Saturday, August 26, 2017

More unum, less pluribus

Dear Jason:

I am glad you enjoyed the bumper sticker, "Too much pluribus, not enough unum." It made me laugh as well and there is nothing that joins people together in a holy instant of communication like a good laugh, and a song.

We get so hung up on bodies and we get aroused sexually by the fantasy of their interaction that we forget that the joy and the bliss of such togetherness comes from the rapport, the deep communication not from physical friction. And so we might appreciate that heaven would be the joyous rapport without the necessity of bodies, only pure communication and a sense of beloved oneness. It says in A Course In Miracles, "For communication embraces everything, and in the peace it re-establishes, love comes of itself."

When, Jason, you find a friend that you can talk to without any effort or sacrifice, only pure joy and openness, you no doubt, if you are mindful, will be aware of a blessing which we call grace. If we are skilled enough to listen deeply to a person and we look for the divine spark and focus on that we can establish this kind of rapport with any of our brothers and sisters. These skills do take a purity of mind, an intention of generosity of our effort and energy, and the deliberate diminishment, if not elimination, of our fears. These skills are a very tall order, but achievable of development with sincere intention.

Our Unitarian Univeralist covenant calls us to this kind of life in our first, second, and third principles. We promise to affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person,  to strive towards justice, equity, and compassion in all our human relations, and to accept one another and encourage the spiritual growth of ourselves and those we interact with in our congregations, our work places, our families, our communities, our states, our nation, and the whole wide world.

If you wonder, Jason, if this can be done, we can study and reflect on the lives of Jesus, Buddha, St. Francis, Martin Luther King, Jr. and any number of other enlightened masters and saints who have walked the earth. You may have your own heroes and heroins whom you admire and would like to emulate. We UUs call these people "prophetic women and men" and their lives and witness are the second of six sources of the UU tradition.

If there is one quality which I would encourage you to look for it would be a cosmic consciousness, what we UUs call a respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part. There seems to be a minority of human beings who achieve this level of awareness and I don't know if UUs are any more developed than our fellow citizens, but at least we intellectually acknowledge this value which is far more than most human organizations and individuals do.

Let us work together, Jason, for more unum and to respect and appreciate the pluribus without attacking it as threatening.

We should strive Jason to create heaven right now, right here where we presently find ourselves. We can accomplish this with the establishment of loving communication. I define the atonement as that time in human history when everybody loves everybody all the time. Each time we ask the Holy Spirit to help us with this activity, we decrease the length of time before human kind achieves this state.

Blessings to you and your family,

Uncle David

6 comments:

  1. Communication restores the link, the melding, the being on the same wave length. Bodies are the enactment of our separation and become the identifier of our egos. Be careful, though in thinking that your body is your self. As UUs should know, the inherent worth and dignity of every person is not based on their bodily shape, color, configuation. It is based on something much grander and more precious. Christians call the body the "temple of the Holy Spirit." Would that we all were aware of this and acknowledged that this is so.

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  2. The comment about cosmic consciousness as an indicator of a person's spiritual development is a wonderful idea. This awareness has nothing to do with academic achievement for social class. It is associated with a person's emotional and spiritual intelligence. I have met people with a developmental disability such as what we used to call mental retardation who seem to be very kind, compassionate, sensitive, cosmically conscious people. There is an older lady in my neighborhood who has some signficant health problems and complains of anxiety bordering on agoraphobia but who can rise above these personal infirmities to help others. She has told me that helping others is the only thing that gets her mind off of how terrible she feels most of the time and helps her feel better. We talked about her "ministry" and how God is using her as his instrument to bring comfort and solace to a weary and suffering world. She told me she never thought her work this way before but she liked the idea that it was a ministry.

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  3. The comments above are reminding me that Marriage counselors have found in recent years that sex therapy doesn't help couples improve their sex lives much. However, if the counselor can help couples improve their friendship, their sex life usually seems to improve as if it were all on its own.

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  4. The reason the bumper sticker, "Not so much pluribus, more unum" is funny is because Trumpism is so divisive. It is interesting how quick people are to turn on one another when they feel aggrieved. It is even more interesting how some scoundrals will capitalize on that grievance to gain power over the aggreived and unaggreived alike.

    The games people play to cater to the desires of the ego which has led them to believe that the satiation of such desires will make them happy are at the same time horrifying as in the extreme case of the holocaust and genocide and entertaining as the comedy of slapstick shenanigans with the people slapping each other around.

    At any rate, UUs seem to want to rise above the drama and contemplate higher virtues and their consequential benefits to them I say, "Good for you. And as UU preachers like to say, 'May it be so.'"

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  5. As a Hispanic women my family and I have been accused of being rapists and drug dealers by the President of the United States. A man who is married to an immigrant perpetrates fear of people from other lands and religions. The sorriest thing of all is that enough American citizens support his views that they made him their president. He has made it clear he does not want to be my president. I am grateful that UUs have resisted his policies and provided sanctuary for people like me in their churches. I am assured that it will not be this way in heaven and hopefully not this way on earth for many more generations.

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  6. There comes a point in our spiritual development when the bodies of other people don't seem to matter to us any more. We are more attuned to the vibes we get from them than what they look like. We seem to intuit whether the person has his shit together or is incongruent. What allows this perception but the willingness and desire to tune in at a higher level than normally perceived at the ego level. The real test is whether you "get" somebody or are oblivious and not paying attention. It is a wonderful experience when we "get" somebody who has their shit together. It if a moment of flow and grace that seems, sometimes, miraculous.

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