I remember one bitter day twenty years ago when all doors seemed to have been slammed in front of me, and my life-work seemed at an end. I had no money, nowhere to go but an unheated pidgeon-infested building owned by a friend in Dorchester — I’ll spare you the details. I wouldn’t mention this, except that I know that probably you have been somewhere like that, or you will be. You and I may be there again.
And that day I walked into the Boston Common, down the familiar foot-paths through the Public Garden to the swan pond. There was a dense fog — it shrouded everything, hiding anything that was more than a few feet away — it was perfectly surreal. I stood in the middle of the city of Boston, but, in place of the accustomed cityscape, I saw pure light. There, a visible realm so private I shared it only with a few ducks and swans — the layers of my outward life were stripped away. I can never forget that moment that fused the reality of light with that of mind and soul.
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Here is a truth we should learn in loss: that loss leaves us as it finds us, neither better nor worse. But it is in the stripping away of the not-us and of the transient accidents of our lives — that the deeper fog of our distorted perceptions can melt away.
I didn’t leave the Public Garden any more jubilant than I entered it, but I left it different. The loss, the fear, and the disappointed hope were still there, but there was something else more fundamental than any of these.
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It’s a season of light, but light isn’t always visible.
And light is more fundamental than timje and space.
Light is more fundamental, and it is everywhere. It’s just that we can’t see it. Particles of light — photons that surged from the origin of the Universe — are now spread everywhere.
The light that strikes the eye is known only through the energy it releases. We’ve learned from quantum physics that light interacts with what it strikes and creates new light. Pretty astounding.
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Why am I telling you this?
Because there is something more fundamental, more elemental, than what we can see or hear or taste. But sometimes we can know it.
You could say that even space and time, and matter and energy, are only manifestations of a some deeper mystery underlying them. And everywhere there is light.
There is an obvious parallel between light and consciousness — something that is equally mysterious to us. Neither light nor consciousness is quite part of the physical universe. Mystics, East and West, have long linked light and consciousness.
In Christian churches, this is known as the Advent season, and the first chapter of the Gospel of John is read. It speaks of the Word that was at the Beginning as a Light that shines in the dark, and the darkness has never overcome it, a Light that comes into the world and enlightens us. Images of light are everywhere, from the ancient Gnostics to the Hindu festival of lights, Diwali, last month.
The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation speaks of “the self-originated Clear Light, eternally unborn . . . shining forth within one’s own mind.” A great Sufi mystic [1] spoke of his experience of a light “gleaming in the Unseen. . . . I gazed at it continually, until the time came when I had wholly become that light.”
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The universal religious symbol light marks Hanukkah, too, which began last Wednesday and continues to next Thursday. The Hanukkah Menorah stands as a symbol for all those forces that, twenty-two hundred years ago, surged up within the human spirit and confronted a corrupt and oppressive regime that seemed immovable.
Generations later, some wise rabbis wanted a new symbol of liberation. They wouldn’t focus on those famous Hasmonean liberators, the Maccabees, because those great liberators had, in the end, actually betrayed them. They came up with a symbol whose central theme was something more essential, something less transient, than that Maccabean rebellion, because in the end, the rebellion, too, had failed, it had been corrupted.
They created a story about the eight-day festival that the triumphant Maccabees held when they won freedom so many generations before. It wasn’t so much about the Maccabees, but about a miraculous pot of oil that kept the Temple’s Menorah burning for eight nights even though there was enough oil only for one day.
They wanted to say that there is something more fundamental, more elemental about Life Itself, something at the heart of Being Itself that demands freedom, and justice, and wholeness, and fulfillment. Beyond any particular party or army or hero or cause, there is something elemental that yearns and strives and perseveres and never gives up or gives in.
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Emerson says that fire is the most compelling symbol of what we should be, “the sign of a robust, . . . burning, radiant soul.”
