America the Beautiful Because of Liberals and Conservatives

An eagle soars high only on two wings.

If such a grand bird were to use one of its wings against the other, it would be only crippled and crazy.  America is a bird divided against itself.  Instead of having a higher view, it flops and flounders on the ground.  Such a bird needs psychiatric help or prophetic warning.  That is my intent here today: I want to help America soar again.

I see my beloved America as being the pride of the past and the hope of the future, but some abroad and here, including me, can see it as the shame of the past and threat of the future.

Columnist Richard Reeves reported that the British literary journal Granta asked Europeans about America a year after September 11^th.  The replies revealed a mixture of “fear, resentment, envy, anger, wonder, hope.”  Harold Pinter, a British playwright, put it starkly:

Arrogant, indifferent, contemptuous of international law, both dismissive and manipulative of the United Nations… A ‘rogue state’ of colossal military and economic might… without thought, without pause for reflection, without a moment of doubt, let alone shame… It has effectively declared war on the world.  It knows only one language – bombs and death.

While liberals might see the truth of this criticism, conservatives would resent it more than consider it.  They tend to see criticism and protest as undermining patriotism, not as a part of it.

Humorist Al Franken tried to answer this in his book Lies, and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them.  He jokes that the national dialogue on terrorism goes something like this:

Why do they hate us?  Because they hate freedom and they’re evil.

Maybe if we understood what triggered… Why are you apologizing for the terrorists?

I’m not.  What they did was horrific and inexcusable.  It’s just that maybe there are lessons we can learn.  Why do you hate America?

Such dialog doesn’t get us far.  Rranken reports conservative TV “host” Sean Hannity says liberals “train our children to criticize America, not celebrate it.”  But Franken sees the liberal mindset as incorporating criticism as part of our love.  Honesty must help guide.  He makes a list of the bad and good things about America:

Salem witch trials – bad

Revolutionary War – good

Slavery – bad

Ending slavery – good, but hard

Civil War reenactments – weird

Massacring Native Americans and breaking our treaties with them – bad

Indian casinos – ?

Child labor during the industrial Revolution – bad

Child labor mowing lawns and baby-sitting – character-building

Women getting the vote – good…for women! Just kidding. It’s good for everybody!!!

African Americans getting the vote – good… for African Americans! Kidding again… Good for Democrats

Winning World War II – wow!

Truman Doctrine – smart

Vietnam – mistake

Making mistakes – bad, but inevitable

Calling those who point out mistakes “unpatriotic” – itself unpatriotic

Owning up to our mistakes – brave

America – home of the brave

It is brave and wise to be honest, even when it pinches our inflated egos.  We need bravery and honesty, not just in accusation, but in self-examination.  When the Bush campaign crowd was dispersing in Mesilla, New Mexico and the Kerry crowd was gathering, few realized that in that same place in 1871 political words led to gunfire and nine killed.  Democrats are accused lately of “cultural warfare,” but Franken reminds us that back in 1358 European peasants sacked the manor house, killed the knight, then roasted him in front of his kids and force-fed him to his horrified wife.  That’s cultural warfare.  Our own Civil War was one of our worst.  It and the twentieth century’s Nazis and Communists ought to remind us of how hideous humans can get with each other when they won’t listen to and respect each other.

When I wrote an editorial shortly after 9-11 suggesting we respect Arabs and Muslims, someone returned it to me by mail with a foul word sprawled across it.  Instead of respect, or even understanding, we have attacked and exacerbated an entire civilization whose honor is regained only by revenge.  How does that serve our honor – or our defense – in the long run?

But I write as a liberal, and liberals tend to cast their circle of inclusion widely.  We can see the humanity in the enemy and we tend not to make enemies of our own citizens either.  When President Reagan quipped there are “Democrats and Americans,” we winced in resentful exclusion.  How dare he define us out?  Conservatives tend to draw their circles close to their “I and mine,” that being a small set of family, class, or ideology.  “They and them” to conservatives includes not just the terrorists or the Taliban, but Iraqis in general (or at least those in the way) and even fellow Americans with differing points of view.

But, do I commit the very offense I just deplored?  Because conservative leaders have touted a new crusade abroad and jailed protestors at home, do conservatives in general like that?  I get riled at the conservative siege of our society.  It dominates all three branches of our government, owns and runs all but a paltry few sources of our news and media, defines our religious options, and currently plans endless wars in our name, yet ironically and effectively does it all complaining liberals have too much power.

So I resent and resist the conservative onslaught, and would like to analyze and criticize, but won’t today because I have another agenda: I want to help America soar again, not just for our sake, but for humanity’s.  I don’t want a new Civil War.  I don’t want a new Crusade.  I don’t want World War III.  I want cultural, global, environmental healing.  I want my beloved America to help create peace and prosperity for everyone.  To do that I want to understand and include conservative views in a way that I hope is returned.

America works best when neither liberals nor conservatives take over.  Each has a role to play.  We were founded by both Jefferson and Hamilton.  We were founded in both freedom of religion and freedom from it.  We were founded in resentment of King George, and in fears of presidents acting like kings.  We were founded when the upper middle class of merchants and prosperous farmers assumed the powers of the aristocracy without then taking revenge, and gradually that power and wealth has been owned also by women, blacks, natives, and immigrants.  We were founded with some restraints on corporate influence.  Conservatives once conserved our environmental treasures.  Our conservative faith in free markets was founded in the liberal faith in humans freely doing what they deem best.  Our numerous advances in technology come from the entrepreneurial spirit of liberal innovation and conservative profiteering.  Universal public education, social security, and weekends off come from the liberal efforts of our ancestors.  Our usual lack of debt was touted by conservatives.

