INVISIBLE BUT POWERFUL

John Godbey, my seminary professor and assigned counselor, worked hard to get me to define what “virtual” meant.  Specifically, he wanted me to make a place for “God” in my system and I didn’t want to.  I don’t trust anthropomorphism.  And it is worrisome to name things that can only be perceived by their impact on what IS seen. 

“Virtual definition, being such in power, force, or effect, though not actually or expressly.”  (Same one-sentence definition in several websites.)  

When I formally withdrew my membership from the neighborhood Presbyterian congregation in 1957, the minister (who would have been more persuasive if he had had better personal character) wrote me a return letter (I was in college) that used the existence of the newly discovered planet Pluto which had only been found by realizing its impact on the paths of the other planets.  But eventually Pluto was seen, an actual solid object.  No exploration of space has found God.

But some of the ideas coming from Porges have meant I must consider “virtual” connections and structures among humans that are located only in humans’ unconscious  capacities that are not observable directly.  They come close to being virtual.  The word echoes “virtue” but doesn’t mean praiseworthy.  No judgement about good or bad is relevant, though Porges himself identifies them with compassion, through empathy (feeling with, participating) rather than some principle of good behavior.

Beginning in the circle of enrapturement between mother and baby (which is not always likely or even possible in some socioeconomic circumstances) which comes out of care like feeding, cleaning, embracing, stroking — all natural mammalian things to do — the possibility of participation in a “liminal” space and time is built by experience with eye-gaze, single cells of a special kind, identification with other people even in stories, and attachment. ("A mirror neuron is a neuron that fires both when an animal acts and when the animal observes the same action performed by another. Thus, the neuron "mirrors" the behavior of the other, as though the observer were itself acting. "  Wikipedia)  

What I call “attachment” is called by others “love” or even compassion.  I mean “attachment” to name the invisible bonds formed by experience between people or even between a person and his/her environment or habits.  This can only be seen by others through behavior but to the individual is a “feeling”.  It is a major part of identity, but not always felt consciously until it is challenged some way, perhaps broken so that it causes grief.

A form of attachment is what causes people to join together to further some goal that can’t be achieved by an individual.  This is present in many mammals but is not expanded as it can be among humans because of their ability to communicate, even over time through writing, even after death.  This results in culture, which is attachment to environment or the organizations we call government or religion which are kept in place by attachment.  We can see the institutions, the places, the ecology, but we cannot see the attachment except through behavior or testimony from those who feel them.

The feeling that we call “sacred” or “holy” or hierophanies is more intense than attachment, particularly in terms of something like “fusion with all being,” which is to say participation in all the known but also the unknown.  It is too intense and mysterious to be sustained, and can be labelled “madness.”  The impact on the larger society depends upon the nature of the philosophy and strategy to which they are committed.  If it is one of preventing change, people who have epiphanies can be made into martyrs.

In my case at seminary, I never had a sacred epiphany — I was simply acting out of what I thought was logic — that an unseen and uncontrolled concept didn’t exist.  But for Godbey, who did feel it and remained Christian in a sense, it DID exist.  I’ve met others who say that “feeling” a personal, palpable, human (anthropocentric) relationship with — at least — Jesus, is the whole key to their Christianity.  If it’s an illusion, it’s heartfelt and there’s no reason or method for arguing except logic, which isn’t always useful.  If it’s simply a very intense and meaningful metaphor, that has nothing to do with the level of epiphany that I’m trying to understand.

Maybe it’s not possible to understand.  But if it is, I think the clues are likely to be in the realm of what we used to call the psychological, a term I’d like to avoid because it is used by logical people to attack those who trust their feelings.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YT_63UntRJE

Here is a link to another way to approach the virtual human structures and non-verbal communications that is palpable, perceived but unseen, entering though the ears instead of the eyes, but existing in the brain as a composite, a construct, with near-religious attachment.  This music was used in the movie of “Out of Africa” to express the love/attachment between Isak Dinesen and Dennis Finch-Hatton, carried in the “place” of Kenya and the story related in the book of the same name.  In my brain it is connected to the East Slope grasslands of the Rockies and a whole complex of events, memories, sensations, and so on.

