Radiance

Radiance

A Sermon to Countryside Church, Unitarian Universalist

The Rev. Dr. C. Scot Giles

May 24, 2020

Back when our congregation routinely met in person, we’d end our worship with something Rev. Hilary calls “Sharing the Light.” When we do this I typically grumble and say something along the lines of “what she said.” For a while I would instead look at the people around me and say “the weirdness in me honors the weirdness in you.” But on the whole that didn’t go well as people began to look at me with alarm.

My grumbling about this is because I am a highly introverted person, something of a curmudgeon and I don’t like being told what to do. However, I don’t dispute Rev. Hilary’s idea that people do have an inner light and that it is good to be reminded about this. My sermon today is about that inner light, although I reserve the right to continue in my curmudgeonly grumbling.

The Ripple Effect

Those of you who know my ministry know that I am a Board Certified Consulting Hypnotist specializing in medical work. In the system of hypnotism I practice there is something we call the “Ripple Effect.” That is, when you start working with a client on some issue you open a door to the unconscious mind. Our unconscious minds are vast and deep, and also basically benevolent. It wants to help one. So when the hypnotist opens that door, the mind will use it for other things.

For example, I may be working with a client to bring excessive weight down. That gets accomplished, but other things start to happen too, as the positive change about weight loss ripples out and causes other positive changes. Relationship or occupational issues may get resolved, mood may elevate, energy levels soar - despite the fact that none of these things were ever addressed by the hypnotism. 

That why being a medical hypnotist also makes me into a life coach. Change started in one area of a client’s life quickly generalizes.

Where the human mind is concerned, you can never do just one thing. Everything is connected to everything else. Every action creates multiple reactions.

This is true about our interactions with other people as well.

Radiance

If you behave toward other people in a kind and generous way, you set an example that encourages others to do the same. That’s your radiance. A positive energy you project into the world by the example you set. 

However, it works in reverse too. If you decide to act like a creep, you legitimate that kind of behavior for others. That’s why current Presidential example has had the effect of coarsening our civil life together as citizens of a Republic, and I fear his negative radiance will be affecting our nation for many years.

In the 1920s there was a pidgin saying that came from the folklore of Mali in West Africa. It was “Monkey see, monkey do.” What that describes is the tendency among monkeys and those who share a common evolutionary ancestor with them like us, to mimmic the behavior of others. It refers to a process where a creature repeats the behavior it has observed, without really understanding why, or understanding the consequences of that behavior. 

So if you are raised by racist parents, you will probably have a tendency to become racist yourself, as your parent’s dark radiance contaminates you. Ditto for gender, political or any other form of intolerance. It’s why people who grow up in a home where lawlessness is accepted (for example, the members of the family routinely shoplift or deceive), typically are prone to that behavior themselves. 

We are mammals. We are born in a relationship and are pre-disposed to have relationships all our lives. That’s part of the reason why so many resist social distancing even during the time of a global pandemic. It’s also the reason why when someone is in jail, the threat of solitary confinement is the worst punishment you can threaten someone with. People would rather risk bodily harm that have no contact with anyone for a long period of time.

To me, the ethical implication of this is that we all have a moral imperative to improve our weaknesses and to enhance our strengths, because none of us is ever alone. What we do affects others and so there is a responsibility to consider how our behavior affects the larger whole. Bettering yourself, betters others. 

While it is absolutely clear that none of us can successfully control others, we certainly do influence them, and they in turn carry on our influence by those that they influence. Your radiance, for good or ill, shines on.

If you are unenthusiastic about a project, your negative radiance drains your team of energy. If you’re in a bad mood, you radiate that and then reap the result when your partner sits across form you at dinner in silence.

It seems to me that we have two choices about our radiance. First, we can just ignore it and let things fall where they may, reacting as things happen. However, I think such an unreflective life misses the mark. 

Second, we can become at least somewhat intentional about how we respond, and try to shape our radiance in a way that serves us and others well.

I have kept a journal since I was fifteen years old. While I recognize that this method is not for everyone, I have found it enormously helpful in my own evolution. I find that getting things out of my head and onto paper helps me avoid thinking about things one way and acting in another. Its a form of self-accountability.

Perhaps you can think of a way to do this for yourself. I’m told that meditation often works, especially if done as part of a group or under the guidance of a Spiritual Director. I imagine that simple, reflective, deep conversation could be another.

Awareness

As I pondered all of this I realized that just as it’s important to be aware of what we are radiating out into the world that might influence others, it is equally important to be aware of what others around us are radiating. Just as we affect others in ways we might not be aware of, we are also affected by them.

There is a saying by minimalism advocate Joshua Millburn that “you can’t change the people around you, but you can change the people around you.”

What he means by that somewhat confusing sentence is that while it’s foolish to think you can cause other people to change at your request, you can choose to change the sort of people you surround yourself with. That’s a wise strategy because we are influenced by others just as we influence them. It’s wise to be intentional about that.

One of the truism of addictions counseling is that no one has ever successfully changed seriously dysfunctional behavior if they don’t also change who their friends are. Even if what you are doing is actively harmful to yourself, the people around you will continue to expect you to behave as you always have, and will subtly sabotage your efforts at change - doing what Murray Bowen, the founder of family therapy in America, called “change back maneuvering.” 

That’s why we should pay attention to the people we surround ourselves with. This is not to say we should seek out only people who agree with us - in fact the most prized friendship of every successful person I’ve ever met has been the one with someone who will tell you something you do not want to hear. But you want to be around people who are good for you, in the sense they are aligned with your values and goals. 

The best way to improve your own radiance is to be in the radiance of compatible others. It’s wise to build an awareness of that so you do not miss cues. Ask yourself “does this person make me a better person?” Run with the people who want you to succeed. Do you have an emotional vampire in your friendship circle. If so, why do you allow that? No one is going to be on your side if you are not.

Every year Lindsay and I make it a point to review our friendships and make intentional decisions about how they are going, whether adjustments are needed or if the relationship is complete and we need to move on. It’s not smart to let that sort of thing happen by accident.

Families

The problem with this is that we are born into families. Now, sometimes that is a great thing. I watch my wife’s emotional and psychological development and see that the seeds of it were rooted in a basically happy and supportive childhood family system. I recall my own very different upbringing and realize how easy it is for a young person to became a victim of a family system that never should have involved children in the first place. 

I mentioned Dr. Murray Bowen earlier in connection with family  therapy. He had a light-hearted definition of the family that strikes a cord with me. He said “the family is a seething cauldron of pathology, from which with a lifetime of effort, one might partially extricate oneself.” 

That’s certainly not true of all families. It was most definitely true of my own. 

In the art of family therapy there is something called a “genogram.” It’s a chart of the family, but it goes deeper than a simple genealogy. A genogram lists relationships, their outcomes. A well-drawn genogram includes education, major life events, occupations, social relationships, disorders, alliances and living situations.

Whenever anyone creates their family’s genogram it is always a startling experience, which is why if you want to do this you should obtain expert help.

What quickly becomes obvious from a genogram is that families tend to repeat themselves. Time and again, patterns that family members thought were unique to their lives turn out to be patterns and rituals that have been repeated many times down through the generations.

As some of you know I broke with my family-of-origin at a young age, basically I ran away. While I would eventually recontact the family I did so only from a distance and only as little as possible. I thought that was my unique story.

Heck no.

The only time I spent more than a few minutes with members of my extended family was when I returned to Connecticut to officiate at my mother’s memorial service. I didn’t think I owed her that, but it was her request and I try to be a generous person. 

At the lunch afterward - remember this was the first time I had spoken to any of these people in five decades  - I heard story after story of other family members who had also attempted to detach from the family and run away. It was a pattern repeated in every generation by dozens of family members.

The difference. Most of the family members who ran away gave up and went back. I never went back. I broke the generational pattern and that is why I am here today with my education, profession, happy marriage and health. When I did my genogram I saw this pattern as clear as day and I also saw the mistake so many in my family made. They went back into the dysfunctional radiance of an abusive family system and became themselves corrupted by it. 

You can’t choose your family. The luck of the draw determines if your family is an asset or a liability, but you get to choose how much you let that family system affect you by staying in their radiance, or choosing to exit by cutting ties or holding distance. You don’t need their permission and you don’t have to explain yourself.

When I say this to clients they often hear it as advice to hurt the feelings of others. It’s not. It is healthy behavior, not unhealthy, to avoid people who are bad for you.

Show me your friends and I will tell you your future. Show me your family and I probably can do the same, unless you make an intentional decision to decide the radiance you surround yourself with. 

If you are one of the fortunate to come from a family that was a blessing, good for you. You have the best of all possible worlds. But it you do not, there is still something you can do.

I’ve come to call the circle of people who I relate to as if they were family my “forged family” - created with intent and effort. The way a swordsmith forges a blade.

You  can act with intentionality to create the community you want around you rather than just accepting the one given to you by genetics.

You should be the one who chooses the direction of your life. my colleague Richard Nongard says, “There is a reason why when you get into your car you notice that the windshield looking forward is much bigger than the rear view mirror looking behind.” I agree. What is ahead of you is always more important that what is behind.

Compassion

The things I preach this morning are not easy. There is a way to soften them. Just as I have previously advocated gratitude as a lifestyle I also advocate compassion. That is how I feel toward the people who were bad for me and who I choose to avoid. 

Compassion is a sustainable emotion. It is not the same as forgiveness. We can be compassionate toward someone without agreeing with them in the slightest. Compassion simply means we are neither going to be nasty nor run them down. We may feel sad for them without feeling we need to rescue. Typically this will mean a decision not to argue but decline to be influenced. Negativity cannot be countered by more negativity. 

The other day I was grocery shopping and I saw a person who was obviously an idiot. No mask, no gloves, aggressively refusing to social distance to the point of deliberately crowding others, purposefully walking down the one-way aisles in the wrong direction. The initial response to someone like this is to confront them because they endanger others. 

But the compassionate thing is for everyone to distance, even though that is inconvenient. Ask yourself what the inner life of such a person must be like for them to behave that way. There is nothing I can do to such a person that is worse than what they are doing to themselves.

A seeker once asked a guru, “What is the secret of happiness?” The guru replied, “never argue with fools.” “Well,” said the seeker. I absolutely do not agree with that” “You are right,” said the guru.

Focus is Fuel

The most natural way to develop the sort of radiance you want to have is to pay attention, not only to the people you surround yourself with, but also what you choose to focus on. Like it or not your focus is fuel for your unconscious life. What you focus on tends to happen.

Therefore, it is smart to support the person you want to be by not entertaining things in your mind that drag you down. As it says in scripture, “whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things” (Philippians 4:8, ESV). 

We are all living through a very difficult time. I’ve actually counseled clients to “fast” from the news. Don’t get sucked into the endless negativity of the twenty-four hour news cycle. In social networking many of us have had the experience of “unfollowing” someone who subjected us to comments or attacks that were not enhancing. So we unfollowed them. Unfollow negativity everywhere you find it.

It can be subtile. As I’ve said from our pulpit before, your unconscious mind hears everything you say. Therefore, don’t spend time putting yourself down.

In a major study published in the journal Current Psychiatry, researchers compared people who were self-critical to those who were self-compassionate. The results weren’t even close. Self-criticism was a trans-diagnostic factor in a host of emotional problems, while people who were self-compassionate - who treated themselves as they would like to be treated, with a bit of forgiveness and appreciation - were everywhere more successful (Current Psychiatry, Vol. 15, No 12, December 2016)

The critical factor was two-fold. First, the people who were self-critical were raised in families who were controlling and restrictive. Second, they didn’t do anything about that.

We don’t control our family-of-origin, but we can do something about it by seeking out the experiences and people who will enhance our radiance and letting that energy overwrite whatever darkness may have been in our past. Look out the windshield instead of staring at the rear view mirror.

Or, as it says in scripture, “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. (Matthew 7:7, ESV). Note the number of action verbs in that quotation. I you don’t like your circumstances, take action to change them. Change the people, change the focus. Have a positive radiance.

And that’s my sermon.

Preparing For The Worst

Expecting the Worst

A Sermon to Countryside Church, Unitarian Universalist

February 2, 2020

The Rev. Dr. C. Scot Giles

Are you a Prepier?

According to the Washington Post, in the aptly named community called Lost City, West Virginia, there is a place called Fortitude Ranch. It’s set on fifty acres far into the country, and people become “members” of the ranch in return for a payment of $1000/year. 

Apparently, it is a pleasant place with sturdy log cabins, tree houses where children play, there is a zip line and something called disc golf (which I had never heard of) and is apparently golf played with a Frisbee instead of golf balls. 

Have you ever heard of people who are “prepers” or “survivalists”? That’s what Fortitude Ranch is all about. In the event of a war, climate calamity, pandemic or other form of societal collapse, those tree houses become guard towers. That golf course becomes a “killing field” where marksmen can be stationed with overlapping fields of fire. There are walls and fences and underground bunkers stocked with food, water and equipment. 

“Prepers” are people who spend money and effort because they believe that really bad things can happen, be that a natural disaster, a civil war or the collapse of civilization. They take steps be protect themselves at such a time. The members of Fortitude Ranch will be able to travel to it and take shelter there.

There are places like Fortitude Ranch all over our nation. In fact, Fortitude Ranch itself has just opened up a sister campus in Wisconsin. Their motto is “Prepare for the Worst - Enjoy the Present.”

If all this sounds like too much work and you want something more upscale, there is a company that has purchased from the government a group of missile silos (missiles removed) and is turning them into luxury condos for full or part time residence (go to www.survivalcondo.com if you want to know more.) They have air and water filtration for any sort of chemical, biological or radiological incident, hydrophobic and aquaculture food production, an indoor pool, gym and a luxury spa. Oh, and high speed internet. They come fully furnished with 50” flatscreens, high-end Kohler fixtures and stainless steel kitchen appliances that I frankly envy.

The survival condos really sound nice. The company will not give out the locations for security reasons, but apparently they are all over the nation and are selling well. Cash only.

The Idea of Preparation

If all of this sounds a little paranoid, I tend to agree with you. I think preparing for downside risk is reasonable, but for myself, this is going a little too far. However, the survivalists have a saying, “It’s only 72 hours to animal.” Meaning, that if a social crisis goes on longer than three days, gas stations will be dry, the store shelves will be empty and people will start to turn on each other in the fight for resources. 

Personally, I prize the concept of self-reliance. The essay of the same name by Ralph Waldo Emerson is like a second scripture to me. As both a Unitarian Universalist clergy person, a medical hypnotist, and a martial arts swordsman, no one could ever accuse me of conforming to social norms. Or, as my wife puts it, “Scot, you’re weird.” I am. Proudly so.

While I am not going to go live in a missile silo, I do take what I consider reasonable steps. 

When I was the parish minister to a church on the North Fork of Long Island I learned to make preparations for hurricanes. The North Fork is only fourteen miles wide and you had to be able to evacuate quickly. 

So at the Bates/Giles home we do have what is called a “Go Bag” or a “Bug Out Bag.” This is a backpack with essential supplies and important personal effects like our birth certificates and passports, as well as a shock proof hard drive with all of our photos and scans of important documents. The bag sits on top of a cat carrier large enough to fit all three of our cats. There is even a hand cranked portable radio that can recharge an iPhone.

If we got an evacuation order we could be out with everything important in ten minutes or less (and most of that would be rounding up the cats). As we live close to several nuclear power plants and not far from a flood zone, this seems wise to us.

Anyone who watches the news these days know that terror attacks are a real thing. 

So I also have a small backpack that travels in the back seat of my car whenever I leave my property. Bags like this are called EDC, or Every Day Carry Bags. It’s basically my briefcase holding a laptop, a power supply for my phone and so on. But there is also a first-aid kit with trauma supplies like a rapid application tourniquet, wound closure strips and Narcan. Everything I would need if I had to help someone who was in serious trouble, and I am trained to be able to do that.

To many of you I probably sound a little paranoid myself, and I probably am. However, I’d rather make the mistake in that direction than the other. I believe in being prepaid for the worse, if only a little bit. 

There Are Many Forms of Preparation

However, this sermon isn’t really about preparing for social calamity. It’s really about a different form of preparation altogether. Prepers worry about all sorts of things that could go wrong, from climate change to a pandemic. I’m with them on the last one because I believe we really do live amid a pandemic, but I believe it is an emotional and spiritual one. 

Ever since the 1970s, Dr. Herbert Benson of Harvard Medical School has argued that stress is the “hidden plague” in our society. As a treatment, he wrote a book called The Relaxation Response recommending meditation and the power of expectation and belief to overcome stress. 

More recently along with his colleague William Proctor he wrote The Relaxation Revolution: The Science and Genetics of Mind Body Healing, which connected the out-of-control stress of modern living to a host of medical issues.

What Benson and Proctor argue is that the human body never evolved to be able to hold up to stress that never lets up. The stressors of our time are email, the 24 hour news cycle, sensationalism and exaggeration in most of what we read and see, threat to employment due to automation, and completely unreasonable job expectations for most of us. These things are worse in America than in almost any other First World country. 

What they are referring to is something called Epigenetics. Epigenetics means “on top of genetics” and explores the factors that control how your DNA expresses itself. 

For example the cells in your hand have exactly the same DNA as the cells in your tongue. But something acts on that DNA so that the cells in your tongue become tongue cells, not hand cells. There is an external regulatory power that controls what your DNA does. 

Benson and Proctor argue that modern stress is making that power go haywire. The transformation of a healthy cell into a cancer cell is only one example of what happens when that regulatory power goes wrong.

This is why the incidence rate of every illness that has a stress-related component (cancer, heart disease and every form of inflammatory condition) is increasing alarmingly. It is also why the is a huge flare of nonspecific autoimmune conditions taking place. So much so we do not even have good diagnostic language for talking about them. 

For example, these days physicians are more likely to talk about Parkinsonism rather than Parkinson’s Disease, because we are seeing so many odd variations of that condition that we don’t know how to define or name. 

This is the circumstance that we need to address, because as a species we are literally worrying ourselves to death. While there was a slight improvement this year, according to research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the workforce in the United States is dying faster than an other wealthy country (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/11/26/us-life-expectancy-downward-spiral-study/4303700002/).

If we have an extinction event I don’t think it will come at the tip of a missile. It will come from the physical breakdown we are imposing on ourselves with our minds.

Resentment

As someone who has practiced medical hypnotism for more than 30 years, I’ve long studied the emotional basis for physical and medical problems. I’ve got a theory about what is at the root of it, and that is the emotion of Resentment. 

Resentment is defined as an emotional reaction where one feels unfairly treated. Merriam-Webster defines it as “a feeling of indignant displeasure or persistent ill will at something regarded as a wrong, insult, or injury.”

I do a lot of work with people who live with cancer, and I long ago noticed that those with the worst outcomes also walked around with a lot of resentment, I thought there was likely a connection. Then I realized that cancer patients are hardly unique in this.

Every morning I read two newspapers - the New York Times and the Washington Post. Once you start looking for it you see in just about every opinion piece the writers indignantly point to something they regard as self-evidently wrong. Indeed the editorial and op-ed pages fairly drip with resentment after resentment. 

I have no way to prove this, but my sense is that in our badly divided society today the level of perceived resentment is escalating. I believe this is the emotion that drives people to perform hate crimes. It is a powerful emotion that can lead some people to regard acts of self-destruction as reasonable, provided those acts inflict some sort of perceived “justice” on the people resented.

What the mind does when it experiences excessive stress is find something to blame it on, and then simmer in resentment toward that something or someone.

I used to tell my clients that in order to have some distance from a bad feeling, one should remember that feelings change. “Neither you nor I have ever had an emotional state that lasted,” I used to say.

As I pondered the feeling of resentment I realized that I had been wrong. What makes resentment so powerful is that it is sustainable.

Most direct bad emotional experiences take a lot of energy. They boil up and pass. But resentment doesn’t. It’s a gradual slow burn. 

You can’t be angry forever, but you can be resentful 24/7, 365. What makes resentment so dangerous is that it is possible to sustain a low level of this emotion  in the long term, where it wears down the body defenses and things start to go wrong. If Drs. Benson and Proctor are right, it corrupts a person at the cellular level.

Resentment is what William Blake referred to in his poem “The Poison Tree.” He got angry with his friend and told his friend why. That ended his anger. But when he got angry with his enemy he did not settle the matter. Instead he transformed his anger into resentment which he “watered” with fears, tears and deceit. 

Unlike his anger at his friend which passed, his Resentment toward his enemy was sustainable. Finally, it became an all-consuming desire for vengeance that allowed him to become a person of active ill-will.

The person or thing you resent is not affected by your resentment. They are fine, and may not even be aware of your feelings. The only person Resentment harms the person who holds it. Resentment always turns inward psychologically. I believe it also turns inward physically, as Benson and Proctor propose. 

Much as I’d like to claim this observation as an original thought, it occurs to me that actually the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche had it first. In in book On the Genealogy of Morals he observed that entertaining this emotion allowed one to feel powerful enough to judge others, and was therefore attractive to the subconscious mind. He predicted that it would become epidemic in Western Society as it allowed people to avoid taking responsibility for events and just scapegoat others.

I think he was right. I think the sustainable emotion of resentment is where things have gone off the rails.

Gratitude

All this said, I would be a poor preacher if I stopped here. Because I do think there is an emotional antibiotic that can be used to treat the hidden plague of modern society - the toxic level of stress our society presents us with. That emotional antibiotic to the hidden plague is the emotion of Gratitude.

The problem with Gratitude is that it does not happen by default. As I’ve said from this pulpit before, your brain evolved to keep you safe, not to make you happy. It keeps you safe by exaggerating every negative emotion, because those emotions make you cautious. In order to counteract this default negative setting in your psychological makeup, there has to be something special that you are doing. Resetting your emotional outlook takes effort. The default setting is fear, resentment, hostility and anger.

Therefore, just like the people at Fortitude Ranch who prepare themselves for the worse, we all need to set up a discipline to prepare ourselves spiritually to overcome the effects of the hidden plague. 

Gratitude, derived from the Latin word for graciousness, means a feeling of thankfulness for what one has, in some way, received. It is the opposite of craving something you don’t have or striving to attain. 

You can be grateful about things in your past by reliving good things you have experienced. You can be grateful for the present, reflecting on such good fortune as has come your way. You can be grateful for the future in the sense of having a hopeful or optimistic outlook. 

The really important thing is that, like Resentment, Gratitude is sustainable. You can’t be happy, joyful or exuberant all the time - those emotions take too much energy to last. But you can be Grateful 24/7, 365. Just as Resentment is a long, slow burn, Gratitude is a long, gentle uplift. 

Dr. Martin Seligman, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, whose work I have long followed did an experiment. He took a group of 411 people and had them take a psychological test to assess their level of happiness. 

Then, for a week they were tasked to write and individually deliver a letter expressing gratitude to someone who they believed had never been properly thanked for some act of kindness. The test subjects overwhelmingly displayed a huge increase in happiness scores, with the benefit lasting more than a month. 

Other experiments have returned similar results. One study by Dr. Robert Emmons and Dr. Michael McCullough took three groups of people. One group was tasked to write a few sentences every day about things that displeased them. The other group wrote about things they were grateful for. The the third group, the control group, wrote about anything that affected them for good or ill. 

At the end of 10 weeks the group that wrote about gratitude were more optimistic and less depressed that either of the other groups, and they had fewer visits to physicians. Their health was better. 

Resentment corrupts. Gratitude strengthens.

The trick is that Gratitude is an appreciation of what you have, instead of striving for something you think might make you happier. Not that there is anything wrong with having wholesome goals, but Gratitude allows you to focus on what you have instead of what you lack. That’s always going to be a better place to be. 

As someone who struggles with a metabolic syndrome that creates a cardiac risk, Resentment is more dangerous for me than for most, not that it is safe for anyone. I use two tools to keep my mind pointed in the right direction.

First, I use a Gratitude Journal. I’ve kept a journal since I was 15 years old. Mine contains a special section where, each morning, I write a few sentences about what I was grateful for the previous day and what thing I expect in my upcoming day that I will be happy to receive. It’s amazing how this simple exercise that takes only a few minutes, changes the channel in my mind.

My wife of 32 years is the Rev. Dr. Lindsay Bates, the Minister Emerita to the Geneva Unitarian Universalist Society. When she retired after a 40 year ministry to that congregation she came onboard in my practice as our resident Reiki Master Teacher. 

Reiki is a form of energy healing. No one has any idea how it works, but experiments have shown that it does. For example, it’s been shown that, much like hypnotism, cancer patients who get Reiki in addition to conventional medical care do better than those that do not. This is why most hospital cancer centers have a Reiki program.

Every morning, Lindsay recites the Reiki Principles - one of which is to be grateful for those good things she will receive today.

Over the years I have had several spiritual directors, both Christian and non-Christian. They have all recommended a similar Gratitude practice, and that was why I created a Gratitude section in my journal.

The second tool I use is something that Rhonda Byrne, the author of The Secret, suggests. I’m not a fan of her work, although I’ve read all her books and find some things there that are personally useful. One of her recommendations is to have a Gratitude Rock.

A Gratitude Rock is a stone that you find which has some positive meaning for you. I use a piece of rainbow obsidian. I happen to love this mineral and collect examples of it. A friend of mine took a palm-sized piece and carved it so that as light passed through the layers of minerals trapped in the natural volcanic glass, an optical illusion of a heart appears. It can always be found on my desk or nightstand.

Every night as I go to bed I touch it and ask myself what I have been grateful for that day. In the morning I do the same and recall the gratitude of last night. This points my mind in the right direction to keep me inoculated from the hidden plague and sets up the tone for my entry into the Gratitude Journal.

Lindsay has since adopted a similar practice.

This sermon has been how to prepare oneself for the worse. My point has been that preparation is wise. We live in a time of maximum stress and our bodies cannot cope unless we make preparations. I bid you do so. Find a way to remove Resentment from your inner world and replace it with Gratitude. You will be glad you did.

And that’s my sermon.

Changing Your Minds

Changing Your Minds

September 1, 2019, Labor Day

A Sermon to Countryside Church, Unitarian Universalist

The Rev. Dr. C. Scot Giles

Over the past several months I have used this pulpit to explain my understanding of the human mind and how it affects us as persons. My professional goal both as a Community Minister and as a Consulting Hypnotist is to help people use the power of their minds to take control of their lives.

I believe it imperative that we do this because all around us are social forces that seek to shape what we feel and do using rhetoric, emotional appeals and illogical arguments that only seem plausible until you analyze them. The goal of all this is to make us tame. I don’t like tame. 

Over the past months I have spoken about Conscious and Unconscious Autosuggestion and the Collective Unconsciousness - a theoretical storehouse of wisdom and imagery that we all access simply in virtue of being human. 

People have asked me if I might say a bit more about these things, and that’s silly. I’m a Unitarian Universalist Minister. We’re always happy to say more about anything you can imagine. The hard part is getting ministers to shut up. 

I do promise that this sermon will end my series of psychological preaching and I will return to more spiritual and practical subjects in the future.

Convention

I am just back from the Convention of the National Guild of Hypnotists. It is the largest hypnotism convention in the world with thousands of practitioners from all over attending. While my work is primarily medical hypnotism (scientifically based hypnosis focus on health and well-being) I’ve noticed that a lot of my most prosperous colleagues are doing what they call “success coaching” these days. Perhaps it is a sign of the times, but they sell highly priced programs to help people become more successful and prosperous.

It must work. While I drive around in a nice car, a couple of these folks showed up at the convention driving gleaming Dodge Vipers to demonstrate their success, their love of horsepower and doubts about their virility.  

I’ve been a hypnotist for more than thirty years, and an officer of the National Guild of Hypnotists for most of that time. Therefore, I know all of those people well. I decided to take a look at what they were teaching their customers and clients about how to be prosperous and successful. 

While each of my colleagues had their own particular style or techniques, what they were teaching was basically ways that a person could use to take control over their emotional life and to stop overthinking. Some expressed this is terms that were spiritual or metaphysical, others adopted the language of politics or sales.

As I am a scientific guy I noticed that most of these techniques really involved taking control of one’s brain chemistry - because that is where our emotional life comes from. That’s what I am talking about today. How you can choose to do things that will affect how you feel and behave in service to your life goals by taking control of your brain chemistry.  

Your Have Three Minds

Basically, as hypnotists think of it, you have three minds. Two are packed into your cranium while the third comes to you either from your genetics or perhaps from an awareness of an energetic world that we can feel but not explain. 

The first mind is your Conscious Mind. This is what you think of as your personality and personal narrative. 

The second is your Subconscious Mind, and it is where you store all the habits you have of thought, feeling and behavior. It doesn’t really think in the way your Conscious Mind does. Instead, it functions more as a machine that reacts to certain inputs. 

In the morning when I am getting ready to shave I stand in front of my mirror and my subconscious activates a program that tells me how hot the water should be, what side of my face to start shaving on first, how many times I swirl my shaving brush in the lather and many other small things that result in a smooth shave without nicks or other problems. 

While all this is happing my conscious mind is doing other things - contemplating my schedule for that day, wondering about what I heard on the morning news, etc. My Subconscious Mind controls my body while my Conscious Mind is otherwise occupied.

We also are believed to have a third mind. This one is what some call the Collective Unconscious, although a new term is becoming popular - the Superconscious Mind. The notion is that all of us are also interconnected by a common field of information about what it means to be human. Purportedly, if we become sensitive to the intuitions and nudges that come from our Superconscious Mind, we get an advantage that others do not have. 

So there are three minds: the Conscious, the Subconscious and the Superconscious. As you can’t change whatever larger wisdom your Superconsciousness provides to you, today I am talking about how you can change your Subconscious Mind so that it makes you happier.

As I’ve said before (quoting time management guru David Allen), “Your brain doesn’t have a brain. You have to be smarter than your brain.” The physical organ of the human brain does evolve, but to judge from skull size and shape it has not changed much in a very long time. It is not well suited to the pressures of modern life and it has very definite limitations. But you can do something about that. 

What We Feel and Do

How we feel will affect how we behave. 

The problem is that the rules about how we feel about things are laid down early in our brain. We don’t choose those rules - they come from the experiences we have and the environment we find ourselves in. 

We understand how this happens. The micro-electricity that causes our nerves to program flows more readily among neurons that are coated with a substance called myelin. Myelin is hugely important to insulate the nerves from each other. Diseases like multiple sclerosis are called “de-myelinizing” diseases because they attack the myelin coating and cause the nerves in the brain and spinal column to short out.

If we are healthy, all our our nerves are coated with myelin. However, myelin is more abundant in the nerves before the age of eight years and during puberty. That is why early childhood experiences, and the experiences we have during puberty are so formative.

So most of what we subconsciously think and feel was programmed in early childhood or in early puberty. That’s fine, except that the skills we need to navigate our increasingly complex world as adults are seldom the skills we learned on the playground or hanging around with teenage friends. 

Right now stress-related mood disorders are epidemic because our neurological systems are overwhelmed.

As a psychologist buddy of mine puts it, “your brain evolved to keep you safe, not to make you happy.” He gave me a great example. Consider what it was like for one of your ancestors to be hunting a deer on some ancient landscape. Out of the corner of his or her eye he or she sees something. The ancestor isn’t sure if what has been seen is a big bush or a tiger. Every one of your ancestors who optimistically mistook the tiger for a bush became food for the tiger. Every one of your ancestors who pessimistically mistook the bush for a tiger lived to reproduce. 

The result is that at this time in history your brain automatically assumes the worst. It learned that it is far better to mistake the bush for a tiger than a tiger for a bush.

The result is that your Subconscious Mind automatically assumes the worst about every situation. It doesn’t matter what you consciously think, your Subconscious Mind amplifies the negative, and a nervous system programed during the protected days of early childhood or the hormone-euphoria of puberty isn’t able to cope. As a result you overthink and exaggerate your worries, and we live in a society where antidepressant medications outsell aspirin, ibuprofen and acetaminophen combined. That is why I like that short essay Desiderata, by Max Ehrmann. He advises being calm, graceful and unworried. 

Every day as I sit in meditation with those words I strive to adjust my behavior to do the things that will make me happy. That brings me closer to the Spirit of Life. 

Are You Happy?

If you are unhappy about things in your life, your negative brain is responsible. Your negative brain is distracting you with false fears and exaggerated doubts. There are opportunities for you, that you do not perceive, because your negative Subconscious Mind doesn’t let you. It’s afraid that if it lets you feel more hopeful, you might mistake the tiger for a bush. 

