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what is/are god(s)?
“The Hopi thought-world had no imaginary space. The corollary
to this is that it may not locate thought dealing with real space
anywhere but in real space, nor insulate real space from the effects
of thought. A Hopi would naturally suppose that his thought (or
he himself) traffics with the actual rosebush---or more likely,
corn plant---that he is thinking about. The thought then should
leave some trace of itself with the plant in the field. If it is
a good thought, one about health and growth, it is good for the
plant; if a bad thought, the reverse.”
—Whorf,
BL (1956) Language, Thought & Reality. MIT Press: Cambridge
p. 150
o:O:o
“Mommy, I can hear them now.”
“Hear what, sweetie?”
“Those voices. The ones the adults hear. I just wanted you
to know I can hear the voices you listen to in your head.”
Mother: !!??
— description of a conversation between a 5 year-old child
and her mother while travelling in a car.
o:O:o
Before we were a self, we existed as an
organismal sentience — a cognitively unifed creature.As such
a creature, we never formally referred to anything in opposition
to anything else. There was no stage, inwardly, in which to assemble
what we call formal relation, which is actually imaginary relation.
We could say that we were a biocognitive animal during this set
of phases. No representation. The knowing in the organism
itself, its inward and outward relations — was sufficient
to guide the general development of a creature as complex at its
scale as the living planet it arises in. A planet that does not
use language as we do. None of her other children use language as
we do, or engage in formal representation as we understand it. Almost
all of the larger animalian forms are however surprisingly complex,
and the flora of the ocean, ancient beyond understanding, contains
members such as the Octopus which has had 4 million years of luxury
in which to get symbolic. It didn’t. Along with all
the other species of Earth, with the singular exception of ours.
This organismal knowing we arose in with and from was direct.
It is an entire planetary biology of some 4000 million years recapitulating
itself into the microcosmic sentience-container of a child within
itself — you. Science would like us to believe the container
is essentially mechanical — yet in nature there is no such
metaphor. Religion would like us to believe there is no mechanism
worthy of comparison to its source — and yet busies itself
with creating mechanistic and supralimiting idols for us to worship
in the place of the usually missing and often bizarrely defined
progenesia.
We each experienced a season of this creature-knowing in our gestation
and infancy, and a powerful spark from that season is preserved
in each moment of our lives — just behind the substrates of
formality and systematic knowledge. This ‘season’ was
far longer than we imagine, our ways of measuring time relate fractiously
to its realities. By the time in our infancy or childhood where
we are to first activate the seeds of the complexity that are our
sociocultural inheritence, we have undergone something akin to the
evolution of the entire cognitive lineage of our species up to this
same phase, in our own person. As we re-experience the steps in
the ladder to complex cognition, we are practicing into existence
the psybiocognitive sophisitication necessary to support interaction
in cognitively simulative domains of inward reflection. Part of
this process appears to result in a massive extinction of nueral
diversity and connectivity. At present, this is considered part
of the natural evolutionarily conserved creode of homo sapiens sapiens
— yet the presence of this material may well imply that at
some point in our evolution — this die-off had not yet evolved.
What might the brain of a creature that generally preserved the
nueral complexity we are born expressing be like? I do not mean
to claim that a great deal is not gained by this crisis —
but instead that the fact of its presence is startlingly apparent
as a riddle we should reasonably explore the underpinnings of.
Prior to the onset of effect from significant languaging and ensocialization,
we are engaged in assembling the inward stages necessary to support
such activity, as well as the organismal specializations required
to activate these potentials. If they are not activated socioculturally
— if we do not receive the inheritence directly from another
creature as stimulus (for mimesis), training and information —
we might imagine that all of this specialization is lost. Yet this
is not precisely the case. It is instead redeployed, along other
paths, more cogent to the organismal situation.
We would not be far from the mark in imagining a very significant
moment of twilight in our early development which presages a scalar
array of such moments in the future. This twilight marks the boundary
between the dreaming consciousness of the moveable ‘I’
and the structurally constricive specificity of the the moment before
we can simulate ourselves inwardly. In this progression in our own
formative elaborations of personal consciousness, we are recapitulating
the ascent of our anscestors — and experiencing our relations
with self and universe just as they did. As we become enlanguaged,
we will each uniquely face and respond to the challenges, opportunities
and agonies of animalian integration not merely with language, but
with its anatomy — which I commonly speak of in terms of holophores
and metaphors. It is this encounter that generally shapes, and often
aribitrarily limits what we may experience or become. Too often
it is the source of what we shall suffer, rather than what we shall
enjoy of our potentials and birthrights.
