INTRODUCTION
WHAT IS THE QUESTION?
How should we explain a transcendent moment? What is the meaning and origin of the experience that is “Holy” -- intense, connected to the universe, possibly transformative. Saints describe it but it can strike an ordinary person like “lightning seeking ground.” Yet it evokes peace.
It can be called sacred. holy, epiphany, ecstasy, deep experience, transcendence, theophany, immanence, peak experience, hierophany, valorized.
Is it from some other world?
Is it a state of the brain/body?
Is it inadvertent liminal space?
Is it a kind of cell?
Is it like orgasm?
Is an produced by an organ?
Is it hallucinating?
Is is a madness?
Is it God speaking to you?
In seminary we used to ask ourselves, “ can one call the Holy Spirit”? Not everyone even believed that such a thing as a Holy Spirit existed. (We were Unitarian Universalists, a denomination that includes those who are “atheist,” meaning rejecting the supernatural but forced into the word constructed by “non” theists because in our system everything supernatural is “God” which they reject.) But some still felt the Holy. They said it was more than the aesthetic high of a fine performance, different from a drug high, not like a sex act, and far more than an exceptionally good mood. I used to preach about it for pulpit supply invitations around the area, using Heraclitus as my expert. People always came up quietly afterwards to tell me about their experience and ask me more. But it was indescribable. Almost inexplicable.
In fact, we didn’t study anything like this in seminary. At the U of Chicago Div School we were doing comparative theology, not persuasive apologetics. The work was about “institutional” or “organized” religious bodies. “Feeling” was not considered religious, but rather childish, feminine, and non-scholarly. (I wanted to read Suzanne Langer, but she was waved off.)
Now times have changed. We are no longer confined to the written references and analysis that are the content of a philosophy major’s doctrine. A new body of reflective writing has grown up, cross-disciplinary and referenced to experience. It is often based on the concept of “feeling,” newly defined as something like “intuition” or felt knowledge and might be called “embodiment cognition.” It is not located just in the unconscious brain, but in the whole body.
At the same time science has become so expansive and astounding that the old theological stories (particularly the Christian-based ones) have become irrelevant. Not discredited so much as moved to a different context. The traditional word “theology” is based on the premise of God, theos, and discussion about the nature of that entity, who used to be an anthropomorphic form, vaguely paternal, but then -- after we had been into outer space but saw no heaven and no throne -- was apologetically explained as a “force” or “love” or the “ground of all being.” Whatever we think now about the Holy is no longer about God but about natural perception in a human being. We are no longer little clay puppets shaped by a big puppet master. Something vast out-skin is a reality we have separated to perceive,
HUMANS AS RECIEVERS
Being human is being an instrument for interacting with the world. A person, defined by the envelope of skin, receives the world as an electromagnetic or wave-length code acting on receivers in the body, both organs and cells. There are three ways that out-skin information gets inside the body to be reorganized into a sense of reality.
One is the gastrointestinal tract, which accepts nourishment and reduces it to molecules that are sent to the cells, basically a way of ingesting the world and sending out the unused parts that has been there since the first one-celled microbe.
The second is the lungs which allows their internal surface to accept oxygen and other gases, so they can be pumped to the cells by the heart pushing blood. Evolved in water at the beginning, one function of the skin is to contain the solubles.
The third is a mysterious ability to communicate between persons, often through the line of sight or through language. The capacity and generation is anatomical but the transmission can’t be seen. It is sometimes called empathy. Researchers postulate that “mirror cells” create through the senses (eyes and ears) an interior replica of the outside.
The fourth way is less essential for the individual but key for generating life-forms based on meiosis. The world of the in-skin of one person comes in-skin to another is through sex when sperm come into the vagina, then into the uterus, and up the fallopian tubes which are frilled on the ends and open to the inside of the abdomen near the ovaries. An ovum makes a short but perilous trip from the ovaries through the fallopian tubes to the uterus where, with good luck and timing, they meet the sperm cells and begin a new person.
Getting back to the original question, cutting edge understanding of the Sacred/Holy is about the pre-existing nature of the human instrument (embodiment) as it meets the world, builds up experience (witnessing) and describes how it fits together (testifying). This is no longer anthropomorphic (Big Guy in the Sky) nor anthropocentric (it’s all about me -- er, us.), but an earth-based understanding of what it is to be alive. The planet is the basis and the center for thinking this way, which is why that photograph of the earth from the moon is so powerful.
EXPLODING KNOWLEDGE
Someone explained to me once that communication exists in the meeting between the spoken and the heard. Both ends of the exchange depend upon education, capacity to interpret the transmission. But today we have exceeded most people’s access to discoveries and concepts, much less vocabulary. This piece of writing is an attempt to catch up.
I will use three lines of thought.
1. The first is the evolved life arc, which is how the first “life” arose in the sea and then unfolded through pressure from the expanding molecular map inside (genome) meeting the conditions of the planet, which may include destruction. Beginning with the meiotic one-celled being (with a nucleus) and proceeding through our tentative sequence of aeonic changes until we come to humans, we must remember that “humus”, the word for soil, is the origin of the words “human” and “humanity” and maybe even “humble.” We didn’t drop out of the sky, but emerged from the planet’s embracing sheet of life. Since hominin fossils began to be found in the middle of the 19th century, it has became clear that many “rough drafts” have come and gone, and we may only be one of them, not a pinnacle of perfected being. But what are the next hominins going to be like?
2. The second traces each individual human from conception to the development of body and mind or (as is more accurate) bodymind entwined, capable of entering a state called “liminal” which refers to a door or threshold. Key is the idea that a mother and infant between them create a virtual “ground” of shared focus in the early days and years. This expands and gathers power as play and theatre.