Your brain doesn’t have a brain. You have to be smarter than your brain. To be happy you need to find ways to allow your Conscious Mind to adjust your Subconscious Mind. 

The brain chemistry that we inherited from our evolutionary ancestors involves specific chemicals: cortisol, DHEA, dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin and endorphins. They don’t flow all the time. Rather, they are produced in spurts to motivate survival behavior. They are quickly absorbed and you have to do something to get more of them. But there are certain things you can do that will produce the brain chemicals you need to be happy.

Here’s the List

The brain releases a good feeling chemical (DHEA) when it detects something that is good for your survival. It releases a bad feeling chemical (Cortisol) when is detects something that is a threat. To do this, it depends on neural pathways you built in your youth. 

Dopamine creates excitement when you anticipate a reward. 

The problem is that you can get used to to any good thing and your brain stops producing dopamine with regard to it. It takes some new reward to trigger more. This is why you feel euphoria at the beginning of a new romantic relationship, but over time that euphoria fades.

Serotonin creates a calm, empowered feeling when you’ve gained some advantage. 

This leads you to assert yourself. Members of a group, team or society often have to compete for resources or status. 

A creature that never asserts itself is typically denied success. Therefore, our brain pushes each of us to compare our status to others, and gives us a good feeling when we realize we are in a position of strength.

Oxytocin makes you feel good when you feel supported and nurtured. When a friend reaches out, when a lover comforts or praises you or when a parent nurtures a child. It is there to encourage us to stay with the herd of our own kind, because leaving the herd behind makes us more ready prey. 

Oxytocin is triggered by touch and trust, but it goes away quickly because the reality is that anyone who is close enough to touch you is also close enough to hurt you. Therefore, your brain keeps oxytocin under close control so you keep a healthy suspicion about others. 

Endorphins are triggered by pain. They cover pain over with a feeling of excitement and that gives us the ability to run away from something that is hurting us. But it’s temporary. Pain has a protective function and the brain wants your body to feel it again as soon as possible in order to force you to protect your injury. 

Usually, people do not intentionally hurt themselves in order to feel this exhilaration, although there are some exceptions: tattoos are a popular one these days. When you see someone who has covered themselves with skin art, part of the reason was the pleasure they felt as the artist’s needle moved. 

The Good News

The good news about all this is that you can change the Subconscious programming that controls these chemicals if you put in some effort. My more prosperous colleagues charge their clients thousands of dollars to teach them how. 

These tips are by no means exhaustive. But I do guarantee they will help. If you do them you will be happier. Each takes about 45 days of regular practice to become permanent. The payoff is huge.

If you want more excitement in your life, you need to encourage the production of dopamine. You do this by setting achieving goals. So you take baby steps. Set a goal that you know you could meet with your eyes closed. You are setting yourself up for a regular inoculation of dopamine. 

Don’t have time to exercise for an hour? Set a goal to stretch for the five minutes of a commercial break. Celebrate achieving that goal. Keep giving yourself a dopamine hit. 

Do you want to feel more calm and in control? You need to build a serotonin circuit by relentless focusing on the positive things about yourself, and not dwelling on the negative. Train your brain to feel good about what you have instead of what you lack.

Do you want to feel more appreciated and connected to others? You build a new oxytocin circuit by carefully trusting others in small ways, quickly dropping people you discover you can’t trust and focusing on those you can. You will quickly develop the willingness to trust others and trust your ability to appropriately select them.

Are you in pain and want that to diminish? Endorphin circuits are harder to program as you don’t usually want to go around inflicting pain on yourself in order to get high. But there are things you can do. 

Exercise can help, but you quickly plateau and adjust. Think about the joggers and marathon runners you know who crave the “runner’s high” and keep having to compete in longer and longer races. 

But there is one behavior that does trigger endorphins reliably - laughter. Spending time at a comedy club or with the Comedy Channel can bring your pain down. 

The Result

So there you have it. A formula for coping with modern stress.

Set smaller, reasonable goals for yourself that you know you can meet, and celebrate each victory.

Focus on the positive instead of the negative. In our world today there are not that many tigers, no where near the amount your Subconscious Mind imagines. 

Carefully trust others and quickly drop those discovered to be untrustworthy. Avoiding people to defend your emotional health is not weakness, it is wisdom. You will soon find yourself surrounded by good people and you will gain confidence that you can tell the good from the bad. 

Laugh. Laugh long, hard and often. Take advantage of the opportunities for laughter that you can find. 

What you end up with if you follow all of this advice is very much the life philosophy described in the essay Desiderata.

The Final Reason

There is a final reason why we each should take responsibility for managing our minds by giving our brain the experiences it needs to make us happy.

When our negative Subconscious Mind gets cluttered with negativity, our Conscious response is to deal with the fear that results by focusing on it. This results in toxic overthinking where we imagine everything is a tiger.

Overthinking is when instead of regarding something objectively, we anxiously ponder all of the thousand and one ways that things could go wrong until we’ve turned our brain chemistry into a toxic stew. 

When I am working with my cancer patients I almost have a mantra, “Don’t get out ahead of the data.” There are a million things that could go wrong and most of them are not going to. But if you worry about them you distress yourself with imaginings and mental clutter.

He is a story about potatoes told by Steven Schuster that illustrates the self-defeating danger of overthinking. 

It was a winter night and John decided that he really wanted some french fries. But it was late and all the stores were closed. But John really wanted french fries (dopamine - the anticipation of a reward).

John realized that he could make his own, but he did not have any potatoes. However, he remembered that his friend Tom was always up late and always had a well-stocked pantry.

So John bundled up for the winder cold and set out to walk the two blocks to Tom’s house. As John walked he began to think. In fact he began to overthink. 

“Now, I can’t just show up and ask Tom for a potato as he’d think that I was only a friend because I wanted something from him. I’ll have to pretend I dropped by for a social visit.”

John began to think about all the things that he might say on a social visit. He recalled their their politics and religion were not in agreement, and he pondered different topics that he could raise.

Then, he wondered that Tom might be more well-read on those topics than John was, and that would make John feel inadequate and foolish.

Then, John remembered that Tom’s wife, Patricia, didn’t especially like John, and would resent him showing up at their door. “She could given him a hard time and be short tempered with my friend for the rest of the night.” and on, and on. Cortisol piling on cortisol. 

By the time John came to Tom’s door he had worked himself up into a state of insecurity, self-doubt, anger and worry by all this overthinking. His brain chemistry had become a toxic stew. When Tom answered the door, John looked him straight in the eye and said “Damn your potatoes!” and walked off empty handed into the winter night.

Let’s not be like that.

And that’s my sermon.

The Art and Science of Talking to Yourself

The Art and Science of Talking To Yourself

Rev. Dr. C. Scot Giles

Countryside Church, Unitarian Universalist

June 2, 2018

Every Day….

“Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better,” and so are you.

That simple optimistic affirmation (which some of you may have heard before) goes all the way back to the very beginnings of professional hypnotism and the positive thinking movement. It was created by the French psychologist and pharmacist Émile Coué, who developed it at the turn of the twentieth century.

Coué is believed to be the person who first discovered what we now call the Placebo Effect. He found that if he gave his pharmacy customers a positive affirmation every time he dispensed medicine, the customers did far better. Soon he developed a popular method of personal improvement based on a mantra-like optimistic autosuggestion— “Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better.”

He used other autosuggestions too, tailored to the specific problems and illness of his patients. You would get a different autosuggestion if you came in for a pain medicine than if you had the gout. But he was best known for the simple “every day” verse. In all cases, you were to repeat the autosuggestion aloud about twenty times per day while going about normal activities.

Also, you needed not to allow skeptical thoughts to taint the autosuggestion. Even if you don’t think you’re getter better and better, you don’t let yourself criticize the suggestion. 

The amazing thing is that people found it worked. Not only did they start to feel better about themselves, but their other thoughts started to be become more positive. We tend to be our own enemies. We think negative thoughts much of the time and they take their toll. 

In 1886-7 Coué studied with two of the leading hypnotists of the time, Ambrose-Auguste Liébeault and Hippolyte Bernheim in Nancy, France. In 1910 he would open up his own school and clinic in that city. He taught thousands of people to overcome their negative thoughts using his method and instructed hundreds of others to become teachers of his autosuggestion methods in their own right. Students from Coué’s New Nancy School came to the United States and became the first hypnotists in this nation, and every hypnotist in practice today owes him thanks. Today a bronze bust of him sits on a monument erected by a grateful profession on the place where his school used to be. 

One of the people taught was a leading Unitarian minister, the Rev. Norbert Chapek, who was the founder of the Flower Communion ceremony celebrated each year by most Unitarian Universalist congregations including our own. Chapek’s congregation was tiny and could not pay him a living wage. He earned his livelihood by being a “teacher of autosuggestion,” as hypnotists were called in that part of the world. 

We have no description of what the personality of Émile Coué was like, but his writing indicates that he had a sunny disposition. He did not call himself a healer but said that he taught people how to heal themselves. He believed that “any idea exclusively occupying the mind turns into reality,” provided that idea is plausible. You could not make a missing leg grow back, but you could overcome your asthma. 

Coué treated many of his clients without charge. His biographer, Harry Brooks, claims that he succeeded around 93% of the time. 

Ever had the experience of walking into a room and then realizing that you forgot what it is that you came into that room to do? It’s pretty common. I sometimes joke at my lectures that I had a great mental victory. I walked into a room and actually remembered what I intended to do there. Of course, it was the bathroom, but still….

Seriously, when you walk into a room and realize you’ve forgotten why you did, you could say to yourself “I can’t remember,” or you could say to yourself, “it will come to me in a moment.” Coué  argued that so long as you think “I can’t remember” you will not. But if you think “it will come to me in a moment,” it probably will. 

“Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better.” It seems a bit silly. I used to think so. Yet the Coué Method of autosuggestion meets all requirements of a well-formed hypnotic suggestion. Specifically:

It is simple.

It is positive.

It is in the present tense

It is believable.

It is measurable.

It carries its own reward - it feels good to say it.

Of course people don’t always use those exact words. I was once leading a class for young kids and they voted to say “Damn, I’m good” instead. Then teens took it further. They added another word to that formula. It started with the letter “F” and no, I’m not going to repeat it here.

Explanatory Style

We all talk to ourselves. I’ve spoken before about the work of Dr. Martin Seligman who created a system to classify the characteristic ways people talk to themselves. His research showed that people who talk to themselves optimistically have better health outcomes than those who speak to themselves more negatively. It’s not the case that healthy people are more optimistic, it’s that the optimism creates healthier people. As I’ve long said, what you tell yourself in the privacy of your mind has an enormous power to determine who you become. 

I used to use self-deprecating humor in my talks and sermons. I once told a congregation that “You know? I used to be indecisive, but then I realized I wasn’t sure.” While that kind of talk may get you a chuckle, it’s actually got a nasty edge to it. I now never use that kind of humor. Be careful about what you say to yourself, because you are listening.

As success guru Wayne Dyer put it, “Every time you start a sentence with (the words) I Am, you are creating what you are and what you want to be.”

Equanimity

We live in a stress filled world. Dr. Herbert Benson the author of classic book on mediation The Relaxation Response calls stress the “hidden plague” of our civilization. When in the Stone Age humanity developed clothing and harnessed fire, as far as we can determine our bodies stopped evolving. We have the same bodies as our neolithic ancestors. Our neurological systems developed to deal with the pressures of a campsite—wild animals, warring tribes, bad weather. But our social evolution has not remained static even though our neurological systems have. We are ill equipped to deal with the pressures of modern times—globalism, the 24/7 news cycle, email, the smartphone, the unreasonable job expectation. Such things are now everywhere.

To extend Benson’s metaphor of stress as a contagious disease, if you want to avoid having stress hurt you, it is imperative that you behave in exactly the same way that a scientist behaves when entering a contaminated area. If you work for the Centers for Disease Control and you go into a village where there is an active Ebola epidemic, you don’t go in wearing normal clothing. You wear a Level Four Decontamination Suit. Just so, if you live in a society where stress is everywhere, you need to take proactive steps to protect yourself from coming down with the deleterious effects of that stress—which is as much an invisible peril as a virus or bacteria. 

The best protection you can have is to use your mind to take control over the thoughts you entertain. You want to encourage optimism. But that is easy to say and hard to do. Coué’s affirmation actually can help and I both use it myself and routinely recommend it to my clientele. But there is more. You can cultivate an attitude of Equanimity—an attitude of calmness, composure and even temperament. Recently neuroscience has made a discovery that can help. 

The Carnegie Mellon Study

Here I need to give credit to Dr. David Creswell at Carnegie Mellon University. 

Dr. Creswell recruited 153 volunteers who considered themselves emotionally stressed for any of a number of reasons. They were divided into three groups. The Control Group members were given a smartphone app that gave general stress management advice.

The people in Experimental Group #1 were given an app that taught mindfulness meditation. The ability to focus attention inward and calm oneself in order to just objectively observe what one’s mind was doing, putting emotion aside.

The people in Experimental Group #2 given the same mindfulness app as the in Experimental Group #1, but were also given an instruction to say “yes” aloud to all sensations, feelings and thoughts they experienced during meditation.

All three groups practiced 20 minutes/day plus 10 additional minutes for 2 weeks. The smartphone app tracked them to be sure they complied. Psychological tests were used to measure participant’s stress level before and after the experiment.

Little changed for Controls. There was some improvement in stress management for Experimental Group #1. However, Experimental Group #2 showed the best lowering of stress and feelings of  loneliness. Also, on self-report they were measurably more social and relaxed.

It was the audible reinforcement, the saying “yes” aloud that made a great difference in stress de-contamination. What it appeared to do is create in the mind of those people a feeling of acceptance for whatever was being experienced. Hearing themselves say “yes” was huge.

We know that the brain is constructed in such a way that information heard audibly is processed differently from information that is read silently or simply thought. One of the techniques I routinely use is dream interpretation. People in our culture typically have trouble remembering their dream after a few minutes after waking. However, if while they are still in the borderline state between sleep and wakefulness, if they will say the dream aloud, letting different parts of the brain process that information, they are much more likely to recall the dream later.

I find it fascinating that the spoken word, even if spoken to oneself alone, has more power to affect change than thoughts held silently in the mind. I am reminded how in religious tradition the spoken word is given a special emphasis. In Judeo-Christian Tradition the Bible is referred to as the Word of God, not the Book of God. 

We go to church to hear sermons spoken aloud, rather than simply reading them. 

In scripture it is written in the mythology that at creation “And God SAID let there be light: and there was light.” God doesn’t think “let there be light,” God says it. So too when God “says let there be a firmament….” and God “says let the waters be gathered together…” and so on. Even in the most primitive of religious mythology there is an understanding the words spoken aloud have a greater power than words merely thought.

What happened to Experimental Group #2 is that they were able to calmly identify the emotional stressor they were experiencing, and by saying “yes” aloud were able to program their mind to accept that emotion without praise or blame. They experienced equanimity—the state of being calm, composed and an even temperament. This was an approximation to putting on a Level 4 Stress Decontamination Suit. The benefits of calm acceptance of what goes through your mind is huge.

An Experiment

As a demonstration I am going to show twelve images on the pulpit screen. When you look at each image, pause for a few seconds and identify how it makes you feel. They let us say the word “yes” in unison. Don’t just describe the image to yourself, ask yourself how it makes you feel, and then accept without praise of blame that you are a person who feels that way. 

At this point I do want to offer a trigger warning. There is nothing in the images that is violent or obscene. However, the images are intended to be provocative. Therefore, if you know you are in an emotionally fragile state for some reason you  might wish to close your eyes until this exercise is over. 

Images #1 - #12, (on Dr. Giles’s verbal cue)

People who use this technique teach their mind to accept themselves and their experience without judgment or critique. This sort of acceptance soon leads to a more positive way of being in the world—a calm optimism. 

When one realizes that one is having a feeling, one simply says “I am feeling ______, and they says “yes” aloud. The goal is to notice that one is feeling without denial or struggle. This makes it easier to let any negative feeling go.

This technique is typically easier for those who identify as women than for those who identify as male because men are socialized not to express their feelings and often have a limited emotional vocabulary. If that describes you, a corrective is to read more emotionally expressive literature.

As my favorite time-management guru, David Allen, is fond of saying, “Your brain does not have a brain. You have to be smarter than your brain” and learn how to use it to have the experience of the world that you want. 

Do, Have, Be Fallacy

There is a thing some hypnotists call the “Do, Have, Be” fallacy. 

“If I do A, then I will have B, and I will be C.”

“If I work two jobs, then I will have more money, and then I will feel secure.”

“If I go on enough dating websites and write a really great personal profile, I will be have more popularity, and can find my soul mate.”

“If I get up earlier and go to the gym, then I will have a better physical appearance and people will admire me.”

In all of these examples, the speaker is requiring some behavioral circumstance (getting two jobs, going on websites, getting to a gym) that must be in place in order to feel a certain way (secure, popular, more handsome or beautiful).

While popular because it provides an easy explanation as to why someone might feel insecure, unpopular or unattractive, it is in fact a fallacy. You cannot make yourself be anything by doing particular actions first. You can only be in some specific mental state because your emotions have shifted into that state. External circumstances are not irrelevant, but they do not cause emotions. 

Money can’t make you happy. It may help for a bit, but there are a great many people who have a lot of money and are miserable.

Those my age and older may remember the 1965 Simon and Garfunkel song, Richard Cory. Here is a snippet from the lyrics.

They say that Richard Cory owns one half of this whole town,

With political connections to spread his wealth around.

Born into society, a banker's only child,

He had everything a man could want: power, grace, and style.

The singer goes no to lament his own poverty and feelings.

But I work in his factory

And I curse the life I'm living

And I curse my poverty

And I wish that I could be,

Oh, I wish that I could be,

Oh, I wish that I could be

Richard Cory….

But the song concludes with these lyrics:

He freely gave to charity, he had the common touch,

And they were grateful for his patronage and thanked him very much,

So my mind was filled with wonder when the evening headlines read:

"Richard Cory went home last night and put a bullet through his head."

Being rich doesn’t necessarily make you happy.

Driving the right car can’t make you feel successful. It’s nice to have a car you like, but there are plenty of people who drive around in a nice car and who feel bad about themselves.

The admiration of other people will not make you feel confident. Indeed, it is more likely to make you feel like a fraud. 

If you want to feel happy, secure, popular or self-accepting you do not need to wait until some special circumstance is in place. You can become those things just by adjusting how you explain the world to yourself in the privacy of your mind. 

My colleague Victoria Gallagher advocates for a different path. Instead of falling for the “Do, Have, Be” fallacy she recommends thinking “Be, Do Have.”

If you want to surround yourself with happiness you need get to a place where you feel happy. Then you will do the things that happy people do, and you will have the things that happy people have. 

If you want to be a person of accomplishment, get yourself into a place where you feel motivated, then you will be more productive, and you will have the things that accomplished people have. 

You start with yourself and how you are feeling, then you adjust that by adjusting what you say in your head and how accepting you are of what you think and feel. 

It’s all about the way you talk to yourself, and if you do it right “Every day, in every way, you will get better and better.”

And that’s my sermon. 

Sermon: Collecting My Unconsciousness

Collecting My Unconsciousness

February 3, 2019

Countryside Church, Unitarian Universalist

The Rev. Dr. C. Scot Giles

Carl Jung

Often when speaking here I’ve referred to the work of the great psychoanalyst, Carl Jung, who died in 1961. I find him to be a strong influence on my own thinking.

Originally a disciple of Sigmund Freud and designated as his heir apparent, Jung would break from his former mentor and create a theory of human personality that has been influential in philosophy, psychology, art, literature, religion and anthropology.

He was also sort of a strange guy. And coming from me, that says something.

He was deeply interested in alchemy and had a psychological understanding of it. He was also interested in the occult, astrology, religious symbols and many other esoteric things. In fact one biographer commented that it’s not clear if Jung was a psychoanalyst who was interested in the occult, or if he was an occultist who simply convinced everyone that he was actually writing about psychology. He even reduced parts of the Bible to psychological symbols and explored various religious heresies, explaining them as manifestations of the human drive to be whole.

It is clear from recent publications of Jung’s personal journal that he really did think he was founding something that, if not in fact a new religion, would have the same function as religious belief.

The disagreement between Freud and Jung concerned the role of the Unconscious Mind. Freud believed that we all have base and savage impulses inside of our minds. Things like the urge for sexual conquest or a willingness to murder or dominate others.

However, Freud believed we learn to suppress these urges—making them Unconscious—in order to get along with others and get our needs met. Those impulses show up in dreams and in behavior. In fact, he believed that mental illness was the result of the improper suppression of these impulses, and their energy leaked out and manifested in odd behaviors. The unconscious mind, according to Freud, was a cesspit of dark desires and needs.

Dr. Jung on the other hand came to the opposite belief. He came to believe that everyone was born with a blueprint inside of their minds that influences the flow of a person’s life. 

Controversial at the time, this theory is given support by the study of animals—most of whom are born with a set of behaviors that uniquely adapt them to their environment. Jung thought this applied to people as well. As we are much more complicated than most animals, what we inherit is also far more complicated and useful. 

I am all in on this idea of an internal, unconscious blueprint, and the theory is at the basis of a lot of my work. I am a medical hypnotist and a life coach. I work with people who are living with cancer every working day. I have seen over the years how assisting someone get in touch with that inner blueprint, and find a way to make it manifest, can turn things around.

As many of you know, as part of my professional development I studied and trained with Dr. Bernie Siegel, a cancer surgeon who wrote the first well-received book on mind-body medicine in 1978. The idea of figuring out your internal blueprint, and finding a way to implement it, is central to his thinking. He taught me to use dreams, drawing interpretation and conversation to get a sense of someone’s internal blueprint, and then to use instruction in self hypnosis to get them to make it real. 

People who are unhappy in their relationships or jobs heal by finding a way to tweak things so that they align with their blueprint and everything pulls together.

Sometimes the transformations are dramatic. A stockbroker becomes a poet. I had a client who became a dancer at a club called Heavenly Bodies out by O’Hare airport (not what I would have hoped for her, but she tells me she is happy). Sometimes the transformations are modest. A new hobby is taken up, a relationship issue is addressed or some other lifestyle change is made. 

People who struggle with a life-changing diagnosis can find a way to do the same thing, and all of a sudden they begin to respond to medical treatment much better than they had been. This is, in fact, the insight that lies behind not just my work with individual clients, but my four free clinics for cancer patients (one of which is located here) and my hospital-based research program. 

The Collective Unconscious

Jung’s theory holds that the Unconscious Mind has two parts. the Individual Unconsciousness that is a unique creation of a person’s experience, and a Collective Unconsciousness that all people share. 

Jung mostly believed that access to the Collective Unconsciousness was something we inherit—it contains things that are encoded in our genetic material and passed from parents to child. However, he left open the idea that perhaps it was something more. Maybe it was an awareness streamed from some sort of energetic world with our mind functioning like a radio receiver.

The idea was developed when Jung had a dream that he was in a house with the first floor nicely decorated and organized. This he decided represented the Conscious Mind. The second floor in the dream was dark and full of rough things. This he decided represented the Individual Unconsciousness. Finally he dreamt of a basement containing the trappings of ancient cultures and old bones. This he felt was the Collective Unconscious. 

He would write:

“My thesis then, is as follows: in addition to our immediate consciousness, which is of a thoroughly personal nature….there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals. This collective unconscious does not develop individually but is inherited. (C. G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 1996, p. 43)

The thing to get is that his theory is that everyone is united at a basic level by a collective wisdom that we all share in virtue of being human. We have a Conscious Mind consisting of those things we identify as ourselves, and an Unconscious Mind that has two layers, one personal and the other collective. 

The collective mind is wise and contains information our species has amassed over ages of time. While not perfect, the information that comes to us from our Collective Unconscious is often helpful. 

Alignment

Understand that the Unconscious Mind isn’t passive.

Both our Conscious and our Unconscious Minds are thinking all the time. It is as if there was another being sharing our lives. As fantastical as this sounds, there is scientific evidence that it is so, and historical testimony going back to ancient times. In the Greek Iliad and Odyssey the characters could actually hear a second voice in their minds which they attributed to a supernatural source.

But it wasn’t, believed Jung, a supernatural source. It was the voice of their Unconscious Mind and that at that point in human history they could actually hear it. As time went on our brain evolved and we lost that ability. 

Dr. Ernest Hilgard (who died in 2001) was one of the most famous researchers in modern psychology. His 1953 textbook, Introduction to Psychology, was for a long time the most widely used textbook in psychology according to the American Psychological Association. It is currently in its 15th edition.

Dr. Hilgard was a hypnotist. In the 1970, he published a fascinating piece of research describing this “dual consciousness.” There were many subjects for this experiment (there is in fact a whole book about them) but a fascinating one was of a blind student. In the lab Hilgard hypnotized this student and suggested that he was also deaf. Sure enough, the student ceased responding to verbal questions and showed no physical reaction to extremely loud noises. He was to all intents and purposes both deaf and blind. 

Then Hilgard said to the student, “perhaps there is some part of your mind that does still hear me. If so, raise you index finger.” The student’s index finger rose. There was a part of his mind, different from his consciousness, that was still listening.Then the student came out of hypnosis spontaneously. 

He would later say he had no memory of hearing the suggestion about the index finger, but when he felt his finger go up for no reason he wanted to know what was going on and emerged from hypnosis to find out.

Several subjects reported that this “hidden observer” inside their mind was like a Higher Self. It is cognizant of everything that is happening. is aware of more than what the conscious mind is aware of, but doesn’t contact the conscious mind directly. It is believed that this “hidden observer” is the part of the mind that prevents a person from doing anything in hypnosis that the person would not do when out of hypnosis. It is watching what the hypnotist is doing and forming opinions about it.

Authors point out that the notion that we all have a mind that has two parts is not a new idea. In Traditional Chinese Medicine these two parts of the personality are called the hun and po. In ancient Egypt they were called the ka and ba. The ancient Greeks distinguish between the conscious mind, which they called the Eidolon and this hidden part which they called the Daemon. These two parts of the mind share perceptions about the world and events, but independently think about them and draw their own conclusions.

In fact the Greeks were clear that the Daemon was more important. They considered it a Higher Self acting like a Guardian Angel over the Lower Self—what we think of as our personality.

The great Stoic philosopher Epictetus wrote in the second century of the Common Era: 

“God has placed at every man's side a guardian, the Daemon of each man, who is charged to watch over him; a Daemon that cannot sleep, nor be deceived. To what greater and more watchful guardian could He have entrusted each of us? So, when you have shut the doors, and made darkness in the house, remember, never to say that you are alone; for you are not alone. But God is there, and your Daemon is there. (Discourses of Epictetus,14:11) 

Where Does The Wisdom Come From?

At this point in my life I have had enough experiences, including repeating Hilgard’s experiment at my own office, to have no doubt that what the Greeks called the Inner Daemon does exist. It seems to be the part of the mind that we call the Unconscious Mind. And because it has access to a collective mind, it is wise. 

When a person gets in touch with the Inner Blueprint and transforms themselves into a better and healthier version of themselves, the knowledge of what that blueprint is bubbles up from the deeper places. 

Dr. Jung believed, as do I, that this deeper awareness is something more. It arises from the Collective Unconscious. It is part of our minds that transcends our individuality and unites all of us together into a collective awareness. As it is collective, it is therefore immortal, and we each have a piece of it inside of our cranium.

Within our minds is a collective wisdom that we can access through exploring the part of our personal unconscious process that we are able to access. The pathway to the Collective Unconsciousness lies through the individual one.

When You Feel Bad

Your deeper mind knows you better than you will every know yourself. It is benevolent and wants to help you. The problem is that the Unconscious Mind does not have words. So to communicate it has to use the only language that it does have—your feelings.

Simply put, if your Unconscious Mind and Conscious Mind are in alignment, you feel good. If they are not, you feel bad. 

Let me illustrate this with a personal example.

Introversion and Extroversion

Jung spoke about two types of person, Introverts and Extroverts. These two personality styles are opposite ends of a continuum and people have traits of one or the other in different degrees. I am a strong Introvert. That means I process my thinking in my interior world and when I say something I typically have thought it through. 

Introverts also tend to have acquaintances but only a few friendships—although those tend to be deep and long term. Introverts need time alone and find that being with others can be tiring.

Only an introvert would say something like “I have a fantastic weekend. I stayed home the entire time and didn’t talk to anyone. It was awesome!”

Both Lindsay and I are Introverts and that is one of the strengths in our relationship. We understand the need we each have for time alone and do not interpret it as rejection. 

Extroverts are basically the opposite. They process ideas in their favorite world, which is the external world. They “think out loud,” make friends easily and find being together with others to be fun and stimulating. 

They love to be with others, while people like me say “Go outside. I can’t go outside. There are people out there!”

Our society is heavily structured to give Extroverts a benefit. Being a “team player” is an important job skill. Networking easily with others can be the key to advancement. When the teacher says “And class participation counts for a third of your grade,” Introverts and Extroverts are no longer on a level playing field. The Introverts will not speak until they’ve thought things through and the Extroverts roll right over them and get the extra points. 

Personality testing data indicate that two-thirds of the population in the United States are Extroverts. However, the same data shows that Introverts bring a lot to the table. We tend to be creative, empathetic, often excel at deep thought and are highly focused. It’s been suggested the most successful entrepreneurs are introverted.

Introverts do face discrimination, as they can baffle Extroverts who mistakenly consider them shy, cold, possessed of a social phobia or even an avoidant personality. 

When I was in theological school it was assumed that Introverts should not go into the ministry and the credentialing committee gave Introverts a real hard time. When I had my meeting with that committee I got through, but one member commented that he thought I was a “recovering Introvert.”

So I tried to act like an Extrovert. I forced myself into relationships that really didn’t appeal. I spoke more rapidly and tried to be more outgoing 

I was miserable. The reason I was miserable was that my Conscious Mind thought I should be doing something that my Unconscious Mind did not want. The two halves of my mind were not aligned and I experienced that as emotional upset.

With some help I was able to recognize that mistake and knocked the fake behavior off, deciding to let the chips fall where they may. The two parts of my mind came back into alignment, I felt whole again and become even more effective at my work, not less.

Perhaps you feel unhappy in your job or relationship. Consciously, you can’t put your finger of what is amiss and logically you think things are fine, but your feeling of unhappiness tells you that your Unconscious Mind does not agree. There is in fact something wrong, and doing something intentional to repair or change the relationship or occupation is wise.

Imagine you are someone who feels worthless and a failure. You feel awful. But the feeling of worthlessness is a conclusion reached by your Conscious Mind. That fact that you feel awful means your Unconscious Mind does not agree. The discomfort is there to motivate you to bring these two parts of your mind into alignment by getting help so the erroneous conclusion of your Conscious Mind can be corrected. 

Like all members of the clergy I spend time with people close to the end of their life. I have seen some people who are at peace and content. Their unconscious mind knows it is time for the end to come, and their conscious mind has reached the same conclusion.

But there have been others where there is a lack of alignment. The unconscious process is ready to let go but the conscious process clings to life. They feel horrible and the end is seldom crossed with grace. 

When your Unconscious Mind and your Conscious Mind are aligned, you feel good. When they are out of alignment, you feel bad. In the opinion of Dr. Jung (and Dr. Giles for that matter), as the Unconscious Mind is connected to a deeper collective wisdom, its opinion is the one most likely correct and what you consciously believe to be the case is most likely mistaken. 

Listen to your Unconscious Mind. If you feel bad know that the conclusions drawn by your Conscious Mind are mistaken.

And that’s my sermon.

Traveling in Circles for a Purpose

Traveling in Circles with a Purpose

The Rev. Dr. C. Scot Giles

Labor Day Sunday 2018

Countryside Church, Unitarian Universalist

The Freemasons

Among the men (and yes, there are women too) who are members of the Advisory Board of the National Guild of Hypnotists I am the only one who is not a high ranking Freemason. Mostly, it’s just a matter of time management as I work in the evenings and on weekends, and could not attend Lodge activities. But my father and uncle were Masons when they were alive, and my father actually had a Masonic funeral ceremony.

I was told about something that happens in a Masonic ceremony. Masons will ritually circumambulate at some of the rituals. That is, they ceremonially moving around an object, usually the Masonic Altar.

