VISUALIZING

We have all been told that human knowledge is so overwhelming now that we begin to depict it in graphs of ideas, illuminations like the fabulous computer tracings in color of the connections among brain neurons as they record history and hope in circuits of trillions inside our skulls, the idea that I tried to capture in my worship thesis called "The Bone Chalice."  Some of the variations of individual loopings are on Google Images, arranged differently when the computer was given different instructions, but all symbolic/artistic depictions of something to believe, to be seen, instead of being described in words.  No one can see these tracings in the mush of neurons in a skull.

The computer generated portrait of a human connectome -- the presumed electrochemical ties between neural cells in the brain -- is a stunning portrait of the capacity of thought in one mind --  what I used to call the thought-fire in the 'bone chalice," the web in the head.

The next computer image of tracings is completely virtual, that is, it does not exist in a form we can see because it is about relationships among narratives published in one magazine, called "Nature."  All of these dots, putatively called scientific papers, are depicted as docs with the relationships among them traced by reference and influence.  It must be arbitrary to some degree according to the humans deciding the subjects and relationships, but it is still impressive and even beautiful, partiicularly in its video form which is capable of showing development over time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=274&v=GW4s58u8PZo&feature=emb_logo

This Nature article also uses the method of computer generated connections.  It is about the connections between individual thinking people who write narrative scientific manuscripts deriving from each other's work.  It is a way that humans together amount to far more than any one person.  

Another accumulation of connections has not been computerized, so far as I know.  I'm talking about the presenting bonding between two people.  We talk about "six degrees of separation", which is similar but not quite the same.  What if all the people I have had a relationship with were shown as dots and then the filaments connecting us, not just me to them but the ties among them?  

We know that somehow the "frame of expression" (my phrase but Porges description of how two people present to each other, noting breath, heart beat, muscle tension, voice, and -- most of all -- gaze/eye contact, a phenomenon called "empathy" that allows some of us to "enter" each other, something like the intimacy of sex/attachment, and to create something virtual that is trans-human, fluid and creative.  The web of thought as organized into disciplines is something like that interconnected empathy, at least if it's read with understanding and extended with a new "paper". 

One thinker estimates that there are over 250 disciplines when once there were three recognized categories in major thought:  theology, medicine and law.  In the beginning all three looked pretty much like theology.  That is, the disciplines were believed to describe tha knowledge of god, the fundamental categories of the universities as well as the universe.  Humanities were peripheral.  Now the art of depiction and presentation has become the means of grasping the huge morphing body of thought.  I would love to see a computer graphic of the disciplines or even of the humanities.

The trans-individual connections have developed parallel to the mapping and interacting of knowledge.  The internet has shaken the university monopoly on how we think, but presented the new problem of false relationships.  This was aways in existence, but kept to a minimum if only by capacity.

Now a third process develops in a new way.  In the beginning of hominins, the virtual space created by relationship (which can be shared by, for instance, a person and a dog so that they understand each other) is formed by the mother/infant bond, growing from nurturing interaction like feeding, cleaning and comforting.  Then the bonds of attachment that form in the ideal family extends through the genealogy.  Continuing the hierarchy and heterogenity of relationship, humans organize themselves by occupation, residence and goals.  Eventually, responding to ecology, they become tribes and nations, and even develop the United Nations or the institutions they call "religion."  

What we now realize that though these ties are "real", they are always a bit illusion because the "real" is electromagnetic code that is carried in our DNA which develops and is borrowed from all the codes around us, even the ones that are not human or even mammal or any preceding form of life as evolution tries to tell us.  We are in part even the result of the molecular isotopes of the mineral elements around us.  Most of these codes are kept at "arm's length" by our skins and only conscious in small percentages, single digits, which we can handle only in concept bunches that are given names and become "real" to us, even though they are only what the neural cells of the brain and the rest of the body can perceive and weave into what it already knows, what parent taught it.

Our lives interweave with other lives -- plants, animals and microbes -- mostly time-limited as individual entities, but often intense and significant to the human mind.  We are the first creatures capable of considering our own survival as a category but doomed to death as individuals, no matter how dear we are to others.  We can stand apart and imagine what might happen if this or that were changed, but we don't necessarily agree about what works and even what ought to survive.

But we are also capable to an exquisite degree to what the original "learning" excluded: the simple enjoyment of the flow of sensory code as we walk in the world, the beloved beauty of what is around us from sky to sea, day and night, summer and winter, in the great twirling pulse of the planet whether we are there or not.  These computer-generated tracings are part of it.

A RE-POST ABOUT THE INSTITUTIONAL WORSHIP OF THE UUA

“The Bone Chalice” started out as a simple proposition: that worship services didn’t have to be the same old “hymn sandwiches” even for the Christian-based religious groups like the Unitarian Universalists.  Indeed, the whole idea came out of the Pacific Northwest District’s workshops at Leadership Schools designed by Peter Raible, Rod Stewart, and Ord Elliott in the Seventies.  In seminary I began to run into issues that I couldn’t quite grasp and then lately issues so amazing and new that they seem to change everything, except that they don’t.  They confirm what I thought from the beginning.  

