Changing the World Means Changing Oneself

The end of official summer has begun. Days are longer and it’s warmer, often, even though there is a cold day now and then to keep us on our toes. All and all, however, the days are warmer and brighter, and the skies are bluer. We look forward toward the summer-time and summer vacation. For many of us this will be a time of warmth and relaxation when we can spend time with our friends around back-yard barbeques at the poolside, or at the beach. As we do these many things the remind us of what is really important about life: not rushing and gathering all of the things that we can, but having time to spend the short, precious moments of our lives with close friends and relatives. During these times we realize that whom we can control or what we can control doesn’t make us good people; what makes us good is the ability to share our love, faith and devotion with others and our desire to create a world of justice, equity, and compassion where everyone has the time and resources to just be able to sit and spend time with their friends. This is all that most people want.

One of the ways that we who consider ourselves more spiritual in the world have begun to give more of the world more access to the pursuit of happiness is through our racial and social justice activities. When we do racial and social justice we bring our gifts and talents to bear to create the world of which we dream. We create ways for people to plug into the system and to become empowered to build their own communities and to help us heal the whole nation. This is what justice making is really about: healing the nations and the world. We often don’t go about it in that way, unfortunately. Sometimes if we have been hurt in the past, or didn’t stand up for ourselves one time or the other, or are angry, we do justice work as a catharsis for that anger. This works to a certain extent, but as most social scientists have confirmed catharsis usually doesn’t get rid of feelings of anger; it actually increases the feeling, because we are not dealing with the real cause of the anger, which is an underlying cause. That is why it is important for us to do our justice making work in a new way; in the way of Martin Luther King and Gandhi, and the many great sages who have gone before us and have made lasting effects in the psyches of the human family.

If a person does justice work out of anger and accepts the identity of a fighter against injustice, when there is no injustice what happens? We can see in our liberal circles by the circular firing squad phenomena that the person simply chooses someone in her or his own group who is treating them unjustly, projects the anger onto that person, and makes him or her the enemy. This is why we should begin to do justice work as a spiritual, growth affirming discipline. This would be like Karmic Yoga.

We can do many of the things we are doing now, but in Karmic Yoga one becomes the person that one wants the world to be. One lives as a citizen of the Beloved Community by channeling the love and justice of the divine and working as a loving, spiritual healer instead of a fighter. One surrenders his or her successes to love and renounces the right to be angry, upset, or discouraged and works diligently. One lives in the now, working moment to moment at one’s tasks as a representative of the embodiment of love. Meister Eckhart described this as being a Mother of God. To him we were the one’s birthing God, or the embodiment of love and divine justice, into the world as the creative human beings that we are. As we do God there is no need to worry whether there is a big man walking around in heaven called God or not. We are creating a new world and re-creating ourselves as we work moment by moment to bring about a just and equitable world.

As the writer Kalidassa once wrote: “Today well lived makes every yesterday a dream of happiness and every tomorrow a vision of hope.” If we can just live moment to moment in the now, not worrying about tomorrow, standing with our feet firmly rooted in the ground and our head far above, standing in the doorway in the winds of adversity without flinching, by the very essence of our being we will create a Beloved Community whatever path we choose.

Social/Racial Justice is not a task that one has to hold ones nose to do, it is a path to societal liberation and as we do karmic yoga it is a path to spiritual liberation. When one is whole and one is awake these thinks don’t exist. We realize that we are truly one.
Namaster
Om Prakash (John Gilmore)