The world and I are one. It hasn’t always been so. For a long time, Earth was for me to live on and to do things on. I was a very high achiever in an upper middle class family where my parents expected a good performance and cheered me on. As a child, I saw the world through the eyes of my lawyer father, the closest thing in my life to God, who would explain what I needed to satisfy my limited curiosity. I never felt involved in any of it. Wars were good guys and bad guys doing their thing, and disasters around the globe were like movies and not meaningful in my life.
I am a 180 from there now. Maybe it was psychedelics that burst my materialist bubble. Or, the Human Potential Movement when encounter groups pushed me out of my comfort zone. I do remember a long time of being in-between worlds, when I tried to convince my parents that curiosity was in order. It was a hard sell.
I am unconscionably old now, something I never expected. Concern with self and caring about oneness are playing out in one theater now and I’m the audience, wondering what the drama is all about. While the curtain is up, something has to be going on, but “so what” is a haunting question.
It’s odd to be stuck in reality when the curtain is coming down. Omg, so much trouble humans are in and I’m the achiever so it’s my job to fix that. How can I not knock Trump off his soapbox? He’s depraved. This drama we are in, where people pretend he’s acceptable, is surreal. We argue about his policies, things we can get our teeth into, or the tweets he sends or the laws he breaks, but, with him mean-spirited and endangering the world, the nightmare is being slept through. My job, dammit, is to get him removed.
Closing thought for this riff is some gratitude that I care. I guess. If I didn’t, I could concentrate on having a good time. I could paint again, and read books. I could eat out and find whatever else sweetens a life more than full-time calculation does. But oye, oye, oye, oye, I am stuck in you being me, motivated and despairing, not knowing how to get the world fixed in my time.
Maybe start a club. The Fixers. Big job. We take it on.
Lex Hixon, my superstar friend who died young, left me with this membership qualification. If it fits you, be in touch and let’s see where we go from here:
A coalition already exists in spirit. It is coming together now in the social context by the attraction of its unconventional intelligence and compassionate form of high-mindedness. This natural coalition is drawn together by the recognition that the elevation of consciousness is our fundamental life work. This is a genuinely democratic, self-organizing force, flowing through persons of all descriptions. This force does not flourish as any highly structured form. It is not an institution or a foundation or a non-profit company or anything conventionally named. This coalition is a living organism — natural, wild, free. It is made up of individuals devoted to serving the world and developing themselves as finely tuned instruments of service. They learn to gather in the energy of will-to-good, from which authentic goodwill flows out subtly to the entire world.
reading this, it felt as if it was spilling out of the pages of my own journal, or even directly from my heart. the over achiever, under achieving because i have finally encountered something that will require more than i alone can deliver, or even more than just a small team is capable of accomplishing…and it is the most important task, certainly of my lifetime (half a century so far, which is roughly thirty years longer than i had originally anticipated ;)). i even got the domain motusest.com (motus est is Latin for the movement)…i have a dire need, and a deep desire, to connect with like minded folks. i even moved to the bay area this year, because the field is revealing the pathway. i am connecting the dots, and feel like find this site, on this day, makes perfect sense, and i am very happy about it! thank you!
My assistant approved this when I was away or I would have responded. I really appreciate what you wrote. It is so gratifying to connect to like-minded souls. I wish you were in L.A. I don’t know how you found this but if you aren’t on my mailing list do get on it on http://www.SUESeaks.org so we stay in touch and hopefully help this hurting world together. And do share any ideas you have for what we can do.
This is my first day exploring this site, the title of which brought me great hope. I have been preaching this perspective for decades. I found myself troubled by a few of the posts I saw this morning, and thought I’d speak up. I am praying that I am not in just another version of the present echo chamber that is the present American culture. So here are my thoughts.
I find this a curious perspective “How can I not knock Trump off his soapbox? He’s depraved. This drama we are in, where people pretend he’s acceptable, is surreal. We argue about his policies, things we can get our teeth into, or the tweets he sends or the laws he breaks, but, with him mean-spirited and endangering the world, the nightmare is being slept through. My job, dammit, is to get him removed.”
