Opening Address
This paper is based on Matthew Fox’s Opening Address presented at the Seventeenth Annual ISSSEEM Conference, The Science of the Miraculous (June 21-27, 2006).
by Matthew Fox
ABSTRACT
The mechanical model of the Universe that so dominated the modern era effectively banished the deep wondrous and miraculous to a distant realm outside daily existence and experience of psyche and creation. Modern religion responded by defining miracles as essentially “divine interventions contradicting nature’s laws.” But what if existence itself is miraculous and wondrous and our capacity for awe, reverence, gratitude and “isness” itself were the true meaning of the miraculous? Is this not what the mystics teach and what post-modern science is destined to teach us as well?
Approached with an appropriate sense of wonder, we can see the depth of the miraculous within nature and within human nature in particular. Modern science removed the fantasy that we and our earth occupy the physical center of the universe, but post-modern science has demonstrated that we do live right in the middle of the scale of things, and we have the creative powers to discover our place in the scheme of things. Reawakening awareness of the sacredness of being, the sacredness of existence, enlivens our sciences to recognize the light of the multitude of divine sparks. Awakening wonder empowers compassion, and sparks our creativity to heal the damage we have done by believing we were masters of the world, when we are actually embedded in the web of creation.
We will explore these and other questions about the miraculous within nature in general and within human nature in particular.
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We are thinking together this evening
about the topic of miracles and I
have chosen as a framework: “Advancing
from the modern quest for miracles to a
postmodern science of the miraculous.” I
want to begin with a few peoples' thoughts
about what a miracle is or isn't.
I am sure you all know Einstein's statement
that there are only two ways to live your
life. One is as if nothing is a miracle and
the other is as if everything is a miracle.
That observation is profound. In fact it will
form a kind of substrate of much of what I
have to say this evening. It is expressed, I
think, in the words of Meister Eckhart in
the Fourteenth century when he said “isness
is God.” The miracle of existence is
the substrate of any other miracles we may
encounter. Another insight comes from one
of the truly authentic saints walking on the
planet at this time, and that is our brother
Thich Nhat Hahn, our Vietnamese
Buddhist brother. He says, “Our true home
is the present moment. The miracle is not
to walk on water. The miracle is to walk
on the green Earth in the present moment.”
To me, coming from the Western tradition,
this is an exact echo of what Jesus said, when
he said, “The Kingdom and Queendom of
God is among you.” So, walking on the
green Earth and being fully present to the
moment of walking on the Earth is itself a
miracle far greater than walking on water.
Implications of this are the real profound
moral dilemmas of our time, such as the
suffering of Mother Earth and her creatures;
the implications of this are profound. We
should be careful of rushing into extraordinary
versions of the miraculous, when in
fact what we think is ordinary is already
extraordinary.
I would like to begin with some reflections
on what is a miracle after all. The word
“miracle” etymologically comes from the
word mirari which means to wonder at and
also to smile. They go together nicely. To
wonder deeply is to smile. It is to break
into joy, gratitude, and release. I would
propose that the modern era was not real
good at smiling. It was very serious about
things like “torturing Mother Earth for her
secrets.” (Francis Bacon). Development of
our powers of smile, wonder and awe were
seriously diminished in Western civilization
in the modern era. We were about more
serious stuff as we know, serious stuff that
has culminated in nuclear bombs,
submarines to deliver them and the ability
to tear down a rain forest in a day, that it
has taken God and nature 10,000 years to
give birth to and will not occur again on
this planet and perhaps not anywhere in the
universe. Webster's dictionary says, and you
must understand, I do not live by Webster's
dictionary, but it reveals a lot, when it
defines miracle this way: “an extremely
extraordinary event manifesting divine
intervention in human affairs.” A second
definition: “an extremely outstanding or
unusual event, thing or accomplishment.”
Of course Webster's dictionary comes out of
the modern era, and the whole idea that a
miracle is some kind of Zazam effect, that
is, God intervening with nature's course is
peculiarly modern.
I think it comes from this, in the modern
age, Westerners were taught that the
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Universe was a machine, which is a pretty
done thing, a finished thing. We made up
this idea that a miracle is breaking through
the machine rigidity, the absolute laws of
this Universe as we have been taught about
it. But as you move from modern to postmodern
science and modern to postmodern
consciousness and also welcome in
pre-modern consciousness, (which has the
much fuller experience of the awe of nature
and existence); as we make that move, we
shift profoundly our understanding of
miracle.
What then does miracle really mean?
Here are some antonyms, the
opposite of miracle, because one of the best
ways to negotiate a spiritual concept is to
go to its opposite first. For example, if you
want to know what justice is, take in
injustice, feel the kick in your gut at what
is unjust and you will begin to taste what
justice is. Let's first go to antonyms,
opposites of miracle: mundane, dull,
ordinary, routine, everyday, commonplace,
boring, unexciting, humdrum, dreary,
monotonous, unremarkable, tedious,
mechanistic, repetitive, predictable. It all
makes you tired, doesn't it? This is stuff
that feeds the old cynics, the old goat in all
of us. It feeds cynicism. This is not what
the miraculous is about. There is a lot of
this feeling in the air today. Wherever there
is cynicism there is this wallowing in what
I call the opposite of the miraculous.
