What ever became of vision?  Our current political and religious leadership have visions so dark and backward we forsake ever hoping for better.  Can we look past these dreary scenarios?  Dare we?

The visionaries of the past left failed results, leading us to cynicism.  Skinner’s meager Walden II was at least a fair attempt at being fair.  The Farm in Tennessee and the Oneida Community in upper New York were limited to limited communes.  The great socialist vision of a worker’s paradise descended into forced labor in some places.  The hopeful view of progress due to modernity at the turn of the last century ran head-long into the horrors of war, viral plagues, dust storms, more wars, and a cheapening materialism.

If we despair of the results of visions so much that we despair of having visions at all, where does that lead us?  Are we so vision-bereft as to follow the one that claims government is bad for us?  What happened to labor-saving devices?  What about a three day work week?  Will computers grant us control or be used to track and control us?  Who asks the old utilitarian question: What brings the greatest good for the greatest number?  In its stead we end up with the greatest good for the least number.

It is hard for a culture to generate decent visions when it is so steeped in wretched mythology and theology.  If we’re all flawed and fallen, we deserve a painful, stressful culture.  We gravitate to tragedy to prove how bad it is and we are.  The ultimate vision of a divided win/lose, us versus them view is the popular Rapture series.  The good will be magically floated out of the otherwise horrid conditions of the end of the world.

The movie makers offer visions, though they’re often negative ones.  It is easier to entertain with fright and dramatic tragedy than it is to offer plausible, inspiring visions.  The book 1984 frightened and warned us – until the year came and went.  Who would generate visions these days?  We look to politicians hopefully every four years, but how feasible is that?  We could ask the churches.  The Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Seventh Day Adventists, and the Mormons have colorful visions of a happy future, but those are for the adherents, not everyone.

Our own Unitarian Universalist principles affirm a “goal of world community with peace, liberty and justice for all.”  Our own UU churches and fellowships embody the institutional and individual actualization of that goal, be it planting peace gardens and poles to supporting the UN.  We often end up opposing what impedes or invades a world community more than we generate visions of that community.

Yoko Ono helped generate visions back in the 1970’s.  She put up money as a prize for an essay on “How We Survived the Nuclear Threat.”  You may recall how justifiably frightened we were of the explosive of that massive potential.  The political leaders of the world need examples of practical visions that actually open minds and help guide.

Some geniuses generate design ideas.  Leonardo Da Vinci in his day and Paul McCready and Burt Rutan in ours come to mind.  Others cross over in to relating design to vision, like Buckminster Fuller and Ghandi, though Ghandi added a social spiritual technology to his spinning wheel appropriate technology.  In the realm of theology, Teilhard de Chardin relates Catholicism to Cosmic principles.  In the Buddhist tradition King Ashoka is revered for his actually loving his people and looking to their well being and happy lives.  FDR did that in our time to some extent, and Martin Luther King’s prophetic vision has come partly realized.

Some of earth’s citizens have begun the good work of envisioning a healthy, sustainable future.  The Bioneers annual conference has brought together such persons as Leonardo DiCaprio, Ted Turner, Joan Bavaria, Paul Hawken, Gary Hirshberg, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, David Suzuki, Winona LaDuke, Ray Anderson, and Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell.  This year’s presenters includes Anthropologist Jeremy Narby, who ventures into traditional cultures and the leading edge of contemporary science to determine nature’s way of knowing in Intelligence in Nature: An Inquiry into Knowledge. Traveling from the Amazon basin to the Far East, he probes what traditional healers and pioneering researchers understand about the intelligence present in all life forms.

Intelligence in Nature provides clear illustrative evidence that independent intelligence is not unique to humanity alone. Bacteria, plants, animals and other forms of nonhuman life display an uncanny penchant for self-deterministic decisions, patterns and actions.

Jane Goodall’s Roots and Shoots organization, channeling young people’s love of nature is highlighted, as is Ecotrust, a nonprofit based in Portland, Oregon.  “Place matters” is the lens that serves to focus a wide range of activities. They work with native peoples and in the fisheries, forestry and food sectors to build a regional economy that is based on social and ecological opportunities.  The work of Wendel Berry also comes to mind as one who words the deep affection many already have, but haven’t the voice to express it.

From myth to theology, from basic physics and chemistry to the most sophisticated ecology, from back-yard doings to UN programs, vision matters.

I’ve long had a vision that appropriate technology would help insure a goal of world community with peace, liberty and justice for all.  Instead of controlling the supply of life’s needs from a centralized source, such as energy from nuclear plants and food from industrial plants, we’d get our energy from the sun and wind, and we’d get our food from the plants in our own yards.

The powers that be love to ignore and ridicule solar power.  They ask, “What good is that when the sun is down?” as if that refutes the idea.   Well, it does for the humans on the other side of the world a lot of good all that day, and its heat and electricity can be stored from our share of the day, so answers are there.  What should be asked in return is, “What are you doing when the sun is up?”

Two nearly identical tract houses sit side by side.  One is standard, much like the multi-thousands still being built.  It wards the heat and electricity off with a standard roof in order to replace it by buying it from distant companies.  It sends money out of town and finances pollution somewhere.  The other house gratefully and ingenuously receives the sunlight through glass on to solar cells, creating electricity, which are cooled by heat tubes, which heats the water.  With whole rooftops built this way, there might be enough power to run the lights, computer, entertainment, communications and the battery of a light-weight about-town vehicle.  Even the rain would be treasured in storage for yard needs.

There are many houses like this second one which obtains all their power and heat needs from solar and/or hydro or wind.  But even if it only supplied half the needs, that’s half times the multi-thousands of suitably sited homes that quickly would be saving half the energy dollar for the local community and decreasing pollution by that much.

The question isn’t whether solar and the others work, it is whether we have the ethics and ingenuity to put it to work.   We don’t have an energy shortage; we have shortage of ethics, ingenuity, and vision.

I have a vision that what heats water for hot showers here pollution free and for free would do it in Botswana and Brazil.   Heat for homes and showers in the winter, even hot tubs, cool for summer swelter, these could easily be widespread, giving humans their life needs without having to pollute and pay.

They might also have sophisticated, earthly-wise gardens near at hand where they would grow their food, medicines, enthiogens, and flowers.  Respect for plants might return, as different from expecting industrial plants to supply these life needs and pleasures.

In this vision there would be more fish in the streams than when the early Europeans moved into the New World.  There’d be even more diversity of plant and animal life, more abundance in general, more things living, and hence, more dying for use by others.  We’d take the injunction to “replenish the earth” creatively, building the soils, forests, and oceans to cornucopias of beauty and abundance.

Automatic sustainability would guide our doings.  Instead of a planned obsolescence so we can scurry to “create jobs” to make more to waste, we’d make things to last and free the workers to have fuller lives.  We’d turn our processes into minimally invasive, automatically functioning systems.   Garbage would become resource.   Stuff would become bothersome.  Time would be treasured.   Pleasures would become prevalent.

What I see is wealth.  I’m not talking about the glut of the rich, still poor of spirit after all their stuff, ready to exploit any other for private gain, but of the many now having access to their own lives with each other, with lots of time to enjoy ample food, community, and love.

I see ideallic paintings of Maxfield Parrish, scantily clad youths lounging in innocent ease by blue pools, or idealized images of Krishna and Raddha in bejeweled splendor, more adorned than clothed, and I wonder, why not here, why not anywhere?

Is it too much to believe we could live in a garden paradise together?  I think we could, more and more.  Already we live like kings and queens, with ease, power, and luxuries only the few could hope for in most of our history.  We have indoor toilets, hot showers, comfy floors, cozy beds.  We can instantly talk to people around the world.  We can travel quickly and cheaply.  How much more could we have here and help supply everywhere were we to want it.

Vision is like prayer and intention and guiding plan.  We might see people laughing and so find things funny.

But visions realized always come out different than foreseen.  We used to pray for lots of food; we got it.  We got so much we’re sick from it.  Does that mean visions realized would ruin us?  Hardly.  We learn as we go.  We re-invision, refining what goods we both want and have healthily.   We don’t dig up old FDR and kick him because Social Security needs a minor adjustment, we find the leader who loves humanity as much and who renews the vision.

“Visions of Whole, Healed, Healthy, Happy World” is not for rich Americans alone.  It is for all.  There has been too much waste, trouble, and pain.  The storehouse of knowledge on how to live well isn’t owned by some obscure authority.  It isn’t a meager little office somewhere.  It is a huge temple leading on to an enormous garden of delight.  We’ve only seen a fraction of the truth, beauty, and goodness in store for us.

We never left Eden and it never left us.  We just need to remember who we are as we learn to live well in our wonderful given garden.  Over time, as we learn to live well with the ways of the garden, we will.

Brad Carrier

For the Unitarian Universalists of Grants Pass

C March 5, 2006

Filed under: Healthy People & Planet, Physics to Mysticism by brad
No Comments »

Humans are meaning-seeking creatures.  We want to know, or at least want to seem to know.  We want coherence and congruency.  We want to know what is, why it is, and how to live in it.

By “it” I mean this obvious manifest material world.  We find ourselves born into a family and culture, living in a body that grows and ages.  We cling to life and see that those who pass from it do not return, except in memory and dreams.  Occasionally we encounter the departed in visions, making us wonder if this life is all there is or whether there is an invisible realm not easily or reliably contacted from our material world.  Anxiety about death and yearning to connect past it gives rise to hopeful ideas that this is not all there is, that there is a spiritual reality beyond the one we know.  We tend then to want to believe those shamans and spiritual authorities who claim to know the ways of the beyond that elude us.

Whether via after-life heavens and hells or reincarnation, we want to believe that this life we know is not all there is.  “There’ll be pie in the sky,” we hope.  Much of humanity holds to such ideas despite their elusive proofs.  Thinking that this is all there is offends teachers and believers alike.

It is not just death that makes us want to know ultimate reality; it is the fact and nature of this world in and of itself.  Why is there something rather than nothing?  How is this place put together?  Does someone put it together or is it self-creating, and if so, why?  Mythic explanations orient us, saying why the world came to be and how we’re to be in it.  But as we discover the inherent makings and workings of our physical universe, world, and bodies, those former mythic explanations take on a quaint quality, no longer reliable for orienting us in reality.  Shame, blame, and pain here – pie later?  The Bible and its God no longer seem so correct or convincing.  What then?

What if there was no God or meaning?  What if matter, energy, happenstance and evolution raised us up, but for no reason?  Would we despair, get wild, give up?  Such questions scare some, but we UU’s can face the facts and the void with gratitude and glad purpose.  We can take life as it is and make it into a gracious and grand home.

It interests and amuses me how tenaciously and adamantly people hold to old cosmologies and mythologies.  The feeling of “I just know” or “I believe” is strong in people.  I can see why.  Being at the center of the universe, watched over by God, is a comforting stance, especially for our mammalian nature, wired for connection.  Seeing our whole earth as a mere mote in an enormous universe isn’t cozy.  Knowing that the atoms that make it up are mostly empty space doesn’t help either.  We’re adrift between enormity and eternity, so I can see how people cling to imagined importance and meaning.  What it all means and how we should therefore act is tied up with an old cosmology far more puffed up and tucked in than we may be the truth of things.

If God neither judges nor cares, why try?  Why be good?  If the atoms that make us up and the starry skies up above are all just there, why care?

Let’s assume there is no inherent meaning or purpose in existence.  From the sub-microscopic to the beyond-macroscopic we have only matter and energy to make us up.  Large though our planet seems to us, its thin skin of a biosphere rides precariously beneath the electromagnetic shield that protects it from lethal solar radiation.  Pull out away from earth and it recedes into invisibility.  Pull farther away and our sun is lost in vast emptiness, one of a trillion more, utterly insignificant.  The stars will shine no matter what we do.  Who cares what we do and why?

We care.  Our lives are long enough to learn both history and geo-history.  We know our brief lives will be lost from knowing or caring from the few who now know us.  All our efforts and concerns which seem so big to us will fade into insignificance.  We aren’t noticed by many, and even then, we will be forgotten.  Yet while we are alive we have a chance to live up to life.  There may be no observer keeping track of what we do other than ourselves.  We know whether we partake of life and culture gratefully and generously.  We know whether we move in our circle of influence ethically and kindly or not.  Those who know us are influenced by who and how we are.  The kind of character we exhibit matters in the short run, and how we live contributes to the long run of culture and earth-life.  Even if there is no God watching or Saint Peter’s book keeping tract, who and how we are affects our circle, and how we do with that persists in us as our character.  Collectively, our combined characters make for a gracious society living sustainably or a greedy one self-destructing.  How should we tend this lovely garden?  Maybe no one is watching other than us.  We should care, and we do care.

In this year celebrating Charles Darwin’s life and work we find those resenting his work still clinging to a cozy cosmology of humans involved in a divine drama having little or nothing to do with the facts of life.  Evolution is derided as offensive to faith.  Faith assumes a fallen nature needing the redeeming gift of grace.  This supposed fallen nature rests on a faulty judgment about it, but that is selectively supported by some facts from nature.  Apes were assumed to be only cruel and selfish.  Via observation and imagination, hoarding, violence, and even war were assumed to be our animal inheritance, justifying it in us before excusing it as part of God’s divine plan to have us transcend our lowly animal traits.  Missing from this “bloody tooth and claw” rationalization are all the cooperative and caring aspects of nature.  Gorillas using sign language show grief and caring.  Chimps may be patriarchal and violence prone, but their bonobo cousins across the Zaire River are matriarchal, communal, sexy, and kind.

Our human natures inherit not only the indifferent survival instincts of the reptile, but the motherly bonds of the mammal.  Those bonds apply not only to our children, but to children in general, and mates, fellow citizens, and even distant foreigners.  We may be built of reptiles and mammals but we’re also human, capable of knowing and caring.  Suddenly, the facts of life are larger and more demanding.  Our place in evolution is knowing about it and incorporating it in our religious stance.  It causes us to face three aspects to our material existence: it is precious, precarious, and promising.

Search though we do through the heavens for planets with water or any likelihood of life, we find none.  The heavens are a vast expanse of ice, fire, and emptiness.  As far as we know, earth is our only home and our only hope for continuing to exist.  The thin layer of ocean, land, and atmosphere rides in delicate balance, an interdependent living system that is as precarious as it is precious.  But it is also promising, for knowing the ways of weather and life allows us to modify our practices to quit injuring and depleting life and begin augmenting and sustaining it.  We could live here on earth far longer than we have lived here so far, and well, were we to care.  And we do care.

The current economic meltdown against the backdrop of an even more important ecological one alerts us to the dire and daunting task of changing the way we do business together.  Not only are we exhausting ourselves trying to keep the rich richer, we’re exhausting earth’s life as we do it.

When I speak of valuing the materialism that makes us up I do not mean the materialism of a shallow, consumerist society.  The goods of sunlight and eyes I affirm; the goods of designer sunglasses I tolerate as long as the making and disposing of them doesn’t injure and exploit our primary goods.  We miss out on the former by being enamored of the latter.

Bill Bryson writes of the latter form of materialism as exemplified in the 1950’s:

“By the closing years of the 1950’s most people – certainly most middle-class people – had pretty much everything they had ever dreamed of, so increasingly there was nothing much to do with their wealth but buy more and bigger versions of things they didn’t truly require: second cars, lawn tractors, double-width fridges, hi-fis with bigger speakers and more knobs to twiddle, extra phones and televisions, room intercoms, gas grills, kitchen gadgets, snowblowers, you name it.  Having more things of course also meant having more complexity in one’s life, more running costs, more things to look after, more things to clean, more things to break down.  Women increasingly went out to work to help keep the whole enterprise afloat.  Soon millions pf people were caught in a spiral in which they worked harder and harder to buy labor-saving devices that they wouldn’t have needed if they hadn’t been working so hard in the first place.

