INTRODUCTION:
What we call a liberal democracy, a relatively new cultural phenomena in the long expanse of biological and cultural history, has forced to the surface of awareness two deep cognitive structures that are now being studied and understood by the methods of science. Moral psychology has discovered that many of our political and cultural differences that fuel the modern American culture wars are reflective of certain cognitive dispositions buried deep within our minds and brains. This historical narrative attempts to trace this interplay between liberal cognitive structures and conservative cognitive structures over time and in different types of religious systems. I want to look at how these two basic structures are manifest in ancient religious cultures and systems, and then how these deep structures and cultural traditions inform modern cultural and political systems.
Moral psychology has discovered that political conservatives think, feel, and value the way they do because of the influence of deep cognitive structures that bias them in certain predictable ways. For example, conservatives tend to react to disgust stimuli more intensly than liberals, and this emotional reaction often produces a greater value on ideological purity. Conservatives react to fear stimuli and scenarios much more than liberals, and th erefore tend to value order, hierarchy, and the authority and loyalty values that maintain these social hierarchies. These cognitive biases also tend to be grounded in forms of dualism: the “sacred“ vs. the” profane”, religiuos vs. secular, or body vs. soul, absolutist truth systems, and ultimately black and white lines demarcating “us versus them”–the caste system in India one of the most extreme examples. Conservatives “see” these sacred absolutes in everything from classic literature, church heirarchies, a unitary and inerrant bible, and even a Platonic interpretation of mathematics. Since the value systems that emerge from these cognitive dispositions are experienced as absolute, change itself is either seem as a threat or even an illusion—certain forms of Platonism and and Hindu dualisms come to mind where the world of history and individual differences are understood as only the appearances of more fundamental unitary realities. Conservatives register strong emotional reactions and feelings, fear if you will, to suggestions of moral relativism and multiculturalism. Fundamentalism in both religion and philosophy are therefore manifestations of deep cognitive structures.
Thus the quest for purity in religious systems and certainty in philosophical systems are two expressions of deep rooted cognitive structures, metaphors, and conceptual frameworks that are buried within consciousness, the subconscious as well as the preconscious assumptions that influence how conservatives interpret the world at the level of cognition and feel their way through life. Conservatives adopt religious visions, and interpretations of these visions religions that have strong and clear lines between outsiders and insiders; between right and wrong, high and low, and between truth and error, pure and impure. In many ways this is the evolutionary development of the male brain.
Liberal cognitive structures are different. And so are the conceptual systems, values, religions and worldviews that are generated from these cognitive structures. Liberals are defined by their “openness to new experience”, and experimentation with otherness and diversity of experience is essential for flourishing. Contrary to the fears of the conservative, a basic threat and fear of the liberal mind is the mere boredom of closed systems, and the injustice of oppressive structure and hierarchy. Moral relativism is not a threat to her self and world but an opportunity for the expansion of horizon and deep empathy for “the other.” It is this deep empathy with “the other” itself that grounds and guides her moral systems. Furthermore, the moral systems of liberals tend to be networked cognitively with aesthetic values: “the good” is often understood as a system of creative egalitarian harmonies rather than a hierarchy of rules. Democratic values, natural and civil rights moral systems, are generated from theses cognitive proclivities, and, I will argue, discovered in many ancient religious systems from shamanism to certain forms of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and especially the their mystical traditions. Taoism and Buddhism stand out as religious traditions most significantly generated from liberal cognitive structures.
Liberals and conservatives create religious systems that reflect the biases of these cognitive structures. While it is assumed that most religious systems are naturally conservative, I want to explore the idea that some religious systems express and promote a liberal cognitive structure and some express and promote conservative cognitive structures, although many times, if not most of the time, these two cognitive structures inform and compliment each other in many traditional religions.
SHAMANISM
Where to start? Robert Bellah, the sociologist and historian suggests that the “ground zero” of evolutionary consciousness should start with the “unitary experience” of the great mystics. But the first descriptions we have in the history of religions of a unitary “Being” are quite late, and don’t emerge until the Axial Age. We will look at these developments later, but now I would like to suggest that we look for the cognitive foundations of openness and empathy in much older relgious systems:
Shamanism is the oldest form of religious practice, and the shaman one of our most ancient and creative personalities. In the dream techniques of the shaman I believe we find the first hint of an expansive openness that also produced an expanded empathy beyond the natural immediacy of kin and clan. From this creative openness and empathy of the shaman emerged and evolved thousands of tribal cultures, value and worldview systems, each one a unique and creative responsive to an ecological niche and history.
Cultural anthropologists have documented tens-of-thousands of very unique and vital religio-cultural systems that share family resemblances under this family rubric. Shamanism is worldview typology generated by the ancient shaman’s ritual technologies of the drum, song, dance, and, most important, the creative dream experience. Named after the religious practicioners of the Siberian steppes, the great phenomenologist of religion Mircea Eliade described this early and unique religious specialist as a “master of ecstasy”. For Eliade what separated the shaman as a type from the rest was her ability to go beyond the ordinariness of historical experience and explore and express a magical and creative world revealed in ecstatic trance. The drum and rattle, song and dance, was a kind of ritual technology that opened up consciousness to a different world of deep poetic beauty and kinship-like relationships that expanded empathy beyond the human.
In the Kwakiutl ritual dramas of the Northwest coast we find a symbolic representation of this process in the ritual dramas centered around the “transformation mask.” In the dance dramatising the visions of shamans, the Kwakiutl transformation literally opened up to reveal the humoid behind the bird-like appearance. The term “animism” describes this worldview in which animals, plants, mountains, trees, and rocks are alive with animating, humanoid spirit; but it also manifests (“symbolizes”) the power of the shaman’s dream experience to open up consciousness to empathic relationships with these other-than-human beings.
