Praying Our Way Forward Through the Dance of Opposites

I want to speak to all of you directly from my deepest experience about what I see clearly is happening in America and in our world. But first I want to take a big step back. I want to share with you the deepest wisdom of all the mystical traditions.

This can be summarized very simply. God and reality are a dance of opposites that emanates from an unknowable mystery of love. What this means is that even the worst tragedies contain seeds of astonishing redemption and even the most astounding advances contain seeds of potential sabotage and destruction.

In order to understand this, all the mystical traditions agree that you need to be as aligned as possible with the mysterious void and with peace and subtle joy, out of which the dance of opposites itself emerges to do love’s evolutionary will.

This is of course extremely and constantly demanding, because it challenges us all to do the inner work to purify our mind so it becomes a stainless mirror into which the mystery can shine its truths. Please take this in at the deepest level of which you are capable, because it is always the key of keys.

Let us turn next to what is the most important instruction I know about how to approach both our political crisis and the multiple crises now forming and propelling the obvious global dark night that is unfolding on the planet. This is Jesus’s instruction to his disciples—to marry in their inmost being the wisdom of the serpent and the innocence of the dove.

The innocence of the dove is the joy, hope and radiant vision given to those who open to the mystical path and especially to those who understand the great and saving truth that evolutionary mystics such as Sri Aurobindo, Bede Griffiths and Jesus himself have revealed to us: That the greatest light is born out of the deepest darkness and that humanity is destined to be transfigured into an embodied divine humanity through a period of an almost unimaginably difficult ordeal.

The wisdom of the serpent is the radical and illusion-less knowledge of everything in us that does not want this birth, that fights secretly and bitterly against it and that is addicted to and seduced by the dark forces that are also part of the mystery’s alchemical working.

If you only have the innocence of the dove, you will be like a lamb led to slaughter in a world of addicted and dangerous people. If you only have the wisdom of the serpent, you will often be tempted by despair, paralysis, exhausting rage, denial of possibility and even the kind of nihilism and lethal fantasy we all now see exploding around us.

If you pray for the grace, however, to fuse these seeming opposites in your depths together, what will be given to you is a wholly new level of embodied divine consciousness which will enable you to stay inspired and steady and luminous with realistic hope and focus committed to doing whatever you can for the triumph of justice and compassion in whatever circumstances may arise, however bizarre or terrifying.

It is quite clear to me now that given what is happening in our country and in the world, aspiring to this consciousness is the only real game in town.

Now let us look at what is happening before our eyes in America. And let us all dare calmly to listen to what the wisdom of the serpent will say to us if we are brave enough to attend:

See clearly that the seeds of a potential birth of fascism are now sprouting dangerously. Trumpism will not vanish because Trump is out of office. It has dangerously seduced and polluted the minds and hearts and wills of one entire political party and millions of our brothers and sisters.

The disinformation industrial complex is hell bent on furthering this pollution as are politicians in our Congress who want us not to see what we saw on January 6th, not to hear what we heard in the clearly insurrectionist words of the ex-president and his minions and not to hold accountable anyone who inflamed them to attack the very roots of our democracy. In such a situation any illusion or turning away from a such a stark truth will be useless and dangerous, and everyone who is deeply concerned about preserving democracy and aborting this potential dark birth must now get absolutely real about its potential dangers.

These dangers are not only to America and the noble dream enshrined in the Constitution that so many of us have been so inspired by. If realized they could also set in motion and hasten the potential extinction of humanity. Fascism is enormously powerful already all over the world—look at what is happening in Russia, at what happened late last month in Burma. Consider what Bolsonaro is doing in Brazil, Duterte in the Philippines, Orban in Hungary, Erdogan in Turkey and a host of other tin-pot, crazy and greedy dictators in Africa and South America.

If America goes fascist, the light of the soul of the world goes out. And nothing will be done of any significance about climate change, the growing terrible inequality between rich and poor, whites and people of color, and the continuing genocide of animals. It is essential that you realize the full extent of what this means and could mean and that you work on your denial, your Pollyanna fantasies, your entitlement, your naive belief that nothing so dark could happen in the United States, and the love of comfort most of you have become so addicted to that you fear change more even than annihilation.

Not looking at evil and its powers is to allow them full reign in others and in yourself. Ask now for the courage to see what you must see to be able to protect and rouse yourself and the strength to bear the rugged responsibilities of both.

Please read those paragraphs again slowly and allow their illusion-less clarity to pierce all the layers of resistance that you have been trained in.

Now, calmly and with trust and the joy of all your experiences of life at its fullest and of mystical revelations you may have had, attend to what the voice of the dove says:

You are inherently divine. You were born with the original blessing of divine consciousness and many wonderful paths and practices have been given to you to realize this consciousness in its calm splendor of truth. You are on an unfinished adventure and what is being prepared for you is a birth into a new kind of humanity which will be divinely inspired to co-create with the Divine a wholly new way of being and doing everything.

