CEREMONIAL COMMUNION CIRCLES

The Thunder Pipe transferred to Bob Scriver.

It has disappeared.

People who share a life that is well-defined by beliefs and experience come together.  They begin their ceremony in the anthropologically defined act of crossing a threshold (limen), either actual or symbolic.  Performing some act of unison (singing, making a gesture like genuflecting) that joins them into sympathy that eliminates rivalry, worry, anger.  In this liminal time and space acts of sharing and insight are performed.  (Listening to music or speech, kneeling for prayer)  Then there is a time of putting away.  In the end, crossing that threshold in the other direction, the people return to their ordinary lives.

If the act is Christian communion (as above), the ceremony includes singing, reading, praying, and the sharing of bread and wine in memory of Jesus, the central cult figure.  In the background is the hope of eternal life or sometimes relief in this one.

Opening a Medicine Pipe Bundle

If the act is Blackfeet Thunder Pipe Bundle Opening, the ceremony includes unwrapping the contents of the Bundle, including the three-foot long calumet with an attached fan of eagle tailfeathers, singing, dancing, praying, and sharing of sarvisberry soup, the last of the previous year’s gathering, in hopes of a crop as good or better this coming year.  In the background is the hope of escaping lightning strikes and prairie fires.  Also, a wish for harmony and fittingness with the land, escape from enemies.

There are little mini-versions of these ceremonies.  Christians may open secular deliberations with prayer by a “holy man” or a lay representative of a Abramic tradition.  In the old days Blackfeet might open a discussion when older men sit in a circle and pass around a pipe for smoking.  Those who wish to convene a deliberation are expected to provide enough tobacco to go around the circle -- the one pipe (much shorter than the ceremonial calumet) being passed around and refilled as needed --three or four times, quite like elders in Afghanistan going around their circle with three cups of tea each.  High level business meetings might open with two martinis before an expensive meal.  Family meals, esp. the ones on major occasions, begin by saying grace.  Candles have been lit.  Human patterns echo each other, marking their importance with valued substances.

Bringing branches

Longmire is back.  The plots turn on a fancy casino.  In the office is a wall mural of tribal men on horseback carrying branches like flags -- a long branch with a bunch of leaves at the end.  They are participants in a Sun Lodge ceremony, a sacred ceremony.  Some would say it should not be photographed nor posted in a casino, but gambling (stick game) is an important element of understanding the world for indigenous people.  It competes with notions of causing one’s own bad luck or with ideas about witchcraft and how other people can cause you to have misfortunes.  In the Christian world this sort of thinking about why bad things happen are connected to Satan (a flipped over version of Christianity) and angels.  For all the Abramists (Xian, Jewish and Islam) people are at the mercy of an all-knowing, all-powerful humanoid theos, which provides clues in the form of a book.

To start a comparison of what the general public calls “religion,” we must choose a dimension of a very complex and pervasive system of understanding that varies from one population to another, usually according to what succeeds in that ecology.  It guides the actions of the whole population through the cycle of the seasons.  Theology is a near-mathematical version of how to please the theos, God.  The version may vary from the Golden Rule of Jesus to the “process theology” of physicists, which is not much help in daily life but is infinitely ponderable for people who approach religion that abstract way, which is a bit of a luxury.

Beaver Bundle: kept by a virtuous couple

Theology applied to the Plains Indian understanding of the world can only end up in distortion and oppression because their system is not mathematical nor is it focused on staying alive either on earth or in heaven.  I mean, death is seen as a natural part of life, not a disaster.

The ceremonial aspect of what we call “religion” is very strong because it unifies the people who have an interest in staying together, identifying themselves with the group.  On the prairie one needs community is order to survive, and the community needs the committed participation of individuals in order to continue to exist.  In some of the Abramic traditions, the individual can depart from the group.  At least in our times we are preoccupied with the fortunes of an individual person moving across ecologies, or following the Campbell hero cycle away from home and then returning.  One could joke that Jesus has become Marco Polo.  One could quip that the ceremonial worship circle has become the bazaar, the marketplace, where the sacred is bought and sold and all cultures are reduced to bargaining.

