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The only way out is through.... |
| September, 2006 |
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Why meditate in an age of terror? Terror enters our hearts and minds as fear-gone-wild – unpredictable and out of our control. This triggers the experience of powerlessness, to which the psyche often responds with denial – a psychological mechanism that pushes terror out of consciousness and leads us to live with an out-of-awareness, persistent but tamped-down anxiety. It’s hard to feel as ease. And it’s hard to engage in life.
To be fully alive is to be in touch with what really is – both inside us and in the world around us.
Meditation offers a path. It is a truth-telling method of confronting our internal fears and our external enemies, and so takes us far beyond denial. It may seem that we are just sitting for ourselves in meditation, but focusing on the body and internal thoughts we know the power of moment-to-moment alertness – then we experience this fear-gone- wild with equanimity and that can lead to a cooler, and at the same time more active, response to the political and social mess that humanity has gotten itself into.
Ghandi said, “We must ourselves embody the changes we want to see in the world.” Another way of saying this is that America is the result of the interactions between all its citizens. This means that our country reflects the hearts and the minds of all of us.
Peace in our hearts and in our relationships creates peace in the world.
This is not idealism – it is human nature.
