FINGERPAINT THE SACRED

Fingerpainting is a direct way to relate to the world.

I don't like this post very much because it's not digested enough and it's really lists until the end.  Probably I'll end up using the content another way later, but I've become convinced that institutions are hurting us but escaping reform because we so take them for granted.  Particularly when it comes to religion, institutions have fossilized and are preventing us from by-passing all the written commandments in order to get to the spirit of their meaning.  Instead they have become reasons to hoard and punish.

SOME PREMISES ABOUT INSTITUTIONS:

1.  Neanderthals had no institutions, but they did have art that was based on small communities of shared ideas.

2.  The first institutions were phenomena of towns which were the result of grain and herding domestication of wild sources.  They are organizations based on containers (grain bins, houses, temples, defensive walls), ownership, and allegiance, enforced by storage of resources and the defense thereof.

3.  Domestication as a survival strategy arose in several places at the same time and are related to irrigation, which ties into weather.  We’re still doing that in Valier, though far more elaborately — well, maybe not when you consider Peru or Egypt.

4.  Math and writing arose in response to the need to record, to predict, to find patterns, to confirm ownership and make contracts (particularly those related to interest from borrowing and assigning profits.  They’re for surveying land.

5.  Class specialization and privileged knowledge emerged about this time.

It is at this point in history that “religion” separated from indigenous spirituality, awareness of the sacredness of place and ceremonies related to that.  Religion was an early institution that “owned” sacredness and the power to appeal to whatever forces caused safety and even profit.  

Religious institutions became powerful by the use of writing, particularly written ideas on paper like a scroll or eventually a book with pages and cover.  Religious leaders claimed they were the only ones able to properly interpret writing, and worship ceremonies in some traditions were centered on certain writings.  History, self-management, theology are a primitive form of science, justification of privilege.

Most people today think this IS religion and cannot think of anything outside these perimeters.  

(Brittanica):  The Axial Age (also called Axis Age) is the period when, roughly at the same time around most of the inhabited world, the great intellectual, philosophical, and religious systems that came to shape subsequent human society and culture emerged—with the ancient Greek philosophers, Indian metaphysicians and logicians (who articulated the great traditions of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism), Persian Zoroastrianism, the Hebrew Prophets, the “Hundred Schools” (most notably Confucianism and Daoism) of ancient China….These are only some of the representative Axial traditions that emerged and took root during that time. The phrase originated with the German psychiatrist and philosopher Karl Jaspers, who noted that during this period there was a shift—or a turn, as if on an axis—away from more predominantly localized concerns and toward transcendence.”

This means moving towards the abstract, the universal, the cosmic, the humanly shared strategies and interpretations of how to survive.  Most of this was happening in the first millennium Before the Christian Era (BCE) and seems clearly to have evoked major figures we revere today:  Zarathustra, Buddha, Confucius and even the definitional Jesus the Christ who may have arisen (in an abstract sense) out of Judaism interacting with ideas from Buddhism — the practical result of the Silk Roads bringing ideas across the Eurasian continent along with material goods.

Ideas take on political overtones.  Groups try to justify themselves with religious institutions.  The struggle among them may cause destruction and loss like the “Dark Ages” after the horseback invaders from the steppes destroyed the Roman Empire, or COULD evoke a way to reconcile strife by going to a higher, more inclusive system.  Right now our advances in technology may by themselves so change our understanding that we can create a “new world.”

Those who will be displaced from power (those who are uneducated, unskilled, and unconnected) have already begun to try to destroy any advantage.  These are their weapons:

1.  Emptying education so that it is only a tic list of attendance instead of a certification of achievement at a high level of thought.

2.  Emptying wealth into bookkeeping so that it is fungible, fakeable, transferable in the abstract — no longer the interacting actual solid resources of the world but rather another tic list of credits and debits, arbitrarily arrived at and enforced.  It makes minus balances possible and creates overwhelming sums like the total owed by student borrowing.

3.  By pretending that corporations are people and that “share-holders” actually own or control anything, and that the only good is growth, we have justified terrifying abuses of people, animals and land.  In fiction narratives we have already begun to explore the ways people can possibly survive the unsustainable imaginary conventions that are controlling our lives and threaten to trigger violence.

