 Those are just a few things that I want to say. Yeah. Yeah, so we started with your choice. We started with a note. And I've seen simple, I've even seen fine notes, and we can hear it. So I have to turn the power off every second and say, well, then we were fine. We get to the notes that are on the table. So I'm going to put that in the front. And then, uh, It was, it was just like everything. Just listen to it. Awesome. Don't know if it's going to be any good. It's just like, It's just like, Yeah. Yeah. and then when you look at it, it's all the same. Let's see how it's all going. I know, but there's only one piece of art here, so... Right, so we're standing here. So in the last course... All right. Yes. Please join me in a few moments of centering silence. And now, please remain seated and join in singing our in-gathering hymn, found in your order of service. Welcome to the first Unitarian Universalist Society of Madison. In this community, curious seekers gather to explore spiritual, ethical, and social issues in an accepting and nurturing environment. Unitarian Universalism supports the freedom of conscience of each individual, as together we seek to become a force for good in the world. My name is Carlos Moser, a long-standing and faithful member of this congregation, on behalf of which I wish to extend a special welcome to visitors. We consider ourselves a welcoming congregation, so however you identify yourself or wherever you find yourself on your life's journey, we celebrate your presence among us. We encourage newcomers to stay for our fellowship hour after the service to visit the library, which is directly behind you, across the center doors. Bring your drinks and your questions. You will find members of our staff and lay ministry on hand to welcome you. You may also look for persons holding teal-colored stoneware mugs. They will be members of the FUS knowledgeable about our faith community and who would love to visit with you. If you'd like to learn more about this sustainably designed addition to our national landmark, the Frank Lloyd Wright Design Meeting House, please meet near the large glass windows on your left side of the auditorium immediately after the service. Your guide today, Rose Detmer. We welcome children to stay to the service, if the child needs to talk or move around, we recommend a child haven just behind you or the commons are good places to visit where you can still hear and see the service. And speaking of disruption or noises, please take time now to silence your electronic devices. All of you probably have at least one that might cause a disturbance during the hour. Now I take pleasure in acknowledging the following individuals who help our service run smoothly. There are many opportunities for volunteering in our society, not only in the service, but in helping with, for instance, the search committee for the new replacement music director or selling books or in charge of the Monday night FUS meeting. But the volunteers who actually help us today are the tour guide I mentioned, Rose Detmer, hospitality for your drinks, Jean Hills, the ushers, our Douglas Hill and Tom Dalmage, the greeters upstairs where Elizabeth Barrett and March Schweitzer, in charge of sound giving me such elegance here, is Maureen Friend and our lay minister is Anne Smiley. Thank them and consider volunteering yourself. You may ask any of them how to do so. The notes in the red floors include, in addition to that, I do want to say something about solar panels. Putting solar panels on your home is a great way to lower your energy costs and you get to switch to a clean, renewable energy source that can feel good about your years to come, that can make you feel good. Solar Madison, spelled S-U-N, Solar Group, is bringing together Madison area residents to install solar at their homes for a negotiated low price. This free event at the First Unitarian Society will cover everything you need to know about going solar at your home, including solar energy fundamentals, how much it costs, tax credits and incentives, answers to common questions. Join us and bring a friend. Our speaker today is Nancy Wetter-Schultz, a longtime member of the Society. You have often seen her as one of the three sopranos or singing in the Society choir. In 2013, Nancy was named one of the Wisdom Keepers of the Goddess Spirituality Movement, alongside such luminaries as Alice Walker, Starhawk, Lynn Andrews and Sue Monk Kidd. As a theological columnist for Sage Woman magazine and blogger for the Tycoon Daily and Feminism in Religion, she has often offered spiritual growth, keynotes, workshops and classes since 1987. Nancy honed her speaking and workshop skills in the emerging field of women's studies at the UW Madison from 1975 to 1991. Her muse then nudged her out of academia to record Chants for the Queen of Heaven with the help of a Feminist Theology Award from the Unitarian Universalist Women's Federation. She is a writer, educator, workshop facilitator and musician, whose work has focused on empowerment and spiritual growth. She is most recently the author of The World is Your Oracle, published by Fair Winds Press in April of this year. She will be speaking about her new book today and offering an FUS class on it in October. I recommend you buy it. She also asked me to tell you that she has started blogging about The World is Your Oracle, offering oracular tips and history. So if you already own it, but have not signed the mailing list, please come to her table in the commons and sign up and there you can own it. So again, a warm welcome. We hope today's service will stimulate your mind, touch your heart, expand your understanding and stir your sluggish spirit. Our opening words today are from In lieu of Flowers by Nancy Cobb. A wisdom as constant as the