SERMON FOR NEW YEAR
Scientists: The Secret To Happiness And I'm Not Kidding
This key insight makes a life of extreme joy not just possible but inevitable
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Sven Brandsma on
UnsplashWhy are we not happier? Why is our life so tedious? And why is there so little joy in our hearts?
It's the kind of question one tends to ask oneself as the year ends and another one begins. Because we look at the new year as an opportunity to start over and do it right this time.
Yes, we're all bloated and disgusted with ourselves, not just because of all the holiday overindulgence, but for the sense that we are WASTING a great opportunity. There is obviously the POTENTIAL for life to be extraordinary. And yet, year after year we seem to just be "getting through it." Is that any way to live? Of course not.
But how can we do better in the new year?
It really is so simple. The answer has been right there in front of our noses all this time. And yet nobody, until me, has bothered to point out the obvious.
Before I give the answer, I will ask this question: Would it be possible to think of your entire life as sacred? And for every moment to be bathed in golden light of transcendence? That is, to stop blocking out the extraordinary magic of being and to be truly exalting and thriving in this world? Is that really a possibility?
If you believe it is possible, I will give you a method to achieve it — today. Right now. As soon as you are done with this article the exalting and thriving can begin.
Or course, if you don't think it's possible, then this article will land on deaf ears. It might be too late for you. You've lost your belief in the marvelous. Or the possibility of the marvelous.
So let me begin with what the real source of our problem is. It's not our fault. It's the basic flaw of our society that makes us so unfulfilled.
Society almost everywhere on earth is divided quite arbitrarily into two realms: the sacred and the secular.
In the secular, life is EXPECTED to lack the amazing, miraculous and magnificent qualities that one allots to the sacred.
No wonder we are so miserable.
This division of experience into two fictional categories — sacred and secular — has been great for the society. It has allowed capitalism to thrive and for an entire legal structure based on reason rather than religion to provide order in the world.
But on an individual level, this "halving" of the world has deprived of of the possibility of fully experiencing what it means to be incarnated in this human form. Because it really is quite an astonishing thing, to be a human. However, astonishment is not the go-to response to mose secular experience. The go-to response to secular experience is best expressed by words like: tedious, managerial, administrative, perfunctory, routinous, mechanical, soulless, soul destroying and boring AF.
Sure, in the secular world we are allowed this thing called "recreation" where we get a break from this other thing called "work," and where we supposedly can spread our wings, relax, and experience fun and joy.
Of course, our recreations themselves can soon become quite joyless themselves. Pointless. Isn't that the way we feel after all the Christmas presents have been opened, and the parties are over and the garbage needs to be taken out.
Is that all there is? we ask.
No, of course not. Life has the potential for so much more. There is a way out. There is an escape from the dreary. And it does not entail joining some cult or becoming born again in Jesus or drinking Koolaid.
It involves using your brain and this thing called wisdom to solve the puzzle. To think outside the box a little bit, and to reframe experience in a way that is less oppressive and more liberating.
Yes, you might think you "know it all" or have "heard it all before," and that there is "nothing new under the sun."
But I would bet that you haven't really considered this insight that I am going to be presenting on a plate for you this New Year season. I have not seen or heard this in any of the literature or culture of the day. I do believe it is a new way of looking at things. And that it is very, very helpful. So let's get into it.
The insight begins by us reminding ourselves that the Western World has only recently emerged from what historians call "The Dark Ages", where the Church was the strongest force in society and where the potential of the individual to know anything about the cosmos "outside" the church was de-emphasized.
The Dark Ages supposedly ended with the Renaissance and the Age of Reason and the Englightenment and all that, when people started relying on their reason instead of "God's word."
But you don't recover from being in a weird cult all that easily. I mean, it takes a few years for someone to get over the mental indoctrination that happens in weird religious groups.
The entire Western World has been in a weird cult for about 1500 years.
Yes, we started to come out of this cult with the age of reason. Darwin certainly opened a door for us, but we are still very much under the influence of religious indoctrination, even if we think we are not.
