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.

HeartMath

I am now introducing some technological advances into my consulting hypnotism practice. Private clients already know about my adoption of the HeartMath emWave Pro equipment, introduced into my hypnotic work over the past month. This blog article is to explain how it will help you achieve your healing and goals when working with me, and how this technology will be more deeply integrated into my practice in the months ahead.

I've been following the Institute of HeartMath technology for many years and I am a member of the Institute. The technology has advanced to the point where it can be merged into my hypnotic work, and I introduced the technology immediately. It replaces the older Thoughtstream equipment that was used to get a rough idea of the level of trance you had achieved. While the Thoughtstream worked by measuring the ability of your skin to conduct direct voltage (one of the core measurements of a polygraph), the HeartMath equipment measures the microelectronic activity of your heart which changes from moment to moment. This is called Heart Rate Variation and is a vastly more sophisticated and complex measurement.

The Institute of HeartMath has been doing research for decades on what is called "heart intelligence." This is a somewhat controversial concept, but one that appears well-supported in recent research. The scientific advisory board of the Institute of HeartMath is impressive as is the publication and research list. The conclusion is that your heart is almost a "second brain," and one that controls much of your body, including how your body integrates its different systems. When well integrated (a state the HeartMath Institute calls "coherence") your overall mental and physical health will improve. For those clients struggling with a physical illness or even a stubborn emotional issue, this can make all the difference in the world.

Your heart is a biologically privileged organ. For example, during a heart transplant the surgeons sever the neurological connections between the donor's body and the heart. When implanted into its new host, the heart resumes beating and repairs the severed neurological connections by itself. You can read about it in The Annals of Thoracic Surgery and other places. This is unheard of with any other body organ.

There are more neurons in your heart than in the lower centers in your brain, and the heart communicates with the brain using neurological impulses, pressure variations and electromagnetic pulses. The heart generates a measurable electromagnetic field that is thousands of times more powerful than the electromagnetic field generated by your brain, and the heart has been shown to be sending more information to the brain than the brain sends to the heart.

Measuring your heart rate variation gives us a proxy for your general level of health and stress. Helping you shift your emotional habits toward those things that smooth your heart rate not only puts you in touch with your own natural healing power, it helps clarify your thinking so you make better decisions. In my research the benefits seem almost magical.

The new HeartMath equipment allows me to see in real time on my computer monitor a graphical display of exactly how you are responding to every aspect of your hypnotic experience. I not only see how deeply you have been hypnotized, but how much time you spend at every level of trance. I am able to see your accumulated score which tells me how well your body is being retrained to handle physical and emotional stress, and I see a second-by-second tracing of how you have responded to every hypnotic suggestion I have made. This allows me to quickly determine what techniques work best for you, where your subconscious mind resists change and how best to overcome that resistance. At the end a graphical report is produced that I can send to you along with my written interpretation. This is a huge advance which I am calling Scientific Heart-Centered Hypnotism. 

At the present time this technology is available only to clients who are seeing me for private sessions at my office. However, within six months I will bring it online for clients who work at a distance over Skype. I will send you a device you can use at home and which uploads the data to my computer for analysis. This service is available to selected long-distance clients now, in return for an agreement to allow your de-identified data to be used in my research.

The scientists at HeartMath have developed a ten-point "HeartMath Solution" that helps with almost all physical and emotional issues. You can read about it in the introductory textbook, The HeartMath Solution as well as other publications. These techniques are very similar to the techniques developed by my original mentor, Bernie Siegel M.D. that have been popularized in his many books.

There are some terminology changes between Dr. Siegel's recommendations and those of the Institute. For example, Dr. Siegel talks about "setting boundaries" with other people, while the scientists at HeartMath talk about "overcaring." However, the core ideas are almost identical. What the Institute at HeartMath adds is a large amount of research data and a scientific formalization of the techniques, complete with objective measurement of progress using electronic equipment.

The practices and habits of "The HeartMath Solution" are being added to my hypnotic work now. Participants in my free group clinics will receive a lower level benefit from them starting with the April 2015 free clinics. While I can't utilize the scientific measurement of heart rate variation during group hypnosis sessions, I can incorporate some of the ideas into that work and I will. Obviously, the best results will always be obtained during my highly-focused individual sessions, and that is what I recommend for serious problems. But I anticipate a helpful result for everyone.

This is an exciting time when science and spirituality are starting to come together and discover that they are completely compatible. Every spiritual or mental state is reflected in the body and every body state is reflected in the mind and spirit. By changing one you can influence the other. I look forward to tremendous progress as these developments go forward.

The Church Is On Fire!

In 1978 I was ordained at the First Universalist Church of Southold, Long Island, New York, and installed as their parish minister. I learned today the the church burned to the ground last night. It is a total loss. An electrical fire is believed to be the cause. Fortunately, no one was harmed. I've been pondering my feelings all day.

I received the "call" to serve this congregation right out of theological school. In those days before you could get approval to do a community ministry, you had to serve a parish church for at least three years. Community ministry was my thing, but the rules were the rules and so off to a parish I went.

In the decades that have followed the Southold area has become gentrified. But back in 1978 there was no mail delivery (all mail was kept at the Post Office and you went to pick it up). There was no internet. In fact there was no television (the wealthier people had large, rotating aerials that allowed them to get TV signals from Connecticut over the Long Island Sound). The nearest bookstore was 78 miles away. Amazon.com didn't exist. It was my first, and last, dose of rural living, and I learned that I am an urban creature.

Still, I stayed for three years. The congregation did well. We grew, renovated and restored the property and I was very proud of that. But I was eager to leave and eventually did. I acquired two cats while there, one of whom was a magnificent calico I named Olympia Brown. She was a fierce wharf cat that I rescued (Southold was a big scallop fishery) and she was one of the most remarkable and fun cats I have ever shared my life with.

The ministry had challenges. In those days the denomination was trying to "save" struggling churches. A congregation could get financial help from the denomination if they met membership and contribution goals. That was dumb. The denomination really should have known better.

All that happened was a bunch of rural churches "cooked the books" in order to get the free money. When the ministers of my generation arrived we discovered that the "membership growth" of the previous year resulted from people putting their relatives onto the membership roll even though they had never set foot in the church. The contribution improvements reported to the denomination turned out to be "aspirational" goals the congregation members felt they might eventually meet if they had a good minister. It was an interesting time, and I was not the only one of my classmates who struggled.

For all that, I had a good time in Southold, and over the decades I have found myself returning to that pulpit in my dreams and fondly remembering seashore life. I heard the congregation had a hard time, shrinking in size and supporting only part-time ministry. I'd hoped that as the gentrification of Long Island continued they would have a renaissance and that old building might thrive again. But that hope went up in flames last night. 

Still, sometimes the best thing that can happen to a congregation is that an old building burns down. There will be an insurance settlement and the property is probably worth more now that the church building isn't on it. They can refinance, rebuild, move elsewhere, merge with another congregation or go to a "church without walls" model. There could be a great future there. I hope so.

So I say a prayer for The First Universalist Church of Southold and its current minister, leadership and congregation. I say this prayer in memory of good times past and in the hope of better times in the future. I am so sorry about the loss, but still hopeful that better times will be ahead. 

Do You Need To Overcome Clutter?

The Victor of the Kitchen Sink: A Sermon on Decluttering,
Countryside Church, Unitarian Universalist , Labor Day Sunday 2011
Geneva Unitarian Universalist Society, April 15, 2012
© Rev. C. Scot Giles, D.Min., LLC - All Rights Reserved

Four months ago I selected a topic for my clinics called “Living Free from Clutter.”

In the 1970s, the physician who was my mentor, Dr. Bernie Siegel at Yale, studied the people who beat the odds with life-changing medical problems. He discovered that they had certain personal characteristics in common, and that these characteristics could be taught.

He created a program based upon teaching those “survival skills,” and research continues to show that people who learn them do better medically.

 Living an uncluttered life is in fact a characteristic of the long-term surviving people with a range of illnesses. I figured it was time I put together a program of self-hypnotism to assist people in learning how to do that.

Did I get a surprise.

Almost immediately the clinics were filled. I even received requests to let extra people in. I agreed, and was startled to realize that the “extra people” who wanted to come in were actually the staff of the hospitals and wellness centers where my clinics are based.

That’s when I realized that most of us live lives that have far too much clutter in them.

If You Came Into My Home....

If you were to visit me in my home, or in my office, you would not see clutter. In fact, the rule is that there can be absolutely nothing on any horizontal surface that is not there for some important reason. Everything has its place, and unless it is being used, everything is in its place.

I was not always this way. In fact as a kid I was routinely criticized by teachers and relatives for being messy and disorganized. However, as I got older I realized that I wanted to be effective. As I had only so much energy to go around, I found that I was more effective if I was organized.

I had some help. At an early age I went to work in restaurants, joining the culinary union and rising in its ranks from Apprentice to Journeyman Chef. I left professional cooking to enter the ministry, but had I wanted to stay in food service, an Executive Chef’s ticket was well within reach.

Being a chef isn’t an easy life. The hours are long, and you work them in volcanic heat usually at a fast pace. On my first day as an apprentice, the chef who was my trainer, a madman named Saviastano, showed me the most important place in any professional kitchen.

Any idea what that is?

It’s called the “misen en place”, French for “putting everything in place.” When a professional kitchen is in operation the first thing done is to put everything that will be needed during the shift into a particular place so it can be located quickly.

“I should be able to cook in this kitchen with my eyes closed,” roared Savistano. And God help you if you used something and didn’t put it back where it belonged. Savistano would very likely call you over, dump it down your chef’s jacket and make you wear the stained jacket for the rest of the shift.

Like I said, he was a madman; but a madman who could makes sauces that were so etherial people would fly to New York to taste them. That’s why he could get away with being a madman.

Oh but I learned. In a professional kitchen every motion has to count, because every second does. I learned the value of organization and the peril of clutter. I put that lesson into use in other areas of my life and quickly saw it’s value.

ECaP

When I studied with Dr. Siegel and his Exceptional Cancer Patients Organization I was both pleased and surprised to learn that living free from clutter was one of the survival skills we found in our research.

“Every time someone walks by a pile of clutter that they were meaning to do something about,” Dr. Siegel said, “that pile reaches out and takes a little bit of their energy away from them. That’s deadly, because these people need all their energy in their own lives to heal.”

