UNMASKING THE MIRROR

Since the Internet and the platforms on it have turned out to be illusions and far more fragile than paper, I’ve been transcribing old messages to save them. Right now I’m in 2009 which turns out to have been more momentous than I realized at the time, mostly because so much was happening that coping overran everything else. I was writing with Tim, whose shoulders were being replaced, which meant he had to be in Carolina. I was trying to be our agent, but had no contacts nor any idea of how to go about it. I was climbing a learning curve that I never mastered and finally abandoned. It was collapsing anyway.

Beyond that, we were trying to understand “vooking”, now referred to as “cross media.” Handhelds were not so plentiful and everyone was just realizing that print as sub-titles (so spoken languages could be mixed in spite of mono-lingual audiences), as a continuous strip (like a news teletype), as overprints (as when someone’s subtext is supplied in a balloon or the content of their texting appears in front of their hands), could be mixed with video, sound, changes in speed, fast cuts, black screens, split screens. overlays, morphing — all this STUFF that kids can do without even thinking. 

Tim had a posse carrying little video cameras, building up a massive library of images. They already had play lists of music. It was their life. The point is that this barely contained assortment bursting with need-to-know, passionate emotions both positive and negative, and endless energy (once they figured out their health issues) was fuel for visionary short “essays.” (“Essay” means attempt, experiment, a try.) 

In Paris the group was not kids anymore, even legally, and pretty well-educated with high aesthetic standards.  Some had traveled with well-heeled clients and learned in the way that the consorts of aristos do — watching, osmosis, imitation, privileged access. In the Blue Ridge mountains they were more African, chaotic, uncontained, connected to nature. Both groups danced. I’m speaking of the productions — I never met the kids nor Tim either.

Strangely, what I was learning was relevant to my interest in what I was calling “liturgy” at that time, before I realized that “liturgy” is only print and about institutional religious dogma. What I really wanted was access to something like Deep Experience as conveyed by art and metaphor. It was not irrelevant to what Tim knew from his SF S/M years of “play” out on the edge of sensation, mixing danger with pleasure — getting literally “into” people. 

The backside of that is the taboo on talking about such things. sealing it off. There are still a few antideluvians and throwbacks out there who get into an hysterical froth and there are always the crouching hyenas watching for something they can define as criminal. So I couldn’t talk about it, not because of consequences to me but to Tim and the groups.

My level of discourse was not practice. It was theory. That’s what I was educated for and what I thought ministry would include. (It didn’t.) And I wanted theories that would include all humans, maybe more, not just one socio-economic-ethnic group. But the whole premise of congregations is that the members are alike.

When the French theorists came along — which just about coincided with my seminary education (78–82), we only knew they were “there,” except for Kenner, whose question was always “what does it MEAN?” He was the only one who talked about Derrida. Ricoeur was around on campus but I never understood him and he was too theological. I needed “Metaphors We Live By” by Lakoff and Johnson, published right then and there. No one talked about it. It was brushed off as literary, irrelevant. Today it’s considered vital to thought per se.

In fact, it was the recent neurological studies that made a real difference, specifically because of working with Tim and the boys.  It moved the thinking about metaphor to something besides introspection, internal speculations of a specific class of men.  These kids had brains in all their concrete perplexities and variations.  The brain was right there every day in so many forms: dreams, compulsions, misfires, poetic brilliance, ceaseless questioning and always falling in love. The variations in body fluid, microbes, hormones, minerals, T4 counts, melt-downs, soaring motion — were all on video and sometimes in poetry. 

Puppets v. intellectuals

The real scandal was what a greed culture had done to the arts.  What I saw was that the dominance of the culture was carried in the dominance of words with assumed meanings, and that the literature in print is dominated by circles of collaborators — NOT the writers, but the people who owned the machinery of production and sales. The capitalists. Everything was product. Sales were rigged.  Writers were overwritten.

It was not human. None of these resource developers cared anything about their human resources: the writers and readers, who might have just as well been lumps of coal. They were faggots for the fire.  All producers cared about was production, technical gimmicks, corner-cutting, and teasers far more highly developed than the movies they were teasing. 

Sometimes one wondered, expecting what the preview had shown, where the actual movie had gone. Sometimes one wondered where publishing had gone. What was this new thing, industrialized, mass produced? Trivial. They joined forces to prevent change, to exclude the new or the deep. Or the moral. Anything that would challenge people to do something different. At least not until recently when the shallow slick stuff became so boring that indignation erupted through it.