The Secular/Sacred Divide Is Itself The Problem
While I'm glad the Dark Ages ended, don't get me wrong, the way Western history and culture evolved for the past five hundred years resulted in the splitting in of life into two worlds — secular and sacred. The key insight I'm talking about involves collapsing this false binary forever. And NEVER EVER letting it suck the life out of you again. Because the secular/sacred binary is false. On an experiential level, if we think we are living a secular life, that is half a life. Because obviously there is something about life that is not addressed or even acknowledged in what we call secular spaces — in a store like Target, for instance, or as we will see in the song in the bottom of this article, in a horrible bureaucratic office like the DMV. Can we imagine anything more secular than the DMV? Yet, if human beings, that magnificent and strange being, with all its intelligence and perception and awareness and consciousness, is in the space of the DMV, they are obviously more than just the name on their auto registration or the number in line that they have as they are waiting to be called. That human being is scientifically the most awe-inspiring being that the universe has ever known. It is the first human being — as far as we know — to have figured out the true origin of the universe itself. No squirrel did that. Nor did any dead asteroid floating around a planet. No, the human being is so extraordinary that sacred is the only word that adequately describes it. I define sacred as cosmically and spiritually and philosophically divine. I define divine as holy. I define holy as worthy of the deepest spiritual respect. I define spiritual as full of soul. I define soul as the true BEING of the human being. I've gone around in a big semantic circle here, but what I've arrived at is the sacredness of BEING itself. That is what is throttled and stifled and choked to death by our delusion that we have stepped into the "secular" world when we stepped into the DMV. This secular delusion is a liveliness killer. It makes walking dead people.
You might not think that affects you. Maybe you think you are one hundred percent secular and not split in two.
I know lots of college-educated people who espouse a completely liberal, secular view of things. However, much of their daily life is spent in a realm that while it seems secular is in fact simply "anonymous."
In the sacred world, of course, there is no such thing as anonymous. According to the sacred view of things, in almost every religious tradition I have studied, every single human being is cosmically "known." Some traditions have the individual being more closely scrutinized and judged than others. But in all of them, the individual person is intimately known by whatever cosmic principle is in charge of things.
In the secular, however, we "imagine" anonymity. Many of us live in big cities, where we go to supermarkets full of strangers, where we have a "null" interaction with a cashier. We don't bring the full presence of our humanity to the exchange as he or she bags our groceries. It's just, thank you, have a nice day.
These are actually what I call "rituals of nullness." We think ritualized behavior only exists in the sacred realm, in temples and churches where there are preordained rites to be followed.
But in these rituals of nullness, we assert our secular identity and our freedom from the commands of the sacred. We assert our right to NOT acknowledge one another's "souls" during the exchange. To NOT express our compassion or love for the fellow human we are in conversation with. To NOT be judged for the quality of our sacredness. To NOT be oppressed by the religious demand. And to therefore imagine ourselves "free."
Anonymity is not the opposite of sacred, however. It is a sideways move. It is escapist. We crave the anonymous moments, the rituals of nullness, because the religious notions of "knownness" are so oppressive. The ways in which the institutions of religion have oppressed the human race are well known to us. I don't need to convince my secular audience of it.
But when we examine it closely, it becomes clear that the secular realm is almost entirely defined by what it is NOT. How do we know we are in the secular realm? Well, because it is very obvious when we are in a supermarket that we are not in a church. There is no priest. There is no congregation. No communion. No "call" for us to be a certain way. Our "being" is unthreatened and momentarily "off the hook" of the cosmic principles.
We move through our life from one "off the hook" place to another. From work to supermarket to home. This is our so-called secular life. It is a place where we are left alone. Free to be you and me. And only judged by secular authorities if we step out of line. Unlike the sacred authority, which by definition judges us every second of every minute. Our anonymity has saved us from all that.
Or has it?
A True Revolution Against Ecclesiastical Power Would Mean Treating Every Single Thing In Our Life As Sacred — Not None Of It
This was the church's con game, after all — 'We will maintain our monopoly on the sacred."
Even after the revolutions of the Renaissance and Enlightenment, the so-called Age of Reason, the church played it well. It said, "Sure you can take the secular realm of science and civic laws and so on. You can have the Target department store. And the DMV. But we will retain our monopoly over the sacred. It is in our houses of worship that the sacred will continue to reside. In your secular world, you can be anonymous and free from the scrutiny of the sacred. But in our sacred world, we can be free from the rigors of the secular and civic — that is, we won't pay taxes. Ha!"
