Gaia

Friend and colleague Richard finds himself called to be a "Gaia troubadour." He has the title, and his job is to try and figure out what that means. He seeks to live into a vision of the earth as a single living unit, an idea allied with the view of "Mother Earth" that comes from ancient earth religions and their modern revivals/reinventions—Gaia is the Greek mythological counterpart, the the female half of the dichotomy in that culture, placed in counterpoint to Uranus, the sky.

The "Gaia hypothesis," which has been seized upon by some new-age and other nature-based spiritual groups, has little to say itself about the Earth being an organism. Wikipedia's summary says:

The Gaia hypothesis is an ecological hypothesis proposing that the biosphere and the physical components of the Earth (atmosphere, cryosphere, hydrosphere and lithosphere) are closely integrated to form a complex interacting system that maintains the climatic and biogeochemical conditions on Earth in a preferred homeostasis.

Basically, that the planet is a self-correcting system. So the science does not, at least in this case, go so far as to say that Earth is a single "organism."

But I do think earth-as-body is a great metaphor.

In my previous post, I talked about the problem of hierarchical submission. It seems clear to that one of the real values of a religious/spiritual approach to things, is that it gives a structure within which one can say both, "it's not about me," and, "it's not all my responsibility." Christians seek not to sin, but are forgiven their sins. "Islam" itself means "submission" to the will of Allah. And I do believe this is a very very useful thing to have in one's life. We don't "do it all" ourselves, and pretending we ought to only makes us insane.

But, the models we have for this submission in Abrahamic traditions come out of a social structure in which there are lords and there are servants. And God, in this context, is seen as "Lord of All." I would argue the model went from the human structure to the perceived divine structure; others will probably argue it went the other way. I do not believe we have the ability to view God objectively and clearly enough, beyond our own life context, to say whether God "really" is king or not. But I can say that Kings make a lot less sense to those of us who live in a democracy that overthrew kingly rule 225+ years ago, and a potentially even more twisted meaning in a Europe or Japan where the role is largely ceremonial. God is a figurehead? I don't think that's what was meant.

So. Is it possible for those of us who work within an egalitarian idea of humanity, to come up with an analagous model that also includes "egalitarian submission"?

This is why I like Gaia. One submits to Gaia not as a slave before his/her master, but as a cell before the body. We are part of this whole, not ruled from outside by it.

The only trouble is the whole Mother Nature thing. It is easy to personify Gaia, and I continue to not buy it. The analogy of ourseves as cells in a global "body" implies by analogy that there's a global cerebellum, a "mind" running the show. And while I can believe some sort of global or universal organization, the idea that it has a language center seems like projection to me.

I'll be the first to admit that it is terrifying to think about submitting to a "mindless machine" or a "mindless beast." But how much of that terror is based our the habit of thinking about all our own actions as "intentional." How much of what we human organisms do is actually cerebellum-directed? We use our cerebellums in large part as tools to get out of mindlessness's way (I had a nightmare last night about tornadoes, and finding ways to get all my elderly friends under heavy, fixed objects).

I think the biggest block is that we think of that cerebellum-self as running the show within ourselves, and we want an equivalent cerebellum running The Big Show. I would suggest that, in the egalitarian spirit that started this whole thing off, we recognize that our cerebellum is a part of us, that is provides leadership where leadership is needed, but that it doesn't have to lead like a Lord or King. What does cerebellum-as-clerk look like?

And our role in the world then doesn't have to be a choice between humanity-as-king or humanity-as-follower-of-the-World-King. What does humanity-as-clerk look like? What is our role as a species? Do species have "roles"? And what about cartographers?

Practice Practice Practice

In the carto-theory discussions there has been a lot of sturm und drang around the questions "what is a map?" and "what are cartographers?" — way more than I've seen in any other part of cartographic discourse. As soon as you start stating what cartography is and what cartographers are, you get yelps of indignation from folks who don't think that's what they do. This is especially true when you push the argument further, discussing what cartographers ought to do.

It's not that different in the liberal Quaker circles I'm involved in. We all gather in Meeting for Worship, and we have well-established frameworks for conducting our business. We even share a common gestalt sense, laid out in the Quaker testimonies, but just try telling a Quaker what he or she is...

