The Conscious Activist: Where Activism Meets Mysticism by James O'Dea

Author:James O'Dea [O'Dea, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: The Conscious Activist: Where Activism Meets Mysticism
ISBN: 9781780288437
Publisher: Watkins Media
Published: 2014-12-08T23:00:00+00:00

As I drove back to Washington, I couldn’t help feeling I was going back into the belly of the all-devouring beast. My experience told me that people like me were anonymous lunchmeat in the jaws of power.

Yet it was important to represent power in whatever ways you could on behalf of those whose voices had been silenced. Constantly you had to practise speaking truth to power, as when I confronted President Clinton in a face-to-face meeting: ‘Mr President, you have failed to use the White House as a bully pulpit for human rights. In fact, I cannot think of a single human rights hero you have met with.’ Warren Christopher, his Secretary of State, who was standing beside him, blushed and tried to invent excuses. But to his credit the President knew better than to get hostile with Amnesty International. That would be like hitting your grandmother. He took the scolding and promised to do better.

This mythic activation from the Bushmen of the Kalahari invited me not to dilute my fiery moral tones into milquetoast politeness, but to see how I could begin to embrace a much larger story. It made me want to reach deeper into cause and effect and understand whole-system functioning. I also realized I was becoming tired of constant condemnation. I needed to find a way to be a part of healing both perpetrators and victims and get to the roots of human wholeness. I needed to understand what really might constitute the path to collective transformation.

The next day as I left our Northern Virginia home, I was stopped in my tracks. My first instinct was that what I saw before me was a perfect hallucination. Sitting on the mailbox in the early morning sunlight was a praying mantis. In my ignorance at the time, I didn’t even know that the praying mantis could be found in Virginia, let alone in a suburb not far from the nation’s capitol. I drew closer and looked into its almond-shaped eyes. That’s all it was, a moment. Then the mantis jumped into the white azalea bushes that surrounded the house.

It was like being winked at by the divine. And it was deep confirmation that the archetypal realm can bleed through into everyday reality.

Tuk-Tuk.

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