North Star shines within all of us. It's always present, waiting to be tapped, waiting to guide us to advise us. We need only use it to prevent its atrophy. No matter what our background, profession, color or religion employing this universal compass, this innate sense of what we know to be true will help us to establish a lifelong foundation, a place we go to recover our sanity and to regain our balance. And now please rise in body or in spirit for the lighting of the chalice. You will notice that this is a responsive reading, so please read the bold words. Let us worship with eyes and ears and fingertips. We feed our eyes upon the mystery and revelation in the faces of our brothers and sisters. Let us worship not in bowing down, not with closed eyes and stopped ears. Let us worship with the opening of all the windows of our beings with the full outstretching of our spirits. And while you're still standing, reach out please and exchange friendly greetings with your neighbors. What do you want? Thanks. And please be seated for the sharing of joys and concerns. Once a month we gather generally to set aside a few moments at the first part of our service for the sharing of joys and sorrows. This is a time for members, friends, and visitors to the congregation to relate to the entire gathered community here some special event or circumstance that has affected your life or the life of someone close to you. As Michael always reminds us, this general announcements and news items and partisan appeals are discouraged during joys and sorrows. So for the next few minutes, anyone who wishes is invited to step to the front of the auditorium and light a candle in one of the two candle labras to my left and my right, and then using the microphone provided by Anne Smiling, our lay minister. Please share your name, if that feels comfortable, and a brief message. Please note that our services are live cast, so listeners are not restricted just to those seated in this room. You may also wordlessly light a candle of commemoration and simply return to your seats. And I'd like to start us off today because I have had two major births in my life recently. One of them is The World is Your Oracle, which is right down here. It better because I'm going to be reading from it. But more importantly, five weeks ago Mark and I were blessed with a new and our first grandchild, Leo Linden Steinman. And yes, thank you, Anne. Could you please put two candles? Oh, you did it, great, wonderful. And Mark fixed everything in our daughter's house. We cooked, we cleaned. I made sure that she got out for walks in this section and needed to get healing, which he is doing very well because she's a yogi. But I think we actually gained more than they did because we were for two weeks inside their love bubble because those two parents absolutely are head over heels in love with their little boy. So now I open the floor to the sharing of other significant matters in our lives. I'm Rosalind Woodward and this is gratitude to you all. I've since the end of January to now I've been having medical problems and many, many people have helped me out. And I just wanted to say thank you to this community for all the support and love you've given me during this time. So we just wanted to express gratitude. We went to Suzuki Camp this past week and we were able to spend a whole week together and we learned so much and we're just so grateful for the teachers and the opportunity to do that. Hi, I'm Sandy Curley. My son passed away in March 7. And I'm here because I'm very curious, a curious mind. And I came to a meeting here of bereaved parents, so his name was Cameron Cress. My name is Laura and I laid this candle today for my sister, Mara, who's recently diagnosed with breast cancer. So I'm praying for her and also for the joy of the weather which has been mother nature seems boundless in her wonder. My name is Teresa. I want to light this candle in commemoration of the life and the passing of my grandfather's half-sister, Dixie Kaufman-Zare. There was a divorce and there was kind of bad feelings between the two branches of the family and I had always been kind of sorry about that and I had just started to have some e-mail communication with her when she suddenly died. It's one of those feelings of regret for missed opportunities. Don't do that. Good morning, I'm Carolyn Wachsler and I have what will eventually be a joy but right now is a kind of painful and difficult time for my sister who is recovering from knee replacement surgery. So this is for her and for her partner and who is caring for her and she'll have the other knee replaced in sometime this fall and it will allow her to have greater mobility and do more of the things that she likes to do. This candle is for the Reverend Leslie Chartier. She was ordained in Corvallis, Oregon on July 16th and many of you will remember her as the partner now wife of Diana Vesmar-Valey who worked here years ago. It was a wonderful service. Good morning, I'm Morris Wachsler. Happy birthday, Marianne Kelman. She was 87 yesterday and I visited her accidentally on Thursday when I was downtown and she's at the memory unit and we have a lot of fun because she doesn't remember something and we had a great time. She's 87. My name is T.K. Browning. With my partner Kate, my two kids, we were members here from 2012 to 2014 at the seminary for the past three years and I'm excited to start as the ministerial intern on Tuesday and I'll be here for the next year. My hair was shorter then and I went by Tim, but now I'm T.K. I'm still tall. So in addition to those just shared we also acknowledge all of those unspoken joys and sorrows that remain among us. As a community of concern and caring we hold these in our hearts as well. Let us sit silently for a few moments in the