Ecstatic Rationalism

A sermon offered at the Unitarian Universalist Church

October 21st, 2007

By the Reverend Hilary Landau Krivchenia

Reading

Aldous Huxley from the Doors of Perception

In a world where education is predominantly verbal, highly educated people find it all but impossible to pay serious attention to anything but words and notions. Even in this age of technology the verbal humanities are honored. The non-verbal humanities, the arts of being directly aware of the given facts of our existence, are almost completely ignored - any genuinely Alexandrian project is sure of approval and financial support: But when it comes to finding out how you and I, our children and grandchildren, may become more perceptive, more aware of inward and outward reality, less apt, by psychological malpractices, to make ourselves ill - when it comes to any form of non-verbal education no really respectable person in any really respectable university or church will do anything about it. Verbalists are suspicious of the non-verbal; rationalists fear the given, non-rational fact; intellectuals feel that "what we perceive by the eye (or in any other way) is foreign to us as such and need not impress us deeply." Systematic reasoning is something we could not, as a species or as individuals, possibly do without. But neither, if we are to remain sane, can we possibly do without direct perception of the inner and outer worlds into which we have been born. This given reality is an infinite which passes all understanding and yet admits of being directly and in some sort totally apprehended.  To be enlightened is to be aware, always, of total reality.  Our goal is to discover that we have always been where we ought to be. Unhappily we make the task exceedingly difficult for ourselves.

But the man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less sure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable Mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend.

Sermon

William Blake wrote: To see the world in a grain of sand /And heaven in a wild flower /Hold infinity in the palm of your hand /And eternity in an hour.

Have you ever had such an experience?  An experience of seeing beyond the uses of a thing, beyond habitual observation, cultural labeling to see a deeper reality – it’s a rare experience – and often set apart as a strange, perhaps, even dangerous way of perceiving.

It is religious experience.  Last week in the video from the Unitarian Universalist Association a young man shared a phrase I’ve heard many times. “People say they’re spiritual – but not religious.”  It’s an interesting phrase.  It’s pretty clear that, at least in the present time, “religion” has come to mean those outward forms of practice that belong to specific traditions, churches, temples, mosques and sects.  Thus, spiritual somehow means all those experiences unfiltered through outward form by individuals as they encounter meaning in awe and wonder.  I’d like to go back to the term religious to describe those experiences of ultimate meaning, wonder, and belonging that bind us to the larger world – from the smallest grain of sand to the furthest galaxies.

Probably the most famous work written on this topic was William James Varieties of Religious Experience published from a set of lectures given in 1901-2.  James approached his topic from a psychological viewpoint.  He wanted to ensure that what he explored were not experiences programmed into a person by religious institutions but were authentic experiences and expressions of something – perhaps universally human.  He outlined four characteristics of these experiences.  The first was ineffability – beyond words – that the experience pretty much defied expression.  He likened it to trying to bring alive a specific piece of music to a person who can’t hear music at all.  The second was a noetic quality – a quality that is less feeling than knowing.  I feel happy at hearing the laughter of my children – I know my children when I see them.  Yet the knowing that James was speaking of was profound -- he said “they are states of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect.” The third characteristics he cited was transience.  These states can’t be maintained for long – they happen and then he wrote: “they fade into the light of common day.” The last characteristic he cited is contested – that they’re passive – the person may have done all manner of things to invite this state but once it arrives passivity takes over – as though the person is in the grips of something strong and controlling or overwhelming.  It’s contested because this has often been observed not to be the case – as people who go on vision quests can attest.

Other words for these experiences are peak or mystic experiences -- moments when life opens clear, tangible, and profound.  Much of our time is spent on the surface of life – with the groceries – the errands, chores, the stoplights.  Or – at that place where we’re aware all too painfully that life is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.  Sometimes it’s glorious, sometimes awful – but always it’s larger and greater than we are.  Mysterium tremendum, Rudolph Otto, the theologian called it.  The holy is the giant mystery in which we live.  In mystic experience something about the mystery breaks clear and makes sense.  The holy is revealed in some intimate way.

They are peak experiences – times when life is elevated – and they’re remarkably hard to come by – you can’t just try really hard to have a peak experience now.  Mystics have gotten a strange reputation – sometimes the connotation is of someone who might be bizarre, on the fringe, wild haired and wild eyed – wearing a hair shirt and eating peyote buttons.  Irrational.  Even James tended to see them as neurotic. 

There’s a convergence of reasons that we in the Western world have tended to look on mysticism in this way.  First, our own religious traditions – Judaism, Christianity, and even Islam – have been far more about listening to some religious leader tell you the meaning of life and then believing that – following belief rather than exploring meaning in community and testing it against reason and experience.  While each tradition has had its mystics – they’ve been mostly out of favor – too emotional and challenging to structures of interpretation. It can be hard to tell from the histories of the saints if some of them were really mystics or simply delusional.  Second, our history of philosophy has encouraged what can be discovered by reason alone, from the safety of an armchair -- a reasonable pipe of tobacco silhouetted against the flickering hearth.

