I'VE SOUGHT THIS WORLD FOR MANY YEARS

In dreams there was always a sense of a world behind the world, the world as it was in raw code before the brain sorted it and transformed it into what we call "reality."  Everyone told me I was nuts.  But now, now, I feel it.  I feel as though I’d just discovered that I am wearing red shoes and can click the heels together.

Mark Johnson’s “The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding” turns out to be a crystallization of a point of view that I used to think was a form of humanism that I’d worked around to radical inclusion, which I called “everythingism” to mock the whole idea of “isms.”  Sometimes I called it “scientific mysticism”, the kind of thought evoked by galaxies or the cleverness of microbes.  Some call it “Scientific Atheism”, because they can’t tear their minds away from the theism/atheism dichotomy.

Johnson calls his thought embodied meaning or sometimes immanent meaning.  It seems to enable what I call “sacrality,”  the overwhelming feeling that can come upon a person suddenly and that is named and described various ways, though it’s not quite describable in words.

This is Barbara Ehrenreich’s description in "Living with a Wild God":  “The world flamed into life … Something poured into me and I poured into it … It was a furious encounter with a living substance that was coming at me through all the things at once.  Every mundane object in the street and the shop windows around her gave off a blinding glow. She had no sense of being different from the effulgence — she was it and it was she. The “only condition was overflow. ‘Ecstasy’ would be the word for this, but only if you are willing to acknowledge that ecstasy does not occupy the same spectrum as happiness or euphoria.”

This next version is from Madelon Sprengnether’s book, Great River Road: Memoir and Memory”.  "I'd been sitting quietly after a Sunday meeting service at the Franciscan monastery I sometimes attend when suddenly I felt a sensation of warmth and illumination.  It was as if someone had flipped an interior light switch.  This feeling was not uncomfortable.  Rather, it felt ordinary and natural.  It was just there--something like waking to the sound of birds, the difference being that my awareness of outside and inside had vanished.  As if someone had opened a door or lifted the bars of a cage.  I wasn't frightened by this transformation.  Instead I felt pleased and curious.

I got up from my seat, walked to the entrance of the building, greeted my friends and chatted with them, all the while aware of my unusual state of being.  I was still myself, recognizable to others, and familiar with my environment.  Yet something subtle had changed.

This was nothing like taking drugs--speed, valium, grass--all of which I'd experienced at one point or another in my life.  I was completely myself, yet also not myself.  I drove home in this curious state and then sat in my car in my own driveway, reluctant to do anything that might disturb whatever was happening.  By now, I felt that I was in some kind of field of radiance--as if light were dancing through me into the grass, trees and sky of my own front yard.

'If this is what it's like to die,' I thought, 'then it's all right.'

Just as suddenly as this experience arrived, it left.  Still sitting in my car, I felt that the light switch had been turned off.  I didn't feel bad--as if coming down after a high--but rather that I'd returned to my ordinary way of being.  I'd experienced something extraordinary--and then it was gone.”

These are intense and rather exceptional instances of real experiences previously claimed by ”religious” institutions and credited to their saints.  But Johnson has a different language system for them based on embodiment.  Here are principles derived:

1.  There is no radical mind/body separation.

2.  Meaning is grounded in our bodily experience.

3.  Reason is an embodied process.

4.  Imagination is tied to our bodily processes and can also be creative and transformative of experience.

5.  There is no radical freedom.

6.  Reason and emotion are inextricably intertwined.

7.  Human spirituality is embodied.

Listed in this bare bones way, (remember that Billy Collins poem that begins the video I linked in the last post), these statements seem argumentative to the point of madness, which is pretty much the way T is seen by people who deny the reality of their bodies by flying away to equations and history.  The website where I found the descriptions of intense immanence was originally meant to reconcile art with psychoanalysis.  Now it’s struggling to reconcile psychoanalysis with neurology, which in my opinion is a better use of their energy.  Art can take care of itself.

But so far they’ve been unaware of the embodiment research.  They consider spiritual events to be a form of dissociation: maybe “hemispheric synchrony” or “temporal lobe transience.”  One sophisticate declares, “In my study of poets who have had dissociative experiences (Victor Hugo, for instance, during his exile on Jersey), there is often a reaction against the old religion and a sense of mission to create a better one. I had no conversion experience, only the desire to get that feeling back again.” 

