Perspective
Pull up a moment and view the world from a different perspective. It can be disconcerting and throw us off balance. Face it, we prefer right side up, if only we truly knew where "up" in every situation. My perspective on life is like this picture; it can be unsettling and uncomfortable more often than not, At those times my brain has to work considerably harder as it tries to interpret which way is up in a given situation challenging my view. It is at that those times I must trust my gut to help me to choose wisely. I usually begin by reading and chasing rabbits down trails which leads to a better understanding of my surroundings and how to interpret the data.
Feeding the Gut - Going Down The Rabbit Hole
In my research, for this article, I read an article by Marcia Reynolds Psy.D. published in March of 2017 in Psychology Today. The article is on trusting your gut and is named, "Should You Trust Your Gut? How to determine if your instincts are right.". In her article she quotes William James, who is revered as the father of American psychology, She quotes from one of his books, he wrote: “True beliefs are those that prove useful to the believer”. In response Dr. Reynolds writes in her article,"Few things are absolutely true forever. Science keeps discovering phenomena that debunk what we thought we knew."
Continuing my quest to learn to listen better to my gut, her article leads me further down the hole to Emanuel Swedenborg.
Emanuel Swedenborg
According to the Encyclopedia Britania, Emanuel Swedenborg was "a Swedish scientist, Christian mystic, philosopher, and theologian who wrote many books and articles on interpreting the Scriptures as the immediate word of God.", he lived from 1688-1772. Swedenborg "had become fascinated by mathematics and the natural sciences, and to study them he visited England, Holland, France, and Germany, meeting some of the representatives of the new sciences there and learning practical mechanical skills. Swedenborg’s inventive and mechanical genius flowered at this time, and his speculations ranged from a method of finding terrestrial longitude by the Moon to new methods of constructing docks and even to tentative suggestions for the submarine and the airplane."
Taking A New Perspective
According to a paper by Simon Schaffer - University of Cambridge, UK, "Swedenborg’s Lunars", Emanuel Swedenborg "devoted major efforts to the establishment of a reliable method for the determination of longitude at sea" and that, "mature cosmology sought a rational and enlightened model of the universe.", "he devoted several years to publishing reports and treatises on various scientific and philosophical problems—e.g., cosmology, corpuscular philosophy, mathematics, and human sensory perceptions."
The Gut, Our Second Brain
I read the following articles on the Gut and learned how we are influenced from down under. The Society for Neuroscience published an article in May of 2018 in Science Daily named: "Second brain' neurons keep colon moving", they write, "Brain in the gut coordinates the activity of millions of neurons to propel waste through the digestive system. ... The enteric nervous system is known as the "second brain" or the brain in the gut because it can operate independently of the brain and spinal cord, the central nervous system".
Another article I read on the subject was written in 2010 in Scientific American, by Adam Hadhazy, named: "Think Twice: How the Gut's "Second Brain" Influences Mood and Well-Being", he writes: "The second brain contains some 100 million neurons, more than in either the spinal cord or the peripheral nervous system".
How The Gut Effects Us
write here......
Digesting New Information
Without Emanuel Swedenborg taking a new perspective on the sciences and following his gut we would have only heard of him in a footnote, but his influence continues to draw others to do the same.