2022-06-21 - There Is A Way by Sat Santokh ========================================== Chapter 1, My Roots =================== When my grandfather was over 60, he was severely burned in a fire. After being in the hospital for a month or so, they told him that he would never walk again. He immediately asked to be sent home. Then, whenever he was alone, he would flop himself out of bed and crawl around the house and up and down the stairs. Within a month he was back on the truck with my father. The Oz books were so real to me that when I decided to be a pilot at age eight, it was so I could cross the uncrossable desert and take my place in Oz along with Dorothy, Trot, Captain Bill, and Buttonbright. At ten, I became an atheist, but, I know realize, a Jewish kind of atheist, where I frequently lectured the God I did not believe in for the world's ills and disasters, alternating back and forth from denial of God to anger with God. I felt an ever increasing degree of franticness within the peace movement in our responding to one crisis after another, which, for me, peaked with the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962, when it became appallingly clear that we were at the brink of World War III. I felt this possibility so strongly that after taking part in an 8,000-person protest march to the United Nations at the height of the crisis, I solemnly bade goodbye to my friends, telling them that we might not see each other again, and went home to prepare for the end. Most of my friends felt that I was being excessively melodramatic. However, many years later, in 2006, at a meeting of the ministers of defense of the various countries involved in the Cuban crisis convened by Robert McNamara, who had been the US Secretary of Defense at the time of the confrontation, it was revealed that the situation had been just as dire as I thought. McNamara himself had bid his family goodbye that night, telling his wife that they might not see the morning. It turned out that the decision whether or not to fire the Soviet missiles that were based in Cuba was entirely in the hands of the Soviet captain in charge. If the United States Navy had fired a shot to stop the Soviet vessels cruising towards Cuba from crossing the line in the ocean that President Kennedy had stipulated, the Soviet captain would have opened fire on the United States with nuclear missiles, and the unimaginable Armageddon would surely have begun. Chapter 2, From Psychedelics to Spiritual Practice ================================================== By 1966, I felt burned out. I had been working over 70 hours a week with no breaks, maintaining regular daytime office hours, and then going to meetings, or speaking opportunities just about every night and on the weekends. From my perspective, there was no progress at all. Yes, the Peace Movement was growing exponentially, but so was the war. Michael Rossman, one of the founders and important leaders of the Free Speech Movement at University of California Berkeley began to speak of LSD as potentially the most revolutionary way to shift our collective consciousness. I attended the big "Human Be-In" that took place at the Polo Fields in Golden Gate Park, with Alan Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert (later Ram Dass), the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver, and other beat and hippie notables. Having become disillusioned with my role in the Peace Movement, I resigned from the WRL and became the treasurer, chief cook, and bottle washer for this committee. I was given an office at 715 Ashbury, the Grateful Dead office building. Our committee began to organize frequent free concerts either in Golden Gate Park or the Panhandle, and as I was our (unpaid) staff person, I became the liaison with the San Francisco Park Department, arranging for permits and all the other details. We must have talked for at least six hours straight that first night, staying up until the early hours of the morning. Somewhere in the course of the night, I asked him what I should do with my life. He said "Shine, one must let one's light shine." I asked, "What do you mean?" And he replied with one simple sentence that I have carried throughout my life ever since: "Be a radiant example of how to live on the planet." ... when I took my last acid trip... in May 1970. This experience was very different from all that had preceded it. Every direction my mind would go would result in my perceiving the same message: "There is nothing further to be gained in this direction, everything depends on your daily action." It was time for a change. I decided that I needed to find a teacher. There is an old spiritual teaching that when you are ready to find your teacher, your teacher will come. I attended an event called "The Holy Man Jam at the Family Dog on the Great Highway." It was a transitional event at the close of the hippie era, with many spiritual leaders including Yogi Bhajan, Swami Satchidananda, Pit Vilayat, Rabbi Shlomo Cattebach, Baba Ram Dass, Stephen Gaskin, and others. Just prior to attending the event, I had concluded that in order to do the work before me, I needed to find a way to allow great power and energy to flow through me without the energy being wrongly directed by flaws in my ego or personality; to not crave or seek power, but have it flow through me in service of humanity. When Yogi Bhajan spoke, I felt the immensity of the energy flowing through him, and how easily it flowed without