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

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.

SCIENCE AND RELIGION ARE BOTH DOMINATED BY INSTITUTIONS

While the cognoscenti were busy with their media arguments about how to reconcile religion and science, the “people” just went ahead and started the project -- or possibly they never left off with it anyway, since emotional relationship and the fabric of a familiar ecosystem were -- all along -- the origin and matrix of both science and religion.  

It’s a false dichotomy in the first place, dividing human experience between what can be learned by the scientific method (objective question, research, hypothesis, new questions) and what metaphorical constructs emerge from a specific culture about how to survive.  The territory is divided by “faith”, meaning committing to which of those constructs work, versus the ability to accept the results of testing which requires skepticism, which may not allow a controlling metaphor system to keep order.  But why not do both?

That’s not the problem.  The problem is that institutions have populated both aspects of human experience and try to perpetuate themselves by controlling and imposing their version of each side.  (“WE have the answer!  Come to US!”)  Besides promoting schism between religion and science, each side promotes competition among religions or among scientific fields.  All struggle to grow by dominating.

There are plenty of people who suggest that science IS a religion in many dimensions.  I tend to agree but then one has to ask why science and religion can be in pitched battle.  Both institutions are dealing with raw emotion and violent destruction, each trying to capitalize and insist on their diagnosis and prescription of a troubled society.  I should do some investigation of the beginnings of the most primal and radical concepts of “religion” and “science” in the times before empires and their armies.  Maybe before agriculture.  

Chernobyl

But here’s an even more interesting phenomenon, partly produced by the bad results and ineffectiveness of institutions.  I speak of the return to human experiences that cross borders, even the schism between science and religion.  Some people call it “spirituality,” some call it “rational mysticism,” or “Bioneers” or “the Zen of Physics” or “felt concepts.” 

Here are some domains and clues, thrown out as suggestions to ponder:

Sports

Beatification is a matter of medals, which signify not just achievement, but also devotion, discipline, courage in the face of suffering,

Extreme sports supply the drugs that evoke mystical experiences.

Prayer can be seen as self-talk and defining of goals, aspiration.  

On the one hand Christianity invades the football field and the rodeo arena, but on the other hand medical response to force warns us about the damage sports can do and no angels heal closed-skull concussions, though the person may hear voices and see bright lights.

This piece might be by Malvina Hoffman

Sex

This is in two parts: intimate connection and fertility.  Surely an investigator is overwhelmed by the variety and passion of the gods and goddesses -- and those of no determined gender -- and the ingenious ways of causing a infant to form and be birthed.  Yearning for a return to infancy and drive to acquire power create insatiable experimentation.

We are in the midst of a huge shift now, which is quite parallel to a religious conversion by whole nations.  First, we have left the dyadic understanding of gender and even genitalia and second, we have the power to block fertility but also the power to chemically give men potency.  Not in all cases and not without problems, but it’s still a major shift that affects many other social arrangements, not least economics.  (Who is available to do which jobs?  Who should insurers cover at what cost?  Who can take "communion"?)

Inventions

The creation of shelter (wickiups, tipis, mud huts and thatch), fire, flint-knapping, the wheel, smelting metal -- and we were on our way to cathedrals and eventually outer space, which gave us quite a different feeling about Heaven.  And such a bad case of hubris (evil) that we began to destroy nature as we had loved it (evil).  The invention of new concepts -- the Devil and the Madonna -- grounded the technology our torture chambers.

Chernobyl

Art

Surely the first art was tattoos.  And now, according to some, everything is art.  Surely the first art was sacred, and now -- according to some -- everything is art and art is still sacred.

Drugs

The short cut to both heaven and hell, as well as salvation and damnation.  Being “high” as a form of prayer.  Blissed out.  Scientifically, if everything is code, why not learn to code?  If everything is molecules, why not grasp molecular experience (i.e. drugs)?  Once again the communion.

Animals

The central theme of both science and religion was once to prove that humans were above and separate from animals.  We had souls and would not die as we see them die.  Now there is a significant segment of the population that has returned to a spiritual connection to animals.  Science confirms again and again that we ARE animals, and not in any clear way at all.  If one’s gut biome is part of one’s persona, then how much of a conscious individual can anyone be?  Isn't death merely shifting the boundaries between life and death?