Circle of smokers

So the material culture of Native Americans is made into artifacts for sale and prestige, which the People object to as mocking their importance as holiness.  But they don’t realize that this is an important dimension of Abramic ceremonies, this buying and selling of everything, even skeletons and body parts.  Objectification is an important dimension of the mathematical and technical culture that is so entwined with Xian ideas that one can bargain one’s way into heaven and out of hell.  One can pursue “eternal” life this way, so that for people who have money or strategies for using insurance, total dedication to one’s health can eclipse any of Jesus’ ideas.  He was not afraid to die and we are told that God the Father wanted that death, too.  It was a bargain.

Crucifixion?

“Magic” is a sub-theme of religion anywhere, from the “cheap grace” of outward compliance with virtue to the self-torture of Sun Dance suspension from piercings.  Everybody loves a short cut, a bargain.  So the nature-related mysticism of indigenous communities is often seen as “pagan,” ineffective, but the institutional authority-controlled theologically endorsed ideas are represented as absolute.  Only the “scientific” establishment and institutions have now become persuasive enough to challenge the Abramic theological systems.  Those who feel that the evidence shows that God is indeed dead, if not just a bit of poetry anyway, also see that science is “owned” by an elite.  They turn to what they think are tolerant and inclusive autochthonous ceremonies that make them feel a lot better.  They want magic.

Meanwhile, the old-time restoration of order and relationship gets lost in the rush to emplace alchemic ideas of the right kind of rattle, the right secret song, the proper length of the pipe stem.  All those technologies of the Holy keep individuals from belonging to any community except the crowd around the sales table.  

It turns out that no one can capture the wind nor be the wind, but we can feel it.  Experience of the world itself is what counts, the sensory information that forms human existence, whether it is about wine or athuahasca, whether it is about our personal selves or our community.

Sold at a NYCity auction for thousands of dollars.

Quills -- not beads.  Possibly human scalps.

WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO READ

I well remember what it felt like when, after a lot of flickering while someone read to me, the lights went on and I was actually reading all by myself.  It was like walking into a new space, something like liminal space and something like the cave the twelve dancing princesses entered at night so they could wear out their shoes to music.  

The ultimate intimacy is to read what someone else wrote: vivid and strange, jeweled fruit.  One enters the writer’s head and shares their life.  This is why I am so reluctant to read contemporary run-of-the-mill print.  I hesitate to say genre since it is not even distinct enough to associate with any kind of people outside the advertising world.  From where I’m sitting, genre and literary writing are not different now, simply because there is no true literary writing, just self-conscious compliance with what a publisher will accept.  Publishers are low-brow and competitive.  They like the sensational, sentimental, and salable.  

I like what I must struggle to understand and so appreciate the features of the computer that let me look up background without getting up to visit shelves.  Someone, a friend of mine, just accessed my blog from a place I don’t know.  I looked to find where and see they may be at a music festival.  Once in a while there’s an animal I don’t know, but if there’s a name for it, I can look at photos.  That’s nice, but not what I mean.

An aye-eye

What I mean is the kind of writing that disappears into more than meaning, a shift of understanding, a deepening of life-awareness -- something that I hadn’t known was there.  Not stuff about the cosmos and the meaning of life, but the kind of stuff that must come from adding new neurons to my own brain, like installing some kind of radar or fMRI neurons.  The better TED talks get it, but the Edge often misses. 

And yet I despise the new operating systems in this computer that force configurations and anticipate something that would never happen if I were in control.  Clearly they are devised by young smart aleck boys who think accumulation, competition, and graphs are what life is about.  Our culture created these guys and now these guys are force-feeding it all back to us.  I clench my teeth.  Sometimes I throw up.