spirit of empathy and hope and now you may rise in body or in spirit for the singing of hymn number 184 and since it's time for the kids to leave for summer fun we will be singing it three times through. Be lamps unto yourself. You may be seated. So today I'm going to read from my book The World is Your Oracle. Divinatory practices for tapping your inner wisdom and getting the answers you need. I gave the title to the book. My editor gave the subtitle to it. It's very long. So what's an oracle? From the ancient Greeks to modern-day North Americans people from cultures all over the world have gained insight into many questions by using oracles. These divinatory practices have been performed at times when significant decisions needed to be made. For instance, to establish new capital cities, to choose religious leaders, to create inventions, to dig wells, to write poetry or music. But more importantly, they can help any person in their daily life to stay happy and healthy. So first, what is an oracle? An oracle is simply a technique for uncovering the answer to a question. If you're stumped by a situation or by the behavior of a person in your life, an oracle can help you understand the situation. If you can't figure out how to proceed when it comes to crucial decisions at work or at home, an oracle can give you advice. Advice, that is, not device. These divinatory practices reveal guideposts for your life by helping you tap into your unconscious mind where your inner wisdom resides. After all, your conscious analytical mind only has access to the tip of the iceberg when it comes to your thoughts and your experience, but your unconscious contains much more beneath the surface of your day-to-day mindset. It's a storehouse of hunches, feelings, instincts, and all sorts of knowledge that you can tap into and access through divination. It's the font of your memories, your creativity, and your intuitions. So how do oracles foster wisdom in your life? Every day, we are bombarded by advertising messages, expert advice, campaign promises, and opinions of every sort. Sometimes it's hard to hear ourselves think. Instead, we need to listen to what Steve Jobs, Apple CEO and co-founder calls the whisperings of intuition. According to Jobs, these wise flashes of inspiration will help us to be successful in an environment of rapid change where analytical thinking no longer suffices. In fact, a gathering of 1,500 CEOs from around the world recently identified these types of creative insights as the best strategy for dealing with a world that's volatile, uncertain, and complex. Recent studies also show that to a large degree, we reach our decisions unconsciously. Our unconscious mind constantly monitors our unconscious and our internal and our external environments, and when it judges the information gathered to be important enough, it engages the conscious mind, and we become consciously aware of something. Oracles can put us in touch with our unconscious wisdom sooner, so we don't have to wait out those times when our analytical mind is stuck in a rut. On a more personal level, I found that a good oracle puts you in touch with yourself. It lets you discover your motivations, your feelings, and your thoughts about any questions that you're exploring. It also helps by alerting you to your hidden wishes and fears, those aspects of your personality that might sabotage your conscious choices unless you know about them and put them into account. Once you're aware of the beliefs that are operating beneath the surface of your mind, you can factor them into your conscious decisions just like any other conscious thought. Oracles can guide your life with a sure hand when you flounder. They can help you set priorities, meet challenges, and find creative solutions to your problems. At times, a divination can even point to an outworn habit that you need to discard or can encourage you to take a risk that you might be too timid to tackle on your own. Oracles can provide information that you need, warn you of possible dangers, and inspire you in your professional and creative work. The world is your oracle. This book I'm holding in my hands is for you to tap into your inner wisdom in a variety of ways. For instance, you can read the patterns in the stars. You can listen to a fire sing as it burns. You can flip open a book and read the first phrase that catches your eye. While writing this book, I opened a nearby volume and read, Listen to the cry of your own heart. Something wonderful is being said. I loved that. So finally, I think we all long to be touched by something greater than ourselves, and divination provides that experience. The ultimate aim of an oracle is exactly that, to open us up to a sense of wonder. Our lives can be imbued with a richer significance as a result of being brushed by the mystery of divination, as we experience ourselves in relation to something larger than just our routine lives. It can create an ongoing awareness of the adventure of our lives open at any moment to our inner knowing and the wisdom of the universe. Thus endeth the reading. So we now have special music by this special group of chimers. And that was special. Thank you so much for the beautiful music this morning. While I'm talking today, I'll be showing the paintings that my daughter Linnea did to illustrate the 40 different oracles that are in our book, The World is Your Oracle. So you may be wondering how this highly educated person became the author of a divination book. I was raised in a family of medical people. My dad was a veterinarian. My mother was a nurse. And they were both scientists at heart with a thirst for learning. As a result, I grew up believing that rationality was the sole source of wisdom and that education was the pathway to get there. But in my 20s, I