LIFE GOES RUSHING THROUGH US
Exceeding the grasp of the human mind is pretty easy since we are simply mammals of exceptionally dense brain cells that key into the rest of our bodies and extend our understanding through shared minds of the community, even the long-gone community that left behind writing.
But two forces get us into trouble: one is the conviction that we KNOW what the seed truth, the ultimate key, is. If we don’t know how to define it, we can still learn it and make it ours. The other is the conviction that there is something beyond existence as we experience it and that we should try to figure out what it is, as though we could.
In short, though we may love and attach to where and when we are, we are always reflecting on what is greener than green, vaster than the universe, after Eternity. — well, or maybe before Eternity. We are always narcissists but we are also explorers and speculators, which is how we have spread over the planet and now reach for the solar system.
In terms of today’s religious schematic — beyond a fish and its variations, beyond the cross with or without a corpse spread on it — is the ancient mythic “axis mundi.” It’s wheel imagery. In the middle is the pole, the vertical ladder that reaches into the sky (before airplanes and rockets). That’s one’s “being”, identity. There’s a lot of writing and mythology about all this, even clever depictions of “Jacob’s ladder” reaching to Heaven.
For me, it always brings to mind Carl Sandburg’s idea of the Village of Cream Puffs in windy country with a stanchion that anchored a cable also attached to the town, so that when it blew away, it could be cranked back into place. It’s a Rootabaga Story and various versions can be found online.
So this is the vertical dimension which can rise into the sky, but it anchored by home, your truest self. I suppose it could be made demonic, as a pole on which to be impaled or crucified, but it could also be made organic and mesh into all the mighty trees of myth, including Ygdrassil.
The horizontal dimension is not limited to outstretched human arms but rather is the disc of the known horizon which stretches out to where there be dragons. One can talk about maps or watersheds, but it’s harder to talk about spheres enclosing smaller spheres and the layers and systems that sustain them cosmically or in terms of plate tectonics moving the continents. We are overwhelmed by the knowledge that we can change the planet so much that it will destroy us.
We only recently begin to realize that the sun can send tongues of “flame” that will have more impact than a flood, destroying the internet and ATM’s, but making spectacular “northern lights.” Some of us will be lost in wonderment and admiration, but others will seek to shelter us by getting control, or at least understanding.
I’m only talking about those people educated in Enlightenment terms — logic and math — yet still able to grasp concepts as terrifying as dragons,herefore able to move into the territory of emotion and myth, stories that guide us about how to feel. Those people who don’t even accept the public school insistence on basic math and science that sustains the functions of our country live as wandering parasites among us. Some earn their way with song and story.
This country is not like any other — rich enough to be primary, but confused and messy enough to include a third world nation who neglects its own people as much as the poorest country. We’ve lost our story.
When I was serving the Saskatoon congregation, a family visited the Tyrrell. “The Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology is a palaeontology museum and research facility in Drumheller, Alberta, Canada.” This is an area of prairie east of Calgary where erosion constantly exposes the bones of previous life, both dinosaurs and paleomammals. The visiting family said, accurately, it was the most religious place they had ever visited, a kind of church that evoked both awe and humility, because it so vividly illustrated the ongoing torrent of forms of life that arise out of the conditions of the earth.
More than just bones, an entire mummified dinosaur was recently dug out of a mine and brought to the Tyrrell.
Much of our written history relates to the withdrawing of the last glacial incursion to the south, a little over ten thousand years ago. But being so limited to such a short span of time, we failed to notice much that was happening, both to the land and sea, — even to the air and to our nature as human beings. Religiously, thought goes back a little farther.
“We may conceive of ourselves as “modern” or even “postmodern” and highlight ways in which our lives today are radically different from those of our ancestors. We may embrace technology and integrate it into daily life. We may point to new attitudes about religion or stress spirituality and well-being, even saying we’re “spiritual, not religious.” But the ways that we perceive ourselves and how we relate with our communities and our world overall were shaped just over two millennia ago in the fundamentally transformative, creative, and ingenious stage of human history now called the Axial Age.”
https://www.britannica.com/list/the-axial-age-5-fast-facts
The Brittanica considers the Axial religions to be defined by the concept of transcendence. The entry linked above suggests that we may be at the beginning of a new Axial age. I agree. This time, I would propose, we are moving to immanence, which is a form of transcendence that is not way out there, but wells up from within. The Axial religion thinkers assert that immanence is just a limited version of transcendence and pin the idea to the existence of a god, either apart or participating. I reject this.
Immanence, in my definition and as increasingly others accept, is something more like the Plains Indian understanding that existence is process rather than categories. I’ll try to summarize what Ryan First Diver (previously Ryan Heavy Head) describes. I want to move from sequestered and guarded Euro-thought to participating in whatever we meet.
I’ll also be studying Deleuze’s idea of the Plane of Immanence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plane_of_immanence This, in immanent style, arises from within the previous order.
