"I FEEL YOU"

An intriguing but only indicated issue in Porges' work was how it is that something happens to convert mechanical waves of air hitting the eardrum into electrochemical nerve messages the brain can understand.  This is a rather specific example of the major philosophical problem of how the world outside the skin can be converted into internal thought.  Porges suggested a gizmo or organelle that did the translation since we know that some people lose this ability -- or the closely related ability to make the impact-to-code change but not in a way that results in intelligible words.

Much of brain research is based on lesions:  that is, if something is damaged, the consequence indicates that's what the bit actually did. There are two kinds of code messaging in the body.  One is the electrochemical "wiring" of nerves for which Porges has had special interest.  His wife, Sue Carter, has studied the molecules in the blood and lymph that circulate in the tubing of liquids. She is a behavioral neuroendocrinologist, the expert on prairie voles who discovered that they inherit faithfulness, an amazing phenomenon.  (She is the present head of the Kinsey Institute.)

"A hormone is any member of a class of signalling molecules, produced by glands in multicellular organisms, that are transported by the circulatory system to target distant organs to regulate physiology and behaviour."  (Wikipedia)

We are accustomed to speaking of hormones in terms of sexuality and can name male/female molecules, but there are in fact hundreds of hormones, each with its protein recipe in a gene.  Scientists have just now discovered a new class of molecules that respond to pressure or distention.  Below are some highly technical definitions that I'm just learning.  Then I'll pick up on the real world experiences that they explain.

"PIEZO2 is a mechanosensitive cation channel that has a key role in sensing touch, tactile pain, breathing and blood pressure. Here we describe the cryo-electron microscopy structure of mouse PIEZO2, which is a three-bladed, propeller-like trimer that comprises 114 transmembrane helices (38 per protomer)."  (Nature)

"Piezos are large transmembrane proteins conserved among various species, all having between 24 and 36 predicted transmembrane domains. 'Piezo' comes from the Greek 'piesi,' meaning 'pressure. ' The PIEZO2 protein has a role in rapidly adapting mechanically activated (MA) currents in somatosensory neurons."  (Wikipedia)

Here's a link to "Feel the Force", an article by Amber Dance in Nature that explains that Piezos are ion channels, which means considering ions.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03955-w

"An atom becomes an ion when it gains or loses electrons. ... Positively charged ions are called cations (pronounced CAT-ions). The ions that are formed when an atom gains electrons are negatively charged because they have more electrons in the electron cloud than protons in the nucleus."  (Oxford)

Pliezos are the reacting message molecules that make code when the skin is pushed or stretched, the eardrum is being hit by sound waves, or the body is changing position.  They are vital to our sense of living at such a deep level (literally!) that they are bound up in sex and religion.  Blood responses of swelling lips and genitals, tissue reports when rocking or bowing, the feeling of being hugged hard, are recorded as emotion and encoded in the brain, where they become registers of sound or stroking or compression as our bodies translate what is outside the skin to what is inside the skin, inside the mind.

When we talk about the senses, this is the one that is so pervasive that it gets left out.  It surely must have been one of the early kindling of the baby in the womb as it feels the envelopment of muscle and hears the sounds carried by the mother's tissue and fluid around it.  When a baby is tightly swaddled, even the baby wallaby joeys rescued from Australian fire, it is not just for warmth but also to stimulate pliezos to signal safety.  

When the human baby is born the mother will stroke, cleanse, caress, kiss, rock and talk to the infant, informing the pliezos and creating a virtual womb that includes mother and child.  This embracing relationship is the source of brain pattern development and the beginning of the ability to attach to (love) other human beings which grows through the rest of life to include family, community, and other larger environments until potentially the planet is included.  

This is "religious", to be emphasized and explored by activities that can involve pliezo-impressed actions like clapping, kneeling, whirling or walking.  This is a matter of practice rather than belief in some proposal.  Porges spent time in Asia learning about "Ancient Rituals, Contemplative Practices, and Vagal Pathways" which is the title of his key essay.  It's available on the Internet.  Pressure sensitive pliezos are only one of the senses that are established through the vagal nerve/brain system so that the brain supports social engagement.  He is particularly interested in how this contributes to calming and a feeling of safety.  He returns again and again to the idea of the mother's lullaby, her assurance, through her voice penetrating the infant's ear, often accompanied by rocking.

