Divided We Fall

The things that make us all alike are much more numerous and important than the things that make us different.

The most recent scientific consensus is that 99.5% of the DNA of every human being on the planet is exactly alike. If a strand of your DNA was the length of a football field, the part that makes you different from everyone else in the world would stretch about a foot and a half. Easy first down. Maybe it's reasonable to spend 0.5% of your day pondering these ironclad genetic differences. That's 12 minutes -- or 8 if you sleep. A coupla commercial breaks. For the rest of the day, think about the fact that everyone else on the planet is almost totally, completely, exactly like you.

We want to think of ourselves as unique and special, and of course, you are. Go talk to yourself in the mirror; no one else in the world has that face or that voice. No one else in history has the exact same talents and fears. But what mostly makes you who you are is not the 0.5 things that make you different, it's the 95.5 things you share with every other person in the world. 

People tend to divide themselves into groups based on skin color, education, the language they speak, the country they or their ancestors came from. These divisions make our lives smaller, they make our world smaller. They cut us off from opportunities to make friends, to do business, to experience new games, food, art, music. What's more, too often it seems to me that the public personalities who emphasize these divisions, the people who encourage us to divide ourselves into these groups, are not really trying to help members of their group or any other group. They are trying to gain more power or influence for themselves, trying to herd people toward their personal cause, for their personal benefit. Divide and Conquer, as the saying goes. It's never Divide and Help, or Divide and Heal.

Check out the sea of humanity roiling through your local mall or ball game or concert. People come in a wide variety of shapes, sizes and colors, children and elderly, excited teenagers, weary parents. And every one of them wants to be safe, to be healthy and free from hunger and fear. They all want a new cell phone and Netflix. They want to enjoy life. They want to be loved. They want all of those things for their children. And they are each connected to and part of the one Divine, just like you are.

Advice on Making Decisions

Of course the Divine has a plan. But it doesn't have to tell you what it is.

One of the hardest things about the spirit-centered life is learning to connect with the Divine without expecting any results. You hear catchphrases applied to various tasks like "it's the journey, not the destination", or "the joy is in the process, not the product"; our meditation and mindfulness needs to be done with that kind of attitude. To experience the Spirit and be aware of its presence at all times is not so much a goal as a path; not the endpoint, but the guiding light.

OTOH, while on this planet in this body we have to make plans. We have to decide on careers, partners, hobbies -- some of us multiple times for each. On a daily basis we have to decide how to dress, what to eat. If the Divine doesn't hit you with some gold tablets or vandalize your bedroom wall with graffiti that points the way forward, you still have decisions to make. Here are some ideas: look at the choices in front of you, write them down if that helps. Then ask a couple of questions:

1. Which option is the best use of my talents and abilities?
2. Which option will be of most benefit to my community (or spiritual eco-system in SpiritMode speak)? 

If the answer to number 1 is clear right away, do that. If not, go on to question 2.

DO NOT, under any circumstances, try to "follow your passion". This is one of the big fallacies of late 20th century. I actually had a therapist tell me " don't think about what you 'should' do, concentrate on what you want to do". It took me a couple of confused and rudderless years to realize that being guided by your own desires is a trap.

Just think of Buddha's most famous directive, the 4 Noble Truths:
Life is full of suffering.
Suffering is caused by DESIRE.(emphasis is mine of course, Buddha didn't use italics)
We can end suffering by eliminating desire.
We can eliminate desire by following the 8-fold path.

Or chapter one of the Tao Te Ching:
"Without desire, we see life's true essence.
With desire, we see only it's physical manifestations."

Who are you going to trust, the founders major religions, with 3000 years of history and billions of followers,  or the writer of some self-help book? (You might also ask yourself which "self" that writer was trying to help).

One more thing to remember: If a decision is really, really hard, then it doesn't matter. A lot of people have a hard time accepting this. But if you come down to 2 or 3 options, and the benefits and pitfalls of your options are so close that you can't make up your mind, clearly they all have equal chances of success or failure. So draw straws, throw darts, toss a coin. Then get to work. The time and energy you waste agonizing over a decision is costing you, too.