Third, the realm of feeling has been denigrated over time so that the western world – the one in which we live – has tended to fear feelings.  Feelings can lead us to acts of love or crimes of passion.  But this fear ignores the power that we have to teach and to learn about feeling.  Our unskillfulness with feeling reminds me of Harry Potter and how he accidentally discovers his magic powers and also that he has to learn to govern them – like the time he’s moved to compassion by the snake in the reptile house so that he causes the glass to dissolve and release the snake – to the terror of everybody else or when he angrily inflates his obnoxious aunt.  Even without magical powers, feelings are considered more dangerous than thoughts or ideas – despite the fact that the history of ideas has shown them to be far more dangerous than feelings.  Consider the idea of ethnic cleansing.  You don’t need to stir a mob into a frenzy – just convince them that someone else is dangerous and different and they’ll justify most any behavior.  The idea of one path to salvation has been quite deadly.  In another area -- for centuries the idea prevailed in medical circles that women were too feeling -- “hysterical” governed by their wombs – and therefore their illnesses were easy to dismiss.  Just feelings.  It’s still not uncommon that women’s health issues are dismissed as symptoms of stress.

Fourth, religious practices from around the world were so far outside our frame of reference that they seemed strange – as though spinning in a circle were really any stranger than davening – or chanting in Latin any stranger than chanting in Sanskrit.  In 1995 the best selling poet in the United States, I learned – was Rumi – the Persian Mystic.  So, recently the west has opened its mind to the possibilities of mystics.

            Finally, in the early 20th century scholarly men began to wonder if mystical experiences could be induced chemically – and proven therefore to be of biological origin – universal to human experience if the right neurons were fired.  The yearning for instant insight begat a legacy of serious seekers, scientists, and junkies who hoped to access revelation through the use of chemicals and herbs.  Among some indigenous people the use of substances such as peyote are part of a whole spiritual discipline – a life of purity, prayer, service, schooling the mind before trying a substance – so that the outcome would be not only a test of the person’s courage – but a trusted passage to a new position of spiritual service to the community.  As William Blake also wrote: If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.  Hoping to escape the cave people turn in many directions – but the way is a labyrinth instead of a passageway.   Seeing these seekers inspired folks like Aldous Huxley to experiment with Mescalin.  He wrote: “To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and the inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and - this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially to the intellectual. Let there be a voice to assure them the ultimate Reality remains unshakably itself and is of the same substance as the inner light.”  Yet, Huxley said that mescaline was no substitute for spiritual discipline – or for insights that were wrestled out of the mind with fierce attention – he readily admitted that flinging open the doors of perception with a chemical substance was “cheap grace”.   After Huxley came Timothy Leary and others who hoped to glimpse nirvana through a pill.

And today there are new researchers who think that by stimulating various areas of the brain we might be able to activate what they call a God center.  In Horgan’s book – Rational Mysticism – he described his visit to the laboratory of Michael Persinger of Laurentian University in Ontario who built a machine which generates electromagnetic fields and focuses them on particular regions of the brain’s surface.  Even in a recent article in Scientific American Persinger’s claims were touted as being successful – and yet Horgan not only failed to have more than a warm experience of someone being nearby – but also studied Persinger’s files and interviewed enough of his subjects to learn that the God Helmet had failed to produce God any more than a warm summer day. 

            There have been countless research projects to hook religious persons engaged in prayer or meditation up to machines to see how their brain patterns change.  We want hard evidence – of what?  Many religious practices are meant to focus the mind – to clear away the nonsense that we accumulate in any given week – laundry lists of daily life – and open the inner eyes to insight. 

            Mistakenly people come to meditation expecting that it will calm and focus the mind right away and lead to bliss and clarity in short order.  That often discourages meditators – because, really, it’s like doing scales when learning the piano – not much fun – but utterly needed.  In reality – the practice of meditation is meant to provide practice over time so that the person can learn – slowly, painstakingly, how to pay attention to her surroundings – how to open her eyes and ears – how to perceive clearly – even the most ordinary of things.  So that he truly lives in every moment instead of waiting for the perfect moment – the exciting moment to occur.  The practice of meditation is meant to clear the senses and still the emotions – not so that you don’t perceive or cannot feel – but so that you can do both more clearly and with deeper compassion.

