THE CONSCIOUS ACTIVIST

Where Activism Meets Mysticism

James O’Dea

Dedication

‘O Marvel, a garden within the flames.’
Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi

Torchbearers for justice, for healing and for unconditional love, it is time to pass through the flames together: the garden of the future we have longed for now draws near.

Contents

Preface

PART ONE – INITIATION

Chapter One: Training Wheels for a Young Mystic

Chapter Two: Training Wheels for a Young Activist

Chapter Three: Deeper Initiations for a Committed Activist

Chapter Four: Deeper Initiations for a Committed Mystic

Chapter Five: The Cauldron of Mystical Initiation: I

Chapter Six: The Cauldron of Mystical Initiation: II

Chapter Seven: The Cauldron of the Activist: I

Chapter Eight: The Cauldron of the Activist: II

PART TWO – INTEGRATION

Preamble: What Integration Means

Chapter Nine: Ancient Seeds of Integration

Chapter Ten: Spirituality and Service: The Deeper Work Begins

Chapter Eleven: Native Approaches to Spirit in Action

Chapter Twelve: Sacrifice: Getting to the Heart of Mysticism and Activism

Chapter Thirteen: The Universe Speaks

Chapter Fourteen: Humanity’s Healing

Chapter Fifteen: A New Science of Consciousness, Connection and Compassionate Engagement

Chapter Sixteen: The Conscious Activist Comes of Age

Notes

Bibliography

Preface

Activists and mystics are pioneers and adventurers. They leave the safer territory of comforting spirituality and charitable service and venture to the edges of personal and social transformation. They have a degree of longing and passion that makes some people uncomfortable. They have an unsettling degree of intensity. They ache for breakthroughs. They destabilize normality. They rock the boat of acceptability. They go off the radar screen of life’s prescribed trajectories only to return bursting with ecstatic insight, fiery conscience and new codes to rouse us from a sleepy moral conformity.

Both mystics and activists let their imagination catch fire. Rather than experiencing vision as an abstraction, they join with it as active participants. Vision enters into them and courses their veins until it is fully embodied. They are called relentlessly to step into the cauldron of real-life verification in order to bring airy concepts into flesh-and-blood reality. The path of enactment can be clumsy, painful and dangerous, but there is no other way for those who want to live the reality others conceptualize but hesitate to incarnate.

Have you been fed enough concepts lately? It is exciting to hear so many leading-edge concepts on everyone’s lips but, for my part, I get indigestion if I swallow too many great ideas at once. I need to savour them. I need to experience them in action.

One way important concepts move from a heady parade of ideas to full integration with my heart, my gut and the grip I have on reality is when I see them played out in lived experience. I like to see alluring concepts actualized in richly revealing personal narrative and tested out in the context of societal complexity. I am a little wary when intellectual brilliance feels disembodied.

It helps me to know how people live the scintillating ideas they present to others. I want to know how they got there; how they grew up and what were the pivotal intersections in their personal growth. This is why I decided to share with you those key pivot points in my own journey. There is more than a full spread of ideas about activism and mysticism in this book, but it is my hope that you will also enjoy the adventure of how they were explored and tested and finally integrated.

There is more biographical material in the early chapters on my childhood and adolescence – sharing our origins is an essential part of revealing our growth and development. In contrast, there is more conceptual material in the later chapters laying out the collective growth, integration and quickening of this era of unprecedented transition to a more conscious planetary civilization.

What is intended is that you experience the contrasting requirements of authentic growth for both activist and mystic before you can come to a full understanding of how they integrate in a visionary embodiment for a new humanity. The Conscious Activist describes the many rigorous initiations needed before the power of the activist can become one with the power of the mystic.

The very great idea of a unifying field of engaged spirituality and transformative action, emerging as an earthly reality of universal peace and justice, is not sold at the front door of this book. It is a vision that cannot be accessed without participation. The Conscious Activist will reveal the sacred conjunction of mystic and activist as you enter into its stories, as you meet its many wisdom-keepers and reflect on the threading of ideas whose time has come to ignite the integration of ecstatic spirituality and inspired action.

PART ONE

Initiation

Chapter One

Training Wheels for a Young Mystic

The author describes his formative mystical experiences as a child and a dramatic fall from grace which leads to a reflection on the nature of spiritual guidance, mystical communion and purification as one begins the mystic quest for direct experience of divine reality.

It was three in the morning. I was thirteen. My suitcase was scuffed from being hauled through woods and across rocks and bracken. I had made my escape partly across some wild Cheshire countryside to avoid being seen by even a stray car out for its own mysterious reasons on those remote roads in the dead of night.

I could never have explained myself. As inventive as I was, a young boy dragging a suitcase in a very lonely place at that time of the night would have a hard time explaining himself, when in reality he had committed a robbery and was on the run.

But now I dropped down onto the country road. I had no other option. I had an early train to catch from the nearest town of Macclesfield to the big city of Manchester. From there I would take a plane out of the country. It was a big plan; one that called for unflinching resolve. It would be sheer ignominy to be caught.

About half a mile down the road a red telephone booth presented itself whimsically out of nowhere. These famed English telephone kiosks can be found in the most unlikely of places. As I held the telephone in my hand, about to call the operator to check on the time, a wave of anxiety finally made its way into my otherwise focused and well-paced adventure. I stalled.

It had been only hours since I had stolen the money. Could somebody have woken up at the seminary and found that my bed was empty or the safe had been robbed? Or would I simply arouse suspicion as a young person calling from a remote rural telephone booth in the middle of the night to ask the time? With phone in hand I felt the shocks and jolts of adrenaline as I contemplated the powers of the world – parents, priests, policemen – who would soon be at my heels. But for the moment I was free. I dialled the number, got the time, and then picked up my pace as I headed for the railway station.

In my heart I knew that God was not entirely displeased with me. Somewhere in the cosmos I had a co-conspirator who was smiling down on this more than brash escapade and having fun with shuffling the deck of possible life trajectories to guarantee mine would be anything but a linear destiny path. It was of little concern to such a high cosmic being that I could suffer bitter consequences for my action, since bitterness can be a stern but effective teacher.

One thing was very clear: my priestly vocation had come to an abrupt end. Instead of living at a seminary, there was a distinct possibility I might find myself in an institution for young criminals.

What brought me to this moment cannot be reached by simple addition: who we are and why we act the way we do is a vast equation and one best not accounted for by a flippant psychology or without an understanding of the metaphysics of a universe finely calibrated to the laws of action and karmic consequence.

My bold raid on the Bursar’s office and dramatic departure from the Salesian seminary at Shrigley Hall have a natural connection to my seventh birthday. Age seven is the time of one’s first spiritual coming of age in the Catholic Church. It marks the year when one can receive Holy Communion. My brief, intense and formative experience with Catholicism begins there, as does my first mystical experience.

You might think of a seven-year-old child’s experience of Communion in the context of a religious ritual as peripheral to any core mystical experience. In my case it was acute and real. Confession, on the other hand, with its murky exploration of guilt and shame, held no resonance of deeper spiritual energy.

But waking up on First Communion day and putting on new clothes (white shirt and shiny shoes), arriving at the church and seeing all the girls in white dresses, flowers everywhere, a sea of candles, fragrances and incense – it all heightened a sense of expectation.

As I kneeled in my place after having received the Host, the priest’s words became my own as I gave back the phrase: ‘The Body of Christ’. The words were repeated effortlessly. As I swallowed the wafer my focus deepened. It was as if the sun was rising inside my body with golden sparks of sunlight. It was intimate, between me and the sun-God. I was experiencing a drop of essence, the home of my true self within the Self.

Another child tapped me on the shoulder to indicate that all the children were now seated and not kneeling. I smiled. I knew that in a few moments we would be outside the church receiving money and sweets from our relatives.

How seamlessly a child moves through different states without naming them or owning them as property. How fluidly spirit and emotion dance and flow together before our advancing egos claim them as real estate to be presented, bought and sold in the marketplace of others’ attention or admiration. We have a natural presence as children, when we are healthy and cared for, which we can commune with again and again as we age. For the presence of the inner child is nothing less than a portal to timeless unconditioned being.

Though now grey and bearded, I am here with this child as I recapture my early experience of heart-expanding inner radiance while putting sweets from beaming relatives into my mouth in one continuous moment of graceful flow.

And from here I can see the utter simplicity of consciousness deliciously immersed in the moment, like Krishna with his face in the cream. There is a fusion of both the senses and the spirit in mystical experience, and the conjunction of both shines through in the unrehearsed authenticity of the child.

My experience in the church was the first glimmer of what one might think of as conscious communing with spirit. At some point as an embryo we begin communing with our mother as an inseparable and undifferentiated aspect of our life source. By the age of seven, what was unconscious communication with the ground of our being in the form of mother begins to consciously differentiate as self-conscious identity. We grow out of our mothers both literally and figuratively. If we’re lucky we are allowed to swim freely in the mother’s essence until we are ready to hear the call of our own – until we are ready to emerge as ourselves. Our mothers herald our unique emergence and hold the lantern that guides us to be true to ourselves. A great mother provides both our original experience of ecstatic soulful communion and the highest invitation to manifest our own unique identity without severing the state of oneness.

In my case my mother discovered she was carrying me in the midst of her own first really bitter life crisis – the tragic and untimely death of her first daughter at the age of eleven. In her womb the cells of my body formed around her trauma and suffering. I grew inside her suffering and her heroic attempt to send me all the love I needed to emerge safe and healthy.

It is not surprising that I emerged sensitive to other people’s pain and suffering. Yet I was equally attuned to love and laughter. My birth marked the end of a period of mourning and a time to celebrate new life.

This encoded pattern of being attuned to the heart of pain, while at the same time celebrating new life and joyful possibilities, has repeated itself throughout my life. An alchemical mix of bitter and sweet is at the very core of my journey as a mystic and activist and has guided me to explore wholeness. One can only fully experience life’s wholeness when one learns not to avoid or fixate on either the bitter or the sweet. Our lives are poised between the bitter and the sweet.

While I was a sensitive seven-year-old I was also free-spirited and wild enough to rush at bulls in the field, hang over cliffs’ edges and swing from the branches of high trees. We lived at the seaside south of Dublin. Within the parameters of being home for meals I was given freedom to explore the world around me. Nature requires us to be in this state of freedom if we are to learn how to be carried into its own soul-lifting reality.

In summertime I would slip out of the house at dawn. In the early morning you could taste the salt in the sea breeze and feel the cleansing light of the new day.

When the tide was right I would get in the water near the surf’s edge and float on my back. It was like going into deep space. Time dissolved. There was no effort. I just floated. I would come back from this extended, undulant floating like an astronaut landing back on solid ground. For a while I could feel all that space within me as I walked home.

In the cold weather it was too frigid to go in the water, and the place where you could get pulled into vivid interior space was watching the turf and coals burning in the fireplace. There were kingdoms of red and gold, fiery palaces and spirit beings running through temples and melting in the raging heat of the sun. Later in life when I heard that native peoples stare into the fire during peyote ceremonies and during Mayan fire ceremonies I understood this form of spirituality, because in my own way I had practised it as a child.

Not long after my first Communion experience I told the parish priest that I wished to become an altar boy. I was inducted quickly. To the amusement of both the priest and the congregation at the end of serving my first early morning mass when the priest turned to offer final benediction, I also turned to the assembled parishioners and blessed them. When we were back in the sacristy he informed me that it was a little premature for me to be offering the blessing but that someday I could give blessings if I became a priest.

The seed was sown. I knew I would be called.

As the year progressed I became more familiar with the Catholic versions of heaven and hell and the concepts of guilt, shame and redemption. At the same time that the tiny shoots of a priestly vocation began to form in me, there was something about the concept of hell that seemed wrong. In fact I can remember kneeling at my bedside and telling God that I really didn’t believe He could punish anyone for all eternity. I prayed that Lucifer would one day be freed, since after all he had once been one of the brightest of angels. At some point the feeling and the prayer intensified into a more concrete declaration: ‘I can’t believe in You if some people are going to be tortured for all eternity.’

A quarter of a century later, still unable to bear the idea of torture, I became the Washington office director at Amnesty International.

I like to play with the thought that my prayer to save the Devil was so disturbing to my guardian angel that he sent a message to the higher authorities, ‘I have this young Irish boy who is praying for the Devil, what should I do about it?’; and that the answer that came back was, ‘Don’t worry we’re working on giving him a priestly vocation – that should sort it out.’

Over the next four years my desire to study for the priesthood reached such an intensity that my parents had to relent even though they thought the whole thing was terribly premature.

When I was ten my family migrated from Ireland to England. By age eleven I had identified the Salesian college at Shrigley in Cheshire as the perfect place to begin an early seminary experience. I was not daunted by the fact that it was far from home.

After we had said our goodbyes and my mother and aunt were boarding the bus to take the long journey back to London, I felt a wave of loss and grief. I couldn’t eat much at tea time. By bedtime I was disconsolate and once the lights went out I let the tears stream. I woke to the fearful sense that I had possibly made a great mistake.

Then one morning, during our early pre-breakfast prayers, it happened seamlessly and without effort. I took refuge:

Soul of my Saviour Sanctify my breast

Body of Jesus be my saving guest

Deep in Thy wound Lord

Hide and shelter me

So shall I never,

Never part from Thee¹

I understood intuitively that His wound was a place of sacred tenderness and vulnerability, not a morose place at all. Though young, I already knew something about the subtleties of wounding. As we left the chapel I could feel my strength returning. I was home and where I wanted and needed to be.

Thank God that those priests, brothers and novitiates understood that a young pre-adolescent person can truly have an authentic spiritual life. I am so grateful that the spiritual training at Shrigley was not adulterated by phony psychology or any patronizing attempt to dumb down the reality that we are capable of spiritual experience whatever our chronological age. Maturity can help with many things but we should never, ever deny a child’s ability to commune with spiritual reality.

I spent more than a year and a half at Shrigley Hall and most of my time there was profoundly joyful. I owe so much to my early seminary experience for helping me cultivate a deep spiritual life.

I was given ample space and time to experience reverence, to explore quiet and to taste silence. Special days of silent retreat became an elixir for me. In June, for example, we were given retreat days to contemplate the Sacred Heart. ‘Just remember your own heart is the only place where you can feel a connection with the Sacred Heart,’ the priest had advised us.

Out walking on those days, I felt warmth in my own heart. It never felt as if another presence came into it: it just expanded. But just as my earlier childhood experiences of floating in the sea had given me a sense of inner spaciousness, feeling my heart get warmer as I walked across the fields also gave me the sense that I was expanding from the inside out.

There are times in my life when I have ached to feel again that simplicity of flow that I entered into with such fluency as a twelve-year-old on a spiritual retreat. No mystic can get very far without learning how to kindle the heart.

But things were about to change and the hallowed grace of childhood would soon be over.

In my second year at Shrigley I began to notice a boy whose name was Lynch. He was an awkward and sad-looking boy. It was clear that his awkwardness had led to his being shunned. My conscience and my sense of justice pricked me to do something about Lynch’s situation. I decided to befriend him in every way possible. I sat with him at meals. I walked with him in the Quad. I encouraged him to join in communal games. I know he appreciated this, since I was popular and well-liked by my peers. But my other friends did not appreciate it. How could they be jealous of such a friendship? Whatever their reasons, they began to subtly ostracize me. I slowly built up a sense of moral indignation at this kind of treatment. Couldn’t they see that I was mirroring the values that should be at the core of a priestly vocation? Maybe I was overdoing it but I held on to the moral high ground and knew for certain that I should be with the outcast rather than trying to regain my standing in the popularity contest.

In some ways this was the beginning of the unravelling. What happened next was both ominous and enlightening.

I woke up one morning with a headache and a slight fever. I thought about telling the priest that I needed to go to the infirmary but on consideration I decided to push back any such thought as weak-minded. I dressed and went off for early morning mass. During mass I began to feel decidedly off-peak. Nonetheless, I received Holy Communion, half-expecting that its miraculous power would heal me. When we rose to leave the chapel I began to feel nauseous. With all my strength and with all the will I could muster I resisted the desire to retch. But as I got to the church door my body’s impulses took over and I threw up.

It did not take long for a group to form around me. I noticed that they had gathered not so much to support and help me but to gaze at the strange sight on the floor. What fixated their attention was the sight of discernible pieces of white wafer amidst other bilious matter that had come from my stomach. A few of the boys gasped and called out, ‘Father, Father come quickly!’ As the priest approached, still in his gold and green and white vestments, he too made a gasping sound and then uttered the terrible word: ‘Sacrilege!’

He called for a chair to be brought for me, asked someone to fetch some other priests including the Rector, and then he dismissed the other boys. All I could hear in my mind was sacrilege. I had committed a sacrilege. When the Rector and the others arrived they formed a circle and conferred with each other intently. Finally, they opened the circle and gave me their full attention. ‘You will need to go to the infirmary young man. You probably have the’ flu. There is no need for you to worry. This was an unpremeditated sacrilege. There is no blame. You did not intend any harm. Father will accompany you to the infirmary and we will do what is necessary here.’

All day long as I lay in the infirmary I tried to understand the concept of unpremeditated sacrilege. I had ingested the Body of Christ and then my body had rejected it. Somehow this reflected badly on me and yet I also knew that was absurd. What I threw up could not be the Body of Christ. This became a hugely complicated theological question. If the Spirit of Christ had entered the wafer and changed its atoms into His body and blood so that the communicant could become one with his Lord, could not the process be reversed so that, in the case of someone like myself throwing up, what came out of the mouth had no divine components to it? How could it be a sacrilege?

By the end of the day, feverish or not, I started to get clearer: Holy Communion was mystically true but not literally true. The wafer was a ritual doorway for people to experience mystical communion with God. I took a deep breath. I would no longer rely on the blessed wafer as the literal descent of divinity into matter. I knew now as a mystical beginner that for transubstantiation of matter by spirit to occur there must be a conjunction of spirit with spirit – a meeting – not just a oneway journey of spirit into matter. ‘Spirit to spirit through matter … instantaneous communion.’ My mind became exhausted, as if it had been struggling with a hard maths question.

The attending Brother came by to turn off the lights and I whispered to him, ‘There was no sacrilege.’ ‘That’s right,’ he replied. ‘You’ll feel better in the morning.’

Little did he know that the boy who would walk out of the infirmary was not the Catholic who had gone into it. I had discovered that mystical communion did not require the priest’s blessing of the Host, even though the consecration of the bread added to the spiritual drama and acted as preparatory for the most sacred meeting when the soul opens to a higher source or divine reality. In theory one could commune anywhere at any time. But how? To find that out would be my quest.

In one stroke the unpremeditated sacrilege had diminished the role of the priest. Somewhere in the back of my mind I knew my priestly vocation was going to unravel. I just didn’t know yet how quickly or dramatically that would occur.

How strangely circuitous are the ways by which we receive guidance. But these are the ways the Mystery gets our full attention.

My delicate sense of justice was violated when I saw how Lynch and I were treated. Even at the seminary there was more harshness and insensitivity than I had dreamed would exist in such a place. Added to that, the Communion episode had really shaken my view of the role of the priesthood. As if all that were not enough, I quickly became aware of undercurrents of sexual tension.

As quickly as storm clouds can gather, I knew I would have to leave. For weeks I thought about how I would write my parents. How could I explain my sense of disenchantment? How could I explain the loss of my sweet and deep vocation? How could I share this visceral sense that I hadn’t lost God; that what I had lost was my passionate connection to the priesthood and to a fundamental aspect of Catholic dogma? I had used all my energy to persuade them to allow me to pursue the priesthood at such an early age; would they now think I was just careless and immature? It was all so complex to try to explain. I had lived in a kind of spiritual paradise and now I was being kicked out of that garden by something within me that I didn’t fully understand.

I kept telling myself that no one would understand. I had to face this on my own.

That is when the plan slowly began to form. I would simply have to leave on my own. I would have to find out what was really true for me. No one could help me. It was like looking at a blank canvas and knowing that I had to step into it before I could really see where I was headed.

One day as I passed the Bursar’s office the door was wide open and my attention quickly flashed on a safe that was in the wall with the key in it. With a rush of adrenaline I realized I was being shown the way out. In the days that followed, with a kind of poise and dedication I entered the lucid intentionality of the criminal mind. I monitored meticulously the activities of the Bursar’s office. I learned its procedures and timing, and most importantly where the key to the safe was kept. There was only one problem: the office was locked at night.

Once I reached the fateful day of my departure, that afternoon I slipped into the Bursar’s office after he had gone for tea and flicked the latch on the window so that I could break in when everyone was asleep.

I waited until the dormitory was really still and the patrolling priest had finished his final rounds. It took a long time just to get my suitcase from under the bed without making too much noise, to get dressed and to pass through the squeaky dorm doors without bumping my heavy case on the stairs that led to the outside door. Outside it was a starless night, blackish grey. I worked my way to the outside window of the Bursar’s office and climbed up. To my great relief the latch was still in the open position.

Inside the office everything went like clockwork. There was a lot more money than I had thought in the safe, but in my own imagination I wasn’t there to steal but to take what I needed to get me to Ireland. Since the greater portion was left behind, the missing sum might not be immediately noticed.

Every step I took was into that blank canvas. I knew what I was stepping away from but I couldn’t even begin to fathom what exactly I was stepping into. As young as I was, I had smashed the bridge to one clear path of destiny, and with a mixture of fear and courage I was walking onto a much more perilous bridge, over a chasm of impenetrable mystery.

I made the seven-and-a-half mile trek to Macclesfield to catch the early train to Manchester. Standing on the platform, sweaty and red-faced, I met with a few quizzical looks, and this rattled my nerves. Once on the train I breathed a sigh of relief. In Manchester everything became an unreal dreamscape. I booked myself into a hotel for one night and got a one-way flight to Dublin the next day. Yes, there were all kinds of questions from the hotel people and the airline people and to this day I don’t know why I didn’t arouse more suspicion. One thing that helped was that once the priests had realized I was missing, they asked for help in combing the countryside. It was beyond their powers of imagination that I was in a Manchester hotel and would soon be on a plane to Ireland. Of course, they contacted my parents, who fully expected I would call from a London train station within hours. It was only later that they realized I had disappeared into the night, a pretty expert thief – with enough money to make it out of the country.

In Ireland I lasted a few days before getting caught. The kinds of questions I had been able to dodge in Manchester were impossible to evade in the small town where I grew up. A young boy whose family was known to have emigrated to London, walking along the promenade by the ocean with a large suitcase at his side, was something of a giveaway. Friends of my parents called them and said they would take care of getting me sent back to London. Everyone was so kind and gentle with me – even the priests seemed more concerned about my wellbeing than eager to have me arrested. So I got off the red double-decker bus in Catford, south London, and walked up Newquay Road to number 22. My father came out of the house and walked towards me. He hugged me without a word of reproach. He was such a gentle and forgiving soul.

‘Prepare yourself,’ he said. ‘Your mother had serious heart palpitations and was taken to the hospital. She’s back now. Take it easy.’

She was sitting in an armchair with a blanket over her knees and a shawl over her shoulders. I dropped to my knees and put my head in her lap. I was no longer her champion. I was a fallen angel. We both wept. She whispered, ‘Why, why, why?’ I couldn’t answer. I truly couldn’t explain myself. But the thought that I had wounded her was unbearable.

Everything had crashed. I had stepped into the empty canvas and the only thing it really presented was a picture of me falling off a bridge into an abyss. It showed me that I needed to fall from a great height so that I could experience my own shallowness and pride.

What I couldn’t see was that I needed to fall far enough to prepare me for a future life organized around compassion and action.

Every day for the weeks and months ahead the one feeling that stayed with me from daybreak to dusk was a grey experience of loss. I longed to be back in the seminary. I longed for the state of grace it represented. Any flaws in that life now seemed minor. I walked the sterile streets of row houses in southeast London as if through a wasteland. I had hit a wall and it hurt.

As I approached my fourteenth birthday, my soul was spluttering and in its place all I could seem to find initially was a somewhat shattered ego that was not much help in guiding me through my own private purgatory. I began to feel that higher guidance had not entirely abandoned me. It was just that for the time being it had definitely relocated.

Communing, Purification and Guidance

You can appreciate by now that from childhood to adolescence I lived my early years with an unusual degree of intensity. I had reached a precious spiritual height, only to feel I had lost all that had been gained. My descent had been precipitous, at least that was the way it seemed. What I was unable to realize at that age was the degree to which all this might be viewed as something accelerating, rather than impeding, my spiritual development.

What I couldn’t see was the reality that even when you head out in the wrong direction, guidance is always at your side; when your life crashes, you have an opportunity to commune with a deeper reality; when you fall from grace, you are primed for a purification that can set you on a true path.

A mystic will tell you that hitting the wall is an invaluable experience, particularly when it gives you more insight into the nature of the wall. But if we spend too much time nursing our wounds when we hit the wall, we only serve to delay our progress. We can end up blaming the wall. But the thing is, we will meet the wall again and again: it is a combination of the unknown and the unpredictable mixed in with a medicine-brew the universe creatively concocts to wake us up. The wall is also compounded of every choice we make and every action we take.

Just to be very clear, the wall forms inside us even though it has huge consequences outside us. Evolutionary theorists tell us that humankind’s survival depended on how we dealt with wall after wall of obstacle and challenge until we flowered as a species. From a spiritual perspective, the same is true of the inescapable challenges we must face to make it to the deepest reaches of consciousness until we can truly commune with the reality we find there.

The root meaning of commune and communion is sharing. When we commune, an exchange takes place. We give our most intimate attention, which results in a meeting or conjunction of awareness where intimacy is also experienced. Communing creates flow. It heals the illusion of separateness. It expands us – sometimes right in the place where we were most contracted. Mysticism is based on achieving a reciprocal flow of exchange with the source of one’s being.

A mystic is one who yearns to experience an intimate connection with innermost reality and cannot be satisfied by substitutes or symbols for that reality. Anything that blocks the attainment of that reality or pulls the mystic away from it must be removed like a toxin. Mystics quest for exacting growth experiences that wash away all blockages to intimacy. The inner life becomes a universe which then gets purified as it grows. Without purification that inner universe will stay small and contained within the more rigid confines of ego. It will be unable to commune with the greater Self – the soul’s own essence.

There is nothing better than a fall from grace to lead you to the fires of purification.

As I discovered at an early age, purification does not necessarily mean getting holier. It is really about becoming more whole and more integrated. Sometimes we must experience the polarization of saint and sinner before we can move beyond the divided self. If we are to commit our lives to integration of the spiritual and the mundane we will need a lot of insight into what is truly saintly, sinful or sacrilegious. Similarly, the purification process may give us the training wheels of sweet and then bitter experiences before we are capable of experiencing the deeper mystical states of unity wherein the bitter and the sweet will finally merge into a great compassionate heart of oneness. Any notion of instant oneness without passing through the fires of purification should be treated with suspicion. The mystic Sufi poet Rumi reminded his followers that those who jump too quickly into the water will end up in the fire but those who go through the fire will end up in the water.

A central issue for anyone starting on the inner path is to understand the nature of spiritual guidance. The mystic path requires one to move from reliance on external guidance to learning to fathom the nature of internal guidance. A person of faith is directed by their faith’s rules and codes. A rationalist checks the world’s realities against a set of scientific and philosophical principles. An ideologue is governed by political models. The mystic, however, must be prepared to upset the applecart of rules and conformity in the quest to experience an inner knowing of what is true, in contrast to what has been declared true. A mystic has to taste the truth, even when it is very bitter. A mature mystic will travel through many dimensions of truth on the journey to wholeness.

It is obvious that a mystic who is taking off the training wheels of strictly conforming to given rules of propriety and impropriety must summon up the courage to diverge when inner knowing requires it. But here’s the rub: no soft landings, no simple confirmations and no perfect answers are guaranteed. Sometimes the impulse tells you to take the leap and you break a leg. Was the impulse wrong or did breaking a leg lead you to exactly the insight you needed? Guidance will ensure that you learn to recognize both shallow and impetuous impulses before you can attune to more profound and considered ones.

There is a prevalent notion that if you get the right guidance, magic carpets will appear out of nowhere and carry you far away from life’s foggier challenges.

The guidance I have come to know can accompany you through dark tunnels of hopelessness before you are ready to see the beauty of the light ahead. It can show you how to take trauma, abuse and betrayal to profound levels of healing, forgiveness and compassion. Guidance is not an on-off switch that is with us sometimes and then, as if to punish us, absent at other times. Guidance is actually continuous. But it is so great and so comprehensive that we have tremendous difficulty in appreciating its vast design.

When things go well we feel we have been guided. When things fall apart, we can feel as if we have lost the guidance and we cry out to it to show us the way. It is as if higher guidance is supposed to bring us merely good news and good luck.

The reality is that good people can do things that have terrible consequences and terrible things can also happen to good people. Our universe is not a clockwork mechanism of utter predictability. It is creative, dynamic and unpredictable, but it is not anarchic. It provides us with an unfolding journey through consciousness from its entry point in matter to its full realization in spiritual liberation. This is a journey of eons, not a quick drop-in for a game of punishment and rewards.

Our long journey through consciousness, both exhilarating and arduous, would not be possible without guidance. Nor would we attain anything close to spiritual freedom if guidance was like some meddling granny telling us to stop here or go there.

On the contrary, think of guidance as a knowledge process that we encounter only because we are given the freedom to learn in our own way.

With what magnificent design our universe is calibrated to provide us feedback throughout our life’s adventures and learning expeditions! Just how much energy and awareness we put into appreciating that feedback seems to be up to us and will determine how far we go on the journey.

In his or her spiritual DNA, the mystic knows that you start the journey like a tiny speck trying to communicate with a vast universe, but as you grow that universe begins to unfold and flower inside the tiny speck. And when that happens there is communion between the speck becoming a universe and the universe that always existed, unfathomably intimate and ever aware of all our needs for growth and maturation.

We have an inner voice that shuts down guidance that comes with all kinds of conceits, accusations and complaints. But when we fall from grace and ego knows not where to turn to salvage its interests, guidance crowds around us to offer itself. Guidance will unfold for us every subtle path to healing. It is our choice if we bar the door to its signals by imprisoning ourselves in guilt and self-accusation. It must be our decision to look for guidance when we cannot see our way. In the words of Mahatma Gandhi’s favourite Christian hymn: ‘Lead, Kindly Light, amidst th’encircling gloom. The night is dark, and I am far from home. Lead Thou me on!’²

In my own case, the next phase of the journey did not lead me away from a guided life so much as draw me into engaging in the field of action with its own distinct curriculum for growth and learning. And just as my early spiritual life had been accelerated, my activism in the world was to be equally fast-paced.

Chapter Two

Training Wheels for a Young Activist

His first initiations into activism as an adolescent in London gain the author recognition and a media platform. He affirms passion as a spur to action and reflects on moral conscience and the activist’s high horse.

To his credit my father realized that it was not going to be the best idea to send me to The Good Shepherd – the local Catholic school. This was not because I had strayed but because he saw that I would need to be challenged in a very different way. He arranged for an interview at one of the best schools in the area, Haberdashers’ Aske’s Hatcham Grammar School for Boys.

After I had been given an aggressive interview by Mr Hawkins, one of the House Masters, he called in my father and told him I did not qualify. He said, ‘Your son did not understand, for example, the meaning of the word caterwaul.’ All my father said in response was, ‘Thank you. We would just like to have a word with the headmaster before we leave.’

To this day I tear up a bit when I remember how my father begged the headmaster to offer me a place. ‘I promise you he won’t disappoint.’ The headmaster was moved and agreed to take me on a trial basis. I never looked back.

After less than a month at Haberdashers’ I was hauled before my homeroom teacher by the aforementioned Mr Hawkins, who had caught me in a fight. ‘This new boy was caught fighting. I will leave you with the task of punishing him.’ It all began when an older boy flicked off my school cap and stamped on it. This was not upsetting to me, as it had happened many times and was an accepted initiation rite for new boys. But as I was picking up my cap he deliberately taunted and provoked me: ‘Say Irish, did your mother keep the pigs by your bedside or was their trough at your dinner table?’ Now, you don’t bring a boy’s mother into any kind of a slur, let alone one that was demeaning to your country. I simply let rip and punched him in the stomach, shouting, ‘Take it back!’ Almost instantaneously a circle of boys surrounded us as we engaged in combat. Even though my opponent was a classic older bully and was getting the better of me, a sense of honour kept me in the fight. At one point I felt my nose crack before Mr Hawkins intervened. As Hawkins was leaving the room, the Latin teacher said loud enough to be heard: ‘It seems to me you have been punished enough, O’Dea.’ In fact I had a dislocated nose and needed to be sent to a doctor.

My mother, of course, was upset, and wondered what on Earth had happened to her little priest-to-be. My father, on the other hand, did not hide his pride. He said it wasn’t a matter of winning or losing a fight like that; it was more about letting people see they couldn’t trample on your dignity or that of your family or nation. And most importantly, we must always have the courage to stand up to bullies.

As it turns out, I have spent much of my life standing up to bullies and human rights abusers, though hopefully a lot more skilfully and non-violently than I did in the schoolyard all those years ago as a fourteen-year-old boy.

My first English teacher at Haberdashers’ was Dermot Poston. Mr Poston, with his detachable starched white collar shirts and his conservative politics, was a veritable English patriot. In one of my first classes with him he assigned us the task of writing a poetic couplet that would express something meaningful about our lives. When the time for composition was up he said, ‘We’ll hear from the new boy in class. The Irish know how to write poetry.’

I shared the following couplet:

Who is to know that I have been?

Have I crept through life unseen?

‘Don’t you think it’s premature to worry about whether you have been recognized or not at such a young age?’

‘No. If you think it’s all going to happen in the future you will probably not achieve greatness.’

‘Hmmm.’ Then a pause. ‘And what would you like to be seen for?’

Where my next words came from I do not know, I had never heard them before. ‘I wish to be known as a defender of truth and justice.’

‘Well, we appear to have a young moral firebrand in our midst. Good luck with that, O’Dea.’

What was interesting about this encounter was that instead of feeling buoyed up, I felt hollow and shallow as I sat down. I had no campaign for truth and justice. Those were just empty words. How could I even begin to make them a reality?

That was the question.

Not long after the interaction with Poston, I started volunteering for a group called Task Force. We were given the names of old people who needed help with jobs around the house or shopping. The first old lady I was assigned to was a plump redhead whose name was Mrs Biggles.

Mrs Biggles expressed great delight at every little thing you did for her. ‘Oh that’s lovely, dear. Aren’t you an angel! Now come and have a cup of tea.’ It quickly became clear that the reason she had sought help was primarily loneliness. So I took it on. I brought other young people to see her. I even persuaded my family to have her join us for Christmas.

I wanted to do more.

I was given Mr and Mrs White, both blind, and a couple more impoverished than Mrs Biggles. Initially we needed a small team just to get the house in order. It was more chaotic than filthy, but there were layers of dirt, unopened mail and important documents stuffed all over the place and gathering grime. These people were clearly not getting the support they needed. To complicate matters, they lived in a constant war. The tension they created between each other was a way to stave off depression and despair.

My mother came over one afternoon and opened official letters, notices and even checks from the piles of mail we had put together. How could two elderly blind people slip through the cracks like that?

I began to wonder just how many people like this there were in the back streets and poorer neighbourhoods of southeast London. The first sparks of activist passion were ignited.

I began to organize other teenagers to do a street-by-street, house-by-house survey. Every week we identified fresh targets for Task Force. Word got out that we were doing this and we even began to receive calls from people tipping us off about severe cases.

One such case was Mrs Winter.

Mrs Winter’s address was not in one of the poorest neighbourhoods – it was drab but not run-down. I knocked on the door but there was no answer. Then I caught sight of some movement in the curtains of the neighbouring house, and a woman signalling me to come over there.

‘She doesn’t answer the door,’ the woman told me. ‘I think she has dementia. I’m not supposed to do this, but you can go out my back door and climb over the fence. Let’s hope you’re not accused of breaking and entering.’

Once over the fence, I approached the house cautiously. The kitchen door at the back was not locked. As I opened it, the first thing that caught my attention was the open flame of the stove, burning away but not heating a pot or kettle. Then I saw a figure in the hallway flitting into a room on the left. She’s scared, I thought. As I passed through the kitchen, I noticed a stack of plates with congealed food on them. I knocked on the door I had seen her enter and called her name. There was no response. I slowly opened the door to what had once been a living room. The figure of Mrs Winter, as I saw her then, has been burned into my memory. She was huddled in a corner, emaciated and shaking. She seemed to realize quickly that I was not going to hurt her. But she stayed in the corner like a lost child.

‘My name is Mrs Winter. I am cold because my name is Winter. I am the cold Winter.’

The room was full of canned foods stacked as in a grocery store. There were also a dozen packets of mostly mouldy bread. The carpet was strewn with food and candy wrappers. There was a closet door half-open because hundreds of chocolate bars and candies of every variety were spilling out. Everything looked stale and expired.

I went out into the hall. There I became aware of a horrible stench. I opened the other door off the hallway. It was a scene worthy of a horror movie. There were at least three uncooked chickens on the floor by the bed, all in advanced stages of blue-green putrefaction. The sheets and pillows were a frighteningly strange combination of brown and bloody matter.

When I came back to the living room she was in the same position. I could not find a single word to utter. I was trembling with a mixture of confusion, pity and simmering rage.

I did not retrace my route over the fence but deliberately walked out the front door. I wanted the world to see. I told the neighbour to call an ambulance and the police. And I told myself with the high-octane moral fury of a budding sixteen-year-old activist: This is a travesty which must be exposed.

As fate would have it, I was soon given an opportunity to do just that.

The Evening Standard newspaper had just launched a campaign for communities to identify young people who were role models of creative service. Cities and towns across the country were guided on how to select a Teenager of the Year for their location. The area winners were then brought to London to be interviewed by leading journalists and the like, and from that pool twelve finalists were selected. I ended up being one of that group of twelve exceptional teenagers. And I used every moment of the publicity to talk about Mrs Winter and the treatment of the poor and the elderly generally.

It began when I was informed that I had been nominated as a Teenager of the Year for southeast London. I assembled with about a dozen other teenagers to be interviewed by the Mayor, his deputy and someone from the city council. After our interview we were to wait for announcement of the winner and a press conference with the Mayor.

‘What would you like to say to us as a teenager?’ asked the Mayor.

‘I would like to know who is responsible when our senior citizens are abandoned. I want to know when a social worker goes back to her office and files a report that indicates no one was at home and files that report again and again … I want to know what happens next. I want to know how in the 20th century an old lady can be found in her house with rotting chickens, mouldy food and no heating? I want to know, is it all the government’s responsibility when nobody comes to check in on an old blind couple desperately trying to make ends meet? Or is there more humanity needed in our community?’

The interview went much this way: I harangued, I berated, I lectured them. What was thrilling for me at that moment was finding that I had a voice to speak to power. Now Poston could look at me as an authentic ‘moral firebrand’. I was sure I was throwing away any ambition of becoming a Teenager of the Year. But before I left the room I could tell something had happened. The interviewing panel looked stupefied. The Mayor looked at me. ‘This has been deeply refreshing,’ he said. ‘It’s always refreshing when one hears the voice of conscience speak so clearly.’

Then when the selection was announced to the local media, he quipped: ‘This kid has not only kissed the Blarney Stone, it has kissed him back. I would not be surprised if we hear more of this young man.’

During the finalists’ selection process I continued in much the same vein. When the interviewer asked me my views on social issues such as divorce, I skewered the question: ‘Come on, please ask me something more relevant. We are the first post-war generation and we want peace. We want a better civilization. Ask me about Vietnam. Ask me about nuclear weapons. Ask me why our government cannot even give one per cent of its GNP to end world poverty. And if you are going to ask me about a social issue, ask me why poor senior citizens are treated like social rejects.’ The response was similar to that after the first interview. He looked stunned. Again I thought I had blown it. So it was a surprise when I found myself looking at my photograph in the papers.

