What Makes You Unique?

What Makes You Unique?

Community Ministry Sunday, Countryside Church, Unitarian Universalist, February 6, 2022

The Rev. Dr. C. Scot Giles

Are You Possessed By A Demon?

Are you possessed by a demon? I hope so. If you are not, my hope is that following this sermon you will want to be.

Being possessed by a demon is not supposed to be fun - I’m sure many of you remember, as do I, the 1973 movie The Exorcist, where actress Linda Blair portrayed the young victim Regan MacNeil who was possessed by the demon Pazuzu (who, in mythology, was actually a minor god in Babylonian society and the King of the Wind). 

It was quite a movie! The critics hated it but audiences flocked to it, and some of the scenes were so remarkable that viewers suffered emotional breakdowns just watching it. There were heart attacks and miscarriages, and a psychiatric journal proposed a new diagnostic label - cinematic neurosis - to describe the emotional effects of the movie. The city government of several cities tried to ban the film from being shown. 

This is the classic trope about demonic possession. One is taken over by an evil, supernatural intelligence and does its bidding. Traditional church doctrine proposes that evil women, in league with dark spiritual powers, had the ability to inflict such possession on others, and that is what the Malleus Maleficarum was all about.

Now, I’m being a little deceptive here. When I say I want you to be possessed by a demon, I do not mean the sort of thing The Exorcist movie was all about. Not that kind of demon.

Demons v Daemons

The word demon is derived from the Latin word daemonium which means a “lesser spirit,” and not necessarily an evil one. 

Technically, that term encompasses all spiritual beings some systems of theology believe exist, and some daemoniums were thought to be holy and pure. They were called Angels, which means Messengers, only if there were specifically charged with some mission from God. Otherwise, the same being was considered a daemonium - think of them as Angels who had the day off.

As Christianity evolved and church leaders felt fear was necessary to ensure compliance with church doctrine, the terminology changed. 

Angels were good spirits and the daemonium, shortened to demons, were evil spirits. 

Priests then began to claim that if you did what the church said, you would be protected by Angels and perhaps go to Heaven when you died (“Pie in the sky, by and by when you die,” to quote an old Labor Movement hymn). However, if you didn’t do what the priests taught, then you would go to Hell where you would be punished eternally. 

Comedian George Carlin has a routine about this. It goes…

“Religion has actually convinced people that there's an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever 'til the end of time!….But He loves you. 

You get the idea. However, worse than even this prediction of a fate of sulfurous brimstone, was that fear that demons might take you over while still alive and make you do bad things. Demonic possession.

Well, I want to go back beyond the Latin understanding of demons because there was actually an original Greek understanding of the word. The Greeks spelled it similarly, but they tossed in an “a” so that the word was spelled “daemon.” To the ancient Greeks a daemon was a spirit who fell somewhere between God and humanity. They could even be the ghost of a fallen hero. 

As the concept evolved it came to mean the inner driving force of a person, sometimes also called a person’s “inner genius” or “Higher Self." It is part of what makes a person unique.

The word still gets kicked around. Novelist Philip Pullman uses the term daemon to describe the human soul in the form of an animal in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and some computer programming languages use it to describe a process which runs in the background. 

Your inner daemon is what I want you to consider today.

Your Inner Daemon

What is it about you that makes you unique? Increasingly, mental health workers are discovering that having a sense of one’s own inner core is vital to being happy, and they have some ideas of how you can go about figuring that out.

The reason this is important is that many believe that we easily lose track of who we really are. We grow up, we take on responsibilities and roles. There are social expectations and we are supposed to conform to them. We are expected to dress within certain parameters, behave within certain parameters, live in a manner dictated by convention - and our personal preferences be damned. 

And then we walk around feeling unfulfilled in our lives. We know something is missing but can’t identify it and if we step outside of the mold we’re criticized or made fun of.

Poet William Wordsworth puts this in his poem “The World Is Too Much With Us.”

