BONECHALICE BLOG TABLE OF CONTENTS

TABLE OF CONTENTS

fOR "Bonechalice.blogspot.com 

A blog begun in 1/26/14 but not continued.  Only a few posts justify the caution label at the beginning these posts were originally on prairiemary.blogspot.com and were created to record research and thought.  This specialized blog is not well-formatted.  Not many have read the entries.

Examples of Deep Experience, some designed.

Another Outline 

The Sense of Sound

Ceremonial Smells

Managing the Brain

The Big Shift

Pre-Theological:  Molecular

Liturgy Plus

In the Liminal Space

How Institutions Capture Deep Experience

A List of Jeffrey Prager's Published Articles on Trauma, etc

.

Survival through Deep Experience

Two Kinds of Sources

Meaning Emerges from Experience

You Are Not your Brain

Sensorium to Institution

Winter Solstice: a Substrate for the Sacred

To Suffer Pleasure: Transgressive Sex

The Buffalo Jump: a Way of Looking at Story

Body Music

Psychedelic Drugs Discussion from Alternet

Inskin or Outskin

Inside or Outside the Circle of Belief

Inner Life: Deep Painted Caves

Death Notices

Denominations

The Odor of Sanctity

What is the Origin of Religion

At first I called it Liturgy

Line of Thought

THE STATE OF MY THINKING

On a plain stage in a darkened auditorium, the young woman stood gracefully but electrically, speaking with lyric force and occasional gestures.  The audience was the rest of her acting class as well as some observers who slipped in quietly.  To those few she seemed to be in a garden, wearing something classic.  But she wasn't.  She was just a member of the acting class performing a class assignment, a bit of a play.  The audience was transfixed, her every gesture vaguely echoed in their bodies.  In coming days her words would come back to them and they would think about them.

This was an acting class in 1958 at Northwestern University taught by Alvina Krause, master teacher of "The Method," a way of finding a stage character through sense memories.  In those years I was also taking classes in Philosophy of Religion, World Religions, and Language and Thought.  They seemed relevant.

In 1979 across Chicago, near the campus of the University of Chicago, the small side chapel of a massive stone church was supposed to be divided from the main hall by a fire wall that cranked up and down via some balky mechanism that wouldn't work.  It had been left up but the hall wasn't lit, so the people at vespers in the smaller space were looking at a huge black void where stone echoed dark.  A big mirror was set up in front of the emptiness, reflecting the people.  This vespers was for seminary students at the end of a class week.  They were accustomed to thinking in terms of the Abyss and of self-reflection.  Every word, song, and prayer spoke of these, so that they looked into themselves and saw the Abyss.  A few people wept.

A circle of very old Blackfeet (born in the 1890's) gathered in a house cleared of furniture.  They sat on the floor.  An "orderly" sat by a tub of earth on which a tiny fire was lit, just enough to maintain a smudge and re-light the long-stemmed pipe that traveled the circle.  The door was at the east.  Directly across from the door was a tripod supporting a Bundle of skins that amounted to a hymnal, to be opened as a reminder of songs and dances belonging to each creature.  It was not a quiet nor a solemn occasion, but familiar to these old people who drew great comfort from it.

It's decades since these experiences but I've never stopped thinking about them.  I used to have a "travel sermon" that I presented when invited to preach as a guest.  Called "Honey and Wax," which was the title of an anthology of narratives composed by Richard Stern to be a class text, it talked about moments that were hot and sweet, but came upon us by surprise.  It quoted Heraclitus rather than Plato or Descartes.  The moment that was central was an ordinary moment suddenly struck through by wonder and meaning.  I talked about waiting on the high platform of the elevated train on a sunny afternoon when, unpredicted, it engulfed me.  Nothing remarkable.  Except what I was feeling.  Why?

Every time I gave the sermon, people would come up afterwards and tell me about moments like this.  "What does it mean?" they would ask.  "Were there drugs?  Was it supernatural? Was it God?"  When I told my classmates about it they would ask, "Can a person make such moments happen?  Have you done that?  Can you call the Holy Spirit?"