What do these, and the comments of accolades that followed in the comments to this post, have to do with promoting unity?
I could name countless examples of his haters “… tweets, law breaking, mean-spirited, and world endangerment, as I see the world. Countless. But a part of building unity is to understand that people see things differently. They desire different things in life. They take different approaches to solving the same problem. If I want to encourage unity, then I have to be respectful of differences.
And then there’s the judgment: “where people pretend he’s acceptable, is surreal.” The list of people on the “other side” of whom I could say the same things, also endless.
It was the quest for “all things unity” that brought me to this site. The notion that, blame is cast here on Donald Trump and Republicans (from other posts) for the current state of our country does not sound very unifying, or accurate, to me.
Does President Trump’s behavior upset me? Certainly, sometimes it does. Often does, actually. But, I could say the same thing about the behavior of Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi and Jerry Nadler. I have seen them lie, break the law, be mean-spirited and, in the sense it was communicated about Trump, “endangering the world”. But why would I bother presenting my observations? These conversations are futile because the are about being right or wrong and contrary to the notion of unity. People are so caught up in their bias confirmation that there is little hunger to truly engage in dialog, listen, and learn. All necessary to create “all things unity”.
To that end, I can also find things about President Trump that I truly appreciate and even admire. How could this be? Because I don’t live in an either/or world. The same could be true of Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, and Jerry Nadler, although I have to stretch a bit further because they often support things I don’t agree with and behaving in ways that I find disturbing.
I suspect that just reading that last paragraph will cause a palpable and unfavorable reaction to most of you who see Donald Trump in the way that was promoted in this blog post. Perhaps your reaction was dismissal, or defensiveness, or anger, or even rage. However, the likelihood that your reaction was curiosity, that you were driven to respond with “Tell me more, I’d like to understand”, seems difficult to conceive.
Should I interpret that as evidence that in your “unified world”, I’d have to think and believe the things you do in order to fit in. Is the model unity only for those who see the world my way?
My worldview supports room for differences, because there is no way to successfully engage with humankind without sincere respect for others who are not like me in minor and substantive ways.
To that end, I wonder what the consequences of so many being unwilling or unable to see ANY opportunity and positive attributes of President Trump and, thus, allowing fear, judgment, hate and resentment, to rule the day. Did this behavior contribute to much of what is so hated about his presidency. I wonder in what ways failure to apply the fundamental lessons of human nature has prevented President from growing into more positive and frequent representations of his best self. Fundamentals like recognizing that few people respond well to being demonized, ganged up on, and chronically resisted, while almost everyone responds favorably to being respectfully supported, given the benefit of the doubt, and coached rather than being criticized.
This is not a radical idea. I believe that most reasonable people would say that any human who gets bombarded with constant negative attack would not respond by being kinder, more considerate and more well behaved.
Without honoring these simple truths, we treated President Trump as less than human, making it “OK” to demonize and sabotage him (two practices that most “unity focused” people tend to avoid).
Even his best efforts to work across the aisle, to engage people of different perspectives, and to bring people together. Trump haters, the media, and hold-overs from the Obama era used ends justifies the means to engage in the same behaviors they would crucify him for using, so they could unseat the duly elected* president of the United States. And they, they classified his defensive, dysfunctional, and counter-productive behaviors as his issues, without every considering for a moment the impact on bringing them to the surface.
Ironic, this dynamic passing the note of the same people from whom we hear “words and actions matter”. Yet, they relentlessly reject any notion that things might have been different, at least in some good and positive way, had their behavior toward Donald Trump had been different.
This leaves me with two questions about commitment to unity.
Does sabotage count as a viable tactic for achieving it? Can an us vs. them approach bring people together? Can using an approach that would have sabotaged any prior president be the best way to get the unity we seek?