Circumambulation is an act we see in many rituals. During the Great Pilgrimage members of the Islamic faith will walk around the Kaaba—the cube shaped building at the center of the most important mosque. During the Mass a Roman Catholic priest walks around the altar with a thurible filled with incense. 

Circumambulation means traveling in a circle with a purpose; usually as part of a ritual of some sort. However, I’m going to speak of it as a spiritual and psychological notion, and in this I am indebted to the great psychoanalyst Carl Jung. 

Circumambulation

I believe that it was the salty actress Mae West who said “Getting older ain’t for sissies” and as I’ve gotten older I appreciate her wisdom. Yes, it beats the alternative but getting older isn’t a lot of fun. I miss the things I used to be able to do as a younger person and I miss the stamina I used to have. I resent that my body has gotten weaker and that parts of it are failing. 

I’ve joked that in my bathroom I should install a roll of duct tape above the toilet paper to be used to re-attach whichever part of my body seems to be in danger of falling off today. 

But Jung would disagree with me. He thought that the second half of life was the most important part. In the first half, when we are young, our task is to acquire the social and mechanical skills we needed to survive and hopefully prosper. But it’s in the second half of life, when we have the basics covered, that we grow philosophically and spiritually. 

He thought that the purpose of being alive was to become an individual. He called the process individuation. When we are infants we do not experience ourselves as individuals. Our boundaries are poor. We slowly discover that we are different from others in the world, that the world has expectations of us, and that we have a personality. Over time, we hone that personality attempting to create ourselves to be someone we enjoy being. It’s in the second half of life that this process intensifies.

There is a story that in June of 1961 as Jung lay dying in the Swiss city of Kusnacht he was still writing down and analyzing his dreams. Although he knew he only had hours to live, he was still concerned to learn what his dreams had come to tell him. He kept trying to learn more about himself up to the last second of his life. That image is a role model for me. 

Jung came up with the image of walking around something, circumambulation, as a way of thinking about ourselves. 

Imagine you are standing in the center of a room. Now imagine that you are another person walking in a circle around you. That person sees you from 360 different degree angles. Each view is different than the one before, and the one that would come next. Yet each view is valid.

There isn’t just on view of yourself, there are many. Now imagine that this is true of your personality. You can’t be described by any one description of your personality, there are many descriptions that are also, in their own way, true. 

As Walt Whitman said, “[You are] large, [You] contain multitudes.”

Only by understanding ourselves as the collection of all of those different views allows us to really appreciate who we are in the fullness of our incarnation. 

The Obvious

The brain is a wonderful organ and brain science has advanced amazingly in modern times. As one of its central functions, the brain tries to make connections between multiple events so that we understand what we might do to influence our world. When we make these connections we come to believe that they are obvious and should be obvious to everyone. 

The primitive hunter notices that he or she gets thirsty and needs to find water, and he or she notices that animals tend to flock or herd around water. The brain connects the two facts, and the hunter realizes that the animals are thirsty and then reasons that water holes would be a good place to hunt if you are looking for game. 

Usually, this process works well but it can go off the rails if the brain makes a connection it shouldn’t. A soldier in the Middle East learns that an object on the side of the road could be an “Improvised Explosive Device” and avoids it. But when that soldier comes home he or she continues to have an avoidance reaction to any strange object on the side of the road.

The problem is that what is obvious to one person isn’t obvious to another. For example, one person may think that it is obvious we should have universal healthcare while another person thinks it is equally obvious that we should not. 

Also, the obvious solution to a problem is not always the correct one. The brain seeks simplicity. A false simplicity can lead one to wrong or incomplete answers. This is nowhere more true than in the way we each think about ourselves. 

If I were to ask you to describe yourself, most of you would respond with your occupation first. 

“I sell insurance.” “I am a realtor.” 

Your occupation may be the obvious thing about you but it certainly isn’t the whole truth. You are much more than your occupation.

The Whole Truth

I have been married twice. My first marriage ended in a friendly divorce after thirteen years, and my current marriage to Lindsay is now in it’s thirtieth year. My “wild single days” between my first and current marriage were all of about eighteen months, and twelve of those months was my engagement to Lindsay, so I wasn’t on the market very long.

Those months when I tried to meet people were awful! Dating has got to be one of the most difficult things a person can do, especially if one is an introvert. That difficulty is amplified when you’re both a minister and a hypnotist.

I’d go to the local singles joint in Oak Park (an oyster bar called Poor Phils) and would strike up a conversation with some woman who seemed nice. Everything would go fine until she asked me what I did for a living. 

If I said I was a minister she’d make the Sign of the Cross and immediately vanish. 

If I said I was a hypnotist she’d refuse to make eye contact and quickly leave. 

The only way I could have a conversation of any length was to lie about my occupation. So I started telling people that I was an Assistant Sales Manager for a company that made rawhide dog chews. I rightly guessed that no one would want to hear any more about that and I could have a conversation longer than four minutes. 

Of course eventually I’d have to confess that I was telling a fib and then I’d look like a jerk. 

It was frustrating because while I am a minister and a hypnotist, I am much more. But people judge us on the basis of what is obvious. I wasn’t going to get anyone to mentally circumambulate me to really get to know who I was. No one had any interest beyond the obvious. 

This is what gets people messed up. Just as few are willing to look beyond the obvious when considering someone else, most of us fail to look beyond the obvious when we think about ourselves. 

As Jung said, “I began to understand that the goal of psychic development is the self. There is no linear evolution; there is only a circumambulation of the self. Uniform development exists, at most, at the beginning; later, everything points toward the centre. This insight gave me stability, and gradually my inner peace returned.” (C.G. Jung, Memories  Dreams, Reflections). 

To get a sense of who we really are, we need to do a circumambulation around our self image. This protects us from making mistakes.

I had a couple as clients recently. They were getting into their seventies and really wanted to retire to enjoy the freedom that some people find comes from retirement. But they had a problem. Their forty-two year old son was still living in their basement. He didn’t finish college. He never had a job that lasted more than a month. He expected an allowance from his parents. When pressured to do a job search by his parents he only applied for management level or executive positions for which he was completely unqualified. Some of you may recognize situations like this in your own circumstances. 

When I asked why they were not taking stronger steps regarding this middle aged son, they responded with the obvious. “We’ve loving parents. Loving parents would not throw their son out.”

They needed to circumambulate their image as parents. Yes, they were loving parents. That is on view of who they are. But as we walk in an imaginary circle around their self image other perspectives emerge. 

Are they also people who believe that it is wrong to reward bad behavior? Yes, they thought it was wrong to do that. Are they people who fundamentally believe that it is possible for a person to turn themselves around if motivated? Yes, they believed that too. 

Only by considering all of these other perspectives about who they are allows them to make a decision about their circumstances based on he wholeness of why they are as a couple. They are loving parents, who believe it is wrong to reward bad behavior and who believes that people can choose to turn themselves around. 

When they saw it that way, the vision dictated a different response from the one they had been making. 

We all should do likewise in the circumstances we face. 

A Spiritual Discipline. 

But there is more. Not only does one gain by circumambulating one’s own self image, so that decisions are made holistically—based on the fullness of who we are as persons, there is something deeper going on. Something more. 

In his personal writings, published posthumously because he feared scorn from the more materialistic scientific community, Jung came to believe in what he called “The Circumambulation.”

He came to believe that the unconscious mind in each of us has a sense of a future potential self that we might become if we completed he journey to spiritual wholeness.

He believed that this image of a future potential self—the best person we could possibly ever become—was manifested on a moment-by-moment basis in our daily experience by making us interested in those things that will lead us to maximum development somehow. It may not be clear but if you pursue what interests you you will eventually figure it out.

Think about that for a moment. The claim is that you are set up to automatically be interested in those things that can lead to your wholeness. Everyone else in your world might be skeptical about your passion for weaving, doll collecting, martial arts, baseball cards, or studying the mating patterns of poisonous frogs in Brazil, there is something in every one of the things you enjoy that is a clue to how to be your best self.

Joseph Campbell, perhaps the world’s greatest scholar on Comparative Religion, picked up on this theme and argued that the things you found you were interested in were actually a “Call to Adventure.” That is, they were clues about what you needed to do next to become spiritually alive. If you ignored this Call all that would happen is that it would find a way to show up in your unconscious life in a different way, somehow. This is what most people find the there are certain themes that keep repeating in their lives. 

The Hero’s Journey

In 1949 Joseph Campbell published his best known work, A Hero of a Thousand Faces.” in which he proposed that the hero stories we cherish as a species (Jesus, Moses, Krishna, Buddha, Mohammad and Luke Skywalker) all share a common mythological basis. The heroes start out as ordinary people. Things happen to them that draw them to undertake an adventure. At first they mess up because they are not very good at doing new things, but gaining skills they eventually figure it out and become admirable role models for the rest of us. 

There is even a school of theological thought called the “Christ Myth Theory” that holds that the historical Jesus of Nazareth had no actual historical existence, or if he did exist he was so different from the cultural understanding that he had no impact on the founding of Christianity. 

Instead, the story of Jesus is just a warmer, more humanitarian version of the Hero’s Journey told about many figures over the history of our species. It reflects, not a supernatural event, but a deep psychological phenomena that arises from the reality that we are programmed for wholeness. 

Stories about other people who were also programmed for wholeness and who achieved it in some manner of form become immensely attractive to our minds. Not because they are supernatural, but because they reflect a reality we also find within our own minds. 

He argued that we would have better lives if we tried to undertake the “Hero’s Journey” in our lives in whatever way was appropriate for the circumstances and limitations we find. 

When I was in college I had a girlfriend who was passionate about tarot cards and astrology. In fact, one day she carefully cast my natal horoscope and immediately broke up with me. But prior to that she used to say that the twenty-two cards in one part of the tarot tell out the story of a hero and his or her initiation into spiritual fullness. 

You find yourself interested in things. They attract you but you’re a newbie and so you make mistakes. This relates to the first card in the deck, The Fool. Then, you progress through the realizations suggested by the other cards until you emerge at the last card of the deck, The World, which means completion and fulfillment. That makes sort of sense. 

The Circumambulation starts with the path of The Fool because when you follow your interests you are going to screw up as you don’t know much about how to do it. You are interested in all the things that feed your potential future self but you don’t know how to do those things well nor how to put them together into some coherent image of who we might become. But if you keep at it you learn wisdom, and figure out how to become that future potential self that your unconscious mind has been working to help you become. 

The Compassion Soak

When I work with a client to overcome a stubborn life problem or a scary medical diagnosis I will eventually instruct them in a technique called the “Compassion Soak.” It was developed by the HeartMath Institute in California, a group that does high quality scientific research into mind-body interactions (full disclosure: I am credentialed by them). 

This technique is a way of appreciating oneself. It used to be called the “Soft Heart.” No one can feel good all of the time. Mood swings are as common as commas in a novel. So we ask people to imagine themselves soaking in a warm, bath that can gradually sooth away worry in the way an actual bath can sooth away the aches in our muscles.

Then, find something you find admirable or appreciate—large or small. I often image the loving antics of my animal companions. This helps one get to a “soft” and gentle place in one’s heart. Then, reflect that you are a human who lives in a challenging time and allow yourself to find something about yourself that you find admirable—no matter how small. Give yourself permission to just enjoy this for some time. 

This exercise has a tonic effect for the entire body that we can measure using scientific equipment. It’s intended as an antidote for the reality that we are evolved to wrestle with the world. Nothing comes easily to anyone and happiness is hard to find. However, we contain an inner sense of who we might be able to become and day-to-day reality gives us hints of that as our interests change over the course of a lifetime.

If we  pay attention, and do not give in to the temptation to overly identify with the most obvious parts of ourselves. If we will circumambulate when we think of ourselves and face decisions, we will make better decisions based on the fullness of who we are.

More, if we pay attention to what fascinates us—no matter how odd or impractical—we can glean clues on how to be a better self. If we are young we may have a lot of time to explore that. If we are older, the inquiry is no less valuable for what it might give us in the time that remains. Like Carl Jung puzzling over his dreams in the last hours of his life.

Remember that we are not reducible to the obvious things about ourselves that other’s see. 

Consider all the parts and values that make us up instead of just the obvious ones when decisions are needed.

Pay attention to what hooks your interest, realizing those interests are clues to a better you, sent from your unconscious mind that is always trying to show you a better way as it subjectively walks around your self image and whispers “You are more than you think.”

And that’s my sermon.

What Dr. Frankenstein Got Right.

What Dr. Frankenstein Got Right

A Sermon to Countryside Church, Unitarian Universalist

The Rev. Dr. C. Scot Giles

May 27, 2018

The Book, Not the Movie

If you are anything like me, when you think of the story of Frankenstein, you think about the 1931 classic movie from Universal Pictures staring Boris Karlov. Unfortunately, that movie is not faithful to the book it was based on. 

In the movie a scientist and his assistant engage in grave robbing to construct a patchwork being. The assistant accidentally gives the being the brain of a homicidal maniac. When the patchwork being is brought to life by electricity harnessed from lightening, it becomes a monster. If this movie is what you think of when you think of Frankenstein, you are missing the point of the story.

The actual story is found in a novel by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley who died in 1851. The book was titled Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus. She wrote the novel when she was only eighteen, working over a rainy summer in 1816. 

It was a summer that concerned many people. We talk of global climate change, but that summer Mary Shelley and her friends were experiencing it. It was the “Year Without a Summer” caused by an exceptional cold volcanic winter caused by the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia the year before. People were scared and of a dark turn of mind.

It is the story of Dr. Victor Frankenstein, who was born in Naples into a wealthy family. He would later fall in love with his adopted sister, Elizabeth Lavenza. Just before leaving to study chemistry at a German university, his mother died of scarlet fever. In grief Dr. Frankenstein vows to find a cure for death. He was successful. 

At the university he discovers a secret technique to bring organic matter to life. He ultimately creates a humanoid, making it a giant in order to simplify construction of otherwise minute parts. When brought to life, the creature’s appearance is repellent. Dr. Frankenstein does not know what to do, and while he is deciding the creature, seeing the horror in his creator’s face, escapes. 

Living in isolation in the wilderness the creature avoids human contact. He hides and listens to people talk, and in so doing learns to talk himself. Happening upon a suitcase of abandoned books, he taught himself to read and becomes learned and articulate.

The creature locates Dr. Frankenstein and begs him to create another creature, this time female so that he might have a companion. He argues that as a living being, he has a fundamental right to happiness. 

Dr. Frankenstein agrees, but secretly decides he would not do what he had promised lest the two creatures breed and form a new master race. 

In a rage, the creatures kills members of the Frankenstein family, including Elizabeth. He flees to the North Pole, followed by Dr. Frankenstein who vows revenge. However, Dr. Frankenstein overestimates his own resilience and dies of hypothermia in the frozen wasteland. Heartbroken at the death of his creator the creature isolates himself on an ice flow and drifts out to sea, never to be heard from again.

That’s the original story.

The mention of Prometheus as the subtitle to the novel relates to the Greek legend of the Titan who created the human race at the request of Zeus. But Zeus, seeking to control humanity did not given our race fire. Prometheus, in defiance of Zeus does so. This ushers in the arts of cooking and hunting, but also allowed humanity to learn to kill. Intending good, Prometheus caused harm, just like Dr. Frankenstein. 

Hungers

Eric Berne, the founder of a system of practical psychology called Transactional  Analysis, argued (and I agree) that all people have emotional needs that we seek to fulfill. He called these needs “Hungers.” As we go through life we instinctively seek to meet these needs. We have a choice in that we can do so in ways that are healthy or unhealthy.

Dr. Berne felt there were six such hungers. The first was Contact. We need physical connection to others to thrive. Children who have more skin-to-skin contact with their parents do better than those that have less. This continues throughout life in different ways

The second is a hunger for what Berne called Incidents, or periodic breaks from routine. A vacation or day off is a good example.

The third hunger is the need for Recognition. We all want to be appreciated to some degree by others in order to feel a sense of self-worth and dignity.

The fourth hunger is a Sexual Hunger. Fulfilling that in a healthy way is important for our well being, although Berne noted that it is possible to channel this hunger into other outlets such as creativity, sports or even spirituality.

The fifth hunger is for Stimulation. We will actually go insane if deprived of sensation for too long. That’s why people tend to hallucinate when they float in a sensory deprivation tank for extended periods.

The final hunger is for Structure. We all try to have some measure of organization regarding our time and relationships so that we are not living in a way that is chaotic.

What is interesting about this list of Hungers, is that in her narrative Mary Shelley systematically deprived Frankenstein’s creature of every one of those Hungers. 

He lives in isolation. No one will touch him. Although he is articulate and intelligent, he lacks even the recognition of a personal name. All around him is chaos. He is denied a mate. Striving to survive there is no break from a punishing routine for him. All the human Hungers go unfulfilled. 

And that’s what Dr. Frankenstein got right. If you want to crush a person, you deny that person inner fulfillment. To make this sermon relevant to Memorial Day—I will mention that think we’ve done this to a lot of veterans who return from war broken and then find there is nothing to help them recover. 

In response, Dr. Frankenstein’s creation does what any human being might do when he or she realizes that the game is rigged and there is no way to win, or even to win a little. The creature becomes angry and hostile. 

The Recent News

Many people today believe they are living a life that is like the life that confronted Frankenstein’s creature. 

We all feel that we have a fundamental right to happiness. In order to be happy—to flourish—we need to find a healthy way to fulfill what Dr. Berne called our “Hungers.” But it can seem like the game is rigged against us.

It’s hard to get ahead without a college education, but with the education can come crushing debt. I sometimes wonder how I would ever manage to go to college myself if I were a young person today. During High School I worked to support myself. There would have been no way I could have done any of the extracurricular activities colleges want to see on an application. Nor while working would I have been able to cope with the hours of homework routinely assigned today. The game would seem completely rigged to defeat the aspirations of a boy from the wrong side of the tracks who wanted to go to school. 

As the financial return on investments is so much more than the rise in wages, with rare exceptions, there is no way to become wealthy by working hard. Economists have long explained that these days the way to become wealthy is to inherit wealth or marry someone who has. Unless you are going to be the rare entrepreneur like Bill Gates who invents a disruptive technology, you can’t get really rich through your paycheck alone any more. 

Also, certain ethnic communities face structural oppression in our society, because our society like most societies, benefits its majority culture. The game seems rigged.

As a result, some become angry and hostile. I suspect that is the fuel that drives the active shooter tragedies we have seen. After the Stoneman Douglas School shooting in Parkland, Florida last February the Geneva police department held an “active shooter” training for the churches and community organizations in the City of Geneva. My wife is the parish minister of the Geneva Unitarian Universalist Society and was invited. I attended along with her.

The police told us the the evidence was now clear what motivates the people who commit atrocities like this. It is the lack of hope. Many feel themselves caught up in a rigged game. Believing themselves unable to achieve a good future or obtain recognition in any other way, they opt for infamy, revenge, and a quick exit. 

Likewise, the belief that the game is rigged drives some people to cheat. This explains the corruption and lying we see at even the highest levels of business and government. Those of you who work in health care will be familiar with the contemporary story of the nine billion dollar blood testing company Theranos, whose technology was the darling of Silicon Valley. They sold equipment to allow pinprick blood testing in your local Walgreens. Except it turns out the technology was a fraud. A “get rich quick” scheme to bilk investors, at least for a while, by a college dropout who figured she had nothing to lose. There are many examples. 

If you spend much time on the Internet you do not have to look far to encounter people making angry statements or engaging in personal attacks. These are expressions of rage from people who can’t think of anything else to do because they feel themselves held down. So what you get are expressions of rage. 

The unspoken message many people hear is that you can’t win this game. You get a job and work hard for eight hours a day and as a reward you get promoted to manager where you are expected to work twelve hours a day.

If you are not born into happy circumstance you can’t earn your way to happiness, and they know in their hearts that life isn’t supposed to be this hard. 

I am reminded of a subset of Murphy’s Law called Boling’s Postulate. “If you are feeling good, don’t worry…you’ll get over it.”

But It Isn’t True

The good thing about all this is that it really isn’t true. With a bit of creativity, it is in fact possible to flourish and fulfill the human Hungers, it’s just that a lot of people don’t see the opportunities that they in fact have. They fall victim to a nasty trick evolution has played on the human community. 

If you are not familiar with the work of cognitive scientist, Harvard professor and Pulitzer Prize nominee, Steven Pinker, I recommend you take a look. He has more than a dozen books in print and has been named as one of the 100 most influential public intellectuals by both Time magazine and Foreign Policy.

His proposition is a simple one. While nothing is guaranteed nor inevitable, things are way better than you think. 

Human well-being, while in no sense guaranteed, has undergone a tremendous and underrated improvement over the past few centuries. While there are still people starving, it is worldwide obesity that is more of a threat to the majority of the planet’s population. Famine used to be so feared that when John of Patmos wrote the Book of Revelation, the end-times prophecy in the New Testament in 64 CE, famine was one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Not obesity.

In his 2012 book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, Pinker argues that we are actually living in one of the most peaceful moments in the existence of human beings. 

It’s not hard to find exceptions to these positive generalizations, but still when you look at the data dispassionately, the evidence is clear that war, crime and abject property are at historic lows. It’s not so much a testimony to how good things are now as it is a testimony to how bad things used to be. But the point remains.

As an example, in medieval times you could be executed by Drawing and Quartering for the “crime” of criticizing the Royal Garden. The world still isn’t a just place, but it’s way better than it was.

While injustices still abound, there are not as many as there used to be. The upward general trend is glaringly obvious when you disregard your feelings and fears and consult the objective data instead. 

Pinker believes that the Enlightenment era in the 17th century, a movement that is also the origin of Unitarian Universalist thought, kicked off a wave of humanism and science that changed our civilization fundamentally in positive ways and continues to do so.

When I first read these ideas I experienced cognitive dissonance. I grew up in the “Duck and Cover” era of the Cold War where we expected destruction at any moment. My parents passionately believed in the Red Menace and the Yellow Peril. I was raised in a climate of fear. But I am trained as a philosopher and students of philosophy are taught to bracket their emotions and look at arguments from an objective frame. When I did so, I was convinced. 

Pinker argues that the mental fog that brings so many of us down is due to journalism. He says, “As long as rates of violence and hunger and disease don’t go to zero, there will always be enough incidents to fill the news. Since our intuitions about risk and probability are driven by examples…we get a sense of how dangerous the world is that’s driven by whatever events occur, and we’re never exposed to the millions of locales where nothing bad happens. (Reason magazine interview, June 2018)”

The Negativity Bias

To understand why we think that way I turn to the recent work of University of Chicago professor John Cacioppo. While I have long argued that the human brain has been wired by evolution to favor a negative expectation, Dr. Cacioppo have proven it. 

He calls this the “negativity bias,” and he means that your brain has evolved with a greater sensitivity to negative news than positive news. This bias is so strong it can be detected even in the brain of an infant. 

In an experiment Dr. Cacioppo showed subjects photographs known to arouse positive feelings (a photo of a pizza was popular). Then he showed them pictures intended to arouse negative feelings (an injured person or a dead animal). Finally they were shown photographs intended to produce neutral feelings (one was of a hair dryer). While this was happening he electronically recorded the activity in the cerebral cortex in the brains of the subjects, measuring how much information processing was occurring.

The brains of the subjects reacted much more strongly to the the negative stimuli. The subjects were much more strongly influenced by negative things than positive.

This trait evolved to help us survive. Fearful creatures are cautious and tend to survive, while fearless creatures tend to become food. But this bias affects every domain of our lives. 

Romantic partners are more heavily influenced by the negative things done by their partners than the positive, even if the positive are more plentiful. Parents respond more to what their offspring does wrong. Employers quickly forget our contributions and clearly remember our mistakes. 

In fact, Dr. Cacioppo computed that it takes five positive inputs to overcome the harm done by a single negative input. No wonder people feel bad. No wonder they can see no way to meet their human Hungers when they perceive obstacles to their flourishing. They put themselves on the metaphorical ice flow and drift away into depression and negative expectation. In today’s world anti-depressant medication is wildly popular.

Feeding Our Hungers

This is all by way of saying that in Mary Shelley’s story Dr. Frankenstein’s creation fell into the trap of his own negative bias. He decided there was no way to meet the human hungers, and he fell into rage and despair. That was the tragedy in his story. But it didn’t have to be that way. I can think of other ways to have told that story.

One of the greatest scientists who ever lived was not Dr. Victor Frankenstein. Instead, I think it was Dr. Victor Frankl, a psychoanalyst sentenced by the Nazi government to the Concentration Camp at Dachau. While there, he studied his fellow prisoners and he studied himself. He discovered that even in a Concentration Camp, there were ways to be happy. 

He started small. The sun was still warm and on a nice day could be enjoyed. The clear air still smelled good. As what you have experienced cannot be taken from you, he could enjoy his happy memories and take a few moments of pleasure in them.

Sometimes in the soup line the man serving the soup would give him what he called “one from the bottom,” meaning that the ladle was put all the way to the bottom of the pot before being pulled up—and had a little more meat in it. 

Gradually, Frankl learned that by carefully noticing the good things he could still enjoy, his fear and anger were conquered. He found a way to notice five good things for every bad thing, and he began to think great thoughts.

When he was set free after the American occupation in April 1945, Frankl took these great thoughts and wrote a profound and influential book—titled in English Man’s Search for Meaning. In it he explains how remembering to notice every good thing, however small, was enough to keep dark thoughts away and overcome his negative bias.

I often quote my time management guru David Allen’s favorite quip. “Your brain does not have a brain. You have to be smarter than your brain.” We need to understand the dirty trick evolution has played on us that causes us to be short sighted and negative by default.

Dr. Frankenstein’s creation might well have found a way to meet his needs and find a measure of happiness if he had not decided there was no hope. 

If I were a High School student now in the same situation I was in many years ago I might have had to spend a couple of years at a local Community College to prove my academic worth before applying to a University. But I do believe I’d have found a way to make that work if I didn’t give up.

We are not out of options unless we decide that we are. And Cognitive Science tells us that if we make such a decision we are probably mistaken. There is always a way for a creative person to find a path to happiness. 

Start small. Carefully notice the good things, however tiny and gentle. Keep piling them up. As we say at the HeartMath Institute, “A Change of Heart Changes Everything.”

And that’s my sermon. 

Sermon: Hitting People With Sticks

Hitting People with Sticks

For Community Ministry Sunday 2018
A Sermon to Countryside Church, Unitarian Universalist Sunday, January 28, 2018

In the 1970s there was a TV show called Kung-Fu starring David Carradine who played a Shaolin monk named Kwi Chang Caine. Like all Shaolin monks, he was a martial arts expert who had fled China and lived on the American Old West. Possessed of a deep ethical sense as well as a deep spirituality, Caine moved around the American frontier defending the less fortunate and growing in wisdom, insight and skill.

This show had a strong impact on me because it proposed that fighting could be more than just self-defense. As a young man I had a violent adolescence and fighting was part of this. The show Kung-Fu showed that the martial arts could be a way of personal self-improvement. I began to do some reading, and gradually moved from being a street fighter to someone who knew something about the martial arts.

Then the movie The Karate Kid came out in 1984 and I was hooked.

In the 1980s when I was the parish minister to our Oak Park congregation, I took my sabbatical to study martial arts formally, taking private instruction and then joining a school. It changed my life for the better, teaching me about self-discipline and respect, and how the mind could help my body do things that I had believed were impossible.

As a community minister who works as a medical hypnotist, that lesson about the power of the mind resonated deeply, for I’ve seen people learn to use the power of their minds to heal from terrible afflictions and to take control of their own lives.

I would end up as a multiple black belt. As I grew older I was attracted to the ancient weapons of Okinawa, Korea and Japan and would become the Traditional Weapons Instructor for my school for more than a decade. I taught a total of eight ancient weapons, specializing in the stick and the katana, or sword, what you would probably called the “samurai sword.”

These days I am not the only Unitarian Universalist clergy person who is also a martial artist, but at the time it caused something of a stir. I’d like to think I opened the door for some of my colleagues to also step into the training hall in order to try to become better people.

I retired from teaching in my mid-50s but continued to practice on my own in a home dojo, or training room. Although I still have my sword collection I transitioned to stick fighting as that is easier for an older person to do. Also, I developed soft tissue damage in both knees, and soon discovered I needed to use a cane much of the time so that my knees did not become inflamed.

Well, I figured if I had to use a cane I might as well have canes that were fun to carry and I was be proud to own.

There is a martial arts association dedicated to fighting with a cane, called CaneMasters International. I joined, trained and am now a Lifetime Member. In fact, the cane some of you have seen me carry on Sunday Mornings is actually a CaneMasters Grand Master Cane, hand made and engraved for me. While I have a medical reason to carry it, I exercise and train with that cane every day.

So hitting people with sticks has become part of my life. In fact, even when I was a swordsman, mostly we used specialized sticks, called bokken, to train and spar. You don’t actually use a sharp steel sword when training with another person for obvious reasons.

Today I want to talk about the spiritual aspects of the martial arts. I believe they teach a lesson that all can benefit from, even if you never intend to put on a uniform, walk onto the mat in a dojo and bow to a martial arts master.

Tradition and Meaning

I’ve got am amazing collection of sticks these days. Thanks to ancestory.com I learned that I am Irish—something I never knew and something that my family was actively concealing. Therefore, I added to my collection the traditional Irish fighting stick, the shillalah. I have one here <display>. This is a bata shillalah, made for me by the official shillalah maker of the Village of Shillalah in Ireland.

A true shillalah, like any any martial art tool, is a work of art. They are not the varnished blackthorn sticks you can find in your local Irish Store. It takes three to five years for a craftsperson to take a piece of blackthorn root stock and turn it into a true shillalah. The wood is soaked in special oils and waxes, kept warm for years until it becomes pliable, and then the craftsperson pulls it straight by hand over a period of months. No tools are allowed.

A martial artist treats his or her tools with respect. Swordsmen and swordsmen actually bow to their sword at the start of a training session, just as if the sword were a person. You do this to acknowledge that the sword is more than just a weapon or a tool. It is something you use as a path to personal improvement. Stick fighters do something of the same.

Martial Art v. Martial Sport

Unfortunately, in our time the martial arts have become, in my opinion, somewhat corrupted.

In many cases the respectful and spiritual aspects of the traditional martial arts are being transformed into a “martial sport.” The most obvious being “Mixed Martial Arts” fighting, where people bulk themselves up with steroids and weight training, enter an octagon shaped cage, and proceed to pound other people using pure strength with little strategy or finesse.

Martial sports use the movements and techniques of a martial art, but strip away all the spiritual and philosophical aspects. If traditional weapons are used at all the routines have been changed from ancient philosophical patterns into showy and impractical movements that are little more than cheerleader baton twirling routines done with toys. I hate them.

The fundamental difference between a martial sport and a martial art is that the art is about something—a philosophical or spiritual principle. The sport is only about scoring points.

When Morihei Ueshiba created the martial art of aikido, he didn’t do it because he wanted to hurt people. He did it to demonstrate, in a way no one could deny, that all people are connected by an energy. In fact aikido is often translated as “the way of unifying life energy,”

What a practitioner does is to sense the balance and harmony in a room. If an aggressor disrupts that harmony, the aikido practitioner restores it. If the opponent pulls, the aikido practitioner pushes. If the opponent pushes, the aikido practitioner pulls, and in so doing pulls the opponent off balance and tumbling him or her to the floor. Harmony is restored.

When Miyamoto Musashi, who would come to be called “the sword saint” in Japan formalized sword fighting and wrote his majestic Book of Five Rings in the 16th century he didn’t do it because he wanted to be violent. In his philosophy he came to believe that time was an illusion, and he demonstrated that using the sword.

In a sword or stick fight things happen fast. Faster than the eye can track. It’s all about intuition and feeling. A person must anticipate what the opponent is about to do and begin to move to defend against that BEFORE the opponent has actually done anything. You literally have to predict the future. If you divine the future correctly, you win. In a sword or stick fight both people are attempting be, not in the moment, but in the future and to make the future now.

Toward the end of his life Musashi became so good at this that he would approach his opponents dressed in everyday clothing and carrying only two wooden sticks. The opponents carried live swords and wore armor. Musashi is recorded as having been victorious in over 60 duels. He died undefeated.

The point is that true martial arts are always about something. They exist to illustrate a philosophical or metaphysical principle and succeed because they demonstrate that such principles are real. Then they extend that to other disciplines and activities. Musashi was an educated and accomplished man; expert as an artist, sculptor, architect and calligrapher. His art survives to this day and always displays his profound belief in timelessness. He believed the sword showed that time could be transcended.

