DESIGNING WORSHIP WITHOUT WORSHIPPING ANYTHING

Our group met in Humptulips, WA.

The UUMA Humptulips Study Group assigned me to write a paper distinguishing between “feminist” religions and, well, “normal” religions like theirs. (They were male and so far as I know stayed male.) In the process I ended up reading descriptions of medieval visionary saints about how it felt to confront God, the most Sacred. It became clear that they were speaking in paradox, self-contradictory qualities: they wrote in paired extremes they claimed occurred at the same time: hot/cold, falling/being supported, starving/fed, thirsting/drinking, dazzled/totally dark. What th- ?

When I got to these new embodiment concepts about feeling rather than logic as the basis of thought and about the formation of each human mind from the point of fertilization on through gestation, it began to be clear. Brain neurons develop when they detect sensory qualities: recording the qualities is what makes the cells into neurons — literally creates them and the connections among them, the same way that moving one’s body creates muscle cells.

Neurons are only stem cells until they perceive something, which is why the little fish in lightless caves have no eyes. The earliest qualities that create neurons are the ones that a floating eukaryotic one-celled animal would need: orientation, sense of movement, nourishment, excretion, perception of molecules (smell), meiosis. Everything else is created on that basic platform, clear through life, all life until death. The saints were talking about their earliest concepts as they developed in the womb.

The brain, evolving from a knob at the top of the notochord (primeval spine) that develops into the skull and brain, picks up a lot of awarenesses that it processes without any “self-awareness”. You don’t know you’re doing it. The body goes on ahead of you. It doesn’t necessarily tell you about it, it just embodies it: breathing, heart-beat, secretions of all sorts, adjusting to gravity, filtering blood.

Evolution means that over time the human brain in particular has accumulated a lot of little devices and practices. The rumpled up cortex that is wrapped around all the other stuff in the skull is six layers deep and full of little pillars that join them up and down. This is in addition to the connectome that a computer can make as pretty as a roadmap.

It’s just been announced that a new and much more detailed and clear “map” of the surface of the cortex has been made. But they didn’t say anything about the six layers or how everything plugs together. When they study the amygdala or hippocampus they discover it has little sectors, maybe three areas, front-middle-back, because of what it connects to on both ends.

Because of the “dry eye” thing, I’ve been reading up on tears. The little film of tears over the eyeball has three layers, thinner than is imaginable, each with its own characteristics. All these things become structures inside structures inside structures. And all of them keep changing because all of them are processes, molecules exchanging ions, cells pumped through tubes.

Humans, made of flesh, have limits, but we constantly try to think of things that have NO limits: infinity; eternity; God; an unnamed color that is in an imperceptible part of the range of light vibrations; the sounds a dog can hear but we can’t. Instruments help. Somehow the collision of two impossible-to-reconcile concepts — paradoxes — makes neurons strain to evolve and that may be one of the elements of Sacredness. We become aware of what an unknowable immensity the world is and yet our undoubtable place in it.

This is not mystical magic. It is frank physiology. All the people who want to trick it out with their favorite shrink or literary theory are evading the actual evidence, at least the clues we have so far. The evidence of sensory cells comes from coded waves, vibes, impacts, temperatures, ions. When the neuron signals get to the brain, they are translated into what we “see,” “hear,” “taste” and so on.

But there’s more. “Single cell perception” means that specialized cells like “spindle cells” or VENN cells have special sensitivities to compass directions, edges, spatial transitions like openings. It’s estimated that there are several hundred of these very specific cells. In fact, one layer of the cortex has a map of a human that connects with neurons to the actual places on the body. Another one seems to be laid out in a formal grid.

Some of these cells have been labeled “mirror cells” because if you are looking at someone who does something like throw a ball, your neural network will vaguely register as though you are doing the same thing. This is connected to empathy. Empathy means that you can see how someone else feels by looking at them; it’s wireless communication. You can empathize with any living thing and even a representation of a living thing, like a video. You look at that tiger and feel that you know what it’s feeling.

The pattern of organization when I compose a “worship” service (and I rarely if ever “worship” anything, so I need a better word) is Victor Turner’s three part “room” metaphor: going over a threshold (limen), being in a special “place” that is safe and different in quality than ordinary life, and then returning over that limen. These are sensations, not ideas. I try to capture the sensations, the transitions from outside to inside to outside. Think of theatre. Think of coming home.

Another two-part element seems vital to me. It comes after the people are all together in the space, as much in mind as body, and have established their gathering, their unity. I call it the Dilation of the Spirit. Celebrants in the past have labeled it in dogmatic terms: the Confession of Sins and the Assurance of Pardon, which amount to swearing allegiance and belief in that dogmatic context for the sake of survival.

