From Despair to Awareness

November 23, 2016
A 46 minute youtube helped immensely to restore my peace of mind about the election of Donald Trump. I actually listened to the full 100 minute conference call recording from which the 46 minute video was recorded.  Corinne Zupko, Trump election, A Course in Miracles, and an Oppurtunity for Healing.   I will tell you right up front that Corinne, like me, is a very serious, hard-core practitioner of A Course in Miracles.  Her insights about the election are invaluable to me and some of the people who shared in the call blessed me more than I can say.  I am profoundly grateful to have found this youtube and highly recommend it to anyone who is seriously trying to come to terms with this election.

The history of human life on this planet is fraught with constant stories of conflict, hate, war, destruction.  The current state of human culture in our United States is no different after the election than it was before the election.  But my awareness of this culture is certainly greater and my questions are many.  We could grow by humbling ourselves as a nation from the notion held by many Americans, and almost universally proclaimed by our politicians, that our nation is the greatest nation on earth.  In some ways maybe it is, but in others it certainly is not.  Failure to admit this locks us into patterns that do not serve us all.

I am reading Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates, who grew up in Baltimore and attended Howard University.  He writes from his heart about his Baltimore childhood and his quest at Howard University to find a "black" history, clear and principled.  He read and studied extensively but was not able to find clarity in histories of chaos and confusion.   Yet in this lack of answers, he found some wisdom and solace. He pens, "The writer, and that was what I was becoming, must be wary of every Dream and every nation, even his own nation.  Perhaps his own nation more than any other, precisely because it was his own." "My great error was not that I had accepted someone else's dream but that I had accepted the fact of dreams, the need for escape, and the invention of racecraft."  These quotes relate directly to some of what is on the video youtube mentioned above.  I realize that my attachment to a particular political outcome is really an idol or dream that has now fallen away.

I stated in earlier posts that I dream of a new, all-inclusive middle class.  And this seems like a good dream, but I cannot be attached to any particular  plan for how this "outer" dream might become manifest.  I do not know the best way forward politically or otherwise. What I know is that by taking responsibility for being one with my "inner nation" of peace and abundance, I will be more effective in extending this to others in my "outer world".  I cannot afford to waste time complaining or judging. And if I forget this, may the Holy Spirit of my faith firmly call me back to sanity.