Thus, the arts are a language, communication of something invisible but effective, life-changing, expressive and — well, one doesn’t quite dare say “eternal.”  Yet eternity is fluid, ever-changing.  One can imagine the continuity sometimes breaks, becomes a terrifying void.  The Friday vespers in seminary that were remembered later were the ones that wove these forces into an experience by using music and words.  In addition, people have described moments of unexpected sacred intensity that happened by accident of light, place, relationship that interacted to kindle something in the person.

I wish I’d been far more personal with Godbey. His formality and deafness were obstacles, but if I’d thought to talk about Garrett Theological School, the Methodist seminary attached to NU, or about Morocco or about meeting his wife in Casablanca -- even his childhood in Nebraska -- we might have found virtual forces we recognized. 

MORE REFLECTION ON EPIPHANY

An epiphany feels as though it comes from outside one’s body, which is why people call them “theophanies.”  Supernatural.  More than something you could just think up.  It can grip you and make you shake.

So can epilepsy.

If you run electricity or magnetism through certain parts of the brain, you’ll have an epiphany.  You might hear voices.  You might have a vision.  But it’s just the operator of the vibes doing it.  Really great music could do it.

Every time I mentioned it on a Sunday morning, people would linger afterwards and sidle up to take me aside to tell me about their own experience, usually not anything fancy or grand.  A man said he was bathing the baby in a little plastic tub on a picnic table at a camp spot the family had used before when suddenly the place was charged with energy and he could see every pine needle scattered on the table.

Jonathan Edwards, the guy who said we were all sinners in the hands of an angry god who dangled us over the fires of the kitchen stove as though we were spiders gripping threads we just made, walked with his wife and said the sacred shone through the world like the sun coming through a stained glass window.

Stoned again.  But on what?  And why do drugs work?  Clearly they change the interactions of molecules inside the body and not always the same way from one drug to another, but that means the phenomenon is chemical in origin, doesn’t it?  “Natural” because it’s inside the body, UNnatural because the intervention is intentional, administered from outside the body.  It’s possible to make up words like “entheogen” but that doesn’t mean something supernatural is involved?

One group of people wants extraordinary feeling to be something that the human body “does” in a natural physiological way and another group wants it to be the result of transcendent forces that are completely outside what a human can do.  The two groups want their separate and irreconcilable beliefs to be reinforced, so experiments are skewed and weighed to get the desired results.  We are the instruments, so how can be objective?  Using computers or fMRI’s only extends the territory.  Bliss doesn’t compute in mathematical terms.

But you can market it if you accept the idea of “entheogens,” drugs which claim at least to make you feel as though you were in touch with something supernatural and extraordinary.  How would you prove whether that were true?   Is there anything to consider besides the results of taking such drugs?

One issue is the category of drug: “natural,” meaning used by indigenous cultures and gathered in the wild; “pharmaceutical”, meaning made and marketed by a corporation; “accidental” like ergot fungus growing on bread; “rogue” or underground or "street" meaning made in some kind of improvised lab for no other use that getting high, and so on.

At least one way of getting high that is not an ingestion is instead a deprivation, like the air evacuations of a pressure chamber, or being at a very high altitude, or deep diving.  A stroke or tumor could shut down parts of the brain.  The dashboard that is the brain is vulnerable.  It might be infected or merely inflamed.  (An infection is some invasion from a virus, a bacteria, a fungus or the like.  An inflammation is a reaction of the body that is trying to get rid of some problem, like an infection, trauma, or foreign substance.)  The old Blackfeet used starvation, dehydration, self-torture, and staring at the sun to prompt what they classified as supernatural.  Exsanguination, blood loss, might work.  Ask de Sade.

Clearly entheogens or equivalent behavior can make a person have unusual experiences and some of them, esp. if prolonged, can be damaging or lethal.  But the interpretation can be either positive or negative, and the results in terms of what happens during and afterwards can vary.  If there is a ceremonial context, esp. one with a community, the effect will be quite different than if one is alone and in a bad emotional place, which will have already filled the body with molecules -- maybe the ones the ingestor is hoping an entheogen will end.  The constantly shifting connectomes among the neurons joining different regions will make a difference.  If life is a process flow between the banks of too much and too little, then extraordinary mental states may signal that one is dangerously near one side or the other.  

