Freedom From Self

In American theatre Spalding Gray had an almost unique role; he was by far the best-known performer of onstage, autobiographical monologues. He died earlier this year at the age of 62—apparently by choice, having jumped off the Staten Island Ferry. Spalding Gray struggled with depression much of his life. This had worsened recently after he suffered some brain damage following a car accident in 2001. Throughout his career, the topic of his work was himself: his life, his latest issues, crises, choices, experiences.

Here is what Terry Gross, host of the syndicated National Public Radio show Fresh Air had do say about Gray: “No matter what the subject was… he could get you laughing without diminishing the gravity of the problem. The ability to stand back and report on his life was his artistic gift. He thought it was also his problem. He was always standing back, observing and thinking. Several of his stories were about this predicament. He wanted to experience a perfect moment, but that was usually impossible because he was too trapped in his own mind to let go.”

His was a quintessential human dichotomy. On the one hand there is that awareness of self and the distance it necessarily creates between each of us and everything else: between us and experiences, between us and places, even between us and people, even between us and loved ones. And on the other hand, there is the immersion, subsuming of self in something else: in an experience, in a place, in a person, in a loved one. We are utterly, often blissfully, unaware of ourselves, focused totally on that which commands our attention.

I always loved to read as a child. Opening a book, I could enter a world entirely apart from my own, be free of myself and all the mundane or disappointing details of my own childhood life, and participate entirely in another world, other characters, other experiences, drama, valor, magic, romance, freedom. With a universe shaped by books, my own abilities and adventures were bound only by the range of literature I dug into.

And so I remember how terrible it seemed when one year my English teacher taught us Literary Analysis. Suddenly I was having to notice allusion, alliteration, metaphor, simile, underlying themes or language that might permeate a story. From flying through narratives suddenly I was plodding drearily, dragging along heavy, charmless iron ball of literary analysis… reading was spoiled for me, I honestly feared it would be so forever. No matter the author or the themes, text had become like algebra, dry and academic, obscured with formulae requiring my dissection and exposition.

Thankfully, after a few years away from literary analysis, those academic perceptions and skills wilted, eventually almost entirely dying away, so that for a long time now I have been back to my unconscious, avaricious participation in the world of literature. I almost never notice alliteration or thematic language. And so it’s rare that a cold analytical thought wrests me violently from my intimate immersion in the story back out into my own life and the realization that the writer is using some device or other for some effect or other.

That dynamic—of being free and subsumed in a story—or being bound into self-awareness and annoying analysis – is my own parallel to the struggle Spalding Gray articulates. I could read for seven hours—and never think of death. His words are so telling in that excerpt about skiing, and in that almost non-sequitur line at the end, a quick, New York, neurotic jab at ultimacy. Just as death is the negation of life, so to does fear of death all too often negate the power and beauty in the being present to living; in simple things like drawing breath, feeling water or air moving on our skin, smelling the aromas of the earth around us, listening to the myriad sounds that fill the air, feeling speed or the smooth skin of a friend or lover beneath our touch, feeling a child cling to us like a monkey, snuggling with a beloved pet on a chilly day;… in complex things like making art, skiing a mountain or riding a horse, discussing philosophy,… the world is shot-through with glory and inspiration that comes to us in so many forms they are dazzling. We may perceive beauty in an insect, or a nebula, in fabric or design or theorems or color or human interaction… and why can’t we just always let that lift us up? Why can’t we just let all that is strong and absorbing and inspiring and moving free us of our hang-ups and neuroses and handicaps and self-absorption that ordinarily diminish us? Why do we let the banality that nibbles at our souls, at our wings, why do we let it feed on us?

For there is something in us that does let it happen, when it happens. There is something in us that goes right along with the banality that sucks us down: how do we look while we’re doing what we love, how do we sound, what do others think, what’s wrong with this, what’s coming next? There is so much to distract and retard us in our progress towards that submersion of self in beauty or joy, and frequently we don’t even try to fight it we even abet it, because we don’t want to look or sound foolish, we don’t want to seem silly, we don’t have words for what we felt, so we won’t seek to honor it once we’re done with the feeling. But it’s not just what in us that sometimes keeps us mired, it’s also all around us in what our culture values and doesn’t, supports and doesn’t, even what we have tools for or don’t. We don’t, really, have a lot of spiritual or cultural tools for freeing our spirits, for immersing in what exalts and sustains us. And that’s not true everywhere.

