-- Antonio Gramsci
First Reading
From an essay entitled “Illusions” by Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Some years ago, in company with an agreeable party, I spent a long summer day in exploring the Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. We traversed, through spacious galleries affording a solid masonry foundation for the town and county overhead, the six or eight black miles from the mouth of the cavern to the innermost recess which tourists visit…
I lost the light of one day. I saw high domes, and bottomless pits; heard the voice of unseen waterfalls…plied with music and guns the echoes in these alarming galleries; saw every form of stalagmite and stalactite in the sculptured and fretted chambers,—the icicle, the orange-flower, the acanthus, the grapes, and the snowball. We shot Bengal lights into the vaults and groins of the sparry cathedrals, and examined all the masterpieces which the four combined engineers, water, limestone, gravitation, and time, could make in the dark.
…But I then took notice, and still chiefly remember, that the best thing which the cave had to offer was an illusion. On arriving at what is called the "Star-Chamber," our lamps were taken from us by the guide, and extinguished or put aside, and, on looking upwards, I saw or seemed to see the night heaven thick with stars glimmering more or less brightly over our heads, and even what seemed a comet flaming among them. All the party were touched with astonishment and pleasure. … I sat down on the rocky floor to enjoy the serene picture. Some crystal specks in the black ceiling high overhead, reflecting the light of a half-hid lamp, yielded this magnificent effect.”
Second Reading
From the NPR blog “13.7, Cosmos and Culture,” an entry entitled “Our Brain, The Trickster,” by Marcelo Gleiser, May 28, 2014,
“The ‘here and now.’ We say these words with perfect calm and composure, as if they mean something. We think we know what they mean. They serve an obvious purpose in our lives. But come to think of it, even if we have more freedom with the ‘here’ — as we are free to move about in space and can conceive of an object filling up a volume in space — the ‘now’ doesn't really exist. Our minds create a representation of both so we may guide ourselves in space and time…
What we call reality is the result of our brain's very complex integration of external stimuli: sights, sounds, tastes, touch and smells. The ‘out there’ is collected by our sensory organs, brought into the proper parts of our brain for processing and then, somehow, all this gets integrated into a sense of reality…
Who you are, and how you relate to the world, depend exclusively on how your brain integrates sensorial stimuli with the memories you manage to invoke. It's an interesting paradox that, even though our memory of past events is so faulty and fragmented, our sense of self remains strong day in and day out….
Time flows continually, or so we perceive. But we don't have a clock in our heads. We have perceptions of the ‘out there’ and the ‘in here’ events, such as a waterfall, a beating heart and the never-ending flow of thoughts, the ‘stream of consciousness.’ …
The freedom we have with space, to move about at will, we don't have with time. Time grabs us its own way, and there is little we can do. …
When we look around, we see objects as they were in the past; and even if they are at different distances from us, say a cloud and the sun, we see them at once, in the present. But objects farther out are also farther in the past: we see them not as they are, but as they were. And the farther they are the more in the past we see them: the sun as it were 8 minutes ago; your laptop screen at about a billionth of a second ago. These are the times light takes to go from the object to your eyes.
We can thank the brain for tricking us into building a sense of the ‘real.’"
Third Reading
A poem entitled “Purple” by Alexis Rotella
Purple
In first grade Mrs. Lohr
said my purple teepee
wasn’t realistic enough,
that purple was no color
for a tent,
that purple was a color
for people who died,
that my drawing wasn’t
good enough
to hang with the others.
I walked back to my seat
counting the swish swish swishes
of my baggy corduroy trousers.
With a black crayon
nightfall came
to my purple tent
in the middle
of an afternoon.
In second grade Mr. Barta
said draw anything;
he didn’t care what.
I left my paper blank
and when he came around
to my desk
my heart beat like a tom tom.
He touched my head
with his big hand
and in a soft voice said
the snowfall
how clean
and white
and beautiful.
Sermon— “Choosing Illusions”
The Rev. Elaine G. Gehrmann
Several Saturdays ago, Axel and I took a road trip to visit Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. We took the “Violet City Lantern Tour”—which is a three hour, three mile trek into the depths of the cave, lit only by the paraffin lanterns we carried with us. We were at the front of the tour, just behind the guide, and we had a great view of the darkness that was always just ahead of us… at one point we came upon the star chamber, where the guide stopped the tour, had us sit down, and collected our lanterns and put them behind some large boulders, where they indirectly lit the cavern… like Emerson, we were amazed by the illusion.
