Wonder Hinders

Wonder is the kind of thing that visits you – or that you actively seek out – when there’s not a lot else going on. The barriers to wonder include distress – hunger, pain, illness, bereavement – and stress – busy-ness, tension, anxiety.

“No one chasing after a bus has the time to be astonished at the intricate coordination of everyday life that ensures that buses run to timetables and that we can act in accordance with goals that are at once singular and abstract.” (Raymond Tallis)

A focus on caring for others, doing good in the world, requires solving the problems that need solving, focusing on the practical needs. This reduces the world around you to two categories. Everything is either an instrument that will be helpful for your purpose or an obstacle that threatens to thwart your purpose.

It is a noble thing to have goals, purposes, to pursue accomplishment – at least, it is when those goals and accomplishments involve making the world better, easing suffering, improving the overall quality of life of the inhabitants of this planet. We need, and we take, breaks from our work – and that’s where we can cultivate a wonder that might even linger when we return to work, coloring our tasks with an abiding background radiation of peace and delight.

Unfortunately, modern life encourages us to make our leisure as busy as our work. We line up the most high-quality diversions we can and then make our free time as rushed as our work time. There’s hiking, kayaking, bicycling, tennis or some fun form of exercising. There are things to see: a play, a concert, an art exhibit, movies. There are novels to read and whole seasons of intriguing television shows to binge watch.

“Even the most elevated pleasures, designed to open us up to the world in such a way that we might wonder at it, may be assimilated into the flow of unthinking dailiness.” (Tallis)

We work frenetically and then play frenetically because if we don’t we might be . . . bored.

Ah, boredom. The three main barriers to wonder are the purposive focus of work, a similarly purposive focus on the quality of our diversions, and, when neither of those is happening, allowing ourselves to be bored. Boredom says that

“indifference is the appropriate response to things around us. The ordinary is indeed ordinary. To take it for granted is precisely the way to take it. There is the uneasy sense that, though we urge it on ourselves and on others, wonder is somehow insincere, fake, sentimental. After all, a state you can enter only when it’s convenient, and which is convenient only when there’s nothing serious or important going on, must itself seem nonserious or unimportant.” (Tallis)

We speak of child-like wonder, and though we sometimes say nice things about child-like wonder, most of us secretly would rather be known as a serious adult: productive, on the one hand, and erudite, on the other. Boredom is for serious people, who expect or want or need life to give them serious work and serious play. Boredom makes that demand and signals that it is not being met.

But if Boredom is an obstacle to wonder, then the cultivation of wonder is the antidote to boredom. We can’t make ourselves have experiences like Thomas Merton had at the corner of 4th and Walnut. We can only cultivate – nurture the slow growth of the wonder plant, not knowing what shape it may take as it grows, facilitating a power that, though we nurture, we do not control.

I could tell you that the way to cultivate wonder is with a spiritual practice, but that would only be tautological because a spiritual practice is anything that cultivates wonder. I’d only be saying that the way to cultivate wonder is to do something that cultivates wonder.

Continual mindfulness of death, Raymond Tallis points out, is conducive to wondering at life. (A point The Liberal Pulpit has also made -- SEE HERE.) It raises the question, though: how does one become able to sustain continual mindfulness of death? Perhaps that is not a question for a definite answer – but a mystery to be lived.

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This is part 3 of 3 of "Wonder of Wonders"
See also:
Part 1: Two Kinds of Wonder
Part 2: The Point of Wonder

The Point of Wonder

Certainly there are such things as definite settled answers – perhaps no permanently settled answers, but at least answers that are definite and our best so far. There are times in life when such answers are to be preferred. At such times, of course, science is much better than theology.

When you’re not feeling well, and you don’t know what it is and you go to the doctor, you don’t want your doctor to relish the wonder. You want an answer. That’s appropriate. And often your doctor can give you one. Of course, you’d also like your doctor to be honest about what she doesn’t know, but if she doesn’t know you want her to feel somewhat rueful about that, rather than delighting in the mystery.