I visit prisoners through Prisoner Visitation and Support (PVS). We are an organization which, while supported by a range of religious groups, does not have an evangelical or prosletyzing thrust. Our common work involves visiting prisoners, and talking with them. That's it. Now, many people do visit out of religious impulses (Jesus said, "visit the prisoners" and there are a significant number of visitors who work from this dictum). But I have been mightily impressed by how irrelevant to the common purpose that theological diversity seems at our training workshops. Practice trumps the specifics of faith.

So it's easy to come to the conclusion that we should all just ignore theory and theology and stick to practice. A lot of us do ignore it, but it is so centrally important to many individuals in their work, it makes it frankly dishonest to "leave out" of the discussion. And so we get tangled messes sometimes.

I'm thinking of situations where discord has invaded each of three three communities, and looking for a common thread in these discords. Can we get some perspective that works in general to resolve this kind of conflict on a structural level?

At PVS training sessions, people often give "personal stories" of why and how they joined PVS. I think because they are framed as personal, they are received in the spirit of personal testimonies, and I have never felt a sense of offense from the group. The only real offense I have seen taken at a PVS event was in an after-hours entertainment some years ago.

There was a recitation, clearly framed by the performer as one of her favorite poems, which involved racial stereotypes and issues of Native American suffering. It was explosive. Offense was taken. When the PVS board tried to distance itself from the performance and say it would not have allowed it had it known what the content would be, there was further irateness: some people felt that in distancing itself, the organization had betrayed the ability to speak one's mind. The whole event ended on a sour note, which is really weird for PVS. I think it shocked a lot of us, because it is normally such a "we're all in this toghether" kind of group.

What happened?

PVS does not advocate. It staunchly does not advocate. If you want to work for change in the federal prison system through advocacy or action, you need to join another group. PVS does what it does, and it is permitted access to federal prisoners because it so strictly restricts itself to this set of actions. One of the results of this non-advocacy is that the organization does not in any way link its actions to any specific theoretical or theological viewpoint. That is left solely to individuals.

Those who took offense felt that the performance violated that code. It was a statement framed not as a personal testimony, but as a performance. What caused the initial offense, I gather, was that it was seen as potentially a statement sanctioned by the organization, and there were those who strongly objected to its contents and wanted no part of such a statement. And the subsequent conflict was essentially between people who saw the performance (and perhaps performances in general) as representing the group vs those who saw it is solely personal.

In our Friends meeting, we've been wrestling for some time with a statement on theological diversity. Basically a way of saying, "the specifics of your faith are irrelevant to your being welcomed." An earlier statement was sent back, with a request to also address what it is that binds us together. A pretty broad statement was proposed this winter, and this was met with strong feelings, in large part around its deliberately non-Christian language.

The thing is, while issues of identity surrounding our Christian roots vs our non-Christian members have been brewing and percolating for some time, the meeting as a whole is steaming along. We are still a community. No real schisms. A few interest groups within meeting, and a worship group that budded off, but as far as I can tell no lasting ill-will. But the statement in question was (unintentionally) divisive. And I think the degree of passion in that divisiveness surprised most if not all.

Again, I think it was the idea that this was a statement of the whole that set things ablaze. We're used to individual statements, and have learned to frame them as such, so we can learn from them. And we do make collective statements, especially in the face of public injustice (I'm thinking here about GLBT issues, or issues around peace).

Here's what I think the difference is: We can make true collective statements if they are grounded in our collective experience. We can't make them if they are grounded in our separate experiences, even if those separate experiences seem to converge. Collective statements grounded in separate experience will be weak compromises.

The PVS performance was, I believe, not intended by the performer to somehow pressure us in to agreeing with her. I know her a little, and that's not her style. But something about the frame in which it was presented made it seem like a call to collective statement to some in the group, and I can see that standpoint too.

Likewise, the statement in meeting came out of the strongly felt sense by some members of the group which simply isn't felt by others. The group hadn't felt itself under the weight of collective experience, and so was divided on the statement.

Which brings me to cartography.

Cartography is a scattered practice. We each do our own thing, or we work within a small workgroup that does its own thing. We have common tools, mostly, and a recognizable "mappy" product, but how and why we get there are not as common collectively as we might think. And why we map is absolutely all over the board. We have assumed that there must be some commonality, but we have not really shared much specific experience as a group. And so any collective statement we made will be suspect and weak. And a proposed statement made by one of our number (or worse, someone who is not a practicing cartographer), attempting to speak for the whole, feels presumptuous.