So going back to my own private agenda, how does one leave liturgy and go to Deep Experience, which is a kind of shaped arousal that gives meaning to life. How does one figure out one’s earliest assumptions except by dysfunction, failure, when nothing you thought was permanent is even there anymore. When you find out how many people are suffering and how convenient that is for those in charge. When you find out sacred places are gone. Even those of us who played by the rules and thought we were pretty cute are now trying to think what to carry along when we’re living on the street.  It’s a stripping to basics, a forced asceticism.  What are the ceremonies of no-place-to-go, nothing-to-eat? Surely the Salvation Army is not all there is, stalwart as they may be. 

by Catalan Anastase

I know two universal “liturgical” forms or sequences: one is the recited Christian mass which expanded out of Jewish Torah-based forms and the other is the sung-and-danced Blackfeet Bundle ceremonies. Both conform to the ideas of Victor Turner, whose name should still unlock a wealth of theory for seekers. (He left U of Chicago just as I came, but was often mentioned.) His idea is “liminal,” crossing a threshold from the known to the wildly crazy, the vortex, the blank — and coming back again, renewed.

When everyone killed God and walked out of “religion” as institution,they also left behind the shape of human experience. Not sitting in pews listening to a pulpit, but willingness to share human experience, thereby to learn “vocabulary” (of gesture as much as word) and pattern (of disruption as much as reconciliation.) These are what our new instruments ought to be expressing, not what brand of deodorant to buy, not which shocking new sexual kink can be demonstrated. True “cross-media” is cross-cultural, so that it can be understood by all humans. When one feels that understanding, it gives a person the confidence and vision to make a transition into totally new insight.

LITURGY: BINDING TOGETHER

Chicago Cathedral of the Russian Church Abroad

I spent decades reflecting on liturgies -- not just Christian worship structures, but religious or spiritual protocols from everything from African tribal rites to New Guinea ceremonies  to Blackfeet Bundle Openings.  I was raised Presbyterian and grew up in the neighborhood church where the minister was very preoccupied with conformity, texts, and propriety -- all of them aimed at prestige.  This turned me away.  In my undergrad years at Northwestern (’57 - ’61), I took courses in religion.  (My major was supposed to be speech education, but was, in fact, Method acting.)

When I attended the Pacific Northwest UU Leadership School in 1975, I had my first experience with designing experimental non-conforming liturgies based on human experience (blind-folded silence, feeding each other, excellent music, memory of one’s own turning points, a long line holding hands in the dark while crossing a broad lawn to the sound of a nearby ocean).  I was smitten.  

Blackfeet Reservation

By that time I had a decade of experience on the Blackfeet reservation next to Glacier National Park where I had participated in ceremonies.  I signed up for an MDiv in Chicago and an MA in Religious Studies from the U of Chicago and achieved both, though I was a little exotic from their point of view.  I turned forty during that time.

In congregations I found I could design services that made people react.  They said they were feeling something spiritual.  Sometimes they wept, not necessarily from sadness.  Nothing to do with dogma or even history, except their own personal story which I didn’t always know.  What WAS that?  How did I figure out what to do?  I’ve worked on those questions ever since.  I’ve come to believe it wasn’t liturgy, though that was one pathway.  It was something I might call Deep Experience, a human response to what recent neurological research requires me to call a “connectome.”

Human Fetus at 8 weeks

A person’s identity is first created in the womb by the interaction of molecules that build a certain body with certain capacities.  After birth, the baby continues to develop those capacities at a very basic level, since the first years of a human are really a continuation of gestation, the finishing process that in other animals is mostly over at birth.

This certain body/person will become an identity according to the influence of the environment which includes culture and family.  At about age 3 the dawning person will continue to grow with a complete but not entirely developed brain, which is an aggregate of evolved parts connected by nerve fibers --the connectome -- managed by the brain.  Part of this guidance and experiencing system is fluid, carrying molecules that also supply information and modulation.  Throughout the adrenarche --ages 6 or 7 through maybe 10 -- the person grows into his or her self, guided by the adrenal glands.  The issue seems to be discovering what arouses that person.

At the end of adrenarche, adrenals kick off adolescence.  Adolescence is too powerful for a young child.  Physically they can be torn apart by sex, as well as emotionally.  Their guidance system will not be able to cope with their urges.  They will be presented with dilemmas that cannot be resolved and therefore are stored and ignored.  Later these deadlocks make trouble.

Through adolescence the person develops control and ability until the culture declares it  is adult, but the brain goes on developing until maybe halfway through the twenties, which is when the abstract and insightful meta-thinking are complete.  AT EVERY STAGE it is possible to have Deep Experience, a moment of spiritual intensity and meaning.  I would propose that even an infant can feel it and certainly from adrenarche on, the capacity is present.  I remember.

