Consonance! In a single word all is done. All is answered by that one sound. If logos is the sounding of truth, consonance is the sounding of truth in unison.

The biological significance of ‘story’ is that it serves our success by coordinating our actions as a group. As far as biological success is concerned, it may not matter quite as much whether our story is scientifically factual, as whether we are all on board. But objective accuracy, at this point in our history, may be the only quality left that could entice a majority aboard.

As our world has grown from isolated kingdoms to a single global community we, as a species, have outgrown our various stories and are in deep need of a sturdy, unifying narrative. If we are not able to find a universally believable story somewhere in the apparent chaos of reality, our outmoded stories will sabotage, rather than support our success.

“The CONSONANT” is an attempt to imagine what such a story might look like given the many compromises that necessarily confront such a project. Since I am an artist rather than a scientist, my imaginings will surely lack the precision science requires, but a ballpark picture must be painted before the collective refinement can begin. In the long run, error must always bow to evidence.

So why is consonance the answer? Because we are powerful creatures whose evolutionarily endowed instincts drive us to find and destroy all enemies. It is story’s job to modify and correct instincts toward the goal of living in, and functioning as, a group. If we are not able to find a story that resolves our intraspecies conflicts, the final enemy we destroy will be ourselves.

Our tribal instincts tell us to identify with one faction and fight against the opposing faction. We see that played out in sexism, racism, political partisanism, and maybe most troublingly, in the perceived conflict between science and religion.

Why is the split between science and religion possibly more troubling than even racism? Because it is more fundamental to our worldview. It can be moderately disconcerting to feel that another group may be contending with your group for cultural dominance, but it is maximally terrifying to become uncertain who or what you are, and what the purpose of your existence is. We need an accurate and stable worldview, not one that is divided and warring against itself. Our species needs a narrative that cannot be undermined by objective evidence or estranged from growth by sacred exaltation.

We need the scientific method to discern the facts of Nature, and we need a religious practice to retrain our behavior away from obsolete instincts and toward a harmonious society. Consonance is the habituation of looking for what we have in common, and ignoring our innate impulse to focus on differences. Consonance is first and foremost the realization that science and religion bear much more opportunity as friends than threat as enemies. All other areas of social conflict will be easier to resolve after we have faced and conquered the one that challenges the very foundations of our existential safety.

So this section will focus on the philosophy, or rationale, of this story. But the story begins and ends with “spirit,” so I’d like to say a bit about how the word is used here, and then I’ll get straight to the philosophical calculations.

A recurring theme in this tale will be “getting back to basics.” I find a wealth of insight in the origins of words. I suspect it’s fairly commonly known that spirit meant breath, which is a fitting metaphor, I think, for the invisible life force. And a sure sign, when it ceases, that life has left as well. But more than just the condition of being alive, spirit speaks of the relative buoyancy of life.

Were their “spirits” low when the team lost? Are we discussing the “spirit” or the letter of the law? Or we might talk about the “spirit” of the age. You get the idea. Spirit, in this context, refers to mental or emotional properties: mood, attitude, intuition, intention, or relative emotional buoyancy. No superstition allowed.

With that understanding established, the philosophical trek begins with the concept of evolutionary mismatch. The problem is that environment can change much more rapidly than biological evolution can move. The familiar illustration of this is the relative scarcity of salt, fat and sugar in our ancestral environment, compared to their near-effortless availability in the developed world. Our bodies are designed by millions of years on the savannas of the Pleistocene. But we are now awash in nutrients we are still programmed to crave, causing an epidemic of obesity and related complications. What appears to our moralizing sensibilities to be gluttony, might really just be evolutionary mismatch. So evolutionary mismatch becomes a model for a core principle here.

But I’d like to change that generic-sounding name to something more descriptive: adaptive cavitation, hereafter shortened to cavitation. For our purposes here, cavitation equals what scientists call evolutionary mismatch.

So the first mismatch between evolved biology and environmental change I want to focus on is one that took place some dozen millennia ago. We call it the Agricultural Revolution; the moment when we started trading in our Hunter-Gatherer lifestyles for the Farming life. After being designed to live in close-knit, nomadic tribes of 150 or so individuals – mostly extended family, we are now living in growing, stationary communities where we don’t personally know every single individual.

Evidence now suggests that, rather than being the cause of large societies, organized religion followed the development of established populations; I surmise as a counterbalance to the forces of cavitation. We were now for the first time in our entire existence, living in close proximity to large numbers of our species, but were cast there still wearing our Hunter-Gatherer bodies and social skills. The change was much too abrupt for biology to make up the difference. I imagine there was a painful period of adjustment. The solution appears to have been found in that most rapidly adaptive human organ we call culture.