What Is Your Life About?

The take-away in this somewhat autobiographical sermon is that martial arts are always about something. That is the great lesson they teach. Instead of just being born, thriving as best one can and then ending life when death comes, they propose that one’s life should also carry a meaning. Regardless of whether or not one practices a martial art, our lives should not be about just surviving. They should be about something greater. Ask yourself what your life is about.

You start small. The first time you enter a training hall you are taught easy, small steps—how to punch, how to block, how to avoid. It is only in the most advanced stages of training that you reach for the more elaborate techniques. The martial mind has always understood that the small things matter most. Master the basics.

The most basic thing about a person is his or her character. It determines almost everything else. If you develop your character as a person you may or may not find a path to riches or fame, but your life will be about something.

As an example, one of the people I admire the most is Dr. Dwight Damon, the President of the National Guild of Hypnotists. As I am also an officer in the Guild I’ve known Dwight a long time. He is an accomplished man. A successful chiropractor, he then took over the National Guild of Hypnotists after the departure of its founder and built it into the largest organization of its kind. He raised a large and successful family—and he is a long time Universalist as well, growing up in one of our churches.

But all of that is not what he is about. How I would describe him is that he is about “putting the Golden Rule into practice.” He is one of the very few people I’ve met who I can honestly say constantly tries to treat other people in the way he would want them to treat him.

I’ve seen him insulted. I’ve witnessed people slander him and lie to his face. He always rises above that and reaches for the Golden Rule as his guide. The result is that he treats other people far better than they typically treat him, but he makes it clear that his life, his character, is about putting the Golden Rule into practice.

For myself, I am all about teaching other people to take control of their lives through the power of their minds. I care about all the other things I’ve done and do, but fundamentally I try to show people that they have more power over what happens to them than they believe.

I could go on but I hope I’ve made my point. Ask yourself about your character as a person. What do you take with complete seriousness. What is important to you? What are the things about which you have no sense of humor. That’s your core. That is what you are about.

Organizations should be about something too.

In the 1990s when those of us who were here then decided to build this building, we knew that there was something we took with complete seriousness. We wanted to make it obvious, and so we wrote it on the wall in the foyer. Our covenant says that as a congregation we take seriously: (1) the bonds that unite all people, (2) human dignity, (3) reverence for life and (4) faith in a creating, sustaining and transforming power. That is our congregational character.

We didn’t invent those words. They are drawn from the theology of a great Unitarian Universalist theologian who taught at the University of Chicago. His name was Henry Nelson Wieman and he died in 1975. One of the people he taught was the Reverend Dr. Ruppert Lovely, our late Minister Emeritus.

Our covenant isn’t a complex theological document. What we are about is simple. Unity among people. Dignity. Reverence for Life, Faith that there is something more. Just the basics behind a profound spirituality.

When you fill out your pledge card this season you have the option of making these things something you are about too. I hope you will give until you are proud.

Unitarian Universalism is having a tough time these days. Many of our congregations are faltering, the national denomination has just suffered through a financial scandal regarding departing leadership. More than two thirds of our congregations have fewer than one hundred members and cannot support a full- time minister.

I’ve noticed if you ask the people in those congregations what their church is about you don’t get a clear answer. Usually you hear something vague about “liking the people.” When you go into a larger congregation and ask that same question you get a different answer. They tell you about what they are doing. They, like Countryside Church, try to be about something.

Being about something protects you from getting distracted. That’s a big deal.

Cell Phones

Likely 90% of the people in this room carry a smart phone. They are incredibly useful devices and like the personal computer and the internet, they’ve transformed our society. Probably a lot of you have a gaming console of some sort in your home as well. They can be a lot of fun.

But there is a danger too. Mental health professionals now talk about “smart phone addiction” because some people end up spending so much time on their phones they neglect real time relationships and obligations.

The World Health Organization has now officially recognized a “Gaming Disorder” citing evidence that some people become so involved in their video games that playing them “takes precedence over other life activities.” In fact, some specialists wonder if part of the reason why some people in the upcoming generations seem to lack ambition or a work ethic is because they are getting their sense of satisfaction and accomplishment from success at computer games rather than real world activities.

People are subject to distraction, and there are things in our world that are very distracting. Our smartphones, computer games, advertising, television, the 24 hour news cycle, and much more. While these things gave great value, as a practicing hypnotist I can tell you they also pose a great risk. It’s possible to become so entranced by distractions that we forget what we thought was important.

In that distracted state we become subject to manipulation by societal forces that want us to be little more than sheep and make no trouble while they enrich themselves.

The man who began the positive thinking movement was also a great social philosopher. His name was Napoleon Hill and his classic books Think and Grow Rich and The Laws of Success have continuously been in print since the 1930s. In his last book, Outwitting the Devil, he argued that the tendency to become distracted was so strong that if we are not careful we end up “drifting.” That is, we lose all perspective and purpose and go through life letting other people and forces set the agenda for us.

We become about what others want us to be about.

He thought that was deadly. The only person who ought to set the agenda for your life is you. He thought that a person who knows what is important to him or her was a person of fearsome power. So powerful, that oppressive forces in society conspire to prevent people from becoming that powerful. Therefore, they fill the environment with noise, bread and circuses, distractions to keep us so occupied we fail to notice that we have been suckered.

The antidote to this is to know what one is about. What is really important to you. If you know that you can resist the distractions that make so many easy to manipulate.

Breaking Boards

I’ll close with the martial arts image of a person breaking a thick board with a strike of the hand. When a martial artist is tested for promotion to the next rank he or she will be asked to break one or more boards in this way. This is used as a test because the board will not break unless everything about the punch or kick is perfect.

Breaking a board requires that one be so focused there is no distraction. You aim so that your target is actually on the other side of the board, and you strike with full confidence and belief that the board is not really in your way. If you do that the board will snap. However, if you lose your focus your subconscious mind will see the board and become fearful that you are about to hurt yourself. You will instinctively pull the punch or kick in self-protection and the board will not break.

When you address the target board you have to know what is important to you in that moment—keeping your mind on the target on the other side of the board. You must resist all distraction. You must know your purpose. If you do that, you succeed.

That is what I have learned from my decades as a martial artist. That we need to be able to resist distractions of every sort. That we need to know our purpose and what is, and is not, important to us. That we need to live so that we are about something. Then, we can resist the forces who would keep us distracted so they can have their way with the world.

Perhaps others may find that observation helpful in their own lives too. And that’s my sermon.

Sermon: Feeding the Field

Feeding the Field

A Sermon to Countryside Church, Unitarian Universalist

Sunday, November 5, 2017

The Rev. Dr. C. Scot Giles

A Universal Spiritual Theme

For those of you who do not know me, my community ministry is a practice of medical hypnotism. A recurring theme in this work is that many people find themselves in a place where they are over-caring about other people. They do more than they should for others and as a result become de-energized, depressed and sick.

I often find myself talking to a frustrated client who says something like, “Well, what am I SUPPOSED to be feeling about other people?” Or, “Every time I try to help someone I end up getting taken. How are we supposed to live if everyone else is trying to take advantage?”

Over the centuries spiritual leaders have attempted to answer questions like that. Some answers have emphasized righteousness and rule-based relating to others. Some have recommended a more subjective approach, talking about “loving” others according to varying definitions of the word “love.”

In my opinion the religious teaching of some of the foremost prophets—people such as Jesus or Buddha—is misunderstood. I’ve spoken before about how their teachings have been mistranslated in an unhealthy way, and that people are taught to perform what I call “acts of self-destructive love.” 

So, I’ve long looked for a better answer to the question about how we are supposed to feel and do about others who are not our intimates. While we may choose to help other people, or take care of them, or forgive them, I don’t believe we are ethically obligated to do any of those things.

What Compassion Means

The best and healthiest response I’ve seen is to answer that question with the word “compassion.” We are ethically obligated to treat each other with compassion. But that does not imply rescue or forgiveness. Let me explain.

Compassion merely means responding to the struggles of another with care and warmth. It means you strive to regard everyone with a positive regard. However, it does not imply that you do anything in particular about that positive regard.

In the legends of Jesus and Buddha left to us as examples, they always can be seen to observe that limit.

Compassion is care without over-care. It is positive affirmation of another without setting yourself up for abuse. It’s care with a built-in limit, and that limit is that you are not obligated to forgive or rescue someone from non-physical peril.

Note that qualifier. Of course we all should help someone in physical peril such as drowning, or being caught in a fire or things like that.  

There is a story about a Western Buddhist woman was in India that illustrates this nicely. She was riding with another woman friend in a rickshaw-like carriage, when the friend was attacked by a man on the street. In the end, the attacker only succeeded in frightening the women, but the Buddhist woman was quite upset by the event and told her teacher so. She asked him what she should have done - what would have been the appropriate, the Buddhist teacher responded very simply by saying, "You should have very mindfully, and with great compassion, whacked the sucker over the head with your umbrella.”

Of course we should act in such circumstance. 

I am talking about the danger of the unhealthy belief that you have an obligation to rescue people from chronic problems and situations they have created for themselves. 

Now, I said we are not obligated. If someone is in hardship, you may feel compassion, and because you are in a generous place you may choose to lend a hand, or to forgive or even rescue. But that’s a choice you are making, not an obligation and it is separable from compassion.

The obligation ends once you have regarded someone with the respect and care due another human being. That is all anyone is ethically obligated to do. Compassion.

If you routinely do more—if you are always trying to rescue others, I think you are on an unhealthy path. 

When we see someone who has taken on too much and is suffering from what is commonly called “burn out” and what counselors call “compassion fatigue,” that’s the path they’ve been on and they need to get off. 

That’s why I said earlier that compassion is care, without over-care. It is the positive affirmation of another without setting yourself up for abuse because of the built in limit. One is not obligated to rescue another from non-physical peril.

Jesus and Buddha

The importance of compassion as the baseline ethical value turns out to be a core message of two of the religious leaders I admire the most, Jesus and Buddha.

In 1999 the late biblical scholar Marcus Borg published a book entitled Jesus and Buddha: The Parallel Sayings. Just as the title suggests the book has on facing pages a teaching attributed to Jesus and on the opposite page a matching saying from the Buddha.

The striking point is that in most cases the teachings are essentially identical. In fact, it is likely that the image we have of each man may, to some extent, be a composite of stories about other.

Most scholars believe that Buddha was born about six centuries before Jesus, with writing about him appearing about 500 years later—approximately at the time of the life of Jesus. 

It is now clear that many of the early Christians knew about Buddha. Both St. Jerome and Clement of Alexandra actually mention Buddha in their writings. It’s also clear that Nestorian Christianity, one of the popular Christian movements that sprung up along the Silk Road, was heavily influenced by Buddhist teachings, and in fact there were Buddhist missionaries all over the Greco-Roman world at the time Christianity was moving from being a Jewish reform movement to a faith open to anyone, and at about the time the Gospels were written.

In the art of the period this overlap is seen. Both men were said to have miraculous conceptions. In the slide on the right you see a depiction of the “miraculous impregnation” of Mary the mother of Jesus by the Holy Spirit symbolized as a white light. 

On the left you see a depiction of the dream of Queen Maya, the mother of the Buddha, on the night she conceived, where according to the legend:

“In her dream, she heard the angels tell her to lie down on the couch to rest. Presently, she saw a pure white elephant (a symbol of greatness in that culture) quietly enter the room. Gentle as an angel he seemed as he came up to her couch and stood beside her. On the end of his trunk he carried a large lotus flower, white as the cleanest snow, and he gave it to the Queen…That very moment when the Queen took the flower, the room was filled with a heavenly light.”

There are many similarities in the legends as well. 

• Both went to their temples at 12 years of age and astonished the elders with their knowledge.
• Both fasted in solitude before spiritual maturity. Jesus for 40 days, Buddha for 47.
• Both were about the same age when they began their public ministry.
• Both were said to be tempted by evil spirits at the beginning of their ministry.
• Buddha said he was the latest in a long line of enlightened spiritual teachers. Jesus said he had not come to overturn the previous prophets but to fulfill them.
• When Buddha died it is said the covering of his body unrolled and the lid of his coffin rose because of supernatural power so his followers could view him. When Jesus died it is said that his tomb was opened by a spiritual power, his shroud fell away and be came forth so others could see him. 

And on, and on and on.

No scholar believes that Jesus and Buddha were actually the same person, but increasingly it is obvious that the stories and legends about them that were rattling around the ancient Near East got tangled up together. The reason this happened is because while there are enormous metaphysical differences in the theology of Jesus and Buddha, there is almost an identical match in their practical teachings. They both urged that we be compassionate to others as the core of their ethical teachings. 

Jesus called it Agape, meaning un-self interested affection. The term Buddha used is usually translated as “loving kindness.” Both very similar concepts.

Or, as His Holiness the Dalai Lama said, “If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.” The core value is compassion, not rescue, not forgiveness and not self-destructive love.

However, there is a recommendation in the teaching of both of these great people that there is one sort of action which is implied by the feeling of compassion, and it may be the purest form of action the arises from compassion. Both Jesus and Buddha recommend doing random act of kindness—acts of compassion for no particular reason not with any expectation of recognition. I agree.

The Science Involved

Whenever you find similar practices in different cultures there is usually a rational reason for them that you can ferret out. In the case of compassion, there has been a lot of psychological and anthropological research done. Compassion is good for you in a way over-care is not. We thrive when we are compassionate—following that built in limit of not rescuing except in cases of physical peril.

First, when you engage in an act of compassion, your body changes for the better. Neuroscientist Dr. Richard Davidson, founder of the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin has found that the brain responds differently when we do something for compassionate reasons than for hedonistic reasons. Both produce positive emotions, but the positive emotions from pleasure are fleeting whereas the positive emotions from compassionate behavior lasts. (You can read more about that here.)

Moreover, those emotions stimulate your body’s production of oxytocin, the so-called “love hormone,” a hormone that makes us feel wanted and secure. The physical result of this hormone is to boost cardiovascular function and health. It protects again heartbreak, both in the emotional sense and in the sense of medical heart failure.

Nicole Karlis, author of a recent New York Times article “Why Doing Good is Good for the Do-Gooder” writes of an anxiety attack experienced while in India. She paid for a consultation with a Vedic Astrologer and received an unusual prescription. She was told to buy a black and white checkered blanket and then to visit a leper colony and to give the blanket to the first person she saw. Then, she was to buy a six-pound bag of lentils, spin it around her head while reciting a mantra and then give it to a homeless person. That astrologer treated her anxiety by telling her to engage in random acts of kindness.

There is even something that is being called “the helper’s high,” an actual physical sensation associated with being kind. Half the participants in a major study reported themselves feeling stronger, calmer and happier after engaging in a few random acts of kindness. Such acts appear to trigger the brain’s reward center and creates a literal “dopamine-mediaed euphoria.” (You can read more about that here.)

The Compassion Field

In my opinion the best research into mind-body interactions is being done by the HeartMath Institute of Bolder, California (full disclosure, I hold credentials with them). 

For more than twenty years the Institute has explored the physical aspects of the emotional connection between people. In a study published in 1998 titled “The Electricity of Touch: Detection and Measurement of Cardiac Energy Exchange Between People” the researchers showed that electromagnetic energy produced in the human body when the subject was engaged in acts of kindness could be detected in the bodies of others in the area, calling forth like behavior from them. (You can read more here.)

Your neurological system generates electrical energy, in HeartMath lingo, a local field energy that can be measured with magnetometer technology (I have such a device in my office).  The field measured is created is by the heart, as that field is one hundred times the strength of the field created by the brain. To measure the field produced by the brain it is necessary to attach electrodes directly to the skull, while the field of the heart can be measured at least a meter out from the body.

This means that acts of kindness and compassion are actually contagious. When you engage in random acts of kindness with no expectation of personal reward, you call forth similar behavior from others. This is done not only by social example (“monkey see, monkey do”) but you are actually broadcasting a measurable signal from your body’s own electromagnetic energy that others detect and may respond to. 

This is perhaps why we feel better when in the company of like minded people. It’s why some people can transform the feeling of a room simply by being there. It’s why people will travel for hours to listen to a spiritual leader or artistic performer in person, rather than just watching on YouTube. 

The energy of the speaker, picked up and amplified by the others in the area can become almost intoxicating. 

Perhaps that’s why many of us feel less depressed during holidays or sacred seasons, because we are surrounded by other people who feel joyous or strong. The energy is contagious.

The Good News

As researchers have poured over these studies speculation has grown that their might be a larger energetic phenomena involved. Perhaps we can think of our world as has a “compassion field” generated by the acts of compassion by people the world over. Each time one of us does something compassionate we “feed the field” and make it a little bit easier for other people to also be compassionate. 

I’ve adopted this in my own inner narrative and when I do something I feel good about I think of it as “feeding the field” and perhaps helping to make the whole world a little bit better.

The Dark Side

But, as in Star Wars, there is a dark side. If you have ever seen the 1935 propaganda movie Triumph of the Will by Leni Riefenstahl which glorified the Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg, attended by more than 700,000 supporters of Adolph Hitler, you get a sense how unkind and dominating energy can also be contagious.

When you instinctively moderate what you say or do out of consideration for the impact it has on others, you do this because you recognize that other people are not robots and your words, energy and behaviors will have an impact on then. That’s compassion. 

When our President moderates what he says to deliberately humiliate the people who disagree with him, he chooses his words as weapons. The size of his base shows us that petty nationalism is also contagious.

We are responsible for the energy we create, for it feeds an emotional field larger than ourselves and changes the world.

Care

Be careful. Sometimes the emotional field generated by another person can suck one in. 

Last month in the four free clinics I offer around Chicagoland for people living with cancer and their loved ones my topic was “Overcoming an Emotional Vampire.” I was amazed at the resonance this topic had with almost every one of the cancer patients I worked with.

An emotional vampire is a manipulative person who manipulates through passive aggression. Typically their lives are one long crisis state and their life goal is to share their drama with you—over and over again. If you do not play along they let you know that you are disappointing them and they attempt to shame you into giving them your time, energy, effort and often money.

Overcoming an emotional vampire requires not falling for their con. It means not being sucked in by the emotional atmosphere they project around them. One can be compassionate—that is, one can listen with warmth and care. But compassion never implies a duty to fix. The emotional vampire very much wants you to fix them by attempting to rescue, support or do the work for them. As poet John Ciardi puts it in his poem "In Place of a Curse:"

Let them all into Heaven -- I abolish Hell -- 

but let it be read over them as they enter: 

"Beware the calculations of the meek, who gambled nothing, 

gave nothing, and could never receive enough." 

---

A Practical Spiritual Discipline

A lot of people tell me they would like to be more spiritual but don’t have the time to practice a specific spiritual method. It takes time to learn to meditate in order to feel calm. It takes practice to pray without boredom. It took me years to learn how to keep an effective journal.

But there is a simple spiritual discipline everyone has time to do, and the upcoming holiday season is a great time to do it. Practice random acts of kindness. Do something nice for another without expecting anything in return. Put a buck in the Salvation Army Kettle, let the cashier round up your purchase to send some money off to a good cause. 

Feed the positive energetic field around you, and help others do that same. If some sort of planetary field exists, then you make that stronger. It doesn’t take any time at all, and Jesus and Buddha would be proud of you.

And that’s my sermon.

Sermon: The Joy of Chaos

The Joy of Chaos

A Sermon to Countryside Church, Unitarian Universalist

September 3, 2017

When I was a young minister in my first parish I had a pad of paper I used to send notes to members of the Board of Directors. Each page had a heading that said “Isn’t it a beautiful day? I wonder what SOB is going to mess it up?”

The people who served on the Board were very offended by those notes and directed me in the strongest possible language to stop using the pad. So naturally, I used it as often as possible. 

Hey, no one ever said I’m easy to get along with.

I recount this story not to demonstrate that I tend to be a difficult person in some circumstances, but to reflect on the wisdom of that saying. It does seem that every time we have everything all set and humming along, something is going to happen to disrupt it. 

And disruption is everywhere. The racism of the Charlottesville protests to the devastation of Hurricane Harvey.

Dealing with disruption is my topic today. How can we deal with disruption, chaos, and all the bad things in life, most effectively? 

As usual, I will look for the answer by looking at what science can tell us about human consciousness. I agree with Ken Wilbur who speculated that “in the highest reaches of evolution, maybe, an individual’s consciousness does indeed touch infinity.” That is, whatever process it is that directs our unfolding universe, it leaves fingerprints of itself on what it creates. By exploring the human mind we get a sense of the powers that lie behind that mind, and about how we may order our lives to live with spiritual power. 

The Game of Thrones

As it is one of the most popular shows on television, I’m sure a lot of you have seen The Game of Thrones on HBO. There is a recently-deceased character in that show that was played by actor Aidan Gillen. The character is Pyter Baelish, also called Littlefinger. 

Littlefinger is a nakedly ambitious figure in the storyline. A former brothel keeper he became the Master of Coin (Treasurer) on the Small Council of the Seven Kingdoms and the Lord Protector of the Vale.

There is a phrase Littlefinger used over and over again. He says, “Chaos is a ladder!” meaning that a manipulative person like him can use times of disruption to get ahead. Here is the full quote. He says:

"Chaos isn’t a pit. Chaos is a ladder. Many who try to climb it fail, and never get to try again. The fall breaks them. And some are given a chance to climb, but refuse. They cling to the realm, or the gods, or love... illusions. Only the ladder is real. The climb is all there is. “

The fact is, he’s right. Chaos is a ladder. Progress in any field is always accompanied by disruption. Chaos is inevitable as disrupting the status quo is how all progress occurs.

The printing press disrupted the production of books by scribal copying. Automation disrupts manufacturing. Discordant sounds disrupted modal music and caused alteration in how we listen. That’s why Rock and Roll seemed chaotic to a generation raised on Blues, and why Metal Music sounds so extreme to some of us now.  

In fact the theology of this congregation is rooted in disruption. We are founded upon what was considered the blasphemous ideas of a Spaniard named Michael Servetus whose book On The Errors of the Trinity started Unitarianism in 1531. To generations raised on the beliefs of the Roman church, Servetus’s ideas took orthodox theology and disrupted it completely. 

But the disruption was a ladder. Servetus’s ideas caught on and laid part of the foundation for the Protestant Reformation of which our own denomination descended as the radical wing. 

It’s far from over. Just as personal computers, the internet and smartphones have forever altered the landscape of our lives replacing typerwriters, encyclopedias and paper organizers, so the new technologies of Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality will certainly do more of the same.

Will the chaos of the Charlottesville protests ultimately result in an improved awareness of racial tensions in our society? Will the devastation of the Texas coastline serve to wake people up about climate change?

Will all this chaos be the doorway to something better? If Littlefinger were here this morning instead of being recently deceased on The Game of Thrones, I think he would say that it’s possible. And maybe it is. I really hope so.

The positive thinking guru Clement Stone used to say that “every adversity has the seed of an equivalent or greater benefit” and I repeat that to myself just about every time something bad happens. But I know it’s not really true. I’d like it to be, but sometimes adversity is just the start of a greater problem.

A psychiatrist client once joked with me by saying “Cheer up, they said. Things could be worse. So I cheered up and they were right. Things got worse.”

It’s always possible that things will just get worse. That’s the difficulty with chaos and disruption. Sometimes it opens to great new things. Sometimes it doesn’t.

Alchemy

Several times in the past I have spoken from this pulpit about my academic interest in the ancient precursor to chemistry, alchemy.  

Alchemy was the proto-scientific tradition in medieval and renaissance Europe, Asia and Africa. The Alchemists opened laboratories in which they tried to discover how to create the Philosopher’s Stone that could turn lead into gold, they also tried to create the Elixir of Life that could prevent death, and the Panacea, a medicine that could cure any disease.

Eventually alchemy became the science of chemistry and the Alchemists did make great discoveries. They formalized the experimental method, developed laboratory procedures, they learned how to distill oxygen and isolate many chemicals. Their work transformed medical practice which had not changed much since ancient Greece. 

They had great influence. We think of Sir Isaac Newton as a great physicist. However, he thought of himself as an Alchemist, and wrote more about alchemy than he did about physics, mathematics or optics. 

The Alchemists believed that they were practicing a form of spirituality, and every alchemical laboratory had a small altar where the Alchemist prayed. They believed that as they transformed the chemicals in their crucibles they were also transforming themselves into more spiritual and refined people. 

It was this practice that led the great psychoanalysis Carl Jung to conclude that alchemy was interesting from the perspective of depth psychology. He thought, and I agree, that it was the shadow side of Judaism and Christianity. Alchemy kept everything Christianity and Judaism tried to ignore. 

The core alchemical principle was the Latin phrase Solve et Coagula, which means “dissolve and coagulate.” The Alchemist would try to take what already existed, dissolve it (that is, make it chaotic), and then reform it into something better. 

For the process to work Coagulation had to follow Dissolving. Chaos was useful only if it leads to a new and better organization. Nothing good can ever come from just destroying things. That’s anarchy.

If you know me at all you know I am the enemy of clutter. I live in a curated and decluttered environment where things are organized. I think if one has stacks of stuff around that one has been meaning to deal with, they become an energy thief and pull the joy right out of life.

The most popular de-cluttering writer is Marie Knodo and her two books The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up and Spark Joy are best sellers. Interestingly her method of organizing a home is to take everyone out and stack it in a chaotic heap in the middle of the floor. Then, she teaches a process to bring order out of that chaos by asking yourself questions about every item you remove from the pile. She starts with chaos and creates something better from it. 

Chaos is a ladder only if it leads to a new and better organization. Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t. I’m interested in what helps it lead to something better.

Adversity Into Advantage

In my Consulting Hypnotism practice I work extensively with people who are living with cancer. Typically my clients have late stage disease and know all about adversity. Very often, things are a mess for them. No one knows better about how to overcome chaos and make something out of it than a good-responding person living with cancer. 

What I learned by watching and working with such people over several decades is that there does seem to be a formula to maximizing the chance that something better will result from something bad that has happened to you. 

In the reading I shared earlier from his classic book Cancer as a Turning Point, Lawrence LeShan hints at it. The way one figures out how to get though a time of chaos is not by “living in the moment” nor “doing what your gut says.” The way relies upon using your imagination to predict your best outcome.

That way I express it is that when one is in a really bad place. When one is in a circumstance where everything seems to have gone wrong and there are no good options, imagine yourself in the future (I often suggest two years in the future) looking back at this time, and ask yourself what you feel most proud of having done.

I’ve been in circumstances where I’ve been angry or felt betrayed and at the time wanted to make an angry or aggressive response. But I realized that when I would look back at how I behaved from the future, an angry or aggressive response would not serve me well.

It might feel better at the moment, but in the long term it will embarrass me. Far better I make a graceful response that will mark me as a more evolved being when I think back upon it. 

When you don’t know what to do, ask yourself what you will feel proudest of when you look back at this time from years into the future. 

I had a client call to cancel an appointment recently. His reason was unique. He was trying to make bail. He was at a political demonstration and someone on the other side really got into his face. He gave in to his feelings and shoved back. A fight happened, and he was detained. Far better he resisted his feelings and instead of reacting to them, he might have used a discipline to create a more considered response. 

A couple Lindsay and I have been friends with for some time are getting divorced. That’s always sad. Worse, they are really mad at each other. But they had the presence of mind to realize that working for an amicable end to their relationship was in their long-term interest. They didn’t give in to their feelings. They decided what to do based on what would be best for them in the future. 

The Negative Brain

The reason I recommend navigating chaotic times using a philosophical principle like this rather than an emotional reaction is that brain science gives us a lot of data showing that our emotions are not the best guide to action. 

Don’t get me wrong, knowing how you feel emotionally is important information. But acting on your feelings without more reflection will often end in trouble. I may realize I am angry. That’s important to grasp. But acting in anger will usually turn out badly. Better to use another guide.

The brain transmits information among its parts by sending out chemical information from one neuron to another. Neurochemestry is the sum total of all this messanging. 

There are four major chemicals in your brain that influence the degree of happiness you feel. The acronym to help medical professionals memorize them is DOSE. They are: Dopamine, Oxytocin, Serotonin and Endorphins. 

Dopamine is the serious happiness drug, although its role is more in the anticipation of happiness than in the emotion itself.

Oxytocin is released by positive closeness with another person or animal. It strengthens affection and friendship.

Serotonin controls your greater mood and is one of the most important information carrying chemicals in your body.

Endrophins help you overcome pain or fear, and enable you to power through stress and take risks. 

While these four are the most prominent, there are actually many others: Glutamate, Gama-Aminobutric Acid, Acetylcholine…in fact there are a group of ten molecules, fifty neuroactive proteans, several fatty acids and even a group of individual ions that your brain uses to regulate itself. 

Of these, and this is important, most are involved in the experience of fear and negative expectation. We are all hard-wired to be negative and fearful creatures. Our brain is a fearful and negative creature. That is how the chemicals in our brain combine most readily.

It’s not hard to understand why this evolved. 

Fearful creatures tend to survive and reproduce. Fearless creatures tend to become food for larger creatures. Therefore, we have evolved so that the experience of fear and negative expectation are the default setting in our brains because in a state of nature that keeps us the most safe. 

If you do nothing expect react to the chemical activity of your brain you will be reacting in fear and negativity most of the time. In my experience and belief giving into the predisposition toward fear and negativity at times of disruption will almost always make things worse. Instead of bring a new order out of chaos—Solve et Coagula—we just get more chaos. 

The only way to NOT react in a fearful and negative way is to use your willpower to superimpose some other process on your thoughts, rather than just going with what the chemical reactions in your brain dictate. 

As time management guru David Allen says, “Your brain does not have a brain. You have to be smarter than your brain.” You need a process that can overrule neurochemisty. A process like asking yourself “what would I feel best about doing when I look back at this time from the future?”

Monkey Mind

One of the greatest psychologists of all time was the man we call the Buddha. 2500 years ago he taught his students about the mind, describing it as being filled with drunken monkeys. They jumped around, screeched, carried on, clamoring for attention. 

Of course, the monkeys he mentioned were the chatter of our interior thoughts and feelings, often arising from unconscious forces as the chemicals in our brain flow and change in primitive response to external stimuli. 

Much of the Buddha’s teaching is about how to tame those monkeys, and overcome the disordered thoughts that most of us find we have. He taught them meditation to calm the inner chatter, he taught a way of thinking so that his students didn’t take the chatter of the monkey’s so seriously. If you consider it, what he was teaching is that people need a process that can overrule their neurochemistry. I agree.

Amour Fati

Just as the default emotional state in the brain is a fearful and negative one, so too our memory has evolved to facilitate this. The mind recalls bad things much more readily than good things. The chemical states prevalent in a negative memory are more plentiful in our negative brain, and so those memories stand out. 

If I were to give you a large sheet of paper and ask you to make a list of the Bad Things And Wrongs Done To You, most of you would need to ask for a second sheet of paper, and you’d probably be able to create the list quickly. 

If I were to then ask you to make a list of the Great Experiences you’ve had, most of you would need to pause and think a bit. Your lists would not be long. 

I have been trained by the HeartMath Institute, a group that does high quality research into mind-body interaction. One of the techniques we use is to ask people to center themselves and recall some completely positive memory, and to really put themselves in it. Don’t just think about it. Re-experience it. We’ve learned that almost no one can do this at first. We have to give them time to dredge up a handful of positive memories. It takes work because of the way our brain is wired. 

One of the greatest philosophers in the world was Friedrich Nietzsche. He got a bad press initially because his books didn’t sell much when he was alive. Then, his sister came to be in charge of his literary estate. His sister was a Nazi. She published edited copies of Nietzsche’s books to support that ideology. Since then her chicanery was uncovered and corrected editions of his books published. His though has come to be very influential in both philosophy and psychology. 

Nietzsche wrote about a concept he called “Amour Fati,” or the Love of Fate. He thought that emotional and spiritual health came only when you have done enough inner work to get to a place where you love your fate.

By that he meant that if you really like who you are; If you really respect yourself and are at inner peace, you love everything that has happened to you. Even the bad things must be loved because they helped make you who you are. If you love the person who has resulted from your fate, you must then appreciate all the stepping stones that got you there. Even if they were no fun at the time. 

In my opinion the only way to achieve such a spiritual state is to understand we need disciplines to control our mind, such as the one referred to here. You make fewer missteps and will have fewer things to regret.

