IMMANENCE VS. TRANSCENDENCE

The first commandment of this approach to deep meaning in human life is the simple advice to “pay attention.”  But in my system commandments and advice are ruled out -- the need to pay attention should and will arise inside you.  The most basic assumption is immanence, that life unfolds by itself without tricks, drugs, instruments -- because that is the definition of life.  All the rest is captured and exploited by imposed terms describing someone’s idea of transcendence.  This is not a bad thing unless it is used to oppress, but then it can kill.

It turns out that there are far more then five senses.  The brain alone has maybe 200 kinds of neurons, each specializing in some kind of perception of the world outside the creature’s skin.  One of the most recently investigated was a little locus behind the top of one’s nose that tells you how fast you are going.  It remains to figure out what electrochemical signals it is using and whether it is accurately and actually reporting the real speed you are going, or just the speed you THINK you are going.

An apparatus for training the sense of smell to perceive meaning.

It turns out that what you THINK far too easily (from my stubborn point of view) overwhelms what actually is being reported via electrochemical signals to the sub-sorter cluster of neurons, which edits before sending to the brain where it is edited some more.  I do not like the idea of neurology being organized by dropping out information to preserve earlier heuristics -- giving clarity more importance than reality -- but what alternative do we have?  

Brains are limited because there’s only so much space inside a skull.  That’s why the originating sense-cells are all over the body -- but there’s only so much space in a body, either.  The skin limits a creature, even a dinosaur, who didn’t allot much energy to thinking anyway.  If the skin weren’t limited, we would simple dissolve into the energy needs of the environment and its other creatures.  We are only borrowed from the world because of our skins making the boundary between oneself and everything else.  This way of thinking is biological, practical, operative.

Is this about food?

But what we think of as psychological also has a boundary, which is not perceptible but built (immanent) from the interaction of the neurons trying to understand what’s going on and therefore forming concepts which is a way of creating divisions, boundaries, categories.  They are heuristic:   “involving or serving as an aid to learning, discovery, or problem-solving by experimental and especially trial-and-error methods; also :  of or relating to exploratory problem-solving techniques that utilize self-educating techniques (as the evaluation of feedback) to improve performance.” 

This is in sharp contrast to supernaturally-based institutional religions, whose “magic” is believed to be inalterable, unvarying, and the only real interpretation.  The claim is that unnatural things of another realm can be known by only one source -- person, book, god -- which demands obedience.  A ring, a token, a crown, a throne, are understood as the button that controls power.  If you argue with that, it is justification to confine or destroy you as a danger.

A cat can look at a queen, but what does it see?

Perceiving the world outside one’s skin in a way that respects immanence, the being of something simply as itself, gives one’s inner life many ways to connect and create, which are the third step after sorting and recording what is perceived.  Then one can connect with others (fourth step) and feel the simple obvious fact of being embedded in the universe, separated only by one’s skin and one’s assumptions (fifth step).  

This might not be pleasant. Suffering, awareness of death, rage, sadness, and loss are real.  To look for a supernatural (rather than metaphorical and symbolic) escape is an overwhelming temptation and can successfully fend off despair.  It is those who have no way of interpreting the world who are dangerous.  It is a death and some deaths want to be shared, maybe with a gun.

But interpretation is the second step.  The first is only feeling.

Some geneticists are asking whether one’s ability to create inner categories that are based on peace have anything to do with human wiring as it results from particular helical molecular constructs.  Our skills and knowledge are too primitive to know.  It has been heuristically suggested that the Euro-personality might be operating off inherited Neanderthal hunter/gatherer traits, emphasized by the need to fend off a wave of evolved African people.  And that the Asian genome, after millennia of agriculture, had become peaceful.  This doesn’t allow for the dynamic horse-based people who galloped down from the Asian steppes to spread Genghis Khan’s genes all over Europe.  Obviously it must be over-generalizing.

