Now that "The Bone Chalice" has served its purpose and is empty, I will post it intact to one of the free hosts for academic work -- maybe both. (ResearchGate or Academia.) So far I've sent along a bit of thought about the new research on how minds work as well as a couple of papers about Blackfeet. This practice seems to alert a lot of scholars outside the US, which is still in lockstep governed by universities and academic publishers.
"The Bone Chalice" began as my thesis at Meadville/Lombard Theological School that served as one of three "feeders" for the Unitarian Universalist Association, a merger of two denominations that happened in Portland, OR in 1961 and has struggled to understand itself. In theory based on the idea that intelligent people should think for themselves, it substituted principles and sources for the conventional idea of unified dogmas/beliefs. As time and research have gone forward, our understanding of human beings and their "place" in the world have changed drastically. Now the UUA is a bit stranded between the social nature of "denominations" based on socio-economic similarities that bring people to an affinity, and the new unreality of Judeo-Christian culture based on folk science plus the need to share with other cultures like Islam.
In the first place of the symbol was the division between the container and the contained, which goes back to the martyrdom of Hus, a volatile dissenter who was contained by death, is simply an artifact of our grammar: subjects vs. objects, an ur-binary that we escape only with Whorfian gerunds -- verbs set free. (No chairs but sitting; no wind but blowing,) The concept of the virtual is like a gerund, a reality that is unreal. No god but godding.
Second was the idea that an individual human can "feel" but a group must have a stated "rule of law", "book of source", identity as entity. The whole concept pre-supposes that the elements of denomination or religious grouping must be unitary even as it pretends to be plural. Even if it is "plural", it is on the basis of a binary (theist/atheist of one dimension) or possibly a continuum that responds to one question in one dimension.
The new understanding of the planet no longer entertains a clear division between living and non-living, among plant/animal/microbe, or even time as a process, as opposed to a simultaneous phenomenon through which our perceptions proceed. Everything is connected code. Even the smallest variation counts and contributes: the snowflake, the grain of sand, the drop of water. Every reiteration introduces variation and every variation opens new possibilities, even loss of a continuation opens new possibilities. Time is always arriving and leaving.
Access to the perception of holiness, the ability to feel the difference between the sacred and the profane (Eliade) is located in the subconcious. It cannot be "reasoned" into existence but only "felt". But this cannot be discounted as stigmatized"emotion." If we think of emotion as the conscious recognition the physical expression of that which already exists as a phenomenon coded and located in each cell of the flesh which then rises to recognition by the brain, then it precedes concepts and rules. It is not the product of the cells of the skull (the chalice) but of the whole body. The flame has escaped the chalice -- the division is no longer useful. Maybe the idea of the flame-as-thought is a temporary conceit that only works when it represents conscious thought.
So what replaces this metaphor? Perhaps music works with the person as instrument. Maybe the DNA/computer code ideas are helpful. Both approaches work with 19th century elements like machines and aesthetics. Patterned dance and realistic art. But more recently our understanding of the humanities has accepted the chaotic, the proscribed, the obscene, the unsuspected, the tortured. Are we to accept the idea that these theories and creations can call up the holy, the spiritual?
This would break the link with proprieties imposed by the three Middle Eastern "religions" which may or may not be felt, even though they claim the holy when they are only authoritarian. This may even break the principle of survival as ultimate purpose, since the idea of eternal survival is bogus to begin with.
On a video Vine Deloria Jr. suggests the opposition between the indigenous and the Euro is rooted in the spiritual world versus the material. At some point the Western world moved from geographic territoriality as the basis of importance and salvation to the idea of capital, money symbols of wealth. It was all fantasy, but to those people it was taken to be real. Instead of trying to understand what to do with their money-points that would be good for the world, help it to survive, they began to hoard until their money-points became more real than the world itself and therefore no longer related to the sacred. Nothing was sacred.
Religious performances were emptied, but the claim was that performing these dogmas would bring in more money-points. This is the kind of assumption, which is often subtle enough to escape notice (fine architecture, prosperous members, educated leaders, long history) that I'm opposing. It seems like reality, but it is illusion. Worse, it is a mafia in plain sight, opposing the politics of the whole with a specialized version that only supports itself. Like mafia, it is most powerful when the polity of the greater whole is broken or weak. But all three are illusions. Reality is an illusion. No matter how powerful or persuasive the ideas of the holy might be, they are concepts that are transcended by the felt pre-conceptual, which somehow emerges from mystery.
We "know" that electrochemical patterns of rhythms and interactions in molecules, atoms, energy waves, are as far as we can reduce the elements, as humans can go, even with fabulous instruments. As soon as a living creature loses the wholeness of its interactions, it disperses and its particles no longer interact. Our awareness of the interval between birth and death is what makes us think humans are distinct entities apart from each other, even though the world proves to us that no one is separate, we are indeed islands that may submerge but our continuity persists even submerged, restlessly singing. The goblet poured out.
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