FROM THE BEGINNING

Basic individual minds are developed by dynamic brain organization -- self-creation -- pushing against the environment through the use of the senses and muscles.  This happens according to the instructions encoded in the genome and annotated by the epigenome.  

Gradually the fetus assembles itself in the first environment, literally supported by the womb, which has its own separate genome+epigenome (the mother’s, not the father’s).  It gives the fetus what it can spare, while the fetus seizes what it can.  Once the infant emerges into the world, there are two environments: the sensate world which is presumed by interaction with whatever is outside the skin through the senses and the internal mental world which is partly unique to the person and partly “imparted” by the culture through other humans.

Environment provides the basics of food, shelter, and nurturing through whatever resources are there (animals, plants, minerals, temperatures, water).  Foods might be rice where there is shallow water, wheat where there are grasslands, marine animals at the north pole.  What is eaten, how shelter is formed, responses to weather -- all form the culture which encodes survival: boats, weapons, cooking, sexual relations.  Once internalized, the person becomes committed and finds it hard to change.

Certain ideas are valorized when they lead to success and weeded out when they cause bad things to happen.  “Thou shalt honor thy father and mother” is usually a good and “Thou shalt not kill” is usually preventing a bad.  But if father and mother are abusive and restrictive, one might want to kill them in spite of knowing there will be bad consequences.  These ideas are stored in the brain, generally behind the forehead.  We call them “ethics” or “morality” or “laws.”

At the same time the body is storing a different kind of thought which every living creature has, an accumulation of knowing that is not conscious.  The autonomic nervous system governs this knowledge, which does not normally become conscious unless it prompts noticeable reactions like panting, fast heart beat, or a clenched gut.  The autonomic nervous system is deeply involved in what is called the spiritual when practices or ideas trigger basic blissful or otherwise intense internal reactions.  These abilities form in the fetus as soon as the necessary structures have formed.  They are wordless.  They constantly adapt to new circumstances, maintaining homeostasis.  They are vulnerable to drugs.

Probably the experiences described by saints -- which involve basic binaries (hot/cold, dark/light, embraced/falling, distant/close) -- are perceived, like sex, through the autonomic nervous system.  This system is parallel to conscious nerve/muscle systems and not necessarily controllable.  At one time it was described as dyadic whole-body reactions that work in opposition: calm and resting (parasympathetic) versus alert and ready for action (sympathetic).  Now the enteric system, a mesh of nerves in the wall of the intestines, is considered part of this larger system.  In fact, even the colonies of microbes that live in the guts can influence mood.  These things are connected to the limbic mid-brain unconscious that every mammal has.

Freud realized that something "below" consciousness existed and tried to get at it with free association and by thinking about old stories like Greek drama, which are very close to being religiously valorized and which provide the idea of sitting together, focusing on some kind of performance.  The most distinctly and recently evolved human capacity is that for empathy, which allows us to experience second-hand what another person is experiencing.  Thus we can know strong emotions and deadly reactions without endangering ourselves.  These can prompt us to put felt concepts into words.  These functions are located partly in the pre-frontal cortex.  The arts can move unconscious ideas to consciousness.

There is a thin wall between the religious practice of a communal experience and psychological or artistic sharing.  The crux of “religion” is survival, either survival of the group and species or survival of an individual.  When they support each other, the autonomic system runs along happily and the ordinary sensate world is enjoyed.  The opposite might be called evil and be felt as coming from the outside or seeping up from the inside -- something supernatural and uncontrollable.  If it IS controllable, it is merely sin or crime.

cucumber flower

Beyond empathy is rational thought like mathematics and, more recently, science which by observing certain rules (detachment, testing, repeatability, mathematical measurements) can offer shared concepts that don’t change as obviously as humanities ideas or art styles, what are called “memes”.  Through the use of instruments, we have extended our perception and understanding of realms never dreamed of: subatomic particles, virus codes that invade cells, how the neural networks connect.  These are real and provable, imperceptible without instruments but not unconscious.  When the attitudes of reflection and analysis are used on the problem of non-sensate but significant concepts, they become theologies -- theories of the sacred, which are felt through the autonomic system, translated into social assumptions and groups.  (If the system has no “theos” or concept of “God,” then it is called philosophy or sometimes anthropology.)

cucumber

Individual unconscious feelings (felt meanings) guide people into socio-economic groups provided by the environment and culture.  We call them “congregations” but could call them aggregations.  People group together spontaneously in a pluralistic society but can be forced into groups by a coercive culture.  (Schools, military)  Or they may simply have developed as genetically related people or people in a specific environment or of a certain age.  (Though I don’t know of any teenaged religious congregations, maybe a case could be made that fan groups count.)  When the business of the group is supporting a world-view that controls their behavior, then they are seen as religious by others and begin to be institutions.