“Mongols were highly tolerant of most religions during the early Mongol Empire, and typically sponsored several at the same time. At the time of Genghis Khan in the 13th century, virtually every religion had found converts, from Buddhism to Christianity and Manichaeanism to Islam.” The anonymous expert in Wikipedia includes only one Asian system and three from the complex of choices in the Middle-East.  All are the systems that Karen Armstrong (and Karl Jaspers) explicitly felt were “Axial”, foundations of today’s major institutional religions.  These are transcendence-based systems, claiming supernatural sources as authorization.

Alexander Nevsky among the Shamans

The foundational religion of Genghis Kahn was shamanic which is an immanent system.  Its super-powers are rooted in reality, like bears or cranes or mountains which should be taken as symbols with meaning rather than imitation humans.  The religious systems of Europe before the “Axial” religions were shamanic and so were those in the Americas and Africa.  Institutions are creatures of settlement and wealth.  Kings and armies.  

The 13th century in Europe is described by some historians as “high,” which is not about altitude but about prestige and power.  Maybe it comes from the practice of putting powerful people up on a platform where people could see them.  “High” table, “high” church, and so on.  These are all institutionally ascribed, but also we associate “high” with the sky, whether angels or bomber planes, images of power, though we don’t recognize bombs as religious unless we call them “demonic” -- which means they should be connected to underground, like landmines and terrorists.  Immanence is considered “grounded”, an eruption like Pluto bursting up in his chariot to seize the innocent Persephone, which deranges the order of the seasons.  The earth is "low," meaning vulgar, uncivilized, dirty, and probably sexy.  Maybe childlike.

St. Mary Roman Catholic Church, High Hill, Texas

So does that mean that the intended “high” civilization of skyscrapers, space stations, and church spires has deranged the world into famine and rising oceans?  Maybe.  Or maybe our categories are just wrong.  Are the Bioneers verging into institutional hubris?  Is the media now a hegemony imposing its own worldview from broadcasting satellites?

I would argue that the immanence of pure perception and a willingness to break down boundaries through empathy and compassion are the true Sacred strategies.  How to do that is hidden behind dark glass.  We should be cautious: it may be protective.

MORE REFLECTION ON EPIPHANY

An epiphany feels as though it comes from outside one’s body, which is why people call them “theophanies.”  Supernatural.  More than something you could just think up.  It can grip you and make you shake.

So can epilepsy.

If you run electricity or magnetism through certain parts of the brain, you’ll have an epiphany.  You might hear voices.  You might have a vision.  But it’s just the operator of the vibes doing it.  Really great music could do it.

Every time I mentioned it on a Sunday morning, people would linger afterwards and sidle up to take me aside to tell me about their own experience, usually not anything fancy or grand.  A man said he was bathing the baby in a little plastic tub on a picnic table at a camp spot the family had used before when suddenly the place was charged with energy and he could see every pine needle scattered on the table.

Jonathan Edwards, the guy who said we were all sinners in the hands of an angry god who dangled us over the fires of the kitchen stove as though we were spiders gripping threads we just made, walked with his wife and said the sacred shone through the world like the sun coming through a stained glass window.

Stoned again.  But on what?  And why do drugs work?  Clearly they change the interactions of molecules inside the body and not always the same way from one drug to another, but that means the phenomenon is chemical in origin, doesn’t it?  “Natural” because it’s inside the body, UNnatural because the intervention is intentional, administered from outside the body.  It’s possible to make up words like “entheogen” but that doesn’t mean something supernatural is involved?

One group of people wants extraordinary feeling to be something that the human body “does” in a natural physiological way and another group wants it to be the result of transcendent forces that are completely outside what a human can do.  The two groups want their separate and irreconcilable beliefs to be reinforced, so experiments are skewed and weighed to get the desired results.  We are the instruments, so how can be objective?  Using computers or fMRI’s only extends the territory.  Bliss doesn’t compute in mathematical terms.

But you can market it if you accept the idea of “entheogens,” drugs which claim at least to make you feel as though you were in touch with something supernatural and extraordinary.  How would you prove whether that were true?   Is there anything to consider besides the results of taking such drugs?