Before this moment, there can be no seperable God in our experience.
There may, however be traces of an obvious or intrinsic
God. One whose many faces are easily occluded or distorted by the
frozen idols of formal representation and language. In seeking those
traces we will awaken new questions and new forms of questions.
The questions that follow God should not require experts, codices
or gurus. They should, instead, move — alike with
their target. And they should grant experience, not formal knowing.
Contact. That which such questions seek cannot be absent from any
possible domain. Therefore, even by any realistic rationality —
it mustbe near at hand — and amongst the most obvious
of possible noticings...yet out tokens and traditions do not refer
to it directly. It is someone or something distant. The door is
a token, and a law. How strange that such a situation could accrue
within the body of God itself. How could it be absent from what
is? Seems unlikely. If present, something specific and locateable
is obscurring it.
At the first moment when we are able to sustain a metaphor —
the animal and person we are undergo radical maelstroms of sudden
change. Biocognitively, it is as if a virgin planet has been struck
by a comet bearing strange life — and it is as much a crisis
for the animal we are as it is a moment of uplift. The encounter
is penetrative, and it changes our what our organismal mind is becomming
and is to become drastically and with sudden acceleration. The changes
accrue many scales of velocity in varying waves of reflective elaboration
in our own personal cognitive universe. It is similar at each step
in this process — for example, the moment when we are first
able to link two concepts results in further and novel
biocognitive change in every domain of what it means to be conscious
and a self. We do not notice this as adults watching children, seeing
only an obvious and expected specialization. But behind our ideas
and models something significantly profound is active and unfolding.
The stages of relation for our adult, enlanguaged consciousness
are being assembled. And part of what is assembling them is not
‘natural’ at all. It is an organismal technology which,
like the cultivar of the botanist, can only be activated from
outside. Without this extrinsic activation, the entire process
of our cognitive development would organize structures about which
it is difficult for us to speculate.
The
Split:
Once introduced to language and formal knowing, we are no longer
in a unified garden. The split inside us is real in many domains
we might name and see as polarities. Certainly the animalian consciousness
forming in the infant is radically redeployed and constricted in
the enlanguaged child. Once this process begins, it foreshadows
the end of our internal Eden — but in our adult lives we will
never cease to long for reunition with its spacious and adoring
embrace. From what was unutterably one — there is now a before,
and a behind — an analogy presaged by the biblical action
of hiding their nakedness (thus revealing they had simulated themselves
in their mind).
From this essential division arises a great complexity of con-fusions
and con-flicts. In front of us, lie the inestimable garderns
of specificity, duality, multiplicity and mechanism. Behind all
of this, there is a unity. It is as if the front is a unique mask
— letting certain characters of the behind become highlighted.
Just as the ‘front part’ of our body can be seen as
separate unique elements which are connected (more divisions are
obvious on the front of us) the back of our bodies reveals unity.
The power of this seemingly simple metaphor is more glorious than
we popularly imagine. Have you ever made an image in your
mind of someone from behind when you seek inward after
hearing a reference to them or their name? When we think of a person,
we think first perhaps of their face, then the image we would see
standing in front of them — though we may recall a memory
of view from a specific perspective. Our models are still, as they
were
Our own bodies can thus be seen to recapitulate a non-dualistic
toy with which we can see that separation and unity are two sides
of a coin we cannot name — for it is more than either of them.
To that penultimate unity which is and connot be named, we have
ascribed the label God. Yet it is a crime to make a noun of this
thing. How could it be named? To be named, it must be static —
and it is never thus. If it must be like a thing, it is like a song
that differs at every moment and from every possible perspective.
If we speculate that what remains of ancient civilizations for us
to examine is indicative of what was most common and / or important
for them to celebrate and preserve (which may be an error), we find
that the language coming forward to us from our progenitors is deeply
concerned with authority, sovereignty(identity) and god(s). To understand
ourselves, we must understand the sources and roots of language,
and to understand that — we must understand gods. For this,
we must needs establish direct cognitive contact.
