I grew up by the shores of Lake Michigan. We used to play a game in the summer time. At the beach we would try to smash through the waves that crashed upon the shore. For some reason I really enjoyed the body-shaking feeling of a wave reverberating through my bones. As I think back on it now, I was communing with the superhuman force of ocean currents.

Much later in my life I was exposed to the more gruesome power of such waves. I was part of a team conducting an ethnography of a series of coastal villages in Northwestern Papua New Guinea that were wiped away by a tsunami. We were trying to understand how people in the community dealt with the trauma of that event.

In the short story, “The Seventh Man” Haruki Murakami describes a wave as a doorway into the “other world” that characterizes many of his stories. The other world is the world of thought, dreams, death, and imagination. The story is about a man whose childhood friend was swept away by a giant wave. Two waves came; the first one swept his friend K away. Then, the narrator admits, something slightly unbelievable or counter-intuitive happened when the second wave hit:

In the tip of the wave, as if enclosed in some kind of transparent capsule, floated K’s body, reclining on its side. But that is not all. K was looking straight at me, smiling. There, right in front of me, close enough so that I could have reached out and touched him, was my friend, my friend K who, only moments before, had been swallowed by the wave. And he was smiling at me. Not with an ordinary smile—it was a big, wide-open grin that literally stretched from ear to ear. His cold, frozen eyes were locked on mine. He was no longer the K I knew. And his right arm was stretched out in my direction, as if he were trying to grab my hand and pull me into that other world where he was now. A little closer, and his hand would have caught mine. But, having missed, K then smiled at me one more time, his grin wider than ever.

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I don’t know what spirituality is, but when I think of the word, I think of waves—thought waves.

Because I am interested in the materiality of thought and its medium, I often ask myself: what is thought made of? What is its material?

Perhaps thought is like a sound wave.

Certainly one medium of thought is sound waves. Thought travels in sound waves.

Sound waves are waves of pressure. Like most waves in nature, sound waves must propagate in a medium, for example air or water (sound traveling in such media has different properties depending on the medium).

Perhaps thoughts, like sound, need to travel in a medium. Or maybe they work differently, like light, and do not need a medium at all.

In former centuries physicists looked in vein for the medium in which light traveled; they called this imaginary medium aether. Then physicists discovered that light can travel in a vacuum, that light does not need a medium. Indeed, light was its own medium. Here was a paradox on many levels: light as both matter and wave, a matter-wave. Sometimes light has properties of matter—photons can move other pieces of matter like a billiard ball. And sometimes it has properties of waves—it can be refracted, reflected, interfered etc…

Perhaps thought has this dual nature too.

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As William James said: “our brains are colored lenses in the wall of nature, admitting light from the super-solar source.” James was giving a lecture at Harvard on the subject of human immortality. When James spoke of spirituality or the spiritual he meant consciousness. James was trying to deal with the problem of consciousness, the so-called “hard problem” about how the brain relates to consciousness. We are not that much further along now than we were 100 years ago when James gave his speech.

Image provided courtesy of all-about-pyschology.com

James thought sense could be made of the idea of immortality, that some version of consciousness could be thought to survive death. Or at least he thought that brain death was not necessarily the complete death of consciousness. Perhaps there was some general form of consciousness, one consciousness, that beamed like light. James speculated that brains were lenses that changed the nature of that light and created individual consciousness. Brains, then, did not cause thoughts or consciousness (in what he called a productive function); instead brains had a transmissive function, akin to how vocal chords constrain air to produce a voice but do not themselves produce the voice.

James challenged those puritans of science who thought that the brain produces consciousness. “’Thought is a function of the brain’” for them– just as, “’Steam is a function of the tea-kettle,’ [or] ‘Light is a function of the electric circuit,’ [or] ‘Power is a function of the moving waterfall’.”

In contrast, those who thought the brain had a transmissive function saw the brain as an apparatus for letting consciousness loose upon the world.

James looked to Shelley’s Adonaïs: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats, Author of Endymion, Hyperion, etc in order to make his point: “Life, like a dome of many-colored glass,/Stains the white radiance of eternity” (stanza 52). The brain, according to James, was a threshold like this many-colored glass.

The Greek subtitle of Shelley’s poem is from the Epigram on Aster, which Shelley was translating at the time of Keats’ death: “Thou wert the morning star among the living,/Ere thy fair light had fled;/Now, having died, thou art as Hesperus, giving/New splendour to the dead.”

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I live in Europe where the frequency in which power utilities transmit electricity, that is, waves of electrons, or electric charge, is 50 Hz. In most places, in other words, a wave of electrons cycles 50 times per second.

If an ocean wave hit the shore 6 times every minute, its frequency would be .1 times per second, or .1 Hz.

A heart with a pulse of 60 beats per minute is 1 Hz.

The US transmits electricity at 60 Hz. The waves hit 10 times more times per second than in Europe.

In either case, the pulses are coming too fast to perceive consciously. But, if you record your TV with a video camera, in most cases you will observe a pulsating, flicker effect due to the difference between the frequencies of the recording device and the 50 or 60 Hz. pulse of the television.

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I had a student last year who was allergic to “electricity, electromagnetic radiation, and wireless internet.” She lives in a home completely free of electricity, except for an old computer she uses for limited periods each week. I never saw her; we communicated exclusively by email.