The world discovered by the shaman is her ecstatic trance is a world behind appearances. But this was not Plato’s impersonal and rational forms. The world revealed, the world opened up, by the Shaman’s dreams was a fluid web of interrelatedness grounded in what we recognize as kinship “metaphors.” As much as we would like to think our own world’s of meaing are grounded in reason and scientific observation, what modern cognitive psychology has discovered is that human consciousness itself is grounded in metaphor–we literally live in the metaphors through which we construct the world. These ancient worldviews are difficult to appreciate for moderns whose thinking, beliefs, metaphors and ritual technologies are grounded in Plato’s vision of the fixed mathematical forms that eventually generated natural law theory, secularism, and scientism. Imagine, if you will, a world without the constraints of “natural law” and its metaphors of mechanical and mathematical necessity. Imagine a radically social world that included the animating life-forces of animals, plants, rivers, mountains, all experiencially grounded in a creative and dynamic dream and visionary experience. What we moderns consider the mathematically necessary order of “natural law” was understood as the predictable patterns of “social” behavior by our ancestors. The movements of the sun and moon, the migratory patterns of animals, the cycles of the seasons, were understood through the root metaphors of personhood and social behavior, and deep empathic relationships with “the other”. The mask does not conceal in this instance but open up consciousness and reveal the humanoid social forces that create and maintain cosmic order.
Of course, just like today not everyone can be a physicist, not everyone in traditional societies were ritual specialistis who commanded the technologies of the drum and rattle to enter at will into the magical dream-scape to fly and commune with the animating forces of life. But just like the physicist translates his mathematical visions into ordinary language for us, and opens up for us new ways of thinking and seeing the world, so did shamans open up new ways of seeing and feeling for her tribal lineages and traditions.
The point here is not to argue that these ancient cultural systems were “liberal” as opposed to “conservative”. The point is to recognize the deep cognitive structures of creative openness and empathy that give rise to a plethora of poetic tribal traditions that also allowed them to respond creatively and empathically to their unique environmental and historicaly nitches. These traditional religious systems are “conservative” in the sense that their cultural identifies are maintained through story, ritual, song and dance, but the “liberal” cognitive structures of their ritual specialists, grounded as they were in dream experience and a deep empathy for the natual world, allowed for a pragmaticism and openness that made their traditions creative and fluid. New beings, songs, and rituals could appear in the shaman’s visions, and these adaptations would be integrated into the tradition based on their pragmaticism and authority of the shaman.
One of the basic insights of liberalism is the degree to which humans co-create their universe through the stories we tell. Nietzsche was considered a radical at the time for his polemic of the “will to power”, an awareness that humans co-create their cultural worlds through their narratives–and then attempt to gound those narratives is an Absolure “Other”, God or Plato’s Forms. But prior to the creative development of Monotheism or Platonic rationalism, humans had no problem acknowledging their co-creation of the universe. Through ritual, song and dance, humans participated in this co-creation with other-than-human beings: without the solstice ceremonies and yearly rituals many traditions believe the world would descent into chaos and disorder.
THE POWER OF THE GIFT
CHANGING WOMEN AND RITES OF PASSAGE: CO-CREATING THE UNIVERSE
Early in my academic career I had chance to learn from Native Americans how intimate with deep empathy these these poetic worlds could be. One of my students, we’ll call him Michael, a member of the Dine’ (Navajo) Nation, wrote me an essay about his experience with the “bear people.” One night when was 12 years old, Michael dreamed of the Bear. He told his grandfather about this dream, and he was taken on a pilgrimage up to Abalone Shell Mountain, (“Doko’oosiliid”). His grandfather told him about the Bear People “as if he knew them personally”.
Part of an Athabascan linguistic group that also include the Apache, the Dine’ call their traditional religious specialists “hatatlie” or singers. As part of the long and diverse genealogical tree that goes back to ancient Shamanism, Singers are considered powerful people because their songs and rituals created and maintained the social bonds through which flowed the forces of vital life. The historian of religion, Sam Gill, has described these ritual systems as “symphonies” because of their beauty and complexity. Indeed, the most powerful Singers had a song for almost every formalized activity. Singers reserve their most powerful songs, those associated with their networks of other-than-human beings, for formal ceremonial and healing contexts. When I asked one Singer, whose familiar (an other-than-human being who empowered his healing ceremonies) was “Lightning Boy”, to share one of his songs with a groups of students who had traveled to the beautiful cosmic center of the Dine’ universe, Canyon De Chelly, the singer said, “I can’t share with you a lightning boy song, but I can share with you an Apache song"—which he proceeded to sing.
Blessingway ceremonies, the backbone of the traditional Athabascan ritual system, are rites of passage empowering young men and women to make the transition from adolescents to adulthood. “Changing Woman” is one of the most important and valued other-then-human beings in the Athabascen cosmos. Born of “Long Life (male)” and “Happiness (female)” in the begging of time, Chaning Women is Time as we know it today in it’s most intimate form, the cycles of the seasons.
But for the Dine, the cycles of time are not closed systems. Oral traditions like those of the Hatatlie are conservative in the sense they naturally value maintaining a tradition that defines self and world, but they are also naturally open systems because they are grounded in the creative dream and visionary experiences and liberal cognitive stucutres of religious practicions. In the Dine’ tradition this openess is symbolized in ritual and symbol in the open circle. In Navajo cosmology and symbolism, the open circle allows the good to flow in and the bad to flow out. Hogans, the traditional octigon home and ceremonial center of traditional Dine’, always opened to the east. And the sand paintings on the Hogan floor, a creative and beautiful part of many ceremonies, acts as a cognitive and symbolic map of the Navajo cosmos, and always opens to the East as well.
The openness of the Navajo circle signifies this deep cognitive structure of openness to new experience that allowes the poetic imagination, deeply rooted in the powerful dreams of singers and shamans, to organically create, maintain, and recreate culture over time. We can see this openness to the other in the way many Native American cultures creatively synthesized the horse into their cultural narratives, ceremonies, and cultural subconscious. L.H. Clark documents this process in his book “They Sang For Horses”. Clark notes many different stories and ceremonies where the horse was transformed from historical being to mythic prototype. In one of their many song and ritual symphonies, the Apache’s White Bead Woman (another name for Changing Women) plans her creation by laying out symbolic objects (“fetishes”) associated with the horse following a the four point directional scheme of a sand painting, and opening to the East. Clark records twenty sections to this symphonic chant, all similar but slightly different. Here are a few samples that express the main themes and power of the chants:
This is my plan,
I am White Bead Women
In the center of my home I planned it…
All the beautiful flowers with their pollens,
and the horse fetishes,
They lay in each other,
They lay before me as I planned it.
