Thoughts from my Abnormal Psychology Class

We had a fascinating lengthy discussion on Dissociative Identity Disorder last night in class. Coming from both a psychological and a theological perspective I've been trying to understand the symptomatic difference between this and classical demonic possession. One thing which stands out is that DID doesn't develop after age nine. Another thing is that, like with the subject last night, the alternate identities may attempt to protect and seek help for the host identity. And in reports of classical DP there are elements of abilities such as superhuman strength or knowledge displayed which the host body could not have been capable of. Further, in DID the average number of alters is 15, whereas in DP the average is one. Furthermore, DP can occur without any prior history of severe, extreme trauma, whereas this is necessary for the formation of DID. And DP can occur without warning. The key difference appears to be the supernatural element however. Also in classical DP as described in the New Testament and Ante-Nicene Fathers the host appears to exert no control over the body's voice and actions, where in DID the host is one of several identities that are displayed.

It seems to me that the problem occurs when you diagnose as only DID "or" DP and don't allow for the existence of both. The other problem occurs in that there have been so many misdiagnosed by pastors and priests as DP that were actually DID (or other mental illnesses) that there hasn't been enough viable observation of the differences to truly recognize DP when you see it, except perhaps for the aforementioned obvious supernatural or superhuman symptoms.

We were talking about Conversion Disorder the other night in class. This is where a person may lose the use of their eyes, a limb, or other physical ability for no explainable neural or medical condition. An example might be a woman who walks in on her husband cheating on her with the maid and the next morning wakes up blind. She isn't faking it, she really can't see even though there's nothing physically wrong with her eyes or neural circuitry. While there were a number of students who didn't understand how that was possible, what kept coming to my mind (from my electronics background) was a "driver malfunction". A "device driver" is the piece of software which allows the operating system to communicate with and use "devices" like video cards, printers, mice, network cards, etc. If it malfunctions, even if there's nothing physically wrong with the hardware or the connections, the device will not work. Driver malfunctions happen when either the driver software itself is corrupted, or when another piece of software or coding interferes with its regular function and it can't get past it. Conversion Disorder sounded to me a lot like a driver malfunction in the human brain. This then got me to thinking more about this idea. The traditional model of how the brain works tends to be all "hardware" based, that is, certain parts of the brain control certain functions of the body. But the human nervous system is essentially one enormous organic processor (neurons essentially being advanced organic transistors and functioning roughly the same way with the added chemical component for emotional response). And one thing about coding is that, any function you can achieve with digital hardware you can replicate with lines of code and a processor to run it through. This is the reason why modern computers can function as DVD players, CD players, radios, word processors, gaming machines, etc. All of these functions which would otherwise be achieved through a hard electronic circuit are achieved via lines of code. What if the function of the human body through the nervous system is more "software" controlled than hardware? What if there is organic "coding" controlling the various devices and systems of the body rather than it being all hard controller based? This would explain a great deal as to how psychologically traumatic events could physically affect the function of parts of the body with no medical or neurological reason. The traumatic event acts like new coding that interferes with the drivers and other software responsible for the normal operation of the system. Just some thoughts from Abnormal Psych class.

Continuing my train of thought from my previous post... Computer code breaks down essentially to 1s and 0s. 1 represents a switch turned on and 0 represents a switch turned off. Or another way to say it is 1 represents a single electrical pulse and 0 represents no electrical pulse. When computer code is written, it is written in human readable language and then that language is converted to what is called a binary. That is, it is converted to 1s and 0s that the processor can then use. The sensory inputs of the human body (eyes, ears, nose, taste buds, and of course nerve endings that transmit touch sensations) all feed directly into structures which convert those sensations into the electro-chemical impulses which the brain can then use and apparently stores for future use as memories. In short, from the time those senses are brought online, the brain is being coded on the fly and continues to be coded (programmed) throughout the lifespan of the individual person.

