© Davidson Loehr
11 March 2001
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
Each part of this series on beliefs could, should, and has given birth to a million sermons, and deserves that kind of coverage. That’s even more true of mysticism. It’s the most intuitive and deeply persuasive of all spiritual paths. It isn’t about “knowing” as much as it is about being. It sloughs off all orthodoxies, and makes the boldest of claims – as when the great medieval Christian mystic Meister Eckhart (1260-1327) wrote about the Incarnation of God in Christ (the center of Christian theology) by saying “God became man so that man might become God.” In traditional Christianity, that’s Heresy 666. In traditional mysticism, it’s Religion 101.
Puppet Show – for a parrot and two raccoons
“You’re so already there, dude.”
Davidson Loehr, Ryan Hill, Toby Heidel, David Smith
Parrot/David (Nervous, Self-Pity)
Oh oh oh oh woe is me!
Raccoon/Ryan
Hey! Hey! Hey bird, what’s with you huh?
Parrot/David
Oh oh oh oh woe is me!
Raccoon/Toby
Hey, bird, bird, you’re making me nuts!
Raccoon/Ryan
Heh, he said nevermind.
Raccoon/Toby
Stop yer whining. What the heck is the matter with you anyway?
Parrot/David
(Notices the Raccoons who have rudely interrupted the self-pity party.) Well if you have to know, and in case you couldn’t tell. I’m NOT HAPPY!
Raccoon/Toby
Of course you’re not happy. You’re a miserable green parrot!
Raccoons/Toby and Ryan (Laugh)
Heh heh heh heh!
Parrot/David (Taken by surprise by this comment)
Oh that’s cruel, that’s so cruel! If only I could be a parrot! If only I were a parrot, my troubles would be over, and I would be so happy!!
Raccoon/Ryan (To Toby)
What a birdbrain!
Raccoon/Toby
Yeah, heh heh, yeah, a birdbrain, that’s good.
Raccoon/Ryan
Heh heh, yeah, that’s good.
Raccoon/Toby (To parrot)
OK bird, we’ll play your stupid game. Even if you could be a parrot, how would that do you any good?
Raccoon/Ryan
Yeah, and why would anybody want to be a parrot anyway?
Raccoon/Toby
Whatever that is!
Raccoons/Toby and Ryan (Laugh)
Heh heh heh heh!
Parrot/David
IDIOTS! IDIOTS! (Looking back and forth at them, shaking its head incredulously.) All right, I’ll tell you, though I don’t know what good it can do since you’re just a couple of’well never mind, I’ll tell you.
I have been unhappy for a long time. I’ve just never felt like I was who I was supposed to be. It’s a very deep feeling, one you two couldn’t understand. But you know that wise old owl who sits in the tree at the center of town?
Raccoons/Toby and Ryan
(They quickly look at each other a little nervously. They DO know, because they’ve talked to the owl too, but would never admit that to the parrot.)
Raccoon/Toby
The owl?
Raccoon/Ryan
The owl?
Raccoon/Toby
Oh, yeah, that bird in the tree at the center of town.
Raccoon/Ryan
So what?
Parrot/David
Well I took my troubles to the wise old owl and the owl just made it worse!
Raccoon/Ryan
Worse?
Raccoon/Toby
Yeah, worse? How?
Parrot
The owl said the answer was right under my beak and I wouldn’t see it! She said that to be truly happy I would have to become a parrot! A parrot, for goodness’ sake! How on earth can I become a parrot? I don’t even know what a parrot is!!! Oh, why am I wasting my time telling a couple of stupid raccoons? Oh, I am so unhappy! (Parrot flies away squawking.)
Raccoons/Toby and Ryan
(Look at each other nervously. This has upset them.)
Raccoon/Ryan
Dude, that was messed up right there.
Raccoon/Toby
Yeah, weird. That owl told the birdbrain parrot about our visit.
Raccoon/Ryan
Yeah, but why wouldn’t the owl help us?
