At the quantum level, everything that we’re so comfortable with as “solid matter” is really not matter at all. It’s energy. And this energy is intelligent. From quantum physicists like Neils Bohr and Albert Einstein, to molecular biologists like Candace Pert and Bruce Lipton, we get a vision of a universe ablaze with intelligence – a passionate and curious intelligence eager to recreate itself into higher and higher levels of complexity. Tiny fields of energy, each a whirling vortex of intelligence, seek each other out, joining forces just to see what will happen, creating something new each time, something much more than the mere sum of their parts. Each new synergistic merging creates a higher, more sophisticated level of intelligence. Like an atom. An atom is an incredibly sophisticated form of intelligence. And yet it’s barely the beginning. We go from there to molecules, to carbon chains, to DNA, to cells, to plants and animals. And then to animals that can think, that can reason, that can feel, that can be conscious of their own existence and their own intelligence. (In case you’re wondering, I’m referring to us. I’m giving us the benefit of the doubt.)

Neils Bohr may have reminded us that the universe is on fire, but it’s not exactly new knowledge. We’ve been told for millennia. Moses told us, the Buddha told us, Rumi practically tore his clothes off telling us. We’ve heard it from poets, children, musicians, philosophers, shamans, clergy. It’s come in through whatever cracks it can, through ecstatic experience, through dementia, psychosis, hallucinogens. The universe seems to want us to know that it’s on fire.

And yet somehow, in spite of this insistence, we continue to forget. We continue to ignore. Being animals that can think, we’ve greatly complicated things, and have been cast out of the proverbial Garden in the process. We’ve created all manner of structure and hierarchy – social, political, financial, educational, and religious, to name a few – and we’ve become incredibly busy maintaining all of this. We’ve got responsibilities, work to do, bills to pay. We don’t have time to be on fire. We have to wash the car. In recent centuries, we adopted an entire paradigm to support this rather prosaic approach to life: the Newtonian concept of a mechanistic universe. Everything became matter. It was now a billiard-ball universe that could ultimately be understood and manipulated. And there’s no denying the results were impressive. We came up with telephones and cars and airplanes. We all got a washer and dryer. We became very pleased with ourselves. And while we were busy reading our latest owner’s manual, God silently passed away in the night, and Science and Industry took their place on the Great White Throne.

We tried really hard to put out the fire. It took the irony of science coming back full circle to quantum physics, and quantum physics being co-opted by the military to shock us back into awareness. In our promethean quest to steal the universe’s fire and hide it from ourselves, we brought it right back out in the open in a way no human being could ignore.

64 years ago today, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Nagasaki, Japan. Three days earlier another had been dropped on Hiroshima. It’s estimated that roughly 100,000 people died instantly, another 100,000 died slowly over the next 5 days, and another 200,000 died even more slowly over the next 5 months. And who knows how many millions suffered long-term physical and emotional pain from the radiation and the devastation.

The grief I feel is enormous. I didn’t know any of the victims. I wasn’t even born yet. Even so, I feel tremendous grief. Grief over what this says about the current evolutionary level of our collective consciousness, that we would allow such a thing, that we could even imagine such a thing. That we could take the intelligence of the universe, this glorious intelligence that with rapturous, experimental curiosity had explored and catalyzed and synergized for 15 billion years to come up with this astoundingly complex form of self-aware intelligence… that we could take this unimaginable intelligence and use it to destroy itself!

My grief is a prayer. It burns inside me. It’s a resonance with the fire of the universe. It’s a no and it’s a yes. It’s a no that it’s not OK to be so unconscious. It’s not OK to be so thoroughly disconnected from the intelligence of which we are made. And it’s a yes that longs to stay connected to this intelligence. It’s a yes that refuses to crumble in despair even though 64 years later war still rages around the world. It’s a yes that burns madly and passionately with hope and vision and love and possibility.

Everything is a prayer. The burning intelligence of the universe is a prayer. It’s really the only prayer there is. And at our level of organization – the level of human consciousness – to pray is to engage in the dance. And we do engage, whether we’re conscious of it or not. To pray consciously is to acknowledge this intelligence, and to honor it, and align with it, and be in awe of it. My prayer of grief is a prayer to learn, with my brothers and sisters, to find our way out of our murky unconsciousness and into the light of conscious affirmation of the intelligence of life.

To pray unconsciously is to react, to judge, to categorize, label, dismiss. Mostly it’s to disconnect. Not just from our fellow humans, but from the intelligence that we are and that we are a part of.

To pray consciously is to be as curious as the rest of the universe is. To pray consciously is to allow the intelligence of the universe to express itself, to unfold itself through you in a way that it could not come through anyone else. To pray consciously is to say “The passion of the universe is singing out through me, and I’m letting it pour itself through me.”

This all begs the question: If this is such an intelligent universe, and if we are such a sophisticated organization of this intelligence, why would we ever be unconscious? To a certain extent, we can’t help ourselves. It comes from the paradox of being conscious mammals. Which means that while we possess reason and self-awareness, as mammals we also think with our emotions. In fact, emotion is a huge part of our thinking process. Emotions tell us what’s important and what’s not. They tell us what’s safe and what’s dangerous. It’s a very quick and automatic process, which is crucial for unconscious mammals, because it ensures safety as well as social connection.