began to have mystical experiences which I couldn't rationally explain. At that time in my life, I certainly didn't consider myself psychic and I still don't. But I began to realize that everyone has intuitive experiences. So I set out to discover how to develop my own intuition. As strange as it might sound, I began by reading tarot cards during the most rational period of my life while I was studying for my PhD about 40 years ago. I approached the cards from a fairly logical point of view regarding them as a psychological Roar Shark test for the questions that I was looking at. In retrospect, this was my first step towards comprehending insight triggers, those experiences that can precipitate understanding. And it was also my first step to understanding how we co-create interpretations of oracles and even the oracles themselves by coming up with associations that make sense to us. Spending time with other practitioners of divination, I was introduced to more open-ended and therefore more advanced oracles, techniques that depended on accessing the wellspring of my own intuition through a state of inward focus. I also began to realize that people use different senses to access their inner wisdom, the predominant ones being the visual, auditory, and kinesthetic, and that actually became the backbone of my book. The divination techniques are divided into visual, auditory, and kinesthetic techniques. And eventually I started to create my own oracular techniques based on, in one sense, on the adaptations of ancient or indigenous practices and some of them based on my own experience doing divination. And the ultimate result was, of course, my newly published book, The World is Your Oracle, a compilation of 40 multicultural divinatory techniques for tapping your inner wisdom. In North America, many people associate divination with either ancient religions or the occult. Traditionally this concept has conjured up the image of an old woman with a deck of playing cards who's trying to tell someone's fortune. And we don't have to look very far to discover the reason for our dominant notions about divination, because the first definition in most English dictionaries states that it's the practice of attempting to foretell future events or discover hidden knowledge using occult or supernatural means. But from my perspective, this is an archaic understanding of divination, one that was created during a time when we had sharper delineations between the everyday and the mysterious, the natural, and the supernatural. Instead, I define divination as the active use of our intuition, employing a variety of methods for getting in touch with our inner knowing. Seers and sages have done this for centuries, perhaps even millennia. They've known that in order to answer questions that baffled them, they had to let go of their narrow, habitual responses to situations and to the people around them as well as to the questions that they faced. To do this, they often performed divinations. In the mental state created by divination, new ideas popped into their awareness, making these adepts the first to perfect what we now call thinking outside the box. With breakthroughs in modern technology, we now know why. Research has begun to shed light on how divination acts to facilitate aha moments, those creative insights that seem to come to us spontaneously out of the blue. Brain imaging technology using electroencephalograms, EEGs, and functional magnetic resonance imaging, FMRIs, have shown that flashes of inspiration like this occur when a person's brain is in a particular state, and this is exactly the frame of mind that divination facilitates. So in order to understand these eureka moments, we have to take a step backwards and look at how the mind normally works. Neuroscientists have discovered that every idea in the brain has associations with other thoughts, so that each calls to mind the next and then the next and the next until you have a stream of consciousness. Some of these associations are remote, and as a result they're unlikely to come to mind. We call these associations unconscious. In contrast, many associations are almost automatic, and we call these thoughts conscious. When we're in our normal mindset, using our conscious analytical mind, our thoughts remain wedded to the most obvious associations that we have, associations from our experience, from our reading, and from the ways that we believe the world works. Most of the time, this mental box created by these seemingly self-evident associations allows us to anticipate and understand our lives rapidly. It's sort of like a triage system that allows us to prioritize the likelihood of meaning in any particular situation. But these habitual associations also limit our thinking, causing tunnel vision at times. This can be detrimental when we're presented with new challenges in our lives. When we become stuck in our thinking, that's when we need an aha moment or a divination to free our thoughts. Then our minds can associate with the more remote ideas found in the unconscious, allowing new understandings to surface into our conscious awareness. So how does this happen? Most recent research has demonstrated that aha moments happen when two conditions are met. And the first of these is a burst of alpha wave activity called the brain blink. This sudden increase of alpha waves in the occipital or vision processing lobe of the brain at the back of your head diverts awareness from a person's surroundings and reduces mental distractions. This is what scientists call optimal inattention. Optimal inattention allows the brain to ignore the noise that's always present in your mind so that you can become aware of less obvious unconscious thoughts. And thanks to this neural diversion, novel ideas can bubble up into