic because it's a fact.

Molech, El, Baal, Asherah, Shachar, Chiun, Remphan, Nimrod (Osiris), Tammuz, Azazel all were real gods and many worshipped by the Israelites and Judeans on and off.

Monotheism may be the end result but it took until the end of the Persian Empire for true monotheism to take.

Elohim is SAID to be one God but I guarantee it didn't start that way. It means Gods not God but is translated in the singular so if the divine majestic plurality is the truth it should translate as such.

Let US create man in OUR image has been thought to refer to angels who helped in creation but Christianity abused it to say ''see there is a Trinity, that's why it's plural.''

Believing that would be naive as it's just a convenient excuse for both problems.

However, many of the human patriarchs are the gods of foreign nations humanized as Israelites or enemies of.

Nimrod (Osiris), Abraham (Brahma), Amraphel (Remphan), Issachar (Shachar), Asherah (Asher), Solomon (Saturn), Amelek, (Molek).

Clever though it is it's hardly honest and maybe people had god based names in the ancient world it's clear that Canaan, Egypt, Babylon, Persia, even Greece all influenced Judaism one way or the other with Canaan and Egypt as the major source of names of God (El, El Elyon) and his very real (to the ancients) grandson Baal are the two major Gods of the Israelites.

Further Yahweh began as the tribal Baal of Israel and Judah under El Elyon or God Most High before theology made them the same. Deuteronomy reveals that Yahweh is one of the Sons of El who number 70 in Canaanite mythology.

The exact number of rulers appointed after the flood per nation. Modern Rabbinical tradition is that 70 angels each got a nation and that God chose Israel but in the oldest texts he was GIVEN Israel as an inheritance.

Also Asherah was worshipped in the Temple until Josiah because She is El's Wife before Baal/Yahweh ascended the throne. The Baal of Babylon became Yahweh to the Israelites which is why they have the same Mother/Wife.

It was Persia that introduced monotheism to the Israelites who became more monotheistic than Persia letting it be that God was good and evil.

An honest evaluation of Yahweh, imho.

Thanks for the feedback, I enjoy discussing religion.

a reply to: Malocchio

Just so you know, I'm acquainted with the documentary hypothesis and the claims made. While some of it seems legitimate, the idea of the entire Hebrew Bible just being a "mish-mash" without any coherent organization is totally without merit in my eyes.

Monotheism may be the end result but it took until the end of the Persian Empire for true monotheism to take.

If you read Genesis chapter 1, the Elohim - powers, in Hebrew - may be regarded in totally polytheistic ways.

Then, In Genesis 2, there seems to be a panentheistic doctrine being propounded. This is akin to the vedantic doctrine and the sufi doctrine which sees the physical world as illusory and an extension of the 'soul' of God.

Whether this was known as far back as Moses, which seems plausible given the monotheistic revolution in Egypt around 1300 BCE, or as the documentary hypothesis claims, around the time of the Babylonian exile (500 BCE), neither you nor I can know for certain.

On a side note, I tend to trust what reason and empiricism can demonstrate. Ultimate knowledge - faith - is not appropriate in conversations where either position can seem to have some merit on their side, which is to say, if you know "absolutely" that the Bible was written at this time period as if there weren't contending views, is merely to dabble in dissociation and wishful thinking.

So, my view is that the monotheistic doctrine probably goes as far back as ancient Sumer - may not have been a popular doctrine - but the idea of panentheism doesn't particularly strike me as needing anything more than a mind that can wonder about its own existence, and thus be led to the thought: "who created me, and this world"?

Molech, El, Baal, Asherah, Shachar, Chiun, Remphan, Nimrod (Osiris), Tammuz, Azazel all were real gods and many worshipped by the Israelites and Judeans on and off.

I believe the Bible says just that. It is genuinely hard living in a world with multiple perspectives and not to be taken in by one of them - particularly those which do not stress and burden as greatly as the more difficult ones can.

Further Yahweh began as the tribal Baal of Israel and Judah under El Elyon or God Most High before theology made them the same. Deuteronomy reveals that Yahweh is one of the Sons of El who number 70 in Canaanite mythology.

See, this is where a knowledge of Hebrew (related, of course, to ancient phoenician languages) comes in handy.

The name translated as "Yahweh", has the connotation of "being" in Hebrew. Conversely, Ba'al has the connotation of "master". Different ideas, and so, a different relationship to the divine, is being implied by these different names.

So you really shouldn't be throwing out names without a knowledge of what the names - or archetypes - refer to in, which is to say, what they mean within the language in question.

El Elyon

There seems to be a very ancient idea that the "threshold" of 'heaven and earth' (this is the word used for God by the Jebusite priest who served at the "threshold of dagon" - of which king David bought for the temple) is said to be at the temple mount in Jerusalem, currently occupied by the Dome of the rock.

