The Dual Nature of Our World, Our Self and Our Faith

A sermon by the Rev. Jack Wilkinson

Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Winston-Salem

November 30, 2005

If I begin with a brief personal background, perhaps my sermon will come as less of a shock than it might otherwise.

I am a fifth-generation Unitarian from Syracuse, N.Y. My great-great-grandfather, also named John Wilkinson, was on the pulpit committee that called the Rev. Samuel Joseph May to the Unitarian church in Syracuse. My grandfather's grandfather was president of the Syracuse Railroad, was Syracuse's first postmaster, and named the city. Reverend May was a famous abolitionist, who masterminded the Jerry Rescue, an event in which an escaped slave was snatched from federal marshals and sent on the underground railroad to Canada and freedom. May's sister married Bronson Alcott of Brook Farm fame, from which union issued Louisa May Alcott, who later wrote "Little Women." John Wilkinson and Sam May became best friends, and when their families were joined they became closer still. Albert Wilkinson, brother to my great-grandfather, Forman Wilkinson, married May's daughter shortly after having broken off his engagement to Winnie Davis, daughter of Jefferson Davis, because of the intervention of the War Between the States. In the ensuing generations my forbears were always nominal Unitarians but not regular attenders. The historic role of reversing this backsliding tendency devolved upon me. I went all the way through the Sunday School with two of our denomination's leading educators, Elizabeth Manwell and Josephine Gould.

After college, the U.S. Army and graduate school with a major in drama, I went to New York City to pursue a career in the theater. While there, my church attendance was resumed at the Community Church of New York, where Donald Harrington was minister and John Haynes Holmes was minister emeritus. I joined their very strong social action committee arid directed a young adults theater group. To make a long story short, my involvement at Community Church propelled me into the ministry, thereby nipping my theatrical ambitions in the bud. I took my training at St. Lawrence University Theological School, a Universalist institution founded in 1856. Since being ordained in 1964, I have served churches in South Weymouth, Mass., Chattanooga, Tenn., and Little Falls, N.Y. Since 1990 I have been active as a layman in the Syracuse church, where I conducted summer services for six years and coordinated a play-reading group.

Now let me give you just a few words about my free search. While stationed in Japan and Korea during the Korean War, I had a brief flirtation with Roman Catholicism when I fell under the spell of Thomas Merton. Later, on my return to Syracuse, I made a Sunday by Sunday comparison of his faith and mine, and I was soon back in the Unitarian fold. Then, while at Community Church in New York, on a single day I found my yoga guru and discovered anthroposophy, and thereby entered simultaneously into eastern and western esotericism. Here in a few words is a brief world view that has grown out of my esoteric studies.

When the human race was young, there was no curtain separating the worlds of Nature and Spirit. People shuttled easily back and forth between the two realms. Men walked and talked with gods. However, the gods had a game plan for humans: that they should become free, independent, self-reliant beings. (In other words, they tricked Adam and Eve into eating the apple of knowledge.) So they nudged us out of the nest, as it were. At first they kept in touch with us through heavenly messengers like Enoch and the White Buffalo Spirit, but finally the curtain was dropped altogether, and we were cut off. Individuals like King David sang psalms in a desperate attempt to restore communication. This disciplined severing on the part of the gods was so successful that we forgot about them and eventually decided that they never existed in the first place.

Then Christ incarnated to reverse our vital and spiritual entropies and to lead us back into life in the Spirit, where we might at length bring with us minds developed in freedom, in order that we might once more cavort with the gods, this time as virtual equals. This is the scenario that I ask you to keep in mind as a background to my ensuing remarks.

I analyze my reality with a tool kit of numbers. We hear of controversial world views based on numbers, monism and dualism, for example, based on one and two respectively. However, in my view, there need be no controversy. In my system, fourteen numbers, zero through thirteen, are capable of dividing reality into plausible sets, which are simultaneously operative and interpenetrating. In this presentation I'm using the number two.