But there is an essential and possibly insoluble problem with this kind of discussion on the page:  it is a rational way of thinking confined to and produced by the pre-frontal cortex that is about ancient dark-brain and whole-body-emotion phenomena.  Some people are willing to undergo those experiences and then reflect about them when they are returned to “normal,” but the point of many of them is to change what is normal, esp. when “normal” is dysfunctional in terms of social context.  Some things can't be explained -- just felt.

Epiphany can be induced by another person (by hypnotism, for instance) or by physical activity like dancing, drumming, whirling or by constraint (bondage) . . .   I’m not talking about sex because I think it will introduce a whole new set of emotional variables, but maybe a powerful orgasm is an epiphany and that’s why so many people are willing to leave the flow of safety in order to trigger such a response.  Some dreams can seem like an epiphany, metaphorical images drawing up an insight from the depths of the under-rational.  Maybe it’s a reorganization of insight as is reported by users of LSD.  Or maybe it’s a side-effect of a drug like Sustiva that confronts HIV in the brain tissues.

I’ve deliberately tried to make an epiphany seem merely an intensification of something natural and maybe it is partly that.  But by definition and by report it can be far more intense and singular.  Managed by ceremony, it can pull a person out of their culture or embed them more deeply into a system of behavior.  Some writers feel that it is triggered by irresolvable contradiction and that’s supported by the reports of saints, who are partly defined by epiphanies and partly by written accounts of the experience.  Shamans, specifically, are not defined by good or bad and rarely write anything down.  They are denizens of the dark-brain who claim direct contact with the world, by ayahuasca or by crow.

And now I am in rainbow and raise my arms until they become wings.  The planet shudders like a bell and my mouth is full of honey.  The heat is not healing but annealing as in the treatment of molten metal to rearrange its molecular structure.  I dance with gravity just above the flow of life itself.

EPIPHANY

“The physiological mechanisms of epiphany, not necessarily religious.”  Catchy little subject, don’t you think?  NOT.

I used to preach about this -- the moments that some of us feel (not everyone) in which we are flooded with awareness of how hot and sweet the world is.  We stand motionless for a moment, not wanting it to end.  It’s real, but we don’t seem to have control over when and how it happens.  What the heck is it?

If you’re a god-believer, you might use the terms “theophany” meaning god (theos) breaking through to you or if not religious, “epiphany” which the anonymous writer at Wikipedia broadens and secularizes as a sudden insight into a problem after a long period of study.  In fact, the entry illustrates our Western cultural tendency to make everything explicable (explainable) and the product of rational thought or else some obscure Christian doctrine.  Those are your choices.  Be a grad student in the sciences or be a learned old guy in a church, both male.  

I’m trying to evade all that.  It’s not easy because the idea is SO deeply embedded in us and anyway it is the product of a lot of underlying ideas that people aren’t even aware that they believe, even after decades of countervailing strategies from feminists, Aquarians, and even psychologists.  Their sorting categories prevent them from having a place to put the knowledge and therefore it evaporates.

I’m saving for reflection an article on fMRI studies in which the experimenters challenged deeply held beliefs of people and actually got them to change their minds, to shift to a new point of view.  You can SEE it on the computer screen.  The experimenters did not record what it felt like, because now the idea is to switch from the logical rationality of people to their computerized brain synapses.  Both logic and neurology neglect “feelings” and yet feeling is our true guide in life.  

Suzanne Langer developed many relevant ideas.

Feeling is the whole-body response to one’s inner metaphors.  All thinking is metaphorical.  Rationality is a particular metaphor system -- it is the SUBset of thinking, which is really feeling.  By over-emphasizing rationality, particularly that which is represented in writing, we have suppressed and denied much of our feeling and therefore distorted our humanity.

We’ve lost our ability to perceive subtlety, what the Japanese used to call “shibui” -- elegance, sensitivity to small nuances.  We commodify everything into the symbolic invention of money and then play with its value by making it “worth” more and less according to mysterious rules about gambling on the stock market.

We help the needy according to symbol systems that render the help useless:  convening to wring our hands, writing poems about the emotion of compassion for others without any sharing of the plight of the objects or translating it into effective help -- turning it all back to ourselves in the Mother Teresa image of self-denial and sadness.  We don't let the needy speak for themselves.  Yet people in the most broken societies of the planet are often joyful, full of song and dance, giving it away.

