Sunday, November 03, 2019

SEEDS OF HOLINESS

There's really no such thing as a "new" religion in the way a kid might think of it: new arbitrary rules, new pretentious buildings, new privileged leaders.  Those are what we call "organized religion" which are really governing bodies in competition or coordination with national governments.  They respond to the difference between secular and sacred, making the "sacred" description possible in order to keep the secular protection from ideological interference.  Not that it works.  The moral has escaped the sacred, the obligatory obedience at pain of stigma and ostracism, and is now a component of secular organization unless there is a dictator or -- as in the US -- a failure of realization when people are starving, homeless, suicidal, in spite of presumably having the right to vote.  Mass incarceration is also a component.

That is, the religious morality of the secular is order and status quo for whoever is in control.  Therefore, religious institutions must preserve their separation or be revealed as collaborators, like some of today's apologists for Trump.  Mostly the separation is marked by being excused from taxation.  These characteristics are generally hidden.  Religious institutions are creatures of a group and if individuals become disillusioned, they are ostracized to protect the integrity of the group.

But there is another aspect to what we call "religion" that cannot be mandated or made a principle or dogma. Something mysterious and tremendous happens in the consciousnesses of human beings, one at a time and unexpectedly and not in everyone.  It is a "feeling" for lack of a better word.  Most of what "runs" a human body is as unconscious as it is in any mammal, guiding survival, operating the hungers and fulfillments.  They say only 2% or 5% or some other single digit of percentage points is actually conscious, accessible to reflection.  

Most of us have occasionally had a "feeling" that couldn't be put into words.  We call them intuitions, or instincts, or awarenesses that can sometimes be captured by art, but not by words.  I began to think about "feeling" when I first read books by Suzanne Langer (1895-1985), who was particularly interested in art.  Her Wikipedia entry is a quick way to catch up with her thought.

"Susanne Langer's distinction between discursive versus presentational symbols is one of her better known concepts.  Discursive symbolization arranges elements (not necessarily words) with stable and context invariant meanings into a new meaning. Presentation symbolization operates independently of elements with fixed and stable meanings. The presentation cannot be comprehended by progressively building up an understanding of its parts in isolation. It must be understood as a whole. For example, an element used in one painting may be used to articulate an entirely different meaning in another. The same principle applies to a note in a musical arrangement—such elements independently have no fixed meaning except in the context of their entire presentation."

This is a key difference and highly relevant to me, since I came to "religion" through ceremony, both the individual and the congregational performance, that is, both prayer and worship service or mass, something enacted.  I do not confine my ideas to Christian forms or content.  I'm interested in something universal among humans and began by collecting examples of performance that seemingly had nothing in common except this "feeling" of holiness or meaning.

"This led Langer to construct a biological theory of feeling that explains that "feeling" is an inherently biological concept that can be connected to evolutionary genetics. In her essay, Mind, Langer goes into depth to connect the early evolution of man to how we perceive the mind today. She explains that early organisms underwent refinery through natural selection, in which certain behaviors and functions were shaped in order for them to survive. Langer describes the body's organs to all operate within a specific rhythm, and these rhythms must cooperate with one another to keep the organism alive. This development, Langer explains, was the beginning of the framework for the Central Nervous System, which Langer believed to be the heart of cognitive interactions among humans."

This leads directly into contemporary research into how minds work and Porges' discovery of the third autonomic nerve connecting brain directly to the "frame of expression" face and breast which is the basis of true empathy, participation in a shared virtual world with a correspondent, a capacity that grows from the interaction of mother and infant in play.  I am interested in this "virtual" concept, which is not physically demonstrable, rather than language or even symbolism.  I think it is earlier than concepts that can be transformed into words, which require structuring as grammar with meaning in itself.  The common example is English, which requires subject and verb, possibly objects -- a thing that acts.  An inchoate example, pre-verbal, might be dreams where forms or colors exist as themselves.

In seminary I never could find understanding or guidance about this line of thought.  Part of it was a backlash against what was called "phenomenology".  Leaving words of logic for sensory precursors was considered to be a Christian heresy, since for them "in the beginning was the word" and the basis for academics was the Bible rather than the life of Jesus the Christ.  Partly it was that Langer was female and today's indignation over discounting people of the "wrong" gender has brought her back into consideration.  But even though I was forty years old in seminary, I still didn't have the skill to make my case.

I'm including in the various versions of this bookish manuscript I call "The Bone Chalice," the examples of people who seemed to have the "feeling" of holiness through a performance of some kind in the broadest sense, from the anthropological to the psychological to the accidental.  At some point I was reading material about and written by martyrs and saints who felt they had direct contact with God, which they described in oxymoron paradoxes:  high/cold, embraced/falling, warm/cold, nourished/starving.  When I began to understand that the brain works in circuits that echo chemical status, going from depletion to completion and back again rather like thermostats, it occurred to me that consciousness of holiness might be not one extreme or the other of these circuits, but the "lighting up" in some way of whole circuits.  I'm on the lookout for research evidence.



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