The way I do it is to bring up images of the most extreme tragedy, suffering and injustice — preferably “ripped from the headlines” or at least the lives of those present. It’s essentially the paradox of theodicy which is “if You’re all-powerful and all-merciful, why don’t You get us out of this mess?” Since I’m not theist, this is not my problem, but it recurs for the Abrahamics. My version comes from those primal first sensations of cold, dark, falling, hungering and thirsting.

Loved ones and innocent beings slaughtered, diseased and crushed should lead to facing the temporariness of all human life, the waste and emptiness of what we do. But THEN must come the images of dearness, delight, and dance — intense and accurate enough to be meaningful. Sacred. Some people will never be convinced or consoled. Some people will be so asocial that they are unmoved any way at all. No empathy. Possibly for physiological reasons. But they can be fed, given water, supported, and protected.

If the group can as a unit feel the bottom and then reach for the top, they will be ready to address issues. It’s a mini-catharsis, clearing the deck. Those opened may be ready to realize and even change what they feel. Or it may be that a connection is confirmed or a passion is renewed. This is not dogma, theory, or logic. Essentially it is felt, sometimes like the tumblers of internal locks shifting and opening.

If a celebrant can do this with metaphors, the moment will be powerful, but it takes close attention to the circumstances of the people and a wide repertoire of metaphors and images. Attunement. Not just words. What works and why is what I’ll try to explore in the third of my three proposed volumes, and it clearly seems to be about Mark Johnson’s “organism-environment coupling” when it is accurate and deep enough to “embody meaning.” This is immanent, emergent, welling up from inside the viscera. An incarnation.

AFTER GOD IS DEAD, THEN WHAT?

When I was in seminary (78-82), Meadville/Lombard hosted a conference featuring the two major organizations developing humanism as a religious option.  American Humanist Association and I forget the other one.  These groups, each with a powerful leader and a little cluster of handmaidens, got into such a row that right after lunch the more powerful one packed up and left, enraged.  So much for calm reason.  I guess it left with the supernatural they were resisting.

Thanks to the generosity of Merrill Miller of the Humanist Press, I have a copy of an ebooklet called “Regaining Balance” by Michael Werner.  Reading the whole thing instead of the selection on Google Books was quite a different experience.  What had attracted me in the first place was a list of the cultural forces that have diminished and changed the Unitarian Universalist Association over the past decades.  I thought it was a valid list, though Werner’s explanations of them (feminism, black power, paganism, the Aquarian revolution and counterculture, gay liberation, and so on) didn’t exactly present them in their best light.  After all, this was a polemic and an impassioned (!) plea to return to the core of humanism: thought at its highest and best, a scientific approach to the world.

Michael Werner SMART Recovery

One of the things seminary taught me was always to consider the source.  Michael Werner is a founder and CEO of “SMART Recovery,” a non-profit source of support for groups helping people kick addictions from illegal drugs to sex to gambling.  www.smartrecovery.org  This is for people who don’t believe in God, who were happy for the God is Dead movement, but who still need support from a talking circle like Alcoholics Anonymous and their spin-offs.  It is a strange phenomenon of groups in general that they all claim to be the last best hope, rock-solid in conviction, the ultimate solution — and yet they splinter and spin-off in all directions.  This was true of the earliest Christians and much energy has been consumed by historians trying to understand why one little splinter managed to capture the flag — er, Cross.

Werner tips his hand when he describes worship as a kind of obeisance to a great big powerful figure.  Throw down the huge statue that dictators love so much, and you will have thrown down the God who plagues you with patronizing demands.  He shows his hand again when he accuses the UUA of bad marketing, whoring after numbers and therefore pulling in minorities to the Valhalla of the prosperous, well-educated, governing classes.  In a while I was out of patience, even though I basically agree that the UUA is dwindling and needs to sharpen up its image if it wants to grow.  Compassion, social action, pluralism, tolerance are all good qualities but there’s been a paradigm shift and the UUA missed it.

Consider Werner’s program for addictions that is centered on reason and will-power.  I don’t doubt that it helps.  Even he says that some people will need to feel relationship to “Higher Power.”  I agree that it can become magic and superstition, wishful thinking.  I agree that some people can overcome their addictions without any gods and that it helps to have a community that understands.

