IMMANENCE VS. TRANSCENDENCE

The first commandment of this approach to deep meaning in human life is the simple advice to “pay attention.”  But in my system commandments and advice are ruled out -- the need to pay attention should and will arise inside you.  The most basic assumption is immanence, that life unfolds by itself without tricks, drugs, instruments -- because that is the definition of life.  All the rest is captured and exploited by imposed terms describing someone’s idea of transcendence.  This is not a bad thing unless it is used to oppress, but then it can kill.

It turns out that there are far more then five senses.  The brain alone has maybe 200 kinds of neurons, each specializing in some kind of perception of the world outside the creature’s skin.  One of the most recently investigated was a little locus behind the top of one’s nose that tells you how fast you are going.  It remains to figure out what electrochemical signals it is using and whether it is accurately and actually reporting the real speed you are going, or just the speed you THINK you are going.

An apparatus for training the sense of smell to perceive meaning.

It turns out that what you THINK far too easily (from my stubborn point of view) overwhelms what actually is being reported via electrochemical signals to the sub-sorter cluster of neurons, which edits before sending to the brain where it is edited some more.  I do not like the idea of neurology being organized by dropping out information to preserve earlier heuristics -- giving clarity more importance than reality -- but what alternative do we have?  

Brains are limited because there’s only so much space inside a skull.  That’s why the originating sense-cells are all over the body -- but there’s only so much space in a body, either.  The skin limits a creature, even a dinosaur, who didn’t allot much energy to thinking anyway.  If the skin weren’t limited, we would simple dissolve into the energy needs of the environment and its other creatures.  We are only borrowed from the world because of our skins making the boundary between oneself and everything else.  This way of thinking is biological, practical, operative.

Is this about food?

But what we think of as psychological also has a boundary, which is not perceptible but built (immanent) from the interaction of the neurons trying to understand what’s going on and therefore forming concepts which is a way of creating divisions, boundaries, categories.  They are heuristic:   “involving or serving as an aid to learning, discovery, or problem-solving by experimental and especially trial-and-error methods; also :  of or relating to exploratory problem-solving techniques that utilize self-educating techniques (as the evaluation of feedback) to improve performance.” 

This is in sharp contrast to supernaturally-based institutional religions, whose “magic” is believed to be inalterable, unvarying, and the only real interpretation.  The claim is that unnatural things of another realm can be known by only one source -- person, book, god -- which demands obedience.  A ring, a token, a crown, a throne, are understood as the button that controls power.  If you argue with that, it is justification to confine or destroy you as a danger.

A cat can look at a queen, but what does it see?

Perceiving the world outside one’s skin in a way that respects immanence, the being of something simply as itself, gives one’s inner life many ways to connect and create, which are the third step after sorting and recording what is perceived.  Then one can connect with others (fourth step) and feel the simple obvious fact of being embedded in the universe, separated only by one’s skin and one’s assumptions (fifth step).  

This might not be pleasant. Suffering, awareness of death, rage, sadness, and loss are real.  To look for a supernatural (rather than metaphorical and symbolic) escape is an overwhelming temptation and can successfully fend off despair.  It is those who have no way of interpreting the world who are dangerous.  It is a death and some deaths want to be shared, maybe with a gun.

But interpretation is the second step.  The first is only feeling.

Some geneticists are asking whether one’s ability to create inner categories that are based on peace have anything to do with human wiring as it results from particular helical molecular constructs.  Our skills and knowledge are too primitive to know.  It has been heuristically suggested that the Euro-personality might be operating off inherited Neanderthal hunter/gatherer traits, emphasized by the need to fend off a wave of evolved African people.  And that the Asian genome, after millennia of agriculture, had become peaceful.  This doesn’t allow for the dynamic horse-based people who galloped down from the Asian steppes to spread Genghis Khan’s genes all over Europe.  Obviously it must be over-generalizing.

