UPG: Ugly People Griping
See what I did there? I don’t personally believe it to be remotely accidental that UPG could just as easily stand for Ugly People Griping as it does for Unverified Personal Gnosis. Let’s face it: nine times out of ten, they basically amount to the same damn thing! I’m not really trying to be particularly sarcastic or clever here; on the contrary, I’m trying to make a very real point, so please, stick with me.
Unverified (some people prefer Unconfirmed) Personal Gnosis didn’t actually become a “thing” until sometime in the 1990s. If you’re following a Norse Traditional Path, you probably won’t be terribly shocked that the genesis of the term happened within the Norse Reconstructionist Community (elsewhere cited as the Asatru or Heathen Community). From there, it “bled over” into other Reconstruction-based faiths, such as Druidry, and apparently has now raised its ugly head in pretty much every single branch of Paganism known to humanity. Basically, it is an “activity” participated in by modern day Reconstructionists, but definitely not by the “Ancestors” they are supposedly attempting to emulate. Find that bizarre? I sure do. Prior to the coining of that term in the 1990s (aka, when I first officially began studying as a magickal practitioner/shaman), UPG was known as something else. Something which is so simple and easy to understand, even children do it. Something which y’all might honestly find (at least, I certainly hope so) shocking: religious or mystical experience.*
When you study Religion at the college level (which I did; specifically toward a focus in Comparative Mythology), you learn that religious or mystical experience is, at its most basic, a subjective experience which may be interpreted within a religious or mystical framework. They are revelations with an outside cause (Gods, spirits, etc.) which occur outside the natural order of things–that is, they are preternatural–and are considered real by the one having the experience, to a degree that they consciously believe they have learned something from the experience. William James, the American philosopher and psychologist who wrote one of the most definitive books (ever) on the topic in 1902 defined the “common core” of all genuine religious experiences:
- Religious experiences are experiential, like perception. In other words, they aren’t just felt, as on an emotional level, they are seen, heard, tasted, etc. Of course, such experiences or perceptions remain highly subjective. For example, I may taste a can of diet soda and reply “ooo yum!”, while you may taste a diet soda and reply “oooo yuck!”
- At the same time as being experiential, religious experiences transcend sensory perception. You may “hear God”, for example, but you don’t do that hearing with your actual ears; instead, the words come as “inner words” coupled with a palpable awareness of their speaker.
- Religious experiences include an immediate awareness of and connection to Deity which effectively blocks out everything else–and, most especially, the mundane world–temporarily.
- Religious experience is the immediate sense of the reality of the unseen.
At its most basic, religious experience lies at the core of understanding faith/religion/mystical practice (whichever term you prefer) as an actual force in human life, rather than simply an adherence to doctrines (such as sacred texts, like the Bible) or membership in a select group of individuals (such as church membership). In other words, if you’re just frolicking through life reading every sacred text you can get your paws on (focusing on doctrine) and celebrating “look at me, I’m a [insert title of your membership organization here]” (focusing on membership) without also actively experiencing all of this stuff I just described, then defining what you’re practicing as a faith/religion/mystical practice isn’t entirely accurate. Most of us read tons of books (sacred texts and otherwise) and belong to lots of different organizations (schools, clubs, etc.) over the course of our lives, but just because you read The Girl Scout Handbook while rabidly selling cookies as a member of the Girl Scouts of America doesn’t make being a Girl Scout a religion (or a faith, or even a mystical practice)!
I can read a stack of books on auto-mechanics and go sit in a garage, but that doesn’t make me a car! (Yes, I summarily swiped and dressed up that quote from theologian Joyce Meyer, and yes, she’s a Christian; sue me. It’s apt; that’s all that matters.) I’ve often employed this quote when discussing the behavior of the majority of Christians. It’s likely you know exactly the ones I’m talking about: they can quote Scripture, chapter and verse, as it suits them, and their butts are on a pew every time the church-doors are open, but they wouldn’t know Jesus if He pissed on them, and then turned it into wine! Basically, they focus on doctrine and membership above and beyond religious experience, and because of this, they are an embarrassment to the religion they so proudly proclaim (at every available opportunity, ad nauseum). These are the people that guarantee that Jesus is up there/out there somewhere, face-palming like Captain Picard. They pay lip service to the parts of what they’ve read that suit their agendas, and then toss out all of the stuff that would actually make a positive difference in the world: you know, things like basic charity, love, and equality. Perhaps if they focused more on actually experiencing the God they claim to love so much, and less on making rules and being popular, they wouldn’t be such assholes.
