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Science, Faith and Activism for a New Cosmology The Institute of Noetic Sciences invited Lenore Norrgard to present on an interfaith panel in January 2008, to comment on James O'Dea's talk on the topic. Below are her comments. Thank you. It's wonderful to be here, and I want to underscore what the rabbi said about how far we've come in terms of interfaith work. I've had the opportunity to work in interfaith work for the last few years, and as a person in an earth-based spiritual tradition, that's a pretty big deal. So I'm very excited to be here, and thank you for inviting me. I had a lot of responses to James's talk, it really was very exciting, and so global. I want to talk a little bit about my response when I heard the theme for tonight of science, faith and activism for a new cosmology. It really, really grabbed me, because I have these three strands in my life, about science, spirituality, and activism. I'm going to talk a little bit about my personal journey, hoping that will inform some of the things I'll say later. I turned 50 last year, and I think my personal journey isn't that unique. It's unique, but then I look at everyone around me, and I see that it's a whole wave that we're going through together. So, science: I was a very scientific child. My religious questions were like this: What is Jesus made of?--I was raised in a Christian family. Why is Jesus always sad? And, in regards to the Bible, But what if it's all a fake? Fortunately, my parents were very tolerant--my father was a Lutheran pastor! So I'm grateful that they were tolerant, and actually wrote these questions down, so that I could learn that I asked these things, decades later. I was voted most likely to succeed in science in the 6th grade. My first career aspiration was to be an astronaut. It was dashed when I found out that NASA was part of the air force, and part of the military. I couldn�t do that. I didn't know what I was going to do after that. One of the things that my parents, and particularly my father, have given to me from his faith, was he always preached something that he called the social gospel. What that means is that he would apply the scriptures to social issues of the day. So when I was a teenager, I actually started listening to his sermons. He preached about things like the need to end the Vietnam war, and the injustice of that war. He preached about Civil Rights, he preached about poverty and poverty programs, and that Yes, indeed, we are our brother's keeper. That left a deep impression on me. Although I never was taken with the religious training I was given�it never fit for me--I really had kind of a family crisis when it came time for me to be confirmed--I'l just say that the social gospel was something that I did take with me when I left home. When I left home, I became very, very active as a social activist--actually, it started before I left home. In high school I was involved in demonstrations against the Vietnam war. When I left home, I became involved with all kinds of politics. I always believed from very early on that nobody could be free unless everyone was free. So I was involved in the anti-war movement, Native American treaty rights, labor issues, Civil Rights, feminism. I was from a bi-racial family, due to adoption, and that may be part of why I've always been very passionate about issues of race. The thing that was interesting when I was involved in all these politics--I became a socialist, and I became a Marxist, which was very scientific. We talked about materialism, scientific socialism--and there was a lot of science in it, and I think that has accuracy in it. But there was also a very anti-religion bias. Since I wasn't religious it wasn't a real issue for me, but on the other hand, when they would make put downs that religious people were just preaching pie in the sky, I thought, Hunh-uh, that's not what my dad did--that bothered me a little bit, but it wasn't a big issue. I then became a journalist, and I lived in China for some time. So, that's that strand. But the other thing that was going on through all this was that I suffered from really serious depression and periodic suicidality. I had a lot of heavy trauma in my childhood, and so that would come up periodically, and I would really suffer from that, and mostly I would just work a lot. In 1987 I was going through a period of really serious depression, and I was visited by a spirit. And it sounds so strange to say that in our culture, but I thought I could say that here tonight. I was visited by a spirit--and I was somebody who had no particular interest in spirituality. I didn't consider myself a spiritual person--I think we all are, underneath, but I certainly didn't see myself that way, and wasn't going that way. So when this spirit came to me, and healed me of this depression that I'd suffered from for nearly 25 years, needless to say, it changed my life. The things that resulted from that, besides [healing] the depression, was I understood that I was no longer alone in the Universe. I also was given to understand that I would be able to do what I had come to do. I didn't know just what that would be, but it was very clearly communicated to me that I would have spiritual help, powerful support. I'm telling you this because my spirituality is very much rooted in direct revelation, and it's very empirical. So one of the first thoughts I had after I had that experience--other than gratitude, which was tremendous--was, Oh, this is what's been missing from the politics--this is what's been missing. Because what I experienced was, for the first time, an incredible sense--a very visceral, experiential sense--of oneness, that transcended all kinds of divisions. And I also experienced this incredible, spiritual power for healing and for transformation. And I had the experience of being one with everything--it wasn't a belief, it wasn't something I read in a book, it was a direct experience. So after that I started reading things, and eventually I found shamanism, which fit my experience==because not only were there not spirits in Lutheranism, this was an animal spirit, and there definitely weren't those--anyway, I'll stop with that part of the story. Just to say, I've really worked to integrate the spiritual understanding and power that I was blessed with into my social change work. That's why I was really excited about tonight, and why I really wanted to participate. One of the things that happened for me was a paradigm shift from social revolution to social healing, and starting to see that we're really all in this together. Madge mentioned the Shamanism for Activists training that I developed. For