Think about that. Do you live in a world where there are stacks and piles of stuff you are meaning to get to?

Consult your feelings every time you walk by such a stack or pile and see what your feelings tell you. Very likely you will feel a resigned, downward emotion and experience a thought like “I got’ta do that stuff....someday....” and when you walk on you will notice that you are a little bit weaker than you were.

Try it. You’ll be amazed at what those stacks and piles are doing to you.

I’ve even encountered cases where getting rid of the stacks and piles of clutter was sufficient to help some people resolve actual clinical depression. The energy they recovered when the clutter was no longer draining was enough to reverse their mental state.

Physical clutter is only one kind of clutter. Some of us clutter up our bodies with excess pounds. Some of us clutter up our spiritual lives with too many practices instead of mastering just a few. Some of us clutter up our minds by not thinking ideas through to reasonable conclusions, and end up holding positions that are inconsistent and contradictory.

Clutter is a problem. I’ve found that by tackling physical clutter first helps bring the other in line.

I do need to say that my sermon today is about normal clutter. I’m not addressing people who have a clutter problem brought on by depression, obsessional disorders of attention deficit. Those are medical problems that have a medical solution. Today I’m just talking about having too much stuff.

The Flylady

When Lindsay and I got married almost 24 years ago, one of the issues I had to face was that I was marrying a handicapped person. Lindsay has had severe osteoarthritis since childhood and during the time of our relationship she has had three of the five major orthopedic operations that allow her to walk today.

And Lindsay also cannot cook...

...She’s really, really bad. The Geneva UU Society where she has been the Parish Minister for the past 34 years actually has a written policy that she is not permitted to cook for church events. I’ll tell you the story someday...

What this meant is that I was marrying a partner who could not do any housework. As we could not afford a maid, If we wanted to be homeowners, all of the shopping, cooking and cleaning was going to have to be done by me.

Unlike some men whose idea of housework approximates to living in a cave, I’ve always kept my home in reasonable shape. I know that if you don’t stay on top of things they inevitably fill with clutter, and the the chores become far more difficult.

As I practice from a home office, every one of my clients was going to get to see how good, or bad, a job I was doing. I couldn’t afford to do a bad job.

Thankfully, I discovered the Flylady.

The real name of the Flylady is Marla Cilly. Her website is flylady.com and her best known book is Sink Reflections. If you like this sermon I suggest you check out her work. I swear by it, and honestly don’t know how I’d keep up my home without her ideas.

If you are not sure if you would benefit by her ideas, ask yourself how you would feel if I came over to your house today directly after church. Would you be okay with how things looked and smelled, or do you have what the Flylady calls CHAOS; an acronym for Can’t Have Anyone Over Syndrome. If so, get her book and check out her website.

Marla Cilly lives with severe clinical depression. In her book she describes how that illness caused her entire life to get out of control. As part of her recovery she created techniques to get her from one day to the next.

She started out with two daily chores. First, she would get out of bed and get dressed. Second, she would clean her kitchen sink. That’s it. That’s all she had the energy to do.

Over time that clean kitchen sink became a symbol of sanity for her. It was a beachhead of order in a home of chaos. Gradually she expanded that into a complete system to maintaining a home that took minimal time and effort. She became the Victor over her Kitchen Sink and you can be too.

Her system, everywhere called The Flylady System, is based on staying on top of things, cleaning as you go and tossing things you don’t need, so the clutter doesn’t even get started. That way things never get too far out of control.

She recommends that you create certain household rituals for yourself. Interestingly, the most recent motivational research confirms this. It’s as if all of us have a limited pool of energy that we can use to think our way through things. Every decision you have to make deceases that pool. Therefore, you just set up rituals that you do without thinking.

The Flylady wants you to have a Morning List and an Evening List of things that you do as routinely as brushing your teeth, along with an Outside List of things you do whenever you are outside of your home.

Here are some examples of such rituals:

-When you get out of bed in the morning, immediately make the bed.

-Once the bed is made, shower and dress yourself all the way to your shoes.

-When you fill the car with gas, use the time you are waiting for the tank to fill by cleaning all the trash out of your car and putting it in the trash can next to the gas pump.

-When you finish up your day, put the dishes in the dishwasher and clean your kitchen sink so it greats you in the morning in all its shinny glory.

-Just before you get into bed, lay out your clothing for tomorrow so you don’t have to think about it when you get up.

These are all simple things, and not all of them apply to everyone. But the basics of her system are:

Have a Morning, Evening and Outside list of rituals that you just do without having to think about them.

You divide your house up into five zones for the 4.3 weeks in each month. Each week you clean one zone. Every day, you set a timer, and do exactly 15 minutes of cleaning in the zone for that week. No more. No less. Just 15 minutes is all it takes and everyone can find 15 minutes. Apart from that, just try to clean as you go so nothing piles up.

Once a week you do a one-hour House Blessing, where you vacuum and mop the high traffic areas.

Have a three ring binder or a computer file where you list all the important reference information such as the phone number of your plumber, your kids’s soccer schedule, your mother’s birthday, etc. So there is only one place you have to look for find an important bit of information.

(This is the hardest one) If you are not really using something, get rid of it. Throw it away or give it away. Minimize the clutter in your home by getting rid of everything you don’t really need.

The hardest of her rules is the one about tossing the stuff you don’t need. A lot of people make the mistake of thinking they can organize clutter. But taking a big pile of clutter and using a system of bins and folders to break it into small piles of clutter doesn’t actually do anything. You have to let the stuff go. Throw it away of give it away or there will be no real progress possible.

As it says in the Bible, “there is a time for everything under the sun,” including “a time to keep and a time to throw away (Ecc. 3:6)

Now I’m not saying you can’t have collections of something or mementos. I’m talking about clutter, and the difference is obvious. Collections and mementos are neat and orderly. Otherwise they are not collections. They are a heap or a pile, and that’s clutter.

Well, that’s what the Flylady has to teach. Follow it religiously and you will never have CHAOS. Your home will always be orderly enough to have someone over. Millions of people have found this works, including me.

Of course I do other things. At my office I’ve followed a formal system for workflow management for decades called Getting Things Done, created by productivity guru David Allen.

David Allen argues that you need to get your tasks and responsibilities out of your head and into a simple external system that you can trust. Provided, he says, that any system you have is so simple that you can keep it up even on a rainy Monday morning when you have a bad flu. If you’re interested, look him up.

Clutter is a Symptom

Most of us have too much stuff. Comedian George Carlin had a wonderful 1986 routine about “Stuff.” Commenting that the “meaning of life is trying to find a place for your stuff,” and “your house is just a pile of your stuff with a cover on it.” Hey. Carlin knew his stuff.

As one looks at all the stuff most of us have laying around there is a question that comes to my mind. Why do we collect all this stuff in the first place?

So I began to ask people, mostly clients, but sometimes friends, why they were keeping all the stuff around them that they had? I looked for people who obviously had a lot of clutter in their lives (which wasn’t very hard) and asked what was in those piles and stacks that was so important they didn’t just throw it away? I got three basic answers.

Some people responded that they were “buried in treasures.” That is, they knew all the stuff they had around them has some value. They really didn’t want it themselves, but they knew that some idiot on eBay might pay a pretty penny for it if they ever got around to selling it on eBay, They were clinging to their stuff for fear of getting rid of something valuable.

Others responded that the stuff they had around had a sentimental value. They had their dead grandfather’s Chest of Drawers, and their departed Aunt’s tea service, High School yearbooks and the granddaughter’s kindergarten pictures. They were living surrounded by a sort of “deconstructed” shrine to other people. They were clinging to stuff because they thought that throwing it away would show disrespect about people they loved.

Finally, a third group, by far the largest of the three, responded that they held onto things because “they might need them some day.” They tended to be the hoarders who would throw nothing away that didn’t actively smell. They lived surrounded by books they would never read again, empty jars that might be useful to holding things if they ever got organized, old rugs, newspapers and magazines, and a long list of other things that might “someday” be needed. They held onto stuff because it had a hallucinogenic quality. It appeared to be an asset when actually it was mostly a liability. Some of their homes were so cluttered you could hardly move from room to room.

That’s when I figured something out. even after you have gotten a grip on your stuff by organizing the “misen en place,” using the Flylady System or reliably getting you paperwork under control, there is still another sort of stuff that you have to deal with. That’s the stuff in your head. If you don’t deal with the stuff in your head, you will live a life that is cluttered with stuff.

The Stuff in Your Head

Fundamentally, I have come to believe that there is only one reason why people live with clutter. They may have clutter in different degrees, but there is one reason.

I’ve come to believe that this reason is essentially a spiritual reason. People have clutter to the degree they do not feel safe. It’s a lack of religious confidence.

The word “religion” comes from the Latin word meaning “to connect.” Religion is that thing which connects us to a Higher Power and to the world that is the offspring of that power. When we really feel our religion we feel connected and supported. We have a place in the process. We’re part of the whole.

People who feel secure and safe about their place in the world are willing to let go of things that are really in their way, even if they might be valuable.

They know what they have what it takes to get their needs and responsibilities met, and the thought of “cashing in” on every little thing is outweighed by the thought of their own convenience and effectiveness.

While they may miss the people who have left this world, they understand that an appropriate way to keep a memorial going is at a cemetery, in a memory book or at an annual day of remembrance. Not by stacking stuff in the living room or elsewhere around the house.

People who feel safe about their place in the world have confidence in their own abilities to cope. Therefore, they don’t cling to old books, magazine, articles or objects that “might someday be useful.” They know that in most cases these things will not be useful, even if one could find them amidst the clutter.

They are confident that if they really needed to they could figure out a way to get the same information without turning their home into an obstacle course.

Fundamentally, people who have conquered clutter have also conquered their religious insecurity about being in the world. They don’t need stuff, and they don’t need their home to be a cover for their stuff. They know they are supported by a power greater than themselves and therefore don’t need to hold themselves up with piles of stuff.

Clutter is, I’ve concluded, a spiritual issue and it has a spiritual solution.

So how do we find that solution?

To answer this question I turn to the work of William James, the 19th century philosopher who many believe was the founder of modern psychology.

“Feelings follow behavior!” exclaimed James. If you want to feel a certain way, first you must behave in that way. Then, over time, your feelings will fall into line, and you will come to feel as if your behavior was completely appropriate.