But the research of the last decades, absolutely scientific and accountable (except maybe to the higher powers and superstitions of funding), makes it clear that addiction has a strongly physical component.  It’s NOT being weak.  Neurology shows that genomic predilection triggered by environmental circumstances (trauma, disease, abuse, deprivation) can change the wiring of the brain enough to create an addict.  Certainly, once a person is addicted — whether it’s to substance or behavior — the whole chemistry of the brain and particularly the unconscious molecular loops in the blood that drive the body hard enough to cancel ordinary homeostasis is PHYSICAL.  There will be physical consequences to removing whatever it is as well as to changing behavior.

Beyond that, addiction happens to one person as a time, but within a social context.  If the people around the addict want to keep him or her that way, it can be a real cage, not least a monetary one.  Ask the Weight Watchers franchise, a very similar enterprise, what happens when someone begins to lose weight, particularly if it’s an overweight woman who begins to be thin enough to be appealing.  We are an addictive culture.  It’s called “advertising.”

So to Werner, a human is a mind with no subconscious or body and a social being without captors or users.  This is not about theology — killing God will make no difference.  Humanism is by name about anthropology, what you think a human being is.  This brings us to the next problem with humanism — which is the assumption that humans are a stand-alone species at the pinnacle of evolution and that evolution is “progressive,” that is, gets better and better.  The evidence turns out to prove otherwise.

We are deeply dependent and interwoven with the whole ecology of being on this planet and only beginning to realize that “better” humans have evolved in the past and then disappeared.  Certainly “better” societies have come and gone in spite of desperate efforts, though they probably look better in hindsight and might not have been all that great at the time or for everyone.  Two movements have opened our eyes:  Deep Time, the investigation of what happened before writing (which was a wall that limited history and gave humans an exaggerated importance), before humans or even life itself,and Deep Neurology that is visible so that we can actually see a brain thinking.  It turns out to be a pretty Rube Goldberg contraption that has bits of reptile, bird, and early mammal stuck together and interpreting the world around us with strange results. 

The last nail for this glass coffin where I’m putting Humanism is a serious accusation.  Where are the humanities in humanism?  The arts are not just a frivolous luxury.  It was metaphor, also known as art, that marked the transition into our current state of intelligence.  When we found Neanderthal jewelry and figurines, we knew at last what the genome has confirmed: they are us.  No more sneering about knuckle-draggers and being animals.   Intelligence is not just math and logic.  It is also dance, the goat-herd’s flute, and ceremonies.  THERE’s your worship — it’s art, expressive and consoling.

It has been said that the universal language is money, and it is the only way to put all the cultures into communication with each other.  Profit beyond survival or accomplishment is the cultural fat of accumulated money that can be taken to be power.  It is addictive, it is viral, and it goes to the lowest common denominator.  

Minority groups, women, queers, and otherwise excluded peoples came to the UU movement because it stood for wealth, power and achievement — not because it was so protective of the excluded.  They thought that if they dressed like a UU, talked like a UU, went to UU meetings, attended UU conferences, they would be as prosperous and respected as those then in the UUA.  The trouble is that the markers are gone.  The power players are no longer late-middle-aged white men in suits, sitting in pews or standing in pulpits. 

I’m not sure where the power-mongers went.  They are an exclusive and solitary bunch, very guarded.  Maybe selling drugs in Columbia, maybe running trade cartels from China, maybe enslaving children everywhere.  I feel confident they’re still male and that their values are the same as God’s, at least judging from the evidence.  They love the arts, or at least their wives do.  They eat your children for breakfast — no Passover this time.

Werner is a nice guy, affable and constructive.  Maybe a little affected by a rather nasty addiction called “Oppositional Defiance Disorder”.  If a person tries to organize a group to break that addiction, expect fist-fights to break out.  Hopefully, only metaphorical quarrels.  I know about this one — I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, I don’t use illegal drugs, etc. but I will NOT do what you tell me to do.  But I will try to be human in all directions: mind, body, community, landscape.

THINKING ABOUT EVOLUTIONS

Since keeping a focus on “deep time” or primal evolution means always working two dimensions against each other (one might say horizontal against vertical), one is forced into different kinds of sequencing.  One is the cause-and-effect of time, one thing emerging from the circumstances of what was just previous. Another is a hierarchy of complexification, simple things co-existing and interpenetrating to create something new, presumably better.  When thinking about the evolution of the brain, one is always conscious of working from earliest to most recent, from simple to complex, and — we hadn’t thought about this in the past — pruning or editing for one reason or another, often imposed by the environment.

So the kiwi devolved from Tyrannosaurus.

What makes an advantage will persist, what makes a disadvantage will disappear, and what is neutral might come along for the ride but maybe not.  The environment might change everything.  Particularly in the case of hominins who have evolved a cultural environment, a social network that can change quickly, a kind of interpersonal neural network now made actual by the internet.