At the same time, there’s a lot more to life than figuring things out.

Wonder – the type of wonder I will now be talking about -- is a kind of falling in love: with our world, with ourselves, with the experience of being alive. Wonder is typically expressed in the form of a question, which might fool us into thinking an explanatory answer is being sought. It is not. The point of love is to love, not to explain it, figure it out, or solve it, and the point of wonder is likewise not to get an explanation, solution, or answer. The point of wonder is to wonder – to be filled with admiration, amazement, or awe -- bounded by humility, by gratitude, and by joy.

You might have felt a touch of such wonder on the night of Sun Sep 27, gazing at the lunar eclipse. Or any time you can get away from the city lights far enough to see a truly star-filled sky. Thomas Merton was seized by powerful wonder right in the middle of a bustling city at mid-day – at the corner of 4th and Walnut in Louisville, Kentucky in 1958. He described it in his journal:

“In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness,...The whole illusion of a separate holy existence is a dream....This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud. And I suppose my happiness could have taken form in the words: ‘Thank God, thank God that I am like other men, that I am only a man among others.’ It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race, though it is a race dedicated to many absurdities and one which makes many terrible mistakes:...A member of the human race! To think that such a commonplace realization should suddenly seem like news that one holds the winning ticket in a cosmic sweepstake. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun. They are not ‘they’ but my own self. There are no strangers! Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed…I suppose the big problem would be that we would fall down and worship each other.”

That’s a powerful wonder. How did that happen to Thomas Merton? Why doesn’t it happen to more of us more often?

Writer Raymond Tallis wonders why wonder isn’t a constant, or at least greater proportion, of life. Why am I not “for the greater part of my life transilluminated with awe?” he asks. Why do I not “pass through the world open-mouthed with amazement and joy”? (Video of Tallis' sermon: HERE.)

We are surrounded by, submerged within, wonders of sight, and sound, and smell, the wonder of every single thing, and of all things together – of what Philip Larkin called “the million-petalled flower of being.” Is not our proper state of mind one of “metaphysical intoxication”?

So many wonders and yet so little wondering. Why is that? Is that itself the sort of question which can be figured out and a definite and settled answer determined? Or is our failure to live continuously in deep wonder a mystery to be lived rather than solved? We can, at least, make some conjectures about the things that hinder wonder -- as The Liberal Pulpit will do in the next part.

* * *
This is part 2 of 3 of "Wonder of Wonders"
See also:
Part 1: Two Kinds of Wonder
Part 3: Wonder Hinders

Two Kinds of Wonder

Frederick Buechner has written:

“There are mysteries which you can solve by taking thought. For instance a murder-mystery whose mysteriousness must be dispelled in order for the truth to be known. There are other mysteries which do not conceal a truth to think your way to, but whose truth is itself the mystery. The mystery of your self, for example. The more you try to fathom it, the more fathomless it is revealed to be. No matter how much of your self you are able to objectify and examine, the quintessential, living part of yourself will always elude you, i.e., the part that is conducting the examination. Thus you do not solve the mystery, you live the mystery. And you do that not by fully knowing yourself but by fully being yourself.”

There are these two kinds of wonder. One kind is the figure-it-out wonder. Figure-it-out, or look it up, or try it and see, or wait and see. Examples include:

• I wonder what the 57th digit of pi is.
• I wonder how long it would take me to learn to play the lute passably.
• I wonder what the airspeed velocity of a swallow is.
• I wonder what would happen if I stopped worrying so much about my kids.
• I wonder if a double-reverse half-back pass would work.
• I wonder if giving up caffeine will make me feel better.
• I wonder how many square miles is 64,000 acres.
• I wonder who will be the next presidential candidate to drop out of the race.

These are all in the first category, which Buechner calls “mysteries which you can solve by taking thought.” Some of them you just have to try it and see – or wait and see – and others are a lot easier to look up than to figure out from scratch – though some of them might be more fun to figure out yourself -- like the guy in a bookstore, who asks a store employee, “Could you tell me where the mystery paperbacks are?”