awareness. This experience is very similar to the situation where someone asks you a question that's hard for you to answer and you either look away or close your eyes in order to not be distracted by their face or other extraneous factors. The brain does exactly the same thing. When you're asked something challenging an answer might already be activated at an unconscious level but there's always a lot of noise and distraction so that you can't retrieve it unless you have a brain blink. So if we survey divination techniques from around the world, we find that they operate in a similar way. The state in which divination takes place sometimes meditative, sometimes euphoric, sometimes involving what is known as brain wave entrainment which I will talk about later when I get to drumming is in each case distinguished by alpha waves in the occipital lobe of the brain exactly where the brain blink takes place. In addition, the very techniques of inward focus that are fostered by divination are designed to suppress unnecessary sensations or thoughts. They're designed to create optimal inattention. The wisdom keepers of the world realized this long ago. They knew that in order to tap into their inner knowing they had to walk in the woods, meditate, drum or dance ecstatically. All techniques that I have included in the world is your oracle. In other words, neuroscientists have recently discovered what ancient and indigenous seers have known for a long time. The glare of the external world can block insight. So that's the first necessary condition. The second mental condition that characterizes an aha moment or a successful divination occurs when a spark of inspiration flashes from the unconscious mind into consciousness. And on EEG and fMRI scans, this burst of activity happens in the right temporal lobe directly above your right ear. The brain's right hemisphere, we know, is where these flashes of insight occur, and it's also been shown that it's the major origin for creative thoughts. And the reason for this is because it has a much larger number of associations with any concept or problem. So with the help of optimal inattention and the alpha waves that produce it, the brain sets aside the left hemisphere's habitual and boxed in thinking so that it can tune into alternate interpretations from the right hemisphere and think outside the box. While science is just beginning to chart flashes of insight in the brain, people all over the world have been using divination techniques for centuries, if not millennia. So I want to look at a couple of these techniques, this wide variety of techniques that ancient and indigenous people have used for irregular insight and that I've also included in the world as your oracle to see how they work scientifically. So the first one we're going to look at is shamanic journey. Indigenous traditions the world over have performed shamanic journeys as a means of divination. And 30 years ago, anthropologist Michael Harner reexamined a large number of these divination practices and discovered many similarities among them, rapid drumming, ritual dance, and communication with a person's animal spirit or spirit guide. What he did then was to distill down these methods into an irracular technique that is called core shamanism. And this is a practice that now has thousands of proponents in North America. So taking a shamanic journey is an imaginative process that's much like daydreaming. You close your eyes, you become relaxed, and you drift off into another world. The steady heartbeat rhythm of shamanic drumming helps you to float into this altered state of mind. And in this mindset, you imagine a world known among shamanism practitioners, especially core shamanism practitioners, as the lower world. There's also the upper world, where I only included a journey to the lower world. Here, in the lower world, you meet a creature of some sort who becomes your spirit helper. Often called your power animal, this being will escort you on an adventure to help you find insight into your irracular question. So from a scientific viewpoint, there are three different ways that this technique works. First of all, it separates you from your everyday perspective, your normal analytical mindset. Visiting another realm in your imagination, especially one that is far different from your everyday life, can dissipate thoughts that have become fixed in your mind, and this is what science calls fixation forgetting. You see, thinking is almost always associated with the context in which you have thoughts. For instance, I'm upstairs, and I'll go, oh, I need to get my iPhone. I go down the stairs, but by the time I get to the living room, I can't remember what I came for. So I go back upstairs, and oh, yes, it was my cell that I was looking for. So in a similar way, changing your context by getting far away from your normal haunts helps you to overcome those obvious first thoughts in order to tap into more obscure answers to your query. Once you've left your habitual judgments and assessments behind, you can think more easily outside the box. So that's the first way that it works. Secondly, when you call on a spirit helper to guide your divination, you also enlarge your thinking from your small personal point of view to include the larger perspective of the numinous, the spiritual. Seeing a bigger picture, in this case perhaps the biggest picture, is another scientifically proven practice that induces flashes of insight. It's one of the best ways to see more of the interconnecting pieces that make up your puzzle, even those that seem unimportant. Similarly to dreaming, the shamanic journey also involves a semi-conscious state of inward reflection in which novel ideas can be incubated from an miraculous question. This is the third way that this technique