At the time the Dean of Students just leaving the School of Divinity was opposed to anything that was what he called "phenomenology."  He was devotedly Christian.  That is, he actively suppressed anything that was atheistic, heretical, or secular -- any denial of another world.  What I didn't know and no one told me -- maybe they didn't know either -- was that at the time George Lakoff and Mark Johnson were framing up a new approach to human experience, "The Metaphors We Live By,".which we read but didn't really "get" in terms of implications.  Mihaly Csikszentmihali was doing his research on "flow," which captivated everyone.  Bernie Brown, Dean of Rockefeller Chapel, asked us to read Victor Turner's book "The Ritual Process" and think about liminal time and space, though a few others thought it invited chaos and madness.  All these came to be meaningful.

Luckily, this Divinity School was strongly protective of Comparative Religion, which was a way to access my questions.  The shelves at the Seminary Cooperative Bookstore offered Stephen Toulmin who explained what Enlightenment rationality really was -- warrants for reasoning and so on -- so I could pass the U of Chicago classes which were strictly rational.  And also books by Suzanne Langer who was approaching the questions through art and Felt Meaning.  Then there was Carl Rogers whose clinic was there.  He claimed that if he went and sat with a patient considered unreachable, adopting the person's posture and gradually coming into their emotional space, he could reach understanding and communication.  Often mocked, it seemed as effective as "the talking cure."

I remembered from acting that one could achieve a character from the outside in, taking their stance and voice, or from the inside-out, the Method way.  In the next decades I built up theory and example from experience and the research of others, but it wasn't until the recent revelations about how the brain actually works, which teaches us that we think with our whole bodies ("embodied cognition"), that I could pull together something convincing.  In the guise of an outline for a book, here are most of the bases I touched, the people I thought about.

BEGINNING TO LINK AND SEQUENCE

1.  The need to explore alternative ways of thinking besides the "Western" European white male rationality that has been our mainstream since Greek and Roman thought, as follows:

The Enlightenment

Philosophy precedents that support the academy

Rule of law (written) and bookkeeping

Industrial Revolution

Technology leading to quantum theory, outer space and satellites

Globalization

2.  What is "religion"?  Is it a useful concept?

Theology

Morality

Institutions

Converting life to code and data 

Abandoning the "secular" separation

"Social and Affective cognition"

3.  "Embodied Cognition"  

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/a-brief-guide- to-embodied-cognition-why-you-are-not-your-brain/

understanding through acting classes and Malvina Hoffman

https://www.youtube.com/watch? time_continue=77&v=COFo_z_x5ZM

Sexual interaction

4.  Framing:  conceptual metaphors that organize everything else

Possibly rooted in dimension/space marked by individual cells

cellular filing of memory using date and place

5.  Sensations held in the body wordlessly as concepts.  Human beings are not paperdolls that remain the same, but interacting processes like flames.

Stages in the process that make lifelong marks:

a.  womb

b.  first years

c.  tension between group and individual

d.  the shape of the world

6.  The brain works by connecting two things, thus figurative metaphor.  The brain can connect any two things without restriction.

7.  Language and grammar as evidence or determining what is known?

8.  Empathy: secondary experience

What actors know about how action interacts with mind

9.  Grounding in liminal time and space.  

10.  Meaning: binding it all together into identity : enacting as liturgy.

HISTORY IS NO LONGER LIMITED BY WRITING

Trees and rocks have their own language.

Pressure from global climate change has stimulated much research on the history and process of the planet as a giant ecology, which has moved thought past the origin of human beings, past the origin of eukaryotic cells, past the origin of climate itself and how it has shaped the existence of biological creatures ever since.  We are cosmic.

This has revealed a shift in our understanding of the past, which was artificially limited by written records.  Once we reached back past the document horizon, we moved our thinking to the oral story and interaction society of the pre-contact Blackfeet.  Remnants of it remain, or did in the Sixties, and I had direct contact ceremonially.  This made me realize that what I was pursuing as “liturgy” was limited to institutional religion, circles of believers who needed to reinforce their community and worldview by repeating accepted writing.  Sometimes it was written down (The Book of Common Prayer) and sometimes it was learned by heart (The Lord’s Prayer).  But because it was words and writing, it was a “given”, both anchoring and walling in, co-opted by government and stamped on our money.

History defined by institutional writing is no longer a limit, so new thinking about ceremonies is needed.  One of my sources of inspiration all along had been experimental ceremonies at the Pacific Northwest UU Leadership School, where a gathered temporary community invented actions that would express more modern ideas: nurturing, gender equality, trust, and something that could not be called theology because it resented and shut out all notions of “Theos.”  Not just because of being angry at a big humanoid in the sky, not just because of damage to the concept of family, but because even redefining God as “Love” was a return to old ideas.  

