PIGS WITH BUCKETS OVER OUR HEADS

In the beginning there was no religion — there was simply the way to BE, a primordial muck of undefined convictions arising from family, ecosystem, and experience with events.  People have been writing about this a lot in the last few decades.  Partly because we are like pigs with buckets on our heads, prevented from eating because we can see or operate the way we have been.  We thought it was because we were pigs, but slowly realize that there are buckets on our heads, which are our expectations and our assumptions about life.

So how do we get the buckets off our heads? How do we keep from being dazzled when the light returns? Was it really just greed for what was on the bottom of the bucket that got our heads stuck in there or did someone do this to us?  And what about our nature as pigs? Can we never win horse races or sing in operas?  How did we even find out such things exist?

The earliest and most daunting realization is that there is no salvation in the sense of some place or condition or organization that will make us complete, happy, and better than everyone else.  Everything changes, moves, and goes on.  Yet most people devote most of their lives to holding everything as much the same as possible, even when they complain about being uncomfortable and not being able to find that ideal moment they vaguely remember from infancy when everything was provided.  Hopefully.  

Maybe sex? It’s an interesting fact from uncensored vids of everything we didn’t want to know, that people who artificially inseminate pigs have to get on their backs because the weight of the boar is a trigger for conception.  The weight of the autocrat bearing down on the population? What gets conceived but rebellion.  On the same terms as the overthrown dictator.

The bucket comes in part from being intolerably unhappy or in pain, wanting not to know.  The bodies of animals shut down when there is no motivation, no hope, no memory.  I have no proof, but expect that the great majority of the throngs of people on this planet are so miserable that they have stopped feeling.  They really cannot tell the difference between being enslaved or set free if there’s nothing to eat, no shelter, and no other humans for attachment.  The rest of us cope with them by shutting down awareness of them along with their actual being.  Otherwise their existence can be nearly unbearable unless some fantasy is invented.

We know enough to realize that today’s citizens were created decades ago by cultural child-raising and child-educating practices.  We ask all the time what we did wrong to put buckets on our children’s heads, but never ask what kind of tomorrow’s citizens we are creating today.  There are people who are saying kids are permanently damaged by the necessity of closing down schools.  There are also people who are saying what a relief it is to have children escape the lock-step staging of public education.  There are also people who go into schools to shoot children en masse, but though people say they want to know what that’s about, they really don’t.  They just hire more people with guns.

I admit that the bucket over my head is probably a computer/internet instrument.  For this pig it’s a little hole where I can peer out with my little pig eye.  I try to jiggle the bucket around so I can see different things, though none of them is very encouraging.

It seems necessary to go to questions that have nothing to do with metaphors of pigs and buckets.  What most people just can’t and won’t see is that they are part of a inconceivable reality of cosmos, planet, geology and time. Everyone is temporary, doomed to die.  Everyone is an interaction, a matter of responding to everything else — over which no one has control.  But some can perceive or learn certain relationships and actions that at least help.  None of it has anything to justice or entitlement or deservingness.  Much of it is not even predictable.

Due to that metaphorical bucket I have not realized until now that people are NOT all equal, not all intelligent, not all capable of love, not all doing much more than getting through the day until the end.  Everyone deserves a chance. There is no evil, just prejudice.  If someone is understood, they will reform.  

No longer is it a compliment to tell someone — maybe a child — “Hey!  You might become the president of the United States!”  But it has never been more true that anyone, no matter how stupid or evil, can become the President of the United States.  And the next time the Confederacy of Treason wants to break away, it might be best for all concerned to let them go.

Dazzled by brutal realizations, how do we focus on what to do now.  How can we stop being such egomaniacs and sports fans that we can give up our binaries and the conviction that if things go wrong it’s because of some monster plotting against us. It is now clear that the root of the problem — ONE root of the problem — is that a majority (not all) of Republican senators can block reform, remove all oversight, and by backing the president enforce their preferred world, which elevates them above the rest of us through bookkeeping, which is as fungible as they had hoped.  One hundred senators, a simple majority of them Republican, and evidently a major of those fifty bought off.  Maybe thirty old men running the United States of America.

But not as fungible (exchangeable, transformational) as they had hoped, since we are even able to find the four billion dollars meant for Covid-19 testing and determine it was diverted to pay off Trump’s personal debt in January. Evidently he doesn’t generally believe in paying debts most of the time, but for some reason this one seems important to him, esp if he’s no longer president by then.  At the moment he’s still sane enough to try to avoid death.  But it won’t be long now before he forgets.

It is flatly blinding to have grown up with the 20th century, believing in high ideals, living through deep scandals and their subsequent reforms, and now facing the depth of international crime.  I mean, I can take precautions against a virus, I’m getting enough to eat and my shelter— challenged by a deteriorating roof— is still good enough for now.  But to see whole rows of pigs with buckets over their heads, discarding jackets and tapping pencils . . .  

Yet I still remember that it was over a hundred degrees F. in the Arctic yesterday and wonder whether gravity will fail so we all fly off into black empty space.  No religion is adequate.  None of them is good enough.  Is the concept just another bucket?

