Wednesday, April 15, 2020

CAN YOU HAVE AN EPIPHANY IN AN ELEVATOR?

Two major land masses occupy the Northern Hemisphere, separated from each other by mighty oceans, which rise and fall so that the beaches of the continents are revealed but later disappear. 

We don’t think of Eurasia as one continent but imagine instead that the great expanses of unbroken land between are unimportant, not like the complex and “logical” west side or the mystical but obedient east edge.  North America is similarly bicoastal in terms of settlements also with contrasting cultures depending on which ocean they border, Pacific or Atlantic.  At one time the two continents were one and they are still not quite torn apart in the north.  

We have not investigated much the people who dominate the international world.  I think about this as an exercise is looking at the “old” in a new way, to stir up the depths of assumptions to see what creatures awaken from the times before agriculture, before sea-going, even before language.  It was a sensory world.

The tiny “waves” that are the basis of sight and sound are echoed in the waves and cycles of the planet.  Tipping back and forth between seasons, circled by the waxing and waning moon which changes its path, we are most caught up in the light/dark that circles the planet daily, making “daily” a controlling principle in our lives.  Animals from oysters to humans take the rhythm into our living beings, so that when creatures are hidden from the sun, they keep the alternations in their flesh.

WHAT IS THE ROLE OF THE SUN?

All of these things are somehow the “ground of understanding” that becomes meaningful, deeply felt, by some individuals.  It appears that a mystical or deep and powerful experience may come out this context.  But it is not necessarily a result of “organized” religion.  More likely related to the deep brain paradigm formed in primal years.

The sun gets all the attention, the energy, the source of gravity, the ability to create vitamins and so on.  But it is really the dark that matters.  At one point I wanted to focus this part on the value of the dark, of sleep, of wandering and distorted consciousness.  Maybe I’ll come back to it.

COPING WITH THE EXPLOSION OF KNOWLEDGE

At the U of C Div School focused on comparative and historical theology, a constant question was “what’s your method?”  Are you focused on writing or on performance? What kind of evidence do you accept — what about language development?  And so on.  When the explosion of information about genetics finally reached these scholars it was such a deep shift in point of view -- the previously hidden, suddenly revealed that what was thought to be one kind of animal was actually another. It was a much deeper shift than Europeans naming American animals because of superficial resemblance to the animals “back home.”   The questions didn’t compute: was Jesus genetically possible? What is the genome of God?  The terms of pre-existing discussion were gone.

But it was nothing compared to the technical  access to information far beyond the previous limits of history, space or the cell.  The genome is a code that controls and relates every creature, continuous and inter-relating with all gene-codes everywhere, genes floated as bits in the sea.  The stars moved through time and the poles of the planet were seen to drift.  When the rocks formed and metamorphosed they preserved magnetic orientation of rocks, they told us the past.  We went to the moon and very deep in the sea.  Atlantis was only one submergence, listed with Berringia -- a lowland, not a bridge -- and Doggerland around the British Isles.  The verges of land changed over millennia and when they expanded, people built villages that flooded again.  The early written materials knew nothing about all this.

In the amazement and inconceivability, the concept of God simply dissolved.  Only those who claimed to draw their authorization from that entity stayed invested in describing a sort of uberking. Of course, many people found that the status quo was the best religion of all, so long as conditions allowed one to deny everything else.  Keep the world close and control it.  But an experience of Holiness cannot be controlled, old as it is, deep as it lives in those who can feel it.

Is an epiphany in Asia the same as an epiphany in America or Europe?  If it’s human experience-based before languages make categories, rooted in the primal connectome of the brain, why would culture be relevant?   Culture comes later and is about learned ways of surviving.

These strategies are worth considering but are not vital to this discussion of deep experience, unaccountable.

  1. Limiting the world.
  2. Fractionation ( focus or compartmentalizing identity)
  3. Gender, class, or other assigned groups
  4. Controlling methods of thought (ie reasoning vs. sensation/emotion)
  5. Conversation
  6. Participation
  7. Density enabled by industry and technology
  8. The point system of capitalism

Can you have an epiphany in an elevator?  Has the industrial revolution precluded any visionary feeling?

My challenge to myself is to think about what the culture of indigeneity, which can be very different from one ecosystem to another, has to do with human experience and organization.  The most obvious factor is relationship to “nature”, not as a clever clockwork like a hawk that nests on the window ledge of a skyscraper, and not as a force to resist, like storm proof and cold-proof buildings, but the alternative to the human imposed order.  First humans separated as primates who took advantage of the pre-existing natural to find a niche or adapt, then learned to invent clothes, fire, and agriculture to withstand the environment, and then used the immense industrial power and mechanized movement to make themselves vectors from one ecosystem to another — to change the world, both air and sea.

Is the power and intensity of numinous experience, a way to return to our underlying primate direct connection to the world?  It’s a beguiling thought.  When Asians, even in cities, have epiphanies and, if so, without saints, how do they think of them?  Can an African in the abject poverty of war and famine possibly have such lightning-seeking-ground course through them?  I won’t address aboriginal Australians who almost seem to have lived on the Sacred side of the threshold all their lives until whites came.

It seems that the idea of the specially entered ritual space is as much in time as in space.  Maybe we travel too fast and need to be stopped in our tracks.  Maybe we try to stop time with our drugs of consciousness displacement.  But humans have always used such drugs — even chimps indulge.  Are we auto-drugging ourselves, disrupting our natural rhythms of serotonin or whatever?  Almost surely we are.

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