You know — people come to places like this — to get — spirituality. And spirituality — this mysterious substance is supposed to have something to do — at least in most of the spiritual writings of the world-with losing the self, extinguishing or at least reigning in the ego.

You may have heard Margaret Fuller's description of her great moment of spiritual enlightenment. "I saw," she said, "that there was no self: . . . that it was only because I thought self real that I suffered; that I had only to live in the idea of the all, and all was mine."

Margaret Fuller? No self? Huh? Was ever there a more commanding presence in all American life than Margaret Fuller? No self — Margaret Fuller — who was, in her time, the smartest person alive, according to many; who was the first literary critic in any American newspaper, the feminist who wrote the ground-breaking and earth-shaking Woman in the Nineteenth Century, who in the 1840s went to Rome to report the Italian revolution for the New York Tribune and joined the revolutionary army that tried to break the Pope's political control of Italy, Margaret Fuller of whom there are paintings depicting her teaching classes in revolutionary thought in the Papal Palace before the Pope managed to drive the revolutionaries out and regain his house? No self? What bigger self could there be? No self? Margaret Fuller said this?

I mention this because we seem to have a spiritual conflict here. You keep hearing spiritual language about the end of the self, the self as obstacle. Doesn't Emerson say:

"The weakness of the will begins when the individual would be something of himself." And elsewhere he wrote, "I am nothing."

And yet, out of this spiritual tradition of ours, comes Emerson's essay "Self-Reliance:"

"Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.

"Insist on yourself; never imitate."

What is going on here? If I think I'm gonna develop a "spiritual life," does that mean losing myself and becoming a cipher, or going off and disappearing into a cave? Well, intuitively, we're pretty sure that won't work. That would never work for Unitarian Universalists, and I think that's because intuitively we know it's a pretty bad idea. Besides, our history has too many giant figures to show us otherwise.

Much of the world's spiritual wisdom makes a big mistake about ego. Says you aren't supposed to have any. And so it romanticizes children. Infants are supposed to be the most spiritual of all because they haven't developed a self or ego yet.

Does the developing and deepening of spiritual life mean forcing people to submerge and drown their personal aspirations and precious, hard-won individuality? To not be anybody in particular?

It is hard to get this right. Very few have.

Two who have gotten it right were, first, the greatest religious mind of the nineteenth century and perhaps of any era, the American Unitarian Emerson, and before him, Channing.

Channing — William Ellery Channing, in many ways the founder of American Unitarianism — called it self-culture. The cultivating and growing of the Self. Now think about it.

The point isn't to get rid of the self, but to cultivate it and develop it until it becomes something more than you thought it was. And here is where so much spiritual teaching fails; — glorifies anything that is pre-conscious like the innocence of an infant who actually isn't spiritually developed at all and wouldn't have a clue how to make an ethical decision or have compassion.

But remember this. The individual self is a spectacular development in the evolution of life. What was before ego? Was it something better, holier? Ken Wilbur reminds us: "Prior to the ego was not angels but apes; and prior to that, worms; and prior to that, ferns; and to that, dirt. The ego was not a Fall down from Ground, but a major step up" and toward the realization of our human possibility and beyond that to a superconscious state that a few seem to have achieved and that one day maybe many will achieve.¹

In ancient cultures, the elimination of self was sometimes considered a pretty swell idea. You were supposed to sacrifice your personal will and aspirations and individuality, slay your soul on the altar of the collective ego. You certainly didn't insist on yourself; you conformed, absolutely. And a collective egoism is no more a god to be worshipped than the ego of the individual, and in fact, is probably uglier and far more barbarous, as we find out in times of war and genocide, — or — in popular prejudices and bigotries that no individual would even have thought of.

No, spirituality isn't about regressing.

It is about evolving.

It a stronger and finer self, a more inclusive self that opens up to a great Beyond.

You could say it's the difference between self with a lower-case s and Self with a capital S.

