The Pathless Path

             In my many years in and around the edges of the New Thought movement, Unity in particular, I’ve noticed something: We feel a bit like a refugee camp. So many of us have come from other religious perspectives, sects, and movements – former Catholics, Protestants, Jews, agnostics, atheists, and more. We went wandering and ended up here…for now. Something about the non-dogmatic openness of New Thought felt like a safe haven in a world where partisan and sectarian chest-thumping rends peaceful hearts into tatters.

            Here, finally, was a religion for people who didn’t really like religion.

            It turned out it wasn’t a different or better religion we were after – we were after an experience, not an ideology. We wanted the nameless mystery and boundless peace beyond all the names of God. As Stephen Mitchell’s rendering of the 131^st Psalm puts it: “My mind is not noisy with desires, Lord, and my heart has satisfied its longing. I do not care about religion or anything that is not you.”

            I came to New Thought as a philosophy student writing my master’s thesis on Ralph Waldo Emerson. But I didn’t set foot inside a Unity Church until middle age, decades later. Emerson’s nature mysticism and unaffiliated spirituality kept me on the outskirts of any organized movement. I preferred the squawking of a jay from the boughs of a sugar pine to any Sunday sermon.

            The traditions that spoke to me most clearly were Asian traditions – Daoism, Vedanta, Zen Buddhism. There I felt the nameless draw of the pathless land of the soul. The silence of meditation seemed to hold more truth than any doctrine or belief, no matter how eloquently stated or ardently held. Maybe it was just my philosophical training, which taught me to love questions and distrust answers.

            Still, in the family of New Thought I found a sangha, a community of fellow-wanders. If you’re going to make a nest in the tree of mystery, it’s good to have a flock around you.

            My Unity teachers – Rev. Will Newsom, Rev. Wendy Craig-Purcell, and many others – taught me with their focused presence and loving kindness that there was something I had been missing all those years out on my own. And the New Thought community, being as it is nominally Christian, opened that door for me – a door I had studiously avoided. Sure, in college I devoured the Christian mystics because there I found brothers and sisters in mystery. But ordinary, everyday Christianity with its emphasis on the redemptive power of the risen Christ never spoke to me. Until my immersion in New Thought, where I eventually came to appreciate the Christian narrative as yet another metaphor for the perennial philosophy: Here was yet another dying, gift giving god, another incarnation – the eternal, sacred, formless source taking form in the temporal world of impermanence.  

And that if you want to know God, look no further than where you are, and who you are. 

            I’m still not a very good joiner. No matter where I am, I’m an outsider looking in. But I’m eternally grateful for my time in New Thought, and for all the glimmers of truth it has shown me.

            But today I think I’ll go hiking with Li Po, the 8^th century Chinese poet: “The birds have vanished into the sky, and now the last cloud drains away. We sit together, the mountain and me, until only the mountain remains.”

 [All quotations are from Stephen Mitchell’s The Enlightened Heart: An Anthology of Sacred Poetry.]

[This piece was first published in my A to Zen column in the May/June 2021 issue of Unity Magazine, and is reproduced here with permission.]

The Unhealed Wound

 
How One Unity Minister Broke the Silence and Started the Brave Conversation About Race

Wendy was restless. On the surface she had everything – a great marriage, a beautiful family, and a long, successful career as the senior and founding minister of The Unity Center in San Diego, California. And still, no matter how many lives were changed for the better by the Unity teachings she taught and by the beloved community she shepherded, it wasn’t enough. There was unfinished business. With every book she read, with every documentary she watched, with every deep and honest conversation she had with both her black and white congregants it became increasingly clear – there was a hidden wound we in the New Thought community weren’t doing enough about: the wound of racism.

            She decided to do something about it. Her conviction to act came out of a bedrock Unity principle – that we create our life experiences through our way of thinking. If we in Unity and the larger New Thought community are serious about that principle, then it is of paramount importance that we examine our thinking in ways we never have before. Especially when it comes to hidden, unconscious bias.

            Like a lot of Unity and New Thought ministers, Rev. Wendy Craig-Purcell’s lessons from the pulpit often centered on cognitive or psychological dynamics – how our thinking affects our lives. Drawing from a wide variety of sources – world scripture, scientific journals, and her own spiritual experience – Wendy built a case, Sunday by Sunday, for the rectitude of living the examined life; that if we really want to awaken and contribute meaningfully to an awakening world, we must be willing to exhume our deepest and most hidden thought-structures, drag them out into the light, and let go of any thinking that no longer serves our highest good.

