PSYCHOTHERAPY IS NOT SACRED

Because “psychotherapy” comes from a medical frame based on the scientific method and values of objectivity, it is snarled in many ways.  A counter wave comes from the arts, particularly physical arts like dance, but also music, painting and sculpture, and clever ideas like arranging people in poses that echo their real-life dynamics.  In Western culture the two are gender-assigned and also status-assigned: that is, the women and indigenous are assumed to have access to the “spiritual” and therefore it is assumed to have less value and power than institutionally endorsed empire-builders.

Another distortion is what I call “honey-hunting,” which might more scientifically be called “hooked.”  That is, seeking what is sweet, easy, luxurious, and lights up the addiction-indicator in the brain.  Sex, drugs, and  “spirituality” will do the trick— for an interval, since variety is also needed, which links to seeking.  No sooner did I bring up the subject of what people call “spirituality” — which in my system is NOT the same as sacrality — the honey-hunters were finding me and my number of hits spiked.

To me, the great value of this stream of thought called embodiment is that it’s based on the human capacity to use their senses to access whatever the world “is” through an interpretive system called “metaphor.”  It is an “immanent” system, emerging from the senses, as opposed to the transcendence-based spiritualities that believe they are interacting with what is “above,” “powerful,” and probably explicated and claimed by an institution because it is always framed by the culture and therefore mimics their leaders.

In fact, the problem with honey-hunting is that they are soon evading all the scientific paraphernalia and that becomes the focus, either trying to catch honey in their scientific sieve or discrediting all filters as useless.  There are a number of paper “instruments” that attempt to define spirituality:  The Expressions of Spirituality Inventory, the Spiritual Transcendence Scale, the Brief Multidimensional Measure of Religiousness/Spirituality, the Daily Spritual Experiences Scale, the Faith Maturity Scale, and the Religious Coping Questionnaire. 

Embodiment/sense-based sacrality is something felt when conditions are right.  What those conditions might be is what I’m trying to find out.  But language and even metaphor can never be the same as the original experience, which is far from universal and may, like a frog, be impossible to dissect without killing.  Neither does it have anything to do with virtue, which is bound to dismay some honey-hunters.

Always there is difficult opposition between society and the individual, maybe conflict among multiple social demands (family against profession, military against nonconformity).  The essential difference in this sea change from a surgery model (power, cutting, and transcendence) to a gardening model (nurturing organic unfolding) is that surgery is imposed, dependent on expertise, done by a professional (meaning cultural expert with status); but gardening is natural, and only dependent on nurturing, safety and opportunity.  Well — maybe risk is part of all therapy, simply by being alive and therefore dependent on survival.

For me the key to all “felt” experience goes back to Mircea Eliade’s little book called “The Sacred and the Profane,” which proposes that the sacred can be felt in the world at the extremes and the transitions.  Stand in a doorway or at the top of a staircase or on a mountain summit and you can feel it.  Neurologists today claim that specific cells in the brain are reacting to aspects of the world that have affected life from the beginning as eukaryotic one-celled animals.  Detecting edges, drop-offs, changes in what’s underfoot, altered light, and scores of other physical facts, are crucial to survival if traveling around, which is a definition of creatures.  

So I take an anchored, almost domestic and ordinary attitude towards the sacred — no caps, no status, nothing precious to hoard.  Just watching with awareness the sun come up in the morning.  Just openness to perception — no theory, no “healing”, no honey.

Before I leave today’s post, I want to point out the political dimension of spirituality which is considered — besides sweet to the point of addiction — a source and justification for power.  Before this wave of embodiment theory that seems to have a lot of connections to the U of Chicago, though (alas) not the Div School of my day, there was a set of disciplines developing around language: what it meant, how it was structured, how much it was culture-bound, and a lot of other hard-to-grasp things — though Hayakawa is far easier to understand than Ricoeur.  Some of the thought was coming from philosophy, but also a practical part of it was coming from anthropology which is more open to observation and animal elements of perception.  Barnlund’s class in “Language and Thought” prepared me then (1960) for Lakoff and Johnson in 1980, who were in part prepared by Noam Chomsky.

In the struggle to understand how people think by trying to understand the structure of their grammar, one is soon challenging the idea that language is a superiority, a separation, a rising above animals.  It seems clear that words come out of life in an environment.  Sitting with a chimp, communicating with body language, is a transforming experience.  It teaches us how much we lose if we deny the body to the point of thinking that a computer is human.  Sense-based thought depends upon the body to access the world.  Inability to grasp the world is psychosis.

