Sermon-Tantra, Relationships and Satisfaction

Community Ministry Sunday: Tantra, Relationships and Satisfaction

A Sermon on Community Ministry Sunday 2013

Countryside Church, UU

The Rev. Dr. C. Scot Giles

Good morning. For those of you who do not know me, I am Scot Giles, the Affiliated Community Minister at Countryside Church. Community Ministers are missionaries. We work beyond the walls of the local congregation in secular institutions, seeking to influence those institutions in accordance with Unitarian Universalist purposes and principles. 

I am a medical hypnotist, specializing in the most difficult cases. In my work I see clients from my own office, or at any of the hospitals and wellness centers where I maintain a network of free clinics, I try to influence the American health care delivery system to be more compassionate, humane and enlightened.  

Each year on the first Sunday in February our denomination asks its member congregations to welcome a Community MInister into the pulpit so that the members know about our work.

Spiritual Nookie

I am speaking this morning about something called “Tantra.” It is a spiritual philosophy that emerged in India in the 5th century. However, it is not formally a part of Hinduism nor Buddhism. It is an outlaw spiritual philosophy that has existed uneasily alongside the canons of traditional religion.

Now, and let me just get this out of the way, I am certainly aware that Tantric practitioners have brought it to the West, and have made it a part of the modern spiritual movement. It’s controversial

The reason is that one small part of Tantric philosophy, the Red Path, involves the use of sex as a spiritual stimulus, and that is the part that almost every single Western practitioner emphasizes. You can attend Tantric workshops at the Esalen Institute at Big Sur in California, where you can have experiences on top of massage tables that will make you hyperventilate.

However, there is a lot more to Tantra then that. The Red Path, sometimes called Tantra Proper, does involve sensuality. Other paths involve things like Mantra, the use of voice as a spiritual tool. Or Mudra, the use use the hands. Or Yantra, the use of art. Or Prana, the use of breathing rhythms. 

Today I am talking about the Diamond Path in Tantra, the use of philosophy and insight. I will have nothing more to say about the Red Path, and I apologize to any of you who attended this morning in the hope that I would be talking about “Spiritual Nookie.” If you really want to know about that, type the word “Tantra” into Google and have fun. 

This morning, I am speaking about a majestic insight that was originally set forth 5000 years ago in the text The Vishvasara Tantra, "What is here is elsewhere, what is not here is nowhere.” I realize it’s not exactly clear on first hearing, but I can tell you that it changed my outlook, so hang in with me for a few minutes.

Practical Spirituality.

What makes Tantra different from other Eastern practices is that it’s goal isn’t the worship of a god. It’s not about adoration, thanksgiving, petition, etc. It’s a practical spirituality.

Instead of rejecting the sensual things of this world, tantra seeks to embrace them. The goal is not to please a god, but to enhance the life of the practitioner. 

It’s a bit like modern yoga. While yoga is based on Hindu religious practices, most people do it these days it to help them relax, get in shape and achieve focus. Tantra is what happened when some people, a long time ago, decided to take the spiritual techniques of the priest and shaman, and apply them to solving practical problems instead of the worship of gods.

It’s a bit like Dr. Norman Vincent Peale who took the spiritual insights of one form of New Testament Christianity, and applied them to everyday living to create a system of practical ideas for personal success, which he called Positive Thinking. Or, Ralph Waldo Emerson taking the core ideas of nineteenth century Unitarianism, and creating the philosophy for simple and enlightened living that has come to be known as Transcendentalism.

Practical spirituality is the sort of spirituality I’ve always appreciated. It’s not about making god happy, it’s about getting things done in day-to-day living, so that our lives are improved.

 Greed

In 1987 Oliver Stone played corporate raider Gordon Gekko in the movie Wall Street. Gekko was a financial predator who was voted in 2003 as number 24 of the top 50 movie villains of all time. 

There is a scene in the movie where Gekko is lecturing at a Business School and tells the students: 

“Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures, the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge, has marked the upward surge of mankind...” [^ "Memorable Quotes for Wall Street (1987)". Internet Movie Database. Retrieved 2010-08-09.]

I regard this as a horrible philosophy, but it occurs to me that an awful lot of people subscribe to it without realizing it.

All the time in my consultation room I listen to people lament that they are not as successful as they wanted to be. “I’ll never go to Europe.” “I’ll never be able to live in a mansion, have a supermodel as a trophy wife or boy toy, and I’ll never afford to drive a Lamborghini Spyder.” ...Sometimes the unfairness of it all breaks my heart.

Actually, it does break my heart. It breaks my heart to know there are people who are so broken they really think this way. And there are.

I always question my clients about their life goals. To what degree have they achieved what they wanted? Where have the disappointments been? What makes them happy? How satisfied are they? These are “big” questions. They reveal a lot.

We live in a society where material possessions and wealth are valued. Not all societies do that. Some value wisdom more than money. In Native American civilization the person who was regarding most highly was the person who gave away the most. 

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’ve nothing against wealth. My hypnotism practice provides me with a comfortable living and I hope it will always do that. But it’s not the highest value for me. But it is for a lot of people.

The artist Madonna in her song “Material Girl” says:

“Cause the boy with the cold hard cash; Is always Mister Right, 'cause we are; Living in a material world; And I am a material girl”

And Marilyn Monroe assures us that “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend.” And the group called the Mommas and the Popas instructed us in 1966 that “ Words of love, so soft and tender; Won't win a girl's heart anymore.”  Apparently, it takes cash.

