We have heard it reiterated countless times over the past few days—we've elected our first black president, the first African-American president! This is indeed a cause for celebration for our country, given our long legacy of pain and alienation over race.
And yet my heart and intuition resonated with something else I heard on the radio Wednesday morning. A commentator was being interviewed about the significance of the election. He pushed back against the habitual language of black and white, the impulse to say that Obama's election is important because he is black, and instead he described Obama as "a transcendent figure."
This may sound like more of the nearly religious fervor that his election has aroused with the way that messianic powers and expectations are being projected onto Obama. And honestly, there is a danger in this happening, because to imagine him as a savior is a sure road to disappointment and is the fastest way to give away our power and responsibility as a citizenry.
Instead, what I heard to be true in this idea of Obama being "a transcendent figure" is the way that he defies categorization. He certainly defies the kind of broad-stroke categorization that has grown so tiresome in our politics as a country.
Being biracial, he does not fit easily into the dualistic categories of black or white identity. He comes from international origins, with a Kenyan father and a childhood and youth spent between Hawaii and Indonesia. He's a grassroots organizer on the one hand, and an Ivy League scholar and author on the other. He was elected by being embraced across the spectrum in virtually every major demographic—group across races, ages, genders, religions, and economic and educational levels. His very presence and person suggest something about unity in diversity, something about the union of opposites. I believe it is because of this potentially reconciling quality that so many people experience him as a transcendent figure.
We're entering a time in which our ages-old habit of thinking in dualistic and divisive categories needs to be dissolved into a new way of seeing. In this age, we will be called to evolve beyond tribal, us-and-them identities. We need to come home to a human identity that transcends these divisions.
As long as you have dualistic thinking, as long as you have polarization, you will have battles for dominance and the threat of defeat. But in the merging and harmonizing of seeming opposites, we have the potential to transcend polarization and dissolve the fear and endless battling that it causes. Perhaps this is why so many have been instinctively drawn to this leader who seems to show us a way toward that unity.
My intention for today has been to speak about internal conflict, about working with our personal, inner demons. So, why would I start here, with the election?
I want to explore how we are in conflict with ourselves, how the parts of ourselves that we judge to be good and right battle to suppress and deny the parts of ourselves that we judge to be negative and shameful. I want to explore how we might befriend and pacify the shadowy demons within ourselves until the threat they pose dissolves. I wonder if, like me, you see a connection between this inner work and the larger work of this time, this age, for our country and for our world?
Sam Keen is a philosopher and writer who has long explored the human experience and the ways that we make meaning. He's the author of the book Faces of the Enemy: Reflections of the Hostile Imagination. He has said that…
The heroes and leaders toward peace in our time will be those men and women who have the courage to plunge into the darkness at the bottom of the personal and corporate psyche and face the enemy within.
With these words, he identifies the connection. We have crucial inner peacemaking work to do because some of the external peacemaking work will be impossible without it.
Einstein said that "the significant problems that we face as humanity cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them."
Yes! To break through the causes of our deepest sufferings, to resolve our most intractable conflicts as a human race, to alter our most destructive tendencies, we will have to change our thinking. We will have to change our minds.
One of the gifts and the freedoms of Unitarian Universalism is being able to turn to the wisdom of other spiritual traditions and to find in them universal truths and wisdom for living.
The ideas that I'm going to explore today are particularly indebted to the Buddhist tradition, and especially to Tibetan Buddhism. The rapid spread of Buddhist psychology and teaching to the West is one of the greatest boons to us at this time. Buddhism is a radically non-dualistic philosophy. Always it seeks to break through the appearance of opposites, to recognize schisms as illusory, and to find the unifying essence beneath.
In a book called Feeding Your Demons, the Tibetan nun and teacher Tsultrim Allione offers to the world a practice for engaging the demons within.
By "demons," she means anything that hinders our liberation. These are the internalized energies of shame, anger, jealousy, sloth, violence, addiction and craving, hatred and self-hatred, and so forth.
When we cut these energies off from our selves, when we evade them, or disown them and boot them out of the house of our identity, when they remain unaddressed and unhealed, they tend to go rogue on us in a couple of ways:
They make us vulnerable to the hurtful words and actions of others because we harbor the weapon of self-injury within ourselves. As Ann Lamott says in one of her books, "It's hard to fight an enemy who has an outpost in your head." We all know how terribly hard we can be on ourselves, even to the point of cruelty. The trigger may the disapproving judgments of another person, but we do the punishing work ourselves. This is the mischief of our inner demons.
These demons also go rogue by being projected outward onto other people, or groups of people, or external conditions that are then perceived as threatening. We project upon others the qualities, latent within us, that we find most intolerable or frightening.
This kind of demonization is essential to the waging of any war, including culture wars. Wars draw out "the enemy within," they call upon the fears and hatreds we harbor within ourselves and give them a face—the other.