Ancient grain

In the Middle Eastern lands around the Mediterranean, kingdoms and tribal groups spontaneously formed which defined themselves with theological dogma drawn from living in that place.  Gradually through the millennia, responding to war over territories, dwindling resources, the invention of agriculture allowing grain storage and domestic animals to accumulate wealth, and forms of government that developed into walled towns with focused resources, supported by a specialized priesthood who performed a kind of theatre of sacrifice -- all this formed into a few dozen theological stances and their members.  Then three “took off” in power and wealth, supported by written “books” that were said to be supernatural:  Judaism (Torah), then -- emerging from it -- Christianity (Bible), then -- using many of the same concepts -- Islam (Koran).

These three have dominated our idea of what a “religion” is: an institution.  As Christianity spread over Europe, piggy-backing on the Roman Empire, it became the Holy Roman Church and managed to convince the several governments that it represented “God” who was the Caesar of all Caesars.  It brokered peace, crowned kings, created a supernatural reality of heaven, saints, the devil, and so on that gradually became corrupt.  The reacting Protestant movement meant that many small subdivisions of Christianity formed, according to the environments, temperaments, and sources of success in different groups.  

The original Christian church, as expressed in the Catholic system, had many different styles and subdivisions that came out of spreading into new territories (like teachers learning from students, the Romans were penetrated by Celts), but they were strongly connected to Rome.  The Protestant church had no such restraint and often reached into “spiritual” sources as guided by the autonomic system, the mammal brain of felt meaning.  But also theology could build on rational ideas.  All these differing groups could then be called “denominations” or different "namings" of the basic idea of Christianity.  Denomination is a term usually reserved for Christian sub-groups.

Islam and Judaism are related but separate RELIGIONS, not denominations.  They are grouped with Christianity as the Abrahamic religions, since the holy books of all three say they descended from Abraham, who was asked by God to kill his son but was then spared, an emblem of survival.   Religions and denominations are both institutional: that is, they are organized, hierarchical, supported monetarily and with staff, housed in buildings, legally documented as corporations.  Spirituality continues parallel/beneath/overarching theology.  If the institution supports spiritual meaning in the lives of its people, it succeeds.  Survives.  As do the people.

Spirituality is immanent, an upwelling from within, a product of the limbic/autonomic brain and therefore unconscious except in physiological phenomena.  Theology is a way of unifying and empowering institutions.  What I want to understand is the path from a felt meaning to a power structure intent on perpetuating itself.

The dance of life

WHAT THE ZYGOTE LEARNS

Sacred and Profane, so often mixed in art.

This blog does not operate as a silo, which disconcerts some people who are used to seeing blogs as focused on a product.  This one is a landscape, a horizon, a broad set of topics for a dozen different communities.  But this particular post IS a silo in spite of approaching one topic through several points of view.  It is an inventory of thought about felt internal sensations that all creatures appear to have, but that have been repeatedly in many ways investigated and reflected upon, put into words and philosophically categorized.  It is the felt difference between two kinds of space which Mircea Eliade famously defined as “sacred” and “profane.”  It is also the difference between what is felt as sacred, as spiritual, as something palpable in the environment, and what is a peneplain, a flat featureless plenum, which could be called the profane, the daily, the quotidian, the ordinary (order-nary).

There are a variety of explanations or explications about this.  They come from many “disciplines” we are used to and challenge boundaries between ways of knowing.  One principle is that this difference is between what is wordlessly felt and therefore in every creature, and what is expressed in language, including the language of mathematics.  To many people language IS thinking -- they cannot conceive of thinking in any other way.  To them, for an animal to be thinking is inconceivable unless the animal can at least imitate language.

Recently, given a lot of ingenious and supersensitive instruments, we have been able to see our brains in operation.  These studies, along with what are called “lesion” studies -- observations of humans whose brains have been damaged some way and animals whose brains have been surgically altered -- tell us One Big Thing.  There are two brains, essentially: the primal brainstem and limbic system which has nerves through the body (the autonomic system) and which also controls the hormone chemicals from organs, rarely conscious except as “feelings,” including emotion.  The other is the cortex and the evolved organelles (hippocampus) and specialized cells that it coordinates into conscious thought, images and language.

