​Souls Marinating in Love​

Can Thandeka help save Process Theology? 

​"For Schleiermacher, the feeling of being part of an infinite creation, namely, the affective sense of wonder, the ensuing awe, care, and love beyond belief are simply the spiritual experiences available to all persons because of human nature’s capacity to feel the infinite universe as a finite moment of personal experience. It is the cosmic interior of human life affectively felt."
 
Thandeka. Love Beyond Belief: Finding the Access Point to Spiritual Awareness (p. 190). Polebridge Press. Kindle Edition.

"Thandeka sees in the emergence of the “spiritual but not religious” community a great potential for her goal of “love beyond belief.” She has demonstrated in practice how, by paying close attention to the affects, dying established churches can come alive. She hopes that those who are alienated from these churches, often for excellent reasons, can develop community activities that will lead them to experience love beyond belief. With her leadership and the support of progressive churches, perhaps this project will succeed.”
​
–From the foreword by John B. Cobb, Jr., Center for Process Studies

---

Marinating in Love

Beyond Applied Belief

Can Schleiermacher, or perhaps Thandeka, save help process theology?  I'm hoping so.  

Process theology has too often been reduced to "having an organic worldview" and "applying it in practical ways" that help heal a broken world.  It has been reduced to a mere application of fervently held belief: applied belief.  But humans cannot live by beliefs and applications alone.  IF they do, a third and more powerful dimension of human life is neglected: the affects or emotiions.  Emotions such as awe, care, and love.  Or, to add some more, playfulness, peace, a sense of connection, a sense of beauty, zest for life.  I borrow these additions from the spiritual alphabet of Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat's Spirituality and Practice: an alphabet which serves as a guide for The Center for Process Spirituality.

Marinating in Divine Love

Thandeka's goals in Love Beyond Belief are (1) to help mainline congregations (mostly Christian and Unitarian) rediscover these emotions as the foundations of a vibrant religious life,and (2) to help the growing number of "spiritual but not religious" do the same in non-religious contexts.   To this I add that she can help process theologians reclaim, or perhaps discover, the role that feeling and emotion play in Whitehead's thought, upon whose organic worldview process theologians often rely.  For Whitehead feelings are absolutely primary.  The whole universe is composed of them.  Thandeka can  also help us remember that for Whitehead the universe is indeed immersed in a cosmic consciousness of love that is well beyond belief and that includes all.  Whitehead called it the consequent nature of God.  This cosmic consciousness does not simply believe things about humans and other living beings; it feels their feelings with tenderness and love.  In short, Thandeka reminds us that we humans are part of an infinite creation and we are, to quote Rabbi Bradley Artson, marinating in Love.  

I offer the rest of this page as a further introduction to some of Thandeka's ideas and connections with the process way.

​Jay McDaniel, 11/30/2020

Thandeka's Website

​The Sense of Being Alive

​On Music and Being Alive
process reflections after reading Thandeka

by Jay McDaniel
​

​About Thandeka

"Thandeka received her Ph.D. in philosophy of religion and theology from Claremont Graduate University. She was given the !Xhosa name Thandeka, which means “beloved,” by Archbishop Desmond Tutu in 1984. She is an ordained Unitarian Universalist minister and congregational consultant, an Emmy award-winning television producer, and founder of affect theology, which studies religious experience from the standpoint of emotions. Jaak Panksepp, the founder of affective neuroscience, commends Thandeka’s “decisive historical-philosophical analysis” as work that can provide “a universal substrate for nondenominational religious experience” (The Archeology of the Mind, 391)." 

-- Revthandeka.org

Thandeka is a bridge-builder.  She is building bridges (1) between religion and neuroscience, (2) between contemporary theology and the great nineteenth century theologian, Friedrich Schleiermacher, (3) between mind and body, reason and feeling, (4) between people who are religiously affiliated and those who are, by their own definition, spiritual but not religious, and, as I emphasize below, (5) between religion and music.  And that's just the beginning.

Her particular focus is on the religious lives of those who espouse one or another form of liberal Abrahamic- influenced theology. Her specific audience, in the excerpts on the right, is Unitarian Universalist seminarians.  She wants them to claim the emotional sides of their religious lives.  

