Excerpt from "THE BONE CHALICE"

INTRODUCTION

SOURCES

The “controlling metaphor” for this discussion is the idea that the form of an event is a container for what happens.  The more intense the event, the stronger the container needs to be.  Even a free-form improvised non-verbal event needs a container.  The Catholic mass form is very strong with a long history.  Basically, it is study of written material (derived from Jewish study of the Torah) followed by celebratory sharing of communion (a metaphorical form of sacrifice).  Experiments with mind-altering substances in non-verbal cultures are always attended by adepts who can control what happens.

There is much to explore here.  Are “forms” logical and rational?  Is the content always passionate emotion?  What happens if the same content is put into a new form?

My sources for this thinking about designed ceremonies were derived from Method Acting classes, Blackfeet ceremonies, myth, natural history, and comparative religion.  When I entered seminary, it was clear that I was not functioning the same way as the more conventional people.  To make this simple, they were all thinking like white male grad students aiming for a PhD: rationality, precedence, introspection and literateness.  Once I realized that was the prevailing and natural context in most academic places, I was able to find the minority streams of thought, books that explained how to choose my own path while still functioning with others.

It is easy to shrug this position off as peculiar to the Unitarian Universalist movement, which allowed me space and something like camouflage.  But Ethical Culture and humanist groups would have done the same thing.  Particularly because the tradition I was in (Unitarian more than Universalist despite a merger in 1961) was relatively affluent, educated, and in 1978 still mostly male, everything was as professional as lawyers and doctors — that is, one’s vocation was meant to be professed, stated.  Even the faculty at Meadville/Lombard had credentials meaning they were committed to a faith — though a broad one — and to an academic inheritance.  We were expected to operate through logic, reading historical and theoretical materials, and conviction.  My conviction was one of seeking.  But my basic definitions were out of line, so how could they certify what I believed?

Their method left out some of the most religious people I knew: nonliterate, ceremonial, connected to the land and tribe, the Blackfeet tribe on their reservation in Montana and reserves in Alberta, united by location on the East Slope of the Rocky Mountains.  Some people claim that because of the compression of the continents there, forced by the underlying plate tectonics, there are dynamics at work but unperceived.  Others look to the sky, grass and buffalo that shaped the culture.

I never did connect with any anthropologists at the University of Chicago, though now I know that some work was being done that would have fit exactly with what I was looking for.  My faculty knew nothing about anthropology.  Indeed, if I’d gotten too interested in their indigenous work, it would have pulled me out of preparation for the ministry, which is the point of a seminary.  The denomination was, after all, paying my tuition and they were my side admission gate, a subset of the U of Chicago mechanisms for keeping order and focus.

True to the idea of a university, a collection of thinking communities, there was forming at the time a group of people developing a complex of thoughts described by Mark Johnson in “The Meaning of the Body” as “the origin of meaning in organism-environmental coupling: a nonrepresentational view of mind.”  The names of the people include Victor Turner, George Lakoff, Eugene Gendlin, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Suzanne Langer and more.  They were labeled pejoratively “phenomenologists.”

Since the thinking that I did in Chicago and used in my ten years of ministry, the world and myself have moved on.  I left parish ministry in 1989, but continue as an independent scholar.  In 1999 I was able to move to a disintegrating little house in the village of Valier, next to the Blackfeet Reservation where I spent so many happy years.  Since that time, some transformative new ideas have dawned. 

DESIGNING SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE

DAWNING KNOWLEDGE

Mircea Eliade’s “The Sacred and the Profane” marks the study of consciousness with the felt distinction between the sacred and the profane.  Many, but not all, people have had the sensation of sacredness.  It is something real but not universal, and evidently not controllable.  Like the Holy Spirit metaphor of wind, it “bloweth where it listeth,” a phenomenon of distinct but strongly emotional consciousness.  

A science-based, verifiable and major shift in thinking about consciousness is from neurology where fMRI and other technological strategies have allowed us to see thinking as it happens — not implied results but actual ions moving in and out of neurons and so on, which has introduced a new language of “-omes” to describe the libraries of molecules and cells in potential and patterning, from the genome to the “mineralome.”  We have new support for the idea of humans as evolved animals and new respect for what a cell or a neuron can do.  

