I made an argument for how relevance realisation can explain many of the facets that are found within the normal attribution of human spirituality. And I proposed a term - “religio”, to cover all of those aspects of spirituality that can be explained by the machinery of relevance realisation.
The Numinous
- mystery
- fascinating
- super-salient
- horror
- monster
- Mary Douglas
- inter-categorical
- madness
- monster
- fascinating
22m36s
… and this is why I’m hesitating to just call it straight out flow. It’s super-salient but not in the fact that you’re deeply coupled. It’s super-salient in the way that you’re seeking to be deeply coupled, and the machinery is going faster and faster, but it’s not actually getting a purchase. Because what’s happening is you’re getting horrified by a mystery. Now it’s like - wow, that’s the experience of the numinous?
- reminds me of Ngai’s definition of interesting
25m07s
There’s a sense of the experience of sacredness that is supposed to take us to the very horizon of our intelligibility - the very precipice of our ability to make sense, and make meaning of the world. … It’s supposed to draw us in, and the hope is not to just throw us into horror, but to take us towards horror, until we experience that boundary between awe and horror, where we are forced into a situation of confrontation with a demand to change. A demand to change who and what we are.
27m26s
This is the ultimate frame-breaking! This isn’s just breaking any frame, this is trans-frame-breaking, this is breaking your capacity for framing, or at least breaking it to the very limits where you are forced into a trajectory of trans-framing that is also acknowledging that you are ultimately insufficient. It is, and I’m using this in a technical sense, it is supposed to humiliate you. … humility, a deep appreciation of one’s inescapable limitations, is part of, I’ve argued, the function of horror.
Sacredness
- worldview attunement -> homes us against horror
- meta-assimilation
- numinus -> expose / fascinate us with horror
- meta-accomodation
We are seriously playing with the machinary of relevance realisation.
In order to try and create states of mind states of body, states of interaction with the world that optimise in a comprehensive and profound manner, the machinery of relevance realisation - our connectedness to the world, our selves, and to each other.
33m40s
This, for example, would explain why music is so deeply associated with sacredness. Music isn’t about anything. Not in a conceptual, referential sense. Nevertheless, as Nietzsche said, life would be a mistake without music. Because in music, we just with the machinery of salience landscaping, just with all this machinery, in a powerful way, for no other reason than for its own sake. We try to get into a flow state just for its own sake - seriously playing with this machinery, which is why music is such a pivotal way in which we try to convey and represent the sacred, and why music strikes us so perspectivally, in such a participatory way, we don’t just think about music, it insinuates its way into our perspectival salience landscape and we embody it, the rhythms and what’s happening in the music become sown into our processes of co-identification. The way the world, as an arena, is disclosed to me, and the way my agency has been structured are being deeply transformed by music.
48m36s
I think that symbols are going to tap into these deeper kinds of metaphors, not just the metaphors which are the ornamentation of language, but the more profound metaphors that are structuring our cognition, … they have a bottom up emergence, they have a top down emanation going on in them.
53m09s
What he’s1 arguing is that a lot of what we see in cognition is what he calls “circuit re-use”, circuits that have been used for one thing, getting re-used, get ex-sapted (?) in the way I’ve just described, by reconfiguring their structural-functional organisation, so that side-effects become central effects, and what you do is you get a new machine, a new capacity, created that way.
56m15s
Normally I am looking through all of that machinery at something. But what I can do with the symbol, I want to actually retrace, re-activate, go back through ex-saptation (?), and activate the machinery of balance so that I can then use that machinery in order to get an optimal grip on this other domain, which is justice. This isn’t just simple projection - there is not only a projecting up, there is an emanating back down. You’re also reversing and going down and trying to reactivate this machinery in an important way. There’s top down guidance intersecting with bottom up projection. And so the symbol, in that sense, is deeply participatory. You are trying to participate in this activation of the very cognitive machinery that is used both participating in balance - you don’t just look at balance, you have to be balanced. … and then taking that machinery into being just. Having your perspectival and participatory machinery aligned in a certain way - that’s what the symbol is doing for you. It is deeply participatory. It allows you to hold in mind, and then look back through to activate, and then bring that back up to have insight, participatory and perspectival insight into something like justice.
Footnotes
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Michael L. Anderson, of After Phrenology ↩