The Path to Enlightenment: The Election as Spiritual Practice, Part 2

Quickly! List 3 things that you really hate about the Presidential candidate you are voting against:

1.

2.

3.

That wasn’t too hard, was it?

I made two assumptions in asking you to do that:

1. Although you may or may not be voting enthusiastically for a particular candidate this year, you are almost certainly voting against someone.
2.  I am betting that all three things you listed are personal qualities and not policy positions.

Certainly the candidates in this year’s election have policy differences — and skill set differences  — but my personal polling indicates that we are making our choices largely on personal qualities like honesty or the lack thereof, to name the one that seems to come up most often for both the major party candidates.

OK, writing down those personal qualities you dislike the most in the candidate you dislike the most was step one — pretty easy.

Step 2: Write down one quality in your most-disliked candidate that is deplorable, but you could live with if that was his or her only fault.

1.

That may have been a little harder, but I’ll bet you managed to come up with one.

Step 3:  Ask yourself how those first three qualities reside in you.

I know.

I know.

There is NO WAY any of those three qualities have ANY place in your life. YOU have NEVER said or done ANYTHING remotely like the PERFECTLY AWFUL things that despicable excuse for a human being has said and done!

Take a deep breath, and ask yourself why you get so worked up about those first three things, but you could live with the fourth thing.

Most people will just hit “delete” right now.

That’s because most people (including me) don’t really want to put into practice one of the deepest spiritual disciplines — one that would bring us all closer to what Jesus calls the Kingdom of Heaven:

“Do not judge so that you will not be judged.  For by the standard you judge you will be judged, and the measure you use will be the measure you receive. Why do you see the speck in your brother’s eye, but fail to see the beam of wood in your own? Matthew 7:1-3.

This portion of the Sermon on the Mount is not telling us to abandon our moral principles. Immorality, lying, arrogance, and whatever else you wrote down will still be bad things. Jesus is  asking us to focus our moral laser vision on ourselves rather than someone else. 

I’m asking you to ask yourself:

What  is there about those three things that gets to me?

How are they different from the one thing I could live with?

I admit that I found this incredibly hard to do. I did not want to find those qualities in myself. But they really are there and I work really hard to cover them up — at least from myself.

You will note that I am not about to share publicly what they are, less because I am ashamed of them than because I don’t want to see in the comments section: “Oh yeah, we knew that about you all along.” 

However, I was astounded at the release of spiritual power that I felt when I faced them. We put a lot of energy into fear and loathing that could be used for improving ourselves and the world around us. 

I was heartened by the fact that the fourth quality — the one I could live with — really is kind of despicable, but it doesn’t bother me because I really don’t have that fault. Such a rare thing — a fault that I don’t have. 

Pro tip: Treat this as a game. Be playful about it. Buy a post-Halloween-discount Hillary mask or Donald mask and mentally wear it for a few minutes and imagine yourself acting out those despicable qualities.

Imagine the mask you wear every day that covers up those qualities in you. How much work do you have to do to keep people from seeing those things in you?

The work we do to remove the beam of wood from our own eyes will go a lot further toward making the world a better place than another Facebook posting about how terrible candidate _____ is.

Try it.  It will change your life and, no matter who wins on Tuesday, your transformed self will be making the world around you a better place — in fact, you will be making it the Kingdom of Heaven.