Last Tuesday, U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem went to the city of Portland, Oregon to get a firsthand look at what President Trump called a “very serious left-wing terror threat in our country.”
What she saw was a handful of non-violent protesters playing music from The Benny Hill Show to make the point that Trump’s characterization of the situation, and her appearance to survey it, was absurd and foolish.
As Portland City Council member Angelita Morillo put it during an interview with CNN,
Yes, Portland protestors are wearing frog costumes and, in case you didn’t already know, Kristi Noem really did kill a puppy.
But I digress.
The dueling narratives of a city overrun by “antifa thugs” and a city where a handful of protesters in inflatable frog suits dance in front of an ICE facility provide us with a pretty clear sense of just how different people’s conceptions of reality are right now.
If we look beneath the surface of this divide, we can also see two different conceptions of morality at work: vertical and horizontal.
Vertical morality prioritizes submission to divine authority. Horizontal morality prioritizes loving our neighbors.
Devotional wisdom, in yoga, Christian, and other spiritual traditions, tells us that vertical and horizontal morality are meant to meet up together in the same heart.
All too often, however, people separate these two moral directions, prioritizing one at the expense of the other or, worse, thinking of loving our neighbors as an impediment to faithful submission.
The results: devotion without compassion, compassion without devotion, or the worst case scenario: pseudo-religion that condemns compassion.
Case in point: Christian nationalism’s vision of vertical morality, where authority flows downward, obedience is rebranded as holiness, and critical thinking is condemned as rebellion. The result is a theology of hierarchy that blesses power and sanctifies cruelty in the name of righteousness.
Just my opinion? Nope: it’s right there in Christian nationalism’s political manifesto, Project 2025, where the language of “Christian dominion” describes a return to national greatness through the subjugation of dissent—an America obedient to “God’s law.”
Modern spirituality has an unfortunate variation on this theme: the pursuit of vertical transcendence in isolation from horizontal engagement that results not in theocratic domination, but in silence.
And silence is complicity; at worst, a tacit endorsement of the status quo, at the very least, acceptance of it.
Many sincere seekers, including some within the bhakti-yoga community, use elements of yoga philosophy to excuse themselves from any involvement in worldly horizontal morality: “It’s all māyā; you can’t change anyone’s karma; this is to be expected in kali-yuga; the material world will always be a place of misery; . . .”
When kernels of philosophical truth are spun up into spiritual bypassing, you get a tunnel-vision approach to vertical transcendence that camouflages indifference under a porous netting of “detachment.”
The Bhagavad Gītā offers a different vision. Krishna’s teaching is that true transcendence is found by leaning into engagement with the world, not by fleeing from it. As the Gītā tells it, acting as an instrument of divine will means acting out of love rather than for the sake of domination.
Spiritual engagement can be expressed through four principles of dharma—self-discipline, purity, compassion, and truthfulness—that guide us toward a spiritually integrated life of horizontal morality rooted in divine consciousness: the realization that the Supreme Being is present within the heart of every being:
This is the synthesis of bhakti: cultivating a personal relationship of love for the Supreme Person while simultaneously engaging in meaningful service to the world with an awareness of our shared Source.
When we really follow the path of vertical morality, expressed in the Yoga-sutras as Īśvara praṇidhāna, love naturally expands horizontally out to other people. When we spiritualize the path of horizontal morality, love naturally grows vertically: our love for God, however we may conceive of such a Being, automatically increases.
Just as Krishna encouraged Arjuna to fight in defense of dharma without losing sight of transcendence, we can reclaim faith from domination and transcendence from disengagement through spiritual activism.
And we can do it while wearing inflatable frog costumes. As my parama-guru said many times, “Dress does not matter.”
Wishing you all good fortune,
– Hari-k