"We must become naked of selfhood by possessing nothing, so as to be absorbed in the infinity of God: thus nothing means Everything."
––Meher Baba
In my last post, I started to relate Christian belief in Hell and its impact on our current pandemics to Meher Baba-lovers’ belief in the afterlife and it impact on the same. I was thoughtful that such a reflection is relevant during Francis of Assisi’s Feast of Pardon for all souls, which we celebrated on August 2nd. I promised a second part and have found that I have much more to share. I also need more time to integrate all that I am working through in books, podcasts, videos, and conversations, so I want to include more posts after this one that will attempt to do these things justice.
I recognize that this is a very fraught topic: racism within myself and my own spiritual community while trying to hold and value very broad spiritual principles of Truth that we aspire to live more fully in our bodies as a “life divine.” I am bound to offend someone, even myself as I grow into someone more mature after this post. But sin boldly, I say, in the spirit of St. Augustine. How else to grow into that future self except to follow my intuition with sincerity as I write, think, and feel? That being said, my thoughts and feelings are a work in progress, and dear reader as always, I welcome your considered thoughts and critiques in the comments below. I am using these experimental blog writings as part of my current book project on the Mother and Sri Aurobindo where I will take up the theme of race and their notion of “the New Being” as part of that project.
Here’s my B.L.U.F (Bottom Line Up Front):
· We who identify as being white in the Baba community have an opportunity for growth in the principles of what Meher Baba called his “New Life,” which was a special phase of work he did from 1949-1952 in which he and his companions lived a mendicant life relying wholly and solely upon God. We as people in the white club have the chance to participate in this work by facing with honesty the ugliness of the Kali Yuga (the closing “Age of Quarrel”) instead of acting as if we do not carry it around within our consciousness; that is, to face our racist thoughts, feelings, and actions with honesty. This involves difficult tasks that will challenge our white egos: 1. listening to our Black sisters and brothers more than talking to them and 2. sharing the trauma of racism so they don’t have to carry it alone. Picking it up with them will help us one day to put it down together.
· This shared experience leads to “standing under” what we currently do not understand, which can lead to real unity, real love, and real service.
· Only after we who believe we are white have truly listened and stayed with the real discomfort for a while might we begin to critically relate Meher Baba’s teaching about karma and rebirth with the realities of racism as they exist now, and at another level, discover a more positive sense of being “white” that in no way needs a “Black other” who is by definition inferior as part of that self-definition.
· If we do not do this work, we risk the same kinds of problems that white Evangelical Christians perpetuate now as studied by Robert P. Jones in White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity. We risk perpetuating white supremacy instead of dissolving it within our own bodies as Baba-lovers. The “new world culture” that Baba described in Listen Humanity (pp. 142-144) in which no ethnicity looks down on another is coming and in many wonderful ways is already here, so let’s not work against this tide of a new Satya Yuga (“Age of Truth”) by an unexamined life vis-à-vis racism.
· Thankfully, there are Christians who are abandoning the notion of hell, refusing to see anyone as worthy of an eternal marginalization. They are turning Dante’s inscription written above the doors of the Inferno on its head: “Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch’entrate” or “Abandon all hope you who enter here.” They are now abandoning any notion of hell to make room for the Kingdom of Heaven and what Meher Baba calls its “hopelessness and helplessness” descending in our midst right now. May we follow this lead and let the Kingdom of Heaven fully descend. Let us stop rejecting its will to include all without compromise, dismissing its will to place the last as the first: our dear Sisters and Brothers of Color and anyone or anything on the margins. Let us make the transition to a new creation and a new humanity smoother. Otherwise we will be dragged along anyway. Our revolt in thought, word, or deed only delays the inevitable and makes the birthing process more painful.
Before I attempt to unpack these bullet points, it is helpful to understand some broad outlines of Meher Baba’s teaching of karma and rebirth for those who might be unfamiliar with it. Because the understanding is complex, I have provided a summary in another blog, a brief primer of what Meher Baba called “The Divine Theme” and how it might relate to the afterlife found here. For my purposes in this blog post, I want to highlight the fact that Meher Baba teaches in God Speaks, the Discourses, and The Nothing and the Everything a progressive understanding of karma and rebirth that leads to God-Realization for all souls without exception, and like all other Dharma traditions (Hindu, Jain, Sikh, and Buddhist), it takes a long view of human growth. In Meher Baba’s view, this growth happens through very many lifetimes of being every kind of form in creation and then every kind of human being. However, unlike many of these other traditions which may teach that the number of lives one lives are indefinite and the direction can be regressive or progressive based on virtuous or vicious actions in a given life, Baba teaches that the trajectory of this extremely long development has a set number of lives, is always progressive in terms of gathering and consolidating consciousness (except in one case), and the key to its unfolding drama is the notion of “winding and unwinding impressions” or sanskaras (saṃskāraḥ in Sanskrit), which are the means by which consciousness is gathered and held like a net for any given soul. Hopefully, these are enough broad strokes to move into a reflection about racial justice.
