Spiritual Beliefs

A good friend recently told me some of her philosophy about spiritual beliefs. Basically, she believes that spiritual beliefs are not true or false, they are not even attempts to accurately describe reality - they are about influencing our lives for the better - that "pretending" (my word) something is true causes us to live differently, and if that difference is a good thing, that makes the belief useful, not true.

So if I take on the popular belief that we chose the life we were going to live before we were born, and chose to forget that knowledge, so we could learn the lessons of life - well, that belief has certain effects on how we live our lives, and in particular how we handle traumas or disasters - we no longer see ourselves as victims; it is the choice we made to go through things like this. I personally cannot accept this belief as true, and it angers me to think someone would believe I chose the abuse I went through as a child, but I can see the positive change in attitude that can be wrought by looking at life through this lens, and that could certainly be useful.

What a relief not to have to decide if a belief is literally true or not! Instead, I can look at how I can imagine the world in a way that enhances how I want to live life.

Letting Go of Being in Control

Flying back from my annual trip to the Free Spirit Gathering on the East Coast, I had an insight. At one point, we were making a descent towards the airport, and I was going through my usual anxiety fantasy of spinning and crashing out of control. Suddenly, it came to me - when I stepped into that plane, I had effectively committed my entire life and well-being for the next three hours to this piece of machinery, and the people who controlled it. The moment we took off, my fate was completely and irrevocably determined, and there was absolutely nothing I could do now to change it. It was pretty silly now to tense up as if I could stop a crash from taking place. Whatever was going to happen was going to happen, and I had made an unconscious decision three hours before to let it happen, even if it meant a fiery crash.

My stomach eased up as I watched my fate play out, and we landed without incident. I thought to myself, if I had been fully conscious, I could have been aware that I was sealing my fate the moment I stepped onto that plane, and perhaps I wouldn't have suffered the anxiety of thinking I was still in control.

And then my mind went one step further. In a sense, our fate is sealed the moment we are born. True, there are many moments throughout life where I can make choices that have real consequences, but when I stepped onto this earth for the first time, I was going to have to live a human life with all of its glories and tragedies, for an unspecified period of time, whether I liked it or not. Most of my life has been without my choice or consent, and in that sense, my fate is sealed. It is absurd to pretend I'm in control beyond the small amount of life I can actually affect.

I can relax.

Abandoning the label Liberal

I think I am going to abandon the label "liberal". There are too many things going on under that name that are totally against my values, just as much of what I find on the conservative side is against my values. We are seeing the rise of an "alt-left" movement, militant, violent, and authoritarian, trying to dictate how everyone else should be.

I believe in treating all people with kindness, and that is how I want to be treated. I am anti-one-side-ist. I want all people to respect each other's needs, and be able to listen to each other and walk a mile in their shoes before we judge.

This is not naive idealism. "Oneness" is hard work, very hard work. It is difficult to put your own cherished beliefs aside long enough to understand why someone believes things that you find abhorrent. And once you find common ground in your beliefs, it is still very difficult to find a solution that we can all live with. But what alternative is there, other than suppressing the freedom of all you disagree with, so that you can have power to make the world the way you want? How many good meaning folk have started out to better the world, and wound up being the problem instead of the solution?

I passionately believe this can be done. Any successful relationship has gone through the phases of disagreeing, trying to change the other side, seeing them as wrong and you as right, having to look inside and recognize your own shadow, and learning how to reconcile and compromise so you can build a life of love together. The same must be done politically between warring factions. Society is made up of individuals, and ultimately we have to deal with our shadow side if we want healing in our nation and in the world.

Portland Protests

On my mind this morning are the protests here in Portland that took place on Sunday. People shouting slogans back and forth at each other, taunting, teasing, insulting, bullying.

I felt incredibly sad watching them, opposite sides of a street, bullhorns blaring, police keeping the crowds apart. Like children, taking sides, pretending their team is somehow superior. There was absolutely no possibility of heart-connection, of the two sides developing an understanding and a warmth between them. I do not doubt each side left with a deeper conviction of how right they are.

It is so obvious to me that gun control, or immigration, or Trump, or Russia, is not the issue. The issue, huge and bleeding right in front of us, is our inability to hear each other. We ignore the legitimate fears and needs of the other side, because our side is too filled with our own fears and angers to have the capacity to notice any concerns but our own. Our minds are poorly designed when it comes to seeing clearly that we are all in the same boat, that we rise or fall together, and that we as a whole must be understood and cared for, rather than splitting off some part of us and condemning it.

The crowds egg each other on, building up the beastly energy to the point where we totally lose our ability to see the humanity across the street from us, and they become stupid, ignorant, or worse, immoral, evil, to be shunned or destroyed. They are a part of us! We destroy a part of ourselves when we destroy an opposing side, and we will be a one-sided cripple if we succeed. We need both sides, or else critical elements will be lost and we will be blind to certain dangers the other side saw clearly.

Trump is not the problem. Society is not the problem. "They" are not the problem - not the real problem. The problem is the disowned parts of ourselves that we project outwards onto others, and then try to pummel, mock, berate, or eliminate. We are so numb that we do not feel the pain of the side we are destroying - the desperateness, the sense of injustice, the sense of not being cared about in the side we are choosing to reject. It is as if one part of our body has become numb to us, and the other part is trying to burn it off.

The trick is to deal with the deep pain that comes from becoming conscious of how we treat the other side, without then turning around and berating ourselves for the cruelty we have inflicted. That only splits off another part of ourselves for us to berate, and we repeat the abuse. The trick is bravely feeling the pain that comes with consciousness - to stop being numb to the hurts and fears of those we have ignored, and to step into compassion. Yes, there are real world issues to be decided on, and they are not simple - but no healthy solutions will be found if built by this brutal part of us that is focused on self-protection rather than compassion.

True solutions can only come from an integrated society that has compassion for all of its people. Any solution that only satisfies a portion of the people will forever deal with the portion that is not sufficiently heard and considered. They will rise again, as we have seen, because our insistence to get our needs met is paramount to our existence. It is the stuff of life that causes us to be here.

Separation, as it has been said time and time again, is illusion - interconnectedness is the reality. Our illusions only perpetuate our pain and our destructiveness. Interconnectedness is not easy or simple - we need to get our "big boy pants" on, and do the hard work of connecting with others - of learning compassion and empathy while not losing our own vision and truth. We need each other. And it's not easy opening to someone who seems so opposite to us. It takes a lot of looking past the outward appearance to the heart underneath.