FELT BONDS OF MEANING

Let’s say there are two kinds of bonds between persons.  In order to keep you interested, let’s look at them in terms of sexwork.  These are interactive bonds.  One would be the on-skin and muscle-involved sensations that two people provide each other and that are noted and remembered in the cells that accept the codes of touch.  

The other is soon activated by these actions and physical contacts, but can also stand alone.  It is the brain-conceived but non-physical origin with impact on the organs of the body that generate and remember liquid-carried molecules in-skin.  Though the action can be initiated by images or sounds, the process can be self-kindled and sustained with memory or imagination.  This is the power of story and art.

Winnicott’s assertion of the “play space” that is created between mother and child, Victor Turner’s framing of a space/time that is entered over a threshold, and Porges’ description of  far-reaching empathy for others -- many of us have felt these related but unseen phenomena.  In fact, it may be the evolved possibility supported by mirror cells, and eye beams that has made us uniquely “human” — that is, able to stick together in families, affinities, shared purposes, organizations, nations and as a species.  

The virtual sharing is strongest between two people and weakest as an entire species but can even include different species, as in pets. The trigger is intimacy, time spent together, a desire to protect and prolong, sharing, memory, appreciation. 

This is very difficult to write about, partly because people don’t believe it and partly because it seems to be disappearing.  Jared Diamond suggests that we have lost the ability to connect to each other in person.  He contrasts New Guinea where no one has glass screens.  People stand close, looking into eyes, smelling the other, maybe touching.  We pick up a “thick” way of relating that persists and enriches the memory.   

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/author-jared-diamond-on-the-breakdown-of-american-democracy

Here’s another approach to the idea of bonds across space and time, the elements of cooperation and progress.  https://getpocket.com/explore/item/scientists-say-your-mind-isn-t-confined-to-your-brain-or-even-your-body?utm_source=pocket-newtab

“The mind is more than just the brain. No doubt, the brain plays an incredibly important role. But our mind cannot be confined to what’s inside our skull, or even our body, according to a definition first put forward by Dan Siegel, a professor of psychiatry at UCLA School of Medicine and the author of the 2016 book, Mind: A Journey to the Heart of Being Human.

“the emergent self-organizing process, both embodied and relational, that regulates energy and information flow within and among us.”

“The definition has since been supported by research across the sciences, but much of the original idea came from mathematics. Siegel realized the mind meets the mathematical definition of a complex system in that it’s open (can influence things outside itself), chaos capable (which simply means it’s roughly randomly distributed), and non-linear (which means a small input leads to large and difficult to predict result).”

“In math, complex systems are self-organizing, and Siegel believes this idea is the foundation to mental health. Again borrowing from the mathematics, optimal self-organization is: flexible, adaptive, coherent, energized, and stable. This means that without optimal self-organization, you arrive at either chaos or rigidity—a notion that, Siegel says, fits the range of symptoms of mental health disorders. “

I regret that my math phobia (which I blame on Mrs. Rumble in the 4th grade who was very punitive about it) prevents me from getting hold of this idea very well.  Also, the positive qualities —  flexibility, adaptivity, coherence, energy and stability — are cliches, all snap words whose meaning has escaped.  Yeah, yeah, we already know.

Quantum thought proposes that two tiny particles like atoms on opposite sides of something vast as a planet are somehow connected and can act in unison.  This is closer to what I’m trying to talk about, which is more like Vulcan mind-meld except not confined to logical rational thought.  More like the young man who walked into the Scriver Museum in the Sixties, causing an immediate connection with me.  He was headed to Stanford to study philosophy and he left me a contact name and number, but I lost them. Now I would really like to know what his take on existence has become.

https://candicewu.com/invisible-bonds-abundance-money-love/   This is an interesting “take” on the subject.  Maybe it has something to do with culture.  

I’m going to cut this short and go mow the lawn or the town will be after my hide.  They have no empathy for "intellectual stuff." 