Raccoon/Toby
Yeah, that’s not right. That birdbrain went to the owl, and the owl told it the truth. And the bird’s too dumb to realize that it’s already a parrot!
Raccoon/Ryan
That’s pretty funny.
Raccoons/Toby and Ryan (Laugh)
Heh heh heh heh!
Raccoon/Ryan
But we went to see the old owl too.
Raccoon/Toby
Yeah, we said “Hey owl, how come we never feel so good about ourselves, huh?”
Raccoon/Ryan
“How come we keep lookin’ and never findin’, huh?”
Raccoon/Toby
There’s like this empty feelin’ inside. I mean, I know we’re cool and everything.
Raccoon/Ryan
Yeah, we’re really cool, no doubt about that.
Raccoons/Toby and Ryan (Strut around acting cool.)
Raccoon/Toby
But something’s missing. There’s gotta be more, ya know?
Raccoon/Ryan
Yeah, yeah, what did the owl tell us anyway?
Raccoon/Toby
She said we would never become truly happy until we had become raccoons! Raccoons!!
Raccoon/Ryan
Right! How does that help?
Raccoon/Toby
How should I know? What the heck is a raccoon?
Raccoon/Ryan
I dunno, I dunno, I dunno! Oh, just thinking about it makes me all mad again!
Raccoon/Toby
Me too! Darn that owl! How on earth are we ever gonna become raccoons?
Raccoon/Ryan
Don’t ask me. I think we’re history. Doomed! There is no such thing as a raccoon!
Raccoons/Toby and Ryan
Oh! Oh! Oh! Woe is us! Woe is us!
Exit
SERMON: “That Art Thou”
This series on religious beliefs is really a kind of survey of some of the ways we make sense of ourselves and our world. The German poet Goethe once said that the person who doesn’t know two languages doesn’t really even know one. Because if we only know one language we think it’s the way to think and speak, rather than just a way.
This is even more true in religion. When I was a boy, religion was a pretty simple thing. I’d never heard of a Muslim; Hindus and Buddhists were people in the World Book Encyclopedia who dressed funny. As a kid from Tulsa, I don’t think I knew any Jews, and while I’d probably heard of Catholics, I had no idea what they were. As far as I knew, everyone in the world who really mattered was Presbyterian, and I wasn’t even too sure about some of them.
A few years later, one of my ministers explained to me, in his soft and kindly voice, that everybody but Presbyterians was probably going to hell anyway. Later, I had some Catholic friends who said I was going to hell. It was a funny world I grew up in; hell seemed to be everywhere.
Perhaps the worlds you were raised in weren’t much bigger than mine was. But this kind of provincialism just won’t do any more. The world’s a lot larger now. We look at the people we live and work with, the people we see in classes, on the streets, in our neighborhoods, and there is diversity we couldn’t have imagined a generation or two ago. The races are beginning to blend together in the workplace, through friendships and marriages.
Tiger Woods may be the most famous illustration of why the old “race” categories have just become incoherent. If I remember the math, he is half Thai, three eighths black, and one eighth Native American. It may be that the only category into which he really fits is “the world’s greatest golfer.”
And the whole spectrum of sexual identities and orientations is becoming apparent. It’s always been here, of course, though we were as blind to it as I was to the existence of Muslims when I was a child. But now, as almost all of us know from our own families, friends, colleagues and church members, we’re all here together, and we’re not always sure what to do with it. The world is a lot bigger than our pictures of it.
I think it’s easy to understand why our pictures of the world are too small, and why we have such trouble dealing with differences. And when we remind ourselves of how we are put together, and how we put together our pictures of the world, we will – this is the “magic” in the sermon today – suddenly be in a position to understand what religious mysticism is, and why it is so powerful. I don’t expect you to believe that. But it’s what I hope to persuade you of this morning. You know that only a fool would try to do this in thirty minutes, so I’ve already forgiven myself for failing. Now let’s begin.
