Our religions have not yet given us the rules and guidance for our relationship with Gaia. The humanist concept of sustainable development and the Christian concept of stewardship are flawed by unconscious hubris. We have neither the knowledge nor the capacity to achieve them. We are no more qualified to be the stewards or developers of the Earth than are goats to be gardeners.

Taylor quotes the passage in an early section called “living examples of dark green religion.” I love the phrase “goats to be gardeners”. It so simply portrays a situation where our natural inclination, our very talents and physicality, makes it all but impossible for us to do certain things. Goats have the talent of surviving nearly anywhere and they do that by getting every ounce of flora that is to be had in an area. Of course that means they denude a landscape. Very much like us. I’ve always thought the Jesus metaphor should have portrayed him as the shepherd who walked along behind his goats. It would have been so much more metaphorically accurate.

Anyway, whatever you belief about the existence of Gaia, Lovelock’s analogy is apt. We are very goat-like with respect to our talents for environmental transformation. Now you may say that we are much more aware than goats—the existence of National Parks is evidence that we can control ourselves.

I’d say that is both true and trivial.

The areas where we cannot control ourselves seem to me to be far more ultimately destructive and one of those is our need to reason from what it is like to be human to what it must be like to be non-human. It’s a bit like the is→ought fallacy: I feel I have a “self” therefore there must be a “self” as part of any complex, or living, organism. Bullshit, of course.

What I’m talking about here is the process of embodied cognition and its rational consequences. The fact that reasoning for human beings is something we cannot help but do, just as goats cannot stop before they uproot the plant and destroy its ability to return, makes the process of reasoning something critical to understand if we are to figure out when it misleads us and when it doesn’t.

We are such spectacular successes as technological animals that it seems impossible to argue that our brand of reasoning doesn’t work. We were, after all, evolved inside the environment in which our embodied reasoning takes place, so of course it fits. When we reason about distance and the control of objects based on our bodily experience of extending our arms and legs and picking up things from the ground, such extensions work so well they are essentially invisible. It just seems obvious, all of a piece, natural. We don’t think about it at all. To reach for things, is to grasp them, to understand. It seems so very clear that this is the way to handle the world. It works. We reach out with our minds and grasp a situation. We must, therefore, have it in hand. It’s such a horrible surprise to find that what we thought we had grasped, what we are so very sure we had understood, turns out to vanish while we watch. A phantasm.

And how we experience things is vitally important and horrifically strong. We have built-in images of which we are profoundly sure. It is most disconcerting to have these disconfirmed. Like an apotemnophiliac or a somatoparaphreniac we can sometimes refuse the evidence of our eyes and hands and insist that the evidence of error is not there, or insist that it be removed at once so that our inner sense of what is true remains unchallenged.

Some bits of our embodied reasoning are less sure than our assumptions about understanding and directly grasping the world or the ones that work like body image and body integrity. Like why is “up” associated with “good,” why “black” with “evil”, these kinds of metaphorical reasoning have long bothered. Religious and moral reasoning is of this sort. Still, like the concept of “grasping” as “understanding”, moral thinking is also a metaphorical extension of our bodily experience. We are deeply (largely, but not completely, unconsciously) aware of the dangers of being “down” and “in the dark.” Another example: that there must be a being to which we turn is a natural extension for a species that is fundamentally dependent on other existent, and more powerful, members of the same species to enable individual existence. Nothing in our evolution or our individual development leads us to bodily experience radical individualism. We are all dependent on the existence of others.

We can do nothing about this capacity to think through bodily metaphor except pay attention to our doing of it. We think through our body’s experience of life. Yet by paying attention to a limitation we can become conscious of doing it and try to circumvent the worst of its effects. I doubt we’ll ever be able to forgo the feeling that there must be a “self” like ours out there but we can recognize that it is an illusion of the sort that confuses us—as do all those wonderful optical illusions. Like the Müller-Lyer illusion, we are built to work with a specific kind of environment, to enable us to survive its demands. We are not built to perceive accurately; we are built to perceive effectively.

The concept of “self” is something that corresponds to the “error” in our reading the length of the arrows in the Müller-Lyer illusion through our bodily knowledge of depth perception. The “self” provides a perceptual tool akin to reading a 3D world. A “self” is something that is meant to interpret a social situation that has immense importance to human survival. Just as we see those line segments as being of different lengths because normally in a 3D world they would be, so reading the “self” onto others works for us because in the case of human society the other will have an experience of self like our own.The problem is that we don’t stop at other humans. We read everything that way, especially anything that triggers “other” like a feeling of awe, or the appearance of a big head and big eyes. Of course outside human society such a reading is almost certainly not true.