ELEMENTS OF "RELIGION"

(Big picture identified “axial” religion and Christian subcategory denominations are determined by socio-economics and become institutions.)

compassion (this is most often the emphasis of women so female clergy tend to push thinking in this direction.)

empathy

therapy

morality  (this is most often the emphasis of men, so

  patriarchal societies tend to produce this

emphasis but the “morality” is in the favor of the 

most powerful men’s interests.)

maintaining stigma

evil

worthiness (obedience)

see morality

safety (see compassion)

see morality

government

war/military

righteousness

habits and icons, possibly unconscious

parental

God is Papa — or maybe Mama

power

participation — access

can you take communion

do you tithe?

sexual  (so powerful and so often unacknowledged)

food/weather (famine, disasters, aesthetics)

ecology 

terrain: is your god on the mountain or in the desert or on

the sea? Is any god in the jungle?

group/community

how big is your circle of inclusion  

anthropology

what is a human being

specialness

uncanniness  (miracles, Jesus face on toast)

worthiness (obedience)

see morality

safety (compassion)

see therapy

government

war/military

righteousness, control

awe/wonder

I made the last entry a color to signify that it is my current focus because it is a place where the misleading separation of “religion” from the rest of human life in the name of secularism or science is no longer relevant.  This is a spot of convergence where the only limit is the limit of the person.  Once “religion” and nation were the same. We separated them by creating the “secular” but now it’s time to go the other way.

You see how complicated the references, uses, and meanings of so-called “religion” can be when one person means morality/punishment and another means compassion/therapy.  It’s not just gender that makes the distinction but also the times, particularly whether they are fortunate and generous or severe and depriving.  In times when one situation is exchanging with the other, “religion” is very little help, provoking conflict. 

In any situation the real “religion” is usually Simple Simon’s strategy of doing what worked last time.  It may be fatal, but it feels too dangerous either to ignore the old rules and too impossible to imagine new ones.  Taking “religion” apart is a good reason for a brainstorm list like this.

The problem with “religion” is that when we get to the level of “irreducible structure of the world” (which very few people think about, but act according to) what we actually have is the earliest structure of the specific human brain — what you figured out earliest remains what you think is universally most basic.  The only reason we agree at all is the culture has to be maintained various ways, most significantly child-raising practices that either teach an infant that there is a big being who will protect and please you, or that there is no one there for you.  Or that higher forces are present but what they do depends on whether they are pleased.  Not you.  “Be still and know that I am God.”

The human brain is not able to think in a “feeling” way beyond this earliest structure except through experience.  (Feeling is seen here as a form of thinking in a sensory way.)  We pretend we do this when using logic, but there is no way to confirm many theories.  We end up by saying, “It’s more purple than purple” but still can’t see that color.  Our eyes only evolved to see certain wavelengths and if we don’t have names for something, previous experience with it, we can’t compute it.  The limitation of God is the limitation of human bodies. We only accept the code of our senses.

But there is more beyond that.  We can feel the awe and wonder of existence.  The very forces that dissolved God as a big white man in the sky have given us far more splendour and power than we can process.  Any “religion” that ignores this conflation of science with theories of supernatural existence is not going to survive much longer.  But National Geographic and the Smithsonian are no real substitute for the complex that is a map for living.  Awe and wonder are vital but they are not a system.

One of the main centralities of this new awareness is that it keeps anthromorphs from thinking they are god.  It also prevents the idea of finding a safe perfect place and dwelling in it.  Time is rapids, not the serene stream. And it can cut your life short without warning or cause you torture for years before letting you go like a cat releasing a mouse to death.

Big male experts who constantly argue about God are just stand up comics exploiting old obsessions with bad dads.   It’s strange that it sells books and creates reputations.  It’s a peripheral issue that doesn’t change much.  Mostly it’s about familiar words and pledges, prayers and curses.

The sentiments above, based on science and imagery provided by science, is the inevitable shared understanding of how things work that can transcend all cultures whether based on agriculture, trading, bookkeeping or war.  But no one is willing to call this new vision “religion” yet and the morality that goes with it has not been worked out in terms of life and work for everyone.  It’s still the pressing reality of survival in many different contexts, with or without the help of the rest of us.

There are so many of us and we have constructed so much that we need to do a lot of clearing away, which isn’t easy when it’s metal and concrete.  Still, people go on inventing windmills that are not huge revolving spears, ways of desalinizing water that doesn’t demand major machinery, systems for recycling excrement whether food fiber or exhaled gases.  When it comes to raising children we tend to do too much or too little.  Someone pointed out that we always sacrifice our eldest people when there is a major catastrophe. The first step towards change is facing the evidence and discovering we’re not doing what we thought we were doing.  We might not be progressing at all.  But we keep on keeping on.

EYES TO SEE

An old and honorable strand in monotheistic but king-ridden history is the idea of "natural religion" defined as studying creation (nature) in order to deduce what the Creator is like.  Far earlier than that is the ability to create things ourselves.  In the Sixties or so, the ability to create -- whether art or machine -- was considered a prime characteristic of intelligence and people wrote a lot of books about it. I have a half-shelf of samples.  Most of them pushed the idea of combining two known things into something unexpected.  This is the Picasso theory of found art, when a bicycle becomes a goat.  The most obvious example here is the four pairs of Guardians at the four compass points of the Blackfeet rez which is conveniently squarish with highway entry from four different points.  The splendid pairs by Jay Laber are made from the skins of junkyard autos.

