I have a great admiration for all those who stand up for the craziness of the world. I have a great admiration for all those who realize that we are on a suicidal death trip and want to reverse as quickly and as urgently as possible all the various addictions and undo all the various systems of evil that are destroying human beings and nature. But I have come through my own experience to understand that both mystics and activists, as they are now, have serious and limiting shadows.
The mystic shadow is an addiction to transcendence, an addiction to the light—a forgetting of the responsibilities of mystic consciousness to compassion and justice, and to cherishing and sustaining the real world. So many mystics, especially in the new age, use their mystical experiences as a kind of “subtle heroin” to sign-off from responsibility to the burning world and justify their obscene passivity and addiction to bliss experiences as great wisdom, which is great blindness.
Many of the activists I know, and I admire their nobility and their fierceness and their commitment, are also in their own narcissism and shadow. This narcissism and shadow expresses itself as a divided consciousness which is very often rooted in anger but projects the unacknowledged shadow of the activist himself or herself onto the demonic other, and that leads very often to messiah complexes, great outrage, offending others by brutal condemnation of them, and tragically, despair and burnout, in the face of the very exhausting task of transforming the world so hell-bent on destruction.
So what I’ve come to understand is that this narcissism and these shadows that afflict both the activist and the mystic can only really be healed when the fire of the mystic’s passion for God is united with the fire of the activist’s passion for justice to form a third fire, which is Divine love and wisdom in action.
So what I’ve come to understand is that this narcissism and these shadows that afflict both the activist and the mystic can only really be healed when the fire of the mystic’s passion for God is united with the fire of the activist’s passion for justice to form a third fire, which is Divine love and wisdom in action.
And when this third fire is ignited, the shadow of the mystic is healed by the passion of the activist for justice. And the mystics’ temptation to passivity and the mystics’ temptation to go off into the light and forget the responsibilities of the world and not to put love into action are healed by the activists’ passion for just action. And the activists shadow of divisiveness, of burnout, messiah complexes etc is healed by the mystical wisdom and peace and deep, deep union with the Divine and deep union with the sources of strength the Divine can provide.
So this third fire breeds a new kind of activism. It breeds an activism that flows naturally and profoundly, and wisely, from deep sacred consciousness, deep alignment with the beloved, deep surrender to the will of the beloved, and deep opening on every level of the being, (heart, soul, mind, and body) to the light and truths of the Divine and to it’s mysterious will of transformation in reality.
CHAGALL: WHITE CRUCIFIXION
"Following the September 1935 laws to curtail the civil rights of Jews, the Nazis in 1938 took a Jewish census and registered all Jewish businesses as preliminaries to plans for ethnic genocide. In June and August of that year the synagogues in Munich and Nuremberg were destroyed, and on November 9, the so-called Crystal Night, these anti-semitic atrocities reached a climax. In reaction, Chagall conceived a painting of the martyrdom of the Jew Jesus as a universal symbol for religious persecution. Instead of a crown of thorns, the Jesus on Chagall's picture wears a head-cloth and a prayershawl around his loins. The round halo around his head is repeated by the round glow around the Menorah at his feet. Mourning his persecution, figures of the Hebrew patriarchs and the matriarch Rachel appear in the smoke-filled nighttime sky. All around the cross, Chagall has depicted a bleak snowscape with horrific scenes of modern Germany. In the background to the right, a soldier opens the doors of a flaming Torah ark removed from a pillaged synagogue, the contents of which litter the foreground. Both the flag above the synagogue and the soldier's armband originally were decorated with inverted swastikas. One of the fleeing figures in the foreground at the left wears a sign which originally bore the inscription "Ich bin Jude" ('I am a Jew'). In the background above is a ship full of refugees trying ineffectively to flee a burning village, destroyed before the arrival of a liberating People's Army from the Soviet Union carrying red flags; this last detail was wishful thinking, motivated by the antagonism of Stalin's government toward Hitler's before 1939. Included in an exhibition of Chagall's works in Paris in early 1940, the ""White Crucifixion" was designed to raise awareness of the events in Hitler's Germany and their implications for mankind in general. "
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