Patricia Pearce

Helping You Be the Change

Money: Ally in Our Spiritual Awakening

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Money: Ally in Awakening
What if money could serve our spiritual awakening?

 

[This article has also been published on the Huffington Post.]

Now that the president has released his proposed budget, I thought I would take the opportunity to talk about something that for a lot of spiritually-oriented people is anathema—money. More specifically, I’d like to talk about how money was hijacked to serve the purposes of ego.

When I talk about ego, I am talking about a thought system based upon the idea of separateness. Because separateness is an illusion (the only place it exists is in the mind) the ego itself is an illusion. Yet this illusion has shaped the world in which we live.

Believing separateness to be real, ego constantly fears for its survival, and its deepest hungers are for security, worth, power, and status. Money came to be seen as the provider of all of those things.

By its very nature ego is insatiable. No matter the present circumstances, it always wants more. More power, more influence, more security, more status. Ego, in other words, is an addictive thought system, and money is one of its drugs of choice.Continue Reading

Solidarity Topples an Old Story

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Mt. Carmel Cemetery vandalism

[This article has also been published on the Huffington Post.]

Last week I paid my respects at Mt. Carmel cemetery in Philadelphia, a Jewish cemetery that recently, like others in St. Louis and Rochester, was severely vandalized. Seeing gravestone after gravestone—estimates now say more than 500—toppled with such brute force was sobering. But one thing it wasn’t was news.

News—as the word implies—refers to the new, and bigotry in all its many guises is a very old story. The real news is how thousands upon thousands of people are responding to these acts of bigotry.

In a previous post, Three Ways to Be a Peacemaker in a Time of Hatred, I talked about the importance of solidarity in the face of hatred, and solidarity is exactly what we are seeing take hold. Organizations such as Southern Poverty Law Center have been tracking the rise in hate crimes, but it would be far more telling to track the rise in acts of solidarity.Continue Reading

Hate Crimes and Humanity’s Metamorphosis

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"Metamorphogenesis" painting by Sara Steele.
Metamorphogenesis Nacimiento, c. 2016 by Sara Steele, All Rights Reserved. Used by permission.

[This article has also been published on the Huffington Post.]

As fear and turmoil engulf our nation, there is a metaphor that has been on my mind which I would like to share with you. It is the story of what happens to a caterpillar when it undergoes its metamorphosis into a butterfly.

I am indebted to David Korten, who, in his excellent book The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community, spoke about the work of evolution biologist Elisabet Sahtouris who has studied this mysterious and miraculous transformation.

Before its transformation, the earthbound caterpillar is focused on consuming. It engorges itself, devouring as much as it can, until it is so bloated it can do nothing but hang upside down and give itself over to its destiny. It forms around itself a chrysalis where it undergoes a metamorphosis that, if you had never known of it, would seem completely implausible.

Continue Reading

Fear: Passage to Liberation

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facing fear

[This article has also been published on the Huffington Post.]

In the wake of our recent presidential election, many people are feeling deeply afraid about what the future holds, and understandably so. We have already seen an alarming rise in hate crimes now that bigotry has seemingly been legitimated through our electoral process.

In upcoming posts I will say more about the bigger picture that I see unfolding and the unprecedented opportunities now before us to come together in ways the world has never seen. But for now, I want to speak about fear and offer some ways we can work with it to become the mindful, liberated agents for change these times need us to be.

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Election 2016 and Our Evolutionary Task

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election 2016 evolutionary task

[This article has also been published on the Huffington Post.]

Many of us are heaving a sigh of relief that this presidential election 2016 is drawing to a close, yet we also know that the hostilities that have been playing out in our nation these last many months are not simply going to evaporate after the last poll has closed and the last vote tallied.

We are going to be left with some important work to do — and we are going to need to be clear about what we are dealing with.

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Three Ways to Be a Peacemaker in a Time of Hatred

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flag and dove

[This article has also been published on the Huffington Post.]

In the face of escalating hatred and violence that is tearing at the seams of our country, many of us are left wondering how to be a peacemaker. How can we counteract the alarming anger and violence without engaging in further attack? How do we unleash the power of peace?

The fundamental misunderstanding about reality beneath all the xenophobia, Islamophobia, homophobia, racism and sexism we are witnessing is that something called separateness exists.