First, self with a lower-case s, good ole ego. It is a construction of fear and defenses. Its supporting walls are the expectations of society, the collective ego. Its morality is laws you aren't supposed to transgress. Its fuel is an unquenchable hunger for validation. Parasite-like, this hunger sucks the surrounding environment dry.

We know that is the root of our problems, our greed, our cruelty, our willful ignorance of the things we don't want to know, our desire to diminish another so we can elevate ourselves. We know this ego, this self with a lower-case s, has got to go. But how? By eliminating our individual selfhood?

And that is the great insight of Mr. Emerson.

This ego, this self with a lower-case s — is a step forward in our human evolution and development. But there is a step beyond. And you can't get there without first becoming an individual self or ego.

There is another sense of Self, with a Capital S. And that is what his essay "The Over-Soul" is all about, and it is also what "Self-Reliance" is about.

The key to it all is another s-word, which he uses over and over, and it is Soul. Your soul an opening to a larger Soul, the Soul of All, the Over-Soul.

He writes:

"[An individual person] is the facade of a temple wherein all wisdom and all good abide." And the really important thing isn't "what we commonly call man, the eating, drinking, counting man" — that isn't it —,

"but the soul, whose organ he is, (which, if he would let it appear through his action), would make our knees bend. When it breathes through his intellect, it is genius; when it breathes through his will, it is virtue; when it flows through his affection, it is love. . . . All reform aims in some one particular to let the soul have its way through us. . . ." [the Over-Soul]

And this:

"Here is the fountain of action and of thought. Here are the lungs of that inspiration which [gives us] wisdom. We lie in the lap of immense intelligence, which makes us receivers of its truth and organs of its activity. When we discern justice, when we discern truth, we do nothing of ourselves, but allow a passage to its beams."

We live within a vast Mystery, an Intelligence capable of evolving life and intelligence and human consciousness, and we are expressions of it.

Yet we sense that we have gotten into trouble.

For one thing, it's about that self-image we have. An image that isn't innate at all, but develops in the course of our interactions with the world, significant other people, our bodily life. We invent a self-image and then get attached to it, and we think that that is who and what we are.

We constructed this personality to get through the day and through our lives. And in every situation of life still, we pull out these mental structures and images. We face life out of what we have know.

But that kind of knowledge is knowledge only of the past.

I think I know you, and I think I know myself, but I really only what you have been, what I have been. I know situations that have arisen in the past: challenges, possibilities — but my knowledge is of the past, and therefore reactive, forced, not very responsive to what is really happening. I am tightly packed in a bunch of clutter. What I see from here is sort of like what Yeats was talking about in that poem — the demons have held a bitter glass over my eyes and when I gaze into it, I am filled with weariness, and the ravens of unresting thought.

But Walt Whitman speaks of his life differently:

You road I enter upon and look around, I believe you are not all that is here,

I believe that much unseen is also here.
I inhale great draughts [drafts] of space,
The east and the west are mine, and the north and the south are mine.

I am larger, better than I thought,
I did not know I held so much goodness.

Whitman has got it right — the basic nature of Mind is space, the other s-word, space, unstructured and open, and life an open road.

What is it to be spacious and open to whatever arises in the space around us and within?

But that space is cluttered with the mental structures we use to define ourselves and the world out there too. We are restricted in how we can respond and how much we can develop. We're attached to certain patterns while other possibilities continue to elude us.²

Beyond this clutter is some spacious Essence, something mystics and poets and psychological thinkers have spoken of in pretty much all cultures and times. Rumi speaks of the "Friend" or the "Beloved." Kabir speaks of the "Guest." Lao-Tse speaks of the "Tao." For Emerson it's the Soul, or the Over-Soul.

I wonder if you feel you have lost your way there.

And we go looking for what we have lost — out there.

But because what we have lost is not out there — was never really out there — but is in here, essential to us — it is never really lost at all. We have only to clear away the clutter, experience the spaciousness beyond the emptiness, to find our way home. It is always, already, here.