James would have appreciated the situation of my former student. Her example suggests not only that thoughts are embodied, but that thoughts are physical things—or at least, that they exist at a physical level. This example also suggests how human thought is closely bound to technology, that it is connected to our electrified universe. In the case of my former student, the most likely culprit is the technologically produced electrical energy interfering with the electrical and chemical pathways that regulate homeostasis in her brain and body, in her psyche and soma.

Some of this may sound strange, until one considers that waves themselves also carry energy. Photons, for example, are the fundamental unit of light; they propagate with different frequencies that are characteristic of different forms of electromagnetic radiation or energy.

The Electromagnetic Spectrum by XKCD

Unlike light, utility power is transmitted by moving an electrical charge; that is, a wave of electrically charged particles. Such a wave generates a magnetic field.

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Neuroscience is a young field, just at the beginning. The physics, nuts, and bolts mechanical processes of the brain are pretty well understood. Signals within the body and brain are composed of chemical variations and electrical changes. Though there are many types of communication within the brain, a most basic one is composed of neurons. Neurons create electrical potentials that “fire” and propagate throughout the brain. The patterns of firing in the brain can also be described as “waves”. Unlike the electric wave that is transmitted on a power line, the medium of transmission of brain waves are cells, biological material. However, as in the case of my former student, it is possible that such biological material can be destabilized by electromagnetic energy from other sources.

We know a bit more about what is going on inside brains today than we did in James’s day because we have more reliable ways of locating and measuring the electric waves and magnetic fields noted above, the core media of the brain’s activity. For example, the best and most recent brain scanning equipment, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), measures the magnetic properties of oxygen molecules in the brain. It works because hemoglobin, the most important blood protein, changes its magnetic properties depending on how much oxygen it contains. The body delivers oxygen molecules to parts of the brain that need to do more work. So fMRI does not actually measure brain activity directly but rather blood flow in the brain (changes in oxygenation).

Instead of oxygen flow, another type of brain scan called Electroencephalography (EEG), measures electricity generated by the brain. While fMRI is good at scale (spatial dimension) it is not as good as EEG at time (temporal dimension); that is, fMRI technology is too slow to capture neural processes (because it measures them indirectly by blood flow). EEG, by contrast, captures electrical signals in real time. However, EEG is limited because it only captures electrical energy at the scalp—it does not reach deep into the brain.

So EEG captures the wave pattern of firing neurons. In popular understanding these are called brain waves, but scientists call them neural oscillations. The terminology is probably reflective of the fact that brain waves are associated with the unverified notion that such waves travel outside the brain (that is, between brains). By contrast neural oscillations only apply within brains.

The patterns researchers have found in humans are usually localized (meaning they take place at characteristic places in the brain) and tend to take place during certain types of activities. For example, delta waves are characteristic for adults in slow wave or non-REM sleep and in some attention tasks; theta waves are characteristic of encoding and retrieval in memory and inhibition; alpha waves are associated with focusing of attention. A rhythmic firing pattern of up to 4 Hz. (4 cycles per second) is a delta wave, then there are theta (4-8), alpha (8-13), mu (8-13), beta (13-30), and gamma (30-100) frequencies.

Recent theories suggest that the “neural correlates” of various conscious states are not particular neurons but rather these patterns or waves firing in synchrony. The excitement over the recent discovery of mirror neurons—a type of neuron that fires both when an action is observed and when an individual performs the same action—is that they suggest such synchrony of firing is not confined to individual heads. Brain waves might not move between brains but people may still share patterns of neural activity.

Such an idea was probably first proposed by Gerald Edelman who argued that the “dynamic core” of consciousness is synchronous firing occurring globally across many brain areas. Local waves become part of consciousness when integrated into that global synchrony. Gamma waves in particular have been a focus of attention in this regard.

So like James, Edleman’s is a holistic conception of consciousness, but grounded in neuroscience.

One’s perspective on consciousness, of course, is a politico-historical subject.

To be sure, James’s view is thoroughly modern. However, counter to a neo-liberal view of consciousness, James’s “downward” view suggests that the purpose of thought is not necessarily to help human beings transact or trade. Thought does not exist simply to help singular human beings get the best deal out of things. Indeed, James’s version figures brains as getting in the way of consciousness.

Catastrophic waves, electromagnetic allergies, and brain scans are part and parcel of the present moment when we are recognizing the dual nature of thought: its physical and “spiritual” nature. Our conception of consciousness should follow something like James’s model. A conscious self is physical, and yet not necessarily some kind of automated machine. Like my former student, such selves are deeply affected and implicated in the material world, identical to it, yet paradoxically outside it.

I am sure that I share this experience with many people who work in Native Studies, or in the study of indigenous religions at least. I often find myself meeting people and then having to field their inappropriate responses after hearing what I “do.” To be more specific, people seem to have absolutely no idea how their responses evidence a totalizing colonial mindset. A sample dialogue:

Oh, a professor, how interesting! What do you teach?

I primarily teach courses in Native Studies, or courses about indigenous peoples around the globe.

That’s interesting. I also feel deeply connected to American Indians. I love Sedona and Santa Fe. I guess I’m just a spiritual person.

The last sentence has some variation, including “I like how they have a spiritual connection to the earth.”

