The "I" and the Room

May 28, 1967
Plainfield

The "I" and the Room

Faust said,

"All hearts that beat beneath the heavenly day —
Each in its language — say:
The same thing in all places,
Then why not I, in mine, as well?"

Why speculate about the origin and nature of men in life and life in man? Why do not I proceed immediately to offering my views on who Unitarians and Universalists are, according to the Goals Committee Report; and what Unitarians and Universalists believe their local churches and fellowships should be and do? Why not immediately "point with pride" or "view with alarm?" Because basic belief makes a difference in the character and intensity of opinion, I would speak with you about the "I" and the Room, a phrase which will be explained.

While I am aware of floundering as I attempt to say that which essentially is too deep for words, I attach importance to your becoming aware that much as I value the Unitarian Universalist Association as the basis of my professional qualifications and the continental organization of our wider movement, the U.U.A. is neither the center nor the cause of my religious loyalty. Much as I value the privilege of serving as minister of this Unitarian Society from which I receive my income and occupational fulfillment, this organization is not the center or cause of my religious loyalty. Gordon Allport, the Harvard social-psychologist wrote sentences (BECOMING, p.95) which illuminate my condition:

"Every man whether he is religiously inclined or not, has his own ultimate pre-suppositions. He finds he cannot live his life without them, and for him they are true. Such presuppositions, whether they be called ideologies, philosophies, notions, or merely hunches about life, exert creative pressure upon nearly all of a man's conduct."

In one of my first sermons here I said that we live in a universe of constant creativity. Greater marvel still, we are conscious of this creativity which is immersed in cosmic mystery. This fundamental pre-supposition I still maintain, although clear explanation is difficult for me.

The gods that have been named and worshiped have origins born of human needs, wishes, aspirations, vanities. "The God of Abraham, Issac and Jacob, "the Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ", the clockmaker God of the Deists, these and others are deities which stir my interest but do not lead me to worship. All popular and well-described gods are created by cultures and therefore limited by those cultures. In my time I have been captivated by Gandhi's aphorism that once he believed that God was Truth but came to believe that Truth was God. But such a theology becomes a tumbleweed too when one recognizes that Truth is relative to knowledge, Time, place, culture, circumstance, semantics, subject to the same qualifications we can make about all other gods.

But something else, although I believe it, I have no expectations of convincing the unconvinced that behind all the veils of our roles and goals and illusory perceptions there is a creativity of such stunning force and magnitude that indeed one could speak the word "God" with awe and reverence were it not that all the half-gods have robbed the title of its majesty and depth. Intellectually I know of no argument for this constant creativity that cannot be refuted. Emotionally, I feel with the philosopher that the "heart has; reasons the reason knows not of."

Analogies are always shaky, but the imagery used by the late C. S. Lewis in his little book, BEYOND THE BRIGHT BLUR helped me in this difficult area of merged feeling/understanding, where if one cannot get through on a verbal basis, he probably fails to communicate adequately. (Parenthetically, in many of his better-known writings, Lewis argued for a particular Christian interpretation; and there I respond only negatively.) But here are some of his words from BEYOND THE BRIGHT BLUR:

"What happens to me if I try to take it – "simply", is the juxtaposition of two "representations" or ideas or phantoms. One is the bright blur in the mind which stands for God. The other is the idea I call "me". But I can't leave it at that, because I know – and it's useless to pretend I don't know – that they are both phantasmal. The real I has created them both – or, rather built them up in the vaguest way from all sorts of psychological odds and ends.

"Very often, paradoxically, the first step is to banish the "bright blur" – or, in statelier language, to break the idol. Let's get back to what has at least some degree of resistant reality. Here are the four walls of the room. And here am I. But both terms are merely the facade of impenetrable mysteries.

"The walls, they say, are matter. That is, as the physicists will try to tell me, something totally unimaginable, only mathematically describable, existing in a curved space, charged with appalling energies. If I could penetrate far enough into that mystery I should perhaps finally reach what is sheerly real.

"And what am I? The facade is what I call consciousness. I am at least conscious of the colour of those walls. I am not, in the same way, or to the same degree, conscious of what I call my thoughts; for if I try to examine what happens when I am thinking, it stops happening. Yet even if I could examine my thinking, it would, I well know, turn out to be the thinnest possible film on the surface of a vast deep. The psychologists have taught us that. Their real error lies in underestimating the depth and the variety of its contents. Dazzling lightness as well as dark clouds come up. And if all the enchanting visions are, as they rashly claim, mere disguises for sex, where lives the hidden artist who, from such monotonous and claustrophobic material, can make works of such various and liberating art? And depths of time too. All my past; my ancestral past; perhaps my prehuman past.”