In every hominin’s brain “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” in a quick sketch of evolution.  It’s not that we’re descended from apes, but that the development of the individual retraces the evolutionary steps of the species — from its conception to its birth, every animal passes through the evolutionary steps of the species, from one-celled animals to advanced life-forms.  This is true of the human brain:  at 25 days the embryonic brain resembles the brain of a worm; at 40 days the embryonic brain resembles the brain of a vertebrate like a fish; at 100 days the embryonic brain resembles a mammalian brain.  At 5 months the embryonic brain resembles the brains of other primates.

In previous posts I’ve talked about the idea of the fourth trimester.  It is not until the end of the first three months after birth that the brain begins to seem like that of a hominin that has a prefrontal cortex, but it still needs to “install” the operations, the operating system, of what that brain can do.  The caretaker (mom) will do this over the next three years.  You could say that cultural apps are being installed.

The personal intrauterine evolution, the construction of that physical brain through its stages and the body in which the brain dwells, may have glitches.  We knew about things like cleft palate, spina bifida, club foot and even intestines that develop outside the body rather than inside, or arms and legs that fail to lengthen.  We have not been able to tell what is going on in the brain as it develops.  Now there are all sorts of theories about what neuron structures and choices during gestation might do.  Some claim it might determine the orientation of desire, for instance, which is always understood as either/or because that’s the way our culture sorts people.  This drastically underestimates the possibilities.

Until recently, many people — philosophers but not just philosophers — achieved their understanding through the contemplation of their belly buttons.  That is, they are attached so thoroughly to their cultures that they cannot step outside the cultural circle except by scientific methods — which are also cultural.  Those who study culture are from a culture, even one that struggles to be objective which they think IS what scientific methods are.  But science is as much subject to evolution as everything else.  

In particular the methods of science have depended upon introspection (belly buttons) and meta-introspection — that is, reflection upon how one is going about gathering evidence and sorting it and what sort of evidence counts as valid, and trying to guess what is shaping one’s ignorance: what one DOES NOT know.  What are we missing?  Could we find clues in the structure of an organ like the brain?  Could we devise experiments that would indicate how people are thinking without slanting the info?

“Science” comes out of a specific culture that evolved on the European continent from a creature structure (with a culture) that evolved on the African continent, but migrated across the world’s continents, always evolving as it went.  Part of European culture is constant sorting to see who is the “best,” the “highest.”  It is quick to use evolution to prove that the best among Europeans is the best kind of human it is possible to be.  Because lesser humans were defined as slaves or even beasts.  "Best" meant high-born and educated as far as was possible.

"The Young Doctor Freud"  PBS

Out of this comes the idea that introspection is a “high” and valuable practice.  And then Freud’s idea (I just watched the movie called “The Young Doctor Freud”) was that if you relaxed and reflected, your core issues would rise to the top where they were visible, like one of those party 8-balls.  Many of the core issues were about sex, the most distortable, tabooed and intense human cultural and physical issues, right at the belly button of the survival of the species.  (The movie about “The Young Chanel” was more fun and just as sexy.  Of course, the plots of both movies are about the evolution of remarkable individuals who did not fear taboos.  At least in their adolescent stage.)

The trouble with introspection is that it only deals with what is “thought” and conscious.  But the evolution of ideas, as individuals and as cultures, is largely UN or SUB conscious and not accessible to introspection.  Even an outside observer would be interpreting through his or her own consciousness.  Much is being left out, without the person realizing it is missing. When I say this on Aeon, the educated Euro men get angry.

It is the advent of metaphor that makes way for writing, in which little marks are metaphors for sounds and sound patterns become words, metaphors for concepts and objects.  This is not objective and rational.  At this point some people begin to hear voices.  Voices are essentially music, which are brain-perceived sequential patterns of sound.

Paul Otteson

I’m going back over this ground in part because Paul Otteson, a musician and romantic quite a bit younger that myself, just now responded to my old comment on Aeon about Julian Jaynes’ book “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.”  I assigned Jaynes to a social class.  His father was a Unitarian minister, as was I for a while.  The book was an effort to understand the brain, keeping in mind that it’s in two halves.  Jaynes was a psychologist.  His cousin, Nat Lauriat, was the Unitarian minister who supervised me as a student intern.  Clearly, I’m assigning Otteson to a cultural class niche.  

Veronique Greenwood than commented, approving of what I said.  She is a science writer, maybe the same age as Otteson, but not the same style.  Not in the same culture class.  Otteson is a musician.