But her ideas have relevance to people who learn from many other world religions and also, as she notes, to people with no religion.  They likewise have relevance to people for whom popular music is a fundamental source of meaning and satisfaction in life.  What follows are some scattered reflections inspired by her work and shaped by process theology

Religion is how the world lives in us.

Thandeka makes clear that religion is not primarily about beliefs.  It is about emotions, about affective consciousness: individual and shared, alone and in community.  We can practice our religion alone, in the privacy of our hearts as we lie awake at night; and we can practice our religion with others as we sing hymns and share meals. 

The same applies to music.  It, too, is about emotions: individual and shared, alone and in community.  We can enjoy music alone as it speaks to the depths of our souls; and we can enjoy music with others, talking about the music we enjoy and forming music communities.  

Religion and music are about how we live in the world but also about how the world lives in us. 

The world lives in us through our emotions.

The world lives in us through our feelings of it: our attitudes, emotions, valuations, fears, and dreams.  These feelings are, first and foremost, first-person feelings. They are our feelings, not those of others.  But this is not the whole story, because other people and indeed other living beings have feelings, too, which are first-person to them. Thus music is a way of understanding what others feel, even if the feelings communicated are not our own. Again, music is what feelings sound like.

The feelings at issue may belong to other people, but also to other animals and, think process theologians, to the divine Life in whose life all lives unfold: God.  God is a reservoir of feeling whose empathy, whose love, takes into account and is shaped by all feelings.  Music is what God sounds like, too.

Music is what emotions sound like.

For some people music is a religion in its own right.  They may or may not believe in God, but they find something beautiful and valuable in music, God or no God.  Music itself is a religious experience, whether understood theistically or non-theistically.  When they make it and hear it they feel touched by something more than themselves.  It provides what the theologian Mayra Rivera calls a touch of transcendence. The touch is not simply in the meaning of it, whatever that is.  It is in the enjoyment of it.

In the enjoyment of music there is also a knowing of what others feel.  This knowing may unfold as mere awareness or it may unfold, at its best, as empathy.  Only after knowing what others feel -- pleasing or displeasing -- can we care for them on their own terms.  Music helps us do this.  It is a foundation for community.

Secular music is religious, too.

I am not talking about religious music alone, but all kinds of music: rock, pop, rhythm and blues, country, folk, jazz, hip-hop, and classical. And I am not talking about lyrics alone.  I am talking about the sounds and the soulfulness of the sounds: harmonies, melodies, and rhythms.

Yes, the lyrics of music can have religious themes, and these lyrics can sometimes add to music.  But even if the lyrics do not have ostensibly religious themes -- even if they are, by common definition, secular -- they typically tell stories and communicate truths about human experience and the act of being alive.  To my mind that's enough to make a song religious: it evokes and communicates what the affective neuroscientist, Jaak Panksepp, calls "ineffable sense of being alive."

But the point is that music does not need lyrics to be religious, and sometimes lyrics get in the way. The music itself, quite apart from words, touches a deep place.  We can be thankful to Thandeka and to one of her mentors, Schleiermacher, for bringing home the point that when we are truly touched by a deep place we have religion.  Her Affect Theology offers a bridge between religion and music.

Religion is about life.

So what is touched?  Is it God or the Universe or Life?  As a teacher of world religions I prefer Life.  

For my part, I believe in God.  I think there is a loving presence in whose heart all lives unfold and that she shares in the joys and sufferings of all living beings.  When I pray at night I think Someone is listening.  I think God is alive in a divine way, and I think people and animals and plants and hills and rivers are alive in their ways, too.  There are many kinds of life.

As I see things, some forms of music touch and are touched by the divine life in deep ways.  When we hear music amid which we feel embraced by something more than us in full acceptance, or challenged to become more than we have been and might otherwise be, we are touching God in the very enjoyment of music.  Additionally, I think many and perhaps all forms of music are partly animated by the spirit of God, even if the music is not about God. 

The good news is that God is not vain.  God does not need everything to be about God.  Music can be about life and that pleases God.  God wants us to know, to understand, to enter fully into, and to respect life.  "Choose life," says the Bible (Deuteronomy 30:19).  It seems like good advice.

