Video: Transcendence and Transformation, Take Two
The new initiative will study religious and spiritual traditions and practices—ancient and modern, global in reach—that aim for the transcendence of our normal states of being, consciousness, and embodiment, and the consequent transformation of individual, community, and society.
Full transcript:
SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.
SPEAKER 2: Transcendence and Transformation, Take Two. October 3, 2022.
CHARLES STANG: Good evening and welcome. My name is Charles Stang, and I have the privilege of serving as the Director of the Study for the-- I'm sorry-- Center for the Study of World Religions here at Harvard Divinity School. Welcome to this evening's event, the first of the year, called Transcendence and Transformation, Take Two. The Transcendence and Transformation initiative, or T&T for short, is entering its second year. And we're here this evening to celebrate that fact and to introduce its newest members.
But before I move on to this coming year, permit me to say just a few brief words about T&T, and to celebrate some of what we accomplished last year. But before I do even that, I want to bid farewell to a member of our team, who's been an indispensable part of the initiative and all programming at the Center for many years. Ariella Ruth Goldberg, our Events Coordinator, has moved on from the Center and is taking on a new and exciting position at Harvard's School of Design. So on behalf of the whole CSWR community and the audiences that have enjoyed our public programming, whether online or in person I want to thank Ariella Ruth for all her work with us at the Center and wish her well in her new position.
So back to T&T, this Initiative in its second year is devoted to the study of religious and spiritual traditions and practices, ancient and modern, global in reach, that aim for the transcendence of our normal states of being, consciousness, and embodiment, and the transformation of individual community and society. T&T affirms the existence of the sacred, different levels of reality, seen and unseen, and different modes of access to them. It investigates what might be called metaphysics and mysticism, by which we mean the traditions across time, people, and places that have cultivated practices of transcendence and transformation and have articulated worldviews to make sense of those practices.
Now, as to T&T's accomplishments, last year, briefly, we launched two new speaker series and continued a the third. We launched Gnoseologies, led by my colleague Giovanna Parmigiani, a series which explored ways of knowing that are often labeled nonrational. I'm very happy to report that. Giovanna is continuing that series this year. Her next event will be on Wednesday, October 19 from 1:00 to 2:00 PM, a Conversation with [? Marcelit Faella. ?]
And with that event and with all our events, the best way to keep abreast is to sign up for our newsletter, which you can do on our website home page. We launched another series last year on the Divine Feminine and Its Discontents, led by two of our postdoctoral fellows, Mimi Winick and Hadi Fakhoury. That very successful series came to an end last April, and Hadi and Mimi have returned to Virginia and Beirut, respectively.
And I'm pleased to report that we're continuing our very popular series on Psychedelics and the Future of Religion, but due to staff shortages here at the Center and Ariella Ruth's departure, we're going to delay the start of that series until the Spring semester. But rest assured, I'm lining up an array of great guests who will cover an array of topics, such as the central Dahomey tradition, other Indigenous religious movements using plant medicine sacraments; debates over how to interpret and integrate, quote unquote, "bad trips;" and possibly a panel discussion on Psychedelics and Hinduism.
We ended last year with an in-person conference at the Center called Adventures in the Imaginal-- Henry Corbin in the 21st Century, which was hands down the best conference the center has ever hosted. And it included an exhibition of paintings, a poetry reading, a staged reading of a play, and a live musical performance, all of them inspired by the writings of Henry Corbin. That conference will eventually yield an edited volume, led by Hadi Fakhoury.
Now, to this year, T&T signature events this year will include not only the two speaker series I just mentioned, but also the launch of a podcast called Pop Apocalypse, led by another of our postdoctoral fellows, Matthew Dillon. Pop Apocalypse will offer an examination of myth and mysticism in popular culture, and will be aimed at audiences inside and outside the academy. So please be on the lookout for an announcement of the podcast release sometime later in the Fall semester.
We're also hosting two in-person reading groups, open to members of the Harvard community, one on Mircea Eliade, and another on Plant Consciousness. So these are some of the public faces of T&T, but the initiative also supports research associates and postdoctoral fellows who are pursuing private research projects, projects which will someday be public facing. That is to say, it will be published in whatever form is most appropriate, an article, a book, a website, or a public lecture.
So please let me introduce the new faces of T&T in alphabetical order. I'm going to be brief in my introductions because you can read more about each of them on our website, and because they are going to introduce themselves as they introduce their research projects. After I introduce them all, I will disappear from the screen, and they will take the virtual stage one by one and speak for about 10 minutes each. And then they will hand the mic to the next. And I will return at the end to conclude our evening.
So without further ado, let me introduce our five newest T&T affiliates. Barakatullo Ashurov is a linguist and historian from Tajikistan. His research and teaching focus on the history of religions, cultures, and languages of ancient Iran, encompassing the modern territories of Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and Central Asia. One of his primary areas of interest is the history of Eastern Syriac Christianity among Iranian and Turkic-speaking communities of West and Central Asia.
Second, Sravana Borkataky-Varma is a historian who studies Indian religions, focusing on esoteric rituals and gender, particularly in Hindu Shakta Tantric traditions. She is the instructional Assistant Professor at the University of Houston, and she has taught here at Harvard Divinity School, but also at the University of North Carolina in Wilmington, the University of Montana, and Rice University.
Our third affiliate is Michael Ennis. He's a historian of Patristic Christianity, focusing on the fourth and fifth centuries. His research sits at the intersection of Philology and Theology. His dissertation studied the fourth century poet, Ephrem the Syrian, whose symbolic theology in its interreligious contexts, spanning Greek, Hebrew, and Syriac traditions. In addition to revising his dissertation for publication as a monograph, Michael will spend his time at the Center working on a new book project examining the central texts of the fourth century Origenist controversy, about which he'll say more this evening.
Our fourth affiliate is Michael Ferguson, who is an instructor in Neurology at Harvard Medical School and the Neurospirituality Research Director for the Center for Brain Circuit Therapeutics at Brigham and Women's Hospital. He's a lecturer on neurospirituality here at Harvard Divinity School, he instructs a Cognitive Neuroscience of Meditation course at the College, and he leads graduate-directed readings in mysticism and neuroscience.