“By the 1960’s, the average American was producing twice as much as only fifteen years before.  In theory at least, people could now afford to work a four-hour day, or a two-and-a-half-day week, or a six-month year and still maintain a standard of living equivalent to that enjoyed by people in 1950 when life was already pretty good – and arguably, in terms of stress and distraction and sense of urgency, in many respects much better.  Instead, and almost uniquely among developed nations, Americas took none of the productivity gains in additional leisure.  We decided to work and buy and have instead. ”

A half a century later we find us all working even more and having even less.  The satisfactions of consumerist materialism once seemed real advances.  Clean water supplying indoor kitchens (and bathrooms!) are luxuries much of humanity has not known until recently.  Houses easy to heat, cars fast to get around in, phones and computers connecting us to each other – all these are likely to be desired and obtained by humanity.

But after such materialism meets our needs it goes on to undermine them.  It may profit the manufacturer, shipper, wholesaler, and retailer to create a mop that will fall apart after a few uses (causing the consumer to buy another one) but it depletes resources and energies re-creating disposable “goods” in a way that wears down our real goods.  Our time, money, and resources are spent frittering away our life’s time on wasteful systems.  We should feel satisfied, but we actually feel spent.

The “this, at least” I would have us cherish is closer to us than any gadget.  In the East, two phrases speak to the cause I would have us consider and embrace.  “Neti neti” means “not this – not that.”  Satisfaction is not found in any external thing, for it is inherent in our being.  “Tat twam asi,” means “thou art that.”  What you look upon you become.  Who you look at is a part of yourself.  When we look upon cheap materialism we become it.  When we look at the rich one or the poor one, we are one with them.

Are humans incapable of choosing the good unless a punitive God demands it?  I reject such shallow, simplistic thinking.  Built into us is more care and intelligence than the former religions acknowledged.  The new view of the universe – how big and small it is – and our precious, precarious, promising place in it calls for a maturing of our religions.   Carl Sagan once wrote that, “… a religion that stressed the magnificence of the universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.”

As a banking system built on enriching a few the most for contributing the least falls apart against an even direr backdrop of global climate upheaval, we best reevaluate both our economy and our ecology.  We need leaders who exemplify and engage the care we really have within.  Hubert Humphrey once said, “the moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy, and the handicapped.”  Tat twam asi, for neti neti.

We aren’t fallen fools feigning frantic faith.  We don’t need ever cheaper consumerist items – from faulty mops to empty foods.  We don’t need high-end designer logos to make us feel worthy inside.  We need humans to take themselves seriously and sensitively in such a way as to affirm our inner being by activating our intelligent, caring natures.

We need to care for our home planet and all the interrelated life on it.  We need to cherish our lives and celebrate life itself.  We need to praise, protect, and promote the basic goods of life, not the counterfeits foisted on us instead.  “Take a breath; it’s springtime,” shouldn’t sell cigarettes, but breathing and air.  We need to look out for each other in compassionate, creative community towards a future that is not only sustainable, but likely to flourish ever more beautifully and abundantly.  Come alive in yourself, for this is your time, and you have a right to life it fully.

This, at least, we have – our bodies built for health and ability over a lifetime, each other related by interdependent caring, our planet brimming with variety and abundance, the laws of existence shaping our limits and offering freedom within them.  You are the crown of creation, the living incarnation of all the effort and success of all your ancestors, human and pre-human.  Inherent in the ancient fairy shrimp was the makings of all subsequent evolved life.  It once seemed such a limited plight.  But persist.  Take what is at least, trusting that more than you know will emerge.  Try when you must.  Rest as you need.  Make joy when you can.  Be kind as you are able.  What we are, at least, is much more than we have been noticing.

I want religions, western and eastern, to have the humility to be grateful and responsible for this obvious, given, tenacious, glorious realm.  Why pine for pie in another imaginary one while precious people go hungry here?  Why be greedy for more when the given is already beyond our comprehension much less our understanding or ability?  Take this home gratefully, and gladly make it gracious.  This half-full glass is heaven enough.

Eat pie while you are alive.  Live so that others have theirs too.  And when we die…?  Maybe there’s nothing, not even anyone to know they’re gone, in which case there is the glory of this universe to have lived in and the gift of life to learn, live, and love within it.  If there is anything at all I imagine Saint Peter meeting us at the gates, looking out at Earth and the universe, asking, “Did you love this, at least?  Were you awed by beauty?  Did you know sweet excess?  Did you care for the needy?  Then come in, and rest.”

Reverend Brad Carrier

For the UUFGP

© March 1, 2009

Filed under: Physics to Mysticism by brad
No Comments »

          The end is near!  When?  Any moment.  Every moment.  All kinds of things will happen by a year from now; I guarantee that.  A year up, next solstice, December 21, 2012, could mark the very end.  That’s when the rogue planet Nibiru from the Kuiper Belt is said to arrive here.  Or maybe it will be because of the electromagnetic pole shift.  Or all-out nuclear war.  It makes you want to plan your last year on earth.  What’s important to know or do in humanity’s last year?

People wish they knew the future and love to pay heed to prophets who claim to know the future.  They also tend to ignore them if those prophets actually want them to change.  We need seers who say.  Emerson said, “Always the seer is a sayer.”  I am both.  From my limited perspective and frame of mind, I say what I see.  Therefore, I can and do predict that the planet Nibiru will not arrive in a year.  I cannot, however, despite my Masters of Divinity, divine which Republican will be up in the polls next week.

Some predictions are easy – like, solstice will come on time.  Others are harder – like, will we be happier or worse?  The earth will reliably turn just as it does.  Whether we’re healthier and happier on it depends.  It depends on small and large scale happenstance utterly beyond our control, and it depends on just what we do when what we do affects our inner bodily and spiritual selves and our outer social and environmental matrix.  Some things happen to us; some things we create with our beliefs, intent, habit, inattention, and inventiveness.

The Mayan long-count calendar runs out next year.  It lasted about 5,126 years, about as long as we envisage civilization to have been.  That’s from a cozy view, when time and space seemed comprehensible and manageable.  Now we know – language arose many multiples of that, and tools, even more.   There have been about a thousand five-thousand year periods since we developed feet for walking upright, pelvises capable of that and of birthing big-brained infants, and most importantly, the care and culture to receive and nurture those preemies.  To get those big brains out without crushing them or tearing up the mother, we’ve long been born too early.  We’re born vulnerable, dependent.  What makes us human isn’t just big brains capable of language and planning, but a culture that cares for and develops these ever-promising babes.  A culture that collectively cooperates and creatively cares for its own is built into our bones and brains.  We are the structure of success, the incarnate evidence of thousands of generations of loving community providing protection, nurture, language, play and love.   We did not survive only by being “bloody in tooth and claw,” but by caring for infants, each other, and the old.

The human community has dealt with enormous challenges.  We lived, huddled closer to the equator, through the last ice age.  That lasted over a hundred thousand years!  How colder and harder it was, far different than the recent Holocene, this 10,000 year interglacial period of luxurious warmth.  We’ve lived through cold and draught and flood and disease.  We know the past, but not the future.  Vast events, from volcanoes to floods have come along with entire societies failing from foolishness.  We wish we knew what is coming, why, and what to do about it.

Enter the prophets.  Because we want to believe someone knows, we tend to believe in them.   We know we don’t know; maybe they do!  We tend to ignore it they’re wrong while magnifying when they are right.  Planet Nibru from the Kuiper Belt?  It was to have arrived in 2003.  Edgar Cayce says the earth will tilt and major parts of the west coast will fall into the seas somewhere between 1958 and 1998.  Nostradamus says the king of the Mongols will return in the seventh month of 1959.  George Orwell had me fearing 1984, which came and went without incident.  Remember Y2K, the huge danger of the year 2000?  Lots of beans and rice were stockpiled for that, then probably not eaten.  I forgot to even notice the momentous moment of 11 past 11 on 11-11.  It seemed portentous in possibility and pretty ordinary in retrospect.

‘Tis repeatedly so.  Simple dates can be made into silly headlines and sad disasters.  The poor people in the Heaven’s Gate community abandoned their Cadillacs and donned their tennis shoes in order to take poison and jump on to a passing comet.  David Koresh foresaw a fiery death, and aided by our over-reacting government, got one.  The Seekers, having sold all their businesses and donned special clothing, calculated the final day.  When it came, nothing happened.  They recalculated.  When nothing happened again, they determined God had spared humanity due to their ardent belief.

This last group was studied by Leon Festinger, one of the first psychologists I ever studied.  At that time, he termed their behavior as “the theory of cognitive dissonance.”  Now it’s called confirmation bias or myside thinking.  We look for evidence to support our beliefs and eschew that which makes us feel wrong.  Having bought a Chevy, we read the Chevy ads and ignore the Ford ads.  The end of the world doesn’t come, so we believe all the more in it.  We don’t observe our situations objectively or scientifically, but more like lawyers defending an adversarial attack.  Having made up our minds, they’re hard to change, especially if we take pride in believing against all evidence.  Of towards 50 people who thought Saddam Hussein was behind 9-11 and deserved attack, when shown the evidence that he didn’t, over 40 still held that he did do it and did deserve it.  Believe in a particular end of the world and you might be likely to find evidence to support it.  You might be able to sway events to make it true.

Prophets deal in if–then relationships.  Preacher Pat Robertson laid the cause of the hurricane Katrina devastating New Orleans in the lap of licentious lesbians, even though it was actually fueled by the heat trapped by all the carbon dioxide generated by industries based in Texas, where it was heading (and where, coincidently, as if a message to us, our space shuttle disintegrated) and where recent firestorms recently raged.  We might suspect rampant weather upheaval as related to our addiction to oil.  If CO2 – global weather upheaval.

You’d think we have enough natural calamities without needlessly creating them.   A stray meteor wiped out almost all life on earth some 65 million years ago.  The Mediterranean has emptied and suddenly filled many times, not just that once that Noah floated through.  Some 75,000 years ago Mt. Tobu erupted, leading to a thousand years of dark and cold.  The Little Ice Age in Europe, which led to it losing 1/3^rd of its population, ended starting September 1^st, 1859 when sun spot activity radiated us back to heat.  But those same sort of sun spots burnt out the electric grid for six days in Quebec in 1989, and coupled to a weak electromagnetic field around earth, such as we have lately (and could have during a pole shift) could roast all life with radiation.  Mt. Saint Helens is a pip-squeak compared to the potential earth-changing eruption of Yellowstone.   Earthquakes are up.  Volcanoes are up.  Tsunamis could come.   The ocean is acidifying and numerous dead zones have “grown” along with massive pollution and systematic overfishing.  Storms rage.  Waters rise.  Anxieties rise.  What do we do?  We toy with it all, taunt trouble, add needless wars and toxic technologies to an already vulnerable planet.

Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!  Laughable fears, unless you live in Zanesville, Ohio.  Or is it zanneysville, letting deranged loners harbor nature’s biggest beasts as if tamed pets?  Nature is not so easily caged.  Numerous civilizations thought they could make nature do any silly bidding.  They perished, not just incrementally, but suddenly, in a matter of decades, not eons.  Chop off the forests.  Exhaust the oceans.  Choke the skies.  Overpopulate.  See what you suddenly get.  See if you can get the politicians, media moguls, and industrialists to fix it after, or even say “sorry.”

Here’s a thought: The end isn’t near, The Middle is Near!  Not just of this sermon, but of all life and effort.  Our millions of years of successful persistence, our thousands of years of creative culture, our lifetimes of caring and trying – perhaps we’re at the middle of a long process.  Perhaps the challenges, foibles, and potentials will go on for as long as we’ve been.   We will for sure spin with our planet.  But how?  Improving, or getting worse?  Perhaps our political system will go beyond protection to sustaining, and beyond sustainability to flourishing for everyone for eons to come.  After all, a bi-partisan vote, swayed by food lobbies, declared pizza is a vegetable.  Welcome to life, kids.

The fires in Texas and the Soviet Union, the floods in Australia, Brazil, and the U.S., the tornados by the hundreds – all these are exacerbated by our human doing, our changing boatloads of oil from beneath our ground to carbon dioxide above our head.  This melts our ice and darkens our poles, releasing even more problematic methane from our peat bogs, raising our oceans to flood our cities and farms.  This is just one of the huge things we’re doing with our habits and technologies.  We need to connect what we’re doing with what the result will be.

If we create pollution and divisiveness, then we will live in toxic stress.  If we treat each other uncivilly, we will develop an uncivilization.  If we keep delivering our world to the profit takers, we’ll find it all gone and no one will know joy or ease.

Wendell Berry, a prophet of our time, bemoans our plight:

Critical choices that once belonged to individuals or communities become the property of corporations… [P]olitical leaders become the paid hacks of the corporations…  A total economy is an unrestrained taking of profits from the disintegration of nations, communities, households, landscapes, and ecosystems.  It licenses symbolic or artificial wealth to “grow” by means of the destruction of the real wealth of all the world. (“In the Presence of Fear,” pg. 26)

Another prophet of our time, the Dali Lama, shows how we play into this.  We collude in the very system that besets us.  He was asked, “What surprises you?”  He replied,

Man, because he sacrifices his health in order to make money; then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health.  Then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present – the result being that he does not live in the present or the future.  He lives as if he is never going to die, and then he dies having never really lived

If we care for ourselves and each other, if we seek and implement technologies that supply without exhausting, if we always put personal profit in relation to our collective commonwealth and our self in concert with the Self that is in all, then we will leave this damaging, dangerous, dreary time behind us.

Yes, but how?  These are vast processes, be they natural or caused.  We’re trying to pay the bills and keep a house.  We’re dealing with ordinary woes like loneliness and frustration.  We’re part of a declining empire hooked on destructive processes beyond our agreement or control.  Rats in a cage with no exit, control, or relief finally grow cynical, sick, and they die.  We can Occupy Mainstreet for a while, which lets us know we aren’t alone in our angst, but successful change is as elusive as needed.

Who cares for this?  Who can care?  What agency can address both natural global calamity and the human-generated type?  What system can care for not just all people, but all life?  Our dear democracy now is corruptly managed by wealthy people serving even wealthier interests.  We’re dimly aware of the military-industrial complex corrupting our representatives.  Now, even the potato lobby has more say than we do.  American society is being treated with the same exploitative indifference as once was inflicted on the “third world.”  Sociopathic CEO’s earn the most money for doing the worst things to us.  Will the U.N. chastise and control all economic, industrial, and military activity worldwide?  Will religion care for this life on this world?

Sometimes I consult an oracle, the I Ching.  Two years ago, just after the dismal mid-term elections I asked on behalf of my country.  It said the strong are temporarily restrained by the weak, that friendly persuasion, gentleness and adaptability are needed.  Tricky, but true.  Last night I consulted it again.  It came back Abundance, with a good leader free of sorrow or care, meting out strict and precise punishments, leading to Duration, that which is not worn by hindrances, and being self-renewing, begins at every ending.  Maybe President Obama will reap majority control and we’ll begin putting up windmills and solar rooftops by the millions to generate the light and travel we need.

Back in 1976 I luckily met Thomas Banyacya, Sr., Hopi elder visiting the Taos Foundation in New Mexico.  He has written:

There is a river flowing now very fast.

