READING

Our reading this morning is a meditative reading from Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now, A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment: He writes: "The Buddha taught that even your happiness is dukkha – a Pali word meaning ‘suffering' or ‘unsatisfactoriness.' It is inseparable from its opposite, unhappiness. This means that your happiness and your unhappiness are in fact one. Only the illusion of time separates them.
This is not being negative. It is simply recognizing the nature of things, so that you don't pursue an illusion for the rest of your life. Nor is it saying that you should no longer appreciate pleasant or beautiful things or conditions. But to seek something through them that they cannot give – identity, a sense of permanency and fulfillment – is a recipe for frustration and suffering. The whole advertising industry and consumer society would collapse if people became enlightened and no longer sought to find their identity through things. The more you seek happiness in this way, the more it will elude you. ...
Things and conditions can give you pleasure, but they will also give you pain. Things and conditions can give you pleasure, but they cannot give you joy. Nothing can give you joy. Joy is uncaused and arises from within as the joy of Being. It is an essential part of the inner state of peace,
the state that has been called the peace of God. It is your natural state, not something that you need to work for or struggle to attain. ...
A Buddhist monk once told me: ‘All I have learned in the twenty years that I have been a monk I can sum up in one sentence: ‘All that arises passes away. This I know.'‘ What he meant, of course, was this: I have learned to offer no resistance to what is; I have learned to allow the present moment
to be and to accept the impermanent nature of all things and conditions. Thus I have found peace."

So ends the reading.

SERMON

I have learned that in the worst situations, the best that I can do is simply to be present, be with someone else. There is nothing I can say to take away someone else's pain, nothing I can do. I can offer my empathy, my sadness for another; I can feel their sadness, but I cannot make it go away,
and I can't really even help someone cope with it better – those skills always come from the inside
of the other person. Time and the on-flow of life often seem to be the only hope, and yet, sometimes, time doesn't help that much. And for some people, in the midst of one crisis, even more bad and difficult things occur.
Eckhart Tolle in his book, The Power of Now, says that those who are in psychological pain,
those who are suffering, are only one step away from enlightenment, whether they know it or not. (He believes the psychic pain from major diseases and terminal illnesses also places us close to inner enlightenment, as well, but I'm going to focus more this morning on the pain that comes to us from the difficulties and sometimes harshness of life events.) He says that if someone were to sit with their pain, feel it, not judge it, let it be, go inside it, it would eventually lift and the light that lies within each of us would come forward, and, in the release of the pain, the mental anguish, that person would feel true peace, they would be in contact with their essence, their inner Being, their true self, the real self that is always present and available. They would no longer identify themselves with their pain. This doesn't mean the causes of our unhappiness go away, bad and difficult things will continue to happen – it just means that their usual deep effect upon us would not find such a willing recipient.
Mental pain, pain created by our minds, cannot remain in the presence of our true consciousness, and our true consciousness, our real essence, exists in the NOW, whereas our pain is always connected with past events and worrying about the future. I'm not saying, though, that we shouldn't feel pain – that we shouldn't mourn or grieve deaths and other great losses, it's just that there is a way for us to eventually release that pain. This may sound awfully philosophical to some of you, and maybe even a bit cold. Pain is pain, suffering is suffering, anger is anger, hate is hate –
these emotions don't feel very ephemeral, very easily lifted, when they attack, especially when they are connected to real and difficult events in our lives.
It sounds like Tolle is asking us to be saints in the presence of the sometimes ruinous events of our real lives, enter into the pain and let it go .... find inner peace ... feel the inner light of our being... become enlightened.
(By the way, I can't really define enlightenment either – I admit that I have not quite attained that state. But enlightenment, in the Buddhist sense, and in most religious ideas, is a state where we function at a level connected with our deepest selves, and perhaps something outside ourselves as well, knowing that there is a deeper sense of existence than what appears on the surface.)
The Power of Now is a mystical book – and Tolle admits that he can't describe or define precisely what he means by our Being, for to describe it, is to put it into terms of the mind and, therefore, to lose it. Very convenient, a scientist might say, how can we study or analyze that? To which Tolle responds, enigmatically, that we are not our minds, or certainly not our minds alone, we just think we are. He points out, quite simply, that nothing else on earth, as far as we know, goes around worrying and lamenting the way we do. And the fact that we can't see the obviousness of the beauty of our inner Being – the fact, he believes, that we each contain the essence of whatever it is that is holy or infinite – keeps us stuck inside our huge mental dramas that constantly define and redefine
what we think would make us happy, when in fact, we are drowning in our own misery and despair,
a creation largely of our egos. And you know what I mean – the kind of thinking that there is always something else, something more, something better, somewhere way out there – just beyond the horizon, that if we could just get THERE we would be finally happy. But we have, in other words, defined who we are only by what we can think, and we consider that consciousness, whereas our real consciousness, if we could sense it, is this deeper awareness of our Being which does not change no matter what befalls us. Even if you do not believe in the mysterious or mystical idea of having an inner light within you (or even without you), there is a timeless wisdom to what Tolle says about learning to be present in the Now, feeling and appreciating this very moment and knowing that what is, simply is.