But Deep Experience can be blocked, forced by drugs or events, or stuck in terms of meaning so that it stops being a process and starts being a dogma or superstition.  The “connectome” can forget how and what it connected.  The memory of a crucial piece might be lost or “mislabeled” or suppressed or those irresolvables from childhood may come back to interfere.

I would not be able to think about this clearly except for the new research on neurology and “trace-based” neuropaleontology, pre-verbal.  I need to keep repeating this stuff to understand it better.  Anyway, the research is moving quickly.

Because “liturgy” as defined in our culture is institutionally generated and owned, and is about words, often specifically dictated repetition, combined with certain gestures and material culture, it can be an instrument of outside control.   I mean outside the person.  It works sometimes for some people.  It’s one path.

I won't sell this classic book.

I’m selling my books about liturgy.  Inquire on email if interested.  prairiem at 3rivers.net.  Liturgy wasn’t what I was after.  They aren’t out-dated or mushy popular books.  Some are theory.  I’ll keep a few. They are still perfectly useful for those who respond to liturgy.  I recommend to those folks something like the books on David Montgomery’s website:  http://cardiphonia.org/tag/david-montgomery/  I still enjoy reading them, but they are institutional and I’ve discovered that there is no institution that suits me.  Not even the UUA in its present incarnation. 

Be warned:  Montgomery knows that shock liturgy like this Pussy Riot intervention on You Tube is valid, meant to revive some of the original meaning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN5inCayfnM&app=desktop.  Consider that “Game of Thrones” could be seen as really a reiteration of the Bible.  But liturgies are words, experiences are feelings, often wordless.   That may or may not coincide with liturgy.

Finding the human primal feelings that unite us is -- I strongly believe --  the best way to approach a variety of conflicting but coinciding theologies.  I came to this through “Contructing Local Theologies” by Father Robert J. Schreiter, CPPS.  The book is for sale on Amazon for $0.23.  I would not sell you my copy for $230, but if I did, I would buy as many $0.23 copies as I could and hand them out for free.  This is the way to reconciliation, not just among the many kinds of Christians but among cultures.  To hear him speak go to:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBiUMB74FAs  He hasn’t lost his touch.  He knows deep experience and speaks from it without dogma.  The ideas in the book derive from missionaries trying to explain communion to people who have neither bread nor grain, like Inuit.

Father Robert J. Schreiter, CPPS

These kinds of ideas -- some scientific, some historical, some rude and shocking -- are all pathways to deep meaning, which is different for each person according to their original germ plasm, life experiences, and environment.  It doesn’t have to be done alone.  It doesn’t have to be recognized as "religious".

CONVERSION

Now that we have finally become convinced that there is no God, science tells us we must accept the idea that there is no “reality” or if there is, it’s a code or a barrage of codes, that must be deciphered into electrochemistry from every cell that will accept the impact of them.  Waves of air hit the tympanum of the ear and becomes what we call “sound”, which is an electrochemical parallel in neurons.  Molecules of something smelly get sucked into the nose and cells give an electrochemical lab report.

There are two kinds of these messages: the peripheral that come from the outside world like waves of light or chemical reactions on the tongue or in the nose, and those that come from inside the body, autonomic, dedicated to maintaining the homeostasis of our organs and systems.  To repeat, there are two kinds of neural systems: the peripheral system which connects the sensory organs (including skin) to the brain and then carries impulses back to the muscles to prompt movement; and the autonomic nervous system which is concerned with unconscious maintenance of smooth muscles and organs.  We are sometimes conscious of these systems -- breathing, heartbeat, temperature, gut squeeze -- and feel them as emotions.

The two systems are kept in relationship by the “associational” system: brain, brainstem, spinal cord, cerebellum.  Most of the action is here -- this is the dashboard or at least its location.  In its nexuses, little nodes of neurons, the code is sorted, edited, reframed, and then sent on.  It is filtered information.

The theory of deep experience or epiphany that I’m pursuing is in this associational system.  It can be accessed through the motor systems and sensory systems, and affects the autonomic system.  The autonomic system can be directly accessed through the use of drugs, since the system IS a drug synergy as well as transmitted by electrochemical nerves.

The business of the associational brain systems is often called thought, but is mostly unconscious.  What we think of as consciousness is foam on the surf of the great sea of thought.  Words -- language -- is a derivation of consciousness because it is a code of hearing/speaking.  On top of that is the code of marks on a surface that coordinates with the sounds of speech.   We call it “writing.”  Rationality  in the sense of careful reasoning -- which is what theology claims to be -- is a function of speech, often worked out in writing, like doing math.

