NEUROLITURGY

Liminal space or dissociation?

Over and over for decades I’ve been rewriting and extending research on the design of liturgy/worship or whatever you personally call your time that is set aside for focus, reflection, awareness of higher powers, or however else you refill the aquifers of your personhood.  The short version of this is what we students asked in seminary:  “Can you call the Holy Spirit?”  The long version was my attempted thesis which I could NOT get past the seminary faculty but could not lay aside either.

When one researches this field, one soon realizes that a person can go to the library and check out an entire worship service printed on paper, even the music written out and when to stand or ring a bell.   (It's not likely to set your hair on fire.) Therefore, an academic sees writing and words (if you allow musical notes to be “words”) as what liturgy “is.”  No shaman ever thinks that.  Likewise, theology is about words and a certain kind of reasoning.  No shaman bothers with those.

Lately researchers for religion have been fussing that people keep searching for “spirituality” and don’t like institutions.  The trouble is that few seminaries really teach “spirituality,” though some of them are liturgical.  The troubles at General Theological Seminary in Chelsea, Manhattan, can easily be interpreted as the upside-down situation of a lawyer/social scrambler president, who thinks theology is like law, colliding with a student body young enough to want the spiritual content of beloved liturgy.  One clue is his tone-deaf decision to reschedule morning worship from 8AM to 10AM.  It’s a way to start the day, dummy!  Not just another class-like gathering.  He has succeeded in converting a dedicated community into a corporation court trial.

New Guinea peoples keep the bodies of their loved ones.

It was clear to me even when I first gathered my bizarre set of thesis examples (cannibalism in the Andes, New Guinea ceremonies, a wedding with a dead groom) that there were certain “givens” to spiritually transforming or supporting events.  The concept of liminality, for instance -- the creation of a sequestered and safe place where normal social constraints had been removed and emotion could erupt or simply well up -- is a solid indicator.  But words or even an authority figure were not necessary.  I saw that “spirituality” was a function of the pre- sub- un- conscious  and that it was more a matter of art than reason.  It is FELT.  But it is full of MEANING, which some conflate with words, forgetting that “a poem must not mean but be.”  More like dreams.  Metaphors.  Psychoanalysis.  Interpretive dance.

So I feel joyfully entitled to claim the little corner of the current tsunami of thought about neuro-research that I now label “neuro-liturgy.”  I’m not claiming to account for mystical experiences, which is the way the subject has been approached in some literature.  (I googled.)  I want to know what we should keep in mind when designing an effective experience in ANY human context.  How do we call the “unconscious” since it is not cognizant in a spoken way but certainly aware (conscious in a felt way) of anything inside the skin, including those anatomical structures meant to reach out to whatever it is “out-skin.”   How do we discover the nature of DESIRE, which Mark Solms tells us is what Freud concluded drives human life, the key life-force that gives rise to everything else, particularly survival?  

Human identity is an emergent phenomenon dependent on the richness of in-skin experience gathered by the entire body in the course of interaction with the “reality” that is “out-skin.”  Human brain anatomy is “cumulative” which means that each evolved or mutated ability must be built on and come to terms with whatever the brain was doing earlier.  The two main divisions are between the autonomic and limbic systems that are shared with all mammals (some parts of the system with all vertebrates) and those abilities acquired in the course of developing the cortex.  This later part is -- beyond everything else -- responsive, always rebuilding itself in terms of actual tissue.

1.  The sensorium

The single simplest and most potent thing a person can do to strengthen spirituality is to expand consciousness, both knowledge of the sights, sounds, tastes, temperatures, textures, smells of the world and awareness of how they interact, what they symbolize, how they are drawn from the natural world -- and awareness of one’s inner world, how one is “feeling,” in terms of affect but also bodily comfort or tension.  

2.  Maps and Metaphors

There is simply no possible way to keep “in mind” everything the body is capable of sensing, so we have evolved ways to sort and bundle information.  On the surface of the cortex there are evidently at least two maps.  One is a grid (supported by specific cells that note where the body is in space -- “out-skin”) and another is the homuncular map of the body that records the amount of neuron space devoted to intake from any specific point “in-skin.”