The light of fire seems to tell so much of our story, the ascent of life on earth. It’s the story of a marvelous light that has now created a marvelous creature unlike any other we know of: a creature with moral capacities and aspirations, with the light of consciousness, and with inconceivable creative powers, godlike powers for good — or for ill.
It has been fourteen or so billion years since this adventure, this experiment — got underway. The light exploded into the inconceivable darkness and all this universe was born, in a moment. Its first moments happened fast, if there is any point in talking about time in that inexpressible unfurling of being from potentiality.
But then a dramatic change in the pace. For millions of years there were only the simplest elements, hydrogen, helium, floating around before some more complex elements, like iron, began to show up. You woulda been bored, waiting for something to happen.
And then, it was billions of years before the next big thing, when the lighter elements formed stars,
and then the stars collapsed in on themselves and became supernovae
and from that came some more elements, heavier ones, like cobalt or nickel or copper or gold or uranium. You had to wait a long time for that!
Then, the scene shifts to swirling dust and water on an obscure planet. Once the hundred or so elements known to us came to exist, it took another billion years before the first living cells; and another billion, and there was photosynthesis.
From there, it wasn’t billions, but just mere millions of years that separated the appearance of bacteria that breathe oxygen, and then multicellular organisms and crustaceans, and then fish, and then dinosaurs. Those dinosaurs lasted for maybe 170 million years. And then there were mammals. And then: something utterly astonishing: consciousness.
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Now there’s a British scientist [2] who’s laid all these epochs of development out from the Big Bang to now as though it were the 108 floors of the World Trade Center. Which is at least a little bit spooky, because he published his work only three years before those towers became a dramatic symbol for sudden and monumental change. Kinda makes you tremble.
And the story up to this point has brought us to the top floor. The first living cell would have been at about the 25th floor, the dinosaurs on floors 104 to 107, and mammals wouldn’t come until 108, the top floor.
But there would be no homo erectus standing on two feet until a few inches from the roof on the top floor, and the Neaderthals with their bigger brains and tools wouldn’t come until the last quarter-inch and the Pharaohs would rule Egypt a fiftieth of an inch from the top, the Greek and Roman empires a hundredth of an inch above them. The Renaissance happens within less than the thickness of a layer of paint.
The whole of modern history would play out in the thickness of a microscopic bacterium.
The age of the microchip and the Internet and global warming — invisible to any but the most delicate of scientific instrument.
Here we are, tucked away in the tiniest of spaces in time, and it’s the scene of monumentally consequential events.
Things are happening fast. Ray Kurzweil, the Boston inventor, has said, “we won’t experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century — it will be approximately 20,000 years of progress (at today’s rate).” [3]
There’s a story astronomers tell. Once at an astronomy lecture somebody, looking very very worried, asked the speaker, “how long did you say it would be before the sun burns the Earth to a crisp?” And the lecturer says “six billion years,” and the questioner, looking awfully relieved, says “thank God for that, I thought you said six million.” At first some of this may seem just as blazingly irrelevant to our actual lives. [182]
Yes, but I’m talking about the next twenty years. Or the next one to six years. That’s how long the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says we have to turn ourselves around, though you will have to look at British and European newspapers to read very much about it, while the American media remain nearly silent on what is happening.
What we do today matters.
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Are we about to blow it all up, melt it all down? And so sometimes we get to thinking of the human presence as the problem, as a curse on the world’s life.
At a series of brilliant midweek conversations [5] I was a part of at Cambridge three or four years ago, we’d been talking about the difference between the peril and the possibility and it began really to sink in. I already understood the catastrophic consequences of what we’ve been doing to the natural world if we remain on our present course. What I hadn’t grasped is the magnitude and scope of the magnificent new order we’re capable of creating, right here, right now. We understand what is at risk right now and we tremble. We see the devastation we’re wreaking. Sometimes we’re tempted to think it really would be better if humans had never evolved out of that first light. What we have to see, and feel, and understand is that we can yet create a brilliant future. And that future calls on you to be a carrier of that light.