Now, let's look at what the miraculous
means. What are synonyms for miraculous?
Amazing, astounding, astonishing, incredible,
unbelievable, phenomenal, marvelous,
extraordinary, mind blowing, inextirpable,
wonderful, wondrous, remarkable,
surprising, awesome. That is what miraculous
means, to be struck by awe. How
present then is the miraculous in our daily
life, in our work, in our citizenship on this
blessed planet?
The Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti several
decades ago said, “I am waiting for a rebirth
of wonder.” This is where science comes in
today to really feed us with the authentic
meaning of miraculous. What we are
learning when we are hearing the stories of
creation, the 14 billion years that brought
all of us here, and the kinship we have with
all of the beings of this Universe as we know
it: All of this is enough to pump awe to a
whole new level, never before and perhaps
rarely experienced certainly in recent
Western history. I want to look at the
subject of awakening our studying of
miraculous nature, studying miraculous
nature. I want to begin with this observation,
it is very important for scientists and
other serious people to recall, that to study
is a form of yoga. Study is a spiritual
practice. Study is a prayer. This is the
Jewish tradition for sure, where, to study
Torah is to enter into prayer, so long as you
bring your heart into the study. It was also
part of my tradition as a Dominican. We
were taught that the hours you spent
studying are just as prayerful as the hours
you spend chanting the psalms, or any other
kind of prayer. In fact there is a classical
story of Thomas Aquinas, who was a
Dominican. He was visiting a monastery
and writing a book. A brother came up and
said, “We are chanting the offices
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me that the playwright Antonin Artaud
wrote something very appropriate for this
critical moment in our history when he
said, “It is good that from time to time
cataclysms occur that compel us to return
to nature, that is, to rediscover life.”
Cataclysms occur to get us to return to the
fuller understanding of nature, which is the
rediscovery of life itself. What I am saying
then is that life is a miracle. Our being
here to study life is a miracle. I propose
that every breath you take and I take is a
miracle. The fact that the flowers over 100
million years ago fine tuned the oxygen on
our behalf and other animals' behalf is a
miracle; because the atmosphere at that time
was not appropriate for our lungs and
would have not allowed our presence on this
planet. I would say that all of these
accommodations to our presence are
wondrous, amazing, awesome and therefore
miraculous.
Ernest Becker won the Pulitzer Prize after
his death for his book The Denial of Death.
He has another book and there is this
amazing sentence that speaks to what I am
talking about. He says, “Ancient people,
unlike modern people, had not yet lost their
awe of nature and of being.” He says it all
in this one sentence. The indigenous and
pre-modern people, unlike modern people,
had not yet lost their sense of awe at nature
and being. That is what we need to recover.
That sense of awe is the miraculous. Our
ancestors had this for tens of thousands of
years and we have pretty much erased it in
the last few centuries. When we recover this
sense of awe of nature and the awe of being,
we will be in a whole new place. We will
downstairs. You should come down.”
Aquinas said, “I am busy. Leave me alone.
I am studying.” Then the guy came up
again and said, “You have got to be down
here. We are praying.” Aquinas slammed
his hand on the table and said, “I am
praying! Get out of my room!” So the
whole idea is that to study is to pray, if you
bring your heart to it. That is the point.
Acertain amount of the Western quest
for knowledge has not brought its
heart to it. It has not been an interaction
with wisdom. It has just been an interaction
with knowledge and that is not
enough, because that is not human.
Knowledge by itself is raw power. Do you
remember the teaching from the Celtic
people, that says, “Never give a loaded gun
to a young man who has not first learned
to dance”? Knowledge in itself is a loaded
gun. It needs to find receptors who have
hearts. The mind is not a disembodied
reality. The mind is meant to connect to
the heart. The whole teaching then from
the Celtic people is that a person who has
not learned to dance, has not learned to first
celebrate life, is in no place to be taking life.
At this time in history, people who have
been studying nature must recover their
capacity for heart knowledge and bring that
into the project. That of course it seems
to me is what your entire organization is
about, reconnecting heart and mind.
Indeed, this reconnection is the very
struggle we face as a species today, a struggle
of whether we are even sustainable or not.
It is a struggle of how we are treating the
rest of nature, which of course will result in
our own capacity for survival. It seems to
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was told that I may never walk again. At
thirteen I was able to walk again. It was
an overwhelming blessing. I said to
myself, “I will never take my legs for
granted again.” This taking for granted
is what our civilization has to get over.
David here, the gentleman who I was
eating dinner with, was telling me how he
and his wife are working as medical people
in Uganda for one month a year. I was
asking what he learned from it. One of
the points he stressed was how much we
take for granted in our lives here. The
basics, including the stress of living in
drought in Africa, in living with AIDS in
Africa and so forth, we just don't know;
we are out of touch with how miraculous
our very existence is on a daily basis.
