I wrote this in 2008, in regard to the treatment of Obama, but the same thing arises again in 2019, as conservatives haul out those loaded words—Capitalist and Socialist—to try to polarize voters. Those are OLD words that describe fear-based realities like the 5 years of McCarthyism in the early 1950s, or the 3 hot years of Nixon’s Watergate scandal in the early 1970s. 

I believe there soon will come a time when each of us will voluntarily commit to becoming harmless. That means “I will not allow myself to act from a closed heart; I will not demean, abuse, or injure another person, animal, or plant.” No more excuses. No more postponement. The time is now to choose a spiritually-based, compassionate way of being in the world.

“In the beginning of a change, the patriot is a scarce man, brave, hated, and scorned. When his cause succeeds, however, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot.” —Mark Twain

When the defined inner blueprint (intent) doesn’t match action (expression), energy jams up. When energy doesn’t naturally flow in expansion-exploration-inspiration then contraction-focus-materialization cycles, we experience subtle pain.

Remember the last time someone put you down? How easy was it to get out of that low-frequency state? To handle the meanness, you probably either had to close your heart, go away and cry, get involved in an intense activity, indulge an addiction, or throw more meanness back in the perpetrator’s face.

I remember watching, with morbid fascination, a reality television program that dealt with celebrity rehab from drug, alcohol, and sex addiction. It was interesting to watch the difference between the two states of awareness the addicts swung back and forth between.

Too often we honor swagger and bluster and wielders of force; too often we excuse those who are willing to build their own lives on the shattered dreams of others. Some Americans who preach non-violence abroad fail to practice it here at home. Some who accuse others of inciting riots have by their own conduct invited them. Some look for scapegoats, others look for conspiracies, but this much is clear: violence breeds violence, repression brings retaliation, and only a cleansing of our whole society can remove this sickness from our soul.

So far it’s almost as though I have no concept of what a month is. Does time even pass?” Somehow, this expansive sense of all time/no time feels a bit different than an ordinary shift from stuff to space. Are we actually in limbo between realities?