Since the book was released a few weeks ago, an inner anarchy group has been growing. It started as a Facebook group but we are expanding to a LiveJournal community to better support the level of interaction and conversations we are having in the group. One thing we are doing is discussing the book, chapter by chapter. What follows is the post related to the first chapter. Would love to hear your thoughts.
In Chapter One of Inner Anarchy I start hitting on a particular underlying theme, which is the need to shift to a different source than we’ve been operating under.
Here are a couple excerpts:
“We have put our faith in government, religion, philosophy, psychology, philanthropy, science, technology, and economics, but a quick scan of the daily news shows that none of those are working. Is trying harder really the answer? Some of our planet’s best-intentioned, most brilliant, passionate, dedicated people have poured themselves into every field imaginable. If those avenues could have solved our dilemma, they would have by now.”
“The people who made the promises, societal institutions, and structures that were to solve our problems and make things work and the ideas and knowledge that were supposed to carry us forward into a grand future have not delivered. Many people are now seeing that our God explanations don’t make logical sense. There is no shining light on the horizon that we can look toward with real hope. No . . . not anywhere.”
Of course it’s true that our human ingenuity and brilliance has in many cases improved how we are getting along within our current parameters, but they have not and cannot transform the parameters themselves. Meanwhile, those parameters are like walls closing in on us and choking the life right out of humankind and our planet.
Operating like this has become so ingrained in us that we hardly know any other way other than dipping into that same well over and over and over again. In the book I refer to that well as the ideas, mindsets, narratives and ideologies that rule us from within. There are many different flavors of this, but in the end it’s all the same thing because it’s coming from the same source – that “cosmos” reasoning that I discuss in the book. Even people who “shed religion” and become more liberal and progressive/enlightened in their thinking are often still operating under the same source.
The inner anarchy I call for in the book is fundamentally a shift in source. The shift is turning toward that Spirit-mind within us, which we connect with through our deep feelings. When Jesus said “the kingdom of heaven is within us,” he was referring to this dimension and source inside us. This is where the power is. This is where our salvation and the salvation of the world lies. It doesn’t require some special sort of enlightenment, only that we become elemental like children ad start listing to and trusting what bubbles up inside us through those deep feelings.
Rather than appealing to or arguing against some religious or spiritual belief system or quoting what others have said about spiritual things or engaging in all kinds of heady/mental discussions about this or that spiritual belief or idea, or reading more books and joining more groups to accumulate more spiritual data, ideas and knowledge… I want to encourage us to focus on this shift of source, turning toward those deep feelings within us, and speaking from those deep feelings to each other.
What makes this shift of source and listening to and following our deep feelings so difficult? Are we willing to operate in an entirely different way than what we’re used to? How can we encourage and support one another in this? What would it look like to start speaking to one another from those deep feelings in our own words? How can we break our dependency and attachment to that old way of operating?