Many of us defined our religious center as something like secular unity and progressiveness, a kind of patriotism and concern for governmental ideals.  It was still in writing, still preserving the institutional aspect of religion, but not the driving force of it nor the spiritual passion that can sustain it.  “The Pledge of Allegiance,” composed in 1887, was adopted in 1942 wartime.  “God” was added in 1954.  I was a nice Presbyterian high school girl, but I had ideas and I never have said the phrase.  I just leave it out.

Once the old ways of doing things are questioned and dropped, where is the replacement?  I think it comes like music, out of our daily lives, humming a tune until it catches on and begins to be a chorus.  Deliberation moves in and out of spontaneity, so that the Flower Communion — a Spring event to which people bring a flower, gather them up front during the service, and and choose a different flower to carry away — is a deliberately designed thing to do, but quite natural and capable of containing many thoughts.  (“The Flower Celebration was initiated in Prague on 4 June 1923 by Norbert Čapek, who was also the founder of the Unitarian Church in Czechoslovakia”.)  But I am NOT recommending UU as some kind of ideal.  This is NOT about being UU.  

Once the pattern of gathering/dispersal was familiar, women used it to bring and mingle water, then take away a bit of it — in the original feminist example using their emptied cosmetic containers.  By now people have used soils, seeds, or other symbolic bits, even sometimes declarations written on small bits of paper: regrets, sadness, and resolutions that are then burned.  Or possibly making “Stone Soup” by bringing ingredients to be cooked together.  In the earliest Christian congregations, something like “house churches,” the people brought the bread and wine to assemble and use ceremonially by eating together.  Potluck is a familiar practice, often associated with churches.

Once on a retreat I had asked everyone to bring a can of baked beans and a package of brownie mix.  I dumped all the beans together in a big pot to be heated, which caused some muttering.  These were people who prided themselves on their cooking skill as individuals.  The brownies went better.  It was interesting to discuss, but some people still resented any communalism, not on principle but because it worried them.  It felt wrong.

The Blackfeet use a gesture to express acceptance and appreciation of a speaker: they hold out their hands to the person, then cross their arms across their chests.  It means “all that you say, I take to my heart.”  Then one day when I explained and used the gesture in a small group, a man rose to extend the gesture.  He held out his hands, crossed them on his chest, repeated “all that you say I take to my heart” and then extended his hands again.  “All that is in my heart, I give back to you.”  It was as natural as many of the gestures of sign-talk, both the Plains Indians gestures of meaning and the language used by the American Sign Language community of non-hearing persons.

Now that video is as easily transmitted and stored as writing, a gesture language can exist without paper or spoken words and so can other acts of meaning.  Libraries already exist, not even counting YouTube, Tumblr, and so on.  The shared expression of feelings in this way allows a complete bypass of the logical, precedented, defined, emotionless writing, that we have given hegemony in the past.  Now we can go to the world of art, empathy, the “limbic” brain, the dreamworld, the autonomic nervous system, and limerence.  In fact, as populations mix and expand, more and more people are communicating this way anyhow, out of necessity without a shared language, history, or place.

Millennials and other younger generations speak to each other in music.  The dynamic of commerce, previously one of the great instigators of exchange and expansion, has become troubled, but music, liberated by internet access, is everywhere without payment.  Such communalism worries some, esp. those whose emotions are stirred by the great orchestras and operas of the elite, which are costly to produce  They are the products of institutions, which now often struggle.  But others take music as inspiration for the liberation of print.  We are barely conscious of the costs of institutional religion.  The issue is beyond what I’m doing here.

Excerpt from "THE BONE CHALICE"

INTRODUCTION

SOURCES

The “controlling metaphor” for this discussion is the idea that the form of an event is a container for what happens.  The more intense the event, the stronger the container needs to be.  Even a free-form improvised non-verbal event needs a container.  The Catholic mass form is very strong with a long history.  Basically, it is study of written material (derived from Jewish study of the Torah) followed by celebratory sharing of communion (a metaphorical form of sacrifice).  Experiments with mind-altering substances in non-verbal cultures are always attended by adepts who can control what happens.

