The Simple Truth

Here's something for a Sunday, also known as First Day ...

 

In a rare moment of perfect clarity the other day I suddenly realized that the fundamental truth I believe in is absolutely simple. But before I set down what it is, some background is in order.

The path of my spiritual quest has been a long and winding one. I was born Catholic, but my parents left the church (excuse me, "The Church") when I was about five years old, leaving me only the dimmest memories of candles, incense, and priests intoning Latin prayers. We spent some time as Unitarians until my dad left us and decided he was agnostic if not atheistic. Later still my mom joined a Congregational church until she moved and became Presbyterian. (If we can believe a recent poll, such church-hopping is widespread in contemporary America.)

So you could say I come from a family of seekers. First my parents and then the Unitarians had encouraged me to figure things out for myself, to discover what I believed rather than being told. Accordingly, while still a child I experimented with both prayer and self-hypnosis. Of the two, hypnosis seemed the most promising to me. While saying the words of a prayer I was acutely conscious of talking to myself with no one listening. On the other hand, my attempts to hypnotize myself (inspired by an article in a magazine) were really the first steps toward meditation, the inward focus which I later came to believe was the best path to true spiritual awareness.

 
While I was in junior high school and still attending the Unitarian "Liberal Religious Youth" meetings, Alan Watts began to broadcast his weekly Public TV program from San Francisco called "The Way of Zen." These wonderful 30-minute lectures, delivered in Watts' calm and measured tones, were like an oasis of sanity in the chaos of the rest of my life. Covering the philosophy and practices of not only Zen but traditional Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism, the real subject was Watts' own philosophy, culled from all these sources in the Orient. This led me to try a form of meditation, a simple focusing of the mind by staring into a candle flame. 

Watts had become my first guru, or spiritual teacher. Through the course of the 1960's and 70's I seem to have consumed most of the books he published as fast as they came out. Besides The Way of Zen they included This is It, Psychotherapy East and West, The Joyous Cosmology, and one of my favorites, THE BOOK: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are. 

This last volume includes a wonderful creation myth that he invented to tell children. It goes something like this:

In the beginning God was all alone. He had no one to play with. So what he did was to split himself up into millions and millions of pieces, putting a little bit of himself into each piece. And he arranged that each piece should forget who it was, so that they could go out and play with each other and have the great adventure of discovering their true identity.

What a story! His point, of course, is that to declare that we are God is the greatest blasphemy in our society, as well as definitive proof that we are stark raving nuts. Yet it is the ultimate truth taught by many of the world's religions and philosophies. It is certainly the belief of Quakers, who hold that "there is that of God in everyone," and who practice sitting in silence to attune themselves to the "still, small voice within" that comes from the deepest part of ourselves, the part that is connected to, and at one with, the supreme consciousness. In Hinduism one of the aspects of God is atman, the part that dwells within the human. It is not a separate entity but rather the unifying connection between us and the divine. And wasn't Jesus trying to tell us that we are all children of God, not just him?

Suffice to say that in my better moments I have been on this path ever since, looking for that connection to my own true identity. Sometimes I have become lost in the world and forgotten what the point of it all is, and other times something has called me back to the quest. I read many other books, including the Tao Te Ching, the ancient Taoist text that is a model of simplicity, William James' Varieties of Religious Experience, Aldous Huxley's The Perennial Philosophy, and Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, a wonderful collection of stories about the Zen masters of China and Japan. I read Carl Jung's autobiography, Memories, Dreams and Reflections, some of Carlos Casteneda's dubious volumes about his Yaqui Indian teacher, Don Juan, as well as The Tibetan Book of the Dead. I read the essays of naturalist Loren Eisley, and about the search for the ultimate size and shape and nature of the universe as it is being explored through science.

Through it all I had countless hours of discussion with my friend, artist Richard Sevigny, comparing the Christian mystical tradition with that of the East. And always I looked for direct religious experience of my own in many places, including yoga, psychoactive drugs, and Transcendental Meditation. 

The Question 

Years passed. I grew up and grew older, became comfortable with what I knew and what I thought I believed and did not believe. I had got to a point where I didn't really think about it anymore. Then one day, not long after I began attending the Miami Friends Meeting, my sister-in-law asked me point blank, "Do you believe in God?"

