So what is slavery?

To expand the idea of what slavery is to include both the world and internal states, I would redefine it as the following:

Slavery is the state of living with no perceivable choices.

You can see how this relates to the common definition of being bound in servitude to another. In such a state, there is no perceivable choice to disobey; punishment is too great and death can be meted out on a whim.

I like looking at slavery in terms of choice, because it shows how much of how we live our lives is enmeshed in a world view without it:

• Much of the employment in the world is where pay is low, there is little respect, and there is little option for quitting because of economic consequences. This is known as “wage slavery”.
• In society, depending on your social circle, there are certain assumptions that are not questioned without severe consequence. Noam Chomsky wrote about this occurring in the media. We’re trained to follow thought patterns by rote, automatically and without conscious choice. This could be known as “thought slavery”.
• In most relationships, each partner soon learns roles to play, topics to avoid, habitual behavior, and ways to avoid triggering pain in the other in order to keep the relationship stable. This is done without awareness or conscious choice, so could be called “relationship slavery”. It does not matter who looks like they have the upper hand in the relationship – if there is no perceived choice, it is still slavery.
• Internally, when we react to fears, we usually feel there are no choices. I may have a fear of missing out on life and losing control of the time in my life, and so I think I have to jump at things in order to both not miss out and not feel the fear. It is done automatically, without conscious choice. This is what fear does. This could be called “slavery of fear”.

Freedom

In the last post on enlightenment, I described enlightenment as simply living in the perception of Who You Are. You could also look at enlightenment as freedom, a state of being conscious of every little choice you have in every moment.

Life is choice. We are here to learn to choose with awareness. This is power.

Even in the self-improvement circles, we’re encourage to think we have problems, and thus cultivate the need to improve ourselves. It’s a need, not a desire. So if we look anew at the word of “need”, it implies there is no choice. The desire for balance turns into another form of slavery.

The term “workshop junkies” can apply to this. When you see something lacking in yourself, perhaps from feeling drained or from believing hype, you do not see a choice – you try to fill the lack. This is a form of addiction – which again is a perception of lack of choice, and therefore slavery.

The power of choice

Meditation – simply being in every moment fresh, aware and expansive – is related the full perception all the choices available. If I am watching my breath and my mind and someone insults me, I can breathe deeply and consciously choose my reaction. It could be a firm response. It could be a peaceful turning of the other cheek. It could be a humorous and gentle response. But if I am fully aware of all my choices, there is a great source of freedom and power available, knowing that whatever the other person does, they can not disconnect me from my inner foundation. If on the other hand, I go into reactivity, it is because I do not see a choice. I am attacked, therefore I must defend myself, even if doing so hurts me in the long run. This is being a slave to reactivity and habits.

If you think about what being loving to another is, choice is present during all manifestations of the expression of love. Often the best gifts are those that open doors and create more awareness of choices that have been overlooked. For instance, if you’re in a funk and depressed, being shown different perceptions, new experiences, new emotions, or new thoughts can offer much more awareness of the choices you’re making that contribute to your depression. Someone trying to cheer you up blinding without this can make you more depressed by contributing to that state of lack. Another possible gift might be to offer the choice of non-resistance – that one doesn’t have to fight depression as there are gifts inside it. This is a valid choice, and one with freedom inside it. But without the element of choice present, there is slavery, and where there is slavery there is no Love.

As Karen wrote in another blog, simply looking at everything as choice – no matter how demanding it seems – brings us back to ourselves. It is fairly easy to think of the world as being a dark threatening place filled with cold demands, which is the world of slavery – in this world we have no choice but to react. Bringing choice into it shows how responsive the world can be to our creative powers.

The world

Now, Martin Luther King didn’t just speak about race equality. In fact, it’s rarely mentioned in standard history books that for the latter years of his life, he spoke more often against the economic system that creates a form of slavery, as well as the military industrial complex. This was a man who moved from working against one form of slavery to seeing all beings as brothers and working against slavery in all its forms. He spoke equally of the power of love to bring light into the world.

I’m involved in activism myself, and I work for a world where people have all the choices they desire. There’s no reason with all our advances that we need to enforce slavery in any form whatsoever. We don’t need it economically, in parenthood, in relationships, or internally. Giving others freedom brings us all joy because of the vast interconnection we’re a part of. Giving it to ourselves creates ripples that show a better way of living to all the world.

When we inhabit the full power of the choices we have in every instant – which is to say our powerful and creative nature – that is when we learn that our identity is nothing Love. The most creative, powerful force in existence.