Meditation and prayer, such as centering or heart prayer, teach us to release our thoughts and to learn to sit with just the sensations in our body, and then to feel even those lift ... being only present in the now, what is left, then, is our inner light vibrating within us, Tolle says. To believe this does require a leap of faith for some – it is spiritual or mystical, and yet, Tolle's description is one of the most accessible ways I've heard about or read of someone trying to describe enlightenment. The most interesting thing, too, is that Tolle says we don't have to try and try, study and study – that these, in fact, often keep us from finding it – that it's something we can learn to experience on our own – feel the essence of our Being. The reason this is true, he says, is for the obvious reason that if it exists within us, it always exists, in this moment and in the next; it doesn't come because we pray or meditate really hard – it just is, and it is there for all people as well as all creatures and things.

There are several premises, underlying assumptions, or truths, depending upon your proclivity to agree or disagree, to Tolle's thought. The major premise is that everything is filled with Being,
all matter, all people, all living things, that everything vibrates with the same light on some level, and therefore, we are all truly the same, in that we all contain this inner essence – in effect, we all contain god or spirit and can actually sense this if we allow ourselves to truly enter into the present moment,
the only real moment that exists.
There are several ways to look at Tolle's spiritual explanation of the now that are helpful, even if you don't buy the existence of an essence within each of us. In a most profound way, he is saying that we are all the same and that we are all connected. We could look at this as the reason we, Unitarian Universalists, subscribe to the inherent worth and dignity of every person. Every person contains something, their humanity, that includes them in our first principle. Many, many people will ask what about evil and people who do truly bad and evil things .... we may not want to honor them
with inherent worth and dignity. First, that's not what our first principle says, although you may not agree with it. Tolle's explanation of evil and badness is that most of us are not truly conscious, truly aware of who we are and who others are, in any given moment. People are trapped by their minds
and act out of fear, often creating havoc for themselves and others. He would not say let the criminal go free, but he would say that even the worst offender has a spark within him or her that could set
them free from their inner torment. After all, trees and flowers, rocks and water, dogs and cats, deer and centipedes have this spark, why not any human or anything upon this earth or in the vast heavens?
This universal sense of light also gives us the spiritual basis for why we are connected in the vast web of interdependence, which we also say we promote in our principles. Philosophically or theologically, this is the most appealing part of Tolle's thinking for me – he neatly takes what I do believe in, the principle that we all possess worth and dignity, the reason our religious ancestors fought for universal salvation and a loving god – a deep understanding that beliefs and outward religions wouldn't exclude anyone from worth or heaven – and by the simple observation that this spark is within everyone and everything, we have created for us the full circle, which makes up the interdependent web of existence of which we are all a part.

Russell DiCarlo writes in the forward of the book that the myth that we are separate from each
other, nature and the cosmos – "the myth of "other than me" has been responsible for wars, the rape of the planet, and all forms and expressions of human injustice. After all," DiCarlo says, "who in their right mind would harm another if they experienced that person as a part of themselves." Somehow we are connected.
A few weeks ago, one of our members stood up during candles of community and asked us all to raise our hands, close our eyes and send him prayers and positive thoughts for his upcoming surgery. He's back and doesn't know yet what the outcome will be, but prayers do tend to help, to heal, according to some researchers. This may be because there is a form of reality that we still don't understand. What connects quantum particles across many miles, which somehow communicate with one another, changing instantly as the other is changed, with no obvious means of connection? But you do not have to believe in a cosmic vibration to believe out of a sense of ethics in the worth and dignity of every person and in the interconnectedness of all things.

