Being Anti-Authoritarian Is a Fundamental Spiritual Practice

The Sacred Is Right Here in the Glorious Mess

The Blue Tsunami was a gift of grace to all of us Americans, as well as everyone else on the planet. But we’re not clear of the danger yet.

The monstrous goons who formulated Project 2025 still wield enormous power behind the scenes. The madman president has 26 months left in his term. And he just selected the atrocity-perpetrator Stephen Miller as his Chief of Staff, a move that my favorite activist writer Rebecca Solnit says is “desperate and stupid.”

We need to redouble our efforts to resist and provide antidotes for the MAGA sickness.

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Being Anti-Fascist Is a Fundamental Spiritual Principle

Any spiritual path worth walking leads to a refusal of fascism. I mean this as a statement about the nature of spirit itself. Opposition to fascism belongs in the same category as compassion and reverence for life, because it follows directly from them.

Some seekers challenge this. They want to float above the glorious mess of the real world, untouched by elections and street marches. They retreat into their rituals and practices as a refuge from the noise.

But a spirituality that has nothing to say when the press is threatened and whole categories of people are declared vermin, has confessed that comfort was its real object all along.

The great teachings I trust all point toward the sacredness of each particular soul and the duty to protect what’s vulnerable.

Fascism points the other way.

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Historians have had a lot to say about fascism. Author Robert Paxton described it as a politics fueled by obsessive grievance over a nation’s supposed decline and humiliation, answered by dangerous cults obsessed with unity and purity.

Author Umberto Eco, who grew up under Italian dictator Mussolini, listed 14 traits of what he called Ur-Fascism. Among them are the treatment of disagreement as treason and a contempt for the weak.

Read with a mystic’s perspective, those descriptions sketch a counterfeit religion. They offer its followers rebirth through purification, along with a sense of belonging purchased by excluding scapegoats. It hijacks the soul’s longing for wholeness and redirects it toward a strongman and a flag.

Every wisdom tradition I know warns against this maneuver. The Buddha, for example, diagnosed hatred and delusion as root poisons, and fascism is a machine for cultivating both at industrial scale.

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How spiritual people ought to respond to fascism is a question with a historical record behind it.

In May 1934, a group of German Protestant pastors gathered. Their own national church had begun to bless the Nazi regime, and in 1933 it had even rubber-stamped the exclusion of people with Jewish heritage from public office. Karl Barth drafted the declaration they issued, and its message boiled down to this: Hitler isn’t God. From that statement came the Confessing Church.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer threw himself into this work. In April 1933, weeks after Hitler took power, he became the first voice in the German church to insist that it had a duty to resist the persecution of Jews. He trained pastors in an underground seminary until the Gestapo shut it down, and he joined the conspiracy against the regime. The Nazis hanged him in April 1945.

Only about a fifth of German pastors joined the Confessing Church. The rest made their ugly peace with Nazism. Their neutrality became the regime’s cover.

The same pattern repeats in other traditions. Some Zen institutions in imperial Japan lent their teachings to militarism. Myanmar’s military has carried out a genocide against the Muslim Rohingya people with support from hardline Buddhist-nationalist organizations and influential monks. In the America of right now, evangelical Christians have been instrumental in empowering the Anti-Christ himself.

On the other hand, spiritual figures like Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh and the Christian Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. showed visionary courage as they synergized contemplative depth and fierce public witness.

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Why have so many devout people failed this test? Part of the answer lies in a style of spirituality that treats the material world as an illusion to escape and the body as a cage.

If the Earth is just a waiting room for heaven or nirvana, then who rules it doesn’t matter. You can keep your inner life pure and shield yourself from the world’s mayhem.

I reject that style. The path I love is fervent incarnation: the conviction that spirit yearns to live here in the glorious mess. The divine pours itself into the world and needs our contributions to accomplish the job. From this vantage, politics is one of the places where the soul’s crucial work gets done. How we treat strangers and who gets to be safe on the street are spiritual questions.

Fascism is the most thorough assault on fervent incarnation ever devised. It treats bodies as raw material for the nation, ranking human beings on a scale of worth and marking the lowest for removal.