Thus we see how far away “religion” is from human visceral interaction with whatever is outside the human skin.  Clearly it is the construct of a thick information deck, dependent on simplification suggested by culture.  But it FEELS like direct contact with something more real, more powerful, more sacred.  But there is nothing aside from the internal feeling -- so how do we get that feeling and what do we do with it?

(http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK11061/  is one of my sources.)

First, there is something generating waves and chemical/electrical reactions that can be felt by humans, perhaps augmented with high tech machinery.  With fMRI we can even see interactions within the body that are not in the outside world at all.  The information that comes into the brain -- as soon as there is a brain -- makes access for the first time in the womb.  We know nothing about the sense of the holy as felt in a embryo or an infant or a toddler . . . maybe it begins during “latency” (primary school and early elementary).  At least that’s what Sunday School presumes.  What they deal in is oral language, pictures -- not writing.  Stories.  Images.  NOT reasoning.

In Catholic terms, which are essentially European terms, until children can feel their sin and be sorry for it, so as to accept penance, they cannot go to communion.  These are technically rational theological ideas imposed on children.  No one knows much, if anything, about a child’s blissful holiness.  Maybe a nursing child held by its mother?  A FEELING.  No words. Sounds.

In a Blackfeet ceremony the children are welcome and clamber back and forth over the people seated on the ground throughout the doin’s.  Now and then one or two will become interested and absorbed in the music and dance.  Sitting in laps, they pay attention, or maybe even begin to dance along with the performers.  Or maybe fall asleep.  No one will shout at them.  If there is something big happening --maybe a powwow -- where older kids could get distracted and unruly, there is a person with a small stick or whip who will make them stay respectful. 

Blackfeet girls about 1900

I doubt that a person could get a description of spiritual experience out of little kids.  You’d have to sense it through empathy.  It just IS because it is something that belongs to the whole body, not some code.  The vibe I got off the kids was that they were safe, loved, in a familiar setting.  No kids were crying or angry.  They were relaxed, engaged.

If what people are describing when they talk about a sacred experience is the safe, warm, fed, embraced state of a baby in its mother’s arms -- which is a strong trope in the Christian context and in just about every human context, then how do we design a deliberate experience that will take people over the limen to the state of, well, the “liminal”?  

One way to think about it is through the opposite, so what is that?  I suggest it is “dissociation,” which is when the brain can’t compute the input.  It might be a contradiction, it might be incompleteness, it could be too much, too intense to sort, it might be a blank.  If it’s just a little weird, there’s a name for it:  “the uncanny valley” -- reality with parts that don’t “work,” don’t “compute.”

We live in times that are always slipping over the edge from uncanny to entirely alien, whether it is war, environmental disaster, or a whole new understanding of what a planet is, what a human is.  How do we figure it out?  An uncanny plague requires us to change our instinctive reactions, comes by airplane to America, kills in an unpredictable way from so deep in our systems that the rational scientific reaction to it can only be powered past horror by even deeper compassion for the victims.  And what do we eventually come to?  A little child eating a bat on a stick.

Dr. Patrick Sawyer and Ava.  He treated the first Nigerian ebola patient.

Aad de Gids -- the Netherlands poet, philosopher and psychiatric nurse -- has been tracking ebola with me.  This is what he suggests:

“The irony is also that perhaps ebola also functions as a sociological equalizer postwar, in those war-ridden or tribal conflictuous countries of the west-african coast pseudo-local. (the war and tribal conflicts in itself in general.....) bc it is also such a corrumpating all-out phenomenon, that it ironically swept along a lot of grief, memories ("overwritten", sort of), dissociationalistically hybridized what happened for decades before.   We're not looking at OUR past but at our FUTURE.  If "brazilianization of the inner cities" is an operatic notion in demographics and urbanity in the WEST, then we know we're heading in that HUMANE direction.  The strange thing about war and ravenous diseases is that they are also opportunities for evolvement, not to the higher, with lights from all directions or a mysterious inner glow (although that is not something I automatically discard), goal, an "uniformous goal" that is, but a kind of field of different intensity-laden particles, a "multiplicity", after the resorption of which the socius is changed.” 

That is, ebola puts the whole world in a liminal space contemplating our shared universal susceptibility, and we emerge after a kind of religious conversion.  Not Paul’s defensive rules and regulations for endangered small communities, but Jesus’ original idea of equal compassion on a shared planet, though he didn’t even know it WAS a planet.  