In good writing the sound of the words, the lilt, the beat, are silently there.  Alliteration was discouraged in the Fifties but I love it, and rhyme as well.  Sometimes I really enjoy a mixed metaphor.  The point of establishing a norm and a standard seems to me only a way of creating a trampoline surface for REAL writing.  Not necessarily extreme or profane -- sometimes just subtly changing the emphasis.  That’s why I like reading the writing of autodidacts with their malapropisms and slightly distorted words, sometimes moving them from one tense to another or using an unaccustomed preposition.

 

Thyme and poppies

I enjoy reading Aad de Gid’s poetry out loud, but maybe it’s a mistake to do that because there’s a bit of loss when just one pronunciation system, one interpretation, prevails.  In print, the eye can go back over and over to add a new way of interpreting the words.  Try this phrase:   "sulphurous hypnotic perfume boudoiriste effusion in situ;  the bridges of thyme reverberate with those microshubes".  I picked it at random from his flood of words.  He’s a perfume-lover so one never wonders about smell.

I love to read what leaves me sore and wet from participating, so that when I go to stand up (only if I must) I feel a little sprained and bruised.  Or I’m surprised that I have hands instead of paws.

Here’s a bit of writing about books that’s not the same old thing:

http://lithub.com/the-pleasures-of-destroying-a-good-book/

JFK and Frost

“As a reader, I want to inhabit a book as a form of communion.”  (Nick Ripatrazone)  I assume he was the one who devised this title for another essay:  “IN DEFENSE OF THE POET LAUREATE:  ON POLITICS, ART, AND INAUGURAL DOGGEREL.”  I haven’t read the essay yet.  I just like the idea of defending the poor old (rarely young) poet laureate (though I’m not in favor of the phenomenon) and esp. the phrase “inaugural doggerel” which is only slant rhyme, but what’s wrong with that?  It doesn’t hurt that the illustrating photo shows the romanticized JFK blowing his nose.

I enjoy the incongruous outrageous as much as the obscene.  They are often topographical:  in, out, ob.  (Now I’ve read the article which is just informative, a discussion of what a poet laureate should be and do.  Are they a kind of librarian and guide, or are they supposed to be “the best poet in the country,” an impossible standard in a multiply-cultured nation.)   How does a poet laureate become “a kind of communion” in a secular country?  I have an answer: write like Gerard Manley Hopkins.

In the past I’ve talked about going to the Portland, OR, Multnomah County library and trying to read about ballet in books written in French. I almost could, I thought.  But writing about ballet in English also requires concentration, even when the dances were all white except for Firebird, which was -- of course -- red.  These days gymnastic dance requires gymnastic language.  

U of Chicago Div School

Reading about reading seems far too precious and incestuous to a lot of people, but “The Sense of an Ending” or “The Mirror and the Lamp” shifted everything.  Stephen Toulmin, who was nearly as unintelligible as some French-speaking Algerian with a sharp blade trying to eviscerate domination, finally opened up the Div School world for me with his explanation of argument.  

I listen to NPR classical music programs partly for the music, but also because the commentary (spoken, not written) is often that kind of unfolding origami.  I wouldn’t know what book to buy to get that quality of “look at this and then consider that detail and comparison.”  (At the moment a woman is discussing the different tastes of the cello versus the viola de gamba (the latter sweeter than the other), though I’m quite sure she’s never licked either one.  I had to look up the second instrument:  “de gamba” means “between the legs.”) I still need to hear the music.

Viola de gamba

I was thrilled to discover that on the Internet I could find one of my most beloved paragraphs, the beginning of Steinbeck’s “The Red Pony,” because it was my brother’s book and in late middle age he still remembered it was his and demanded it back.  I had almost memorized the paragraph but now and then want to check a word.  I don’t care about Hemingway very much.  Faulkner not at all.  