Blog roll! I quite enjoyed the Viriditas Spiritual Center blog: she’s an ex-nun working in a homeless shelter, demonstrating her life in a very loving, selfish fashion. It’s amazing how service teaches us not to be in slavery.

If you like this, please StumbleUpon – it works and I appreciate it!

To honor this, I thought I’d share some channeling Karen and I did surrounding what healing actually is. Any similarities to actual persons in the examples are 100% not an accident. Nothing is!

On to the channeling…

Questions: What exactly is healing? How does one “do it”? It seems like a lot of times we think of healing as “getting over it”.

When we use the word “heal” or “healing”, we are talking about allowing something to revert or assume its natural state. Most of you go through your lives with some part of you either physically or emotionally in a other than natural state. This creates conflicts and imbalances which allow you further opportunity for learning and growth. Healing, then, allows those parts of you to revert to their “normal” state: A state of rest, a state without conflict, a state of peace.

Let us suppose there is a man who has some issues surrounding touch. They come for a variety of reasons, and mostly relate to his feelings that others have had a lack of regard, a lack of acknowledgment for who he is. This lack of regard or acknowledgment manifested in various ways, depending on for whom it came, but this has been a pattern in his life and has created a sense of internal conflict for him. On the one hand he feels he should accept touch, but a part of him wants to say “f*ck you” (actual channeled words!) to himself and to all those others. So, how to heal this? What has he done to heal it? What will allow this situation to revert to it’s “natural” state?

A lot of this depends, of course, on choice. There are myriad possibilities for what this natural state could be. There is no one right answer. In the case of healing of physical malady, a burn on the skin, then one would expect the cells of that part of the body to end up looking like, feeling like, and acting like the ones that were there before the injury. Well, what if the choice is to hold a memory of the injury as a reminder for something. In that case, the body could create scar tissue that would serve as a reminder. It would feel different and it would look different. Who decides which one is the natural state?

So let’s go back to the man.  As we see it, he has many possibilities open to him, and any one of them could be (if he wanted them to be)  his new natural state. It’s a matter of perception. And he could change his mind about it at any time and choose something else. The only real choice then, is choosing whether to experience this as conflict or choosing to create a different perception.

Question (follow up): So what would be a different perception of this conflict described above?

Why must he choose one or the other of acceptance and “f*ck you”? Why should they be mutually exclusive? Why can’t he have both? Again, it’s simply a matter of perception. The perception that one or the other is wrong is simply a perception he has decided to accept. The perception likely came from social or cultural or familial sources, but he is in a position to choose to accept or not to accept any of those perceptions that he has adopted in the past. The trick, then, is in figuring out what he wants and using that as his perception. What he wants. We don’t say that is an easy process, for often what you want is covered over by what you think others want. And allowing yourself the freedom to identify what you want is often difficult.

Although to some people channeling can seem a little ‘cold’, being present with the energy is one of the warmest, loving experiences I know. It’s also detached. This may seem contradictory, but to me goes hand in hand with the entities involved loving us so much they would never interfere with our choices and learning. There’s also a sense they give us that they don’t see any ‘problems’ with us, even pain. It’s their perception of perfection in all my experiences and my past that greatly aids me on my journey.

Too add to the last paragraph, I notice when I’m being asked “what do you want?”, there’s really no “you” in that statement. Look into the eyes of the next person asking you that. It’s more like “what desire is there?”  This is a real symptom of a consumerist culture – there’s little curiosity on who the person is we interact with, even our selves. Imagine the confusion of a teenage boy when being asked this regarding his future career. Knowing what you want goes hand in hand with knowing who you are, which is the spiritual journey in a nutshell. Acknowledging the magnitude of this question brings a great deal of self-honesty and reflection, resulting in a sifting through what we’ve been told we want from the inner radiant desires from within. We all can grow out of what we’ve been programmed to be and inhabit the magnitude of what we are.

I hope it’s helped you as well!