What makes this, in my mind, one of the most challenging of colonial mindsets is that such perceptions of native people are fostered by how indigenous people around the world represent themselves. Due to the on-going theft of native lands, indigenous people have used the linguistic framings of “sacred” property and “spiritual” connections to the land and to “nature” as key articulations of their own sovereignty. The thought was that such framing devices would help land claims cases. Whether a serious matter of internal colonization or simply the attempt to communicate to cultural outsiders in terms the outsiders might better understand, the connection between spirituality and indigenous people runs deep in history. Over and over, scholars have shown that the earliest representations of native people that circulated throughout the 17th and 18th centuries were that they lacked civilization and therefore were somehow untainted by the material concerns for possessions, laws, and capitalism. During these same early reports, indigenous peoples of the Americas (and other lands), were portrayed as some sort of animal-human hybrids, close to nature, more wild than fully evolved people. In the worse cases they were cannibalistic monsters; in more romantic characterizations, they were children of nature. Michael Taussig demonstrated how such projections excused the othering and killing of indigenous peoples in South America in one century, and then provided the “magic of primitivism” in a later era, both parts constituting the project of colonization. And yet, in the first quarter of the 21st century, little has changed. One can draw fairly quickly a direct line from the earliest and most racist views of indigenous peoples to the mascots, Navajo designed fashions of Urban Outfitters, Halloween costumes of American Indians, and the continued legal theft of indigenous lands across the globe.

Historically, we can now look back and see how modernity was perhaps defined by a yearning to make sense of everything in categorical and typological fashion. From Darwin’s desire to categorize everything to the creation of academic disciplines, the world not only could be understood, but there was a category for everything and everything belonged in its place. The most basic of these categorical distinctions is a binary: mind/body, body/spirit, us/them, knowledge/belief, black/white, straight/gay, etc. These dichotomies are often a sign of elementary thinking: we begin with basics, including basic ways to differentiate between two things.

But as our own lives prove time and time again: life is messy. Boundaries break down. Borders are porous. And still, these false binaries continue to frame legal practices and the sciences, and therefore have serious consequences for subjugated or marginalized peoples. Western man has logic; ethnic people have beliefs. Western man has History and Science and other people have folklore, mythology, and superstition.

I want to be very careful about terms that imply dichotomies, or binaries that falsely construct an order that then divide the world into one thing and then (vs.) another. Allow me to use a binary myself, that of spirit vs. matter, to illustrate my point. When non-indigenous people claim a connection to indigenous people due to their spirituality, they are almost never connected to indigenous people due to their materiality. In fact, this is exactly the allusion that people unconsciously mean to accentuate. They are saying that they are interested in, reading about, and consuming indigenous non-materiality: spirits, dreams, beliefs, legends, and myths. They are rarely interested in reading or sharing indigenous struggles for sovereignty, water rights, or political recognition. (I am adding here to the important work of both Andy Smith and Lisa Aldred).

I believe there is considerable force to Sherman Alexie’s argument that the market of non-Indian readers leads many writers (including indigenous authors) to continue misrepresenting Native Americans in romantically religious terms. There is real danger to this representation. Indians died in higher numbers than other soldiers when serving in Vietnam. They were put in the front lines because they were thought to be able to listen to the wind and have a natural ability to track prey. A market for Indian spirituality enables both retailers and consumers to feel good about supporting a subjugated group. They can sell, wear, perform, or symbolize their care for others by buying, consuming, and profiting from the Other, rather than real labor for human rights. They do not have to fight for native rights; but they can buy native purification for a weekend in a sweat lodge. Imagine if every dream catcher purchased also entailed a letter written to request Leonard Peltier’s freedom from prison. If we think of native peoples as somehow more spiritual, and thus less material, than we have to care less about their material needs.

Not considering the materiality of native communities helps colonial settlers (most readers of this essay) ignore the realities of life for the original Americans. Like an American version of the movie, Sarah’s Key, we choose not to look at those histories which evidence our continued complicity in the displacement and subjugation of humans. Frankly, it is a downer. Then again, so is living in dire poverty. Unemployment and poverty rates are higher in reservation communities than for any other group in the United States, four times the rate for the average American. Even among gaming tribes, unemployment afflicts a quarter or more of reservation populations. The image of the “rich Indian” was used to combat pro-gaming ballot initiatives in the ’90s, particularly in California. How could real Indians also have large houses and cars, plural? The contrast between a “real” Indian as spiritual and a “fake” Indian as a rich Indian was portrayed to some comic relief by Seth McFarland’s Family Guy episode, “The Son Also Draws.” However, as with other popular representations, I believe the laughs provide relief mostly for the colonizer. The main non-Indian characters have a gambling problem but try to convince the tribal casino management that they are from that tribe. The tribal members in the cartoon are mocked as being pretend Indians since they cannot simultaneously be rich, dress in contemporary fashion, AND also be indigenous people. Indians cannot win. They are invisible out on the reservation, or no longer Indian if they attempt to work within the capitalist system. In fact, the Occupy Wall Street movement has enabled me many chances to point out how Indians were the first that were, and generally speaking still are, left out of the system. And when they “occupied” Alcatraz, Wounded Knee and the offices of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, members of the American Indian Movement experienced the blunt repercussions of living in a police state.

