One of the themes I have explored over the last 14 years is that of engaging with the world vs. withdrawing from mundane life to focus on the spiritual.
My opinion is:
- both are needed;
- both are interdependent for incarnate people; and
- there may be times for focusing on one or the other.
To illustrate that further, consider the following two matters.
First: Pema Chodron describes (in this book) a story about a monk who had been meditating for three years, then came down out of the hills to a market, and then, when someone stood on his foot raised his walking stick to strike the person, realised what he had done, and then turned around to walk back into the hills and spend another three years meditating before trying again.
This illustrates (a) that we may need to get away from mundane physical life in order to be able to develop our skills, and (b) we ultimately should be able to bring our spiritual skills into our physical life.Second: we are are spirits having a physical experience.
Now, I've been expanding my social media interactions (consider the image of a technophobe prodding suspiciously at a mobile phone with a stick), and came across someone who posted a social justice matter - through the prism of politics - on a starseed site. I saw an extremely dismissive response along the lines of starseeds would not get involved in politics and questioning whether the poster was, in fact, eligible to be called a starseed.
That response was rubbish (it wasn't even the accursed "fashionable cynicism" - it lacked that level of being informed) for the following reasons:
- it wrongly pre-judged everyone in politics as being bad people. I've had a fair bit to do with politicians over the last quarter century, and in my experience, most MPs are genuine - even the ones whose views I disagree with - and are often in politics because they genuinely hold those views as being important and right;
- such pre-judgement is the basis of bigotry such as racism, sexism, LGBTIQ-phobia, etc, and is therefore not only wrong, but actually evil conduct - it is as harmful as bigotry;
- there are some MPs who are genuinely evil people - POTUS45 was one (and still has the power to be, if ever re-elected), John Howard in my nation (Australia) was another (see also here, here, and here), and so was Hitler - who initially seized power through political machinations; but
- politics is how a lot of change for the better will be manifested - sure, people (whether starseeds or not) can contribute to a healthier political soup that makes change for the better more likely, but without politics women would not have the vote, slavery would still be legal, and colonial empires would still run rampant under kings/Emperors/pseudo-gods across the world and all its peoples.
Anyone who attempts to divorce spirituality from a better world- in the sense of more socially progressive and inclusive - is NOT spiritual: they're as much of a dogma driven ideologue as the worst of neochristianity or any other mainstream religion.
And they're not likely to be an effective starseed.
PS - I've also found that social media platform to be a disappointment. At this stage, the best sense of community I'm getting (apart from BPM Guides) is from a monthly meditation group.