It is so great and swift

There are those who will be afraid.

They will try to hold onto the shore.

They will feel they are being pulled apart

And will suffer greatly.  Understand that the river knows its destination.

The elders say we must let go of the shore,

Push off into the middle of the river,

Keep our eyes open and our heads above water.

And I say: see who is in there with you.

Hold fast to them and celebrate!

Celebrate?  Yes.  Bring joy to your body and to each other.  Thank God for blue skies and strawberries and pleasure.  Look past the collective befuddlement we’re undergoing and cherish the abundance we still have.  Yes, we need jobs, but not any jobs at any cost to ourselves and our world.  We need meaningful work that serves the common good, not slavery to a process that ruins our lives and environment in order to generate profits upward to those who never have enough.  We’ve come to confuse anxiety and anger with the excitement we could be having through joyful living.  Anxiety sells medicines and anger peps up politics, but both wear us out.  Cortisol flows instead of oxytocin.  Tolerance becomes intolerable.  Irritable, irritating people clamor to wear guns so we’ll all feel safe.  Just as some were putting crosshairs on pictures of their political opponents, “the most positive person in Congress,” Gabby Gifford, was shot in the head.  She is coming out of it, singing “This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine.”  If she can, we can.

Mostly, and if we don’t mess it up, the world and the weather are reliable.  Since ancient times, we have been able to predict the exact moment of the solstice.  We calculate the procession of the solstices over a 26,000 year cycle.  The solar power that warmed Roman courtyards (due to their intelligent placement) will be warming us and giving us electricity for millions of years to come.  The wind that gives us “free” electricity will blow forever.  The astronomer Harlow Shapley once speculated what increase in knowledge and ability we will have if the scientific method, only two hundred years old, were to progress another two hundred years, or two thousand years, or two million years.  We’re not short of oil or coal or natural gas or kindness.  We’re short on ingenuity and ethics.  We’re short on tapping the kindness and genius of humanity.

“Hydrogen,” said an anonymous scientist “is a light, odorless gas, which, given enough time, turns into people.”  Absurd?  Not at all.  This is the new telling of our place in space and time.  We live betwixt the unimaginably small and the incomprehensibly tall.  We live with time briefer than breath and more ancient than continents moving about.  In the smallness of atoms, where the elemental particles flash into and out of existence, and in the vast slowness of galaxies turning (ours has turned only twenty times since our sun was formed) we have our lives, “three score and ten, or by reason of strength, four score.”  But, like the grass and the leaves, we have our season, then pass.

Perhaps the Hindus had something right in their trinity: Brahma is the origin, Vishnu the ongoingness, and Shiva is the end.  They all exist together, happening at once.  It is a vast momentum which generates us and which we try to steer here or there.  Endings are beginnings too.  Who knew what potential there was in hydrogen?  Who knew what apes could create?  Who knows what potential there is in us?  Given our growing understanding and renewed valuing of our miraculous creation, complete with reliable laws that can lead to lovely lives, who knows what our intensions can lead to?  This is not in the future.  It exists where time exists, in the Now.

(Read from I Ching, Duration, pg. 126.)

The Hopi leader Thomas Banyacya went on:

You have been telling the people that this is the eleventh hour.

Now you must go and tell the people the THIS is the hour,

And there are things to be considered.

Where are you living?  What are you doing?

What are your relationships?

Where is your water?  Know your garden.

It is time to speak your truth.

Create your community.  Be good to each other.

Do not look outside yourself for a leader.

We are all about to go on a journey.

We are the ones we have been waiting for.

So, my predictions?  More of the same – potential upheaval from anomalies in nature, probable repeating problems and benefits from doing things as we do.  I don’t look for vision or leadership from Congress; at best, we feel deeply the systematic dysfunction there and begin the process to change it and /or work around it.  Nor will the Free Market fix things.  Nor will religion significantly help.  It’s a hard time in a society used to better times, but we’re still plush with abundance too.  We’ve intelligence, humor, and care.  Cleave to your family, friends, and fellowship.  Steer your lives in the ways you can.  You incarnate potential.

Dear ones, we do not know the future.  We only know a version of the past, a view of the present, and a vision of the future.  This time is ours, ours to live in, ours to live up to.  Let the present be a precious present to you.  Veer the vast momentum.  Though this sermon is ending, The Beginning is Near!

Reverend Brad Carrier

For the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Grants Pass

Grants Pass, Oregon

© November 27, 2011

Filed under: Physics to Mysticism by brad
No Comments »

It seems paradoxical that here on Perihelion Day, when we’re the closest to the sun, we’re so cold.  If we’re three million miles closer now than we are on July 4^th, Aphelion Day, why aren’t we hotter now and colder then?  It depends more on the angle of relationship than the distance.  Our northern hemisphere gets a glancing-off short day of sunlight that also has to penetrate more atmosphere at that shallow angle.  So, while we’re closer than ever, we’re coldest because of our angel of relationship with our sun, the source of all life and energy.  Let this serve as a metaphor for this sermon celebrating our place and time in the cosmos, especially as we approach the inauguration of our next U.S. president, Barak Obama.

Most religions are interested in supernatural realities; I’m more interested in super natural realities.  Most sermons will elaborate on scriptural passages; I build on scientific principles.  Most preachers this day are more likely to talk about angels than angles.  Let our angles evoke our angels.  Let us make the perihelion paradox into the perihelion promise.  This promise applies not just to solar energy and Obama’s presidency, but how we relate to our center, our source, as known in our sky, each other, and in ourselves.

It is because earth is tilted on its axis of rotation as it spins, traveling through the yearly seasons that we’re so cold even when we’re closest.  Short days, long nights, thicker atmosphere, a glancing path for rays – all these leave us cold in winter.  But sit in a sunny window on a clear day and you’ll be warmed.  Merely face the sun with the proper attitude and relation and its gifts flow into our lives.  All energies of all forms are originally derived from our current sun or the former one we’re all made of.  Our earth, our bodies, the uranium we use in nuclear power plants and bombs – all these came from the re-condensed matter of a former sun collapsed into itself and exploded out into cold space.  The oil we suck up and burn in our engines was former plant life powered by our current sun long ago.  The food we eat and the way it gets to us is all solar derived.  The sunny window that warms our back and room is using the ever-shining source directly.  A house with windows and walls designed for space heating, and the rooftop for hot water and electricity production, merely relates to the sun in such a way as to stop warding off this incoming gift and instead welcome it with gratitude, ethics, and ingenuity.

How ethics?  Because two houses sitting side by side can have massively different consequences on the larger environment, especially as multiplied by the thousands and millions.   This is more than mere economics or style.  How we get our energy and what we do with it is an ethical issue.  One house wastes off the sun with conventional roofing and un-thoughtful window placement.  It wards off the daily sun in order to replace that heat and energy with deplete-able and problematic sources.  Coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear, even hydro-electric, all exploit, deplete, or injure the single ecosystem we all share.  It costs money to injure our planet to get our needs met.  This first house is like mine.  Let’s call it “Houses as They Used to Be” and let’s call the second house “Houses as They are Becoming.”

Snickering that the second house can’t avail itself of the sunlight at night ignores the value of that incoming daylight on the other side of our world, and it misses the newer issue: how is the first house relating to the sunlight when it is shining?  The second house still has back-up heat and electricity supply, but whenever the sun is shining on it, it makes use of it.  It uses the right angle or relationship to welcome a clean, free, renewable source for its needs before or instead of calling on the old polluting, wasteful ways.  It doesn’t automatically squander the world’s dwindling energy supply or pollute the world’s ground, water, or air.  If the blowing wind and the passing waves also contribute to its heat, light, and electronics, fine, for these too are solar energy intelligently welcomed.

Even though we have entered Peak Oil, where less and less oil will come economically from the ground and the profit makers will try to scare us into scarcity and strife, for both ethical and practical reasons, we will gradually improve our angle of relationship with sunlight, wind, waves, and many more arenas of supply from unethical, polluting, depleting, destabilizing sources to ethical, clean, renewing, democratizing ones.  If we have the will, there will be the way.  In housing, transportation, communication, food, clothing, community – all the things we humans need, – we will find the ethical and abundant way – if we have the will.

Great fright is upon us again, this time in the form of a world-wide depression.  This follows a glut-fest of money going out to attack, invade and occupy an innocent country that happens to be in the middle of massive oil and gas areas.  Great fright, supposed scarcity, and senseless stress will occupy our media and minds.

Given the wrong leadership, fear and hate could rule our higher nature, causing us to take and waste as if patriotic, excused by “God Bless America” stickers.  But what if that cheap, selfish prayer were a sincere, selfless one?  What if God were to bless America with a blossoming of ethics and ingenuity in such a way as not only to meet our needs cleanly and well, but help all people everywhere to have their lives simplified and improved?  The same sunlight that warms your back in that favorite window is shining on the rest of that south-facing wall as well as the roof, and not just for your one house, but most of them up and down the street, and across the towns, and across the nations and around the world.  Could innovation in how houses are conceived and designed lead to an automatic, ongoing reduction in our trade deficit?  Could someone in Uzbekistan get some house heat and electricity and maybe even a hot shower straight from sunlight and other clean, decentralized, ever-coming sources?  Yes.  Heat, light, entertainment, communication, transportation, sustenance, security – all of these are available to the human community by altering the angle of relationship we use to meet our needs.

Our angle of relationship with wealth needs adjusting.  Even as we desire money we know how excessive concentrations of it in the hands of the uncaring can be a danger to us all.  We know the billionaire is not a thousand times happier and healthier than the mere millionaire.  Crafting a society that uses technology and economy to create a few rich by making the many more poor doesn’t create wealth; it creates gluttony amidst scarcity fueled by slavery and usury.  “You have been pre-approved!” is not really a gift to you.  Wealth is having some time to relax in that sunny window breathing clean air having a cup of tea, knowing your family and loved ones are secure and satisfied.  Wealth is knowing that cup of tea came from an agricultural and economic system built on sustainable abundance and economic fairness.  We need and can help each other to have this latter form of wealth.  We don’t need life-draining jobs making expendable stuff designed more for profitable exploitation than for ethical life-enhancing functions.  We have valued the wrong kind of wealth and forsaken the world that could provide the right kind.  But this needn’t continue.  This economic downturn could provide the impetus to veer our technological, economic, and political habits from house one to house two.  We can still have disparities of wealth.  Important CEO’s could still make twenty times what the janitor makes, as was the ratio, scaled back from the egregious two hundred times we recently “enjoyed.”

Real wealth is needs met ethically and efficiently for the whole human community, not just the few who benefit from the scarcity and strife of the many.  God bless that sort of America.  God bless us as we are a blessing.

(And God damn us if we are not.  If we continue to inflict our little selfish hells on the world, armies imposing corporate agendas, raining down fire to rack up profits, let God find the ways for revenge and justice to come home to us.  Let not just massive bombs, but hideous diseases, wend their way here, indiscriminately injuring those who merely live here, just as we have flippantly excused “collateral damage” in Iraq, Vietnam, and Japan.  I know I’m not supposed to say this in a sermon.  It seems jarring and unpatriotic.  So I won’t preach this part, and I actually don’t want any of this to happen.  I just want us to get real about our place in history.  Instead of yet another round of doomed empire, we could endeavor to dream and devise those technological, economic, political, social, and religious innovations that seek to let heaven bloom on earth for all.  Then and only then is the “God Bless America” sticker suitable.)

In the daytime, when we’re spinning through the sun’s bright light, we tend to forget that our sun is a star and that in the daytime sky the stars are still shining.  At night we get a view of our larger local place.  All the stars we see on a clear, dark night, about a thousand, are our near neighbors in our own Milky Way Galaxy.  We only see a few of the many more that are in our galaxy.  If you put a telescope or even just some binoculars on the Milky Way above us, you’ll be looking in towards the center of our galaxy.  You’ll see how many more stars there are in our galaxy than we humans ever knew until recently.  If you know were to look you can see the faint glow of a nearby galaxy, Andromeda, our neighbor galaxy a mere two million light years away from us.  If you took a long piece of string and wrapped it around our earth’s equator seven and half times and then stretched it out in space towards Andromeda, you’d cover one second’s worth of the two million year old light coming towards us.  Our galaxy takes a hundred times two million years to turn once in its spin.  The dinosaurs came and went and we mammals arose in this one galactic year.  The scale of space and time that we have only recently discovered is at once astonishing and reassuring.

“Reassuring” because earth spins reliably.  We tend to get so stressed out over quarterly statements and year-end summaries we easily forget and forsake what benefits we inherit and what responsibilities and opportunities we hold.  Were we to have the right angle of relationship with not just our sun, but all the forces and wonders of nature and our cosmos, and not just physics, chemistry, botany, and ecology, but each other, and for that matter, our own inner self – what wonders we might yet discover and devise!   Our earth will spin reliably not just for this next year or century, but for thousands of centuries to come.  We could live rightly and well here.

I just included our inner self in this partial list of the sorts of things we could have a right angle of relationship with to segue into Barak Obama’s inauguration.  Somehow, after eight years of a party which came to power on the philosophy that government is bad for us and then proceeded to demonstrate that, somehow, the American people saw through the sins of arrogant stupidity, greed and waste to elect an intelligent, humble, practical man.  Somehow, after generations of racism we easily reach across the supposed divide to welcome a man of darker color.  But better than his being half African is his being principled and practical without being pompous or preachy, a genuine man rather than a media package.  We were closer to our own promise and possibilities than we knew.  We needed to shift the angle of our relations.  Ending the war we all feel guilty about and moving our economy to serve the ecosystem that ultimately houses us appeals to something inside.  We weren’t totally bamboozled by the bamboozlers.  They were good at what they did, but what they did wasn’t good.  We saw it.  Maybe all those God Bless America stickers started working.  There was no chance of rescuing earth and humanity from that old-house sort of thinking.  This new-house way might seem unusual at first, until it becomes the norm.

Of course, even Barak Obama, imbued with baraka, can’t alone rescue us from our own follies.  We let our last good president, Bill Clinton, fend off the incessant attacks of the packs of the snarling dogs of his time.  Having elected a decent man, we all need to step into our decency.  The challenge in Obama’s lap and ours was big enough just with the war and global warming and thousands of other environmental and humanitarian challenges without this massive economic meltdown (or is it trickle down?) to contend with.  Our klutzy human way of thinking tends to counter worldwide depressions with new wars bound to stimulate some parts of the economy.  Do we have the ethics, vision and ingenuity to take this crisis as an opportunity to truly veer our direction?  I think so.  Change need not be radical and obvious to be effective.  Just altering the angle of our relationship to our important sources will work wonders as we go.

On election night we felt a surge of comity in our community.  Blacks, whites, natives, Asians, Latinos – we all smiled with neighborly gladness.  We recently seemed decades or centuries from any real change from white men running things on behalf of vast corporate control.  We seemed so far from any genuine inclusive democracy.  Something shining in us beckoned us away from the fear and hate that seemed ever to rule and towards the hope and love we really are and want.  The angle of our relationship shifted and the angels of our nature began to dance.  The light, so dim and distant, suddenly flashes in our hearts and fires up our minds.  We elected not just a man, but a symbol and leader of our own higher natures.  The gladness in our hearts isn’t just about him; it is about us and the future.