The other side of the material/spiritual binary is that it elevates the Indian to a position of civilizational healer. Thinking of native people as having more access to all things spiritual, we fail to recognize that no one has the upper hand on deeply cosmological questions (not Buddhists, not Hindus, not Southern Baptists). However, settler colonizers do have the upper hand in legal and academic structures. And if we think of Indians as spiritual people, then their land claims and wisdom traditions are about sacred matters rather than rational science, and we have seen how those battles are lost. They are lost in courts of law and they are lost in what gets to count as History with a capital “H,” and Truth with a capital “T.” The real life implications of representing my research on native rituals and mythistory as “spiritual” are that I would be continuing to simplify the importance of indigenous lifeways as matters of the otherworldly. Because my first book dealt directly with the Yaqui people’s views of dreams, myths, and the afterlife, I committed myself to writing also about how such matters related to their struggle for land and the current debt-peonage in Mexico.

But of course, in colloquial settings, it gets a bit tricky; highlighting why settler colonialists might want to think of kokopelis and dream catchers makes people uncomfortable. Still, I like to do it. When I tell someone that I teach about indigenous peoples including American Indians, and they respond that they have visited a vortex or use Native American Tarot Cards, I graciously respond, “That’s interesting!” And then I immediately follow with a question about the last time they visited the tribe near to where they live. My point is that I want them to know, and I want them to consider, living Indians, not just the ones showing up to psychics in channeling sessions. I tend to ask if they agree with the indigenous contentions regarding Occupy Wall Street. I might throw in a trick question or two, such as “What do you think those Indian spirit guides have to say about that Keystone Pipeline?” Or laughing a bit maniacally, “I bet all those Indian spirits want back their land you’re living on!”

You can imagine why I do not get invited to a lot of new age events. I sent a PR letter to every new age bookshop in Los Angeles when my book was coming out, and not one bookstore replied. Yet their weekends are packed with presenters on Indian spirituality. I did wiggle my way into a book fair session in Tucson on spirituality. I felt a bit like an infiltrator, but to a packed room I was able to introduce the subversive idea that if you want to learn about Indians, you must encounter living Indians and their political struggles to be heard above the din of their commodification.

The conundrum is quite complex. On one hand, Indians probably do have ghosts just as any other human population does. And, I do think indigenous religiosity is important to study and understand for both native and non-native peoples. For all I know, dream catchers even work. I am even willing to admit that perhaps the Indian spirits roaming the forests and new age bookstores are laughing at me now. Perhaps they are able to see what really matters for us poor living folk and that we should pay more attention to the spiritual aspects of our lives.

I also know that indigenous people, even some well-meaning scholars, seemingly cannot help themselves from using “sacred,” “holy,” “spiritual,” and the like, when talking about indigenous worldviews and land claims. When asked during the research of the famous Maine Indian Land Claims case, a Passamaquoddy woman told a professor of mine that her relationship to the land was spiritual. As the conversation continued, she explained that she needed to communicate with the land, feed the land, and dance with the land. And she explained that if she did not do such activities, the land would cease to be in relation with her. But as my professor relayed to her, these very real, very physical responsibilities are not included in the concept of “spirituality.” “Spiritual” and “spirituality” do not get at the actuality of that relationship and those words often fail to address what is at stake. She agreed but added that there was a not direct translation for the word she used in her language to categorize such activities. When taught how to pick sage at sunrise, I was told by a Navajo friend to verbally ask for permission, to breathe on a pinch of corn pollen, and to put that pollen at the base of the plant where the sage comes out of the ground. He said these acts were “holy.” But, these are intensely physical acts that establish relations. And how does “holy” make sense in a generative linguistic system (as opposed to a representative linguistic system) that does not have a word for “profane” or “non-holy?”

One more example is in order from my own fieldwork. When Yoeme collaborators tell me about visiting ancestral worlds, or “aniam,” in the hills, they are talking about actual physical entrances. And if a visitor to these worlds fails the tests therein, the affects are physical in the most real sense, including sickness and death. The Yoemem characterize such worlds as “yo,” which earlier ethnographers translated as “enchanted.” But my research into this syllable has shown it means “ancient, respected, and/or elder,” which characterize aspects of culture without implying other aspects as profane. Rather than a dichotomous designation and evaluation, “yo” denotes importance in the spectral terms of something or someone’s aboriginalness or traditionalness.

The Passamaquoddy, Navajo and Yoeme examples, though only briefly described here, tell us that however respected, vital, and religiously considered, many indigenous connections to land are not without materiality, physicality, and substance. Many indigenous peoples do not maintain “spiritual” relations with the land if that term, “spiritual,” is in some way defined or co-constructed as non-physical. Indeed, one can argue that Indians and allies who use the word “spiritual” have been selling the boat to keep the sail. I have been thinking for a while now on the absurdity of calling something “spiritual” or “sacred” to win a land claim in a colonial court of law. Have you seen how non-Indians commodify, represent, and sell their sacred things? Colleen McDannell’s Material Christianity covers this latter ground quite well.

All of this reminds me when “spiritual” made it to the big time, when it had its own commercial practically. When Extra made it’s 1996 commercial for sugarfree, extra-lasting gum, viewers had to watch this poor woman miss her life-time dream of seeing the “elusive blue-back whale.” While looking for a piece of gum with more flavor, the crass lady who is portrayed to be doubtful of the whale’s impact, ends up having a moment of rapture and yelling out, “Oh, that is soo spiritual!” It still cracks me up. And like that lady who misses it, I am at a loss for how “spiritual” can come to mean so much and therefore mean so little. “Spirituality,” the term, has become my great white whale. This essay is just one part of my hunt.