Spalding Gray talked a lot about the time he spent in Thailand, and one of the things he came back struck by was how much Thai people knew how to have a good time. He said they have a good time learning, a good time working, a good time getting married, a good time staying married, a good time dying… they even knew how to have a good time on New Year’s Eve.

Those are striking examples, because by American standards, a lot of those experiences are defined here as work. Right? Learning takes application and diligence—and it’s a responsibility and with college costs these days, a pretty awesome responsibility at that. And work—well that’s the very definition of effort. A good time getting married—well a lot of us hope for that, but as any recent bridal couple can tell you, getting married is generally a whole lot of work. And staying married—it’s common wisdom that a good and lasting marriage requires commitment and work from both parties—marriage is not all fun and games. And dying—I wish I knew more about how the Thai people make that fun—apparently we have an awful lot to learn.

And New Year’s Eve. Isn’t New Year’s Eve a quintessential example of being stuck in our own selves? What will we do, where will we go, what will live up to that inexplicable, unattainable expectation of a good time on New Year’s Eve? What are we searching for at all those parties, with all that drinking, roaming the First Night festivities of major cities, watching the ball drop from the quiet of our living rooms or that teeming chaos of Times Square? What is it that is so usually missing on New Year’s Eve—and why are we so often disappointed by its continual absence?

Somehow New Year’s Eve is about wanting to be lifted out of ourselves by a good time—to no longer be aware that we are cold and our feet are wet from tramping from one exhibit to another at some city’s First Night, or that we can’t think of anything to say to this group of people at a party, or that we don’t really want the hangover that will come with too much of the excellent punch, or who is really having fun here or where is it that people are having fun and why are they having fun and what am I missing, I, I, I? We let ourselves be drawn into that self-limited, self-fulfilling evening of opportunity and disappointment, and though it is a mundane spiritual example, it is also a real example.

Back to Thailand. Also regarding that trip, Gray said that at one point he was thinking: “I hadn’t had a perfect moment yet. And… it’s very important for me to have perfect moments in exotic countries like that, you know, I always like to have to have them because it gives you a good sense of closure, you know, it kind of lets you know when it’s time to go home? And you never know when you’re going to have a perfect moment. I mean they’re best had alone and you never know when you’re going to have one.”

What he is talking about, what longing for and anticipating, is transcendence. Transcendence is that experience of being immersed in something that lifts you right up—that absorbs and transforms and renews you, fills you with a sense of wonder at the greatness that hovers in the world, that animates all things, that is at once immanent all around us and yet too often hidden from our preoccupied senses and self-absorbed consciousness.

Anne Louise Germaine Necker, better known as Mme. De Stael, was a leading European intellectual who bridged the18th and 19th centuries, and she was one of the great influences on our own Unitarian prophet, Ralph Waldo Emerson. For her, religion was an experience, rather than a theological system or practice. She wrote that religion was a feeling of the infinite, which was not the same as the infinite itself. The infinite was “the absence of limits, but the feeling of the infinite, such as the imagination and the heart experience, is positive and creative.” (Emerson, Mind on Fire, p. 53) And religion, she wrote, “is nothing if it is not everything, if existence is not filled with it, if we do not incessantly maintain in the soul this belief in the invisible, this self-devotion, this elevation of desire.” She felt that human living should be “naturally and without effort, an act of worship at every moment.” (Emerson, Mind on Fire, p. 53-54)

Ultimately worship, religious experience, is another definition of what Spalding Gray was talking about—the losing of the self in an experience of something larger, a rhythm, a joy, a perception, something that lifts us to another level of living, of transcendence, something we experience in fleeting glimpses, in perfect yet inchoate moments, something towards which we yearn and might spend a lifetime seeking, but which we cannot command. If we are acquainted that wonder and level of experience at all, it is because it commands us.