Time and again I have heard clients tell me that the highest value in their lives was the acquisition of money, or the acquisition of the things money can buy: travel, possessions, the perfect adorable partner, and experiences. If you don’t have these things, you feel diminished. Lessor. Cheated. 

 As Lama Yeshe said in our Reading this morning, “...when disappointed with what we have, we wonder what we could replace it with that would guarantee us the happiness we crave. The next thing we know we are searching for a new wife, or a new husband, or a new car, placing expectations on this new object that are just as unrealistic as the expectations we had placed on what we are now discarding.”

I’m a sinner too. There have been times in my life when as a younger man I felt the same way. Thankfully, I encountered the Vishvasara Tantra at an early age where it teaches, "What is here is elsewhere, what is not here is nowhere.” What that means is that there is no place nor person that is privileged. Let me explain.

 Interbeing

In the oldest strand of spiritual philosophy, found in the primordial traditions of both East and West, there is an idea that we are not separate from each other. All persons are somehow bound up together.

Likewise, all places, all experiences are made up of the same stuff and somehow connected. Zen Buddhist Master Thich Nhat Hanh calls this theory “Interbeing.” It’s the same idea as in the Tantric scripture, and in fact I suspect he got it from there.

For example, you may feel bad that you will never have coffee and croissant at a delightfully little cafe in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower in Paris. The cost of having such an experience may forever be out of your reach. But, the Theory of Interbeing says it really doesn’t matter. The molecules and atoms, the neurological impulses that get to your brain at that cafe are in fact everywhere.

Within the circumstances of your life there are places where you can have an experience that is every bit as wonderful as sitting in that Paris cafe. You can see or imagine scenes that are in their own way every bit as magnificent. You can have a croissant that is every bit as buttery and rich, right in the town where you life. You are deprived of nothing that is spiritually important by not being able to go to Paris. The same quality of experience is available to you right here, in Palatine, Illinois. 

Because, “What is here is elsewhere, what is not here is nowhere.”

Many of us have the privilege of being in a loving relationship with another person. But there probably are times when you look at your partner and wonder if “you know,” maybe it would have been fun to have hooked up with someone who is prettier, more handsome, smarter, hotter, better cut, or what have you. Everyone probably wonders about that from time to time.

The Center for Health Statistics says that the divorce rate is currently 53%. In fact, given the fact that only a minority of our romantic relationships end in marriage, and that only a minority of marriages are happy, I’ve sometimes wondered why people fall in love at all. It’s got to be a world-class example of the triumph of faith over experience. 

We all know people who grew dissatisfied with their romantic partner and decided to look again, or we’ve been in relationship with someone who did that to us.

While no one can be faulted for exiting a relationship where there is abuse, I suspect most relationships end out of boredom or the illusion that the “grass is greener” somewhere else.

According to the Theory of Interbeing, that’s almost always a mistake. Any experience you could have with another partner, be he or she prettier, more handsome, smarter, hotter or better cut, you can have with the partner you are with now, if you have one. 

The Theory of Interbeing teaches that there is no romantic experience that you could have with a human being that is impossible to have in some way with your present partner, if he or she has empathy and a measure of spiritual enlightenment. 

It is true that sometimes you don’t have a partner who has that measure, and that’s a shame. 

But if you do have such a partner, it is simply an illusion to believe that the quality of your inner emotional experience would be different with someone else. 

The quality of your inner emotional experience is about you, not about the other person. The quality of your emotional experience comes out of you, and is not dependent on anyone else, somewhere else.

Because, “What is here is elsewhere, what is not here is nowhere.”

The Spiritual in the Ordinary

I sometimes fantasize about a more spiritual life than I actually lead. That’s a bit strange as I’m a clergy person and someone who maintains a disciplined spiritual life. 

A while ago my personal Spiritual Director asked me to watch a 2005 German film Die Grosse Stille (Into The Great Silence), which documents that day-to-day life of Carthusian monks in the French Alps. I was totally blown away. The movie is in German, but that doesn’t matter as there is essentially no dialogue, except what one of the monks says to the cats in the monastery kitchen.

I was impressed. These people are spiritual athletes. Vowed to silence, they do everything with total mindfulness and total sincerity. Part of me acknowledges a deep admiration for such a lifestyle, and for a life lived in that kind of contact with a spiritual power. 

However, I possess both a mirror and a sense of self. I suspect the lifestyle in such a monastery would actually drive me insane in short order. Living on little more than bread and water, never arguing with anyone, never touching anyone, never having a lowly or sarcastic thought, never being able to bitch, moan or whine.

Ain’t gon’na happen. Fortunately, it doesn’t have to.

Without taking anything away from the monks in Die Grosse Stille, ordinary people can be monks and mystics, or any other spiritual thing you can image. (In fact there is a classic book titled Ordinary People as Monks and Mystics, by Marsha Sinetar which I recommend). 

The task of being spiritual is to live in accordance with one’s own higher nature, however that is understood. For some it may be a life of withdrawal from the world, for others it may be a life fully immersed in the world. 

According to the Theory of Interbeing, there is no lifestyle that is privileged. It is possible to have spiritual experiences that are just as deep, just as profound and just as valid, right while living your life now, working at your occupation now. You may have less objective support, there may be less spiritual paraphernalia, fewer “bells and smells,” or other forms of “holy hardware.” But any transcendence available to one of those Carthusian monks is available in some way to any one of us. 

Because, “What is here is elsewhere, what is not here is nowhere.”

The Metaphysical

There is even a deeper level to this Tantra as well. Do you have a regret about someone who is now forever gone from your life?