Life is the act of experiencing things, feeling things.

By life I mean the act of experiencing things, feeling things and responding to them, from a subjective point of view. Most of life is pre-propositional.  It consists of what Panksepp calls "affective states" in which we are moved by something other than us.  

These affective states are manifold and they can be healthy or unhealthy depending on the situation.  Rage is an affective state, and so is tenderness.  Most of the affective states are beneath the level of clear, focused awareness (consciousness).  Music brings them to the surface.  Music is what feelings (including unconscious feelings) sound like.

We live in a universe of feeling.  Buddhists tell us that the universe is interconnected and that beings are really inter-beings.  They come into being in relation to other beings that are also coming into being.  Whitehead adds that inter-being is inter-feeling.  All things are alive in one way or another.  All things are feeling other things, one way or another.  

To become aware of life through music is not just to know how individuals feel in themselves, it is also knowing how they feel in relation to other things. Rage? Tenderness?  Anger? Jealousy?  Attraction? Restentment?  It's all inter-being.

God is on the side of life and the well-being of life.

In any case, as a theist, I know that there are religious traditions that are non-theistic: Buddhism, Jainism, and Humanism, for example.  The whole idea that religions need to be about God in order to be religions is false to the facts.  

If the world's many religions have wisdom to offer -- and I think they do --  their wisdom does not have to be about God in order to be wise.  They can be about being present in the present moment (Buddhism) or living non-violently (Jainism) or honoring the dignity of all people (Humanism).  

Moreover, process theologians propose that there truly are different but complementary ultimate realities around which different religions can be oriented.  Buddhists are oriented around the primacy of the present moment, which is ultimate in its own way; Confucians are oriented around the sacrament of social relations, which are ultimate in their way; and some Hindus are oriented around a creative abyss from which all things arise, even God.  This abyss is ultimate in its way, too. As a theist I believe that God inspires people to be aware of different kinds of ultimacy.  Again, God is not vain.

So what do these religions have in common?  It seems to me that what the religions have in common is that they help people make meaning of their lives, form identities, and offer tastes of different ways of being alive.  Music is about life, and this is how it is connected to religion.  When we make music or listen to music, we are taken into the ineffable sense of being alive and that is why all musical experience is, in its own way, religious experience.  

The well-being of life is wisdom, compassion, and creativity.

Music lovers may or may not be formally religious, but they, like the rest of us, need community.  The religiously unaffiliated will probably not go to the mosque on Fridays, or to the synagogue on Saturdays, or to church on Sundays, but they will indeed go to the jazz bar or the coffee shop or the disco during the weekend, and there they find their sacrament.  Their holy eucharist is not bread and wine but rather sound, sometimes combined with dancing and conversation.  Alcohol is often available in these venues, but it is not necessary for the sacrament.  You can be baptized in sound even without a mood altering drug.

For others, music in these settings is not quite enough. They turn to music and institutionalized religion, making meaning of their lives and forming their identities through the songs they hear, the music they love, the friendships they enjoy, and the wisdom they receive from faith traditions: Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, Daoism, Confucianism, Baha'i, Native traditions, and Humanism.  They go to bars on Saturday night and church on Sundays, finding religion in both places.

There's always hope.

Music and religion meet in (1) meaning-making, (2) identity-formation, and (3) and tastes of being fully alive. At least this is how those of us in the Whiteheadian tradition think of religion. We think of religion, not simply as the traditions with which people affiliate or the communities of faith to which they belong; but also, and perhaps more deeply, as an activity, a process, by which a person makes meaning, forms an identity, and enjoys some degree of satisfaction or full aliveness.  The first two aspects of religion -- meaning-making and identity-formation -- are what one theologian of music, Tom Beaudoin, calls subjectification or subject-making.  The third aspect -- the enjoyment of being alive -- is what we can call religious experience.  

Of course, there are many ways of being alive.  We can be alive sadly, happily, quietly, loudly, anxiously, calmly, hurriedly, slowly, angrily, peacefully, humorously, seriously, dreamily, energetically, ecstatically, or lovingly.  All of these have been considered forms of religious experience in one context or another, by one or another of the world's religions. 