There is much to explore here.  Are “forms” logical and rational?  Is the content always passionate emotion?  What happens if the same content is put into a new form?

My sources for this thinking about designed ceremonies were derived from Method Acting classes, Blackfeet ceremonies, myth, natural history, and comparative religion.  When I entered seminary, it was clear that I was not functioning the same way as the more conventional people.  To make this simple, they were all thinking like white male grad students aiming for a PhD: rationality, precedence, introspection and literateness.  Once I realized that was the prevailing and natural context in most academic places, I was able to find the minority streams of thought, books that explained how to choose my own path while still functioning with others.

It is easy to shrug this position off as peculiar to the Unitarian Universalist movement, which allowed me space and something like camouflage.  But Ethical Culture and humanist groups would have done the same thing.  Particularly because the tradition I was in (Unitarian more than Universalist despite a merger in 1961) was relatively affluent, educated, and in 1978 still mostly male, everything was as professional as lawyers and doctors — that is, one’s vocation was meant to be professed, stated.  Even the faculty at Meadville/Lombard had credentials meaning they were committed to a faith — though a broad one — and to an academic inheritance.  We were expected to operate through logic, reading historical and theoretical materials, and conviction.  My conviction was one of seeking.  But my basic definitions were out of line, so how could they certify what I believed?

Their method left out some of the most religious people I knew: nonliterate, ceremonial, connected to the land and tribe, the Blackfeet tribe on their reservation in Montana and reserves in Alberta, united by location on the East Slope of the Rocky Mountains.  Some people claim that because of the compression of the continents there, forced by the underlying plate tectonics, there are dynamics at work but unperceived.  Others look to the sky, grass and buffalo that shaped the culture.

I never did connect with any anthropologists at the University of Chicago, though now I know that some work was being done that would have fit exactly with what I was looking for.  My faculty knew nothing about anthropology.  Indeed, if I’d gotten too interested in their indigenous work, it would have pulled me out of preparation for the ministry, which is the point of a seminary.  The denomination was, after all, paying my tuition and they were my side admission gate, a subset of the U of Chicago mechanisms for keeping order and focus.

True to the idea of a university, a collection of thinking communities, there was forming at the time a group of people developing a complex of thoughts described by Mark Johnson in “The Meaning of the Body” as “the origin of meaning in organism-environmental coupling: a nonrepresentational view of mind.”  The names of the people include Victor Turner, George Lakoff, Eugene Gendlin, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Suzanne Langer and more.  They were labeled pejoratively “phenomenologists.”

Since the thinking that I did in Chicago and used in my ten years of ministry, the world and myself have moved on.  I left parish ministry in 1989, but continue as an independent scholar.  In 1999 I was able to move to a disintegrating little house in the village of Valier, next to the Blackfeet Reservation where I spent so many happy years.  Since that time, some transformative new ideas have dawned. 

DESIGNING SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE

DAWNING KNOWLEDGE

Mircea Eliade’s “The Sacred and the Profane” marks the study of consciousness with the felt distinction between the sacred and the profane.  Many, but not all, people have had the sensation of sacredness.  It is something real but not universal, and evidently not controllable.  Like the Holy Spirit metaphor of wind, it “bloweth where it listeth,” a phenomenon of distinct but strongly emotional consciousness.  

A science-based, verifiable and major shift in thinking about consciousness is from neurology where fMRI and other technological strategies have allowed us to see thinking as it happens — not implied results but actual ions moving in and out of neurons and so on, which has introduced a new language of “-omes” to describe the libraries of molecules and cells in potential and patterning, from the genome to the “mineralome.”  We have new support for the idea of humans as evolved animals and new respect for what a cell or a neuron can do.  

The connectome is the name of the dynamic process of impulses traveling between neurons and being processed in various small nodes of sorting, editing, triggering, and storing the coded impulses of sensory cells and organs.  The shifting patterns of connection are physical evidence of consciousness accommodating our awareness of the world, the embodiment of our identities.  Designing experience is a matter of arranging events that will shift that connectome to get the wanted effect.

Mysterious as that sounds, it is no more mysterious than the sensory preparation for church or theatre or court.  A short list:

Bells ringing.

An impressive entrance with big embellished doors.

A wide and steep staircase.