Our American experiment is old in terms of stable constitutions and adolescent and clunky in terms of a mature and ideal democracy.  Perhaps we stumble and glide along because we all participate, and should.  Perhaps liberal and conservative are more than poles of philosophy; perhaps these are spectrums of an organic society, types of persons, even aspects of ourselves.

When the First Amendment is actually used (and not just praised) America finds its honest and pragmatic voice.  A dynamic balance, a faith in honesty, a welcoming of humor, a sense of inclusive participation comes alive and saves us from us.  To do that we have to be wary of leaders who would divide out dissidents or destroy “enemies,” who are really just people with another point of view.  More than that, we must open our minds and hearts to those we fear as “other,” for those others are really our neighbors, part of the larger family of “us.”

Let’s look at the definitions and characteristics of liberal and conservative with a mind towards mutual understanding, appreciation, and respect.

The dictionary says a liberal is or favors:

Progress or reform in political and religious affairs

The maximum freedom possible, protected by law

A representative government rather than a monarchy or aristocracy

Open-mindedness and tolerance

Generosity from a sense of abundance

Leniency rather than strictness or literalness

I wonder if conservatives can see value in these definitions.  These are so much closer to the liberal way than the “tax and spend, destroy our institutions” label some conservatives tend to resent.

Similarly, I wonder if liberals would resent conservative traits if they know them.  Conservative come from “conserve,” meaning: to prevent injury, decay, waste, or loss, and to use and manage resources wisely.  Britain’s Conservative Party of 1832, successor to the Tory party (which was against the American Revolution), was characterized by “moderate progressivism.”  The dictionary describes conservative as:

Preserving existing conditions, institutions, or restoring traditional ones

Limiting change

Cautiously moderate

Traditional in style or manner, avoiding novelty or showiness

These seem familiar and innocent, not the cruel and crafty conservatism liberals resent.  Liberals resent Karl Rove.  Our disgust for his dirty tricks delights him.  He does the conservative’s sneaky work, but it gets us off our butts and gets us on our feet.  Bullies only respect those who fight back.  But in fighting back against him must we contend with genuine conservatives?  Are conservatives in general so quick to belittle and hear analysis as insult, like hate-talk-radio hosts do?  I doubt typical conservatives are as petty, ignorant, and arrogant as the Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage mouthpieces model.

Perhaps what we both do is to find extreme examples of the things we like or dislike and suppose those apply to the whole category or group.  Some see odd protestors as a sure sign of impending anarchy; others see the dirty trickster Karl Rove as a modern Goebels.  We see what we expect and viola! America is going communist or fascist.  Rather than such sweeping generalizations, let’s look at liberal and conservative traits as parts of us, both helping to fly this American bird.  Let’s go from “how can they think that way?” to “that makes some sense.”

Both liberals and conservatives care, it’s just that liberals cast their circle of care widely while conservatives keep it closer to home.  Liberals include conservatives in their “us’ in a way that isn’t reciprocated.  Conservatives value individual initiative, tending to “I and mind,” not “you and yours,” and certainly not “they and them.”  Both love their children, but while liberals want systems that spread care and fairness to children and general, conservatives tend to see parents taking care of their own children as being a fair and wise system.  Could it be that both are operant and each at times advisable?

Liberals look for win/win solutions to problems while conservatives expect winners and losers.  Competition in sports, the economy, and war keeps us sharp, says the conservative while cooperation makes us stronger, says the liberal.  Again, this is not a false dilemma, for both ways make sense.

Liberals tend to favor open-mindedness and are tolerant of variation and experiment.  Conservatives value the tried and true, the traditions that change only gradually and cautiously.  They are wary of those who would change what has worked.  Liberals want to change what hasn’t worked and so welcome criticism and analysis.  Conservatives resist this as risky and instead value duty, honor, and loyalty to those they believe know better.  Without progress we’d still be troglodytes (cave people), but without caution and reliance on the group wisdom and its leaders, we’d never retain our progress.

The liberal says to his or her child, “Don’t go in the street because a car might hurt you.”  A conservative might say, “Don’t go in the street because I told you so.”  The reasonableness inherent in the liberal way tends to be replaced by obedience to authority in the conservative.  The liberal tends to see goodness within to be allowed and nurtured.  The conservative, who instead finds wickedness there to be controlled and guarded against, doubts this.  Both tend to be self-fulfilling prophesies, but each has trouble admitting valid examples of the opposite.

Liberals tend to the licentious.  They like pleasures and see no harm in pursuing them.  Conservatives feel there are rules against this and either don’t do it or hide it for fear of scorn.  Max Weber rightly rooted the rise of capitalism in the existential anxiety in the puritan tradition of not knowing whether one was saved or not.  Those who don’t fritter away their profits at the bar tend to get more work done and grow those profits.  However, this can lead to the rich feeling morally superior and more deserving than the poor, no matter family advantage or how those profits were created.  Our own James Luther Adams also rightly pointed out that the shining city of God on the hill was never intended to be built on a festering slum.  Both pleasure and work are parts of a whole and healthy life.

Finally, liberals tend to find the courage of their convictions early in life, while conservatives gain strength later.  It could be the idealism and brashness of youth gets worn down into reactive cynicism.  I hope not.  I’d hate to see the Baby Boomers loose their ideals and passions at this crucial juncture.  And I hope cautious conservatives would still venture to try out all the wild abandon they imagine we had (but didn’t, at least not as much as we might have liked).