We looked up at what clearly appeared to be stars in the night sky, an apparent opening in the cave ceiling above our heads… and then the guide explained that the stars were actually flakes of gypsum, shining chips in the dark ceiling which was blackened from the smoke and soot from years of lanterns and torches.
For those few moments when I thought it was actually the night sky, it inspired all the awe that the night sky does… and then when I realized it was the glittering minerals on the darkened ceiling, it inspired a different kind of awe.
The night sky with all of its stars is a wondrous sight, and yet the cave ceiling was also wondrous.
If I was going to try to launch myself to the stars through that apparent opening, that would have been a problem, but in terms of inspiration, it did just fine.
And then, even after I knew it was an illusion, I willed my mind to imagine it again as the night sky…
The night sky too is an optical illusion… as Marcelo Gleiser reminds us, the stars we see in the night sky, are actually as they appeared in the past… the farther away they are, the longer the light takes to travel to our eyes… although our mind tells us that we are viewing them in the present.
* * *
The theologian and scholar Howard Thurman further built on an illusion of the night sky— he wrote, “As a boy, in Florida, I walked along the beach of the Atlantic Ocean in the quiet stillness that can only be completely felt, where the murmur of the ocean is stilled and the tide moves stealthily along the shore. I held my breath against the night, and watched the stars etch their brightness on the face of the darkened canopy of the heavens. I had the sense that all things--the sand, the sea, the stars, the night, and I--were one lung through which all of life was breathing. Not only was I aware of a vast rhythm enveloping all, but I was a part of that rhythm, and the rhythm was a part of me.”
As a child I loved to look out the front windshield during summer road trips, and I would squeal with glee everytime I saw the “water” on the road ahead of us. This illusion or mirage was fascinating to me because it would disappear as we came up on it… and yet it looked so real… I didn’t understand why my parents weren’t as excited as I was.
I read an article recently that pointed out that rainbows are really a form of optical illusion… an illusion formed by water droplets viewed from a certain angle relative to a light source. As Wikipedia explains, “All raindrops refract and reflect the sunlight in the same way, but only the light from some raindrops reaches the observer's eye. This light is what constitutes the rainbow for that observer.” We each see our own individual rainbow, the colors of which are only in our minds.
We can see more colors in the rainbow than dogs… most of us see seven distinguishable colors in the rainbow, while dogs can only see three…blue, green and tiny bit of yellow, though of course they can hear many more frequencies of sound than we can…
Butterflies and bees and mantis shrimp all can see more colors than we can…
* * *
Emerson said in his “Illusions” essay—
“I own, I did not like the cave so well for eking out its sublimities with this theatrical trick. But I have had many experiences like it, before and since; and we must be content to be pleased without too curiously analyzing the occasions. Our conversation with Nature is not just what it seems. The cloud-rack, the sunrise and sunset glories, rainbows, and northern lights are not quite so spheral as our childhood thought them; and the part our organization plays in them is too large. The senses interfere everywhere, and mix their own structure with all they report of. Once, we fancied the earth a plane, and stationary. In admiring the sunset, we do not yet deduct the rounding, coördinating, pictorial powers of the eye.”
We talk about truth, reality, science, objectivity, and yet to some degree these are all created by our minds… limited by our five senses, and limited by our mind’s ability to integrate these sensory inputs into recognizable combinations…
We are surrounded by illusions of our own creation and interpretation…
Perhaps, as Jane Wagner ,via Lily Tomlin, famously put it, Reality is nothing but a collective hunch…
* * *
Our individual hunches about reality seem to differ rather widely at times…
The Pew Research Center released the results of a new study last week which show that American political views are more polarized than ever…
Their report says that, “The overall share of Americans who express consistently conservative or consistently liberal opinions has doubled over the past two decades from 10% to 21%. And ideological thinking is now much more closely aligned with partisanship than in the past. As a result, ideological overlap between the two parties has diminished: Today, 92% of Republicans are to the right of the median Democrat, and 94% of Democrats are to the left of the median Republican. Partisan animosity has increased substantially over the same period. In each party, the share with a highly negative view of the opposing party has more than doubled since 1994. Most of these intense partisans believe the opposing party’s policies “are so misguided that they threaten the nation’s well-being.””
This partisan view is in sharp contrast to the Dalai Lama’s view—he said, "Because we all share an identical need for love, it is possible to feel that anybody we meet, in whatever circumstances, is a brother or sister. No matter how new the face or how different the dress and behavior, there is no significant division between us and other people. It is foolish to dwell on external differences, because our basic natures are the same."