Veronique Greenwood

Unitarian Universalists at present are like Otteson and Greenwood, partly romantic, wanting to sing to small animals, and partly scientific, wanting scrupulous information.  This is a problem and it is cultural.  All three of us have good minds.  The two sons of Unitarian ministers — from the old days when they were trying to be objective, logical, and superior — have special problems.  I would love to see a comparison of e e cummings (also the son of a Unitarian minister) and Julian Jaynes.  (Nat Lauriat’s father ran a bookstore in Boston.)  In fact, Aeon — the online magazine that proposed this debate of comments — is pretty much in the same split space culturally.

My divergence is because of fifty years of experience with Blackfeet culture, which is not European or African, but a Third Force that I can’t really explain very well so far.  More present than people realize.  It’s phenomenological, oral language-based, HIGHLY metaphorical.  The metaphors are more than rural — land-bound.  Most of the thinking about metaphor has been done by academics like Jaynes and Lauriat.  They discredit experience and trust their belly buttons.  Maybe I’m more aligned with Jared Diamond who spent so many years in New Guinea.  But I think I should catch up with Greenwood. 

https://www.quantamagazine.org/authors/veronique-greenwood/

THE EVOLUTION OF BRAINS

This is continuing comment on “The 10,000 Year Explosion”.

Cochran and Harpening did a brave, dangerous thing.  It had two steps.  The first one was to point out that mutation and evolution, which go hand in hand, are a changing code flow that make bodies change, including the brain.  That is, people today think in a different way that they did only centuries ago or in different environments because their brains have evolved but the same cells evolve differently when challenged by different tasks.  We think about this when we say that kids’ attention spans are shorter but more of them have an ability to see patterns quickly -- both of which we attribute to the impact of the internet.  

We do not think of “thinking” as anything concrete, but as a kind of vapor that hangs in a thought bubble over our heads.  But “thinking” is X and O, electrochemical charges, molecules and blood flows -- very real.  Its codes and functions change.  They say there are over 200 different KINDS of neurons, each specializing in some certain information.

With that insight in place (one hopes) the second step was to study a specific population, assert that it has demonstrably evolved differently than the surrounding population because of stigma and oppression or restrictions, and then describe specifically what became different and why.  They chose  Ashkenazi Jews to study.  Probably they could not have done that in an Ivy League university, but they were working in Utah.  This meant NOT studying Mormons who practice polygamy.  Maybe they haven’t evolved.   Or maybe they HAVE. (Jokes.)

Most Americans are not aware of the subdivisions of the Jewish population over the millennia or what has happened to them.  The subdivision called Ashkenazi (meaning German) Jews were practicing Judaism and identifying with it in Germany, but barred from the main culture and, anyway, compelled by their beliefs to marry within their faith community.  The result was that by 1800 they were small group who specialized in finances because Christians are supposed to avoid usury (that’s the theory, anyway).  

Such work does not make the world love Jews running banks, but it DOES make those peoples' IQ’s go up, because success is predicated on handling complex transactions and lots of math and theory.  A magazine length version of this reasoning is in the Journal of Biosocial Science 38, no.5 (2005): 659-693.  The article by the same two men is called “Natural History of Ashkenazie Intelligence.”  

I recommend this whole book, esp. for Valier since it talks a lot about how brains developed to handle agriculture, particularly crops but also pastoral herding, much helped by a mutation that allowed milk and other dairy products as a source of food.  It knocked out the enzyme that made people lactose intolerant.  Good nutrition means good functioning, no matter the creature.  Belgians carried lactose tolerance and other traits good for agriculture to the early immigrants to Valier.

The dark side of the Ashkenazi evolution, which through bottlenecks caused the survival of “smart” people, was that the same mutations (there were several) that made them smarter also carried along -- if there were not quite the right changes in the right amounts -- deadly diseases.  Mostly the mutations had to do with the dendrites of brain cells proliferating (involving fats).  These changes were detectable by 1800.  Below normal dendrite numbers meant below normal intelligence.  The right number within a narrow spectrum meant high intelligence as expressed in IQ.  (I have a lot of quarrels with IQ.)  Too many dendrites meant disease and early death.  They do not have children.

Since the many other populations of practitioners of Judaism -- those not Ashkenazi who are from other world populations -- have gathered in Israel, and since Europe and North America had mostly stopped resenting Jews so much after the Holocaust (until now), intermarriage has lessened this curse/blessing.  WWII didn’t just murder many Jews, but also drove many of the smartest and most accomplished people into enclaves like Manhattan, where they were impressively high achievers.  But there are still people who when they have hardships will look for someone to blame -- they still focus on Jews and immigrants.  I have no answers for that.