These are some of the unhappy surprises that may tip the balance:

1.  Catastrophe, beginning with climate turbulence and shift.  Drought and high temps in the tropics are as devastating as were the great glaciers that ground over the northern continents.  Rising sea level is erasing land.

2.  Disease, often the direct result of changing climate and population density.  Some bug will eventually hit the balance between traveling so quickly that it’s self-snuffing and infecting so deeply and ingeniously that its cure will be very slow coming.  HIV is still doing well.

3.  Interruption of fertility.  There are hints of this and fiction has been following up.

4.  Gradually achieved toxicity of the land itself and the major water sources so that our food and water supplies poison us.  This is already happening.

5.  Violence and terrorism are likewise already sanctioned by institutions both religious and secular.  The fire is there -- so an accelerant will be what sweeps our lives.

6.  Destruction of power grids and the internet.

How can we achieve innocence enough to escape the prescribing and limiting institutions that are strangling us?When designing experiences intended to reach for and maybe even touch the sacred, to kindle meaning from inside the people, one must first sit down and feel with one’s own guts where those people are in themselves.  Are they scared?  Are they exuberant?  Are they confused?  Are they depressed?  Are they enraged?

Ira Progoff was a journal-keeper who taught a particular procedure very much in line with this kind of thinking.  In his workshops a person would make a list of the turning points in that person’s life: a death, a birth, a marriage, a divorce, a graduation, a decision to leave a job, a house burning down — maybe things that no one else even noticed or thought was important: starting a garden, wallpapering a bedroom.  He called them Stepping Stones.  They were like Turning Points. Then one went back and thought about the intervals.  What might be the metaphor that captured the feeling of that period?  Was it a flower blooming?  Was it a tractor harrowing a field?  Was it a night of falling stars?  Was it an old rotten floor in an abandoned house?

So what is the metaphor for beginning a designed experience?  A tightrope?  A well?  A kite?  A scalpel?  Not literally, but metaphorically what suggests the FEELING you want?  The idea is to be totally separated from everything you already think of as church, institutional church.  Go to art.  Finger paint the sacred.  Start new.

POST-WRITING AUTOCHTHONOUS THOUGHT

EGYPT

We’re all pretty clear that somewhere around 12,000 BCE or 10,000 BCE, maybe because of the weather which was warming (up to that point it had been very cold), humans in various places began to invent agriculture, each with the plants and animals of their place.  Jared Diamond suggests that the locations with easily domesticated animals (cows, pigs, donkeys, camels, horses) were propelled by more ability to use animal power both to travel and to work.  The places with plants with seeds that could be stored, like grain of various kinds, could produce enough food to keep everyone fed plus a surplus to use for trade.  None of this happened all at once, but gradually.

The next step was hierarchies and specializations.  Some people toiled in the fields, some people had little shops, some people were artisans, and some were priests.  Copper smelting begins in 5500 BCE.  Around 3200 BCE, in Mesopotamia writing had been invented, then in Mesoamerica separately around 600 BCE.  People were in towns, and trading paths had been established.  Northern Africa was drying up, with one of the largest lakes draining to the north. All this increased sophistication and awareness of far places that had previously only been possible in sea ports.  Once writing is established, history begins.

Karen Armstrong’s argument appears to be that when the Axial Age arose, defined by the formation of the big religious systems between 700 and 200 BCE, it was prompted by two things.  One was compassion for the suffering of all the peasant classes who did the labor in the fields, and the other was a failure of "paganism".  I disagree with both of these.

I do see that the Axial Era was a time of systems forming, reflecting on the “long history” of humans through the lithic eras.  Infant versions of the great dominating professions formed and grew to be called Western Thought.  Law, medicine, and theology formed thick nodes of population and luxury in some places, all joined by travel-ways.  Pilgrimages.  The Silk Road.  (The original one.)  But truthfully, in any time period I don’t see anyone with much compassion for peasants, esp. in a time of slavery.  I think there was probably more worry about revolution, internal war.  Or why would Jesus and hundreds of others have to be crucified to maintain control?

Many were crucified along the roads.

This image shows up in "Game of Thrones"

I have a lot of respect for paganism, which I don’t interpret as “worshipping” self-indulgent gods of this and that.  I see it in the much older Eliade way, a felt pattern of what is sacred and what is profane.  The idea that a lot of people were being oppressed and this made them yearn for transcendence just doesn’t work for me.  More likely they yearned for freedom, comfort and progress.  Or just went blank.