Overpopulation (Philippines)

A more cynical view might be expressed by a devil’s advocate -- that disease is a natural result of environmental violations, that the reduction of overpopulation via any means is a necessary fever that will not be easily broken, and that it will have a curative effect. 

TEMPLATES OF WORSHIP

A template is anything that determines or serves as a pattern; a model. There are templates for things as big as society itself and templates as small as an attachment for a sewing machine that will make buttonholes. In the past templates have been used to control propaganda, manners, proper grammar usage, and the arrangement of furniture. They have been been seen in such a rigid and determining manner that someone in Dear Abby today had to ask whether it were “proper” to put a paper towel roll holder in her bathroom, since she’d never seen one in anyone’s bathroom. Note to paper towel advertisers: Make it absolutely essential to have a paper towel roll holder in every home bathroom. Actually I have one in mine. Many public bathroooms have them. Abby’s response was “go for it.”

We are at a point in higher levels of discussion where we no longer talk about the “propriety” of existing templates, nor question the usefulness of old ones, but try to think of new templates, try to understand how to fit life-to-template in new ways. Particularly when it comes to religious templates and specifically those that come out of the Abrahamic tribal/patriarch/chieftain patterns that now wreak so much havoc. This is what in grad school circles is called “post-modern” and even “post-post-modern.” I consciously challenge templates.

My poet/philosopher friend in the Netherlands puts it this way: “i think you're sketching "the new figure of speech" for "the new now". all elements of it, i.e. of "the case", are continuously shifting, interdependently but in (guattari:) "chaosmosis". so: no one topic; no linearity; no singular causality; no monoculturality; no chronoconstituency: all is momentaneous, contingent and simultaneously; overlapping multiplicities; if clarity is reached then at once, opaqueness; goal orientation is fictive; societies are loose collections of shortly adhesive or cohesive elements; secret agendas are buzzing along; "goodness" is present more in individual gestes than as a concept; i guess there is no "ethics"; naturality is a regulative shadow. yet my interest deepens as the core seems to evade.” If you can't figure this out, don’t worry. There will be no test.

Now I’m going to talk about templates for what happens when people come together, maybe on Sunday morning, maybe on some other day, to do something familiar as a group that sustains them. In seminary we were told that “worship” derives from “worth-ship,” which is focus on one’s highest values. We were also told that “liturgy” comes from “binding together” ("ligature") and is that which holds a group of people together in strength. When I read “The Shape of the Liturgy” by Dom Gregory Dix, he made it clear that what began in response to the emergence of written rules and wisdom in the Middle East gave rise to study groups who read and reflected on written scrolls in the way of Judaism and then was wrapped around by the rite of Communion, a shared meal of bread and wine, as Christianity. This is what we call the "Mass." 

Today in Unitarian Universalist and other semi-secular post-Christian groups, following the early Christian practice of bringing bread and wine from home to share for Communion, the people sometimes bring water or flowers, mix them, and share them. A “litany” is a pattern in which a leader alternates words with a repeated group response. Sometimes this is called “responsive reading.” Prayer may be as a group, using the same words in unison, as in the Lord’s Prayer, or may be an address by a leader to a higher being with the congregation listening, or may be silent -- each congregant thinking his own prayer. Foxhole prayers may not be in church or in the context of a congregation at all -- just an outburst of appeal to some higher power or cherished persona, whether mother or saint.

But there are less admired templates. One is that of “magic”, a kind of bribery of the fates by promising whatever the person thinks the gods want: maybe a fine new building, possibly a reform of character, or a promise of some kind of ordeal undertaken in thanks. The use of hierarchy to dominate ceremonies or interpose authorities between the ordinary people and what they understand to be their ultimate authority (God) is what the Protestants were protesting. On the other hand, the giving of alms or devotion to the poor and vulnerable are templates for religious ceremonies, though now they are performed by secular organizations such as Red Cross or United Nations or Medicins Sans Frontieres. 

What I’ve been working on in my own idiosyncratic way and without interacting with other people is a new template for intense and focused experience, possibly with a group, that will be deep and universal enough to be useful for anyone, even a person who has no “religious” identity. I don’t include other people because I find they can NOT give up their old templates, particularly if they have long-term affiliations with identity-providing named religions. In fact, to name a religion is to suggest a template. Can one be Catholic without a Mass? Come to that, can one be a Blackfeet in a spiritual sense without being a Bundle Opener, where the template is sitting in a circle and opening a collection of animal skins to honor the nature of each with prayer, song and dance? If one follows the pattern of that template but replaces the animal materials with something else, does it necessarily mean it is no longer Blackfeet? 

