WHAT IS SACRED?

What is sacred?  Not "religion".  Those who -- like the Pope -- have been in this world at the professional level know it can be the most cutthroat, child oppressing, greedy-and-hoarding, cruelty-encouraging way of life possible.  While all the time claiming to be a moral guide.

Religion is a social hallucination.  That's why so many people insist that the definition is "believing," dictating that a particular set of ideas must be unquestioned in order for the members to belong.  This is in a context where non-belonging is to be non-conformist, stigmatized, and even labeled a heretic, if not demonic.  Measures taken to punish heresy can be horrific:  burning at the stake, various tortures, exclusion from life-supporting social nets like food and residence.  My reference is European and its derived empires, which had a special interest in maintaining loyalty through hallucination, called "myth" to dress it up a bit.

The metaphor in recent decades has been "God is dead," which is impossible since a big anthropomorph in the sky was an hallucination in the first place, never alive.  Jesus is not even a hominin in myth, since he was fathered by an hallucination and survived death, appearing to people as a frank vision.  All the countries and empires who claimed to be authorized personally by God are in big trouble.  They must look for a new way of justifying what they have done, what it is they think they own.  This search may be one of the causes of nations being so unsettled.

What really has happened is the hallucination that "science is truth" (in a Platonic actual sense) has prevailed as a final truth.  Now this idea has to be killed.  Science is based on the whole idea that humans with their electro-chemical-magnetic-neurological access to the world outside their skin and even to each other is NOT absolute, given as if from God.  They are outside the problem, they thought. But not.  We must go on searching.  We need to murder the idea that ANYTHING is absolute, immutable, from some other realm that is superior.  "Reality" is partly a matter of consensus and partly a matter of whether it works.  If you ignore walls, you'll walk into them.  Many religions and some science will leave you with knobs on your forehead from collisions with surfaces you didn't know were there.

Even those who claim to be "spiritual" are implying that there is a greater power with which they can connect.  They feel it can be found in nature, maybe grizzly bears and wild storms.  There is not.  The hallucination is only a little bit closer to being admitted once you've been whacked by the flat surface of it.  People are stubborn. They insist on the past.

We know that as the past versions of hominin developed out of variations of DNA formulas for their bodies, not everyone had the same mutations at the same time or at all.  Special circumstances like high altitudes or pearl diving put a certain kind of evolutionary pressure on some, who HAD to do it or die.  Adaptation to digesting milk or combating malaria also developed out of local circumstances.  I would like to know whether the perception of the sacred -- not the nature or source or circumstances of it but the actual perception of it -- might be universal.  

Maybe not everyone can feel the sacred, but many will claim to have felt it.  Is this also hallucinating?  I do not believe that Putin or certain Chinese authorities or Richard Graham have any experience of the holy.  Religion to them is control.

Reading the powerful accounts of people like Saint Theresa (the one with the ecstatic statue), I note that she speaks of holy experience in paradoxical couplets: dropped/held, hot/cold, light/dark, fed/starved.  This is partly the problem of describing something unknown and unnamed -- no names for aspects we didn't know existed -- but there's something in oxymorons that pushes our brains into acknowledging something that feels higher.  It is probably also an hallucination.  Poets know how to evoke it.  It is powerful.

I do know how to create a liminal space, that boundary over some kind of door threshold that feels different, gives permissions, opens concepts, builds solidarity among people.  An actual door is not necessary -- one can do it outdoors with no limen.  It's a matter of going to the most central concept of where the people are (their omphalos (belly button) or axis mundi, a concept worth visiting Wikipedia for), and making them safe.  What to do with that space once created --  realization, dedication, transformation, inspiration and so on -- will be unique.

This means that not everyone has evolved to have a theory of what is sacred and -- worse -- not everyone has a capacity to feel it.  My standing idea so far is that it comes from child-raising (or rather "being-risen").  When the infant is born, it is incapable of anything but staying alive.  it is "altricial" if it's a bird, requiring a nest.  I don't think there are any altricial reptiles.  Maybe I'm wrong.  Dinoes? Turtles?  Insects as they grow do not necessarily get bigger but change into a different version, metamorphize.  People are not so different from each other, but they do differ.  Mammal species that are born hairless, blind, and incapable of walking (like humans) are usually predators.  Prey must be born ready to run. Or hide.

