THE BONE CHALICE: WHAT IS THE ORIGIN OF RELIGION

This brief overview of the concept of “religion” is meant for people who are interested in how it “works” in human life. Sci-fi writers almost always have understood it as a process rather than isolated systems that assert that they are “true” or the “only way.” In some ways, anthropology -- the science of humans -- is the key to all fiction.

First of all, religion itself is a composite of several categories: ritual and artistic expression, morality, theory of existence, guide for human arrangements (mostly fitting to the physical ecology through material culture, economics, science, hierarchy and war). Different cultures organize these categories in different ways.

Most people feel that the earliest sign of religion in the sense of ritual was the strewing of flowers in graves among the neanderthal peoples. The closest to this practice in other species is the phenomenon of elephants covering dead bodies of their comrades with branches.

There has always been science of a kind (an accumulation of information about how things work) from the very beginning, as in hunting. Only ten thousand years ago humans moved to agriculture and settlements, which allowed the development of math, writing, and an accumulation and sharing of knowledge by specialized persons. Religion was quick to claim all that, including dedicated property. In the specialization of roles, they relied heavily on mysteries and secrets, but in the best of situations they provided a framework for practical daily living plus an “ultimate” goal, such as achieving immortality, participating in life itself, attaining privileged status, contributing to their human community, or reaching an internal sense of the Holy. Often there was special attention to death. Or sex and birth.

All of this was built on a mammalian substrate of physical function, including the brain and its management of the body. Evolution, defined as persistence through survival of individuals and groups, has only recently reached the point of being able to observe itself on a cellular. New technology has taught us how much beyond our senses there is a cosmos and a molecular elemental structure to existence, but also it has taught us how our senses deliver information to our brains and how it is processed, censored, elaborated, and resolved into identity which is shared and embedded in human relationships. Bits of the brain, evolved before there was such a thing as a human being, still control our actions regardless of our beliefs.

Exploring these interrelationships and speculating with vivid illustrations what would happen, if there were changes in the actual body or in the culture-sphere that includes religion, is the work of science fiction.

ALL RELIGION IS ROOTED IN LAND

If the land is desert where the skies are wide and crammed with stars, the religion will focus on that as well as the practices that are necessary for desert survival. The metaphors of the texts, the management of birth and death, the over all moral “style” will be those necessary for survival in the desert. That means chieftains, polygamy, abstinence, control, and rivalries among tribes. In a coastal warm-climate place where there is plenty of food, there are likely to be elaborate arts and religious mechanisms for distributing plenty or even destroying some of it, as in the Pacific Northwest ceremonies of breaking and throwing away “coppers,” sheets of embossed metal, sometimes of great beauty.

BUT ALSO BY HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS

For a religion to form protocols in one ecology and then move to another, is very problematic. Those that are more detached from the land and dependent on human relationships are more likely to make the transition -- as the Christians who depend on the father-mother-son nucleus -- but even they are now being challenged by the social deconstruction of families caused by economic shortfalls. It has been suggested that the new patriarch is simply the government -- issuing the checks and making the rules, even providing the habitation -- so that the essential family is simply mother and children with no place for a father. Insemination is random, childbirth is unclaimed, and yet the inseminator can be identified even if he was introduced via a turkey baster or through violent rape -- without anyone being able to explain what that means in terms of the male role. Males without families are often males without any religious patterns in their lives, vulnerable to substance abuse, crime, and depression. Young males -- no longer children but not yet adults -- are in limbo, accumulating incredible amounts of information without enough sorting mechanisms. In their drive to find an anchor point they might attach to young women, to their own mothers, to powerful men, to religious leaders, to military contexts, and to exo-cultures. The most interesting ones are the more daring ones, signaling their status on the boundary by exotic ornamentation and secret signals.

But then comes the news that gender is not diadic, that in fact it is not two separated biological states but rather a continuum, dumb-bells shaped with bulges on each end instead of the middle, and that it is not immutable -- one can change gender. One can combine two genders. One can, in fact, have two genomes in one body. The gender-controlling protein template can be XY as standard, or XXY or XYY or XXYY or XX but never YY. The more we know, the more confusion there is, but also the more scope for science fiction as we speculate on what that might mean. Might evolution develop what amounts to a three-gendered system of human being? Will it necessarily be tied to birth? Could it be voluntary the way transgender people are today, or might it be a new stage of growth? What organs might evolve?

RELIGION IS LIKE LANGUAGE

On the one hand it could be designed consciously, like Mr. Spock’s Vulcan or Esperanto, but more commonly it grows in response to the need to say something. It has points of reference -- nouns and verbs -- plus an internal structure, a grammar, which also responds to the way the people in question think the world is shaped. There is no need for an Inuit to talk about a tree and no need for a Tahitian to talk about an igloo. But the underlying concepts might be shared -- things like shelter or awe, the meaning level of experience and emotional response. They just won’t be attached to the same nouns and verbs.

Religion evolves, as does language, so that new generations of speakers find new ways to talk. They respond to technological innovation, learning to “speak” math or texting. It’s easier to learn the points of attachment, because they are often matters of sensory perception, than to learn the invisible structuring of their relationships. A bowl is a bowl in China and in Italy, but the ways of speaking about them are not the same and what one puts in a bowl is bound to be different if the food comes from a different ecology, so a rice bowl is likely to be shaped differently than a pasta bowl. Still, if one makes a bowl of one’s two cupped hands, it is likely to be understood everywhere that the people have hands.

DOES SCIENCE CONTRADICT RELIGION?

Some say that science IS a new religion, but the truth is that science and religion are enmeshed in each other, one cannot move forward without the other and neither can hold the other back. The most obvious interface is the scientific study of religion. Over the past decades the paradigms have evolved quickly. At first it was like natural science, a matter of botanizing: collecting samples and trying to group by families. Most recently the idea that God must be somewhere has persuaded the media to call the Higgs boson the “God particle.” The space age has done serious damage to the idea that there’s a big humanoid in the sky.

My interest is in the brain and how it works. At first the idea was that there must be a little knob or patch somewhere in the brain that was the connection to “religion,” which actually connects to the idea that religion is about the supernatural and therefore must need a superorgan, a kind of antenna to pick up the signals. Indeed, running weak electromagnetic current through someone’s temples will cause a percentage of them will have a “spiritual” experience possibly hearing voices. A whole generation, having watched God “die” before their eyes, has tried to find a chemical that will attune their brains to another world.

SCIENCE FICTION ROOTED IN MYTHS

Two short stories have remained with me for more than fifty years, though I don’t know who wrote them. Both were based on mythology. In one story a space sailor went to a planetary brothel where the female who would provide intimacy was wearing a big turban. Settled in a small private room, she unwound her turban, revealing not snakes but worms and not ordinary worms. They were electromagnetic, slithery with gel like that used for a sonogram, and they were long and there were a LOT of them. The sailor was enveloped in ecstasy beyond anything he had ever known. Finally burnt out, the sailor was absorbed by the tentacles into the Medusa.

The other story was about a beloved woman, a dancer, whose body died. Scientists kept her brain alive and gave her a new body made of golden bangles, cleverly shaped in rings which -- fitted together in sequence -- reproduced the woman’s shape. They were held together by electromagnetic forces. Eurydice could dance more beautifully than ever before. I forget what equivalent to “looking back” this futuristic Orpheus couldn’t resist, but her brain, her identity source, died. Maybe the music stopped. The golden rings showered to the floor, scattered and chiming.

The best science fiction mixes “hard science” with human truths, like the series of stories about the children who survived an alien spaceship crash. They appeared to be human, but they could fly and read minds. Far from being recognized as “above average,” they were resented -- maybe the way science nerds are in high school -- and had to work out strategies for sticking together.

