The definition of a human being -- in formal terms the "anthropology" -- makes all the difference in organizing knowledge about humans. It changes everything and challenges many of our practices. I suspect the idea of ourselves as little clay puppets, created in the image of a supernatural Being by that Being him or her self, who then controls us, either rescuing or punishing, comes from our childhood when our parents were the gods. It prevents us from acting from ourselves.
But I propose we are animals evolved from a soluble 4-molecule element code that interacts with environment whereever the animal is in time and place. To keep the person alive, the brain is a dashboard managing the rest of the body. A failure means the end of that individual. A lot of failures means the end of that line of hominins.
In physical terms we are skeletons supporting bands of muscle, networks of wiring and tubes of nutrients. But now we begin to hypothesize that in addition to this organic flesh there is a body-wide system of memory that results from the experiences saved inside us from the confrontation and embrace of what is around us. One could say these memories are an epi-flesh, a skeleton structure -- the worldview developed in first awareness -- then made sensory by fleshly holding pockets, pouches and packets of saved code, all filed according to the sensation involved. Not just sight, sound, touch, taste and smell, but also the one-cell recordings of standing upright, against a wall, keeping the head on top, maintaining balance and other unsuspected detections.
This is more metaphoric than anatomical and almost entirely unconscious except under particular circumstances like dreams, hypnotism, art and free association. More dangerously, they can be "triggered". Unconscious knowledge becomes conscious in a context of safety and relaxation, but more is remembered in times of danger and extreme exertion. The most intense experiences come back again and again as obsessions or PTSD or a kind of key to extraordinary creation.
Ordinarily, the world -- or whatever is out there beyond the skin -- is transmitted to the brain only as code. A leaf is green, which means it reflects s a certain light wavelength that is encoded in a electrochemical set of molecules that is carried from the sensing eye retina to the brain. It is not decoded but translated into what we "see" -- a green leaf. We must always go through this process to perceive anything, maybe with the help of instruments. Once we form a concept carried in by that code, it can be altered by the brain so we can think of "greener than green" even though we've never seen it because we made it up.
But there are also many things happening in the body that send information and form patterns. These are also encoded and stored in protected places, maybe nerve synapses. The brain is a relentless editor and (like publishers) favors best what is most like what has gone before. Physically, the brain is neurons connected into matrixes or networks that are loops and also concept-assigned, each network developing as needed. If there is no brain network that addresses a concept, for that person the concept doesn't exist.
A characteristic of "liminal" time and place is that it allows "plasticity" to change the arrangement and meaning of these concept loops -- adding, subtracting, renaming -- or so we can propose. It's not really tested or seen. But we can see the individual neurons and the axons, the long threads that connect them at synapses. How it all works is not deciphered yet. It's all so new that vocabulary has to be invented and the old assumptions must be dropped or changed.
One of the strongest meanings of this approach to holiness is the importance of a rich and inclusive approach to life that engages all the senses and provides a huge fund to draw on and project from. When the Edmonton UU Church published "Sweetgrass and Cottonwood Smoke" which was a set of sermon/essays focused on the prairie, they subtitled it "Be Where You Are," which echoes the Ram Dass famous book "Be Here Now." I think it is a mistake to seek the novelty and dissociation of drug-worlds instead of deepening relationship with the "real" one. But so many time/places are unbearably grim that it's understandable.
A troublesome feature of confusing and traveling times is that there are fewer whole and convincing ecologies to know and yet such unified and deep experience offers structure to more elaborate "religious" issues like morality or composing liturgy. How can a person raised in a desert really "feel" (important word) the complex tangle of a lush wet environment? Or does rain suddenly have new importance? Can a "built" environment be as deeply felt as what we call "nature?" What about a world under glass, always virtual and therefore partial, impossible to smell or taste? If we are separated by our devices, how do we build congregations?
Someone suggested that the word "diaspora" can be discarded because we are all so mixed and displaced from one "nation" or "continent" to the next until our food, music, and clothing are all jumbled together. But this is not taking into account the unities forming around specific occupations or other ways of being in the world. Clearly, our legislators inhabit an unreal world of offices, hearing rooms, luxury autos, and briefly visited homes. This has created a kind of "religion" about privilege that excludes the reality of the nation they claim to govern with understanding. At the same time people living on sidewalks create a world of their own among themselves. Medical workers see the world in their own way.
I'm looking at the origin of holiness as it arises from the nature of human bodies struggling to survive by understanding experience held by memories of sensation which become ideas. This piece doesn't address the coming phenomenon of using the frame of expression that connects our brain to the face/heart/breath/gut so that we can escape from our individual lives by sharing the lives of others.
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