AN IRRESPONSIBLE MEDITATION

SOME USEFUL DEFINITIONS FOR IRRESPONSIBLE MEDITATION:

Sacredness is direct unmediated contact with the universe, not by-passing the senses but a chord, a symphony, a melody.  It is felt holistically.

Religion is produced by cultural evolution, beginning with hunting/gathering people.  Religion is an institution that claims the sacred but is NOT sacred.

“Institutions are identified with a social purpose, transcending individuals and intentions by mediating the rules that govern living behavior. The term "institution" commonly applies to a custom or behavior pattern important to a society, and to particular formal organizations of the government and public services.”  (By the secret author at Wikipedia — I always wish I knew who they are so I could read more of their thinking.)

So it begins with a superstition, a lucky hat, a little chant to call the prey but repel the predator.  Connected to the hunting grounds.  Maybe accompanied by a bribe, a sacrifice.

Then comes the beginnings of control: domestication, which means being able to locate and kill animals at will; and gardens or fields.  Swidden agriculture means clearing forest or jungle, growing crops that can’t be stored, like yams, or crops that need extraordinary preparation like sago palm pulp.  But grain agriculture means storage, surplus, value for trade, the necessity of guarding.  Math for defining territories.  The concept of “owning.”  Community/towns.  This is the root of institutional religion.

The social purpose of everything is survival, transcending individuals.  This means that individuals are subsumed, consumed, and even sacrificed physically and horribly for the benefit of the whole.  These are religious institutions, even if today they are thinned and paled, except in some places they are not.  Instead they have reverted to blood sacrifice.

If a religious institution becomes too cruel, too destructive, another institution based on resistance will begin to form.  Now we have “Game of Thrones.”  Except that there is an alternative, which is Asian Evasion. (The art of turning forceful oppression back on the oppressor.)  The appearance of some seemingly un-formed institution that carries the resistance.  (Guerrilla warfare.)  

Saturn eating his children -- Goya

Now we have the arts.  The arts don’t support institutions, but the culture can form institutions that pretend to say that the arts are marked by sacredness and therefore institutions should protect them.  These institutions are only pretending, providing ways to institutionalize free thought.  They are the opposite of sacrifice in their own instititional existence but often sacrifice the artists as a means of control.

Government, like agriculture, is territory-based, in terms of owning which is called “patriotism” which is a form of religion.  It is capable of inventing the equivalent of land, food, shelter, walls and wars and printing it all on paper called money or contracts.  Government is a religious institution.  It is not sacred.

Science is also a religious, community-based, resource-using institution.  Its walls are negotiable, its products are technological, and occasionally it touches the sacred.  Not the sacred as defined by the priests (though scientists can be considered parallel) but as defined by direct contact with the universe.  Awe, wonder, humility, exaltation.

Science tells us that our brains and bodies work according to code that can be perceived and measured as electrochemical pulses and molecular interactions.  They are the sum of evolution that began with eukaryotes, one-celled creatures, who in their hunger and willingness to discard (sacrifice) developed a gastro-intestinal tract capable of passing the environment through them in a self-nurturing way.  Because they were meiotic, that is, capable of code-exchange that produced varied offspring, producing enough variation for winnowing.  They kept morphing over the millennia.  Until now.

Having achieved consciousness and control, humans now institutionalize what is familiar and manageable.  They no longer discard what is not good for them, but try to hoard resources, swelling up their institutions and governments until they are paralyzed.  This will kill them.  Only the few, the nimble, the Asian evasive (turning the force of the oppressors back on them), the autochthonous, the indigenous, the artistic, will survive -- mammals slipping between the toes of the dinosaurs.  Maybe a predator drone has no pilot who is at risk because he or she is far away from deadly fire — but the global corporation fantasists who think they are greater than nations and entitled to all resources are doomed.  They cannot escape their own drones.

I can only wish this were true.  But maybe it is.  I now turn away from institutions except for my small town, which provides the infrastructure of water, fuel, food.  I’m a lousy gardener and don’t want to give up time away from the keyboard, so I need a store.  I’m a gluten glutton, adapted to grain and dairy.  I could easily take to alcohol except that it interferes with my thinking.

When institutions discovered writing, it was as though they had discovered alcohol.  I mean they stopped thinking and started wanting.  They didn’t have to memorize anymore.  (Too bad for Islam schools where the Koran is memorized, now the action is in schools that teach the reading of the Torah.)  Writing is such an aid to preventing change.  Now there can be law books.  But of course a new kind of priest is invented, to interpret what the writing “really” says or decide when it is too old-fashioned to use anymore.  But it’s hard to purge law.  And universities now study advertising.

