[from a lecture Haywood delivered at the San Francisco Theological Seminary on 09/15/02.]
This is nothing new. The criticism of Worship should not be that it’s heresy. It may be syncretism, but it’s not heresy. And I don’t think of it as syncretic, either. It is… triangulated. We looked at all these paths, and made the assumption they were as straight as possible, and tried to figure out where they intersected… the idea being that the intersection was, if not their common destination, at least very near to it.
Syncretism implies that it picks and chooses that which is convenient and discards that which is uncomfortable. And that's not true at all. Worship is at heart not really a new study of religion but a, a review of literature. A meta-study. An analysis of the analyses, looking for common truths. And discovering at the end that they're ALL common truths.
But I can try to summarize it pretty quickly. And it starts with the ordinary notion that the Divine – God, if you prefer – is unlimited. Omnipresent and immanent. And therefore everything is Divine – there is no place where there is not-God.
Which means that you and everything around you is Divine. So act like it.
See how simple this is?
And this is nothing new. It does not contradict any particular faith. Most people who find it meaningful find it meaningful in the context of their own faiths. People who have no faith at all often find Worship as a portal back to a more traditional faith; there are Worship Catholics, Jews, Moslems, Buddhists. It only serves as a complete faith in its own right with those who simply cannot see the paths others have laid down before.
This is nothing new. This is old wine in old skins. The Worshippers have taken these ageless messages and tried to rephrase them for 21st century Americans instead of 1st century fishermen. That’s all. Others have said the same things better already. At best Worship will just pick up a few stragglers who didn’t understand it the first time.
Today’s audience steeped in First Principles, so I’m going to gloss over a lot of nuance. If I gloss too much, call me on it when you start asking me questions in a few minutes.
First, you exist. Cogito ergo sum, an oldie but a goodie. If you don’t believe you exist, I don’t believe you’re here, so what do I care?
Next, I invite you to listen to the singing of Amalia Rodrigues. And look at the Degas bronzes. And read One Hundred Years Of Solitude. These are things that prove the existence of “other” human beings besides you. Because these are things that you could not have done. These are things that you could not have invented in your own mind.
So you exist and not-you exists. The world exists. Look at a tree. Think you could have dreamed that up if there was no external reality called “tree”? Hold a sparrow, thrumming, in your hands. Smell the ocean. These are things that must exist, in some sense, outside of your own consciousness because, well, let’s face it: you’re not that smart. And neither am I. We’re not creative enough to have come up with these things on our own.
Every time you learn something new, every time you experience something you’d never thought of before, the existence of a world outside your own mind is reaffirmed.
And if even if you and I and the world are fictions, they’re useful fictions, like the solar model of the atom or the Second Law of Thermodynamics. They allow us to function. But they can be dangerous fictions because they also create the illusion of other-ness. Other-ness is, in the end, what separates us from the Divine.
(I should note here that the question of whether things exist because of the Big Bang and evolution or because they were created by God is, is… superfluous. Because they still exist either way. In fact it’s not just a superfluous question, it’s a silly one. It presupposes that those two things, nature and God, are mutually exclusive. Go read your Spinoza. This is nothing new.)
So what is the Divine, then? We can account for the existence of these things, ourselves and what seems to be not-ourselves. What about the Divine?
Same answer. The answer to the question “what exists” and “what is Divine” is the same. You and I and the world. Degas and a tree and the ocean. Manifestations of the Divine that we perceive as “other” because they are beyond our own limited understanding. To say that the Divine is not those things is to ascribe limits to the Divine that do not exist.
What are you and a tree and the ocean, after all? Complex systems. A mixture of matter and energy existing in a complicated and tenuous state of balance. Degas and Amalia and you and I exist in the tension between the universal slouch towards chaos and entropy and a very localized but unmistakable will to exist.
And what is the universe? A complex mixture of matter and energy in a delicate state of equipoise, slouching towards maximum disorder but existing nonetheless.
There is no difference, in that sense, between you and a tree. And the universe. And Gabriel Garcia Marquez. And me. Trees are taller than me and Gabriel Garcia Marquez is older than me, but space and time are all manifestations of the same Divine, too.
People want “proof” of the existence of the Divine, and I offer them the same proof that is found in the Koran: Fresh water falls from the sky. Trees rise from the soil and bear fruit. Could you do this?