Iwill put out some questions. These are
for you to answer more than me. You
people have more scientific degrees than I
do. I ask: Is light a miracle? Is enfleshed
light or matter, what David Bohm calls
“frozen light,” a miracle? It's one in a
billion form of light. Is water a miracle?
Is breath a miracle? And the lungs with
which we process breath? Is the human
brain a miracle? Is the eye a miracle? It's
all wondrous. It's all amazing. We make
a huge mistake if we wait until our
deathbed to say thank you for it. As
Meister Eckhart said, “If the only prayer
you say in your whole life is thank you,
that will suffice.” But he didn't say, “And
wait until your last breath to say it.”
Are rainforests miracles? Are elephant's
miracles? Whales? Dogs? Polar bears?
How surrounded are we by miracles? What
no longer be beating up on nature,
including our own, and we will no longer
be neglecting the gift and the preciousness
of existence. We will not be taking
existence for granted.
One of the exciting people here this
evening, and you are all exciting, but
I ran into one fellow I haven't seen in years,
Courtney Milne sitting over here. He is a
photographer and a mystic who has done
some brilliant photographic books on the
wonders of the world. He has traveled all
over the world to get photos on the sacred
sites of the world, from Ayers Rock to
Machu Picchu and others. He had tremendous
mystical and other kinds of experiences
all around the world including having
his camera stolen in one sacred place. He
just came up to me before dinner and told
me this amazing story. He said, “I did all
of these books about these sacred spaces,
places all over the world. For the last seven
years I have been taking photographs of one
place--my back yard, the pond in my back
yard. I have 35,000 photographs if you
want to see them. Each one is more
revealing of the beauty, depths and sacredness
of this one place, which rivals Ayers
Rock and Machu Picchu.”
That, my friends, is exactly what I am
talking about. It is what Thich Nhat Hahn
was talking about. We are walking on
miracles everyday. You don't have to get on
a jet plane and fly to Machu Picchu to
know those things. Mother Earth is
blessing us everyday. If you have feet to
walk, that alone is a miracle. I know that
because when I was twelve I got polio and
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Baudelaire was saying. It is a story about
the yearning of the rest of creation to see
our hearts and a reminder that we are kin
with the rest of creation. To really grasp
the depths of this we have to rediscover this
sense that Einstein talked about that the
miraculous is a daily event. We must not
take life for granted.
As Rabbi Hessel says, “Life without wonder
is not worth living. What we lack is not a
will to believe, but a will to wonder.” The
will to wonder, the will to be open to awe,
that is the miraculous that can come alive
in our time and it must, because it is in
that context that we become warriors on
behalf of health and well-being of the other
creatures on this planet.
Let me give you one example of where
I find today's science reminding us of
how miraculous our lives are. We all know
the story about how Moses went to the top
of the mountain and found God in a
burning bush, took his shoes off out of
reverence and so forth. Mt. Sinai. You can
spend several thousand dollars and make
that pigrimage yourself to Mt. Sinai if you
care to. However, given today's physics, the
truth is that every bush, we now know, is
a burning bush. Protons and light waves
are in every atom in the universe. And
those beings that are green, who have taught
the rest of us how to eat, because they have
learned how to eat the sun with photosynthesis,
these beings are especially burning.
You don't have to take a trip to Mt. Sinai.
You can step right outside this hall, pick up
a leaf and you are encountering a burning
bush.
are we doing about it? How are we allowing
this wonder and this awe to seep into our
souls, our minds, our bodies and our
educational systems? Our political systems?
Our economic systems? Our worship
systems? Have we created armored suits so
that none of this is really received by us at
the depth at which it is coming at us?
There is a beautiful statement by
Baudelaire, the nineteenth century French
poet and art critic. He says, “We walk
through forests of physical things which are
also spiritual things that look on us with
affectionate looks. “We are continuously
being blessed by the beings of the world.
But are we preoccupied with our agendas so
strongly that we are not receiving?”
There is a beautiful story that happened last
year near where I live in San Francisco on
the ocean outside of San Francisco Bay. A
whale got stuck tied up in ropes. She had
a rope right through her mouth and she was
thrashing around and getting tighter,
beginning to drown. Five men went out in
rubber suits with machetes to try to release
her. It was a very dangerous task. One flip
of her tail and they would have been done
for, but she remained very still for the hour
and a half of this operation. One of them
was working on the rope in her mouth, eye
to eye with her for over an hour. They
succeeded and undid the ropes. This is
what happened then. The whale took three
laps, three circles. You would do that too
if you had just been liberated from prison.
Then she went up to each of the five men
and nudged them. A thank you. For me
that is a profound story. It is just as
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ago. It is all wondrous. It is all amazing.
It is all, therefore, miraculous. It was
Aquinas who said, “Revelation comes in two
volumes, nature and the bible.” This is what
religion in the West has been missing for
centuries. It has put all its eggs into the bible
basket. The bible is only 2,500 years old.