The connectome is the name of the dynamic process of impulses traveling between neurons and being processed in various small nodes of sorting, editing, triggering, and storing the coded impulses of sensory cells and organs.  The shifting patterns of connection are physical evidence of consciousness accommodating our awareness of the world, the embodiment of our identities.  Designing experience is a matter of arranging events that will shift that connectome to get the wanted effect.

Mysterious as that sounds, it is no more mysterious than the sensory preparation for church or theatre or court.  A short list:

Bells ringing.

An impressive entrance with big embellished doors.

A wide and steep staircase.

A foyer meant to be an architectural transition, perhaps with

      certain lighting like chandeliers.

The sight of familiar people, or people marked by costumes

      indicating roles.

The sound of an orchestra tuning.
Incense or smudging.

On one hand we are tempted to think of ourselves as “meat computers” but on the other hand we are forced to admit that our more elegant experiences and empathies are far beyond anything a computer can achieve, even a self-taught OS able to play chess, a simply computational system cannot achieve embodied organism-environment coupling.  Human awareness and action is an accumulation of functions that includes everything back to the first eukaryotic one-celled creature.

As the horizon of artificial intelligence moves outward, the dimensions of human experience also expand and elaborate.  We can feel ourselves still mutating into new evolving creatures.  This demands a different kind of spiritual life, one that will support individuals in a time when institutions of all sorts are confused and even failing.  If the social containers of our lives are falling away, can the spiritual flame sustain us?

METHOD ACTING IS A FORM OF EMBODIMENT

In undergrad classes (1957-1961) I was on scholarship and had to maintain a B average, which I did.  Luckily, I had enough A’s to offset my two lowest grades: a C in acting and a C in philosophy of religion.  These are probably the two courses that have been most meaningful in my life during the half-century since.  Part of the reason I got low grades is that I was thinking about the issues too much to focus on tests of content.  Both professors were exceptional: Alvina Krause and Paul Schilpp.  I want to talk about Stanislavski’s Method acting as AK taught it.

Basically, this approach to acting was very similar to Mark Johnson’s understanding of embodied meaning, using sense memories to manage the actor’s inner life in a way that communicated the meaning of the character in a play.  We worked on our bodies as instruments — doing exercises of posture, voice and movements — but also increasing awareness of each other and building empathy.  A big component was studying cultures and how they pattern emotion and reaction, what the embodiment people might call “framing”.

Alvina Krause

But always the base of operations was the senses, including internal body feedback.  It is now a pretty well-confirmed premise that the brain’s index to what it knows, particularly memory, is filed according to senses associated with the content so that it is not frivolous to think of grasping a concept in terms of the sense-ambiance of the moment, for the senses interact to create a sort of globe that contains knowledge.  This is why Johnson speaks of “the aesthetics of human understanding.”  The director of a play aims to create just such a “globe” of sight and sound in a way that will illuminate the meaning of the presentation by being both vivid and coherent.  It should offer feeling, not just evidence.  The same is true of religious ceremonies.

When intensity is high and the actors have properly entered the inner lives of their roles, something palpable happens that is fabulous but also a little frightening until the actors have a bit of experience: the boundaries melt, onstage becomes realer than real, and somehow the audience is able to participate in that.  Even actors working for film find this to be true, though it’s more difficult for a number of reasons.

Paula Ragusa and Dick Benjamin

my classmates

Still, it isn’t necessary to have an audience or at least not a big one.  These moments happened in acting class with only a few observers or even when working in practice halls.  The most powerful idea coming out of embodiment theory is the ability to “merge” or attune with other people.  In terms of music, it’s being perfectly in tune, and in that context it’s also very powerful.  Bob Scriver, who was famous for the quality of his high school orchestras in the Fifties, used to say that if junior high musicians learned to play perfectly in tune, they could sound as good as professionals.  Witnessing true engagement between actors is much like hearing music perfectly in tune.

