The Holy Force

Sacred Activism as Embodied Enlightenment

THE HOLY FORCE: Sacred Activism as Embodied Enlightenment

1. Beyond the Therapy Room

James Hillman and Michael Ventura wrote a book called We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World’s Getting Worse. In it, they made a radical proposition.

They theorized that resolving our problems may not only come from talking about our deep, private feelings with a trusted counselor. They challenged the assumption that our salvation lies completely in excavating the archaeology of our personal wounds.

Instead, they proposed that one of our most effective therapeutic acts may be to engage the world’s wounds directly. What if we could heal ourselves by fighting for social justice and serving historically marginalized people?

This insight is the foundational architecture for my team and me. 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 Instagram meme: You can’t heal your soul in a burning world by retreating to a hermetically sealed, air-conditioned room. The smoke will find you. Better to be a firefighter.

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2. Gandhi’s Declaration: The Political is Spiritual

“Those who say spirituality has nothing to do with politics,” wrote Mohandas Gandhi, “don’t know what spirituality really means.”

Gandhi, the activist who toppled an occupying empire with nonviolent resistance, understood that spirituality divorced from justice is narcissism in meditation posture. It’s the luxury of the privileged who can afford to ignore the suffering of others while pursuing their own transcendence and salvation.

True spirituality, what Andrew Harvey calls “Sacred Activism,” recognizes that the mystic and the revolutionary are two faces of the same fervent love. When we understand that all beings are interconnected, then the suffering of others becomes our own suffering. Compassion isn’t a sentimental feeling but a robust force for transformation.

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

My team and I study not just Gandhi’s philosophy but his methodology: how prayer and protest became one seamless practice, how fasting was both spiritual discipline and political strategy, and how the inner cultivation of ahimsa (nonviolence) manifested as outer revolution.

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3. Intimacy with All Things: A New Definition of Enlightenment

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

This single sentence revolutionizes our understanding of spiritual attainment. Should we imagine that “enlightenment” is our solo realization of the ultimate truth? Is it a possession we can own? Once we have acquired it, are we forever guaranteed to understand the nature of reality at the deepest levels?

We propose a different vision: There’s no such thing as that kind of “enlightenment.”

Instead, we offer another definition of genuine spiritual realization:. It’s 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.

“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 service as it is about attaining transcendent awareness or making pious displays of devotion.

According to 16th-century Kabbalist Rabbi Isaac Luria, the idea of “enlightenment” was never some 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 everything. Enlightenment becomes not ascension but descent, not escape but engagement, not perfection but participation.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, expresses this understanding with clarity: “Action on behalf of life transforms. Because the relationship between self and the world is reciprocal, it is not a question of first getting enlightened or saved and then acting. As we work to heal the earth, the earth heals us.”

There is no waiting period. No prerequisite of perfection. The work of healing and the experience of being healed are simultaneous, reciprocal, and inseparable. This is enlightenment as lived practice rather than distant goal.

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4. The Extended Bodhisattva Vow

For us, happiness, potency, and spiritual skill are impossible and hollow unless we are in service to others. With this in mind, we propose an extension 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 Extended 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 helping them experience joy, pleasure, liberation, and meaningfulness.”

Joan Halifax, Zen Buddhist teacher and founder of the Upaya Zen Center, describes what she calls “engaged Buddhism”—a practice that asks the essential question: “How do we actualize the spirit of the bodhisattva, the compassionate dimension in our lives, in a direct, practical way?”

Halifax’s work in the civil rights and anti-war movements taught her that engaged Buddhism is “about the application of the Buddhist ethos in the context of suffering, whether it’s institutional suffering or individual suffering. It’s where the rubber meets the road.”

This is precisely what our Extended Vow demands: not abstract devotion but concrete action. A cornerstone of the Extended Vow is the commitment to providing the fundamental needs of all human beings—their food, shelter, medical care, money—so they have the ability to cultivate joy, pleasure, liberation, and abundance.

This is our bottom-line spiritual philosophy: Whatever hurts other people hurts us. Injustices experienced by others are injustices experienced by us.

None of us can truly be free and fulfilled unless we work toward the goal of ensuring everyone is free and fulfilled.

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

5. Testing for Fake Enlightenment

Maybe there is a version of “enlightenment” that signifies a transcendent level of awareness: a relaxed and savvy understanding of life as it really is. If so, we propose these diagnostic rules for that hypothetical state:

• If “enlightenment” doesn’t enhance our ability to witness and heal the suffering of our fellow humans, then it’s fake or bet incomplete enlightenment.

• If “enlightenment” encourages us to imagine that expressing our personal freedom excuses us from caring for the health and well-being of our fellow humans, then it’s fake enlightenment.