Or there is another beloved scifi story that comes from the Old Testament fantasies about what an angel might be like. An old lady is washing the dishes and glancing at her backyard through the window over the sink. An angel crashes, the traditional bare young man with wings. She rushes out to help him, carrying a mug of warm milk she had made for herself. This brings the life back into the angel and he is soon well enough to fly off. Then she realizes that touching him had brought a kind of electrical force into her that has healed her rheumatism.

The metaphors go back and forth: sometimes the idea is Ouroboros, the snake with its tail in its mouth, and sometimes it’s the benzene ring. There are levels: science hardware builds the computer, software science writes the programs and algorithms, and the human wetware yearns to go beyond -- tries to capture the unknown, even unsuspected. The hard science is intriguing: I recall an essay describing the metabolism of green blood, copper-based, that worked on methane instead of oxygen. I can’t remember the particulars, just that it was so detailed and possible. But then the implications: could a red-blooded human love a green-blooded alien?

NEW PARADIGMS FOR BRAIN FUNCTION MEAN NEW PARADIGMS FOR WHAT WE CALL RELIGIOUS

Throw out theism, the big humanoid in the sky. Throw out institutions, the corporations that grow up around a particular world view. Throw out history and even art. What is left? An ability to sense the holy. Is it in the perceiver or the perceived or in some transaction between them? I’m betting on the transaction.

Sensory information comes into the body many ways. Some organs have their own nexus of nerves that sorts and shapes the information. Then the nerve impulses begin a journey through various centers that have evolved over the millennia. The most immediate is the one that decides whether immediate danger is presenting. Then another place in the brain decides whether to freeze, fight or run like hell. Even as the decision is being made, the messages are going out to the body to act, and the brain must process which way to run, whether to jump over that branch, and a lot of other muscle, position, and kinetic information. Only when enough information gets through all the instant reaction do you understand that the big dark shape is not a grizzly bear but your Uncle Fred come to call you for dinner. Then the extra energy has to drain off in laughter and panting.

INSTITUTIONAL RELIGION V. SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE

The “power” of religion and the whole question of whether there is a source of power outside of human beings, as symbolized by being “high in the sky,” is confused because two different realms are discussed without being distinguished from each other.

One kind is religious experience INSIDE persons. We know that scientifically a human being is a colony of specialized cells cooperating to operate as a systematic unified creature. Information from the outside world comes in through the cells that can perceive light waves, sound waves, temperature change, pressure and so on. The electrochemical codes are passed to “sorting centers” where some is cancelled and others are marked “high priority.” Complex and differing locations in the brain then balance the sense infos against each other according to a set of assumptions, decide whether and what to do, and store much of the info as memory associated with the emotion the senses generated in the whole body.

There is no other known way to get concepts into a human being: nothing that can “beam” into a head though people will claim it happened. There is no scientific information about anything that can pick up more than these sensory things. (Though we can expand our senses with technology, so we know we are constantly penetrated by forces like x-rays.) But we know a lot about how complex and quick the internal process is in order to support survival, the engine that drives it all, keeping us out of the tiger’s maw.

We are also aware of phenomena like waves, esp. those in the brain, and electrochemical self-correcting loops that maintain coordination and homeostasis. This is what religious experience in terms of “the oceanic feeling,” “the mysterium tremendum and fascinans,” and the “sublime” are about. It is personal, often described as beautiful, sometimes surprising and transforming, occasionally terrifying, and mostly not controllable -- though one can prepare for it or occasionally evoke it through memory or the arts or even drugs.

For the person having the experience, this sort of sensing of the sacred -- something greater than human beings -- can be empowering, leading to renewed efforts, forgiveness, generosity, confidence and so on that make that person stronger. This is often called “spirituality.” As in “inspiring.” The metaphor is breath, the breath of life, the reciprocity of oxygen in our lungs and blood.

The other impersonal kind of power might be described as “aspiring.” We don’t talk about A-spiring in the way we talk about A-theism. “A-” mean not. NOT a believer in the theos, the big god with all powers, all perception, all control and the Master Plan. Most religious institutions, but esp. the ones based on theism, are a-spiring. Human authority over other humans depends upon grouping them, usually hierarchically, but spirituality empowers the individual, sometimes so much that they can defy any crucifixion, inquisition, or justification of governmental institutions by religious institutions. The government, as we now see in the Middle East and the American South, is always striving to claim the Higher Power in terms of an authorizing and ultimate source of delegation. Traced back far enough, one comes to tribal chieftains in the Middle East, the ancient structure that was free-form, allowing for individuals until the culture turned to crops and domestic herds ten thousand years ago. That’s when the towns, temples and armies formed.

IN-spiring means drawing the spirit (as though it were breath) into the body. A-spiring means ignoring the spirit and trying to climb the hierarchical structures of society. (Much stronger since industrialization.) These structures developed out of the invention of writing and bookkeeping, which led to the disciplines of mathematics and philosophy. They are very powerful BECAUSE of their ordering ability which can support domination and control. They have built civilization: cities, temples, libraries, telescopes, rocket ships and so on. They have made it possible to treat cancer or AIDS and feed the world, but they have not given us the power to want to do it. This kind of power has no compassion -- only politics. It is competitive: “winner take all”, “last man standing is top man”, “number one”. There is no rule about protecting the least and the minority, the vulnerable who are often the growing edge.

The attitude of domination would have brought the human world to a standstill long ago except that it is not sustainable. Due both to internal flaws and external new ideas, the old order is always crashing. The planet itself is the ultimate structure on which we build and it changes constantly: erosion, climate change, earthquake and hurricane, the ocean acidifying, the air currents shifting, even solar storms -- all our infrastructure comes crashing down. If enough of us as a group survive, than human beings go on -- the flood is countered by the efforts and creativity of Noah.

But individuals, ourselves and those dear to us, remain vulnerable. Some will seek to force the dominators to provide what is needed. Some will accept their lot. Both can be kept whole by their individual spirit, whether they consider it formally religious or not. Awareness of what feels like an empowerment, a harmony with the universe, can be supported by what the Quakers call “Light.” Whether this is something “real” or not is beside the point. Maybe it’s a breaking through to the human heart of some great symphony of the cosmos or maybe it’s a form of euphoria contained by the body, but the consequences are evident in the actions of those who feel it.

When I started reflecting about “liturgy, ceremonies, worship, mass, Bundle Opening” and so on, I had not made this distinction and would have been discouraged from doing so, maybe subtly. Formal group activities in the Western world are usually in support of religious institutions which may or may not be separated from the governmental institutions. They are based on writing, which allows them to be accumulated historically in a body of laws and theories called theology. This was natural enough since I was studying in a denominational seminary. However, I was concurrently studying at a university “divinity” school that accepted a wider spectrum, at least in theory -- though they didn’t like the idea of what they called “phenomenology.” That is, the individual human sensorium as access to the sacred.

What kept coming back even after I left the ministry was the difference between institutional liturgy and individual religious experience. The two things interpenetrate so that sometimes a simple mass or elegant “high” ceremony can be a source of personal inner joy and connection. But religious experience is emergent in the individual human being (prayer, devotion, meditation, ordeal, intense intimacy) and often inchoate if electrifying. It’s a feeling, which means it is “whole body,” not just a brain function like reading. The accumulated interacting organs that are not quite hierarchical and sometimes competitive (when one’s gut diverges from one’s brain) are by religious experience finally harmonized.

Even if it’s not in words, which is not likely, it will be kept in memory which depends upon the concepts formed by the sensorium. Not the words learned in a class or from a book. In this context, spirituality is closer to dreams or psychotherapies that emerge from art or movement. They cannot be taught, but they can be found. Spirituality is not controlled by expert gate-keepers, but is always present and needs only a shift of consciousness.

DEEP EXPERIENCE

“The Bone Chalice” -- which began as my D. Min. thesis proposal -- now appears to be a lifework, morphing and splitting as it goes. Partly because it began as an academic exercise in hoop-jumping, it has been necessary to pry open a chrysalis of assumptions, footnotes and previous books by experts to get at the soft and potential larva within. It appears that -- for me at least -- that takes a long time. While I was in seminary, a fellow student who was a nun (it may have been the one David Loehr tried to pick up at Orientation, the sort who wears gray skirts and cardigans) told me I was post-Christian. I went with that idea for quite a while. Now I have a new idea.

