Headstrong
Unitarian Universalism and the Seventh Chakra
By
Rev. Dr. Todd F. Eklof
December 1, 2013
I like to think I gave up shame-based theology when I became a Unitarian
Universalist 25 years ago. The notion that we are all born fundamentally flawed,
inherently bad, abominations deserving of eternal torment from the moment of our
very first breath, is one paradigm I’m grateful to be unshackled from. Yet I’m not
certain which came first, the bad theology or the shame. For if, as Freud argued,
“civilization has to be defended against the individual,”1 then what better way to
discourage the pursuit of our individual interests than by making us feel ashamed of
ourselves; what better way than to convince us that we cannot trust ourselves to do
the right thing and that desire itself is symptomatic of our sinful condition? “It is in
keeping with the course of human development,” he said, “that external coercion
gradually becomes internalized,”2 which is also what Nobel Prize winning Brazilian
educator, Paulo Freire meant in claiming the oppressed often "internalize the world
of their oppressors."3
As such, societies are often comprised of individuals who have come to
mistake the interests of the status quo as their very own. They do what society
expects of them, rather than what they want for themselves, if they are even capable
of distinguishing their own authentic desires and interests anymore. “Those in
whom [this] has taken place,” Freud said, “are turned from being opponents of
civilization into being its vehicles.”4 So, my guess is that religion, even one based on
inclusion and forgiveness, eventually gets usurped and spun into a mechanism of
social control. For again, as Freud put it, “[all] its regulations, institutions and
commands are directed to that task.”5
This is not to say society is itself inherently evil, but using shame as the glue
that holds community together is. We are social animals. We need others and we
need each other, and this requires a little give and take now and then, the
compromising of our individual positions once in awhile, and, sometimes, forgoing
our individual interests for the greater good. All of this is fine so long as the glue that
holds society together is equality and justice, the valuation of every individual as
being equal under the law, meaning nobody’s individual rights should be trampled
upon for the benefit of others. But when shame is the glue that holds it all together,
Freud, Sigmund, The Future of an Illusion, (W.W. Norton & Company, New York, NY, 1961,
1989) p. 7.
2 Ibid., p.7f.
3 Herzog, William R., Parables as Subversive Speech, (Westminster/John Knox Pres,
Louisville, KY, 1994) p. 19.
4 Freud, ibid., p. 14.
5 Freud, ibid., 7.
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applied through various institutions, including religion, then we end up with a
society in which those who are different are made to feel more deserving of shame
than those in the mainstream; thus, laying the foundation of the dominator society’s
hierarchical pecking order. What’s more, just as Fall/Redemption theology teaches
that we are all born with a congenital disposition for sin, the shame based society
segregates and discriminates against certain individuals for arbitrary genetic
characteristics they cannot help, like ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, or the
situations they are born into, especially poverty.
So, again, I am glad to be part of a religion that so highly esteems the worth
and dignity of every person and has, for the most part, let go of shame-based
thinking. How, after all, would you feel if each Sunday I got up here and suggested
there is something innately wrong with you, a foul and embarrassing congenital
condition that you must constantly strive to overcome if you are to be of any value
at all? But shame-based theology is not a product of Christianity’s Atonement
theology alone. I consider it, rather, a bi-product of the dominator culture itself.
Religion may be usurped by the powers-that-be to help instill this widespread sense
of shame, but it is not the only institution to do so. So simply declaring oneself a
Unitarian Universalist, or something else, like a Buddhist, or even an atheist, isn’t
enough to make the claim we are free of shame-based thinking or shame-based
community.
There are lots of other ways inherent shame infiltrates our ways of thinking
and being together, probably because, despite great advances in equality, ours’
remains largely a dominator society, based, that is, upon hierarchy, which is almost
synonymous with inequality. Hierarchy is always based upon someone being at the
bottom, and it keeps those unfortunate enough to be considered less than others
compliant, at least in part, by making them feel ashamed of themselves, believing,
that is, they deserve whatever they get, or, more usually, what they don’t get.