When we drop our fear of each other, looking past the riled-up language of dramatic conflict, we can see the decent intent and sensible values of both liberals and conservatives.  Our neighbors ought not to be our enemies.  They are people with reasons for their convictions, reasons as sincere as our own.  We may come from different sorts of families, but we can understand and value each other better than we’ve done lately.

Our philosophies often flow from our families.  George Lakoff, expert in cognitive linguistics, uses his understanding of metaphorical thinking to critique liberals before affirming them.  He shows how liberals neither understand conservative rationales nor back their own.  Conservatives fund ample institutes, think tanks, and media outlets, acting proactively, while unfocused liberals play scattered defense.  Sometimes his book, Moral Politics – How Liberals and Conservatives Think seems too neatly confined to his family type thesis, but that thesis makes a lot of sense.

I have tended to think wealthy conservatives ally with poor ones as a manipulative convenience, using the latter’s strict morality as a device to secure their own unending greed.  Lakoff sees something else.  He claims both liberals and conservatives organize their politics around a morality rooted in their respective family structures.

Liberals favor a nurturing family structure, where the worth of the child is allowed to flower and is nurtured into self-actualization.  Conservatives favor the strict father family structure, where the child obeys the mother, and they both obey the father.  Clear rules and strong guidance assures the children will grow up right and finally be able to fend for their selves.  Each expects our government to act towards the citizens and world as parents should towards the children.

When liberals see a stern upholding of the law as unreasonable and cruel, conservatives see it as building character.  The cold-heartedness of the one is the admirable leadership of the other.  Both, however, have the welfare of the children at heart, each wanting their children to be able to live full free adult lives.

While Lakoff spends most of his book neatly explaining the rationales of the conservative, he finally sides with the liberal way, largely because of ample research showing the nurturing family as more successful than the strict.  He bemoans the lack of a coherent liberal philosophy these days, and he chides liberals for not funding those intellectuals and think thanks that would generate and promote such a philosophy.  I think he’s right, but conservatives still resent liberal philosophy for being so rampant in our media and institutions.

Liberal humanism is rooted in ancient Christianity and in Enlightenment clarification.  It weaves itself into our founding documents and is instituted in our prevailing assumptions and programs from universal education to free markets.  But the institutional guardians of humanism are puny.  A couple of small but adamant groups seek to protect and promote it.  The multiple broadsides against it from Evangelical and conservative Catholics, and from the Islamic world, gradually erodes humanism with out-and-out hostility and dismissive ridicule.  Turning our society and world over to radical fundamentalists and rabid militarists will lead to all the folly and failure of the past, from Inquisitions to Crusades.  The fundamentalists in the Christian, Jewish, and Islamic worlds are similar to each other in attitude and method, differing only by theological nuance.  They really aren’t so different, while their hostile mechanisms against humanism are quite similar.  Their real opposite is the secular humanism inherent in America’s founding essence and documents, yet it is defended by only a couple of meager humanistic organizations.

The secular humanistic assumptions inherent in our pluralistic democracy allowed and protected the very extremist faiths which now use our openness to attack and undermine it.  The checks and balances built into our constitution allow the organic checks and balances of liberals and conservatives to contribute to a dynamic, resilient, and long-lived society.  But consider what has happened in the last four decades.

We still reel in reaction against the so-called excesses of the 60’s.  We’re past that now, we’re repeatedly told.  We overcame “Make Love, Not War,” with its exact opposite.  In the liberal 70’s we saw our media systematically hound and grind down President Carter with the daily-emphasized “hostage crisis” regarding 52 people.  Perhaps his forward-looking alternative energy supply and conservation policies threatened the oil industry profits.  (Had we pursued those policies we would now be saving an amount of energy equal to what we import from the Middle East.)  President Reagan ripped Carter’s solar panels off the White House and immediately abandoned Carter’s energy and human rights policies.  Instead, he set us on a course of waste and insult.  Our moral abhorrence for war following Vietnam was steadily replaced with a gung-ho macho track, from Grenada to Panama to Kosovo to Iraq.  Now, hundreds of times those 52 people have been killed, hostages are beheaded regularly, we trounce human rights abroad and at home, and our huge embassy and military bases are setting the stage for future wars.  Our government gives tax credits to drive heavy, wasteful trucks and SUV’s rather than cars.  Domestically, we are more divided than ever, and we slide into debt for investments in even larger debt, none of which strengthens our infrastructure at home or our dollar’s standing in the world.  Our president’s [G.W. Bush] approval rating in the lands of our former friends stands at a miserable 4 to 10 percent.  We’ve become an embarrassment in the world and a threat to it.  This will rouse new alliances against us.  Our own people, seeing lies and suspecting failure, are not joining the military.  Are conservatives, who rule utterly, utterly ruining our country?

It is hard to see how true conservatives approve of the debt, reputation, and radical direction the neo-cons have taken our country (and plan to take it further).  It may be laudable that conservatives salute the flag, and even I get tingles at the thought of the Islamic peoples having access to their own form of democracy.  But is it their form, or the shallow ruse we impose to appear noble while securing oil and a new launching pad for further wars?  Having propped up Saudi Arabia for decades, we’re losing it.  If democracy were the real goal, why didn’t we establish it there where they still behead people for blasphemy?  Does it dignify our flag to wrap our lies and the blood of hapless soldiers and civilians in it, or does that defile the flag far beyond what liberal protestors could do?

