Movement

"It's not a cult, sect, religion - it's a movement."  This was the response to a comment made to a teacher dedicated to helping people wake up - long before the movement that coined the word, "Woke.".  The goal was not to create a space of dogma, but to invite people into curiosity about their life circumstances.  Almost everyone goes through a stage where there is questioning about life.  Many find themselves seeking the answer to a question about life's purpose - as if the answer, even if it could be given, would set aside the uneasiness.  Those who are really curi
ous end up finding people and places where a community of practice exists and often return to the idea that maybe the purpose of any human life is to discover love.  Not just personal love, but big love.

Whenever there is a swelling of curiosity, and people act collectively on that curiosity in a way that challenges that which exists, the first thing is to call it something like a "cult" or some other term that suggests danger. Images of "de-programming" and "intervention" immediately arise because things are fine the way they are - why join with others to talk about or try to change that which is fine?  What movements ask is that things shift away from how it has always been.

Why?  Because as long as humanity wallows in misery and the dominant response is to rebuild or replicate what has been destroyed by nature or people, there will be a need for a movement to change things.  The misery cannot continue.  Movements can bring both more misery or less misery.

In the world today, movements are happening both large and small.  This is evidenced by the entry of people lifting up the idea that Black Lives Matter. And yes, while all lives matter, the current conditions demonstrate that there is a particular need to lift Black skinned, Black male, Black women and children up because there is a strange global phenomenon:  their deaths are disproportionate in the numbers of those who perish out of brutality of all kinds.  And interestingly, those are the lives that disappear in natural disasters.  And even more interestingly, many societies seem to think things should not change.  It is the people most affected that have to give voice to the need for change and a movement, now.

This has always been:  that those most affected reach a point where enough misery or violence will create a movement for change, which in turn, can become violent unless there is an opening for a new path, a new way.  

This morning's news carried a story about the discovery of the movement to resist the Nazi deportations of Polish Jews in a Warsaw Ghetto.  These were images never before known to exist - a photographer captured the movement to exterminate the Jews in 1943 and they are surfacing now in 2023.  Movements can take a long time with a lot of activity in between events and public awareness beyond family stories or community narratives.  

There surely will be a critic who will comment that the photographs were doctored images and what can be seen did not really happen.  This is predictable.  What might be the response?  Hopefully, a way to invite deeper connection and reflection, not new movements to prove that the images are real or fabricated.

Movements to shift how societies operate and what values will be adopted are nothing new.  What is new is the awareness that opportunity that arises in every moment.  It is the opportunity to recognize the possibility of change going forward, to affirm life for future generations.  It is the opportunity to shift individual behavior so that the collective movement for caring and acting differently, can emerge.  It is the opportunity to resist choosing self-interest over what the common good would ask each to consider doing differently.

And it is the opportunity now, to recognize that the movement is always happening - in many directions, on many levles.  This is why clarity of purpose is such a big topic these days.  Whether conscious of it or not, many people "know" without knowing, that something is wrong with how things are today.  An uneasy awareness about collective demise exists and there are ways to enter the movement, shedding the idea that caring for humanity's future by looking deeply at oneself, is akin to joining a cult.