One tremendous source of shame these days that I want to focus on now is
thinking. We are all born with this ability to reason, which may very well be the
defining characteristic of our species. Yet, almost from the outset, we can be made to
feel bad about using our own noggins. Children are scolded for talking back,
ridiculed for asking dumb questions, and downgraded for not giving the answers
expected of them. As Cognitive scientists John C. Clement and Jack Lochhead
complain, “We should be teaching students how to think. Instead we are teaching
them what to think.”6
I don’t know if it still goes on these days, but when I was growing up, children
themselves became vehicles through which such shame was instilled. Even looking
smart could get you labeled a “bookworm” or called “four-eyes.” And if you actually
performed well in school, you could be ostracized as “teacher’s pet” or cast out of
Clement, John C., and Lochhead, Jack, Cognitive Process Instruction, Lawrence Erlbaum
Associates, Hillsdale, NJ, 1979.
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the mainstream for being a “nerd.” Even the cool kids that did well knew to keep
their good grades to themselves. We also know it is often the case that kids growing
up in disadvantaged communities are made to feel ashamed for doing well in school,
or for abandoning their communities by going off to college to better their
circumstances. In an online opinion article on NBC’s Latino blog, Kelly Carrion
writes, “I have seen many students from urban neighborhoods feel guilty when they
leave behind communities and friends to try and reach their goals in other places.” 7
After she received help from a nonprofit organization that helps prepare highachieving kids from low-income families get into private high schools, Carrion’s own
friends began calling her, “white girl.”
In another article entitled, A Persistent Problem: Being Bullied By Our Own for
Being Smart, 8 its author, Lisa Davis, begins with:
A generation ago, when I was a kid being bused into a predominantly white school
in Brooklyn, I faced daily taunting and intimidation on the school bus from other
Black students, who accused me of “acting white,” and “thinking I was cute” for the
crime of being the only Black kid picked to be in the class for high achievers in my
grade in the predominantly white school. I was teased, spat on and physically
assaulted frequently during that 25-minute bus ride. While intervention by my
parents and the school stopped the physical assaults, the ostracism continued.
According to other research cited in Davis’ article, the African Americans and
Latinos among nearly 10-thousand senior high school students surveyed were far
more likely to show a decrease in their academic performance when bullied than
were white students.9 According to the report, this may be because they “face social
penalties such as bullying for breaking stereotypes.”10 In other words, they are
made to feel ashamed about something that is, once again, arbitrary and congenital.
According to yet another study, representative of more than 90-thousand students,
the popularity of Blacks and Hispanics decreases significantly as their Grade Point
Averages rise. “Put differently,” the report’s author, Roland Fryer, says, “a black
student with straight As is no more popular than a black student with a 2.9 GPA, but
high-achieving whites are at the top of the popularity pyramid… [And] A Hispanic
student with a 4.0 GPA is the least popular of all Hispanic students…”11 In all cases
these students are made to feel ashamed by their peers for being smarter than their
stereotyped status dictates they should be.
http://nbclatino.com/2013/08/17/opinion-im-not-uppity-im-ambitious-about-myeducation/
8 http://groundcontrolparenting.com/2011/08/30/a-persistent-problem-being-bullied-byour-own-for-being-smart/
9http://colorlines.com/archives/2011/08/study_shows_bullying_leads_to_decrease_in_aca
demic_performance.html
10 Ibid.
11 http://educationnext.org/actingwhite/
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On a global scale, the same can be said of many women and girls around the
world who are discouraged or forbidden from getting educations simply because of
their gender, which, again, is a congenital condition. We need only look to the
example of Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani teenager who survived an assassination
attempt last year after she was shot for advocating for the education of girls and
women. The point of all of this is to suggest, while the dominator culture has a
vested interest in discouraging anyone from thinking for one's self, it is particularly
true of the most vulnerable and marginalized in society. (Talk about the oppressed
adopting the position of their oppressors!)