Of course, before birth the fetus shares the mother's chemistry, movement, temperature, and sounds.  The fact that the newborn infant is cared for means gazing into each others eyes: the nursing baby is held where mother and child can read each other's faces.  A baby under a covered face for modesty, maybe a shawl flung over the shoulder, still has the mother's body to feel.  A baby with a propped bottle in a crib alone never gets that experience and may never feel either the Sacred or safety.  It is the experience of shared gaze that is the germ of liminality, the ability to perceive the Sacred.

As adults there are several ways to get to the Sacred even in a church that is not one's own, though the access through community might be challenged.  Other ways "in" to access are arts of all kinds, including poetry and architecture, emotional openness, history, life-changing events like baptism, marriages and memorials, extreme danger.  (Some have added divorce or other secular events that have great meaning, like winning an international war.)  The usual aesthetics of managing experience apply always: surprise, continuity, reminding, climax, humor, narrative, etc.  The land or sky themselves can often break through in a Holy moment, unexpected.

For adults, self-management in all respects becomes crucial.  In a destructive world or circumstances of riskiness, self-healing is vital.  This means, in part, being able to control the operation of a brain state.  Some people self-talk.  Some pray.  Someone who can't go to sleep or can't write is failing to grasp how brain states can be moved and bodies eased. Some of us can call the Sacred.

NESTED HOLARCHY

This post refers to an essay from “The Next System Project,” which publishes essays responding to the economic and environmental crisis of the world.  So far this essay is the one that really speaks to me.  In fact, I’ve often expressed the same ideas, but this is coherent and convincing.

http://thenextsystem.org/the-new-economy-a-living-earth-system-model/

One proposition adds a new-to-me concept: a nested holarchy of bioregions.  Holarchy is a new term for me.  “The basic organizational frame is a nested holarchy of bioregions that are substantially self-reliant in meeting most of their needs through their own labor and environmental resources.”  One of my continuing interests has been the village of Valier, nested in the county of Pondera, nested in the bioregion of grain growing “Golden Triangle,” nested in the high prairie, nested in the state of Montana, and so on.  

But also once I was part of the nested holarchy of small independent religious fellowships in the bioregion of the NW district of the denomination.  And earlier I was part of the nested holarchy of Montana bronze sculpture as part of the regional Cowboy Artists of America.  Is that right?

A holon is something that is simultaneously a whole and a part, like a seed contains a tree but then a tree contains a seed. “The word was coined by Arthur Koestler” who “was compelled by two observations in proposing the notion of the holon. The first observation was . . . that complex systems evolve from simple systems much more rapidly when there are stable intermediate forms present in that evolutionary process than if they are not present.”  Cowboy Artists of American was proof of this, creating an intermediate form, until the growth of auctions, galleries, publishers, and historical societies invested in “cowboy” art took hold.

(2)  “The second observation was . . . that, although it is easy to identify sub-wholes or parts, wholes and parts in an absolute sense do not exist anywhere. Koestler proposed the word holon to describe the hybrid nature of sub-wholes and parts within in vivo systems. From this perspective, holons exist simultaneously as self-contained wholes in relation to their sub-ordinate parts, and dependent parts when considered from the inverse direction.”  I suppose the UUA is an illustration, each congregation independent and voluntary, as are the members of the congregations.

“Koestler also says holons are autonomous, self-reliant units that possess a degree of independence and handle contingencies without asking higher authorities for instructions.”

Two organizational national mega-structures in the US are education and Christian denominations in the US.  Martin Marty, a prof emeritus at the U of Chicago Div School, and a favorite source of wisdom for the nation, wrote in his last “Sightings” post about the appalling vacuum at the heart of necessary understanding of both religion and citizenship.  (https://divinity.uchicago.edu/sightings/history-less-judgments)  In one of those terrifying surveys, it was revealed once again that basic citizenship concepts simply don’t exist, even in the minds of certified educated people.  This is what I mean by the emptying of diplomas that once indicated skills and knowledge.  They have become basically prerequisites for employment by corporations.  This is why parents and students DEMAND A’s merely for attendance and a minimum of compliance.  Greed.

Something similar has happened to churches where the cost of maintaining a building and staff including a minister demands that the congregation be popular enough to attract “critical mass” to the pews.  Reduced to pandering, whatever their message was intended to be is aborted.

Corporations, in the name of research and development, pour a LOT of money into colleges and universities, even state universities.  Part of this is through sports coliseums, part is through expensive labs and technical equipment, even cyclotrons.  They endow buildings named for them.  As a first reform, I would legally separate corporations from universities, that is, prevent gifts of money, esp. for sports coliseums, and forbid overlapping board memberships.  It will never happen.

