Tree tale

It's a gorgeous sunny day, and the Lang courtyard maples' leaves are already almost full size and deepening green in taking best advantage of it. 

But perhaps you've been wondering what's become of that red maple branch which came so close to my office window this spring, and allowed me rapturous witness to the magical procession from bud to flower to growing samara to leaf. It's a little complicated. The short version is that the branch is broken.

Not completely, but it dangles down now rather than reaching up. Here's how it looked last week; below is the way it's looking now. 

I can't remember a branch so close before. I even encouraged students to reach out the window and touch it! But the very thing that made it available for my devotion put it at risk. When the wind eddies in the courtyard, branches brush against the windows. No surprise that some will have snapped from the collision.

And so we dangle, small leaves green but flaccid. My witness continues.

Greening of the self

 

As students were sharing their final projects for "Religion and Ecology: Buddhist Perspectives," the wall of the courtyard out our classroom window, recovering from a night of rain, made its own offering.

 

Joanna Macy: The self is the metaphoric construct of identity and agency, the hypothetical piece of turf on which we construct our strategies for survival, the notion around which we focus our instincts for self-preservation, our needs for self-approval, and the boundaries of our self- interest. Something is shifting here. The conventional notion of the self with which we have been raised and to which we have been conditioned by mainstream culture is being undermined. What Alan Watts called “the skin-encapsulated ego” and Gregory Bateson referred to as “the epistemological error of Occidental civilization” is being peeled off. It is being replaced by wider constructs of identity and self-interest—by what philosopher Arne Naess termed the ecological self, co-extensive with other beings and the life of our planet. It is what I like to call “the greening of the self.”

Moist

DEI? No: DIE

 

How do you say "we don't care if you live or die"? There are so many ways. Here as elsewhere there are so many undercurrents in this administration that are homicidal .

Democracy is supposed to be about sharing a society with others, maybe even delighting in the privilege of the shared journey. Not these guys.

Lilies of the uncanny valley

As the internet fills with AI-generated images, the more refined ones plagiarizing the best of actual images taken by actual humans of actual things, there's an unexpected uncanny valley when a picture you were lucky enough to take looks too good to be true. How to keep it real?

 

For now, at least, a messy composition, with some leafless branches, 

 

or sun flares and leaf shadows through other fresh green leaves might work (or in a pinch, the not-quite-hidden form of another human)...

but the shadows of these forest floor lilies of the valley are sadly just perfect enough that AI might have cribbed them somewhere; luckily tree flowers photo-bombing from above might come to the rescue.

But with these preternatural beauties you'll have to take my word for it.

And with a sci-fi aspirant like this jack-in-the-pulpit, I just give up!

Not infinite, not solitary

Since all facts are particular facts (522) ... the practical needs and experiences of religion seem to me sufficiently met by the belief that beyond each man and in a fashion continuous with him there exists a larger power which is friendly to him and to his ideals. All that the facts require is that the power should be both other and larger than our conscious selves. Anything larger will do, if only it be large enough to trust for the next step. It need not be infinite, it need not be solitary. (525) 

To process the quietly explosive implications of William James' "piecemeal supernaturalism," the Varieties class (well, the students who could make it) today pulled out guitar and watercolors. I provided tea. 

 

We have one more session, next week, to come to a more academic conclusion of our explorations, but it was nice to extend our textual discussions by articulating the ways the stuff of Varieties speaks to us more personally. (Several of us tried to make visual sense of the claim that In the religion of the twice-born, ... the world is a double-storied mystery, 166) It was nice to see the friendships forged in the class, too!

Beyond the human

The students in "After Religion" present their final projects in the discussion sections this week, and at least some of them will share them with the whole class in next week's lecture slot. (Their prompt: "What comes after religion?" )This means today was the last chance the TAs and I had to talk about the broader questions and implications of the class. I warmed us up with a counterpart to the "three ways" we'd parsed the course title in our opening class. "Faith beyond the human" - the name for this week's material on the interface of religion and new technology - might be taken three ways too.

(1) More than humans might be "religious." Last week we saw Jane Goodall's insistence that chimpanzees feel religious awe and wonder, and Ursula Goodenough and Terence Deacon's suggestion that we share "non-depressing and religiously fertile traits" with most forms of life. The modern western notion of religion may be obsolete and the "world religions" a fateful figment of imperial imaginations, but something of what humans are "after" in "religion" may vastly predate and transcend our experience.

 

(2) The function of religion (sic) might be to connect us to things beyond just the play of human feelings, meanings and relationships. One of the barren gifts of the secularism left us by receding western monotheism is the idea that religion has only ever been comforting stories human beings tell each other in a world that's really utterly indifferent to us. But what if we learned from indigenous traditions to feel and find ourselves in the land and the relationships which sustain us? 