I’m saying I’m “pre-theological.” When others responded to what I proposed, partly because I defined it as about “liturgy,” it was usually seen in terms of that person’s institutional liturgy: the mass or baptism or a communal meal. People can’t be blamed for categorizing new things according to what they know already. At first I was looking at prescribed rituals, almost always in a written script. But I was trying to discover principles applying to “emergent” and particularly land-based (autochthonous) experiences.

What I’m after is what I might call “deep experience,” a moment of intensity that can reorganize the mind. This takes me close to the people who use substances or other short-cut mind-altering strategies, but that wasn’t what I wanted to think about either. It could also take me off onto a side trail about electroshock therapy but I’ll resist. It could tempt me onto the rather shaky ground of the quest for the Big O, orgasm as the best experience there is. In religious terms “deep experience” might be called hierophany (that’s Eliade) or theophany (more specifically a direct experience of God/theos) or maybe epiphany or conversion (Saul into Paul) and so on. I was more interested in the sort of thing like the old days when Blackfeet young went up on the mountain to fast and meditate until their protective totem visited them. Some people claim that voluntary torture will do it (Sun Lodge) or any high-adrenaline situation (combat). As you see, vocabulary is a big problem -- there are not enough useful words.

It remains to say that Czikszentmihalyi and his ideas about “flow” are valid and approach “deep experience” but there is still another step to make it “spiritual” -- a word that has become so trendy that I’d like to go back to the more traditional “sacred” or “holy.” Still, this approach is “instrument-based,” the instrument being the human body (not just the brain but including the brain) in every sensory and skill dimension, producing a harmony that is probably expressed in brain waves, a kind of music.

Part of the reason I kept getting re-captured by traditional or even experimental institutional liturgies became clear when I looked back through the centuries: since writing was invented (let alone the printing press) it has controlled religions. The focus of development moved to written dogma and specific words Language became overwhelmingly important. Among the UU’s, at one point the hymnal was revised to throw out all the “God” talk and then later it was revised (often by hand, women sitting in pews after church with stacks of hymnals alongside) to take out all the man/men. But the tunes lingered until new ones were composed.

A UCC minister and religious writer, the Rev. Lillian Daniel, one of those honey-haired, blue-eyed good girls (only lacking wings), made a popular furor by declaring that she was bored by “spiritual but not religious” people who find God in the sunsets, whom she claims are invariably seated next to her on airplanes. I don’t fly these days, so maybe that’s why I only find gorgeously diffracted light in sunsets (very red right now because of forest fires) but that doesn’t keep me from “feeling” it with a sense of heightened perception. I just give the same thing a different name.

But Rev. Daniel wants that person in church. She says, “There is nothing challenging about having deep thoughts all by oneself.” She says you must, “dig deeply into a tradition that you did not invent all for yourself.” Though she attended the U of Chicago Div School, she resisted the call of Bibfeldt (both/and). www.ucc.org/feed-your-spirit/daily.../spiritual-but-not-religious.html‎ I did not. She’s welcome to her academic and institutional bias, but I find in those same sources what she might define as “the devil,” stuff that doesn’t work and actively hurts people.

Reflecting on Rev. Daniel’s assertion, I haven’t had many deep experiences in church with the exception of congregational singing, though there’s a great deal of suffering in the words of traditional hymns, so it must be the communal sound. Nor do I find that solitude is an obstacle to personal deep experience. It’s not that I’m just roaming around in my subconscious with no reference to the world -- it’s more like the earth itself and my going to and fro on it is my text rather than the secondary interface of words -- with the exception of stories and some poetry. I never have had an ecstatic reaction to dogma or morality.

I decided that I would chuck out any word-based liturgies, which means all those Middle-Eastern institutions that so love their books and transcribed rules and all the bookkeeping -- the numbers written in Saint Peter’s Pearly Gates no-fly book.

Luckily, the recent scientific study of neurological brain function reveals that brain cells remember and think by patterns of molecule interaction supplied by the senses -- not just the five basic holes in the head (sight/sound/smell/taste/feel) but the whole body’s constant information loops from gut, feet, main organs, fingertips, orientation to gravity, state of arousal and so on. The brain is only the sorting and settling bridge of the ship, where the monitoring thermostat and rheostat readings are managed and course corrections are issued. It is in the brain that intense, passionate (deep) experience is determined and then experienced. Remember that the brain is part of the body which need not be accessed through words.

Put simply, the place to start is with the instrument, not the sheet music: the singer, the wordless song, and the dance. If the body is responding to place, time and other beings, and has formed categories of thought that do not censor or distort, and if the body is expressive in sound and movement, then it is likely that the harmony of the pattern will yield the “deep experience.”

To summarize, this bottom-up approach to “deep experience” does not depend on intervention from above, via a book-based institution, but rather on holistic experience through the entire sensory body (guided by the management of the brain), allowing concepts to emerge from immediate experience, and expressing engagement with them through movement, including utterances. This is an immanent theory of the sacred, even autochthonous since the world is taken as the ground of being. It is therefore local, but unified by the capacities of the human body as an instrument of perception and expression. Therefore it is in opposition to print-confined, pew-confined, pulpit-confined religious methods.

YOU ARE NOT YOUR BRAIN, DUMMY!

The brain is only the managing system, the dashboard! Your consciousness is the dials of feedback system (speedometer, oil level, etc.), but what the brain is managing is your body! Your WHOLE body -- guts and all. Skin, five classic senses plus many others, some subconscious like beating your heart and digesting your food and healing your cut. The brain is constantly gathering, sorting, and prioritizing information from the body and deciding what to do about it. The main goal is survival.

http://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_wolpert_the_real_reason_for_brains.html There are 86 TED talks in the category called “brain.” This particular one is the closest to what I’m trying to say. (But I’ve watched only a few of the other 85, so . . .) I’m right there with Wolpert when he says that the difference between inanimate and animate (living) things is that the latter move. The fact that they can move for their own purposes, either to approach food and sex or to avoid trauma and poisoning, means that they are alive and have intentions or at least reactions. In the early moments of evolution, like bacteria, there is only a one-celled animal, but it has both kinds of movement: approach and avoid. No brain, no skeleton, no muscles, but it can move.

Wolpert says that movement can account for everything a body does except sweat. I think he should broaden his category to “secrete.” In the bacterium, that would mean managing the permeability of the cell boundary to let certain molecules in and push other molecules out. The brain cells must do something like that, because every cell does that, but that’s not interacting with the world. Still, bodies excrete as well as secrete. Muscles are involved in excretion. We even speak of a bowel movement.

People who get all hung up on a person being the same as a brain are thinking of consciousness, which is a late evolution. I would describe emotion as the response of the body that is both voluntary and involuntary, but both are the movements of organs or molecules circulating (movement) in the solutions of the body. Some of it is conscious and some of it is not. Training and practice can move the boundary back and forth.

If the brain isn’t functioning properly, it will be demonstrated to others through aberrant movement. That movement might originate in a failure of sensory systems, like problems with sight and hearing.

There is a more mysterious and recent development in the positive function of the brain which is “mirror cells,” which means that if some one else moves, as in dancing or playing tennis, the person who is watching will “ghost” the movement in their own brain and muscles. It’s possible that this is the beginning of a more intense empathy -- feeling what other people feel -- that someday might amount to mental telepathy.

History seems to show that the more we understand each other, the more likely we are to be doing things that help everyone survive. So how do we get that understanding? Art. Expression. Story. This is the eventual conclusion of the following TED TALK.

