Personal Search For Meaning
1. Suzanne Scott: How I Know What I Know
In my art studio in Reeb Hall, I have a quotation from a Lawrence Ferlinghetti poem:
Don’t let that horse
Eat that violin
Cried Chagall’s mother
But he
Kept right on
Painting
And became famous
And kept on painting
The Horse With Violin in Mouth . . .
The quotation is a is a constant reminder to me to trust myself and my own intuition. In almost all of the important places in my life, I have expended a serious amount of energy on NOT knowing. Not knowing I was a lesbian. Not knowing I was an artist.
I have seldom come to the place of understanding any of the really important issues about the world or about my place in it without great personal drama.
So how do I help myself to KNOW rather than to NOT Know? To trust myself and my own intuition rather than the hordes of people whose voices I have internalized?
Through my art and my stories.
I am convinced that, for me, when I abandon myself to my art, the work pops directly out of my unconscious. And if I look deeply at what I am drawing in my sketchbook and the paintings that I am working on, I understand. I problem solve. I know. I push myself to action.
I paint a series of African slaves, and the internal voices ask why I am “appropriating” their lives and “colonizing” them yet again. I keep on painting, knowing that I am working on my on issues of white privilege in a racist society.
I draw a series of Afghan women with scarves and children with large, sad eyes. The internal voices tell me I am an outsider, that I am making them into “exotic others.” I keep on drawing, knowing that I am problem-solving about my own responsibility for this terrible war.
Through my art I remind myself again and again that KNOWING is better than NOT knowing—even when NOT knowing feels much safer. I may be more vulnerable when I dare to let myself paint the equivalent of a horse with violin in mouth. But I am also more alive.
2. Lynne M. Constantine: How Do We Know What We Know?
I teach a class called "Visual Perception and the Arts" at George Mason University. The first time I taught it, I was startled at how much my students resisted what I thought of as a self-evident proposition: that we "see" with our brains, not with our eyes. Our eyes are just the means by which light is transmitted for interpretation to the brain; and so the apparently solid world we see is, in fact, a complex construction, not a direct representation.
"No," my students say. "That cannot be. Things are things. They are outside us."
Last week, through one of those lovely byways that happen when you spend time really talking with children, my four grandchildren and I found ourselves discussing eyes and brains. The three boys took the idea that we see with our brains in stride, and soon moved on to speculating about whether, if they could hook their eyes up to special computers, they might be able to see like dogs and alligators.
But 11-year-old Jennifer Lynne worried about the implications of human sight.
"I hate to think that we're trapped like that in our heads," she said. "I love the world."
"But we aren't trapped at all," I said. "Think of it instead as an amazing power. You're always creating the world fresh—and you become part of the world by giving a new look to everything you see."
She was quiet for a while. Then she smiled. "Yes," she said. "I can see that."
But I admit I was putting a rosy face on it for her. Because my Mason students are right. It's extremely disconcerting and dangerous to accept the idea that perception is co-creation. In a wonderful book called The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing, art theorist James Elkins describes visual perception as sharp, invasive, acidic. "Light is a corrosive," he says, "something that has the potential to tunnel into me, to melt part of what I am and re-form it in another shape. Some things in me are different because of what I see, and that means—if I am willing to let down my guard and be honest about how this works—that I am not the same person as I was before."
And that is the scariest thought of all. When it comes to perception, the world is not "out there," and the "I" who perceives the things of the world is not a fixed and stable self. Instead of a strict separation of the knower and the known, there is a between-ness, a mutual vulnerability that is essential to knowledge. Perception is, ultimately, relationship—not distant and emotionless as the old scientific paradigms would have us think, but moral, ethical and emotional to its core.
I'm spending a lot of my time these days trying to understand the implications of that statement. I hope some day to have a long conversations about it with Jennifer Lynne.
Meditation
Then I was standing on the highest mountain of them all,
and round about beneath me was the whole hoop of the world.
And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell
and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner
the shapes of all things in the spirit,
and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being.
And I saw the sacred hoop of my people was one
of the many hoops that made one circle,
Wide as daylight and starlight,
and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree
to shelter all the children of one mother and one father.And I saw that it was holy……
But anywhere is the center of the world.