We believe rationality and imagination to be separate, and, in
the West, we model imagination as nonsense, and rationality as a
form of structural underGod — we fail to realize that rationality
is a function of imagination. Without a simulatory stage, there
is no anything — and imagination is precisely that
stage. Our rationality is then the unexamined child of imagination,
and it despises its sources for some reason. This reason is fascinating
to behold. Perhaps we shall grab a glimpse on our journey.
Somewhere in our childhood, I believe, we must as animals generally
and cognitively recapitulate the template of our entire evolution
as a species — cognitive as well as physical. If my belief
is true, it means that in our own childhood we should be able to
locate clear evidence of God — because our species underwent
thousands of years of constant interaction with this ‘something’
we thus entoken. Was it all imaginary? Superstition? Was it merely
a response to an incredibly unknown and threatening universe as
many scholars or scientists overtly suppose or covertly imply? Does
one of the religions on our world hold the obvious answer? Is science
the answer? All such questions imply the domain wherein we must
follow them, and because of this, none of them will reveal to us
what we most need access to: experiential contact with our sources.
This, after all, is what all the hubub is generally about. Perhaps
we must examine something about the nature of our questions.
We cannot ask questions about God from ‘outside our perspective’
— meaning simply that we are unlikely to rewrite the thousands
of years of systematically encoded information relating to this
topic in all its myriad forms. Subject to the cognitive gravity
of the models and stories we are saturated with in our conscious
experience of development and ensocialization, we will follow the
models we find more than we will forge experience with their sources
— this is the very model of the preservation of knowledge,
and of learning what has come before.
We may, however, redefine our understandings, and even the root-metaphors
and stories. We can choose primarily to seek experience, or knowledge.
In general, science values and encodes for the latter, and spirituality
for the former, though in formal religion we find something
too commonly akin to seeking experience of frozen knowledge —
rather than its sources.
In this regard it is useful to return to something most of us are
familiar with from childhood. In the twilight between our initial
exposure to language and our completion of the roster skills that
comprise our elemental languaging, many if not all of us had unique
inward experiences with inward voices, simulation, language, and
authority. The general and collective shape of these often ‘anomolous’
experiences, I believe, hold the keys not only to our origins, but
also our questions of arisal, purpose and relation. Here is a specific
example of precisely what I am speaking towards:
[beginquote]
I had been out of the Navy for three years. My daughter began talking
when she was two months old, clear and complete words at first,
and then small sentences by the time she was one year old. At two,
she held ‘normal conversation’ with my, (then) wife
and I. This is the point when my daughter and step-son had their
‘visit’.
My step-son, age five, came out of his room late one night, again
about one in the morning, and told me that his sister was talking
to the three “glowy lights.” I felt the same fear run
through me as when I first I saw the spheres as a child. As calmly
as I could, I asked him what color they were, and he answered, “a
pretty green”. I got up off the couch and rushed to the kids’
room. When I got there, my daughter was sitting up on her bed. She
grinned, pointed at the window, and said, ”Green pretty lights.”
But they were nowhere to be seen. I didn't make a deal out of it
and tucked the kids back into bed.
Over the next year this scene repeated six more times. After the
second time, my step-son told me that he didn't like the green lights,
and said they'd told him they didn't much like him, either, and
that scared him. A year later he could remember nothing whatsoever
about the occurrences. Once again, keep this in mind, I had never
told my wife anything about my own strange experiences. Nor did
I ever discuss them with the children, before or even during the
occurrences. But it was always three glowing lights. I knew this
because my step-son would tell me the three green lights were back.
I questioned my daughter about it only once, the last time it occurred.
I asked her what she ‘talked’ about with the green lights,
and she answered, “The planet, and how it’s hurt.”
—
Anonymous Contactee Report
[endquote]
I believe that most children experience similar events — perhaps
at least in part because I myself have — but they are not
allowed to discuss or explore these visitations, which are —
at least in the West — regarded as either a nonsensical aspect
of a child’s development, or something to be ignored or modified.