And so, may you have good luck in taming the drunken monkeys in your mind, and when hardship befalls you may you have the presence of mind to listen to your imagination instead of your emotions, and may you ask “When I look back from the future, what behavior would I be proud of.  What would serve me well in the long term?”

My experience, and those of my clients, is that asking that question and then doing what it suggests is the best way to bring better things our of disruption—be that disruption emotional, political, economic or spiritual.

And that’s my sermon.

Sermon: Expectations of Immortality

Expectations of Immortality

A Sermon to Countryside Church Unitarian Universalist

May 28, 2017

The Rev. Dr. C. Scot Giles

As Above, So Below

Years ago when explaining an unusual point of eastern philosophy to my late first wife, she said, “You know, there are many strange things in the world.” Then she looked me in the eye and said, “How come you know about most of them.”

The answer is that, like most Unitarian Universalist clergy, I read widely. As myprofessional world encompasses religion, theology (which is not the same thing as religion), hypnosis, medicine and psychology, my reading list is quite varied and more than a little strange.

Today I begin with a saying that some of you may have encountered before (and it’s a strange one). It is the saying, “As Above, So Below.”

Some of you may be familiar with this saying as it is popular in modern spiritual literature. As I understand it, the saying comes from medieval alchemy and supposedly is a quote from a book called The Emerald Tablet, said to have been written by a man in ancient Greece who modestly called himself “Hermes, the Three Times Great.” 

The notion is that things that happen here on earth have an effect on things that happen in the wider universe, and vice versa. That’s why astrologers quote it in support of their claim that what the planets and stars are doing influences what happens here on earth. 

I don’t know about that (I am a Virgo, and we Virgos don’t believe in astrology), but science has now discovered something called evolving symmetry. That is, that similar substances display similar properties, regardless of size. They are often illustrated by geometric designs called “fractals.” It turns out that “As Above, So Below” sort of works in the sense that the same physical forces that affect very small things, also affect very large things in the same way.

For example, the same geometries that control how your cream swirls when you pour it into your coffee, also controls how vast clouds of interstellar gas swirl as they pass near distant galaxies. By studying the math about how your cream swirls in a coffee cup, allows astronomers to understand some of what they see with their telescopes. So the saying, “As Above, So Below” isn’t entirely without merit and it frames my topic today. 

Death

Because my work as a Consulting Hypnotist with a medical specialty brings me in contact with people who are very ill, I’ve had to think about the phenomena of death, illness and other dark topics. 

One of the rules in my profession is that you have to work out your own issues around scary stuff before you can successfully help another person deal with that material. Today I’m sharing my personal view and the reason I expect an immortality after I pass from this world. To explain why, I’m going to be considering information from neurophysiology and cellular biology, not faith or scripture. There is nothing wrong with faith or scripture, but today I want to put a different spin on the discussion.

This Memorial Day Weekend, where we pause to remember all those who have died in the service of our country, and more widely, remember all who we have lost, I felt it was an appropriate time to speculate and explain why I expect some form of happy immortality. Let me stipulate I speak with no authority on this beyond my personal experience and the research cited. Your mileage may vary.

A Society of Cells

When I want to learn about a subject my first response is to look at what science has to say about it, especially if there is a parallel within the human body. I believe we can learn a lot about what our universe is like by looking at the things that shape our physical selves. As Above, So Below. As Below, So Above. This is certainly true when considering the issue of death and immortality.

Each of us began as a single cell. Our bodies are a society of cells. Each cell is independently alive but works together with other cells to make up our physical form. We are actually a great living system made up of living parts. Those parts are created though cell division. They grow, die and pass away, to be replaced by newly divided cells. 

So we can grow new skin to cover a wound. It’s why bones can heal. It’s even why chemotherapy works.

The Four Fates Of The Cell

When a cell dies, one of four things happens. The first thing that can happen, and it’s nasty, is called necrosis. A damaged cell that should perish, instead fights to survive. When it inevitably loses that battle, it breaks open and suddenly spills its contents into the body’s fluids. This can make us feel sick.

The second thing that can happen to a cell is autophagy. A cell becomes aware that it is too damaged to repair itself, and it turns itself off suddenly. This goes on all the time and mostly we are not aware of it. But if a lot of it is happening at one time it can make us feel weak and fatigued.

There is a third thing that can happen to a cell, and it’s a very bad thing. Some cells, for reasons we don’t understand become immortalized. They are sick cells and should die, but for some reason they don’t. We call this cancer. I personally think calling these cells immortal is misleading. They are actually zombie cells and no one wants to have them. 

The fourth and final thing in the life of a cell is called apoptosis, from a Greek word which I’m told is used to describe falling leaves.  It’s vital for life. 

When a cell realizes that it is at the end of its life, it gradually turns itself down, and finally turns itself off. The process is slow, it doesn’t trigger the immune system and doesn’t cause any problems at all. We’re not even aware of it except that we feel healthy and if we’ve been sick. We feel like we are getting stronger.

The best thing for our bodies is that when our cells reach the end of their lives they quietly turn themselves off, either quickly as with autophagy or slowly as with apoptosis. The process is peaceful. The passing away of the cells at the appropriate time allows our body to thrive. 

Simply, we want the cells in our body to “die well” and be replaced and renewed. When that happens we flourish. The strategy our healthy cells use to project themselves into the future isn’t to try to live forever. Reproduction is simpler than eternal maintenance.

Thinking about the ancient saying, “As Above, So Below” I wonder if there is a human equivalent for the processes that go on with our cells as they die. Does the way cells pass away and are renewed tell us anything about what happens when we—a great living system of cells—pass away?

When my time comes, I want it to be like the cells that realize they’ve had a good run but that it’s time to find a graceful end. But then what? What happens after death? If there is anything our cells tell us about what comes after death.

I think there is. Cells that are healthy but have not yet reached apoptosis do not die when the body does. Instead, the do something very special. 

Immortality

Believe it or not comedian Woody Allen once reflected on immortality and he wrote:

“I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying. I don't want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live on in my apartment.”

Our cells tell us this desire is a mistake. It’s not good to become physically immortalized. Like I said, when a cell does that, it becomes cancer. Nature’s way for all healthy life is that we arise, flourish and pass away. But that does not mean that death is the end. I personally expect a non-physical immortality.

My reason for expecting this has something to do with motorcycles. 

Some of you know that in my youth I rode with a MC, or a motorcycle club. Despite the bad rep such clubs have, it was a completely good experience for me. To this day I continue to dress the part and wear biker jewelry as a way of reminding myself of the positive lessons of those years.

Sadly, I don’t ride anymore. When Lindsay and I got together almost 40 years ago she extracted a promise that I would not get back on a motorcycle. She required this because my last motorcycle accident almost killed me, and she didn’t want me to be in danger again. 

I’ve honored my promise to her, although I’ve kept my motorcycle license. A household joke is that if she ever leaves me I’ll be stopping at the Harley-Davidson dealership on my way to see the attorney; and if she dies before I do, I’ll be riding a motorcycle to her funeral. 

The last accident I had was in my last year of college and it almost killed me. It wasn’t my fault. People who drive cars often don’t look for motorcycles and another driver just smashed right into me. Luckily I was wearing full leather and a good helmet, and managed to fall between the lanes of traffic instead of into one. 

As I lay on the road I had what people now call and “out of body” experience. I was unconscious, but I remember finding myself looking down at my unconscious body. 

I watched people try to take off my helmet, and not knowing how to do that ended up hurting me more. I watched the ambulance driver steal my watch, and he did. All the while, I was laying unconscious on the road, eyes closed. 

This was one of the most important experiences of my lifetime because it convinced me that the mind and the body—while tightly linked—were actually separate. My mind was not confined by the limitations of my body. And if that was true, what else might be? Could my mind survive my death?

I was a Philosophy major and my plan had been to go on for a Ph.D and seek a job as a Philosophy Professor. I was at the time a materialist. I believed that our minds are nothing more than the activity of our brain, and that there is no reality to anything that was not physical. 

That changed on the rainy road in my senior year. If the mind could function, and even sense things, independently of the body, what other metaphysical realities might exist? I felt my call to a spiritual life to explore that. I changed my career plans, and that’s how I ended up here. My call to ministry came as a part of a motorcycle wreck. 

I stayed at the University of Connecticut to take a terminal Master’s Degree in Philosophy before coming to Chicago to seek my doctoral degree in ministry. During that last year in Philosophy I turned my attention to the Philosophy of the Mind, and there I learned about a more severe parallel to my “out of body experience” called the “near death experience.”

I was helped by the fact that there was an actual International Associationfor Near Death Studies at the University of Connecticut, under the leadership of a Professor of Psychology named Dr. Kenneth Ring, the author of the reading I shared earlier.

I believe he is up five books on the subject now and they are available on amazon.com if you are interested. I didn’t have the pleasure of studying with him personally as I was in a different graduate division, but the information was available and it was fascinating. Keep in mind his statement that these experiences “demonstrate that the appearance of death is not at all like the experience of death. What death looks like is not what it feels like. Indeed, what it feels like is in many ways the opposite of what it appears to be to someone witnessing the onset of death in another.”

I will not belabor what near death experiences are like, but simply these are the accounts of people who were clinically dead, but were revived at the last instant. The cells of our body can live on even after the heart has ceased, and with the right combination of drugs and electric shock, sometimes the heart can be restarted.

These are people at the imminent edge of biological death who experience a pattern of feeling and images that include a sense of profound well being, the experience of being separate from their bodies and sometimes able to see their bodies from the side or from above, just as I was able to do. They often are profoundly changed by the experience. Many also experience themselves passing through a tunnel of some sort.

Almost all of the recorded and studied experiences, and there are now many thousands, conform to at least some part of what I have described. Dr. Ring estimates that one out of every three persons who come close to death will have a “near death” experience. 

It doesn’t matter what you believe. Atheists have just as many of these experiences as religious persons. The main features are: (1) a sense of profound well-being, (2) the experience of being separate from your body, (3) a feeling that one is on the cusp of some wonderful new experience, and (4) typically being profoundly changed by the experience into a more optimistic and compassionate person.

There are many explanations offered for this phenomenon. Some feel it results from activity in the temporoparietal junction of the brain caused by the electrical activity as the brain dies. It’s even possible to simulate that in a laboratory. But the “near death experience” appears to be a very organized and structured experience that is nothing like the chaotic activity we can see in a brain that is actually dying.

There are also Freudian explanations about reliving birth, except the passage down the birth canal is tight and confining. People who have had “near death experiences” typically describe them as spacious and liberating. 

There are biochemical explanations about the experience being a side effect of the drugs (such as ketamine) given during resuscitation, and theories that chalk the whole thing up to hallucination. The fact is, nobody knows for sure and there is tension in the scientific community between those who insist that the “near death experience” is a purely physical phenomena that is basically a hallucination, and those who believe it is exactly what it seems like to the person having the experience—a door opening to a new way of being aware—that there is something that is supposed to come next.

What I know is that when I was lying on a road next to the wreck of my beloved motorcycle, my brain was not dying, there were no drugs used to revive me (I regained awareness naturally in the ambulance). What I had was an “out of the body experience” not a “near death experience,” but it had some of the same features. As I looked down at my unconscious body I found it convincing.

Is Death Really the End?

It turns out that our cells offer an additional clue. When the heart stops, breathing ceases and the brain flatlines, some of our cells continue to be alive. The research is limited but this appears to be a universal phenomena. There is a period, now called “Twilight Death,” between the end of clinical life and the actual death of our cells. During this period not only do some living cells continue to live, but cells which had been dormant switch themselves on to create a unique state in the body.

In a 2013 University of Michigan study, it was discovered that just after we die there appears to be an enormous spike in brain activity as cells that have been idle suddenly activate. (You can learn more about that here and here). 

As doing this sort of research on dying people would be unethical, the research has only been done on mice, but it appears to be generally true. The pattern of activation seems to be exactly what we would expect to see in a creature that was alert, focused and concentrating. Literally, it was what we would see in a creature that has just woken up.

As we die, it appears that the cells of our brain suddenly give us a huge burst of awareness, and it appears near certain that our journey into death begins with a brief state of expanded consciousness. You will be most aware you have ever been at the very moment of your death. Perhaps this is why his biographer tells us that the last words of Steven Jobs, the founder of Apple, seconds before he died were, “Oh Wow! Oh Wow! Oh Wow!”

Coincidence? I don’t think so. A sign that something special is about to happen? That sounds more plausible to me.

Certainly this is not proof that there is something for us beyond death, I personally find it strongly suggestive that death is not the end. I doubt anyone marches through a literal pearly gate, but everything science tells us about what happens when we die, suggests that death is not a dissolution into chaos. Instead, our cells do something very special, and that appears to be more like waking up, than going to sleep.

And that is why I expect an immortality. And that’s my sermon.

Sermon: Expecting the Positive in a Negative World

Expecting the Positive in a Negative World

Countryside Church, January 8, 2017

Rev. Dr. C. Scot Giles

This is sort of a personal sermon today. I’m going to talk about a strategy I have long used to help me deal with my life. I hope you will find it interesting and suggestive. 

It’s about what we clergy-types called “Practical Theology.” That is, taking theological principles and applying them to solve practical problems. I’m going to explain why I think it’s important to find ways to stay positive in a negative world. 

Napoleon Hill

“To every disadvantage, there is a corresponding advantage.” That is a quotation by W. Clement Stone, and is his version of a saying by Napoleon Hill, a positive thinking guru of the 1930s and 40s. What Hill said was “Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit.”

While I don’t think that is always true, there have been times when I’ve found it a comfort as I tried to figure out how to move on from some reversal or problem. 

One of the prize books in my personal library is a leather bound edition of The Laws of Success by Napoleon Hill. It was a personal gift from W. Clement Stone, the founder of the Combined Insurance Company of America. Mr. Stone was one of the wealthiest people in American when he was alive, building an empire and rising out of poverty by putting into practice the “laws of success” taught by Napoleon Hill. 

Mr. Stone was a patron of People’s Liberal Church, an independent Unitarian church on Chicago’s North Side, and I met him through the minister of that church, Dr. Preston Bradley. Dr. Bradley taught me how to preach, even though when I knew him he was more than 90 years old. 

Napoleon Hill is credited with being the founder of the whole “Positive Thinking” movement and was influential on the teaching of the Rev. Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, the clergyperson our new President-Elect most admires.

Basically, what Positive Thinking (in its more rational form) says is “what you can realistically imagine you can probably achieve,” and that you will get much farther by putting a positive spin on everything than otherwise. 

It’s possible to go too far with that, in the way that some of the people who talk about “The Law of Attraction” do in the book The Secret and its sequels, but I’ve actually got some respect for the whole positive thinking thing. 

The Biochemistry if it All

Of the 60 or so chemicals that your brain uses to regulate its functioning, about 45 are involved in the experience of fear. In fact, worrying about bad things happening is very much the default setting of human consciousness. 

It’s not hard to understand why. Fear makes a creature cautious. Cautious creatures tend to survive by avoiding larger creatures who want to eat them. 

Cautious creatures who survive then pass on the “fearful” gene combinations to their offspring. At this point in evolution, fear is the easiest emotion for anyone to experience. It’s something that makes mental health professionals happy and their bank accounts full. 

This morning I want to talk about how to expect positive things in a world that sees to be negative and fearful. 

My take-away point is that unless we intentionally do something to overcome the biologically pre-determined tendency to expect the negative, we don’t actually perceive the world correctly. For biochemical reasons, our minds put a negative spin on observations. Positive Thinking was for Peale, Hill, Stone and Bradley, an intentional mental discipline to correct for that. 

It makes some kind of sense. In fact, I doubt I would be alive today if it were not for my tendency to live my life as if I expected the best. I have a cardio-vascular condition that was expected to end my life years ago. I keep myself going with a combination of good medical care, a healthy lifestyle and by practicing good mental hygiene. I have trained myself to quickly process and release negative emotions.

Most chronic medical conditions have a psychological state that is common among the people who live with that condition. 

For example, research has show than people living with cancer tend (you can always find exceptions) to be the care taking members of their families who put everyone else first and themselves last. Their self-care and self-soothing skills tend to be rocky. 

People with cardiac issues like myself (and the American Heart Association has done excellent research about this) tend to be people who struggle with anger. Therefore, my efforts to release anger and replace it with optimism is important in my own survival. 

As I like to say, “I live my life with a positive expectancy, a mental state that goes all the way with pessimism but manages to arrive at a point beyond it.” I put a positive spin on pretty much all I say and do (much the the annoyance of my wife and friends). 

This method has stood me well over the years. Not only am I still alive, I believe that a decision to be optimistic, even in the face of negative data, is a wise decision. 

When the human community harnessed fire and invented clothing, our bodies stopped evolving. They no longer had to change to match the environment because we developed technologies that could shield us from the environment. 

Unfortunately, the result is that the human nervous system evolved to deal with the stress of a Neolithic society. But while our bodies stopped changing, our social and technological evolution continued. We are now ill suited to living in the world we find ourselves in, which is why stress-related and lifestyle-related illnesses are the modern plague. 

The harmful effects of stress on the human body and mind are well known. I’ve spoken about some of them from this pulpit. When you are frightened your body produces a chemistry set of hormones that evolved to help you meet the terrors and issues of a bygone time. They do not help you now. Instead, they impair your immune system, encourage cardio-vascular disease and even cause changes down to the level of the telomeres on the chromosomes in every cell of your body. 

So I try to remain positive no matter how scary things seem to be. In that way I shield my body from the consequences of excessive stress. Even if bad things do actually happen, at least I have not made my situation worse by damaging my body through the process of anticipation. I’m still ahead of the game. 

A Negative World

It can be a negative world. As Ric Masten put it in the reading I shared earlier—none of us are going to get out of this alive. We all get older, and there comes a point where the goal (and I love how Ric Master puts it) isn’t so much winning, as “looking good while losing.” And we have to cope with that. 

Some of you may have noticed that we had a national election recently. Much of the political community that considers itself “progressive” was blindsided with the unexpected win by a person that no one considered “politically-correct.”

Winston Churchill once said that “the best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.” While I don’t really believe that, I get the irony, and recited that quotation to my parish minister wife on election night.

The shock in some areas of society was so great that in a story by science reporter Maddie Stone about the New Year’s Day approach of comet 45b which appeared recently, she titled the story, “Sorry, this Nearby Comet will not Strike the Earth and End our Collective Nightmare.” Better luck next time.

Talk about living in a scary and negative world! “Sorry, this nearby comet will not strike the Earth.” Sorry?

To be honest, how some people have responded has been bewildering to me. Humorist Garrison Keillor recently characterized the response from the political left as being like people who are “lost in a forest and who keep bumping into trees.”

As my ministry specializes in medical hypnotism, especially with cancer patients, 

I’m probably doing a bit better than most because of my years helping people deal with any of a number of life-changing medical diagnoses. 

When you get such a diagnosis there is a period when your physicians are gathering information about you. It isn’t until all the blanks are filled in that anyone really knows what to expect. In cancer care this is called “staging.” It’s the period between the diagnosis and the determination about how far along the disease has progressed. 

This time where you are waiting to discover your situation is a time of very high anxiety. I always caution people not to get your emotions too far out ahead of the data. There are 1001 bad things that might happen, and most of them are NOT going to. If you exhaust yourself worrying about what might happen you only make your own situation worse and drive everyone around you crazy. 

When something actually happens, that is the time to make a thoughtful response. It is never a good idea to react in fear to all the things that might happen. Because most of them won’t. 

Therefore, I counsel people to self-soothe and wait to see. I tell my politically active friends to try to stay as chill as possible for the time being. Give the benefit of the doubt, hope that people will stand up when the time and comes…whatever you need to do to keep yourself from a negative expectation. Who knows? This might actually go better than you think.

I tell my medical clients to stay calm. When we’ve got all the information we’ll be able to make a good response. Until then, you are just hurting yourself worrying about what might happen.

For myself, I am confident in my ability to make an appropriate and effective response to any bad thing that happens, and I am determined not to injure myself by descending into fear prematurely.

In saying this I am not minimizing the emotional trauma that goes along with fear. While I’ve had a lifetime to get used to my own medical condition, I’ve had to companion my wife through her many operations and recently her cancer (she’s doing fine). I see what happens to people who get overwhelmed every day among my clientele. 

However, as Gandalf said to Frodo in The Fellowship of the Ring when Frodo said… “I wish it need not have happened in my time,….”So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

We need to make the best of the situations we find ourselves in, it’s in our self-interest to do so. 

Chunking

As for why the world seems to have gone mad? I think I understand why, and what we can individually do about it. 

The human mind has a limited capacity to handle specific information. The limitation is created by the way nerve cells work together to form short-term memory. To greatly simplify this, neuroscience estimates that our short term processing can handle only seven (plus or minus two) items of information at a time. Unless we make a concentrated study of something and move processing from short into long-term memory, we start forgetting what we learned about seven items ago. 

Our nervous system loves simplicity. When a lot of complex information is presented to us we automatically seek to find ways to simplify it. It’s just what we do.

For example, take the complex system of moving parts that is your automobile. Except for those who have made a study of such things, we don’t have much of an idea about how all those gears, pistons, shafts and pins work together. 

So our nervous system gets to work. It takes one chunk of that stuff and associates it together in our minds because that stuff makes the “horsepower” (whatever that is), and we call that chunk the “engine.” We take another chunk that transforms the horsepower into spinning wheels and we call that the “transmission.” Most of us have no idea about how either of these work, and I personally have no idea about how one chunk is connected to another. But thinking in this way makes things seem more simple. Therefore my mind goes along with it even though I don’t understand what is inside of those “chunks.”

Hypnotists call this simplification process, “chunking” and we all do it. The more detail we have to confront the more powerfully our nervous system tries to associate those details into “chunks” so we don’t get overwhelmed.

But when we do this we lose an understanding of how things actually work. We have only a symbolic understanding and that makes it easy for us to misunderstand what is really going on.

We live in a society with a 24 hour news cycle. Information is increasing exponentially. We are in a constant state of near overwhelm.

To keep us sane our nervous system is constantly creating chunks of ideas and information to give us an illusion of understanding. It’s an illusion, as we don’t really understand what is in those chunks, and have no idea if someone is actually just selling us a bill of goods. That makes us vulnerable. 

If you are a politician, or an advertising executive, and you want to manipulate people all you have to do is provide a simple explanation that gathers worrisome information into an easy-to-understand chunk, and you will be believed by most. 

The scientific fact is that dirt is good for us, and antibacterial products are promoting the evolution of resistant bacteria. Worse, we’re creating generations of hyper-allergic children because we are harming their immune systems by protecting them from exposure to dirt and allergens. But we chunk all this together into the idea that “Clean is Good” and personal care products fly off the shelves. 

The interlocking geopolitical situation is immensely complex, and it may be that no one entirely understands it. Then, someone comes along and says the problems can all be chunked together into clear issues of “immigration,” “race” or “energy” and because that it simple, we tend to buy it.

Then charismatic leaders arise who offer the ultimate simplification by saying “I can fix this. Just leave to me.” And the brain wants to do exactly that, as it prevents the feeling of overwhelm and takes problems off the mental table. We just chunk all the social problems we’re worried about into a chunk that says “My guy will fix that. I don’t have to give that any thought after all.”

So we see Modi in India, Duterte in the Philippines, Putin in Russia, Jinping in China, Le Pen in France, Jong-un in North Korea…the list goes on and on. Each promising to make the world seem simpler by giving a simple way of thinking about a complicated world. “Leave it to me,” they say. “I can fix what is wrong” and for biological reasons the mind’s reflex is to agree. 

I believe this is why we are seeing the rise of the meme of the “strong man” everywhere around the world today. I suspect it’s actually caused by the tendency of the human nervous system to seek simplified solutions whenever things get too complex. That is what the human mind does when information becomes overwhelming. 

Coping Skills

Sounds scary, doesn’t it? It scares me. Which is why I keep that leather-bound copy of The Laws of Success on my office bookshelf and periodically take it down for a refresher read.

As I mentioned earlier, when we are worried or frightened, our bodies produce a chemistry set of stress hormones. While these hormones are in our bloodstream we are cortically inhibited—our brain is not working at its best. Called the “Fight or Flight” response, instead of thinking critically and figuring things out, we prepare to run away or do combat. That was fine in a Neolithic campsite, not so helpful now.

The more worried you are, the less effectively your mind works. To manage that worry your nervous system goes to work and chunks things together trying to find some simple way of thinking about what is happening. 

The more you simplify in this way, the more inaccurate your understanding becomes, and the more likely you are to settle for a simplified explanation that is actually a bill of goods created by someone who wants to deceive. 

So I always try to put a positive spin on things. It helps me lower worry, reduce chunking, and improve how I processes information. I make better decisions and protect my physical health. It’s gotten me through some tough times.  

In Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 19th century poem, The Masque of Pandora, Prometheus says, “Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.” What he meant by that is when someone is getting ready to sabotage themselves, usually this begins with them getting angry. The stress hormones flow, the mind ceases to work properly. Mistakes are made and bad things happen.

I would tweak this a bit. I’d put it “If you want to take advantage of someone, start by getting them worried.” The stress hormones flow, logic fails, and many people will believe anything you tell them if it lowers their stress. 

But those who find a way to look for the positive in a negative world they will be resilient. You will not find them as easy to fool. That’s what I hope for myself and it is what I hope for you.

And that’s my sermon. 

Sermon: Leviathan's Treasures

Leviathan’s Treasures

A Sermon for Countryside Church, Unitarian Universalist

Labor Day Sunday, September 4, 2016

The Rev. Dr. C. Scot Giles

The Lord of Dreams

In the Old Testament there is a sea monster called Leviathan. In modern Hebrew, the name simply means “whale” and although some scholars think the model for Leviathan may actually have been a crocodile, it is obvious from much of the description in the Book of Job that a whale is being described.

But part of the description in the Book of Job makes it clear that the Leviathan described is not an ordinary creature, as ordinary creatures do not breath fire.

Its sneezes flash forth light, and its eyes are like the eyelids of the dawn. 

From its mouth go flaming torches; sparks of fire leap out. 

Out of its nostrils comes smoke, as from a boiling pot and burning rushes. 

Its breath kindles coals, and a flame comes out of its mouth. (Job 41:18-21)

Leviathan is a fire breathing sea dragon. 

Sea serpents and dragons are common in the earliest literature of the Ancient Near East. Every divinity student will study the Babylonian creation story where Marduk, the god of order and power, defeats Tiamat, the serpent goddess whose body is used to create the heavens and the earth.

In Jewish literature, Leviathan is described as a female dragon who reigns over the sea, while Behemoth, a male counterpart, reigns over the land. Both will be slain at the end of time when the Messiah comes. This image made its way into Christianity and the art created by my Anglo-Saxon ancestors portrayed Leviathan as a Hell Mouth, into which sinners will be driven at the Last Judgement. 

Scary stuff. 

The great psychoanalyst Carl Jung tried to illuminate connections between modern psychology and ancient spiritual practices. Be believed that we instinctively imagine creatures like dragons because they represent the part of our mind that is immediately below our animal consciousness. 

When each of us was in the womb and our spinal column is formed, we actually had a dragon-like, or serpent-like shape. At some unconscious level we rememberthat. Jung would write:

“We contain nature, are part of it; animals are not only in text books, but are living things with which we are in contact…Probably in our remote ancestry we have gone through those stages and therefore the imprints are still to be found in us.” (Zarathustra Seminar,  pp. 900-902)

The image of the dragon endures—in Biblical Literature, Fairy Tales and in modern books like the dragon Smaug in The Hobbit because the image speaks to the deep part of our minds formed long before we ever saw the light of day.

Of all the dragons in literature I have always most liked Great Leviathan. The Dragon of the Abyss, the Guardian of the Waters and the Ruler of Dreams.

Leviathan is the Ruler of Dreams because Leviathan is of the sea. The sea itself has long been an image for those things in our minds that are below the surface of consciousness. The surface of the waters may seem calm, when actually much is happening in the depths. The surface of our minds likewise might conceal much activity that is happening in our unconscious minds. 

And nothing tells us as more about what is happening in the deepest part of our minds than our dreams. That’s why I always ask my clients about their dreams.

Dreaming

Do you remember your dreams? Dreams are a procession of images, emotions, sensations and even ideas that occur in our minds involuntarily while we sleep. Sleep Lab research tells us that most people have about three to five dreams every night. 

We fail to remember our dreams because we do not pay attention to them. In ancient times dreams were understood to be important, and so people remembered. In our time dreams are novelties, and mostly ignored.

However, if you decide you want to remember your dreams just decide to pay attention to them, and your recall will improve. As dreams occur at the edge of consciousness be sure to record them quickly on awakening. Most people can go from no dream awareness to comprehensive recall in about two weeks if they really try.

There is disagreement among experts about the meaning of dreams, but those of us who have explored them as a tool in spiritual healing think we have a few clues about how to proceed. I’m going to share the understand I have. As always, your mileage may vary. But in decades of practice this is how it seems to me.

Some believe that dreams are merely random brain activation that clears the electrical and biochemical debris out the nerve cells. Yet somehow I think we know they are more than that because our species has always been fascinated by dreams. 

There are dreams recorded on 5000 year old clay tablets from Mesopotamia. Greek and Roman literature are full of recorded dreams, as is the Bible. Likewise Hindu literature and even the aboriginal tales of the indigenous Australians speak of them. Uncounted millions of people have found dreams meaningful, which is unlikely if dreams were only random static from the nervous system.

I do believe dreams are meaningful. They are treasures bestowed by Leviathan, bestowed by the deepest part of our human consciousness. I think there is a lot of self-knowledge to be gained by studying our dreams. 

That’s why I once told Lindsay, “I intend to spend the day in self-improvement. Therefore, I’m going back to bed to take a nap.”

Mastering Dreams

I was taught about the importance of dreams by Dr. Bernie Siegel, the man who first trained me about how the mind could be a tool in medical healing. Even in his first book published in 1978, Love, Medicine and Miracles, he talked about how the dreams of his patients often gave the key to unlocking how that patient could use their minds to recover from life-changing illness. 

I’m just scratching the surface here. There is a well-known Unitarian Universalist minister, the Rev. Dr. Jeremy Taylor, who has written several authoritative books about dreams and is the Past President of the International Association for the Study of Dreams. He is a friend of mine and I respect him a lot. If this sermon speaks to you, check him out at www.jeremytaylor.com. 

However, when Bernie Siegel trained me, he used a simple technique. There are three parts.

First, your unconscious mind is protective. It wants to help you because you are what allows it to exist. I often tell my clients “Your unconscious knows you better than I will ever know you, so let’s listen to it.” This protective power is the key to the first rule—always pay attention to the literal meaning of a dream first.

If you have a dream about the left front tire of your car falling off, it might be a symbolic dream about difficulty in moving toward some goal. On the other hand, go check that tire before you drive to work tomorrow. It could be your unconscious awareness noticed that something didn’t sound right about that tire and it is warning you of a possible dangerous situation. Consider literal meanings first.

The second rule is the interesting one. Dreams always come to tell us how we really feel. 

The higher centers in your brain are capable of making up symbols, metaphors and even puns. The people you see in your dreams might stand for other people, forces of nature, institutions and so on. These things can be complicated and deceptive. 

If fact, if you study some symbol, it will start to show up in your dreams. 

As a martial artist I have been a swordsman for more than 30 years. Therefore, swords very frequently show up in my dreams in exacting detail. They have a meaning to me that is much deeper and more precise than to someone who has never held a sword, let alone knows how to use one. 

But while the symbols in a dream can be hard to understand, the feelings of a dream are easy. Feelings arise from the Limbic System in the middle part of your brain. This part of your brain is a more primitive information system than the Cortex which organizes your higher thought. The Limbic System isn’t sophisticated enough to do symbolism or metaphor. 

That means whatever emotion you experienced in the dream is the emotion your unconscious mind wanted you to have. The feelings of a dream are the key to unlocking Leviathan’s treasures.

Hidden Emotions

The mind has an uncanny ability to prevent us from realizing how we really feel. If an emotion isn’t safe for us to express, we’ve evolved mechanisms to block it. 

You may feel angry at your supervisor, but if you express that anger you will be fired. So you may direct that emotion toward a safer target, such as a spouse, and think you are really mad at him or her. Counselors call this “displacement” and it is a very common defense mechanism. 