The universe is over thirteen billion, and this
contains the sacred writings of divinity. It is
in all of our bodies. Our bodies are much
older than the bible. Our bodies are cosmic
bodies. We must be paying more attention
to the revelation of nature.
For that task, we of course call upon the
sacred vocation of the scientist, because the
scientist unpacks, unveils, therefore helps
reveal the grace that nature is, the presence
of the divine that nature is, the sacred
throne on which the Goddess sits. Again,
Aquinas said this in the thirteenth century
and of course his whole effort was to bring
science into Christianity and he paid a price
for it. He was condemned three times
before they canonized him as a Saint. Keep
that in mind. He said, “A mistake about
creation results in a mistake about God.”
That ennobles the scientific quest as much
as any one sentence can ennoble it. Turn
it around and it means this: an insight into
creation is a revelation of God. It adds to
our understanding of God. To take the
example of the photographer who has spent
so much serious time taking pictures of just
his backyard pond, as he tells me he is going
deeper and deeper into the wonder, the
miracle of that one place. This is true of
you people who spend hours and hours,
years and years, months and months in your
sacred study, which is your prayer, in your
Today's physics has democratized the
theophany that was the launching pad of
the entire Western spiritual tradition. Be
with that for a minute folks. This is
stunning. That is just one tiny example.
Take another example in the Christian
tradition. John's gospel says, “Christ is the
light in all things.” We now know there is
light; there are photons in every atom in the
universe. This means that the Christ
presence is in every atom in the universe,
which parallels exactly the Buddhist
teaching that the Buddha nature is present
in all beings in the universe. All of this is
about awakening our awareness of the
sacredness of being, the sacredness of
existence. It is becoming simpler for us to
realize these things. We don't need all of
the paraphernalia of organized religions and
churches to get to the heart of the matter.
As a species we have to travel much lighter
at this time. We need a deeper spirituality,
but not necessarily more religious institutions.
Meister Eckhart put it this way in the
Fourteenth century. He said, “Every creature
is a word of God and a book about God.”
In other words, every creature is a bible. He
said, “If I spend enough time with a
caterpillar, I will never have to prepare a
sermon, because one caterpillar is so full of
the divine.” What we know from science is
that every caterpillar has a fourteen billion
year history, as do every one of us. The
caterpillar carries the carbon, nitrogen and
magnesium from the supernova explosions
from five and one half billion years ago, but
also the hydrogen and the helium from the
original fireball of thirteen plus billion years
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hunting/gathering exercise and it takes the
same spiritual warrior-hood that any other
spiritual practice takes. It takes strength. It
takes integrity. And it takes caring. Many
of you have invested many years into this
kind of hunting and I want to acknowledge
that. Let's now turn to one of the most remarkable
sentences about miracles that I have
ever read. This comes from my brother
Thomas Aquinas. He says, “The greatest
miracle of all is a virtuous life.” The greatest
miracle of all is a life lived virtuously. Now
we are talking about the miracle in the
human. I alluded to the miracle of the
burning bush, the miracle of the light in all
things and the miracles of the fourteen
billion years that got us here. Now let's look
at human nature. This is an astounding
statement that blows me away, that human
virtue is the greatest miracle we have got
going for us. Think about it. Is what
Gandhi did a miracle? Taking on the British
Empire, not firing a shot, and winning? Is
what Martin Luther King did a miracle?
Filling the jails and bringing about some
basic civil rights legislation and turning
segregation, at least at many levels, around.
Is what Malcolm X did a miracle? Including
his own conversion in Mecca where he got
over his own reverse racism and accepted
every human being as a child of God? Is
what Oscar Romero did--standing up to the
military in El Salvador, and to his own
church, because the Vatican was attacking
him for standing up to the military in El
Salvador--a miracle? Is what Dorothy Day
did--working and living among the poorest
of the poor in urban areas and starting houses
laboratories or at your computer examining
the miraculous that is the wonder and awe,
whether it is in the microcosm or the
macrocosm or in between in this sacred
place we call nature.
I am doing a book currently on the recovery
of the sacred masculine because it is obvious
that the divine feminine is back, the
Goddess is back. She's pissed, but she is
back. The Black Madonna is back and she
is whipping things up. The sacred
masculine has to step up to the plate. The
divine feminine needs a partner. I am keen
on that. One of the archetypes I am trying
to arouse for men to get going again is the
archetype of the hunter/gatherer. Certainly
for 95% of our species we were
hunting/gathering. I am asking now, how
have we taken this energy of
hunting/gathering? Which was certainly a
survival mechanism among other things.
How have we translated that into our world
today? I look around and I say, “Oh, it's
hunting for a shopping deal, a sale.” Is that
hunting/gathering in today's version?
Hunting for a parking place, is that
hunting/gathering? When I get into the
depth of it the first thing that comes to my
mind is the scientist. What is the other side
of Mars? What is at the extreme of these
expanding galaxies? Everyday in the paper
there is evidence that scientists are hunting
and gathering. It is a beautiful thing that
we converted that energy into something so
powerful and significant as learning the
story of how we got here. The story of
where here is, therefore, hopefully of where
we might be going and how we can get
there. The quest for truth is a
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to say we are half way through the life of
the Earth. At 8-10 billion years the sun is
going to gobble the Earth up. It's going to
go away. So we are in the middle. If we
had come a lot sooner or if we had come
a lot later, we would not be in a position
to be examining, to be studying the kind
of holy lessons, holy beings that we are
living with and studying today.
