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Rev. Mark Skrabacz
October 23, 2011
Widening our circle of compassion, opening our hearts, embracing life, living large…these are expressions of growing out, the theme of today’s examination of maturing. Most often, I think of it as unconditional love or attentive presence. This involves learning to acknowledge, allow, open to and inquire into the experience that each of us has of what is, without trying to have some other experience than the one we are in. This can be difficult.
Interestingly, there’s little in our Western experiences of community, religion, spirituality and psychology that helps us develop the capacity for unconditional presence. Most of what we learn in school, church and society sends us an opposite message — setting boundaries, isolating, developing caution and fear. These examples result in the tendency to turn away from aspects of our lives that are painful, unpleasant or threatening. They teach us that we must be strong — and that strength is about having power over. Yet from the East there’s a different lesson. The Tao Teh Ching reveals that genuine power is gentle and kind.
Chapter 8 begins: “The highest good is like water. Water gives life to the ten thousand things and does not strive. It flows in places men reject and so is like the Tao.”
Chapter 13 concludes with this couplet: “Surrender yourself humbly; then you can be trusted to care for all things. Love the world as your own self; then you can truly care for all things.”
In Chapter 22 it says: “Yield and overcome.” And from Chapter 43: “The softest thing in the universe overcomes the hardest thing in the universe.”
Obviously, there is truth in both the teachings of West and East…and the both-and is a preferable balance to the either-or. Yet growing out, as the quality of maturing that we are exploring today asks the question: how can we expand our embrace into a quality of presence, awareness and equanimity that is able to respond with openness to unpleasantries, wherever and whenever they show up, most often in our relationships with family, friends, neighbors and our world?
Consider the idea of healing. We all have our scars. I have scars from various injuries, some more serious than others. They don’t go away no matter how much lotion, or massage or therapy I undertake. I have to learn to live with them. Part of this process is my recognition of how how I was affected. I’ve had to develop a different relationship to my wounds and because of them. Every time I see them and feel them, I recognize what they mean to me. My life has a different shape because of my scars. Healing does not mean the absence of suffering. It means learning from its presence. Recall the final words of the poem (The Cure by Anonymous) read by Eric (Stimmel, Lay Leader) before our time of contemplation.
And life is as natural as a leaf.
That’s what we’re looking for:
not the end of a thing but the shape of it.
Wisdom is seeing the shape of your life
without getting over a single
instant of it.
Have you heard of the practice of Tonglen? It’s described in some of Pema Chodren’s work. Do you know her? She’s a westerner who received training as a teacher of the Kagyu Tibetan Buddhist lineage of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, the wild Tibetan master, author of Cutting through Spiritual Materialism and other powerful books, and who taught in Boulder, Colorado in the ’70s. He founded the Shambhala Training and the Naropa Institute. Chodron has written numerous books, including Getting Unstuck and When Things Fall Apart.
Tonglen is an integrative meditation consisting of a breathing practice with thoughts, visualizations and especially feelings. In Tonglen one vizualizes a real condition for which great compassion is needed, like domestic abuse, and inhales the feelings of pain, violence and anger. You breathe in and actually take on this issue physically, mentally, emotionally and consciously. One literally feels into the condition, making it as imaginatively real as possible. Then with the out-breath, one exhales compassion into the situation. This means one must access genuine compassion in the midst of distress, a beneficial exercise in itself. Tonglen is a practice of a Bodhisattva (translated as “awakened being”), a compassionate one, who willingly takes on and transmutes the energy of violence, hate, abuse, war, terrorism, overpopulation, genocide, environmental degradation and other forms of dis-ease. Tonglen is a very personal practice that can result in very transpersonal changes.
Pema Chodron writes: “If your everyday practice is open to all your emotions, to all the people you meet, to all the situations you encounter, without closing down, trusting that you can do that — then that will take you as far as you can go. And then you’ll understand all the teachings that anyone as ever taught.”
Can you imagine being that open and willing with your embrace?
Maturity begins when we can understand the basic distresses and blocks that are at the root of our immaturity, personally and collectively. I often speak from the pulpit about that which I find to be true and basic. Perhaps a most basic truth has to do with acceptance. No matter where you are or what the circumstances, come to terms and become friendly with yourself and with the present moment. Because if you do not accept the present moment, you’re not friendly with life because life is only now. Some call it “the eternal now.” If you’re not friendly with life, life cannot support you.
The nature of our basic distress as human beings is that we continually judge, reject and turn away from areas of our lives that cause us discomfort, pain or anxiety. We think that if we can just get rid of these areas then we’ll suffer less, we’ll finally be comfortable. What happens however, is that in getting rid of our problems, we simply trade these concerns for a new set of concerns that keep us just as distressed as before, lending truth to the aphorism that what you resist persists. Changing circumstances isn’t the answer. Changing ourselves is.
We are all involved somehow in an inner struggle. It’s the human condition and no one gets a free pass. This inner struggle keeps us inwardly divided. This in antithetical to our nature as individuals; individual means undivided. We are constantly cutting ourselves off from the totality of who we are.
Of this totality, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote (in his essay The Oversoul):
“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…
When it breaks through our intellect, it is genius;
When it breathes through our will, it is virtue;
When it flows through our affections, it is love.”
This is a picture of our true nature. This is our goal. What we mostly experience is an emotional programming that contracts our bodies and minds, shuts us down, like a safety valve, keeping us from flowing when we perceive danger or threat. This is our way of survival, of protecting ourselves. Yet in cutting off our anger, our need for love, our openness, our sexuality, we form negative judgments against these parts of ourselves and of others. Hence we become disabled and disabling of others.