David Korten is two years older than myself and was born less than an hour’s drive north of my birthplace (PDX) in Longview, WA, an idealistically founded community as indicated by its name.  This means that WWII is foundational in his awareness of the world, the same as in mine, and that after the war he believed in the corporate flowering of America.  (I did not.  My father worked for a cooperative and was committed to that ideology.)  Both Korten and I are appalled that it has all come to this — so quickly!  So recently!

Korten uses the word “sacred” quite a lot, but differently than I do.  To him it seems to mark those concepts that should be inviolable because they are logically vital to living systems.  That is, he’s still in the Harvard intellectual mold to some extent: propositional thinking, logic, evidence, science, etc.  

When I say “sacred” I don’t mean untouchable or privileged.  I mean you can feel it literally.  I mean it’s holistic, a whole person phenomenon.  And yet there is convergence between Korten’s “sacred” and mine.  A nested holarchy maybe.

Another place we converge is the awareness of systems failure causing individual anguish.  In my answer to the boy Will — who was crying at the HIV clinic because he, who had already been deeply abused by being raped, infected with HIV, and then had an eye cut out by someone trying to punish him for being infected, was now being treated with rough impatience and contempt by the clinic personnel.  (https://medium.com/@timbarrus/my-friend-will-is-crying-at-the-hiv-clinic-by-tyrone-7dbd2b8c5909#.33lzzitz7) — I suggested that our whole medical system has been reorganized so as to maximize profit and lock out complaints.  The HIV/AIDS clinic itself is a bone thrown to “lesser” people for political expediency.  This idealogical explanation of mine was no comfort to the boy — his friend’s arms around him helped some — but it certainly suggests that corporate/governmental expediency is far from victimless, and that our universal social callousness is only meant to keep from knowing that a little one-eyed boy is crying.  Of course, Will is black.

I am not.  But to get an appointment with a doctor, I must tell the scheduler what my affliction is because she has a little list on her desk that tells her how much time to allot me: so-much for cancer, so much for pneumonia.  Unless I label the diagnosis myself, she will balk because the doc will run late.  I have no idea who made that list or how they know how much time with the doc I need.  Even then, the doc will try to get me to agree to see his nurse who will decide whether I should see the doctor.

Will’s problem is more serious.  He can only stay alive by taking meds he can only get by being obedient in that clinic.  (There’s an armed guard.)  The meds are subsidized because they are terrifically expensive, much more than in other countries.  Meds for other countries are also sometimes subsidized by the US in order to keep them obedient.  Big pharma is one of the most potent global corporations and it has the governments by the balls — Viagra for old rich men of various colors.

The great value of the David Korten model is that he comes out of the heart of MBA territory and shifts their terms from money to a living planet.  He has recognized that defining our Gross National Product (my mother used to say “heavy on the GROSS”) in a way that includes disaster and tragedy (because it forces expenditure) is a Suicide Culture.  Likewise with the constant exploitation of resources that cannot be replaced — not just coal and oil, but also the exotic trace minerals that make handheld electronic devices possible.

Korten has been out in the world and does not think in a bubble as so many do, as the small HighLine Montana towns do — refusing to admit that county, state nor federal agencies have anything to do with them and so tolerating their evolution towards increased domination.  Locals deny global weather change, deny the accumulation of toxic molecules, deny the loss of soil fertility, and deny that money is a fantasy.  Even better, Korten can explain his ideas in an intelligible way with a minimum of jargon.

http://thenextsystem.org/the-new-economy-a-living-earth-system-model/

Either read online or download a PDF.

FINGERPAINT THE SACRED

Fingerpainting is a direct way to relate to the world.

I don't like this post very much because it's not digested enough and it's really lists until the end.  Probably I'll end up using the content another way later, but I've become convinced that institutions are hurting us but escaping reform because we so take them for granted.  Particularly when it comes to religion, institutions have fossilized and are preventing us from by-passing all the written commandments in order to get to the spirit of their meaning.  Instead they have become reasons to hoard and punish.

SOME PREMISES ABOUT INSTITUTIONS:

1.  Neanderthals had no institutions, but they did have art that was based on small communities of shared ideas.

2.  The first institutions were phenomena of towns which were the result of grain and herding domestication of wild sources.  They are organizations based on containers (grain bins, houses, temples, defensive walls), ownership, and allegiance, enforced by storage of resources and the defense thereof.

3.  Domestication as a survival strategy arose in several places at the same time and are related to irrigation, which ties into weather.  We’re still doing that in Valier, though far more elaborately — well, maybe not when you consider Peru or Egypt.

