The political situation in America seems to saturate public life; it can seem hard to unplug from politics when every aspect of life seems to be politicized and discussed constantly in mass media and social situations alike. However, it is essential that the spiritual seeker learns to keep a healthy relationship, if not a complete distance, from politics. This is because politics in its current form deals mostly with man’s lower nature, whereas spirituality is the attempt to transcend the lower nature for the higher nature. Without this healthy balance, we become dominated by the need to know who is winning, who is losing, and whether “our side” will come out on top; and we get caught in the negative energy generated by the political process as seen on cable news or in acrimonious debates with other citizens. We risk getting caught in the turbulent phenomena of the lower world and losing our hold on the higher spiritual reality.
But politics is reluctant to let go of its hold on the seeker, as it claims to be all encompassing, demanding our engagement and energy. The slogan from the 1960s, the personal is political, pointed out how the seemingly neutral structures of daily life are actually microcosms of political structures, with the implication that there is no safe refuge from political structures in simply going about one’s regular life. In society, having the right political opinions is seen to be important to being a decent person; a person with the wrong views is suspected of being unsavory and thus worthy of marginalization. There is a tremendous urgency that people on all sides of the spectrum place on politics, and every development seems to be the crucial one separating utopia from dystopia.
In this climate, the first step towards a healthy balance is seeing politics for what it is. Politics is the way that humans come together to resolve disputes, allocate resources, solve collective problems, manage social systems—in short, to govern society. While these functions are essential, it is important to recognize some truths about the nature of politics. First, even where politics claims to be about principles, it is fundamentally driven by material interests. While this critique is often leveled from a leftist perspective, it is not the case that centrist and conservative politics are driven by material interests while leftist politics are pure; in fact, leftist politics are driven by material interests as well. We see an open admission of this in the notion of “popularism” that has surfaced—which is the idea that the Democratic party can both move left and win more by doing what is popular with voters, which inevitably means attending to their material interests. Material interests are essential to human life and need to be respected. However, for the spiritual seeker they are ultimately secondary, and it is not helpful to be overly preoccupied with them. Second, the entire mechanism of politics in the present age works through the ego to drive its results—through the manipulation of emotions like resentment and desire at scale, or the appeal to self-interest, or by casting the political situation as the manichaean battle of good and evil. This is as true of one’s favored side as it is of the opposite side. While again this is essential for the maintenance of the world in the current conditions, the goal of the spiritual path is to go past all such dualities and obscurations to reach the Divine, so it is imperative to avoid being caught by this machinery.
It is true that in a certain lens of analysis, there is no escaping politics and political structures because they condition all the structures of our life. But this isn’t the healthiest or even most accurate framing to use as a spiritual seeker; as a spiritual seeker we see that even more fundamental than political structures is the Divine, his manifestations, and his conditions. Rather than believing that everything is a fundamentally political development, we can see that everything has a fundamentally spiritual basis. From a spiritual perspective, it is the ego that is the fundamental psychological fact that conditions the relations of man; if politics seems pervasive, it is because the ego is pervasive.
But how, then, are we to engage with the specifically political dimension of life? One approach is to cut off engagement with politics altogether. This is very difficult in our current society, but it can be done. This would involve choosing not to pay attention to politics on the news, and bowing out of political discussions with your associates. No matter how much one might be badgered, the line “I’m not political” is still respected. While this approach is possible in a secluded spiritual atmosphere such as an ashram—indeed, the Sri Aurobindo Ashram insisted on upholding a ban on politics at the Ashram as one of their three fundamental rules—it is difficult to practice in a democratic society such as the one we have today.
A more suitable practice in a society like ours may be to continue participating in social norms around politics, first, without getting overly invested in it, and second, while constantly performing introspection so as to overcome the ego in this engagement. This can mean paying attention to political developments, participating in political engagement such as by voting, and even having discussions with others about politics. If there is a political action that has a positive and concrete goal, it is fine to participate in it. But this must be done with a calm and steady heart, not one that is agitated into a frenzy by mass-media. And self-inquiry around politics should be conducted regularly. Are you taking sides on an issue by demonizing another group of people? Are you allowing your resentments and desires to color your political opinions? Are you arguing about a political issue because you want to prove yourself right to an acquaintance or colleague? If we start to inquire into our motives, we find that political questions we previously found to be essential turn out to be manifestations of some underlying psychological factor, which we can then release, heal, or clear.
As these egoic facets drop off, we develop a clearer view as to what is really going on in politics. In fact, it is the spiritual seeker who is often most able to see through to the real truth of political matters. The seeker who moves past their own cherished thoughts and seeks the Divine truth will see in any political debate two sides that are each caught in their own mental formations about what is right and what is wrong; by working through their own desires and resentments, the seeker comes to see how the political positions of others are colored by these factors. This is not to say that there is a moral equivalence between each side. Nor is it to say that the Lord has no favorites; the Lord has a favored side that he supports, just as Krishna had special political designs in the Gita which required Arjuna to win. But the Divine recognizes that the side that is chosen to win is limited and imperfect as well, and is chosen because it is the vessel through which a larger Divine purpose works—a purpose which has no sides.
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