Inviting Epiphanies

Audio File:  

Opening Words

I’m actually not entirely sure it’s appropriate for us as Unitarian Universalists to celebrate a traditional Christian Epiphany.  There are actually two different understandings of the historical roots of the holiday…some Christians lift it up as the anniversary of the day the wise men arrived in Bethlehem, having followed the Star.  Others believe it’s the day of Jesus’ (adult) baptism.  In both cases, the underlying meaning of Epiphany is to remember and celebrate the day that Jesus of Nazareth was revealed as the Christ, as God incarnate. UU’s typically, but not always, have pretty low Christology- which is to say, we believe Jesus was a special teacher and a worthy role model but not necessarily divine. So it feels a little weird to celebrate Epiphany.

That said, I’m perfectly comfortable celebrating epiphanies, small “e.”  These are ‘a-ha’ moments, when we make a cognitive leap, and understand something we have been puzzling about.  Think Isaac Newton and the apple that prompted the formulation of the theory of gravity.  Epiphanies are the moment when our subconscious breaks through and offers us the solution to the problem we’ve been wrestling with.

The Unitarian side of our heritage emphasizes reason, and reason gets us a long way in life.  But epiphanies live at the edge of what we can determine rationally- where facts intersect with intuition and inspiration.  That’s a fun place to hang out!  If reason offers us knowledge, epiphanies (along with life experience) give us the gift of wisdom.  So let’s explore this topic a bit together.  Let’s see what new epiphanies are waiting to break through and change the course of our lives.

Sermon

I am a huge fan of rationality.  I have been trained from childhood to value knowledge, to trust science, and to maintain a healthy curiosity about the world.  My grandmother taught me that the best way to make decisions is to draw a line down the middle of a piece of paper, and list the pros on one side and the cons on the other.  My lawyer father instilled in me the belief that the best way to form opinions is to conduct research, and then construct logical arguments.

And yet (you knew this was coming) as I have moved through life, it’s become clear to me that there are limits to rationality.  What’s more, we humans are not as rational as we think we are.  We value knowledge that supports our personal preferences and world view way more than the pieces that don’t fit.  Science, I have learned, is not as impartial as I was taught to believe.  And my grandmother’s lovely decision making process?  If Malcolm Gladwell and other social scientists are to be believed, it’s mostly a way of justifying snap decisions that we make within the first few moments of considering a problem.

I say all of this not to assert that rationality is bad; quite to the contrary, as I stated, I’m a fan. But I am prepared to acknowledge that it is not the be-all and end-all.  Our brains are complex organs, our knowledge about their function just a drop in the bucket.  The mode of thought we are considering today- epiphanies- is a powerful tool in our process of understanding ourselves and our world.

Brainworld magazine defines an epiphany as “a powerful moment of spontaneous insight” and goes on to explain what we know about how they happen.  (You knew the geeky brain science stuff was coming, right?)  This is from an article called “The Aha Moment:  The Science Behind Creative Insight”.

There are many different representations we use colloquially to describe good ideas — sparks, flashes, light-bulb moments; inspirations and innovations; muses and visions. But what makes these moments so mystifying is that they usually materialize abruptly, without warning and seemingly out of thin air.

In today’s fast-paced industries, everyone is eager to foster these sparks of creativity, and it’s no wonder why: From these aha! moments come world-changing breakthroughs — from the discovery of penicillin and the invention of the microwave and safety glass to prescriptions for eyelash growth and the invention of Velcro and Post-its.

Laboratories and psychologists have attempted to study this phenomenon using behavioral methods for nearly a century, resulting merely in speculations as to where these ideas come from and how they form. Lately, though, with recent advancements and tools of cognitive neuroscience, researchers are able to explain the inner workings of the brain during moments of insight. By looking at images of the brain and recording brainwaves of individuals in experiments that generate insight, scientists have found that these sudden sparks are the result of a complex series of brain states. Findings also suggest that we require more neural processes operating at different time scales in these moments than we use when solving a problem analytically or methodically.

What did these studies look like?  Researchers had people engage in creative tasks while hooked up to devices that scanned the brain, and then had them report on whether they had figured it out methodically or had a flash of insight.  Here’s what the studies showed:

• In cases of reported insight, gamma activity would spike about a third of a second before participants recorded their answer. Gamma activity indicates the formation of new neural pathways.
• At the same time, there was an increase in alpha waves in the right visual cortex, the part of our brain that controls our sight. Think about how we close our eyes when we’re working on a problem, or stare into space.  Apparently a decrease in visual stimulus is part of the phenomenon.
• (I think this is the coolest one.) The brain decides a full 8 seconds before the flash of insight whether we are going to use a methodical approach or this alternate mode.  In people who solved the puzzle they were given, the right frontal cortex began revving up the gamma waves and sending out the soothing alpha waves to the visual cortex without the brain’s owner being consciously aware of it. (Migliore, Lauren, The Aha! Moment:  The Science Behind Creative Insight, BrainWorld Magazine, Nov. 11, 2017.)