So? Well let me give you an example of how this kind of misapplied thinking can create more problems than it solves. For a long time women were thought to be misproportioned men, missing a vital bit of anatomy. Need I say more?

I think saving the earth is rather important; our lives probably depend upon it. And while it is true that the feelings of awe, reverence, wonder and the like that Taylor construes as Dark Green Religion can be seen as a new religion, is this the most useful way of doing so? Will it accomplish what Taylor wants—the change of our behaviour to reduce our goat-like destructiveness? Probably not if we keep using the same kind of logical patterns that created much of the problem in the first place. The thing is that those nasties seem to be tied up with the inherent bodily logic of the human religious impulse, tied as it is to seeing echoes of ourselves in the world around us. What I think we need to do is see that this is an illusion, and not despise it, but just recognize that it is not a true representation of the non-human other.

If we can do that, then maybe we can get down to the business of finding a more accurate metaphor for what is in fact the case in all things non-human, i.e. that they are not human. That they are something quite else.

Nevertheless, I wish that physicists would refrain from using the word God in their special metaphorical sense. The metaphorical or pantheistic God of the physicists is light years away from the interventionist, miracle-wreaking, thought-reading, sin-punishing, prayer-answering God of the Bible, of priests, mullahs and rabbis, and of ordinary language. Deliberately to confuse the two is, in my opinion, an act of intellectual high treason.

Here’s how Taylor brings this into his discussion in Dark Green Religion:

Dawkins contended that it is “destructively misleading” when scientists label as religious their aesthetic and affective experiences when contemplating nature because “for the vast majority of people, ‘religious’ implies “supernatural.’ ” Dawkins even declared that it is “intellectual high treason” when atheists and others who do not really believe in the “interventionist, miracle wreaking…prayer answering God” confuse people with pantheistic or other religious language.

Do you see the twist? It made me mad, I must admit. But then I thought, what is this evidence of?

I mean, does Taylor think it’s OK to confuse readers with terminology? Of course not. Taylor is a scholar so terminology is important to him. I mean what is scholarship except the careful increase of epistemological clarity? That’s why Taylor spent so much time defining “religion.” He’s trying to be clear about why it is OK to call “religious” those persons who don’t believe in anything apart from the material world. Of course Dawkins’ argument is that this isn’t good enough. His reason? That to mix terms that sound alike / religion and religion or god and god / but mean radically different things is guaranteed to confuse the issue.

Revisit Wittgenstein’s language games and my earlier post on the term “evidence.” Why do that? What is it about religious terminology that Taylor really needs for his project? What about it makes it worth the confusion such religious terminology brings with it?

That’s a question I wish he would answer for me, because I don’t think it is necessary. That’s why I posted the underlying framework that gets beyond religious terminology.

Finally, what Dawkins said in that quote above is that the pantheistic god of the scientists does not equate with the personal god of most Western religious practitioners and that he is not criticizing the pantheistic god of the scientists with the same criteria as he does the idea and consequence of a belief in a personal god. Taylor seems to misread the passage as Dawkins inveighing against pantheism as he does against those religions with a personal god. Based on the quote above, this is simply not true. Bad, Taylor, bad.

The next “goat” posts are the but.

In my thinking about Dark Green Religion (dgr), there seem to be some aspects of Taylor’s theory which I can’t reconcile with the intent of the book. As I read it, the author is compelled by the idea that dgr could be an even greater social force for adjusting our wants to a more sustainable level than it is now and thereby helping balance our species’ impact on planetary resources and health with the planet’s ability to keep producing said resources, remaining healthy while it does so.

A laudable goal and a question I would like answered as well, hence my fascination with the book. The thing is that there are a few places in the framework Taylor sets up that seem to me to work against answering such a question with any real explanatory power.

First I should say that I think he is quite right that one can read the all the recent emphasis on “our Mother Earth” as religious, and certainly these trends are experienced by many as at least parareligious. I don’t think there’s really any question that anything that evokes such awe, loyalty, reverence and a sense of kinship can be the seed of a human religion. It is quite clear that the Earth can and does evoke such; Taylor demonstrates just how widespread such feelings have become. The question is really will such feelings become normative. That possibility, Taylor seems to think, might give humanity a more sustainable attitude and might help ensure our survival. So a second question: is that link—between a sense of  the earth as “Mother” and sustainable behaviours—true?

