I have been asked upon occasion, "what do you Unitarian Universalists believe?" I'm sure many of you have been asked the same and , like me, have found it hard to answer since we have no boilerplate creed to parrot. Well, in the course of considering what I was going to talk about today, I came upon a nice, short answer that I'll be using to respond to that question in the future. That answer is: "We believe what we know. " Yes, it sounds kind of glib; even smart-alecky, but I think it's accurate--and not just in the tautological sense that one might say that all knowledge is merely belief. What it says is that our beliefs are not statements made by someone else that we have adopted without question, examination and testing with our powers of reason. It says that we don't recognize belief as being as important or significant as knowledge--true belief, if you will. In that sense, I would say that Unitarian Universalism finds itself squarely in the tradition of gnosis.
We, in this congregation, affirm to "support the free and disciplined search for truth as the center of religious community." Similarly, as part of the larger Unitarian Universalist Association, we covenant to affirm and promote "A free and responsible search for truth and meaning." What does this mean, I wonder. What is this truth that we're after? And what of meaning? I think Ill leave the question of meaning aside for the moment, but don't worry, I'll be compelled to come back to it none too soon.
So truth. We're supposed to be looking for it, but what is it? Would we know it when we found it? Is there but one Truth with a capital T', or are there many truths--as many as there are seekers, as some would argue? Well, as a starting point, I think we ought to consider, not the Truth that may or may not be known. Not the thing, the noun, but rather the verb part, to know. What is it to know?
It seems to me that most in this day and age would hear a question beginning with "Do you know..." as "Do you know for a fact," with fact being thought of as an accurate description or measurement of some physical thing or behavior of a physical thing in the world. This chair is steel and gold colored and it moves when I push it. Those are true facts and we know these facts are true. Right? So I, we, know the chair. I have knowledge of this chair.
But what do I really have when I say "I have knowledge of the chair." Well, you all have seen it. Close your eyes a moment and remember this chair. Okay? What do you have? A picture? Maybe even a picture like a diagram or mechanical drawing with labels like steel, gold, and little arrows, three feet this way, two feet that way; a picture as complete as you have studied it. What you have in your mind is a representation, or map, of the external reality of the chair. The more you've studied it, the more accurate that map is, but the real chair is still outside you. All you have is the map.
So if I tell you, this chair is steel. Am I telling the truth? Well, you don't have to take my word for it. You can test it with a magnet....and sure enough the fact that a magnet responds in the right way and it has other properties like flexibility, and so forth, confirms that it is steel. You don't have to believe me--you can test it for yourself. Right, so we know the truth about this chair, it is made of steel.
Now let's look at this chair in another way. It has lots of parts, I see: a back, a seat, legs, and hinges and pins so that it folds up and down, and when it's down you can sit on it. A real sitting system, you could say. And as I examine it, I see how the parts all fit together, and I can say I know what the back, seat, legs, and hinges and pins are and how they fit together with each other. I also know they work. The chair works, right? How do I know? I can test it; you can test it....
So now we have two kinds of knowledge; two ways of knowing this chair: its properties as a chair and how it works as a system of parts. And these knowledges are testable facts. My picture, my map, and your maps can be validated by each of us testing our knowledge against the external reality of this chair.
Now let me tell you about another chair I have at home. Man it is a beautiful chair. I couldn't believe my luck when I found it on sale and could bring it home and make it mine. Just to gaze on it makes my heart skip a beat; I want to cry sometimes, it's so beautiful. Unfortunately, I'm a little cash-poor right now--will one of you buy it from me? $750 and that's cheap, let me tell you. Come on, any takers? No? I swear to you it's really beautiful--surely you all appreciate beauty.... Well, why not? Don't you believe me. I know beauty, honest, and this chair is it.
Okay, the point here is about another kind of knowledge. Anyone here not know beauty when they apprehend it--a sunrise, a perfume, a symphony? This is different though, isn't it? It's personal. Beauty isn't something that can be tested. Its an inherent quality, you could say, rather than an external property that can be measured with scientific instruments. And for you to accept that it's beautiful, you have to do one of two things: you have to either believe me--that I am sincere and honest and I know beauty or you have to experience the chair for yourself--and you won't because I won't let you. I this case you will have to rely not on the true fact of its beauty but on my interpretation of it and the truthfulness of my communication of that interpretation.
One more thing about this chair. It's a really good chair. Now you know. Right? No? Well let me tell you more: the seat is just the right size for comfort and the back supports your back just right. It's sturdy but light. Sounds good, right? Actually all I've told you so far is that it works very well for what it is for, but does that make it good? A couple other things: the frame is made from the heartwood of 500 year-old gombola trees in the Amazon rainforest and all the rest of the tree has to be destroyed to extract this strong but light wood. Also, the upholstery is made from at least 30 skins of the rare Leaping Lemur that is an endangered species. Now tell me, is it a good chair? I expect this group, not being nature-rapers, would say that it was not a good chair because we are concerned with more than the fact that it works and is beautiful.
Now what if I said I lied--that it really is made from 100% recycled materials? Is that better? Okay, then with everything else being equal, we have found a way to validate the inherent good-ness of the chair. It's not in the particulars of the materials I've described; what we have done is come to a mutual understanding of what makes the chair good or not. This has to do with cultural fit. Our culture says this is right and this other is not right. Eating dogs is not good in this culture though it might be in some other. The testable parts of the dog--you know, the little nutritional/contents label hung on one ear-- wouldn't tell me in this culture that it is good to eat this dog.
So there are four flavors of knowledge. The external individual (the physical properties of the chair), the external collective (the chair parts working as a system), the internal-individual (the beauty of the chair), and the internal collective(the goodness or rightness of the chair in our culture. That is, knowledge, or the mind's representation of reality deals with subjective-personal and subjective-cultural as well as with objective reality.
