Religion as a Cry from the Vertical Body – The Evolutionary Fracture
the substrate for deeper psychological and cultural expressions(traditions)
The blog post “Upright Posture Has Left Humans Predisposed to Autonomic Breakdown” proposes a deep evolutionary irony: that our greatest triumph—walking upright—came at a hidden cost. link
By freeing our hands and expanding our horizon, we taxed the autonomic nervous system (ANS) to its limits. To remain upright in a gravitational field, the organism must constantly correct against falling, pushing blood upward, maintaining balance, and stabilizing organs. Over time, this tension creates a subtle but chronic physiological/cognitive unease, a sense of not-quite-being-at-home in the organism.
This is not metaphorical—it’s systemic. The body’s homeostatic baseline is stressed by our very upright structure. In this sense, the human organism is always-already on the verge of breakdown. This biological strain could form the substrate for deeper psychological and cultural expressions(traditions) of fragility, shame, obedience, alienation, and the longing for relief. Deep felt helplessness.
The ANS, strained by gravity, struggles to maintain the dynamic oscillations needed for health. This mirrors the quantum analogy: just as a wave function collapses into a single reality, chronic stress collapses the organism’s potential into a narrower, dysfunctional state—spinning brain, fatigue.
Christianity as a Postural Cry?
In this light,
Christianity might be interpreted as a cultural-theological symptom of this postural tension—a structured cry for help directed upward, mirroring the body’s verticality.
The direction of prayer is upward.
The figure of Christ is often suspended between Earth and heaven—a literal embodiment of vertical tension.
The cross itself represents a fractured axis: the vertical line of striving and suffering intersecting the horizontal plane of the body.
The core doctrine is about suffering, fallenness, and redemption—premised on the idea that human beings are in a broken state, in need of external rescue.
What if this theological structure is not merely symbolic, but somatically rooted? That is, what if the “fallen” condition Christianity describes is not only moral or spiritual, but autonomic—a felt breakdown in the body’s ability to maintain coherence in the face of two-legged evolutionary demands?
From Postural Collapse to Spiritual Ascent – Happy in Paradise
This perspective reframes Christianity not as an abstract belief system, but as an existential technology for accepting and praising the autonomic burden of being upright. The body, overstrained, collapses inward. Feeling diminishes. Orientation is lost. And the mind, unable to regulate the body alone, projects its cry into the heavens.
Thus, salvation is not merely moral—it’s postural. It’s a longing for vertical support, for something to hold us up when the body can no longer do so. In this sense, religion becomes:
A cultural negation to a biological contradiction –
The collapse of feeling (through autonomic strain) produces a search for reconnection.
Christianity, in particular, preserves the vertical longing—the cry “upward,” the hope, the condition of transcendence through endless suffering.
This idea challenges traditional views of spirituality and highlights the intricate relationships between body, mind, and culture. It encourages us to consider the potential somatic roots of cultural and theological expressions, and how our bodily experiences might shape our understanding of the world and our place within it.