From Andrew Harvey: Why is Sacred Activism crucial for our future? The economic, political, spiritual world crisis that we currently find ourselves in is a call to action. It is an opportunity for us to understand the realities around us and to rally together to do something different. We now have before us the possibility of using this current crisis to empower ourselves, and others, to actually get the planet to work. Embracing an uncertain future, we need to support leaders, who are inspired, courageous and effective to rise up. We need to renew the energy of people who are burnt out and apathetic in institutions and corporations. If we point individuals to an inner compass that renews their passion, there is hope for real solutions and inspired creativity. All that we need is already there, in the currency of people, and it only needs to be tapped into. Both contemporary spiritual seekers, and activists have not been connected to a vision of action that is inspiring, hopeful and rooted in deep spiritual wisdom and compassion. Some spiritual seekers, for instance, use spiritual knowledge as a subtle way of dissociating from hands-on realistic social, economic, and political engagement in the world, thereby ensuring that the world and its people will be abandoned in its hour of extreme need. Activists, on the other hand, are prone to complete exhaustion, burn out, and debilitating and divisive rage and are often cut off from the healing and transforming wisdom of the spiritual traditions and the simple techniques, prayers, and practices that could sustain, inspire, and nourish them in their heroic endeavors. We have seen that in the very heart of the chaos of the modern crisis, an extraordinary lineage has arisen of ordinary people who have fused deep spiritual knowledge, experience, and practice, with wise, incessant action for justice and peace. Having emerged against all odds, they accomplished the unimaginable. The vision of Sacred Activism is dedicated to honoring and continuing the tremendous work of extraordinary ordinary people such as Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, the Dalai Lama, Nelson Mandela, Rosa Parks and Desmond Tutu. Each of these individuals rose up to meet the challenges of their time with great spiritual grace and integrated inner contemplation with decisive action. The work of Paul Ray and Paul Hawken reveals to us that there is in our contemporary world an arising of different groups of concerned people anxious for change. Sacred Activism provides these people with a system of thought and traditional wisdom practices to help support the kind of transformative change that is necessary for the world to be preserved. "The one hope for the future lies, I believe, in Sacred Activism - the fusion of the deepest spiritual knowledge and passion with clear, wise, radical action in all the arenas of the world, inner and outer. We have very little time in which to awaken and transform ourselves, to be able to preserve the planet, and to heal the divisions between the powerful and the powerless. Let us go forward now with firm resolve and profound dedication." --Andrew Harvey
Posted on: Wed, 25 Sep 2013 00:27:24 +0000