I was interviewed on the radio and even on TV. On every occasion I mentioned Mrs Winter. As an activist you discover that having a really concrete example to keep hammering away at is a golden opportunity. People started investigating just who was responsible in this case. Eventually I got a letter from somebody who was higher up in the British government, I don’t recall his position. The letter said something like: ‘It appears that you have serious concerns about the way the government has been handling the care of senior citizens. I would be very grateful if you would call my secretary and arrange a meeting to discuss your points.’ I was amazed at how successfully I was stirring things up.

With the arrogance of youth, I wrote back: ‘You know what you need to do and when you do it we can meet.’

By the age of eighteen I was ready to indulge in some hedonistic pleasures as I headed off to college. The budding mystic and activist surrendered to the freedoms of college life. But both streams would emerge again in my twenties, strengthened by my formative childhood and teen experiences.

Passion, Conscience and the Activist’s High Horse

I refuse to get too highbrow or morally subtle about my fight with the bully in the schoolyard at Haberdashers’. As someone who now teaches peacebuilding skills, I think even young people can be taught non-violent communication skills. But I didn’t have those skills at the time. What I did have was an instinct for justice and also a sense that if you cowered before a bully you would end up living in the shadows. So I will not detach the roots of activism from instincts like this which tell us we must confront aggressors and dominators. Research has shown that our sense of fairness is a primal instinct.

Of course, there is a huge learning curve for activists who seek to promote fairness and confront aggression in ways that are truly fair to all and not reliant on finger-pointing – in fact, the transformation of our planet depends on more skilful activism in this regard. But let us honour all those who in innumerable ways have helped to make sure that we have been and will be liberated from all forms of dominance and oppression.

Activism has always gained a great deal from clear intellectual insight and the moral coherence of certain ideas, but it has its roots in passion. Passion ignites a precious spark that generates action. I like to think of this spark as simultaneously coming from spirit, psyche, emotion and intellect. I believe that this super-concentrated charge can enter into us and give us the energy to act in ways we never thought possible. We become instruments of something larger than ourselves.

When I finally opened the front door to Mrs Winter’s house and walked out into the street after seeing the hell she lived in, I was not just opening a physical door, I was opening the door of moral conscience. I was allowing the light in. The simmering rage that I felt allowed me to take charge in a way that my polite self would not have done. It’s not that we need to suppress rage, it’s that we need to channel it into creative action. Mahatma Gandhi once compared anger to electricity which, if properly channelled, can turn raw power into light. In this case the higher frequency of compassion for Mrs Winter’s misery guided rage into bold and effective action.

The heart must be the crowning agency of all action. We will have much to discover about the education and initiations of the heart as we deepen our exploration of activism.

But as we set out on the activist path, our basic tools are a gut instinct for justice, a little fire in the belly, a moral compass and a kind heart; and, of course, the courage to act when that supercharged lightning of integrated passion illuminates the way forward.

All this presupposes that you have some kind of choice with regard to passionate activist engagement. Some, however, are born into searing injustice and grossly authoritarian and oppressive systems; some are born into a fabric of violations that deny them access to education and healthcare or to equal opportunity. For such people activism is not a conscious choice, it is an imperative for survival. It is the daily struggle to liberate themselves from humiliation, prejudice and exploitation. When our own conscience matures, we realize that evolving morality is about experiencing a shared imperative for our collective liberation. I see the emergence of this imperative as an evolutionary development that I would describe as the moral communion of all souls to consciously transform our collective story. Passion and conscience together create waves of transformative energy: they bring gut instinct, the heart’s compassion and a lucid mind into a single potent energy field. And when that happens, we become evolutionary agents of change.

Conscience itself is a very awakening force. It pushes us to a new frontier of morality. Conscience is the spur to action. It doesn’t like to lie dormant. Conscience calls us to break through to the next level. When it is just used as the arbiter of guilt and shame, it becomes sleepy, heavy and dull. But call on it to lead the way and mobilize collective action and it will reveal its reservoirs of available energy. When conscience joins with imagination, real change is possible.

The loss of imagination kills that sense of possibility that we can really transform moral decay in ourselves or in the social order. The bog land of guilt, numbness and indifference steals the vital energy needed to imagine change. But when imagination and conscience combine, we begin to unleash those archetypal energies that are at the root of human progress and evolution. The voice of conscience has the power to dissolve petty ego with its narrow self-preoccupation. Although it’s sometimes confused with adherence to strict religious dictates and narrow cultural mores, conscience has much less to do with conditioned responses than with the courage to break the new ground of a more expansive and inclusive vision for humanity.

But conscience comes with a warning label: side effects can lead to self-righteousness and arrogance if not grounded in true humility. If conscience is invoked in ways that open the collective psyche to higher possibilities, the energy can be so strong that it feels like riding a wave swept along by a higher power. It takes skill to ride that wave, like learning to surf the ‘big one’. Activists can ride the wave in such a way that they develop a superior attitude or a kind of self-righteous disdain for the things or the people they critique. Feeling privileged by being on the side of ‘right’ is a high horse that one must learn to get off early in one’s activist career.

It should be quite obvious that because one’s moral compass has pointed to a higher solution, this does not make those who are part of the problem inferior – obvious with a little maturity, that is, though not necessarily so in adolescence. The activist must learn early to get out of the trap of projecting real social ills and problems onto other people rather than onto the conditions that need to be changed. As we shall explore later, the mature activist develops a deep and accurate understanding of the problem but puts his or her energy into creating the solution.

In my own case, my arrogant response to the government official who wrote me requesting a meeting is an example of getting too high on the horse. It was also an example of fearing that I would have to compromise cherished principles, and that the dialogue would not have been one of equals. To refuse dialogue is adolescent. Many of our contemporary politicians still act as if dialogue is a betrayal of their beliefs. But they and all who seek to change the world must learn to serve the power of sharing ideas and not seek to make ideas serve their personal power.

A final note is called for. Some of you are probably wondering what happened to Mrs Winter. Personally I am a sucker for happy endings. In her case, though ‘happy’ is hardly the word, it was certainly a much better ending to the story than might have befallen her without an intervention.

After a few days in hospital she was taken to a nursing home for senior citizens. About a month after I had found her in those abysmal conditions, I went to see her in the nursing home. It was a light and clean place with large windows that looked onto a simple English garden. When I approached her, she smiled. That’s really all I remember. When I first saw her crouched in the corner of her chaotic living room, a flash of instinct told me on looking into her eyes that she was not afraid of me. Now I recognized in her smile the meaning of that moment. She had been waiting for me. Not waiting for James O’Dea but waiting to be rescued; waiting for her knight in shining armour. And in the end he hadn’t failed her.

When a story resolves like this, an activist feels what scientists refer to as ‘the helper’s high’, accompanied by an even deeper longing for more sweet justice.

This experience of the rebalancing power of justice can feel quite elevated. But getting up on that horse is quite a different matter. As an activist, it is better to keep your heart in a lofty place but your feet on the ground.

The more grounded you are, the better equipped you will be when a wounded world comes to wound you.

Chapter Three

Deeper Initiations for a Committed Activist

After a brutal knife attack, witnessing war and other atrocities, the author examines the elements of naiveté, commitment and vision for the maturing activist.

To overcome a suffocating sense of living a cozy lifestyle in my twenties, I accepted a position to teach in Turkey. The passion to serve was a disruptive force; it kept saying, don’t let your life get too easy. It told me to push the boundaries of the known.

As it turned out, not only would Turkey push the boundaries, it would test me and train me to transform my activist zeal into dedicated service. I was to find myself dropped late one night at the steps of the public hospital in the city of Izmir, bleeding badly after a knife attack. I would find a one-year commitment turned to five. I would find myself living and guiding my students through intense political violence that led up to a coup. All of this would serve as my preparation for the war and slaughter in Lebanon where I worked from 1982 to 1983.

There seems to be a pattern: just when things are pretty idyllic, one gets kicked out of the garden or slammed against a wall. Teaching at what was then the Izmir Collegiate Institute was by no means a hardship assignment. The setting was stunning: the spacious campus was on a wooded hill lined with thick rosemary bushes above the city, overlooking Izmir Bay.

There had been rumours here and there of clashes between left-and right-wing students in various parts of the country, but nothing that would prevent you from going down to the city at night for a meal. On the fated evening of my knifing, I was having a late fish and raki supper at one of the harbour restaurants, enjoying Turkish conviviality, when suddenly I noticed how late it was. I decided to cut through the deserted marketplace to pick up a bus or a taxi to take me back to the college.

The marketplace was about ten blocks in length and at this time of the night it was deserted, or so I thought. Gone were the colour, clamour and bustle that characterized the market in full swing. About halfway into this area, I saw a bunch of students fighting ahead. I recognized the danger and sped into a side alley and then into a doorway where I crouched for what seemed a long time. I listened. I could hear nothing. Then as I turned back into the thoroughfare through the marketplace there were about five students standing as if waiting for me. They obviously thought I was a straggler from the opposing party. And without a moment’s pause they attacked.

It all happened so quickly. The thrust of the knife jabs came in rapid succession. Then they pinned me against a wall. The knife was pressed just below my left rib cage. I could feel my heart squeezing to pull away from its sharp point. I could hardly find my voice, I was so paralyzed with fear, but I blurted out, ‘English!’

As if in a dream, one of my attackers, the caricature of brawny-but-not-so-bright, said with surprise, ‘You English?’ ‘No, actually I’m Irish.’ He pushed the guy with the knife away, then the group just looked at me in disbelief. My clothes were already heavily blood-stained and a lot of blood was coming from my left wrist. A moment later they were running away, swallowed up in the darkness.

I started walking out of the marketplace the way I had come. Then I sank to my knees, partly out of relief and partly out of exhaustion. Then I didn’t want to get up. A wave of weakness was coming over me and I wanted to lie down.

The next thing I remember is a man hauling me out of his car and leaving me on the steps of the public hospital before he drove way. This mysterious angel of the night had probably saved my life.

I was stitched and given rest. When I was finally taken back to the Izmir Collegiate Institute I was given time to recuperate at the home of the Principal and his kind wife. Everything I had been wearing was so blood-soaked it had to be thrown out.

Once I had time to reflect, my first thought was, nobody will mind if I break my contract early and return to England. But that is not what happened. A much deeper feeling took hold. It came unbidden. I woke up one morning and it was just there. I felt grateful to be alive. With the recognition that I might have lost my life came a more vivid sense that I needed to live my life with even greater passion and purpose. I couldn’t believe it but rather than feeling weakened and depressed, I felt mysteriously recharged.

In the year following my knifing, I not only made a commitment to working as head of the English department at another school in Turkey, I also made a commitment to the love of my life and we married in Izmir before moving to Tarsus. Kathleen and I shared a common passion for service. The next three years gave us plenty of opportunities for that.

From 1978 to 1980, thousands of people in Turkey were killed in political violence. It got to the point that almost every evening you would hear machine gun fire. In fact, the lovely house we lived in across from the Tarsus American School was fired at from the street one evening when luckily we were not there. Again, rather than run because things were getting too hot, we had the school increase the height of the wall around the house and put in a sheet metal gate. It seemed to deter would-be assassins and it sent a signal to our students that we would rather potentially risk our lives than abandon them. Adversity can, indeed, help us manifest our highest ideals.

But some days life got very raw.

Once, while rehearsing a play with the senior class, a student burst into the auditorium with the news that the authorities were closing the Tarsus schools for two weeks: the Principal of the school right next to us had been knifed to death just a few hours earlier. I experienced a mental flashback of my own knifing.

But what really stunned me was the way the students responded. They cheered with glee, delighted about the news that they would have two weeks off school. Eventually my shocked silence brought them to their senses. I expressed my disappointment. ‘I know you wouldn’t have cheered if that had been me. I might have been the one to have a knife plunged into his heart. What’s happening to your humanity, boys?’

In fact, this was my first lesson in really understanding the nature of violence and how it doesn’t just affect the immediate actors but carries its traumatic wounding deep into the social order. Because they were beginning to see so much murder and violence around them, they were becoming numb to it.

One night, a few months before the coup d’état, there was a loud banging on that sheet metal gate we had installed. It was very late; nonetheless, I put on my bathrobe and went to see what was happening. It turned out to be a student of mine. He was extremely agitated. I brought him inside and Kathleen comforted him and gave him a cup of tea. He described how his mother had been dragged off to prison in the early hours of the morning. His estranged father had been murdered and she was being accused of the crime. But it was clearly a travesty of justice: his father had been politically active in the right wing and his mother was Armenian. Right-wing zealots accused her of being an Armenian terrorist. It was ludicrous. He begged us to help.

The next morning I wrote an urgent letter to Amnesty International (AI) in London, giving them the facts. For about a year I had been an international member of AI, receiving their bulletins about human rights conditions around the world. Little did I know that some years later in my activist career I was to become Director of the organization’s Washington, DC, office.

Even though many years have passed, I’m still sensitive about using anybody’s name in this case. What I can say is that visiting the boy’s mother in the Tarsus jail was a profoundly transformative experience for me.

Wrongful imprisonment touches me so strongly. Prison with its punitive underpinnings and often inhuman conditions is bad enough, but to have to endure it when one is totally innocent is really intolerable.

The moment I set eyes on the boy’s mother it was clear that she was innocent. She had a quiet luminosity which radiated a patient and generous spirit. She was already so moderate towards those who had put her in this terrible situation.

The light shines in the darkness but the darkness knows it not.¹

So often minds poisoned by layers of ignorance and hearts shut down by viral hatreds spit their toxins at the light because they simply cannot understand the freedom and beauty it offers.

It was still in the early months after martial law had been imposed following the coup when the boy called to let me know that his mother had been freed. He was sure that some international attention to her case had been very helpful. Who knows? But I felt in that moment something like the sense of freedom I experienced as a child running up the hills above the ocean with the wind blowing all the way through my body. This was no moment of theoretical insight into the nature of freedom. This was a moment to taste that freedom and to feel its energy running through you. This is the elixir of activism for me, to be right there in that palpable transformation of suffering into celebration.

But it seemed I had only touched the tip of the iceberg of human suffering. I was now about to witness human brutality on a scale that was incomprehensible to me. My sense of commitment had been tested and I had been found true, but now my faith would be tested and I would have to experience revulsion and despair before daring to hope in human possibilities again.

We were headed to the port of Jounieh, north of Beirut, on a ferry from Larnaca when an Israeli gunboat intercepted us. They were looking for Palestinian men who might be making their way to Beirut to join the fight. No one was hauled off the boat that night. But it got our attention. Even though we were travelling to Beirut during a ceasefire, we didn’t know how long that would last. As it happened, war broke out again the night we arrived in Beirut.

Kathleen and I had gone to sleep in an East Beirut hotel only to wake up to the sound of screeching planes and explosions. We put on our clothes in a panic and headed into the hallway. To our surprise, several people were running up the stairs to the roof, not downstairs to the lobby. We could tell immediately that they were journalists.

Once on the roof, we saw a bank of cameras and correspondents silhouetted against the terrifying son et lumière of war. The contrast between our own safety and the death and destruction unfolding in West Beirut struck an alienating cord: our relief that we were safe was palpable as we watched the F-16 death machines drop their load. It felt like an instantaneous moral trap. There was nothing you could do in that moment except deeply scrutinize your own reaction to the presence of death stomping around performing high-tech killing, then screeching away as the anti-aircraft fire, like an image from a child’s comic book, hopelessly tried to pursue it. Then Act Two: another wave of planes flying at higher altitude would drop flares to illuminate the stage for more killing. In less than an hour any naïveté I had about the world was obliterated. Could any activist agenda bring the modern war machine to an end?

Next morning, as I met Gabriel Habib, the Secretary General of the Middle East Council of Churches, the world was strangely normal, as if the night’s activities had been an hallucination.

Gabby wanted us to organize regional fact-finding missions and ecumenical and educational tourism designed to highlight the complexities of interfaith co-existence and the mosaic of peace and justice issues in Lebanon, Jordan, Israel-Palestine and Egypt. ‘From evangelicals to liberal Christians, design programs for them that will help them open their eyes to the need for religious pluralism, self-determination and justice. For the moment you will return to Cyprus to help expedite shipments of urgently needed medical supplies. We have international medical teams trying to do triage in apartment basements and schoolrooms and they need our support in getting supplies for severe trauma and so on. There are so many civilian casualties in this war. There are so many children orphaned. Just last month Mother Teresa went into West Beirut during a ceasefire and brought out abandoned orphans. A friend who was with her told me that one of the young ones nervously peed on her as she argued at the checkpoint for humanitarian passage for the children. I honour how she doesn’t look away from the ugliness, the bitterness and the raw suffering of humanity.

‘The PLO soldiers should be leaving West Beirut in a few weeks and you will join us later in our West Beirut office.’

When we moved into our apartment on the top floor of the building that housed the Middle East Council of Churches, we didn’t realize that the peace would be relatively short-lived or that our own lives would face deep personal challenges and trauma. We were in West Beirut when the Israelis invaded and we were there during the Sabra Chatilla massacres of Palestinian women and children.

This time it was not just hitting a wall, it was like being walled in from every side.

The sense of ‘darkness visible’ really began to intensify after the Israelis entered West Beirut. Everything they did was designed to keep people indoors and off the streets as much as possible. At night it was pretty much a blackout. Then it happened. As flares lit up the sky above the Palestinian camps on a mid-September night in 1982, the occupying force permitted militia assassins to enter the Sabra Chatilla refugee camps and slaughter the civilian population. Families were found butchered at their dinner tables, in their beds, in doorways and on the street. Many of the husbands, fathers and brothers had been shipped out of the country in an internationally brokered agreement. This was yet another betrayal that would leave its burn mark on the pages of the history books and in the hearts of people for a very long time.

As dawn broke and news of the massacre got to us, the first members of the international medical team that had been at the camp hospital arrived at our offices to share graphic stories of what they had seen. Some of the doctors had even been lined up for a mock firing squad. It was as if a pool of impenetrable darkness had invaded the room, choking everyone’s motivation to serve the cause of human decency. At that moment I felt only a pit of despair. When you’re that close to evil, it has the power to eclipse human goodness. It has the power to leave you numb and immobilized. No knights in shining armour here. No let’s get the job done activism. Just a gaping wound you can’t crawl out of and a void only humans seem capable of creating.

It was around the end of the 40-day mourning period following the massacres that I went south to another Palestinian camp called Ain al-Hilweh. Ironically, the camp’s name means ‘sweet spring’. However, it was anything but a sweet spring that day. It had been flattened in the war; even its hospital had been bombed. In commemoration of its own dead and the victims of the massacre, black flags were everywhere. Even twisted metal rods rising out of the bombed cinderblock homes were tied with black ribbons.

I was with a medical doctor assessing the needs of war victims when my attention was caught by the sight of an old man waving to us. He was calling to us to come. I thought he might need help. I hoped we were not going to be asked to drag a body from under the rubble. But he was not looking for any such assistance; on the contrary, he wanted to serve us. That’s right: he wanted to serve us coffee. At first we declined. But it became obvious it was important to him. So we sat in the rubble as he pulled out a small stove and began preparing the coffee in the classic Arabian style. Every time the coffee began to bubble up, he would remove it from the heat with an elegant flick of his wrist. He made a joke about having to serve us from assorted cracked cups.

It was there amidst the rubble that I finally began to find my way back to the world. I saw something I had never expected to behold: this man, in his simple dignity, mirrored what I needed to see. It was a moment to witness the indestructible spirit out of which human nature emerges. This was a human being rising out of the rubble of destruction, as so many had done before him, reminding us that the essence of humanness cannot be destroyed.

I had come to help. But my inner being was saddened and weary. Now I rose, as from a deep epiphany, knowing that this man who had lost so much and who had so much need of consoling was at this moment a doctor to my soul. And as I left Ain al-Hilweh I knew I had tasted the ‘sweet spring’. It told me to believe more deeply in human possibilities of renewal. It told me to imagine large-scale human transformation. It told me that no quick fix Band-Aid solutions would get us there. But it also told me that taking on violent militarism, cruelty and hatred on a global scale would take the greatest mobilization of effective activism our planet had ever seen.

Naïveté, Commitment and Deeper Vision

If you really tried to obtain a comprehensive analysis of every problem before you decided to act, you would end up being paralyzed. There is actually no end to the analysis of how things got to be the way they are. There is no perfect analysis of social problems or the consequences of past thinking and cultural conditioning.

That is not to say the activist should not use the best analytical tools available to him or her, but tools are like maps – as has been famously pointed out, we should never confuse maps with actual territory. What gets you to move into the territory of social transformation is the quality of your original motivation and intention. The deeper and more rooted your intention when you set out to address a problem, the greater will be the chances of sustained impact. Maturing activists have to continually refine the flame of moral passion that ignited the desire to act in the first place.

So I maintain there is a necessary element of naïveté that launches us into the field of morally inspired action. If we contemplated how treacherous, brutal and wounding the world can be for too long, we might lose that naïve sense that we can actually do things to change its rank and deadly ways. If we get too sophisticated in learning how the world operates, we can persuade ourselves that we really know what can be changed and what can’t – when in fact none of us knows. We do not know how the enactment of conscience by individuals, in simple but daring acts of courage, selfless service or the presentation of new ideas of justice and inclusion, can herald the end of perniciously ingrained forms of exploitation and oppression.

I sometimes wonder if those who scoff so much at the possibility of real and dramatic changes in human nature didn’t themselves at some point feel attacked for being naïve idealists. The evolving activist begins to recognize that there is always a price to pay for taking on the status quo. That is when the original – and maybe naïve – intention must be fortified with conscious commitment.

Commitment says I won’t run when the going gets hot. Commitment says, draw deeper, you have the resources needed to continue. Commitment says, I am willing to pay the price for my ideals. There is heroism in commitment. There is a discovery of strength. It is here that one can feel the presence of higher agency, greater inspiration and deeper guidance.

Commitment affirms that one is on the right path. It is a way of communing with one’s destiny and with self-realization. It leads one into a deeper story and a more expansive sense of mission and purpose. Commitment offers us an intimate communion with self-giving and the wellbeing of others.

Naturally, it has its increments of testing and initiation. Are you ready to experience some pain, some hardship, some confusion and still feel the fervour of your passion and the joy of your work? Are you willing to face your doubts? Can you see that some level of heartbreak and despair may take you even further into an unshakeable commitment?

If we have decided to stay in the game and live our commitments, there comes a time when things move from simple to more complex. That’s invariably when the head messes with the heart. The head attacks our desire to do good in the world as crazy and naïve. The head wants immediate results. It wants clear action plans. It has problems continuing when reason argues that the odds are against a successful outcome. It will not tolerate paradox. It flips at the idea of hidden higher solutions that can only be accessed through surrender or self-sacrifice.

The rising tension between head and heart can be a defining juncture in the life of an activist. The heart, which has been the instigator of compassionate action, can be intimidated by the head, which always seems to have innumerable proofs about what is the more sensible thing to do. The practice of listening to the heart, and ultimately attuning to the deep heart’s core, is the true centre of organizing for the conscious activist. It is the heart that guides us to the higher vision that informs and constantly re-energizes our commitment. Rather than abandoning intellect, the heart knows how to synchronize with ideas that emerge from our most evolved moral imagination.

And it is only the heart that can rise from the ashes of disillusionment and despair to breathe life and commitment into an even bolder vision.

Vision is where the activist and the mystic meet. Vision will unite them. But not so fast: we are getting ahead of ourselves. Activist and mystic each have their deepening initiations and exacting course requirements. Let us keep them on parallel tracks for the moment so we can maintain the focus on the distinct learning of each until we are ready for the great alchemy and transformational power of their merging.

Vision unfolds to the level of our knowledge. It is the forward edge of our knowing. By knowledge I do not mean the repository of collected data or the sum total of conditioned perspectives. It is a little more nuanced than that. What we are referring to here is a form of knowledge that is accessed through our being. The degree to which our being has been expanded, developed and refined opens us to higher and more comprehensive forms of knowing. This is sometimes referred to as ‘higher knowing’ or ‘visionary insight’, a form of knowledge not constrained by what we already know with the intellect.

Accessing higher knowing is rudimentary for the mystic, since it is a path to communing with a higher reality where the fully realized being is synonymous with omniscience. But it is not so rudimentary for the activist, who is much more interested in receiving direction on how to act in the world and how best to effectively address its inequities. The activist seeks higher principles for moral engagement to guide him or her through a complex mesh of history, culture, systems and beliefs without getting lost or overwhelmed or burnt out.

The evolving activist may have an exacting and adventurous life, and be truly stretched as a human being, but what defines the nature of his or her activism is a quality of vision that is matched with the moral development to embody it. It requires a huge visionary shift to move beyond polarized thinking, beyond some version of an us-versus-them world. The pairing of polarities seems never-ending for the activist: right versus wrong, selfish versus altruistic, good versus evil, liberation versus oppression, are valid and necessary truths and part of establishing reliable moral maps. But polarities can be self-reinforcing and deeply conditioning. The activist is now called to be the embodiment of a non-polarizing vision. Getting there is at the heart of conscious activism.

What you will discover as you attempt to actualize moral principles in service to your highest self and for the benefit of others is that nothing is fixed or static. As you engage, you grow, and as you grow, your understanding of what is needed changes – your moral vision evolves with you.

If you answer an inner call to serve, you will be challenged to keep growing and keep expanding your vision. This is very different from being given a strict set of moral codes and rules and deciding to conform to them. In this latter case, vision is locked in dogma; in the former case, it is constantly unfolding and evolving.

Activists can get locked into inflexible ideologies as easily as religious believers get hidebound by their faith. What can happen in this instance is they begin to favour ideological answers and to privilege them over actual experience. This is understandable as the activist awakens to the scale and systemic nature of some of our more intractable problems.

It is the ultimate test for the activist to stay radically open. When the hammer falls, it is openness that will secure spontaneity, creativity and a vision that is alive, anchored in the heart and evolving beyond simplistic polarities to embrace the root causes of all human suffering.

And the hammer will fall: our faith in ourselves or our faith in others gets tested – even severely tested. For the activist who stays the distance, there will be some level of heartbreak and despair. Step far enough into the world’s injustices, cruelty and stark brutality, and they will hammer away at your idealism. They will even shatter your dreams of being an effective agent of change.

However, if your vision is rooted in your heart, when the heartbreak comes you will feel pain, loss and deep deprivation, but it will not be the end of the story. It will be the beginning of a sacred transformation.

Chapter Four

Deeper Initiations for a Committed Mystic

Encounters with a Hindu sadhu, the Senior Tutor of the Dalai Lama and dervishes lead to reflections on the nature of spiritual commitment, discernment and receptivity.

About three months after my knifing incident, I was given a copy of Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism by Chögyam Trungpa. Given the knife attack, cutting through had an ironic twist to it. But there was one paragraph that I kept reading again and again:

The problem is that we tend to seek an easy and painless answer. But this kind of solution does not apply to the spiritual path, which many of us should not have begun at all. Once we commit ourselves to the spiritual path it is very painful and we are in for it. We have committed ourselves to the pain of exposing ourselves, of taking off our clothes, our skin, nerves, brains until we are exposed to the universe. Nothing will be left. It will be terrible, excruciating, but that is the way it is.¹

I couldn’t tell why, but these words were strangely comforting. I had never felt that spirituality was designed to coddle. The invitation had always been to pursue reality, even if that meant hitting walls, starting over and drinking deeper from life’s bittersweet brew.

But just as you summon up the courage for the lesson to get harder, the universe can throw you a bouquet. Reading Trungpa made me want to explore his roots in Tibet, but since that was not possible I chose to visit the Tibetan community in exile in Dharamsala, India. I travelled overland from Turkey, going through Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan to India. The year was 1977.

The final stage of the journey was through the foothills of the Himalayas to a village called McLeod Gang. I had noticed how skeletal the dogs in the Indian towns and villages were as the bus had climbed to its destination. But here the dogs were combed and well-fed, their eyes clear and alert. The animals signalled to me that I had crossed a threshold into another world.

I would return 30 years later and find the whole area quite built-up and packed with tourists. Because it was the Dalai Lama’s home in exile, Dharamsala was to become a Mecca for Buddhist seekers and all kinds of well-wishers, but in 1977 it was still relatively quiet.

I signed up for a month-long course at the Tibetan Library where I would be inducted into the basics of Buddhism, meditation and chanting. I settled into the austerity of my tiny cell space with a chair, mat and monastic single bed. I delighted in taking icy cold showers and eating lightly. I was ready for asceticism and rigorous spiritual practice. Fortunately, I had no illusions about my level of knowledge or my degree of enlightenment.

After a few weeks I could feel a resonance of inner purity – that great feeling of being scrubbed clean on the inside that you can get after more intense spiritual work. It didn’t take long for me to be able to feel a transmission of refined energy in the presence of the monks and the lamas. The raw energy of the world was distilled into a subtle elixir which left for all who experienced it a constant sweet smile traced around the mouth and reflected in the eyes.

Then something shifted.

It was mid-July and about midday. I was walking towards my cell when the monsoon deity suddenly tipped buckets of rain and laughed, no doubt, as anyone moving below was instantly drenched. Since there was no escape from such sudden downpours, they prompted lightness and humour as people ran and sheltered under the nearest lean-to.

As a cluster of young monks and students huddled under the simple awning outside the row of small cells, I looked back at the empty terrace in front of the library. Sitting cross-legged on the cement was a sadhu wearing only a loin cloth. He remained motionless; rain poured over his skin as it would have poured over the polished bronze of a statue.

For reasons that were not clear, he did not attract attention. I, however, was transfixed. His stillness reflected an awareness that was oblivious to the pummelling of the downpour. I could not stand there without attending to him. I ran back to the terrace with an umbrella.

As I stood before him, I saw that his eyes were still closed. Immediately the dilemma presented itself – if he was in such a profound meditation, how could I have the audacity to assist him? I turned and looked at the group under the awning. They had fallen silent and were watching me. In India a sadhu taking a soaking in a monsoon downpour was nothing, but a hapless foreigner attempting charity was good theatre. Clearly a lesson was in progress.

I decided that I would leave him undisturbed. I bowed and offered him a respectful ‘Namaste’ in farewell. As I did so, he opened his eyes and in a gesture that was both seamless and graceful he offered me his hand. I took it and he slowly raised himself to a standing position, picking up as he did a stick with some items attached to it in a small bundle.

Nothing was said. We walked at the pace lovers take on sunny mornings when the world is their oyster.

When we reached the group of monks and students, they opened a space for us. Everything occurred in a dreamlike silence except for the rushing sound of the rain. I showed him to my cell and offered him my bed but he smiled, lay down on the floor and slept.

Later under clear skies we walked up the mountain to McLeod Gang. He told me his name was Anagarika. I understood that it meant ‘one who lives without a home’. We stepped into a small restaurant run by a family of Tibetan refugees. We ordered vegetable momos, hot soup and plain lassi. After the first sip of lassi he called the owner, who was also our waiter, and told him to take back the lassis. He responded to my questioning expression: ‘The curds have been badly watered down, they should be creamier.’

This seemed arrogant to me, especially since I was paying for the meal.

When our waiter returned with fresh lassis, thick and creamy ones this time, I gave him a glance loaded with apologetic meaning, as if to suggest that I was a little embarrassed with the behaviour of my Indian guest.

Anagarika and I returned to my cell in silence. He indicated as we drew close that he was going to continue on down to Dharamsala. ‘Because I choose poverty and live without a roof over my head does not mean that I need to accept inferior quality when it is offered to me. On the contrary it only increases my appreciation for true quality … like time with you, my beloved friend. Good night.’

When a teacher opens your heart, there is no better place to be than alone on a mountain in the crystalline presence of stars, witnessing their beauty in the dark ocean of night’s limitless dignity and silence. Or in a cell, if you have one, where there is nothing to distract you.

The fire in my heart burned through my superficiality and arrogance. It burned white hot. This was the conscious communion with the sacred that my soul had been longing for.

As happens when an opening occurs, another follows. I received an invitation to join a woman who was a friend of the Dalai Lama for an audience with his Senior Tutor, Ling Rinpoche.

The Senior Tutor’s house was above McCloud Gang. The American woman explained the cycles of reincarnation involving the Senior Tutor and His Holiness. She estimated that Ling Rinpoche, in his seventies, would probably be in his early thirties when he would be called upon to be the tutor for the next Dalai Lama. Little did either of us know that I would meet this venerable master again in another lifetime when he would ask me to give him a tutorial on human rights.

As we approached Rinpoche’s home, I felt a subtle tension, like that of a stringed instrument tightened just a fraction before the bow descends. We tiptoed reverentially on to the veranda of the colonial house and bowed to the young monk who appeared to be waiting for us. Even before he spoke, his manner conveyed a quiet note of polite regret.

‘Rinpoche is doing puja. They have been shooting dogs in the Indian villages lower down and he hears the shooting at night. It has aroused his compassion for both animal and human distress. He might remain in puja until tomorrow. If you care to wait, Rinpoche may decide to give you his blessing. It might be a long wait even for that. If you still desire a formal audience, you may return at this time tomorrow.’

We turned to each other and without hesitation it was clear that we were of the same mind. ‘We will wait for the blessing.’ He slipped away and we settled on a bench on the veranda. Time seemed to dissolve in that place. Whatever length of time it was, it was a timeless meditative pause before the monk returned. ‘Rinpoche has decided to give you audience.’

As we crossed the threshold into the house, I felt a swarming sensation around my solar plexus like the butterflies one feels before a test or other big occasion. My mind, however, was calm. It felt as if my body was independently registering a shift, the way it would for a change in altitude or temperature. I had a repeated sensation that my tear ducts were filling and that I was going to release a succession of heavy sobs. Waves of sadness were seeking a beach to crash upon but it was not to be found. Each wave was met with a counter-wave that was light and lifted me to a weightless place that was free of emotion. The contradiction was intensified: sad happy, bitter sweet, until they seemed to come together at a higher octave.

‘Compassion,’ instructed Rinpoche, ‘loosens the tight hold of categories and concepts in the mind. It is a quality that is behind all thought and sentiment. When we’re in touch with compassion, it unifies all things. It holds all without distinction.’

I looked into the dark pool of his eyes. They were still.

Stillness.

Nothing was moving inside him. There was no surface reaction to our presence in the room. In the absence of movement on the outside, inner space grew. I looked again: he was there and not there. He was like a window blown open to the vast and silent skies of night. He was empty, unfathomably still and beyond reach, yet his presence filled the room. He conversed with the American for a while and then he turned to me and uttered one simple phrase: ‘Serve all beings without distinction.’

I cannot remember ever leaving that room. It is as if that timeless space dissolved us.

Shortly after that, my time in the foothills of the Himalayas was over. As I headed for the bus and the long road to Turkey, I was deeply grateful for the spiritual gifts I had been given. It felt as if my spiritual core had been reignited. Even so, something had been mysteriously clarified: I had communed deeply with the Hindu sage and the Buddhist master, but for the moment at least I was not feeling any call to become a Hindu or Buddhist.

The resonant call that carried me off the mountains was, ‘Serve all beings without distinction.’ The mystic in me could sense the essence of this guidance but the activist had no idea how many years it would take to begin to realize the full meaning of that noble injunction.

In 1981, after five years in Turkey and before we were plunged into the war in Lebanon, Kathleen and I spent six months at the School for International Training in Brattleboro, Vermont. In another ironic twist of fate we were to find ourselves deeply drawn to a Sufi group there, inspired by the great 13th-century poet, Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi. We had been to Mevlana’s tomb in Konya, Turkey, and had even watched a performance of whirling dervishes; but our real access to the Mevlevi Order was to be in America.

We attended a public commemoration of Mevlana’s passing. Before the whirling ceremony began there were readings of Rumi’s poetry:

Let the beauty we love be what we do.

There are a hundred ways to kneel and kiss the ground.²

The beauty and originality of this commemoration was that the dervishes who turned with such precision and grace were men and women in their thirties and forties. They had managed to bring something from the past into the present without compromising it or themselves. Their American Sheik, Kabir Helminski, moved with a combination of softness and authority that was very suggestive. There was a hint in his bearing that he was both guarding something of value and at the same time marking the place where it was hidden.

Kabir lived on Putney Mountain. After the commemoration we pursued a connection with him. As we drove up, we saw a light over the side entrance of the large red house. A dozen pairs of boots had been placed just inside the vestibule which had been designed as a staging area for leaving or arriving with mud-caked or snow-laden boots. As we crossed the threshold into the house, we immediately felt its warmth and invitation.

Camille Helminski greeted us quietly and led us through a wide country kitchen with apple and spice aromas and logs on the hearth. We proceeded through the living room into a spacious room which served as a study, music room and meeting space.

A group of men and women were sitting composed and relaxed on floor pillows. We picked up some pillows and found our place in the circle. ‘Welcome,’ said Kabir. ‘We are ready to begin.’

Camille read:

Everything is perishing except His Face.

Unless you have that Face don’t try to exist.³

We sat in silence. Out of nowhere, it seemed, a presence moved through my breath and into my heart, stirring its fire like a breeze over embers. As I relaxed my breathing, accretions of tight energy dissolved. I was a ship out on a dark ocean but the water that lapped around me assured me in wave after confirming wave that I was coming home.

I felt the presence of subtle guidance leading me to the inner reaches of my own heart. The group had begun singing together. I did not open my eyes. This was the balm of community in sacred communion. They were singing the Self to the self. This was communing with universal being:

We once held tight and then let go

We found our wings and flew together

We made our peace among ourselves

We disappeared

Alhamdulillah

One small drop became a spring

And now that spring is overflowing

A clear stream floats into the sea

And there we drown

Alhamdulillah⁴

Commitment, Discernment and Receptivity

Commitment expresses itself differently for the mystic and the activist. The activist is committed to seeing changes in the world. The mystic is committed to experiencing inner changes. As we have noted, the evolving activist must stay open and heart-centred to be effective. While this is also true for anyone committed to the mystical path, the mystic must learn to attune to the invisible. For the activist, there have to be more definable and objective benchmarks of progress in achieving measurable goals in the world, whereas the mystic commits to the intensification of a subjective process and subjective states of being.

It is not as if the mystic does not also seek to progress, but the necessary commitment revolves around a more intangible longing. The mystic measures progress not in getting rid of longing but in intensifying it. As more attention is paid to this longing, the mystic must be prepared to jettison peripheral and superficial preoccupations and let all energy flow towards the mysterious centre of his or her own being. There is no linear map showing how to do that, since the whole mystical impulse runs countercurrent to the logic of the world.

The mystic must commit unswervingly to faith in the unshatterable reality at the core of his or her own being while, at the same time, perceiving ever more clearly how ego functions to block us from knowing and seeing accurately our own essence. Experience will reveal again and again how ego prevents us from communing with the truth of who it is we really are in the depths of our being.

How fortunate we are when we meet a master who cuts through our ego to reveal essence.

Like the activist, the mystic must face trials and testing, but they are of a different order. Indeed, both must be committed to growth, but the endurance and battle scars of the activist, which forge new determination and new learning, are experienced by the mystic much more intimately as gifts of the spirit.

The mystic is constantly invited to commit to treating every experience as a gift: the gift in the wounding and the gift of healing. For the commitment is to walk the bittersweet way. The commitment is to become so subtle and sensitive that all experience is understood to contain its balm even when sometimes we can only feel its bite. With enough subtlety, we can be touched in ways that open up dimensions of our being we never thought existed. And then our spiritual commitment is that of the little drop eager to get pulled back into an ocean of being.

