Of course!
The penitents, the flagellants, Christian, Catholic, or other — anyone who
believes that the body, with all its sensual potential, is evil or an obstacle to the spiritual
life — believes the body and our senses must be mortified, "put to death." They find
redemption and joy in their pain, in their self-flagellation, in being riddled with arrows,
boiled alive, eaten by lions or crucified.
We know that sensory deprivation, extreme pain, mystical ecstasy, and orgasmic
ecstasy very likely involve the same or similar neural circuits in the brain. Neural pain
and pleasure are yin and yang. Each can induce a very pleasurable, at times frightening
altered state of mind.
Fifty years ago, Harry and Margaret Harlow deprived infant monkeys of skin love
by isolating them in cages where they could see, hear and smell other monkeys, but could
not touch or be touched. Raised with wire-mesh surrogate mothers and deprived of
nurturing touch, these monkeys grew into anti-social, violent adults. James W. Prescott
and other neuroscientists have documented a clear connection in the brain between the
lack of nurturing touch in childhood and elevated pain thresholds in the violence-aggression circuits that consistently leads to painful self-cannibalistic behavior. Our brain
circuits for pleasure and pain/violence operate like a see-saw: stimulate one side and you
depress the other side. Don't stimulate the pleasure circuits and the pain/violence circuits
proliferate out of control. An overload of pain then is interpreted as pleasurable; pain,
especially extreme pain, can then serve as a substitute for the pleasures of nurturing touch
we need to survive but don't get.
An addiction to redemption by mortification and pain denies our bodies and our
sensual needs. It is a violent attack on and denial of our human nature. It is just as
dangerous as an undisciplined, unfocused, indiscriminate obsession with sensory
stimulation and overload.
Moore responds
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