[Dialogue] I Am

[darrell walker]

            I feel moved to offer a few words of reflection on the just-completed presidential campaign.  The expression on Barack Obama's face Tuesday evening when he acknowledged his election as president caused me to dig out the files on what I believe we called the Solitaries earlier.

            From time to time I continue to wrestle with those issues-poverty, chastity, obedience, meditation, contemplation, prayer, knowing, doing. being.  I have, especially, never internalized the concept of transparent being.  But the look on Obama's face the other evening gave me an insight that I have missed before.

            It was not the look of beaming triumph-he has understood that the moment would arrive since the third grade when he first announced he would one day be president.  Nor was it the look from the Robert Redford movie The Candidate when the just-elected character exclaimed, "What do we do now?"  Given the total mess that Obama is inheriting, such an expression would have been justified.  Rather, it was an expression of I Am.

            Obama exhibited the traits other than being as we saw during the campaign.  His life story detailed his understanding of poverty, knowing, chastity and the others.  For example, Edward Luce in a Financial Times article quoted a senior member of Clinton's campaign as saying, "Obama had this brilliant and infuriating way of appearing to be above it all while sticking a knife into Hillary.  He perfected this with McCain-for example, he never once said McCain was too old or unhealthy.  But he loved to praise McCain's 50 years of honourable public service."  

            On the doing pole, Luce said, "Future campaigns will seek to replicate Mr. Obama's multiply savvy approaches.  But without the personality and the message, technique alone may prove insufficient."

            Obama had near-zero experience for the job.  Even Sarah Palin had more training as everyone acknowledged.   Joe Biden has more knowledge of global issues.  Bill Richardson has negotiated delicate confrontations in other countries.  John Edwards spoke for the poor and Hillary Clinton carried the flame for women.  Obama had a few years in a state legislature and a couple of years in the Senate where he was not outstanding.  His resume does not qualify him for being president of the United States.

            Obama's campaign is conceded to have been nearly flawless.  The candidate himself went twenty months, giving speeches and interviews, with only one minor verbal gaff.  Literally millions of people worked and gave small amounts of money for the campaign, which are technical reasons for the victory.  But the campaign is but the visible symbol of reality.

            There is a quality of presence.  Bill Clinton has it.  Barack Obama has it, and the two repel each other as like-poles of magnets.  But they understand and respect each other.  Evidence in early staffing announcements indicates that Obama listened intently to Bill Clinton in a conversation they had in New York this summer.  

As regards listening, a quote from Rudolf Steiner's 1918 book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment is appropriate: "Of very great importance for the development of the student is the way in which he listens to others when they speak.  He must accustom himself to do this in such a way that, while listening, his inner self is absolutely silent.  If someone expresses an opinion and another listens, assent or dissent will, generally speaking, stir the inner self of the listener.  Many people in such cases feel themselves impelled to an expression of their assent, or more especially, of their dissent.  In the student, all such assent or dissent must be silenced."  

Most of us do not listen in this way-dispassionately, certainly not me.  But I can picture Obama doing so, and in this manner may well enter the concept of bipartisanship, a concept much bantered about but little practiced. 

Of central consequence to the Obama phenomenon is that of being.  It is central to what EI/ICA has referred to in the concept of The Word.  JWM and others tried to verbalize the ineffable concept of Being but somehow it never came through to me.  It requires a living example-Jesus, Paul, St. Francis, Abraham Lincoln and many others come to mind but they are only figures out of a book.  My first inclination that Barack Obama possessed this quality came at the conclusion of his 2004 speech before the Democratic Convention when through his speech, not so much the words themselves, some ineffable presence announced I Am.  That is the message that ICA has encouraged over much of the known world-every human being can stand up and say I Am.  

Grace and Peace,

Darrell Walker  --  Lincoln, California

            

             
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