Memories are filed according to the emotional “vibe” and the sensory records of the moment, but they are not preserved as remembered units.  Rather, when they are called up they are gathered back together from separate records.  The process of memory can go wrong in ways that have not entirely been explained so far.  Suppressed memory, mistaken memories, memories based on erroneous information, and memories that hijack the emotional system are all being investigated.

The brain connectome

3.  The Connectome

Somewhat similarly, at any given moment the brain is connecting clusters of neurons in a kind of “chord” or pattern of interaction.  These patterns shift according to the task being presented, and represent what is felt as meaning as well as awareness of a certain cognizance.  A common transition to use as reference is “going to sleep” which is sort of semi-conscious but can happen without any intention.  Waking up is an opposite but parallel phenomenon -- not consciously intended but easily conditioned.  But so are many of the things that happen in sleep and a high proportion of what happens when awake.

Oh, yeah?

4.  Expression

Voluntary and involuntary kinds of expression include facial cues on up a scale of intention, control and inspiration to fine arts.  Expression in all ways possible are often guided and powered by feeling, the pre- un- sub- functioning of the brain.  This produces meaning as well as expressing it.

This meaning is often recorded "outskin" either purposely or naively as material culture: clothing, instruments, music, architecture, painting, toys, decoration.  These things are “containers” for meaning.

5.  Community

It appears that the brain functions on several distinct levels, one being the thalamic limbic system of animal desire to survive (which, since we are not up-tight Viennese patriarchs, we can consider a GOOD thing), and the other being the cortex, esp. the prefrontal cortex.  In addition to the small structures or organelles of hippocampus and whatever, there are also individual kinds of cells that specialize in specific awareness.  They are a reminder that we are essentially a colony of collaborating one-celled animals united within a skin.

One of these cell specialties is empathy, which is clearly transpersonal and a way to join human awareness into community.  This is the point where private prayer and devotion meets the congregation that sings, prays, orally or physically responds, and listens together.  It remains a function of the individual human mind.  The generous will extend the ability to all mammals.

When the community of “boys at risk” expresses what they most yearn for, what their lifeforce desire might be, they speak of two modes:  one is the “beloved community” that provides shelter and supports identity (they know who you are and will help you), and the other is deep intimacy with another person.  These are “emergent” survival-based desires that when satisfied create meaning and transcendent experience.  Those of us who try to understand need great attentiveness to persons, the world, and ourselves.

http://www.digitalamherst.org/items/show/81

Keep me from going to sleep too soon
Or if I go to sleep too soon
Come wake me up. Come any hour
Of night. Come whistling up the road.
Stomp on the porch. Bang on the door.
Make me get out of bed and come
And let you in and light a light.
Tell me the northern lights are on
And make me look. Or tell me clouds
Are doing something to the moon
They never did before, and show me.
See that I see. Talk to me till
I'm half as wide awake as you
And start to dress wondering why
I ever went to bed at all.
Tell me the walking is superb.
Not only tell me but persuade me.
You know I'm not too hard persuaded. 

-- Robert Francis

THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS WRITING

There’s no such thing as writing.  All those people called “writers” you see in movies, on stage, in magazines, and all the writing about writers is a hoax.  All the prestige and awards and praise and respect and the money that rolls in -- it’s all a hoax.  When you see the “writer” portrayed as sensitive, exceptional, but an outsider; and then you see him or her pounding on a typewriter or scritching away with a pen; and then you see a big pile of crumpled up rough drafts; then something mysterious happens, the person is wreathed in light and words roll out onto paper.  Some angel steps out and dumps money on a table -- VOILA!   The writer is a young god or goddess.  Better than being a movie star because you don’t have to dress up.  It’s a myth.

