Showing posts with label religion and gut feeling. Show all posts
Showing posts with label religion and gut feeling. Show all posts

Tuesday, April 16, 2013

Following Gut Instincts to the Awareness of Our True Human Nature


 Few people really understand the esoteric meaning of "redemption" and thus simply understand it as some sort of higher spiritual force granting forgiveness to a lost soul though some atonement. But as we become more aware of ourselves through reflection on our gut feelings and instincts, we understand redemption with more self-involvement and see it as a deep renewal process of returning to the true Self, the Source of our Being; and we discover in that awareness the true Nature of the human being. For at the core of the human being, within all our Natures, springs our vital energy connected to the Sacred. There within our Nature we find the impact of our experiences upon us, our truth as we know it, and the inner needs that flower our motivation behind all our actions, even those actions we find difficult to explain or understand in positive ways become clear as acts of caring. 

Without an awareness of our inner Nature, we have no truth to hold onto and little of what we think is actually real. But how can we say our past is not really what we think it is? How can we say that we have always cared as human beings in our guts and our Human Nature? How can we say this when there are actions we know we have committed that were vile and poisonous to others? And when there are actions we have not made that have left our brothers and sisters alone and cold? We know the history of our actions, our behavior, so how can we challenge that these hauntings we have, these thoughts of who we have been are not real? The evidence weights so very heavy in favor of focusing on the external beliefs of good and evil, and in believing that truth lies only in an external judgment of human actions. And we are told to believe that the unseen part of the human experience is best left described as the "beast" by the religious majority and that this beast must be tamed—which is all "a powerful instrument for human mind control and a dogma that has become the foundation of human behavior control in both Mid Eastern and Western cultures". 

But what truly needs to be "tamed" for enlightenment to occur? Our inner Nature and instinct or our propensity of ignorance with a childlike innocense toward accepting the glamour of external judgments and thinking about ourselves? In reflection of our past, what part of us really got us in trouble? Our instinctive needs or our acceptance of inaccurate thinking about ourselves? Was our fear born out of an instinctive human need or a negative view, an illusion, we accepted quite early in life about the lack of divinity of our true selves? DId we then behave in less than caring ways due to our fears? And like a snow ball rolling down a hill, did we compound those actions based on our illusions until it was so big that we lost site of where it all began, how it all began, why it all began?

True redemption can only come once we lose our understanding of the truth of where we have come from and what we have truly needed. Only then are we compelled from our suffering to reflect upon our lives to understand how our inner needs are so vastly different from what we have accepted from the external judgments and views upon us that have been inaccurate descriptions of our core being.  We then see that what we think was reality was not. When the whole picture of who we have been is revealed, then we understand the confusion in our awareness of ourselves and can distinguish for the first time the "me" and the "not me". Those old tapes of beliefs about self and others, and those emotional hauntings, we have been running over and over and feeding energy into with our every action, fade away into oblivion. 

The truth of Self is our strongest energy on earth and has the ability to erase the past, the past that we thought was true, the past that we have suffered thinking was all that there was in our life history. That false and unholy past is erased for the truth turns on all the lights within us at last, our fear is gone, and we feel only eternal peace at the core of our caring nature. We step into the awareness of being a part of the Human Family, home at last in this connection. It is there that we find each other, there that we join in doing what we as Humans are meant to do, and there that history pivots in an eternal reality.