The tiny but still-physical specialized appearance of pliezo ion channel molecules is almost Rube Goldberg, though the early studies are pretty vague.  There are appear to be three "rotors" that somehow open and shut and turn, but what this makes happen is unclear.  Mostly what we know is that if the responsible gene is "knocked out" of specialized mice, they no longer feel pressure.  It's possible that other pliezos are related to the perception of pain and that if we could remove or disable them, we could help prevent suffering.  There ought to be clues for deafness.  A connection to the development and maintenance of bones means a possible answer to astronaut's losing bone density in space.  There may be answers to questions about sickle cell anemia.

More immediately, including thought about affecting pressure and position of the body when designing intervals of ritual or contemplation that are meant to call peace and safety, or when expressing intimacy with another human or even another species (all mammals have pliezos) this ability enriches our lives.  Decades ago in the PNWD of the UUA, there was a New Age sort of clergyman who joined the "Church of Venus" endorsing love.  Member stripped and lay on platforms where pretty girls came around with feather dusters to tickle and stroke them for purposes of meditating.  This became a scandal that ended the man's marriage and ministry, but he was a clinical psychologist by training and simply moved as far away as possible and resumed more conventional counselling, or so I assume.  That takes the ideas about pliezos a little too far or so I assume.

"YOU FEEL ME?"

Michael K. Williams as Omar Little

“YOU FEEL ME?” was the query by everyone’s favorite assassin on “The Wire,” Omar Little. (Michael K. Williams)  It’s a very apt phrase for those working out embodiment meaning in terms of the brain.  

When we say the word “grasp,” there is a faint sensory echo in the brain of actually grasping something.  That’s embodiment — that little ghost in there, in the body.  You FEEL grasping, actually and electrochemically.  This is NOT about the pre-frontal orbital abstracting abilities behind the forehead.  In fact, on brain monitors it might not even show up in one spot in the rest of the brain but be distributed around the connectome according to how the act of grasping was first recorded — maybe your baby bottle.

The first surface, the first muscle pattern, the first stress on the wrist bones, all processed into electrochemical traces in brain cells.  After that, the concept is there.  The word doesn’t come until much later.  Using it to denote an abstraction (grasping the truth) comes even later.

We’ve thought that words were the pinnacle and container of thoughts.  That was wrong.  The experience is recorded from the sensory qualities of the act, then it is somehow associated with others that are similar but indexed by the sensory qualities of each instance.  Finally a word might be assigned.  Then there is a cloud of associations around each word, where it was rhymed, when used in a poem, who often used the word, and so on.  None of this is in the famous pre-frontal cortex, but in an image of a page, an echo of a conversation, seen on some billboard passed during a long drive.

“Grasp” of vocabulary and abstract concepts depends on being exposed to them — words and categories — but more than that -- and earlier -- it depends on the original experience.  A person who has never grasped something (no hands?) will have to rely on watching and empathizing with the person who grasps, from his first crayon to the concept of “the end.”  It’s subconscious, not intentional, not a product of education — particularly the Germanic factory fodder kind of education many people get.

Or did you use fibertips to color?

Sometimes I talk to a Blackfeet kid who’s never left town and as I talk, I see his brain behind his eyes shutteringfluttering as he tries to “grasp” what I say about things he's never experienced.  Elevator?  Bookstore?  I said to a young woman in uniform back on her first leave, “But 9/11 was not planned by Iraq — most of the terrorists were Saudi.”  She was paralyzed for a moment while her brain went in and out of hearing what I said.  She couldn’t “feel” me.  She walked away.  

The same thing happened with the small town white kids.  Their life schema did not include what I said, it included only black and white and I was gray.  Their faces said, “Does not compute.”  They tried to feel as little as possible.  “Grasping” means your fingers get pinched and burned.  New ideas are dangerous.

Insisting that words are the same as “knowing” and that knowing lots of words means you are "smart" is a common delusion, esp in a 19th century rural culture that was largely immigrant and illiterate until world wars made reading important.  That was a short time ago.

The pre-existing culture where I am, the indigenous peoples, were an oral culture, who did everything face-to-face and — because of that — “felt” each other.  They had time, they grasped what they did even if it hurt, and when the Napi Yahki’s didn’t have time to listen to explanations, they just withdrew to wait it out.  There were lots of old tribal words and they were famously punished for using them, as though they were unpatriotic, the way the Euro-immigrants were punished for speaking Ukraine or Celtic or Spanish. It wasn't just the indigenous who were being pounded into a mold.

