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Perfection and the need for change: transcript of session 9/16/2001 relating to the New York Trade Center Terrorist Attack.
There's a need for those of us who are engaged on a spiritual path to figure out how to relate to the worldly. At the highest level of spiritual understanding is the recognition that everything is perfect. However the perfection that is recognized in that understanding is not the perfection that we talk about from the perspective of duality, which is perfection as opposed to imperfection. It's something much less personal. It's an understanding that all that is, is, and there's nothing more to be said about it. So it's the perfection of non-judgment, not the perfection of positive judgment. From the perspective of Spirit there is no preference and all that happens on the material plane is the inevitable enactment of karma, which is the unfolding over time and space of expansion and contraction and contraction and expansion. And there's no holding against that. There's a full acceptance of that, in joy. So that's what 'everything is perfect' means. But when you come into the human experience we are dealing with a different understanding of perfect, and that understanding includes every side of every argument, so that the people who have seen fit to fly into the towers of the World Trade Center and cause havoc in New York believe that the world would be closer to perfect if America and the Western bloc were brought down, and we, speaking loosely, we, as America, have seen fit to believe that the world would be more perfect if we could eradicate communism and socialism and any political systems that doesn't include what we call the free market.
The distinction between those two ideas of what it means to approach perfection is very important because, although meditation and stillness are intrinsic to spiritual work, non-participation is not essential to it. Even though you can touch into and understand from the highest perspective that everything is perfect, being a human being on the spiritual path doesn't mean that you don't take action or participate in the world as you find it. What many of us have been receiving through the internet are communications from people who are holding higher consciousness or working with higher consciousness and who are taking action which is political in requesting that people hold the space for a certain level of unfolding. So there's a level of engagement that is possible even while you hold the highest perspective that you can. One of the misapprehensions between groups that are political and groups that are spiritual is that people who are political are averse to spirituality because they believe that if you are spiritual you won't take a position. You will move into a position of neutrality which says, "Everything is perfect exactly the way it is," and that therefore from their point of view you will support the status quo. But the truth is that to be spiritual doesn't mean not to take action, not essentially so. And of course for some spiritual groups, for some fundamentalist spiritual groups, being spiritual means that you take extremely partisan action.
So the perspective that comes in here is the understanding of the unfolding of karma and what it means from this perspective to hold a spiritual position that is also political. How do we, from a spiritual perspective, look at what's happening in the world this week, look at what's happened in NY this week, and hold a position that is healing and supportive of a certain political movement? In order to do that we have to hold an understanding of the unfolding of karma as we are seeing it in front of us. This is the recognition that since as a nation we participate in the creation of a world that is based on war, it is inevitable that we will have an experience of war. That's the simplest way that we can put it. And if we understand what's happened in New York at the deepest level as the unfolding of karma - not personal karma but national karma - then we begin to take a political perspective that is in line with spiritual unfolding.
There are several different levels at which we participate in creating a world based on war. One is simply the level at which we, as America, manufacture and export arms; we forment war in different parts of the globe because we say that our way of doing things is right and their way of doing things is wrong; we have trained terrorists and sent them out into the world. So we have created a karma that we will inevitably meet, and there's no avoiding that. It's a national karma not a personal karma which means that the people who were on those planes and the people who were in those towers did not personally deserve to die. But we all participate in a system that allows violence to happen and so we all reap the karma. We experience ourselves as caught in a dilemma because we feel helpless in the face of the policies of our leaders, and yet we all reap the karma, actually the whole globe does, and so we're left with a recourse that is deeply spiritual, which is to work our own war very deeply in ourselves. And in a way that is the only way that we can participate in shifting this karma, even given the understanding that it can still land on us. Because the community of people that is against war at every level has to get much bigger before we can shift the political realities on the planet. In the meantime, we are caught in this dilemma: we participate in a system that we don't like and because we participate in it we're going to reap the karma of it. And that's true of the whole western world, not just America.
So the working through of that karma for us as individuals is a deep exploration into our own racism, our own separatism, our own greed, our own aggression towards and rejection of that which is different, and all of the places in our lives where we close our hearts out of fear. That's the work we can do that makes a difference, and that difference is as though we're all pebbles that jump into a pond and the work that we do ripples out from there. That's how the spiritual journey of emptying and opening can meet a situation like this in which violence has been acted out so intensely and work with it.
One of the tasks of this work is to not deny our fear and our anxiety and our grief. It's very tempting. It's a temptation we succumb to nationally all the time, to deny those levels of truth and to act out a toughness, and by doing so inviting that which is tough to meet us. In order to interface with the political world and with the world of power politics we have to keep examining whatever is in our hearts that is not open to love. This doesn't mean if something happens that throws us into grief that we don't go into anger or rage. We do. But we keep opening our hearts so that we can come through them into acceptance and resolution. It's only then that we can walk forward with solutions that can shift the paradigm away from war and vendetta and punishment.
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