And finally, our fifth affiliate is Shiraz Hajiani, a scholar of Religion and History with over a decade of experience in teaching and advising undergraduates, graduates, and lifelong learners, including at the University of Chicago and here at Harvard. He specializes in Islamic history and thought, Shi'ism, Isma'ili Studies, and has regional experience in the study of the Middle East, North Africa, Central and South Asia.
So without further ado, I welcome our five affiliates, first of whom is Barakatullo. Barakatullo, take the stage.
BARAKATULLO ASHUROV: Thank you so much, Charlie, and thank you, everybody in attendance tonight. My name is Barakatullo Ashurov, as mentioned, and I'm very pleased to be one of this year's research associates in the Transcendence and Transformation initiative at the Center for the Study of World Religion at Divinity School. I came to Harvard Divinity School last year as a part time lecturer in Eastern Christianity, and I'm immensely happy that I found this opportunity that I can continue this year in the new capacity with T&T.
I began my academic training as an Oriental Studies student in my home country in the Republic of Tajikistan. My studies will focus on South Asia, and I graduated with a specialist in Hindi and Urdu. After that, I attended another three more different graduate programs in India, the Russian Federation, and Ukraine. And my studies all involved studying the languages and religions of the Near East and Eurasia, eventually leading me to my doctoral program at School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, where I earned my PhD in study of Religions.
My PhD dissertation was an interdisciplinary study of Syriac Christianity among the Iranian-speaking people of Central Asia, looking at the history of transfer and transmission of the Syriac-speaking Christianity from Iran plateau to Central Asia, specifically people called [INAUDIBLE]. However, my research goes beyond the study of Syriac Christianity, and it covers the study of other ancient and contemporary religiosities of both West and Central Asia.
This year, particularly at T&T, I am working on a project on contemporary healing practices in Central Asia, focusing on the Tajik people. The theme of my research is part of a globally attested and research phenomenon known today, "shamanism," quote unquote. Now the main theme of shamanism, or the academic interest in shamanism, is a global phenomenon, which [? Andres Naminsky ?] called it shamanism going global. And according to his publications, he marks that the notion or the study of shamanism becoming global is marked by the publication of the English edition of Mircea Eliade's Shamanism-- Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy.
However, the history of research in shamanism shows that the earliest records on shamanic practices in North Asia as well as parts of Central Asia were already known as early as 1773, 1778. Now, over 250 years of research have hardly exhausted the topic, especially when we try to localize or try to study a specific aspect of this phenomenon. And my research specifically tries to fill in this lacuna by bringing in and researching on the so-called shamanic practices that are current among the Tajik people.
Many aspects of the healing practices and persona of the healer have been recorded and interpreted by Russian scholars, and to a lesser extent, by the local scholars. But these studies are not all available in English and are often short article-sized publications in obscure and inaccessible journals. In my research this year, I hope to bring together this important but largely inaccessible studies and provide a comprehensive examination of such practices in the wider context of Central Asian religious life, where traces of much older religious traditions, such as Zoroastrianism, are still visible, along with the tradition and practices often labeled, for better or worse, as tokenism and animism.
Moreover, all of these practices, as we know, have also been long embedded and reinterpreted by Muslim religious practice, often under the influence of Sufi tradition. My research focuses on these localized Indigenous healing practices that often, in European or in English-speaking research, are put under the umbrella term of shamanism. However, in my research, I try to avoid using the word "shamanism" as much as possible, given that these practices have its own local name.
And specifically in my research, I will be using the word "tabib," which comes from the Arabic word for "physician." And I also will be discussing the relationship of this word in contested and against the controversial title of shaman. The word "tabib" in Tajik context means a medical professional, but only in literary form of Tajik language. In spoken Tajik language, the medical professionals are called "doctor."
There are yet another term in Tajiki, [? tabibi halke ?] or mardumi, which means a folk habit. This title, however, is specifically used to designate a person who uses herbal medicine. But then there is a word, just "tabib," used without any adjectives, which is a specifically designatory the term that is used to someone who practices a healing involving spiritual powers. Now, tabibs, in general, can be of different groups, and the categories are usually defined based on the types of healing that they can perform.
For example, there is a tabib who would conduct [? perihoni, ?] a ritual which is aimed for taming or enchanting a lesser demonic possession. But then there is a tabib whose craft is performing [? jinburon, ?] which is exorcism of evil spirits, or to expel the jins. Both diversity and a rich lexicon of healing practices shows that ascribing them through shaman, as Mircea Eliade has laid foundation, would be a little bit misrepresenting these local healers.
It is true that in contemporary Kazakh society as well as Russian Federation, under the movement of neoshamanism, many local Indigenous healers came to be self-identifying themselves as shamans. However, this is not true in Tajik context. And hence, I try in my study to show that the vocabulary of local practices are significant and should be used. And as Ronald Hutton, the scholar of Siberian shamanism says, the word "shamanism" has become one of the most heavily worked among the scholars of Anthropology and Religious Studies. And this excessive use of the word, I think, has made this word as a metaphor that does not anymore convey a specific meaning, especially representing the healing practitioners in individual cultures in Central Asia.
In my research, I will be examining the healing rituals based on their types, kinds of rituals, what the intention of those rituals are, as well as the context, the time of the day, the place, the days of the week, when certain rituals can be performed. I will be examining the materiality of these healing rituals to look at the objects and the elements that are involved in performing this ritual, such as fire, blood from the sacrificial animal, et cetera.
As well as, in the center of this, would be the persona of healer, the tabib himself. And I will be also examining and discussing regarding the gender, ethnicity, and the pedigree as well as the language used by these tabibs. I would also investigate the profession of the tabib in a social context where they function and how their activities are permitted or restricted and controlled by secular state laws and regulations as well as Islamic legal views held by certain segments of population.
From the earliest available records to our days, we see a consistent, continuous presence of tabibs among the people, and we see that all these tabibs work and perform their practices in the network with other tabibs. As well as they also have a network of their trusted clients that helps them to maintain-- for them to be secure as well as to protect their craft. We see that the urbanization and introduction of modern medicine in Soviet-era Tajikistan has marginalized the practice of the traditional healers, and many of these healers would be found only in a deep suburbs or in the villages.
But they have not gone. They have not been replaced completely by medical professionals of contemporary medicine. And we still see the transmission of this healing practice as the knowledge of healing that goes from one professional to another professional as well as from murid or [? shogid, ?] a discipleship. As well as the transmission of the gift of healing, as it is called, [? darde ?] tabib, through the lineage, the family craft that is passed from generation to generation.