The initiations of a mystic have nothing to do with esoteric induction rituals. They have to do with spiritual intimacy. Mystics often use metaphors about profound longing, taking off their clothes and having trysts with the beloved. A surface impression might lead you to believe that the mystic is attracted by sensuality. But that is really not the case – although a deep mystic is never a prude. The mystic uses symbols of intimacy to represent the rich flow of communing which takes place as the little local self is unclothed and allowed to contemplate its beauty in unadorned Reality.

Just as the commitment of the mystic is a deepening cultivation of gratitude for being itself, and not necessarily concern with becoming a successful agent of change, so also the kind of discernment which is cultivated by the mystic differs from that of the activist.

I must stress that the journey will be towards masterful integration of the mystic and the activist, but thus far we have been exploring the distinctive elements in the training of each.

The emerging mystic makes a groundbreaking discovery: there is a world to perceive other than the world of everyday reality. This other world cannot be seen with the naked eye alone even though it is not a separate reality. It can only be seen and experienced by an awareness which comes through one’s whole being. Developing that whole-being awareness is a lifetime’s work. It is the place where body, mind and spirit live in conjunction. The more we are in that state of conjunction the greater will be our capacity to see beyond the flickering or even volatile illusions of the mind and discern Reality as it is.

As the mystic develops a greater and greater capacity to make contact with the inner core of everything around the individual self, he or she begins to discover one of the defining aspects of mysticism in contrast to more orthodox religious experience or anything that might loosely be defined as transcendental spirituality. The mystic begins to realize that spirit does not exist in a place other than here-andnow experience. The mystic makes contact with spirit as the burning centre of what is: spirit as both immanence and transcendence.

The emerging mystic begins a long journey learning how to perceive the presence of essence behind form; essence radiant in the core of everything. The light shines in the darkness but the darkness knows it not. Mystics learn to train their eyes to see the light as the original source-point of everything. Eventually they may come to a state of complete union with what is apprehended: ‘The eye by which I see God is the same eye by which God sees me’ (Meister Eckhart).

But until we get there, we can be grateful for any experiences or teachers along the way who help to nudge us out of our more superficial preoccupations and ego-saturated perceptions to discern what is real and of true value in any given moment.

To discern true quality from artificiality is a good beginning. And to taste that true quality is even better.

One does not become automatically more receptive to the subtler world of essence. The more we head towards essence, the more we enter a reality that is non-polarized. But our basic training in the world teaches us how to be effective in a world of polarity – a world organized around the privileges of inclusion and the price of exclusion. Even when we are working for the cause of justice, we can get locked into a polarized fight against those whom we identify as the architects and perpetrators of injustice. We will discuss the nuances of polarization as related to evolving activism in the chapters ahead. For the moment, we are flagging the concept that spiritual reality is not polarized as mundane reality is. This does not mean there is no right and wrong from a spiritual perspective, since that would be moral anarchy: it means there can be no sticky ego attachment to being right. From a spiritual perspective, ego is always trying to claim the privileges of being right and to assign judgmental proof about who is wrong; and by doing so it blocks receptivity to the subtler realms of spiritual insight.

Receptivity is the door to a more spacious and non-judgmental awareness. The mystic practises attunement to what is and tries to leave behind any ego attachment to what should be. It is one thing to practise this as a meditation exercise; it is another to carry it into one’s daily life. After all, what we’re talking about here is a strenuous commitment to breaking down the conditioning that blocks us from a subtle receptivity to the language of spirit. We literally have to dismantle the way we see the world and still function effectively within it even as we become more receptive to spirit!

As we become more consciously receptive to what is, we listen with more empathy and slowly develop greater compassion for ourselves and others. We are not so hard on our own or others’ shallowness and superficiality. We are less easily lured into the ongoing manipulations around us. We begin to commune with a deeper reality. We find there is a constant gravitational pull towards what is more essential. We develop an antenna for the presence of integrity and for subtler qualities of being. We shift from quantitative perceptions about how good, how bad, how much, how little and so on, to qualitative perceptions; and to noticing how present or absent we or others are in any given situation.

There is a Sufi expression: The best of men and women are hidden. They are hidden from the world’s definition of success and failure, but their treasure of qualities is visible to those who cultivate an awareness of the subtle and to those who develop a keener receptivity to masterful beings who transcend polarity within themselves. The mystic who has begun to develop these capacities will be mysteriously drawn to such great beings as they light the way ahead and prepare the seeker for the cauldron of truly deep initiation.

The subtle realms are accessed through fire and light, deprivation and spiritual abundance: there is no linear way. We will have to shed skin, as Trungpa described. Our ignorance is thickly coated with energies that will need plenty of refining; and the receptive mirror of the heart will need to be polished until it reflects Love at the source.

Having a place to serve the world as this inner drama unfolds can be a great gift for the emerging mystic and, rather than being a distraction, the world of dedicated activism can intensify contemplation of what is real and what is corrosively false.

Chapter Five

The Cauldron of Mystical Initiation: I

On a new assignment in Istanbul the author finds his real work through encounters with spiritual masters; and he shares deepening insight into the nature of transmission and the task of remembrance.

In 1984 I was 33, an age when, if your goal is self-actualization, it helps to be spiritually committed and advancing on the path. For me this was to be a year of such great spiritual gifting that I no longer experienced myself as a seeker so much as one who was to be given one intense mystical confirmation after another. But each level of confirmation brought its own quality of stretching, shedding and realization.

It was a year when we were to return to Turkey again, but this time with an infant son and a very different assignment. Based in Istanbul, I was to be an ecumenical liaison between the Middle East Council of Churches in Beirut and the Suryani, a Christian remnant of about 11,000 in a remoter part of southeastern Turkey.

As it turned out, I quickly discovered that a great Sufi master was to be found about five minutes walk from my office in Istanbul. Sheik Muzaffer Efendi had a bookstore for rare publications in the antique book market. What was immediately captivating about this discovery was the connection I already had to Sheik Muzaffer. In 1981 I first saw him as he presided at a Sufi ceremony hosted by St John the Divine Cathedral in New York. In 1983 I encountered him through a mysterious synchronicity in Frankfurt, Germany, while on a stopover as I fled from fighting in Beirut via Damascus on the way to the birth of my son. Now this great being was next door. Sometimes the great mystery takes us by the scruff of the neck, pulls back the curtain and says, ‘Here!’ In fact it got my attention so clearly that I became a frequent visitor at Efendi’s bookstore.

Sheik Muzaffer was the head of the Jerrahis, a Sufi order founded by Pir Nureddin at the beginning of the 18th century. In Sufism it is considered meritorious to have a day job even if one is the illustrious head of an important Sufi order. One of my later teachers referred to this as having ‘a cover’ in the world: ‘We honour the requirements of living in the world and by doing so we anchor our spirituality in its affairs. Those who are subtly attuned discover that we provide doorways to other subtle levels; those who are not attuned never see beyond our cover.’

That’s how it was at Efendi’s bookstore. His dervishes would huddle together drinking tea and soaking in the master’s presence. Sometimes they would even get a bit rowdy, telling stories and challenging each other. Then the door would open and you could tell immediately if it was another dervish or someone seeking a rare book. When it was a customer, everyone would go quiet and the theatre of mystical questing would be seamlessly transformed into the theatre of everyday life. Then as soon as the transaction was complete, the Sufi business would continue.

A dervish might sweep into the bookstore and act the provocateur. ‘Look at the smelly fish warming themselves by the stove. Come on, get up. If you are sincere you’ll have to throw yourselves in the fire. Don’t just sit there and expect to get cooked.’

I remember an older woman taunting a young dervish. ‘Throw that young squid back in the water. He’s trying to write prescriptions but he doesn’t have enough ink in him yet.’

No matter what was said, everything in the room seemed to radiate through the brilliant heart of love which was the field that existed in the presence of Muzaffer Efendi. The epithet ‘Aski’ was often used around him. In Turkish, ashk is the word that is used to express the divine radiance of spiritual love. That is what drew me to him, that quality of love which can radiate into the heart of our humanness and into the highest frequency of our spiritual ideals. One became intimate with him quickly and you felt the presence of a friend who had always known you. This was communion. The heart was consecrated by the energy of unconditional love reaching into every crevice of one’s being, like taking a sunbath in divine energy. Although Sheik Muzaffer was a Muslim, again and again as I visited the store my heart and mind would turn to the contemplation of Jesus. It was not the energy of the crucified Jesus that came to me, so much as Jesus the ecstatic mystic who turned the water into wine at the wedding feast. What a contrast to the Jesus of formal religion who is represented as turning the wine into cold water.

Every now and then the Sheik would look at me in what I came to refer to as the ‘glance of annihilation’. In contrast to the solar glance of love, this was a look that sent everything into nothingness. For a moment we would be in the place of no beginning and no end, of no narrative and of no subject-object. Then the lights would go back on and he would look at me as if he knew everything there was to know. He never invited me to enter into a formal relationship with him as a member of his Order. It was as if he held a secret that even I could not know at this point.

But I know now irrefutably that he was the instigator of the intense spiritual initiations that were to follow in the months ahead. There are some things that can only unfold by being in the presence of a great mystic.

It was, in fact, a few months after my first visit to the bookstore that I found myself reading In Search of the Miraculous by PD Ouspensky, and the universe brazenly tore the fabric of everyday reality by seating a mysterious Englishwoman on the bench beside me overlooking the Bosphorus. It was more than a great coincidence that she was very familiar with Ouspensky. Before we parted she wrote down a telephone number and told me that it belonged to a great spiritual teacher who knew intimately the lines of transmission that Ouspensky’s teacher Gurdjieff had traced in Central Asia. For days I carried around the scrap of paper and found myself a little daunted by the thought of calling the number. Then it just happened.

‘Hello, my name is James. Can I speak to Hasan Shushud?’

‘One moment.’ It was the voice of an older woman, followed by what seemed an interminable pause. Finally there was a presence on the other end of the phone. I could hear him breathing.

‘Hello, my name is James.’

‘Yes.’

‘I was given your number to call.’

‘I’m sorry, I no longer take pupils. I am too old.’

Long pause. Breathing. I could not put down the phone. I was already in communion with the invisible presence holding my full attention across the hum of static on the line. Then he said:

‘There is something in your voice that tells me we should meet. Come on Tuesday at 11am. It is Beyaz Karanfil Sokak … White Carnation Street.’

On the appointed day I was permitted to see a great living mystic with all covering removed. When I entered the room he was sitting in a corner, his petite frame poised forward in a large armchair. The room was charged with his presence. I sat down and tea was served. I sipped the hot sweet tea in silence, and yet I felt fully absorbed as though we were already having the conversation of a lifetime.

‘Good, I can see you are in a state of love. You have heard about ashk; our word for spiritual love. But you must go deeper into the state we call ashk hakiki. Real love is that which overwhelms the traveller on the path of Truth and Reality at the stage we refer to as annihilation of the attributes. Annihilation is an imposing word, isn’t it?’

‘Well, yes. It is a word we use to refer to the total and catastrophic destruction of something.’

‘Yes, catastrophic. Yes, that is good. The path of annihilation blows away all confining forms until we experience the bliss of nonexistence. Is that what you are looking for?’

I could not respond with my head – after all, the intellect doesn’t particularly care for annihilation. But this was a call from essence to essence and one could only try to swim in it. I was a swimmer who had gone far out. In such a short time he had taken me far out into the ocean.

‘You know the expression, We possess only that which survives total shipwreck? We first annihilate the gross energy of sensory attachment. Next we annihilate all emotional dependence – that is where Real Love is experienced. Then even essence is annihilated. At that point there are no hooks to pull us back to the restless seas of existence.’

Silence. The room was so charged it was as if matter itself was going to dissolve.

All is vanishing except the face of God.

Hassan Bey could see that my cup was running over. He asked to be excused and left the room. His wife came in to fill my tea glass and leave some cookies. I picked up a cookie and took a bite, giggling as I did so like a child in the midst of the best game he has ever played.

When he returned, Hassan came directly over to the sofa and sat beside me. The face of the ageing Turk with a prominent forehead and receding hair quite literally dissolved. In its place was a face from deep in Central Asia. The luminous being appearing on the screen of my mind could have been from Samarkand or Bokhara or even Lhasa. The shining face was both physically masculine and, at the same time, etheric. This was transubstantiation. Spirit had taken another form in the body of the old man. The voice said:

‘Fast and pray, fast and pray. Keep prayer vigil at night.’ He placed a finger on the centre of my throat and instructed me to draw the breath four times in quick succession and then release a long out-breath. It was a practice of remembrance for the name of God.

After a while the stark youth and virility of the image that was riveting my attention began to sag into the weakened lines of an ageing, somewhat suburban sage.

As if to emphasize his frailty, his wife came in with a blanket and put it on his chair. I took it as my signal to leave. At the door he said, ‘Later you will read my book, Masters of Wisdom in Central Asia.’

Indeed, I kept night vigils. I fasted regularly. To the best of my ability I did the breathing exercise as continuously as possible. The vigils, fasting and constant zhikr (a Sufi term for remembrance) began to produce a state of deep spiritual reverie. Everything in my life was moving into higher coherence.

Transmission and Remembrance

Transmission is an essential dimension of spirituality. But if you think it goes one way, you would be mistaken. We are all transmitting all of the time. Our thoughts, feelings and deeper emotions are sending signals without interruption. We live in a universe that is pulsed with frequency at all levels, visible and invisible. Lust, sloth and greed have their frequency, as sincerity, non-judgment and love have theirs. When we think of spiritual transmission, it is best to have in mind first and foremost the communion of souls in resonance with each other, rather than the idea of passing on esoteric information.

When you meet a being who has gained mastery of the highest reaches of compassion and unconditional love, you will feel the pull to your own highest attainment. In that instance there is a sacred transmission of higher consciousness. As you modulate your own frequency to the higher frequency, it adjusts upwards and withdraws from coarser vibrations. As this readjustment is occurring, you receive support from the higher frequency. This is what we mean by the phrase, When the student is ready, the master appears. Such support is critical for the seeker. Those who have mastered higher levels are able to help us stabilize our consciousness at the next level it is capable of reaching.

The master cannot help if you are not drawn to his or her state of being. What is being transmitted is a mutual confirmation that these inner states and qualities are real – much more real than normal, habitually conditioned consciousness. There is also a confirmation that these states constitute our own natural state of being and are not transferred to us by others. When the teacher reflects the absence of any action or attributes that create attachment, the purity you feel in such a presence is actually that part of you that is also luminously empty – this is transmission.

Transmission is without any element of abstraction. Mystics often refer to tasting the process of transmission as a way of conveying the reality that the soul is fed when it is in the presence of selfless love. And when it is fed, the soul rises to a place where it can see the cramped and caged energies of mind in which it has been confined. It can see that it needs help resonating with the storehouse of all spiritual nutrition, which is nothing other than its own essence. You could say that the whole process is about the waking soul beginning to resonate with its own true state of freedom.

It is particularly important to recognize the intense intimacy between master and student when this kind of soul transmission occurs between them. A good teacher will make sure there is no dependency in the relationship. Yet at the same time the teacher tunes into your most intimate self. There is always the danger of manipulation on the one hand, and a great deal of projection on the other. Creating the transmission of union without entanglements of any kind is spiritually advanced work.

Sacred practices can be shared as part of the treasured transmission of a particular tradition, and while this is of a different order than the need for an impeccable purity in the relationship between master and student, practices should nevertheless be received and honoured with reverence for the tradition. There are people who go around sharing practices from various traditions without recognizing that in doing so they are not fully honouring the sacred field of transmission that has been cultivated by some traditions for many centuries. It is an error to think that the mystical path can be sustained by techniques that have been disconnected from the field of love in which they were transmitted.

So this question of transmission is very delicate. A great teacher will not only attune us to essence; he or she will recognize our essential qualities and predispositions. With these insights the teacher will know intuitively what structure of development would best suit the seeker. This is the opposite of proselytizing or trying to gain followers. It comes from being at rest in the state of oneness. When one has reached such a state it is very clear that one size does not fit all. There is an exquisite mystery in the process of mystical transmission. Lucky indeed are we when a spiritual master invisibly guides us into the heart of that mystery, allowing it to catalyze our transformation.

Remembrance is a key theme in mysticism. In Zen the seeker is invited to remember one’s original face, the face we had before birth and after death. We have to cut through all that has accumulated to form our identity and remember our essence. Essence has none of the accoutrements of human identity, and even those parts of our identity we consider essential are peripheral to the core. This is tricky because we’re asked to remember something that at first seems intangible. We are asked to remember something that is invisible to most. That is why Meher Baba suggests that the central task that brings us to remembrance is forgetting what is inessential.

Mystics must forget who it is they are perceived to be in the world. They must forget everything that has been projected upon them. They must loosen the grip the world has on them. Sometimes the very energy that has helped them to succeed in the world will have to be let go if they are to remember themselves in a spiritual sense.

This would appear to have the mystic and the activist going in opposite directions, but as we shall see later they end up having to shed many of the same things. Initially the psychological stance of the activist and the mystic is quite contrasting, seeing as one plunges into the world and its problems and the other seeks to place attention on subtler spheres not recognized by the world in general. Going into the thick of the gross energy of the world, while at the same time cultivating the subtle energy that reaches beyond the manifest world, requires quite an advanced skill set; as does forgetting the peripheral so we can remember the essential.

At first it seems we’re being asked to remember something we have never been taught or told. It is decidedly more akin to a treasure hunt. We’re asked to look for something of supreme value that has been placed inside us. We’re asked to search our own being. Once the search has begun in earnest, we begin to hear a response to our call to the universe to reveal to us who it is we really are. The quest to remember helps amplify the spaciousness of our own being: looking where we have never looked before, we begin to see with different eyes. We begin to see on the horizon of our subtle awareness a world so distilled with essence that our everyday world appears to be a dim reflection of its original brilliance.

There are many ways by which the spiritual traditions activate remembrance, from breath work, mantras, quieting the mind, fasting, communal prayer and silence, to solitary retreat. Vividly contrasting methodologies can be at work. One may aim to bring a rich awareness of divine qualities, another absolute stillness and emptiness. But behind all these practices there is a primal remembering that takes us on a journey from the surface to the depth – a depth that annihilates all entangling attraction to illusion.

The mystic would say, As we turn, we return. As we turn towards the root of our own being, we remember the common source of all being. And for the mystic this is to be experienced more than believed. In fact, it is to be tasted.

Chapter Six

The Cauldron of Mystical Initiation: II

A Syriac Orthodox Bishop and a teacher in Istanbul initiate the author deeper on the mystical path and stimulate reflection on The Great Mystery, on the subtle planes of reality and on cultivating spiritual intuition.

The reason I was back in Turkey in 1983–4 was to act as an ecumenical liaison to the Suryani community who are a Christian remnant of the Syriac Orthodox Church inhabiting a remote corner of southeastern Turkey. I lived in Istanbul but travelled once every couple of months out to the remote Tur Abdin region. My main contact was the abbot of a very large monastery that served as the community’s administrative centre. His name was Rev. Samuel and he was a very effective administrator.

The massive stone walls of the monastery were windowless and served as a peripheral defensive wall, like an enclosed medieval city. To pass through its doors was to step inside history and an ancient lineage of monastic transmission. The Syriac Orthodox Church is possibly the most ancient of Christian churches, for it has its roots in the church at Antioch founded at the dawn of Christianity. Today Antioch is Antakya, a city in southeastern Turkey. The patriarchate of the Syriac Orthodox Church was located in Antioch until the 13th century, when it was moved to Mardin at the edge of the Tur Abdin region. In 1933, owing to political turmoil in Turkey, the patriarchate was moved to Syria. The Syriac used in their liturgy is very close to the Aramaic that Jesus would have spoken.

There was an expression of Christianity amongst the Suryani that gave one a feeling of the early Christian church. Regular prayer and fasting were a part of daily life and not just something monks did. But at the monastery one felt the concentrated lineage of an ancient tradition with its rigours and secrets.

My work with the Abbot was more mundane. We discussed well projects and other development initiatives which would help to sustain the Suryani who had been migrating out of the area in significant numbers. Rev. Samuel greatly appreciated the funds I brought and the risk that was taken to bring large sums of money into a region known for hostage-taking and bandits. It was on my third visit that the Abbot announced that I would be invited to meet the bishop of the area, His Grace Elias Çankaya. I was to come to his private quarters for dinner. Interestingly, there would be only one other guest, Brother Thomas, who had taken a vow of silence.

It was of particular interest to me that Brother Thomas was to be present. For even though he had taken a vow of silence, I had the distinct impression he was trying to communicate with me. From time to time I would notice that he would lift his brows and flick a glance at me as you would when trying to get someone’s attention. Sometimes the glance had a kind of darting intensity; at other times it might be accompanied by an equally sudden flick of the wrist. What was he trying to communicate?

The Abbot and the Bishop were already seated when we entered the small formal dining room. Brother Thomas took his seat opposite the Abbot and I sat opposite the Bishop. The meal was conducted in silence.

As we waited for dessert to be served, the Bishop turned to the Abbot and asked who I was. The reply practically threw me off my seat. The Bishop was told that I was a very interesting tourist. That was certainly not the case. Why the misrepresentation? More silence followed.

I looked over at the Bishop. He was contained, eyes focused downward in the kind of unperturbed solitude that is the substance of monastic life. Then he lifted his head with measured deliberateness as if about to speak. But he did not speak. Instead he threw a glance at me that ruptured forever the membrane of the separate self. Gold threads poured from his eyes into mine. The threads were finely braided. They entered through the portal of the eyes and gathered in a pool in the centre of my chest. As the Abbot and the Bishop left the room, Brother Thomas was looking at me with eyes ablaze. He was witness to the fiery transmission. He knew why I was speechless: I had witnessed the divine in a human being.

The next day the Abbot refused to explain why he had misrepresented me to the Bishop. I insisted that I needed to see the Bishop. For a few days it was a contest of wills. Finally my host relented and his driver took me to the monastery where the Bishop resided. It was a smaller and more ancient monastery. In fact it had been the seat of the patriarchs after they had moved from Antioch.

Bishop Elias Çankaya was a tall, thickset man who had the imposing stature you might associate with a biblical prophet. He lived in relative poverty compared to the Abbot. Our first meal together was chicken broth and stale bread.

After dinner I was taken to my room. To my deep surprise I was given the room reserved for the Patriarch and high dignitaries. The Bishop clearly didn’t think I was a tourist. My sleep did not last long: close to midnight I was called to join His Grace in the catacomb beneath the monastery.

A slow candlelit procession followed the Bishop as we prayed at the tombs of saints and patriarchs departed. As we completed the rounds, the Bishop stood at the base of the winding stone stairwell. In one hand he held an amethyst-studded cross, attached to which was a rose-coloured scarf reaching from the base of the cross to the ground. The other hand, which bore his episcopal ring, was held out for each person to kiss the ring and then the cross before heading up the stairs. The intensity of this archetypal image is burned into my memory forever.

The next day the Bishop and I discussed wells, beehives, needlework, carpentry, water pipes and so many other small projects that were needed by the communities. We had a deep sense of alignment. It was as if we were very old friends. I went to bed that night glowing. Again I was awakened, not at midnight but about an hour after daybreak. I was told the Bishop was waiting for me but this time he was not in the catacombs: he was on the roof of the monastery.

He stood on the flat monastery roof pointing at the horizon like a prophetic figure from a Bible scene.

‘You will have to leave. Do you see that black cloud in the distance? It is a chaff storm. These storms are very rare. Once it gets here you will not be able to breathe. The chaff and the dust will get into everything.’

Fighting back tears and a strong sense of rejection, I knew I could not argue with him. I felt I had earned the spiritual right to be with him and now I was being sent away. So much passed between us in those moments that words cannot convey. I was son, initiate and beloved friend, but for some reason this connection was going to be cut off.

A month later, back in Istanbul, I had just finished writing my ecumenical report to the Council of Churches when I received a call. I was told that His Grace Elias Çankaya had been killed in a car accident. He had died instantly.

The mind itself is just a dust mote. I had no power to understand. I had to surrender to the mystery.

A few days later, sitting in the bookstore, Sheik Muzaffer looked at me with great kindness and told one of the dervishes to get me some lokum – which we know as Turkish delight.

After the Bishop’s death I knew it would not be long before we left Turkey and headed to the United States. The activist in me was getting restless.

The vigils, fasting and constant remembrance instigated by Hasan Shushud began to produce a shift that sustained a higher octave in my life. I was also grateful to be alive. Every day was punctuated with moments when I would pause and feel keenly the synchronization of heart, mind and spirit. A simple, original beauty began to shine through the conditioned layers of my mind.

At this time a young Turkish friend was pestering me to go and see his spiritual teacher. I was equally insistent that my cup was full. I had been given gift upon gift and I needed time to process my experiences. But clearly the universe had a different idea. I agreed to see my friend’s teacher just to get him off my back. What followed was the coup de grâce of this period of intense mystical immersion.

On the appointed day my internal energy system quietly told me to prepare. I was to go to a certain pots and pans store and the teacher would be found at the back. As the time approached, I found myself buying a jar of honey for the teacher and then as I got near to the store I picked up some white flowering sage from a girl selling herbs in the street.

Metin was just a few years older than me. As I walked towards the group huddled in the back of the store, he looked at me and declared mysteriously, ‘He brings honey and herbs to the Baptist.’

I sat down, whereupon with hardly any introduction he asked if he could ask me a question. He wanted to know if I knew who the dost (Turkish for ‘beloved friend’) of Jesus was. He confirmed it was indeed John.

‘When Jesus was on the Cross he looked down at his beloved friend who was standing by his mother Merriam. He looked at her and said, “Woman, this is your son.” And to John he said, “Son, this is your mother.” Why did he say woman to his mother and son to his close disciple?’ I didn’t know how to answer.

Metin’s words were translated by one of his students. They used no specific honourific title towards him, except that occasionally they called him Abi, which means ‘older brother’.

‘At this moment on the Cross, Jesus is getting ready to leave the world and enter the cosmos. He is ready to return to the throne of God. He looks at his mother. He does not want her to suffer. But Jesus the son of Mary is leaving and he wants her to have another son to take his place. He says woman because his earthly personality is dissolving. In reality she is no longer his mother because he is already ascending to the universal Christhood. He gives her a son in his place.

‘Jesus looks at John and calls him son. This is the moment. The fire collects in the master. This is the fire he cannot take with him. If this fire ever went out, our Earth would fall into darkness. It would be a cold dark planet. This fire goes by many names but tonight we remember it as the Breath of Jesus and the Spirit of God.

‘Jesus breathed this fire into the heart of John. John’s heart had been prepared. Only his heart was ready. Only his heart could bear it. Jesus poured the fire of his unconditional love into the heart of his beloved friend. It is John who is the inheritor, who is the spiritual son. As this flame enters John’s heart, Jesus cracks open like an egg and the cosmos begins to flow through him. Later, John experiences Revelation.

‘James you are a hunter. You are a hunter of that flame, that unbearable fire whose lightning entered John’s heart. No religion will feed you. Only that raw flame will feed you. Please come back and see me. We have found each other.’

I visited Metin as often as I could before leaving Turkey.

On a later visit:

‘The object of spirituality is not saintliness. Better to be entirely invisible and transparent than to be seen as a saint. You are a page that needs to be written upon. People can become addicted to practice but it can put too much emphasis on what they are doing. They become like self-conscious actors in a play … their assigned role to kneel and pray or meditate. I wonder if you would agree to a test. Live for the next six months without ever thinking about God. Abstain from it all. Every time you have an impulse that relates to spiritual practice, just refuse it as if you are on a diet. The practice is just to be who you are and let Him write the script in you. Through this practice of no practice you will be pulled where you are needed most.’

It would be 30 years before I would meet Metin again. But I never stopped drinking the wine of his love.

And as it happened, about six months after the practice of no practice I started working for Amnesty International. It was as if Metin knew that the spiritual fire I so longed for could only be accessed if, in my case, I walked right towards the fury of the world’s cruelty and hatred and not away from it.

The Great Mystery, the Subtle Planes and Intuition

The Great Mystery is a central theme of mysticism. It is how we represent omniscience. As unfathomable as it may be, the Mystery is where everything is known. For anyone rooted in the logic of scientific materialism, omniscience doesn’t make sense because, from that perspective, knowing does not exist outside of the human brain. There are new scientific theories influenced by quantum physics that postulate a field of consciousness which we can and do tap into all the time. Some physicists go so far as to suggest that the root of all matter is an ocean of consciousness which has infinite memory of all patterns in the universe. We will come back later to this evolving conversation between the scientist and the mystic. It has a bearing on the full integration of the mystic and the activist. For the moment what is important is that the mystic commits to being in a dynamic relationship with the mother field of all consciousness and the source of all being. The drop wants to make its way back to the ocean. And that is quite an epic quest!

Mystics must first explore the subtle dimensions of inner reality with the same precision that one learns a language. You can communicate inside the language only when you know it. One learns that this inner reality is governed by its own laws, and those laws are constant. This is the difference between getting a random intuition and beginning to find yourself in the subtle territory that sources intuition. The entry requirement to the subtle planes is a purified heart. One might call the doorway between the gross and the subtle a frequency-blocker that denies access to crude intentions and unethical behaviour and is off-limits to ego’s low-grade demands. Not only is the subtle off-limits to these coarse energies – it is much cleverer than that: the subtle is invisible to them.

Once you make contact with the subtle, you learn how to perceive it more clearly. The subtle is a way of journeying, but no movement occurs without reverence, which is a form of love. It has its own unique relationship to time and space: the subtle field creates its own conjunctions in these dimensions for its own purposes. There are many levels of the subtle domain and each level has associated powers. But what I know of those who traverse these planes is that those who go farthest surrender every power and every atom of their will to the Mystery.

The Great Mystery does not operate a train schedule. It catalyzes wave upon wave of synchronicity and connection. When we experience these synchronicities, the universe seems to be an ocean of flow that we can tap into to perceive incredible layers of connectivity. When this occurs, one doesn’t need to seek the miraculous: miracles abound. The more one is able to step into this flow, the more one experiences grace and guidance. But think that you are directing or managing the flow and you are in for a rude awakening. Only by surrendering to its qualities can one stay in the flow. Cultivating reverence, gratitude and affirmation is not about managing the Mystery to get what you want: it is about participating in the nature of its flow. But be advised, there is no linear trajectory; if you project a certain destination, you will inevitably be disappointed.

From the perspective of omniscience you are most definitely going to have to take what appear to be detours in linear reality. You’ll also meet what seem to be inexplicable delays and stop signs. You will meet what the I Ching refers to as Mountain Arresting Progress. The mountain that suddenly seems to block your path may send your ego into a tantrum or your life into a tailspin but, when properly understood, the obstacle on the journey is a gift from a universe which knows what you need in any given moment. When we learn to be grateful for the mountains in our way, as much as for the rapids that speed us along, we make great progress. We refer to this as co-operating with the Great Mystery.

Learning to co-operate with the mysterious hidden guidance of the universe is a huge milestone in the development of the aspiring mystic. We literally partner with the unknown. We place our trust in what is given. All this will prepare us for an even deeper surrender that will be called for later in the process.

While the Great Mystery does not operate a train schedule, it does communicate. First it may communicate through signs and symbols which are read and interpreted, but when things really begin to move, the communication takes the form of inspiration and intuition. In my own case the intuitive pulses a particular feeling tone. I allow space for that feeling to grow. As the feeling is amplified, it registers a deeper sensing, which then forms a more reliable knowing.

Intuition carries a concentrated script from the universe which the heart can receive more easily than the head. The mind gets lost in the myriad details. The heart picks up the essential transmission. The heart looks for a match in the world for the frequency it is receiving and then it gravitates towards the source of that frequency.

Thus for the mystic nothing needs to be forced in the field of action. Rather one needs to cultivate the quality and depth of one’s intuitive capacity. One learns to commune with the universal language of the heart. At times one hears the great roaring flow of the universe there in one’s own heart; at other times one feels a single and solitary drop of grace uniquely experienced in the simplicity of any given moment.

Our real challenges invariably come when the mind challenges intuition. The mind is charged with making sense of what is happening around it. It works on available data. The mind gets frustrated when things don’t add up. In fact, it can make a lot of trouble when it is in that state. Rather than admitting that it doesn’t know what is going on, it can default to pretending that it does. Speak my language, it demands. And if we surrender to that mental voice, we may succeed in having our way in the world but be tone-deaf to spiritual intuition and completely blind to the reality that exists in the subtle spheres.

When one reaches a sustained amplified field of spiritual intuition, one begins to see things from the more inclusive perspective of the subtle world. That is why someone who has gained mastery of the subtle plane has the capacity to see the flow of qualities and connections around any given person or event. Quite simply, this is how a master recognizes the potential of a student and why the guidance of a true master of the subtle plane can be reliable – and invaluable to the sincere seeker. That guidance is not about receiving ‘how to’ directions but comes indirectly as intuition by which knowledge enters into one’s being.

Intuition is the antenna for the guidance system of the Great Mystery working through the subtle planes to communicate with us. If we really are attuned to receiving its pulse, we are slowly inducted into higher reason, which runs counter to the logic of a world that cannot see beyond limited agendas.

The logic of the world is ‘full steam ahead’. We make plans. Set goals and objectives. We mobilize resources and get the job done. All this requires good management skills, whether we are running a household or a business or keeping our lives organized. Keeping your life together and functioning successfully often require some accommodation to the way that the world rewards accomplishment, acknowledges merit, recognizes uniqueness and celebrates talent. There are rules to the game of being in the world. The activist seeks to make sure that the world game is played fairly and that the rules are changed when they result in exploitation and abuse. This leads the activist to a place where he or she must ring the alarm, cry foul and ultimately oppose or defy the manoeuvres of the power brokers with a higher moral logic.

It is my contention that a sacred transformation occurs when higher reason, which is informed by spiritual reality, consciously unites with the logic of higher morality to not only bring about a better world but also bring us closer to divinity.

But for the moment, the mystic who is on a quest to learn the laws of inner reality must keep letting go of what he or she has been taught are the rules for making progress in the world. The seeker has to develop a new capacity. It’s as if the lights are turned off and you have to learn to sense your way rather than seeing with your eyes. You must learn to drive blindfolded, unable to project what lies ahead. But once this capacity begins to establish itself you begin to gain inner sight – or insight – into the nature of higher reality and higher reason.

It is then that you discover that only profound levels of trust, love and surrender will give you access to the universe beyond this world. When you’re sensing ability leads you to recognize the presence of the miraculous qualities hidden in the invisible, it will not be long before you meet yet another kind of big roadblock for the mind: these are the doors of contradiction and paradox that linearity and simple logic cannot pass through.

The mind is conditioned by either/or, by this or that. To enter the place where unconditional love resides, you have to let go of subject/object, self and other. Polarity functions beautifully in the physics of linear reality. But higher reason dissolves the limited functionality of polarity in favour of a reality that is based upon interconnection, interdependence, interpenetration and unity.

When you are able to recognize that you are in the presence of unconditional love, you trust its guidance over anything that might indicate the contrary. The seeker, at this point in the journey, can now experience the joy of intuitive knowing even as their head tells them that nothing makes sense.

This is when, as the Sufis say, you are no longer raw, you are getting cooked. And when you are really cooked, you become very subtle indeed. You can even glimpse the divine in another human being.

Chapter Seven

The Cauldron of the Activist: I

Working at Amnesty International for a decade, the author shares the triumphs and challenges of human rights work and reflects on moral coherence in a complex world.

I worked at Amnesty International from the mid-80s to the mid-90s. This was a climactic period for the human rights movement. We learned how to do mass public mobilization. We made leaps and bounds in telling the story of officially sanctioned torture and murder and the inspired heroism of so many of the world’s prisoners of conscience.

This was a decade when human rights activism really came of age. Through gruelling effort, backed by rising public support, we saw the death throes of the Soviet Union, the collapse of the Berlin wall, the end of apartheid and the final days of dictators like Marcos and Pinochet. There was a sense that with the right kind of heft we could start to bring down the world’s remaining dictatorships and oppressive regimes; that we could end the practice of torture; that violators would have no place to hide; and that we could provide legal safeguards for women and children, as well as for minorities and refugees. At the same time, the worldwide democracy movement was starting to gather great momentum, international human rights legal instruments were gaining strength and the United Nations was more vigorously promoting and protecting human rights. There was a sense that even though we lived in an insanely cruel world, the moral order would ultimately triumph.

During this time Amnesty organized a massive mobilization campaign whose theme was the Conspiracy of Hope. With the help of brilliant marketing strategies that included rock concerts and Hollywood celebrity involvement, hundreds of thousands of people joined Amnesty and actively supported its work. Tens of thousands of them were students – nearly every campus in the US had an Amnesty International chapter.

Even though we were buoyed up with these dramatic milestones of progress, the same decade saw genocide in Rwanda; the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the subsequent war with the US-led coalition; war in Bosnia, Slovenia, Croatia and Kosovo; the suppression of the first intifada against Israeli occupation; insurgencies and atrocities in Latin America; repression in the Middle East; and gross human rights violations and systemic abuse in scores of countries. We took hope where we could – otherwise things would have looked too bleak. Because there were so many challenges, you had to learn the resilience of the long-distance runner even as, at the same time, you were spurred to sprint faster and faster as wave upon wave of human rights crises landed upon your desk.

Imagine the pressure you might feel if you felt genocide was on the horizon. As human rights activists, we repeatedly warned of a looming catastrophe in Rwanda: neither the governments of the world nor the media, and not even the United Nations, was paying attention. It is almost soul-destroying to report on ethnic killings, looming massacres and inevitable genocide and see no response. You try beating the drum louder, staying at the office later and later, calling everyone you know, demanding Congressional hearings, sending out more urgent appeals and berating editors who will not publish your opinions. Then consider that you know at the same time that some Kurdish children have had their eyes gouged out in Iraq, while child soldiers in Africa are being inducted into how to hack off limbs and terrorize communities, while elsewhere a Tibetan nun is having her fingernails pulled out in a torture session. Like a doctor doing bloody triage in the middle of a war, you have to keep going – constantly focusing with your staff team on what would be the most effective response and then refocusing as more cases and more crises fill every hour of your day.

When you had a breakthrough, when you saved somebody’s life, when you rescued somebody from the torture slab, or when you really got people to sit up and take note, you celebrated every inch and every drop of good news and success. But you didn’t have a lot of time to sit around savouring achievement. A great deal of time and energy was spent identifying perpetrators and then doing your best to expose them. Some people seem to think it was easy to do a lot of self-righteous finger-pointing and meting out of condemnation, but most of the energy came from a place of feeling the existential reality of someone else’s unspeakable suffering and trying to end it.

The sense of immediacy that human rights activists feel in relation to cases or situations they are working on can spur them into electrifying creativity and charged altruism to act on behalf of another human being. A sense of urgency can catalyze will as an instrument of powerful transformational action. Getting the bad guys – in human rights parlance ‘prosecuting the violators’ – was a means to an end: that is, stopping the torture or the killings.

It was all about getting more and more people to join the conspiracy of hope. Whatever we did, we had to keep hope alive. We were ever on the lookout for iconic stories of hope. The story of Juan Carlos Rodriguez, for example, led to a campaign we called ‘the Colours of Hope’.

