SCIENCE AND RELIGION ARE BOTH DOMINATED BY INSTITUTIONS

While the cognoscenti were busy with their media arguments about how to reconcile religion and science, the “people” just went ahead and started the project -- or possibly they never left off with it anyway, since emotional relationship and the fabric of a familiar ecosystem were -- all along -- the origin and matrix of both science and religion.  

It’s a false dichotomy in the first place, dividing human experience between what can be learned by the scientific method (objective question, research, hypothesis, new questions) and what metaphorical constructs emerge from a specific culture about how to survive.  The territory is divided by “faith”, meaning committing to which of those constructs work, versus the ability to accept the results of testing which requires skepticism, which may not allow a controlling metaphor system to keep order.  But why not do both?

That’s not the problem.  The problem is that institutions have populated both aspects of human experience and try to perpetuate themselves by controlling and imposing their version of each side.  (“WE have the answer!  Come to US!”)  Besides promoting schism between religion and science, each side promotes competition among religions or among scientific fields.  All struggle to grow by dominating.

There are plenty of people who suggest that science IS a religion in many dimensions.  I tend to agree but then one has to ask why science and religion can be in pitched battle.  Both institutions are dealing with raw emotion and violent destruction, each trying to capitalize and insist on their diagnosis and prescription of a troubled society.  I should do some investigation of the beginnings of the most primal and radical concepts of “religion” and “science” in the times before empires and their armies.  Maybe before agriculture.  

Chernobyl

But here’s an even more interesting phenomenon, partly produced by the bad results and ineffectiveness of institutions.  I speak of the return to human experiences that cross borders, even the schism between science and religion.  Some people call it “spirituality,” some call it “rational mysticism,” or “Bioneers” or “the Zen of Physics” or “felt concepts.” 

Here are some domains and clues, thrown out as suggestions to ponder:

Sports

Beatification is a matter of medals, which signify not just achievement, but also devotion, discipline, courage in the face of suffering,

Extreme sports supply the drugs that evoke mystical experiences.

Prayer can be seen as self-talk and defining of goals, aspiration.  

On the one hand Christianity invades the football field and the rodeo arena, but on the other hand medical response to force warns us about the damage sports can do and no angels heal closed-skull concussions, though the person may hear voices and see bright lights.

This piece might be by Malvina Hoffman

Sex

This is in two parts: intimate connection and fertility.  Surely an investigator is overwhelmed by the variety and passion of the gods and goddesses -- and those of no determined gender -- and the ingenious ways of causing a infant to form and be birthed.  Yearning for a return to infancy and drive to acquire power create insatiable experimentation.

We are in the midst of a huge shift now, which is quite parallel to a religious conversion by whole nations.  First, we have left the dyadic understanding of gender and even genitalia and second, we have the power to block fertility but also the power to chemically give men potency.  Not in all cases and not without problems, but it’s still a major shift that affects many other social arrangements, not least economics.  (Who is available to do which jobs?  Who should insurers cover at what cost?  Who can take "communion"?)

Inventions

The creation of shelter (wickiups, tipis, mud huts and thatch), fire, flint-knapping, the wheel, smelting metal -- and we were on our way to cathedrals and eventually outer space, which gave us quite a different feeling about Heaven.  And such a bad case of hubris (evil) that we began to destroy nature as we had loved it (evil).  The invention of new concepts -- the Devil and the Madonna -- grounded the technology our torture chambers.

Chernobyl

Art

Surely the first art was tattoos.  And now, according to some, everything is art.  Surely the first art was sacred, and now -- according to some -- everything is art and art is still sacred.

Drugs

The short cut to both heaven and hell, as well as salvation and damnation.  Being “high” as a form of prayer.  Blissed out.  Scientifically, if everything is code, why not learn to code?  If everything is molecules, why not grasp molecular experience (i.e. drugs)?  Once again the communion.

Animals

The central theme of both science and religion was once to prove that humans were above and separate from animals.  We had souls and would not die as we see them die.  Now there is a significant segment of the population that has returned to a spiritual connection to animals.  Science confirms again and again that we ARE animals, and not in any clear way at all.  If one’s gut biome is part of one’s persona, then how much of a conscious individual can anyone be?  Isn't death merely shifting the boundaries between life and death?