But the old feelings weren’t in the sounds — they were in the grasp of things, the tipi poles, the arrow shafts, the buffalo hide, the horse’s jaw, and the grasp of each other’s hands, “feeling” each other. Not just the things, but the motions of throwing or scraping or skinning.  There’s no use in learning words for things one has never experienced.  Unless it causes one to go looking for the experience, to recognize it when it appears.  The loss isn’t the words so much as the experiences, because those are contacts that access sensory memory.  To get back the vocabulary, one must live the lost life.  But it is gone.  Now we have new lives and words.  But it still feels the same to have a horse under you.

There’s a Blackfeet gesture meaning “everything you say, I take to my heart” which has come to be a sort of “amen” when attending an event with speaking.  The gesture is holding out one’s hands to the speaker, then pulling them back to one’s heart.  The neotraditionalists use it a lot.  So I taught it to UU congregations but then one day a man said, “I want to add to that.”  He gestured the opposite direction, from his hands on his heart to stretching them out.  “All that is in my heart I give back to you.”  We grasped it.  We always used both after that.  By now there need be no words so long as one can feel the message and respond to it.

Because I was curious about where “Saving Grace” came from, I googled the person, Nancy Miller, who was behind this series before Holly Hunter made it hers.  This is Nancy:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgumdWJmmNY  She’s talking about not just grasping something, but feeling that it is so important that it must be conveyed to others — so they can “feel” it.  Then arranging a forceful enough plot that the actors can form it into a kind of piston that pushes meaning into actions.  That’s what I mean by “designing ceremonies” — building that force into feeling that can be shared.  No noodling around in the soft familiar, no empty repetitions, no blurry dispersals of images. 

Nancy Miller

It’s a tall order and not something that be thrown together on a Saturday night, but it can be done by a group.  (Just don’t call them a committee, which is by now a crippling idea.)  Figuring out some exercises that will bond a small group together would be good.  Easy stuff like the trick of finding something in the environment, a rock or a flower or a scrap, studying it closely and then explaining it to someone.  More powerful for bonding than you might expect.  

Most of the theory of embodiment is still unfolding.  There are two kinds of structure involved: the brain cells and connections that come from sensory experience and the metaphorical abstract concepts that interact with each other.  Probably there are more confusions like those two.  Long ago when I said I was going to wait until computers were a little more easy to understand before I got into them, some wise person said,  “No, start now and grow with the computers.”  I didn’t do it quite soon enough.  But you've already got a headstart with feeling.  We all do.

DEEP EXPERIENCE

“The Bone Chalice” -- which began as my D. Min. thesis proposal -- now appears to be a lifework, morphing and splitting as it goes.  Partly because it began as an academic exercise in hoop-jumping, it has been necessary to pry open a chrysalis of assumptions, footnotes and previous books by experts to get at the soft and potential larva within.  It appears that -- for me at least -- that takes a long time.  While I was in seminary, a fellow student who was a nun (it may have been the one David Loehr tried to pick up at Orientation, the sort who wears skirts and cardigans) told me I was post-Christian.  I went with that idea for quite a while.  Now I have a new idea.

I’m saying I’m “pre-theological.”  Previously when others responded to what I proposed, partly because I defined it as about “liturgy,” it was usually seen in terms of that person’s institutional liturgy: the mass or baptism or a communal meal.  People can’t be blamed for categorizing new things according to what they know already.  At first even I was looking at prescribed rituals, almost always in a written script.  But actually I was trying to discover principles that apply to “emergent” and particularly land-based (autochthonous) experiences.  

What I’m after is what I might call “deep experience,” moments of intensity that can reorganize the mind -- and heart. This takes me close to the people who use substances or other short-cut mind-altering strategies, but that wasn’t what I wanted to think about either.  It could also take me off onto a side trail about electroshock therapy but I’ll resist.  It could tempt me onto the rather shaky ground of the quest for the Big O, orgasm as the best experience there is.  In religious terms “deep experience” might be called hierophany (that’s Eliade) or theophany (more specifically a direct experience of God/theos) or maybe epiphany or conversion (Saul into Paul) and so on.  I was more interested in the sort of thing like the old days when Blackfeet young went up on the mountain to fast and meditate until their protective totem visited them.  Some people claim that voluntary torture will do it (Sun Lodge) or any high-adrenaline situation (combat).  As you see, vocabulary is a big problem -- there are not enough useful words.