Embodiment thought has nothing to do with religious institutions, so why would it suggest a conversion from one institutional dogma to another?  It is entirely outside the conventional, logic-based Enlightenment system as well as the millennial supernatural claims privileging adherents in the Western world.  Johnson’s term for this latter is “propositional thought.”  Propositions are not far from dogmas.

I come to embodiment through through theatre, Blackfeet, animals, and formal seminary training, which gave me vocabulary but not for embodiment thought.  Now I fall upon Johnson’s terms and phrases with glee.  “The origin of meaning in organism-environment coupling: a nonrepresentational view of mind”, “qualitative dimensions of movement”, “image schemas”, “primary intersubjectivity”, “vitality affects”, “the grounding of meaning” — I haven’t mastered all these terms yet, but finding them is an experience of recognition rather than the usual struggle to master multisyllabic Latinate words.

Maybe this is because my seminary years (1978-82) were right in the middle of this body of thought as it developed.  But I did not come to it through courses or any professors.  (In fact, they actively suppressed this thought path.)  I was reading the metaphor books and absorbed their “frame” by myself.  Fascinating as it was, I was not emotionally gripped by these materials until 2006 when I began to correspond with T. because he was not theorizing — he was just doing it outside any academic, publishing, medical, authorization, political group.  He was another case of recognition.  He was an “embodiment.”

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson co-wrote “Metaphors We Live By” (1980) which is a major classic in cognition and “Philosophy in the Flesh: the Embodied Mind” which continues that line of reflection as do other books separately and together.  There are other people. (almost all men, at least the ones who are promoted.)  Here’s a George Lakoff clip that explains why thought is physical and every word is both symbolic and neurologically physical.  This is the information that mended the split between physical and mental.

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

What I was after — still am, ultimately — was not theory but practice.  I had several times performed “services” with Unitarians that broke through to a different level than just acknowledgement while sitting in pews.  I didn’t know how it happened.  I wanted to be able to do it purposely.  (T. had the same interest.  Not in church.)  I think this embodiment frame is the one that will go there.

DUNBAR'S NUMBER

Class Notes

Thinking about Dunbar’s number (150), which is about the number of people who can really know each other on a supportive basis, connects with a lot of thinking from my past.  One is Alban Institute’s work on church size.   They persisted a long time but are now gone.  Their work was trying to understand what made congregations survive or fail.  At the time I knew about Alban, in the Seventies, 150 people was about the number it took to maintain a viable church with a building and a professional minister.  Now it would take three times that number but many congregations have shrunk to one-third that number.

Ranchers and wildlife experts are familiar with the idea of “carrying capacity,” the number of animals who can occupy an ecology without destroying it.  Environments have the ability to rebound from overgrazing or drought and can increase their carrying capacity by complexifying or when conditions improve.  Conversely, some exotic plant or animal can crowd into the ecology and tear the relationships apart.  Drought and floods throw off the balance of everything, but some ecologies — like the bottom of the Grand Canyon where regular periodic floods in spring are necessary to replant the cottonwoods — need that disruption to drive the systems.

When I did the three-year extension ministry for the UUA, which meant circuit riding among four groups who probably added up to 150 people, it was interpreted by most people as a “salesmanship” problem.  Make UU sound wonderful, promise it will be profitable, and all will be well.  No one thought of it as an ecology, not even me.   (Well, I did a little bit.)  We did use the Alban Institute’s figures for “carrying capacity” which they estimated to be about 2 potential UU’s per 1,000 population.  That means that in Valier, there should only be about one-third of a UU person.  That must be me.  Thirty-five years later, only one of the groups has died — it was Great Falls where the town is also struggling to keep its people.  The one that flared and grew was in Whitefish/

Kalispell, glamourous, growing, the banana belt of Montana.  This group was not part of the program.   For success, the economy means far more than preaching.

My preaching gown

My seminary finally adapted to its tiny student population by converting to a mail-order low-residence school in leased offices.  They're living off the profit from selling the building originally created for them.  They haven’t quite resorted to the strategy of a minister in the midwest who used to destroy all graphs by claiming thousands of church members.  It turned out he had a radio ministry and claimed everyone in the listening area.

