The Unclad Soul

I have asked this before, but I still want to know. What does any of it mean? Why are we here? Why do we so easily give in to hate and resist giving in to love? Why is aggression okay but the way of peace is not?   Why are we all so afraid? And of what? Are we, as religion teaches, just evil at heart? Are we already ruined at birth? Is it in our DNA to make wrong choices, so that we require an outside force, God or Karma or Allah or whomever, to coerce us to do good, through threats of punishment, suffering, damnation, and hell? Are we not able to do that on our own without being forced? I believe we are. I know too many good, decent people who are not driven by evil and selfishness. But unfortunately, they are always overshadowed, especially today, by an ugly, arrogant, mean-spirited crowd of self-aggrandizers, who are bitter, angry people. People obsessed with fears and prejudices and resentments. These people are all around us. In the government. In the media. ...

There are forces in society today that keep luring us into some kind of primitive, relic thinking; thinking that is stripped of compassion and decency and thrives only on some prehistoric brutal mode of survival. It is thinking that is soaking in psychologically damaging fear. It fills us with paranoid dread and suspicion. In this thinking we forget how to care about others. We are too busy building some safe zone for ourselves, some small bubble of existence that keeps out all the bad things and all the bad people. It is thinking that shrivels and diminishes us into people almost unrecognizably human. Hate radio is a part of these forces; voices dripping with the most crude, vicious hateful stuff, meant to divide us from our better thoughts and acts and from one another. So are horribly biased TV pundits who cash in on scaring people, who make up outrageous lies for the sheer pleasure of ratings and big salaries. Bogus politicians who are basically just puppets with financial str...

“Is your first responsibility to yourself? The question is misleading; that is, it misleads the person who takes it to heart. It’s like asking, must you shift your weight in order to walk? Of course you must, but anyone who concentrates first on shifting their weight will not walk well.” – Hugh Prather, Writer/Mystic

Our maniacal obsession with money in this country is ruining us. This obsession has corrupted and made incompetent our political system. It now works only for the rich and powerful. It is not capitalism that guides our politics; it's greed. Congress is populated not with patriots but with plutocrats, filthy rich money bags recklessly and arrogantly working for themselves and their billionaire patrons not the American people they supposedly represent. According to Stephan Richter, publisher and editor-in-chief of “The Globalist,” a daily online magazine on the global economy and politics, the average American family has a net worth of $120,000. The average American Congressman has a net worth of nearly $700,000. Two-thirds of Congress are millionaires. It is a rich man's club and the rest of the country is not welcome. This obsession with money has corrupted and is making many of our religious institutions irrelevant and repugnant. The prosperity gospel now trumps the tea...

There is a lurid kind of selfishness among us today. It struts itself in religious language and patriotic mumblings. It looks out on the world and our nation and sees only forces out to take away one’s security, one’s freedom, one’s money. This selfishness never sees the needs of people, the scarring hurts, the struggle to be human, the longing to have self respect and to be loved. It knows no empathy, only resentment bathed in bitterness. It convinces us that people on the fringes of survival are losers, void of ambition and initiative, wasters of resources we want for ourselves. This selfishness scorns the provisions of government agencies that exist to assist single moms stuck in the debris of betrayal and abandonment. It dismisses the limits of the disabled who are seen by this selfishness as cripples useless to us and to our economy, beggars looking for a handout. It disregards the elderly in their tiny homes with leaky roofs and thin walls that can’t hold back the cold o...

There is a call upon us today.  It comes from the forces of good within us and from outside us in the universe.  You can say it’s God if you want to.  Or you can say it is a force inside our human spirit, the stuff we were made of at our creation, which all the sacred texts of every religion say was, at our origin, good. It is a call to basic decency, to common sense, to getting our heads out of the muck and breathing some fresh air and getting in touch with our goodness again. We are stuck in the dirt, stuck down to our souls, filthy inside and out, stained with our own fears and prejudices and anger and hate.  We have given in to our meanness and it has made us a nation of moral pygmies.  Our wrath, our fuming oaths, our senseless petty fury—all of that is mountainous, a huge growing thing within us and it has left us with pint-sized virtues that are being more and more diminished by the day. We are greedy and tacky and mean, nasty and spiteful a...

And so the world goes on in its complexities, in its bewilderment. And we in America contribute to it one way or another. Violence does a number on the innocent in places so absent of hope so bankrupt of the slightest respect for human life that finally the dignity of people turns stale and then sours and life crawls in despair for all of them.  And this happens in the ghettos of Chicago as well as the bloody streets of Syria. War still carries the day, still gets all the attention, still struts in defiance of everything decent and humane and sucks dry the economies of the oppressed while boosting with endless bounty the finances of those who ride this beastly machine to their fortunes. The shrillest, pettiest, most shameless acts of selfishness and greed and blatant lying unfold daily in places of governance, not just in evil empires and far off places of darkness but right here in our own political campaigns, among people running for the highest offices in America, an...