I have a special interest in two populations: Blackfeet and the Smash Street Boys.  Both have been confined and stigmatized, the originally hunter/gatherer Blackfeet tribe for about as long as Jews have been changing in the US.  The traits that were encouraged until after the horse arrived have not been helpful today, but the transition to the new world is happening, with the help of Metis and tribes who were traders, like the Mandan genome that helped the original Joe Kipp make deals and build forts.  

Joe Kipp

The Smash Street Boys time span is way too short for actual DNA mutations that are consistent, though they are under enormous molecular pressure both from the HIV in their cells and the violent meds in their blood streams.  Nevertheless, one can speculate, particularly in terms of the epigenome, which is a sort of molecular annotation of the four gene elements.  But their sources are multiple and each boy is too unique for anyone to suspect a bad seed gene.  There is no such thing anyway, since no gene can be expressed without an environment.  The universal environment for the boys is unstable and punishing families.  Poverty, bad mental health, lack of nutrition and shelter -- the “bad seed” is really a toxic seed bed or as one playwright has it "A Chalk Garden".

What’s intriguing is that both Blackfeet and SSB are natural artists and, as well, take to the cyberworld like ducks discovering ponds.  Nor are they afraid to stick their heads down into the muck.  They know muck.  They do not sit paralyzed in front of a keyboard but at once begin to explore.  If their internal heads were watched via fMRI, the paisley patterns of the connectome and its underlying blood flow would be urgent and various.  Of course, head phones would be necessary to fortify the brain waves with a beat.

I don’t think IQ tests can pick up such things.  IQ tests only identify those who do well on IQ tests, which correlates pretty well with good grades in schools.  We are now calling into question the efficacy of stair-stepped schools, the constant sorting according to previous assumptions and expectations.  This system, which worked pretty well a century ago, might be creating the wrong kind of people. Or at least brain mutations perpetuated by the wrong kind of environment.

Darrell Kipp, founder and director of the Piegan Institute and

Cuts Wood Immersion Blackfeet School.

"THE TEN THOUSAND YEAR EXPLOSION"

I’m halfway through reading “The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution” by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending (both anthropologists and Cochran is also a physicist).  I’m going back and forth between,  “Well, I already knew that” and “This is amazing!”  It is -- in imitation of its subject which is the weaving of genetic variation through time and place -- a cross-breeding of disciplines from geology to genomics, arts to sciences, homo sapiens to neanderthals, Africa to Finland.  

The main message is simply that everything is a process and some of the elements are very small but with huge impact.  (Consider the needle.) This is true of the brain itself.  Over time small specialized cells like mirror cells have transformed cultures because of new capacities to understand and enlist humans into a unity or creative enterprise -- from the pyramids to the space station.  But it’s not just a new gizmo, it’s then doubled back, recycled, repurposed and so on and on in a creative reciprocity we may not even notice.  For instance, the ability to talk was accompanied by a new ability to hear, so as to pick up the tiny hisses and curls of the tongue.  Sharper hearing meant the discovery of sonar like bats. 

Some of this material comes perilously close to becoming racism.  The story begins with homo sapiens developing in northeast Africa, then they go north to Europe and not only adapt to the new environment (becoming white in order to absorb vitamin D through their skins). 

A reconstruction of a Neanderthal man confronts an unintimidated homo sapiens.

Homo sapiens, we are shocked to realize, intermarry with neanderthals which causes the intromission of whole sections of genetic code.   (You will probably need to use the glossary in this book.) If one has a head for statistics, it will be easier to understand the spread of one advantageous genetic mutation or acquisition (or dropping out) into a whole nation of people.  The neanderthal mutations that had developed over a long period of hunting and gathering are taken into a post-African genome, combining into new abilities, and then a climate change releases the practice of agriculture, which changes the nutritional status of the people and that provides a surplus that powers war, towns, religious institutions -- not just “beliefs” but organizations that self-perpetuate.  Until the next global climate change or asteroid impact.

Meanwhile, across the whole planet, the process of weeding out lame genes goes on while powerful new code begins to spread.  Whether the dominant power will be with peace or with violence still remains to be seen, but surely those who are trying to hold everything the same because it suits them so well are doomed.  The effort to enforce conformity takes so much energy and attention that even if a clued-in Roman Emperor like Hadrian builds a wall to say,  “We will only go this far -- no farther,” it won’t work.  

Hadrian's wall across Britain.