What might have been possible if we were able to first identify, and then work WITH President Trump’s good attributes? If, instead of focusing on assumptions, fear, and judgment, we might have supported what’s good. If you can’t find that, then you’re just being stubborn or not trying. For example, his desire to use listening sessions to better understand issues where we’ve made no progress in decades. His attempt to bring business leaders, regardless of their political affiliation, into the problem solving of issues that would have benefited our nation as a whole.
Please, I’d love an example of any person on this site who feels that they, or any human they know, who could have remained functional and productive under the treatment that President Trump has faced since being elected president. You can certainly “justify” it because of your judgment and hatred of him, his foibles, character, and policies. But has your behavior fostered unity? Have you helped bring our country together, or contributed to a greater divide? Does demonizing and questioning the motives and integrity of his supporters support your mission?
Of course, you can make it your mission to get him out of office. You can believe the one-sided nonsense that’s being fed to you via those who you agree with. If that makes sense to you, have at it, but don’t call yourselves promoters of unity, because here are the realities of that approach:
1. Win-lose is always a losing game
2. The ends justify the means is based on desperation, not values
3. Either/or thinking is a profoundly ineffective way of resolving any serious problem
4. The ONLY proven method of building unity is working on common ground, not focusing on things we disagree about
* I say duly elected because, according to the present law in which the election took place, this is true. Some are frustrated with the electoral college. However, we should remember two things. 1. This is the system we used to conduct the election, and that is not Trump’s fault. If we wanted majority to decide, then that law should be changed. And, 2. Hillary Clinton and nearly all of her supporters defended this same system prior to the election outcome, stating clearly that if Trump lost and challenged it, he would be out of line. When we “forget” such things, we engage in a level of hypocrisy that also fails to foster unity, truth, and the American way.
You can’t create unity with a snake. Trump is evil. I have no hesitation about saying that, at the same time as I’m focused on getting to a worldview where caring about each other is as important as caring about ourselves. I just saw a documentary where the filmmaker, with whom there was a Q&A after the screening, was motivated to make the film to expose Trump for who he is. This is the headline of the Vanity Fair review: Where’s My Roy Cohn? Digs into One of the 20th Century’s Most Evil Men. Trump was mentored by Roy Cohn. Cohn’s m.o. was to win at all costs (the movie title is something Trump said), and part of the behavior he indulged in was never to admit to anything wrong. Just for some highlights, he was the lawyer for McCarthy, and being Jewish and gay he persecuted Jews and promoted homophobia. He died of AIDS, denying he had it. He had sex with new young man daily. I could go on and on. A more despicable human you could not find.
Hitler is over-used, but it would not have been useful for you to have written a similar plea for understanding with Hitler as the subject. I feel equally strongly about your plea for kinder treatment of Trump. Every word Trump utters spews contempt and hatred, and I’m actually dumbfounded that you wrote what you did.
Oh my.
I am genuinely stunned that the issue that prompted me to write my post yesterday received this reply. I was honestly not prepared for it. All things unity is a pretty clear statement. It never crossed my mind that the person who launched such an awesome mission would use her own opinions of someone to dehumanize another person and thus determine that person unfit for unity.
Now I am left to wonder, since you have judged President Trump an evil snake with whom IS unity possible? What about those who support him? Are they eliminated as well, perhaps as evil snake followers? And i wonder, if unity is a deeply held mission, yet one rejects the people they judge as evil, is it really THE EVIL DOER that makes unity impossible?
I’m quite serious with my questions. Can we only make unity with people that pass our unity availability screen. If so, then the notion of “all things unity” is really a misnomer, yes?
I appreciate your challenge, none the less. I have struggled the same way when trying to have compassion for people who did things that I, and most “reasonable people”, would consider evil.
I recall years ago when someone proposed that the reason there were so many Islamic extremists beheading innocent people, including young children, was because they were without other options. They had been oppressed. Their homeland had been destroyed by evil, greedy western countries. They had no money, no jobs, and no hope.
My response to that was much like yours to mine today.
I also found it hard to find compassion and curiosity for other “evil doers”… pedophiles, rapists, mass shooters, and parents who killed their own children. Much like you did with President Trump, I judged them through my own filter, dismissed them as nonredeemable, and declared their sins unforgivable.