If the higher angels of our nature are ever to dance on our pins or with us, we best tend to the angle of our relationship with all the sources of our being – solar, nature, each other, and the divine.  Times now aren’t as tough as they can get.  Remember the flu, the plague, the Inquisition, the hundred years of holy war, etc.?  Beyond human follies, there are always potential asteroids and the shifting of the magnetic poles to contend with.  No matter how dismal and dire, humans get through.  With tenacity and talent, we learn and improve.  We persevere.  It’s going to take more than one charismatic man to sway the entrenched forces of lobbyists, greed, desperation, and dull-headedness as we spin our way around our own private star.  Time is long.  We are brief.  How we relate – to our star and the stars and our human stars and the starlight shining on us and in us – makes all the difference.

Things change.  The shakedown in money and oil that we could mismanage can lead to a renewal of community.  That politics and politicians reached a low ebb was a dire and dangerous time.  We will never be without some form of political organization, so let true public servants come to the fore with our support.  But let us know that the political realm is limited.  All realms need that right angle of relationship.  Our economy can increasingly support stores like The Creative Alternative and institutions like the Farmer’s Market.  Our schools can apply the best we know about the best humans can be to instill and elicit the talents, genius, and social graciousness of our growing generations.  Our economic exchanges can move into mutual respect and fairness, each adding some synergy to the betterment of the All.  Our technologies can favor local, decentralized energy and food production, promoting bounty, security, and time to enjoy life for all.  Our everyday human connections can shift the angle of our relations from scarcity and suspicion to generosity and kindness.

No one is black.  No one is white.  Like our soon-to-be president, we’re all shades of brown.  Finally, someone represents the inescapable and promising reality that we’re all in this together.

The early 21^st Century seemed doomed to repeat all the tenacious mistakes of the 20^th, or for that matter, more than 2,000 years of mistakes.  But look larger than that.  Look to the vast past free of armies and massive polluting industries.  The life of the garden flourished in resplendent variety and inter-related health.  We needn’t return to a primitive life to have a primary life.  The wealth awaiting the human community needs only our wanting to achieve, spread, share, and improve it.  Barak Obama can’t do this alone, but as our choice and leader, we can do this together.  From the top of the political process to who you are and how you are, “Yes, we can.”

Yes, we can have a government that is us taking care of ourselves as best we can.  Yes, we can shift technology’s benefits from serving the few to helping the all.  Yes, we can find and forge the ways to live with ever-improving health, abundance, pleasures, and security for our whole colorful family.  Yes, we can live and let live in ways that bring us all to full, free, fun lives.  Yes, we can live with gratitude and ingenuity with the reliable forces of cosmos and natures.  Yes, we can.

Our garden could blossom and fruit as never before.  A thousand years from now we’ll still be spinning through sunlight.  It isn’t the distance from our source or each other that matters; it is how we relate.  How we relate to our sources – solar, social, and spiritual – will change the paradox of coldness in closeness to the promise of warmth despite distance.  Let 2009 mark a deep and lasting change for not just America, but humanity and earth’s life.  Only in this holy worldwide cause, may God bless America.

Reverend Brad Carrier

For the UU’s of Grants Pass

Grants Pass, Oregon

© January 4, 2009

Filed under: Democratic Relations, Physics to Mysticism by brad
No Comments »

Bucky Fuller, one of the more innovative and colorful engineers of our 20^th Century, saw early boats as the strong shape of a dome upside down.  Typical of his far-reaching sort of thinking, he once speculated that early boats either went with the wind or against it.  In the west, we admire the daring-do of earliest ship captains fighting the wind by using it, angling sail and rudder just so to travel zig-zag out of the Indian Ocean, around Africa, and up to Europe.  This skillful opposing of the forces of nature marks the western mind.  Bucky and I agree in praising and utilizing our thinking to successfully work our way in the world.

Other boats sailed east.  They went with the wind, going the easy way.  As a metaphor, these two ways can describe two ways of using our minds.  One way works them hard and gets things done.  The other lets them float and also gets things done, but differently.  I don’t disparage the western can-do way.  Thinking is what we are born to do.  But always thinking, always going against the wind, wears us and keeps us from a whole other set of abilities and satisfactions.  We also need to go with the flow.

My introduction to eastern thought came in F. S. C. Northrop’s “The Meeting of East and West.”  He looked for a way to sum up the east’s ephemeral religious ways and located them in what he called “the undifferentiated aesthetic continuum.”  Various things or situations exist, but only temporarily.  They are not afforded the zeal of attention in and of themselves so much as the substance of them or background to them.  The particular thing or thought isn’t as important as the context it is in or the way in which we view it.  The Chinese Yin and Yang are the opposites following each other, each containing a bit of the other, but both turn within the undifferentiated circle of the Tao.

Look deeper than the surface, said Lao Tzu in about 600 BC.    Just as the ten thousand things have names which are not the same as the things, naming the Tao is not knowing the Tao.  “Look to the Tao,” he wrote,

and it is not enough to be seen…

There was Something, without form and yet complete.

Silent!  Empty!

Sufficient to itself… never exhausted!

Go to the limit of emptiness;

Hold fast to the stability of stillness.

The Tao flows ever out of this stillness.  This is not a passive stillness.  We can float or flow with it, or ever swim against it.  Only a dead fish always goes with the flow.  Rather, it is learning to rely on the silence as a guide in all partial or temporary situations.  The ten thousand things come and go.  What they mean and how we view them matters in us more than they do.  Hard rules can’t fit all situations.  Martyring or murdering for concrete moral precepts shows a lack of wisdom.  Even the legalistic Confucius knew this, claiming the best rules are no rules at all, with wise people following the invisible order of heaven residing in all nature and events.  The icon is not heaven, but the icon can remind us of the way of heaven around and in us.

Over time Taoism grew weird.  Priests sold magic rituals and potions.  It seems any good religion can be caught by its own habits and hierarchies.  Buddhism itself was a liberal revolutionary reaction to a similarly hardened Hinduism.  Ritual magic, gurus, and caste distinctions were all too limited.  Gautama, the Buddha, saw suffering in the world of changeable things.  He advised not clinging to those things but being detached from them, from desiring them, and from fearing them.  Rather, rest contented in them as they come and go, cleaving to the constancy of change.  All is transitory.

Buddhism also grew into sects and has its rigidities.  Even so, its advice is practical.  Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh explains the Buddhist version of the law as, not something you must obey or be punished in hell, but the ways to live that allow enlightenment or liberation to succeed.  Operating in harmony with the dharma, one just doesn’t lie, steal, or kill.  We don’t need to obey or be punished.  It is simpler in us than that.  One’s nature is too dear and wouldn’t feel right doing such things.

My own friend and guru, Dr. Vasavada, told me that following one’s dharma is discerning one’s inner nature and ideal work.  Go with that, he advised.  It was at Dr. Vasavada’s home that I met an enlightened Danishman, Shunyat.  Shunyat was given his name, meaning emptiness (we called him Mr. Nobody), by Ramana Maharshi, an Indian guru.  Devoid of a permanent identity, Shunyat was like a happy androgynous old man, ready to be new in any moment.  He had an imaginary pet dog named Wuji, a playful reminder of the Taoist Wu Wei, spontaneous effortlessness.  The present moment need not be ruled by the past.  He liked me and saw a bit of a nobody in me too.

It was through Vasavada that I met Swami Sharanand, the Blind Saint of Vrindavan.  Blind since the age of ten, he became enlightened and went about teaching till he died.  He advised we heed our inner knowing, closer to us and prior to our conditioned thinking.  This Viveka shines constantly, showing us that which we get caught up in but is not us.  When we see something that we do or are that isn’t our real self we simply renounce it, letting the real self replace it with something more authentic.  Serving those around us is a good way to overcome aviveka with viveka.

Here are some quotes taken from a translation of Swami’s writings by Vasavada.  You’ll find he isn’t easy, for he advises going with the inner flow even in the midst of storms, living free of fear and desire to discover the calmer and truer sense of Self.  (Please look past the redundancy, sexist pronouns, and stilted writing of this illiterate saint to get his spiritual lesson.)

“One who cannot tolerate dependence, helplessness and boredom easily awakens to the inner need to be free.  There is life beyond pain and pleasure.  All that is required is alertness, watchfulness…

“It is necessary to see that man is more than the turns of events in life.  He [or she] need not sell himself [herself] cheap to circumstances. He [or she] is a value in himself [herself].  Circumstances are merely useful materials.  Until he sees his Self as separate from circumstances, he cannot innerstand who really he is.  Man who realizes his independence from circumstances can be aware of his responsibilities to himself as a human being and to his inner need…

“One can never be free from fear so long as dependence on pleasure persists.  Without realizing the true nature of pain, dependence on pleasure continues.  It is a mistake to suppress any pain which comes about unbidden and naturally.  One can really learn the lesson from pain only when one does not suppress it in order to have future pleasure.  … Man continues to be afraid of pain as long as he gives importance to pleasure.  Pleasure does not come by asking for it; it comes on its own, according to Nature’s benevolent plan.  … Pain and pleasure are alternating phases of life; Life is beyond both….

“Being with pain and learning its lessons destroys lure for pleasure, but not pleasure.… Being desire-free opens the door to Life beyond pleasure and pain…   One has to distinguish between desire and inner need.  Desires get fulfilled sometimes and sometimes not.  Desire is a state of mind.  Inner need is something one cannot live without… Want is not Life.  It is, therefore, essential to turn away from it and be affectionately detached from that which is not life.  Turning away will awaken the real question, “What do I really want?” or “What is the inner need?”  …

“Real non-doing is attained only when one has done all that needs to be done or when he has made full use of what is available to him.  It is also attained by coming to Rest through a desire-free state of mind, which means he is affectionately detached from things and events.”

Swami wants us to be free of the desires and fears we tend to get lost in, and instead dwell in the full emptiness of our real and spontaneous self.  This is a very eastern yogic approach.

Before leaving India I happened upon Shri Rajneesh, also called Osho here in the States.  Rajneesh taught Tantra.  Instead of denying one’s pleasures to get past them, one indulges in them to see how empty they are.  Whether via denial or indulgence, one learns to be unafraid of the pain, unattached to the pleasure, and instead dwells in the fullness of being.

I’ve had the contact with other notorious Indian gurus, such as Muktananda and boy Guru Maharaji.  Maharaji later had a scandal and changed from being a boy god-guru to a plain-spoken lecturer, Prem Rawat.  His updated advice takes his status out of the issue and puts your own peace or lack of it in your concern.  He says, “Empty-handed you came and empty-handed you will go.”  Whether we stand on our own two feet and know the peace of our own being, or not – is his very rational offering.

Life is a gift, but do we open it?  At the end of life, will we die having failed to live?  Would God be glad if you never opened the grand gift?  Only you can un-tie the bow on your gift; it’s a Gordian knot that cannot be opened by force.  Allowing it to be undone, it unravels itself to reveal the treasure inside the gift.

Just so, the way of meditation that we learn from the east is the opposite of thinking.  Again, I think we should think.  “Think and think and think,” said Art Brayfield, president of the APA.  I agree.  But if we cannot not-think, how in control of our mind are we?  We can sail against the wind, but we should also know how to flow with it.  Meditation is the deliberate cultivation of the ability to allow the flow to take you to the realm of being, about as close to heaven on earth as you’ll find.

This whole year I’ve shared with you bits and pieces of brain science.  A healthy body and mind is made of many elements including ample nurture, stimulation, orientation, exercise, sleep, and community.  But whatever we’ve inherited in life, we have to work with what we’ve got, with who we are.  The short of the long of that brain science is our ability to cultivate the meditative mind.  It just helps and there is no downside.

I’d like to make use of this last Sunday of the season with you to share some moments drifting in the ocean of stillness.  I tend to deliver heartfelt but brainy sermons.  Today, let’s shorten the talk and practice the flow.  Knowing what the flow is and how to go with it and tap into it all require familiarity and practice.  The eastern way is as much a natural part of us as the western.

Instead of residing in your thinking, be in your being.  The thoughts will be there, tugging at your attention, wanting to wrestle or amuse you.  Let them be.  Observe without resistance, reaction, or indulgence.  They come and go but aren’t you.  You’re deeper in yourself, prior to and detached from the churning mind.  A sense of relief comes from not-doing.  You allow the mind to be.  It presents thoughts that can dissolve.  In between such thoughts, and actually, during them, there is also the great peace of presence.  That peace, that primal presence, is most precious.  It takes noticing, then deliberately visiting and practicing, then taken into life as usual.

In the Zen world, that “life as usual” is attended to calmly and single-pointedly.  There is still work and doing, but there is ease, centeredness, and wisdom in between our actions and even during them.  We can do, do, do.  And we can be, be, be in the midst of activities and between them.

I view this innate ability as natural but needing practice.  We have built in an ability to reach deeper rest than during our deep sleep at night, but in a mere 20 minutes of meditation.  Our blood pressure drops, our mind is calmer and clearer, our sensitivities are heightened but our reactions to them are soothed.  Though we can load meditation up with meanings and religious images, it can be considered purely physiological.  Just witnessing one’s own breath puts oneself in one’s body and being in the living Now where we glimpse how fully alive and aware we really are.

So sit symmetrical and comfortable, relax your muscles in your face, shoulders, hands, etc., allow your mind to be without interacting with it, and simply relish the relief of giving up having to go against the wind.  The operant word here is “allow.”  The paradox is that we use our will to not do.  Our control is to release control yet stay aware.  We go with the flow of dissolving into a vast, silent energy.  In that pause that refreshes, take refuge.  Get acquainted with it.  Deepen and lengthen your connection.  Know it well so that you can find it when you need it, and bring it into your life too.  It takes patience and practice.

There is an undifferentiated aesthetic continuum in you and around you that is as beautiful a part of your wholeness as your rationality and emotions.  You are of the west, but you’re not only western.  How round would our globe be without a west or east?  How rounded are you if you are only doubting and never delighting, only driven and never drifting, only doing and never being?  The eastern aspect of our lives and being is as fitting.  We’ve no forbidden aspects of our wholeness, only parts or ways we haven’t discovered and explored.  I gently urge you develop this way of being as part of your human wholeness.

(Practice silent meditation together with minimal reminders on thought, tension, exhaling, and pure allowing.  Leave time for reports and questions.)

Reverend Brad Carrier

For the UU Fellowship of Grants Pass (Oregon)

© May 8, 2011

Filed under: Healthy People & Planet, Physics to Mysticism by brad
No Comments »

We greet the sun in the morning

We sigh good-bye at night

But the sun is always with us

Though to us, seems dark and bright.

It stands still, ‘tis we go spinning

Whirl our earth-flung way

Counting our days and our seasons

Living our life’s time away.

Our perspectives on time and life are limited.  We fool ourselves by the immediate and the apparent, missing the interconnectedness of time and life.  But we reorient ourselves to our longer and larger reality by dwelling on the truths of our temporal and special oneness.  We are one; our earth is one.

This may sound abstract and remote, and while what I will describe here may be taken as metaphorical, it is rooted in the actual.  Our actual situation is far more enduring and interconnected than we tend to realize.

This seems like a new day, and it is.  Yesterday has gone and tomorrow has yet to come.  This is our one unique Sunday, to be lived and finally left.  But in actuality, this day is our one day.  Since the beginning of the planet there has been only one ongoing day.  The sun glows constantly.  The earth spins in that glow and revolves around it.  What seems to us a new day is really the one ongoing day through which we daily spin.  The dawn seems to come to us and leave, but really, we come to it and pass through it.  The sun seems to rise, pass over us, and set.  But really we spin under it.  The sunset seems to follow the sun down, but really, we spin through it as we turn towards the night.  Ah, the night, far more ancient than the day, the night is our window on the vast, the older mother of our recent sun.  Out there are her stars, denizens of her slow breath: out and in and out.  Our one day may be billions of years old, but even it has its beginning and end, as surely, our beautiful planet earth will eventually spin back into the sun.  Don’t worry about it yet, though.  From our human perspective, we’ve all the time in the world.