If you want to feel more self-confident, act in the same way that the self-confident people in your world act.

At first it will feel strange, for you know you are playing a role, but over time your feelings will change to match your behavior. If you wait until you feel a certain way before you act that way, you never get there.

Feelings follow behavior. If you want to feel a certain way you must first act as if you already did feel that way.

People in this congregation who have had the chops to work a Twelve Step Program know what I mean. I admire such people, because Twelve Step Programs are among the most spiritually rigorous disciplines in our word today.

In such programs the principle I am talking about is called “Fake It Till You Feel It,” or “Fake It Until Your Make It.” They are all based on the same insight from William James. If you want to be different, act as if you already are. Then, things will change for you.”

This is true for the Great Spiritual War Against Clutter too. If you want to live free from the feelings that drive you to live a cluttered life, the best way to get there is to actually take the risk and declutter your home or environment.

Throw Stuff Away. Reduce your possessions to the minimum you need. This will feel weird at first, but Fake It Until You Make It. After a short while you will discover that you are happier in your uncluttered environment and that you would never go back to the way things were.

If you want the spiritual confidence that will let you lead an uncluttered life, start by tossing away the clutter. Soon you will feel like you too are the Victor of the Kitchen Sink and clutter is something that you will automatically remove from your world.

As the Bible says, “there is a time to throw things away.”

And I agree.  And that’s my sermon.

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.

Concerns from my Unitarian Universalist Colleagues

This post will be irrelevant to most of the usual readers of my blog. However, in my role as President of the Unitarian Universalist Society for Community Ministries I need to address concerns that some of my parish colleagues have made on Facebook.

Unfortunately, Facebook does not readily allow me to make a detailed response to a message. Therefore, I am making it here and will link to Facebook. Feel free to read this if you find it of interest.

---

Dear Friends -I am the current President of UUSCM. I have been an Ordained and Fellowshipped UU Minister for 37 years. I was in fact one of the first four ministers given Final Fellowship as a community minister. I have been the Affiliated Community Minister at Countryside Church UU in Palatine, Illinois for 24 years. I am not a member of the UUMA. Allow me to clear up some of the uncertainty in this discussion.

All members of UUSCM must be members in good standing of a UU Congregation. While rare exceptions are possible, all have a reference from their parish minister in addition to other references. All must abide by  the UUSCM Code of Practice which is more strict regarding confidentiality than the UUMA Code and is enforced by a national Good Offices system. There is also a strongly recommended Best Practices Guide.

We have a membership consisting of three tiers. Ordained Community Ministers, Commissioned Community Ministers (laity in explicit covenant with a UU congregation) and Lay Community Ministers (laity who feel their community work constitutes a ministry in some sense but whom are otherwise independent).

Ordained Community Ministers are ordained persons. Most are ordained in the UU Tradition and most are in  Ministerial Fellowship with the UUA. If they are in a formal relationship with a UU congregation they are said to be “Affiliated."

Commissioned Community Ministers are laity who are in a formal ministerial relationship with a UU congregation. Many were once clergy in other denominations and many hold MDiv Degrees or higher. Many are employed in religious leadership positions (such as institutional chaplains).

UUSCM would prefer that you permit all of our members to participate in groups like this, however we understand that you may wish to impose other restrictions. If so, please inform us and we will see that it happens.

Understand that everyone holding current UUSCM membership must abide by our Code or face discipline. That said, there has never been a single complaint. The obvious reason is that most UUSCM members, including our laity, practice legally regulated professions with codes of confidentiality and restrictions on behavior that are much stricter than anything parish clergy experience.

I would be happy to address any concerns you may have. Please feel free to message me directly if you wish.

A final reflection as I’ve seen a lot of concern about UUA Fellowship in these comments. Please understand that to a colleague who does not wish to serve a parish, UUA Fellowship is optional. Secular institutions such as those that employ chaplains, pastoral counseling organizations or universities do not care about it. Therefore, a UUSCM member not in UUA Fellowship may have reasons for not bothering with it that are perfectly reasonable--especially given the long-standing resistance of the MFC to make reasonable adjustments in its rules where community ministers are concerned.

You have been most kind to read this long posting.

Hypnotism Regulatory Laws

The following is an article I wrote last week. Originally I intended it as my column in the Journal of Hypnotism for the March 2015 edition. However, as there is legislation being considered in some of the Western States in February, I decided to release this article as an informational essay for my colleagues. It is important that every practitioner understand the differences between the different sorts of hypnotic regulation.

National Guild of Hypnotists

Differences in Regulatory Law

The Rev. C. Scot Giles, DNGH

November 2014

Recently I’ve had several documents and internet postings come over my desk which show that some colleagues are confused about the different sorts of regulation for the practice of hypnotism.

While this is something I cover each year in my two hour workshop on State Laws and Legal Issues at the National Guild of Hypnotists convention, I felt it would be good to review the issue here. There are a couple of states flirting with the notion of regulating hypnotism as I write this and it would bode ill if colleagues are not clear on what is actually being discussed.

The Great Divide

All forms of professional regulation fall into one of two categories. The first is the sort of law that provide permission for a person to practice hypnotism but do not specify any particular sort of training. These laws are Exemption Acts, Health Freedom Acts and State Registration Acts.

The other sort of law not only provides permission for a person to practice hypnotism but further specifies the sort of training a person must have to do so. These laws are State Certification Acts and State License Acts.

The two categories of laws are very different and should not be confused, although confusion is common when people talk about a Registration Act as “licensing” or make statements that blur the distinction between those laws.

At the present time, all states with active regulation of hypnotism have Exemption Acts, Health Freedom Acts or State Registration Acts. No state has a State License or Certification Act for the practice of hypnotism (although one once did).

Exemption Acts

An Exemption Act is the simplest form of regulation and they exist in several states. Basically, it consists of wording inserted in a comprehensive license law that says the provisions of the law do not apply to a specific sort of practitioner. For example, my home state of Illinois has wording in the Clinical Psychologist License Act that says the law does not apply to unlicensed persons practicing hypnotism provided they stay within certain boundaries and do not offer to provide the services of professional psychology that are listed in another section of that law.

There is a lot to be said for Exemption Acts. First, they provide reasonably good protection for the public from unethical practitioners. If you fail to keep your practice within the boundaries of the exemption you become guilty of violating the underlying license law.

For example, we had a hypnotist in Illinois who insisted in calling what he did a form of psychology. Eventually, a complaint was filed and he received a Cease and Desist Order. When he refused to follow it, he was convicted of the unlicensed practice of psychology.

Another nice thing about Exemption Acts is they are inexpensive. They cost the State Government nothing. If the exemption is violated, enforcement falls to an already existing governmental agency (in Illinois that was the Department of Professional Regulation) that is already funded through the state budget.

The down side to an Exemption Act for hypnotists is that your freedom to practice is controlled by wording in the regulatory law of some other profession. It can vanish at the stroke of the legislative pen. You have to be vigilant and watch how laws are amended to be sure your protective exemption doesn’t vanish.

The National Guild of Hypnotists and our union was directly involved in passing Exemption Act in Illinois, where it is explicitly part of the statues. We also were responsible for the Exemption in New Jersey where it is encoded in the Psychology Board Rules. 

Health Freedom Acts

Health Freedom Laws are the creation of the National Health Freedom Coalition (www.nationalhealthfreedom.org) and they amount to Exemption Acts but with a huge and important difference.

A Health Freedom Act is a free-standing piece of legislation that says unlicensed persons may practice any of a range of complementary and alternative healing arts provided they hold out their services in a specific way.

Typically, Health Freedom Acts exempt practitioners of a long list of services, from herbalism to energy work, provided they do not hold their services out to the public as medical or psychological services. They require practitioners to give a specific disclosure statement to every customer or client and to follow restrictions in advertising. If you do these things, a Health Freedom Act exempts you from regulation from a list of license laws in your state.

The huge advantage of Health Freedom Acts is that they are independent pieces of legislation. They cannot be changed during a routine amendment to the license law of a specific profession.

They are also inexpensive for the government. If a person violates the terms of the Health Freedom Act they are guilty of violating one of the existing licensing laws. Once again enforcement falls to an existing governmental agency that is already funded in the state budget.

For example, if a herbalist violates the Health Freedom Act by the way he or she advertises services, he or she might be prosecuted for the unlicensed practice of medicine. If a hypnotist did the same, he or she might be prosecuted for the unlicensed practice of psychology. But in all cases the prosecution happens by an agency that already exists. No new costs are added to the state budget.

At the present time Health Freedom Acts exist in Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Louisiana, Rhode Island, California, Minnesota, Oklahoma and Idaho. They work well for hypnotists most of the time, the exception being Colorado where specific wording does not allow hypnotists

protection. The National Guild of Hypnotists has a long history of support of the National Health Freedom Coalition.

The only downside to a Health Freedom Act is that they are relatively difficulty to pass. All of the other regulated professions routinely oppose them.

State Registration Acts

Registration Acts are used when a state government wants to impose specific regulation on the way a particular unlicensed professional group does business. They allow anyone who wishes to apply and register. Once registered, you are given freedom to practice provided you pay an annual fee and follow specific behavioral standards. So long as you follow those standards, you keep your registration and your right to practice. However, if you violate those behavioral standards or fail to pay the fee you lose your registration and may no longer practice.

Typically Registration Acts require all the consumer protections found in Health Freedom Acts, but add more restrictions. For example, they may prohibit sexual contact between a practitioner and a client, or may require that everyone registered prove citizenship or that no child-support or traffic violations payments are delinquent.

Registration Acts for hypnotists exist in Washington State, Colorado and Connecticut. The National Guild of Hypnotists was heavily involved in the crafting of the Connecticut law.

Registration Acts have worked well for hypnotists but they are somewhat expensive. Enforcement requires the creation of a new state agency or assigning new duties to an existing state agency. However, the costs are offset by the collection of registration fees. They provide good protection of our right to practice.

State License and State Certification Acts

All of the kinds of regulation mentioned so far have one thing in common. They allow anyone to practice with no requirement on training. Not so State License Acts or State Certification Acts. These laws do specify what sort of training a person has to have in order to practice their profession. Also, many require the passing of an examination given by the state government to prove the training was adequate.

These laws are expensive, and that is the problem. The moment you move from regulating behavior to trying to restrict training you make the cash register in your state capital ring.

