THE FIRST UNITARIAN CHURCH OF HONOLULU
A Unitarian Universalist Congregation
CONFESSIONS OF A SECULAR HUMANIST MYSTIC
Sermon by Rev. Mike Young
Preached at the First Unitarian Church of Honolulu, December 28, 1997
Thirty-five years ago, if you had called me a mystic, I might have punched you in the mouth. That was about the most superstitious, dumb, weird, insulting thing to be called.
A strange thing happened about 35 years ago. Tim Leary, while he was still only a professor at Harvard University, stumbled across these interesting chemicals--psilocybin and LSD--and was engaged in research trying to figure out what the significance of these might be. Some said they were psychomimetics; that is to say they made people briefly insane. One of the populations they tested the drugs with was a group of life prisoners in Walpole State Prison in Massachusetts. An interesting thing began to happen. When he administered the drug to these folks many of them came back from their eight-to twelve-hour experience under the drug with interesting stories to tell. Largely uneducated, certainly not readers of the classic literature of religion east and west, their description of their experiences sounded like you had flipped open the writings of the great mystics, and started in reading randomly. Well, that wasn't supposed to happen.
As it also happens, I was one of the people that one of his graduate students did some experiments on. I, too, had something like what they experienced in the prison.
Now, suddenly, this word "mystic" took on a somewhat different meaning for me. You see, I was taught as a child that I had this ego that was my eternal soul; and Mike Young was going to exist forever, in the good place or the bad place, but forever. There was also a whole bunch of stuff that I had to get this ego of mine to believe, or else -- good place or bad place. This universe in which I had to believe all of this stuff and in which I at least came to consciousness as this eternal soul--this universe including my body--was dead stuff, a passive backdrop against which the drama of my eternal soul's salvation was played out. That's the picture I went to theological school with. I no longer actually believed in heaven, hell, after-life or soul; but my relationship with my own body and the rest of that universe out there remained essentially unchanged. They were still dead stuff, a backdrop. However, I had lost the story that gave that drama any meaning and had nothing with which to replace it.
In and just after theological school I began to lose the rest of the remaining pieces of the backdrop. The first piece that I lost was my own isolation. It may sound strange to say so, but it was science that did that. I had been a student of science in high school and college. In fact, I could have taken my major exams, in any of five different fields. I had discovered that you could con professors into letting you take upper division courses instead of required lower division courses. They were a whole lot more interesting. You got to count them as the graduation requirements and still got the upper division credit for them.
That being the 1960's, what was then exploding was our understanding of cosmology, our understanding of the interrelationship between everything and everything else, what has come to be called ecology. The details of that interconnectedness was finally beginning to erupt on the consciousness, not only of a few specialists in a few areas of science, but broadly across all of the boundaries and barriers. It began to become plain to me that, when the ancient mystics said, "I am one with the universe," we had taken them to mean "one with the universe" at some incredibly high level of abstraction. At the level of symbol, perhaps, or even merely of the imagination.
What became apparent was that, they were right! And that not at high-flown levels of abstraction but at the most concrete levels of tissue and molecules, The allegation that I am one with the universe is self-evident -- not as something to achieve, but as an already existing fact available to be noticed.
If you were walking on the streets of New York and announced to the world that you were God, they would put you in Bellevue. But isn't it interesting that if you were walking on the streets of Calcutta and announced that you were God, the next Hindu to you would look at you say, "Ah, little slow, weren't you! You finally got it."
This boundary that I call my skin is terribly artificial. My body is exchanging molecules constantly with the universe around it. In fact, every molecule in my body is totally exchanged approximately every seven years. The boundaries that I had been in the habit of taking for granted and establishing and insisting upon were all horribly arbitrary. They are not there except as I impose them. Those boundaries are not insignificant. They can be very useful, except as I fail to notice that I impose them.
Something happened to me in 1965. I went to a Unitarian Universalist Ministers conference, at Esalen Institute. Now Esalen Institute has these incredible hot springs set back into the face of a cliff. There are about eight foot square tubs with huge plugs that you can pull out and fill the tub up with a hundred and five or six degree water. You get down into the tub and look over the Pacific with a misty rain coming down, and step out onto the lip and get all cold, then step back into the nice hot.
I happened to be down at the baths when it was cleaning time. A young woman came in and started to scrub the tub next to me. I said hello to her and attempted to initiate a friendly conversation. She looked over at me and said, "I'm sorry, I only talk to people while I'm holding hands with them."
Well, my wife wasn't there, so . . . She quickly added, "No, I don't mean it that way." And she didn't. But it was true she would only talk to you when she held hands with you.