Mysteries of the Spiritual and the Physical

The Divine is very confusing, if you make the mistake of thinking about it. It is a doing as much as a being, a guide as well as a path. It is everywhere we are, and everything we are, but if we could go somewhere that was nowhere and nothing, it would be there too.

I've been reading "A Short History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson, which is mostly about all the wacky people who made great scientific discoveries, or scary things that might happen to us, like massive asteroids hitting the earth or Yellowstone Park blowing a huge hole in it. It's very entertaining.

One of the parts I found most interesting is the discussion of sub-atomic particles. Quarks, bosons, etc. And how, when physicists were able to learn more about the atom, they realized that none of its parts behaved the way we expect things to behave. They are still trying to find new particles that fit their calculations, or new calculations to fit the particles they know of. Also, the Large Hadron Collider is about to be switched back on after a massive 2 year upgrade. Having found the Higg's boson, they are now going to look for Susy -- supersymmetrical particles that will either confirm physicist's Standard Model of how the universe works, or send them back to the drawing board to come up with a new theory.

Reading the details of these quests to figure out how gravity works, what dark matter is made of, why the universe is expanding at an accelerated rate, etc, makes it much less scary to think about how it can be that the Spirit creates us all, connects us all, nurtures and guides all of creation. Life has mysteries on many levels. Except of course on TV, where even the mysteries are predictable.

UPDATE:

As of 2017-08-05 (Unix style time), the LHC has been running at nearly full energy, and no Susy's or wimps have shown up.

New Year's Thought on Fulfillment

I think pretty much everyone has one or two rare/awesome/useless/off-beat talents. While working in the audit department of a semiconductor distributor, I discovered one of mine. The director of my department pointed out that 2 of our reports didn't match. I glanced at the numbers, said something like, "yeah, wow, we're off by 12 or 13 percent." He gave me a quizzical look and ran the numbers through his calculator: 12.8%. He gave me another quizzical look.

And I think I'll start using the word fulfillment more often. To most people it means something like accomplishing a task, finishing a project, or achieving a dream. Sometimes it just means doing something that feels good. But logistics people (UPS, FedEx) use it in a very concrete way, to indicate the point in time where the package arrives in the customers hands.

So here's my estimate of what it takes to reach most of those lofty life and career goals we all think about a lot: 

• Visualizing, planning, dreaming, organizing, reading how-to self-help books is about 5% of the job. 
• Showing up every day to get one more inch down the road toward fulfillment is the other 95%. 

Your mileage may vary, but not by much.

Outliers --- by Malcolm Gladwell

As a tween (decades before the term was invented) I used to take long walks around the neighborhood, a safe, quiet lower-middle-class suburb of Cincinnati. I would work out issues, carefully verbalize explanations, explain things to imaginary audiences. Was I a strange kid?

On one of these walks, when I was 12 years old, I had my first memorable encounter with the Divine. I was thinking about God, where he lived, what he did all the time, and it suddenly struck me --- quite literally struck me psychologically, emotionally, almost physically --- that God didn't just hide in the church waiting for us to show up on weekends. What kind of lame-ass deity would that be? God was everywhere, "He" was right there with me at that moment, beside me, within me, all around me. I may have had mild spiritual experiences before that, and just don't remember. But from that day on I never doubted the existence of the Divine, and I felt the presence of the Spirit many times.

I did not talk to many people about this, but later I was at a friend's house, the subject of religion came up, and I told him exactly how I felt. The subject was dropped pretty quickly, but he told me later that it was almost creepy, like he could feel another person, another presence in the room as we talked.

The dominant message of Outliers, as I understand it, is that talent, intelligence, and perseverance matter much less than we usually assume. Success and failure are heavily influenced --- sometimes wholly determined --- by where and how we are raised, by rare circumstances (more often a chain of circumstances), opportunities and lucky breaks. We, humanity, could produce many more success stories if we could figure out how to spread the opportunities around and teach people how to be successful.

