IMAGINEERING: Lecture #1

First Lecture for my courses in Religion 

with Marc Mullinax

The following is a shortened outline of material to be presented on Days Two/Three in our course together.

All Power to the Imagination.
–Graffito on 14^th Street, NW Washington, DC, January 1985 (then, a burned-out district)

Imagination: This course is about the imagination. Organized religion is ever an act of the imagination, developed in a cultural ways after a mystic experience leads to an interruption in the religious status quo (e.g., The Buddha, Jesus, Moses, Joseph Smith, to start a L-O-N-G list). Religion is always about how culture reacts to and takes over the mystics’ experience, and attempts to help that culture repeat that experience. [Culture is very skilled at one thing: repeating.] The more something gets repeated, the more “true” and “powerful” it becomes. Thus, truth becomes whatever gets repeated most and loudest; “truth” is whatever the culture has made into acceptable habit.

[Here, I will have a “Magnet + Nail” demonstration. The magnetism in the magnet gets transferred to the nail only by close proximity/repetition; metaphorically, picture yourself as the nail, and one’s culture-parents-education-religion-conditioning-socialization as the repetitive magnet.]

Start at 0:35"

Take-away #1: The more one is exposed to something, the “more true” one's imagination makes that something becomes. [This is Sociology 101.] For example, if one lives with gravity all one’s life, gravity becomes an automatic, background “given”. No one questions when you place your water glass on the table, whether or not it will stay there, or rise into the air. Additionally, I do not have to understand Newton’s experiments or law of universal gravitation, or “gravitons” in order to know gravity to be “true.”

Take-away #2: "People without imagination," wrote 20th Century theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, "really have no right to write about ultimate things... Ultimate religious truth can only be grasped only in symbolic form. Only poets can do justice" to the great events of a faith. The power of a faith is expressed imaginatively. Thus, to be religious is to engage in acts of the imagination. For example, for the next minute, pray. After one minute of praying, reflect on what you just did, where the prayer "went", who "heard" it, and what's supposed to happen now. Think now: Did you pray in the last minute like you have always prayed, not thinking about the mechanics of the prayer? If so, culture and worldview have done their repeating work well.

The power of imagination, for those invested in social justice is here. This is NOT just an academic exercise! The correct use of religious imagination saves lives, da**it! The wrongful use of the imagination leads to murder! Can you say, "Charlottesville"?

Worldview: What is worldview? One’s worldview is the collection of habits of thought (e.g., there is a God, and that God is “up” in heaven; and any other view just isn't right); habits of practice (e.g., driving on the right or left and the “other side” just isn’t “right”); habits of viewing (e.g., a particular gender, nationality, race, religion, political party, etc., has certain attributes or attitudes that often get generalized, valued or even repudiated).

A worldview is one’s inner map from which one unconsciously negotiates all one’s daily twists and turns, all of which are met with one’s internalized and habituated (magnet/nail) thoughts and actions, thoughts and actions which one shares with the majority of people in your part of the world. Those who do not share these thoughts and actions are “deviants”. In other words, you might (without really knowing how to articulate why) object to someone without your worldview marrying your son, daughter or best friend .

Here are three videos to take notes on:

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I include these videos to let you know how important it is to "get this".

A worldview is your OS, your Operating System, and we are as loyal to them as we might be to more digital OS’s, such as Apple vs. Windows vs. Android.

Your worldview's main task is to "normalize" everything in your world. In the following video, you'll see examples of "normalized" beauty throughout the world. See this video NOT as a way to feel superior, but to acknowledge how different worldviews produce different ideas of beauty. 

Thought question: What does your culture have you do to your body to be more beautiful?

We know that we have a worldview first and most consciously when it gets challenged, and that challenge is often painful. This video (it has Parental Advisory language) demonstrates what I mean:

The young woman in the video above just got her worldview blown away, and it was not comfortable!

Most worldviews that originate in East Asia are monist, instead of dualist (this will take some unpacking). The yin/yang symbol is a good example of monist, in which one can have a lively interplay between complementing opposites, yet both opposites emerge from one single source. Another example from Asian religions is the idea of Brahman in India spirituality. In the West, however, dualist worldviews prevail. Opposites are not complementary, but opposing, not friendly to each other. And only one side can win. Think Jesus and Satan as often depicted in culture.

Spiritually speaking, one can depict monism and dualism in the metaphors of “deep well” and “gas station,” respectively. In monism, the source of one’s being, energy, wisdom and peace is always within. The way one finds such is by going “interior,” going deep within oneself, and drawing out one’s own deep well all one needs to live well. Contrast this with the “gas station” mode: one goes to a religious house about as often as one goes to the gas station, where one is “injected” from without with the energy and sustenance to live well.

Is your spiritual life more intrinsic (deep well) or extrinsic (gas station) to you? (I apologize for this dualist-oriented question!)

