J. Social Biol. Struct.

1980 3,219-225

Notes on the biology of religion

Antonio T. de Nicolas

Department o f Philosophy, SUNY at Stony Brook, Long Island, New York 11794, USA

(Reviewing 7 and THAT' :Notes on the Biology o f Religion. By Alex Comfort. New York:
Crown Publishers, 1979. $6.95.)

Introduction
I and TttA T deals with the religious experience o f mankind. The focus o f
religious experience is primarily on 'oceanic' and mystical states that tell us not
'where the world came from' but h o w the shift in self-consciousness created for
us the worlds we know. The focus, therefore, is not on the Creator o f the world,
b u t on the kind of knowledge men needed to create the worlds they inhabit.
The base o f this inquiry is not how the world reflects the image o f a Creator
but rather how the human nervous system is coded to create the worlds known
to men. We could state bluntly that Alex Comfort does not believe that there is
a conflict between science and religion but rather that all form o f science, from
primitive to m o d e m physics, are forms o f religion, and vice versa.
Alex Comfort does not need an introduction to the general reader; his
writings on sex and old age have taken care o f that. The Alex Comfort,
however, who wrote I and TttA T is neither that same popular writer, nor does
he appear to have the same general audience in mind. This new book is
theoretically sophisticated, empirically sound, practical, and d u e . t o its subject
matter and approach, humanly explosive. Needless to say, this is a well written
b o o k - he is an Englishman, greened in California - and notwithstanding the
seriousness o f the subject matter, it is toned down in its claims by humble
humor.
It is not easy to write a critical review o f a b o o k one likes, especially when it
humbly claims to be only a series o f 'notes' on the Biology o f Religion. The
intention o f the author is apparently to sketch a profile o f questions and
strategies which involve the reader in these questions and strategies rather than
to formulate any kind o f formal and absolute answer.
According to Alex Comfort in the present book, the world divides into two
primary sensations: the 'I' and the ~ o t - I ' (or THAT). The 'I' he calls the
homuncular experience of self identity. The 'not-I' experience he calls with
Freud the 'oceanic' experience. Both experiences are empirically verifiable, and
they are practically interesting because each experience determines the kind o f
world we 'feel'. Were we to experience ourselves differently, our worlds would
also be different. The experience itself of objectivity and/or subjectivity is the
question.

0140-1750/80/020219+07 $02.00/0 © 1980 Academic Press Inc. (London) Limited

 220 A. T. de Nicolds

Alex Comfort proposes as a strategy of inquiry to ground the experience o f

'I' and 'not-I' in biology rather than in theology or comparative religion. By
biology he means neurological and somatic behavior patterns that are
observable and measurable. The observation measurement is to be done by the
criteria of a systems theory model sophisticated enough to account for the two
disparate forms o f the T and 'not-I' experiences.
By introducing a systems theory model to examine experience, Alex
Comfort leaves aside the unquestioned ontologies of 'I' and 'not-I' and
introduces the reader to a level of inquiry which by its very nature is
questioning. This level is, of course, epistemology.
•I a n d T t I A T divides into ten chapters, tightly argued and widely exemplified
on the experience of the self; on the 'oceanic' experience; on schizophrenics
and shamans; on Hindu philosophers and Tantrik yogis; asceticism and
masochism; archetypes, Kabbalah, Blake and medicine. It is impossible for me
to do justice to the book and my following commentaries take for granted that
the reader has already read the book and realizes that I am in basic agreement
with the author or wish to bring the author to agreement in the following main
points:
(a) that the study of religion should be moved to its biological base;
(b) that the experiences of 'I' and 'not-I' are empirically clear only if both
are linked to particular language structures;
(c) that these language structures are traceable to particular language
models;
(d) that these language models are identical with scientific models;
(e) that the biological base of these models is not a function of religious
faith but rather the function of a particular language and a particular
rationality;
(f) that the study of a religious experience from its biological basis might
not say directly anything about God, the gods, ghosts or phantoms, but
it would certainly do a lot to displace God, the gods, ghosts and
phantoms from a territory which belongs to human rationality, human
effort and human language;
(g) that the study of religion from its biological base is a necessary strategy
to increase human rationality, human effort and human life where the
taboos of systematic theologies constrain the human experience to be
conceived narrowly human by calling 'divine' a biological ground which
was always totally human.
Strategically, the grounding of religion in biology has a decisive advantage
over theology for it is neither concerned nor not concerned with questions of
the existence of God or of agency outside the human psyche. The questions of
God's existence do not even arise in this context. The only context considered
is human experience coded into the neurology, in its broadest sense, of the
human body.
It is obvious that the formulation of my beliefs and Alex Comfort's
formulations o f similar beliefs in his book are neither identical nor dissimilar,
but in several points they go beyond each other's formulations. I will try to
clarify these points of departure.
 Notes on the biology o f religion 221