Think about it: How did you come by your understanding of who you are and what the world is like? We can at least sketch an answer that is pretty close:
Some of it is biology, heredity. Babies seem to come into the world with their own distinct styles. Some are happy, some are fearful, some are calm, some whiney. Even the studies of identical twins raised in different families show that as adults the twins have some amazing similarities in style and taste – even to preferring the same brands of beer or cigarettes, the same make and color of car, and the same hobbies. So our unique hereditary package is part of the answer.
But most of it is nurture rather than nature. We were raised in our family with its weird little idiosyncrasies, rather than among the weird idiosyncrasies of the family across the street. That makes our worlds and us a little different. Religion plays a role, too. Our childhood religion trained us to think of important questions in terms of God, or several gods, or no gods at all. While I knew all regular people were Presbyterians, there were people on the other side of the world who thought all regular people were Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, or a thousand other flavors. So our religions help create our picture of ourselves and our world.
And our culture makes us different. If you were raised in the United States, you were soaked in a very different set of cultural expectations than you would have been if you had been raised in China, Vietnam, central Africa, Denmark or Greece. Last fall, I read a book on The Gods of Greece by political commentator Arianna Huffington, who grew up in Greece. The ancient Greek polytheism is still deeply embedded in the culture, and she was raised to see psychological dynamics like rage, lust, industriousness or independence as the presence within her of a whole pantheon of gods. She was taught that all of these powerful urges are sacred, but they’re not all wise, and that the wise person must find ways to blend the influence of all the thirteen gods and goddesses into an integrated personality. Imagine how differently she must see the world than someone raised in the fundamentalism of west Texas!
This list could be extended, but it’s already clear that who we think we are and what we think the world is like are largely shaped by our differences from other people raised in other places and ways. We each see the world in slightly different ways. And even when we begin meeting people who differ from us in significant ways, it’s hard not to think of them as abnormal. Our most obvious worlds are determined by our differences from one another in belief, race, sexual identity and orientation, culture, heredity and a dozen other variables.
This also means that people who are very different are a threat. Because if our beliefs are true, how can others live well without them? And if they can live happily without believing what we believe, then how could our beliefs be true? Can we really say that our deepest beliefs might be “true but irrelevant”? It’s not likely. The need to exalt and protect our little pictures of the world lie behind almost every family feud, war, and religious persecution in history. Unless we can force the world into our small understanding of it, we’re no longer sure what’s right, who we are, or how we fit into things. So we blithely condemn the others to hell. But that glib condemnation is accompanied by the unspoken fear that if we are wrong and they are right, then maybe we’re the ones going to hell. Frankly, it’s a hell of a way to live.
So far, I don’t think any of this is news. This isn’t one you want to write home about and say “Boy, I’m glad I went to church this morning! I learned something that will just amaze you: we each see things differently!”
The point is that the reason for it is because we’ve each seen, experienced, and understood only a tiny piece of the world. We can’t see the whole thing. We can’t experience the whole of life. We can’t understand it all. Not now, not ever. And this isn’t a problem to be solved by tomorrow’s sciences; it’s an abiding part of the human condition.
This is the human situation pictured so well in the ancient Hindu story of the blind men and the elephant. The “elephant” is a symbol for Life, the Universe, the biggest possible picture. We will never see the whole elephant. We can only see little pieces of the whole, and we think the whole is like the little pieces we’ve seen or touched. If one blind person has got hold of a leg, she thinks the elephant is like a leg. If another has the trunk, he thinks the beast is like a big rubbery snake. Religious wars are between people who think the elephant is a leg and those who think it’s a trunk.
And now we can understand religion, and we’re almost ready to understand mysticism.
When you begin studying almost any religion, you learn that the first word spoken in religion is usually “No.” The first lesson is to pry you loose from the certainties you entered with, because they are too small to capture life or to sustain you. It’s as though the greatest sages and religious writers think of us all as a bunch of two-year-olds. And in many ways – few of them flattering – we do act like two-year-olds in our beliefs.