I was disconcerted to find that the question brought me up short. I flipped through the catalog of things I knew and thought, trying to figure out if the complex mess of readings, meditations, conversations, and life experiences in my head amounted to a belief in God. I can't even remember exactly how I replied except that it amounted to a kind of, sort of, qualified, yes.

How could that be? Wasn't I sure after all those years? Was it just a question of terminology? Of course I didn't think there was a bearded old man in the sky demanding my worship and obedience, but that wasn't the question. The real question was, could I apply the name of God to whatever it was that I did believe in? But what I believed had come from so many sources, and had as much to do with science and philosophy as it did with religion and spiritual things. It was just too complicated.

I suppose I have continued to look for the answer for the past several years. But in Quaker fashion I have done so mostly by sitting quietly and waiting to see what comes to me. And finally, with a calm certainty, like the proverbial pool of water settling until it becomes clear, I came to this:

I believe that only one thing exists.

It is huge, multifaceted, complex beyond imagining, at once infinitely large and incomprehensibly small. We are all in it, yet it lives in us as well. The simple fact that it exists is so obvious it is almost impossible to frame a way to question it. It is the forest we can't see for the trees. It is sometimes called "reality." We may as well name it God. And not to believe in it is to deny all the evidence of our minds and senses.

There is a Zen story that points in the right direction: One day the student comes to his master and says, "I've reached enlightenment. Nothing exists." Whereupon the master smacks him in the head with his fan. "Ouch!" says the startled student. "If nothing exists," the master says, "then what are you complaining about?"

It's that simple. If we don't believe in God, then what is this all around us, smacking us in the face every moment? What is this divine spark within us that can contain the concept of an entire universe in each of our heads?


I don't believe in God also, I believe in God only.

That's it. That's all it is. Everything else I can say about it is mere embroidery. The divine being that the world's religions have been urging us toward is no different from that Holy Grail of modern science, the Grand Unified Theory that will describe all the laws of nature as the operation of a single law that includes them all. The equations will be written in the language of mathematics, but the subject will be the same as the holiest of sacred books, because there is nothing else to write about but all there is.

Time to be quiet now. Listen--you can hear it happening.

Wearing the Flag

Hey, what's that in your lapel? 





So here it is, the 4th of July, which is why I'm posting this a day earlier than my usual Saturday morning update, and I'm thinking about the wearing of the flag.-- particularly those lapel pins that have become a fetish of our elected officials since 9/11/01. (And it's important to remember how recent this custom is.)



I'm saddened that Barrack Obama, who once looked ready to take a stand against this mindless substitute for what he rightly called "true patriotism," has bowed to public expectations in recognition that elections are ruled by symbols more than by ideals. At least "sometimes" the candidate now sports this tiny bit of metal on his jacket just so no one can interpret his refusal to do so as a form of disrespect, not to say subversion.




Recently NPR ran a story comparing the flag shirt worn by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff with the one Abbie Hoffman was notoriously arrested in back in 1968. (You can read and hear the story here.) The short version is that Hoffman, who was protesting at the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings on the Chicago riots, had bought his shirt at Sears -- which would seem to indicate that there were a large number of them in circulation at the time. Yet the police who nabbed him not only used his "desecration" of this holy object as a chargeable offense, but actually ripped it from his back, arguably doing more desecration than Hoffman had by wearing it. I suppose people were just supposed to buy these shirts and then frame them or run them up a pole in order to show respect..



Yet here was the modern Chairman-General cavorting in the street with his motorcycle-riding fellow Vietnam Vets in strikingly similar garb. What gives? It's not that people now are any less rabid about the hallowed bunting. In fact, it is entirely possible that legislation will pass that will prohibit the burning of the flag, considered by some to be protected as freedom of expression. (Visit the Flag Burning Page for more info, where you can burn a virtual flag if you are so inclined, at least so long as it is still legal to do so.)



Evidently who you are largely determines whether your wearing of the flag is considered patriotic or sacrilegious. And this is regardless of the fact that many long-standing uses of the flag -- for example, draping podiums or printing it on postage stamps -- really should not be allowed under the official Flag Code, which only dates from 1942 anyway.



Maybe those lapel pins really bother me because they are so similar to the ones that used to be worn in the Soviet Union by Communist Party members. All those little red stars and hammers-and-sickles seemed so evil back then, and the comparable use of the US flag pin by government officials smacks of the same regimentation -- especially if it becomes an obligatory badge of membership in an elite group of power-mongers.