In light of this, there are three reasons being a conscious mammal lends itself to being unconscious. The first is that for the most part, our emotional experience doesn’t come from direct interaction with the world; it’s largely mediated by our perceptions. And our perceptions come mostly from our unconscious beliefs, which come from emotional memories we form mostly in infancy and very early childhood. This is why sometimes our emotions have nothing to do with what’s actually happening in the moment.

The second reason is that emotion happens much faster than thought, so by the time we get around to reflecting on what just happened, our emotions may have already triggered a fight-or-flight response in our body, and that’s a very hard train to stop.

The third reason is that because emotional decisiveness is so crucial for survival, the more primitive emotional structures of the brain act with absolute certainty, whereas the reflective, thinking brain operates with uncertainty, with open-minded curiosity. That’s what it means to be awake and aware and conscious. It means you live with uncertainty. You live with mystery. And this tension between the certainty of the emotional brain and the uncertainty of the conscious brain is to a large extent both the problem and the solution.

It’s the problem because our mind-body system doesn’t like anxiety, and anxiety is exactly what we feel when faced with uncertainty. Anxiety freezes us. It debilitates us. So from a survival standpoint, it doesn’t make sense to indulge it. Because of this, there is vastly more neural circuitry in the brain dedicated to defense mechanisms like denial, projection, and rationalization than there is to self-reflection. I’m going to say that again, because this is the stuff that addiction, and divorce, and nuclear warheads are made of. There is vastly more neural circuitry in the brain dedicated to defense mechanisms like denial, projection, and rationalization than there is to self-reflection. We trade our consciousness to be free of anxiety.

I said this was the solution as well as the problem. The solution rests in knowing that this is what we’re up against. Knowing that the deck is significantly stacked against us. Knowing that the fiery intelligence of the universe is forged of uncertainty, while a good deal of our brain wants certainty to triumph. When we realize how much we’re up against, we realize how much it takes to be conscious. It cannot simply be an idle wish. We need to dedicate ourselves to becoming conscious. It takes work, diligence, and a fierce commitment. In order to meet the titanic momentum of our unconscious beliefs and all their certainty, and all the devastation they are capable of wreaking, we need to be able to hang out in the fire of uncertainty and all of its accompanying anxiety. We need to choose to live in the fire of curiosity and wonderment. To embrace uncertainty is the holiest of prayers we can ever offer.

Mark Nepo, the Kalamazoo poet, talks about the origins of the word “sincere.” It’s from Latin, and it means “without wax.” In the Italian Renaissance, sculpture was a flourishing artform, and unscrupulous marble vendors would hide the cracks in their marble by filling them with wax. So an honest vendor who would not hide the flaws was said to be “sincere.” When we let ourselves be sincere, when we let others see the places we’re cracked, we let the fire of the universe shine through, both into us and out of us. The burning intelligence that we are is allowed to be seen, and known, and understood, and shared.

I stand before you as someone completely broken. Utterly lost. Baffled. Thwarted at every turn by the relentless momentum of my unconscious belief systems. As I think we all are. And I do know, through experience, that we can find each other, we can find ourselves through our lost-ness. If I can meet you without pretending to know who you are, without labeling or categorizing you, if I can let you see how you impact me, let you see my fear, my anger, my sadness, my delight, my tenderness, my strength, if I can let my light, my fire, shine out through the cracks, and if you can do the same – even if we do it badly, clumsily, stupidly, childishly – if we can even do that – then we will give each other a huge gift. We will help each other stay in the fire with our uncertainty, and bring compassionate awareness to whatever we’re faced with. And we will have allowed 15 billion years of passionate intelligence to come together in a wholly – and a holy – new way. We will have given birth to a new thought, a new prayer, a new synergy that could not have existed without us letting go of our egoic self-importance. We only need to look back 64 years to see what happens when we don’t do this. We only need to look back to last week and that angry or uncomfortable exchange we had because neither of us would let go of our perceptions.

And we only need to look to this very moment, right now, to change our prayer. We only need to look to this very moment to invite new and unlimited possibilities by joining in the grand universal dance of wonder, openness, curiosity, and creation.

I’d like to finish with a poem by that Sufi wild man, Jalal al-Din Rumi. It’s called Love Dogs.*

One night a man was crying,

Allah! Allah!

His lips grew sweet with the praising,

until a cynic said,

“So! I have heard you

calling out, but have you ever

gotten any response?”

The man had no answer to that.

He quit praying and fell into a confused sleep.

He dreamed he saw Khidr, the guide of souls,

in a thick, green foliage.

“Why did you stop praising?”

“Because I’ve never heard anything back.”

“This longing

you express is the return message.”

The grief you cry out from

draws you toward union.

Your pure sadness

that wants help

is the secret cup.

Listen to the moan of a dog for its master.

That whining is the connection.

There are love dogs

no one knows the names of.

Give your life

to be one of them.

* From The Essential Rumi, by Jalal Al-Din Rumi (HarperSanFrancisco, 1995), Translated by Coleman Barks with John Moyne.

August 9, 2009