From a talk given at Pagosa Unitarian Universalist
Fellowship on February 12, 2012
A couple of months ago when I was asked to
speak about love for
Valentine’s Day, I knew that I was up
for an interesting couple of months
when my heart said a quick “yes”
and Spirit quickly followed with the
title “The Final Frontier.” I had
no idea what I would say, but with a
title like that, I knew that I was in for an
interesting journey!
Some time ago I basically quit giving talks
because I thought that enough had been said—we
simply need to live from what we have already
heard and know in our intellects. When my heart
said “yes,” I knew that this talk
was as much for me as from me.
Hence, my journey began as I contemplated the
meaning of Love as the Final Frontier over the
next couple of months. I share those musings
with you today.
An important catalyst in my thinking was January’s
Spiritual Cinema selection, “I Am.”
It was a documentary on how we are all connected.
“I Am” was created by Tom Shadyack,
the director of several Jim Carey comedies including
Ace Ventura and Bruce Almighty. He was highly
successful financially, but noticed that he
was not any happier than he was when he was
living in an apartment and just getting started
on his film career. That career came to a crashing
halt when he had a bicycle accident with a broken
arm and a concussion that evolved into post-concussion
syndrome.
Post-concussion syndrome is a problem for many
boxers, soccer players, and football players.
The full impact of the problem is only just
now coming to be recognized. With light and
sound sensitivity, a constant ringing in his
ears, wide mood swings, and a poor memory, he
entered into a deep depression and wished for
death but wasn’t overtly suicidal. As
he contemplated death, Tom asked himself, “What
have I come to know?” As he was pondering
that question, he suddenly began to improve
as people with PC often do.
As he recovered, he decided to ask some of
the wise people in the world “What is
the fundamental problem underlying what is wrong
with the world?” and “What can we
do about it?” He took a film crew of four
and crisscrossed the globe interviewing some
of the deepest thinkers of our time. Most of
them had never heard of Ace Ventura, his Oscar
winning movie, which was very humbling to him.
He was absolutely delighted when Lynn McTaggart,
the scientist and author of “The Field,”
said that “Ace Ventura” was one
of her family’s favorite movies. That
was his first surprise—and he was in for
a lot more surprises as he continued his interviews.
Although I’ve read lots of books on love,
spirituality, and compassion, I learned a lot
from his interviews and I’m going to share
some of it with you today. For those of you
who were here last week, I think you will see
how it feels like a continuation of that discussion.
For those of you who weren’t here last
week, don’t worry. This is a stand-alone
talk, as well.
Lynn McTaggart said that cultures learn from
the stories that they tell
each other. She went on to say that science
is a story that is 300 years
old and that in that relatively short time many
of the “facts” that we
were certain of are no longer true. For example,
the world is not flat
and Pluto is not a planet. The biggest mistake
of all is that science has
thought that separate objects can only influence
each other physically.
That is, it is commonly thought that objects
must physically touch each
other in order to have an effect on each other.
Einstein disagreed,
however. Einstein claimed that the field is
the only reality, citing
“spooky action at a distance.” He
noted that when two electrons were in
connection and then moved an infinite distance
apart, if the spin on one
electron was changed, the other electron’s
spin changed simultaneously.
That influence of objects at a distance is just
now starting to be
explored in more depth and more of those studies
will be discussed later
in this talk.
Interesting, but what does that have to do with
love? Let’s go back to
Darwin’s “Descent of Man.”
When speaking of evolution, he mentions love
and cooperation 95 times and survival of the
fittest only twice. Aldous
Huxley was the man who popularized Darwin’s
concept of evolution. He
chose to emphasize the “survival of the
fittest” aspect and it has had a
huge impact on how we see ourselves, people
with whom we interact, and
society in general. And, yet, like the notion
that the world is flat, it
simply isn’t true.
Let’s look at some examples in animals
of where cooperation takes
precedence over the concept of the alpha male
who rules supreme because he
is the most powerful. In observation of deer,
the alpha male is not the
determiner of what water hole they go to. Rather,
it is a democratic
decision. In observation of a deer herd that
had three possible water
holes, individual deer began looking toward
one of the three water holes.
That continued until a majority of the deer
were looking toward one hole.
When the majority of deer were looking toward
one hole, the whole group
moved in that direction. The alpha male simply
followed. The same has
been observed in how a starling flock changes
directions of flight and how
insect colonies change their direction. Nature
is basically democratic.
Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor at
Berkeley, maintains that sympathy is the strongest
instinct. He supports his assertion with an
explanation of studies done on mirror neurons.
Recently mirror neurons have been discovered
in great apes, dolphins and elephants. When
an ape observes another ape doing a behavior
he himself has done in the past, that part of
the brain lights up just as if he was doing
the behavior himself. That is why that college
students observing a film about Mother Theresa
have an increase in their immune system. They
have mirror neurons for compassionate behavior
and compassionate behavior has been shown to
increase the immune system. They are tapping
into times that they themselves have shown compassion
and their mirror neurons are firing just as
if they were feeding the hungry in Calcutta.
Let’s go a little deeper into exactly
how emotions come to be. While conventional
science has thought the brain was the seat of
emotions, recent scientific studies show that
90-95% of neuronal connections go from the body
to the brain, not the other way around. Only
5-10% of connections go from the brain to the
body. So, literally, our heart and our stomachs
are telling the brain what to feel.