In my abnormal psych class, part of what I've been learning is the multidimensionality of psychopathology. That is, a psychological disorder has more than one cause. There can be several contributing factors including biological, environmental, and psychological. As I was finishing up Romans seven this morning, what stood out to me was Paul's insistence that the fatal flaw clearly has a biological cause and not a psychological one. He repeats it several times and in several different ways that the fatal flaw resides within the biological part of the human psyche (sarx) and not the mental component (noos). In other words, it is genetically inherited and doesn't skip generations.

Continuing my thoughts from earlier, if the fatal flaw is biological in nature, and hereditary, as St. Paul describes it in Romans 7, then it is genetic, passed down from parent to offspring and appears to be unique to the human species as no other animal life appears to display its symptoms. Furthermore, if it is biological and affects human thought, emotions, and behavior, then the fatal flaw is somehow physiologically centered in the human central nervous system and primarily the brain as it is the brain which regulates and directs behavior, thought, and emotions. The question that then comes up is what about the human brain is so very different from other animal species? The natural answer would be the size of the frontal lobes and the cerebral cortex in particular (as opposed to our nearest genetic relatives, the bonobo and chimpanzee). However, dolphins appear to have a larger cerebral cortex than we do and do not apparently share the same fatal flaw or predisposition to psychopathology. Among other regions, one of the more primitive portions of the brain that is important in the role of decision-making, motivations, and emotional control as well as the creation of short term and long term memories is the limbic system. Another thing we covered in abnormal psych was the ability of the environment to change genetics through epigenetics. That the environment of an organism can actually interfere with genetic "switches". Putting all this together, the thought occurs to me that whatever occurred, either the literal story of Adam and Eve's fall regarding eating from the wrong tree, or taking this as a metaphor for something else equally damaging, that it affected the human genetics surrounding the limbic system of the brain which was then passed down to all human descendants thereafter.

A Ramble About Museum Fremen

A Ramble About Museum Fremen

In Frank Herbert's Dune series, the Fremen are the semi-native inhabitants of the planet Arrakis, aka "Dune". They descended from escaped "Buddhislamic" slaves that took refuge on the extremely water scarce, harsh world. It was here that they first encountered the awesome and terrible dominance of Shai-Hulud, the great sandworms, and here that they became involuntarily addicted to the “Spice Melange” which was ever present around them in the air, the food, and the sands beneath their feet. It was the residue of Shai-Hulud that would prove to be a powerful, consciousness expanding drug that could grant visions and open possibilities of existence. Those first escaped slaves suffered immensely in their new environment, but that suffering forced them to adapt themselves if they wanted to survive.

Over a period of ten thousand years, the harsh desert environment and its “peculiarities” transformed them into a fanatically religious, incredibly tough, spice addicted, survivalist race of people that learned to treasure water to the point that they would even distil it from their dead so as not to lose one drop from their tribal stash. Led by their messiah, Paul Muad’Dib, they not only took their planet back from those who would exploit it and them, but they conquered the known universe planet by planet, bringing each one into subjection to Muad’Dib’s rule.

Later on, thousands of years later, Dune has been transformed into a paradise world through environmental terraforming. Sandworms are more and more confined to mere pockets of what had been a worldwide desert. Water runs freely on the planet’s surface and rain falls from the sky in a normal water cycle, something that the Fremen could never have imagined. The human-sandworm hybrid God Emperor Leto, the son of Muad’Dib, has maintained communities of what are called "museum Fremen" in tribute to his own ancestry as well as the planet's.

Except, the museum Fremen are barely shadows of what their ancestors were. They are little more than actors in a carefully controlled, barely recognizable recreation. Water pools in muddy puddles in their villages. They talk much of their personal honor, but do nothing about it. Their villages tend to be filthy. Their religious devotion is hollow and rehearsed, and their ancestor' s spice addiction is long a thing of the past. They couldn't conquer anything. When a man with memories of what Muad’Dib’s Fremen were encounters them, he is appalled and their leader appeals to him for help in recovering their true heritage.