5 KEY BOOKS FOR MY LINE OF THOUGHT

The ideas I've been exploring for the past decades are hard to convey to anyone else because I came to them in small shifts over many years, sometimes not realizing how strange they may seem to more conventional people, even at seminaries where they should have been at home.  Maybe it would help if I offered a list of books that were milestones.  Each has one of five insights that add up to a new way to understand how to understand the world. I keep a longer list, but these five are a good start.  They are small books and not difficult.

1.  Mircea Eliade defends and describes the idea that sacredness can be felt in ordinary settings as well as the big visions.  It is a matter of feeling, not theology.

2.  D. W. Winnicott explains how a person develops with the help of older caretakers, building on childhood. This is not about discipline but about attachment, which is love.

3.  Robert Schreiter shows how under all our theories and requirements, humans share far deeper commonalities that can resolve the differences of religious systems. It's far different than catechisms or icons.

4.  Stephen Porges finds the evolved structure of the vagus nerve that makes mammals into caretakers of each other, because mammals that don't do that will die. Reptiles don't nurse their babies.

5.  Antonio Damasio maps out the long story of how we came to be ourselves, tracing mutations through evolution from microbes to the feeling creatures that we are in the midst of all these other beings.

“THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE: The Nature of Religion” by Mircea Eliade (1957)  This book responds to Otto’s IDEA OF THE HOLY which I never really read.  Eliade’s office was in the Meadville/Lombard building when I was there and I often encountered him but never talked to him.  His book is foundational for me.

“PLAYING AND REALITY” by D.W. Winnicott  (1971)  The first “teddy bear” book I read that led me to Bowlby and Kohut.  This is one of the gentle and comprehensive English object relations people whose books I found late at night in the Hyde Park Powell’s bookstore. 

“CONSTRUCTING LOCAL THEOLOGIES” by Robert J Schreiter.  (1985)  How to think about Christianity when explaining it to people who are not Christian or even Western.  Schreiter belongs to a religious order, The Society of Religious Blood, and was a professor whose course I took while at the U of Chicago Div School Cluster.  This book is meant for missionaries but is not focused on conversions.  Rather it draws on the deep meanings where the similarities are shared because we are all human.

“THE POCKET GUIDE TO POLYVAGAL THEORY: The Transformative Power of Feeling Safe.”  by Stephen W. Porges  (2017)  Anchoring “feelings” in physiology, this anatomical expansion of the freeze/flee/fight/fawn responses to danger also notes our Frame of Expression (my term) and how we use it to create empathy which is the foundation of humans working together.

“THE STRANGE ORDER OF THINGS: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures” by Antonio Damasio (2018)  A summary of what an educated person should know that dispels the conventional 19th century and even medieval ways of thinking that confine us and blind us. It throws open the future.

THERE IS NO BOTTOM LINE

Though I’m vitally concerned with the return of whole body elements of thought, there is still a place for logic, nearer to mathematical “if-then” thinking.  For instance, what if we replaced the Christian obsession with life after death with something more like “belonging to creation”.  The great harmony and enfolding that is described after someone experiences “mystical” deep experience might be a persuasive emotional matrix as much as some abstract goal like “progress”.  

These experiences, when they are claimed by “religion”, become just another justification for theories and organizations invested in self-perpetuation.  They are claimed as “founding” but they are more like “found and exploited.”  The Big Three (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) have been particularly resourceful at enveloping deep experiences of individuals into pre-existing governmental and cultural structures, so that they provide vocations and fine buildings.  They have coped with competition by building what they take to be power. 

Most of the time they also frame reasons for responsible moral behavior, but occasionally they become perverted into sin and destruction, often because they are picked up by pre-existing greed for control. This is particularly enabled by the pattern of the patriarch, the monarch, the anthropomorphic god — because the imaging becomes exemplars of humans complete with their shortcomings.  Simply shooting the king so as to become him is a consequence.

Widening inclusion of concerns as far as one can is a better alternative to obeying “the highest”, which blurs into status, entitlement, and domination.  Turning a perversion of Darwin’s theory of evolution into Hobbs’ idea of survival of the bloodiest and most violent is not a path to a healthy society or a joyful life.  Domination as a key to relationship needs to be replaced by attachment, an evolved phenomenon basic to mammal life but not well explored except as human belonging, patriotism, loyalty.  This is partly because we see “attachment” in terms of sentimentality that is a cultural construct rather than the intrinsically evolutionary and physical foundation of survival, arising from the need to nurture babies.

We love what we know in a sensory flesh-based way, the way your dog loves you even if you’re mean to him. His expression of love is contact and protection, just as in the best of families who have shared experience over time, each helping the belonging to the whole.  We’re told (that’s my phrase for “scientific information based on research”) that the outside limits of our capacity to know individuals is probably about a hundred people, the size of an original tribe or an extended family.  About the number that a public school teacher has responsibility for in a year.  It’s a limit — not an ideal.

