The Power for Good

By nature our Soul is loving, generous and seeks to serve life in every way possible. During our earthly sojourn, the personality—while acting as the Soul’s incarnated agent—often experiences periods of isolation and insecurity and finds itself focused primarily on the needs of the self, so it tends to think and act in a more ‘selfish’ way. However, in the long run, the health of any system is compromised if its component parts continue to act in a self-centered, separative and greedy manner.

We have reached a critical point in our evolution as a human family where a better, healthier collective future is only possible if each of us holds the ‘good of the whole’ in our hearts and acts accordingly. Whether we are speaking about that system or community of lives we call the individual Self, a Nation, or the broader planetary ecosystem, the secret to achieving well-being is cooperation, not adversarial relationships between the various parts that make up the ‘whole’. It is in giving, not in taking, that harmony and benevolent coherence is created on Earth. This is the tipping point we are facing today.

Standing at this crucial crossroad as a species, we can either choose self-centeredness that perpetuates the heresy of separation or take that radical path which leads to what Martin Luther King describes as ‘beloved community’ where the illusion of separation no longer exists. He summed this up in the following way:

“In a real sense all life is inter-related. All persons are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the inter-related structure of reality.”

The power to create this preferred future lies exclusively in our hands as we dare to take responsibility for shifting the locus of our lives from an ego-centered to an eco-centered stance. This whole subject of ‘the right use of power’ is far from being fully comprehended in society and so we turn again to MLK to enlighten us.

“Power properly understood is nothing but the ability to achieve purpose. And one of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites—polar opposites—so that love is identified with a resignation of power, and power with a denial of love. We’ve got to get this thing right.

What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love. It is precisely this collision of immoral power with powerless morality which constitutes the major crisis of our time.

Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men. Our hope for creative living lies in our ability to reestablish the spiritual needs of our lives in personal character and social justice. Without this spiritual and moral re-awakening we shall destroy ourselves in the misuse of our own instruments.”

The battle between our demons and our better Angels is now in full swing and how we choose to wield our innate power will ultimately decide its outcome. We are beginning to hear the deep compelling call to follow the hope-filled promptings of the Soul while simultaneously responding to the painful cry from our ‘wounded parts’ that have been hurt and thus, by default, are temporarily programmed to hurt others. Violence is all around us–whether in the form of extreme weather-related storms or out of control human confrontations.

This final quote from Martin Luther King exposes violence as a senseless and self-defeating way of comporting ourselves in life:

“The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate. 

So it goes. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”

Once our hearts have been touched, and we know without a shadow of a doubt that loving kindness is the way forward, there is no turning back.

May we choose to walk this path together in a shared spirit of joy and companionship with an abiding sense of respect and gratitude for the gift of Life. We are ‘the power for good’ incarnate.

Michael Lindfield

Board President

Meditation Mount