The question is, how do we respond to this erroneous idea without engaging in the same posture of attack that such an idea engenders? I am going to suggest three ways, based on the principles of nonviolence.Continue Reading

Donald Trump: Your Spiritual Teacher in Disguise

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Behold your spiritual teacher

With this presidency you may feel you are in the midst of a nightmare. The crucial question is, do you know how to work with nightmares?

According to the late dream expert and author Jeremy Taylor, who worked with dreams for over 40 years, all dreams come in the interest of health and wholeness. All dreams—including nightmares, which bring information so crucial and urgent that they scare the bejesus out of us to get our attention.

This presidency nightmare is no different. It is offering us exactly what we need at this precise moment to grow and evolve as a species. But first we have to be willing to look at what is happening beneath the contentious headlines to discover the deeper wisdom being offered us.

So let’s do some dream work, shall we?Continue Reading

Ferguson and Other Nightmares

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Like most people, I have found the recent events in Ferguson, Missouri, deeply disturbing. One of the most troubling things I learned this morning didn’t have to do with the ongoing violence, looting and arrests. It was the results of a Pew survey that showed a wide disparity of opinion between whites and blacks about whether Mike Brown’s murder points to deep racial issues in our country.

I think part of the disparity of opinion is because many white people don’t understand the difference between racism and prejudice. Prejudice is holding negative stereotypes about others. Anybody can be prejudiced, and most of us are in some way or another.

Racism, though, is far more insidious because it couples prejudice with institutional power. It places people in the dominant group in the position of being able to carry out their prejudice through institutional systems.

I don’t know about you, but I can’t recall a time when an unarmed white youth was gunned down in similar fashion by a black member of a police force. The judicial system in this country is certainly racist as well. The evidence? Blacks are incarcerated at overwhelming rates and for far longer compared to whites for similar crimes.

Someone has said that racism is a disease white people catch, but black people die from. And black people are dying.

As a white person, therefore, it is incumbent on me not only to speak out about injustice, but just as important to heal myself of the disease of racism. It is a highly contagious disease that everyone in our society is exposed to from an early age. It landed on our shores with the arrival of slave ships unloading their emaciated cargo onto the auction blocks, and unlike so many diseases that our medical establishment has managed to banish, racism is one that continues to inflict us all, sometimes with deadly results. [Along those lines, let me recommend an excellent book: Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America’s Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing, by Joy DeGruy]

Every now and then in this blog I talk about this world we live in being a dream. That isn’t an abstract concept for me. It was something that I saw to be the case at the height of an intense awakening I experienced over a decade ago. We are literally living out a story based on our unconsciousness. At the root of this dream’s plot is a very simple, erroneous premise: that something called “separateness” exists.

Anyone who knows me well knows that dream work has been a central feature of my spiritual life. Some of the most important decisions of my life have been informed by dreams, and much of my own healing has come about because of the insights dreams have brought me.

While I was in seminary, when “big dreams” first started coming to me, I studied dream interpretation with Jeremy Taylor, author of several books on dream work, and one of Taylor’s central premises is that all dreams come in the interest of health and wholeness. All dreams.

So let’s imagine for a moment that what’s happening in Ferguson is a dream, that it’s our dream. Better yet, look at it as your dream, because if separateness doesn’t exist, then it is your dream as much as it is mine, as much as it is the people’s on the embattled streets of Ferguson.

What does it mean in your dream that a white police officer has just gunned down an unarmed black teenager? What part of you is that officer? What is at the root of his hatred? What does he really fear?

And what part of you is that black teenager, despised, vilified as dangerous, the target for your psyche’s rage and fear?

How might the battle happening on the streets of Ferguson point to the same divisions that play out in your own psyche, and what must you do to reconcile those factions so that true peace can come? In other words, how can you bring the truth of Love (which is, simply put, the Reality of Oneness) to bear in this hostile, volatile situation?

These are not idle questions. The peace of the world rests on each of us doing this difficult work, of seeing the “other” as an aspect of ourselves no matter how hard it may be to accept. I, too, must embrace the unpleasant truth that inside of me is an armed racist policeman who needs healing, and a despised black teenager who needs respect.

What’s happening in Ferguson is a nightmare. What’s happening in Gaza is a nightmare. What’s happening in Syria and the Ukraine are nightmares. They are all extreme cases of the fallacy of otherness playing itself out in deadly fashion.

And nightmares, like all dreams, come in the interest of health and wholeness. They come in extreme form because the information they bring is important, and because the time has come for us to accept it. They are invitations to us to wake, finally, from our illusions.