Of all the most obvious “felt” symbol systems, sex in the most direct sense of body contact
is the feeling most commodified and disconnected from the new reality created by lab technology: petri dish conception, three-parent children from mitochondrial donation or from surrogate gestation, viagra-caused hydraulic responses without eroticism or bonding, deflected paraphilias, dab-on pheromones, transgressions of all kinds.  I was startled that a philosopher seeking a “new religion” would give as an example of degradation the habit of “watching porn.”  How does one tell porn from mainstream programming?  

More than that, how can one seek a new religion without first breaking apart the old ones into the hierarchical, institutional, patriarchal corporations they are.  The word "religion" as we were taught in seminary, is rooted in semantics.  Remember Wikipedia is a collaboration of male grad school students with tenured academic pedants, both types common in the “Western world” still yearning after empires.

“The Latin term religiō, origin of the modern lexeme religion (via Old French/Middle Latin) is of ultimately obscure etymology. It is recorded beginning in the 1st century BC, i.e. in Classical Latin at the beginning of the Roman Empire, notably by Cicero, in the sense of "scrupulous or strict observance of the traditional cultus".

“The classical explanation of the word, traced to Cicero himself, derives it from re- (again) + lego in the sense of "choose", "go over again" or "consider carefully". Modern scholars such as Tom Harpur and Joseph Campbell favor the derivation from ligo "bind, connect", probably from a prefixed re-ligare, i.e. re- (again) + ligare or "to reconnect," which was made prominent by St. Augustine, following the interpretation of Lactantius.”

See?  Everything defined by categories and specific men whose thoughts have been saved in writing and used by ecclesiastical authorities to bind together their constituencies, which are always based on money, more pleasantly called “prosperity.”

I’m thinking that “religion” works best in times of distress, then deteriorates when the crisis is over.  The people who nearly starved in the Great Depression and then desperately fought to save the world from Nazi ideas felt they were honorably religious and that a big entity overhead was therefore supporting them.  The two forces, one-two blows, in spite of being deeply felt, have by now been corrupted and commodified into terrorists and plutocrats.  It’s all forms of blackmail, extortion, and piracy.

Unless you step clear out of that metaphor system. 

Luckily, sort of by accident, I have an alternative.  I did not enter through mathematical logic, but through actor’s training which is about feeling.  (The Method, as taught by Alvina Krause.)  Not one’s endless stream of feeling, the narcissistic pondering of one’s reflection in a puddle, but rather the empathic sharing of experience.  Inhabiting the Other.  Not just humans, not just pets, not just working animals who have been bred to know what you want, but extension into the metaphorical “feelings” of things and their way of fitting into existence.  People love to make fun of trying to become a tree, but it’s less scary than trying to become, for instance, Tim.  Or one of the boys.

They can explain it themselves, but not necessarily in words.  Image, music, and maybe a private language, jargon or slang.  I love it because it makes me feel.  Not from out here, but from inside their desperate lungs, their spasming guts, their stinging feet.  And their seeking hands, their soaring leaps, their nobly shaven skulls.  

My level of success varies.  The effort is always rewarded.

There’s another source of my metaphor system, which is the Blackfeet reservation.  They teach me that what seems solid might be illusion and might disappear, that deceptions can be entrances never suspected, that -- as the Asians teach -- one must pay attention.  Always.  

In the end, it’s geology: watching the mountains being forced up from the depths, feeling the catabatic winds warm your face, walking past a tipi circle of stones, realizing that you’re smelling sweetgrass.  Even as I struggled to grasp theology, I was taking writing classes from Richard Stern.  The class, three women, were all writing fiction, though no one said we had to.  What Stern was urging us to see (urgently -- sometimes impatiently) was how to build a metaphor system, a poetry of living, so often shocking but more dangerous when quiet.

How can anyone devise or discover a theology for boys who have been thrown out on the street, making a living with their bodies, stunning themselves with drugs?  There’s nothing rational about it; nothing is bound together (ligere) for the sake of institutions.  But it can be felt.  If one has the courage.  There’s no reading list.  DO something.  I’ll go on trying to figure out how to trigger an epiphany, hot and sweet -- salvific.

A TRANSPARENT EYE

Someplace in the last weeks I read an article about the planet’s oceans being cleared through the action of some tiny creature that lived in great numbers, and how that clearing so increased the usefulness of seeing that the smallest creatures began to evolve to be light sensitive.