These problems of exceeding or diminishing, as related to economic carrying capacity, are affecting everyone across the Montana Highline.  It’s hard enough to gather and organize people to create a town, but then when the economy collapses, it’s even harder to cut back.  Schools must combine, ministers must travel, and roads don’t get repaired.  The local/state/federal balance is distorted — or at least changed.  As new sources of income are developed and old ones disappear, the kind of population changes.  If no new sources of income are found, the existing population ages in place, creating new needs while destroying old supplies. 

Sometimes you're the cheetah,

And sometimes you're the baboons.

It’s strange to think about hominins, about how they came down out of the trees.  How many individuals must have been lost due to the new conditions without trees -- no place to be safe -- and yet whole new ways of living on the land appeared.  They had to overwhelm their own biologically rooted desire to stay in one place, do the same things, even when that didn’t work.  What finally made them change?  A drought?  A dream? A mutation?

Just as more new converts are needed, the churches empty out — all the different kinds from prosperity mega-operations to little remnant rural groups of grannies and grandpas.  The denominations used to grow, inventing new names to identify themselves and their splinters, just like the expanding economy that demanded new forms.  But now the Walmarts are closing down and no one knows what’s next.  Well, they do — they just don’t want to admit it.  Amazon.  Infinite numbers of people?  Maybe.  Growth as a marker of success?  Being challenged.  Maybe "Small IS Beautiful."  What's after Amazon?

New product?  We’re sort of on the cusp of development.  VERY expensive hightech breakthroughs, but at the same time cheap cell phones and computers for everyone. An interesting development is the realization that while many were rushing around with their salesmanship ideas, there was a whole layer of society that was quietly and persistently developing “organic food,” “counter-cultures,”  "heritage seeds," “co-operatives,” off the grid.

My money, my stockbroker.

One of the interesting things about the economics of art is that on the edge are always very rich people who buy, sustain, found major institutions like museums and so on.  These are the 1 or 2% of people who control, er, “own” the great majority of the wealth in the world.  Artists are part of their infrastructure of prestige and so we visit them, sell to them, get to know them.  

What I am just now realizing is that a really rich person is not at all what we ordinary plodders think.  They are NOT individuals who can do what they want.  Instead they are managed by all sorts of people who tell them what to do.  They have the same problems of expansion and contraction in their Dunbar’s number (friends and family), and often have losses in that context, particularly if they’re not good at “grooming,” (meaning the innocent maintenance of relationships) or pervert friendship grooming into the acquisition of people as though they were bought.  Very wealthy individuals may have a lot of family, but because of English-originating law over inheritance, that can be a serious disruption.  It drives many a BBC plot.

Disney Studios

The truth is that very wealthy people, particularly those who come into a lot of money suddenly, like movie stars and rock singers, are almost immediately converted into being corporations, a business machine with its members intent on keeping their jobs and expanding their control and remuneration.  When someone like Walt Disney dies, it’s barely noticeable because he goes on as a franchise, still keeping all those folks on the payroll, adding lawyers searching contracts for more profit.  He’s just a trade name now.  

Organizational design was another way I came to understanding the importance of these arrangements that are NOT REAL.  They’re like money — it’s only paper that stands for profit.  Who supervises whom, the chain of accountability, divisions and assignments, all that seemingly boring stuff can make a major difference.  Management today is a crippling problem, a failure of producing people who have the skills.

The receding tide of “religion” -- which to the media and most citizens is some set of beliefs and the machinery of an organization -- is not serving the core "carrying capacity" of spirituality.  Rather they are shrinking the spirit.  It hasn’t got anything to do with “theism” or any of the other tent poles of the world’s systems.  It’s about human beings and their 150 friends, neighbors, and relatives, who no longer sing together unless they’re drunk or pushing a political agenda. 

I have no trust that any present venue will increase the spiritual carrying capacity of the country.  But I’m very intrigued by experiments like the one that recorded people all over the world singing the same song and then blended them into one giant chorus.  The “flash choirs” around Christmas always make me cry.  Spiritual content is not the words of the songs, nor even their familiarity, but the human voices — no matter the number.