4.  Math and writing arose in response to the need to record, to predict, to find patterns, to confirm ownership and make contracts (particularly those related to interest from borrowing and assigning profits.  They’re for surveying land.

5.  Class specialization and privileged knowledge emerged about this time.

It is at this point in history that “religion” separated from indigenous spirituality, awareness of the sacredness of place and ceremonies related to that.  Religion was an early institution that “owned” sacredness and the power to appeal to whatever forces caused safety and even profit.  

Religious institutions became powerful by the use of writing, particularly written ideas on paper like a scroll or eventually a book with pages and cover.  Religious leaders claimed they were the only ones able to properly interpret writing, and worship ceremonies in some traditions were centered on certain writings.  History, self-management, theology are a primitive form of science, justification of privilege.

Most people today think this IS religion and cannot think of anything outside these perimeters.  

(Brittanica):  The Axial Age (also called Axis Age) is the period when, roughly at the same time around most of the inhabited world, the great intellectual, philosophical, and religious systems that came to shape subsequent human society and culture emerged—with the ancient Greek philosophers, Indian metaphysicians and logicians (who articulated the great traditions of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism), Persian Zoroastrianism, the Hebrew Prophets, the “Hundred Schools” (most notably Confucianism and Daoism) of ancient China….These are only some of the representative Axial traditions that emerged and took root during that time. The phrase originated with the German psychiatrist and philosopher Karl Jaspers, who noted that during this period there was a shift—or a turn, as if on an axis—away from more predominantly localized concerns and toward transcendence.”

This means moving towards the abstract, the universal, the cosmic, the humanly shared strategies and interpretations of how to survive.  Most of this was happening in the first millennium Before the Christian Era (BCE) and seems clearly to have evoked major figures we revere today:  Zarathustra, Buddha, Confucius and even the definitional Jesus the Christ who may have arisen (in an abstract sense) out of Judaism interacting with ideas from Buddhism — the practical result of the Silk Roads bringing ideas across the Eurasian continent along with material goods.

Ideas take on political overtones.  Groups try to justify themselves with religious institutions.  The struggle among them may cause destruction and loss like the “Dark Ages” after the horseback invaders from the steppes destroyed the Roman Empire, or COULD evoke a way to reconcile strife by going to a higher, more inclusive system.  Right now our advances in technology may by themselves so change our understanding that we can create a “new world.”

Those who will be displaced from power (those who are uneducated, unskilled, and unconnected) have already begun to try to destroy any advantage.  These are their weapons:

1.  Emptying education so that it is only a tic list of attendance instead of a certification of achievement at a high level of thought.

2.  Emptying wealth into bookkeeping so that it is fungible, fakeable, transferable in the abstract — no longer the interacting actual solid resources of the world but rather another tic list of credits and debits, arbitrarily arrived at and enforced.  It makes minus balances possible and creates overwhelming sums like the total owed by student borrowing.

3.  By pretending that corporations are people and that “share-holders” actually own or control anything, and that the only good is growth, we have justified terrifying abuses of people, animals and land.  In fiction narratives we have already begun to explore the ways people can possibly survive the unsustainable imaginary conventions that are controlling our lives and threaten to trigger violence.

These are some of the unhappy surprises that may tip the balance:

1.  Catastrophe, beginning with climate turbulence and shift.  Drought and high temps in the tropics are as devastating as were the great glaciers that ground over the northern continents.  Rising sea level is erasing land.

2.  Disease, often the direct result of changing climate and population density.  Some bug will eventually hit the balance between traveling so quickly that it’s self-snuffing and infecting so deeply and ingeniously that its cure will be very slow coming.  HIV is still doing well.

3.  Interruption of fertility.  There are hints of this and fiction has been following up.

4.  Gradually achieved toxicity of the land itself and the major water sources so that our food and water supplies poison us.  This is already happening.

5.  Violence and terrorism are likewise already sanctioned by institutions both religious and secular.  The fire is there -- so an accelerant will be what sweeps our lives.

6.  Destruction of power grids and the internet.

How can we achieve innocence enough to escape the prescribing and limiting institutions that are strangling us?When designing experiences intended to reach for and maybe even touch the sacred, to kindle meaning from inside the people, one must first sit down and feel with one’s own guts where those people are in themselves.  Are they scared?  Are they exuberant?  Are they confused?  Are they depressed?  Are they enraged?

