I read the news today, oh boy.
Lately, the news has been . . . not great.
Well, actually . . . more like pretty bad.
But that’s just what I’m seeing on dedicated news feeds.
My social feeds have been a whole other story.
In the past couple of weeks, I’ve been seeing videos that have documented extraordinary displays of courage and determination.
You might have seen them, too:
A young woman single-handedly blocking a police prison van that was carrying students who were arrested during an anti-government demonstration in Mumbai, inspiring dozens of people to stand with her and set the students free.
Tens of thousands of anti-fascists from more than 80 different cities and towns across Germany mobilizing to blockade and disrupt the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party’s conference in the central city of Erfurt.
A handful of people forming a wall around their neighbor at a village board meeting to prevent the police from stopping her from speaking out against plans for a hyperscale data center to be built in their county.
The former pardon attorney for the U.S. Justice Department testifying before Congress about why they should reject Trump’s nominee for Attorney General despite knowing full well that she would receive death threats from MAGA cult crazies for doing so.
Sometimes I hear spiritually-minded people say that this is all just maya (illusion), that politics is just a distraction from spiritual life, that picking a side means getting caught up in dualities of material consciousness, etc.
That way of thinking inevitably resolves in the proposition that getting involved in worldly politics is a waste of time.
There’s some truth to this: if you get involved in worldly politics in a condition of worldly consciousness, then politics will end being a worldly entanglement, just like everything else in the material world.
What makes politics good or bad isn’t necessarily a matter of which side you’re on; it’s a matter of what consciousness you’re in.
The process of yoga in general — and of bhakti-yoga in particular — is the process of spiritualizing our experiences, including our experience of politics.
That process begins with a reframing of our experience of politics by seeing it in a spiritual context.
For example, all the people on my social feeds who inspired me by their determination and courage also reminded me of Krishna, the form of divinity I feel a special attraction to and the speaker of the Bhagavad Gita:
“I am the taste of water, the radiance of the moon and the sun, the sacred vibration oṁ in the Vedas, the sound in space and powerful actions among human beings.” – BG 7.8 (emphasis added)
This verse gives us 6 different ways to connect everyday lived experiences to the omnipresence of divinity. The last one is how I made a spiritual association between Krishna and the powerful actions I was witnessing on social media.
In this verse, “powerful actions among human beings” translates the Sanskrit phrase pauruṣaṁ nṛṣu. It can also be translated as “ability in man” (meaning all mankind), which suggests that our ability to perform any action has its origins in transcendence, that the connection between the will to act and the execution of action is, in and of itself, a kind of mystic power.
Another way to translate pauruṣaṁ nṛṣu is as “valor in human beings.” The mystical nature of folding the laundry may be easy to miss, but we’re heroic acts get our attention and we’re more likely to assocate them with transcendence because they call for transcendental levels of courage.
Every association that Krishna makes between himself and common features of our lived experiences — the fragrance of the earth, the wind, silence, even consciousness itself — are all meant to guide us toward an experience of the transcendent source of the world that’s concealed behind the world’s superficial phenomena.
What about all the phenomenally bad news? The Gita speaks to the nature of evil, too, in ways that, once again, support our ability to see evil-doers and their evil deeds from a spiritual perspective. (see Chapter 16 for details).
What does all of this mean for us? It means that whenever we need to find the courage to step out of our comfort zones for the sake of supporting a noble cause, we can remember that the innermost source of courage itself resides within us.
“Peace is attained by knowing me to be the beneficiary of all sacrifices and austerities, the Supreme Lord of all worlds, and the most benevolent friend within the heart of all beings.” – BG 5.29
And since this benevolent source of courage has an unlimited supply, spiritualizing our consciousness is a way for us to access far more courage than we could ever generate on our own.
I don’t know about you, but in times like these, I need all the courage I can get.
Wishing you all good fortune,
– Hari-k