Furthermore they say that in terms of the
history of the universe, being fourteen
billion years old nevertheless, that we are
here at this time, we are still able to pick
up the receding galaxies, and that before too
long future generations are not going to be
able to pick up the receding galaxies. And
we are able to pick up the sound of the
original fireball and the radiation and light
from the original fireball, and that too will
not be so visible in future time. We are at
the right place to be here. Like Goldilocks
and the Three Bears, this mattress is too
soft, this one is too hard, this one is just
right. We are at a miraculous place, just
like where Goldilocks found herself to be.
Furthermore they say the size of our bodies
is so interesting. They believe, having done
the counting on this, that if you look at all
the beings in the universe, the macrocosmic
beings, the big ones and the microcosmic,
humans lie right in the middle. And they
say that our bodies are the right size to be
studying the universe because if we were
much larger, if our heads were larger our
brain would have to put all its energy into
processing our body and not into looking
through telescopes or whatnot to the rest of
the universe. This is stunning and
astounding and therefore miraculous
of hospitality in the poorest places and
bringing a lot of young people into that arena
of service, a base community that stood up
to the dictatorial rulers in Latin America for
decades, even amidst great persecution--is
that a miracle? Is what Mozart accomplished
a miracle? And Mother Theresa? And
Hildegard of Bingen?
Our admiration, that is what miraculous is
about, admiration for the greatness of
human courage and integrity, what we
honor and those we honor the most and
praise the most. This supports Aquinas's
thesis that to live a virtuous life is
profoundly miraculous and admirable. It
comes home to all of us because every one
of us is called to live a life of integrity and
courage that is wondrous.
Every one of us is unique and every one
of us is in a unique place today. Also,
all of us are living at a very unique time in
planetary history, human history and even
cosmic history. In their recent book, View
from the Center of the Universe, two very
fine cosmological thinkers, Joel Primack (a
very active NASA astrophysicist) and his
wife Nancy Abrams have put together this
wonderful book essentially on what we have
learned in the last five years from the
Hubble telescope about our universe and
our place in it. They have come to some
amazing conclusions. Of course we are not
the center of the universe like pre-
Copernican thought. There is something
peculiar going on with us and here are some
of their findings. First of all, the Earth is
going to live 8-10 billion years and we are
at the 4.5 billion year mark, which means
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archeologist's interest has focused on art
work, such as the paintings in caves 40,000
years ago. That is when they have found
our immediate ancestors. Just recently,
archeologists found human tools and beads
from the beaches of Morocco, in cave strata
that have been dated to 82,000 years ago.
These are the oldest ancestors we have
found to this moment. We know they are
our ancestors because they were busy
making beads for artistic ornamentation. If
for the anthropologist the working definition
of a human being is a biped who makes
artistic things, I don't know why our
education systems don't catch on.
Where is creativity in, “no child left
behind?” This is why the most creative
youngsters in our country, which are inner
city kids, are dropping out like flies, because
there is absolutely no acknowledgement of
their humanness, i.e. their creativity, in the
classroom. It is not just the young who are
dropping out. I was in Napa a few months
ago and a woman said, “I am a teacher. I'm
a great teacher. I love teaching and I'm
quitting. Every good teacher I know around
here is quitting. We never felt it was our
job to give an infinite amount of exams to
kids. We think it is our job to educe from
the kids their curiosity, their creativity and
their mindfulness. This is no longer the
agenda in education in this country.” I've
been working lately with an African
American, a thirty-two year old poet, rapper
and filmmaker. We are trying to reinvent
education from the inner city out.
Beginning with an after school program
from 3:00 to 6:00. It is built around several
elements; one is a spiritual practice with the
information. This is why they talk about
the view from the center of the universe.
We are not centered as they thought before
Copernicus, but there is something going
on. We are in the middle of something.
We have the chops to relate to it. We have
the intelligence. We have the creativity.
And we have the hearts, if we put ourselves
to the task. What this underscores is, on
the one hand, our dignity as a species, and
also our responsibility, and those go
together. What Eckhart called our nobility
is also our responsibility.
What are some of these virtues that are
calling us today to our miraculous
life of being virtuous human beings? One
of them that does not get nearly the press
that it deserves is curiosity. Curiosity is one
of the most holy enticers and forces of
allurement in the entire universe.
Unfortunately I have never had a class in
Curiosity 101 or much less Curiosity 303.
I wonder if we shouldn't be teaching
curiosity or at least encouraging it and
awakening it much more fully than we do
in the processes we call education. We
should be rewarding curiosity because
without it we truly withdraw, take for
granted, grow stale and freeze--truly freeze.
Another virtue that I think is appropriate
for our time is the virtue of creativity.