I've come to understand that 12 was young to have a first true, sticky, non-dual experience. It seems that other people I read about, like Eben Alexander, Russel Razzaque, Eckhart Tolle are usually in their 30s or 40s when struck by spiritual lightening. I was raised in a Southern Baptist church. Almost literally. My family went to services Sunday morning, Sunday night, Wednesday night, and usually a couple of committee meetings, choir practices, pot-luck dinners throughout the week. It's frightening now to catalogue all the things Southern Baptists get wrong. When it comes to our understanding of the Divine, our relationship to it, their own Bible, their own history, not to mention the wealth of teachings from other prophets, traditions, cultures that they vehemently ignore --- it's as if Southern Baptists are determined to stay as willfully ignorant as possible.

Yet, here's the thing: in our home it was understood that God was real. We prayed to him, asked for help and guidance. My father would pray before any big investment, we would pray for friends who were sick. There was never a hint that our prayers were just for our own mental health; I was raised to believe that praying to God can bring about real change in someone's life. They could have told me that the Divine was short and hairy, had furry feet and tusks, chewed tobacco and farted a lot. It didn't really matter, because at least I was emotionally open to the idea that it did exist and was accessible to me personally. And maybe because of that, I was able to reach through the fog of Protestant untruths and halftruths in order to truly connect with the Spirit. Maybe even bad spiritual training was better than no training at all.

I've always thought it brilliant that Krishnamurti refused to start a church. Instead he started schools. One in Ojai, California, one in England, a few in India. He didn't talk about teaching kids a certain path or dogma or way of thinking; he talked instead about teaching children to overcome their conditioning and thus end it. David Lynch advocates teaching meditation to school children.I often wonder how much better off we'd all be if our kids were gently introduced to the spiritual side of their own nature, before they grow up to be responsible adults whose ego has turned into an ogre that is that much harder to tame.

SBNR - The Spiritual But Not Religious have their own Acronym!

It's about time, since they make up "7 percent of all Americans, a bigger group than atheists, and way bigger than Jews, Muslims or Episcopalians" according to an article in the New York Times, which chronicles the interaction of four different people with SBNRs. That's a technical term Nate Silver and Ben Bernanke like to use -- "way bigger".

Rev. Lillan Daniel gained notoriety with a funny rant in the Huffington Post where she "voiced her exasperation with the predictability that she found in spiritual but not religious people." So she thinks they ought to join a church where they all read from the same book, profess their belief in the same conception of the divine, repeat the same rituals they've been doing for a thousand years. That would cure that predictability problem.

When I left the Congregational church where I'd been an active member for a decade, I told the ministers and deacons who questioned me the following:

• I don't think everything we need to know about the Divine and our relationship to it was given to us in one book or set of books from one teacher or one culture
• I think religions are actually inhibiting the spiritual growth of their members by limiting their experience and understanding to a single tradition. 
• We only truly connect to God right here and right now, not via a person or prophet or event from the past

Their responses shocked me at the time, because they were all similar to Rev. Daniels'. They expressed no concern about my spiritual health or relationship to the the Divine. They talked about how nice it is to worship in a group, do good things in the neighborhood, how good it made them feel to conduct rituals and sing songs.

"Can I spend my time talking to someone brave enough to encounter God in a real human community?" the Rev. Daniel asks. Yes, it was hard for me to give up those days of not even thinking about the Divine and go back to church. But after 10 years of church-going, it was much, much harder to give up that community, to insult or disappoint the friends I'd made there, and frighten my family, to search for the truth all alone. But I can assure you of this: my relationship to God is much, much better now after having learned so many things that the Church refused or declined to teach me. I miss the community, but I now feel the presence of the Divine everywhere, not just in a church.

In her background article in the Christian Century (which was, like, the 1300s right?) Rev. Daniels suggests that the real problem most SBNRs have with the church is that they don't like the mass of humanity in it; she specifically mentions people singing out of tune, people who haven't showered, screaming babies. I get the impression the Rev has not been to the Electric Daisy Carnival, where 300,000 young people (the generation which is abandoning the faiths of their parents in droves) get together every year to enjoy just such togetherness (pls substitute "babes" for "babies"). 