Like Gray, many of us long for those moments that catch us up, that immerse us in experience that takes us out of our heads and into new awareness of the world. Much as we are rational beings, gifted with cognition and reason and the capacity to learn and understand symbolism and generalize and systematize and yes, analyze—much as those gifts are exactly what allow us to continue to expand the many blessed ways people live in the world, still, when all is done, we long not to stand on the bank, gauging the river of life flowing before us, but rather to enter that flow and feel it carry us with it, in it.

Set that example from before of New Year’s Eve against another dark, cold, still day bearing in its demeanor all the same wintry challenge. But it was Thanksgiving, 1831 and had been a day of disappointment and isolation for another of De Stael’s students, the brilliant American Unitarian scholar Margaret Fuller. She wrote of feeling within herself great power, and generosity, and tenderness, “but it seemed to me as if they were all unrecognized… . Suddenly the shone shone out with that transparent sweetness…” And there followed a revelation which endured for Fuller all her life: “How is it that I seem to be this Margaret Fuller? What does it mean? What shall I do about it?….I saw how long it must be before the soul can learn to act under these limitations of time and space, and human nature; but I saw also that it must do it… I saw that there was no self: that selfishness was all folly, and the result of circumstance; that it was only because I thought self real that I suffered.” (Emerson, Mind on Fire p. 237-238)

Margaret Fuller articulates a vision with meaning for we moderns, who can see in her not only her intellectual alliance to Emerson, Goethe, and the European Romanticism that was the foundation for American Transcendentalism but also relevance to Buddhism and Zen practice, And also to the struggle between self-consciousness and transcendence that is eternal and is my topic this morning.

I don’t know if Spalding Gray knew about Unitarian Universalism, or what he thought about us if he did. Certainly I would never offer Unitarian Universalism as a panacea, least of all for depression and brain damage. But I do know that our belief in life as a journey, in revelation as ongoing, in the ultimate legitimacy of personal religious experience over doctrine or creed, offers us a gift that is important to the quintessentially human struggle that was Spalding Gray’s.

The gift is that in holding that revelation is not sealed—that we do not arrive at a single point in our lives and know thereafter all we can ever know—that we hold also a promise of further perfect moments, of experiences of transcendence and exaltation and freedom from self, that will indeed, we believe, come to us throughout our lives—unpredictable as Gray notes, but also infinite, as we believe. Their grace is available to us at any moment, and our task is to keep ourselves open to their grace, and be present to it when it arrives and to honor what lessons come with it.

Spalding Gray’s life was complex, intelligent, emotional, quixotic and ultimately tragic. Those same elements are present in all our lives, to varying degrees at varying times. Spirituality is personal, and represents our individual souls’ responses to what comes upon us in the course of our days. Religion is communal and represents the community response what comes upon us and upon humanity generally, in the course of our days. We are not only individuals with spirituality, but also participants in a religion and so we are none of us alone. We have kinship with each other, sharing the same journey, sharing in a heritage with wisdom to draw upon, and bearing a future we will create together.

We may hear a reflection of our selves and our own lonely seeking in the life and words of Spalding Gray. But we have also the companionship of De Stael and Fuller and others, who also knew not only that same longing, but who sought and found ways to deepen their ability to be present to life, to be free of the self, to immerse the soul in the world, to, as Emerson wrote, lift up their hands and say “Kosmos.” Together we know know about routine and mundanity and frustration, and also we know encounter and wonder and awe.

“And then it happens, it’s the ineffable. I can’t tell you how it happens. All this time I think I had to think myself around, it was just a shift of weight and I never experienced this in my life, except in 1946 on Thanksgiving Day when I first learned how to pump on a swing. I suddenly turned right. Or something turned me right. And then left, right, left…”

“How is it that I seem to be this? What does it mean? What shall I do about it? How long it must be before the soul can learn to act under these limitations of time and space, and human nature; but…also the soul must learn to act.”

Amen.