Understand that I’m still thinking this through, and this writing is part of the process of doing so, but there seems to me to be at least two problematic areas. The first is the conceptual/ethical frame Taylor sets up doesn’t seem to me to go deep enough and the second is his apparent bias toward the answer he clearly wants to be the case, that should such feelings become normative this will cause a correlative shift in behaviours. This second is exemplified in the book by Taylor’s problems with Richard Dawkins and D’s brand of atheism. This post is about the first. The second will be in “goats” part 3.

The ethical/conceptual framework

Taylor lays out the ethical frame for dark green religion (dgr) early in the book. In the same section he also lays out the conceptual or metaphysical frame which allows for his four different (overlapping) kinds of dgr. While I agree that there do seem to be four kinds of approaches to the “religious” phenomena he is discussing, what underlies the reason for those four approaches (or cognitive expressions) seems to me important to acknowledge. In other words, a mere description of the phenomena he has observed is not enough. What is needed is an analysis that goes deeper into the workings of the human mind.

It is only by understanding what it is about us that makes us think the way we do that we can begin to answer the question of  change. If a new kind of thinking/understanding can become normative and whether such a change in attitude will make our behaviours more sustainable (goats part 3) is a question only understandable through a historical evaluation of a similarly rooted processes. An exploration of the basic frame that underlies our current dgr expressions can be useful here, and through historical analysis, understanding similar expressions of such cognitive and ethical change.

Taylor’s ethical frame:

This value system is generally (1) based on a felt kinship with the rest of life, often derived from a common ancestor and are therefore related; (2) accompanied by feelings of humility and a corresponding critique of human moral superiority, often inspired or reinforced by a science-based cosmology that reveals how tiny human beings are in the universe; and (3) reinforced by metaphysics of interconnection and the idea of interdependence (mutual influence and reciprocal dependence) found in the sciences, especially in ecology and physics.

I  have no problem with this, nor with the conceptual frame that follows below. Part of my problem is the presumed connection between the two. It’s as if he is saying I’ve noticed this new ethic. And I’ve noticed this new metaphysical sense and I’ve noticed this four-fold way of expressing parareligious feeling about the earth and then leaves it up to the reader to connect them—and of course these trends do seem to be connected since they are part of the same section of text, and part of the definition of his book’s intent and scope. What happens is that the reader is lead to make a presumed causal connection: the ethical frame leads to this four-fold distinction. But I rather think it doesn’t necessarily; that it might be more a correlation than a causal chain. And if that’s the case, then the deeper motive Taylor seems to have for the book—to make clear the dynamics of dgr to foster human respect for environment—may need rethinking.

The conceptual frame:

Taylor considers dgr to fall into four types: “Spiritual Animism,” “Naturalistic Animism, “Gaian Spirituality” and “Gaian Naturalism.” These types represent the breadth of the conceptual frame in which the ethical frame (above) can be enacted in daily life. He tabulates it with the categories “Animism,” “Gaian Earth Religion,” “Supernaturalism” and “Naturalism.” (See table below.) He then gives exemplars of each type, showing the resultant category’s inherent mutability. He uses well known cases, for example, Jane Goodall and Gary Snyder; it makes it easier for the reader to connect with the sometimes subtle differences between the four types. The green text blocks in the diagram below represent Taylor’s categories. The rest is a recasting of Taylor’s observations on a set of known cognitive properties extant in the human mind, the purpose being to show the deeper relationship between the changes Taylor has noticed and the long-term tendencies expressed by the cognitive structures of the human mind.

The vertical axis:

What I am calling figure-ground in the diagram below represents a key cognitive choice humans make when seeing things. We are structured so that we can perceive either figure or ground, and can rapidly switch between them, but we cannot perceive both at the same time. This innate capacity allows for but also constrains our perceptions of the world around us. The capacity for figure-ground observations is projected (so to speak) onto our environments and translates into our perception of objects and relationships between objects. In fact, almost certainly, our evolved figure-ground perceptual mode came to be as it is because as a species we need to be able to concentrate on both objects and the relationship between them, but still have the ability to intensely focus on one or the other.

We all live in world that requires us to distinguish between bounded objects and the space between, but we also live in a culture that tends to focus on one more than the other. In cultures that have a noun-centered language (such as English) you also have a culture that is “object” oriented. Not that language precedes or is the cause of the cultural bias. In fact it’s probably the other way around. Focus on objects more than relationships between objects and all the cultural communication and symbolic systems will all participate in this bias. This includes religion. Animism is an example, but so are the three Middle Eastern/Western monotheisms.

