Hacking Transcendence

Rev. Chris Jimmerson
March 11, 2018
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

Neuroscience and other research is learning more and more about what is happening in our brains and in our bodies during spiritual / transcendent / flow / peak experiences. Organizations from the Navy Seals to Google have been exploring ways to help their people reach these altered states more easily and more quickly, as such experiences can increase creativity, productivity, and team cohesion.

Call to Worship

Now let us worship together.
Now let us celebrate our highest values.

Transcendence
To connect with wonder and awe of the unity of life.

Community
To connect with joy, sorrow, and service with those whose lives we touch.

Compassion
To treat ourselves and others with love.

Courage
To live lives of honesty, vulnerability, and beauty.

Transformation
To pursue the growth that changes our lives and heals our world.

Now we raise up that which we hold as ultimate and larger than ourselves.
Now we worship, together.

Readings

THE NIGHT HOUSE
– Billy Collins

Every day the body works in the fields of the world
Mending a stone wall
Or swinging a sickle through the tall grass-
The grass of civics, the grass of money-
And every night the body curls around itself
And listens for the soft bells of sleep.

But the heart is restless and rises
From the body in the middle of the night,
Leaves the trapezoidal bedroom
With its thick, pictureless walls
To sit by herself at the kitchen table
And heat some milk in a pan.

And the mind gets up too, puts on a robe
And goes downstairs, lights a cigarette,
And opens a book on engineering.
Even the conscience awakens
And roams from room to room in the dark,
Darting away from every mirror like a strange fish.

And the soul is up on the roof
In her nightdress, straddling the ridge,
Singing a song about the wildness of the sea
Until the first rip of pink appears in the sky.
Then, they all will return to the sleeping body
The way a flock of birds settles back into a tree,

Resuming their daily colloquy,
Talking to each other or themselves
Even through the heat of the long afternoons.
Which is why the body-the house of voices-
Sometimes puts down its metal tongs, its needle, or its pen
To stare into the distance,

To listen to all its names being called
Before bending again to its labor.

THE GUEST HOUSE
– Jellaludin Rumi

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice.
meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.
Be grateful for whatever comes.
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

Sermon

In a remote area of northeastern Afghanistan, an elite team of the already elite Navy SEALS special forces was on the move. Known as the Special Development Group, or DEVGRU, their mission was to capture Al-Wazu, an Al-Qadea terrorist who had recently escaped a U.S. detention facility. Al-Wazu could provide invaluable intelligence, so it was essential that the team capture him alive.

As they moved stealthily toward a compound of buildings where they knew Al-Wazu was hiding, a switch flipped within each of them. Their brainwave patterns began to synchronize. The composition of the neurochemicals in their brains changed in similar ways.

Suddenly, they were a collective, not individual actors. In this state of altered consciousness, this group flow state, they were able to move both quickly and quietly, communicating without verbalizations and with minimal physical gestures.

Their movements became synchronized. Their division of scanning for potential enemies, side to side, ahead and behind became automatic. The person best positioned to take leadership changed as needed without discussion or debate.

As they approached the compound, they automatically split into teams that would surround it, as well as an assault team that would enter the the compound and attempt the capture.

The first room the assault team entered was empty, but the next room was crowded with armed guards mixed in with unarmed women and children. It was vital that the assault team be able to disarm the guards with as little fire fighting and unarmed casualties as possible.

And in their state of altered consciousness, they were able to do exactly that – read even minute facial expressions or body movements; sweeping in to capture each of the guards quickly and disarm them.

Leaving a couple of their team behind to watch over the guards and civilians, the remainder of the team entered the next room, only to immediately encounter Al-Wazu himself, sitting in a chair, an AK-47 rifle in his hands.

It would have been so easy to react immediately and fire upon him. In a normal state of consciousness, anyone of the team might have quite rationally thought, “better to strike immediately than to give him time to open fire with the automatic weapon in his hands”.

But they didn’t. In theIr altered state, each of them had processed almost instantaneously that Al-Wazu’s eyes were closed. He was fast asleep.

They made the capture without firing a shot, without any bloodshed.

And they could do so because they had been selected and trained for this ability to enter into a group flow state.

Back in the U.S., an artist was installing her interactive sculpture, sound and light experiential art piece.

As she worked, she lost all sense of time. Time seemed to slow or perhaps to just lose all meaning.