Few people know well a hundred places, but we tend to attach to them as we do to people, in that sensory way of naming, seeing metaphor and interacting.  Someone who can’t do this is limited at best and a form of, well, “sociopath” at worst.  The results of inability to attach to place are unhappy.  As reassurance, many have learned to attach to virtual people and places depicted in stories — writing, film, paintings, dance, whatever has this sensory narrative dimension.  We sometimes call it “church.”

Going back, one moral principle is that “good” is doing the best for as many involved entities as possible, including animals and land.  Maybe conceptualized virtual things like nations or books.  The difficulty is our not knowing enough, which explains our yearning for omniscience, and our “explanation” for why God lets bad things happen — bad things in our view which might be justified by a greater good somewhere else, though we don’t know what that might be.  

How do we make that concrete, felt?  This pandemic is good for viruses (bitter laugh).  It is breaking open pre-existing and fossilized systems and schools of thought that have been preventing growth or even justice.  (Incarcerating poor and stigmatized people.)  But the price is tearing open attachments around the planet, a high price in grief and confusion.  As the more steely among us suggest, the virus is the predator that culls the herd by killing the old, the infirm, and the unwary.  Part of the price is numbness, failure to reinvest, avoidance of future attachment.  

It will take generations to forget.  Already the deification of family is raised up without explaining that a family is not necessarily biological, genomic.  And yet the kernel of attachment is formed during gestation and the infant years afterwards when the mother/caregiver teaches the new being the sensory stroking, cleaning, cherishing that create a virtual world of communication between them.  This first experience of embrace is what becomes the ability to experience one's engulfment by Being.  

The funniest google I’ve run across is a list of “Disney’s Best Epiphanies” which are the sentimental plot changers and pay-offs of cartoon stories.  I shouldn’t sneer, but . . .  Childish examples include things like falling in love or winning a prize — happy immediate human moments.  I wish I’d kept a notebook with examples of the deeper, truly ultimate moments.  This is William James whom we did not study in seminary.

“In mystic states we both become one with the Absolute and we become aware of our oneness. This is the everlasting and triumphant mystical tradition, hardly altered by differences of clime or creed. In Hinduism, in Neoplatonism, in Sufism, in Christian mysticism, in Whitmanism, we find the same recurring note, so that there is about mystical utterances an eternal unanimity which ought to make a critic stop and think, and which bring it about that the mystical classics have, as been said, neither birthday nor native land.”

Today’s Western attitude is “how can I make money off this?” (Disney?)  The preponderant Buddhist attitude has been, “sit down and be part of it.”  If we could maintain a consciousness of the stunning photos of the galaxies, an awareness of their melodic gyring through space, and the echo in our own blood molecules, we might accept the idea that we are minute participants — nevertheless messengers from the past to the future, links that are not broken but transformed.  Our grief over lost attachments is valid but not the whole story.
Yet not to attach is not to be human.

BRING OUT YOUR DEAD

This line of thought hardened when I tried to phone my brother and was told he died two years ago. When I called cousins to tell them, they reluctantly added others who had died without me ever knowing. My cousin said, "We didn't want you to feel bad." Bad is not the word.  These were not pandemic deaths.  We're just an aging generation.

Researchers are beginning to wonder whether Covid19 affects brains, maybe later after the original life-threatening episode is over, even if it was less dramatic — just flu.  This issue is very lively to me because of family experience, mostly on the paternal side.  To give you an idea of what I’m talking about, here’s a terrifying story that was in one of my media feeds today:

https://www.wired.com/story/lee-holloway-devastating-decline-brilliant-young-coder/?
utm_source=pocket&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pockethits

It is obvious to some, of course, that our President — even as he evades proper medical diagnosis and treatment — has this deterioration of the brain and that — linked with a devil’s disposition — he is killing people out of failure to perform his duties.  Do we forgive him for that because of frontal lobe deterioration preventing him from thinking? Not me.  "Bad" isn't the word.

In my immediate family there are three instances of brain deterioration because of trauma to the forehead which undoubtedly damaged that frontal lobe, though no one recognized it or understood it.  One was my father in a car accident in 1948.  One was my brother after a fall in the early Eighties, and one was my cousin after repeated motorcycle accidents.  We already knew about my mother’s uncle whose wife “had hardening of the arteries in her brain” so that she was in an institution.  The gentle rock-hound uncle never divorced her but occasionally had lady partners living with him in Oakland. My mother always liked them.

Of my aunts, the one on my father’s side and the two on my mother’s side all died demented, but not from identifiable frontal temporal lobe failure so much as global confusion.  I blame my mother’s sisters' failure on farm chemicals, fertilizers and particularly spraying for flies. My mother was clear-headed to the end. So was the cousin that grew up with her.

My family is in three streams because my mother’s sisters and cousin married brothers and a cousin.  They were from ag lives.  Two were sane to the end and one, a farmer, was not.  There is another brother who never married anyone because he was "paranoid schizophrenic" and mostly institutionalized.  No one names him or admits he exists.  I saw his photograph.