• If “enlightenment” allows or encourages us to ignore racism, bigotry, fascism, oligarchy, misogyny, militarism, and LGBTQ-phobia, it’s fake enlightenment.

Real enlightenment, by this standard, is measured not by how high we ascend but by how deeply we connect. Not by how much we know but by how much we love.

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6. The Wisdom of Sacred Activists: A Chorus of Voices

Throughout history, those who have understood the marriage of spirit and action have left us guidance.

Howard Zinn

“Politics is pointless if it does nothing to enhance the beauty of our lives,” declared author and activist Howard Zinn.

Our interpretation: Political work disconnected from beauty becomes merely mechanical; it’s a grim duty that drains the soul.

But when activism is infused with artistry, when protests are performances and organizing is creative expression, then politics becomes a life-giving practice.

Zinn’s insight ensures that sacred activism never degenerates into joyless obligation. The revolution must be beautiful, or it’s not worth having.

PS: Emma Goldman (1869-1940) was a charismatic activist whose writing and speeches had a big impact on leftist politics in the first half of the 20th century. She championed a kind of liberation that celebrated beauty and joy. “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be in your revolution,” she is alleged to have told a sourpuss colleague.

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Huston Smith

“Such power as I possess for working in the political field has derived from my experiments in the spiritual field,” wrote religious scholar Huston Smith.

This statement responds to those who doubt the efficacy of contemplative practice in a world demanding immediate action. Smith testifies that his capacity for sustained political engagement—his stamina, clarity, courage—all originated in spiritual disciplines.

My team and I conduct our own experiments, discovering firsthand how meditation sharpens strategic thinking. We know that prayer fortifies resolve and contemplation reveals leverage points for change. The spiritual field becomes the training ground for political effectiveness.

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Desmond Tutu

“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor,” declared theologian and activist Desmond Tutu. “If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse, and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.”

This teaching destroys the delusion of spiritual bypass: the notion that we can somehow remain “above” worldly conflicts while pursuing personal enlightenment.

Neutrality is not noble detachment but active complicity. In the face of injustice, there is no Switzerland of the soul. We are either resisting oppression or enabling it. Silence is a choice. Inaction is an action.

Joanna Macy

Eco-philosopher and Buddhist scholar Joanna Macy offers us a potent antidote to despair: “If the world is to be healed through human efforts, I am convinced it will be by ordinary people, people whose love for this life is even greater than their fear.”

This teaching liberates us from the paralysis of imagining that world-healing is the province of saints, heroes, or specially anointed beings. Macy reminds us that the transformation our world needs will come from regular humans—flawed, frightened, imperfect—who nonetheless choose love as their organizing principle.

We don’t have to be fearless. We just have to love more than we fear. We don’t need all the answers. We simply have to care enough to keep trying.

Macy’s work on what she calls “Active Hope” tells us that hope isn’t a feeling we wait to experience but a practice we engage in regardless of how we feel. It’s the decision to participate in healing even when outcomes are uncertain. We make a commitment to act from love even when fear screams at us to retreat.

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Alan Watts

Alan Watts’s counsel is beloved: “Our best efforts for civil rights, international peace, conservation of natural resources, and assistance to the starving of the earth—urgent as they are—will destroy rather than help if made in the present spirit.

“Peace can be made only by those who are peaceful, and love can be shown only by those who love. No work of love will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart, just as no valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.”

To that end, our activism is grounded in presence exercises. We might savor a ripe persimmon as attentively as we might read a holy text. The lesson is that joy itself is a renewable energy source for revolution. We party so the gods remember why the world is worth saving. The revolution fails if we forget to exult.

Other movements may mobilize through outrage, and we honor that. But we ourselves mobilize through ecstasy. It’s not escapism. It’s a refusal to let despair monopolize realism. Watts’s injunction to live now in joy becomes our tactic of resistance: presence as defiance, embodiment as activism, pleasure as proof of life.

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Martha Gellhorn

If Alan Watts offers the sensual foundation of our rebellion and Andrew Harvey supplies our mystical fire, Martha Gellhorn provides the grounding: a mandate for civic wakefulness.

Gellhorn wrote, “People often say, with pride, ‘I’m not interested in politics.’ They might as well say, ‘I’m not interested in my rights or my future.’”

We take that line as scripture. We study not only mythology but legislation, not only astrology and Qabalah but economics. We seek to translate visionary insights into real-world policy proposals. To withdraw from politics is to abandon the collective body of the world.

