2025 #9: Elephant in the Room - Get it OUT!
Buddhist wisdom from Chiang Dao, northern Thailand
Dear Friend
Who are you?
Be you English, Russian, American, Chilean, Ugandian, Korean, Japanese, Brazilian…
Be you Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist…
Be you Western, Eastern, of the global South…
Be you man or woman…
Be you black, white, brown, any shade thereof…
Be you working class, middle class, upper class…
Be you white collar, blue collar, university-educated…
Be you famous, a nobody, a somebody, rich, poor…
It matters not a jot…
… for in this incomprehensibly vast universe on the landscape of all the infinite time that has ever been and will ever be, you are the same as all the other human beings alive today, and the same as the human beings of the past and the human beings yet to inhabit the future times: you are a minuscule, microscopic dot of cosmic dust just floating on by for your own nano-second of life.
To the whole universe that is, was, and always will be, you are a complete and total nobody.
Yet… this very same universe specifically invited you to join the party of life that makes up what we know as Earth, Mother Earth, Gaia, the world, our world, our planet. You are a nobody, but you are a very very special nobody, because you are a human being, and you have been given the most tremendous powers, talents, skills, and ability to see, feel and experience unimaginable beauties, joys, and the flowing energy of ineffable love within your being, and all around you in the gardens and nature of Mother Earth.
And, most magically—it truly is a miracle of miracles—to be aware and conscious of all this.
But there’s one small catch.
It’s all just potential.
For you, for me, for each and every single one of us. Just potential.
The universe gave it all to you, but it said, “Now it’s up to you what to do with this potential, but the magic doesn’t come to you without you working for it.”
“If you would like to experience freedom, joy, compassion, unconditional love, happiness, kinship, togetherness”, it said, “then you have to learn how, and you have to forevermore apply and practise what you learn. You have to actualise your potential, you have to manifest all these glories into being; you will find that all the skills and tools you need are inside you; nothing is missing, you have everything.”
We have all been formed into cosmic dots of dust, yet with galactic hearts. But you have to allow your heart to be opened this big. Potential must be activated into reality! This is why I originally called this series of Letters Unblock Your Mind, Unblock Your Heart, Unleash Your Spirit. We all have to work to get the magic and miracles into our own life.
I would like to return to the topic of this potential we were all given, but before that let’s get to this week’s extract.
Like in last week’s Letter, it comes from Osho, and you may recall my story of me buying 18 Osho books when I first learned about this giant of the 20th century (he himself often said he was just a ‘nobody’), and then being faced with the quandary of which book to start on. It was the title that self-selected itself for me: Priests and Politicians: The Mafia of the Soul.
Well, this week we have a short extract from that very first Osho book I read. Reading this book at the time simultaneously thrilled and shocked me; I quickly discovered that Osho never minced his words! I was getting a spiritual interpretation of our political world for the first time, and he articulated what I sort of innately understood, but which hitherto, I now realised, I was unable to articulate for myself.
Okay, over to Osho…
Priests and Politicians: The Mafia of the Soul
Reading Task
As you read this extract, notice your instant feelings and reactions to Osho’s message, and then after you have read it use the post-reading task to reflect upon his message at a deeper level.
As per usual in most Osho books, each chapter starts with a question or request from one of his sannyasins.
The Extract
Beloved Osho, please talk about the misuse of power.
“There is the famous statement of an English philosopher: “Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
I do not agree with him. My analysis is totally different. Everybody is full of violence, greed, anger, passion – but has no power so he remains a saint. To be violent you need to be powerful. To fulfil your greed you need to be powerful. To satisfy your passions, you need to be powerful.
So when power falls into your hands, all your sleeping dogs start barking. Power becomes a nourishment to you, an opportunity. It is not that power corrupts, you are corrupted. Power only brings your corruption into the open. You wanted to kill somebody, but you did not have the power to kill; but if you have the power, you will kill.
It is not power that corrupts you, you carry corruption within yourself; power simply gives you the opportunity to do whatever you want to do.
Power in the hands of a man like Gautam Buddha will not corrupt; on the contrary, it will help humanity to raise its consciousness. Power in the hands of Genghis Khan destroys people, rapes women, burns people alive. Whole villages are burned – people are not allowed to get out. It is not power… this man Genghis Khan must have been carrying all these desires within him.”
…
Power in itself is neutral. In a good man's hand, it will be a blessing. In an unconscious man's hand, it is going to be a curse. But for thousands of years we have condemned power, without thinking that power has not to be condemned; people have to be cleaned of all the ugly instincts that are hiding within, because everybody is going to have some kind of power or other.
It does not have to be great power. You may be just sitting in a railway station selling tickets, but that too gives you power. You are standing at the window, and the man does not even look at you. He goes on turning his file – and you can see that he is not concerned with the file, he simply wants to show you your place. Even the peon sitting outside the collector’s office behaves as if he is the president of the country – so it is not a question of where you are. Wherever you are, you will have some kind of power.
…
Even parents use power. Teachers use power, husbands use power, wives use power. It does not matter where you are.”
Post-Reading Task
1. To what extent do you agree with what Osho says here? Reflect upon your own life, and upon the bigger picture of the whole of humankind.