So, again, I am glad to be part of a religion that embraces reason and science
as one of our sources of inspiration. Even so, I am also painfully aware of a
tendency—even within our rational religion—that can sometimes make us feel
ashamed for being too thoughtful. Have you ever hear anyone say things like, “You
think too much,” or, “You’re over thinking things,” or, “You’ve live in your head too
much?” While it’s true that we can easily obsess over our own ideas, and avoid
reality by ascending into its ideality, there is also an implication here that rational
people aren’t spiritual enough, that spiritual experience is based upon a feeling the
head can’t make sense of. “If you’re too much in your head,” the argument goes,
“you’ll miss the experience. You might even miss life itself!”
While I certainly agree that we ought to fully experience life in a sensual way,
I also think we ought to experience it in a human way—the only way we can—and a
huge part of what it means to be human is to think. We may be heads attached to
bodies, but we are also bodies attached to heads. It’s a package deal and it’s not
really possible for us to live with one and not the other. There is a rare condition,
anencephaly, that causes some infants to be born with little more than a brain stem,
but it is fatal. So we can’t really “get out of our heads” to live. If by “living” we mean
really experiencing life, then we have to do so with our brains.
In his book, On Intelligence, for example, Jeff Hawkins, inventor of the original
palm pilot, argues we can’t make a truly intelligent computer, equal to the human
brain, until it is wired in a way that receives feedback, that is, until it becomes
sensual. The fundamental difference between computers and brains, he says, is that
“One is programmed, one is self-learning.”12 The human brain teaches itself through
sensual experience, through its body. In fact, according Hawkins, there are 10 times
as many feedback fibers extending from the brain to the senses as those inputting
information. In other words, the brain is a sensual organ, a mechanism that reaches
out and gropes the world around us, not merely a senseless thinking, computer-like,
machine as we sometimes imagine. Our fingertips are both the end and beginning of
our brains. Our sixth sense is intelligence.
Another common criticism, ever since Roger Sperry’s famous Nobel Prize
winning split-brain experiments, is that we are thinking too much with the left side
12
Hawkins, Jeff, On Intelligence, Henry Hold and Company, LLC, New York, NY, 2004, p. 12.
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of our brains. The left hemisphere, according to Sperry’s research, is usually the
verbal and analytical side, and the right is the more creative and emotional side.
Perhaps it is because ours is a dominator culture that we have come to imagine one
side must dominate the other. Just a couple months ago, however, researchers at the
University of Utah made big news debunking this myth.13 Using modern MRI
technology to scan more than 1000 brains and 7000 brain regions, the study shows
the brain works unilaterally across both hemispheres and that both sides are
involved together in speech, analysis, spatial awareness, and creativity. The Utah
study is proof of what most neuroscientists have believed all along, that both sides
of the brain contribute to logic and creativity and that it isn’t really possible for one
side of the brain to dominate the other.
The other point I would make about the brain is that ours, in particular, is a
defining characteristic of our species. Human beings are among very few animals
that retain juvenile characteristics throughout our entire lives. As early as 1936,
Dutch anatomist, Louis Bolk described our species as “a primate foetus that has
become sexually mature.”14 In their book, The First Chimpanzee, scientists John
Gribbin and Jeremy Cherfas also say, “human beings are a form of infant ape that has
learned to reproduce without reaching physical maturity.”15 And renowned
biologist, Stephen Jay Gould succinctly says the human infant is “still an embryo.”16
The only advantage to continuing to incubate outside the womb is that our brains
can continue to grow much larger than any other kind of ape. The brains of chimps
and gorillas, for example, are 70 percent of their full size at birth, something that
doesn’t happen until humans are two-years-old. The human brain isn’t fully mature
until, at least, age 25, but even then continues to develop throughout our lives.
We’ve had to sacrifice many of the other physical advantages and strengths of being
apes, but remaining premature primates gives us our big heads and brains. In short,
the human animal is a thinking animal. It’s what we are born to do.