“Therapy” in terms of human psychology was invented by Freud in the medical model as a way of bringing people in a highly restrictive culture into alignment with what was expected of them.  What he ran into was the limbic animal, which he called the subconscious, the 98% of neurological function that keeps bodies living even during sleep.  His instrument was talking, linguistics, sort of.  He was listening for metaphor, his genre was poetry, but his goal was still to make the client conform.

Bringing person and culture into alignment is a lot easier if the culture is tolerant of difference and resistant to stigma.  Spirituality, when it is co-opted by institutions and honey-hunters, can be as bullying as anything else.  Felt sacredness doesn’t respond to institutions and may not be sweet.  In fact, it might be full of terror or disgust because what counts is what keeps the creature alive.  That’s what pain is for.  Empathy, even with suffering, can keep us alive.

SPIRITUAL FLOW

The Unitarian Universalist denomination symbol is a flame in a chalice, to show the ambiguous relationship with Christianity, but also to identify with iconoclastic defiance as in when people are burned at the stake for their beliefs.   It turned out to be a very flexible and inventive sort of icon:  a flame in cupped hands, a flame in a tree, a chalice with a tree for a flame and on and on.  So what I was after with my skull chalice was some kind of universality that was a little shocking.  Instead, I seem to have stumbled into a sort of "Goth" context.  But worse, the impression is that I'm only talking about this one denomination.  In a sense, I am, but in a larger sense, I'm not.

The revelation I've finally come to is twofold, based on two different ways of researching the brain.  One is the direct observation of the neurons and their connections by using incredibly sensitive instruments and injecting various tracers.  The most recent is a method of “Comparative Consciousness” that puts light-responsive genes into rat cells and then connects them with very fine fiberoptics.  By manipulating the light the genes that are light-responsive can be turned on and off, so specifically that once the researchers discovered that adjacent cells controlled sex OR violence, they could make a rat attack or fuck or stop doing either unless the sex had gone far enough along the rising stimulation to nearly trigger climax.   They say there are tens of thousands of KINDS of neurons specifically evolved for certain kinds of responsiveness, evidently organized into nodes connected by strands.  (Rhizome patterning.)

The cortex of the cerebrum is in very thin layers.  (Dana.org/cerebrum is a terrific resource.) Thought at present is that the body is “mapped” onto one wrinkly layer, with space allocated according to the sources of the sensorium;  most sensitive and often-used parts have more brain space.  The map has great big hands and eyes.

Also there is a connectome related to memories, which are evidently filed according to the compass directions, up/down, in/out, and sensory moments, which is why the memory exercise of imagining a building and pretending to walk through it in your head, noting furnishings as one goes, associating each with a detail of what you're trying to remember, is a trick for remembering long complex narratives. 

This kind of research is on the physical, provable, observable brain as it operates.  It comes from academic research, the field of medicine, and organic chemistry.

The other stream of research I’m rejoicing over is in part derived from above.  George Lakoff calls it “embodiment philosophy.”  That is, understanding how a human becomes a thinker and a self-aware one at that, but by empirical, experimental investigation rather than logic and reflection.  More about this as I understand it better, but Lakoff's view is a confluence of literature, psychological research, art theory, linguistics, semiotics, narrative, method acting, psychotherapy.

Lakoff has a political dimension:  this chapter can be downloaded.  It would please most UU's.

http://changethis.com/manifesto/show/5.GeorgeLakoff

George Lakoff's work has met brain neurology in a remarkable convergence.  It is simpler and more poetic than post-modern theories, but I didn’t really “get it” when I first read “Metaphors We Live By” (by both Lakoff and Mark Johnson) in 1980.  I did not really grasp that if a person’s brain structure has accepted the idea that “life is a journey” and interprets everything as a way station, a rocky road, a new path, a gateway, that person will have a different response to accepting new information than will the person whose life has taught him “life is a trap” so that vigilance, frustration, the impossibility of change are what to expect.

The structure of the brain’s connectome is CREATED by life experiences.  It can change deep metaphors, but not necessarily consciously.  Conversion, transformation, epiphany are religious terms referring to the experience (I will claim) of revising deep brain node filters to allow both new information and new configurations to enter.  I suspect this is what LSD does, and maybe ketamine or ecstasy.  Not the opiods.  But I have no experience or expertise, so I’ll stick to the more literary ideas like insight or inspiration.

What to read?  Or google?  Or YouTube?  (Use recent bibliographies.  This stuff is moving fast.) 

Some books on my shelf:

BRAIN RESEARCH

Antonio Damasio

Antonio Damasio:  “Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain” (2010)

Antonio Damasio:   “The Feeling of What Happens:  Body, Emotion and the Making of Consciousness”  (2000)

Robert Ornstein “The Roots of the Self: Unraveling the Mystery of Who We Are”  (1995)

Daniel Bor:  “The Ravenous Brain: How the New Science of Consciousness Explains our Insatiable Search for Meaning”  (2012)

EMBODIMENT PHILOSOPHY  

Life is a journey.  That's a metaphor that feels like a fact.