First some general points:
What seems to me the most salient at this time is the call to be like Meher Baba, a name that means “Compassionate Father.” Compassion means to “feel with” another her joys and sorrows, which is the important basis for the experience of empathy which is to feel as another. This in turn is the basis for the illumined experience of what Sri Aurobindo calls “knowledge by identity,” or “a pure awareness of the self-truth of things in the self and by the self” (The Synthesis of Yoga, p.831-832). Meher Baba also did not speak for 44 years (1925-1969). I think it is time for us who believe we are white not to speak as well, but to listen with our whole being. The call coming (since the fifteenth century) from People of Color to those of European descent is the call to really listen and to really become uncomfortable within our own bodies about the fact of racism and casteism, to hold the trauma with them. They are tired of making the call and no one listening. They are tired of holding the trauma by themselves when yet another Emmett Till or George Floyd or Brianna Taylor is lynched with almost no response, no recognition, and no accountability. As I see it, our job as people who have been admitted to the white club is to listen and to feel without speaking and without denying the discomfort.
We have Google so there is no excuse about finding the voices that are calling to us American white folk. There are resources like the PBS series created by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross”, or Nikole Hannah-Jones’ incredible NY Times podcast called 1619, or any number of films or interviews with Stephen Baldwin or Toni Morrison; or beloved Maya Angelou whom I met in the Greensboro, NC airport after having read her book I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings in my first year of college. In just a few minutes, her wisdom and towering presence humbled me in a way that I will never forget and that stays with me like a goad to stay uncomfortable about this issue of racism among other issues. There are so many films and documentaries on the topic, that it’s too numerous to recount. But I suggest that one start with the Netflix movie 13th, directed by Ava DuVernay which offers a helpful overview of the call Blacks are making to anyone willing to be a real collaborator in the effort to make a new world culture that recognizes their equal humanity. After all this (and save this for the last), if you have the courage to face up to how our society might begin to heal, please take the time to read Nikole Hannah-Jones’ and especially Ta-Nehisi Coates’ call for us to support a study on reparations in the Congress, what is now called HR 40, the Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act.
Listening and staying with the discomfort of facing this relic of the Kali Yuga is not even a huge request, but we who believe we are white seek to avoid it almost instantaneously, even unconsciously, which should be a sign of how deep this problem goes. It is not a problem of the past, but a history that very much binds our present and keeps us living an “old life,” trying to stay clothed with a “self” that wants to possess as much as possible. The call is for growth, to grow into more silent empathy, more silent understanding (“standing under”), understanding of what all scholars teach, that racism is a universal, structural phenomenon that helps “white” bodies more than “black” bodies swim in the currents of American life––without exception. The call is to share the suffering, to stop using places of privilege as bulwarks of ignorance and comfort. What if we just listened to Black people tell their stories, really listened and took in the criticism of our racism and casteism with grace and without defensiveness? As writer Robin DiAngelo writes, such a small step would be REVOLUTIONARY. If I could leave you, dear reader, with just one resource for your own work in this area, please read her book White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism. It is compassionately but boldly written especially for us liberals who believe that we are white and already woke to the issues, already passed on to higher spiritual principles of universal love and harmony that somehow anesthetize us from racism. Please think again. This knee-jerk reliance on universalism is one of the ways that perpetuates racism and is a dog-whistle that Blacks notice right away. “Oh, I’m not racist!”, you say? DiAngelo says, “Yes, we are, and if you are willing to look, let me show you how.” As DiAngelo writes, there is no such thing as a white non-racist in a white supremacist nation like ours because it is part of our cultural training as people who believe we are white. This is the stark reality. But are we so fragile that we cannot own up to it? Becoming anti-racist is a life-time commitment, not just a one-time event, the mindset is so engrained. I can offer some good news, though. Ever since my teenage years in the 1980s learning about what was then called “race relations” both formally and informally in Greensboro, NC, I have found it to be a difficult but incredibly satisfying process, one that never fails to expand my own sense of kinship with others, with the earth, and with Beloved God. I can attest that my many failures in this work are a treasure for this helpful growth. Such failures comprise a special doorway into the New Creation that Meher Baba says he has manifested, an absorption in the infinity of God in matter. Why not open the door to this New Life and become naked of selfhood by possessing nothing, especially the identity and burden of whiteness?
In my next post, I will take up the topic of karma and rebirth directly. Thank you for staying with me thus far.