To increase and to multiply..
From the East comes a big black mare.
Changing into a Maiden,
She comes to me.
From the South comes a blue mare.
Changing into a maiden,
She comes to me.
From the West comes a sorrel mare.
Changing into a maiden,
She comes to me.
From the North comes a white mare.
Changing into a maiden,
she comes to me… (p. 60)
The open circle of Navajo cosmology, structured in four (to six) directions with Changing Women (Time) at the center, assures harmoneus change. The Singer’s songs and ritual creatively and poetically appropriate the good that comes in, in this case, the horse, and allows the bad, negative forces that create disharmony and suffering to be expelled. The circle, the culture, the mind and the culture remains open while maintaing the integrity of the cultural system–in fact, it is this openness in the face of historical and evolutionary change that allow cultural systems their flexibility over time.
This logic of openness and harmonious transformation is also illustrated in the ceremonies of White Shell Women, another manifestation of Changing Women in Apache ceremonial life, the neighbors of the Dine’. In an elaborate female puberty symphany, White Shell Women is called upon in the song and ritual of the Singer to enter into the dance of a young women. Dressed in white leather and shell, the young women’s mind and body are opened up and transformed into White Shell Woman by the songs of family and Singer, and in this evervescent semi-trance state, the young women manifests the source of Life and Time itself. Through this ritual process a new mature self is sung into being. (SEE NAVAJO WIND).
To those outside the circle of culture, to anthropologists and outsiders these narratives and ceremonies are obviously creative and poetic creations emerging deep within the dreams and visions of the Singers and their people. Within the culture, they express simply the way things are. For the Apache and Navajo, the open circle is the root metaphor planted deep within the psyche and culture that promotes harmoneous change and beauty. And unlike the Axial age religions that so influenced eastern and western religious traditions, the symphany of song, dance, and ritual were not concerned with individual immortality, but with maintaining the vitality and beauty of social relationships and lineages through time.
THE POWER OF THE GIFT:
In traditional worldviews like the Dine’, knowledge and power is not discovered; They are given in a gift. The gift opens one up to the relationships that sustain life. Understanding the power of the gift is essential to understanding how cognitive openness is maintained in traditonal societies influenced by shamanic experience. When Christianity and the destructivness of empire, Spanish and American, came to the Navajo and Apache, the extreme suffering and new questions of salvation and individual immortality introduced the possibilty for a creative response. Many converted to this new icon and power. But Peyotism was a more common response. Peyotism migrated into the Southwest from Oklahoma as a creative response to the destruction of native cultures in the late 19th and early twentieth centuries, and a response to the existential questions put forth by traditional Christianity as it spread and competed with more traditional cultural systems in what had become impovershed reservation communities. Traditional native traditions were religions constructed and centered in space and sacred environments: mountains, springs, rivers, canyons, and their animals and plants, were places embodied and given life through traditional poetic narratives, and brought to life in seasonal rituals.
In the Peyotism, “Mother Peyote” is experienced and understood both as a “plant” and as a other-than-human person who gives the gifts of power and life through the creative vision. Consistent with the traditional Navajo singer’s tradition centered on Changing women, the matrilineal metaphor connects this new religious tradition to the subconscious root metaphors of the old tradition, but also introduces another power, Jesus. Peyotist’s say, with Mother Peyote, “We speak with Jesus, and Jesus speaks with us”–in contrast, they believe, with the prostalyzing traditional Christian that is said to “believe” and recite the words of a book but who do not actually experience and speak to Jesus in a powerful visionary experience.
One does not have to be an anthropologiest and historian to appreciate the incredible creativity and diversity of these early cultural systems. In fact, it is only from a perspective of openness and empathy, a liberal cognitive structure, that we can appreciate their poetic beauty, creativity, and inner cultural logics. From the creative ritual technologies and dreams of the shaman evolved tens of thousands of unique and vital cultural, religious, and tribal systems. Without the openness built into shamanic traditions through dream experience, they simply could not respond to change: storytellers and visionaries of oral traditions, unemcombured with written texts, could creatively, and sometimes radically, reinterpret traditional stories in light of contemporary contexts and crisis. New other-than-humans, like Mother Peyote, could introduce themselves through the gift of visions and dreams. These new stories, songs, and rituals are then creatively woven into the tradition. Because many oral traditions were experiencially grounded in the creative and poetic dream experience, they were always an artful work in progress.
This is not to say early shamanic system were not concerned with “traditional” values. Creativity worked organically with the more conservative concern for social heirarchy and cosmic order in most cultures, and eventually this very creative openness gave rise to even more concervative systems for gaining and maintaining power which began to severely limit and close down the reliance on dream and visions as sources of creativity. Consider for example, other Native American cultural systems still functioning in the American Southwest, the Pueblos. The Pueblos comprise a cultural of family resemblences, although their languages are unique to their tribal groups. The villages of Hopi and Zuni are the Western most cultural centers, which the pueblos of the Rio Grande constitute twenty six separate but culturally related tribal groups. These cultures demonstrate a transition from the dominance of individual shamans of hunting and gathering lineages, to more structured village structures and the solidaries of lineage controlled priesthoods.
Anyone who has witnessed the beautiful katsina ceremonies of the Pueblos can readily identify the shamanic influences of the culture: the masked dancers, the song, the rattle and the drum–and the open circles that structure the katsina dances. The seansonal katsina dances of the Hopi are visions made public, and until recently, the power of Hopi dances could be witnessed even by outsiders to the tradition. In the summer of 1986, my twin sister and her husband joined me at Navajo Community College, a short drive to the Hopi Mesas. I had been teaching a summer course called “Man in the Southwest,” at NCC, and my sister Joan wanted to witness a Hopi dance. When we woke that summer morning, the sky were crystal clear and beautifull against the red cliffs of Canyon de Chelley, but the clear sky did not portend a successful katsina dance for rain. I half-jokinly warned my sister and her husband that the clear skys might make the Hopi’s suspicious of outsiders, since the Hopi considered a prayerful and respectful heart as essential for bringing the gifts of the katsinas, rain–and outsiders rarely contributed possitively to that needed attitude and energy.