seeming to be distorted by his ego. One day I was sitting alone on a couch with him when he said, "Why don't you give up all this nonsense?" I said that I would like to. He placed his hand on my head and I felt very comfortable and secure, like a little child with his father. I asked him what to do for the morning practice, and he told me to chant Sat Nam... In this short period, I stopped smoking cigarettes and grass and stopped eating meat. Then there was the continuing experience of my early morning sadhana practice. Robin and I were at the point that the simple act of sitting down to do sadhana was profound in itself. Chapter 3, How I Came To Be A Healer ==================================== About half a year after returning to the Bay Area in late 1970, I Was in charge of a large 17-bedroom Kundalini Yoga ashram overlooking Mt. Tamalpais, with 25-40 residents. For some years afterward, I wholly immersed myself in yoga practice--morning sadhana with everyone, one or two yoga classes during the day, and an evening practice as well. I had jumped onto the "Kundalini Yoga as taught by Yogi Bhajan" (as we described it in those days) practice with both feet, as it were, with the result that I was a bit of a fanatic in the early years all through the 70s and into the 80s. I had decided that Yogi Bhajan was my teacher and that I would do what he said in pretty much all things. He named our yoga organization "3HO," which stood for "Healthy, Happy, Holly Organization," telling us that if we followed the practice, we would first become healthy, then happy, and then holy. As the name Sat Santokh, which was given to me by Yogi Bhajan, translates as "true contentment," I had thought that my work was to find contentment in whatever circumstance I found myself. Yet, clearly, I was not content... Towards the end of that winter, I decided that if even emulating Ghandi would not make me feel "good enough," then there was no hope of ever feeling that way, and the only solution was to find a way to accept myself as I was, flaws and all. Finally, after going over all this every day for months, I was able to accept myself as "good enough" with all my faults, flaws, needs, and desires. Later, I Was to discover that this was just the beginning of learning to accept myself. I wanted to be pulled forward by my vision of service rather than being pushed by my fear of failure or need for personal benefit. I had observed that for the most part, as an energy-dynamic, "pulling" works much better than "pushing"... Another way of saying this is that I was learning to "be in the flow," which is generally not possible when struggling or in fear. Through the influence of Joanna Macy, who was on our board and helped lead workshops in the first year, and her Despair and Empowerment workshops, we started to ask deep questions at Creating Our Future workshop sharing sessions, such as: * How do you feel about yourself? * How do you feel about your parents? * How do they feel about you? * What do you like about yourself? * What do you not like about yourself? * What are your fears about the state of the planet? For many years I thought doing a strong daily yoga or other spiritual practice would heal and clear up these wounds, but I have not found that to be the case, either for myself or for most people of my acquaintance, and I know very large numbers of people who are committed to such work. Spiritual practice is profoundly helpful and important, but it is not enough, in most cases, to heal the wounds of life. Chapter 4, Self Worth ===================== I do not know of any way to raise a child and never make a mistake There will be wounds. The best a parent can do is let the child know that they are loved without condition, that they do not have to prove or accomplish anything to be loved and listened to. I recognize that "self-demoting feedback loop" is a challenging phrase, but it is the most apt and concise one that I can come up with to describe an all-too-frequent phenomenon. The term applies to almost all addictive behavioral patterns, whose root cause is a subconscious wound-story resulting in a compulsion to punish oneself... The wounded self stays present in the subconscious indefinitely unless there is some form of intercession or healing. The subconscious exists only in the present "now." When a person believes that they do not deserve to be happy, to do well, to be well, or that they deserve to suffer, they set out to prove and justify that belief over and over again. This is not a consciously made choice, but is directed by the subconscious. There are many defense-mechanisms that develop in childhood that may be needed for survival at the time, but might become serious impediments as one matures. Wherever our wounds may come from, they leave us with a story we believe about ourselves, and it is that story that determines what is and is not possible for us. It is important to understand that the wound is not the event that happened, but its impact on our sense of self. The wound is to our psyche, our sense of identity. In healing work, we cannot change or take away what happened. What we can change is the story that was implanted in our subconscious as a result of what happened. For each of us, there are habits, jobs, and relationships that are demoting and ones that are promoting. Why go to such places? Why bring up such horrible memories? The reality is that the wounds are there. They have been planted in the subconscious. For healing