What To Transcend

Rainbows

Too often we don’t notice the abundance and beauty that is around us at every moment. Rainbows, for instance. One of the questions in the May issue of “On The Journey” asks, “When was the last time you saw a rainbow and how did it make you feel?” Rainbows seem to have a power for a lot of us for pulling us out of ourselves, getting us to drop for a moment, the running story of who we are.

That story runs through our heads with ourselves as the noble hero, persecuted yet struggling on. The life of busy-ness we construct serves the purpose of sustaining the basic plot about a noble and important person carrying on amidst hardship, accomplishing worthy things. Have you had the feeling that life is the acting out of the movie about our life? We are the stars of our biopic. I’ve started to become a little self-aware of this tendency. Sometimes as I drive down a road, or walk up the path to the church, I’ll notice that this could the opening sequence of the movie about me. I can almost hear the theme music playing. The opening credits are flashing before me – only, since I’m on the other side of them, they’re backwards. Who’s the director of this thing? I wonder. I hope it’s not Tarantino. Hey, maybe this is going to be a Cecil B Demille production – whoah! There are days when my life feels like a movie by the Coen brothers. Or the Marx brothers. Where was I? Oh, yes: Rainbows.

Sometimes some of us find that a rainbow has the power to make that story about ourselves just fall away. The nearly constant playing of our inner narrative falls silent. All our busy strategizing for getting the next thing we want and avoiding the things we fear stops. There’s this thing of wonder and beauty – a rainbow – and nothing in all our busy-ness made it happen. It’s not our reward for being a good person. We didn’t earn that rainbow, and we don’t deserve it. It is a grace that is simply given. We just open our eyes and look.

If we can look at a rainbow that way, with the story on pause, then we can also look at a blue sky that way. And if we can look at a blue sky that way, then we can look at a gray sky that way. We can look at trees and buildings and one another’s faces that way. We can even look at a pile of dirty dishes and the socks on the floor that belong to children who seem incapable of picking them up that way. The invitation of the rainbow is: now look at everything that way.

Is there something more? Not more than what’s right around us right now, no. But certainly more than that storyline running through our heads about the setbacks we deserved and didn’t deserve, the triumphs we deserved and the lucky breaks we didn’t – the story about “dealing with things.”

There is something more than dealing with things. There is basking in them, loving them, being with them without any desires or fears or goals or purposes entering in. There is something more than all that we know, and that is the life of not knowing. The life of not-knowing is a receptive, curious openness to the wonder of the uniqueness of each circumstance, deciding not to bring it under the categories of your prior knowledge about what is present. It’s stepping down from the grand sweeping epic spectacle of the Cecil B. DeMille movie of your life, and into the step by step not-knowing described by his niece, the dancer and choreographer Agnes DeMille who said:

“Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.”

And not just the artist. The scientist, too, at her best, lives in the space of not-knowing, leaping and leaping in the dark. Someone with a scientific bent picked up that line, “the moment you know how, you begin to die a little,” and commented: “Which is to say, your wavefunction begins to collapse.” Right. Once something is determined, waves of open possibility collapse.

Transcendence

I have not as yet used this word, but I’ve been leading up to it all the way: Transcend -- from trans, beyond, and scandere, to climb. It means to escape inclusion in, lie beyond the scope of; surpass; climb over or beyond; surmount, overstep, rise above.

Transcendence, I submit, is not about climbing out of what’s here and now into some other realm. It is about climbing out of your story and your knowledge so that you can truly be with what’s here and now.

Transcendence is not about transcending the here and now. It’s about transcending your self -- your narrative, your purposes, your habitual categorization of things.

This month’s spiritual exercise asks, suppose you took 30 minutes to have a direct experience of transcending mystery and wonder, how would you do it? That is, what would you do to get out of your story, your plans, purposes, and judgments, and be as present as you can to the surprising wonder that’s all around you. You’ll probably find it helpful to be still and quiet. Look at each thought as it comes up – watch it fade away. Then another one comes. Watch it, until it fades.