Most often in my interfacing with reality, zero and one alternate in their relative supremacy. Everything is zero, that is, all of a piece. Then ones pop up, stay vivid a few moments, and melt back into the general mass of zero-ness. However, when I decide to subject this reality to analysis, I require the use of two. This two-tool I shall apply to three arenas: World, Self, and our Unitarian Universalist faith.

When we divide our world into two parts, we get Spirit and Nature. Spirit is the realm of causes; Nature is the realm of effects. There are no natural causes, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding. If we were to examine Sprit as a whole, then we would use theology, which is the study of subjects. If we were to examine Nature as a whole, then we would use cosmology, which is the study of objects. Our world, then, has two parts, the first of which, Spirit, I also call All Time, in which Space has a small seat. I also call it the Fourth Dimension.

The other part I call All Space, in which Time has a small seat. Space, we say, consists of the first three dimensions. We humans shuttle between these two worlds, as did our ancestors. The difference is that they did it in a self-aware way, and we do it without knowing it. We do it in two perspectives: in sleep, sometimes known as the little death, and in death, sometimes known as the big sleep. Imagine a figure 8, a lemniscate. The curtain of consciousness is a line traversing the 8 between its upper and lower loops. Now, let's begin at the line and move down the lower loop of the lemniscate in a counterclockwise direction. We are passing through our waking hours. Then we loop around and return to the line, which we cross into sleep, where we loop around in a clockwise way returning to the line and, again to wakefulness. People who carry the sleep-trance into wakefulness are called “mystics.” People who carry wakefulness into sleep are called “ecstatics.”

Now let's use the lemniscate in the larger journey. Starting the same place as before, we describe a counterclockwise voyage through the lower loop representing existence between birth and death and cross the curtain line into existence between death and rebirth, this time looping around in a clockwise path to the curtain line again and a new birth. So much for the duality of our world.

Now, when we apply our two tool to the Self, there emerge in the two resultant halves our first nature and our second nature.

This insight came to me one day in a flash, and since then I have found corroborating testimony. To put it with maximum succinctness: Our first nature partakes of the purity of Spirit, and our second nature of Nature herself's contamination. Let me flesh out this distinction. Doug Morrison, a physician practicing alternative medicine, in his book “How We Heal,” tries to determine whether humans are natural vegans or natural carnivores. He concludes that we are both, because we have two natures. In our essential nature, which I am calling our first nature, we are vegan, and in our functional nature, which I am calling our second nature, we are meat-eaters. Evolution with its pitfalls forced us into a compromise, and this brings me to a remarkable insight derived from scripture and from spiritual science: Each of our two natures has its own god. The god of our first nature is named EI Elyon; the god of our second nature is Jahweh.

Biblical scholars say that the first few chapters of Genesis contain two documents of note, one of which they call 'J,' the other 'E.' I deny their claim. There are not two documents, each with its different name for god. Rather is there but one document (let us call it 'E-J') and two gods. El- Elyon, God of Creation, is god of our first nature; and Jahweh, God of Evolution, is god of our second nature. El-Elyon and his fellow Elohim, after completing his mission of Earth creation, returned to the Sun and left Jahweh in charge of our evolution and our second nature. Our evolutionary task is to bring our second nature into alignment with our first nature. However, El- Elyon's departure created a sticky situation.

Adam, prototype of the First Man and Eve, prototype of the First Woman, had two sons, Cain and Abel. Cain raised fruit and vegetables in conformity with our first nature, and Abel hunted animals in conformity with our second nature. In regard to our second nature, Jahweh made allowances for our human frailty and for practical necessity. When the two offerings were made, Cain's offering was rejected and Abel's was accepted. Why was that the case? From a moral standpoint Cain's offering was the better of the two. Well, sure, but, unfortunately, EI-Elyon, god of our first nature, had already departed for the Sun. Had he hung around until then, inasmuch as he, no doubt, outranked Jahweh, the Cain offering would have been preferred. Or, perhaps, both offerings would have been accepted, one by each god.