Along with numbers for accounting, and written languages, rules for living in such unfamiliar conditions had to be established. My prescription here will deliberately lean to the reductionist side, for the expedience of getting a complex idea across as a coherent concept, but subtleties and exceptions can be addressed in other places. What we today usually call organized religion, can be seen as a cultural counterbalance to the environmental shock of the agricultural revolution, twelve thousand years ago. To be sure, religious behaviors of various types existed long before that, but what we generally refer to today as Organized Religion arose after the agrarian lifestyle was well established.

The three components of this new cultural behavior, of primary concern to this hypothesis, are the counterbalances that support material wellbeing, social cohesion, and those that promote mental health. New environmental demands required a shoring up, or scaffolding for these, and no doubt certain other, human skillsets. If Pleistocene beasties were to live in cities, tempers must be tamed, and movements must be co-ordinated. Disciplines must be practiced, and institutions must teach them. The original core purpose of organized religion is hypothesized here to be the training of cultural correctives for the adaptive cavitation brought on by the agricultural revolution.

There were, apparently, always two tracks. The bulk of the population mostly just needed a coordinator. But a more esoteric practice existed, hidden in the same language that was used to prescribe guidelines for the masses. Somebody figured out, a very long time ago, that there is a way to escape the horrors that life invariably presents, from the daily trials of survival, all the way up to and including the horror of death. The horror, mind you; not death itself. Death, we can deal with. It’s the horror of death that is so unpalatable. Over the millennia, many, very different, methods of achieving this blessed escape have been discovered, and more may yet be found. But these various routes all lead to the same bio-cultural solution; locally unique in cultural expression, but ultimately possessing a basis in evolved biology.

Evolution “wants” us to be successful. It operates exactly as if it wants us to succeed, just as any loving parent would want for their offspring. It is not entirely insane to personify nature as an all-knowing, all-loving creator, because in a very real way, that is how it behaves. Nature has built us to reproduce and raise our progeny to viability. There is nothing to be gained by letting us suffer so terribly that we aren’t able to complete our biological duties, so, whether as an adaptation, or only as an “easter egg” left for us to find, we have been given a way to sidestep the most crippling of horrors and go about our duties.

But this most precious gift is an evolutionary afterthought, appended to our biology through that most malleable part of our anatomy, culture. It is added to us after we are complete biological creatures, so it must be administered through mechanisms of training. If not biologically, then it is certainly culturally, adaptive. To be “finished” humans, we must take the medicine. We must learn how to properly relate to our “creator”, or we must bear our suffering without such assistance. Uncorrupted “religion” is the ad-ministering of this patch. The problem is keeping it uncorrupted. Because, where there is power, there will be thieves.

Maybe a way to resist thievery is to avoid institutions (where possible). Institutions are necessary for some purposes, but they always seem to need money, and money always attracts flies. So while the institutions are working out their problems, individuals are still free to engage in practices that work, especially now, with modern technology as an aid. The internet can serve many of the needs previously met by institutions, without the necessity of brick and mortar expenses. More on that later.

So as religions organized, the corruption followed, reliably, as might be expected. Not just thievery, but also, unavoidable cultural drift. Gods, that may have been reasonable abstractions of real forces, became reified as literal personages. Primitive explanations of nature’s mysteries calcified into hardened doctrine. The original, authentic, cultural counterbalance to cavitation soon became so embarnacled with error as to be nearly unrecognizable, and in many ways, arguably, counterproductive.

Among the many corrupting influences upon authentic religion, perhaps the strongest competitor hasn’t been thievery, or even careless drift, but a more insidious force, also supplied by dear Mother Nature. Biologist John C. Wathey explains on page 61 of his book, ” The Illusion Of God’s Presence”:

“There is innate neural circuitry, both in the parents – especially the mother – and in the infant, the purpose of which is to establish and maintain a powerful emotional bond between parent and infant. In the infant, this circuitry does more than merely cause the infant to cry when cold, hungry, or alone. It constitutes an internal neural model of the infant’s world. The single most important feature of this model is an innate mental image of the mother as a loving agent who wants to satisfy the infant’s needs and who will do so only if the infant cries loudly and long enough. Included in this neural model is a feeling of certainty that this agent exists. The circuitry that implements the innate model of the mother persists into adulthood, but normally lies dormant. The existence of this circuitry in the adult gives rise to religious experience, and hence religious belief, especially under conditions of great physical or emotional stress that evoke feelings of desperate need and helplessness.”

It is neither by accident nor by way of some fiendishly clever public relations campaign that some 80% of our global population continues to feel an innate confidence in the presence of an all powerful, loving creator who is capable of protecting, judging, and ultimately, forgiving us, if we will only submit to its authority and trust that it knows what’s best for us.

