Your Inner Terrorist

Your Inner Terrorist
I don't know about you, but it seems I'm a little behind this week, not only in my writing, but in blowing up busloads of innocent people.

Stacy Lawson puts the "ass" in "asinine" with a piece on Huffington Post, entitled "We Are The Terrorists." Here's an excerpt:

To see Bhutto's death as an isolated act of cruelty by an evil group of terrorists, distant and separate from each of us, would be to miss a profound teaching moment.

Lucky for us poor naifs, Stacy has a Ph.D. in bombastic flatulence.

It gets better:

We are all terrorists. Before you dismiss this out of hand, please take a closer look. The terrorist inside you wages acts of aggression on those you believe to oppress you. The dictator inside you declares martial law when it suits you. The suicide bomber martyrs you and wounds others in your attempts to be heard and to be right.

Global events are a mirror of aggressions taking place on a daily basis within each of us. This poses necessary and immediate questions: Who am I terrorizing? What part of myself or others am I assassinating?

It is our instinctual nature to polarize the world (and ourselves) into good and evil and then attempt to eradicate all evil from view - through repression and denial or through aggression and violence. Until we reconcile the violent parts of ourselves that we have dispelled into the shadow, we will continue to play out violent scenes on the world stage.

We have denied and discarded the unsavory bits of ourselves for so long, that we can no longer clearly see how we're creating our troubled world. By definition, it is not easy to see that which is in the shadow. It is outside of our peripheral vision. It is our blind spot, the Achilles heal of the individual and of humanity. What we despise or deny we push deep into the dark recesses of the psyche, hoping it will be forever hidden there. But instead, contorted into all manner of gruesome expression that we no longer recognize as our own shadow, we confront these twisted and alienated bits of self over and over until they are reintegrated. Ms. Bhutto's death is a painful illustration of our collective shadow.

Uh, my "shadow side" wants to ask customer service people at Verizon if they were trained by the Three fucking Stooges, but somehow, I restrain myself. You want to see a real "shadow side"? Here's the result of one or more of them.

But, let's not lose track of the wisdom of The Dalai Lawson:

Our small daily acts of aggression may seem like nothing compared to the brutal assassination of a revered public figure. But the collective consciousness is an assimilation of each of us. As is the microcosm, so is the macrocosm. As long as we perpetuate the fracturing and fragmentation of disallowed parts of ourselves, stuffing our emotions and perpetuating a sense of shame and worthlessness even on a small scale, we will continue to create terrorists.

Emil Durkeim meets "I'm Okay/You're Okay" meets "Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret." (In Ashtanga class at Yogaworks.)

I'm guessing the conversation would go something like this:

"Mommy, where do terrorists come from?"

"We create them when we don't share our cookies."

Stacy earnests on about why we "create terrorists":

Why? Because operating from this fractured consciousness, we don't have the wisdom or the capacity to create a world that fosters wholeness. If we are not whole, we cannot know or create a world that is whole. As such, there will always be disenfranchised, forgotten and expendable parts. Those expendable parts and expendable people will rise up to terrorize us.

In order to heal this schism, we must reconcile with the shadow. It will require us to collect up all the forgotten, orphaned, disowned, disgusting and estranged parts of ourselves...and bring them back home. All that we have denied and disdained must be held with equal love. Only then can we transmute the lower nature into higher forms. Integration of the poles of our experience is the path toward wholeness.

We are all necessary in this collective healing process since "the only true battle is the one that rages inside" of us...

Tell that to a guy whose wife and kids got turned into raw hamburger by a nutbag with a nail bomb strapped around his waist.

My big inner battle at the moment? Figuring out who this girl is trying to be. And/or whose prose she's trying to copy. I mean, real people don't talk or write like this, do they? I mean, not unless they're getting paid to play cult leaders on Law & Order or something.

Oh, wait -- here's something. From another Stacy Lawson HuffPo piece, "Igniting The Modern Mystic":

I've always adored the great mystics - Hafiz, Rumi, St. Teresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross. Their writings transcend our mundane human perception and give glimpses into the rapturous experience of a higher reality. Truth be told, I fancy myself a modern day mystic, someone weaving together these worlds of the mundane and the magical.

And all along, I was picturing a rectum with a Dell.

More turds of wisdom:

When asked at dinner parties or social events what kind of work I do, I find it an awkward question. The simple answer is that I'm an entrepreneur, investor, teacher, speaker and writer. But, there's far more to it than that. As Khalil Gibran once wrote, "work is love made visible." I find building social ventures and connecting with people in a teaching environment as ecstatic as love-making. The ultimate reason to create, teach, speak or write is to dissolve the veil of separation and reveal the intimate union of all existence...to awaken a recognition of ourselves as One with all that is.

So when Arianna Huffington asked me to write a column on conscious living and spirituality I was simultaneously thrilled and tentative. Thrilled because these topics provoke great joy for me. Tentative because authenticity demands a level of revealed public dialogue that I've previously saved for engaged audiences or private circles. It demands an even deeper level of "love made visible."

Lest this sound trite, let me add that the mystic's love is not blind to the complication and suffering in the world. It is all-embracing, using the full human experience as fuel for the raging fire of awakening. Our modern lives are difficult. We face social injustices, environmental crises, war, economic imbalances, poverty, hunger, a vast array of suffering across our planet.

A little vaster now that you're blogging -- although we do appreciate the unintended laughs, which should give us a nice little break between reports of actual terrorism. You know, the kind where there are bloody arms, legs, and heads all over the pavement?