Imagine an institution without writing.  No by-laws.  No instructions.  No record of boundaries to register down at the court house.  Birth, marriage and death all uncertified.  No diplomas.  No post office.  No texting.  No internet.  No list of in/out or who's in charge.

No treaties, no United Nation accords.  But what does it matter?  Even when they were signed, they were disregarded.  Writing is a tool and it can be a deception.  It’s arbitrary, a matter of social agreement.  Even the alphabet.  It’s a great revelation to some that different languages use different alphabets.  They don’t use different numbers, right?  They DO use different numbers, different bases, different symbols.  Consider zero.  Consider the algorithm.  Think about standard deviations.

To realize that symbols are not realities is to begin to step away from institutions as reality.  They are not sacred.  Even reality is not sacred, no matter how precious the bud, how glorious the sunrise.  Reality is the carrier of the sacred and not all humans can receive it.  

It cannot be defined in writing but only in experience.  It is a “felt” meaning.  Artists work with felt meaning.  A priest is an institutionally identified artist who works in a symbol system that is used by that institution, regardless of the ethics, the social consequences, the attempts to prevent change.  The task is to make people “feel” sacredness in a way that benefits the institution.  

If it crushes the individual, that is called a necessary sacrifice.  They are the animal on the altar with their throats cut before they are burned.  They forget that the sacred moment spared the child.

Abraham's ram

WHAT'S SO SPECIAL?

What’s so special about humans?  How are we different from other animals?  Do the new neurology insights make it clear that there is no such thing as a soul, as a super-natural connection to another world, as magic?  Everyone seems to be abandoning “religion” so they can justify greed -- virtue as defined by income.  

What about spirituality?  It is irrefutable that people feel sacredness, whatever it is.  The circumstances and terms, like the environment and the previous experience of the person, appear to be wildly various -- not that they can’t be made “domestic”, pulled into daily life.  Even then the “wild” unpredicted experience of the sacred can burst upon us unexpectedly.

Human institutions are the way groups try to gain control and to guide arrangements and duties by defining “memes” (customs -- little sections of culture -- that people perform, mostly because of ecological factors like food, climate, transportation, the raising of children).  Institutions are constantly trying to capture sacredness for their own ends, partly in order to be exempted from accountability.   This may not be cynical -- may be sincere conviction and experience -- but no institution can experience the sacred because it is a human experience.   An institution is not itself human, only a product of being human.

But an institution, through memes, assumptions of reality, has an eerie way of pretending it’s a person, trying to get control in order to perpetuate itself, and even building a “super-meme” of laws that will protect its wealth and power.  It does not like variousness and competition, but without these, it will harden and fossilize until it is useless, or perhaps accrue so much resistance and hatred (emotional resistance) that it will be pulled to its knees with violence.

Institutions need infrastructure (buildings, transportation, storage, sources of power) but can be tempted to neglect them when they prefer memes that are empty, like luxury that is useless or toxic.  (I do not mean art.)  Both institutions and infrastructures must support memes that do not destroy the larger context -- the planetary environment and the beings of it.

The meaning and use of memes is to guide behavior at the level of individuals, organizations, and religions, which are organizations protecting meme-systems that work for the people and other life in a specific ecology.  If that ecology (system of interacting and mutually supporting symbiotic region) changes or the system is applied to a different ecology, it will break down.  This applies to communities, categories of thought, nations, businesses, corporations and religions.  Their authority, usefulness and boundaries will empty.  This will often cause them to resort to force and destruction.

New memes are always needed.  They arise from research that offers new ideas, new words to describe them, and the jostling for new relationships.  Right now, neurological and cosmological realizations are causing major reframings of understanding that were once the province of religion.  Religion, in the institutional sense of theologies and practices, are now “provincial” in the sense of limited to an area, even in the pejorative definition of “concerning the regions outside the capital city of a country, especially when regarded as unsophisticated or narrow-minded.”   It is sophisticated to presume that what one knows is smarter and more refined than what others know, even when there is no way of really knowing.  Until the sacred breaks in.

We need some terms and strategies to address the disconnect between the cities and the rest of the earth’s surface, since the city dwellers have lost touch with the “boonies” even for the practice of marketing.  I get questionnaires about my address that make it impossible to answer. Their own way of relating is either through “picturing” -- making distant and “artistic” the views of what is considered attractive but scary, like mountains or deserts -- or by statistics: GPS, temps, crop yields, miles between two points, house number, street name.  