In addition to recording and examining these healers and healing practices in Tajikistan, one of my other hopes is that the healing practices and the traditional healers, they are representative of the intangible culture, part of the cultural diversity in Tajikistan. And since 2015, the Republic of Tajikistan criminalized the practice of traditional medicine, including practicing of the traditional healing rituals.
And I believe that my research will contribute into documenting many of these endangered, and now in the verge of vanishing, local practices and knowledges about the magic, about the healing practices in Tajikistan, that could be lost in the near future. But at the same time, I hope that this research that I'm undertaking would be as a documentary testimony to be used for protecting the rights of individual tabibs in my country, that it is a fundamental rights to practice what they believe.
And I will now pass the mic to my colleague to take the stage. Thank you.
SRAVANA BORKATAKY-VARMA: Thank you Barakat. Thank you, Charlie, for this wonderful opportunity and the platform. And thank you to everyone who has joined us here right now and to the ones that would be watching us at a later time. My name is Sravana Borkataky-Varma, and I am currently-- I've been with Harvard Divinity School, this is my third year. First, I started as a lecturer in the Hindu traditions, and now I am part of this wonderful Initiative formally. I've been informally associated with this Initiative for a long time.
I'm going to share my screen because I do have a PowerPoint presentation that I would like to use today. So the title of my presentation is "Embodied Contemplative Pedagogy." I am doing this project with a dear friend and colleague, Sarabinh Levy-Brightman. Sarabinh is currently the Education Fellow for the program in Religion and Public Life. So this is trying to project, and we just kind of started it. We are in the first month, and we are super excited.
And I will tell you why we are so excited about this project. So what we realized, and Charlie mentioned briefly in his introduction I have taught in a few universities over the years, and one of the growing demands that come from students in divinity schools and Religion departments across the country is to have courses in the catalog that actively integrate embodied contemplative practices. Now, these come up in my course evaluations; these come up in Student meetings; over coffee; or even if they have come to ask a question or discuss their papers.
Now, you may wonder why. Like, what am I teaching that is leading to these questions? So I identify myself as a scholar, practitioner, and a guide. I'm an initiate of Hindu Shakta Tantra, which is Hindu goddess tradition, Hindu goddess esoteric tradition, which kind of gets categorized as Tantra. And within this larger space, I specialize in bodies. And this is in plural, which means I look at the causal body, what brought us to this world; the gross body, which is the body that you see on your screen right now; and the subtle body, which is the body that, in our tradition, in our practice, becomes extremely important.
So I've been teaching from the concept of bodies and then integrate that with gender for a very long time. And that's the reason why I would get these requests. I would get these questions. I would get these requests. And then the more I spoke with my colleagues, I recognized that if any of my colleagues was open to and was integrating or talking about any kind of contemplative practices, these demands or these requests will come from students.
So given this kind of growing request from the student body, both Sarabinh and I, we decided it is high time that we also kind of make our passion of how we teach, what we teach, the standing that we take as individuals in the space into a formal project and, hopefully, into a book in the near future. So the objective of the project that we're doing together is to study, evaluate, and make recommendations of the relevance of thinking about and designing pedagogy that centers around embodiment.
So what does it mean? What will it take? What are some of the risks that we are playing with? What kind of support do we need? So it's kind of a really big project, and I would love to share a few of the first few steps that we have taken so far in the first six weeks that we've been in session.
But before I even do that, the question is, what is this based on? So in Fall of 2021, I taught a course at Harvard Divinity School titled "Arousing Cosmic Energy in the Subtle Body: The Scholar-Practitioner Model." There were 33 students, and 33 students were taking this course for credit. There were students who were auditing the course or students that were taking the course for a pass and fail grade. So I'm not adding them to this list of 33. When I do that, that comes to, I think, 42 or 44 students.
So this was in the Fall of 2021. And we had only Master's and PhD students that were taking this course. This was a course where we met twice a week on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Tuesday was a traditional classroom format, which meant we had preassigned readings. So we would read, we would meet in a seminar style, and we would have deep discussions and questions and just conversations around the topic.
So that was Tuesday, and we met in a classroom, so it was in table and chair. Yes, we didn't sit in rows, but we kind of built a circular classroom with tables and so forth. But it was very traditional. I would come in, I would give a lecture for about 20 minutes on the content, and then we will get into conversations.
Thursdays, Harvard Divinity School was wonderful. And I'm so grateful that they allowed me and gave me the beautiful chapel in Divinity School inside of Schwartz Hall to teach my course in a traditional format. And so on Thursdays, all the chairs were removed from the chapel. You would sit on the floor. There were no electronics allowed inside the chapel. Ideally, we would be in comfortable clothes because we're sitting on the floor. I would advise people not to wear even socks because we believe the subtle energies flow a certain way.
And based on what we were reading and how this course was progressing, we were doing meditative practices. These were curated by me very, very carefully from the tradition that I come from, which is the Hindu goddess Tantra tradition. And we would integrate that, in not a very formal religious setting, because the idea was, for students to engage in a practice outside of religion and build it to their own experience. If they had a religious practice, how does that translate into your own religious practice? If you have a spiritual practice, what does that look like? And if you have neither, how would you integrate that?
The other part of this course was, they were supposed to have-- submit journal entry every single day. And they did miss a few times, so I'm taking minimum of five days, but they did it for seven days. Most of them entered for seven days, even if it meant saying, I did not practice today, or saying, I did not want to practice today, or saying, I forgot about practice today. Did not matter what they said. They had to go in, and they had to write.
And finally, this course, I said, I will not grade. It was self-graded, which meant they would grade themselves, but they have to come and tell me why they gave themselves the grade that they gave themselves. And if there was a big disparity, we would talk about it, and we would discuss and so forth.
What is fascinating, absolutely fascinating, is that we find in about third to four weeks, but by the time we come to about four and half weeks, there is an explosion of the types of journal entries that start coming through. Students move away from traditional typing of the entries to voice recordings, art. They started expressing it with art, video recordings, music, sound, and so forth. So something was happening.
