IN LIKE SKIN

Carrying death on our backs

Everyone has a fine time talking about Sin and Evil and Why Bad Things Happen.  Where’s the discussion of Desire, Delight, and Intimacy?  Getting outside of your own skin in a good way.  A real way. This is NOT about sex.  Nor is it about the abyss that faces us.

This post about three things:

1.  Crossing the skin barrier with senses, which is the first step towards meaning.

2.  Crossing the skin barrier with empathy, which is the fifth step toward meaning
        (2,3,4 are brain processing functions.  See earlier posts.)

3.  Escaping the skin barrier with wonder, mysticism, virtual worlds -- which isn’t a “step” but something that happens.

Lesley Hazleton

Let me start with a story from a blog I read which is by a hard-headed female international journalist living on a houseboat in Seattle.  She told about an experience that was either funny or tragic, depending on how you look at it.  It’s on the line between mysticism and science, one literal “point of view” unaccountable and another a test-able explanation.   (You could google for it.  Try “sky phenomena” for starters.)

Here’s a severely edited version of Lesley Hazleton’s account.  To get to know her, try her TED talk:  http://www.ted.com/talks/lesley_hazleton_the_doubt_essential_to_faith  Her blog is Accidentaltheologist.com/  She posted this story on Oct.23, 2014, and called it “Sun Dog.”

“People experience awe in very different ways. One person’s exhilarating glimpse of something infinitely grand can be another’s nightmare, to be denied, even exiled from consciousness.

“. . .The sun began to rise over the mountains to the east – a large, fuzzy sun, the color of a white daffodil. Mesmerized by its slow ascent, I waited for the moment when it would detach itself from the mountain ridges and assume a perfect, independent roundness. Except it didn’t. Just when I expected to see clear sky between sun and mountains, there seemed instead to be something beneath the sun, pushing it upward, and I realized that there were now two suns rising — two suns of equal size, conjoined, one on top of the other. “A sun dog!” I shouted.

“My friend came running up from below, took one look, and froze. “That shouldn’t be happening. That can’t be happening,” he shouted, adamantly refusing to believe the testimony of his own eyes. “That’s impossible!”

“. . . Something awful is happening, against all the laws of nature.” . . . But he only dashed back down into the cabin for shelter from the sky, leaving me alone to watch as it became still more extraordinary. The lower sun assumed a deeper color and more definite form as it rose, and as the upper one faded, a thick pillar of white light took shape between the remaining sun – the real sun — and the mountaintops. It occurred to me that it may have been as well that my friend was below deck: a pillar of light was so damn biblical. And then that in turn gave way to a huge double rainbow in an ellipse around the risen sun, and I could only stand there shaking my head and laughing, tears in my eyes, knowing that I would never again witness a sunrise as stunningly eerie and beautiful and grand as this.”

More conventional depiction of a sun dog (parhelion) often seen around here in winter.  

Some say it's what the ancients called "Elijah's Chariot Wheel of Fire."

So Lesley, open to her own senses, was able to accept this sky phenomenon while her companion, a preacher’s son, was so conditioned to think that anything out of the ordinary must be perverse, became terrified and rejecting.  Happens all the time.  Institutional religion is forever afraid it will sail over the edge of the world.

Especially here on the east slope of the Rockies where Pacific moisture, basically little prism droplets, meet the dry, windy, often very hot or cold, light-bending air of the prairies and creates something like a chandelier.  I need several metaphors.   

Our sky canopy is full of ruffles and tucks that we can’t see until they are beaded with water.  Enough airplanes leak or deliberately dump volatile fuel, possibly burning, that exhaust plumes add embroidery and spangles.  Wind shear can twist it into knots.  We know that the aurora borealis with its transparent chiffon veil dances is really ions from the Sun, which doesn’t make them any less miraculous-looking.  

To change the metaphor, it is as if the sky were the underside of a crystal geodesic dome against which someone is pointing laser lights, making shining pillars and flaring rainbows.  Some people don’t want to know what the display “really” is -- they’d rather let their imaginations play -- but others (probably the same ones who want to know how movie effects are made) only feel enriched by understanding the behavior of light refraction.  