Whoever believes that the sacred dwells in each body really has a duty to stand against a system built on the premise that some bodies are disposable.

Another spiritual casualty of fascism is the role played by the truth. Fascist movements depend on the Big Lie and on exhausting people until they stop caring what is real. Every contemplative discipline I know is a training in seeing clearly. Meditation and prayer are trainings in refusing illusion, and over time that refusal spills into public life whether we intend it or not.

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Some spiritual teachers oppose this argument. They say that the true path is about loosening attachment to all opinions, including political ones. Taking sides, in their view, hardens the ego and multiplies the enmity they aspire to heal.

My answer is that equanimity describes how we act, not whether we act. It frees us from hatred and from clinging to results, and that’s what keeps a stand from hardening the ego. It doesn’t excuse us from defending those in harm’s way.

The Bhagavad Gita opens on a battlefield, where Arjuna, overwhelmed by doubt, wants to drop his bow and leave. Krishna refuses to bless his retreat. Act without hatred, he tells him, and without attachment to the fruits; but act. Be detached from the outcome, not from the struggle.

Some spiritual teachers worry about the word “fascism.” It may get thrown at every opponent, and overuse drains it of meaning and poisons conversation with people who might be persuaded.

That critique has some validity. A spiritual anti-fascism has to be precise. It names specific behaviors: scapegoating, the cult of an authoritarian leader, contempt for law and press, and the celebration of violence. It doesn’t treat everyone on the other side of a policy fight as a brutish thug.

There’s another potential problem: Anti-fascist movements can generate self-righteous dogmas that justify cruelty. Resistance movements sometimes adopt tactics they oppose.

Here the spiritual frame acts as a safeguard, though not by asking us to love those who champion cruelty. I feel no tenderness toward Nazis, and I don’t believe any path worth walking demands it. The safeguard is in how we fight.

If my opposition to fascism grows from reverence for life, then I can’t adopt fascism’s methods: the lies, the scapegoating, and the delusion that some people are less than human. I can loathe what fascists do and refuse to become what they are. My vow is to never let my enemies decide what kind of person I turn into.

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Fascism feeds on paranoia. It says that fear is logical and necessary. Strangers are enemies. Safety comes from submission to macho strength.

The antidote I cultivate is pronoia: the hypothesis that all of creation is conspiring to bring us blessings, and the discipline of collaborating with that conspiracy.

For pronoiacs like me, we engage in a rigorous practice of looking for the generosity hidden in everyday life, and of becoming a source of it. It builds the capacities that fascism must destroy to succeed: curiosity about strangers and delight in difference.

So anti-fascism, for the spiritually inclined, is a daily devotion. Some days it means learning your neighbors’ names, especially the ones who don’t look like you or believe what you do.

Other days it means voting, refusing to pass along the lies, sheltering the hunted, or telling the truth when the truth is costly, all while keeping your heart wild and tender enough that the forces trying to harden it find nothing to grip.

My anti-fascist spirituality consists of this proposal: The sacred lives in every body, and anyone who claims the right to decide which bodies count has declared war on the sacred. Standing against them is a spiritual path.

Dear Readers—

Some of you (not all!) say that I write too damn much. You ask me to be briefer and quicker. You don’t have the time and attention span to dwell with the intensity I offer.

I’m not mad at you for feeling or saying that. But I can’t obey. To do so would violate my soul’s code, which exults in diving down to the root of the core of the marrow of the heart of life.

The good news: You’re free to ignore some or even most of what I write. You can simply enjoy the horoscopes and skip the rest. That’s OK with me. But I’ll keep doing what I do best and love most.

In that spirit, I’m adding an essay below to continue my thoughts from above. I won’t be offended if you choose to skip it!

With Love,

Rob

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The Holy Force: Sacred Activism as Embodied Enlightenment (an excerpt from my book)

James Hillman and Michael Ventura wrote a book called We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World’s Getting Worse.

They theorized that resolving our problems may not come solely from talking about our deep, private feelings with a trusted counselor. Maybe it’s not true, they speculated, that our salvation lies solely in excavating the archaeology of our personal wounds.