Up on the Hopi mesas, the Long Hair katsinas danced all morning and into the early afteroon to clear skys. It was smack in the middle of summer in Northern Arizona and it was hot. But in late afternoon large thunderheads could be seen emergining along the southeast horizons near the San Francisco Peaks. The mood of the dances began to change and one couldn’t help but get caught up in the anticipation of rain. My sister and I watched from the rooftop as the thunderheads slowely moved toward us–can we say “danced” their way to the Hopi corn and squash fields below the Mesas? Soon dark streams of rain fell like waterfalls from the towering thunderheads, and everyone, insider and outsider felt the joy of participating in the gifts of life the katsinas brought with them. Year later, on her death bed, my sister Joan, dying of cervical cancer, told me that that day on the Hopi mesas had been one of the most powerful and beautiful spiritual experiences of her life. Through the song and dance, outsider had become insider–through our openness and empathy, we all participated in the Hopi dream that day, and it lasted a life-time.
Hopis ritual processes are elaborate symphonies whose instrumental design is to bring rain to the high desert fields. As a form of cultural life, the songs and dances are a form of poetic openness to the gifts of life, a way of being-in-the-world of deep social empathy. The katsinas, who are both rain clouds and masked dancers, are a celebration of those deep social relations. in song and dance. But the shaman’s dream, so evident in the aesthetics of Hopi ritual life, evenutally produced something different: priesthoods. The life of hunters and gatherers were based on small group dynamics; certain lineages tended to produce and reproduce ritual specialties that eventually created dogmatic limits to the creative power of dreams. The masks, dances, rituals and songs, of the Hopi (and Peublos in general), for example, are also understood as gifts to specific matrilineal clans. So while the ceremonies are performed for the general benefit of all–including non-humans–and while the song and dances opened up new experiences to many, including outsiders like myself and my sister–they also established certain lineages and clans with powerful social status and set limits on participation. Only those lineages and clans who “own” the ceremonies are eligible for leadership roles in the ritual sodalities, and at Hopi both the mother and father’s totemic clan of a child play a role in the limits of participation. One of my students once confided in me that he could not become a member of the katsina sodality in his village because his father was Navajo (Dine’) and the father’s clan had to sponsor his membership in this important ritual sodality. And among the Pueblos of the Rio Grande, detailed in a controversial book by Alfonso Ortiz, those lineages without powerful ceremonies are consider “trash people” and at the bottom of the religious and social hierarchy.
Geertz and Foucault on power
So while openness and creativity were grounded in powerful dreams and visions, and empathy was expanded to include other-then-human beings, subtle systems of power and social heirarchy were also encoded in those same dreams and dramas. Incredibly complex and sophisticated cultural systems evolved from these very early cultural sources of openness and empathy. But that very creativity evolved ever more complex systems of conservative power maintenance and heirarchy.
So while early tribal cultures based in shamanic dream experience were multicultural and multi-perspectival in the natural and pragmatic sense that the cosmic powers were believed to speak to different people in different ways. At times, these ceremonies were shared between religious specialists of different tribal groups. The Navajo sandpaintings appear to have been borrowed or gifted from Pueblo influence; the Dine’ even had their own masked dancer called the yei-bechei. On one February night on Second Mesa, Hopi, I was invited inside the kiva and to my surprise what appeared to be a contingent of powerful Zuni katsinas were being danced. The question of truth was a pragmatic one: if the masked dances brought moisture and rain; they were danced. These oral tradition were dynamic and creative because they were grounded in the creative time and space of the shaman’s dreams, and because there were few sources of dogma–no written texts, no jealous gods, no monologic, just the weight of tradition itself, these traditions were open-ended creative responses to their ecological and cultural niches.
ORAL TRADITIONS vs. literalism of textual fundamentalism
With the development of agriculture and social complexity came the development of priesthoods. Priesthoods minimized the use of trance states per say, although those who evolved with small scale agriculture without writing culture and empire, like the Hopi and Zuni of Arizona and New Mexico, maintained their traditional ties to the shamans dream world through masked song and dance. But even here where the shamanic influence is so obviously in the aesthetics and technologies of the katsina dances, conservative concerns for mainting social status and power though secrecy and ownership limited that creativity and eventually eliminated the trance as ecstatic dream as sources of power and creativity.
Many native cultures of the Americas remained open to new religious experience until the adoption and creative integration of Christian symbols, narratives, and rituals. Every Easter to this day, the Yaqui Deer Dancer, a power associated with a distant shamanic past, dances along side the Pascola, Christian church members, and children throwing flowers at the Chapenyecas who represent the forces of evil and those who crucified Jesus. Ironically, once this liberal tradition appropriated the monological texts, symbols and narratives of Christianity and empire the Yaquis became much more conservative and dogmatic, a cognitive system concerned with the maintenance of the status quo and resistant to change. With the advent of priesthoods, eventually shamans, their dynamic oral and dream traditions, became suspect; and the dream world that inspired so much human creativity and diversity of culture in human prehistory, was displaced by the monological tendencies of textual culture and literalism, and the power of priest and empire to maintain orthodoxy. Liberal cognitive structures, openness and empthy, the source of so much human cultural creativity, the source of meaning and tradition, could always give way to conservative cognitive structures concerned with definining orthodoxy, and maintaining the power and social heirarchies created by the open and creativie mind. In other words, the conservative forces at play in the history of culture, the need for order, heirarchy, and power, often appropriated the creative effects of creative liberal forces, openness and empthy, to secure those needs and values.