This correlates with Freud’s most useful observation: that there is a conscious or cognizant mind and then another which he intuitively described as the “sub” conscious, though he was a good enough neuroscientist to understand that it was primal brain that was the generator of these forces, the drive systems,  Desire.  Survival.  But the survival of the individual can be suppressed or contradicted by a rigid culture; and the survival of a culture can be threatened by maladjustment to the environment which -- in the end -- determines survival.  Darwin called it “fitness.”   I say “fittingness” because it isn’t always a matter of biggest and best.  (Remember the little first mammals running between the toes of the dinosaurs.)

Now the scientists have identified the specialized cells in the cortex that somehow connect to deep primal awareness in the earlier brain:  the “grid” cells that let us feel where in a specific space we are; the “heading” or compass cells that let us sense the directions, the "boundary" cells that tell us where edges are, and the "homunculus" map that allots space to neurons according to their relationship to the body.  Somehow this hooks up with memory, so that an intense experience will call up sense memory of where you were, the smells, the sounds, the temperature, and so on.

From anthropology (van Gennep and Turner) comes the insight that besides physical space there is a psychological “felt” space that uses this associating of the sensory moment to cue something they call “liminal” space.  (The limen is the threshold of a doorway.)  It is a shift from the secular, profane, daily, public space to a sacred, spiritual, protected space that somehow escapes boundaries.  In that space one is psychologically equal to everyone else who is present and one may be able to change deeply felt beliefs.  It might be traditional ceremonial worship but maybe not.

I once was once asked to study the cultural gender assignments of worshipping people. (Post-Christian UU's, therefore Abramic.)  Our contemporary culture assigns men to the profane, mathematical, rule-operated, engineering sort of experience -- theological, hierarchical, empowering.  I called it the glass telephone booth where Superman assumes his powers.  The women are assigned the sacred, messy, emotional, enfolding approach that nurtures from the most basic physical level.  I called it the hot tub in which one almost returns to birth.

Partly this set of metaphors came from watching people attending a retreat.  At the end of a worship service (overgeneralized): the men leapt out to go do something; the women sat smiling and dreaming.  But also partly it came from reading about infant development and the accounts of saints.  The brains of children develop in response to what is happening to them.  Before they are born they move in their mother’s bodies, somersaulting in the womb and creating neurons that are aware of the mother’s body moving through the world -- the grid, the compass.  Their budding brains record the rhythm of heartbeat and the whale-like sounds of digestion.  Their first sensations are smell/taste, the most primordial senses necessary even for a one-celled animal trying to find food.  The cycle of darkness/light is built into the circuits as the baby grows.

What the saints described was paradoxes of the first distinctions, not yet separated, what an infant brain learns both before and after birth.  They said they felt they were falling, but supported in an embrace; there was utter darkness but blinding light; they were burning and freezing at once; they were flying and paralyzed.  These were feelings interpreted as the presence of the Holy which some named God.

People who "do religion" in a dogmatically believing way are “inside the theological (churchly) circle.”  Those who don’t define it -- just feel it -- might be “outside the theological circle” but they sense the primal matrix of spirituality.  The circle itself is defined by community, tilted to male culture:  hierarchical, definitional, historical.  In short, institutional.  Institutions are not spiritual.  Some will actively exclude spirituality and feeling in order to strengthen obedience, consistency, morality and order.  The Old Testament and the letters of Paul tend to be institutional.  The Gospels and Psalms are spiritual.

The politics of theology and institutions can be cruel.  Spirituality, feeling-based, empathetic, can be ineffective.  The prefrontal cortex is the part of the human brain that tries to sort it out.  Gender definitions are as paradoxical as the other basic distinctions.  The extremes interact, the two “long tails” of the gender bell-curves overlapping so that the strongest, tallest, fastest females will surpass the weakest, shortest, slowest males.  Our use of gender hormone ratios to separate male from female doesn’t really work.

Intergenders are far more common than we think because in modern culture people wear clothes which carry the gender clues instead of exposing their bodies.  And the qualities of individuals interact within them, responding to the environment whether it’s chemical or situational.  To some extent an ovum of any creature is always different from a cloud of sperm because it has the directions for the “house” of the body.  But once we get to mammals, gestating, birth, and nursing are not just achieved by the unfolding plan in the DNA of two people, but also are deeply affected by the embracing relationship of the immediate family -- the epigenetics -- and the world situation.  We are just now discovering what war, hardship, or happiness can provide in the continuing gestation we call life, even crossing the generational barrier so that what our grandfathers encoded in their epigenes guides the development of their grandchildren.

The feeling of not being who others say you must be can drive escape from the theological circle into a far more ambiguous spiritual world.  Depending on what the zygote learned, this can be a new birth.