With State License Acts the government must set up a licensing Board to oversee issues related to the awarding and maintenance of the licenses. The members of that Board must be compensated. If training is to be required, then some state agency must do “due diligence” to insure the training isn’t bogus and that other requirements are met. That means people must be paid (and given a pension and benefit package) to do it. Further, those people must be supervised and managed, which requires the hiring of more people.

If the License Act requires a test for competence, then a test must be created. To prevent lawsuits claiming the test is biased, the test must pass accepted objective standards for tests and measurements. Then people must be hired to administer and score the test, space must be found to allow people to take the test, and someone must be paid to mail out licenses, keep track of renewals, review disciplinary issues, etc.

All of this gets very expensive, fast.

No state government will pass a License Act if the financial impact review doesn’t add up. There have to be enough people in the state who will apply for the license so that the fees at least pay for the cost of administering the law. If not, the financial burden is shifted to the taxpayer and no politician wants to do that.

In no state have there ever been enough hypnotists so that the fees would offset the cost of administering a License Act. That is why no state has ever had a License Act for hypnotic practitioners. Even in the State of California, where there are more hypnotists per square mile than in any other state, the math doesn’t work. California has a Health Freedom Act.

State Certification Acts are similar to State License Acts except that instead of a separate Licensing Board we have a Certification Committee under an existing Licensing Board. This is less expensive. However there are two enormous downsides.

First, if you allow your profession to be State Certified you are turning over control of your profession to the Licensing Board of another profession.

Second, while cheaper, Certification Acts still cost a bundle.

Only the State of Indiana has attempted a State Certification Act for hypnotic practitioners. It was a disaster. The ink wasn’t even dry on the bill when the Medical Board in control of the Hypnotist Certification Committee began to amend the law to restrict who could practice until almost no one could.

Finally, the law was repealed when a financial review showed that the costs of administering the Act where not even remotely covered by fees, and that the Act was a burden on taxpayers.

I hope the above clarifies the different sorts of regulation that exist in those states that regulate hypnotism and what the issues with each form of regulation are.

Winter Finding

I write this on September 23rd 2014, the Autumn Equinox. This day was important to my Anglo-Saxon ancestors and they called it “Winter Finding.” The Summer was over and Winter was close. More than most peoples they depended on the harvest to get them through the Winter, so they paused to give thanks on this day. It was a reflective holiday, because hard times were coming and it was a reminder to prepare.

The ceremony they used in celebration was called “Boasting.” I frankly I think it is a good idea. They would gather in a circle and a horn of mead (wine made from honey) would be passed around. When it came to you the custom was for you to single out a member of the community you felt was worthy of praise and to offer a toast to that person. That’s cool. So was what came next.

After a few rounds of this as the mead did it’s work, some of the warriors would begin to praise themselves, but the custom was to do this in a light hearted way that was obviously intended to be funny. People would boast about their foibles or exaggerate their accomplishments to the degree that everyone knew they were kidding. It was a way for important people in the community to apologize for their rough spots, or at least acknowledge they were not blind to their own faults.

These days some people who are influenced by wider spiritual practices also pause on the Autumn Equinox to ponder what the Buddha called “Right Livelihood.” We ask ourselves about our work. Is it still a good match to personality and temperament? Is it fulfilling work? Are we being treated well? Are we happy or is it time to look for new employment? Hard times might be ahead for us occupationally, are we prepared? I think that’s a good thing for everyone to ask themselves at least once each year.

For myself, my work remains a joy. I love what I do and certainly plan to continue. So I use this time to reflect on what I need to do to improve. What books do I need to study? Is there new equipment to acquire? Are my business systems working or is there a repair needed? But that said, I’m happy and as the year swings toward the cold and dark times I feel pretty good. 

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.

The Renaissance Faire

Most people probably regard the fact that I am a complete geek for Renaissance Faires with tolerance and humor. That’s okay. I don’t judge myself by how others feel, and the Renaissance Faire has been a part of my life for a long time. I started going as a graduate student (back when the same site was called “King Richard’s Faire"). 

The season at my “home faire” opened this past weekend. It was the 37th year I’ve been in attendance. My home faire is the Bristol Renaissance Faire in Bristol Wisconsin (http://www.renfair.com/bristol/). It’s about a 90 minute drive from my home. It is the second largest Renaissance Faire in the nation and the highest rated.

I am a Noble Level member of the Friends of the Faire, which means I attend in period costume. The Friends of the Faire are not members of the cast. In fact we pay to belong. We are there to help give the Village of Bristol some local color and generally speaking we are the people dressed up as whores, cut-throats, pickpockets and thieves. There are some perks. We get VIP parking right by the gate and have a private garden only we can use. We are also given an unlimited supply of water and gatorade to keep us going when the weather gets hot.

For me, it is a day in the fresh air, away from computers, fax machines and other interruptions that are an ordinary part of my day. As a Friend of the Faire I am not supposed to talk on my cell phone, and can be arrested for the practice of magic if I do. If one is caught doing that they put you in stocks and people get to throw wet sponges at you. Therefore, I am “call-free” for the day.

After all these years I know some of the vendors and performers personally. Artists often come to the Faire year after year to sell unique handmade wares, and there are 22 stage areas (some major, some minor) with performances held continuously all during the day. 

You will see jousting, sword fights, mimes, comedians, jugglers, falconers, acrobats and musicians. In addition to the stage areas, minor performances occur routinely in the streets that range from Morris Dancers to the cast acting out a drama as the day unfolds. If you’ve never been worked over by "Christophe the Professional Insulter” you have not fully lived, and this year he has a buddy offering “Expert Advice.” I don’t recommend you take any of the advice he gives. 

Fantasy is an important component in mental and spiritual health. It allows us to imagine what a just world would look like and what we need in our own lives to live fully and well. For me, the Faire helps me keep that in my life.

And so I raise my drinking horn filled with mead and say, “Huzzah!"

The Religion of Sheliaism

The One True Religion of Sheilaism

A Sermon by the Rev. Dr. C. Scot Giles

Countryside Church, Unitarian Universalist

May 25, 2014

Introduction

On this Memorial Day Sunday we reflect on things. We remember people we’ve known who have died, especially veterans. We reflect on the meaning of our own lives. 

Today, I’m going to ask your indulgence in departing from a strict Memorial Day theme to reflect on some aspects of modern religious and spiritual life. 

Being President of one of our denomination’s ministerial associations has given me an overview of what is happening in religious life in American that I didn’t have before, and I’m fascinated enough by it that I want to speak about it.

I hope what I have to say may encourage you in your own spiritual journey and may deepen your appreciation for Countryside Church.

Basically, I believe we all need to create our own spirituality. I think we have the means to do that and increasingly doing that is common.

Second, I believe religious denominations are in serious decline and that they will not recover. They may continue to exist but will be increasingly irrelevant.

Finally, while I think the future of most denominations is dark, the future for specific, healthy congregations is bright.

And I blame it all on Sheila.

Robert Bellah

Sociologist Robert Bellah has famously identified a new religion in America. It is the religion of a person named Shelia. He used her as a foil to describe what he saw as a trend: people choosing their religious and spiritual beliefs from eclectic sources, and creating a personal mix that may not match what their denomination teaches or believes. 

In 1985 Bellah and his colleagues published a well-done study on contemporary American values called Habits of the Heart. In it they argued that a profound shift was occurring in the mind of Americans.

Bellah called her “Sheila Larson” although that was not her real name. She was a young nurse and he argued she was typical. 

Sheila said she was “spiritual” and that her faith was important to her. But she couldn’t remember the last time she had gone to church. She believed in some sort of God and had named her faith after herself. She called it “Sheilaism.” 

“It’s just try to love yourself and be gentle with yourself. You know, I guess, take care of each other.”

According the the Gallup Poll, 80% of Americans agree that “an individual should arrive at his or her own religious beliefs independent of any churches or synagogues.”

Soon scholars were using the name “Sheilaism” to describe this position where religion was seen as a private matter, and there is no particular constraint placed upon a person by tradition, the Bible or church denominations.

This is such a common belief now almost 30 years later that few of us find it remarkable. But it was a tremendous change. 

Now, “do it yourself faith” is what every Unitarian Universalist does. For us, Sheilaism isn’t anything new. All all do it. The difference is that we do it in a congregation together. Sheila can’t remember the last time she went to church. Therein lies my point this morning: even in an age of “do it yourself faith” being part of a good congregation is important. 

The Separation of Spirituality from Religion

Something has happened in our time that is unprecedented in the Western Religious Tradition. It is possible to be Spiritual, but not Religious.

Spirituality has become separated from religion. That’s what Sheilaism is all about. Shelia really doesn’t have a religion although she calls it that. What she has is a simple, personal spirituality. 

Religion is something you do with others. It unites you with other people, a faith communities and historical tradition. Religion is something you do with others.

Spirituality on the other hand is something you do alone. It is something that joins you to a power that is greater than yourself or a power that is deeper and imminent within yourself.

It is possible to be spiritual and have no religion. It is possible to be part of a religious community and have no spirituality. I would argue that its best to have both, but spirituality and religion are not the same.

Sheila has a spirituality, not a religion.

In ages past that would have been unthinkable. You got your spiritual practices from your religion, and you could use only the practices that your religion sanctioned. 

You couldn’t combine Buddhist meditation with Christian theology, or Japanese Energy Work with Liberal Judaism. If you had tried, people would have thought you insane. In some places you would have been punished, and in some places in our modern world you still can be.

In our society every person has the opportunity to be a deeply spiritual person in a way that is just right for them. Due to worldwide information exchange, never before have people had as many opportunities to explore different aspects of their spirituality. No one has to be confined to the teaching of any one church. 

Do It Yourself Spirituality

Spiritual writer Thomas Moore, a former Roman Catholic monk and now a Jungian Therapist has recently asked the religious community in his book A Religion of One’s Own, to rethink it’s rejection of Sheilaism or other forms of “do it yourself” religion. 

Moore thinks that each of us is responsible to develop our own “soul,” and we are better off if we each create a path for ourselves. By “soul” what both he and I mean is that part of you that seeks a deeper experience of everyday life.

If you do things to develop your soul, you have a spiritual practice.

Moore suggests there are ten things we should do in order to create a “do it yourself” faith that has substance. If you are interested in his specific list I recommend his book to you, or just type “modern spiritual practices” into Google or Bing and you will find a lot of good material.