They are also forms of musical experience.  Religious experience and musical experience overlap as two sides of a single coin.  It doesn't matter whether we call them religious or musical, something sacred is present. Whitehead speaks of these forms of aliveness as subjective forms. 

What, then, can we do with these subjective forms, these feelings?  The good news is that God is alive in us as a calling presence to become wise, compassionate, and creative.  This means that when we hear what feelings sound like, whether our own or those of others, we may well discover some feelings that are fine just as they are and others that need to be transmuted into something more positive.  Process theologians call it creative transformation. 

The purpose of music in our lives is not simply to rest where we are, it is for us to become who we can best become.  Even though not all music is about God, God can help turn our musical experiences into deeply positive realities.  To whatever extent this happens, we have become fully alive.  That's the purpose of life.  That's the purpose of music, too.

-- Jay McDaniel
​

Thandeka on Affect Theology

extended excerpts from her essay Affect Theology: A Roadmap for The Continental Gathering of Unitarian Universalist Seminarions ​

"I created affect theology to fill in the emotion gap in liberal theology. Affect theology studies the human emotions and affective states that guide, direct, and prioritize religious beliefs, creedal claims, liturgical structures, religious education programs, and pastoral practices by members and leaders of a religious community.  As an affective analysis of religious experience, theological reflection, and leadership practices in a religious community, affect theology functions as a complement to a systematic study of religious belief systems and doctrines. It also rounds out the investigation of religion as cultural studies and social science disciplines by focused attention of the way emotions are altered by religious practices. Affect theology’s antecedent, as we have seen, is Schleiermacher’s Affekt Theology, which focused on the affective stimulations of the human nervous system and made these movements of the “human soul” the first reference for all discourse on religious experience (piety).

---

Three types of affective states

​Affect theology uses insights from the new field in brain research called affective neuroscience founded by Jaak Panksepp[li] to elucidate, correct, and expand Schleiermacher’s original insights about the role of the nervous system in creating pious feelings and religious ideas. The importance of affective neuroscience for affect theology is seen when we take into account two basic things. 

First, codification of affective states into three basic types: (1) affect that makes us aware of the internal state of our body (e.g., hunger or fatigue); (2) affect that makes us aware of the type of emotional system that has been triggered and thus aroused (e.g., the awareness of being enraged); (3) affect that makes us aware as commentary on bodily sensations (e.g. tactile and visual stimulation from sources exterior to the body).[lii] These affective commentaries on internal muscular and anatomical shifts, on our emotions, and on our sensations are the way we initially, consciously but non-conceptually, take note or become aware of what has just happened to our body. This awareness is indeed a state of consciousness, defined here functionally as the “bare awareness of ‘something.’”[liii]

Affective Consciousness

Second, analysis of “affective consciousness.” According to Panksepp, affects are “pre-propositional feelings” that grab hold of our attention not through ideas, but through a felt sense that lets us immediately know how we are faring in the world, within ourselves, and with others at the somatic level of our lives.[liv] Feeling startled, fearful or anxious are examples of affective consciousness as our immediate awareness of pre-propositional feelings felt as shifts in our own nervous system rather than through studied reflections using concepts and ideas. Babies, after all, can be startled, made fearful or anxious even though there are not yet any concepts in their minds to explain, analyze or reflect upon their triggered affective states.

To be sure, Panksepp argues, affective triggerings can be mediated by rational consideration as well as through dream work on alternative ways of responding behaviorally to the triggered feelings.[lv] Nevertheless, they are a way in which the brain neurologically assesses the surrounding environment in order to make affective judgments, links to motor movements that dictate approach or retreat, seeking, rage, fear, play, lust or other neurochemical systems constructed as physical value judgments that prompt actions by the organism in its exterior environment, its world.

And we affirm the primal importance of our emotions without claiming that our biology is our destiny, because, as Panksepp puts it, we do have the ability to make cognitive choices. But our neurobiology qualifies our destiny affectively. If, for example, the underlying groups of molecular structures produced by the brain that create our affective feelings of social solidarity, acceptance, nurturance, and love are compromised, our affective bonds with others will “probably remain shallow and without emotional intensity.”[lvi] His findings concur with other recent brain investigations showing that “social bonding is rooted in various brain chemistries that are normally activated by friendly and supportive forms of social interaction.”[lvii]

These neuroscientific investigations reveal the role of affect in the creation of social bonds and the material content of what Schleiermacher called the human soul. It is here that the foundation of liberal theology is found and affirmed by affective neuroscience and its related fields in two basic ways.

