I believe that inside each human heart there burns a deep desire for wholeness and wellbeing – a compelling call to find greater meaning and belonging in life. With each step on the spiritual path, we find ourselves engaged in an intimate and deeply personal process of integration and alignment to bring together the many disparate aspects of our life into one unified field of expression.
This individual desire has been articulated on behalf of the collective by visionaries such as Martin Luther King who held the dream of a ‘beloved community’ where people gather in joyful service and celebration of the common good. The preamble to the US Constitution declares a similar sentiment and sincere intent to work cooperatively, “in order to form a more perfect union”. What often stands in the way of us achieving this higher union, are our fixed and inflexible beliefs coupled with unconscious habits and entrenched behaviors that are still predominantly self-serving by nature.
According to the Ageless Wisdom teachings, the Soul is in constant meditation as it seeks to stimulate us – its incarnated agent on Earth – to meet and merge and cooperate in forming “a more perfect union”. We are being invited to organize our inner ‘Community of Self’ and establish a United State of Being that is governed by the light and wisdom of our sovereign nature. We are talking spiritual politics.
I have described politics as, “the way we choose to live together and govern ourselves”. All change and all positive growth begins with us and so it is imperative that we gain an understanding that the internal politics of the eco-system of Self – the universe of you and me – is our primary area of responsibility and a pre-requisite for any true and lasting change in society. It is the needed first step on the journey. We are learning to live in harmony with the various aspects of ourself that may temporarily be in conflict with each other and to bring them gracefully and compassionately into a state of coherence and consensus.
There are many questions that require clear answers from us in our role as the ‘eco-system steward’ in order to achieve forward momentum in attaining the goal of a higher union. Perhaps you recognize some of them. How do I choose to live my life moving forward? Who is really in charge? How do I aspire to and achieve a more perfect union inside myself and with others? To what degree are my ‘better Angels’ in charge or how powerfully do my ‘inner demons’ and shadow aspects still color, condition and direct my daily life?
By answering these questions with clarity and intentionality, we initiate a deep exploration and examination of the ‘politics of Self’ that leads to a powerful act of Will. Our declared choices dictate the direction and path we take in life. How you and I show up in daily life is a reflection of our inner state of consciousness because our deeply-held values and beliefs shape and determine our worldly persona.
As Shakespeare pointed out, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances.” While watching several productions of the Greek tragedies being performed in Syracusa, Sicily, inside a 2,300 year-old amphitheater, I reflected on how unsavory some of the characters were that appeared on stage. For a moment I questioned why they weren’t disqualified and removed from the cast list because of their despicable behavior. There were sons murdering fathers, seducing mothers and betraying sisters and brothers, in most cruel and calculating ways. For instance, in a production of Elektra, I witnessed Agamemnon, king of Argos, sacrifice his daughter Iphigeneia to appease the goddess Artemis so he could sail off to Troy and then while away, his wife Clytemnestra had an affair with his cousin Aegisthus who proceeded to claim the throne.
It quickly became obvious that the real reason these characters existed and were permitted to act was in order to portray the darker aspects of our human nature that we are still wrestling with and seeking to overcome. A Greek tragedy is like a long-running ‘soap opera’ that vividly depicts the dynamics of the human psyche and reflects with great clarity the vast psychodrama in which all of our lives are engaged as fellow actors. When we look at the world and the current political and social landscape with all of its struggles, I believe that in a similar manner, what we perceive outwardly is a clear reflection and vivid externalization of an inner state of consciousness. The ‘outer’ reality is always a precipitation and manifestation of an ‘inner’ level of consciousness.
Without blame or judgement and without entering into the tense polarity of party politics, we can witness the playing out of the psychological drama of evolution in every field of life. At the moment in the United States, there are those who are celebrating the outcome of the recent US election as a hopeful step forward so that a new broom can sweep away the old encrusted forms while another section of society sees the result as a disaster, the sign of a moral decline and a dramatic step backward.
How do we now move forward from the locked positions of duality to a higher point of convergence? What if there are no winners or losers – only the grace of tough lessons to be faced and learned over many generations so we may mature and invite our ‘better Angels’ to govern wisely? We might even dare to say that presidents and governments are not so much ‘elected’ as they are ‘precipitated’ from out of the collective psyche and thus represent a combination of our highest aspirations and those character impediments still blocking the way to a more ‘united state of being’.
At Meditation Mount, the government we are seeking to promote and elect to high office is that of the enlightened Soul – with its wisdom, compassionate intelligence and fiery alignment to a higher purpose in Life.
So how do we remedy the current situation and move from political impasse to a state of social harmony, mutual respect and understanding? If we don’t like the present portrayal of the story and the way things are playing out then, perhaps, we need to write a new common script describing a preferred and brighter future and carefully develop the plot and the characters so they mature and become more potent expressions of the innate qualities of the human spirit instead of a rude and raucous out-picturing of our human vices and shadow aspects. The stage is set for the opening of the next act in this unfolding drama of the human story and we are being invited to play our part.
We are always faced with the decision of ‘leadership’ at a personal and collective level whenever we consider the fact that politics is how we ‘choose to live together and govern ourselves’. Our lives can come into harmony with our interior nature and with that of others as we organize around shared principles and values that eventually lead to a more perfect union.
Here at Meditation Mount, we are focused on three basic principles that we believe form the solid bedrock upon which the preferred future of our dreams and aspirations can be built. There is the Principle of Unanimity that proclaims the ‘oneness’ of all Life, the Principle of Goodwill that declares LOVE lives at the heart of our True Nature as the natural urge of the Soul to engage fully in life and the Principle of Essential Divinity which affirms a ‘spark of the Creator’ lives inside the heart of all Creation. We are each ‘fractals of the One Life’ and thus contain a note of the original Word that gave rise to all manifestations. We are conscious co-authors of the continuing story of Creation as we sound our note and follow the dictum of the Soul.
The Creator is not however, a coercive and imposing ‘dictator’ but The One who issued the original ‘dictum’ which we know as the Creative WORD or AUM. It is the initiating force and continuous dynamo of manifestation that allows The One to consciously know Itself through the many expressions of Itself, as they consciously make their way back Home. “E pluribus unum” – the Latin motto of the United States – means, “Out of many, one” and perfectly represents the spiritual task of this nation and the evolutionary assignment of all people on Earth.
The new story we are co-writing is based on the values of the heart, on the qualities of caring and sharing and on a genuine desire to create a more perfect union between ‘heaven and earth’. Acting out this drama on the great stage of daily life is how we evolve together in a more conscious way.
When ‘inner union’ is achieved, as the divergent parts of our own universe of Self cohere and coalesce, then a corresponding outer union in the form of a healthy and wholesome society is finally possible. A ‘more perfect union’ is waiting to be revealed in all walks of life.
It lives as a pregnant promise in the ethers and you and I are the appointed agents of revelation in ‘time, space and substance’ who can deliver on this promise. Let us not lose heart and only see the current state of the world as an irreconcilable situation but, instead, view this powerful moment in human history as a golden opportunity for us to respond to the call of the Soul together.
Michael Lindfield
Board President
Meditation Mount