This is nothing new.
This is nothing new.
Is something the less Divine for being small and simple? Is a protozoan less Divine than the Grand Canyon?
Of course not. The Bible says, too: sparrows and people, mustard seeds and mountains, all part of God.
The Divine is as large as the universe and as small as a meson. Everything as a whole makes up the Divine, yet the Divine does not disappear when we consider only a small part of the whole, a planet or a continent or a sparrow. It is as Divine, big or small, molecule or galaxy.
Therefore we say: the Divine is omnipresent and indivisible. Which is a way of saying: there is no not-Divine.
OK, you’re thinking, enough gobbledegook, Haywood, what’s that mean to me? Am I praying to a protozoan? How does this help me answer these fundamental existential questions that other people turn to God to answer?
Koans are Buddhist devices, questions that teeter on the margin between profound and absurd. They are designed to make the mind stop for a second. Designed to show you the futility of constantly subjecting everything to logical analysis.
One of my favorites is this: can a dog know the Buddha-mind? No!
You have something trees and dogs and rocks don’t have. You have a conscious mind. You are not just aware, you are aware that you are aware. This is a two-edged sword. On the down side, your consciousness – your own awareness of your own singularity – serves to separate you from the Divine in a way that dogs and trees and rocks aren’t. Dogs don’t have to seek the Divine because they don’t know that they’ve left it. You, on the other hand, don’t know that you’ve never left it.
But on the up side, you can come to know the Divine – can come to experience oneness with It – and emerge with your consciousness intact. Altered, but intact. You can become aware that you are Divine. An ecstasy denied to trees and rocks and dogs.
Christians say to me: have you been saved by Jesus Christ? And I say, yes! I have to come know the oneness with the Divine that he promised we could find through him.
And they think that this makes me a Christian. Until they realize it doesn’t. Then some of them try to shoot me. Please, don’t shoot me. Call me a goddamn liar, argue with me, prove me to be an idiot. But let’s not shoot one another. Dead, I’ll never get it right. Alive, you might make me see the error of my ways.
The fact of the matter is that this oneness, this at-one-ment (I stole that from Joseph Campbell), is the end promise of all the great religions. It is expressed in different ways, Nirvana or Heaven or whatever, but it is the same thing. A state of awareness, more than a place. A Buddhist might say a state of non-awareness, but understood properly, it’s the same thing. We’re westerners with this ingrained belief in our uniqueness and individuality and so therefore it is easier for us to approach it as awareness, I think.
The fallacy that some people fall for, though, is the idea that this Divine state it is an Other place. It’s not. There is nothing and no place that is not Divine. So when you say you’re going to go to Heaven, guess what? Save your bus fare. You’re here. You are in the presence of God right now.
If you understand that the Divine is here, immanent, omnipresent, that there is nothing that is not Divine, then you give up this idea that God is somewhere else. That God is Other. That Heaven is up in the sky. Those are bad ideas. Those are obstacles to oneness.
Easy for me to say. The trick is gaining and holding onto that understanding of the immanence of the Divine.
Which is why we say: let every act be an act of worship.
If you and a tree and a rock are all Divine – and you all are – then I should treat you (and a tree and a rock) accordingly. If I do that, if I work hard at understanding the Divinity that surrounds and infuses every particle of matter, every joule of energy, I will condition myself to gradually perceive that this place of permanent Divinity, this Heaven, this Nirvana, this oneness with God… is occurring right here and now. (And therefore the terms “here” and “now” are illusions, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.)
Even those who dislike the philosophy of Worship like hiring Worshippers, for that very reason. Who do you want waiting tables at your restaurant? The guy who’s just in it for the paycheck? Or the guy who thinks he must honor God with his every act, who sees incarnations of the Divine in every customer, who thinks that food is sacred?
When done correctly the omnipresence of the Divine can be overpowering. Paralyzing, even. Fortunately it usually takes time to reach that point. You creep up on it slowly. You have brief intervals, epiphanies, where your own Divine essence leaps out like a flame at the rediscovered Divinity around it, Divinity it was never actually separate from, except in your own illusion of singular consciousness.
And it can be hard to find the Divine in a rock. I understand that. There are two places where most people have the easiest time (“easy” being relative) finding that Divine spark.