Your thoughts aren’t you, and they don’t even seem to come from anyplace you have control of. Your thoughts are just these things that happen to you, like weather or traffic. Maybe, just maybe, in the pause between them, you’ll suddenly notice things are shining – like a rainbow. And there you’ll be smack in the middle of something so much more – that at the same time is not at all more than what you’ve always been in the middle of but were too busy making other plans to see. You’ll be directly experiencing transcending mystery and wonder.

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This is part 3 of 3 of "Direct Experience of Transcending Mystery and Wonder"
Part 1: This Is It
Part 2: Is There Nothing But Matter?

Is There Nothing But Matter?

“There is something more” risks becoming about consumerism – if not consumerism of things then consumerism of experiences. Experience this, go there, do that -- as if life were about collecting special experiences, as if everything you did were part of a bucket list.

Kick the Bucket List

You might remember the 2007 film, “The Bucket List” starring Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman which further popularized the idea of having a list of things to do or places to go before dying – before "kicking the bucket." Dear friends, this is a bad idea. Don’t do it. Don’t make that list, and if you have one, throw it away. The measure of a life is not the length of the list of things done once, but the integrity of things done over and over, 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, until they radiate with beauty and grow fresher with each repetition.

Too often have I myself said, and too often heard, “been there, done that” -- as if everything in the whole possible conceivable world was worth paying attention to once, at most, and never again. Go back to that place you have been and that thing you have done because last time you were there you didn’t stay. Go back to what you do know, but live as if you’ve forgotten. Touch that familiar cloth, and the electric jolt of mad implication: This is it. All of it. All of it right here.

There is nowhere to go except here. When Ecclesiastes says there is no new thing under the sun, it means that that's because all things are always new beneath this sun. So hanker not for the fresh and new but open your eyes to the wonder that is always before you.

Let us be a countercultural people, standing counter to the consumer culture exerting all its might to entice us to buy new experiences, a consumer culture that would sell water to a fish if it could, for we are as immersed in constantly shifting new experience as a fish in the ocean. Nothing could be more abundant than brand-new, fresh, never-before experience. Forget about making a list of the ones you want, and notice the amazing ones you have.

If religion is a way of living, an approach to life, the film “The Bucket List” is bad religion. For good religion in film, I would mention “Ground Hog Day.” Presented with the exact same circumstances every morning, Bill Murray makes each day different by how he responds to it. He learns at last to live in the moment and finds that when he does, his life becomes one of compassion and joy – right there in the same old small town, day after day. There's not anything more.

Nothing but Matter?

Is there something more than the world science describes? I know many of us feel it’s too reductive to say there is nothing but matter. Surely there is something more profound and mysterious than matter, mere lumps of stuff. Life has got to be more than just clods bumping into each other -- even in New York!

I understand. But have you looked at how profound and mysterious matter is? For one thing, matter actually is energy. How weird is that? Chairs, tables, my body, stones, lakes, this wide earth -- they are all congealed energy. Sounds like woo-woo spirituality, and maybe it is. It's also basic physics. Every gram of matter is 90 trillion joules of energy. One paper clip is the energy of the Hiroshima atomic bomb. One five-pound bag of flour is the electrical energy that New York City's five boroughs plus Westchester consume in a year.

Consider that:

• Everything with mass warps spacetime -- that warping is how gravity happens.
• The faster you move through space the slower you move through time.
• Observing a wave, without exerting any force or influence on it, merely observing it, makes it collapse into a particle.
• You can determine the velocity of a particle, and you can determine the location of a particle, but not both because the very act of determining one renders the other indeterminate.
• Right now you are spinning faster than the speed of sound; you're being bombarded by electromagnetic beams flying through your body, a hundred million signals are racing through your brain; and there’s a blueprint of your bones in every single cell of you.
• Certain quantum phenomena defy causality.
• Reality extends through 11 dimensions (maybe; maybe more) and, according to our current best guess, is made of superstrings.
• Black holes, of which there are about 100 million in our galaxy, are surrounded by event horizons nothing inside of which can ever be seen or detected in any way by anyone outside of which.
• Most of the matter in the universe is dark matter, which no one has ever seen or detected, but it's gotta be there (well, somewhere).

