“If you see that some aspect of your society is bad, and you want to improve it, there is only one way to do so: you have to improve the people. And in order to improve people, you begin with only ONE thing: you can better yourself” Leo Tolstoy.
I started out to write this this post by first reading the concluding paragraph of my last post, especially since it has, ‘to be continued’ and I promised to explain more about what I had just written. Some days I realize that it is not good to eat any old mushrooms growing wild in the woods (joke, in case you are taking this too seriously). I obviously had a train of ideas that I was eager to get down and didn’t before I posted last week. After several minutes of pondering, and another cup of tea, the Aha light went off over my head and I now recall what I was trying to say.
I was reading, that billionaires like Musk, Bezos, and Branson, are investing in ‘commercial’ space travel. For whom? You have more chance of reaching the summit of Everest than being a space tourist. You pretty much have to be a billionaire to afford it. Talk about a closed club serving only the elite. So service is a lot more than simply meeting someone’s wants or desires. I suspect that most of us would love the option to fly into space and see this gorgeous planet from 200 miles up, but the reality for the majority is that a photograph is as good as it is going to get. The service I was talking about in the last post is the one where you simply help other people all while being as authentic in yourself. I would put this as the fist step in creating a cooperative community.
There is nothing selfish about taking care of yourself first. It’s a lot like the airline attendants telling you to put on your own oxygen mask before you help anyone else. The proverbial extension on this is that you do need to help others put on their masks after you have put on yours, otherwise that would be selfish. Even the person with no money can offer spiritual service. Giving an encouraging smile, praise to lift someone’s esteem, words of comfort in times of stress of grief, sharing one’s heartfelt compassion and Love freely with no expectations, and looking at life with the eyes of goodness, are all forms of invaluable service that raise us up to act and believe in our better angels. It also means to actively seek what spiritual gurus call enlightenment. That is, whether in thought or action, we should dig more deeply into ourselves and think or act in a way that is somehow more highly evolved or enlightened to embrace life as special.
Having said that, being enlightened is only a first step. There are many ‘enlightened gurus’ out there who are just self-righteous and self-serving arseholes. While they may openly preach spiritual principles, they do so egotistically. Avoid these fakes. Find those that lift you up without any need to be acknowledged for what they do. To serve your better angels is to improve yourself even as you help improve others. As I tell people I work with, I am a ‘Life Guide’ and not a ‘Life Guard.’ I nurture and guide people to find the enlightened solutions in their lives, not to save them from life’s hard experiences. I help people understand service as a way to live while still being authentic and sovereign individuals.
Helping people attain a spiritual path is not just fuzzy, warm feelings, but a path that connects us and the planet on a real basis that promotes harmony. Yes, you might want to protest all the injustices towards humanity and the planet, but protesting alone is just negative energy that promotes more anger and division. We might want to change the world and system that is ruining it, but we mustn’t lose sight of the many wonderful things that society has that we want to save. These include things like beauty in all its forms; indigenous wisdom, knowledge, and worldview; organic agriculture (e.g., permaculture, poly-cropping, Agri-forestry); even traditional and modern spirituality if it connects us instead of creating division and separation.
British Indian Satish Kumar has spent much of his life protesting all manner of global injustices, but he emphasizes that protesting is a start but a failed one if that is all that happens. Protest must be followed by protection of what is good and works. And then the protesting and protection must lead to rebuilding what is not right or good. Of course, good is subjective, but when framed through the eyes of justice becomes more obvious. My colleague Julian Agyeman has written extensively about JUST sustainability justice (see previous posts Adapting to Transformational changes 3 – Creating dialogue for ‘JUST’ Sustainability for Transformational changes {December 2018} and Reconditioning Ourselves: Alternative Perspectives 8 – Walking the Talk of Green Business and Sustainability? Part 3 {February 2020}) and importantly emphasizes that JUST sustainability is not a left-right politics where separation is rampant. Without environmental and ecological justice there can be no true human justice, and vice-versa. Focusing solely on human justice without directly linking it to all the justice movements is self-defeating and merely continues the problems of separation and division.
A spiritual focus creates unity because it is the logical and better way to find harmony where everything is seen as connected. This is what I tried to emphasize in my last post where relational research looks at the whole picture and not reductionist parts of it. When we focus on what values are truly important, the tools and the end-goals to reach unity become obvious. Currently we treat everything as a commodity (including humanity) to achieve economic goals, when the opposite is what we want. Connection brings unity because it celebrates diversity, uniqueness, and harmony as part of the whole system without having to reduce it to component parts. Wholeness occurs when all life serves all other life because true resilient community is the wholeness of all life interacting. Once humans realize this, they can step back into the web of life that has flourished on this planet for eons instead of continuing to wreck it as they have done for a mere few hundred years.
“We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature” Abraham Lincoln
To Be Continued ……………………
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