Because the light is everywhere, but you can’t see it until somebody, somewhere, embodies it, gives it form, translates that energy into something palpable and recognizable in this world. The light is hidden until somebody turns its energy to some new creation. And you are that light, 14 billion years later.
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We have come to a place that is absolutely without parallel in the journey of life. Think of where we are. Think of both the possibilities and the responsibilities that rest now in the hands of those who are conscious of who and where we are! Human consciousness shines with a radiance it’s never known before. And yet the downward pull of the old superstitions, fears, and hatred, and greed threatens the future of this human enterprise as never before. Still terrorists who think they’re doing God a favor can terrorize one of the world’s greatest cities and leave death and carnage and heartbreak and fear in their wake. Still the polar ice caps melt and the soot and greenhouse gases spew into the skies. Still terrible weapons proliferate. Still tribal and national pride overwhelm the sense of a single, interdependent family of life. And the consequences of that archaic mind are amplified a million times over by our technology.
And still we might be tempted to carry on as though no urgent call were summoning us to share a great work.
Think of what we are trying to do here: — what does it mean to you? It’s our shared journey into the realm of possibility. These times cry out for some great vision, some magnificent daring, some bold representation of human possibility. Right now this congregation is struggling with how to proceed, where to take hold. That work needs you. It asks of us our very best, without reservation. If I may say so, in a time like this — do we understand the significance of these days, of this time? — in a time like this, it is astonishing, isn’t it? — that we barely have enough funds to keep a bare-bones operation going. It’s time for a breakthrough conception of possibility and an accompanying depth of commitment to ignite this community of faith and vision. Isn’t it time — isn’t it time to bring our best gifts here, or to some community of enlightenment, and to hone those gifts, and refuse to give up?
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In a time that felt very dark indeed, our spiritual forebears faced the power of a paralyzing theology that resisted the advancing light of conscioussness, and they stood in the light, and for it, and they emancipated minds and hearts and, they eradicated slavery — and what they spoke into that darkness was light, and what they did in their time was light.
When I walk the Boston streets where the small, frail man we remember as William Ellery Channing once walked, I am breathless when I contemplate the change in consciousness that great man set in motion. His message was that we are godlike, we are not fallen sinners but sometimes erring expressions of that Immensity that he called God — except that we don’t know who we are.
In his time, superstition reigned, and slavery, and archaic, barbaric images of the universe and the divine. Mr. Channing saw beyond the horizon and his vision was infectious, and we are different people and our nation is different and our world because of his light.
Those who heard him learned to ask the questions no one had dared to ask; and they caught a vision of beauty that melted away the vengeful, parochial vision of the God who sent nations into war and whose pulpits taught his believers to hold slaves. In its place was planted an anthem that rang from the very depths of existence with all the sorrow and pathos, but it was a gentle sweet song of love and beauty that began a work of transformation. And the new strain was taken up and expanded and enriched by those he inspired.
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And today — when we grasp what is at risk — we tremble. Something has to change. It’s time for another revolution. But we have to wonder: is there enough time?
Prophets and seers have always seen beyond the present darkness. They’ve yearned and reached for a better day, a wiser, nobler human, a new development in human consciousness and culture — something they sometimes called the Kingdom of God. The gospel writer talks about a “Light that shines in the dark, and the darkness has never overcome it.”
In our moments of both private and public anguish, remember the light that is always, already everywhere.
And we ourselves are the most astonishing, the most powerful, the most potentially creative expressions of that light. Something creative is at work in the dark: only now, the next magnificent advance won’t “just happen.” The great power of human consciousness and the new culture we have got to create will now drive the continuing evolution of this world of life. Now it’s us who will create the future — we, in whom the Light is embodied and expressed.
We don’t have a lot of time. Does that scare you? Worry you? Leave you feeling: I’ve got enough to worry about already without the fate of the whole darned world of life! ?
Well, it kind of puts the meaning of our lives and the purpose of our days in a different light, doesn’t it?