Something started to shift for this group of 33 students who were taking the course for credit, where, for some reasons-- and now we are kind of going through those reasons as to why it could be, and that's why this project is so exciting-- is words we understand, the way we speak, the way we communicate, stopped working for them. It was not enough. It just did not emote what they needed to emote. And so they moved to these wide range of expressions in their entry format, which, by the way, I had allowed. And I had always said, if you wish to, I would be more than happy, and they took it. And that was fascinating.
So as we are now going through the 2,000 plus data entries that we have in front of us, and it's taking us a long time because Sarabinh and I, there are times we just kind of read maybe two sentences, and our minds are just absolutely blown. Like, what? We can't even believe it because what we are seeing is the use of aesthetic language. As I said, something transpired for these students where they were seeking for a richer and deeper vocabulary. So words like "vastness" and "expansiveness," or witnessing gravity in a different way, or feeling sounds, no longer hearing sounds.
So how do you start expressing feeling sounds? How do you start expressing when you start feeling the gravitational force changing under your very feet, even if it is momentarily? So in this project, the first objective we have is, if and what patterns emerge in meditative experiences. Second, what terms are being used to describe the experiences? And this is where it's just beautiful because we are realizing that we have to expand it. We cannot just say "terms" anymore, so we will have to even analyze colors. It's the patterns and colors they're using, or when they're saying certain words because they're recording themselves at this point, because they don't think they can write. What are what are some of the patterns we are starting to hear?
And what is the process of meaning making? I think this becomes extremely important because Charlie touched upon this in the context of the psychedelics and what happens when we're taking some of these plant medicines and experiencing the world in very multidimensional ways. We're seeing the same thing here. There are students who had a religious practice or a contemplative practice, so they are very quickly tapping into them. There is somewhat of a spiritual practice. Great, they tapped into that. There were somewhat aspirational religious or aspirational spiritual practice, they tried their best to happen to them. And then there were some who had neither.
And so we are trying to see what happens then. So if there is a Catholic student, is that student leaning more into the realm of Christianity, angels, Jesus, and God, and trying to make meaning? What's happening if there's a Buddhist student, Hindu students, Jewish student, and a student who is Muslim? How does that kind of integrate into language? So that's our first cut objective. We intend to get this completed by early Spring.
We would then want to look at, what is the risk and support that we need if we have to run this course at an university? So what is at stake in teaching a course which integrates embodied component of contemplative practices? Because what I very quickly realized-- and this is not something that was new to me, but at the same time, I did not realize the intensity of it. Saying, just because it is December 17 and the semester is over does not mean the course is over, does not mean the transformation of the student is over.
So now what happens? I'm still there, the student is still there, but the course number on the registrar's log may not be there. And therefore, do we have the support, the services that are required, to aid, to support, to help these students going through this transformation? What are some challenges, and what kind of boundaries are necessary? And therefore, what support structures are necessary? And therefore, what kind of policies, health and wellness that we need to talk about?
And as I said-- I cannot emphasize this enough-- semester end does not mean the course ends. A year later, I'm still working with several students because the transformation continues. The discovery process continues. The exploration continues. And therefore, what is the personal toll on the faculty. For example, me. What does that do to me when I have to still work with students, where officially, in some way, the course is over, and the University says the course is over? So we are going to be looking at that and in deeper depths.
And finally, we plan to propose, do some research on similar courses that may be taught in other higher institutions. And we know of a few where these courses are being taught. And finally, design a sample course on the larger topic of embodiment. And as we design this course, we do hope to apply this, bring this to a larger audience. We have some exciting plans of running maybe certain smaller workshops parallelly in the field, so that we can keep getting data back and forth.
Sarabinh and I are also talking about maybe returning to some of these students and asking them what happened. What happened since January 1? And today's October 3. The course is over, but what happened in the last 10 months? So that's our project. Again, thank you for joining, and we are very excited. And hopefully, you will see a book in the near future.
With that note, I will hand over to Michael Ennis, who will take it forward with his exciting project. Thank you once again.
MICHAEL ENNIS: Thank you, Sravana, for the introduction, and thank you, everyone, for being here this evening. I'll just begin by noting that it is a real privilege to be among such exciting scholars doing such exciting work in so many different fields.
Just briefly to expand on the biography that Charlie provided, I did my doctorate, my ThD here at the Harvard Divinity School. And prior to that, did an MTS here, so I've been here for quite a while. And it never ceases to be a source of wonder to me how many different kinds of minds the Harvard Divinity School can attract, and it's a real privilege.
Anyway, to get into my project, my project at the Center this year will examine the reception of the controversial third century Christian theologian, Origen of Alexandria. Now, you may well be asking yourself, who is Origen of Alexandria? I think that that question is best addressed with a picture, and I'll give you just a moment to look at it and note what you see.
If you look at the left hand of your screen, and you've got good eyesight, and you aced your early Christianity exam back in school, you will see many of the most famous names in Greek Christian theology in the 1st millennium. Maximus the Confessor, Gregory of Nazianzus, Cyril of Alexandria. The list goes on and on. And they are all paying rapt attention to this single figure on the right side of your screen, who is helpfully labeled in big letters, Origen of Alexandria. And he is holding a scroll that reads, attend above all else to the reading of the scriptures.
For reasons of space, I had to cut off the title of this image, but I think you would not be surprised to learn that it is called "Origen Teaching the Saints." But look for just a moment longer, and one interesting detail may stand out to you. All of the members of Origen's audience have halos around their heads. That is the traditional Christian iconographic convention for portraying a saint. They are the saints of the church. But Origen himself does not have a halo. Although he is teaching the saints, he is not among their number.
My project is an examination of the history of this paradox. It's a complicated story that spans several centuries and some of the great names of the early Christian church. Origen is most famous as a teacher of biblical interpretation. Remember the scroll, attend above all else to the reading of the scriptures. But reading the scriptures in the third century, just like it is in the 21st century, is a practice likely to raise questions. In fact, more likely to raise more questions than it is necessarily to build faith.
Why does God give Israel so many exacting rules about clothing and food in Leviticus? Was it just for God to punish the pharaoh by killing the firstborn son of every Egyptian family in Exodus? Should Christians even care at all about the Hebrew Bible, the set of books they call the Old Testament? This last was not a theoretical question in Origen's own lifetime. There were some movements of the early church which rejected the Hebrew Bible, and even saw the God depicted within as an evil being opposed to the good God of Jesus Christ.