Here is a short excerpt from our book What's Behind Your Belly Button? that describes the process of finding our true caring Nature through using the Somatic Reflection Process on our gut feelings to reassess our life and find our authentic Self. (From Chapter Eight):

"Generally, the only way we can unravel this tightly woven thread of inaccurate thinking judgment and resulting emotional stress, is to reflect back to the source of when the thinking head first applied this very same judgment and find the actual source or as close to it as possible. And the key to finding this first experience is through reflection on the gut feeling of emptiness and fullness, not through thinking back on the details of our lives. Once we find this original experience in which we started the “tape” that plays over and over in our heads that we are all at fault, powerless, too needy, unlovable, etc., then we can lift the sentence we have placed on ourselves and our feelings and begin to see ourselves clearer and make healthy decisions—begin to use our thinking head to follow our instinctual needs and fulfill our true human nature."
"Of course, we realize that this is frightening for people because people have long ago been convinced that our human nature is selfishly uncaring and they think from that fear that is why we need laws and religion to keep us in control (not that we are against laws to help us have a guide). Freud founded psychoanalytical psychology with statements of this lack of dependability of human nature and it is difficult to pry the human race away from this dark and inaccurate judgment of whom we think we are deep inside. As we reflect on somatic gut feelings and listen to the gut voice, we see that it is the very judgment against the consciousness of our human nature or our gut instinctual responses that is ultimately responsible for the evils that it preaches against. So while it may seem frightening at first to reflect on our gut responses, people like the caring person they find themselves to have always been when they reach the consciousness of the gut response. And becoming aware of one’s true inner nature, instinctive gut feelings,  is not generally thought by those who experience it to be in conflict with the essence of one’s spiritual knowledge, but more of a Gnostic direct experience of the Sacred experienced in the gut or all of nature that is greater than us to be connected to us through the gut instincts. Some call this experiencing Presence."
"Reflection on the gut voice helps us to be more mindful of our caring nature and thus be more caring for others. And with the new awareness of our gut responses and needs that we acquire through reflection on our instinctual gut responses, we are able to live a more caring and healthy life with the thinking head finally conscious and listening more clearly to the responses of our most reliable and authentic self—our gut instinctual feelings in our body. What is called in yoga charkas systems as the Nabhi chakra located at the hara or gut center will fill and overflow with energy to the Anahatha or heart center and it will open with compassion loving others and improving the feeling of well being and the strength of the physical immune system."

Click on a book cover below to go to Amazon to Buy:


"Increasing Intuitional Intelligence" is available on Amazon USA and Amazon UK
as well as Amazon,de and Amazon.fr  other international Amazon sites


"What's Behind Your Belly Button?" is also available on Amazon USA and Amazon UK

as well as Amazon,de and Amazon.fr and Amazon.CA and other international Amazon sites

and it is on The Book Depository with free international shipping.


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Saturday, February 9, 2013

Was Religion Invented By the Thinking Mind to Try to Make Sense of Gut Feeling and Gut Instinct? An Exploration of the Theory of "God Is In the Gut"!




There are those who have said for some time that "God" speaks through the gut, the most natural part of us that can not be altered by the thinking brain. And now according to an article in Huffington Post on February 8, 2013, Nicolas Baumard of the University of Pennsylvania and Pascal Boyer of Washington University in St. Louis have added something new to the mix in an article to be published soon in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science that theorizes that religious beliefs are a result of the thinking brain trying to explain gut feelings that are expressed in intuitive thought. 

From what Huffington Post's author Wray Herbert has written, it may be that Baumard and Boyer have come across the same thing that we have discovered in our work, that religion has historically been fortified by one of our instinctual needs for a gut feeling experience of “connectedness” or acceptance. But our understanding through over 40 years of counseling experience with people reflecting on their gut feelings, is that religion at present does not completely explain the entire gut feeling experience and often sees gut instinct as disruptive to society.  While it may care about the gut instinctual need for acceptance (connection), religion seems to have left out the gut instinctive need for freedom (a sense of control of one’s own responses to life). As you may have read in our previous blog posts, we found that the gut feeling expresses both of these needs and that we need them in balance—the need for acceptance (connectedness and attention) and the need for freedom (control of one’s own responses). 

