Quest for life's ultimate efficient principle in 2008

Everywhere we look, we see the trend towards more and more efficiency: Less work for greater output, less investment for greater profits, less effort for greater results.

Yet, as we inch towards the second and third decades of the 21st century, we are reminded of a basic tendency of human beings to live the inefficient life.
Is it efficient for humans as a race to build structures like the Twin Towers, or bridges over the Tigris and the Euphrates or sacred sites and then destroy them for whatever reasons?

Is it efficient to build financial institutions and then let them crumble because they were designed to benefit only a segment of the society?

Is it efficient to invent and market products that are harmful to our lives and endanger the earth -- personal care products that hasten the aging process and cause cancer, foods that sterilize, etc., etc?

Is it efficient to describe success by the disproportionate wealth of a negligible few when the majority of the human race wallows in abject poverty, disease and despair?

While we are trapped in selfish efficiency concepts of strategic planning, political expediency, and profit maximization that work for only a few, we as a race are losing sight of the fundamental imperative. This is OUR world and its time to ask whose efficiency must make it work.

Our financial institutions will crumble, our most cherished edifices annihilated, we will self-destruct -- if we fail to rediscover and re-energize our societies with life’s ultimate perennial efficient principle.

This New Year and two decades ahead, the world will thirst for those who will rekindle that flame, those who will work to sustain this earth for the greater good of all.

They will be those who, like Albert Einstein, will seek above all to “know God’s thoughts” and let the details follow.

They will be those who will seek true happiness, not in finite things, but as the 2500 years old Chandogya Upanishad reveals: “There is no happiness in anything finite. The infinite alone is happiness. But one must desire to understand the infinite.”

The ultimate efficient principle then is to seek to understand the mind of God, the Kingdom of Heaven within, the Infinite Invisible. On this foundation alone can we sustain and build a world of justice and fairness that recognizes the interconnected of all human beings.

2008 is the year we can recommit to recognize the mystery within as the rock on which we can build in the long run the truly lasting and efficient social, economic and political structures.

The Fearless Life

The night before her annual mammogram in the summer of 2003, Jan Frazier said a prayer. "Could I maybe do this [mammogram] tomorrow without being terrified?"
Jan, who turned fifty that summer and had endured three breast cancer scares in her early thirties and forties, was afraid of an early death.
This is understandable. In 2003, the U.S. Cancer Statistics Working Group reported that one out of every four women diagnosed with breast cancer dies.

"The specter of a possible young death put fear in my face, the ugly thieving monster of it," Jan writes in her soulful story of spontaneous awakening: When Fear Falls Away.

The following morning when this mother of two teenagers went to see her radiologist at a Jamaica Plain hospital, in Massachusetts, she noticed a change.

"I really was not afraid today. I couldn't get over it. After the films were taken and then the waiting began, I watched myself sit comfortably in the waiting room, reading my magazine, paying attention to what it said, instead of how it always was in the past, looking at the pages but not really seeing them."

When Fear Falls Away is a "testimony to a life transformed – an ordinary, fully suffering life transformed." It is about a middle class American woman’s victory over her worries about children, guilt, others' opinions, health, money, and fear of death.

There's so much suffering in our world. Even those who appear to have everything going for them are hurting deep within. The big cars, mansions on beaches, and the latest electronic gadgets do not in themselves satisfy our deep yearning for inner peace. When Fear Falls Away tells of the ocean of joy that is possible for all of us when we turn within to the inner consciousness. Material joy is like a drop in that vast expanse of deep peace.

Theravada Buddhism teaches that "enlightenment consists of the complete eradication of craving and attachment." In Zen Buddhism, it comes through emptying of the mind. In Western Christian literature, enlightenment is union with God. In Orthodox Christianity, it is divinization, or the process of becoming God.

Many doors lead to enlightenment's interior castle and include various forms of spiritual practice: meditation, devotion, and prayer. Mathematical or philosophical abstraction and being in the presence of enlightened individuals are other doorways. Enlightenment can also happen spontaneously.

These experiences are ineffable, difficult to express in prosaic terms. In Western Culture the enlightened individual can be misdiagnosed as mad if the individual experiencing this breakthrough in consciousness is not sophisticated enough to check himself or herself. At a diner while she was having breakfast with Peter, her significant other, we see Jan struggling to control her overwhelming urge to go out to tell everyone eating: "Do you know how lucky you are to be alive?"

Enlightenment is the most sublime change any individual can experience.

"The world has not changed. It is the looker who has changed. But I keep having to hit myself upside the head to believe the world is its same self. I cannot believe it. It's like I want to say, What? It's been this way all along? You mean, I could have lived my whole life this way, spared myself all that pointless anguish?"

I have borrowed a copy of When Fear Falls Away from the local library for my significant other who is reading it. I have bought two copies: There are some books you skim and forget. There are some books you read to remember. And there are some books you study and keep. For me, Jan Frazier’s book is a book I will read and reread, marking it, making notes, getting clues and tracking down all the influences that have prepared Jan for this most wonderful of human experiences.

Here is a like to Jan Frazier's website

When I think about Rev Ed Brock

I’ve been posting the comments that some members of the Edmonds Unitarian Universalist Church made about Rev Dr. Ed Brock’s seven-year ministry. Tomorrow, I’ll post the comments that the Covenant Groups Coordinator made about Ed’s Leadership. Today, I’m posting the words of the President of the Board of Trustees. Sometime next week, I'll post my comments about the reasons for posting all these comments. I'll attempt to give my comments about the joys and challenges of being a Unitarian Universalist Minister.

“When I think of Rev Ed Brock”
Victor Place
President, EUUC Board of Trustees

When I think about the Reverend Ed Brock there are many things that come to mind.

I see the person Ed; I think about the role that he plays in peoples lives.

I think about the father, the husband, the son, the leader, the brother, the friend, the social activist, the minister, and the student, the man of good words and of good work.

I think about the man who for so many of our Sundays has worked to bring us words to contemplate during our week -- words to impact us, to remind us about being in the river of life; words to inspire us to appreciate, or to encourage us to act.

I think about being connected to what is alive in us.

I think about Ed modeling social activism in Florida during the elections and the search for personal truth in his interest in Non Violent Communication.

I think about a man who this congregation has watched create a family, who we watched become a father, a parent; who many of us could knowingly and warmly watch struggle with the tasks, and bathe in the bliss, of being a new parent. And while Ed was creating his family he also nurtured the life of this congregational family.

This congregation has grown and developed over these seven years with Ed as our minister. As it is in nuclear families, when one person changes or grows it effects the change and growth in the other members, so it is in the life of our church family.

We have, in collaboration with Ed’s leadership, and the will of the congregation, created new programs that reflect our values and principles.

Peace and Justice, Sustainability, Covenant Groups to name a few.

We have made efforts in being a Welcoming Congregation, we are working towards becoming a Green Sanctuary, and we have expanded our giving to our local and world communities. We are investing in our youth and the growth of our congregation.

We have all been moved, or inspired, or challenged, in some way affected by our relationship with Ed and I want to take this time to thank him for his gifts to us.