I heard a story about Smokey Robinson today. This was back when he had a serious cocaine habit and was trying to give it up.
One night he had a dream. In the dream he was going towards the light. As he got closer he saw it was a man holding a torch.
Smokey expected to keep going into the light, but when he got to the man he handed Smokey the torch and said, "It's your turn to hold the light now."
It's our turn. We may not be ready, but it doesn't matter; it's our turn.
In these difficult times, full of grief and anger and fear, it's our turn to hold the light.
What does that mean?
It means to open to the highest place of consciousness you can open to, and stay open there.
It means giving up all the judgments, letting them all go, or more accurately, letting them be there without thinking they mean something, without getting involved.
It means loving our country, yes, coming together as a country, yes, but it means more than that. It means coming together as a world.
It's not enough to come together as a country. That still leaves an "us" and a "them" and there is no "them." There's only "us." It's all us; there's only us life. There's only us Life.
Life is all there is, and it's just One. It's forever One.
It's time to hold the light, and open our hearts to all humankind.
Millions of Americans are suffering. We're feeling grief and shock for recent tragic events. It's time to hold the light and open our hearts to all our fellow Americans.
Millions of Israelis are suffering. They live in fear and want their homeland to be secure. It's time to hold the light and open our hearts to them.
Millions of Palestinians are suffering. They're living in poverty, displaced from their homes. It's time to hold the light and open our hearts to them.
Millions of Afghans are suffering. They've had 20 years of draught and war and brutality. It's time to hold the light and open our hearts to them.
Millions of people in the Arab-Muslin world are suffering. Right or wrong, they feel a profound sense of injustice in our foreign policy. It's time to hold the light and open our hearts to them.
Millions of people in the developing world are suffering. They're subsisting and feel ignored, left out of the prosperity in the developed world. It's time to hold the light and open our hearts to them.
We can't heal our planet by simply "getting rid" of terrorists. Many more will spring up if we don't address the causes from which terrorism fundamentally spring: poverty, disease, hopelessness, despair.
We must come together as a planet, to see all of us as just "us." There's nobody else, just "us." It's time to hold the light for all of us.
The practice of tonglen is a particularly good one right now. We relax, close our eyes, and breathe in the suffering of the world, poised on the edge of global conflict. Then we breathe out love and compassion to everyone with no-one left out.
We breathe in everyone who's in misery and poverty, and breathe out love and support and enlightened action to them.
We breathe in everyone caught in fear, and breathe out love and safety to them.
We breathe in everyone caught in hatred, and breathe out love and compassion to them.
We breathe in everyone caught in "us" and "them," yes maybe we ourselves, and breathe out love and the crisp air of the truth beyond words, the truth beyond divisions and judgments.
It's up to us now. There's nobody else to do it. It's just you and me, multiplied six billion times.
Let us hold up the light of love so well that everyone, but everyone, can find their way home.
—jim sloman, for 10/1/01
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