Origen rejected this opposition. To him, the whole Bible was both divinely inspired and Christian. To prove this and to resolve difficult passages, he developed a robust method of scriptural interpretation. He allowed, of course, that there was a surface level meaning to the Bible that told the origins of humanity in a garden, the selection of Abraham to father a chosen nation, the giving of the law to this nation at Mount Sinai, the founding and later the fall of a kingdom, and so on and so forth. But this was just one level, and for Origen, not nearly the most important level of the Bible.
Origen taught that there were three levels of meaning within the biblical text. Below this literal surface level, there was a deeper level of moral meanings, the soul, as he calls it, of the biblical text. This taught the reader how to behave rightly in a Christian manner. To take-- just I'm coining two examples here-- the story of Cain and Abel could be read as a moral tale against the dangers of jealousy. The Levitical law against eating pigs could be read as a coded way of cautioning against gluttony.
But even further beneath this moral soul level was the spiritual meaning of the text, the truest purpose of the scriptures. This dealt with eternal cosmic realities, the origins of the soul, the nature of the world around us, and the highest goal of Christian life, namely reunion with God. Moreover, for Origen, these meanings are not merely lying passively within the text. Instead, the Holy Spirit, through the text of the Bible itself, is actively trying to draw readers in to the deeper spiritual truths.
Whenever the Bible doesn't make sense on a surface level, or records something that seems obviously impossible or immoral or self-contradictory, Origen claims that these problems were deliberately woven into the text so that the reader would, upon encountering them, be driven to explore more deeply. Instead of rejecting the absurdities of the literal text, Origen embraces them and claims that the believer should be transformed by them and learn to read on this deeper spiritual level.
And by the way, the word "transformation" I chose deliberately, and not merely for a thematic connection to tonight's event. Origen does not believe that this act of spiritual reading merely provides the Christian with new knowledge of spiritual facts. Rather, it changes the person who engages in this practice, taking them out of the mundane world and integrating them into a higher spiritual way of being.
Origen's method of reading was profoundly influential on nearly all subsequent Christian writers. That's the reason for that icon. Origen taught the saints how to read the Bible. Indeed, if the idea of the Bible holding spiritual truths and nonliteral meanings doesn't surprise you, it doesn't seem particularly shocking or revolutionary. this is in no small part a testament to Origen's lasting influence on all subsequent Christian history.
And yet, I called him a controversial figure. And yet, Origen has no halo. How did this come about? Well, in large measure, it can be attributed to timing. Origen wrote in the third century before the great councils of the fourth century formalized a lot of Christian doctrine. The third century was in some ways a more freewheeling time doctrinally than what came after, and Origen accordingly was a very daring and speculative theologian.
When he described the highest levels of scripture as pointing to spiritual realities, he sometimes means things by those spiritual realities that seemed out of sorts with later Christian doctrine. Origen speculates that we were all created originally as minds, designed to contemplate God. When, through the sin of pride, we began to contemplate not God, but ourselves, we fell away, eventually becoming imprisoned, as it were, in our bodies until we learn to contemplate God again more perfectly.
He also seems to believe that angels and demons, too, were originally minds, and the one group simply fell less than we did, and the other fell more than we did. He even seems to speculate that it might be possible, since we and angels and demons were originally just minds, for human beings to become angels and demons based on our conduct in this life. Origen, moreover, is skeptical of the resurrection of the body. Since the body of flesh is a prison or teaching tool for us, we will not need it in the resurrection. Indeed, we are going to transcend this material existence and become a spiritual or intellectual body in communion with God.
Origen also seems to believe that all of creation is on a path towards this kind of divinization. It is a long and slow path, one that might even proceed through multiple, for want of a better word, reincarnations. But eventually, everyone will be saved and reunited with God. Everyone. Not only all humans, mind you. Even the demons, even the devil himself, will one day be restored. Origen does not teach all this dogmatically. Rather, as I said, he speculates and grounds his speculation in careful reading of the Bible.
And yet, after the doctrinal controversies and developments of the fourth century, a lot of this material became more difficult for Orthodox Christianity to accept. Things came to a head at the end of the fourth century in the so-called first Origenist controversy, and that is the subject of my project. What's fascinating about this controversy is that all of the participants agree about the value of Origen as a biblical interpreter. None of them want to jettison him altogether.
And yet, it becomes a very heated argument between two parties about what else to take from Origen. One party wants to protect him from the claim of heresy by doing one of two things. Either they will claim that some of these daring and speculative things weren't actually originally Origen at all. They were interpolated later by heretics to discredit him. Others, meanwhile, seem to want to maintain some of that speculative energy, even after the doctrinal controversies have settled. They don't want to get rid of that more freewheeling style because they see it as central to the practice of spiritual interpretation.
On the other hand, you have a separate party, and this one led by the famous Saint Jerome, the translator of the Bible from Hebrew into Latin, who, although he is perfectly willing to maintain that Origen is a great teacher when it comes to how to interpret the Bible, wants to jettison all of this more controversial speculative material. In the end, Jerome's party largely won the day, and their negative assessment of Origen's teaching informed Origen's reception down to modernity and accounts for his lack of saintly status.
My project this year is a study of this late fourth century controversy. It's a fascinating and exciting project in itself purely as history. Indeed, there are elements of a detective story to it because much of what we know about Origen's teaching is mediated to us not by his own Greek words, but by Latin translations that were made by competing parties in the fourth century controversy. So if, like me, you're a bit of a nerd for Greek and Latin, there's a lot of material to sink your teeth into here, just on that philological level. Teasing out the biases and differences of methods that went into these translations is exciting and might reshape something of what we understand about the state of Christianity at the end of the fourth century.
But the controversy also raises interesting questions for religious groups today. How should contemporary authority shape our assessments of prior authorities and our own textual history? How should we go about the practice of historical retrieval of earlier thinkers? Should we appropriate only what is good in our eyes and leave the rest to lie forgotten? Should we appropriate them in all their complexity, regardless of what that means for the stability of our own contemporary practice?
Stripping these questions of their ancient Christian particulars, I think they are ones that all traditions must, from time to time, contend with. And I believe that the legacy of Origen of Alexandria and the history of the first Origenist controversy may have interesting things to say about the promises and the pitfalls of precisely these kinds of historical retrievals.
