Mar 28, 2010

A Sea Change

I have been dubbing away at my spiritual development for about twenty years. During that time I have tried very hard to connect with a community of like minded people. Most of my friends respect my spiritual work, but have little interest in pursuing it themselves. One on one, I have had conversations with just about everyone of my friends about spiritual matters, but it sometimes seems that they are afraid of what might be called the wuss factor: that spirituality, and thinking about God and such, assigns them to a level of touchy-feely that embarrasses them. I knew that somewhere around, there must be some sort of greater community that I could connect with, but try as I might I could not find it. Part of the problem is that I do not much go for the spiritual communities that are inhabited by people who live, as I see it, in the ether; the believers in channeling, or angels, supreme beings, or leprechauns, or fairies; that is, people who latch on to some external thing as truth more than metaphor. My experience with the UU church helped a bit, but I found myself often leading rather than having spiritual discussions—something that is only half satisfying. On top of that many UU’res didn’t really seem to want figure out how to believe in something as much as they did want to argue about what not to believe in.

When I went to Oakland, California, to take my first intensive doctoral course, it was the first time I had spent any time in California. When I arrived at the school, a second floor space with a large central meeting room, I was astonished to find nearly 100 other people who had the same focus as I did, and at the same time had somewhat of the same state of mind about it; namely, that a spiritual search was both serious business and mysterious at the same time. For me it was, you might say, instant community. Not that I agreed with everyone, and not that there weren’t a few real nuts in the bunch, but for the most part everyone wanted to both understand and experience the nature of spiritual life. Because of my California experience, I have managed to find some deeper spiritual relationships and a larger spiritual community closer to home. And this has significantly broadened my understanding of spiritual resources that are available closer to home than the west coast. Equally, over the last two or three years, a change seems to be in the air about the whole nature of spirituality in the public eye. Frankly, I think what is happening is wonderful and bodes well for this church’s future, and the future of institutions that favor interfaith and inter-spiritual approaches to personal spiritual development. Any institution that can steer the individual towards a spiritual experience, a true spiritual experience, no matter how brief, I think will be helping to further develop this apparent change in public attitude.

I think there is a fairly simple reason why this is happening: people want actual spiritual experience, and are learning that it is available to them. I am not talking about religious experience. Religious experience is, in my opinion, exactly what is happening here right now. Religious experience offers us the opportunity to think about our spiritual life, to explore perhaps moral and/or ethical positions about things, to remind us of our obligations to community and to ourselves to pursue spiritual experience. Clearly, the bible, the Quran, the Bhagavad Gita, and just about every other gospel and religious text explore these kinds of questions. Unfortunately, the purveyors of this theology try their best to convince us that reliance on them is equivalent to spiritual experience, or will result, eventually, in a direct connection with the divine.

But as minimal as any spiritual experiences might end up being, people want to connect directly with their divinity and have interactions with whatever moments of spiritual truth they can find within. They do not want to wait until they die to go to heaven, or try to fit themselves into the boxes created by someone else’s theology, or become monks, or live in caves, or change their lifestyles, or be seen as wusses and airheaded new age believers in fairy tales. What they want is an experience that allows them to quiet their mind and explore the silence within, to be relieved, however briefly, from the clamor that is a part of everyday living so that they can experience a deeper level of consciousness; sans logic, emotion and intellect.

But why is this happening now? Well, if I had a definitive answer, with some sort of proof, I would likely change my career to marketing. But I do have some ideas based on the developmental sequence we go through in our intellectual/emotional/spiritual growth. The upshot of which is that perhaps the baby boomers are entering a more pluralistic and worldly way of envisioning the meaning of spirituality, or the meaning, even, of God.

Let me give a bit of background. When we are very young, we see much of life, and, in particular, spiritual experiences, through a magical lens. Magic, as you know already, is an experience when at one moment something is one way and then at the next moment, like the flick of a switch, that same thing shifts “magically” to something entirely different; a card is magically found; a rabbit magically appears. But what makes it magic is that we have no idea how it happens, our disbelief is entirely suspended to the point that it is hard to even believe that we could figure out what happened. By this way of thinking, the mysteries of life are accepted as unexplained, unexplainable and magical moments, not connected to us, but with no known source.

As we grow older, about age 4 or 5, we move to a period of mythic thinking. We come to believe that everything has to have some sort of cause, and since we cannot identify anything earthly, we make something up that explains what we cannot understand. This, to a great degree was the nature of the human condition until, in historic terms, quite recently. The Greek Gods, the Mesoamerican idols and even God itself are reflections of this mythic thinking. And such things as the Aztec human sacrifice, the pyramids of Egypt, and enormous monuments built to the Greek Gods, all are indicators of how mythical thinking creates the belief that something real exists behind the unexplainable. Now-a-days, mythical thinking revolves around superheroes at the youngest age and then morphs into a somewhat less concrete focus, primarily converging on some sort of supreme all-controlling being.

Also, many New Age ideas fit this bill. If I rely on astrology to run my life, if I believe angels are in charge, if I believe psychics, or mediums, or channelers are truly in contact with the nether world, then I am thinking mythically. Mythical thinking puts someone else in charge, assuming that things that happen to us must be done to us by something else. So it must also be said that a belief in God as an actual controlling supreme being is mythical thinking as well.

As science became more prevalent, and inductive and deductive reasoning became a more common way of approaching the world, mythical thinking gave way to rational thinking. We see this happen in our lives at about the same time as adolescence. We slowly begin to realize that there is no supernatural, mythical, all-powerful being ordering the world. Things happen, and we start to believe that there must a rational explanation for everything. Any notion that there are actual controlling forces that we might identify is jettisoned for the belief that if we look hard enough we can find a reason for everything that takes place in our life. Because most spiritual things are unexplainable, they are set aside as being irrational. In a sense, our ego has taken over and we rely only on objective truth and actual objects to explain our world.

