The salvage of America’s largest banks and most inefficient industries with tax-payer money and the enormous reductions in care to young, old, poor, ill, handicapped, and frail Americans at the same time has focused rage and ridicule on Congress. In simpler times, electing better representatives might have solved these problems, but our times are different. A few people and corporations have quickly come to own huge portions of American wealth while millions of Americans (and people in other countries, too) plummet from middle class into poverty. In simpler times, regulating (taxing) greed might have solved these problems, but our times are different.
We are evolving in a new way. Relationships and institutions that are built on the perception of power as external have become dysfunctional, and this is impossible to ignore. Competition, discord, hoarding, and exploitation have become counterproductive to our evolution. New relationships and institutions that are built on the perception of power as authentic are emerging. They create harmony, cooperation, sharing, and reverence for Life, which our evolution now requires. In other words, rage and ridicule – at Congress or elsewhere – have become destructive because they are attempts to impose one will upon another, and that now prevents our evolution.
If we have no compassion for those who have no compassion – such as self-serving members of Congress – we become like them. Our self-importance, self-benefit, and self-righteousness fuel theirs. They become our proxies, acting out on national and international stages the same energy that we act out in our own ways. A new requirement for social activism is emerging – the creation of compassion in myself instead of demanding that others become compassionate; developing the ability think, speak, and act without seeing others as villains, because we no longer want to see ourselves as victims.
Developing compassion is the only way to become a spiritual activist. It relieves you of the burden of judgment and frees your creativity to find new, untried, and constructive solutions that are invisible to those who lack compassion.
Our evolution now requires each of us to become a spiritual activist.
