While Rome Burns - Facing The Politics Of Resentment & Hatred.

Living Your Wisdom

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Sadness And Dismay

The usual topics of my posts is the exploration of the inner world of wisdom and contemplations on how to bring that wisdom within each of us into our life in the world. This post is in line with that theme, but challenged by how difficult living our wisdom can sometimes be.

Like many of you I have been watching the state of the body politic in the USA over the past years with a deep sadness and dismay. Of course this last week it has come to a head, and the path forward to the November elections and beyond looks fraught with danger.

I lived in the United States for 20 years, and my wife and I built our family there. I love America dearly. That love sharpens the pain, and keeps me awake at night, and praying. Being in Australia, across the other side of the world, does not lessen the pain or worry.

America is a land filled with some of the most beautiful, thoughtful, creative, brilliant and loving people and communities I have ever encountered. Of course, there is a dark side and extremely troubled communities as well. It is a country living in the midst of a great historical experiment. A country built on the possible viability of an idea of democracy. The European settlement and multicultural expansion part of its history has been riddled with deep deep challenges to that idea, including slavery, civil war, racial conflict, riots, and economic and social inequality of all kinds. We are all watching first-hand another one of those deeply disturbing moments. We may want to turn our heads, but history won’t.

The current situation is more a symptom of the failures in overcoming past challenges, than it is an aberration. We can argue which of those failures is most critical in this moment. The list is long. But that is not new or unusual in the American experiment. As a nation it has had to face its failures and continue to function, with a hope that the core principles of its founding could be held above the raging waters likely to drown them. So many have suffered and died in those waters.

The nature of the experiment is built on failures, successes, death and chaos, beauty and triumph. Yet somehow, ‘midst all of that chaos, the heart of its founding ideal has kept beating. The fact that the life-giving blood of power and freedom has not flowed unhindered to every person, community or group, means we face yet another moment of explosion or implosion.

America has had to face such moments before. We now fact the danger that the beating heart may be damaged beyond repair by the jackboot of dictatorship.

We weep now at the possibility. We are in anguish of the moment we may weep again at its realisation…”how did we let that happen”?

To Face It Or Turn Away?

I have watched my own reaction. I want to turn away to maintain some inner peace. Those who venture on the spiritual path know this tugging. Many a renunciate has fled to the caves, physical or inward, to find solace, quiet and peace.

I am grateful to many of those cave dwellers, because their visions and insights gained in those caves, gave hope and direction to many of us. But cave dwelling is not an option for most of us.

I think we need to face the chaos and dismay, and find the eyes of peace with which to look.

Quantum physics has shown us that the behaviour of photons, and presumably the smallest of all energies, and probably the largest, is altered by observation and attention. Our attention is an active and significant factor in how energy moves. It would be best that we not look away, but look on with love, compassion, resilience and attention.

That is not to say that therefore we need not act in other ways too. Particularly those living in America can do a great deal. None of the following are new, and yet we seem to have strayed from these most basic of approaches fundamental to the survival of democracy.

• To live with others we disagree with in the heart of sacred respect. To never sink into resentment, hatred and violence.

• To stay connected with our families and communities and build the threads of peace and cooperation critical to our survival.

• To vote, and support those who carry out the process so it can be protected and honoured. How can we not vote when so many have died to stand for that right, and the deadly struggle to ensure that the vote will mean something and genuinely reflect the will of the people.

• To pray, in whatever way that has meaning for you, and to join with others to do so if that is possible.

• To educate yourself about the real issues rather than the junk most media is churning out. Don’t get sucked in to the information or disinformation vortex.

• To remind ourselves that the freedoms and democracy we currently experience is profoundly fragile and the exception in human history. We are the ones that hold it in our hands. Of course it is flawed and in desperate need of repair, constant review, and renewal. No amount of blame will engineer the changes needed.

How To Face What Is

There is most certainly some peace to be found in turning our heads away. Some time doing just that is critical for us. But constant turning away will not serve you, or the world, well.

We also need to turn our heads, hearts, action, attention, compassion and sacred love, towards the tumult. The energy of attention cannot be left to the attention and energy of resentment and hatred. Our attention matters. Our attention makes a difference.

I have spent a bit of time contemplating how to do this. To face what is, including what is happening in America.

What follows are my inner approaches to enable me to face what is, and to maintain hope and attention. For me this reframing is necessary for me to have any energy to actually “do” something. I share them with you. You may accept or reject all, some or none of them. I think that without very conscious consideration and framing it is so easy to get caught up in a whirlpool of hopelessness.

The Nature Of Awareness Is Peace.

My experience is that we are each inseparable from each other and the Awareness from which we, and all things, arise. That is not a theory, or a theology, but an experience.

