"IF I DON'T THINK OF ME, I DON'T EXIST"

“We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world.”  - Buddha

Among a scramble of attempts to figure out how we think, much of the focus is on consciousness, even though we know it arises from the other 99% of our protein code.  We want it all to be special, unique, self-confirming, but the truth is that even one percent of a bazillion little interactions that run a mammal body, that's still a whole heckuva lot of things to go wrong.

Stanley McCormick, son of the famous Cyrus McCormick

Stanley McCormick (1874-1947), started out to be a handsome, intelligent leader at an Ivy League college, but at about the age a brain is meant to be mature, it went wacky, sort of like having a frontal lobotomy.  It might have been a stroke, a parasite, or genetics.  He had inherited an immense fortune from his father who had designed the plans for the McCormick Reaper, a machine he developed from precursors and marketed cleverly. 

The Stanley McCormicks, newly wed.

Stanley's wife from before his affliction was also beautiful, intelligent and well-educated in the field of biology.  She specialized in studying hormones and was partly motivated by the belief that that was what was the matter with Stanley.  Whether or not that was true, and since his caretakers (he required constant care) only knew one hormone -- testosterone/sex -- their position was that he was now a sex maniac and would attack all women.  They were convincing enough to get the wife excluded from his presence, but not quite enough to get the money away from her.  She used some of it for the development of the birth control pill.  The link between eugenics and insanity is alive here, as well as the quarrelling over the quality of families that preoccupied my mother's generation.

Stanley had a sister with the same kind of disorder, though I couldn't find a photo.  She was also kept sequestered in luxury, but in a different place.  She never married.  The mother of these children and others had been an adopted orphan, so possibly she was carrying something that had destroyed her parents.  Cyrus McCormick himself married late, so maybe his sperm were defective from old age.  Possibly drinking was involved and this was fetal alcohol syndrome.  Or opium addiction.  Or just the prejudices of poorly informed but attention-seeking medical people.  The novel about the situation, "Riven Rock", is too sensational to be helpful.

Our understanding of brains is much farther along.  So far I've not found an illustration in real people in modern times.  We know that the brain works by "connectomes" which computers can model in color.  These are circuits, connected loops assigned to different subjects.  Here's the jargon:  "neural circuitry underlying emotional processing across a range of tasks and across psychiatric disorders  through a transdiagnosis quantitative meta-analysis of publishing data."

Some of the circuits were named.  I found these on Wikipedia where the author is unnamed.:

The salience network is a collection of regions of the brain that select which stimuli are deserving of our attention. The network has key nodes in the insular cortex and is critical for detecting behaviorally relevant stimuli and for coordinating the brain's neural resources in response to these stimuli.

(The insular cortex (also insula and insular lobe) is a portion of the cerebral cortex folded deep within the lateral sulcus (the fissure separating the temporal lobe from the parietal and frontal lobes) within each hemisphere of the mammalian brain.)

The ventral/striatal orbitofrontal "nonreward" network

Schizophrenia is a psychiatric disorder that is associated with impaired functioning of the fronto-striatal network, in particular during reward processing. .

The lateral orbitofrontal circuit. The ventral region of prefrontal cortex (PFC) is involved in aspects of cognition, and the inferior lateral parts are involved in emotions. The orbitofrontal or prefrontal lateral cortex (PFLC) has extensive interconnections with the limbic system—the hypothalamus, amygdala, insula, and ACC.

Circuits may also be connected to specific organs and their functions, but though there are a lot of circuits (enormous numbers), they seem to be more specialized in terms of processing than in thought content. The article below lists specifics.  These kinds of physiological. anatomical, electrochemical studies justify the separation of "psychiatry" from "psychology,"  though the experiments of the latter asking for perception and behavior by subjects, often frame concepts for medical investigation.

https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appl.ajp.2019.18111271

No one ever found out for sure what Stanley thought, what he was conscious of.  He did seem to attack women but no one is sure why except in terms of being a sex maniac, which was a uni-concept itself.  Surely there must be more than one kind of "sex maniac."  And maybe that's not what his problem was.

Recently, facing the accusation that everything is based on the genome of the white European male with bad results for other categories, a genomic study was made of schizophrenia in Africa.  The thought is that the group of disorders in the category are in fact multiples interacting rather than one-on-one.  Also, the focus is on synapses, the tiny gaps between neurons, rather than in the neurons themselves.  The study of Africans did not find that schizophrenia and its associated mutations were much different from those in Euro populations, except that there was more variety and that the genome was much older.