For example, say we didn’t get the love we needed as a child. One typical response is to contract our feelings when this need for love arises. We learned it is simply too painful to feel the rejection or unfulfilment. Hence we develop an emotional pattern or program, such that even as adults, when we continue to feel a need for love, we shut down our awareness of it. We become unable to function in areas of our life that evoke feelings we’ve never been able to tolerate. We contract and close off. This may be at the root of not asking for help and our incessant drive to do it my way. This is 180 degrees from opening our embrace as Einstein suggests (in a Letter of 1950, as quoted in The New York Times 29 March 1972 and The New York Post 28 November 1972 and read by our Lay Leader today as our Call to Worship –
“A human being is a part of the whole, called by us Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security.”) or of the poetic description of Emerson of the soul of the whole.
This programming creates a false self, a personal self-image and identity based on distress. With such a pattern we are faced with the challenge of having to continually display this identity and prop it up like the mask that it is. We fuel it with stories about our reality, our parents, former or current spouses or friends. Stories like: men are emotionally unavailable, women are crazy, certain people can’t be trusted, etc. This petty and divisive false self system can lock us into a distortion of life and drain our energy that instead could be feeding our true nature, that of our larger self — the soul of the whole.
Hence, the call to maturing is a call to recognize this burdensome facade and to become a real explorer of the vast embrace of the Universe.
In order to grow out, to expand our embrace, to welcome what is we must expose our wounds which lie at the root of our disconnection from our larger being. We must engage our suffering directly. Of course, it’s hard to let ourselves feel our pain. We’ve spent our lives masking it, denying it, avoiding it. Our society, education and experiences reinforce the delusion of separateness. As in 12 step recovery work, the first thing we must do is acknowledge our distress, our human condition. That’s one of the reasons we meet here. An important component of our gathering is to connect with ourself and each other in honesty and humility.
There are many ways to observe life. There’s the view that we do make mistakes. We have failed to do as we would. We act and feel imperfectly. There’s also the view that there are no real mistakes, that all things work together to make life what it is.
Nisargadatta Maharaj says: “Nobody ever fails in Yoga. It is all a matter of the rate of progress. It is slow in the beginning and rapid in the end. When one is fully matured, realization is explosive. It takes place spontaneously, or at the slightest hint. The quick is not better than the slow. Slow ripening and rapid flowering alternate. Both are natural and right.”
Whatever our view, let’s get straight with ourselves and each other. We also need each other. We need to receive love — to give love.
And so I encourage us to develop an antidote to the emotional programming of our false self system, and that is in developing unconditional presence and a wider embrace. It starts within each of us. We must connect with that which shuts us down and accept what is. We must exercise our innate awareness to recognize (re-cognize) our dilemma.
I’m no expert in human behavior. Truth is, no one is. That’s because our true nature is unbounded and open-ended. We have yet to experience who we really are, who we fully are. As Unitarian Universalists we are committed by covenant to an exploration of our true and unlimited potential as human beings. We want to see evolution continue and to cooperate with it in every way possible.
I can say with confidence that if we wish to mature, we must learn to bring awareness to our false selves, to bring it out in the open, so that we can stop investing so much energy in propping it up. We must devote more and more of our energy and attention to the fact of our true nature. Our true nature may be seldom seen, but does not have to live for us as merely the poetic and visionary potential of an Einstein or Emerson. We are the people we’ve been waiting for!
Fact is, like the air that surrounds us and often goes unnoticed as a source of the life force in our breathing, unconditional presence is also already always here. It lies within, beneath the layers created by our busy and judgmental minds. Unconditional love and presence is accessible to everyone and is, in fact, our most intimate reality.
Whenever we open into our larger self and our unconditional presence, our conditioned self or our emotional programming tries to run away or else, says, “I know that,” and puts the experience in a familiar box. Fact is, our false selves can’t fix ourselves and neither can anyone else. Our natural opening, maturing and expansive embrace will only come when we can see and feel our truth. And truth shows up against the background of our sustained awareness of our facades, programming and dis-ease.
Sorry, no quick fix. However, like I’m find of saying, “You have to do your work, and you can’t do it alone.” We are a community in covenant to work out our lives together. As our awareness of unconscious patterns of our false selves starts to be seen, it becomes conscious. This awakens our desire and will to a new life. This new life is the life that is our real and present experience, that accepts our life as it is. It takes awareness.
This description may not fit the picture that our mind wants, just as those we are related to don’t always measure up. Folks, the world is in a mess and if you are paying attention, if you live from awareness, you’ll risk heart break. Yet our broken, open and fragile nature is the one that can open wide its arms in expansive embrace. We need to become vulnerable in order to be mature. “The softest thing in the universe overcomes the hardest thing in the universe.” Paradoxically we need to be vulnerable to be solid.
Understanding our false nature and the possibilities of our true nature is a start. It’s the beginning of self-awareness and self-acceptance. It provides compassion for ourselves and for others whom we may begin to understand are afflicted with the same human condition. We need to heal our separation from ourselves and those we meet everyday. We need to heal our separation from the life we know as our daily reality. This is true for us and for our whole world.
Let us join together in opening our arms in a wide embrace. Here’s a vision: imagine opening to all and fully accepting your present reality. Imagine transforming your identity into its full and unique part of the interdependent web of all existence. Imagine living so large that even the specter of death would appear as a friendly and fearless embrace of the Universe, which is not other than you. Our greatest difficulties provide us with our greatest opportunities.
