Spirit in Action

Activism Meets Mysticism

James O'Dea's latest book is The Conscious Activist: Where Activism Meets Mysticism, and he stands as an expert with a foot solidly in each camp. In addition to his 10 years as director of Amnesty International's Washington office, James has been President of the Institute of Noetic Sciences and CEO of the Seva Foundation. He is also lead faculty for the Shift Network's Peace Ambassador Training.

Duration:: 55m
Broadcast on:: 04 Jan 2015
Audio Format:: other

[music] Let us sing this song for the healing of the world That we may hear as one With every voice, with every song We will move this world along And our lives will feel the echo of our healing [music] Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpes Me. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred food in your own life. Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world That we may dream as one With every voice, with every song We will move this world along Occasionally, a book comes along to address the things that are exactly at the core of what I try to address in this Spirit in Action program. And that's what happened for me when I read James O.D.'s latest book, The Conscious Activist, where activism meets mysticism. The life that James has lived provides rich ground for reflections on the intersection of these two aspects of life. Born in Ireland, James felt a powerful pull to religious life at a tender age and got involved in activism by his mid teens. Lived and worked in Turkey and Lebanon witnessing the pain, violence, and confusion of those areas, but also coming in contact with profound mystics of the region. James eventually served as Director of the Washington D.C. Office of Amnesty International for ten years, working to spotlight and remedy abuses of human rights around the world. He has served as President of the Institute of Noetic Sciences and CEO of the SAVA Foundation and as Lead Faculty for the Shift Network's Peace Ambassador Training. I'm especially thankful that he's willing to join me today in spite of a very severe throat problem he's currently having and will do our best to provide as much technical help to compensate for the difficulty he'll have in speaking with us. Remember that you can always find more, including more writings and recordings, when he's not having throat problems via his website, jamesod.com. Odie is O-D-E-A, by the way, or on YouTube. James Odie joins us by phone today from Crestone, Colorado. James, I so appreciate your willingness to join us today for spirit in action. Great to be with you, Mark. I look forward to our conversation. You're currently located in Crestone, Colorado, which I had not known about until just recently, because my wife was considering doing a yoga training retreat in that area with her yoga mentor. Could you tell me a little about the area and what you're doing there? Yes, it's sort of in a mountain retreat area. About 20 years ago, a lot of land was donated to the world of spiritual traditions. And so, it's predominantly a community with spiritual interests, or Buddhist, and Hindus, and Japanese jewelry, and safety, and as many different communities with faith and spiritual encounter. I like to think that we are a community that focuses on three major elements of ecology, spirituality, and deeper community. I have moved here because of my attraction to this kind of location, to embody when living and have a cat, the value they want to seek to promote in the world. So, I don't have a century or I live here as a member of the community. I have sometimes retreats for individuals and small groups involved in kind of work that is night pass and combination of spirituality and social transformation. While you have a couple other books, your latest book is "The Conscious Activist" where activism meets mysticism. Do you find that these two things, activism and mysticism, that they go together well for most people, or do they tend to see it as kind of an either or a situation? You're an activist or you're a mystic, but not both. Generally speaking, we have perception that these are very distinct worlds. The mystic is interested in off-climate activity and transcendental reality. And the activist is interested in changing the world into the systems of oppression and injustice. And of course there are some, I don't know how to call it in age, who are belonging together if they were, of course, same things. And I broke them in my work. I like to show it was really a developmental curve. It really is a distinct curriculum for each. It is the work of growing inward in that work of self-discovery, of exploring the source of reality. The truth of one is very core and essence of one's being. And there are all kinds of skills without learning the subtle world. On the other hand, there is the journey outward of the activists into the world to stand up, be counted, speak out, stare down oppression, help transform, ingest systems and all of the skills that are involved in mobilization of people, inspiring people, and the surrounding countries. I think one has to really be honoring your growth path and the work that is involved in being effective and growing. And those kinds of places I've described in my own development and the growth, the kinds of places where they unite, where the activists is really maturing your work and really can even see that they have to work on themselves. They go into the root causes of ignorance and ego, and they find that they have work to do on themselves. They find that they are allowed to engage in the world, and actually present, and actually incarnate the stakes of being, the stakes of forgiveness and unconditional love. And being, as the husband of Andy pointed