Remember the word virtue, virtus in Latin,
means power. We are talking about our
powers. Our species is precisely defined by
our creativity. When anthropologists go out
looking for our ancestors, they just don't
look for biped's bones, they look for biped
bones with artifacts next to them. Some tool
makers are considered to be pre-human, so
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They will be the viruses to change education;
we won't have to work through school
boards. Life is too short for that. As an
example of what these kids can do, Professor
Pitt has made a four minute DVD, a video
about the subject and spirit of meditation.
What is refreshing for me about this is several
things, one is you can see that Pitt is
presenting a spiritual practice he has been
doing since he was ten, for over twenty years,
this is serious teaching here. He's teaching
it with the new art forms of rap and video
making. What I find when I see this is a
great load off my shoulders. The new generation
can step up to the plate. They are ready
to step up to the plate. They have whole
new languages, whole new art forms to tell
the important stories today. They do need
us elders for content. Pitt has told me he
has been waiting twenty years for me to show
up because he knew he needed the content.
Meanwhile, he has been preparing. He has
become a crafts person, a filmmaker and he's
done his inner work. Now he's ready to do
his warrior work. In this four minute video,
you can get a feel for the new languages of
creativity that are at the finger tips of our
young people today.
Does that give you hope like it gives me
hope? There is a whole new thing
happening. I spoke on Fathers' Day at
Howard Thurman's church in San
Francisco, and afterwards this young
African American man came up to me. He
said, “You're the first adult I've heard who
understands my generation.” This is exactly
where we are at, we know that we have new
tools, we know we are powerful. But we
don't feel that our parents know it; we don't
body. That is to say he will be teaching you
Kung Fu or the marriage of heaven and
earth, which are things he learned when he
was ten years old in the ghetto in the inner
city and it literally saved his life. We are
both convinced that it is this awareness of
our power through our bodies and creating
boundaries with our bodies that is so
essential for young people to hold for
themselves. He has taught these same
practices in juvenile detention homes with
profound results. For the first time in these
kid's lives they have learned to calm the
reptilian brain and to get in touch with their
own powers of silence and self-inner
discipline. A big part of our program is also
a thirty minute teaching each day, which will
be about the new cosmology, the wonders
of our body, the genius of Howard
Thurman, or some other worth while topic.
Then the last hour and a half of their
afternoon is going to be spent making
movies, making rap, poetry, theater about
these topics, the new cosmology, the
wonders of our body, Howard Thurman's
spiritual philosophy of community, or some
other worthwhile topic. We are very excited
about this. We see a way here--without
arguing about it, without going to school
boards and all the politics--of just bringing
it forward. The kids will be viruses because
they go to school the next morning, they are
going to go to school and say hey this
learning thing can be fun. We are making
movies, making rap about our place in the
universe.
We have learned that the universe has
set it up for us for fourteen billion
years. No one is teaching us this in school.
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break loose, can finally emerge. This is what
the Buddha calls for, what Isaiah called for,
what Mohammad called for and what Jesus
called for. Our capacity for compassion,
where has it been? It has been swamped
lately with the reptilian brain. We can find
a way to quiet that reptilian brain. This is
what meditation does. Because reptiles like
solitude, to lie in the sun alone, they are
monks. You befriend your reptile brain by
taking care of the solitude needs that are in
you. Then the mammal brain can flourish.
No other virtue is as all-important,
according to every spiritual teacher that has
ever walked this earth or worked it.
Compassion can finally begin to happen.
The middle brain, the mammal brain can
finally emerge. Remember that the reptilian
brain is four hundred and twenty million
years old. The mammals compassionate
brain is two hundred ten million years old-
-half as old--but it does not get the
attention, especially in the modern era, that
it clearly deserves. Then igniting creativity
and putting it to the service of compassion
is where it's at today regarding our virtuous
work on this planet. This is service; all of
us are called to participate in the healing of
this planet in some way.
It is so clear that our creativity is our way
out of problems, i.e., clean fuel, clean energy
and so forth. Recently there was this article
in the paper, something I've never thought
about before, about scientists hunting,
gathering for some problem solving.
Scientists are eyeing the jet stream, an
energy source that rages night and day, 365
days a year, just a few miles above our heads.
feel that the school system knows it. We
know Dick Cheney and George Bush don't
know it. The media doesn't know it.
Mother earth in her suffering today is not
passive, she's active and she is awakening a
lot of young people, and a lot of creativity
everywhere. That is why the virtue, the
power of creativity needs to be tapped into
everywhere. These young people need
intergenerational wisdom. They need elders
who can help them with the content. They
need what scientists and explorers of human
nature and more can help them with. Not
because you want to make some kind of
esoteric fancy, get out-of-your-body experiences.
No, we like to stay in our bodies,
on this healthy body of mother earth.
