Call to Celebration

Drawn by curiosity, like ants to honey,
we gather this morning drawn by desire
Some stumble out of an emotional desert thirsting living water.
Others arrive with pockets full of plenty looking for a way to give.
Some are confused by arguing voices in their heads
and want to sort them out.
Others are overwhelmed by the spiritual bazaar available today
and are seeking guidance.
Yet others are clear in what they think and believe
and want to be tested and challenged.

Each of us is driven by a desire and brings an expectation.
We hope this will be the day when we have that desire fulfilled.
That this will be the day we are graced with enlightenment.
I tell you, this will be the day that your desire is fulfilled.

Watch carefully for you may miss it.
It could be hidden in the music.
It could happen during joys and concerns.
Listen for it in the songs we sing.
It will be there in the sermon.
The Spirit of Life is here, right now.
All you need do is open the eyes of your eyes
And the ears of your ears.
Help yourself, there is plenty for everyone.
Come let us join together in the celebration of life.

CENTERING

From the introduction to volume 8 of Ken Wilber's collected writings.

Science and religion, science and religion, science and religion. Their relationship really will drive humanity insane, if only humanity were sensitive enough. As it is, their relationship is merely fated to be one of those damnable dyads--like mind and body, consciousness and matter, facts and values--that remain annoying thorns in philosopher's sides. Ordinary men and women, on the other hand, have always drawn freely on both science (or some sort of technical-empirical knowledge) and religion (or some sort of meaning, value, transcendental purpose, or immanent presence). Still, how to fit them together: "Ah, and there's the rub," as Shakespeare would say.

[My] two books, The Marriage of Sense and Soul--Integrating Science and Religion and One Taste (the journals I kept while writing and publishing Sense and Soul). ...are devoted, in their own ways, to the relationship of science and spirituality, the former, in a scholarly fashion, the latter, according to my own personal experiences. I believe both books are advancing points that are not getting a hearing in the typical debates on these issues. I also suspect that these points will, for the most part, continue to be neglected, because they champion a direct experience of Spirit, and not simply ideas about Spirit. In other words, I am attempting to include direct contemplative and meditative spirituality in this debate, whereas most writers on the topic simply want to discuss the philosophical or scientific ideas involved: not direct experience but abstractions. It is as if a group of scholars were discussing the beaches of Hawaii, and instead of going to Hawaii and looking for themselves, they simply pulled out a bunch of geography books and studied them. They study the maps, not the territory itself, which always seemed rather odd to me.

Surely there is room for both--direct spiritual experience, and more accurate maps and models of those experiences.

But what if, instead of science telling us about one floor [of reality] and religion about another, they both told us something different about each and every floor? What if science and religion were related, not as floors in a building, but as equal columns in a mansion? Not one on top of the other, but each alongside the other, all the way up and down? What then?

SERMON

Resolving the rift between science and religion is deeply personal for me. I was raised by a father who is a high priest of science - a retired professor of physical chemistry for the University of Delaware. I loved science as a child and looked up to my father as an exemplar of the scientific method of discovering truth. Repeatable experimentation was the enlightened path to knowledge for me. Those fossilized, sooth saying charlatans in the irrational religious world were self-deluded crackpots. Christians, in particular, were caught in an archaic system of thought that became obsolete hundreds of years ago. I continue today with the same appreciation and passion for the expansion of understanding through systematic and repeatable methods that are the crown of the scientific method.

And then I had an unasked for, unexpected, and life changing experience playing a game of chess. There is no luck or chance in chess - it is a game of logic and rational pure intelligence. Against a stronger player, I had a completely new subjective experience of playing a game that felt effortless, as if I was guided to see the right next move - spiritually intuitive chess if you will. I experienced a state of consciousness that felt completely new to me, one that expanded my perception of reality. That one experience began a religious journey for me that leads to this moment today.

I call this journey `religious' because before this experience, when I read the Bible or other religious texts I found nothing inspirational in them. They were dead historical texts that chronicled a semi-barbaric past which scientific thinking had overcome and was in the process of putting behind us. I had no interest in gurus and swamis who deluded themselves with magical thinking lost in their imaginations. Science outlined exactly what was real and the rest could be discarded.