Emotions as foundational for community

​Affect as foundational for the creation of community. Affect, as Schleiermacher insisted, is foundational to religious community. Pious communities, he said, are created by the reproduction of affective states, “by means of facial expressions, gestures, tones, and (indirectly) words” such that the contagion[lviii] of collective affective displays becomes for others not only a revelation of the inward as foundational for religious community, but also creates and maintains pious communities through affective consciousness as an emotional “consciousness of kind.”[lix]

Schleiermacher’s fundamental claim here about “consciousness of kind” identifies affect as a foundational material enabling community to be created and maintained. Affective neuroscience and its related fields confirm Schleiermacher’s claim that the foundational material here is shared affect.

For Panksepp, consciousness of kind begins affectively. It is our “internal biological logic,” and it pertains to our “emotional minds.” Our emotional minds create our desire to express our deeply social nature to other human beings, “especially those with whom we shared attachment bonds, and to mutually glory in the kinds of deeply feeling creatures that we are.”[lx]

Consciousness of kind thus entails an acculturation process. Clinical psychoanalyst and theorist John E. Gedo, who uses insights from Panksepp’s work, calls this acculturation process a “cybernetic loop between infant and caretaker.”[lxi] It pertains to the central nervous system of the infant and the caretaker as a dyad, Gedo observes. The unity of the self is thus a collaborative achievement.[lxii] Here Gedo and Schleiermacher meet.

As Schleiermacher succinctly put it, “We never do exist except along with another.” Human consciousness, Schleiermacher notes, always entails the co-existence of an Other whose affective signals we have first received. Schleiermacher understood the phenomenon, which Gedo terms the “cybernetic loop,” to be foundational to the creation and support of religious community."

No disembodied soul

Affect as the neural content of the soul. Schleiermacher called the study of the core affective level of human consciousness a study of the material impulses of the human soul.[lxiii] Panksepp makes a strikingly similar claim.

At the foundational level of consciousness, Panksepp suggests, we are aware of “our ineffable sense of being alive and an active agent in the world.”[lxiv] Panksepp describes this ineffable sense as the “primordial self-schema” or “self-representation,” and refers to “it” using the acronym, the “SELF – A Simple Ego-type Life Form” – to refer to this primordial structure of agency found “deep within the brain.”[lxv]

Moreover, as Panksepp suggests, this foundational fact of non-rational, affective conscious awareness can be thought about as a “core self” – or even as a soul. Perhaps it is now appropriate, Panksepp suggests, to “entertain neuro-psychological conceptions of human and animal ‘souls’”[lxvi] Panksepp calls this primal material “a subcortical viscero-somatic homunculus,”[lxvii] a SELF, and a soul. Here, Panksepp and Schleiermacher meet.

Neurologist Antonio Damasio also investigates this primal, affective level of human experience. He, too, talks about a self – a “proto-self” – where consciousness begins. Moreover, Damasio affirms Panksepp’s work on the link between the body and the self “by means of an innate representation of the body in the brain stem.”[lxviii] Damasio concludes that neither the mind nor the soul can be adequately discussed today without attending to a neurological analysis of the subcortical structures of consciousness.[lxix] Here, Damasio and Schleiermacher meet.

The ineffable sense of being alive

More broadly, Panksepp suggests that the analysis of affect is challenging regnant Western religious claims about the nature of the human soul and the human spirit as strictly rational entities. The human soul and the human spirit, like all other mammalian experiences, Panksepp notes, have neurological characteristics, constraints, and histories, and so they must no longer be described as disembodied, rational, emotion-less entities.[lxx] If the human soul and the human spirit are human experiences, Panksepp asserts, then they have to have human characteristics – and the foundations of such characteristics are neurological, affective states.