Like Trump's mother, Stanley, and myself, the immediate locus of the gene carriers were Scots/Irish who seem to be particularly vulnerable to schizo mutations, though no one would dare say so in a loud voice.  But as Trump's deterioration becomes more obvious, we are bound to eventually wonder about those acid-soaked British islands and what they can do to the synapses of circuits.  Anyway, it all sounds so much more "scientific" than saying his brain is twisted and therefore so is he.  I figure that staying high and dry on the Montana prairie has saved me.

PERINEAL POLITICS

Maureen Mullarkey

Perhaps is not so surprising to use this word in a time when science has introduced us — upclose and on video — to non-human meiosis, known in human terms as “sex.”  My favorite example of sexual predation is a bug that bores a hole in the female and injects his sperm.  Bugs don’t have perineums, which is called in slang about women, “the pink.”  Sometimes it’s called “the slash”, which gives it a bug-like violent vibe, or the “slot” which sort of suggests a coin-operated function.  Violence and monetization are two characteristics of human intercourse of all kinds.  We don’t manage them very well.  Men have names for their unruly little man: Peter or Dick.  Technically, the perineum is unisex.

Those of us who try to understand existence in ultimate terms as well as in the framework of “embodiment” have been challenged to the point of shifting the paradigm of theology from one big old gramps in the sky to an infinitely interrelated and constantly morphing fabric or symphony of electrochemical atomic interactions — the atom being, of course, a pattern of energy.  If being is actually, really, this and not the pattern of brain interaction assembly that goes on through our lives, casting a connectome over the universe that sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t, what are we to use as a guide for human interactions?  

Rule out drilling holes in each other, though the NRA will not agree with that.  Personally, I’m going to the tension in the relationship between the human individual and the human group, even the species taken as a group.  Even “hominins” taken as a group.  The point is life-going-on, which we call evolution or survival of the fittest, though we get all incoherent about fitness.  It’s not about the biggest, strongest, smartest, prettiest, etc.  It’s about what fits.

Most crucially, “fitness” is a shifting target because the planet shifts, the cultures shift, the mood shifts.  Fitness shifts. Therefore, a system (meiosis) succeeds if it constantly creates a variety of kinds, so that even if everything changes, some of the kinds will survive.  Some will not.  (Goodbye hominins.  Goodbye cave bears.)  In a world jammed with humans, individual survival is often pitched against group survival.  Results vary.

A group that has settled upon an understanding of the world that lets its members survive will attract more people and eventually form an institution with leaders, buildings, images, songs, and dogma — lots of stuff to support functioning.  What supports the institution is likely to be written down and enforced by the group.  Until it doesn’t work anymore.  Then, in a freely joined group, people will leave.

Margaret Sanger

American Christian churches of all kinds are shrinking.  It’s not that people are going from one group to another, but that they are simply going group-less.  The larger culture is not recreating religious sub-groups people want.  Or maybe they just aren’t recognizing them as religious.  This may be the case with a new consensus forming about creation.  Some call it “scientific mysticism” meaning that it accepts all the work of responsible science without wandering off into the woo-woo, but is keenly aware of the awful grandeur of ultimates, eternals, and unimaginables that science points to.  I’m hearing rumors about the formation of new congregations, something like the earliest Unitarians and Universalists reacting against Calvin’s paradigm.

Actually it was Luther who admired the pink ruffles of the perineum as a source of salvation.  He famously said, as recorded by his students, that when the devil threatened him, he put his hand between the legs of his wife and was consoled.  It’s a puzzle to me why the more stringent feminists won’t share the wealth of the original container of life.

Artemisia Gentileschi

There are many jokes about the UU heresies.  One is that if there were two gates to heaven, one labeled “salvation” and the other one labeled “discussion of salvation,” all the UU’s would turn off to the discussion access.  But I often think that the UUA is best not thought of as a denomination but as a ground for denominations.  (I’m trying to echo Tillich resolution between being versus non-being by suggesting a “ground of being.”)  Reading “The Silk Roads” is a bit of a revelation in that it traces how the Greek-Persian rivalry/collaboration, the Christian-Buddhist interactions, and all the other tribal institutions formed by ecologies of river and mountain — especially after erosion and exploitation narrowed the world — had to change to survive.

Nothing has changed more abruptly or more drastically than our understanding of sex in terms of fertility, entitlement, protection, identity, leadership and so on.  Now we might be prepared to accept the idea that a virgin can have a baby — but so what?  We might not think that crucifixion is the most horrible death — today’s Messiah might be more likely to die of HIV/AIDS because of being denied meds.  We’ve accepted leaders and heroes who have sex with people to whom they have no legal obligation.  I won’t bother to name them — it’s a good parlor game.