I do. My father left my mother when I was only a young boy. I realize he did that to keep himself intact. But, to my young mind, my father’s departure felt like he had abandoned me. I would spend many years in inner work coming to terms with that dark and formative experience. 

My father died years ago, and he did not die well. There were many things between us that went unsaid. 

What can be done? According to the spiritual Theory of Interbeing, there is something that can be done. 

When two people are related by blood, or by affection or are comrades through a common experience, those two people are forever connected. We are all somehow bound up with each other. My father is still a part of me, just as is my late first wife, my best friend from childhood, even my animal companions from years past. We are part of each other because we shared so much, both good and bad.

In moments of stillness, when the mood and time is right, I can reach into my own mind and because of Interbeing I can still find my father. I can still feel him. I can sense how he looked, sounded and recall his Old Spice aftershave. 

In those moments of stillness I can speak to him and I think in some way he does still hear me. The fact that he is dead does not separate us. And what went unsaid, can be said.

People who were once connected are connected always. We can still experience them in the stillness of memory and awareness. They are still here, even if they are also elsewhere behind the barrier of mortality.

Because, “What is here is elsewhere, what is not here is nowhere.”

Community Ministry Sunday

Some people take exception to my statement that Community Ministers are missionaries. They think that sounds too traditional, and perhaps it is.

Community Ministers exist because we Unitarian Universalists believe that all people are connected and that our values need to be spread out over the land beyond the walls of any local congregation. We believe this because we know that all people are interconnected, from the least to the greatest. That’s why the dynamics of our congregational life are so healthy and positive. We believe that the values we use to order our own congregation and our personal relationships should also be used to order other institutions. 

“What is here (should be) elsewhere, what is not here (should be) nowhere.”

And that’s my sermon.

Guns

The tragedy of the shooting in Sandy Hook is awful. I grew up in Connecticut not far from there, in a family where the men routinely hunted the forests of Connecticut to put meat on the dinner table. I was taught the safe handling of firearms from an early age and learned how to dress and cook game from my aunts. Therefore, this atrocity and its aftermath hit close to home.

Whenever a tragedy like this happens some people react emotionally by trying to find a way to punish the people who didn't do it. A world-class example of this can be seen in the decision by the New York Journal News to publish a list of the names and address of gun owners in their community.

My wife and I are target shooters. We do not feel that the peaceful practice of a lawful sport (an Olympic sport to boot) is a moral issue. We have taken safety training from a qualified instructor. Our target pistols are kept unloaded and locked in a safe, separate from ammunition. They are low-caliber, low-power target pistols, suitable for punching holes in paper targets and not much else. 

Regardless of what you might hear in the press, most gun owners support an assault weapons ban and a large capacity magazine ban. Most also support registration laws, required safety training, comprehensive background checks and closing the gun show loophole. If our anti-gun friends could stop yelling at us long enough to listen, they'd discover that we're actually on the same side more often than not. I believe a majority of gun owners disagree with the public policies of the National Rifle Association. We do.

In the case of the Journal News, the paper has a right to publish the gun owner list as it is a public record. However, the decision to do it was asinine. 

Law-abiding gun owners are not persons like sex offenders that the community should be warned about. Treating them that way is needlessly provocative. It is as offensive as a local paper publishing a list of the people in the community who have rented adult videos (your local video store's customer list is also a public record in the sense that it is not protected or privileged from disclosure). 

If someone is breaking no law, why is their behavior anyone else's business? What happened to a citizen's reasonable expectation of privacy? Plus, it's really, really dumb.

About three years ago my home was burglarized. The thief has never been caught. Most are not. If it happened to me, it can happen to you or anyone else. In this case the thief did not get our target pistols, but I'm sure he would have been delighted to steal them if he could have.

If a local newspaper publishes a list of gun owners and their address, the paper is providing a service to thieves by helping them locate likely places to steal guns they will quickly be able to "fence" and sell to criminals. It would be like publishing a list of the names and addresses of people in your local community who purchased expensive jewelry so the local burglars don't waste their time breaking into the homes of the people who have the cheap stuff. 

What were the editors thinking? Were they thinking at all?

Crabs and Advertising

I was a child from a broken home and needed to find work at an early age. I ended up getting jobs in food service as child labor is legal in that industry, and through the union training program I could easily acquire skills.

It worked out well for me. I was always able to find work through high school, college and graduate school. I still cook as a hobby and the Food Network is something I enjoy watching.

As I know food I'm amazed at some of the things I see on television. I saw a weird commercial the other night for a seafood restaurant. They are featuring crab this month and the picture was of an arctic fisherman opening up his net and spilling beautiful crabs on the deck of his boat while telling everyone how good they were.

They did look good--bright red and juicy. They looked very appetising. However, crabs are not red in their natural state. They turn red when you cook them. I've never heard of a fisherman who actually was able to catch pre-cooked crabs in a net, and can't imagine they'd be good if one could.

 Obviously, the picture had been altered somehow to make the crabs look like the crabs that appear in the photos in the menu. I understand the strategy, but do the advertising agencies really think people don't notice such things?

Sermon-Herding Electronic Sheep

Sermon-Herding Electronic Sheep

A Sermon to Countryside Church, Unitarian Universalist

Sunday, September 2, 2012, Labor Day Sunday

On Labor Day Sunday I like to preach about why I think Unitarian Universalism is important, and I’m going to do that again. But first I want to talk about slot machines.

Casino Gambling

 Some, perhaps most, of you have at one time or another gone into a casino. I certainly have. The National Guild of Hypnotists has it’s Winter Convention in Las Vegas most years, and while we on the faculty would rather the Winter Convention be anywhere else, the conventioneers love Vegas. 