Memes come from material culture.  The homogeneity of cities based on building materials, use of light, street grids, labor shifts, high levels of supervision and stipulation, noise, ubiquity of machinery, mean that to many people these are reality.  Their sense of sacredness is likely to be pushed aside for the sake of productivity, often expressed in numbers rather than in sensory metaphor.  Thus people go to the past or to the mock planet of a spaceship, sources jammed with images never really experienced (suits of armor, catapults, walled castles) or to “sets” invented by designers, closer to machines than art.  Religious institutions do the same thing: cathedrals or self-containment.  (I’d rather have dragons than angels.)

The hardest part of the environment to capture and systematize is other people.  There are a great many of them in cities and they are much more assorted than in rural ecologies.  In a small village, everyone knows everyone else and they all keep track of each other.  If someone is missing in a village, people wonder.  If someone is missing in a city, people shrug if they even notice.

In the city there are always a lot of excess people, maybe from some other ecology where they would have fit, or maybe because they were damaged or malformed early, or maybe got addicted -- anyway, they’re a drag on society. A meme that they ought to be just eliminated grows out of frustration and for lack of any other ideas. Resistance to the idea of just exterminating them begins to become more powerful but unexpressed and therefore unaddressed and more powerful in reprocity.   Taboos always intensify what they are trying to avoid.

People are shot in the streets.  Or roughed up enough and helplessly exposed to disease and violence, that they will die secretly.  Or be put into situations of hopelessness so deep that inanition and marasmus will kill them, either by active suicide or gradual fading.  

Sacredness can re-empower them.  It is an art of hope and vision.  It rests on and emerges from biology as much as the fantasy of other worlds.  It’s where the memes meet genes and the spiral chromosomes in cells empower the cramped body/minds to endure, think, and eventually rise up.  The genes teach the memes to do idea-judo, where the raw force of dictionaries and laws are met and deflected by reinterpretation, new stories, going for the joints and leveraging the weight of flesh.  It is the power of the under-power, the shadow world growing stronger because it is unexpressed.

Bill T. Jones

http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_t_jones_the_dancer_the_singer_the_cellist_and_a_moment_of_creative_magic?utm_source=newsletter_daily&utm_campaign=daily&utm_medium=email&utm_content=image__2015-05-06

It is the power of the particle, the granular accumulation of tiny bits, like one-celled animals building reefs that create and protect islands.  It is possible because of the universal sea in which they dwell and which conveys the forces of pattern that can change everything.  We must each do our tiny daily bit.

THE TERRITORIAL IMPERATIVE: Sacred Place

The key to the relationship between religion and war is the concept of territory.  All religions grow out of a local ecology -- the interacting forces that dictate the economy and therefore the strategies of survival.  If the strategies are successful, the population will expand until it hits limits, sometimes geological and sometimes other people.  If the confrontation is with other unified people, the ecological solutions might be developing a new survival strategy, infiltrating the other people in a symbiotic of trade, or going to war.  War displaces whole populations, making their survival problematic.

In the beginning humans passed innocently through the world, like any other animal, depending on their wits, strategies, or maybe what some call “confrontation hunting,” which depended on a group taking on a big animal like a mammoth with only spears.  

An eBook

In an ebook called “Hunting - Philosophy for Everyone: In Search of the Wild Life” which can be partly read by Googling (a form of hunting), a writer distinguishes between “distant confrontation hunting” which means throwing weapons from a distance, and “close confrontation” which he describes in close detail, claiming that the woolly fur of the mammoth offered handholds so that one hunter could “rodeo” as a distraction while the others drove their sturdy spears into the innards of the beast.  Early humans, who came out of Africa later than Neanderthals, used throwing -- Neanderthals used grappling.  Hunting skills become war skills.

Today we have two even more separated strategies:  REALLY distant hunting, like bombs and missiles which are indiscriminate, or personal representative diplomacy, which offers possible scenarios and consequences by people facing each other across tables.  Then game theory is in play.  When I look at the Netflix movie suggestions, I see very few stories that are not about these various struggles for territory.  In fact, the futuristic dystopias use the loss of habitat, both the structures and functions that supported complex life and the raw land full of plants and animals.  All gone.  In small ways, we do this in cities all the time, tearing down neighborhoods and replacing them.  Sometimes we wall off our territory.

In fact, now that people would rather be “spiritual” than institutional, the church buildings that once seemed to offer sanctuary, continuity and inspiration have become problems.  When we turn to secular life, what happens to the sacred?   The ceremonies of “de-sacralizing” buildings are not much of a solution, but Catholic canon law provides for it. 

Canon 1222 §1 If a church cannot in any way be used for divine worship and there is no possibility of its being restored, the diocesan Bishop may allow it to be used for some secular but not unbecoming purpose. §2 Where other grave reasons suggest that a particular church should no longer be used for divine worship, the diocesan Bishop may allow it to be used for a secular but not unbecoming purpose. Before doing so, he must consult the council of priests; he must also have the consent of those who could lawfully claim rights over that church, and be sure that the good of souls would not be harmed by the transfer.