"The Chorus" about a boys' school.

Here's a link to a terrific French film called "The Chorus" about how the unity of song can redeem misguided morality.

http://www.netflix.com/watch/70019005?trackId=13752289&tctx=0%2C0%2C03dc472065f5306cd985db4d73dc8a3f469a0603%3A5adfb04c3165f7d026977f96b0413bc7975bcec2

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.

RELIGION IS NOT CHURCH

We get into so many dead end arguments about religion -- generally ending in either violence or ostracism because we consistently start at the wrong end:  the end of the formal institution rather than at the other extreme, which is the emergent meanings of people interacting with the world.

Institutions have only one faith, one demand, one principle, always the same: the perpetuation of themselves.  Beginning with small groups who share a point of view, the origination development path proceeds through buying property (declaring it sacred) and hiring specialists (often granting them “supernatural” power), excluding dissenters (heretics), gathering power through legal status that gives exemptions in exchange for endorsements, and finally justifying war.  The newest wrinkle is claiming to be a virtual person.  Not an iconic person like Jesus or Buddha or Mohammed, but a virtual person, institutional and corporate, with all the rights and entitlements of an actual human being.  At the same time, persons who are not IN the institution are considered non-persons -- animals.

Its helpful to reflect in the terms of "Game of Thrones."  The naked self-perpetuating institution clothes itself in theologies drawn from the local ecology: sky theologies in the desert, tree theologies in the forests, bison valorized on the prairie, axolotl connected to the god of deformations and death -- Xolotl in the Aztec underworld imagery.  The most clever institutions hold up the human family -- sons and kings and virtuous mothers -- because that part of the ecology is always with us.  Hard to explain a tiger salamander to an Inuit, though he’d have no trouble with an Irish selkie who was his mother and disappeared.

"This is the forest primeval."

The evolutionary point of all this is simply survival, but on two levels:  if the survival is meant to save the individual, that’s quite different from survival of the group.  For the individual, abortion or killing is sometimes survival.  For the group, anything that diminishes the total number of members is a threat to survival.  The sin/evil/heresy labels are assigned accordingly: no abortion, no birth control, no morning-after pill, no infanticide except by neglect and poverty.  Kill only "others" or those who break the succession of power.  The civil laws follow the religious thinking, because a civil society cannot afford dissension because it breaks the illusion of consensus that are constitutions and laws. 

But now we realize that the survival of ourselves and other species may depend upon reducing the number of people consuming resources.  How can global religions dependent upon birth as a sacred event respond without revealing that they are derived from different circumstances, different times?  Of course, if there is a major population die-off of humans (pandemic, famine), producing children will be highly relevant again.

She is not virginal -- simply childless.

Thus powerful like Elizabeth I, not II.

The more powerful and protective a nation is, the more patriotism it can muster, the more it becomes a religious institution itself.  If it is destructive and oppressive, or simply chaotic and ineffective, it will trigger movements from both inside and outside that will struggle to replace or control it.  This is the principle of “Game of Thrones.”  The dragons are only window-dressing.  The real power is Daenarys as what a mother is supposed to be, dressed in Della Robbia blue robes.  She’s Pinocchio’s fairy godmother, Dorothy’s Glinda the Good Witch.  In the end she is the only kind of survival that MUST survive because otherwise there will be no babies and there must be SOME.  Same with Gillie.  Violence and strategy are all very well, but in the end there is either creation or transformation or extinction.  Those are the real options of power.

The Catholic church, the Jewish diaspora, the Buddhists, the Amish and so on all know this.  At their best, they guard the basics and discard the irrelevancies.  The Blackfeet are just now trying to understand what is basic and what is irrelevant.  I’m working on myself.  The USA is having a very hard time with it, but remember that Daenarys comes from the most primitive and harsh kingdom. When she steps into the fire, she is purified enough to walk on into the future.  Otherwise, her people would be ended but, like Jesus, she frees the slaves and gains a population.  (India needs to think again -- burning 25,000 women a year won't work.)