I'm cogitating on this. Maybe hidden in this common practice are a variety of theoretical/theological types of personal bases to this practice. Maybe it would be helpful to open up the "whys" of cartographers in the same way that the "personal perspectives" pieces at PVS trainings and spoken ministry in Friends meeting can open up understanding. Maybe that would lead to a better sort of collective statement.

Or maybe it would lead to an understanding that at some level the only collective statement we can make is the practice itself.

Neurotheology

Here's what I don't like about Matthew Alper's The "God" Part of the Brain:

1. Mr Alper has a trajectory, which he disguises in a narrative of discovery. His whole discussion of religion is framed in the question of whether there is a deity, a god-person. That's the question he seeks at the start of the book to discern, and it's the question he answers by the end, in the process doing a fair amount of steamroller-ing.

2. Mr Alper overgeneralizes. There's a lot of "no society in human history" and "this trait is inherent in all humans." To me this obvious call to people to recall exceptions weakens his argument.

In short, it's making his discussion of the neurological basis of spirituality into an argument that I don't like.

On the other hand, here's what I like about the book:

1. Religious activity and spirituality fill a human need. Being our own subjects, it's easy to be blind to this, and Alper is relentless in zeroing in on particular activities and habits that are common enough to suggest a human predisposition.

2. The book begins as a personal narrative of a search through most of the major formal fields of knowledge, and I enjoyed the way these field are shown to fit together.

3. No only does what we call "religion" in English fill a specific set of human needs, it makes a lot of sense to me that these particualar predispositions have a historic basis in how homo sapiens and our ancestors operate. I don't agree with all of Alper's specific speculations, but I like the general question, "Why do human animals need this? What advantage does this give us?"

To me, this way of approaching spirit, of acknowledging that our experience of spirit has a functionality, feels like the beginning of a bridge between "religion is a bunch of superstitious bunkum" and "science is trying to take away that which is most precious to me." Both of which feel like crippled half-truths. The bridge isn't built, but this to me feels like a good, solid foundation to begin working on it.

Fragments of a Religion That Never Existed

My senior fine arts project was called something like "Fragments of a Religion That Never Existed" (I can't find anything with the title printed on it). It consisted of the text of Tales of the Tattoo-Rumba Man, with some artworks illustrating the text.

It's become clearer to me that one of my challenges as someone who does not identify with most traditionally "religious" texts or practices, is that I need to make clearer what I do identify with and what I do hold instead. I think that not only have I historically made a straw-man of orthodox practices and beliefs, but I have used that straw-man to deny the places those practices and beliefs hold in orthodox religious people's lives.

What I mean: the conventional view of non-theists around religious ideas like "scripture" and "prayer" and "sacrament" is that these are "superstition," things that can simply be discarded like Tiny Tim's crutch. But I believe that these and other religious forms are present in most adults, whether we call them by their religious names or not.

Take "scripture."

Scripture in its usual sense is the sacred text at the heart of a religion. In most Christian sects, this is the Old and New Testaments. Interestingly, while early Quaker texts are regarded as essential to our heritage, they are not regarded as scriptural. Quakers have long argued about the centrality and the role of scripture (it's one of the main points of contention in the 19th century schisms that rent the Society for Friends). But never did Friends seek to raise Fox's Journals or Barclay's Apology or Penn's No Cross, No Crown to the level of "word of God" reserved for at least the Gospels.

But there is a special class of scripture that varies from person to person—scripture taken to heart. It is the group of particular passages that keeps coming back as a reminder, a support, a running theme. And this special class in fact funtionally breaches the bounds of the Bible. Friends absolutely take passages from Quaker classics to heart (Fox-as-reported-by-Fell saying "What canst thou say?" is a common favorite. One of mine is Fox's answer to Penn on sword-wearing, even if it is urban legend).

What I'm interested in here is the idea of scripture not defined by its innate qualities (e.g. dictated by God), but by its functional qualities. What does scripture do? I find scripture-as-community-glue interesting, but my sympathies lie with scriptures-taken-to-heart. I do have a series of books, passages from books, poems, some formal religious texts, ballads, and films that form what I believe is similar to the sort of scripture-taken-to-heart that orthodox folk might have. Except I do not have a community that draws from the same set of texts.