“Mongols were highly tolerant of most religions during the early Mongol Empire, and typically sponsored several at the same time. At the time of Genghis Khan in the 13th century, virtually every religion had found converts, from Buddhism to Christianity and Manichaeanism to Islam.” The anonymous expert in Wikipedia includes only one Asian system and three from the complex of choices in the Middle-East.  All are the systems that Karen Armstrong (and Karl Jaspers) explicitly felt were “Axial”, foundations of today’s major institutional religions.  These are transcendence-based systems, claiming supernatural sources as authorization.

Alexander Nevsky among the Shamans

The foundational religion of Genghis Kahn was shamanic which is an immanent system.  Its super-powers are rooted in reality, like bears or cranes or mountains which should be taken as symbols with meaning rather than imitation humans.  The religious systems of Europe before the “Axial” religions were shamanic and so were those in the Americas and Africa.  Institutions are creatures of settlement and wealth.  Kings and armies.  

The 13th century in Europe is described by some historians as “high,” which is not about altitude but about prestige and power.  Maybe it comes from the practice of putting powerful people up on a platform where people could see them.  “High” table, “high” church, and so on.  These are all institutionally ascribed, but also we associate “high” with the sky, whether angels or bomber planes, images of power, though we don’t recognize bombs as religious unless we call them “demonic” -- which means they should be connected to underground, like landmines and terrorists.  Immanence is considered “grounded”, an eruption like Pluto bursting up in his chariot to seize the innocent Persephone, which deranges the order of the seasons.  The earth is "low," meaning vulgar, uncivilized, dirty, and probably sexy.  Maybe childlike.

St. Mary Roman Catholic Church, High Hill, Texas

So does that mean that the intended “high” civilization of skyscrapers, space stations, and church spires has deranged the world into famine and rising oceans?  Maybe.  Or maybe our categories are just wrong.  Are the Bioneers verging into institutional hubris?  Is the media now a hegemony imposing its own worldview from broadcasting satellites?

I would argue that the immanence of pure perception and a willingness to break down boundaries through empathy and compassion are the true Sacred strategies.  How to do that is hidden behind dark glass.  We should be cautious: it may be protective.

SO WHERE IS ALL THIS GOING?

This is the path I trod so far, though “path” is not a good metaphor because I didn’t try to follow anything, it’s just that I often found footprints of those who were ahead of me.  But sometimes I do try to retrace the way.

The first thought I had this time was asking why all the books on worship, liturgy, etc. only considered the major “world religions.”  Who decided on which ones qualified?  By what standards? (One of the most recent explanations I’ve run across (it’s Karen Armstrong’s) was that these labels come out of the Axial Era (originally achsenzeit) which was retroactively defined by Karl Jaspers (1883 - 1969), a German psychiatrist and philosopher who thought that the years between 800 BC and 200 BC were great pivotal times.

I looked that period up in one of my key reference books:  “The Timetables of History”.  What Jaspers meant was that Rome was founded in about 800 BC and stopped expanding about 200 BC at Hadrian’s Wall across Britain.  (Hadrian was the Roman Emperor who said, "We won't go any farther than this."  So what Jaspers was really considering pivotal was Rome without the Greek pantheon of gods: the Roman Empire, the model for the Roman Catholic Church.  And what he implied was that the Germans (like him) belonged to this Roman “classical age.”  In fact, the Germans thought they were replacing Christian religion with science.  We know how that turned out.  (Personally, I prefer Greece.)

Hadrian's wall

Also, between 540 BCE and 200 BCE, Afghanistan was invaded by the Huns, a word sometimes associated with Germany in WWI.   Pivotal is right -- like one of those revolving doors.  Jaspers ended up exiled to Switzerland with other thinkers who shared his pigeon holes and categories, reinforcing each other.  But probably the times were too intense for them to step out of their assumptions.  Neither can we, but at least we know that our thinking is ALWAYS controlled by assumptions that might or might not be warranted with evidence.

Ironically (as always) only Freud and Jung saw that under all the rational introspecting and fancy language was the great Unconscious.  Not even they quite understood that the great bulk of our brains is NOT conscious, much less literate nor even speaking a national language.  

