August 11, 2013
by Tom Endress
Jeremiah 13
The reading this morning is from the book of Jeremiah in the Bible. Jeremiah is known as the “weeping prophet†of the Old Testament. Travel back over 2,600 years with me to listen to a prophet much despised in his time, although now he is held by many as the second greatest prophet in the Old Testament. He prophesized accurately the downfall of Jerusalem and the captivity of the Jews by Babylonia. The reading is from the King James Version, chapter 13 of Jeremiah, verses 1 through 10.
Jeremiah is speaking:
13 Thus saith the Lord unto me, Go and get thee a linen girdle, and put it upon thy loins, and put it not in water.
2 So I got a girdle according to the word of the Lord, and put it on my loins.
3 And the word of the Lord came unto me the second time, saying,
4 Take the girdle that thou hast got, which is upon thy loins, and arise, go to Euphrates, and hide it there in a hole of the rock.
5 So I went, and hid it by Euphrates, as the Lord commanded me.
6 And it came to pass after many days, that the Lord said unto me, Arise, go to Euphrates, and take the girdle from thence, which I commanded thee to hide there.
7 Then I went to Euphrates, and digged, and took the girdle from the place where I had hid it: and, behold, the girdle was marred, it was profitable for nothing.
8 Then the word of the Lord came unto me, saying,
9 Thus saith the Lord, After this manner will I mar the pride of Judah, and the great pride of Jerusalem.
10 This evil people, which refuse to hear my words, which walk in the imagination of their heart, and walk after other gods, to serve them, and to worship them, shall even be as this girdle, which is good for nothing.
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My talk this morning is the continuation of a talk I started here in May as a joint presentation with Gabriella Luschei as part of the spiritual journeys project being done by the Harrisonburg Unitarian Universalist congregation.
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I am completing it here with a little embellishment centered around the Key Task of “Sense Makingâ€. As you may recall, sense-making is the first of three Key Tasks emphasized in our Harrisonburg UU fellowship as mentioned during the introduction earlier this morning, along with the other two Key Tasks of care-giving and justice-seeking. In sense-making we are helping each other find the truths in our lives and in the world. This morning I would like to propose that sense-making is not just intellectual but that intuition is also an important factor.
Let me give you an example of both these intellectual and intuitive aspects of sense-making from my own childhood.
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This occurred when I was 7 or 8 years of age. I was walking home from my elementary school. In those days all of us walked back and forth to school in the small town of North Manchester, Indiana where I was born and raised for the first 10 years of my life. On this particular day I was carrying the Bible under my arm that my grandmother Edith Endress had given me for my 7th birthday.
Every week a woman from one of the local churches came into the elementary school I attended to give Bible lessons. As part of the class she required that we read and memorize Bible verses. I did not particularly like those classes. Still, because of my having been brought up in a church going family who regularly attended the local First Brethren Church I wanted to believe in the divine nature of the Bible, God, and Jesus’ resurrection…. but I was skeptical.
So, it was a beautiful afternoon as I neared Sycamore Street where our home was located. Something captured my attention and I stopped to look across the street. I could see a large, well-kept yard surrounding the neighbor’s house on the corner. It must have been late spring because I remember the lush green lawn and the abundant maple trees with large, deep green leaves lining the street.**** I can still picture the scene vividly after all these years. ****Overhead fleecy white clouds drifted across a robin egg blue sky. Morning doves cooed from their perch on the roof of my friend Jan’s shed, maybe 50 yards away.
While standing there taking in all this beauty a strong impression overcame me. It seemed clear to me that consciousness, the very consciousness of all this beauty about me, was as real a thing as were all the objects within my view. Moreover, this consciousness, which flowed through me and everything, would go on forever. I felt this so strongly that I resolved never to forget this moment. To help remember it I took a pencil, randomly turned to approximately the center of my Bible and made a dot on the page.
“There!†I told myself. “I will never forget this day.â€â€¦â€¦. Of course I did forget.******
I wonder how many of you have similar…. perhaps forgotten…. memories of those magical moments during your childhood when everything seemed fascinating, magical, and real? So what has happened to us since then? Have we taken on too many responsibilities to any longer see life as a child? Has our “ordinary†utilitarian minds filled with so many responsibilities and worries blocked out this mode of perception?
Again, I will use my life is an example.
So….. to let’s skip from the pencil dot incident in Indiana to Germany a few years later when I was 22. We find me alone late at night in a park in Kassel rather despondent over some personal matters and my then recent experiences in Germany. Having been brought up to believe that the Second World War cured the world of evil by defeating Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan I now found, as a result of my work with East German refugees in 1957 and 58, that Europe was still heavily involved in ethnic cleansing and political violence. As I stood there in the dark cursing the fates I so rebelled against the Weltschmerz or pathos I was feeling that I underwent an emotional reversal into a tranquil state of mind that could probably best described as a peak experience or an epiphany.
