Radical Wholeness: The Embodied Present and the Ordinary Grace of Being by Philip Shepherd

Author:Philip Shepherd [Shepherd, Philip]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SOC002000 Social Science / Anthropology / General
ISBN: 9781623171773
Publisher: North Atlantic Books
Published: 2017-12-04T23:00:00+00:00

This is a deeply cautionary description. If you look for it, what is being described is in evidence all around us. Our politics are charged with a vehemence for the “greedy rights of ‘my and mine’”; no politician today, for instance, would dare to utter John F. Kennedy’s advice, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”

And when we reflect on the phrases “Self-terrorized, fear-haunted, alert at every hand to meet and battle back the anticipated aggressions of his environment,” they echo the mind-set of the National Rifle Association and reflect the fears of allowing your children to play outside, and the need to lock your door the minute you step inside your home. Politicians have learned that fear trumps hope when it comes to voter motivation.

And when Campbell writes of “the uncontrollable impulses to acquisition,” he is describing precisely the restless cravings that drive our consumer culture—and indeed, our society at large. Having embraced the tyrant as the model of success, our culture is displaying the outcomes we would expect.

The tyrant’s fantasies live in us all. They show up in every urge we feel to assert a special status for ourselves; in every harsh judgment of another that raises or defends our worth by comparison; in every thought that we stand apart from nature, or need to control it; in every instance in which we harden against the Present, or withdraw from it; in every impulse to impose a top-down solution on our lives. Each of these tendencies is an urge to turn away from wholeness; any such urge is a contraction towards self-achieved independence; and any such contraction is an attempt by the inner tyrant to exert control.

To accurately assess the threat posed by our identification with the tyrant, you might appreciate that, on a global scale, our alienation from the wholeness of the world and the anxieties stirred up by that alienation could justifiably be deemed the deepest crisis of our age—for it leads to a corrosion of our social support systems (family, community, society), the despoiling of the natural world and the heedless destruction of other species. It keeps us from seeing that the world’s wounds are our personal wounds, just as it inclines us to try to heal our personal wounds by concentrating on the self and seeking to manage it, rather than by softening into the wholeness that is held by the harmonies of the Present.

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