Can one participate in a Communion that does not accompany the study of Scripture (especially the Gospels) and does not consist of bread and wine? This is what my seminary class professor Robert Schreiter, a priest in religious orders and a mission thinker, asked us. (“Constructing Local Theologies.” is his book.) If you are a missionary to the Inuit in the first contact days, how do you express the story of Jesus in a place where there is no wood to make a cross, no bread, no wine? Schreiter says we must go to the most deep prompting of humans to find the equivalent of those things -- what they stand for.

With the insights of recent neuroresearch, it is clear that much of what our modern society sees as metaphors and templates legitimized by historical and institutional traditions are always the products of pre-frontal cortex word-and-rule-dominated thinking. But the deepest of devotions for all human beings in whatever time and place are emergent from the unconscious functions, beginning with song and dance. They have nothing to do with authority figures or institutions, but respond to what we call mystical or spiritual.

Authority figures and institutions emerge from and depend upon the language functions of the brain plus all the restraints and reflections of the pre-frontal cortex. But mystically-emerging felt experience comes from the rest of the brain: unconscious, inarticulate, without templates. Emergent practices that come out of human experience in desert, tundra, mountain, grassland, and verdant valleys along streams are powerful. To the humans who have those lived experiences, whatever is derived from them will be powerful, comforting and inspiring. They can also encourage the destruction of anything or anyone that seems to threaten them and what they value.

In a world of the mega-urban cacaphony [sic] what are the emergent values? Belonging, protection, survival. What are the templates? The old-fashioned defensive tribes in the desert gathered around their chieftains. The demand for “respect,” gangs, violence, destruction of the privileged, and orgasmic violent outbursts of terrorism. These are not unaccountable and surprising: the templates are there in the media and politics every day -- the insistence on “worthship” and “binding together” by the excluded, stigmatized, and desperate who have nothing to lose.

LIFE'S PRECIPICES

Guy Claxton is a education thinker something like Sir Kenneth Robinson who has become so popular on TED Talks.  In Aeon magazine he begins an article this way: “It is every parent’s nightmare. The sea wall at Plymouth Hoe is 65ft high and a line of boys, aged from 11 to 15, are leaping off the wall into the aptly named Dead Man’s Cove, each of them egged on by their friends. This is ‘tombstoning’ — the idea is to enter the water feet-first, as upright and rigid as a tombstone. Most of the boys come up proud and unscathed. A few, inevitably, don’t.”

“When Jez, a tombstoning veteran aged 16, was interviewed by The Guardian in 2006, he explained: ‘You spend the whole day in school doing boring stuff … you still want to do something that will give you a rush ... Jumping does that. Just for a second you forget all the boring bits of your day and feel free.’ Steve, 18, said: ‘It’s a way of getting out of your mind for a moment or two without taking drugs or drinking alcohol. When you are out there in mid-air, you don’t think of anything — your head goes clear.’

“That desire for ‘your head to go clear’ motivates much of the adolescent behaviour that seems irrational and self-destructive to adults. Aggression and fighting are more about being jerked into the present — and so feeling fully alive — than actually intimidating or injuring other people. “

Whether we’re talking about medieval peasants, modern wealthy, modern poor, middle-class working stiffs, the hunger for something to happen is universal.  If nothing good happens, it may turn out to be something bad.  One of the most addictive drugs there is they call “adrenaline.”  When it is a matter of real survival, adrenaline is useful, but if it gets turned back on the body -- never expressed, never shaped, never even recognized because it is responding to denied fear -- it is a killer.

The inner cliff for human beings in our times -- maybe now more than ever because so many have been driven out of our familiar headlands or are at the edge of precipice, afraid to jump, unable to turn back -- is to accept a whole new set of “givens”, quite different from the deep sorting categories we learned as children, the ones set up in our minds as sin, violation, taboo, and filth.  Ideas that once worked taught us that prosperity is the only safety, pretty faces mean leadership quality, and technology is okay -- running water, cars and all that, but not science which is satanic and will twist up your mind.  The “leap of faith,” as in the belief in God as the Most Humonguous Humanoid and that “He” will save you, might feel the same as the leap to any idea that is unknown, impalpable, unseen.   But it's not the same.

A primate leap of faith is from one branch to another, smaller leaps depending on the individual’s own skill and judgment.  To change a whole worldview is only possible for humans and maybe not all of them.  Most of the time the new understanding is not a cliff but a trail and leads us along in stories.  I’m tempted to say that a war is a buffalo jump.

