Fan the Spark of Curiosity Within You with Jackie Harris

[00:00:01] Welcome, this is Josh Rees with Mile Hi Church in Lakewood, Colorado. Thank you for tuning

[00:00:07] in to our podcast today. For more information about our church, please visit our website,

[00:00:14] milehighchurch.org.

[00:00:17] And now we're going to talk about curiosity, and you may kind of say to yourself, why are

[00:00:21] we talking about curiosity before a new year? Well, because I believe we need to. This year

[00:00:29] has seen in our world wars, rumors of wars, terrible weather crises, and then add on top

[00:00:42] of that we had an interesting political season. And what happened because of that political

[00:00:48] season is many people walked away, and now they've found a foe instead of pulling ourselves

[00:00:57] together. And curiosity can help us with that, and that's what I hope this talk will help

[00:01:04] you with. And I always like to use this disclaimer. For those of you that have had any kind of severe

[00:01:12] trauma in your life, I see you and I know that some of the things I'm going to share aren't

[00:01:20] easy for you. And that's okay. If you can take one nugget away, then it may help you move through

[00:01:29] all of your own issues.

[00:01:32] So we know, I believe that curiosity and wonder can soften all of us if we learn how to use it.

[00:01:41] In our readings for the month of December, the author from the guides actually talked one day about

[00:01:52] curiosity being our superpower. Have you ever thought about that? That as human beings, curiosity can be

[00:02:01] our superpower. So we're going to spend some time this morning thinking about that. And Josh shared the,

[00:02:10] I love the curiouser and curiouser quote, but Josh shared that quote from Albert Einstein, but there's a very

[00:02:17] short quote that Dr. Einstein said that I think speaks very much to his belief. He said that he wasn't talented.

[00:02:28] He said, I am just passionately curious.

[00:02:35] Now the rest of us would probably say, wow, I think he was pretty talented. But I love that he reflected

[00:02:42] back to say it wasn't anything special about him. He just knew how to use his curiosity.

[00:02:55] Carl Sagan, who is another scientist, he was an astronomer and a planetary scientist, had a quote,

[00:03:04] and I'm going to paraphrase it because I'm going to split it in half. And the first thing he said was

[00:03:11] that kindergartners are really science enthusiasts. They are curious. Any of you that have children know

[00:03:22] that. They asked the questions like, why is the moon round? Why is the grass green? What's the birthday

[00:03:31] day of the earth? Just to name a few. Now what I want to share with you is that triggered something in

[00:03:38] me as I saw that quote and knew I was going to use it because it's so true. I thought about my own

[00:03:45] experience as a kindergartner. Now you might say, how did you remember that? It was such a significant

[00:03:53] part of my life that it has stayed with me all this time. I went to the little red schoolhouse

[00:04:02] at five years old, five or six years old. And in that little preschool program that they had,

[00:04:10] I had marvelous teachers. Those teachers would teach us things like Tchaikovsky's Peter and the Wolf.

[00:04:19] Not your five years old. But they would send us out into the side yard because this was a very large

[00:04:27] piece of property they had to reenact what we thought that whole song of Peter and the Wolf was about.

[00:04:34] Then they taught us about Three Kings Day, which we now know as Epiphany. And they taught us about

[00:04:42] cultural things like the Maypole dance. And here's a picture I found of me as a kindergartner and the

[00:04:52] Maypole dance. And what's so profound to me about it, and it's the reason it has stayed with me,

[00:05:00] is they really sparked my curiosity. They wanted me and everyone in my class to continue

[00:05:12] to ask the questions. Why? Why is that person different? Why? Why is it so hot outside?

[00:05:23] They didn't want us to stop being curious. So I love that. And the rest of Sagan's quote says,

[00:05:31] Then we hit 12th grade. And we become incurious. And he even said,

[00:05:43] Ledden. And that was in the 1970s. So what about now?

[00:05:51] And what I love about thinking about that is that isn't true for everyone.

[00:05:55] We all know someone that that was definitely not true of. Ernest Holmes. When he was a young teenager,

[00:06:05] he actually was known as the eternal question mark. Because he questioned everything. And he has a

[00:06:14] quote that says, From the beginning I was a nonconformist. Asking so many questions,

[00:06:23] I drove my relatives crazy. So it doesn't have to stop. It's in you. It's in us. It's that superpower that is within us.

[00:06:37] It's not external to us. It is within us. But what happens to most of us

[00:06:47] when our curiosity diminishes? I do believe it's outside influences. Some of them are natural causes.