The most interesting case is my father’s only sister and her two children.  This aunt and her daughter both had a terrible case of flu when the daughter was in high school.  Both developed what was diagnosed as Alzheimers, to the extent that it can be diagnosed pre-mortem.  The aunt died, the cousin is at home.  The mother of this mother and my father, that is, my grandmother on that side, developed a severe goiter in the Thirties, thyroid disfunction because of living in northern Manitoba before iodine was discovered to be vital.  Knowing what we do about epigenetics it’s quite possible that my aunt’s and cousin’s “Alzheimers” are as related to the lingering cross-generational effects as they are to the strong flu infections.  Of the cousin’s two children, the girl seems stable, productive, and cheerful, but the boy has struggled with severe alcoholism since grade school years.  His own daughter is fine, an achiever.

Doubling back to consider the son of my father's sister, his own family -- I'm told -- struggles with autism.  He married a twin with autism tendencies and their only daughter who seems to have inherited them, married a man with those traits which passed on to three children. They don't find anything wrong.  I closed them out, so I don't really know.  Of course, Aspies -- high-functioning autistics   -- will claim they are simply an alternative and justified.

What I grasp from all this is that most families wrestle with mental and emotional issues without understanding or maybe even not coping very well.  Since there is sometimes no real scientific explanation and because the issues of attachment are so strong, a cloud of denial and excuses often moves the issues into moral judgement to justify excluding people.  Pain is evil, is it not?  There’s a price to excluding people who are evil, no? And unaccountability is always painful.

My father's family is particularly vulnerable to these kinds of issues because of their high valuing of intelligence and education.  This was their Golden Calf, a golden calfskin binding a book.  

One aunt who died in a nursing home was a nurse during WWII in a time of overwhelming air pollution.  In London she  said the smog was so thick one could barely see the counters in department stores.  She returned somehow changed.  The fog of war was a subtly killing mist.

Of her four children, one had the motorcycle concussions but was always strung tight, two were twins, one can’t hold a job and is obsessive-compulsive, and the girl became a nurse like her mother, the WWII nurse, who had a sort of Munchausen syndrome by proxy and became convinced that her daughter had some kind of brain problem which subjected her to medical scrutiny and invasion.  The son of this daughter was brilliant and became a scientist.  That daughter, who is now retirement age, lives in a culture of variant medicine that works on the edge of what is accepted.

What I’m saying and trying to analyze, is that humans are not at all the defined and identifiable standard individuals we assume, especially in the American culture of standing alone and resisting community pressure.  And then, secondarily, the attachment groups of family and community, try to stay safe from the ambiguity and confusion by denying and inventing, as often feeling motivated out of necessity and self-preservation, emotions that resist scrutiny.

My strategy has been high independence and sometimes invasive inquiry.  I want to know why.  I realize how much has been hidden.  When my cousins were clearly hurt and angry when I tried to talk about all this, I decided to simply withdraw.  It was ironic.  My mother’s side had already built a wall to close me out.  Now I closed the door on my father’s side.  My mother and brothers are dead, a final exclusion.

When I had the animal control job I got deeper into the physical expression of life in context — the dogs’ lives — and found the Unitarian Universalist movement which seemed invested in high thought and carried me to seminary at the U of C Div School.  Ironically, it was not the traditional Ph.D.-style education that had meaning as much it was the English psychological thought I began to find late at night at the Hyde Park Powell’s bookstore.  These thinkers were kinder, sweeter people than Freud, less inscrutable than the French.  No one in my family knows anything about these books.  But we’re many generations along now — I don’t know the younglings.  This fluid and erratic blog records what I do know.

On the news I see bulldozers burying the unknown dead in boxes closer together than recommended in life.  Their families will never find them, but maybe the families are dispersed.  It's a coming-apart time.

CAN YOU HAVE AN EPIPHANY IN AN ELEVATOR?

Two major land masses occupy the Northern Hemisphere, separated from each other by mighty oceans, which rise and fall so that the beaches of the continents are revealed but later disappear. 

We don’t think of Eurasia as one continent but imagine instead that the great expanses of unbroken land between are unimportant, not like the complex and “logical” west side or the mystical but obedient east edge.  North America is similarly bicoastal in terms of settlements also with contrasting cultures depending on which ocean they border, Pacific or Atlantic.  At one time the two continents were one and they are still not quite torn apart in the north.  

We have not investigated much the people who dominate the international world.  I think about this as an exercise is looking at the “old” in a new way, to stir up the depths of assumptions to see what creatures awaken from the times before agriculture, before sea-going, even before language.  It was a sensory world.

The tiny “waves” that are the basis of sight and sound are echoed in the waves and cycles of the planet.  Tipping back and forth between seasons, circled by the waxing and waning moon which changes its path, we are most caught up in the light/dark that circles the planet daily, making “daily” a controlling principle in our lives.  Animals from oysters to humans take the rhythm into our living beings, so that when creatures are hidden from the sun, they keep the alternations in their flesh.

WHAT IS THE ROLE OF THE SUN?