A couple of additional points I'd like to raise concerning knowledge: getting back to the concept of the map: have you all seen those 3D pictures that look like chaos until you unfocus just right and then the pattern- the picture jumps out? Or M.C. Escher's art where the picture looks like one thing but then another reality jumps out. Tricks on our human perception we are all familiar with, right? Well, let's take that a little further.
Here we are, mapmakers all. What is this process of mapmaking anyway? The common idea is that the map is a representation of a world that is out there waiting to be discovered. That we reach out there with our senses and discover and gather and process all this information and imprint it on our memory neural circuits. But this idea of representation and external existing information--natural laws, as an example) as been recently disputed by a couple of neuroscientists at the University of Santiago, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela say in the so-called Santiago theory that cognition is the process of "bringing forth a world." What this means in greatly simplified form is that cognition by any organism--every organism--is a process of structural coupling with the environment in which the organism exists. [ Capra quote, page 270].
Gaining knowledge is more than progressing through a cafeteria line of prepared information. What happens is a coupling; a full interaction between a patterned entity--organisms like bacteria or us-- and the environment. This interaction results in structural changes to our patterns as in our neural systems and our limbic and endocrine systems as well which we incorporate as memories or emotions or muscle memory or reflexes. We may then assign other patterns of symbols to represent these changes as language. This we call knowledge. We only know and can only represent what we are structural capable of becoming. As far as the material world is concerned, that means we are limited to knowing what our senses (and all the sensing devices we have devised to augment our natural senses) are capable of interacting with. And, of course, this is the are that our culture has been pre-occupied with and very successful in over the past 400 years since the age of the so-called enlightenment dawned. But let's look at the rest of the story.
The rest of the story is not about those external, physical, independently testable aspect of the world. It's about the internal, subjective reality for each of us individually and for all of us collectively. For the "I", it's consciousness, subjectivity, self, and self-expression (art and aesthetics), truthfulness and sincerity. For the "We", it's ethics and morals, worldviews, common context, meaning, culture, mutual understanding, appropriateness, and justness. These are not matters for our science and technology but of our religion. So what is religious truth? What is religious knowledge? Is religious knowledge possible--or is it all a case of leaps of faith?
Consider gnosis, which means knowing. More specifically, though, the term refers to knowing God. From Harold Bloom: "When the knowing represents itself as mutual, in which God knows the deep self even as it knows God, then we have abandoned belief for Gnosis."
Bloom further posits that we are predominantly a culture of Gnostics:
"As a people crazed with an appetite for information, we are natural Gnostics anyway. The American God and the American Jesus are encountered experientially by American religionists, so many of whom assert intimate acquainance with God's or Jesus' love for them."
He goes on to on to use the examples of such popular trends as angels, near death experiences, and dreams, and cites groups such as the Mormons, and Pentecostal as gnostic movements. He discusses the gnostic traditions associated with the western religions: Sufi for Islam, the Kabbalah for Judaism and Gnostic Christianity from the first centuries of the common era. He also draws from one of our Unitarian Universalist antecedents, Emerson, whose transcendentalism is very much a form of gnosticism.
All these traditions, trends and movements assert the fact of direct knowing of God. Now remember, the term god here means only what people mutually understand it to mean, which is to say what a particular culture says it means. Well, we obviously have a multicultural situation because it is difficult to get much agreement in this country; in this denomination even. Many of us have rejected the term because the dominant cultural understanding does seem to represent god as as a bearded male. But forget that representation if you want. All such representations are products of our upbringing, our diverse experiences and education--what we have each been structural changed or culturally imprinted with. However god is represented, we do have thousands of years of human testimony to the direct human experience of reality beyond the physical. From Siddhartha Gautama to Jesus to Paul down to Joseph Smith and Emerson and people all across the globe today whose books fill the religion and New Age shelves of bookstores everywhere.
Recall too that knowing is not just a matter of a concept or information we put in a certain syntax of word-symbols. Knowing is a structural change in our organisms that involves limbic, hormonal and muscular systems as well as neural. Our response to experience involves the complete organism so we feel ecstasy, bliss or whatever and that is knowledge as much as any words we try to convey it with.
So, as UUs seeking truth, what do we make of all this. We are, it seems to me, gnostic wannabees. Many of us are loathe to accept the testimonials of the sages and prophets I've alluded to. We doubt. We are skeptics--which means either we doubt the truthfulness, sincerity, or integrity of those human beings or we just don't have a common context to let us understand them. Nothing wrong about that, but what that does is impose a formidable responsibility on us. It is not sufficient to just assert disbelief or disagreement; to be merely reactive. If we are sincerely seeking truth, seeking gnosis, this knowledge of our selves, of beauty and the good, we cannot merely disbelieve and dismiss the testimony of the sages and prophets, taking shelter in our own established, static patterns that have been on various levels comfortable or productive for us, which for many of us are the scientific, materialistic, and technical disciplines. For disbelief is not the opposite of knowledge, ignorance is, and ignorance is the process of ignoring what is possible. Thus it is thrust upon us to endeavor to bring forth the knowledge through continuing interaction with our worlds through new practices and disciplines that these sages and prophets have offered.
And you know, this is precisely what I see many of us engaged in, for these practices can range all the way from zazen, meditation, or prayer to various types of religious rituals, to social justice works to gardening. It is heartening to me that our Unitarian Universalist community allows and encourages these various ways of knowing, of connecting, of coupling structurally to the entirety of our world. As we commune with each other, we must remember to honor (much more than merely accept or allow or (ugh) tolerate) each others gnosis--and perhaps we will find a way to complete a definition and establish a common context of true mutual understanding. So be it.