An example of this might be the hatred of the poor harbored by some members of our society. Perhaps, for those who hold this prejudice, there is nothing more loathsome and frightening than the thought of being helpless and in need, dependent upon the mercy of others, without access to the goods of society, and powerless to change one's situation. It's easy to hate what is most frightening to us.
Tsultrim Allione offers a series of practices in which we learn to turn toward those demon energies, to fully witness them, engage with them, discover the root of their suffering, and to work with that suffering through compassion.
Through imagination, we give the demon energy within ourselves a visual, tangible form. We take a long look at it and consider, what does the demon's form tell us about its suffering, its hunger? We enter into conversation with it, bringing deep curiosity to its experience and its wounds.
The amazing heart of the practice is to fill one's body with a sense of compassionate love, to turn one's body, though imagination, into a food offering, and finally, to feed the demon what it most deeply needs.
This visualization comes from very ancient Tibetan teaching stories about saints who transformed terrifying demons into allies by turning their own bodies into nectar and feeding the demons so that the deepest root of their craving was satisfied. By doing this, the demon's destructive power was pacified and all its power, vitality, energy, and hidden wisdom came into the service of the master, rather than being an obstruction.
Our reading today was the Inuit story of Skeleton Woman. The story is so evocative, and probably each of us will hear something different in it. Yet there are a few themes that I would like to lift up:
The young woman becomes Skeleton Woman by being wounded and abandoned. She grasps after the object of her affection, but he ever eludes her and abandons her to a terrible fate. She becomes the embodiment of desperate, craving, unreciprocated love. In her woundedness, she becomes a monstrosity.
What is her primary demon energy? Loneliness. Isolation. Loss. Shame.
Like the demons we have been considering, she is terrifying because she is misunderstood, unperceived for the core truth of what she is.
The young men who reject her in horror and disgust symbolize the reactive fear that cannot see into the deeper nature of things. They misinterpret her wailing and flailing and her terrible appearance as dangerous. They seek only to escape from her, intensifying her suffering and isolation.
The old man is the soul's wisdom, the soul's clear sight and compassion. As Wisdom, he understands the potential wholeness behind her terrible manifestation. He is not afraid of her, but instead goes out to find her where she is hiding. He asks to be let in to her house, removing the division between them. His song invites her to heal.
In the end, she not only becomes whole again because of his song of compassion, but she in turn heals him, makes him more whole. Somehow, she holds the secret of his own vitality, which returns to him because of his willingness to interact with her.
In the end, they are united. By merging, they disappear into unity.
At this point, let's return to Sam Keen's words:
The heroes, and leaders toward peace, in our time, will be those men and women who have the courage to plunge into the darkness at the bottom of the personal and [collective] psyche and face the enemy within.
To do the outer work of peacemaking, of growing toward a peaceful society, we must also do the inner work of facing our demons.
This country's election of an African-American president has already begun to flush to the surface the great demon of racism and will force us to encounter it in its many, many guises. I pray that this election signals our readiness to enter into this work at a whole new level of thinking and of responsibility—a level more self-confronting, self-integrating, and healing than we have ever engaged previously as a nation.
But first, the demon has to be drawn out of hiding. The appearance of nooses on trees in the South, assassination plots, and the surge in recruitments to white supremacist groups represent the grossest reappearance of our nation's shadow. As horrifying as this may be to us, isn't it absolutely inevitable and necessary that this would be manifesting? If it's in us as a people, which it is, it must come forward and be seen before it can be consciously dealt with.
This is Skeleton Woman lurking around inside us, inside our nation's wounded psyche. Demonic energy is a grasping reaction against loss and the fear of loss. The demonic often manifests most dramatically in conditions of deprivation, betrayal, humiliation, isolation, and powerlessness. Terrorism is born out of terror, and violence out of a sense of having been violated.
Those who track the activity of hate groups have always seen surges in the ranks of those groups in times of economic insecurity and social instability. The demon of violent racism shows us a picture of our own brokenness, the violence and fear and division within "we the people."
I do not mean to diminish the terrible impact and consequences of racism upon those targeted by it, nor turn violators into victims. What I am suggesting is we cannot address the demon of racism only by punishing it or ostracizing it. That hate groups proliferate among the rural poor and the disenfranchised is neither random nor incidental.
This suggests that there are some root causes behind the appeal of hate groups that will have to be addressed, and yes, healed, before we see the demon of racism transformed into wisdom.
But we also know that racism takes far more subtle forms than nooses on trees. The danger for us is imagining that we, here in this room, aren't responsible for our own demons of racism and how they manifest in the spheres we inhabit.
We all have our work to do. We all have our inner demons to engage, to learn from and to heal. I'll end with the words of Machig Labrod, an 11th century Tibetan Buddhist woman saint:
With a loving mind, cherish more than a child the hostile gods and demons of apparent existence, and tenderly surround yourself with them.
May it be so.