The two natures of our humanity also split into two laws; the Law of Demeter and the Law of Moses. When humanity was young, its sense of rectitude was internalized as instinct. We were ruled from within by the Goddess or, if you prefer, the Holy Spirit. However, when humans were shut off from the Spirit, then we had to get our instruction from the outside, so we were given the Decalogue, to cite one example, a set of good, commonsense rules of conduct that we took into our minds, thereby making them possessions of the intellect. Second-nature growth is intellectual growth. First nature is symbolized by the sun, which corresponds to the heart; second nature is symbolized by the moon, which corresponds to the head. The sun gives direct light; the moon gives reflected light, and reflection, of course, is thought.

Perhaps the clearest distinction between our two natures happens between death and rebirth. After death we go through a brief retrospective of our lives, and then we get rid of our second nature. Let me compare existence between death and rebirth with going to the opera. Somewhere in the vicinity of the moon (let that represent the vestibule of the opera house) we doff our second nature, which we can think of as a karmic cloak. When we check our cloak, which contains all the bad stuff, along with some good stuff, then we attend the opera, unencumbered. Let the various stations in our solar system that we traverse represent acts and scenes in the performance. We experience our arias in the music of the spheres. At last we return. Our cosmic caretakers induce in us a desire to reincarnate, so we eagerly head towards our next earthly destiny. There's only one catch: We have to take back our karmic cloak. Although we have just spent a thousand years or so floating through the heavens as pure, guiltless beings, the moment has now come to take up the burden of our destiny yet another time.

Now it's time to apply our tool of dualism to our faith. Whatever is left of our evangelistic fervor as a denomination has more to do with our Universalist than with our Unitarian heritage, so for the next few minutes the subject will be universal salvation as applicable to the two halves of Universalism after bifurcation, theism and humanism, the historic division of which came about at the midpoint of the twentieth century.

I'm drawing support for universal salvation from three sources: 1) Christianity, 2) Buddhism, and 3) anthroposophy, or Spiritual Science. In Christianity the witness for universal salvation began with Clement of Alexandria in the second century of the common era. In 17th-century England the movement gave birth to the Universalist Church. The persuasive arguments for universal salvation reached their apogee in the 19th-century work of American Universalist Hosea Ballou in his “Treatise on Atonement.” A proper representation of his views would take several hours, which is not a luxury we can afford in our contemporary era of the short attention span.

Suffice it to say, then, that, first, he argued that the hellfire preachers were guilty of the error of projecting onto God their own frailties, which included such vices as vengefulness, sadism and envy and of ignoring his fatherly love and protective guidance. Second, he pointed out the want of logic in a scenario that made suffering in the next world never-ending, when the purpose of such suffering needs must be to bring the supplicant to an informed reconciliation with God and to a radical change of heart. After all, if he could forgive St. Paul, the murderer of St. Stephen, arguably the holiest human who ever lived (besides Jesus Christ), then he could forgive anybody. The idea of endless suffering is pointless and, frankly, feeble-minded. God, whatever else he may be, is not our intellectual or moral inferior. As I suggested earlier, Universalism has its theistic and humanistic dimensions, which I intend to address in a few moments.

The second source of the doctrine of universal salvation is Buddhism. Before the turn of time, which is to say, before the Golgotha Event, the dominant Buddhist sect was Therevada, which took the view that the number of those destined to reach Nirvana, the rough equivalent of the Christian Paradise, was limited. Now, it may be significant that an opposing view of Buddhist transcendence did not emerge until after the turn of time, when Christ had ascended. To put it in the language of spiritual science, El-Elyon had returned to earth, this time as the Christ, to reboot his original creation and, incidentally, to reintroduce the Cain offering at the Last Supper. It might be argued, then, that the new Buddhism, called 'Mahayana,' emerged as a direct result of Christ having taken possession of the atmosphere of the Earth as the new Soul of the Earth. These new-wave Buddhists nicknamed the traditional Therevada Buddhism, 'Hinayana,' the little boat, as opposed to the new Buddhism, 'Mahayana,' the big boat. This new designation says it all, to wit: when it comes to salvation, everybody gets on board.

