[Dialogue] Transparent Being

[KarenBueno at aol.com]

In a message dated 12/11/2006 11:21:19 AM Mountain Standard Time, 
KroegerD at aol.com writes:
This is long, old, and right on target, I think

http://www.wie.org/j19/lerner.asp
Colleagues--I spent quite awhile with this interview of Michael Lerner.  Here 
are some major points of Lerner's.  With apologies if I left out any crucial 
ones.  Refer to the whole article if you have time.

Karen Bueno

>From Rabbi Michael Lerner:

Detachment is an extremely important element in moving to the level from 
which one can engage in compassionate transformation of the universe. When one is 
truly detached from one's ego and one's own needs and one's own desires, one 
can simply be a manifestation of God's energy in the world. And the way that 
one will be a manifestation of God's energy in the world is to be passionately 
involved in social change movements to transform the world. But that passion is 
a passion that is a manifestation of nonattachment to any particular outcome 
or to a fulfillment of one's own needs. One would merely be a clear vehicle 
through which God, the energy of the totality of all Being, pours itself out 
into the universe. 

No ego investment. No personal ego investment. It's not for oneself. And it's 
not with some illusion, for example, that one is going to make the changes 
oneself, that oneself is the critical vehicle. Oneself is just one of the 
billions of divine energy cells of the universe that are working together to 
manifest the spiritual energy of the universe in a particular way. And that 
particular way is through the accumulation of greater and greater love and caring, 
justice, and awareness. 

I want a different form of spiritual action, one which, for example, pays 
attention to not having a caste of people who are untouchables. Or that is 
concerned about a way of treating women that involves, among other things, having 
widows throw themselves on the burning funeral pyres of their husbands. There 
are a number of things that happen in that world in which the suffering of 
people doesn't seem to have been dramatically decreased by the spiritual 
traditions. The sensitivity to these issues didn't emerge from the spiritual traditions 
you're talking about. Now you might say, "Well, that isn't real suffering. The 
only real suffering is attachment." But from my standpoint, that's another 
way of saying, "I don't really care about the suffering of certain kinds of 
people." And to not really care seems to me to be a lower level of consciousness, 
a consciousness that really doesn't connect to the totality of all Being. So 
again, from my standpoint, I see many people who put themselves forward as 
spiritual masters as actually being people who have absorbed a certain amount of 
powerlessness into their consciousness. I actually believe them to be caring 
people who have given up on the possibility of eliminating the suffering in the 
world on any level except the one that they themselves could immediately 
control—which is very different from what it would take to change the rest of the 
world. Because to change the rest of the world would mean having to work with 
other human beings. 

And when you're working with other human beings, you can't control them. 
Whereas you have at least a better chance of being able to control what's going on 
in your own mind. And so because of this despair about the difficulty of 
working with others to change the world, people then enter into a spiritual 
tradition which says, "Okay, go as far as you can by yourself." That, I believe, is 
a misunderstanding of the unity of all Being and the interconnection of all 
human life; it's actually a spiritual consciousness that isn't evolved enough. I 
think there needs to be a different level of evolution in which one could get 
to the point of recognizing that, yes, the world is in pain. It needs healing 
and the healing requires working with others. 

Now once you get to that, you then find this next point: In order to work 
with others, you're going to have to work with others who are not fully evolved, 
who are not as developed in their consciousness as you are, let's say. And I 
want to emphasize here that I don't put myself forward as being at the highest 
level of that evolution of consciousness myself. But what I argue, what I 
believe, is that to heal this planet, to save it from the ecological destruction 
that is facing us, to keep us from the various ways in which we are on a 
fast-track toward the destruction of the human experiment or the human experience, 
we are going to have to recognize that we need each other to transform this 
world. And to need each other means that we have to build social transformation 
with millions and millions of people who are themselves deformed—
psychologically, spiritually, emotionally, at every possible level. 

In my view, that's all there is on the planet. There is nothing else. There 
is nobody who hasn't been somewhat spiritually deformed and that includes these 
people who sometimes put themselves forward as fully realized beings. What's 
their deformation? That they have given up on hope and have isolated 
themselves to a point where they think that the highest goal is to get themselves into 
this place of transformed consciousness and are able, as a result, to turn 
their back on the pain and suffering of so many others. That is a form of 
deformation that is every bit as much a deformation in my view as all the other forms 
of deformation.

The movement that will change this world will be made up of limited, 
unenlightened human beings who, through more compassion, can move toward that 
enlightenment. But we can't wait for everyone to achieve it before we act to at least 
stop the greatest crazinesses that are going on at the present moment. 

And spiritual life is about balance, and getting the right balance between 
those two—between, on the one hand, the pull of hearing the spiritual voice of 
the universe screaming out, "The world can be healed and transformed, and you 
have to be part of it. You must be a manifestation of the goodness and love of 
the universe," and on the other hand, the other voice that says, "Be 
compassionate and recognize the limits that we have, and don't judge, don't be harsh, 
don't be hurtful toward the ways in which you can't fully transcend. Accept the 
limitations." And so, yes. These are two different pulls. 


 
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