“The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!”

The Inner Blueprint

Many of you know that my ministry is a healthcare ministry. I work with people who have received a life-changing diagnosis like cancer, AIDS, heart disease, autoimmune or organ failure. 

The method I use for this is hypnotism, but the theory that directs how I use it comes from the work of Dr. Bernie Siegel who did his fundamental research at Yale/New Haven Medical Center and has published any number of best-setting books about his findings.

Dr. Siegel has what he called his “blueprint hypothesis.” His discovery was that people living with cancer, indeed, people living with any chronic, life-changing, diagnosis, did better if they felt fulfillment in their lives.

Consequently, the whole approach became helping people with this sort of issue discover what changes they needed to make to their lives in order to feel more fulfilled as persons. If they made those changes they almost always did better medically.

Dr. Siegel proposed that we all have an “inner blueprint” for the sort of person we are supposed to be. Some claim such a blueprint comes from a spiritual source, while others take the view that it arises from our deeper psychology. But in all cases, figuring out your inner blueprint and then sculpting your life to work with it, will result in greater happiness. 

A whole methodology arose using conversation, testing, dream and drawing interpretation and other techniques to help a person discover their inner core, and then methods (including hypnotism) were used to help people shift to match what that core was about.

Research, including that from my own I CAN program which was based at LaGrange Memorial Hospital for more than thirty years, showed significantly improved medical outcomes with this approach.

Sometimes the changes people made were extreme and obvious - for example relationship or occupational changes. Other times the changes were modest - a patient acquired a hobby or some other focus. But in all cases they changed to better conform to their inner blueprint.

One patient told me that when she figured this out she felt she had found her “superpower.” 

There Will Be Objections

Obviously, the task of figuring out your “inner blueprint” was the same task as deciding what your “inner daemon” or core identity is all about. I want to help you do exactly that right now.

One caution. When you decide that you will make adjustments within your lifestyle, habits or temperament, others are going to object. They like you just the way you are. Even if you are miserable, others have you pigeonholed as one sort of person and will resist any attempt to climb out of that pigeonhole. Family Therapists call these efforts “change back maneuvers” and they are common.

“Gee…I wonder if that therapist is really helping you.” Translation, “I don’t like the way you are behaving and want you to stop.”

“You know - there are other people depending on you.” Translation, “Please stop trying to please yourself and instead try to please me.”

As understandable as “change back maneuvering” may be, it is always wrong. You should be the star of your own life. Your loyalty should be to yourself first, and your responsibilities to others (while real) need to take a reasonable back seat to that. Resist the many social pressures to conform.

I wasn’t kidding about starting this sermon out by taking about the traditional church and its warning about demon possession - facilitated by wicked women or otherwise. The traditional church wants you to do what it says you should do, and become the sort of person it wants you to be. So it warns you about paying attention to the wisdom inside of you. Your inner daemon.

Performer Sammy Davis, Jr., put it nicely in the song he wrote titled “I’ve Gotta Be Me.” 

“Whether I'm right or whether I'm wrong

Whether I find a place in this world or never belong

I gotta be me, I've gotta be me

What else can I be but what I am….

I'll go it alone, that's how it must be

I can't be right for somebody else

If I'm not right for me."

Amen brother. You sang the truth. We all need to know what our inner core, our inner daemon, is and we need to do what we can to be “right for ourselves.” Chips fall where they may, you don’t want to waste time following a false path that isn’t really you.

Finding Your Daemon

So how do you figure out what you inner core, your inner daemon, is if you have not already?

Philosopher Robert Greene gives us a clue in his recent book titled, Mastery. He wrote:

“Some 2,600 years ago the ancient Greek poet Pindar wrote, ‘Become who you are by learning who you are.’ What he meant is the following: You are born with a particular makeup and tendencies that mark you as a piece of fate. It is who you are to the core. Some people never become who they are; they stop trusting in themselves; they conform to the tastes of others, and they end up wearing a mask that hides their true nature.”

