Chapter 06: Lining up the Ancestors

HEARTH SCIENCE: PHENOMENOLOGY OF AN EMBODIED NEUROSCIENCE

A brief aside: This is the sixth chapter of my forthcoming book, HEARTH SCIENCE: PHENOMENOLOGY OF AN EMBODIED NEUROSCIENCE. The book was written primarily from August 2024 through January 2025, as we brought the new foundation model of Autonomics into the world, finalized The Neurobiology of Connection, and dealt with the very strong reactions thereto. While I was quite aware that The Neurobiology of Connection was going to generate waves in the field, because it had been doing this since I began serially publishing chapters of the book in this Substack, and before that publishing draft essays in the Polyvagal Study Group on Facebook, I was not fully prepared for the vehemence of the backlash the book would receive from people who hadn’t read it, didn’t understand what I was saying, why I was saying it, or the extensive body of research and clinical practice beneath it, but were rather simply offended that I was saying Polyvagal Theory is incomplete.

This group included a number of colleagues I had considered sober, but whose knee-jerk reaction to having an element of their orthodoxy challenged reminded me more of evangelical fervor than science. This book grew out of my own grapplings with how to explain to people that I was not, and had never been attacking Stephen Porges, Ph.D. The worldview and insights articulated in The Neurobiology of Connection arose out of methodical investigations arising from an alternate way-of-knowing that gave us access to different insights than those Dr. Porges gleaned.

This book is therefore a companion to The Neurobiology of Connection: a discourse on its method. It opens with a discussion of the role of paradigms in science, modeled on Thomas Kuhn’s seminal 1970 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. For those of you following this book, here are the chapters published thus far, as I realize you would have trouble sequencing them without a bit of help:

HEARTH SCIENCE: PHENOMENOLOGY OF AN EMBODIED NEUROSCIENCE

Introduction

PART ONE: DREAMT BY EMPIRE

Chapter 01 - Vehemently Suspect of Heresy

Chapter 02 - Epistemologies of the Oracular Blind

Chapter 03 - Listening with the Eyes

Chapter 04 - In Search of the Myenteric Plexus

Chapter 05 - The Spiritual Interior of the Word

And now, without further ado, Chapter 06 - Lining up the Ancestors

What I’m trying to do is write myself a lineage history that I can tolerate. I’m trying to find precursors to my own work, note them, name them, say– Look, this is not an anomaly: it has a precedent. I am gathering a lineage that precedes me; I am lining up ancestors. In this way, gaze back-cast through time, I am claiming specific ancestors to my methodology: my feeling-thinking, my interoceptive tracking, my inward neural cartography. I am saying that these people belong to me. That they explain me somehow, that they are part of how I got here, they are my interoceptive neuroscience lineage.

At some level, and I don’t have the correct word to describe what this level is, I am engaged in any act of seeking out and consecrating fathers. There is some element of paternity involved. I have reclaimed wild mothers at other moments in my life, but this is unmistakably about fathers: the energy is masculine. This makes sense to me when I consider it, although it is not something that I was conscious I was doing. A dream, last night, has made it clearer.

I fall asleep with a charge in my body that will not dispel, an overbrimming with vitality, to put it in the way that might have the greatest possibility of being understood. In the dream, the particulars of which escape me, I am attending a wedding. Not my own. For some reason I have parked several blocks away. It is in a city, and I walk several blocks to arrive. At the end of the ceremony, two people offer to drive me back to my car and for whatever reason the one whose offer I accept is my father’s. I get into the passenger seat of a vehicle with him. I hand him the address, we begin to speak about something I do not remember, and he begins to drive. Immediately, I sense that he is going in the wrong direction. He drives steadily, assuredly in the wrong direction several blocks, my bodily navigation telling me the entire time that we are getting farther and farther away from where I need to go. Then he stops, triumphant, to let me out. We are nowhere near where my vehicle is. I do not recognize the intersection at all. He has completely mis-read the map.

Perhaps it is as simple as a city that has both streets and avenues, and that he has inverted the coordinates. Instead of taking me to the intersection of 7th street and 4th Avenue, he has taken me to the corner of 4th street and 7th Avenue. Oddly, in the dream, the entire time this is happening, I have a bodily visceral registration of exactly where my car is, exactly where I have to get to. I can feel it the way I imagine you would sense a homing beacon, were it tethered to your blood.