Chernobyl

Academia

We must constantly develop new disciplines to suit our new knowledge.  Heard of "omics?"  (Not comics.)  We invent new ways to handle statistics and other data in vivid and immediately palpable ways so that less specialized training is needed to understand it.  We monitor methods and the distortions each one creates.  Thought is deliberately set against elitism in order to support dominated people as justice.

This confirms the idea that what you see is what you look for.  We have a generation now that throve in the post WWII academic environment, found it dignified and supportive of reasoned argument.  That’s gone, but some don't realize it.  It was only part of what was happening anyway.  Underneath that cultural stream, surrounding it and bursting up through it was a whole different -- and iconoclastic -- way of thinking.  

Maybe it came out of existentialism and maybe it came out of chaos or maybe those were the same thing anyhow.  One of the characteristics is the abandonment of labels, the appetite for experience, the joy of looking at everything in “why not?” mode.  And all the troublemakers who had been thrown out for asking new questions had now found a mental state they could live with -- despair, agony, adrenaline, and comradeship.  Even intimacy.

Terrifying and saddening results have powered recent developments with some institutions digging in to perpetuate themselves in the face of terrorism or new knowledge or systems reform.  Each flies the flag of religion, but they have committed to faiths that don’t work anymore.  The beliefs no longer are anchored in reality -- just familiarity.  This is as true of capitalism as it is in any of the Abrahamic religions that developed alongside capitalism, military force, and schism.  This is the territory that is explored so brilliantly in “Game of Thrones,” though the exhibit is not accompanied by much analysis except the private lives of the actors.

Survival is based in one extreme on the gorgeous sidereal realms of endless time and in the other on the human body itself and how it fits into the matrix of biological code which includes sex -- which is the means of reproduction of individuals, species, and the flow of creature life itself.  Human knowledge, anchored in human experience, is an interface with whatever reality may be -- an unknowable source of sensory information that responds to how we organize what penetrates our bodies, becoming part of us.  Our ability to create instruments that expand our awareness means we must constantly reorganize.  Our ability to record what we perceive (piercing received), so that the limits of one human lifetime can be transcended, means we can extend our methods.  But we need unifying and stabilizing metaphors that spiritual systems can supply if they aren’t reduced to book and flag.

WHAT THE ZYGOTE LEARNS

Sacred and Profane, so often mixed in art.

This blog does not operate as a silo, which disconcerts some people who are used to seeing blogs as focused on a product.  This one is a landscape, a horizon, a broad set of topics for a dozen different communities.  But this particular post IS a silo in spite of approaching one topic through several points of view.  It is an inventory of thought about felt internal sensations that all creatures appear to have, but that have been repeatedly in many ways investigated and reflected upon, put into words and philosophically categorized.  It is the felt difference between two kinds of space which Mircea Eliade famously defined as “sacred” and “profane.”  It is also the difference between what is felt as sacred, as spiritual, as something palpable in the environment, and what is a peneplain, a flat featureless plenum, which could be called the profane, the daily, the quotidian, the ordinary (order-nary).

There are a variety of explanations or explications about this.  They come from many “disciplines” we are used to and challenge boundaries between ways of knowing.  One principle is that this difference is between what is wordlessly felt and therefore in every creature, and what is expressed in language, including the language of mathematics.  To many people language IS thinking -- they cannot conceive of thinking in any other way.  To them, for an animal to be thinking is inconceivable unless the animal can at least imitate language.

Recently, given a lot of ingenious and supersensitive instruments, we have been able to see our brains in operation.  These studies, along with what are called “lesion” studies -- observations of humans whose brains have been damaged some way and animals whose brains have been surgically altered -- tell us One Big Thing.  There are two brains, essentially: the primal brainstem and limbic system which has nerves through the body (the autonomic system) and which also controls the hormone chemicals from organs, rarely conscious except as “feelings,” including emotion.  The other is the cortex and the evolved organelles (hippocampus) and specialized cells that it coordinates into conscious thought, images and language.