It seems to me that medieval Europe had plenty of peasants, oppressed, bullied, taxed, and required to attend the local religion which was fused with the local government and justice system.  The transcendence part may have migrated to romantic narratives like the King Arthur myths.  The church was competing politically and thoroughly.  The transcendence seems to apply to the cathedral architecture.  But there IS an ability to imagine virtual systems built on abstract thinking.  

Peasant life

Commerce was the engine and commerce was the corruption, the source of all profit and many alliances.  I don’t see evidence of Heaven as transcendent.  It looks like another seaport to me -- escapism.

My interest is not in going back to the Axial Age as an imaginary Golden Time when everyone was unconflicted and kind nor before that to the Stone Age which Jean Auel half-explored and half-exploited.  I want to know more about the time before writing, even before agriculture.  Call me Esau, the red and hairy hunter.  The Axial Era was a later time when all the systems and hierarchies were just forming.  Our time now is growing pot-bound and still rewards the few at the expense of the many, which Armstrong feels is what triggered the Axial Era.  I think she’s suggesting a new shift is happening.  I agree.

We skipped a few steps in our shift to agriculture, perhaps didn’t make a complete transition from hunter/gatherer, because there’s a LOT of difference between stalking game and plowing.  Things that had to change were the organization of family, the allotment of gender roles, child-rearing, and education.  The new life removed the advantages of one kind of person, replacing it with people who had entirely different characteristics.  Lately there has been a lot of fuss about the diet changes, moving from meat to wheat.  But maybe the invention of writing in 5,000 BCE  (the beginning of history) has been a more subtle and profound change.  Literacy still separates whole populations from everyone else.

I’ve never heard anyone discuss the psychological consequences of switching from hunting/gathering to agriculture.  Part of it is like the difference between television and the internet: television is passive receiving and the internet is active seeking.  (Big institutional and liturgical churches ask the believer to receive.  Active seeking is more the function of the university, but they also establish limits and don’t allow pre-verbal thought unless it is in written description.)  Hunting/gathering is responding to what is really in the world and trying to figure out what the other creatures are doing.  This is like internet exploring.  Gathering means studying the responses of the plants to the climate.  But agriculture means taking control, whether by weeding, planting or watering.  This is more like academia.  In fact, seminary means "seed bed."

Another change is a loss of privacy since in fields and settlements everyone can see what everyone else is doing, in contrast to small groups or individuals going off on their own into forest.  And maybe a change in the order of the day, since hunting is done on the schedule of the animals, usually diurnal and sometimes nocturnal, unless they are in large herds.  To work with plants is to be awake and active through the day.  Cooking would also be changed, with plants often needing shucking or chopping and then boiling or baking.  Meat needs much less fuel which means less wood gathering.  Fermentation and leavening appear: bread and wine.

These changes would be reflected in ceremonies.  For instance, burnt offerings of meat  -- modeled on sharing meat from hunting with family and band -- converted to vegetable crops, pottage, and finally wheat bread in the Christian communion -- seems to have been hard emotionally, considering that Jacob and Esau’s rivalry was probably a narrative meant to persuade men that the change was right by bringing in the previous generation, the old blind father.  (Aside from its function of justifying succession and animosities.)

Hunting is not so far from war.  Where does the aggression go when the culture shifts to working fields?  Raiding and defending crops is probably not enough action.  It’s hard to imagine that the energy goes into the stone buildings and streets that persist today.  Maybe it goes into violence against women, children and domestic animals.  For hunters, reflexes and complexes from their dark and animal brains are quite fitting and find their uses.  No animals do agriculture on any scale.  The neolithic psyche is explored today in terms of adaptation or lack thereof in the modern (using metal and writing) world, which is once again a conversion of patterns and energies left from the “Axial Age”.  World religions at that time did urge empathy and compassion.  Not that it made much difference.

The human ability to adapt to different contexts is, of course, what keeps us from being trapped in one environment which extinguished some animal species, but ability is not willingness.  People distribute themselves through classes and places according to their adaptations.  Maybe the lighthouse keepers and fire tower watchers are reacting to a primal arboreal life.  The walking gene is still strong in many people and still good for our basic physiology.  People thrown out of mainstream culture, maybe for lack of literacy, form their own tribal groups.