out, has to change the world mostly. Is there a particular danger you would point to if one does not develop both sides, if one only develops the mystical inward and not the activist or develops only the activist? Is there anything that's particularly problematic if you don't do both? Or I'm not one to judge. I think there is a potential trap to be aware of. That spirituality is about another place, a place beyond its world. And I think that that can be a trap. It's sort of falling into the transcendental reality and ignoring what is right in front of us. But you know, each of us in our souls journey and in our life path may have certain kinds of priorities given our karmic development and the nature of the conditions that are operating in our lives. So, I have met contemplatives who are doing great work for the world. I have met committed activists who don't think about spirituality and who are helping save the forest and be habitat and bringing health and social justice and human rights to different parts of the world. Trap there also is that you can always, you can sort of fall into that place where it falls outside you. And really, when we begin to understand the nature of reality, it's a continuum of inner and outer. And then once we're aware of the nature of consciousness itself, we see how ego itself is, in fact, the common elements of the mystery and the actors have to deal with if they're to serve their ultimate mission. How much do you find your perspective right now in common with the perspective of you as a young boy when James O.D. was before he's reached his teens when he finds his vocation is to become a Catholic priest when you headed off to Shrigley for the year and a half that you were there. How much do you find in common with that young boy and his ideals and his motivations? Well, for me, I'm very powerfully interested in the way we can acknowledge and honor childhood spirituality. I think we get messed up a little by psychology and cognitive psychology. We have PIA and other developmental psychologists who say that certain kinds of mental operations are sequentially developed and only developed at certain ages. And the reason I think that we're going to try is that putting the whole weight in the cognitive, the intellectual, and ignoring the spirit, and truly believe a child can experience spirit, which actually is a form of appreciation of the whole, of the vastness, of the depth of the universe as it appears inside of one. And so in my own case, I had a precocious and exposure experience. I think partly brought on by the fact that I was born into trauma. My sister died on the eve of my birth, and my mother discovered that she was carrying me as she was mourning the loss of her first daughter. And so like they were in tense conditioning in utero and in early childhood, for me to potentially develop that spiritual sense of being inside. I ate, I lied, for an intensification of this spiritual work. And proportionately persuaded my parents to allow me at age 11 to go to the admitted to the family of Ireland to England, and to allow me to go to a seminary in a fairly remote part of England. And really, I'm so grateful for that period for the days of silence and fasting, and the rising early in the day for masks before breakfast. All those experiences were highly developmental. They allowed me to go into the territory of the mystic experience, and ecstatic, and really get early in life. And then we all fell apart. And this universe said, "Okay, enough of that. Try something that's going to really nut you out of that security that you're in. For our listeners, I have to read the book to get the whole story as to why, in the end, I got up in the night, brought to the bank of the school and headed off on a journey back to Ireland. And really, the important part of the time of that narrative is the fall from grace. Is that experience when you've tasted directly the sweetheart nature of the divinity of one's own soul. And then to lose that, to do something that, you know, is categorically making a spiritual thing, hurts other people, is wrecking, is careless, is unconscionable in its own way, and is the fall from grace. And that fall from grace is so powerful, because it tells you, "I want to get back. I want to get back to a state of faith. I can't go take the root of that I took initially so that it has to be a new path, a new way for me." In my own cases, this tremendous sense of loss, of lying, of desolation, of fearing that I've heard others. And that's really instrumental, that's ferment, and it's really fertile territory for spiritual development, because it opens up the depth of lying that is so important for ministry. In my case, that turned, that longing turned into service and social action, and really beginning to focus my moral energy towards helping senior citizens and as described in the book I get, an award as teenager of the year, and start to really do have an activist voice as a 15- and 16-year-old in London. And again, it was an early developmental experience for me, where I really am passionate about helping others and being awarded and being recognized. And the government, the senior person in the British government, writes to me and says, "It seems as if you have a serious critique of the way we treat senior citizens, I'd be so grateful if you would come and discuss these matters with me." And I wrote back with the arrogance of youth and the arrogance of the activists, and I said, "You know what you need to do, and when you do it, we can meet." See there? I was refusing dialogue. I was on my high horse. I was polarizing the other. I needed that polarity in order to work the way I did as an adolescent activist. But really, we need dialogue. The