One of the great appeals of writing is that, properly done, the "water" clears and one can see.  Then one begins to evolve an eye (and an ear) that sees, but is unseen.  Somehow there is an illusion that an unseen viewer will be seeing unguarded truth.  This is probably not true, since most censoring is done by the one who is looking, in his or her own head, seeing on terms of suspicion.  It is opening the mind that counts, not opening some shutter.

The Ebola eye is on the right, dilated for examination.

In the same news-span we have learned about the doctor who was cured of ebola, except for his eye, which turned green because the virus was still in the vitreous fluid of his eye.  Other things we laypeople learned was that there are small reservoirs in the body where the immune system is blocked out because the place (the eye and the testicles, for instance) is too delicate and crucial to tolerate the battle the immune system will put up against intruders, maybe even turning on the person.  The phrase you need to search for is “immune-privileged regions of the body.”  Other viruses can taken shelter in the placenta, hair follicles, and  “the haematopoietic stem-cell niche” in bone marrow.  It’s not easy to find information about these niches because there is so little known.  

The human brain also has a blood barrier for many substances.  More is known about this because docs want to get meds past the barrier and so do those wanting to experience derangement of the neurons in order to get high.  These “immune-privileged” parts are supposed to be sanctuaries, but there is something in some humans that psychologically despises all sanctuaries or privileges.  Nor do we necessarily admire unembellished nature.

A friend, who acquired one of those antibiotic-resistant hospital infections when surgery was done on his leg, struggled for more than a year to get rid of it.  In the end, they removed some immune cells, tagged them radioactively, injected them back in and traced where they went as they traveled to fight the virus.  Then they injected the most powerful drugs right into the “sanctuary” location.  It worked.

When doing an autopsy, the investigator is likely to take a biopsy of the vitreous fluid of the eye, perhaps by withdrawing some of it with a needle.  The fluid is likely to preserve a record of substances that have cleared the rest of the body.  The tissues of the eye are the slowest of the body cells to replace and the least able to resist intruders, which is why toxoplasmosis worms like eyes, even though they can be seen there.  

The progression of this post has been from ancient limnology and the development of first life to the persistence of primitive life within the complexity of the human body.  Now let us step over to a spiritual level.

from Emerson's notebook about his essay on nature.

Ralph Waldo Emerson has been key for those who have strong sympathy with the Transcendental style of Unitarian thought that was influenced by Buddhist and Hindu sources brought to Boston by Yankee Traders on the seas.  It also speaks to those who see the Sacred in nature.  But the place where Emerson had his key epiphany of fusion with creation was on Boston Commons, a city park, not during the wilderness treks his essay inspired in Henry David Thoreau.  Emerson was simply going about his business when he was struck by a deep experience of felt meaning.  Every time I’ve ever preached about these moments, people have come up afterwards to report their own light-struck interval.  They were always mundane times doing routine things, that were suddenly interrupted for a few moments.

“Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,—and all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. “ -- Emerson

The idea of the transparent eyeball first appeared in Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay, "Nature", which was published in 1836.  The eyeball is not the theme, which is instead nature as the closest experience to experiencing the presence of God.  This process requires absolute "solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society" to uninhabited places like the woods where . . .  "We return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, — no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite spaces, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Emerson is often thought of as a wise old man with no troubles, which is a cultural archetype we are constantly pushing.  But in fact he was so in love with his wife that he insisted on marrying her though she was too young and suffering with tuberculosis, the HIV of the time.  After she had died, he would occasionally return to her tomb and open it to see if she were truly dead.  Dealing with his guilt was complicated because she had family wealth which he inherited and which supported his genteel philosophical life so that he could leave the Unitarian ministry with which he often quarreled.  

He finally arrived at the idea of an Oversoul that includes everything and is palpably felt in the experience of being a “transparent eyeball.”  It’s closely related to the notion of the “Oceanic feeling” which might be welcomed or rejected, depending on the psychology of the person and whether they have had the experience.

by Joseph McGurl

From Wikipedia:  “The concept was coined in a letter of December 5th, 1927 from Romain Rolland to Freud as part of their correspondence, where Rolland writes:

“Mais j'aurais aimé à vous voir faire l'analyse du sentiment religieux spontané ou, plus exactement, de la sensation religieuse qui est (...) le fait simple et direct de la sensation de l'éternel (qui peut très bien n'être pas éternel, mais simplement sans bornes perceptibles, et comme océanique).

