By Peter Gabel
MY ADVICE TO CANDIDATES IS AS FOLLOWS: READ Eckhart Tolle's A New Earth. Seek to quiet your monkey mind as it races from what to say to this group, what to say to that group, how to deal with the media, how to deal with your staff, what to do about the polls, while containing your anger at public mischaracterizations of your views.
Seek to become Present. Present as you talk to your staff and the media about what you believe. Present as you address a human community through the media. Present as you face each of the thousand natural shocks of a presidential campaign.
The single most important source of suffering for the people that you are speaking to and seeking to lead is not their fear of physical harm for themselves and their loved ones, and not their fears about the economy or lack of health care or any other material need: it is their experience of disconnection from a substantial, meaningful, authentic reality.
Surrounded by people who are always keeping their distance by averting their gaze and playing this or that artificial role, bombarded by messages from this same artificial environment telling them they are somehow lacking in this or that quality or attribute, bathed in media images whose predominant emotion is cynicism toward everyone and everything, the people that you are speaking to are longing to be anchored by the presence and authenticity of a compassionate and loving spokesperson for the group who confidently projects his or her energy toward the possibility of our creation together of a compassionate and loving world.
To manifest that Presence is your job. Nothing else.
Becoming Present will be challenging for you because you must conduct your campaign through a mediating screen of images that will resemble the fun house at an amusement park, except that there's nothing fun or amusing about it. Everything you say will be subject to distortion as it passes through the ether of media scrutiny. Those who cannot embrace your manifestation of authentic Presence and the call for authenticity that implicitly accompanies it will seek to cynically undermine your every word and gesture. And since you cannot control the process by which your views and character and aspirations are stolen from you and replayed in alien form to sectors of the population whose votes you may need to win the election, you will be pressed by your staff to be more and more careful, to constantly "position yourself' taking account of the spin that is about to be put on your words, to move to the Center independent of your actual convictions, to stand for as little as possible and still win because the more strongly you stand for something the easier it is to make the consequences appear to lead to some kind of "disaster."
The mediating screen of images through which you must pass to reach the real human beings you are addressing is constituted by the very same impulse toward doubt, cynicism, and collective flight that has placed your actual listener in his or her isolation, his or her spiritual prison. But that anxious circulation of doubt and fear about whether it is possible to connect with others in an authentic loving and compassionate way is precisely what your listener longs to be liberated from. And that mediating ether of doubt and cynicism and fear and flight from one another is made of "nothing" besides its own noise. Your own capacity for love and compassion can penetrate it because it is made of something, your very own Presence.
This then sets for you your task: Become Present as a manifestation of love and compassion for your human listeners who long most of all for the affirmation of this Presence in themselves but who can only be brought into contact with it by having it "recognized"; project your Presence through the mediating environment while taking account of the environment's distorting effects without altering Who you are; and create a mandate for bringing closer the world that we all know ought to be.
Peter Gabel is Director of the Institute for Spirituality and Politics, and Associate Editor of Tikkun.