maturing actor has to be a truth that's not one-sided. There is a just cause, but there is also dialogue. And dialogue is a very interesting word, the root of the word dialogue is dia logo. Dia means through logo, a higher mind, a higher reason. So it's together we must go through the higher mind and the higher reason in order to find that place where we can meet each other, where we can resolve conflict, where we can truly be instruments of an evolving story of peace and reconciliation. And that's exactly what we need in this world. Somehow you made that transition. You left Shrigley under be knighted circumstances. But you went on to great activism after you're rising in people's notice because of your activism with Miss Winter. I thought it was so beautiful and perhaps so horrible as well, the way that you return your address to the government official when you got on your high horse. Somehow yet this train of activism led you to go to the Middle East, to both Turkey and eventually to Lebanon. Are there any of the stories that you share in the book? And again, folks, the book is the conscious activist where activism meets mysticism by James O.D. Are there any of the stories from your experience in the Middle East that you think would be particular use to our listeners right now to give them an idea of how concretely you got motivated in the depth of your activism? For me it was a question of how do I serve, deepen my service. As you can tell a little in the book, I glare the line a little bit between service and activism and I think they need to be blurred in the sense that when we talk about service, we get a sense, we get an echo, we get a resonance. There's something stirring inside the person that makes someone to act on behalf of others. But you're still in that field of action and in my case when I went to Turkey and was caught up in a knifeing incident and I lost a lot of blood in the knifeing incident and actually was taken to the hospital via mysterious angel of the knife who dropped me on the touch of the hospital. He didn't want to get involved. But that is such a powerfully interesting moment for me when I was writing the book and reviewing that part of my life. Because after the knifeing incident, I mean literally every dish of clothing I had and tops of all of the evening including the shoes I was wearing, everything had to be thrown out. It was soaked in blood. And I had a first thought a few days later on, bringing an evaporation. And nobody will think the less of me if I leave Turkey now and return to England and I was a teacher and then later a senior administrator with a boy's boarding school in foreign Turkey. But something happened and the mysterious connection of the depths rose up in me and I found that in fact my commitment had been deepened and my sense of life's purpose had been strengthened. And I really now knew that I had an even deeper reason to live that I had been given my life tag and I was going to use it even more passionately than I had used it before. And I think in terms of your question, I was doing my response to people who find themselves sometimes in a moment of crisis or trauma things fall apart. And when we dropped down, there were certain elements of the book you're feeling recurrently where some sort of crisis happened, but yet out of that crisis something even more powerful and beautifully born is it's the solo ones' challenges to wake up, to see the true nature, to stop being asleep and do I read a book called Creative Stress, that for evolving souls living deep personal and collective trauma. And there is that sense that you find in the conscious actors, which sometimes the greatest challenges reveal the deepest and most powerful spiritual capacities of the human being. It was revealed to me in Beirut after the massacre. It was revealed to me in dollars between foreign Nazi and Holocaust. I had a spiritual power of the human being to forgive, to release the past, to heal, to move on, to move forward, point the way for the next cycle of evolutionary development. It says that it is really in that sense of leading the crisis in the trauma is the invitation to meet ourselves at the next level of death and wonder. And sometimes it looks pretty paradoxical. I am pretty sure that a large percentage of people not tuned to the same spiritual frequency as you are, that getting knifed almost to the point of death would be a pretty good idea that a message from the universe may be turned and run. Whereas paradoxically you found it as a motivation for deeper commitment. At that time, did you still spiritually, religiously identify as Catholic? What spiritual guides were you following at that time? I was not really after my teenage experiences. I moved out of the Catholic Church. I was beginning to open up to other spiritual forms. I was still part in terms of certain Christian principles and Christ-centered services. I had not engaged with, as I did later in my career a little later. I was being welcomed up by Sufi last year. Sufi then became a strong stream for me. But I think it was my path, as it used to sound, to be exposed to Catholic and Protestant and Protestant, to be exposed to Buddhist and Hindu. I had more than a superficial level to have that miserable journey towards the one who is the source of all. Well, let's continue with a little bit about your stay in the Middle East, which lasts at least a few years. You had the time in Turkey, you had a time in Lebanon. Were there any other events that precipitated a much greater sense of consciousness of what you needed to do as your work in the world? Certainly, the experiences in their roots really both challenged my senses over coming to stare at human ability and at the