Instead, they proposed that it may be therapeutic to engage the wider world’s wounds directly. What if we could heal ourselves through compassionate acts like serving historically marginalized people?

This insight is foundational for me and my close allies. We reject the false binary between inner work and outer work. The psyche and the polis are not separate realms but interpenetrating dimensions of a single reality. Our nightly dreams might inform and inspire our waking-life devotion to repairing culture and weaving social justice—and vice versa.

Our Instagram meme: You can’t heal your soul in a burning world by retreating to a hermetically sealed, air-conditioned room.

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The Political is Spiritual

We love the thoughts of author Andrew Harvey: “Spirituality without politics is escapism. Politics without spirituality is brutality. The marriage of the two gives birth to the holy force.” He expounds:

A spirituality that is only private and self-absorbed, one devoid of an authentic political and social consciousness, does little to halt the suicidal juggernaut of history.

On the other hand, an activism that is not purified by profound spiritual and psychological self-awareness and rooted in divine truth, wisdom, and compassion will only perpetuate the problem it is trying to solve, however righteous its intentions.

When, however, the deepest and most grounded spiritual vision is married to a practical and pragmatic drive to transform all existing political, economic and social institutions, a holy force—the power of wisdom and love in action—is born.

This force I define as Sacred Activism.

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Intimacy with All Things: A Revised Definition of Enlightenment

“Enlightenment is intimacy with all things,” wrote 13th-century Buddhist monk Dōgen Zenji.

That formulation disrupts common misunderstandings about spiritual attainment. No, “enlightenment” is not merely our heroic solo realization of the ultimate truth, nor a possession we can greedily own and hoard. There’s no such thing as that kind of “enlightenment.”

We prize a different definition of genuine spiritual realization: It includes a visceral sensation of feeling close to all living things, buoyed by an ever-renewing empathy. It’s not a static achievement but a dynamic practice. It’s relationship, not ownership.

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“Holiness is an infinite compassion for others,” wrote author and activist Olive Schreiner.

“The soul is awakened through service,” said author Erica Jong.

We agree. The quest to align one’s life with the highest good is at least as much about offering care and inspiration as it is about attaining capacious sagacity or making pious displays of devotion.

According to 16th-century Kabbalist Rabbi Isaac Luria, the idea of “enlightenment” was never an individual personal goal to escape mortal limitations and gain knowledge. It was a group process conducted by humans to assist the Divine in bringing creation into alignment with the original plan: “on earth as it is in heaven.”

This reframes the discussion. Enlightenment resides not in ascent but in descent. The most delightful project is to engage rather than escape. Our goal isn’t perfection but participation in the glorious mess.

Buddhist author Joanna Macy and Indigenous botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer have used similar language to convey ideas like these: Since the relationship between self and world is reciprocal, we don’t have to wait to be enlightened or saved before we act. As we work to heal the earth, the earth also heals us. There’s no need to wait until we’re fully ready at the ideal moment.

The work of healing and the experience of being healed are simultaneous, reciprocal, and inseparable. Enlightenment is a lived practice rather than a distant goal.

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The Extended Bodhisattva Vow

For us, happiness, potency, and spiritual skill are impossible and hollow unless we labor in love for others. With this in mind, we propose an adjustment of the traditional Bodhisattva’s Vow.

The original declares: “My own personal quest for illumination is incomplete, and my own personal enlightenment is meaningless, unless I am also devoted to easing the suffering of others.”

The Adjusted Version goes further: “Our quest for illumination is incomplete, and our enlightenment meaningless, unless we are also devoted to the goals of easing the suffering of others AND ALSO helping them experience joy, pleasure, liberation, and meaningfulness.”

Our Via Negativa complements our Via Positiva: We aspire not only to heal but to bless, not just to banish pain but to provide well-being.

Furthermore, our Extended Vow demands more than abstract devotion and pretty thoughts. We’re thrilled when we unleash concrete actions that nurture the fundamental needs of all human beings—their food, shelter, medical care, mental health, money—so they can cultivate joy, pleasure, liberation, and abundance.