Is this true? I don't know. I'm not a mystic and have not spent my life developing an awareness to know whether this is true or not. But it is interesting how ancient the walls are. And, from the perspective of modern day systems theory, it would not be too surprising to know that the Earth system, like biodynamical systems (organisms) possesses a "naval", or a singular point, where the conscious energy of Human awareness 'turns outward' upon the material processes of physical reality.

Is this true? I don't know. Again, it is so distant and far from the life I know and the coherency I generally seek in living, that all I can say is "its plausible", which is to say, it could be true, but it is so incredibly distant from the life we live and know that I don't particular feel the need to dedicate my existence to living as if it were true.

While knowledgeable of spiritual traditions, I have a deep resentment for the way they can phuck with the Human's spiritual well being.

70 in Canaanite mythology.

There's a belief, again, that the number 70 underlies the way spiritual energies "refract" into the physical world, from a "higher name" into a "lower name", for a total of 72 names.

Is this true? Could be.

It was Persia that introduced monotheism to the Israelites who became more monotheistic than Persia letting it be that God was good and evil.

Perhaps. Zoroastrianism is pretty ancient, and they did have a "good vs. evil" way of seeing things.

My problem with the dualism and oppositionality of some religious views is the way it triggers dissociative processes in the minds of Others.

If you don't speak nicely - that is, if you aren't conscious of HOW you appear (based upon WHAT you feel), you are - as a matter of biological law - probably going to trigger a dissociative reaction in the mind of the Other, which is to say, the other is going to become reflexively defensive - and so what appears in their mind will not be a feeling or constraint that is congruent with your position - but, in fact, the exact opposite. Aggressive opposition towards Others tends to produce aggressive opposition. Surprising?

This is so intuitively obvious, yet the stress of living and the neediness we have to be heard and understood by the Other can cause us to act in incredibly unrealistic ways.

originally posted by: lostgirl
While I really appreciate the correlations you've made, and I think that what you've written accurately describes those psychological tendencies in humankind -

- ll seems much too complicated and 'information' dense to have been the meaning 'intended' by those who wrote it...

From my understanding, the Hebrew bible was first written down sometime around the 5th or 6th century BC while the Israelites were captive in Babylon?

This is simply not true and probably an idea presented by someone with an ax to grind. I could go on a bit but really no goes way back before Babylon.

a reply to: Astrocyte

Nice post which does go quite deeply into the hebrew interpretation.

I really hope that you studied the qabalistic Tree of Life as well. Whilst Genesis would normally relate to the supernals on the tree , you made a very good job of relating Adam to the ego and Eve to the feeling body. Not something that I have come across before but nonetheless valid.

I am going back to the "magical" tree of life (as opposed to the orthodox use of the Tree) where the Ego has a magical image of a strong naked man (represented by the Sephira Yesod) whilst , one step away, is the Sephira Netzah (magical image is a beautiful naked woman) representing the feeling body and has the attribution of emotional force and associated with Venus (or any female concept)

So, the lower part of the tree mirrors the top of the tree (although they are inversely positioned). In short, you seem to be bringing Genesis down a few levels for a better understanding.

a reply to: crowdedskies

Yeah, I'm not sure what you're talking about.

I have a basic sense of the Kabbalistic tree of life, as described by Orthodox Judaism.

What you're describing about a "strong naked man" and a "beautiful naked woman" - is just not as needed for me or my sense of well-being as it may seem for you.

Ultimately, my sense of the Qabbalah - with a Quf - has always been negative. Is it merely sexuality? Or is there also an assumed sense that we need to be "evil" or get in touch with our "evil" side, to be balanced and at peace?

Like the Dalai Lama and other philosophical schools of thought - and particularly in light of modern neuroscience (neuroplasticity) I am enormously skeptical of that position, and see it more so as a patriarchal-masculinistic imposition of male needs upon females (who are bullied into embracing the same view) inasmuch as the ego - the male element, associated most properly with the pleasure and joy of self-experience - can "exceed" what is reasonable and what is implied by the feminine i.e. the Others, their needs, and their reality.

Crowley, and the rest of them, strike me as deeply, deeply mentally ill souls. Of course, a part of me even feels compassion for them: the world were born into basically "constructs" us - our brainstem and thus our embodied sense of need - and so, in a certain sense, outside of a society that has a more accurate understanding of self-organization, people will simply do what the Other's they grow around - who enliven them - are also doing.

Identification processes therefore "orient" every individuals feeling-needs. So if you're exposed to a traumatizing and dominating parent(s), you're on the same path to become just as they are.

Even mysticism needs to be contextualized and made more clear by the empirical scientific method