“In strict translation:

“But I would have liked to see you make an analysis of the spontaneous religious sentiment or, more exactly, of the religious sensation which is (...) the simple and direct fact of the sensation of the eternal (which can very well not be eternal, but simply without perceptible boundaries, and like oceanic). Similar as an independent contact, the feeling is fundamentally subjective.”

Freud is another we press into the mold of genius wise old man, unchallenged.  (At least he spoke French.)

Alex Grey, visionary

The ideas of the oceanic feeling -- fusion, love, and loss -- are merged and culturally recognized in the lyrics of a song from “Nine Inch Nails.”

Staring at the sea

Will she come?

Is there hope for me

After all is said and done

Anything at any price

All of this for you

All the spoils of a wasted life

All of this for you

All the world has closed her eyes

Tired faith all worn and thin

For all we could have done

And all that could have been

Ocean pulls me close

And whispers in my ear

The destiny I've chose

All becoming clear

The currents have their say

The time is drawing near

Washes me away

Makes me disappear

And I descend from grace

In arms of undertow

I will take my place

In the great below

I can still feel you

Even so far away

And that's only human love!  This complex of metaphors evades both the cold mathematics of theological argument and mawkish commercial hearts and flowers.  Once felt, it is haematopoietic, the term for the bone marrow stem cells at the core of the body that can give rise to vital tissues in the sanctuary niches of the mind.  And eye.

Manga

"LIVING WITH A WILD GOD" by Barbara Ehrenreich (review)

The first Barbara Ehrenreich book I read was “The Hearts of Men.”  At the time, which was 1983, just after I left seminary, it was a defense not heard often and full of resonance.  Now, after reading “Living with a Wild God,” the earlier book is clearly recognizable as a defense of her father.  That’s not a slam.  The lives of theologians always foreshadow their eventual theories of God.  In fact, the lives of scientists also can shape their theories.  How can we be other than what our pasts have made us, since even rejection of them amounts to a development from them?

It is often suggested that science is a kind of religion with its own leaders and morality, its own way of being in the world, but that’s backwards.  Religions are early versions of science, rough drafts composed of the knowledge of the times.  The differences in religion, once one learns how to look, are the differences in the evidence offered by the environment, the ecology, of the place the religion evolved.  To understand this, then, means accepting the ideas -- the grand principles -- of both ecology and evolution.  Both are about how things fit together and can vary radically but finally come down to survival.

To get closer to the universal forces beyond ecology, one must go to genetics, neurotheory, and quantum theory.  In our times we have gone beyond the observational science of the centuries leading up to the 19^th century nose-counting and notebook sketches to highly technical investigations requiring complex machines of enormous expense and the education to operate them.   

People shaped by infinitely differing conditions are now mixed together into circumstances that can provoke war or simply maladaptation that imposes enormous suffering to masses who are displaced from everything they believe and can do.  And yet the primal questions persist.  The two that preoccupy us now are whether there is any reality outside our perceptions and whether our capacity to make contact with it (which we now begin to understand is only symbolized by our brains, because we turn out to think with our guts and muscles as well as our neurons, and which is limited as much by our capacity to organize what comes to us through our sensorium as it is by the acuteness of our perceptions.

The Holy Land

Those people whose roots came out of the Middle East, which offered the Abrahamic religious positions, were based on the nuclear family and the tribal chieftain, especially the father/son connection that was the means of passing down power and wealth in a shrinking ecology.  Erosion, land exhaustion, diminishing rainfall, the invention of agriculture and irrigation that pushed away hunting/gathering, walled cities and the invention of chariots for the purpose of war.  These are the stories of the Old Testament and the Koran and the advice for how to deal with them.  Where the influence of the New Testament came from -- Buddhism from India, Celtic goddesses from the tribes to the north -- is up to better minds with more resources than mine.

Barbara Ehrenreich’s new book, “Living with a Wild God: a Non-believer’s Search for the Truth About Everything” is confined by our obsessive conviction that GOD is what religion is about, in the same way that FATHER is what family is about. “The Hearts of Men,” is now clearly about FATHER, her father and what she experienced while witnessing the life-arcs of her parents.  These were closely related to the furor about Communism and Marxism and the demand for economic justice.  