Because currently it's not healthy--it's
unhealthy--because humans have been
taking a lot of weird trips lately. It is very
important, our invitation from the young,
though they may not articulate it always
very clearly. They want us in on the
picture. It's going to be a joint project, the
marriage of elderly wisdom with youth
wisdom. With these new art forms there is
no telling what can happen. I presented
Dr. Pitt's video at one place, and an older
gentlemen came up to me and said, “I can't
imagine any young person seeing that and
not being curious about meditation.” Isn't
it about time that we are curious about
meditation? What makes meditation so
important today? It can calm the reptilian
brain. When you can calm the reptilian brain
then that mammal brain, which is
our capacity for compassion, can finally
Subtle Energies & Energy Medicine • Volume 18 • Number 1 • Page 13
compassion is the whole ballgame, the whole
law. Compassion being the most used name
for God in the Koran by far. Is God the
compassionate one? We have a wonderful
marriage here of science and its teaching
interdependence and our spiritual traditions
and our capacity for compassion. So
compassion then becomes a virtue that will
be the hallmark of our generation. We are
talking about the next evolutionary step of
our species. We don't have 500 years for it
or even 100 years. This has to happen
swiftly, time is running out on us. Time is
running out, and also we are adversely
affecting the other species.
Compassion is not about sentimentally,
feeling sorry or pity for one another. This
again is Webster's dictionary mistake.
Webster's dictionary says the idea that
compassion is about a relationship between
equals is obsolete. In fact, I propose that
Webster's dictionary is obsolete. “Passion
means justice,” says Meister Eckhart, calling
from the Jewish tradition. Justice is about
finding the balance. David was telling me
that one thing he's learned from being in
Africa is how unbalanced our world is. In
terms of accessibility to basic health care,
accessibility to basic healthy water, and so
forth. We have to hunt and gather the forces
of justice. The forces of balance again.
Because that is what compassion is about.
Compassion is not something sentimental
sweet or mushy. Compassion is about finding
the dance in the world between ourselves and
others and within all the communities of
which we are a part. This of course means
the human community as well.
If they can tap into these fierce winds the
worlds entire electrical needs would be met,
they say. The trick is figuring out how to
harness the energy. But the jet stream blows
from west to east six to nine miles over the
northern hemisphere with speeds up to 310
miles per hour twenty-four hours a day.
This is a very interesting concept. I never
thought of that. This, plus solar energy,
plus wind energy on the earth, plus so many
other ways to go. Again, we're living in a
moment of the unleashing of our creativity.
This is really the strong point of our species-
-our creativity and our capacity for compassion.
Here again is where today's science
really serves compassion. Science has
rediscovered an ancient mystical awareness
of interdependence. Interdependence is
now obviously one of the primary principals
of today's physics. Interdependence is
the basis of all compassion. Thomas
Merton, a Catholic monk who died perhaps
of assassination a number of years ago, two
hours before he died, gave a talk on compassion.
He said, “Compassion is keen
awareness of an interdependence of all living
things that are all part of one another.”
Science had confirmed this. You and I are
literally living with the atoms of the stars,
the galaxies, and indeed the molecules in
our lungs are those that Buddha breathed,
that Jesus breathed, that others have been
breathing. We are living interconnected
lives in every sense of the word.
What we have now is a new basis for
human behavior and it matches
ancient teachings: Jesus saying, “be you
compassionate as your creator in heaven is
compassionate,” and the Buddha taught that
Think right now of the sacredness of
water, because that's the real issue
around the world and it's going to become
more of an issue. Who is going to own the
water? Thomas Merton one day wrote in
his journal, “It's raining outside my
hermitage. I'm going to take my hat off and
walk in the rain, because some day they will
be selling us the rain.” That day is here
already. I was taught by a Native American
teacher, a Lakota man named Buck Ghost
Horse several years ago. He said: “you want
to know how holy water is, how miraculous
water is? Go without water for three days.”
It's simple, it doesn't take a sermon, doesn't
even take scientific investigation. Just go
without it for three days and you will know
what a miracle that first sip of water is. The
truth is people all around this globe are
going without water on a regular basis, and
without healthy water. These are some of
the lessons I wanted to share with you
around this topic of our daily experience of
the miraculous.
One more virtue that needs special
attention today is the virtue of
generosity. Sometimes we forget how
generous nature is. Are we aware for
example that the entire earth system runs
on one billionth of the sun's energy
everyday? The sun is giving away all this
energy all we need is one billionth. Are we
thanking the sun? There is a beautiful
poem from Hafiz, the fourteen century Sufi
mystic, that says, “Even after all this time
the sun never says to the earth, 'you owe
me.' Look what happens with a love like
that, it lights up the whole sky.” There's a
give away going on, there's a give away
going on in nature all over the place and
we are invited to the table. Not just to
receive but to deliver. That is, we have to
grow up as a species. We have been taking,
especially western civilization, from mother
earth and her children, her creatures for so
long. Now mother earth is asking of us,
“Isn't it time that you act like grown ups
and give as well as take?” That act of giving
is what we mean by generosity. I found the
word generosity so primal to the miracle,
the miracle of being human. When you
can tap into your generosity, our being fully
human, the miracle of your power, of your
virtue is shining. What I find about this
word generosity is terribly interesting. I
find it to be one of the richest words in our
language.