 

(3) And our own religion might outlive us in the robots and AI we have brought into the world. I illustrated my "three ways" with an image from a Muslim Futurism collective we looked at a month and a half ago, androids enjoying the practice of "dhikr" even after humans have come and gone, the resplendent landscape evoking "the positive energy felt when performing a communal act." But I refreshed the point with that passage from solarpunk novella A Psalm for the Wild Built that I so love.

 

"Wild-built" robot Mosscap experiences the gods "everywhere and in everything" - and not just because it was made of parts originally made by human beings, recombined since by other robots. Mosscap is a curious and caring observer of everything it encounters (like the mushroom it's named after), and so has observed the gods because they, well, are more than just stories humans made up. "Surely you know that," Mosscap says to his human interlocutor, a traveling healer.

 

And then we watched a video of a whooshing soul-exalting starling murmuration, and then a video of a simple computer simulation of such movement, something I told the class I'd learned about from Tyson Yunkaporta, whom we met two weeks ago. Where western folks are terrified that AI will do to us what we've done to the rest of the living world, Yunkaporta's view, rooted in Aboriginal ways, suggests that the right kinds of AI might reaquaint human beings with the "patterns of creation" which have all along sustained us. "Surely you know that." 

It all added up to a more upbeat conclusion than anyone, including yours truly, anticipated. This isn't a time when you hear much in the way of hope for the future, so perhaps I was semi-consciously compensating for that. But the funny thing is that I was more than academically rehearsing a hypothetical possibility as if it were real - what I've become so good at over my years in religious studies. I was (egad) preaching.

 

Evidently this is what I think comes "after religion," "beyond the human" (and not just after the human, it's true now). The gods, the pattern of creation, are everywhere and in everything. Everyone else knows that. Don't we?

Coffeetree explosion

Do you suppose those other little buds contain comparable multitudes?

Political prisoner

 Barry Blitt does it again.

Canopies

Vote of confidence

Is it frivolous denial to post pictures of trees budding when the nation is under siege by barbarians not the least of the victims of whose destructiveness will be our other than human kin around the world? Maybe not. These buds capture the feeling of a steadily growing resistance, promise of eventual course correction. The death-dealing damage is vast, and will continue. But defiant life will out.

Gospel of James

We've nearly finished our semester-long read-through of James' Varieties (all but the Postscript). I had everyone write out something they found significant from his "Conclusion" on one of the two whiteboards which frame our class, and then move around the room and underline, comment or otherwise respond to some of what their classmates had written. 

Instead of taking the quotes in the sequence in which they appear in the text we went clockwise around the room, hearing from those who'd chosen and from those who'd responded to each passage. This somewhat jumbly approach proved perfect for teasing out the most important themes in the book as a whole and our enduring questions about them. 

In particular it helped me make clear that James thinks the evidence he's assembled and parsed entitles him to make some bold claims - not just about religious experiences and their variety but about their significance. For it is in these experiences, which in their irreducible personalness are "fuller" than the abstracted and general teachings of the sciences, philosophy and theology, that we appreciate that reality itself is more than the sciences, philosophy and theology can conceive. 

Epitomized by prayer, the mutual intercourse of an individual with what they take to be divine, religion in this way is not just relational but transactional. We and God have business with each other. Human beings don't just access new energy, peace and inspiration in the experiences he calls religious, but it might be there that we make our signal contribution to the universe.

The quote I put up for us to engage (which I made sure came at the end of our movement around the room) was: the recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making (501). 

By this time we'd revisited James' sense that religious experience comes through a "subliminal door" and had seen the ways he bends and stretches words like "real" and "fact." We remembered our impatience with the squishiness of his language and frustration at his almost solipsistic emphasis on the individual when human lives are social and many of our most important experiences are too. 

We'd seen Oliver Wendell Holmes' observation that on religion James had always made a point to turn the lights down low so as to give miracle a chance but this time we found ourselves willing to join him. How exciting to conclude with the pregnant paradox of fact in the making, how electrifying the hope that one might achieve effective occupation of a place in life, with its dynamic currents passing through your being.

I found myself quite the evangelist for James, delivering the good news that there is enough openness in a reality that at its deepest is about relationship that received accounts of the world and our place in it are always incomplete. Just as the saints lead us redefine our human possibilities, so our experience and attention forge new connections within reality as a whole, "new facts." As James concludes the book, Who knows whether the faithfulness of individuals here below to their own poor over-beliefs may not actually help God in turn to be more effectively faithful to his own greater tasks?

Next week we'll see James move beyond the "God" language he settled into for the comfort of the audience of the Varieties lectures and suggest that the personal transactional reality disclosed to us in the variety of religious experiences is more polytheistic, the "piecemeal supernaturalism" which Mary-Jane Rubenstein celebrates as a "pluralistic pantheism." How many of us will be willing to go there with him?