me, that was really, really exciting, because I was actually able to get activists together, teach them how to access direct revelation, and really shift how they were looking at how to do activism in the world. I'm thinking of a workshop that I gave that was meeting at the same time as the G-8 summit, one of those big globalization things before 9/11 happened. One of the things I have people do in one these trainings is to do a collective shamanic journey, and together to ask a question that's of concern to everybody, then to compare notes on the information we get. That weekend, everyone wanted to ask, How do we stop globalization? I had to really think about that. I said, Well, my heart is really with you. I really am feeling it. But, what I've been teaching all weekend is how we only have a small part of the picture. We don't know the biggest picture. And so, by asking this question, we�re assuming what needs to happen, and we don't have enough information. What was so exciting was that people got it, and people were able to shift the question. And so what we asked instead was, What is our right relationship to globalization? It's a very, very, very different question. So it was no longer about controlling--not about, We know what needs to happen, and we're going to make it happen, come hell or high water. Instead it shifted to, Okay, there's a mystery here, that's beyond what we know. And that's what I feel a lot of my work is about, in my teaching, it's about being able to embrace Mystery, and to give up the addiction to understanding everything with the intellect. The Mystery of the Universe is too wonderful, and too complex and too big, to understand with our little brains, but we can embrace it with our hearts. Now I want to jump ahead to when 9/11 happened. One of the things that I noticed for myself, that kind of surprised me, was that as I heard the war-mongering and the jingoistic things on the radio, it definitely was disturbing, but I didn't feel hate. And when I looked at Bush I thought, There but for the grace of God--that could have been me, and I'm so grateful it's not me. And I thought, He's my brother. That could be me. And I was talking with a client, and I said something about this, and she said--this is why I don't think it's a unique journey--she said, Yeah, back when Reagan was in office, I used to visualize a bullet-hole in the middle of his forehead. And after this happened, I started doing that with Bush, and I realized, Oh, no--this isn't it, this isn't the solution, this isn't going to work, and I can't do that. She didn't know what to do instead, but I thought it certainly was an important evolution. I want to talk about a couple specific things that I've been thinking and writing about lately. One thing I think a lot about is, Why are we on this trajectory of continuous war, of gobbling up the Earth's resources? Why are we on this trajectory, as a nation, and how can we shift it? And one of the things I've thought about is that our collective body--the United States as a nation--was born in trauma. It was born in trauma for almost everybody involved. It was not just the native people, who were decimated, and their land taken over, and on, all the horrors, some of which we know. It wasn't just the Africans, who were sold into slavery, and brought over into slavery. It was also a lot of Europeans, who were rounded up and sold into slavery, and indentured servitude, and who never got out. It was people who left their families behind in Europe, and never saw them again. It was people who were shipped across the ocean because their families couldn't afford to feed them. I learned a story recently, that in Scandinavia it was common that if one of your children, or relatives, emigrated to the U.S., you would then hold a funeral. They just didn't exist any more. And if you consider what communications were like back then, that was very common. There won't be any further contact. So we're a nation that's rootless, for most of us, other than the native people, and they had their culture scrambled a lot by the colonization, too, [and suffered a lot of dislocation themselves]. My point is that there is so much trauma in the national body, and I think what happens is the repetition compulsion. We keep repeating it, just like an individual does who has a trauma. So making continual wars of colonization--that's what this nation has done from the beginning--perpetrating wars, stealing resources from other people, particularly people who have brown skin--and I hate to say it, but it's an American tradition--one that I want to change. And so how do we shift that? James talked about the amygdala, and I really believe that there's a collective amygdala. I think that when you have a group of people, there's a collective memory in the national body about these traumas. And sometimes they come up: During the 1960s and 70s there was a lot of work done by Civil Rights movement, Black Power movement, and different movements that were inspired by those movements, that were bringing up the true history of the country, and we were starting to look at it, and starting to do a little work around that. But then Reagan came in, and all that work got back-burnered. I really believe that one thing we need to do to shift the trajectory is to work on an ancestral level, with the ancestors that we all have, [asking] What happened when they came here? for those of us whose ancestors came from elsewhere, which is 98% of Americans today. And of course, most of us have multiple strands, right? Almost all of us have multiple strands. But to go back and to look at what happened when our ancestors came here, to honor that, to grieve that, so that we can shift the energy of our country and go forward in a different way. In a way that we honor each other, in a way that we honor the wounds that we've suffered as a people, because they're sacred--I think wounds are sacred, and if we can wash those out, and come together as a whole, rather than all these divisions we have--we're kind of addicted to divisions--different races, different classes, different sexes, etc., etc. But I think those divisions can be mended if we can go back and do some really serious work about the founding of the country. And the way I think to do that is through ritual. I do a lot of work with ritual. And again, in terms of how you can work with the amygdala, I think ritual is what it takes: to come into sacred space together, and align together energetically, and bring in the spiritual power that's available to us from the unseen world. I think that's what we can do to really shift our country's direction. Thank you. |
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