Far earlier than all this, possibly Neanderthal, humans began making art, envisioning and making things that weren't there earlier.  It's generally suggested that art is formed in the pre-optic forebrain, where the most advanced concepts are housed, but Neanderthals had only a small and undeveloped lobe in that spot.  Creativity and art must happen in some other part of the brain.

We don't know whether apes can see beauty.  It's clear that birds can see it, make it and wear it.  It's an integral part of their sex lives. They can become symbols of holiness, like peace doves, or avatars of stupidity like domesticated fowl, or even the symbols of men, like cassowaries in New Guinea.

But beauty is a matter of both perception and culture and both are limited even between humans, overwhelmed by convictions and associations so that some humans believe that stretching their necks until they look like giraffes, binding women's feet until they can't walk, stretching ear lobes or lower lips, make the person more beautiful.  Today's equivalent might be tattooes and metal inserts.  The earliest art might be painting oneself.  We only know what will fossilize. 

Even as we find peculiar things beautiful, we also see the ugly, the horrifying, the preposterous, as part of art.  It's the intensity we're after, pushing it towards "religious" ideology, meaning that which carries intense emotion, like a crucified person.  But if depicted enough times in enough variations, we no longer react.  If we are betrayed by what the image stands for, we are contemptuous and destructive, like burning flags or putting a crucifix into a jar of urine.

At what point does art cross over into religion, not because of a message from Heaven or in a book, but because of the aura around it, the emotion and memory it carries.  There's no clear line.  And  there are blind alleys like obsessions or kinks.  Or a turn to horror like killing babies.

When I was small, my bed was against a bookshelf and on the ledge closest to my eye-level, I kept a row of tiny ceramic cats.  Also, a penguin and a sleeping spaniel.  I moved them around, imagined them talking though I have no idea now what they said.  Each object had for me some deep significance about life and its orderliness.  My mother had no feelings about them -- they were nothing.  Nor did she quite realize how I felt about them.  She thought I was a bit delusional.

I deduce that some people do not see the "virtual" (unseen) meanings of things nor do they see that others are seeing them.  It is a limited but recurring capacity.  Not everyone evolves at the same pace or in the same way.  They do not consider creations in order to figure out the Creator.  Nor do they create.  Things are just objects.

But wait.  The point of this inquiry is not art per se, nor is it religion, which has turned into a human institutional reflex that yields aggression instead of peace.  What I'm looking for is the capacity to feel the Holy.  If one must have eyes in order to see. what in human beings allows some to feel the Holy?  The religious would like the ability to confer importance, significance dictated by the pre-existing institutions, the really Big ones that formed around 1300 AD, maybe related to the idea of "nations."  The ideas competed, umpired by the Pope, combining religion and kingships until the invention of the Secular, the separation of church and state.  Some found that for them the king and country were a more potent ideology than Christianity or Judaism or Islam.

I'm looking for an intense experience of meaning, wholeness, and universal relationship.  To some people, this is confined or defined by certain places or objects or people.  But to other cultures everything is Holy and nothing is separated out as Taboo or Exalted.

"Fundamentally, it’s about seeing all of our struggles as interconnected, all of our destinies as interconnected, and therefore seeking to do one of the things that humans are uniquely good at, which is to be compassionate as a species."   Julian Brave Noise Cat 

A major issue in "religion" is that of the supernatural.  A feature of the human mind is the ability to imagine a reality apart from ours and only present occasionally as magic.  Thus miracles are a part of conceiving of the Holy.  The new StarTrek Picard uses an excellent phrase for the experience of something powerful coming into one's being: "lightning seeking the ground."  This is a transcendent, heaven-identified feeling using the electrical charge of clouds coming down with fire and explosion, since it is used in battle in the story.  But there is an immanent side, leaping up from within the ground.  A great electromagnetic release of tension?  It's a new metaphor.

And now scientists propose that "reality" is just a matter of networks and patterns in the tumult of the brain, circuits of electromagnetic energy that create meaning.  It begin during gestation, is guided by nurturing in the early years, finds a place in community and is shaped by the environment, and finally blossoms into making, possibly carriers of virtual meaning called "art".  But how do we know who is able to "see" the Holy, and who is just faking it?