In yourself.
In another person.
Finding it in yourself can be difficult for some. We aren’t equipped for that much introspection. And we are acutely aware of our own flaws. But It is there, if you look hard enough and long enough. First you will see a spark, then an ember, then a flame, then you will realize that you are on fire, no, that you ARE the fire, and the fire is Divine.
(I like the idea of Divine sparks. Lurianic Kabbalah makes references to them, the bits of Godhead that rained into the space within the Divine when the world was created. But again, the metaphor is limited; Luria talks about the vessels for the sparks and the shevirat ha-kelim, the shattering of vessels, but in truth the vessels are made of sparks, too.)
It’s hard to do. It takes time and work and solitude. It is why virtually every great faith has developed a monastic tradition – there are those who can find their own Divinity while being in the regular world, but they are few and far between. Most will need more seclusion, solitude, and simplicity than their lives will allow.
But luckily, there’s another route.
You can find God in another. Looking with more than just your eyes, until your Divinity and that other person’s Divinity reach a sympathetic vibration and touch off a chord that fills your being.
There is a word for that.
We call it Love.
Sadly we use that same word to describe the feeling we have when we find, at least on some subconscious level, merely the potential to discover the Divine in someone else. A person can live a long and happy life in “love” with someone without actually awakening her own Divinity in a sympathetic leap toward the spark of the Godhead she fans in her beloved. She might not ever find that spark in herself or anyone else but still be quite happily in “love,” proto-love, really, happy with that sort of love that exists because of the mere potential of the unveiling of the Divine.
To that I say, great. And, too bad, because whether through fear or inhibition or lack of knowledge you have stopped short.
So this is why they call Worship a sex cult. Because when you combine this idea that the path to oneness with the Divine is through seeking the spark of the Godhead in another, with the idea that every act should be an act of Worship recognizing the immanence of the Divine… you get great sex. When you take your lover in your arms you are seeking God, and holding God, and trying to move the caul from your eyes so you can see that indeed the two of you are not two but simply aspects of the same indivisible Divine.
It is sex as a form of prayer. Or prayer as a form of sex. Take your pick.
This is nothing new. The criticism of Worship should not be that it’s heresy. It may be syncretism, but it’s not heresy. And I don’t think of it as syncretic, either. It is… triangulated. We looked at all these paths, and made the assumption they were as straight as possible, and tried to figure out where they intersected… the idea being that the intersection was, if not their common destination, at least very near to it.
Syncretism implies that it picks and chooses that which is convenient and discards that which is uncomfortable. And that's not true at all. Worship is at heart not really a new study of religion but a, a review of literature. A meta-study. An analysis of the analyses, looking for common truths. And discovering at the end that they're ALL common truths.
But I can try to summarize it pretty quickly. And it starts with the ordinary notion that the Divine – God, if you prefer – is unlimited. Omnipresent and immanent. And therefore everything is Divine – there is no place where there is not-God.
Which means that you and everything around you is Divine. So act like it.
See how simple this is?
And this is nothing new. It does not contradict any particular faith. Most people who find it meaningful find it meaningful in the context of their own faiths. People who have no faith at all often find Worship as a portal back to a more traditional faith; there are Worship Catholics, Jews, Moslems, Buddhists. It only serves as a complete faith in its own right with those who simply cannot see the paths others have laid down before.
This is nothing new. This is old wine in old skins. The Worshippers have taken these ageless messages and tried to rephrase them for 21st century Americans instead of 1st century fishermen. That’s all. Others have said the same things better already. At best Worship will just pick up a few stragglers who didn’t understand it the first time.
Today’s audience steeped in First Principles, so I’m going to gloss over a lot of nuance. If I gloss too much, call me on it when you start asking me questions in a few minutes.
First, you exist. Cogito ergo sum, an oldie but a goodie. If you don’t believe you exist, I don’t believe you’re here, so what do I care?
Next, I invite you to listen to the singing of Amalia Rodrigues. And look at the Degas bronzes. And read One Hundred Years Of Solitude. These are things that prove the existence of “other” human beings besides you. Because these are things that you could not have done. These are things that you could not have invented in your own mind.