So the first of the two tracks of religion will, maybe forever, need to accept our biological predisposition toward god worship, and minister lovingly to those whose needs or curiosity never wander beyond it. But it is the second track to which I devote the bulk of my explorations. If the first track could be said to recognize the needs of the laity, it is this second track that encompasses the equivalent of monastic disciplines.

Adaptive cavitation sets traps for civilized humans in the form of supernormal stimuli. Along with readily recognizable cavitation hazards like fast food, and its biblical understanding as temptation to gluttony, are also, unsurprisingly, the other six deadly sins, pride, greed, lust, envy, wrath, and sloth. For a Pleistocene hominid, a flashy new automobile in the driveway is rocket-fueled pride. Having virtually no limit to the amount of power that can accrue now by the hoarding of money, greed becomes supercharged. Social media and internet porn comprise a vending machine of lust. The advertising industry skillfully leverages our capacity for envy. 24-hour news of perpetual wars inflames our wrathful instincts, and, truth be known, I’m just too lazy to come up with one for sloth!

And religion itself, with its neonatal comforts, can represent a supernormal stimulus, at least in its currently popular forms. It gives us a parent figure of heroic proportions to look up to, absolves our guilt in the court of celestial opinion, and provides us with a get-out-of-death-free card. No wonder 80% of our friends and neighbors can’t resist!

A useful and authentic spiritual practice for our current times, I will argue, will lean in the direction of recognizing the hazards of cavitation, and help us resist them by way of wisdom instead of guilt or fear. So the first duty of a consonant practice would be to train its practitioners how to avoid, or cope with, this adaptive dissonance. In order to be more useful than destructive, a modern religion must help us understand that our temptations are not a byproduct of our flawed personalities, but an artifact of our invention of agriculture, and civilization, which took the responsibility of regulating our appetites away from nature and put it in our Pleistocene hands. The only part of us that can evolve fast enough to make corrections for this imbalance is culture. So instead of retiring religion to the evolutionary trash heap, we need, more than ever, to revitalize it to again serve as the cultural counterbalance to cavitation it probably originally was.

The second kind of dissonance that a useful, modern practice would address is our heightened potential for interpersonal conflict; or social dissonance. In a world where we had a personal relationship with every member of our tribe, and a relatively fixed place in the hierarchy, conflicts met natural limits in interdependency. But in a tribe of seven billion, there is no natural containment mechanism, so this too must be added culturally in the form of social consonance training. We must rehabituate our defensive and xenophobic instincts to a mindful seeking of commonality.

And the third dissonance is the one we’re all likely familiar with; Leon Festinger’s cognitive dissonance, or at least a particular iteration of it. While the concession science must make to religion is the recognition of its vital role in the delivery of regular (weekly) training of personal disciplines aimed at counterbalancing cavitation, religion, on the other hand, must fully relinquish any aspirations it may have had for fact-finding, to science. There is only one reality; there is nothing to argue about. Evidence dictates the facts. Training counterbalances adaptive cavitation. We need both.

So the replacement of objective error with scientific fact becomes the ally of spiritual liberation instead of its enemy. Cognitive (spiritual) consonance is achieved by correcting our mental model of reality (worldview) to the known facts of nature.

As cognitive consonance relieves the suffering caused by cognitive dissonance, and the same for adaptive and social consonances relative to their respective dissonances, we are gradually released to the “miracle” of spiritual liberation. What is spiritual liberation?

It’s not magic. It just feels like magic. What it actually is is the result of cognitive development that goes beyond those stages that occur without specific training. It is the building of meaning structures, one upon another, until insight is gained. It is the deep understanding of how and why you are not your ego. Cognitive consonance, the replacing of erroneous information with truth, leads to the irreversible loss of the ability to suffer. This is the scientific equivalent of what was traditionally called salvation, enlightenment, or nirvana.

Traditional methods of reaching this state included meditation, and in some cases “communion” was enhanced by various mind-altering substances. CONSONANCE claims to be a method that doesn’t require either of these time-honored devices, but can be accomplished by nothing other than the building of “meaning structures”. This entails a lot of learning, but it is more than a mere collection of knowledge. It is a process of constructing layers of understanding that ultimately precipitate a loosening of the bonds that identity naturally makes to a natal sense of self.

So whether a monastic discipline is desired or just a more satisfying and productive way of managing life’s spiritual challenges, the philosophy behind CONSONANCE offers a path that is based on the timeless principles of ancient wisdom traditions, but is stripped of the superstition, factual error, and ambiguity we have come to associate with institutionalized religion.