And when we trace the lines of our hurt, the structures of our rigidity, we will find the ways we once tried to fill a hole in ourselves. If I feel a lack of love, it isn't really that I need somebody to love me, but that, when I was very young, my own love was not seen and recognized and affirmed, and so I invented personality structures to take the place of something I believed missing, looks like love, sounds like love, though maybe a tad desperate, a tad solicitous, and it never seems quite authentic. Or maybe I stuff stubborness in the hole where I can't find my strength. Or maybe it's the essential quality of compassion, or will, that I think I've lost, and I've made up structures that look like it to fill the space, — kinda fakin' it, a near-life experience.

Maybe we are afraid of what we may become. So long we have inhabited this image of ourselves, this habitual pattern. I suppose even a refrigerator carton in the park can begin to feel like the only safe haven if that's been your home long enough — and you're afraid to leave it.

There are holes in our wholeness What if we approach the holes in our wholeness with an accepting awareness, find that repressed aspect of our self, that emptiness or lack or absence in ourselves — what then?

The hole in your wholeness contains, not simply your repressed past, but the emptiness on the edge of a future potential.

And when we examine our defenses against past memories and hurts, we open ourselves to the emergence of a new future, because the same defenses screen out both the old hurts and the future growth and development of the Self that flows from Beyond.³

When we retrace the path away from these lost but essential qualities of ourselves, let ourselves see those patterns of compulsion and inauthenticity that we have put in their place — if we dare go far enough — we might feel ourselves in some kind of void, a sense of emptiness, and it might scare us. Yet that is the place to start. Because there, the false constructs of ourselves, the self-image, the near-life experience — begin to melt away. Let them go.

I did not say this is not a scary journey. It might be scary when things you have relied on — melt. And for such a journey, you are likely to need a community of journeyers.

But what is at work in us is something more than the brittle fabrication called ego driven by its compulsions devouring like a great hunger walking about, conducting life, managing life after the specifications of our fears, our rigid expectations, the safety of our previous experiences.

We had to go there, we had to be that — to become more. This Soul in us, and in which we exist — unfolds and creates with the strength and originality of the very engine of Life Itself, following a design you could not have seen, but which flows from the mind of Being Itself.

And if you dare go there, you might find yourself in a very spacious place. Because beyond the Void, there comes that Spaciousness.

Like the spiritual act of meditating, when we cease our obsessions, let go the ravens of unceasing thought, there is a spiritual art to clearing the space of junk and clutter, rigid self-image and habitual response, and letting arise something fresh, something original, something quietly thundering a freshness and a power that flows from the Immensity Beyond Silence.

Before the Space, the Emptiness, when we've cleared the junk away. To be there in the void — would that be terrifying?

But —

It is out of the profoundest darkness of those places called a vacuum state, that this universe gives birth to the stars, and the universe is a roaring engine of creativity. And Life Itself is a roaring engine of creativity. Mystics have always understood that.

But then, what is nothingness? What would that be? A quantum vacuum is not quite nothing; there is a ground state of energy there, and a little fluctuation of energy can become matter. Being precedes becoming. Are you confused? If you are not, you are smarter than Einstein and an awful lot smarter than me.

And a vacuum state is full of energy. The nothingness is full of potential somethingness. Stars suddenly appear out of the darkness. And out of the emptiness of our lives, we give birth to magnificent somethingness.

And soon enough, you can begin to feel a delicious somethingness, full of something utterly transcendent, and it can make your life new.

And where can we locate this Space, this powerful creative nothingness full of somethingness? Where do you start?

Some ancient gnostic teacher, name of Monoimus, said:

"Abandon the search for God and the creation and other matters of a similar sort. Look for God by taking yourself as a starting point. Learn who it is within you who makes everything her own and says, 'My God, my mind, my thought, my soul, my body.' Learn the sources of sorrow, joy, love, hate. If you carefully investigate these matters you will find him, her, in yourself."

The Tao de Ching says, "Without going outside, you may know the whole world. Without looking through the window, you may see the ways of heaven."