And, in fact, the creators of those texts may object strenuously to their being taken as scriptural. But I think a big part of that objection is the sense that scriptures ought to be treated in certain ways, they they themselves are inherently different.

My thinking is this: if we take the Universalist idea that our goal as Quakers is to abolish not the clergy, but the laity (a view I think has a lot of resonance in Friends circles), then wouldn't the scriptural variant be that in some ways, the qualities some seek in traditional scripture are in fact present in all texts, that what varies is the accessibility of those qualities. This is not placing some sort of special responsibility on authors' shoulders, which I think is perhaps what makes writers least comfortable about the idea of their work being "scriptural."

It's like saying "namaste" to the text and to its author. And it is holding and appreciating texts, regardless of where they come from, that open us up in some way.

Horizontal and Vertical Trajectories

I'm just throwing this idea out there. Maybe in comparative religion studies (Joe, you out there?) there's already a term for it.

Back in high school I worked summers at the Princeton University Press. One of my jobs was researching the photo permissions for the paperback edition of Joseph Campbell's The Mythic Image. I got to know the book pretty well. One part that intrigued me particularly was the section on the Kundalini yoga system of chakras (much of the text in question is available starting on page 30 here [typo correction: should be 330] , but almost no illustrations are).

Now anyone who's spent time around New Age groups knows chakras, the light-filled centers of energy based in different parts of the body. Campbell went specifically for the symbolic meaning of them, and included illustrations from a variety of sources that really made the point.

In Kundalini yoga, the object is to train the Kundalini, the snake, to rise up from the root chakra (down by the anus), through the other six chakras and out through the head. The meanings of these chakras have a clear "higher" and "lower" hierarchy: the root chakra is about basic survival, the chakra based in the genitals is about sex, the one based in the belly is about consumption or devouring. The remaining four have more esoteric meanings in Kundalini Yoga, involving increasing levels of connection with the divine: the heart, the throat, the brow, and the crown of the head.

The goal is "up," vertical.

[And I know there's a lot of philosophical disgreement about what I just wrote, that the Theosophical aproach is a distortion of true teachings, etc etc...]

Freshman year in college, Religion 101, we read Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha. I had read it once before for religion class in high school, but this time saw the book in a structural way, looking at how the central character goes through a life path of ascetic devotion to prayer, alternating with a life of the flesh, and finally finds himself in a simple, happy life of work as a ferryman, where he truly does achieve a sense of oneness with the universe.

My reading looked at the book from the point of the chakras, seeing the top chakras not so much as steps on a ladder, but (from what I realize now is a western standpoint) as "heady" aspects of self. Where he finds peace is not climbing up the vertical ladder, but in deeply loving his work, in being open to the world before him. In my understanding of the chakras, he had found a sense of balance in the center, at the heart.

In other words, he isn't aiming up, he's aiming among.

I think religious impulses form along both of these basic structural lines. Ecstatic religious experiences look up, meditative ones look across. Philosophies based on judgement tend to look up, while those based on balance tend to look across.

And I think we all have some of both in us. I know I do. Among my peak religious experiences is going to sung services in English high-church centers: Westminster Abbey, Kings College... last year Ingrid and I got to go to evensong at York Minster, and it was really lovely.

Yet, I am philosophically diametrically opposed to high church. I'm with Phillip Pullman in going for the Republic of Heaven. Down with the Priestly caste! Off with his head! Sorry, I get carried away. Taoist ideas of balance and harmony appeal to me. That of God in everyone, that kind of Universalist thing.

My point is, there tends to be an emphasis in the vertical or the horizontal in any given religious community or system or individual, but there may be a strong countervailing tendency elsewhere in the same place. My own take on Friends has been that they are radically horizontal, but it's been interesting and instructive in recent blog discussions to see how this opinion may even be a minority one. Our practice and our social teaching are decisively horizontal, but there is a strong sense of the vertical in the historical sense of seeking for God.

I don't know, is this a reasonable tree to be barking up?

Soon I Will Be Invincible... and all alone

I finished Soon I Will Be Invincible, by Austin Grossman, last night. It's the first time in quite a while I've been hooked by a book jacket, but it turned out to be a fun read. It's essentially Wicked, but with the world of comic-book superheroes instead of the world of the Wizard of Oz.