Epistemology
The weakest link in Alex Comfort's chain of arguments is what should be the
strongest - epistemology. For Alex Comfort epistemology equals ' a theory o f
knowledge': his systems theory model. This general presupposition weakens
considerably the strength o f the book. Look at the consequences. By grounding
experience and knowledge on human biology, one would hopefully expect that
at last a strategy of inquiry has been devised so that any form of human life as
biologically lived, from primitive to contemporary, has found a possible
absolute meaning and a possible absolute value. A systems theory model when
universally applied to human biology implies, however, that all experience is
ultimately reducible to a universal and uniform linguistic behavior. Vast
cultural diversity and individual mechanisms of embodiment are cancelled;
furthermore, the theoretical level of abstraction which a comtemporary
systems theory model carries with it does not only not coincide with the
theoretical level of abstraction at which biological mechanisms functioned in
history, but it is precisely this new level of abstraction o f a m o d e m theory over
past biological lives that completely cancels the flesh of the past. In other
words, where theology depreciates human flesh by inhabiting the human
territory with abstract and ahen gods, the systems theory model might do the
same by abstracting all human flesh from biology. Human flesh lives and
embodies particular theories by which it lives and objectifies itself culturally
and publically in the same process, but never universally in the same manner.
Alex Comfort is obviously aware of this at the end of the exposition of his
systems theory model:
I have put this hypothesis at some length because it may be in principle verifiable, and
because, as l have said, though it is probably wrong, it lies in the right universe of discourse
and something like it is probably right {p. 57).

The experience of T
Epistemology, of course, holds the key to solving this impasse. In other
historical instances, in any past culture, a particular and public epistemology
provides, for a particular group of people, the sets of criteria that allows them
to create a knowledge that objectifies the world, the self and the language of
their interaction. From an epistemological point of view, the experience of the
T let us say for an Aristotle or Descartes does not coincide. The Cartesian T ,
moves at a level of abstraction different from the Aristotelian T , and it is
precisely the level of abstraction which marks the significant shifts in self
identities, objectifications and empirical contents of languages. It is precisely
the level of abstractions that the human biology registers in order to be able to
code and decode a determination that could make the study of religion scien-
tifically and humanly interesting.
From an epistemological point of view, the experience of the T is neither
simple nor clear. It is true that historically people have spoken of the
experience of the T as a unity of sensation, but in Aristotle's formulation of
the same experience the T is experienced as a unity only on condition that its
epistemological plurality of criteria be forgotten. The T for Aristotle is made
of an active power that may become potentially many things, but activity and
potentiality could only be executed if a chain of causality is linked to it. Thus
222 A. T. de Nicolas

the 'I' is also - and it is therefore experienced as such - a final cause, an

efficient cause, or an agent, a formal cause and a material cause. Furthermore,
the selection o f criteria itself will be drawn by Aristotle from the sense o f sight,
as opposed to the previous culture that t o o k criteria from the ear, and b y those
criteria Aristotle brings in the categories, space and time, the principles o f
thought, and reduces 'oceanic' experiences to aesthetics. As Aristotle said in
The Politics, 'we must remove necessity from music'. The Cartesian 'I' on the
other hand, is an abstraction o f a different kind. Necessity is injected into it
b y the movements o f a language that takes mathematical relations as the
ground o f its mobility. But while the mathematical ground stresses only
relations it simultaneously says nothing and can say nothing about existence.
From a biological point o f view, one wishes to find in what way the different
levels o f abstraction contribute to the sensitization and desensitization o f the
nervous system as it moves from one level to another, and from one historical
period to the next.
There are other dramatic differences that the studies o f religion in the
traditional sense have failed to show, but one would expect the Biology o f
Religion would be involved in clarifying. For example, no religion earlier than
Christianity believed in personal immortality. Continuity was understood to be
in death and discontinuity appeared with birth. Individual death was only the
return to continuity. For the people from oral cultures oceanic experiences and
the language used to describe them were further confirmation o f this insight.
From an epistemological point o f view, it would appear to make more sense
to divide the world o f culture into oral and written rather then Eastern or
Western, for it is from the criteria o f the ear or o f the eye that knowledge was
organized, experience o f one kind or another was made possible, and sciences
o f explanation, prediction and control were devised. In a rigorous sense,
scientific models gave birth to language and language in turn repeated and
repeats the model. It is through language that sensation is interiorized or made
flesh. Language is the empirical evidence o f what we call a culture, not in any
defined form, but as the source of meaning o f any name and form. Thus,
language takes into account not only the external tokens o f sound, gesture
and word b u t also the internal tokens o f intentionality, conceptualization and
purposive action. Language is reversible, it can unveil its own origins;
nominalism is not.

