Yesterday morning was taken up with my daily entry as usual, while the aft was occupied – using public transit – with my visit with John, a short stop at The Bay and my visit with Juliet. She showed me her prepared dishes as soon as I got in, which looked enticing even at three pm, while I wasn’t a bit hungry yet!

We first made the corrections that Juliet has spotted since last week, which amounted to about two dozen, with some being quite minute and subtle. A ‘the’ for a ‘they’, or replacing a present tense, where a past should have been, as a former teacher of English knows. At times Juliet even spells out the words while I type and she dictates! Eventually we got to the end of chapter ten, Juliet on her printed copy and I in the word document version on the laptop.

We now finally have a single document to work on and not three different versions as was threatening to be the case. Later this morning I hope to complete the ‘theme description’ for each chapter, needed since most still have just a number to identify them.

After lunch, coffee with Don and a search for the right headphone set for my Atablet, followed with the Thursday session with Juliet on ‘My Story’. Some cool air is flowing into my apartment, but no breeze as yet and the sun is not yet shining through that thick haze.

I am still not finished with the subject that I started with last Monday. I described it as ‘Describing the world of human experience’ in the Writings entry of Monday afore going. In the Writings of last Tuesday and Wednesday I suggested a way we humans came to use words as concept formed in a slowly evolving process, analogous to the development of tool making techniques and other skills that were acquired, such as the collective hunt, art and cooking.

I suggested that these development eventually resulted in our present day human traditions as we know them. The issue that I did not address in this context is that of ‘authority’. We all know that society functions on the bases of recognised – albeit reluctantly at times – authority that is imperative in nature.

In several of my Talks I have addressed this question of authority in the early agricultural cultures, such as the ones of Semitic Mesopotamia and the Egyptian Nile valley. However, that context does not suit the present one, because it relied mainly on historical religious practices of oracles and divining, characteristic of those cultures. But, we still publish and read horoscopes even on the internet!

In the setting of the present theme, I want to use modern ideas to describe our sense of authority and its ‘origin’. I am talking here about authority experienced by the person as coming from ‘without the person’. I am not talking about established authority that is based on the traditions of the community and/or society, such as a judge or a court in some present day tradition.

Humans have reported right up to the present day instances of experiencing a voice or a vision that was experienced as being external. This can happen in a religious or secular setting and I know of several examples in my own life, in that of friends and as reported in general literature.

Rather than giving instances, I want to describe a possible mechanism for the phenomenon of the externally experienced authority that at times motivates people or institutions to act in various ways.

First I recall my earlier mentioned concept of the ‘boundary experience’, which occurs when a person or community is confronted with a new situation for which none of the known strategies or remedies are effective. It is that situation in which a human encounters the limit of what is known. That is, we find ourselves face to face with mystery. This is the boundary experience.

The second aspect relates to our human way of thinking by means of associations and the looking for patterns. This continuous process of making various associations results in combinations that we call ‘having an idea’ when a new association combination rises to our level of attention. ‘I have an idea’ we say in a meeting where we are discussing a problem of some kind.

However, brain research has discovered that recalled memories are not distinguished by the brain from similar external experiences in vivid cases.

The emphasis was on ‘I’ in the above case, where we are talking about every day conscious processes. However, brain research has discovered that recalled memories are not distinguished by the brain from similar external experiences in vivid cases.

We now combine the experience of the ‘end of knowledge’ – the boundary experience – with the experience of a totally new insight. Since there is no internal reference for this new knowledge I judge it as to come from outside of me.

Then, depending on how numinous – powerful – this new knowledge content is, I may either take it as just so, like I may do with a vivid dream. But, such a new ‘truth’ can also be too overwhelming in other instances. It may then be interpreted as the voice or vision from a higher power, since ‘I have never heard of or seen this before’. In such a case, one outcome could be for the person or community to act on this new insight, with results depending on time, place, people and circumstance.

We know from history in general that people have experienced insights in boundary situations. It is a process that I consider part and parcel of our human way of functioning in the acquisition of new knowledge. In the foregoing paragraphs I have tried to formulate a modern explanation of such ‘revelations coming from above’ without devaluing the validity of the process or its outcomes. With this observation I conclude the discussion of the topic of ‘Describing the human experience and the way we define our world’.
<10:01am and 10:51am with that edit again!~