Black Elk
Oglala Sioux (1863-1950)
Sermon –
Exploring the Big Questions-
4. How Do We Know What We Know?Welcome back this morning to the BIG QUESTIONS Series!
Starting at the end of September, the Big Question was “Why Are We Here?” A month later, it was, “Why Do We Need Religion?” Last month, “Why Evil?” Today, in this bleak midwinter, we consider something a bit more esoteric – “How Do We Know What We Know?”
I remember when Michael and I were synthesizing the final eight questions out of the many suggestions you gave us, and deciding who would do which one, I immediately grabbed for this.
“Ohhhhh! I want that one! That one’s mine!”
There was no fight on Michael’s part. “Good!” he said, “It’s yours!”
So – I get to grapple with irony, paradox, philosophy, psychology, spiritual intelligence, and brain chemistry, and you get to figure out what I’m talking about!
I reflected a bit on why I was drawn to this question. You know, if ministers pick a particular subject, it’s either because a particular group in the church is putting excessive pressure on us to do it (you know who you are!), or, we feel strongly, intuitively drawn to it, whether we would put it that way or not.
That guiding “intuition” is basically mysterious, ephemeral, vague --- and, nevertheless, also decidedly strong. I feel it, in terms of preaching, as a “call” between us; a place we go, together, because the message is pertinent to our on-going dialogue, as a congregation, in this time and in this place.
But, that doesn’t mean there’s an entirely understandable reason for choosing sermon topics! The subtleties of this are such, that, for the most part, outcomes are not clear. Things change constantly; the name of the Life Game is flux – everything is always in process. So, what is going on now is pointing us in a direction that has probably already been underway, probably for a long time. We are picking up new pieces and moving in new ways – slowly – and in rich nuance of relationship, context, genes, and knowledge already in place.
You realize, of course, that I’ve begun to address the question of “How Do We Know What We Know?”
Like the other Big Questions, when you begin to pull back the layers, from obvious to obscure, you realize how difficult each question is, in and of itself, let alone, how they all fit together, and keep changing.
There’s quite a lot of stuff we learn throughout our lives – at our Mother’s knee, in school, in the “school of hard knocks,” specific skills related to our work or professions, in our reading, TV viewing, on the computer, from mentors and teachers. Lots and lots of information, practical advice, survival skills, social skills, body development and sports training, playing an instrument, singing, drawing, understandings about feelings and consequences of our actions. The list goes on. We know a lot, and we’ve learned it from a lot of people and situations and courses of study and practice. We have diplomas and degrees that attest to a formidable amount of intentional learning.
We acquire knowledge through pursuing it, specifically, in a variety of subjects.
We acquire knowledge through relationships and interactions with others.
We acquire knowledge by just being there, hanging around, listening in, observing.
We acquire knowledge of our identity in the context of our culture, family, neighbors, and in discovering our potentials.
What we know and come to know lies on a genetic foundation that offers traits and pre-dispositions.
A lot of what we know comes to us by choice; but, even more, comes to us serendipitously, and in ways not noticed or known to us.
We are mysterious and wondrous amalgams of individual and collective knowledge, and some of our knowing is essentially unknown to us in the usual ways.
The concept of collective knowing was an important part of psychologist, Carl Jung’s theories. The term he used was “The Collective Unconscious.” In Jungian psychology, it is a hidden part of the unconscious mind, shared by a society, a people, or all humankind, that is the product of ancestral experience and contains such concepts as science, religion, and morality.
The Collective Unconscious has nothing to do with the specific details of our personal life, but comes to us through heredity. It is, in Jung’s conception, impersonal and universal, and the source of all inspirations and instincts.
It appears to consist of mythological motifs or primordial images – archetypes, and is the source of the myths of all peoples and nations. The whole of mythology could be taken as a projection of the collective unconscious. People just know these things—all of our myths and stories have similar and repeated themes, even for cultures that lived at great distances from each other and formed at times when there was no contact between them.
These are our human roots, in Jung’s thinking. All of our human struggles and conditions are representative of aspects of the collective. We are always taking on some part of an archetypal collective pattern that is of humanity, and of our ONE BODY. This deeper Self, a hidden aspect of our human psyche, cannot be fully comprehended, but can be experienced – as a from of “knowing.”
What Jung suggests to us is that there is a larger, connecting, enveloping, and unseen ancient knowledge, which surrounds us and is part of us. We have received it and it influences our understanding of life.
