SPIRITUAL MATERIAL – EVOLUTIONARY THEORY OF SPIRITUAL MATE SELECTION AND PERSONALITY DEVELOPMENT

Resurrexit Spiritus part 6

Dr. Marcus Aurelius Roe (2023)

“They are no more two, but one flesh.”

-Jesus Christ

“The first bond of society is marriage. The second, raising children.”

-Marcus Tulius Cicero

Human mind evolution is an ongoing development including a diverse array of forming modules (Gerrans, 2002). These mind modules first appear in raw states that then stabilise to select additional skills and related abilities. Advantages create population booms that alter the dynamics across generations, giving rise to gene migrations and then recombination. The dispersed advantages in mental abilities are then refined further through competition between novel recombination in various environments. The modern mind can be thus described as an accumulative ordering of talents out of chaotic and diverse origins.

These mind modules evolved alongside proclivities and behavioural tendencies. All tendencies must have been subject to the same forces of selection as any other mental attributes. Matrices of behavioural tendencies, or “personalities,” constitute the sum of individual responsiveness to situations.

There is a special connection between behavioural tendencies comprising human social personality and mate selection. This is a selection process that involves significantly more possibility for error, since misalignments of opposing or contradictory traits can create major behavioural dysfunctions. The fitness benefits compensated all historical risks in this regard. This is proven by the fact that human beings are the most populous and mentally complicated form of life known on Earth.

BASELINE (AS-IS)

An individual life is an extended series of interactions. Humans judge themselves and their potential through physical and contextual social realisations based upon those interactions. The self is witness to the failures and successes in interaction with reality as it is. This starts from the very first stages of social interactions as an infant.

These realisations occur through the interaction dynamics, as explicit and implicit communication compiled for understanding and personality development. Potential personality is analysed in terms of self and other, which is to say a dialectic formatting of proto-socialisation. This format first manifests as the resistance and conformance states of the Kratos domain in Resurrexit Theory.

Shock occurs at the inopportune imposition of new normalities, and then abhorrence in disgust. The abhorrence triggers desire for restoration to the old normality. A new normality must entail integration or rejection of the shocking things. This can cause greater extremes without an understanding of appropriate moderation. Abhorrence is disturbing and can confuse sensibilities. Perseverance on accessories of abhorrence and rejection encourage secondary rejections of related and similar things.

So-called overreactions force a person into an extreme residency in the lower domains. Protective reactions are beneficial and can be justified in the right circumstances. These become opportunities to learn and generate a new normality, or adjustment of lifestyle and personality, upon the affiliation of the self between opposing ideals.

The action of witnessing, aligning, and affiliating the self builds a tool for judging traits and abilities in others. There are many advantages to this. By thorough comprehension of relative position in the World, an individual is more realistic and reasonable. This includes nuances of cultural norms. The broadened perspective directly mediates important elements of mate selection.

INSTINCTS AND OUTMODING (OF-AS)

In the advancement of life, instincts have been gradually replaced, or dulled toward outmoding, by sets of social and logic-oriented behaviours. This is especially true for mammalian life. Many basic reactive instincts found in the most primitive life have been progressively outmoded. For instance, the iron-coded will to survive appears to have been supplanted by mechanisms of life value analysis in humans. This must be true, otherwise any rational explanation for suicidal kin altruism fails logically.

Instincts in human beings were displaced by more flexible cognitive behavioural traits on bases of general adaptive fitness. In this theory, the greater propensity for suicide than most other species is a side-effect of this process. Sensitivities should naturally decrease with the fitness advantages of intelligence and community gradually replacing instincts, which is to say when instincts begin to be selected against because of the new behaviours. This is demonstrated by average human being attenuations in smell, sight, and sound, relative to other mammals. This process also attended greater acuity for specific visual spectrums, such as with colour depth especially for social purposes.

I theorise spiritual mate selection first enabled the advanced displacement of instincts that occurred in hominids beyond that typical of mammals. The honest critical judgement of poorly-adapted behaviours seen in the self encourages the selection of opposite adaptations perceived in potential mates. This is similar to how people select mates to overcome their own perceived shortcomings, as described in regards to physical traits by Schöpenhauer (1818), who left the psychological and spiritual trait selection up to a coordinating godly genius.

Theoretically, such a “selecting traits” trait began as the ability to select the most flexible behavioural traits in harsh environments. This makes the ability to decipher optimal mate selection the most flexibly advantaged trait across generations. This constitutes an entire mind module unto itself, and explains the fickle nature of courting in human beings. People, of course, betray true intentions with their attempts at extending courtship, as suggested by Schöpenhauer.