The employee says, “I could. But wouldn’t that spoil it for you?”

The thing is, there is a definite answer to all of these. And then there are the wonderings that don’t have a definite answer.

• Who am I?
• Who is asking that question?
• What is this world?
• What is matter? The more we attend to the details of what the physicists say about it, the weirder and more mysterious it gets.
• Why is there me?
• Why is there anything?
• Why is there something rather than nothing?
• Where am I – what is the meaning of this geographic location, or this stage in the arc of my life?
• How do I understand my relationship to my family members? To my parents, or the memory of my parents? To my neighbors? To the dog and cat who share my house? To the squirrels in my yard? To the cow that could be on my plate? To the humans and other animals on the other side of the globe? To the soil beneath my feet? To the Atlantic Ocean? To the Indian Ocean? To the Catskills? To the Rockies? To the Himalayas? To the moon? To the sun? To the stars? How do I understand my relationship to anything, and how do I understand my relationship to everything?
• What is mine to do?
• Is there a plan for me? If so, what is it?
• What is going on around me right now?

These are the questions that admit of no settled answer. You might have provisional partial answers, but it might be better to not even have that much. Just be in the mystery, without grasping after an answer. As Buechner says, “you do not solve the mystery, you live the mystery."

There are wonderings that have a definite answer, and that answer is the point of the wondering, and there are other wonderings for which a settled and definite answer is not the point. There are also wonderings that could go either way. "Does Brad really love me?" You might arrive at a settled definite answer to that question. Or you might take it as a mystery to be lived: what can we know of the mysteries of another person’s heart? Or, indeed, "Do I really love Brad?" What can we know of the mysteries of our own hearts?

Then there are questions like:

• What sort of place is the universe?
• What is life, and how does it happen?
• What is consciousness, and how does it happen?

Scientists seem to have a lot to say about these, so maybe they are in the category of things to figure out. But on the other hand, what the scientists say doesn’t really quite seem to be to the point. When the physicists say that, you see, there are 11 dimensions, and billions of parallel universes made possible by different pathways taken by photons – or when biologists tell us about the chemical equations of the reactions inside a cell, reactions which, they say, constitute and define life – or when neurologists say that consciousness is an emergent property of 100 billion neurons firing across 100 trillion synapses – one may reasonably feel that such steps toward solving the mystery don’t really clear up any of the mysteriousness we must live.

Science gives us a story about things that has emerged from thousands of very bright women and men in the last 400 years running lots of experiments and trying to make coherent sense of all the results. Knowing the science merely gives us a particular sort of language for expressing what is, at bottom, the same wonder.

Before science, some of our brightest women and men devised elaborate theologies. From the standpoint of wonder, these were also rather beside the point. Saying, “God made it that way” doesn’t clear up any of the mysteriousness we must live either. Knowing the theology merely gives us a particular sort of language for expressing what is, at bottom, the same wonder.

From the standpoint of wonder, neither scientific explanation nor theological explanation does us much good because, again, explanation and answers are not the point. (When explanations and answers are the point, science is much better.)

* * *
This is part 1 of 3 of "Wonder of Wonders"
See also:
Part 2: The Point of Wonder
Part 3: Wonder Hinders

How To Save The World

I know that a part of the appeal of Buddhism for some Westerners is that it looks like a mystical escape from the realities of the workaday world. I know that Buddhist compassion, just like Christian love, is sometimes – to outside observers and maybe to the practitioners themselves – taken to mean being nice to people with whom we are in face-to-face contact rather than committing ourselves to justice for the faceless people far away who sew our shirts, or work the fields of our sugar and coffee.

In fact, however, Eastern religions can help the West be more West – more prophetic, more justice-oriented, more activist. The truth is, we aren't always very energetic about carrying through on our ideals. Or sometimes, for a while, an activist might be very intense about advocating those ideals, but then get burned out. Attention to spiritual training and discipline is necessary. The Eastern traditions can be very helpful with that.