Damasio is in pursuit of consciousness. http://www.ted.com/playlists/1/how_does_my_brain_work.html We have seen that the work of the brain is to manage the body, taking in “a flow of sensory images” both inside the flesh and outside the skin -- the environment we cannot access except through our senses even though it what we draw sustenance from.. In the process of sorting and weighing these sensory information systems, we spontaneously create “a “self” which is the consciousness. These are managed by the construction of a map or grid in our brains, that is actually graphed on the cerebellum as memory in the language of the senses. Electrochemical impulses, coordinated by rhythm (not the heart’s rhythm but one like it), travel along the axons of the neurons in what is called “the connectome.”

This shuttling has two goals: first is the maintenance of homeostasis in the molecular fluid system of the body: water, salt, sugar, hormones of all kinds, and the like -- even the “drugs” like adrenaline or cortisol. The second is the homeostasis of the body in the environment, achieved by movement which is part of what separates animals from vegetables. Animals can change location, can alter their environment, can change their relationship to the environment. The concerns here are food, shelter, freedom from trauma and more, particularly in relation to the part of environment that is other people.

The body is an instrument controlled by the brain: the self is the music, all of it that is conscious. Because of writing or video or even actual music or other art, the self can persist apart from the person’s body as memory and emotional response in other people. A body can exist without a brain if it has support -- person as oyster or what is called a “vegetative state.” A brain without a body cannot do anything and will not support identity. People who think the brain can be kept in a jar to preserve identity are wrong. There will be nothing for the brain to manage. All dashboard dials show zero.

Damasio says the molecular fluid system is the most important set of parameters to keep consistent. If molecules that are misshapen, missing or entirely alien are floating around in the fluids of the body and brain, the self will be lost. In addition, the top of the spine (brain stem) is the earliest part evolved and formed in utero. It controls the most basic functions of the body. One half allows consciousness and the other one does not. If the half that allows consciousness is undamaged but the unconscious half is damaged, the “self” will be trapped in a non-responsive body, a parked car. This is probably what makes people think they can just remove the brain and have the person. The only part that is missing in a nonresponsive body containing an otherwise functioning brain is the movement part. The molecular fluid system, the sensory signaling throughout the body must persist in order for there to be consciousness, but that can go on without movement if others supply the basic nutrients and air, so on. None of it will show up on the dashboard.

The cerebral cortex, in Damasio’s words, “conducts the great spectacle of the mind,” the score for the self’s music. Once produced by an individual, one’s instrument is playing in concert with many other instruments who are “conducted” by sociocultural regulation, the homeostasis of culture. Just like the homeostasis of water or sugar, the culture keeps behavior within the parameters that sustain life. (We might call it morality, which is not necessarily conventional since the conditions of society are sometimes outside the usual parameters and demand a new morality for survival.)

But this means endangering the curiosity and wandering that allow the exploration of new ways and spaces, perhaps at great cost and perhaps with great rewards, and often identified as art. It is this force, in my opinion, that takes us closest to what Damasio calls: “True happiness and the possibility of transcendence.” We call this religion, but that implies an institutional capture of beliefs and practices. In truth, when the brain is skillfully playing a gorgeous symphony of the senses, perhaps with others, it is capturing holiness. It is participating in the cosmos, which is music. If the brain-body instrument is just sitting in church, it may be playing a tin whistle in a tune that is merely noise.

HOW INSTITUTIONS CAPTURE DEEP EXPERIENCE

Deep experience is not that different, I think, from Maslow’s “peak experience,” which seems to be back in public consciousness again. The effervescence (explosion is too big a word) of the newer neurosciences -- not just the technological perception of molecular nerve function but also the patterns discovered by computer analysis of mega-statistical accumulations such as internet behavior records -- reminds me very much of the blossoming psych theories of the Seventies when I was just staggering out of a very intense relationship.

For me, taking the Maslowian approach of looking for what makes people happy and healthy (which, after all, was only pushing forward the Menninger pattern, though the latter was concentrating on “maturity” instead of fulfillment) gave me a place to start. Erikson’s evolution of the individual from birth to death was helpful, Perl’s counterphobic confrontations, Rogers’ value of empathy as the basis of relationship, Winnicott’s formation of self in relation to others -- all these were miles and miles beyond my undergrad psych classes, which were merciless examinations of rats in glass boxes. Deep experience is a confirmed, valuable, manageable phenomenon, perhaps the most purely human capacity there is -- so far.

How do institutions capture deep experience? Call it faith or call it patriotism or even call it falling in love -- all three become captured in religions, nations and marriage. These common social structures (usually built on an economic foundation) use deep experience to capture people. Institutions are ways of capturing “territory” (actual or virtual or a combination of both) in structured, stabilized systems for the sake of safety, predictability, and therefore profit. If deep experience dissipates, then usually habit or peer pressure or self-interest will take over, but sometimes it is necessary to use force and punishment.

In American society today we are kept in our places by barrages of advertising that model how we should be, what rewards and punishments will ensue, and various stories illustrating those. Underneath this “mainstream” is always an undercurrent of counter-culture, parasitical culture, experimental individuals and small specialized groups. These alternative “ways” are closely related to the ecology and to economic niches created by the larger stream.

To make a quick list, religions and nations (and marriage which is a merging of both to keep households orderly, solvent and contributing) use the following means of creating allegiance:

aesthetics: is it beautiful

brain function: you can’t do what you can’t think

affiliation: with whom do you belong

individual psych patterns: what has life taught you so far

community: where is everyone going

protection: help me out here

stories: and then what might happen

writing: recording rules, decisions, bookkeeping

All of these means use content drawn from the ecology and the ways people relate to it. Thus, the surface of the planet is covered by a mosaic of various human arrangements. A religion or government developed to fit one place will not necessarily work in another -- in fact, probably not. But the constant is the human part: if it is true of most or all humans, it will work. Often these are family patterns, or child-raising practices.

Governing institutions merge with religion to exclude some people, punish others, control behavior with laws and criminalization, and set norms of behavior. For a nation to function, it must submerge religious dissension, often by ruling it irrelevant.

At the root of both is basic turf protection, the impulse of all living beings to survive by protecting their environment and claiming whatever they need. Not every living being is driven to expand, to claim more land, more followers, more profit, more domination, but many are. When it comes to institutions, the drive to dominate seems far more powerful than the drive to submit, though they always go together. A general cannot dominate the battle without the voluntary obedience and submission of his subordinates. Though there is a sense in which governing institutions (nations, cities, the securities exchange, the United Nations) have a virtual element (waving flags, brass bands, statues of idealized personification, images of heaven and hell) they tend to be pretty much earthly.

Religion can trump anything of this real world by claiming an imaginary virtual world that seems so powerful as to cause a change of heart: the promise of a better place, the threat of everlasting punishment. If a religion can use the elements listed above to make this happen, it can overpower governments. The trouble is that then there is chaos, unless the church has an infrastructure capable of taking on the functions of a nation. Most of them are not able to deal with matters outside their own turf, and their method of keeping order inside the nation might be to simply elimination of all competition and difference.

This, of course, causes something they cannot see because of the smallness of their vision: it makes them vulnerable to the capacity of every other nation to generate prosperity by providing options and a rich inspirational life. Violence, fear, and threats -- all demand huge economic resources while diminishing the impulse to experiment, reach out and grow. All force-based nations must fail, particularly if they are rooted in punishment-based religions.

I come from a mildly progressive background that believed in cooperatives, pluralism, and democracy -- not just in the sense of being guided by majority vote but also in the sense of protecting dissent as a valuable growing edge. To an authoritarian government this “reads” as weakness and confusion. Indian reservations are a good example of a population where three-handed institutional power (tribe, BIA, state) and multiple styles and goals full of exploitable gradients have been both the strength (because no one can grab the snake by the throat -- there are too many of them) and the weakness (they go off in every unpredictable direction).

Deep experience, when described as Native American spirituality, is ascribed to reservation lands and religious practices. People come hoping to find a guide to achieving something life-changing, but it is a circle. Deep experience is not in a place or a protocol: it is in the perceiving human. If those people would simply change their own lives -- perhaps using the Ericson steps, the Perls confrontation, the Winnicott tenderness, the Rogers empathy, and so on -- then deep experience would come to them. As AA recommends, the first step is surrender of the craving for power.