Our days seem numbered, and they are.  Our numbers are puny to the life of our earth, but important to us.  Absolute time may be sliced as briefly as a multi-billionth of a second or stretched beyond the drift of continents.  But relative time matters greatly to the creatures perceiving it.  Some insects live their entire life’s cycle in mere days.  All the effort and drama of birth, change, breeding, and death opens worlds to them.  Our lives are as the psalmist reminds, “three score and ten, or by reason of strength four score.”  Life’s time seems long enough to accommodate a full life, yet even a long life ends.  I once asked a hundred year old person whether that seemed like a long time.  “Not once it’s gone,” he said, snapping his fingers.

So here we are, spinning through our one eternal day, seeing it always as new, having our time from our human perspective.  This huge and lovely earth, so regular and reliable, spins its way in the daylight and ancient night.  The sunlight heats the oceans and continents.  Up goes the evaporated water, all the atoms billions of years old, into the clouds and winds, carried into yet another round of rise and fall.  The water in our cells is very old.  It is coming through us again, passed on to its eternal refreshment.  The weather, dynamically balanced, brings shower and sunlight, seasons to be savored.

We’re lucky, living out here on the west coast.  The jet stream and the prevailing winds bring freshened water to us, distilled back to purity.  We don’t get much of our human pollutants in it.  The gasses and particles cast off of our modern devices mostly travel eastward in the air or downward in the water for others to deal with.  Poor easterners, they get all the accumulated sulfur, mercury, and other poisons, and we all gradually but inexorably add carbon to our sky.  Slowly to us but quickly to earth’s biosphere, we fill up what seemed an endless volume.

Just recently we learned to use engines to do our work.  Suddenly, we grow in numbers and impact.  What seemed the endless forests of the New World are suddenly mostly gone.  What seemed the limitless bounty of the oceans is quickly depleted.  What seemed the endless nourishment of rich soils is soon extracted.  What seemed the sure source of fresh air is soon befouled.  We spin through our one ongoing day carrying with us the consequences of our doings.  In our weather, in our bodies, in our societies, we live with what we are.  We want to flush away our waste and forget our follies, but we live in a closed system, bound to keep what we were and are becoming with us.

Some assume our one earth is important only as staging ground in a divine story where we’re expected to learn to live by faith.  Doing so will usher in a rewarding afterlife.  What happens to earth during this doesn’t much matter.  How presumptuous, wasteful, and immoral.

To take the goods of life that Creation provides and sacrifice them with neither appreciation or responsibility on the gamble that an invisible realm is more real and important is the ultimate insult to Creator and created.  The interrelated diversity of all life suffers insult and injury.  “Not good enough,” “Unimportant,” and “More” comes from their greedy grasping.  Never at home in the natural cosmos, embarrassed by evolution and life, puffed up with adamant opinion, they deplete and sicken the one earth day we all share.  Faith trumps fact, belief burdens bounty, and sanctimony sacrifices soul.  Following such religion is folly.

Fortunately, such leaders look behind themselves with uneasy hesitations.  Gradually, other leaders step up to voice and enact a deeper yearning and higher ethic.

Example.  When the actor, director, and producer George Clooney, who put out the telling movies “Good Night and Good Luck,” and “Syriana,” received two academy nominations he had to respond to TV’s attack host Bill O’Reilly’s dismissing of his career as “over” because of Clooney’s outspoken stands against crushing censorship and foolish wars.

“We are a little bit out of touch in Hollywood,” Clooney admitted, “we’re the ones talked about AIDS when it was just being whispered and we talked about civil rights when it wasn’t really popular.  I’m proud to be part of this community and proud to be out of touch.”

Being out of touch with the onslaught of media bullies saying what we should and shouldn’t say helped Clooney put out his bold movies (much like Warren Beatty had with “Bullworth”) and to model a new image and ethic in the cars he drives.  He dropped the limo for the Prius.  He went on to be the first owner of the T600, an electric car just over three feet wide and eight feet long that is faster than a Porsche Turbo.  He uses his celebrity to brighten and sweeten our one earth’s day.

His little advantage is based on our collective one.   He speaks because we spoke.  We do not suffer from an energy shortage; we suffer from a shortage of ethics.  Given new leaders, we will find the ways to generate our ingenuity and live up to our responsibility.  We find our individual lives are not so separate and inconsequential.  We participate in our circle of influence, modeling for others the ways we wish they would also share.

Our little habits are part of our common habitat.  Mere scraps of tin foil seem unimportant until we add them all together.  The engineer Buckminister Fuller noted what enormous quantities of material were wasted when we thought our scraps and waste meant nothing.  He viewed pollution as “wasted resources.”  By recycling tin foil, Americans once contributed to our shared resources to a war effort.  By starting to compost and recycle, isolated Americans started a movement that results now in a systematic keeping of resources that formerly were burdensome pollution.

Example.  On the sink at the Westin Hotel was this sign:

Save our planet.  Dear guests:  Every day millions of gallons of water are used to wash towels that have been used only once.  You make the choice: A towel on the rack means “I will use it again.”  A towel on the floor means “please exchange.”  Please decide for yourself.  Thank you for helping us conserve The Earth’s Vital Resources.

One could cynically say the hotel just want to save money on water and other energy.  That may be, but it also actually saves water and energy.  The sign gives reason for the etiquette.  So-informed, patrons can decide to help save just that little bit.  It adds up.

Having saved the towel for tomorrow’s stay, having eaten only what was really needed, having purchased a more fuel-efficient auto, having paid for a solar powered hot water heater, one actually participates in the little ways that empower the larger movements.  Doing what’s right becomes normal.

Little drops of rain, little grains of sand

Make a mighty ocean, and a pleasant land.

Little notes that sing, little words that rhyme

Make for mighty memories, and the dreams of time.

Never let a minute lie there on the shelf

For there may be in it all of life itself.

Little drops of rain, little rays of sun

Make the hopeful rainbow glow for everyone.

In the scriptures the rainbow was said to be the mark of the covenant.  After ecological disaster the sun returned above the waters.  The spectrum of color showed the hidden mystery in simple light.  The ways of creation are ours to honor.  When we do, the gods shine on us.

Example.  In the New York Times business section (right under the story about Rupert Murdoch trying to buy and control The Wall Street Journal, no doubt to magnify the greedy rich with all savvy and sneakiness he uses on Fox News) was a story about Norway.   Little Norway controls the third largest oil and gas deposits in the world, just after Saudi Arabia and Russia.  A Socialist nation, it decided to divest those stocks from its collective pension fund that offended their values.  Human rights violations, violations of individuals in wars and conflicts, environmental damage, ethical failures, and gross corruption were not to be funded.  Because such devices as cluster bombs and nuclear bombs are not right to fund, they dropped support for General Dynamics, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, and Rayathon in the U.S.  Other such companies were dropped from other countries.  Their three hundred billion pension fund continues to profit from decent ventures.  Soon, every man, woman, and child in Norway will be entitled to $180,000 guilt-lessened retirement ease.

While the prevailing assumptions of conservatives about selfish human nature will continue to manifest the Rupert Murdoch’s of our times, so do the overlooked but none-the-less accurate assumptions about our caring human natures continue to show and grow.  From Norway to George Clooney, leadership emerges because of the widespread cultural push that spots issues and creates solutions.  Misguided leadership may temporarily scuttle appropriate energy, transport, housing, and food solutions.  It may temporarily launch illegal, unethical wars on innocent people while seeking to look noble doing it.  But humans have within themselves the care and creativity needed to see through it (despite the moneyed media barrage of slick lies) and take control of their collective conscience and well-being.

When you remember to turn off the unused light, or go on to replace the old style with the new efficient types, when you recycle your resources and pare down your overall energy needs, when you operate a business that funds its suppliers in a deliberately just way – all these things add up and help you to be a part of a worldwide growing consciousness.  Having participated, we then exercise our right of speech, telling others of our contributions and our elected leaders what we would have them do.

“Our deepest fear,” wrote Nelson Mandela, “is not that we are inadequate; our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.”  We fear taking on the mantle of incarnation.  We project our caring and capabilities on to the great others of yesteryear or the magical saviors of tomorrow.  But this is our time in earth’s one day.  How are we going to live it?  Mandela goes on:

“We ask ourselves, “Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous?”  Actually, who are you not to be?  You are a child of God.  Your playing small does not serve the world… We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us.  It is not just in some of us.  It is in everyone.  And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.  As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

Thinking one’s little actions don’t matter, retreating from the public discourse in false humility, living like tomorrow won’t come out of today – these are the little ways we waste our day in the sun.  We don’t need the old humility of humiliation.  We need the new humility of actualization.  The old way was, “I don’t know,” and “what can I do?”  The new way is to live fully and well, ethically and enthusiastically in such a way as to allow others to also do that.  Live up to yourself in your way.  As we come alive and live well, others will be enabled.  As we do this together earth’s one day will improve again.

Earth’s one day will go on far beyond us.  We’ll spin through it, inheriting the momentums of the past in our weather, culture, and mind.  We’ll put our mark on those momentums in the ways we can.  Whether this day becomes worse or better, we’ll ride our shared ground, breathing our common air together.  Having seen the limits of the ways of exploitation we can veer our momentums into not just sustainability, but flowering and flourishing.  It is conceivable and possible that our earth could be a garden paradise that gets ever more healthy, beautiful, and abundant – for all.  The rainbows will glow on not just the chosen few, but the worthy all.

The Reverend Brad Carrier

For the Unitarian Universalists of Grants Pass

Grants Pass, Oregon

©May 20, 2007

Filed under: Physics to Mysticism by brad
No Comments »

Humanists tend not to believe in prayer.  Humanists believe in human ability and choice in a natural universe.  Miracles are either impossible or explainable.  Working material and social reality by merely thinking something fervently just doesn’t happen.  Scientific evidence for the effect of prayer is scant.  But personal experience of many is profound.

Prayer may not be humanistic, but is human.  Many humans in all sorts of cultures pray.  They talk as with ancestors, saints, gods, or God.  Healing is an act of both medicine and prayer in many cultures.  I don’t mind atheistic humanists, but I wonder if they’re acknowledging the whole abilities of the human being.  Is it better to rise above wishful thinking?  Prayer may seem sacred, but is it any better than blowing on the dice?  What sort of prayer might a humanist pray?

One of my main prayers is: “Thank You.”  But I wonder, who do I thank and how?  It is, after all, a big and intricate universe.  Things seem to work well, mostly.  It is beautiful, varied, functional, so wonderful I want to express my awe and gratitude.  But, to who?  When I’m feeling loving I want someone to love.  The devotional path, Bhakti, is said to be the purest and fastest way to pray praise that elevates the one who prays.  Or my prayer might be contrition when I fess up to a wrong I’ve done and resolve to do better.  All these seem a normal part of being human.  Devotion, remorse, and resolve all fit within the humanist pantheon.  If prayer focuses these, what harm?

Petitionary or intercessory prayer is all too human too, but it gets tricky when one tries to work the world from within.  This could be merely magical thinking.  It seems like someone might be listening, wants to help, and has ways to do it, but maybe that’s just human imagination.  My humanist side is able to question the propriety of piety and the plausibility of prayer.  Does it help all of us to have freer, fuller lives?  If so, how?

My Aunt Mary always ends any conversation about family members having trouble by, “Pray for them.”  I usually say, “I will,” though a big part of me doesn’t believe it works at all.   Then again, there is often not a lot else you can do, especially when Aunt Mary requests it, and what if it does work?  So I silently murmur, “Help them, please, O Lord,” feeling a bit silly for having tried, but also hoping it helps.

Does it help?  This existential question is easier than whether and how an afterlife might be.  Prayer affects not only the one praying, but those who hear it or know it is happening.  It may awaken the angels or saints, who relay the message instantly to Central Command who somehow gives it full attention (while handling seven hundred thousand million billion trillion other requests every moment) and magically influences material, biological, psychological, and social reality to answer the request.   Or in modern terms, it may affect the quantum realm with similar results.  I don’t know whether you have to include praise for God and humility for your self for it to work, or if it works all the time for any who yearn and intend, or it is just more wishful thinking and emotionalized self and group delusion.

It at least works in the one praying.  The usual mind is somewhat left as focus is sought and found.  Heart, breathing, brain and metabolism rate all go down.  Clarity is viewed.  Relinquishing or resolve emerge.  Often with the pictorial aid of revered images, Jesus or Krishna seems to be present.  Deeper emotions and ideas are engaged.  Sometimes, willfulness is relaxed to allow wisdom in from the gods or the unconscious.  The one who prays can improve, if only because the limbic (mammalian) part of the mid mind seems nourished and connected.  Vision can lead to the inner and outer doing that improves things for people and groups.

The Buddhists pray for limitless love: “May all beings, in all realms be happy; may they be free of pain and suffering.”  Of course, pain and suffering are part of life for all beings.  Wanting them to suffer less seems noble, far nobler than praying for one’s own private benefit.  I like it also that they assign prayer to an energy-efficient appropriate technology: the wind flaps the flag that makes the prayer.  No one has to know it’s happening, but when they do notice, it is.  The prayers fly in the wind.

It’s plausible that prayer works even if there’s no One to hear and answer.  The old atheist Karl Marx said, “Religion is the heart of a heartless world,” perhaps more appreciatively than cynically.  Well, that is some heart at least, comforting even if illusory.

Prayer appears to work even if an absence of Presence.  I’ve prayed for world peace, and that hasn’t happened… except mostly.  Though war rages in Iraq and some other places, most of the world does live in peace.  Did God grant it?  If so, does He also grant the wars?

Most people believe prayer works, but then again, most people fall for placebos.  Non-existent placebos regularly improve the health of up to thirty percent of those taking them while believing they’re taking medicine.  It is one of the most highly-studied, reliable medicines we’ve never had.  It would make a great product: “Studies consistently show Placebos work,” and “For whatever ails you.”

Belief helps make prayer work.  Slightly over half the studies on remote prayer show some slight improvement in the recipients.  Maybe I’ve been helping the family by following Aunt Mary’s request, and if not, no one hurt.  I certainly would receive understanding appreciation from her and many others if I said I prayed.  Group pressure to believe is pervasive.

As much as one part of me wants to believe prayer works, another part resents having to pretend it does.  As with most things religious and spiritual, it comes with the manipulative expectation that we agree and approve.  I might agree and approve, but not because I’m supposed to.  It is as right to use brains to doubt group pressure or authority figures as it is to inquire sincerely among them or within oneself.  I use my brain to doubt, but in that doubt is another doubt – that I’m wrong.  Could I use my humanistic brain to activate my whole human potential?  Would praying be a part of that, or misleading from it?

Having reduced my brain and prayer, can I now expand it all?

Putting my rationalistic, reductionistic minimalism aside, and letting down my doubting defenses, what if prayer really works, even for humanists?  What if our every inner yearning is affecting existence towards its fulfillment?  What if what we pray for – we get?  Would that be good?

One would hope so.  But what one hopes for can be shallow or even part of an unconscious egocentric viciousness.

At the age of about twelve, when I was the young one amongst older adolescents, and I had only two or three pubic hairs and none under my arms or on my face, I prayed to God for hair:  “God, please give me hair on my body.”  Doubter though I early was, I tested God’s ability to hear and answer.  Now, later in life, with a chest almost as hairy as Austin Power’s, and hair on my legs, arms and back too, I have to admit, prayer works.

