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In a previous article I discussed that there was
a connection between politics and spirituality,
and that developing an awareness of this link would
help to forge a deeper understanding of them both.
The exploration of this connection, if done purely
on an abstract level, runs the risk of becoming
just a theoretical exercise - a study of philosophers
and texts that gets left behind the moment we lift
up our eyes and look at whatever is going on around
us. This search for a new awareness of politics
and spirituality, the search for connections between
two things that in most peoples' minds are completely
unrelated, can only truly begin to take form through
our engagement with our world. Not only in terms
of political activism in the causes we feel most
strongly about, but in terms of how we understand
who we are in relation to each other and ourselves.
How we begin to develop this understanding has to
start with who we are at this moment. Who and what
we each are is so strongly influenced by where we
are coming from.
In my case it was New York in the 1960s and 1970s.
While my family was very apolitical, they voted
in important elections and idolized FDR, the politics
of the time - the protests and the aroma of revolution
- vitalized me. With the exception of a brief flirtation
with right wing ideology when I was eleven, I politically
gravitated to the left and on most issues to the
far left. While I never joined any political party,
I created my own version of popular front politics,
forming alliances with pacifists, anarchists, Trotskyites,
Maoists, Marxists and liberal and reform democrats
(and on occasion an enlightened monarchist). But
what intrigued me, excited me and spoke nearest
to my heart were the political ideas and philosophies
that were growing out of the Feminist movement.
Especially the understanding that political transformation
goes hand in hand with personal transformation.
The understanding that there is indeed a link between
political and personal transformation has often
implied that in order to change the world, each
individual had to first begin to transform oneself.
How one went about starting on this monumental task
was an open question to which there were many possible
alternative paths offered. Yet such an approach
to transformation resulted in discouragement for
a lot of the people I knew. As a result, in comparison,
transforming the world appeared to be the easier
thing to do. Just look at history, it is full of
examples of people standing up against great odds,
uniting behind a great cause and creating a major
change in the society in which they lived. From
India to South Africa, it seemed that if you could
just convince enough people to believe passionately
in something, and to put their time and energy behind
it, something powerful could happen. Granted such
an effort could took a long time in coming, require
an immense amount of sacrifice on the part of many
people, and the results are often far off the mark
from the original goal, but at least something could
happen.
As so many people who have been and are involved
in social justice movements know, the road to social
change is one of constant frustration and set backs.
The task can appear to be so monumental that it
is easy to come to believe that as a single individual
you can never make much of a difference. After experiencing
such frustration, one can assume that personal transformation,
while a difficult and far off goal, at least is
something you can try to bring about through your
own efforts. While it is often a more satisfying
experience to explore such a transformation as part
of a community, the annals of every spiritual tradition
are filled with tales of people going off into caves,
living in forests and making pilgrimages to mountains.
In fact, the search for such a level of transformation
often requires that a person go off and be by oneself.
At times being alone is the only way to get to know
what is going on inside.
Even though this is something that we ultimately
have the power to do something about, it still remains
a formidable task easily requiring more than one
lifetime. So many of us striving to grow in our
lives still wake up each morning to face the same
issues, the same anxieties, the same fears day after
day. And once again the question comes up that if
we are not able to bring about change in our own
lives, how can we begin to think about changing
the world? How can you expect people to change in
a world that is so imperfect? After all, isn't personal
transformation the purview of an elite group of
holy individuals who were probably born enlightened?
This line of thinking leaves us in a dilemma. If
we believe that one form of change is dependent
on bringing about the other, we must ask ourselves
if personal or political transformation is possible
at all?
What we need to first realize is that one type
of change does not precede or preclude the other.
For us to gain the full potential of such transformations,
it is essential that we travel on both paths simultaneously.
Because they are each a manifestation of the other.
While one is focused inward, the other is focused
on the world. They ultimately serve to complement,
drive and inform each other. The world and the individual
do not exist separately, each one is imbedded in
the other. While we live in the world, the world
lives in us - the engagement is constant whether
we choose to recognize it or not. They both require
that we look deeply within our assumptions, questioning
and reevaluating all of our most cherished notions
and opinions. Without questioning, without reexamining,
change and growth can never happen. Our old ways
of thinking will just continue to bog us down making
it impossible to develop new ways of thinking to
address the problems and issues that continue to
confront us.
Many years ago a friend criticized me for what
she interpreted as my lack of commitment to a particular
set of political ideas. She was concerned that my
being able to find areas of commonality with people
of differing ideological points of view was a sign
of weakness that would ultimately make me lose my
way and become one more of the vast number of apolitical,
uninvolved people. Being someone whose opinion I
valued, I took this criticism to heart and spent
a long period thereafter assessing what I really
did believe in. It was only after a long period
of soul searching that I came to realize that instead
of being a weakness it was actually a strength.
As long as I continued to be open to new ideas and
new people, to understand them and assess them using
my critical faculties, growth and change would continue
to be possible. It was only when I attempted to
find and fit into a particular worldview that I
found myself becoming rigid and pulling away from
a path dedicated to transforming myself while being
actively engaged in the world.
At this particular time more than in any other
that I have lived through, we need all of us to
be open to new ways of thinking and new ways of
being in the world. Recently, I found myself along
with thousands of others in a march protesting the
current war in Iraq. What troubled me most was that
on both sides of this troubling and heart rendering
issue the arguments that were being expressed had
very little to do with the actual state of events.
Instead they seemed to hearken back to an earlier
war in an earlier world. For, while the past informs
the present it too often ends up controlling the
way we see the present. To live in the present our
ultimate goal has to be to acknowledge the past
while learning to leave it behind. While the past
has shaped us and our world, our task as political
and personal beings is to learn to understand how
it made us what we are, and then to go beyond it.
Only then can we hope to begin to move successfully
down the combined paths toward personal and political
transformation.
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