Religion? Next, religion is an imagined worldview foisted by the West upon Eastern traditions. Religion comes from “re-ligio” a Latin word often comes down to us to mean “to bind” together – such as gods and creation, heaven and earth – into a unified world. But even this meaning implies a dualistic worldview, where things are not naturally unified. Take-away: Religion is a Western, perhaps dualist-informed concept. I love what the Japanese did with the word religion when they translated the Western word in the 19th Century: 宗教: which means those foreign spiritual movements with doctrines and required membership. In a Monist understanding, religion does not compute because it is something that one compartmentalizes into one's life; but in Japan, one's spirituality is one's entire life, not something one does at special times, places or in special rituals.

In Asia, worldviews have been mostly monistic, where the Tao (道) or Buddhahood is a deep-well of wisdom that anyone can draw out of themselves, because each person is already the same “stuff” as the universe and its gods. There is no natural division, only unnatural and temporary divisions between earth and heaven, good and bad, time and eternity. One does not need a religion, for one is already ALL that one needs. (Critical Question to the reader: What good and what bad result from both monist and dualist worldviews?)

Most worldviews presented in our course together will be Dualist. In Dualism, only one side will (must!) win in what MUST be a struggle between light and dark, good and evil, high and low, spirit and flesh, heaven and hell. The following picture illustrates an extreme dualism.
 How dualist is faith in America? How much of an implicit dualism pervades American religiosity? ß Please stay with this question.

Three Levels of Religious Imagination: Whatever it is that we understand “religion” to be, it is an act of creativity, an act of the imagination. Just to say “God” means that one’s brain has already been at work imagining what “God” is, looks like, “his” attributes, etc. Let me explain this in three movements or levels of thinking.

A-Level: The mystics who stand at the forefront and earliest history of a faith have had a massively life-changing vision of their ultimate reality, or god, or their universe at its most vital essence, which “changes everything”. Think Moses at his Burning Bush, or Buddha under his Bo Tree, or Muhammad (peace be upon him) receiving the Holy Qur’an from the archangel Gabriel in the cave in Hira. Think of strongly religious people you may know who have had a life-changing experience of their divinity. However, there is no way that Moses, Buddha, Muhammad or someone you know can actually translate exactly what happened in their BIG experience. It is essentially a mind/heart-opening, but mouth-closing experience, not easily translatable.

B-Level: But these people (or their disciples) “have to” say something! It’s like you, after a marvelous dream, or horrible nightmare, unable to express the full drama and content of what you have been through. But still, you try. And you try, and try. The words, however, are “fat-fingered” and clumsy, and only vaguely point to or translate that A-Level experience.

C-Level: This is where we all are (and it’s a pun, by the way). We are two levels away from the A-Level “OMG” experience of a mystic, who has “had” to express his or her mystical experience in B-Level words that can never capture that experience, only “dumbed down” in ways we understand. At C-Level, we share codified, "dumbed-down" language that we all can understand, but it is poor fare. So, all we get of Moses is that it was a burning bush, but that’s poetry for what really happened and could never make it into words. 

Religion as we know it is ever two levels away. It is where we all dwell: the pope, me, you, your favorite (and least favorite) religious people. At C-level, we can see scriptures, rituals, pilgrimages, prayers, and the like, all of which are efforts by religious people to get as close as they can to the “A-Level” experience themselves in their time and place.

Always two levels from an absolute God, the absolute best we can do is build linguistic stairways to the heavens to attempt to bridge the distance between our understanding and the mystics’. 

Take-away: Every religion may be incomplete, misrepresentational, and even contains wrong-headed elements in it. But each faith is also, I feel, an honest attempt to bring meaning to a worldview. Religion is an attempt to bring meaning to a sometimes meaningless world. Religion is a “necessary misunderstanding” of the experience of God/Ultimate Reality.

This course is about how people articulate their beyond-language religious experience (A-Level) of a mystic in human language (B-Level) that gets codified into clumsy religious/cultural thought at C-Level. We can observe these C-Level phenomena in the religious languages of America.

At C-Level, religion is an act of the imagination; it is how we “imagineer” heaven and earth hand-shaking, of time cooperating with eternity, of this world sidling up to the next world. It is imaginative because nothing in religion is verifiable (or falsifiable) like in a Chemistry or Biology lab experience. And yet, even if it is imaginative and not based in verifiable-falsifiable scientific discourse, religion is powerful. Religion unifies people, gives them hope and comfort, gets them excited about doing good work in the world, and more often than not, makes the world a better place. This is why religion remains a viable force, and it is this force that gives our course its focus and content this semester.

So, a summary: Religion is an act of the imagination, (A) initiated originally by mysticism’s original “picture” of the divine, (B) reprinted or translated (partially) to others, who then try to (C) recreate that original “picture”, often without the benefit of the mystical experience.

The above, I hope, is provocative and question-raising for you. Please note your questions and objections for us. In the classes to come, we shall flesh out how our own understandings of religion, worldview and how the imagination works in culture. Welcome to class!

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Worldview Enrichment Viewing

This is Water by David Foster Wallace

The Lie We Live, a slightly disturbing challenge to some worldviews

They’re Made out of Meat!! A sci-fi story depiction of the power of worldviews. The story is by Terry Bisson, who published the story originally in OMNI Magazine in 1990.

This blog post is brought to you by the words Imagination, Habit, Worldview, Monism and Dualism.