A foyer meant to be an architectural transition, perhaps with

      certain lighting like chandeliers.

The sight of familiar people, or people marked by costumes

      indicating roles.

The sound of an orchestra tuning.
Incense or smudging.

On one hand we are tempted to think of ourselves as “meat computers” but on the other hand we are forced to admit that our more elegant experiences and empathies are far beyond anything a computer can achieve, even a self-taught OS able to play chess, a simply computational system cannot achieve embodied organism-environment coupling.  Human awareness and action is an accumulation of functions that includes everything back to the first eukaryotic one-celled creature.

As the horizon of artificial intelligence moves outward, the dimensions of human experience also expand and elaborate.  We can feel ourselves still mutating into new evolving creatures.  This demands a different kind of spiritual life, one that will support individuals in a time when institutions of all sorts are confused and even failing.  If the social containers of our lives are falling away, can the spiritual flame sustain us?

THE ODOR OF SANCTITY

In medieval times it was thought that saints emitted a scent of lilies at the time of their death.  If they were martyred, the belief was that the fragrance came from their wounds, and that was linked somehow to the idea that their bodies would not decay.  There have been explanations proposed by scientists, mostly along the lines that the saints had a condition like diabetes or starvation that would cause them to emit ketones.

The Asian cultures valued the scent of tea and wove that into their ceremonies, while later Europeans recognized these gentle smells and made them an ingredient in perfumes rather than liturgies.  Of course, as precious things, tea, frankincense, myrrh and other fragrances have always been valued as the prerogative of the privileged and therefore excellent gifts for even a baby if the idea of king/god was mixed with the idea of riches and the baby was thought to have hereditary entitlement to an exalted family tree of One.

For the more secular, who still yearn for mysticism and mind-shifting, the scents of psychoactive drugs are attractive enough for expensive perfumes to be named for them.  And for those who worship books, we have those bound in Russian leather with its characteristic smell.   Coco Chanel was said to have a book collection that emanated the smell she often wanted in her perfumes.  Ecclesiastical furniture might be made of aromatic woods like cedar or sandalwood, and Holy Oils for anointing are likely to have a scent, either of itself, if simply olive oil, or maybe of some special addition.

Anointing leads us to sex and though most Christian versions are officially ascetic in their prescriptions (one god, one sexual partner, one life, one smell -- and it had better be soap) Jesus is constantly being anointed and surely anointing feet through the use of one’s hair is sexy.

Decidedly NOT sexy is the connection of smell with burnt sacrifice, though the burning bodies of animals (earlier, possibly even humans) were said to reach the gods in their heaven through their nostrils and were said to be pleasing to them.  Still, burnt vegetable matter, like sweetgrass, sage and kinnikinnick smudges, can be quite pleasant and varieties of smoke enhance foods as well as preserving them, like smoked salmon or smoked oysters.

Living things have their smells, sometimes the reek of skunk and civet or ambergris, the secretion of whales, which might not be particularly pleasant alone, but combined with other fragrances can give them a dark and musky appeal.

A fascinating connection advanced by Octavian Coifan, a perfume writer and expert, is that there exists a strong relationship between orris root, which is the rhizome of irises (you can buy it online), and the Egyptian god Osiris, “usually identified as the god of the afterlife, the underworld and the dead. He was classically depicted as a green-skinned man with a pharaoh's beard, partially mummy-wrapped at the legs, wearing a distinctive crown with two large ostrich feathers at either side, and holding a symbolic crook and flail.  Osiris was considered not only a merciful judge of the dead in the afterlife, but also the underworld agency that granted all life, including sprouting vegetation and the fertile flooding of the Nile River. “

Some propose that this god of the cut-up-to-be-replanted rhizome/tuber is a primal concept that eventually led to the idea of the crucified Jesus: that He is killed in order to renew life.  This is something like the sacrifices of the Inca, who cut out living hearts to offer the Sun.  I hope I never find out what these deaths smell like.

One of the perfume writers suggested that the perpetual search for a new perfume of greater beauty is “the constant human desire to go beyond the senses.”  Clearly the spiritual enterprise is one that urges transcending our sensorium into other realms that we know are there, because our technical expertise lets us see things beyond the range of our eyes, hear things that our ears can’t record, and enter other worlds -- or so they seem to be.   Attempts to describe these experiences are often paradoxical: hot/cold, floating/falling, dark/light.