As a child you may have felt hurt or even rage toward an overbearing or abusive adult. But your unconscious mind knew it would not be safe to express that as the adult might abandon or hurt you. So you held that feeling inside and didn’t let yourself experience the emotion you actually contained. Counselors call this one “denial” and it’s probably the most common defense mechanism. 

There is a long list of such mechanisms.

When someone is foolish enough to consider a career in Unitarian Universalist ministry, the first thing one does is to consult with an actual UU minister for an initial interview. This interview is to learn about what our process is for becoming a member of our clergy and includes discussion of such things as academic degrees, internships, clinical pastoral education, etc.

When one is conducting such an interview one of the things you are supposed to do is to get a sense of the interior life of the candidate by trying to rattle them. A lot of people think they’d like to go into ministry as a way of working out personal problems, and if so we want to identify that quickly. So you probe and see if you can shake their composure.

I’ve seen candidates become so angry they were gripping the arms of my visitor’s chair in white-knuckle rage, while simultaneously smiling and claiming they were calm. They were out of touch with what they actually felt. 

No one is going to be happy if they are out of touch with how they really feel. Dreams come to help us with that.

The feelings of a dream are always the feelings of the dream. Dreams come to disclose to us how we really feel. That disclosure is the treasure. 

You may believe everything is fine. But if your dream is about sadness, everything isn’t fine. Somewhere in your life there is a sadness you are blocking. 

You may feel insecure and trapped. But if your dream has you on top of the world and in command, there is a self-confidence in you that you are not tapping.

You may feel unloved, misunderstood or betrayed. But if your dream is about being cared for, you are not noticing love, affection or friendship that is actually in your environment. 

Dreams come to tell us what we really feel. They come to bring that information through the defense mechanisms we use. Those feelings are very important. Your deeper mind wants you to be successful. That is easier if you have better information.

At this Labor Day, when the Summer’s rest is over and we pause to reflect on our work for the coming seasons, it’s a good time to consider how we feel and what that implies we need to do in order to be happy.

To Be Happy

And that’s the third thing to consider when pondering a dream. Any theme that recurs likely is a genuine request from your unconscious to do something, usually something that will make you happier than you are. That’s why reoccurring dreams are interesting.

The Buddha taught the life is full of suffering, and perhaps it is. But he also taught there were ways to navigate that suffering in order to be content.

In my day, students at the Unitarian Universalist Seminary, Meadville/Lombard, were also full students at the University of Chicago. When I was there I was immersed in the thinking of a psychiatrist who had taught at the University in the 40s and thereafter. His name was Heinz Kohut. 

Kohut believed that when we were infants one of the experiences we needed to have was to look up and see the smiling faces of our parents, beaming over us. He felt an important part of personality was formed at that time, and if we missed that experience we would never feel really adequate or happy. 

Indeed, he believed that a lot of the things people do in society, striving for money, power, seeking political position, were actually attempts to compensate for that confidence we were supposed to acquire.

The themes that recur in our dreams are often hints about what we need to repair that lack and be whole. If we did not get what we needed from the adults in our infant home, our dreams can tell us how to give ourselves what we need. 

The really interesting thing is that I found over the decades of my work with cancer patients is that usually the dreams do not ask one to make major changes. Instead, they can often be understood as requests to give oneself small indulgences. 

Over time, these accumulate and help us feel cared for and that boosts our confidence and calm. It also enhances our physical resilience. I see that with people who are doing well with serious illness all the time. 

Heck, I see this with my cats. Lindsay and I take in sick and abused cats. We’ve gotten really good at taming feral cats that could previously only be handled with gloves. The trick is to give the animal small indulgences for no particular reason—a food treat, an especially nice place to take a nap, a word of praise or a dash of catnip. 

These small gestures accumulate over time in the mind of the animal and make a change in how secure the animal feels. The unsought reward establishes in the mind of the animal the conviction that it is worth receiving good things.

So too with people.

I often joke that I come from a family that is something of a train wreck. As a young adult I realized that my dreams typically contained images of unusual hand made things. When I mentioned this during training I was guided to give myself small indulgences in the form of one-of-a-kind objects that were affordable.

I carry a handmade wallet. As I am hopelessly absent minded I chain the wallet to my belt with a bronze chain, also handmade. 

It’s little gifts to myself like that which I credit with undoing some of the damage of my upbringing. I’ve known others who accomplish the same by taking themselves on a nice vacation regularly, or buying a slightly more upscale car or suit of clothing. These are self-reinforcing gestures that you are worth good treatment.

Interestingly, science now agrees. If you suffer damage to your nerves from trauma, disease or stress, the nerves either die or repair themselves. You can’t grow new nerves so that the only hope of recovery is repair. 

Thankfully, nerves can regenerate but to do so they require stimulation, and the stimulation that works best is gentle and repeated. Just like offering a cat small treats for no particular reason, or offering oneself pleasant indulgences from time to time, healing comes. There really neat thing is that it can come from small gifts to oneself that anyone can do. 

Leviathan’s Treasures

Absolutely no one gets to adulthood without a collection of scars and a pile of baggage. But it may be that our dreams are Leviathan’s Treasures. They are gifts from the deepest and wisest part of our minds. They come to warn us, to tell us how we really feel, and to advise us on what we can do to be whole. 

Perhaps that’s something to dream about as you linger in bed over this long weekend. Maybe you’ll dream about it.

And that’s my sermon.

Sermon: Not My Circus, Not My Monkeys

Not My Circus, Not My Monkeys

A Sermon to Countryside Church, Unitarian Universalist

Memorial Day Sunday, May 29, 2016

Circuses Have a Role

I love circuses, and actually have a personal connection with them. When she was a young woman my mother was an aerialist with Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus. She did something called Spanish Web, where a woman insets her foot into a loop at the top of a fifty-foot rope. She executes a series of acrobatic maneuvers while being spun by a man at the base of the rope, synchronized to music. My mother left the circus to become a professional dancer before I was born, but took me there when I was young and I loved it. 

During the Dustbowl in America, and in Europe to this day, circuses and carnivals had an important social role. Not only are they entertainment, they formed a social safety net for people who were disabled or who just didn’t fit in elsewhere. “Running away to join the circus” was something that people did when everything else in their lives fell apart, and the circus took care of its own. 

Once you were a part of the “circle of light” as performers refer to their community, people look after you. They had your back, even if you weren’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, or you needed to lie low because the law, ex-spouses or creditors were after you. 

There is even a special mongrel language, that circus and carnival people speak to set their world apart. If you are on circus grounds and seem to to know what you are doing, someone will probably come up as ask if you “Farly la Ciazarn?” which means “Do you understand Carnival Cant?” or circus-talk. If they think you are one of them, they will treat you differently. You’ll get a better seat and the games in the sideshow will not be rigged. 

There is a show business tradition of wishing performers good luck by saying “break a leg.” Never do that at a circus or carnival as it’s considered a curse. Wish them “greasy luck” instead.

Eastern Europe has a very rich circus tradition with some performers part of multi-generational families that pass down their secrets and skills only to their own blood. In Poland the circus tradition is especially strong and it’s given rise to a saying the I’ve chosen as the title for this sermon, “Not my circus. Not my monkeys.”

The saying arose because it was not uncommon for more than one circus or carnival to be playing in a town at the same time. Performers and utility workers, called Roustabouts, would light up the town after-hours by hitting the bars, brothels and gambling dens. And some of them would get into trouble. 

It was not uncommon for the Ringmaster of a circus to be pulled out of bed by the authorities in the wee hours of the morning to bail people out of jail or deal with some problem caused by an escaped animal. Especially monkeys as monkeys are quite mischievous. 

As fixing problems like this is expansive, the circus official is always relieved to find out that the problems were caused by people and creatures belonging to some other performing troop. Hence, the saying “Not my circus. Not my monkeys” as a way of saying “this isn’t my responsibility.” 

That’s an important thing—knowing what you are responsible for and what you are not. I wish our politicians knew that before involving our great nation in wars of adventure that had no real point. But let me move away from politics. Preaching on politics is the province of the parish minister not a community minister whose work focuses on healing. 

Boundaries

As a Consulting Hypnotist specializing in medical work, especially cancer care, one of the most import concept in my theoretical universe is the concept of boundaries. 

Some of my recent sermons to this congregation have focused on this concept. They’ve been about the importance of setting limits between oneself and others. About knowing where you leave off and other people begin. About the danger of “overcaring” where you do too much for other people to the detriment of your own happiness and fulfillment. 

When I studied with Dr. Bernie Siegel at Yale/New Haven about Mind-Body Healing, one of the things he stressed was that cancer patients in particular seemed to have real problems with this. They routinely put other people first and themselves last. They sacrificed their own self-care for others to a degree that was scary. While it is good to live one’s life as a generous and caring person, there is a line where that leaves off and being the victim of abuse begins. Cancer patients especially were shown not to be very good at figuring out where that line was.

A lot of the hypnotic work I do is to help people who can’t see that line discover it anew and put it back in place, despite the “Change Back” maneuvers of other people.

Every living thing, except one, needs a boundary between itself and the rest of the world to survive. Even a cell needs a cell wall. Even a virus needs a protean shell. 

But there is one exception. Only one. There is one living creature that does not need a boundary between itself and its environment. In fact, it thrives where such a boundary cannot be found. That creature is a cancer cell. Alone, among all living things, it is by its nature invasive and transgressional.

Just like the Ringmasters of Old Europe who could dismiss someone who tried to get them to take responsibility for something that was actually someone else’s problem, we all need to know when to say “Not my circus. Not my monkeys.”

Today I want to take a new step. It’s one thing to say you should have limits with others. Today I want to talk about what comes next.

Once you have stopped allowing other people and institutions from siphoning off your energy and depleting you, what do you do next? What is the healthy way to invest the energy you have protected from depletion?

The Alchemist

One of the most prized books in my personal library is a leather bound and signed copy of The Alchemist by Brazilian author Paulo Coelho. Published in 1988 it quickly became a best-seller and remains in print to this day. It has been translated in 80 languages and has sold more than 200 million copies.

On the surface there is little remarkable about the story. It’s a tale of a Andalusian shepherd named Santiago who journeys from home looking to make his fortune. He has a number of adventures along the way including an encounter with a practitioner of Alchemy.

For those who don’t know, Alchemy was a magical craft widely practiced during the Middle Ages and Renaissance. It actually gave rise to the modern sciences of chemistry and physics, but was understood during its time as a spiritual process. 

The old Alchemists tried to turn lead into gold and sought to find the Elixir of Life that could cure all diseases. In the story, Santiago finds such a person who has done both.

Modern Depth Psychology has long been fascinated by Alchemy, with the venerable William Jung even claiming that it was the “shadow side” of Christianity. Jung believed that Alchemy had preserved, amid the flasks, test tubes and furnaces, all of the philosophical beliefs Christianity had shed as it evolved into a world faith.

Coelho’s tale ends when Santiago discovers that the fortune he was looking for was not in a distant land. Instead, he returns home to the Andalusian meadows and there finds his treasure in the form of gold buried in the ground, not far from where his sheep used to graze. 

This is actually an old theme. Going on a journey to find riches, and discovering that they were actually in the place where you started, is a common trope in mystical literature. It means that opportunities can be found anywhere, if you look for them. 

You will find this trope in rabbinical tales. It is one of the more famous of Scheherazade’s stories from 1001 Arabian Nights. You will even find it echoed in the positive thinking literature such as Russell Conwell’s 1869 essay, Acres of Diamonds in which he said “I say to you that you have ‘acres of diamonds’ right where you now live.”

What made Paulo Coelho’s story different was in that in addition to this theme, there are many other themes that people have found attractive. 

Coelho is himself a colorful figure. He was misunderstood by his parents who committed him to a mental hospital because they thought his interest in mysticism was a sign of mental illness. 

When he got out, he became a song writer for some rather dark Latin American bands, and made a lot of money at it. His interest in the occult let him to a Roman Catholic magical organization called Regnus Agnus Mundi (loosely, The Mind of God Reigns). This organization, RAM, conducts its initiation rituals as part of a 500 mile pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain. 

Coelho wrote an autobiography, called The Pilgrimage, which has also been a best seller and summarizes both his magical experiences on the pilgrimage, and the teachings of that magical organization. It’s a good read if you are into that sort of stuff. 

The book titled The Alchemist is full of spiritual teachings. One of the most interesting is the notion of a “Personal Legend.” 

It is a bit like Dr. Joseph Campbell’s advice to “follow your bliss,” the Personal Legend is the belief that there is a unique path for each person than leads to the unfolding of that person’s destiny. 

Coelho believes that we are on earth in order to discover what our Personal Legend is, and then to find a way to make it real in the daily events of our lives. 

More than just a “mission statement” for our lives, the Personal Legend is your unique path. Coelho says he is “100 percent convinced” that everyone has a Personal Legend, but that not everyone will figure it out. 

“You are here to honor something called the miracle of life,” he teaches. “You can…fill your hours and days with something that is meaningless, but you know that you have a reason to be here.”

You know you have found your Personal Legend when you find a way of living that fills you with enthusiasm. You “betray your Personal Legend,” he says when you fill your time with things that do not give you enthusiasm. 

This resonates with me. My own professional mentor in cancer care, Dr. Bernie Siegel, teaches that we each have an inner blueprint. If we live our lives in such a way that we make at least part of the blueprint real, we are healthy and fulfilled. If we live while ignoring that blueprint, we live with a feeling that something important is missing. We will not be as healthy and resilient as we hoped to be. 

When I start to work with a client on overcoming cancer what I start with is to help the client subtract the things in their lives that are draining away their residence. Typically, there are relationships that need to change or end, limits that need to be constructed with other people who are actually subtly abusive or too demanding. Then, we turn to the fun part that work, how to use cancer as a turning point to reinvent oneself so you become the person you want to be.

The person who was born to be a poet becomes a stockbroker instead, because that is “more practical.” The person who was created to be a chef settles for working at McDonalds. The person who was gifted with spiritual insight settles for reading magazines and never gets around to sharing with others the wisdom a spiritual power actually placed in that person’s heart. 

Sometimes the reinvention of self can be powerful and obvious. Sometimes it is much more modest and visible only to the person him or herself. You learn about this by paying attention to how you feel, by making mistakes and correcting them, until you arrive at what really makes you happy. And then you do that.

That happened to me. I’ve been a member of Countryside Church for 25 years now, but started out as a parish minister. I served two congregations over a thirteen years period and did it well enough. But something was missing. I realized (using a tool I’ll share with you today) that I was not happy with my professional role. I didn’t want to be a religious worker, I wanted to be a spiritual healer. And so my evolution into a religiously oriented medical hypnotist began. We can all begin.

The Stockbroker poet starts to write poetry in the midst of stockbrokering, and maybe gets something published or self-publishes a book that might later become important. 

The shift supervisor at McDonalds, figures out that you can make eggs on a hamburger grill and devises a version of Eggs Benedict that is sold everywhere now as the Egg McMuffin (and yes, that is how that breakfast sandwich came to be). 

In his 1977 biography Grinding It Out, McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc tells the story of a franchise holder in Santa Barbara, California, named Herb Peterson. Peterson, who always wanted to be a chef, had made himself a set of grill rings, and figured out how a version of Eggs Benedict might be made in a hamburger joint. The rest is history. Herb Peterson, a frustrated chef, has gone down into culinary history. 

You don’t have to resign from your life and family and go off on a journey of discovery. Sometimes the treasure can be found in your own backyard. You can find out how to be happy amidst the life you are already leading. Sometimes it takes a big change. Sometimes a small change is more than enough.

A Helpful Exercise

For many years now I do a self-assessment exercise taught by one of my therapist colleagues. This is Memorial Day when we pause to remember those who have fought in our nation’s wars, and more generally everyone who we have cared about. It is a day of national reflection, and so it might be a good day to self-reflect and give this a try yourselves.

My custom has been to do this each year on my birthday. Take a sheet of paper and fold it in half lengthwise, creating two columns.

On one side, list all the things that you would really, realistically, love to do. Be honest. List only the things you would do if you could. Things you world be enthusiastic about. 

It’s important to know that. Enthusiasm is a gift from God. The word itself comes from the ancient Greek. En-theos. God (theos), inside you. In ancient times the word meant that someone was possessed by a god and spoke with the god’s voice. What you feel enthusiastic about is a sign that points to your Personal Legend.  

The key is to be brutally honest with yourself. 

For example, I might jokingly think that I’d like to tour the world. However, in fact I really don’t actually like to travel, so a world tour shouldn’t be on my list. 

But, I’m a committed foodie, and so touring all the high end restaurants in Chicago, really is something that I would realistically like to do. That belongs on my list. 

When you are done. Look at the other column. With total honestly, knowing that no one else is going to read it, write down all of the things you are doing that are not accompanied by enthusiasm. 

Then look at the two lists. When I do this I usually decide that it’s time for a cocktail. You’d be amazed how much junk creeps onto that second list. Stuff other people want you to do, things you need to do to stay afloat but dislike doing, and so on. And I do this exercise every year! If you try it for the first time you might want to invest in a second cocktail. 

Then do something. Start small, but start. Plan to actually do something that at least points to something that is on the Enthusiasm List. Maybe I can’t afford to tour all of Chicago’s finest restaurant, but surely I can make plans to hit one or two over the next year. Start small, but start.

Then stop doing something. Stop slowly, but stop. Shed something that is on the Unenthusiastic List. You’ve still got to stay afloat, but do you really need all of those things that are using up your energy? Do you really need to help people who actually don’t seem to much appreciate it? Can’t someone else get the kids to soccer practice, at least occasionally. Is that committee really all that important to you? Pull back. Stop slowly, but stop. 

If it doesn’t at least point to something on your Enthusiasm List, should you really be doing it at all? 

The first time I did this exercise I realized that most of my energy was going to maintain stuff I really didn’t want. Everyone else said I should want all that fragile furniture, all that shiny silver serving wear which required polishing, all those copper pans that also had to be polished. But I was perfectly happy with good cast iron, simple white china and things I didn’t need to baby. 

If something doesn’t at least point to what is on your Enthusiasm List, should you really be doing it at all?

Might you be happier if you said “Not my circus. Not my monkeys” and turned you attention to what actually fills you with energy. En-theos. God within. Your Personal Legend. 

Don’t base everything on financial gain. The Buddha taught about Right Livelihood. If you are doing what you love it will attract what you need. Look at me. I went and became a hypnotist for gods sake. And it’s working out rather well if I don’t say so myself. 

If something would give you enthusiasm, don’t hesitate or look back. If you aren’t sure, consider your choices and contemplate what each choice will bring you. The choice that brings you the most renewal is the right one. 

Over time, you will see there is a pattern to those choices and you will discover that your treasure is right there in your life, just like the Andalusian Shepherd Santiago found when he looked in his own backyard.

And that’s my sermon. 

Sermon: The Power of Not Giving a Damn

The Power of Not Giving a Damn

Sermon to Countryside Church, Unitarian Universalist

February 7, 2016, Community Ministry Sunday

The Rev. Dr. C. Scot Giles

The First Really Bad Job I Ever Had

I have another psychological sermon for you today. This one inspired by the harm that happens when people do too much for others and become victimized. I see this all the time in my work as a Community Minister. A lot of people make themselves sick.

I started my working career in food service. I entered the culinary union at the age of 15 as labor laws did not apply to food service and I needed a job. Back in those days Culinary School wasn’t a thing, and I would do four years as an apprentice and five years as a journeyman. I cooked and catered my way through High School, College, Grad School and Theological School.

During those years I had some really fine jobs. And one bad one.

The bad one was when I took a position with a fast food company. I wanted to get married and I needed a second job to earn enough cash to pay for the wedding.

The people who worked there had “spirit.”

What I mean by that is the company actually had what amounted to motivational speakers who traveled around to give pep talks to the employees about what a wonderful job they had. 

We would all stand in a circle and there were chants and cheers. We were all supposed to yell “This Is The Best Place To Work Anywhere In The World!”

I’m proud to say the job didn’t last. It was in fact the dirtiest kitchen I’ve ever worked in. There wasn’t a food safety rule that wasn’t routinely ignored. The employees were mistreated and often cheated out of pay they’d earned.

The job of the motivational cheerleaders was to convince the workers that the job was better than it was. The workers were told they should care so much about having happy customers and a happy shift supervisor that they were not supposed to notice that the pay envelope had been shorted and the boss was a bully.

If you complained that your pay didn’t add up right, or that you were told to do something you knew wasn’t safe in the food locker, you were told you “Didn’t have the right spirit to work here.” 

The bosses used that to turn every objection around. The problem wasn’t that the company was cheating you. The problem wasn’t that food safety was being ignored. The real problem was that you didn’t have the “Right Spirit” to work on the “Team.”

Even after all these years I still find myself angry when I remember that job.

This was one of my first experiences with what we in helping professions call “Overcare,” following the lead of Doc Childre of the HeartMath Institute.

Overcare is when you care too much about something, and as a result someone takes advantage of you. The only cure for it is to care up to a point, and then put on the brakes.

Care is Good

I’m a big fan of living a caring life. Heathy care, which we who follow the HeartMath system call True Care, is a tonic. It renews our nervous system. It builds and then reinforces the connections that link us to other people. It’s regenerative when we are stressed. It even improves brain function. 

I sometimes think of it like a really good cup of coffee. It’s smooth, rich, renewing and almost worth the money the barista overcharges for it.

But there can be too much of a good thing. One cup of great coffee is a good thing. Fifteen cups of coffee will turn any of us in a jangled, anxious wreck. 

So also for care. If we go too far in our feelings of care for others, we become the victims of Overcare. 

Today I want to talk about Overcare, how to recognize it, how to correct from it by knowing when to set limits to the amount of care you give another person.

Feeders v. Drains

We have have an inner energetic life. There are things that renew us and pour energy into the bucket of our lives. But there are things that deplete us. They are like holes in our bucket.

I encourage my clients to always have a rough awareness of the ratio of “feeders” to “drains” in their lives. The idea is that you try to set things up so that there is always a positive balance. If you are pouring out of your energetic bucket into the buckets of other people by caring and helping them, you need to be sure you’ve got enough pouring into your bucket so the level of energy stays at least half full.

We all want to cultivate the things that renew us, and control the things the deplete us. If your spouse has cancer it’s great that you want to help him or her through that. But, the advice you will receive from the cancer care community is that you have to set limits. You will need respite yourself. You will need to be sure that the demands made on you are counterbalanced somehow. 

As I put this, “You can’t be there for someone else if you are not going to be there for yourself first.” Just like you were in an aircraft that lost cabin pressure. You put your own oxygen mask on first before you try to help someone else. Otherwise you will both pass out. 

The bank account of your inner emotional energy should always have a positive balance, and if it dips into the red you need to take care of that to bring the balance back up. And quickly.

A World of Overcare

Unfortunately, it’s easy to get that wrong.

Overcare is seductive and subtile. We see it in addictions work where an addict will exploit other people with claims of helplessness in an effort to guilt-trip others into helping. The addict then takes advantage and the addiction continues. 

Or you feel sorry for someone at work who is having trouble. So you help out a little bit. Except that, over time, it’s more than a little bit. Pretty soon the other person feels entitled. They may even get promoted because they seem calm and cool—mostly because they got you to do their work.

Overcare allows others to take advantage of you.

Many of us come from homes that have issues. In troubled homes people who are being abused sometimes put up with the abuse because they have an emotional attachment to the the family, so they conceal all the bad stuff out of a misplaced loyalty. Overcare can get you abused.

The common theme is we can easily become pushovers. We can be taken advantage of, or easily defeated. We end up doing things we don’t want to do, maybe even tasks that legitimately belong to others.

In the 1970s psychologist Lawrence LeShan did research on the personality of people who were diagnosed with cancer. He quickly discovered, and the finding has proved to be a robust one, that overwhelmingly people living with cancer tend to be the care taking members of their families who put everyone else first and themselves last. Whenever I mention that and ask for a show of hands at one of the workshops I do to help people boost their cancer resiliency, hands still go up all over the room. Overcare can make you sick. 

I began many years ago working with people who struggled with illnesses that had a stress-related component. It’s been rewarding, but there were some things about it that I found very, very surprising. I found case after case of people who realized they were exhausting themselves on behalf of other people, but they wouldn’t stop because they believed that would make them blameworthy. They were taught that caring for other people should be self-destructive.

The blame for this I place squarely on the people who wrote the Bible and on a whole lot of traditional religious education. Or least the parts of it about Jesus.

The Dark Side of Christianity

In our society there is a dark and dangerous social meme in Judeo-Christian culture that we are supposed to sacrifice ourselves for other people. Some of you who grew up on churches that had a heavily emphasis on sin and guilt will remember this. I feel it is really destructive.

In lots of places we were taught by our elders that it was wrong to look after our own self-interest. When working with the very ill I often find that they cannot distinguish between having a healthy self-interest (seeing to it that your own legitimate needs are met) and being selfish (advancing yourself at the expense of the legitimate needs of others). They have a healthy self-interest confused with an unhealthy selfishness. As a result they do not take care of themselves and end up being taken advantage because they Overcare.

I have met women expected by their families to prepare Thanksgiving Dinner for the whole extended family, the day after they had chemotherapy. I’ve seen unsuccessfully launched children take financial advantage of their parents, justifying that by saying “Well, if you really cared about me…”

An Issue of Punctuation

In the 5th Chapter of the Gospel of Matthew we read the Sermon on the Mount said to have been given by Jesus at the beginning of his ministry. It is the longest teaching and one of the most widely quoted. It contains some of the most remarkable verses, including the Beatitudes and the Lord’s Prayer. But is also contains some really dark stuff. Like this:

“…if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile. Give to everyone who begs from you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you.”

Really?  “If anyone wants to…take your coat, give your cloak as well.” Say What? I’m supposed to give everything I have, including the shirt on my back, to anyone who asks for it?”

“Give to everyone who begs from you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you.” Wait a minute. Am I actually expected to do just give out unlimited loans to anyone who wants one? Am I actually obligated to give to every single beggar I meet, even those who are obviously running a scam? 

No. That’s not what it means at all. But that is how it has been translated and that is how it got picked up into our culture. The theme is that it is somehow praiseworthy to care about others to the point where you hurt yourself.

This is the dark side of the Jesus tradition, and it’s been interpreted to mean that there is something praiseworthy in self-destructive caring. We are not supposed to honor our own legitimate self-interest. Instead, we are supposed to let others walk over us even to the point where we are harmed. 

Jesus didn’t really mean this. The educated classes in Jesus time spoke Hebrew or Greek. Jesus was not an educated person. He spoke the language of his time, a rough street vernacular called Aramaic. We know that because there are places where his actual words were considered so important they were copied down. 

On the cross he is reported to have said “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani? (My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?). Those words are neither Hebrew nor Greek. They are Aramaic.

Aramaic was a street language in use among everyday people. One of its features is that it had no formal punctuation. Especially, it had no way to show emphasis in that way we might emphasize a statement with an exclamation point. 

Instead, an Aramaic speaker showed emphasis by exaggerating what was said. Today we call this hyperbole. These exaggerated statements were not meant to be taken literally and the hearers in Jesus’s time understood that. 

So, when elsewhere in the Sermon on the Mount Jesus said…

“If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away.,,,And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away.”

Jesus did not actually mean that he wanted people to cut off their hands or pluck out their eyes, and we can be sure there were no eyeless followers with amputated hands among his disciples. If there were, I’m sure someone would have mentioned it.

Jesus was simply using hyperbole to show emphasis as all Aramaic speakers did. He was just saying it was a good thing to be a generous person. 

This is also what he was doing earlier in the Sermon on the Mount when he said those things about caring for others. 

He wasn’t recommending Overcare —giving anyone anything they wanted, whenever they wanted—that was hyperbole. He didn’t really think anyone should do that. He was just saying it was really good to be a caring person.

But when his words were written down in Greek (the language the New Testament) they were copied down literally. And for centuries people have mistakenly believed that self-destructive caring was good. It’s not. Overcare is never a good idea. It has never been recommended by any person of true spiritual authority. 

How do we tell Legitimate Care from Overcare?

There is an easy way to determine if the care you feel for someone else is True Care, or if you have gone too far and are Overcaring. It goes back to paying attention to Feeders and Drains—those experiences that pour energy into the bucket of your life and those things which are like holes in that bucket.

True Care is renewing. It helps both the person who gives and the person who receives the care. It reinforces healthy connection. Basically, it feels good regardless of whether we are the giver or receiver.

This may be a silly example, but let me use the example of one of my cats—The Late Lord Gray Shadow Underfoot. Shadow was a magnificent cat who ruled our household for18 years with a gentle paw. He would sing to the other cats when they were upset, and when they were ill he would stay close and snuggle. 

Toward the end of his life Shadow had a lot of medical problems: Cholangiohepatitis Chronic Bronchitis, Malignant Melanoma and he was an insulin dependent diabetic. For all that, with excellent veterinary care he was happy right up to the end. But it was expensive to care for him, and with the needs for two insulin shots and one blood test per day, he took up a lot of our time.

It didn’t matter at all. I loved this big guy and I loved taking care of him. It felt good to meet his needs and every day he was with us was a joy because he gave back more energy than he took. That is an example of True Care, whether for a cat or a person. The hallmark is that both parties benefit. It feels good.

When I hooked myself up to my biofeedback equipment and looked at my heart rhythm what I would see would be coherent and synchronized rhythms. All my body systems worked together better. I was stronger, happier, healthier because of my care for my Feline Overlord. 

Overcare is the reverse. It takes energy away. It is burdensome. It doesn’t feel good. It feels bad, worried, anxious. You feel used, taken advantage of, inconvenienced and so on. The energy flow is all or mostly one way. Your heart rhythms become incoherent and chaotic. Cortisol and Adrenaline flow instead of the vitality hormone DHEA in the blood, and endorphins in the brain. Overcare may sometimes be unavoidable, but it always takes its toll. 

You can tell True Care from Overcare by how you feel when you do it. Once you set aside the social conditioning that says you should sacrifice yourself for others, your feelings will guide you correctly.

Transformation

The thing is that all cases of Overcare began with True Care that somehow went wrong. Often we became over-attached. We get an idea of how things should turn out and tried to shape events to cause that. 

Sometimes another person simply takes advantage from the get-go, and they go looking for someone who will dance the Dance of Overcare with them.

As one of my colleagues says, “Here’s a simple question you can ask yourself from time to time. ‘Is what I am caring about adding quality to my life or is it adding stress?’” 

This is what the title of my sermon this morning is about.

The phrase “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn” is of course what Rhett Butler said to Scarlett O’Hara in the 1939 film, Gone With The Wind, believed by film scholars to be one of the top movies ever made.

Rhett Butler has been trying to win Scarlett’s affection for many years and she basically puts him through hell because of it. She secretly loves another, Ashley Wilkes. But she knows Rhett loves her so she plays him and takes advantage. Rhett moves into Overcare for Scarlett, and she makes him miserable.

In the script, Butler finally gives up on trying to win Scarlett’s genuine affection, says the famous phrase and walks out into the early morning fog. He set a limit. 

In the last scene of the movie Scarlett feels regret, realizes that she’s lost a good thing and vows to win him back. We’re not told what happens. Maybe in some imagined realm they will reconnect and move into a healthy relationship. If so, that happened only because Rhett set a limit and decided he would not Overcare any more.

Our Goal

And that is the power of not giving a damn. It’s the realization that you are in Overcare. What you care about is adding stress and not giving enough back. Then it is time to set a limit. Perhaps not explosively walking off into the morning fog as Rhett Butler did. Perhaps starting with smaller limits and then strengthening. But not continuing to be hooked. 

I can promise you one thing. If you do this you will learn something about how the people you care about care about you. If they sulk, escalate and try to get you to change back, the people you care about do not really care about you.

But if they say, “Oh!” and stop the pressure. Then the possibility of a deeper, healthy relationship exists. I think even Jesus would approve of such a change.

And that’s my sermon.

Sermon: Choking on the Breath of Life

Choking on the Breath of Life

A Sermon by the Rev. Dr. C. Scot Giles to Countryside Church UU

Sunday, September 7, 2015 (Labor Day Sunday)

My sermon today is perhaps more psychological than spiritual, but in my world the two disciplines are closely related. On this Labor Day Sunday I’m going to talk about work, and the stress of work. 

Autopsy

I expect that few of you have witnessed an autopsy. Theological students go through something called a CPE, or Clinical Pastoral Education, as part of our training. We are placed as a chaplain in a stressful situation such as a hospital, rehab center or community agency, closely supervised and challenged by senior colleagues. It can be a difficult and transformative experience, and a time of real personal change.