Her sense of self dissolved into an experience of being part of something larger than her – something that was luring her to create the piece of art that was coming to be all around her. The act of creation felt effortless, and she felt a great sense of richness, a vividness, an aliveness.

In this flow state, she experienced a sense of right place and well being. She felt a great sense of belonging and connection, even though at the present moment she was physically completely alone.

If someone could have scanned her brainwave patterns at that very moment, they would have looked almost identical to those of that DEVGRU team during their mission in Afghanistan.

Interestingly, though she would not have used this same terminology, she had designed her art installation to stimulate virtually the same neurological responses.

In a lab in another part of the country, a neuroscientist who specialized in neurotheology was studying long-term meditators and other spiritual practitioners to examine what was happening with their brainwaves, neurochemicals, breathing, heart rates, etc. when they entered a state of altered consciousness that these practices could bring about.

These states have been described as nirvana, transcendent, an experience of the holy and in many other ways depending upon the religion involved.

Had this scientist been able to compare his neurological and biological findings from these spiritual practitioners with our artist and our Navy seals team, once again, he would have discovered remarkably similar results.

The neuroscientist as well as many others have also taken these findings and created biofeedback mechanisms that can help newer meditators, for example, reach the desired state of altered consciousness much more quickly than the years of practice it can otherwise sometimes take. By providing instantaneous feedback on heart rate, brainwave patterns, and the like, scientists have been able to help people more quickly focus their spiritual practices.

And this may be consequential, because other research has found that more frequent experiences of such altered states are associated with increased life satisfaction, a greater sense of belonging, increased compassion and empathy and higher levels of cooperative social behavior to name just a few of the potential benefits.

Maybe that is why Google has worked with Stephen Cotler and Jamie Wheal of the Flow Genome Project to install a prototype research and training center dedicated to helping Google’s employees experience such altered states of consciousness.

They call it “Flow Dojo”. Cute, huh?

Now, it turns out, experiences of art, music, nature, beauty, extreme physical activity, strong connections with others and certain types of sound and visual stimuli can also spontaneously generate these altered states of consciousness.

So, the Flow Dojo” prototype combines training in classical techniques such as meditation with biofeedback, art, music and the like, along with machines that can safely simulate the gravitational, centrifugal and other forces associated with extreme sports.

You see, while extreme sports can be be one of the most powerful ways of inducing an altered state of consciousness, a flow or transcendent or peak experience, they can also be, by their very nature, very dangerous. Take for example, wing suit gliding through mountain caverns and caves.

This is a sport wherein one straps on a suit that creates more bodily surface areas by stretching fabric between the legs and under the arms, essentially creating winglike structures that allow one to glide like a bird after launching from a high altitude, in this case swooping through the narrow, rock wall crevices of mountainous caverns and caves.

You can probably already imagine the potential problem. It is far too easy to make a navigational error that sends the extreme sports enthusiast smack into one of those rock walls.

For me, smashing into a rock wall at a high rate of speed followed by falling to my death on the rocky ground hundreds to thousands of feet below, would just ruin any peak experience I might just have had.

So the Flow Genome Project and Google provide machines that allow folks to experience the state of mind induced by this and other extreme sports but to do so safely.

Why are Google and other companies investing in how to help their employees experience these altered states of consciousness more deeply and more often?

Why are the Navy Seals and other areas of the military hacking transcendence?

Because it turns out the advantages they can convey upon individuals are also beneficial to the workplace and in combat situations.

These altered states have been shown to increase creativity in the workplace even after employees have returned to a more normal state of consciousness.

The sense of selflessness, timelessness, effortlessness and richness that occurs while in a state of flow, like I mentioned with our artist earlier, can also create a sense of cohesiveness and cooperation in the work place, increase job satisfaction, enhance productivity and deepen commitment.

Google employees have reported that after undergoing training at the Flow Dojo center, they found themselves more often slipping into a flow state at work and at home without even trying.

Now I should mention that Cotler and Wheal, in their book, “Stealing Fire” and elsewhere, describe certain types of excessive sex, drugs and extreme breath holding that can also induce an experience of transcendence.

To my knowledge, Google hasn’t been training their employees in these areas, and I should note that I am in no way recommending excessive sex, drugs, extreme breath holding or any combination thereof as a means of obtaining transcendence.