(C) 1963 by the Estate of C. S. Lewis. Reprinted from LETTERS TO MALCOLM: CHIEFLY ON PRAYER by C. S. Lewis by permission of Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc.

"Here again, if I could dive deeply enough, I might again reach at the bottom that which simply is.

"And only now am I ready, in my own fashion to "place myself in the presence of God." Either mystery, if I could follow it far enough, would lead me to the same point – the point where something, in each case unimaginable, leaps forth from God's naked hand. The Indian, looking at the material world says, "I am that." I say, "That and I grow from one root." Verbum superne prodiens, the Word coming forth from the Father, has made both, and brought them together in this subject-object embrace.

"And what, you ask, is the advantage of all this? Well, for me – I am not talking about anyone else – it plants the prayer right in the present reality. For, whatever else is or is not real, this momentary confrontation of subject and object is certainly occurring; always occurring except when I am sleep. Here is the actual meeting of God's activity and man's – not some imaginary meeting that might occur if I were an angel or if God incarnate entered the room. There is here no question of a God "up there" or "out there"; rather, the present operation of God, "in here", as the ground of my own being, and God "in there," as the ground of the matter that surrounds me, and God embracing and uniting both in the daily miracle of finite consciousness.

"The two facades – the "I" as I perceive myself and the room as I perceive it – were obstacles as long as I mistook them for ultimate realities. But the moment I recognized them as facades, as mere surfaces, they became conductors. Do you see? A lie is a delusion only so long as we believe it; but a recognized lie is a reality – a real lie – and as such may be highly instructive. A dream ceases to be a delusion as soon as we wake. But it does not become a nonentity. It is a real dream: and it also may be instructive. A stage set is not a real wood or drawing room: it is a real stage set, and may be a good one. (In fact we should never ask of anything "Is it real?," for everything is real. The proper question is "A real what?," e.g., a real snake or real delirium tremens?) The objects around me, and my idea of "me", will deceive if taken at their face value. But they are momentous if taken as the end-products of divine activities. Thus and not otherwise, the creation of matter and the creation of mind meet one another and the circuit is closed."

FIRST, who am I? (Not the e-y-e but the I) Who is this self, conscious of speaking to you, conscious of the room in which we are? Ever since Freud and continuing with his successors, we know that this question not only requires extremely complex, qualified answers, but also no answer suffices fully.

Each of us in his separateness of the "I" has his social roles and goals. We are individual persons, each one of us. We should remember too that "person" is from the Greek persona – he who wears a mask, as on the ancient stage, the player held the mask in front of his face as the lines were delivered.

Freud and his successors have taught us how much of our actions and apparent motives are rationalizations and re-directions of primitive energies and hungers, which if expressed, will be punished by the human social order by disapproving us, restraining us or rejecting us – and these are painful experiences.

Underneath the "I" we present to those we meet there are undisclosed feelings bubbling and seeking the surface – loneliness, hunger, anxiety, guilt, fear of old age, fear of death, a yen for experiences which Society labels "forbidden."

Sometimes when our feelings fracture the roles and goals, our social functioning is impaired. Impaired or malfunctioning in the manner Society expects, that is. Then, perhaps, we counsel with a psychologist, psychiatrist or analyst. Under his professional guidance we may get an insight into the manner in which our turbulent, rascal emotions have been the cause of disorder in our patterns of behavior or the cause of our going astray from the recognized, acceptable paths of social conventions.

But even in an age such as ours when knowledge advances and formulas are fashionable; when case studies are analyzed to arrive at "correct" interpretations, the fundamental question, "Who am I?" is not fully answered. The most thorough analysis never fully explains the self. Even when Society takes our tumbled feelings, sorts them out and impresses on us a proper direction for our roles and goals, there is underlying, basic force, eternally creating, which vitally charges with life that which is the "I". Important to me is that I am part of this creative nucleus, enlivened and articulated by it; and that to it I shall return. I like the way Alan Watts phrased it in THE BOOK, "We do not come into this world; we come out of it as leaves from a tree. As the ocean 'waves', the universe 'peoples'".

There is a wooden, novelty toy of eggs within eggs. Beginning at the size of a hen's egg, the separation of each successive surface reveals another egg, with the innermost being rather tiny, but carved and shaped as the outermost. I believe the basic stuff of human life is not an empty void, as one encounters eventually after opening wooden egg after egg, finally arriving at emptiness. Rather that which is at center after all the husks are peeled is a basic force, creating eternally. Such a force is the fibre of my origin and destiny, and yours. The poet helps me more than scientist or philosopher to understand who I am and who you are. Lines such as Richard Eberhart's in "The Incomparable Light":

"Elusive element, final mystery,
The light beyond compare has been my visitant,
Some sort of angel sometimes at my shoulder,
A beckoning guide, elusive nevertheless,
Under the mind where currents of being are running.
It is this strange light I come back to.
Agent of truth, protean, a radical of time."