to take place, there needs to be some context within which to access the wounded self in the subconscious, so that the story that the wounded self came away with can be heart and changed, and the person can feel healed. These wounds, then, are stories, conclusions we come to believe about ourselves that are based on wounding circumstances, and also based on the ways in which we seem to be programmed to react. Chapter 5, The Human Condition ============================== Insofar as I can tell, we are all wounded in one way or another, generally with multiple wounds. Yet it seems that most people do not seem to be aware of their inner wounds, but instead there are beliefs about the self and what is possible or not possible in life that are results of being wounded. These beliefs generally become axiomatic, meaning, "obviously true and therefore not needing to be proved." One of my prime reasons for writing this book is to establish and make clear the role and importance of inner wounds in our lives, and to show that these wounds can be healed. It is important to know that the wounds are stories, and as such they are mutable, for stories can be changed, and one's quality of life can change dramatically. I hope to create a shift in our collective understanding about the possibility of healing our wounds, and our collective understanding about what we can aspire to in our lives. Chapter 6, Healing the Wounds of Life ===================================== One of the things I say quite often to prospective journeyers at the beginning of the workshops is: "If you are thinking of something that you do not want to share, something that you do not want to mention, that you do not want anyone to know about, then that is the most important thing for you to bring up at this time. It is what you are here to deal with. This is the place and time. You may not have this opportunity again." They may have tried to say these [positive, uplifting] things to themselves many times in the past, but there is virtually no connection between the cognitive mind and the subconscious self, it does not help much. I have found that generally one cannot do this by oneself. To simultaneously be in your conscious mind trying to guide yourself, and in your subconscious mind being guided, is a big stretch, and it is very rare that one can lead oneself into such a deep place. One of the critical elements of the healing is the creation of a space in which a person can say virtually anything that they are deeply ashamed of, and have it received with love, understanding, and compassion. Most of us have something in our past, or present, that we are deeply ashamed of, about which we feel that if others ever knew this about us, we would be judged and rejected. One of the results of holding such beliefs is that we conclude within our subconscious that we are no good and that we must hide this no-goodness from others. So when we say these things in a group of peers and there is no negative reaction at all, but only a palpable love felt by all, this in itself is profoundly healing. This tender new plant is their new sense of self, a self that deserves to love and be loved, to trust and be trusted, and to succeed in life. The weeding, feeding, cultivating, and nurturing is usually done by adopting a yoga and/or meditation practice in which they regularly repeat to themselves the phrases that they record. In addition, I ask them to practice self-forgiveness, and to talk about its profound importance in cultivating their inner garden and keeping it healthy. This homework is really a critical part of the process. Chapter 7, About Myself as a Healer =================================== I have not yet found any meaningful answer to why God allows bad things to happen. I have seen many attempts at providing that answer, from within myself and from various religious and spiritual perspectives, but for me none of them hold up to examination, the reasoning is always flawed. I have come to accept simply not knowing and not understanding; it is as it is, and I do not know why. Some twelve years later I found myself in an interesting discussion with two long-time friends at the 2005 Kundalini Yoga Summer Solstice Celebration, in which one of them said, "Sat Santokh, here you are a devoted leader and practicioner of what is essentially a form of Bhakti Yoga, yet you are quite angry with the object of your devotion. How can you ever realize the fruits of that devotion if you continue to harbor that anger?" [Better to be angry with God than to be angry with a human being. God can take it.] I realized that sitting in judgment of God pretty much throughout my life profoundly limited my capacity to love God, and also, perhaps, my capacity to love myself. I led the first training on how to guide Self Worth workshops in Ireland in late 2007. By the end of that training, I saw that I could pass on this work; that it was not just going to be confined to me. Second, just before the end of the training, I was led on my first true Self Worth journey by two of the students, which deepened and expanded the healing I had previously experienced. I thought, "If you cannot trust, you cannot really be open to life or be present in life. I would rather trust and be betrayed than never trust at all." Chapter 8, Anger and Hate ========================= I wish to assert here that from my perspective, any corporal punishment of children is physical abuse. In most children, the first and