The faculty at the Winter Convention hate Las Vegas because casino hotels are designed so that to get from one’s room to anywhere in the hotel requires that one go through the casino. We quickly found that the casino acts like a sort of filter. When the classes are supposed to start, a certain number of students enter the casino at one end, while a much smaller number of students emerge at the other end and actually get to the classroom. It can be frustrating.

I wonder why casinos are so attractive. Everyone knows that you can’t really win. The odds favor the house. If you play long enough you will always lose.

This is especially true of slot machines. They are completely automated and by law set for a 20% rate of return. That is, you will win back $20 for every $100 you invest. Unless you hit quickly by dumb luck, you will only get back $20 for every C note you spend. Apparently, that is attractive enough to keep people hooked. People will hang in there if they feel good about what is happening 20% of the time, even if they lose the other 80% of the time.

And that’s an important theological insight. To see why, let me discuss an ancient religion.

Gnosticism

 Most people don’t realize that when Christianity was getting started it had a competitor that was popular. The competitor was called “Gnosticism,” a title that comes from the Greek word for knowledge, “gnosis.” They also claimed Jesus as their teacher, but had a completely different idea of what he taught.

While Christianity was a “you all come” faith that welcomed everyone from the most aristocratic to the most humble, Gnosticism was for the elite. It’s teaching was that salvation did not come by faith, but by knowledge. Gnostics believed that the world we live in was an immense hoax, and that there was a hidden spiritual reality that only a few understood. 

The Gnostics believed that the world was the work of a false and malevolent deity. The proof of this was the world itself, with all of its imperfection, injustice and conflict. This malevolent deity, called the “Demiurge,” was assisted in its nefarious spiritual activity by “Archons,” or spiritual beings that governed different parts of the world and worked together to cause suffering and strife.

The really evil thing about this setup, the Gnostics argued, is that the Demiurge had convinced everyone that it was actually good and holy. It was a vast illusion when actually humanity was in the grip of a spiritual slavery. The Gnostics hated the God that everyone else worshipped, and they thought that the angels were really demons.

Fortunately, beyond the realm of the Demiurge, the Gnostics believed, there was an actual holy realm, where human intellect would be honored and where true justice could be found. But this spiritual realm could only be accessed by a few people who had achieved a special level of spiritual development. Every member of every Gnostic Congregation sought the develop this special spiritual insight.

The problem was that this was a lot of work, and mostly Gnosticism died out because people found it to be far too difficult. However, Gnostic themes remain. There are sections of the New Testament that reflect it. The library of the Dead Sea Scrolls contain many Gnostic Texts that have survived, and the whole idea of our world being an illusion is a common literary theme.

Perhaps some of you saw the 1999 film with Keanu Reeves called The Matrix, which spelled out the Gnostic Theme perfectly. The world we see is actually an illusion--a vast computer simulation. The reality is completely different, but only a few people know that--those who have swallowed the red pill.

Dan Brown’s 2003 mystery novel The Di Vinci Code, is another example, and it was the 8th best selling book of all time. It proposed that there is a hidden spiritual wisdom about a Divine Feminine power that is only known to a spiritual elite, the members of the Priory of Sion.

There are many more examples, from Freemasonry to Faust. The notion that there is a reality hidden beyond what we can see. Only an elite can know this world. This is an enduring theme. We even see it in popular scientific literature.

When Cosmologist Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow published their masterful book The Grand Design, they argued that M-Theory, a complex theory made of overlapping scientific models, renders philosophy dead, and proves that neither God nor free will exist.

Without realizing it, they were advocating a new form of Gnosticism. Their explanation of what reality is really like--vibrating quasi-dimensional strings and multiple universes--could only be understood by the best and the brightest. People with special training, such as physicists or those who listen to them.

The Existential Detective Story

In fact, one cosmologist, Jim Holt, has just published a fascinating book titled Why Does the World Exist: An Existential Detective Story. In this book he asked the ultimate “why” question first asked by philosopher Martin Heidegger, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” 

The catch is that there really is no calculus that let’s you explain how the universe came to be. There is a logical flaw in even asking the question.

The universe, by definition, is made up of everything that physically exists or has ever existed. Anything that could explain the cause of the universe would have to also be something that exists, or has existed, and would therefore be part of the physical universe. 

Accordingly, all scientific explanations of the origin of the universe are doomed to be circular. Circular arguments are always logically false. You end up trying to explain the cause of something in terms of something it is defined to contain.

You will always end up in the infinite loop like the riddle “which came first, the chicken or the egg?” 

That’s why the current trend in cosmology is to claim that the universe “just is.” Stephen Hawking calls this the “no boundary” model, arguing that when speaking of the universe it is nonsensical to ask when it began. 

But that is unsatisfactory, agues Dr. Holt. 

There is something called the “Principle of Sufficient Reason,” universally used in every form of science. This principle states that there is a sufficient reason for everything. If something exists, there is something that caused it. There is a reason for everything, and if that were not true nothing could ever make any sense, and all of science would be impossible.

Therefore, it feels like there should be a reason why the universe exists, and exists in the way that it does. The problem is that, as George Carlin noted in his comedy routine, the place is a real mess.

Oh...there are lots of pretty things in the universe. I get giddy when watching The Nature Channel. But there’s lots of bad stuff too. A lot of it created by human action.

Wars. Atrocities. Misfortune. Evil. George Carlin apparently doesn’t like the Ice Capades. Every galaxy has a Black Hole at its center that will eventually eat it alive. Under the Principle of Entropy everything is winding down. None of us are getting out of this alive, which is the observation behind a quip I use in my medical lectures where I define “Being Alive” as “A sexually-transmitted terminal disease.” 