A friend who expected to become a psychiatrist used to observe AK’s acting classes with me, a practice that was neither encouraged or discouraged so long as observers were quiet.  I met him when he was my assigned biology lab partner.  Much of our discussion after these acting classes was about rationality versus emotionality.  He was from that kind of student (usually male) full of introspection, trying to reason out the meaning of life instead of experiencing it.  I was the other way around, skipping in and out of logic, which was why we were friends — one of those opposite relationships, which can be very intimate, but maybe not physically.  He was not a “cold” philosopher: his close cohort called him “Hume.”  I loved him dearly and we remained friends after I left for Montana and he went on to a Ph.D. and teaching.

I’ve repeatedly sketched out my current understanding of how persons grow through life, beginning from conception, continuing through the school years, on into adulthood and through until death.  After one drastic pruning of brain cells in toddlerhood, there are several points of brain expansion — actual neuron development and connectome thickening — as at the adrenarche, puberty, and a crucial reconfiguring in early twenties that has no name except maybe maturity.  By this time a person is no longer confined to what’s inside one’s skin, but through empathy can extend awareness into all living beings and the world that sustains them.  Interaction, attunement, attachment, concatenation, and other subtle things with multi-syllabic names have embedded mere embodiment into a system of understanding and action.  It happens all by itself and may not be conscious at all.

Russians have not been so confined by the Platonic roots of thought that have made an obsession of what was once Enlightenment, which actively rejected emotion as a distortion, some kind of reversion to animal life, not as real as what Johnson calls “propositional” thought.  This elevation of math-driven and introspection-developed rationality, as free from emotion as possible, has become demonic in its ability to enforce dogma and justify domination.  It is the engine of terrorism and the enablement of crime.

And it’s stuck.  Even the UU’s with their list of principles that are supposed to be bulletproof, can’t get past them in order to join the universe and act with effectiveness.  Few can grasp that insisting on a list of principles is what the principles were supposed to oppose, a path to arrogance.  Once a person has arrived at a totally logical and convincing “proof” of something without awareness of the emotional structure of their own brain and the frame of their own family and culture, it is very hard to give up.  Efforts to enforce a rigid conviction of “rightness” is at the base of many a malignant family.

Of course, the Russians, for all their inquiry into the physical dynamics of emotional life, have not learned how to manage their rage and romanticism into a viable government.  Maybe it is the anguish of always slipping back into scarcity and brutality that drives their interest in operant conditioning, inherited mind, and the sharing of melancholy.  Or maybe their environment is so harsh that it limits them somehow.  Humans can never entirely overcome the planet.

"The Cherry Orchard"

Making oneself transparent is not always easy and is sometimes painful.  Sustaining empathy for other people takes energy and courage.  They don’t always want to be understood, particularly if they are victims of stigma that has taught them that the only safety is secrecy and deception.   For them, to be detected and understood is to be targeted.  Therapists and playwrights investigate under very specific and guarded circumstances and even then some inner dynamics are explosive when exposed to “oxygen.”  Actors and writers use various personas to buffer and reinvent, but the strategy doesn’t always work.

Community, if it is trustworthy, sustains individuals, keeps track of who they are so they can explore.  Therapy circles have never gone out of fashion, though some have turned toxic.  Others have devised a protocol, a system that guides discipline, that guarantees integrity, until it as well becomes corroded and worn.   Something like that has happened to both Freud and Stanislavski.

I'VE SOUGHT THIS WORLD FOR MANY YEARS

In dreams there was always a sense of a world behind the world, the world as it was in raw code before the brain sorted it and transformed it into what we call "reality."  Everyone told me I was nuts.  But now, now, I feel it.  I feel as though I’d just discovered that I am wearing red shoes and can click the heels together.

Mark Johnson’s “The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding” turns out to be a crystallization of a point of view that I used to think was a form of humanism that I’d worked around to radical inclusion, which I called “everythingism” to mock the whole idea of “isms.”  Sometimes I called it “scientific mysticism”, the kind of thought evoked by galaxies or the cleverness of microbes.  Some call it “Scientific Atheism”, because they can’t tear their minds away from the theism/atheism dichotomy.

Johnson calls his thought embodied meaning or sometimes immanent meaning.  It seems to enable what I call “sacrality,”  the overwhelming feeling that can come upon a person suddenly and that is named and described various ways, though it’s not quite describable in words.