None of this is to suggest, whether they are right or left brained functions or
not, that humans don’t feel and create and visualize and verbalize and analyze, or
that some of us aren’t more creative, or more intelligent, or more logical or
emotional than others. Nor does it mean we can’t over-think things, or over-feel
them, for that matter. What I am really pointing out is that none of these qualities is
innately wrong and, except for our individual dispositions and personalities, none
An Evaluation of the Left-Brain vs. Right-Brain Hypothesis with Resting State
Functional Connectivity Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Jared A. Nielsen mail, Brandon A.
Zielinski, Michael A. Ferguson, Janet E. Lainhart, Jeffrey S. Anderson, Published: Aug 14,
2013, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0071275
14 Gribbin, John, & Cherfas, Jeremy, The First Chimpanzee, 2001, Barnes & Noble, Inc., 2003,
US p. 178.
13
15
Gribbin & Cherfas, ibid. p. 177.
Gould, Stephen Jay, Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History, from the chapter
Human Babies as Embryos, Penguin, 1977.
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are better than the other. I’m really advocating a holistic approach to being that
includes reason and logic as a valuable part of human experience.
One of the most effective models of this holistic approach that I know of is
the Hindu and Buddhist chakra system. Chakra, if you don’t know, is the Sanskrit
word for, “wheel.” The chakra system represents a belief that several subtle energy
wheels, or centers, are aligned between the base of the spine to the top of the head.
Traditionally there are seven altogether, each representing a different kind of subtle
or spiritual energy. The first, located at the base of the spine, is the root chakra,
which I summarize as our deepest, oldest, and most unconscious wisdom. The
second, for which the Sanskrit names means, “Dwelling Place of the Self,” is located
near the genitalia and, obviously, represents sexual and creative energy. The third,
located at the navel, called, “The City of Gems,” represents the energy of raw
emotion and gut instinct. The fourth, the heart chakra, represents our capacity to
love. The fifth, located at the throat, as you might guess, represents the energy of
truth and communication—the power to speak. The sixth, located midway between
the brows, represents intuition and imagination—the third eye. And the seventh, the
crown chakra, located at the top of the head, represents the ability to think and
reason.
Whether or not these subtle energy centers actually exist, the energies they
represent seem an undeniable part of the human condition. Ours is, indeed, an
unconscious, sexual, instinctive, loving, speaking, intuitive, thinking species. I
particularly appreciate mythologist Joseph Campbell’s insight that the heart chakra
is the great transformer of all these energies as they pass through the subtle body,
through the release of Kundalini energy. Kundalini is also called “serpent wisdom,”
because it is thought to begin coiled up in the root chakra before spiraling upward
like a snake. I like Campbell’s insight because it suggests the first three energies of
unconsciousness, sexuality, and instinct, all of which are shared by other animals,
are transformed through love, into energies that are uniquely human—speech,
intuition, and reason. When rage is transformed through love, for example, through
the heart, which means “core,” it become courage. Gandhi was an angry man who
channeled his anger through love, and became one of the most courageous people
ever to have lived. Likewise, passion, when channeled through love, becomes
compassion; instinct becomes articulate, emotion become intuition, and what is
unconscious is made conscious.
Another way to say it is that the earthly energies of unawareness, sexuality,
and instinct, through love, are what make us most human through our abilities to
speak, imagine, and reason. This, I consider, to be one of the unique strengths of our
faith, that we not only embrace what it means to be human, but that we lift up
reason as a source of inspiration, as an ability that is both human and spiritual, if, in
the end, there is any difference. (And I don’t believe there is!) It may be true, as G. K.
Chesterton once said, “The madman is not the man who has lost all reason. The
madman is the one who has lost everything except his reason.” Yet what are we
without it? The ability to reason is what makes us human. Thinking, like our
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pigmentation and sexuality, is a congenital condition, but it is not a sin, and there is
no reason to ever feel ashamed for using our heads.
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