“At day break Billy Buck emerged from the bunkhouse and stood for a moment on the porch looking up at the sky. He was a broad, bandy-legged little man with a walrus mustache, with square hands, puffed and muscled on the palms. His eyes were a contemplative, watery gray and the hair which protruded from under his Stetson hat was spiky and weathered. Billy was still stuffing his shirt into his blue jeans as he stood on the porch. He unbuckled his belt and tightened it again. The belt showed, by the worn shiny places opposite each hole, the gradual increase of Billy's middle over a period of years. When he had seen to the weather, Billy cleared each nostril by holding its mate closed with his forefinger and blowing fiercely. Then he walked down to the barn, rubbing his hands together. He curried and brushed two saddle horses in the stalls, talking quietly to them all the time; and he had hardly finished when the iron triangle started ringing at the ranch house.”

Mitchum as Billy Buck

I’m here because there are people here like Billy Buck.  I suspect he was Metis, maybe Cree/Swede.  But what happened to the walrus mustache?  I want to see Mitchum with a walrus mustache.

THE DYNAMIC UNCONSCIOUS

Freud’s notion of what went on in the mind was thus:

Based on introspection, he started with the conscious mind which he connected to the “ego” or one's general feeling of identity and then proposed a superego, which was one’s “best self,” something like a conscience.  But, held down by repression, there was below consciousness the “un-”conscious where there was a lot of stuff that couldn’t be known and a “pre-conscious” where stuff went in and out through dreams, jokes, drifting on the edge of sleep and so on.  The deepest unconscious is also called the “id.” “In Freudian theory, the part of the psyche associated with instinctual, repressed, or antisocial desires, usually sexual or aggressive. In its efforts to satisfy these desires, the id comes into conflict with the social and practical constraints enforced by the ego and superego.”  (online definition)  This is close to the prevalent notion of what society/culture was like.

Sigmund Freud defined libido as "the energy, regarded as a quantitative magnitude ... of those instincts which have to do with all that may be comprised under the word 'love'.  " It is the instinct energy or force, contained in what Freud called the id, the strictly unconscious structure of the psyche." (wiki)  Its shadow is thanatos, the wish to die.

This is invented.  There is no single brain-blob that can be identified as the ego or even the libido.  Freud was scribbling doodles to keep metaphorical ideas clear.  They were dynamic and theoretical, but they were not real.  Yet we have all talked and speculated so much about this little diagram that it seems real.  Esp. to the psychoanalyst, to whom these concepts are very useful and come to account for things otherwise inexplicable.

Since they are based on introspection, what one can think of consciously is the main category.  Then under that is the unconscious -- we are aware that sometimes we do what we didn’t intend, that we remember and other times forget -- sometimes conveniently.  This is Freud’s strongest concept.  It pulls back into the human mind things that to more “primitive” people might be projected out onto the world, so that “the devil made me do it” seems like a good explanation.  People might feel they are somehow under a spell or not really even know how they feel, deceiving themselves somehow.   "Jesus loves me."

Research now has undermined the idea that there is a "truth," something resistant to fantasy.  Memories are as unreal and fluid as everything else.  It appears that a memory is re-assembled every time it comes to mind and thus can accidentally include mistaken ideas. 

The superego was the attempt to keep the ego sorted.  The id was identified with the raw body and all its indecencies, childishness, craving appetites.  In 19^th century Vienna, the highest value was given to rationality, control, fitting one’s culture, staying clean,  being close and obedient to one’s family.  The result was a lot of suffering and an unending source of jokes, which are an effective way to frame ridiculous contradictions.

There have been many other systems since this “egg” was hatched.  Basically the division between the conscious and the unconscious has persisted, but always the unconscious was seen as an undeveloped source of energy, merely an emotional substrate for the refined mind, messy enough to require the ego and superego to keep a lid on it.  And yet psychoanalysis asks for access to all the steaming, roiling mess in order to straighten out misconceptions.  The old Greek mythology has been authentic and powerful enough to provide “pot handles” by which to grasp strong hot stuff.  At least in the Euro-American setting.  But that's NOT universal.