Lucy Maude Montgomery pr photo

No one tells you that Lucy Maude Montgomery, who wrote the wonderful and inspirational “Anne of Green Gables”, committed suicide after years of drudgery repeating and repeating the same formula about “Anne” to please her publisher so she could pay bills -- the same as Louisa May Alcott.   My mother said, "Why can't you marry a nice Presbyterian minister and then everything would be all right."  Lucy Maude (same name as my mother) needed money because her nice Presbyterian minister husband was paralyzed with depression.  Louisa May's family was Unitarian, like me, but she was on the same treadmill.  No one points out all the miserable depressed men who went right on being miserable and depressed all their lives, thinking they could self-cure with writing.  It's fantasy. 

France loved Jim Welch.

Recently I’ve had occasion to talk to a young Blackfeet-enrolled writer who attended a famous writer’s workshop.  They didn’t teach him much -- specifically, not the courage it takes to be a writer, the risk, the danger, the level of work that is necessary.  The likelihood that someone will make you into a cash cow and not let you write what you want to write -- even if you’re Jimmie Welch.  Readers want brand consistency.

So what the heck IS writing?  It’s a metaphor.

A complexity of steps and motives are necessary and they are not different from the multitude of small functions and abilities that I frame out as the steps of worship -- which is really just focused intensity of being human.  No math necessary.  No dissection.  No posing.  You don’t even need a computer.  But there will be consequences, unpredictable.  Your unconscious may come out, but not because you want it to.  They call it "acting out."

Writing can’t be taught, but it can be learned.  It might not be saleable or even read by anyone.  A major part of it can be mastered without real public accomplishment happening.  No closure, no turning point, no epiphany or revelation.  No real explanation.  Some of it is found after the writer’s death and other people get rich from it.  Then there are the people who make a living by explaining you even though they never knew you and have no clue about your real, private, secret, dreaming life.

But there’s where it starts, where the sensory world and what it requires for survival, gets through the skin into the body and forms patterns in the mind.  If part of that is learning to read and if the person reads and reads and reads, they will have created a thick network of neurons in the brain that specializes in print, grammar, sequences of story, bits of dialogue, and a lot of other elements.  The thing is -- it’s all unconscious.  You don’t know it’s happening, it’s not on purpose, no one makes you do it, it just happens in there.  

Except for a lot of people, it doesn’t.  The neurons shrug and turn away.  But if their attention is caught by color, shape, line, contrast -- other visual elements that have nothing to do with writing but everything to do with seeing, they might paint.  Or it might be movement -- dance, athletic competitions.  It’s not a matter of choice.  It's choosing to DO it even before you can.  What was that meme going around about how many hours of practice it takes to master something?  Hundreds and hundreds.  It’s all unconscious.  

"Teaching writing" is then a matter of providing the opportunity to learn -- the space, the safety, the materials, the exposure, the time.  Bring your own motive.  Writing is the most minimalist art in one sense -- all you need is a surface and something to mark on it.  You could do it in solitary confinement, orally, by memorizing.  Since the material is life, it is everywhere, but like the water in which the fish swims, the writer has to realize it’s there.

What a person actually does with words might stay spoken instead of marked down.  It’s nice if people will respond.  Some of them might know where to find things you’ll like.  No one CAN tell you what to like, but you can figure it out.  There are things that will keep you from writing:  starvation (not just being hungry), sickness, no sleep, drugs, people mocking and sneering, worry, fear, fear, fear.  Exploitation.  Madness can be an advantage.

So you have stored up sense memories about a place and time.  You feel the patterns of it, you can see the dancing mosaic going on.  You begin to write everything down.  Confusion gets in the way.  Now comes some stuff you can learn.  A good teacher can chop it up so as to explain grammar, usage, sentence structure, stuff like antecedents, metaphor strategy.  Actually, you probably already know it, but it’s unconscious so the problem is figuring out what you already know and learning to manage it: your own internal life.  Learn without self-accusation because you're hitting the limits.  It's a good and necessary thing.

Once upon a time there were people who cruised the country, looking for writing that was marketable.  That’s as gone as writing books on clay tablets with a little stylus.  Those scouts disappeared along with grandma’s apple pie and the nuclear family.  You’re on your own now.  I have no advice.  Anyone who says they do is a con artist.  There is no publishing in the sense we once knew it.  Neither are there bonanzas of money.  There are a LOT of jobs for people willing to write in harness, producing unattributed print that explains, persuades, argues, advises and so on.  You can make a living that way.  (Wikipedia is a scam, getting you to write entries for free.)  Teaching is writing in harness.

