Soul Activism

Robert Sardello

When we look at something going on in the world and feel dissatisfied with what is happening, it is our soul aspect that feels this dissatisfaction. We either like or dislike what we see. If we are highly dissatisfied, then it is easy to imagine the possibility of joining some sort of protest, or of becoming an activist. However, dissatisfaction, even when felt deeply, does not form a very good basis for activism. Say you were deeply opposed to the war and felt it was entirely unjust. It is not sufficient to imagine the world without that war, and, imagining that the world would be decidedly better without it, join a protest. While that would seem to be following your soul sensibility, this could hardly be called Soul Activism. A judgment coming from these soul feeling cannot be made based on the few facts close at hand in conjunction with your soul feelings. The feelings are entirely valid, but humankind would not necessarily be served by your activism, because it is too narrowly based. For this level of soul engagement to become the basis for activism, it would be necessary to refrain from any judgment concerning the war and spend a very long time searching out all sides of the question, mainly because what comes to us from the media is fraught with misconception and lies. At some point in the work of taking all aspects of the question deeply in the soul, a sudden insight will arise, a creative insight that makes a whole picture of the matter we are concerned with. Only at that point would we see what is at stake in a larger context than the immediate soul dissatisfaction. Rudolf Steiner, for example, followed this methodology of activism in his work, The Karma of Untruthfulness. Such an insight leads to an activism most likely quite different that what immediately caught our emotions. For example, activism against the war might well turn instead to an activism countering manifestations of rank materialism. This level of Soul Activism, however, is insufficient because it rests in being oppositional which always results in providing energy for what we stand against to feed off of. For example, the million man march in Washington several years ago was immediately followed by the greatest one month increase in subscription to the National Rifle Association that has ever occurred.

It is possible to go to an even deeper level of soul engagement by taking a current event in the world with which you feel strong dissatisfaction and to take the difficulty into meditation. For example, we may have very immediate feelings of dissatisfaction with the way McDonald’s buys its eggs. For a long time, this corporation purchased eggs from factory chicken farms that keep animals in overcrowded pens stacked up on top of each other. This situation was actually the basis for the work of an activist group. They felt repugnance at animals being treated this way. It is certainly possible to work with this situation at a deeper soul level. If you took it deeper, you would go beyond the personal soul level and begin to have an inner experience in meditation of the life of the animal soul in relation to the whole of the cosmos. You would begin to inwardly have a sense of what treating animals in this way does on a larger cosmic and spiritual scale, the way such treatment numbs us to the deep spiritual sense of life itself. As you deepened the meditation, the feelings of anger and dissatisfaction, surprisingly, would go away. They would not, however, be replaced by feelings that this way of treating animals is acceptable either. We have now gone to a different level, a level beyond likes and dislikes in which something of the spiritual consequences in the world that result from treating animals in this way can be felt. And in the process, the desire to protest, to become an activist in the usual sense would also disappear. The question, though, is, how would what one experienced at a deeper soul level come to expression? It would seem that a completely different kind of activism would now be needed. One for which I do not think there is a form. What might that form look like?

At this deeper level, spontaneous thoughts, feelings, and images begin to come to you. You may find creative ideas coming concerning the forms your individual engagement with the concern in question could take. These soul images always take the form of creative possibilities and are, at least at the outset, always possibilities to be carried out individually rather than in groups. An example. A friend of mine, Gail Thomas, who certainly could be called an activist of the city, one whose life energies are devoted to bringing a sense of soul to the city, was working with the city of Dallas with the aim of persuading planners to refrain from building a large freeway alongside the Trinity River in Dallas without regard to the river. One of their objections to taking the river into account was that in one place along the river there is a toxic dump that would require too much money to clear, and hence it was expedient to avoid confronting that problem altogether. Gail had come across some interesting research in which mushrooms are utilized to ‘feed’ off of toxic waste, which could be a way of clearing the toxic waste inexpensively. What is interesting is that when she worked with this meditatively, all sorts of creative ideas began to come to her, not only with regard to the work with the city, but in many other areas as well. The image virtually exploded with excitement, and instead of protesting against the city for their disregard to the soul of the river, she instead introduced them to the wonderful power of the mushroom.