same time beginning to see that the endowmentable nature of the human spirit was at the root of all experience. So the intensity of the root, the bombing, the massacres, the graphic nature, the killing of children and women and massacres really pierced the veil from me in a way that again was more of a spiritual crisis and was finding the light when it seemed as if the road was covered in darkness. And so interesting, shortly after that, I began to have contact with the spiritual masters in Istanbul and really the reader is training they put me under in terms of fasting and praying and experiencing the state. As soon as you have a wonderful and metaphoric system, we talk about a lot getting cooked and tasting and a sense of really tasting the spiritual is so important. We can get trapped again by getting the concept. Well, I can convey the concept to you. That's definitely not the same as you're experiencing the reality behind that concept. I would find myself in the antique bookstore of Sheikh Musa Farafendi in Istanbul with literally rubbish activity going on all day. And then people who really book buyers coming into Bible and seeing how those realities could mesh together if the shake could be the antique book dealer and when the customer left the store, it would return to deep spiritual conversation. And my final encounter in Istanbul was a wonderful mystic who's still alive to this day. It really encouraged me not to become addicted to the spiritual path, not to find that I was centering my life around prayer and worship and the transcendental around. He asked me to take a fast from all of the spiritual praying and activity. And after that, he says like he was cleaning the slate for something else to come in. And what came in after that was amnesty international. He was, and I started working for amnesty international. So you can see the weave of spirituality and action just got deeper and deeper. When I abstained from spiritual work, the activist work came more deeply. The activists were beginning to see how in fact what we needed most of the healing of our world rather than the polarization and condemnation. As much as I could fuel moral outrage, eventually ten years of working for amnesty international, my sense of moral outrage is at a very nice point. There's a whole lot we can talk about that and we will do that in a moment right now. I want to remind our listeners that you are tuned in listening to spirit in action, which is a Northern spirit radio production. We're on the web at northernspiritradio.org where we have nine and a half years of our programs for free listening and download. We have further information about and links to our guests. So if you want to get a hold of James OD, you can find the link to jamesod.com. That's j-a-m-e-s-o-d-e-a.com. Or simply follow the link from northernspiritradio.org. There's also a place for comments and we love two-way communication. So please, when you visit our site, post a comment. Also, there's a place to donate and that is how we sustain this work. Click on support to donate to northern spirit radio. But even more important than that, I ask that you first consider supporting your local community radio stations, the kind of stations that carry these programs because they contain a slice of news and of music that you get nowhere else on the American airwaves. So please, start by supporting your local community radio station. Again, our guest is James OD. He's author of a new book, The Conscious Activist, where activism meets mysticism. He's part of the Shift Network's Peace Ambassador Training. He's lead faculty for that. He served as president of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, director for ten years of Amnesty International's Washington D.C. office. That was in the mid-80s to 90s. He's CEO of SAVA Foundation. And there's many more items that we could add to your curriculum vitae, James. From your perspective at this point in your life, what items would you put at the top of your curriculum vitae? To say, these are the most important ones that I've been part of. Again, that's hard because what I really like to emphasize is the developmental curve. So each element also revolves towards the next element. That includes on errors, on both days, on inadequacy. All those things become part of the building law, the deeper past. But I'm grateful that after so many years of service with Amnesty International, working every day to free prisoners of conscience, top torture, and executions and human rights abuse, I was able to go on and serve in other capacities, but also to help facilitate social healing data across the world. And really, with that transition from Amnesty, to the United States of mind, where you're trying to stop the perpetrators from doing what they do, to a larger kind of, we're trying to intervene at the level of consciousness around the wound that is transmitted from generation to generation, where the wound itself causes perpetration, where the victim becomes the abuser, and the cycle of abuse and perpetration is transmitted generationally. And to begin to look at our capacity to go into that wound, understand its nature, and interrupt its transmission, and to experience the capacity, the human capacity, or healing and forgiveness and reconciliation, to see that, in fact, these are powerful, evolutionary drivers. And that the path forwards for humanity is as Archbishop Desmond Tutu has widely said, there is no future without forgiveness, there is no future without reconciliation, and deeply honored to have been part of so many dialogues that bring forth that depth of healing, and the word healing itself, comes from the root to make whole, to make whole again, to restore. Now we can