THE AXIAL AGE:
The Axial Age is celebrated as one one of the most religiously creative of human evolutionary history. And it was. But because our Euro-American traditions find their ideological basis and bias in the religous traditions that emerged in the Axial age, we tend to discount the creativity and value of those traditions that came before it. Indeed, it was the long history of dynamic and poetic oral traditions and the shamans dreams that layed the cognitive groundwork of openness to new expience and expansions of empathetic understanding–even the narrative structure of consciousness itself.
Most historians attribute the creativity of the Axial Age as a response to empires and the violence that emerged with complex social structures. And indeed in India and other regions, the creative and empathic dreams of the shaman eventually gave rise to the creative dreams of the warrior and his gods–for the creative womb of the shaman’s dreams also emerged the warrior hero’s that protected hearth and home, and eventually offered a new and violent paradigm took in the powerful warrior cultures of human history. Even in the mythology of the Dine‘, Changing Woman gives birth to Child-of-water and Monster Slayer, and the Apache and Dine’ often took what they wanted from their neighbors, the Pueblos, finding in their raids a source of gifts from the gods.
THE DREAMS OF WARRIORS
In the early Vedas, some of the earliest texts inscribing much older oral traditions, Indra drinks the intoxicant Soma, revealing a god-like vision and power to defeat Vitra, Chaos, in battle. The gift is now understood as the sacrifices necessary for war, and the warriors vision’s and battles take on cosmic significane. It may be difficult to see how “openness” and empathy find their expression in war, but war can also bring a powerful sense of solidarity even while it objectifies “the other” as “evil” and incapable of empathy.
The warrior’s dreams of power and pride are intoxicating; and the estatic acts of warring itself can opened up huge vistas and horizons of experience through territorial expansion and the deepen social solidarity through crisis, collective sacrifice, and collective victory. One of the most famous of these warrior’s visions is that described in the Bhadavad Gita of India. Arjuna wants to renounce his dharma or duty as a ksatriya warrior when he anticipates warring against those he loves. Krishna, an incarnation of Vishnu disguised as his charioteer helps Arjuna work through his despair by revealing to Arjuna a vision of Vishnu and a new way of reaching salvation: “I am Death, Destroyer of Worlds”. God is revealed to Arjuna as the infinite power behind all war and destruction, a process through which the warrior’s dharma is realized through faith (bhakti) as an absolute God devours all life.
In India we see the geneology of the shaman’s dream split and follows two different pathos. One direction went radically conservative in the creative formation and maintenance of heirarchy and power of a caste system by Brahmin priests and sacred texts like the Bhagavad Gita; and the other more liberal direction developed a path towards a vision of absolute freedom from heirarchies and individual suffering, and an empathetic reach that was universal in its scope.
The Upanishads are a series of sacred texts developed in the first millennium over a five hundred year period. These dialogues between master and disciples articulated a radical new discovery at the foundations of shamanic consciousness, and a radical new openness and ground for empathy.
The teachers in the Upanishads articulate what they understand as a profound discovery at the foundations of ordinary and dream consciousness: Atman (Self) is Brahman (God). In this formula and experience the possibilites for openness were extended to infinity; and the possibilities for empathy were expanded to everyone and everything in the cosmos. The Upanishads signal a radical new vison grounded a discplined exploration of the shaman’s dream world. Because while the early Vedas described a polytheistic and animated world of many gods behind the forces of nature and social structure, an order maintained in intricate fire rituals of the priesthoods, a few of the more inquisitive and liberal minded explored the source of that power and found it deep within consciousness itself, a universal consciousness underlying even the individual gods of the Vedas.
We can see this revolution in consciousness and ritual power articulted in the Upanishads within a long geneological tree with it’s roots in ancient shamanic practices. Early Harapa civilization artifacts reveal a human like being sitting in a yogic meditation like posture. Speculation is that the yogis of the Upanishads had their cultural roots here. Rather than the drum and rattle to initiate trance, however, early yogis develped ritual techniques to exlore the shaman’s dreams in more a more systematic fashion that explored not only dream consciouness, but forms of consciousness associated with sleep without dreams, and the relationship between thoughts, desires, suffering, joy, and other estatic states of consciousness.
THE LOTUS AND OPENNESS: TANTRA:
The Lotus Flower became a dominant symbol of the nature of consciouness at different stage of openness in many yogic traditions. The lotus flower lies on the surface of water but its long roots take their nourishment from the muddy bottom. The lotus flower symbolizes consciousness because ordinary consciousness begins with the confusions and sufferings of the undisciplined and untrained mind at the muddy bottom of the lake. With yogic training and discipline however, consciouness can be trained to become aware of its compliced root system in desires and thoughts, and eventually can rise to discover the source of its energy in the blossom of enlightenment. Early yogis visualized this process in a serious of seven stages or chakras, with each stage a blossom opening up to more awareness, greater understanding, a broadened empathy. Meditations on desire were associated with the anal chakra; disciplining desire in the form of asceticism opened up the lotus and redirected this energy to higher levels of awareness. The solar plexus lotus opened up with a mastery of breath; control and focus on breath took consciousness to an awareness of the heart chakra, a calm repose assoiated with a growing awareness of the suffering of others. The throat chackra opened up awareness to the power of sound and language in constructing the world and an awareness of special sounds that opened consciousss up to the deepest regions of consciousness. Through sound–recall the drum and rattle of the shaman–consciousness could be directed to its source, visualized symbolically as a lotus opening up at the top of the head, and revealing that one’s true self, Atman was really Brahman or God, the Absolute Mind dwelling in the true self (atman) and everything else. Indeed, the simplest ritual form in traditions informed by this methodical explortion of consciousness is called “the Lotus Position”.
Like the dreams of the shaman that generated and maintained tens-of-thousands of tribal traditions, the disciplined exploration of shamanic consciousness in Yoga open up hundreds of philosophical discourses and schools of thought and practice that attempted to interpret and understand these new experiences of self and world. The Samkhya school of philosophy interpreted the samadhi experience of Atman and Brahman as a radical dualism prefacing and informing everything. The creative dreams of the shaman, as well as ordinary empirical experience, were now considered a grand illusion in the Mind of an impersonal God, “Purusha,” transcendent and distinct from the material world, “Prakriti.” Humans and all individual life forms on this account were trapped in a potentially infinite cycle of material birth and rebirth–a Soul contually trapped in a bodily form until emancipated through acetism and yoga.
