A Conversation with a Spiritual Being

I just don’t know what to do with my life. Time to try something, anything, meditation? Why not? Nothing to lose.

Get comfortable, turn off interruptions, take a deep breath and exhale while making a low rumbling sound, focus on your breath.

“Ommmmmm……Ommmmm…...Ommmmm…”

“Hello?”

“Can we talk?”

“Any time. That is what I am here for.”

“I am confused, tell me what to do.”

“Hey, I just can’t do that. The deal is, you come up with the ideas and then we discuss them.”

“So you are leaving all the creative work to me?”

“I am not here to tell you what to do. If I did that you would, very quickly, feel oppressed. You have to do the work, use your initiative.”

“The problem is I do feel oppressed.”

“The old down in the dumps, everyone against you, no viable options?”

“Yes, you’ve got it.”

“That tells me you must have lost your initiative, because that’s what happens when you lose that thing.”

“ I just don’t know what to do. By the way, what should I call you?”

“Well, just give me a name, if you think I need one.”

“I can’t give you a name, you have to tell me what your name is.”

“Hey, you remember what I said about using your initiative?”

“Are you trying to confuse me, Devil?”

“You want me to be your Devil?”

“No, I really don’t want to go there, I just need some advice, and you don’t seem willing to give it.”

“Sounds like you are frustrated as well as oppressed. So let me make it quite clear. You come up with the ideas and then we discuss them. That is the only way it is going to work. If you don’t come up with the ideas: no discussion. No matter how hard you try, you cannot change that. The oppression you feel is a direct result of not coming up with ideas.”

“But other people seem to get along find doing what they are told. They say they are doing what you told them and seem quite happy taking your instructions.”

“Good for them, they are happy to be oppressed. They feel comfortable knowing that they are following a leader. But it won’t work for you. You are beyond that stage. You have learnt to question things and that puts you in a different ballpark ”

“Suppose I called you God?”

“If you are happy with that, it is cool with me.”

“Do you talk to them?”

“Sure.”

“What do you tell them?”

“I tell them exactly what they want to hear.”

“Why?”

“Let’s just say they can’t deal with anything else.”

“So why do you tell them lies?”

“I don’t, I simply enter their reality and live it with them. In that reality I am what they make me.”

“Are you doing the same thing with me?”

“Yes.”

“Why.”

“Same reason. I have to be whatever you make me.”

“So I can make you an all powerful God, or a Devil, or my conscience, or my rational thought process. I just “make it so,” and it happens?”

“I think you have finally got the message.”

“But I don’t like it like that.”

“Then change it.”

“But I don’t know what to change it to.”

“Welcome to leadership.”

“Let me think about this. Are you are telling me that I can choose to follow someone else’s ideas, and accept the oppression that comes with that, or I can choose my own path?”

“That’s about right.”

“What about the people who follow someone else’s path, but do not feel oppressed?”

“If they do not feel oppressed they have taken their right path. Many people never consciously make the choice, it simply never occurs to them to question what they are doing.”

“And I do not fall into that category?”

“You have eaten from the tree of knowledge and evicted yourself from the garden of blissful existence.”

“So I have to choose a path, not knowing what that choice will bring?”

“You got it.”

“That makes me feel oppressed. I can’t make a good decision without knowing the consequences.”

“I thought you would be elated. This is “freedom” man. You can do whatever you want. And by the way, you can make “best guess” decisions and then change them as you go along.”

“So I have to choose a path and take it and you will come with me like a parrot on my shoulder.”

“An intelligent parrot.”

“So what is the meaning of life?”

“Toss me some ideas and we can work on them.”

“Piss off parrot, you’re no use to me.”

Looking Back to Look Forward

We are celebrating the 200^th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade and looking back we can easily see many things that were wrong with that shameful period. This makes us want to fix those old problems, but we can’t as they have already happened and there is nothing we can do to reverse what has already happened.

We can however influence what happens in the future and the challenge is to learn from the mistakes of the past so that we can fix the future before it happens.

This raises the question, what mistakes are we making today? For what will our future historians blame us? Slavery existed for a long time before the community accepted it was wrong. Similarly, there are probably several things that we are doing today that we think are OK, but which will be judged as wrong by future generations.

Perspectives change and we can expect that in, say one hundred years time, Barbadians will have a different outlook on life. When they look back they may recoil in horror at some of the things we are currently doing. Meanwhile, from today’s perspective we have difficulty identifying what those things are, because we are doing the things that we are “accustomed” to doing. We should challenge ourselves to figure out what those things are and start the correction process.

Several possibilities come immediately to mind; capital punishment, punishment in general, not doing enough against AIDS, creating too large a public debt, not preparing for high energy costs, not responding fast enough to global warming. All of these are possibilities, but I want to stick with the issue of slavery and its aftereffects.

We do not like to talk about the wrong things we do. That takes a great effort and it is much easier to keep quiet. Self-examination is very difficult for us, perhaps because we expect to find a “sinner” when we look at ourselves and so refuse to take the exam. We can feel the fear tugging at us, turning us away from this self-examination and we very easily find ways to avoid doing it.

This could be why we are so secretive and value “privacy” so highly. The report on our self-examination on a national scale has not been published. Something is restraining this. Could it be that one of Bob Marley’s “mental chains” is wrapped around this report?

This secrecy is a social characteristic and could be one of the legacies of slavery. It has many side effects. One of these is a lack of trust. When you know very little about the people around you the tendency is to be suspicious. In this atmosphere of suspicion the only stories that are accepted as true are those that depict people as thieves or criminals. This has the effect of perpetuating a negative self-image that reinforces the distrust.

Another legacy of oppression could be our predisposition to avoid responsibility. Our tendency to blame others for our problems is complimented by a great skill at avoiding any responsibility ourselves and so avoiding blame. We tend to see the world as a place where “others” call the shots and so “others” must be blamed for whatever happens. Our secrecy, complimented by this avoidance of responsibility, severely restrains progress.

There are echoes here of the scene in the Garden of Eden after Adam and Eve ate from the forbidden tree. This suggests that we have to take a more fundamental step and work on our predisposition to hide and judge and blame.

Transparency is one way out of this trap, but if the public attacks whoever releases information, we cannot expect many people to volunteer to do this. Instead of living in the light of information we seem to end up living in the dark where we can more easily avoid responsibilities.

The Churches should be able to lead an initiative to take us into the light of transparency. It is an opportunity for them to re-establishing their leadership in spiritual matters. The upcoming election will be an opportunity for them to show leadership, but will they take it? Avoidance of leadership is another characteristic that seems to have its roots in oppression.

If we are going to propel Barbados into developed nation status, we need to get everyone working on this project. The Churches need to make a significant contribution. Perhaps they should also look back to see what they have done wrong and then move forward on a principled basis.

Failure in this mission is a serious contender for criticism from our future historians.