Betsy Robinson's blog

This past weekend I listened (for the fourth time) to a show about Pastor Carlton Pearson on NPR’s This American Life. Pearson rose to the pinnacle of preaching as a Christian Evangelical bishop, then was declared a heretic and banished from his church when he had an epiphany about hell — that it does not exist except as a condition in the here and now, perpetrated by people on themselves and others.

Today Pearson is the senior pastor of New Dimensions Worship Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he preaches a “Gospel of Inclusion.” If you want to know more about any of this, go to Pearson's website.  And if you want to listen to the riveting radio program, click here.

The reason that I’m writing about this is that I’ve been in and out of hell for a couple of weeks, and listening to Pearson, I realized that I (a spiritual-but-not-religious, former agnostic, sometimes atheist, delinquent meditator with the firm conviction that something that I call “God” exists and that knowing it/being one with it/being a conduit for its energy of Love is the most important thing I have to do) … I’ve lost track of that sentence … the hell with it, I’ll start a new one.

Thanks to the fact that I’ve been in and out of hell a lot recently, I’ve realized that I have a whole lot in common with Evangelical Christians.

Pearson said that the possibility of burning for eternity is the driving force for an awful lot of people. My version of that driving negative force is the nightmare that I might waste my life by not “doing it right,” and therefore I will fail at being human and properly approaching enlightenment. And if I don’t do better, if I don’t meditate, if I don’t, don’t, don’t — the worrying about which, makes me even more delinquent — Need I say more? This is hell. I know it well.

However there is one nice thing about being delinquent (also known as easy-going) about spiritual practices:  my hell doesn’t last long. I feel really bad, then think of something silly and laugh, or go for a walk, or get excited about something, and I forget all about being a failure at life.

The January/February issue of S&H (which ships to subscribers next week) explains my wafts and wanes as “normal” in an amazing article by neuroscientist Peggy La Cerra. Peggy explains what drives us to do anything. (I know this is mean, but I’m not going to tell you what that is. You’ll have to read the article. Believe me, Peggy says it a lot better in a feature than I could in a quick blog, so maybe you’ll thank me for this.)

I’ve been reading a tremendous amount of neuroscience lately. I think Carlton Pearson would love a lot of what I’ve been reading. It gives you a bigger picture of what we can and can’t know, and it’s actually making me less delinquent at meditation. It helps to know what your dendrites are doing when you repeat a mantra. When you know what you’re doing, you can do it better … and you want to do it … and then you take a big leap out of hell.

“Who can say what's true?
Nothing's quite so clear now-
Do things, fight things...
Feel you've lost your way?
You decide, but
You are not alone, You are not alone.
Believe me.
No one is alone.”

These lyrics are from Stephen Sondheim’s amazing song “No One Is Alone” from his musical Into the Woods.

It’s a dark, cold, rainy Sunday, and I’ve been lying on my couch listening to Jonathan Schwartz’s weekend show on WNYC public radio. When “No One Is Alone” came on, I stopped breathing.

I’ve been feeling like things may or may not be toppling. I’m not quite sure. And that’s an unsettling feeling. And I’m guessing I’m not alone. I’m guessing lots of people are wondering what’s going on with our economy, our homes, our jobs, and maybe a lot of us are feeling alone. But if we’re all feeling that, then clearly we are not alone. “No one is alone.”

And I find myself wondering, what if we all could feel how joined we are? Wouldn’t that make it easier to make decisions? For instance, if we all understood that when the economy takes a dive, the way we gauge the value of things must also dive to accommodate the new terrain. If we all understood that there is no place to run to get paid at a standard of worth that no longer exists, we might all adjust in one motion — sparing our vast organism death by individual appendage and organ. If we understand that we are one organism… well you get the picture.

Really, there’s only one thing that’s true: No one is alone!

It has been an exciting, but also a really hard week — both for the same reason. I spent the week reading a wonderful book about brain science. I learned a tremendous amount; the book is beautifully written; I’m grateful to the author and publicist who sent it to me for use in an article I’m writing; and often, I read things that so nauseated me that I had to lie down.

What I read was matter-of-fact descriptions of gruesome experiments conducted on monkeys and other animals. The author, a doctor and poet, recounted them with fascination and admiration for the researchers. After several chapters riddled with these descriptions, I had the sick feeling that I was reading beneficial research gleaned from the Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele’s experiments on children.

I sat for long periods of time trying to figure out a way to read this book without getting sick. Sometimes I skimmed the sections about the experiments. But finally I reached a chapter that recounted the “unfair” persecution of the doctor who performed the worst of them, how he was “ridiculously” referred to as a Mengele, how his work was distorted and photographs staged by an under-cover PETA investigator who exposed what was happening, how his reputation was destroyed and his family hurt, and what an awful thing it was for somebody who was only trying to do medical research that would help so many.

I suspect the man was unfairly treated if his family was stalked. And I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the photographs were staged. These things seem clearly wrong. But also wrong is torturing living beings who are just as capable of suffering as any human.

The book is the story of many amazing people who rewired their brains. It seems that when we’re given a challenge, our species rises to it, and I couldn’t help wondering what ways we would invent to learn if it were unthinkable to use animals as objects.

I am still sick from the feelings I’ve had this week. So that probably added to my difficulty watching a magnificent DVD called Earthlings. This award-winning documentary, narrated by Joaquin Phoenix, presents us all — humans and every other animal — as inhabitants of our planet: Earthlings.

I have not been able to watch the whole thing yet. My stomach is still too tender. But suffice it to say that if you want to understand where we are in regard to the other inhabitants of our big, beautiful, moving planet, this is a must-see.  I wish I could be more articulate, more poetic, more convincing, but I'm ... well ... I'm just not. But I can tell you that this movie is —  poetic, moving, convincing, and much more.

Take a look at the  trailer and see what you think.