The animism and dream world of the shaman was thus revisioned and reevaluated as an intricately woven web of karmic cause and effect relations among all living persons, human and other-than-human. Possibly as a creative reaction against the dreams of the warrior, and the oppresive structures of the priesthoods, the dreams of the sanyassin tradition visualized a radical break with the concern for the structures of this world, and fostered a severe renunciation to escape the sufferings of these cycles. This Brahman was so radically Other that even the qualities of personhood no longer applied to it. To realize your true self (Atman) was identical with Brahmin through the arduous task of renunciation, self mortification, and ritual yoga was to transcend the suffering of this world completely.
Here is one the logical conclusions and geneological branches of a liberal cognitive structure: a deep empathy and awareness of suffering and the oppression of arbitrary structures, and a radical openness and empathy in response: in yogic experience the whole world is opened up as the “true self,” and a universal bond and empathy with all forms of life are realized in a state of consciousness beyond the empirical world of lineage, clan, priest and priesthood, even contingent personhood itself.
The Upanishads signal a radical breakthrough in liberal consciousness. But here again we notice how this creative openness can be appropriated by conservative social forces and those who are empowered in the traditional power structures to maintain and even strengthen those power structures! In this case the hierarchy and caste system of priests. Because in the early development of this new paradigm only Brahmins were declaired to have the right to renounce the world and pursue samadhi and freedom from the cycles of birth and rebirth. All other castes had to wait until rebirth both as a male and as a Brahmin to pursue their freedom from samsara and obtain a god-like consciousness and god-like bliss free of the suffering of this life and the lives to come.
Cracking it wide open:
The conservative constrait on radical openness and empathy was eventally broken wide open by the experiences and teachings of Gotema Siddartha. Siddartha was a kashatryia warrior when he decided it was time to renounce the world to seek enlightenment and release from the cycles of birth and rebirth. Having it all–wealth, power, family, his dissatisfaction with the goods of this world and liberal minded inquisitiveness drove him from the comforts of the palace to the life of the renunciaste. This rejection of the Brahmin dharma was itself a signal that the Siddartha was willing to break with tradition to pursue the higher value and goals of truth and freedom, and this openness resulted in a radical reinterpretation of the enlightenment experience and a radical empathy that extended beyond traditional patriarchal social structures to empower all castes and women as well.
In the 6th century BCE, heavily influenced by Samkya dualism and ascetism, exhausted and near death by practicing severe acetism , Siddartha broke his vows to his five friends, ate a bowl of rice and replentished, sat in meditation under a Bo tree in northern India. As he went deeper and deeper into the dream world of shamans and previous sannyasins, Siddhartha’s consciousness opened up to another reality, in many ways more intellectually complex than simply dualism of Samkhya, the and become “the Buddha” or enlightened one.
Having discovered what he recognized as the truth, Siddartha found his friends and began to describe his new vision. His five friends are said to have recognize something profound had happened, and these friends became the first disciples that later developed a new doctrine and practice based on “the middle way” between extreme asceticism and self indulgence.
What did the Buddha see that was so different from the what the masters of the Upanishads described as “Atman is Brahman”? The Buddha had a penchant for simlicity, both in the “middle way” of practice and in the poetic and philosophical language he used to describe his liberating experience. What he say was described in what are called the “Three Jewells” or Three Marks of Existence: (1) anica, or impermanence: life was radically impermanent. For those of you familiar with Greek philosophy, the thought of Hericlitus comes to mind. (2) all phenomena we co-dependent origniating: all phenomena, internal as well as external, were causually and essentially interrelated. (3) Anatman: no-self. An enligheted mind recognized on a deep and intuitive level the first two marks applied to his “self” as well, and this realization inself broke the spell of attachment and grasping that propelled life-times of suffering.
“Anatman,” in many ways the equivalent of Nietzsche’s “God is Dead” in western civilization, the Buddha’s vision opened up a radical way of seeing and talking about the self and world within the context of Hindu caste hierarchies and Upanishadic mysticism. The buddha’s openness to new experience generated not only a unique interpretation of the depths of human consciousness, but one of the most liberal and undogmatic religious systems in history. The Buddha argued that all human beings as human beings are potential Buddhas; caste nor gender did not limit the empathy the Buddha experienced: all were invited to pursue enlightenment and nirvana or extinction from the cycles of birth, rebirth and suffering–including women.
The Buddha and his disciples established the first non-familiar social institution, the sangha, which operated as the first monestary in human history. The sanghya functioned as an institutional liminality outside of India social structure and caste, but with a warriors disciplinary structure. One can find many instances of the Buddha sitting in meditation with sword in hand, but the sword and heroic discline that was not directed outward to “the other”, but inward toward a desiring self that propelled the individual into lifetimes of egocentric action and suffering. The sangha was heirarchical, with the master-disciple relationship functioning as the model for interpreting and transfering the masters enlightenment experience to others. But it was also a democratic meritocracy based on advancement through “middle way” disciplines, chanting, and meditative activities, and texual study to the full fledged enlightenment of a master. “If you see the master, kill him!” was a later Zen saying suggesting separation and heirarchy was ultimately a barrier to enlightenment. The goal was radical freedom and radical equality, the twin pillars of a liberal consciousness.
True to the liberal imagination, the creative experiences of the Buddha open up many schools of thought and practice to articulate and explore this new psychic territory and poety. Again demonstration the pattern of open creativity and then conservative appropriation, the tradition more conservative after the Buddha’s death, and his discilples developed their own dogmas based on the teachings of their founder. It took another five hundred years before another Buddhist master, Nagarjuna, challenged those dogmas and opened up another way of experiencing enlightenent by developing new set of root metaphors to describe and inform this very refined and exclusive experience. And with this new language came an explosion of creativity in theory and method we now associate with Mahayana Buddhism.
