The Biogenetic Foundation of CSV Beliefs

The strikingly similar ritual practices of experiential religious societies around the world reflect biogenetic foundations. These biological foundations provide the framework for a religious paradigm that illustrates the foundation of humanity’s original religious practices and rituals as practiced by the CSV. The biological basis of the universal features of CSV beliefs are derived from the ancient phylogenetic roots of sacred ritual as a mechanism for human bonding, spiritual healing, group communication and social coordination. The deeper evolutionary origins of CSV spiritual practices are derived from ancient hominid ritual capacities dating back to maximal displays of early hominids or indeed even further into pre-history.

These displays include:

• Community bonding rituals that involve emotional vocalizations and music as social signaling and communication processes;
• ASC that involve the elicitation of an integrative mode of consciousness;
• Healing capacities based on the above processes, including ritual effects in eliciting physiological responses and the ASC that provides physiological relaxation and integration

 

The biological evolution of CSV beliefs may be found in the preservation of the functions of previous adaptive structures as illustrated in ritual activities of early hominids. These implicate ancient areas of the brain and the paleomammalian brain, which are involved in community bonding and attachment processes. Uniquely human foundations of worship are also found in the brain system itself, particularly innate modules for representation of spirit guides, animals, plants and self.

CSV rituals are based on the selection of features of prior adaptations of these innate systems, involving new selective resources on previously established features for new adaptive functions. CSV ceremonies expand the capacities of ritual for community integration and use them to produce ASC that enhances awareness and capacities for representation.

ASC integrate prior representational capacities to produce metaphoric thought that enables new forms of cognition and symbolic healing processes. These are manifested in the roles of plant and animal spirit concepts in the formation of personal and social identities and the information processing and integration provided in the visionary images of ASC.

These provide mechanisms for personal individuation, social integration, and cognitive and emotional integration that combines the outputs of different innate cognitive modules or processes that are inherent in human biology. These integrative outputs are exemplified in CSV participants’ visionary experiences, complex models combining the normally unconscious integrative information capacities of dream cognition with the egoic capacities and the self. These integrative potentials are manifested in CSV beliefs of plant and animal spirit allies.

Specialized innate modules for processing information relevant to self, social others and the plant spirit world are integrated in CSV practices to produce metaphoric thought represented in Axeti Nete universals of soul flight, plant and animal spirit allies, spirits, and death-and-rebirth experiences.

The ancient biological basis of CSV rituals and their adaptive functions are illustrated by understanding the functional nature of experiential religiosity. Such evolutionary biological approaches to ritual illustrate that CSV rituals have ancient roots built out of prior adaptations, revealed in the homologous behaviors humans share with other primate or hominin species.

CSV Rituals and Co-operative Behaviors

Ritual is integral to vertebrate social life, providing mechanisms for communication that are basic to social coordination. Such rituals use behaviors, manifested in actions, which signal a disposition for social behaviors. Rituals have communication and social signaling functions, using genetically based behaviors to provide information that facilitates interactions among members of a species, coordinating their behaviors in ways that contribute to cooperation, bonding and shared understanding.

By making internal dispositions publicly available, CSV rituals contribute to cooperative behaviors by providing information that helps produce personal healing and socially coordinated responses.

Ecstasy: The Integrative Mode of Consciousness

An ASC can be described as a state of ‘ecstasy’ or a state of grace and is a central feature of CSV beliefs and practices. The near-universality of institutionalized ASC reflects an inherent basis in human biology and the fundamental similarity of the brain responses produced by a variety of conditions, activities, and agents.

CSV ASC generally begin with dietary restrictions and then an all-night ceremony involving the ritual ingestion of ayahuasca, drumming, music, chanting, and dancing. The overall physiological effects of these activities activate the sympathetic division of the autonomic nervous system.

ASC involve systemic brain discharge patterns that propagate across the neuraxis of the brain, producing brain-wave synchronization in the alpha and theta wave range. The underlying basis of these responses to many different stimuli is created by the serotonergic connections between the limbic system and brain-stem regions that produce synchronous discharges that propagate across the neuraxis into the frontal cortex.

The synchronous patterns originating in the hippo-campal-septal-reticular raphe circuits are manifested in high-voltage, slow-wave EEG activity (especially theta, 3–6 cycles per second waves). These discharges are linkages of the attentional mechanisms in the behavioral brain regions (reticular formation) and the emotional brain (limbic brain, particularly the hippocampal-septal area), producing ascending discharge patterns that synchronize these levels of the brain with projecting discharges into the two frontal lobes.

This paradigm of integrative brain states is a generic feature underlying altered consciousness produced by the action of ayahuasca. These include selective effects on the brain’s CSTC (cortico-striato-thalamo- cortical) feedback loops. These loops are the principal organizational networks of the brain that link the information-gating systems of lower levels of the brain with the frontal cortex of the brain.

These loops are regulated at lower levels of the brain in the thalamus, which limits the ascending information. The disinhibition of these systems by ayahuasca results in the flooding of the frontal cortex with information, leading to breakdown of the integrative capacity of the ego (ego death). The limbic loop originates in the hippocampal area and the temporal lobe and projects to ventral striatum, nucleus accumbens, and caudate nucleus, with feedback to the orbitofrontal cortex.

These areas exert an inhibitory influence on the thalamus, functioning as ‘gate- keepers’ or filters for the level of the frontal cortex, the basic filtering node for information from the environment and body. Ayahuasca disables this disinhibition process, which increases access to the information capacities, increasing the flow of information that is ordinarily inhibited.

ASC produce psychophysiological and psychosocial integration by enhancing interactions between conscious and unconscious processes, linking the pre-verbal structures of consciousness (R-complex and paleomammalian brain) with the functions of the frontal brain through the ascending impulses manifested in vision and feelings.

Music in CSV Rituals

Music in the form of chanting (Axeti Nete Icaros), and singing, often accompanied by percussive expression has direct impacts on the brain, inducing a variety of patterns and responses. There are a number of mechanisms through which music may also induce physiological effects that result in relaxation and reduce stress. Physiological reactions produced by music include its impact on the autonomic nervous system and the emotional processing centers.

In Axeti Nete, the Icaros help the Onanya travel between worlds. They awaken the Ayahuasca spirit to have her pull the Onanya and guide him through the worlds and energy fields in order to perform the energetic healing required in any given ceremony.

Music has an ability to heal through the elicitation of emotions and by providing supportive cathartic expression that relieves troubled emotions. Music’s effects on emotions is the consequence of biologically determined neural responses, its direct impact on nonverbal communication processes and its ability to both communicate and elicit experiences in others.

A range of research indicates emotional expression induced by music is based in the elicitation of innate biologically determined emotional states. Music has a capacity for healing through eliciting these emotional states and providing a mechanism for venting and constructive expression of repressed emotions, generating insight into our own feelings.

In Axeti Nete, these properties of music function as a form of communication beyond the nonverbal expression of basic emotions to express more developed affective forms. While there are a variety of personal and cultural factors that shape the way in which music is perceived and affects the body and consciousness, it remains a primordial form of emotional communication whose cross-cultural power is perhaps more evident in the modern world than ever before.