Teaching can destroy your ability to write.  It can even destroy your ability to read.  Nothing is more destructive that the contemporary school lockstep through grades and certificates.  Public or private, day-care to post doc.  Writing now is a great numbing glacier of trivia.  It can destroy your soul.

Oh, come on.  That’s over-dramatic.  But that’s the pattern I see.  So, okay, how does one endure the Great Wall of Winter?  Well, there’s this ingenious thing called the Internet.  A blog is as good as a book and will probably be read by a lot more people.  You can illustrate it.  You can’t confine it.  Every published book of mine has soon showed up as a pirated PDF on the Internet, including the book published by the University of Calgary Press.  Copyright is a creature of nations, which are as much threatened and limited as publishing.  Literarily, we’re not far away from “Game of Thrones” except that the Thrones are not nations -- they’re affinity groups and transnational corporations.

In spite of all that, sometimes a hand reaches out to take yours in the dark, sometimes an arrow pierces your heart, sometimes you look up and see eyes as blue as those of newborn kittens.  Then you think,  “How did they do that?  I want to do that.”  So figure it out.  And do it.  Let it be its own satisfaction. 

The last step in this 5-step thing I have going is the factor of sharing with others, the empathy, the reaction, the consequences.  Uncontrollable.  You take your chances.  All this is drastic, but it’s metaphorical.  Hyperbole: exaggeration for effect.  Except I’m telling you the truth and the bottom line is always survival.  Do what you have to.  Smash all mirrors.  Buy more ink or toner.

ARCHAIC MUSHROOMS

The psychological impact of unexpected cold wet weather is that the household tightens around the heat sources. (Squibbie under the cat-incubator which is the hanging lightbulb next to my computer and Crackers on the electric blanket.)  My foot-warmer is on and I’m wearing socks.  I wouldn't be surprised to find mushrooms in the yard.  Now I’m retrieving “saves” from the summer when my brain was looser and more inclined to wander.

http://edge.org/conversation/touched-by-the-tremendum-march-27-1990

Here’s a remarkable one from “The Edge” which has a sub-category called “The Reality Club”.  It is an argument AGAINST “reality” as we define it today, entitled “Touched by the Tremendum”  The talker is Terence McKenna and the date of this talk is 3-27-90, though one might guess it was from a couple of decades earlier since it is a “pitch” for psychedelic experience triggered by psilocybin.  I saved it because I am so interested in the human mind and whatever will keep it from being locked into one punishing connectome -- call it Calvinism if you want to, but it could be fascism, or profit.

Briefly, and perhaps not quite accurately, McKenna goes back into the paleobiome.  Our curiousity about it has generated a lot of theories.  There is general agreement that humans evolved in Africa. We are thought to have begun like the other primates as arboreal bands living on fruit.  Then a planetary climate shift -- I need a geologist here -- dried up whatever climate patterns supported the forests so the hominids came down to the grasslands where they followed grazing herds to pick off laggards and carrion.   

Now McKenna goes theory airborne. The dung the herds left behind were the growing media for psychedelic mushrooms, which humans discovered.  Also, the exposure to new foods and new social patterns triggered many mutations, including the transformation of arboreal location hoots and hollers to pack-hunting signals, which led to language.  As a bioethic premise, this is lots of fun to explore.  He feels that the mushroom-powered capacity to dream led to the development of the early Mediterranean climax cultures.  He thinks that the symbols found in early writing and taken to mean “wheat” are really about mushrooms.

The next step is that the horse culture raiders from the high grassy Mongol plateaus, not just riding but also driving chariots, came down on these people and pushed them north into Europe, where they made homes in the shelter of the cliffs along rivers.  (This is Neanderthal habitat.  It also makes chariots impossible.)  Just before this shift is a time he calls “the Archaic.”  McKenna’s idea is that what we seem to be searching for in our predatory and destructive modern lives is a restoration of the Archaic through dreams.  He feels that our fascination with both medieval Europe and classical Greece were attempts to recover our capacity to dream that didn’t go back early enough.  In Europe, deprived of herd-supported fungus, the people turned to honey and learned to ferment it into mead.