But we have NOT reformed our societal protection of children, who are still partly commodities and partly party prizes, rarely human beings deserving of protection for their development.  There is NO UUA scandal-monger pursuing ministers who neglect their children or have children they don’t want.  The conservatives will punish for abortion, defending it with sentimental appeal to babies, not realistic concern or help for a baby that will need public money and attention.

Virginia Woolf

Can we say that our present institutions and protocols are serving either individuals or groups very well?  So many of our schemes from the 19th century have turned demonic so that peace-keeping forces are rapists, humane societies are money-machines, and hospitals are bombed.  What are churches?  What is the putative role of specifically religious institutions in a world where nothing is sacred?

It’s clear that the journey of the individual has become even more intensely a search for the Sacred, that transcends even individual survival.  Thus, the abuse of the pink perineum as a way of waging war is an abomination.  The  use of someone’s perineum for enjoyment in the face of social disruption is ill-advised but human.  It speaks to a greater lack that the individual is not addressing, but there is always the tantalizing hint that sex is sometimes sacred.  Ceremonies, even those of being drummed out, are not enough.  We must look to the swirling fractals of understanding the Big Picture and I mean galactic, not “me and my neighbors.”

Place settings are from Judy Chicago's Supper Party.

This conversation is not merely an address in a venue on Boston’s Berry Street.  It is now on the Internet and global, googleable.  

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?

DESIGNED SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE

ESSENCE OF DESIGNED EXPERIENCE 

Jonathan A. Anderson, whose lectures are on YouTube.  http://open.biola.edu/authors/jonathan-a-anderson, teaches at a fundamentalist school that believes in Biblical inerrancy but he talks about the most avant garde kinds of art with full comprehension and insight. Here is an example of his designed sacred experience, a “proof of life.”

"Put a chilled piece of glass in front of you.  An oscillating fan should be running in the room.  Lean forward in your chair and breathe on the glass.  Observe your breath as it clouds the glass.  Lean back.  Watch as your breath clears from the glass.  This is seeing your life."

Part two:

"Get a friend to sit on the other side of the chilled glass.  Put two oscillating fans in the room.  You lean forward to make a cloud while your friend sits back.  Then you lean back and he leans forward to breathe on the glass.  Observe carefully.  You are looking at each other's lives.”

If one is to work at the level of the body that kindles a feeling of the sacred, one must be aware somehow at the level of the 200 kinds of one-celled perception that is posited to have developed to guide us since the beginning.  To a rat it is clear that these cells perceive whether we are next to and following a wall, or approaching a drop-off; whether it is daytime or nighttime even if there is no light; the approach of some living thing bigger than us; whether we are being watched; and many other subtle things most of us pay no attention to.  Worship design is like any other art form except that the focus is survival.

The trouble is that the survival of the group and of the individual can be opposed.  Groups don’t like the atypical.  Individuals do.  The tension between them is either creative, triggering evolution, or deadly, destroying one or the other.  We are sharply aware of that right now.  Worship experience can help reconcile the conflict.

There are three concepts from Paul Tillich that I accept.

1.  If two things are in direct conflict, the remedy is to find that which includes them both.  His key is “being” versus “non-being”, overarched by “the ground of being.”  Be careful to avoid Manicheism, which tries to make every binary into an evil versus good. 

2.  Symbols cannot be “assigned” rationally.  They are “emergent,” forming when the situation provides the force that produces them.  They might not be nice; they can certainly not be controlled.  One can learn to recognize them.

3.  Worship and religion can only transcend the politico-economics of a specific time and place by relating to what he calls the Ultimate, consciousness of belonging and participating in something on the edge of conceivability: cosmic, inscrutable, impossible to describe.  It is what we come out of  and what we go into.  It has NOTHING to do with religion and includes science as a kind of religion.  It has nothing to do with institutions.  It’s the “is-ness” of being even before it’s divided into time and space.  We are submerged and connected in being.

THEORY

Victor Turner provides basics by defining the experience of ceremonies in time as though it were in space, like a room with walls, a door, and a threshold, called a limen.  

The beginning is entering over the threshold which might actually be physical.  But it could be anything that affects the level of consciousness, which could also be defined as reorganizing the connectome, if you know what a connectome is.