In “essence” what happens when smelling is that molecules floating in air enter the nose and penetrate to what amounts to an organic analysis lab that can detect even faint amounts of material.  Much of what we think of as taste is really smell: a solution of coffee, toasted bread, and a burnt fat meat: bacon.  But an accustomed American breakfast could smell repellant to someone from a culture that didn’t eat that way.  The smells of cooking have a moral overtone: you shouldn’t eat that, the smell is low-class, the food may be spoiled, the smell comes into my room uninvited, you'll ruin your health.

Smell must have been the first sense as we think of them today, though the senses that control location in space and movement must have come first, because the purpose of smell for the one-celled animal suspended in space is to find food and avoid danger.  With locomotion but no smell, the creature could only blunder around, depending on chance which is not a strong factor in favor of survival.  

Suspended in liquid as the “firsties/onesies” must have been, without orifices of either ingestion or disposal, the chemical diagnoses of bits of the environment (“the out-skin”) must have happened in the cell (“in-skin”).  It would be a great convenience and a matter of survival safety again, to know what something was made of before taking it through the skin and finding out too late that it’s toxic.  Thus the first nose was a step towards survival that has evolved in many ways, according to its uses, like pigs trained to find truffles.  Or babies who smell good to their mothers.  But fawns in the wild are scentless because all the smelly ones were found and eaten by predators.

Today we have discovered that dogs can smell diabetic overload, maybe even cancer, and some say cats can detect impending death -- how else but by smell?  We use drug dogs, cadaver dogs, and search bloodhounds.  Dogs don’t smell so sweet themselves, but I personally am fond of the smell of horse.

In the late Nineties I was jolted to stop by a church I once attended regularly.  On the door I confronted a sign telling me that if I were wearing perfume, I was not allowed to enter because the secretary and possibly others were allergic to it.  Granted, it was a time of strong perfumes, but this began to approach the need for a bathing ritual before entering the temple.  Should there be showers by the door?  Or should the allergic be sequestered behind glass with a separate air-conditioning system?

Not all lab-created molecules are friendly -- in fact, the likelihood is low, considering they didn’t evolve so were not winnowed out by avoidance/attraction/consequences.  This means there’s a moral difficulty, which is already present in the stigmatizing of smells of sweat, dirt, and excretions.  Smelly people are generally poor people, street people, maybe crazy people and no one wants them in church.  I’ll repeat:  should there be showers at the door?

FANCY THEORIES WITH A SIMPLE GOAL

Sweetgrass Hills

If a person were determined to get everything into labeled boxes, they might call my approach to designing intense experiences an atheo-anthro-bio-geo-sophy.  The label is coming out of a double understanding of bio and geo studies that is much like the reframing that has emerged for Christians, originally geographically located in the Holy Land and focused on supra-anthro-theological matters, especially separating the three mega-institutions that have emerged in the modern world from a welter of forces.  This is a dynamic understanding of existence, always changing but always connected.  (You know about the Bioneers?)

When I say this set of interacting disciplines is “emergent” I mean that it is coming out of increasing and interacting understanding of the world and ourselves as we scientifically explore and propose -- never conclusively because the point of science is always to keep an open mind about possible future developments.  The study of “religion” is also a scientific enterprise, though it does not address the supernatural.  It is not A-religious or A-theistic -- it simply directs its attention elsewhere to the study of religious institutions and the human response to them.  Studying worship is not worshipping.

One of the deepest sources of guidance about human life is the idea that we can understand the creator by studying “his/her/its” creation.  Therefore, one of the most troubling challenges to the idea of a theos is that living creatures suffer so much.  “If God is good, he is not God; if God is God, he is not good,” said Archibald Macleish in his play, “J.B.” based on the book of Job.  I am accepting the idea that creation is a “book” in which we can read about our sources and nature, but I am turning aside from suffering the same as I turn aside from the supernatural.  Not because I don’t care, but because that’s not my focus.

Often the relationship between the theos and the anthros is the basis of study of ritual, liturgy, worship, ceremony, prayer and so on.  Rarely is the bio noted, except to note that mountains tend to have gods living on them and that springs are associated with renewal and insight.  