[00:06:55] One for me was sticking a pencil in an electrical outlet and getting a shock. I was curious,

[00:07:02] but that was the last time I was curious about that particular action. And all of us have those

[00:07:09] experiences. We get stung by bees. We get bitten. We fall out of a tree and break our arm.

[00:07:15] And then we have parents who caution us when we're curious. They don't want us to get hurt. They

[00:07:26] really don't want us to fall out of the tree, but caution. And what can happen is we can become so

[00:07:33] cautious that we lose our ability or our interest in being curious.

[00:07:42] So let me ask a question of you. How often do you get defensive instead of curious? Ever?

[00:07:57] I hear a few laughs. I do. Many of us do. We're not interested in being curious. We're interested in

[00:08:06] winning. Or we're not interested in the truth. We're interested in maintaining our belief system.

[00:08:15] And we're going to talk this morning somewhat about how we can work towards changing that in

[00:08:22] ourselves. As I was putting this talk together, I found a book called Seek, and it's how curiosity

[00:08:30] can transform your life and change the world by Scott Shigioka, who is part of the greater good

[00:08:39] organization in Berkeley. You remember someone else who came from there, and that was awe.

[00:08:44] And his whole emphasis is curiosity. And he took a whole year off in his life to travel across the

[00:08:53] country to practice curiosity. He is part of the LGBTQ plus community. And one of the things that he did

[00:09:04] was he would go to some of the political rallies for the person that he was not supporting,

[00:09:11] just to talk to the people, to understand why they believed what they believed. He didn't go there to

[00:09:19] change their mind. He went there to have a conversation, to practice his curiosity. Then he came back and he

[00:09:29] wrote this book. So he obviously learned a lot. So I want to share with you before I get into the points of my

[00:09:36] talk. His feelings or his understanding of curiosity. He said curiosity is like you have a

[00:09:45] doors in front of you. And the first thing is in curiosity, I N curiosity, the lack of curiosity.

[00:09:56] That's when you act as though the door isn't even there. You have no interest in being curious.

[00:10:07] The next one is shallow curiosity. And most of us have practiced shallow curiosity.

[00:10:15] You know, you go to a party where you don't know a lot of the people in the room and you say,

[00:10:20] hi, I'm Jackie. What's your name? What do you do for a living? Where do you live? That's shallow.

[00:10:27] It's there's nothing wrong with it. But what happens is it's like going to the door,

[00:10:34] looking through the people, but not getting invested in the group. That's shallow.

[00:10:43] And he mentions another one that's to me disturbing, but I have seen this happen. And it's part of

[00:10:50] shallow curiosity. And he calls it predatory curiosity. Predatory curiosity is when you think

[00:10:59] or say to yourself, I want to change you. So you go to the door, you turn the knob, you walk in,

[00:11:07] and you know it's not going to be comfortable. But you're okay because you know that you're going

[00:11:37] to come away from walking through that door with something much bigger than you had when you walked

[00:11:44] in to the door. So we're going to talk about how we can get to deep curiosity. But first, I want to

[00:11:54] talk to you about some points that I think are important for how we can be more curious.

[00:12:05] The first one is see no stranger. That comes from the work of Valerie Kaur. And actually, that is a

[00:12:16] primary part of the sick faith, is they see no stranger. That's the whole point of the Lunger,

[00:12:25] is everyone sits down. There is no class. Everyone sits down and has a meal. See no stranger.

[00:12:34] Valerie Kaur's first work that she wrote was in 2021. And I was introduced to her when we were all

[00:12:42] locked away, if you remember, during the pandemic. She put on several webinars, and I participated in

[00:12:49] two of them. And she's a young woman who her life experience and her sick religion have so influenced

[00:12:59] how she responds to life. She started the Revolutionary Love Project. Because what she realized is,

[00:13:08] after 9-11 and seeing so many of the sick men being killed for being different, she took it upon herself

[00:13:21] to say, we've got to change. So she took that see no stranger, and she really has profoundly changed

[00:13:32] many lives with what she has taught. She's come out with a second book that just came out in 2024,

[00:13:40] which talks about the ancestors of the sick. And it's called Sage Warrior. It's a great book,

[00:13:48] but I want to share a quote with you from that book. We are born seeing no stranger. The moment we land in

[00:13:58] someone's arms, we don't care about the color of their skin, the language they speak, the status they

[00:14:05] hold, or even their gender. The only thing that matters is whether the body loves us back.

