By Amaya Gayle Gregory
Sedona, AZ — Radicalization is fascinating to me. The word applies to religions, politics, social norms, personal expression, even our self-talk and the way we respond to one another. It’s an all-purpose term. The more radicalization worms into the mind, gut and heart, the greater the inflexibility is. Radicalization is another word for intolerance, for judgement, for knowing definitively what is right and what is wrong.
In some ways, we are all radicalized. Are you? It’s easy to look and see. I am. I am radicalized to love.
Now that word love is slippery. What some call love, I call something else. If it’s not unconditional, it’s not love. Love isn’t picky. Love simply loves. For many, unconditional love is thought to be out of reach for mere humans, or unwanted (in conflict with the judging mind), or misunderstood (experienced as condemnation by the one who is judging).
Loving unconditionally conflicts with what we’ve been taught since we were little nippers.
We’ve been taught to know. Knowing is a tough nut. We were taught to know our ABCs, to memorize dates and places, events and names. We needed to know mathematical formulas, scientific theories, which God was the right one. Being right was honored: gold stars, high grades, entry into the college of our choice, sometimes with a full ride scholarship, not being looked down upon, feeling good about ourselves. Knowing was good.
There’s a reason we value being right and disparage being wrong. The dumb kids sat at the back of the room, weren’t picked, were ostracized.
It’s interesting to me now that the dumb kids weren’t really dumb at all.
Many of them went on to be huge successes in traditional society, but some found their niche skating along its edges. It’s pretty clear that the system was either ignorantly rigged or was never designed to work for us all.
Regardless of our ability to game the system, the message was implanted. Know. Be certain. Be right. For god’s sake, don’t tolerate the wrong.
‘Teaching to the test’ wasn’t a solution to our education woes. It only exacerbated the problem. Instead of teaching kids how to actually think, it taught answers to specific questions. It hammered in the concept of right versus wrong, of win-lose, of the smart kids and the ones who just don’t get it.
Well folks, this kind of education, and I use that term loosely, is here to haunt us. We don’t seem to be able to discern, to think systemically, to think beyond our now hardened beliefs and that leaves us primed to fight with all our might against one another, those we deem to be wrong, those with different answers to the test question.
It doesn’t have to be that way, that is, if you can see the programming for what it was and are willing to admit you’ve been conned. Or, you can continue adding more intolerance to the growing mountain range of narrow minded, hate producing, violence begetting, radicalization. To love, or not to love, that is the question.
How do we do that and not simply give up and allow the entire world to set itself on fire? Is it even possible to love our world and its inhabitants and not take on a sense of fatality? And what does that even mean? I’ve written about this before but not when the stakes were this high, not when I could clearly see where this is taking us. Before it was an assumption, now it feels more like certainty, and maybe that’s the problem.
I don’t know, even though it seems like I do.
My version of the world, of what is right and wrong (we all have one or two), says that intolerance leads to great harm, that what some call love, isn’t love at all, that being intolerant of those who are not like us is a big ‘no’ to life, an unloving way of being, that it is a sin against life itself.
So, if I take what I just wrote and put myself and my views into it, I am intolerant of those who I see as intolerant. I am unloving to those I view as unloving. I am saying a big ‘no’ to life, what some call God, to the creation as it is taking form. I am separating myself by the act of my judgement.
How can I not fear or judge, for judgement is a type of fear, those who I see as fearing, as judging, as causing great harm? And should I?
It’s an interesting place to sit, right in the middle of the question.
It seems like that is my pseudo answer. Sitting in the uncertainty, willing to not know, waiting to see how life moves me as love-in-action, leaves me free of the stress of judgement, stripping away the angst, the meaning I may give to events of the day. I let go of my need to put the pieces together like the cars of a train leaving the station, to see where it is headed. I trust that wherever it is headed, worrying about the destination does me no good. I rely on the love I am, the love I feel, to do what’s helpful, what’s necessary as it is needed to be done, to act according to my sense of fairness and compassion.
I need not fear. I need not judge. I need not worry. I need not stay on top of the events of the day and ride that train into an early grave. Stoking the fires of anger within only makes it harder to see the course of right action, inflaming emotions, sparking anger, igniting chaos within. Remaining present and empty, I am simply moved, moved simply, to be of good use.
That’s really it. It’s not easy, but it is possible. If I simply notice that the smoke is filling my lungs, I can turn towards emptiness and breathe. I can notice that I’m filling up with the detritus of old radicalized beliefs. Noticing, as wild as it seems, brings me immediately back to the present, jerks me out of my head, away from the stories I was creating. It is a return to love.
Be here for one another, for all others. Love your neighbors, the entire beautiful distinctively precious diverse worldwide community of beloveds. That’s it, folks.
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