It’s important to remember that when a culture or person focuses on objects, it’s not that they are unaware of the relationship between things, but that the conceptual systems and ethics they develop as a society tend to preference objects. So you get noun-centered languages, cultures that prize individual rights over individual responsibilities and the like. But history shows that this emphasis, while normally quite sturdy, can change. Social transformation has happened, and will happen again.

Animism…commonly refers to perceptions that natural entities, forces, and nonhuman life forms have one or more of the following: a soul or vital lifeforce or spirit, personhood (an affective life and personal intentions), and consciousness, often but not always including special spiritual intelligence or powers.

If the cultural focus is on relationship you get verb-centered languages and societies that prize the group, the family, or the nation. Salish is one such language group, a Native American language and culture belonging to what in the U.S. is called the Pacific Northwest. Again, open to change under the right conditions. Here one would see Taylor’s Gaian, organicist forms.

Gaian Earth Religion, in my lexicon, stands firmly in the organicist tradition. It understands the biosphere (universe or cosmos) to be alive or conscious, or at least by metaphor and analogy to resemble organisms with the many interdependent parts. Moreover, this energetic, interdependent, living system is understood to be the fundamental thing to understand and venerate.

One fundamental point is that our current reading of our world as either filled with “natural entities” or as an “organism” is part of the fabric of our mind and has nothing really to do with a new trend in human beings, or even a return to a pattern of earthly reverence. Animism/Gaian perceptions represent an expression of the normal human mind that is as much cultural fad as it is new insight. Could it become culturally revolutionary as perspective did in the Renaissance? Sure. Will it? That probably depends on how useful this new form of figure-ground expression is to us in understanding ourselves.

Another fundamental point, such a cognitive “axis” is really only useful if understood in context with those other cognitive abilities that constrain or develop its potential expressions. An example: the horizontal axis.

The horizontal axis:

What I am calling the “metaphysical stance” in the chart above covers the cognitive spectrum between non-material (e.g. idealism, dualism or pluralism) and material-only ideas about the nature of the “real” world. I want to be clear here about what I mean by materialism, because Taylor seems to hold it in disrepute, which, I think is rather unfair—even silly—given the book is about a religion revering the material earth.

Materialism is just the idea that all that exists is matter. This means that all phenomena are a function of the material universe. Consciousness, mind, awe, love, hate, energy, heat, pain, all of these things are functions of the operation and organization of matter. Sure we don’t yet understand just what matter might “really” be, nevertheless, materialism would seem to me to be a sensible understanding of the world for someone who is (justifiably) in awe of the earth and its processes—and of someone not looking to unconsciously (or not) impose human phenomenology on non-human entities.

The horizontal axis on the chart below represents the human range of assessing “reality” as either in the physical world (Taylor’s naturalism) or in some postulated non-physical realm that, in some way, lies parallel to the physical (Taylor’s supernaturalism). Why do we assess “reality” this way and is it necessary?

Whilst the vertical axis fundamentally grounds itself in a hard-wired cognitive ability developed through eons of evolutionary necessity, the horizontal axis is a bit different. Not that it didn’t evolve, but rather it is different because it appears to be a “secondary” ability.

What I mean by this is that the fundamental ability that underlies the range of ideal to material, is the human ability to project our phenomenological sense of what it is like to be us onto the world outside us. We move about our days, from infancy on, learning to control ourselves, to make distinctions between needs and desires. An instance: we feel a wave of hunger but social or cultural conditions make that physically available food not socially or morally available. We must wait to eat.

Both the hunger and the need to recognize conditions where that hunger should not be immediately obeyed are quintessentially human. What it feels like internally, phenomenologically, is something like my body wants to eat but I know I must wait. The initial and primary phenomenological experience of being human posits two entities, my body and my mind. Of course the fact that this is what it feels like, does not make it so, but it does make it the simplest way to construe our reality. Dualism is just such a construal. Idealism is that same kind of thinking—the postulation of a universal “I” of the sort that we feel internally.

So where does materialism come from? Because we can extend our bodily metaphors, we can reason with them, and since we have many of them, we can try out different phenomenological logics (e.g. I feel like there are two of me, body and mind, so I’m going to think about the world that way and see how that works out) on our environment. We also have singular bodily metaphors, experiences of unification, very, very often stimulated, as Taylor points out, by some aspect of our natural environment.  Imagine you are Wordsworth on Mount Snowdon and that sense of unity he expresses in his poetry overwhelms you. From that it is easy to move to a monistic metaphysical stance, whether Idealism or Materialism. Which expression one takes up depends greatly on one’s cultural milieu and probably on one’s practical experience with the things of the earth.