“Spirit” has meant breath courage, desire, mind, soul, spirit, demon, energy, and succubus. The inability to use the word with specificity makes it all the more dangerous in a colonial context. If the post-Cartesian turn among the sciences is to mean anything, it should mean to “escape the materialist-spiritualist dualism that mistakenly constructs some humans as rational, and others as not.” Kenneth Morrison wrote that in a forthcoming essay. He adds, “Utopian dreams constituted a romantic impulse to ‘spiritualize’ both nature and indigenous peoples, and might be dismissed (as has animism) as unreal fantasy.”

We are served well to think about how non-Indians, and Americans in general, like their Indians. They seem to like them talking as Indian guides to psychics. They seem to like them as brave chiefs leading a football team to victory. They seem to like them as sad, downtrodden and droopy, losers on the Trail of Tears. They like them with six-pack abs and holding up half-naked princesses on top of ancient temples. They like them crying about pollution. And they like them selling hand-blown pipes and rolling papers on the Venice Beach Boardwalk.

But most of all, they like them spiritually. Like the blue-back whale, Indian spirituality comes to non-Indians, to remind them of something gloriously wild and free, something unfettered by materialism and modern day life. Like an eagle calling out its screech of liberty, the spirit of the Indian lets us know: we are a nation meant for great things. You can make this country better, just keep shopping. If only the living Indians, with their daily lives and struggles, would stop reminding us of reality.

The opening ritual of every First Place meeting is the weigh-in. First Place is a national Christian weight loss program sponsored in thousands of evangelical churches and private homes around the country. Before the meeting begins, group members line up to be weighed. The scale is typically located in a semi-private space: a church’s kitchen, a hallway, a small closet. The weigh-in itself is between the group member and the group leader alone, but the line is often bristling with conversation and often with tension. When being weighed, the member steps on the scale and recites the week’s scripture memory verse, one of nine commitments participants make for the duration of the thirteen-week program. The leader writes down the member’s weight in her book—it is almost always a her—along with the member’s success at recalling the verse. The fusion between religiosity and weight loss that marks First Place is exemplified in that moment where the member is held accountable to two sacred symbols of God’s power and will: scripture and the scale.

The weigh-in is constructed in First Place, as it is in many weight loss practices, as the time of judgment, where the truth of one’s adherence to the program will be revealed. There is an expectation of reward for the faithful and punishment for the transgressor: that the scale will be just in its pronouncement. But, as many dieters know, there is a great tension in almost all weight loss pursuits between what the mind wants and what the body does. In First Place that tension is sacralized in an ongoing contest between godly ideals and bodily realities. While the program celebrates thinness as God’s normative ideal, weight loss is in fact hard to come by, especially in diet-based programs like First Place. The scale’s authority as arbiter of fidelity to the virtues of weight loss, an authority established by the program and reinforced in American culture, is always at danger of being undermined by fat’s tenacity. Thus tension around the weigh-in is high, filled with fear of judgment and condemnation for failing at a project that is seen as reflective of God’s will yet is notoriously difficult, if not impossible, to achieve. This tension needs to be managed if faith in the program, and, at some level, faith in God, is to be sustained, especially when the scale shows its disfavor and weight is not lost.

One way this tension is managed is through a regular, informal conversation that I observed regularly at the First Place group I attended and came to call “divining the scale.” After the weigh in was completed and participants settled in for the meeting, but before the meeting formally began, the group, often at the behest of the group leader, collectively discussed their weight loss results, interpreting them and discerning what they meant or didn’t mean about the women themselves, about their relationship to God, and about the program.

One conversation took place in the sixth of the group’s thirteen meetings. After everyone weighed in, but before the meeting formally began, Norma, a group leader in her mid-60s with short brown hair, a solid build, and sparkly eyes, asked everyone how they were doing. “Did you all have a really crappy week?” she asked. Someone in the group asked if Norma could give a tally of the weight lost. “This week it wouldn’t help,” she responded. “It was terrible. We’ve had one superstar, but I don’t want to say who so as not to jinx her.” “You don’t want to say cause she isn’t safe,” someone teased. “You know we’d kill her.” “But the rest of us,” Norma continued, “it’s pathetic. At least I’m the same, not up. But we’re up and down. Any idea what’s going on?”

In making the move to divine the scale’s message for its faithful but flawed supplicants, Norma raises questions about religion and food, eating and spiritual transgression, questions that have been of interest to Christians for a long time. And it raises a tension that stands at the heart of First Place’s project. The program believes that thinness is normative for the believer and that weight loss occurs when we are in physical, mental, spiritual and emotional harmony with God’s will. “As we put God in first place for our day and with our weight,” writes program director Carole Lewis, “then everything else falls into place.” The more one aligns with God’s will through adherence to First Place’s nine commitments, the more that alignment should be reflected on the scale.

But bodily realities and the limitations of dieting as a method of weight loss challenge this presumption and reality of weight’s persistence threatens to overrun the spiritual ideals that underpin the program and are the basis for its claim to efficacy. If people don’t lose weight after faithfully adhering to the program they may come to question its conflation of God’s bodily ideal with thinness and weight loss. Members need to be trained to read the persistence of weight not as a reflection itself of God’s will (if I’m trying and I don’t lose weight, maybe God doesn’t want me to), or the failure of dieting’s disciplines (if I keep doing this and it doesn’t work, maybe it just doesn’t work) but to attribute it to other causes.

