The Captain Goes Down with the Ship

The Captain doesn’t literally go down and drown, but captainhood is so intimately connected with the ship that when the ship goes down, the captain goes down with the ship, even if the man gets away in a rescue boat.

At Friends of St. Thomas, Jeremy asked an interesting question. Which is higher Christ or science? The question stopped me cold, and I could see by his astonishment at our silence that he must have thought that he had fallen in with a group of anti-Christian heretics. But the answer for me is not simple. I believe that Christ is the creator, and that nature is a direct manifestation of God’s character and personality, of equal authority with the Bible, and that just as reading the Bible is an act of worship, so doing science is an act of worship. For me, doing science in the lab is just as much about a relationship with God the creator, as is the Sabbath worship service. To ask which is higher, or more authoritative, is like asking which is of higher authority, my wife, or my relationship with my wife? My wife does not exist in my consciousness or universe except in relationship with me. A man cannot be a husband without a wife, a captain cannot be a captain without a ship, a god cannot be a creator without a creation, a savior cannot be a savior without a loss. Do you value being a husband? Then you must value both the wife, and the relationship. Do you value being a captain? You must value the ship. You can only value the creator to the extent you value the creation. Do you honor the savior? Then you must affirm the both the fall, and the death as well. Without a sinner, there cannot be a savior, without a death there cannot be a salvation.

One morning when we didn’t have to go to work, Judith rolled over and asked, “Show me cherish”. As I thought about it, I realized that I have heard the word, and the song, but I couldn’t identify an emotion to connect to the word, and I hadn’t the slightest idea what to do to demonstrate the emotion. So I asked her, “What is cherish? What does it feel like?”
She responded, “It is a feeling of quiet, peace, protectiveness and value”. Searching the emotional memory banks I finally asked, “Is it that warm feeling I had holding a sleeping baby?”
When she said yes, I felt like crying. Cherish! What a wonderful thing. It was a new feeling, something that was always there, but never felt.

In the book, My Stroke Of Insight the author, Dr. Taylor, talks about what it is like to live with only the right brain. The left brain is responsible for defining boundaries and meaning. It holds the map that defines the limits of your skin, what is you and what isn’t, what is near and what is far, what is good and what is bad. It measures time and determines what is the past, the now and the not yet. So when the left brain is quiet, she describes feeling liquid, at one with the universe, peaceful and happy without judgment. She had a sense of being part of the universe without beginning or end. Eternal if you will.

As she was healing, and her left brain was coming back on line, she describes seeing, but she didn’t discern colors. It wasn’t until some said, “That’s red” that she could see red. Then she could see red all around her. When someone said no, that’s green, and then suddenly she could see green. Certainly, she was seeing the colors all along, but until they were named, they didn’t really exist; they weren’t distinguishable from one another.

Suddenly, I knew what she was describing, only for me it was emotion. They talk about “emotional intelligence”. I think I grew up in a very emotionally ignorant family. I never remember anyone in my family talking about emotion. I knew the words of course, but I don’t remember anyone saying, I feel angry, sad, or happy. When I got married, my wife would ask me, why are you angry? And I would respond, “I’m not angry.” “Yes you are.” It was several years before I could identify anger. At first it took several days before I could identify the feeling, and realize, oh, yes, I guess I am angry. Then Judith and I could talk about it. As time went on I got so I could identify the anger quicker, but it took a long time for me to recognize it quick enough for me to deal with it in real time. Even now, I often don’t realize it until the situation is past. As life went on, I was able to identify a few other emotions, like fear, frustration and betrayal. The only good emotions I knew were compassion, that is what makes you want to become a doctor, and love, which for me was basically the same thing as sex. But now, I have another emotion, cherish.

As we lay there talking about, and identifying other emotions, I began to feel something strange. It was like my emotional life was being chopped into pieces. Once an emotion was identified, then there seemed to come a time when the emotion existed and another time when it didn’t exist. Judith told me about a time she felt hurt by something I did. It was also, connected to a time when I felt a strong sense of betrayal. She said something strange, like “I don’t feel hurt any more, I just feel sad, like there was a loss, but it doesn’t hurt anymore.” I thought that was strange, because for me, the sense of betrayal was always there, connected to that event. The memory of the event, and the accompanying emotion were always the same. The emotion never went away. It could be layered with other emotions, but the emotional experience of any person or event, was always the sum total of all the emotions associated with it. If I liked, you, you could do things that made me angry, but the like never went away. Also, the anger never went away, it was just layered with new emotion as the relationship continued. It wasn’t like there were separate emotions, it more like emotional layers of colored glass. As you looked thru the emotional lens, the color of the lens would change as the layers were added, but the emotions that made up the lens were not distinguishable. When Judith started identifying emotions, it was like turning the lens on edge, suddenly you could see emotions of different colors, layered out sequentially, each with a beginning and an end.

I can’t help wondering if this is a good thing. Certainly, it is good to be able to identify an emotion, and tell people how you feel, but I wonder what it does to your history, when the emotions connected with events change, when hurt becomes sadness, betrayal becomes thoughtlessness. Or disdain becomes rejection, and rejection becomes fatigue. What happens to you when you remember an event and it feels different? I suppose it might be helpful to soften the edges of painful events, or even to turn a negative into a positive, but, then, what’s the point? What is reality, if emotions and events are no longer connected? What does anything mean if you can make it mean anything?

In religion, we talk about God being spirit, and spirit being eternal, while the physical is temporal (time bound) and mortal. Man is both spiritual and physical. A partaker of the Eternal divine nature, and yet physical and mortal. I wonder if the difference between eternity and time isn’t something like the difference between the right and left brain experience, or the difference between looking thru the lens, eternity, or looking at the edge of the lens, time. I wonder if eternity and spirituality aren’t something like the emotional life. It is always there and yet it doesn’t exist until it is named. It never goes away, but once it is named it is no longer present. It is always the same, and yet always different. Consequences are both good and bad at the same time. It is what it is now, but later it might be something else. The past determines the present, and still the present can change the past.

Buddhists talk about enlightenment. Meditation is a process of quieting the judging mind, the left, verbal mind, to stop doing, and to be. They describe Nirvana in much the same terms Dr. Taylor uses to describe the experience of the right brain, this oneness with the eternal universe.

For the Buddhist, the process of enlightenment is the letting go of judgment. Is it then possible to become enlightened, to enter eternity without first having left eternity thru judgment?
Was it possible for Christ to leave the undifferentiated eternity of the god head to become “God with us” without first making a judgment? Without first defining a separation between God and creature, a beginning and end, a life and death? Is that why he first became the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world, the alpha and the omega, because it is impossible to define a life separate from God without death?

Is it possible that as infants we started out in the un-named, undifferentiated Nirvana, the perfect paradise of Eden where there was no good and no evil? Life, like cherish, has no existence until a judgment is made, until a self can be defined, a separation is made in the eternal. To make the judgment is to define the beginning, life, the definition creates the end, death. Thus in choosing to create, Christ made the first judgment that life is good, that it is worth starting and ending.

Is it possible that Christ the creator who made man in his image, and pronounced the first judgment, that life is good, also gives to man that same power of judgment? Is it possible that our spiritual life starts with our first judgment, when we first leave the garden of innocence, when we first partake of the tree of knowledge of good and evil and decide for the first time that one is good, the other is bad? Christ said that Christians would be judged as they judged. Perhaps as we come to the end of life, the difference between heaven and hell is our own judgment about the value of our own life? What is the meaning of my life? Was it good? Was it bad? As ye judge, so shall ye be judged. As they say, the captain goes down with the ship.