So we may have fun experimenting with channeling archetypes into city ordinances. We might draft proposals for river protection inspired by Yemaya, or urban gardens modeled after the Hindu goddess Annapurna’s kitchens. Our activism is poetic but pragmatic, equal parts symbol and system.

Gellhorn’s realism ensures that as dreamers, we remain fully incarnate, our spiritual yearnings tethered to earth by social consequence.

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7. Where the Streams Converge: Integration as Revolution

How do the teachings of all the sacred activists intertwine?

Harvey teaches us why the heart must burn. Watts teaches us how to stay lit without choking on smoke. Gellhorn reminds us to carry the flame into city hall. Gandhi shows us how to make the flame contagious. Hillman and Ventura push us out of the therapy room and into the streets where another kind of healing happens.

Kimmerer shows us that healing the earth and being healed by the earth are the same reciprocal motion. Macy reminds us that ordinary people with extraordinary love are the agents of transformation. Halifax demonstrates how to actualize the bodhisattva spirit in direct practical response to injustice.

For us, activism without mysticism is mechanical, and mysticism without activism is narcissistic. The integration births what Harvey calls the holy force: the power of wisdom and love in action.

This integration is not a compromise between opposites but a recognition of their essential unity. The mystic who doesn’t act on behalf of justice has not truly seen the interconnection of all beings. Activists who don’t cultivate inner peace will burn out and become what they oppose.

Starhawk, the author, activist, and ecofeminist who founded the Reclaiming tradition, articulates this integration with precision: “Our magical tools and insights, our awareness of energies and allies on many planes, can deepen and inform our activism. And our activism can deepen our magic, by encouraging us to create ritual that speaks to the real challenges we face in the world, offers the healing and renewal we need to continue working, and a community that understands that spirit and action are one.”

This is the synthesis we want: where contemplation sharpens strategy and action deepens wisdom, where ritual addresses real-world suffering and real-world work becomes sacred practice, where the spiritual and political aren’t merely compatible but mutually reinforcing dimensions of a single integrated life.

The streams converge in us. We are the meeting place where mysticism and activism, prayer and protest, inner cultivation and outer transformation become one holy force.

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8. Vows

Our pledges:

• To become instruments of luminous justice in our own communities

• To make ecstasy politically useful

• To treat every heartbreak as a rehearsal for compassion

• To refuse the false choice between inner work and outer work

• To practice enlightenment as intimacy with all things

• To honor Gandhi’s truth that spirituality and politics are one

• To carry beauty into the battlegrounds and battle into the beautiful

• To preserve in our hearts those qualities that acquiescence would destroy

• To never be neutral in the face of injustice

• To stay lit without choking on smoke

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Epilogue: The Holy Force in Action

We aren’t perfected beings but committed activists: people who have integrated the wisdom traditions with the urgency of this moment, who understand that transformation happens simultaneously in the psyche and the polis, in the soul and the street.

We aspire to embody and express the holy force: love and wisdom in action. We tend both the inner garden and the outer world, refusing the false binary, embodying the integration, living the vow.

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To read about “Sacred Activism During the Trumpocalypse,” go here:

tinyurl.com/SacredActivismNow

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FREE WILL ASTROLOGY

Week of November 13

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): Your dreams speak in images, not ideas. They bypass your rational defenses and tell the truth slantwise because the truth straight-on may be too bright to bear. The source of dreams, your unconscious, is fluent in a language that your waking mind may not be entirely adept in understanding: symbol, metaphor, and emotional logic. It tries to tell you things your conscious self refuses to hear. Are you listening? Or are you too busy being reasonable? The coming weeks will be a crucial time to tune in to messages from deep within you.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): The tour guide at the museum was describing the leisure habits of ancient Romans. “Each day’s work was often completed by noon,” he said. “For the remainder of the day, they indulged in amusement and pleasure. Over half of the calendar consisted of holidays.” As I heard this cheerful news, my attention gravitated to you, Sagittarius. You probably can’t permanently arrange your schedule to be like the Romans’. But you’ll be wise to do so during the coming days. Do you dare to give yourself such abundant comfort and delight? Might you be bold enough to rebel against the daily drudgery to honor your soul’s and body’s cravings for relief and release?

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): The Zulu greeting Sawubona means “I see you.” Not just “hello,” but “I acknowledge your existence, your dignity, and your humanity.” The response is Ngikhona: “I am here.” In this exchange, people receive a respectful appreciation of the fact that they contain deeper truths below the surface level of their personality. This is the opposite of the Western world’s default state of mutual invisibility. What if you greeted everyone like this, Capricorn—with an intention to bestow honor and recognition? I recommend that you try this experiment. It will spur others to treat you even better than they already do.