So what does these findings mean in terms of inviting epiphanies?  According to the article, we are going to be more prone to flashes of insight if we give ourselves time to relax, daydream, and drift.  They also suggest maintaining a positive mood, which has been shown to correlate with greater access to higher cognitive functions.

Most importantly, though, we need to keep our brains supple by engaging in new experiences, finding ways to challenge ourselves, learning new tasks, exposing ourselves to new ideas.  These epiphanies don’t actually come out of nowhere.  Rather, they are new connections our brains make between things we already know.

There are other epiphanies that have less to do with the connection between divergent ideas and more to do with the connection between our gut- our intuition- and our conscious awareness. Or our emotions and our conscious awareness.  Or subconscious and our conscious awareness.

I’m guessing we all can think of moments when our gut was telling us something so strongly that it broke through.  Let’s call them intuitive epiphanies.  Suddenly, we know something that, by rights, we have no way of knowing.  Our intuition might tell us that a situation isn’t safe, or a job isn’t right.  It might tell us that someone we are with is in trouble, or not feeling well.

I’ve actually been accused of being psychic, because sometimes, I get an urge to reach out to someone.  I call, and it turns out, they’ve just lost a loved one or had a difficult diagnosis.  I’ve learned, over the years, to trust those nudges.  Of course, it’s not reliable.  I’ve been wrong before- had the urge and reached out and it’s turned out there’s no need.  And, for sure, there are times when something is wrong and I don’t find out until I’m actually told.  In other words- if you are ever in trouble, please don’t rely on my so-called psychic abilities.  Shoot me an email, a text, or call.

Emotional epiphanies are subtly different.  These are moments when we feel something inexplicably… perhaps we are angry or anxious…and we trace the feeling back, and then, “a-ha,” we figure out what is wrong, the change we need to make, the person we need to speak to, the person we need to speak up for, that sort of thing.

My mom had an emotional epiphany once at my cousin’s wedding.  The feeling that snuck up on her was joy!  She was dancing and laughing and having a good time, and she realized she was happy.  And that she hadn’t been happy in a long time.  That moment of clarity sparked a journey that eventually led her out of her marriage to my dad and into a happier and healthier relationship and life.

Epiphanies that are gifts from our unconscious are on my mind just now because my colleague and teacher, Jeremy Taylor, just died.  He taught generations of UU’s to work our dreams, and harvest the gifts there.  Jeremy had a couple of basic tenets:  first, all dreams (even the scary nightmares) come in the service of health and wholeness, and in fact, the intensity of emotion has more to do with the importance of the message than its content.   A dream that comes as a nightmare isn’t necessarily about something scary.

Second, we are each the authority as to the meaning of our dreams.  In working dreams, Jeremy insisted on a strict adherence to the “If it were my dream…” protocol.  Which is to say, if I am working a friend’s dream, and I have a thought about the symbolism or the import, I have to preface my insight with, “If it were my dream, the talking rabbit might have something to do with feeling a loss of control- like Alice down the rabbit hole.”  In working dreams, the dreamer needs to simultaneously listen and pay attention to an inner sense of “a-ha” that indicates yes, this is part of the message the dream is offering.

Third, everything in the dream represents an aspect of the dreamer.  I have to remind myself of this whenever I have dreams about my husband or kids where they do something that ticks me off.  It’s not fair to yell at real-people for things that dream-people do.  This makes dream work really easy and intuitive.  You think about the person or animal or object in the dream and reflect on what it symbolizes in your own psyche.

My favorite dream-epiphany story to tell comes from when I was in seminary, taking Jeremy’s class, but also process theology.  Some of you have heard my sermon on process theology- for those who haven’t, the piece you need to know for purposes of understanding this story is that process theology offered me a way of conceptualizing the word “God” so that it made sense to me for the first time in my life.  Anyway- in the dream, I was having this wild, hot affair with a glowing, golden sort of gender-neutral being, and Graham, my husband, knew about it and was okay with it.  I felt so scandalous when I woke up, and I couldn’t stop thinking about this dream.

One day, I was having lunch with my friend Lillia, and I told her about the dream, and she looked at me like I was an idiot.  “Liz,” she said, “often, in the dream world, sex is a metaphor for our relationship with the divine.  If it were my dream, this would be about a change in my relationship with God.”

“Oh, no,” I said, the epiphany breaking through, “I may be a theist after all!”

Here’s the thing.  Being human is hard.  Just surviving is tricky enough.  If we want to be in this world without losing our humanity, our patience, our kindness…if we want to work to make the world a better place, we need all the help we can get.  All of the ways of knowing, all of the ways of learning, have value and bring gifts.  We need to invite it all in, and welcome each insight, regardless of its method of delivery.

Deep truths- whole truths- streak through our awareness, lighting up our consciousness, and showing us the way.  May we notice.  May we trust.  May that light and that fire transform our minds and hearts, that we might transform our hurting world.