I think Freud would have reveled in todays’ neuroscience.  He was trying to get at those dark limbic repositories of dreams, drives, experience and madness.  That he failed was only the limitations of his times.  At least he recognized how limited words are, even arranged into the rules and images of “axial” religion, when the emotional undertow overpowers everything else.  At least it forced us all to look harder, devise instruments, keep looking for what happens in the dark subtext.

Anthropology did a lot better.  In the same time period, more or less, people like Van Gennep and Turner were beginning to understand the power of metaphor in performance: song, dance, mimesis of events, masks, games.   At least it was a lot more fun.  At worst they were cannibals and ate anthropologists as well as missionaries.  This dramatic material made anthropologists wonderfully popular at upscale dinner parties, which helped fund their explorations. Shrinks make people nervous.

The two-generation Turners (dad with the three-part explanation of liminal experience and son with the technology that could see on a screen the dancing connectome that shows shifts of thinking) are far more important than any religionists.  They made it possible to pull the conversation away from the small privileged educated elite and put it back into the hands of tribal people where it had begun.  Now we can talk about world religions that are indigenous, ecological, liminal. 

What I’ve been after all along is how to get the connectome to shift from the ordinary to the sacred.  What cues the brain to perceive the sacred, which presumably is there all along?  It’s not a matter of words or temples or who-was-your-mama.  It’s not a matter of virtue or how much of a donation one makes to the needy.  But neither is it so supernatural that no human can understand or control it.  Something happens in the human that is an attunement, a receptivity.  Chemicals and electricity are part of it, but still not the key.  Maybe it’s emotion.

There’s irony in this line of thinking.  It put me out of my print-centered denomination and sermon-centered Sunday services.  But it was the experience of UU Leadership School that awoke the non-print concepts I’ve been working through ever since.   Finally I begin to understand the Blackfeet Bundle Ceremony as well as its substrate of relationship to the land.  More than that, I begin to see how to design experiences that are meaningful without having any allegiance to a particular historical institution or book.

And finally that brought me to Cinematheque, a group that pulls in boys at-risk who might be adept at print, well-read, able to write well; but also includes the boys from the street who grew up like Topsy (the little girl in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” who grew up as a slave -- a trafficked African-American -- “every which way.”)  The common denominator has been the image, sometimes a conventional still photo but more often a kind of woven set of images, possibly moving in a video, often combining colors in an intense and suggestive way.  They are in the visual language of the boys which requires them to learn the technical grammar of producing computer images.  They do it as though it were easy, just soak it up. The other great lingua franca of kids all over the planet is music.  Matching music to image is an art they easily master, but with all my education I can’t do it.  

The New Language is image and sound, but not necessarily words. That’s one barrier eliminated.  “Tell me about your life,” and you get a cascade of darkness shot with lightning; an Asian boy in a singlet dancing in a bare basement with a peeling radiator for a ballet barre; a skateboarder gliding down stairs across a plaza and somehow jumping a bridge to skate on the water.  I've watched some of these vids over and over.  A few of them are so indelible that I only need to watch a few times to have them etched in my memory.

The ones made in Europe were relatively conventional until a breakthrough during the Amsterdam days.  A boy said his mother, who had neglected and abused him, was a “cunt.”  One of the other boys, who was thrown to the street when his beloved mother died, objected to this.  

The argument continued through the making of a video that was not chronological, repetitive, emotion expressed in color changes, the spoken refrain (like a pop song) was “she was lonely.”  In fact, this vid took the group from Hollywood assumptions out into a kind of abstract expressionism.  The boys, who had divvied up the tasks among them, objected,  “That was way too hard!”  Pretty soon they were doing harder things.

By now the vids challenge comprehension with their tachistoscopic cascades, but the kids can understand them.  Their brains are trained in a way adults can rarely match.  I’m not sure an adult can really grasp the content either.  Should they?