And then one day I decided to become curious rather than dismissive. There was nothing about my curiosity that caused me to feel OK about what they had done. It was more to challenge my notion that they were inherently evil rather than incredibly lost and horrifically misguided. It wasn’t my idea to shift my thinking; I felt pretty grounded in my point of view. But a series of unexpected events called me out of my comfort zone.
It began while I was watching a movie about Navy Seals, one of my favorite past times. The scene included two young Muslim boys having a wonderful time playing in their yard one moment, and the next moment desperately digging out of a pile of burning rubble trying to survive. Their agony screamed off the screen, and the horror made me want to look away. But I continued to watch as the oldest boy struggled to lift a hug beam covered with burning embers off of his baby brother’s broken legs, searing his own hands in the process. The scene crushed my spirit.
As the show continued, it became clear that this type of situation was not a random incident. It was the way life was for those young boys and their families… their communities. So, if my spirit was crushed just watching this in a movie, it didn’t take too much of a stretch to understand how growing up to become Islamic extremists made sense to them. This doesn’t dismiss their choice. It simply explains why it made sense to them. How they had lost touch with their humanity and become “doers of evil”.
Not to long after that I heard a story about a woman who also became a “doer of evil”. She had a brutal childhood and like so many, took the obvious path of drugs, crime, and dehumanizing those for whom she blamed her plight. She did her time in jail and when she got out, a wealthy man stumbled upon her. For some reason, he saw beyond her life of crime and bad choices and eventually befriended her. His pursuit was not romantic and had no particular motive other than to see what might be possible for her. Recognizing how smart she was, he offered to go to college with her. He did not NEED to go to college, he had already achieved success. He just thought it might be good for her. After graduating he decided “he” wanted a graduate degree and invited her to join him, which she did. Years later they fell in love and got married. And then he died.
She was lost, thinking that the goodness she had experienced in her soul was because of HIM. It took her a while to understand that he’d just uncovered that which she was previously unable to see. He was the catalyst that helped her find her true identity… the beautiful human she was created to be which she had never known.
And after that discovery, this tiny 4’11” 90 pound woman embraced a mission. She decided to use her street smarts as a criminal to do for others what he had done for her. She landed in some a high-security prison housing some of the most vile criminals in the country. And fearlessly, she helped inmates that most people would call the scum of the earth find THEIR true identities. Slowly but surely, many prisoners, including many who were considered so dangerous and hopeless that they needed to be contained in isolation, became aware of who they were called to be while on this earth. They discovered their humanness and started using their gifts for greater good.
Clearly, this tiny woman didn’t believe one could not find unity with “snakes”.
Eventually, the nonredeemable prisoners who’d actually been redeemed became catalysts themselves, helping others discover who they were born to be. This wasn’t any “I’m born again so please let me out” kind of thing; most of these men were “lifers” with no hope for parole. This single committed soul miraculously changed the lives of hardened, heartless prisoners simply because she saw beyond the horrific crimes they committed.
Shortly thereafter, I stumbled upon a pedophile who discovered his urges for young children and made a decision to never act on them. He started a support group for other pedophiles, helping them understand that they could resist their urges and avoid the harm that would result if they acted on them.
This brave man had an affliction that was considered despicable to virtually all humankind. Simply admitting his situation isolated him like a leper, and left him under endless and relentless judgement, despite the fact that he had “come out” just to be able to help others. To my knowledge, this had never been done before. It was soul crushing to learn the helplessness he felt, the fear he lived with every day, the emptiness in his life because if this urge which he neither asked for or desired. His courage was daunting and completely unacknowledged. It sucked the breath from my lungs.
As time passed, more and more examples like this showed up in my life and I was completely unprepared for what was happening inside of me. I started to feel my overwhelming temptation to judge, condemn, dismiss, and punish gently give way to more compassion. I became more curious and less afraid. I had less hate and disgust and more hope. Eventually, I came to believe that people are shaped by all kinds of things, and although some find their way, many become so detached from the human being they were created as, that the only identity they see was the one defined by the shrapnel of their life experiences.
