Is the spiritual political?
How my psychic experiences have shaped how I view political life in America
I didn’t grow up in a political household. Sure, my working class parents dutifully voted every four years, but politics wasn’t a conversation at the dinner table. We talked sports. Shared about school. Perhaps unconventionally, we did talk about dreams and what they might mean. Much of those conversations were about dream symbols and what they could potentially be telling us about our own personal, spiritual growth. Then one day, I had a kind of dream I’d never had before:
My point of view was as if I was looking through a glass table up at all these men in suits gathered around me. They were powerful men of all different shapes, sizes, colors and creeds. There was a roar of chatter — some of which was in languages I did not understand. Men shuffled around the table, and there was passionate, spirited discussion back and forth. Suddenly, a big map was sprawled out over my point of view and I could faintly see the outlines of countries drawn on what was a map of the world. Some fingers pointed to a spot near the center of the map, what felt like Egypt to me, and suddenly a voice — in an indiscernible accent —very audibly pronounced, “He’s going to do it without us. It doesn’t matter what we say, he’s going to go in by himself. He’s going to do it.” - Awakening Soul Force, Chapter 4
When I woke up from this dream, it left a residual weight on my psyche I would eventually come to recognize as a “psychic” dream. As it would turn out, I had this haunting insight weeks before the United States unilaterally invaded Iraq without UN Security Council approval. When the invasion became headline news, the residual tension remaining in me from that dream finally released. That’s when I knew my night vision and the war were connected in a way I could not comprehend at the time.
In the short time after this revelation, I would find myself dreaming about American combat overseas at night, only to come across the same scenes in pictures and footage on newscasts throughout the week. Frankly, it was confusing. Echoes of explosions, the rat-tat-tat of gunfire — some mornings I’d wake up feeling like I had been right there on the front lines. Other nights, I felt like a passionless observer watching the action with a neutral, omnipresent eye. It was a lot to hold in my young mind. I was just a high school football junkie who had taken an interest in meditation and metaphysics for personal growth. I had no idea I’d be so quickly attuned to the collective psyche in this way.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this initial experience lately. Not just because it was the beginning of my now twenty-five or so year journey with psychic awareness, but because my intuitive path seems to have long been intertwined with American politics. And fortunately or unfortunately, there’s no burying my head in the sand at what comes through. I dreamt about Benjamin Netanyahu’s second rise to power in 2009, Obama’s reliance on the use of military contractors when we were keeping a ‘light footprint’ in Afghanistan, several mass shootings at home and abroad, Donald Trump’s first election, the January 6th attack, Elon Musk chaos, and as of recent, the accelerating threat of tech-juiced authoritarianism here in America.
I have had so many insights about collective events that have come to pass, it’s hard not to associate part of my psychic awareness with political power grabs, war and brutal violence. Having grown up in a quiet part of California in a safe and loving community, it’s been my connection to the unseen that has informed me of the darker horrors of the Earth plane. Has my physical body been to these wars, been shot at in a school or chased by vigilante forces? No. But these atrocities terrorize people around the globe daily, and strangely have the potential of touching my life and people I love in America today. Based on my psychic dreams, not to mention a general sense of empathy and reason, war and violence are not what I aim to cultivate as a lived experience for myself or anyone else.
In contrast, the same psychic awareness that would bring me visions of violence being perpetrated globally has also allowed me to personally touch dimensions of love and wisdom that I can only describe as divine. Through dedicated meditation and prayer I have felt my union with God, with Christ and my connection with all things. While my dreams at times bring the intensity of collective darkness, my spiritual practice often brings a serene and surrendered peace, inspired insights and a depth of connection with fellow souls that I simply cannot deny. Rather than violence and division, connection and cooperation are lived experiences I am interested in cultivating for myself and others.
I often think about the single garment of destiny Dr. King wrote about in his Letter From Birmingham Jail. His words, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” As I’ve gotten older and my psychic and spiritual journey has taken me where it has, these words hit in a remarkably different way today. Not just in an intellectual or philosophical sense, but in a lived sense. I know each one of us is a thread in a larger garment of shared experience. I know that war, violence and exploitation is a harm to the individuals involved and the collective soul of humanity. I know our oneness is inescapable. It is deniable to our detriment — but it is inescapable.
