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Sermon on Self

My wife wanted me to explain to her what this service was about. It was difficult to
explain, because two people can have very different explanations for the same events.
The explanations can be even more different if people have different beliefs, or com
from different cultures. Now I'm not saying that my wife and I are from different
cultures! It's just that some of the ideas in this sermon are not from our culture. It all
starts with a simple story.

One day at work, I needed to have a good place to set up a conference call. My own
desk wasn't a good place, so I reserved our smallest conference call, because I was going
to be the only person on my end. When I got there, there were four people in the
conference room. Now, I had reserved that conference room, and they were, using our
company's term, "squatters." According to our corporate culture, I could simply walk in
and say, "I reserved this room," and they would apologize and leave. But instead, I chose
to let them continue their meeting, and I went off to another conference room, which
turned out was big enough for a large meeting and was in all ways better, but most
importantly from my point of view, it was empty. I just had to take a little walk to get
there.

I told this story to my son. He asked me why I didn't just kick the people in the reserved
conference room out. After all, they were in the wrong and I was in the right. So, I
needed to explain to him why what I did was the right course of action, at least from my
point of view.

He had the facts, but he needed the why, which is the cultural part. I told my son that the
reason I did what I did is that these people were my colleagues. They may have been in
the wrong, but that didn't really matter. What mattered was how to resolve the problem
in the best way. The best way for everyone was for the people in the larger group to stay
where they were and for me to move, because that involved fewer people being
inconvenienced. At nine years old, though, my son was still in the paradigm of right and
wrong, and clearly I was right and they were wrong. So I said, well, if I viewed us as
two groups, them and me, then that was true. But if I viewed it instead as us, then I'd
want to do what was right not simply for me, but for all of us, just like in our family we
do what's best for all of us, not just what's best for each individual. That explanation
made sense to him, I think especially because I used the idea of family.

When my wife asked me to explain my sermon to her, I quickly told her the story about
the conference room and Patrick, and then said how by changing my sense of self from
just me to me and the others of involved, the right course of action was clear. But she
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had another explanation. I did what I did out of empathy. I knew that the other people
had feelings, and I knew how they would feel, so I decided to go to the other conference
room so that they would be happier, and that would make me feel happy as well.

She was absolutely right, of course. I do have empathy for other people, and know that
other people are happy because of me does make me happier. But that's not the way I
was thinking about it as I walked to from one conference room to the other. I was
thinking in terms of an expanded sense of self, which included my colleagues at work.

I'm a little bothered by the idea of empathy. Of course, it's a wonderful virtue, but it
seems when we are empathetic, we act selfishly, in a way, because we want to feel
happy through making others happy. It's not that far away from guilt avoidance. We do
what's right because if we don't, we'll feel bad about it. I guess that's different though.
Feeling guilty isn't the same as feeling bad because you feel that you've hurt someone,
and their hurting hurts you too.

Enlightened self-interest is another way to explain why we are good to people. The idea
here is that being good to people is good for you, too. This is what drives
philanthropists. Philanthropy comes from the words philo and anthro. Philo means love,
and anthro means man, so philanthropy is the "love of man." We know that we are better
when the world is better, so perhaps the philanthropist is being a little selfish in his
giving, but maybe not. Maybe he's expanded his sense of self to all of humanity, and
then helping all humans is helping himself. Think Bill Gates here. But then, an a silly
sort of way, if you've identified yourself with all of humanity, then helping humanity is
helping yourself, which is by definitions selfish!

Yes, I'm kidding here. No one really thinks like that. We're more likely to act on our
beliefs of right and wrong, or on principles that we've learned. This is very strong in
Christianity, for example. "Love thy neighbor as thyself" is the second of the two great
commandments. The first, by the way is "love the lord your God with all your heart
mind and soul." When a disciple as Jesus, who is my neighbor, he tells the story of the
Good Samaritan, who helped the man he did not know when the man was robbed and
left to die on the road.

But for this service, I'm looking further east than the Middle East. I'm looking to India,
the birthplace of Buddhism, and to Vietnam, the birthplace of Thich Nhat Hanh, a Zen
Buddhist who has touched the West his explanations of Buddhism, and touched
humanity with his words and actions.

[Read p. 100: Not Two]

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In this reading by Thich Nhat Hanh, he allowed himself to merge himself with the child
in the picture. He entered into non-duality, "not two." That's a different sense of self, a
self which includes two human beings. It's perhaps a state which is not all that foreign to
us, the state when we feel very close to someone that we love.

The Buddha appears in many ways, but one of the most celebrated is that of the
Compassionate Buddha, or the Bodhisattva. The Bodhisattva is one who has attained
enlightenment, but remains on Earth for continued reincarnations in order to help others
to achieve enlightenment. I think that this is a natural aspect of enlightenment. An
enlightened individual has an expanded sense of self, and sees no difference between
himself and others. In a non-Western twist of logic, to achieve enlightenment, you
eliminate your separation from others. How then could you enter Nirvana and leave part
of yourself behind? Those other souls are as much you as you are, and of course you
must help them to become enlightened.

Just this past week, my son received a Genographic kit from the National Geographic
Society. With the kit, he swabs cells from inside his cheek, puts them in a little bottle
and sends them away in the mail. Sometime later, we'll get back information that will
tell him where is direct male line came from. And after that he'll do the same thing again
and find out what his direct female line is. They can do this because the study is
collecting theses samples from all over the world, especially in indigenous peoples, and
comparing genetic markers in the Y chromosome, for the male line, and in the
mitochondrial DNA for the female line. And he'll find out the particular set of migrations
that he his ancestors took out of Africa and eventually to Franklin, Massachusetts.