When musicians play certain chords exactly in tune, a note that isn’t played at all will be heard.  They’re called “overtones” and can be described and predicted by the physics of vibration, particularly with strings and columns of air.  Something like overtones exists in the human brain and perhaps it is an explanation of mysticism, the perception of something imperceptible -- that is, to ordinary senses.  

If one has rich experiences and is open to what is mysterious, exalting, and gorgeous, it’s not hard to imagine angels and aliens.  Why discourage this?  Aesthetics is a kind of morality, a guide to rewarding behavior, sometimes shared -- maybe not.  Lesley is a person who has traveled the world, studied other religious systems, seen terrifying and horrible violence.  Yet she is capable of amazement at beauty.  She knows it is a kind of redemption.

We struggle to survive as individuals and as groups, but why?   What is the name of “the force that through the green fuse drives” but desire.  It’s desire that pulls us through the narrative trajectory of our lives, both the suffering and the bliss.  Sometimes the world opens around us like a jeweled rose blooming and other times the torment of dark, cold, suffocation, plummeting is overwhelming.  They say that the worst outcome of torture is the loss of desire -- no longer wanting, no longer remembering, no longer even feeling.  It is separation from Being Itself.

In our struggle to preserve ourselves and others who are too different to understand, at least in the terms we know, we push those others off the edge of the world.  No room!  No room!  Not enough food!  You scare us!  Foolishness.  This planet is a sphere.  If you push the others out, they’ll just travel around and come up behind you to bite you in the butt.

Sorry this is mono-sexual.

I’ve moved my understanding of the basis of salvation away from virtue and into participation.  To participate in the webbed life of the planet, the movement of air and water, the dance of creation, the surprises and efforts -- these are what make life worth living, worth the survival.  It IS survival, no matter the length of your life, how rewarded your gifts, the magnificence of your status.  If you were there, you saw, you figured it out, that’s enough.  You did your part for the group and yourself. 

As a compliment, some people are described as being “comfortable in their skins,” meaning that they are neither pretentious nor shrinking and therefore good to be around.  Some say that one of the important characteristics of humans is that they can enjoy the creation, wherever it came from, and know that they belong in it, even if only as observers.

This post is a birthday message to a close friend.

"LIVING WITH A WILD GOD" by Barbara Ehrenreich (review)

The first Barbara Ehrenreich book I read was “The Hearts of Men.”  At the time, which was 1983, just after I left seminary, it was a defense not heard often and full of resonance.  Now, after reading “Living with a Wild God,” the earlier book is clearly recognizable as a defense of her father.  That’s not a slam.  The lives of theologians always foreshadow their eventual theories of God.  In fact, the lives of scientists also can shape their theories.  How can we be other than what our pasts have made us, since even rejection of them amounts to a development from them?

It is often suggested that science is a kind of religion with its own leaders and morality, its own way of being in the world, but that’s backwards.  Religions are early versions of science, rough drafts composed of the knowledge of the times.  The differences in religion, once one learns how to look, are the differences in the evidence offered by the environment, the ecology, of the place the religion evolved.  To understand this, then, means accepting the ideas -- the grand principles -- of both ecology and evolution.  Both are about how things fit together and can vary radically but finally come down to survival.

To get closer to the universal forces beyond ecology, one must go to genetics, neurotheory, and quantum theory.  In our times we have gone beyond the observational science of the centuries leading up to the 19^th century nose-counting and notebook sketches to highly technical investigations requiring complex machines of enormous expense and the education to operate them.   

People shaped by infinitely differing conditions are now mixed together into circumstances that can provoke war or simply maladaptation that imposes enormous suffering to masses who are displaced from everything they believe and can do.  And yet the primal questions persist.  The two that preoccupy us now are whether there is any reality outside our perceptions and whether our capacity to make contact with it (which we now begin to understand is only symbolized by our brains, because we turn out to think with our guts and muscles as well as our neurons, and which is limited as much by our capacity to organize what comes to us through our sensorium as it is by the acuteness of our perceptions.

