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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: YlangYlangBreeze who wrote (843)	1/13/2001 4:19:02 PM
From: bela_ghoulashi	Respond to of 82486

To primitive men, it only made sense to eat that which you wished to incorporate into yourself. "Eating the god" far, far predates Christianity or the Catholic church...as does nearly all Catholic ritual, of course. Mircea Eliade has written extensively on the difference between "secular" time and "sacred" time in human religious experience. The enactment of ritual served as a means to exit secular time (common, everyday time) and enter sacred time (timeless time, the time in which creation takes place and from which secular time was originally set into motion, and hence from which it can be repeatedly refreshed and renewed). By enacting a ritual, you were in fact participating in the original act by virtue of having exited common, everyday time, and entering the time in which the act first took place...you are there. That was Eliade's view. Ernest Rossi wrote a book several decades ago developing a theory of what he termed "state-dependent" memory. Basically, he says, state-dependent memory is what causes us to forget what we walked into the kitchen for, only to remember again once we return to the den. What the human brain learns, feels, or thinks, it encodes chemically as a holistic experience...in other words, environmental cues, emotional cues, physiological cues, the whole bit. It is not simply a fact that is stored, it is stored within the whole context of the experience and the emotional configuration of the individual at the time. When you argue with your spouse, that is why you tend to return to the same issues, fears, and concerns of previous arguments...your brain is literally returning to the same "state" it was in the midst of earlier conflicts...and all the same triggers go off again. It would seem, therefore, that religious ritual is designed to take advantage of this phenomenon. You perform these acts to return yourself to this original state. The state could be transcendent, it could be simply powerfully emotional. But you repeat the ritual to return to the state, to place yourself in the same "configuration" as those who initiated the ritual, for whatever purpose they did so.