What may trump all our games of “Let’s You and Him Fight,” (Eric Byrne’s “Games People Play” from that same favorite era) is the great glory of the cosmos and the great endangerment of this little planet. These are pushing the realignment of both government and religion, human by human.

If one’s culture is based on guarding resources, claiming turf, excluding intruders, then it becomes important to preserve one’s literal life along with everything else. Then immortality is just another form of hoarding, wanting to have bigger, higher, more, even after death and to be deserving of it.

If one’s culture is based on relationship with everything else -- other people, other creatures, other lands to the extent that you can know them -- then the feeling that everything is going on, an enduring process that includes your influence on them, your attachment to them, then a view of death that is a dispersal through the cosmos, dissolving into it, a generosity, is satisfying.

At the end of this piece I’m posting the formal abstract for a paper called “The Nature of Feelings: Evolutionary and Neurobiological Origins” by Damasio and Carvalho. The concept from their work I’m using is that:

“Feelings are mental experiences of body states that guide the responses to:

tissue injury

optimal function

threats to the organism

specific social interactions”

“Feelings constitute a crucial component of the mechanisms of life regulation, from simple to complex. Their neural substrates can be found at all levels of the nervous system, from individual neurons to subcortical nuclei and cortical regions.”

The task I set myself in “The Bone Chalice” was to develop a theory of liturgy based on “feeling” -- specifically the feeling of the Sacred or Holy as defined by Mircea Eliade. One central guide is that of Turner’s three parts created by envisioning the state of feeling this Holiness as “liminal” or over a threshold: going over the limen into the special space, being in that special numinous space, and emerging from that space. One value of the liminal space seems to be that it is a state that allows one to change or confirm deep meanings that guide one’s life. Either undergo a conversion or sees more deeply into what was already accepted. This seems to be somehow related to the necessary survival compromises between the individual and the social context. They may have intense personal meaning. While in this state, all humans are perceived as equal in value. I take this as being the heart of justice.

Parallel to these feelings, which are derived from introspection and experience, is the new study of the neurobiological phenomena of neuron, subcortical nuclei and cortical regions. Again, there are three parts: the intake of sensory signals from the outer world, the processing through the subcortical nuclei, and then decisions at the cortical level that are meant to address the short list of four categories above, for the purpose of causing the individual to survive, which is what drives evolution. Bad processing weeds out the badly adapted, not just the one’s not equipped but those who don’t “get it.” The ability to grow and change when presented with new meaning is of enormous survival value, not just in terms of length of life but also in quality.

It has been established by now that animals are not different from us except that humans have more powerful and elaborate internal levels of processing, especially those located in the unique human prefrontal cortext behind the forehead. Though some believe that animals perceive the Holy, it is not proven. But it IS proven that animals -- even rats -- have a feeling of justice in the sense of sharing resources and providing compassion, based on understanding. (I’ll have to nail down footnotes for these.) For them the beginnings of problematic individual versus group quandaries are present mostly in terms of pecking order, turf ownership and sexual competition. Animals do not appear to have ideas that let them contradict their instincts, but humans seem to affiliate in ways that suppress instincts like compassion and sharing. Or maybe that’s not unique to humans: it’s well-known that dogs in packs will do things that none of the individual dogs would do separately. It’s just that they probably don’t reflect on this difference, so have no regret nor plans for the future.

In a previous post I contrasted a god of compassion for the suffering masses against a godless world where events other than those of humans simply happen without purpose. I asked, what is the missing element that connects a religion constructed around the first and a philosophy constructed around the second. I think it is in our innate sense of justice: not so much deserving or punishing as in an equity of moral standing, of dignity and significance. We have essential feelings of Holiness which are accompanied by feelings of what is Justice to human individuals. This is not the same as morality or rules laid out by an institution, whether a church or the law or any other cultural construct. One might say that there is a gut-feeling of what is just.

Wikipedia: “Studies at UCLA in 2008 have indicated that reactions to fairness are "wired" into the brain and that, " ‘Fairness is activating the same part of the brain that responds to food in rats... This is consistent with the notion that being treated fairly satisfies a basic need". Research conducted in 2003 at Emory University involving Capuchin Monkeys demonstrated that other cooperative animals also possess such a sense and that ‘inequity aversion may not be uniquely human,’ indicating that ideas of fairness and justice may be instinctual in nature.

Perhaps our social embeddedness in institutions is what allows us to ignore and suppress our sense of “inequity aversion” (a fancy term for gut feeling) by saying that others “don’t deserve” whatever. Or perhaps this is what allows us to force rules to persist long after their usefulness. (Not many of those admirers of Leviticus note that they ought not to wear “mixed fibers.”) Certainly group identity that erases “inequity aversion” makes war possible on the modern scale, especially that waged via satellite and predator drone instead of face-to-face where you can smell the garlic or haggis on the other guy’s breath. But then, in the midst of so much destruction as there is in today’s world, there is so much accidental unjust death that conflict loses its social context. Existential despair, as in war, erases the gut-feeling of what is just.

It is possible for very young human beings to “feel” justice BEFORE the social context and institutions begin to define and influence what should be done and why. Is it possible for older human beings to change their minds about something like homosexuality, which varies from one culture to another? We know it is and that it happens through intense (liminal) experiences that might have been organic to the moment or designed in an effective way, maybe in a movie. That moment of meaning-shift probably felt “holy” because of its intensity and even purity. Another element was probably empathy -- not sympathetic pity, but shared second-hand experience -- which gave new information to the brain: not just sensory input but also interpretive information about survival, even something so elementary as needing each other in order to get through an experience.

Okay, so everyone has summoned up their sensory access to the Sacred, has centered their breathing and relaxed enough to let their guard down. Now what?

This is the time and place for the reaffirmation of the group (assuming we’re dealing with a group) and what makes it a community. In some times and places the simple fact that everyone lives in that area means they are part of that group -- parish, tribe, family. Other times and places the individuals have come together in a “gathering,” so what is it that brought them together? A status, a belief, a yearning for something, a determination to change everything or maybe just to sustain themselves? Now is the time to identify it.

Maybe it will be a story, most often the story of the founding of the group or maybe the story of what brought an individual to the group. Maybe it will be relating to a specific leader who is the “flagpole” that leads the way. It might be rational reflection in the manner of science or theology. It might be the valorization of some quality or the affirmation of the dimension of identity that indicates belonging. It might be testifying or witnessing.

A leader might be the main speaker, a performing subgroup might sing, the whole might sing, there might be a ceremony of intitiation or cleansing. There is an episode of “Midsomer Murders” in which Masonic rites are shown, things that are normally kept very secret indeed. The applicant for membership is brought into the room hooded with one foot bare and one foot in a slipper. (“barefoot and slipshod.”) Around his neck is a hanging noose. He wears an apron, a reference to the Biblical dance of David before the Lord because this ceremony has a religious authorization besides admitting only persons privileged by community respect -- in the opinion of the pre-existing members.

When the experience of belonging is intense, even if it is one individual confronting the universe as a reflecting part of it, then one is open to insight, a widening consciousness, that can allow deep shifts in the understanding of how life proceeds, because part of homeostasis (that which allows life to go on) is the conviction that one understands life, that it has meaning. This may not mean change: it may be reaffirmation of what is already believed.

At the end of this section of a “service,” particularly if it has triggered change, something has to return the person or group back to ordinary life. Perhaps it is a song or prayer, perhaps a recessional on the part of the celebrant, maybe the handing out of something, or a blessing. Last of all is a command or precept about how to live: “go in peace,” “do no harm,” “celebrate each day as it comes,” “sin no more.” This reverses the passage over the limen.