SECOND - In addition to "I", there is the Room. There is reality external to Self. Reality is not only the self and its many layers but also the Room is real. The four walls are there. But like the self, there is much more than paint, wood, metal, glass and fabric.

During the Denver meetings, several of us took a day to sightsee in the Colorado Springs area, including the famous Garden of the Gods where reddish Colorado Sandstone appears in various, striking forms. To the human eye, there is a rock formation like unto two kissing camels; there is Steamboat Rock, shaped like the bow of a vessel and from which one has a superb view of Pike's Peak; there is Balancing Rock where a great mass seemingly is delicately poised on a thin edge.

But these jagged points and shaped forms were not fashioned to be kissing camels, steamboats or balancing rocks. For millions of years, great forces of heat and pressure beneath the crust of Earth were fracturing, folding, submerging, uplifting the accumulated deposits of incredibly ancient rivers and seas. When mountains and rocks were thrust into the atmosphere, wind, sand, water, freezing and thawing and other erosive forces wore away the rocks, sculptured the mountains, created the river valleys.

Our fine scenic experience was just one aspect of reality, for the creation forces are still engaged in change, even though that change is so slow in the human time-scheme that little if any change could have been noted in Balancing Rock from the earliest man to the latest tourist. The room is real, but just as real are the dynamic forces of everlasting energy.

The physicists instruct us that what appears to be solid is really a form of energy. Molecular structures are complex, with elements of different atomic weights active in their orbits. I'm told that more advanced studies have made the planetary model suggested by Niels Bohr somewhat dated, but it is illustrative. The atomic nucleus corresponds to the Sun, and the electrons correspond to the planets moving in orbit.

The reality of the Room is more than the appearance. We peel off layers of various realities. Yet we may not soon get more basic than to say that at the core of external reality are positive arid negative discharges of electricity. Which would be instructive if we knew what electricity was, really.

CONCLUSION – Which brings me to an attempt to summarize my feelings about these basic mysteries of the "I" and the "Room," of the Self and the Other. Without being able to present any evidence which would be persuasive to those who insist on tested assumptions, I believe that the same ultimate, creative force is the dimension of depth in Self and the dimension of depth in all that is not Self. In this, I certainly am not a rationalist for what I have been speaking about is not verifiable discourse.

But when I speak of the folly and cruelties of war, of the need for rights to be established for all people, everywhere, of the need to understand our conflicts, and other issues of a given day, such views are advanced not only for the cause in its own right, justified by that alone, but also because this Creationist Force is somehow involved when a person makes a serious commitment. Of course human values are established by human culture. Of course there is considerable relativism in manners and morals in different time, place, circumstance. Of course many persons with clearer insight into issues and greater courage than I would consider rubbish this feeling for a Creationist Force. Like Jacob, no one may wrestle with this "bright blur" without thereafter walking with a limp, figuratively. Sometimes I feel the mood which grasped Francis Thompson, poet-mystic, when he created the "Hound of Heaven":

"I dimly guess what
Time in mist confounds;
Yet ever and anon a trumpet sounds
From the hid battlements of Eternity;
Those shaken mists awhile unsettle, then
Round the half-glimpsed turrets slowly wash again."

What the poet describes as "the trumpet sounds", Maslow, the psychologist would call peak experiences. When this happens, we have broken through the crust of Self or Other or both. The interpretations we give these experiences not only differ because of the unlike complexities of individual layers of Self, but also words are inadequate, although they may be the best effort we can make in an age such as ours Alfred North Whitehead was more eloquent than most of us when he wrote (quoted by Margaret Isherwood, FAITH WITHOUT DOGMA, p. 102), " This creative principle is everywhere, in animate and so-called inanimate matter, in the ether, water, earth, human hearts. But the creation is a continuing process, and the process itself is the actuality since no sooner do you arrive than you start on a fresh journey."

Closing Words from Rainer Maria Rilke, 1875-1926 (quoted in THE UNIVERSAL GOD, p. 13):

"All those who seek Thee tempt Thee,
And those who find would bind Thee
To gesture and form.

"But I would comprehend Thee
As the wide Earth enfolds Thee.
Thou growest with my maturity,
Thou art in calm and storm.

"I ask of Thee no vanity
To evidence and prove Thee.
Thou wert in aeons old.
Perform no miracles for me,
But justify Thy laws to to me –
Which as the years pass by me,
All soundlessly unfold."