I said, "Well, let's try that out." And a rather strange event occurred. I could not talk to her the way we normally chitchat while holding hands. I could not talk to her in my then usual style of talking to women, which had a heavy layer of seduction laid over the top of it. You had to talk to her and that interesting phenomenon sent my mind off in a number of directions. One of the sermons on our sermon rack in the entry way contains a version of the sermon that I wrote in response to this experience. It has been published in a number of books since then, from psychology and communications texts to a Disciples of Christ teenagers religious education lesson, picture that! I used to get requests for copies of it from all over the world.
What that young woman in the hot tub forced me to surrender was the notion of my body as this empty husk I occupy. Which is to say I didn't lose my body, I recovered it.
Shortly thereafter, I ran into this very unusual gentleman by the name of Shinryu Suzuki Roshi, Abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center and was introduced for the first time to Buddhism as something that actual human beings do. Buddhism introduced me to the notion of the impermanence of my own soul. As I began to look at that ego that I was raised to believe was my eternal soul I was forced to the inevitable conclusion that, indeed, all of the pieces that I had been running around carefully defending against all of you is completely acquisition. The habits of mine that I got from all of those things being pushed at me as a kid, from experiencing myself reflected back from your eyes, from the habits I acquired, from the experiences that happened to me, from all of the things I end up carrying around with me and mistake for myself; permanence being only the illusion produced by the continuity of memory.
It became fairly obvious that there is no spooky spiritual realm. Between the discovery of how I came to be me and what some of that began to mean, and the science that I was still fascinated with, I concluded that there were only perfectly wonderful ordinary experiences that I don't yet understand. That non-physical, spiritual, spooky realm does not, in fact, add anything to the universe.
This multi-dimensional complexity of universe can only be experienced from a point of view, and I am one of the universe's points of view on the universe's own unfolding drama. The difference that makes is sometimes hard to say, and I may or may not succeed in saying even a small part of it this morning.
The first difference that it makes is that all of our conversations about ethics and morality get dumped into a totally different bucket. No longer does right behavior have to do with whether or not I am following somebody else's rules, including God's, but has to do with the degree in which I am, in fact, paying attention to what's happening in the universe in my general vicinity. It has to do with whether or not I am paying attention to the relationships between myself and others in that environment. For if I am paying attention to those relationships, I need not worry about whether I have behaved rightly. Sometimes I can do the wrong thing and it works. And I remember keenly how often it is possible to do the right thing and it doesn't work. Obeying somebody else's rules is not morality,but the abdication of moral decision making.
One of the problems that this notion creates for an awful lot of people is that, until you have sat and done the job for yourself of peeling the pieces of ego away, none of this means much. It is necessary to sit with the layers of all that and all that, with the pieces of self and peel them away. To sit for a while in the midst of the pile of your own pieces and discover that not only is there not something in the middle of the onion to peel down to, but that it's okay that there isn't.
For me, at least, the notion that there really isn't any me to have an eternal soul dovetails nicely with my observation that one of the things the universe does not do is be boring. I can't think of anything more boring than to do Mike Young over again. I did that; I'm doing that. It does mean that I find myself taking doing that with a degree of seriousness that somehow was badly undercut in those days when I thought I was an eternal soul, worried only about believing the right things in order to go to the good place or the bad place.
If this is what there is-- right here, right now--there is a kind and quality of attention that needs to be paid to it that is quite different from watching over your shoulder to see whether you're getting good marks or bad marks in the great Book of Life in the sky somewhere. Indeed, my suspicion is that the following story is absolutely true.
There was, once upon a time, a gentleman who obeyed all the rules. He did everything correctly. He did not ever at any time sin, and then he died. As he stood before St. Peter, St. Peter went through the book, got really flustered and said, "Ah, I think I'd better kick this one upstairs." Yahweh himself came down to the throne of judgment and took a look at the book. He said, "Mr, do you realize that it says here that you never did anything wrong!"
"Yes, sir," he said. "I never have. I have always obeyed the law, the rules, ethics, morality. I have always obeyed.""Yes," said God, "and according to the book you like to bored us to tears. Now, you're going to have to go back down there and do it all over again until you get it right !"
And this is how reincarnation was invented.
Will You Not Stand Naked
Will you not stand naked before the stars
And rise into the mystery of life unbound, unfettered?
Who are you to carry all that baggage!
Every dent in the fender is moaned over
As if it were your own shin or, worse,
your own honor somehow marred.
Ancient witches turned princes into frogs.
We work a weirder magic still.
We turn ourselves into things and roles
And imagined images conjured into
Stuff and nonsense, glued like camouflage
So successfully that we have disappeared.
We are not the things. What thing
Have you not survived the loss of!
What role have you not put on
And taken off again like a mask
At a masquerade ball! Even this mortal flesh
Which does seem so substantially you
Completely exchanges its molecules
With the ever-enveloping universe
Every seven years or so. Your past,
What you have done, you are not bound to.
Nor your future. If your dreams and desires fail,
You are not destroyed; or if you succeed,
You are not bound to that either.
