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Poetry for Order of Service
I swear I think now that every thing without exception has an eternal soul!
The trees have, rooted in the ground! the weeds of the sea have! the animals!
I swear I think there is nothing but immortality!
(Walt Whitman, from "To Think of Time")Love so vast, love the sky cannot contain!
How does all this fit within my heart?(Jelaluddin Rumi, tr., Coleman Barks)
As essence turns to ocean the particles glisten.
Watch how in this candle flame instant
blaze all the moments you have lived.(Jelaluddin Rumi, tr., Coleman Barks)
Call to Worship
Holy and beautiful is the custom by which we gather on this Sunday morning.
Here we come to give our thanks, to face our ideals, to remember our loved ones, to seek that which is permanent, and to serve goodness, beauty, and the qualities of life that make it rich and whole.
Through this hour breathes the worship of all ages, the cathedral music of all history; blessed are the ears that hear that eternal sound.Covenant Statement (Spoken in unison)
We are travelers. We meet for a moment in this sacred place to love, to share, to serve. Let us use compassion, curiosity, reverence, and respect while seeking our truths. In this way we will support a just and joyful community, and this moment shall endure.
Introduction to Responsive Reading
This morning I will be speaking about Mysticism and Mystical experience, beginning with this responsive reading from Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose perspective I regard as primarily Mystical in nature.
Emerson, who lived from 1803 to 1882, was a watershed figure in the Unitarian faith. Even though he only served as a Unitarian minister for three years, he was the primary figure who broke open Unitarian Christianity so that it began to engage other religious perspectives such as Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islamic Mysticism.
His own religious philosophy is identified by the forbidding term, "Transcendentalism." However, he would just as soon have used the term "Idealism." His perspective, as he spoke of it, was one of philosophical idealism as opposed to philosophical materialism, meaning that in your thinking and living you start with "Mind" or "Consciousness" rather than matter. In other words, what is ultimately real, self-existing, and eternal is more akin to "Mind" or "Consciousness" than to matter or matter-energy.
The most striking and well-known term used by Emerson to speak of this ultimate reality was the term "Over-Soul." Our responsive reading consists of statements taken from Emerson's famous essay titled, "The Over-Soul."
There are, however, also other terms Emerson used to convey the sense of this ultimate reality: "Unknown Centre," "The Whole," "Being," "Unity," "Order," "Highest Law," "Supreme Cause." Emerson capitalizes each of these words or terms and utilizes each to approach the same unapproachable cosmic reality.
In addition, Emerson employed the conventional word "God" in his religious philosophy, though he didn't employ it in the conventional way. "God," for Emerson, was not a personal being but rather, as 20th century theologian Paul Tillich would later say, "Being-itself," that is the ground, the source, the creative power and possibility of all individual beings, but not one of those beings, not even the highest being.
So, too, for Emerson, "God" is non-personal or, better yet, trans-personal, that is, larger than the personal, containing and including the personal. One might address "God" personally, as Emerson sometimes does, but "God" is not a personal being. Says Emerson, "I deny personality to God because it is too little, not too much."
Responsive Reading
MINISTER: Our faith comes in moments; our vice is habitual. Yet there is a depth in those brief moments which constrains us to ascribe more reality to them than to all other experiences.
CONGREGATION: We are a stream whose source is hidden. Always our being is descending into us from we know not whence.
MINISTER: I am constrained every moment to acknowledge a higher origin for events than the will I call mine.
CONGREGATION: Within us is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal One.
MINISTER: This deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the subject and the object, are one.
CONGREGATION: From within or from behind, a light shines through us upon things and makes us aware that we are nothing, but the light is all.
MINISTER: When it breaks through the intellect, it is genius; when it breathes through the will, it is virtue; when it flows through the affections, it is love.
CONGREGATION: Every moment when the individual feels invaded by it, is memorable. The soul's health consists in the fullness of its reception.
MINISTER: This energy does not descend into individual life on any other condition than entire possession. It comes to the lowly and simple; it comes to whomsoever will put off what is foreign and proud; it comes as insight; it comes as serenity and grandeur.