But none of this three step process has to be in words. It could all happen in metaphorical concepts, as in a dream, a vision, an experience. What counts is the structure, the pattern, the belief-system that is brought to consciousness and possibly supports change.

Another factor is the extent to which the smaller group belongs to a larger society, for what brought them together may be persecution and resistance, powerful forces that may prompt life-threatening consequences to the individuals on behalf of preserving the quality of life for the smaller group, forcing changes to the large group. Sometimes there is no way to resist -- perhaps in the face of catastrophe like drought or tsunami or earthquake. Then a new group may form that takes on the moral challenge of protecting displaced and suffering people. They will need ways to sustain their energy and focus: religion can be part of that.

One Jewish group is dedicated to gathering the body parts torn and scattered in explosions and other disasters, in order to treat them in a ceremonial honoring way that sustains and is sustained by the larger believing community. Eventually, these small horrifying but necessary acts with their example affect the human community of the whole planet, but the horrifying collection of flesh must be either sustained by deep religious connection or be imposed on the lowliest workers by authorities.

In American general culture we do not honor such acts and pay them the minimum, except for contract businesses who clean up after murder or accidents -- for a fee. I expect the employee turnover is high and that the president of the company doesn’t go into the field much. American mainstream religion is based on the premise that deserving believers never have to do dirty or demeaning work, because their deservingness will make them prosperous. As the 9/ll rescuers discovered, such work is risky and after the emergency is over, compensation thins out.

Assumptions about life that are captured in religious groups often promise they are a permanent solution, but in a world that is whirl, both in its actual operation and in the changing processes of new perceptions, “permanent” is a silly idea. Nonfunctional and, at heart, ridiculous -- not in touch with reality. Therefore, the energy of a religious institution ought to be going into awareness and response, rather than self-preservation. Freeze or flee only works for individuals in dangerous situations, not for organizations.

WEBBING OVER THE ABYSS

it is the abyss. A geologically-termed theological subject which is not about the theos at all, but about the anthros and our current meaning vertigo. I made a metaphorical image of sitting on the edge of the abyss while a foul and sucking wind blew up out of the depths. Well, I guess it has to blow down INTO the abyss to be sucking, but we can feel it pulling at our feet, even caressing our faces. As a species, we have left the comforting babyhood tales of being cherished, all different, and trusted our lives to science. Very mixed results.

On the one hand it’s given us all sorts of terrific technology and on the other hand it has diminished us to self-hating fuzz on the thin surface of a third-circle planet in the arm of one galaxy among the many, where we continue to war and rape and destroy just the same as we always did. The reaction to this truth ranges from suicide to creation, heroin to song.

When I go to look up Abyss, the word turns out to popular. All the images are blue, round, underwater and full of either nosy people or crazy monsters. This image is getting threadbare and so is everything else. Even the holocausts. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yesterday’s news. Good people want to fence the Void off and baby people want to dangle us over it. Not push us in, because the goal is pretty much extortion and there’s no ATM down there.

Humans are meaning-makers knitting the senses into grand concepts. But all the while the world is both horrifying and chance-based. We’re just distracting ourselves. I woke up this morning to the sound of the cat vomiting into my computer keyboard -- having a hard time not thinking about it though the thing still seems to work.

I’ll refrain from nasty jokes, but here’s an account of how TED talks evolved: http://nymag.com/news/features/ted-conferences-2012-3/index2.html The present idea, the article suggests is “eighteen-minute nerd-bomb disquisitions—flies in the face of what is commonly understood about the Internet’s viewing habits: Shorter is better. Dumber is better.” Us snobs prefer Edge.org, esp. us OLD hippie nerds who were devoted to the Whole Earth Catalog. The dream is still alive.

Lately a lot of people have discovered the horror of war and famine. They look at the shocking photos, drop a fiver in a begging veteran amputee’s cup, and after five they cocoon. You’re not supposed to go to anyone’s house without calling first to ask permission, even out here in the Boonies. No drop-ins. No hitch-hikers. No left-overs. I’m that way myself.

And yet somehow we manage to discover each other, people we would never meet in reality. I’m talking Internet. We form cobwebs over the mouth of the abyss and the cats take naps on them. On a good day. I just took a nap to the drone of a grain augur moving wheat out of the bin, into a truck to go to the elevator to go to the railroad to go to the ship to go to some country far away that bakes bread. We don’t grow the kind of wheat for noodles. But we grow a lot of barley for beer.

PART TWO The Sensorium

Intro

How does sensory information, usually specific to a particular ecology, become transformed and distilled into meaning so vital to human beings that it reaches the level of being Sacred?

First of all, of course, the person has to have sharpened senses, usually focused on survival -- either as a way to find food or as a way to avoid becoming food. That’s the way it is for all animals, but we admit we don’t smell as well as dogs, see as well as eagles, and so on. Still, we have skills and priorities and those can be negotiated so as to hear jazz or interpret YouTube vids -- whatever. Too much of modern life is a mono-sense, a mono-culture, with blurry priorities that teach us to shut out rather than to focus and draw in new perceptions. Not enough sharp danger.

Second, the brain’s networking (better to use a verb) which consists of both neural nodes specific to senses and cross-node or distant processing connections. (Somewhere on YouTube is an actual photo of a neuron axon snaking around through the maze of cells like an extension cord in search of the proper connection, which it probably “knows” through “smell” which is the same thing as molecular analysis. This animal filament growth is much like the mycelia that connect humble mushrooms to the root-hairs of trees so powerfully that if the mushrooms are all removed, the trees die.)

Third, most of this processing of information is set up early in life and hard to change, but not all of it is. Humans are the only animals able to think about “how” they are thinking as well as “what” they are thinking. This is often done outside the individual in the culture, which can act as if it were a unified individual though it isn’t, and ask individuals to entertain new ideas, discard some of the old. We manage ourselves in part by watching the people nearby, esp. the ones we admire. If they change, we change.

Fourth, this is an “emergent” skill that comes about through the interaction of the unconscious-but-busy processes of neuron connections. Before this kind of reflection can take place, another skill must “emerge:” that of consciousness, knowing that you are thinking and then getting access to how you are thinking. Not everyone can do this latter. Some call it “reflexivity.” Researchers are VERY interested in these emergent skills such as “reflexivity.” War is a reflex: peace is reflexive, being aware of one’s behavior. Pulling the trigger is a reflex: NOT pulling the trigger is the result of reflection, reflexive, considering the consequences. Psychotic “shooters” lack this skill.

In past decades we have talked a lot about “consciousness-raising”, meaning recovering awareness of neglected realities, both human and environmental. Women sat in circles with a lit candle in the middle, telling the stories of their lives and real-izing each other. “Who knew?” we asked. “Who knew?” and “You, too?” It was patterned and intense, life-changing, courage-building, sometimes doomed. It still had not reached the level of being Sacred, though it was certainly on the way.

The women who had been taught that the institution of their church denomination was Sacred tried to capture the hierarchies and offices. They’ve done pretty well -- becoming bishops and so on. But there was an unexpected side-effect: instead of achieving the status and respect of the office, the office became unimportant, just management and caretaking, shrugged off by alpha men. If women enter a high-status vocation, all the status goes out of it. But that’s just social status stuff. It can be pretty intense (consider what happened to the uppity Joan of Arc) but it is still socially determined and enforced.

Still, it was fun thinking about God as a Goddess, Jesus as a daughter. Theology is all metaphors and it can’t be confined except by authority and thinking in boxes. It’s mostly writing and a kind of philosophy that’s like math, algebra syllogisms: “if this is true, then that must be so.” Everything must have evidence -- even science which is, let’s be honest, a competing theology with no theos. If one can keep a healthy sense of possibility, it’s good.

None of this is sacred experience. Some people think about sex as a kind of patterned experience that they hope will bring them ultimate ecstasy, like that of Saint Theresa of Bernini’s portrait in her orgasmic state of beatitude. The secular sex experimenters try helpers, accoutrements, drugs, electrical gizmos -- but the human body can only perform the hat trick of orgasm so many times and only to the limits of the specific body. It’s a bribe for procreation, not an ultimate end.