All of these things are somehow the “ground of understanding” that becomes meaningful, deeply felt, by some individuals.  It appears that a mystical or deep and powerful experience may come out this context.  But it is not necessarily a result of “organized” religion.  More likely related to the deep brain paradigm formed in primal years.

The sun gets all the attention, the energy, the source of gravity, the ability to create vitamins and so on.  But it is really the dark that matters.  At one point I wanted to focus this part on the value of the dark, of sleep, of wandering and distorted consciousness.  Maybe I’ll come back to it.

COPING WITH THE EXPLOSION OF KNOWLEDGE

At the U of C Div School focused on comparative and historical theology, a constant question was “what’s your method?”  Are you focused on writing or on performance? What kind of evidence do you accept — what about language development?  And so on.  When the explosion of information about genetics finally reached these scholars it was such a deep shift in point of view -- the previously hidden, suddenly revealed that what was thought to be one kind of animal was actually another. It was a much deeper shift than Europeans naming American animals because of superficial resemblance to the animals “back home.”   The questions didn’t compute: was Jesus genetically possible? What is the genome of God?  The terms of pre-existing discussion were gone.

But it was nothing compared to the technical  access to information far beyond the previous limits of history, space or the cell.  The genome is a code that controls and relates every creature, continuous and inter-relating with all gene-codes everywhere, genes floated as bits in the sea.  The stars moved through time and the poles of the planet were seen to drift.  When the rocks formed and metamorphosed they preserved magnetic orientation of rocks, they told us the past.  We went to the moon and very deep in the sea.  Atlantis was only one submergence, listed with Berringia -- a lowland, not a bridge -- and Doggerland around the British Isles.  The verges of land changed over millennia and when they expanded, people built villages that flooded again.  The early written materials knew nothing about all this.

In the amazement and inconceivability, the concept of God simply dissolved.  Only those who claimed to draw their authorization from that entity stayed invested in describing a sort of uberking. Of course, many people found that the status quo was the best religion of all, so long as conditions allowed one to deny everything else.  Keep the world close and control it.  But an experience of Holiness cannot be controlled, old as it is, deep as it lives in those who can feel it.

Is an epiphany in Asia the same as an epiphany in America or Europe?  If it’s human experience-based before languages make categories, rooted in the primal connectome of the brain, why would culture be relevant?   Culture comes later and is about learned ways of surviving.

These strategies are worth considering but are not vital to this discussion of deep experience, unaccountable.

1. Limiting the world.
2. Fractionation ( focus or compartmentalizing identity)
3. Gender, class, or other assigned groups
4. Controlling methods of thought (ie reasoning vs. sensation/emotion)
5. Conversation
6. Participation
7. Density enabled by industry and technology
8. The point system of capitalism

Can you have an epiphany in an elevator?  Has the industrial revolution precluded any visionary feeling?

My challenge to myself is to think about what the culture of indigeneity, which can be very different from one ecosystem to another, has to do with human experience and organization.  The most obvious factor is relationship to “nature”, not as a clever clockwork like a hawk that nests on the window ledge of a skyscraper, and not as a force to resist, like storm proof and cold-proof buildings, but the alternative to the human imposed order.  First humans separated as primates who took advantage of the pre-existing natural to find a niche or adapt, then learned to invent clothes, fire, and agriculture to withstand the environment, and then used the immense industrial power and mechanized movement to make themselves vectors from one ecosystem to another — to change the world, both air and sea.

Is the power and intensity of numinous experience, a way to return to our underlying primate direct connection to the world?  It’s a beguiling thought.  When Asians, even in cities, have epiphanies and, if so, without saints, how do they think of them?  Can an African in the abject poverty of war and famine possibly have such lightning-seeking-ground course through them?  I won’t address aboriginal Australians who almost seem to have lived on the Sacred side of the threshold all their lives until whites came.

It seems that the idea of the specially entered ritual space is as much in time as in space.  Maybe we travel too fast and need to be stopped in our tracks.  Maybe we try to stop time with our drugs of consciousness displacement.  But humans have always used such drugs — even chimps indulge.  Are we auto-drugging ourselves, disrupting our natural rhythms of serotonin or whatever?  Almost surely we are.

CAN WE FEEL THE SUPERNATURAL?

Logic allows us to realize that we will all die.  Logic also makes us admit that there is existence out there (out-skin) that we simply can’t perceive, though we are constantly inventing instruments that expand our perceptions.  Sometimes we can only do this expanding by inventing codes that must be graphed, like the connectors of the brain genome, a gorgeous image we can only see on a computer screen and know is not what it really looks like, which is gray mush.

Brain connections interpreted by computer.

We think that there might be a color more purple than purple, but in fact we are looking at electromagnetic wave lengths that are orderly, in sequence and seen only as translated by our eyes and then our brains.  Same with the air waves we perceive as sounds, though some of them are powerful enough to feel against our skin, in our guts.  And there is a whole chemistry-perceiving apparatus in our noses and mouths that don’t necessarily agree with the results that others get with their taste and smell organs.  Evidently molecules are trickier than wave lengths.