Basically Thomas Moore would urge you to learn to meditate, practice some form of contemplation like journal keeping, music or art appreciation, mindful living or some other “deep” experience.

He thinks you should learn to enjoy the grandeur of nature in some way. 

He thinks you should discipline yourself to mean what you say, say what you mean, and never say less than you actually believe. 

Finally, he thinks you should do enough homework to be able to carry on an intelligent conversation about spiritual matters.

It really isn’t very hard to create a beautiful spiritual life that is just right for you. It actually doesn’t take a lot of work, just a bit. 

I think that’s a good thing. But it is bad news for denominations. Because denominations are in the business of telling people what their spiritual practices should look like. “Do It Yourself Spirituality” is a direct threat to that.

Bad News for Denominations

Most mainline religious denominations today are in decline, including ours. Only the most politically conservative denominations are doing well, because they teach that there is no salvation outside of them. Therefore, you are either in and saved, or out and damned. If you buy that, you’re devoted to your denomination.

But most people don’t buy that. They feel that the universe is a friendly place, much like Max Ehrmann expressed in his famous poem Desiderata. 

“You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.”

That’s great theology, but it doesn’t motivate a lot of people to join a church.

The Unitarian Universalist denomination is in decline. Our Middle Class demographic has been hard hit by economic changes. Our people move around for occupational reasons, and if they move to a place that has no Unitarian Universalist congregation (and there are not a lot of them) we tend to lose those people. 

In a former time when everyone belonged to some church, our primary appeal was that we were a place where you didn’t have to say anything you didn’t believe. You could have intellectual integrity here.

A famous ad asked “Are You A Unitarian Universalist Without Knowing It?” The appeal was that we were a place where what you believed, and what you said you believed, matched.

All that is still true, but it doesn’t matter as much as it used to. People feel entitled to arrive at their own spiritual conclusions independent of what their religion teaches. Today people practice what I call “Cafeteria Faith.” That is, they pick and choose what they believe from among the things their denomination teaches, taking up what they like and leaving behind what they do not like.

No where is this as evident as among contemporary Roman Catholics. 82% of American Catholics feel perfectly comfortable ignoring their church's teaching about contraception. 

Think about that. The Bishops have instructed the priests to preach regularly on the evil of contraception. The Roman Catholic Church in America did everything they could to oppose Universal Healthcare because it included contraception coverage.

And 82% of their members do not agree. But those members don’t leave either. They don’t come over to a more liberal church like they used to. In fact it used to be that a clear majority of people who joined us did so after leaving the Roman Catholic or Methodist denominations. But today, they simply look past the issue and go to mass on Sunday to enjoy the music. 

What churches teach is no longer authoritative. If people like the pope they listen to what he has to say. If they do not like the pope they ignore what he has to say. In centuries past, what the pope said was law. No longer.

That’s the result of Sheilaism. 

But if denominations are not that important, there is less need to change denominations if you don’t agree with what is printed in the Order of Worship, because everyone feels you can just ignore that. 

Because people feel denominations are not important, people support them less. Simple as that.

Snark

Not surprisingly, some denominationally specific parish ministers often don’t like “do it yourself” faith. They want you to listen to them when they tell you what is right. Even our own Unitarian Universalist Association does this from time to time often pushing a specific political message.

A United Church of Christ minister named Lillian Daniel has written a book that is very popular among clergy, but that I personally find kind of snarky. It is titled, When Being Spiritual But Not Religious, is Not Enough.

The book is intended as a critique of the people who practice some form of “do it yourself” faith. 

Rev. Daniel’s basic argument is that such people are selfish and the faith they practice shallow. They excuse themselves from the demand of a serious commitment to charity and the welfare of others. The claim is that their spirituality is often unaccompanied by generosity, and they do little or nothing to lift the burden of others. 

I think this argument is snarky because I don’t really think it’s true.

You no longer need a religion to be a generous and charitable person and there are many ways to conveniently give. 

When you check out at Whole Foods you have a chance to make a donation to a worthy charity that is seamlessly added to your checkout receipt. 

When I make my weekly trip to PetSmart to buy kitty litter I am offered the chance to make a donation to an Animal Rescue charity when my credit card is processed. 

If you buy a burger or a plate of wings at Hooters during National Breast Cancer Month you are asked to make a significant contribution to that charity. (Seriously, the waitress hits you up for twenty to thirty bucks. My buddy tried to give her a dollar and she threw it back at him and took away his beer.). 

You don’t need a religion to be charitable today. There are lots of ways to be generous, and they obviously work or the participating stores and institutions wouldn’t do them. 

So I don’t think that argument is valid.

Congregations Can Be Important

All that said, while mainline denominations may be in for a rough time, I think some local congregations have the potential to be seriously needed. My conviction is that as denominations become less important, good local congregations become more important, they just will be increasingly non-denominational. 

But all congregations are not created equal. I said good congregations. Not all congregations are good.

Rev. Daniel’s book is fun to read. But at the end of the day the good reverend ignores the core issue. The people who reject churches are often doing it out of an intuition that something has gone wrong with the institutional church. They are not finding what they need there, or they have actually been damaged.

Some churches really mess people up, and the smaller they are the more effectively they do this. 

This next bit may seem counter-intuitive, but I assure you it is true. Most congregations, the vast majority of free-standing church congregations, are small congregations. 

However, most people who attend church, do so at large congregations. 

The Duke University National Congregations Study found that 90% of the people who attend church do so in congregations of more than 400 people.

Only 10% of the people who attend church attend in churches that are smaller than 400 members. So while most churches are small, most of the people attend church attend the few that are very large. It’s the small churches that disproportionately cause pain.

Consultants have shown that the level of interpersonal conflict in congregations is much higher the smaller the congregation is. In a small church it only takes a few determined people to create a stink. 

In a small congregation I served at the very beginning of my career (average Sunday attendance was 35), fist fights would occasionally break out during the Annual Meeting. Seriously. I remarked to my mentor that it appeared that churches don’t split because of the Great Issues in Theology. They split over fights about what color we’re going to paint the nursery.

It is the little congregations with their politics and factions, their matriarchs and patriarchs and dominance battles that really do a job at hurting the feelings of good people.

We clergy know that churches can mess people up, because we hear it all the time when we meet someone and they learn what we do for a living. 

We routinely hear from people about how hurt they were by something painful that happened in some church long ago. It almost always has nothing to do with any church we represent, but that doesn’t stop them.

Think about it. If someone tells you they are a chef, you don’t immediately pour out your frustrations or horror stories about bad meals you have had. 

If the person sitting next to you on an airplane tells you he or she is a plumber, you don’t immediate launch into a harangue about that plumber years ago who couldn’t fix the leak under your sink. 

But if you tell people you are a member of the clergy, a lot of people will not shut up. They are in so much pain.

In fact, (and maybe it is a stain on my soul) when I travel and someone asks me what I do for a living, in simple self-defense I usually reply that I am the Assistant Sales Manager for a company that makes rawhide dog chews. Because, no one wants to hear any more about that, and I can spend the time in peace.

Something has gone wrong with a lot of congregations. No wonder a lot of people want nothing to do with them and find a way to explore the spiritual depths they can sense on their own.

Not Created Equal

Our Unitarian Universalist path is not an easy path. Or rather, it is an easy religion to do badly and a hard one to do well. That’s because we have always required you come up with your own set of beliefs. We’ve always been kind of on Sheila’s side. But, we also covenant to work together, and that requires that our different spiritual positions get a workout in a way they do not get in setting where everyone agrees to say the words even if they don’t believe them.

Right now you could be sitting next to someone whose spirituality is baffling to you or whose theology is the polar opposite of yours. But most Sundays you listen to someone prattle on from the pulpit and that person may challenge what you believe or do. Then, you go to coffee hour and you may talk to others about it. Your “do-it-yourself” faith gets a workout. It gets examined by the indirect friction of talking to others about spiritual or religious things.

Sheila doesn’t do that. That’s the major problem with Sheilaism. If Sheila makes some huge blunder no one is likely to call it to her attention. No one is around to say, “Hey, that’s a contradiction.” Sheila lives an unexamined life, practicing an unexamined faith. If she makes a mistake she’ll never know until it causes her some sort of pain or lets her down.

A good religious community can help you develop your personal spirituality if you can find a good congregation. Some are better than others, some are awful. 

My advice is that if you find a good one stick with it, because it can help you do important work. But take if from me, the good ones can be hard to find. 

Oh. I’ve been part of this one for 23 years now. I think it’s pretty good.

And that’s my sermon.

What you say?

I’m hard of hearing. Have been for many years. I find that difficult to write because as disabilities go, being hard of hearing these days isn’t much of one. Technological advances have been amazing and with them I function almost as well a normally-hearing person. Still, people treat you differently if they know. There is an old fashioned social stigma attached to being “deaf."

There's a medical condition that runs in my family on the male line. The men in my family develop tinnitus (ringing in the ears) in our teens and it progresses to hearing loss by midlife. Therefore, when it happened to me I was not surprised. I’d watched my father and uncle try to cope, and made it my business to learn about audiology so that when my time came I could make an informed decision.

These days hearing aids (which I’ve now worn for decades) are very sophisticated. Unless you are looking for them you really can’t see that someone is wearing them. They are no longer little loudspeakers. Instead, they are sophisticated computers that turn incoming sound into data, manipulate the data according to the wearer’s hearing loss and output it on the other side. For example, rather than just making sounds louder, my aids take sound in a range that I do not hear well and transform it into a range that I can hear normally. They can even take out background sounds, so that when I’m in a noisy restaurant I often can hear better than anyone else at the table.

Today is my second day wearing a new pair of hearing aids (they are Starkey Halos) that use a whole new technology. These use bluetooth to not only communicate with each other but with my iPhone. The computer in the iPhone is much better than anything one can fit into a hearing aid, so these instruments have capacities that no one could have dreamed of a few years ago.

There is an app on my iPhone that controls the aids. I can adjust all the settings on the fly to get the best hearing profile in any environment. Then, I can store those settings in the iPhone, and use the Global Positioning System to identify the location exactly. The next time I am in that environment the iPhone tells the hearing aids to switch over to that program. The iPhone even knows when I am in my car moving faster than 10 miles per hour and adjusts itself so I hear best in that environment.