If the universe has a cause, what do we say about the mess that it’s in? If you read his book, Dr. Hold has a personal solution. He agrees that the universe must have a cause, but argues that it’s not a good cause. Woody Allen asked if “Maybe God is an underachiever,” and Dr. Hold agrees. 

He goes back to the Gnostics and their belief that the universe is the creation of a bad god, a Demiurge. However (and I will quote him here), “A useful compromise between the Christians and the Gnostics might be my own position, that the universe was created by a being that is 100 percent malevolent but only 80 perfect effective. (pp. 34-5). 

I certainly don’t think this is true, and I hope he is kidding about what he believes, but his point is that way more Bad Things seem to happen than Good Things. 

We get some wins; about 20%. Like the slot machines set for a 20% rate of return, we keep getting just enough back that we’re motivated to keep putting in our quarters and pulling the handle of life, rather than giving up. 

But if we settle for that, we end up letting external circumstances push us around. The willingness to settle for that is what causes a lot of what’s gone wrong in our civilization.

At least, that’s what science fiction author Philip K. Dick said after his encounter with a Radiant Fish. 

Philip K. Dick

Philip Dick is easily the most influential science fiction writer of modern times. By the time he died in 1982 at the age of 53, he had written 121 stories and 45 novels. Many of his novels have been made into movies. The movie Blade Runner was based on his story Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and I’ve taken the title of my sermon today from that story. Other movies based on his work are Total Recall, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly,” and most recently The Adjustment Bureau. 

What scholars find interesting about Dick is that his social predictions often seem prophetic. He wrote about a world where corporations are more powerful than governments, where information is more valuable than money, where political parties have so mastered persuasion and rhetoric that people unquestioningly believe outright lies, and where we are so dependent on machines and computers that we’re losing the ability to think critically. 

In short, he predicted what actually happened.

And he was fascinated by the ancient religion of Gnosticism, because he thought it was sort of true.

On February 20, 1974 he sought treatment from a dentist for an impacted wisdom tooth. He received a dose of sodium pentothal for pain. Later that day, a young woman delivered a bottle of Darvon to his apartment as a longer-acting pain medication. She was wearing a necklace with a charm in the shape of a golden fish. A beam of light reflected off the necklace into Dick’s eye and he had a sudden vision. A true mystical experience, or so he claimed. 

That was when he glimpsed what he believed our society was heading toward, and he wrote his books as a warning that our willingness to settle for the path of least resistance might turn us into “electric sheep” where we are led around and don’t really see what is going on.

The result was an experience that changed his life. He would spend the next eight years writing about it in a vast text he called his Exegesis, where he tried to make sense of it all. 

Only parts of the Exegesis have been published as the actual text is more than 8000 pages long. As Dick read widely in ancient and modern philosophy, it’s heavy going.

Basically, he felt that most people believe an illusion. But it’s not the creation of an evil God, it’s the result of a human weakness. Human beings tend to take the easy intellectual path. Instead of making choices about the life we want, we tend to drift along, winning sometimes, losing most, and letting external events shape our lives.

While he considered his Radient Fish vision to be mystical, what it revealed to him was that most people were in the grip of powers that were not so much supernatural as psychological--a trick of nature burried deep in our genes.

He argued that our world is really in the grip of a Demiurge. But it wasn’t a God. It was a human trait. The trait of genetically-programmed individualism and will to power.

This Demiurge is supported by the Archons, or institutions, like capitalism, global economy, tribalism, environmental exploitation, corporate personhood and a long host of similar powers. These larger philosophical and biological structures are the demons and devils that keep us enslaved, but we don’t see it.

The consequence is that we are easily fooled into believing that things are different than they actually are. He called this living in the “Black Iron Prison.” 

There are political and philosophical institutions that are happy to keep us fooled. He called those institutions “The Empire.” People stay in the Black Iron Prison because they get into a “Comfort Zone” where things work well enough for them that they don’t rock the boat. This allows the Empire to prosper. And so our civilization has developed and it is increasingly a mess.

I find myself living in a world where otherwise intelligent people think our current President, who is someone I know personally, is a Moslem*. Where despite the fact the long form of his birth certificate has been published people still think he really isn’t a citizen. I listen to Presidential Candidates talk about repealing laws on the first day in office, when Presidents do not in fact have the authority to repeal laws. 

I routinely see advertising for products that do not work. I interact on a daily basis with medical institutions that deliberately push expensive procedures that everyone knows are unnecessary, and where the voices of moderation and reason are routinely drowned out in a cacophony of fundamentalisms both religious and political. 

It’s a mess.

Perhaps some of you have been watching the new BBC series “The Newsroom” about a news channel anchored by a person of high intellectual integrity who exposes the rhetorical chicanery of contemporary politics being done by both parties. 

I love that show. I feel great after watching it. The only problem with it is that it is a TV show. It’s not actually happening. Real news programs are not doing that. 

Not good. Too many people are content to be “Sheeple.”

By the way, that’s the term some people in marketing call you and me. Sheeple. A contraction of the word “sheep,” and the word “people.” In my martial arts classes I sometimes hear students who make their living as law enforcement officers use the same term. “Sheeple.”

What Is To Be Done

The remedy for all this is spiritual. Like the Gnostics, Dick believed that there would always be a small group of people who were spiritual enough that they could see through the illusion, and free themselves from the Black Iron Prison. They would understand what was happening to them. Even if they couldn’t change what was happening, they at least would not be fooled by it. 