There is an even further level we must go in relation to the soul in activism. The act of activism is a social act, not just an individual act. Even if I am an activist with a membership of one, it is a social act. It expresses something concerning the soul of a people, not just the soul of the individual. Our individual feelings of dissatisfaction concerning something happening in the world easily bypass what is going on at the level of the soul of a people. Our emotions lead us to think that what we stand so strongly for is what is right and the other side is simply wrongheaded. We do not stop to realize that our feeling is coming from a level of soul that goes beyond our individual reaction. For example, Desmond Tutu was a speaker recently at a local university and he was taking a stance against the war. In the short news interview I saw, his way of speaking was quite interesting. He said that this war was an unjust war. Now that statement might be one that expresses the individual soul, a statement of immediate feeling. But there was no trace of reaction in what he was saying. He did not say, for example, that we must unite against this war and go out into the streets and protest. He is, as you know, not a man who would be against such protests. He went on, however, and spoke of how America is a country of great generosity and is understood that way by people in many parts of the world. The archetype of America is the soul quality of generosity, the true direction of will. He was here seeing something of the deeper soul/spirit nature of the nation and he was speaking how this war defiles that spirit. At that moment he touched into another entirely different level of activism. This level requires us to say that a nation is not the same as the collection of individuals who reside in that nation. Each nation has a soul, and the urges to activism are based in a deep, often unconscious sense of the folk soul of the nation. Desmond Tutu entered another level of activism by prompting people to find ways to publicly address the generous spirit of this nation.

There is yet one further level to consider. Every people, as a people, not as individuals, every folk soul, have a mission, a destiny. Every nation has its destiny and the destiny of each nation fits together to make a whole, the destiny of humankind. And, in particular times, particular epochs, one or more nations may have a particular responsibility of carrying the soul aspects of that time period. In Rudolf Steiner’s terms, for example, we are currently in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch the one following the ancient Indian, the ancient Persian, the Egyptian, and the Greek-Roman epoch - and this epoch is the epoch of the English-speaking countries with all that accompanies that kind of soul logic, scientific thinking, commerce, industrial thinking, individuality, technology ----all that we see coming into the world since the 15^th century. There is a soul necessity to the direction we see so prevalent in the world. This epoch, with all it brings, is a vast training of soul life into precision. We presently focus this precision in outer things the precision of science, technology, and business. The purpose of this training, however, is so that we can come to learn to observe the processes of inner life with precision. An epoch is a time of particular forms of soul development of humanity. If and when this training is completed, there will be a further epoch, centered in a different part of the world, with a different mission for the whole of humanity.

There are many individuals and groups that clearly understand the mission of humanity, and knowing this mission, make use of it for the purposes of limited groups. That is, there are those that want to slant the direction of spiritual development in a way that turns that development in ways that are useful to those groups. For example, rather than taking this time as a soul education, the focus is kept outward on the materialistic possibilities of the present mode of consciousness. And here is the reason for the crucial importance of Soul Activism. For example, the mission of this time, if it is to be in connection with the folk soul, the deep spiritual soul, and the ordinary soul life, excludes exaggerations of power in the economic realms. The soul mission of this time also excludes war. Wars sometimes and in some ages are important. War itself it not something that is inherently wrong. But the mission of this time, what we are supposed to be developing as human beings, the soul capacities that come about through science and technology, commerce, industrialization, and so on, do not need war as a necessary condition for their development. If, then, we see wars going on we can be sure that there is an excessive exaggeration of one or more of the soul aspects of the age. This realization helps us to see that activism is not just for the moment but rather concerns standing for the spiritual direction of humanity and trying to make sure that direction does not get diverted into the selfish desires of a few.

Each of these four levels of soul requires different forms of activism. If the soul element is not a conscious aspect of activism, our urgent feelings to do something that stands against destructive forces and stands for creative forces are bound to be confused. We risk unwittingly participating in the same mean spirited, oppositional, antagonistic, self-centered, materialistic modes of consciousness that characterizes what we protest against and fight for. Perhaps this reflection will inspire new modes of activism.

A version of this article was previously published in the online magazine, Lapis.