Cultures evolve or die.  Religions evolve or die.  Pull in new elements that are destructive and contagious and the whole creature will die.  Think of the gradual infestation of institutions that serve children with the craving for sexual use of them.  Think of the tenure system meant to protect professors from those who would snuff their innovative ideas which now imposes rigid and old-fashioned ideas on students.  Think of food aid, meant to solve two problems (over-production and famine), that has become a form of money, manipulated by greed.

The planet itself evolves and dies even as it creates new life forms by fitting them into niches and cross-borrowing of codes.  Recently it has been discovered that prions, which are not even as much alive as viruses but are misfolded molecules that sneak into the places where their distortion destroys life, and which are widely spread through the prairie in elk, can leave the elk through dung, be taken up by plants into leaves, and then enter the next elk, causing it to collapse and die, whereupon the beetles enter and carry the prions back out to more leaves.

Wasted elk

The very essence of being, not even living being, is a circulating system that carries both life and death.  No one knows how to control prions -- we didn’t even know they existed until recently.

This book is not as scary as my thoughts about it, but it does end the idea that “we” are the only and chosen and divinely protected people on the planet, and it gently suggests that people are not “the same smart” unless they are in the context (both cultural and physical) that they have adapted to.   It's called "FITTINGNESS."  Though there are different adaptations for the same problem in separate times and places.  The high altitude adaptation of the people in the Andes is not the same blood strategy that evolved in the people of the Himalayas.  These are Bioneer realizations.  But not everyone has the culture or resources to be a Bioneer, not that there is one privileged suitability -- or is there?

It is becoming clear from fossils that there have been many versions of human primate, some of them pretty smart and capable, who have been lost because of a virus, an inability to adapt to a change in the environment, lactose intolerance, a religious notion that they should eat the brains of their dead or the death of a body of water.  

Bioneers conference

One big overriding question has been what happened 40,000 years ago that suddenly created art, ceremony, and metaphorical elaboration -- a keystone change in the culture that some modern humans are intent on stamping out.  And then why is it that agriculture began when the last Ice Age drew back and not in the previous intervals between glaciation -- when nothing of the kind happened.  Was there a genomic readiness factor? 

It’s very hard for us to realize how recent agriculture is, how woven and dynamic it was/is in terms of the human brain and life patterns.  Maybe the terrorist fundamentalists who are out there destroying orchards, irrigation systems and fabulous statues are onto something.  Maybe we SHOULD all go back to being hunter-gatherers or at least pastoralists.  Maybe there will be no choice if industrialization, translated into cyber-technology, overwhelms the world.

A new discipline is “space weather,” which is not as silly as it sounds when you include radiations, cycles of movement, pulses, and how much they affect not just our rockets and telescopes, but also our planet.  We are only beginning to detect and predict what’s going on.

http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/communities/space-weather-enthusiasts

Northern Lights from the Sun

If we can find the confidence to reach out of our comfort zones, to confront our limitations and find our most earnest and idealistic selves, this can be exhilarating and salvific.  But if we resort to “forting up,” “fencing the communion,” we will be self-snuffing, on an island with the water rising.  That sounds like preaching because it is.  We cannot escape.  There is death.  But it is only transformation.

CREATING A BRAIN: IN-SKIN/OUT-SKIN

The human brain specifically “grows” or unfolds itself, beginning in the womb, by creating neurons and then connecting them.  This is done through the sensorium (the sum of all the senses, including a sense of gravity, space, and internal body states) which sends signals from the organs that interface with the out-skin world and then ties the information together in “hubs” or points of neural concentration for interaction and winnowing.  At this level all thought and feeling are woven together, each individual in uniqueness but united in basic similarity.  The phenomenon of this happening is what caused humans to have big brains or maybe big brains allowed this to happen or -- most likely -- the two interacted, the capacity to record and store memory pushing for more space in the cranium at the same time that the pre-existing richness of material compressing together and complexifying increased the capacity and nature of what was stored.  Capacity creates desire; the desire demands more capacity.  This is enough of an advantage to cause survival evolution.

A brain is an ecology: the push to expand into niches, as a consequence creating new niches, means -- in the case of humans -- not just better integration with the out-skin world but also the artistic creation of virtual worlds, representations that only exist in-skin but can be made “real” and communicable to other humans out-skin through painting, dance, music, ritual.  The brain is the in-skin’s access to the out-skin world, powered by wanting to know, to understand, to participate, to desire, to be awestruck.

