The Diaspora of the Self

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“The centaur being one-half man,

could never plough or pull a van,

But being one half horse as well,

it could not learn to add or spell,

Thus barred from all utility,

it spends its time in being free.”

 

A subsidiary of Apple called Apple Operations International paid virtually no corporate income tax on $29.9 billion in dividends over the last 3 years. They got away with this because they were incorporated in Ireland, which taxes according to where a company is managed, and managed in the U.S., which taxes according to where a company is incorporated. Like the centaur, Apple Operations International avoids responsibility by fragmenting itself. It’s impossible to locate and pin down because it exists nowhere in particular. Wherever you’re looking, it is elsewhere. And so it spends its time in being free.

 

We do this too. We fragment ourselves. We are one way in front of our mothers and another way in front of our kids; one way on Facebook and another way at work; one way at church and another way on the highway. We know certain things about the labor practices in Apple’s supply chain one day, but we don’t know them the next day when it’s time to buy holiday gifts. We know something about the cruelty with which farm animals are raised one day but we don’t know it the next day when we go out to dinner. And it’s understandable. We fragment ourselves in a desperate response to a world that makes impossible and contradictory demands on us. We want to be free. So our own self becomes a diaspora – shards of consciousness scattered across our lives. On some level it’s painful to be so internally divided. But how could it be otherwise? How could we possibly be everything we are required to be and know everything we are required to know all at once? This is the question and the challenge posed to us by the Unitarian half of our faith. How can we, in this postmodern world, personally manifest oneness?

 

The old joke is that Unitarians believe in “one God at most.” But, cute as that is, the number of Gods is not really the point. In the Unitarian vision, the point is more that God – or, if you prefer, the essence of the universe – is one. One as opposed to fragmented. One as opposed to a diaspora. Just as we talked a few weeks ago about the mystical vision of Universalism – the all-encompassing love of the universe – Unitarianism, too, teaches a mystical vision. It’s a vision shared with mystics of pretty much every religious tradition: That a fundamental oneness undergirds all of reality. All that seems divided, all that seems in conflict, all that seems other, somehow partakes of that oneness. It’s a mystery and it’s a miracle.

 

Emerson (who was not a Unitarian for much of his career, but we’re going to pretend we don’t know that) writes,

We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the equally related; the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one. We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are the shining parts, is the soul.

 

It’s very Buddhist. And it’s very Unitarian. And it highlights the classic dissonance between our beliefs about ultimate reality and how we actually experience the world day to day. We may believe that in an ontological sense the world is all one, but we also know that in daily life it’s anything but. Thich Nhat Hanh has a nice way of explaining this issue in Buddhism. He says that there are two kinds of truth: conventional truth and ultimate truth. In the framework of conventional truth, we talk about being and non-being, birth and dying, coming and going, inside and outside, one and many, etc. In the framework of ultimate truth, the teaching transcends all of these concepts in order to help the practitioner touch Nirvana and ultimate reality. Buddhists see no conflict between these two truths and are free to make good use of both frameworks.

 

He also explains that it’s the same thing with classical science and Quantum physics. In classical science we talk about material objects having an independent, individual existence and being located in time and space. And that’s certainly how we experience things in our world (As Emerson said: the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree). But in Quantum physics, Thich Nhat Hanh says the “elementary particles fluctuate in and out of existence and do not really exist but have only a ‘tendency to exist.’ Classical science seems to reflect the conventional truth and quantum physics seems to be on its way to discover the absolute truth, trying very hard to discard notions such as being and non-being, inside and outside, sameness and otherness.” In other words, Quantum physics, too, points to a radical oneness of all that is.

 

We have moments when we touch this oneness – listening to music that envelops us, the proverbial sunset moment where we feel connected with all of nature, moments in relationship with others, sexuality, prayer, yoga, swimming in the ocean – moments when we experience true union. But then those moments pass and we’re back into our normal framework where we divide stuff back up into “self” and “other.” And then we divide internally and we have a self for this and a self for that. Like the centaur.

 

I am not as sanguine as Thich Nhat Hanh about the peaceful co-existence of these two frameworks — conventional reality and ultimate reality. To me, the call of Unitarianism is to draw them together. To bring our daily life into closer and closer alignment with the ultimate truth of the universe – the truth of oneness. In fact, I believe that spiritual work is inherently centripetal – it gathers in toward the center all that is fragmented, all that is lost. So through spiritual work, we slowly integrate our parts and manifest that cosmic oneness personally.

 

It takes courage to do this in our world. It’s a lot easier, as Apple Operations International found out, to split ourselves into parts so that we can remain unaccountable. If we have integrity – which is to say that our parts are “integrated,” we tend not to spend our time in being free.

 

Nelson Mandela, who died this week at age 95, spent 27 of those years in prison and rejected freedom whenever it would have compromised his integrity. He spurned an offer of release with strings attached in 1985, stating, “What freedom am I being offered while the organization of the people [ANC] remains banned? Only free men can negotiate. A prisoner cannot enter into contracts.” From this stance of personal integrity, he went on to become a centripetal force in South Africa.

 

Apartheid, in Afrikaans, literally means “separateness.” Instead of establishing a new, inverted kind of separateness, with the black majority in the power position, Mandela instead helped establish and Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The commission’s work was to create very public forums for victims to tell their stories of injustice and brutality and for the perpetrators of those acts to offer public confession and contrition. It was an amazing act of a society – or at least its emerging leaders – recognizing that they could only move into the future together and that this would require extraordinary acts of forgiveness and restorative justice.

 

Bringing together the fragmented parts of our world involves every aspect of life and every aspect of our being; our stewardship of the planet is primary since failure in that arena obviates all other possibilities. It involves the recognition that if one person is suffering, we all own a piece of that fate. It involves recognizing the divisions of race, class, gender, and even species as ultimately artificial. It involves a process of truth and reconciliation with our families, our co-workers, and fellow congregants.

 

Mystical Judaism describes the creation of the world as God placing matter into vessels that could not contain it, and the vessels shattered. The work of healing and repairing the world is likened to gathering up the shards and bringing them back into wholeness.

 

I see this as our work as Unitarians as well. To bring the scattered diaspora back to wholeness. But we’re just human – fragmented, seeking congruence while trying to be all things to all people, struggling with moral inconsistencies and hyphenated identities. Like the centaur, we are “barred from all utility” as long as our parts remain divided. The diaspora of ourselves and the diaspora of our world are just two sides of the same fragmentation. And the healing of each requires the same work.

 

First we have to slow down. Step back from the knee-jerk responses to our over-stimulated, hyper-stressed, and in some cases, over–caffeinated lives. We need to take time – perhaps during a Sabbath practice – to remind ourselves what’s most important, what we value, and what we are trying to become in the world. We need to take time to remind ourselves of the ultimate truth of oneness and measure the distance from here to there. Let ourselves feel the shudder of incongruence pass through our psyches when we behave out of accord with that truth.

 

The metaphor in the Wisdom Story Meagan told is perfect: the individual and the world are two sides of a single sheet of paper. The world comes together when an individual gets things aligned and together for him or herself. The world comes together when families come together and communities come together.

 

In faith, we recognize that some day, all of this will happen. As in the song, “soon we’ll reach the shining river; soon our pilgrimage will cease; soon our happy hearts will quiver with the melody of peace. Yes, we will gather by the river, the beautiful, the beautiful river.” Some day we will be one with the river, one with the people on its banks, one with the birds on its trees and the fish in its waters. Some day we will be one in our hearts and one with all that is. Our work as Unitarians is to hasten the coming of that day.