However, if you have ever happened to notice my large bald forehead, top, and back of head you know why I also add: You have to be specific.  I should have also prayed to keep the hair I had.

Besides, is it good to be hairy?  It’s comfortable enough, and though some people like it, others don’t.  Is being hairy what I really needed in life?  I should have prayed for hair, keep my hair, and money.  Janis Joplin sang prayers for a Mercedes Benz, a color TV, and a night on the town.  “Prove that you love me and buy the next round,” she entreated.  She got all that, just as I’ve got my hairy body and bald head, so we’ve got to suspect that prayer works, which begs the question of what’s really good to pray for.   God bought her so many rounds He had to take her home.

We can pray individually or collectively, but should we?  Emerson once sternly stated that any prayer for private advantage is vicious.  Overstated?  Religious groups pray together.  Is that always good?  What if God granted the prayers of all those who want Him to smite their enemies, that is, from both sides?  Not all prayer turns out to be for the best.

What if God answers not just our stated prayers, but our unspoken ones too?  Mark Twain exposed the shadow side of prayer in his “War Prayer” story.  The patriotic prayers to “support our troops” were answered by a mysterious stranger from God revealing the hidden intension to “tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells . . . to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead. . . to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief . . . to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land.”  “For our sakes who adore Thee, Lord,” he went on, in all-too-familiar fashion, “blast their hopes, blight their lives… We ask it in the spirit of love of Him who is the source of Love.”  He went on to ask the former fervent prayers if they still desire it to “speak, for the Most High awaits.”

Speak, for the Most High awaits.  Existence may be attuned to our intension.  The angels, saints, and God may hear our inner call.  It isn’t just how it makes you feel, or that others hear it, or what could emerge in fact because of the mental momentum, all your being may speak all the time to all the beings, to the One being.  Speak, for the Most High awaits.  Prayer isn’t just what you want while on your knees.  Many of our desires are prayers, secret wishes the universe would go our way.  What is our way?

It may be that, as Rumsfield reasons, “the absence of evidence does not constitute the evidence of absence,” and an invisible, silent, yet all-knowing, all-powerful God hears our every prayer.  Michael Novak, conservative Catholic theologian takes Rumsfield’s logic further: It is the God you can’t see, hear, or sense that you need to pray to all the more.  The absence of Presence is its evidence.

This sort of logic steers a culture to spend all the more when the word SAVE is written large.  It also helps us ignore the answer box under the coat of the presidential candidate and instead to praise his wisdom because he’s so mentally shallow and stubborn.  It’s those darn humanists and liberals who actually do save, do see his lies and don’t see his brains, and care more for visible reality than invisible.  They actually care for our actual world.  Our Unitarian and Universalist traditions favor “deed, not creed.”  It isn’t so much the inner belief as the outer action.  It isn’t just belief or faith that matter; it is what you incarnate in your intension and action.

The most high that we can surely see is this lovely planet amidst this glorious universe.  Whatever the actuality of gods and angels, or the mechanisms of prayer, what are the inner and spoken realities of our being?  If the known and hidden parts of our prayers or intensions were really known by God, would we be proud and ready to receive?  If we could work the world by praying here today, what would we pray for?

More obvious than Him is His.  His good earth in this magnificent universe deserves our appreciation and care.  Would praying for the stop to global warming and rising seas be more important than actually conserving our narrow range of global comforts?  Should we rebuild New Orleans and pray the oceans don’t rise?  On this planet is a delicately and dynamically balanced system of interactive life.  In this web of life the human family plays and prays, plies and preys, doing what it can to survive.  Most of that family is poor.  Only a few have had their prayers answered in the form of material abundance.  Of these few, fewer still care to eschew the traps of materialism, to ward off the glut that keeps them from caring for the glory.  The glory of a healthy ecosystem teaming with whole, healthy, happy people living full, free, satisfying lives beckons.  The marketing, military, and political systems of people mostly ignore or even ruin the makings of a good life.  The religious systems cast shame on a truly good life and instead offer their contorted version of it.  If prayer is answered, what is yours?  What would you pray for this world?

Similarly, this little fellowship satisfies our growing enjoyments of community.  It provides a safe haven for those marginalized by society and affords a place of free thinking and plain speaking.  It does not impose ignorance with arrogance.  It admits fallibility while encouraging ability.  It loves God by caring for God’s goods – this earth, life, humans.  It is small but important, both to those who attend and to the larger community.  If prayer is answered, what is yours?  What would you pray for this fellowship?

Finally, you are as much a child of God or of Nature’s God as anyone else.  You have a right to as free and full a life as is possible.  You, like any human, loves happiness and avoids pain.  You, like any human, have a limited lifetime in which to live, learn, and love.  You matter to others and you matter to your self.  If prayer is answered, what is yours?  What would you pray for your self?

Reverend Brad Carrier

for the Unitarian Universalists of Grant’s Pass

Grants Pass, Oregon

© September 4, 2005

Here’s mine:

Dear God, if it’s wrong to doubt, please forgive me that.  I sense You want me to think, not to be gullible to any and every imagination.  I pray that all people live fully and freely, healthily provided with life’s essentials, sustainably enjoying the sustenance and security of home, community, and worldwide mutuality.  May this little fellowship be a happy home for all who come.  May we be our authentic selves here, helping each other to our wholeness.  May we serve our social and environmental region with intelligent and effective creativity, and may we be recognized and appreciated for this.  May our financial condition always be secure, may our facilities always serve our mission and reflect our artfulness.  May our leaders be wise, gentle, and supported.  May I live my life fully, giving out the best of what I’ve learned, helping others to be full, free, healthy, and whole, even as I enjoy that in me.  I love this wonderful world.  I don’t need more, but if there is more, show me when the time is right.

Filed under: Healthy People & Planet, Physics to Mysticism by brad
No Comments »

I once got to meet The Blind Saint of Vrindivan, India.  He was the guru of my guru, Dr. Vasavada.  Dr. Vasavada, of Bombay, India, was fresh in Chicago from having been trained with Carl Jung as an analyst.  I was at the University of Chicago in seminary and took to helping Dr. Vasavada get around town while learning about Jungian psychology and eastern religion from him.  When the chance to meet his guru in India came up in the summer of 1972, I went.  Let me share that meeting and his teachings with you towards our asking whether and how this saint’s call fits our lives.

As soon as I landed in Bombay (now called Mumbai) Vasavada eagerly told me his guru saint happed to be near.  We hopped on a plane and went to Gujarat State in western India.  Two blind gurus were holding forth with a small group of spiritual seekers in an unostentatious room, “the blind leading the blind,” I joked in my mind.

Swami Sharananad, the Blind Saint, was a big, bearded, long haired, bronze-colored man with a big belly (even though he ate only one meal a day).  He walked with a staff and kept his eyes closed except sometime when he’d open them and roll them down, as if looking at you.  Unprepared to ask questions, I was asked to anyway, so came up with this: “What is the Self?  How can I recognize it as the guide and the goal?  [and later] What’s it like to be a saint?  How do I know it’s any different than what we have?”  The interpreters were embarrassed by this latter question and were reluctant to ask it.  But they did and he laughed and replied: “A saint is a member of the universal family.”  At first I thought he was evading the question, but now, thirty six years later, I’m beginning to get it.  You will too by the time I’ve finished this talk.  A saint is not so different than you or me, especially if we open our inner hearts and deeper minds to his call.

I had hoped there was some shortcut to self realization, some sort of natural LSD to awaken my inner sainthood, the direct and quick path.  All these years later I finally read the larger of his books, “A Saint’s Call to Mankind” and find the demands on my character are as exacting and total as ever.  Perhaps you will recognize the wisdom of his system by having avoided and fulfilled it in your lives.

For years all I remembered of his lessons were a few rudimentary ideas:  A spiritual seeker, a sadhaka, tries to bring the spiritual learning and improvement of sadhana into his or her life.  Gradually, the inner innate light of viveka is heeded as it shines on the accumulated ignorance of aviveka.  By trusting the inner light and renouncing the not-real the spiritual real comes more and more to life.  In other words, you give up what you really know isn’t you or true, and by doing that, the true you emerges.

In the east, desire and aversion are viewed as distractions from our real selves.  An endless supply of persons, objects, or circumstances attracts our involvement or makes us want to get away from them.  Neither grasping nor fleeing serves our inner freedom.  Totally renouncing both impulses awakens our real self.  No longer steered by wanting or avoiding, our real self moves in a new sort if freedom.  In the east, the real self is a spark of the divine Self, also called Source or God.

Greed and fear block us from our pure mind and our God.  Swami jokes we want God to supply our earthly desires and would quickly drop God if we could get desires satisfied without Him.  We tend to take our sadhana as a part of our life, like going to church on Sunday, but the real sadhaka takes her or his entire life as sadhana.  Any circumstance or situation can be a proving ground for the sadhaka.  Prior to self-surrender, our “I” is a bundle of desires and aversions.  Our ego tries to serve itself.  It doesn’t notice that desire isn’t really satisfied by pleasure or satisfaction, for these lead to hoarding or more desire.  Desire begins and ends in pain.  The temporary relief we take refuge in – of getting or avoiding – doesn’t benefit our inner ongoing nature.  The ups and downs of ego divert us from an inner freedom capable of loving beyond our little needs.

We try to hoard the waters of love.  But like water, the love we really are can’t be confined to our private pool, for the water turns stagnant and breeds germs.  Love has to flow to stay fresh and pure.  It has to flow to be renewed.  Living by desire and aversion tries to keep our own water.  Living by renunciation and service opens an ever-flowing spring.

Swami teaches that identifying ourselves as our bodies tends to limit what we do with them.  He doesn’t have a hatred for them, but rather sees them as on loan to us to be used as tools of our sadhana.  He also notes a lot of what supports us in life and culture deserves a return of our service to nature, society, and those around us.  We are raised by parents and relatives, schooled by institutions we didn’t create, walk on roads we didn’t build.  We are dependent and owe our part of a return.  We do our best to be the ideal son, the loving wife, the responsible father, the dutiful citizen.

By surrendering our own demands and serving the needs of others we get out of ourselves.  We don’t organize our lives around our own indulgence.  We let our big point go.  We put our pressing need aside.  We don’t dwell on other’s faults but work on our own.  We look to be of service to that one in front of us.  Swami says we “hear for the pleasure of the speaker” and “speak for the pleasure of the listener.”  By trying to take away another’s sorrow and supplying them with happiness, we uproot our own little needs and begin to be free of them.  The sadhaka should not then take pride in serving, for the server is served by becoming more unlimited and less needy.  Nor does he or she question the progress thus gained any more than a gardener keeps digging up the seeds to see how they’re sprouting.

He suggests a good question: “Should one fear that it is not possible to retain one’s so-called life without things, let him reflect if it is possible to retain it with things!”  What we tend to hold to holds us in their mystique and promise, veiling the larger possession and fuller freedom we really already are.

There in Vrindivan, the village Krishna lived in, I had wanted Swami to touch me mystically, to awaken my infinite Self by his saintly presence.  But Swami teaches we cannot be magically lifted out of ourselves by the guru.  We have to actually do what the guru advises.  Meditation doesn’t fix us by itself.  We have to actually love.

“Being is dying by loving,” another holy one taught.  The shortcut to self realization goes right through one’s own ego as if it weren’t there in order to be of total service.  We renounce pursuing our own desires and instead serve all those we can.  We die to self to live in love.  “The peace of God,” writes Swami, “is a state not of the individual mind, but of a mind freed of individuality.”

All of this makes sense to my nature, experience, and hope.  I constrict in pursuing pleasure or avoiding pain.  I expand when accepting obstacles to pleasure or when I relinquish to pain.  An inner duty urges me on if I but heed it.  All is sadhana.  Like me, all others are the Self in their forms.  If I give up my ego in those difficult moments to be with them in truth and love as best I can, or if I bravely go with my self as it innerly impels me to do, doing the right thing for that moment, it turns out well.  The Tao, or Thy Will, appears, undemanding, yet spiritually real.  It is beyond explaining or rationalizing.  Followed, it is usually the loving thing to do.

Metaphysically, I do not know what Swami means when he writes that “viveka makes it plain to the thinking man that he is not his body.”  He makes it clearer: “desire is born of aviveka, by man identifying himself with the body.”  He is even more explicit: “All that springs from one’s identifying oneself with the body and the world is sin, while all that emanates from transcending the body-consciousness is virtue.”  Finally, “the dissolution of the ego is the supreme virtue, while ego-consciousness is sin.”

These challenge me deeply, for I believe we are this flame that burns on the wick of our bodies. I ride in this body gratefully.  I value this manifest material earth.  I have not seen that we exist independent of either.  I notice that those who speak of the Self being beyond form and limit do so from a body, their particular form and limit.  Saying we are not the body while using the body seems to dismiss and denigrate this marvelous incarnation countless generations of effort in the making.  Without all our ancestors, the forces of nature, and society, we couldn’t even consider an infinite Self.  What value is the freedom and love of Self if it does not freely love this precious, precarious earthly existence?

Some say you cannot know Self until you give up believing you’re the body, and all else you might believe, rationally or wrongly.  Meher Baba “said” asking to know God with the mind is like trying to see with your ears.  Give up all you’ve ever learned or wondered in favor of their explanation.  It could be what we think we know is really an impediment to what we really are.

There are times to give up all we know or think we know in favor of the unmanifested, even when we don’t know what that will be.  But I don’t think we should dance any guru’s expected performance to fit their formula.  It has to be spontaneous and genuine.

And truthful.  When I once tried to express this metaphysical question to a guru he claimed it was evidence I’ve never known what it is to be Self, or to sacrifice ego in service of truth or love.  This seemed presumptuous and offensive, for I have spent much of my life trying to do these things while staying vigilant to the truth as I know it.  I am loathe to agree to a formula just because a person and a community agree to it and expect me to do likewise.  I value our bodies and our material universe.  Not valuing them seems insulting and wasteful.

I like the distinction Swami provides.  He says, “Whatever things – including one’s mind and body – are dedicated to God become purified and turn into tools of worship.”  He says that desirelessness “does not mean hatred or contempt for the body or the world, but only equanimity by giving them their right place.  Like sewage, it irrigates the world and leaves it more prosperous.”

I know this sewage.  Having been an embalmer I know the eventual outcome for these bodies.  The dust on my piano is mostly my own dead skin cells.  I see no harm in celebrating these bodies, keeping them lithe and healthy, and using them to return to nature and society a bit of what they have afforded us.  Love is not limited by our bodies; we use them as the place to know and give it far beyond our bodies.

My resolution comes from the archetype of the Buddhist Bodhisattva, the one who could go beyond the gates of enlightenment into eternal Samadhi only to return to our earthly realm to help liberate all still-bound souls.  To me, this doesn’t have to be a one-time event at the apex of lifetimes of saddhana and final realization, it is any time we manage to go beyond our little needs, beyond our desires and fears, to share the benefits of our love with others.

Whether Self is independent of the body or rooted in it, we have choice within moments to satisfy our little self or serve that “something” that calls from within or appears as need before us.  This isn’t exceptional life, it is ordinary life that can be exceptionally difficult, then silently rewarding.

Part of being a Unitarian Universalist is accepting the limited units we are only to transcend them and instead serve the precious “I am” that appears in the form of another before us.  Just as God is said to love all, so can we.  If you’re like me, you don’t always do it right, and yet sometimes you do.  I don’t claim to be an enlightened saint and I don’t require that you be either.  The saint’s call is to something we inwardly know and already are.  We are Sadhakas in the human family and the family of life, and our life is our Saddhana.  Live up to yourself by going beyond your self to the universal love awakening in the human family.

