DIAGRAMS OF IDEAS

Working my way down through old files I came to this “insightful” page, a little smeared with what might have blood, sweat and tears -- or maybe tea and peanut butter. The top diagram is an interpretation of Tillich’s concept: “the ground of being.” People were arguing about the relationship between being and nonbeing, which they conceived of as being in opposition to each other. His insight was to create an overarching category (“the ground of being”) on which the two co-exist, complementarily. There are three metaphors for non-being here: void, wilderness, chaos. They aren’t very good categories because non-being can’t have categories: it is non-categorical.

But then I divided being into two parts: self and other. I put “new form of being” down the column, but don’t remember why, except that I was trying to make a pitch for not fearing growth and transformation because it is synonymous with creation. Then I tried to say that this comes from giving up control in order to focus on process as in the process of worship or the formal category of “process theology,” which was Alfred North Whitehead’s attempt to reconceive of Christian theology in terms of quantum physics. It works pretty well until you get to Jesus, because the whole point of Jesus is that he’s human. Quantum physics is not human.

Then I tried to say the UUA was a denomination defined by process. I was still under the spell of Leadership School where Joan Goodwin and others felt attention to process and organizational design was the path to success. Also, I was at a UU seminary, after all, and they were paying my way. And I put on this list the idea of “felt concept.” That was the crucial element: that one can have a thought that is not in words, just a “feeling.”

The second diagram is an explanation of “felt concept,” kind of ripping off the idea of webbing from teaching writing. In a circle one puts sensory information, which adds up to the symbol “dog” which is a word that evokes images of a “dog.” This, in turn, is recomplexified by combining a concrete dog you once knew, the symbolisms of “dog” you know, and the combination of all this into a myth or story. Your story, of course, will come out in quite a different place if you know a certain kind of dog and think of Lassie rather than Cerberus.

So: Worship is a movement from one “felt concept” to another that yields a perception (and perhaps a recommendation) about being.

This is close to the brain theory about “felt concepts” that has developed since I was working with this material thirty years ago.

This is from an article called “The Global Neuronal Workspace Model of Conscious Access: From Neuronal Architectures to Clinical Applications.” It is a description of how brain function can be detected with instruments like an fMRI. The hope is finding out how to detect cases of people who are “trapped inside” -- able to think but not produce communication. In order to convince some people that not all consciousness and not all communication is words I will have to clarify “felt concepts”. To most of us, words are conflated with thinking, so no wonder our liturgies tend to be dominated by words. But many people describe spiritual experience as something wordless.

The metaphor of the “global neuronal workspace,” a technical term used by Stanislas Dehaene, makes me think of rolling out dough on a tabletop in a small version and might be described as a threshing floor on a larger scale. Both are processes, you might notice, but the scientific version is based on a structure. Lida Cosmides and John Tooby call it the “architecture” of consciousness which they discuss in terms of brain evolution. First, there are a number of small specialized entities in the brain, each in charge of some kind of sub-process (time, value, space, memory), and then a localized, detectable “place” in the brain where their results are sorted by taking in the processed sensory information and putting out intentions and actions. This sorting is controlled by one’s assumptions and priorities. A person might misunderstand things badly. But if one isn’t in too disconcerting a context, the upshot might be reassuring, reconfirming, relaxing.

It’s interesting that within this controlling metaphor, there are small figures of speech which are a necessity when speaking of things one can’t exactly tweeze out and put on the lab counter. (Though it’s amazing that they can separate pyramidal cells in numbered layers and so on.) The psychoanalytic way of thinking about consciousness is like a water level: when one is above the surface, the thoughts are conscious. UN-conscious thoughts are submerged but active, like fish. Dehaene, et al, have a physiological model that turns to fire: cells “fire”, consciousness “ignites.” Since part of what instruments detect is the consumption of oxygen by cells -- technically “burning” -- it seems apt. Also, a consciousness that “burns” like a dancing flame is far more suggestive of a process, but then what is SUBconsciousness? The metaphor isn’t always useful.

Another metaphor is the theatre with the pool of light to signify consciousness and the shadows for the locus of the subconscious. But this has the disadvantage of sounding as though the person is a passive observer.

I will say that the “liminal space” reached by controlling consciousness (whether or not the person is aware of the transition) takes people to their “neuronal workspace platform.” But now I have to say what makes it liturgy instead of only the concentration necessary to make a pie.

Here’s the wiki version of “liminal space:” “As developed by van Gennep (and later Turner), the term is used to “refer to in-between situations and conditions that are characterized by the dislocation of established structures, the reversal of hierarchies, and uncertainty regarding the continuity of tradition and future outcomes”. Although initially developed as a means to analyze the middle stage in ritual passages, it is “now considered by some to be a master concept in the social and political sciences writ large”. In this sense, it is very useful when studying “events or situations that involve the dissolution of order, but which are also formative of institutions and structures.”

I propose that liturgy is a way of either opening up to change or reconfirming present understanding. I would put change and stasis into relationship, rather like Tillich’s being and nonbeing, so that liturgy is the ground of changing/not changing. The skill of the liturgist is not so much in dictating which that should be, but in the control of consciousness so as to get the person to that ground. It is the inner work of the individual or the community to address specifics once they are there.

If you want to think of God reversed to Dog, that's okay with me.