The Holy Land

Those people whose roots came out of the Middle East, which offered the Abrahamic religious positions, were based on the nuclear family and the tribal chieftain, especially the father/son connection that was the means of passing down power and wealth in a shrinking ecology.  Erosion, land exhaustion, diminishing rainfall, the invention of agriculture and irrigation that pushed away hunting/gathering, walled cities and the invention of chariots for the purpose of war.  These are the stories of the Old Testament and the Koran and the advice for how to deal with them.  Where the influence of the New Testament came from -- Buddhism from India, Celtic goddesses from the tribes to the north -- is up to better minds with more resources than mine.

Barbara Ehrenreich’s new book, “Living with a Wild God: a Non-believer’s Search for the Truth About Everything” is confined by our obsessive conviction that GOD is what religion is about, in the same way that FATHER is what family is about. “The Hearts of Men,” is now clearly about FATHER, her father and what she experienced while witnessing the life-arcs of her parents.  These were closely related to the furor about Communism and Marxism and the demand for economic justice.  

Butte mine accesses

Ehrenreich is about the same age as I am, took her undergrad work at Reed in Portland, and proceeded through a technician’s career under the guidance and oppression of respected scientists.  Her brilliant father began in Butte (a bit of European coal culture transplanted to the high mountains of Montana) digging below ground, and somehow by patronage from “fathers” and support from wife, managed to rise so high in the resource corporations that he finally transcended to management.  (The priesthood.)  He was admired and well-paid but not happy and eventually fell apart into alcoholism.  Divorced, his wife lost control of her life as well.  Their religion was “atheism” which I do not see as a cause so much as a result.

Ehrenreich has always been scrupulously honest about her thoughts and in this case was investigating her personal development through “lab notes,” i.e. a journal she kept throughout her youth.  She is also honest -- but not disclosive -- about her relationships, even her two children, one of which died.  What comes through is a lack of empathy, a distrust of intimacy.  As she moved into journalism, her strength was investigating other people’s lives, understanding them in a kind of ecological way, but then leaving.

This specific book is based on a risky disclosure: a mystical experience that caused the world to “burst into flame” with meaning and inclusion.  As a young adult she and her brother, plus a friend, had gone skiing on Mt. Shasta, were sleep-lagged and famished, when she walked alone into her vision.  It is indecipherable.  Through her life little gleams of flame would return, but never that engulfment.

To complicate it, the “friend” guided them to Death Valley so he could retrieve a cache of dynamite he had found -- old, sweating, unstable, explosives which they took back to his home.  She claims she had no idea at the time but realizes in retrospect that in many alternative scenarios they could have blown up the car or his house and family.

Ehrenreich says, “My agent Kris Dahl pressed me to turn was was originally conceived as a history of religion into a personal narrative.  At first I resisted, but I think that, as usual, she was right.”  She also lets us know that she was hurting financially, since in one of the many hurricanes she had lost a New Orleans home with all her accumulated papers and since the collapse of traditional publishing had removed the practice of offering advances.  In fact, the entire ecology of publishing had collapsed, hurting her as much as anyone else writing.

Today agents do much of the shaping of a book that was once undertaken by "house" editors.  Rather than the reputation of a publishing house, profit is the guide.  The overwhelming concept is that “immersion” sells.  That is, sensation and adventure, but also intimacy with the author.  “How did you feel?  What was it like?”  Somehow, the paradigm of the sexual encounter has become our key to the meaning of life.  Orgasmic saints, both those who are virtuous and those who were wicked, seem to be our epitome of humanness.  We’ve been here before:  Zeus was very resourceful about being a swan, a shower of gold, a bull.  We see erotic love as an overwhelming -- even consuming -- force that takes us out of our skins, even out of our minds.  Of course, back there in the trunk of the car is always that sweating dynamite, liable to “blow” us to “kingdom cum.”

A dynamite explosion.

Like myself, Ehrenreich was open to Hindu ideas, though she doesn’t seem to have had access to the classes I was taking in my parallel years at Northwestern where several strong atheists and comparative religionists had found a niche.   They were the same ideas that seduced the Transcendentalists in New England.  But my “god-prob” was not the nuclear atomic “Shiva” that coincided with her and my primary school years.  Mine was “Deus Absconditus,” since my father was a traveling man who had a prefrontal cortex injury in 1948 that erased all empathy.  Of course, alcoholism and divorce are also "flights from commitment."  Maybe the right phrase is "from engagement."  So we're similar there, too.