After my religious chess experience, when I picked up these texts anew, suddenly I began to find meaning in them. Gradually, I began to see that hidden in the archaic language and ideas was a message that had some kind of synergy, resonance, familiarity, emotional connection, and attraction that before they didn't have. The rational, systematic, and experiential approach of Buddhist insight meditation opened up an even greater experiential understanding of what these religious teachers were talking about.

What I have lived as a scientifically minded person encountering religious phenomena has been analyzed and explained by a philosopher named Ken Wilber. His unifying theories that bring science and religion together then extend beyond them are, to my mind, some of the most exciting synthesis in the world of philosophy being written today. While his theories are new and require a great deal of consideration and testing, they promise to revolutionize how we think about just about everything. I cannot hope to fully capture the breadth of his thinking in the time I have with you today. I can, however, give you a taste of the integration he believes is possible for science and religion using my personal experience as an example.

The change in my consciousness I experienced would be understood by Wilber as a shift to a more expansive level of consciousness. Piaget, Fowler and Gilligan are all researchers of the mind who have also revolutionized our thinking about the experience of consciousness. They discovered that we progress through discrete stages of awareness as we mature. Our perception as an infant is quite limited as compared with an adult. Babies are not born with a sense of self. They completely identify with their mothers. A baby cannot conceive of having a self until one day that awareness appears. Suddenly the child realizes they are not an extension of their caregiver. It is That sense of self most of us recognize when the child starts saying NO. Few, if any, children begin life being able to empathize with others. They must become a differentiated self before they can recognize that other people experience the same thoughts and feelings they do. The ability to see things from another person's perspective is a pattern of thinking we strongly encourage and a fundamental aspect of moral education. Another revolution in thinking for a child is discovering how to reason and think symbolically.

My point here is that in each stage of thinking, the next stage doesn't make sense until one's level of brain development and experience open the way for that next stage of thinking. Each is more expansive than the last. It includes the old way of thinking and adds to it. The child looks at a sequence of squiggles and sees a word rather than disconnected shapes. The child sees someone's face, recognizes the emotion happening in the other child, and has an emotional response they recognize as their own feelings in response to the other child. Each level of consciousness expands to include and extend the child's thinking.

Many of us end the growth and development of consciousness the same place Piaget did with what he called formal operational thinking - the secular mind state of your average adult capable of symbolic thinking. Wilber believes there are greater, more expansive states of consciousness for us to discover that are more common among mystics and shaman than the average intellectual.

And here is where we discover the rift between science and religion. This is where religious people start talking about God and the scientific folk start talking in disparaging tones about the supernatural. The religionists see a progression, a Great Chain of Being, from matter, to body, to mind, to spirit. The scientist sees only the complex interaction of atoms and molecules.

I've had a number of objectively ordinary but subjectively transformative experiences at meditation retreats. Using my scientific mind frame, I'm constantly trying to figure out what is happening and on-guard for superstitious and magical thinking. The language that best fits these experiences comes from mythopoetic and religious literature. And some of the experiences don't translate well into language at all.

I've written some pretty enthusiastic letters to my father after these retreats trying to share what I was experiencing that pointed me in a spiritual direction. My father would respond as empathetically as he could by talking about the chemistry of the brain, and endorphins. For him, the world can be completely explained by chemical reactions. There is nothing more, nothing less.

Where science and religion collide is around the existence of God and an entity called Spirit. Religion begins with a revelation of God and Spirit and creates the universe. Science begins with observable matter and builds up from there. The methods of science have proved far more reliable for understanding the external world, much to the consternation of Popes and bishops.

Science is excellent at observing the surface of things because of its objective methods. The essential aspects of the philosophy of scientific inquiry are[1]:

1. Instrumental injunction - a method or system that can be followed and repeated by others to duplicate one's results. "If you want to know this, do this."
   
2. Direct apprehension - an immediate experience brought forward by the injunction that generates some sort of measurable, verifiable data.
   
3. Communal confirmation (or rejection) Checking and comparing the results with others who have also followed the instrumental injunction and experienced the direct apprehension.

Religion has worked the other direction. It has started with an interior direct revelation to a prophet who has then demonstrated its reality in his or her life that then brings communal confirmation. The prophet and/or his or her disciples then leave instrumental injunctions on how to reproduce the direct apprehension which can be confirmed by the community who have also experienced the same direct apprehension as the prophet.