The idea is to refine what has been hiding in you all along. One of the first places to discover that, is to think about your childhood likes, desires and preferences. What did you enjoy? What fascinated you? What made you different from your peers? Who were your childhood heroes? What did you do well?

The answers to these questions come from a deep place. Greene suggests that if answers do not suggest themselves to you because you’ve buried those answers too deep. So ask someone who knew you as a child. What about you stood out? 

There is a kind of reinforcement that psychologists call “shaping.” It is what happens when there isn’t a big event that changes one. Instead, there are a thousand and one little, tiny reinforcements and disconfirmations from others intended to push you to be who they want you to be. 

Parents has always done this to their children. Teachers do it to their students. Lovers do it to their paramours. Therapists do it to their clients, and ministers do it almost nonstop to everyone.

But who were you originally, before society and family got to you and tried to shape you into what they thought you should be like?

They may have meant well. Friends and roommates did their best to convince me not to follow my harebrained idea to become a clergy person, and worse yet, a hypnotist. They thought they had my best interest at heart. But they were wrong.

It’s okay to feel dismay at people who tried to get you to follow a false path. Feel anger toward any who tried to force you.

Your early inclinations can provide a clue as to what your inner daemon is like.

One wag put this by saying “Embrace Your Weirdness.” Embrace what distinguishes you from others.

I mentioned this do my wife of almost forty years as I was composing this sermon and her response was “I can see that would be comforting for you, because you’re one of the oddest people around,” 

She meant that as a joke (I think), but I get the point. From my earliest days I have never given a damn about social convention. From my days as a motorcyclist to my profession as a ministerial hypnotist, I am, frankly, odd. But I am happy.

And I think that is great. I think that is one of the reasons I’ve lived as long as I have, when I wasn’t supposed to. My inner daemon and I are friends.

You are a one-time creation. Even if you have an identical twin somewhere your DNA is unique to you because it has been shaped by your experiences (that’s called epigenetics). When you were conceived, the cells that successfully fertilized the egg that became you were in a competition, and exactly one was victorious over all the others. You began as a winner because you were different from everyone else. 

If your early experiences do not help you, ask about what you take delight in now. Ask yourself what you are good at now - no matter how small. Indulge that. Assert yourself against any who would stop you.

It’s Never Too Late

Think about the times when you did what you really enjoyed and how you felt. Think about the times when you did what others wanted, and how you felt then. Trust your own insights more, and the insights of others less.

No matter where you are on life’s journey, there is always a way to be more like the person you were created to be. You may already have made decisions that will prevent you from making a radical change in your circumstances, but I am here to tell you that you will nonetheless benefit by making some small change. Even if you are late in life, it’s never too late to make yourself more happy than you were.

I’ve seen, many times, how even people close to the end of their lives can make their remaining time better by caring less about how others want them to behave, and caring more about what actually brings happiness. 

Even if what makes you happy is binge watching movies on the Hallmark Channel, your own mind is telling you by the realization that there is something there that is important for you.

I had a client for whom precisely that was the case. After watching the Hallmark Channel from her hospital bed she realized that her inner hunger was for stories that ended happily and well, and this allowed her to reflect on the stories she remembered about herself. 

Like most people she remembered the bad stories better. When she realized her inner core longed for a different sort of story she wrote down her memories about the things that had gone well for her. She realized there were more than she’d noticed. Everything improved, and she made sure that from that time forward she put her energy into things that might plausibly go well, because she was, at core, an optimist for the rest of her days.

Are You Possessed?

So, are you possessed by your inner daemon? Do you have a sense of who you were created to be and can you find a way to make even a piece of that real now? I hope so.

Happiness doesn’t happen to us. We have to resolve to seek it because it will not occur on its own. We need to do the inner work and not let ourselves be pushed around by the expectations of others.

And that’s my sermon.