Psychologically, Tolle's idea that we let our mind control us also is fascinating. He believes that none of us would willingly experience mental anguish for any serious length of time, if we were being completely sane – so why do we? He believes our ego insists on being trapped in its pain for its very existence, that we fight releasing our pain, because often we use our pain to identify ourselves – I'm the person whose father left me; I'm the person who was abused as a child; I'm the victim of divorce; I'm the person who can't have children. These are the identities of our ego, usually shrouded in pain and past hurt; we are the victims of such and such. I'm not trying to trivialize real harms
and real tragedies, but I am suggesting that there is more to living, more than this to who we truly are.
We create our dramas and then live them over and over within our minds, obsessively going over the details of the past that brought us to this state, and then imagining with bleakness what our futures will hold. I know that everyone of us has been there, and some of us have trouble imagining our lives any other way. Stuff happens – which would be put another way by a lot of people I know – so why fight it, why embody it, Tolle asks? Things simply are; things happen; people are born and people die; people leave us and people come; some people are cruel; some act evilly; some are good.
But who are we? Why does all this outside din change who we are – his point is that it really doesn't,
not if we could simply be in the present moment of Now, observing things as they happen, accepting them – sometimes in all their injustice – but still remaining ourselves, still staying present. We still remain, still filled with our inner Being; still the same inside, though perhaps somewhat wiser outside.
It's hard to imagine in the grip of pain, that we are still simply Beings connected to all ... but this is the kind of realization many people find before their deaths, an inner peace with what is, a calm acceptance that allows real peace to enter them, even if happiness does not. This process could be described as spiritual or psychological – it doesn't really matter. The real point is that we cannot force ourselves there through reason and thinking – we don't have to give up reason and thinking,
heaven forbid in a Unitarian Universalist church! – but we do have to realize how our minds trap
us into believing our own dramas, how we trap ourselves into believing we think we know the formula for happiness in our lives.

But happiness and unhappiness are impermanent – as the Buddhists say – we should be seeking instead true inner peace and letting that peace direct us in all that we do. Through this peace, real joy, unbidden, rises up in our hearts and minds, and, according to Tolle, real love also comes from this place within. Real love is not a drama in our minds, an infatuation and fascination with someone who will change, or remain doggedly the same, tormenting us later. Deep love could be felt with any individual, because all contain the same inner light, but sometimes, someone special for you shines through and connects more surely with your inner light. That's what they really mean when they
tell us not to try to change the people we love – they are already perfect, even though we, and probably they, can't see it.
There are three more ideas I'd like to explore with you from Tolle's thinking. The first is the realistic, reasonable conclusion that if nothing really brings happiness – that nothing we can do or say will ever really change anything – then we might be logically confronted with despair, despair of life, and wrenching weariness wondering what is the point of it all – what's the point in living? Tolle, who interestingly and thoughtfully uses examples throughout his book from Buddhism and Christianity,
says this must be how the Hebrew prophet felt who said: "I have seen everything that is done under the sun, and, behold, all is vanity and a striving after wind." Nothingness.
Tolle, again, believes that at this level of despair one is close to enlightenment, close to understanding the essential nature of your inner self, the real essence of life – close to experiencing real peace. I gave a sermon some time back on forgiveness and Tolle has quite a bit to say about forgiveness – it is, he believes, the understanding of our true natures that can lead to real forgiveness,
a true letting go – for some people, even in the face of the worst tragedies. What happens with true forgiveness is that the person who forgives is transformed – the person who caused the pain and the event itself do not go away, and the person who is being forgiven doesn't necessarily change, either – but the person who forgives is transformed, they have a larger and deeper understanding
of the nature of life and its transience; they are changed within, filled with inner peace.
A second interesting point, I thought, centered on Tolle's ideas about compassion. True compassion, like real love, come from this same place within. We are accustomed to the idea of giving or feeling compassion for another, caring deeply about the pain of another or caring deeply about the state of our world, in all its pain. But if our compassion were arising from this sense of inner peace and harmony and connectedness with all things, our compassion would be driven with hope, and not despair, because we would see that beneath all the pain, this same spirit or holiness or god or being or humanity exists within every person, and that there is a real peace waiting for every person – so,
we would be happy in our work and happy for others, in the sense that they, too, have this hope within themselves.

My final observation has to do with one of my favorite sayings from Jesus – that he asks us to turn the other cheek, even to our enemy. Of this, Tolle writes: "You may have heard the phrase ‘turn the other cheek,' which a great teacher of enlightenment used 2,000 years ago. He was attempting to convey symbolically the secret of nonresistance and non-reaction. In this statement, as in all his others, he was concerned only with your inner reality, not with the outer conduct of your life." The inner reality is that we are all the same and that we are all connected. This is why we do not have to resist life and fight life, name enemies and fight them. This is how we could walk into any situation and find buried beneath the strife, the kernel of hope that exists within each of us. We would turn the other cheek because we would not let another's anger or hatred towards another or ourselves
keep us from knowing the deeper meaning of the real peace and inner beauty of life that exists in the now. We would act from peace, knowing peace, instead of strife.
It is like a deep lake of calm, Tolle says, it exists at the heart of all life, it is enlightenment or god consciousness. Over the waters, the winds may be rough and stormy, or soft and balmy, but the deep sea remains, connecting us and keeping us. Deep peace enthralled by the beauty of existence,
our very breathe, this very moment of now, is there to bring us inner joy and to help us live lives of love and compassion. AMEN