Where is America the Beautiful?  America is an eagle flopping and floundering on the ground, senselessly divided against itself.  Liberals and conservatives need to do two things: understand or even appreciate each other, and seek to make their respective ways better integrated.  America has always been the home for both types.  Both types are needed – the adventurous and the wary, the inclusive and the exclusive, the player and the planner, the kind and the strict.  Both types raise their children and influence their democracy with the best of intentions.  We needn’t let our differences divide, nor let what we honor lead to who we hate.  We are an organic whole, each and all needed if ever this glorious eagle will once again soar with ease on both wings to a decent destiny.

Reverend Brad Carrier

for the UU’s of Central Oregon

Bend, Oregon

C September 26, 2004

Filed under: Democratic Relations, Sermons by brad
No Comments »

Minor Mind Mending

An outgoing, uplifting stage personality killed herself recently.  Who would have suspected such a powerhouse of positivity would have such a dark side as to tragically die too early because of it?  Everyone was shocked.  Towards six hundred people attended her memorial service at our university in Ashland.

I wanted to put her loss to the community’s gain and so joined an ad-hoc group.  We wanted somehow to help prevent suicides.  Quickly, we entered the difficult and overwhelming world of mental dis-eases and the woeful lack of resources to treat them.

It reminded me how pervasive and endemic various disorders are, and how the people who suffer them are not alien others, but ours and us.  One beautiful woman reminded us of the difficulties we avoid yet share.  Her secret anguish is a magnified version of ours.  What little things might we have done, what little changes of mind might she have enjoyed, that would have averted this tragedy?

The tragic act of suicide is not easily reduced to an exact cause.  The bio-psychology of our brains and bodies is enmeshed in mental habits born of genes, shaped by upbringing, maintained by cultural assumptions, churned by moods, and steered by will.  New drugs and old diets help, and professionals can too, but what of the little mental habits that make up our identity?  What about our part in our own well-being in minor and major ways?  In the midst of it all we have responsibility and opportunity.

Little changes of mind can lead to major outcomes in life.  Little thoughts gently veer vast momentums.  Little thoughts lead to larger karmas

Like “a stitch in time saves nine,” and doing the tune-up on the car to prevent major damage, what minor mind mending might we do to “keep it all together” and go on running smoothly?

Let’s start with the most elusive, invisible, and important element in ourselves: our intension or will.  Do we want to have mental, emotional, and bodily well-being?  Do we want to live with a genuine and spontaneous sense of truth, beauty, and goodness?  Do we want to live authentically, with a sure sense of a unique self we like and are proud of?  To some extent, this is in our ability.  We choose to live well or not.  What we intend creates itself.

(J. Krishnamurti has a difficult but useful caveat to this approach.  He reminds us that all of what we think we are is really just the conditioned past re-presenting itself.  Who are we to think, “I know what I need,” when that “I” isn’t the real I we each are?  The troubled mind goes on recreating itself with the illusion of trying.  The unconditioned mind, known inwardly as both new yet quietly persistent, rarely gets a notice or a nod.  He challenges us to awaken to our self even while being a victim of our self.)

This is where the meditative or rational mind comes in to help.  Some rightly say the rational mind is the problem.  But it can also be the solution, such as trying on the thought: “I don’t have to think as I have; I can try on new thoughts and behaviors.”  (This might be missing Krishnamurti’s warning, though.)

The meditative mind just watches.  It extricates itself from having to continue or to react.  It looks without judgment, without dislike or like, at what is, and so it opens to an unexpected “could be.”  At least it lets the mind unleash, to let go of habitual ruminations and get a glimpse of the bright silence never noticed in the midst of a jangling but familiar rut.

This ability to just watch is practiced in sitting meditation, but applied during life’s insignificant and demanding moments.  You don’t have to react.  You don’t have to be led by fear or desire.  The unattached freedom you practice in meditation can be known in the midst of crisis or despair.  It can also make crisis or despair less likely.  We don’t need suicide or any of its lesser variants.  Intervention isn’t the dramatic gesture at the last moment, it is the attention and alteration we apply as we go in ordinary moments.

An ancient spiritual psychology applies in a modern scientific sense.  The old Hindu theory of sanskaras holds that energetic momentum is established in life.  The habits we cultivate tend to run us.  They’re like gyroscopes in our mind and emotions.  We put energy into these notions and motions by repeating them.  We give little pushes to the habitual thought by thinking it, more by speaking it, and most by doing it.  Such thoughts will likely return for more energy, sometimes with nagging insistence.

The unaware and reactive mind might never notice how much energy these habitual sanskaric thoughts take, or how much of one’s lifetime is spent involved with them.  The observant non-reactive mind might notice its own rut and say, “Hmm, I don’t have to be this way.”  The Blind Saint of Vrindivan says all we have to do is to notice without reactive judgment that which is not us and give it up.  The real I shines light on the imposter I and says, “Not me, and no more.”  By relinquishing what you are not, you allow what you are.  You die to the rut and come alive to the relief.

We can then either quit cold turkey, or at least stop doing some of the actions, words, or thoughts that we no longer want to run us.  Because habits are habits, they’ll come back many times seeking involvement, but you, by your intension, don’t have to cooperate.  You can say, “No,” and be new.  You can say, “No, you’re from a former era, so goodbye,” and then relish in reunion to newness.

Synaptic patterns in our brains and a plush array of mood chemicals in our blood sway us to do what we’ve done and resist change.  Add to this personal situation the context of family upbringing, religious teachings, cultural assumptions, and socially persistent patterns and we see many forces for unconscious continuation and few resources for altering it.  Yet, we can.  Because thoughts are not wholly in our control we must take our opportunity to responsibly address that aspect which is.