The primacy o f sensation

The biological study o f culture or religion is most probably the one single study
that will mark the interest of the 80's. I and TttA T will, in this sense, become a
seminal book. From a biological point o f view, men and women live by
sensation alone and it makes no difference from which theoretical model men
and women are sensitized. At each and every level o f abstraction and with each
and every level o f T or haot-I' identification, sensation is the measure o f
health and continuity, desensitization is the measure o f crisis and theoretical
death. In any case, the neurological system, the human b o d y , is the only
witness we have to clarify b o t h the process o f sensitization and crisis, provided,
o f course, that those who take biology as the ground o f human studies take
theoretical mobility as their o w n gospel.
 Notes on the biology of religion 223

The language of oceanic experience

It is as misleading, from a biological point of view, to pile up all of the different
experiences of the T as one, with one kind of rationality, as it is to pile all the
oceanic experiences into one kind o f irrationality.
I and T t t A T is meticulous, exuberant and exciting in cataloguing oceanic
experiences from East and West from religious and non-religious people, from
sex drives and the manipulations o f the gods. All one needs is the respect of an
authoritative approval, like Alex Comfort's, to know that the next decade will
irmd the American scene riffled with closet mystics adding more details to his
catalogue of oceanic oddities. But this cataloguing approach will not do for a
Biology o f Religion. This is not epistemologically sufficient and does not add
much to theoretical mobility.
Alex Comfort deals competently with Hinduism in his cataloguing o f oceanic
experiences. Unfortunately, his selection is aimed exclusively at traditions that
are apophatic or are bent on the 'destruction of the movements of the mind':
the irrational. He mysteriously passes over the classic documents of Hinduism
like the R.g Veda and the GTt~ where the oceanic experience is given a
rationality, a language, an epistemological model and in fact the same division
of the world as his book I and TItAT: the Ahamk~ra and Anahamv~din -
the experience of T and 'not-l'.
The world of the GTt~ divides also by two - the Aham. k~ra literally the
'l-maker' (X42), and the Anaham. v~din, literally the 'not-l' speaking (XVIII,
19, 26, 40). The Ahamka-ra is the world of Arjuna in chapter 1 of the GTt~
and the agent of his crisis. Anahamv~din is the world of K.~na, of the oceanic
view of chapter XI, and the embodiment of a language which has no agent but
is a witness (Puru4a), while agency is given to Prakrti and the Gu~as." Sattva,
rajas, tamas. According to this language, knowledge is not discursive but
appears in quanta, fields ks etra or dharmas, and the body is the ontological
occasion for agency to appear. The Bhagavad GTt~ portrays three basic types
of agency in chapter XVIII, verses 19-40, which can be explained in terms of
these two languages, ahamk~ra, 'I-maker', and anaham, v~din, 'not-I' speaking.
Instrumental agency is paradigmatic of the 'agent' of 'light' (s~ttvika) who
allows the cosmic ritual of karman, sams~ra, and dharma to play itself out or
appear through the body (XVIII, 23). Here the 'agent', in the instrumental
case, is on a par with the body or material instrument through which an
interpretation appears (III, 27); the efficient cause is not to be distinguished
from the cause of the movement of interpretation made flesh through the
material cause or body.
Dative agency is paradigmatic of the 'agent' or 'passion' (r~]asa), who is
accordingly disparaged in Indian culture, for he continues ignorantly to bind
himself to the wheel of sams~ra and to accumulate karma-phala (fruits of
action) (XVIII, 24).
Dative agency is also typical of the 'agent' of ignorance and darkness
(t~rnasa), who is even worse off than the 'agent' of passion, for he acts blindly,
with no knowledge of dharma or how things 'hang together' (XVIII, 25).
Thus, if the individual subject were to be understood as material instrument
through which movement appeared, he was expressed in the instrumental case.
If he were to be understood as a partaker of the action and vitally interested in
224 A. T. de NicoMs