Ira Progoff was a journal-keeper who taught a particular procedure very much in line with this kind of thinking.  In his workshops a person would make a list of the turning points in that person’s life: a death, a birth, a marriage, a divorce, a graduation, a decision to leave a job, a house burning down — maybe things that no one else even noticed or thought was important: starting a garden, wallpapering a bedroom.  He called them Stepping Stones.  They were like Turning Points. Then one went back and thought about the intervals.  What might be the metaphor that captured the feeling of that period?  Was it a flower blooming?  Was it a tractor harrowing a field?  Was it a night of falling stars?  Was it an old rotten floor in an abandoned house?

So what is the metaphor for beginning a designed experience?  A tightrope?  A well?  A kite?  A scalpel?  Not literally, but metaphorically what suggests the FEELING you want?  The idea is to be totally separated from everything you already think of as church, institutional church.  Go to art.  Finger paint the sacred.  Start new.

CONFRONTING THE SACRED

A pilgrim in Tibet

Confronting the Sacred takes courage, whether it is the kind of Holiness that comes upon you with terror and despair or the kind that bathes and renews you, equally unexpectedly.  Neither the safety of institutional religion nor the leap to delusion of some “spiritual sure thing,” this idea I’m chasing is both scientific (which is institutional) and revelatory (finding out nothing is what you thought it was).  We’ve had a lot of things upside down and yet many other things are confirmed.  We are dots in an enormous eternal universe and we matter.  Dots add up.  Once they exist they are part of eternity.

I print out and read fancy science articles that sound as though they might have something to do with “worship” design that will provide that confrontation with Sacrality.  Then I get my colored fibertips and zebra-patterned clipboard (because this is not a sterile enterprise) and try to figure it out.  Here are two I’m trying to digest at the moment.

“Attachment and the regulation of the Right Brain” by Allan N Schore from Attachment and Human Development Vol 2 No 1 April 2000  23-47

“The Hippocampal Indexing Theory and Episodic Memory: Updating the Index” by Timothy J. Teyler and Jerry W. Rudy.  Hippocampus DOI 10.1002/hipo

Attachment is what I call “teddy bear theory” because of Bowlby’s observations about toddlers entering the great adventure of separating from the primal attachment to mother.  (I’m including the blastosphere that creates the placenta that literally attaches to the lining of the womb in order to begin creating the toddler)  The little one is helped by a metaphoric talisman: a teddy bear.  This toy has been commercialized and often turns up on the covers of books about attachment or at the sites of tragedy.  

Attachment to one’s own survival is embedded in the survival of an ecosystem which might include family, friends, nation, a specific place and time, affinity-based institutions, and the survival of other loved and loving persons.  A culture can abandon or actively turn to attack a category of people, which we call genocide.  

If the mechanisms that produce attachment are not present in the society, a child can become more attached to dying than living.  Examples abound on reservations where kids have told me, “I just don’t want to grow up.  Adults are terrible and they have terrible lives.  All they do is destroy and go out of their minds.”  The priest in Browning lamented,  “I came to bring these people faith and all I do is bury their youngsters.”

Holy Family Mission cemetery

So if the enduring Catholic Mass won’t turn the tide, what ceremonies and understanding will?  Bundle Keeping is no more powerful.  Traditional ceremonialists commit crimes (including murder) and are shamed as often as secular people.  The politically ambitious, even the ones with a grasp of post-colonial righteousness, are not always careful of boundaries.

You can’t go around forcing Sacredness on people nor can they pretend they feel it.  Attachment is the same.  Some of the trouble comes from attachment that is insecure or toxic.  Parents who disappear or attack, places that trap children in stigma, or lure them into danger.  I feel as though I’ll never learn enough about attachment, but maybe I’m attached to the search just for my own reasons.

“Hippocampal Indexing and Episodic Memory” are about the mechanics of how brains store information, molecularly and electrochemically.  Like many other functions we thought would be contained and assigned like imitation objects, it turns out that simply creating an index to what we have recorded as memory is a matter of several interacting steps, and that a memory is neither accurate in the first place nor unchanging.  

Acting and writing people speak of “beats,” which are sort of like scenes or episodes.  It turns out we remember in beats, but they are stored in a scattered way, separating content, then reassembling at the point of memory which is assigned to that beat.  The connector is sensory: a song, a smell, someone’s voice, a certain taste.  (It can’t be like a computer because computers have no senses.)  But how does a brain know when to begin or end a “beat” or how long it should be?  All these discoveries lead to other questions.  Now we have the technical equipment to answer many of them.

But overall we are returned to a simple disconcerting understanding that what we think is a search for God is a search for humans.  All theism is really anthropology.  Who we are means we grasp the Sacred in different ways and that every way is variable, unfolding, evolving.  