To me, this is the best illustration of Christians in the first two or three centuries, and the "museum Christians" of the churches today. The museum Fremen didn't know the first thing about being a Fremen, and quite frankly the museum Christians of today don't know the first thing about being a Christian. The Fremen's eyes glowed a deep solid blue with the ever present spice, whereas the museum Fremen's eyes were the normal white with different colored irises. In the same way, the ancient Christians were so energized by Grace that healings, exorcisms, and miracles were common. Today, museum Christians have to resort to excuses or staged illusions when the charismata are brought up, and any real evidence of these powers being displayed is explained away or vehemently opposed because it is from the “wrong denomination”. We lost the blue from our eyes long ago. We squander the water in a way our spiritual ancestors never did.

Is it really any wonder then people are leaving the churches? We can only BS our way through it for so long before people begin to realize we don't really know what we're talking about. It is so bad that the written accounts of the Christians from the first three centuries (and many of the Saints of the following) are often dismissed as fairy tales because they don’t match with modern experience. When our lives don't match what's written of theirs, people will cry foul and rightly so.

So then, what do we do? How do we return to our roots? By imitating those whose lives do match theirs. By studying those people living and dead. And by going back to what made those ancient Christians Christians. For the Fremen it was water scarcity and spice saturation. For the ancient Christians it was community, voluntary poverty, and Jesus saturation (John 15:4-7). It's when these things are removed from our lives that we exist only as a shadow of what was.

A Ramble About Humiliation

"You learn humility only by accepting humiliations. And you will meet humiliation all through your life. The greatest humiliation is to know that you are nothing. This you come to know when you face God in prayer. Often a deep and fervent look at Christ is the best prayer: I look at Him and He looks at me. When you come face to face with God, you cannot but know that you are nothing, that you have nothing." - Mother St. Theresa of Calcutta

Mother St. Theresa is someone I deeply, deeply admire and respect. Every day she proved what she said she believed through her actions and her life, and she proved the truth of what she believed in them as well. After her death, it was revealed that she had deeply dark moments in her own faith as well where she felt that God might have abandoned her, and yet in spite of this she persisted and finally finished the race so well, God moved the nation of India, mostly polytheistic, to throw her a State funeral. So, when she says something about Christian practice and faith I tend to pay attention.

I don't like being or feeling humiliated. When I am, either intentionally or unintentionally, it hurts and it hurts deeply. Part of this is due to my own childhood woes and insecurities, and part of it is due to the insecure and positive attention loving ego which developed out of them. I wish this wasn't true about myself, but it is and it is something with which I struggle.

I find myself consistently feeling humiliated in one way or another, and have throughout my life. I am sure that part of this is my own fault for asking God to humble me earlier in my life (knowing my own ego and pride), but that does not make it any easier. To feel less than, to feel cast aside, to watch while all of your friends and acquaintances move on successfully in life while it seems like everything you try your hand at somehow gets stopped or malfunctions in some way, all of these things are humiliating.

It makes you want to run. It makes you want to escape or bury yourself in order to numb the pain. It makes you just want to quit trying and walk away from all of it, though you aren't allowed to. And no matter what happens, in the blink of an eye, and just for an instant you are called back to service in some small capacity, and then it fades again.

Jesus Christ was humiliated as well all through his life. He was accused of being an illegitimate child. He became, by his own account, homeless. During his ministry, he lived off the means of three women. This is not to mention his constant belittlement by the religious gatekeepers and his abhorrent execution. The Apostles as well suffered humiliation after humiliation as they attempted to serve and walk their own journey of faith.

I think that somehow we romanticize these humiliations and hardships. We take them and hold them up as shining examples of the faith without going into the dirty details of what it actually felt like. We tend to put rose colored glasses over the fact that the reality was vicious, hurtful, and extremely painful.

It is hard to find peace in being humiliated, especially when you can't see the outcome of it all. And it gets harder to trust that outcome when it continues to seem so far off in the distance. A shield of faith which is continuously bombarded with flaming arrows can eventually show the scars and splinters of intense bombardment in combat. This is also not something Sunday School teachers, caught up in the imagery of Ephesians 6, will tell you about. Though any soldier who has seen combat will tell you of the damage projectiles can do to armor. And I think there must be a kind of fatigue which comes with intense and unrelenting spiritual combat.