In every culture, but particularly in ag-based communities, there is a strong will to keep things the same.  The overwhelming variable for farmers is the climate, which is totally uncontrollable.  Weather comes from overhead and is occasionally as destructive as Noah’s flood.  By the time prayers and hymns are written down, the evidence of weather as a deliberate religious act by a god or Gods is certainly there and gets carried into the Axial thinking, possibly through things like studies of seasons and the creation of systems like irrigation to manage fields, to compensate for the arbitrary reward and punishment.

The other big ag variable is the market, which exists if there is enough food left over to sell.  In some times and places, greed has taken the people’s food to sell for profits that the elite can grab.  We feel this is happening now, and that the major religious systems devised in the Axial Era have been sold out to major commercial corporations, partly because they have become religions themselves and the religious institutions have become corporations.

The “Axial Era” was a long time ago.  Something new is forming, something granular, coded, and differently limited by cosmic physics and our own brain function.  I don’t think it will be writing-based; I think it will be arts based and that we will recognize technology as an art form.

AXIAL: PIVOTING FROM WHAT TO WHAT?

This is not going to be a post dependent on fine writing, but rather a matter of shoving ideas around in crude and fuzzy ways.

Karen Armstrong did not think up the idea of the Axial age.  The premise was that the “Axial Age” or “Pivotal Age” lasted from 800 BC to 200 BC, so what happened to the “C”?  One would expect it to be the axis or pivot!  It was Karl Jaspers’ idea.  He was a German psychiatrist/philosopher/theologian (1883 to 1969), part of a cohort of big shots from about that time and place.  Nietsche, Wagner, and Goethe were there.  I think you could make a case that these are Grandiose Narcissists in quite an impressive way, and also that they could be accused of underlying if not contributing to two world wars.  Certainly, the ideas inflamed Hitler.

Further, my suspicion is that Jaspers, assuming that he and his cohorts were the newest wave of world-changing religious theorizers, looked back to Jesus and earlier and saw a mirror, identifying with them.  Here’s the short list, the people who came to be considered “Western Thought.”

Jeremiah by Rembrandt

Judaism: founded over 3500 years ago.  The Old Testament.

Christianity founded over 2,000 years ago.  It’s supposed to be the C.  It emerged from Judaism.  The New Testament.

Islam began in the 600’s and uses many derived ideas from Christianity.  The Koran.

Zoroaster:  maybe 1,000 to 600 BCE.  Yasna Haptanghaiti as well as the Gathas, which are hymns.  We don’t think about these folks much these days, but if you know where to look, they’ve left clues everywhere. 

These four traditions, which have many similarities and are from about the same area, the institutional survivors of a swarm of ideas that seem to have fascinated the Big Guy shrinks/philosophers/theologians.

Here’s a longer list:

IRAN

ZARATHUSTRA  (MONOTHEISM)

PALESTINE

ELIJAH

ISAIAH

JEREMIAH

DEUTERO-ISAIAH

GREECE

HOMER

PARMENIDES

HERACLITUS

PLATO

TRAGEDIANS

THUCYDIDES

ARCHIMEDES

The Eastern and Middle Eastern religions and thinkers are on another list that you probably won’t recognize in total.  I don’t.  I looked up Mo-Ti.  c.472-c 391 BC.  A Chinese philosopher who preached universal love and who split off from Confucianism by challenging parental authority and loving simplicity.  He’s either Thoreau or a hippie.  Was Ho-Ti his cousin?  That jolly dancer with the round belly?  I’ll leave the others for another day.

INDIA

UPANISHADS

BUDDHA

JAINISM

SINOSPHERE

LAO-TSE

CONFUCIUS

MO-TI

CHUANG TSE

LIEH TZU

One person looking at this list suggested that these folks came from a new “elite” class of religious leaders and thinkers in China, India and the Occident which began a tradition of traveling scholars, pilgrims in search of ideas, following the nodes and connections of marketplaces and long distance commerce.  Cross-pollinators.

