By Anna Karola
August 9, 2020
When I sat down yesterday to take one last look at this talk, I came across this quote from Hildegarde von Bingham. She was a poet, composer, mystic far ahead of her place and time. She was a Renaissance woman before the Renaissance, who led a monastery north of the Alps. In her holistic understanding of the universe, she expresses herself in one sentence and expresses my talk in this one sentence. Born in 1098, she predates me by over 1000 years and yet, I cannot improve upon what she said. In her understanding of the Universe, the inner shows itself in the outer, and the outer reflects the inner. The individual reflects the cosmos, and the cosmos reflects the individual.
With this thought let us take a moment to be grateful for what connects us all, through the ages, our breath. Gently close your eyes and just breathe. What does this breath feel like? Is it smooth? Easily in, easily out? Does it have a bit of a catch, almost like a deeply hidden sob? Our breath holds our life. It holds our sorrows, our dreams, our life. It asks nothing of us, and it stays with us giving us life. It asks nothing of us, and it connects us to all life. The breath I breathe now passed through millions of other humans, animals, plants and rocks to get to me. Some call this breath God. It connects us to the Oneness of all life and reminds us that we are all interconnected.
My talk today is a summation of my own experiences leading to my philosophical view of Oneness. It is the belief that we are all expressions of a Source seeking to realize itself through our individual experiences. It is the belief that what we are seeing in the external world today is an expression of the Shadow side of each one of us. The Shadow contains significant power, it contains the creative potential within each of us for creation or de-creation or destruction. If this Shadow is not embraced with Love it becomes malevolent, seeking attention rather like a neglected and abused child. It is the result of all the hurts and traumas and experiences, we have had, which our ancestors have experienced and passed down to us, sometimes called karma.
I believe the basic principle of the Universe is Love and that Compassion encompasses all making sin or forgiveness a nonentity. These are complex ideas that are particular to my own philosophical understanding of the experiences I have had and the studies I have undergone in order to understand these experiences more deeply.
Tich Nat Hahn wrote:
When you understand, you cannot help but love. . .. To develop understanding, you have to practice looking at all living beings with the eyes of compassion. When you understand, you love. And when you love, you naturally act in a way that can relieve the suffering of people.
The experiences I relate here are not to elicit sympathy but to demonstrate how my life contributed to my understanding of the Universe. What I am today, the strength I have, the compassion and understanding, and my ability to work with children and adults is a result of my experiences. I am not a victim, nor a survivor as I have moved beyond where the compassion, I have developed for who I am has developed outwards, to understand with compassion the pain of others.
My childhood was difficult. As the child of immigrants and growing up during the McCarthy era, we were often the targets of discrimination and my parents, particularly my father, lived with a fear he did not understand. My mother was the end product of an extensive line of women who were forced to live their lives as they were told, not as they wanted. She was angry and she took her anger out on me, explaining that I was strong, I could take it. I worked my way through this with the help of man in a white robe with long white hair and a long beard. He would visit me in my dreams, and he allowed me to sit on his lap. I would tell him of my day, and he would listen, saying nothing but holding me and allowing me to cry in my loneliness and sadness. When I became an adolescent, he stopped visiting and I forgot about him until I was in my forties when I felt and knew him again on a Buddhist silent retreat that lasted for ten days.
Although he protected me and gave me compassion, he could not neutralize my anger. I grew up defensive and angry at the world with a touch of defiance thrown in for good measure. I remember a dream I had once where I found myself standing in the hallway of my childhood home and I was covered in blood, holding a knife dripping with the blood of my family. I had apparently killed them all. This was such a vivid dream that 65 years later I still see it as vividly as if it just happened. This dream, through the years, taught me the value of not judging. I realized the hatred and anger deep within me and the ability I had for murder. I realized the ability I had for murder and torture and there was a part of me that was deep and dark and terrifying. As I learned to face this part of me with compassion and love, it neutralized and was transformed into deep grief and sorrow and eventually to compassion and understanding for myself and then others. I realized Hitler existed because he was an expression of each one of us. Without his existence within each of us he would never have been able to come to power. This is the same for all of the horror we see external to ourselves. When we face it within ourselves, we disempower it in the external world. For our external world is an expression of what is within us. The horror needs our energy to exist. The Eastern Orthodox Church believes that evil has no life of its own, it relies on us to feed it. Without our anger, our hatred evil would die of starvation.