It is important to note that the Kyoto accord was only meant as a starting point. It refers only to gases contributing to global warming, which is a subset of the pollution mankind gives to the world. Not only that, but it refers to 1990 levels, which is still a level beyond that which is truly sustainable. Furthermore, it is limited in scope. For instance, transportation over international waters is not Kyoto. So if you get your kiwi from New Zealand and you live in Canada, that 10,000 km of transportation and associated pollution is not counted under Kyoto, even if it causes pollution. Neither does air travel between those destinations. (This has more info) So even if Kyoto is implemented by all nations, including the US, it will not necessarily have the effect required to avoid environmental changes. counted in

Furthermore, some of the fixes proposed actually do more harm than good. For instance, there have been large efforts to create an alternate fuel supply based on ethanol made from corn and other crops. While this would be extremely helpful if there was an unlimited supply of arable land, in reality we have reached the limit of arable land on this planet. We cannot grow more crops without sacrificing the production of food, more rainforests, or other species on this planet. Often it’s been the latter two. As George Monbiot (and even Fidel Castro recently!) have written (see http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2007/03/27/a-lethal-solution/) , while theoretically ethanol is a “net zero greenhouse gas fuel”, in reality it is worse than gasoline because under the current economic system, much more carbon-dioxide sinks such as rainforests will be cleared to harvest ethanol-producing crops. The farming practices for these crops tend to be short term (as they are cash crops) and can easily lead to that land not being able to grow crops or trees for thousands of years.

All of this is fairly inherent in the economic system we’ve created. Governments and corporations have no inherent motivation to act for the long term common good; they look out for short term benefits. Political parties only focus on succeeding in the next election, and corporations are legally obligated to maximize profits, irrespective of the harm they may cause in the process. There’s more impetus to provide news that appears like they’re doing something than to make sacrifices for the long term. There is no way around this without changing the framework, which does not look likely at this time.

This is not meant to depress you at all; it’s meant to describe the current state of the world and provide a context for where real change will come from. In reality – and this goes for psychological changes as well – all change in the world comes from groups of individuals making changes of their own. This is always how it works. So any time people sit back in resignation because governments do not make the changes necessary, but do not make changes in their own life, they are really saying “I give my tacit approval for the way things are.” This has its parallels in dysfunctional relationships that people stay in without working towards change; there’s an unstated approval, however horrific the life is. Unfortunately, in both cases, things can easily get worse until the point where changes HAVE to be made. The problem is simply that in the case of the earth’s environment, billions of people may start dying -and a sizable percentage of the earth’s species becoming extinct – before the point is recognized by the majority of people that can make effective change. Individual changes DO matter, and have a sizeable and growing effect.

As many people have noted, in my eyes the most effective motto for positive change is Gandhi’s “be the change you wish to see in the world.” If you wish to have less environmental footprint in the world, live that.

It behooves us all to be aware of all the ramifications for our actions. Though most people don’t admit it, every time we purchase something we are in effect supporting all the byproducts and methods used to produce that item. If we buy beef from factory farms we support the cruelty, pollution, and possible rainforest degradation from harvesting the grains used to feed the beef. If we replace the carpet in our home we support all the pollutants used to make it, as well as that of the transport and the eventual disposal of it. If we purchase organic food from across the world, we’re still supporting the greenhouse gases produced by the transport. A car isn’t only about greenhouse gases; there’s the waste from mining, from steel plants, from the waste, and any chemicals going into rivers and oceans. I’m not saying any of these are bad in the absolute sense – I’m only saying there are consequences for supporting them. This goes for everything, from something innocent like snowboarding to buying diamonds from war-ravaged Africa. Every action we have on this earth (internal and external) will always produce waste and consequence; pretending otherwise is not good work. The earth is built to re-process waste, but it has its limitations as well.

The path of awareness means being more and more aware of cause and effect, product and waste, both within and without – and making more conscious choices based on them, rather than behaving automatically. Thus a fairly aware person may choose to get drunk one night in order to facilitate an emotional release, because the hangover is worth it; it’s a conscious choice. It is VERY hard to live with little environmental impact in the society we’ve created, but being aware of the effects the choices we have is a very good start and may lead to different choices. Not to mention have a domino effect on others’ awareness and choices!

Ultimately, I see the only thing I see helping our planet is a focus away from consumerism. Consumerism is the focus on things, that having more things are better. So long as we have this attitude, we will always want to push aside awareness of consequences for short term benefit. Consumerism can be emotional as well; how many of us have thought “MmMm, yumm, I want some of that!” at the beginning of a relationship that went sour soon after? It is a belief in lack, which of course is fundamentally untrue. We already have all that we need, and if our actions come from that state, we actually experience more even if from consumerists’ eyes we don’t seem to have very much.

Being less work-focused can also be a part of this. If we’re doing jobs we don’t love that feel empty in order to get more things, the natural tendency is to fill that emptiness with more emptiness – like things. This too will take time to change in society as a whole, but awareness helps in this as well.

I invite everyone to comment on what they’ve discovered regarding better choices they’ve made, and informing of discoveries on actual wastes/consequences common products have!