Chernobyl

Academia

We must constantly develop new disciplines to suit our new knowledge.  Heard of "omics?"  (Not comics.)  We invent new ways to handle statistics and other data in vivid and immediately palpable ways so that less specialized training is needed to understand it.  We monitor methods and the distortions each one creates.  Thought is deliberately set against elitism in order to support dominated people as justice.

This confirms the idea that what you see is what you look for.  We have a generation now that throve in the post WWII academic environment, found it dignified and supportive of reasoned argument.  That’s gone, but some don't realize it.  It was only part of what was happening anyway.  Underneath that cultural stream, surrounding it and bursting up through it was a whole different -- and iconoclastic -- way of thinking.  

Maybe it came out of existentialism and maybe it came out of chaos or maybe those were the same thing anyhow.  One of the characteristics is the abandonment of labels, the appetite for experience, the joy of looking at everything in “why not?” mode.  And all the troublemakers who had been thrown out for asking new questions had now found a mental state they could live with -- despair, agony, adrenaline, and comradeship.  Even intimacy.

Terrifying and saddening results have powered recent developments with some institutions digging in to perpetuate themselves in the face of terrorism or new knowledge or systems reform.  Each flies the flag of religion, but they have committed to faiths that don’t work anymore.  The beliefs no longer are anchored in reality -- just familiarity.  This is as true of capitalism as it is in any of the Abrahamic religions that developed alongside capitalism, military force, and schism.  This is the territory that is explored so brilliantly in “Game of Thrones,” though the exhibit is not accompanied by much analysis except the private lives of the actors.

Survival is based in one extreme on the gorgeous sidereal realms of endless time and in the other on the human body itself and how it fits into the matrix of biological code which includes sex -- which is the means of reproduction of individuals, species, and the flow of creature life itself.  Human knowledge, anchored in human experience, is an interface with whatever reality may be -- an unknowable source of sensory information that responds to how we organize what penetrates our bodies, becoming part of us.  Our ability to create instruments that expand our awareness means we must constantly reorganize.  Our ability to record what we perceive (piercing received), so that the limits of one human lifetime can be transcended, means we can extend our methods.  But we need unifying and stabilizing metaphors that spiritual systems can supply if they aren’t reduced to book and flag.

"WHERE DO YOU GET THIS STUFF?"

This post is not narcissism so much as it is “self-reflexivity” -- that is, an attempt to see myself from outside of myself as though I were still myself as the observer.  We KNOW that most of what is our identity is not accessible to our conscious mind and yet we keep thinking [sic] that our only thinking is only conscious and that we know everything about ourselves.  There is a gray area between what we think we know about ourselves and what simply cannot be known, much less controlled.  Yogis go there.

But much of it can only be accessed by instruments and even then the innermost workings of ourselves -- breath, electrochemical reactions, blood distribution, sensory sorting, gut biome, methylation of the epigenome, imprints from the past -- still remain unknown.  In fact, I’m seeing that most people still haven’t caught up with the neurology research and all the other “omics” that are constantly complexifying our understanding.   (Omics Group is a bit of a guide, but your computer will try to put a “C” on the beginning of the phrase.  omicsonline.org  Resist.)

Myself about 1967

Two blunders repeat in the responses to whatever I post.  The first comes from identifying myself as living on the high prairie next to the Blackfeet Reservation.  Many people, esp. urban techies, assume that means an uneducated person and they proceed to patronize and instruct me.  Some think I must be an Indian since they are unaware of the heterogenous nature of American reservations.  (Canadian reserves are more homogenous.)  

The other blunder people make is assuming my “avatar” -- which is often a photo from the past -- is me in the present.  Since their default position about everything is sexual, they kind of “come on” to that person in the photo.  In the days when I was a “fox,”(the Sixties) I got rid of their pestering by “belonging” [sic] to a powerful older man.  Today I depend upon my “delete” button.  But an opposite problem is solved by email because they can't see me.  Therefore they can't judge me by my baggy old clothes.  (Why buy clothes when I could buy a book?)  If I want respect and proper attention, I must dig out my dress-up duds.  Otherwise they are startled when I turn out to be, as my supervisor for student teaching once said,  "You're a lot smarter than you look."  That was Wallace Smith, who used to answer the phone in his wonderfully rich and cultivated voice by saying, "Hello.  This is GOD speaking."  