But a good metaphor can be murdered if it’s used too rigidly.  We aren’t buffalo.  But education is experiencing a bit of a buffalo jump effect because the world has changed so much -- at least in some places.  The same is true of religious institutions, challenged by the mass importation of rival systems that developed far away and long ago, to say nothing of those constantly sprouting up from the middle of us.   I do indeed think that science is like a religion, though it not based on blind faith and its evidence is as ungraspable as a cherubim.  But we have not realized that economics is also a religion and that bookkeeping that allows the tertiary bundling of unsecured debt is about as helpful as the rules of Leviticus.

So the trip I’m laying on a “deep experience” addresses that awful vertigo of realizing that what you had assumed all these decades is simply wrong and that you must change -- indeed, that you have already changed, you are in mid-air.  But also “deep experience” is a release from the monotony of meaninglessness that is our normal protection and obligation.   It should work in the way street drugs work, but without the cost, the damage, the addiction.  Not that there aren’t “deep experience” junkies.

A lot of people know all this and practice it and I glimpse them in the distance.  They are not attending seminary.  A few teach school for a while.  Many are artists.  It’s the society as a whole that condemns and resists any defiance of the standing order.  But every time I’ve preached about moments of transcendence or have even brought it up in conversation quietly, a good proportion of the people around me have nodded.  “Yes, I had a moment like that.  But I didn’t understand it.”

One theory is that the feeling (not a body of explicitly worked out thought) comes from a surge of certain chemicals, maybe serotonin or oxcytocin.  Another theory is that the cerebrum with its cautions and shaping shuts down so that the mid-brain, the one that supports emotion and the “seven urges” of Panskepp, can express itself directly to consciousness.  I pursue the idea that it is a moment when the whole self is unified, no longer pulling against itself, justifying concepts like harmony and peace.  But the truth is that when I read hard-core S/M philosophy it was there, too.  Why else would our movies and video games be so loaded with destruction -- though I haven’t noticed much realistic suffering in the latter except sometimes personified as a desperate little kid.

This is all justification for just thinking about such things.  But the goal is practical application.  Why would a crazy idea like Communion -- the trans-substantiation of a man’s flesh and blood into bread and wine -- become a source of sanity for an athletic team forced into cannibalism to survive in the Andes?  And what does that say about what the relaxation of censorship has revealed as a small fraction of random humans who eat other people -- because they want to, because they think they are taking those people into themselves as part of themselves?  That’s a huge buffalo jump sort of question.  But sharing a water communion, a seed communion, a flower communion -- in which people bring meaningful fractions to merge and then separate and take away on departure -- that’s a practicality.  Often quite moving.

Such ceremonies should be short, vivid, memorable, and cooperative -- not “done to” someone.  In the best of moments the natural world may join in.  One morning so early it was not yet dawn, I was asked to “baptize” a baby who was in danger.  I’m not Christian, but the symbolism of water is pretty universal.  We gathered in the infant ICU, a tiny congregation, and the nurses showed me how to use a cotton ball to squeeze a few drops of sterile water onto the tiny mite in the isolette.  Because the parents were Christian, I took as my text, “This is the day the Lord has made.  Let us rejoice and be glad in it.”  Just then the sun broke over the horizon and bathed us all in light.  The baby cried.  Its birth had been a buffalo jump.

FANCY THEORIES WITH A SIMPLE GOAL

Sweetgrass Hills

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

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

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

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

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

Wolverine

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

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

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

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

Prairie Fire

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

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

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

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

The continents today and long ago

THE OMICS OF THE SACRED

Among the many new disciplines that are born daily is that of “omics” -- which has many subcategories:  the genome (the twirly links of chromosomes with our basic plans on them that is contained in each of our cells except the red blood cells) , the epigenome (which is a kind of sleeve around each gene that can turn individual pairs on or off), the proteome (the molecules that the previous “omes” produce constantly), and the connectome (the zillions of connections among the neurons of the body which collect and sort the sensorium of the body (much more than the five senses).   The sensorium is the interface with whatever is outside of the body.

This is vid is about the connectome as explained by a charismatic scientist, a description which in this case is not an oxymoron.  http://www.ted.com/talks/sebastian_seung.html  

The connectome of neurons and floating molecules give us the bodily responses we call “emotions.”  This is the music of the body: we sing with feelings.

Deep experience is a “felt” phenomemon, a whole-body function.  The neural system has grown over the millennia into a cumulative complex of interacting functions and structures, roughly in historical order: the spine, the knob at the top of the spine, the basic body operating structure (the reptile brain), the mid-brain that interfaces with emotion (mammalian), up to the rumpled sheet of neurons under the skull that we call the cerebral cortex.  Behind the forehead in humans are tiny structures, some of them only a scatter of cells, that by mirroring (causing your body to imitate in a faint way what they see in other beings) gives us access to the inner lives of other beings.