Juan Carlos had been arrested in 1976 during the period of the military junta in Argentina. His crime was that he was a union organizer. He was wrongfully imprisoned and regularly tortured. He told me about one occasion when he was lying on the torture slab and the pain was so extreme he thought he would die. As he prepared mentally for death, he had one thought. It was about the son he had been unable to get to know, who was still a young child: ‘I hope that my son will one day know that his father died nobly, in a noble cause.’ The poignancy of this thought remains with me to this day. Abusers always want to deny the nobility of their victims. That is why they rape their opponents, throw their bodies on the streets or disappear them as if they have no identity. That is why Amnesty International chose as its logo a candle in barbed wire to symbolize the light of conscience speaking to us from inside the prisons of the world. It is a light that calls us to act. It is a light that calls us to join light with light.

As the junta in Argentina faced more pressure from home and abroad, conditions began to improve for Juan Carlos. The torture stopped. His thoughts for his son were vividly expressed in a score of drawings that he did at that time using, amongst other things, the dye from his prison food to create pictures of elementary simplicity and beauty. One of the pictures that lives in my memory is that of a little boy on a swing and a large smiling sun in the sky sketched in primary colours. These were the colours of hope.

The other aspect of hope was that even though you might feel it failing in yourself, part of your activist commitment was that you had a duty to represent it for others. But there is so much abuse in the world that you can’t take up everybody’s case. Not everything can be a priority. Staff with regional responsibilities would come to me in my capacity as Washington office director with reasons why certain cases or countries needed to be a super-priority, and difficult decisions had to be made.

On one occasion, for example, Maryam Elahi, the director of Middle East and North Africa programs in the Washington office, came to me with a request that we focus more priority attention on Morocco. Frankly I didn’t buy it. I argued that the situation in Morocco was not as severe as the rampant abuses in Libya, Iraq and Syria. But something had set her on fire and she wasn’t going to let go that easily. The next morning when I came into the office she had left a copy of a letter on my desk. It was a letter that had been smuggled out of a dungeon in the Atlas mountains. The name of this hell-hole was Tazmamart. Some people referred to it as the King of Morocco’s private Rose Garden – a place where he wanted some people to rot in hell.

The letter described how so many of the prisoners died agonizing deaths. Lying on bare cement slabs, some would simply die of cold and malnutrition in the severe winter conditions of the Atlas mountains. Never allowed out of their cells, many died of sickness; several went insane. I felt I was reading something from the 16th century. I went to Maryam’s office. She knew by my expression that she had me.

I asked her what we could do. ‘I’m pretty sure,’ she said, ‘we can get the relevant sub-committee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee to hold a hearing. There are also currently more letter-writing campaigns focusing on disappearances in Morocco by our worldwide membership which will result in sustained pressure on the government.’

Naturally we were more than pleased when the congressional committee agreed to hold hearings on Morocco. Maryam did an excellent job of preparing the testimony I was asked to deliver. As I finished my testimony, I paused for effect, then read from the letter that had been smuggled out of the prison. For the first time in my experience after testifying before a congressional committee, you could have heard a pin drop in the room. Then one member of Congress asked, ‘What was the name of that dungeon?’ And another said, ‘How do you spell Tazmamart?’ Everyone knew that the King would probably be reading the testimony before bedtime. There was an exhilarating sense that we were using the levers of power on behalf of those prisoners suffering so deeply in the Atlas mountains. But that was just the beginning, as our members kept up the pressure.

That same year Tazmamart was closed down and its remaining prisoners released. My God, the joy we felt the day we heard that news! Even then there was more to come.

A few months later Maryam came to my office and asked if I was free for lunch that day. She said she had someone special she wanted me to meet. At lunchtime she knocked on my door, accompanied by a kind-looking man. ‘Please meet Ali Bourequat. He spent 18 years in the Tazmamart prison. He is currently living in Paris but he wanted to come to Washington for various reasons and to thank us.’ I don’t know if you can imagine what such a moment is like, but it’s a moment every human rights activist dreams of having.

When we sat down at the local Mexican restaurant on Capitol Hill, Ali seemed baffled by the menu, so I explained fajitas, burritos and enchiladas. He looked at me and said with the force of a man who’d been fed slops and starved for 18 years: ‘Food, my friend, is beautiful.’

Getting the levers of power to work in your favour is thrilling, especially when the purpose is to right the moral wrongs of the world. But activists are keenly aware of the scale of the resources that can be employed by the power brokers of the world when they really want things to go their way. You learn to be strategic like David vs Goliath, or Rosa Parks, and you study master tacticians and visionaries like Gandhi, Sakharov, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and Aung San Suu Kyi.

You also learn that nothing is what it appears when the agents of power say they need you because you’re on the same side. When you find yourself in the middle of a chess game where checkmate means all-out war, you realize you are no longer the knight in shining armour: you are a rook to be used skilfully in a late-game manoeuvre. Then you find out how the world will claim the purity of your principles for itself when it’s convenient. You may also discover that moral and ethical considerations get much more complicated as the continuation of atrocities becomes one of the stated reasons for a just war to end a reign of terror.

I was thrown into exactly this kind of predicament when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and George Herbert Bush needed human rights to help end the game for the dictator.

Before his invasion of Kuwait, the US Government was unable to find ‘a gross and consistent pattern of human rights violations in Iraq’, even though it condemned some of the egregious atrocities by Saddam Hussein’s agents. The US had its own reasons for withholding full condemnation of the man they were about to call the ‘Butcher of Bagdad’.

Before he invaded Kuwait, Hussein rained unspeakable cruelty on his own people. I cry when I think of the man who would regularly come by the office to see if we had been able to get information on his three sons; two were engineers, the other a doctor. They had been disappeared. I had three sons. I imagined his pain.

Then it happened. Iraq invaded Kuwait. Saddam’s signature cruelty and brutality were evident in the slaughter that accompanied the invasion. Amnesty went into high gear documenting massive human rights violations. Some would say it moved too fast and that some of the information was exaggerated. The US Government became aware that AI was compiling a report. That’s when the calls began.

First, calls came from a few media people here and there, congressional staffers and junior State Department officials. Then a few weeks before the publication date for the report, which until then was under wraps, the White House started to call. Everyone who called was told about the strict embargo date and the release of the report at the United Nations. There was heightened interest in the report because of the charged atmosphere around building a case for war with Saddam. The calls from the White House got more persistent. They were looking for an advance copy, and again and again I told them to wait. I could feel the pressure was mounting.

Then on a Friday afternoon, the weekend before the report’s release, a special assistant to the President called to inform me that President Bush was making a direct and personal appeal to me to let him have the report within a couple hours. He was going to Camp David, where he would have time to read the report in full. It was very important for him to get the facts straight before his meeting with the ambassadors from the coalition he had put together. The President promised that he would not break the embargo. I told the caller to call me back in an hour. I went outside and walked around Capitol Hill. The simplicity and naïveté of my early activism seemed like a dream that had dissolved into great complexity. I was very torn about the prospect of war with Saddam. I knew he needed to be stopped, but I also knew that war would bring its own ravages.

I went back to the office, got a large magic marker and wrote over the cover ‘For the President of the United States only’. I called the White House back. Within minutes an official car pulled up at the office to pick up the report.

I went to bed that night with so much anxiety that I had a nightmare. It began with people dancing in a huge ballroom. It was a black-tie affair. It was a Washington event with lots of officials swirling in the mix. Then the main doors of the ballroom were thrown open as a wind blew into the room. There was sand in the wind. People began to run and then scream loudly after seeing a scorpion on the ground. The scorpion took to the air and started flying directly towards me. As the scorpion entered my heart, I woke up screaming in terror. I could literally feel the hair rising on the back of my head.

This was fear as I had never experienced it. It was a moral fear, a fear of forces way beyond my control.

On the Monday morning after his weekend in Camp David, the President told the world that he had read the report. It even made the news that his wife Barbara had attempted to read it but she found it too graphic and sickening and had to put it down. The President encouraged everyone to read this report. A day later I was told the White House was printing its own copies of it. I called in anger and told them to stop the process, reminding them that we were an independent non-profit organization.

Operation Desert Storm followed about four months later.

The placards of the peace marchers carried the slogan, ‘No Blood for Oil.’ This was true but a part of a more complex truth. And for me as an activist it spelled the end of seeing reality through the prism of binary right or wrong equations. But I was still left with the question: How can we change the world when it is so entangled in complexity?

Moral Coherence and Complexity

The core of activism is motivated by pure intentions. There is a fundamental desire to see wrongs righted. There is a perception that we must participate vigorously in safeguarding justice. The activist feels called to shake people out of moral passivity. Raising the alarm is necessary to help people see that if they are not actively promoting justice, they may be colluding with injustice. The activist is constantly asking people to make choices that define whether or not they are consciously willing to forge a better world or put their heads in the sand because they don’t care enough to look at what is going on around them. However complex and confusing life can get, the activist attempts to make it morally coherent.

Activists see themselves as the bearers of clear truth and as bearers of a higher truth that will lead to a more inclusive, sustainable, equitable and peaceful world. In order to promote this truth the activist needs to expose the basis for the perpetuation of privileges, interests, ideas, attitudes, beliefs, cultural mores and systems that prevent higher truth from being actualized. This can be seen as fuelling polarization, but the activist is generally convinced that in order to wake people up you have to give them binary choices – recycle or wreck the planet, financially disinvest or be seen as a supporter of a racist or oppressive regime, boycott a product line or support child labour, prosecute human rights violators or sanction impunity.

And if people choose to ignore the real impact of their lifestyles and choices, there is nothing wrong with prodding their conscience to make them so uncomfortable that they feel guilt or shame.

The New Age idea that one should look away from the negative and put all one’s attention on the positive can be particularly roiling to activists who are engaged in exposing corrosively damaging negatives. The anti-tobacco campaigners are not negative when they show images of cancerous lungs, nor are the environmental activists negative when they show the devastation created by tar sands mining. Guilt and shame can motivate, just as exposing the dark side of human affairs can spark conscience and help people wake up. But shame works only to a limited extent.

It is one thing to be woken by an alarm, it is another to get really motivated to change your plans for the day. There is an evolution in activism that makes sure that it doesn’t get trapped in feeding negative energies but puts its best energy into creating solutions. To do that, to really engage positive change and paradigm shift, the activist learns to connect the inner and the outer in a new map of reality. In connecting the inner and outer, one never ignores negativity, one learns to face it, understand where it comes from and what structures sustain it. The pragmatist will say that activists cocoon themselves in the safety of an oversimplified reality and that they are afraid to sacrifice their purity or ideals to accommodate a complex and imperfect world. The pragmatist claims that the activist can also be polarizing and divisive. To which the activist responds, ‘Exposing exploitation and corruption is only divisive from a surface perspective.’

Activists see themselves as creating a middle way between the accommodations and compromising behaviours of the pragmatist and the kind of disengagement that can be created by the uncompromising stance of the spiritually aloof. Activists have to engage on the ground in confronting oppression that is generally powerfully active in defending its interests. To do so they summon an intensity of focus and the will to save lives, forests and a thousand other causes where suffering lasts for as long as no one intervenes.

This is the activist’s challenge: how to simplify a complex world by demonstrating moral coherence and offering clear choices that can guide humanity away from self-destruction and, at the same time, unite it around a vision that will end cycles of exploitation and deliver on the promise of sustainability and justice?

One thing is clear to me from my own journey: we will never have a safe or just world in the absence of courage. No matter how complex things get, it is through courage that we define our moral choices and speak truth to power. It is courage that transforms moral platitudes into game-changing visionary imperatives.

It is also courage that plays a vital role in uniting the mystic and the activist. For in the end they both have to confront ego’s marauding and destructive self-interest.

Chapter Eight

The Cauldron of the Activist: II

The author accompanies Jennifer Harbury to an encampment in Guatemala to find her husband’s body and meditates on the role of instinct and equipoise in activism.

Jennifer Harbury embodied courage as I had never witnessed it before. She lives a quieter life now, but in the 90s she was a beacon of audacity, courage and conscience.

As a young Harvard-trained lawyer, she had gone to Guatemala to find out for herself about persistent and aggravated abuses against the Mayan people. A guerilla movement had formed as a push-back against atrocities being committed by the security forces. She not only met the leader of the guerillas, they fell in love and married. In 1992 her husband Efrain Bamaca, known popularly as Commandante Everardo, was captured and brutally tortured by Guatemalan security forces. He was never seen again. Like a modern-day Antigone, Jennifer asked the government to reveal what happened. She went back to Guatemala despite death threats, and publicly went on a hunger strike. Her husband had been disappeared but one thing was certain: Jennifer Harbury was going to be a permanent inquisitor of the government responsible for her husband’s disappearance.

Information about what had happened began to leak out. Efrain had been repeatedly tortured by a Guatemalan who was a CIA asset – Efrain’s torturer was on the CIA payroll. The scandal erupted in Washington. High-profile congressional hearings were held. Bill Clinton ordered an investigation. Jennifer held the government’s feet to the fire as much as possible. It helped that there was intense media interest in the case.

In the midst of this mounting pressure I got a call from Jennifer. She informed me that the US government was willing to provide information about where Efrain had been buried. She asked me if I would accompany her to Guatemala. It would be an unpublicized trip. We would meet with the US ambassador, who would give us details. We would then go to the location and look for his body. There was also another informer we would meet at the UN compound. I agreed to go.

When we arrived at the airport in Guatemala City, far from being unpublicized we found ourselves in the middle of a media zoo with 30 to 40 members of the press waiting for us shouting out questions. We were headline news. The next day not only were we front-page news, but a leading columnist in a major newspaper wrote a piece entitled Jennifer Harbury, You Should Never Have Been Born. It was the equivalent of a death threat. Nevertheless we proceeded.

Our meeting at the UN compound did not produce much, and the informant was understandably pretty nervous. But as we drove away, an SUV came up beside us. It had about six men in it, one of whom was smiling as he put a silencer on the barrel of his machine gun. It was intimidating for sure but not enough to deter us.

At the US Embassy the ambassador gave us information that would lead us to a remote military encampment in Huehuetenango. It was not much more than a location – that’s all we were given. After all, the US government had to protect its sources and methods.

Getting to a remote encampment deep in the jungle to see if we could find the remains of someone tortured to death was a bit of a strain, but when we arrived at the outpost the tension came to a climax. Jennifer got out of the vehicle and walked up to the guard on duty. They talked. Then an officer was called. When she came back to the van, I asked her what she had said.

‘I told them we were here to look for bodies of tortured and murdered Mayans and if they knew anything they should tell us.’ My heart came to rest. I couldn’t feel anything but awe in the presence of such courage.

There were four of us and it didn’t take us long to conclude from mounds and caved earth that this was a site that would need formal forensic examination. We decided that we shouldn’t even disturb the ground. It would take weeks before we could get a forensic team there. I have one last vivid image, imprinted on me before we left. Behind the encampment was a stream. On the other side of the stream was a teenage boy who looked out from behind a tree. He looked at me with an urgent glare and then, as if screaming with his eyes, he looked at the ground nearby. Then he darted away. It is a haunting image that still conveys so much.

After the site was examined, scores of bodies were found but Efrain was not amongst them. We know this from dental records.

Sometime later Carlos Salinas, the Latin America director at Amnesty International’s Washington office, told me that we had received a mysterious request to meet someone at a Los Angeles airport hotel who claimed he would give us the final truth about what had happened to Efrain Bamaca. We decided to meet the informant at the designated hotel. Sitting nervously on the edge of his bed, he told us that Efrain had been taken out to sea in a helicopter and dropped in shark-infested waters. Many questions remain.

I am so fortunate to have known Jennifer Harbury. She is in the great lineage of courageous human rights activists who stand up against the raw abuse of power by government. Just like spiritual people, activists have their master teachers who instruct us in the mighty power of one individual to stare down the gravest lies and distortions of truth.

Towards the end of the ten-year period that I worked for AI I began to feel activist burnout. I still felt moral outrage but it was becoming less spontaneous and more mechanical. A certain degree of numbness was creeping in. There is only so much cruelty the human heart can bear.

I remember vividly how beaten down I felt at the news of Iqbal Masih’s death. He had been one of my heroes. Although he was only a child he was a torchbearer of hope for many of us in the human rights movement. At the age of four his parents sold him into bonded labour for a miserable $16. He was forced to work a fourteen-hour day seven days a week shackled to a loom. At the age of ten he not only escaped, he started campaigning against bonded child labour. He was a voice of conscience that couldn’t be ignored. He started to gain international recognition travelling abroad and speaking to other children around the world. At the age of twelve he was shot to death.

Why do good people have to pay such a high price to transform the crude self-interest of the world?

Days later I am on the Washington Metro. I am reading an essay on Prometheus in a book of collected essays by Thomas Merton entitled Raids on the Unspeakable. As I finish the essay I begin to sob quietly. I notice that ironically we’re at the Pentagon station.

Promethean despair is the cry that arises out of the abyss of man’s nothingness – the inarticulate expression of the terror man cannot face, the terror of having to be someone, of having to be himself. The fire Prometheus thought he had to steal was his own spiritual freedom. In the eyes of Prometheus to be himself was to be guilty.

Guilty, frustrated, rebellious, fear-ridden, Prometheus seeks to assert himself and fails. His mysticism enables him to glory in defeat. For since Prometheus cannot conceive of a true victory, his own triumph is to let the vulture of despair devour his liver: he will be a martyr and a victim, because the gods he has created in his own image represent his own tyrannical demands on himself. There is only one issue in his struggle with them: glorious defiance in a luxury of despair.¹

I understood completely what Thomas Merton was saying. We become ugly, tyrannical and cruel when we make ourselves agents of a lesser god. Vindictive religiosity, racial supremacy, political repression and economic exploitation are the vultures of a guilty inadequacy we send to punish ourselves for not having the courage to walk in the light of our own true nature and for ignoring the divine spark within us.

The great warriors of conscience on this planet are not those who need to prove who is inferior. Men and women of conscience endure the unspeakable because they will not let themselves become lesser. We act as lesser beings when fear invades the soul. And we rise when we have the courage to be.

The fear that we will be punished if we dare to own the fire within our souls is an ancient one, for countless beings who have asserted their right to express their deepest identity have been exterminated, humiliated or forced to live in the shadows. And then, perversely, cruelty emerges out of the fear-ridden shadows.

Merton suggests that reality is far different than the self-negating, self-torturing Promethean fiction that has created so much cruelty and suffering in the world. Our task is to find a God that is worthy of our liberated selves, not one who will punish us for being ourselves:

Far from killing the man who seeks the divine fire, the Living God will Himself pass through death in order that man may have what is destined for him. There is nothing we can steal from Him at all because before we can think of stealing it, it has already been given.²

Instinct – a Rudder in Complexity

As activists evolve, and if they stay committed long enough, the complexity of catalyzing real and lasting change becomes evident to them. They may have purity of purpose and they may be able to hold steadfastly to a narrowly focused intention, but everything around them is in flux. Because nothing is static, activists have to stay creatively alert as they respond to new information, events, media attention, and fluctuations in resources and funding. Their campaigning has to be skilfully effective in a world of volatile change – a world where entrenched interests have their hands closer to levers of power, media access and money.

If you are really to make a difference as an activist, you need more than stamina, determination and skilfully managed resources to row your boat against the massive tides and currents of power, influence and money. You need vision that is responsive and alive, a generative sense of hope and possibility, a state of equipoise and a positively charged instinct for spontaneous creativity. While they interact with the outer world and external events, all four come from the inner life of the activist; yet instinct remains the most mysterious.

It is fascinating to me that for all the weight we put upon knowledge and skills development, instinct remains central in the evolving story of humanity. So often when we refer to instinct it is in the context of raw survival needs, but as evolutionary biologists have pointed out, we have instincts for sharing, caring and collaborative play. We even have a very deep instinct for fair play. Rather than being a thing of our primitive past, instinct aligns with higher intuition as our consciousness evolves; it acts as an effective rudder in complexity.

I have known many activists whose instinct for justice seems to be an integral part of who they are – not something they were taught and not something that was derived from being personally exposed to conditions of injustice. For them it came with the package and often showed up early in their lives. Some are able to hone in on this instinct in ways that make them beautifully sensitive to all kinds of social fairness situations. They are sensitive to the ways hierarchy and privilege can consciously or unconsciously exclude others. They quickly sense the presence of intolerance. Instincts show up in the body, and some of us can literally sense the presence of racial prejudice, religious bigotry or class condescension without a word being said.

For some this instinct for justice shows up vividly in relation to Nature. They feel revulsion towards the arrogant and destructive ways that human beings lord it over the natural world. They feel instinctively how we are out of balance. They have a visceral sense of the danger our current trajectory of devouring natural resources puts us in collectively. They attune to the quality of being in other animal life forms whose mistreatment is experienced as a travesty of justice.

Instinct is a rich resource in the life of an activist. When instinct is joined by conviction and subtle intuition, they provoke not just passionate intensity but the kind of passion that can transform others and turn the tide. Instinct has a quality of in-the-now that can catalyze spontaneous creativity. Because it is unrehearsed it spurs originality and dynamism in the field of action. It is often more concerned with being real than being right. And instinct asks the activist to do something quintessentially important – namely, to learn how to reliably trust his or her own gut and not to get so crowded in by complexity that effective action is diluted.

Like tightrope walkers, activists also need to acquire equipoise, not so that they can tamp down their instinct for peace and justice but so that they can stay on the edge. This quality allows them to be bold and daring, while also being balanced. Courage is daring but not reckless. Passion becomes ranting if it isn’t matched with convincing argument. Moral indignation loses its power if it has no self-reflection. And fear paralyzes if it becomes a dominant emotion. Gaining equipoise requires inner mastery.

Trusting instinct is a way to tap into the highest inspiration. You cultivate inner balance and then you release any control and follow your instinct; and, if you are evolving, this will manifest not as a lower self-interest but as an instinctual pursuit of beauty, truth and justice.

As we shall continue to explore, the mystic and the activist have much to teach each other about finding balance. They are each positioned on a tightrope over chasms where nothing can be rehearsed but where our deepest instincts can guide us to a future of human solidarity and spiritual integration.

PART TWO

Integration

‘As long as human experience lies within the limitation of duality, integration of experience is an essential condition for a rational and significant life. But the ego as a nucleus for integration has to be renounced because of its inevitable alliance with the forces of ignorance. There arises, then, an imperative need for a new centre of integration that will steer clear of the basic ignorance of separateness and allow free scope for the incorporation of all values formerly inaccessible to the ego centre.’¹
MEHER BABA (1894–1969)

Preamble

What Integration Means

Integration is an evolving process leading to wholeness. It is a journey from fragmentation and polarization to coherence and unity. We recognize integration when a person walks their talk; when the inner is mirrored in the outer. When we are in the presence of someone who has really lived their values, a light shines through. When we meet someone whose energetic core is a synchronized expression of generosity and compassion, we can perceive their integration as a luminous field of awareness. Integration signals a degree of mastery.

For most of us the journey towards becoming more personally integrated begins when we detect the gap between the person we present to the world as our authentic self and the one that runs amok in our off-camera inner world. This is where our spiritual work begins. At first we face glaring inconsistencies between the inner self and the socially projected self. Later, we get to tackle the deeper roots of our wounding, the subtler levels of our narcissism, and the contradictions in our belief system.

It takes commitment to stay with the rigours of the journey. Each fresh insight that points the way to greater wholeness tests our motivation to expand our being or realign our doing. The work of becoming more integrated calls for a commitment to self-scrutiny and growth. But because integration pivots on an axis that includes both being and doing, it reshapes the relationship between self and others and spurs us to examine the quality of both our inner life and our engagement in the world. As we have already seen, the activist and the mystic have growing to do in both arenas.

Spirituality cannot exist in a vacuum, ignoring social conditions or the plight of humanity; and activism cannot hope to transform the social order in the absence of mature spiritual development. Both must grow beyond any form of privileged exclusivity. In fact, they each must embrace a reality that joins them in service to individual and collective liberation.

Thus far I have tried to show the distinct but complementary requirements in the training of the activist and the mystic. Now we will turn our attention to their fuller integration. The emergence of a spiritually engaged conscious activism is one of the critical assignments for our time. When so much is at stake we cannot afford divisive activist agendas or an in-grown spirituality that focuses exclusively on personal transcendence. We are called upon to cultivate a wisdom that can help us manifest human capacities, including powers of consciousness, and will address the current catastrophic rebellion against the laws of Nature and the soul-destroying surrender to the gods of acquisition and wholesale greed.

I found in my own journey that not only are there templates of wisdom in certain spiritual lineages, and equally luminous insights transmitted by the great torchbearers of social justice through the ages, but also there are powerful myths encoded in cultures across the world that speak of a once and future time of peace and justice. It is as if we have sent messages collectively down through the ages to remind ourselves that we shall overcome all forms of division. There are many myths about an original paradise, a fall from grace and a lost golden age, but an equal number herald a future time of great healing.

Like a good many people, I was deeply influenced in the late 80s by the popular television series The Power of Myth, with Joseph Campbell. A few years later I met up with Jean Houston who engaged me even more deeply in appreciating how myth can help activate psycho-spiritual integration. She felt keenly that as a global society we were entering a time of great confluence in culture when myth, ancestral ways of knowing, sacred psychology and new science would complement each other to create massive breakthroughs in consciousness.

What happens when the inner and the outer come into deeper alignment, expressing themselves as integration, is that our personal story begins to merge with the collective story: it becomes a paradigm of the story of cultural transformation unfolding around us. The actor merges with the field of action and the story of me gathers into the full orchestration of the story of we.

Chapter Nine

Ancient Seeds of Integration

A vignette of Jean Houston advising the author on the subject of the death penalty is followed by the author’s experience of myth and how it informs his quest to integrate the mystic and the activist.

Jean Houston loves the word entelechy. It is a word coined by Aristotle. The philosopher made a distinction between frivolous possibilities and the nature of true potential. The acorn actually contains the full potential of an oak tree: in the right conditions for the little acorn, it is not a case of might be, possibly, could be – it is a case of it definitely will become a great oak tree. The acorn contains the code for its own manifestation. The outcome is fully latent in the original design.

So when Jean talks about possibilities – she wrote a book entitled The Possible Human – she is not referring to fanciful kinds of possibilities, she is referring to possibilities impregnated with the dynamic energy to manifest and to be crowned by actual existence. What she sees in the seeded patterns of human potential are codes embedded in our great myths.

We first met under unusual circumstances. It was a phone conversation. The subject was the death penalty.

I had heard about Jean’s prodigious creativity and her ability to think out of the box. The architect Buckminster Fuller referred to her mind as a ‘national treasure’ of the US. I decided I needed help from such a mind for a tough activist issue – namely, ending the cruel and morally repugnant practice of executing people. It was during my time as Washington Office Director of Amnesty International. Amnesty had released a report on the death penalty in the US. I got Jean’s number and called her cold. I explained the situation: we had released the report and needed to make progress on the issue. She asked that the report be overnighted to her for early delivery and that I call her late the following afternoon.

The conversation that followed her read was life-changing.

She told me that I needed to understand that from her perspective the report would not change much. I was struck by her directness. It was like a stomach punch when you least expected it. She suggested that the material as presented reinforced the conditioned reality that it came from. ‘You cannot de-condition people by presenting images and stories that have conditioned them in the first place. The neural circuitry is laid down with an intense subliminal relationship to violence. This report with its devastating documentation of the execution of severely emotionally and mentally incapacitated people, of people who were abused and neglected as children, and the horror of botched executions, are part of the nightmare we are called to move beyond. But the report does not tell the story of human possibility, it portrays our failure to move beyond the old story. Go tell the story of human possibility. Tell the story of our capacity to change all that has been dominated by extremely limited consciousness. We are the Imago Dei. We are godseeds. The present imperative is precisely what we need to rouse us and awaken our capacities. We are the people of the breakthrough.’ She invited me to get a hold of The Possible Human – which was published at the time I was in Beirut witnessing the brutality of the old story.

This is Jean in a passage from that book:

The idea of freedom is expanding because the idea of what it is to be a human is expanding. The traditional views of freedom and the possible human have served as moral beacons, drawing forth the highest aspirations and noblest actions of those who sighted them. The uncompromising light brought oppression into high relief and sparked the courage needed to confront the squalor of social evils. But now the beacons must be tuned to even greater brilliance.

Never before has the responsibility of the human being for the planetary process been greater. Never before have we gained power of such magnitude over the primordial issues of life and death. The density and intimacy of the global village, along with the staggering consequences of our new knowledge and technologies, make us directors of a world that, up to now, has mostly directed us.¹

Jean invited me to be her guest at her Mystery School program. Jean Houston is known as a polymath: her knowledge of science, philosophy, history, religion and culture is truly impressive, but nothing surpasses her knowledge of myth. She sees in myth the deep codes for human becoming. She thinks of myth as the DNA of culture. Like the seeded patterns within the acorn, myth contains concentrated forms of knowledge and transmission of human wisdom and integration. Jean is no dabbler in mythology: she is an expert on the ancient cultures of the world and was a close friend of Joseph Campbell.

There is a magic to the re-enactment and re-telling of myth – it opens up different layers of meaning depending on the consciousness you bring to it. If you are open to its seedbed of meaning, it can interact in a very profound way with your own inner world. It is where the language of the ancients can meet the language of the evolving edge of the human enterprise. Sometimes we can only see where we are headed when we know our origins. It is entirely appropriate to tell a myth from the perspective of what it means to you in the here and now – the important thing is not to conjecture what a myth means to others (unless, of course, you are writing anthropological or historical treatises) but what it means to you. There is a place for academic and scholarly precision but that does not give it the right to put the lid on the transmission of humanity’s great stories, as if academic interpretation was the only way we can relate to myth.

So I invite you now to come with me on two different mythic journeys that I experienced under the guidance of Jean Houston – master evocateur of human possibilities and integration. For it is possible that one day human life will be so integrated that the light of our moral beacons will shine from street and temple; spirituality will engage with the complete transformation of the material plane; the cause of justice will come to fruition in having served the realization of universal love – and the mystic and the activist will celebrate their common work.

I want to emphasize that I entered these myths as one would a dream – a sacred dream handed down by the ancestors to guide me on my quest to understand the call of the mystic and the call of the activist and the place where those calls become one.

First Myth: Isis and Osiris

He is described in the Hymn to Osiris as ‘the most fruitful among the divinitie’. Through his death the seed rises again out of the earth and life is renewed. Beloved spouse of Isis, he is murdered by his jealous brother Seth, and becomes the original sacrificial God of Egypt.

She is known as Queen of Heaven and Earth, and in the fullness of her compassion and healing powers she was revered and adored through the ages; she sees humanity through its most violent hour, mourning our losses with us and reminding us of the determination that is needed to restore the full promise of life.²

As we entered the myth, we enacted key parts of it. Jean guided us through its layers of meaning, always stressing that we allow it to activate us. We were to feel a conjunction with the soul of Egypt, entering fully into its mind and psyche and spirit. This was not storytelling, it was imaginative communion.

Osiris is a deity who dedicates himself to the soil, to bringing the nourishment of crops and the regulation of the floodwaters of the Nile delta. His brother Seth is god of the blowing desert sands. His totem is the scorpion. Seth is jealous of Osiris and his ability to be so generative and fruitful.

In a murderous subterfuge Seth imprisons Osiris in an ornate cask and drowns him in the waters of the Nile. Isis takes upon herself the quest of finding her beloved Osiris and bringing him back to life. She discovers that his body has been encased inside the trunk of a tamarisk tree and that the tree has been cut down and used as a column for a palace in Byblos. Eventually, by becoming a lowly servant and proving herself at the palace, she is given the tamarisk column containing the body of Osiris.

She takes the body to their former temple-palace at Abydos but it has been razed to the ground. Here Isis stands with the corpse of her husband in the ashes of their former home. Yet despite destruction and death, she knows she must go forward. Finding an acacia grove nearby, she enters into mystical communion with the soul of her beloved Osiris. This is how Horus is conceived as a deity of light.

But Seth has followed her. This time he hacks and dismembers the body of Osiris, ripping out the phallus and feeding it to a fish. Again the indomitable Isis brings the parts of the dismembered body together. She replaces the phallus with one made of cedar and gold. Through mystical communion with Isis, Osiris comes to life in the eternal soul of Egypt.

We have spent the evening symbolically re-enacting the dismemberment of Osiris. Having drawn full-sized outlines of our own bodies, we then proceeded to rip them apart limb by limb. Here we throw the heads into one pile, the hearts on another, feet, legs, arms, hands all thrown into different piles. The genitalia get swallowed by an ugly fish – a little comic opera before the mood changes to a hushed ritual intensity. We are not playing games.

It is night. Jean has invited a group of eleven people to keep an all-night vigil. I am one of them.

With touching ceremony and great dignity we reassemble all the ripped body parts as one great reconfigured Osiris in the centre of the room. Between his legs a huge candle, reminiscent of the Paschal candle used in Catholic Easter services, is placed with reverence and lit.

The flame burns through the night.

As I circle and pace into the long hours of a sleepless night, I begin to have the feeling that I am being accompanied. She is present. It is a compassionate energy reaching into me. Even though the contact is unbelievably tender, I find I am holding back. Yet this energy is so still, and so penetrating at the same time, that I start to let go.

I begin to release a great wave of sorrow. Like an energy that had been choking my heart, I let the images stream into the river of compassion that surrounds me: scenes from Beirut and the camps; skull mounds from Cambodia; Mayans tortured and disappeared; pogroms and bone-chilling acts of genocide; scenes of dismemberment, hands chopped off, organs pulled from the bodies of the living; screams coming from torture prisons and the purpled beaten soles of prisoners’ feet.

The energy washes me with such deep care that all I can feel is a longing to see the fair face that was so cruelly taken away. I ache to see the transformation of human suffering.

I focus on the light of the candle with fixed intensity.

I feel an energy rising through it. It is him. It takes on an energy of faith resurrecting. It surges with hope. It is an energy that embodies an unfathomable force of vitality and renewal. The feeling is charged with reservoirs of dynamic possibility. I am being re-coded with the story of a new life for humanity. I hear myself whisper aloud, ‘Rise, Osiris!’

I find that I am on the floor. Head down. I must have momentarily fallen asleep. I look up. It is a breath before dawn. The light is almost granular, like glistening sand poured through a sieve. My heart is lighter, clearer. The shadows of secretly strangled hopes no longer choke the inner light. The sun is rising.

Thank you, Isis, Osiris and Horus, for yes indeed, the communion between resilient compassion and generative commitment gives birth to the light of integration. This is the precise conjunction needed for integrating the work of both activist and mystic.

If you are feeling a need for more analysis at this point, I suggest you slow down your breathing and let the images of the myth do their work until a deeper knowing is available to you. The templates of Isis and Osiris are within you and their conjunction will catalyze a sacred transformation.

Second Myth: Mantis, Porcupine and All-Devourer

Once more Jean took us inside the myth. We entered the world of the Bushmen of the Kalahari. As you will see, this mythic journey gave me great insight into the relationship between the mystic and the activist. It’s important to note that this is a Kalahari myth amplified by Jean Houston and interpreted by me.

The Bushmen, as we have come to know them, have lived for thousands of years in the region of the Kalahari Desert in southern Africa. They are a hunting people whose language is sounded with clicking and stops and who today are subject to the relentless dispossession experienced by indigenous peoples the world over.

Standing in the desert outside their temporary wicker huts, they look up to the heavens, laugh, tell stories, make music and celebrate their kinship with their divine ancestor, the praying mantis known to them as Tuk-Tuk. Mantis has both divine and very human qualities and is not regarded as the Creator.

In the ancient days when the world was largely covered in water, a honeybee carried Mantis over endless stretches of seething water. As Mantis weighed heavier and heavier on the bee’s back, the bee sought a place to rest. It left Mantis in the throat of a white flower and flew away. As the sun’s rays poured into the flower, there beside Mantis was a seed, out of which grew the first human being. Humanity is born in a blossoming flower beside a praying insect and mystically connected to the maker of honey!

From the heavenly constellations to the succulence of tuber roots and delicate grubs beneath the crusted sands, the Bushmen have an intimate knowledge of their world. They have five names for Canopus alone, Jupiter on the horizon is Dawn’s Heart, Orion’s Belt is Three She-Tortoises Hanging on a Belt. They also have a keen eye for detail and can tell when a hartebeest made its tracks by how far along the termites are in rebuilding nests damaged by its hooves.

Porcupine, springbok, zebra, eland, ostrich, lizard, frogs and caterpillars fill the stories of the Bushmen, but Mantis is their spokesperson for the divine. It is Mantis who teaches them love, friendship and the great cycles of life.

In one magnificent mythic summation of the cycles of destruction and rebirth, Mantis calls for a Council of all the animals: ‘It is the time of All-Devourer. Everything is being destroyed. The trees and plants are being eaten up, the rivers are being swallowed and the air itself is carrying poison. A great noise is covering the Earth. Everything spins faster as it enters the mouth of All-Devourer. Call all the beings. We will have a supper. Then we must find a new creation.’

But Porcupine, a child of All-Devourer, summons her courage and says no to Mantis: ‘I will not come to this supper. I will not obey you. I think this is madness. You are falling right into the hands of All-Devourer. I know who this monster is and I will resist him to my dying day. Think of the children, Mantis.’

With that, Porcupine goes off with her two children. She claws a deep hole and places her two children in it and then with her own body as protection she straddles the hole and raises her quills.

As All-Devourer comes upon the assembly Mantis has convened, Porcupine sees the carnage begin. The sorrow she feels is unbearable. Everything is destroyed. It is brutal, murderous, hateful and greedy. Oh, what it is to live in the time of All-Devourer! She burns with a desperate rage at the futility of it all.

But then Porcupine sees that a moment has come. She knows now that she was born for such a time as this. She sees that All-Devourer is momentarily sated. He falls into the slumber of the grossly overfed. Porcupine recognizes this is her moment. It is time to act.

She rouses the children. She has known all along that it’s the children who will change the story: ‘It is your time now. You, my child, are the child of the left hand. Your nature is compassion. You, my child, are the child of the right hand. Your nature is will. Together right and left, will and compassion, you must go rip open the belly of All-Devourer. You must go into the stench, into the dread and into the poison. Never lose faith. Go now, timing is everything.’

The children set about ripping open the belly of All-Devourer with the combined energy of will and compassion. Then finally it happens. They see a light. First, a single golden thread of light comes through the darkness, and then more threads. The golden threaded light is like food for the deepest part of their nature. Then the sun comes up in all its glory. Mantis is standing in the belly of All-Devourer. His whole being is braided with the golden threads. Like a song, he expresses notes of uplift: ‘And so it is that from inside the belly and outside the belly of that which came to devour us our story is complete. We take all with us into a new creation.’ With that, Mantis and all the beings stream out of the belly of the one that had devoured them. Porcupine and her children dance to the music of their new community.

Then for a moment everything becomes still and they realize that there’s no noise. And they move with newly found gentleness over the Earth.

The room is full of music and movement as we enact the birth of the new creation. I am flooded with the reverberations of meaning that the myth has activated. Mantis is clearly a mystical being and Porcupine a resolute activist. It is only because both play their roles that the tension resolves at a higher level to result in a breakthrough outcome.

The myth is relentlessly inclusive. While All-Devourer is the out-of-control machine of progress devouring natural resources and destroying the planet with greed and brutal ignorance, it is also the progenitor of the next evolutionary cycle. While Mantis has a great knowing of how the entire drama functions, he becomes the light of the Bodhisattva joining with others in their suffering. And while Porcupine is a child of the devouring beast, she knows that she must bring down the system that has created her. What a map!

I dropped to my knees in gratitude to the simple people who have lived in the Kalahari region for as long as 20,000 years – simple because they simply understood the greater processes at play in the human story. This is a worldview that does not fall into a good vs bad polarity, though it contains both good and bad. It is a perspective that asks you to know your role in the story and to play your part boldly – molto appassionato.