He called this living in “The Palm Tree Garden.” Not a paradise. Not a salvation. The universe and our society would still be messed up. But a life where at least you had figured things out for yourself and were not one of the “Sheeple.” Your eyes were open. The goal was to be one of these people. Someone who at least was no one’s fool.

That’s why I think liberal religion is important. We’re the people who are no one’s fool. We don’t just believe what we are told. We pay attention to our own mind and gut.

Salt and Light

I believe that’s what liberal churches are, groups of people who don’t just go with the flow that allows bad things to happen. The reason this is important is because if only a few people resist like this, it changes everything.

This is what Jesus taught. You find it in all of the Synoptic Gospels: Matthew, Mark and Luke. “You are the salt of the earth (Matt 5:13)” “You are the light of the world. (Matt 5:14) “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast... (Matt. 13:33).

Jesus of Nazareth knew that his followers were few, and the might of the Roman Empire was vast. He knew he would never be able to lead his followers to a military victory. He realized he didn’t have to. If he could only convince a small but critical number of people to live lives that stood out from the herd, that would be enough.

Like a pinch of salt flavors a whole dish; or a single flame brightens a whole room; or a bit of yeast causes and entire loaf of bread to rise--if only a certain critical mass of people could change the focus of their lives, then the whole of society would change. If only a small number of people do the inner work to become a spiritual elite, their example would be so powerful that it would inspire others and elevate the whole.

I believe this is the core of what Jesus taught--that a few enlightened people can elevate all of society--and he set out to inspire those people.

We Unitarian Universalists are few. There are only about 160,000 adults in our churches. We are not the only example of liberal religion, but even putting us all together we will never be many. 

We don’t have to be. So long as we are here with our free pulpit and our free pew, there will always be a forum where people can speak out against the deception of those who want us to be Sheeple.

So long as there are liberal scholars who critically evaluate textual, archaeological and theological arguments, there will always be a countervailing voice to the fundamentalisms of our time.

We may be few, but we are not fooled. We can strive to dwell in the Palm Tree Garden. Our task is to be heard and noticed. If we are, we really do change things and then the world might not have to settle for winning only 20% of the time.

And that’s my sermon.

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* A number of people were curious about this statement. When President Obama was a Senator from my home state of Illinois, his wife worked for the University of Chicago. He attended, and spoke at, the Cancer Survivors Day hosted by the University of Chicago Medical Center. I have participated as an exhibitor at the University's Cancer Survivors Day for many years and met him there. I even had the opportunity to discuss the value of Complementary and Alternative Medical Care with him. You can find a photo of him taken at the Cancer Survivors Day in the Photo Gallery on my website.

Sermon-Beware of Dragons

Beware of Dragons!

Sermon to Countryside Church Unitarian Universalist

The Rev. Dr. C. Scot Giles

Sunday, May 27, 2012

 Long ago, map-makers would put the legend “Here be Dragons” or “Beware of Dragons” on those areas of a map where they had no information about the geography. They really didn’t think there were dragons there. It was simply a convention to indicate that if you went it that direction you were entering uncharted territory and did so at your own risk.

 My sermon this morning concerns the dangers of entering uncharted territory too. But I’m referring to the darker places in the mind where there are no maps, few guides and only a handful of rules to guide us. Hence the title, “Beware of Dragons!”

This is Memorial Day Sunday. Originally Memorial Day was called Decoration Day, and it was a day of remembrance for those who died in the Civil War. Gradually that gave way to a remembrance for those who died is all wars, and in recent years its became a time of remembrance for all we’ve loved and who are absent. 

Times of remembrance can be melancholy. So this is an appropriate time to explore a theme about a danger in the human mind and heart that can made sadness worse.

Dragons

But first I want to prattle about dragons.

Now I think dragons have gotten an undeservedly bad reputation. Legend has it that they are immense creatures with reptilian or serpentine features. I’ve long suspected they represent a survival in our Collective Unconscious Minds of a dim recollection of the dinosaurs, some of whom are dead ringers for dragons. The next time you are at the Field Museum, check out the skeleton of the Pterosaur and you’ll see what I mean.

There are specific sorts of dragons. There is the Common European Dragon that was said to possess bat-like wings and that walked on four legs. This is the sort of dragon you find in European Fairy Tales and in some religious mythology such as the story of St. George the Dragon Slayer. 

The Common European Dragon, sometimes fire-breathing and often guarding a cache of gold, is not to be confused with the Wyvern [why-verm], a completely different creature that resembles the European Dragon except that it has only two forelegs. The Wyverm is the symbol you find in Family Crests and other Heraldic Designs from Wales in Great Britain.

Very different from the Wyvern and the Common European Dragon is the Asian Dragon, depicted as having four legs and no wings. My personal keychain and wallet chain are crafted of bronze in the form of an Asian Dragon, and in Asian mythology this sort of dragon is a benevolent creature, symbolizing strength, wisdom, healing, power and good fortune. 

The Asian Dragon is common in all forms of Asian art and heraldry, with the Five-Clawed Dragon representing the Emperor. To this day it is a crime in the People’s Republic of China to deface or show disrespect for an image of a dragon. 

In ages past when people encountered fossilized remains of dinosaurs, they assumed they were looking at dragon bones, so it’s not hard to see how they might have believed that dragons existed somewhere. 

I think they were right. Dragons do exist, there are many in this very room right now. For we all have a dragon within our skeletons. It’s the spine. It’s the long, serpentine structure that holds us upright. 