So when we start talking about something like Holy or Sacred, it might not even be real.  How would we know?  We wouldn’t want a God or Sacredness that could be perceived or conceived by our limited flesh senses, right?  But what if some people are able to feel the usually unfelt?  What sense would they use?  Can you taste the Holy Spirit?  Some have claimed they could smell sainthood.

Sensory limitations (some people are colorblind, some can’t smell) are reinforced by limitations of experience.  Can experience of something “mystical” exceed one’s senses?  When is experience real?  The research coming from split brains, which demonstrate that the two sides sense the world in different ways with different content, suggests it is the instrument, the perceiving apparatus cam present artifacts, accounting for things by making up reasons in their brains — in-skin, not out-skin.

Some people would like to use the word “virtual” to describe something imaginary or to be equivalent to religious, because it is a compilation of a mass of senses and thoughts into a pattern.  It is not out-skin, a feature of the world, but rather in-skin produced by the connector.  It may be very useful and a good fit with the information about the outer world, which is taken to be real, factual, and unchanging.  

A METHOD

“Method acting” is based on the actor’s ability to use memory of experience to develop a character.  It is much more structured and disciplined that the pop version of it.  First is the “spine” of the character, where their identity came from, what defines them, and where they are trying to go.  Second in the structure of the play itself, the narrated time and place that forms the situation.  Exploration of the character’s ability to survive in that setting is what gives us the drama.  This is what forms my method, diversion from both logic and emotion, as I confront the “sacred” or “holy.”  it is neither rational in the sense of deduction, nor is it visceral in an emotional physical reaction.  It is usually described as individual and personal experience, but a consideration of what is perceived by a person as instrument when thrust against the world in all its dimensions, some of which are undefined or unrecognized by the person.  Maybe beyond any human awareness.

The writing about these experiences is oxymoronic to begin with, since they are deeper in the mind than words, even poetry or other art forms, though music and art are suggestive and symphonies are a good metaphor that refers to one element contributing to a larger whole.  It's hard to think about. 

One of my first realizations was that the saints, who are more or less defined by this element of intense experience, often spoke in oxymorons: that is, contradictions.  Caught up and dropped; frozen and warmed; deafened and hearing music, total darkness and blinding light; and so on — often in terms of what a baby perceives very early.  From early on in developing a theory about mystic/deep/flaming experience I thought it might be recalling of the original premises of the forming brain, the things recorded as the connectome first began to make connections.  It seems that “liminal” time or sometimes “numinous” experience are addressing those early foundational brain beliefs with enough impact to challenge their truth or, on the other hand, reaffirm them.

People who are always looking for legitimization of their authority will try to claim that there is moral authority in such experiences, that they are proof of God or the Virgin Mary or some other source of power.  This introduces a moral element.  Rudolph Otto was the first thinker (1869 - 1937) to object to this.  Morality, what is right or wrong, develops as social consensus, and is not at all universal.  In fact, some of these intense experiences are demonic, shattering, “bad trips.”  Or can be triggered by intense sex or torture.

Morality tries to find what is best for all, a sort of natural law search that wants homogeneousness, not too much and not too little.  This is a dimension of religiosity that we live with day to day.  It is related to law, which is a consensus, often written out, maybe as a story, compiled in a book.  Otto’s feeling about this caused him to create a new composite word from Greek and Roman roots:  “numen.”  The numinous.  

Mircea Eliade’s book, “The Sacred and the Profane”, describes how we can psychically — almost viscerally — feel the Sacred or the numinous in our world without having it dictated by authorities.  Transitions, extremes, nearness to fire or water, gateways and flights of stairs, will give a sense of something beyond our human perception, and so it is.  It’s not a full scale vision, but one can feel it as though it were a change in the ambient temperature of air.  When doing a home ceremony — wedding or baptism — without any thought about it, people will put the officiant by the hearth, or a picture window, or even a grand piano, responding to their aura of importance.

(This reflecting will continue.)

THE TRAJECTORY OF THE HUMAN INDIVIDUAL

HUMAN TRAJECTORY

OUTLINE OF THE INDIVIDUAL HUMAN TRAJECTORY

Conception

Unfolding the fetus

Experience begins the sensory when it penetrates the skin

Specialized organs

One-celled base

Pre-existing categories:  scaffolding paradigm

Participation of the person

Not everyone is the same, not everyone goes to the same level

LIMINAL VIRTUAL SPACE develops while a human forms

A new kind of map held in the brain connector

Unseen, made and remade, interpersonal, enabler of empathy

mother/infant

container of meaning

This account of creating a human person is not scientific so much as it is conjectural but informed by science.  There are assumptions that could probably be defended by research.

This section addresses how the tumult of the out-skin world is brought into the patterns of the individual in-skin.

An animal is a collection of one-celled creatures that have assembled into a cooperation made possible by first a skin to separate it from the environment and then circulating systems to distribute nutrition and directions.  The in-skin world is dependent on homeostasis, which is the directional flow of existence in time between two parameters: too much or too little.  This movement produces experience of two kinds, that which is in-skin and that which is out-skin.  The two are in dialogue with the out-skin pressing against the in-skin from the moment of conception.

