You must CHOOSE your Gods.
Dopamine, adrenaline, and Divinity.
What does a sacrificial offering to ensure the rising of the sun have in common with a techbro on 20k a year ferociously defending Elon Musk The Big Baddie Billionaire in the comment section?
Both are what happens when dopamine dances with endorphins and adrenaline, mixing up the perfect cocktail of WORSHIP.
One of the marvellous things about the human body is that we can neurologically track our physical experience of reverent exaltation.
Our lungs breathe.
Out cardiovascular system pumps and filters blood.
Our nervous systems emote and protect.
And our dopamine receptors will find or create meaning + divinity.
It is literally part of our makeup to be in worship.
Accept this truth, and you have a way better chance of self-authoring your understanding of reality.
Reject it, and you become wildly susceptible to coercion and control.
We must choose our Gods.
Because choose them or not, best believe they’re going to be there.
The only agency we have is the choice between bowing in gleeful reverence to Gods we want to hang out with, or else prostrating ourselves at altars erected by the systems that seek to destroy us for profit.
Inhale, Exhale…
As with literally everything that exists, our perception of reality can be mythically broken into two distinct halves:
The inhale…
…and the exhale.
The exhale half of our reality perception is the here and now. We can settle into it. Most of the time, we can touch it.
Our here and now perception concerns anything and everything that’s already ours.
If you were to look around you now, you’d probably see a laptop or a phone. Maybe a cup of coffee. You might see a pen, or a desk, even a seat on a bus.
All of these these are already yours, according to your brain. You don’t have to exert any effort in order to acquire them.
No planning or scheming or future-prediction has to be put in place in order for you to get the device you are now reading this from.
Literally everything else that exists in the world can be put into the not here, not yet category.
This is the inhale half of our perception of reality.
Unlike the here and now stuff in the exhale half, the not here, not yet stuff in the inhale half consists of things we have to think about and work for in order to get.
Even if it’s just a tiny bit, some coordinated effort and planning will be involved, and you will be rewarded for exerting that effort (and often, you’ll be neurologically punished when you don’t).
Whether it’s the cup of tea you have to walk into your kitchen to make, or that art project that will take you years.
The inhale half of our perception of reality is ruled almost entirely by Dopamine.
The Great Devourer.
Dopamine is the chemical reality behind all mythology and folklore. It’s the translation matrix through which we attempt to grapple with our reality, to make meaning, and to reinforce that meaning over and over until it becomes “just the way it is”.
It’s why now, in the landscape of our culture, the acquisition of wealth and power is the be-all and end-all. It’s why we venerate celebrities and billionaires like they are gods.
It’s why nothing we do will ever be enough, so we devote our entire lives to climbing up to the next rung on the ladder we’ve been prescribed. It has us chasing arbitrary capitalist milestones with the fervour of addicts (because we are), worshipping at the altar of Wealth and Victory, making macabre myths out of money itself, blood sacrifices and all.
Anything that is not here, not yet, is what dopamine is for.
Where there is abstraction, there is dopamine.
The Great Devourer
In spaces devoted to nervous system health and somatic work, we’ll often see experts talking about the fact that when it comes to our stress response, we really havent’t evolved all that much in the hundred thousand years that have elapsed since our nomadic ancestors were being chased by predators.
We know that the reason we experience a thrill of anxiety when we see an email from our boss is because our bodies are going into fight or flight as part of the stress response cycle, and they’re giving us a little burst of adrenaline to outrun the threat.
Logically, we know that opening an email isn’t anything like seeing a bear coming closer to the place where we sleep. But our body’s response is the same, none the less.
What isn’t talked about nearly as much, but is definitely just as vital for our understanding of ourselves, is that our stress response is not the only bit of our physiology that hasn’t evolved all that drastically in a hundred thousand years.
Our DOPAMINE PRODUCTION + RECEPTIVITY is pretty much the same as it used to be too.
I’d like for us to really reflect on what this means for us as apparently “autonomous” human beings, living in a free-will based society.
Back in the day, when we were nomads who depended on our stress response to get us a safe distance from the bear that’s wandered towards our camp, we created glorious and captivating mythology to make meaning out of the seemingly chaotic reality we found ourselves in.
We saw the moon vanish into boundless darkness, only to return to the sky three days later, and our dopamine receptors went nuts creating the most beautiful and lyrical poetry to encapsulate rebirth.