The advent and roaring success of science in the last few hundred years has made us much more alert to the things and processes of the earth. We also know a great deal more about the earth than we did, and can no longer function as a society without the resultant technologies. That combination would motivate continued change in the same direction. This correlative (not causal) linkage between the growth and science and our dependency upon its products  is almost certainly what has moved us toward the materialist end of the axis, or to Taylor’s naturalism.

The Four Types of Dark Green Religion and what underlies them

Taylor categorizes his concepts with this chart.

	Animism	Gaian Earth Religion
Supernaturalism	Spiritual Animism	Gaian Spirituality
Naturalism	Naturalistic Animism	Gaian Naturalism

So Spiritual Animism is that conceptual framework that tends to notice “objects” and to explain them using a bifurcated universe, one where there is a material universe as well as a non-material one. Gaian Naturalism is a conceptual framework that notices the relationships between things, the “family” rather than the “individual”, whilst maintaining that all effects can be attributed to the material world.

What I would suggest is that his system is more understandable, and has better explanatory power if seen against the constituent cognitive abilities which ultimately enable the four kinds of dgr that Taylor has identified.

Here “Spiritual Animism” locates its “heart” in the center of the upper-left quadrant. “Gaian Naturalism” is located in the lower-right sector. For one thing, this kind of diagrammatic understanding helps explain the mutability of individual expressions of the types of dgr. Since a person is cognitively constituted to flip when necessary between figure and ground, the diagram would suggest that under the right circumstances (such as a change in cultural conditions), an individual can shift focus, thereby moving along the vertical axis and (presumably) exhibiting a different perception of what is perceptually important.

It seems to me that even Taylor’s own evidence, and his repeated examination of the mutability of individual’s expression of dgr sentiments, support this reading of the deeper cognitive structures that underlie the four types of dgr he has examined.

There’s more here to be examined. For example, is it cognitively possible for a human being to be in the center of this chart, and if not does that imply a kind of blind spot in our perceptual system? Another interesting way of examining this would be to place long-gone cultures on the axis and read them forward through massive social change.  For example, Classical Greece and its Platonic and Aristotelian battle over the Ideal-Material axis and how that worked out given they were a culture that resided far into the ground/relationship/Gaian portion of the chart. Their overwhelming focus on philosophical issues and their nearly absent sense of material, physical, evidence-based experimentation drove their culture to great heights, just as our overwhelming focus on experimentation has driven ours. So does what happened to them presage what will happen to us? Does the millenia-long influence Greek ideas have had on us (I mean we are still arguing with Plato and Aristotle about what is “really” real!) mean that our materialism will be just as influential?

Anyway, questions for another time, but ones I think explorable by moving Taylor’s analysis of what we are doing now in our dgr expressions onto a deeper cognitive framework for analysis.

Coming in goats part 3, Richard Dawkins’ “militant” atheism and the question of a link between attitude and sustainable behaviours.

It’s a good question, because it suggests answers that get to the root of intellectual bias. I suspect part of the answer lies in the fact that contemporary paranormal claims are often so outrageous, so non-sensical that it makes a mockery of religion in toto. And academics often have very little sense of humor about their topical areas.

Is that what taboo is then? A way of protecting an untenable, but dearly held, belief from examination? An interesting thought when one considers taboo subjects like incest. When I was an undergraduate anthropologist I remember thinking about the universal incest taboo and realizing that meant that it was also universal behaviour. The question is do we make it taboo to stop it or to hide it?

Thanks to Letter from Hardscrabble Creek for including the link to Eideard.

So far I like the book, appreciate its scholarship and its purpose—the subtitle of the book, Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future should make that last one clear. The book seems to intend to work toward a rubric by which methods of bringing more people into contact with the ethical frame of mind that will allow us to avert ecological disaster and our own subsequent demise can become clear and practicable. In other words, figuring out how to foster an appreciation of that which allows our existence by figuring out what is actually taking place in what Taylor calls dark green religion. This I applaud but I do think basic conceptual frameworks need to be very clear if such an intent is to be workable.

One of the things he does to facilitate this is define terms right at the beginning. He makes it clear that he is defining terms for the purpose of setting up this study, so problematic terms like “religion” and “spirituality” can take on meaning, can also be mutable, and still be useful terms. What I find odd is that he left out the term “sacred.” This is especially so since much depends upon it. Dark green religion (dgr) as opposed to green religion is defined by the fact that nature is held as sacred.  He does have a parenthetical remark: “in which nature is sacred, has intrinsic value, and is therefore due reverent care.” I think this is meant as the definition of “sacred.” Really what this definition amounts to is the normal use of the term stripped of it’s “god’ component.