Grossman's take on the whole thing is centered on Dr. Impossible, a beat-up-as-a-kid, misunderstood-genius, superiority-complex/inferiority-complex supervillain...the characters are all familiar, but vaguely familiar. Grossman has done a bang-up job of creating a parallel superhero-infested universe to D.C. and Marvel's trademarked and copyrighted realms.

Anyway, putting it down I was reminded of a pretty much universal theme of modern fiction, how we are all alone. Alienation. Overindividuation. Separation. And so on. It's honestly been a while since I even thought much about it. It's old hat, this alienation thing. It's so, like, 1960.

But, ya know, just be cause it's a cliché doesn't mean it isn't true. Superheroes, or Wicked's witch, just weren't on the cultural radar when Baum's original Wizard of Oz came out. Not that people weren't desperately lonely 100 years ago, but as a cultural theme, it kind of took World War I and the Lost Generation to make alienation interesting. Or normal.

It feels to me like there's a bunch of themes I've been carrying around for long time, some of them for decades even, that come together oddly in the Grossman novel. It's odd to me because, honestly, I've never gotten the appeal of superhero comics. I'm an arty-comic kind of person. Neil Gaiman all the way.

• DIY alienation: I think I've mentioned this before on the blog, how it drives me crazy when people figure they have to "do it themselves" if they are to feel justified in the world. People make fun of Academy Award winners who go on and on thanking everyone, but really they're being realistic. No-one does it alone, and anyone who starts to believe the publicity saying he or she does, is setting themselves for a repeat of Lightning McQueen's situation in Cars. But, of course, we are set up to look at single operators. Soloists are heroes, orchestras are like cabals or gangs. Superheroes are like that false value, magnified.
• Alienation and scale: Superheroes are urban. So are most of us who read this kind of blog-stuff. We have a peer group made up of people "like us" in some respect, rather than family or neighborhood. I know my neighbors, but not well. We don't hang out. My family lives in Maine and New Jersey; my wife's in Colorado and Utah. You get a different story when the characters all have lived in the same town for a long time (you get Garrison Keillor or Louise Erdrich), or if family is what they know and do mainly. And even these non-urban writers can't help but write from a viewpoint where most of the world is urban.
• Alienation, science and universalism: Look, what I'm seeing from where I sit is: there are people for whom God is a person. An all-knowing, all-powerful person, like superheroes are imitations of. And there are others (I'm on this side of the argument), for whom God, or the idea of God, is a map-maker, looking down equally at all points. This point of view does not lend itself to a cozy relationship to the divine, because it includes necessarily the idea that God didn't choose you; you aren't on the "cool" side of God's red velvet rope, because there is no rope. God doesn't choose anyone.

Up up and away. Or something.

Stray bit: In looking at others' comments tot he book, I really like burritoboy's notes on supervillians as stand-ins for Hitler. Makes a ton of sense; as in so many things, most of the second half of the 20th century is backwash from The War.

The Blind Men, the Elephant and the Narrator.

The next entry from my Quaker blog, from June 15, 2008:


It’s an old story, much beloved by unviersalists. Some say it’s originally Buddhist, some say it originated with the Jains of India. In any case, it entered western consciousness mainly through a poem by John Godfrey Saxe.

Five (or six, or three) blind men go to see an elephant and decide what it is. One feels the leg and proclaims the elephant a great tree. Another feels the trunk and declares it must be a great serpent. On they go: the ear is like a fan, the tusks like spears, the rail like a rope. The blind men fall into a terrible argument. The moral is clearly drawn: when people talk about the divine, they argue because they all generalize from incomplete information.

The problem with the story is that we all know what an elephant is. The storyteller isn’t blind. Someone is enlightened enough to tell us the whole truth. And that right there is the crux of a big cultural divide: some people believe there really is a storyteller like that, and some believe that all storytellers are just as blind as the blind men.

What makes us “blind” in the metaphorical language of the tale? I think we can divide them into three categories: mortality, individuality, and limited senses.

Our mortality is the great delimiter: we can only learn so much, we can only live so long. There’s a reason immortality is pretty much guaranteed to deities: any being that is immortal, we believe, would have the time to learn everything.