No, the problem with the church is not the people in it; it is the fact that the church (and I mean every church in every religion that I know about) is not providing the spiritual guidance we need. "Thousands of years later, we're still trying to be the body of Christ, and we are human and realistic enough to know we need a savior who is divine." Well, maybe if you stop indoctrinating us with myths and legends, start teaching us the truth about Jesus and Buddha and Lao-Tzu and Mohammed as human beings, explain what they were all trying to teach us, stop trying to make us the body of Christ (is that yucky or what?) and stop trying to tell us we need something besides a close, strong, healthy --- and yes, because we are each unique -- personal  relationship to the Divine, then maybe there will be a smaller canyon between what is spiritual and what is religious.

OTOH --- stay tuned for part 2 ...

A Spirit-Centered Life is a Life Without Fear

"And which of you by being anxious can add one cubit to his stature?" Jesus asked, right in the middle of the sermon on the mount.

There's an excellent article in The Atlantic: Surviving Anxiety by the magazine's editor Scott Stossel, in which he chronicles his life-long battle with anxieties, fears, and phobias. He boldly describes several embarassing incidents, as well as encounters or relationships with varied and numerous therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists and institutions. The list of medications he has tried or is currently taking, plus therapies he's attempted (or been subjected to) is absolutely mind-boggling.

The one thing he didn't mention trying was a truly spiritual path. Prayer and meditation are embedded in a long list of therapies, but I have to wonder if he ever made a serious attempt to connect with and seek guidance from the Divine. He talks briefly about his family's religious heritage; his father's parents were German Jews who came to the US before World War II, his mother a proud Mayflower descendant wasp, so he and his sister were raised Episcopal -- pretty much guaranteeing they would never come anywhere near a true metaphysical encounter with the Divine. 

I think this is a good time to bring up Ken Wilber's AQAL concept: he said he was having trouble tying together all his (end everyone else's) theories about life, love, society, religion, science, etc., until he drew a big cross, creating four quadrants. He put Interior(subjective) on the left, Exterior (objective) on the right, Individual at the top and Collective at the bottom. Every human endeavor you can think of fits somewhere on this simple grid. Individual/Collective is pretty self-explanatory. Exterior refers to anything that can be seen, touched or measured; Interior is something less tangible, whose nature and state can only be determined by asking about it.

So let's say you go for a physical. The nurse measures your height, weight, blood pressure; these are all Individual/Exterior/Upper Right qualities. Maybe you took the subway from your apartment building to the doctor's office in a skyscraper downtown; your home, mode of transport, and the office tower are all Collective/Exterior/Lower Right accomplishments. The doctor asks how you feel; he can't measure this directly, he has to ask. So your answer --- happy, depressed, anxious, or (crucially for this blog) spiritually ill --- falls in the Individual/Interior/Upper Left quadrant. He mentions that he really likes some new sitcom that's on TV tonight, it's a big hit. This is a lower left Collective/Interior item, which Wilber describes as "cultural" (so maybe a TV show was not a good example); point is, it's a collective endeavour because a bunch of people watch it, it's interior because they have to poll people to find out if it's popular. He asks if you like it. You say yes. This is an upper left Individual /Interior lie; you really think it's stupid, which is exactly why science hates dealing with anything on the left side of this chart. There are no instruments that can tell how happy or depressed someone is, it's really difficult to know when people are lying, thus it's pretty much impossible to predict whether a movie or show will be a hit.

My takeaway from Wilber's writings is always that science has dominated human thought and progress for the last couple of centuries. Psychologists have tried to create a science to deal with the upper left quadrant, with the result that "We've Had A Hundred Years of Psychotherapy & the World's Getting Worse" as the famous Jungian James Hillman titled his book back in 1992. And if the measure of scientific theory is in the results it can produce, Scott Stossel's experience is an undeniable condemnation of our efforts to understand the Individual/Interior part of lives.

Yet, the upper left quadrant -- Individual/Interior -- is precisely where our connection to the Divine happens. How can we lead a balanced, healthy life if we ignore the very thing that northwest-pointing arrow is actually pointing at?

From Mathew 6:

 “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? 26 Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? 27 Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life[e]?

28 “And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. 29 Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. 30 If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? 31 So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ 32 For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. 33 But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. 34 Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.