Deep in the central functions of our brain, the amygdala of the old limbic (mammalian) brain reacts instantly to stimuli, even before the rest of the brain knows it.  It is also the site of stored emotional trauma, tending to defensive reactions.  Finally, it is influenced by belief and training.  How we react, judge, and believe is built of neuron pathways and connections, wired to keep being the same.

Soldiers suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder have had their amygdala shocked into explosive wariness.  By repeated sessions of loving nurture they gradually regain control of hyper-reaction.  Angry judgmental-ness, fear, and hate rouse the mind towards interior moods leading to social cycles of attack and revenge.  War-torn societies, and those hyped on a stern and wrathful God, will have a hard time turning the other cheek or cultivating compassion.  They make defensive reactivity a must.

Which is why we must take care to teach and practice those little changes in our mind, talk, and behavior that gently lead us to new patterns of healthy wholeness, peace, love, and joy.  We can work with each other and our body/minds to promote our goodness.  It is not a bad thing to have contentment and joy in our lives.  Our religious culture hypes blame and shame for our so-called fallen-ness, our consumer culture pushes slick but shallow identities and pleasures, and our political culture hawks fear, belligerence, and cynicism.  We can see all these as not us, not part of our inherent goodness, and renouncing them, allow our real self to live.

After Adam and Eve are expelled from the Garden, God places a cherub with a flaming sword turning in all directions to bar their return.  This is a union of opposites symbol.  Having been tricked into divisive opposites, we must turn the concepts inside out, look at them with objective awareness.  Though shamed into belief that our sexuality is bad, we walk innocently naked through the flaming sword unscathed.  Though believing we’re depressed or addicted, we step right through the damning thoughts to relief from them.

This need not be a grand and dramatic act.  It is more likely to work if it is a simple, subtle one.  The thought arises: “I’m depressed.”  Instead of wilting under it, or trying to fight it off, we simply observe it.  “Be in it,” Vasavada used to say.  A slight relief comes from not fleeing or fighting.  A slight opportunity opens to new thoughts: “I’m depressed, but I don’t have to be,” or, “I’m tired of it,” or, “I can grow out of this.”

By observing and allowing the “I am depressed” thought, but as a witness in the act of relinquishing it, space for a new emerging self opens.  Instead of “it’s always like this,” or, “it’s all my fault” or, “I’ll never get out of this,” perhaps the thoughts “it’s often like this, but not always,” or, “it’s partly my fault, if fault has to be laid at all,” or, “I just got out of this a bit” might arise.  We admit the depression but resolve to exercise vigorously anyway, to burn it off with adamant intent.

Daring to have the intent to say “no” to the old and “yes” to the new – sets magic in motion.  Be it by angels in the invisible ethers or micro chemicals in our blood, a slight shift happens.  We haven’t stopped a momentum, or drastically changed it, but we have veered it off a little, off towards an accumulating change.  Paths open.  New vistas gradually come into view and reach.  We step into the agony to walk through to the other side of it.

Consider addictions.  Addictions are habits grown round some activity or substance that makes it the center of life, taking too much from other aspects of life.  It could be the obvious ones like heroin, meth, or alcohol, or it could be behavioral ruts like gambling, anger, or whining.  TV can become addictive, or even just having to see the news.  In all these there is a payoff, some pleasure, a sort of high.  The problem isn’t that we want to be high or have pleasure; the problem is all it costs us to have it.  Does our entire life revolve around brief spurts of pleasure, as with a sex addict?  Rats working levers wired to their pleasure centers will pump themselves to starvation.  Do we do our counterparts?

Any habit you can’t break is an addiction.  Again, it isn’t the reactive or judgmental mind that we need here, but the simply honest meditative one.  Recovery starts when one is honest and brave enough to say, “I’m too far into this.”  This thought isn’t fought off, run from, glorified, or ignored; it is just admitted.  Self shines on non-self.  Then comes the possibility of renouncement and newness.

The cigarette smoker might say, “Yeah, over a pack a day… Costs a lot now… Could be worse later… Makes me stink… Hardens my arteries… Hampers my sex life…” She might also admit she likes it, that it makes her feel what she has come to feel is normal, that it’s hard to quit, et cetera.   Admitting it, she can renounce even in bits: often avoiding instead of always indulging, smoking only the first inch, picking a non-smoking restaurant.  Or one day, she just realizes she has quit.  Yearning becomes learning and mastery.

Admitting the truth is made easier by cultures that don’t blame and shame, that value humility, and like humor.  Saying what is the case is the first step in possibly renouncing what isn’t you and discovering what is.  Weed from your minds those little thoughts that you don’t want taking over your real you.

Minor mind mending is the ongoing maintenance we exercise to keep us from descending into depleting sickness or ultimate tragedy and points us towards healthy balance.  We might also want to avail ourselves of help from friends or family, or from professionals, or from attention to diet, exercise, and rest, or from the herbs or medicines that might help.  A supportive culture like our fellowship or even the understanding and activities of some aspects of the larger culture – from Dr. Dwyer to cowboy poetry – also can help.  I’m not saying this is an either/or situation.  We need each other and we sometimes need help.

But whatever the external information, attention, or intervention we might use or not, we have some key access inside ourselves, some simple truth-knowing that knows a rut and how to climb out of it.  Every day can be known as a blessing when we tend to the little movements in our mind, gently erasing those thoughts and moods we don’t want, and gladly nourishing those we do

Try it.  When you notice yourself thinking, feeling, saying, or doing something you just know isn’t really you, simply notice it.  Calmly, without fear or judgment, admit what you see.  Know whether you want to live with that and watch it grow, or not.  If not, be glad to have realized that, for the next step is easier: say good bye.  Renounce it, if only by a bit in that moment, resolving to drop it again when it returns, which it likely will.  But when it does, and you know you don’t have to go along, that you’re relegating it to a part of your past, you will feel a bit of the mastery and newness you really are.  In minor and major ways, drop despondency or dependency and go for the joy you really and rightly are.