What — as a celebrant who analyzes and responds to that — should be the elements that trigger Sacredness?  I think the meaning comes from “fitting” those who are in attendance, going to meet them with accuracy and understanding.  That’s the opposite of what we do in our institutional services, where we try to move people to predetermined convictions.  

Pow wow singers listen to themselves

in order to stay with the others.

Listening is a beginning.  The next concept after attachment is attunement: not just words but feeling their vibes.  Think music.  We’re not talking teddy bears here — it takes another person, though companion animals can do some of it which proves it’s not a matter of words.  Eye contact and physical contact or sometimes a wraparound safe place — a cocoon.

The point is that we are constantly trying to deny we are animals and every time we break attachment we pull away from the animal part of us that does the work of attach and attune.  They are survival skills of all mammals.  This is not dogma but actuality.

One of the most powerful movements in what is a worldwide tide of reordering what we believe — much more revolutionary than a paradigm shift — is the realization that the brain evolves parts and mechanisms that are additive to neural systems but also conserved (the reptile brain is still at work) and often combines with newly added parts or enables or converts them to new uses or new environments.  The limbic mammal brain is the home of the subconscious wordless concepts that form in the womb, continue to erupt through our prefrontal cortext, and explode through emotions.  (human-ities record them.)  Simply denying all this with the more recent code-trick of language systems and introspective logic is not just futile but misleading.  Nor is it a matter of adding pharmaceutical chemicals. 

If we can figure out someone’s inner reality, and respond to it with a spiral dance or a rock opera or by sharing a meal or simply by holding them, then we can create the attunement and attachment they need.  Then the beats of memory can contain happiness and sharing.

As usual, serendipity and synchronicity are at hand.  Last night’s movie was “Wildlike”, about a man and a distraught teen in the Alaskan wilderness, acting out the trope of the Path in a light-handed but believable way.  (There’s a very nice bear!)  Great discussion starter.  Don’t get too pretentious or everyone will sit there thinking about pizza.  Or whatever.  

This third book will be the hardest to write.  It won’t hold still — more is constantly discovered, so it demands a lot of research.  It’s another path.  But it’s what’s been luring me forward all this time.

JOKING ABOUT CIRCLES MEANS WE CAN TAKE HOLD

The joke goes, “There are two kinds of people.  Those who divide everything into two kinds and those who do not.”  Lately the impulse has been more to say, “Everything is shades of something and there are a billion wicked thoughts about it."  But even a one-off distinction creates two sides which can be argued into two categories with different qualities.

For instance, I notice that there are websites calling themselves “religious” which are all about institutions and other sites calling themselves “religious” that are based on what they would name spirituality.  It would be intriguing to trace them back to orthodox versus heresy, as in when the original Roman Catholic church began to break up.  Something like that seems to be happening now, partly because of the mixing of populations trying to escape war or famine and partly because of the addition of science which operates like religion.

Science argues that the scientific method is the only real way to get hold of reality, but -- confusingly -- argues that there IS no reality.  Reality is a constantly reinvented consensus and, as well, human identity is a collection of interacting forces that must be constantly updated.  Science, which once assured us which things could be trusted to stay true, has now begun asserting these two new propositions, based on scientific research, that all is change and interpretation.  But religions still try to stabilize one’s identity as well as one’s understanding of what behavior and beliefs will guide a good life.

There is a concept that goes back to anthropology but is taught in schools that address both of those above.  It is the idea of “the believers’ circle” and comes from the anthropologist watching some indigenous people, the people of the land, in order to understand what it is they’re doing.  Inside the believers’ circle the people believe they are celebrating the truth, a reality that will help them survive and even prosper.  It is a place of virtue and generous enactment.  

But to the anthropologist, no matter how carefully he or she pays attention and is able to understand, it is only one system among many.  You can study all the Bundle Openings you want, but until you have a close felt knowledge of the animals represented in it, your senses connected to them, you won’t really be a believer.  To the believers, the anthropologist is a fool, uninformed, a child unable to learn.  To those with different beliefs, particularly the belief that there are no beliefs that are real, the anthro merely smiles and writes it all down.  It's just a story among many -- nothing to do with them.

Aeon is a shared thinking website based in England.  The theory is that if we all share our ideas from both inside and outside the circle, this exchange will cause us to have major insights that will eventually cause brilliant breakthroughs of human thought.  But this is a preoccupation of educated people, each of which accepts the terms of their believing circle.

