A theologian and an astronomer were talking together one day. The astronomer said that after reading widely in the field of religion, he had concluded that all religion could be summed up in a single phrase. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," He said it with some smugness, believing that his field was so much more complex. After a brief pause, the theologian replied that after reading widely in the area of astronomy he had concluded that all of it could be summed up in a single phrase also. "Oh, and what is that?" the astronomer inquired. "Twinkle, twinkle, little star; how I wonder what you are!"
Of course they both had it right and wrong. Each captured an accurate summary of the other’s field, but they failed to realize that theology and astronomy are seeking answers to the very same questions. They both seek meaning in as broad a context as possible. They both seek guidance in a complex world, where decisions are made with the greatest good for the greatest number in mind. They both to find extraordinary meaning in ordinary quests for truth.
You may not consider yourself either a theologian or an astronomer, and yet are both. You are scientist and poet, knowledge seeker, star gazer and love maker.
The Fierce Entanglement of Knowing and Loving
Rebecca Godlstein wrote a novel called ‘Properties of Light” which tells the story of two physicists; one a young, rational, physicist and an older physicist who teaches a class called “Physics for Poets”. The point of the story is that in both love and physics ''the knower and the known are physically entangled with one another.''
Theres a beautiful scene where the two are in conversation about the essence of life.
The younger man, Justin, begins with the question:
--What is the essential fact?
Then follows this description of their wordless encounter-
“He bends his gaze at last to merge with mine, and in the clarity of his light- streaming eyes I can at last unravel the fury of the passions that we are given to live. The one eye’s message is of the eros contained in the thought, injecting its fire into our yearning to know. And in the other is the knowingness that comes of love. We are things that would know and we are things that would love, and oh how fused is that entanglement, how fused and fierce and forever in our entangled passions.”
Today, we continue our adventure into the ordinary and the extraordinary, the things we know and the things we love, the new frontiers of science and knowledge and the hidden depths of inner consciousness.
Assuming that is true that we only see 1% of what exists, then there is no shortage of new discovery and mystery. Today, we continue this exploration into the unknown, with the theme of intuition and decision making.
Extraordinary Intuition
Have you ever driven somewhere with very little recollection of how you got there? Chances are, your subconscious took over, and all your previous experience of how to drive and which directions to follow, got you to your destination safely. It doesn’t just happen in cars.
George Soros, the billionaire investor has written a book “The Alchemy of Finance”, admits that he is likely to change his position in a market because of a backache. “I used to treat it as a warning sign that something was wrong in the portfolio”, he said. “It used to occur before I knew what was wrong, often even before the fund began to decline in value. That is what made it so valuable as a signal. When I finally discovered what was wrong, my backache usually went away,” (Soros 2003).
Even when making billion-dollar decisions, Soros doesn’t always know how he knows what he knows. He doesn’t have to know why his back hurts because he has learned to trust his intuition.
Learning to trust your intuition, even when your intuition is a back ache sparking reminders of past back aches, opens up worlds of possibility for you. But extraordinary knowing is not just for your own benefit.
Elizabeth Mayer tells the story in her book ‘Extraordinary Knowing” about one of the world’s top neuro-surgeons. He is the type of doctor who is called on to attend to heads of state, because he is known to never lose a patient on the operating table. His secret, and it is a secret because he would be shunned for revealing his methods, is that he stands at the patient’s bedside and does nothing until he sees a light appear over their head and at that point he knows its time to begin. He might wait 30 seconds or hours, but he intuits that until the white light appears it’s not safe to operate. (P. 11-12)
The extraordinary knowing of intuition is not uncommon, just unspoken in mainstream circles; especially mainstream medicine and mainstream religion.
Extraordinary knowing in the Christian story
In the Gospel of John’s account of the baptism of Jesus, John said that he saw Jesus coming towards him and did not recognize him and then in a moment of extraordinary knowing that involved a vision of a dove descending from Heaven, John saw Jesus with new eyes. John and Jesus were cousins. It’s very unlikely that they hadn’t met many times. In this incident, John saw Jesus as if for the first time. He saw with what Jesus described in Matthew 6 as a “single eye, full of light”. This is the eye without division, left and right brain in divine union where all of life is intuited as being interrelated, mitakuye oyasin.