Come to think of it, the Nazis were big on party jewelry too -- so much so that before we went to war against them little swastika pins and tie tacks and earrings were all the rage right here in the USA, and were even sold at stores like Tiffany's. (Picture Holly Golightly breakfasting in those!)  Maybe that's why the red star, abandoned by Russia, was so quickly adopted as the logo of Macy's department stores.



So please, Barrack, and anyone else -- before you go sticking those things in your lapels, give some thought to the Nazis and Communists. You know what happened to them, right? What? You say this is different? Well, perhaps you can explain how ...

The Energy Crisis: Just What We Need

Necessity is a mother, all right ...



I'm in denial about the oil shortage. I've put myself on a budget where I'm only allowed to put $30 worth of gas in my tank each week and then I try to make it last by planning my travel and using public transit sometimes. That way I can ignore the fact that filling up would cost me over $60, though I remember filling my 1960 VW for about $4.50.



Seems like nationally we have really short memories. On the news the current prices are being compared to those "much lower ones" of a year or two ago, back when it was below $3.00 a gallon, as if that's as far back as the records go. But you don't have to be very old to remember when it was way less than that. On the famous date of 9/11/2001 we were paying about $1.50 a gallon on average. And just a few months later, around New Year's Day 2002, I visited my family in Central Florida where the prices are somewhat lower and seized the opportunity to fill my tank for only 99.9 cents per gallon, just so I could tell people back home that I had done it. But the joke was on me -- if I'd waited till I was a few miles down the road I could have had it for 97.9 cents!



An interesting footnote to this is that while I was at the gas station I picked up a bottle of water for the trip and paid $1.29 for a liter -- approximately $4.96 per gallon. For water! Well, at least it was chilled. Personally I'd rather pay 5.00 for the gas and 1.00 for the water. Maybe we'll get there someday when world economics have sorted this mess into something more sensible.



Of course, us old timers can remember prices that make even 97 cents seem outrageous. When I was a kid in the early 1950's competing stations sometimes had "gas wars," driving the prices down to unbelievable levels. We're talking less than 20 cents per gallon at a time when a loaf of bread was about 15 cents. Maybe that's a measure of what the price should be: 1 gallon = 1.33 loaves of bread.



Once my father asked the station owner how he could make any money with the price so low. The guy just grinned and confessed that he and his "competitor" on the opposite corner had worked a deal where they would take turns having the lowest price. The "Gas War!" signs that they both displayed were a great way to bring in customers for both of them. At last, an honest man!



There have certainly been times when the situation was lots worse than it is now. How about gas rationing during World War II, when you couldn't get gas at all without your coupon? Or the shortage during the Iran crisis in 1978-9 with gas lines and limits on how much you could buy?



But we seem to sense that the situation now is something new and different. It's pretty clear that prices will remain high and the supply will continue to shrink as we approach the final end of what we can pump out of the ground. With both China and India rapidly catching up to our own flagrant consumption levels, the situation can only get worse from here on out.



Which brings us to why this crisis is exactly what we need. Let's face it, we don't do anything in this country until it becomes a crisis. But when we do, we often surprise ourselves with what is possible. During that shortage in 1979 I read an interesting magazine article called "The Great Energy Crisis of 1550." The author's point was that back then the problem was that Europe was out of wood, and wood was everything -- both the principle fuel and building material of the age. It was one of the main reasons for colonization, to insure a supply of fresh forests once Europe was denuded of them. The tallest and straightest trees in North America were soon marked as reserved for the masts of the Royal Navy.



The unforeseen development of course was that technology was about to move into a new age of coal and iron and steam and mass production. And after only a century of that it was time to start burning oil instead, and then driving everything with electricity. Meanwhile Europe reforested to the extent that there are more trees in it now than there were 400 years ago. If history is any gauge then we are due for another and even larger shift into using the raw energy of the sun itself, as well as other resources that cannot be depleted, such wind and waves and tidal forces which also derive from the sun. Beyond that may lie even more incredible options -- maybe creating our own suns with water and nuclear fusion.



So cheer up, fellow travelers -- the worse it gets, the faster we'll have to invent our way out the mess, and the sooner we can get on with the next stage of civilization. Meanwhile, keep this card ... you may need it.