EPIPHANY

“The physiological mechanisms of epiphany, not necessarily religious.”  Catchy little subject, don’t you think?  NOT.

I used to preach about this -- the moments that some of us feel (not everyone) in which we are flooded with awareness of how hot and sweet the world is.  We stand motionless for a moment, not wanting it to end.  It’s real, but we don’t seem to have control over when and how it happens.  What the heck is it?

If you’re a god-believer, you might use the terms “theophany” meaning god (theos) breaking through to you or if not religious, “epiphany” which the anonymous writer at Wikipedia broadens and secularizes as a sudden insight into a problem after a long period of study.  In fact, the entry illustrates our Western cultural tendency to make everything explicable (explainable) and the product of rational thought or else some obscure Christian doctrine.  Those are your choices.  Be a grad student in the sciences or be a learned old guy in a church, both male.  

I’m trying to evade all that.  It’s not easy because the idea is SO deeply embedded in us and anyway it is the product of a lot of underlying ideas that people aren’t even aware that they believe, even after decades of countervailing strategies from feminists, Aquarians, and even psychologists.  Their sorting categories prevent them from having a place to put the knowledge and therefore it evaporates.

I’m saving for reflection an article on fMRI studies in which the experimenters challenged deeply held beliefs of people and actually got them to change their minds, to shift to a new point of view.  You can SEE it on the computer screen.  The experimenters did not record what it felt like, because now the idea is to switch from the logical rationality of people to their computerized brain synapses.  Both logic and neurology neglect “feelings” and yet feeling is our true guide in life.  

Suzanne Langer developed many relevant ideas.

Feeling is the whole-body response to one’s inner metaphors.  All thinking is metaphorical.  Rationality is a particular metaphor system -- it is the SUBset of thinking, which is really feeling.  By over-emphasizing rationality, particularly that which is represented in writing, we have suppressed and denied much of our feeling and therefore distorted our humanity.

We’ve lost our ability to perceive subtlety, what the Japanese used to call “shibui” -- elegance, sensitivity to small nuances.  We commodify everything into the symbolic invention of money and then play with its value by making it “worth” more and less according to mysterious rules about gambling on the stock market.

We help the needy according to symbol systems that render the help useless:  convening to wring our hands, writing poems about the emotion of compassion for others without any sharing of the plight of the objects or translating it into effective help -- turning it all back to ourselves in the Mother Teresa image of self-denial and sadness.  We don't let the needy speak for themselves.  Yet people in the most broken societies of the planet are often joyful, full of song and dance, giving it away.

Of all the most obvious “felt” symbol systems, sex in the most direct sense of body contact
is the feeling most commodified and disconnected from the new reality created by lab technology: petri dish conception, three-parent children from mitochondrial donation or from surrogate gestation, viagra-caused hydraulic responses without eroticism or bonding, deflected paraphilias, dab-on pheromones, transgressions of all kinds.  I was startled that a philosopher seeking a “new religion” would give as an example of degradation the habit of “watching porn.”  How does one tell porn from mainstream programming?  

More than that, how can one seek a new religion without first breaking apart the old ones into the hierarchical, institutional, patriarchal corporations they are.  The word "religion" as we were taught in seminary, is rooted in semantics.  Remember Wikipedia is a collaboration of male grad school students with tenured academic pedants, both types common in the “Western world” still yearning after empires.

“The Latin term religiō, origin of the modern lexeme religion (via Old French/Middle Latin) is of ultimately obscure etymology. It is recorded beginning in the 1st century BC, i.e. in Classical Latin at the beginning of the Roman Empire, notably by Cicero, in the sense of "scrupulous or strict observance of the traditional cultus".

“The classical explanation of the word, traced to Cicero himself, derives it from re- (again) + lego in the sense of "choose", "go over again" or "consider carefully". Modern scholars such as Tom Harpur and Joseph Campbell favor the derivation from ligo "bind, connect", probably from a prefixed re-ligare, i.e. re- (again) + ligare or "to reconnect," which was made prominent by St. Augustine, following the interpretation of Lactantius.”

See?  Everything defined by categories and specific men whose thoughts have been saved in writing and used by ecclesiastical authorities to bind together their constituencies, which are always based on money, more pleasantly called “prosperity.”

I’m thinking that “religion” works best in times of distress, then deteriorates when the crisis is over.  The people who nearly starved in the Great Depression and then desperately fought to save the world from Nazi ideas felt they were honorably religious and that a big entity overhead was therefore supporting them.  The two forces, one-two blows, in spite of being deeply felt, have by now been corrupted and commodified into terrorists and plutocrats.  It’s all forms of blackmail, extortion, and piracy.