We know who All-Devourer is, and it’s not just the wealthiest one per cent. We have only to look in the mirror to see some aspect of Devourer in ourselves. While it may seem that there’s an unstoppable momentum to humanity’s voracious destruction of the collective habitat for all life on planet Earth, this is not so. We can mobilize a whole new way of living sustainably and peacefully. Visionary possibilities, innovative thinking and practical models for change abound but we must first say no to the rapacious engine of unsustainable growth.

When Porcupine says no, she is not being negative – she is affirming the stance that must be taken in order to propel the action to the next level. The next stage of her activist wisdom is to recognize the role her children must play. She passes the mantle of responsibility on to her children, for they are the representatives in evolutionary time of the integration needed to move beyond polarization. They accept the activist’s commitment to go into the filth, corruption and stench with pure intention. They are not afraid to get their hands dirty. They manifest a resilient commitment to serve the whole and, by doing so, they transcend the illusion of separation and division.

It is from both inside and outside the belly of the beast that the change will be brought about – from inside the corporations and outside, from inside the military and outside, from both the Left and the Right; for in the end nothing of our learning will be wasted. It is the conjunction of the inner and outer, the immanent and transcendent, that ignites the alchemy of transformation.

Mantis knows this mystical secret: if you eat me and all that I am is pure love, then I will be irreducible in your belly. Whoever swallows the seed of love will one day become love. Yes, the story is that great. This is why Mantis can sacrifice himself. He knows all about entelechy and the god-seed placed in the human heart that will one day be our species-wide destiny to grow into fully. It is why the mystic can say with such conviction, ‘All shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.’ But that wellness is not achieved by the arrival of sugar plum fairies. In the words of the mystic Julian of Norwich: ‘and all manner of thing shall be well in the purification of the motive.’

The purification of motivation is where both mystic and activist have a lot of work to do.

As I drove back to Washington, I couldn’t help feeling I was going back into the belly of the all-devouring beast. My experience told me that people like me were anonymous lunchmeat in the jaws of power.

Yet it was important to represent power in whatever ways you could on behalf of those whose voices had been silenced. Constantly you had to practise speaking truth to power, as when I confronted President Clinton in a face-to-face meeting: ‘Mr President, you have failed to use the White House as a bully pulpit for human rights. In fact, I cannot think of a single human rights hero you have met with.’ Warren Christopher, his Secretary of State, who was standing beside him, blushed and tried to invent excuses. But to his credit the President knew better than to get hostile with Amnesty International. That would be like hitting your grandmother. He took the scolding and promised to do better.

This mythic activation from the Bushmen of the Kalahari invited me not to dilute my fiery moral tones into milquetoast politeness, but to see how I could begin to embrace a much larger story. It made me want to reach deeper into cause and effect and understand whole-system functioning. I also realized I was becoming tired of constant condemnation. I needed to find a way to be a part of healing both perpetrators and victims and get to the roots of human wholeness. I needed to understand what really might constitute the path to collective transformation.

The next day as I left our Northern Virginia home, I was stopped in my tracks. My first instinct was that what I saw before me was a perfect hallucination. Sitting on the mailbox in the early morning sunlight was a praying mantis. In my ignorance at the time, I didn’t even know that the praying mantis could be found in Virginia, let alone in a suburb not far from the nation’s capitol. I drew closer and looked into its almond-shaped eyes. That’s all it was, a moment. Then the mantis jumped into the white azalea bushes that surrounded the house.

It was like being winked at by the divine. And it was deep confirmation that the archetypal realm can bleed through into everyday reality.

Tuk-Tuk.

Chapter Ten

Spirituality and Service: The Deeper Work Begins

A meeting with Ram Dass is followed by a probing exploration of spirituality and service and the important nuances we must appreciate in moving towards an integrated approach to activism and mysticism.

I first met Ram Dass when I was appointed CEO of the Seva Foundation. The celebrated 60s guru and author of Be Here Now was one of the founders of Seva. Seva is a Sanskrit word for service. Inspired by the great Indian sage Neem Karoli Baba, who stressed karma yoga, Ram Dass and a wonderfully eclectic mix of people including Dr Larry Brilliant and Wavy Gravy founded an organization that would apply spiritual principles to service in the world.

Wavy Gravy – flashback to him as Woodstock MC – wanted to focus on diarrhea. After all, he argued, they had a great 60s meme in ‘no shit!’ But the founders decided to focus on eradicating blindness. One of the spiritual principles they established from the beginning was to keep ego from riding its high horse of self-importance. Take the suffering of humanity very seriously but don’t take your own role in alleviating it so seriously. They had a motto: ‘Towards the fun!’

Some days the contrast between Amnesty International in Washington, DC, and the Seva Foundation in Berkeley, California, was so extreme I felt I was living a hallucination – especially when tie-dyed Wavy Gravy would enter the office with a stuffed bass on a leash.

That first meeting with Ram Dass was unforgettable. We met for dinner, and rather than being a light-hearted affair it was very intense. I recognized immediately the presence in Ram Dass’s energy of the bittersweet; the deep flow of suffering and celebration. This was not to be a casual encounter. It was more like watching surgery.

Ram Dass talked about each of the founders and key personalities at Seva with a combination of deep caring and surgical precision. He described each person’s gift and their shadow. If this hadn’t been conveyed in a spirit of love and compassion, some of it could have been perceived as harsh. He was like a teacher laying out a difficult lesson. Things would not be all fun. The ego always has a manipulative side, and he wanted to expose that right from the get-go. His gift was to try to be impeccable: to start the journey without dark secrets. It was his way of honouring me: to cut through – and leave the niceness and social façade for another time.

Not long after, Ram Dass was slammed with a stroke. It took him years to recover. One of the first things he said in the slurred staccato of a stroke victim was, ‘I-have-been-stroked.’ He allowed the divine to stroke him, to go right in and stroke him until he was utterly vulnerable and surrendered. And he didn’t lose his sense of humour, despite the gravity and challenge of being a stroke victim who had to learn to walk and speak again.

Not long after the stroke, the shadow rose big time and his character and integrity were attacked. I can’t say much more, it’s one of those lawsuit things. It was terrifying to me to see that spirituality was no protective shield as it is sometimes portrayed. It was a reminder of Trungpa’s words about having our ‘nerves raw and exposed to the universe’. If we go all the way, we will get stripped clean for sure.

I learned the meaning of equanimity as Ram Dass faced both a catastrophic health crisis and a kind of legal inquisition at the same time, and never exhibited a drop of negativity. It was as if he was the honoured guest at the divine lila and enjoying it.

I saw how far he had gone on the path of service: he was willing to have every attachment erased so that he could authentically show the way and even accompany others on the journey. I have met so very many people for whom Ram Dass had become the embodiment of compassion – war veterans, people with AIDS, people experiencing bereavement, addiction and despair. He influenced a whole generation of seekers and he showed me how deep one has to go to serve others.

The last photo I saw of Ram Dass was one in which he is beaming as he swims in a pool at his home in Hawaii on a gorgeous sun-drenched day, probably taken after he had written Still Here.

The Spiritual Heart of Service

I had heard about an admirer of Ram Dass who was both a spiritual teacher and a successful businessman. For the moment let’s refer to him as ‘the guide’. I called the guide cold to see if, given his background, he might be interested in supporting Seva. This turned out to be one of the most important calls of my life.

He was fascinated that as an activist I was beginning to explore the deeper aspects of the path of service. He thought I would learn much from the contrast of working to protect human rights and working to restore sight to the blind and the other basic human needs work that Seva was involved in. He emphasized that the great work was the work to be done on one’s own mental projections. The problems of the world appeared on the outside but came from the inside. Our most primary responsibility was not in going out to fix the world but in releasing all the entanglements that mind creates.

The guide had that signature quality of authority, without any kind of dominating energy in it – a quality the heart recognizes as mastery. Within minutes he took us into the depths and I felt once again as if I was drinking from the Source.

He could sense immediately where my mind was going.

I was very much of the viewpoint that we needed to fix a broken world. In fact, I believed that it was centrally a question of mobilization and orchestrating the momentum for change – the evolutionary impulse for change needed to be catalyzed by inspired leadership, mass movements, redistribution of resources and the articulation of ideas that had the power and scope to transform systems. I had seen the momentum for deep change created by the human rights movement. We had moved from world wars to a framework of universality. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was an achievement of visionary ideas and evolving moral imperatives that had spurred institutional development, popular education and international law to make this a safer and freer world. Gruelling sacrifices and dogged effort had created a new platform of universal inclusion for humanity. As an activist I was raised on the notion, Take hope!

Activist and author Rebecca Solnit brilliantly captures this quality of hope in the following words:

Hope is not like a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch feeling lucky … Hope is an ax you break down doors with in an emergency; … hope should shove you out the door; because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth’s treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal. Hope just means another world might be possible, not promised, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope.¹

It is indeed hope that spurs activism into believing in the collective power of humanity to overcome all that is deeply broken about our world. Yes, we shall overcome racism, exploitation, cruelty, domination, greed and destruction of earth’s ecosystem. But to do so we need to ring the alarm and awaken the conscience of humanity as never before – expose the rot and inspire the energy for radical social transformation! Of course, I was becoming increasingly aware of the importance of penetrating psychological insight into the human condition and the cumulative relevance of sociology, cultural anthropology, the human capacities movement, whole systems thinking and the growing interest in spiritual practice in stimulating deep change. There was an explosion of knowledge interfaces that could accelerate deep social transformation. But there would always be the active drivers of change constantly carrying the torch of justice, spurring us to new levels of equity and inclusion and leading us away from the wreckage of dysfunctional beliefs and behaviour towards a more peaceful, compassionate and enlightened planetary civilization.

But the guide had a different model.

It was a model that didn’t begin with what was wrong with the world. It didn’t start from the premise that something was broken and that we were called to fix it. Rather it was a perspective that saw the universe as synchronized perfection – once, that is, you fully surrendered to it. The thing that made a mess of things was mind. The guide quoted Meher Baba: ‘man minus mind equals God.’

Mind was constantly creating its own version of things which had little or nothing to do with reality. Not surprisingly, in this model ego rules the mind. Ego organizes the mind around what it likes and doesn’t like. It has an elaborate system for determining what is acceptable or unacceptable, what is desirable or undesirable. Ego-mind is attached to its own predilections whether they are carnal or intellectual. Take away this noisy and opinionated mind and you create a vacuum into which the energy of the universe will flow in an orderly and coherent way. Rather than setting out to fix things, we needed to co-operate with a masterfully creative universe by getting out of its way.

The guide explained that this model was based upon an ancient understanding that there are basically two things going on in the universe – namely, consciousness and energy. The whole drama of life unfolds around the interaction between these two elements. On the one hand you have pure witnessing consciousness. This is the ground of all knowing. It is omniscience. On the other hand you have energy – what is referred to in Sanskrit as shakti. Everything on the physical and material plane is made up of energy. Energy can become highly subtle and refined and is not limited by materialist observation or quantification. You could say that it is the destiny of energy to travel from a gross state to an infinitely subtle state. Energy moves, while absolutely pure witnessing consciousness is still.

As energy oscillates, its nature is perceived by consciousness. It is not judged, it is witnessed for what it is. In this equation pure consciousness allows energy to flow through it without interruption. We call this the dance of Shakti and Shiva. Every spinning atom in creation is witnessed and known. Consciousness does not interrupt the freedom of anything – that is, as long as the consciousness remains poised and still. In this way everything in creation can optimize its potential. But once consciousness gets pulled by the energy, it no longer remains in its infinite state of stillness. This is when the perfect flow of the universe gets interrupted and confusion arises.

When consciousness is attracted or repulsed by energy, it can no longer bear witness from the perspective of absolute sublime truth – it becomes a partisan of an infinitesimally small part of the universe. When consciousness and energy become caught in the pursuit of preferences, they create chaos and adversity. Mind is the centre of chaotic entanglement; instead of experiencing the flow of the universe we get caught in a very sticky mixture of likes and dislikes. What is ludicrous from this perspective is the way ego dresses up this mess as its grand achievement, inviting praise and applause for what it has created – or blame, castigation and even vengeance against those responsible for creating a mess ego claims no responsibility for. The Buddha understood this: clawing attachment is the source of all suffering.

The guide communicated these ideas in a more pristine and simple way. He ended our first call by suggesting that I would do the most good if I could learn to serve like the Shadow Saint.

Here is the way I remember the story of the Shadow Saint. This is not literally how the guide told it but how my heart received it.

Once there was a good man, a holy man who was devoted to Krishna. He kept Krishna in his heart constantly. For him Krishna was the most compelling reflection of divinity. He would pray: ‘Oh Krishna, you are blue because you are the image of the deep mystery. You are the clear blue of the day and the dark black of the night mixed together as one. And you are blue because you draw out the poison of the world and swallow it with love and compassion. Through your golden flute come the harmonies that dissolve all hatred and awaken the soul to ecstatic union with your being. You who are the golden threads of the sunlight of all suns, bring me to your presence.’

This was his prayer, which only intensified as he prayed, fasted and did night vigils. His longing for his Beloved only grew. His was the longing of the mystic to experience the very essence of his soul’s divinity and to commune forever with the eternal radiance of a loving godhead: ‘Let me see you as you are in your true nature. Reveal yourself to me, oh Beloved. Krishna, let me behold your face. For what is it if the true lover cannot behold the radiance of his beloved? I feel your beauty but I cannot see it.’

This was his prayer of longing night and day. Then one night as he kept vigil he felt a million golden threads enter his heart and in the centre of this sun was blue Krishna. In this unimaginable intensity of communion they were one. There was not a shred of separation.

Then Krishna spoke: ‘Dear heart, now that you behold me, how can I serve you?’

The holy man answered: ‘Krishna, I only ask that I may never lose sight of you.’

Krishna replied: ‘So shall it be. Now tell me two other things your heart desires.’

‘I desire nothing but to see you always – Soul of my Saviour.’

‘I lovingly command you to wish for two more things.’

‘Then I desire as I face you, Sun of suns, that the shadow falling behind me be so filled with your grace that it heal all hurts and wounds, all sickness and grief, for anyone it touches.’

‘That is beautiful. Anyone touched by your shadow shall be healed. And the last wish?’

‘My wish is that I never see or know where my shadow falls or who it heals, for that would separate me from knowing that my shadow comes from your light.’

‘So it shall be, my beautiful Shadow Saint. You will serve without any attachment to results.’

With beauty and penetrating insight, the story of the Shadow Saint revealed the way of integrating the mystic and the activist.

The Evolutionary Potential of Spiritually Inspired Action

As part of my work with the Seva Foundation, I visited its projects in India, Nepal, Tibet and elsewhere. The focus of its work in Asia was blindness prevention. Its concept of service was the opposite of the flying doctor model, or what we referred to as ‘hit-and-run’ development work. Seva’s approach was people-centred and oriented to institutional development and strategies that would be effective in the long run. It helped support a small clinic in India that was to become the largest eye hospital in the world and it helped develop the entire eye care infrastructure of Nepal. It was able to prove that the motivation of selfless service could lead to very impressive results.

The founder and many of the administrative and medical teams of Seva’s main partner in India, the Aravind network of eye hospitals, were deeply inspired by the great spiritual master Sri Aurobindo. An independence activist imprisoned by the British, Sri Aurobindo later went on to become one of the great spiritual philosophers of the 20th century. He brilliantly laid out the central role of spirituality in the evolution of human consciousness. He saw that consciousness would continue to evolve as humanity shed the attachments of the lower self. He mapped the journey of the soul on its progress towards vast cosmic awareness. Yet the path he described was not a journey out of this world but one that could also permeate and illuminate the material plane of existence. Through rigorous spiritual practice, free of dogmatism, we could shed the blinding force of ignorance which created so much suffering. He saw the beauty that was possible in humanity’s future, but it required the guidance of higher vision, the cultivation of collective service and the purification of will. Sri Aurobindo was not naïve about the violent and insidious nature of the forces that blocked human progress, but he never ceased to articulate a vision that beckons us towards a peaceful and enlightened planetary civilization.

If you want to see how a spiritual philosophy can transform the field of action, go visit Aravind Hospital in Madurai. I met the founder, Dr Venkataswamy, on my first visit. He had started a clinic for no more than a dozen people which had blossomed into a state-of-the-art hospital restoring sight to over 100,000 blind people every year. On the wall behind him were photos of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother – Aurobindo’s spiritual partner and successor. Despite having a severe arthritic condition which crumpled and twisted his hands, Dr V never stopped serving humanity until the day he dropped. His hospital not only restored sight to the blind but also, frustrated at the cost of the lenses that were implanted after cataract surgery, its technicians started manufacturing their own lenses – with high-tech precision. Not only did they make intra-ocular lenses for themselves, they started selling them at very affordable prices to countries in the developing world. Dr V was an embodiment of the evolutionary potential in humanity that Aurobindo points towards. He was living proof that one could transform service into an expression of the most evolved philosophy of contemplation and action. It was a vision that led one to experience the realms of higher consciousness and then to manifest that consciousness to skilfully relieve suffering and build a better future. This was the essence of Aurobindo’s integral yoga.

Integral yoga is the science of inner ascension so that a seeker might experience directly the divine fire of unitive truth and then seek to become a realized embodiment of that truth in the world. Aurobindo viewed integral yoga as the next great homework assignment for humanity. In the great tradition of mysticism, he takes, as the starting point, the desire to experience the divine rather than the development of a plan of action to do good works in the world. But his special contribution lies in regarding the place of mystical realization as a point of departure for enlightened service and social transformation. In doing so he integrates all the paths of devotion, service and knowledge known as bhakti, karma and jnana yoga as well as the yoga of the body and mind known as hatha and raja yoga.

Lest you find yourself dissolving into the philosophical ether, let me tell a story that impressed me deeply while visiting a remote rural eye clinic in Nepal.

Attendance at these clinics had increased since Seva had begun working with the traditional healers. We had trained healers to recognize cataracts effectively and send patients to clinics rather than attempt to take them out themselves using thorns. The traditional healers took care of the spiritual dimension while Seva helped train Nepali ophthalmologists in modern cataract surgery – it was a good partnership. Thus news about sight-restoring surgery had spread even to the very remote mountainous regions.

As I entered the clinic, a very old man was leaving, and I asked the young doctor about him. He had been completely blind for more than twenty years. They had done cataract surgery for both eyes. After two decades of blindness he could see again. Usually, once the post-op period is completed and the patient can see clearly, there is elation. In the case of this elder, once he regained fully the power of sight he called out, ‘Bring me a stick. I want to beat my children and grandchildren. Didn’t they know that God himself came down to Earth and taught the people how to make the blind see?’

Now that’s an activist’s response. It says come on, no excuses. We have the power, technology and resources to address poverty, disease, malnutrition, poor sanitation, ecological degradation and so many other issues. There are tens of millions of blind people who could have their sight restored if we focused on the solutions available and applied the resources needed. Not a single person on this planet need die hungry. Instead, globally, governments invest in arms, corporations accrue obscene wealth and people buy more and more useless stuff. We live through a nightmare of madness where myopic greed is allowed to rule a planet that it’s taking apart. We are the only species to utterly devastate its own habitat and go to bed so numbed and distracted that we fail to see we are killing tomorrow.

I understand the moral fury of a man needlessly blind for so many years. Indeed, we need a stick. We need a big wake-up call. But it is not a stick for beating – that only creates another army of angry people. It is a branch we each must bring to build the sweat lodge of our collective cleansing, our collective atonement and our collective healing. For each of us must sweat. We must sweat out the toxins of disempowerment, apathy and fatalism.

Oh, there are so many tears to cry, wounds to heal and prayers to offer, but let us affirm what the man who was given back his sight affirmed in his raw passion – that God has walked amongst us with solutions; and all that’s asked of us is that we be the eyes and ears, the hands and feet, the lungs and voices and the hearts and minds of this skilful, creative and compassionate energy that abounds when we quest for it, call it forth and consciously embody it.

Important Nuances for Both Mystics and Activists

There are a good many stereotypes around the need for activists to be less attached and for spiritual people to be more engaged. It really doesn’t help when people quote spiritual and philosophical soundbites to prove or affirm truths they have not experienced. It does a disservice to both sides when we miss all-important nuances in this arena.

My experience tells me that some people have keenly investigated these nuances, while others need a little more prompting.

Take the spiritual maxim, Give up attachment to results. An activist will say that results are not something to which you have no attachment. If your goal is to save whales, you will be judged as effective or ineffective depending on whether or not you actually save whales. If your goal is to save trees and you have no impact on deforestation, you will be deemed ineffective. If you are an organization set up to promote and protect refugee rights and you show no success in your caseload, you will go out of business. If you cannot demonstrate your achievements, you will not be able to raise funds; you will have to cut staff or potentially close shop. If you don’t take credit for your achievements, you won’t last as a non-profit organization. And if you don’t survive, you have failed to serve: who is now going to work on sweatshops, arms sales, slaughter of dolphins, sex slavery, equal pay for women, minority rights, religious freedom, global warming and thousands of other issues requiring activist engagement? If your whole raison d’être is targeted improvements in key arenas, when you reach your goals you will be justified in broadcasting achievements and celebrating successes.

Believe me, if you prevent someone’s execution, if you rescue someone from a dungeon, if you protect thousands of acres of forest land, if you win a legal battle for a refugee, if you save a species from extinction, you celebrate the achievement. You celebrate the equation that morally focused intention + adequate resources + creative action = results. And I don’t think we are mired in ego attachment when we acknowledge and say thank you to our moral heroes for their role in the story of human liberation. We can give credit where credit is due. Celebrating achievement can inspire others to act. And we want people to act.

Of course, ego can get into everything: it is a spoiler for sure, but even with ego’s antics, if you are serving a higher cause, one in which there is no limited self-interest in contrast to one based on greed or self-aggrandizement, your attachment to results does not pose the same kind of spiritual problem as when the intended benefits are self-centred.

But let’s tread carefully. Here is the nuance.

Activists who have not done work to tame ego can demonstrate arrogant attachment to their own ideas as well as a self-righteous superiority about their mission. Even when they are more modest, I have seen activists inspired by a noble purpose become subtly lured into an almost addictive attachment to their approach to solving any given problem: their vision is noble but the execution is snared by attachment to particular strategies.

In contrast, an evolving activist learns to hold the torch of vision with resilience and conviction while at the same time testing the effectiveness of different strategies with the detachment of a scientist. For them every action will provide critical feedback, and they respond like surgeons at the first sign of hemorrhaging in a patient. To those who say, ‘Of course, isn’t that obvious?’ I say, ‘Be my guest. Try it. You will learn something.’ Describing a tightrope walk and getting up on the wire are two different things.

There is much to learn about what to hold on to and what to let go.

There is one further element where nuance abounds that clusters around what we believe and how we make sense of the world and what shapes our worldview. Our moral development is linked to our belief about the world – it is a journey from exclusive self-interest to inclusivity and serving the common interest. Along the way we are invited to re-define self and other until we learn to treat other as self. To reach this degree of mature development requires a high level of integration.

Immature activism gets caught in us vs them scenarios and ancient versions of the good guys vs the bad guys. Some of us were lucky enough to have had a teacher early in life – in my case my mother – who gave us an antidote to such polarized thinking. There but for the grace of God go I. This medicine not only invites us to step into the shoes of others, it helps cultivate an empathic stance to all forms of otherness. This stance dissolves the ice caps of ego’s mountain of exclusive self-interest and separate identity. And when we walk the path of empathy, a greatly different landscape of belief emerges which has huge consequences for activism.

Empathy calls for understanding, not judgment. It looks for insight, wisdom and healing. And it discovers the root source of unconscious behaviour in the inner world of transmitted wounds and worldviews which were fed by privilege and exclusion and sometimes bankrolled by vast privilege and violent exclusion. We live at a time of unprecedented transformation of beliefs when activism is called to re-frame polarizing beliefs as more encompassing worldviews that envision collective healing.

To really embody a healing worldview we must actually become what we believe: we must act in ways that signal the deepest intentionality to heal ancient wounds. Finally we are beginning to see that how we act really defines where we go, which is why there is growing emphasis on emotional, psychological and spiritual integration for the conscious activist. It is here, in modelling how we authentically live our inner values, that the mystic has much to teach the activist.

For the mystic the quest to experience love, empathy and compassion is the starting point. Just as the activist is called by a moral imperative to take action, the mystic feels a powerful inner call that must be responded to. What appears to some as passivity and disengagement is nothing of the sort. The mystic’s work has no vacations, no time off – it requires constant mental vigilance combined with ever-present heart-centred awareness. It requires learning a new language – for the language of spirit is non-dual. It must shed all projections about the nature of reality and surrender to the still point of the witness where everything that is not essence is recognized as illusory. The mystic works to scour and polish the mirror of the heart until the presence of the Beloved Friend of Truth appears in it.

To equate this work with a lack of passion would be a gross misperception, but it is indeed far from the in your face intensity of those who wear their passion on their sleeves. Study the lives of great mystics if you want evidence of deep and vital passion stirring souls and manifesting in transformational action. A quick glance at the life of Hildegard von Bingen (1098–1179) reveals a mystic who experienced communion with the divine revealing itself to her in the natural order, and a woman who was able to stare down entrenched male domination and misogyny.

Here again is the nuance.

Just as the activist who has a noble goal can get unskilfully attached to the means to achieving the goal, the spiritual seeker has even more complex snares. Detaching oneself from the pervasive ego-manipulations of the world and their reflection in one’s own conditioned thinking and behaviour can lead to an off-planet mentality where reality exists only in some other dimension.

Clearly the mystic is deeply engaged in inner work, and it does not take long once this work progresses to see how the world lives inside us. We and the world are not two separate things. But if we treat them as separate we may hold the world in a place of unredeemed ignorance to be shunned. When reality is only experienced in transcendence, we can drift into a stance that weakens the motivation to act in the here and now.

The lure of a perfected state of being in the form of salvation in heaven, paradise or nirvana as something separate from the here and now of pure awareness is regarded as infantile by mature mystics. Just as hell has been relegated to a self-inflicted state of mind, heaven becomes a state of pure conscious realization, love and compassion – timeless and limitless and ever-present.

These apparent dichotomies between spiritual and worldly are hard to overcome, and making the attempt to do so is extremely subtle and demanding work. Above and below are concepts that lure seekers into feeling holy and set apart from a filthy world; but those who have gone deeper know that spirit, though pure and impeccable, shines not from above but from the centre of all.

Yes, we must work on ourselves and face the suffering of the world. We must hold fast to goals that serve to end the suffering of others and be supple about the means we employ to reach those goals. As His Holiness the Dalai Lama says, ‘It is not enough to be compassionate, one must act.’ And we must learn to act from the insight gained from the depths of compassion.

The mature activist and mature mystic have much to teach other about getting off high horses, surviving shipwrecks and piercing the veil of grand illusions. But one thing is sure: God walks amongst us showing us how to give sight to the blind, how to feed the poor, how to share resources and live within the laws of Nature. The solutions before us will be a combination of high tech and high touch; and rather than creating dependency, our creative problem-solving will nurture intricate networks of interdependence. There is an activism emerging out of global complexity that maps with fluency the paths to resolving climate change, ending poverty and malnutrition, and that gives clear directions for wise stewardship of resources, building healthy communities and designing sustainable economies. These maps are created by veritable systems shamans like Lester Brown, Charles Eisenstein, Riane Eisler, Bill McKibben, David Korten, Vandana Shiva and so many other visionaries of whole-system transformation.

If we don’t get the work done because we are caught in ego entanglement, too busy saving ourselves or entranced in introspective bliss, we know where to look – and it’s not to heaven.

Chapter Eleven

Native Approaches to Spirit in Action

Portraits of Native American health activist Lorelei DeCora, the wise Choctaw-Cherokee elder Sequoyah Trueblood and Mayan and Kogi wisdom-keepers illuminate the integration of spirituality and action so needed for a world in transition.

It is easy to either romanticize Native peoples or to undervalue their contribution. My experience of working with Mayans and Native Americans and spending time with the Kogi in Colombia does not incline towards setting them apart as much as seeing them mirror our humanness. What does define their uniqueness is a capacity to avoid drowning in intellectual abstraction and their dedication to the transmission of a vivid relational field of reverence that includes places, people and other life forms. There is much to integrate between techno-civilization and Native ways of being, but it will require the recovery of an appreciation for the interdependence of all life and the humility needed to synchronize head and heart.

There is a tendency in certain quarters to see Native peoples as paralyzed when it comes to innovation: they are viewed as stuck in the past and lost in shamanic mysticism. From this perspective, when they interact with modernity, they cannot cope with its complexity and they sink into regressive and addictive behaviours. Native peoples get blamed for the devastation created by colonial invasion and destruction of their cultures.

But there is an incipient Native renaissance going on across the planet as Native communities reclaim their spiritual and cultural heritage and more people understand the critical relevance of the Native worldview.

What if evolution has actually given Native peoples a key role in the future of our species? What if our collective survival requires that we learn to serve the interdependence of all life rather than selectively destroying it? Let’s not make our future an either/or scenario but one that calls for integrating our best wisdom in every sphere of life; technology has proved that it can serve human wellbeing brilliantly and assist us in eco-sustainability, but when it serves unbridled greed it becomes an accelerated wrecking machine. Native approaches to natural resources point to a sacred responsibility to future generations in ways that model precisely the values needed for planetary survival.

Sitting with a Mayan farmer in Quetzaltenango, I was in awe of the ecological vision that had been employed to grow crops, herbs, medicinal plants and trees. He explained that it had taken him years to recover from a time of greed when he had used chemical fertilizer. He found he was destroying the biodiversity that existed for generations. Then he saw fertilizer was getting more expensive and you had to use more and more just to keep up. That’s when the grub worm came to him in his dreams. The grub worm was angry: ‘You are a greedy man. Before, you used to share some of the food that lay on the ground, then you poisoned everything. Now there is so much poison I will start eating the roots and you will lose everything.’

He listened to the grub worm. As a result he has restored some acres of paradise. I call this ‘communion with Nature’. If you are ruled by the intellect, you probably will not listen to the grub worm when it comes to prompt you in your dreams. We live at a time when Nature sends us the most graphic stress signals and still we do not act because we are locked into purely mental frameworks and projections about profit and loss. It will take more than small bands of activists to turn around the story of pervasive ecological destruction: it will take a tidal shift in consciousness.

Only then will we discover what Native peoples have long understood: that Nature’s dreams are ours, and that the same is true of her nightmares. When once again we consciously participate with Nature rather than operating against her, we shall end the nightmares.

Embodying Resilience

Lorelei DeCora is a Native health rights activist. When I was CEO of the Seva Foundation I helped her expand her work amongst her own tribe, the Ho-Chunk people. Her activism is part of a profound lifelong commitment to her people. She is private about her spiritual practices and beliefs. Put it this way, she is not one who will induct you into Native American ceremonies; but offer to help her promote the health of her people and she’ll show you all you need to know. While she doesn’t wear her spirituality on her sleeve, she embodies Native values, wisdom and resilience.

Lorelei was at Wounded Knee in 1973. She tells how she got caught in the crossfire during the shootout between armed activists and a large contingent of federal marshals including the FBI. She was barely eighteen. At one point, as the bullets were flying, she was pinned down. She vowed in that moment that if she survived the siege she would dedicate her life to promoting the health of her people.

She has lived her vow. She founded the Porcupine Clinic on Pine Ridge Reservation and was recognized by Robert Wood Johnson for community health leadership. Like Porcupine in the Bushmen story, she was capable of unambiguous displays of strength and courage. She did raise her quills at times but only on behalf of her people and to help secure vital resources for health and wellbeing.

She never got stuck in ideological head games. She recognized that the path back to health for so many of her people suffering from diabetes required an integration of Western medicine and traditional diet.

When she went back to the Ho-Chunk Reservation she knew it was important to get people talking about the disease and the fact that so many young people were beginning to show signs of type II diabetes. Through Native talking circles, people shared their grief, loss and depression, but they also shared stories about all their favourite traditional meals and the healthy foods they used to eat.

I went to visit Lorelei when her program was underway. We visited families who were planting varieties of squash and beans and land that had been bought for growing corn. There was even a half-acre set aside for the children to grow corn. Lots of people were learning from the elders the traditional methods to dry corn for winter meals. When the harvest was ready, the children were able to give a bag of corn to their families. And, of course, there was still someone alive who was able to teach them the traditional corn dance – food, health and culture were all being reconnected. You could feel the flow of spirit penetrating the field of action.

We also visited the bison herd that Seva was supporting. The steamy breath of the herd rising from a small bare hillock invited both caution and reverence. We stopped a fair distance from them and stood quietly in the back of the truck. Slowly they moved in our direction. Waves of earthy energy came towards us as the herd moved over the crystalline blades of frozen stubble. In the presence of the buffalo people, Lorelei assumed a natural state of grace. The animal beings moving around us became a concentrated magnetic field of the life force. Their huge heads and soft, impenetrable eyes elicited feelings of both tenderness and trepidation.

Lorelei – tall, erect, wearing a long black and red wool coat, her long black hair loose with only a thick beaded band at the back – stared hard at the bison. They were present to each other.

She was a resolute and fearless Indian leader who had faced hardship, obstruction, injustice and indifference. She stood there, an iconic representation of the dignity of Native peoples who must look beyond the rejection of biased history and the seductions of manic progress to the time when they will be seen again as resilient wisdom-keepers. Her vow of commitment was written in her being.

I know the Buddha wanted us to understand that resistance is the cause of suffering, but there is a form of resistance that is noble. It says, ‘I will not let you oppress my people. Even if you banish them from the fertile plains to rocky and desolate regions, I will bring them back and bring them home to health and nurturance, though it may take me many generations. I will teach them about the lies that poisoned their hearts and made their bodies sick. I will tell them, swallow no more poison. Our resistance is to live the truth of who we are. I will teach my people their true value, which is nothing less and nothing more than the value of every child of our common Earth Mother.’

Lorelei could read my unspoken passion. I was breathing in that buffalo strength. She slapped her thigh and laughed as a sign of camaraderie. Best focus on the work. We both had learned how much can get done when you learn patience and keep faith.

That’s the thing about the porcupine, she is such a tender being when she doesn’t have to put up her quills.

Being Present to the Flow of Action

I have known Sequoyah Trueblood for twenty years and we have travelled together in the United States, Canada, Colombia, England and Ireland. It is a colourful name but it is not made up, although the Catholic missionaries renamed him Stephen Trueblood. His father was Choctaw-Cherokee and his mother was a mix of German and English. His German grandmother tried to beat the savage out of him and one of the missionary priests sexually molested him. Yet he had one thing they could not take away: he had a capacity to read Nature as accurately as advanced scholars read Leibniz. He was capable of acute attention out in the woods, able to become very still and subtly attuned; able to sense any movement even at considerable distances. He merged with whatever was observed, collapsing the subject-object divide.

That is no doubt why he was sent into remote jungle areas of Southeast Asia by US military intelligence – which was where he was inducted into drugs that help you stay hyper-alert for days; followed by rat’s blood and opium to bring you down. Sequoyah’s might be a not unfamiliar veteran’s story of ending up in prison for drug offenses, except that in prison he completely woke up. It wasn’t just an interesting spiritual epiphany, it was a root awakening to unconditioned self. Whether it was Zen or yogic or Native practice, he was proficient and even advanced. Out of prison it didn’t take long for people to seek him out as a teacher. He became a pipe carrier, a faithful sun dancer and leader of purification lodges.

In an early conversation I had with him, he referred to the nature of what he called ‘the face of darkness and the face of light’. He considered them both as teachers and guides. The face of darkness is the one that holds the glitter world on a tray and teaches you about the pain and destruction created by addictive desires. The face of light is like a mirror that shows you your true nature; rather than being the judge, its essence is non-judgment. What struck me was a concept he used when talking about the face of darkness. In a very emphatic way he suggested that the intellect was always a reflection of the face of darkness. There was no presence of intellect in the face of light.

I felt myself resisting this idea. It felt extremist. After all, intellect is behind much of human achievement; it distinguishes us as a species. Human rights activists will tell you that it is invariably the intellectuals that repressive governments target first. Ideas like freedom, equality and autonomy are dangerous to oppressors. Sequoyah responded in a way that defines the Native worldview: freedom and equality are not ideas thought up by clever people, they are states of being and laws of Nature. It is because Native peoples have embodied this worldview that they have been exterminated and marginalized.

For Sequoyah there was no compromise on this question: intellect was embedded in the world of illusion. Only spirit was free of illusion. Intellect needs to prove itself and has agendas. Spirit has no agendas and its own nature is proof of what it is. Intellect can only point at truth, spirit invites us to embody truth.

The activist says that while we may be creating a world of illusion based on delusional greed and lust for power, that does not make the pain and suffering of the oppressed illusory. Intellect has to be skilfully employed to outwit the oppressor and help relieve suffering. Intellect can be an instrument of moral authority.

‘In the end,’ Sequoyah concluded, ‘what intellect produces is no more than a hill of beans compared to spirit which is in everything and knows everything. Everything we call human achievement is spirit in action.’

Was there a way that a more spiritual and mystical perspective could surrender intellect to a higher order of intelligence that embodied irreducible truth and universal oneness while not negating the moral imperative of the activist to outmanoeuvre the denser energies of the face of darkness? People can quote spiritual texts and give you the answer to that question quickly, but can you find it for yourself? Can you live the answer?

In Sequoyah’s case, he stopped projecting into the future and organized his life around what showed up. He didn’t make plans so much as respond to what was placed in front of him. He didn’t request engagements, he accepted invitations. He didn’t charge a fee for his services, he simply received what was given to him. He didn’t have a cell phone or a computer, but people got hold of him. He was at ease with scarcity and abundance; slow pace and acceleration; contraction and expansion; time for work and time for play. With him you learned the miraculous nature of spontaneity and flow. But you had to quiet the mind’s opinionated commentary on how it perceived the flow of events. It was like living in a state where nothing was an interruption. Any kind of challenge was simply a change in the geometry of energy as you interacted with it. That state always called for perception more than making judgments.

In Ireland, on our way to the very ancient site of Newgrange, we got lost. But nothing seemed to interrupt him – being lost was just a concept for what was happening in the flow of the day. ‘Oh, Creator,’ he would say, ‘whatever it is you are putting before us today, that is what we are doing.’ Somehow, if one stayed in this consciousness, being lost was as perfect as finding your way.

When we drove into a village to ask the way to Newgrange, we decided to listen to our stomachs and get some food. As we entered the small café, Sequoyah asked loudly if anyone could give us directions to Newgrange. He got a few quiet shrugs and non-committal looks. A little spooked, we sat down and ordered some fish and chips. As we were eating, an eleven-year-old boy named James came over and gave us extraordinarily detailed instructions on how to get to Newgrange. We were very impressed, but then amazed at what followed.

The boy looked at Sequoyah. ‘By the looks of it you are a Native American elder. I wonder if you could tell me your tribal affiliation?’

Sequoyah’s jaw dropped. He responded as if the headmaster himself had asked the question.

‘I am Choctaw-Cherokee.’

‘Yes, indeed, to be sure. We owe so much to the Choctaw.’

Sequoyah was dazzled. ‘What do you owe to our people?’

‘Well, I am referring to the money and the seeds the Choctaw brought to Ireland during the time of the great famine.’ The boy returned to his table.

Overcome by the beauty and intensity of the moment, Sequoyah went over to the boy. He reached into his mochila and pulled out a green frog with red eyes. Then he started singing over the boy and moving rhythmically. The question to the patrons of the café about Newgrange hadn’t managed to elicit much of a response, but now their attention was riveted as the Native elder chanted over their gifted native son. This was a visitation and it would be remembered.