My premise in the eventual longer document is that the sense of the sacred and the ability to feel and even create experiences of deep-felt meaning are what maintain a clear relationship between in-skin and out-skin.  In times and situations that are unvarying and that do not demand peaks of exertion or risk, it may be that unchallenged ideas and practices accumulate in the way that brains store first level memories that must be edited by the hippocampus, perhaps through dreams or maybe simply forgetting, disuse.  If there are no occasions of felt transcendence, humans can fall into depression and malfunction.  (Nassim Taleb has discussed his ideas about this.  The paleoanthropologists talk about it.)

This material is best approached through anthropology, arts, psychoanalysis, paleobiology, and possibly theories of sexual function but NOT theology.  Human institutions claim “ownership” of transcendent phenomena and because institutions are the result of group consensus and self-maintenance, they will exclude any free-ranging or innovative theories.  Also, in the modern Western world, they are dominated by written words and the rules and bookkeeping that arise from them.  But this line of thinking here doesn’t challenge any institutions and possibly could even benefit them: probably has always dwelt somewhere within them particularly at the level of founding.  But the particularity of dogma and practice interfere with thought about primal levels so deep that they were shared with Neanderthal humans.

I hasten to say that this is all speculative, though there is a huge body of material and I have a certain amount of “clinical” experience through arts and institutional religion.  Our present ability to see individual neurons or “hubs” of interaction in the brain as they fire offers a window on the mind we’ve never had before.  But this is not to brush aside introspection as a long-standing and useful access to the mind.  The limitation on simply asking “how do you feel?” has always been to hit that boundary between what is conscious and what is unconscious.  Since that boundary can be pushed back and forth by various means, such as free-association or performance and creation in arts or drugs, we know it’s there.  A boundary is felt when crossing it.  Likewise, there is a permeable or variable boundary between reason and emotion:  we react emotionally to what we have reasoned out, but that emotional response is evidence useful in rational reflection.

Institutions are not always helpful when they become enforcers of morality, even when the precepts seems humane and possible, such as obeying the Golden Rule.  Still, even that can become problematic.  (Sir Bertrand Russell remarked that it might not be helpful when dealing with a liver fluke.  Is it helpful when dealing with pets?)  If institutions develop in one place and then move to a different set of circumstances, they can do immense damage, particularly when their ideas have destroyed the place they have come from (a form of clear-cutting) and now move to a new place where they repeat their approach.  This sort of issue belongs to ideas about community identity rather than individual persons.  But it also puts both person and community into a context of environment.

Drawing on an environmentally-based theory of thought, I‘m developing a three-part argument.  The pattern derives from a buffalo jump as newly understood by Jack Brink in his book “Imagining Head-Smashed-In: Aboriginal Buffalo Hunting on the Northern Plains,” published by the University of Athabasca Press.  We think of bison in simple generic terms as a given and a “jump” as simply where they are killed by being pushed over a precipice.  In fact, certain preconditions and skills are necessary.  One is a broad grassy area above the cliff where buffalo collect to graze, then the patterned means of hazing and finally stampeding them over the cliff, and finally the sorting and processing that converts them into cured hides and dried meat that can be stored.  Kind of an hourglass pattern with the precipitation as the pinch-point.  In this manuscript the first part is awareness and collection of the sensorium, the actual intense experience is the “buffalo jump”, and the third part dissects how the events nurture people, how the incident is assimilated.  This neither contradicts nor excludes principles of syllogism, narrative climax, or scientific method.

“Afterlife” or immortality will not be addressed, though their felt meanings will be.  Plains Indians had their own felt sources of courage in a life full of peril.  Much of the variation in institutional or broadly cultural ideas about such matters comes from the tension between individual and community.  Fears of personal survival can be subsumed by the necessity of saving the group, but the group may keep control by threatening individuals with dire fates, one way or another.  The tension between person and community is another matter that can be addressed by transcendent experience, the feeling of proportion and a far greater belonging to creation, a way of going to James Flynn's thinking at the level of abstraction and imagination.

That felt connection to an ultimate is part of the in-skin knowledge crossing to intense relationship with the out-skin world.   Intimacy with other humans, the existence of other life-forms, the understanding of geological processes, an awareness of the cosmos, can energize lives that require small acts of service and vision in a local setting.  One might say “the heroism of the ordinary,” which is a moral concept but one drawn from life experience, rather than dictated in a book.  If a person can compensate for his or her own limits and fears by helping others, even in indirect ways, that opens the mind to empathy, which I take to be the newest evolutionary accomplishment of the brain, even beyond the group efforts necessary for something like driving buffalo.  This can take us past the blind mammal instincts of lethal domination.  Maybe even past the famous “banality of evil.”