Behind the word generosity is a Latin word
genero, to beget, to produce, to create, to
cause to exist, to bring to life. So it's the
basis of our word generate, to be generative.
To be generous is to be creative. The word
generosity incorporates our creativity. In
addition, behind the word generosity is the
word genes or origin, birth, descent, father,
family, nation, offspring, race, ancestors.
All of these include the word generous. It
is our ancestors too. There is this
cosmological meaning to generosity too.
You're bringing in fourteen billion years of
ancestors when you're tapping in to your
powers of generosity. That is a miracle. In
addition the word generous comes from the
same source as the word generosity. Your
genius is the showing off of your generosity,
the display of your generosity. This is not
about building your ego up. It's about
participating in the generosity of the rest of
Subtle Energies & Energy Medicine • Volume 18 • Number 1 • Page 14
nature. The miraculous, wondrous, stupendous
generosity of the universe. Which has
dared to bring our species aboard; a species
very exaggerated in our intellectual capacities,
and very feeble in our capacity for heart
and compassionate steering of the intelligence.
We've been proving the last few
centuries the deep danger of knowledge,
naked knowledge. Our species has to shift
and now, to the hunting and gathering of
wisdom. To draw the wisdom from all the
spiritual traditions of the world, including
science. To draw from our own hearts from
that of our children and from the warnings
that science is giving us. Part of the hope
of our time is the despair. I look at human
history and see nothing moves humans like
necessity. The truth is that we are living in
a moment of immense necessity. This is
one way we draw on our capacity for
generosity and creativity. One story I was
told by a scientist a few years ago that really
stuck with me is this: when our ancestors
discovered fire they left Africa. I would say
it was especially curiosity that had us leaving
Africa and we went on our ways. A bunch
of our ancestors landed in Euro-Asia and
the ice age hit. They just left the hot
savannas of Africa and now they're in an ice
age. I bet they spent a thousand years
blaming one another. Who turned off the
heat? What did you do? What bad dreams
did you have? Meanwhile they got to work,
they started killing mammoths, learned how
to sew them. They learned how to live in
caves and tell stories at night (instead of
watching television, watching other people's
stories at night). They developed all kinds
of survival mechanisms. But the point is
they survived. We come from tough stock.
Now we have self-pity that always goes
along with patriarchy. Patriarchy by
definition feels sorry for itself, because it
banished the mother capacity of compassion
within itself, so it has to look for mother
outside. It falls into to self-pity. One
concrete example would be the Vatican in
our time; It is overwhelmed with self-pity.
Because it destroyed the mother principal
within itself, that's called karma. We have
all kinds of whining and cynical media
people and politicians telling us, “Woe,
woe, woe! We can't do it. We don't have
the creativity. We don't have the energy,
don't have the time. We don't have the
money.” All self-pity. Every one of us
comes from very strong stock. Our
ancestors made it from the heat of Africa
through the ice age. Don't tell me we can't
make it today from this precipice of global
warming to a new way of living on this
planet. Every one of you in your work as
healers, searchers, investigators, scientists--
every one of you, every one of us and
everyone of the community that we
represent has a profound role to play in this
gathering of wisdom. This gathering of
wisdom and hunting for wisdom will be the
hallmark of our generation. These are some
thoughts I brought to share with you. We
might learn something from Gregory
Bateson when he says “the hardest teaching
in the Christian gospels is Saint Paul when
he says God is not mocked.” Gregory
Bateson says, “This saying should be
applied to the relationship between
humanity and ecology, the processes of
ecology are not mocked.” In other words
there has been a ledger that has been kept,
not by a God in the sky but by what
Subtle Energies & Energy Medicine • Volume 18 • Number 1 • Page 15
Hildegard called the “web of creation”. She
says humans are a part of the web of
creation. There is give and take as there is
in a web. She says if humans ignore the
justice that keeps the web together then
God, she says, will allow creation to punish
humanity. It's not God seeking vengeance.
It's the web of creation that's going to put
us in our place.
That is the moment at which we gather
today, that is the reason we are asking
questions about where is the miraculous and
how is our grasp of the miraculous shifted in
this post-modern time? You people have the
stuff that we all have within us, the chops.
To stand with the strength of the spiritual
warrior. The strength of the green man, the
strength of the goddess and of the Black
Madonna. At this time in history to reopen
the human agenda and the human perspective
to the basic truth that the miraculous
happens with every breath we take. If you've
ever been present for a birth of a baby you
know how stupendous and sacred that first
breath is. If you've been present at the last
breath as a person dies you know how special
that breath is. There is no reason then for
us to take every breath in between for
granted, quite the opposite. Every breath in
between can be the energy that brings out of
us our Divine-like generosity, compassion,
joy and creativity. That would be miraculous.
Don't you agree?
• • •
1. This paper is based on Matthew Fox’s Opening
Address presented at the Seventeenth Annual
ISSSEEMConference, The Science of theMiraculous
(June 21-27, 2006).
∞ ∞ ∞
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