Spiritual Politics

Many of you know that I have a very conservative, religious upbringing. One of the things that always bothered me about many of the churches I attended growing up was pastors who preached politics. Many of them endorsed political candidates (always the republican candidate) and essentially encouraged their congregations to vote for that candidate, outlining all of the reasons why they were “god’s chosen candidate.”

Since the pandemic began, I’ve begun to see many alleged spiritual teachers doing and saying the exact same things, largely driven by QAnon. And this, once again, rubs me the wrong way.

Learn more about how QAnon infected the wellness community and what you can do about it.

No true teacher should be telling you who to vote for. They should encourage you to think for yourself. No true teacher should be laying out what you should believe and then say, “But I’ll let you decide for yourself,” because that’s leading the audience.

True spiritual teachers understand that the political saga playing out on partisan news television is a game that exists within the illusion of duality. Binary opposites: Left vs. Right. Republican vs. Democrat. Liberal vs. Conservative. This is the matrix. As long as one exists, its opposite will rise up to meet it, until we transcend the illusion and recognize that we are a single community and what is best for the most vulnerable among us is what is best for the whole.

Learn more about how separation consciousness shows up masked as spirituality and opposing politics.

What we are attempting to do here, now, is dismantle this system and build a completely new one. It does not look like capitalism. It does not look like socialism. It does not look like communism. It looks like something completely new that has never existed.

As we’ve witnessed, one person can, in a very short period of time, almost completely destroy decades of perceived progress. I say perceived because if it were truly transformative change, rather than performative, it wouldn’t have been burned down so easily.
 
Getting to the point where we even had the semblance of change took lifetimes of work from activists who never quit. They tried to enact change from the top-down, but because that change only occurred at the top, populism was still able to take hold and allow the past to rear its ugly head. So If you think that the kind of deeply transformative change we need in this country is as simple as voting for the next president, you are sorely mistaken. That kind of change has to come from the bottom up. No single person, no political Jesus, is going to swoop in and fix it. It’s almost silly that we expect a single administration, in mere four to eight years, to repair an entire society that was built on oppression and still operates from the cyclical trauma inflicted by that oppression.
 
That kind of deep change is for us, the people to do–not by simply casting a single vote for a person already entrenched in the system and expecting them to fix it, but by being the change you want to see. By inhabiting the consciousness that we purport to believe in. By no longer looking outside of ourselves for solutions, but by being the solution.

What does that look like?

It looks like taking responsibility for the change you want to see by implementing it in yourself and your own community. It looks like reaching out to each other, such as supporting or creating organizations within your community that aid the people most affected by systemic oppression. It looks like supporting one another in times of need in whatever way you can. For example, people are in financial trouble right now, but are offering their services on a pay-what-you-can basis anyway, and those who aren’t in financial trouble giving more to help them, or sending other people who can pay to them, to help keep each other afloat. That’s what community looks like. We don’t do it because we benefit from it, we do it because it’s the right thing to do for the good of everyone. It looks like an intrinsically-driven system built from the ground up, not a mandated top-down system implemented by a government.

Learn how certain political ideologies are rooted in separation consciousness.

It looks like uniting with each other and standing in our true power. It looks like creative problem solving at the local level. It looks like grassroots-led movements. It looks like something completely new that we have to build because it doesn’t not yet exist on this planet.

These are all Aquarian themes that we will see as we ramp up to the Age of Aquarius, as soon as Pluto is finished laying waste to all of the shadow energy of Capricorn (greed and selfishness in government and economic systems).

Learn more about the political and social changes we can expect in the Age of Aquarius.

What we need is each other.

But for as long as we, as a collective, continue to seek solutions externally by expecting someone else to do the work or come and save us, we will stay on exactly the same path we’ve been on. Thinking Donald Trump or Joe Biden, or whoever the fuck ends up on the ballots is going to save the world without you having to lift a finger is no different than sitting around and waiting for Jesus to come back or the aliens to land and rescue all of humanity from itself.

If any spiritual leaders are telling you to believe that the system is going to catch you right now, advocating for things to go “back to normal,” or to believe that any single political party or candidate will fix everything, then they are a part of the system. That is old paradigm and it is dead. Do not cling to what is crumbling before your very eyes.