CONGREGATION: The simplest person who in integrity worships God, becomes God; yet forever and ever the influx of this better and universal self is new and unsearchable.
MINISTER: As there is no screen or ceiling between our heads and the infinite heavens, so is there no bar or wall in the soul, where we, the effect, cease, and God, the cause, begins.
CONGREGATION: Let us learn the revelation of all nature and all thought: that the Highest dwells within us; that the sources of nature are in our own minds.
(Statements from "The Over-Soul," Ralph Waldo Emerson)
Introduction to Hymn
One of the aspects of Mysticism I will be briefly addressing today is the Mystic's sense of the inadequacy of words to express the nature of "ultimate reality" and of our experience of "ultimate reality."
The problem is two-fold. First, a description or an account of an experience is not the same as the experience. This is a problem in trying to describe any experience.
But the problem is compounded for the Mystic because the experience the Mystic wants to talk about is an experience of unity. And words have to do with distinctions. They are based on the rational part of the mind whose capacity and role is to make distinctions.
Thus, the frustration of the Mystic in the use of literal language and the felt need to resort to symbol, story, parable, music, and to the other arts in order to try to describe an experience for which literal words are, of their very nature, inadequate.
Our first hymn this morning speaks of that reality for which words fail. Number 286, "A Core of Silence."
Introduction to Reading
The Mystical experience has primarily to do with an experience of unity in which the distinctions between things fall away and an underlying identity is felt and experienced.
This experience relates to a different way of knowing than our everyday rational way of knowing. Typically, to know something - some thing - means to understand how that thing is different and separate from something else.
But in Mysticism we find another way of "knowing," not a negation of the rational part of our mind that breaks things into pieces separating and distinguishing one thing from another, and not a knowing that adds information to our rational and empirical knowledge, but rather a more intuitive way of knowing that may have value in its own way and at its own level.
My reading is from the great American student of religious experience, William James, and from his classic study of religion titled, The Varieties of Religious Experience, published a little over a century ago in 1902.
Some years ago I myself made some observations on...nitrous oxide intoxication, and reported them in print - [And, indeed, William James had experimented with the use of ammonium nitrate, a kind of precursor to the use of the psychedelic drugs that began in the 1960's]. One conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth has ever since remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. How to regard them is the question, for they are so discontinuous with ordinary consciousness. Yet they may determine attitudes though they fail to give a map. At any rate, they forbid a premature closing of our accounts with reality. Looking back on my own experiences, they all converge towards a kind of insight to which I cannot help ascribing some metaphysical significance.
(The Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902, New American Library edition, 1958, p. 298)
Meditation: Let us be together in a time of silence and inwardness in which we try to relax the mind and open it to forms of consciousness other than our everyday, ordinary rational form of consciousness.
"FOUR FAITHS IN A MODERN WORLD: MYSTICISM"Introduction
This is the fourth in a five-part sermon series based on the work of The Reverend Fred Campbell, a retired Unitarian Universalist minister, who found that in the 11 different Unitarian Universalist congregations he served over a period of 31 years there were four basic faiths which he identified as Humanism, Naturalism, Mysticism, and Theism.
In my first sermon in this series I introduced the larger framework of a modern world-view that each of these four faiths embraced. Two weeks ago I spoke on Humanism, then last week on Naturalism, and now this week on Mysticism.
Last week I also introduced the mental image of a house on a hill with four large windows facing the four directions as a way of showing both the connections among the four faiths - they all look out upon the same ultimate reality - and the distinctions between them - the four different frames of reference focus and limit what is seen and experienced of ultimate reality.
Last Sunday the window we looked through was the window of Naturalism. I leaned heavily on the poetry of Robinson Jeffers as a way of getting at that frame of reference. Now this week we move to window that frames the Mystical perspective.
As I have been saying, it's not as if a given individual is always and only standing before just one window. Even though a person might prefer or be drawn to one view over the others, still such an individual will be also found in front of one or more other windows.