Our vertebrae not dissimilar to that of the serpent. Legends tell of energetic centers called chakras in Traditional Chinese and Asian Medicine, or worlds in Northern European myth, located along the spine and having immense power; spinning in a rainbow pattern with every color of visible light. 

In the meditative practices of Theravada Buddhism, the dragon power, or kundlini is said to rise along the spine from the lowest chakra to the highest--bringing health and power if its flow is strong, bringing madness if its flow is interrupted.

And topping this inner dragon is the skull, encasing the most perfect biological organ ever created, whose mystery still eludes our understanding--the brain. 

And somehow arising from the activity of that brain is our mind, “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma” (to quote Winston Churchill out of context). 

In fact, the dragon isn’t a bad symbol for our whole nervous system which is why it often shows up in martial arts imagery. You may recall the movie, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; the “hidden dragon” is a reference to neurological power. A serpentine energy system, encased in vertebra which, for most of its length, is almost identical to that possessed by serpents. 

Unfortunately, our nervous system is a bad dragon. Our nervous system often gets things wrong. And so we make bad decisions, understand events partially and make assumptions that will often be mistaken.

The Mind

We study the brain.We know how it works, partially. 

There is clearly some form of associational stimulus-response programming going on that can be demonstrated experimentally. 

There is a wonderful true story of how two of the greatest modern hypnotists were having dinner. Dr. Ernest Rossi, a brilliant neuropsychologist sat chatting with Dr. Milton Erickson, who likely was the greatest hypnotist who ever lived.

They were old friends, but as the evening wore on, Dr. Rossi found himself possessed of a deep need to pass Dr. Erickson the salt. Dr. Erickson did not ask for the salt, but by the end of the meal Dr. Rossi was desperate for a way to give it to him.

Erickson laughed and pointed out that during the meal whenever Dr. Rossi moved closer to the salt shaker, Dr. Erickson began to praise Dr. Rossi’s work. Whenever he moved away from the salt shaker, Dr. Erickson criticized Dr. Rossi’s work. Within an hour, Dr. Rossi found himself hovering over the salt shaker and trying to find a way to give it to Dr. Erickson without catching on that he was being subtly manipulated. 

In some ways, like that, the brain is simple to understand. But in others it is not understood. 

What is clear at this point is that the mind is not something that simply arises from the activity of the brain, in the way that blood pressure is something that arises from the activity of the heart. The brain is more than a biological computer. It is capable of immense creativity, logical leaps and intuitions. In fact it is constantly re-wiring itself whenever it learns a new way to do something. No computer can do that.

In a fascinating and still famous book published in 1976, The Origin of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, scientist Julian Jaynes argued that the whole nature of human consciousness has been changing over time. He argued that ancient peoples as recently as 3000 years ago were not conscious of themselves in the way that we are. Their minds were more sharply divided between conscious and unconscious parts. The division was so strong, that the parts communicated with each other using words. 

In ages past, people made most of their decisions on the basis of tradition or habit. In those cases where tradition and habit were insufficient guides, ancient humans could “hear” in their own minds a hallucinated a guiding voice that seemed to come from an external source. They heard and obeyed. 

Jaynes argues that the voice they heard was actually the activity of their own unconscious minds, but they experienced it as if it was someone speaking to them. The ancient Greeks called this voice “The Logos” and it’s a concept which was so well-known it ended up in New Testament scripture. 

The evidence for this startling theory came from an elaborate analysis of ancient literature. In none of the earliest literature, such as writing of Homer or the Book of Amos in the Old Testament, is there any evidence of introspection, conscious deliberation or self-awareness on the part of the writer. You do find that in the more recent books of the bible such as Ecclesiastes, or in modern literature, but in the ancient books what you read is that “the gods spoke, and said...” Those stories are not stories of people who thought and figured things out for themselves. The oldest stories are tales of people who heard and obeyed a voice. 

Modern observations of the mental illness of schizophrenia have confirmed that it is possible for a human brain to experience such hallucinated command voices, and Jaynes’ work is now considered crucial to understanding those illnesses.

Jaynes believed that our modern self-awareness didn’t even begin to develop until about the year 1200 BCE; about the time of Moses in the Old Testament timeline. That was the time when Bronze Age civilizations began to collapse all over the world, and habit and tradition no longer provided enough of a guide on how to keep oneself alive in the chaos that followed.

But the Bicameral Mind is still with us. In fact, it’s just a short drive from here. 

Someday stop over at one of the “Big Box” evangelical churches in the area. One of these, Harvest Bible Chapel has 8 campuses in the Chicago area and the numerical membership of this one congregation is about 20% of the worldwide membership of the entire Unitarian Universalist Association. 

Such religious communities practice a spiritual method where they almost literately recreate the Bicameral Mind. Recently a brilliant anthropologist, T.M. Luhrmann published a book about them entitled When God Talks Back. The book is currently making the rounds on the reading lists of most clergy.

I’ve known Luhrmann’s work for many years. Back at the beginning of the movement we call today Feminist Spirituality she published a book called The Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft, a sensitive and sympathetic analysis of the modern neo-pagan Wicca movement and explained why it appeals to so many.

In her latest work she examines the Vineyard Christian Fellowship, a large “Jesus People” denomination. She describes how members train themselves to talk constantly to God about the smallest details of their lives. They then work to hear God talking back about the smallest and most intimate decisions.

They pray about what pair of shoes to put on, what sort of car to buy. They pray when considering which brand of oatmeal to serve for breakfast, and they do not stop until they hear a voice answering back. 