Of course, it's the route that's interesting. You don't need to swab your cheek to find your
earliest known direct male and direct female line ancestors. They're already known.
They both lived in Africa thousands of years ago, and though they themselves are
separated by thousands of years, one is the common male ancestor of all of us, and one
is the common female ancestor of all of us. The male's Y chromosome is found in all
living males, and all his direct line male ancestors. The female's mitochondrial DNA is
found in all living people, male and female. All the other lines that may have been
around when they were alive have died out. So we really are all related. We really are all
one family. I know that we all already know this, but it's something we should keep
reminding ourselves. All war really is brother against brother.

My son Patrick (remember Patrick?) asked me what Jerusalem was. I told him that it
was in the modern state of Israel, and that it was a holy city to three major world
religions. He said, "It must be the most peaceful place on Earth."
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Well, no, I said. In fact, there's a lot of fighting there. He had a hard time understanding
how that can be, and I can't blame him. It's ironic not only because one would expect a
holy place to be peaceful, but because the people that are fighting are actually very
closely related to each other. Religiously, the Arabs and the Jews both believe in a the
one god. The Koran tells many of the same stories that are in the Hebrew Scriptures.
Hebrew and Arabic are closely related languages, together forming the Semitic
language group, along with Aramaic. And yes, they are genetically related as well,
children of Abraham no not only theologically, but genetically.

In fact, in conflicts throughout the world and throughout history, the combatants have
more often than not been closely related. It's usually between those who are quite close
together, genetically, geographically and culturally. Some of the bloodiest fighting is
between two tribes or ethnic groups that outsiders could scarcely tell apart. Of course,
the problem is not how closely we all are or are not related to each other. The problem is
that we draw the lines of self, community, tradition, tribe, ethnic group, nation, or
culture much to small. We miss the big picture of how close we are each other because
we seem to concentrate only on our differences.

[Play Jerusalem]

Can we go beyond expanding the self beyond people?

[Read p. 96 "Flowers and Garbage" Stop before the "Manila" paragraph on p. 97]

Our world, too, is part of us, and we part of it. If we don't have cosmic consciousness,
we can at least have solar system consciousness! I talked about the relatedness of all
humans, but we are truly related to all life. Douglas Hofstadter, a computer scientist who
deals with symbols and representations, asked some biologists if the famous genetic
code in which all the amino acids have a three letter code made from a combination of
four letters, ATCG, is the only possible code. In other words, when the coding system in
our DNA was put together, could DNA representation have been done using different
letter sequences to represent each amino acid. The answer turned out to be that yes, it
could have been a different code. The only thing that mattered is that there was code so
that that information could be stored.

The interesting thing is, we've collected DNA from every sort of plant, animal and
microbe, all over the world, and all of them use the same code. Mildew, elephants,
bananas, blue-green algae, mushrooms and the bacteria that give people staph infections
all use exactly the same code, or in some rare cases, a slightly expanded version that can
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be attributed to an evolution of the original code. But what this means that all life that is
around today descended from a single organism that use the same code that makes all
the cells in our bodies work. That's not to say that life didn't come about more than once,
just that if it did, only one of those beginnings survived, perhaps through just being out-
competed. Now our common human ancestors are only about two thousand generations
back and 50 millions years ago, and life is about three billion years old, but its still a
fantastic connection.

[Read p. 103: The Sun My Heart]

When I was in college, I meditated quite a bit. The particular meditation group I was in
assumed that we had all already opened up our first five chakras, so we meditated on our
sixth chakra, the third eye, located between your two eyes and a little above, on the
forehead. The seventh chakra is actually on the top of the head. We didn't meditate on
that one. It's the one associated with cosmic consciousness, and it was assumed that no
one in our group was ready for that!

One time while meditating, I had a vision. Now, you're not supposed to have a vision
when you meditate. You're supposed to clear your mind of all thoughts and imaginings. I
guess what I was having could have been a dream, but I did not have the feeling of being
asleep in a dream. But whatever it was that happened to me, it had a profound effect on
me.

In my vision, I saw myself in the lotus position, which is how I meditated back then,
with my hand on my side. But in my right hand, I held a blue ball. It had no weight or
feel to it, but it seemed solid and full, like glass. And somehow I knew that it was the
entire universe. And not just the entire universe, but the totality of all space and all time.
It was unchangeable, because it encompassed all changes. And it was perfect. It needed
no changes. And though I was holding it, I knew that really I was a part of it, all of me,
including all my past and all my future, and it was not external to me.

The vision went away after a bit, but the feeling of peace and the rightness of the world
did not. Somehow, though, the universe seemed to not be so big, to not be at all scary,
and to be in its own way very delicate. And I loved it.
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We're not just dependent on the Earth and sun. The elements of life include things that
didn't exist in the early universe. They were forged in stars that died before our solar
system was even formed. And I don't have to tell you that absolutely everything existed
in the form a of a single particle some fifteen billion years ago. A single particle which
popped into existence due to a quantum vibration, and then exploded into what would
become hour universe. Everything since then has been about differentiation and
dispersion, but that doesn't mean that it wasn't all just one thing. And it doesn't mean
mean that it still isn't all just one thing, if you realize that all the splitting up really
occurs in our minds trying to sort things out, rather than anything else. From dust you
were made and dust you shall be. Give yourself enough perspective and there really isn't
any separation. It's all just a blue ball, and it's perfect the way it is.

[Do a meditation]

In relax, out smile.......

Visualize......self.....family.....friends.....community.....nation.....world of people.... world

of life .... world - the Earth ..... The sun and solar system ... the past ... people and history
.... the past .... animals and plants .... the past .... the first life ... the past .... the early stars
forging the elements ..... the past .... the start of it all ....

[Play Beautiful City]

[Please Call Me by my True Names, Being Piece, p 66-67]