As we left, Sequoyah said quietly, ‘Another beautiful day on Mother Earth.’

You could have heard a pin drop until he closed the door, and then there was a bit of a commotion inside.

We had gracefully surrendered to being lost, and what had arisen was deeply delightful and to be savoured. I knew that surrendering to the moment is not always that sweet and magical. I had been trained well enough to know that surrender also leads to the fire of annihilation and to something more akin to having your nerves exposed to the universe than magical encounters in the Irish countryside. I had an intuition that for my own integration I would have to pass through more of both bitter and sweet initiations before I could walk a path of activism that was an expression of universal love.

Conscious Energy Mastery

Sequoyah and I also travelled in Colombia together. The purpose of that trip was to spend time with the indigenous people known to the world as the Kogi. This was not a casual drop-by. Sequoyah had strong connections with the Kogi elders, and after meditating on my name for some months, they invited me to come with him. They referred to him as sabunsi, which he understood to mean ‘snowcapped’, referring to his long white hair.

Having had little contact with the world, the Kogi emerged in 1990 with a bold message of impending climate disasters. From their villages atop one of the world’s highest coastal mountains, they were beginning to read the signs of global climate change – including melting snow caps and deforestation. More recently, they have sent an urgent message advising people about the great danger for humanity in dropping water tables and dying streams and rivers.

Their warnings always come with gentleness and hope. They refer to themselves as ‘elder brother’ as a way of referring to their ancient roots; and they refer to modern civilization as ‘little brother.’ We are their little brother who has gotten lost in a maze of our own making; it appears we may destroy the maze in trying to find our way out of it.

Their spiritual leaders, known as mamas, spend the first nine years of life receiving instructions on their sacred responsibilities, mastering their cosmology and learning to read energy fields. Each mama has a specific responsibility in addition to the general transmission of knowledge and culture. One mama, whose photograph I have near my desk, was given a lifelong responsibility of absorbing and transmuting negative energy; another had the task of praying for the health of every mountain in the world.

The Kogi are skilful energy readers.

When we arrived at the village where we were to stay, they took each of us aside and scanned our energy field. Then they gave us balls of cotton to place between the thumb and index finger of both hands. We were asked to place any energy that was out of balance in the cotton. This went on for a while, just releasing any projections, expectations, disappointments, judgments or frustrations – releasing them all into the cotton. It was a kind of psychic cleansing that needed to be performed before we could proceed. They took the cotton away when we were finished, and did a ceremony for the dissolution of that energy so that we would not bring it into the village.

What an intense reminder that our thoughts and energies are part of a collective field and that we have a shared responsibility for maintaining the health of that field. The frontier of Western science is exploring the nature of fields. It is clear that the fields around our bodies interact and affect each other deeply. The day will come when we will not only study energy fields, we will practise deep energy mastery the way the Kogi do. In fact, the day will come when we won’t think of just monasteries, churches, temples, synagogues and mosques as psychically clean zones: responsibility for thought-forms and energy will permeate home life, school life and life at work.

Sometimes what we think of as the past is the future – this is a truth Native peoples understand very deeply.

One morning at dawn, I slipped out of my hammock and drank in the clean mountain air. Already up before me was a young couple. They were sitting opposite each other. They were looking very intently at each other: every now and then some energy would flicker in their eyes and it would get transmitted to their fingers where the cotton would receive it. They were literally cleaning up the energy field of their relationship. It was so beautiful to behold. I could see how they were getting mind out of the way. They were entering a deeper state of energetic flow. They were in communion.

Their young children, a boy and a girl, came to join them in what seemed simple and loving play, but I had noticed that some objects that had been in front of the couple were now handed to the children with loving care. It was as if their toys and household objects had been energetically cleared and now carried the frequency of their parents’ higher bond. They knew their household objects were not just stuff; they were energy containers which were part of a larger energy field.

I walked up a hill and sat quietly with a cluster of men chewing their traditional coca leaf and lime paste mix. The Kogi understand that everything in creation has a dual nature. They believe that the dual aspect can be perceived in things, and one can see which element dominates or whether they are in harmonious conjunction. Every object, like every living thing, has a mother and father. One of the men leaned over and touched a wristband I was wearing. He sent his energy into it. He was looking for its mother and father. He smiled approvingly and his eyes shifted as if they were looking to a far-off place. The band was from Lhasa and I had bought it myself on a visit to Tibet.

The day we left the village I went over and gave him the wristband. He received it with an acknowledgment that seemed to reverence its origins – its mother and father – rather than exhibiting personal gratitude to me. He removed my sense of ownership. It was a perfect ego-less moment. It was also a masterful teaching moment to the Western mind so obsessed with ownership – in the end we own nothing. We are called into a consciousness which itself must be developed into a higher knowledge of our sacred trusteeship for all matter – all energy that we interact with in the form of matter. And more than that, we are called to recognize our responsibility to clean up when we pollute – whether the pollution goes into the rivers or flows through our minds.

Now that’s a new activist agenda: to clean the world from the inside out; to cease all contamination at the source and root out ego’s proprietary claims to ownership. There are plenty of Native peoples who have been waiting patiently for the penny to drop so that we can finally all agree on the basic curriculum needed for humanity to take up this kind of human homework assignment together.

To conclude, thinking will have its own strategic part to play in our whole Earth recovery assignment. I affirm the great achievement of men like Galileo – who famously said: ‘I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.’¹ But as long as greed dominates the intellect, then progress becomes an instrument to colonize the mind. We get reduced to profit and loss.

The spiritual perspective audaciously looks towards values that are timeless and eternal. ‘He who sees the Infinite in all things, sees God,’ says William Blake; and ‘He who sees the Ratio only, sees himself only.’² We have been captured by the Ratio and its fixation with quantifiable categories and profit margins, which only leads us into myopic ignorance where we cannot pay attention even when the entire climate of the planet is imperiled.

But those whom ‘civilization’ has deemed ignorant wait in rainforests, mountains and deserts for the moment when ‘little brother’ will realize that pursuing the ‘ratio of all things’ will lead only to a dead end.

Clearing out our collective mind of zero-sum games will require a new integration of spirit and action. The most dangerous pollution is in our minds. Our collective detox will not be easy and will require much healing, but at least we can begin to see that the work ahead is more of a psychological and spiritual task than simply a case of more efficient planning.

I pray that we will finally understand the treasures of wisdom that Native peoples have guarded as they have lived on the outer periphery of so-called progress.

But the day is coming when we will understand that their periphery is actually the new centre of an integrated Earth wisdom where spirituality expresses itself in a fearless resistance to being quantified.

Chapter Twelve

Sacrifice: Getting to the Heart of Mysticism and Activism

With Gandhi’s concept of sacrifice as a springboard, the author explores the concept of sacrificial process necessary in both mystical and activist work and in our domestic lives where sacrifice makes its most intimate demands.

Mahatma Gandhi is the activist’s activist and one of the most celebrated models of spiritually conscious engagement in dismantling oppression. His list of Seven Social Sins is worth noting: politics without principle; wealth without work; commerce without morality; pleasure without conscience; education without character; science without humanity; and worship without sacrifice.¹

Whatever you devote yourself to, whether it’s political or domestic, a cause or a person, your devotion will require sacrifice. From a spiritual perspective, sacrifice leads to liberation and joy.

For Gandhi, sacrifice was key to social transformation. He came to the view that oppression secured its claim to legitimacy through hypocrisy and the presumption of moral superiority. In opposing the forces of oppression, he first tried to educate them and certainly never to denigrate them: ‘I have no enemies, only some misguided friends.’ His stance was always to take the moral high ground. When education and persuasion didn’t work, he advocated resistance. His signature non-violent resistance is where he introduces the idea of sacrifice. If you take the lash, if you deny yourself benefit, if you willingly go to prison, then you deprive the oppressor of any moral superiority and you make their injustice more visible.

As an activist strategy, Gandhi’s methodology seeks to hold a mirror up to the oppressor to help him see how ugly his exploitation really is. The catch is that activists cannot succeed in disturbing the moral conscience of oppressors from a safe distance of righteous condemnation; they can only succeed if they themselves make sacrifices.

In his repeated fasting, Gandhi self-sacrificed his own health and wellbeing for the greater good of his people. He constantly taught in a Christ-like way that we have to shed narrow self-interest to inhabit the more expansive and inclusive value system of love and compassion. This is not only brilliant tactically, at the level of activism: it is essential for spiritual growth.

We know that so many spiritual traditions have sacrificial elements in their practice, including overcoming the lures of distraction through solitary contemplation; engaging in a variety of fasting practices and other forms of abstinence; shedding material excess; choosing ‘voluntary simplicity’; and thousands of ways to deprive ego of applause and credit. There are also so many ways to make sacrifices for others in the context of sharing, parenting, friendship, partnership and on behalf of those who are our beloveds. Some of the greatest expressions of heroism and love throughout history come from the sacrifices made on behalf of others.

If the idea of sacrifice directs your mind automatically to blood and flesh being offered to appease angry gods, let go of that association for the moment. Even as you contemplate the sacrifice of those who willingly offer their lives on behalf of others, honour their intention to serve a higher ideal. If your association with sacrifice is any kind of begrudging or whining holy martyr attitude, let that go as well. Focus on the idea that sacrifice seeks to create space for something else to thrive and flourish. Love cannot thrive without sacrifice. Life cannot flourish without sacrifice.

But there is another aspect of sacrifice that is different from specific intentional acts, and that is the unfolding of our own development as sacrificial process. We are familiar in mysticism with the idea of the dark night of the soul. This dark night is a process that unfolds as a result of the authentic longing of the mystic to experience God as Beloved. If we are lucky, all our longing, all our work to be authentic and to live selflessly, has a cumulative effect and catalyzes the demise of the narcissistic daydream of our limiting ego. The result of all this effort is that we live life in a way that orients itself to sacrificing the lower self for a higher purpose, a greater good, leading us inexorably to the luminous fire of abiding truth. In the words of Catherine of Siena:

We work so hard to fly
And no matter what heights we reach
Our wings get folded near a candle
At the end.²

So the very act of trying to experience deeper truth instigates an irreversible process – a process in which we are sacrificed to our own higher truth. In fact, it is our own inner truth that is the candle that starts to burn away the fog of self-created fiction. In the words of St John of the Cross:

My soul is a candle that burned away the veil;
The sufferings I knew initiated me into God.³

When we gain a deepening understanding of how this sacrificial process works, we become aware that we live in ceaseless currents of thought, word and deed, and that there are limitless opportunities to sacrifice for others – not just in acts but in fasting from obsessively self-oriented thinking. The mystic and the contemplative know that as the oppressor is to the world, ego is to the field of one’s own being. Ego can be quite the slum lord of our inner life, and rather than offer energy and attention to its sprawling schemes we must sacrifice all of its false hope – even though in its own contorted way it’s just trying to barter for us some happiness.

Ironically, the path to true happiness is through sacrifice. Every monastic and contemplative is taught in their early training that sacrifice is a ‘principle of higher choice’. When you really know the true value of what can be achieved through sacrifice, you’ll see that it’s about higher choices and lasting happiness.

But here’s the kicker: opening the flow of our own lives to heal self and serve others only takes us deeper into the ocean of Being – with its towering waves and gale force winds. Then we discover that we don’t even need to go on the world stage to experience those thundering waves: they come right through the front door of our lives.

Sacrificial Process

I had known more of the world’s suffering than many. I was conceived in the womb of my mother’s mourning. I had been knifed. I had witnessed the horror of war. I had been stressed, stretched, tested and brought to the limit of my capacities in doing what I could to live a meaningful life of service. But nothing had prepared me for the intimate suffering of separation and divorce.

The word ‘separation’ still sends chills down my spine. When I hear it, it’s as if the God of the Old Testament returns. It contains rejection, judgment and splitting apart. It comes with the all-powerful and authoritarian Father God throwing Adam and Eve out of the Garden. For what? Curiosity? Experimenting? Getting it wrong?

But it’s hard to hear the quiet voice of the loving God whisper to your soul while you are being kicked out of the Garden. If we could hear it, it might sound like this: ‘You will taste the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, which is both bitter and sweet; only when you have come to know the bitterest and the sweetest can you know your own essence where the bitter and the sweet are one. There is a garden you must find – the garden of your soul where Life springs eternal and Love is all there is.’

The root of the word ‘paradise’ comes from Persia and suggests a walled enclosure – something like a walled garden. Somehow our higher self knows that however cozy it might get behind the walls we build for our comfort and security, those walls can be a dangerous trap. As awful as it is to be thrown out of treasured enclosures that have nurtured us, our ejection can send us pioneering into the territory of our own souls. This is what I mean by sacrificial process. It is as if our soul decides we are ready for the tsunami that will hit us as we open the door. We are ready for shipwreck. We are ready for a scenario where spirit can release the vast resources that have been sealed up behind the walls of a satisfied and self-justified life.

In the sacrificial process, our deepest inner code tells us we are ready for an encounter with essence. The ejection from life’s lovely garden can be brutal: we may suffer a catastrophic illness, social rejection, loss of a loved one, break-up, financial ruin, or any number of scenarios that can trigger deep wounding, a crisis of faith, paralysis, numbness or a sense of hopelessness – all of which can push us out of the womb-comfort of the conditioned self to our more essential self.

Then, traumatized and shaken at the roots, we are sent out on a tightrope to cross what feels like an impossibly difficult divide. For our spiritual journey requires us to keep moving. Suffering is initiation, not the destination. What lies below the tightrope is a sheer drop into the canyon of the wound. Spirit says, ‘Keep moving towards me. Through all the pain, keep moving. Don’t look down into the depths of the wound. You are not the wound, you are the one passing through it. Let yourself feel the full impact of the pain. Go to the root of it.’ Oh, how hard it can be not to have the wound become your identity. How hard it is to allow yourself to feel the pain without suckling the wound. Ego acts like a magnet to the wound, saying, ‘Let me tell you about right and wrong. Let me tell you about fair and unfair. You want vindication, I have it!’

The paradox is that to move along this tightrope you have to let go. This is the heart of sacrifice: to experience the full force of pain but not attach to it and not allow it to establish privileged prerogatives over others. When you sacrifice any attachment to suffering, you will find yourself on higher ground. Pain is inevitable, while suffering is ultimately a choice. And I would add that numbness is not an option.

Finding Integration When Things Fall Apart

It was Saturday morning. Saturn’s day. I was sitting on the cement floor of the garage in the half-light. I had in my hand a list of weekend chores; my head was sunk in depression. Kathleen opened the door to the garage from the kitchen and saw me sitting on the ground, a lump of dejection.

Out of her subconscious popped the words, ‘You are going to leave me, aren’t you?’

Out of my subconscious came the reply, ‘Yes, I am.’

For a moment we were just stunned. Then we found ourselves pacing around the house as if even the furniture and the walls were going to melt away. The solidity of everything began to dissolve. Climbing the stairs was like riding a shock wave. Closing a door was like erasing memory. Sitting down was sinking into an abyss; and then standing up was like commanding muscles to remember how they worked. And in the pit of your stomach the densest fog just crept up – first to the heart, then to the head. After that, the mind decided it was going to drown if it didn’t start making up stories.

Within hours, it seemed, we were discussing bank arrangements and moving out.

Days later you couldn’t really think through the fog but you almost prayed it didn’t lift. You knew once it did, the pain would come out of hiding. I believe now that trees scream when they are uprooted. We were two trees with roots intertwined over 21 years.

Body, mind and heart began their screaming, not in emotional tantrums, but just the sheer wrenching force of extraction from the soil of profound relatedness.

Life goes on. Everything is logistics and you run on the treadmill bleeding, but only a few perceptive people see the arterial flow; even amongst them, only a few are not afraid of stirring their own agonized ghosts if they get close.

Men cry – often alone. Tears and abandonment go together. But when children cry, they are really crying for solidarity. One of my sons cried all day when I told him that his mother and I were getting separated. He went to his room and began to sob. Sobbing is when the convulsion goes all the way through the body, wave after wave. The breath gets caught and there are huge gulps – a vivid re-enactment of birth and death. I could offer him only the avoidance of false consolation – no ‘everything is going to be OK’ routine. In some ways I was just affirming for him, ‘I am with you in this pain’– no separation in our sorrow.

It is true we can find communion in pain – especially when our tears are not strangled, and rather than allow the fog to become permanent, we prepare ourselves for a time when the pain will subside and we will wake and greet the light, even if it comes in the form of a single golden thread to lead us out of the labyrinth of our suffering.

The epicentre of activism is probably domestic activism, though we don’t usually call it that.

Domestic life is the frontier of many pivotal social change issues. At home gender equity and gender roles aren’t just theorized, they are acted out. This is where authority is challenged and autonomy claims its rights. On the domestic front you live out the tension between rights and responsibilities and what is mine vs what is shared. Home is where the boundary between self and other is most permeable and most tested. The place where you make daily existential sacrifices on behalf of others is most often your home. Parents make sacrifices all the time for their children: you sacrifice preferences, time, finances and a lot more to support the optimal development of your children.

But no matter how much you share values, conflict emerges. People evolve through healthy conflict and tend to regress when conflict becomes emotionally shabby, debilitating or destructive. Repressed and unresolved conflict is the greatest thief of joy.

Kathleen and I had different parenting styles. She scrutinized homework and report cards and always challenged our sons to do their best. I came from the perspective that they were doing their best and if that was graded as a C, fine. That is how it was for me growing up, and I always felt fully supported. The only report card my mother asked about was one from Haberdashers’ which read: ‘James can be too Dionysian in his approach to life and school affairs and he would do well to be more Apollonian.’ She responded by saying, ‘Your teachers agree with me, your hair is getting too long.’

Kathleen was tighter on discipline, I was more: ‘You fall down. I pick you up and we move on.’ This created tension and conflict but in the end it didn’t matter because we were so reliably consistent in responding to our sons the way we did. They discovered that love was the core of both approaches.

It was that love that guided us through the separation and eventual divorce. We simply put our children in the centre of the picture. Our solution involved plenty of personal sacrifice for the parents but it’s one that’s considered by some to be leading-edge. Instead of having the boys alternate between two households, we became the planets circling their sun. They stayed where they were and we rotated around them. Half the week Kathleen was with them, then we rotated and it was my turn. It was as if they became the nucleus and we orbited around them.

In their own way they blossomed under this arrangement. The rhythm of the house continued. But something had changed. None of us could quite define it, but in the end the separation had failed to topple our world. In a subtle way we had found a new expression of unity. Kathleen and I divorced when the youngest went off to college. There was no acrimony, only caring. The substance of love had not been harmed, despite the severity of pain in the break-up. Maybe our deepest soul contract was to agree to sever the relationship rather than let it sink into a swamp of dependency. Separation was to be the signal that we were ready to fly: fly towards the interior fire of the soul’s mystical candle and burn brighter.

Separation is one of the steps in alchemical process, followed by conjunction. It is a process which Hermes Trismegistus says must be conducted ‘with gentleness and great sagacity’. And he might have added, not without sacrifice. Not without offering your whole being to that which must be dissolved before it can find its own essential nature. That is the gold of alchemy, to discover who it is you are.

I am acutely conscious that there is a noble sphere of human endeavour where men and women have sacrificed themselves heroically for great causes. They inspire us and excite conscience. They forge a better world. They show us the way. Yet we can also light a torch to every human partnership that offers everything it has to create a garden to nourish heart and soul and a safe place to practise ways of being with each other that truly humanize the world. In the case of Kathleen and me, we know that our most enduring activist achievements were on the home front.

It is said in the Holy Bible that, after eating of the Tree of Knowledge, Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden, but then an Angel was sent to the Eastern Gate with a flaming sword to guard the way back to the Tree of Life. I guess that’s a divine clue that getting thrown out of life’s gardens is not the end of the story.

I once asked Metin Abi in Istanbul what he thought might happen when a soul tried to return to the Garden via the Eastern Gate:

‘The Angel with the flaming sword of discernment will look deep inside and ask one question.’

‘And what is that question?’

‘Beloved, do you know at last who you are?’

Both the mystic and the activist discover who they are when they sacrifice the old ways of doing business for the new life they seek to experience in themselves and in the world.

Chapter Thirteen

The Universe Speaks

Intuition and epiphany open us to direct experience of a wider, more communicative universe that is likened to finding a tear in the fabric of reality; the author experiences a grand epiphany that changes the direction of his life.

There are two kinds of experience and they are radically different from each other. One kind of experience imprints upon us in a way that acts as a selective filter for other experiences; we view what happens to us through a network of self-referencing experiences which condition our view of reality. The problem with this kind of conditioning experience is that our filters can also act as blinders. Psychologists recognize that we tend to project on to the world around us based on our past experiences; we see the world through lenses coloured by the highs and lows of experience. Our attention is much more selective than we care to imagine. Even in the physical domain psychologists talk about inattentional or perceptual blindness. In one famous example of such blindness, people can be directed to watch for passes in a basketball game with the result that they completely fail to see a gorilla walking across the court.

But there is another kind of experience – it is the direct experience of Reality that is cultivated as part of the mystical quest. In this case we are referring to the kind of experience that removes the screens and filters of the conditioned mind, dissolving projections, judgmental thinking and separate identity. When we commune with what is without a predetermined expectation about how it should be or how it must be if we are to be happy, we see that our normal state of consciousness has been creating illusions.

The whole process of creating illusions affects both individuals and the entire collective field of consciousness, with one illusion nested within another to an exponential degree. It is not just individuals who can find themselves lost in intensely vivid projections: whole societies can descend into chaos as a result of virally shared misconceptions about what is real and true. The mystic spends a lifetime developing an antenna for the reality that exists beyond the blinders of the conditioned mind. As vividly as we can smell a meal being prepared in the kitchen, mystics sense the essence concealed in the form.

This work of unravelling the hold that illusions have over us takes many forms. Some practices involve cultivating stillness, while others find a connection to essence through ecstatic music and movement. Some find that the false can be more easily shed in solitary retreat, while others find their truth in communal practice. Some find Nature to be their best mirror, while others look for embodiment of truth in an enlightened Master. Some study, while others play. And some seek to integrate aspects of all of the above. Whatever form is used, there is a realization that we can work to move out of the shadowy world of our projections and step into the sunlight of clear perception. We discover that there is a wide universe of connectivity awaiting us – if we can only learn to attune to it through conscious awareness.

Even when we try hard to tune into essential reality, we can find it aggravatingly difficult to get beyond the babbling commentary of the ego-mind. It is as if our ego has its own cellular connection in our head! We block any form of communing with the wider universe because all circuits are busy processing mind-chatter. Compounding this distraction are dominant belief systems rooted in scientific materialism which tell us that the universe is devoid of consciousness and is only made of elaborate forms of gaseous interaction, spinning and colliding matter clustered in ice, magma and rock; white dwarves and black holes and mysterious forms of dark energy and dark matter. From this perspective, where possible we can observe matter even to the infinitesimally small scale of subatomic particles; but for the materialist, consciousness appears only in the electrochemistry of the brain.

Yet even in the mighty fortress of materialism we occasionally hear a knocking at the door of intuition. In all the hullabaloo, something qualitatively different sends a signal and for a moment we attend to it. Something speaks to us from beyond the conditioned mind and from outside of our normal understanding.

Contact with a reality beyond the everyday frequencies of busy mind-chatter may come as stillness, as a hush that interrupts the storm of noise inside us – a hallowed moment where we hear the still, small voice within. It might rise like volcanic magma in the centre of the solar plexus switching the entire circuitry of the body to attend to some vitally neglected truth. It can feel like music calling us out of the humdrum into higher planes of creative imagination. It can feel like tapping into a source so saturated with connectivity that we experience awe, revelation and a cornucopia of synchronicity. It can break through the fog of data overload and excessive trivia with flashes of truly meaningful insight. It can summon us with a call to step courageously into the fullness of our own being. Or it can descend into the heart as a presence of great love and compassion and, for some, a deeper longing to be one with the Beloved.

The word epiphany comes from the Greek, and denotes a striking appearance or manifestation. It suggests something that comes from another domain and can feel like a visitation from a mysterious dimension. It can also take the form of flashes of insight or Eureka! experiences. In Christianity the Feast of the Epiphany celebrates the recognition of the manifestation of divinity on Earth by the three wise kings who visit the baby Jesus in a stable near Bethlehem.

In her book Epiphanies, Ann Jauregui writes, ‘Epiphany is a big word, a thunderclap of a word. It conjures up the landscapes of mystics and saints, of Moses at the Burning Bush, and the Buddha under the Bodhi tree.’ But Jauregui suggests that an epiphany can also be triggered in the context of ‘commonplace experience’. ‘And it unfolds from there – sometimes as a flash, sometimes in exquisite slow motion – out of conventional time and space and language.’¹

Ann Jauregui also reminds us that we can find ourselves in a bind, fearing we will be laughed at or incoherent in attempting to explain contact with a different form of reality than we are used to dealing with, and one that we think of as fleeting and insubstantial. She asks how anyone except a poet can speak coherently ‘of consciousness transcending the body and spreading out all over the north woods and beyond?’²

Some experiences are unique and represent a tear in the fabric of reality as we know it. Then, when we cross the boundary, we feel as if we have been living in a doll’s house – so striking is contact with the vastness of expanded reality compared to the contained little world of normal social intercourse. And yet there is always a paradoxical conjunction in a powerful epiphany between being recognizably ourselves and yet also being freed up to swim in the greater flow of the universe. As one mystic put it, one finds oneself in the presence of something which is ‘great enough to be God and small enough to be me’.³

This sense of greater meaning, which can be experienced when the walls of conditioning mysteriously dissolve, has much of the shift from concrete to symbolic reality that we experience in the dream world. Dreams are saturated in meaning. They take us into a dimension where linearity and simple chronology drown in an ocean of resonance and interconnection with other meanings.

Jung felt that our experiences of synchronicity are times when we tap into a shared field of connectivity that cannot be explained as random coincidence. It is not only mystics and psychologists who speak of entering the flow of a much larger field of meaning where synchronicities and connectivity abound. There is an increasing number of physicists who find themselves sharing a similar language. F David Peat, colleague of renowned physicist David Bohm, even wrote a book entitled Synchronicity: The Bridge Between Mind and Matter.

‘Synchronicities,’ he explained, ‘give us a glimpse beyond our conventional notions of time and causality into the immense patterns of nature, the underlying dance which connects all things and the mirror which is suspended between inner and outer universes. With synchronicity, it becomes possible to begin the construction of a bridge that spans the worlds of mind and matter, physics and psyche.’⁴

John Fetzer had a lifelong interest in radio. He ended up owning a lot of radio stations and played a role in securing the rights of independent broadcasters in America. He became fascinated by the role and influence of the invisible on the visible and tangible. He became interested in transmission not just as related to radio waves but also in the subtle and spiritual senses. He founded and endowed the Fetzer Institute to explore the interactions of the unseen world and the everyday world. The heart of its mission was to bring together the sacred and the secular. The Institute is explicit about fostering love and forgiveness for a transformed world.

While still CEO of the Seva Foundation I was invited to a meeting at the Fetzer Institute, which is located in Kalamazoo, Michigan. The meeting was called to explore the spiritual heart of service – a theme I was drawn to like a bee to nectar. At the gathering, I remember sharing the Tagore quote which I kept on my desk:

I slept and dreamt that life was joy
I awoke and saw that life was service
I acted and behold, service was joy

There was a shared sense at this gathering that the spiritual heart of service certainly has more to do with joy than duty. Of course, the kind of joy we alluded to was not the oh-so-cheery cheeriness of a Mary Poppins, more the kind embodied by Mother Teresa who witnessed her divine Beloved in everyday human suffering and challenge. Service as an expression of joy is not structured around the concept of doing things for others so much as acting in a way that dissolves the boundary of self and others. The joy experienced in this context is an expression of a non-dual state of being.

We can think of service as mutually liberating rather than onesided. It is a sharing of need, time, resources, energy and creativity that would otherwise remain dormant. Service liberates our potential to receive as well as to give in an exchange that amplifies wholeness, mutuality and oneness. The spiritual heart of service is a flow of effort, testing, sacrifice, acknowledging, bonding, gratefulness and communion without ego trapping consciousness into surrendering to its sole ownership rights as the doer. It takes a mature being to step out from the seduction of ‘I am the doer’ to ‘I am the one who is participating and witnessing what is getting done.’ But when we switch from ego to witness we become so much more receptive to the creative agency of a universe ready to help us transform, and it is in that state of receptivity that epiphanies occur and synchronicities abound.

The Spiritual Heart of Service meeting at Fetzer was so rich with this kind of reflection that it was decided to have a second round on the same theme a few months later. I was more than eager to participate. These questions were the ones I had dedicated my life to. Now finally I was beginning to feel that really big answers were being revealed to me.

As I made my way to the second meeting, the universe had apparently decided I was ready for a grand epiphany. Soon I would experience a tear in the fabric of reality, and this time I would step all the way through and find myself on the other side.

I was at Chicago airport, on my way from San Francisco to Kalamazoo, when an announcement invited me to go to the nearest telephone. The call was from a program officer at Fetzer telling me that the meeting was cancelled. Mother Nature had blown in a whopping snow dump seemingly out of nowhere – otherwise they would have caught me before I left San Fran. I was a little disoriented: should I try to spend the night in Chicago or should I try to catch a plane going back to SFO? On my way to grab a coffee over which to ponder my little dilemma, suddenly I received a vivid jolt in the solar plexus like an internal telegram which urged me: Do Not Stay in Chicago. Get Back to the Bay Area. You have a Big Day Ahead of You Tomorrow. I decided to go with the first part of the message and dismiss the latter. Rather than attend to any business the next day, I would simply play hooky. And that is what I did. I didn’t even call my office – after all they thought I was in Kalamazoo!

I decided to drive along the Marin County coast: no plans, just a free day of precious rest. Then I got a vague inkling that I should go to the little meditation hut overlooking the ocean on the Commonweal property on the mesa above Bolinas. It’s a wonderfully atmospheric spot. I had last been up there at Commonweal for a retreat with social activists exploring the inner life. It also struck me that there was an interesting link to Fetzer, since the same place had hosted the Radio Corporation of America’s original transmissions; it was from here that Marconi first sent signals to Hawaii.

The town of Bolinas is below the mesa, and I was drawn to explore it briefly before heading up for some peaceful inner opening. Bolinas has a 60s time warp feel to it – and the residents like it that way. There are no road signs to Bolinas, as they prefer to keep it off the tourist routes.

I parked near the post office. Immediately, I noticed a building across the street that attracted my attention. It was a red two-story house surrounded by a wooden fence. I couldn’t tell why, but its energy was appealing. Crossing the street, I noticed there was a ceramic inscription attached to the fence. It looked like Islamic calligraphy. Ah yes, I thought, they must be Sufis. I must be picking up on their subtle energy field.

What happened next defied all expectation. As I strolled away from the house I got another fireball in the solar plexus. With telegraphic urgency an inner voice said, ‘Stop. Turn around. Go back to that house and go inside and introduce yourself.’ I did indeed stop. The rational mind took over. It persuaded me that I needed rest. Somehow on my way to Kalamazoo I found myself in Bolinas and things had got jumbled. Anyway, what was I going to say? ‘Hello, I heard a voice which told me to introduce myself to you. Actually I was on my way to Kalamazoo when I got turned around …’

I let out a great sigh of relief. Thank God for the rational mind! I continued walking.

Then it happened. No voice. No internal discussion. I just stopped. Turned around. And headed for the house.

The Question I Didn’t Know I Had Been Waiting For

As I flipped the latch on the gate, I was pumping adrenaline but I couldn’t locate my mind. There was no way to reset the controls. My body took the path through the garden to the front door as I witnessed what was happening from a distant stratosphere.

As I approached, I noticed the main door was sheet glass and I could see inside. There were three women there. They had their backs to me. They were seated and in conversation.

I knocked on the glass. One of the women got up and walked towards the door. About half way, she stopped. She peered at the door in an expression of disbelief. Then, half screaming and half delightedly exclaiming, her voice uttered the words my memory will never erase: ‘It’s Jim O’Dea!’

When she opened the door she was beside herself with excitement and puzzlement, attempting to process her own interpretation as to why I was there. Her rational mind explained the following: The meeting was over. I had missed it. Everyone would have loved to have seen me. Who had told me about it? My ideas would have been appreciated. She uttered a stream of speech as I stood in silence. Since my own mind was on planet Z, or who knows where, I was unable to make sense of what she was saying or give a response. A few times I moved my jaw but I no longer had a voice. But as puzzling as my dumbstruck behaviour must have been, the woman – whose name was Nancy Flowers – ushered me into her home.

The two other women rose to greet me as if I was an old friend. Then came a similar stream of talk about the meeting that had broken up – how productive it was, how many old friends of mine had left the house just half an hour before I’d appeared at the door, who had given me the address, and on and on. I was like a deaf-mute dropped into a foreign country. After a while the cascade of questions subsided and the three women, exhibiting a little confusion about my lack of response, went into another mode. They observed that I looked a little pale and that I could probably do with a cup of coffee. In fact, there was also plenty of food. We gravitated into the spacious kitchen.

For a few minutes we just indulged in chit chat, and I found I had a voice. Then as if a clue was dawning on her, Nancy said, ‘You know, Larry himself was not at the meeting. Maybe you heard that he was. I think you must be quite disappointed.’

That was it. I had to break through the bubble. It became very silent. They looked sorry for me. They could see I was in difficulty.

‘I know this is going to sound strange, but I have no idea who you are. I have no idea where I am, other than that I am in a house in Bolinas. I don’t know anything about the meeting that occurred here. I don’t know anything about a group of friends of mine meeting up here. I certainly had no intention of trying to meet Larry here, because I haven’t the faintest idea who he is.’

One of them said with a mixture of gravity and compassion, ‘I think we all need to sit down.’

When they were all seated, each woman told me who she was and then Nancy explained what the meeting had been about. I sat transfixed.

They were all human rights activists. The leaders of diverse human rights organizations across the US had come together to see how they could jointly celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Larry Cox was at the time the program director at the Ford Foundation in New York. Larry was going to fund this initiative.

The women could see why they might know me, even though I didn’t know them. But they were still deeply puzzled as to what I was doing there. I tried to explain as best I could that I had simply followed an impulse to walk up to the front of the house and introduce myself. I gave them the background on Kalamazoo and the rest. The room was very hushed for a while, and then the conversation turned to human rights issues. But I was in an anything but normal state. A good part of my mind still felt as if it had been abducted. There was now also an additional element. As I got over my incredulity at what was unfolding, rather than feeling awe I felt anger. I surmised – wrongly – that the universe was conspiring at any cost to get me back into the kind of human rights work I had been doing for ten years at Amnesty International. If they could have tuned in, the three women might have been surprised at just how acrimonious my internal tirade was: I gave you ten years. Ten years of torture, murder and mayhem. Ten years of doing my uttermost to stop it all. I was exhausted; burned to a crisp. I can’t go back. When is enough enough for you, dear God? So much for a benign universe! I need something beyond the cruelty. My spirit needs some resolution of the pain.

I decided I had to leave – this experience was too excruciating. I explained to the women that I had been on my way to the meditation hut at Commonweal when I got sucked down the rabbit hole.

One of the women, Kristi Rudelius-Palmer, interjected, ‘Before you leave, I have just one question. I think if there is anyone who can answer this question, it is you. What is the relationship between spirituality and human rights?’

Instantly, as if a trap door had opened somewhere in the universe, I dropped back into my body. I was present, animated, fully myself, and happy to be alive. It was as if this was the question I had waited for all my life. Equally instantaneously, I understood why the universe had gone to such great lengths to make sure that I would give my fullest attention to answering this question.

‘Human evolution is, I believe, ultimately purposeful: we are headed somewhere. It is not random. It is not a meaningless story. A story is just a nightmare if it does not lead to resolution. Your meeting was about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. After the unspeakable suffering of the Holocaust and Second World War, world leaders came together and forged a new vision. They created a new benchmark in the human evolution story. They declared for the first time in the history of humanity that human rights are universal and indivisible. Every one of us on the face of this Earth now has equal protection in international law. We have by no means secured this vision, but it is our story – it is our destiny to fulfil it. We have come to realize not that there are so many obstacles on the path to the full manifestation of universal human rights, but that our common goal to get there is clear and unshakeable. Each and every day, people wake up to the growing reality of our interdependence across the planet. We are collectively a part of each other as never before. As painful as the process is, we are giving birth to oneness. But we did not create this code of universality and oneness: it is a code which the universe itself carries and transmits.

Spirit is the whole story. It is the whole story of you, the whole story of me and the whole story of all of us. It is the whole story of our abuse and painful learning in the process of evolving and the whole story of awakening to the consciousness of who it is we really are and how inseparable we are from the source of all creation. Once we understand this story, healing can begin and wisdom can flourish. Human rights abuse is always a denial of the truth of the whole story. The human rights activist of the future will also be a conscious activist who seeks to live and embody the whole story. The old story transmits wounds of elitism and separatism, and this leaves a lot of work for human rights activists to do. But our work is deeper than trying to fix things. We must now address root causes. That means we will have to uproot any mental conditioning that reinforces superiority and division.’

The three women saw me to the door in a spirit of peace and appreciation. And I spent some richly restoring hours in the meditation hut at Commonweal, washed by the sound of the ocean’s waves and saturated with gratitude.

The Soul’s Authority

In this elaborate epiphany it is important to observe how the discursive and rational mind is taken off-line and replaced by surrender to a far greater intelligence which sees beyond the little boundaries of time and space. Mind likes to think that it’s in charge and certainly that it knows what’s going on. But in strict preservation of its own interests, it actually blocks us from seeing Reality.

As you can see from my Bolinas experience, the mind fights hard when it feels it’s losing its tight grip. It bends and contorts in order to reassert control. It desperately tries to squeeze the cosmic genie back into its compact jam jar version of things. It tries to douse the flames of any kind of prophetic wisdom that summons greater truth. It knows that the rationale of self-interest will be extinguished by the fire of selfless love and self-sacrifice. It knows it must run from the Burning Bush back to the safety and familiarity of the old gods that mind itself created for its self-perpetuation. For the one thing mind fears most is death.

What is inspiring about a deep epiphany like this is that it just can’t be forced into something as tight and narrow as coincidence. What occurred defied the laws of chance. If the Fetzer meeting had not been cancelled, I would have been in Kalamazoo, not Bolinas. If I’d stayed in Chicago, if I hadn’t gone into Bolinas, if I hadn’t gone into the house, if I had listened to my head instead of my gut instinct or if I had resisted instead of surrendering to deeper guidance, then my life might have taken a different course. What happened that day set me on a new course – a direction in my life and work that was even more deeply soul-directed. And yet I was not the doer. Without mind-interference or the concept that ‘I am the doer’ it seems that quite a lot can get done.

What stopped me in my tracks that day and switched off my mind was the authority of my own soul. The soul is entirely obedient to the greater universe because it is a part of that universe. Spiritual reality and mystical truth wanted an even greater place in my life. To gain this they had to jostle my little local self into concentrated focus and undivided attention to what really mattered. As it turned out, the Bolinas epiphany was just the beginning of an intense journey exploring our human capacity to heal from the gravest trauma and wounding. It also catalyzed deep inquiry into the nature and powers of human consciousness and intensified the quest to fully integrate the secular and the spiritual.

When I returned to my office on Monday morning, my secretary reminded me that I had a lunch appointment with Wink Franklin, the president of the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS). My, what a coincidence! IONS was a leader in the field of consciousness research. When we met I couldn’t help sharing my epiphany with Wink. He was so captivated that he asked me to share my story with the president of the Fetzer Institute. Not long after that the Fetzer Institute invited me to convene a meeting in Kalamazoo entitled ‘The Spirit of Human Rights’. The meeting explored the transformation in consciousness needed to end human oppression and abuse.