At first the single cell and then the increasing number of proliferating cells is dependent on two sources of information: that from the blueprint nucleus and that from the placenta which conveys both nutrients and chemical information to the new cell-ball.  At this point there is no vascular system or nervous system.  Both develop in the context of what the mother is sending.  It must be the birth mother rather than any caretaker because it begins in the womb.

The first sensory information is a combination of rhythm and sound, both of them from the mother.  A womb is a noisy place: breathing, heart, digestion, and the mother’s voice.  It is also a mobile place so the new fetus builds its brain around her sitting, standing, lying down, walking (another rhythm) and macro-movements  like lifting or throwing.  If one thinks of movies of tribal dancing in either Africa or America (most commonly)  they are often stepping rhythmically while chanting, singing, drumming, in this pre-birth kind of experience.

Experience builds the brain from the nutrients meeting the capacities of the fetal sensing cells and organs. Amniotic fluid and the flesh of the mother cushions and muffles some sensory information, but the molecules managed by the mother’s brain and organs in reaction to her out-skin environment come directly and internally to the fetus.

When first born, an infant must learn to use its unfocused  eyes, its flailing limbs, to create the capacity of the brain to manage them along with the other senses.  The point of focus that’s needed to organize all of this comes from the mother, especially her face, and now includes other caretakers.  The “theos” notion of an overlooking larger caretaker may come from this early experience of being cleaned, held, stroked, fed, and talked to in a familiar voice.  The mother looks in the face of the infant while relating to it and the infant brain learns how to relate back with kicking and cooing.

This is the beginning of relationship between the in-skin and out-skin, whether it is comforting or distressing, and the extent to which the two relate.  This context creates the paradigm in the brain that structures whatever happens for the rest of life.  It also creates something “virtual,” meaning unseen, not factual and concrete but felt, though it is described in terms of a “space,” an area of experience that includes creation, play, and attachment.  It is a “place” of potential and imagination that develops in the brain and reaches out to the other person.  This is liminal space that contains ceremony/ritual.

Most of this is expressed and recognized in what I call the “frame of communication”:  the face, the breath and heartbeat, the ears and the oral/pharynx voice creation. Speech comes out of this formation.  Stephen Porges discovered a third autonomic nerve system that is myenilated so capable of carrying more information, and that comes directly from the brain stem to this “frame.”  The thought-world the brain has created is expressed and understood directly by variation in muscle movement or tension, breathing, heart rate and speech or singing or exclaiming.  The nerve carries information both ways.  What the person feels is both conscious and unconscious, relating to the homeostasis of the body.  The conscious part, which is much smaller than what is never conscious, is recognized as emotion and is recognizable to others.  We learn from experience to separate what should be brought up to consciousness and what should become habit, taken for granted and never examined.  “Instinct” is part of this.

SECTION 1: "PATTERNED TUMULT" (evolution)

THE LIFE ARC

OUTLINE of evolution

Life arose in the ocean.  It remains wet.

Water, carbon, oxygen, boundary skin, one cell formed in a bubble but then contained a smaller bubble with a code-plan and that changed everything.

NUCLEUS:  Mapping, variation

in/out, backward/forwards, the cell basics

THROUGHLINE:  notochord, spine, bilateral

quadrapod, organizing principles

PASSTHROUGH:  gi tract, the world made internal molecularly

secondary passthrough of gases to provide oxygen-in toxins-out

BRAIN:  Fish/amphibian/dino/bird/reptile/

MAMMAL:  primates, hominin

MUTATION/EVOLUTION

If it were not for the pressure of environment and occasional internal gene glitches, variations would not exist.  The mechanism of evolution is that when variety develops, some versions will be slightly better in that environment and will persist, gradually becoming a prevalent new creature.  This is not necessarily a matter of force or superior strength.  A better use of water in the body or a different habit of rhythm in the day might be better adapted for survival.

These days there are MANY books that describe the long evolution of life on this planet.  Your grandpa was not a monkey, but a one-celled microbe in the sea.  However, there were interesting developments along the way, some of which have become semi-psychological but also actual physiological functions and concepts.  Here are a few:

1.  To be alive is to change.  Failure to change is the same as dying.  A corpse changes because it is not a composite of cooperating cells anymore, but disintegrating cells at the mercy of other entities (microbes, carrion eating animals and insects).  Dryness can cause death or result from death because the process of circulation inside the body must not stop.  Only the most primitive creatures can go completely dry and then come back to life, usually insects or plants, a few fish.

2.  The first step towards “being” is the creation of a boundary between the guts of the cell and the sea at large. (This is also a psychological concept, all about psychic boundaries.)  A living cell with a nucleus and other inclusions is very complex.  Its primal ability is movement toward food and away from danger.  This is always true of creatures unless the environment brings food and washes away debris, like a barnacle in the tide. The boundary itself must invent ways to take in food and throw out excesses, so there are ports in the cell-skin. It is not impermeable, but controls what goes in and out. 

