ONE CELL, ONE PERSON -- SAME PROCESS

So by now I have -- in this pursuit of the elements of deep or intense or meaningful experience and how to make it happen --  a five step process describing how a human being thinks.  It’s a circle, so just imagine this list bending around to meet itself.  One? Meet five.  Five? Meet one.  (I just added the fifth a few days ago, but I stuck it on as the first.)

1.  A one-celled creature evolves inside a skin.  At first it’s all about what’s in there, what it needs in terms of adding and subtracting, and the gradual building up of complexity over millennia until finally it has a notochord, then a spine with a knob on the end, and then an elaborating knob that becomes a brain.  All INSIDE.   

The one cell absorbs what it needs from the liquid in which it floats and excretes whatever is inside that its metabolism tears apart to use some of but doesn’t want partly after all. In a few millennia it develops an intake on one end and an outflow on the other end and a tube connecting the two of them.  This is the first gut, the GI “tract.”  

By this stage the creature has created three parts: skin, movement, and a way to pass the outside through the inside so as to derive energy for moving around.  Then it begins to sense what’s outside it’s skin, going towards food, moving away from danger.  This is the beginning of the sensorium, which is more like smell than anything else: sampling the molecules of the environment.  But the real function of the primordial not-brain-yet is to manage what’s inside the cell, the homeostasis, which is the boundaries that dictate individual survival.  Not just the skin, but the solutions mixing inside, which the skin can separate from the solutions mixing outside the creature.

2.  As the creatures begin to add complexity by dividing up cells into specialized duties (muscles here, message carrying nerves there) it has a skin, a sensorium to carry information from outside the skin to inside the skin.  The five senses are only the most conscious ones, highly evolved complexes of cells.  There continue to be senses inside the creature that manage the binary balancing functions of fluid solutions, adding and subtracting molecules to manage homeostasis.  But we don’t “feel” the acid/alkali balance, the glucose level, the secretion of bile and so on, unless homeostasis is out-of-whack enough to make us feel sick as a warning.

3.  The brain is the dashboard of all this commotion inside the skin, with the double obligation of maintaining homeostasis inside and interpreting the information that arrives through the sensorium.  The brain develops in response to the environment so that it fits itself into the ecology, first of all through understanding, which is an interpretation.  The brain edits and then stores the information by ear-marking it with the sensory signature of the moment, the way a digital camera will print info right onto the image.  Then the brain keeps order by mapping, both the anatomy in-skin and the orientation to the out-skin, noting gravity, placement within space, and geometric concepts.  These two functions have been in the one-celled animal all along, but now they are elaborated, but still edited by the notes the brain keeps.  The brain senses what it expects.  Something totally unexperienced, uninterpretable, may be pushed back out.  Or it may force the total reorganization of assumptions.  Or it may be invisible.

The first sorting is done by binaries important to the survival of the infant:  hot/cold, dark/light, falling/embraced, hungry/fed, thirsty/sated, wet/dry.  One of the next distinctions is human faces: familiar/strange and the beginning of response.  If survival homeostasis is maintained, this is the beginning of bonding and love.

4.  Response is the next step.  Possibly in-skin feelings or possibly out-skin actions.  Waving limbs, gazing, crying, cooing.  The consequences feed back into the brain through the sensorium which begins to build consciousness of the interaction and to create a felt identity.

5.  A mammal cannot survive alone for long and not at all in infancy.  When its stimulus/response sequences are establishing, which is largely a matter of interacting with caregivers, the baby develops empathy for the caregiver, so it knows whether that person is happy or sad, angry or caring.  In a modern adult human this empathy becomes an extension of the brain, another way for information to get into the body and to the brain by entering through the sensorium.  You SEE how they feel, HEAR how they feel.  The brain notes how the other people are handling information and what they are doing about it.  The tendency is to do what they do and the group encourages that.  

Once the individual becomes embedded in a group, taking on its characteristics and enjoying its protection, there is a new kind of survival which is that of the group as a whole.  A person need not stay in one group but can move to smaller or alternative or larger gatherings of people.   They need not be exclusive, though some will insist on it.  The most dangerous is failing to realize that one's group is NOT the only group there is.  Whether the person handles new groups with xenophobia or with pleased discovery depends in part on experience in the past as encoded in the brain and partly on whether the new group is welcoming.  Then action is needed to create homeostasis push/pull of the individual in that group.  