Within a few years I had become president of the Institute of Noetic Sciences and ‘The Spirit of Human Rights’ meeting had morphed into ten years of international dialogues under the banner of Compassion and Social Healing.

It pays to listen when the universe speaks.

Chapter Fourteen

Humanity’s Healing

The author explores humanity’s capacity to rise out of the ashes of terrible suffering, to heal itself of the gravest wounds and to lay the foundation for a future based on reconciliation, unity and love.

I have already mentioned the 13th-century Persian mystic known as Rumi. He is wildly popular, and celebrities like Madonna and Deepak Chopra have made recordings of his poetry. Yet there is another important Sufi mystic born about 40 years earlier whom most people have not heard of. His name is Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi. In Sufism Rumi is known as the pole of love, while Ibn ‘Arabi is known as the pole of knowledge. As a love poet, Rumi is accessible to us even though every symbol and every metaphor are about divine love. Ibn ‘Arabi is a lot more difficult to read and generally one doesn’t get very far by just dropping in to the text. I participated for several years in an Ibn ‘Arabi study group that had its rigours and rewards in unpacking the holistic wisdom of the great master.

I remember that early on in the course, the teacher facilitating our study asked me to elucidate the meaning of a phrase in the chapter on Adam in Ibn ‘Arabi’s The Wisdom of the Prophets. In my response I used an analogy from my own experience. With severity the teacher replied, ‘It is neither “like” anything nor does it “remind” you of anything. This text will never surrender to your conjectures and projections. You must grapple with the text itself. You will break its seals only when you have a direct encounter with its wisdom.’ In that class the teacher never gave us a single word of commentary that was not directly related to the text.

Ibn ‘Arabi is known for his healing vision of the unbreakable unity between Creator and creation. He is a great teacher of the unity of all being. Even when we think we are separate, we are not. Even when we think that certain heinous acts and behaviours separate people from God’s mercy, it is not so. All is God’s creation; He is the essence of all beings. Separation is an illusion.

The universe is a place of signs, and every reality in it is a sign that leads to a divine reality, upon which it is founded in coming into existence, and to which it will return when withdrawn.¹

For Ibn ‘Arabi, while creation is an expression of indivisible divine essence, what we variously imagine it to be creates multiplicity. That multiplicity can be a joyful expression of uniqueness but it can also be an expression of divisiveness and confusion. Multiplicity – when it takes the form of superiority – can stir the fires of cruelty and hatred. These are the flames that keep us from recognizing our essential unity. But the mystic knows that we are one and that hidden in the flames there is still an indestructible reality that cannot be divided into any kind of factionalism. Ibn ‘Arabi calls to us from that place of unity:

O marvel! A garden amidst the flames!
My heart has become capable of every form:
it is a pasture for gazelles, and a convent for Christian monks,
and a temple for idols, and the pilgrims’ Ka’ba,
and the tables of the Torah and the book of the Qur’an.
I follow the religion of Love: whatever way
Love’s camels take, that is my religion and my faith.²

The kind of Love referred to here is not one based on tender feelings and sentiment but one based in a rare form of knowledge and deep integration that bridges all divides. When we experience reality as it is, compassion arises and there is no division between heart and head. This place of oneness Ibn ‘Arabi calls ‘a garden amidst the flames’. Beyond the crazy hallucinations of the mind there is a field of pure mental insight and eternal truth, and beyond the wild fibrillations of the heart’s desires there is an infinite reservoir of peaceful intimacy and beauty. In the end we are all headed towards that reality, and there is no way to that garden where all is one except through the purifying fire of unconditional love.

We are all somewhere on the journey to perfect integration. Slowly we discover through every fall, through every blunder, through every wounding and sweet balm of recovery that we are always guided – and the inexhaustible force that guides us all the way home is Love. Love sends us out and Love calls us back. When we truly experience this Love we have reached higher ground – high enough to see the fabric of our oneness and to know in the heart’s core that we have always been a part of it. Once we reach this place we stop being pawns in a hostile universe, and the whole chess game of gain and loss is over. It is through the fire of love that the conscious activist unites inner and outer transformation.

Ibn ‘Arabi reminds us that it is obvious that our senses are limited; less obvious is the fact that ‘the Intellect is of the world of limitation’. He even reminds us that the root of the Arabic word for intellect means ‘restraining cord’. But the heart is compounded of a more universal substance, and rather than being restrained, its essential nature opens to embrace wholeness. When the heart does not open fully, it is like a malfunctioning shutter on a camera which will leave you with a botched or blurred picture. When the heart opens it unites not with intellect but with higher reason. This unity is sometimes referred to as gnosis.

Now we reach what for me is Ibn ‘Arabi’s greatest revelation, which is his understanding of how Love comes about: ‘The cause of Love is Beauty.’

It is with this deep revelation that I can contemplate facing the ravages of human suffering and divisive hatred with any hope of healing on a grand scale. This has been my unrelenting focus for the past twenty years, to keep looking for beauty in the most hardened people and in the most rotten conditions of human degeneration. I have learned how to look for the beauty in the perpetrator as well as the victim.

And when I find that beauty I feel immense love.

I have always been attracted to Krishna. In this divine name I hear splashing cymbals and crashing waves. In colour the Avatar is deep dark blue and in form he dances and plays the flute. His is the dance of unitive being and the music of the soul’s divinity. His wisdom comes to us in the form of the Bhagavad Gita, the great epic scripture on the relationship between spirituality and action: ‘Freedom from activity is never achieved by abstaining from action.’

In the epic, Arjuna, the king of the Pandavas, tries to persuade Krishna that it is more righteous to abstain from fighting the Kauravas because it would mean killing relatives – even though the Kauravas have been lawless for many years. Krishna knocks Arjuna off his transcendental high horse and explains to him why spirituality must engage in righteous action: ‘The immature think that knowledge and action are different, but the wise see them as the same.’

Now, with a little shift of focus, imagine Krishna, not as Arjuna’s charioteer in some ancient battle, but as divine witness to the relentless slaughter of the Cambodian genocide. What is at stake is not a simple victory of one adversary over another – this carnage is about the eradication of human tenderness, love and compassion. Like Stalin and Chairman Mao, Pol Pot added to the millions slaughtered in the name of communist ideology.

So it is that Krishna descends with flute in hand into that orgy of hatred to find a tender human soul to carry the song of Love through hell itself. Let us follow him as witnesses.

Healing from the Greatest Wounding

By the age of six, Arn Chorn-Pond is learning traditional Cambodian music from his father. At nine, flute in hand, he is picked up by the rampaging Khmer Rouge. He is taken to a temple whose blood-splattered walls are used to smash children’s heads and where every kind of execution is performed.

Arn is forced to play his flute for the genocidaires. They want him to play folk songs and traditional lullabies. They demand that he does not stop playing even if somebody is being killed in front of him. He too will be killed if he cries or sheds a tear. He must block his senses from any expression of human emotion. Even when they force him to watch a human being disemboweled, he must not react.

He had to live and breathe in a state of numbness. He even learned to stifle his nostrils from the smell of human blood. Arn became a child flute player at an endless genocide of his own people. A documentary has been made about his life. It is simply called The Flute Player.

But this was only part of his journey. The killers could see that there was still some innocence in Arn. They wanted to annihilate this innocence, for they had annihilated it in themselves. They put a machine gun in his hand and he saw the bullets flying into a woman as she came out of the jungle. At the next opportunity he got, he fled. It was very dangerous to flee, the punishment being execution.

Facing the terror of land mines and slow starvation, he headed for the Thai border. When he finally got to a refugee camp he was emaciated and suffering from cerebral malaria. No doubt he would have died had not the Rev. Peter Pond found a way to get him out and bring him to New Hampshire.

When I first met Arn he was a student at Brown University. I was struck by the light in his being and the presence of a beauty and innocence that hell itself had not been able to extinguish in him. I invited him to speak at an international human rights day event at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC, and later to participate in the social healing dialogues funded by Fetzer. One of the things he said that lives forever in my memory is this: ‘I’m not just alive today because bullets failed to reach my brain or because I wasn’t butchered by the awful Khmer Rouge genocide. I’m alive, finally, after all these years because I can love again. I can feel the pain of others – not just my own – who are suffering the pain of human madness.’

Arn shows us how love can dissolve the most devastating numbness and how it can reconnect us to each other even after insanely brutal efforts to sever the ties that bind us. And if love can do that, what healing is not possible on planet Earth?

Under the guidance of Judith Thompson, Arn spent many years working with children from the world’s conflict zones under the umbrella of an organization called Children of War. Judith made sure that the deeply traumatized children she brought together were held in a process that helped them begin their healing. She is a masterful soul who is able to accompany people through the shadows of the gravest violation to the healing garden of recovering wholeness.

The etymology of health and healing has roots in old English, Norse and German words for wholeness. There is nothing separate in the universe. Even when we have been violated, betrayed or told that we are worthless, we can recover from the harshest isolation and rejection. To do so we must set the conditions for healing. We must open to healing. We must face the wound. I knew there was no one I would rather work with on how to create those conditions for collective healing and for addressing our collective wounding than Judith Thompson. Thus began many years of social healing dialogues and a new emphasis in my activism on promoting broader societal healing.

We were first confronted with the worldview that believes the primary way to bring civility and order to our planet is to punish those who violate the rights of others. From this perspective, punishment serves as a necessary instrument to civilize our world. It sends the signal that impunity will never be tolerated. The problem with punishment fixation is that it does not address the wound out of which perpetrators act in the first place. It does little to address root causes. Transforming a culture of impunity can have a moderating influence and normative value, but we need other psychological and spiritual elements to stimulate healing and prevent the wound from hiding in the shadows where it waits dangerously unhealed.

On the wider political front Judith and I had begun to see that there was a way to address collective wounding other than through outright revenge or by means of showcase trials. There had been a number of national truth commissions that had shown a profound, socially therapeutic role for comprehensive truth-telling after a period of repression. Then the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa set a new benchmark for the social healing process. It even brought forgiveness into the work of healing collective wounds. Subsequently, Gacaca in Rwanda and Fambul Tok in Sierra Leone integrated traditional restorative justice approaches into the collective healing process.

At the same time, we launched the Compassion and Social Healing Dialogues when the mind-body health movement was making significant advances in transforming people’s views about how good health and healing occur. Attitude and belief had been identified as contributing to disease and also to recovery and health. There was an explosion of interest and related research concerning the quality of inner life and outer health. Yoga and various meditation techniques were seen to have a variety of physical, emotional and mental health advantages. Concurrently, psychology and psychotherapy were less fixated with pathology than with, where possible, guiding people to build relational skills and engage in positive strategies for moving beyond their wounding experiences. Science, spirituality and psychology were beginning to converge around a new consensus that affirmed our power to heal. Consciousness itself was now seen as a key factor in exploring healing paradigms.

Over the years the dialogues that Judith and I facilitated covered a vast territory of intergenerational wounding and truly inspirational healing. Those who helped us map the territory and experience the revelation of personal and collective healing included: survivors of genocide and war; torture survivors; victims blinded or otherwise maimed by politically motivated assault; former refugees; former perpetrators of abuse; people living under violent occupation; parties to major conflicts; psychotherapists; trauma recovery professionals; social workers; peacebuilders; conflict resolution experts; those engaged in forgiveness and reconciliation work; practitioners of racial healing; social activists; women’s rights activists; indigenous elders; leading-edge scientists; and practitioners of diverse spiritual traditions and world religions.

What we found through dozens of dialogues, extended retreats and visits to the world’s conflict zones is that we are in the midst of an intense evolutionary phase change. At the epicentre of this change is the shedding of old hierarchical identities. At the same time evolution is thrusting us towards a shared human identity which can flourish in peace and justice, thrive in diversity, and sustain life in ecological balance. This is an excruciatingly painful process.

We seem to be advancing and regressing at the same time. So often, brutal self-interest is permitted to exploit the commons until, finally, evolutionary conditions make it clear that there is no exit from approaches that harm collective interest. Again and again we are shown the catastrophic and dead-end consequences of domination, hegemony, greed and violent aggression. Our future is ruthless in demanding visionary collaboration over myopic competition. Evolution does not let a single human off the hook: each and every one of us is called to evolve. No matter how cozy and comfy we would like our lives to be, we are being pushed to embrace a larger identity than the one we were born into.

The spiritual path teaches us to participate in the process of releasing our addiction and attachment to our current identity even as religion, culture and social status seek to reinforce it. When we stop defining ourselves by our fixed identity labels, the hard boundaries of self-absorption begin to dissolve and we naturally flow towards a deeper engagement with others and with the reality behind all life. This does not mean that we get busier, only more centred and more grounded in the flow that is moving all life inexorably forward. In releasing our superficial identity and exploring a deep identity that unites us with the underlying field of existence, we pursue a mystical path.

We found in our social healing dialogues that major trauma first sends people into a terrifying contraction whereby their sense of identity is threatened by the behaviour of others, or by their own loss, grief, pain or unbearable suffering. But if we do not let the pain define us or allow our victimization to become our new identity, we can find ourselves becoming wiser and more compassionate after such suffering. We heard from a wide spectrum of victims of oppression how they were infinitely more capable of being resourceful for others after enduring trauma themselves. They shared with us how this wasn’t simply about feeling solidarity in suffering but the opening up of a path of inspiration and connection to a more encompassing vision for humanity. They had seen the potential for a much wider circle of healing.

All acknowledged that truth plays a central role in healing – objective truth and hard facts, as well as subjective truth about feelings and motivations. Factual truth can expose systemic and structural abuse, chains of command, and not just the authors of oppression, but those who bankroll it. This aspect of truth can provide an incontrovertible accounting. Subjective truth takes us to the heart of experience and the honouring and valuing of inner struggle. It gives pain a voice – not so that it can wail forever but so that it can be acknowledged and thereby transformed.

For some, an important part of the healing was to embrace the shadow aspect of their own group identity. As one Israeli activist described to us, he had to learn not to identify exclusively with the victimization of the Holocaust and also with the reality that his government was occupying a whole nation which longed to be free. ‘When our narratives begin to crumble, our sense of self is shaken. Yet seeing the falseness of what we’ve always been told to be true can lead to the acknowledgment of a much broader reality that can incorporate the truths of others.’

Dialogues of this nature are for me a form of communion and conscious activism; they create a field of heart-awakened awareness. When people come together to share a full spectrum of truth which includes the primal reality of their own experience, they consecrate human interaction and they align with our highest evolutionary purpose and the grand design of the universe itself. When we give ourselves to each other in this way, we abandon the nightmare of unresolved narratives and begin to tell the story of our future and how we reach for it – the story of our journey to Peace on Earth.

A Bridge over the Abyss

Almost daily one of the dialogues in particular comes back to me. Judith Thompson was a guiding spirit as she modelled an ability to hold both suffering and celebration in her being. This dialogue is my guiding star pointing the way to unimaginable levels of human reconciliation. Woven into a larger dialogue, Mary Rothschild, daughter of Holocaust survivors, and Gottfried Leich, former Nazi, interacted in ways that became spiritually revelatory for me.

Mary had questioned Gottfried very directly about his role in the persecution of the Jews. She wanted to know how active he had been in the Hitler Youth movement and how aggressively he would have participated in the murder of so many of her relatives if he had been older. As he responded, without any sense of making excuses for his own or others’ behaviour and with a genuine desire to atone even though he had not personally led people to the gas chambers, she could sense that he was speaking with complete sincerity. She had no need to go after him. Her need was to meet him in a place of truth. For nothing in her life could change her more than hearing the truth spoken from someone who had been inside the very bastion of poisoned lies which constituted Nazism.

As the four-day dialogue progressed, Mary’s presence was filled with a poignant compassion for Gottfried. This was not about forgiveness – that would only have been an abstraction in these circumstances. It was about holding Gottfried as a human being.

At one point Gottfried broke open. Being a former Nazi was like living in an abyss. His children were the children of a Nazi. His grandchildren were the grandchildren of a Nazi. It was an inescapable abyss of history. Then he turned to Mary with great emotion, acknowledging that it was the daughter of Holocaust survivors who had ‘thrown a bridge across the abyss’ where he and she could meet as human beings.

So often I visualize this bridge across the abyss and who is on it. I know all too well about the abyss. But my life has been about pointing to this bridge. And when the abyss seems really bitter and impenetrably dark, I see Mary and Gottfried meeting on the bridge. I see Arn with his flute. I see them and so many more streaming towards a common future.

At the end of the dialogue Mary got up, went over to Gottfried and said the following: ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me...’³

When the victim says these words to the perpetrator, every atom in the universe witnesses its truth. And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.⁴

Mary died a little before Gottfried. I imagine she waited for him.

And that Angel with the flaming sword at the Eastern Gate of Paradise never even stooped to ask them if they knew who they truly were, it was so obvious.

Chapter Fifteen

A New Science of Consciousness, Connection and Compassionate Engagement

An exploration of consciousness research at the Institute of Noetic Sciences leads to a reflection on the science of fields, contrasting ways of knowing and insights from neuroscience, heart science and releasing the toxins of trauma and wounding.

One of the accomplishments of modern science is that we not only put men on the moon but hauled more than 300 kg of moon rock back to Earth. When bits of the moon were taken for analysis, we found no magical compounds or mysterious substances, but traces of iron, calcium and even titanium. Even though scientists confirmed that it is ‘dead’, the moon is made up of the same minerals as planet Earth. Some theories suggest that the moon was originally a part of us. Today those bits of moon rock are either in museums or they are being analyzed to compare things like the similarities or differences between titanium isotope ratios in rocks on Earth and from the moon.

Native elders either lamented or laughed at what they considered the folly of taking hundreds of kilos of the moon back to Earth for analysis and for museum showcases. For them it was a question of values: rather than being a dead thing to be treated as a mere object, the moon is a very sacred relative. She lives in our hearts. She walks through our dreams. She inspires lovers. She stirs passion. She mirrors death and resurrection. Her waxing and waning affect tides, plants, animals and humans alike.

In every human culture the moon is given an archetypal significance in myth, folklore, romance, poetry and mysticism:

Last night the moon came dropping its clothes in the street.

I took it as a sign to start singing.¹

There is no question that the value of the moon to the human soul and psyche is far more significant than knowing about its titanium isotope ratios. From a neutral perspective these are simply different ways of knowing. We refer to one as objective and the other as subjective. Unfortunately, neutrality does not help in this instance. For what is referred to here as objective is the bedrock orientation of scientific materialism which tends to objectify everything, dominates our beliefs about the nature of reality, and determines how we organize our educational systems, health systems, economic systems and more. We live in a world that is increasingly dominated by a worldview that is based upon quantifiable and measurable ratios and margins. The split between quantitative and qualitative thinking has never been greater.

It is ridiculous to make scientific materialism out to be the bad guy, but the momentum of its central tenets has led to a collective consciousness that is shaped by materialism. Ironically, ‘got to have it’ rampant materialism has now pitted the demands of production quotas against measurable climate science which tells us we must live differently or suffer catastrophic consequences. We’re living through a split within a split within a split in consciousness. ‘Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold,’ as the poet William Butler Yeats put it.

Scientific materialism does not deny the existence of God or a spiritual realm but simply relegates them to a matter of faith. But what this kind of thinking does is condition us to accept a version of reality that is reductionist and mechanistic. This worldview doesn’t have to challenge the existence of a spiritual reality; all it needs to do is persuade us that survival depends upon maintaining a competitive edge.

Many truly inspiring discoveries have come from pioneering explorations into the nature of matter in all its forms and varieties, both living and inanimate. But our fascination and even obsession with what we have found have so dominated our development as a species that they threaten the deep ground of meaning necessary for the full thriving of human civilization. In an inversion of reality, matter has real substance while spirit is insubstantial and ephemeral.

If spirituality is relegated to some indeterminate, invisible, off-planet realm experienced in some highly personal way as real but otherwise absolutely undiscoverable, we are left with a widening gap between the spiritual and material.

For many of the power brokers on the planet, this has meant that we must organize the world around material reality and compete for limited resources. For many activists, the struggle is also around improving things on the material plane, though driven by the pursuit of equity, collaboration and sustainability. For some spiritually oriented people, the quest has been to accommodate to the world as it is structured while really seeking salvation through inner exploration and practice and communing with a transcendental reality.

There are even some who believe that these splits between spirit and matter can be surmounted by an applied spirituality that can help us create unlimited material abundance. We could go on, as there are multiple important nuances in each of these perspectives, not to mention the fundamentalist extremes on either side of the divide. Suffice it to say that we have been creating a dangerous cocktail of planetary confusion. The divisions on our small planet come from the fact that our ways of knowing who we are and what the world is are in constant collision.

But there is hope – real hope that an engaged spirituality and a conscious activism represent a coherent path forward. It is a path that seeks to integrate subjective and objective reality, consciousness and matter, science and spirituality, and personal transformation and whole-system transformation.

Strangely, my own journey into exploring this coherence was accelerated by meeting a remarkable man who had actually walked on the moon, who gave me the opportunity to head up the institute he created to explore the nature and powers of consciousness.

Science and Spiritual Consciousness

Edgar Mitchell was not only the sixth man to walk on the moon, he spent more time walking on the surface of the moon than any other human being. It was indeed a hike to remember. In a trek lasting over nine hours, he explored the moon’s Fra Mauro Highlands, which sound as if they belong in Tuscany. In fact, Fra Mauro, named after a 15th-century monk and cartographer, is the remnant of a walled lunar plain northeast of an area of the moon referred to as Mare Cognitum. As we walked the campus of the institute he had created to study consciousness, situated in the rolling hills of northern California, he shared with me the intensity of that long walk on the moon and his subsequent epiphany on the way back to Earth.

It was not difficult to sense an expanded field in his presence. You wouldn’t need to know that this man was an astronaut to feel some aspect of mystery that surrounded him. Yet he was very grounded. There was the soldier in him reflected in his early career as a Navy pilot. There was the trained scientific thinker who had a PhD from MIT. There was the explorer who had taken his explorations not only to the moon but into the nature of consciousness itself. At one moment he would be expounding on the nature of the quantum hologram; the next, sensitively attuning to your personal needs. I realized that he himself was a code for the conjunction between head and heart, science and spirit.

It was on the way back to Earth that he had his life-changing epiphany. Finally, in the return capsule, he began to unwind; the most demanding part of his role in the mission had been completed. It was then that he began to experience a mystical state we call samadhi. This is a state in which the consciousness of the experiencing subject becomes one with the experienced object. There are different kinds of samadhi experience, but here is Mitchell in his own words: ‘Consider the experience of the nirvikalpa samadhi, which is described similarly in different traditions. In this experience the sense of Self merges with the cosmos, and reality is experienced as unity of Self with All-That-Is. The experience is accompanied by intense ecstasy, a sense of eternity and a complete loss of fear. The experience is ineffable in the sense that description is inadequate to convey the experience and the description alone does not assist others in attaining the experience.’²

As awe-inspiring as Mitchell’s epiphany was, it was when he shared what happened once he had his feet back on the ground that I really felt the bond between his work and my own life purpose. After experiencing cosmic oneness, he saw how human consciousness was caught in immature divisiveness. He could see that we were really not living to our full potential. Our impulsive behaviour and our fascination with symbols of power seemed so adolescent. He felt an urgent need to explore the territory of mature human consciousness. He saw that scientific materialism was the dominant paradigm, which could not be ignored – after all, it was classical physics that got him to the moon. But his great question was: Could we use the scientific method itself to break down this dominant paradigm? What would be the coherent basis for a conversation between science and mysticism, and one that would have relevance to a world facing macro-scale crises? He knew that science needed to begin to answer deeper cosmological questions about the nature of our universe, which put consciousness back in the centre of the picture. On the one hand, we needed to understand consciousness itself and its true nature and powers. But on the other, we needed to carefully examine the cracks in the dominant worldview in order to help forge a new consensus about a more integral reality.

And we needed to paint a picture of the great evolutionary phase change that was upon us, when a new integral science would bridge the worlds of spirit and action.

It was out of these insights and convictions that Edgar founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences. Noetic comes from the Greek noēsis/noētikos, meaning inner wisdom, direct knowing, or subjective understanding. Edgar was the first to put noetic and science together. Noetic sciences: a multidisciplinary field that brings objective scientific tools and techniques together with subjective inner knowing to study the full range of human experiences.

In a series of lectures published in 1902 under the heading Varieties of Religious Experience, William James described ‘the noetic quality’ of mystical experience:

Although so similar to states of feeling, mystical states seem to those who experience them to be also states of knowledge. They are states of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect. They are illuminations, revelations, full of significance and importance, all inarticulate though they remain; and as a rule they carry with them a curious sense of authority for aftertime.³

In addition to Edgar’s own books and those of Willis Harmon, an earlier president of IONS, the research team published findings and writing on spontaneous remission of disease, the art and science of spiritual transformation, explorations in global consciousness, as well as consciousness and healing – integral approaches to mind-body medicine, consciousness and non-locality, and the process of worldview formation. Some of the most provocative research was conducted by Dr Dean Radin, the Institute’s Senior Scientist.

Dean is both academic and elfin. He’s a mixture of dreamy and precise. One thing is very clear: his laser-like intellect can detect anomalies in the conventional scientific paradigm and his research builds a bridge from those anomalies to a more coherent worldview. His findings are reflected in Entangled Minds: Extrasensory Experiences in a Quantum Reality and The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena.

Dean would smile if I told you that he is also a super-hero in disguise. The truth is, we need people like Dean Radin to go toe to toe with the dominant paradigm and to challenge it in ways that it finds credible and incontrovertible. Year in and year out, Dean, and other colleagues at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, chip away at a worldview that sidelines spiritual reality and dismisses the central role of consciousness as causal. They do so by conducting airtight research, using quantification, measurement and statistics to point at a reality where mind and matter are deeply interfused. At the same time as exploring intuition, calibrating phenomena such as a person’s gut response to a strong emotion directed at them from a distance, or calculating the effect of intentionality on water crystals, IONS participates in the great conversation about a fundamental transformation of our thinking about the nature of reality with some of the most creative thought leaders of our day.

Just as I had found myself many years earlier on the front lines of the human rights movement, now I was a privileged participant in a movement that was attempting to shake the foundations of contemporary understanding about consciousness itself. And I, in my own mystical searching, had found an important connection to science – the last place I expected to find it.

Quantum physics changed it all. The only question is, what has it really changed? I went into my super-conscious, healthy foods grocery store the other day and they asked me if I wanted to buy some Quantum coffee. ‘No thanks,’ I quipped. ‘I’ll need a bit more than that.’ Quantum comes from the Latin for ‘how much’. Well not very much, as it turns out. Quantum is now used in physics to refer to the smallest possible energy interactions of entities: a single photon is a quantum of light. We have to rearrange our thinking when we observe quantum interactions at the subatomic level, because the rules that seem to apply in everyday reality do not apply below the surface of matter. The inflation and hype around quantum comes as a result of the excitement people feel about the implications of quantum physics. But discernment and caution are needed if we are to bring worlds of meaning – with their own rigorous requirements for truth – into a coherent relationship with each other. Without this discernment we only create more fanciful splits in our thinking, inviting opportunists and cynics to sabotage the process of integration so necessary for a healthy future for us all.

What is essential for the average person to take from the esoteric world of quantum physics, is that consciousness itself interacts with subatomic phenomena. Consciousness cannot extricate itself as something entirely separate: physicists report that the process of observation is not entirely neutral when seeking to observe the quantum behaviour of an electron or a photon. Instead of pure neutrality at this level, there is an interaction occurring between the observer and observed. To observe something is somehow to participate with it. We are a part of what we observe.

This leads to another concept in quantum physics, known as entanglement. The brilliant cosmologist Ervin László uses a vivid metaphor for what is a complex scientific theory: ‘Perhaps the most remarkable feature of particles is their mutual entanglement. Particles turn out to be highly sociable: once two particles assume a precisely identical state, they remain linked no matter how far they may be from each other. These states are not real but potential – they are the states the particles can assume when they are observed or measured. It is as if the observer fishes the particles out of the sea of possibilities.’⁴ Everything is related. The subatomic particles mirror a truth that everything in the universe is part of one great society of inseparable relatedness. ‘No man is an island, entire unto himself,’ declares the 17th-century metaphysical poet John Donne, ‘but is a part of the continent, the whole.’ And not even the tiniest energy interaction anywhere in the universe is separate unto itself.

Not only is nothing separate, everything is mysteriously connected – to the point that you might wonder if you’re reading the words of a scientist or a mystic. The key notion here is the pervasive nature of fields. Electromagnetic fields have measurable signals which drop off in time and space, but interactions in the quantum field are non-local – that is, they defy the rules of space and time as we know them.

What is the field that can allow for interactions that appear to be instantaneous across great distances, and how does human consciousness relate to this field? As Lynne McTaggart puts it:

Our natural state of being is in relationship, a tango, a constant state of one influencing the other. Just as the subatomic particles that compose us cannot be separated from the space and particles surrounding them, so living beings cannot be isolated from each other … By the act of observation and intention, we have the ability to extend a kind of super-radiance to the world.⁵

That is a very beautiful concept – a connecting field in which each of us has ‘the ability to extend a kind of super-radiance to the world’. Now we really are in a place of conjunction between scientist and mystic, for mystical experience leads to communion with that pure radiant oneness of everything in creation. The mystic makes contact with the ground of being itself, which is nothing less than a luminous ocean of possibility offering infinite freedom, creativity and love.

László consummates the marriage of science and mysticism when he names the source of all fields as the mother field itself – the Akashic Field. This is the field that ensures coherence in the universe; it is both the source and record of every pattern in Creation; without it nothing would hold together; it is the once and future home of all. ‘Akasha is a Sanskrit word meaning ether: all-pervasive space. Originally signifying radiance or brilliance. It is the womb from which everything we perceive with our senses has emerged and into which everything will ultimately re-descend.’⁶

Now we have a map: we are connected to the radiance of the underlying source of all existence and invited to reflect it into a world that gets dazzled and distracted by its own shallow glitter.

Scientists and Native Elders in Dialogue

I had my own fascinating noetic experience not long after meeting Edgar, when I attended a meeting of scientists, Native elders and indigenous scholars at a dialogue in New Mexico. I was excited to participate in this meeting. After all, it is not often you get to sit down with physicists, biologists, linguists and a wide spectrum of Native leaders and elders. The dialogue was part of a series that had been started by the renowned physicist David Bohm and the brilliant Blackfoot elder, Leroy Little Bear. The ‘Language of Spirit’ dialogues were the setting for truly groundbreaking conversations about how we make meaning and understand the nature of time and space, beauty, cosmos and reality.

Early in the first dialogue I attended, Leroy asked us to have a conversation with a being who came from 1,000 years into the future. I remember Sir Brian Josephson, Nobel Laureate in Physics, commenting that if humanity had made it through another millennium, the only way it could have survived would have been through the discovery of free energy. The Native elders were much more oriented to interacting with the qualities of this being from the future than projections about what life would be like.

On the last morning of the dialogue Leroy flipped the question and added a twist. This time we were to have a dialogue with a Native American woman from the 18th century and we were to talk to her about diabetes. At first I thought it was a strange instruction.

Out of nowhere I found myself looking intently at the tall blue water jar that was in the centre of our circle. Then I found myself speaking to it as if it were a being. In the concentrated flow of what unfolded, it was as if I had made contact with a young Indian woman of the 18th century. I could not see her but I could sense her presence and her beauty in the blue sheen of the jar. It was as if the words I spoke were an impulse inside her own being. The voice within her was her own seed of wisdom:

They will tell you that you belong to the past; that your culture is primitive; that history will judge you as ignorant; that the buffalo and the deer are not your relatives; that there are no star people. They will tell you that their God is the only true God; that He is loving but if you do not worship Him He will send you and your people to hell; they will persecute you in the name of their loving God who is also the God of Progress; they will cheat you and throw you off your land; they will tell you that human beings don’t belong to land, they own it.

Do not swallow their meaning, it will make you sick. What they say is poison. Your people will become ill because this poison makes them forget their sacred destiny for humanity. For in its hour of great peril humanity must remember the great truth of ‘all my relations’. Keep the Beauty Way and one day the health of your people will be restored. You do not belong to a discarded past – your lineage of wisdom belongs to the future.

As my consciousness returned to the room, I flashed on Lorelei deCora and me in the field of buffalo. She was slapping her thigh and laughing loudly.

As the dialogue ended, the blue jar was taken outside and the water it was holding was poured onto the roots of a tree.

‘Time,’ said Albert Einstein, ‘is an illusion. But a very persistent one.’

Consider now all the elders, the wise beings and masterful spiritual teachers that you have met in the pages of this book. They are not just history – a chapter opened, a chapter closed. They do not exist in linear time, here now and then gone forever. Nor do they exist in museum time as lifeless objects to be inspected. They live in the field of those who have passed through the fires of separation to find unity. They touch my field; the field of this book; the field of our communing together. New science and mysticism understand that we are inseparably woven together in fields within fields of connectivity.

Within these fields of connection, I experience the frequency of love. I hold all my teachers in my heart. Their light guides me though the shadow world of illusion. Their deeply subtle frequencies stir me to remembrance of who it is I truly am. Like the golden threads that issued from the Bishop’s eyes, these guides send the holy fire of wisdom from the unmanifest ocean of infinite possibility to manifest in actual existence as compassion, as truth and as justice. Above all, their wisdom is a reflection of the beauty that awakens Creation and propels us to evolve towards higher consciousness. Science has its root in to know: but the ancients and the wisdom-keepers of all ages knew that science should not separate itself from the contemplation of beauty.

We come from beauty; to beauty we shall return and not a blemish shall be left. When the shadow conceals the beauty, our work is not to look away but to know that the akash – that original radiance of the Source – can never be erased.

In Sufism a murid, or initiate, enters into a state of communion with a murshid, an enlightened guide. The term for this state of communion is rabita. It is an acknowledgment that the teacher has become one with the Source; and that the teacher is one with the Light that illuminates the inner and the outer worlds of Creation. The work of initiates is to hold that Light in their own heart and to let its radiance purify their intention. This form of communing with the Light from the heart-to-heart exchange between teacher and initiate is more than a simple telepathic bond, it is a transmission of both love and knowledge.

Mystics do not need scientists to validate the process of telepathic communion and transmission between teachers and students, nor do they need affirmation of a unifying field as the source-bed of all matter, energy and consciousness. But it is certainly thrilling for the future of human civilization that, from their radically different perspectives, the scientist and the mystic are beginning to point at one integral reality.

Just as mystics do not need science to validate their experience, neither do activists need it to tell them about the expression of moral conscience or the instinct for justice. Activists operate in almost every sphere of human activity, often putting themselves at risk to bring about systemic changes and face down exploitation, lies and corruption. They act instinctively on behalf of the most vulnerable. They are invariably on the forward edge of evolutionary transformation. They forge a path of inclusion through history and bring those who were excluded into cherished community. They assert power with rather than power over. Paul Hawken refers to the massive evolutionary thrust of change spearheaded by activist organizations the world over as ‘Blessed Unrest’. As much as the hundreds of thousands of non-profit organizations involved in social change are involved in opposing entrenched hierarchies, they are also at the frontier of visionary and highly creative social experiments, fair economic practice and brilliant initiatives in ecological sustainability.

But just as we find science and spirituality entering into a new resonance, science is also playing its part in influencing a new form of conscious activism. It is a science that points us towards balance.

As I traced the development of my own activism, I learned that, to be effective, I could not just point to problems on the outside, I had to do a heap of inner work on myself. In order to ensure that moral outrage and problem fixation did not take over as the exclusive rocket fuel of my passion, I had to learn – after burn-out – to cultivate self-care and deepen an empathic connection to perpetrators and colluders of abuse.

Once you go back and start looking at the root causes of the mess we are in, you begin to see the intergenerational transmission of every kind of wounding, and then you cannot help tracing some aspect of wounding to your own door. That discovery should not incapacitate you but rather point to the balance of inner and outer work you need to do.

The term I use for this quest to find balance of inner and outer is: activist equipoise. Just as the mystic must transcend adversity on the path to experiencing oneness, the activist is also required to transcend harmful reactivity on the path to transformative action.

In a state of equipoise an activist can release an awakening fire of passion without doing harm to self or others. She or he can shine a ‘fierce light’ on the nature of injustice and yet be motivated by love and feel compassion for the ignorance that perpetrated the injustice.

To pursue this equipoise and prevent judgmental reactivity, activists must find practices that tame the wild horses of the mind or the equivalent wild tigers of the heart. The most transformational activists can sustain a lifetime’s focus on one issue and not be snared by any amount of denigration or seduction. Mandela, Martin Luther King and Gandhi were all commanding examples of passion, focus and poise.

Contemporary science has conducted a lot of research into practices that synchronize the activity of the mind and heart, allowing highly focused and engaged responsiveness to others to flow from a stream of inner-sourced peacefulness. Please note this is not about any form of passivity but rather a centred, presence-filled awareness that attends skilfully to situations as they arise. Multiple and sustained longitudinal studies confirm that meditative practice – which can take many forms – creates positive emotions, improved health, more lucid cognition, more empathy and less reactivity.

These are not just benefits that accrue to individual practitioners; those who interact with them can also be positively affected. Two primary areas influenced by meditation are attention and negative stress reduction. The normal brain often looks like a computer that needs to be reorganized and defragged: data storage has become highly fragmented, affecting overall efficiency. When our brains are revving with multiple voices, agendas, fears, fantasies and projections, we are present neither to ourselves nor to others. We are out of balance. We move from hyperactivity to attention deficit. This is critically important for the activist to appreciate. Thomas Merton stated the problem succinctly:

There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist … most easily succumbs: activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by the multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence … It destroys the fruitfulness of one’s own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.⁷

Merton was himself a mystic and contemplative who saw the need to engage. He was not against activism: he was someone who understood the replenishing cycle of speech and silence, contemplation and action. He died in Asia, a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War.

The contemplative activist is definitely emerging. A group called Center for Contemplative Mind in Society has shared meditative practice with leading ecologists, business people, social activists, lawyers and philanthropists. During the many Occupy demonstrations in 2011–12, there were designated corners for meditation, and during the protests in 2013 in Istanbul, a number of demonstrators protested by standing still in silence. There are many exceptional activist projects teaching meditative practice to inmates in prison, to homeless people and to youth at risk. And now they have a lot of good science to support the efficacy of contemplative activism.

The whole scientific underpinning of the mind-body health movement has led to a sea-change in attitudes and beliefs about the need for conscious management of our own health and wellbeing. We have begun to see how self-care is more life-affirmative than selfish. The neurosis of the compulsive overachiever is finally being exposed by good scientific research. If we want to live longer, be healthier, sustain quality connections with others, we must become paradigms in ourselves of the nurturance we would like to offer the world.

Psychologists refer to privileging one’s own needs in a way that excludes sensitivity to others as egocentricity bias in the emotional domain. How ironic that activists who seek to serve a socially beneficial cause can themselves get so caught up in the drama of saving others, saving endangered species or saving the environment, that they fail to recognize needs in primary relationships around them. Fortunately, the activist community is now at the leading edge of healthy collaboration and mutual self-care. The medium and the message are coming into deeper alignment.

Neuroscience Emerges as an Ally of Both the Mystic and the Activist

Major paradigm shifts in how we conceive healthy social change are unfolding as a result of insights from neuroscience and heart science. These insights reveal that we are designed for collaboration, empathy and altruism. We are fundamentally relational beings who are wired for deep attunement and connectivity with each other. When we are hurt, insulted, blamed or threatened, our circuitry of connection shuts down, communication breaks down and our bodies create an intense biochemical cocktail designed for fight or flight. But the opposite is equally true: we can radiate frequencies that signal safety, respect and trust and build the circuitry of connection.