So if we want to imitate George W.W. Martin, how do we develop our own philosophical/ecological understanding and where does it come from?  Some is inherited from the great anthropological and literary ransacking of the planet, of course.  Maybe some is from today’s dragon eggs: science as it cracks open the genome, the cosmos, and the paleo-past.  Some of it will be forced upon a person by assumptions from history and family and their genealogies, the locale of your childhood -- which may be multiple -- and the extent of your schooling.  Much will depend on what generation you are.

But the point is that spiritual meaning -- as opposed to institutional meaning -- is EMERGENT.  It doesn’t drop down from the sky, but climbs up from your bowels to your throat and bursts out as song.  It is a relationship with the universe that gives you something to put in your hand, whether a sword, a flag, a cup, a ring, or another human hand.  Possibly a paw.  Some like -- oh, you know -- roses -- but the Inuit hold bones.

You should wander a while, then sit.  You might end up on an outcropping, or floating in a spaceship or at a keyboard, trying to remember to get up and walk around now and then.  Probably not a throne of swords.  Anyway, that bit of furniture is occupied as usual.  (Putin squats there now.)  Maybe you’ll take a seat on an old unmaintained bus on a narrow high road and unsurvivably crash.  Them’s the breaks.  Or lack of brakes.  Living forever is not possible on this planet.  You could have been in the one-fifth of conceptions that barely get past implantation -- not even a zygote before they are resorbed.

Attending a church, joining a denomination, is not necessary for accessing the deep meaning we call “spiritual.”  It wells up now and then, sometimes with no warning and with no message except “you are here.”  It’s not so much the next step in evolution but in the skillful management of the brains we already have so as to step outside our assumptions without freaking.  It is not denying formal religions, but reaching back through them to their creations.  This is the way the brain itself works: the prefrontal cortex reaching back through the limbic brain and the reptile brain, until it grips the spine.

Inuit Shaman Mask

EMPATHY WITH IMAGINARY PEOPLE

If it is possible to see into another person and know how they feel -- a phenomenon we called “empathy” -- how is it possible to have empathy with someone who doesn’t exist?  Whose eyes do you look into?  The brain catscradle connectome -- the mirror neurons and right supramarginal gyrus don’t have anything to work with.  Anyway, the research I’m looking at confuses all sorts of things: ability to “see into” others, ability to give a damn about anyone else, simple compassion even for a weed struggling to grow, and so on.  This is not so much a surprise when one remembers that a person’s identity is a dynamic composite of shifting abilities, some coming online as others are suppressed.

Co-consciousness seemed to me a better word for empathy than the literary sympathy/
empathy idea derived from literature studies, but “co-consciousness” is used by psych people to denote split personalities, persons who have two or more “identities” shifting in and out of their minds, maybe in a creative and helpful way.  Maybe not.  

Trying to see what he sees.

This is what writers and actors do all the time.  In fact, when one counts the technical matters of things like grammar and onstage presentation, there have got to be three identities present:  the character portrayed, the technical monitor, and the actual person.  This is why it is so important to have the techniques internalized enough to be nearly unconscious.

The actor is using his or her ability to empathize in order to understand and “identify with” a character created by someone else.  There’s no face-to-face contact, though actors learn about that by practicing “transference,” in actor’s terms an exercise in moving someone else from their pre-existing emotional state to the actor’s by interacting, like maybe getting a gloomy person to smile.  (In psychotherapy what is called transference arises spontaneously -- an emergence -- from inside the client. The client’s emotional relationship with someone in the past is slipped over onto the therapist, which is very useful in terms of material to work with, but awkward when it is acted upon as though real -- especially when unrecognized.)

James Franco has a lot of empathy with James Franco.

If the acting is skillful and the play is well-made, then the production has much felt meaning for the audience, which is a second kind of empathy -- to watch people on a stage or screen create scenes and feel what they mean and that the meaning is significant.  Another complication arises here: empathy is often emotional.  Can something rational, even schematic, be an empathic transference of understanding offered by the writer and accepted by the reader or watcher?  Is an emotional chess player better than a cool one?  Presumably the strategy of a game is a function of the prefrontal cortex and strong emotion (except for the drive to win) is seen as interfering, even blinding, that dwells in the “limbic” parts of the unconscious brain so must be suppressed.  How does one suppress the unconscious if the consciousness by definition has no access to it?  