Reverend Brad Carrier

for the Umpqua Unitarian Universalists, Roseburg, Oregon,

C May 22, 2005

Filed under: Healthy People & Planet, Sermons by brad
No Comments »

THC, MDMA, LSD, DMT, etc.

These letters are acronyms for four kinds of drugs that I would like to explore in this sermon.  Basically, I will recommend them as possibly problematic but potentially beneficial for persons and society.

On the whole, and especially compared with the Counter Culture, I have not found a lot of interest in entheogens or other drugs in our UU culture.  UU’s have concern for civil liberties, curtailing a needless and excessive police/prison state, the right for people to live their own lives as long as it doesn’t hurt others, scientific and medical interest, some experimentation with recommendation and some with warnings, latitude for ministers to be honest, but overall, not a keen craving to know or try such sacramental substances.

UU’s have cared about sacraments, though.  Emerson quit the Unitarian ministry only a few years into it, saying he wouldn’t pretend to transform the Communion bread and wine into the body and blood of Jesus.  He preferred natural and manifest miracles to feigned ones, snowflakes and intuition to Transubstantiation.  Emerson wanted to acquaint us with divinity directly.  His 1838 address to the graduating Harvard seminarians is a classic call for them to “know” and manifest God directly, not just read and preach bout It.

Alas for the unhappy man that is called to stand in the pulpit, and not give the bread of life… The village blasphemer sees fear in the face, form, and gait of the minister… [Yet] all that is clearly due today is not to lie… That which he venerates is still his [or her] own, though he has not realized it yet…”

I introduce this largely unspoken and potentially risky topic with Emerson quotes, because I agree with his stance about life and ministry.  I take my job as simply this: to give my truth and care for those around me.  Also, like Emerson, I am far more excited by snowflakes and consciousness than I am by many religious or spiritual teachings and topics.  The actual miracle enthuses.

“Enthuse” comes from “having God.”  It is akin to “entheogen”: in-God-generate.  In my lifetime, compared to all other experiences and aspects of existence, entheogens interest, inform and attract me more than most things and ideas.  I’m not attracted in an addicted sense, but out of promising curiosity about intense and meaningful experiences.  I also agree with many partakers (Huxley, Shulgin, Ball) that these substances are good for persons and society.

So, sit back and enjoy a different sort of a Drug Awareness Sunday, a sort of Free Drug Event (without the actual illegal drugs).  I know you didn’t ask for such a sermon, but I thought you’d be interested in hearing something other than the perpetually misleading “Just Say No” campaigns.  UU’s may not be into drugs, but I’m proud that it is a place where we can attempt some useful honesty about them.

Some definitions: By drugs I mean any substance we take to alter our mind or mood.  That’s a large category, from aspirin and coffee, through Valium and Vicadin, through addictive and problematic meth, heroin, coke, and alcohol, to many entheogens, four of which I’ll describe.  Obviously, this is a wide category with wildly differing effects.  Lumping them all together and calling many of them bad and making them illegal is a clumsy and destructive a way for a society to go.  Alcohol can enhance an evening, and it can ruin a life and culture.  We should admit this, advise and adjust, not create a police/prison/mob world of fines, prisons, and enormous profits.  Not all drugs are the same; we should honestly delineate.  Taking meth, inhaling glue or snorting gasoline alters one’s consciousness, but affects health, lives and society in deleterious ways, whereas taking entheogens affects those same dimensions in predominately positive ways.  I honor these sacred aids to us and will not shrink from publically praising and promoting them.   They’re too good for us, and the damage done to them and us by the War on them is an un-American shame, an insult to our inherent freedom, an assault on our divine prerogatives.

That declared, I would also admit that even these divine aids can be misused.  I recommend the neutral and natural state as a touchstone for all drug use or explorations.  If one can’t spend periods without their drug of choice (be it problematic or promising) it is a misbalance, a clinging to an idol or a habit.  Healthiness and regular living in society should be served by the drugs, not the reverse, where too often some are “always stoned but never high.”

But neither should our reasonable concerns and cautions be the only thing ever told about drugs, especially the entheogens.  So let’s consider these four entheogens, moving from the milder and more recreational to the more profound.

THC

Delta-9 tetrahydrocannabinol is the chemical name for the primary part in pot’s getting people high.  You might think marijuana (or cannabis, or pot) is relatively new.  In fact, it goes back thousands of years in Africa and India.  It both relaxes and energizes, promotes the enjoyment of the day, and has few side effects.  Some kinds make you want to work: Mine workers in South Africa used to have two pot breaks a day, to get them working again.  The two thousand year old shaman mummy found recently in China had some in his grave.  Old Shiva in India was said to carry some concentrated resins, hash, in his belt, and it is still used by many Saddhus and others in India today.  In fact, it is the center of a transnational, worldwide culture, enjoyed all around the earth, far more than we’re hearing about.  Our own modern Properties and Chemicals text used to describe it as: “A mood enhancer, almost invariably for the better.”

But you wouldn’t know these things in America.  In the early twentieth century it became politically expedient and commercially lucrative to deliberately lie about pot by linking it to Mexicans and lunacy.  What Americans didn’t realize then, or since, is how commercial interests wanted to eliminate the supply of hemp so that cotton, timber, and nylon could be sold instead.  Hemp is the weak cousin of pot.  It used to be a patriotic duty to grow it for fiber.  Washington and Jefferson both did, and there is good evidence they also enjoyed it as a smoke.  How ironic and tragic that what helped inspire our core spiritual values in America, as in “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” has been twisted into a convenient excuse for intimidation and imprisonment in a growing police state.