A connectome is the pattern of neuron connections at a given time.  It can be seen on fMRI sorts of instruments and will shift as the task of the brain changes.  It’s like an old-fashioned operator’s board for a telephone, plugging in the acoustic-processing center for sounds or the math rules for arithmetic.  If one is trying to think something in one realm with a connectome patterned for another realm, a lot of things will just go blank.  The result might be creative, but also might be an incoherent mess.

What shifts a person’s consciousness into the connectome for an event meant to be sacred?  How the event is thought of will make a difference: a litany, traditional to a denomination, will mean activating memory, habit, association with a certain kind of place, maybe giving attention to a leader.

Sometimes this entry into the sacred “room” can be seen as a task of “entrainment” or “concatenation”, basically getting everyone on the same page.  A song by the group; an entry procession as in a wedding; the literal tuning up of an orchestra, the lights go down, the curtain goes up, the candles are lit, the orchestra conductor raises his arms.  But also walking up stairs and opening an impressive door, or greeting and being greeted by people.  In some ways a sacred event is not that different from an arts performance.

If the limen is crossed in the connectome of those attending, then they are ready for the body of the event.  Turner’s theory is that the people should be separated enough from their daily life to temporarily give up hierachy — everyone is equal in the sacred time and place.  One is released to accept change or to reconfirm their commitment.  It is both a very safe place, and the very most dangerous because of what might be realized.

At the end of this, the task is to send people back over the limen into the real world, but renewed.  Some of the same acts, words, songs, will work.  When this is done powerfully, it will be hard to explain, but people will feel those who were present were changed.

Beginning, Middle, End are the trinity of all time experience, but when they are envisioned as a space, it’s easier to see them as a progression across time.  That doesn’t seem logical, but there it is.

There is another strategy that comes close to the beginning, after the people have justified their attendance (knocked on the door) and sat down together (entrainment).  I call it the Dilation of the Spirit.  You could relate it to what Tillich has said about “ultimates.”  That is, disengaging the mind from the teeny-tiny quotidian and taking it to the absolute limit of imagination. 

First, one thinks of the most ghastly, evil, disastrous things and how we are not at all safe from any of them.  In fact, chances are someone in the group has just been diagnosed with cancer, just lost someone dear, just watched the news of another predator drone attack that killed an innocent family.  With lots of prompting from the media, most of us don’t find it hard to envision Evil, but “nice people” who are surviving on denial and fantasy while they walk on the crust of the volcano, will usually banish it, simply not allow it.  This reduces religious experience to a cotillion, a pleasant night at the card table.

Institutional religion promises protection.  When the dogmas don’t deliver, the people leave the pews.  The Creedal belief in life after death is just about exhausted.  Few of us can sustain the vision of rising out of the grave restored.  Our efforts to believe end up with movies about zombies and White Walkers.  Gruesome and ridiculous.

I go instead to the idea of inclusion, which is simply a bald fact.  Every particle of existence is connected to every other particle and if one is changed, so are the others.  Every tiny thing matters.  That is, life matters.  What you do matters.  You may have just manufactured in your organs a molecule that will change you and therefore your life and that you might pass on to your children, altering their lives and all the lives around you.  Hey, I’ve seen it happen.  Survival is the same thing as participation.  Even if it were possible to separate from everything else, that would be death.  No sensation, no nurturing, no connectome.

AND NOW THE HOLOGENOME . . .

The genome.  Then the connectome.  The epigenome.  And now the hologenome, which is the creature plus all the other microbial life forms that cuddle down with us.  Maybe feed on us.  Insert their genes in among the spirals that we thought were only ours, because they were the plan for us.  We think of them as infections but they are elaborations.  The holobiont is the “whole shebang,”  connected and dynamic.  It’s all ecology: the logic of interactions and fittingness.

http://nautil.us/issue/29/scaling/when-evolution-is-infectious

I suppose we ought to include the molecules we ingest as medicines, escapes, food, and — well, just accidental soak-ups from breathing, bathing, rubbing up against things.  This is an Age of Inclusion despite our complaints and rejections, our attempts to insist on boundaries.

So the docs talk about leverage, probiotic epidemics, niches, dysbiosis, protective commensals, and fecal transplants.  Mucus earns a new respect because it harbors so much.  Then there’s the “envirome” where the creature grapples with and seduces what’s around it on every level, including the emotional.  This is why I’m an “everythingist.”

Dr. Stan Rowe, U of Saskatchewan faculty

In 1988 in Saskatoon, Stan Rowe was one of my heroes.  He was proposing this point of view explored by Max Tegmark, as linked below, one of the constant attempts to unite science, religion, and human experience (philosophy included).  I think a lot of people think this way, quietly in order to avoid the yapping opportunist media.  Stan talked about “slices of space/time” and I tried to pass on his thoughts in Sunday sermons.

