ANOTHER OUTLINE

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 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.

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, but they are not recorded in words but rather in a consciousness best expressed as image and metaphor, 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 responds in its development 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 binaries:  heat/cold, moving/stationary, dark/light, sound/silence, alarm/calm.  Much of it is transferred into the womb from the mother.

At birth the amount of sensory information explodes, which pushes the formation of input-managing 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, 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 produce 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.” 

THE SENSE OF SOUND

The sense of sound begins with the beating heart of the zygote, contrapuntal to the beating heart of the mother.  Then her breath.  And the song of digestion.  The only way to get to absolute silence is with sound-canceling technology, because otherwise one hears one’s own body, even if you are nude to eliminate clothing friction.  

The earth itself rings like a gong and some places, many near mountains -- like Valier -- have a detectable hum.  Some speculate this is caused by a deep pressure among the tectonic plates that compress rock formations like quartz deposits, making them vibrate.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuRBM0i8mbI   Taos Hum

Psychologists trying to discover a way to make a situation unpleasant without doing physical damage resorted to recordings of a baby screaming.  They could hardly bear it themselves.  Here’s a very brief sound of a child screaming. It is meant to be intolerable, either brief or sustained, because the survival of children is crucial.  It demands response.

http://www.saunalahti.fi/klahdens/snd/child.wav  child screaming

To compensate for that unpleasantness, I hurry to offer a favorite hymn to fend off trouble.  Actually, it’s the tune that counts:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4rSAIts3MA  

from David Dodd in the Petaluma CA congregation: 

Hymn #1 in our hymnal is "Prayer For This House" (entitled, in the hymnal, "May Nothing Evil Cross This Door," which is really just the first line....). It's a beautiful hymn, with words by Louis Untermeyer (1885-1977), who, besides being an excellent poet, was an influential poetry anthologist in the early part of the 20th century, as well as a jewelry manufacturer. "Prayer For This House" is frequently used in house blessing rituals and building dedications, and its position as Number One is surely no accident. It's sort of a doorway into the whole hymnal. The tune is by Robert N. Quaile, a Methodist minister's son from Mallow, Ireland. He composed the tune in 1903. 

The more familiar Christian words begin “For All the Blessings of the Year.”  But it is the tune that makes it familiar, and it is the familiarity that is reassuring.

Smells are perceived by one-celled animals, but the same animals ARE vibrating in ways that would be perceptible only with instruments.  Vibrations permeate all of existence, our eyes see vibrations, our brains dance out alpha, beta, theta rhythms, we sing, we listen, we hum -- in both senses.  John Cage has alerted us all to the fabric of sound around us -- fridge going on and off, hissing radiator, rustling collapse of the hearth fire, dog thumping as he digs at a flea.  When I first came to Valier, I kept waking up because it was so quiet.  I was used to voices below the window, siren over on Broadway, doors slamming in the apartment hallway.  At night here the only sound -- except wind, of course -- is likely to be compression brakes on semi-trucks going through town.  

Sound must be close to the earliest of the arts, how could it not be?  

Percussion on just about any surface, including the body.  Clapping, stomping, slapping a bare belly.  (It is percussion to make fart noises with your underarm?)  Percussion instruments from the kindergarten instruments of clapping blocks, dinging triangle or jingling tambourine.

Wind from whistling to blowing through a tube or a reed.  English horn, clarinet, the human voice with its capacity to shape the air flow into vowels and howls, its glottal stops or hissing sibilants or pinching lips.  Tongue against teeth.  Digiridoo or if one of them is not handy, the tube off a vacuum cleaner will work.  And not all voices are human.  Elephants rumble so low they are not perceptible to humans.  That hoarse cry that’s so often used in English mystery night-scenes?  I thought it was a night bird of some kind until I was fooling around with google listening to animal cries.  It’s the cry of a female fox in season.  I can only say it’s a sound our pet foxes never made.

Twanging from African thumb-piano to a theatrical thundersheet, that big piece of sheet metal shaken backstage to imitate a storm.

Making strings vibrate, hearing cables sing.  If you knew how to listen, the Golden Gate Bridge would sing to you, quite apart from the wind whistling through.  Those cables must know songs.