This is true even of the poet Robinson Jeffers, who is about as single-minded in his Naturalistic faith as one could imagine. Yet even with him he would occasionally move to another window, in his case the Mystical one. Therefore, I thought this morning I would begin with Jeffers, watching as he moves from one perspective to the other, as a way of delineating some of the differences between the Naturalistic and Mystical perspectives.
Distinguishing Naturalism and Mysticism
Last Sunday I read a poem of Jeffers titled "Oh, Lovely Rock" in which the poet speaks of seeing through the surface of the solid rock "into the real and bodily and living rock." This approach I termed "ecstatic naturalism" - not "static" but "ecstatic," having to do with ecstasy, seeing divinity in nature, boring into and through the surface of the natural into a dimension of depth.
In other poems written late in his life he speaks of everything as having consciousness of one sort or another. "All things are conscious," he says, and the nerves and brain of an animal simply bring that consciousness to focus. ("The Beginning and the End")
So here the poet is moving away from the Naturalistic window toward a perspective that involves another level of being or reality, a sense of some underlying unity and consciousness to things that is more than nature (in the typical way of speaking about nature). He is moving from this "ecstatic naturalism" to what can be termed a "naturalistic mysticism," that is to say, a vision and an experience in which nature becomes the means of the mystical, unitive experience. Nature is still important, but now it is the reality of an underlying unifying consciousness that becomes even more important.
In Mysticism an individual understands: 1) that all things are of one piece and interconnected; 2) that there is an interior essence or depth dimension that links all things; and 3) that this interior essence is also the root of one's own being so that one can "know" and experience this interior essence or depth dimension of reality.
Thus, the poet Jeffers, taking his place before the Mystical window, becomes aware of a unity in Nature, so that he cries out:
Erase the lines: I pray you not to love classifications:
The thing is like a river, from source to sea-mouth
One flowing life. We that have the honor and hardship of being human
Are one flesh with the beasts, and the beasts with the plants
One streaming sap, and certainly the plants and algae and the earth they spring from
Are one flesh with the stars. The classifications
Are mostly a kind of memoria technica [a technical memory; a contrivance for aiding the memory]. Use it but don't be fooled.
It is all truly one life, red blood and tree-sap,
Animal, mineral, sidereal, one stream, one organism, one God.
(from "Monument," The Beginning and the End)This recognition of the unity of things - in this case, the unity of the natural world - is the foreground of the Mystical perspective. But we're not there yet, because in the Mystical frame of reference one also becomes aware of an interior essence to things, and, most importantly, one experiences one's identity with that interior essence.
Now listen to these words of the poet as he enters fully into the Mystical experience:
To-night, lying on the hillside,[. . .] I remembered
The knife in the stalk of my humanity; I drew [the knife] and the stalk broke [the stalk of his humanity]; [then] I entered the life of the brown forest
And the great life of the ancient peaks, the patience of stone, I felt the changes in the veins
In the throat of the mountain,[. . .]I was the stream
Draining the mountain wood; and I the stag drinking; and I was the stars,
Boiling with light, wandering alone, each one the lord of his own summit; and I was the darkness
Outside the stars, I included them, they were part of me. I was mankind also, a moving lichen
On the cheek of the round stone [a tiny living form on the earth]. . .they have not made words for it, to go behind things, beyond hours and ages,
And be all things in all time, in their returns and passages, in the motionless and timeless center,
In the white of the fire. . .how can I express the excellence I have found, that has no color but clearness;
No honey but ecstasy; nothing wrought nor remembered; no undertone nor silver second murmur
That rings in love's voice, I and my loved are one; no desire but fulfilled; no passion but peace,
The pure flame and the white, fierier than any passion; no time but spheral eternity."(from The Tower Beyond Tragedy)
This is an expression of the Mystical frame of reference in which a person: 1) starts with the interconnectedness of things; 2) recognizes an interior essence that accounts for that connectedness; 3) experiences one's identity with that essence; and, then, 4) finds language utterly inadequate to get at that experience. All four of these basics of the Mystical perspective are present in this reading.
To clarify this Mystical perspective a bit more let me quote Jeffers one more time, this from a book-length narrative poem. In this poem the poet puts the following words into the mouth of the hero of the poem, who is an elderly sage.