Perhaps what Baumard and Boyer are seeing is that humans have historically needed to find a way to feel safe and connected and have undoubtedly been willing to give up our freedom needs and accept religious doctrine in order to experience this feeling of safety, containment, and acceptance. We could say, then, that it was what we needed most at the time, although not completely satisfying but one of the two of our instinctive needs at least met, and perhaps the one most pressing at the time for survival. And this may explain why so many people feel that religion now leaves us empty and scratching our heads. This may be an indication that we need a new image of humanity, a new belief system that encompasses our need for freedom as well as it does our need for acceptance.

Gut feelings are not thoughts, they are purely feelings of emptiness or fullness in the body—specifically in the gut (ENS) or region called the Hara—and are a gauge as to how well our instinctive needs of acceptance (attention) and freedom (control of our own responses to life) are being met or not met, moment to moment. It is the thinking brain (the CNS) that comes up with religious thought. And we can see in a glimpse of history that religious beliefs have often in the past been contrived to control people from having a sense of individuality and to the advantage of someone or group outside of the individual person. These religious thoughts or beliefs are generally external to the understanding of the needs of the individual human being. Gut feelings always reflect the instinctive needs of the human being, while religious thought often will drown out our awareness of our gut feelings and needs in favor of following a doctrine.

An important question here is, did the CNS come up with religious thought and beliefs to explain gut feeling and gut instinct (the ENS) or did it invent religious belief to control instinct? Or perhaps both are true? Is this invention of religious beliefs a natural and common pattern of the CNS, an evolution of mind with further steps ahead? Is this an unnatural turn in human events that has been invented by only a few in history and then followed by billions, or is that also a natural step, with another step ahead that will be comprised of less following and more individual expression? Are we getting to the point in history where we as a humanity are questioning these past “inventions of religious thought” and through somatic reflection on our inner truth are seeing a need for change? Are we now ready to accept a new image of humanity that embraces the entire Human gut instincts, both for our needs of acceptance and freedom, and thus explains and helps us understand our connection to the universe in ways that feel more truly Human and increases benevolent evolution? You will find in reading our book, What's Behind Your Belly Button? that we both think it is time for a new image of humanity, and we have outlined exactly how the Gut Brain figures into the equation of who we are as human beings with a caring nature.

We try in each blog to give a brief excerpt from our book, “What’s Behind Your Belly Button? A Psychological Perspective of the Intelligence of Human Nature and Gut Instinct”. We thought you might find this excerpt particularly relevant to the discussion of the invention of religion and gut instinct.


“The entire process of human inspired events seems to take place and have a lasting value when there is something seeming to benefit the inner needs of the organism. When there is support from both ‘houses’ then there is furnished energy of motion, confidence of purpose in the intended result, and movement towards the objectives.
“We can intuit the gradual emergence of the power of change of inner human need, control and acceptance, overpowering the external controls of feudal control. The two-brain image established by human nature has, up until now, lay partially hidden from its own understanding, subject to interpretation by external imaginations and external judgments. In the past, the external awareness of the possessor and observer alike accepted the presence of something internal existed but it didn’t fit the ideas of external control. There existed something internal to all human beings that could be externally disruptive yet supportive, good yet evil, indifferent yet loving, dependable yet unreliable, certain yet unsure. It seems clear that this mystery became the prudence of the action of Charlemagne to incorporate the early Christian movement into the Roman Empire and form the Roman Catholic Church (RCC). The sequence of events that followed were understood and projected primarily as progress of intelligent adaptation to the environments, providing major contributions in wide ranging endeavors to existing cultures in Western Europe (printing, literature, art, science, philosophy, religion, etc.).”


Click on a book cover below to go to Amazon to Buy:


"Increasing Intuitional Intelligence" is available on Amazon USA and Amazon UK
as well as Amazon,de and Amazon.fr  other international Amazon sites


"What's Behind Your Belly Button?" is also available on Amazon USA and Amazon UK

as well as Amazon,de and Amazon.fr and Amazon.CA and other international Amazon sites

and it is on The Book Depository with free international shipping.


If you are on the homepage of this blog, click word "comment" directly below to see all comments and make one yourself! If you are on the webpage for this post, then simply post in the box provided below.