Emancipatory Spirituality

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Excerpts from Science and Spirit

Rabbi Michael Lerner

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Emancipatory Spirituality offers a different kind of immortality, not a promise that our own individual personalities with their specific sets of memories and experiences will last forever, but the immortality of being part and parcel of the totality of all being.  To appreciate this second kind of immortality, we need to reach a fuller awareness of our place in the universe and our identity as manifestations of the totality of all that is.

We are “holons,” entities who are simultaneously separate beings seeking to maintain our own individual existence and parts of something much bigger than ourselves.  In the contemporary world, it’s easy to understand the consciousness of ourselves as separate beings, but it’s very hard to develop a sense of ourselves as part of the unity of all being.

The Western intellectual tradition tends to encourage us to see the world as a collection of individual things, separated from each other, and then tries to figure out how they might interact.  Much of our language contributes to this sense of separateness because it was developed to break up nature and our visual field into objects that could be used or shaped by human action.

But this isn’t the only possible human goal.  There’s another way of thinking, one that stresses the fundamental interconnectedness of all being, one that starts with the premise of totality and moves from there.  To understand the world from the standpoint of its fundamental unity, we need to transcend the language that was created to serve a different and narrower purpose.  It’s difficult for words to capture our intuition or perception of “the totality of all with all.”

I sometimes think of our individual consciousness as a liver cell in a complex body.  The liver cell understands what it can take in, given the limited consciousness a liver cell can have.  It has some inkling of connection to other liver cells, and probably some notion of a larger consciousness of the entire body.  But it can’t imagine a larger interconnected reality with a consciousness of the totality that is filled with love and pours out its generosity to all of its parts.

When a liver cell gets out of balance with the rest of the body, we get a destructive expansiveness in which certain cells starts to crowd out neighboring cells.  We call that condition cancer.  Cancer is the perfect analogy for individual egos that have lost their sense of balance and begin to expand themselves at the expense of others.

In some spiritual traditions, the solution to this problem is to obliterate the individual ego.  The ego itself is seen as the big problem, so the solution is to overcome it.

Emancipatory Spirituality, on the other hand, does not seek to obliterate the ego, but to put it in balance with the rest of the universe.  In our society we are in great need of this kind of re-balancing. Our society is full of people who go around saying “I am a self-made man or woman.  I did it myself and therefore I deserve more money or power or recognition than anyone else.”  Many people say that because they were spiritually wounded, deprived of recognition and love, or because they never had the experience of being in a supportive community.  It never occurs to them that the science and technology, the phone lines and the paved streets, the automobiles and airplanes that they use, even the conceptual distinctions and the language they draw upon, were not built by them but by others.  Instead they need to puff themselves up to defend against their feeling of aloneness and their certainty that they cannot count on others.  Said often enough, the myth of the self-made individual starts to take on the dimension of common sense in contemporary capitalist societies.

But look a little closer.  Emancipatory Spirituality teaches that every one of us is standing on the platform of thousands of previous generations of human beings.  We inherited the wisdom, the language, the categories, and the work of the past.