So thank you all. That is the project that I will be working on this year. I expect it to eventuate in a book. And I am now going to hand the baton on to Michael Ferguson.
MICHAEL FERGUSON: All righty. So my name is Michael Ferguson, and as has been discussed, I am working in an emerging field termed neurospirituality. A question that I'm often asked is, why do you care what neuroscience says about spirituality? And this is a type of question that I receive on a fairly regular basis. But depending on which side of the Charles River I happen to be located on, when someone asks me the question, it is likely to mean one of two very different things.
If I'm on the Longwood Medical Campus, the question, why do you care what neuroscience says about spirituality, may mean something like this. The National Institutes of Health don't fund big projects on spirituality. We need to solve Alzheimer's disease. Why aren't you dedicating more of your time to medically urgent and more generously funded research problems? The unifying thesis statement underlying these types of sentiments is, there is no big reveal waiting for us in spirituality studies.
However, if I'm in my other universe at Harvard Divinity School on the Cambridge side of the Charles River, the question, why do you care what neuroscience says about spirituality, may mean something more like, why are you trying to harsh my mellow? Do we really need another scientist telling us that spirituality is an illusion and that religion is a delusion? The things that really matter can't be explained materially. The thesis statement underlying these sentiments is, there is no big reveal waiting for us in neuroscience.
I've told some of my friends before that what most makes me queer isn't the fact that I'm married to a man. Especially if queerness is ultimately represented by living orthogonally to a norm, my attractions to neurospirituality and my identity as a scholar-practitioner represent the queerest aspects of my soul. This orthogonality may sometimes cause me to grow sideways, while other colleagues seem to be growing straight upward and to live in a liminal twilight that I wager anticipates dawn rather than dusk.
I came to this particular queerness honestly, though. Belief, miracles, and spirit were the fabric of my upbringing, woven together from Joseph Smith's Egyptian cotton and produced with the highest thread count possible on the curious loom of Mormonism. In my adulthood, these same fine-twined linens would become burial cloths for a faith whose death. I still grieve. And yet, in the similitude of a great Christian paradox, the belly of death became a womb.
Today, at this point in my life, right here and right now in front of your eyes, I am chasing a spirit that is chasing me. I don't expect all of my colleagues, friends, or family to completely understand an interior resurrection that I myself don't fully comprehend. But the spirit is vital, and the chase, irresistible to me.
As a graduate student in Bioengineering at the University of Utah, I had the unique opportunity to use Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging technology, or fMRI, to look inside the brains of believing Latter-day Saints when they were reading scripture and praying. These faithful LDS research participants had a button box, somewhat inelegantly attached to their chest, while they were reclining with their heads carefully positioned inside a comically large brain scanning machine. So that at the literal press of a button, they could indicate to us in real time the moments when they perceived that God was speaking to them.
I go more deeply into the description and some interpretation of these findings in my TEDx talk titled "This is Your Brain on God," which you can readily find on YouTube using the search string, "this is your brain on God." For me, the most important discovery of my first neurospirituality experiment was not which neural correlates survive rigorous statistical thresholds following a computational analysis of the brain images that we collected while participants were feeling the spirit. Rather, the most important discovery for me from my first neurospirituality experiment was the fact itself that any neural correlates survived rigorous statistical thresholds in the analysis of these brain images.
Following a postdoctoral fellowship in Cognitive Neuroscience at Cornell University and a hot love affair with the mind of Aristotle, I became persuaded that philosophical accounts of scientific results are essential. I remain further convicted that neither the eliminative reductivism of an unexamined scientific hegemony nor the commonplace substance dualism occupying so much contemporary religion provide comfortable or sufficient wisdom garb for the developing body of neurospirituality research.
My default philosophical positions these days assume postures of hylomorphism, which is a paradigm that emphasizes the crucial unity of substance and form and postulates soul as the form of the body. On days when my intellect is especially limber, I enjoy stretching my mind into positions of hylomorphic panpsychism, which not only holds a significant the substance form unity hypothesis, but also speculates that there is some elemental way in which material existence is ensouled.
I'm thrilled to share that I'm currently launching a first of its kind scientific study of an ancient prayer tradition from contemplative Christianity, known as hesychasm. This hesychastic prayer study will recruit a nationally representative sample of self-identified Christians who will be introduced to this ancient form of Christian contemplative prayer to examine various quantitative and qualitative outcomes resulting from initiation into an adoption of this spiritual practice. My hope is that this will be the start of not just a one-off individual research project, but rather what will eventually become an entire research program dedicated to scientifically exploring the contour and substance of world contemplative traditions.
Lastly, I'll at least nod to the early and tender shoots growing from the spirituality seeds that have been planted in the foreign soils of Theology and History, and which I'm grateful to tend, fertilize, and water with the help of kind colleagues for whom Theology and History are native countries of their mind. I'm grateful for their generous hospitality, as we consider the Imago Dei in a brain image, or contemplate social history as an outward amplification of inward neural drama.
For example, my published scientific work has illuminated an unexpected association between multiple aspects of spirituality and a brain stem circuit grounded in a region called the periaqueductal gray. This finding was published this year in the journal Biological Psychiatry, which is currently the highest impact psychiatry journal in the world. The report was featured as the journal's cover story for its print edition and became one of the top five most downloaded articles from all issues of the journal published this past year.
The Periaqueductal Gray, or PAG for short, was a data-driven finding that replicated across multiple independent data sets, and which I'm happy to say, appears to continue replicating across new data that I'm presently analyzing. Although it was an unexpected finding derived from data-driven discovery science, the PAG, as a brain circuit hub of human spirituality, promises to tell us a richly humane story, given its dual roles of mediating both fear conditioning and altruistic love.
I am a self-professed neophyte in both Theology and History, but indulge me to submit for your consideration that both the personal and the social trajectories of spiritual development might, in at least some ways and in some contexts, be described in terms of the processes through which fear is transcended and transformed into love. How striking, then, to see a science of spirituality, which orients us to the very substrates of our own brain where these exact processes are being worked out.
In conclusion, we don't know what we don't know. But mysteries of brain and mysteries of spirit are deep, rich, and vital. It is exactly the type of multidisciplinary approach engaged by my colleagues in this Transcendence and Transformation cohort that we need to adopt in order to bask in the life-giving light of divine darkness.