I found myself opening up to thoughts that I’d spent my life rejecting as somewhere between insanity and utter nonsense. It was transformation divine intervention that spanned so far beyond the politics of left and right.
And it was these deep convictions that came from that transformation that caused me concern the words I encountered on a unity site about our President, not a gentle wish that people would be kinder to him. I wanted to know whether this kind of rhetoric was a-typical on this site or whether my notion of “unity in everything” was in conflict with those held by who participated on this site. I was expecting a profound and courageous commitment to the pursuit of unity; one I could not find in conventional places. I wanted to spend time with others who were about growing out of beliefs that destroy all hope and refusing to submit to the fears that make us rely on case building and condemnation rather than exposing and overcoming the barriers to human connection.
This is why I reject the belief that it’s impossible to have unity with President Trump. I know that he was made like I was made, with the divine goodness of humanity and an identity that he has either lost or never known. And I believe with every cell in my body that love, and grace, and compassion – not hate, judgment and isolation – are the tools of healing the brokenness that makes people, even Donald Trump, do evil things.
And as it happens, I believe the same thing about Hitler. AND, I believe that embracing that notion some people are inherently evil is the antithesis pursuing unity.
This is not a safe and comfortable worldview that I have embraced. It’s scary and lonely as hell. I am often misunderstood and verbally stoned, much like I was today via your reply.
Every day I have to wrestle with my own human vulnerabilities, thoughts and judgment. I have to fight my own temptation to put certain people into the “exception” category. I struggle to imagine the seemingly impossible, such as the notion that there could actually be way to help a Hitler find his soul. I have to constantly remind myself that there is a force more powerful than evil, even when I look at the evil that exists in this world and sometimes seems to be “winning”. I have to LIVE with an unfailing resolve in my believe that sincere prayer really does make a difference, even when there seems to be an abundance of evidence to the contrary.
But, there is no other way for me. I do this because I believe it is God’s will for me to let go of anything that stops me from loving my neighbor, no matter who he or she is. I do it because helping people overcome the lies about who they are and then discover the person they were created to be is preferable to righteous indignation, being on the “winning team”, and using my clever mind and quick wit to put people in their place. And, I live with absolute confidence that this quest which brings hope and possibility that the alternative just can’t.
So I must confess that when I read “all things unity”, this is what I’d hoped to find. Like-minded people who were ready to step into a mission that meant giving up demonizing, overcoming fear, and refusing to spew generalizations that are as false and hateful as the lies of others they so claim to hate. They would have bold beliefs about what’s possible, reject conventional habits that naturally propagate separation, and demonstrated unbridled courage to challenge the status quo, beginning with their own paradigms.
So, once again, I am wondering whether hate for Donald Trump caused the owner of this site to overlook the sincere questions I asked in my previous post? Did any self-reflection make its way between the desire to defend a position and building a case to support a contrary position? Was there at least a moment before replying to my “dumbfounding” post when an sincere internal dialog existed that asked, “do I want to build unity here with this person, or do I want to be right and make her wrong?”
I won’t answer those questions for you by assuming your answer. I will simply close by saying that I chose to tame my triggers so that I could respond rather than react to the outrage I felt when reading your response. This is because I don’t give up hope easily. I have spoken my peace and look forward to hearing yours.
Trump is a danger to the world. He has the power to do devastating things and he doesn’t have the discernment to avoid doing them. I would say that you need to see more deeply into the nature of reality. Read this about the two realities we live in, the ultimate and the relative: http://www.mightycompanions.org/page6.html. Here’s a salient quote: “There’s nothing more depressing than someone who’s always harping on the relative. Many social radicals are this way. Yet, on the other hand, there’s nothing more debilitating than someone who’s always referring us to some grand vision, without a deep sensitivity to relative concerns.”
Also have a look at my thoughts about Trump re the positive context of how you suggest seeing him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whkGWar0xLA&t=7s and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vqV3JuoEFk&t=5s