But that assumes truth is separate from point of view. The fact of my independent consciousness, my individuality, means that no matter how long I live, I will not be able to understand all that goes on even for one instant of time. I cannot fully and completely understand my neighbor, let alone all five billion other humans, let alone the points of view of every other being in the universe.

And even if we did see from every other person’s point of view, that point of view only hears and sees certain wavelengths, has a limited sense of smell and taste, and our brain tends to to do a constant filtering job on what sensory input receive, focusing on what we deem “important.” Even if we focus our attention on hearing and seeing more, both important and not, we then lose time to process and understand that input.

All of which leads to a cold, inhospitable sense: we will never really understand the divine. It will always be beyond our reach.

Our religious traditions say otherwise. And that, as I said, is the crux of a conflict.

Religious traditions propose that our soul, our consciousness, is separate from our body; it is immortal, and its limitations are bound up in our physicality. We can free ourselves of that physicality now or after death, and thus be reunited with a more transcendent point of view.
Religious traditions often propose prophets or siddhas or shamans who are like the storyteller. They may or may not transcend death, but they do transcend their mortal bodies to achieve a higher understanding.

And, as the old story goes, if you put enough of them together, they sound like a bunch of blind men arguing about an elephant.

I guess I don't buy it. Some people my develop (or be born with) a longer vision than others, but I can't get myself behind anyone truly developing transcendent consciousness. I think what we see is not a whole elephant, but at most part of one arm. The left elbow of God. The great visionaries may see a shoulder or a wrist, but I think our limitations as mortal, individuated beings with limited senses, bound to our bodies, pretty much mean we can't ever see the whole thing. We can't know how many arms there are, or it there's one head or ten heads or no head.

That's where I am now anyway.

Lone Star Ma commented on June 16:

I am also very universalist and I guess I don't really see it as a conflict so much. I'm happy enough with the elbow and excited about the journey to the shoulder. I think it's more about touching the elephant and trying to understand what the elephant wants of me...

intro to my old Quaker blog

I decided a little while ago to lay down my blog on Quaker topics and just blog one place, here. Just to make things smoother, I'm going to bring over the few posts from the old blog. Here's the first one, from June 12, 2008:

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I've been meaning to join the Quaker Blogging rounds for a while now. I mostly have lurked, and mostly at blogs by folks from my home meeting like Jeanne and Liz and James. I've been blogging for a couple years at maphead.blogspot.com, which is fun but I feel an urge more and more to drift away from the cartographic focus there, and go on about Quakerly stuff. So, with the miracles of modern technology, here I am.

And here goes.

The biggest thing I've felt myself wrestling with over the last few years on a spiritual level is the apparent divide between universalist and what I'll call specificist ways of approaching spiritual matters. To me these feel like approaching the same point from different directions, and I have spent some time trying to wrap myself around the problem, to find a point of view from which the two can be reconciled.

I grew up unchurched, and with a frankly dismissive attitude towards religion. My high school days at George School were a kind of opening for me; I got to talk about ideas and the shapes of things, in a more-or-less Quaker context. But I ended up deciding I was not with the Quakers because of what I called the Quaker paradox: how do you show tolerance and understanding for those whose explicit message is that you are not legitimate. How should an FGC Quaker deal with a foaming-at-the-mouth millenarian Baptist? What I saw a lot of at George was a dodging of the question... foaming at the mouth got you laughed out of town, and if there was a hint of threat, it got you ridden out of town. I had friends who, well, they didn't foam, but they did dribble, and they were not treated with peace love and understanding by my fellow right-thinking classmates. Who were high school students after all.

Anyway, I wandered hither and yon in college and after, ended up settling with the Unitarians in Excelsior, MN for a few years... a really lovely group, but I found myself missing the sense of a spiritual center.

Four years in Vermont and a marriage that wasn't going so well, and I was asked by a friend to "go do something for myself." Well, I liked Quaker meeting, even if I didn't feel especially Quaker myself, so I started going to Hanover Friends Meeting. After a year I decided I had in fact found my home, and I joined. Moved to the Twin Cities as part of my remarriage, and joined Twin Cities Friends Meeting.

And the Quaker paradox keeps coming back in different forms: how do you reconcile a notion of universal love and tolerance—of eight blind men making their way around an elephant—with the undeniable need of individuals to recognize specific experiences, and to form groups based on common identity.

So that's what I plan on writing about here.