So you exist and not-you exists. The world exists. Look at a tree. Think you could have dreamed that up if there was no external reality called “tree”? Hold a sparrow, thrumming, in your hands. Smell the ocean. These are things that must exist, in some sense, outside of your own consciousness because, well, let’s face it: you’re not that smart. And neither am I. We’re not creative enough to have come up with these things on our own.
Every time you learn something new, every time you experience something you’d never thought of before, the existence of a world outside your own mind is reaffirmed.
And if even if you and I and the world are fictions, they’re useful fictions, like the solar model of the atom or the Second Law of Thermodynamics. They allow us to function. But they can be dangerous fictions because they also create the illusion of other-ness. Other-ness is, in the end, what separates us from the Divine.
(I should note here that the question of whether things exist because of the Big Bang and evolution or because they were created by God is, is… superfluous. Because they still exist either way. In fact it’s not just a superfluous question, it’s a silly one. It presupposes that those two things, nature and God, are mutually exclusive. Go read your Spinoza. This is nothing new.)
So what is the Divine, then? We can account for the existence of these things, ourselves and what seems to be not-ourselves. What about the Divine?
Same answer. The answer to the question “what exists” and “what is Divine” is the same. You and I and the world. Degas and a tree and the ocean. Manifestations of the Divine that we perceive as “other” because they are beyond our own limited understanding. To say that the Divine is not those things is to ascribe limits to the Divine that do not exist.
What are you and a tree and the ocean, after all? Complex systems. A mixture of matter and energy existing in a complicated and tenuous state of balance. Degas and Amalia and you and I exist in the tension between the universal slouch towards chaos and entropy and a very localized but unmistakable will to exist.
And what is the universe? A complex mixture of matter and energy in a delicate state of equipoise, slouching towards maximum disorder but existing nonetheless.
There is no difference, in that sense, between you and a tree. And the universe. And Gabriel Garcia Marquez. And me. Trees are taller than me and Gabriel Garcia Marquez is older than me, but space and time are all manifestations of the same Divine, too.
People want “proof” of the existence of the Divine, and I offer them the same proof that is found in the Koran: Fresh water falls from the sky. Trees rise from the soil and bear fruit. Could you do this?
This is nothing new.
This is nothing new.
Is something the less Divine for being small and simple? Is a protozoan less Divine than the Grand Canyon?
Of course not. The Bible says, too: sparrows and people, mustard seeds and mountains, all part of God.
The Divine is as large as the universe and as small as a meson. Everything as a whole makes up the Divine, yet the Divine does not disappear when we consider only a small part of the whole, a planet or a continent or a sparrow. It is as Divine, big or small, molecule or galaxy.
Therefore we say: the Divine is omnipresent and indivisible. Which is a way of saying: there is no not-Divine.
OK, you’re thinking, enough gobbledegook, Haywood, what’s that mean to me? Am I praying to a protozoan? How does this help me answer these fundamental existential questions that other people turn to God to answer?
Koans are Buddhist devices, questions that teeter on the margin between profound and absurd. They are designed to make the mind stop for a second. Designed to show you the futility of constantly subjecting everything to logical analysis.
One of my favorites is this: can a dog know the Buddha-mind? No!
You have something trees and dogs and rocks don’t have. You have a conscious mind. You are not just aware, you are aware that you are aware. This is a two-edged sword. On the down side, your consciousness – your own awareness of your own singularity – serves to separate you from the Divine in a way that dogs and trees and rocks aren’t. Dogs don’t have to seek the Divine because they don’t know that they’ve left it. You, on the other hand, don’t know that you’ve never left it.
But on the up side, you can come to know the Divine – can come to experience oneness with It – and emerge with your consciousness intact. Altered, but intact. You can become aware that you are Divine. An ecstasy denied to trees and rocks and dogs.
Christians say to me: have you been saved by Jesus Christ? And I say, yes! I have to come know the oneness with the Divine that he promised we could find through him.
And they think that this makes me a Christian. Until they realize it doesn’t. Then some of them try to shoot me. Please, don’t shoot me. Call me a goddamn liar, argue with me, prove me to be an idiot. But let’s not shoot one another. Dead, I’ll never get it right. Alive, you might make me see the error of my ways.