Having been around a pot culture for almost 50 years and seeing the “Reefer Madness” propaganda that persists is to see how sinister and mistaken the drug warriors are.  Giggles, munchies, laziness, rebelliousness, and creativity should not be threatened or invaded by armed intruders, wreaking emotional and legal agony on innocent citizens.   This divides us from each other, our police, and the truth.

Fortunately, medical marijuana has acquainted many who otherwise would never have understood this.  Marijuana is a mild, pleasant, interesting, effective medicine.  Grandma used to rail against the devil weed; now she’s more fun and pleasant when she smokes it.  Both California and Oregon are on the path to legalize and capitalize on the same stuff it has direly cost to futilely persecute.

Would that I could, I’d share lots with those of you who wanted.  We could have a Drug Awareness Sunday that you’d probably find relaxing, musical, funny, and imaginative.  It saddens me to see people endure bleak, difficult, or just plain boring lives, growing old and dying having never known the aids and options THC and the other entheogens afford.

MDMA

Ecstasy was synthesized in the 40’s and was only rediscovered years later.  It is the Love Drug.  Its effect lasts two to six hours.  It grants a temporary reprieve from paranoia, anger, resentment, worry, and relationship woes into a time of honest, easy love.  It was being used by marriage and family therapists to good results with couples until it was declared a Schedule I drug, unsuitable for use or even study.  It also has had much success with those soldiers suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, wounded deeply in their emotional memory and functioning.  (The harsh restrictions have been somewhat relaxed.)  Couples can live decades in simmering anger or co-dependent mutual binds.  One session of MDMA can open up fearless loving-kindness.  This can give voice to all they really have inside that had been shrouded by troubles.  Repair of the relationship, or at least loving-kind understanding and acceptance of the other, is effortlessly likely.

Ecstasy isn’t as psychedelic as LSD.  It isn’t very visual or primarily sexual.  An investigator in Shulgin’s PIHKAL described it as “all the joy and beauty I can stand.”  Grand affection for another, others, and the cosmos is certainly experienced.  Many young people also take this at raves.  Sex while on it can be wonderful, except sex isn’t wanted as much as the lovely relating.  The genitals aren’t awakened as much as the heart.

LSD

LSD is a whole order of magnitude more interesting and powerful than THC or MDMA.  Though substances near to it in effect go back thousands of years (in certain mushrooms and molded rye) it wasn’t until around 1940 that scientist Hofmann tasted its tasteless power and discovered its fascinating effects.  Kaleidoscopic visions of fractal paisleys coupled to a profound sense of meaning and cosmic connection swept through him, as it does for many who tried it since (or will).  Not every experience is predictable.  It can vary from person to person and time to time.  It can be a disorienting or frightening experience, and some people have had trouble or worse.  That admitted as the unusual case, it can be used in mild doses while functioning well in society and in large doses for a profound journey into consciousness, energy, and meanings far removed from our usual daily frame of mind.  Some people take it only once, satisfied they have encountered a reality undergirding and informing the rest of their lives.  Others do it many times in their lives.  I’ve noticed a sort of anti-addictive quality to wanting it.  It actually wards off wanting it too frequently and leaves a lasting afterglow of “knowing.”

An LSD trip can last 12 hours.  It is astonishing to see how small the actual substance is to then find how big it is in our consciousness.  (When I showed some to my aging father, inviting him on a trip, he thought I was joking.  After it set in he knew how extraordinaire it was.  After a long period of silence he remarked, “You have not reached my mind.”  An adept observation.)  One can’t remember all of what one encounters and carries from a LSD trip when coming out of it, much less years later in a sermon.  It seems a portal into a deep, profound, colorful, energetic self and world.  I cannot help but resonate to William Blake’s painting of a man living in a lovely and majestic world poking his head through its veil to see an even more wonderful one.

DMT

5 MeO DMT is the specific form of DMT that I’m more familiar with.  The other variety, N,N-DMT, is more explicitly visual, with brilliant, colorful displays of complex symmetrical patterns, along with the sense of cosmic connection.  5 MeO DMT is even more direct and overwhelming than that.  It has been called the God Pill by some.  The active chemical is found in certain grasses, barks, and the facial juices of a toad.  (How shamans came to suck toads’ eyes, I don’t know.)  It also is found in the cells and neurons of all mammals.

This is the active ingredient in Ayahuasca, a native mix of one plant that overcome’s the body’s defense of the active ingredient in time for another plant’s active ingredient to work its wonders.  There are two types of churches in America that ingest this sacred brew as part of its ritual worship, including a local one.  I have not attended, partly because I don’t want to have a powerful spiritual experience put through a particular ritual and assumed theology.

Then there’s the throwing up.  Throwing up is unpleasant, then relieving, but yucky, especially in a congregation of others, some of whom are also throwing up.  You have to wonder why people would go to a communion that might make them throw up.

Before I go on to describe the DMT experience, let’s ask this about these sacraments: Why would people willingly throw up, eat bitter cacti that won’t chew yet feels like snot, drink the pee of the honored leader who got the first round of the special mushroom, tempt psychic annihilation/restoration, risk legal repercussion, and encounter disapproval from an ignorant, disapproving public?  What is it about DMT, LSD, MDMA, THC, and other related entheogens such as psilocybin mushrooms, peyote, mescaline and the like?  What is so good about these things that people endure and risk all sorts of unpleasantness to have them?  Not that every encounter with an entheogen is difficult or unpleasant; quite the opposite, for most experiences are profoundly positive, life-affirming, love-awakening, and utterly delightful, if sometimes wildly difficult, then revelatory.  People risk police, scorn, expense, vomiting, having one’s ego dissolved and reassembled – because it’s worth it.