The first response to Norma’s question came from Celeste, a small woman, also in her 60s, with dyed blond hair who converted to evangelical Christianity from Catholicism. She offered: “Satan and his dirty work.” Tessa, one of the group’s success stories, gave a more worldly explanation. “We get complacent at week six,” she said. “We started by doing everything we’re supposed to do. So this week, after not coming last week, I didn’t write anything down for CR [Commitment Report], didn’t open up the Bible study.” Norma then confessed her own complacency, saying “I’ve decided I didn’t need to do a CR because I haven’t been taking it with me.” “Mine is exercise,” offered Kathleen, a younger, larger woman with two small children at home. “All I can say is don’t think you’re a Lone Ranger.” Norma comforted, “We’re all not doing well.”

First Place’s program consists of nine spiritual and physical commitments. These commitments serve a range of purposes, but one, as we can see in this exchange, is an opportunity to defuse the tension between godly ideals and bodily realities. When beginning a thirteen-week session, First Place members commit to regular attendance at group meetings, adherence to the food plan, regular exercise, memorization of one scripture verse per week, daily bible reading, daily bible study (the two are different), daily “quiet time” in prayer, weekly encouragement of another group member (usually via email or phone), and faithful recording of adherence to these commitments, including every bit of food eaten, in what’s known as a Commitment Record or a CR. The CR is handed in to the group leader every week and she returns it at the next meeting with comments. Commitments are so numerous in part because the program aims to address the problem of weight loss physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually. They also reflect an increasing tendency to see weight loss as a life altering pursuit that requires personal changes far more extensive than food restriction and increased exercise and a resultant proliferation of disciplines.

It is widely recognized and accepted that it is difficult if not impossible to meet all of these commitments at any one time, not to mention in an ongoing manner. But the virtual impossibility of ongoing, faithful adherence does not keep members from being held accountable to them, especially when weight loss is not achieved. The sheer number of commitments give First Place members a variety of ways to explain why weight loss has not occurred as hoped. Surely there is always something that members have not faithfully implemented in their lives during the previous week, especially as the thirteen-week session progresses. The proliferation of commitments provides a range of ways to assign individual responsibility for the lack of weight loss success, diverting attention from the shortcomings of dieting and from the possibility that God is the author of those failings which may themselves carry a message that participants could discern.

Frustration with the complexity of the program, and confusion over which aspects should be prioritized, was then voiced by Deborah, a medical professional with a teen-aged daughter who came to First Place in part to manage her diabetes. “But the program is about all emotions, spirituality. You should focus on exercise,” she told Kathleen, “and make that a focus. It’s hard to manage every piece of the program.” Norma used this comment to report on a conversation she heard at another church meeting that she and other First Place members attended the previous week. “I overheard, very recently, Deborah talking about the First Place group. Someone asked how are you doing. She goes, ‘Well, I’m doing really well spiritually, but not so much with losing weight.’” “I didn’t think I could do the Bible verses,” Deborah modestly replied. “She has the right idea,” Norma continued. “The bottom line is to keep the communication line open with God. Bible study forces us to be self-reflective and to get to the important stuff.”

First Place’s range of commitments reflects a central ambiguity in the program’s purpose: whether First Place is a weight loss program whose value is enhanced by the inclusion of spiritual practices or whether it is a spiritual program whose value is enhanced by the inclusion of weight loss practices. This a live question that is often at play in First Place interactions, including this one. Ostensibly, the program positions itself as the first: as a weight loss program that is enhanced by spirituality. First Place is effective at weight loss, they claim, because it focuses on the whole person, integrating spiritual concerns into the heart of its practice. The absence of God is depicted as the problem in secular weight loss programs and First Place presents itself as filling that crucial void.

Yet there is reason to see First Place as primarily a program of Christian discipleship that instills spiritual practices by linking them to the popular goal of weight loss. Spiritual changes are often the changes celebrated in First Place literature and its spiritual disciplines inculcate Christian practices that are deeply valued yet quotidian in the evangelical subculture. To use a food metaphor, spirituality and weight loss are applesauce and pill, combined in First Place to make the vital but bitter one more palatable. The question is whether spirituality is the applesauce that makes the pill of weight loss go down more easily, or whether the possibility of weight loss is the appealing substance that allows Christian disciplines to slip in. If weight loss is the pill, the weigh-in is the moment where it should display its efficacy. But if spiritual discipline is the pill, the lack of weight loss threatens to keep people from eating the applesauce.

Most of the time this ambiguity is not an issue. Within this self-help landscape, weight loss aims and spiritual aims are seen as so vitally interconnected, so conflated, that there is no need to distinguish between the two. Thinness is God’s desire, and godly devotion will effect weight loss. But when the judgment of the scale threatens to reveal possible tensions between First Place’s spiritual and weight loss projects, distinguishing between the two can be helpful. First Place commitments are so extensive that most people need to prioritize one or two of them at any given time. Spiritual commitments have the advantages of being the clear priority in a faith-based program that, after all, puts God first and of being more easily attainable than weight loss. It is far easier to cultivate a regular prayer practice than to ensure that one’s body will respond to dietary disciplines in the desired way.

By reporting Deborah’s conversation as a positive example, Norma makes the distinction between the physical and spiritual aims of the program in order to place the importance clearly on the spiritual. Deborah is held up as a model for recognizing the importance of spiritual improvements made in the course of the program even when weight loss does not follow. This not only gives members a more attainable goal to focus one’s sights on, but defuses the power of the scale as the ultimate revelator of faithfulness. Members have a means of claiming success even when it’s not reflected in the numbers. This strategy is not without its risks: the promise of weight loss is what provides the opportunity for inculcating spiritual disciplines. Thus Norma can’t go so far as to say that weight loss is not a priority at all. But differentiating between the physical and spiritual aims of the program, and prioritizing the latter, is useful in deflecting attention from the limitations of weight loss by devaluing it as a goal in comparison to spiritual development.

