Secular Americans more politically engaged than evangelicals

 

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The dawning and the search

This is a course in miracles. It is a required course. Only the time you take it is voluntary. Free will does not mean that you can establish the curriculum. It means only that you can elect what you want to take at a given time.

Schucman, Dr. Helen. A Course in Miracles (p. 90). Foundation for Inner Peace. Kindle Edition. 

There are many resources to nurture one’s interior spiritual life. A Course in Miracles is one of them. Having been born, life is a required course and we can learn from it or not. Socrates said that an unexamined life is not worth living. How many people do you know that live examined lives? 

Some people learn from their experience some of the time, and some people do not learn from their experience some of the time, but when people become highly stressed and have hit bottom they sometimes start to search for a better way to live their lives and they begin a search. When a person wonders if there is a better way, it is called “the dawning.” It dawns on them that there might be a better way to live. This dawning then leads to the second phase which is called “the search”. 

In Unitarian Universalism one of the seven principles is the free and responsible search for truth and meaning. Once one decides to embark on the search for truth and meaning and live an examined life, the interior spiritual life begins in an intentional and significant way. Welcome, along on our journey on Nurturing One’s Interior Spiritual Life. What has brought you here?

The witness and Love

THE MAIN PRINCIPLE of A Course in Miracles, and key to the peace of God, is this: “Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists.” Love is the all-encompassing reality of God and thus can have no opposite. The absence of love, which is fear, is mere illusion. Love is the only eternal truth, while fear is a hallucination of the mortal mind.

Williamson, Marianne. The Law of Divine Compensation: On Work, Money, and Miracles (The Marianne Williamson Series) (p. xi). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition. 

A Course In Miracles is based on a non dual philosophy. “God” is the All. God is the ocean. Everything else are droplets. Human beings and the phenomena we call “life” are merely projections we humans have made up and are temporary illusions which come and go like the shadows in Plato’s cave.

The separation which begins for each of us at birth fills us with fear of punishment for separating ourselves from our home. We, whether we are aware of it or not, are always yearning to get back home where there is peace and happiness. 

The lessons of life occur to help us to remember from whence we have separated ourselves as separate selves and to which we are destined to return. What is required for the return is the giving up of the separate self we have created and struggle to maintain. This separate self is named the “ego”. 

As real as the ego seems to us, it is only a temporary illusion with which we play as we attempt to learn our lessons and remember, deep down, what we are made of.

What am I without my ego? No body. No feelings. No thoughts. No personality. No social status. No possessions. The “witness” is the part of ourselves that can watch our body change, our thoughts change, our feelings arise and subside, our earthly circumstances come and go and change in what seems like willy nilly ways. We can make all the money in the world and accumulate the most precious possessions and when we die we can’t take any of it with us. So what is this witness that can watch all these changes in our experience of our ego? What do you call this part of consciousness?

According to A Course In Miracles once we give up all the illusions of our ego and ego itself what is left is only Love which has no opposite.

As the Buddhist monk said to the hot dog vendor, "Make me one with everything."

The moral compass is based on wisdom

The moral compass is what the Stoics called "wisdom." Wisdom comes from experience as we learn the hard way the difference between right and wrong which is based on what works or doesn't work which is based on what gets the desired and compared to the unwanted outcome. In other words, we all are working, whether we know it or not, on our Ph.D. from the University of Hard Knocks.

The moral compass is provided by the "wise elder" or what the stoics called a "sage". Do you know any sages? There are a few on this list who contribute from time to time. A sage is also sometimes called a "mensch" in yiddish.

As Bob Dylan sang "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows." but a sage or a mensch knows if you need help.

Forgiveness is the path out of polarization

 There can be a big difference between validation and agreement.

A wise person doesn't believe everything they think.

It is a fool's errand to attempt to change what another person believes unless they ask for help. People usually only change their beliefs if circumstances require it for a more desirable outcome.

As they say in AA, "Don't be taking other people's inventory. Focus on your own."

As one grows in spiritual maturity, one realizes that trying to change another person's beliefs is a form of judgment and attack. As changing minds is a form of judgment and attack, the wise person gives up the effort. As the Buddhist's say, "It is what it is." No amount of talking or communication is going to change the person's perceptions, projections, and beliefs unless and until they are open to it.

The spiritual practice which allows a person to stop arguing and defending or advocating for what they think is the truth is called "forgiveness." Forgiveness is being willing to give up making other people and circumstances responsible for your unhappiness. As it says in A Course In Miracles, "Would you rather be right or be happy?"

Politics as a spiritual practice.

It is a skill of Spiritual Intelligence to become aware of, appreciate, acknowledge, our fundamental interdependence, that we are all in this thing called "life" together. Moving beyond the developmentally appropriate narcissism of a child is necessary if humanity and other living things are to survive on this planet and in the universe. To become aware that we are not alone on this planet or in the universe is a sign of spiritual maturity.

Government is an expression of and a means of managing this necessary aspect of our social system in which we all participate whether we are consciously aware of it and acknowledge it or not. Rarely do we think of politics as a spiritual practice and yet even if we are not aware of it, our participation in democratic institutions can be a spiritual practice if the intention is to benefit all of humanity. How do you support democratic institutions whose mission is to create a better world for the benefit of all?

Gratitude: The Heart Of Unitarian Universalism

 

Back in the Spring of 2007 the UU World published a feature article entitled The Heart Of Our Faith by Rev. Dr. Galen Guengerich the senior pastor at All Souls Church in New York City. The article was based on a sermon that Rev. Dr. Guengerich had given at All Souls on October 15, 2006.

Rev. Dr. Guengerich writes in part:

The feeling of awe emerges from experiences of the grandeur of life and the mystery of the divine. We happen upon a sense of inexpressible exhilaration at being alive and a sense of utter dependence upon sources of being beyond ourselves. This sense of awe and dependence should engender in us a discipline of gratitude, which constantly acknowledges that our present experience depends upon the sources that make it possible. The feeling of obligation lays claim to us when we sense our duty to the larger life we share. As we glimpse our dependence upon other people and things, we also glimpse our duty to them. This sense of obligation leads to an ethic of gratitude, which takes our experience of transcendence in the present and works for a future in which all relationships—among humans, as well as between humans and the physical world—are fair, constructive, and beautiful.

Rev. Dr. Guengerich had a book published in May of 2020 entitled “The Way Of Gratitude: A New Spirituality For Today.”