One issue is the category of drug: “natural,” meaning used by indigenous cultures and gathered in the wild; “pharmaceutical”, meaning made and marketed by a corporation; “accidental” like ergot fungus growing on bread; “rogue” or underground or "street" meaning made in some kind of improvised lab for no other use that getting high, and so on.

At least one way of getting high that is not an ingestion is instead a deprivation, like the air evacuations of a pressure chamber, or being at a very high altitude, or deep diving.  A stroke or tumor could shut down parts of the brain.  The dashboard that is the brain is vulnerable.  It might be infected or merely inflamed.  (An infection is some invasion from a virus, a bacteria, a fungus or the like.  An inflammation is a reaction of the body that is trying to get rid of some problem, like an infection, trauma, or foreign substance.)  The old Blackfeet used starvation, dehydration, self-torture, and staring at the sun to prompt what they classified as supernatural.  Exsanguination, blood loss, might work.  Ask de Sade.

Clearly entheogens or equivalent behavior can make a person have unusual experiences and some of them, esp. if prolonged, can be damaging or lethal.  But the interpretation can be either positive or negative, and the results in terms of what happens during and afterwards can vary.  If there is a ceremonial context, esp. one with a community, the effect will be quite different than if one is alone and in a bad emotional place, which will have already filled the body with molecules -- maybe the ones the ingestor is hoping an entheogen will end.  The constantly shifting connectomes among the neurons joining different regions will make a difference.  If life is a process flow between the banks of too much and too little, then extraordinary mental states may signal that one is dangerously near one side or the other.  

But there is an essential and possibly insoluble problem with this kind of discussion on the page:  it is a rational way of thinking confined to and produced by the pre-frontal cortex that is about ancient dark-brain and whole-body-emotion phenomena.  Some people are willing to undergo those experiences and then reflect about them when they are returned to “normal,” but the point of many of them is to change what is normal, esp. when “normal” is dysfunctional in terms of social context.  Some things can't be explained -- just felt.

Epiphany can be induced by another person (by hypnotism, for instance) or by physical activity like dancing, drumming, whirling or by constraint (bondage) . . .   I’m not talking about sex because I think it will introduce a whole new set of emotional variables, but maybe a powerful orgasm is an epiphany and that’s why so many people are willing to leave the flow of safety in order to trigger such a response.  Some dreams can seem like an epiphany, metaphorical images drawing up an insight from the depths of the under-rational.  Maybe it’s a reorganization of insight as is reported by users of LSD.  Or maybe it’s a side-effect of a drug like Sustiva that confronts HIV in the brain tissues.

I’ve deliberately tried to make an epiphany seem merely an intensification of something natural and maybe it is partly that.  But by definition and by report it can be far more intense and singular.  Managed by ceremony, it can pull a person out of their culture or embed them more deeply into a system of behavior.  Some writers feel that it is triggered by irresolvable contradiction and that’s supported by the reports of saints, who are partly defined by epiphanies and partly by written accounts of the experience.  Shamans, specifically, are not defined by good or bad and rarely write anything down.  They are denizens of the dark-brain who claim direct contact with the world, by ayahuasca or by crow.

And now I am in rainbow and raise my arms until they become wings.  The planet shudders like a bell and my mouth is full of honey.  The heat is not healing but annealing as in the treatment of molten metal to rearrange its molecular structure.  I dance with gravity just above the flow of life itself.

UNCANNY BEINGS

Certain figures of philosophy, story and poetry in all their glorious forms will return to basic domains of human concern again and again, giving them flesh in semi-human bodies such as the nagual, the shaman, the werewolf, the windigo, the sorcerer, the messiah. Incarnation means “in flesh form.”

Let’s do some sorting. The umbrella that includes ALL these forms is our human ability to think of inhuman or superhuman powers. We all live in societies where there is a continuum of skills and awareness, where some people have more skills and power or even awareness than other people. This is worrisome, because it affects one’s ability to eat -- not just in the practical nutritional sense, but in all the life-sustaining dimensions including healing. When one of these forms with special powers is imagined, they are often anthropocentric, that is, about human concerns.