talk about justice, not from the punitive perspective, but from the restorative perspective, from the healing perspective. And that gives me the great sense of relief that that work is growing, that the restorative justice movement is growing, the social healing movement is growing, and understand the power of forgiveness and conflict resolution. These are very powerful, evolutionary drivers. You know, there's so many wonderful stories, James, that you share in the conscious activist, both from your childhood, from your spiritual experiences, and from your time with Amnesty International. There was one that I felt completely involved in, the moral conundrum you found yourself in, the moral bind that you experienced regarding the U.S. justification for military invasion of Iraq. Saddam Hussein, Amnesty International, had done up a paper analyzing how horrible that regime had been, and the President of the United States says, "I want it so I can look at it." And you knew that there was the danger that this would be used to justify war. Could you talk a little bit about your experience of that conundrum, how you made that choice? It seems so very challenging. Yes, you know, in my early activism, in case we refer to briefly as Mrs. Winter, and I went to her home and found a terrible situation of neglect and exposed it. You know, there really was that sense of moral clarity and simplicity. This is wrong, we can do better, let's change it. And there is that element that's still there for me. Something like blindness is what I worked on as a data foundation. 15 million people in India alone were blind from cataract blindness. We could take out those cataracts. We could restore sight to 15 million people. We have the resources we could do. It's morally clear. And yes, there's also that element of complexity that you're taking out on. And the height of this challenging situation is so damn who's saying, having so clearly tortured your own people, so clearly is reason. Even cases where there's gouging out the eyes of Kurdish children to send a message to their parents. And it is an invasion of Kuwait, of talking into the dry amnesty in terms of that cruelty. You want that moral clarity, you want that simplicity. I'm on the side of right and this is how we're going to make the world better. But that report, as the president wanted it so badly before over the hour, because he wanted to use this as a cause of spelling, as a declaration of the truth of his position, that Saddam needed to be struck if he's going to take his next country, if he was going to engage with Saudi Arabia. I just felt such deep sense of pressure and confusion entered into my dream, like I had a vivid nightmare of a scorpion entering my heart, flying and entering my heart. And I woke out literally with the hair on the back of my head, rising. I now understand that that's the true physiological reaction to fear. And I sort of reflected a point, no nights in shining on or in no sense of simple moral equations. The reality is that Saddam had to be stopped, and the reality is also that war creates more abuse and more carnage and violations. We have to walk through that complexity through as much light in our consciousness and conscience as we can bring to any choice in any decision. In my case, I decided to relent and allow the White House to get a copy of the report early, a vote in ink on the cover for the president's eyes on the strictly embargo. Because I felt it was really important for him to read a full report on human rights abuses by Amnesty International. And hopefully that would affect his own consciousness like human rights abuses. I like your question because it reminds us that there isn't always that shining line between what is the best way forward or not, or who's on the right side and who's on the wrong side. And we have to work with enormous complexity. The only thing we can do is really rely on our own instincts deeply as we can to guide us through. It's a bit like the very famous, I think, cartoon pogo. We have met the enemy and they as us to not realize that the problems and the complexities and the multiple values that we need to apply to look at a situation are within us. When we only see them out there versus in us, I think we short-change reality. Yes indeed, and we can get into this fixation with all we need to do to study the problem better. You know, people have PhDs in every kind of problem. You can talk up the problem. So they're actually becoming the solution. Wow, that seems like a whole different character of being in Nova's order of being. We actually are called to understand the problem, to see the problem, to see the complexity of the systemic nature problem. And yet to put our best energy and our greatest creativity into becoming the solution. The book we're talking about, and really it's part of the results of the life experience of James O.D. The book is "The Conscious Activist" where activism meets mysticism. You're 10 years as the director of the Washington office for Amnesty International. Are there any other stories that you care to share right now before we talk about your work since that period? One story I share is a story of a dungeon in Morocco, both as a member. And it was referred to as the king of Morocco's private rose garden. That's where he had people think that he had a personal issue around. And I share the story of getting a letter snugged out from the prison by a prison guard who had some conscience. And he described how over half the prisoners died of hunger from malnutrition or the cold, sleeping on the cold cement slab. We testified in Congress about this issue. I read part of the letter from the prison at the end of my testimony. And really this is an example