An ugly, angry, pus-filled sore actually serves a purpose - it draws out the poisons that are lurking beneath the surface of the skin. Yes, it hurts, yes it's worrying, yes it's unattractive and once it bursts, it takes a while before the resulting open sore heals and recedes into memory. But the toxins are carried away from the vital organs and the entire organism is healthier as a result.
The parallel to our social climate is marked, as it seems to have grown very toxic. The schisms between black and white, left and right, rich and poor, young and old, religious and agnostic have widened. Rarely do I have a conversation these days that does not contain an anecdote about someone going off the rails and behaving with previously unthinkable vitriol. Road rage is more common, squabbles between neighbors and within families seem to be on the rise. I have asked myself repeatedly if this is 'truth' or if it is just my perception. But the evidence continues to pile up that there is an epidemic of incivility and, all too often, deadly behavior.
In my experience, the cause of such behaviors is, at its root, always fear. And fearful people are dangerous people,
At a dinner party recently, the inevitable political conversation arose with the accompanying expression of fear about the election and more especially the fear that Donald Trump has a chance of winning the presidency. I expressed what I believe to be true which is that Trump is serving a role of monumental importance in our culture - that of drawing out the venom that is coursing through the very lifeblood of our society. It seemed as though my dinner companions couldn't hear me. Their dialogue continued on the same vein, 'What if? What will we do? Shall we all move to Canada?'
What I found most notable about that conversation was this sense of barely disguised glee in the fear that America might elect an individual like Donald Trump. It was a dazzling 'aha' moment for me. I realized that even the people who will show up at the polls and vote with their intelligent, rational brain are being triggered by this Circus Maximus that is the election process in America.
Like children around a campfire telling ghost stories or fans in a football stadium screaming for their team, people are entertained by the prospect of more horrors to come. That is what's dangerous. It's rather like the people who go to the Indy 500 and cluck their tongues at the spectacle of a fiery death by car crash but who go back year after year because secretly (or not) they want to see that gruesome car crash.
This is the source of the danger in our culture. It is our individual appetite for drama allowed to overwhelm our better selves. It is the abandonment of our higher principles in favor of the desire for entertainment that leads us down the path of collective uncivility.
The antidote is to be awake. To have the 'observer' so well established in your consciousness that even when tempted to react with fear or anger to a situation, the witness intervenes. The observer as outline in The Message: A Guide to Being Human is the part of your consciousness that views everything in the context of infinity, in the context that everything here on this physical plane is illusionary and that Earth is where we come to follow our Soul's curriculum to gather knowledge and to evolve. Meditation, chanting, breathing exercises, yoga are all means to help bring about greater consciousness but the most important key is to sit in the witness every moment of every day and from that perspective view all the drama unfolding before you.
Every day we are presented with opportunities to feel fearful - mass shootings, the refugee crisis, climate change, degradation of the world's oceans, gridlock in Washington, rising cost of living, even things like automated phone trees and someone dinging your new car when opening their door. Trigger upon trigger. But by sitting in the witness, we have a chance to respond rather than react. We have the ability to contribute our thought, energy, action and all of our better selves to evolving as a race rather than devolving.
What matters in each of these instances is our own behaviors. If we respond from our instinctual, primitive brain the toxicity in our culture is reinforced.
However, if we, as individuals, hold ourselves to a higher standard and respond from a higher, more evolved part of ourselves that knows that reaction and retaliation only escalate incivility, then we have a chance to up-level the dialogue in our culture, but perhaps even more importantly, we can engage in behaviors that draw off the poison and begin to mend the wounds that divide us.
Sometimes, it takes a boil coming to a head, to draw the toxins out of a body. And sometimes it takes someone voicing ugly, fear-based, bigoted, ignorant ideology to reveal the darkness in the collective human psyche. That's what the Trump phenomenon seems to be, a nasty toxin that needs to be drawn out of the American body politic and released so that the healing process may begin.