Our bottom-line spiritual philosophy says that whatever hurts anyone hurts us. Injustices experienced by others, even strangers, are injustices inflicted on us. No one can truly be emancipated and gratified unless we work toward the goal of ensuring everyone is emancipated and gratified.

Corollary: Whatever helps other people helps us.

These aren’t vague abstract ideals. They’re central imprints on our soul’s code and how we organize our beliefs, emotions, and actions.

Testing for Fake Enlightenment

Maybe there are truly versions of “enlightenment” that bring expanded and luminous levels of awareness: relaxed and savvy understandings of life as it really is. If so, we propose diagnostic rules to further assess those hypothetical states:

If “enlightenment” doesn’t enhance our ability to witness and heal the suffering of the earth’s living things, and if it doesn’t enhance our ability to bolster their vigor, then it’s fake or incomplete enlightenment.

If “enlightenment” encourages us to imagine that expressing our personal freedom excuses us from caring for the health and vigor of the earth’s creatures, then it’s fake enlightenment.

If “enlightenment” allows or encourages us to ignore racism, bigotry, fascism, oligarchy, misogyny, militarism, and hostility toward LGBTQ+ people, it’s fake enlightenment.

Real enlightenment is measured not by how high we ascend but by how deeply we connect. Not by how much we know, but by how intelligently and beautifully we love.

For more ruminations on Sacred Activism, go here: tinyurl.com/SacredActivistWisdom

This piece is excerpted from my book Enlightenment for Rebels

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Check out my Linktree, with links to other things I create: linktr.ee/robbrezsny

Enlightenment for Rebels: Celebrating Our Wild and Sacred Earthly Selves in Jubilant Defiance of Disembodied Spirituality is available at online stores, and you can get a 25% discount here: tinyurl.com/SacredEarthySelves

Also available as a cheap e-book: https://tinyurl.com/REBELSebook

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FREE WILL ASTROLOGY

Week of November 12

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): Some of our most powerful medicines come from feared venoms. A compound from the deadly cone snail became a painkiller stronger than morphine. Venoms from vipers and lizards have yielded drugs that treat blood clots and diabetes. The very chemistry that evolved to harm, once understood and transformed, becomes the chemistry that heals. This is your native alchemy, Scorpio. You grasp, as few others do, that the dangerous and the toxic can be transmuted into potent medicine when wrangled with courage and skill. But wait! Stop! None of this will be relevant for you in the coming weeks. Some of your best medicines will be sweet, agreeable, pleasant, and filled with light. I invite you to expand beyond your usual attitude and approach.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): Sagittarian novelist Jane Austen wielded her drollery with aplomb. In a letter to her sister, she wrote, “I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal.” Over two centuries later, I still find that joke funny. Jane was a wickedly independent spirit who refused to sugarcoat the raw truth or perform affection she didn’t feel. Let’s make her your guardian spirit for the coming weeks, Sagittarius. I hope she’ll inspire you to leaven your honesty with humor and liberate yourself from the need for people’s approval. Can you be blunt and genuine with wit and grace? I think you can. Feel no obligation to like or praise what hasn’t earned it.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): Who are your favorite wild women? One of mine is Capricorn magician Patti Smith, whose untamed creativity has inspired me for years. At the root of her output as a musician and writer is her disciplined devotion: decades of patient, faithful labor at her craft, never chasing trends, simply doing the deep work year after year. She has been experimental and diligent; iconoclastic and tireless; one-of-a-kind and collaborative. I salute her contributions to my life and encourage you to be inspired by her skillful weaving of hard work and soulful expression.

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): Aquarius-born inventor Thomas Edison treated failure as useful information. He tinkered with thousands of materials as he sought a workable lightbulb filament. After each dud, he insisted he hadn’t misfired but had just found another way that didn’t work. Eventually, his numerous failures cleared his path to creating the lightbulb. In the coming weeks, I propose that you make him your role model, Aquarius. Your inventive, future-facing mind will be at its best when it treats setbacks not as verdicts but as data, clues pointing toward the solution. The breakthrough you’re in quest of will come just past the last dead end.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): The painter Henri Matisse said he wanted his art to provide “a soothing, calming influence on the mind.” Yet his work shimmered with bold color and daring composition. Joyful vitality spilled out of his creations. For him, serenity wasn’t bland. I’d love for you to incorporate his attitude and approach in the coming weeks. There will be no need to choose between excitement and peace. You can attract experiences that are simultaneously stimulating and harmonious. My advice: Expect and pursue intriguing adventures that leave your nervous system feeling nourished.

