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.

DESIGNED SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE

ESSENCE OF DESIGNED EXPERIENCE 

Jonathan A. Anderson, whose lectures are on YouTube.  http://open.biola.edu/authors/jonathan-a-anderson, teaches at a fundamentalist school that believes in Biblical inerrancy but he talks about the most avant garde kinds of art with full comprehension and insight. Here is an example of his designed sacred experience, a “proof of life.”

"Put a chilled piece of glass in front of you.  An oscillating fan should be running in the room.  Lean forward in your chair and breathe on the glass.  Observe your breath as it clouds the glass.  Lean back.  Watch as your breath clears from the glass.  This is seeing your life."

Part two:

"Get a friend to sit on the other side of the chilled glass.  Put two oscillating fans in the room.  You lean forward to make a cloud while your friend sits back.  Then you lean back and he leans forward to breathe on the glass.  Observe carefully.  You are looking at each other's lives.”

If one is to work at the level of the body that kindles a feeling of the sacred, one must be aware somehow at the level of the 200 kinds of one-celled perception that is posited to have developed to guide us since the beginning.  To a rat it is clear that these cells perceive whether we are next to and following a wall, or approaching a drop-off; whether it is daytime or nighttime even if there is no light; the approach of some living thing bigger than us; whether we are being watched; and many other subtle things most of us pay no attention to.  Worship design is like any other art form except that the focus is survival.

The trouble is that the survival of the group and of the individual can be opposed.  Groups don’t like the atypical.  Individuals do.  The tension between them is either creative, triggering evolution, or deadly, destroying one or the other.  We are sharply aware of that right now.  Worship experience can help reconcile the conflict.

There are three concepts from Paul Tillich that I accept.

1.  If two things are in direct conflict, the remedy is to find that which includes them both.  His key is “being” versus “non-being”, overarched by “the ground of being.”  Be careful to avoid Manicheism, which tries to make every binary into an evil versus good. 

2.  Symbols cannot be “assigned” rationally.  They are “emergent,” forming when the situation provides the force that produces them.  They might not be nice; they can certainly not be controlled.  One can learn to recognize them.

3.  Worship and religion can only transcend the politico-economics of a specific time and place by relating to what he calls the Ultimate, consciousness of belonging and participating in something on the edge of conceivability: cosmic, inscrutable, impossible to describe.  It is what we come out of  and what we go into.  It has NOTHING to do with religion and includes science as a kind of religion.  It has nothing to do with institutions.  It’s the “is-ness” of being even before it’s divided into time and space.  We are submerged and connected in being.

THEORY

Victor Turner provides basics by defining the experience of ceremonies in time as though it were in space, like a room with walls, a door, and a threshold, called a limen.  

The beginning is entering over the threshold which might actually be physical.  But it could be anything that affects the level of consciousness, which could also be defined as reorganizing the connectome, if you know what a connectome is.

A connectome is the pattern of neuron connections at a given time.  It can be seen on fMRI sorts of instruments and will shift as the task of the brain changes.  It’s like an old-fashioned operator’s board for a telephone, plugging in the acoustic-processing center for sounds or the math rules for arithmetic.  If one is trying to think something in one realm with a connectome patterned for another realm, a lot of things will just go blank.  The result might be creative, but also might be an incoherent mess.

What shifts a person’s consciousness into the connectome for an event meant to be sacred?  How the event is thought of will make a difference: a litany, traditional to a denomination, will mean activating memory, habit, association with a certain kind of place, maybe giving attention to a leader.

Sometimes this entry into the sacred “room” can be seen as a task of “entrainment” or “concatenation”, basically getting everyone on the same page.  A song by the group; an entry procession as in a wedding; the literal tuning up of an orchestra, the lights go down, the curtain goes up, the candles are lit, the orchestra conductor raises his arms.  But also walking up stairs and opening an impressive door, or greeting and being greeted by people.  In some ways a sacred event is not that different from an arts performance.

If the limen is crossed in the connectome of those attending, then they are ready for the body of the event.  Turner’s theory is that the people should be separated enough from their daily life to temporarily give up hierachy — everyone is equal in the sacred time and place.  One is released to accept change or to reconfirm their commitment.  It is both a very safe place, and the very most dangerous because of what might be realized.

At the end of this, the task is to send people back over the limen into the real world, but renewed.  Some of the same acts, words, songs, will work.  When this is done powerfully, it will be hard to explain, but people will feel those who were present were changed.

Beginning, Middle, End are the trinity of all time experience, but when they are envisioned as a space, it’s easier to see them as a progression across time.  That doesn’t seem logical, but there it is.

There is another strategy that comes close to the beginning, after the people have justified their attendance (knocked on the door) and sat down together (entrainment).  I call it the Dilation of the Spirit.  You could relate it to what Tillich has said about “ultimates.”  That is, disengaging the mind from the teeny-tiny quotidian and taking it to the absolute limit of imagination. 

First, one thinks of the most ghastly, evil, disastrous things and how we are not at all safe from any of them.  In fact, chances are someone in the group has just been diagnosed with cancer, just lost someone dear, just watched the news of another predator drone attack that killed an innocent family.  With lots of prompting from the media, most of us don’t find it hard to envision Evil, but “nice people” who are surviving on denial and fantasy while they walk on the crust of the volcano, will usually banish it, simply not allow it.  This reduces religious experience to a cotillion, a pleasant night at the card table.

Institutional religion promises protection.  When the dogmas don’t deliver, the people leave the pews.  The Creedal belief in life after death is just about exhausted.  Few of us can sustain the vision of rising out of the grave restored.  Our efforts to believe end up with movies about zombies and White Walkers.  Gruesome and ridiculous.

I go instead to the idea of inclusion, which is simply a bald fact.  Every particle of existence is connected to every other particle and if one is changed, so are the others.  Every tiny thing matters.  That is, life matters.  What you do matters.  You may have just manufactured in your organs a molecule that will change you and therefore your life and that you might pass on to your children, altering their lives and all the lives around you.  Hey, I’ve seen it happen.  Survival is the same thing as participation.  Even if it were possible to separate from everything else, that would be death.  No sensation, no nurturing, no connectome.