Instead of shouting over the din, trying to be heard amongst the competing voices, the work of the contemporary activist is to restore healthy communicative environments where people really listen to each other. Dialogue has become a tool of conscious activism, modelling compassionate listening and non-violent communication.

Neuroscientists describe how we mirror events that occur on the outside as an instant holographic replay on the screen of our minds – not as observers but rather as if we are the participants. Imagine you are watching your favourite sports team. As you watch the game, your mirror neurons fire as if you yourself were flying through the air, scoring the point or missing the goal. That is why it is so satisfying to watch others perform: those special neurons take us inside the game or the performance as if we were the players, the dancers or the actors.

Once you understand this mirroring process, you will understand why those who do peacebuilding and conflict resolution work are so careful to model and embody peaceful behaviours. Each one of us is actually depth-reading anyone we come into contact with, as if that person was ourselves – this is what I would look like if I were a leader; this is what I would look like if I were a manipulator; this is what I would look like if I were truthful and compassionate.

The activist who understands this will truly become the mirror of the change they wish to see in the world. As the Sufis say, part of the work is to make sure time is spent polishing the mirror of the heart, which means work on clearing the path to the light within your own being – it is not about projecting your light onto others. And as the contemporary peacebuilder would say: first tend to the needs of the other; and connect, not convert.

Gradually the picture emerges of frontier science nudging us to integrate mind and body in such a way that all of our actions flow from a centred awareness. Heart science demonstrates that when we fill our hearts with feelings of love and appreciation for others, we radiate peace in the heart-brain connection, in the biochemistry of our blood and in our electromagnetic field. When you have brought this degree of peace to your own body, you are not only less likely to be triggered in conflict situations, you become a peaceful mirror for others. You become a field of harmony within yourself and a safe place for deep or challenging encounters. Through the quality of your presence you are able to create a field of listening and an energetic space where dialogue can occur. How inspiring to think that a peaceful and loving heart is such an effective spur to transformational action.

When we have established the resonance of connection, we never have to compromise truth. The activist does not have to fear that opening up a heartful and empathic space for dialogue means that he or she has to compromise in any way the full force of the truth. It actually means that they can move into even more sensitive nuances of the truth that are missed when the biology of defensiveness gets triggered.

While we are never asked to compromise the truth, new body science confirms that we do have to release a toxic biochemistry that signals rejection and hostility to those around us. We have to release our attachment to our own hurt and wounding; we have to release rage and we have to release unforgiveness. The biochemistry that recycles our wounding drowns out other voices and only allows us to hear our own voice; only allows us to hear victimization and self-justification, condemning us to cycles of vengeful justice.

But when we let go, our body releases a wave of hormones and neuropeptides that wash us with relief and shower us with the energy to move on.

No Future without Forgiveness

I first met Everett Worthington at one of the Compassion and Social Healing dialogues convened with Judith Thompson. He strikes one as quiet, gentle and a little formal. He is a university Professor of Psychology who for many years has been a leader in the field of forgiveness research. He wrote Forgiveness and Reconciliation: Theory and Application, a book explaining his stress-and-coping theory of forgiveness, describing his psycho-educational programs to promote forgiveness and reconciliation, and discussing a model of psychotherapy to promote forgiveness.

At first, when he spoke in the circle, I got the impression that he had an academic relationship to forgiveness. He had none of the accoutrements of the passionate activist. He described years and years of dedicated research into how people can move beyond the toxic brew of unforgiveness. Then the same kind of quiet poise became staggeringly intense as he described receiving a call from his brother about the brutal murder of his mother. On the phone his brother described the horrific scene in the house: his mother had been raped and beaten to death with a crowbar. He provided more details.

Despite the fact that Everett was writing his next book on forgiveness, he was consumed with boiling anger. There is no quick fix when something as devastating as this happens; you are the trauma and there is no way out. As Angeles Arrien puts it, ‘Healing does not occur in the fast lane.’ If the rage that is triggered by this kind of trauma is ever to be released, it must first be fully experienced.

True to his own teachings, Everett finally released the feelings that were killing his own heart. Unfortunately, his brother was so overwhelmed that he committed suicide some years later.

Over the years I’ve met scores of people who demonstrated an unfathomably deep power to release feelings of vengeance and enmity and to forgive those who perpetrated the most heinous violence against their family or community. They don’t call themselves activists yet they are at the frontier of human evolution.

Every increment of scientific research that points to the health imperative of releasing the truly toxic brew that traumatic wounding creates in our bodies encourages us to explore healing through forgiveness.

Bishop Tutu is most decidedly right when he declares there shall be ‘no future without forgiveness’. But, it seems, there shall be a brighter future as science increasingly reinforces spiritual truth and compassionate action.

Chapter Sixteen

The Conscious Activist Comes of Age

The story of human becoming is unfolding as we probe the majesty of our home galaxy and peer into the teeming universe beyond. At the same time, life here on Earth converges around an accelerating conversation about our collective interdependence. We have developed an insatiable urge both to connect in networks and to express unique identities and individual potential. We are entering a phase of graphic learning that Earth itself is a whole system, which, if sabotaged by crude self-interest, will create wave upon wave of damage to the entire web of life.

As we begin collectively to emerge with a consciousness that shows us how interconnected and interdependent life is on Earth, we can see vividly just how much damage to the whole we humans are responsible for. We are the species that is not only destroying its own habitat, we are wrecking the entire ecosystem for all life.

From the storyteller’s point of view, this is both a terrifying and a thrilling moment. This is the part of the story when we really get to see who we are. It is one thing to tell the story of our collective shortsightedness and to tell of the ruin created by our ignorance. But it is another story to tell of our waking up in time to save life on Earth. Now that’s a great story. That’s an epic if ever there was one.

Great visionaries and prophetic activists like Joanna Macy, Riane Eisler and David Korten have spent recent decades naming this wake-up for humanity and delineating the requirements for a great collective turnaround – The Great Turning. Jean Houston calls it Jump Time to remind us that there is no linear progression in evolution: when we approach the cliff of extinction we must summon up the capacities to make the leap that is necessary for a sustainable future – a future of high integration and collective thriving. Barbara Marx Hubbard, inspired visionary of human emergence, sees the birth of a highly integrated humanity rising out of our multiple crises and heralding a fully conscious participation in our own collective evolution. Duane Elgin articulates the story of the evolutionary pulsing of awakening in human consciousness. Bruce Lipton illuminates the role of belief in activating healthy DNA and how humanity really functions as a super-organism. Anodea Judith invokes the awakening of the global heart and the ascent of humanity to an era of heart-centred intelligence and skilful compassion. Jeremy Rifkin heralds The Empathic Civilization when global consciousness redesigns systems around empathy, altruism and collaboration. Charles Eisenstein envisions the transformation of the entire global financial system in Sacred Economics: Money, Gift and Society in the Age of Transition. Andrew Harvey, fiery prophet and mystic warrior of this charged era of urgent change, calls forth and mentors a new generation of sacred activists. Caroline Casey champions visionary activism. And David Nicol nurtures an emerging community of subtle activists.

For every visionary voice there are scores of new organizations being created every day at the frontiers of social transformation. Organizations like Kiva Microfunds, known as Kiva.org, has crowdsourced over a million loans worth half a billion in 70 countries. That’s people like you and me going online and lending money for small entrepreneurial initiatives across the globe that help the poor, vulnerable groups and provide economic access for women. It’s an example of how so-called average people around the world start to respond to each other’s needs as a whole planetary organism.

Avaaz, meaning voice, has a stunning 34 million members in 180 countries. It reflects the voice and conscience of people across the planet on issues such as human rights, climate change, corruption, conflict, animal rights and related issues. It has no ideology per se but seeks to unite idealists to ‘close the gap between the world we have, and the world most people everywhere want’.

For every visionary new organization there is a larger movement reflecting a tidal shift in consciousness: there’s a new mind-body health movement; there’s a new conscious parenting movement; there’s a new social healing and restorative justice movement; there’s a new science movement; there’s a new culture of peace movement; there’s a new emotional and social intelligence movement; there’s a new holistic education movement; there’s a new solar and alternative energy movement; there’s a new participatory democracy movement; there’s a new permaculture movement; there’s a new deep ecology movement; there’s a new urban renewal movement; there’s a new spiritual psychology movement; there’s a new yoga and meditation movement; there’s a new global women’s movement at the frontiers of social justice; there’s a new integral movement and an emerging conscious evolution movement … and so on. Since there is pretty much nothing new in creation, all these movements beginning to ripen in the early 21st century have their roots in humanity’s great evolutionary struggle to emerge as healthy and harmonious beings dedicated to being free, happy, creative and of service to the whole. We bow to the wisdom-keepers of all ages who kept this vision alive and we bow to all who suffered persecution so that we might thrive.

Beyond these movements are the master codes and templates of the evolutionary process and of human emergence into full-blown consciousness. In a way that recalls the story of the acorn and the oak tree, we must ask, ‘what is the template of human becoming?’ Who are we when we are fully evolved? What is the most dynamic and fruitful balance of masculine and feminine, of freedom and order, of individual rights and collective responsibility, of autonomy and interdependence?

It seems that every phase of human development has its advantages and disadvantages. We are asked to take the best of each era of our development while making sure we have learned lessons from what needs to be discarded. When we don’t learn our collective lessons, we take our problems to the next level of complexity. So it is that the great problems that face us collectively are the extreme competitiveness, acquisitiveness, aggression and violence that have escalated in human history because we have not learned to evolve beyond them. Yet we have been cracking through many of our limitations to build upon the great inheritance of love, collaboration, selfless service and power to heal, passed on and amplified since humans began to walk this Earth.

According to a leading social development theory called Spiral Dynamics, we still have two receding codes: rule by force and military domination and collective conformity by adherence to strict religious principles. In the context of the sharing, connecting, individual creativity and diversity of an emerging global civilization, monolithic structures of power and control, and insistence on rigid conformity to beliefs, become things of the past. Dictatorship and fundamentalism are in their (violent) death throes. The more dominant social codes now favour creative expression, the exploration of opportunities, personal success and materialism. Yet these codes are also beginning to be shed in favour of more social values, as we turn from me to we. Social status is less isolated and individualistic, and more oriented towards participation in social networks and social movements. There is more consciousness about our collective habitat and the need to protect it. There is also more consciousness about equity issues, minority rights and diversity. Yet even beyond socially networked, ecologically conscious codes, there is another very different set of codes on the horizon for humanity.

Like Jean Houston’s idea of ‘jump time’ or the notion of a ‘great turning’, Spiral Dynamics theory suggests that what is ahead for humanity is a leap to another tier of consciousness. When the mass of humanity reaches this level of consciousness, we will become stewards of the whole. We will be able to master the art and science of individual freedom with collective whole-system responsibility. We will cultivate inner qualities of being to reflect into the world of action. Billions of people will become personally integrated, balancing a rich inner life with high social conscience. Science, spirituality, ecology and enlightened social governance will begin to harmonize and converge with humanity’s great lineages of wisdom.

The conscious activist is nothing less than midwife, coach and courageous provocateur for the time when the overwhelming majority of humanity leaps towards its destiny of high integration. Just as the tiny acorn must face its years of blistering winters and scorching summers and keep stretching upwards to become the mighty oak tree, humanity too has a searing destiny path through the furnace of so many self-created hells until we become fully conscious of our power to bring Heaven to Earth.

In many ways this transition towards an era of integration is a collective expression of the shift individual seekers experience on the spiritual path when they really commit to the inner journey. When the seeker sets out, there is a commitment to learn the language of spirit – a language that can only be learned when you offer your whole being to it. It is not a language of imitation. It is a language of direct experience and direct encounter with your own Source. If you surrender to it, spirit opens you up and reveals to you, not the codes of social development, nor even the mysterious codes structuring matter and cosmic order, but the codes of a spiritual reality that were written in you from the beginning. The spiritual path really begins when your consciousness lifts out of the field of dense energy interactions and discovers the world of subtle energies which live free of dogma, rigid fixation, gross materialism and any form of domination. The subtle energy fields of spirit are more perceptive and more saturated in qualities of love, gratefulness, generosity and compassion. When these subtle energies are matched with will and focused intention expressed as visionary social conscience, we synchronize inner and outer transformation. We reach an important threshold of integration as individuals, which is consolidated as an irreversible shift in our personal lives.

The great shift in the collective field of human development towards a planetary civilization rooted in empathic qualities will really begin to manifest on a grand scale when a sufficient sub-set of the global population reaches this level of integration of inner and outer. It is as if evolution itself acknowledges that sufficient learning has occurred when any aspect of the field of human experience reaches a degree of coherence and stabilization. Once integration has been achieved by a sufficient number of people, the science of ‘trim tabs’ and ‘tipping points’ suggests that it will take only a relatively small percentage at the vanguard of change to activate whole-system transition.

We can recognize the state of deep integration mirrored by the conscious activist in the following ways:

NON-REACTIVE ENERGY FIELD

As our interactions in the world reflect an alignment with our inner being, our whole energy field becomes more coherent. We see that the inner really organizes the outer and that consciousness is causal. We begin to recognize how awareness creates more awareness. People who do even a little meditation report that they can feel the presence of a deeper awareness throughout the day. Awareness is self-witnessing, it creates a space for us to see ourselves in action and to sense the ground of being that holds us. As we become aware of the subtle intelligence of the heart and synchronize it with the intelligence of the brain, we see both our own and other people’s energy fields more clearly. The more we access the subtle dimensions of consciousness, the more we experience an amplified spaciousness in our lives. This spaciousness gives us a kind of sensory depth we didn’t have before. We literally begin to sense energy more vividly and more precisely as it flows out from us to others and as we sense the energy directed at us. We can become so sensitive to frequency and vibration that we can read energy environments around us and detect subtle modulations in our own and other people’s fields. When this sensitivity is sustained, we can maintain a state of equanimity that is invaluable when we are buffeted by the wild energies of a world in turmoil.

CULTIVATING EQUIPOISE

There is a documentary about Ram Dass called Fierce Grace and another film about spirituality and activism called Fierce Light. Maintaining equipoise is the high art of keeping your balance even when confronted with betrayal and wounding. At the same time, equipoise is about being real and fiercely true to who you are in the face of either hostility or seduction. In a state of equipoise you can show unflinching courage and meet the fires of vengeful attack with relentless compassion towards unskilful behaviour. You can also allow a fierce grace to sweep through your life, taking what you value most and yet leaving you feeling cleansed and grateful and closer to the divine.

Equipoise is a key concept for the conscious activist. It is like the ‘garden within the flames’, in the words of Ibn ‘Arabi, quoted earlier. His heart had become ‘capable of every form’, because he had reached the garden where no separation can exist. To reach that state of oneness, we have to pass through the fires of divisiveness that seek to pull us all apart. The activist tells us that we must never give up believing in the garden of truth and justice, and we must not shrink from the furious flames of division, intolerance and exploitation. The mystic tells us that we must face the fires that are constantly fuelled in our own hearts and minds and recognize how crude ego concerns prevent us from experiencing oneness with each other and with our divine source. The mystic discovers that the garden cannot be reached without complete surrender of the petty self to divine grace.

The conscious activist carries the integrating codes for both paths. Spiritual growth is not disconnected from the pursuit of enlightened society nor from any form of visionary action that carries the torch for a wiser, more healing and more sustainable world. The conscious activist tells us that equipoise may best be achieved when the fierce light of the activist becomes one with the fierce grace of the mystic.

SERVING WHOLENESS AND INCLUSION

We talk about expanding consciousness to be more whole and inclusive – but what does that mean? The busier and more frantic the mind gets, the more the neural activity of the brain looks like the LA highway system, with some routes jammed, others zipping along and a few high-speed chases thrown in. It is anything but the synchronized flow in the brain of someone who meditates or who is centred. When we centre, we have a more expansive field of perception. There is an observable difference in the activity of a brain that is hyper-focusing on problems and challenges while simultaneously suppressing or venting strong emotions as it listens to the random static of the mind’s incessant radio commentary, compared to the harmonized flow of a brain where stillness and presence open up the field of attention to witness what is unfolding and not go chasing after it. In the later case, awareness can be more quietly focused and at the same time more spaciously perceptive of the depth-field of consciousness itself. It is in this place that tight boundaries between self and other dissolve and we develop a more expansive connectivity and a wider compassion for others.

It is equally true that the witnessing state of the meditative mind can also be developed by awakening moral conscience. Conscience can get dulled and sleepy if it is not engaged. Conscience calls for a commitment to respond. It has profound energy to take us beyond the narrow confines of self-preoccupation. It calls us out into the broad territory of collective experience and helps us remove the blinkers of self-interest. If we live with an active moral conscience, rather than reading mechanically from the script of rehearsed belief, we will find we are constantly invited to expand our horizons. For in its essence conscience always pushes us towards greater inclusion. Leave none behind, it says. Just as the soft witnessing of the flow of the breath connects us with the source of our being, so conscience acts as a rudder in consciousness itself, guiding us towards what is eternally true in the ocean of our inseparable oneness.

In the spiritual DNA of the conscious activist there is a code that says, You are not a partisan of the part but truly a servant of the whole.

RESOLUTION IS THE GREATER GOAL

Resolution is not about simplistic cozy endings where everyone gets surface needs met. It is far greater than that. A consciousness that is oriented to resolution is not about short-term gains or pyrrhic victories, it is one that is on a quest for deeper solutions; it is willing to address root causes and not just clean-up effects. Resolution is not about political compromise, it’s about going to the very heart of any given conflict and looking for transformation rather than accommodation.

Resolution of any given conflict calls for an ability to be deeply receptive to the other party. It requires the kind of listening that sometimes reaches past the words that are spoken into the hidden world of many of our transactions. It requires deep training in nonpolarized thinking so that respect and understanding are never compromised by strong differences of opinion.

Resolution, on this higher level, is charged with imaginative engagement. Albert Einstein thought that imagination was more important than knowledge, and he thought of it as a kind of substance: ‘imagination encircles our world.’ For many mystics the imaginal realm is a more concentrated expression of reality than the linear world of everyday transactions. Our souls are fed by the inspiration we draw from imagination, and we are activated in ways that are more compelling than fantasies or daydreams.

The conscious activist feels this substance of imagination in a vividly embodied way because it contains reservoirs of kinetic energy that can be brought into the field of action. It is here that great solutions can be sensed like a destination ahead. It is here in the territory of imagination that the future becomes palpable. Without imagination our solutions are cosmetic and shallow.

‘We are kept from our goal, not by obstacles, but by a clear path to a lesser goal’ (Robert Brault). This is devastatingly clear and so we must constantly course-correct with: Always take the path to the greater goal. This could become the mantra for conscious activists to remind us that we will arrive at the destination we set for ourselves. So we call forth those who can feel the imaginative pulsing of the complete resolution of our ecological crisis and the total transformation of violent ways being.

Imagine, then act for the greatest resolution possible.

POWER AND HUMILITY

If ever a word carried baggage, it is humility. Sourced from the Latin word for ‘earth’, it gathers associations of being lowly, insignificant, meek, self-effacing and modest. When did earth become something low, synonymous with humble origins or dirt poor? This word humility contains a convoluted history, revealing all kinds of hierarchical worldviews that encouraged voluntary submission to higher power and authority, showing deference to your betters and holding back from showing off or bragging about your talents. In the religious sense humility is thought to be the antidote to the sin of pride, and the way to remind us of our insignificance before the power of God.

But enlightened teachers have pointed out that true humility is not about effacing or concealing power, it is about revealing it. Clearly, flaunting or bragging about your skills and talents is an expression of some kind of inadequacy or inflated ego. But, equally, false modesty gets trapped in ego calculations and subtle manipulation. The question is: do we have the courage and the humility to reveal who it is we truly are? Do we have the humility to get out of the way and let the truth of our essential being shine through? Can we speak our truth to the power that threatens to annihilate us? Can we manifest an expression of spiritual power that transforms the social order by lifting all boats.

The conscious activist is a significant player in the work of social transformation because there is a radical commitment to transparency – no hiding, no inflating, no discounting. One can only manifest power in this way if one has developed a mature inner life, for it is only through spiritual insight that ego’s grip on false power can be dissolved.

The conscious activist realizes that power is an expression of energy and insight; no one owns it. Any use of energy or intellect to dominate others is an obstruction of the natural justice of the universe. Power optimizes when it is in reciprocal flow. When faced with destructive and corrupt concentrations of power amassed to dominate and exploit others, the conscious activist must mobilize shared power, move from conformity to consensus, encourage creative participation and mirror oneness. I do not imply that recalcitrant power over will not continue to inflict severe pain and wounding, but that the future belongs to the mass expression of power with.

Humility, for the conscious activist, is the critical acknowledgment that states of inferiority or superiority have been transcended and that all that remains is the power of a universal humanity. People power is an expression of the rising tide in collective consciousness and it has just begun to integrate at the next level of visionary insight. With this consciousness we can see that humility, human and humanity have their common kinship with that sacred substance we call earth and with our shared home, the Earth:

Children of the Earth tribe – rise up
Children of the Earth tribe – rise up now
Some say namaste
Some say aho mitakuye oyasin
Some say aum
Some say shalom
We all call Mother Earth our home
Protect her
Respect her
Give her love, don’t neglect her

LOVE AND SELF-ACTUALIZATION

Mystics work intensively to break out of the prison of the little local self, with all of its confining attractions and repulsions, and unite with the true Self. The activist also seeks to sacrifice the petty preoccupations of the local self in favour of serving the common good: An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity. Martin Luther King, whose words these are, also affirmed that all reality is based upon a moral foundation and that that foundation is spiritual. King called this driving force of spiritual and moral development creative altruism. He believed that non-violence and creative altruism would impact us at the level of the soul and be expressed in our lives as beloved community: love itself as the driver of individual and collective self-actualization.

The work of the activist and the mystic is not so different when viewed from the perspective of love: one seeks to unite with the source of all love, the other seeks to have love prevail on Earth. They both seek to be an authentic expression of love.

Love cannot be either divorced from true power or compelled as a form of moral obligation. Love is the heart of self-actualization; without it, any kind of inner growth or service in the world is shallow. It is unimaginable that we could fully realize our potential without expanding our capacity to be love and to know love.

In the third of his trilogy of movies about spirituality and action – Scared Sacred, Fierce Light and Occupy Love – Velcrow Ripper asks, ‘How can our current crisis become a love story?’ Great question. These movies vividly portray the process of collective self-actualization when we discover our sacred responsibility to each other and when we move courageously to change the stories that no longer represent us. In a love story we become one with beauty. We call forth the beauty in each other and find there is no person on the face of the Earth who has a lesser status.

Meher Baba, the Avatar, says it profoundly:

Love has to spring spontaneously from within; it is in no way amenable to any form of inner or outer force. Love and coercion can never go together. True love is unconquerable and irresistible. It goes on gathering power and spreading itself until eventually it transforms everyone it touches. Humanity will attain a new mode of being and life through the free and unhampered interplay of pure love from heart to heart.¹

One Last Story

I was born in Bray, County Wicklow, Ireland. We had a grocery store right opposite the Town Hall. Also in clear view was the local fire station. In fact, our house was the point of contact for emergency services to call in the event of a fire. We had two phones and if the one nearest the front door rang, then you knew it was about a fire. Our job was then to hit the fire alarm switch that would set off the siren. It sounded exactly like an air raid siren. It could be heard all over the town, and on hearing it members of the fire brigade would make their dash to the fire station, board the red fire truck and hurtle off to put out the fire.

For a child this was an electrifying sequence. There was something very important about the fact that we got to sound the alarm. It was an early demonstration of the theatre of action. Years later, at Amnesty International, I was still in a place where we received emergency calls – this time from a world in dire pain. Our challenge today, as activists sounding the alarm on so many fronts, is to be heard above the din of marketing sleaze, misinformation and apathy. But that doesn’t mean we stop sounding the sirens. It means we must do so in ways that mobilize effective responses.

I had a favourite perch in one of the upstairs bedrooms where you could watch the action at the fire station or just kneel on the bed with your elbows planted on the windowsill and daydream as the world went by. I have a vivid memory of this spot to which I would gravitate from time to time; it was an anchoring place for me. I have a particularly strong recollection of sitting there in the dark when my mother had gone out one evening with friends to a whist drive. I might have been about five years old at the time.

What is important to understand is the intensity of the communication my mother and I had when I was forming in her womb and she was simultaneously mourning the death of her eleven-year-old daughter. I was given to her as a gift of life in the midst of death. When her sorrow was too great she would pull herself back to mothering the energy that was forming inside her. We had a symbiotic relationship: together we navigated the threatening currents of heartbreak. We were the alchemy of a bittersweet joy secretly forming out of the bitterness of loss and the sweetness of new life.

Looking out of the window that night, it was not difficult for me to imagine her playing cards with her friends – it was easy enough to visualize her surrounded by the chatter and laughter of the other women. But at the same time I could feel the part of her being that was far out on a dark starless ocean. I knew that she might never find her way back from the endless black waves secretly churning in the wound of her loss, unless I called to her. I had to call her in from that place no heart should have to go alone. So it was that I began to call, in a voice that only silence can summon with such intensity, ‘Mama, please come home.’ Then after a few hours of calling, calling, calling, there comes the sight of a car pulling up at the front door and the sound of her voice as she gets out and my body faints in a wave of happiness and sleep.

My mother died when I was in my late 40s. I never really experienced any separation in her death. I shared the news with a friend and spiritual mentor who guided me through my years in Washington. He responded by saying, ‘Now she is part of the mother of us all. She is the air you breathe. She is the ground you walk upon.’ I knew this was right. Everything that is local also has a universal dimension.

What I discovered, as I grew older, was that I never lost that aching to see my mother return safe and happy: it merely transformed into a more mature longing for lasting peace in the human family and a deep longing to end viciousness and violence.

There are times I tap into a field of human ignorance that is light-choking. It is a field that holds the patterns of dense greed and distraction. It is a field of self-devouring narcissism and betrayed ideals. It is a field that has lost its Mother. It is a field that pushes aside the mother in us all.

Now is our time to call her back.

But make no mistake, we must call her by her true names:

She whose moral beauty can never be seduced by crude self-interest;

She whose fierce truth annihilates soul-suffocating deceit;

She who stands in her power to resolve every contamination and perversion with ceaseless compassion;

She whose fearless grace ignites the conscious spiritual activism needed in the birth and ascendance of a new humanity.

Even now as we shatter and fragment into particles of greed, even as we choke the life force in forest and stream, in air and ocean, even as we drive her from our hearts in a mass hallucination of distraction, we must know that this is not the end of the story. For even in the midst of rampaging chaos and death our common mother is giving birth.

She hears our longing to incarnate the grace and wisdom needed for this hour. She reminds us that the entire book of life is written with four simple letters that encode the DNA of all living things, and that everything in the universe is connected in a depth-field underlying all that is seemingly separate. She is illuminating our hearts and minds with this knowledge that we may live consciously in awe of our inseparable bond with each other, with love for our exquisite Earth home and with reverence for a universe gestating our long-awaited coming of age.

She is giving birth to a culture of peace seeded in hearts of compassion and whole-system collaboration. She is taking shape as a conscious parenting movement that nurtures the soulful intelligence of children. She is emerging as holistic education and holistic health. She is carrying an ample sufficiency in a new collaborative economics. She is reaching deep into the heart of human reconciliation with restorative justice. She is raising a generation that thrives on equity. She is teaching the science and cosmology of oneness. She is proving the wisdom of diversity. As the mother of all life, she is teaching us the true science of sustainable self-actualization.

She comes to inspire us through every form of artistic and creative expression to harmonize life, free the spirit and unite with its source. She comes to pass the mantle of her fierce light to a generation that will dissolve the death-trance of materialism and liberate the spirit of relational peace.

In this hour of emergence for the human family she integrates ecstatic spirituality and inspired action.

Yet we must consciously call her in. Call with a commitment to be her spirit in action.

Call now from the deepest part of your longing, for in the Great Mystery, you are both mother and father to the solar child of your own conscious awakening. Awake and witness how so many divine sparks of healing and justice have already ignited in the heart of a new humanity.

The story of Watkins Publishing dates back to March 1893, when John M. Watkins, a scholar of esotericism, overheard his friend and teacher Madame Blavatsky lamenting the fact that there was nowhere in London to buy books on mysticism, occultism or metaphysics. At that moment Watkins was born, soon to become the home of many of the leading lights of spiritual literature, including Carl Jung, Rudolf Steiner, Alice Bailey and Chögyam Trungpa.

Today our passion for vigorous questioning is still resolute. With over 350 titles on our list, Watkins Publishing reflects the development of spiritual thinking and new science over the past 120 years. We remain at the cutting edge, committed to publishing books that change lives.

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Notes

CHAPTER ONE, pp?-21

1  Soul of my Saviour is a popular Catholic hymn. It is usually sung at the time of Holy Communion

2  Lead, Kindly Light is a hymn written in 1833 by John Henry Newman, and is said to be a favourite of Mahatma Gandhi

CHAPTER TWO, pp23-34

1  ‘And the light shineth in the darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not’ is from the King James Bible, John 1.5

CHAPTER FOUR, pp49-61

1  Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism (Shambhala, Boston, 2002)

2  John Moyne and Coleman Barks, Open Secret (Threshold Books, Putney, VT, 1984), p7

3  Based upon Surah al-Qasas, 28.88, Holy Qur’an

4  Kabir Helminski, Illahis: Sufi Songs & Poems, distributed by the Threshold Society, p3

CHAPTER EIGHT, pp97-104

1  Thomas Merton, Raids on the Unspeakable (New Directions, New York, 1964), p83

2  Ibid., p88

PART TWO: INTEGRATION, p1o6

1  Meher Baba, Discourses (Sheriar Foundation, Myrtle Beach, SC, 1995), pp176-7

CHAPTER NINE, ppm-23

1  Jean Houston, The Possible Human: A Course in Enhancing Your Physical, Mental and Creative Abilities (Tarcher, Los Angeles, 1982), p213

2  Jean Houston, The Passion of Isis and Osiris: A Gateway to Transcendent Love (Wellspring/Ballantine, New York, 1998)

CHAPTER TEN, pp125-41

1  Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities (Nation Books, New York, 2004), p5

CHAPTER ELEVEN, pp145-55

1  Galileo Galiei (1564–1642) was an Italian physicist and astronomer. This famous quote is from a letter he wrote to the Grand Duchess Christina in 1615

2  The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake (Google Books archive, google.com). First published under the title, Poetry and Prose of William Blake, edited by David V Erdman (Doubleday, New York, 1965)

CHAPTER TWELVE, pp157-66

1  Gandhi’s list of Seven Social Sins is given in Jeffrey Paine, Father India; How Encounters with an Ancient Culture Transformed the Modern West (Harper Collins, New York, 1998), p189

2  Daniel Ladinsky, Love Poems from God (Penguin Compass, New York, 2002), p184

3  Ibid., p305

CHAPTER THIRTEEN, pp167-80

1  Ann Jauregui, Epiphanies: A Psychotherapist’s Tales of Spontaneous Healing (Prima Publishing, Rosevillle, 2003), p3

2  Ibid., p3

3  Quoted but not ascribed in Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness (Meridian, New York, 1911), p100

4  F David Peat, Synchronicity: The Bridge Between Mind and Matter (Bantam Books, New York, 1987), p2

CHAPTER FOURTEEN, pp181-92

1  Stephen Hirtenstein, The Unlimited Mercifier: The Spiritual Life and Thought of Ibn ‘Arabi (White Cloud Press, Ashland, 1999), p28

2  Ibid., p203

3  Psalm 23.4

4  Revelation 21.4

CHAPTER FIFTEEN, pp193-212

1  John Moyne and Coleman Barks, Open Secret: Versions of Rumi (Threshold Books, Putney, VT, 1984), p45

2  Edgar Mitchell, with Dwight Williams, The Way of the Explorer: An Apollo Astronaut’s Journey through the Material and Mystical Worlds, revised edn (New Page Books, Pompton Plain, NJ, 2008), p143

3  William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (first published Longmans, Green & Co., 1902; Penguin Classics, 1983)

4  Ervin László, Science and the Reenchantment of the Cosmos: The Rise of the Integral Vision of Reality (Inner Traditions, Rochester, NY, 2006), p12

5  Lynne McTaggart, The Intention Experiment (Atria Books, New York, 2008)

6  Ervin László, Science and the Akashic Field (Inner Traditions, Rochester, NY, 2004), p25

7  Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (Image/Doubleday, New York, 1968)

CHAPTER SIXTEEN, pp213-29

1  Meher Baba, Discourses (Sheriar Foundation, Myrtle Beach, SC, 1995), p8

Bibliography

Baba, Meher, Discourses (Sheriar Foundation, Myrtle Beach, SC, 1995)

Beck, Don E, and Christopher Cowan, Spiral Dynamics: Mastering Values, Leadership and Change (Wiley-Blackwell, 2005)

Cousineau, Phil (ed.), Beyond Forgiveness: Reflections on Atonement (Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, 2011)

Eisenstein, Charles, Sacred Economics: Money, Gift and Society in the Age of Transition (Evolver Editions, Berkeley, CA, 2011)

Elgin, Duane, Awakening Earth: Exploring the Evolution of Human Culture and Consciousness (William Morrow & Co., New York, 1993)

Harvey, Andrew, The Hope: A Guide to Sacred Activism (Carlsbad, CA, 2009)

Heinberg, Richard, Memories and Visions of Paradise: Exploring the Universal Myth of a Lost Golden Age (Aquarian Press, Wellingborough, Northamptonshire, 1990)

Helminski, Kabir, and Ahmad Rezwani, Love’s Ripening: Rumi on the Heart’s Journey (Shambala, Boston, 2008)

Hirtenstein, Stephen, The Unlimited Mercifier: The Spiritual Life and Thought of Ibn ‘Arabi (White Cloud Press, Ashland; and Anqa Press, Oxford, 1999)

Houston Jean, The Passion of Isis and Osiris: A Gateway to Transcendent Love (Wellspring/Ballantine, New York, 1998)

The Possible Human (Tarcher, Los Angeles, 1982)

Ibn ‘Arabi, Muhyiddin, The Bezels of Wisdom, trans. RWJ Austin (Mahwah, NJ, 1980)

Jauregui, Ann, Epiphanies: A Psychotherapist’s Tales of Spontaneous Healing (Prima Publishing, Roseville, CA, 2003)

Korten, David, The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community (Berrett-Koehler, San Francisco, 2007)

Ladinsky, Daniel, I Heard God Laughing: Renderings of Hafiz (Paris Printing, Point Richmond, CA, 1996)

Love Poems from God (Penguin Compass, New York, 2002)

László, Ervin, Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Everything (Inner Traditions, Rochester, NY, 2004)

The Chaos Point: The World at the Crossroads (Hampton Roads, Newburyport, MA, 2006)

Lipton, Bruce, The Biology of Belief: Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter and Miracles (Hay House Books, Carlsbad, CA, 2011)

Merton, Thomas, Raids on the Unspeakable (New Directions, New York, 1964)

Mitchell, Edgar, with Dwight Williams, The Way of the Explorer: An Apollo Astronaut’s Journey through the Material and Mystical Worlds, revised edition (New Page Books, Pompton Plains, NJ, 2008)

Moyne, John, and Coleman Barks, Open Secret: Versions of Rumi (Threshold Books, Putney, VT, 1984)

Ouspensky, PD, In Search of the Miraculous (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1975)

Paine, Jeffrey, Father India: How Encounters with an Ancient Culture Transformed the Modern West (Harper Collins, New York, 1998)

Peat, F David, Synchronicity: The Bridge Between Mind and Matter (Bantam Books, New York, 1987)

Rifkin, Jeremy, The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis (Tarcher/Penguin, 2009)

Shushud, Hasan, Masters of Wisdom in Central Asia (Coombe Springs Press, Moorcote, Yorkshire, 1984)

Singer, Michael, The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself (New Harbinger/Noetic Press, Oakland, CA, 2007)

Trungpa, Chogyam, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism (Shambhala, Boston, MA, 2002)

Underhill, Evelyn, Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness (Meridian, New York, 1911)

Wallace, B Alan, Contemplative Science: Where Buddhism and Neuroscience Converge (Columbia University Press, New York, 2007)

Do you want to create profound inner peace in your life AND learn the leading-edge peacebuilding practices to co-create genuine harmony in your family, your community and our world?

With the right training and tools you CAN make a profound difference on this planet and truly contribute to the change that our world so urgently needs.

The Shift Network offers a number of powerful, virtual educational programs featuring James O’Dea throughout the year that can support your growth and ability to bring about peace.

Please visit James O’Dea’s website (www.jamesodea.com) for more information about courses with James O’Dea at The Shift Network, including:

The acclaimed Peace Ambassador Training, which features many of our planet’s most respected peacebuilders including Deepak Chopra, Arun Gandhi, Dot Maver, Andrew Harvey, Aqeela Sherrills, Susan Collin Marks and many more.

Join an impressive and diverse team of global citizens committed to a new way of being that integrates ecstatic spirituality and inspired action.

Learn more about The Shift Network at:
www.TheShiftnetwork.com

JAMES O’DEA is the award-winning author of two books, Cultivating Peace: Becoming a 21st-century Peace Ambassador and Creative Stress: A Path for Evolving Souls Through Personal and Planetary Upheaval, as well as highly praised essays such as ‘Creative Atonement in a Time of Peril’ and ‘You Were Born for Such a Time as This’.

James is lead faculty for the Shift Network’s acclaimed Peace Ambassador Training and has trained more than 800 peace ambassadors from 30 countries. He has served as president of the Institute of Noetic Sciences; as Washington, DC, office director of Amnesty International; and as CEO of the Seva Foundation. Currently he serves on several advisory boards, including the Peace Alliance and Kosmos Journal, and is a member of the Evolutionary Leaders group.

James lived in Turkey during civil strife and a coup, and was in Beirut during the Israeli invasion and subsequent massacres in the Sabra Chatilla refugee camps. He is also a mystic who is passionate about global transformation. He offers guidance and consultancy services on peacebuilding, visionary leadership, and spirituality and service from his mountain home in Crestone, Colorado. Website: www.jamesodea.com

By the same author

Cultivating Peace: Becoming a 21st-century Peace Ambassador

Creative Stress: A Path for Evolving Souls Living Through Personal and Planetary Upheaval

Acknowledgments

I offer deep appreciation to Michael A Singer whose friendship and guidance are a constant support on the way.

To all my spiritual teachers and activist mentors I offer sincere gratitude: some of you are mentioned in the pages of this book and some of you remain hidden. May your wisdom shine into the hearts of my readers and whatever is erroneous be forgiven as my own. I count my mother amongst you: she dissolved all of my errors in the fire of her unconditional love.

I thank the members, staff and boards of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, the Seva Foundation and Amnesty International USA for giving me the opportunity to serve. May each of these important institutions continue to flourish.

Special thanks to those dear friends who took an early interest in this book; namely, Brahmi and William Howell and Jacqueline Zoe de Bray; also Jeffrey Paine, Ramloti and Marika Popovits. Your collective encouragement was so appreciated.

I am equally grateful to Olivia Hansen, Hank and Carol Goldberg and Rich Myers for your sustaining friendship. Each one of you is a conscious activist.

Thanks to Jo Lal, my publisher, for her genuine commitment to this book and to my editor, Bob Saxton, for all his skilful discernment.

This edition first published in the UK and USA 2014 by

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Design and typography copyright © Watkins, 2014

Text copyright © James O’Dea 2014

James O’Dea has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

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