Politics, Anger, Unity, & the Heart
Image credit: The Ta-Sin of Self-Awareness in Tawhid, Amar Dawod, 2011.
As a religious/spiritual leader, finding a public, political voice can be confusing. Exactly how much can (or should) a spiritual teacher share on this front? Where's the line? Is political engagement a distraction from spiritual work? Should we just keep our mouths shut? "Keep politics out of spirituality!" or, "Keep spirituality out of politics!" are common rallying cries. But as I've kept at this work over the years, it's become so clear that politics and spirituality are deeply intertwined, and ultimately inseparable. And this has everything to do with the reality of the human being—what we are, and how we're made.
A human being is a threshold between worlds. There's the world of form around us, and a world of qualities within us. As we move "within" during spiritual practice—into our own depths, into our spaciousness—a realm of love, beauty, and unity opens to us. It's a realm that is utterly satisfying in its own right. And then we open our eyes! And once again, we're confronted with the world of division, argument, and dualing perspectives. The human being is a dance between these two—a constant balancing act. We can lean one way, and get pulled into a maelstrom of emotion, confusion, and conflict—or lean the other, and want to simply leave it all behind!
The work of being human is to strive to keep a steady foot in both worlds, and to act in the world of form from an anchoring, a constant returning, to that inner realm of harmony. When we do that, and even better, when a group does it together, we achieve something magnificent: a field of shared resonance, and the conscious interabiding of realms. There is nothing more wonderful or satisfying than to sit in a group of individuals humming together in this way, and to see that inner world of beauty gazing back at you through the eyes of everyone present. A fragrance is produced by such gatherings that I suspect is one of the chief purposes of creation.
It's the nature, purpose, and possibility of human beings to live in both of these worlds—to integrate them, and to actualize something incredibly precious in the process. Very often, however, we're so fused to identification with our body, our ego states, and our emotions that we have no awareness of that subtler, more spacious, expansive, and infinite realm within us—a reality that is actually our own deepest selfhood. Spiritual work is about opening that channel—but it's also about what we do in the world once it's open. When we go within, we discover that it's the very nature of Being to radiate love, which then moves us back outward, where we discover that love worked out in the world of form is called justice. And so spirituality becomes inherently political—inherently about how we organize ourselves as human beings to create more love—which is to say, more justice.
But here we have to be careful—because as the conditions of injustice in the world become more obvious and evident to us, it's easy to be drawn back into more coarse, emotional states—particularly anger. So first, let me be clear—anger is energy, and energy is information. It's no good to label anger a "negative emotion" and dismiss it. We need to sit with our anger, listen to it, and allow it to reveal itself. Generally speaking, anger is always a protective veil. Underneath anger we usually find fear, sadness, or pain. (Deeper still is what G. I. Gurdjieff movingly named "the sorrows of our common Father," or the deep suffering-with of God.) Anger is inherently tied to egoic consciousness, rooted in reactivity and defensiveness. When we act out of anger, in reality we are reacting. Reaction is not conscious choice, and it only tends to pour ego-fuel on whatever fire is already burning.
Whenever we feel the movement of defensive or reactive posturing arising in us, it's always bound to our ego-self. This may be a hard pill to swallow in our contemporary climate of praising or celebrating anger: "Use your anger! Channel your anger!" But what if instead we listened to and transformed our anger? We may think we can ride our anger, but it will always end up riding us. Instead, we need to purify our anger, transmute it into compassion, and then act from there. The simple fact is, anger clouds clear, nonjudgmental seeing. "Nonjudging" does not mean "undiscerning"; it means that we see and act from alignment with our compassionate and unitive heart, rather than our dualistic and limited ego-mind. Learning to do this—for most of us anyway—is a constant dance, navigation, and negotiation.
Emotions (as opposed to authentic feeling and sensation) arise from story attached to ego-narrative, and they will inevitably rise and swell and fade, as long as we're in these bodies. Emotion is always an invitation into practice (and this goes for so-called "positive" emotions as well as "negative" ones). Practice is by and large the daily purification of emotion—from coarse, egoic reactivity to spacious, non-egoic holding. In practice, we are learning to expand our identity or sense of selfhood just enough to hold what's arising—not pushing it away, and not collapsing into it. We hold our hurt, our anger, our frustration, and let them serve as polish for the rust on the mirror of our hearts. These reactive states are always revealing something about our stuck places to us, as well us work we may need to do in the outer world—healing in our personal relationships, renewed political engagement, etc.