Oh…I can also listen to music, take phone calls and use a remote microphone up to 50 feet away without having to use any sort of headset or earbuds. The hearing aids simply become a high quality stereo headset that automatically adjusts for the best sound. I have literally become one with my iPhone. 

In fact the iPhone can now send messages directly to my hearing aids that no one else can hear. I can get reminders, information from Siri and other data delivered directly to my brain. Think of it as Google Glass for my ears. Actually, that sort of bothers me. It’s like being part of the Borg from the old Star Trek series.

So, if you are going to have a hearing loss in this day and age it’s amazing what a good audiologist can do to help you out. The only downside is the cost. High tech hearing aids are amazingly expensive and insurance does not pay for them. But it’s worth it, especially if you make your living listening to people. As we baby boomers get older I suspect audiologists will see more and more business from us. 
 

Considering Swords

I’m considering getting a new sword. That statement probably seems strange to those who do not know me personally, but friends and colleagues will understand.

I have been a martial artist most of my adult life. I hold multiple black belts in the Korean style of karate called taekwondo. When I was in active practice and teaching I was also the instructor for my school in the traditional weapons of ancient Japan and Korea. These are the Sai, the Sword, the Bo, the Nunchaku, the Manriki Chain, the Tonfa, Kobuton and Kama. If you are curious about these, look them up on Google or YouTube and you will get an eyeful.

My time as an active martial artist was very good for me. It was excellent exercise and I enjoyed teaching and making friends in the community. I take a lot of pride in developing personal precision and the ancient weapons were a great way to do that.

But time takes it’s toll. After one enters one’s 50s, sticking with karate can be a problem, especially a hard kicking style like taekwondo. The older skeleton doesn’t hold up as well as the younger one does, and most senior black belts move over to one of the grappling styles like Judo or into the traditional weapons as I did to prevent long-term injury.

When I retired from competition and teaching ten years ago I continued to practice with my favorite weapon, the classical Asian sword. I’ve studied many systems of traditional blade fighting and keep up with regular practice.

But it’s time for a new sword. Most of the training a swordsman does is with a perfectly balanced wooden sword called a “bokken.” I have a lovely set handmade by Kingfisher Bokken in Vermont (http://kingfisherwoodworks.com/) that I adore. I also have a real sword (called a "live blade”) made for me by Master Daniel Watson of Angel Sword when I first became a black belt many years ago (http://www.angelsword.com/). That sword has been my companion for almost thirty years now.

But there are issues. A sword made in traditional dimensions is fitted for a person who stands about five feet, three inches tall. That was the height of the typical samurai warrior as best we can determine from existing suits of armor. Most modern people are taller than that. 

A swordsmith can make a blade longer to accommodate the additional height of modern people, but doing that destroys the geometry of the weapon. Also, longer blades are more prone to shatter dangerously when used. 

If the smith reinforces a sword blade to make it shatter resistant, the resulting sword is so blade-heavy it can’t be precisely controlled. If the smith cuts holes in the blade to lighten it, you end up with a sword that doesn’t look like a classical sword and is very hard to clean. If you use a lighter steel alloy to make the blade, the result is a sword that doesn’t hold the razor edge one expects in an Asian sword. The list of problems goes on. 

After almost three decades of hard use my live blade is ready to be retired or completely rebuilt. It was made blade-heavy to accommodate my height, and the vibration from hitting blade-on-blade as weakened the fittings. Simply, it’s falling apart. Soon I will need a new sword for the next chapter of my martial arts career. 

Currently, I am talking to sword makers and thinking about what I want. There are lots of choices regarding design, style and steel. This will likely be the last sword I will own in my lifetime and I want to get it right.

My long-suffering wife is very tolerant when I talk to her about all this. I suspect she figures that sword fighting is a better hobby for me than golf, and my exploits are more interesting to listen to than semi-fictional accounts of hole-in-one golf shots. I hope so.

 

Boomers and Millennials

Michael Gerber’s book, The E-Myth Revisited should be required reading for all my colleagues. The book makes an important distinction. There is a difference between working “in” your business and working “on” your business.

When you are working “in” your business you are doing the stuff your business does. In my case that means consulting with individuals and groups using individualized spiritual and hypnotic techniques. Working “on” my business is different. That means spending some time perfecting my systems, methods, tools and workflows.

Every year I take some time to work “on” my hypnotism practice. I look at my systems and processes, tighten things up and make adjustments. Every five years I do a more comprehensive review and every ten years I hire an outside consultant to review my practice, on the theory that a different pair of eyes will see things I am missing. I am in the midst of a five-year review right now.

One of the things I did was to look at the average age of my clients. The result was surprising. My clients tend to be older than they were a decade ago.

Now, some of that is I am older too, and like attracts like. But I am a helping professional and being a bit older than your clients is actually an advantage.

My practice has a focus into medical hypnotism and I do a lot of work with chronic conditions. Chronic medical issues tend to be issues of older people.

All that said, my practice focus has not changed in twenty five years, yet I have many fewer clients in my practice in their 30s and 40s than I did ten years ago. My clients tend to be in their 50s and 60s today. Why is that?

After a fair amount of reflection I realized that the issue was my practice marketing. I know how to market my services to people who are part of the Baby Boom. I understand that generational cohort.

Boomers are intuitive. To market to them you state your case and show them your results and credentials. They consult their intuition and if they decide you’re authentic, they buy in. I’m a “Boomer” myself and I think like they do.

I did not know how to market my services to “Generation X” nor to “Millennials,” who comprise the younger people in our society today. They are much more suspicious and analytical. You still state your case and show them results and credentials, but they don’t buy in when you’ve done that. Bit if you've done it right they are willing to keep listening.

With Generation X and Millennials you have to “warm up” the relationship you establish with them. If they think you’re for real they expect you to supply them with more information. Then, over time, once they know you, they might buy in and become a client. It’s a slower process.

I can see how people who are children of meaningless wars, stock bubbles and crashes and widespread betrayal by elected leaders would grow to be reluctant to believe anyone. I get that.

I’ve been helped in this by a series of videos created by my colleague Jason Linett. Jason has been creating a serious of video podcasts at the request of the National Guild of Hypnotists that describes his method of “lead generation marketing.” This is the name given to establishing and then building your credibility in business relationships. This turns out to be vital in doing business with GenXers and Millennials. The videos have been very helpful as has my email correspondence with Jason.

So…it’s time to introduce some new things into my practice.

I started my electronic Newsletter called Powerlines about a year ago, and it’s been a complete hit. Each month an edition goes out that has a very high “open” and “click through” rate.

But I need to do more. So I’ve followed Jason’s recommendation and set up an account with a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) service. This is a new software platform that allows me to set up “sequences” of reports and emails to people who have contacted me to show them the ways hypnotism can make their life easier. All they have to do it “opt in” by filling out a form on my website (if you want to do this, be my guest). What then follows is a series of free reports and other materials that I created, which are sent out on a timed routine by the CRM service.

The goal is straightforward and it’s customer service and education. The reports teach people about hypnotism and encourage a deeper connection with the craft. I’ll be adding other things as I integrate this into my work and learn the software platform more fully.

And I got a call today from a new client. She’s in her 20s. She liked the reports.

Mardi Gras 2014

Mardi Gras began this past week. Most people don’t realize that Mardi Gras isn’t only one day. They think of it as the parade of the Rex Krewe through the French Quarter on Fat Tuesday (March 4th this year). However, Mardi Gras is a season of parades and events that goes on for weeks before then.

Every Mardi Gras parade is run by an organization called a “krewe.” I personally support a krewe in New Orleans called the Intergalactic Krewe of Chewbacchus. It’s for science fiction fans and the floats and marchers must be themed to Star Wars, Star Trek, Dr. Who, or something similar. The motto is “Saving the Galaxy One Drunken Nerd at a Time.” It is a family friendly parade, and it is today at 8 pm. This year’s theme is "The Wrath of Khan-ival."

Mardi Gras is part of the worldwide custom of Carnival happening in many nations this time of year. This tradition goes back to ancient Rome. The priests of Apollo, concerned about declining attendance in the wake of the rising oriental mystery cults, mounted a statue of the god on a cart and paraded it through the streets of Rome to mimic the progress of the Sun through the sky. To insure a good crowd, the priests of Apollo threw jewelry and coins from the cart to the people watching, guaranteeing a popular response.

After a few years of this the priests of the other Roman cults figured out that the Apollonians were onto something good and they did likewise, competing for applause. Soon prominent merchants and politicians joined in, and the rest is history.

In Christendom, the tradition of Carnival came to serve the purpose of using up the household supply of eggs, cream, butter and other perishables that would go bad during the penitential season of Lent. That’s why Mardi Gras recipes, such as the one for the batter of traditional King Cakes, tend to be very rich.

I spend formative years in New York at a place where some Mardi Gras customs were followed and I acquired an affection for the festival there. During this season I do some Cajun Cooking and we decorate our home with the traditional colors of Mardi Gras. They are purple for justice, green for faith and gold for wealth. May all those things come into your home as well.

2014 Solid Gold

I am just back from the 2014 Solid Gold Convention of the National Guild of Hypnotists. While the major convention of the Guild occurs in the Boston area every year in August, this is a mini-convention for the convenience of our West Coast members (and for those of us who live elsewhere and enjoy a February week in the sun).

I am often faculty for the Solid Gold and always enjoy it. Unlike the major Guild convention which has hundreds of programs, with a dozen or more occurring simultaneously, the Solid Gold is a large lecture with only one presenter at a time on stage. Like the name sounds, the presenters are all senior practitioners with established practices, reputations and publishing or research credits.

Usually Lindsay and I go, arriving a day early and staying a day late to enjoy Las Vegas. This year our return was delayed due to Chicago weather and so we stayed an additional day (there are many worse places to be stuck than downtown Las Vegas). The Solid Gold was held at the Riviera, a landmark casino from the early beginnings of Las Vegas. Now under new management and completely renovated it was a great place.

Lindsay and I got out to a couple of shows: Absinthe, an adult cabaret (rated R for language) at Caesar’s Palace, and the Blue Man Group, a fantasy drum and multimedia show. We did some fine dining with friends and as a personal treat got a table at Mario Batali’s B & B Ristorante. I consider Mario Batali to be the greatest chef in the world today and I’ve been wanting to dine at one of his establishments for years.