A human brain can agree with the ideals of social justice, can admire the social justice heroes, but it has difficulty sustaining commitments. Old habits return: resentments, envy, insecurity, fears, a sense of scarcity rather than abundance, a felt need to guard or promote our status. The skills of sustaining compassion and insight require intentional and disciplined cultivation. Get down on that cushion. Put in the meditation time – the sitting time -- or the time in some other spiritual practice. Put in the time strengthening awareness of the connection to ourselves and our feelings -- our neuroses -- and the connection to one another. Feel, rather than merely say, “I am you, and the 3rd-world sweatshop worker, the homeless alcoholic, the teen prostitute, the ethically-compromised Wall Street millionaire – all these people are I, and I they.” Know it in your bones not just on your lips. Retrain those neural pathways so that this awareness is a habit rather than a fleeting glimpse.

For 10 years my Zen teacher was Ruben Habito, a Filipino man who, as a young adult, became a Jesuit priest, got stationed in Japan, and found himself practicing Zen at a monastery there for 16 years – then came to Dallas, where he teaches at Perkins Theological School. In one of his books, Healing Breath: Zen Spirituality for a Wounded Earth, Ruben wrote:

“To see the natural world as one’s own body radically changes our attitude to everything in it. The pain of Earth at the violence being wrought upon it ceases to be something out there, but comes to be our very own pain, crying out for redress and healing. In Zen sitting, breathing in and breathing out, we are disposed to listen to the sounds of Earth from the depths of our being. The lament of the forests turning into barren desert, the plaint of the oceans continually being violated with toxic matter that poisons the life nurtured therein, the cry of the dolphins and the fish, come to be our very own pain, our own cry, from the depths of our very being.”

If we don't do the spiritual work to make and maintain interbeing as our felt and lived truth, to understand that the natural world is our very own body not merely as cognitive knowledge but as visceral awareness – if we haven't trained ourselves in calmness and steadfastness, aren’t centered or cleansed or in touch with ourselves or interconnected with all beings, never feel anything close to a luminous sense of joy and peace flowing throughout the world -- then we are not going to sustain any work to transform injustice. Only when energized by deliberate spiritual strengthening, can we make Unitarian Universalism be all we say it is.

So get down on that cushion. Then get up off it. Spiritual practice must engage the world, confront wrongdoing; renounce the systems of greed. As steadfast and peaceful happiness enables justice work, so also does justice work facilitate steadfast and peaceful happiness.

We have developed systems of single-minded devotion to producing and consuming. These systems reduce the possibilities of human relations to solely economic relations. They oppress ultimately both the poor laborers and wealthy consumers. It's a system in which we allow others -- far away and out of sight -- to be exploited, downtrodden, broken, beaten, malnourished and diseased so that we may gain loneliness and alienation. It's a hell of a deal.

The life of passionate and compassionate activism and service and the life of equanimity, inner peace, and joy support each other. The prophetic tradition of the west which, as Unitarian Universalists, we inherit and carry forward, is absolutely essential. The various traditions, many of them Eastern or Eastern influenced, for doing our own inner work are also essential.

We must stand with those who challenge and confront powers and structures of injustice, violence, and oppression. But we won’t be able to stand for very long if we don’t also sit.

* * *
This is part 3 of 3 of "UU Buddhism"
See also:
Part 1: Boomer Buddhism
Part 2: Athens, Jerusalem, and Buddha

This Week's Prayer

“God, lover of us all, most holy one, help us to respond to you, to create what you want for us here on earth. Give us today enough for our needs. Forgive our weak and deliberate offenses, just as we must forgive others when they hurt us. Help us to resist evil and to do what is good, for we are yours, endowed with your power to make our world whole” (Lala Winkley, SLT #514)

Our hearts are broken by the shootings Thursday at Oregon’s Umpqua Community College leaving 10 dead and 7 wounded. We are deeply saddened by this loss of life, and saddened and angered by our country’s evident willingness to allow mass shootings to continue.