Listening to animals, calling back to them, sweeping them up into symphonies, has been a speciality of Paul Winter’s for a long time.  He began with the wolf who sang with his clarinet and whose song became part of his Missa Gaea, his Earth Mass.  The religious nature of sound has been quite obvious and certainly welcomed by Winter.  Perhaps more than any other source he has recognized the need for liturgies that appeal to every human, regardless of nation or language.  The poor plagued continent of Africa, the one that seduces and exasperates us all, where percussion and twanging and keening voices still persist in spite of all the pressure to go electronicly modern.  This is the place of our origin, they say, and birds are the descendants of dinosaurs, and the only true American musical roots came here in the hearts of Africans trafficked centuries ago.  Well, for Paul Winter that’s an invitation.  Here you go, the beginning of a symphony.

http://www.flywaysmusic.org/flyways-music/videos/44-videoslisting/83-flyways-video-and-music-selections

And you’ll see in this video that the inevitable consequence of music is movement, whether it is the simple stamping of feet or the long soaring of wings.  Culture can only try to catch up -- at least our culture.  Some cultures are already there.  Their children babble, their old folks chant, they dance while they drum or twang.  Long wooden xylophones are set up alongside each other where the hammers fly up and down them.  You’re sad?  You don’t know what sadness is.  You’re glad?  Who has time to stop and consider it?  The rule of migration is to move on, to complete the cycle, to continue the millennia of vibrations.  Put pebbles in a pop can, throw sand into a hollow gourd, keep time, slap your feet on the earth.  Extinct?  Hardly!   Endangered.  Well, maybe.

But the cranes are flying!  Can’t you hear them?

CEREMONIAL SMELLS

There is a certain man who comes into the souk at dusk.  He has the face of a hawk and the gait of a cat and he wraps himself tightly from turban to sandals.  When he passes, the people fall back -- not because of the way he looks, but because of the smell.  It is the smell of precious substances -- frankincense and myrrh and drying agents -- and under those is the smell of . . . human flesh.  His dark cloak often has white shadows, powder marks, from the natron -- we know it as soda, a drying agent, a cleansing powder recovered from the white beds of dried up seas and alkaline lakes.  This man is a mummifier.  He works on the line between death and immortality.  His icons are hawks and cats and kings.  Oh, yes, and the servants and lovers of the king.  Mummification was the transition of them all to eternity.

In some cultures natron was thought to enhance spiritual safety for both the living and the dead. Natron was added to castor oil to make a smokeless fuel, for lamps inside the tombs.  Natron is an ingredient for making cerulean blue, the color of scarabs.  A white drift of natron covered the whole body for forty days, drawing out the fluids of life, preventing visitations from insects.

The mummy maker in the souk was going to visit the potter to commission canopic jars, each with a lid shaped like a head to indicate the contents that once dwelt in the body.  The four canopic jars -- marked jackal, baboon, hawk and human -- were designated for human organs: the stomach, intestines, lungs, and liver, all of which, it was believed, would be needed in the afterlife. There was no jar for the heart: the Egyptians believed it to be the seat of the soul, and so it was left inside the body.  Nor was there a jar for the brains which were hooked out of the nose and discarded as meaningless mush.

But this was all theology.  What the people remembered was the smell.

____________________

If we accept the idea that spirituality precedes any theories because the only way that a creature can know the world is through the senses -- which in humans can then be woven into ideas and rituals -- and if we accept the idea that the whole point of “religion,” whether formally institutionalized or merely recorded in the memes of a culture, is to guide actions that preserve survival (homeostasis: the conditions that allow life), then the most basic sense is that of smell.

Even the first one-celled animals, the eukaryotes, were somehow able to detect molecules suspended in the fluid where they traveled so that they could approach those elements that would help them and retreat from those elements that would harm them.  The whole cell wall must have been a “nose,” analyzing in some way the smell of molecules directly through its wall.  Throughout the millennia of evolution the nose was preserved as a specialization of the brain and it persists in the middle of the face, so directly connected to the brain that inhaled solvents will dissolve brain tissue.

Smell is part of the food-sorting categories of the mind, indicating ripe or rotten, bitter or sweet, and marking toxins.  With the discovery of spices, chilies, pepper and cinnamon, salt and sugar, food acquired variety and it was possible to tolerate some foods otherwise unpleasant.  Minerals, bark derivatives, pods and seeds, alcohol, resins and oils were variously popular and expensive through the centuries.  Some would repel insects or act as preservatives, as dessicants or ingredients of fatty mixes or in mild acids as vinegar or lemon juice.  Sandalwood, lavender, patchouli, cedar, and blue juniper berries.