This is Barbara Ehrenreich’s description in "Living with a Wild God":  “The world flamed into life … Something poured into me and I poured into it … It was a furious encounter with a living substance that was coming at me through all the things at once.  Every mundane object in the street and the shop windows around her gave off a blinding glow. She had no sense of being different from the effulgence — she was it and it was she. The “only condition was overflow. ‘Ecstasy’ would be the word for this, but only if you are willing to acknowledge that ecstasy does not occupy the same spectrum as happiness or euphoria.”

This next version is from Madelon Sprengnether’s book, Great River Road: Memoir and Memory”.  "I'd been sitting quietly after a Sunday meeting service at the Franciscan monastery I sometimes attend when suddenly I felt a sensation of warmth and illumination.  It was as if someone had flipped an interior light switch.  This feeling was not uncomfortable.  Rather, it felt ordinary and natural.  It was just there--something like waking to the sound of birds, the difference being that my awareness of outside and inside had vanished.  As if someone had opened a door or lifted the bars of a cage.  I wasn't frightened by this transformation.  Instead I felt pleased and curious.

I got up from my seat, walked to the entrance of the building, greeted my friends and chatted with them, all the while aware of my unusual state of being.  I was still myself, recognizable to others, and familiar with my environment.  Yet something subtle had changed.

This was nothing like taking drugs--speed, valium, grass--all of which I'd experienced at one point or another in my life.  I was completely myself, yet also not myself.  I drove home in this curious state and then sat in my car in my own driveway, reluctant to do anything that might disturb whatever was happening.  By now, I felt that I was in some kind of field of radiance--as if light were dancing through me into the grass, trees and sky of my own front yard.

'If this is what it's like to die,' I thought, 'then it's all right.'

Just as suddenly as this experience arrived, it left.  Still sitting in my car, I felt that the light switch had been turned off.  I didn't feel bad--as if coming down after a high--but rather that I'd returned to my ordinary way of being.  I'd experienced something extraordinary--and then it was gone.”

These are intense and rather exceptional instances of real experiences previously claimed by ”religious” institutions and credited to their saints.  But Johnson has a different language system for them based on embodiment.  Here are principles derived:

1.  There is no radical mind/body separation.

2.  Meaning is grounded in our bodily experience.

3.  Reason is an embodied process.

4.  Imagination is tied to our bodily processes and can also be creative and transformative of experience.

5.  There is no radical freedom.

6.  Reason and emotion are inextricably intertwined.

7.  Human spirituality is embodied.

Listed in this bare bones way, (remember that Billy Collins poem that begins the video I linked in the last post), these statements seem argumentative to the point of madness, which is pretty much the way T is seen by people who deny the reality of their bodies by flying away to equations and history.  The website where I found the descriptions of intense immanence was originally meant to reconcile art with psychoanalysis.  Now it’s struggling to reconcile psychoanalysis with neurology, which in my opinion is a better use of their energy.  Art can take care of itself.

But so far they’ve been unaware of the embodiment research.  They consider spiritual events to be a form of dissociation: maybe “hemispheric synchrony” or “temporal lobe transience.”  One sophisticate declares, “In my study of poets who have had dissociative experiences (Victor Hugo, for instance, during his exile on Jersey), there is often a reaction against the old religion and a sense of mission to create a better one. I had no conversion experience, only the desire to get that feeling back again.” 

Embodiment thought has nothing to do with religious institutions, so why would it suggest a conversion from one institutional dogma to another?  It is entirely outside the conventional, logic-based Enlightenment system as well as the millennial supernatural claims privileging adherents in the Western world.  Johnson’s term for this latter is “propositional thought.”  Propositions are not far from dogmas.

I come to embodiment through through theatre, Blackfeet, animals, and formal seminary training, which gave me vocabulary but not for embodiment thought.  Now I fall upon Johnson’s terms and phrases with glee.  “The origin of meaning in organism-environment coupling: a nonrepresentational view of mind”, “qualitative dimensions of movement”, “image schemas”, “primary intersubjectivity”, “vitality affects”, “the grounding of meaning” — I haven’t mastered all these terms yet, but finding them is an experience of recognition rather than the usual struggle to master multisyllabic Latinate words.