The inside/outside dynamic of the one-celled animal, though greatly complexified, is still there: taking in what is needed, throwing out what is debris.  The boundary membrane of the actual skin is matched some way by a psychological boundary of either brain-imposed limits or group-imposed limits, which might actually be expansions.  I am proposing that a deeply meaningful experience will be one that expands or elaborates or re-adjusts the felt identity of a human being in a way that increases well-being, understanding and skill.  

So this comes back around to the one-cell which is now part of a cooperating complex, a creature defined by its skin in the same way that the whole creature is a cooperating complex element of the entire ecology of the planet and the cosmos out beyond it.  This can be felt and it is meaningful.  Capturing that in experience is a matter of sensorium, intake/outflow for homeostasis and ease in survival, and the skillful, artful management of interaction with the brain’s assumptions.

These ideas are echoed by the people who have fiddled with Maslow’s pyramid explaining “peak experience” -- peak coming from the metaphor of climbing a mountain and reaching the summit.  Actually, the diagram is a triangle suggesting there is a sequence beginning with the most basic and crucial elements of human happiness, those necessary for survival, then evolving from that (using the scientific idea of one thing developing out of another) into narrowing stages that finally -- most rarely (a function of plenitude or scarcity) focuses (camera) on that intense (concentrated) feeling.  

The Christian/Abrahamic assumption is that once you’re there, that’s the end.  But it isn’t.  To stick with the mountain idea, life is not climbing to the top and sitting there like a cartoon guru.  Instead it is a matter of continuing around the mountains, through them, between them, maybe even inside them by accessing a cave.  The difference between religion and spirituality is that religion assumes there is a goal and then it’s over.  Spirituality is about the process.  

One is a map, the other is an exploration.  It doesn’t really matter where so long as the world is coming into the person and the debris of the experience, the ashes, are being discarded.  That’s achieving “flow.”  The actual “travel” for a spiritual person comes from awareness of metaphor and willingness to explore it.

THE BRAIN IS A FIST

George Lakoff

“Metaphors We Live By” by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson was published in 1980, the year I was mostly in Hartford, Conn., trying to survive a ministry internship.  I knew about Lakoff, knew it fit into the ideas I held most precious, but didn’t have the time and focus to do it justice.  Evidently others had the same problem, but now suddenly this is one of the most discussed books around -- the book and its subsequent stream of thought which has met and mingled with neuroscience in a confirming way.  

“Stream of thought ” -- now there’s a master metaphor for you!  What follows now (like a puppy) is drawn  (like a bucket up from a well) from the document on the Internet at:   http://terpconnect.umd.edu/~israel/lakoff-ConTheorMetaphor.pdf    The point of it is that the separation of body and mind is ended.  Since the division has been a staple of European and American introspection and reasoning, all that is out-of-date now.  Interesting but not necessarily relevant.

Probably male as well.

When I was an undergrad (1957-61) we were taught Skinnerian rules:  stimulus (senses) in--> black box (???) --> response (action) out.  I’ve added a fourth step --> the community which supports and guides the person.  The “black box” is now much better understood, but it is nothing without the sensorium, the bodily responses, and the interacting community.  

Basically the composite organ/brain is a “dashboard,” which accepts, sorts through various OS strategies, and then triggers the action.  Much of the description of what happens is easily understood in computer terms, but the brain is far more than a computer because it is accepting and processing far more than five senses (much of them inaccessible to the conscious mind), which is why I keep calling it the “sensorium”, and because it IS the whole body that supplies the part of the sensorium that we perceive as our “emotions”, and because when it thinks and acts it is in the context of a community and -- even more than that -- a real-world ecology which has shaped that community.  Desert/jungle/mountain/plains.

Sprint dashboard

How does it work?  Metaphor.  The brain works by metaphor.  Lakoff: “The word metaphor has come to mean a cross-domain mapping in the conceptual system.”  The big controlling metaphor is what I’m calling the “game board.”  What Lakoff explores is also the “game board,” a big master conceptual pattern that supports and guides expressions of smaller relationships.  He speaks of it as “mapping” which is like my game-board idea, except that a MAP gives rise to a different set of sub-metaphors:  “Where are we going with this idea?  What is the path?  Do we have land marks?  Are we there yet?”   But a GAME BOARD offers a competitive Gestalt:  “Are we winning?  What’s the score?  Let’s roll the dice and take a chance.  I’m getting good at this.”  

What counts is not which prescribed overall metaphor context one should use, but achieving awareness of the assumptions involved and choosing the set that works the best for the task.  As Lakoff reminds us, “everyday abstract concepts like time, states, change, causation and purpose also turn out to be metaphorical.”  The brain creates these categories from experience and then enacts them as thinking.  