That's some deeply weird stuff! Far from being reductive, matter turns out to be expansive beyond our capacity to comprehend. For me, I’m seeing mystery and wonder in science, not beyond it.

And it seems to me that if I experience it, then it’s in my neurons, and my neurons are physical, and any force that influences physical things is a physical force because that’s what "physical force" means.

But I do agree that there’s something beyond science in this sense: there is the poetic.

T.S. Eliot says,

“I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas.”

Shakespeare says,

“life is but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour on the stage and then is heard no more.”

Walt Whitman says,

“I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.”

Jacob Trapp says that worship

"is the window of the moment open to the sky of the eternal." (Singing the Living Tradition #441)

These are important claims. They express vital truth, but they are not claims for science to assess. So, yes, there is something more than science – in the sense that there are important ways of talking beyond scientific ways of talking. There are insights that are not scientific insights.

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This is part 2 of 3 of "Direct Experience of Transcending Mystery and Wonder"
Part 1: This Is It
Part 3: What To Transcend

This Is It

There is something more.

What a fraught statement that is!

There is something more.

Really? That perilous thought has seduced so many down dark paths -- indeed, all of us, I dare say, to some extent.

When you hear that inner voice whispering to you, “There is something more,” be careful. And when you don’t hear it, be more careful, because it may be an assumption so buried you don’t even hear it, but it’s at work in your life. “There is something more” is a truth that is in so many ways false.

Something more? More than what? Is not the path of wisdom, of peace, taken step by step in each moment, nothing but this. As the poet James Broughton says:

This is It
and I am It
and You are It
and so is That
and He is It
and She is It
and It is It
and That is That

O it is This
and it is Thus
and it is Them
and it is Us
and it is Now
and Here It is
and Here We are
so This is It

This is it, the whole thing, right here – there’s not some “more” to come later, right? Everything is given, nothing is lacking. Later, James Broughton wrote ‘This is It #2” to say it even more explicitly:

“This is It
This is really It.
This is all there is.
And it’s perfect as It is.
There is nowhere to go
but Here.
There is nothing here
but Now.
There is nothing now
but This.
And this is It.
This is really It.
This is all there is.
And It’s perfect as It is.”

The world's religious teachings agree, saying it in various ways. When Moses asks the burning bush, “who is this I'm speaking to?” the answer is, "I am who am." (Exodus 3:14) -- I am what is. God is what is. There's nothing more than that.

Later, Jesus teaches, "the kingdom [or kindom] of god is within (or among) you" (Luke 17:21). It's all right here.

“All the verities and realities of your existence,” as Kalidasa said, are now -- not yesterday, which is a dream -- not tomorrow, which is only a vision -- not any other time but now.

This “something more” talk is a trap. That voice that whispers there is something more has lured people down the theological paths that say this world, this life in relatively unimportant. There’s something more than this life, some theologians have said – there’s the eternity of hell or of heaven, for which this life is merely a testing ground. Our history as Unitarian Universalists is one of emphasizing this life.

Listening to that seductive whisper, we may be lured into consumerism. "Something more? Well, let me buy it. What’s it called? I’ll Google it right now and order it online."

But the voice keeps whispering, “There is something more.” So you buy more and more stuff, and, what happens? Either you use it or you don’t. If you don’t use it, well, that was a waste. I’ve got stuff I haven’t touched in years, except to pack it up for moving. What good is that?

And if you do use it, then it’s a convenience. But conveniences are double-edged swords. The fact that something can be done quicker is a convenience only if you want to do it quicker -- and the more you want things to be done quicker the more you find yourself living as though the purpose of life is to get as many things done as possible.

A dishwasher, for example, saves a little bit of time over washing dishes by hand – but it’s harder to enjoy loading a dishwasher than to enjoy hand washing them. And that’s only partly because you’re distracted by all the other tasks you’re rushing to get to.

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This is part 1 of 3 of "Direct Experience of Transcending Mystery and Wonder"
Part 2: Is There Nothing But Matter?
Part 3: What To Transcend