My question, and it is in fact a question, can such a definition be enough?

One of the reasons it is called into question for me is the same reason Taylor defines all the other terms. Our society is built on a conceptual system that fosters a disconnect from material nature in order to “point” us toward some other reality usually constructed as to be external to nature. This other is normally the divine.

So I suspect a rethinking of what “sacred” actually means about human experience, human mind, human body would be an important part of the bones of what this book is trying to accomplish. Where such a thing might come from is most likely embodied cognition since it is grounded in nature and an understanding of the world that has “green” at its bottom.

That’s it for part 1. Part 2 is going to be a look at the (absent) link between Taylor’s account of dgr’s ethical and metaphysical stances.

Actually I am not sure that is the real source of the problem but it is the only thing I can think of that explains what I am experiencing when reading the book. Let me give you an example. In the chapter called “Desert Hermits” she wants to discern and then understand the difference she perceives between two forms of silence. She has come to understand the two forms as the kind of silence that allows the Self to emerge (or create Itself) and the other is the kind of silence that abnegates personal identity, emptying one out until all that is inside is the Silence. The first (silence) she exemplifies with Kafka and then the Romantics and the second (Silence) with the those (usually Christian or at least religious) who seek an emptiness that is to be filled with God (or in the case of Buddhism, the loss of illusion).

She uses two quotes as reference points.

You said once that you would like to sit beside me while I write. Listen, in that case I could not write at all. For writing means revealing oneself to excess, that utmost of self revelation and surrender…that is why one can never be alone enough when one writes, why can there can never be enough silence around one when one writes, why even night is not night enough. (Kafka, Letters to Felice)

We must cross the desert and spend some time in it to receive the grace of God as we should. It is there that one empties oneself, that one drives away from oneself everything that is not God and that one empties completely the small house of one’s soul so as to leave all the room free for God alone…it is indispensable: the soul needs the silence of it, the inward retirement, this oblivion of all created things. (Charles de Foucauld, from Ann Freemantle’s book Desert Calling)

Of course I can feel the difference between the way Kafka and de Foucauld sought – and the difference between what it is they sought. This sense of becoming empty (whether to release Self or destroy self) is one all essentially quiet people can intuitively grasp, even one like me who does not require a god to explain the sense of unbearable intimacy that comes from being overwhelmed by that which is infinitely large. And the thing is that both the Self and the Silence are that – infinitely large.

The fact that I can identify either way is part of the problem I have with Maitland’s silence/Silence. I do know what “both” feel like.  I know Kafka’s need as well as I do de Foucauld’s and they are not different, not really. They are both about the loss of the sense of separation. That which Maitland calls solitude/silence (evoking the Romantics) approaches the identity of self and universe by expanding self until it explodes in a kind of ecstatic sense of enfolding of the universe – not humanizing reality but including more and more into what it is to be “human,” so that “to be human” becomes ultimately meaningless — there is nothing that isn’t “to be human.”  This is what Robinson Jeffers was going for in his inhumanism (or should have been if he wasn’t so pissed off at our inveterate stupidity).  The Silence that the hermits sought, that is also achieved through making “to be human” meaningless. It is found by eliminating elements of what “to be human” means until one’s self/identity implodes — and that black hole of the Void (longed for by Simone Weil) is finally found to be at the center of the universe — where one’s self used to be.

Both paths lead to the same experience/event. There one finds a singular identity. It is universally encompassing and inexpressibly minute; monolithic and multitudinous, and our normal sense of isolation, incompleteness, finitude and threatened meaninglessness is utterly vanquished.

I suspect that my problem with what feels like an artificial division in Maitland’s book is compounded by the fact that even with her quotes she can’t seem to hold up the division. Near the end of this same chapter she gives us the words of an Egyptian hermit.

“What is there to love about the desert?
“We love the peace, the silence…You can pray anywhere. After all God is everywhere, so you can find him everywhere.” He gestured to the darkening and dunes outside. “But in the desert, in the pure clean atmosphere, in the silence – there you can find yourself. (Dalrymple, From the Holy Mountain)

This last is supposed to be an example of the second kind of seeker and yet, what the Silence provides is nevertheless the Self.

It is not, I think, the the goal of the querent that decides between the “exploder” or “imploder” as Maitland’s book implies, but something to do with cultural expectations and probably basic personality. A bit like solace sought…an extrovert will seek it in the company of others; an extrovert, no. Yet it is still solace that is sought, and found. It is these implications that bug me about the book and, to be honest, I associate this kind of rhetoric with the proselytizing tendencies of religious folk. Not fair perhaps, but there you are.