When I inhaled a long toke of 5 MeO it took less than a minute for me to fall back into a ringing, energetic vast expanse of centralized bright energy felt to be my real me, my self before, below, and beyond my usual me.  God, Love, and Me were One.  I gushed, “Oh, Yes!  This is It!  It is Real!  I am satisfied.  Oh, my God!  Thank You!  Yes!”  Though my body was there, I was centered in vastness, alive with pure, wild energy.  I knew the Oneness of it all, of us all.  I knew love is the portal and the destination.  I felt overwhelmingly grateful for my whole life, all my ancestors, the cosmos, the sacrament, and the couple who voyaged with me.  My life felt satisfied.  I had found it.  All the other efforts of my life, and all the attempts with entheogens, led to this, and I was glad.  Were I to die, which I will, I have made it to an answer.

DMT is in the cells, tissues and neurons of all mammals as well as the plants mentioned.  It may be the natural substance our pineal gland secretes in abundance at near-death experiences.   The advantage of the drug is that you don’t have to actually die.  You can get a quick, egoless view of your entire life in some deep and important way, or a profound immersion in Being itself, or inclusion in the Oneness connecting us all.  It is hard to convey the overwhelming power, meaning, and profound loveliness of this entheogens – a sacrament that delivers.  It hardly seems fair or wise to try to outlaw and eliminate this way to visit our deeper reality.  What is it about love, being, and God that should be kept from the citizens who want it?

Etc.

We haven’t time to explore any more entheogens, or consider other kinds of drugs that people try or resort to.  Many natural and synthesized options exist.  Some, I warn against.  These I favor.  Some, I would never try or promote.  These I promote with sensible intensions and cautions along with positive purposes and advice.

I have a deep appreciation for the plants, toads, shamans, scientists, and guides who find, design, evaluate, and share these sacred substances.   They’re far more beneficial than the stuffier mechanisms (church) and lesser drugs (alcohol, opiates, speed) that we have used so far.  Humans are adventurous psychenaughts, curious to explore all manner of consciousness alteration.  We should warn and recommend.  The possibilities and blessings inherent in these entheogens call humanity to a new world of loving relations.  It is as if the universe has given us the keys to itself.  The God we sought outside we can experience within.  To say it any less plainly or honestly than that would be to fail Emerson’s charge to know divinity directly.  “Always a seer is a sayer,” he said.  “Only he can give, who has.”

“God is, not was,” he reminded.  Live in your own actual soul.

“…the soul of man is not an organ, but animates and exercises all the organs; it is not a faculty, but a light; it is not the intellect and the will, but the master of the intellect and will… When it breathes through his intellect it is genius; when it breathes through his will, it is virtue; when it flows through his affection, it is love.”

The Easterners say our real self is of the mind and energy of God.  Atman and Brahman are One.  We find it in our body, yet it isn’t just our body.  They say, “Neti, neti,” meaning, “not this, not that,” not this temporary situation, not that desire.  It’s not a thought or any idol.  Aspiration and anguish are the outer efforts of an inner soul forgetting it is born of, and is the bearer of, Love.  Tat twam asi (Thou art That.)  Within all effort is a divine ease.  Entheogens encounter it, reassuring us.  Acquaint us directly with divinity, indeed!

Reverend Brad Carrier

For the UU Fellowship of Grants Pass

Grants Pass, Oregon

© May 2, 2010

Filed under: Sermons by brad
No Comments »

(Letter to local NPR station’s call-in show, The Jefferson Exchange, regarding Columbus’ and Bush’s faith)

Two weeks ago this Thursday I heard the “click of no return” during Stephen Mansfield’s answer to whether a sense of faith is necessarily a good thing, Columbus being an example of deluded faith. He replied that Columbus did things “contrary” to his own faith.

Not so. My point was he did those atrocities because of his faith – a god-ordained, self-righteous pillaging, raping, and murdering. Because I couldn’t differ with his first pious fiction he then went into a worse second one: that Bush was in Iraq to “eradicate the militant wing of Islam.”

Not so. Iraq was one of the only secular states in the Muslim world. The radical militant Islamisists who attacked on 9-11 were from Saudi Arabia, a fundamentalist Islamic theocracy, long our corrupted ally, now decaying and being abandoned by the U.S. for its new base of war making – Iraq.

Far from eradicating the militant wing of Islam in Iraq, Bush’s war there attracts it. Far from the front lines, Bush bravely said, “Bring it on!” So that’s what they’re doing. The same radical militant Islamic forces we earlier recruited to Afghanistan (to fight the Soviets) now pick off our men and others daily (as we do to theirs too).

Americans had faith in their president when he rushed us to that war, using massively murderous actual weapons to “defend ourselves” from imaginary ones. We bragged that we dropped MOAB, the Mother of All Bombs, just short of a nuclear blast in power. We attack and occupy with sanctimony, forgetting we are foreign invaders to them – and infidels to their faith.

Whether fueling jihad or crusade, faith can be deceptive. Suicide bombers have great faith. Piety protects the power it plies. Should we have faith in our pious pied piper president – and that we citizens are absolved of our complicity? Oh, the trouble we sow, though we go there with great faith.

Filed under: Sermons by brad
No Comments »