Universal salvation is also supported by anthroposophy, which teaches us, among other things, that there is no hell. Should I pause here for a general sigh of relief? Although we have been confident all along that hell was a cruel fiction, we may still be curious as to how it came into being. It emerged because of a misinterpretation of the Book of Revelation. One generalization can be made at the outset: Hell is not a feature of the realm of Spirit but of the realm of Nature. In other words, whatever passes for hell we are living it now. Hell can only happen in Nature and then largely as a metaphor for suffering. However, Nature, as we know, does not have a permanent hold on us but must every now and then release us to Spirit, whether in sleep or in death. Now let me attempt to explain the misunderstanding.

"Revelation" tells us of a new heaven and a new earth. Here it becomes necessary for spiritual science to deny one of empirical science's shibboleths: the law of the conservation of matter. Spiritual science holds that the destruction of matter is necessary to human progress. Matter is destroyed by soul-striving, most particularly by thinking. By human thinking, a material world is gradually transmuted into a world of thought, which will be our environment during a future planetary incarnation, by which I mean a future condition of our solar system; and although it will not be a material world like our present world of rocks and other hard, palpable objects, it will be a new manifestation of Nature, that is, Nature in an advanced condition of subtlety.

So, what is meant by hell in such a context? Suppose, for example, that while still living on an Earth as it is presently constituted, while you still had a physical body, you developed an addiction to smoking tobacco. Then suppose that in your next incarnation you are born into the newly constituted earth condition as described in "Revelation." You no longer have a physical body; therefore you have no means of satisfying your addiction. You can no longer assuage your inherited cravings. Therefore, you burn of a desire incapable of satisfaction and you continue to burn until the desire has been eradicated by time. That, along with similar examples, is the extent of your hellfire.

At this point there arises another shibboleth, this time of a theological nature: the doctrine of vicarious atonement. This doctrine is also refuted by Hosea Ballou, but let me give you the spiritual science take on it. Vicarious atonement means the lifting from our shoulders of the burden of working off our debts of transgression. Spiritual science teaches that all such debts must be paid by us and nobody else, but only to the measure of the offense. What does happen through God's mercy, however, is that the record of the offenses is erased from the Book of Life, much as the record of a juvenile crime might be expunged from the police files.

Now let me make a more detailed assessment of universal salvation in the context of the two halves of Universalism, namely, Theistic Universalism and Humanistic Universalism. If one looks at the Universalist Church's professions of faith from the Philadelphia Articles of Faith in 1790 to the Washington Profession in 1935, one witnesses a continuous and unambiguous acknowledgment of God. After 1935 there seem to have been no further professions until merger with the Unitarians in 1961, when their common profession of faith in that year resulted in a humanist supremacy that has been maintained ever since.

When I graduated from theological school in 1964 and went to my first church at Weymouth, Mass., the battle lines were clearly drawn. I had a lunatic fringe of theists on my right amounting to about one sixth of the congregation, a lunatic fringe of humanists on my left also running at about one sixth, and the remaining two thirds in the middle, where they gave me no trouble.

I'm going to try to distinguish between theistic Universalists, who are largely in our past, and humanistic Universalists, who are largely in our present, by a choice of metaphors. For theistic Universalists my metaphor is 'the big boat' and my slogan is "Everybody gets in the boat." However, for those Universalists who have crossed the line from theism to humanism I need a new metaphor and slogan. Everyone deserves food, clothing and shelter. Everyone deserves healthcare. Everyone deserves legal representation. Everyone deserves a decent burial. I think these sentiments might well be symbolized by a large table and by the slogan "Everybody sits at the table." Now, if you put the two metaphors and slogans together, you have a complete picture. In reference to anyone we might meet or consider in our thoughts, we might well say, "This person, these people have a first nature, which is to say, a higher nature, even as I do. Therefore, whether I like it or not, they will be with me in Paradise." Such thoughts might induce us to look upon them with more kindness. Now we can extend that sentiment into the day-to-day world. If these people deserve a place in the boat, then surely they equally merit a place at the table as well. Then we might well ask ourselves, "What are we doing to make sure this happens?"

In the John Gospel, Jesus said to his disciples, "Is it not written in your law, ‘I said you are gods’?” Indeed, by virtue of our first nature, our higher nature, our god-seed, if you will, we truly are.