Writers are engaged in the opposite process, bringing felt meaning out of the unconscious and making them into a pattern that can be acted out or analyzed on a page.  They must be using the same brain machinery that sees into the identity of other people, but making it operate oppositely to assemble an identity out of their own experience. Since the memory operates by “filing” moments according to their sensory content and perhaps a cellular time indicator, these become vitally accessible and plentiful.

Empathy with a whatzit.

Actors must first “feel” the character by relating sensory indicators in a secondary use of the writer’s material.  Then they must demonstrate through behavioral clues -- which will come naturally out of their own memories -- what this fictional character is like, following the felt meanings of the script as it progresses to climax and resolution.  If their stage technique supports the story, the audience will then respond empathically, summoning their own memory and felt meanings.  This is the “method” that Stanislavski famously developed by “feeling” the results of experimenting with each of these stages of theatrical development.  He recognized what worked by feeling it.

One of the reasons these matters are so hard to discuss in any clear way is that there isn’t enough vocabulary that isn’t confused between disciplines, let alone practices.  The other problem is that, as William Wegner says, this work is internal, mysterious, more Zen than rule.  All we really know is that -- once felt -- one doesn’t forget and seeks that experience again.  

Bunrako puppets: ignore the men in black--

they're only the puppeteers.

Particularly neglected is any application of these principles to “religious” matters.  We tend to taboo inquiry into religion because the institutions protect their turf.  Maybe that’s not surprising since much “religious” performance is prefrontal cortex stuff: rules, ethics, schematics called “theology,” the dominance of “prescribed” words over felt meaning, particularly in the Abrahamic traditions “we” know best.  Power.  Control.  

Let me try to make a comparison in terms of Blackfeet practices.  In the old days, pre-horse, everything had to be transported as the People went through the nomadic hunting/gathering cycles.  The People walked with their dogs, experiencing everything at ground level, esp. the signs of food: animals, plants, climate shift, geological traces.  Interacting with these things meant survival, and so their “Bundles” acted like hymnals.  Every animal -- carefully skinned, cured and wrapped with tobacco preservative -- had a song and dance, largely imitative of the living animal.  In the ceremony of the Bundle they were empathically regarding the animal: not playfully imitating them, but calling their felt meanings to consciousness as allies in the struggle of staying alive.

A personal Bundle.

Today there are still Bundle-keepers, but they don’t walk the land anymore.  Some of the species are extinct now.  As they drive their pickups along the two-tracks that web the land, they never put their feet on the grass or they would notice overgrazing.  They see rocker pumps pulling up oil, pale Charolais and black Angus cattle, irrigation ditches with day-glo red plastic tarp dams, and only now and then the splintered gray remains of old homesteads.  Any chirping of iniskum would be drowned out by the radio songs.  So today’s Bundle-keepers, earnest as they may be, have no associations in their sense-memories of sitting on a hillside watching a coyote watch a badger dig out a ground squirrel, in case one of the rodents should escape in his direction.  They might take a shot at the coyote -- or the badger.  They behave like institutions guarding their ownership as though it were magic.

One foot in the past, one foot in the future

Theatrical and spiritual are woven together by felt meanings through sense memory.  But institutional religion such as Christianity today has a devil’s choice: use the sense memories of the testaments (herding lambs, salty lake fishing, eroded badlands where shadowy people intrude) or move to the modern equivalents which have more to do with sitting in pews and maybe sipping grape juice for fear of alcoholism -- though the wine of Jesus’ time was nothing like what we drink today.

Felt meaning coming from the “limbic” brain is often classified as “lesser” in comparison to science.  Maybe dangerous.  Unmanaged, unrecognized, emotional images and memories can seem realer than they are.  In fact, there is a little brain organ or nexus that’s in charge of separating the actual world and identity from the one that is constructed in one’s mind -- though the latter can be shared empathetically.  That little knot of neurons is late developing.  Small kids sometimes lose the line between what everyone can sense and what only they are sensing.  

Even as adults we lose the line when watching or reading intense drama.  We WANT to lose the line.  We hunger for the felt meanings of our dreams and the emotions they trigger.  This is our human gift, which is so often a Pandora’s box.

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