In my view it is also something consistent with every person’s experience. We are that awareness, by nature. We may remain blind to the experience, and our essential nature for a long long time, but that sacred essence is present in each and every one of us.

That recognition and experience leads inevitably to experiencing the nature of that awareness. It is an energy of unspeakable power, expressed wordlessly in intimate stillness, peace, love and freedom.

The arc of human evolution is pointed in that direction. No matter the pain and struggle, the ground on which we exist calls us to peace. The exercise or misuse of our essential freedom defines the levels of joy or pain we inflict on ourselves and others. Our essential nature within us draws us towards itself.

In the midst of chaos we are called to bring this perspective to the way we live our lives, in the relationships and communities we build, and to the institutions we erect and maintain.

There Is No Birth Or Death.

Though we measure our perceptions and experiences in time and space, we are part of an Awareness that is not born, and therefore cannot die. The infinite and the eternal are our attempt to measure that which is only now. Ever created in this moment.

From that perspective we can recognise that all “things” including our own lives and the structures we build to prolong our hold on power, wealth, position and purpose, and physical life itself, will pass.

This is neither fatalistic or hopeless. Rather it injects tremendous value to the level of attention we pay in any moment. The lives of saints and tyrants pass. It would appear that the remaining footprints of the saints are honoured by the gratitude of history, whilst the footprints of tyrants are washed away by the waters of history’s distain.

Knowing that we will die physically brings an urgency to living a valuable life. Knowing that something most essential in us does not die, brings an expansion and fearlessness to our actions in the world.

When surrounded by fear, we can access resilient depths beneath the oceans of fear.

Our Inner Perspective And Attention Matters.

Our inner perspectives fashion our values. How we act on those values will determine our moral suasion. We achieve nothing of value by hatred and resentment. Only by living a life that honours the sacred value of all people and their deep longing for freedom can we hope to fashion a society and institutions worthy of them.

Paying deep attention to these values matters, particularly in the chaos and growing swamps of accusation and anger. Where possible we need to live by, and speak of, these convictions. According to the founders of the American experiment, these values are “self evident”. They are most evident when seen in the actions and heart of others.

The easy way forward for those seeking power on their own terms, is to create the illusion that we are surrounded by enemies who must be less worthy . The option then taken, countless times in history, is to crush the enemy. Blind to the self evident we grasp after power, only to discover that in so doing we left, lying in waste in the piles of destruction, the power that could have been granted by the governed.

I take refuge in the idea that my simple actions based on these sacred values, can make a difference. It is my hope and commitment. Though sometimes faltering I seek to return there.

The Arch Of History Is Long. The Human Longing For Freedom Cannot Be Destroyed

Martin Luther King Jr, in the midst of his fight to “let freedom ring” in the lives of African Americans, spoke of the arc of history tending towards justice. To most of us that arc seems too long, but its movement is inexorable. One of the reasons for this is that freedom is part of the essential nature of human beings. We long for it, it burns in our very depths. The denial of it by force, may quell the activities of freedom for some time, but force cannot resist that power of our essential awareness.

Dr David R. Hawkins in his book Power vs Force, points to the infinite field of power that is the awareness and consciousness from which all that is arises. The work of the ego, our evolved capacity for self preservation, is to use force to maintain our position, our ideology, our created perception of what is most important.

The nature of the Power of the Conscious Field, that some have called God, is love, oneness and peace. The nature of force is human created energy to gain and maintain a created position. Let us not underestimate the impact of force. More than 100 million people were killed by it in the twentieth century, and billions more currently have their freedom denied by government structures that need to control what their people say, read, hear and believe, for the government to remain in position. Power is infinite and eternal. Force is temporary and will, by nature, pass.

Historically almost every significant movement of force and dictatorship has dressed itself in the words of freedom, unity and peace. That wolf always, always dresses in sheep’s clothing.

How will you know them? Look beneath the wool. If you see the teeth of resentment, ridicule, retribution, hatred and violence, and the pitting of the so called “righteous” against someone, some group, some structure that is the “oppressing” enemy; stand clear. We don’t need to look too far to see them historically. Hitler, Stalin, Kim Jong Un, Mao and the “isms” they created, are just the more recent in a long bloody list.

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In America the freedom to vote may remain the last bastion to withstand the waves of force that are in motion. If we miss this moment the arc of justice may stall until we rediscover a new road to justice and a place for freedom to again raise its head.

On this journey I wish you all…and I mean all, peace. Both internally and in our communities and institutions.

Thank you for taking time to read this post.

I wish you peace and attention.

These are my thoughts. I would really appreciate you sharing your thoughts, respectfully, with others.