We sacrificed brave martyrs… and then came the Spring, with it’s fertility and abundance of resources. Our dopamine receptors fired on all cylinders. Meaning had been determined, validated, and therefore reinforced. Our little worldviews solidified.
We like to think with all of our technology and so-called “civilised” (read: colonised) societies, that we’re oh so much more advanced than our myth-making ancestors were.
But the truth is, our brains and nervous systems are still doing literally the exact same thing. All that’s shifted, are the myths we reinforce.
MYTHS are simply the skeletons of the Unconscious.
Let’s take a moment here to get really clear on what we’re discussing when we say “myth”.
I am not using the word “myth” to simply mean something that isn’t factually true.
I mean it in a deeper sense, an older sense.
A myth is something that is DEFINITELY true, but it only REMAINS true, because of how often and how effectively it is collectively reinforced.
Whenever a society or culture decides that something is “just the way it is”, that’s the myth underpinning that culture.
The trouble with the dominant paradigm of our deeply colonised world, is that we’re so divorced from anything that even resembles the sacred, that “mythology” has all but been driven OUT of our collective lexicon.
But, this is the rub…
Cutting us off from the idea of Mythology…
…from the language of Mythology…
…does NOTHING to stop us from participating in Mythology.
It just means that now, we can’t recognise it for what it is.
So, mistakenly, we call them truths.
When something is simply true, we forget that we have autonomy over it.
We are creatures that are organically wired to seek the sacred.
Seeking and making meaning of the poetry of our existence is just as much a part of our physiological makeup as the thrill of adrenaline we experience when we’re under threat.
We can just as easily strip ourselves of our longing for divine meaning as we can ask our lungs to stop breathing, or our bellies to stop digesting, or our hearts to stop beating.
We are always going to seek and make meaning out of the “sacred” as we see it.
There’s no getting around this fact.
So, much like so many things that we have been systematically disconnected from, this primal and base yearning for meaning and for the sacred has now been weaponised against us by our oppressors.
We are cut off from what is inherently sacred to us…
(ie the earth, the people and creatures who hang out here with us, and the movement of Life itself)
…we are then prescribed a new understanding of “sacred”, in accordance with the desired mythology of our oppressors.
And our adorable bodies, they run with it just the same.
Colonising the Sacred: a very brief and haphazard timeline…
It’s pretty widely known that until about five thousand years ago, human beings lived in harmony with the natural world, and our dopamine-fuelled drive for worship was directed at the Earth itself, and to symbols of Mother.
(If you didn’t know that, now you do! Patriarchy and all its beneficiaries are not innate. In fact, when we zoom out a little bit, patriarchy is a very young and unstable phenomenon for our species)
At that time, humans had been around for about 300,000 years.
Our bodies had already evolved to perceive and respond to threat (with what we now call the HPA axis), and to perceive and create meaning (through what we now know to be the RAS in the brainstem and it’s relationship with our dopamine production).
When the symbols of Mother were usurped by the Myth of the Father, the template of our collective mythology changed.
Our need to recognise and create meaning didn’t go anywhere, but it did adapt to align itself with the new consciousness that was sweeping the planet.
We don’t know precisely how and why this shift came to be. What we do know, is that humans moved quickly from perceiving the sacred to be Of The Earth, to perceiving the sacred to be Of The Heavens.
Rites and rituals became things of self sacrifice, to appease a vengeful transcendent Father figure.
Monotheistic Abrahamic religions abounded.
We came to understand that the world as we lived in it, didn’t really count. What it was all about was the transcendental next world.
Slowly but surely, our understanding of the sacred as immanent (meaning something to be experienced, in the Here and Now), was corroded away, to be replaced with our understanding of the sacred to be transcendent (meaning something to be contemplated, in the Maybe Later, Far Away).
A thousand or so years later, the Christian Empire was wrapping it’s way around the planet. Killing or suppressing any and all mythology that didn’t centre the Myth of the Transcendent Father.
Pan- and Poly-theistic religions were quashed.
(The Mother and the Primordial Feminine is already long gone at this point)
The Church and the State are thoroughly intertwined. The word of Father God is Law.
Then comes the Industrial Revolution. Early stage capitalism coupled with puritanical Imperial Christianity combines to create the perfect cocktail of meaning-making fodder: that our productivity was not only the One Thing that mattered, it was also sacred. It was the thing that guaranteed our special place in the Next World.
A moment of pause here as we remember together that what we’re exploring here in this article is dopamine and Myth.