Twenty-six dead at Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown. Thirteen dead at the Washington Navy Yard. Three dead at Fort Hood in Killeen, Texas. Nine dead in a church in Charleston, South Carolina. Three dead, nine injured, in a theater in Lafayette, Louisiana.

Sacred ground of being, can’t we make this stop?

There have been many more mass shooting than those that make the headlines. There have been 294 mass shootings – incidents where four or more people are killed or injured by gunfire – in the US, in 2015 alone. That’s an average of more than one a day.

Sacred ground of being, can’t we make this stop?

We know that we can. May we find the courage to do so.

We acknowledge that America’s devotion to guns is unique in the world; it is complicated, and it follows from a great many factors in our nation’s unique history. Let fearfulness be met by compassion. Let fantasies of protection give way to safer and more effective protection.

Where racial fears or immigrant fears or fear of a faith tradition have a role in our country’s amassing of firearms, may we tirelessly seek ways to build trust, understanding, and fair treatment.

Where fear of crime plays a role, may we seek ways to assuage fears. Building trust in our police departments, and insisting that police be worthy of trust, is a part of that. We know that reduced crime does not correlate with reduced fear of crime, but programs that address causes of crime are also valuable for their own sake – anti-poverty programs, jobs programs, education grants, drug treatment facilities, counseling, assistance, and rehabilitation.

May we be a part of building a beloved community that takes care of everyone, that educates everyone, that finds a productive and meaningful role for everyone. Sacred ground of being, may we be agents of the love that drives out fear.

Athens, Jerusalem, and Buddha

From "Boomer Buddhist":

There’s a lot of overlap between Unitarian Universalism and Buddhism, especially the naturalized, liberal Buddhism that I practice and teach. But to get a picture of what UU Buddhism looks like, we need to look at one important thing that’s very UU and isn’t Buddhist. In fact, none of the Eastern religions include it: an orientation toward justice as part of the religion. The Unitarian Universalist second principle is "justice, equity, and compassion" (justice also appears in our sixth principle). The Buddhist tradition has a lot to say about compassion; very little about justice or equity.

Buddhism is great on lovingkindness, and has very helpful practices for cultivating equanimity, which social justice activists require to ground and sustain their work, but there is very little there in the way of a tradition of engaging with the question of how society ought to be set up, what arrangement of powers and authorities would be fair and reasonable.

In recent decades this has begun to change. There's been a lot of work developing "Socially Engaged Buddhism." But the Eastern traditions have not, historically, focused on justice the way the Western faith traditions have. In lands where, for millennia, the Emperor was simply in charge, the idea that your spiritual development also called for you to engage in questions of public policy just never arose.

Western civilization, by contrast, took its shape from the interaction between two powerful and enduring traditions – call them Athens and Jerusalem. In the millennium before the Common Era began, the Greeks developed a limited form of democracy. Along with it came public discourse about what was right and fair for the state to do. And the Israelites developed a society with a place for the prophets.

Our English word “prophet” comes from a Greek word meaning advocate. The Hebrew word, navi, translated as prophet, means spokesperson. The prophets of the Hebrew Bible – Ezekiel, Jeremiah, Isaiah, Amos, Hosea, et al – had a recognized role which even the king felt compelled to respect. The prophets were supposedly the mouths of God. It was a society built around certain texts, and one of those texts, Deuteronomy, gave the people a formative narrative according to which the Creator said, “I will put My words in his mouth, and he shall speak unto them all that I shall command him."

There was a recognized place for prophets -- the mouths of God. Utilizing the protections of a legitimate, recognized social role, the prophets criticized their government, criticized the powerful. When we today say "speak truth to power," we are alluding back to those ancient Israelite prophets. The prophets often warned that the wrath of God was going to befall the people of Israel for straying from the divine law. A central part of that divine law had to do with treating people fairly and taking care of the poor. Isaiah said, “What do you mean by crushing my people, and grinding down the poor?” He denounced judges who took bribes and failed to give proper justice in cases involving the orphan and the widow. Amos proclaimed divine judgment upon those who “sell the righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals.” Says Biblical scholar D.N. Premnath:

“One thing we learn from the prophets is that poverty or injustice is no accident. They knew exactly what the causes were and who was responsible for it. They did not speak in abstraction. They knew what the oppression/injustice was, and who the oppressors and oppressed were.”