All these things are social, shared, even useful. But they are not what I mean by sacred experience. This is not to say that all of the above, including sex, cannot be means to the end, materials for liturgy.

True sacred experience is more like being struck by lightning -- all systems of the body involved. But I’m thinking there are variations in the voltage. It can be lethal. Or occasional. Or I’m thinking it’s possible to feel the Sacred in a low-voltage constant way, a sort of quiet thrill through sense organs to emotion to thought to whole-body constant meaningfulness. You can prepare for it, I think, by being open and responsive, but there are no guarantees. It seems to help to be around people who have this confidence in existence, this feeling that it means something. I don’t have it. I just have a strong feeling that it exists, that it is emergent, and that it can’t be expressed in words -- it must be evoked by the arts.

If skill and insight are used to create a patterned experience that touches off the structuring of meaning for both individual and culture and if it is done with focus and passion, the result is very likely to be Sacred Meaning. No guarantees. Can’t be just connect-the-dots on Sunday morning. Takes energy. Can’t be replaced by reading the Sunday New York Times wearing jammies with espresso in hand and good music on your Bose.

No matter how skillful the liturgist, how resourceful and intense, there is no equivalent to the Sacred Moment that the outside world itself, belly to belly, can detonate in a person without any warning or defense. THEN all the resources of human skills become crucial in order to respond to the meaning of that contact. Won’t mean the same thing to everyone. Might never be told to anyone. If there is NO response, it will die.

PART THREE LITURGY

My reading of neuro-research, culture theory, and Alvina Krause’s 1933 thesis on creativity are converging on a new outline for my own manuscript: “The Bone Chalice.”

Liturgy/ritual are poetic, metaphorical ways of discerning, creating, and defending meanings strong enough to act on in our daily lives. So they are an art form.

Art forms come from the “ravenous brain” that seeks meaningful patterns everywhere and -- if it finds none -- invents them. The difference between art and some liturgical enactments is that art is usually provisional, exploratory, and maybe transient, but liturgy is meaning that has been captured by institutionalized religion that will destroy variance in order to protect continuity. It can be enforced meaning.

To survive, liturgy must be constantly recharged and re-enacted, so to some extent art is allowed within the religious establishment. Caravaggio can live a life outside of virtue so long as he keeps up the pretense of painting religiously admired subjects. Torture can be tolerated so long as the agony is interpreted as a demonstration of faith. Sex can be openly celebrated so long as it is seen as a metaphor for the erotic relationship with God.

When religious institutions are far too much of a mismatch to be compensated for by either art or theological apologetics -- as when priests become corrupt and lascivious -- then the establishment throws up a flurry of counter-accusations, moves to new populations, or just collapses. Their best defense is wealth, so that’s their biggest vulnerability. If the meaning of life is understood to be wealth, if it becomes clear that faith does not necessarily lead to prosperity, then one of the main supports of religious institutions is gone: then the search for meaning must look outside any established religion. Wealth is not meaning and will not yield meaning.

Deep meaning in the brain is complex and much of it is pre-human and subconscious. The concepts are there, not recorded in words but rather in a consciousness best expressed as image and metaphor, the latter defined as two images intersecting in thought. Words may result or words may evoke, but words are not the real content of the deepest meanings. If only words are valued, the deep meanings will cruise under the surface of consciousness like sea creatures, powerful but hidden.

Meaning is recorded in the whole body as sensory input from the environment. This begins as soon as there is enough brain formed in the fetus to begin registering its floating world and move its rudimentary limbs. As soon as this begins, the brain in its development responds to the sensory information. The brain is built molecule-by-molecule, neuron/axon by neuron/axon, by forming relationships according to a plan always shaped by reality. First and therefore deepest, sensory awareness is in contrasting binaries: heat/cold, moving/stationary, dark/light, sound/silence, alarm/calm. Much of it is transferred into the womb from the mother. This is true of emotions as well as sensations: the mother’s adrenaline is an active drug. So is serotonin and the other molecules of contentment.

At birth the amount of sensory information explodes, which pushes the formation of input-managing neuron nexuses for each sensory organ: ears, eyes, skin, nose, mouth. These are “educated” and grow according to the pressure of the new engulfing environment. But they are rarely, if ever, changed later in life, partly because any of the potentially energized neurons at birth that are not used will die away, leaving the space they occupied open for more neuron growth specific to what is happening. A Saharan brain does not need to think about snow -- it needs the brain space for sand and wind. It has been proven that if a sense organ is missing, say, due to blindness, then the space normally allocated to seeing will be taken up by other senses, likely by hearing.

These levels of sense and pattern hold the deepest foundational meanings. All cultures, no matter how resourceful, are built on these first concepts. The saints who have visions talk about their experience in these terms, but also in terms of parenting: being fed, held, comforted, cleaned. This is the next constant in human experience: enough care for the baby to survive. The baby’s survival drive is the most basic urgency, with the goal of achieving the homeostasic needs of the body: to eat, to sleep, to excrete, to explore the body by moving. But also to seduce by snuggling and to express distress by struggling. That is, relationship is the second most basic task of survival and the source of emotion from the beginning. A successful religion must support and interpret both.

MEANINGFUL LITURGY must relate to these basic needs, regardless of whether they are explicit in the service. Therefore, the liturgist ought to:

Explore the sensory information most valued by the congregation and what homeostatic (self-preserving) meanings they have, both for the individual and for the larger group -- possibly for larger categories like the nation or even the planet.

Find the limits of homeostasis: the symbolism of the worst destruction and the answering symbolism of how to preserve life.

HOW TO START: First of all there must be delineation of safety: a place, a time, a shield of some sort that should provide privacy, belonging, familiarity (even habit patterns), and probably relationship with a person or persons or personifications.

Second must be focusing: the call to worship, the concentration on the moment. Possibly there are words or actions: maybe a gesture, maybe an act like dipping fingers in water or lighting a candle or drumming or singing an anthem or processing.

These are the same ways that an artist begins. But an artist may have an intention or at least materials in front of him or her, even if only a computer screen. The artist has time to doodle, explore, wonder what would happen if . . . let the mind free-associate in almost the same way as the hypnogogic state before falling asleep. In short, let images rise up from the normally subconscious state. They may need to be triggered by making a mark, creating a sentence, blowing a note, making a gesture.

The context of liturgy as most people understand it is pre-determined by the institution, but if we can tolerate the open moment, which most people might call “meditation,” then deep meaning may rise from the subconscious. This might be easier done by individuals, but the Quakers and Buddhists have developed group meditation, each in their own way.

Human beings are defined by their responses to their environment, their ability to find the patterns that will preserve homeostasis. The guides they invent from their material culture are called liturgy, ritual, or maybe just “art.”

A TEST CASE

Instead of going to some remote place with a tribe that has a funny name, let’s choose a “tribe” that is with us, within us, the urban boys who do sexwork in the United States. This can be no more than a beginning.

Realize that to design any meaningful experience for this group or any other, one must accept their reality. What they say is real to them IS real to them, because it’s about them and nothing else except the world they inhabit. The most vehement talkback I get is that:

I’m judging them by my standards. (They don’t know what my standards are any more than I know what their standards are, but that’s not relevant.)
I’m getting off on feeling like I know them or feeling all tender about them, so therefore I’m doing what I do for ME, not for them.
There is no way I CAN know them.

So, after years of sitting here looking at their images -- both of them and by them -- and reading stories about them, what do I know?

Almost entirely they live in an urban setting, but when they leave that they go to water: beaches, streams. They are aware of the luxuries of the city, sometimes have access through sex work, but just as often may live like pigeons roosting in the rubble and the abandoned places.

Their world is movement-based: skateboards, surfboards, running, climbing, doing backflips, orienteering, parcours in a built environment. Like young animals of all kinds, when they run out of energy, they go flat and unconscious. If that isn’t safe, they suffer and take drugs.