The buddha’s openness and empathy so transcended the social structures of ancient India that Buddhism was one of the few successful Indian religious traditions to move beyond the confines of Indian culture and plant seeds in Tibet, China, Korea, Japan, Europe, and eventually America. Everywhere it traveled Buddhism’s openness found a way to fuse horizons of experience and culture and generate unique historical experience. In China, Buddhism fused with Taoist traditions to create Chan or Zen which became the experiential foundation for a unique aesthetic and artistic tradition. In Japan, Buddhism fused with the animistic traditions of Shinto and generated the unique devotional traditions of “Pure Land” Buddhism. In Tibet, Buddhism fused with shamanism and Indian Tantra to generate a unique expression of aesthetic and spiritual beauty in Tibetan Tantric Buddhism.
Tibetan Mandala and the Navajo circle: the lotus at the center
Tibetan Tantra provides a unique window into the openness at the foundation of liberal cognitive structures. For while the Buddhism that migrated through China opened itself to the influences of Taoism to create Chan Buddhism, the Buddhism that emerged in Tibet opened itself both to Tibetan shamanism and to Indian Tantra, while maintaining its experiential and philosophical foundationless “foundation” in the language of Mahayana Buddhism and Nagarjuna’s Emptiness metaphysics.
As we have seen, ancient shamans are masters of the dream and visionary world, and it is this world that Tibetan Buddhism deals with in its meditation and ritual processes. Tantric adepts are asked to visualize and chant the prayers, songs, and mantras of bodhisattvas and to “unite” in sexual embrace with these deity-like beings. After months and years of meditative visualization practice though which ones psychic content is mapped, mined, and transformed through the ritual process, the individual is said to experience the “clear light of the void”, which, I would suggest is the psychological, if not metaphysical, foundation for liberal openness and deep empathy.
ZEN: THE FORM OF THE FORMESS:
INK ON RICE PAPER PAINTINGS
THE SOUTHERN SCHOOL
CONSERVATIVE APPROPRIATING: THE SAMURAI
AMERICAN ZEN: engaged, political Buddhism
In Tibetan Buddhism we saw how the Buddhist psychology of openness and deep empathy can absorb and transform transform shamanic cultural systems into new models of heroic transformation aimed at solving the Buddhist problem of samsara. Buddhas and Bodhisattvas absord mountain dieties and the animated forces of the natural and psychological, including the sexual energies of desire and the negativ energies of fear, and proved the adept with an intimate mind-scape in which to practice “deity yoga”, transform self-awareness and reach bodhsatvahood–enlighenment with one foot in Samsara and one foot in Nirvana. Trantric Buddhism, like its counterpart Hindu tantra, is “dangerous” because the methods play with the fire of desire directly rather than use more conventional ascetic methods of self-denial. For this reason, the dreams and visions of tantra are both dangerous and heroic.
Heroic dreams: conservative and liberal
Warrior dreams are part of every great civilization. But the nuances are informative and reflect a divergence of liberal and conservative cognitive structures. War and the warrior has a special place in conservative religious systems and an ambiguous place in liberal cultural systems. Conservative cogntive structures and the relious systems they produce, tend to need clear lines of good and bad, or good and evil that also produce clear lines demarcating “otherness”. Historically race, gender, and class or caste provide the models by which humanity defined, and this reflects clear metaphysical lines between God or gods and man. The warrior and the warrior god provide the cognitive archtypes that inform the the dreams-scapes of the warrior: Good battles Evil, God “hates” injustice (the Koran); life itself is a batttle between good and evil. The warrior is the warrior for and of God. The enemy is evil. This is the basic outline of the dreams of a warrior, at least within the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition, a worldview and value system produced by conservative minds and satisfying to conservative values. Liberal minds, with liberal dreams, tend to view the warrior differently, but more of this to come. Right now we want to look at the warrior dreams paradigmatic of the conservative mind.
The paradigm expression of a conservative warrior dream is the Christian “Book of Revelation”. The Book of Revelation is traditionally ascribed to John of Patmos, who most scholars believe to be a second generation Jewish Christian living through early years of intense religious persecution of both Ancient Israite religion and it’s heretical offspring, Christianity. What stands out about this dream is it’s violent resentment against those who oppress it, and it’s violent revenge igniting the whole world in a bloody and ghastly battle of cosmic good against cosmic evil. The world is a dreamscape not of benevolent nature spirits, but of demons and monsters, the “Children of Darkness” battling the “children of Light”. Rivers flow with blood, children and their parents, “unbelievers”, are caste into Hell, and “believers” are led by Jesus, this time on a white stead wielding a sword, to heavenly and earthy bliss. “Revelation” is a starkly heirarchical, dreached with fear and hatred for the “other”, full of hope and glory for the righteous.
The Book of Revelation is about power lost and the hope of renewal; the narrative is deeply about counter-revolution. The Ancient Israelites believed they had a special relationship with a transcendent God. This God was conceived as a God of history, one that acted on the stage of history, and the Great Men of history. God was conceived as a monarch, a Creator of the universe. God spoke through his prophets and maintained order their his blessed monarchs on earth. The God of Israel, most scholars believe was originally a mountain dieity who mainted his “flock” by excluse worhip–“Though shall have no other gods before me” seemed to assume other gods for other peoples in its orginal tribal interpretation, but with the success of empire, the moutain god evolved into a creator God of all. “Israel” was reconcieved as priestly caste as a “light unto all nations”, at least until the Assyrians conquered Isreal and destroyed the Temple, “God’s home”.
Cyrus eventually allowed the Israelites to rebuild their Temple, and the new theology preached that the God of Israel had just used other nations to punish Israel for its transgression of the “the law”. But this interpretation, for many, could not hold once the Roman Empire conquered and brutally subjugated Israel under it’s polytheistic rule. A new type of literature emerged, and a new typle of story that saw Israel as the victim of absolute, irredemable, Evil. Apocalyptic literature of books like Daniel were the percursors to the Book of Revelation that told a story of vicimhood and power lost, not an Israel punished by God, but a community collectively victimized by an “evil empire” and a “Great Satan”.