These are not major problems.  It is more troublesome that my “picture of the world” is so different from most local people, because it puzzles them that I should be "Other" and their first reaction to puzzlement is elimination.  Partly the difference is due to a different past and kind of education, but also much of it comes from my information feed.  And then there are those who deny any difference because that would imply that one was better than the other.

Snow Geese at Freezeout Lake are going through on the way north.

I’m in list-making mode, since it’s Spring, the true new year.  I thought it would be a good idea to list my sources of information.  This is not all of them, but in case people are curious or might find them useful, here are four categories of online sources I use pretty often.  (There are more categories.  I keep hoping they will help me get a grip on all this stuff.)  Strangely, the Flathead Beacon is much more useful than the Glacier Reporter which is dominated by a right-wing female publisher who constantly fights the rez.  She has “Sarah Palin” complex.

Where do I get these contacts?  BOOKS!  FRIENDS!   Twitter.  (I avoid Facebook since they sell user info to anyone who will buy.)  Magazine articles.  Google.  Wikipedia -- rarely.  Alumni mags.  Sometimes TED Talks and until now Edge.org but that’s losing its value to me.  Too fuddy-duddy and high tech at the same time.  Cutting "edge" about 1970.  There are others that are similar but my self-imposed routine doesn’t always make room for hour-long lectures, unless I’m actively researching something.

NEWSPAPERS ONLINE

OZY  (Ozymandias)

Al Jazeera

Guardian

NY Times

The Tyee

The Economist

Flathead Beacon

   Justin Franz  @franz88  (Reporter for above who tweets breaking news)

GF Tribune

Glacier Reporter

SEX

Dr. Stephen Snyder   @SexualityToday

James Cantor   @JamesCantorPhD

Dr. Ogi Ogas  @ogiogas

Dr. Sai Gaddam  @SaiDrGaddam

Heather Berlin  @heather_Berlin

Real Stories Gallery   @HIVstories

Big Voice Pictures  @bigvoice

HIV Community Link  @HIVCommLink

Sexresearchhoneypot.blogspot.com

Sexuality and Religion   debrahaffner.blogspot.com

Love and intimacy   intimacyquarry.blogspot.com

The Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction.
     www.Kinseyinstitute.org  

SCIENCE  (following some on Twittter, others by subscription)

OliverSacks   @OliverSacks

Nature  @nature

The Neuro Network  @TheNeuroNetwork

LeDoux Lab  @LeDoux Lab

Joseph E. LeDoux  @the amygdaloid

David Quammen  @DavidQuammen

Bioneers  @bioneers

Web of Life Foundation

Neuropsychoanalysis  www.neuropsa.org.uk

Science Daily  wwww.sciencedaily.com

Emerging Infectious Diseases Journal   wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid

Cognitive-edge.com

Knowingneurons.com

Defending the Early Years   @deyproject.org

The Evolution-institute.org   evolution-institute.org

Skinner Laboratory  skinner.wsu.edu

Neurosciencenews.com

Cerebrum - Dana Foundation

Institute of Cognitive Neurosceince

Felt Sense Literacy

The Elusive Self (comment on the science of the self)

ANIMALS (including birds)

JournalAnimalEcology   @AnimalEcology

Lameness in Horses  @WhatHorses Know

Sid Gustafson DVM  @sidgustafson

   (Sid Gustafson)

Christopher Cauble  @chriscauble

Ursus Horribilis  @bearadvocate

Helen Macdonald  @HelenJMacdonald

Terrierman  terriermandotcom.blogspot.com
Tony Bynum  tonybynum.com

I made a quick run to Cut Bank this morning. When I opened the door for the paper, there was loud clamor from Lake Francis -- night-flying geese were taking a break.   Craig Wellman's horses were lounging in the full sunlight.  There was one dead gopher with a raven working on it.  Calves are growing quickly.    Evidently headless swans had found a small pond where they could reach all the way to the bottom to graze.  When I got back home, there were huge flocks of snow geese passing through, their formations in loosely linked and shifting arrowhead formations.  There's a bird I never have identified that has a lovely liquid song.  It only passes through at migration time, but it likes my blue spruce, so it can't be seen.  No green grass yet.  Temp will fall back to freezing in a few days.