Suddenly he [the elderly sage] knelt, and tears ran down the gullied leather
Of his old cheeks. "Dear Love [he said, addressing the God of Nature, the God of the Universe], You are so beautiful.
Even this side the stars and below the moon. How can you be. . .all this. . .and me also?
Be human also? The yellow puma, the flighty mourning-dove and flecked hawk, yes, and the rattlesnake
Are in the nature of things; they are noble and beautiful
As the rocks and grass - not this grim ape,
Although it loves you. - Yet two or three times in my life my walls have fallen - beyond love - no room for love -
I have been you."(The Double Axe, Robinson Jeffers: p. 89)
"No room for love." Love implies relationship. And relationship implies a distinction and separation between things, an "I" and a "Thou." But in the Mystical experience all separation is erased and all boundaries dissolved. There is no room for even that highest human experience, the experience of love. For there is no "I" and there is no "Thou;" there is only the "One."
Even to say "One" is inadequate, for it implies that there might be another. . .which makes speaking about Mystical experience more than a little difficult since language is rooted in "twoness" not "oneness."
Other types of Mysticism
This, then, is an illustration of the Mystical perspective, in this case a "naturalistic Mysticism," in which nature is the conduit for the Mystical experience of unity and identity. But there are other types of Mysticism. One author I recently read identified 25 different types of Mysticism. (Michael Daniels, "Making Sense of Mysticism")
There are nature Mysticisms, like that of Jeffers, in which the connection is made with the eyes wide-open, going outward into reality through the senses. But there are also other Mysticisms in which one closes the eyes and goes "inward" into interior depths, perhaps through techniques of meditation, seeking the "Mind" or the "Consciousness" out of which all natural things proceed and back into which they fall.
Earlier in the service I spoke of Ralph Waldo Emerson whose religious philosophy starts with "Mind" or "Consciousness." Whereas Jeffers penetrates into and through nature by means of the senses, with Emerson it sometimes seems that the senses are almost a distraction from pure Being, or what he calls the "Over-Soul" - ". . .that great nature in which we rest as the earth lies in the soft arms of the atmosphere." ("The Over-Soul)
The influence of the senses [says Emerson] has in most people overpowered the mind to that degree that the walls of time and space have come to look real and insurmountable.
("The Over-Soul")For Emerson, as with the Mystics in general, all things of one piece:
"The ploughman, the plough, and the furrow are of one stuff."
(Dr. Forrest Church, "Emerson's Shadow," UU World, March/April 2003, p. 31)
"The sailor and the ship and the sea are of one stuff."
(Robert Richardson Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire, p. 408)
And that "cosmic stuff, " for Emerson, is more akin to "Mind" than to matter. "Mind" is prior to matter. "Ideas" are more real than things. "The Universe," he says, "is the externalization of the soul." (from his essay, "The Poet") And, again, he says, "The soul makes the body." ("The Poet")
We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are the shining parts, is the soul.
("The Over-Soul")
So, for Emerson, we are Soul-Stuff. Congealed soul, you might say, very dense soul. This is who we are! Recognize that, glory in it, and live out of it!
Author J. D. Salinger writes:
I was six when I saw that everything was God, and my hair stood up. . . . It was on a Sunday, I remember. My sister was only a tiny child then, and she was drinking her milk, and all of a sudden I saw that she was God and the milk was God. I mean, all she was doing was pouring God into God, if you know what I mean.
This, I would say, is the primary feature of mystical experience. From the one side, it is subtraction: the dissolving of the distinctions and the blurring of the boundaries. And from the other side it is addition: the positive recognition of the fundamental identity of things of which you are part and which you can experience.
Thus, the Mystical faith locates the primary meaning, value, and purpose in life as having to do with a sense of union with that essence of Being which underlies and which is more than nature in the typical use of the word.
Modern Mysticism does not by any means deny science, its method or its value, but it operates on the notion that there is more than science is equipped to handle.