I’ve abandoned that hierarchical and territorial sort of thinking in favor of an ecological criterion.  You might say that an ecology is an operating circle: everything inside the circle created by geology and weather and the main economic forces, is related to and interwoven with everything else in that circle.  In fact, vegetable, animal and insect intruders from other ecologies may throw everything into chaos and destruction.  Some elements will be lost and others will be drawn in or mutated until a fit is regained.  Then there's a new circle.  It’s not a matter of what’s “right” or “virtuous” or has always been before.  Instead the main thing is whatever works.  (Sometimes something appears to be working but has a long-term insidious influence, a slow poison.)

Human beings are unique in that they can change their environment or at least compensate for extremes by making interfaces and equipment.  They can also experiment in their minds with consequences or look for new evidence:  virtual circles.  Religion can be used to impose what is best for the people who are their believers, or it can extend compassion to all people, whatever their allegiance.  Compassion comes from empathetic awareness, even recognizing existential despair because those inside see nothing they can believe or even bear.  It's a cage.

In terms of that big scramble of religious definitions, there is one thing that some human beings can access without education, cost, or special privilege.  That is perception of the sacred.  Whether that is seen as an individual brain phenomenon or something cosmic and eternal reaching into us, we don’t know.  We don’t even know how to think about it and maybe we shouldn’t anyway.  Maybe we privilege “thinking” (meaning logic and definitions) too much.

Speech-based thinking happens in parts of the whole brain but is concentrated or managed somehow in the complex of the pre-frontal cortex behind the forehead and most often draws on the metaphors of the eyes, ears and nose.  It can be cool math or hot poetry, and for some people there are not exactly words, but just unspoken concepts of color, pitch, fragrance that they can at least perceive and possibly put into words.

Some people will be deeply offended by this joke and some people will just laugh.

The point is that speech is what we understand to be uniquely human and valuable.  It is, but what everyone forgets is that it rests in, on, and through the animal functions of bone, muscle, circulation, and the management of nourishment.  The constantly reciprocating changes of one’s body supports what is considered identity -- not just words about them.

Part of the point of a community -- which is defined by the believing circle -- is that if individual identity is so wrenched out of itself by trauma, over-extension, ecstasy, migration, then the others in the circle will remember who you are and help you rebuild.  There are many stories about people who rebuild a new identity with strangers -- amnesia, living apart, education -- and then the old and new identities are brought to confront each other.  It’s painful and dangerous, but an alluring and exciting way to escape from a circle that is no longer convincing or healthy.

Recently I watched “Snowpiercer,” a speculation on class hierarchy that is miserable at the bottom/rear, and blindly attached to rails that go round and round.  This is necessary because the whole planet has over-reacted to global warming and turned time back to “Snowball Earth” when everything was a glacier.  The tail end of the train thinks that the front end is oppressing them, and fights its way to the engine to seize power back.  Because it’s a film, the ideas of class structure luxury are vivid.  In the end there is no emperor or Great God.  The train is powered by a child who is destroyed in the process.  

When the sign of hope arrives (this is a spoiler) it is a crashed airplane that is being melted out of the ice and then a polar bear.  This film was written before the polar bears were depicted as starving.  What the bear is going to eat, since it seems to be the only living thing, will be a happy immediate surprise for him, since the train is crashing and presumably there will be many dead people, some of them even cooked.  This is an existential despair movie, but only if one is attached to one’s own circle of belief, which might be that humans are privileged, not animals at all, even if they are edible.  Give it up.  Bears are waiting.

WHAT SCIENCE CAN TELL US ABOUT THE SACRED

Commonly it is assumed that the sacred is impossible to perceive by science because it is unaccountable, mystical and magical.  Of course, there have always been those who thrill to math and find meaning in formulas.  I want to take an idiosyncratic path through all this.  I am as interested in “show” as “tell.”

Begin with the eukaryote, the tiny one-celled creature with a nucleus that can “have sex,” that is, share genomes with another one-celled creature.  No longer dependent on budding, thus producing clones, the little critter has laid a pseudopod on creation.  In the beginning was the Code.  (A Word is only a Code.)  

The one-celled creature could only respond.  (That’s an actor’s word.)  It could go towards things that were good for it, and avoid things that were bad for it, including any molecules dissolved in the fluid in which the creature floated and motivated.  (This became our sense of smell.)  There were no organs, so substances were taken in or thrown out by pushing them through the wall of the cell.  (The image in my mind is always a medieval housewife emptying a chamberpot out the window!)