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Undoubtedly that experience has motivated much of my philosophical, psychological, and spiritual pursuits since then. During the following years in addition to studying psychology I became involved in Quakerism, Transcendental Meditation, Buddhism, Gurdjieff-Ousprensky dance movement, The Sedona Method, Da Free John, Krishnamurti-Bohm dialogue groups, and Tia Chi to name a few.*********
Sometimes I have rather felt like Vladimir or Estragon in Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting For Godot. They stood around aimlessly chit chatting while they waited for the magical being Godot to appear. Similarly it often seemed as though many of us participants in the spiritual groups I attended were merely marking time chit chatting like Vladimir and Estragon ….. while we passed time waiting for that magical moment to happen called…. well….fill in the blank…..Christ Consciousness, The Light, Satori, Bodhisattva, out-of-body awareness, psychic events, etc.
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Still, there were moments of serenity during meditation in these groups. But doubt crept in. I began to wonder if the serenity of these moments was not merely the normal subjective experience of relaxing and quieting down from the normal stresses and strains of living. That is, rather than its being some sort of “spiritual awarenessâ€.
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So there I was living two lives. The one of a meditator who learned over years of practice how to enter or dive into that silent meditative space quickly and the other of that of a busy religious skeptic going about putting in his long hours working as both a clinical and school psychologist. Ultimately I became even more skeptical and could not see any practical transference between what I was experiencing during mediation and that of the normal stress, strains, and tensions of “ordinary lifeâ€. So…… I placed my meditation zafu pillows and zabuton cushion into a trunk and stopped formally meditating.
But my curiosity about “altered states of consciousness†continued and this prompted me to study hypnosis and biofeedback. I used these techniques with clients to help them reduce anxiety, undesired behaviors, emotional conflicts, and painful memories. Intermittently while deeply relaxed some individuals spontaneously entered a space that, without prompting, they reported as being spiritual. Each time I was astounded as many of these people were not necessarily religious people.
So I continued to study Buddhist writings with an eye to understanding them in the light of current neurological studies on meditation and altered states of consciousness that had begun to appear in the literature within that decade.
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Having been interested for some time in the writings of Ram Dass on consciousness and spiritual experience, I attended a retreat with him in the early 1990s at the Omega Institute in Rinebeck, New York. While there I met his co-presenter Surya Das, an American Tibetan Buddhist Lama.
I felt an immediate affinity with Surya Das and became keenly interested in sharing my experiences privately with him….to see if he could help me put them into some sort of perspective. And he did so quickly. After listening for only a few minutes to my description of my 1958 park experience in Germany he interrupted me by saying, “Tom! It’s real.â€
Now that was quite an emotional moment. Immediately I fell silent as I became aware of the extent of my skepticism about spiritual experience. At the same time I became aware that I had been hesitant to view these experiences skeptically as these moments seemed filled with so much meaning while in them. Without being fully conscious of it I had been in a civil war internally between my religious skepticism and meditative longing.
A couple of years after Reinbeck I attended another retreat with Surya Das in Santa Rosa, California. On one particular morning I was attending a silent meditation session with 50 or 60 other meditators. We were in a large, spacious conference room surrounded on two sides by floor to ceiling windows. I had been meditating for about 20 minutes when I opened my eyes to absorb the spaciousness of the room and combine this with the space outside the room. This is a particular space centered Dzogchen Buddhism meditative practice. It was a beautiful morning and outside a countless variety of hummingbirds, each with different shimmering colored feathers could be seen darting about collecting nectar from the blossoms of the flowering shrubs immediately outside the windows. All this vibrant space and activity was perceived, or intuited, to be one beautiful, energized essence of life-force animating everything. This perception was as real as all the objects within and outside the room.
Suddenly that memory of my childhood experience of walking home from school with the Bible under my arm popped into awareness. I was surprised as I did not recall ever having thought about it since that event over a half century ago. So it was a recovered lost memory.
Then about two years ago when I became interested in developing this talk I decided to try once and for all to find that pencil dot I remembered making in the grandmother’s Bible lo so many years ago. I had tried several times after Santa Rosa to find it but failed. It took a couple of days of carefully searching back and forth between all its tissue thin 1,082 pages. But I found it. And where do you think it was? ……………. You guessed it. It was right on the Jeremiah verses I read at the beginning. As I have re-read these verses since then they have taken on a special meaning to me which I would like to share.