One layer of the brain cortex, which has several layers pushed against the skull and wrapped around the other parts, is concerned with mapping the body, on which it notes the plurality of neuron intakes by size on the map so that faces and hands are outsized big.  Another set of neurons (I’m not sure where) remembers directions, speed and kinds of movement, position of the body, which is head and which is bottom and which goes “up”, whether one is next to a drop-off or a wall.  This collection of operational information is acquired through experience but some of it seems to have become genetic.  Earlier we did not know that learned experience could become preserved in a genome.  Of course, we didn’t know we could insert genes or delete genes, entirely changing the results in the entity, the phenotye.

The development of the gastro-intestinal tract which leads from the mouth-inport to the anal-export presents the fact that the world is constantly passing through us.  En route it encounters digestive squeezing and dissection into molecules that can travel in the blood to the cells.  This world-within is also teeming with microbes and worms, sharing our food sources and producing their own molecules with DNA.

The great hard-to-swallow truth is that in-skin reality is quite different from what is out-skin.  Neurons can only accept and carry code from the out-skin world.  Much information in-skin takes the form of molecular code in solutions like hormones created by organs to regulate what those organs do.  These exist in the blood and lymph. Blood differs by also including red blood cells that specialize in oxygen and immune cells that fight intruder.  

Neuron systems are in two major systems, autonomic or smooth and striated, the latter likely to be voluntary.  Autonomic nervous systems were once apparently divided into two parts, sympathetic and parasympathetic but more recently the third autonomic branch, which goes directly from brain to parts of the body that are expressive.  I’m much influenced by polyvagal theory but will discuss it later.

THE DARK SIDE

The dark side of this upbeat theory of adapting (improving) mutation/selection is very dark indeed.  The new versions of a creature would not be able to replace the old versions, less well-adapted, unless the old ones die.  Selection means survival.  Quite aside from environmental change, like the gradual change of temperature we’re experiencing worldwide or the sudden impact of an asteroid like the one that evidently ended the dinosaurs, each individual creature has a life-arc of new-mature-aging-senile-death. Something in living creatures is a clock that will expire.

In addition, generations have a rhythm of childhood-maturing-birthing-raising that creates a new kind of person, each raised in a different environment and therefore “mutated.”  Society becomes “shingled” with overlapping generations and some of them will qualify as more “fitting” than their progenitors.  The levels of attachment, achievement and separation will determine much of what happens over the centuries as we creatures react to their surroundings.  Today’s teenagers will vote in the next election after this one.

In some times and places humans lived barely long enough to create and raise children.  If they didn’t manage that, their genealogical sequence would stop.  In the end there were not enough surviving dinosaurs, except some adapted to be birds.  But creatures like sharks were so enduring that their kind is aeons old though we haven’t found any that are eternal.  We are living in the midst of ending species due to environmental changes that were often made by us.   A great extinction comes just as we are discovering many exotic living things, just as we are attaching to species not our own, elephants and koala bears. We realize that we might end our own sequence of hominins before a new one could emerge from genetic or generational sources.  We may be the end of this line, though life would go on.

CONTINUITY

Genomes are persistent and continue through the additions, subtractions and adaptations of time.  They are invasive so that babies send their cells into their mothers, dog-owners exchange genes with their pets, and elements are still present even after millennia of evolution.  When humans are  intimate when taking care or having sex, they begin to share microbes.  We can talk about our “inner fish” in terms of how structures and functions like gill arches can become the nasopharyngeal apparatus of hearing and speech in humans.

Genomes are cumulative so that early bits of protein mapping will simply be overlain by new instructions.  This is apparent during gestation when it once was thought that every fetus went through the stages of evolution.  Once in a while something installed more recently can buckle, allowing the old function to come back, particularly when the  function is psychological like items in the autonomic nervous system that are connected to the brain.  The reaction to primal threats is particularly impactful.

LIFE WANTING TO LIVE

The major drive of creatures is to survive.  In order to do this it is necessary to maintain homeostasis, which is a matter of keeping the business of being alive within limits -- not too much and not too little, whether that’s about salt or sugar, blood pressure, shelter, or any of a myriad of other necessities for life.  These functions are most often described in single terms as a kind of thermostat.  In larger more abstract terms it is portrayed as a stream with two banks, one for too much and one for too little.  But most of it is unconscious and must be accessed through instruments or chemical analysis.  Thermometers, glucose monitors and measures of blood pressure. 

The deepest continuous part of the stream is geologically called the “thalwag” which might not be obvious from the surface of the water, but it makes a nice metaphor for most basic impelling force of the desire to survive and the creature’s ability to feel it.  There are psychological words for that.  When the person is following his thalwag, in harmony and “in the zone,” he is contented.  For a human, conscious awareness of it may be a precursor for whatever it is that triggers the feeling of Holiness, which is not just feeling one’s insides but also feeling the world beyond the skin.  Some feel that origin of religious systems and institutions is in a search for meaning in life and consolation for the knowledge of death.

When I’ve posted a complete rough of this thesis, I’ll add a bibliograpy.