The divining the scale exchange concluded with participants making confounding observations about the vagaries of weight loss. Caroline observed “It’s weird that the week I didn’t write the food down I lost a lot of weight. It’s weird.” Tessa seconded the weirdness of weight loss, saying “[. . .] Sometimes I feel the same way. I had a weight loss during a week when I ate the worst in years.” Celeste said, “I did well and gained a pound. I knew I was going to lose a pound this week but I didn’t.” Norma tried to reassure her, replying “Sometimes there’s a delay thing. You might lose three next week.” “Thanks for trying to make me feel better,” Celeste said, “but that won’t do it.”

The pursuit of weight loss is in almost all contexts something akin to evangelical religion. Both are based on a simple philosophy based on perceived common sense and easy-to-apply salvific formulas. Both value and cultivate a perception of the transparency and accessibility of its central authority, scripture or the scale, for those who seek answers there. Both present themselves as straightforward in theory yet are complicated in practice, continually threatened by lived experience which often seems to trump its claims. When it doesn’t all make the sense that it should, sometimes it’s best to simply contemplate the mystery.

The question Christian weight loss programs often poses for scholars of both religion and of dieting culture is similar to the ambiguity in First Place’s purpose: is Christian weight loss essentially a secular venture, luring believers into its programs by adding a spiritual varnish to a worldly practice, or is it merely explicating, marking or making clear the religious concerns that are at the heart of weight loss projects both sacred and secular? This is a question that is important to me and has informed a great deal of my writing about First Place. But First Place members don’t really care. They are much more taken with tension that mounts as the weigh-in progresses and their faithfulness is about to be measured by number. By collectively divining the scale in the wake of that judgment, the tension between godly ideals and bodily realities are eased and the program maintains its plausibility for another week.

I understand spirituality as the contemplative and introspective process of answering the ultimate questions of meaning, purpose, and identity. According to this perspective, everyone is spiritual insomuch as everyone is deeply invested in the ultimate questions in their lives. The search for meaning and purpose not only defines us as humans, but also differentiates us as individuals, and I believe that our spiritual lives are intimately and intricately intertwined with our human identities. In this regard, I agree with the French theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who emphasized the primacy of spirituality for humans—“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience.”

As the dean of religious life at the University of Southern California, I oversee many programs, events, and opportunities exploring religious and spiritual life on campus. I often ask university students what they think the difference is between religion and spirituality, and most of the time, their answers focus on the notion that religion is for communities while spirituality is for individuals. My favorite response was from a computer science student, who likened religion and spirituality to close-source and open-source software systems, respectively.

Among this generation of university students, often called the millennial generation, many self-identify as “spiritual but not religious.” According to studies and polls, the millennial generation is less interested in traditional liturgy and religious dogma, and more interested in community service and spiritual exploration. They are also the first generation of students in American history to state consistently that finding meaning and purpose is a personal aspiration and a primary career goal, an approach that brings together the spiritual and the professional in their lives.

Accordingly, we have oriented the Office of Religious Life at the University of Southern California around “meaning” as opposed to “God.” As a result, we engage with our entire university community and not just those who self-identify as religious. We have also developed initiatives around spirituality and sports, spirituality and science, and spirituality and the arts. These combinations have enabled us to have conversations about the ultimate questions across many disciplines and university domains. Our shift recognizes the generational change in how Americans construct and imagine spirituality in their lives, and our programming specifically focuses on convening the unique spiritual and scholarly resources on our campus and in our city.

2. Central Park West, New York City, 1963
skipping through mounds of crisp autumn leaves, I experience mortality

3. Brandeis University, Waltham, 1970
rolling down a summer green hill, I experience wonder

4. Jutland, Denmark, 1971
psychedelically altered on Easter morning, I experience at-one-ness

5. Jerusalem, Israel, 1971
watching “The Fixer,” Joel explains the history of blood libel and European anti-Semitism to me, I experience belonging

6. Museum of Modern Art, New York City, 1980
sitting in front of “Guernica,” I experience transcendence

7. Greensboro, North Carolina, 1987
attending back-to-back Springsteen concerts, I experience full-ness

8. Princeton, New Jersey, 1992
facing the impossibility of biological parenthood, I experience desolation

9. Princeton, New Jersey, 1995
praying, I hear a soft voice telling me to take care of others. I experience immanence, then rebellion

10a. Guatemala City, Guatemala, 1999
holding my infant daughter, I experience a leap of faith

10b. Ramallah, West Bank, 2010
traveling with students, I hear them intelligently discuss politics and religion, I experience gratitude

At first there is no time.

That is what I tell myself when I am asked for my views on a topic that is spiritual.

There is a white page and that is like a box. I have to write in it. Literally, it is a box of light I have to darken. I have to fill it to some extent.

But, of course, there is no time. So I don’t write.

The contemplation of a box, or boxes, can become a spiritual event. Joseph Cornell approached boxes like that. (Or did he?) Very organized people do this, too. The results are more mundane. Still, there are entire stores devoted to it, towers of gleaming cabinets, geometrical temples that shine. Compression, the aesthetics of stacking and order. It is nice.