Affective neuroscience goes beneath concepts, below doctrines and creeds, and investigates the ineffable sense of being alive. For Schleiermacher, this affective sense is not religion, but its inception: the “natal hour of everything living in religion.”[lxxi] Schleiermacher did not make this sense the content of his theology. He made it the foundation of his theology. Affective neuroscience has found and affirmed this affective, ineffable sense exactly where Schleiermacher placed it: outside the theological domain.

Panksepp has noted the possibilities for this new affective theological field in his latest book, The Archeology of the Mind: Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotions, co-authored with psychologist Lucy Biven. Referring to my affective theological work, Panksepp suggests it “can provide a universal substrate for nondenominational religious experiences.”[lxxii]

This claim by Panksepp marks the first formal affirmation of affect theology by a neuroscientist as a theological system with affective neuroscientific integrity. And the link between affective neuroscience and Unitarian Universalist theology as an affective theological system gives us a cutting edge in an academic revolution Panksepp’s work, in part, has begun. Unitarian Universalism now has a constructive theology with its own doctrine of human nature.

The academy is presently on the verge of an “affective revolution,” Panksepp claims; one that will force the academic community to redefine the way in which it thinks about human nature, the human spirit, and the human soul.  Nature, Panksepp argues, has encoded our organism with emotive organizing systems that help us decipher, interact with, interpret, and learn lessons from the world in which we live.[lxxiii] Affect theology is part of this cutting edge as a new field within liberal theological studies.

Contemporary academic theology, of course, has begun to take note of this emerging neuroscientific revolution, but there is more work to be done. The new field, neurotheology, has emerged to explain old religious beliefs using the new scientific work. Theists are using brain science to explain how God gets into our heads.[lxxiv]  Non-theists are using neuroscience to get rid of all such theistic claims.[lxxv]  In other words, much of the current neurotheological work attempts to “harmonize scientific method and religious belief,”[lxxvi] rather than to reveal the hidden foundational claim that occurs before and beyond rationally explained and delineated beliefs.[lxxvii]

A more balanced and non-reductionist theological engagement with contemporary brain science can be achieved when we begin with insights from Schleiermacher’s Affekt theology and contemporary affective neuroscience, which challenge traditional notions of the human soul as a disembodied entity.[lxxviii]  The human soul, like every other aspect of human nature, has neurological characteristics, constraints and histories.[lxxix]

-- Thandeka, Affect Theology: A Roadmap for The Continental Gathering of Unitarian Universalist Seminarians

---

Schleiermacher: Early pioneer of Affect Theology ​

"First, Schleiermacher argued that the human feeling of being an inextricable part of the universe was far more immediate and easily felt than the notion that there must be a God. Schleiermacher, in effect, raised the importance of human feeling and lowered the importance of belief in or talk about God. As Schleiermacher put it in his book On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, “the idea of God does not rank as high as you think.”[xx] Schleiermacher then created, in effect, a theological perspective that made artists and other “cultured despisers of religion” the true priests of religion. And Schleiermacher argued they did not even have to believe in God to have religious experiences.[xxi]

Second, Schleiermacher insisted that in the realm of religious experience there is no mathematical proof to demonstrate that things must be so and not otherwise.[xxii] The only test, Schleiermacher concluded, is personal experience. And so he called upon his readers to examine the structure of their own piety through their own acts of  “immediate self-consciousness.” They must use this self-evidence to determine the veracity of his claims, Schleiermacher insisted. They must find the affective side of pious experience in order to complete, through personal self-description, his theological claims. This is why Schleiermacher’s new theological system was called “liberal.” He made personal experience rather than church doctrine, liturgical traditions, the Bible, or belief in God the benchmark for pious feelings. Now, thanks to Schleiermacher, one could reject all of the religious traditions, beliefs and creeds of a community and still count oneself as pious. The role of a religious community was indeed to change emotions into pious feelings, but the words and beliefs linked to this change of heart need no longer hold absolute sway over the individual.

The result of Schleiermacher’s theology for these “Nones” showed up in nineteenth-century Unitarianism in two basic ways: the distinction between man and God was lost; and the inherent worth and dignity of man was found and then lost again."

-- Thandeka, Affect Theology: A Roadmap for The Continental Gathering of Unitarian Universalist Seminarians
​

---

---