Whatever you make of Jeremiah’s “voice of Godâ€â€”that is, whether he believed he actually heard a divine voice or interpreted his thoughts to be in the spirit of God is open to debate. I do not want to get into the psychologist Julian Jaynes’ controversial debate about the bicameral mind in ancient peoples. He believes these ancient peoples thought that many of their internal voices and thoughts were coming from outside. However, most Bible scholars do agree that the content of that chapter is analogy. That is, Jeremiah didn’t actually bury his girdle, which was the religious linen apron worn by Jewish men. He was using analogy to illustrate what he had learned from his direct experience of the sacred, or God. He was convinced that if you neglect such direct experience, or intuition, and hide it from the view of others your spirituality cannot grow. You must pursue it and share it openly like an unadulterated, unwashed, unbleached pure linen apron. Conversely if you pursue other religions or even your own religion in an effort to become more religious or spiritual without the direct experience of the sacred it is of little value. His view was that priests and organized religions are of little help. It is an individual’s direct experience that counts.
Now I want to shift gears away from the Bible toward psychology. Surprised? What else would you expect from a retired psychologist? Well, my 7 year old childhood experience of becoming aware of consciousness and labeling it as such certainly fits lock step in with the theory of Jean Piaget. Those of you who have studied child development recognized that moment in my life as reflective of Piaget’s theory that children move from magical thinking to logical thinking between the ages of 7 to 11.
But from a spiritual standpoint I believe the less widely known psychological research of Silvan Tomkins adds an important perspective. In the 1940s Tomkins carefully observed his own children and other children from birth through their early childhood years. He concluded that children are naturally mystical and spiritual as they observe the world about them. To them the world is a marvelous place full of wonder and energy. They enthusiastically explore this fascinating world until they are stopped from doing so by parents and adults who have other ideas about how children should behave and use their time.
You know….. “Merle! It’s time to stop playing, come inside and wash your hands for supper!†or… “Jim! Stop making so much noise!†or “Nancy! Don’t play with that. Do this!†Each time such injunctions are issued emotional discomfort is generated in the child who then develops psychological strategies to either prevent or undo future discomfort. Each strategy or program developed takes the child further away from spiritual spontaneity and full awareness of themselves and their environment.
So….by the time we become adults we are so chuck full of these time oriented programs that we have covered up most of our natural inclination to marvel at the world about us. We continue to spend our time developing ever new programs, even after retirement, for using our time “efficiently†to continue pursuing security and/or accomplishment. Forget thinking you might be neurotic! This is what it means to be “normalâ€â€¦. that is to have all these time oriented programs spinning around between our ears at any one moment. But even more out of awareness than the dynamics of these time oriented programs is a more basic urge to return to a tranquil state where we can again feel whole, experience the world openly, and enjoy life. Tomkins believes this is the urge to wholeness called spiritual by so many people…… but realized by so few of us.
Now it gets even more interesting as we look at how the words and concepts we use serve to glue these time based programs together. We could look at this from a Western or Eastern perspective. But this morning I will focus on the East and Buddhism.
Buddha clearly saw this when he developed the philosophy that later became known as the Madhyamika, or the Middle Way. This was further developed by two Buddhist scholars– Nagarjuna in 150 AD and Candrakirti in 600 AD. They speculated that words, concepts and beliefs do not exist in and of themselves. Every belief exists in our minds with a polar opposite belief, even if this dualistic nature is unconscious. If you hold the belief there is a God, the possibility also exists in your mind that there is no God. If you believe God does good in the world, then there has to be something that causes bad such as the devil or evil. So our mind is held in a sort of frozen tension between our two beliefs. Our mind dares not let down its guard or the unrecognized belief will raise its head. For example I may believe that Ford cars are the best in the world. Yet I hold some doubts that they just might not be the best. Those are the two halves of the duality. Then someone in the crowd begins espousing the virtues of Chevys. Immediately you go on the defensive to support Fords because you do not want to give in to your fears that Ford might not actually be the best. Hence, we have projected our inner conflict onto someone else thus being able to externalize our inner conflict. I suspect that you could think of many similar situations. Just substitute our beliefs concerning professional team sports, religion, and political orientation into the equation.
It has been rather accepted in psychology that we can only hold 7 or 8 bits of information in our awareness at any one time. Hence, it does not take too many pairs of these dualistic time absorbing preoccupations operating in or near the level of our awareness to bind up our conscious attention. To be free of them can be an astounding experience- even a mystical one as we simply observe what is going on here and now about us. But how do we get away from all this dualistic roof brain chatter?