B & B Ristorante (that stands for Batali and Bastianich) serves high Northern Italian cuisine, which is the cuisine I most love and cook myself. But I can’t hold a candle to the quality of the meal we were served. We did the traditional tasting menu and it was fantastic. I will definitely return.

The presentations at the Solid Gold are always great and this year was no exception. Cal Banyon did a neat presentation on the Affect Bridge Regression technique, Wendy Packer presented her new work on hypnotically enhanced charisma, Tony DeMarco delivered a brilliant piece on Epidentics, Patricia MacIsaac shared her work on texting and cell phone use as a kind of addiction, Michael Ellner explained his approach to medical hypnotism. Don Mottin offered the latest on self-hypnotism in his usual high-energy style. Laura King shared her secrets for sports improvement hypnotism, and while that’s not my thing it works well for those who like that form of hypnotic practice. Wow! Solid Gold indeed.

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.

A New Website for Imbolc

“Imbolc” (pronounced I-Molg) is the ancient festival that was celebrated by my ancestors this time of year (of February 2nd). In more modern times it’s called St. Bridget’s Day. Held approximately halfway between the Winter Solstice and the Spring Equinox, Imbolc marks the beginning of Spring.

It’s still Winter for sure, but the first signs of Spring can be seen. The days are getting longer and the night noticeably does not arrive as early. There is more sunlight. There are glimpses of the thaw to come. It’s a hopeful time.

My ancestors used this time to reflect upon their practices and systems. Spring is coming. It’s time to review and inspect our tools and plans so that when Spring arrives we are ready to begin. We know we will need to get the first crop planted, clean our homes, etc. Imbolc is a time when we prepare to begin anew.

In my professional world this is the time each year when I blow the dust off my practice and look at what I’m doing and ask if there is a better way to get it done. As part of this I have completely rebuilding my practice website. The new is live now. Check it out at http://www.csgiles.org.

The new site abandons the old “happy rainbow” theme I’ve used for more than a decade. It still preserves the rainbow metaphor but is a darker theme. The new photograph of the rainbow across a stormy sky has now become a standard theme in my office, and forms the wallpaper for all of computer systems, right on down to my iPhone. It will also form the opening slide for presentations, classes and talks.

Ninety-five percent of the hits on my website each month are coming from people using mobile devices (tablets or smartphones). Therefore, the new site is dynamic and reformats itself so it appears different for easy viewing on whatever platform you are using. The site is also simpler and more modern.

I hope to write more frequently and so am renewing my blog. The blog will also be reflected in my Facebook timeline and you can read it there too. If you subscribed to my blog using an RSS feed, you may need to reset the subscription. Also, my entire Twitter feed can be followed from within the website more easily than before. I post daily links to interesting material from around the web.

The next blog posting will be a copy of my recent Sermon on Napoleon Hill, titled “Having a Purpose."

Dark Night of the Soul

Over the years I received many requests to post the text of some of the sermons I have given at churches of my denomination. I've decided to go ahead a do that with a selection of my best pulpit work. The text of the sermon will be at the start of the Blog entry, and you will find service details (readings, prayers, etc.) at the end.

Endarkenment: Dark Nights of the Soul
by the Rev. Dr. C. Scot Giles at Countryside UU Church, September 3, 2006

I’m an optimistic and positive person. But like everyone, there have been times of emotional trouble. The sermon is about how I think of those times.

St. John of the Cross

His name was Juan de la Cruz, St. John of the Cross. He was a major figure in the Catholic Counter-Reformation. A mystic from Spain and a member of the Carmelite religious order. He is now numbered as one of the 33 “Doctors of the Church” whose thought helped heal it after the sundering of the Protestant Reformation, which eventually gave birth to congregations such as ours.

He was a close friend and confident of the woman now known as St. Teresa of Avila, and like her, practiced a spirituality that was passionate to the point of sexuality. The homoerotic imagery of his Stanzas of the Soul are obvious, and you can find similar passion in the work of St. Teresa, whose sculpture by Bernini in the year 1652 shows a woman, lying legs akimbo, writhing in an ecstasy that Art Historians long ago realized appears orgasmic.

Yet despite the passion of all Carmelite spirituality, St. John of the Cross is known for a concept called The Dark Night of the Soul.

I’ve had Dark Nights of the Soul, and so have you. These are times of Endarkenment, when our plans and hopes have unwound and failed.

The athlete faces a Dark Night of the Soul when the game has been lost, and the athlete realizes that if he or she had only played a bit differently the outcome might have been different.

The man or woman faces a Dark Night of the Soul when they sit home, holding the pink lay-off notice and realizes that plans for house, education and vacation are dashed; and it will be a strain to find the money for food as the dry time of unemployment awaits. Labor Day will bring no celebration this year.

The lover faces a Dark Night of the Soul when the email opens on the computer screen and he or she realizes that the person he or she loved and desired actually loves and desires someone else.

The comfortably-off person faces a Dark Night of the Soul when the stock report shows that half the value of a key investment has been lost and there is no way to recover.

All of us know times when light has died, when hope seems gone, where resources seem exhausted and we do not know how we will be able to continue. St. John speaks of the Dark Night of the Soul as having two parts: “The Night of the Senses” and “The Night of the Spirit.”

Ever notice how when things are going really well for you that the world simply seems more intense? Colors seem brighter, tastes more delightful, aromas, like a lung-full of autumn air, seem more grand? The mystics of all nations have spoken about “the Light” when things are in sync. I don’t think it’s a metaphor. We perceive things differently when happy. That is the Daylight of the Senses.

The Night of the Senses is when the opposite is true. When things seem gray and bland because emotional pressure pushes out he joy. But mostly St. John of the Cross is concerned about the Night of the Soul, when God and hope seem far away and spiritual distress comes calling.

I’ve had my Dark Nights of the Soul. So have you. They are one of the things that unite up into a human community.

The Critical Factor

I don’t know about you. But when hard times pass from my life and the day once again tastes sweet, I want to forget about the difficulty times and look ahead with optimism. That’s a whole lot more fun.

“But wait,” St. John of the Cross says. “Tarry!” His teaching is that if one looks back on the times of Endarkenment you can often see that they were not all bad. Often, they were actually the times that caused us to change. Often the very success we have later, comes from changes and understandings we gained during our Dark Night.

Far from being bad, St. John of the Cross proposes that our most difficult personal times are actually doorways that open us to improved functioning and greater happiness. While they are never fun, they may in retrospect be good.

That’s the key learning about life’s bad time. They are never fun, but they may be good. They become good if they motivate us to change our habits.

The human mind contains a function that hypnotists call the Critical Factor. It is a very old part of our consciousness. The job of the Critical Factor is to unconsciously set things up so the future will resemble the past. It wants the future to resemble the past because it knows we have survived the past, and if the future is similar, it figures we’ll survive that too. The Critical Factor resists all change--even good change.

And so the woman raised by an abusive father recruits someone just like him as a husband. The man whose mother was mean-spirited finds that only mean-spirited women seem attractive--at first. The person who grew up in a family where money was scarce finds him or herself drawn to jobs that continue a hand-to-mouth-lifestyle by offering no possibility for advancement.

The pain of the Dark Night of the Soul may be the only thing that can hurt us enough so we will ignore the Critical Factor in our mind and do things differently in the future.

The woman holding the layoff notice finds a way to go back to school. Skills improve, new skills are gained, better employment becomes possible.

The lover’s heart mends and with it the understanding that the woman who had been so beloved may not actually have been the best long-term partner after all. A new love is found and this time a more considered decision is made before love is given.

I am a specialist in working with persons who live with a cancer diagnosis. When the horror of 9/11 came onto the television screens of our nation, we had a whole nation of people who went into a sort of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Seeing that horror shook us, and changed us. But it didn’t shake the people who live with cancer. They already knew that bad things can happen to good people. The Dark Night of the Soul that opened for them when the physician gave them their diagnosis had changed them. They already viewed the world more realistically.

No one consults a helping professional, especially one who charges as much as I do, unless they are in a time of difficulty. The sun has set in their world and a Dark Night has come. They seek help.

Time and again I have witnessed in my own consultation room how people can cull from their time of pain and difficulty critically important insights about themselves that allow them to transform themselves in good ways. As the hindu Tantric Masters taught, sometimes a poison can turn out to be medicine.

The man who was born with the soul of a poet but become an accountant instead (because Father insisted it was more practical) finds poetry again and reinvents himself. The woman who was born to dance (but got a Master’s Degree in Counseling instead) finds a way to bring Dance Therapy into her practice.

In the late 1980s I faced a medical crisis that forced me to realize my time on earth was not without limit. With the help of a colleague I made an inventory of my life and realized that I had problems (one of my favorite quips about this time is to say that I realized I had a problem in only three areas of my life: my marriage, career and lifestyle. Everything else was okay). The realization led me to change, and those changes are among the best decisions I have ever made. My stress level dropped to a fraction of what it was and in response my health improved.

Yet I cannot honestly say I would ever had made those decisions if life had not kicked me in the keister on the morning when my doctor looked up from his lab report and said, “Scot, I don’t like what I see here.”

Often the darkest times in our lives contain the seeds that will grow into a better life for each of us. The Dark Night of the Soul is never fun, but it can be good--or at least good for us.

When I received my first Board Certification it was given at the 1993 meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in Washington, DC. The keynote talk was given my a Connecticut psychiatrist I’ve long admired, M. Scott Peck. Some of you may have read his popular book The Road Less Traveled.

The very first sentence in that book is “Life is difficult.” And so it is. But, Peck went on to say, the reason for life’s difficulties is that life presents us with problems, but it is by solving life’s problems that we find life’s meaning. I agree.

His keynote talk was a plea with his psychiatrist colleagues to recognize that sometimes a temporary depression is actually a good thing--a Dark Night of the Soul--and if that patient just works through it, the patient may become a better person.

Not all depressions, he argued, should be medicated away. The medication is a blessing to those in pain, and they are always good if the depression is biological. But before reaching for the prescription pad, Peck asked his colleagues to wonder if perhaps the patient needs to learn something from the pain first.

Now, I’ve seen hundreds of people helped by anti-depression medication. I am not critical of the use of those drugs. But still, there is something to what Peck said. Even if the Dark Night can be lifted with a drug, there is still benefit in asking oneself what there is to learn from the fact that the Dark Night came upon us at all.