When working with ritual, Victor Turner’s anthopological concept of the “liminal” has proven very useful.  The idea is that the inner life is more like a room than a pot with a lid --  and that one enters it through a sort of door.  A limen is the name of the threshold one steps over.  In this idea the liminal space is sequestered like the unconscious, but it’s like hypnosis in that it gives access to what is not usually conscious and throws off the superego nagging. It allows change.  No shame.

With this concept and some others, the consciousness is a much “smaller” state than "id/animal/flesh".  One might think of consciousness as the circle of light from a spotlight that can be moved around to reveal the dark stage.  Instead of being some kind of volatile animal to be contained, the unconscious becomes a potential to explore in the way an artist might develop a view or narrative.  What one doesn’t know about oneself becomes a potential discovery instead of some kind of inner monster.

But these are all fantasies, metaphors, poetries about a molecular structure interacting electrochemically, that somehow manages to throw up to "view" a small stage, a fraction of the busy city of transactions that supports it. A puppet show. Only recently have we been able to actually SEE things flowing busily around and to identify the organized, though sometimes very small, cellular structures of the body and brain that connect messages from outside the body, messages from the actual tissues and their orientation in the world (Where's "up", where's "North?") and messages about well-being or dysfunction in the gut, the eye, the lung, the heart.

A metaphorical illustration of a human connectome.

At the same time professors and their students have been resourcefully devising ways to reveal how the mind works, sort of parallel to the way cloud chambers can leave traces that imply what particles of the atom are like and what they do.  At first it was a bit of a shock to realize how much of our "rational" decision-making -- thought to be fact-based analysis -- was in fact being managed before it ever got to consciousness and sometimes that level did a much better job of evaluating choices.  “Zen” archery turns out to be a real thing, another way of tapping the knowing unknown, while “overthinking” complex problems can prevent good decisions.

It now appears that what we “feel” as the limen or threshold may be the instant of the connectome rearranging itself to address a new sort of task.  Say, going from writing a poem or even a shopping list, to playing a game of ping pong.  The information/decision flow will connect different points in the brain -- maybe more or maybe less.  Maybe not even in the brain.  But if the space/time is liminal, it will be protected without being secret.

It’s clear that the brain has evolved “consciousness” as we think of it when we use language, which must have been recently evolved.  But on the whole, brain evolution is not simply cumulative -- rising steadily up from fish to animal to human.  It may be that some new twist appears, but it’s possible and likely that sometimes it may be a dropped-out bit that has opened up possibilities by eliminating some blockage or sidetrack.  Clearly there are long nerve connections that go down into the legs, but also it seems that some of the newest and more powerful abilities are in individual cells, like mirror cells that enable empathy.  It’s likely that human beings will not evolve by growing wheels on their feet or by being patched in to iPods, but by finding new uses and connections for cells that are already there.  What is the autonomic nervous system up to these days?

Heather Berlin

Heather Berlin is a researcher who addresses these matters.  She’s VERY smart and quite beautiful, which means she is (and must be) meticulous in her thinking and carefully watched by others.  I’m going to spend some time today on an article she wrote for “Neuropsychoanalsis" 2011,13(1) called “The Neural Basis of the Dynamic Unconscious".  It’s so “sourced”, linked to previous research, that it’s hard to read, but I’ll see what I can do.  Freud’s unconscious, you notice, is still being used as though it were a unified entity, but “dynamic” is a good word: the unconscious is not just a junk pile -- it’s doing something, flashing along the connectome in electrochemical transmissions, jumping synapses, and -- only an hour or so ago making me dream.  

by Adolfo 1111

Dream.  “I had taken a train to Chanticleer, a medieval town with a stone wall along a river and some buildings that seemed to be small castles once but are now converted to business, so the nearest one had a huge sign advertising beer.  I was attending partly for a conference but was proud of myself for putting on a backpack and wandering the town.  One of the fellow attendees was trying to get my attention and called my name.  He was very fat and crouched behind the railing of an old stone bridge.  Then he threw a rock.  It was a black gritty one with tiny blue sparkling crystals embedded in it.”