[00:14:14] Am I warm? Am I fed? Am I held? We are born thirsting for love. Ernest Holmes also speaks to this in a

[00:14:30] slightly different way when he says, when the natural joy of life is unblocked, it will flow freely

[00:14:37] through us. And we shall become whole and happy. But doubt, fear, uncertainty, anxiety, and a sense of

[00:14:49] insecurity can so congest our mental life that nothing good can get through. Listening to wisdom from within

[00:15:01] us is really should be part of our self-care practice. Valerie talks about the wise woman that speaks to her.

[00:15:12] Could be the wise man, the wise other, whatever it might be, but it's always speaking to us.

[00:15:22] You know, our culture is filled with a lot of noise. Would you agree?

[00:15:27] And so this practice of becoming curious can slow down the noise and the anxiety that we feel.

[00:15:37] There is another piece of the Sikh tradition that I love, and it's, I would call it an affirmation that

[00:15:47] they have, and it says, you, when they see someone different or someone they don't know,

[00:15:53] you are a part of me, I do not yet know. You are a part of me, I do not yet know. Wouldn't that change the world?

[00:16:09] Don't believe that because you're one person, you can't make a change. What you do in your life

[00:16:17] impacts the people around you? Those people then go out, and it's, it's a ripple effect.

[00:16:26] We are naive to believe we have no power, and curiosity really should become our superpower.

[00:16:38] The second point I want to make is on oneness. That is the first principle of science of mind,

[00:16:45] oneness. Do you believe in oneness? Do you understand oneness? That is also a principle of the Sikh tradition,

[00:17:01] is oneness. And you can see how all of that is tied together. Seeing no stranger. You are a part of me,

[00:17:09] I don't yet know. And now we talk about oneness. I'm teaching the advanced consciousness studies

[00:17:18] class, which used to be called prac one. We changed the name in part because we wanted to make it

[00:17:24] more accessible to people who maybe didn't want to go into practitioner training, but wanted to

[00:17:30] increase their consciousness. And in the first term of that class, something came up about perspective

[00:17:38] taking, which is another way of saying curiosity. It refers to the active contemplation of other's

[00:17:45] psychological experiences. That is thinking and imagining the feelings and viewpoints of others.

[00:17:55] Helping they to become me. We teach this in science of mind. I want to tell you, if you have not taken a

[00:18:06] class, in January we start our classes up again. I really encourage you, if you haven't taken a class,

[00:18:12] to get into beyond limits. That's the starting and it will change your life. I had someone at the eight

[00:18:22] o'clock say to me, as we were talking about curiosity, guess why they came to Mile High Church?

[00:18:30] They were curious. All of us walk through life curious. Let's take advantage of it. And as I said,

[00:18:39] please get into a class, you will not be sorry. Ernest Holmes said, identify yourself with that one and

[00:18:48] everyone you meet. Know that everyone you meet is just a little different expression of that one.

[00:18:58] And meet them as that one and you will meet yourself in that one.

[00:19:08] That is oneness. This oneness can really also heal hatred. You know, I said we can make a difference.

[00:19:20] In 2012, you may remember the Oak Creek Goudwara that a white supremacist went in,

[00:19:29] shot and killed six members of that community.

[00:19:34] And one of the people that was killed was the father of Pardeep Kalika. And he was really concerned

[00:19:42] because he didn't, he wanted to understand how. And we sit there every time we hear this happen.

[00:19:48] How could someone do this? So he reached out to Arno Mikolas, who is the person that actually had started

[00:19:58] this white supremacist group in Wisconsin, but since had left them because in his own heart, he knew that wasn't,

[00:20:07] wasn't right. But at this point, Pardeep is not sure that that's happened, but they get together,

[00:20:16] they go to have a meal at a Thai restaurant together to get to know each other. And then they have become,

[00:20:24] over the years, great friends. And they've started a program that is called Serve to Unite.

[00:20:32] And the intention of that is to work with students who, in schools and, I'm just laughing, you know,

[00:20:43] one thing you love about schools and other community organizations to try to get rid of this

[00:20:55] whole notion of othering, of the darkness that comes, but to try to give them some kind of basis

[00:21:06] for being able to have a better life and to take that better life out into the world.

[00:21:14] Pardeep says, I think that's the way that we need to go together as we move forward in America.

[00:21:20] We all need to help each other work our way out of this pain. That's going to take genuine

[00:21:31] relationships. And the last is to practice deepening your curiosity. So we've talked about

[00:21:40] see no stranger. We've talked about oneness. And now I want to give you some thoughts for how you

[00:21:47] can practice to get that deepening curiosity. Get away from the superficial. First, apply a beginner's mind.

[00:21:56] Open yourself up. Look for new and novel ways of doing things. See no stranger.