So long as the sacred is kept hidden from you, in those shuttered houses of worship, your life will only be half a life. Because of course your life is sacred. You're certainly going to realize that in the last second of your life. At the moment of death you're obviously going to think, "Fuck, I'm about to lose something that was really special. Sacred even. My incarnation. My life. Shit. I wish I had been slightly more aware of its preciousness and magic during its unfolding. Damn, why did it take me so long to see? Now I'm about to die, and I've only just been born."
Throw the doors of the churches and temples open and let the sacred out!!!!!
These institutions have no claim on sacredness.
The secular has every right to it.
Witness the Sacred Secular
This is the true revolution and recovery from the dark ages. No, we are not doomed to mechanized anonymity and lives of quiet desperation in cities of secular zombies wandering around half dead.
I know this might seem a little abstract, so let me give you a concrete example.
I know a young man. He was fine, but maybe he exhibited a certain lack of discipline. When he got undressed at night he would just let his clothes fall to the floor and leave them there. When he drove, he sometimes would do rolling stops instead of stopping all the way. He sometimes didn't use his turn signal before signaling. When he did his taxes, he sort of fudged some of the figures. When he tended to his diet, he let himself overeat if he felt like it. When it came to drugs and alcohol, if he felt like getting inebriated, he allowed himself to.
When it came to his girlfriend, he allowed himself to cheat on her with three different women over the six years of their relationship. She never found out about it and there were no consequences.
When an old acquaintance surprised him with a phone message, maybe he would answer the phone call, maybe not. It depended on how he felt.
Behind his friends' backs, he would sometimes talk shit about his OWN FRIENDS, for the sake of amusement.
In his career, he allowed himself to put in exactly the amount of effort he wanted to put in, and not the amount that was maybe requested by his superiors.
In other words, he was kind of a rebel. He marched to the beat of his own drum. Nobody held any moral sway over him. Nobody could force this young man to act any other way.
Or so he thought.
One day it occurred to him that all these choices he was supposedly making, these "freedoms from discipline", were not his choices at all! They were choices being made for him by an entity that didn't even exist — his so-called ego.
It was the human ego of our forebears, who centuries ago asserted their right to do as they please against the ecclesiastical authorities.
We inherited this willfulness from them.
Only we didn't go ALL the way. We didn't seize the sacred for our own daily life.
After the "revelation" that this young man underwent, learning this one important insight, that the secular/sacred binary is a false one, his life was completely revolutionized.
Now that he was no longer hiding out in this fake ego entity, it was amazing what happened to the young man's daily life. For instance, when he went into that supermarket we spoke about at the beginning of this article, everything seemed ritualized to him. Every shopper seemed a pilgrim. Every word exchanged seemed a holy word. Every "have a nice day" said by the cashier seemed a priest's blessing.
Wow! What a life, to suddenly be grateful, sacredly grateful, for everything he encountered. And this was only made possible by the foregoing of ego.
And the most amazing — his girlfriend.
What the hell! the man said to himself. This beautiful amazing female spends her life with me and shares these most intimate experiences.
Am I the luckiest man alive or what?
How could he have betrayed her like that? The man was humbled by his hitherto ignorance. Now that he saw, he knew that he had been blind.
Every moment he spent with this wonderful woman was heavenly from that moment on.
And his own mother! My goodness, for her to still be alive. To be able to go to Florida to visit this elderly saint, this woman who had brought him into this world. To be able to sit with his mother and have idle laughs and conversation. What a privilege and a joy. Not everybody was so lucky, no sir, not everyone.
When the doors of the sacred had been blown open, and this non-secular grace-filled every corner of this young man's secular life, he was really, really, reborn.
Before, he had only been living half a life — the so-called secular half. Sure, there had been profound moments — like camping with his college buddies where they all took mushrooms.
But the drugs had worn off. And the secular had returned.
This never wore off.
The young man now didn't just leave his clothes on the floor, because he had a kind of joyous "caretaking" attitude about keeping things in order in the temple that was his life.
He didn't mind coming to a full stop at stop signs because he was no longer in a hurry to get anywhere. He was already right where he wanted to be. In the sacred space he occupied inside a car.