Neither parent of Ehrenreich seems to have those little spindle cells that bestow empathy.  This lack was considered an advantage in the Cold War worlds of science labs, corporation management, and sexual carelessness.  These detached frigid contexts may be the background emptiness that creates our craving for intimacy with people we will never meet.  We're trying to come in from the cold.

"Coming in from the Cold"  (a movie)

The title of Erhrenreich's book, like the titles of many books, is meant as enticement.  It has nothing to do with the content.  There's no such thing as a "wild god" -- all gods are domestic.  (Some of them are feral.)  The heart of the book is about direct mystical experience of existence -- God has nothing to do with it.  Ehrenreich's search is not for God -- it is for meaningful relationship.  She believes in the search.  She was gifted with epiphany.

WHERE OUR HEADS ARE AT

The most recent neuroresearch has been so startling but so convincing that philosophers, writers, and speculators have been stampeding to catch up.  I love Barbara Ehrenreich’s writing, but it DOES give me a twinge to see her out there exploring what I thought was MY “wilderness.”  (“Living with a Wild God.”)  It’s worse that I will probably agree with her, once I catch up with the book.  Though I do NOT believe in personalizing some unknown singularity/unity/force.  But there’s no sense in hiding my cards now.

This is what’s in my hand at the moment.  First, a growing understanding of brain structure and function that came out of trying to understand what was going on with my brother and father when they had traumatic damage to their prefrontal lobe cortex that left them seemingly functional, but somehow empty.  

Second, an endorsed appreciation of the importance of the bodily sensorium, the raw intake of the WHOLE body which may in the end amount to a hundred different senses, not even counting the combined/blended senses like smell/taste.  (You know they’ve added a sense to taste?  Umami -- “yumminess.”)  The muscles are recording and sending, internal organs are recording and sending, gamma rays are shooting through us -- all this stuff goes on and we don’t even know we’re recording it: day length, for instance, and yet all creatures react to the sum and interaction of this information.

Third, the brain is not a bowl of jello.  Substructures, arranged in order of evolution, and specialized cells, imperceptible until recently, make a network with specialized organelles that connect through threads and by varying the chemicals in solution throughout the brain and into the blood.  We grow neurons, we form new nodes, we destroy old ones, in response to the sensorium which underlies and orders thinking through the use of sense memory, just as the Method acting coaches said.  We “grow” an internal world which is like a theatre with many different sets, depending on whether the action is opera, mystery, political speech, or intimacy.  

Some sophisticated “explainers” will teach the main structure of the brain by using a fist as a mnemonic device.  

Fist for a Brain

1. Extend both arms with palms open facing down and lock your thumbs. 
2. Curl your fingers to make two fists. 
3. Turn your fists inward and connect your hands until the knuckles
   touch. 
4. Cross over your thumbs. 
5. While the fists are touching, pull both toward your chest until you
   are looking down on your knuckles. This is the approximate size of your brain! Not as big as you thought? Most brains are 2% of your total body weight, about 3 pounds and the size of a small grapefruit. It’s not the size that matters, and they do not get larger with a larger person. What matters is the numbers of connections in neurons, and the number of deep crevasses or folds in the brain structure. Those connections form when stimuli result in learning. The thumbs are the front and are crossed to remind us that the left side of the brain controls the right side of the body, and the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body. The knuckles and outside part of the hands represent the cerebrum, or thinking part of the brain. 
6. Spread your palms apart and keep your knuckles touching. Look at the tips of your fingers, which represent the limbic system or emotional area. Note how this area is buried deep within the brain, and how the fingers are mirror imaged. This reminds us that most of the structures of the limbic system are duplicated in each hemisphere. 
7. The wrists are the brainstem where vital body functions (such as body temperature, heart beat, blood pressure) are controlled. Rotating your hands shows how the brain can move on top of the spinal column, which is represented by your forearms. 