            Racism is the crisis that never seems to go away. No matter how much progress we make, and the progress is real, there are still dangerous undercurrents flowing through the American heart that threaten to drown us all. And the message Wendy received from the African American members of The Unity Center was clear. White people are the ones that have the best chance to change the whole game. Wendy got to work.

An Incomplete Education

            My wife Lori and I jumped at the chance to join a white ally group that Wendy was forming. Twelve of us gathered in her home early last year. We sat in a circle and looked at each other, not knowing what would unfold over the next five months. But we were willing. And that’s the biggest piece.

            In preparation for our first meeting Wendy had us read Waking Up White by Debby Irving. Irving’s memoir does a remarkable job, largely through confession, of delineating the extent of both structural racism and white privilege. In the same way that fish do not know what water is, white people are generally unaware that they benefit from unearned privilege simply by virtue of the color of their skin. I began to see it everywhere. As a straight white male I’m treated differently on the car lot, at the bank, by the police, and at job interviews. But don’t take my word for it. There are decades of research documenting the unconscious bias we all have, and the devastating impact this has on people of color.

            We also watched documentaries like 13^th, Ava DuVernay’s essential film about the tenacity of racial inequity. When the Civil War and slavery ended, white supremacists simply changed their tactics, finding new, cruel, and innovative ways to keep African Americans oppressed. It’s disorienting and worse to realize how little you know about the real history of America. I kept thinking about that line from the Tao Te Ching: “The more you know, the less you understand.”

As we learned about black codes, work gangs, Jim Crow, sundown towns, inequities in the G.I. Bill, redlining, and racial disparities in arrest, conviction, and incarceration rates, it became painfully clear that many of the structures of American society were intentionally designed by white supremacists to benefit themselves and harm people of color. And that I and every other white person had unwittingly benefited from these structural advantages, even if we had no hand in creating them.

What Racism Is and Is Not

            White allies are used to being angry about racism. Some of us even take comfort in a sense of moral superiority over those we consider less enlightened. So it was particularly transformative to begin to realize that racism is not so much a moral failing as it is a cognitive error. In a way that’s good news. We can drop the moral condescension and simply work to expand everyone’s understanding, including our own, about the pervasive and destructive nature of unexamined implicit bias.

            That’s why Wendy introduced Dr. David Campt’s White AllyToolkit into the curriculum of our white ally work. Dr. Campt is a nationally-recognized leader in dialogue training with a long resume of ground breaking work in both the private and public sector. The underlying premise of the White Ally Toolkit is that the only thing that’s going to move us out of our centuries-long entrenchment in racist consciousness is honest, compassionate, and empathy-based dialogue with our “racism skeptic” white friends, relatives, and co-workers.

            Racism skeptics run the gamut from explicit white supremacists to ordinary white people unaware of their implicit biases. Racism skeptics comprise 55% of white America. They believe that racism is no longer a significant problem. They express the view that talking about racism makes racism worse, and that we ought to “just move on.” They say things like “I don’t see color.” So this is where white allies must focus their work – on their racism skeptic friends, family members, and co-workers. If we could bring even a small percentage of these folks out of their skepticism and into racism awareness, real change would unfold.

The R.A.C.E. Method

            It starts with conversations. Dr. Campt suggests a four step process called the R.A.C.E. method.

            First, reflect. Make sure you’re emotionally ready to begin this challenging work. Come out of judgment, drop all your arguments, and don’t try to win. Bite your tongue, get ready to do some deep listening, and use your compassion and empathy to find common ground.

            Second, ask. If your racism skeptic friend says something problematic like, “I don’t see color. I don’t have a racist bone in my body. I judge people by the content of their character, not the color of their skin just like MLK said,” then you might say something like, “O.K., that’s interesting, tell me more about that. Tell me an experience you had that leads to you think that.” (It’s key that you lead them away from their beliefs and toward a story about a specific experience that led them to have that belief.) They might tell you about a project they just completed with their black colleague at work, and about how well they get along

            Third, connect. Mirror their story by describing a great relationship you have with a person of color at work. Now, your friend’s worldview is not under attack, so he has no need to get defensive. You’ve established an empathetic bond. When we talk about our beliefs and opinions, we argue. When we talk about our stories, we connect.

            Fourth, expand. Now it’s time to gently lead your friend out of their racism skepticism, not by citing statistics or quoting studies, but with another personal story. Here you might tell them a story about a time when you caught yourself being biased. You might say something like, “So one time this black guy in a hoodie came into the store where I work, and for a second I got a little nervous. But then I saw that he had his baby in one of those slings around shoulders, and he was just buying some diapers and formula. Man did I feel like an idiot. Here I am this open-minded guy, or so I thought. I mean, I’m not a racist right? And still this unconscious bias leaped up out of nowhere.” And with any luck, your friend is nodding his head. He’ll probably share a similar story. By using self-disclosure, empathy, and compassion, you’ve enticed him to admit his own unconscious, implicit bias. He’ll take this with him. It is slow work, but it’s powerful, and when done properly, truly transformative.