RELIGION IS NOT SPIRITUAL -- IT'S INSTITUTIONAL

Disentangling spirituality from religion is particularly difficult at the moment because religion has become a creature of the corporation and the corporation has become entangled with nations, specifically Western nations and the troubles among the children of Abraham.  Worse than that, corporations are dominated by capitalism as the broadest common denominator and driving engine, and use the methods of bureaucracy to keep track of growth, catering to surveys of preferences.  None of this has anything to do with the organic roots of congregations which are family, clan and tribe.  THAT’s where it begins.  Not shares and board meetings, but in ecologically fitting personal spirituality. 

None of this devil’s bargain between temple and warehouse would be possible without writing and bookkeeping.  We still can’t quite see whether congregations will be exploded by the cyber-revolution.  Maybe it already has been in the form of “nones” (those who check the relentlessly Procrustean questionnaires with “none of the above”).

“Pure” spirituality is an individual human capacity, a “felt” state. a consciousness.  It’s not even love or compassion or generosity, though it may prompt those good things in time.  It’s something people describe as “oceanic,” or “transcendent,” or “mysterium tremendum et fascinans.”  An awareness of the totality of the universe and being part of it.  No morality.  Just existence infinite and splendid.

Most people are unaware of the three or four “polities” of Western-style congregations.  Each is a system of relationship and accountability.  Congregational polity means the group is accountable only to itself.  This is what UU’s, Baptists, and megachurches practice.  Some may form associations among themselves to fund specialized services.  This is close to cooperatives.

The Roman Catholics accepted the structures of the Roman Empire, which are hierarchical with ultimate authority at the top.  Sometimes there are voluntary hierarchies, or sometimes a major association may divide itself into territories.  There are two basic ways to group people into congregations:  a parish, which is an area where everyone in that area belongs to the church, sort of like a nation, except maybe more homogenized; or a voluntary association which is based on what is usually assumed to be beliefs and creeds.  In truth, most often the group is formed by socio-economic similarity: people who have about the same “lifestyles”, educational level, expectations about life.

Andromeda galaxy

Science has proven to be a time-bomb in that it groups people in this denominational "similarity" way, but pretends not to be “religious” though it is often deeply spiritual.  When Ken Patton had the Andromeda nebula painted on the inner wall of his church, he was claiming the cosmos as transcendent.  He never quite reconciled the tension between congregation and denomination, the same as the tension between science and religion is unresolved.

The concept of family is at the core of successful Christianity -- maybe all three of the Abramic streams -- which may suggest accurately that their wars are family wars.  Human family all over the planet is centered on reproduction, which hopefully is supported by nurturing and bonding among those who are related.  Projecting that onto the sky as though seeing star constellations gives us the source of God/Abba/Papa ideas.

Family corporations, including kingdoms, are the great preoccupation of our present media.  A few sci-fi series have tried to unravel communal colonies on new planets, but they tend to slide over into the same old corporate patterns, triggering hierachy struggles.  Maybe that’s just human.  What evolutionary mutation can change it?  Auto-secretion of ecstasy?

The US is specifically prohibited from conflating the government with religious corporations like the Catholic church, the hierarchical denominations, and so on.  This was to prevent situations like the Church of England, where the Queen is the equivalent of a Pope, but must govern for the good of immigrants with all sorts of religious frameworks.  The first Elizabeth was well-aware of this problem, since she had just narrowly survived religio-national war, and coping with it well was the secret of her success.  (It was tolerance, you elephants!)  But a shipping nation is always a mercantile nation and profit also grips that country.  Still, England allows women to scarve their heads, just as Elizabeth II does when she’s in the country with the horses and dogs.

Corporations, hierarchies and profit motives -- including their self-studies and marketing in the name of growth -- are snuffers of spirituality.  People who are selling t-shirts with “love” on them are being religious and saving the institution they may love, but they are NOT spiritual.  You don’t need a t-shirt or even love to be spiritual.  (Thank goodness cranky people can have peak experiences.  What they do with them is their problem.)  

Issues of birth control or abortion are religious in the sense of loyalty to the “mother” corporation, the brand.  They are NOT spiritual.  What IS spiritual is awareness of the molecular intricacy of process-design that creates a new human being.  Also awareness of the living connectedness of every human being of every age and condition.  Those “feelings” can strike one through-and-through with awe and humility.  They will not suggest how close to an abortion clinic you can stand if you’re in disagreement with their policies.