Unfortunately, over time, religion often becomes reduced to following instrumental injunctions for themselves alone. Say this prayer, do this yoga position, chant this mantra because this is what God wants you to do to be good. Science, too, can be reduced to an investigation of physical phenomena, closing off all interest in investigating Spirit. One method works well in the invisible world of meaning and the other one in the measurable world of facts.

Wilber breaks through these entrenched, dissociated positions by challenging science to recognize the interior dimension of reality while calling on religion to release the concrete-literalism of its adherence to doctrine and dogma and recognize the legitimate authority of scientific understanding of the exterior dimension of reality.

No scientist can deny the interior experience of reality for long. Consciousness is, of course, necessary for the scientist to observe and record the surface of things. No theories or integrating formulas could be devised without a great deal of mental sophistication. Our interior reality is much greater than the physiological processes that support it. Sense data do not contain the message. Two people looking at the same painting and listening to the same music have vastly different experiences of the same object even though the sensory input is exactly the same. Measuring the brain waves of meditators will not reveal the significance of their subjective inner experience. One can completely characterize and understand how a computer functions without discovering the meaning in its program. They operate on different levels of integration, just as a blood cell cannot smell a flower and smile.

No intellectually honest religious leader today can ignore the truths revealed by scientific methods. While we may not have a full understanding of how evolution actually happened, we know with an extremely high degree of confidence that the world wasn't literally made in seven days. The universe is many orders of magnitude older than 5760 years. Much of the ancient sacred text and ritual in religion, if it has any contemporary truth value at all, has metaphoric and symbolic meaning rather than literal meaning.

Most religious traditions demand that you begin with a faith in God or Spirit. Wilber believes this is not necessary--one only need begin with interest and curiosity. Through the method of direct personal experience, guided by a method with the confirmation of a community of practitioners, one can find out what the verbal symbols, `God' and `Spirit' are pointing at but cannot adequately convey. Spirit is an interior, thus subjective truth that cannot be objectified but can be experienced. We Unitarian Universalists are especially critical of the historical errors and deceptions in encoding this direct experience into words--and rightly so. Religion easily becomes a tool of oppression rather than freedom because spiritual experience points to a truth that transcends the individual. Yet paradoxically, one must become fully an individual to realize this truth. We must differentiate before we can integrate.

Where religion and science can meet once again and find common ground is the center of the scientific method - direct, repeatable experience. Just as the laws of the movement of objects can be directly witnessed and repeated by anyone sufficiently trained in the scientific method, so too are methods taught by spiritual leaders that also lead to direct, repeatable experiences that can be verified by a community of practitioners. Enlightenment can be approached with the same precision as a scientific experiment.

Not only can they share a methodology, science and religion can be mutually reinforcing because they both study the same thing - what is real. Scientific techniques to measure how a meditator's brain works may reveal better methods of spiritual realization. Technologists are working on better and better biofeedback machines to do just that. Prayer and devotion may help a scientist break through a difficult problem and make a leap in understanding. The science of the mind and heart can be joined together.

Wilber believes this integration is possible because at the core of everything is Spirit. There is nothing but Spirit taking the form of matter, body and mind. The duality of matter and energy is transcended in Spirit. We are already what we seek. Our challenge is to wake up to this truth.

I believe Wilber's vision provides a profound spiritual and scientific grounding for Unitarian Universalism that affirms our principles. It is central to my ministerial vision and presence I bring to you today. Wilber's vision respects the individuality of the religious quest and integrates it with reason and direct personal experience. While his ideas aren't perfected, they point persuasively to a way to integrate us, move us beyond the humanist/ spiritualist debate and toward a religious vision that will stand the test of time.

BENEDICTION

May the desire for direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder affirmed in all cultures which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces that create and uphold life grow in your heart.

May we at the same time heed the guidance of reason and the results of science that warn us against the idolatries of the mind and spirit.

May the spirit of reason and revelation go with you from this sanctuary that shelters and integrates both.

[1] Wilber, Ken, The Marriage of Sense and Soul, Integrating Science and Religion, © 1998, Random House, NY,NY, pp.155-6