His reasoning is centered on Western Civilization as it developed in Europe.  Why didn’t the people following the great American prairie herds ever get hooked on buffalo chip mushrooms?  Or did they?  There was peyote, of course.  McKenna and his brother went to South America and returned with the news of ayahuasca that enchanted many.  In fact, it turns out that Central and South America have a rich and complicated history with psychedelics.  It wouldn’t be unreasonable to premise that humans are always trying to get out of their minds, whether it’s through the generation of endomolecules like adrenaline or serotonin or oxcytocin or testosterone -- or by ingesting something from the environment.  Deprived of access to vegetative sources in rural life, we turn to manufacturing designer drugs.  (I’m not counting Big Pharma.)

I looked up psilocybin, which appears to be one of the most benign of these substances, often classified as an endotheist drug because it is said to be spiritual and put one in touch with “god.”  (Again, this betrays the European hegemony over matters of the mind by defining anything that feels holy as “theist,” related to a big being in the sky.)  In Oregon, where there is lots of rain and many cow pastures, people go out looking for Magic Mushrooms quite a lot.  Only some kinds of mushrooms have the proper substance.  And it seems to be rather fugitive, so that sometimes drying the fungi disperses the psilocybin.  At least those who went into the fields got fresh air and exercise.  Of course, one must avoid toadstools.

All ingested molecules must interact with the molecules already present in the body, including both those floating in the blood because they have been produced various ways and those inside the cells.  The effect of an entheogen is not just altered by these metabolic interactions, but is also much affected by context.  Look back at the five steps of function that I framed up some weeks ago.

By Thammuz

In terms of the sensorium, the first step, which is the gathering of information from outside the skin, psilocybin seems to increase acuity of eyesight and general sensitivity.  The effect on the second step, which is the sorting and filtering of the neuron coding of the sensorium, may be where the substance is most active.  The third step is also a process likely affected, as this is where the conclusions of the sensory nexus come together into value judgments and editing.  The hope is that these character-producing patterns can be opened up to possibility and renewal.

The fourth step, which is taking action, is discouraged in a religious atmosphere of meditation and isn’t safe when what is happening inside the skin is more powerful than what is happening outside the skin.  People may feel they are in a different world entirely and forget which side of the street to drive on.

The fifth step, which is empathic sharing with the people around one, depends on who they are and what they think, because that will affect the way the experience is understood and what happens in future.  A kid or outsider may get contradictory opinions: one of approval and one of blame and restriction.  Usually such a contradiction makes the person defend the practice.

At least, in contrast to the home lab inventions, psilocybin is organic and has been used for millennia, not unlike alcohol or marijuana.   One can find it spontaneously and without cost.  Those who feel the secret to a good future is buried in the Archaic past will value this.  Big Pharma, without some way to make big profits exclusive to itself, will continue to demonize psychedelics of this kind while promoting equally marginal psychotropic medicines because they are medical and conform to certain protocols imposed by the government -- which is controlled by Big Pharma.

At the same time religious professionals based in institutional churches such as Christian denominations and Jewish synagogues, will rely on sensory cues (buildings, music, incense, flowers, candles, formal clothes), prayer, strong metaphor and community consensus to support a feeling of holiness and meaning.  It’s harder than it sounds, which is why many people only know blunted and mediocre experiences that have been brought in from other places and are not supported with proper training.  

I tried to cook up a diagram that would relate the health-preoccupied Christian Science church to the industrial/capitalist CVS juggernauts to the homeopathists and herbalists to the military/mafia of street drugs, but it was too complex.  Maybe the rhizome pattern with mycelia instead of stolons.  Anyway, maybe the entheogens and endomolecules are not the real key to the longing we feel, however Archaic they may be.

The strongest drug is always passion.  If religion doesn’t supply it, there’s always sex.  Or danger.  Or narcissism.  Words and dogma are judy abracadabra from outside the skin.  Only when meaning is felt inside can the real connection happen.