primary reaction to being physically punished is fear. The fear becomes internalized, and the belief that the world is not a safe place becomes entrenched. [Is the world really such a safe place though?] I have been studying and thinking about hate and anger in society for a long time, their relation to war, xenophobia, and the mostly dysfunctional ways we govern ourselves, live our lives, and conduct business around the planet. I have come to believe that... any doctrine that preaches hate of some group of "others"--are all rooted in the fear, anger, and hatred activated by abusive childhood experiences. And I believe that the abuse of children and its expression as anger and hate in adults has profound implications for the state of the world today. Chapter 9, Consequences ======================= There seems to be not a single exception. From Sumer to Egypt to China, from ancient India to pre-Columbian America, from Athens to Rome, children were hit. Oral and then written traditions universally came to postulate this behavior in proverbs that are found on every continent. Between the seventh and sixth centuries BC, about 2,500 years ago, Spartan boys were taken from their homes at age seven to begin military training. It was believed that they needed to be removed from their mothers' care in order not to be "coddled." Instead, they experienced a very harsh discipline. They were regularly flogged and taught not to cry out. The older boys beat the younger boys as a regular part of the program. They were required to steal food and clothing in order to have food to eat or shoes on their feet, and would be severely punished if caught; punished, not for stealing, but for being caught. The example created by the Spartans at Thermopylae giving their lives in sacrifice while only 300 of them were able to hold off the huge Persian army for several days, has resounded through military history throughout the world ever since. Over the 2,500 years since then, military leaders and heads of state, wishing to have the best possible soldiers so they could win their wars, have frequently come to the conclusion that they needed to emulate the Spartan way of training men and boys in order to create Spartan-like soldiers, even to this day. Sparta was the only Greek city-state that had a professional army; at the time of this battle, the only occupation for Spartan men was warfare. A slave class called "Helots," composed primarily of the conquered people of neighboring city-states, did all the farming and artisinal work to provide food, clothing, and material goods for the Spartans. Prior to Napoleon, Frederick the Great had developed the most powerful and well-disciplined army Europe had ever seen, and had made Prussia into a great European power. However, Napoleon easily crushed the Prussian army in two major battles in 1806, a humiliating defeat for King Frederick William III, grandson of Frederick the Great, which led to the subjugation of the Kingdom of Prussia to the French Empire. Casting about for how to rebuild his armies, Frederick William III, impressed by the discipline, competence, fierceness, willingness if not eagerness to sacrifice their lives, and patriotism of the Spartan army at Thermopylae, decided to modify the Prussian Corps into a training program for boys and young men modeled directly upon the Spartan Agoge. Interestingly, we find that both Britain and the United States modeled their education systems on this Prussian education system. Many educational pioneers throughout Europe and the United States thought that the Prussians had developed the best education system for disciplining and educating students so that they would become efficient and obedient workers and soldiers. Even the idealistic Herman Mann (1796-1859), "The father of American public education," went to Prussia to study their system. Spartans believed that they were descended from the Dorian tribe, which is generally thought to have conquered most of what we know think of as Greece, between 1100 and 1000 BCE. The Dorians were not considered to be a particularly cultured people, but they did introduce the iron sword, with which they conquered the Minoan and Mycenaean peoples. The Spartans, who were dedicated to being a warrior people, took pride in their presumed Dorian ancestry. In the mid-1800s, the belief began to enter into the culture of the Germanic and Prussian peoples as they began to idealize and mythologize Sparta, that they too were descended from the Dorians, a belief which was tied to their developing notion of Aryan superiority. Around this time in Prussia/Germany, a fascination with the "noble savages" of the New World also began to develop. Their Spartan mythology expanded to include the belief that these "noble savages" were actually descendants of Dorian tribes that had emigrated to the New World, and that, they shared the same racially pure warrior bloodstream as the Germanic people. This fantasy about Native Americans was catapulted throughout Germany via the novels of Karl May (1842-1912), a very popular German author whose books have sold 200 million copies, and to whom we are indebted for the Germanic myth about "An Indian brave who knows no pain." Native Americans in German popular culture Cover for Winnetou the Apache Knight Winnetou the Apache Knight, translated to English by Marion Ames Taggart Perhaps the most common inner wound-story is the sense that one is "no good" and/or "not as good as others" which, for many