In my defencelessness, my safety lies.
A spiritual-political reflection on the events of June 2025.
In response to the events of June and 2025 thus far, I want to bring attention to a teaching from A Course in Miracles I continue to gain significant insight from.
In my defencelessness, my safety lies.
This seems an unimaginable premise to adopt in our current times. The flooding of ICE upon migrant communities in the United States; the incessant violence exercised by Israel upon Palestinians and now Iraqis; the growing opaqueness of the future of human and environmental rights … has us rightly alert and in our defences.
Letting the world know we are not at peace with what’s happening is essential; but doing so without a strong anchoring in peace seems to me futile.
In a Chinese Buddhist myth, a tyrannical king invades upon a small monastery. All but one of the monastics clear out in a frenzy: he stays humbly kneeled before the king’s army. “If you don’t leave, I will slaughter you,” says the king. The monk does not fight back. He remains still, completely unfazed by the king’s words. The king does not kill him. Instead, he moves onto an easier territory to invade.
In too many cases, we are slaughtered by a belief in the power of violence, rather than saved from conviction in the power of peace. Marianne Williamson once famously said — just like a body that does not practice health, a society that does not practice peace welcomes the inevitably of all forms of sickness, violence, and malevolence to arise.
When sickness reaches the extreme it has in our society, open-heart surgery is necessarily due. All forms of protest, dissent, and defence are needed to get the collective body back on track. But external fixes are not the end game here. In my opinion, only proactively creating peace from the place of root cause, which is the mind, can accomplish such a task.
A Course in Miracles is a psychological mind training based on universal spiritual themes. It is not a religious dogma, but rather an aid in shifting our perspective on a given situation from fear to love. In the Course’s words, adopting a thought system based on love is a process of unlearning our separation and the defences that maintain it, and accepting our function in the interconnectedness of all life.
“In my defencelessness, my safety lies,” means that on an ultimate level, there is nothing to defend because we are One. Thus, anything I do to you, I also do to myself. Be it personal neurosis or geo-political war games, these all stem from the hallucination that we are seperate from each other and thereby designed to compete with each other, rather than to collaborate and to love one another.
The violence we see in the world today is, yes, deeply entrenched in systems of power, capital, and land … all of which are due to stagnant systems of thought. Dominating several political narratives, the thought that “the world should revolve around me, my ideals, my people — and everybody outside is a mere inconvenience,” has put the entirety of the planet into jeopardy, requiring a new moral and spiritual vision.
While we go through this painful period of chemotherapy on the collective body, may we also make room to contemplate what’s happening in the collective mind. If thoughts come before actions, and actions create systems, then what thoughts are we thinking right now that will lead to a world we wish to see? Meditation and political activism are not mutually exclusive; rather they are mutually interdependent. If we do not think thoughts of the world we wish to see, we inevitably fail to create it.
I don’t begrudge people when they say: “what can I even do right now?” when every solution seems to be a highly technical, bereaucratic, or is just generally out of touch with our shared humanity.
In addition to whatever political advocacy we are involved in (which is very important), I believe all of us have the power to work on our minds, our relationships, and the service roles we play in the interconnected web of life.
From the vantage point of this world, there need be no defences, because everything works together. It’s only when we forget about this world — the world that holds together our oneness — do we give into the illusion of defences and searation, forgetting our way into slaughter and violence …
May we remember the peace that arises from our shared humanity, and bless ourselves, loved ones, and those we don’t even know from this awareness.
-Ethan
I think you meant Iran not Iraq in opening. In my opinion, inequality is violence. US has been moving in the direction of more and more inequality for over 40 years, that inequality is money which is also power. If you look at our Gross National Product average per person and compare it with average income the story is clear. Switzerland has a GNP of about 84K and an average income of about 76K a 8K spread. The US has GNP PP of $86K and average income of about $38K a spread of $38K a spread of $48K or more than 1/2 of GNP is concentrated into a small percent. Among high GNP countries we are the most unequal. As of the use of the levers of power, the US has been moving towards an all powerful executive for years. Congress has willingly given up power to focus on money raising just as our populace gives up power to our government to focus on other things. Our ideas of balance of power and our constitution are very different things. Our constitution does not even address Judicial Review. That concept was invented by the first Supreme Court in a case referred to as Marbury vs Madison. Unlike court systems of states who have Sheriffs as it enforcement arm, our court have no enforcement arm. Our Justice Dept, Military and all other law enforcement reports directly to the President. Our institutions are institutions of tyranny. The men who wrote our constitution were all except for B Franklin under the age of 35 and inexperienced in the mechanics of governing, what they had were concepts of how they wanted to live and not live. If you read the Federalists papers between Jefferson, Madison and others at the time of our founding, you will understand that these very young men did not think they were creating a document that would last but one that would grow to meet our expectations and realities of new times. Except for a couple of brief periods, we have treated our Constitution not as a living document to be developed and changed with times, but as a religious document to be worshipped. Trump is not our only tyrannical President, but he is the most uncouth one whose corruption is in your face not hidden like we are used to. Neither should exist. Polite tyranny is no less tyranny we have to do more than throw off Trump we have to start acting like a Democracy by first providing ourselves with a constitution that reflects our beliefs.