Interpretation.  I free-associate to a long ago meeting in Halifax that looks rather like Bruges in my mind.  I had posted a photo of Bruges recently.  Also I ran across a photo from that Halifax meeting, which was chilly.  (My electric mattress pad had turned itself off.)  I suspect that Corky came over to look at my sink drain while I was still asleep -- I wrote between 3AM and 5AM, then went back to sleep) and called my name.  I have another friend who does this sort of work -- he's had surgery in Spokane that reduced his weight by a fourth or a third, but I haven't seen him since then.   (I'm trying to lose weight.)   I had read something about the imposingly big female knight, Briana, in "Game of Thrones" who was saved by the idea that she was from the Island of Sapphires.  The rooster was a little figure I'd torn out of a magazine for my painting morgue that keeps floating around on my desk without getting filed.

NO revelations of the future.  Just scraps.

NEUROLITURGY

Liminal space or dissociation?

Over and over for decades I’ve been rewriting and extending research on the design of liturgy/worship or whatever you personally call your time that is set aside for focus, reflection, awareness of higher powers, or however else you refill the aquifers of your personhood.  The short version of this is what we students asked in seminary:  “Can you call the Holy Spirit?”  The long version was my attempted thesis which I could NOT get past the seminary faculty but could not lay aside either.

When one researches this field, one soon realizes that a person can go to the library and check out an entire worship service printed on paper, even the music written out and when to stand or ring a bell.   (It's not likely to set your hair on fire.) Therefore, an academic sees writing and words (if you allow musical notes to be “words”) as what liturgy “is.”  No shaman ever thinks that.  Likewise, theology is about words and a certain kind of reasoning.  No shaman bothers with those.

Lately researchers for religion have been fussing that people keep searching for “spirituality” and don’t like institutions.  The trouble is that few seminaries really teach “spirituality,” though some of them are liturgical.  The troubles at General Theological Seminary in Chelsea, Manhattan, can easily be interpreted as the upside-down situation of a lawyer/social scrambler president, who thinks theology is like law, colliding with a student body young enough to want the spiritual content of beloved liturgy.  One clue is his tone-deaf decision to reschedule morning worship from 8AM to 10AM.  It’s a way to start the day, dummy!  Not just another class-like gathering.  He has succeeded in converting a dedicated community into a corporation court trial.

New Guinea peoples keep the bodies of their loved ones.

It was clear to me even when I first gathered my bizarre set of thesis examples (cannibalism in the Andes, New Guinea ceremonies, a wedding with a dead groom) that there were certain “givens” to spiritually transforming or supporting events.  The concept of liminality, for instance -- the creation of a sequestered and safe place where normal social constraints had been removed and emotion could erupt or simply well up -- is a solid indicator.  But words or even an authority figure were not necessary.  I saw that “spirituality” was a function of the pre- sub- un- conscious  and that it was more a matter of art than reason.  It is FELT.  But it is full of MEANING, which some conflate with words, forgetting that “a poem must not mean but be.”  More like dreams.  Metaphors.  Psychoanalysis.  Interpretive dance.

So I feel joyfully entitled to claim the little corner of the current tsunami of thought about neuro-research that I now label “neuro-liturgy.”  I’m not claiming to account for mystical experiences, which is the way the subject has been approached in some literature.  (I googled.)  I want to know what we should keep in mind when designing an effective experience in ANY human context.  How do we call the “unconscious” since it is not cognizant in a spoken way but certainly aware (conscious in a felt way) of anything inside the skin, including those anatomical structures meant to reach out to whatever it is “out-skin.”   How do we discover the nature of DESIRE, which Mark Solms tells us is what Freud concluded drives human life, the key life-force that gives rise to everything else, particularly survival?  

Human identity is an emergent phenomenon dependent on the richness of in-skin experience gathered by the entire body in the course of interaction with the “reality” that is “out-skin.”  Human brain anatomy is “cumulative” which means that each evolved or mutated ability must be built on and come to terms with whatever the brain was doing earlier.  The two main divisions are between the autonomic and limbic systems that are shared with all mammals (some parts of the system with all vertebrates) and those abilities acquired in the course of developing the cortex.  This later part is -- beyond everything else -- responsive, always rebuilding itself in terms of actual tissue.