Unitarian theologian James Luther Adams recognized the enduring importance of the prophetic tradition for Unitarians:

“Old Testament prophetism institutionalized dissent and criticism and thus initiated the separation of powers. The prophets said that the culture was not under the control of centralized power; viable culture requires the institutionalization of dissent – in other words, the freedom to criticize the powers that be.”

Out of Jerusalem going back 3,000 years, we have this tradition of dissent, of appealing to an authority greater than the king to counterbalance the king’s power. Out of Athens, going back 2500 years, we have this tradition of public discourse, citizens trying to reason with each other to reach consensus or at least majority agreement on what should be done.

To get a sense of how remarkable that is, contrast it with Eastern Asia, which had neither of those traditions. The Emperor’s power of decree was hindered by no channel of dissent recognized as legitimate and no need to persuade anyone with reasons.

It might be tempting to summarize this difference between East and West by saying that the Western religious traditions have this outward-directed component, and Eastern religions are more inward-directed. Tempting – but not true to my experience.

I don't meditate for myself. (Actually, I don’t usually call it meditating. I just call it sitting. Get still, get quiet, and notice. Just sit.) I sit to see more clearly that there's no self there, and in that awareness, notice all being shift a bit toward peace, equanimity, compassion, insight, and wisdom. The practices and teachings to which I committed myself at jukai change the world every day.

* * *
This is part 2 of 3 of "UU Buddhism"
See also:
Part 1: Boomer Buddhist
Part 3: How to Save the World

What'll You Get Out of It?

Suppose you got serious about maintaining a spiritual discipline. You engage your practice daily; you do it mindfully, you do it with intention to cultivate compassion, connection, nonjudgmental curiosity -- self-forgetfulness, transpersonal identification, and acceptance; you get together regularly with a group that helps you maintain and explore the spiritual focus of your practice, and you develop your base with daily silence, journaling, and study. What then? What will happen? If you do everything to ensure that your practice is a true, bona fide spiritual practice, and you do that spiritual practice long enough – every day for a year, or 10 years, or 30 years – will you then exude equanimity and compassion while unperturbable calm inner peace and beauty continuously manifests as you gracefully, lovingly flow through your life? Maybe. I offer no guarantees.

Spirituality, as I mentioned in the previous post in this series, is not a matter of will. Strong muscles aren’t either. That is, you can’t just decide to bench press 500 pounds, and then go do it. But at least with muscles, there’s a fairly predictable timeline by which exercise increases strength. If you have a normal and healthy physiology, and you adopt a regimen of exercise, and stick to it, then you will get stronger. There’s a smooth curve by which you’ll progress toward the limit to which that regimen can take you. Spiritual strengthening doesn’t go like that. It’s not a reliable product of putting in the time doing the exercise. The spirit has its own schedule. Committed serious spiritual practitioners can go for years when their practice just seems void and useless. Then they can hit a patch where they actually seem to be regressing. They’re acting as cranky, unkind, disconnected -- as withdrawn, on the one hand, or as controlling, on the other – as they ever had before they started any spiritual practice. There is no smooth curve of progress.

The Worst Motive

I started my primary spiritual practice for the worst reason: because an authority told me to. Fourteen-and-a-half years ago I was in Chicago trying to pass muster to become a minister, trying to prove I was good enough. I had just finished my first year of divinity school, and I was meeting with the Midwest regional subcommittee on candidacy. "Do you have a spiritual practice?" the committee asked me.

