Thinking With Your Body: Jordan Peterson Disrupts Theology, Psychology, etc.

I’m up to Biblical Series XV in Jordan Peterson’s lectures, and I would predict that Jordan Peterson is the number one force disrupting the modern theological industry, but psychology too, which Freud intended as nothing less than a “Secular Priesthood.”

Jordan Peterson posits among many of his brilliant statements that we are a collective of demons of sorts. Which is to say that each part of our body functions, in a way, much as an organism independent of, yet part of, the whole. It painfully calls to mind Christ’s words in 1 Corinthians 12:21. Let’s take a look.

The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you”; or again the head to the feet, “I have no need of you.”

https://biblehub.com/1_corinthians/12-21.htm

Christ is more than suggesting, in the infinite layers of meaning that God’s Word is, that the struggle between various appendages of one’s body to execute what they want to do is like those of people within the tribe of God, or Israel, or Christiandom, what have you, vying for whatever their fundamental God-given force really is. Of course, Scripture is also rife with warnings against that Flesh Nature; however in the realm of focus and staying on point here, I’m not addressing that elephant in the room in this article. Because remember, the body is, if we are reborn in Christ, part flesh and partly the fingerprints of God, and inhabited by the Holy Spirit and omniscient God Himself. So let’s not condemn people by reducing ourselves or others to the flesh; because our bodies are no more evil, or solely the flesh nature, than our souls are, if you believe in the necessary duality of the flesh-soul and its interconnectedness. If that is difficult to follow, no worries, keep reading.

It’s often said that men, particularly, think with our hands. So here’s the thing; if men are more prone to think with their hands, I would say that women are too. By way of explanation before I go down this path, more Jordan Peterson theory:

Jordan Peterson says in his Biblical series lectures, particularly on dreams, that we don’t merely think with our brains. He made the example that if you set a decapitated human on a treadmill, it will run on that treadmill. And of course, I hate to bring up the example of a chicken running for a very long time after its head is cut off, but, well, you get the idea. And of course, we are all well-acquainted with the mysterious “impulse.” How is it taught to us in grade school: well, God designed certain “impulse” reactions, like when you automatically pull your hand away after you accidentally set it upon a hot stove — and science has shown us that those instances of impulses, same as the knee jerk when the doctor hits your knee with that rubber thing – these impulse reactions bypass our brains entirely. Science explains our bodies were designed this way in order that our bodies can save us from danger when fractions of a second matter; if the “hot” sensory reaction had to travel all the way to our brains and back down to the muscles of the hand to pull the fingers away to avoid being burned, the fingers may already be burned to a crisp by then. So God was ver smart in designing our bodies the way he did, and of course he is, because He’s God.

All of this is accepted “science.” However the point here is to carry this over into the philosophical realm, the theological one, the psychological one. It certainly makes me think about the brain and the way it is connected with the rest of the body.

It’s almost like the human body is that metaphorical kingdom of sorts.

Think of a child with ADD. The leg shakes unexpectedly. It’s not because the child is consciously thinking, “I had better shake my leg now.” It’s what we might consider an involuntary movement. He doesn’t know why he’s doing it. He just does.

What does this mean? Well, I know I’m oversimplifying here, but if electrical impulses travel along both the nerves and the brain, then perhaps the nerves that run throughout our bodies are more integrated in our actual thinking than we’re taught – at least in our Union-run government schools, to give them credit for. Heck, we all know we men inexplicably think better when our hands are busy. It’s been observed that we remember things better when we take notes with our hands, writing rather than typing, although typing also helps. Modern psychological theory has made much of “kinetic memory” and various types of intelligence. Documented studies are psychological cannon regarding how saying things aloud means we remember them better, from prepping for a spelling bee to that study that shows that ingesting popcorn during the preview trailers at the movies inhibits the effectiveness of the advertising because eating the product prevents the tongue from silently repeating, actually mouthing, the verbal parts of the advertisements therein. So, bottom line, we remember things by doing them. This is why, in the manner of common sense, it’s often said that you can sit through a million lectures but you don’t truly know how to do something until you actually do it, execute. Which is why typing, or football, aren’t taught in classrooms without footballs or typewriters. Your fingers have got to feel the football in your hand to learn what it feels like, how heavy it is; words can summarize the experience vaguely, but in many respects, it’s your below-the-neck circuitry actually doing, or playing a starring role in, much of the learning.