It remains to say that Czikszentmihalyi  and his ideas about “flow” are valid and approach “deep experience” but there is still another step to make it “spiritual” -- a word that has become so trendy that I’d like to go back to the more traditional “sacred” or “holy.”  This approach is “instrument-based,” the instrument being the human body (not just the brain but including the brain) in every sensory and skill dimension, producing a harmony that is probably expressed in brain waves, a kind of music, a sort of harmony with the cosmos.

Part of the reason I kept getting re-captured by traditional or even experimental institutional liturgies became clearer when I looked back through the centuries:  since writing was invented (let alone the printing press) it has controlled religions.  Theology is a creature of written words.  When the focus of development moved to written dogma and specific words  language became overwhelmingly important.  It was all code and laws.  Among the UU’s, at one point the hymnal was revised to throw out all the “God” talk and then later it was revised (often by hand, women sitting in pews after church with stacks of hymnals alongside) to take out all the man/men.  The tunes lingered .

The Reverend Lillian Daniel

A UCC minister and religious writer, the Rev. Lillian Daniel, one of those honey-haired, blue-eyed good girls (only lacking wings), made a popular furor by declaring that she was bored by “spiritual but not religious” people who find God in the sunsets, whom she claims are invariably seated next to her on airplanes.  I don’t fly these days, so maybe that’s why I only find gorgeously diffracted light in sunsets  (very red right now because of forest fires) but that doesn’t keep me from “feeling” it with a sense of heightened perception.  I just give the same thing a different name.  

But Rev. Daniel wants that person in church.  She says, “There is nothing challenging about having deep thoughts all by oneself.”  She says you must, “dig deeply into a tradition that you did not invent all for yourself.”  Though she attended the U of Chicago Div School, she resisted the call of Bibfeldt ("both/and").  www.ucc.org/feed-your-spirit/daily.../spiritual-but-not-religious.html‎  I did not.  She’s welcome to her academic and institutional bias, but I find in those same sources what we might define as “the devil,” stuff that doesn’t work and actively hurts people.

Reflecting on Rev. Daniel’s assertion, I haven’t had many deep experiences in church with the exception of congregational singing, though there’s a great deal of suffering in the words of traditional hymns, so it must be the communal sound. Nor do I find that solitude is an obstacle to personal deep experience.  It’s not that I’m just roaming around in my subconscious with no reference to the world -- it’s more like the earth itself and my going to and fro on it is my text rather than the secondary interface of words -- with the exception of stories and some poetry.  I never have had an ecstatic reaction to dogma or morality.

I decided that I would chuck out any word-based liturgies, which means all those Middle-Eastern institutions that so love their books and transcribed rules and all the bookkeeping -- the numbers written in Saint Peter’s Pearly Gates no-fly book.  

Luckily, the recent scientific study of neurological brain function reveals that brain cells remember and think by patterns of molecule interaction supplied by the senses -- not just the five basic holes in the head (sight/sound/smell/taste/feel) but the whole body’s constant information loops from gut, feet, main organs, fingertips, orientation to gravity, state of arousal and so on.  The brain is only the sorting and settling bridge of the ship, where the monitoring thermostat and rheostat readings are managed and course corrections are issued.  It is in the brain that intense, passionate (deep) experience is determined and then experienced.  Remember that the brain is part of the body which need not be accessed through words.  

Put simply, the place to start is not the sheet music but with the instrument: the singer, the wordless song, and the dance.  If the body is responding to place, time and other beings, and has formed categories of thought that do not censor or distort, and if the body is expressive in sound and movement, then it is likely that the harmony of the pattern will yield the “deep experience.” Felt, not defined.

To summarize, this bottom-up approach to “deep experience” does not depend on intervention from above, via a book-based institution, but rather on holistic experience through the entire sensory body (guided by the management of the brain), allowing concepts to emerge from immediate experience, and expressing engagement with them through movement, including utterances.  This is an immanent theory of the sacred, even autochthonous since the world is taken as the ground of being.  It is therefore local, but unified by the capacities of the human body as an instrument of perception and expression.  Therefore it is in divergence from print-confined, pew-confined, pulpit-confined religious methods.  Some would say, "heresy."  I rule that irrelevant.