Dr. John Young                                                                                                          6/14/09

Unitarian Universalist Church of Jacksonville

Less Ego, More Soul-Force

            We are a nation, a denomination, and a congregation focused on the individual. Growing up in the modern world significantly is a process of individuation, of developing beyond, even breaking away from constraints and limitations of family, home-neighborhood, even ancestral religion and ideologies. Growing up and breaking away is like being born again. First, we exited the womb; growing up becomes a process of outgrowing the nests of childhood nurture and the wombs of childhood.

            This conscious creation of our individual selves was the culmination of a revolution in Western thought from the Renaissance through the Reformation into the Enlightenment, blooming into American Transcendentalism with each human as their own liberated bard of the Holy Spirit. In this democratizing of consciousness, ethics, freedoms, and spirituality, Unitarians and Universalists were an advance-guard, joyful prophets of emancipated spirituality. We celebrated ourselves as ‘America’s real religion,’ and perceived ourselves to be among the vanguard of liberated, individualized spirituality.

            This revolution in Western thought emancipated the individual. It did so by 1. developing a secular-scientific foundation for thought and action which super ceded much superstition and dogma, 2. empowering democratic platforms for politics and economics which overthrew many authoritarian hierarchies and 3. arguing for individual rights with foundations both in law and ethics which confront arbitrary violations. Liberal religion, personified by Unitarian Universalism, is both spiritual arguments for and institutional approximations of this revolution.

            Late twentieth century social thinkers conceptualized adult stages of development that charted the maturation of the ego, the creation of the self as a conscious project, and the cultivation of our chosen characters. But they made clear that once we have, in adolescence and young adulthood, become individuals and begun to make our own ways that we then need to continue to be further reborn for the rest of our lives. How do we do that? How do we continue to be reborn for the rest of our lives? We do so by concentrating on making chosen connections, building relationships, choosing commitments, and taking responsibility.

            Sigmund Freud divided the human psyche into id, ego, and super-ego. Id was completely unconscious, the source of psychic energy derived from our instinctual needs and drives. This strength and persistence of our animal nature continues to amaze all of us. Ego was the organized conscious mediator between the person and reality, shaping both our perceptions and our adaptations to reality. Super-ego was the internalization of parental conscience and the rules of our culture which created moral attitudes, our conscience, and a sense of guilt that rewards and punishes our thoughts and actions. In modern times, many people develop more liberated, and, therefore less static, super-egos. Modern people are more responsible for their consciences, and we are more dependent upon our chosen communities because we have fewer built-in cultural expectations. Think of how Mary Claire Van der Horst and David Johnson, Lynne Paradise and Brian Lapinski help us with our collective consciences as a congregation.

            I’m not arguing against becoming a liberated individual nor am I opposed to the need to develop and nurture an energetic and self-confidant ego. These are foundations for the liberated revolution at the heart of our shared faith. However, it always remains temptingly easy to regress into egotism, to repeatedly fall from a healthy and energetic individuality into a selfish, even obsessive, anti-social and ultimately self-destructive egotism. I am in favor of egos but opposed to egotism.

            Human maturation is essentially this process of finding an appropriate balance that emancipates our individuality without stumbling into egotism. My physical symbol for the ego today is this clown by Alvarez, the popular Mexican artist. Clowns are adults who act like children. They personify playfulness, leisure, and humor, but they often also embody our fecklessness and confusion as adults. Adults who get stuck in their egotism unwittingly become clowns. We all want to be and to nurture others capable of, even exuberant with, humor, leisure, and playfulness, but whenever we are caught being clowns playing like grown-ups, neither we nor the world are better for those experiences. Unfortunately, the jokes are usually not only on us but they diminish the world. Think of invading Iraq or selling mortgages to people who can never hope to pay them or marketing securities few understood. Think of people who hold forth about the future of this congregation, but fail to provide the funds, skills or energy that future requires and deserves.

Remember what Malcolm Gladwell in this morning’s reading wrote of practical intelligence? I call it procedural intelligence because it is: “What, when and how to say and do the right thing.” Peter Racine has had that ability as your congregation’s President. Each of us remembers bad moments in our lives when we did not have that practical or procedural intelligence, and we said or did something which others could unfortunately neither forget nor forgive. They perceived us as clowns in these negative ways.

            Now let’s move on from ego to soul. For the whole of human history, people have endeavored to discover and to embody soul. We all try to discover what the world is really all about, our appropriate roles in this ultimate reality, and then try to live our lives in harmony with our discoveries. This is the quest of spirituality. It often entails a sense of higher governing powers, human prophets or saviors, holy books and sacred rites, but in our modern world these may be science, Einstein or Star Hawk, the Bill of Rights, or citizen debates almost as often as they may be Allah, Jesus, the Book of Revelations, or marriage.