And so, to bring this back to the political: at the end of the day, the two worlds—inner and outer, higher and lower—are one world. And this is especially true for the human being, who is designed (or is evolving) to live consciously at the threshold between the two. An awakened heart knows that we each have to do our part, in whatever ways we're called, to reflect into the outer structures of our lives and our world the beauty and unity that we find within. When compassion awakens in a heart, there's no longer any question of how immigrants should be treated, or whether or not everyone is deserving of healthcare and a living wage. When Jesus says, "Whatever you do to the least of these, you do to me," he is speaking from that place of compassionate unity in which the two worlds are one. Love is realized as unity and overflows as action.
Today there is a growing religious, spiritual, and political "Left" within the United States. It is anti-capitalist; unafraid of terms like “democratic socialism”; and made up of an incredibly diverse coalition of human beings. It grows out of an increasing awakening to our common, shared humanity; often, however, this is only a logical and/or emotional realization. The logic that we are one humanity and one planet is increasingly obvious to anyone who has grown up with the internet and our dawning ecological awareness; the emotional reality is easily felt by every child who's grown up with friends of different colors, ethnicities, and religions. But an emotional and logical grasp of unity is not the same as a spiritual grasping (or is it ungrasping?!) of that reality. Without a spiritual understanding of unity, rooted in the constant work of purifying the ego, emotions, and heart, whenever our logical or emotional desire for unity in our outer structures is frustrated, that same impulse toward unity easily devolves into anger, divisiveness, and blame. Yes, it may be "righteous anger." But anger always clouds the heart's clear-seeing. It must be purified if the information it conveys to us is to be used skillfully.
And so, to the moment we find ourselves in now. For many on the Left, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders represented our best hopes for the face of a new moral order in our country—one that takes human dignity seriously (universal healthcare, a reasonable wealth tax, etc.) and that fights relentlessly for the protection of our planet and our collapsing ecosystems (a Green New Deal, a just energy transition, etc.). With a corporate, “centrist,” neoliberal Democrat, Joe Biden, now rising to the position of presumptive nominee for the Democratic Party, there is lot of disappointed, anger, and outright grieving on the Left. I am grieving. And yet, should it come to it, I will vote for Biden without hesitation—and will continue to work to push him leftward in his policies, especially when it comes to healthcare and the environment.
It is clear to me that Joe Biden is the much lesser of two evils. Biden’s policy platform has already shifted dramatically to the Left thanks to progressive voices and the work of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. In fact, just about anything good in his current platform is directly attributable to the "Sanders/Warren effect"—their policies shifting his platform, and showing up there now in a weakened or compromised version. I do not doubt that the planet will be better off with the environmental regulations Biden will restore and expand. Fewer immigrants will die at our borders if he is elected. The Muslim ban will be lifted. At the same time, he will likely do little to end our endless wars or restrain the excesses of capitalism. But fewer people, and less of our planet, will die under a Biden administration.
And yet I want to recognize that the disappointment many are feeling in this moment is not misplaced. It’s not simply about being a “sore loser” because your preferred candidate didn’t win. It’s about fundamentally different visions of the future of our country, and fundamentally different understandings of what justice requires of us in this moment. But this is where our spiritual work comes in. That disappointment and anger, while valid and real, must be purified through practice. As emotional states, they are still tied to our limited perspectives, and must be transformed into compassion strong enough and ready to meet this moment. It does no good to get lost in rage or despair.
At the end of the day, our work on our own hearts is the most important thing we can do. How do we act and choose and serve from that open channel of love? How do we best avoid falling into reactivity or fueling anger? How do we make clear-sighted, compassionate choices within this web of moral ambiguity into which we're interwoven? We come back to our hearts, again and again. Find that realm of beauty. Let it purify our intentions. And then act, speak. And when we realize that we’ve spoken or acted from elsewhere, we strive to acknowledge it and return. While losing this election would be disastrous, losing our hearts in the process would be the greater tragedy.
And we should never forget the perspective of deep-time. Justice has been working itself out on this planet for generations and millennia. Cultural and political change rarely happens overnight, but in the steady growth and gradual awakening of human consciousness—a work that’s been in progress for about 200,000 years now. Dr. King said it best: "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice." We are living only one small moment in a much larger story. We each do our own little part in that great bending, as we're given and able, adding what we can to Love's unfolding. Seeds planted now might take a hundred years to blossom. And the blossoming might not even be in this world.
If Joe Biden becomes the nominee, we'll still have our hearts to work on. If Trump wins in November, we'll still have our hearts to work on. If Biden (or someone else entirely!) wins in November, we’ll still have our hearts to work on. And as we do that work, we'll each know what we're called to do. The work is so much bigger than any one of us, and so much bigger than this moment in time. And yet this moment does matter. And so, let's listen to our hearts, and choose always from and for Love.