Charles Dickens, in A Christmas Carol, has Ebeneezer tell the Ghost of Christmas Past – or one of those dang gosts, I forget which, that he or she is merely a piece of undigested beef, something to that effect. It’s long been a running joke in pop culture that bad dreams are part brain, part “some bad Chinese food I ate last night.”

Let me be very clear, I’m not saying that ultimately, God is not the source of dreams. What I am saying, though, is that, given the ability He gave us to observe Himself and his creation, that we might see dreams as our conscious mind’s best logical, word-based translation of a body-wide subconscious which is constantly, constantly, sending a steady stream of information to the brain which our hopelessly finite, mortal brains are rather valiantly, if underwhelmingly, able to keep up with. Which is why humility is such a great human virtue, because humility helps the wise man understand that, to use a computing metaphor, the subconscious mind is being fed a broadband connection of sensory data, really forcing it onto the brain at times; but the brain is the relative equivalent of, say, an old Pentium 2 in attempting to deal with this.

To use another analogy, and to integrate a little bit of technology and media theory here; machines, and specifically, our cell phones and devices like you’re reading this article on, are blasting our bodies and minds with twenty thousand Disney Channels’ worth of sensory overload. Tons, tons more than our natural brains were built by our Intelligent Creator to process; and this is how technology can manipulate the mind if our moral theory doesn’t keep up with technological advancement. Most pastors I know don’t have the humility to understand this, which is why today’s American church has been so reverse-evangelized to the point of near total destruction by media (social media, television, etc.).

Between rapidly flashing video billboards, built-in car and refrigerator phone integration systems, and the internet of things as a whole, we human beings are being blasted with a firehose-worth of profit-driven sensory stimuli unprecedented in human history. The motivation is painfully obvious to me: the men who build the FakeNews television networks, and Google, and the porn Web sites which account for the majority of internet data, have massive investments that they are trying to reap to their full potential for maximum profit, like any self-interested business owner. Hollywood is the same way. NYU Prof and Prophet Neil Postman succinctly put the problem like this: “We’ve got the technology; now what do we do with it?” Nevermind questions of right or wrong. Now that we’ve invested in this new tech – think Hormonal Birth Control, anti-depressants, Ritalin, or Opioids — we’ve got to find a way to sell it to make good on all those years of R&D. Why? Because if we don’t, well, the people who sold the stockholders on all those years of R&D are going to be professional failures, and the Wall Street Journal, often as philosophically high-minded as it often is, will condemn them as financial failures, like Stephen Sondheim. Who, I believe, also morally fails. But that’s besides the point.

The point is, we think with our bodies; and so perhaps when we grasp at concepts of “the subconscious,” because that’s as far as our top-level verbal consciousness has been able to classify that dark stew of dreams and that “other” of dreams, and those vague shadows as amusing and scary as the dancing corpses in Michael Jackson’s thriller that wander out of that primordial darkness to play only in our deepest REM cycles –

Perhaps, perhaps that “subconscious” is merely our body’s way, perhaps in collaboration with the base of our brain, and other parts of the brain most associated with channeling impulses from the rest of the body –

Perhaps the subconscious is the opposite of what we thought it was. Perhaps the “fiction” of our dreams can be, at times, more truthful than the “logical” verbal reality of our conscious minds, at least in a certain temporal sense. Maybe, when our conscious minds develop elaborate fantasies of theology and philosophy too detached from the hand and the eye arguing with one another to care what these lesser citizens of the Kingdom are doing — perhaps it is this ethereal, yet heavily grounded “subconscious,” that yanks the analysis-paralyzed conscious brain’s attention back to that practicality of a heavenly life, just as sure as the widow yanks the aloof judge’s attention to her striving for justice, and ultimately succeeds, because in some crazy, weird way, the judge knows that somehow, his “salvation,” perhaps even his earthly existence, is just a tiny, tiny, tiny bit, maybe even more, dependent upon that desperate widow’s existence. Perhaps that judge’s progeny, who knows. Maybe this is real submission to the Father God as the future you, and the intersection of fundamentalist Christianity and evolution. Thanks to Jordan Peterson and CS Lewis for all the ideas borrowed, consciously and otherwise, in this article. Oh, and by the way, if you borrow any ideas from this, please credit Peter Vadala properly, whether you’re a scholar, FakeNews, legit journalist, or otherwise.