This correlates with Freud’s most useful observation: that there is a conscious or cognizant mind and then another which he intuitively described as the “sub” conscious, though he was a good enough neuroscientist to understand that it was primal brain that was the generator of these forces, the drive systems,  Desire.  Survival.  But the survival of the individual can be suppressed or contradicted by a rigid culture; and the survival of a culture can be threatened by maladjustment to the environment which -- in the end -- determines survival.  Darwin called it “fitness.”   I say “fittingness” because it isn’t always a matter of biggest and best.  (Remember the little first mammals running between the toes of the dinosaurs.)

Now the scientists have identified the specialized cells in the cortex that somehow connect to deep primal awareness in the earlier brain:  the “grid” cells that let us feel where in a specific space we are; the “heading” or compass cells that let us sense the directions, the "boundary" cells that tell us where edges are, and the "homunculus" map that allots space to neurons according to their relationship to the body.  Somehow this hooks up with memory, so that an intense experience will call up sense memory of where you were, the smells, the sounds, the temperature, and so on.

From anthropology (van Gennep and Turner) comes the insight that besides physical space there is a psychological “felt” space that uses this associating of the sensory moment to cue something they call “liminal” space.  (The limen is the threshold of a doorway.)  It is a shift from the secular, profane, daily, public space to a sacred, spiritual, protected space that somehow escapes boundaries.  In that space one is psychologically equal to everyone else who is present and one may be able to change deeply felt beliefs.  It might be traditional ceremonial worship but maybe not.

I once was once asked to study the cultural gender assignments of worshipping people. (Post-Christian UU's, therefore Abramic.)  Our contemporary culture assigns men to the profane, mathematical, rule-operated, engineering sort of experience -- theological, hierarchical, empowering.  I called it the glass telephone booth where Superman assumes his powers.  The women are assigned the sacred, messy, emotional, enfolding approach that nurtures from the most basic physical level.  I called it the hot tub in which one almost returns to birth.

Partly this set of metaphors came from watching people attending a retreat.  At the end of a worship service (overgeneralized): the men leapt out to go do something; the women sat smiling and dreaming.  But also partly it came from reading about infant development and the accounts of saints.  The brains of children develop in response to what is happening to them.  Before they are born they move in their mother’s bodies, somersaulting in the womb and creating neurons that are aware of the mother’s body moving through the world -- the grid, the compass.  Their budding brains record the rhythm of heartbeat and the whale-like sounds of digestion.  Their first sensations are smell/taste, the most primordial senses necessary even for a one-celled animal trying to find food.  The cycle of darkness/light is built into the circuits as the baby grows.

What the saints described was paradoxes of the first distinctions, not yet separated, what an infant brain learns both before and after birth.  They said they felt they were falling, but supported in an embrace; there was utter darkness but blinding light; they were burning and freezing at once; they were flying and paralyzed.  These were feelings interpreted as the presence of the Holy which some named God.

People who "do religion" in a dogmatically believing way are “inside the theological (churchly) circle.”  Those who don’t define it -- just feel it -- might be “outside the theological circle” but they sense the primal matrix of spirituality.  The circle itself is defined by community, tilted to male culture:  hierarchical, definitional, historical.  In short, institutional.  Institutions are not spiritual.  Some will actively exclude spirituality and feeling in order to strengthen obedience, consistency, morality and order.  The Old Testament and the letters of Paul tend to be institutional.  The Gospels and Psalms are spiritual.

The politics of theology and institutions can be cruel.  Spirituality, feeling-based, empathetic, can be ineffective.  The prefrontal cortex is the part of the human brain that tries to sort it out.  Gender definitions are as paradoxical as the other basic distinctions.  The extremes interact, the two “long tails” of the gender bell-curves overlapping so that the strongest, tallest, fastest females will surpass the weakest, shortest, slowest males.  Our use of gender hormone ratios to separate male from female doesn’t really work.

Intergenders are far more common than we think because in modern culture people wear clothes which carry the gender clues instead of exposing their bodies.  And the qualities of individuals interact within them, responding to the environment whether it’s chemical or situational.  To some extent an ovum of any creature is always different from a cloud of sperm because it has the directions for the “house” of the body.  But once we get to mammals, gestating, birth, and nursing are not just achieved by the unfolding plan in the DNA of two people, but also are deeply affected by the embracing relationship of the immediate family -- the epigenetics -- and the world situation.  We are just now discovering what war, hardship, or happiness can provide in the continuing gestation we call life, even crossing the generational barrier so that what our grandfathers encoded in their epigenes guides the development of their grandchildren.