I did my CPE in a medical center and back in my day we were supposed to witness a surgery, a birth and an autopsy. This doesn’t happen anymore as the rules around medical privacy have changed, AND my observation is that contemporary theological students tend to have more delicate stomachs than in my day.

In my cohort we all got through the surgery without having to leave the room. None of us got through the birth observation (including me) and only about half of us got through the autopsy.

He was a middle-age man, or he had been. He was in good physical shape. His weight was appropriate, and he had keeled over and died at his desk while at work. 

The suspected cause of death was a heart attack but the autopsy showed his heart was fine. In fact, no cause of death could be found. His body was completely healthy, except, of course, for being dead. 

SUNDS

It’s now called Sudden Unexpected Death Syndrome. We are seeing it more an more. It’s become common enough that the International Codes for Disease published by the World Health Organization has given it a code number for medical records—R 96.0.

In Japan it goes by the name of Karoshi, and they translate that as “Death by Overwork—Occupational Sudden Death. It is literally choking on the breath of life—trying to do so much that your activity destroys you.

First described in medical literature in 1969, Karsohi became so common in the 1980s that the Japanese Ministry of Labor began to track it. The report said “It was recognized that employees cannot work for 12 or more hours a day, 6–7 days a week, year after year, without suffering physically as well as mentally. It is common for the overtime to go unpaid.” 

Does that job description sound familiar to any of you? How about we update it by adding the expectation of online availability 24/7, 365? Add that and you have the kind of work where antacid tablets become a major source of nutrition. 

In Japan they do have a broader definition of what qualifies as Unexpected Death Syndrome. They include deaths from heart attacks and stroke, but a lot of deaths go unexplained as in the autopsy I witnessed.

There is a theory. You have two nervous systems in your body. The first is your Central Nervous System that you control consciously. The second is your Autonomic Nervous System which controls all the things that take place without your awareness—heartbeat, breathing, digestion, etc. which is most of what happens in your body.

Your Autonomic Nervous System has two branches. The first is the sympathetic system which basically controls the activation of some part of your body. The second is the parasympathetic system which controls relaxation of some part of your body. We see both in the beating of your heart—contraction, release, contraction, release…

Ideally these two systems should always be in balance, but situational stress can change that. If these two systems get out of balance you feel either anxious or fatigued. In a society where tranquilizers and antidepressant medications outsell aspirin, those feelings are common.

If these two systems get completely out of balance your heart will stop—Sudden Unexpected Death Syndrome.

In my office when a person is hypnotized, electronic equipment monitors the client’s Autonomic Nervous System as that tells me many things, including how deeply they are hypnotized. 

Over the past few years when the computer spits out the client’s report, more and more, I see a lack of balance in the Autonomic Nervous System. I see it in about half my clients these days. In one case I sent the client directly from my office to the Emergency Room.

What do you think my computer would say about you if I hooked you up? Is your life in balance or are you so overstressed that you are choking on the breath of life? 

Is your life so full of responsibility and care that you cannot enjoy Emerson’s “refulgent Summer”? Are you in danger? You might be.

Our World of Work

On August 16th of this year the New York Times published a blistering article about the employment practices at the online retailer, Amazon.com. Titled “Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace.” Here’s a quote:

“At Amazon, workers are encouraged to tear apart one another’s ideas in meetings, toil long and late (emails arrive past midnight, followed by text messages asking why they were not answered), and held to standards that the company boasts are “unreasonably high.” The internal phone directory instructs colleagues on how to send secret feedback to one another’s bosses. Employees say it is frequently used to sabotage others.”

One former employee interviewed described the workplace culture at amazon.com as “Amazon is where overachievers go to feel bad about themselves.”

Spokespersons for amazon.com have disputed the story, but it rings true to me. Worse I suspect the practices described in there article, such as forced employee ranking, encouraging anonymous complaints, and a complete disrespect for the private lives of employees, are metastasizing to other workplaces if they have not already.

Fortunately, this isn’t universal. There are good companies to work for that understand that happy employees are good employees. But we’ve all heard of places that are white-collar sweatshops where overlords maintain control by fear and intimidation. Places where the only acceptable status report to your boss is something along the lines of:

All targets met,

All customers satisfied,

All systems fully operational,

All staff keen and well motivated,

All pigs fed and ready to fly.

Such a life cannot be part of God’s plan, however you understand God. It cannot possibility be a spiritually fulfilled life. It becomes an unholy thing.

Many of you know I am a Consulting Hypnotist. You probably don’t know that since the 1940s hypnotism has been a union occupation with the AFL-CIO. As we all work for ourselves we don’t engage in collective bargaining. Instead, we are part of the AFL-CIO as we need the legislative clout to protect ourselves from encroachment by other healthcare professionals.

On the Advisory Board of the National Guild of Hypnotists I carry the Legislation and Governmental Concerns Portfolio, and that makes me a union operative. They sent me for training at the George Meany Campus of the National Labor College just outside Washington DC. The history of work was interesting because it documented that people have never in human history worked harder than we do today. 

When you count up all the festivals and feast days, you discover that the medieval peasant—a sharecropper working in His Majesty’s fields had one day out of every three off. A third of the time! In the Middle Ages! People have never worked harder than we do now in America. Is it any wonder that stress-related illnesses are like a modern plague?

The Biochemistry of Stress

When you are stressed you body produces a hormone called cortisol. It is a precursor hormone. When it is released it causes a whole host of physical changes. 

When you are happy, your body produces a different hormone called DHEA (dehydroepiandrosterone), It likewise produces a host of physical changes in your body, all of which are good. 

In fact, if you are suffering from any sort of serious or chronic medical condition everything I’ll try to teach you would be to maximize your production of DHEA, because that is what triggers physical, mental, emotional and spiritual healing and resilience.

But there is a problem. The half-life of the stress hormone cortisol is 12 hours. That means when you have a negative reaction, 12 hours later, half of the cortisol is still in your body. That’s why when you try to go to sleep at night after a stressful day you have trouble. Half the cortisol is still in your blood acting as a stimulant. 

It takes 5 half-lives, or 60 hours for all of that cortisol to extinguish. So when you get stressed it casts a biochemical shadow in your body that stretches out 60 hours. 

When you have too much of the stress hormone in your body you are actually cortically inhibited. That means you are not exactly the brightest crayon in the box. The mistakes you will make, even with the best of intentions, will be haunting you for some time.

Unfortunately, the half-life of the renewing hormone DHEA is very brief—15 to 38 minutes. That’s why, when you get stressed you tend to stay that way. When you feel good, it doesn’t last. 

In the human body feelings travel faster than thought. When you have a negative experience the emotional result is almost instant. Then, you think about it and those thoughts might give you a different perspective. But by the time you’ve had those thoughts the cortisol has already been produced and released into your blood.

You can’t work your way out of stressful situations. The work just produces more cortisol which only increases your perception of stress, inhibits your thinking and you find yourself trapped. The only way to win this game is not to play. 

But there is something you can do to prevent that whole cycle from getting started, and on this Labor Day Sunday I can’t think of anything more appropriate to talk about.

Your Have Choices

A thirsty cowboy walks into a bar. The bartender comes over and asked “Do you want a drink?”

“What are my choices?” says the cowboy. “Why, yes or no” says the bartender.

The point of that silly story is that most of us have more choices than we realize, we just don’t think about that. Had the cowboy asked the bartender “What’s the menu?” he would have gotten a very different answer than he did get. We need to think about the wide range of choices we do have.

We are not really passive victims of circumstance. We just often do not recognize the choices that we do have. We can’t control what other people do or always control what happens to us, but we can control what bait we will rise to. 

The first step, I have found is to define what success means to you. In my observation—both of myself and my clients—many of us have let other people define success. It means living in the right neighborhood, having the right sort of car, being able to boast about things, and to provide a softer life for our family.

In service to that, we get into debt up to our eyeballs, ruin our health, spoil our kids, and make ourselves unhappy. Maybe a different definition of what a successful life could be is in order. 

About a year ago a Japanese woman named Marie Kondo published a book that quickly climbed to the top of the New York Times Best Seller List. It was titled "The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up,” which I think is too trite a title for a really good book. 

It’s a book about personal organization. She has taught personal organization for many years in Japan and has a large following. What is remarkable about her thought is that the people who follow it tend to keep on using it for long periods of time. They don’t just try it out for awhile and then go back to disorderly ways.

Her system is based on three rules.

First, go through all of the things that you have and get rid of anything you don’t really love. Give the other stuff away, throw it out or sell it to some sucker. But don’t keep anything you don’t love.

Second, find a place in your home for everything you love. Everything you own should be something that you love, AND it should have a place to live in your home.

Finally, when you use something, do not put it down. Put it away.

That’s it. Reduce your possessions to the beloved essentials. Have a place to store the beloved essentials. Always return a beloved essential to its home when you are finished using it. If you do that there will never be a stack of stuff, a pile of files or anything disorderly in your home. 

As I’ve played with her ideas I realize that her advice is applicable to more than just things. We can make the choice to apply it to feelings, memories and people as well. I started to teach this in my clinics for cancer patients and watched the stress level of the participants drop amazingly, even as measured on objective testing. 

Mentally go through your definition of success. Keep only the parts of it you really love. If you drop the things you don’t really care about, you might discover that the things you love about your life and not what you thought. 

Mentally go through all of your relationships. As far as is possible, keep the relationships you love. Regard the others as less important, or perhaps even complete. Not that they were bad, not that they were mistakes, but simply that they are over.

Lindsay and I do this every New Year’s Day. Over a glass of wine we run the list of the relationships and activities we have, and ask ourselves about what sort of shape they are in. Do we need more or less time with those people? Is the relationship really over and it’s time to move on? What about our work? Do we need to put in more energy or less? What are will willing to sacrifice to balance things out? Etc.

I do this with emotional events too. I mentally go through my memories and recollections. While I can’t decide to forget things, I can decide not to dwell on things that I do not love. When a bad memory surfaces I find a way to distract myself and not dwell on it. I don’t want that cortisol to get into my blood because all it does is mess me up and increase my stress. 

I don’t want to be laying on the mortuary slab at too young an age while the Medical Examiner looks puzzled and says “Darn if I know why he’s dead.” No thank you. 

Make a choice to dwell on the memories and recollections you love and to change the channel in your mind when other memories or recollections intrude. 

Decide that you will no longer try to get even with people who have harmed you, nor plot what to do to even the score. Use your mind to think about the memories and recollections you love. It’s your mind after all. It will follow your rules. 

Have a place in your life for the people, memories and recollections you love. That is, make time for the good relationships and much less time for the other relationships. Make time for the activities your love.

Do something to remind you about the memories you love—I keep a list in my journal and a collection of positive mementos in my mediation area. I have a place for these things in my own life.    

Curate your interior life so that you do not lose sight of the fact that your life is supposed to be for your benefit. While it is great to help out others, you should not be harming yourself in the process. If you are, maybe that job, the relationship, those responsibilities are not wise. Maybe a change of pace, a downshifting, a lightening of the load or a change in priorities are in order. 

People will let you harm yourself in order to enrich themselves. But you do not have to let them. 

Perhaps that concept is important enough that it bears repeating. Your life is supposed to benefit you. It’s good if it also benefits others, but primarily you are on this planet to have a fulfilling life yourself, according to the way you honestly define that. 

A fulfilled life is a life where you are relaxed and happy. It might be successful by the standards of other people or not. We are here to breath deeply the breath of life. Not choke on it. 

And that’s my sermon. 

Sermon: Heart Transplant Surgery as a Spiritual Discipline

Heart Transplant Surgery as a Spiritual Discipline

The Rev. Dr. C. Scot Giles, BCC, DNGH

Countryside Church, Unitarian Universalist

May 24, 2015

Heart Transplant Surgery

When I was growing up my hometown newspaper was the now defunct Bridgeport Post. It was a conservative rag that the School of Journalism at the University of Connecticut called, “The Worst Newspaper in the History of the State.”

They were being kind.

Several times during the Watergate Investigations, the paper went to press with huge headlines announcing that Nixon had been exonerated, which was a surprise to everyone including the late President. Often the paper took strange editorial positions about weird conspiracy theories, along that lines of the current hysteria in Texas about governmental invasion tunnels under Wal-Mart Stores. 

But that was nothing compared to what they printed when South African surgeon Christiaan Barnard performed the first heart transplant operation on December 3, 1967. You’d have thought the Martians had landed. 

Quoting Romans 2:15 in the New Testament, “Which shew the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness…” the newspaper editor announced that if you transplanted the heart from one patient into another you would also be transplanting the personality. 

“Surgeon’s playing God!” the editorial announced, and predicted the end of civilization as hordes of demon-like creatures would walk the darkened streets not sure of who they actually were. 

Speculating that a supply of hearts would come from executed criminals, the paper worried that we would be transforming law abiding citizens into unwitting disciples of Charles Manson, who would rise from their hospital beds and wander the streets seeking to slay us all, helter-skelter.

The editors of that paper were seriously messed up.

But they were right about at least one thing. Hearts are important.

Heart Intelligence: The Mind Is Not The Brain

When most of us think about what we call “our mind” we mostly think of it as the activity of the brain. Historically, not all people have assumed that—the Ancient Egyptians threw away the brain when they made a mummy believing it to be unimportant. 

But in modern times we understand that our brain is an amazing creation for the processing and categorizing of information. But the brain is not the mind. 

Physiologists have come to understand that the mind is more than the activity of the brain. The mind is actually what IT professionals call a “distributed processing network.” That is, our minds process information in different ways using different parts of our body. The brain pulls all of that together into the thoughts and feelings that we have. 

This is why people who are “brain dead” can still maintain biological life. There is enough nerve tissue functioning elsewhere to keep the body going even when the brain as ceased function, or in the tragic case of Terri Schiavo in 2005 when the brain had turned to liquid.

The mind is more then the brain. We think and feel with numerous parts of our body and the brain just pulls that information together like the hub of a computer network.

For example, in addition to our brain, we also process information in our spinal column and in our gut. Traditional Chinese Medicine Practitioners call the bowel the “lower brain.” And it does sort of look like it with the same kind of crenelations in the intestines as you see in the neural tissue in the brain. 

The fact is you have more nerve cells in your gut than anywhere else except your brain. As we all know, when we feel emotionally upset often our gut is the first place with feel it, which is why there are so many laxatives (and remedies that do the opposite of laxatives, like Pepto Bismol) on drugstore shelves.  

You also process information, a lot of it, using your heart. 

Since about 1990 physiologists have come to understand it is a mistake to think of the heart as only a biological pump for blood. It actually turns out to be an important part of the information processing system of the mind. The heart has nerve cells, just like the brain, and in fact sends more information to the brain than any other organ.

The heart communicates with the brain and the rest of the body neurologically through nerve impulses, biochemically by hormones and neurotransmitters, biophysically through pressure waves and energetically through electromagnetic pulses. Through these forces the heart has a lot of influence over what your mind thinks, believes and does. 

It is also medically privileged in a number of fascinating ways. The heart is one of the easiest organs to transplant because all you have to do is connect the plumbing. Unlike other organs where the surgeon also has to try to hook up the nerves, the heart will send out new nerve tissue on its own and literally install itself in the body of its new host. Your personality doesn't change as my hometown newspaper claimed, but no other organ installs itself during transplant in that way.

While science has now confirmed all this, I feel that people have always known it. Often we find there is a wisdom in language, even poetic language. People have always talked about their hearts “breaking,” or feeling “heavy” when they are melancholy or sad. We refer to some people as being “light hearted” or “hard hearted” when we describe their personality. We’ve always intuitively known that a person’s heart has something to do with their personality. 

HeartMath®

As many of you know my community ministry is one of spiritual healing and I am a well-known practitioner of the hypnotic arts and sciences. I quite literally “wrote the book” used by the National Guild of Hypnotists to train practitioners to do healing and medical work, and doing that work is my calling. 

The philosophy behind my work originally came from the work of Bernie Siegel, MD, a surgeon at Yale New Haven Medical Center who wrote the first well-received book on Mind-Body Medicine in 1978. It was called Love, Medicine and Miracles and it had a huge impact on me.

Dr. Siegel argued that feelings were more important than thoughts in understanding how the body maintained health. 

Even if a person was very ill, by adjusting their interior feeling lives, they could make almost miraculous changes in their physical health. He used imagery, drawing and dream interpretation to help people figure out what they needed to be able to get in touch with their own healing power. 

As I read scripture, and scripture is important to me, I believe the miraculous healings of Jesus found in the New Testament were caused more by a change of heart in the people healed than by any spiritual power. 

I would ultimately to to Yale and took the training programs offered by the center that Dr. Siegel founded and studied with him directly. His heart-centered approach to healing became the basis of my work, and it turned out to work especially well with people who were living with cancer.

Over the decades others have built on this model. The group doing the most research in this area these days is the HeartMath Institute in Boulder Creek, California, and I am a member. I use their technology and support their research. 

What we do is to assume that the heart is a kind of second brain in the human body.

As far as current technology discloses, the neurological activity of your heart controls how you integrate the other systems of your body: your nervous system, your circulatory system, your endocrine system, etc. 

When everything works together well we call it “coherence” and it correlates to good emotional, spiritual and physical health. You feel good, you are healthier, happier and more resilient on every measure.

Coherence means that the biological, emotional and energetic systems in your body are working together well. That’s a good thing. Incoherence is when they are not working together well, and that’s a bad thing and nothing but trouble results.

When I talk about “putting people in touch with their own healing power” what I mean by that is as psychophysiological coherence increases, people become healthier and happier. It’s not actually something I am doing to them, I’m just teaching them how to listen and respond to the intelligence that resides in their own heart. We have computerized technology that actually measures this, and it’s really cool.

But I’m not here today to talk about the technology. What I want to talk about today how you can find your own Heart Intelligence and why you should pay attention to it. And you don’t need any gadgets (although I think they are really cool).

Heart Intelligence

As Dr. Siegel taught me so many years ago, listening to your heart is one of the most important things you can do. 

Our Western civilization has accomplished wonderful things but I believe we've allowed a lop-sided development. We prize the work of science and cognitive intelligence, but tend to overlook emotional and intuitive intelligence. That is what William Wordsworth decried in his poem “The World Is Too Much With Us.” While we've accomplished much we've also lost something. 

From the time we are children most of us are socialized not to pay attention to our intuitions, our feelings, or our own deeper self. By neglecting these things we neglect the very tools God gave us to manage the stress of our lives. We strive to live up to the demands made on us, we tolerate negative situations even though our stress builds. 

Herbert Benson, MD, the founder of the Mind-Body Institute at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston calls stress “the hidden plague” because so many walk around inflected with it. The incidence of diseases with a stress-related component are soaring. Relationships go on the rocks because the partners are so stressed they can't relate to each other. Business ventures crash and burn because distressed employees can’t find the energy to do their jobs well. 

The people who taught me believed there was a solution located right in our own chests. They called it our Heart Intelligence. It is the intelligence encoded, not in the brain, but in the physical organ of our heart.

When you are stressed your heart begins to respond to that stress before your brain does. The heart increases blood pressure, it begins to pour stress hormones such as adrenaline into your body as a way to get the brain’s attention. It is your early warning system.

But your heart can also do the opposite. It can slow its function so your blood pressure drops, it can produce dopamine and oxytocin (sometimes called the happiness and love hormones) because they reduce fear, increase your eye contact with others and boosts your ability to experience trust and generosity. It can swing your brain into a more positive and healthy mode of processing.

And it’s really easy to do. 

To listen to your Heart Intelligence all you have to do it focus your attention on your heart. That’s it. It’s not a new discovery. Yoga instructors and meditation teachers have been saying this for thousands of years. 

Stop thinking about yourself as if you were a spirit inhabiting your skull and instead let your attention drop to your heart. There’s an ancient yoga technique of imagining that you are breathing through your heart rather than your lungs. Do this for just a 10-15 seconds. Then, find a happy thought, good memory or feeling of appreciation. That’s all. Then, make your decisions, rethink your conclusions and plans, and you will find that your thoughts have changed for the better.

It’s possible to actually measure this. As people do this simple technique brain scans alter, skin conductivity decreases, respiration and body temperature drop. It’s amazing. We just don’t notice it because it is so simple. 

One of my own colleagues believes that when people talk about feeling the power of God within them what they are actually feeling is the intelligence of their own beating heart as it responds to events, alters biochemistry and changes what the mind is doing. 

Focus on your heart. Imagine yourself breathing through your heart and summon a positive and happy thought or feeling into your mind for a moment and you change yourself for the better. It’s the ultimate heart transplant because you remove stressful feelings and replace them with better.

I believe this is spiritually important. To explain that I need to talk about clocks. Not just any sort of clocks. I want to talk about clocks with big, swinging pendulums. 

Entrainment

In the 17th century a mathematician, astronomer and inventor named Christiaan Huygens invented the pendulum clock. He had quite a collection of these and in 1666 he noticed something weird. If he had two or more pendulum clocks on a single shelf or board, after a time all of their pendulums would be swinging together at the same time. 

If you separated the clocks, they didn't do this. He wrote about this calling it an “odd sympathy.” We now call it entrainment or “mode locking” and it is something known to every physicist. If you have two or more things oscillating and they begin out of phase, within a short period of time they will synchronize and be in phase. And the one that sets the pace for this will be the largest oscillator in the system.

So if you have a shelf full of pendulum clocks, and start them all up with their pendulums in different positions, within a short time all the pendulums will swing back-and-forth together in exact rhythm. And the rhythm will be set by the clock that has the largest pendulum. Look it up if you want to know more, but many medical devices (including cardiac pacemakers) work using this principle. 

The really cool thing is that both your brain and heart project an electromagnetic field beyond your body. The field projected by your brain is not very strong and to measure it we have to glue electrodes directly to the outside of your skull. The field projected by your heart is much stronger, and it can be detected by sensors positioned even five or six feet away. 

Because your heart is the strongest biological oscillator in your body, it is just like the biggest pendulum clock on a shelf full of clocks. The rest of your bodily systems will be drawn into entrainment with the activity of your heart. 

By tracking the activity of your heart we can infer how the other systems in your body are working. And if your heart is relaxed the other organs are drawn into relaxation as well. 

The really amazing thing, and one I consider to have spiritual implications, is that the electromagnetic field projected by your heart actually can influence other people in your immediate environment. 

Research at HeartMath has shown that if we have three people in a room who are functioning with good coherence between their mental, emotional, physical and energetic systems (you know, people who really “have their stuff together”), and a fourth person enters the room who has no idea what is going on and just stands there, his or her body will go into coherence too. His or her mental, physical, emotional and energetic body systems will start to work better.

You’ve had this experience. You know you are at your best when you are with certain people. You feel better in certain places where certain kinds of people hang out. That’s because those people “have it together” and just being with them helps you get it together too. Those people are in touch with their Heart Intelligence and just being with them helps you do the same.

“…(and Jesus said)…For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” Matthew 18:20.

We Can Share Our Heart Intelligence

When I look at the mess our world is in. When I look at the problems our denomination is having (I’m about to head off to a denominational summit where we will try to figure out how a better financial future for the Unitarian Universalist Association can be achieved) I get really sad.

When I was a younger man I believed that somehow everything would work out. The values of liberal enlightenment and the light of science would ultimately move everyone toward a better future. There are days when I don't believe that anymore. 

Fundamentalisms of all sort abound. Science and logic seem to be a dirty words that lawmakers purposefully ignore. It’s disheartening.

But then I remember what I just said. If people can actually influence each other just by getting themselves into a healthier place mentally and energetically, that may be how we bring the New World. 

I think the task before all of us is to take personal responsibility, not just for our own economic prosperity, our health and safety, but also for our energetic and inner lives, we can accomplish great things. 

If we get in touch with our own Heart Intelligence, and if there are even a few of us, we can draw other people along and help them become their better selves. 

This weekend is Memorial Day and we remember all who have gone before us, especially our veterans. But we know that wars are not the way to lasting peace. What will bring peace is if we all take responsibility for our own spiritual growth and thereby encourage others to do the same. If there is hope for this planet it will be because we all use what I’ve called Heart Intelligence to become the very best we can be. And it’s actually easy.

And that’s my sermon. 

HeartMath is a registered trademark of the Institute of HeartMath.

A Sermon: "Freedom, Reason, Tolerance and Zombies"

Freedom, Reason, Tolerance and Zombies

A Sermon at Countryside Church, Unitarian Universalist

January 25, 2015

The Rev. Dr. C. Scot Giles

The Zombies of Haitian Folklore

Do you like Zombies? I do. I grew up on 1950s Science Fiction and Fantasy movies and still enjoy them. I Walked With A Zombie, The Movie about Stephen King’s Pet Cemetery and my all-time favorite, Plan 9 From Outer Space. In fact the first time a girl hugged me was during the classic zombie movie Night of the Living Dead (she hugged because she was terrified, but I enjoyed it anyway). 

In case you haven’t noticed, we are living during the Golden Age of Zombie literature and cinema. The Walking Dead, a TV series about an apocalypse caused by a zombie virus, is the  most watched show on television, and it’s ratings have out-performed the Olympics twice.

But there are many more: 28 Days, 28 Weeks, the Last Ship, Strain, Shaun of the Dead, Z-Nation, World War Z, In The Flesh, Helix, the list goes on. 

In fact, the you may want to know that the Centers for Disease Control have designated October as the official Zombie Preparedness Month, and if you don’t believe me check out their website. Heck, there is even a Zombie Weekend at the Bristol Renaissance Faire and some of my colleagues have participated in wedding ceremonies with a zombie theme. Seriously.

What in the world is all of this about? I mean, why is this even “A Thing”?

Well, the Centers for Disease Control use their Zombie Preparedness Campaign as a tongue-in-cheek way of encouraging people to be prepared for natural disasters. If it’s good preparation for zombies it’ll be good prep for hurricanes too.  

But there is something about this sort of literature that intrigues me. What does it say about our civilization that an obscure and unofficial part of Haitian folklore has become so prominent?

Zombies began as a religious phenomena. Long ago when slaves were being imported from West-Africa they brought their religion along with them. This religion involves the worship of a complex pantheon of gods and it is guided by a system of divination called Ifa’. It is still practiced today and in fact it is growing. 

When these slaves got to Cuba, their religion mixed with the indigenous Spanish Roman Catholicism and became the religion we now call Santeria. 

In Haiti, the mix was with French Roman Catholicism and it came to be called Voudun. That strain was imported to America in Southern States and became called Voodoo or Hoodoo. 

In Brazil it’s called Candomblé, and on an on under many different names: Palo, Umbanda, La Regla Lucumi, the list goes on. 

A priest or priestess who had lost his or her good heart might engage in black magic. Such a person might re-animate a dead body as a personal slave. These were called “zombies.” 

There is actually something to this belief. In 1985 an ethnobotanist named Wade Davis went to Haiti and found that some practitioners had developed a drug, called tetrodoxin from the Datura plant and an extract from the puffer fish, that could create a coma-like state of somnambulistic slavery. The actual drug is now used in cancer care for pain relief, and I’ll refer you to Dr. Davis’ book, or the very well-done movie of the same name, The Serpent and the Rainbow, for a sympathetic account of all this. 

But modern zombies are different. They are presented as scientific phenomena. Instead of being the work of religious professionals, they are the result of contagious viruses or genetic experiments gone wrong. It is either our science that has let us down, or Mother Nature herself rises up using the smallest life forms, to strike us down.

That’s something new. Zombies not from Voodoo, but from an pandemic or a science lab gone bad. That’s an important point I want you to get. In the 1930s, 40s and 50s, zombies came from Voodoo. No longer. The contemporary zombie is not the creation of magic. They are creations of technology or a germ.

I think this literature (books, movies, television, graphic novels and role play) discloses a deep thread of anxiety in our culture. This anxiety is mostly unarticulated but very real that we may be entering an age of disruption. Our collective unconscious minds are using the zombie metaphor to express things that most of us are deeply concerned about. The image of the zombie engages themes that thoughtful people do ponder. I notice three such themes.

Hell is Other People

In 1944 the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre published a play called No Exit. It is about the afterlife where three deceased people are put in a room together for all eternity. They’re all bad people and their punishment is to live together making each other miserable. Which they do. There is famous line in that play, “Hell is Other People.”

I personally have a much more optimistic view of the afterlife than that one, but the zombie image I feel discloses how much we do have to fear from other people. 

In modern zombie lore the zombification is contagious, and if you get bitten, scratched, bled upon or come into contact with any other body fluid, you become a zombie yourself. We don’t see this in the original religious version of the zombie image, but it’s there in all the modern depictions. Why is that? 

The answer, I believe, is that we are increasingly seeing other people as a source of anxiety. We used to have communities; neighborhoods. The whole pioneer ethic that enabled us to settle the Great Prairies was that we would try to look after one another, because you never knew what you might need your neighbors.

It’s different now. People seem different. How do we stay decent people in a world where there are school shootings, financial meltdowns, racial cleansing and people who behead innocent captives and upload the video to YouTube? Even our consumerism is out of control, which is probably why Director George Romero shot his Dawn of the Dead inside a shopping mall. 

During Hurricane Katrina we all got a lesson about how quickly society can break down. It took, what, a few days before police were turning traffic around and not letting people flee stricken areas. Exactly how long was it before looting broke out? Three days? And then we heard about how everyone was crammed into the Superdome where gangs had taken control. 

Didn’t take long at all. Hell is other people. That’s one of the vibes from the modern zombie literature. Urban life might be fun but if people are turning into zombies, you do not want to be around a lot of them. When everything goes wrong, there is nothing more anxiety-producing than other people. 

Technology Out Of Control 

The second anxiety disclosed by the popularity of zombie literature is the fear that we might lose control of our technology. A lot of zombie literature is about genetic or viral experiments going wrong and unleashing a plague of the undead upon the world. It is claimed that when we tamper with nature, things go wrong. 

I think this aspect discloses an intuitive sense that our scientific and technological understanding has advanced beyond our philosophical and moral understandings, and like Walt Disney’s Sorcerer's Apprentice we are about to be brought to task by our own hubris and over-reach. 

People of my generation were raised with the fear of a nuclear war, that our weaponry had become so powerful it outstripped our ability to use it wisely. That theme is commonplace in the media portrayals of the future now: The 12 Monkeys, Jericho, The Day After, Resident Evil and its endless sequels, and many more.

Contagion

The third anxiety that I think zombie literature explores is the fear of contagion. Remember the original zombies of Haitian folklore were creations of a religious professional gone bad. But modern zombie literature reflects the theme of some sort of virus or plague that runs out of control. That’s the vibe you see in the television show The Walking Dead, the book and movie World War Z and others.

There is something very deep and dark in this. Most of you know that in my community ministry I specialize in working with people who are living with cancer; I’m sort of a spiritual healer. Due to a number of  courageous celebrities who went public when they were diagnosed with cancer, some of the social stigma that used to exist has lifted. But most people still don’t want others to know if they’ve had cancer.

When I was in training we conducted an experiment. A candid video was made of an actor at a college party. On cue the actor said, “Oh, I’ve just been diagnosed with cancer. But it’s very treatable and I should be fine.” People around him moved away. They increased their interpersonal distance by double. They later denied they had done it, so it was a completely instinctual phenomena, but you could measure it on the video.

Now if he had said, “Oh, I just had a cardiac bypass,” I don’t think anyone would have reacted. But think—most people who have cancer will survive it. Most people who have heart disease (like me) will die of heart disease. Yet everyone is afraid of getting cancer and no one is afraid of getting heart disease. 

The reason, I believe, is that if you die of heart disease it’s usually quick and clean. If you die of cancer, you can waste away. Also, many of the most successful treatments we have for cancer such as chemo or radiotherapy themselves cause temporary loss of weight, hair, energy and appearance. 

Deep in our Collective Unconsciousness there is something about wasting diseases because for 99% of our social evolution that meant plague, and plague was contagious. Even though we know that cancer isn’t a plague, and it isn’t contagious, there is still something in us at a deep level that pulls back. We fear contagion. The modern zombie literature is all about that.

In the 1970s a chemist named James Lovelock published a book in which he set forth the idea he called the Gaia Hypothesis after the Greek goddess of the Earth. There are many planetologists who now endorse it and in 2006 Lovelock received an award from the Geological Society of London. 