To be nothing, the goal of humiliation, there is both an attraction and a repulsion to it. It is something for which to strive, and yet it is also something which the ego desperately wishes to escape from. On the one hand, it means union with God through Christ, but on the other hand it means more painful humiliations and suffering. That suffering, ultimately is caused by attachments to things, people, ideas, etc. All of which are stripped away in humiliation. It is easy to say "Yes, Lord! Bring it on!" (as I did in my youth), but it is a far different thing to experience it. Eventually, you find yourself saying, "Please! No more! I can't take any more!" Even as you know that more humiliations are what is needed to finally destroy the ego which is pleading for the very idea of its existence.

I know I must trust God's process with me. No one needs to explain this or make it any more clear to me than it already is. Everything He does, including when He humiliates me, is because He loves me, not because He doesn't, and because He knows what will best achieve that goal He has for me. But it will never be without costing everything.

Yet Another Ramble About Discipleship...

Not long ago, I purchased a new original language Bible. Since then, I have been reading back through different New Testament books, transferring notes from my old Greek New Testament. The book I have been going through most recently is Matthew. Several weeks ago, I went through Matthew 10, and after making some notes and a Facebook comment, I moved on, but I find myself continuing to come back to it in my mind.

There were two things which stood out most to me then. The first was that this was more than just Jesus prepping his twelve disciples for a missionary road trip. This was their formal consecration as Apostles. The rules they were given by Jesus here weren't just for the immediate journey, but they were a rule of religious life which the Apostles were to continue following for the rest of their lives. Virtually the same rules were laid down for the seventy disciples who were sent out as well in Luke 10:1-11.

The second observation flows from the first, and this is that voluntary poverty was a part of their religious practice from this point in time onward(vs. 9-10), and appears to have been a mandated requirement to be one of Jesus's disciples. Jesus Himself lays this requirement on the rich young ruler, the only thing he lacked was to sell everything he had, give the proceeds to the destitute, then come and follow him in Matthew 19:21. Jesus was also clear that He Himself was homeless, and becoming His disciple meant following Him into homelessness in Matthew 8:20 (compare with the instructions to the Apostles in v. 11-14). His Apostles in the gospels also reiterated that they had given up everything to follow Him (Luke 18:28, Matthew 19:27). Jesus's admonishment towards voluntary, absolute poverty, homelessness, and detachment from earthly relationships for His disciples was strong, repeated, and consistent throughout the gospels (Luke 14:26-33, Matthew 10:37-39; 16:24-26). And it appears to have carried over into the practice of the Apostolic Church immediately before and after Pentecost in Acts 1-2.

Finally, He was also clear that those who didn't follow these conditions couldn't be His disciples. He said this over and over again. This is what keeps running through my mind. How can we reconcile the modern, western, materialistic life with being a disciple of Jesus Christ? And yet those most guilty of this at times are those professing to be “Christians”. About the only Christian populations today that continue to maintain these conditions of discipleship are some, though not all, religious and monastic orders.

One of the things that strikes me most about the conditions of discipleship is how similar this life was to the practice of the Buddha and his bhikkus (bhikku is “disciple” in Pali) as described in the Gospel of Buddha. They too were expected to renounce, or at least detach from all earthly relationships. They were expected to renounce or detach from all material possessions and enter a state of voluntary, near absolute poverty. And they too were expected to enter into homelessness. They were also expected to remain chaste and/or celibate.

Where this last part is concerned, the Jewish law already expected this in that only heterosexual marriage was permitted, and celibacy was expected otherwise on pain of death or forced marriage according to the Mosaic Law. And it is clear from, not only what Jesus taught, but also the letters of the Apostles in the rest of the New Testament that chastity was expected of Jesus's disciples both before and after Pentecost with the only exception being a monogamous, heterosexual marriage. Otherwise, the disciple was expected to remain celibate.