people, results in a life spent in trying to prove that one is okay. This often results in trying to prove to oneself that one is better than others, and all too frequently manifests in finding whole classes of people to be better than, such as: women, children, other races, nationalities, and/or religions. This does not take place on the cognitive level, but within the subconscious mind. This "being better than others" combines with the anger and hatred that arises from physical and emotional abuse, and then we have anger and hatred towards women and children, plus anger, fear, and hatred towards other races, nationalities, and/or religions. There is one more component that when added to the mix takes things over the top, which is: economic displacement, job loss, real financial insecurity with the threat of hunger and loss of shelter. For the "man of the family" not to be able to "provide for his family" is a huge blow to his sense of personal dignity and self-worth. This needs to be the fault of someone else or some class of others. When all this comes together for a whole community or country, then we have rampant xenophobia. Chapter 10, The Work is Clear ============================= After asking myself all these many years, where is the place to find the leverage to move the world so that we can bring an end to war, I have become convinced that ending corporal punishment of children in schools, seminaries, madrassas, and in the home, is the most important task facing humanity, so that we can make the great journey from an immature desert-building species, to a mature species capable of living in harmony with our environment and one another. Chapter 11, Working Effectively for Change ========================================== The subject reminds me of when my anti-war activist friends made it clear that they would not talk with pro-war people because they were, well, pro-war, and therefore they were "others." But these "others" need to be recognized as fellow human beings who are, to the best of their understanding, acting with integrity in relation to their beliefs. The hard question, to which I do not have easy answers, is how do we effectively communicate with such people, with OUR "others"? It is quite clear that if we are unwilling to listen to those we consider "others," and do not take them seriously as fellow human beings, then there is no possibility of fruitful communication. Good communication begins with really listening. I began to study both Appreciative Inquiry and Chaordic Process, and subsequently learned of the National Coalition for Dialog and Deliberation (NCDD). Appreciative Inquiry Chaordic Path Chaordic Organization National Coalition for Dialog and Deliberation Chapter 12, Whole Being Training ================================ It seems to me that most people [who] enter the realm of social change do so as well-intentioned amateurs, wishing to do good, and hoping to make a difference, but often without having thoroughly prepared through study, research, and training to undertake such critically important and challenging work. Good communication begins with good listening, and developing a rapport with the object of one's communication, so that if we feel that we are not being understood, our response is not to say, "you do not understand," but to tell ourselves that we have not yet been able to speak in such a way as to be heard. If we care to play a meaningful role in rising to meet the needs of the times, we must commit to deep inner work and intelligent, strategic outer work at a level that is vastly beyond what we have witnessed in our lifetime. I look back at the sixties as an elementary school for social change. Now it is time for graduate work. Now is the time to apply our whole beings, our full attention and consciousness, to the work before us. Bibliography ============ * A History of Children, A.R. Colon * A Short History of the Weimar Republic, Colin Storer * Beating the Devil Out of Them, Murray A Strauss * Centuries of Childhood, Phillipe Aries * Childhood in the Western World, Edited by Paula Fass * Children and Childhood in Western Society, Hugh Cunningham * Conquest of Violence, Joan Bondurant * Economics and Politics in the Wiemar Republic, Theo Balderston * For Your Own Good, Alice Miller * Gandhi: An Autobiography, Mohandas K. Gandhi * Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and a Culture in Crisis, J.D. Vance * Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin, John D'Emilio * Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think, George Lakoff * On War, Carl Von Clausewitz * Physical Punishment in Childhood: The Rights of the Child, Bernadette J. Saunders and Chris Godard * Spare the child: the religious roots of punishment and the psychological impact of physical abuse, Phylip Greven * Sparta's German Children, Helen Roche * The Child in Human Progress, George Henry Payne * The Handbook of Family Violence, Vincent B Van Hasselt * The Harvest of Hellenism, Francis E. Peters * The History of Childhood, Lloyd de Mause * The Spartan Tradition in European Thought, Elizabeth Rawson * The Ties That Bound, Barbara A Hanawalt * The Weimar Republic, Eberhard Kolb * Time on Two Crosses: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin, edited by Devon W. Carbado * Winnetou, Karl May author: Sat Santokh S. Khalsa detail: tags: book,gender,spirit title: There Is A Way: What the World Needs Now - and How to Bring It In Tags ==== book gender spirit