Does Maitland’s division matter?  I think it does. For the same reason that it is important to realize that ecstatic experiences are artifacts of the human brain and body and not artifacts of mythological beings (i.e. we have some power in the situation), the false division of silence and Silence obscures — and the whole point of seeking is to actually find.

And then I found – in probably my favourite tiny used bookstore in Vancouver – a delightful burgundy bound small volume of Elia’s essays published and printed by Collins’ Clear-Type Press sometime around 1905. Some $19 later, I carried the little book up the street to the coffee shop, ordered my latte and started reading. I read “The South-Sea House” first and was delighted by the whimsicality of the characters but there was something else, like a deep current under the words. I couldn’t stop there and glanced through the table of contents and came upon “Witches and Other Night Fears.” Given my fascination for the use of female power images in other writers, that was were I went next.

He seems to me a very careful writer. That is, I sincerely doubt whether his juxtapositions were not carefully considered. He seems an author that delights in the subtle indicator, the quiet joke to make palatable a difficult truth. So when he begins the essay with a discussion about the “creed of witchcraft” and the problem of interpretation (taking our ancestors to be fools for belief) only to follow it closely with a child’s interpretation of Stackhouse’s biblical explication (and his “brief, modest and satisfactory” solutions to numerous apparent biblical contradictions), it seems unlikely that such a juxtaposition was not intended to order our experience and create meaning.

For me the moment of deepest, although quiet, hilarity in that essay is the scene where the young Elia is exposed in his dedication to Stackhouse’s book. The pictures, it seems, had his devotion.

In my father’s book-closet, the “History of the Bible,” by Stackhouse, occupied a distinguished station.  The pictures with which it abounds–one of the ark, in particular, and another of Solomon’s temple, delineated with all the fidelity of ocular admeasurement, as if the artist had been upon the spot–attracted my childish attention. There was a picture, too, of the Witch raising up Samuel, which I wish that I had never seen. We shall come to that hereafter. Stackhouse is in two huge tomes–and there was a pleasure in removing folios of tomes–and there was a pleasure in removing folios of that magnitude, which, with infinite straining, was as much as I could manage, from the situation which they occupied upon an upper shelf.

Sitting in the coffee shop, I had to place the little red-ribbon book marker, place the book upon the table and simply grin.

That child, straining for a book probably placed on a high shelf just so he wouldn’t see it, just as parents in the ’70s hid their copy of The Joy of Sex from their children, this is Lamb for me, this quiet teaching, this delight in the whimsical, the deep respect for what is real about how people go about things.

It made me want to find a digital copy of Stackhouse just so I could see the Witch. So I did, and after a diligent search (which made me late for work), I found a copy of the volumes and a copy of the Witch. Here she is. Can you make her out?

More on Lamb later. The dude is my hero.

I saw pictures form in my mind and I felt a surge of something moving through my body: pictures of the woman whose body was rendered; pictures of the woman staring at the moon, her hand on her womb feeling (as I imagined it at the time) the contractions that would result in blood between her legs. I imagined her being caught as I had been by the fulgent moon. As I continued to stare at the picture in the library, these imagined similarities of life explained to me the horn she held and probably the marks cut on its crescent curve. The fact that she held it in her right hand meant to me that the moon was waxing. Interestingly, I did not connect that observation with the possibility that her hand on her womb might mean she felt the movements of a child, but then I was fourteen and not at all in favor of the idea of pregnancy. Staring at the picture, it was if I was also staring at the moon inside the eyes of the woman who carved that bas-relief and a woman it was, of that I was sure. I lost sight of the book as it was swallowed up in the overlay of her eyes in a face with broad cheeks and black hair.

These moments are transfixing for me. They alter my perception of myself, of my place in the world and my sense of just how big the world really is, especially in time. I learn from them, and later when I read the text, or study the topic, these experiences help me comprehend the humanness of the social and scientific history. They don’t, I hasten to say, replace the study but they do augment it.

When I looked down again at the book in my lap it was if I could see her belly superimposed on my shirt and jeans. I could feel my hands on her skin and simultaneously it was as if I could feel her stirring deep inside me, moving into life through my body. It was profoundly comforting and deeply connecting. It was proof, to me, of my existence, although despite the sensations, I still didn’t click that the woman was pregnant.