Collectors do this. They put things in boxes, and thus capture a moment in the physical world. The thing in the box is frozen. The thing in the box stops time.

(Aside. Transparency is essential to this experience. If light cannot pass through the box, game off, we might as well be blind.)

Is that what God looks like? A butterfly? A marble? A tiny Victorian chair?

Why, the answer is certainly, Yes.

I should write that, too, but I don’t.

Months pass, and I don’t—write, I mean. I fill that no-time with activities that consume time voraciously. They are of two sorts. The first sort involves me meeting the demands of productivity in time, as defined by others. I strive to accomplish a certain number of things to the satisfaction of others and myself in a certain time frame. Often I fail. I go outside the frame. Or I never make it in. I’m not sure.

The second sort are of more interest to me. These involve me obliterating the imposed structures of time and space. It’s 6:45 p.m., people, in Times Square. I have just walked out of one box and I am not about to descend into another.

I am itching to bust out of the temporal. Altered perceptions of or manipulations of sound and light, intensifying the hum in the wiring. I strive to do this without hurting anyone. At times there is tempo, but it is distant, barely perceptible. As sometimes you can hear your pulse, muffled, beating in your temples and ears. Sometimes there is alcohol. Chemical changes brought on by sexual arousal. Smoke. Or sunlight.

The requests for my views are persistent, gently and kindly so. Because I am instinctively drawn to activities that deliver me an illusion, a vision even, of self-worth, I cannot refuse. I want to do what I’ve been asked to do.

I am supposed to know about these things. But I don’t. I am immersed in the daily lives of philosophers, musicians, poets, children. Yet it is clear that I do not know what “spiritual” means. I begin to believe the idea is an illusion. A fucking fraud. And I love that.

Over time, I agitate more and more, but something in me can’t let the idea of it go. I begin talking out loud, dissociatively, to my wife. In bed most nights I say to her, “I’m going to do that thing I told you about.” And she says, “Good.” But of course, I never do.

In my mind I compose a piece about how the only people who can consistently communicate a sense of the spiritual to me are artists—specifically, the masters of abstraction whose acknowledgement of the concrete, temporal world is certain, but implied. Their inventions may celebrate or reject that physical world: they compress, reshape or expand our sense of space and time. And thus we experience it anew. As though perhaps we are breathing air for the first time, or warming in the sun.

The piece centers on the work of the composer Morton Feldman, who created an entire realm of music I can only call celestial, partly by shunning the typical notions of time. Feldman’s music, even when written out and measured, cannot really be said to progress. The experience of it is this. At one moment the music does not exist, yet in another moment it does. And it may ring harmonically in your ears. It may shock or grate. But it does not seem to go forward or backward. It expands. It sounds.

I think of Durations, of Crippled Symmetry, of Rothko Chapel, and of Coptic Light.

In many ways, Feldman replaced Jesus for me. He appeared to be as unspiritual a creature as one could imagine. He was fat. He chain-smoked unfiltered cigarettes. He spoke with an absurdly thick New York accent, the sort that you’d think they only invented for movies of the 1930s. But it is with him that I leave earth. And it is with him that I dance, and stop time.

But I didn’t write that either. I didn’t want to put my God in a box. More honestly: I did want to, but I couldn’t.

The idea of which we speak, or don’t, is a fundamentally desired experience in which we don’t feel as we do most of the time. And it’s nice. We like it. We are not mired in the concerns that prevent our perception and enjoyment of the present moment. Those concerns are usually memories of actions past that caused, and continue to cause, upset. Or projections about the future which cause upset. To be free of these and thus, unfettered, released into the present moment—that can be said to be spiritual. It happens in time.

But we are talking about the pursuit of pleasure. In some form. Even in martyrdom. My body being torn apart by wolves. God will fix that. He will make it a pleasure. This is a judgment. It is good, not bad. It is born of a value system. It is a box.

We are really chasing a good thing. That’s okay.

In 1999 in New York City I spent an evening that altered the way I experienced the world. I was in the audience for the performance at Cooper Union of Feldman’s six-hour work, String Quartet No. 2. Of that, I wrote:

The music seemed to float and expand, abolishing typical notions of time and scale. … By 1 a.m., the 75 or so listeners who remained had surrendered to the thing. They sat or stretched out on the floor in Trappist silence. As time wore on, I traversed the music listener’s version of the runner’s wall. Dissonant and sweet harmonic patterns shifted on the quiet surface. Plucked figures emerged and receded. There was a pulse, but little narrative or forward motion. In Feldman’s universe, time needs no prodding—it moves on its own, leaving the pure sound free to unfold.

I went outside. There was still traffic. Headlights. The streets were still shining, still divided in grids. But it was different.

Feldman once asked: “Do we have anything in music for example that really wipes everything out? That just cleans everything away?”

I am supposed to know about these things but I don’t.

I keep thinking about the request for my views. So I send in this.

But it is too late. I’ve missed the deadline.

And it is not what they were looking for anyway.

*Mel Day, Study Guide for Experimental Contemplatives: Volume One (Performative Exchange), 2011 | dimensions variable | unique archival print | (Coat: Miriam Dym for Dymproducts; cover photo: Jeffrey Cross) | The artist would like to acknowledge the support of the Stanford University Experimental Media Arts Visiting Artist Program and the Stanford University Office for Religious Life.