This is the unanimous testimony and witness of the world’s greatest prophets and mystics and they are not lying to you or fantasizing, because they have heard my voice and seen and known the all-transforming glory of the one who sends me to you. Look for the signs of this momentous birth right now in the exploding chaos around you and grace will give you the eyes to see it.

Grace descended in flames on January 20th when more than 80 million people who had braved the horror of Covid to vote for democracy breathed in sane and noble speech that announced realistic policies, gorgeous hope-filled singing and the sight of honorable humans of both parties coming together as one family in the name of the future. In the days that have followed, staggering new plans for the climate and the new economy it could generate are being proposed into law.

The full map of the dark’s addiction to power has been fearlessly opened up by brilliant journalists and commentators who have let neither threats nor derision swerve them from their duty to expose the truth, however painful. Great advances in science are beginning to grapple with the dangers that Covid so clearly still engenders. There is a dawning recognition, too, in the party in power now that the serious situation it faces demands a more rigorous and dry-eyed resolution than it has ever been able to employ before.

There are millions of extraordinary ordinary people doing humble and heroic work as healthcare workers, bus drivers, teachers, grocery clerks, delivery men and women, military and law enforcement members, food bank personnel and philanthropists opening their purses to help directly. Such amazing people are all around us and many of them are far more aware of the dreadful circumstances that face us than those trapped in the la-la land of fake mysticism.

It is urgently necessary for you to see this as both a source of profound joy and a challenge to all of you to put your full soul into your civic responsibilities and your spiritual practice, to commit your love and passion for justice into real, pragmatic and downhome action. Above all, do not let fear or despair claim your deepest attention. Remember always that divine love is the ultimate reality and will work with you to do both small and large miracles if you surrender to it and cultivate it both through adoration and celebration and in your willingness to be its servant.

This is the eternal law and you have never needed to remember and praise it with more focus of being and gladness of soul.

Please take a long moment to allow what the dove is singing to irradiate your mind, ennoble your heart and make yourself ring with the secret music of love’s quantum field.

Now you have listened to the serpent and you have listened to the dove. Pray with all your sincerity for these two kinds of radical knowledge to come together through grace in an unwavering resolution to deepen your spiritual practice immeasurably and to commit yourself to keeping democracy and justice and compassion alive with far more urgency than you have ever done before.

If you do this, the grace of the Divine that wills the birth of a new humanity through the death of the destructive habits of the old will flood you with humble clarity, educate you with a wholly new set of skillful means and give you subtle but unmistakable revelations of what could still happen even at one minute to midnight.

But remember this always now: the window of possibility is closing for this possible birth and if you do not rise to the challenge of this immense catastrophe, everything could be lost.

This is not a rehearsal. This is showtime. This is not yet another set of ordeals for humanity. This is a full-on global dark night which has been perfectly designed by the Divine either to wipe us off the face of the earth or to birth us onto a wholly new evolutionary level of power, dignity, joy and active grace.

The choice will always be ours and my whole work now is to help you see both how necessary this choice is and how potentially glorious, if you can make it with fullest trust and abandoned surrender.

I have carefully constructed my next class, 40 Days & 40 Nights: A Prayer Journey for the Soul, that spans the time of Lent (itself a period for inner work) from February 17th to Easter Sunday; it is a journey that I know will help you progress in wisdom and nobility with unique intensity and truth.

I have drawn the prayers from all the major traditions, I have calibrated them carefully so as to give your entire being a rigorous and gorgeous divine workout. On my Facebook page, I have added for you four major interviews with four major masters of prayer—Caroline Myss, Adam Bucko, Matthew Fox and Diane Berke—so that you can receive from two men and two women the highest, simplest and most inspiring instruction.

If you truly want to rise to our time, the power of prayer is what you most need and that was why, when I began to see what unfolding events would give birth to, I created this program for us all. I have also priced it modestly to enable as many of you as possible to take it in a time when we are all financially worried.

Please know that I am praying this now for you. Take full advantage of this journey and commit yourself to it as part of a sustained program to be fed by the Divine on everything that you will need to help you preserve our democracy, keep vibrant through immensely challenging times and help birth a new world.

The key, my friends, to letting divine passion triumph is prayer. Do not believe me. Believe Jesus, Ramakrishna, Rumi, Teresa of Avila, Mahatma Gandhi, Dalai Lama.

Join me in the holy adventure of 40 Days & 40 Nights: A Prayer Journey for the Soul, and in the integration sessions afterwards where I will be able to help you in any way I can, and you will be able to share your wisdom and learn from the wisdom of all the others that are daring to turn up with divine inspiration.

Thank you in advance for your clarity, your courage, your support. I will continue to give you everything I have in the very best way I know how to give it, because I am under no illusions about where we are, but calmly joyful at where we could be if we truly availed ourselves of all the divine grace that is now streaming in incandescent, golden empowering torrents towards us.

Let me end with two lines from Rumi:

Run my friends from all false solutions.

Let divine passion triumph and rebirth you in yourself.

In love and joy,

Andrew