The Hope of Spirit-Fueled Social Action

By Bruce Allen Morris

Yesterday, I posted an article about our awful summer and promised a follow-up article on our true hope. Here it is:

As a strong liberal and hard-working grassroots activist (whether paid or volunteer), I often find it difficult to speak of the true source of my hope and what I believe is the only true basis for lasting, peaceful, compassionate change in our society and the world. That source is divine spirituality. Call it what you will—God, Goddess, the Universe, Spirit, Great Spirit, Allah (just Arabic for God, folks), Deus (Latin for God), Divinity, whatever. I believe, yes, have faith, that we live among untold, imperceptible (at least consciously and to most of us) forces and entities that guide us and work with our individual and collective consciousness to co-create the environment in which we live. Think of them as powerful assistants devoted to making immanent our deepest and truest desires, when backed by co-creative action on our part (that one can be scary, I know, but when we are grounded in love and compassion, or work will bear loving and compassionate results).

Cutting to the chase, here is the basic message of hope, exposed in more detail below. Good will always prevail over evil in the long run. In fact, in a true spiritual sense, evil does not exist because it is not love and only love exists in truth. So love and compassion will win out in the long run; it is guaranteed.

Here is the problem for us. The “long run” to spirit may very encompass a time period wholly unsatisfactory to human beings. If we want to see the results of good in our lives or those of our progeny, we have to get working and fast. The forces arrayed against us could very quickly destroy our world and institutions sufficiently to render it impossible to preserve our planet as a place to live a decent life. But if we get working soon enough and in sufficient quantity for the good, our efforts will prevail. It may be a long time in human years, but very positive and lasting results are possible even in the working life of this 46-year old writer.

We have been given amazing communications through ordinary human channels in recent years making the message of hope for the future very clear, but also making clear that a positive outcome is by no means guaranteed and the fate of our world depends on our actions. Some of those communications are A Course in Miracles, the Conversations With God series, just about anything from Marianne Williamson, but I like The Healing of America’s Soul, the Seth Channelings from Jane Roberts, the Kryon channelings from Lee Carroll; and the Miracle of Love series and its progeny through Paul Ferrini from the Christ mind.

Please don’t dismiss me as batty. If you are a committed secularist, agnostic or atheist and have not left already, this is where we agree: our fate depends on our own actions (its just that I believe in Spirit guiding, helping, comforting us along the way). If you must, remember Shakespeare: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy”.

(Now, you may ask me, how can I call these messages credible, while George Bush’s and the Chritian rightist's alleged messages from God false? Simple. The messages I cite are messages of love. Bush’s and the right-wingers' war-mongering and intolerant words are messages of fear. Meister Echkart, the great modern mystic, said this; “It is a lie, any talk of God that does not comfort you.” How much does war and hatred comfort you?

All of these new communications convey essentially the same message: Loving and compassionate human consciousness was engaged in a consistent social movement toward creating a new a better world for all of us beginning sometime around the 1930’s (seeded, of course, by 18th and 19th century democratic movements) and continuing even today. Around the 1930’s we began to seek societal arrangements that placed the well-being of the many over the power and privilege of the few. People-sovereign government began spreading rapidly; nations began enacting communal policies, such as social security, progressive taxation, protection of labor and, in Europe, Japan and some other places, guaranteed, universal health care. The world rose up against fascism, which, at bottom, was a movement of the privileged to exploit the masses and could have taken hold among the elite in many other nations, including ours. But it did not and the world stood against it. We created the United Nations to build peace and avoid war.

After World War II the United States, Canada, Europe and Latin American specifically, but also unlikely places like Iran and Japan, began to expand democratic government, social welfare programs, labor protection and the like. As a result, the greatest good for the most people began to expand. Later, the world began conscious work to root out racial, gender, ethnic and religious prejudice and repression. We began social and technological efforts to eliminate pollution and protect the natural environment. The common person began to prosper and to take his and her rightful role as sovereign and free to shape society as the people, not the elite, wanted. We also stood against and largely put an end to repressive totalitarianism disguised as communism.

From a spiritual perspective, we were working with a strong collective energy of compassion and love and were co-creating with spirit a world of that nature. Spirit was amazed and impressed. One of the common themes of many recent channels was that the old spiritual messages were shifting. Many spiritual seekers believed the Mayan calendar that placed the end of the world at 2012, and noted the number of astonishing accuracies of this calendar in the past. Many Christians had also begun predicting the end of the world and their apocalypse at the turn of the third millennium.