The feeling of not being who others say you must be can drive escape from the theological circle into a far more ambiguous spiritual world.  Depending on what the zygote learned, this can be a new birth.

LIMINAL VS. DISSOCIATION

What is the difference between “liminal space” and “dissociation”?  Both are outside ordinary experience and either can be good or bad, depending on circumstances.  

The main difference depends on the origins of the concept.  “Liminal space” comes from anthropology and was a theory derived from the ceremonies (especially rites of passage) of groups.  In fact, it was developed by observing “primitive” peoples but it soon became clear that it works pretty well for the “developed world.”  Where there are humans, there are ceremonies, and ceremonies work by taking the people across a limen (threshold) of some kind into a sort of changing ground where the group witnesses a shift in status, and then returns the changed person to ordinary society but with a new set of parameters.   The specifics depend on the customs of the culture.  Where it gets into trouble is confusing "liminal" with "numinous" or "theodicy," which are religious terms.

Dissociation comes from psychology.  It shows in behavior and personal reports, but seems to be directly linked to brain function that is detectable with instruments.  (Liminality is maybe not.) Whatever is happening inside the skull of the person may or may not change them as far as anyone else can tell.  Mild versions might be a waking dream or memory gaps.  The most intense would be outright psychosis, although probably coma would be the ultimate.  Dissociation can be imposed chemically or by heredity, trauma, lesion, infection or inflammation.  It can be forced deliberately as torture.  It can be triggered emotionally.  Again, it is confused when the category is considered epiphany or visions, which are spiritual and can easily be claimed by religions.

  

In my enthusiasm for creating events that would evoke deep meaning, perhaps life-changing, I have not reconciled the “high” that might come from an evangelical tent meeting with the “high” of a person who has a brain tumor.  “Meaning” in our culture seems to be double:  on the one hand the rational thought of the scientist or mathematician, and on the other hand an emotional total-body response.  Our religious institutions offer rational “theo”-ology, reasoning about God or Gods or whatever mask you choose for some almighty power.    They draw diagrams and argue numbers.  But there is nothing rational about the belief that there IS an almighty power.  It’s a felt meaning, which is spiritual.   And not everyone feels it. 

The DSM composed and constantly revised by the psych people is always in pursuit of a final definition of dissociation with little success -- they are trying to impose rationality (like theology or math) on something that is essentially elusive because it is individual.  Psych-handbook people are urged on by pharma folks who want to identify a pill for every symptom and insurance people who want to pin down the exact compensation per symptom.  ("How much is a severed limb worth?"  It's on a list.  Ask your agent.)

Feelings are undependable.  Words are shifty.  Dance, art, music, vids, and the other less scholastic (taught) media are more useful.  Humans are a process, culture is a process, life is defined by being a process -- once it stops processing, it’s dead.  Feelings are embodied, an expression of living bodies.  The state of the body can dictate the state of the felt meaning.  However it was caused, a “high” is not a deduction (rational) but a reaction (emotional).  But it does not deny rational reflection, maybe later.  One can reflect rationally on anything, including the practice of being rational!  (How does that make you feel?)

It occurs to me that institutions are agents of reconciliation between reason and emotion and that they arose as we know them because of the invention of bookkeeping and writing.  Nomadic hunter/gatherers millennia ago had no need for such markings.  Agriculture, which underlies the invention of written records, is rooted in ownership and defense of land and its stored products.  The invention of inventories.  Institutions need to be in a place, so the record books and measuring devices can be kept there. At this point in history war also became located -- no longer done on the run, but marked by the measurements of boundaries, often seeming to be ABOUT the location of boundaries.

Thinking this way lets me make a helpful distinction.  “Liturgy” is usually institutional and based on prescribed -- or at least recorded -- words and possibly actions.  “Ceremonies” might be liturgical, but also could be events that aren’t even considered primarily religious, like the installation of secular leaders.  Institutional religion cherishes liturgy.  Nations need ceremonies.  If the two are mixed, there can be trouble.