Piaget and Iliusha

Remember Piaget?  All that endless child-watching while the kid put clothespins into a milk bottle, then dumped them out; bounced a ball off a wall; rolled it down a board; stacked up blocks and knocked them over; pinched spring-loaded clothespins.  That was world-making.  All recorded as “how things work.”  Part of the bag (!) of metaphor details.  Those were just objects:  the same kinds of experiments were going on with people to see how they would react, though most of us don’t really remember poking their mom in the eye out of curiosity.

Recently I was fascinated by a video of little kids whose teacher would call them over individually and get them to tell stories which she wrote down, then discussed.  The boys wanted to include death and talked about a horse being killed.  The girls didn’t want death and in particular didn’t want horses to be killed.  They LIKED horses ("My Little Pony"), but they would let them “faint” in the story.  

And they were willing to let “bad” creatures (i.e. the ones they didn’t like) go ahead and die.  They said explicitly that it was fine to kill “bad people.”  Already they had picked up their culture’s preoccupations, trying to figure them out.  (I was shocked by the judgmental girls.)  Here are the beginnings of stigma and all the racist, classist, sexist categories that confound us.  The girls were adamant -- but what about the boys who got shut up to keep from offending them?  The girls knew that their parents will say death is not “nice.”  All “bad” should be eliminated by making it faint.  I think the film was on Aeon, a site that loves this sort of thing.  http://aeon.co/film/games-bring-discoveries-for-the-children-playing-and-for-us-too/  http://aeon.co/film/wrights-law-a-short-film-about-an-extraordinary-physics-teacher/

So far I don't really have a grip on Lakoff and “liminality” but I think it’s here somewhere: going to a “place” where it’s “safe” to “change” your mind: a sanctuary, a no man’s land, time out, King’s X.  Going back inside yourself to the place where you were a wide-eyed kid who could just consider stuff, absorbing its smell, its sound, its feel against the skin and how you “felt” about it before you had words for feelings.

At some point in the lives of some people there comes a realization that there is more than one way to “map” the world.  Maybe it’s a change in location, maybe a whole cultural change from moving to a different country, or maybe a relationship with a person who is quite different, who eats different foods, hums different tunes, is surprised you haven’t read the same books.  There is nothing more exciting and scary than dealing with the world breaking apart into possibility.  Some people can’t stand it.  It might help them to consider a metaphor like mapping overlays, those transparent sheets of plastic one puts on top of the old map so as to mark the points of same and different.  (You can do it on the computer easily, but it won’t have the sensory aspect.  On the other hand, it can sequence through time.)

This comparison forces one to be abstract, to go to meta-thought, thinking about what matches and why.  Some call it re-framing, some call it re-newal, re-naissance (naissance is birth/natal), a whole new dimension revealed.  It’s scary -- like falling into space without knowing where you’ll land -- some people freak, others go into denial, some run for it. Marv Shaw, when he was teaching philosophy of religion in Bozeman years ago, used to tell about big tough cowboy kids and the horror that crossed their faces to realize that maybe there was no God after all.  That you could even THINK that.

When I was admitted to Northwestern, one of my favorite high school teachers said to me, “Oh, I’m so glad because now you’ll get to know rich people!”  I had no idea what she was talking about then.  Only later did I understand that they were entirely different folks with different tastes and beliefs.  Of course, I thought I DID know about theatre people, but they turned out to be from a different kind of theatre than I ever imagined.  The very first acting student I met was Dave Pressman who asked me what I thought of The Method.  I didn’t know what he was talking about.  When I began consorting with UU’s, I was suddenly introduced to “Pachelbel’s Canon” and “Pavane for a Dead Princess.”   Here are several artistic ways to illustrate a dead princess.  Different cultures for different folks.

A person can get a taste for this sort of thing, so my first teaching job on the unknown-to-me Blackfeet Rez was right up my alley.  I was the only person in town delighted to find horses in my front yard.  Beyond that, the world of cowboy artists was more worth exploring then than it is now that it’s sort of mushed into the glamour mainstream.  But animal control -- well, that has teeth!  Each was a coherent world, a realm, all unsuspected and functional.

In the end thinking this way gives a person a sense of possibility, that there is NOT just one way to be, that existence can be negotiated.  John Calvin had it wrong.  It also means we’re all in this together, sensorium/dashboard/songanddance/and the big community of the planet.  The metaphor is a boat, an ark, a space ship, spherical, room for everyone.  So far.  Result?  Riding the solar circuit, swinging around the orbit and hoping for what is new under the sun.  Hoping it will be a shock.  Or at least a surprise.

Street rat exploring velocity.

Already mastered parcours.