Over the millennia, things got more complicated but it still all came down to intake and outflow.  Complexification demands more clever “engineering.” This was emergent structure -- there were no engineers, not even one great big engineer in the sky.  So -- notochords, tubing for carrying concentrations of fluid with special ingredients like oxygen, and little pumps to drive it.  (Do you know an angleworm has nine hearts?)

Sensation became routed, matrixes developed to specialize, and a laparoscopic head-end developed at the top of the notochord.   “Mesenchymal cells migrate from the primitive knot to form a midline cellular cord known as the notochordal process.” [DO look it up!  http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=notochordal+process&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8]   Something very parallel happens as a persona develops.  We say in acting,  “What is the SPINE of this person?” meaning motives, yearnings, aim in life, the coherent spear of intention.  But the action is always back at the boundary, the skin that separates the creature from the milieu, that prevents it from dissolving.  Every sense evolves from that skin, but now the tip of the spear, the brain -- originally only a knob at the top of the spine -- is the guide sorting out the two actions:  go forward/ingest, retreat/avoid.

On top of the neural tube things form:  diencephalon, proencephalon. telecephalon.  It’s all just fancy talk to most of us.  But the point is, as it gets more complicated, the creature takes in more information from outside the skin and therefore must do more sorting and classifying, and therefore can allow more measured and subtle responses -- maybe just a tightened lip, a tilted eyebrow, a clenched butt muscle.  Now we’re performing our anatomy.  Our persona is our performed body as we take in sensation and release “response.”  In a good actor, one sees the taking in, the quick-sorting, and the decision to act. We call that “inevitability.”  Authentic.  The differences in the way we sort information and act on it, we call “personality.”

One creature can see these things happening in another creature.  Your dog sees what you’re thinking.  (Your cat sees, but figures what does it have to do with her?)  Even a fly or ant can try to avoid your swatting hand.  Some humans are better at it than others.  Some humans signal more than they think, often mixed signals -- hands saying one thing, feet saying another.  

I once stood just outside a shark’s aquarium (hoping the glass was at least six inches thick) about two feet away from the shark’s eye.  It did not see me.  It did not care.  It did not know i was there.  Sharks sense only things in the water with them, possibly through subtle electrical charges or dispersed molecules of blood.  The starring night sky as seen from a dark place can seem as inscrutable and uncaring as that shark.  Or you can be that shark, cruising, always cruising the stars in case of something meaningful -- meaning edible.

“Meaningful” to a human is more than food.  Meaningful is what supports survival as individuals and as species.  We ingest ideas/ideals and excrete the ones that don’t work.  Mostly we take huge amounts of information in through our senses, sort and discard much before the real import of the pattern gets up through the brain stem, the reptile brain, the limbic system, the cerebrum and eventually to the frontal forebrain where our clearest and most intense humanity is focused, the little camera at the tip of the fiber-optic.  But it happens in a flash.

If something is strong and clear enough to make it to that level, maybe with the help of arts or scientific ideas or just another human creature, then it may be intense enough to be “Sacred.”  It shakes and shudders us, fills us with light, paradox, epiphany.    When you’re a little kid, a powerful movie can do it.  Some of us search all our lives without ever feeling it -- the membrane between us and the universe may be too thick, too guarded, too quick to censor and filter.  Or our self may be clenched against pain and starvation.   Our curiosity atrophies because our lives are too safe -- we are sessile in our shells, letting the bits of sustenance come to us on the tide.

What Performance Art can crack open an adult oyster, well-anchored?  Ritual?  Violence?  Sex?  Drugs?  Threats of burning in Hell?  We keep trying to find out.  These days it takes a good deal of study and skill.  Atrocities don’t seem to move us much anymore.  Injustice?  Personal danger?  Combat?  Poverty just dulls us.  Therapy?  How much can we absorb from a fellow creature?  Can you get an oyster drunk?  (Is there anything more phallic than a geoduck?)  What paroxysm of epiphany will wake up a Wall Street banker who doesn’t even work on Wall Street anymore?

Or let’s look at it the other way around.  For a child who has been abused and sexually taken to climax by a well-loved adult, in a storm of pain, ecstasy, love and terror, ever be content with an ordinary life?  Can a person tortured to the edge of death and forced into gratitude by the tiniest respite, ever reach out?  Can a man captured by terrorists and forced to choose which leg will be shot off, ever stop making choices in his head?  We are our bodies, we are our minds, and we are both -- there is no boundary.  The boundary is at the skin.  Wonder in the front end; boredom out the rear end -- the result is AK’s “astonishment of living.”   Life is stalking us.  The Sacred is dangerous.