|
When I was putting this address together, I was advised, 'If you have something important to say, for God's sake, start at the end'. So here goes making carrot cake is important.
Now to return to the beginning, during Heritage Week, I did a couple of shifts here in the church talking to visitors and showing them around. It was for the most part an enjoyable way to spent a few hours. There were however, some irritations. The biggest annoyance for me was that several people asked me, 'Unitarians, aren't you the ones who believe anything?' I did not have a suitable sound bite reply to this. Finally when this question was asked for the third or fourth time, I said, 'Actually in here we do not believe in the Tooth Fairy!
Sorry to anyone whose beliefs I misrepresented.
Later, I wondered what it was that needled me, in that question. It is worth wondering about. If you can believe what you like, how do you in fact choose a set of beliefs?
A more interesting question, for now, is, 'What actions or lifestyle choices follow from my beliefs, our beliefs?'
Learning how to do something is a discouragingly slow process. When we went on holiday in September I had to bring the instruction booklet for my watch to adjust it for the time zone change, going and coming. When clock went back, I had to get out the book again. It is not even a new watch.
Psychologists say there are at least three stages in learning anything.
First is conscious incompetence -the stage where you know you cannot do it. This is where you know you cannot drive a car or speak Spanish.
Stage two is conscious competence. This is the place where the learning curve is very steep. We get by only by dint of hard slog. If you are trying to say in Spanish, I drove there yesterday. It starts with looking up the verb in a dictionary and then putting it into the past tense. This is where progress is slow and the question arises, 'is this enterprise worth the trouble?'
The third stage is unconscious competence. Here the previous hard work pays off. You can order a beer or buy the paper without thinking about it. You have learned how to do it, and can do it automatically and without a lot of conscious effort.
There are very many worthwhile spiritual practices in the world, for example praying, meditating, theological reflection, reading scripture, fasting and other similar practices. For the real difficulty is sticking with one until I get over the barrier that is stage 2 conscious competence. It is easy for me too decide that I will meditate. Then I buy a book or three on the subject. Next I meditate three or four times, get to where it is difficult and just stop. Some time later, I start again with something different, only to stop once again when the learning curve becomes steep.
The problem with this way of doing things is I do not learn anything. There is a huge difference between really learning something and merely fiddling with it.
If we compare our individual lives to a pilgrimage, then the end goal variously called enlightenment, Heaven or even simply happiness can be compared with carrot cake. There are a number of ways of getting carrot cake. The easy way is to run to the nearest shop and buy it. The challenging way is to start at the garden centre and buy carrot seeds.
There is a danger with buying your carrot cake that you end up like the medieval Green Knight who saw the Holy Grail at the start of his quest but failed to recognise it and did not appreciate its value.
The pitfall with starting with carrot seed is you become like a knight traveling to Jerusalem who finds the journey so interesting that he looses sight of his destination and becomes wanderer and is no longer a pilgrim.
The middle path of making your own carrot cake is the best way. Avail of the cookery books and recipes that other bakers have left as signposts. Also to make good carrot cake it is allowed to use carrots you did not grow yourself. Not accepting the advice and experience of other people would mean
that a single lifetime is too short a time scale to learn how to make the carrot cake.
The issue is picking a path and at least for a time sticking to it. Moving from one spiritual practice to another before arriving at unconscious competence results is almost no forward progress.
Daniel Gilbert in his book Stumbling on Happiness, suggests that faulty thinking is the reason why many of us are stuck or making less progress than we could. We fret about the past and fear the future. The fear that human beings generate in their imaginations leads to an insatiable desire to know the future. Whole professions are engaged in the business of prediction. Fortune tellers, economists and insurers do little else.
Many of us are under the illusion of having sight in the present, we delude ourselves that be have hindsight looking back and foresight looking forward. Otto Scharmer says that the greatest flaw in human thinking is to imagine that the future will be a re-run of the present. It won't. To advance beyond flawed thinking, it is essential to change the thinking that lies behind our thinking. Some method of spiritual practice or reflection will achieve this. It will expose the delusions, the huge difference between the way the world really is and the ways we would like it to be and perhaps the ways we fear it is.
As a result it is possible to abandon the inhibiting fears. Then it is possible to in the words of Jack Finnegan, 'to come to terms with the blank page'. This results is going blank in the present, in a way that only works if there is no fear and no panic. Then it is possible to really see where we are and move smoothly towards growth, happiness and even carrot cake.
By sticking with a spiritual exercise until it is mastered and the level of unconscious competence is reached a new level of thinking and behaving is reached. This is what Thomas Edison was describing when he said, 'There ain't no rules around here. We're trying to accomplish something'.
It is where you are mixing carrot cake and have done it often enough to be able to react to the unfolding condition of the mixture. Adding extra milk to get the result you want and not slavishly following the recipe. The instructions may not include nutmeg, but it is possible to know that this particular mix just needs nutmeg to raise it from ok to fantastic.
What does all this mean in practice? Pick a path and stick with it for long enough to find out whether it is taking you somewhere. Again balance is essential. Even on a spiritual journey, remember what W. C. Fields said, 'If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then give up there is no point in being pig headed'.
Finally, in the search for a perfect carrot cake, when all is said and done, it is not the cake you make that counts, but the person you become by making cake.
Pam McCarthy, Sunday 26th November 2006 |