1.  The sensorium

The single simplest and most potent thing a person can do to strengthen spirituality is to expand consciousness, both knowledge of the sights, sounds, tastes, temperatures, textures, smells of the world and awareness of how they interact, what they symbolize, how they are drawn from the natural world -- and awareness of one’s inner world, how one is “feeling,” in terms of affect but also bodily comfort or tension.  

2.  Maps and Metaphors

There is simply no possible way to keep “in mind” everything the body is capable of sensing, so we have evolved ways to sort and bundle information.  On the surface of the cortex there are evidently at least two maps.  One is a grid (supported by specific cells that note where the body is in space -- “out-skin”) and another is the homuncular map of the body that records the amount of neuron space devoted to intake from any specific point “in-skin.”

Memories are filed according to the emotional “vibe” and the sensory records of the moment, but they are not preserved as remembered units.  Rather, when they are called up they are gathered back together from separate records.  The process of memory can go wrong in ways that have not entirely been explained so far.  Suppressed memory, mistaken memories, memories based on erroneous information, and memories that hijack the emotional system are all being investigated.

The brain connectome

3.  The Connectome

Somewhat similarly, at any given moment the brain is connecting clusters of neurons in a kind of “chord” or pattern of interaction.  These patterns shift according to the task being presented, and represent what is felt as meaning as well as awareness of a certain cognizance.  A common transition to use as reference is “going to sleep” which is sort of semi-conscious but can happen without any intention.  Waking up is an opposite but parallel phenomenon -- not consciously intended but easily conditioned.  But so are many of the things that happen in sleep and a high proportion of what happens when awake.

Oh, yeah?

4.  Expression

Voluntary and involuntary kinds of expression include facial cues on up a scale of intention, control and inspiration to fine arts.  Expression in all ways possible are often guided and powered by feeling, the pre- un- sub- functioning of the brain.  This produces meaning as well as expressing it.

This meaning is often recorded "outskin" either purposely or naively as material culture: clothing, instruments, music, architecture, painting, toys, decoration.  These things are “containers” for meaning.

5.  Community

It appears that the brain functions on several distinct levels, one being the thalamic limbic system of animal desire to survive (which, since we are not up-tight Viennese patriarchs, we can consider a GOOD thing), and the other being the cortex, esp. the prefrontal cortex.  In addition to the small structures or organelles of hippocampus and whatever, there are also individual kinds of cells that specialize in specific awareness.  They are a reminder that we are essentially a colony of collaborating one-celled animals united within a skin.

One of these cell specialties is empathy, which is clearly transpersonal and a way to join human awareness into community.  This is the point where private prayer and devotion meets the congregation that sings, prays, orally or physically responds, and listens together.  It remains a function of the individual human mind.  The generous will extend the ability to all mammals.

When the community of “boys at risk” expresses what they most yearn for, what their lifeforce desire might be, they speak of two modes:  one is the “beloved community” that provides shelter and supports identity (they know who you are and will help you), and the other is deep intimacy with another person.  These are “emergent” survival-based desires that when satisfied create meaning and transcendent experience.  Those of us who try to understand need great attentiveness to persons, the world, and ourselves.

http://www.digitalamherst.org/items/show/81

Keep me from going to sleep too soon
Or if I go to sleep too soon
Come wake me up. Come any hour
Of night. Come whistling up the road.
Stomp on the porch. Bang on the door.
Make me get out of bed and come
And let you in and light a light.
Tell me the northern lights are on
And make me look. Or tell me clouds
Are doing something to the moon
They never did before, and show me.
See that I see. Talk to me till
I'm half as wide awake as you
And start to dress wondering why
I ever went to bed at all.
Tell me the walking is superb.
Not only tell me but persuade me.
You know I'm not too hard persuaded. 

-- Robert Francis