I want you to really consider what it means for us as organically meaning-making and sacred-seeking creatures to be living in a world where that which we consider to be Holy is prescribed to us by the powers that be.
Think about this timeline of events through the lens of dopamine receptivity.
Through the lens of the evolution of our biology.
Remember that everything that isn’t literally Here and Now, involved the production of dopamine.
Our adorable little brains can’t actually comprehend the vastness and the infinity of existence and consciousness, so we have always, and will always, mythologise and archetype-ify it.
By cutting us off from an understanding of sacred grounded in mythology that is life and Earth affirming, we as a species became incredibly vulnerable to the spells of colonial capitalist white supremacy and patriarchy.
At the time of writing this, Taylor Swift has just released her Tortured Poets Department album.
Her millions upon millions of fans are shrieking and flailing about like it’s Armageddon and the second coming of Christ put together, and she herself is swimming in billions of dollars of profit.
Meanwhile, the state-sanctioned and live-streamed genocide of the Palestinian people is coming to the end of its seventh consecutive month.
Think about this through the lens of myth and dopamine.
Through the lens of our biological imperative to seek the Sacred, and to make meaning out of the Myths we’re reinforcing.
Ponder celebrity worship in the face of devastating global calamity through this lens, and suddenly it all makes sense.
In the beginning, we evolved to make meaning and seek the Sacred.
We worshipped the Earth, the spirit of the land, and the Primordial Feminine.
And now, after the systemic and long-time-in-the-works severing of our connection to that sanctity, we worship Taylor Swift instead.
Our bodies not only know how to worship the divine.
We are literally WIRED to.
We cannot help but be in worship. Just as we cannot help but to breathe.
Only now our world teaches us to prostrate ourselves at the altar of profit, greed, competition, victory, conquest, hierarchy.
This is not a mere recollection or mimicry of our experience of the Divine.
It is literally how we now experience the Divine in a world that has commodified it.
Your Gods have been chosen for you.
It’s highly likely the altars you erect and the entities you worship are not taking up residence in your psyche with your consent.
Re-defining how we understand the Sacred is crucial to effective resistance.
Please hear me:
We have autonomy here.
We have the power to redirect our biological drive for meaning and for the Sacred.
We can self-author our perception of the Divine.
We MUST.
We have the power to RECLAIM OUR GODS.
Remember here that if you’re new to this work, it’ll take some digging first.
Your understanding of Sacred probably isn’t the one you’d like to have. It’s probably there at the behest of a rich white dude profiting off of your acquiescence.
Be mindful of that as you begin. Catch yourself whenever you make an assumption that something is “just the way it is” (is it? Who told you that? Does life feel more fun and affirming when it’s true? How does it feel to imagine that it’s not true?)
But most importantly, remember that you have autonomy.
Your body is going to keep veraciously chasing after the Sacred as you understand it until the day you die. Dopamine production and receptivity will make sure of that.
But you get to choose what that means.
What’s the most important thing in the world to you?
(No, really.)
If you don’t know, reflect on the thing you find yourself thinking about the most. Even if “thinking” really just means “worrying”, that’s a good place to start.
What are you most terrified of losing?
What are you most repulsed to perceived as? What’s the opposite of that?
You’ll find your Gods with these contemplations.
Get creative with this.
What would you most love to hold as sacred?
What worldview do you wish you had grown up with?
In your perfect childhood, what were you taught to value about yourself? About the world? About what it means to be Human?
What would it look like to erect altars to those Gods?
How would you invoke them? What Rites or Rituals would you do when you’re in worship?
(Remember, all of this is a metaphor. We “erect an altar to money” when we devote our entire lives to it’s pursuit. We “perform rituals in service to it” by sacrificing parts of our lives we love for it’s sake.)
If you’re feeling sticky about the language here, because you’re not the type of person to do a ritual or create an altar or worship anything, thank you very much, remember that you already are, you have been all your life, and you will continue to do so until you die.
Our power comes flooding back to us in vast waves when we remember how much autonomy we have over the “gods” we worship.
Suddenly, we’re not as vulnerable to the indoctrination of our culture.
Suddenly, we’re living lives that reflect the essence of who we are.
Suddenly, we are free.
And if you’re looking for a literal map of your own inner mythology, a deeper understanding of the gods that live in your dopamine receptors, and how to rearrange them to suit your liberation and the liberation of all, come join REWILDING. That’s what that container is for.
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