Lfiting the Veil of Mystery from Mysticism. 3

To Alper, the religious instinct is evolutionarily selected because it satisfies a number of functions conducive to the survival of the human race as a species. Man has the ability to reason and to be aware of themselves, of self-reflection. When people start to think " if we exist, then is it not conceivable that one day we may cease to exist, ie die?" and with this, man experiences his first existential crisis. We realize that after birth, we grow, get sick, we grow weak and then we die.

Freud wrote: "We are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our own body, ...doomed to decay and dissolution and which cannot do without pain and anxiety as warning signals; from the external world which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless forces of destruction and finally from our relations to other men."

Pain is a negative sensation experienced by an organism when specific receptors are triggered in the brain: usually when we are exposed to the risk of being injured by some force inimical to our continual existence or health e.g excessive heat, cold, weight, sharpness, hunger for food or for sex.. Our natural instinct in the face of pain is to avoid it. In humans, sexual deprivation involves both physical and psychological tension and discomforts. Sexual intercourse releases or relieves us of normal sexual tension, which release is experienced by us as a pleasure. But it may be more accurate to describe it as a freedom or relief or diminution of pain or painful tension.

But we may also experience another kind of psychological discomfort or tension or pain e.g loneliness. When isolated from the community, we feel vulnerable because no one can survive without help, care, assistance and the protection of others. Hence we have a social instinct to seek the company of other fellow human beings. Thus we may suffer from what some psychologists have called "separation anxiety" e.g when we are separated from our romantic partners. Like relief of sexual tension, the joy of the company of our lovers and friends is more accurately described as a relief from the pain of separation.

Anxiety is merely a specific kind of painful response ( heart palpitation, muscular tension, hyperventilation, trembling, perspirations) intended to alert us to avoid potentially hazardous circumstances. We remember painful situations in the past and the kind of symptoms or hints  associated with the arrival of such previously painful situations in order that we can take speedy or timely steps to avoid such potentially dangerous or harmful situation in future. Anxiety is our body's early warning system of the risk of future harm or dangers. Thus damage to our amgydala, (which helps us to code and to retrieve previously emotionally painful responses ) may result in loss of our capacity to retrieve memories that contain emotional contents, as shown by Joseph LeDoux (The Emotional Brain NY Simon & Schuster 1996). 

Anxiety or fear of death is a most basic, universal and agonizing existential emotion. We realize that no matter what we do, no matter how hard we work to provide ourselves with food, shelter, plan and generally prepare for our future, with imagination,with ingenuity and foresight, we will all eventually die and our lives on earth is an inexorable march towards our ultimate extinction and  our death. This awareness strips our anxiety of its efficacy for survival! All will eventually be rendered futile or useless. Everything will be reduced to nothingness again! We have the capacity to appreciate the working of time, an ability normally of great assistance in our planning because we can anticipate what may happen a week, a month or even years in advance and will thus enable us to have much more time to make provisions for the anticipated events. But this capacity is not an undiluted boon. We may also see our eventual and ultimate demise too! No other creature on earth has our capacity to look so far into the future as to contemplate our eventual and inevitable death and our non-existence! All the other animals live only in the perpetual present. We alone, of all creatures, know our mortality!  Not only are we aware that we will die one day, we also know with clarity that death can come any moment! We live constantly under the threat of death and annihilation. Each day may be our last! Death hangs over our head at every moment! There is no escape! We also live under the constant threat that those we love may be claimed by death any moment too! 

As social animals, not only is our physical survival threatened, our emotional and social survival is threatened too, by the prospects of death! And for many, we place more value on our love for our beloved and their love for us than our physical lives and survival: hence people may even kill for love. Just as there is no escape from death, there is equally no escape from the anxiety of our mortality.  Death is an enemy we cannot see, from whom we cannot flee and an enemy we can never conquer. Before death, we stand naked, exposed, alone, vulnerable,defenceless, unprotected by any higher force or being. As Kierkegaard says, we are afflicted by this "sickness unto death". We may even become neurotic as a result of this awareness because when the full impact of this realization hits us, life suddenly takes on a new sense of futility, of meaninglessness. It's as if everything is suddenly covered by a pall of ashes which looks upon us in mocking silence and that silence thunders upon our ears the apocalyptic message that we are nothing and shall always be nothing: an absolute zero!

We must find a solution, or we shall not want to live any more. Our solution is our desperate belief in some kind of afterlife, some kind of spirit or god which defies the otherwise inevitable and invincible destructive power of time: we hardwire our brain for such beliefs! If we cannot change the objective environment, we change our way of looking at and dealing with that external and objective environment and otherwise unpalatable reality! We start to believe in an alternative reality, a "spiritual" reality, immune from the all devouring action of time, a transcendental reality, a supernatural "reality"! As this has survival value, evolution has allowed it to be further developed by favouring those individuals whose brain were thus wired for belief in this kind of "imaginary" and ""ïllusory"  brain generated "reality" which cushioned them from the fate of being overwhelmed and destroyed by such fear of their own demise and which enabled them to view themselves as somehow immortal and to believe in an all powerful and protective God. According to Freud, "The derivation of religious needs from the infant's helplessness and the longing for the father aroused by it seems to me incontrovertible, especially since the feeling is not simply prolonged from childhood days but is permanently sustained by fear of the superior powers of fate. I cannot think of  any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection." Hence the need for the concept of an almighty God. And when there is a need, we can be sure there will always be people who are ready to supply it. These are our medicine men, our shamans, our prophets, our holy men, our saints, our religious writers, our theologians! To make their effect more permanent, we build up institutions to support their views. We establish churches. We build temples! We build seminaries and schools.