ARIES (March 21-April 19): There is an old way of making fire: Strike a sharp edge of flint in a hard, glancing blow against steel. The flint shears off small particles of metal. Heated by the blow and exposed to air, they oxidize so swiftly that they burn as sparks. The fire is born from the fierce meeting of two hard things. This is a fitting emblem for you, Aries. Your fire often comes alive through bold contact, like a decisive strike or a willingness to meet resistance head-on rather than avoiding it. In the coming weeks, seek out, enjoy, and use the friction that ignites you. Find worthy flints and make sparks. Some fires can only be lit by impact.

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TAURUS (April 20-May 20): A ship’s anchor doesn’t work by weight alone. Some of its holding power comes from how its blades dig into the seabed. A heavy anchor sitting on smooth rock is useless; a lighter anchor that catches in mud or sand can hold a massive vessel against storms. So the anchor’s value resides as much in its grip as its mass. Regard this as a useful metaphor, Taurus. Don’t try to hold yourself in place through sheer gravity, with accumulated possessions and commitments piling up like ballast. You need to hook yourself into a strong foundation.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): Editors of dictionaries continually add new words while retiring obsolete definitions. Language remains vital and wild because it adapts to shifting realities. In that spirit, I invite you to eagerly edit the words you speak and the concepts you use to interpret your experience. Maybe you’ve attached labels to yourself that have become outdated. For example, you’re “multifaceted,” not “scattered.” One of your relationships isn’t so much “complicated” as “intricate” and “evolving.” A feeling you call “confusion” might be more accurately named “curiosity.” Fresh vocabulary may unlock intriguing and catalytic possibilities.

CANCER (June 21-July 22): When a Pakistani student named Malala Yousafzai was 11, she became a passionate advocate for female education. Girls had been banned by the Taliban from attending school in her native district. Her tireless work in this righteous cause angered conservatives, and at 15, she was shot in the head by a would-be assassin. Yet she survived and prevailed, redoubled her efforts, and at age 17, she became the youngest person to win a Nobel Peace Prize. Since then, she has continued her quest to aid girls and women, and extended her activism to assist refugees and immigrants. Can you guess her astrological sign? Cancer, of course. Who nurtures and protects so fiercely? Who fights tenderly for people in need to be safe and free? Now is an excellent time to decide how you can be inspired by Malala.

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): During my first show as a lead singer for a rock band, age 19, I was absurdly anxious about hitting every note perfectly. Afterward, a friend critiqued my performance, saying I seemed locked up inside my own head. The next time I took the stage, I sang looser, sloppier, and wilder. I focused on connecting with the audience and allowing their enthusiasm to feed my energy. Much better! My technical execution was less than perfect, but I was far more engaging and entertaining. I dare you to apply this lesson to your own life in the coming weeks.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): I advocate giving people the resources they need when they’re experiencing scarcity or deficiency. I also believe that exceptional ability deserves encouragement and support to thrive and ripen. That balance offers a useful way to think about your life right now. You’ve devoted plenty of attention to the parts of yourself that need help, while giving too little care to the parts that shine. To restore the balance, I suggest you seek out tools, teachers, and adventures that will challenge and nurture your talents. A gift that comes naturally isn’t a finished achievement. With practice, it can become even more extraordinary.

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): Libran poet Ocean Vuong describes tenderness as a courageous force rather than a sentimental one. Please try out this idea. Imagine the ways that gentle devotion and creative affection mobilize your most interesting strengths. Explore how your ability to express nourishing kindness empowers you to spawn wonders and marvels. Remember that water, yielding and supple, can reshape mountains and carve canyons. Your tenderness, too, may have the patient power to transform what seems fixed and unyielding.

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