With this eye, there is no distinction between theology and astronomy, science and poetry, logic and mystery, knowing and loving, life becomes a united whole. In this state of a single eye, there is no right or wrong decision. With the single eye, when you come to a fork in the road, you take it, trusting that this is where you need to go, and if at some point it turns out to be a dead end, you turn around and take a different fork in the road.
The Christmas story has three Persian physicists following a star to the birth of Jesus. The star represents their single eye, shining light on all the division in the world, and what occurs is one of the most extraordinary moments of universal love that has been captured by history or legend. Gentile alchemists, following the pagan practice of star gazing, arrive to bow before the King of the Jews.
The star is an archetype, a familiar metaphor, having heralded many famous births, both Hebrew and Gentile. 4 super sized stars reportedly hovered over the birth place of Abraham. A star announced the birth of the Hindu saviour Krishna, as well as Pythagoras and Caesar in the Roman world. The star as archetype points to the fact the brightest beacon begins as a pin hole of light, great leaders and guides of many begin as babies. Now, with the left/ right brain union, you can both honor natural laws and science knowing that a supernatural star over Bethlehem was unlikely and also wonder in the enduring power of star stories to evoke a sense of mystique and awe around the birth of significant leaders.
Stars are archetypes for intuition, both considered decisions and seemingly spontaneous moments of extraordinary clarity. This morning’s service is an encouragement to trust your intuition. Trust your gut and verify your assumptions. Consider intuition an internal conversation that is never ending; in other words even if you don’t know why you know something, or how you came to a decision it was inevitably part of a life long process of forming your intuition. Intuition is both rational and spontaneous, left and right brain. Every time you make a decision that seems to have gone wrong, it informs your intuition for the next time. Every time you make a decision that benefits yourself and others, your subconscious stores that away for future reference.
I want to offer some practical suggestions for both trusting and honing your intuition.
1. Stand in awe before your intuition- trust it for the miracle that it is
Abraham Heschel, 20th century Jewish theologian said this-
“Awe is the intuition for the dignity of all things, a realization that things not only are what they are but, also stand, however remotely, for something supreme.”
Believe not only that your intuition can be trusted, but that it is pointing you beyond the life you have planned out towards the life that is waiting for you; a life of extraordinary goodness and beauty. If the wonder of your intuition eludes you, then gaze at the stars and know that you are as much star as you are flesh and blood.
Heschel continues-
“We can never sneer at the stars, mock the dawn or scoff at the totality of being. Sublime grandeur evokes unhesitating, unflinching awe. Away from the immense, cloistered in our own concepts, we may scorn and revile everything. But standing between earth and sky, we are silenced by the sight…”
2. If intuition doesn’t come naturally to you, then nature will remind you
One of the important Jewish festivals is Sukkot (pronounced Sue Coat). It is the Hebrew word for a temporary shelter, which is designed specifically to be carried by a nation of no fixed address. The Sukka’s roof is covered with leaves that are spaced to allow light in and to allow star gazing at night. It is a powerful reminder that no physical structure, no belief system, no ritual and no church authority are permanent or binding. None of these things can protect you from the changing fortunes of life, nor mediate an experience of God.
In fact, on the contrary, only when you have a healthy detachment from things and knowledge, can your intuition lead you into the midst of a direct experience of divine mystery, which is the heart’s desire of intuition.
Walt Whitman once wrote-
"When I heard the learn'd astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander'd off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars."
3. When your sense are overloaded, get a reboot
Mark Haddon wrote the very successful 2003 novel, “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time.”In it, he tells the story of Christopher, an autistic savant. He is brilliant in math, but unable to cope with normal daily life, like reading another person's face for signs of emotion, or like riding the underground subway system in London. The subway is a particular challenge because he is unable to filter the wide array of sensory information. This is Christopher’s description of his overload-
“When I am in a new place, because I see everything, it is like when a computer is doing too many things at the same time and the central processor unit is blocked up and there isn't any space left to think about other things. And when I am in a new place and there are lots of people there it is even harder because people are not like cows and flowers and grass and they can talk to you and do things that you don't expect, so you have to notice everything that is in the place, and also you have to notice things that might happen as well. And sometimes when I am in a new place and there are lots of people there it is like a computer crashing and I have to close my eyes and put my hands over my ears and groan, which is like pressing CTRL + ALT + DELETE and shutting down programs and turning the computer off and rebooting so that I can remember what I am doing and where I am meant to be going.” (p. 143-4)
Even for those of us without the challenge of autism, life can throw too much information at us. Haven't you, at some point, felt like rebooting yourself? You have way too many choices to make about things that don’t really matter that much, and yet your preoccupation with these details can sometimes be veiling your intuition.Instead of spinning on the information overload, try asking yourself the questions- What matters the most right now in this moment? What is the one right thing to do right now? Not What are all the steps I need to take to save the world, just what do I need to do right now to take one step forward? Questions such as these will function like a computer reboot, bringing you back to focus on your intuition. They will direct your attention to the single shining star circling your orbit- follow that star!
