By Roland Ashby
President Biden faces enormous challenges: not just COVID-19, climate change, racial injustice, and social and economic inequality, but also a deep sickness of pandemic proportions - the fear and loathing of closed hearts and minds. Not something that can easily be legislated against!
During the deadly assault on the Capitol on 6 January, one protestor described it as a “revolution”. Whether revolution or not, it does cry out for a revolution in consciousness. This spiritual revolution has actually been going on for millennia, with the Buddha and Jesus having been among its most prominent leaders.
What author and theologian Matthew Fox calls “the reptilian brain” – the dualistic thinking of “I’m right, you’re wrong; I win, you lose” is tragically alive and well today in our civil discourse, and has been on naked display during the Trump presidency.
Spiritual revolutionaries for millennia have been seeking a transformation of consciousness, which happens when we tune into what hermit Maggie Ross calls “Deep Mind”, a deep level of consciousness in which we find the source of the “better angels of our nature”, as that great Republican president Abraham Lincoln described them. Buddhists would call this source, this deeper consciousness, the Buddha mind or Buddha nature, while for Christians it’s the Christ mind or Christ consciousness.
Mystics would say this consciousness is to be discovered in silent contemplation in the “cave of the heart”, where you encounter pure being itself, beyond the dualistic/reptilian mind and grasping, fearful ego. What might be described as the “demons of our nature”.
Pope Francis, in his 2015 address to Congress, named the Trappist monk Thomas Merton as one of four great Americans (the others being Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King and Dorothy Day). Merton described the encounter with pure being, pure consciousness, as one of pure love, pure compassion, pure forgiveness.
In this encounter, the sense of other people as other is seen as illusory, a creation of the dualistic mind and the ego. Merton lived as a hermit, devoting much of his time to silent prayer and meditation. This became the ground for a revolutionary consciousness of deep, intrinsic union with all of human life, and culminated in one of his most profound epiphanies observing passers-by “shining like the sun” in the centre of a busy city:
“It was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts... the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only they could see themselves as they really are... There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed.”[1]
In this vision, this expanded consciousness, there is no division into republican and democrat, black and white, rich and poor, believer and non-believer, gay and straight; just human beings infinitely loved and with a divine potential for infinite love.
America’s future, and the future of the human race, will depend on whether the “better angels of our nature” will prevail, or be shouted down by the “demons of our nature”.
[1] As cited on page 52 of Thomas Merton – A Book of Hours, edited by Kathleen Deignan. Published by Sorin Books.