Before starting seminary, I had spent two years as the congregational facilitator and preacher for the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Clarksville, Tennessee. Before that, I'd served as a president of our Fellowship in Waco, Texas, as Vice President of our church in Charlottesville, Virginia and had worked as the church secretary for a year at our Nashville, Tennessee church. But did I have a spiritual practice?

I was a born-and-raised Unitarian Universalist. I had a Ph.D. I'd been a university professor of philosophy for four years. I could debate about metaphysics, metaethics, metatheology, poststructuralism, postindustrialism, and postmodernism. If it was meta-, or post-, I was all over it. But did I have a spiritual practice?

Well, no, I didn't.

“Get a spiritual practice,” the committee told me.

It is contradictory to take up a path of self-acceptance and trusting in my own inner wisdom because an outside authority told me to. Yet that’s what I did. It is contradictory to judge myself for judging myself too much. Yet that’s what I did, and still do, albeit somewhat more gently. Usually. I’ve now had a chance to talk with a number of people on a path of serious spiritual practice. All of us, or so it seems, began, as I did, in some form of contradiction. We felt broken, wrong, inadequate, and we thought spiritual practice would fix us. But spiritual practice isn’t about fixing anything – which is why there’s no smooth curve toward becoming fixed.

You're Not Broken and Don't Need Fixing

Spiritual awakening is about realizing that we aren’t broke and don’t need fixing. We aren’t broken and from the beginning never have been.

(Earlier, I listed some symptoms of developing spirituality -- increased this and decreased that -- and I mentioned Cloninger's measures of spirituality: self-forgetfulness, transpersonal identification, and acceptance. Do not, however, imagine that these are the goals of spiritual practice. Any practice that has a goal is not a spiritual practice. Yes, there is a role to play for intending to cultivate those qualities -- but it is a rather small role, and attempting to measure progress toward such qualities is delusion. A spiritual practice will tend -- naturally, on its own, but irregularly and unpredictably -- to bring fuller recognition that we are not broken, that we are whole and perfect just as we are and always have been; and fuller recognition of our intrinsic wholeness will tend -- naturally, on its own, but irregularly and unpredictably -- to bring the symptoms of developing spirituality.)

It’s hard to really believe that we are not broken and don't need fixing. Our culture constantly tells us we aren’t good enough, get better, buy this product, this treatment, this school, this exercise, this method.

Spirituality is about remembering the fact of abundance in the midst of the daily barrage of messages of scarcity. Will recognition of abundance happen if you do the practice? I can tell you there will be more ups and downs than the stock market. But over the long haul? Probably, yes. If you love just doing the practice, and you do it just because it is who you are, and not with any idea that you’re gaining something from it – if judgment about gain and loss, progress and regress, falls away and there’s just you, loving who you are and loving the way you, and the whole universe, manifest in and through your practice, then, yes. The fact of abundance will be clearer to you.

Woooo-Hoooooo!

At the end of “Dr. Strangelove,” the bomber plane is set to release its nuclear payload, which will set off a nuclear conflagration to end civilization, but the release mechanism jams. Slim Pickens climbs down into the bomb-bay to fix the jam. He succeeds, and the bomb is released -- while he’s still sitting on it.

In the film’s most memorable shot, Slim Pickens is waving his cowboy hat and whooping as he rides the bomb down to his – and what will ultimately be the planet’s – destruction.

“Woooo-hoooo!”

Maybe that’s what learning to stop worrying and love the bomb looks like. He does seem to be living in the moment.

That was such a striking shot when I first saw it because I knew if I were falling out of the sky riding on a nuclear bomb, I’d be freaked out in fear and despair: “My god, my god, my god, I’ve only got maybe one minute to live.”

But look at what Slim Pickens’ character is doing with his minute! Woooo-hooooo.

All of us are riding that bomb. Our time is so short before life blows up on us.

There’s something very pure about this – just one chance at every minute. This is it.

* * *
This is part 3 of 3 of "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Spirituality"
See also:
Part 1: Atheist Spirituality vs. The Family Business
Part 2: What Is Spirituality?