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson:  “Metaphors We Live By” (1980)

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson:  “Philosophy in the Flesh: the Embodied Mind and It’s Challenge to Western Thought”  (1999)

FOUNDATIONAL BOOKS

Roy A. Rappaport:  “Ecology, Meaning and Religion”  (1979)

Robert J. Schreiter:  “Constructing Local Theologies”  (1985)

Richard Kuhns:  “Structures of Experience:  Essays on the Affinity Between Philosophy and Literature”

Victor Turner:  “The Ritual Process”

Tentatively, I’m working on the idea that these last four books relate to structure, the chalice, a source of patterns.   This is also a good use of the four brain research books.  But the embodiment books (there are more than what’s here) suggest content, the flame.

Too many UU congregations lose the “flow.”  Flow comes from engaging in something that is just difficult enough to be at your skill level.  It’s too easy to be a UU.  No challenge, nothing hard to think about, repetition of stuff without it having present meaning.  Some don't believe in Evil.  Do any UU questionnaires ask,  “Are you bored?”  Both ministers and congregations get into a groove.  Maybe this is why rivalries and emotional social issues tend to dominate dynamics.  Maybe this explains the liberal fascination with the under-culture.

Few know how to handle spirituality without prescribed liturgies, usually word-based.  Spirituality is defined as individual, unaccountable, with the person having the duty of figuring out the dogmatic framework of the denomination.  The rigidity is that of the magical spell.  It’s exhortational tone is from advertising.  When conforming fails to deliver on its promise, the people leave or get into side issues.  Among UU’s the “social issues” group forms, usually older men, and argues in a tight circle at the same time as worship, which doesn’t touch them.  And everyone loves the experts who do come-and-go workshops.

What’s missing from most of the mainstream denominations is a true dimension of spirituality.  Most of the books out there are either treacle or woo-woo.

The breakthrough when I was writing “Bronze Inside and Out” about Bob Scriver was structuring it around the experience of the materials:  how if feels to hold plastilene and plaster in your hands, not just the dramatic bronze pouring.  I feel as though “The Bone Chalice” is breaking into several books, one of them a “handbook” with steps, examples, and all that. Another one would follow the theory of embodiment philosophy, while recovering some of the principles of Rappaport, Schreiter, Kuhn, Turner.   I think I should begin to design experiences and see if I can find small groups to play them out.  I need feedback.

ENRAPT by EMBODIMENT

Ryan and Adrienne Heavy Head

For anthropological thinkers the meta-concepts of group cohesion due to primal assumptions about life, esp. those prompted by the requirements of survival in a specific place, are always in tension with the divisions that sometimes help define and sometimes cut across those assumptions.  The Blackfoot Confederacy, an organic and dynamic body with very deep roots in the high prairie, is sliced across by the 49^th parallel, the border between Canada and the US.  A once-unified population has been separated politically for almost two centuries.

Canadian (and British) versus American policies have been quite different in terms of lands set aside for indigenous people when their culture was still distinctively evolved.  In the States either extinction or assimilation was the point while Canada was more inclined to seek protection that might have been paternal, but also was more respectful.  The Canadian Blackfoot people have held onto their language and ceremonies longer and therefore have been a reservoir for modern American Blackfeet and also for anthropologists, particularly the kind who join the circle of believers as well as reflecting about it.  

Ryan Heavy Head is this sort of anthro, an affiliated and functioning member of the community who still keeps a foothold in academia through the University of Lethbridge and Red Crow Community College.  I spent yesterday reading his Master’s thesis, “Feeding Sublimity: Embodiment in Blackfoot Experience.”  It’s a free download.  https://www.uleth.ca/dspace/bitstream/handle/10133/621/heavy%20head,%20ryan.pdf?sequence=1  I knew to look for it because of a presentation he and Narcisse Blood made at the Blackfeet Community College in Browning, Montana.  Before I can cross into Canada (I am an American citizen) or to be more accurate, before I can return to the US after crossing into Canada, I must renew my passport, so I was grateful to BCC for bringing them to this side.  

Specifically, Narcisse and Ryan were talking about Abraham Maslow’s pyramid schema for understanding human priorities for survival, beginning at the bottom with the most basic needs: air, shelter, food, water, and then building layers up through safety, affiliation, and so on to the pinnacle which he generally called “self-actualization” or “peak experience.”  The idea is that Maslow got this notion while visiting the Blackfoot reserves near Calgary just before WWII.  This converts the pyramid into a tipi which works out rather well.

