When I pitched this focus for Sunday’s Livestream on the Ram Dass Foundation platform, I knew we would be sailing stormy seas from here on. But, of course, I did not know we would be navigating the high-noon showdown of Trump’s cult-driven coup with its far-reaching tentacles wrapped around almost every aspect of American life, from its core power structures into the depth of its disaffected psyche.

The last few days, while shocking, are not surprising. Yet, the speed of so much unmasked, while profoundly unsettling, is oddly gratifying. To have made clear and conscious, for so many, the foundational rot within the American project, alongside this moment of clear choice going ahead, feels cathartic.

The journey through Trump has always been, in significant part, about catalyzing an expose of America’s shadow, and within that gaslit, brutish curriculum, an opportunity to clarify where we stand individually, institutionally, collectively, and because the American empire is still a primary power fulcrum globally.

In 2016, just before that terrible election, I wrote a blog warning titled, “Trump, America’s Ebola Virus,” making the point that he was worse than Ebola, which eats away at flesh. In contrast, Trump was about destroying the very soul of America and radically stymying a world on the cusp of marshalling its collective will to tackle the multiple crises that constitute our planetary emergency.

None of us wanted the curriculum for the last four years. Still, it’s been both unavoidable and inevitable, given the unaddressed, unacknowledged, uncompensated grievous injustices the US founded itself on. That, in brief, would be the Eurocentric, Patriarchal, Racist, Imperial, Colonial project.

While we’re not “out of the woods” yet, by any means, we have collectively dodged a dreadful bullet, which is Trump’s Fascist takedown, and with that, a rapid devolving of the higher dream of humanity to which we are called to more fully realize.

We all know time is ticking down on securing any hope of a sustainable path forward. Still, perhaps, we now also irrevocably see that we cannot embody such a course without a core systemic overhaul and a deconstruction of hierarchical oppression.

In a chaotic, distorted way, those baying, pissing, defecating, dressed in cult garb, ransacking the hallowed Capitol, are trying to access some deeper shared initiatory “truth.” Perhaps, some meaning and placement within the failed American dream, from which they probably never felt included.

However, engaging this malcontent through an inversion of all societal norms, without any ethical or wise guide rails, left them wide open to possession by the unprocessed shadow. A ghostly, cold planet where not only rage and hate stalk but also the great demons of the past who have resurfaced in horrific slogans like “Auschwitz Camp Staff / 6 Million Wasn’t Enough.”

With no real, worked out, integrated inner ethic beyond a tribally based, obsessive narcissism, millions, it seems, have been made vulnerable to occultish manipulation and mass delusion. While complicit themselves, they have been taken advantage of by Trump’s psychopathy, by craven politicians, by those peddling conspiracy fetishes, and by media hate mongers, to name some of the primary players feeding off their loyalty.

All of this has delivered a pseudo-culture that is so abstracted from a more profound sense of real, embodied belonging that what is a soulless vacuity is parading as an all-knowing messiah.

This profound loss of bearings, when instead we need to know we belong to each other in a vastly complex, ensouled world, has left a mass of the population in a psychotic break from reality. Unfortunately, just at a time when we need to face hard truths straight on. Instead, encouraged by sociopaths to surf an absurd, alternative universe, where lies are truth and truth is lies, our shared, liveable world is being pulled apart and fast destroyed.

This cultivation of hate and delusion is profoundly consequential, not only for society but also for friendships, families, communities, and institutions. We have all likely been impacted by a twisted agenda that has successfully sown a seemingly irreconcilable division through the fraying fault lines of our relationships.

As I write this, I’m struck that while 2020 was an initiatory year through the shadow and its curriculum, 2021 is about applying what we have learned. If we’ve discovered anything, it is that we cannot reach for our evolutionary arch without undoing the foundations of white supremacy, misogyny, and extractive, predator, oligarchic Capitalism.

Neither can we project all our power onto a President, political and religious authorities, or take refuge down some conspiratorial rabbit hole without deadly consequences. In other words, we have to grow up, and roll up our collective sleeves, and do whatever it is our heart is calling us to do.

So, then. What is showing up with love got to do with all this?
I aim to explore this a little in this Livestream. I’d also like to inquire whether our spiritual practice equips us for the task ahead or enables a massive bypass and an abdication from this decade’s great work.

To pick up the proverbial snake at the wrong end is to deliver a poisoned chalice at a moment when instead, the portal is open for us to take our power back, from wherever we’ve projected it, and marshal ourselves for the task ahead.

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https://www.ramdass.org/event/showing-up-with-love-for-whatever-comes-next-with-thanissara/