Reality is not exhausted by matter-energy or by what the five senses can take in. Mysticism, in contrast to Humanism and Naturalism, does wish to go behind or beyond or beneath or within this concrete cosmos. . .not necessarily so much to create another reality apart from it, but in order to say that there is more to Reality than meets the eye. There is an interior essence to Reality so that it consists of both manifest and unmanifest Being.
Behind matter there is some kind of heat, around and behind things,
so that what we experience is not the turtle nor the night
only, nor the rising whirlwind, nor the certainty, nor the steady gaze,
nor the meeting by the altar, nor the rising sun only.(Robert Bly, from "Out of the Rolling Ocean, the Crowd. . .", in
Loving A Woman In Two Worlds)Or, leaving the poets aside for a moment, let us try a scientist, a scientist of some note. Says Albert Einstein:
To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms - this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I belong to the ranks of [the] devoutly religious. . . .
The basic theme of all mythology, says scholar Joseph Campbell, is "that there is an invisible plane supporting the visible one." (The Power of Myth p. 71) This plane transcends - goes beyond - the "pairs of opposites" that characterize the visible plane and with which the rational aspect of the human mind is occupied.
And the point of Mysticism is that we humans have the capacity - a non-rational capacity - to identify with and to experience that invisible plane.
And why? Again, because in our deepest being, we belong to that invisible plane. It is at the root of everything, ourselves included. "You are that," say the Hindu Mystics. "Tat tvam asi" - "You are that." In your most essential self, you are one with "It." By stilling your active, ego-oriented, rational mind, you can perhaps connect with "Deeper Mind," or recognize the connection that is always there.
Thus, if there is a God-concept in the Mystical faith, it is likely a pan-en-theism - not pantheism in which all is God, but pan-en-theism, in which All is in God, and God is in All - all the parts contained in the Whole and the Whole at the center of each of the parts.
A modern analogy for the Mystical perspective is that of the hologram in which each part of the thing contains the image of the whole thing, as in holographic photography, for example. In traditional photography if you split the photographic plate, you get that part of the image. But in holographic photography you can splinter the plate, and in each sliver you get the whole image, just in a less dense form.
Reality in the Mystical perspective is holographic in nature. Each part contains an image of the whole thing. Each of us, on the one hand, is a tiny particle of the Whole and, on the other hand, each of us contains the image of the Whole.
And sometimes "the great door opens a crack" ("December," White Pine, Mary Oliver) so that we catch a glimpse of the Wholeness of which we are a small part. Though, as Emerson says, our vice is habitual and our faith present only in moments, sometimes those moments come, sometimes the door does open, and just for a moment we behold the radiance of things,
so bright it is almost a death,
a joy we can't bear. . .("December," White Pine, Mary Oliver)
There are times in my life when the world is so achingly beautiful, when everything holds such meaning, that I am incapable of any expression except tears of joy. The boundaries of my being begin to blur, whatever separates one thing from another begins to dissolve, and in that confluence of light and line and law, lies an experience for which I have no words.
This experience is the exception not the rule, yet it happens often enough that I no longer believe it to be just coincidence, but rather a level of reality that is always there if I am open enough to see it. This level of being is incredibly positive. It doesn't negate the pain and suffering of the world, but it puts it into a larger context and allows me to experience this context directly, not just with my intellect, but with my entire being. It is: "The merging of the purity in us with the purity of the world and the recognition that there is in us, the same music, the same joy and light, as there is in that to which we are responding.
(Dewitt Jones)
Benediction
The heart in thee is the heart of all; not a valve, not a wall, not an intersection is there anywhere in nature, but one blood rolls uninterruptedly an endless circulation through all.
(Ralph Waldo Emerson, from "The Over-Soul")
Extinguishing the Chalice
Now may peace be in our hearts,
and understanding in our minds,
may courage steel our wills,
and the love of truth forever guide us.(NOTE: This is a manuscript version of the sermon preached by The Reverend Bruce A. Bode at the Quimper Unitarian Universalist Fellowship on October 17, 2004. The spoken sermon, available on audio cassette at the Fellowship, may differ slightly in phrasing and detail from this manuscript version.)