for me, working the letters of power. If you conduct enough attention to have Congress hold a hearing on it, the transcription of the hearing would be immediately relayed to the relevant government. If you like the king's bedtime reading, and if you continue to use pressure with letters from members around the world, about six months later the king of Morocco closed to Tazno north prison. By the year after that I had the privilege of meeting one of the men who had been in prison for 18 years. Very, very powerful experience to meet someone who was again saved in that way. To see that really when can you use those letters of power and can really get solutions in places where you would never expect progress to remain. And so it takes a lot of energy and focus energy to keep driving through issues like that day after day. It does, and you said that at the end of your ten years you felt burnt out, or at least that's how I've seen it written down, then burnt out after all this time that you had served with Amnesty International. I think of someone like Mother Teresa who put many decades into what most people would think of as desperate, hopeless work. The unending poor and all the suffering that she faced daily. Was there something that you, James O.D., were missing or maybe could have had that would have sustained you so that it would have been sustainable to continue working for Amnesty International? Maybe that's just not what you were called to do, so I'm not presuming that you should have stayed at that work. But the fact that you were burned out, it seems to me to indicate there was something perhaps missing. Mother Teresa's case and she was asked about is she reflected that in each of the people she met, you know, high or low, suffering or celebrating. She saw the faces of the lovered, of the lovered design in each of them, and so she was a high level of contractors activist in that sense. She was seeing the Godhead in each being. In Amnesty, I had been deeply conditioned by the polarization of the perpetrator and the victim. And we need to prosecute the perpetrator to stop the torture, to stop the abuse. That's how the work was organized. So it really required me to move on, beyond that, to explore how does the perpetrator get so wounded? A lot of the states that being themselves that we need to look at, certainly in my own development, I was ready to move to a place for the exploration of healing and those capacities that do, in fact, when you cannot move into the future without them, it will always be polarized by ask them, you know, victims and perpetrators. And in an odd and easy way, there is no simple remedy in this story that there is the invitation to sit down and to begin to explore healing. And if former Nazis and Holocaust survivors, if Catholics and Protestants were Northern Ireland or Israelis and Palestinians, if Hutu and Tutsis endured, we can do it. The mother in Iran death can forgive the mergers of our three children. We can go that far. These are the ways for, these are the examples that say, beyond the polarization, beyond the punishment, beyond that obsession with finding the punishment for the perpetrator, there is a path to healing. There is a way forward for humanity that we can take and it requires its own development of human capacities and consciousness. Unfortunately, if people do sit down and read the conscious activist, and I hope they will, they'll get some of the ideas of the important steps that they might be taking, and certainly that you took in leading up to your involvement in wholeness, in integration. That's one of the words you use there. Another one that you speak about is the importance of sacrifice. You call it the heart of mysticism. Could you explain a little bit about that for our listeners, James? In the contemplative tradition, the concept of sacrifice is really a decision or choice that is made in favor of a higher principle. It's not a, you know, when you make sacrifices in your life, you're doing it in favor of that higher principle. It says, if I let these things go in my life, I'm going to allow in something more perfect, more life-giving, more hope. And so, we don't often think about it in terms of activism. Gandhi, of course, understood sacrifice as central, as the central tenet of non-violence. It comes to a point where you meet the violent force. You are the ones who must sacrifice. Again, because you're pointing to a higher principle, you're taking the higher ground. And when you do that, then you reveal your strength to those who would beat you and oppress you. What I do in that chapter on sacrifice, I bring it home to the domestic front, is I think that's where a lot is revealed in terms of what's really happening spiritually in our lives. How activist is the activist when it comes to the home front? And how is there saving the way of saving the rainforest? How are they doing on the domestic front? What are they giving up? What are they giving for domestic peace and harmony and autonomy of the children and so forth? So, I use my own separation and divorce story as an example of how, in our case, we made sacrifices for the children. We instead of building them up and having different households, we had one household, which the parents wrote catered around. I was there half a week. My life was there the other half a week. And it was enormously complicated and required quite a few sacrifices. But it was affirmed for the children that they were the nucleus of the family. And it was a very, very healing situation. They had done wonderfully well through the process. As it really reinforced to them, the parents could make sacrifices and choices in their lives so that the unity and harmony of the whole of its growth. So