The premise I hypothesize is that it is the connectome of deep experience, both the physical connections of neurons and their ability to remember, is the source of the sacred/the holy.  The rituals, liturgies and ceremonies of institutional religion try to create and reinforce their own connectome, but the capacity can be sourced anywhere.  Artists work with the phenomenon through their individual and cultural access to the sensorium of their own bodies.

A connectome is a physical phenomenon that can now be detected by instruments but not produced that way.   It is a product of thought and emotion.  In the past the technology of the connectome has been a matter of inner reflection, conditioned triggers, and sometimes just chance confluence of environmental forces or possibly ingestion of substances.  The content of a deep experience connectome is whatever the sensorium has gathered from the outside world whether nature, nurture or intimacy.

This last statement is where I began an attempt to discover what happens and to provide occasions that trigger deep experience.  The particular art in which my thought is rooted is acting, specifically the Method in all its splendid varieties and off-shoots, because the Method is a way of managing the connectome to access the psychological and cultural world of the character.  Whether it was a heaven or a hell for the character, it created an inner world by compliance or resistance.  In a sense, a play or movie or video or even a painting or song, are connectomes produced with the intention of triggering something like that same pattern in the performer and thus, though mirror cells, the viewer.

We live in a time of challenging chaos.  The cultural constructs of the world -- not just the content but also the styles and methods -- are competing.  In addition to the biomes that used to offer the content of cultures -- whether desert or sea islands or jungle or grasslands -- now we must integrate a landscape of intergalactic star nurseries, black holes and clashing quasars.  At the same time add all the National Geographic landscapes of black fumaroles under the sea, the traffic of blood in our bodies, the constant danger of biological particles that threaten our existence, teeny filaments, spirals and depth charges.

The invention of nations is only a few hundreds of years old -- we are still wired for tribes.  Awareness of famine and geological catastrophe is still growing -- some of us trying to wall it out and others trying to counter it with plastic tarps and sacks of grain.  Individuals still turn against their children and the nations themselves choose which people will live and which to ignore to death, all by manipulating resources.

We seek relief and re-energizing through deep experience, each in our own way.  Some will capitalize on that search by promising contact with some other realm and some will feel that they have achieved it.  Some sources will promise eternal existence, ultimate protection, but human life is built on risk rather than freezing in place.  Some will provide rules for behavior, a ready-made moral connectome that might be of true value, so long as the circumstances stay the same, but what if it doesn’t?  (It won't.)  What if the rule that would have saved your life only a few decades ago will now shrink and distort you, or maybe just eliminate you?  (It has.)

Institutional religion is built on grouped individuals and works best if it is congruent with the consensus culture of a broad area, an ecotome.  Some institutional religions work pretty well even if they move to a whole new context, but most of them buckle and crack and diminish.  When that happens, the institution tries to build a new consensus that works or maybe splinter groups form and leave.  If the institution becomes a bully and tries to force inquisitions and purifications, the consequences become lethal for many individuals  There can never be a return to what was before.  

In the US we try to blunt this by preventing institutional government from using institutional religion as a weapon.  One way to do it is to build a consensus of artistically symbolized connectome called “patriotism.”  Flags, bands, parades, commemorations, and armies that the religious institutions are used to standing with as mutual reinforcement -- supplying chaplains in combat and sonorous prayers at events.  We don’t know how to manage multiple sources of spirituality.  TMI.  No proper sorting categories or even enough experience.  What do we put on the headstones of soldiers who are patriotic but not conventionally religious when the realm of death is usually managed by religion?  What do we do about headstones at Arlington when people choose to be cremated?  (See below.)

Science appears to be a source of relief, not beholden to either country or religion.  NEITHER.  But it is still captured by money and pinched by both national and religious forces.  Science is not a contradiction to art -- it IS an art, and art IS science.  They are an interpenetration.   Both are in pursuit -- through the connectomes of the sensorium -- of constructs that address our humanness.  

Science tells us that our sensorium is the way our bodies manage both memory and hope, indexing what we know by tagging events with the weather that day, the smell of the room, the tension of our muscles, the song in our ears.  This is the actor’s Method, to deliberately kindle their own sensorium in a way that makes their personal connectome echo that of the artistic creation that is the character they portray.  And this is also the method of leaders, who hope to create a deep experience in others that will cause them to follow.  Not because someone is holding a gun on them or withholding meds they need, but because their inner being is connected to the outer world of others.

Here are your current choices for a headstone symbol at Arlington National Cemetery.