Over time, this voice because completely real to them and they use it to inform every aspect of their lives. 

They don’t so much have a theology as they have a spiritual method. It is a method that changes their minds and probably also changes their brains, because the brain will rewrite itself to hear the inner voice more readily if the owner insists. They reinstate a version of the Bicameral Mind and use it to create a mass movement.

But think about it. The When God Talks Back people are teaching a method where you hear a voice in your head that tells you what to do. It takes away stress, doubt and uncertainty. Within social limits, all you have to do is hear and obey. I can see why it sells.

We All Hear An Inner Voice

Do you talk to yourself? I do. Most people do. It’s an inner voice, but we know it is our own voice. We don’t understand it as coming from an external source and we certainly don’t think it is the voice of God. So it doesn’t take away our stress. In fact, a lot of the time it makes our stress worse.

It’s my observation that our inner voices get us in trouble more often than not. In fact, when you hear that inner voice I would have you beware. There be dragons there.

Ever get stage fright? You’re up there on stage, or giving a talk, or at an important meeting? You know your stuff but something has you shaken. All these eyes are looking at you and you hear this voice in your head, “You’re go’in to screw this up!” And once you start to hear that voice, there is no way to get it to shut up.  

“Everyone is going to know you’re a fake,” it says. “Now everything is going to fall into place...on top of you....” Most people feel this way. It’s even got a name. We call it The Impostor Syndrome. People who really know their stuff also know how much they have yet to learn. That’s the factoid that gets hooked and your confidence can shatter. All really smart people have times like this. The only people this never happens to are the people who are complete fakes, because they think they know it all. 

Whenever I ask someone to tell me what they say to themselves in the privacy of their own minds I am amazed. Most people subject themselves to an endless flow of criticism and blame. They talk to themselves with zero empathy, zero forgiveness, zero compassion. If we ever talked to another person the way most of us talk to ourselves, we’d have very few friends indeed.

All of us move through life making decisions based on our perspective; our model of what the world is like. There are many different perspectives possible.

Your senses are bombarded by 2 million bits of information per second, but your conscious mind can deal with only 5-9 pieces of information at any moment. Therefore, there is a vast amount of information about what is happening to us that is filtered out by our brain. That filtering occurs on the basis of what we believe is important--our perspective on things. Unfortunately, for many of us, our perspective on the things that concern ourselves, often stinks.

The Blame Frame

The human mind attempts to solve problems. That is it’s primary function. As psychiatrist M. Scott Peck said at the start of his classic book, The Road Less Traveled:

“Life is difficult.

This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths....

Life is a series of problems....

What makes life difficult is that the process of confronting and solving problems is a painful one....

Yet it is in this whole process of meeting and solving problems that life has its meaning.”

Because our minds are focused on solving problems, when something goes wrong we tend to look backwards to analyze what went wrong. The side-effect of this is to lay blame. We focus on what’s wrong, how long it’s been wrong, whose fault is it that things went wrong, and why we haven’t done anything about it.

Asking “why” forces us deeper into the problem where we become defensive and over-focused on our failures and inadequacies. In hypnotism, this is called “The Blame Frame.” It’s a very common behavior but one that prevents us from figuring out what do to. Instead of fixing the problem, we find someone to blame. Usually ourselves.

The problem is that once we have assigned blame, our thinking process usually comes to a halt. In ancient tribal societies that was fine, because the tribe had simple ways of dealing with blameworthy people: shunning, expulsion, incarceration, execution and maybe education and correction. But our complex world has few such simple solutions that still work, and fewer institutions that can reliably carry them out.

Therefore, asking “why” when you have a problem is almost always a mistake. Beware of it. It takes you somewhere emotionally and spiritually where there is peril, because you are looking at the wrong thing. It is a dirty trick played on you by your nervous system that takes you away from finding a positive solution. There be dragons there.

Much of what goes on in contemporary politics is an example of this process. We rarely hear politicians saying “how can we fix this?” Instead, the focus is on what they blame: immigrants, taxes, socialism, regulation. Much blame, few specific solutions. While it’s tempting to blame specific political institutions for it, in fact it’s the human nervous system doing this. By default it asks “why.” Then it assigns  blame. Then it stops. I see this every day helping people in my hypnotism practice. Not good.

The Outcomes Frame

Far better to embrace what is known as “The Outcomes Frame” which will outwit the inner dragon. Instead of asking “What went wrong? Why did a bad thing happen?” we ask “What was I trying to accomplish? What were we trying to achieve? Is there another way to pull that off?”

If I am in a situation and my self-confidence has fled. If the inner voice is yelling that I’m really a fake and everyone is about to find out. Or if I simply know something isn’t working, I pause. I shift my mind to ask “what else can I try” and give that a shot. 

If it isn’t working, do something different, regardless of whose fault you think it is. Try something different instead of doing more of what isn’t working. Fix the problem instead of the blame. I think our whole government should learn this lesson.

Or as Ruppert Lovely, our late Minister Emeritus was fond of saying, “If what you do is what you’ve always done. What you get is what you’ve always gotten.” He and I used to talk about how once you could get someone to stop trying to assign the blame and try to fix the problem instead, wonderful things could happen. It was part of his genius as a clergyperson that he could often help people do that. A gift our present Senior Minister appears to share.

The human brain is a learning machine that needs to be kept busy or it gets into trouble. We need to focus on what we want in a positive sense or it starts to dwell on the negative, and causes us trouble.  

Equally, if we point the dragon in a different direction, it tends to go there. Perhaps at this time of remembrance we can ponder how we might do that in each of our lives.

And that’s my sermon.