Rational thinking really drives a good portion of our lives. By the fact of living we must be pragmatic. To a great degree we require control in our lives. Our lives are motivated by our material well being and by safety and comfort, and until we have a reasonable level of these things, delving deeper into the mysteries of life is not something that we do to any great degree, though mystery is present in some ways in most of our lives. Many people acknowledge that mystery is still there, and so by trying to adhere to religion and continuing to cling to the fringes of mythical thought, they create a way to avoid having to explore the unexplainable. There is, or course, nothing wrong with this, it certainly does offer relief and a like minded community on which to rely for similar thinking.

An interesting note here is that there is one thing on which all scientists, all skeptics and all spiritualists agree: that we are all imbued with consciousness; that consciousness exists. And yet consciousness is the one thing that no science, no skeptic and no one who attaches themselves to spiritual pursuits can, as yet, explain. There appears to be nothing rational about consciousness, though we all agree that it does exist… interesting.

That brings me to what I think is currently happening in our spiritual development. Why are more and more people starting to want deeper spiritual experiences? Well, I am no sociologist, but here’s what I think; as a culture we are now moving past the rationalist stage and into what is known as a pluralist stage, or into pluralistic thinking. This type of thinking is informed by the idea that there are unexplainable mysteries in life, and that the experience of them is both satisfying and comforting. And, we realize, this is true for everyone (hence, pluralistic thinking) and that we are part of a community which needs more contact with mystery and transcendence in order to have full lives. The baby boomer generation is, however, the first generation to move away, en masse, from the mythical thinking offered by the church, into rational thinking offered by reason, and now we are moving en masse toward pluralistic thinking.

Another important thing about pluralistic thinking is that the ego starts to take a back seat. We feel less need to strive because we have less need and desire for creating a stable and safe material life. Our lives become less about doing and more about being. And finally, pluralistic thinking arises because we realize that everyone must, at some level, exist in a similar plane.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, church often does little more than offer us a return to mythical thinking. Though some churches do offer us an experience with mystery, we are continually asked to assign that mystery to something outside ourselves. But nothing outside us remains constant, nothing. There is only one constant in our lives and we cannot explain what it is or why it exists. We are born with it, but do not know whether we are born of it. We die with it but do not know if it dies with us. It is our pure consciousness, or, as it is called in the philosophical vernacular; I-am-ness.

Try conceiving of it this way: is there anything, anything at all, that you can say has remained ever-present and absolutely consistent throughout your life other than some innate sense that you have that says “I am.” What is happening right now is that you are listening to me, and my words keep changing, but what remains the same? I am. Ten minutes ago I was saying something different, but what remained in the background? I am. Or ten years ago, or even, in a larger sense, or perhaps even ten decades or ten centuries ago, what was still there, in you and in me? I am. It is the only thing that can truly be said to exist of every sentient being that has ever been on this earth; I am. But since it is unexplainable, irrational even, it becomes subjugated to our material needs and assigned to any external source that makes it at least on the surface, explainable.

But we baby-boomers and those connected loosely to us on both ends, have grown up, and as rational as we might be, as hopeful as we have been that we might find relief in material life, our I-am-ness is still there, still just as unexplainable, but now it has become an alluring part of life that we are once again compelled to explore. But now we explore it from a non-magical, non-mythical, and non-rational perspective. And now that we are starting to acknowledge our I-am-ness, we want a more meaningful relationship with it.

And what does this require? A quieter mind. A mind rid of the attractions of ego. A mind unburdened by reasoning. A mind tolerant of mystery. A mind unafraid of a self deeper than what we know in our emotion and our intellect. And so back we come to that place where what more and more people are seeking is spiritual experience. Not more magic or myth. Not more explanations, but simply more experience.

Now, some of you may be thinking: well, he’s the minister, shouldn’t he be able to do this for us? And believe me, I have thought long and hard about the same thing. I have pondered this question at my desk on a number of occasions, sometimes for as much as an hour or more. There is nothing I would like more than to have each and every one of you leave here every week feeling uplifted, connected more clearly your divinity, having had an experience with your I-am-ness, and ready to face the week with the more centered self that tends to result from such an experience. I have observed the sermons of some of the truly inspiring Pentecostal and Evangelical preachers trying to understand what it is they do that arouses spiritual relief in people. And, I ain’t found it, whatever it is.

Because, though those ministers leave people feeling good, they generally do so by luring people into mythical thinking—by asking them to believe that something/someone else is in charge. And I can’t do that, because I don’t believe that. You are in charge, because only you can experience your I-am-ness. I can’t give it to you because I am not you. God cannot give it to you, because god is you. The experience of I-am-ness, of pure consciousness, is the experience of God; the experience of that single thing that has remained consistent from the moment that it first inhabited our species, or, who knows, perhaps even before then. It has inhabited you from the first moment you were born, or perhaps before that. And because of this, because it is so personal, so you, only you can create the experience of it in your life.

A bit ago we finished our spiritual practice month, though I certainly hope that just because February ended you did not mark the end of your spiritual practice. And today I ask you to remember these thoughts. If you want a deeper relationship with your I-am-ness; if you want to explore the mysteries that transcend logic and emotion and intellect; if you want the experience of the calmness and safety that lies within you, you must act, as so many other people are starting to do. It is only through action that you will develop a deeper and more meaningful relationship with your inner divinity. It is only through action that you will abandon the need to have mysteries revealed. It is only through action that you will come to have an on-going relationship with your own divinity.

Blessed BE and Amen