how about that? The family was strengthened in its own dynamic way through the process rather than broken up and divided. I think sacrifice is a very deep theme. We want to get out of the martyrs' imagery of sacrifice and replace it with choice or preference to do something that favors a much higher principle. There are that and many, many other lessons and principles. Synchronicity is another one or this sensitivity to leadings that most people would dismiss, but it's almost as if you have developed an additional sense. Could you talk about your trip? You were going to the Federal Institute, Kalamazoo, got aborted in Chicago. You went back to Marin County. Could you talk about that and how your faithfulness to that sensitive leading was so important? Yes, indeed. I'll tell you before that, a friend recently told me about listening to the inner voice and he said he was out driving one day and the inner voice said, pull over now. And he pulled over and sure enough, coming out of control, a huge truck, careening around the corner, and in the road, he would have been hit. And a few weeks later, he was out driving and he heard the voice, pull over now, and he pulled over and waited ten minutes and nothing happened. And he said, you know, the challenges know when you listen to that voice and know that it's the deepest voice of your own inner guidance and when it's just the gathering voice of your mind. In my case, in a story too complex to write now, but it's in the book, I was heading out to Kalamazoo to a meeting that got postponed and found myself taking a day off work and driving out of here along the California coast and came to the lienus and basically felt called by my inner voice to go into a house and introduce myself. I totally, challenging and daring and difficult thing to do to walk past the house and have your voice stand okay and go inside and introduce yourself. And to know when that voice is faithfully and truly her own inner voice, breaking through the constructions of time and space, calling you to be faithful to it, to listen so deeply that you're willing to face the embarrassment in me. It's huge to be able to bring up to a house and say, hello, what's going on here. In my case, it was a very rich encounter with universe, a tear in the fabric of reality in which I get to that house and believe it or not, the human rights leaders of America have all been meeting and had recently became a very profound experience around why I was called into that house. And before I left, a young woman asked me the question, what is the relationship between spirituality and human rights? And it was really in responding to that, not like the universe had orchestrated this bizarre thing of a certain sense where I walk into a house that I didn't know, where everybody who had been in the house I knew, and they were all human rights leaders, and then somebody asking me what is the relationship between the spirits and human rights so that I could answer it so that I could hear myself speaking about the evolution of consciousness itself, the movement and human rights into this inner work, the transmission of mourning and healing, the whole story of the evolution of our human rights work and story from being against to creating something new It was a very, very powerful example of really that primitive nature of spirit where spirit can get right into the gut and say, do you hear me down here? Do you hear me resonating in the gut? Do you hear me calling you to do something? It may seem outrageous, are you willing to take the steps out of the known world, out of the conditioned world, and be with or could be so entirely different, and it's there all the time, that voice calling us out, calling us onward to step into, and what we really call to step into is that path of deep self-discovery We have an identity, a being, a soul force, a universe once, a universe is calling us, come, be, act, be with me, be truly who you are, and in doing that, I think we release what I call the self-actualizing power of love That our root, we are all love, even those who get through an act of ignorance night to a very dangerous and final path, if they could really, really discover who they were, it would be led back to the path of love We've covered so much, and there's so much more yet in the book, the Conscious Activist, where activism meets mysticism by James O.D. We didn't touch on, or barely touched upon, such portions as your work as President of the Institute of Noetic Sciences as CEO of the Sava Foundation There's so much more that you've done, continued to do to this day, James, I am honored to have the fruits of that in this book, and for you to share today It's really an inspirational journey, and your stories are so captivating, and your thoughts so profound, I really hope that our listeners will go out and find the Conscious Activist Use it to nurture their own path, so thank you so much for writing the book, for living the life, and for joining me here today for spirit and action Thank you Mark, many better things on the journey Remember that you can read and listen to James on his website, jamesod.com J-A-M-E-S-O-D-E-A.com, or listen to him before he had his severe throat issue, you can find him on YouTube In any case, thank you for joining us today, and we'll see you next week for spirit in action The theme music for this program is Turning of the World, performed by Sarah Thompson This spirit in action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org Thank you for listening, I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light, this is spirit in action With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along And our lives will feel the echo of our healing [MUSIC PLAYING]