THE BRAIN'S WORKSPACE & SOURCES

“The Molten Chalice” is not about theology. It’s not even really about religion in the institutional sense. Nor is it about being “spiritual,” whatever that means. It’s about being human, which means using the most human part of the brain -- the frontal lobe -- and whatever it is that brain research people are calling “workspace” and “sensorimotor” which some say are complementary approachs to experience. The idea is that the brain is the collection point for all the sensory material (including those from movement) where it is sorted into categories according to what the brain already knows, and then dictates what should be done. This workspace is “where” you can update your categories, eliminate some, make new ones. Religion has a lot to do with all those categories a brain sets up in childhood. And it has even more to do with managing them later in life. But it’s not the same thing as our daily shifts of attitude as we go along hour-by-hour, mostly because of a difference in degree and depth.

It is a matter of consciousness and shifts of consciousness when addressing different situations. The shifts are real things: neurons firing, hormones and enzymes secreting, muscles tensing or relaxing, electrochemical waves varying. Consciousness and memory are “filed” in the brain by being marked with sensory inputs. But much of this -- MOST of this -- goes on underneath awareness. If you lose a sense (hearing, taste, sight), you can still get along. If your “workspace” shuts down, you are asleep, in a coma, not “there.” The difference on an fMRI is not the end of brain action, a blank, but the end of its integration, the “making sense” part.

The point of this liturgical technique is to think about how to move consciousness by using senses to a point where the “work space” is deeper and more intense. This is what von Gennep and Victor Turner were talking about with their “liminality” metaphor, limen being the threshold of a doorway. If this liturgy theory is working, the person crosses into a vulnerable and intimate state of “play” or “virtual reality” or creativeness. Then it brings them back over that threshold, possibly changed.

Religious institutions with traditional worship practices have developed these protocols for specific times and places, so that they are connected to the imagery of a certain material culture. So long as that culture remains the same, the worship is meaningful. If there begins to be a mismatch, the intensity drains out. Going up broad stairs into a building with carved doors and a steeple stops meaning: “you are coming into a special space.” Kings and shepherds lose their significance.

Robert Schreiter http://www.ctu.edu/academics/robert-schreiter-cpps -- and Eliade and Campbell if one listens closely -- tries to get us to understand that though deep human categories developed very early in life never really dissolve, the equivalents between cultures are not obvious and cannot be imposed on each other. They are drawn from different ecologies. There is not a “Jesus” in every culture, much less bread and wine, but there is always a force towards salvation.

The long struggle to move the hunter/gatherer people with their burnt flesh offerings over to the bread and wine of the agriculturists is the theme of the Old Testament. It is not the theme of the Plains Indians. I would argue that one can’t even properly say that the self-torture ordeals of the Sun Lodge can be compared to the Crucifixion ordeal -- in the first place, it doesn’t mean the same thing. (This college kid who comes prowling around the Sioux to get them to let him tear his flesh with thongs, is he suffering to save the souls of his people?) Secondly, the REALLY important part of the ceremony is the old woman who fasts in a lodge. It is her digging stick -- which feeds the people when there are no buffalo -- that is the real sacred object. And it is feeding the body -- plain raw survival -- that counts. I would make an argument for an old woman with a pointed stick as a “Jesus” salvation figure.

What the contemporary (post-modern?) liturgist must investigate is what material culture the people feel and what those sensory objects stand for. A sensory “object” might not even be a material object: maybe it’s moving very fast, maybe it’s music, maybe it’s a smell. And under that, what are the categories that the brain “workspace” uses, what are the issues of life in this specific time and place?

Much of our liturgy doesn’t dare go near sex, though that’s obsessive in the culture. Some do take on the realization that our little planet is so small and we may be very temporary. What about the problem of patriotism? I don’t think I’d take on emotional depression as such, because I think depression is the result of a lack of engagement with reality, perhaps because of a malfunction in brain function. Not that reality isn’t pretty depressing, but there is a lack of energy to confront it, reflect on it, do something about it, a failure of identity that religion can address liminally.

Crossing-the-limen three-part shifts happen all the time: love-making, reading, cooking. Reflecting on them, becoming more sensitive to them, can be rewarding and enlightening. Stop and smell the roses or coffee or foot powder -- whatever. Let your body catch up with itself. Liturgies are about bodies, not just words on paper, because brains are in bodies, managing what they take in and making decisions about all of it.

Paradigm shift can be the work of the brain’s “workspace” and so can be paradigm confirmation. Faith needs to be maintained. Sensory information and other evidence need to be reconsidered. Are you in touch with reality? Can you handle the truth? What do all these other people know that you can’t figure out? What do you know for sure?

Every time I restate this little chain of logic, I become more convinced I’m onto something significant and add a little more to it. For instance, it seems pretty clear to me now that the “workspace” in the brain is the place where “dissociation” happens. “Dissociation” events (some call them schizy, but that’s too stigmatizing) are like day-dreaming, being “in the zone,” runner’s high, Mihály Csíkszentmihályi’s “flow”, immersive reading that seems real, acting, or extreme states like the out-of-body experiences of an abused child, danger as in combat, or drug-induced mind alterations. Shift of consciousness can be intense, but not really recognized as out of the ordinary until on reflection afterwards, back in the daily mind.

Much of religious thinking is academic, book-centered, and forced to work with all the thinking that has gone before, especially when one is working with institutions. This “Molten Chalice” concept is an attempt to go back to the elementary evolutionary and celebratory steps of percussion, dance, chanting, and then maybe recapitulate civilization as expressed in the material culture that emerged from a particular ecology, whether it’s about salmon, or wheat or bears or digging up something edible on the prairie.