Should spiritual people avoid politics? Some of my friends say things like, “We are supposed to be in the world, but NOT of the world,” or “We are uniters, not dividers.” Agreed.  They might state, “I wish that spiritual people would shut up when it comes to politics.” Perhaps.

Should spiritual people embrace politics? Some of my friends say things like, “We are supposed to be in the world, but NOT be worldly,” or “What use is spirituality if it is not engaged?” Agreed.  They might state, “I wish that spiritual people would speak up when it comes to politics.” Perhaps.

And I wrote about shutting up or speaking up here. And Henry Shukman, a Zen teacher, quotes the great Tang Dynasty poet Du Fu from the eighth century:

“The nation is shattered. Mountains and rivers remain.”

Things are volatile in the relative realm of apparent separation, but they are unchanged in the Absolute realm. In The Way, I wrote, “I find that I live a better life when I live as if there is a Oneness, as if we are supposed to bring our understanding of the Absolute world, which is Oneness, to our relative world, which can seem disconnected and divided.”

Larry Jordan

Larry  Jordan – who describes himself as “a follower of Jesus with a Zen practice” – is making a point very similar to Joan Tollifson’s, which I quoted the other day, where she wrote,

I don’t want to ignore the world or turn away. But I don’t want to be pulled down into the madness of it either. Karl Marx famously wrote, “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” I don’t want to offer people false or illusory comfort or an intoxicating or addictive escape from a grim reality. But I have a deep sense of a peace and freedom that is untouched by the world and a way of being “in the world but not of the world” that I feel is perhaps the deepest healing we can offer to the world because it goes to the root of the problems.

Mountains and rivers do remain. As Steven Pinker points out, no human, and no point in human history, stands alone. We are all part of an evolutionary current; as Martin Luther King said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

It is easy to forget. We are so readily, especially at times like the present, drawn into polarised positions, swayed by shouts of “Pick a side!”, that we lose sight of not only our indissoluble common humanity, but the metaphysical oneness of things, Being (Eckhart Tolle), the Tao, Rigpa.

Only be still, be quiet. The flickering passage of thought and emotion is no different to the impressions of the senses, the sound of the jackdaws settling into their roost in the old water tower, the rustle of tyres on the road at the end of the garden.

Out of stillness arises, quite by itself, what is needful. I nearly said, “what needs to be done”, but maybe there is nothing that needs to be done. Now is all that is real; if it contains doing, so be it. That will be doing, but in stillness. Like Chuang Tzu’s Cook Ding, following things as they are, we do what is needful without resistance. But only in stillness, only in quiet, can the way open, just as it is.