Just as it’s foolish to sit by the fire in the belief that the world can be understood from the safety of the armchair it’s equally absurd to think that by simply tickling the brain or pushing it over the edge -- something revelatory – enduring, worthwhile and true – can be achieved.  We are mind/body, whole persons living in time.  We know the world through mind and senses at once.  To reduce us to intellects alone or to bundles of impulses – is to reduce human life to less than half a life.  To think that we’re capable of being purely rational is to wistfully fool ourselves – time honored – but still fooling ourselves.  We’re not simply rational and almost never rational at the times of life’s greatest meaning.  This summer I got to hear the Reverend Jeremiah Wright preach in Portland – he’s Barak Obama’s minister.   He was talking about the virtues and limitations of rationalism.  And then he said – you know there are some folks who claim that all life can be experienced and understood rationally – and to them I say – tell me – when have you had a rational orgasm.  Well – I wouldn’t say orgasm is a time of life’s great meaning – but, well – never mind.  I can say – I know that I wasn’t rational while in labor.  I know that I was beyond rational when I stood joyfully with my husband to exchange wedding vows.  And I know that while raising children takes every ounce of reason I’ve got – I’d get nowhere without that ineffable, electrifying, sense of miracle that they’re part of my life.

Often people yearn for peak experiences so that they might make sense of the world – especially of the fact of suffering.  In Here If You Need Me by Unitarian Universalist minister and chaplain Kate Braestrup, in heartrending prose describes the work of chaplaincy in the Maine State Park Patrol.  In one chapter she describes the search for a woman lost in the Maine woods.  She never reveals whether the woman is found.  Crews look everywhere – rangers, police, firefighters, even men from the local prison search and all later have warm drinks together on a break.  Braestrup is haunted by the question that comes up among the searchers – where is God in all this?  Why does God allow the many tragedies she sees – we see – in our lives?  And then in the interactions between all the people working together on the search – she sees what she calls God.  This is what it means to say that humans are a meaning making animal.

Life’s peak moments are more than rational.  For them to have meaning, value, and religious dimension they have to engage our understanding and not simply our emotions.  Untrained, unskilled, or broken, the mind can have false, bleak, and even evil perceptions and think they’re the truth.  In addition, our revelations take on the tint of our character and history.  It’s always escaped me how people can see the Virgin Mary on a piece of toast – but I know that cultural training shapes what and how we see.  In our Adult Religious Education Room there’s a beautiful slice of a large old tree which has in its center the exact shape of a chalice.  A tree that lived long in our John Wilms’ back yard and had to be removed.  Was it a miracle?  When I was given a copy of the world’s great religions at a tender age I saw immediately that the holy carried different names, faces, forms, practices – all with equal fervor – all around the world.  I wondered what the holy would be like without all the different names, faces, and forms.  And when I had my own rather mystical experience at an early age it reflected my own background. I experienced, as though from within a million people -- the inherent worth and dignity of each of them – unmediated by thoughts of Gods or angels.  It was direct – it was holy and glorious.  It was an ecstatic rationalism – a mystical humanism – a marriage of wonder and reason.

            In college, Barb, a geology major, brought the Earth to life as she described layer upon layer of rock and fossil in which she saw millions of years of history.  That was ecstatic rationalism – mystical humanism – a marriage of wonder and reason.

            When my youngest was little we had a pretty book of Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.  The pictures charmed me as I often read and sang to her.  But even as I read and sang I was aware that those tiny stars twinkling like diamonds in the sky were fiery giants creating the possibility of life on billions of planets.  It was an ecstatic rationalism – a mystical humanism – a marriage of wonder and reason.

            And when I would hold and rock her it was indeed to hold infinity in my hands and to feel eternity in an hour. It was an ecstatic rationalism – a mystical humanism – a marriage of wonder and reason.

            There’s a Zen expression -- Before you study Zen, mountains are mountains and rivers are rivers. While you are studying Zen, mountains are no longer mountains and rivers are no longer rivers, but once you have had enlightenment, mountains are once again mountains and rivers again rivers.  This ecstatic rationalism is not an otherworld experience – but an intensely this-worldly experience. It’s only reasonable to feel ecstasy, wonder, and awe.  It’s only reasonable to nurture and cultivate the ability to do it well so that our religious practice is informed by healing and compassion.

            William James wrote about my beloved Walt Whitman because his revelations were not couched in traditional religious understanding or language and he’d perceived that even a blade of grass was no less than the journeywork of the stars.  That, too, was an ecstatic rationalism – a mystical humanism – a marriage of wonder and reason.

            The 18th century Jewish mystic the Ba’al Shem Tov said that there were many paths to the holy.  And one person’s path was not for another person.  When you peel away the prescriptions of dogma and leave clear perception the possibility opens up that you’ll find that path.  Further, he said, the holy is not beyond this world – it’s the light in everyone and everything around you.  It is obscured by dogma.  Unitarian Universalism claims, too, that there are many paths and many names for that which is holy – but that each true path answers to reason, compassion, and direct experience.  Unitarian Universalism claims that together we have more hope to find the path than alone – and that our insights are worthless if they are only sights inward and not sights among us. 

            In many ways – as a tradition that asks that we peel away dogma and front the world directly – we ask that our practice be one of cleansing the doors of perception. At our best we ask that of ourselves and support it in one another.  And that reminds me of one of my favorite passages from Willa Cather, “The miracles of the church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always.”  She could have been speaking of our miracles -- ecstatic rationalism – mystical humanism – a marriage of wonder and reason.  With our love and will so may it be.