4. Intuition is not so much found, as lived into
When you come to the fork in the road, you are unlikely to form your character at that moment to make a decision of integrity. Your decision is made as part of a life long accumulation of information and values. So much of this is formed by the company you keep.
I came across a beautiful Opus and Augie comic strip. Opus is a penguin and Augie his human friend. Opus says, “Auggie, ol’ buddy…ever wonder how all of this came to be?” Auggie says, “You don’t believe in God, Opus?” “I’m a penguin. We’re not sure what we believe in….except purpose. We believe in having a purpose. Also lots of squid.” Auggie counters, “That’s ridiculous. If you think this is all just a cosmic accident, you’re left purposeless!” And Opus retorts, “I’m not purposeless!”
As Auggie lies down in the grass, Auggie mutters, “Yeah, well, if we really are merely atoms bumping around by chance, there’s little hope for finding meaning in life.” He yawns and, presumably, is soon asleep.
In the next frame, a few big fat rain drops are falling. Opus looks up at the sky, catches a raindrop in his hand and says, “Ah. LIFE’S MEANING [shown in bolded letters].”
Next, we see Opus gently placing his big puffy hat under Auggie’s sleeping head for a pillow, saying “Maybe it’s not so much found…” and, then, Opus takes his coat off and is laying it over Auggie to cover him.
In the final frame, the rain is pouring down and Opus is standing in the rain, holding his umbrella over the still-sleeping Auggie. Opus concludes, “Maybe it’s not so much found…as it is made.” Maybe intuition is not so much found, as it is made.
WH Auden wrote a poem called “A Christmas Oratorio”, in which he uses each of the three wise men to make a point about human longings.
The first wiseman seeks knowledge-
Finally, he says
"To discover how to be truthful now
Is the reason I follow this star."
The second Wise Man is a philosopher who seeks purpose. He says-
“To discover how to be living now
Is the reason I follow this star."
Auden's third Wise Man is a sociologist who keeps looking for a just society. He concludes:
"To discover how to be loving now
Is the reason I follow this star."
And then all three Wise Men, complaining of the long, weary journey, come to a common conclusion-
“To discover how to be human now
Is the reason we follow this Star."
I could say so much more, but our time is running close and I fear for too many words this morning, lest I overload you with information. Suffice to say that intuition, like a day time star, may appear hidden and mysterious but it is just as real as the hands that touch your face. Trust your gut. It has been many years in the formation, and has resources that you are aware of, and galaxies of shining stars that make up your unconscious world of senses and extraordinary knowing.
Let Your Soul Take You Where you Want to Go
I often prepare for a Sunday with one particular song playing in my mind. It’s intuition’s way of keeping me focused. This week, the song was Andrew Lloyd Webber’s "The Music of the Night" from "The Phantom of the Opera"
Allow these words to wash over you and take you closer to your own core, your single eye full of light, your heart center, your sense of intuition both hidden and mysterious and known and conscious.
Nighttime sharpens, heightens each sensation
Darkness stirs and wakes imagination
Silently the senses abandon their defenses
Helpless to resist the notes I write
For I compose the music of the night
Slowly, gently, night unfurls its splendor
Grasp it, sense it, tremulous and tender
Turn your face away from the garish light of day
Turn your face away from cold, unfeeling light
And listen to the music of the night
Close your eyes and surrender to your darkest dreams
Leave all thoughts of the world you knew before
Close your eyes, let your spirit start to soar
And you'll live as you've never lived before
Softly, deftly, music shall caress you
Hear it, feel it, secretly possess you
Open up your mind, let your fantasies unwind
In this darkness which you know you cannot fight
The darkness of the music of the night
Let your mind start a journey through a strange, new world
Leave all thoughts of the world you knew before
Let your soul take you where you long to go
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