I, of course, didn’t do justice to Jungian psychology, but wished only to add this idea, from a respected and influential psychologist, as being similar to ideas from other fields of thought and research.
Recently, there has been some research to suggest that religion is hard-wired into the brain. If true, it affirms Jung’s theory of humans having some kind of built-in collective knowledge. Actually, neurological research in this area of spirituality has developed data to connect early human’s ritual activity with brain development. It seems we have been myth-makers from the time we began to be self-conscious and to reflect on the mysteries of life. And, that’s some 200,000 years ago! Our brains have actually had a long time to be developing these biological patterns of meeting our existential worries.
In a recent book, Why God Won’t Go Away; Brain Science and the Biology of Belief, the co-authors blend science with insights into the nature of consciousness and spirituality, and get some fascinating data out of it. They are pioneers in the new field of neurotheology, a discipline dedicated to understanding the complex relationship between spirituality and the brain.
One of the authors is Andrew Newberg, M.D., who is an assistant professor in the Dept. of Radiology in the Division of Nuclear Medicine, and an instructor in the Dept. of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He has spent several years studying brain physiology and function, with a focus on the neurology of religious and mystical experiences. The other author, who died before the completion of the book, was Eugene D’Aquili, M.D., Ph.D.. He worked as clinical assistant professor in the Dept. of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania for twenty years, and authored several books.
In their long-term research work together, they came to the conclusion that the religious impulse is rooted in the biology of the brain.
They examined brain function and behavior. They conducted studies using high-tech imaging techniques to examine the brain activity of meditating Buddhists and Franciscan nuns at prayer. What they discovered was that intensely focused spiritual contemplation triggers an alteration in the activity of the brain that leads us to perceive transcendent religious experiences as solid and tangibly real.
In other words, the sensation that Buddhists call “oneness with the universe” and the Franciscans attribute to the palpable presence of God, is actually a chain of neurological events that can be objectively observed, recorded, and photographed.
The authors conclude that what is thought of as reality, is, instead, a rendition of reality that is created by the brain. They talk about understanding the brain’s perceptual powers. This is a quote from the book:
“Nothing enters consciousness whole. There is no direct, objective experience of reality.
“All the things the mind perceives ---- all thoughts, feelings, hunches, memories, insights, desires, and revelations --- have been assembled piece by piece by the processing powers of the brain from a swirl of neural blips, sensory perceptions, and scattered cognitions dwelling in its structures and neural pathways.”
The deep sense of connection to all of Life, or God, cannot exist as a concept or as reality anyplace else but in your mind. The processing powers of the brain and the cognitive and analytical functions of the mind make things real to us.
Whatever the ultimate nature of spiritual experience might be, all that is meaningful in human spirituality happens in the mind. The mind is mystical by default.
The authors can’t tell us for sure why such capabilities evolved, but they can find traces of spirituality’s neurological roots in some basic structures and functions of the brain. And they can conjecture about the possibilities.
All the great scriptures make this same point: Fundamental truth has been revealed to human beings through a mystical encounter with a higher spiritual reality.
Mysticism, in other words, is the source of essential wisdom and truth upon which most all religions are founded.
But, before religions can begin, mystical experiences, occurring in the neural processing of the brain, must be analyzed in the thinking, interpretive terms of the mind. Not until the mind tries to make some sense of the experience, can the ineffable insights that neural processing gives to us become myth and belief.
Religious beliefs are good for people; they lessen the anxieties of living, like those associated with pain, suffering, and death. They help people be hopeful and feel more in control of their lives. In terms of survival skills that promote unique advantages for a particular species, creating some religious/spiritual expression came out high on the list for Humans,
Here, again, is what the authors of the book have to say:
“The strong survival advantages of religious belief make it very likely that evolution would enhance the neurological wiring that makes transcendence possible. The inherited ability to experience spiritual union is the real source of religion’s staying power. It anchors religious belief in something deeper and more potent than intellect and reason; it makes God a reality that can’t be undone by ideas, and that never grows obsolete.”
Whether we call that reality “God,” or “The Connecting Principle,” or the “Spirit of Life,” it is good to know that there may be a resource for meaning built in to us – deep in our intuitive awareness of what being Human is all about.
I prefer to think about the chemical and electrical goings-on in my temporal lobe as “Spiritual Intelligence,” rather than “God.” I am heir to rational intelligence and emotional intelligence, most of which is mediated by the chemistry of my brain. An innate spiritual intelligence, so uniquely human, seems to be another breath-taking gift! I say uniquely human because as far as we know, our brains are the only ones that have evolved in this way.