(Rev) Brad Carrier

For the Unitarian Universalists of Grants Pass

December 7, 2008

Filed under: Healthy People & Planet, Physics to Mysticism by brad
No Comments »

The eastern version of our western divine right of kings was the Chinese Mandate of Heaven.  Let us consider its framework and apply it to our current king of sorts, King George.  I do this, not in a partisan way, but towards loving our country, all humanity, and earth.

The Chou, a somewhat crude but ambitious crew, defeated the Shang in 1115 B.C., beginning one of the longest dynasties in Chinese history (1115-221 B.C.)   In order to convince their subject peoples, especially the nobles, of the legitimacy of their power, the Chou invented a new system of authority which they called t’ien ming, or “the Mandate of Heaven.”  The Chou defined the kingship as an intermediary position between heaven and earth.  Heaven (“t’ien”) desires that humans be provided for in all their needs, and the emperor, according to the idea of “t’ien ming” is appointed by heaven to see to the welfare of the people.   If the emperor or king, having fallen into selfishness and corruption, fails to see to the welfare of the people, heaven withdraws its mandate and invests it in another.

In the twelfth month of the first year, Yi Yin sacrificed to the former [Shang] king, and presented the [Chou] heir-king reverently before the shrine of his grandfather. Yi Yin clearly described the complete virtue of the Meritorious Ancestor for the instruction of the young king.  He said,

“Of old, the former kings of Xia cultivated earnestly their virtue, and then there were no calamities from Heaven. The spirits of the hills and rivers alike were all in tranquility; and the birds and beasts, the fishes and tortoises, all enjoyed their existence according to their nature. But their descendant did not follow their example, and great Heaven sent down calamities. Our king of Shang had brilliantly displayed his sagely prowess; for oppression he substituted his generous gentleness; and the millions of the people gave him their hearts. Now your Majesty is entering on the inheritance of his virtue; — all depends on how you commence your reign. The commencement is in the family and the state.  To set up love, it is for you to love your relations; to set up respect, it is for you to respect your elders…..

“Oh! do you, who now succeed to the throne, revere these warnings in your person. Think of them! — sacred counsels of vast importance, admirable words forcibly set forth! Do you but be virtuous, be it in small things or in large, and the myriad regions will have cause for rejoicing. If you will not be virtuous, be it in large things or in small, it will bring the ruin of your ancestral temple.  The ways of Heaven are not invariable: — on the good-doer it sends down all blessings, and on the evil-doer it sends down all miseries.”

The Mandate of Heaven is based on four principles:

1. The right to rule is granted by Heaven.
2. There is only one Heaven, therefore there can be only one ruler.
3. The right to rule is based on the virtue of the ruler.
4. The right to rule is not limited to one dynasty.

What are the positive and negatives sides to the Mandate of Heaven for a dynasty?

1. It gives the ruler supreme power, prestige and religious importance.
2. It allows a new ruler to gain power quickly because everyone believes he has the ‘Mandate of Heaven’.
3. The ruler’s power must be kept in check by virtue.
4. It justifies rebellion as long as the rebellion is successful.

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – -

As I remember learning of the Mandate of Heaven in a survey course on Chinese history, the familiar notion of the king being an intermediary between heaven and the good health and fortune of the people was augmented by certain signs.  When the people were fed, fit, and happy, the weather was reliable, and all was well between heaven, earth, and the ruler, he had the Mandate of Heaven to rule.  When society had grown too bureaucratic, cumbersome and corrupt, and draughts, storms and other natural disasters struck, they were seen as a sign from on high to pass the mandate to a new ruler.

Humans are prone to reading meaning into the tea leaves in the bottom of the cup, the winners of sports events, and the weather.  It is easy to read causal connections into random events.  Do we undermine reason by resorting to synchronicity?  I think not, if we keep rationality active while noticing meaningful coincidences and by thinking of the causal connections that do exist in otherwise random events.

For instance, it would be a cheap shot to connect the disintegration of the Columbia space shuttle over Texas in 2003 with President Bush.  Just because it split apart over his home state doesn’t mean he caused it or that we should blame him for it.

However, when four major hurricanes swept through Florida the next year we began to wonder if Mother Nature was trying to send us signs.  Is this superstitious magical thinking?  Should we ignore this as random coincidence?  Perhaps, for Florida has had many hurricanes over the centuries.  The issues are — how normal are these storms, what trends do they point to, what are we doing to make them worse, and who is in charge?  I’m surprised more people didn’t make the connections.

Then, during the presidential campaign, a miracle sign came through that we still didn’t heed.  Against all odds, Boston won the World Series!  Heaven reached in beyond the realm of physics to hand the Democrats a miraculous sign.  Candidate Kerry was from Boston, yet didn’t take advantage of that rare opportunity.  It is of course silly to think because Boston won God favored Kerry to Bush, but that’s the sort of edge smart people can use when rounding up shallow votes in a close race.

While the Democrats let that advantage slip away, the Republicans were busy taking it.  The sneaky dealings of the 2000 election and the blatant black boxes of the 2004 have added to a deep distrust of our electoral process and the current government.  The mandate that George W. Bush assumed was not bequeathed by about half the voters.  We suspect we have a phony government, putting on a media show in order to continue a private, pernicious agenda.  What does it say about our society that so many are willing to consider whether 911 could have been an inside job, a fake Pearl Harbor used to justify distant wars and domestic repression?

Then, Katrina.  Initially aimed at Texas, it veered slightly to impact New Orleans, devastating most of that poor, low-lying community, along with many others along the Gulf coast.  It almost hit our oil refineries head on.  What’s the message here?  Is this Nature’s initially feeble way of striking back?  What should we do with the negative mandate implied?  Is there meaning in the madness of a tremendous storm?

I think there is.  These storms are signs from God, warnings.  We have got to address the way we live.  Protecting the ego of a president, no matter how big, is not as important as the health of our entire planet.  The signs may not be miracles, but they’re markers, the likely results of our flippant toying with the weather.

It used to be we seemed small in a huge garden of unlimited scope and resources.  The New World opened hope and abundance as if endless until we reached the west coast.  Despite a recent war run by a general named Westmoreland, there was no west more land.  The limitless forests were limited.  The fertile soil was exhaustible.  The boundless oceans were contained and rapidly exploited.  The single volume of air we all share was changeable.  Like crude men leaving their mark by missing the mark while peeing then leaving it for others, we swept from Europe to Asia, always leaving our mess behind.  We blunder into vast and delicate systems (air, water, soil, genes) with all the sophistication of surgeons wielding shotguns.  We use scientists to put the guns together, then mock them when they point out what a clumsy mess they make.

Of the 928 atmospheric scientists who have devoted their professional lives to studying the long-term swings of global temperature, none of them thinks global warming doesn’t exist, and 75% believe it has already begun.  They remind us, of the last two million years the temperature has swung wildly.  Although it has usually been much colder than it is today, it has only rarely been warmer.  Worse, these spikes in temperature conclude a warm inter-glaciated period can precipitate a sudden swing into another glacial period.  In other words, global warming can trigger global freezing.  Whereas a warm period like we’ve had for some 15,000 years can return, it usually takes over 100,000 years of glaciation from freezing before it does.

From the ancient extinctions of the seven hundred pound saber-toothed cats and fifteen foot tall mastodons here in North America at the start of the Holocene era to the lovely butterflies of Costa Rica going extinct, we are confronted with the reality of widespread death due to a change in weather.  There have been twenty ice ages in the last two million years, the last maxing out about 19,000 years ago.  We have been enjoying the shy end of the ratio between warm and frozen, about 1:10.  From New England to the Midwest, ice a mile thick is more the norm.

At the end of the last ice age and the start of our Holocene period, the concentration of carbon dioxide in our air stood at 260 parts per million.  This carried us through the start of agriculture, the beginnings of cities, and all we think of as historical civilization.  In the 19^th century coal burning raised CO2 to 300 PPM over about a hundred years.  By 1965 it was 320 PPM and in 2005 it was 378.  If we continue as we are, by 2100 we’ll reach from 500-750 PPM, three times the historic pre-industrial stable level.  We have the highest CO2 we’ve ever known, and new CO2 lasts a hundred years.

1990 was the warmest year on record since records had been kept, that is, until 1991, equally as hot.  Almost every year since than has been hotter.  The Kilinailau Islands have already been inundated with rising seawater.  Nearly every glacier in the world is shrinking.  The oceans are warmer and more acidic.  The Artic is melting.  The permafrost from Alaska to Siberia, running from two hundred to two thousand feet thick, is thawing, releasing another greenhouse gas, methane.  Alaska is seeing melts of permafrost frozen for a hundred and twenty thousand years.  The formerly reflective white polar caps are growing darker as land emerges, absorbing more heat from the sunlight, changing the albedo effect from reflective to warming.

In the Eemian warm spell that preceded our last ice age, the sea rose 15 feet higher than it is today.   Not only would this drown New Orleans, but Miami, New York, Calcutta, and so forth.  That is, if it didn’t trigger a sudden reversion to another ice age.  In the last century, sea level has risen about a half a foot.

One would think we should value and protect our reliable patterns of weather.  All of human history has emerged in this last inter-glacial period.  Every bit of our prosperity is dependent on its continuing in familiar ways.  We exist comfortably twixt the deadly extremes of ice and fire.  Blue skies and soft seasons nourish and enfold us, yet we taunt their end with flippant and arrogant irresponsibility.

One would think conservatives would conserve reliable weather if they could.  They could help do this, but seem instead to conserve only the right of the wealthy to their profits.  As Bob Dylan sang in his “Masters of War,” “… you play with our world like it’s your little toy.”  Ronald Reagan tore the solar panels off the White House as soon as he got there.  George Bush (and companies) refuses to sign the Kyoto Accords designed to slow the rate of global warming, and Bush won’t participate in setting up the new round of those accords, due in 2012.  Elizabeth Kolbert, in her excellent reporting on these issues in the New Yorker, says if we don’t move to meaningful agreement for that year, “…the world will have missed what may well be its last opportunity to alter course.”  “Such is the nature of global warming that the problem is always further along than it seems,” she says, “to continue delay is not to put off catastrophe but, rather, to rush towards it.”  (The New Yorker, Dec. 12, 2005)

Hurricanes form from warm waters.  2005 had the most hurricanes of any year in known history.  Most of these will strike in the northern hemisphere.  I helped patch up a house after the first of the four in Florida.  Thousands of houses were torn apart.

Carbon dioxide in the air insulates our atmosphere, blanketing the heat back down on us.  When we run the engines of our industry, transport, and housing, it adds to the carbon in the air.  The weight of a tank of gas goes somewhere; it doesn’t lose much in the running of the car, but transfers the molecules upward.  A typical midsized car that might weigh 8000 pounds has emitted over 30,000 pounds of carbon dioxide just in its manufacture and delivery.  Then it emits its weight in carbon dioxide into the air for each year it runs (on average).  In 2003, the average household produced 12.4 tons of carbon dioxide from its household operations and approximately 11.7 tons from its automotive uses.  Our gasoline is 44% less expensive than Europe’s and, not surprisingly, our cars are 50% less fuel-efficient than theirs.  Our Bush/Cheny government even credited back to consumers much of the cost of huge SUV’s if they managed to weigh more than 8,000 pounds.  The policy is to subsidize our gas to hide its cost, then encourage us to buy and use the most wasteful machines we make.

In 2003, the average American household produced 12.4 tons of carbon dioxide from its household operations and approximately 11.7 tons from its automotive uses.  This is six times the household average of the other industrialized nations.  The US comprises about 4% of the earth’s population, but emits about 25% of the total global greenhouse gases. About 12% of total greenhouse gas emissions result from just growing, preparing and shipping our food. About 6% of emissions derive from the delivery of medical services to consumers alone.  Everything we have come to assume depends on processes that put lots of CO2 into our global air.

Our recent government has done everything it can to ignore the problem and to make it worse.  It substitutes a shallow sanctimony over serious sensibility.  It caters to our worst wastes.  It allies itself with its crudest members.  This last week I saw a huge pickup truck with a “God Bless America” sticker on it idling outside the grocery store, its driver having picked up some milk, standing there talking for ten minutes while the engine ran.  The small cars so popular in Europe aren’t even known about in our country, much less available.  We waste hapless Iraqis on the other side of the world in order to keep wasting gas on this.  We collude in insolently insulting and injuring Mother Nature.

There is much our government could do, were it to see itself as “us, taking care of ourselves and our world.”  We could put progressive taxes and insurance rates on the size and weight of our vehicles.  We could modify our traffic laws to stop wasting gas at most stop signs and lights (by changing from “you must stop” to “stop if you must”).  We could develop small, light weight around-town vehicles and leave our cars for high speed, long distance, heavy weight travel.  We could hire scores of manufactures and millions of carpenters to retrofit every suitable house and building to be solar smart, taking advantage of the sure systems of light and shade for our electricity, heat, and cooling.  We could promote the worldwide switch to sustainable forestry, always growing more wood than we take towards repairing our planet’s shade and carbon absorption.  We could learn to live better than we do now by following our heart and ethics regarding all our energy systems, veering them to non-polluting, sustainable mechanisms.  We could lead the world with innovative, practical examples that save our planet and serve its well-being in a way utterly counterpart to our current glut and waste.  Everything we do should be done with not just the enjoyment and economics in mind, but the ethics as well.

Individuals can and should adjust their energy habits.  But they should go beyond their little change to direct their government to creatively and responsibly participate in the larger change our world needs.

The current government thinks it has a mandate from God and the people.  I’d say that mandate was squandered and it is clear that God, Nature, and the people know it should be given to only those willing to protect our world’s weather.  From starting illegal, immoral wars to global warming to the deliberate insertion of suicide genes into our world’s food supply, the current rulers have shown themselves to be utterly criminal.  Their mandate has expired and turned on them.  They have earned their own ouster.  To let them continue is to violate all the larger laws that govern our existence.  This goes beyond partisan politics to our very survival.

Reverend Brad Carrier

For the Unitarian Universalists of Grants Pass

May 7, 2006

Filed under: Healthy People & Planet, Physics to Mysticism by brad
No Comments »

What is the worth of matter and these bodies made from it?  Some religionists say matter provides a mere stage on which we act the drama of our lives, creating the conditions of our afterlives.  Some scientists say it and our world are just insignificant specks in the enormity of the universe.  Are we lost in a false dilemma?  Must we choose between irrelevant matter and senseless matter?

We should reject both irrelevancy and senselessness.   As I once wrote in a paper for the Humanist Institute, “Matter Matters.”  To take matter and life as a mere stage-set for a testing, vengeful God seems presumptuous, dismissive of the good glory.  Without these corporeal bodies on this living earth in a dynamic universe of lawful order we couldn’t even argue the case.  Matter matters.

For me, physics and biology are part of how we know and treat our religious world.  I’m glad we have matter and a plausible scientific explanation of how it has formed and evolved into ever more elaborate life.  Those who resent this materialistic approach snub the very ground of their being.  They act as though matter, life, and animals are somehow below us, in direct contrast to how Elohim God evaluates them as “good” in Genesis One.  If you would seek God, study nature, outer and inner.  That’s my deistic approach.  So when I came across Joseph Chilton Pearce’s The Biology of Transcendence: A Blueprint of the Human Spirit, using scientific reference and hard on religion, I jumped in.