His taxes were done rigorously because what is money? Nothing compared to the precious joys of simply being alive and free from ego.
No Ego, But No Longer Anonymous
That is the paradox of post ego. When you let go of your ego, you can at last become "known" in that sacred way when you move in the world. Because you are finally "there" in the world, with people, instead of "elsewhere" in your head, in your ego.
You have arrived on the beautiful planet Earth! Congratulations. Now when you go into the grocery store, you are known by the cashier, and the cashier is known by you. It's such a beautiful thing.
Maybe you guessed that this young man was me. And I have been walking in the secular sacred for about twenty-five years since I discovered it.
I'm married to that wonderful girlfriend. She gave me two children. There I witnessed twice the most sacred miracles — the bringing forth of life.
How To Practice Sacredness
All of life is potentially mystical. None of life is relegated to "just secular every day life." There is no such thing. The practice of post ego means that the more you throw off your ego, the more you are open to this sacredness, mysticism, and magic of the ordinary.
It's like the Japanese tea ceremony. What is that but the most ordinary of activities — making a pot of tea? But the practitioner sees it as somehow imbued with mystical qualities.
The particular brand of mysticism is different for all people. Depending on your constitution, you might find being open to the sacred every day to be more emotional. Or more peaceful. Or more exciting. I've heard thousands of varieties of mystical experience. What you won't find is that life is dreary or anxiety-inducing or a chore. You will be free from all that.
The Key Is To Remember
I recommend setting an alarm on your phone to remind you every ten minutes. Write in the reminder — "there is no secular. You are in the sacred realm." The conditioning of the secular mind is so strong that at first you will be able to last only about 30 seconds in the world before it returns to its secular appearance. But after days, weeks, months of practice, you stay in the sacred longer and longer. And you begin to realize you live in the life of your dreams. Really. You say, "It doesn't get any better than this," and you mean it. Only you wake up the next day and it DOES get even better. Better and better and better until you are walking in paradise.
It was this insight and practice that led me to start the post-ego movement, to share with others the true recovery from the Dark Ages — the seizing of sacred wisdom for ourselves, not for some corrupt so-called religious institution.
Post-ego has no institution. It is a movement of human beings to temper individualism with another way. It's a collective way. It's a sacred way. It's a non-religious or religious way, whichever you prefer. It doesn't matter, but what does matter is when we go into the world, we go all the way. No more halfway. We go all the way into life. Sacred. Secular. And so awesome.
Join us.
Now our hymn. Music by Boccherini played by Marek Cupák
Words by Clem Samson
[Sorry. The music audio didn't copy and paste properly. His singing wasn't all that great anyway....)
YOUR LIFE IS SACRED
You're are reverent
crossing the cement
You walk piously
Into the DMV
it's a sacred space
It's a holy see
It's a sacred space
The DMV
There's a long line
For you to wait in now
It takes a long time
It's frustrating now
It's a painful place
It's a Kind of a hell
Yet a sacred space
Heaven as well
Choose the sacred it's more fun
Let yourself be overcome
Let the love rise
From your brain stem
Let somebody know
That you're aware of them
That you're a pilgrim
That you are just like them
That neither one of you is all alone
Choose the sacred it's more fun
Let yourself be overcome
Let the love rise
From your brain stem
Let somebody know
That you're aware of them
That you're a pilgrim
That you are just like them
That neither one of you is all alone
Don't think for one moment that the place you're standing now isn't sacred ground it is it is of course it is yes it
Every second of your life is lit by precious light that shines so bright into your face
Don't think for one moment that the place you're standing now isn't sacred ground it is it is of course it is yes it
Every second of your life is lit by precious light that shines so bright into your face
Your life is sacred
Your chores are sacred
Your joys and sorrows they are sacred too
Your life is sacred
Your chores are sacred
Your joys and sorrows they are sacred too
There's nothing secular in this mysterious place called earth
We are sacred from birth
Walk in the light in the light in the mystical sun everyone.
You and your life — that is true religion.
Your home is sacred
Your cathedral
And you devoted to your precious ones
There's nothing secular in this mysterious place called earth
We are sacred from birth
Walk in the light in the light in the mystical sun everyone.
You and your life — that is true religion.
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