Will you not stand naked before the stars
And know that you have surrendered nothing ?
What is it that could be lost!
The things are gone but you knew they would crumble.
Your image, so carefully manicured,
Has changed a dozen times or more.
Your roles were for the doing of this and that,
And when this or that are done,
They are like an outgrown sloughed-off snake skin.
Whatever small or large amount of truth
And worth was in that image of your
Self lives in the memory of those who cared about you.
That's all you wanted of it anyway.
The rest was sham to start with.
Your body, too, will change, but it was changing daily;
And you got so used to that you hardly noticed.
Past and future are as much yours as they ever were.
You will be on to other things as you always were
For all the anxiety and nostalgia you indulged in.
And if you die ? Ah, if you die,
Your relationship to what's out there has changed,
That's all. It always was, from day to day,
And is no more or less unknown now than then.
Will you not stand naked before the stars
And let that icy anxious thrill transform itself
From fear to ecstacy ?
To set your baggage down and to shed your armor,
To peel away the layers to the silent naked center
Is not loss, is not becoming less but more.
In the stillness of the moment after
That sharp intake of breath, Ah !
There ! There is a brief glimpse
Of a you worthy of standing naked before the stars.
Under the layers of all that and all that,
Were you not there, before the stars,
Naked always, after all ?
Will you not therefore arise
Into the mystery of life unbound, unfettered ?--Mike Young
The Universe Is One
The universe is one,
One unfolding event
And one only.
From the heart of star heat
Starting the chain of thing-making
Out of pure exuberant motion,
Unbroken; to the tight coils of life
That crawl from cooling seas,
Unbroken; to dream-making man and woman
Awed by the mystery of knowing.
One event, one being.
Who am I ? Thou art that !
Fooled by point of view into
Lonely Isolation, filling
The imagined void with a heady stew
Of superstition, dreamtime truths
Misperceived and impossible reports
Of soul-travelers scared crazy
By the vision of that one.
Building out of fear and guilt
An angry, judging moralist
Petty potentate of a god
To condemn the imagined sin
Of selfhood.
Who am I ? Thou art that !
The exhilarating adventure
Of trying every form and formless
Possibility. Each of us
A point of view from which
The universe observes itself
From within itself and awakens
To look out of and into its own eyes.
Each incarnated point of view unique
And impossibly important,
For even the gods do not know as we know.
And because you are that one !
Such a one !
It is your incarnation
To be this fragile individual
To the hilt.--Mike Young
Something Erupts As Flesh
There is something that erupts in flesh
like breath rushing in at birth,
a witness looking out through eyes,
suddenly someone home inside the skin bag
a few dollars worth of chemicals and water
can't account for. Or is the unaccountability
in our ignorance of the subtle power
of clay! It seems so ordinary.
bricks and vessels, sculpted playthings
for the hand or mind, its power
receptiveness, to passively accept
the artist's vision or the workman's plan,
to receive the stamp of thought
and come alive. Born of mind
and clay; of dust, of dirt.
Breath, life, thought . . . and dirt.
We are still corn-fed but no longer see
in corn the ear, the stalk,
the rootedness in soil. The earth
for us is not alive, not soil but dirt.
Sweep this dirty floor! Wash those
dirty hands, dirty socks, dirty minds!
Soil inconvenient to our purposes is dirt.
"Can spirits really put on dirty flesh ?"
they asked. And, knowing urine, pus and spittle,
they concluded thoughts must only seem
to merge with clay's corruptions.
"The form, the pattern, image, thought,
stays pure," they said, "shaping passive substance
Dirt despite itself is lifted up
by uncorrupted thought's creative power.
Spirit calls life forth from clay."
And so, we looked for God beyond the most
insistent stuff-ness of this world of dirt.
Life seemed to flesh a body-snatching alien.
Flesh seemed to life a snare and prison.
Ahura Mazda constantly at war with Ahriman.
God and Satan, good and evil, life and death,
flesh and spirit, sacred and profane.
The universe was sliced in two
because we did not understand
the subtle chemistry of clay.
Form is what substance does.
The primal chaos is not formless
but an explosion of infinities of form.
With ever-increasing power
of microscope and telescope, the swirls
of patterns within patterns are found
waiting for discovery.
The vision of ordered form emerges
from the very stuff on which
our misconceiving mind would press it.
We are perhaps clay's tool to shape itself,
evoking in the human potter
the vision to be rescued from the mud.
There is something that erupts as flesh
in the unsuspecting chemistry
as unprecedented as each prior eruption was.
Big bang and star birth, heavy metal soup from supernova,
cooling blue water planet and replicating molecule.
Its lineage a litany of surprises,
this living thought incarnate,
this awakened fleshly vessel,
this gasp of awe, the realization:
the universe is not sliced in two.
There is something
that erupts in flesh like breath--Mike Young
The First Unitarian Church of Honolulu