Butte mine accesses

Ehrenreich is about the same age as I am, took her undergrad work at Reed in Portland, and proceeded through a technician’s career under the guidance and oppression of respected scientists.  Her brilliant father began in Butte (a bit of European coal culture transplanted to the high mountains of Montana) digging below ground, and somehow by patronage from “fathers” and support from wife, managed to rise so high in the resource corporations that he finally transcended to management.  (The priesthood.)  He was admired and well-paid but not happy and eventually fell apart into alcoholism.  Divorced, his wife lost control of her life as well.  Their religion was “atheism” which I do not see as a cause so much as a result.

Ehrenreich has always been scrupulously honest about her thoughts and in this case was investigating her personal development through “lab notes,” i.e. a journal she kept throughout her youth.  She is also honest -- but not disclosive -- about her relationships, even her two children, one of which died.  What comes through is a lack of empathy, a distrust of intimacy.  As she moved into journalism, her strength was investigating other people’s lives, understanding them in a kind of ecological way, but then leaving.

This specific book is based on a risky disclosure: a mystical experience that caused the world to “burst into flame” with meaning and inclusion.  As a young adult she and her brother, plus a friend, had gone skiing on Mt. Shasta, were sleep-lagged and famished, when she walked alone into her vision.  It is indecipherable.  Through her life little gleams of flame would return, but never that engulfment.

To complicate it, the “friend” guided them to Death Valley so he could retrieve a cache of dynamite he had found -- old, sweating, unstable, explosives which they took back to his home.  She claims she had no idea at the time but realizes in retrospect that in many alternative scenarios they could have blown up the car or his house and family.

Ehrenreich says, “My agent Kris Dahl pressed me to turn was was originally conceived as a history of religion into a personal narrative.  At first I resisted, but I think that, as usual, she was right.”  She also lets us know that she was hurting financially, since in one of the many hurricanes she had lost a New Orleans home with all her accumulated papers and since the collapse of traditional publishing had removed the practice of offering advances.  In fact, the entire ecology of publishing had collapsed, hurting her as much as anyone else writing.

Today agents do much of the shaping of a book that was once undertaken by "house" editors.  Rather than the reputation of a publishing house, profit is the guide.  The overwhelming concept is that “immersion” sells.  That is, sensation and adventure, but also intimacy with the author.  “How did you feel?  What was it like?”  Somehow, the paradigm of the sexual encounter has become our key to the meaning of life.  Orgasmic saints, both those who are virtuous and those who were wicked, seem to be our epitome of humanness.  We’ve been here before:  Zeus was very resourceful about being a swan, a shower of gold, a bull.  We see erotic love as an overwhelming -- even consuming -- force that takes us out of our skins, even out of our minds.  Of course, back there in the trunk of the car is always that sweating dynamite, liable to “blow” us to “kingdom cum.”

A dynamite explosion.

Like myself, Ehrenreich was open to Hindu ideas, though she doesn’t seem to have had access to the classes I was taking in my parallel years at Northwestern where several strong atheists and comparative religionists had found a niche.   They were the same ideas that seduced the Transcendentalists in New England.  But my “god-prob” was not the nuclear atomic “Shiva” that coincided with her and my primary school years.  Mine was “Deus Absconditus,” since my father was a traveling man who had a prefrontal cortex injury in 1948 that erased all empathy.  Of course, alcoholism and divorce are also "flights from commitment."  Maybe the right phrase is "from engagement."  So we're similar there, too.

Neither parent of Ehrenreich seems to have those little spindle cells that bestow empathy.  This lack was considered an advantage in the Cold War worlds of science labs, corporation management, and sexual carelessness.  These detached frigid contexts may be the background emptiness that creates our craving for intimacy with people we will never meet.  We're trying to come in from the cold.

"Coming in from the Cold"  (a movie)

The title of Erhrenreich's book, like the titles of many books, is meant as enticement.  It has nothing to do with the content.  There's no such thing as a "wild god" -- all gods are domestic.  (Some of them are feral.)  The heart of the book is about direct mystical experience of existence -- God has nothing to do with it.  Ehrenreich's search is not for God -- it is for meaningful relationship.  She believes in the search.  She was gifted with epiphany.