Some are even institutional, supported and funded, for instance, as a priest or a doctor or -- in a tribe -- a medicine person or herbalist. They are meant to be able to join two realms: that of special knowledge and that of the person needing help.

Because good and evil are human constructs, different in different contexts whether that context is culture-wide or simply an atypical exceptional event, many of these go-between roles are anthropocentric. It is a matter of concern whether the role is an evil one or a benign one -- good for people or bad for people. Because “good” and “bad” when taken beyond simple rule-based morality are often ambiguous or even have unknown ultimate results, the stories about them are meant to help people reflect.

But some of these go-betweens have no concern with good or evil. They are from some other dimension, somewhere beyond human knowledge, and break through unaccountably. In our times the pseudo-scientific beings called “extra-terrestials” come in their flying saucers. Many who interact with them pull them down to human dimensions, often medically which is the only way many ordinary people interact with science. The aliens give them “examinations,” often sexual which is the deepest and most worrisome aspect of medicine for many people.

Today’s sci-fi, like Battlestar Galactica, addresses science in a different way, the relationship between human and machine, especially in terms of robots, who in this storyline are able to get pregnant by humans. We know from experience with animals that this is the test of relationship: can the meiosis that separates chromosome pairs and then rematches them with another set actually form a new creature? (We get nervous when there is mitosis, the simple breaking apart of one creature into two. That’s what plants do, and what scientists do when they clone.) Might we end up with a chimera, something half one animal and half another, half animal and half human: a centaur, a minotaur, a mermaid?

In older times the troubling relationship was between humans and animals. Humans tried to say they were NOT animals, not vulnerable edible meat, but rather something superior whether through mind or soul. Or magic. Or trickiness. BUT it was then possible to conceive of someone who could shape-shift in and out of being an animal or someone like Circe in the Odyssey, who could force people to shape-shift in and out of an animal. Some cultures, like Native Americans, enlist the aid of animals and identify with the qualities of one sort of animal, taking dream guidance from them. These stories are still in the realm of good and evil.

Concern about animal-being gives us the werewolf or possibly the vampire. But these shapes are flesh-eaters, humans who have taken the form of predators. (Strange to think about our love of predators, our sexualization of being consumed.) A little farther out are the windigo (the personification of starvation/predation) and the skin-walker. The only story I’ve ever heard of a windigo turning good was one Joe Bruchac told the junior high in Browning years ago. It was about a loving young mother who fed the windigo enough soup to make it human. A female Messiah whose power of good, defined as nourishment, was able to convert the windigo into a human. Another figure on the “evil” side is the skinwalker.

Do you doubt the reality of the windigo? Consider the case of the bus passenger in Canada who decapitated and ate the man next to him. Consider the cannibal in Great Falls who ate little boys. Consider the recent story of the mother in the paper recently who killed and ate her own baby. There is something in the human brain that can lose the category of “human being” and go entirely outside any human context.

More recent than the tension between human and animal, or human and machine, is between the human per se and the human mind, the struggle to tell “reality” from “illusion” regardless of whether they work anthropocentrically for good or evil. Pogo’s principle, “we have found the enemy and it is us,” is one thing. Now I want to bring up the possibility of parallel universes, the reality of insanity (we do not hold insane people accountable morally in the usual way) and the idea that in the cosmic scheme of things we are just a bit of fuzz on a tiny planet far from the center. This what the crawling baby Krishna reveals when his mother looks into his mouth. Infinity.

Some people have been so endangered in their lives, sometimes beginning in infancy, that they feel they must constantly fight to keep their existence alive, like fighting to keep a flame burning or fighting against a shrinking habitat niche. They are so aware of temporariness and smallness and possibly have seen so many people snuffed by deprivation, starvation, that they yearn to call down the power from that other realm. They may become tricksters in an effort to elude destruction. They do not purposely do good or evil, do not seek power over others, evade all institutions that seek to capture them, and often work as poets rather than scientists, though if a person gets far enough out into deep ecology and theoretical physics, it’s hard to tell poetry from the logic and math. It’s hard to tell madness from insight. It's not about good and evil. It's about being and nonbeing.