From:  ©Jerry Clemens {http://www.LZ95.org/msn/faculty/jclemens}

Here’s another version on video with a little different detail.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DD-lfP1FBFk  This is Daniel Siegel’s main schtick, the basis for “Mindsight.”  It’s a good gig.  And he added something new that I’ve never resolved, which is community.

Fourth:  Behind the forehead are cells that specialize in empathy: knowing how other people feel.  It’s a sense that is unconscious -- you can’t taste it or feel it -- but it is the loss of that sense that crippled and hollowed my father and brother.  Besides the connectome in the skull responding/comprising the various mind-modes of the brain, we need also to be able to connect to the other people around us -- a community connectome.  THIS is the basis of audiences and congregations, choirs and orchestras, dance troupes and athletic teams, even writers and their readers.

Some of our groups, like our families and lovers, reach deep into us.  Some groups are pretty impersonal -- riding the bus.  Some are chosen (friends), and some are imposed (boot camp).  Teachers, preachers, judges and lovers -- all propose for us a relational connectome.  How to act, esp. in regard to others.  What our social obligations might be.  Ways to survive.  Some people are gregarious and need to be in the midst of community; others are introverts who need a lot of time alone.

I feel privileged to write alone in a small town with few real-life interactions in person.  I’m also privileged to have the kind of education that makes my print people (like email) very close, very vivid, very different from each other.  So I write to them when I write this blog.  They would shock each other and actively avoid each other in person.  

Once (when considering the ministry but wondering whether I weren’t just reacting to the UU community and the PNWD’s exceptionally charismatic set of ministers in the Seventies) I was working with a counselor and we were discussing how very different people can be from each other and yet seem so intimate and meaningful to just oneself.  She said she once threw a party for all her closest friends.  They were so different from each other that they all got into a terrible row.  What I had in common with her was an appreciation of every sort of friend -- what perplexed us was that they refused to value anyone not like themselves.  This dynamic goes lethal.  

When I was a little Presbyterian, I went happily off to St. Andrews with my classmate.  Then I invited her to come to my church, but it was forbidden.  When I was a big retired UU minister, a couple was killed in a car accident.  The Methodist minister and I attended the funeral mass of the one who was Catholic.  The priest for the other person couldn’t attend the funeral for the one who was Methodist.  Hardened boundaries between the two denominations have plagued the Blackfeet for centuries.

My original UU minister, Alan Deale, used to tell a joke about a Methodist church and a Catholic church that were next door to each other.  They felt ecumenical about it and often cooperated to do good deeds.  When the Catholics had a fund drive for a new roof, the Methodists kicked in a generous donation.  Then the Methodists became prosperous enough and were growing fast enough to build a new church, but they didn’t have enough for a new lot, so they would have to demolish the old church.  They began fund-raising and went to the Catholics.  The old priest said,  “The church rules stipulate that I can’t ever help a Protestant church grow.  But I could help destroy one.”  Then he handed over a generous check for demolishing the old church building.  His name might have been Francis.

Clear away the outdated rules and fences, the institutional underbrush, so we can see the thalweg.  The point is that these religious bodies recognized that they were part of the same community, that they had connection which is a kind of communion, that they respected their differences, and they could even hear each other’s religious music when the windows were open.

Human brains start with the molecules of the world; develop sensoria;  then form thought patterns moving through nodes in the connectome of the brain; enact actions and ideas; share in community.  You know that little child’s hand-game?  “This is the church, this is the steeple, open the doors and see all the people.”  It’s the next step in the brain-as-a-fist metaphor.  In case you’ve forgotten, here’s a kid doing it.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uksssUfLdIs

Where’s the next step after that?  Hands UP!  Twinkle, twinkle, little star.  Cosmic connection.  Maybe Ehrenreich is already there.  Take my hand.

On a predawn walk in Lone Pine, California, Ehrenreich recalls, she encountered “something alive” which she describes as nothing short of a “cataclysmic experience” when “the world flamed into life.”
 
No visual hallucination, no prophetic voices; rather, the world opened up and was “rushing out to” her. Ehrenreich writes: “Something poured into me and I poured out into it…. a furious encounter with a living substance.” 

Yes.