The lesson of twentieth-century science is that truth is an infinite, never-ending, unfolding process, and we are a significant part of the process.
Our engagement with, and response to, reality is what makes reality happen. “Reality” is my response to something I know without being told; to something I know from within.
When I can understand and experience this form of Grace, as a response to connecting with the deepest core of the self, and to the core of being in which that deep self is grounded, then I understand my incredible connection with all of life.
Everything these days is pointing to a new truth – a new understanding of the deep connection of all of life-- as an interdependent web of all existence. We spiral through the ages to different awareness of an ancient insight.
I am connected with all of nature and its processes, and with the whole of universal reality. I am the world and it is part of me. It is a knowing I feel deep at the center of my Self.
We Unitarian Universalists, Humanist and Agnostic as so many of us are, are not devoid of spiritual intelligence, not if it’s true that our brain has evolved to support a different way of knowing. We can learn to use this capability in our own way. Traditional language often gives us pause, words like spiritual, God, divine, mystical, and prayer. I can only hope we get over or through this language barrier; maybe, invent new words and concepts, discover this new creative possibility embedded right up there in our gray matter! If we know that the basis for spirituality is brain biology, we don’t have to disown a useful part of our own nature. It’s all in what we do with what we’ve got!
Super smart, “brainey” kids, who were also a bit arrogant about their own intelligence, were often called “Know-it-alls.” Truth is, Know-it-alls, these days, in order to be even more worthy of that designation, might have to dig deeper and open up their inner landscape if they really want to know it all!
Let loose the intuition; cuddle up to myths, or create new ones; bask in the delights of paradox and irony; pride yourself in your perceptivity; go mystical!! Get out your Joseph Campbell books, and court your own creative genius at designing a world rich in healing and hopeful symbolism and stories. “Find your bliss!” as Campbell would say. And, it’s nice to know – now -- that your bliss, as mine, resides solidly in the temporal lobe of our brain and is already accessible to us.
With a beautifully tuned spiritual intelligence I am enabled to respond to Life with passion, purpose, and love.
In one of the Gnostic Gospels, The Gospel of Thomas, Jesus said to his disciples, “If you know who you are, you will become as I am.” Perhaps Jesus did not see himself as divine, but rather as someone who had awakened to a divine force within himself. He certainly preached that that divine force was within us all.
To dance with Jesus is to feel that force. To dance spontaneously with existence is to feel the active force of our spiritual intelligence, and to know what it knows.
I’d like to end with a reading – from “Listening Days” by the Naturalist, Terry Tempest Williams. It is in the arts that we touch the deepest knowing.
From “Listening Days,” by Terry Tempest Williams
As printed in Parabola magazine, Spring, 1997: theme of the issue – “Ways of Knowing.”
How do we know what we know?
The “how” seems interestingly in view now because of new neurological research. The “why” is even hinted at, if you’re an evolutionist.
What is more important is how we integrate this new awareness, and how that will effect our choices for living.
I know you will make wise and compassionate use of your new awareness! Don’t ask me how I know – I just know!!
Closing words and Benediction
The realness of Absolute Unitary Being is not conclusive proof that a higher God exists, but it makes a strong case that there is more to human existence than sheer material existence.
Our minds are drawn by the intuition of this deeper reality, this utter sense of oneness, where suffering vanishes and all desires are at peace.
As long as our brains are arranged the way they are, as long as our minds are capable of sensing this deeper reality, spirituality will continue to shape the human experience, and God, however we define that majestic, mysterious concept, will not go away.
--Andrew Newberg and Eugene D’Aquili, Why God Won’t Go Away
Go now in peace and love.
Amen, Shalom, and Blessed Be!
Suggested Reading:
1. Why God Won’t Go Away; Brain Science & the Biology of Belief, by Andrew Newberg, M.D., Eugene D’Aquili, M.D., Ph.D., and Vince Rause. 2001. The Ballantine Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
2. Connecting with our Spiritual Intelligence, by Danah Zohar & Dr. Ian Marshall. 2000. Bloomsbury Publishing, New York and London.
3. Parabola; Myth, Tradition, and the Search for Meaning, Volume XXII, No. 1 1997, “Ways of Knowing.”