Psychological triggers, especially moral and social, are capable of epigenetic influence of suicide or death conditions in terms of evolutionary selection. People can be selected for the same genes selected against in relatives by not exhibiting a set of behaviours. This is to say that combinations of certain genes and behavioural sets imposed suicidal conditions for genetic cohorts. This can be described as a sort of behavioural sieve for social and religious organisation.

PSYCHOMENA OF PSYCHOMENA: MENTAL BEAUTY (PHILOSOPHY OF-AS-IS LIFE)

A person is attracted to personality traits in others based upon judgements developed experientially and alongside their own personality. This is due to a mind module evolved to discern best compensation for traits observed of the self. It is this mechanism of personality shaping through reflective negative-image selection that mimics the act of creation itself. This is the very process that evolved spirit, which is the formation of spiritual personality.

One of these personality traits is a willingness to devote energy to a centralised body, through the state and religion. The most important of these traits are those that imbue meaning and importance to activities that assure group survival. Some of these behaviours manifest as devotion or submission to something deemed greater than the self. Some of these are not behavioural traits that immediately lend themselves to survival, however rely upon the survival of the community, culture, and group.

This process appears to have been metaphysically unavoidable. Metaphorically, a self-programming social “computer virus” or, perhaps, an “evolutionary sinkhole” through recursive function of trait accumulation would naturally target some optimal personality. The definition and accuracy of the selection-traits increase exponentially across populations in consistent cooperation with the advantageous selected traits themselves. Such a dynamic makes development of spiritual traits inevitable. Inevitability is a very good sign that something is an important particle of the patterns built into the fabric of reality.

RELIGIOUS DISCOURSE (LIFE IS-AS-OF PHILOSOPHY)

It is this spiritual tendency that informs the most pro-social behaviours. Spirituality in daily life contributes to an exuberance for the accumulative collective. There is a momentousness in the personality of spiritual people. They express a higher love through their family, community, and culture. These are a group of traits that were extremely self-selective.

They encompass an attitude toward the World amenable to congregational and religious behaviours. People most enthusiastic toward community and family naturally selected mates with similar dispositions. The communities with more exuberant behaviours out-competed more mundane groups.

Forced to contend with ecological disasters, human beings meet uncertainty with extremity in the resistance state of Kratos domain. These situations force generations to explore novel social dynamics when they sense cultural upheaval and disarray, as a means of identifying optimal lifestyles. Religious groups continuously attracted people with similar behavioural phenotypes throughout these periods.

These groups would then be benefited by the greater proportion of the population sinking their immediate survival costs, for contribution to the whole. All the members of these groups would benefit from the increased fitness of individuals contributing to the culture. Selection for these behavioural types will occur no matter the religious situation. Actors of religious schisms react with similarly increased investment into selection for spiritual personality.

PARTICULARITY AS HUMAN UNIVERSALITY

Archaic religions were far more particular at the same time as being more universal. This is to say schisms were nearly always coordinated and calculated, not occurring through procedural change. These were communal religions that permanently attached the person, in the same way foreigners to their own communities.

‘Love thy neighbour’ can also be interpreted as ‘do not live near people you cannot love,’ and so people not only selected their own mates but those of descendants by setting required living and moral standards for neighbours. Through that reality they shared in universality with the rest of humanity similarly devoted to their own municipal deities. These deities and standards were as similar as the cultural and racial continuance between cities, wider archetypes notwithstanding.

Ironically, modern Western religion turns people away from their communities with promises of greater universality. Believers neglect the charge of improving their families, communities, and descendants which was essential to the evolutionary formation of spiritual emotions. These are the same spiritual emotions their ancestors felt toward a personal deity devoted to everyone and everything they knew. Modern believers are disconnected from legitimate and beneficial community, severing their universality with the empty promises of an alternative and impossible universality.

The environment of modern religious culture maintains an extractive and predatory normality by distancing people from their actual communities. So many people have left the churches. Is it because the churches have stopped serving their evolutionary and communal purposes?

REFERENCES

Gerrans, P. (2002). The theory of mind module in evolutionary psychology. Biology and Philosophy, 17(3), 305–321. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1020183525825

Schöpenhauer, A. (1818). The Metaphysics of the Sexual Love (R. B. Haldane, Trans. 2018). https://books.google.com/books?id=DYgVwQEACAAJ