STRUCTURED TUMULT

Public atheists -- usually old white males -- have told us "God" is dead but are vague about where to go from there, like how to account for humans.  What I'm doing is completely different and might not called either "religion" or "science" but a sort of theory of existence using the latest high-tech assisting instruments.  It doesn't "feel" like anything we've known before, but profoundly informs what we do on this planet.

We "know" that everything is composed of atoms, which are whirling bits of energy according to a chart of elements, and which can then be structured into molecules which compose everything we can sense.  We know that whatever "everything" is, we can only perceive any of it by using our senses which are far more than five or six, but are of different kinds, all of them contained in the flesh arranged inside the boundary of our skin.  Some are evolved organs like ears, noses, tongues and the skin itself.  Others are single-cells or clusters that tell us where our bodies are and monitor the state of our insides.  

There is only one moral command: survive.  It's not really moral or a command: it's a consequence, a self-enforcing set of rules.  "Good" is continuing to exist.  "Bad" left an imprint on the galaxy but is no more.  Still, the contribution of its existence may affect us all an aeon later, like the first water creatures who came on land or the multitude of oxygen-creating plants who consume carbon dioxide.  Creatures that don't live long enough to reproduce may have an impact through the others around them.

Humans have two basic strategies for survival.  One is adaptability to changing circumstances and the other is forming groups that can do as a cluster what they could never accomplish as individuals.  I've heard theories about Beethoven playing the piano though deaf, and what he would have done without pianos existing, but never about the people who invented and constructed the piano, why they did it, and what would have happened if Beethoven's music was never heard by anyone else or written out to be renewed by others.

Many papers now are considering what mega-climate changes have required evolution of hominins until we reach the present, because now we know that our climate continues to change, quite drastically.  Our "religion" has been first based on agriculture so that if climate destroys growing food we may not survive, and second based on business, the structure of money symbolism so that we can move resources around the planet.  If the ocean rises again, if the great travel paths around the planet defined by water and wind are changed again, we will not be able to sustain as many people through trade.  Now morality enters the picture as we decide who is discardable.  Already many people are succumbing to economic despair.

Two elements of individuals that promote survival are attachment (love) and empathy (the ability to understand others so as to communicate).  These are not just emotional or imagined aspects of living, but physical conserved events in the bodily cells of humans that are able to project outside the skin to where we live and whom we know.  It is clear that outside our skins are phenomena we can only perceive (not even understand) unless our senses encode them into electrochemical messages that will travel our neural networks to our brains.  It is the brain that recomposes them (like reading sheet music written by Beethoven) into the symphony that is our reality.  Like music, we are a time art.

We come closer to understanding that the brain IS the whole sensory system and neural network that guides us to survival -- or not.  Ultimately and strictly speaking, our bodies are an assembly of one-celled animals that cooperate by specializing into muscle, bone, fat, and certain abilities.  But a one-celled animal can be very complex.  Most recently we learn that because cells also have skins, they have "ports of entry" based on the actions of ions, which are certain kinds of atoms. Inside their skins are ways of dealing with elements and molecules. 

"Proteins are macromolecules formed by amino acids. Proteins are large size molecules (macromolecules), polymers of structural units called amino acids. A total of 20 different amino acids exist in proteins and hundreds to thousands of these amino acids are attached to each other in long chains to form a protein."  (Sciencedirect)  

Proteins are assembled according to the recipes in genes and proteins are the substance of cells.  So, like a child's rhyme, the electrons circle the element nucleus, the elements make the molecules, the molecules make the cells, the cells make the creature, and the skin holds it all !  Heigh, ho, the skin holds it all!

So much happens on so many levels that something has to keep order, which are the neurons plus their insulation and nourishment.  In the great concentration of these in the brain, the codes of the senses form circuits.  The great majority are not conscious and simply run the body so that it maintains homeostasis: just enough and not too much of oxygen, heat, salt, water, certain messenger solutions, and so on.  But other circuits are conscious and are recognized as "thought", which a "built" virtual understanding of what the world "is" and how we feel about it, which can communicate with the actions of the whole body.  There is much more to learn about the brain, which looks like slush but operates as cleverly as a computer (though I hurry to say it is NOT a computer and works with a different "code" which may or may not be binary).

Something about the brain allows humans to recognize beauty, which seems to be a kind of mysterious aspect of existence that might be embracing or terrifying, which we can both create and recognize, which evokes strong emotions, and  which is palpably virtual and yet can seem more real than anything else.  This is the realm of the Sacred, what is felt as Holy.  More than simply venerated -- in addition to tradition or history or experience -- some humans can feel something they cannot name.  This is what I want to know more about.   I call it "structured tumult."