During a recent conversation, one of my good friends noted in a kind of parenthetical way, “You pay a lot of attention to the world situation,” meaning impeachment and its various aspects and implications.
The subtext of that might have been that he doesn’t. I do have spiritually-motivated friends who see all of the impeachment, Brexit and such things as part of the Passing Show that is the world, or in a mystic’s terms: ILLUSION.
3 examples of the “It’s illusion” school
In writing this little reflection today, I’m examining my own commitment to pay attention. I want to say a little about why I do that, even though on the deepest levels, I think we’re kind of hard-wired with respect to whether we consider such things important.
After the official impeachment happened in the U.S. recently, one Facebook friend of mine posted, “I see little real prospect of anything coming out of it, and intend to focus on really important things,” meaning not the “mental rugby” that we refer to as our political life these days.
According to another friend, an American whom I saw when I visited Australia (where he now resides) in the summer of 2017, “It’s just the name of the guy in charge that’s changed, nothing else.” He seemed to imply that the world’s political system has always been corrupt and always will be.
Still another friend believes that those who “rent space in their heads” to Trump or to getting him out are projecting their own inner Trump onto the situation, rather than dealing with what Dr. Carl Jung would call that “shadow material” and, in his view, facing it by making the process conscious and taking back the projection.
OK. So, there are three separate examples of the “don’t pay much attention” or “the attention is misplaced” school.
My own reason for paying attention
Here is my own thinking, aside from what may indeed by my hard-wiring, or even—and I say this with no sarcasm—my genuinely not being as spiritual as some: I am what I am at this moment of this lifetime. I must act as that person while knowing, or at least believing on some level, that “that person” is what was referred to by Meher Baba in a prayer* as “a living lie of the Truth that is me.”
My mind often goes back to some points made by James Hillman, the neo-Jungian psychologist who used to be featured at Robert Bly’s men’s workshops. Hillman dinged many of the then-youngish men of my generation as being caught in the “Peter Pan” syndrome, or what Jung called the puer aeternus archetype. He saw us, as Bly did, as tending to be “soft men,” and in some sense, boys who never grew up.
Hillman, if I’m remembering correctly, saw the spiritual perspective that “the world is Illusion,” as a symptom of this. He maintained that we live on many different levels at once, and that some of them involve the roles generated by our incarnation in the world and in a specific country, town, etc. He spoke of one’s responsibilities not only as a spiritual being, but as a citizen of a city, state or province, country and planet.
I’ve rarely felt deeply drawn to the things Hillman says. In general, I don’t find as much heart in his writings as there is in those of some others, including Jung himself. However, his words about citizenship have grown on me as the years and then decades have passed.
Today, I feel it is an essential part of my responsibility, as a spiritual being, to contribute my energy and some of my best thinking, speaking, writing and action, to conscious participation in my society. I do this through writing and painting, and sometimes by joining public demonstrations and carrying a sign.
Thus, I attempt to bring awareness, compassion and a sense of justice to the social, cultural and political waking dreams in which I find myself incarnated.
Moving forward with rationalized intuition
So when a person who seems to be a bully and whose method of governing sometimes seems to resemble the M.O. of a mafia don, becomes president of my country, in a perfect storm situation, I feel it behooves me to take a peaceful activist stance.
I feel that the American Constitution and the relative longevity of our system, which has endured for nearly 250 years in spite of a civil war, really has been a boon to humanity and a kind of divine experiment that has mushroomed to many other countries. All in all, it has helped bring humanity a little closer to the divine life that I believe is gradually evolving for both individuals and nations on Earth.
Democracy may not be the final development for nations, and nations themselves may not be the final development for human populations. But even though it’s well-known that Americans have always fallen short of the ideals expressed in our founding documents, we have long carried a positive spark that has inspired others to try to implement their own ideals, even at the cost of life in such places as Tiananmen Square.
Philosopher Thomas Hobbes wrote in the 17th century that on the whole, human life was “nasty, brutish and short.” That statement is a little less true today; partly, I believe, because of the American experiment.
And so, I feel the matters we face today are worthy of my attention. I try to contribute in a way that helps solve, rather than add to the problem, even though, to quote Leonard Cohen, I can say, “Please understand, I never had a secret chart / to get me to the heart / of this or any other matter.”
I use what “rationalized intuition”*— harmony of the head and heart—I am privy to, with the belief that the highest wisdom resides within me and I must trust that I can access it and base my life on such access.
As my spiritual guide Meher Baba dictated in an important discourse, “Spiritual workers cannot afford to ignore the element of time in creation. To ignore time would be to ignore the spiritual work itself. It is imperative to be discriminatingly aware of the flow of time in creation…”
He ends the last sentence with, “and to appreciate fully the supreme importance of the moment in the future that shall witness the universal dispensation of the Truth of spiritual wisdom.”**
And so I, like all of you, go on doing what I feel is the best I can do.
Footnotes
* In 1949, Meher Baba dictated this prayer for some of his close disciples to recite: I am not the body, I am not the mind;
I am not this, I am not that.
I am nothing but a living lie of that Truth that is me;
And unless the lie is dead, the Truth cannot be.
da LORD MEHER (online version), p. 2831
** from “The Task for Spiritual Workers,” Discourses of Meher Baba, p.345
"LEGGI RELATIVI" O, THE TIMES: A spiritual essay about coping with current events»
image 1: Wikimedia Commons; image 2: Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons (Cropped from original); image 3: Wikimedia Commons; image 4: Max Reif; image 5: Avatar Meher Baba Perpetual Memorial Trust