the outcome as to whether it might be of benefit or. disadvantage to him, he

was expressed in the dative case. The most highly favored modality of dwelling
in the world is characterized by anahamvffdin (not the T speaking).
~4ham' emphasizes the agent in an artificial way for the simple reason that
the personal suffix to the verb alone suffices to specify the agent. The reason
for the use o f aham has been more concerned with the partial aspect of
momentary interest, on the emphasis placed on individuation for the sake of
clarification: aham ya/e (It is I who sacrifices as opposed to ya/e, I-sacrificing).
Indian philosophy has made extensive use of what in Sanskrit is called
ahamka-ra, literally "the I-maker'. It is understood as a principle of artificial
individuation of any and all particulars. However, by using aham the speaker
would be committed to a way o f speaking which would 'create the impression
that' (or talk 'as if') the individual had an ultimate ontological identity with the
activity-whole.
What is true of the rationality derived from a document from an oral culture
like the GTt~-, is also true for a written document like the Spiritual Exercises
of Ignatius de Loyola. Rationality and language are interiorized into a system
of verification which accompanies the exercise of meditation: detachment for
the Hindu's - the ability to move from world to world - and consolation or
desolation for the exercitant of Ignatius' Exercises in search of the will of God.
I have already described at length in my books and Ernest McClain has
verified in his that underlying the Hindu world there is a scientific model of
rationality determining the language or languages of Hindu and other oral
documents. The fact that the world divides by two, that we come from death
into life - from continuity into discontinuity - that space, up and down,
derives from the model of musical scales and that time is a shift of perspective
on the model of musical modulation, etc., are all criteria derived from a model
that took sound as primary, ~lnd adapted the human sensorium to these criteria.
From this point of view, it will be interesting to study mysticism, ancient or
modern, as a verification of this particular language model, and to study oceanic
experiences as vestiges of a language our body remembers even when our mind
is bent on other areas of focusing. I can think, for example, of the interest
Blake might have from the point of view of a poetic oceanic vision in so far as
oral and written cultures mix in it, or Juan RamGn Jim6nez as a poetic vision
which, while belonging to the 20th century, does not use a single Aristotelian
category but fails back into a Platonic musical epistemology.

The biological grounding of religion

I would like to conclude these notes by going back to the original excitement
that originated them: the grounding of religion in biology. When everything is
said and done, it appears that biology should provide for religion a human
ground which so far has been lacking. For this to be possible, biology cannot,
in the name of theory, abstract men and women from their historical and
individual flesh and cancel the ground biology sets itself to study. It is true
that biological focusing is immediately faced with ontological experiences.
Ontology is what we encounter. However, ontologies are not what the nervous
system gives us. Ontologies die with the flesh. The code of the nervous system
is primarily epistemology.This is what makes ontology possible. Its
 Notes on the biology of religion 225

determination accounts for the seeming continuity o f human experience and at

the same time for the ontological diversity o f the same code. Furthermore,
since the world divides by two, the experience of the T and the experience of
'not-P, and since each one of these experiences follows the laws and rules of
its own particular language, the reading of those experiences follows the
particular laws of their genesis. The language o f T and the language of 'not-'I'
are furthermore mutually exclusive. They follow the laws o f complementarity
of modern physics, i.e. what can truly be said in one language cannot truly be
said in the other and vice versa.
Tlfe language of T functions through agency, finality, discursive knowledge,
memory, imagination, and the space and time of Classical Physics. The language
of 'not-I' on the other hand has no agency, finality, memory and imagination;
knowledge, the field, the body share the same dimensions each time; where
time and space are derived from the science of acoustics, music and
mathematics. In the language of T substance is pr:dnary. In the language of
'not-I' m o v e m e n t is primary.
Ultimately, it would appear that, from a biological point o f view, men and
women have never been any one particular thing or have had any one particular
nature to tie them down metaphysically. From a biological point of view,
humans become through their powers of embodiment a multiplicity of theories
that became human because man has the capacity to turn theory into flesh.
In so far as the past conditions the present, the biological study of religion
could liberate humans from codings in the nervous systems which if not known
as conditioning might be taken as liberation when in every case they are only
the shackles of human freedom.
One only hopes that Alex Comfort's effort in his book is taken seriously and
that it does not share the fate the author fears:
If in fact it proves true that there are large resources of body manipulation which could be
tapped by a better comprehension of the structure of identity, there is no single finding
which could do more to focus our attention on inner space: if not, identity and its structure
retain philosophical interest and we may learn to modify it pharmacologically, and probably,
on the record of technology for its own sake, to our hurt. But the study of the subject, if
that study is, as I have suggested by its own proper motion 'religious', is bound to modify
our social style and to qualify the limited intuitions of old-type objectivism, as Einsteinian
insights qualified Newtonian without contradicting them. What occurs in a change of
cultural style is that the universe of discourse is expanded, and every such expansion, in that
it alters the feel of our experiences both of I and of That, is by the terms of our initial
definition religious or 'spiritual' in its content. It is this expansion rather than a return to the
numinous or the mysterious that constitutes an augmented awareness of the sacral with
which humanity finds itself in encounter.
And that is the heart of the matter.