Did I ever think that somewhere a sentient Laussel existed outside her time and place and that somehow I had contacted her? No. I never did. By some quirk of cerebral and bodily oddity I fall into profound imaginative states with the greatest of ease. I think it is maybe a kind of hyper-empathy. It’s as if my body acts as an amplifier for what is probably a completely normal process of connection to life outside oneself. Nevertheless, even as a very young child, I understood that what I could do was of this world because what is of this world is all that there is. Luckily, I also understood that this world is enough. The world (and its evolved creation imagination) is the source of the magic and the wonder. This world is the origin of both the experience of ecstasy and the ability to feel it. That is bloody magic.

Anne Triesman has described the “building blocks” of vision. These are the basic categories of sight. Out of them comes our sense of seeing. They include: color, size, contrast, curvature and tilt. These are the things we are built to notice quickly. The various combinations of these basic blocks are done serially and this takes processing time. So we can notice the difference between a curved line and a straight line very quickly, but the difference between different shaped arcs takes a little longer. Each of these basic blocks is processed separately; the range of possibilities of the various combinations constrains what we can see.

Like all sighted creatures, what we can see is limited by the structure of our brain and our eyes. Our eyes, for example, can only respond to certain frequencies of light. So we can see within a range of 400 and 700 angstroms. (One angstrom is equal to one hundred-millionth of a centimeter.) We cannot see UV light which falls outside our range, but a hummingbird can. How life looks depends on the relationship between the limitations of the visual perceptual system and the limitations of the conceptual system which then processes the received stimuli.
A frog’s organizational rules of sight, according to Jerome Lettvin include the 1) general outline of their environment, 2) detecting moving edges, 3) the perception of small dark objects and 4) a sudden decrease in light. The balance between the frog’s perceptual and conceptual system conscribes frog lived reality as surely as the same balance conscribes human lived reality.

Perception is an act of physical interpretation: we “compute semblances from sparse signals” We do not perceive the hyacinth, but the curve, the balance between perceivable energy frequencies (which we see as color), by the three different types of cones in our retinas, the general form of the structure, etc. Our brain takes those signals and weaves it together processing the production against stored patterns (memories: cerebral pattern reconstruction) and presenting us with a whole-cloth. This is the visual experience of the flower hyacinth.

All perceptual systems work the same way. Our auditory system has a set of “building blocks” (tone, loudness etc) as does our kinesthetic system (uprightness, depth, direction etc). Two key components to understanding the combined effect of these various systems is to understand that by preference we like “stable, invariable patterns of organization” and that some systems are more (evolutionarily) basic than others. For example, uprightness as a sign of bodily viability takes precedence over visual information because if (as in the experiments of Ivo Kohler, reported in Robert Ornstein’s book The Evolution of Consciousness) special glasses are used to seriously distort vision, an “acceptable semblance” was created within a fairly short time allowing the body to operate well even in conditions where sight would seem invaluable (traffic, for example). The eye presenting an upside down world is interpreted by virtue of the body’s kinesthetic system which is still “saying” Nope. Everything is fine. The body believes this kinesthetic sense and fixes what the eye sees until it agrees with the body.

And here, in uprightness and its primacy over the eye, is the key to spiritual learning. Even though the eye is inextricably linked to our developing sense of self, it still bows to the authority of what the body knows. It is acknowledging this and following the eye’s lead and attending to the body’s knowledge that opens the door to the world of “spirit.” Much of the discipline of attention (spiritual practice) that fuels spiritual or perceptual change results in and from the capacity to begin discerning the various systems of the sensorium. As practice develops and the normally unattended world of the body-speaking begins to be heard, then a mountain is no longer a mountain.

Blindsight: “a medical condition in which the sufferer responds to visual stimuli without consciously perceiving them.”

There is so much that we perceive and respond to that is not conscious. In this case the patient didn’t know where the object was, but his hand did. It was the prompting, the “just guess” that allowed the patient to find the object. As far as I can tell from my reading the monkeys didn’t need the prompting. Perhaps a lot of what we call intuition is no more incorporeal than blindsight. Perhaps all the tools that are available to “develop you intuition” are actually working like the prompts from the doctor. Perhaps that is also what art does. Reading poetry, especially poetry that operates with a different set of “rules of evidence” than your own is just such a prompt. Just guess, it seems to say. You don’t have to know what it means to find it, just guess.

Myung Mi Kim’s poetry strikes me that way.

I don’t understand the poetry, not in a conscious way. Yet I read it and sometimes when I hold the words on a page in my eyes, let them settle down into my body, then close my eyes and feel the words move around, clittering and tapping in my body, I can feel what they mean. My left knee and other body parts sometimes know more than I do, but to utilize bodily knowledge of this sort takes a conscious effort of attention.