Alan Deale, Peter Raible, Rod Stewart at Fort Worden, WA

Historically, the Unitarian movement has always been a “thought” game:  principles, logic, academia.  Services are exercises in words.  They come from the Jewish root of the Middle Eastern source: the study and prayer groups.  The Universalist movement is Jesus-based, focused on compassion, forgiveness, women.  It values the Communion, an act of giving and nurturing.  This usually hidden schism affects the design of ceremonies.

Mostly it has been UU men who have gotten interested in liturgical design and they generally have seen it in a priestly light: that is, a primary figure directs the event and a supernatural overtone is not discouraged.  In the UU context in America, there have been several experimental sub-types:

Vern Barnett

ABRAXAS, a group, on the one hand picked up the English Vespers pattern (Rev. Duke Gray) and on the other the use of materials drawn from world religions.  (Rev. Vern Barnett, Center for Religious Experience and Study, Kansas City.)  There was also strong input from Rev. Fred Wooden and Rev. Mark Belletini, who both entered through music, both traditional and newly composed.

Dean Willard Sperry

Dean Willard Sperry at Harvard used the syllogism of thesis/antithesis/resolution as a worship pattern and was mostly sermon-centered.

Rev. Von Ogden Vogt used traditional European Christian structure in both worship and building but filled them with industrial images, which to him were the cutting edge of modernity: steamships and locomotives.  His ideas were used to create the First Unitarian Church of Chicago, which is patterned on an actual European cathedral, but embellished with industrial images

Rev. Kenneth Patton, a Universalist, kept the structure but went to science: the cosmos, anthropology, and a steady flow of compelling human images expressed in words.

The feminist movement brought in a new concern for words, since English is so gender-linked, but also an entry point for lay people and women who were less interested in being “priests” than in organizing cooperative experiences; a wave of new music composed to be inclusive  (Carolyn McDade); more openness to the “enthusiastic” emotional Christian denominations and the folk element in the Catholic context; sharing of space (sometimes members) with the Metropolitan Community Church congregations; Starhawk; Third Force Psych exercises. 

  

Alan Deale and Harlan Limpert, First Unitarian Church of Portland, OR

Norbert Capek's flower communion expanded into a whole family of communions, most notably the Ceremony of Water Mingling, which had universal precedents.

Meadville/Lombard Seminary, where I began work on this subject, was a tiny seminary attached to the University of Chicago Divinity School.  It was the most conservative of the three possibilities I considered and the most academically stringent, which is what I wanted though I had to struggle.  The new theories of Foucault et al were just taking hold and no faculty member had studied them.  Though much of that work comes out of language, esp. semantics and semiotics, it was trying to access “meta” language, primal thought.  

Dean Barnlund

My undergrad School of Speech work at NU had included Dean Barnlund’s “Language and Thought” classes (mostly based on S.I. Hayakawa at that point).  Likewise, since childhood I’d read fairy tales and mythology, which should have led me to Eliade, but at Meadville he was inaccessibly in residence.   His "discipline" is called Comparative Religion or History of Religion.  (Joe Campbell is a “cousin,” a popularizer of the same concepts.)

The important point is that my faculty advisor, John Godbey, wanted me to have a faith standpoint but I didn’t.  I had an experience standpoint.  He wanted me to have "God", though he understood the idea that “He” could only be accessed through a mask.  He didn't want to confront my dismissal of God because we were supposed to pluralistic.  Nevertheless, to him, a conservative man, a liturgy that was not based on formal philosophy and words, was not worship.  At least it was not academic and academic was the route to ministry. Thesis paralyzed.

A challenging and therefore valuable parishioner in Missoula balked at the cost of having a minister, as well as the role itself.  Sunday morning services, which I provided two Sundays out of the month, were not worth his pledge of $100 a month.  He could go to a movie or read a book to get the same ideas.  He valued only the sermon, which is pretty typical of many UU’s.  He had been a lawyer and could do handsprings with our principles.  He recognized that the UUA is an institution but could not see any “spirituality” in it.  Even our social justice programs to him were limited and self-serving.  (They do buy considerable respect and influence.)  All denominations are socio-economic.  I agree.

Headquarters of the UUA

Is a religious institution irreligious?  That is, religious institutions ennoble, accompany, and justify wars on every hand.  What is the difference between all that and the deep power of somethingorother that makes us value and love our lives, even in the face of death?  Or give up our lives for what we love?

In the struggle between the individual and the group, a religious institution is clearly on the side of the group, even if it explicitly states that the individual must be protected and honored.  Institutions pretend to be based on new visions of truth, but to use the Biblical metaphor, they put new wine in old wineskins.  Like Von Ogden Vogt, they only replace the symbols in the frieze around the sanctuary.