Music is a driver, music with a beat. THEIR music.

Bodies vary but these are all male bodies. Physical styles are quite different, from the smooth and hairless naked body to the incredibly tattooed and studded spectacular skin. Performance-pride is a constant and therefore physical affliction, esp. something repulsive, is very much weighted. There’s a contradictory desire to believe they are irresistible. First impulse with an affliction is to hide it. Second impulse is to doubt anyone can cure it, even as they long for a cure. And always the guilt that somehow they caused it or deserve it, which is rarely addressed. To address it is to imply that they’re not in control of their own destiny, which they desperately need to believe they ARE -- when they are not fatalistically convinced that they are transient, doomed, and will die young so nothing matters.

No one is doing anything about their destiny. There are few practical societal responses to their needs. They go hungry, dirty, unsheltered, infected, abused, in unaddressed ways. On the one hand, they are stigmatized for performing sex acts for money and on the other hand there is a society-wide denial that they have sex, that anyone would ask them for sex or pay for sex with them, and anyway that sex with a boy doesn’t count because he can’t get pregnant and boys don’t care what they do. “Whipping boy” is not a metaphor -- it’s a reality underlain by the idea that boys can take it. If they can’t, they’re a “GIRL.” So first they are demeaned by having to do something unpleasant and socially forbidden and then they are trapped by their own sense of pride in themselves, whatever vestiges are left, and then no one will even name what they do.

What happens after that depends on the foundational sensory organization of their brain/meaning: in the womb, after birth, in the infant stages until walking and talking, in the way they are taken into daycare, Headstart, kindergarten, or just left to wander as they can or actively abused. Then again in the adrenarche years, what ways they found to form an identity, usually by joining some kind of group. So adolescence, the years of sexual self-definition, may be built on sand. Maybe quicksand.

The situation is different for the tough guys who grew up in abuse and debris, because the weak among them were weeded out by death. The ones who came from “nice” backgrounds with good educations -- even good smart boys can get thrown out of happy homes when someone dies or something finds out they are gay -- may suffer more because they remember the contrast.

What remedy is possible?

First, they need to be made safe: physically and emotionally.
Basic homeostasis needs to be maintained: whatever it takes to survive, including medicines and mates in the sense of equals, friends, belonging.
Role models.
Careful listening, because listening calls out their thinking and feeling. What is heard and recognized can be made real and useful.
Generation of options: small empowerments, awareness of choices in the moment and their consequences. Doing. Computer videos are excellent for this, but also actual art materials and building things, even rag tents and caves, tree-houses and squats.
Connection with others in common cause. (the Internet allows this to be planetary).

(to be continued)

At-risk boys are an insider culture. Perhaps then only they themselves could design a meaningful liturgy. An institution, even one as friendly as the Metropolitan Church, might not be able to reach them. I only led one Metropolitan Church service and therefore am not qualified to say much, but I was impressed that the focus was on relationship, one-on-one. Part of the ritual was that two men involved with each other came forward as a pair to be blessed. These congregations have a Christian focus and it also seems to be focused on the one-to-one relationship with God or, especially, Jesus.

YOU ARE NOT YOUR BRAIN, DUMMY!

The African man had had good luck on this day. Not just one but TWO elands had fallen to his spear. Now it is nightfall and the cooking fires have died down, but a sentinel fire is burning in the middle of the village. The little children with full bellies are sleeping like puppies in the huts. There has been enough meat for many families and they are happy. The man puts on his ceremonial headdress and takes his spear to stand by the fire. His weight shifts from one foot to the other. Slowly he raps the butt of his long spear on the ground in a steady rhythm. The other men get their spears and come to stand alongside him, synchronizing their spears with his, their rocking with his. The women come to make a second circle, clapping and rocking, adding a counterpoint, and singing.

The Plains Indian woman’s baby has died despite every effort. No one knows the cause. The mother wraps it carefully in a spotted fawn hide -- it is a very small baby. Singing, she walks out alone over the prairie towards the closest river coulee, some miles away. When she gets there, she climbs into a tree and finds a place that will cradle the wrapped baby. Then she sits beneath the tree, trying to bear the sorrow. In her belt bag of instruments is an obsidian hand-blade with an edge sharper than metal. This she uses to score her skin, cutting that releases serotonin into her system even as she loses blood. For several days she remains at the base of the tree, singing, hallucinating, dissociated from the world around her. Finally her brother, leading a horse because he knows she will be weak, comes to take her home.

Consider the survival problem of cultivated people: how to match their children into happy pairs that will responsibly raise the next generation in a way that’s good for them but also good for the whole group. So the British social template for the upper classes includes “coming out” with a grand ball for girls who have come of marriageable age. They wear white to indicate they are virginal and dance in a patterned way to show their skills. The men wear tuxes or tails, signs of high formality and properly worn with medals and sashes to show power.

Today this practice persists in terms of high school proms, when middle-class Americans use the British idea of how to mark prosperity and blessedness. Now the importance slips from the power of the family to produce a worthy mother to a kind of declaration of coming of age on the part of the girls. The senior prom replaces marriage, since young people now go through a period of co-habitation, but the expensive ball gowns once white and attached to marriage ceremonies are equally expensive. Now in colors and more influenced by Hollywood than princesses, sequins instead of diamonds. This becomes such an important ceremony that systems are invented to allow low-income girls to “borrow” the fabulous dresses so they can be proud.

At the same time, liberated young women may choose this significant moment to make a statement of their own. They do not appreciate being “marketed” as sexual objects, and so they go as a female pair, wearing tuxes and -- to show even further reversal -- high-top tennis shoes. Others, equally liberated, mock the event by dancing in explicit imitation of sexual union, defying any attempt to formalize or control sex by adults.

The kind of liturgy that interests me is this primal level where people “speak” in metaphor, both inventing and responding to pre-determined ceremonies. It isn’t created in words from a book (that’s the way of weddings) but in a code of behavior and sensory information.

Once at the Multnomah County Courthouse I was in the elevator in my Animal Control Officer uniform: sheriff’s badge, shirt and trousers originally chosen for the Sheriff’s posse on horseback -- so a wide-brimmed felt Ranger hat to match. I was going up to courtrooms and so were a dozen women arrested for prostitution the previous night. Some had fur coats over their skimpy outfits. Their hair had originally been elaborate, like their earrings and makeup -- all a bit blurred now. They reeked of Opium perfume, which had only been on the market a few months at the time. We were really crushed together, maybe too many of us, because the elevator got stuck. (It did that quite a lot.) They were a jolly bunch which was lucky. (It did that quite a lot.) We stood together for twenty minutes: me and the escorting officer and them. It wasn’t quite a liturgy. If we had begun to sing gospel songs and sway it little, it would have been.

Foundry work, especially. on the level of a homemade art bronze foundry in the days before cheap kits for sand-casting, was dangerous and required carefully patterned behavior. Exhaust fans for the extreme heat roared too loudly to play music. We wore asbestos protective gear and plastic face shields. So much was at stake that we had a prayerful beseeching undertone in our minds and then if it went well, we rejoiced. The connection to the most primitive beginnings of molding molten bronze was always there in the taste of burnt metal. It wasn’t about the actual art, but about the process. It was not a liturgy, but if someone staged a dance and called it “Vulcan’s Work”, using some of the gestures including the stream of molten metal, then it would be close.

Would it be Sacred? The potential would surely be there, but what would make it rise to the highest level? Skill? Intensity? Social context? Maybe all of the above. But the key has to be sensory awareness, personal experience, and a strong grip on either the structure of the event (Apollonian) or what can explode the structure (Dionysian) -- both can be powerful. Partly you have to feel it, and partly you have to figure it out. Partly it can be improvised and partly it can be a grand cultural tradition. Like the kids in this video:

http://vimeo.com/52129103

Saturday, January 25, 2014

WHAT IS THE ORIGIN OF RELIGION

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