Times of Testing Faith
or
Becoming Whole in Dangerous Days
As I write in the Spring of 2006, these are the
pressing questions that rise to the surface.
How should people of the Spirit respond to the rapidly deteriorating
situation in America?What are we to make of an elected leadership that
sanctions preemptive strikes and torture?
Of self-styled religious authorities who recommend assassinating foreign
presidents?
Of men too cowardly to fight for their country when young, and who
now send others to die to enrich their friends?
How is it possible to take seriously men and women who, while maintaining
they are churchgoing, religious people, can rationalize destroying innocent
lives in the name of their God?
Or, how did we arrive at a government so rife with corruption and
greed that we would have to be simple-minded to believe that they have
the peoples’ interests in mind?
What could have gone so wrong that we have an administration trapped
in a failing ideology and incapable of admitting its errors; so arrogant
in its policies that it ignores the fact that most of the world considers
that it is either insane or criminal; so convinced in its own rightness
that it feels justified in jailing and humiliating those who think differently
about personal freedoms; a leadership so blinded by their pathological
beliefs that they can deny the obvious, from global warming to the real
causes behind 9/11.
If it is true that we get the government we deserve, then what have
we done to deserve this?
We see faith corrupted by power-mongering and the brutality of fundamentalism.
The central tenets of great religious principles are ignored, or perverted,
by the greed for victory. Corporations bleed their workers dry while
rewarding their CEOs with obscene salaries. Goodhearted people who are
swindled into voting against their best interests by cynical mass persuasion
and downright lies. The list goes on: ruined health care, the militarization
of space, nuclear proliferation, a hyped war on terror, brutal immigration
policies, the ever-growing gap between the rich and the poor... we can
all add our own pet peeves.
The point is that if we take an honest look at what is happening in
this wonderful country, there is clearly something terribly wrong going
on. It feels like everything we have valued is collapsing all around
us. Nothing is quite what it seems to be anymore. Who is there left
to trust? What could possibly make us feel secure?
It’s so easy to fall into despair and to search desperately for
something, or somebody, outside ourselves who seems to have all the
answers. It’s all too tempting to grasp for simplistic solutions,
or to turn to people who seem to be strong and decisive, without realizing
they are every bit as confused as we are.
But if we can see all that and choose not to follow the herd, to not
allow the fear to get the better of us, we find that these conditions
tend to throw us back on our own resources. What then, we have to ask
ourselves, are our own resources?
Some people, like those who lost their faith after the discovery of
the concentration camps in the Second World War, collapse into cynicism,
finding it impossible to believe a loving God would permit the atrocities
of an Abu Graib or a Bagram. Others shut themselves tightly in their
shells and turn in fear to those they’ve been persuaded to believe
are in control, ignoring the blatant lies and corrupt manipulations.
Still others choose to blind themselves to the cruelties and inequities
of the world outside the compound, and bury themselves in wholly materialistic
pursuits. Whilst other people, perhaps in the majority, are living in
a constant state of anxiety, frantically trying to hold onto what they
have, isolating themselves in gated communities and behind impermeable
borders.
Things look pretty dark out there, so let’s step back for a moment
and see if we can’t make sense of it in a larger historical context.
In psychosocial terms, one of the main themes, running like a deep current
through the western world since the Renaissance and the Enlightenment,
is the gradual and inexorable broadening of the human mind. As science
and technology have opened our eyes to the enormity of the Universe,
so also have our worldviews been jimmied open by a wealth of information
inconceivable to even our recent forebears. Ease of travel, the impulse
to trade, and natural human curiosity has drawn different nations into
a previously unheard-of closeness and interdependency. This, in turn,
has pressed individuals within those cultures to be open to new concepts,
to accept that people are different without being threatened by that
difference. Beneath the revolutions and wars that have shaped so much
of recent world history there appears to be a compelling drive towards
unification. Even the era of European colonization, for all its evils,
was a manifestation of this unifying principle inching its sorry way
towards a new social equilibrium. For all the fractious hostility we
see on the our TV screens, much of it caused by just this collision
of opposing ideologies, the movement towards global unification is clearly
an inevitable step in the civilizing process that all inhabited planets
have to go through.
While this massive movement towards unification has been continuing,
so also has there been a seemingly contradictory impulse towards greater
expressions of individuality. Perhaps another way of describing this
process is to say that each one of us is waking up, individual by individual,
in cultures all over the world. The very momentum that is drawing us
all closer together is also forcing us to be more fully conscious and
aware. As we are introduced to new ideas, we are compelled to reexamine
and challenge our own ways of thinking and acting. Think of the example
that Gandhi’s nonviolent approach has had on subsequent resistance
movements in the western world.
It is often helpful to remind ourselves that life is essentially a process
of individual spiritual, emotional and mental growth. The social and
political environment in which we find ourselves, while not unimportant,
is in reality a backdrop, a vast and wonderful theatrical production
if you like, in which each of us might learn the life-lessons which
contribute to our growth as spiritual beings.
Georges Gurdjieff has pointed out, accurately, in my opinion, that this
planet is experiencing a period of accelerated evolution. We know from
the Urantia Book that the normal progression of the evolutionary process
on this world was interrupted by the Lucifer Rebellion, vastly changing
the arc of our development. Scientists tell us that stress can cause
mutations in biological organisms, allowing them to flourish under new,
and previously hostile, conditions.
We are undeniably a species in transformation. The choices each of us
make, from the highest to the lowest in the land, directly contribute
to this massive change. Some of us with bombs and bullets; some with
votes and exhortations of free speech; some by making terrible errors
and some by becoming examples of courage and wisdom; and more importantly,
by all the small decisions we make in our lives towards love or fear,
each one of us influences the Whole as surely as the flapping of the
proverbial butterfly’s wings in Hong Kong may initiate a hurricane
in the Caribbean.
There are also more and more of us who have awakened to our choice to
incarnate at this particular point in time, specifically to help in
this massive and necessary transmutation of consciousness. We know that
it is up to us to inform our choices with love and respect for others;
to not blind ourselves to the terrible decisions others might make,
while at the same time not becoming overwhelmed by the negativity we
see each day on our TV screens. Rather than becoming immobilized by
fear or hopelessness, or holding on to being appalled or depressed by
the events of the day, we need to remind ourselves of who we are and
why we’re here and that however dire the world situation might
appear, everything is working its way irrevocably towards a positive
resolution, and to act accordingly.
We can do this best by holding firmly to the faith that behind the scrim
of reality is a Divine sense of order, in which each of us, as individuals,
gets to experience exactly what we need to grow in emotional and spiritual
maturity. This understanding can yield to a deeper appreciation of what
it means to be human and to know that we are all participating in a
truly extraordinary event, much admired by angels and many curious extraterrestrials,
the birthing of a new human consciousness.
Timothy Wyllie c 2006
Other short essays are available on my Website: <Timothywyllie.com>
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