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): Bear with me while I propose an outlandish-sounding theory: that you have enough of everything. Not eventually, not after the next achievement, but right now: You have all you need. What if enoughness is not a quantity but a quality of attention? What if enoughness isn’t a perk you have to earn but a treasure you simply claim? In this way of thinking, you consider the possibility that the finish line keeps moving because you keep moving it. And now you will decide to stop doing that. You resolve to believe that this breath, this moment, and this gloriously imperfect life are enough, and the voice telling you it’s not enough is selling something you don’t need.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): The Inuit people have dozens of words for snow. The Scots have over 100 words for rain. Sanskrit is renowned for its detailed and nuanced vocabulary relating to love, tenderness, and spiritual bliss. According to some estimates, there are 96 different terms for various expressions of love, including the romantic and sensual kind, as well as compassion, friendship, devotion, and transcendence. I invite you to take an inventory of all the kinds of affection and care you experience. Now is an excellent phase to expand your understanding of these mysteries—and increase your capacity for giving and receiving them.

ARIES (March 21-April 19): The Akan concept of Sankofa is represented by a bird looking backward while moving forward. The message is “Go back and get it.” You must retrieve wisdom from the past to move into the future. Forgetting where you came from doesn’t liberate you; it orphans you. I encourage you to make Sankofa a prime meditation, Aries. The shape of your becoming must include the shape of your origin. You can’t transcend what you haven’t integrated. So look back, retrieve what you left behind, and bring it forward.

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TAURUS (April 20-May 20): The coming weeks will be an excellent time for you to engage in STRATEGIC FORGETTING. It’s the art of deliberately unlearning what you were taught about who you should be, what you should want, and how you should spend your precious life. Fact: Fanatical brand loyalty to yourself can be an act of self-sabotage. I suggest you fire yourself from your own expectations. Clock out from the job of being who you were yesterday. It’s liberation time!

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): We should all risk asking supposedly wrong questions. Doing so reminds us that truth and discovery often hide in the compost pile of our mistaken notions. A wrong question can help us shed tired assumptions, expose invisible taboos, and lure new insights out of hiding. By leaning into the awkward, we invite surprise, which may be a rich source of genuine learning. With that in mind, I invite you to ask the following: Why not? What if I fail spectacularly? What would I do if I weren’t afraid of looking dumb? How can I make this weirder? What if the opposite were true? What if I said yes? What if I said no? What if this is all simpler than I’m making it? What if it’s stranger than I can imagine?

CANCER (June 21-July 22): Cancerian novelist Octavia Butler said her stories were fueled by two obsessions: “Where will we be going?” and “How will we get there?” One critic praised this approach, saying she paid “serious attention to the way human beings actually work together and against each other.” Other critics praised her “clear-headed and brutally unsentimental” explorations of “far-reaching issues of race, sex, power.” She was a gritty visionary whose imagination was expansive and attention to detail meticulous. Let’s make her your inspirational role model. Your future self is now leaning toward you, whispering previews and hints about paths still half-formed. You’re being invited to be both a dreamer and builder, both a seer and strategist. Where are you going, and how will you get there?

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): The Tagalog language includes the word kilig. It refers to the butterfly-in-the-stomach flutter when something momentous, romantic, or cute happens. I suspect kilig will be a featured experience for you in the coming weeks—if you make room for it. Please don’t fill up every minute with mundane tasks and relentless worrying. Meditate on the truth that you deserve an influx of such blessings and must expand your consciousness to welcome their full arrival.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): Your liver performs countless functions, including storing vitamins, synthesizing proteins, regulating blood sugar, filtering 1.5 quarts of blood per minute, and detoxifying metabolic wastes. It can regenerate itself from as little as 25 percent of its original tissue. It’s your internal resurrection machine: proof that some damage is reversible, and some second chances come built-in. Many cultures have regarded the liver not just as an organ, but as the seat of the soul and the source of passions. Some practice ritual purification ceremonies that honor the liver’s pivotal role. In accordance with astrological omens, Virgo, I invite you to celebrate this central repository of your life energy. Regard it as an inspiring symbol of your ability to revitalize yourself.

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): The pupils of your eyes aren’t black. They are actually holes. Each pupil is an absence, a portal where light enters you and becomes sight. Do you understand how amazing this is? You have two voids in your face through which the world pours itself into your nervous system. These crucial features are literally made of nothing. The voidness is key to your love of life. Everything I just said reframes emptiness not as loss or deficiency, but as a functioning joy. Without the pupils’ hollowness, there is no color, no shape, no sunrise, no art. Likewise in emotional life, our ability to be delighted depends on vulnerability. To feel wonder and curiosity is to let the world enter us, just as light enters the eye.

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