[00:22:06] Then ask questions and observe. Seek first to understand, not to explain. Again, is the truth more important

[00:22:20] to you or your own beliefs? Listen longer. Have you noticed that if you listen longer, you hear more?

[00:22:30] rather than when someone speaks and you jump right in there to give them the counterpoint. Listen longer.

[00:22:40] Interrupt your own biases and othering when you listen longer.

[00:22:47] When you're practicing curiosity, you're turning toward another rather than away from.

[00:22:54] Then here, I think, is an easy one. Try something new. Take a different route to work. See what it does? It shifts your brain.

[00:23:02] Try reading a different genre of book. If you've always read fiction, try reading non-fiction.

[00:23:12] Try reading autobiographies. Go to an art gallery or a museum that has some kind of presentation

[00:23:21] that you say, what is that about? Go and see it. It can change your own mind.

[00:23:29] Because what it will do is start opening your mind to new points of view.

[00:23:33] And that's what curiosity is intended to do. Open your mind to new ways of seeing.

[00:23:41] And then be inquisitive.

[00:23:44] Be bold enough to ask other people's opinions and then listen to their opinions.

[00:23:54] Understand that every person in this room does things a little bit differently.

[00:23:59] And that's okay.

[00:24:01] That's what makes us a beautiful body for God to be able to enjoy.

[00:24:08] For that power that's greater than all of us to be able to say,

[00:24:12] I am thrilled with what I'm seeing from these humans.

[00:24:19] Don't get stuck with other people's biases.

[00:24:24] Ernest Holmes says this,

[00:24:26] practically the whole human race is hypnotized

[00:24:32] because it thinks what somebody else told it to think.

[00:24:40] Is that not interesting?

[00:24:41] Because it does appear that that's how we function in the world.

[00:24:47] You know, by choosing curiosity in every moment,

[00:24:51] even those routine moments, you can make a difference.

[00:24:55] It can be different in this world.

[00:24:57] One person at a time can change this world

[00:25:01] and you're the person that it needs to start with.

[00:25:07] Curiosity is about seeking what unites us,

[00:25:11] not what tears us apart.

[00:25:14] So what I'm going to suggest is for all of us in 2025,

[00:25:18] we put on our cloaks of curiosity

[00:25:22] because that is our superpower.

[00:25:27] Think of yourself.

[00:25:29] Putting on your cloak of curiosity

[00:25:32] and then stepping out the door

[00:25:34] and using that superpower.

[00:25:37] Remember to see no stranger.

[00:25:40] Remember to embrace oneness

[00:25:42] and practice, practice, practice,

[00:25:46] practice deepening your curiosity

[00:25:48] and never lose your holy curiosity.

[00:25:54] And so it is.

[00:25:56] And now as we go into prayer,

[00:26:03] I ask our practitioners to stand,

[00:26:06] holding consciousness for all of us.

[00:26:10] We know in this space right now,

[00:26:12] God is all there is,

[00:26:14] that God is the infinite,

[00:26:18] the all-seeing, the all-knowing, the powerful.

[00:26:23] And all of that is available to each one of us in this room right now.

[00:26:28] And as we become curious about that power that is greater than any one of us,

[00:26:36] we move forward in life.

[00:26:38] Happy.

[00:26:41] Happy.

[00:26:42] Happy.

[00:26:43] Happy because of our curiosity as well as our love that is shining through this curiosity.

[00:26:49] I am so thankful for each person who is here,

[00:26:56] each person who is online,

[00:26:59] knowing that as we step into 2025,

[00:27:03] we try new things.

[00:27:05] We experience that curiosity

[00:27:10] because we know

[00:27:12] that is what will change us

[00:27:17] and that is what will change our world.

[00:27:21] As we step into times that are difficult

[00:27:24] or times that we don't know what to expect,

[00:27:28] curiosity,

[00:27:30] curiosity,

[00:27:32] curiosity.

[00:27:33] We don't have to know the answer.

[00:27:36] Thank you, God.

[00:27:38] Thank you, God,

[00:27:39] for always being a part of us

[00:27:44] and showing up,

[00:27:46] helping us to show up

[00:27:48] in this world.

[00:27:51] So I can release this prayer right now

[00:27:53] into that law

[00:27:55] that says yes

[00:27:57] to what we believe.

[00:27:59] So I can let this prayer go,

[00:28:02] let it be.

[00:28:03] And so it is.

[00:28:05] Amen.

[00:28:09] Thanks for listening to the Mile High Church podcast.

[00:28:12] This podcast is made possible by the generous contributions

[00:28:16] from listeners like you.

[00:28:17] To make a donation,

[00:28:18] please visit milehighchurch.org.