Unless you step clear out of that metaphor system. 

Luckily, sort of by accident, I have an alternative.  I did not enter through mathematical logic, but through actor’s training which is about feeling.  (The Method, as taught by Alvina Krause.)  Not one’s endless stream of feeling, the narcissistic pondering of one’s reflection in a puddle, but rather the empathic sharing of experience.  Inhabiting the Other.  Not just humans, not just pets, not just working animals who have been bred to know what you want, but extension into the metaphorical “feelings” of things and their way of fitting into existence.  People love to make fun of trying to become a tree, but it’s less scary than trying to become, for instance, Tim.  Or one of the boys.

They can explain it themselves, but not necessarily in words.  Image, music, and maybe a private language, jargon or slang.  I love it because it makes me feel.  Not from out here, but from inside their desperate lungs, their spasming guts, their stinging feet.  And their seeking hands, their soaring leaps, their nobly shaven skulls.  

My level of success varies.  The effort is always rewarded.

There’s another source of my metaphor system, which is the Blackfeet reservation.  They teach me that what seems solid might be illusion and might disappear, that deceptions can be entrances never suspected, that -- as the Asians teach -- one must pay attention.  Always.  

In the end, it’s geology: watching the mountains being forced up from the depths, feeling the catabatic winds warm your face, walking past a tipi circle of stones, realizing that you’re smelling sweetgrass.  Even as I struggled to grasp theology, I was taking writing classes from Richard Stern.  The class, three women, were all writing fiction, though no one said we had to.  What Stern was urging us to see (urgently -- sometimes impatiently) was how to build a metaphor system, a poetry of living, so often shocking but more dangerous when quiet.

How can anyone devise or discover a theology for boys who have been thrown out on the street, making a living with their bodies, stunning themselves with drugs?  There’s nothing rational about it; nothing is bound together (ligere) for the sake of institutions.  But it can be felt.  If one has the courage.  There’s no reading list.  DO something.  I’ll go on trying to figure out how to trigger an epiphany, hot and sweet -- salvific.

CHURCH PORN

Notre Dame in Paris, France.

I say “church” because the Christian name for the institutional gathering of people in the name of religion is familiar and this argument here is that institutions make pornography out of spirituality, meaning direct experience of the Great Mystery that produced us and will end us, sustaining us in between -- or not. 

I say “porn” because it is something that people desire, even yearn for, are aroused by, but never quite satisfied by because it is only a representation of what is really desired.  It’s not the church’s fault.  Porn is in the psyche of the individual person, maybe fanned along by media representations that don’t care about the reality -- just teasing the culture enough to make some money from it.  Another case of selling sizzle instead of steak.

For porn to work, the real object has to be mysterious, not quite accessible, and implying status, wealth, privilege.  Both sex and religion, often involved with each other, have these qualities.  The real goal of sexual porn is the projected image of an impossible intense wrenching, emotional experience in a number of ways, engrossingly physical, possibly flipped over into black mass or the demonic and thus violence or torture.  Privileged to be the narcissistic target.   Maybe expensive in more ways than money (addiction).  

Sexual porn may be doomed now.  When you can go to wikipedia to find photos of all the things that weren’t even hinted to exist when I was young, then the exclusiveness is burnt out.  In adolescence I spent whole afternoons at the library trying to find out what “carnal knowledge” was by looking in bigger and more omnipotent dictionaries.  The main thing I got was that it was red, which was encouraged when I ran across a Biblical quote:  “Behold a woman of virtue -- her value is beyond rubies.” Or something like that. “Incarnate”: red meat.

The Stained Glass Jukebox

“Fifty Shades of Gray” is meant to catch all the moms up on the basics of pornography. Grandma already knows: she watched “9 1/2 Weeks” in 1986.  No one will ever match Mickey Rourke and Kim Basinger, partly because it was the first of its kind and people just aren’t like that anymore.  Sex becomes more and more innocent (babies get stiffies in the womb), less and less a status symbol (though -- flipped over -- the status of a pedophile is the lowest of the low, which is a distinction of a kind), less and less mysterious as research explained from analyzing internet porn hits, “A Billion Wicked Thoughts.”  Surprisingly, the more we all know about how to do naughty things, the more the juju rubs off and we don’t bother.

