Maybe the way to value a seminary is not what answers it give you, but what questions it asks you. My advisor in seminary was John Godbey, an expert on historical Transylvanian Unitarianism. (Many jokes about Transylvania, but the kernel is that it was a declared Unitarian country -- until it wasn't.) I kept talking about the "virtual" and John was never happy with my explanation. He wanted to know whether I meant "supernatural" and he wanted me to make a place for God. I didn't want either one. But I didn't really know what I meant by "virtual." Now I have an answer I like.
Evolution turns out not to be progressive. I mean there was no goal to get better and better until we were super animals. It's estimated than homonids arose a couple of hundred times and always failed after a long time. We haven't even evolved in a straight line as depicted in a zillion single file illustrations. But here is how a human being existing today is likely to unfold:
1. Chromosomes are double. In the process of meiosis they go apart, the two halves find a way to unite with someone else's half, and then they use the plans in the molecules of their united being to create a new version. One side has all the necessary "housing" (the ovum) and the other (sperm), stripping itself, travels light by lashing its tail.
2. It takes roughly 9 months for this new being to grow enough to leave the mother's support system. It will be influenced by the health of the mother, the content of her fluids as they carry nutrition to the child, and the real movement of her life, rocking the protobaby along in her as she walks.
3. Like an altricial bird, naked and uncontrolled, a human baby spends the next three years becoming able to walk and talk. In this time period the baby builds in its brain a schema, a pattern, a blueprint, a theory of the world based on whatever info was in its chromosomes -- the kind of stuff that makes chicks cower and hide when the shadow of a hawk sweeps over them. By kindergarten, all the brain neurons not being actively used in circuits, systems, loops, will die, be pruned. From then on, new knowledge will build on what remains from that first active system, but it will be unconscious.
4. At the same time, the caregiver will be interacting in a space that grows invisibly between infant and adult, through eyes and voice, cuddling and sucking, an invisible place described as "virtual" but physically supported by neurons and -- in the same way as muscle neurons -- a structured, enabling schema of how to be connected another being. Call it love if you want to, but it's a little more sophisticated to call it "attachment." I come to the idea through Bowlby and Winnicott, who are nurturing and generous thinkers, but there is a dark side. Normally attachment forms more warmly in the protection of a family but deficits and defects can happen clear back to the original blueprint in the womb.
Linked below is a vid of grim old Sam Vaknin reporting the bad news of what happens if the attachment is just flat. Not secure, not unreliable or intermittent, not scary and wary -- sociopathic. Sam gives it to you straight. I see the same thing as he does, lived through some scraps as he has. It is Trump.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fg6Yrj_ZSnc
5. Evolution is cumulative, and in the elementary school years it's time for social evolution. Again the pattern forms, one hopes with a bit more wiggle room for experiment, according to what circumstances allow and encourage. For many people a role-model works, or the ideas of a group or the media, and always the reward/punishment dynamic. Overall are the economic and ecological givens of place -- or, as for a military child, the constantly changing place. Or the terrifying disaster of forced flight. In these years the child comes to realize itself as an identity, a self, a time/place. Possibly there is fantasy, invention of other worlds.
6. By high school in America youngsters learned to mirror and critique themselves. Attachment comes back, much complicated by desire, the physical urge to achieve bodily intimacy. Evolution is always cumulative, but it is also inventive and every addition means the possibility of morphing into something unexpected. Maybe salvific.
7. Then comes the real intellectual power. The brain is said to be immature as late as age 24. Some pattern management -- math, music, chess -- is possible earlier in some people.
Now I'm quoting LeDoux, p. 368. "The Deep History of Ourselves"
All species
manage energy resources,
balance fluids and ions,
defend against harm,
reproduce.
These fundamental survival mechanisms are instantiated in dedicated circuits that control specific innate behaviors in organisms with central nervous systems.
None of them are self-aware or emotional. Emotions could not exist in the form we experience them without our early hominid ancestors having evolved:
language,
hierarchical relational reasoning,
noetic (self-aware) consciousness,
reflective autonoetic consciousness. (Thinking about one's thinking.)
These capacities made it possible for activities of ancient survival circuits, to be integrated into self-awareness,
framed in terms of
semantic,
conceptual,
and episodic memories,
interpreted in terms of personalized self and emotion schema,
used to guide behavior in the present,
and also to plan for future emotional experiences.
Emotions thereby became the mental center of gravity of the human brain:
fodder for narratives and folktales,
and the basis of culture,
religion,
art,
literature,
and relations with others and our world.
This proposal will give me enough to unpack and think about for a long time, but what I'm looking for is the whateveritis that often through this "mental center of gravity" opens up to something not from some other world but amounting to a consciousness of this world that is qualitatively different from ordinary life: the mysterium tremendum and fascinans.
Porges suggests that because of evolution, humans have a third autonomic neuron strand that goes directly from the brain to what I call the "frame of expression." If we confront each other, gazing at each other, our breathing and heartbeats apparent to each other, our facial muscles and speaking apparatus expressive and flexible. we will enter a unity, a virtual space, that is intimate and bigger than both of us. This is called a "liminal space" over a threshold into a special place, felt as different. Play, ceremony, intimacy, performance can be liminal. (This is analyzed by Victor Turner.)
In the context of preaching, I was taught that if I were making real contact with the people, that the "real", the "virtual", sermon would form between us, transcending us. It's not a matter of passion or even inspiration, but about perception and honesty. I'll think about that. But I have felt it. So have others.
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