In Christian theology, Paul Tillich taught this. I think that Tillich was the best Christian theologian of the 20th century, because the 20th century was the century of psychology, and Tillich defined theology as depth psychology. (I think theology is depth psychology.) Tillich said the first word in religion must always be “No!” because we can’t grow bigger until we let go of the provincial understandings that keep us small.
This notion that you have to begin religion with a “No” isn’t just modern liberal hogwash. It isn’t modern at all. In Hinduism, the first teaching, the first lesson taught to religious seekers, is a simple lesson that translates into English as “Not this, not that.” Whatever you begin clinging to, whatever you want to identify as the nature of the gods, the sacred truth, you will be told “No.” It’s not this; it’s not that. It’s not what you’re grabbing at or clinging to, because we have almost all grabbed something too small. So it’s “Not this, not that” – it’s bigger.
This is also like Jesus’ saying that the Kingdom of God is not something you can point to, not something that’s coming, not there, not there. In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus said the kingdom is already spread out on the earth, and people don’t see it. In another gospel, he said the Kingdom of God is within you. Jesus was very clear about this, though Christianity has often forgotten it: the Kingdom of God is not something that’s coming in the future. It’s already here, if only we would see it. So, in order to snap us out of our trance, the first word spoken in religion must always be “No.”
The Buddha also taught that human suffering comes from our tiny pictures, our delusions, which are grounded in our ignorance of the way things really are.
We can’t see the bigger picture until we can let go of the little ones. Most of the lessons in most religions are trying to lead us toward a bigger picture of the world, the gods, reality, and ourselves. The goal of these religions is to try and tell us that it is safe to let go of our smaller understandings, because the larger picture is both more true and more comforting, as well as being our best hope toward a world of understanding rather than prejudice, peace rather than war.
Mysticism – the mystical experience – is the sudden, enveloping, realization that the world is far bigger than we had thought, and that our true home lies only within that bigger picture.
Here are a few statements from mystics of three different traditions. See if they don’t sound like the same message:
An 11th century Islamic mystic wrote “If men wish to draw near to God, they must seek Him in the hearts of men.”
A 17th century Sikh said “God is in your heart, yet you seek Him in the wilderness.”
Fifty years ago a man named Sri Aurobindo wrote, “The divine Nature, free and perfect and blissful, must be manifested in the individual in order that it may manifest in the world.” That’s not very poetic, but it’s the same message.
When we read religious writings like these, we need to remember that these statements are not eyewitness accounts from reporters. They are all created to try and describe a way of seeing that these people have found, or that has found them, and which felt so important they needed to tell others about it. These writers came from a whole array of religions, yet what they experienced sounds much the same.
You don’t have to come to this view through religion, either. Many have found this transcendent view through science. Some years ago, Carl Sagan said in his television series Cosmos that every atom of every one of us is stardust, because everything in the universe was once united before the Big Bang. He made quite a passionate point that our essence is one with the heart of the universe. That’s very close to a mystical vision, even though it came from the late High Priest of Science.
For instance, see how close it sounds to this statement from Hinduism’s Chandogya Upanishad, written more than 2400 years ago: “Brahman is supreme; he is self luminous, he is beyond all thought. Subtler than the subtlest is he, farther than the farthest, nearer than the nearest. He resides in the heart of every being.” Like a universe made of stardust: farther than the farthest, nearer than the nearest, residing in the heart of every being.
Carl Sagan nearly glowed when he spoke this way, and he was trying to spread his “good news” to others, that they might feel the glow as well – he was not only a mystic, he was also an evangelical! This certainly isn’t a modern yearning. Two thousand years ago the Roman poet Ovid wrote “There is a God within us, and we glow when He stirs us.” What a lovely line! Ovid saw his vision by looking within. Sagan found it by looking through telescopes to galaxies formed billions and billions of years ago, from the creative explosion that gave birth to the universe.