Most adults would react with terror, as this one commonly did in
the early phases of his experience. The general consensus is one
of negation. It would not, in common circles, be understood as contact
with God. Yet this is precisely what contact with God would be like,
and many if not all children are born with an organismal prediliction
for this species of cognitive congress. Perhaps more importantly,
it is prescient. It defies everything we understand, practice, and
teach ourselves about what it means to be human, and what it means
to have a mind.
To experience a God is to experience a non-owning interaction with
the sentience at the core of the organismal intentions which resulted
in language.
I want us to imagine the absolute departure of nouns together for
a moment. Many sages and scholars have spoken of the dangers of
the noun, and how it hides something essential from our understanding
and experience with its peculiar species of utility. When I use
the term, I mean the pseudo-permanantly structured cognitive reference.
A noun, implies stasis, a form of non-change, and individuality
— which I would translate in verb-form to something akin to
temporary local identity. But there was a time in the cognitive
history of our own persons, and our species, when there was no noun.
Without nouns, there is no way to refer to stasis, for what I mean
is not so much the lingual form but the metaphoric one. Separation,
requires naming. Whoever is deciding upon the naming, and building
the roots of relation beneath it — is deciding on our spiritual
and cognitive development, simultaneously. The incredible power
of the roots of language — not language iteslf but a specific
language’s root elements and comparitors — it is here
that we receive wings, or chains — too often, and especially
in English, the latter.
At some point in our infancy, this feature of our cognitive consciousness
still lay in immanence. It existed as a great store (as we can see
in the modern moment of our own person, and the societies of our
speces) of essentially invisible potential energy. Like the pendulum
hanging at the top of its arc, weightless for a moment, the noun
lay in the early consciousness of our species — an unformed
seed, waiting to explode. It was a potential for an entirely new
domain of knowing and relation. But what was our experience before
we saw its face for the first time? In what inner womb did it find
purchase and gestate — growing to dominate so vast a universe
of potentials and domains?
There is a challenge in the tradition of rinzai Zen which attends
this question. With it we are inspired to seek beyond our understanding
of our own identity, and locate the source of identity itself.
The question or challenge is usually phrased in english as ‘show
me your orignal face, the one from before you were born’.
It is a question that cannot be answered, but instead must be experienced,
swallowed, and evoked from one’s own core. It is a demand
for intimacy that exists far outside the domains of language and
rationality entirely. The position it offers should we accept is
an extremely esssential challenge: discover what it is you are.
It cannot be answered in nounal forms. What the question is pointing
at, flows — and changes when attended. Since it wears a thousand
faces, if you freeze one and take a snapshot — a moment is
mistaken for a thing. For a child, the answer might be a fairly
simple affair. For an adult, it could take many years of seeking,
or perhaps many lifetimes to uncover and give answer to such a challenge.
Adults are cognitively symbiotic with tokens. Essentially, humans
are cognitively sexual with language (of every kind). Like our own
bodies, in different cultures, there are vast networks of agreement
about which portions it is allowable to express or explore. Where
once we spoke with our faces and bodies, we now use lingual tokens,
and concentrate our attention upon them directly. But they are far
removed from their sources.
We might imagine the terrain before the noun as existing before
language, but languages such as the indigenous langage of the Hopi
offer evidence that this may not be the case. My own experience
is similar, for in my memories of the universe of myself before
language was well-established, I remember a phase where I could
choose to name a thing or merely experience it. Nounification was
optional – a sort of game.
It is not necessarily clear whether we had to have language before
we had metaphor. It seems more likely that metaphor is immanent
in animalian consciousness, but it not necessarily awarded the primacy
that its relations with formalized language afford it in our own
species.The Hopi language does not distinguish local identity or
time in nounal ways. To ‘think’ of something is thus
to be ‘touching inside’ it. The whole domain is participatory,
and based on interflowing, rather than connecting. They could have
no noun for God. It would have been impossible for them to explain
their experience of God to a European. Their God was never ’named’
and if it was, it was a name of many names., within every name,
inseparable in every particular from the moment of becomming-now.