The Heart Math Institute has spent years looking
into this phenomenon, primarily through studying
heart beat variability under varying emotional
states. They have found that is the pause between
heartbeats that influences are physiology and
that is affected by our emotions. The pause
between heartbeats renews our physiology if
we are in positive emotional states. If we are
angry or afraid, that pause causes a depletion
of our vital energy and causes us to not think
as well. In short, anger makes us stupid!
And, now for one more mind-blowing fact about
how interconnected we really are. Dean Radin
from the Institute of Noetic Sciences has place
65 Random Event Generators in cities throughout
the world. It is a binary system, a “yes”
“no” system. It is like flipping
several thousand coins every second. Theoretically,
in a non-interactive world, there would be 50%
heads and 50% tails. However, when the world
is going through a crisis such as 9/11 or the
tsunami, all 65 Random Event Generators respond
simultaneously with a spike in one direction.
It is as if the world feels the pain and responds,
even without knowing what is happening on a
conscious level. And, if it is not only felt
my people, but it has an effect on machines!!
Radin concludes that everything is connected
all of the time. There is only the appearance
of separation.
When I finished watching that film, I better
understood my own innate
feeling that we had said enough and now it was
time to live it. Indeed,
it is music, movement such as tai chi and yoga,
dance, and just being
together in a heartfelt way that gives the positive
feeling to the heart
that allows our physiology to be at its best
and that allows our minds to
work with intelligence. Indeed, it is a happy
heart that creates a
functioning brain!
What if we focused only on that which makes
our heart sing? I submit that
a singing heart is an engaged heart. That means
to me that it isn’t
always about what is best for me in an objective
way, but what allows me
to feel really connected and compassionate to
the whole world. How would
our culture change if we learned at an early
age that when we rage against
someone else we are literally hurting ourselves
and making ourselves
stupid? As I was preparing for this talk, I
watched the movie, “Ghandi”
for probably the 100th time. I am always impressed
that Ghandi was not
angry with the British—he showed complete
non-violence at all times, not
only in his actions, but in his heart as well—at
least to the best of his
ability.
Well, that is the world view of the mystical
traditions and increasingly of scientific studies
as they converge with time-honored mystical
traditions of all religions. How does that compare
with our Western psychological tradition that
says that we must love ourselves first before
we can love anyone else? That view does seems
to make sense. We spend considerable effort,
time, and money on looking back at our childhood
memories and working through old injuries, coming
to understand that we are our own best parents
to our inner child, because we know ourselves
and what we need more than even the best parents
ever could. By the same token, as we look back
at lost loves or disappointing loves, we realize
that each of us are flawed individuals here
to do our own work and that no individual will
be our ideal mate nor will we be anyone else’s
ideal mate.
We are each responsible for our own emotional
needs while we can still enjoy having relationships
with others. This modern psychological view
of love is certainly far removed from the romantic
version of the fairy tales. Sounds pretty far
removed from the fairy tales of Sleeping Beauty
who is rescued from unawareness by a kiss, doesn’t
it? Or the knight in shining armor? Or the beautiful
muse who will bring out all of a man’s
hidden potentials?
So, let’s put the fairy tales aside.
Perhaps the ideal relationship in the Western
tradition is one in which each of the partners
knows themselves very well and provides their
own basic emotional support while wishing each
other profoundly well. Partners are willing
to make compromises in order to meet the needs
of their partner, expecting that in the long
run those compromises will be approximately
equal on both sides. And that anything is open
to negotiation.
Sounds tidy, doesn’t it? Then life happens
and life is anything but tidy. Children die,
spouses have affairs, partners lose their jobs,
houses are foreclosed, and chronic illness descends
on one or both of the partners. Old age and
death happen. Everyone in the room has experienced
some of these difficult events in their lives.
How does the Western understanding of love
help us in these times? Certainly, it helps
to have strong emotional cores during such trials,
but an emphasis on self-love might well cause
us to abandon the situation because it is “just
too hard” and not in our own best interest.
What is the difference between being a martyr
(a negative connotation in psychology circles)
or a committed partner who acts from love? Is
losing our boundary between ourselves and the
other a bad thing--or a good thing? There are
no black and white answers, here, but I feel
it is important to be aware of the contradictions
in our thinking when faced with real life situations.
The Valentine season inspires focus on intimate
relationships, but, of
course, the boundaries between self and other
are issues in every
relationship, whether with individuals or organizations.
When do we let
go of our own self-interests on behalf of the
larger whole? And is that
letting go in the long run, really in our on
best self-interest? What is
the difference between the psychologically pejorative
term of martyring
ourselves and the lives of enlightened individuals
who simply move from
compassion and love without any regard for themselves.
Those people
literally see themselves as part of the Oneness
and look at such a large
view of what is occurring that their own self-interest
isn’t on their
radar screens.
So, we come back to the dichotomy between these
two very different points
of view about love. Perhaps as we come to embrace
the new scientific view
that we are all connected and that every action,
every thought, indeed
every feeling we have influences the whole world,
there will come
modifications of the psychological thought that
take these realities into
account and we will come to have a more coherent
understanding of what it
is to be a human in relationship with all that
is.
I have no tidy answer for a grand finale, only
the suggestion that is
these days, it is not someone out there who
gives us the answer, but that
it is going deeply within to ask ourselves,
what from these thoughts
rings true for me? Is there something here that
I want to contemplate?
Might anything that I have read today change
my behavior? Is a deeper
consideration of love as the final frontier
a part of my journey?
Clearly, it is for me—and perhaps it is
for you as well.
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