Maybe this is because my seminary years (1978-82) were right in the middle of this body of thought as it developed.  But I did not come to it through courses or any professors.  (In fact, they actively suppressed this thought path.)  I was reading the metaphor books and absorbed their “frame” by myself.  Fascinating as it was, I was not emotionally gripped by these materials until 2006 when I began to correspond with T. because he was not theorizing — he was just doing it outside any academic, publishing, medical, authorization, political group.  He was another case of recognition.  He was an “embodiment.”

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson co-wrote “Metaphors We Live By” (1980) which is a major classic in cognition and “Philosophy in the Flesh: the Embodied Mind” which continues that line of reflection as do other books separately and together.  There are other people. (almost all men, at least the ones who are promoted.)  Here’s a George Lakoff clip that explains why thought is physical and every word is both symbolic and neurologically physical.  This is the information that mended the split between physical and mental.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_CWBjyIERY

What I was after — still am, ultimately — was not theory but practice.  I had several times performed “services” with Unitarians that broke through to a different level than just acknowledgement while sitting in pews.  I didn’t know how it happened.  I wanted to be able to do it purposely.  (T. had the same interest.  Not in church.)  I think this embodiment frame is the one that will go there.

THERE ARE DRAGONS

This was a strange week.  Two former students from Browning in the very beginning of the Sixties and Seventies, died, both white.  One was a boy who never behaved and had a malicious streak.  I called his father to ask for a conference.  His father sighed and said, “Oh, I’ll beat him again, but it won’t do any good.”  

The other one was a polar opposite, a glamorous hard-working young woman who starred in a play with the man she would marry, both of them respected, invested in education and ranching.  Cancer took her early.  These contrasting former students are the boundaries of a world I shared for a decade and then left behind because of — sorry, but this is going to sound pretentious — intellectual hunger.  I wanted university in an inchoate way, but not the way college is thought of around here: beer blasts, best friends, good connections, certification, escaping parents.  

I wanted the full ivory tower.  With bells.  And I got it, though it wasn’t what I expected.  But it was serious, it mattered, and it was actually about how to think.  Not much to do with IQ or being smart.  Rather how to join into a conversation that has lasted for thousands of years, one that some people think of as religious and others think of scientific.

This same week an old friend and her husband stopped by on their way to a family reunion.  Kathy was the sister of a gifted chef in East Glacier in the earliest Seventies.  We had grown up not knowing each other but in the same time and place: Portland in the Fifties where nothing ever happened.  I was newly divorced and sorting out my head while living in Ramona Wellman’s big abandoned house.  We sat for hours talking in the built in breakfast nook that has now been torn off the building.

Now we’re all grown up now, getting old, and Kathy and Craig have accomplished children with happy grandchildren and good jobs and everything has been pretty much resolved.  People walk into my house and are impressed by my books, a working library that covers most of the walls.  They think it’s a sign of erudition instead of just a tool, but Craig — who is not quite retired — was interested because of his own equivalent library— housed in his office at Portland State University as an Associate Professor of Public Administration, and coordinator of the MPA specialization in environmental and natural resource management for the Division of Public Administration.  He asks, what does one do with such a library on retirement?  The sheer effort of sorting and transporting is overwhelming.

But it freed me to talk about what I’ve done with MY retirement:  I’ve recreated my seminary setting, my ivory tower.  (Good thing — since my seminary’s library has been moved and probably reorganized and edited.)  The categories on my shelves are Montana history (including natural history), Montana writers, Western and French bronzes, Blackfeet, theatre, UU history, and miscellaneous things like clouds, sewing, star constellations and the complete works of certain authors: Matthiessen, Berry, Dinesen, Stratton-Porter. 

The most active section is the current research on neurology, deep time, the evolution of the brain, pre-literate and sub-literate thought, and the design of sacred ceremonies, with emphasis on anthropological thought — NOT institutional dogma.  I don’t talk to people about it much because they never understand it anyway.  Not their fault.  The concepts are just now forming and they are entirely different from what we have assumed because instruments give us so much more information.

