Claustrum

The claustrum is a thin sheet of neurons beneath the insula, wired to almost the whole cortex and proposed by Crick and Koch as a binder of conscious experience; the sacred-secretion tradition separately names it the source of the monthly "Christ oil."

Definition

The word carries two registers that must be kept apart. In anatomy, the claustrum is a thin, irregular sheet of grey matter lying between the insular cortex and the putamen in each hemisphere, notable for reciprocal connections with nearly every region of the cortex. In the sacred-secretion tradition — the early-twentieth-century esoteric physiology of George W. Carey and Inez Eudora Perry — "the claustrum" names the organ said to produce a "holy oil" once a month, the chrism, whose preservation through fasting is the basis of the Chrism Fast. The first is a structure. The second is a teaching. This entry describes both and endorses the physiology of neither beyond what the evidence supports.

Deep Understanding

The anatomy. The claustrum has been known since the eighteenth century and ignored for most of the time since, because it is hard to reach and easy to damage. Interest returned in 2005 when Francis Crick — in his final paper, completed by Christof Koch — asked "What is the function of the claustrum?" (Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 360: 1271–1279). Their answer was a hypothesis, not a finding: because the claustrum receives input from almost all cortical areas and projects back to almost all of them, it may act like the conductor of an orchestra, binding colour, sound, touch and thought into a single conscious percept. A striking case followed in 2014, when Koubeissi and colleagues (Epilepsy & Behavior) reported that electrical stimulation near the left claustrum in one epilepsy patient reversibly arrested her volitional behaviour and awareness — she stopped, stared, and resumed with no memory of the gap when the current stopped. One patient is not a theory. As of today the claustrum's function remains unsettled, and two facts are not in dispute: it is neural tissue, not a gland, and it secretes nothing. Cerebrospinal fluid is made by the choroid plexus in the ventricles.

The tradition. In God-Man: The Word Made Flesh (Los Angeles, 1920), Carey and Perry read the Christian story as an allegory of physiology. In their scheme the claustrum yields a precious oil — they play on Santa Claus as "holy claustrum" — which flows down the spinal cord to the solar plexus (the "manger") once a month, when the Moon transits the sign of one's natal Sun. If the seed is not "wasted" during roughly two and a half days of fasting and continence, it rises again to the pineal and pituitary and "illumines" the brain: crucifixion, tomb, resurrection, rendered as a monthly cycle in the body. This is a contemplative teaching with its own internal physiology. It is not established medicine, and this site does not present it as such. The Chrism Fast Calendar computes the traditional window from your birth date so you can work with the practice as a calendar of attention.

How Pleroma holds the two. We do not need the oil to be literal for the practice to be real. What the tradition encodes — a monthly return of the Moon to your Sun, a deliberate withdrawal of appetite, a turning of attention up the spine — is a discipline older than Carey's vocabulary: the kundalini ascent through sushumna, the lunar principle as the timing of receptivity, the vagus nerve as the body's actual descending channel. Carey named the mechanism wrongly and the rhythm well. The word itself is the clue: claustrum means an enclosure. Whatever the neurons do, the practice is about what happens when attention is enclosed for a few days and not spent.

Primary Sources

• Crick, F. C. & Koch, C. (2005). "What is the function of the claustrum?" Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 360 (1458), 1271–1279.
• Koubeissi, M. Z. et al. (2014). "Electrical stimulation of a small brain area reversibly disrupts consciousness." Epilepsy & Behavior, 37, 32–35.
• Carey, G. W. & Perry, I. E. (1920). God-Man: The Word Made Flesh. Los Angeles: The Chemistry of Life Co. The source text of the "Christ oil" teaching.

In Practice

The calendar is optional; the enclosure is not. Tonight, without fasting anything, practice the word. Sit for ten minutes and let attention withdraw from the day's spending — the screens, the replies, the small leaks of reaction — and gather at the base of the skull, then the length of the spine, then the belly. Do not try to move anything up or down. Simply keep attention enclosed — unspent — for ten minutes and notice how rare that is. If you want to bring the Moon into it, open the Chrism Fast Calendar, note your window, and decide in advance what your attention will not be spent on during those days.

In Pleroma's Words

"Whether or not an oil descends, something in you is spent every day and never gathered. The tradition gives that gathering a name, a date and a story. Take the date and the discipline; hold the story lightly; and see what a few enclosed days do to the quality of your attention."

See also

• Kundalini — the older name for the ascent Carey described
• Sushumna — the central channel of the spine
• Lunar Principle — why the practice is timed by the Moon
• Vagus Nerve — the body's real descending pathway
• Chrism Fast Calendar — compute your monthly window