What we perceived as “normal” was a broken shit show, and nothing that was an intrinsic part of that broken shit show is going to survive the next four years.

This is new paradigm. We are our own saviors. And do not let any spiritual teacher tell you otherwise.

Thanks for being here,

Ash

 

Enjoy this post? Subscribe to get ass-kicking inspiration delivered to your inbox.

Got a question? Submit it to me via email.

Send me a question that you want me to cover in a future blog post to ash@inmysacredspace.com or use the button below.

SUPPORT MY WORK

If you benefit from the free educational content I provide and would like to further support my ability to provide these resources, you can purchase a business consultation, or make a donation:

 

Venmo: @akk4zd

3 Comments

  1. YES!!! Aweh. Amen. Very true. And I want to even add here that spiritual teachers that are trying to convince people to believe or do certain things to ‘earn’ or ‘deserve’ ascension are not honouring that we all have inherent wisdom and connection to our own truth.

    Reply
  2. I’ve enjoyed reading all of your articles and really appreciate your perspective, especially on critical thinking, sniffing out misinformation, and spiritual commercialism. Unfortunately this article is an exception for me because the ability to be apolitical is a privilege that I and many others can’t engage in because we need our human rights to be legislated and one of the two political parties in this country doesn’t actually support our human rights. If you’re white and straight yeah not much will change for you no matter who is in power and you can enjoy the luxury of floating above it all; but the 1/3 of the Supreme Court and 25% of Federal judges that Trump appointed will be shaping our policies and laws for a generation (unless you think this country will dissolve sometime in the near future?) that hurt marginalized and vulnerable communities the most. I vote for them and for the ones who can’t vote because of work, poverty, getting disenfranchised, etc. because I want to live in an equitable and just society and unfortunately until people can learn to mind their own business, that entails some sort of governance.

    Do I think spiritual leaders should try to influence their followers votes? Of course not. It’s not their lane whatsoever and to be honest it is extremely lazy to take any one person’s word on who to vote for. But I also believe it’s irresponsible to the most vulnerable in our society to encourage people not to vote at all or insinuate that there will be no difference locally or globally with Biden vs. Trump. We don’t have the privilege to “be the change”, we need the change to be legislated.

    Reply
    • Hi Katrina,

      I think I’ve been greatly misunderstood here. I am not at all advocating for being apolitical… in fact, I am advocating for people to become even more involved within their communities at a local level–including political.

      I am also not advocating for people not to vote, I am advocating for people, specifically spiritual people, not to allow social media influencers to tell them that Donald Trump is an undercover lightworker and therefore, they should vote for him.

      I am also not saying that there will be no change based on the person we are voting into office, but I am saying that the level of change that the people you’ve mentioned actually want and need to see isn’t going to come from voting one person into the Whitehouse for four years–and that includes Biden, given his centrism. He’ll put out the fires stoked by Trump, but he alone isn’t going to liberate us from oligarchy, mostly because the system is broken. And in the months since I wrote this post, that has continued to be revealed over and over and over in just about every way possible.

      What I am saying is that the current political system we have was built by oppressors, and as such, is meant to oppress, and attempting to use an oppressive system to liberate people from that very system is completely counter-intuitive. The system itself must be dismantled. I know that’s difficult for people to imagine when this system is all we’ve ever known, but we have to open ourselves up to possibility–as well as stop clinging to something that is clearly not working.

      We cling to it as a collective, by looking to a single president to be our savior– which results in people thinking that the mere casting of a single vote is enough (and then being disappointed when it isn’t), as well as people becoming total fanatics and ransacking the Capitol building when their expectations don’t come to fruition. We have to start saving ourselves. And that begins at the community level, as well as a very individual level of examining our own trauma and how that manifests into our politics as oppression.

      Perhaps I could have done a better job articulating that. I suppose I assumed folks would take it in context with all of my other writing where I talk about this a great deal. I’ll edit the post to try to clarify.

      Reply

Submit a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

@ASHRISING ON INSTAGRAM