When we constantly chalk up every single religious experience to UPG within Pagan practice (and, yes, I’m lumping all the Reconstructionists, inclusive of Heathens, in as Pagans: again, sue me), we create an atmosphere that breeds that exact same type of assholery! Our faith/religion/mystical practice becomes focused entirely on making rules and being popular, instead of actually experiencing the Gods. In the process, we likewise lose our hold on basic concepts of charity, love, and equality. Don’t buy that for a minute? Take a look around: how often have you personally felt like you’re hanging out on the fringes, actively experiencing your relationship with the Gods, while everybody in the “in-group” is elbowing you in the face and the gut from within the safety of the cliques they’ve formed around their rules, and their popularity?
Which brings me back to those Ugly People Griping….
My use of the term ugly here has nothing to do with physical appearance; it goes back to the Southern colloquialism for someone who is behaving in a mean or otherwise emotionally/physically damaging way. If a kid throws a tantrum at the checkout in Walmart, you’ll often hear their Mama tell them to “quit acting ugly” (most of the time while also kindly “jerking a knot in them”: i.e., grabbing them by the sleeve, collar, or other readily reachable piece of clothing into an upright position). If a lady tells another lady, uninvited, that her butt is entirely too big to be wearing those jeans, Bluejean lady might reply bitterly “well, that was ugly!” When we actively consider every single religious experience as possible UPG, we are likewise being ugly. In doing that, we are denigrating a person’s (likely very) private experiences of God(s) to the realm of religious sock-puppetry. In case y’all need a reminder on the definition of the word “denigrate”, it means to unfairly criticize or disparage. Hate to break it to ya, y’all, but that’s just plain mean; that is emotionally damaging; that is ugly!
Which brings me to the griping portion of Ugly People Griping: to gripe means to complain or grumble about something, usually in a trivial way or about something that’s trivial in the first place. When a Southern child has one worksheet of homework that would only take about five minutes to actually do, yet spends an hour complaining about having to do the work, Mama might say “quit your griping and just do the darn thing!” Thanks to that last bit of the definition of griping, constantly complaining about something can also actually lead to that something becoming trivialized. An actual example from real life (this really happened): when I was in high school, one of my friends-at-the-time got a brand new car. Krista drove her brand new car to my annual Halloween party and parked it on the side-street beside my house. Upon her arrival, we all went outside to ooo and aah over said new car. Krista spent the next five hours (no lie!) griping about her new car: “Nobody better hit my brand new car”; “I hope my car is safe where I parked it”; “my car is so shiny and beautiful and new, I’d have a fit if anybody hit it where I have it parked”. Consequently, by the end of the night, Krista’s brand new car garnered more eyerolls than exclamations of excitement. She had effectively griped her way to trivialization! A lot of the inherent problems in modern Paganism could likewise be sorted if people would “quit their griping” about UPG and “just do the darn thing”, instead of trivializing other people’s experiences. If people would actually work to live and experience their chosen faith-practice, rather than reaching toward doctrine (sacred texts) and membership to verify the numinous (which I’ll talk about in a later post), there would be a lot less ugliness. Those two things go hand-in-hand. Chalk it up to things I just know as a Southerner: down South, Mama’s admonishment of “quit acting ugly” is most often preceded by “stop griping”!
Stop griping and quit acting ugly and actually allow people to have religious experiences! Sure, mental sock-puppets may occasionally happen, but that’s where the gnosis portion of UPG comes into play (see my next post). Bottom line is, when we try to define that for others by bandying about the term UPG, we only wind up disparaging those experiences and trivializing them, and both of those things are just plain mean! It also leads to behavior that is highly hypocritical: people sit around and point fingers at the behavior of “certain Christians”, while then perpetrating the exact same behavior themselves, only dressed up in a pointy hat and cool jewelry! Bible-thumping turns into Edda-thumping (hail, Connla Freyjason, for coining that phrase!); church membership becomes coven membership, kindred membership, etc., and the Gods get left on the sidelines, twiddling their divine thumbs! Meanwhile, people claim to be reconstructing history, while forgetting that we wouldn’t have that history in the first place without the initial religious experiences of those people of the past: experiences often identical to those being had in the modern era, which then get picked apart as nothing more than UPG. Bottom line is this: if we wish to claim any semblance of “scholarship” in our chosen faith or practice, it is high time we left behind this completely made-up phrase in favor of actual scholarship. Everybody’s so intent on reading books, how about reading all those countless tomes written by actual scholars about the definition of religious experience, and what it is and isn’t, instead of sitting around puffing ourselves up and working to make ourselves feel important by looking down our noses at other people’s personal relationships with the Gods?
Other posts in this series:
UPG: Mental Sock-puppets (Putting the Gnosis back in Personal Gnosis, unconfirmed or otherwise.)
UPG: Feeling Small (What the happy heck does Numinous mean?)
UPG: Hypocrisy Ain’t Hip (Why are ancient experiences somehow more valid than modern ones?)
*Note: Religious experience and mystical experience are actually not exactly the same thing, but most people’s basic understanding is that the two terms are interchangeable. Therefore, for ease of understanding, I have chosen not to explain those differences herein.