Thank you all so much for being here for this opportunity. And with that, I will pass it on to my final colleague here for concluding our session together.
SHIRAZ HAJIANI: Thank you, Michael. Good evening. And as the last person to go, it feels almost like the warm-up bands are done, but in reality, having heard what we have heard, this is clearly me playing out while the credits are rolling. So here we go. And given that this is a virtual room, I'm imagining that all of you are smirking right now at that, and some of you are laughing as well.
So let me get into what I'm talking about what I'm researching. I study the Nizari Isma'ili polity, which is a Shi'i community, and particularly in Iran between 1090 and 1256. And my research at CSWR and the T&T project is to examine The Great Resurrection, something that I have worked on in my dissertation. And this is a fantastic opportunity to work with some great colleagues and learn from them and advance my own research. And Inshallah, there will be a book in the near future.
So the qiyamah [? buzurg ?] The Great Resurrection, or the Qiyamah al Qiyamat, the Resurrection of Resurrections, what is it? It's a complex set of eschatological doctrines that were developed by the Isma'ilis over centuries, and we'll talk about when and how. And it is also an event that takes place on the 17th of Ramadan, Ramadan being the month of fasting, and this equates to the 15th of August 1164.
And my project is basically to look at what are the elements of transcendence? And how does transformation manifest at the individual level, at the communal level? And what are the continuing repercussions, if you will, or remnants of this? So if there is time, perhaps I will also try and weave in a brief introduction to the Nizari Isma'ilis into this short presentation.
So what are the perspectives that I'm taking? Let me start off with that. And the reason why I'm doing this is, I was teaching this earlier today. I had two hours to cover this topic. And about when I was getting right into the deep end, a fire alarm went off. So I'm switching gears and presenting the key points first, just in case the fire alarm goes off again.
So what is my perspective? Looking at this event that took place in August of 1164, most of the scholars-- and there are about four scholars, and Henry Corbin, who was mentioned earlier, is one of them who have studied this event-- and what they do is they compact the notions of theology, of eschatology, into this one event. And what I do is I turn the cone sideways, and I slice it in time frames. So my approach is to unravel the compounded layers of theology, cosmology, and materiality. And I want to map this discourse between the [? zuhurists ?] and the [? satrist ?] and I'll explain who they are in just a moment.
And what I want to understand is, what are their views of sacred? This is something that all of my colleagues are doing in various different ways, and this is something that I want to focus on as well. And I want to place the Isma'ili Nizari Shi'i messianic eschatological thinking into the wider framework of human notions of cosmology and soteriology.
So this is kind of my schematic version of how the Isma'ilis developed-- and this is something that can be applied to other religious traditions as well-- how the Isma'ilis have a worldview and develop it. So the dotted line is a division between the spiritual realm and the material world. Material world, we know, but the understanding of monotheistic traditions, at least, is that there is the creator. And from that creator emerges this multiplicity that exists in the universe and our world.
So the cosmology of the Isma'ilis is informed and formulated at a time when Greek thought, Persian thought, is being adopted and developed further in the Islamic context in the eighth century. And there is a weaving together of notions of Neoplatonic thought, some Aristotelian thought, along with-- and it's being synthesized and reconciled with their notions of history as well as revelation, revelation in particular of the Qur'an, but also the Judeo-Christians texts. And there's an influence of Zoroastrian thought as well because of the context of where this is happening. This is happening in Iran and Central Asia.
So this cosmology has a notion of a drama in heaven, that God is beyond all understanding, all contemplation. He does not have any characteristics that we humans can contemplate. And the creative moment is, God says, Kun, Faya Kun. Be, and it is. That's seven letters, and you will see the number 7 repeatingly. And from there, the whole of the pleroma develops until the earthly creation takes place, and the universe manifests as we know it.
So that leads us to the understanding of where we are. But on the left hand side of the screen is the updraft, that there is a notion of eschatological end and the soteriology. How does salvation take place? How does that chasm between creator and the created, how is that gap filled? How is that chasm filled? How's that chasm bridged?
And in the Islamicate context, especially the Isma'ilis working in the eighth and ninth century with especially Neoplatonic influences, they're looking at the Qur'an. And I have Qur'an chapter 7, verse 172. An exegesis of that is, God speaking to the uncreated creation, and God says, am I not your Lord. And the response is not, yes, OK. But it's [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]. Yes, indeed. So this is a total accord of creator and creation.
And then the creation comes about. And looking back at the history, especially the history embedded within the Qur'an and the Bible, both the Hebrew and the Christian Bibles, the Isma'ili scholars are contemplating a helical structure, that Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad are part of this continuum where Muhammad is supposed to have said that there are 124,000 prophets. Adam being the first, and he, Muhammad would be the last.
And so within this, the conception is that each one of these great prophets brought a new dispensation. And at the end of that dispensation, a new prophet emerges, and that new dispensation will last for a length of time. In some conceptions, it's a millennial perspective, so 1,000 years. But Muhammad said that he's the last, so what happens from here?
The idea is that an eschatological entity, an eschatological intervention, is necessary at this point. So the concept of the Mahdi, the Rightly Guided One, or the Qaim, the One Who Brings about the Resurrection, is something that entered into Islamic thought. And the idea is that this agent of the end of times is going to come and is going to restore justice where there's injustice, equality where there's inequality.
And so the Isma'ilis conceptualize this helical structure of the past, and in this conception, each one of these law bringers is followed by seven individuals who are going to then provide the esoteric teaching of the exoteric law, the inner truths of the outer law. And these imams-- imam means leader-- these imams may be hidden. They may be concealed, or they may be manifest. And the seventh of them is going to rise up and be a lawgiver.
Now, I'm going to show this in the context of the era of Muhammad. And Muhammad is succeeded in the Shi'i conception. His authority is inherited by his cousin and son-in-law, Ali, and then successively in his genealogy. And some of these imams I will show here are in concealment because of their own safety or the safety of their followers. And then to come out of this period of [? satr, ?] concealment, there is a need of an eschatological cosmological shift.
So the Fatimid Empire, which starts in 909, the first of the imams who emerges out of concealment is construed to be the Mahdi, the messianic figure. And this dynasty continues up until 1171, but there is a dynastic succession crisis in 1095. And I study that group called the Nizaris because the imam who gives them the name was named Nizar.