I copied and pasted these from amazon.ca, in case the US site doesn’t show them.

Home Place: Essays on Ecology, new revised edition  Oct 16 2002  by Stan Rowe

Earth Alive: Essays on Ecology  Apr 15 2006  by Stan Rowe

http://nautil.us/issue/29/scaling/life-is-a-braid-in-spacetime-rp

Max “the braidman” says, “Some people find it emotionally displeasing to think of themselves as a collection of particles. I got a good laugh back in my 20s when my friend Emil addressed my friend Mats as an “atomhög,” Swedish for “atom heap,” in an attempt to insult him. However, if someone says “I can’t believe I’m just a heap of atoms!’’ I object to the use of the word “just”: the elaborate spacetime braid that corresponds to their mind is hands down the most beautifully complex type of pattern we’ve ever encountered in our universe. The world’s fastest computer, the Grand Canyon or even the Sun—their spacetime patterns are all simple in comparison.”

Articles like these two in nautil.us make me dizzy with the joy of insight.   

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/07/science/a-glossy-science-magazine-or-living-fossil.html  Dennis Overbye explains in this linked NY Times article that the ‘zine is a bit of a throwback to a time a few decades ago when there were more magazines like it.

1991

At the time, mostly ’70’s, the one I went absolutely crazy over was “The Sciences” published by The New York Academy of Sciences.  I kept breaking my rule about not hoarding magazines because the issues were both so amazing and so beautiful.  In fact, my use of images on prairiemary is inspired by “The Sciences” though they used contemporary art and abstract impressionist paintings, very sophisticated.  This frame of reference that unites art with science is one of my affinities to Tim Barrus and Aad de Gids. I suppose it’s structuralist and deconstructive at once.  Open to argument and the startling.

Ralph Burhoe, founder of Zygon

These days I admire the online magazine Aeon, which is peripherally connected to Nautil.us through the Templeton Foundation, which gave its very first prize to Ralph Burhoe, then associated with Meadville/Lombard.  We weren’t very appreciative of Burhoe and his magazine.  Maybe because, in Gertrude Stein terms, there was no “there” yet in his attempt to unite science and religion.  In 1980 it was just early "process theology".  My problem was that I never could see the difference between science and religion in the first place and don’t appreciate math at all, but Burhoe loved all that stuff, all the apparatus of thought.

Spencer Burhoe, sexy male model

My complaint about Aeon has been that it’s too Anglican culture-bound.  They’ve never gotten down to the homonin layer because they are always in their pre-frontal cortex hobnobbing with respectable libraries.  I like a little porn in my spirituality.  They manage to talk about generations without ever really getting to full-frontal sex.   Less Buddhism, more Hindu!  More autonomic juice!

This vid is pretty seductive:  http://nautil.us/issue/1/what-makes-you-so-special/what-would-buddha-say    It’s Uma Thurman’s dad.  I love the short vids on Aeon.

In the end, in terms of congregations and the paranoid threat of being “religious”, or “institutional” or “dogmatic,” I think — not to worry — but some kind of “denomination” (group with a name, nomenclature) is forming now with many small starts here and there, maybe not understood as religious and maybe not much more than a “house church” that meets in someone’s home.  

Some will consider it “post-Christian” but that’s just because they are as Christocentric as they are anthropocentric.  They don’t frame life in cosmic terms yet.  Or even consider the planetary.  I think this nascent movement is simply a response to the Kuhnian phenomenon of re-organizing thought and belief because of the need to accommodate new information.  

This time it’s pretty extreme because there is so much knowledge and it’s so counter-intuitive.  But I do not think that anyone will be prepared to torture those who refuse to admit that there is a genome.  Well, maybe if they realize it’s a description of how we evolved from monkeys.

Just now in one of those Sharia nations a man who blogged about atheism has been condemned to decades in prison, 2,000 lashes of flogging and a huge money fine.  The people who have the power to do this are showing that they have no power except the power of fear and paranoia.  Their rifle has a barrel that turns back on their own faces.  I doubt they have enough time left in their regime to carry out the sentence to the end.  

Even if they do, their insane reaction will recruit many others to follow the informed man.  That’s the way human culture works.  You can’t resist the whole planet anymore because you can’t put up walls against ideas when people have smart phones in their pockets.  But I ache for the guy.  Like everything else, we’re connected.  Also to the floggers, of course.