It is very tempting to get wedded to our positions… to feel strongly that our positions are the correct ones, the only rational conclusions, the only sane views…
I myself have been known to have rather strongly held beliefs, and often find it hard to see the other side… but if I stop for a moment… and take a deep breath…
I can believe it is possible to still hold on to my cherished and well-thought-through beliefs, and to acknowledge that there are more thoughts to consider, more points of view to hear, more information to be gathered… more perspectives to try to understand.
After the recent Santa Barbara shooting, there was a widely circulated hashtag on Social media called “Yes all men”— meaning that to some degree all men may be perceived by women as potentially threatening…
I had an easier time being sympathetic with men about the “Yes all men” hashtag after I read an article about “yes all white women” by a woman of color… who wrote that to some degree all white women may be perceived by women of color as being potentially problematic … ouch.
It is important for us to be able to shift our perspective, and to try to see the world through other people’s eyes and experiences…
The Dalai lama has said, “There are two levels of compassion, one a biological instinct, the other the result of awareness.”
I read recently that one of the big reasons that a lot of fundamentalist Christians cite for not being concerned about climate change, is that they believe the world is going to end anyway… I personally tend to find that view rather frustrating, but then when I think about it, I realize that I think the world is most likely going to end anyway also, eventually… we just have a slightly different view of the timeframe… but maybe we could talk about it.
I have to think of one of my favorite quotes from Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis—in it Zorba says…
“… one day I had gone to a little village. An old grandfather of ninety was busy planting an almond tree. ‘What, grandfather!’ I exclaimed. ‘Planting an almond tree?’ And he, bent as he was, turned around and said: ‘My son, I carry on as if I should never die.’ I replied: ‘And I carry on as if I was going to die any minute.’
Which of us was right…?”
As Marcelo Gleiser reminds us… even time and space are illusions, at least our movement and existence in them… and yet we act as if,
As if we have a past and a future, as if we have something other than just the present… we build our lives on these illusions…
* * *
On the front of the order of service this morning is a Necker cube…
The Necker cube, says Wikipedia, “is an optical illusion first published in 1832 by the Swiss crystallographer Louis Albert Necker.
Each part of the drawing is ambiguous, but our human visual processing sees an interpretation of the drawing that makes the whole consistent. It is very difficult for us to see an inconsistent interpretation of the cube.”
Most of us see the cube with the lower left square as being in front most of the time…
This could be because we more often view things from above, so the brain may prefer this view… or it could have to do with the brain’s preference for viewing things from left to right… or some other reason…
Interestingly, by concentrating your focus on different parts of the cube, you can keep one of the views of the cube more stable…
There are two Y-shaped junctions in the middle of the drawing, one lower left center and one upper right center… If you focus on the upper Y junction… the lower left square will appear to stay in front… if you focus on the lower y junction, the upper right square will appear to stay in front…
Sometimes you can switch back and forth by blinking…
Malcolm Gladwell wrote a best-selling book called Blink—about the automatic processes of the brain… how much we process input unconsciously, and how quickly we make gut level decisions…sometimes very accurately, although also often influenced by unconscious biases.
But I think that we also often underestimate the power of our will-- we often defer to our habits, our automatic responses, our sensory inputs… without acknowledging that we can often choose to override them.
We look at the cube, and automatically see the lower left square in the front… but we can blink and focus on that lower y intersection… and bring the right square to the front.
My partner comes into the living room where I am sitting comfortably on the couch and asks me if I want to go for a walk… it’s easy to say no… but I can say yes.
The more I say yes, the easier it gets… but I often still have to will myself to say yes…but it helps to remember how glad I was all the previous times I said yes… and that it is my choice.
Anyone who has ever quit a bad habit, knows that quitting is not something you do once, but over and over… it is an ongoing stream of decisions to continue to say no to the habit and yes to the conscious choice to live more healthily, more deliberately…day after day after day…
All we have is our ‘now’-- in the long run, big picture, it may not matter much to the universe… but it can matter greatly to us.
Axel and I saw a short play last week called “Just suppose”… which was about the end of a first date, which had been going very enjoyably, and just as the couple was about to kiss goodnight, one of them stopped, and said, let’s think about where this might lead… just suppose… and they went about imagining a future scenario involving falling in love, getting married, having two perfect children, wonderful fulfilling careers, and an amazing life together. In the glow of this vision, they were about to finally kiss, when one of them stopped again, and this time said just suppose, and they went through a future scenario involving getting pregnant too soon, marrying quickly, having difficulty with children, getting laid off, living with their parents, and a miserable life together ending in violence. After this imagined dismal scenario, they ended up not kissing, but shaking hands, and going their separate ways.