What it Takes

            What it takes is leadership. For years Reverend Wendy has been building programs at The Unity Center designed to draw her congregants from the inherently interior work of spiritual practice toward the challenging application of our insights and principles in the field of action. Her “Brave Conversations” initiative brought a large group of African American congregants into Wendy’s home to explore paths forward (an effort out of which the white allies groups were born). Her “Muslim Outreach” initiative built ongoing interfaith dialogue and joint activities with a neighboring mosque. Her “Bolder Together” initiative brings Unity, CSL, and other New Thought ministers into her home to form coalitions committed to meaningful social justice action and community service. With these programs and others, Wendy is teaching us how to wield our time-tested Unity and New Thought principles as tools of transformation.

            If we are serious about both our own awakening and the awakening of the world, then it is time to come out of our privileged timidity, safety, and comfort and practice being bolder together with the fullness of our hearts, minds, bodies, and souls. To no longer just witness suffering, but to be party to its diminishment and end. This is where our spiritual work has been leading us. It is time to finish the job. Our compassion demands it.

What's Me and What's Maya?

[This piece first appeared in my column "A to Zen" in the September/October 2014 issue of Unity Magazine, and is reproduced here with permission.] 
      
       Most of the time, the illusion holds.

But once in a while, we catch a glimpse of our face in the mirror and honestly wonder, Who is that person looking back at me? Sure, we generally know who we are. We know our names. We remember our addresses. At work, we kind of know what to do. But on those dark nights of the soul when our very existence is called into question, the center around which all of the disparate elements of our lives orbit loses its gravitational pull. We see the parts, but can’t find the whole. The lights are on, but no one’s home.

The great 20th-century Indian spiritual teacher Ramana Maharshi used to ask his students to meditate on the question, “Who are you?” But the question often elicits a mere list of labels—a man, a woman, a husband, a wife, a parent, an athlete, an artist, an engineer. As spiritual archaeologists, we must somehow be able to dig down beneath these layers of social identity.

Knowing that real inquiry can begin only after removing all masks, Adyashanti and other contemporary teachers shift the question to “What are you?” Yet no matter how you word the query, the goal is the same—discernment. Learning to tell the difference between illusion and reality, between our myriad masks and our primal, authentic nature is the urgent task of every thinking man and woman. Without discernment, we remain forever trapped in an unexamined illusion.

When we are born, we fall immediately under the spell of the perceptual world and the inherent structures of consciousness. Our senses and our minds portray the boundless energy around us as discrete and solid objects, even though at the atomic level, so-called “solid matter” is 99.9999 percent empty space. Even our concept of self is haunted by this same vexing problem. We think we are separate. As a purely defensive move, our ego usurps control. Then fear puts us in competition with all of the other “separate” objects and entities that our addled mind concocts. Thinking itself, in other words, is the source of our confusion. The ancient Indians had a word for this shared communal delusion—maya.

Maya is the illusory nature of the perceptual field, including our surface consciousness, shaped as it is by this mistaken reading of the energy field around us. Caught in the dream of maya, we don’t see an essential truth—that we are at our core divine. Hinduism refers to this divine nature within us as Atman, or Self. The purpose of the many paths of yoga, in fact, is to see through this fog of maya that hangs between us and reality so that we can discover and realize our inner divinity. The process may seem impossible, yet there’s hope. There is a way across the ocean of this dreamworld. Discernment is our raft to the other shore.

When Unity cofounder Charles Fillmore and other New Thought leaders went looking for a way to transform the fire-and-brimstone Christianity of 19th-century America into an affirmative spiritual practice, they turned to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and the sacred literature of Hinduism for a new vocabulary with which to render the spiritual truths of their own experience. In an essay of the same name, Emerson renders the Atman as “Over-Soul,” the one, universal consciousness. When Fillmore writes of the Christ within, he is referring to this same spiritual principle.

Discernment then, it turns out, is the most important of all spiritual work. The pervasive, relentless tenacity of the illusion of ego-separation is the source of all our powerlessness, conflict, and suffering. Realizing the Christ within, our Buddha nature, our God consciousness, our Over-Soul, is a prize won only through an arduous and disciplined process of discerning truth from illusion. We are not our bodies. We are not our genes. We are not our cultural and environmental conditioning. We are shaped by those things, but not bound by them. We are more. We are one with the divine.