The Book of Revelation is a conservative’s warrior dreams that continue to provide inspiration for conservative cognitive structures even today in modern American. Edmond Burke provides the classic secular articulation of this conservative dream of “the sacred” when he describes “the sublime” as a sythesis of horror and aw. The conservative passion for the Cold War and invasion of Iraq after 9/11 ignited a deep fear in the conservative mind, that is also a need for heirarchy and the tests of manhood, superiority and inferiority, the “civilized” and the “barbaric”. War is where “real men” are made, where the soft materialism of the marketplace is transcended in sacrifice for a noble cause. The “other” is evil, and barbaric, and so inhuman that torture is not only appropriate but just.
War for the liberal mind, informed by openness and empathy, is different. In the Bhagavad Gita, Arjuna is confronted with a moral delema. He know he must fight bacause this is his dharma as a Ksatria warrior. He understands that "the other’ is not really other at all, but part of his extended family. He knows them as friends and relatives, and as such understands their humanity. He wants solve this moral puzzel by renouncing the world, and as such renouncing his dharma or moral responsibility to fight. But he understands that even if he doesn’t fight other will have to. This is war understood from the openness and empathy of the liberal mind.
Arjuna’s charateer is Krishna, one of the many avatars or incarnations of God who reveal themselves the mankind for moral and spiritual insight and inspiration. Krishan councils Arjuna that his duty is to fight; and the duty of his opponents is also to fight. Life, as the liberal mind sees it, is conflict that must me managed, and war is simply politics by other means. The key to salvation, Arjuna councils, is to perform you dharma with self-less love for God. The arrogance and glory, the test of manhood on the anvil of war, of the conservative warrior is selfish and karmically destructive, argues Krishna. Sefl-less action according to your dharma, argues Krishna, self-less sacrifice will compell one to moksha just as surley as the renunciates joga. In fact this is “dharma-yoga,” a clensing of the mind and transcendence of samasara through the act of war. Krisha reveals himself as God through a vision of the absolute devouring warriors on both sides. This vision of war sees the good on both sides, and suggests a deep openness to the other and empathy for the suffering and destruction of war.
We can see this very historical process, and dynamic between liberal and conservative cognitive structures, between shamanic dream and meditative practices, played out in the religious system that developed just north of modern day India, Tibetan Buddhism.
The creative development of writing, the tendencyhe language to literalism and monological ideological systems, suited religious priesthoods and the end of this dream source of creative openness, lineage and tribal empathy that connected lineage and clan to the natural world. Conservatism as an ideological system for the preservation of tradition and culture for the sake of power and the status quo was born.
the shamans dreams did not occur in a vacuum. They we’re informed and embedded in tradition itself, so much so that we can hardly say the shaman was a creative subject at all. He understood himself as an archetype (or prototype) of that tradition, perpetuating tradition and the relationships with the beings that animated his world, human and other-than-human.
This fact, that the shaman’s creative openness was informed by tradition, is why shamanism as a cultural system eventually gave way to a transitional figure called the medicine man, and eventually a priesthood, whose creative experience was in the performance and dramatization of traditional song, dance, and ritual actions that were originally grounded in the creative dreams of the shaman.
____________________________________________________
INTRODUCTION: Thesis: This historical narrative attempts to trace the interplay between liberal cognitive structures and conservative cognitive structures through time and demonstrate how this interplay generates culture and history.
Moral Psychology has demonstrated that our beliefs and values can be understood as an interplay between at least two cognitive structures: “conservative” and “liberal”. Conservative cognitive structures value hierarchy and order, and tend to conservation of traditional cultural values. Conservative worldviews and value systems tend to ground their “tables of the good” in an absolute transcendent, “God” or gods and Platonic Forms (realism in mathematics). They are fundamentalist in tendency and in fact throughout history. Conservatives tend to fear change and “the other”.
Liberal cognitive structures tend to value change through a cognitive disposition called an “openness to new experience”. Because this openness allows individuals to empathize with “the other”, liberals tend to test higher in sympathy, and therefore more sensitive to the those who have often been marginalized and oppressed within traditional structures. This tendency also allows liberal minds to respond to crisis that cause suffering in others in creative ways that alleviate that suffering but that also threaten the status quo among conservatives. Liberals tend to, therefore, create ideological and philosophical systems that challenge traditional social and cultural absolutes and structures, and in this creative destruction create new social forms that then become traditional social structures.
Chapter 1: MORAL PSYCHOLOGY and the work of Jonathan Haidt:
Modern moral psychology is the historical intersection of philosophy and psychology that attempt to map out how and why we value and reason the way we do.
In Haidt’s work across cultures he discovers at least six “moral foundations”: Care/harm, Fairness/cheating, Liberty/oppression, Loyalty/betrayal, Authority/subversion, and Sanctity/degradation. Individuals who are politically “liberal” tend to place greater value on the first three, test higher for empathy and are more “open to new experience” than do political “conservatives” who tend to value the last three equally with the first, and who test higher than normal on issues of disgust, fear, and purity.
Chapter 2: Shamanism, dreamers and the conservative/liberal cognitive structure.
Liberal creativity, empathy, and crisis: Taoism and Confucius, liberal and conservative.
Chapter 3: Shamans, priests, and masters and the rise of Monism and monological thinking in India and Tibetan Tantra in Tibet.
Dreams and liberalism
Chapter 4 Monotheism: and prophets and priests: liberals or conservatives.
The Prophets, Jesus and Paul: liberal radicals?
Mohammad and liberalism
Chapter 5: Science, Religion, and Self in the modern world: Sources of the Self (Taylor)
Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle and the rise of humanism and science
Democratic Liberalism, American pragmatism, multiculturalism, and the political brain:
Liberal systems get dogmatic when conservatives appropriate them/conservatism as a reactionary system: Maoism, Cambodia, The Soviet Union: Marx and Lenin; Reagan (the conservative) meet Gorbachev (the liberal)
Neo-Liberalism and economic man: Purity in modern politics
The creative destruction and transcendence of Enlightenment Reason and dogma: The New Liberal Consciousness:
