David Lopez dug me up after Googling his way to my post on "Neural Buddhists and the Rest of Us."
He is part of a fascinating blog called The Immanent Frame, which he describes as "a blog on religion, secularism and the public sphere, produced by the Social Science Research Council" (the blog, that is, not the public sphere).
Here's his post on the subject, which is part of a series.
Read, in your copious spare time; read, learn and enjoy.
--T.A.
In the space of a couple of weeks, the New York Times ran at least three articles about how therapy, neurology and the search for spiritual fulfillment are converging. On May 13, the Times published a much-discussed column by David Brooks that ran under the headline "The Neural Buddhists." In it, Brooks noted that "scientists have more respect for elevated spiritual states." The moral: "The real challenge is going to come from people who feel the existence of the sacred, but who think that particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits . . . Orthodox believers are going to have to defend particular doctrines and particular biblical teachings. They're going to have to defend the idea of a personal God, and explain why specific theologies are true guides for behavior day to day."
Twelve days later, under the headline "A Superhighway to Bliss," Times Reporter Leslie Kaufman wrote an article about Jill Bolte Taylor, a Harvard neuroscientist who experienced nirvana when she had stroke that temporarily silenced the left lobe of her brain. Dr. Taylor was able to "see that the atoms and molecules making up her body blended with the space around her; the whole world and the creatures in it were all part of the same magnificent field of shimmering energy." The article goes on to describe her electrifying speech at the Technology, Entertainment, Design conference and a subsequent appearance on Oprah. (I've embedded a link to the talk, below, but it doesn't seem to be working. Use the link above as an alternative.)
The moral: "I believe that the more time we spend choosing to run the deep inner peace circuitry of our right hemispheres, the more peace we will project into the world, and the more peaceful our planet will be."
And two days after that, Benedict Carey wrote the lead piece in the May 27th Science Times section. It described how mindfulness meditation is rapidly gaining credence with therapists across a variety of disciplines. Although research doesn't seem to indicate that meditation is universally helpful, the "Buddha-like effort to move beyond language to change fundamental psychological processes" is changing the focus of many therapists from merely reframing thoughts to changing one's relationship to the content of one's thoughts.
It seems that the underlying premise of these articles is that science will help discern the real essence of what religionists have been misunderstanding and exploiting all these millennia -- that by understanding the processes at work within distinct and diverse regions of the brain, we'll be able to put the poetic nonsense aside and get at Oneness the way we might get at a flu vaccine or an endoscopy.
It's an intriguing thought, but in the end, I don't think it'll work out that way. There is a mystery that neither religion nor science can own. Religion at its best celebrates, at its worst exploits this mystery. Science at its best exploits that mystery, and at its worst turns it to deadly effect.
In my mind, neither will ever corner the market on Truth.
I'm writing this in the few moments before the beginning of Shavuot, the Jewish holiday celebrating the giving of the Torah to Moses at Mt. Sinai. We will never know what truly happened to a band of Jews on the run in the wilderness. But if all that happened was that Moses had a stroke, or ate some 'shrooms, and the event had been handed down to us with that narrative, we'd have a religion where we went about inducing strokes and hallucinations in ourselves (some would say this is, in fact, the case).
Thankfully, this isn't what happened. We received the narrative of that event and its aftermath in the form of a system of laws that, according to an intriguing paper by a Maryland undergraduate named Eitan Freedenberg, "start at a single point and expand into a vast array of wavelengths." That point is Mt. Sinai -- wherever it is -- and those wavelengths are the spokes of law and custom, narrative and ritual that are the bedrock of at least three major religions and much of the moral and ethical framework of modern life.
But sometimes I wonder: if Moses had been Jill Bolte Taylor and taken a detached view of his revelatory experience, would we really be that different? After all, Moses said the word of God is "in your mouth and in your heart, that you may do it" (Deut. 30:14). Professor Taylor says that anyone can choose to live a more peaceful, spiritual life (by sidestepping their left brain).
As the sun sets and Shavuot dawns, I find myself hoping -- praying, really -- that we take advantage of the confluence of these mighty rivers of thought, and ride them to a new sea of wisdom, still riding our rudimentary rafts of choice.
--T.A.
I just don't get it.
Which means I get it.
Which means I don't get it.
What I don't get is how much bile and invective there is in the blogosphere.
But it's not like I never excoriate anyone, never lose my temper. I do that all the time (just did it again this week). I like to think about and study religion, but I really, really don't get it. I get it less than ever. Not only do I not seem to be able to learn Hebrew, but I don't seem to be able to absorb the lessons of Judaism or retain what I learned from Buddhism. I'm the same cranky, thin-skinned misanthrope I was before I studied any of this stuff.
I don't get how we've wound up with three such seriously flawed presidential candidates. One has little in the way of experience but posesses tremendous vision; one has tremendous experience but little or no vision; one is just someone who puts you in a bad mood, and you can't put your finger on why.
Each one of them represents some aspect of our national persona: the war hero, the cool, ambitious climber, the valiant outsider. These individuals have subjected themselves and their families to the most unending scrutiny, the most horrendous slander, the straight-up danger of running for the presidency, and you just know there's got to be something wrong with each of them.
But our consummate wrongness, our flawed decision-making is already reinstalled in the White House. Do we just have a system that rewards and enshrines thick-skinned mistake-makers?
But this isn't about them. As usual, it's about me.
As Passover nears, I see, more clearly than ever that the story of liberation doesn't make sense on a peoplehood level unless you can make sense of it on a personal level. Through the preparation for and observance of Passover, we're supposedly affirming belief through memory. Of course, you can't remember something you never experienced. Can you...? What, then, are you remembering? And what are you believing in? Are you remembering beyond the horizon of your own lifetime? Or are you engaging in existential self-examination and dogmatic myth-making?
The real question Passover poses is: What do you need to get liberated from?
Me: I guess it's my thin skin. My concern for whether people like me or not. My lack of certainty. Which gives me a temper. Which begins the cycle all over again. So where do I interrupt the circuit?
I think I begin with the trait of Equanimity. As a good friend reminded me today, it says in Cheshbon ha Nefesh (Accounting of the Soul) by Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Satanov: "Rise above events that are inconsequential - both bad and good - for they are not worth disturbing your equanimity."
Easy for him to say. That's just an old-fashioned way of saying "Don't worry, be happy."
Or maybe it's Humility. If you're worried and uncertain and easily offended, you're probably overestimating your own importance. You can learn this from your sacred texts, but I just started catching on when I saw an episode of South Park last week, in which Kyle spends the better part of an episode trying to show Token that he, Kyle, understands what it feels like to be African American and suffer discrimination. Token gets angrier the more sensitive Kyle tries to be.
At the end of the episode, Kyle has his epiphany, and tells Token: "I get it, Token! I finally get it: I don't get it."
Token smiles and says: "Now ya got it."
Shabbat Shalom.
--T.A.
Having received approval from the One True Wife, consulted the oracles, and sat with it for awhile, I formally gave word to the University of Chicago Divinity School that I intend to enter their MA program this coming Fall.
This is a two-year program that will require me to ramp up my knowledge of Hebrew and one other language -- probably French -- and study and read more than I have in the two-plus decades since I was last in school full time. It will also help me figure out if I want to go any further into the study of Jewish text and history.
I can't wait.
When I went to a meeting for prospective students last week, I wound up sitting at lunch with two Baptists from Oklahoma who also are entering the MA program. These were big, corn-fed guys with calloused hands, wearing ties and leather jackets. The Divinity school served a vegan lunch. One of the Oklahomans stared at the food and said: "This ain't lunch. This is what we eat before lunch." They were extremely young and extremely polite. One of them was very excited to meet a Jew.
"Have you been Jewish from birth?," he asked.
I allowed as how I had.
"May I ask you a question?," he said.
Anything, I said.
"Does a Jewish person achieve salvation through works or through Grace?"
I said, "Well, to most Jewish people that question wouldn't even compute, I suspect. I also think I'll answer that question better in a couple of years than I can answer it now. But basically, we don't really believe in salvation, and our idea of Grace is a little different from yours, I suspect. We also have this little thing called Ancestry: if you're born Jewish, you're a Jew no matter what you do. If you convert -- well, that's a little complicated, because the Orthodox don't recognize non-Orthodox conversions. You won't be able to get 10 Jews together who agree on this stuff -- and I don't even think I agree with myself sometimes, so maybe we should leave it at that."
He nodded, but looked puzzled.
It should be a really interesting couple of years.
--T.A.
What someone said to me in a dream, right before I woke up this morning.
Time to meditate.
Or medicate.
--T.A.
It's that time of year again -- that time when nothing that's irritating shows signs of going away.
It's the endless expiration of the Midwestern winter (even though tomorrow is Opening Day), the sado-voyeuristic pleasure found by the financial press in the mess of our markets, the slow-motion, anarchic implosion of the Iraq War, and the logorrhea of the presidential campaign.
This latter is defined lately by the hand- and neck-wringing over the issue of race. The issue of religion is tucked neatly within that of race, and like a pair of Russian nesting dolls, perhaps they're concealing smaller but no less remarkable issues further down.
Those who would castigate Obama for his relationship with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright are somehow overlooking the fact that the pulpit has been used in every religion, throughout that religion's history, to set boundaries between one community and another. What Reverend Wright said from his pulpit -- Cliff Notes: 'May God wreak vengeance on [fill in the blank]: oppressors, unbelievers, evil, those different from us' -- has been said from lecterns in churches, synagogues, mosques -- probably in every religious edifice except Baha'i temples and Quaker meeting halls -- since the first pulpit was hewn or hammered together.
Belonging and belief create communities in part by reinforcing boundaries, and one of the ways boundaries are reinforced is through reminding parishioners of collective wounds and grievances -- making sure they never forget the wrongs done to them, and never lose the resolve to redress those wrongs. A preacher may urge transcendence or he may urge revenge, but either way, Scripture has his back, because transcendence and vengeance are simply two sides of the same currency. And written on that currency are the words:
We can be better than we are, and we are damn sure better than Them.
I wonder: if a Catholic were running for president today, would we be scrutinizing the utterances and policy pronouncements of Pope Benedict? Would the Easter baptism of a prominent Muslim, or Benedict's utterances on the evil and inhumanity of Islam, reflect on a candidate the way Wright's blandishments are dogging Obama?
What about the fact that Benedict has moved to restore the Latin or Tridentine Mass, with its prayers for the conversion of Jews?
There's a distinct and well-documented relationship between proselytizing and demonizing the Other (as Professor Larry Hoffman said to our Wexner group, "To know who you are is to know who you're not"). There are more than two ways to strengthen a faith community, but among the most prominent are winning converts and erecting barriers between your community and those that cannot or will not be a part of it. In this way, Jeremiah Wright and Pope Benedict aren't so different.
Open any book of Jewish prayer and ritual and you'll see (with a little help) that Judaism remembers its grievances and sees vengeance as a critical component of redemption. Jews affirm belief through memory, and the Siddur, or prayer book, includes prayers that leverage the victimization of Jews as a way to strengthen conviction and community. The Siddur was not created at the stroke of a pen, but evolved over time and is revealed in archaeological layers. In 200 CE, for example, when post-Temple Jewish liturgy was still in its early stages, Jewish prayer was highly extemporaneous and relied heavily on oral transmission, not unlike today's pulpit-pounding preachers.
The first blessing of the central Amidah prayer, for example, is, according to Professor Hoffman, a polemic against Gnosticism written in a primarily Gnostic environment. (The blessing praises God as "creator of all," whereas Gnosticism holds there is a Creator of Light and a Creator of Darkness that are at war with each other.) The twelfth blessing urges the punishment of heretics; the thirteenth prays for reward of the righteous. All the middle blessings of the Amidah, according to Reuven Kimelman of Brandeis, can be seen as a counter-messianic manifesto, written at a time when several different strains of Judaism (among them the messianic and their less wild-eyed brethren) were equally prevalent and defining themselves in opposition to each other.
The Passover Haggadah, the most widely read Jewish text of all, and which we're about to open at the Seder table, contains this passage, just after we open the door for the Prophet Elijah, whose coming is said to herald the Messianic Age:
Pour out your wrath upon the heathen who will not acknowledge Thee, and upon the kingdoms who invoke not Thy name, for they have devoured Jacob, and laid waste his dwelling.
What seems, taken on its own, to be a blood-thirsty call for the slaying of non-believers is actually a 12th-century cry for justice -- a response to the wholesale destruction of European Jewish communities during the Crusades of 1096.
(Of course, plenty of Jewish text also supports healing and reconciliation: the Wexner Foundation just sent all its participants a book that builds on Judaism's rational and pacific strains to build bridges between denominations, faiths and worlds. It's You Don't Have To Be Wrong For Me To Be Right: Building Faith Without Fanaticism, by Brad Hirschfield. It jumps to the top of my reading list.)
It's not just religious communities that define themselves by calling upon God to aid their cause by punishing others. How about this ringing phrase from Benjamin Franklin:
Rebellion against tyrants is obedience to God.
Reverend Wright, in condemning the tyranny of racism, is hewing close to this sentiment. His cry to God is, or should be, immediately and intimately familiar to any person, of any faith, who prays.
And so, as this election season drags on, we should remember that all our faiths and all our communities cry out for justice, and that those cries, born of centuries of pain and privation, are sometimes harsh.
--T.A.
Well, the good news about being admitted to the U. of Chicago Divinity School has been tarnished somewhat by the fact (confirmed by the Dean) that I am not being offered any financial aid. For four years. This puts a damper on the whole idea of returning to school. More than a damper, actually; more like the Kiss of Death.
There are some scholarships and fellowships out there, but the overwhelming majority of them are for people right out of school and/or under age 40. I'm neither. The University claims that reduced funding and the way money is allocated mean that I'll have to tough it out or find funding elsewhere.
It's a good thing I'm older, I guess. I'm not taking this personally. I'm taking it as a challenge. I figure that universities are businesses, too, and this is a business decision. If a 48-year-old guy wants to go to school, make him pay his own way (at least at first). Universities make investments in graduates who go onto careers in academia. Any career I have in teaching and writing will be a decade and a half shorter than the average.
On the other hand: kinda diminishes the thrill of victory, you know? Throws the whole enterprise into question. With two kids in college next year, and a third about 6 years out, I need every penny I can lay my hands on.
Any suggestions? Any hidden pots of gold? Any scholarships for old people?
Or should I just bag it...?
--T.A.
Some months ago, I wrote about the desire to go back to school to really study the workings and the history of religion. I have an active spiritual life, but it's defined by my intellectual curiosity. I felt I'd gotten to a point in my life, perhaps even economically (jury's still out), where I could pursue the study of religion single-mindedly, without dragging my family across the country, or the world, to do it.
So, naively, I applied to two PhD programs in the Chicago area. One -- Northwestern, the one I'd courted more assiduously and set my hopes on -- rejected me. Yesterday, I found out that the other, the University of Chicago Divinity School -- somewhat more prestigious, about twice as far from home as Northwestern, and the institution that set the backdrop for my childhood -- accepted me.
I have a terrible time making major decisions. I have no problem exploring possibilities, but when a possibility reaches some kind of fruition, I seize up. I text-message Oldest Daughter with the news. She texted back: "Daddy: This is not the kind news you text message! Call me when you get this." When I called her, she told me that if I did not go to the U of C I would regret it for the rest of my life.
Annie and Jacques called. Jacques left a message on my cell phone and said, "Congratulations on becoming Chief Rabbi," and then he and Annie dissolved in laughter.
My brother's wife, an Episcopal priest, went to Yale Divinity School. From her I began to learn that some divinity schools are more "church-y" than others, and that the U of C is not a "church-y" divinity school. So that's good.
It's also -- and I know this not just from my past in its shadow, and its reputation, but from asking around -- that the University of Chicago is a fiercely intellectual place. And I'm just not sure I have that kind of energy anymore (if I ever did).
Fortunately, I don't have to decide right now. I can feel good about getting accepted, and go teach my Jewish meditation class, and watch Scrubs with Gabe, be grateful for the opportunity -- and for the chance to let it sink in a little.
--T.A.
In another eye-opening presentation, Rabbi/Professor Lawrence Hoffman told our Wexner group Tuesday evening about the cultural backdrop that created fertile conditions for Jewish mysticism. As comfy as we are after a couple of centuries (at the most) in America, imagine how fully Spanish the Jews of Spain must have fellt after 600 years there. Until the period that began with the anti-Jewish upheavals of 1381 and culminated in the expulsion in 1492, the Jews of Spain understood themselves to be Spanish and Jewish both.
They couldn't cross the Pyrenees -- they'd already been expelled from France in the 14th century, and France hadn't changed its mind. Some headed to Portugal and got booted from there a few years later. So many got on boats, set sail in the Mediterranean, and wound up in Italy, or in a rocky outpost of the Ottoman Empire, a town called Safed (pronounced s'-FAHT) in the northern part of Eretz Israel.
But they didn't feel they'd come home, according to Professor Hoffman; they felt deeply exiled. They were influenced, too, by the Gnostic thought prevalent at the time. Their world was in need of repair, the forces of Light and Darkness were in full battle array; the mystics saw brokenness as the inherent state of the world, and indeed the Universe.
They turned to Jewish text, and there they saw not only the battle between Light and Darkness laid out but the answers hidden in plain sight. Jewish text showed that God was exiled from Godself, and needed partnership with humanity to repair Godhead. Jewish Mysticism flourished in Safed under the influence of exiled Spanish Jews who felt that human beings needed to repair not just themselves, not just their world, but needed to partner with God to heal the very cosmos. The real meaning of tikkun olam (healing the world), the original meaning, was not social justice work: it was work on the self and on society, yes, but it was work on the Universe. We could work to heal God.
Advances in religious thought -- or political thought, or indeed thought of any kind -- often emerge from enormous trauma and dislocation. Think Declaration of Independence. Think Magna Carta. Think Torah. We dismiss the stories as dogmatic folk-tales meant to control our mind, and in fact bureaucracies can spring up and exploit them in that way. In fact, however, they are deep searches for meaning in the midst of upheaval. They have merit because they have meaning on deeper levels -- levels on which we exist but of which we're afraid.
The trauma of exile meant that the Kabbalists went in search of healing their own world, which mirrored the fractured vessel of all of existence. They understood their trauma to be a symptom of a greater dislocation.
They were onto something.
--T.A.
Like this one. Shot out of the sky during a World War II photo-reconnaissance mission, Fred Hargesheimer goes through a brutal test of survival and will, and winds up not only surviving but transforming his own life and the lives of the natives on the island onto which he parachuted.
There are probably other, less fortunate souls who, like this army lieutenant, got shot out of their planes but didn't land, or didn't land alive, or landed alive but mortally wounded, or who landed in one piece but got found by head-hunters or crocodiles or enemy combatants.
But the natives of New Britain didn't make Lt. Hargesheimer a prisoner or a meal. They went out of their way to nurse him back to full health (hiding him all the while, at their own considerable peril, from the occupying Japanese forces). And in the process, he became an exalted member of their society. Someone who literally landed in their midst. Someone whose life they saved, and who in turn built them schools and libraries, who helped them plant a plot of oil palm trees that turned into a plantation and created scores of jobs for the impoverished island residents.
He dropped into their midst and he totally changed them, because they totally changed him. He survived a brush with death; he prayed, and he practiced his survival skills, and in time he met a people in need of inspiration, just as they found a man in need of literal, corporeal salvation.
A rabbi -- I wish I could remember who it was -- once told me that "We invented God because God needs us." I didn't really know what he meant until I read this story.
Or, as Rabbi David Cooper said, God is a verb.
The question isn't whether God is this kind of confluence of energy and circumstance, or whether God causes these things. And anyway, there's no difference between those two possibilities.
Which means that God is just another word for a sea change -- the impetus, the something or someone, that comes along at the right time, in just the right way, and changes everything.
Forever.
--T.A.