works. Science has now shown us that this type of unconscious incubation is what generates insights. Since hidden relationships brought from the unconscious to the forefront of the brain are the material from which sudden realizations are drawn. Incubation involves taking time away from your issue or your problem. The further away you get, the better. The easiest way to incubate an oracle is to sleep on your question and come up with a dream that answers it, which is also one of the techniques in the world as your oracle. But you can also take a short break from consciously considering a problem by taking a walk in the woods or in this case by journeying to the lower world. So some divination methods only involve one means of gaining miraculous insight, but this one has three. Changing your context, which leads to fixation forgetting. Secondly, broadening your attention and therefore broadening your thinking. And thirdly, incubation. So let's look at a second divination practice and see how it functions from a scientific viewpoint. Candle oracles have existed since antiquity. Depending on how the candle was used, the ancients called these divinations capnamancy, which was watching for signs in the patterns made by the candle's smoke. Saramancy, which is dripping melted wax into cold water and then looking at the images as insight triggers for a new concept or thought. And lichnoscopy, which is noticing the appearance, color, and movements of a candle's flame in order to discover the answer to an irracular question. Candle magic was found all over the world in Christian and Jewish contexts, especially in the Middle Ages. It's still found all over the Far East, for example, in Tibet. And you can find it today in African American hoodoo practices. In the world as your oracle, I decided to incorporate a candle divination that I created. It's called Light Illumines Your Inner Well, and it's for sure the most sensual and yummy divination technique in the whole book. In order to discover deeper insight with this technique, what you do is you relax in a warm bath with the water running and let the candlelight that is reflecting off of the water mesmerize you into a state of greater openness to your inner knowing. Light Illumines Your Inner Well uses sensory restriction in three ways, actually, to allow the person undertaking the oracle to look inward. The running water produces a type of white noise that blocks other sounds from being heard. The warmth of the water makes it more difficult to feel the boundaries of your skin and therefore restricts your feeling of touch. And the dim lighting limits your vision. The most recent research demonstrates that all three of these ways of restricting the senses can induce a powerful pull towards deep receptivity. And in each case, the sensory restriction cuts you off from your environment and draws your focus inward. So the last divination practice I want to look at is drumming. Also included in the world is your oracle. People everywhere, all over the world, have literally tapped into their inner wisdom using these rhythm instruments in Africa, in Europe, in Asia, in Australia, and in both North and South America. In fact, the discovery of drumming's oracular properties probably occurred within shamanic circles in the Paleolithic era. Shamans from Asia and the Americas used drums, and they still do today, to transcend ordinary consciousness in order to travel to the spirit world and find divinatory guidance. Tom Keepers, a cochiti drum maker, says, and I quote, to consult the drum, present your question to the drum, and then play a steady beat until it provides an answer. It's that simple and that profound. So this rhythmic technique uses what people call brainwave entrainment to create a semi-conscious state of inward focus. Entrainment can be defined as synchronizing the body's rhythms with some sort of outside rhythm. And consistent rhythmic stimuli, like those of the fast-beating drum, can synchronize the brain's waves to these same rhythms, including inducing a deeply relaxing state of altered consciousness. A recent study by Barry Quinn, PhD, demonstrates that even a short drumming session can double alpha wave activity, and as we've seen, alpha wave activity can lead to an aha moment or an irracular insight. So you know when people reach out to an irracular technique for answers, they're usually feeling frustrated and upset about the issue that faces them. Usually you're stuck in some way. Divination allows your mood to lighten and helps you to become more peaceful since it eliminates extraneous thoughts or feelings concerning your query. And this is perhaps the most important thing that I learned from the recent scientific research. You actually need to create a positive mood in order to get beyond your prior fixed ideas. So my suggestion is to smile. Because even earlier research has shown that if you smile, you become happier. And the recent EEGs and FMRI studies demonstrate that emotions like joy and tranquility and love all facilitate aha moments. As I say in my divination workshops, it's important to warmly anticipate the insight that will come to you. So let go of your anxieties and find that anticipatory glow for the outcome of your oracle. Or as Bobby McFerrin says, In every life there is some trouble, when you worry you make it double, don't worry, be happy. So now it's time for this morning's offering. And I think this community means a lot to many of us, so please give generously. Closing hymn is number 3848, Guide My Feet. Please be seated for the benediction and the postlude. We receive fragments of holiness, glimpses of eternity, brief moments of insight. Let us gather them up for the precious gifts that they are and renewed by their grace. Go our ways in peace. Blessed be an amen.