It is not mere pulpit rhetoric to say that it is time for a spiritual revolution, a Revolution of Consciousness. It’s time, and, I believe, it’s the deepest meaning of these times.
Will we have the time? So here’s some good news:
Human consciousness advances when the old order no longer works.
The faster things get worse, the faster the new consciousness can come, if we want it. It can come like a great dawn that starts as a very gentle glow on the horizon.
We know what’s at risk and we tremble. The trembling is good. Once we’ve been shocked out of our embarrassment at talking about it we can take our place in the making of a new consciousness and a new culture.
Communities of enlightened consciousness — like Unitarian Universalist congregations — have got to be in earnest about this and grasp the power and consequences of what we’re doing.
The change will come when a changed, a larger, a more far-seeing consciousness, changes the culture. A culture is created wherever people come together — as we do, here. A spiritual community like this can create a new culture and change the culture around it. And that’s what’s it’s going take.
The spiritual quest is about grasping who and what and where we are, and what it is that moves and surges in us, yearns and strives in us, that Light of which we are expressions, that is everywhere, even in the dark.
Is it some ragtag army of farmer-priests in ancient Jerusalem? Is it Martin Luther King declaring that he has a dream, and a multitude of people who share it?
Maybe it’s you, not sure if there is really life after some heartbreak or loss, or facing something that must be called by every customary definition Failure, or maybe Success, but something in your gut calls you on, to take the next step, to speak the word or do the work only you can do.
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What is it that glows in these faces and enlightens these minds and fires these hearts? Can you see it here today lighting these faces?
That light is in you, and you — you — are the light of the world.
1 Abu’l-Hosian al-Nuri.
2 Peter Russell. Waking Up In Time. Novato, Calif.: Origin Press, Inc., 1998; reprinted from original title The White Hole in Time, Harper San Francisco, 1992.
3 Ray Kurzweil: Are We Spiritual Machines, Chapter 10: The Material World: “Is That All There Is?” Available at: http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?m=10
4 Martin Rees. Our Final Hour: A Scientist’s Warning. New York: Basic Books, 2003, p. 186.
5 At EnlightenNex.
READINGS:
Sampson Reed, Observations on the Growth of the Mind, 1826. A passage that deeply affected the young Waldo Emerson. [9-10]
The mind has attained an upward and onward look, and is shaking off the errors and prejudices of the past. . . . The loud call on the past to instruct us . . . comes back in echo from the future. . . . We appear to be approaching an age which will be the silent pause of merely physical force before the powers of the mind, the timid, subdued, awed condition of the brute, gazing on the erect and godlike [human form][form of man].
Aurobindo, The Life Divine
The appearance of a human possibility in a material and animal world was the first glint of some coming divine Light, the first far-off promise of a godhead to be born out of Matter. Out of the material consciousness in which our mind works as a chained slave is emerging the disk of a secret sun . . .
Man is himself a little more than an ambitious nothing. He is a littleness that reaches to a wideness and a grandeur that are beyond him, a dwarf enamoured of the heights. His mind is a striving, exulting, suffering, an eager passion-tossed and sorrow-stricken or a blindly and dumbly longing petty moment of the universal Life. His body is a labouring perishable speck in the material universe. This cannot be the end of the mysterious upward surge of Nature. There is something beyond, something that [human]kind shall be; it is see now only in broken glimpses through rifts in the great wall of limitations that deny its possibility and existence.
We speak of the evolution of Life in Matter, the evolution of Mind in Matter; but evolution is a word which merely states the phenomenon without explaining it. For there seems to be no reason why Life should evolve out of material elements or Mind out of living form, unless we accept the Vedantic solution that Life is already involved in Matter and Mind in Life because in essence Matter is a form of veiled Life, Life a form of veiled Consciousness.
If evolution is the progressive manifestation by Nature of that which slept or worked in her, . . . it is also the overt realization of that which [Nature] secretly is.