I think philosophically, we as a culture have a vague sense of justice. It’s a word we use, but may broadly speak of it in terms of equality, rights and wrongs, lawful or unlawful acts. But if I seek an anchor for justice in something spiritual, something larger and more enduring, it would be anchored in this inescapable network of mutuality that Dr. King speaks of. For if we are all children of God, the creative compassionate intelligence animating life, then surely we all have a right to live our lives in peace, to enjoy our freedom and autonomy, and to enjoy that in relationship to others. Even if we strip away the concept of God, we are all citizens of the Earth. The ground beneath my feet is the same ground that peaks in the Himalayas and plunges to the depths of the Mariana Trench, and touches every person in between.
Therefore, this oneness of mind I have psychically touched, and the oneness of physical experience I enjoy as a man of the Earth, has become my moral, spiritual and political touchstone. It becomes the North Star I use to check if I am on course or not, if I am living in alignment with a principle that is fundamentally true about human existence. To me that is a principle of oneness, the interconnected nature of all things seen and unseen. I could call living in alignment with this principle of oneness ‘justice’ and not living in alignment with the principle of oneness an ‘injustice’, and I can measure my actions and the actions of others against this principle. I do so not to make myself or anyone else right or wrong, it’s a matter of alignment, checking to see if the ship is heading toward the destination I feel compelled to reach.
In an effort to live a just life, I find myself constantly checking in with myself and this organizing principle: If oneness is the truth of my existence, how does that express itself?
How do I honor oneness and wholeness within myself? Can I do this fully for me without diminishing another? Can I fully honor another without diminishing myself? Is it possible finding synergy between self and other unlocks unrealized potential for us both?
How do I choose to communicate? Is it in alignment with the truth out of respect for myself and respect for another? Is it possible, that out of truthful relationship, we find understanding and shared reality?
How do I choose to make a living? Can I do so without being exploited? Can I do so without exploiting another? Is it possible to build, rise and expand, while also minimizing harm — together?
How does oneness impact how I approach conflict? Can I honor my own dignity in disagreement and also honor the dignity of another at the same time? Can our disagreements and incongruence potentially lead to our most ground breaking discoveries about what’s next?
If oneness is the truth of my spiritual experience, how does this inform the type of agreements I enter into with my family, friends, neighbors, collaborators? Can I find a balance between sovereignty and sacrifice that honors the best and highest of all involved?
These questions reflect my impulse to live a just existence in my own right, one that reflects the balance and harmony of life expressed through the principle of oneness. My desire to shift insight and understanding into known experience is precisely how the spiritual becomes political in my mind. As soon as another person is introduced into relationship with me, my spiritual understanding becomes political through relational expression. How I conduct myself, how I speak, how I handle conflict, how I collaborate with another all become a testing grounds to demonstrate the depth or lack of my spiritual understanding.
Participating in the messy act of finding the balance between sovereignty and sacrifice in personal relationships, in work, in my civic life, that’s been the meat of my human experience. Life is a clunky and often unsexy creative process as we fumble and bumble through our own personal growth that is inextricably linked to a collective growth process — whether we like it or not, whether we acknowledge it or not. If my psychic life is any indication, the dual nature of human consciousness sprouts everything from the terror of war and violence to the transcendent bliss of oneness with all that is. What a weighty polarity we’ve chosen to carry — both consciously and unconsciously.
So, here I am — here we are — all living together somewhere on the spectrum in-between. And the questions we are all called to answer is, what is our North Star? What’s the guiding principle we’re using to organize our lives? Globally, we are 8 billion people on the planet, with 8 billion perspectives shaped by unique life experiences. Here in the United States we are more or less 330 million people. So how do we find unity in our diversity? How do we balance sovereignty and sacrifice at such scale? It starts with us and how we choose to live.
For me, I have landed on this principle of oneness. It’s the only principle that anchors me in something that feels undeniably true about the nature of our human existence, while at the same time providing a guiding light for how I ought to organize my life. It informs what I strive to create in my shared experience with others. History shows I’m not the only person who perhaps arrived here. After all, the official motto of the United States can be found, held in the beak of an Eagle and printed widely on all our money:
E PLURIBUS UNUM
Latin. It translates as out of many, one.
Interesting.
Maybe the spiritual really is political after all…
-jb