Spirituality is a condition of radical and transcendent unity.  Religion is an invented human system of values and practices.  Spirituality does not identify what is evil because it is beyond human values.  It does suggest that patterns of coming together and going apart are inevitable.  Religion tries to figure out what interferes with the status quo without improving it.  (Their own terms of what improvement might be.)  At its best, religion tries to get into alignment with “natural law” which is a matter of consequences as inevitable as those of gravity or wind.  But Mother Nature is far more cruel than God.

Abraham Maslow and his pyramid

The Great Eminence of peak experiences, which ARE spiritual, was Abraham Maslow.  He was right about almost everything he said, IMHO, but it’s unfortunate that he got entangled with that damned pyramid.  In the first place, it implies that a starving, unsheltered, unloved person cannot have a spiritual epiphany.  That’s not true.  It will be harder, because the person him or herself will be a dimmed instrument, but he or she CAN be made incandescent spiritually.  So I believe.  

Port Neches, TX.  The homeowner finally removed the screen door and hid it.

There are two problems:  one is that such a person will be considered better than everyone else, more enlightened; the other is that almost instantly he or she will become the precipitating crystal of a corporate body.  When someone finds the face of the Madonna or Jesus limned in rust on a screen door, it is at first a felt experience, perhaps intense.  By the time crowds are coming to see the image, maybe hoping to be healed, the spirituality is replaced by profit, status, exploitation, accusations, and so on.  The incandescent person becomes merely another light bulb.

The USA gives church corporations and even individual congregations (and their clergy) special consideration in the same spirit that they give breaks to married couples: the idea is that they contribute to the quality of everyone’s lives and improve society.  Clearly the extreme right is not doing that.  But you could argue that the liberals acting through demonstrations and the ACLU is not providing harmony and universal protection either.  All points on the continuum are acting like competing corporations determined to capture market dominance.  People are walking away from marriage the same as they walk away from religious organization.  Except for those who've been told they can’t have one or the other, which makes them instantly crave it.

Alban Institute work session

I just discovered that the Alban Institute has ended, its remaining assets carefully parted-out to responsible entities like the Duke University Div School. Details at http://www.alban.org.  The Pacific Northwest District UU’s leaned heavily on Alban for advice and strategies for growth.  Alban worked hard for four decades to understand accurately what was going on in terms of process rather than dogma.  They were effective, honorable, and as responsible as corporate non-profits can be.  Not enough.   But no dishonor to them.  They knew they were doing an earthly thing for the common good and never claimed they were sacred.

Religion is the building; spirituality is the sky

BREAK THAT PARADIGM!!!

Science has created for itself some exciting times.  Newly devised technology has allowed them to see inside the cells and beyond the stars, to the heart of the atom and the unconscious mind of the human.  But it’s all a big landslide of data and new forces, mostly unsorted, with meanings still hidden.  And, as in Kuhn’s understanding of how ideas morph from one paradigm to another when new information arrives, we struggle with our basic “religious” concepts, both morality and spirituality.  Much of society is guided by those concepts.  It is not a surprise that conventional, concrete, local people are having the hardest time and that their desperation makes them intransigent.  But little-kid tantrums will not change research into the boson particles, even if the minority manages to cut off all funding.  The genii will not go back into the bottle.  The particles will not go into black holes.  (Well, they do -- but that’s because it’s what they do.  It wouldn’t change anything.)

What excites the scientists is that every advance clears the way for another advance, under every newly discovered insight there turns out to be another one, subtler but more powerful.  It’s pretty common knowledge now that REM sleep is when people are detectably dreaming: we see eyeballs shifting around and the dog’s legs running as he sleeps.  But now that the brain can be monitored cell-by-cell, tiny structure by tiny structure, it turns out that many dreams happen when there is NOT REM sleep!  Something else goes on and it’s not even in the same part of the brain as REM sleep.  So what the heck is that?

Another new discovery is that the brain’s vulnerability to addiction is two-fold.  Simple experience tells us that a new user is hooked by the “high” of pleasure and the same brain hubs light up for illegal drugs that respond to chocolate and sex, only more intensely.  Now it turns out that in some people the brain seizes on the substance so hard that even long after the pleasures of new use have disappeared in misery, after the pain killing properties have worn off, there is another unrelated whole circuit of tiny hubs that perpetuate and drive -- drive HARD -- to make the body go find more.  The consequences of not having more become physically catastrophic.  