Therapeutic exercises, possibly for the healing of individuals and possibly for building group morale, have little to do with written words or prescriptions.   Rather, spoken words, acting out, using props, composing living sculptures of relationships, pretending to be reborn . . . all often improvised.  Try something -- see how it makes you feel.  Follow your gut.

Most institutional therapy is practical and concrete: meds, surgery, electroconvulsive therapy.    Controlling stuff.  These are severe enough that the larger secular institution of the state will try to regulate them through credentialing and even oversight by inspectors and professional peer organizations.  But this does not spare society from major ghastly blunders like lobotomies or pharmaceutical suppression of personality.  Nor does it seem able to control the self-medication of people through street drugs.  It is a puzzle how the institutions came to eject the people they were supposed to help -- some kind of bait and switch.

Religion began to get into the therapy approach through morality.  The Salvation Army, for instance, appeals to people hooked on alcohol to accept the theological “high” of feeling saved.  They offer themselves as a support group that is practical: food and beds, but you must accept their God.  Many “pastors” of mainstream denominations now function as counselors far more than they do as theologians.  Their role in maintaining the institution of the congregation or denomination is always controversial.  Everyone wants the congregations saved, but maybe not on the same terms.

Another escape from institutional theology and control is to the great outdoors.  Some interpret it as returning to the world before agriculture.  This is considered therapeutic but not theological -- some accept spirituality as a middle ground that escapes institutional control, therefore not needing theology.  But spirituality might be mediated or expressed by a person, as in Jesus or Buddha.  Neither was a theologian but both advocated empathy rather than rules.  Compassion for others.  Benevolent masks for God.

Neither liminality nor dissociation has much to do with rationality: math, science and legalities.  Liminality is an art form; dissociation is simply a state of mind.  But both of the them can underlie a demand for justice because of suffering.  Both are forces in a world that gets far too much absorbed in doing what they CAN do (Can we make a weapon we never use?) instead of what they OUGHT to do.  Both can function as alternatives to force/violence/war.  Both can reconcile and heal.

Now that internet culture is escaping the necessity of basing affinity groups on a place, offering close relationships without physical presence, what does that mean in terms of liminality or dissociation?  Some would claim that the Internet IS liminal, over a threshold, and that dissociation IS working in a virtuality, not attached to ordinary reality, particularly when playing cybergames as an invented avatar.  So in a ceremonial sense, how is it connecting us to institutions?  Or is it only a new kind of hunting and gathering?  Whose culture applies or is a new one developing?  (I vote for the second option.) 

It’s clear that governments want control of the internet.  It erases boundaries, evades certification, cannot guarantee loyalty to certain leaders.  Shifty stuff.  It can be “scraped” to give us a nearly theological statistical understanding of what people as a group are doing -- omniscient and provable math/science algorithms about behavior.  It can control feedback to make people believe others are doing what they are not.  But also it can be a surveillance tool, watching individuals, a fox and hounds game that foxes can win. 

Dissociation is a given, one skull planted at the pixel end distribution point of the whole system.  Hypnotic suggestions, arousing and disorienting images and storylines, all the tricks of illusionists are there to be used.  But liminality is something else, dependent on a group that forms the time/space and also, probably, defines the transformation that will happen with the cooperation of the people as equals in consensus.  Screenwriters are liminalists.

The origin of my fascination with all this was high school dramatics -- that simple.  (Unless you count reading.)  Then theatre -- as it is wont to do -- became religion.  Why not play "for reals"?  In both fields the more I went into them, the more mysterious, entwined and unmanageable they became. 
  

"Beaver Bundle Opening" by Bob Scriver

Since my exposure was to two religious kinds of ceremony, one the Bundle-Keeping of Blackfeet and the other the formal elitist post-Christian Unitarian Universalists, my interest became reconciling them or at least putting them into relationship.  What I find is a need for new terminology, new science, and a heckuva lot more reading.  Excitingly enough, it’s all there -- still in books -- and in retirement I have the time to read.  When I figure it all out, I’ll let you know.  It’s not likely to be theological.  Nor institutional.  Nor even urban.