The brilliance of the Lakoff/Johnson system of metaphors managing thought is that it is rooted in the animalness of humans -- their moderated contact with the world "outside" their skins through a myriad of sensory perceivers, some of them special organs and some as individually sensitive cells. The "religions" that dominate most discussions are based on institutions outside the individual human. Often called "organized religion", they are maps and not the world. They claim their maps will save you. (I'm confining this to the "Western world.") In fact, a good match between the organization and the life probably WILL save you.
People think of religion as not-reality, but some kind of super-reality. They give priority mostly to the "map" function, esp. the three (Judaism/Christianity/Islam) as interpreted by the Roman Empire. Sadly, the map is pretty outdated since it's thousands of years old and developed in a world much changed.
Another understanding of religion -- as people know it -- is as a set of "beliefs" which are often lists of unbelievables, miracles, which one learns as a kind of initiation when joining. Then again religion can be a system of moralities. right and wrong as believed not by one's parents but by one's grandparents, irrefutable and sometimes involving drastic punishment. And there's a lot of imagery, decoration and things to do. For many people one of the most satisfying things to do is "owning" the often valuable things with the pleasant shadow notion that one is also owning the "religion." This was much inflamed by the ship-based culture of acquisition that brought home objects from the romantic edge of the world. Cabinets of censers, dream webs, jeweled chalices, menorahs.
Brits, a sailing culture built on top of a coal-mining culture, has a keen sense of hierarchy and "collecting" justified by superiority. Ninian Smart exploited this with a sort of anthropological tour of foreign religions, "The Long Search", and then PBS picked up on it with a much later anthology of sacred objects. UU's of a certain age also enjoyed this "collecting" which they mostly confined to quoting prayers and exhortations, translated of course. But they lit candles and tapped "singing bowls" or hit drums. They mixed different sources on grounds that there is a universal element in all religions, a conviction remarkably like their own.
I'm after the words that carry a penumbra of meanings drawn from an ecosystem, significant to their speakers because of their real lives and the guidance jn their life trajectory. I want to know how a sacred symbol forms in humans both as singular and plural beings. Sensory, animal, experienced rather than thought out, it is not dropped from above, but wells up from within through experience endorsed by feeling. Impossible to entirely put into words, outside either countability (data) or unaccountability (the numinous), one knows it when one feels it.
I went to unconventional -- even taboo -- thinkers. Geoff Mains, a forest ecologist with expertise in electrochemical reactions, was freed by his social commitment to the SF gay community to consider what happened in the most secret, sacred and sheltered practices of the Vietnam combat veterans. Mains explained that intense sensual contact with the world can produce serotonin, a powerful internally manufactured molecule. His insight was reduced by pop ideas, thrill-seekers, and new research, but at the time and even now at its heart, it was profane (anti-mystical) and yet transcendent in terms of experience.
Blogger is afraid to post this image or else it is copyrighted. Go to Google images and ask for "dissected nervous system" or try http://ezinetime.net/dissected-human-nervous-system/
This is the dissected neurological system of a person. It's wiring.
We've not had evidence of direct brain-to-flesh communication until the recent theories about the multiple polyvagal nerve connection of the autonomic nervous system running directly from brain to body. What we think, remember, and perceive is a big part of who we are, including all the other people who press our identity on us. It is a key to empathy which I'll address later.
The new divergence is the arrogant notion of the brain-in-a-bucket, based on the idea that a brain is a computer. A favorite dogma of the tech world, it is exposed when it's realized that a brain is meant to manage a body. No body, no brain. No brain, no life. No racing electromagnetic impulses to sort nor any muscles to direct. Not even any blood vessels to bring oxygen in the "juice of life." (Bubbling the solution where the dissected brain floats in a bucket will not work. A brain is not a goldfish.)
My idea, my narrative entwining of silk (felt concepts) and hemp (real world experience), is not even recognizable as religion in most people's eyes. No one could have had this discussion before now, because the concepts didn't exist. And yet the formation of a person across the 9m/3yr interval after conception is the beginning of what religion as cultural expression, map of life, moral compass, and corporation power entity eventually becomes.
Other nodes in the journey might be 8y, when the individual versus community balance must be solved; 12y when sex of some kind adds complexity; 18y when the culture's legal system becomes a player; 21y when social maturity is often pegged; and 23y, the time of true brain maturity. In terms of Western-style school, this is the beginning of the post-doc years, when no one can buy their way in. Let us admit that science and learning are at least quasi-religious. Other cultural systems have other markers: how old must one be to kill one's first lion? Women have biological markers forced onto them as fertility, birth, and menopause. These things are also seen as religious.
This is why people who want fine cultures must begin with infants. If we want to see what the world will be like in twenty years, we must reflect on our child-protecting and cherishing practices now.
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