When settled communities began to treat their foods by soaking them in lye, leaching, fermenting, grinding, boiling, leavening, roasting, baking -- all these smells acquired the associations of a household, shared family meals as opposed to the wandering nomad foods eaten as found, taken along in a pouch.  Burnt offerings, showing that there enough abundance to spare meat and fat for the gods, filled the air with sharp smoke. Soaps and bleaching agents accompanied the maintenance of clothing and bedding.  Dairies meant sour milk, cheese, churned butter.

Then came the tinctures, decoctions, infusions of tea, coffee, chocolate, chamomile and a host of other herbal tisanes, some medicinal and some merely pleasant mild stimulants, appropriate for sharing.  And the vegetable smudges of tobacco, marijuana, sage, pine, concocted incense.

Buildings have smells of their own, depending on their construction and use.  Imagine the scriptorium of a monastery where the sacred books are written: the smell of ink, animal-skin parchment, candle wax, the quills of large birds, and the monks themselves in heavy robes, smelling funky-human in the midst of the small elegant work of reproducing God’s words, sweating to get every jot and tittle in the right place along the lines of gospel and psalm.

They say that saints had a unique smell, “the odour of sanctity,” reported to be like lilies or roses, a force of grace converting tragedy.  Scientists have speculated about what could have caused it.  Of course we know that devils smell of sulphur and brimstone.  At one time doctors diagnosed patients by smelling them, dreading the smell of gangrene, catching the characteristic taints of certain maladies, recognizing substances in the exuding sweat of the patient. 

Medicine, food, ceremonies, and books wax and wane through the history of religions, carriers and participants of the sacred, weaving themselves into memory complexes of the lives of people so as to guide them to survival either as individuals or as groups.  Sometimes demonic, sometimes excremental instead of elemental, not every sensory trace was from what would sustain survival.  Some destroyed, but could be used with caution in a ritual context, a chalice to hold the intoxicant, a pipe bowl for the tobacco.  Some gradually became meaningless, like the preservation of mummies.

___________________

In a small Russian orthodox church on Rusalii,” known in the west as Pentecost -- the eighth Sunday after Easter when the Holy Spirit traditionally returned to the world and came into the apostles, making them ecstatically speak in tongues, chanting strange magic words -- a group of young women come with armloads of sweetgrass and artemisia, a form of sage.  They will strew the aromatic herbs on the floor so that when the congregation arrives for the service, their treading feet will fill the air with tangy sweetness.  

The sun is finally warm again and plants are swelling and twining everywhere. This pleasant task of preparing for holy services fills the young women with joy so that they mix dance steps into their walking and some even run.  Their sweat is scented with mating pheromones and joy makes them welcoming of love.  They are roses and violets made round arms and warm clefts.  It will be nine months until the birth of the Christ child.  When the ceremonies of love end, so will human life.

MANAGING THE BRAIN

Clearly, the mind is a process more than a “box.”  Its variations can be seen as vascular dilation, or as electrical activity along axons interchanging across synapses with molecular conversions, or as waves of various kinds.  We know there are “nodes” or matrixes where nerve perceptions from the skin interface with the outside world as well as from inside the body are sorted and edited -- sometimes even augmented with what the brain thinks ought to be there but isn’t.  As individuals we perceive the main management modes of the brain as “moods,” or “attitudes” or “frame of mind” and realize that one can get “in the groove” or be “cookin’” on some occasions, while suffering from brain stutter on others.  

How to manage these moods, unless you are a yogi, is not exactly clear to most people.  But we are aware that with feedback loops enabled by monitors, a person can learn to control aspects of their bodies that they couldn’t before -- like lowering blood pressure or slowing heart rate.  Many of us use little household monitors to keep track of blood sugar or even cholesterol.  Once a person becomes aware, habit patterns form in response, as well as consciousness of mental and emotional change brought on by subtle molecular variation.  So far we have not generally thought of creativity as being manageable in this same way except for actors, artists, and maybe athletes. But the regulation of spiritual connection is possible through the use of liturgies, rituals and ceremonies, whether individual (meditation, prayer) or group.     