In two ways assumptions about the evolution of ways of addressing the sacred have begun to be explored apart from the mega-institutions of the world.   One is biogeography and the other, which is related, is molecular systematics, the study of interacting genomes as they guide the creature in its environment. 

Wolverine

“Biogeography is an integrative field of inquiry that unites concepts and information from ecology, evolutionary biology, geology and physical geography.   Modern biogeographic research combines information and ideas from many fields, from the physiological and ecological constraints on organismal dispersal to geological and climatological phenomena operating at global spatial scales and evolutionary time frames.”  (Since this is from Wikipedia, I cannot credit the author.)  Biogeography is what gave rise to Darwin’s ideas, based on observations of island animal changes.

Molecular systematics has developed from the study of DNA, which allows the study of the essential biological molecular cell nucleus formulas of animals and how they unfold across time and place.  It is a second source of theory about human beings.

A third scientific force is coming to bear now, which is the study of neurology, an extremely close (molecular, electrical, neuronal) study of the human sensorium (not limited to the five senses) and to its management by the brain in order for the creature to act in the world so as to survive.  This includes the study of malfunctions and lesions that impose deficits, but also the detection of the newest evolved senses, like mirror cells which are a source of empathy, the arts and compassion.  The pre-frontal cortex is the location of much human identity.

When Mircea Eliade wrote “The Sacred and the Profane,” he could not have had any idea about most of this material since it wasn’t developed yet, but somehow he went directly to the capacity to feel the Holy.  It’s clear that most people can sense a place or time that is Sacred, not because of some institution or authority and not necessarily anything they can put into words, and not confined to the times, places and people they know best.  What is happening when they feel these small, often unexpected epiphanies?  Can such a moment be created?

Prairie Fire

In "Constructing Local Theologies," Robert Schreiter put aside his own focus on Catholic devotion enough to point out that the material culture that is the basis of one ritual, like the bread and wine of the Mass, cannot be transferred directly to another place and time that has no experience of such substances.  To an Inuit, what can bread and wine possibly mean?  Theirs is a world of snow and meat!  Maybe their communion is the burning lamp, an occasion for being together, sharing.  Schreiter points out that the missionary must go to the culture of the people to find out what material objects and their associated acts can express the concept that is symbolized in Communion.  But that means that the missionary must explore at a deeply felt level his/her own assumptions, psychology and material culture in order to know what the bread and wine mean to him or her.  And probably there ought to be a bit of accounting for why and how the bread and wine have changed over the centuries, from the peasant loaf to the commercial wafer and from daily table wine to grape juice.

People studying theatre and acting are aware that Greek drama was meant to be an acted narrative that explored great moral dilemmas like the killing of family members.  They also know that modern “Method” acting is a way of kindling the sensorium in ways that transmits emotion through empathy in the audience.  Ray Rappaport says homoeostasis means keeping oneself or one’s group inside the limits that, if crossed, would destroy life.  Starvation, violence, exposure are the basic animal requirements of existence.  But a human needs to know what is right, to be passionate about something, to be intimate with others, to be at peace with oneself. These are what worship supplies.  One of the most difficult survival situations, common to both Greek drama and contemporary serious drama, is those in which the individual and the group are at odds, one surviving at the expense of the other, or possibly one saving the other.  Greek drama explores it.  Deep experience justifies it.

What remains is the theory of Von Gennep and Victor Turner, who found that most rituals are in three parts which consist of what they called “crossing the liminal, being in liminal time/space, and returning to ordinary life.”  A limen is a threshold.  This liminal “space/time” is a special brain space or connectome (pattern of neural connections among hubs that manage identity and memory).  Mysterious as it is, the state is detectable on instruments.  It’s main characteristic is that it allows the kind of free state that some report is the result of ingesting lsd or being hypnotized or in extremis, either due to distress or joy.  It allows transformation, new insight, and confirmation of one’s belonging in the world.

Entering liminal time/space as a result of a designed experience (call it worship, liturgy, ceremony, epiphany, devotion, or fine art), is what I’m seeking to understand better.  What I have so far is evidence of reported experiences, of anthropological place-based ceremony, and of experimental worship services.  It is only a beginning, but it attempts to coordinate  the study of humans (anthro), living creatures (bio) and the places that give rise to them (geo) in a way that simply does not address God or gods, nor institutions, nor the supernatural one way or another.  It helps us ride the continents to survival.

The continents today and long ago