The Layered Brain

The Unitarian clergyman Ralph Waldo Emerson once taught that we didn’t need to read books as much as to read the “Book of Nature.” By that he meant that we need to look at the world and learn from it what God intends.

When I do this I like to look at the brain. It’s a wonderful organ. The brain is arranged in layers. The outermost is called the cortex, and it is the source of all higher thought. Beneath it is the limbic brain which governs emotion and memory. Sitting in front of that part of the brain is the amygdala. It is the size and shape of an almond. It tells us when to feel fear.

When something happens that causes alarm, the amygdala switches on. The center for emotion and memory activate so that we will not only respond to what we fear, we will also remember it so that we might avoid a problem in the future. In this state of mind we create memories differently. They have a special and deep power.

The aircraft we were on almost crashed. Now we have a phobia about flying.

One of my cats was terrorized by her former owner at a gang initiation, transported there in a pillowcase. She was rescued, and yet for the rest of her long and happy life (where she ruled over my professional office from her throne that used to be the IN BOX on my desk), she would run when she saw a pillowcase.

The one experience creates a powerful learning. No repetition is needed. This is how the memories of all trauma and all bad things are created. This is why we remember the bad times with special clarity.

Unfortunately, that can give the bad times a distorted importance in our mind, and we give them too much consideration in our future. In our fear we forget they may be useful to us.

Thomas Moore

For years now I have followed the work of a contemporary writer named Thomas Moore. I have all his books and love them. His best known book was very popular some years ago, called Care of the Soul.

Recently he published his inquiry into the St. John’s idea. He calls his new book Dark Nights (plural) of the Soul, because he wants to make clear that all of us can expect to have more than one of them.

But he’s got an interesting notion. He thinks a Dark Night of the Soul can be fun.

Well, not fun exactly. Drawing on the spiritual psychology of James Hillman, Moore argues that the fact that one has a time of Endarkenment--the times when it’s all fallen apart for us--means that one is a very interesting person.

Shallow people don’t hurt the same way deeper people do. The Dark Night of the Soul is the emotional heritage of only bright, self-aware people. When such people talk about their spiritual journey, they usually identify the dark times, not the bright times, as being the most transformative.

I get this. I know someone from my family who I swear will live forever. She has not a bit of stress. She has never had a self-doubting thought in her life. She is absolutely certain that she is right about everything. If confronted by incontrovertible proof that she has made a mistake, she will simply announce that it is someone else’s fault, and she will believe that to the very bottom of her heart.

She would not know a Dark Night of the Soul from a dust bunny, and you can probably imagine that she is a rather stimulating person to be around (when she comes to visit even the cats have the good sense to hide until she is gone).

Only sensitive and self-aware people can be shaken in the way St. John of the Cross proposes. If you have ever known a Dark Night in your life, it means that you are a more interesting person than you realize, and some time should be given to appreciating your own depth.

Alchemy

And now I’m going to talk about alchemy and medicine. Hang in with me. All this will make sense eventually.

Alchemy is usually considered the medieval forerunner of chemistry, but that’s not right. Psychiatrist Carl Jung in his great therapy based on archetypical symbols argued that Alchemy was actually the dark side of Christianity. It kept everything that Christianity had discarded in an effort to make itself nice and socially acceptable, after Charlemagne declared it as the state religion of the Holy Roman Empire in the year 800.

The medieval alchemists sought to transform matter. They tried to develop processes by which lead could be turned into gold. The sought to take dead matter and find a way to make it come alive. They attempted to compound medicines that would allow a person to live forever.

Along the way they discovered things that did in fact evolve into modern medicine and chemistry, but that was never their goal. Their goal was actually spiritual. The Alchemist sought to change the lead of personality into the gold of enlightenment.

The greatest alchemist was Philip Theophrastus Bombast von Hohenheim, a name historians have shorted to Paracelsus. He lived from 1493 to 1541, a time that was one of the fulcrums of western civilization.

He was a physician whom the other doctors of the age hated. They hated him because his patients did better then theirs did. Way better.

At the time most physicians refused to touch their patients. Instead they dispensed medical advice based upon classical Greek texts by Aristotle, Hippocrates and Galen. The physicians of the age based everything they did on these texts, even when the texts were obviously in error about human anatomy (for example, Aristotle got the number of teeth a human being has wrong). The practice of dispensing medicines was left to the apothecaries, and surgery was left to the barber-surgeons. Both were considered low class occupations. Doctors never got their hands dirty.

Paracelsus got his hands dirty, and was scorned for showing disrespect for the classical texts. Today he is remembered as the father of modern medicine because he was one of the first physicians who actually examined his patients. Also, because he made his remedies from chemicals instead of herbs, he is also credited with being the father of chemotherapy.

Of course almost everything Paracelsus did was wrong. His patients did better because while mistaken, his methods were also harmless. People who went to other doctors did worse, because the other doctors were using methods that were not only mistaken but actively harmful (such as packing all wounds with batting, which always caused infection).

Goethe, in his 1801 drama Faust, has the physician of the age who had grown rich by dispensing harmful medicine, say while standing in a graveyard:

"That was the physic! True, their patients died,
But none ever asked them who was cured.
So, with a nostrum of this hellish sort,
We made these hills and valleys our resort,
And ravaged there more deadly than the pest.
These hands have ministered the deadly bane
To thousands who have perished; I remain
To hear cool murders extolled and bless’d."

Yet in his off-hours, Paracelsus was an alchemist, and he left behind texts which illuminate that discipline.

The alchemist used substances as symbols for people. Mercury was a symbol for men while copper stood for women. Other chemicals stood for concepts, planets and virtues. They mixed chemicals in crucibles heated in a special furnace as symbols of the kinds of relationship people could have. When they attempted to turn a bit of lead into gold they always failed, but the legends say that a few succeeded. Maybe they did in a purely spiritual sense.

At the end the alchemist would decant from the crucible that had been put through the flame a crude black stone, called the Lapis Niger. It was said to be an ugly thing.

But when held in tongs and struck with a hammer the skin of the Lapis Niger would shatter, and beneath it was said to be a nugget of gold, the color of warm butter.

Because of the fire and the struggle within the crucible, the alchemist said, a dark ugly thing was formed. Yet within it was gold.

The Dark Night Today

That’s sort of what the Dark Times of our lives can be like too. They seem so ugly and they hurt so much, but perhaps within them there is something important.

Perhaps they can be the stimulus to make a change that we need to make but were kept from making because of the inertia of life and daily responsibility. Perhaps within the ugly Lapis Niger, there can be a nugget of gold.

So when the Dark Night comes upon you. And they will come upon you if you are a sensitive and caring person. When your plans fail. When you are betrayed or scorned. When “someone done you wrong” and your optimism collapses, pause.

Before you lose hope, look at the circumstances of your life. Is the ugly thing you confront actually a Lapis Niger? Is there something within this time that you can learn from or be motivated by? Is the really a reversal, or is it a Dark Night of the Soul that will actually open to a future happiness.

The testimony of the mystic is that it often will be.

---
Service

Call to Worship (Jacob Boehme, On True Resignation)
A [person] must wrestle till the dark centre,
that is shut up close, break open,
and the spark lying therein kindle.

Chalice Lighting
Whatsoever things are true,
whatsoever things are honorable.
whatsoever things are just,
whatsoever things are pure,
whatsoever things are lovely,
whatsoever things are good,
if there is any virtue,
and if there be any praise,
think on these things.

Reading
from DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL, by St. John of the Cross (16th Century) This work is regarded by scholars as the summit of Spanish mysticism as well as one of the greatest works of Spanish literature.

STANZAS OF THE SOUL

1. On a dark night, Kindled in love with yearnings—oh, happy chance!—
I went forth without being observed, My house being now at rest.

2. In darkness and secure, By the secret ladder, disguised—oh, happy
chance!—In darkness and in concealment, My house being now at rest.

3. In the happy night, In secret, when none saw me,
Nor I beheld aught, Without light or guide, save that which burned in my
heart.

4. This light guided me More surely than the light of noonday To the place where he (well I knew who!) was awaiting me— A place where
none appeared.

5. Oh, night that guided me, Oh, night more lovely than the dawn,
Oh, night that joined Beloved with lover, Lover transformed in the
Beloved!

6. Upon my flowery breast, Kept wholly for himself alone,
There he stayed sleeping, and I caressed him, And the fanning of the
cedars made a breeze.

7. The breeze blew from the turret As I parted his locks;
With his gentle hand he wounded my neck And caused all my senses to be suspended.

8. I remained, lost in oblivion; My face I reclined on the Beloved.
All ceased and I abandoned myself, Leaving my cares forgotten among the lilies.

….
DURING the time, then, of the aridities of this night of sense ...spiritual persons suffer great trials, by reason not so much of the aridities which they suffer, as of the fear which they have of being lost on the road, thinking that all spiritual blessing is over for them and that God has abandoned them since they find no help or pleasure in good things…. they lose the spirit of tranquillity and peace which they had before. And thus they are like to one who abandons what he has done in order to do it over again, or to one who leaves a city only to re-enter it, or to one who is hunting and lets his prey go in order to hunt it once more. This is useless here, for the soul will gain nothing further by conducting itself in this way, as has been said.

Silent and Spoken Prayer
I have chosen a prayer today that sounds Christian, but it is not. The writer was the hindu poet Rabindranath Tagore. He was a member of Brahmo Samaj (the Unitarian form of Hinduism) and his reference to “Lord” and “King” is not to Jesus of Nazareth but to the concept of God in general. His words perfectly capture my theme of “Endarkenment” today.

Let us keep silence….

My God,

When the heart is hard and parched up, come upon us with a shower of mercy.

When grace is lost from life, come with a burst of song.

When tumultuous work raises its din on all sides
shutting us out from beyond, come to us, our lord of silence, with thy peace and rest.

When the beggarly heart sits crouched, shut up in a corner, break open the door, our king, and come with the ceremony of a king.

When desire blinds the mind with delusion and dust, O thou holy one, thou wakeful, come with thy light and thy thunder.

Show us the way. Amen.

Offertory (by Peyton Conway March)
There is a wonderful mythical law of nature that the three things we crave most in life -- happiness, freedom, and peace of mind -- are always attained by giving them to someone else.

Unison Closing
For we shall go out in joy, and return in peace;
The mountains and the hills before us shall burst into song,
And all the trees of the field shall clap their hands. (Isa. 55)