Victor Turner’s “liminal place”, which is one of the brain states that supports creativity and change, is reached by getting into the proper “frame of mind,” going “over the limen.”  Partly intentional, partly habitual, partly a matter of preparation, the fulfillment of that place or state depends upon learning how to “cross over the limen or threshold.”  Maybe it’s “warming up,” maybe it’s bathing and changing clothing, maybe it’s being with certain others or in a particular location.  Done well, it can give access to the Holy, as people have known since ancient times.  No religion has a copyright or “lock” on these practices.  They are available to all aware humans, even children -- at least happy and secure children whose natural state is exploration.  No specific institution, leader or vocabulary is necessary.  It is a naturally evolved ability that is shaped by the circumstances of a person’s life.  It CAN be suppressed, neglected or turned to evil uses.

Crossing the limen is entering the altered state necessary for ceremony of a sacred nature.

These steps are by-passed when using drugs or facing circumstances that flood the body with substances that amount to mind-altering drugs:  adrenaline, serotonin, and the like.  In those circumstances, results vary.

Here are the steps:

First, safety.  Sex and sleep are done at night in bed because that is a safe and sequestered place.  Worship doesn’t have to be quite THAT protected!  Still, a certain amount of privacy and protection from interruption is vital.  People in history have built a little “closet” for devotion.  A special building might be available, or perhaps a clearing in a forest, or maybe just a solitary place.  A mantra or chant or gesture like palms together might be a social signal for people to leave one alone. 

Parts of the brain have two states:  open for creativity or closed to shunt off irrelevant thoughts and reflexes in order to immediately flee, fight or freeze in the face of danger.  (One writer likens this to the two states of the sea anemone: open as a flower when it is ready for food but knotted closed if there is danger.  I like sea creature metaphors for human cells living in our briny internal sea of blood and lymph.  Besides, sea anemones are gorgeous.  One can easily imagine a Chihuly glass sea anemone as the focus of an altar.)  

Second, relaxation.  The purpose of safety is to allow dropping the tension of always being prepared -- braced -- which frees energy to be available for thought and feeling.  Tension -- which is a self-imposed version of “stress” from outside -- needs to be loosened enough to let the sea anemone of the brain open.  This doesn’t mean going limp.  It means escaping from “stage fright” -- anticipating, dreading bad outcomes -- into “performance high,” which makes one deeply aware of what is really there and able to generate inspired responses.

Third, confidence.  This is a result of relaxation.  One cannot walk a tightrope with tight muscles and a worried mind. Not that the liminal state is walking a tightrope, but that one must focus in order the muster the skills for achievement. The first steps begin to create the confidence necessary for the rest of the way.

Fourth, focused awareness.  Again, this is a matter of being present in the now, in the reality, with one’s best capacities, meeting the challenges.  This is what is called “flow.”

Fifth, generosity.  Now the anemone opens to the sea and mingles with it, drawing sustenance.  Now the individual becomes aware of others, aware of the world.  This is even called by some writers, “the oceanic feeling.” (Romain Rolland invented the phrase.)  It is about expanding, opening boundaries, which for some means helplessness and for others means willing merger with something eternal and infinite.

This marker distinguishes the kind of religion as something closed, institutional, privileged, and only for the elite, as distinct and apart from sacredness or holiness as something everywhere accessible to anyone.  Religious institutions are vulnerable to a phenomenon called “fencing the communion,” which refers to the historical practice of Christians denying some the right to take communion because of unworthiness or lack of belonging.  This is roughly the same as ex-communication or at least a symbolic version of it, and is occasionally enforced by a little railing along the front of the church that prevents people in the pews from walking up to the altar or communion table.  The priest brings the bread and wine to the communicants as they kneel, often with their elbows on that little railing, unaware of its other purpose.  It’s another power marker.  Holiness or sacredness cannot be separated by a fence for a boundary.  It can be closed out by fear.

We live in a culture dominated by sex and death -- the great fear is that we might not get any sex but might die.  These are the motors in the stories on any television show, including the news and the creatures on National Geographic.  There has never been a time when we needed direct access to the Holy more or had less of a notion of how to get to it.  Too many people are trying to “fence the liminal” so as to charge admission in the name of supporting their own religious institutions.  But sea anemones are immortal.  You could look it up.

THE BIG SHIFT

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.

PRE-THEOLOGICAL: MOLECULAR

“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.

LITURGY PLUS

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:

1. 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.)
2.   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. 
3.   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?  

1. First, they need to be made safe: physically and emotionally.
2. Basic homeostasis needs to be maintained:  whatever it takes to survive, including medicines and mates in the sense of equals, friends, belonging.
3. Role models.
4. Careful listening, because listening calls out their thinking and feeling.  What is heard and recognized can be made real and useful.
5. 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.
6. 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.