Beloved, gaze in thine own heart. Gaze under the junk you find around the surface. Look at see.

There, in that silent Space inside your heart and mind and you bodiliness, too — is the manifestation of an intelligent creative process that reaches back to the birth of the stars. And we are all held in that web of life, and we are all manifestations of it, and the deep wells that sustain us spring from places we cannot comprehend. There is the wondrous fruition of 15 billion years of the living, intelligent Universe's creation, circuits and systems of 10 billion neurons and the architecture of their synapses, memory and consciousness and sensation, evolving, gathering richness and brilliance, weaving the story of life into your humanity, our humanity. You will know this Space where you now stand as it is: a far greater ocean into which opens each of our personal wells of existence. You will find energies of healing and new creation.

And then we will rise, each of us, each with a fire in our eyes and a quiet power in our presence and a grace in our loving-all alive and aglow with a destiny our own — each of us an unrepeatable and indispensable expression of the Soul of All, each a fresh witness for truth, each an opening to the Light, shining as the sun.

¹ Wilber, Eye of Spirit, 369.

² I am indebted here to John Davis, The Diamond Approach: An Introduction to the Teachings of A.H. Almaas. Boston and London: Shambhala, 1999, esp. pp. 62ff.

³ Language suggested by Wilbur, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution. Boston: Shambhala, 1995, p. 366.

⁴ Ken Wilbur. Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, p. 282.

Readings

Words of Doris Lessing, in Shikasta: looking back from a far distant century on the remains of what was once called Earth:

Forced back and back upon herself, himself; bereft of comfort, security, denuded of belief in "country," "religion," "progress" — stripped of certainties, there is no Shikastan who will not let her eyes rest on a patch of earth, perhaps no more than a patch of littered and soured soil between buildings in a slum, and think: Yes, but that will come to life, there is enough power there to tear down this dreadfulness and heal all our ugliness — a couple of seasons, and it would all be alive again.

This, then, is the condition of Shikastans now ... Nothing they handle or see has substance, and so they repose in their imaginations on chaos, making strength from the possibilities of a creative destruction. they are weaned from everything but the knowledge that the universe is a roaring engine of creativity. . .

William Butler Keats, The Two Trees

In 1892 Yeats penned these words inspired by the sight of two trees, one leafy and full of colorful flowers so that, as its leafy head shook in the breeze it seemed even to give light and music; the other tree all barren and broken; and it is about what grows in our minds and hearts, and how it grows, and where me must turn, where to start.

The Two Trees.

Beloved, gaze in thine own heart -

The holy tree is growing there;

From joy the holy branches start

And all the trembling flowers they bear.

The changing colors of its fruit

Have dowered the stars with merry light;

The surety of its hidden root

Has planted silent in the night;

The shaking of its leafy head

Has given the waves their melody,

And made my lips and music wed

Murmuring a wizard song for thee.

There the Loves a circle go -

The flaming circle of our days,

Gyring, spiring, to and fro

In those great ignorant leafy ways;

Remembering all that shaken hair

and how the winged sandals dart,

Thine eyes grow full of tender care:

Beloved, gaze in thine own heart.

Gaze no more in the bitter glass

The demons, with their subtle guile

Lift up before us when they pass

Or only gaze for a little while;

for there a fatal image grows

That the stormy night receives,

Roots half hidden under snows,

Broken boughs and blackened leaves.

For all things turn to barrenness

In the dim glass the demons hold,

The glass of outer weariness

Made when God slept in times of old.

There, through the broken branches, go

The ravens of unresting thought;

Flying, crying, to and fro,

Cruel claw and hungry throat,

Or else they stand and sniff the wind

And shake their ragged wings; alas!

Thy tender eyes grow all unkind:

Gaze no more in the bitter glass.

We look outside ourselves for the resources we need. At times we do so desperately. A joke in the recovery movement goes, "You know you're codependent when you're dying and somebody else's life passes in front of you."

Meditation