Sacrality seems to be a shift in conciousness, not a shaft of light from the sky, as in theatre, but equally striking and closely related to moments of extraordinary perception. This is undoubtedly where the Holy becomes significant and is a source of meaning. Maybe even deep change, particularly in relation to community.
3. The third line of thought is pattern-making, global structures of meaning shared and invented by those within the context of that ecosystem. As our present globalization proceeds, it becomes necessary to go “cross-culture” and “cross-ecology” so we realize we share the macro-patterns, climate, and atmosphere of the planet. In fact, we use the planet as a kind of “house” for understanding the cosmos, which is still largely unknown.
A DIVERSION
In an effort to adapt to the new research about how brains handle “religious” feelings, there are a few popular ideas. I reject them as reductionist and mistakenly concrete, trying to shrink something global to something small and specific. Also, they are convinced that “religions” are institutions belonging to cultures through history, inheritance, moral principles, ideas about world constitution, ritual practices, and artifacts.
In fact, religious groups use ideas of the Sacred to justify their bureaucracies and hierarchies. They are never in themselves “Sacred”, though they try to say so and resist new ideas as a loss of authority. The formal secular government has never quite given up the idea that “In God We Trust” because the idea has been the highest authority for hundreds of years, a way of transcending warring kings.
Another popular set of ideas that I do not consider includes the phenomenon that magnetically induced or epileptic episodes that involve the temporal lobes of the brain will prompt “religious” ideas or a “felt presence. (Look for Michael Persinger’s research.) Some people will “see” figures -- shadow humans -- when in a hypnogogic state related to sleep. (Discussion by Granqvist or Schjodt) This idea gets connected to Joan of Arc’s voices. Such vignettes are often connected to women and also children, on the assumption that serious men are the only rational beings and such moments are emotional, psychosomatic.
Eugene d’Aquili and Andrew Newberg thought, rather elaborately, that “ritual can induce an altered state of consciousness by overloading the limbic structures involved in emotion and bodily self-regulation by the hypothalamus and amygdala.” Various culturally recognized practitioners like nuns,meditators, and so on have been asked to lie in fMRI tunnels in case something can be detected. All this is interesting but not definitive.
EMBODIMENT COGNITION
Some of these new researchers and theorists speak of “embodiment cognition”, which resists the idea that humans are computers balanced on bodies that might as well be hatracks on wheels. They speak of being able to separate the brain from the body while preserving the mind, hoping to keep someone like Einstein in a jar. I call this the “Brain in a Bucket” theory. It’s connected to computers which are assumed to be “thinking” because they are so “rational” and fact-based. To these people a brain or a computer is an individual, sans sensory input except for language which is not the same code as the neurochemical messages of the body nor the dissolved atoms and molecules that organs send.
In somewhat the same way, this way of thinking separates the individual from the community and larger society in a rejection of the “hive mind”, which seems to be a combination of mind-reading, control, and the sting of dis-individuation, producing something between the internet and robots. I have not studied formal “embodiment cognition”, a growing body of thought, almost a “discipline”, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they would include me.
Another related concept is that of “out of mind” states of dissociation during which something unbearable like torture or shattering disorientation provokes a “flight” to a a different reality, which is often described as “a gray and silvery space with no definition.” Some relate it to split-off personality or multiple personality, others consider it a “place”. Again, there is a body of literature about this. (Personally, it sounds to me a bit like the old-time Blackfeet Sand Hills where a soul goes after death. That is related to a real area of sands between Saskatchewan and Alberta, evidently crossed by Blackfeet precursors in migration from north in Canada to the present location.)
The big “anthro” terms -- root-based words, composite neologisms -- were used as a heresy for claiming that God was somehow human (supposedly countered or solved by the idea of Jesus as the son of God). Another use, anthropomorphism, was about the idea that we see things as versions of ourselves. This is also related to the idea that everything -- animals, stones, trees, and mountains -- are like humans, even with souls.
All this comes from wrestling with the idea of the nature of the supernatural (another composite neologism) and our access to it. None of it has anything to do with the direct, undefined, and uncontrollable moment of intensity, the world inflamed and luminous. Rudolph Otto claimed “numinous” for such moments. The Holy or Sacred confuses our thought about cutting edge extraordinary, nearly unbelievable, ideas of “deep time” and “thick history”, to say nothing of the submicroscopic antics of atoms and molecules in our bodies.
IMPLICATIONS
The dissolution of God. He didn’t have to be “killed.” He just dissolved.
Irrelevancy of theology as explicated in history by thinkers.
The valorization of embodiment created by the boundary of the skin which contains sensory information from inside and from outside through specialized organs and cells means that we need a whole new description of thinking. Code of the world, otherwise known as sensory information, is managed by special neural and free-floating networks through the body with the brain as a dashboard full of circuits and translators, connected to the rest of the body through the nervous system circuits and through the chemical codes in blood and lymph.
This re-inclusion of attachment (love) and image (icons) in understanding the individual humans also means stepping away from Freudian psychology/psychiatry and Greek mythology. More modern systems vary in effectiveness, mostly based on language and renewed experience. Now we approach neural physiology.
Major importance goes to polyvagal theory as explored by Dr. Stephen Porges. It is the key to community building, including institutions based on “religious” ideas which emerge from ecosystems. If interested, go to my blogger location: prairiemary.blogger.com where I posted an outline.
Institutions persist inside “skins” or borders and keep others out partly by contrast with stigmatized others, those who are socially rejected (poor, diseased, primitive, criminal, sexual). If the assumptions of institutions are not relevant to the consideration of the Sacred/Holy and, in fact, are sometimes a way of access to them, or at least an escape from the institutional/conventional, then it is no longer useful to make them taboo, dark, inaccessible, or enforced by poverty and violence. Evil can be examined just like everything else.
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