Our Collective Potential, What Will It Be?
September 23rd, 2006
Nearly forty years ago, Janis Joplin screamed in song that “freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” A few years before her, an impassioned Martin Luther King called out his dreams of freedom, amplifying the determined footfall of Gandhi’s earlier satyagraha, or non violent protest for freedom. Their messages replay everywhere: echoes, chants, calls to action.
Before them, Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha and Guru Nanak all broke away from cultural constructions to deliver messages of freedom, messages that pointed, always, to love, to forgive and by implication to the responsibility of personal choice within community. The sequencing of these messages through the millennium suggests a systemic directive than we have yet to fully grasp.
Today, freedom seems always to be within sight and within sound, but still beyond our reach. Why, when we as a species have taken our dreams of freedom to the highest powers on earth, do they still elude us? We’ve turned to God for freedom; we’ve turned to his messengers, to governments, to ideologies, to substances, sex, information, education and certitude. As human beings we’ve sought freedom in the guise of force, in the guise of nationalism, indoctrination and even in the spin of media. The result is a couple of thousand years of the same old stuff spinning out of control and into “nothing left to lose.”
American newsman Keith Olbermann’s Special Comment for the Anniversary of 9/11 mentions the most dangerous weapon of war is ignorance of our power to enact powerful choices. The operative words here are “our power.” It is within us, this choice; ours to own, to voice and to enact. We have nothing left to lose. Or do we?
What if, from our finely cultivated ignorance, we are enacting a kind of mass euthanasia when we should be assisting in the long, overdue birthing of our highest selves? Again, the world is offered once more a magnificent midwife for this possibility of an evolutionary breakthrough.
Aung San Suu Kyi, from the harshness of her Burmese imprisonment, voices over and over the same message: The only freedom we have is compassion. Her words offer yet another magnetic north to our quest for freedom. What kind of imprisonment are we awaiting before understanding the stunning metaphor of her life and the lives of those messengers before?
We have nothing left to lose, except the evolution of our species to a capacity beyond Mr. King’s and our wildest dreams. Her words invite nothing less than a revolution of the spirit: our capacity for compassion will ultimately determine our realization of freedom. That makes freedom more than just another word, because we have the magnificence of our collective potential to lose.
by Jane Woodland
Mother/Activist
Everything else: inconsequential
It is our collective potential that makes this quest for freedom so real and so liberating. Thank you for this wonderful sharing.
Jane’s words reflect what the great teachers have all demonstrated, that what is most worth learning is simple, to the point, and common to all human beings. Indeed all great movements start with conversion of the heart not with some new idea. As we become more attuned and familiar with the peace/compassion that is intrinsic in our own hearts, then will be know how to manifest that peace/compassion in our world.
with gratitude, Larry Lauro