The Paleomammalian Brain and Emotiomentation

The paleomammalian brain’s emotiomentation processes, represented in intuitions and feelings, have particular significance for CSV spiritual healing practices. Emotiomentation involves brain processes underlying emotions that influence behavior through subjective information manifested as feelings.

The paleomammalian brain mediates many of these processes to provide mechanisms for the management of these problems and promotes an integration of the self within the community. The paleomammalian brain’s emotiomentation processes provide a major basis for ritualistic healing, based on integrating its own subjective evaluative influences and self-reference with the instinctual responses of the reptilian brain and the cognitive processes of the neomammalian brain.

Paleomammalian processes involved in self-preservation behaviors, procreation, emotions, nursing, maternal care, audiovocal contact, and play provide foundations for personal identity. The paleomammalian brain system also synthesizes internal and external data, combining somatic (physical) reactions with interpretations of the outside world, based on personal memory, self-representation, and social context.

The paleomammalian capacities for empathic caring that evolved from the long- term dependence of infants on adults for survival provided the basis for the development of attachment processes. CSV practices amplifies these attachments in rituals to extend the feelings of emotional security to non-kin, including beings in spiritual and religious realms.

The paleomammalian brain mediates the biological processes that promote a sense of community and provide for cooperation to enhance human adaptation and survival. The basis of personal well-being is deeply intertwined with a sense of community, a social identity where empathy with other humans provides the basis for self and security.

These interactions also provide the basis for a variety of health problems derived from relations among emotions, social interaction, and sense of self. CSV practices elicits paleomammalian brain processes in rituals that provide healing practices through integrations of emotions, sense of self, attachments, and social relations.

The development of the serotonergic system across phylogenetic evolution illustrates how it can have such a central role in these integrative processes. In the reptilian part of the brain, it is a regulatory system for the R-complex itself and the information emerging from the spinal cord. In the paleomammalian brain, the serotonergic system has a central role in the regulatory inhibition of the R-complex and the upward transmission of information into the neocortex, particularly through its projections into the prefrontal cortex.

Together, the evolutionary levels of the serotonergic system and its numerous projections provide a central system of integration and coordination of the different brain systems. These integrative processes are elicited by key aspects of CSV practices — the ASC, the physiological and psychological effects of community rituals, and the representations of person and social processes in spirits.

Axeti Nete traditions produce an integration of consciousness through rituals that stimulate physiologically based psychological integration of metaphoric cognitive processes, and community bonding rituals. CSV rituals involve a variety of mechanisms for the transformation of the practitioner’s health, eliciting physiological responses and social support and enhancing symbolically mediated placebo and other psychosomatic effects.

A basic dynamic of CSV ritualistic healing involves the systemic brain integration that ASC produce, the coordination and increased coherence of the potentials of many parts of the brain discussed above in terms of the theta-wave induced interhemispheric synchronization and limbic-frontal integration. ASC impose the paleomammalian brain’s analogical processes and material of an emotional, social, and personal nature into the self-conscious processes of the frontal cortex.

Basic physiological aspects of ASC involve parasympathetic dominance, which has inherent therapeutic effects in reducing stress because a natural response of the parasympathetic nervous system to a variety of different inputs is to counteract excessive activity of the sympathetic nervous system.

Symbolic manipulations are the most effective processes for intervention in stress mechanisms, re-establishing balance in the autonomic nervous system by changing cognitive and emotional responses. Observations of the outcomes of participants in CSV rituals indicate that they provide assurance and comfort, processes which are known to counteract emotional distress and anxiety and their deleterious physiological effects. ASC have the ability to elicit emotional memories and reduce the ego-centeredness that inhibits the experience of community connectedness and support that meets needs for belonging, comfort, and bonding with others.

Ritual relations with spiritual ‘others’ also have the capacity to elicit a variety of endogenous healing responses. CSV ritualistic healing elicits and restructures repressed memories, providing processes for expression of unconscious concerns and resolving intrapsychic and social conflicts. Ritual management of behavior, emotions, and reason is mediated physiologically and symbolically within the paleomammalian brain where social signaling and bonding promote subjective evaluations that play a vital role in integrating instinctual responses of the ancient brain with the cognitive processes of the neomammalian brain.

Axeti Nete ritual evolved as a system for managing the relationships among innate drives and needs, social bonding processes and cultural representational systems, providing a system for managing health problems derived from anxiety, fears, conflicts, excessive emotionality, obsessions, and compulsions. The fact that CSV rituals have therapeutic efficacy is supported by the evidence of the general effect of religion on health. Scientific evidence found in hundreds of epidemiological studies shows that religious participation is associated with lower morbidity and mortality rates for virtually all diseases, independent of the type of measure of religion or disease.

Therapeutic Qualities of ASC

A central effect of CSV ceremonial healing derives from the ASC induction. ASC slow-wave brain-discharge patterns (alpha and theta) results in a shift in the autonomic nervous system to parasympathetic dominance, reducing stress hormone levels and activating the serotonergic nervous system.

The serotonergic system acts as a modulatory system, affecting other neurotransmitter systems and managing activities across levels of the brain through both stimulating and inhibiting processes. Central roles of serotonin are the integration of emotional and motivational processes and the synthesis of information across the functional levels of the brain.

This serotonergic action is exemplified in the effects of ayahuasca on the brain. ASCs in general integrate information from the lower levels of the brain into the processing capacity of the frontal cortex, particularly integrating information from the emotional and behavioral preverbal brain structures.

This integration of information from the preverbal brain structures into the language-mediated activities of the frontal cortex is why ASC are often characterized as providing understanding, enlightenment, a sense of unity and oneness with the universe, feelings of connection with others and personal integration.

ASC addresses physiological dispositions associated with anxiety, stress, and depression through modifying the imbalance in serotonergic systems. They outline a neuroendocrine model for the mechanisms of these effects. ASC reduce stress and enhance serotonin functioning by inducing relaxed states with low levels of autonomic arousal and enhanced EEG coherence. Increases in serotonin levels reduce cortisol levels, indirectly reducing stimulation of limbic anger and fear centers. The serotonin-enhancing effects alter the activity of the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis and chronic stress, reversing the serotonin depletion effects that result from the release of cortisol.

ASC increases in serotonin availability mirror models of serotonergic mechanisms of ’transcendent states‘ suggesting a generic role of enhanced serotonin availability in ASC. CSV ceremonies exploits the ancient role of ritual to enhance serotonergic production and produce special forms of awareness that integrate waking and dreaming modes of awareness.