When we remove all nouns, what we find at the root of verbs is a
cognitive following activity. To have even a verb is to
situate a witness in metaphorical (or inwardly relational) space,
and have them comment. In examining the sources of verbs, Coming,
and Going predominantly stand out as formative in our own experience
of enlanguaging at the personal as well as the species level —
and their progenitor is what we call movement. I suspect that understanding
these two verbs directly is perhaps of critical formative importance
in learning language, and in understanding our relations with it.
Without these two essential roots, it is difficult to imagine the
formation of formalized knowing, and thus my speculation that they
are innocently glorious for all their seemingly bare simplicity.
They are base arbiters of organismal experience, a root polarity
which is recognizeable at every scale of life, however unique this
recognition is in its embodiments.
Before nouns then, and possibly before verbs, there was coming and
going. But before there was coming and going — there was light.
For creatures with eyes, the coming and going of light was perhaps
the single most essential feature of daily experience, elaboration,
and intimacy. Light changed what might be coming or going. And with
light, probably before color, there was shading. If we could compare,
Size would be another root. So our essential experience was of light,
shading, size and movement. Amongst these relations our knowing,
and our emotion would be founded and expressed.
The
Flower of ItThem:
In taking a broad look
at human religious history (given what we may examine of it), we
can also see another story too rarely and incompletely remarked
upon — the inflorescence of the assembly of God. It makes
little difference is God is ‘present and connecting’
to humanity, or if god is distant and ‘building a receiver’
— in either case, the biocognitive complexification or infolding
of biology on earth was creating the recepticle — or the organism
of assembly of god, locally. As human connectivity and social intimacy
complexified, the potentials for distributed sentience in populations
was growing exponentially — much in the way the precursors
to the bud of a flower do. When we note key correspondances in basic
theme across many timelines and specific cultural accruals —
we may observe in analogy a single flower is first assembling its
precursors as potentials — just as our own minds do —
and then overtly emerging as a unified mind which is recorded and
storied in nearly every human culture, to the degree we may reasonably
examine them.
What I wish to underline is that, as a collective cognitive momentum,
God, like ourselves, underwent evolution in concert with the human
cognisium — at least in the experience and expression of our
species. Unless all of this is false (a rather strange concept given
the organization of our own consciousness) any actual supraconsciousness
would wax and wane with the complexity and intimacy of its embodied
‘families’ locally. As the biospheric and cognitive
complexity of Earth and of consciousness-in-biology expanded —
the ‘local’ aspects of godlets were busy forming rings,
and thus becomming the ‘inside’ of gods — much
the way our own consciousness assembles itself in the phases of
our genesis and maturation. Over time, these godlets accrued the
connective complexity to at last become aware of each other, at
which point many became ’warring siblings’.
Like the budlets of a flower whose as-yet-to-be-expressed petals
are growing at different rates in a psybiocognitive medium, humanity
experienced the arisals and departures of many gods — each
emerging from a unified template — however unique the local
identity might be. Occasionally one of these godlets would make
a bid for a larger ‘family’, and attempt to cement its
authority in new areas and populations — through the auspices
of ‘those who hear, and thus obey’.
The ‘behind’ of the cognition of humanity — is
god(s). Similarly, the psybiocognitive behind of the god(s) —
is human consciousness. Monotheism was always the case, even in
complex mythologies — because the experiencers recognized
the power of a simple concept: containment. There was always a container,
and that container was unified in its expression. To different peoples,
it would encode for different characters — but there could
only be one source, and one container. Eventually, language would
render the unified God into a supracontainer, like the term universe.
But all of this is theory, and what was being experienced by our
anscestors is not theory. It was God, becomming human, in humans,
becomming gods. What this really means will require careful exploration.
o:O:o
In examining the human being, we find a small-scale representation
of a thing like a God. What renders us alike with a god is the fact
that we can metaphy experience in (locally) complex ways. This allows
us to act with and upon our circumstance creatively, utilizing a
form of integral relation uncommon in animals. We will call this
our ‘special feature’. Moving up the scale, we can examine
a community (or arbitrary size) and recognize that this feature
is generally recapitulated, but in geometrically magnified form
— the inclusion of diversely charactered ‘small gods’
equates with something akin to a metaGod. It has identity and character
locally — like the gods it is comprised of, but is also itself
comprising something else, one step up the scale. At the scale of
humanity as an organism, we again see character generally represented
as a unified identity.
