Sunday early evening I had the wonderful privilege of listening to Michael Lerner speak. He is a rabbi and co-founder of the Spiritual Progressives organization and the author of a book called The Left Hand of God. I joined the organization in the past but had not kept up since there always seem to be so much going on. I will immediately reactivate my participation after hearing his wisdom and ideas about the new leadership and how we can make a difference.
If he comes to your community, I highly recommend you go hear him speak. You will feel his passion and greatly value his ideas. The most powerful idea was the difference between what he called the right hand and left hand of God. This is not the conservative right and the liberal left as you might guess. The right is ruled by fear and about having power and control over others, this is about an all powerful God that about damnation and domination. The left is ruled by hope and about compassion, understanding and the realization that we are all connected and this God is a loving and caring God who wants the best for the people.
Fear . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Hope
He says you and I have the full spectrum going on in our heads. We at any moment can be in fear or in hope. President Obama was elected because we were in the mindset of hope because he inspired that in us. As president there will be many people around him who will argue about being practical, which means living by fear and having power and control over others. Rabbi Lerner knows Obama and says he is a hope based person but will have incredible forces insisting he be practical and go for power and control. We have to offset that fear mindset and do all we can to push for hope and compassion to win out.
He suggested that we look for solutions that are hope based and not be a government of fear as the last administration was. He said be mindful of what movies, books, news etc that we watch or read and ask ourselves is this nurturing our hope or feeding our fear. Almost all news is about fear. We need to watch and read what will build hope in us and not take ourselves in the direction of fear. A simple measure we can use to evaluate our mindset is asking ourselves, is this expanding me and my heart or causing me to contract in fear?
He has what he calls a Global Marshall Plan in which we use our resource to make sure everyone gets fed, has a home, has health care and a good education. He said this plan will truly provide homeland security for everyone on the planet. You can read more by picking up his magazine called Tikkun or by going to their website. Please consider joining today. This is political involvement from a conscious spiritual perspective that is about real and positive change.
Have a good week and keep your mind and heart focused on the positive results you plan on achieving.