And no, I don’t know how “excessive” is defined in this context.

Researchers also warn that there are also potential dangers in all of this knowledge we are gathering about what happens in our brains and bodies when we experience a flow state.

For example, advertisers could insert in their ads visual, sound and other cues that tend to induce these brain wave patterns, to manipulate us into associating I their product with the heightened sense of wellbeing that often results.

Extreme sports and some of the drugs that can lead to experiencing flow, can also be highly addictive.

It is possible that such altered states of consciousness can themselves become addictive as people learn to more easily enter into them. Their is some early evidence of this.

The thing is, we can’t function if we live in these states of transcendent experience all of the time. The idea is that we carry out of them values and understandings that enhance our day to day functioning and state of mind. Jack Cornfield, American Buddhist, author and teacher writes about this in his book, “After the Ecstasy, the Laundry.“

As a minister, I worry that these scientists, the military and Google learning more and more about how to hack transcendence are going to put me right out of my job.

In fact, I was going to call this sermon, “Google is Really Pissing Me Off,” but I wasn’t sure if I could say that in the sanctuary.

Oops. Actually I think that these things we are learning from science can help inform how we do church and can supplement and enhance our personal spiritual practices.

Maybe I’ll have one of those extreme sports contraptions installed in the back parking lot.

And though we are learning much about what is going on neurologically and biologically when we have these experience, for me at least, this in no way robs them of a spiritual dimension nor does it remove a sense of awe, wonder and mystery.

We still have much to explore about why we have this ability to enter these altered states and why it seems beneficial to us to do so. This may be yet another area where religion and science have the potential to inform rather than be in conflict with one another. After all, it is entirely possible that religious rites and rituals may well have been among the earliest ways we learned to hack transcendence.

And I do think that especially for us as Unitarian Universalist, these peak or transcendent experiences are a core element of our faith going back at least to our transcendentalist forbearers.

We list them as the first of the six sources of our faith. Here in this church, we list first among our religious values that we read together earlier – “Transcendence – To connect with wonder and awe of the unity of life”.

So the rituals, music, sermons, readings, fellowship opportunities and other activities we engage in here at the church are intended at least in part to help lead us into this type of experiences.

I know for me, very often our music program moves me into an altered and wonderful state of being. Another recent example was when Meg talked about the “me too” movement and then offered a ritual folks could participate in afterwards.

It was moving and powerful and difficult and cathartic, and I suspect for many of us it forever altered our consciousness about the subject.

And I think that a key reason we seek such experiences when we have gathered as a religious community is that they can help move us toward and even into another of our religious values transformation, which we define as “To pursue the growth that changes our lives and heals our world”.

In describing transformation this way, we are basically talking about creating the Beloved Community.

Now the term, “Beloved Community” get used fairly frequently in religious circles. Today though, I am using it with specific meaning.

Part of that meaning is the community of love, compassion, empathy and care we work to create here at the church. We do so through our covenant – a set of promises we make to one another about how we will walk together in the ways of love.

And this is not a sappy, sugary-sweet view of beloved community. It acknowledges that creating such a religious community is hard work. We need our covenant precisely because we will fail each other and ourselves sometimes, and our covenant helps us get back to the ways of love and right relationship.

We do so because it is worth it. As one theologian put it, the divine is to be found in the messiness of making and maintaining loving religious community together.

Another part of the meaning of Beloved Community is our participation-in a much broader movement to create more loving and just relationships and institutions in our larger world. This is the Beloved Community which Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King envisioned.

Here is how one of King’s followers described Beloved Community, “an inclusive, interdependent space based on love, justice, compassion, responsibility, shared power and a deep and abiding respect for all people, places and things that radically transforms individuals and restructures institutions.”

So, beloved community calls us to dismantle racist systems and institutions for instance – indeed it calls us to work for justice against all forms of oppression as well as the betterment of all living creatures and our environment.

It requires transformation that changes our lives and heals our world.

“An inclusive space based upon love, justice, compassion, responsibility, shared power and a deep and abiding respect for all people, places and things… “

Wow. I think creating that might be yet another way we could hack transcendence, radically transforming ourselves and revealing our path toward restructuring our institutions to benefit all people and our world.

That is transcendence beckoning us toward transformation.

That is the power of Beloved Community.

And amen to that.

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 18 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.