Universalist Unitarian Church Santa Paula, California

The Music Is Nothing If the Audience Is Deaf
by Reverend John Alexie Crane

But sometimes we are alone. Sometimes we are lonely. Because we need each other so deeply, when we are by ourselves for any extended period of time, we may well experience loneliness; and it is a deep-seated, pervasive feeling. It touches our whole being — mind, body, and feelings — saps our vitality, colors our perceptions, may press us to experience the world as a cold and empty place.

When we are lonely, we are not well, are not fully alive, not fully ourselves. This is not just idle speculation or casual observation. The matter has been explored in experiments at McGill University in Canada and at our own National Institute of Mental Health.

Subjects were placed in situations of complete isolation, of extreme loneliness, cut off from human contact, as well as from all physical and emotional stimulation. It was found that they experienced striking symptoms. They began to hallucinate, began to see, hear, or feel things that were not actually there. They experienced an eerie sense of unreality.

In addition, it has been learned in psychotherapy that when ordinary, everyday loneliness is long-lasting, we lose our affection for life. Begin to feel a sense of hopelessness, meaninglessness, and futility.

We are so structured within ourselves that our perception of the world is markedly altered by a state of sustained loneliness. We will not see the world in at all the same way we do when we are not lonely. Our understanding of the world, of life, may be colored darkly. Loneliness alters our understanding as well as our perceptions.

But loneliness is an inner state that we can, by taking action, do something about. We can turn to others. We can learn to reach out, to let others know that we want to be with them. Be near them.

To be sure, everyone we want to be with will not want to be with us, will not have time or space for us in their lives. When we reach out, we will sometimes be rejected. Of course. That’s how it is.

Even so, knowing we need to be with others, we can go on reaching out, running the risks, and in this way rise above loneliness. Which is what most of us do. We do things that help to ease the emptiness. We change the way we experience the world .

What I am arguing is that the way we know (or think we know) the world to be is profoundly affected by the state and quality of our own being.

II. Limitations of the Intellect
The human mind is, without doubt, an extraordinary organ. It is incredible the quantity of information and experience it can hold in itself. In some mysterious form. It can make all this material available to consciousness, sometimes even when we ask it to. At other times it acts with a will of its own.

The mind can make connections between various items of experience or information, without any effort on our part. It can conceive new ideas, perceive new insights, create new ways of doing things.

Indeed, I think it is safe to say that without the help of our active, restless, searching minds, we would, as a species, have long since gone under in the struggle for existence. Apart from our minds, we are pitifully puny in comparison with other animal species.

Our fingernails are inconsequential as compared with those of a bear or a bobcat. Our teeth are of little use in self-defense: a shark or even a dog is far better equipped than we are in this regard.

The mind has been an enormous asset to us, without doubt. Still, it has limitations, and we have become more and more aware of these in the 20th century. We have come to see, among other things, that, while the intellect is tremendously useful in understanding the physical universe, it is of much less use in understanding our personal selves.

We have such confidence in the intellect that we are inclined to think, if we are helping someone deal with a personal problem, that all we need to do is explain to them what is wrong, what needs to be changed, what to do about it, and, after hearing our clear explanation, they will then, of course, go off and solve the problem forthwith.

People who do counseling every day know very well that this is not how people change. Counselors are aware that intellectual explanation is of very little use in helping people to change themselves. The reason for this is that verbal explanation does not touch the depths of the self where our outer deeds and decisions take form.

It is also true, in much the same way, that individuals may be highly developed intellectually, have minds which function with logical precision, contain enormous funds of information, have a profound understanding of one or another field of knowledge – biology, literature, engineering, mathematics, whatever – and, at the same time, have little or no understanding of themselves, of others, of the problems of personal existence.

III. Knowing Is a Function of Being
An insight implicit in the Unitarian and Universalist tradition, one that we don’t talk much about but that, even so, underlies a considerable amount of our thought, action and organization, might be stated as follows – truth is always greater than any given statement of it.

No matter how widely accepted, how traditional, how revered a statement is, it does not and cannot contain the truth to which it points. It cannot transmit the truth to other people. It is an awareness of this that has led UUs to set aside statements of religious belief as the ultimate truth, as what people need to know, to affirm, if they are to be saved.

Even if it were possible for a statement to express the complete and ultimate truth about some aspect of existence, the statement would have to be heard, grasped, and understood, by imperfect human individuals. Each individual would, of course, have their perception of it colored by, limited by the quality, the state of their own inner nature.

The result is we can now begin to grasp the extremely important insight that the actual container of truth, the location where it achieves its fullest and most effective expression, is not in verbal statements about it, but rather in each living person, in the depths of each personality, the whole inner being of individuals.

Truth must find expression not in words only, but in us, in our inner being. Not in consciousness only, in the intellect, but in our whole person. This holds especially in the area of religion. It holds especially in the area of understanding the problems and possibilities of human existence.

We may have in our heads a huge mass of verbal knowledge, and as a result begin to think that we know practically everything worth knowing. I remember firmly holding this conviction myself when I was a sophomore in college.

