Newspaper Vendor

My newspaper this morning gave me hope. And brothers and sisters, that doesn’t happen very often. On the front page, taking up about one third of the sheet, there was an article entitled “Trying to open the ‘inner eye.’” It was a piece that described the new Center for Conscious Living, an offshoot of the Church of Religious Science, which the pastor said is “reinventing the idea of church, with ‘stand you up music,’ meditation, singing, chanting and ‘an inclusive message of self-empowerment.’” Above this article, the top story was about our governor’s clean energy plan, in which 25 percent of the Wisconsin’s energy must come from wind, solar, biomass, or other renewable sources by 2025. My friend Jack Kisslinger, whose website is called Planet for Life, tells me that 25% might be a good number, but it has to be 25% of reduced overall energy consumption. So the governor’s goal is at least a step in the right direction. These days we’re at less than 5%!?! But the miracle is that some of Wisconsin’s business leaders are lining up behind the governor, including executives of Johnson Controls, an auto parts and building products manufacturer. All of this combined with the EPA’s stricter standards for smog-causing pollution made me ebullient.

I’ve been really angry at the Obama administration lately, so it was nice to agree with them for the first time in what seems like months. The last straw for me was Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize speech, coming right on the heels of his announcement about expanding the war in Afghanistan. Until then had I tried to see his incrementalism as “realism.” But Rabbi Michael Lerner‘s editorial in the latest Tikkun, “Afghanistan: Obama Capitulates to the War Makers,” says it all. I agree with Rabbi Lerner that Obama’s announcement represented “a decisive endorsement of the strategy of domination.” And then Obama’s Nobel Prize speech tried to justify his decision by saying that we will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes, that “Evil does exist in the world.” When Obama used that final phrase, I stopped listening to him. Christopher Hedges‘ article in the same Tikkun, “Celebrity Culture and the Obama Brand,” describes the shift in my opinion at that point: “President Obama does one thing and Brand Obama gets you to believe another.” I stopped believing in Brand Obama.

It’s hard to be optimistic given the world situation these days. But I believe that the three stories that filled me with hope today are related in a way that may not be immediately apparent. Without more spiritual exploration, people in this country will have trouble opening their minds to the changes in store for us. And those changes are going to be very fast, whether for the better or for the worse. As I said in a post several months ago,

[W]e have reached a point in our history where change is occurring so rapidly that we need to rely on our own know-how and skills, not just those of the “experts.”….Expertise may sometimes help us, but I believe that we also need to teach people how to tap their own inner resources, their own wisdom, intuition, and experience, in order to keep up with the change that’s taking place.

Seeing with the “inner eye” — with our unconscious — is exactly the type of vision we need to practice. As I continued,

Scientists used to think that the unconscious was the dumb cousin of the conscious mind, driving most of the time on autopilot. But now we know that the unconscious mind constantly monitors both our external and internal environment. When it judges the information gathered to be important enough, it engages the conscious mind, and we become aware of something.

As a result, the unconscious seems to be the source of our creativity and our insight. And we always need more of that, because it allows people to integrate complex information in a more holistic way.

The people who attended the Center for Conscious Living yesterday also met in a circle, saying with their geometry that “we’re all equal here.” This is another part of the change we need to create in this culture — acknowledging the inherent worth and dignity of all members of our society — not raising up some people as more valuable than others. When the Conscious Living folks addressed one another with the Sanskrit greeting “Namasté,” they underscored this belief. Namasté means “the divine in me greets the divine in you,” spelling out the source of that equality, namely that we’re all a part of the Sacred. And the pastor goes on to explain that the group’s theology adheres to this mystical notion as well. They don’t have a traditional view of God. Rather, the pastor notes,

We find our connection to the divine in ourselves and in our interactions with each other.

One of the people attending this Sunday service contrasts what he finds at the Center for Conscious Living with other religious settings:

Many spiritual environments are designed to advance one particular spiritual agenda, and that implicitly or explicitly brands other spiritual paths as bad or wrong,…[creating] a space that is not safe for me to explore my own spiritul truth. There is only room in that space to explore someone else’s truth.

I also loved the sensuality of eating dark chocolate and blackberries during the Religious Science service described in my newspaper. In fact, it reminded me of what we Pagans call “Cakes and Ale,” which we enjoy at the end of every get-together. Like Religious Scientists, we don’t subscribe to a body/spirit split. We Pagans see our bodies as sacred, and sensuality and sexuality as holy rituals. For us, all matter is sacred. Seeing the Earth as sacred is another change we need if we’re going to salvage our planet before it’s devastated by a combination of industrial greed and theological indifference.

So I guess the good news today was both spiritual and practical. And I don’t think we can have one without the other.