So there’s a flowering of subtle and beautiful schools of thought into institutions that Jaspers may have hoped his own group echoed, though life in Germany was more industrial and mathematical, which may have made them yearn for the romance of humanities, even as it was pushed aside into France.  Maybe Jaspers was trying to re-access the dark limbic parts of brains and looking for justification in the lives of the people on this list, which turn out not be confined to the Axial Age at all.  

Baths of Neptune, Ostia Attica

It looks to me as though the invention of agriculture 10,000 BC  took several millennia to consolidate and standardize enough for people to look up from their fields and flocks and wonder what it was all for, in a way that the hunter-gatherers never considered.  There was probably a period of terrible epidemics carried in by the domestication of animals and then relief when everyone who was susceptible had already died.  Judging from the beauty of material remains, some must have been prosperous.  It would have been a hard winnowing that raised a lot of questions about suffering and evil as a cause for punishment.  But the reward is the blooming of prosperity and the city with a granary and a temple where people are beginning to write hymns instead of invoices.

By the time the temple has become a stage and the kings have begun to consider their own actions, prompted by the chorus, something has changed.  The brains are different, handling abstract concepts on human emotional terms, thinking through people in an observing group.  We are beginning to understand that aside from organs, there are over 200 kinds of brain cells, each with it’s own way of dealing with information.  Rather than a new organ having evolved, maybe a new kind of brain cell had mutated.  It could have happened quickly.  We know that each individual has the potential for a stage of maturation in early adulthood that means a capacity to think in abstractions.  Not all people reach that stage.

Kinds of brain cells.  Who knew?

Beginning in about this “axial” time (which I still don’t understand, particularly in terms of being a pivot -- what did it turn from and what did it turn to?) it seems to me the intervening centuries until now are better seen as part of the “Guns, Germs and Steel” story explored in Jared Diamond’s book.  It was a time of expansion and competition, hard on those crushed beneath the wheels of progress, but leading to a brief moment of balance quite recently.  

Now the guns are domestic. Family members shoot each other.  Powerful viruses emerge from the vestiges of jungles and sweep through the huge vulnerable populations who are displaced, starving, and traumatized, challenging our commodified “compassion.” The planetary weather systems change everything.  We look out into the cosmos from our space station telescopes and again ask the Big Questions.  Some of the people on the Axial list above made some pretty good guesses.  

None of the Germans operating from a Victorian understanding of Christianity have much to say about it, except that a lot of people are wondering what happened to Jesus’ simple idea.  Why is it that the theologian who is meaningful and has a name starting with B (as so many theologians do) is not anyone trained by fancy institutions, but rather Bibfeldt, who was invented as a joke.  He’s the “both/and” guy responding to Kierkegard’s “either/or.”    

Rumored to be Bibfeldt

I suggest that NOW is the Age of Axis.  Or maybe Karen was talking about the back axle and we’re on the front axle.   Or vice versa.   I’ll wait for her book.  Diamond’s book, “The World Until Yesterday,” skips over all that grandfathery stuff and goes back to the early days, the first hunter/gatherers in their little wandering groups.  Some of us do feel an affinity.

According to Wikipedia: “Either/Or is the work of the Søren Kierkegaard. Appearing in two volumes in 1843, it outlines a theory of human development in which consciousness progresses from an essentially hedonistic, aesthetic mode to one characterized by ethical imperatives arising from the maturing of human conscience.”  If you watch Ingmar Bergman movies, you’ll get the same concept, which is essentially that growing up means being grimly duty-bound, never having any fun or beauty.  Kids around here have told me the same thing.

Paul Rorem, reviewer of Bibfeldt's book:  "The Unrelieved Paradox."

Well, screw that.  I’m with Bibfeldt.  “He” writes now and then, channeling through U of Chicago Div School, esp. the students of Martin Marty. If you manage to spend any time with true hunter-gatherers, I think you will discover that they love to laugh, esp. at blunders and tragedies.  This would cause Kierkegaard to accuse them of being children.  But Rousseau would ask,  “What’s wrong with that?

Strangely, this new layer of Internet communication is adding BOTH fun/aesthetics and a new take on ethics that includes all humans, all animals, all life, all existence, and right on out as far as you can imagine.  It challenges exclusions and elaborates on the two sidedness that can stop being a binary in order to create a spectrum.  And as T constantly remembers, the New Physics says that a particle can be both here and there at the same time.

So what are you going to do about it?  Read a book?  Write a book?