Nizar was executed in Cairo in 1095, and his followers mainly existed in Iran. And they believed that the successors of Nizar were in concealment, these individuals who were the access to the interpretation of truth and would bring the followers to their spiritual elevation, to be able to themselves return, as it were. And these imams were in concealment on the 17th of Ramadan in the year 559, halfway during the month of fasting.
An event takes place in the Caspian region at the fortress, which is the headquarters of the Nizaris. This was the Qiyamah al Qiyamat or The Great Resurrection. So what is this? And here's just a map to show you where Nizar was executed in Cairo and at Alamut where the event that I'm talking about takes place. This is the polity. It extends from 1090 to 1256. In 1256, the fortress was destroyed, and the communities of Isma'ilis were massacred by the Mongols.
So the writings about this era and the difficulty that I have to navigate is much of the writing is through historians who were avowed-- who had avowed antipathy towards the Isma'ilis. So I have to do a forensic analysis of these texts to extract the remaining traces of the thought of the Nizaris. And I have a handful of texts that have been published that pertain to this era. In fact, I have myself discovered a text, which I'll be presenting on November 3 through the Al-walid Seminar Series, which speaks to this time.
So as you can see at the bottom of the screen, there is a block there saying, satr. The imams are concealed between 1095 and 1164. And in the yellow box in the middle of the screen, the qiyamah [? buzurg, ?] The Great Resurrection, is proclaimed. And from then on, the imam is known. And the idea here is that paradise is realized, that the imam has brought his followers to the point of being in the presence of God. And historically, there are other periods of this concealment and revelation of this teacher figure who brings one to truth.
So what happens on this date? It is the middle of the month of fasting. At noon, there's a pulpit structured so that the congregation's backs will be towards Mecca. Typically, the congregation faces Mecca when they pray. And the person who is the head of the polity reads out a khutbah, a sermon, which is purportedly a message from the concealed imam. After this, the people broke their fast, there was merriment, and celebratory prayers were said. And the leader of the community at that time was recognized as the eschatological figure. Then the epithet, Alayhi as-salaam, on whose name be peace, is attached to him. And the subsequent rulers of this polity became the imams.
In that proclamation, he talks about the time of the resurrector of The Great Resurrection. He says that this person is the lord of everything, is the absolute Lord. He is the negation of the physical existence. He is glorious and omniscient. Every prophet in their time pointed towards the imam, and this imam was pleased to show his holy essence during these times. But there were times when the imams would be concealed, and that was a test for the followers.
So this is what I'm looking at. I'm looking at this eschatological thought that has Judeo-Christian Zoroastrian messianism as an undercurrent. And here is kind of a tracking of how this thought percolates through in Islamic eschatological messianic thinking. And it is not something that just happens in the past, but it persists into the present, so many of these communities are living with their notions of the Messiah and eschatological Savior. And there are a raft of Shi'i and Sunni sociopolitical movements today that we hear about, that are talking in messianic language, that have an imminent expectation.
So what I'm trying to do is, I'm trying to place this event that takes place in 1164, the thinking of this community, I'm trying to place it within the wider understanding of not just Islamicate, but also human understandings of theology and the end of times. And my approach differs from the four or five books that have been written about this topic, in that people look at this cone from, I guess, the circle perspective, and this event becomes a single event. And the Nizaris are seen as abandoning the world and saying, we are the elite, and the damned, rest of society. And later on, there are fluctuations that when the period of [? satr ?] is reinvoked, that this becomes a temporary dissimulation.
My approach is different. I look at it as a very complex process of theological development, and there are some internal discourses taking place. There are people who want the manifestation of this salvific figure. And yet, there are others who hesitate. There is a lot of study of why there is this urge for the salvific figure to come, but not of the people who say, well, let's stay with that. Let's stay in this moment where the imam is not known.
So I'm interested in studying that. I'm interested in studying why and how the [? satrist ?] viewed the abrogation of the previous dispensation. And how do [? zuhurists, ?] then, in the 1240s, almost a century after the events took place in Alamut? They are going and building up this doctrinal theology that constructs a notion that gives us that specularity that I pointed to earlier, that a very deep understanding of cosmology and an urgent perspective of soteriology, that the Earth needs to have a realignment, that the Earth needs to be in perfection, and we need to return to that moment of perfect accord between creator and the creation.
And I will end here, but I want to say that over the last couple of weeks, I found a paper that I had written in a class that, Charlie, you were the TA for, and it was a paper comparing Origen and Ibn Sina's understandings of the soul. I wouldn't give myself a very good grade now, but at that time, it was lovely to get an A-minus. So with that, it's lovely to be back home at HDS, and I am so delighted to be part of this project. Thank you, for all the people I'm working with, and thank you for those of you who stayed on to listen.
CHARLES STANG: Thank you so much, Shiraz. What a wonderful end to the paper, that surprise. So Shiraz and I have known each other for 20 years when we were both students here at Harvard Divinity School, and I had the privilege of being a teaching fellow at the course he took. And what a wonderful synchronicity that the paper you wrote was on Origen of Alexandria, and here is Michael Ennis' his report on that very figure.
What a wonderfully rich array of topics from these five affiliates. There are other affiliates that we have not introduced tonight because they are ongoing. This is their second, or in some cases, third year with the initiative, with the Center. You can find out about all of them on our website, and that's also where you can find out about all of our upcoming events. Well, in fact, our events calendar will soon be populated.
As I mentioned before, we have a staff shortage right now, but rest assured, events are coming. Giovanna's Gnoseologies series, as I mentioned, is underway this semester. Several events. And I know Michael Ferguson and I will be on an event in early November, celebrating the release of David Yaden and Andrew Newberg's new book called The Varieties of Spiritual Experience, I believe. In many ways, a follow up to William James' famous landmark study from the early 20th century.
So I want to thank the five affiliates that spoke, Barakatullo, Sravana, Michael, Michael, and Shiraz. Thank you so much. I want to thank the audience for sticking with us for this hour and a half. And as always-- I believe this is now in the chat-- the best way to keep abreast of what we're doing here at the center is to join our mailing list. We promise we won't share your address with anyone. And it will be a weekly newsletter letting you know what we're up to.
So without further ado, I will conclude this evening. I wish you all a wonderful evening. And thank you, once again, for joining us. And do stick around for the future of T&T. Good night.
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