Another example I keep coming back to is that of several of the recognized Saints. One such example is that of Saint Theresa of Calcutta (she'll be fully canonized this year). I recently watched the movie, "The Letters" again, which is about her life and work. As a nun, she assumed voluntary poverty and chastity to begin with. But in going out from her security in her convent to live and work with Calcutta's poorest of the poor, she also, in a way, went forward into homelessness as well. Other examples may be St. Francis of Assisi, or St. Ignatius of Loyola. It occurs to me that, according to the writings and biographies of the Saints for the last two thousand years, the power and presence of Christ is most apparent and most active in those who adhere to the conditions of discipleship that He Himself laid out.

What does that look like with a spouse? With a family? What does that look like with responsibilities within society? And yet weren’t these questions that the Apostles and the seventy also had to wrestle with? St. Paul mentions that St. Peter had a wife that went with him, and the gospel writers also allude to his wife when they mention his mother-in-law with a fever.

I think there is a great deal of soul searching that needs to be done by those today that profess themselves to be His disciples. Do we despise the homeless, or do we join them as He did? Do we look down on those in poverty, or do we sell everything we have and give the proceeds to them as He taught? Do we indulge our sensual desires, or do we remain chaste as He did? And what would, and what did Jesus do and teach? What did He say we must do in order to truly be His disciples? If we don’t ask these questions and be honest with ourselves about the answers, how can we seriously even begin to call ourselves by His name?

Thoughts While Laying Awake at Night

God is on my mind tonight.

I don't like being asked the question “Do you believe in God?” For most this seems like a simple “yes” or “no” answer. But for me, the image that comes to my mind is of the titular character in “Evan Almighty” when he's naively told that he needs to shave after he'd spent hours that morning struggling to remove a beard that refused to die, “You have no idea!” However, in most conversations, I can't really say that as a response because the questioner really does have no idea what he's asking or the absurdity of the question and would be offended if I pointed this out, or like many would try to analyze me and figure me out which then becomes awkward and throws up more barriers.

Another response which goes through my head is, “Are you kidding me?” And this too would probably be either threatening to the questioner, or mark me as someone who tries to artificially spiritualize everything to make myself sound more religious than I really am. This is why I rarely talk about what I believe anymore to people I'm not certain share the same faith. I've learned the hard way that if my actions don't match what I say I believe then it's best to stay silent. I'd rather let my actions share Christ than let my mouth embarrass Him.

For a long time now I've been trying to come up with a realistic picture of God given all available data. While what I've got so far works for me, I know it doesn't work for everyone. That's fine. It doesn't matter if it does, because that doesn't change the reality of His existence. It's like trying to put a face to a familiar voice, a familiar touch that you've never seen because you're blind. You don't even know where to begin. And it's only every so often that you get a glimmer of the reality behind the Presence because when you do it's overwhelming and you're left almost unable to process.

I understand where people start from, where the existence of God might be questioned when there is no basis of a relationship or communication. But at this point in my life, questioning His existence is more ludicrous than questioning my own. We have too much of a history together. It is true that He sees no need to prove His existence to anyone. But this shouldn't surprise anyone. There is a saying, small dogs bark the loudest. The opposite is also true. Alphas have no need to prove themselves. The inferior members of the pack vie for their attention, not the Alpha for theirs. So it is with God, you either submit and accept Him as a starting point of a relationship, or you don't. It is not a relationship of equals. Don't be arrogant enough to demand it. This is what the small dog does.

The "picture" I have of God now, I've tried to understand and explain, and I think my hypothesis fits the data. When I truly sit and try to meditate on it, it overwhelms me and can move me to terrified trembling and tears while at the same time realizing I continue to exist only because of His lovingkindness and mercy. I can't think if the term "I Am" anymore without it provoking some kind of a response in this vein.

It takes real work to cultivate a relationship with Him. Just like it does with anyone. It takes communication, trying to listen, making mistakes, learning about each other and taking leaps of faith. None of this happens overnight. Sure, He might briefly take control of you for something with your cooperation, but that's one experience. One experience does not a solid relationship make for anyone. Salvation is a result of this relationship, both in this life and beyond, and God's no fool. He knows who His friends are, and who they aren't. He loves you but He's not going to acknowledge a relationship that doesn't exist. Relationships are two way not one way.

Just my thoughts before bed.