In fact, I don’t think I really understand it that well yet myself.  We know that there seems to be a “real” world with solid objects and predictable characteristics and actions.  But we also know that all that is just waves and tiny impacts, ion showers, molecules and radiation.  Now we realize that each of us is an evolved colony of cooperating cells that are somehow capable of perceiving the “real” world in various ways (far more than we suspected), translating all those waves and molecules into code that can be transmitted along the axons of nerves to the brain where the code is sorted and translated into what we fondly think of as reality.  

The brain is an extremely complex “organ” that is actually just the dashboard for what goes on everywhere in our skins.  Almost artistically, the brain decides what to recognize, what to ignore, what to pretend is something it isn’t, and what to do about it.  It saturates the body with indicators and directions, and evokes what we think of as emotion.

Mark Johnson

We end up with something we call our identity.  At seminary I struggled to understand Stephen Toulmin.  I could only get a shadowy impression.  Now I’m reading Mark Johnson’s  “The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding” which you can get an idea of on YouTube through an hour and a half lecture at this link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaMeGdrKnEE

There are a lot of related vids that YouTube will suggest.  It’s all this material and more that I’ve been struggling with for half a century.  For the last decade I’ve been in conversation about the issues in a “practicum” for these ideas.  We owe a lot to the real lives of a steady stream of boys and young men searching desperately for meaning.  Drugs, abuse, displacement, catastrophe, disease and torture have sorely tested their ability to survive.  The effort to protect them, and help them grow, constantly suggests hope but also raises questions of metaphysical dimensions, and sometimes casts us all into an abyss of despair.  They die incomplete.

So I read my books and  across the continent T folds the laundry while making sure there are pills to take.  (Those are metaphorical statements.)

Kathy Shinn had not long ago taken a trip to Bhutan, the real Dragon Country, with a group of brave women who crossed suspension bridges and toughed out icy nights.  She’s still processing it.  Craig understands and admires this.  When I said that I begin to think that the end of the civilized world is coming, maybe sooner than we thought, he agreed but then began to lay out the evidence for prevention and mitigation.  We didn’t have time to go far with this, but it’s real and it may turn the tide.

Bhutan

I don’t include many people in this conversation because there’s already too much to process.  I’m narrowing my own goal down to the composing (think music) of experiences that are sacred for humans, carrying meaning.  I have no interest at all in institutional religion nor in conventional philosophy.  It was strange to talk to people who understood, not because of being beaten or because of conventional university courses, but because they yearn for knowing and they love the world.  They see a lot of books and know they are means, not ends.

IN-SKIN - OUT-SKIN

Felt thinking is always embodied and admits that. No need for debate over abstracts. A major part of embodiment is the sensory system. There are at least four different categories of senses:

1. Senses like sight and hearing that are really detected electromagnetic waves whose wavelength and variability provide code that comes to our awareness on a screen we call the mind. We think we are actually seeing something or hearing something. Technical machinery can demonstrate that we’re only seeing part of the light waves and the sound waves, and that we greatly edit and interpret the code that gets to us.through the sensitivities of cells.

2. Senses that get to the brain directly through brain cells with the ability to interpret atomic particles and molecules, like smell. Taste is close. The perceiving cells of smell are actually an extension of the brain. Without smell, taste is very limited. Taste and smell are named and perceptible but they cannot be shown on the “screen” of the mind. One can’t see or hear a smell or taste, but only the source of the sensation.

3. Senses that only occasionally come to consciousness, like breathing. We sense breathing but we don’t control it consciously unless there is a problem. The parasympathetic nervous system monitors and corrects the functions needed for homeostasis all the time, like heartbeat, kidney function. Some senses are almost automatic like the dilation of eyes. But hormone secretion responding to situations can order a suite of responses without our consciousness: like fear or falling in love or just getting excited. Hunger and thirst fall into this category.

I don’t know what to do with instant reflexes like responding to danger or pain or coughing or blinking. There has to be a stimulus of some sort, but the response might be too fast to be routed through the brain.

4. Just now being found are specialized cells in the brain that monitor whether we are right side up, the propriocentric sense of where our bodies are, whether we are close to a wall or a precipice, whether there is food close by, whether we are being watched. Some of this is so subtle we hardly know the situation exists, much less perception of it.