His book is promising, but frustrating.  He’s prophetic in providing a biological basis for our personal and social transformation, and he’s frustrating for not providing clear cites.  He gives himself the latitude to tell it his own way.  That’s refreshing, but hardly reliable.  We need religious writers to ground their work in verifiable, agreed facts.  When they obscure the sources of those facts they short us and weaken their credibility.

For instance, part of Pearce’s thesis depends on the supposed fact that a mother’s emotional condition during pregnancy affects the size of certain areas of their baby’s brain.  An insecure, frightened mother will birth a baby with small pre-frontal brain mass and larger primitive brain mass.  A secure, happy mother will give birth to a baby with more neo cortex.  Crucial support for this thesis goes mostly undocumented, thus weakening the whole argument I wish I could rely on – because it is so important to us.

Here’s his approach.  Early in his life he spontaneously entered “unconflicted behavior.”  In his twenties, he could see the contents of letters before they arrived, do all-night banking work far beyond typical ability, and move with uncanny agility.  He had lost his fear of death, finding life far more manageable than it ever is.  Part of it had to do with immediacy.  As intuition spoke he had to go with it or lose it.  Later in life he wrote A Crack in the Cosmic Egg to describe it, and much later, this book, his prophesy to us.

He notes how as creatures evolve in nature they inherit previous advantages which they then incorporate in order to transcend them.  The ancient reptilian brain at the base of our skulls carries the emotionless survival instinct.  It takes novelty fearfully and quickly either flees or fights.  This old pattern served the reptiles well even as it became the rudimentary mind of the mammal.  The mammals needed the reptilian skill in order to develop their new abilities.  The old form is not lost, but is utilized in going beyond it.

Our second level of brain comes from our mammalian inheritance (as I explored via the book A General Theory of Love).  This mid-brain limbic system of emotional/social ability incorporates and transcends the reptilian.  Both levels are needed in us.  We need to survive, and then we need nurture and communion with others.  Our lives are not isolated survival strategies; we live with family and larger group.  Touch, voice, and gaze all help us thrive.

(New discovery and research show we have more options in our behavior than our near cousins the chimps model.  While they are patriarchal and violent, our other near cousins across the river, the Bonobos, show matriarchal ways of sharing, tenderness, and generalized sexual friendliness.  Humans show bits of both.)

Though other mammals have a bit of neo-cortex, it is much bigger in humans, five times larger than the first two levels combined.  This human brain is crucial to our language, compassion, and higher modes of thought.  Built on these earlier animal forms, the human brain transcends all that came before it in ways both magnificent and frightening.  Getting these big brains born and developed is our uniquely human task, danger, and opportunity.

Pearce sees a fourth step in our evolution – a heart/prefrontal loop.  He says the heart is not just a pump, but has brain-like structure in and near it that can be part of our next evolutionary step.  In a zygote, the heart develops first, then the brain, then the body.  The heart is not just a muscle; it is made largely of neural cells which communicate with our overall brain via a sophisticated system of nerves and hormones.  One of its functions is to produce ANF, a hormone that leads to the production of cortisol, which stimulates our sympathetic nervous system (responsible for our fight and flight reactions of attacking, defending or fleeing).  Or if such cortisol release is too frequent, it goes to the parasympathetic system responsible for shutting down our system into depression.

Just as the laws of physics describe how matter exists in simple and complex forms, the laws of biology show the parameters and reciprocal cycles of our dynamic organism.  Structure and function affect our thoughts and our thoughts affect our structure and function.  Translated to the collective social mode, our biology influences society and society influences our psycho-physiological system.  It is a dynamic, cyclical interrelationship.

How we are at heart shapes us and our culture.  Pearce rightly warns us against cultural trends that repeatedly stimulate our alarm, anger, and fear so much we either react with anger and anxiety, or we succumb to apathy, powerlessness, and overall susceptibility to diseases.  Transcendence is a vulnerable flower.  Consider what became of the peace and love generation: we went from “Make Love, not War,” to “Make War, not Love.”  The consequences of this in our personal minds and bodies, our infants and our familial relations, and our overall society are enormous.

Unfortunately, our economic, marketing, political, military and even religious systems don’t counter this over-stimulating our anxiety, anger, and fear into cortisol; they make it worse.  We are frequently prodded to react, be it to sell pills, prop up politicians, or participate in wars.  All of this sucks us into our reactive minds and tends to create infant’s brains primed for the fight or flight sort of reactive minds.  A culture of fear and anger is bound to perpetuate a bunch of low-brain bullies and intimidated victims.  Pearce sees this as a biological, social tragedy.  Instead, he offers the biological and spiritual tools that can literally change us and our world.  For him, the Second Coming is humans forsaking the reactive fear and hate that leads to a hellish world, replacing it with the bravery, trust, and compassion Jesus modeled.  This is not a sectarian argument; it is a biological possibility and opportunity.

While the reptilian brain tends only to the dangerous present, the mammalian tends to the emotional past, storing early nurture or fright information in the amygdala, deep in our unconsciousness, where it still influence us in our attitudes, identities, and dramas.  The high brain, the neocortex, reaches into the future as well.  But when it does so with trepidation and anxiety, it sets off loops of hormones and thoughts bound to drag us back into a fearful or angry sort of mind.  Do that long enough and it turns depressive.  Do that long enough and we wither and get sick.

At only 40,000 years old, the newest parts of our neocortex are our prefrontals, the most precious and precarious part of our brain.  Seat of our creativity and compassion, they can quickly lose it to the demands of the amygdala as it routs us back into primitive brain survival modes.  The primary prefrontals grow only after birth, during the first year, in tandem with the infant’s sensory-motor system.  The secondary prefrontals then grow along with the emotional-cognitive development via the orbital-frontal loop.  In the four to five year old, they grow along with the more intuitive right hemisphere and temporal lobe development, and in the seven to eleven year old are involved in the synthesis of the right and left hemispheres.  If all goes well, the prefrontals integrate with all the functions of the brain by adolescence.  Then a secondary growth spurt comes on in conjunction with the myelination (or sheathing and stabilizing) of the neural connections, which takes place by year 21.  (Interestingly, this final growth spurt has no known function; it’s just new brain atop everything else we’ve become.)

Not only can mothers give births to babies with brains structured (to some extent) for fear and hate on one extreme or creativity and compassion on the other, the crucial first years of nurture also structure our baby’s brains and patterns.  In other words, when babies are born in security and love and are raised in closeness and care, they can develop their transcendent abilities – their highest and most humane of possibilities.  And when not . . .

Thomas Merton once commented that western civilization is a one-eyed monster great at parsing out facts but poor at learning intuition and love.  Pearce has a similar complaint.  How is it, he wonders, that we can pick Jesus as our model then repeatedly act like crucifiers?  Why do we generate lofty sentiments but manifest Hiroshima?  Why do we live with so much tragedy and violence when we really want to love?

His complaint is that culture itself perpetuates fear and hence, trouble.  He sees culture as teaching survival.  His preferred term is socialization, the impartment of civility.  I think he makes too simple a linguistic dichotomy between these two and that he stresses culture’s survival teachings while forgetting culture’s mechanisms of kindness, art, and progress.  But, in main, he makes a good case for the mutuality of the biology/culture dynamic.

“Culture has been the principal environment of mind for many millennia,” he writes.  What served us to flee the proverbial saber-toothed tiger persists in generalized fearfulness and meanness.  Tigers are no longer the threat; we are.  Humankind must survive itself if it is ever to flourish.  Wars are great at focusing this primitive survival brain on to killing the enemy, the “other.”  But when wars stop, the warring mind doesn’t, and we can then turn on ourselves.  Witness the eager rush to war on innocent Iraqis (who never attacked us) on the flimsiest of rationales.  Consider the rise of hate talk radio and how it and our current president make sport of despising liberals.  Our supposed reaction to 9-11 was “United We Stand,” while the domestic reality was the dyslexic version: “Untied We Stand.”  Why does our culture launch wars on others and us?  What is it in us that make us so fearful and hateful?

Classic Christian and conservative philosophy contend we’re born flawed, inclined to be bad.  I contend the flaw is in their thinking, and that they fail to honor and cultivate the promising wonder we are by instead creating systems that make us turn wretched.  They create a culture that forces and fulfills their twisted philosophy.

In this culture, instead of loving nurture, the infant comes into a world of scorn and shame.  Too many children develop their identity seeing a scowling face, hearing an angry “No,” and getting painful swats on their butt.  They’re then taught, “thou shall not this,” “thou shall not that” in a way that expects submission and obedience rather than understanding.  The child fears abandonment and begins to conform to the “no” in order to be included, sharpening and maintaining her or his survival responses.  They acquiesce obediently, or grow sneaky by learning how to lie.  Sensitive little children come into a world of angry giants teaching them how to grow up to be angry giants.  The cycles of abuse roll down through the generations, victims becoming victimizers.

As it clearly states in Genesis One, we are built in the image of God, part of the goods that are this natural world.  We are built for magnificence, creativity, and happiness.  But we cannot arrive at our transcendent possibility if we’re caught in a culture that keeps activating our primitive survival brain.  We cannot use blind belief in worshipping a mean God and expect to develop our innate humanistic abilities.  We cannot live by the sword and expect to reside in heaven.  Nature builds in excellence and exultance, but our religions keep teaching us the ways of fear and hate.

As Pearce notes, Christianity is not the light of a radically kind Jesus, but the lengthened shadow of a fanatical Paul.  Jesus loved Mary Magdeline and asked her to teach; Paul said, “I do not allow women to teach in church.” He started out as the zealot Saul, became the zealot Paul, and gets used by the zealots of the fall.   Augustine twisted the Garden of Eden story into the exact opposite of its obvious intent.  Original Sin isn’t in our sex and nature; it’s in judging our sex and nature as flawed and fallen, taking our natural goodness and calling it bad.  John Calvin led inquisitors to strip innocent women and voyeuristically look for the hated “witch’s tit,” killing many.  John Wesley’s wife described how he would daily whip his screaming children in an effort to “beat the devil out of them.”  What started in kindness and forgiveness has become shame and blame.  Pearce complains some fundamentalist, evangelical, and Catholic teachings do it all: they induce the illness, diagnose the disease, and sell the supposed antidote.

(We have come a long way from these difficult habits, but our progress is precarious.  Whipping children used to be normal.  A recent Newsweek article recounted how in the late 70’s some 90% of parents reported spanking their children.  By the late 80’s that had dropped to 66%.  And recently it has dropped to 9%.  The norm of how to treat children has improved, but voices are active in justifying and even promoting the practice again.)

How can we fix this?

Pearce wants families and society to know the importance of the mother’s happiness and security during pregnancy and the early years of their children’s lives.  Close, loving contact does more than teach; it creates the very structure of goodness.  This is not for mothers alone; it takes a village of wise, kind, gentle elders.  But parenting is limited and there’s more that we all can do.  Pearce picks up on the work of the HeartMath Institute, which has mapped the electromagnetic field of the heart.  The force of this field is 60 times greater than that of our brain waves.  Not only does the heart integrate and inform the rest of our brain, it influences others.  An incoherent heart poorly integrates the body/mind and it doesn’t do well with affecting others.  A coherent heart has a healing effect on both the body/mind of the person and that of other persons.  This seems implausible until we remember effective therapy and the many saints and sages who advise we consult our heart and live from it.  Consider love or grief and how they feel in the heart.

The importance of this for mothers with fetuses inside or infants at breasts is obvious.  But we influence those around us too.  A coherent heart manifests in subtle behavior changes.  The tone of the voice softens; the look in the eye is lighter.  Our mammalian brain watches for such subtlety, whether we notice it or not.  How well we incorporate our lower brain and develop our higher matters.  How we are in ourselves becomes who and what we are in society.  We are not just affected by society; we affect it.

Like Jesus asked, do we want to live by an eye for an eye, or develop a new way of seeing?  That new way has to do with interrupting our usual way of reacting and inserting a kinder heart and wiser mind.  It takes awareness and effort.  At the moment of difficult challenge we stop our usual sight, freeze-frame it, and get a bit of meditative detachment from it.  We might replace reaction with deliberately inserting a memory of a peaceful event.  In any case, we don’t let old emotional scripts built into our amygdala, muscles, and bones run us with old fears, angers, and reactiveness.

Instead of reacting, listen to your heart.  When it speaks to you, act on it.  Use the moment to be new.  Do as Emerson advised: “Trust thyself.”  Get a bit of masterful detachment going that replaces fear, anger, self-loathing, depression, or weariness with bravery, kindness, pride, happiness, and energy.  Doing so is changing the very structure and functioning of your brain.  And beyond that, you’re affecting those near you, which influences society.  Like Emerson, Pearce noticed: this cannot be had second hand.  Real mastery is in the living.  You can incarnate something bold and wonderful if you have the intension and bravery to do it in the instant of trial.  Pearce defines dominion as “transcending limitations as they arise.”  The Now is where you can be new.

Easier said than done; I know, for I recently stumbled on this very advice.  I should listen to the sermons I preach.  During an argument with my son I realized his needs were old emotional ones having nothing to do with my point.  When I saw his shaking hand I didn’t freeze-frame soon enough and say, “Forget it, son.  I love you.  Let’s deal with your needs.”  Later I did, which reached him and helped, but not soon enough to prevent him from leaving.

“Speak when you’re angry,” Ambrose Bierce wrote, “and you’ll make the best speech you’ll ever regret.”  Instead, we need to practice behaviors that enable our transcendent abilities to emerge.

Our biology holds the secret treasure of our transcendence but it takes our effort too.  This has long been known in religious ways.  Buddhists try to be four things in Right Speech: truthful, helpful, pertinent, and kind.  What sort of second coming would result from our incarnating the inclusive kindness of Jesus society-wide were we to apply it in our every near and distant interaction?

When you need grace, grace flows in; something good built in comes across eons of time.  Grace isn’t external; it is imminent in our structure.  We have long-dealt with fear and hate; we have long been learning how to rise above it.  One guru applies the universalistic practice of looking at difficult or disappointing others, and saying, “There I go.”  The ones we have centered on to be our idols (such as Jesus) advise “judge not,” “turn thy cheek,” and “in the least of these you find me.”

Especially in this time of shallow, sanctimonious politicians launching needless wars and preparing to launch more, we need our supposedly largely Christian culture to live up to the promise that Jesus modeled: living by love in spite of fear.  What the biologists have finally come to anew is really quite old.  Ancient wisdom applies in our lives and in our world.  Yes, we are mammals and lizards and all the earlier forms, but we are so much more than that.  We can transcend what we thought we were to incarnate transcendent beings alive with compassion, care, and creativity.  What heavens we could create and dwell in were we to go the way of intelligent, heartfelt love!

This matter, formed into our magnificent world, is neither irrelevant nor senseless; it is our precious home needing our care in order to be shaped into an enthused culture.  You’re not just a lizard or a mammal; you’re a human capable of the highest forms of transcendence.  The Holy Spirit isn’t a ghost; it’s how you’re built to best be.

The cynical but caring Karl Marx once remarked “religion is the opium of the masses.”  Too true, but the rest of that quote is even better, for he also said religion is “the heart of a heartless world.”  Your heart is the heart of matter.

Reverend Brad Carrier

Largely as developed and presented at:

The Unitarian Universalists of Grants Pass, Feb. 4, 2007

The Unitarian Universalists of Central Oregon, Feb. 11, 2007

The Humboldt Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, Feb. 25, 2007

© February 28, 2007

Filed under: Healthy People & Planet, Physics to Mysticism by brad
No Comments »