In my first two years at Johns Hopkins I had, as is customary, taken a great many survery courses – history, science, classics, mathematics, literature, drama, etc – skimming swiftly over all the accumulated verbal knowledge in western culture.

So, as I came to the end of my sophomore year, having taken into myself this vast body of generalizations, I began to have the comfortable feeling that I did not have far to go before I would know everything of any real importance.

Alas, it is possible for us to have a head full of knowledge, but if the rest of our being, all that is not intellect, is not well-developed, if it is of poor quality, then our actual, effective understanding of ourselves and the world may be severely limited.

Our ability to understand existence is determined not only by our intelligence but by our feelings and fantasies, by our instincts and urges, our inclinations, whimsies, wishes (by even such non-intellectual factors as our muscle tone, our physical condition).

The level of truth we are capable of grasping is determined in large part by the quality of our personal nature. To put it very briefly, concisely: understanding is a function of being. Personal being; character.

There is no doubt whatever that verbal knowledge has been extremely helpful to our species. But by itself, it does not bring us awareness of the essential truths of existence. If we are to advance in this area, we must develop the quality of our own personal nature.

If we are to improve our understanding of life, we must improve our selves. We must learn to move through existence in such a way as to expand our personal powers, to grow in sensitivity, in caring, in awareness of ourselves and others. The level of quality of our being will set limits on the level of truth we can contain.

IV. To Be Better Than We Are
Improve ourselves: how do we go about doing that? How can we tell when the quality of our being is improving and when it is in decline.?

Aldous Huxley, among others, after making an extended study of the writings of the great teachers of religion in many parts of the world, summed up their conclusions in this way: how ever much verbal knowledge we come to contain, we will understand little of any great consequence unless we develop in our selves the personal qualities of detachment, love, and humility. [detachment = ego transcendence]

These are the qualities we would do well to aim for if we are seeking an understanding of the essential truths of human life. This conclusion is not casual or arbitrary. It emerges out of a deep acquaintance with the accumulated wisdom of the species in all cultures of the world.

Detachment, love, humility. We have some understanding of love and humility; but detachment tends to be murky in its implications. Love here means, not romance, but more like caring and concern for the well-being of others as well as oneself. Humility means having an awareness that, of course, we are not perfect, that we have shortcomings, limitations, weaknesses – like all other humans. That we do not know everything.

Detachment is much harder for us to understand, especially here in America. It’s not a quality we have ever celebrated. With one exception. We do celebrate it in science, where it is studiously cultivated; but we have great difficulty seeing its relevance to the conduct of our personal lives.

Consider this example of the use of the word cited in a new dictionary: “students were surprised at the professor’s air of detachment in talking about his own books.” This points effectively at the subtle meaning of the word.

You see, anyone who goes through all the exceedingly taxing labor involved in creating a book has a considerable ego-involvement in it. They are proud of it, will find pleasure in pointing out its strengths and assets to people. It is nearly impossible for authors to judge impartially the value of books they have themselves created.

Hence, we will be surprised if we meet someone who is able to discuss dispassionately a book they have themselves written, discuss it without ego-involvement, with detachment. This is what the word points to. It doesn’t mean being completely without feeling. Rather, it means being free of a lust for ego satisfactions, not driven blindly to gain prestige, recognition, status, or elevation of oneself.

This inner state of detachment is taught as an essential quality for a fulfilled human life in the leading edges of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity. All three of these movements understand that we need to separate our selves from the impact of exclusively self-centered desires, not allow our selves to be incessantly greedy for sensations or status or self-inflation.

It is not that the satisfactions to be derived from these things are bad; it is that being greedy for them is toxic to our nature, our existence. Things do not work out well in life for those wholly given to the pursuit of these ends.

“The students were surprised at the professor’s air of detachment in talking about his own books.” Detachment means getting away from the pressure of short-sighted, self-centered ego needs, not allowing them to determine how we see the world — which is what we strive for in science.

Detachment means educating our desires, our wishes, our wants. It means learning to want above all those satisfactions that we actually need for a fulfilled existence. It means not allowing ourselves to be driven by ego needs. It means being aware, not only of our selves, but of the whole context of our lives, in which we live and move.

When we can approach life with this kind of detachment, we will be better able to love others as well as ourselves, will be more likely to have humility as a quality in our nature. When we have humility, detachment comes easier to us, and love will be more likely to characterize our relationship to others. And perhaps best of all, to our selves.

These three precious human qualities – detachment, love, humility – are interwoven in us, are interdependent; and they characterize human nature at its best. They mark the direction in which we need to move, if we aim to enhance the quality of our being, if we wish to feel in our selves a sense of fulfillment.

If we are to understand the things a human being most needs to grasp, we will have to cultivate detachment, love, humility. This is one of the basic teachings that emerges out of 3000 years of experience of individuals in philosophical religion in cultures around the world.

V. Footnote
I want to mention briefly, to conclude, that the insight into existence I have been exploring today is summed up in an aphorism I have carried about in my mind for many years: “It takes wisdom to understand wisdom; the music is nothing if the audience is deaf.” [Walter Lippmann]

Dr Alexie Crane
2880 Exeter Place
Santa Barbara, CA 93105
(805) 682-3476

Lex1304@aol.com