JESUALITY

JESUALITY

 

The following are summary notes of the presentation to begin the Wood Hath Hope course in spirituality (10.4.13).

In the past spirituality has been understood in Greek terms: spirit as a separate and separable part of the self which does not belong to the material universe. Because our spiritual experience is borderless and invisible—it puts us in felt intimate connection with things other than ourselves and very often we cannot see, we quickly believe there is another realm to reality, an immaterial one. The classic instance of this is death and the dead. It is very hard for us to disconnect from our deceased parents and ancestors, because they are so much part of our memories and who we are. They continue to receive a life from us as the mimetic "other." This spiritual realm was made intellectual and structural in Platonic thought. By making the realm of death also the realm of intellect (the world of eternal or heavenly truth) the die was cast on the meaning of spiritual in the West.

But today contemporary thought is showing how we are connected to each other and indeed the whole universe by means of material imitation.

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Babies as young as 36 hours, and even 42 minutes, can be seen to imitate facial gestures. There are more than two dozen accepted studies of early infant imitation. (See "Mimesis and Science," Scott Garrels, 58-59: "exteroception" and "proprioception" use the same code, they are "bound together at birth.") This means we perceive ourselves at the same time and by the same means as we perceive others.

And if our first meaningful world is our mother then forever after our perception of the world will have a personal sense. This explains the constant response in people, “Why me?” when something goes wrong, or “Someone up there likes me” if they go right. This also explains the Girardian thesis that natural disasters become the occasions for community crises in which someone is mythically blamed. It's very difficult not see things in personal-meaningful terms.

Showing of PBS informational short on mirror neurons at http://video.pbs.org/video/1615173073/

All this means there is something spiritual about our root imitation code. Or rather, our neural coding is the spiritual: I am you, and you are me, and I have a self-other relation to the whole world. Neural receptors, therefore, are not material in the usual sense, located in one spot and one sequence of causes. They belong also to the other, the other human. They are effectively in two places at once and are so from our birth. A 42 minute old baby couldn’t possibly judge and decide the other human face was important to imitate. It is already logged into the other before it opened its eyes for the first time. Think about a child’s eye, a neonate, the way it seeks you out and uploads you, receives you, it means we are internally programmed for and to the other, or the other already is us. In the past this would have been called an immortal soul which already knows eternal truth, coming to earth and recognizing stuff it already knows. But from a science point of view we have simple dual function neurons, you move I move. In fact at the earliest stage you and I are not differentiated enough to say "you" or "I", it’s  really a “we move” thing. Effectively an electronic discharge of energy does not switch on inside of me until an external source tells it to do so. Part of my electronic/chemical structure is coded to something other than myself. Like a photoelectric sensor switches when it sees a shadow etc. it switches. Except this shadow is highly specific and complex, matching the complexity of the human sensor.

If this is the case then empathy is foundational: “self-other connectedness” exists at birth. Empathy is the word we use for the continuing power of this connection. According to Iacoboni there is a connection between mirror neurons and the limbic system, i.e. our emotions also switch on when we imitate the other. This explains the power of the other to move us emotionally, and especially the way compassion is activated by another's vulnerability. See Iacoboni, "Mirroring People" 119.

The point then is that the soul is not a separate part of the human being. The body is the soul, the soul is the body, in its neural complexity. What does this mean then for "salvation"? The soul is not a commodity, an item I possess, to be saved by some kind of a deal, like personal property or privilege. Instead it is the way I interact with others.  That’s the issue.

My global interactions, their sum or totality, is what is governed by religion, with God as the final authority of this spiritual order. But Christianity does not start with God, it really starts with a man. If we learn the totality of this man’s responses and above all his final response on the cross, then our humanity is saved. It becomes radically human.  And this is not something we do, but something we receive from the Christ.

Christianity also has Holy Spirit, a discovery of the first church through empathy with the Crucified and Risen one. It is both a human event and a divine Spirit, a tuning of the neural human to the frequency of God, so we become functionally one. “The Spirit testifies with our spirit…” (Rom 8:16).

Glossalalia is a great illustration. I am not sure if it surfaced before in other communal religious contexts. Effectively in the New Testament it means the connections, the strings or relays of verbal meaning have been completely scrambled by the impact of Jesus, resolving into a raw sound giving expression to new human meaning. Instead of old meaning originated in violence, a completely new order of human meaning is born.

Through Jesus we are imitating a God whom we can only discover through this imitation. If and when you imitate perfectly is there a difference in kind? There is in fact adoption to the nature of God. But this is happening at the cellular level!

John’s gospel sets the emphasis on the "word made flesh," not salvation. A word is a unique event of human neural processing, in a chain with other words. When I say “tree” a whole series of images and associations are let loose inside your head, all connected at one remove or another to our total view of the world. Words are world and they are learned along with mother’s milk. My son's first word was "draw" because that contained the world for him. We have interpreted John's "In the beginning was the word" in absolute metaphysical terms, i.e. the divine logos/word. This may indeed be valid, but it’s also valid to see it in simple human terms—this is the "word" that changes all our human meaning. It’s the new holistic language we are asked to learn in imitation of Jesus' new human/divine meaning. It is the new way of being human in a humanly constructed world, reconstructed by Jesus.