Both scenarios were illusions, and both were possible futures… but they were still unwritten… they could have had some say in which scenario they worked to create…
Marcelo Gleiser tells us,
“We perceive nothing in the actual present. What we call "the present" is built out of the integration of many past histories. The flow of time is the succession of these integrations, disjointed but appearing to be continuous, as if life were a grand movie. The analogy is apt for even movies are discontinuous; to see this, all you have to do is change the frame rate. Meanwhile,” Gleiser says, “(we should all) enjoy the show!”
We are the director of our own movies… our lives will be the sum total of all the frames… we can change the camera angle and lens, we can adjust the lighting, we can choose the cast and crew… and we can decide if we are filming a tragedy or a comedy, a western or a love story… or some combination of them all… we can rewrite the script as we go along…
We may have bad weather, sickness, unexpected delays, changes in cast members, budget overruns… but we have so many choices within our control…
To make our best choices in how we live amidst illusions…Emerson says that the key is to be true to ourselves and each other—
He wrote-- “In this kingdom of illusions we grope eagerly for stays and foundations. There is none but a strict and faithful dealing at home, and a severe barring out of all duplicity or illusion there. Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth. I look upon the simple and childish virtues of veracity and honesty as the root of all that is sublime in character. Speak as you think, be what you are, …, … A little integrity is better than any career. This reality is the foundation of friendship, religion, poetry, and art. … it is what we really are that avails with friends, with strangers, and with fate or fortune.”
Robert Walsh, who wrote our meditation about the fault line, wrote another meditation, entitled ‘Nothing is settled, everything matters.’ He says,
“The meaning of your life is not contained within one act, or one day, or one year. As long as you are alive the story of your life is still being told, and the meaning is still open. As long as there is life in the world, the story of the world is still being told. What is done is done, but nothing is settled.
And if nothing is settled, then everything matters. Every choice, every act in the new year matters. Every word, every deed is making the meaning of your life and telling the story of the world. Everything matters in the year coming, and, more importantly, everything matters today.”
* * *
Most of us look at the glass as either half-full or half-empty… what we forget is that it is we who can decide. We have a choice as to which we focus on… which we choose to embrace as our truth. We can acknowledge the fullness and choose to embrace the emptiness … or we can acknowledge the emptiness and still choose to embrace the fullness.
Are we all more different or more alike? We can choose…
Should we live as if we will live forever or die tomorrow? We can choose…
Is the glass half-empty or half-full ? We can choose…
We can choose… we can will ourselves to blink--
Look--it’s a box with the left side in front, blink it’s a box with the right side in front
Look--it’s a darkened cave ceiling, blink—it’s a night full of stars…blink again and it is the stars breathing along with us…
Look-- it’s a righwing republican who wants to destroy the planet, blink—it’s my neighbor who loves his children and worries about their future and brings me tomatoes from his garden
Look--it’s my father, who walked out on us many years ago, blink—it’s my father and he’s still loving us all these years later…
Look-- it’s me being fully justified in my well-researched and conscientious opinion, blink—it’s me being close-minded and not making room for the insights of others
Look—it’s a screaming child in the supermarket, blink—it’s a child who is hungry, or frustrated, sad or angry, sick or lonely, needing love and attention… blink again—it’s all of us, sometimes…
look—it’s you, and I remember your hurtful words… blink—it’s you and I remember your joyful laughter…
look—it’s a child’s blank piece of paper, afraid of harsh critique, blink—it’s a snowfall, clean, white and beautiful…
look—the cup is half-empty… blink—the cup is half-full… blink again—my cup is overflowing.
Emerson says, in this world of illusions, the best we can do is to be as true to ourselves as possible, and honest to those around us…
Perhaps Reality is a collective hunch… but then I think that “collective”, is the key…
All our individual knowing is partial, limited, finite, subjective, illusory…
But together… we can transcend our limitations, pool our wisdom, change our destinies…
May we realize the power in our every moment, to choose our illusions, to direct our life story,
May we choose to focus on those interpretations and illusions that lead to a life more abundant, more honest, more compassionate, more true.
May we choose wisely and lovingly, knowing that our futures and the futures of all of our brothers and sisters, depend on us.
Amen.
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