The idea is that the organic and inorganic elements on Earth cooperate together to form a self-regulating system to regulate life on earth. If any part of the biosphere acts in a way that is a liability, the Earth itself changes to correct that, even if it means bringing some life forms to extinction. In the great drama of life on Earth, The Gaia Hypothesis says the Earth gets a vote. 

Just last week, the New York Times published that an international commission has confirmed that human activity has so changed our planet that we are now living in a new geological age, called the Anthropocene, and that it’s not going well. We’re pushing the boundaries of what our planet can support. 

This is exactly reflected in the zombie literature. There is an intuitive sense that we are violating nature and nature will respond by creating an extinction event for us in self-defense. The zombie literature proposes this and suggests that the instrument Mother Nature will use one of  the smallest and most deadly tool in her arsenal--the virus. In fact I wonder is some of the over-reaction we saw about the rare and relatively-hard-to-catch ebola virus was a manifestation of this fear.

That this gets me to why I like zombies

The Value of the Zombie

It would be easy to supply a list of things that might head off the problems I’ve just listed. Move toward sustainable agriculture, limit consumerism, reduce and eventually eliminate fossil fuels, put restrictions on dangerous research, etc. 

All of these are these are all worthwhile ideas. Some people predict that the end of our industrial civilization is inevitable and counsel the we all need to reduce our lifestyle in anticipation. 

One of the best of these, a book titled The Long Descent by John Michael Greer, an Archdruid of The Ancient Order of Druids in America, predicts a gradual slide into a “de-industrial” civilization where environmental collapse will lead to simpler and more agrarian lifestyles. He claims the process is inevitable, may even be a good thing overall. His recommendation is we should all now start moving in that direction. Or, as he puts it, “Collapse now and avoid the rush.”

But my hope lies in a deeper place, a more spiritual place.

I am an optimist about humanity. I expect good things of the future, not bad things. I believe that our society has some capacity to deal with serious threats. But we tend toward careless thinking, and unless these threats are brought to our attention we tend to ignore them. 

Part of the cultural role of literature is to remind us of things we might overlook or take for granted. Zombie literature, precisely because it captures our anxiety about social unrest, technological meltdown or biological collapse keeps us reminded of those possibilities, and that will make us more careful than we would otherwise be.

A really scary movie about zombies eating your family does more to remind the average person about the need to worry about biological warfare research than all the white papers liberal think tanks issue. 

The zombie literature speaks loudly to us because it speaks to the place where our deepest fears live in a way that an article in the New Yorker or the Atlantic, ever will. 

That’s a good thing. So I like zombies.

The future is always a bit scary, but I believe the problems we face do have solutions and that catastrophe is not inevitable. When I was in Theological School in the 1970s we were all upset about a report issued by an international think tank called The Club of Rome. The report, titled The Limits of Growth predicted the end our our industrial society because of limited resources.

For example, at the time most of our electronics used copper wire and copper connectors. The Club of Rome computed that there was not enough copper in existence to meet the anticipated future growth of technology and therefore technology would inevitably collapse. But it didn’t. 

What happened is that we developed silicon chips and fiber optics which we make out of sand. Hardly anything uses a lot of copper anymore. And so I think it will go for the other problems. It may not be easy and it probably will not be seamless, but I do think we will cope with every one of the upcoming problems and we’ll be fine.

But I said my optimism is spiritual.

Earl Morse Wilbur

An important history of Unitarianism is Earl Morse Wilbur’s, A History of Unitarianism in two volumes. Professor Wilbur lived prior to the merger between the Unitarian and Universalist denominations in 1961 so he only wrote about the Unitarian side. He believed that the essential genius behind the Unitarian movement could be articulated in three values: Freedom, Reason and Tolerance. 

If you took any historical Judeo-Christian tradition, and inoculate it with those three values, it would end up looking pretty much like the Unitarian Universalism of today. 

It’s possible to quibble. “Reason” in the sense of “deductive reason” is not as critical a value among us as it was back in the 1950s. We’ve all learned to appreciate the value of intuition and inductive reasoning as well. 

“Freedom” has become much more closely analyzed as we’ve learned about multi-culturalism and the pervasiveness of racism. 

“Tolerance” is somewhat qualified in today’s world too. While we respect Islam, Right Wing Christianity and Ultra-Orthodox religion, no one is going to tolerate them being expressed as terrorism.

But that said, we’re really still the people who tolerate a heck of a lot from each other, fundamentally value the life of the mind and heart, and all of us claim the freedom to believe as we see fit. 

What made us unique, said Wilbur, was that we were proposing a new reason for being religious. Everywhere else in the West the reason to belong to a religion was to either experience pleasure (go to heaven when you died) or to avoid pain (to not go to hell when you died). Basically you practiced a religion because it offered you a Get Out Of Jail Free card that allowed you to escape a punishment to come.

The Unitarian tradition was the first to say that neither the hope of heaven nor the fear of hell was the best motivating factor. Instead, belonging to a community of seekers, having the freedom to do spiritual seeking yourself was enough of a reason to practice the faith. 

That was an incredibly optimistic proposal for a religious tradition. While everyone else was shouting about “the Wrath to Come” the Unitarians took a completely different path. It would be what psychologist William James called “A Healthy Minded Religion.”

I have said before the optimism is a choice. It is not about feelings, at least at first. It is a decision to interpret what happens to you through the lens of a positive worldview. That doesn’t mean we’ll always be able to come up with a positive interpretation, but it does mean we’ve decided that when there are competing interpretations available, we will select the one most likely to lead to positive thoughts. A Healthy Minded Faith.

And this is another reason why I love zombies. The three cultural anxieties that are represented by the image of the modern zombie: anxiety about other people, anxiety about our technology, and anxiety about our impact on nature are made laughable by the far-fetched image of the shambling zombie who both reminds us to be careful and ministers to us by suggesting our fear might be overblown.

That’s why I enjoyed the novel, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. It is so overdone that it reminds me not to be fearful.

Everyone knows zombies are not real. By our unconscious choice of the cultural image of the zombie as a representation of those fears, our Collective Unconscious Mind proposes that perhaps those fear are not as inevitable as they seem either. Maybe a way will be found and a sun-filled future could await us all. I think it does.

And that’s why I like zombies.

And that’s my sermon.

Sermon-Manna from Heaven

Manna from Heaven

A Sermon by Rev. Dr. C. Scot Giles

Countryside Church, Unitarian Universalist

Labor Day Sunday, August 31, 2014

The Background: The Exodus

Most of us are probably familiar with the Old Testament Story of the Exodus, although I suspect our impressions of it probably have more to do with the 1956 Cecil B. DeMille movie starring Charlton Heston and Yul Brynner than actual study of the scriptural text itself.

In the Bible it is implied that the Israelites had migrated to Egypt and sold themselves into slavery to escape famine. After a time, scripture claims that God commanded the Israelites to depart Egypt where they had been enslaved and to make an exodus to find the Promised Land. The Land of Milk and Honey.

And so Moses, an Israelite patriarch went to Pharaoh and announced that God demanded Pharaoh set the Hebrew slaves free and permit them to leave Egypt. Pharaoh refused, and God sent plagues upon Egypt until Pharaoh changed his mind.

There were ten plagues said to have been unleashed by God. Water was changed into blood, then plagues of frogs, lice, flies, diseased livestock, boils, firestorms, locusts, darkness and last but not least, the death of all first born Egyptian children. Not exactly a good time.

There are actually naturalistic explanations for these plagues. In fact, they are really only exaggerations of naturally occurring changes in the Egyptian ecosystem. 

Red algae would have turned the Nile red. 

The blighted water would have caused the frogs to leave the river and come onto the land and die. 

The death of frogs would have allowed insect populations to increase geometrically, including flies which carry anthrax. 

Cattle afflicted with anthrax would have died in the fields polluting them, people infected would break out in boils. 

Severe hail can appear as fire when it falls through sunlight, and would have crushed the crops. The barren fields would turn in dustbowls, and sandstorms would darken the skies. 

When the darkness passed, Egyptian custom would have been given firstborn children priority for food, and they would have been given food from the polluted fields where the sick cattle had died. 

So it all makes a sort of sense if you allow for the historical lens of exaggeration. 

And so Pharaoh let the Israelites go. 

Scholars today do not really think the Exodus happened in the way the Old Testament describes in the 2nd or 3rd millennia BCE. Exodus is really just the Greek word for the concept of “going out” and there isn’t a scrap of archeological evidence that it ever happened. 

According to the story in Exodus Chapter 12, the Israelites numbered 600,000 men, plus women and children, plus retainers and livestock. The Book of Numbers gives an exact count of 603,550 men over the age of twenty, plus wives, children, elderly and retainers. If you do the math that something like two million people.

At the time, scholars estimate the entire Egyptian population was not more than 3.5 million people. So if the Exodus happened, then more than half of the population of Egypt would have been involved. As ancient Egypt was a slave economy, the departure of that many slaves would have resulted in economic collapse, and no such collapse is recorded in the written Egyptian histories of the time. 

Also, the numbers are completely improbable. That many people, marching ten abreast, would have formed a line 150 miles long, without even counting the livestock. There is simply no way the logistics existed to support such a procession, nor could the Sinai desert have supported such a host of people. The exodus is a fable.

But something happened. The leader of the Israelites was said to have been a man named Moses, and that is an Egyptian name. One of the plagues was of frogs, and there are no frogs in Israel, only in Egypt. Probably there was an procession of a small group of people who gradually gained strength and size in the desert as other nomadic tribes attached themselves. Each adopting the story of the Exodus as their cultural narrative. And that brings us to the manna.

The Story of the Manna

The story of the manna occurs in two Old Testament Books, Exodus 16 and Numbers 11. The accounts differ but basically the people were hungry. God heard their need and offered to provide a miraculous food. 

One morning the people found spread out on the ground a white particle that was edible and good tasting. They said “what is it?” and the name “manna” is an Aramaic translation of the exact question.

The people could gather the manna every morning and it sustained them. But no matter how much they gathered, they could not store the manna. If they tried it would go bad overnight. So each day they gathered the food they found and it sustained them for that day. They had to trust there would be more tomorrow.

There are more than one kind of manna described in the story. The first kind was said to look like the spice coriander and tasted like wafers baked with honey. The second, recounted in the Book of Numbers was different. It was said to look like “bdellium,” a dark sap that had to be ground and fashioned into loaves. It tasted like cakes made with olive oil.

The story of the manna occurs in the Quran too, and early Islamic scholars wrote “Truffles are part of the ‘manna’ which Allah, sent to the people of Israel through Moses, and its juice is a medicine for the eye” (6th Hadath of the Sahih Muslim).

The different accounts of what manna was I think gives us a clue that it really was not one thing. This has led some scholars to think that the word “manna” was actually a cognate of the word “mennu,” the Egyptian word for food. Manna simply designates the naturally occurring food sources of the desert. 

It turns out there are a lot of them, which is why the deserts in the Middle East support human settlements and nomadic cultures to this day. The foods available would have included various kind of plant saps that are released by the activity of scale insects. These crystalized saps would indeed have resembled coriander in some cases and are a good carbohydate source. It would also have included the tougher bdellium, which would have to be ground and fashioned into cakes in order to be digestible. 

The indigenous foodstuffs of desert ecology would also have included various sorts of fungi which would also spring up overnight and would appear like bread on the ground. The fact that the Quran refers to manna as “truffles,” a kind of fungi, supports this.

Now, this is where I’m going to get myself in trouble. 

The speculation that the manna, the naturally occurring food sources of the desert may have included fungi, has led some anthropologists to wonder if some of that fungi included Psilocybe cubensis mushrooms or something similar. These mushrooms do not grow in the Sinai desert now, but may have millennia ago, and still exist as close as India. 

These mushrooms are notorious breeding grounds for insects, including the scale insects that would cause plants to weep sap. The mushrooms also contain a mild hallucinogenic (psilocybin) that has as a side effect decreasing appetite which would have been useful to desert nomads. 

Scholars have also proposed that as fungi of this family are hallucinogens, perhaps some of the miracles described in the Old Testament stories might have a biochemical explanation rather than a supernatural explanation.

If you don’t believe me on this one spend a few minutes with Google or Bing and look up the word “manna” and you will find a surprising amount of literature has been published about this and the idea isn’t as crazy as it sounds. 

Now...Don’t Get Me Wrong

Now, don't’ get me wrong. I maintain a radical reading of the scripture as the basis for my Unitarian Universalism and always have. I claim scholarly accuracy for my position, but acknowledge that I pay little attention to traditional explanations of the story. Instead, I employ a philosophical discipline called “phenomenology” where I read the scripture with as few presuppositions as possible, then ask what light archeology, psychology, philosophy, comparative religion and medicine might have to shed on a new understanding. 

This sometimes gets me in trouble because people, especially very conventional people who were raised not to question what they were taught, can be shocked by the new reading I suggest.

I can hear it now. Someone says, “My minister thinks the Israelites wandered in the desert for 40 years where they were fed daily by the divine Hand of God with a miraculous bread.”

Then someone in this congregation says “Well, one of the ministers at my church thinks the Israelites spent 40 years in the desert whacked out on magic mushrooms, and that’s where we got all this stuff.”

If you do that it might cause a bit of conflict. So please exercise restraint. 

What I am saying is that the word “manna” may come from the Egyptian work for food, “mennu” and that the Aramaic derivation of the word was added later.

I am saying that the legend of the manna probably refers to the naturally occurring foodstuffs of the desert ecology that are consumed there to this day. That would include crystallized plant sap released by scale insects and fungi of various sorts. And the the scriptural text of both the Islamic and Hebrew religious text have some support for this.

I am also saying that among the fungi that occur in this area are hallucinogenic fungi, which have often been used in religious ceremonies in those cultures where they exist. It is therefore possible, that such hallucinations may have played a part in some of the religious imagery that has been passed down to us from Old Testament times. 

I’d appreciate if you’d not quote me out of context. Tar and feathers do not look good given my fair complexion.

Why I Care

Apart from these really interesting speculations, as I read the story of the manna I am struck with how the writer presents the tale. It wasn’t as if God led the people into the desert and then said “Hey, gather around let me explain how I’m going to take care of you…” God was silent. The waters of the Red Sea closed and there was nothing but four decades of desert life ahead. 

They found themselves in the desert with nothing beyond what they could carry and they didn’t have centuries of fieldcraft knowledge in how to survive there. They would have had to gather what wisdom the elders had, learn from any indigenous people they found, figure the rest out by trial and error. 

They were worried. If we were in that position we’d be worried too, and wondering where to find food. 

Worry is an emotion about anticipated negative events. It’s what you feel when you realize there may be challenges ahead, and you that you do not have the skills to meet them. Worry comes when you feel inadequate to deal with what might come.

Some things we worry about one can fix. You can learn new skills. You can take precautions. If you are worried about a car accident you can check the tires and make sure you put on seat belts. There is something you can do.

But an awful lot of things we worry about we can’t do anything to fix. We are all going to die. We all get sick. Bad things happen to good people. The world isn’t fair, and on and on. There is little we can do to prepare for them and at some point they will overwhelm us and we will die. None of us get out of this alive.

You have two choices, you can “Keep Calm and Carry On” as the poster from Britain of the Second World War proposes, or you can over-focus on your worry and keep in your mind.  That’s toxic worry. You fill your head with thoughts about things you can’t do anything about.

Now, as I’m a Consulting Hypnotist this is all very good for business as I make my living helping people get over their worries. But toxic worry is a very bad thing.

Dr. Herbert Benson the author of the popular book The Relaxation Response calls worry of this sort the “hidden plague.” Stress related illness are epidemic in our society. The illness that have a stress related component are also increasing. Our mental health is fragile, antidepressants outsell aspirin, and everywhere we see signs of people cracking under the strain. We are worrying ourselves into sickness with an over-focus on things we cannot control. 

That is a mistake. If you fill your mind with fear and worry, it takes you over. The human nervous system can process only one impulse at a time. Only one. Let me prove that to you.

Cross one leg over the other. Rotate your foot in a clockwise direction. Now, with your finger in the air sketch out the integer zero. Great. Keep your foot moving clockwise and now with your finger sketch out the number six. Is your foot still moving clockwise? No? 

You foot changed its clockwise direction because your hand started moving in a counterclockwise direction. As you were focused on the hand, the foot automatically shifted too. The human nervous system can entertain only one impulse at a time. 

That’s true of the part of your nervous system called your brain too. It can process one idea at a time. If you experience worry and do nothing about it, that impulse--worry--takes up the channel and it is all your mind can focus on.

You can do it intermittently, and most of us do. We’re worried, then we think about something else, then we worry again, then we do something else, then we worry. All the gaps. All the spaces in our minds that might have been use for creative thinking, imagination, problem solving are taken up by the mental constipation we inflict upon ourselves.

The way out is to do what the Israelites did. In a vision (of some sort; I am NOT saying what sort of vision) Moses realizes that there is food in the desert if you know how to look for it, and he then shows the Israelites how to gather and prepare it.

The key thing to get is that you couldn't store manna. You gathered and ate it the same day or it went bad. Later editors adjusted the story to allow for a sabbath day but most scholars think that was added later. 

You can’t save up the manna for a rainy day, or any other kind of day. You are given food now and you just have to trust that there will be more tomorrow. You can’t hoard it because you are worried about tomorrow. You have to live as if tomorrow will be okay.

Self-Talk is Powerful

There is a story recounted in Marilyn Chandler McEntyre’s great little book, What’s in a Phrase. During a spiritual exercise she was challenged to “write her spiritual autobiography in six words.” what she came up with was “Eat the Manna. More will come.”

This phrase came to her in a vision when she remembered her mother who lived close to poverty. Things were tight, but her mother also realized that quality of life mattered and you can’t deprive yourself of everything. So she was willing to spend on things that mattered to her heart. 

She was confident she’d find a way to afford it somehow. “Eat the Manna. More will come.” You can’t hoard everything because you are worried. Sometimes you have to trust that you will be adequate to meet future challenges, even if you’re not exactly sure how.

You’ve heard me say before that as a Consulting Hypnotist I believe that what we tell ourselves in the privacy of our minds has a tremendous power to affect what happens to us. Not total power, but a lot of power.

The legend of the manna is the answer. The ancient Israelites simply decided that they would live as if there would always be enough to sustain them. That is the meaning of the story of the manna. 

They didn’t know where it came from. They couldn’t store it up for a future time. They could only eat it now and be satisfied, trusting that their would be more later. They could have worried, but the scripture says they choose not to. 

The human ability to choose to do one thing rather than another is a great power. If your mind is filled with worry you can choose to change the channel by deciding the worry is pointless and thinking instead about other things. “Eat the manna. More will come.” If you are going to tell yourself a story, that’s a good one. 

Winston Churchill is said to have quipped “I’ve had lots of worries in my day, mostly about things that never happened. Therefore, obviously, worrying helps.”  That’s funny because it is so obviously wrong. Worrying about things doesn’t change things, it just changes our brains and not in a good way. But there is something more, and I close with that reflection.

If we allow ourselves to live worried lives, we hurt other people. Because if you do not release the things you worry about, you will transmit them. Children take seriously what their parents and other adult authority figures do. If they see you fretting, they will decide that is appropriate behavior and will do the same thing. 

Employees need to have confidence in the enterprise they work for to give their best work. If they see their managers and executives stressed and unsettled, their own productivity will plummet. 

Spouses need to be confident in each other, and if they observe one partner anxious and bedeviled, they find they cannot relax into the relationship either. 

If you cannot release your worry, you transmit it. You owe it to the people you love to do what the Israelites did--eat the manna trusting that somehow more will come. By that I mean being willing to believe that you will be adequate to the challenges of the future. 

Or at least it’s way more likely that you will be if you keep your mind clear of a worried noise.

And that’s my sermon.

Sermon-Having a Purpose

Having a Purpose
A Sermon to Countryside Church UU
Community Ministry Sunday, February 2, 2014
The Rev. Dr. C. Scot Giles

I believe that everyone has a purpose: something we are on Earth do. It might be a big thing like running a business or having a career. It might be a more modest thing such as being a great partner or parent. But everyone is valuable and if we all do what we should, I believe we’d have a happy and just society. If we can find a way to do what we are here for, we’re happy and fulfilled.

My sermon today is about how to take control of what is in your mind so you can live the way you want, instead of the way someone else wants. It’s not easy. There are powerful forces that are trying to shape you and that’s why the world is as messed up as it is.
 

My Mentor

I want to start by talking about a man who influenced me. Some of you might recognize him, W. Clement Stone (1902-2002). Stone was the President of Combined Insurance Company (now Aeon Corporation), one of the richest men in the world and a Chicago philanthropist.


Stone made his vast fortune rising from “rags to riches” by putting into practice the principles of a self-help writer named Napoleon Hill. Some of you may know Hill’s work, because his most popular book, Think and Grow Rich has sold over 70 million copies and is still in print today. In fact, Clement Stone would say not long before his death in 2002, "One of the most important days in my life was the day I began to read Think and Grow Rich in 1937.”

Stone loved the ideas of Napoleon Hill because Hill taught a way to control the mind. Hill believed that most people are unhappy because they defeat themselves by uncritically accepting ideas and principles learned from others. The result is that we live our lives holding up the purpose of other people, instead of our own purpose. Usually, that doesn’t work out well.

Hill’s books are about taking control of our thinking so that doesn’t happen, and W. Clement Stone credited all his personal success to that process.

I met Clement Stone only briefly and in passing and I doubt he even remembered my name. But he invited me to the founding meeting of the Napoleon Hill Foundation. One of my prize possessions is a leather bound copy of Hill’s major work, The Laws of Success, which was a personal gift from Clement Stone at the organizational meeting of that Foundation. I employ the principles of Napoleon Hill in much of my personal and professional life. While his books are classist, dated and sexist, I still recommend them because they contain insightful ideas and realistic advice.

It’s fashionable for Unitarian Universalist clergy to make fun of Napoleon Hill’s ideas. He argued for a “Horatio Alger” philosophy saying that if you just keep a Positive Mental Attitude, put the Golden Rule into sincere practice, and do more than you are expected to do, you will prosper.

It’s not hard to see what’s wrong with that. There are complicated social and psychological dynamics regarding labor and oppression. There is a lot more to economic justice and equality that all the positive thinking in the world can correct. Hard work is not always rewarded, the deck is stacked against some of us, and socio-economic class distinctions keep a lot of people down. Some people can’t get ahead because of no fault of their own.

But that is not to say that there isn’t something to the conviction that people tend to do better if they are sincere and honest, try hard, don’t stop at the first problem they encounter, and avoid the behavioral pitfalls of addiction, lethargy and peer-group entrapment into gangs, cliques or social class. And that is a lot of what Napoleon Hill had to say and I believe there is value in that, regardless of class, race or socio-economic standing.
 

Outwitting the Devil

The year after he published his blockbuster book Think and Grow Rich in 1937, Hill wrote another book titled Outwitting the Devil. He wrote it to explain why some people seemed unable to break free from self-defeating behaviors and ideas, even when there was plenty of evidence that what they believed and thought did not serve them well. They knew what they needed to do, but they couldn’t bring themselves to do it.

In Romans 7:19, Saint Paul bewails his own tendency to do this, writing “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.”

Hill asked “why”?

The resulting book was so controversial in its social and political criticism that the publisher refused it. After Hill’s death the manuscript was inherited by his daughter, Annie Lou, who also refused to publish it despite the best-seller status of all the other books written by her father. When she died, she willed the manuscript to the Napoleon Hill Foundation which published it just three years ago along with an explanatory commentary.

Outwitting the Devil is an amazing book. Like The Screwtape Letters written by C. S. Lewis, the book is a demonic dialogue. The dialogue takes place between the Devil (addressed as Your Majesty) and Mr. Earthbound (who apparently was Hill himself).

In this book Hill argues that the most fundamental divide between people is that some people struggle to take control over their minds, while others are content to comfortably allow external forces to shape them. He called this “drifting.”

Even if you put into practice every other thing Hill wanted to teach you about the habits of highly successful people, if you are letting external forces program your mind, you will fail. The linchpin is a willingness to take responsibility for what gets put inside your head.
 

The Structure of the Mind

You have a conscious mind. It’s the part of you that thinks.

You have an subconscious mind. It’s the part of you that acts.

Most of what you do is controlled by your subconscious mind because it’s not possible to think your way through your life. We all use our habits of thought, feeling and behavior to automate what we do.

I do not make a decision every morning about which side of my face I will start shaving on today. Once upon a time I did, but I’ve done that behavior so often that I no longer think about it. I just do it. It’s subconscious. Most of what we do, think or feel is the result of things we have programmed into our subconscious minds.

Your subconscious mind is the greatest goal achieving instrument ever evolved. Once your subconscious mind has accepted something as true, it will do everything in its power to insure you behave like it. It doesn’t think. Only the conscious mind thinks. It simply uncritically acts on what it has accepted as fact.

For example, a person who is overweight due to emotional eating has somewhere in his or her subconscious mind a principle that “When I am upset, should eat something.” Because this idea has gotten into the subconscious mind, the subconscious mind will act on it. An upset person reaches for a donut without even thinking about (or sometimes without even remembering) what it is doing and eats unmindfully.

In fact, I saw this wonderful poster the other day of a young woman in a leotard folding on a yoga mat in a perfect lotus posture. She was deep in meditation. the caption said, “Today I will be mindful of the Present Moment. Unless the Present Moment is unpleasant, in which case I will eat a cookie.” Well some people with weight issues think like that. They’ve programmed their subconscious mind that eating a cookie is the way to get through difficult times.

It makes no difference to your subconscious mind what you consciously say you desire or want. It is much more powerful than your conscious mind. It will act on what it has accepted as true, regardless of what you say you want but have not really accepted.

Therefore, it’s very important that we be careful about what we accept as true.
 

Who Programs Us?

According to Hill, that’s the problem. Just about everyone wants to program your subconscious mind for their own purpose: the Governments, the Churches, the Political Parties, the Media, your Family, your Friends, your Spouse, your Minister (please don’t quote me).

Just about everyone has a vested interest in manipulating you. They want to surround you in a blanket of explanations and unquestioned ideas to lure you into a comfort zone that will make you easy to manage and manipulate.

Hill’s scathing critique of big business, the schools, established religion and politics is what kept the book from publication in the years since 1938. It criticized all the political parties, all the churches, all the schools, all the politicians calling them merchants of self-serving mind-control, and the work of his metaphorical Devil.

Most of us wind up programmed by the media, political parties, establishments and elites that have a vested interest in having us shut up, do what we are told. So we find our heads filled with mush. We live according to their purposes, instead of our own.
 

What To Do?

Hill’s solution? Trust nothing. Question everything. Believe nothing anyone tells you, including me.

Evaluate every assumption you have and if you decide the assumption is wrong, update your thinking. As the Napoleon Hill’s Devil says, “accurate thought is the death of me.” The problem is that correcting our thinking is really hard to do.
 

The Critical Factor

You all know that I’m a Consulting Hypnotist. I make my living and base my community ministry on putting people into a trance and telling them what they need to do in order to change something that isn’t going well.

When I do this I’m not controlling them even if it looks like it. They will accept no suggestion from me that they find fundamentally wrong. What I’m doing is conducting a specialized discussion with my client’s subconscious mind to give it new information, or make it question information it already believes correct.

Because the subconscious mind simply acts on what it believes is true, it is protected by a guardian. Hypnotists (following a name I believe was created by Gerry Kein) call the guardian, “The Critical Factor” or “The Critical Faculty.” This is what messes us up and makes it really hard to break out of the comfort zones we have drifted into.

The Critical Factor is a primitive part of your mind that arose from the survival instinct. The Critical Faculty wants the future to resemble the past, because it knows you have survived the past. If the future resembles the past, the odds are you will survive that too. Therefore, the Critical Factor resists all change, even desirable change.

How the Critical Factor resists change is by comparing any new information presented to your awareness with the old information your subconscious process has accepted.

If there is a match, it allows the new information in, as reinforcement and compounding. If there is not a match, it rejects the new information by causing you to ignore it, deny it, or minimize its importance.

Let’s say you spent your childhood being programmed by your parents to think that you were stupid and worthless. As an adult your Critical Faculty discounts any information that contradicts the belief in your stupidity or worthlessness. It attends only to information that reinforces the childhood belief.

...Placed on the Dean’s List did you? Well, that was just dumb luck.

...Got a promotion? Heck, you’re really got them fooled, I wonder how long it will be before the figure out you're really a fraud?

...Your lover told you that you are beautiful or handsome? That’s just because you're putting out, and that will vanish as soon as you get older. Just wait.

It works in the other direction too. If you grew up being told you were precious and could do no wrong, you’ve got a storehouse of belief inside of you that is sure to cause trouble.

...Your lover asks you to be more considerate? Heck, time for a new lover because there’s nothing wrong with me.

...What do you mean I can’t cheat on a test to get an easy grade? Everything I do is supposed to be right.

...Work hard? Pay my dues? Start at any entry level job and learn the company from the bottom up? Why should I do that? I’m moving back in with mom and dad because I’m supposed to be indulged, not held accountable.

There is not a single experience or proposition that your Critical Factor cannot find a way to discount, in service to what you already believe.

Achieving what we call “Critical Factor Bypass” is what you pay a hypnotist to do. We smuggle information past the Critical Factor so that old limiting beliefs and bad thinking are subverted and positive beliefs are encouraged.
 

Critical Factor Bypass

I really do believe that most people are good. They are trying their best to do the best they can with the cards in the hand that life has dealt them. You meet the occasional Card Sharp or Cheater, but most people try to play by the rules in the Great Game of Life.

Some people play the hand better than others. Some are lucky to have better cards in their hand than others. But everyone is basically trying to do the best they can with what they’ve got.

In all cases, success or failure, happiness or misery, will be in large measure determined what what beliefs and principles we have in our subconscious minds, because that determines how we play those cards. Those beliefs and principles can limit us or, make us stronger.

So where do those beliefs and principles come from?

Initially, what gets into the subconscious mind are the lessons of childhood. What parents say, what teachers say, what Presidents say and, (God help us all) what ministers say.

In an effort to control this process, our species has developed education. The purpose of education is to expose us to Great Ideas, Best Practices and the Lessons of History. It’s also the purpose behind great preaching, lifelong religious education and what enlightened parenting can accomplish.

Unfortunately, as Napoleon Hill pointed out in Outwitting the Devil, our system of moral and philosophical education is profoundly busted and we are trapped within it. Even when you realize that, it can be hard pressed to fix your thinking.

“For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.”

Little has changed in the two thousand years since those words were written.
 

Change

There are three ways to get corrective information past the Critical Factor and into the deeper mind where it will do us some good.

First, hypnotism works. That’s the whole reason the craft exists. But enough about that.

Second, any idea accompanied by strong emotion has a good chance of getting past the Critical Factor. That’s why a person can develop a fear of flying after one scary airplane ride. It’s why a lifetime of positive experiences with the opposite sex can be outweighed by one abusive experience. It’s why Fox News uses every rhetorical trick in the book to make it’s news broadcasts emotionally charged, and what motivates political speech by both parties.

Finally, the Critical Factor can be overcome by repetition. This is the least effective technique but it does work and it’s the one we all can use. If we struggle with something over and over again, eventually it gets into our thick skulls.

This is why we should attend church regularly. It’s why we should go to class when we’re in school. It’s why lifelong religious education is important. It’s why a regular spiritual or psychological practice is helpful.

The more we expose ourselves to ideas that make us pause and reconsider, the less likely we are to drift in accordance with the purpose of others.

You may not always like it, but the sermon you found a little bit upsetting. The class that left you unsettled, the book you profoundly disagreed with, the argument you lost; these are the things which shake up your preconceived opinions. These are the things that allow us to fight back again the many institutions that would prefer we drift and serve their purpose rather than our own.

You probably get more out of the ideas and experiences that make you uncomfortable than those that glide past your Critical Factor because you already agree with them.
 

Religious Liberalism

I realize I’m talking to people who are no strangers to the positive use of skepticism. Ninety percent of the people who fill Unitarian Universalist congregations started out in some other denomination or no denomination. We’re here because we found that being in a place where ideas are questioned and beliefs are challenged is good for us.

We attend church regularly because by repetition we get better ideas into our heads and that provides a tonic to the dreck others would pour into our minds. This allows us to liberate the greatest goal achieving instrument ever evolved, our own subconscious. And that allows us to live our lives in accordance with our own purpose instead of the purpose of others.

And that’s my sermon.