I’m thinking about whether this is different from insulin for diabetics or psycho-drugs for sanity or life-supporting systems for those who are incomplete or damaged. How we think about this sort of augmentation, particularly things that must be funded, manufactured, and distributed, will be the difference between life and death for a lot of people, more now than ever -- partly because there are more people and partly because there are more interventions and supports that have been invented.

These understandings, made possible by a rising and stratified sedimentation of ideas and techniques as much as by technical access to phenomena, are leaving the general public -- ordinary college grads as much as early flunkouts, successful urbanites as much as country hicks -- gasping for ways to integrate, searching around for new paradigms, especially religious and governmental ones.  Both of those (often intertwined) are systems of ordering and planning life.  They “emerge” from conditions, not from someone sitting down and designing them.

The broken paradigm most difficult to give up is the theist one: that the world is ruled by someone or something that is a “king,” a “pope,” a cabal that has some goal in mind.  It’s an idea created by having been a baby at the mercy of an adult.  That’s why we need to project god onto the clouds, and why we need to cozy up to him/her/it in hopes of hiding under the majestic hem of power.  I just watched a video made by a man who calls himself Maxwell Igan: half gorgeous nature imagery and half crack-brained paranoia -- it’s like looking inside the heads of half-educated people who admire Ayn Rand.  In the end it’s about his god-like vision of himself and what he values, like adding superpowers through technology.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcnTdO47p0Q   His version of “transhumanism” is just human domination of everything else.  Superman as Cyberman.

As I work on my own less-than-godlike schema for a human being (it’s hard to be anthropocentric on the high prairie with 100 mph winds and thirty below temps), I see that our own real distinction is that we are self-conscious: we can think about ourselves.  That is the only thing that picks us out as little pinpoints in the surging complexity of the cosmos.  My idea of transhumanism is very different from “Igor’s.” (Oops, I mean Igan’s.)  You might not like mine: it is that humans really don’t matter very much.  We’re just an interesting theme in the music of existence.  A time art.

http://www.ipa.org.uk/en/IPA/Video_Resources/Mark_Solms_Interview.aspx

This is a link to a discussion of a different sort, addressing how to integrate the introspective systems of thought developed by shrinks -- trying to be scientific in their traditional way -- with the new technological discoveries about how brains work.  It turns out that their commonality is the knowledge of unknowing!’  Freuds key idea was that of the Unconscious -- lots of stuff going on in the mind that is NOT conscious, that can’t be accessed except in dreams or by observing behavior or by a kind of poetry called “free association.”  And the neurologists agree that most of what happens in the brain (and in the whole body because the brain is only managing the information that pours in from the entire sensorium of the body) is not available consciously to the person whose brain it is.  Maybe prompted by this, scientists are challenging whether the 96% of the genome that seems “useless” to Igan, is vital but just not obviously expressed or expressed in a way we don’t understand yet. Timing, for instance.  We just now realized that "methylation" can turn a gene on or off or convert it to a different use.

Igan depends on TED talks and I love ‘em, too.  But I see them differently.  I was very struck by this talk linked below, partly because I’d been doing enough reading on the subject to keep up with this fast-talking guy:   http://www.ted.com/talks/michael_merzenich_on_the_elastic_brain.html   (You may have to read the transcript to figure out what he’s saying.)  He has two points to make:  human beings create themselves by interacting with their environment, part of which is culture; and this function of interaction depends upon the quality of their sensorium because that’s how information gets into the brain. 

So at one time any baby with a cleft palate was automatically thought to be retarded because its ears couldn’t drain properly which meant that it had no access to the sounds needed to develop speech.   So it threw a lot of frustration tantrums, which made people lose patience.  An early surgery -- which if successful was the only intervention needed -- made that baby able to create itself.  It wasn’t controlling the baby -- it was enabling it.

Non-REM dreaming, addictive dependence beyond pleasure, and learned strategies are all self-creations whether conscious or not.  The impelling human mechanism that drives them is desire.  Not just hedonistic pleasure-seeking, but also empathic compassion for others, the desire to help.  Not just for other human beings who are like us, but for those who are unlike us, and beyond that for all the creatures of the planet, animal and vegetable.  Technology doesn’t just give us power, it gives us deeper participation in what is around us and that’s what makes us human: not science but art.  And sometimes that’s holy, even when we’re wide awake.  The best part of Igor’s vid are the bits that illustrate this.