Some people are saying it’s the most vitriolic, attack-oriented, negativity-based political season they can ever remember.
The American presidential election, with its concurrent races for the country’s Senate and House of Representatives, has turned into a cesspool. Most (but not all) Americans are saddened by this, and wonder: “What has happened to a political process that we were once able to celebrate, and were proud to place before the world as a model for the entire planet?”
More important, perhaps, than what has happened or how, is what, if anything, can be done to save the situation. And not just to save one country’s interior decision-making process, but to save all of humanity from itself—for our entire species, from one corner of the globe to another, has failed to find a way to disagree agreeably.
And a poisoned political system is just one manifestation of that. At least (so far) people are not killing each other en masse in the U.S. to get their point across or their grievances heard. The same can’t be said in some other parts of the world, where there is no room—none whatsoever—for dissent of any kind, to say nothing of vitriolic denunciation of those who are or would be leaders.
What, then, could be the answer? Is there any antidote to humanity’s poisonous ways?
Yes. It is a New Spirituality that informs our politics. That is, a new set of sacred understandings that we hold about ourselves and about the purpose of life. And, of course, about God.
“Spirituality” is just a long six-syllable utterance for a two-syllable word: beliefs. Our highest and most sacred beliefs form the basis of our most critical and self-creative behaviors, and of our politics. A politics that do not arise out of our most sacred beliefs are bankrupt. Yet if you most sacred beliefs are themselves incompletely informed, what then? What we need is a new set of beliefs about everything: who we are, why we are here, and the best way to accomplish that. Our present understands and beliefs about God, about Life, and about each other arise out of religious doctrines that are incomplete.
Those beliefs hold that we human beings are separate from each other, and separate from God. We are not, those dogmas tell us, all The Same Thing. Yet the New Spirituality holds otherwise. “All things are One Thing,” it says. “There is only One Thing, and all things are part of the One Thing There Is.”
One source of that New Spirituality, a series of books titled Conversations with God, has placed a remarkable “dare” in front of all the world’s leaders. In the dialogue which comprises the books (from which the above statement emerges), every global political figure, every planetary spiritual or religious leader, every world business or economic trendsetter, and especially every teacher or professor in every classroom, is challenged to place a simple, astonishing 15-word message before those who turn to them for guidance:
We are all One. Ours is not a better way, ours is merely another way.
Those are 15 words that would change the world. Conversations with God calls them The New Gospel. Can the Pope say them? Can the highest Ulama utter them? Can the chief Rabbi speak them? Will the Archbishop of Canterbury? Will any president, prime minister, senator, member of parliament, or candidate for any such office, make this declaration?
How about you? Can you say them, in the midst of a disagreement you may be having with another?
Until and unless we all can, we will never remove the poison from our politics. For our politics are our lives, narrowly defined by greatly magnified. Yet the antidote is there; a healing formula is available. It is not a “secret formula.” It is widely known and widely available to all of us. We can mix up a batch in a jiffy. All it takes is a blending of the Soul, the Heart, and the Mind.
What could cause humanity to embrace this New Gospel? Do we have to be brought to our knees? Must we come right to the edge of our own extinction? Will we have to virtually self-destruct, as we are watching ourselves do in Syria and other places? Would even the threat of planetary (as opposed to regional) self-destruction be enough? Some people in America are asking that right now.
We must get clear as to who has the answer—and it is neither Mr. Obama nor Mr. Romney.
It is you.
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(If you have an observation that you would like to offer specifically in the area of World News or Current Events from a New Spirituality point of view, we will be happy to consider it for publication here. This is your opportunity to Dialogue With The World on your ideas about what’s happening making headlines these days, within the context of The New Spirituality–and how you believe the second could one day affect the first. Please send submissions to Lisa McCormack, Managing Editor, at Lisa@TheGlobalConversation.com)
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