I’m not sure that people have quite realized that sex is in the body -- not pictures -- and everyone has a body.  Everybody has an unconscious, a complex of reflexes that live everywhere the brain can reach with its molecular electrochemistry, not just in the genitals.  It’s how you think abut it that can make things happen, even if there is no one else within arm’s reach.

Teophania Garcia Vega

But now it’s spirituality that has become a kind of pornography of religion.  Thrilling, “life-changing” theophanies.  "Mine was bigger and more intense than yours, and, no, I really can’t tell you about it."  And (like sex) no book is ever more than a handful of clues.  But something definitely happened.  Where are the Masters and Johnson of theophanies to explain?  The Billion Blissful Thoughts?  

The “porn” part of the word comes from “prostitute” so at first it meant writing about prostitutes.  Temple whore?  Ritual intercourse?  Sex surrogate?  Surrogate mother?  The point is survival of the individual and survival of the group.  There were times -- still are in other places -- when having a baby would endanger your life so your handmaiden had your baby for you.  That’s Biblical, as Biblical as comments on homosexuality and masturbation, which weren’t good for the survival of the group because they didn't produce babies.

But let’s look at the “graphy” part -- “graphic,” which is not just writing but any kind of depiction, which is so powerful that it is celebrated in temple friezes in India but a killing offense in some Islamic minds.  Graph is to write.  I begin to link the pornography of religion to writing, though some will link it to idols, depictions of the Great Mystery using the metaphor of a human being, maybe extra big or with flourishes borrowed from other creatures (Ganesh and his elephant head).  Through writing we turn our attention away from Evil, which I’m defining as the welling up of destruction and suffering, and towards Sin, which has to do with laws and their punishments -- all defined and enforced by humans no matter how many gold tablets may have rained down out of the sky or been etched on granite by thunderbolts -- all that theatrical stuff is part of the pornography of religion.

Jesus, Buddha, and many another leader have said that compassion/empathy is the only efficacious way to handle human sin.  There is NO way to handle the suffering that comes from Evil, whether it is earthquake, famine, firestorm, volcano, drought -- except that we must help each other instead of blaming it all on God, a suspiciously humanoid figure evidently in the sky, who is no more than a graphic and pornographic figure.

Jesus is depicted with only a diaphanous loincloth as he hangs on the cross.  The pornography doesn’t come from hiding his genitals, but rather from presenting his suffering.  It is the suffering, the willingness to tolerate or even to impose such exposure and death, that is pornographic.  Sin is pornographic.  Evil is not.  The crucifixion was not imposed by anything supernatural, but was a common penalty imposed on a whole population that those in authority found troublesome.  The most accurate depictions show Jesus crucified between two thieves, but also roads lined with crucified people.  We just let them die of disease now.  The same Evil still wells up in humans, part of our evolved heritage that has turned demonic.

Robson Green and James Norton in "Grantchester"

People have many varied tastes when it comes to church porn.  I just watched the first episode of “Grantchester” with Robson Green.  This is a mystery series involving a young vicar played by James Norton, the usual big handsome hunk  -- Green is the local police chief.  The first episode suggests an outlook rather like “Morse,” with Cambridge airs, quite unlike Green’s previous two series in which he collaborated with Val McDermid, a writer of great viciousness who writes about torture, death and pedophilia -- even interviewing the notorious Jimmy Saville.  The TV series, "Touching  Evil" and "Wire in the Blood" were diluted in comparison with McDermid’s books.  But “Grantchester” is drawn from books by the son of Robert Runcie, the former Archbishop of Canterbury.  I suggest that McDermid wrote about Evil and Runcie’s scripts will probably be about sin.  And yet they break through each other -- Evil erupting out of Sin, and vice versa.  McDermid is frankly pornographic -- Runcie probably far more subtly so.

Some churches suggest virtue, honor and status by being magnificent or at least striking.  Others propose that it is the humble and simple that allow meaning to break through the bric-a-brac.  At one time the chapels of England had in their rafters two often repeated figures: a "Green man" (face often made of leaves) holding his mouth open and his tongue sticking out and a woman holding open her cunt as if to say, “here’s where you came from.”  In times of Puritanism, these were mostly destroyed, but a few were missed.

Green man

Pornography, whether that of sex or religion, is best handled frankly and with accurate understanding as a small institutionalized and graphic depiction of something so intense and mysterious that no human mind -- conscious or unconscious -- can ever grip it.  But all of us can feel it in our own bodies which sustain and express themselves in minds that can depict, enjoy, participate if we can just figure out how to do it.  Probably not in a book.  Check the rafters.

Sheilanagig