Ryan’s formal thesis is not directly about that.  He uses George P. Lakoff’s idea that “lives of individuals are significantly influenced by the central metaphors they use to explain complex phenomena.”  If you believe life is a battle, a journey, a search or something else, that will govern your decisions and desires.  Lakoff’s discipline label is “cognitive linguist” which puts him in loose association with those French philosophers who have dominated so much thought.  He’s important enough to have his own website:  www.georgelakoff.com   The splash screen alone, which is the fronts of his books, is worth contemplating.  The book Ryan uses -- and that I’ve also used gratefully since seminary -- is “Metaphors We Live By.”   Johnson, Lakoff’s co-author, “maintains that image schema are regularly recurring embodied patterns of experience that are acquired during the course of early child development. Such schemata are image-like in that they are analogic neural activation patterns which preserve the topological contours of perceptual experience as a cohesive whole.”  This is highly relevant to the thinking about brain neurology that I’ve been doing.  They are Damasio’s deep patterns.

Ryan’s thesis begins with an explanation of “aistomatoo’p” (accustomed body), the self-embodiment of Blackfoot people indigenous to the high prairie east of the Rockies and derived from a plenitude of buffalo.  His double use of language throughout (supplying the Blackfoot words with his own translations) comes from speaking both as someone inside the believing and ceremonially participating circle and from outside that circle in a “meta” or analytical way.  He uses the ceremonies themselves to explain his concepts and is personal about it, doing a kind of “body check” to make it clear where he “is” as he speaks.

First, he explains the key image:  amopistaanistsi (bound-together-by-wrapping-around) which is commonly called a “medicine bundle.”  This is the kind of image that I use when I speak of “the bone chalice,” hoping to combine the idea of the skull containing a brain and the Unitarian device of a communion chalice with a flame in it.  He also uses a three-step progression of thought that I use:  personal understanding, community understanding, and what he calls “the sublime,” a literary concept that approaches “holiness” or “sacredness” but manages to dodge the Christian institutional dogmas.

The first ceremony considered is the “sweatlodge,” which has suffered from popularization among the New Age crowd to the extent of killing people who try to copy it without knowing what they are doing.  In it’s “pure” historical form it is meant to be an ordeal of cleansing specifically for men, supported by women.  Feminism has disrupted this.  Ryan begins by using the translation:  “steam-making” and investigating it in terms of being “enwrapped” by the affinity group (the women) and their protective nourishment of those in the lodge.  Being sheltered is described as being “taken into a mouth” and there are many poetic stories about such a thing that then transfers to a house or home.  Many animals on the prairie take shelter in a cave or burrow with a mouth-like entrance.

If a person has spent much time on the open prairie exposed to sun and wind -- dazzled, scorched, abraded, and even deafened -- then the shelter provided by a lodgeskin over the ribs of poles or even the protection of a robe or blanket wrapped around the head and shoulders becomes a kind of embrace.  So the next pattern of nurturing is specific to Ryan’s wife within the shelter of marriage and family, but suffering from arthritis so in need of healing.  How this comes about exposes them to self-search and change.  The idea of spiritual ceremony as dynamic and changing is quite different from the Roman Catholic emphasis on inerrancy and permanence pushed by missionaries.  Survival among nomads on the prairie is a matter of constantly adapting and seeking.

Another example is in the life of Alan Pard, a noted ceremonialist who now protects Bundles including those that were once kept by Bob Scriver, except that when they were with Bob they were inactive except for his own, now missing.  Ryan came to this world by accompanying repatriated Bundles from prestigious American museums.  This was considered dangerous, attracting evil spirits (tell me about it!), but necessary in order to avert the greater danger of having one’s essential, ontological, epistomological life-support -- one’s identity -- destroyed by absorption into the great world-eating mass of commercial popularization that slurps up everything.  Pard’s challenge was heart problems due to the usual modern middle-aged male cardiopathy.  Beyond just changing his diet and quitting smoking, his case emphasizes the great value of “backing someone up.”  His friends joined him in kicking cigarettes, sitting with him to distract him with good company.  In the old days they might have joined him on a hunt or a raid -- backing him up as one does in a fight.

Ryan writes so clearly and uses these concepts so deftly that in spite of these concepts being subtle, the power of them comes through.  All the quarrels about what’s “real” and “authentic” fall away when these ideas take hold.  The issues become more personal than political.  Ryan’s bibliography is going to keep me busy all winter as I go into my “cave” to shelter from prairie blizzards that have already begun.  The nourishment is named.  Words can be a warming shelter.

Ryan and Adrienne Heavy Head