Here is a paragraph from the CLSA New Commentary for canon 1212:

Quote:

If a sacred place is to be given over permanently for profane uses, the competent ordinary should first issue a decree in writing, directed to the person responsible for the sacred place, stating that the place in question is no longer a sacred place and has by the decree lost its dedication or blessing. The issuance of the decree is subject ot the rules for individual administrative acts and individual decrees (cc. 35-47, 48-58), and recourse may be taken against it if a person, physical or juridic, is aggrieved by it. Although a sacred place also loses its dedication or blessing when in fact it has been permanently given over for secular purposes, this is not a legal option for omitting a decree but simply a provision of law in case a decree is not issued. A decree should be issued because it recognizes the authority of the ordinary who had the competence to establish the sacred place, it leaves no uncertainty about the status of the place, and it allows the possibility of recourse.

When the Unitarians left the Unitarian church in Helena, I do not know whether there was a ceremony of deconsecration, but there was a legal provision that it had to be used for a purpose in keeping with the principles of the denomination.  It has been a library and is now a theatre, which are good uses that no one disapproves.  Secular but idealistic.

When a territory is legal rather than sacred it will be recorded according to the laws of the state.  In the case of Valier, one possibility for addressing our infrastructure dilemma -- which is that the people living inside the boundary of the town are taxed to pay for the amenities enjoyed freely by the whole service area in the form of businesses, the school, the library, the churches and so on -- is to disband the town, dissolve the boundaries -- a secular version of deconsecration.  The problem with that is that county officials are not likely to be very protective and the interests of the town might simply dissolve. 

The new Valier Catholic Church

The most concrete vestige of the Belgian origins of Valier is the church that still stands east of the town at the foot of "Belgian Hill" where the communication relays are.  So far as I know, that church has never been deconsecrated though the congregation moved to the church in town.  The cemetery is still visited and neighbors will come to investigate idle visits.

That’s an immediate example.  There are ecological examples like the NW spotted owls in timber who displace the barred owls which then come back to displace spotted owls, or possibly merge.  There are scorched earth human industrial examples like the wheat fields around Valier that have eliminated microbiota, root networks, whole species -- replacing them not just with rows of genetically altered wheat but also saturating the earth with poisons.  And installing tall windmills that change air currents, shake the earth, and throw off microwaves we can’t even detect.  Yet.  We have declared war on ourselves, with little success since the population doesn’t diminish -- merely suffers.  A new microwave tower has been installed just outside Valier that will solve the problem of the service shadow cast by the Cargill-built elevators because it is taller.  More, taller, straighter, replicated. 

It could be a relief to resort to “close confrontation war” to claim back our territory of prairie and buffalo -- or even the open range.   But it’s not possible so in our frustration we quarrel with each other.  One cannot bomb a stubble field in any useful way.  There is no way to war.  We’ve got to use words on paper, faces across tables.  That means education and creating coalitions -- not depending on separatism.  If we look at the older millennial history of this land, it is daunting -- a story of a people whose land was taken from them. 

The Thirty Years War in Belgium

If we look at the history of the Belgian people we see war.  At first the usual scatter of kingdoms, divided among various allegiances, including ownership by the Roman Catholic church, then separating by languages into loyalty to Netherlands, France, and Luxemborg, and finally, after the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648) and the earlier Eighty Years' War (1568-1648), becoming a nation in the modern sense in 1830.  This is little more than twenty-five years AFTER Lewis and Clark came through and twenty years BEFORE the prairie tribes signed the first big treaty.

Today Brussels, Belgium, is the headquarters of NATO and the European Union, which it supported.  But Belgium has its dark side of early industrial development and failure to achieve real unity, partly because of language differences which always means different assumptions about the nature and goal of human beings.  The darkest side of all was in the Belgian Congo where many of the contemporary ghastly practices of mutilation, slavery, and oppression were brought to the local people by King Leopold.  The demoralizing scandal resulting from knowledge of this broke just before WWI, about the time that Cargill bought the 7 Block Ranch.  

It was the irrigation project that created Lake Francis as a holding reservoir that also caused the development of the town of Valier, beginning with the big boom that was dam and canal construction.  The town was incorporated in 1910, more than a century ago.  Now we are pressed to renew the aging infrastructure and come to terms with legal neglect of water allocation with the Blackfeet tribe.  So should we do “close confrontation” or “distant confrontation”?  Or just run?  But to where? For some of us, this is our sacred place.  Our holy land.