But the new messages are not that the Mayan mystics and Christian preachers (and many others predicting basically the same thing) were wrong, but that our collective work changed the prophecy and made continuation of life on earth possible beyond the early 21st Century. If you think about how bad global warming and pollution are now and then think how much worse it would be without a strong environmental movement in the last half of the 20th Century and its not hard to imagine THAT climate change could be making life on earth impossible very soon. Combine that with the massive uprising likely from 70 more years of the type of repression we were seeing world-wide in the early 20th Century and with fascism and totalitarian “communism” unopposed, and the end of the world does not look so improbable.

Now, here is the problem today. This new energy of love and compassion made great progress for more than 60 years and still moves forward today in many ways and places. But the old energy of selfishness and self-seeking did not just go away. It was surprised, if you will, by the sudden emergence of love energy and lost many social arguments for a long time before it could gather itself to fight back.

And the old energy fighting back with a vengeance is what we are seeing today. We are caught now in a huge clash for the energy and consciousness of humanity. The old knows it faces huge odds (see next paragraph) and is, despite appearances otherwise, currently losing. That is why its actions and pronouncements are so dramatic and exaggerated. It fears its death is imminent without a huge and sudden push taking it over the top once and for all.

In the United States, in some ways, it appears the resurgence of old energy is winning. But in most ways and in truth, it is not. Even here, we are still seeing continuous progress toward equality for women, racial minorities, and now for homosexuals and transgendered people. Yes, there are set backs and hate speech and actions, but that is the old energy striking back; the general direction remains forward. Europe is still moving generally in the direction of providing for the common good. The amazing and surprising popular sovereignty movement in Latin America is perhaps the most hopeful sign of all. Virtually the entire world is recognizing and acting on the need to change our energy usage and consumption patterns to save the Earth as our life support system, against the best efforts of the old energy.

Even in the United States, the people largely support compassionate societal arrangements and policies that support the common good. Large majorities support some form of universal, guaranteed health care; better environmental protection; a dependable, compassionate safety net for the less fortunate; progressive, but fair taxation of the richest Americans and biggest corporations to support social programs; effective regulation of business to protect the people; and the preservation and protection of our civil rights and liberties and the right to actual sovereignty of the people. Large majorities oppose our imperial wars, excessive militarization and hostile and aggressive foreign policy.

We don’t see these policies enacted because the old energy is strong and has a huge store of old energy power (that’s’ money, folks) behind it. We don’t have the old energy’s money, but we do have ourselves, our greater number and the only true engine of Spirit, Love, behind us. Political organizers say the way to beat organized money is with organized people. Spirit says the same.

So we are facing the old energy making what it knows is its last stand. It will not go quietly. It is desperate and terrified. It actually believes the abandonment of its principles and policies will lead to the end of the world, because for it, the world will end. The loss of the old energy feels like death to the old energy; just as the loss of the new energy feels like death to it (us).

Our hope, as I led off, is that Spirit is Love and Love will always prevail. Our challenge is that spirit will not give us that for which we are not working in co-creative cooperation with spirit.

Many of us are on the fence and doing little or nothing to revive the spirit of compassion as the organizing principle of our society. When the new energy was generally prevailing and rising, it was acceptable for many of us to stay on the fence, not really active, not really working for change, but living our nice and improving lives quietly, just as we want and should be able to do. But the old energy came flying off the fence and is working as hard as it can to reestablish its dominion and rid the world of the new energy for all time.

What we need to prevail is for enough of those who seek the good to get off the fence. We know the Edmond Burke Quote: “The only thing needed for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.”

The opposite, of course, and the hope for our age: all that is needed for good to triumph is for good people to do something.

When enough of us being to work consistently, diligently and with compassionate hearts to seek the greatest good for the most people, we will prevail. Love cannot be stopped, for love is all there is. Btu we have to work, we have to get involved. And, yes that means involved in politics and is social activism. NOW!

A Course In Miracles says this: “Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists. Therein lies the peace of God.” Therein lies the source of my faith and hope that we can apply love to our lives and bring peace and harmony to our world.

Authors Website: http://madnessofdivinity.blogspot.com

Authors Bio: Bruce is 46 year-old father of one, stepfather of three and grandfather of two, who left a lucrative law practice at a large national law firm to work, advocate and write for social justice and equality and find a way to incorporate a spiritual life into the material world. He now struggles along to make a decent living while holding true to his deepest principles in Portland Oregon.