The fact of the matter is that this oneness, this at-one-ment (I stole that from Joseph Campbell), is the end promise of all the great religions. It is expressed in different ways, Nirvana or Heaven or whatever, but it is the same thing. A state of awareness, more than a place. A Buddhist might say a state of non-awareness, but understood properly, it’s the same thing. We’re westerners with this ingrained belief in our uniqueness and individuality and so therefore it is easier for us to approach it as awareness, I think.
The fallacy that some people fall for, though, is the idea that this Divine state it is an Other place. It’s not. There is nothing and no place that is not Divine. So when you say you’re going to go to Heaven, guess what? Save your bus fare. You’re here. You are in the presence of God right now.
If you understand that the Divine is here, immanent, omnipresent, that there is nothing that is not Divine, then you give up this idea that God is somewhere else. That God is Other. That Heaven is up in the sky. Those are bad ideas. Those are obstacles to oneness.
Easy for me to say. The trick is gaining and holding onto that understanding of the immanence of the Divine.
Which is why we say: let every act be an act of worship.
If you and a tree and a rock are all Divine – and you all are – then I should treat you (and a tree and a rock) accordingly. If I do that, if I work hard at understanding the Divinity that surrounds and infuses every particle of matter, every joule of energy, I will condition myself to gradually perceive that this place of permanent Divinity, this Heaven, this Nirvana, this oneness with God… is occurring right here and now. (And therefore the terms “here” and “now” are illusions, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.)
Even those who dislike the philosophy of Worship like hiring Worshippers, for that very reason. Who do you want waiting tables at your restaurant? The guy who’s just in it for the paycheck? Or the guy who thinks he must honor God with his every act, who sees incarnations of the Divine in every customer, who thinks that food is sacred?
When done correctly the omnipresence of the Divine can be overpowering. Paralyzing, even. Fortunately it usually takes time to reach that point. You creep up on it slowly. You have brief intervals, epiphanies, where your own Divine essence leaps out like a flame at the rediscovered Divinity around it, Divinity it was never actually separate from, except in your own illusion of singular consciousness.
And it can be hard to find the Divine in a rock. I understand that. There are two places where most people have the easiest time (“easy” being relative) finding that Divine spark.
In yourself.
In another person.
Finding it in yourself can be difficult for some. We aren’t equipped for that much introspection. And we are acutely aware of our own flaws. But It is there, if you look hard enough and long enough. First you will see a spark, then an ember, then a flame, then you will realize that you are on fire, no, that you ARE the fire, and the fire is Divine.
(I like the idea of Divine sparks. Lurianic Kabbalah makes references to them, the bits of Godhead that rained into the space within the Divine when the world was created. But again, the metaphor is limited; Luria talks about the vessels for the sparks and the shevirat ha-kelim, the shattering of vessels, but in truth the vessels are made of sparks, too.)
It’s hard to do. It takes time and work and solitude. It is why virtually every great faith has developed a monastic tradition – there are those who can find their own Divinity while being in the regular world, but they are few and far between. Most will need more seclusion, solitude, and simplicity than their lives will allow.
But luckily, there’s another route.
You can find God in another. Looking with more than just your eyes, until your Divinity and that other person’s Divinity reach a sympathetic vibration and touch off a chord that fills your being.
There is a word for that.
We call it Love.
Sadly we use that same word to describe the feeling we have when we find, at least on some subconscious level, merely the potential to discover the Divine in someone else. A person can live a long and happy life in “love” with someone without actually awakening her own Divinity in a sympathetic leap toward the spark of the Godhead she fans in her beloved. She might not ever find that spark in herself or anyone else but still be quite happily in “love,” proto-love, really, happy with that sort of love that exists because of the mere potential of the unveiling of the Divine.
To that I say, great. And, too bad, because whether through fear or inhibition or lack of knowledge you have stopped short.
So this is why they call Worship a sex cult. Because when you combine this idea that the path to oneness with the Divine is through seeking the spark of the Godhead in another, with the idea that every act should be an act of Worship recognizing the immanence of the Divine… you get great sex. When you take your lover in your arms you are seeking God, and holding God, and trying to move the caul from your eyes so you can see that indeed the two of you are not two but simply aspects of the same indivisible Divine.
It is sex as a form of prayer. Or prayer as a form of sex. Take your pick.
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