The sense-nodes near sense organs do a lot of sorting and pruning before they send the code to the main management platform in the brain, which is believed to be in the pre-frontal lobe of the orbital cortex behind the forehead. This part IS capable of looking at relationships and metaphors beyond just feeling them. They can imagine “as-if” and consider alternative explanations.

The brain can perform Entrainment and concatenation, gathering things up into a kind of chain link or layering so that separate whatevers are reinforcing each other, maybe over time or maybe by making divisions of quality or sequence. This may be related to liminal time, concentrating without analysis or imposing hierarchies, so that one can re-think, change one’s paradigm, include new information. If things are coordinated and consonant, then dissonance will be more meaningful and dynamic. The sensation, which can be physical, will push things along the way that internal contradiction, paradox or oxymoron can force thought into a higher context, more inclusion, seeing the consistencies under-or-over-lying conflict, a new point of view, changing the terms of the argument.

So now we have a environment outside the skin that can only be accessed by senses and another environment inside the skin which is crucially what runs the body, a community of cells that must be reconciled and coordinated. The evolution of mammals doesn’t only mean that they can create their own warmth and new creatures inside their bodies, which greatly increases the complexity and need for homeostasis monitoring, as those of us who manage things like our glucose level or blood pressure are aware. Normally the mammal body does those things beneath our awareness. If they get a little out of kilter, we are not well.

"Reponomamus" -- your payment is overdue!

(That's this early critter's real name!)

Mammals also add emotion to the repertoire of the “cold-blooded” reptiles. Emotion is closely related to the hormone loops of adrenalin, oxytocin, serotonin, and so on — every addition or subtraction of a molecule is monitored by the brain to keep the in-skin within the necessary limits. The action is unconscious, but the results of the process rise to our awareness, becoming sensory: hunger, love, fear. Growling stomachs, blushing faces, hair rising on the head.

Mark Johnson (who has been Lakoff’s long-term collaborator in exploring metaphor) wrote “The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding.” I’m only beginning to read it, but I see that he addresses the senses of movement, the uses of space and containment, the actual interaction between in-skin and out-skin, impact and traveling in the world, and the invention of play as a way of learning how to use this action/perception loop. Reptiles do not play. I doubt that they dream. I’m thinking about dreams as a form of play, a rehearsal of “real” action and sensory recording — sometimes overwhelming. There is a body of writing about worship/ceremony as play. Children’s play often involves flow, focusing, mental exploration, natural ceremonies of the senses, tasting the world.

When it became possible to “read” brains and what they are doing through the use of machines that could pick up the subtle electro-chemical changes of thought, one amazing realization was that a person who is watching someone dance or play tennis is in their own observing brain and muscles duplicating faintly the same moves. The reality of empathy between persons — not just sympathizing with them or admiring them but feeling “with” them — which had been understood as imagining by observing through eyes and ears — was suddenly enlarged by muscle synchrony that links in-skin with out-skin. When mammals play, this is what they are developing. I watch the feral kittens in my backyard get better at pouncing every day. My own muscles “pounce.”

There is a concept called “Theory of Mind” that is meant to designate the empathic ability to understand first that others are also thinking, and then to be able to predict what they are thinking. It is thought to have developed as a hunting skill related to the effective coordination of muscle empathy. The cougar watches carefully, coordinates speed, and is finally able to jump to a grip on the throat of the prey.

Quickly, I found that using this phrase in the presence of young male Ph.D. academics makes them very upset. They think there is only one mind: their introspections; and that movement has nothing to do with thinking, even though thinking has been proven again and again to depend upon the schematics of movement through space. The better thinkers are often walkers.

Empathy is an evolved capacity that allows humans to sense other humans so as to entrain the whole group into thinking and acting together to form social effectiveness. Empathy works against violence and destruction. People who can have empathy with the stigmatized and understand them well-enough to work with them are the “molecules” that hold society in the homeostasis of survival. If empathy dies, the result is holocaust and genocide. It’s not a mystery — even chimpanzees have empathy for each other and included Jane Goodahl, who returned empathy with rational understanding. And even chimps sometimes “lose it” and go to war, reverting to reptile predation. Ceremonies that reinforce empathy are part of evolution to a better world.