Well…. we all do this regularly in one way or another by listening to music, reading poetry, losing ourselves in books, tending our flower gardens, going on vacations, walking in nature, playing with our pets, etc. The list is infinite. But as likely as not, not long after returning from our hiatus, the unresolved roof brain chatter, or the monkey brain, starts up again. We are back to living in the past again trying to resolve issues hanging over from there or focused on developing plans to cope with something anticipated in the future. So we are everywhere in time but the present. As Eckhart Tolle says, “Stress is caused by being ‘here’ but wanting to be ‘there’.â€
Buddha’s Middle way offers help that is just plain, effective psychology. By placing oneself in a meditative or contemplative frame of mind…. if you like the word “contemplative†better….you simply watch whatever ideas, words, or images arise in your mind. Then as bubbles in water, let these float away as they are replaced by other thoughts and images, or simply by a relaxed state of mind. However, sometimes a conflicted issue will arise. If we allow ourselves to be fully aware of all the thoughts, feelings and images that arise around the issue we will often become aware of the other side of the conflict. For example, if we are angry at someone and fully become aware of all the components of our anger such as our feelings, images, and how the anger is affecting each part of our body we may suddenly become aware of what we are fearing that is actually underneath and supporting the anger. Suppose we are angry that a particular person has said something hurting about us. But by exploring our anger about the person we discover our underlying fear is that what they have said may be true about us. Such an exploration of both sides of a conflicted issue sometimes reveals the tremendous time, effort and energy we have placed in maintaining the conflict. Some of the bond up conflicts that arise during reflection are issues around our self-esteem, past failures, anxieties about the future, loses in our lives, and fears surrounding death.
So, what happens after we become aware of the multiple nature of our bound up, time oriented programs? Fortunately I have heard both Ram Dass and Surya Das address this question. They stress it is never the same thing twice. Often we simply feel more relaxed and “in the momentâ€. At other moments everything about us takes on a sudden unexpected beauty. The “Wow!†moment. However, sometimes an ineffable space opens as the conflict, words and concepts drop away. This latter moment is called Sunyata or emptiness in Buddhism.….But it is an emptiness full of meaning, energy, unity, and beauty. And aware of this unity we become cognizant of the interconnectedness of everything within our view and we may become filled with love and compassion. Thus this Sunyata or emptiness is the source of the compassion that is so often cited in Buddhist literature.
As Candrakirti said in one of his most famous sayings:
“That which arises interdependently is characterized as meeting and working together.â€
So…. whereas on the one hand we humans have a tendency to anxiously view the universe as consisting of countless, separate entities that function independently from each other, live a short while, then disappear into some scary abyss. On the other hand, sometimes, just sometimes…. in that moment of silent contemplation all separateness disappears and everything that appears in our awareness seems to be meeting, working and flowing together into some sort of unity or oneness our dualistic, intellectual minds cannot grasp.
Thich Nhat Hanh says it succinctly:
“We are here to awaken from the illusion of our separateness.â€
In my estimation both quotes reflect the ongoing process of “sense making†which is, again, the first key task held by our Harrisonburg U U fellowship. And it is reflected in the seventh principle of the Unitarian Universality Association, namely, the “Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.†The UAA further adds, this respect is drawn from many sources including, quote, the “Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces which create and uphold life.â€
So…it is upon this plane that the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah, Buddhism, and Unitarian-Universalism meet.
References regarding Tom Endress’ Pencil Dot talk:
(In the order presented in the talk)
The Holy Bible, King James Version. Jeremiah 13 verses 1 through 10.
On the fate of German and European citizens after World War II. (merely Googling the reviews on these books will give you much information)
Keith Lowe. Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II. St. Martin’s Press, 2012.
Giles MacDonogh. After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation. Basic Books, 2007.
Jean Piaget. The Psychology of Intelligence. Routledge Classics, 2001.
Silvan Tomkins- See a definitive study of his works in Donald L. Nathanson. Shame And Pride: Affect , Sex, And The Birth Of The Self. Norton, 1992.
Julian Jaynes- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_(psychology)
On Candrakirti and the Buddhist Madhyamika-C.W. Huntington, Jr. The Emptiness of Emptiness: An Introduction To Early Indian Madhyamika. University of Hawaii Press, 1989.
On Nagarjuna and the Buddhist Madhyamika- David J. Kalupahan. The Principles of Buddhist Psychology. State University of New York Press, 1987.
On the Dzogchen-Nyingmapa School of Tibetan Buddhism:
Longchen Rabjam. The Practice of Dzogchen. Snow Lion, 1989.
Lama Surya Das. Awakening The Buddha Within. Broadway Books, 1997.
On the neuroscience of meditation- so much literature can be Googled on the internet- or see: Neuroscience of Meditation http://blogs.la.psy.edu/wepe/2013/neuroscience-of-meditation.html
Brain activity and meditation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_activity_and_meditation,
Tom Endress’ previous HUU talks: A Walk In The Park With Doubting Thomas http://huuweb.org/community-cafe/walk-in-the-park/, Letting Go http://huuweb.org/community-cafe/letting-go/, Meeting Werner http://huuweb.org/community-cafe/meeting-werner/