During my childhood I also came to understand what discrimination meant. I remember a teacher giving our fourth-grade class a lecture on the superiority of Americans. This was the McCarthy era – Eugene McCarthy that is. She explained people born in America were superior to those born abroad. I raised my hand and said my parents were born in Lebanon and I was born in the United States. Did this mean I was superior to my parents? She said it did. When I went home and explained to my mother what the teacher had said, she was not amused.
This type of discrimination went on through school where my grades were dropped when teachers discovered my parents were “foreign”, when I tried to do something that was not what “girls” should be doing, etc. And it included two teachers telling my parents not to send me to college as I would never amount to anything. Fortunately, my father did not agree. He had always been my champion. However, I nearly proved them right when I flunked out of college my junior year because I was suddenly struck with two questions:” Who am I?” and “What am I doing here?”
I quit college in 1965. At that point I was an arch conservative and then I heard Martin Luther King speak on campus at Penn State. I do not remember his words, but he changed me. When I returned to college in 1967, it was to a small liberal college in Vermont,
The mood of the times had changed. I was arrested in my first antiwar demonstration and beaten by police. It was unpleasant experience. Unpleasant enough that I became an advocate in other ways. Whatever jobs I held, I was seen as an agent of change and someone who wanted to change the system and to protect children. As a seventh-grade science teacher, I was asked what position I wanted to do when the Harlem Diplomats came to town for an exhibition game. Did I want to sell tickets? Did I want to bake stuff? No, I said. I want to play. The faculty had to have a special meeting for this. I did play and the Harlem Diplomats had to protect me from my own teammates. As can be seen the quote from the sixties, “question authority” was my motto and not necessarily an asset. It took me decades to realize inner peace brought outer peace.
It was the seventies. I became involved in Kundalini Yoga, became a member of a small cult, experimented with religion. By now, I was a cynic, an agnostic, and generally decided God had a sense of weird humor creating humans. I experimented with drugs and alcohol and decided drugs were better. I had some phenomenal insights while doing a ten-day meditation sit in a Buddhist Center, while high on pot, and while reading poetry by William Blake and works by Teilhard de Chardin, Dante, Buddha, and so many others.
In 1993, I went to live overseas in Kuwait, and I remained for over twenty years in Kuwait, Chad, South Africa, and Rwanda. I live though the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the attempt of a rebel takeover in Chad, and the aftereffects of the genocide in Rwanda. At one point I could tell the difference between an ak47 made in Russian, China, and the United States. I knew the difference between the sound of a bomber and an aircraft carrier. The most distinct memory I have is standing on a mass grave in Rwanda in the rain smelling the odor of decaying bodies and trying desperately to understand how a Catholic priest could lock 900 people in a church, telling them they would be safe and then watching as the Hutu set the church on fire.
Some of the more amazing memories I have from this time are visiting Iraq, after the fall of Sadaam Hussein and visiting Babylon – realizing I was standing where Alexander the Great had stood. In Jerash in Jordan, I saw where chariot wheels had carved their way into the blocks of stone that formed the pavement. It almost felt I could feel the chariots whiz by me. I felt the blood of my ancestors as I sat on a hill in Lebanon where my mother had sat and her mother before her, and back through over two thousand years and in the distance we together stared at the blue Mediterranean. My family was the first to leave Lebanon and our ancestry dates back to Biblical times.
Through all of this, I have come to understand the meaning of personal responsibility. I cannot blame an external being for what humans created. We, each of us individually, create the world where we want to live. I came to realize that we are sacred. All life is sacred. It is when we realize that all life is sacred, that all is born from Love and that Love is the basic vibration of the Universe, 528 Hz to be exact that we begin to evolve. It is when we realize we are an extension of this Love and when we recognize we are children of the Divine Spark, that we will evolve as a species and become who we were truly meant to be. And that time is now. We are faced with our shadow and how we face it will determine our future.
Most of the time I was in isolation during CoVid19 spent meditating and thinking. It was a time turning most of us inward to think about ourselves and our place within the universe. While I do not believe in an external God – I don’t think I ever did, even as a young child. I do believe we are all sparks of the Divine. We are all expressions of God capable of far more than we realize. And like young children, who do not know their own power, create incredible damage and then expect an external force to make it right. We mostly operate from a base of fear and scarcity. We are responsible for the damage we create. The responsibility for this is found within each of us and it is when we embrace ourselves with compassion, when we embrace our past with compassion; when we can say “I truly love myself, that I am perfect for I was created with and from Love”, that we will be able to evolve into the world so many spiritual traditions have predicted. My experiences both within myself and within the worlds I have travelled have led me to see an amazing creature we call Human.
To see a World in a Grain of Sand. And Heaven in a Wildflower. Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand. And Eternity in an hour.
William Blake