Personal memoir excerpt with religious and neuro‑psychological reflections

a psychoanalytical neuroscientist with a computational bent, the partitions divided thoughtful, forewarning forebrain from automatic and stereotyped hind brain, the signal analyzing thalamocortical system from the emotional and impulsive brain stem-limbic, the symbolically logical left from _ intuitively geometric right hemispheres. We divide the neurotransmitter moods of dopamine aggression from the transcendentally erotic serotonin and the organized dynamical states of periodicity and quasi(multi)periodicity from the real world complexity of chaos. | learned that it is comforting to divide an unknown whole into two or more unknowable parts. The Jewish guru and Hebraic tutor of my childhood, Rabbi Isadore Kliegfeld, smiled when | told him about my sudden loss of panic during nighttime Hebrew letter meditations. He said that | had had received personal evidence that these powerful symbols could call forth the transformational powers of God. He said that | had been given a blessing, in Yiddish, a nachas. Maybe panic is not that far from the transcendence of an activated mind. In my tenth summer, behind closed door in a hot back bedroom, first by accidental touch and then by more systematic chaffing, | evoked a pleasurably urgent and yawning feeling that began in the lower part of my abdomen and back. It filled me with thought emptying fullness that a sudden involuntary burst of pelvic contractions found resolution in an hour or two of an unexplainable sadness. | had been struggling to understand my father’s well warn copy of William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience and | wondered if | had been visited by one of the altered states he described. Was this what he meant by a _ transformative experience? A few months later, a late night meditation produced physical evidence, a thick, sticky, salty sweet stuff that by morning stuck my sheets together. Later that year, in my father’s library, | found a translation of the 1500 BCE Egyptian Book of the Dead. It contained a creation myth of two Gods in which “rubbing with my fist, my heart came into my mouth and | spat forth Shu and Tefnut.” Psalm 23, read rather regularly in Sunday school, began to make me wonder about the meanings of*...rod and staff that comforts...” and what was meant by “...my cup runneth over.” Among the ten regions of the Zohar, connecting the inner world of HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_013506