But what these pictures have in common is a kind of cosmic wholeness, a lovely picture of everything that ever was or ever will be, with us right there in the very heart of it, and it right there in the very heart of us. There is no Hell in these pictures. There is no vicious judgment day that damns those who are different from us. It is a picture of wholeness, and the message is always the same: that it is our true identity, our true home, our true destiny, to recognize ourselves as a part of everything and everything as a part of us. To know that we are indeed made of stardust, as is everyone else, and our true home is here with each other, on this amazing blue-green planet floating in the infinite space of a universe containing all that ever was or ever will be. And then the boundary, the illusory boundary between you and me and them and the world and the universe vanishes, and we become at home in, and at one with, everything that is or will be. The great Hindu Mohandas Gandhi said, “I know God is neither in heaven nor down below, but in everyone.” Stardust!
Two and a half millennia ago, another Hindu mystic wrote, “A knower of Brahman becomes Brahman.” This sounds like the “salvation through understanding” of modern liberalism (or classic Buddhism).
Mysticism may sound like it’s just letting yourself be drowned in powerful feelings – a kind of emotional epistemology. And a lot of pop mysticism and New Age hoopla is that flimsy. But the best mysticism is not just about feelings. It is seeing yourself as an essential part of an immense creation that is whole and good – and then, of course, acting out of that vision.
It’s no wonder that mystical experiences are described in such dramatic terms:
“There is a God within us, and we glow when He stirs us.”
“A knower of Brahman becomes Brahman.”
Or in the lines of the Danish Poet Piet Hein that accompany his drawing on the cover of your order of service, “Who am I to deny that maybe God is me?”
It’s ironic, but in both Christianity and Hinduism, the introductory religious lessons are the opposite of the “advanced” lessons. Christians learn to worship and perhaps fear God as the creator of the universe, infinitely greater than anything that we can imagine. After all, He created us out of dirt! He’s God, we’re dirt – you hardly get further apart than that! — And then Jesus says the kingdom of God is within you!
Likewise, the Hindus begin by slapping your hands and saying “No, No! Not this, not that!” But the ultimate teaching of Hinduism is the opposite. Once you can let go of little pictures, stop believing the elephant is a leg or a trunk, you can see the bigger picture. Now the teacher points out in a grand sweeping motion that includes everything, everything in the universe, then looks at you and says “That art Thou.” Brahman – the lord of the universe – is atman, the soul of each individual. God is hiding in the human heart. Carl Sagan looks out through a telescope at a universe so vast it can’t even be imagined, and concludes that everything is made of stardust.
Then suddenly – and this is the truly magical gift of the mystical experience – it’s almost impossible to think of other people as being different from us. It’s hard to think that any of our beliefs are worth declaring war over. It’s suddenly hard to find any excuse, or any place in our heart, for prejudice or hatred. Who are we to deny that maybe God is us? For that matter, who are we to deny that maybe God is a raccoon? – and that all raccoons have to do is to become really good raccoons, and know that it is sufficient?
Thinking this way can be revolutionary. It is a kind of conversion experience, and it’s shocking. The good news is that it can scare the hell out of you. The better news is that after the hell has been scared out of you, what’s left is heavenly. The best news – as every mystic of history has said – is that it’s true. And it really is the truth that can absolutely set us free.
—————————-
Endnotes
1 Abu Said ibn Abi Khayr (d. 1049)
2 Arjan (d. 1606)
3 Sri Aurobindo, Synthesis of Yoga, 1950
4 Mohandas K. Gandi (1869-1948), The Essential Ghandi.
5 Mundaka Upanishad, prior to 400 BC
6 Though Piet Hein is not well known, he’s one of my favorite quirky and wise poets. He drew, wrote, sculpted and invented, and was the author of five volumes of Grooks – the word he coined for his witty little poems.