            My physical symbol today for soul is this little statue of Mahavira, the founder of Jainism, a religion in some ways parallel to Buddhism that arose in India in the same century, some 2600 years ago. The Jain holy people are called self-conquerors, and that remains an enduring description of our human spiritual quests. For our entire lives we keep trying to discover what the world is all about, to develop our vocations or goals in relation to these discovered truths, and thus to live in harmony with ultimate truth as we understand it. Most of us have worked so hard to develop our individualities. We are proud of what we have evolved and nurtured. We tend to cling to our discoveries and well-practiced habits even when those discoveries and habits no longer serve us well given new experiences and changing realities. The spiritual process, our soul work, moves back and forth between the self-conquering enlightened being, like Mahavira, and the clown.

            If individuals are truly to mature, they need to develop and regularly practice spiritual disciplines, conceptualized as our highest human virtues and ethical practices. These practices need to remain open to growth and responsive to new experiences and changing realities. Here is John’s noble 8-fold path for spiritual growth. 1. Stretch your body, mind, ethics, and spirit every day. 2. Take quiet time to find your unique center and to connect that center with what you most value in the world. 3. Be in dialogue with people you love and 4. be active in organizations that you care about, but also 5. periodically interact and respond to people and situations that challenge and even oppose you. 6. Let go of what is no longer true and useful. 7. Give up what wastes your time and energies, what corrupts your soul or imprisons your spirit. Finally, 8. Do your best every day to be your beliefs and to embody your highest goals. Life is short, while we have many opportunities too many of us waste most of them, and end up feeling like clowns when we want to be intellectual acrobats or tamers of beasts. Remember in those dialogues with others: to listen as much as you talk, to respond and accept as much as you assert.

            That brings us to power, and too often in the modern world, liberated people have acted as if, once the truth was discovered and shared, that the world would fix itself. Since we moderns have science, democracy and human rights, everything will just progress by itself. That is not so. The 20^th century proved it. Science can be misused; a democratic mob is still a mob, and rights without responsibilities are a mess. The truth needs to be empowered by natural, instinctive energies and by our egotistical cravings, but these all continue to need both individual and community disciplines. The Western revolution in consciousness: with its liberated individuals, democratic institutions, and protection of individual rights provides a strong foundation, but it needs to systematically oppose and overcome violations. That’s where my third symbol today comes into play. Sherie and Jorge gave me this Gandhi doll, and Gandhi not only conceptualized but significantly embodied Satyagraha, soul force. For me, soul-force puts it all together. It recognizes the ego, but it refuses to transform it into a libertarian idol as Ayn Rand did or as the worshippers of free enterprise Christian conservatism are doing now. Soul-force recognizes our animal nature, the daily persistence of our ids, but it refuses to fall into either the abyss of “its all good” or the pit of despair. It recognizes injustice and the persistence of human anger, frustration, and confusion, but it gives us ways to channel the anger, frustration, and confusion into effective action for the greater good and for our personal altruistic growth and fulfillment without degrading into violation and violence.

            Gandhi and other practitioners of soul-force can be wonderfully emancipated and exuberant human egos. Like any other human, they contain clownishness, and stumble as we all do, but they can also embody the best characteristics of childhood and youth. But these soul-force activists also give us working models of effectively combining very modern searches for soul and ways of using the forces of nature, ego, and human institutions to build civilization and to sustain this planet without violating other people or themselves. These soul-force methods are based upon the discoveries of science and secular education, the processes of democracies, and the reverence for humanity’s rights, but they also face up to human frailties, and they point out ways to be powerful without destroying what we wish to create and nurture. We all need boundaries and limits, conscience and community to temper our egotism.

            What are the ways of soul-force? 1. Seek the truth unremittingly, 2. Proceed democratically, 3. Live with respect, 4. Act with compassion, 5. Courageously change the world in the ways you believe it needs to be changed, 6. Never stop conquering your own weaknesses and the weaknesses of the world, but do so in ways that do not destroy what you are trying to create and sustain, 7. do not presume that you have the final answers or have the last word, 8. for only if you are truly brave and steadfast will you have courage to put your life on the line for what you believe in many days of your life, and 8. You need to do so while remembering that you will always also remain a clown; so, remain play, humorous, and at peace as you proceed. I am not arguing that any one of these three images is the only truth, but rather that each of us needs to be and to remain partly each of them: a clown, a self-conqueror, and a soul-force activist, who transforms the world with justice and love.

            This process of maturation is soul-force, key to following the path of liberation to its appropriate global fulfillment. Genuine maturation entails further stages of being born again. It shifts the center of our consciousness and action beyond our obsessive self-centeredness or egotism toward our connections and relationships, commitments and responsibilities. Enlightened self-conquerors grow up into soul-force activists, world citizens who are focused on the needs of future generations. These are people who strive to sustain the best of natural realities and to build a world that furthers the best of Creation’s energies.