2. Will ordinary human beings really kill others if they had the power to do this, without being held accountable for their actions? Are leaders who take nations to war, who invade other nations, not just ordinary people who got political power? What if we replace ‘kill’ with ‘hurt’ or ‘harm’? What do you think Osho wants us to understand by telling us about our ‘sleeping dogs’?
3. Have you ever experienced powerful feelings of a desire for retribution or revenge? How often do you feel resentment towards somebody who has slighted, disrespected or hurt you, or from seeing them do this to other human beings? What do you think of political leaders?
4. Do you think you have inadvertently caused harm to others without realising it? Could it be that others acting negatively towards you, are acting out of their own resentment or retribution for a slight they perceive you to have directed at them? Have you later regretted doing or saying something (in the heat of the moment, or even in a calculated way) which you know has hurt another person, especially those close to you? Did you apologise later?
5. Holding onto thoughts of retribution, revenge, resentment are powerful forces of energy; how do they impact upon our own health and wellbeing? What kind of relationship do you have with the act of forgiveness?
6. How do we protect ourselves from the damage these kinds of emotions can wreak on us? How do we make ourselves into a Buddha and make sure we will never be a Genghis Khan?
My commentary
For me this is a foundational message for those who seek to fundamentally transform their own life, health and wellbeing, and their destiny. We cannot evolve and grow into a wonderful unique human being, nor practise and achieve spiritual ascension and personal sovereignty, until we recognise and accept that we do wrong against others, and that we have the potential, if triggered by an environment of, say, ‘the perfect storm’, to do serious harm against others.
It’s very easy to see the bad in others, but painful to see, or even look for, the bad in ourselves. But to be human is to carry that full range of human possibilities. Nobody is exempt, nobody is immune. You can research the African concept of ‘ubuntu’ which talks about this.
It is also a common phenomenon for us to feel shame and guilt for things we have done in the past, and this happens because we feel like we are a bad person, and this thought can be crippling. Self-doubt and self-sabotage is rampant in our struggling human world, and it just need not be this way. I remain convinced that this is NOT natural, rather it is a consequence of what I consider to be a woeful and harmful schooling that about 99% of us receive.
It’s not human nature that we should be worried about at all, it’s the kind of human nurture that we have created for ourselves. This is the source of all the human world’s troubles. We want a nurture that complements and develops our nature, not one that antagonises it.
The reality is as Osho says: if our psyche is conditioned in a certain way, we can act in harmful ways, and to harm another is to harm myself. And if I harm myself, those who love me will feel hurt too. Yet, we can be a Buddha, an energy presence that brings flowers and flourishing and good vibrations to ourselves and to those we love and to complete strangers.
That is our potential as we recognised at the outset of this Letter. So too do we have the potential to harm others, perhaps even kill them, who knows?
If we received a damaging childhood and upbringing, or to the degree that we did, then can we recover? Can we recondition ourselves? Can we nourish the good seeds, and stop watering the bad seeds within us?
Yes of course! But it takes work, and only we can do it ourselves. There is no magic bullet, no knight in shining armour, no guru, no special pill that can do it for us. We have to do the hard work, and that’s the truth of the whole of human history - trying to avoid doing this work and seeking out the instant fix to all our woes.
We have to completely review, reconstruct and rejuvenate the way we do our nurturing. That means in the schools first and foremost.
In my five-step journey of self-inquiry that is A Spiritual Revolution—i) to discover who the authentic true you is, ii) to become aligned with your true nature, and iii) to live in harmony with others and the planet—the first step is perhaps the hardest of all: accepting that the troubles, problems and suffering we experience in life are our own doing. We are so accustomed to blaming the politicians, the media, the elites, the rich families, bad luck, a friend, a family member, or ‘them’… anybody or anything will do so long as we don’t have to look at ourselves.
The elephant in the room of the house of all humankind is that we are ignorant, and this is why it’s the elephant… who wants to think of themselves as ignorant? But viewing humankind as a single entity—enabling us to see the bigger picture—we can say that we know not who we are, nor how the web of life on our planet works. But it’s a really destructive kind of ignorance, because humanity assumes it is knowledgable, intelligent, wise.
Not only don’t we know, we don’t know that we don’t know.
Only individual human beings can, one by one, bust this ignorance right out into the open, once and for all. We must, urgently, and as the very foundation for the rest of our life, discover who we are and learn about the interconnected and interdependent nature of all life on Earth.
We are not apart from the rest of the natural world, we are a part of it.
However, the good news is that, within the whole human family, there exists all the knowledge, understanding and wisdom needed to gently lead the big jumbo out of our living room.
The way to bust this ignorance is for each of us to take the path of self-inquiry - a journey where the deepest kind of learning takes place. How can we possibly understand the world around us if we have so little idea of the world inside our own skin? But the reverse can be said. So, we learn both simultaneously. In schools around the world, they actively block us from learning about the world within our own body, mind, soul and consciousness.
Step #2 of A Spiritual Revolution is to ask ourselves what our dreams, aspirations and hopes are for both ourselves and the whole world. What kind of world do I want? What kind of person do I want to be? Who, really, am I? What is my purpose in life? How can I serve the greater good of all, and the universe who birthed me?
While we can refer to step #1 as a ‘situation analysis’, step #2 can be viewed as our ‘needs analysis’. What is my, and our, world like now? What world do I want for me and everybody?
Then it’s all about getting from here to there, all about learning how we can deprogram and recondition ourselves so that we can:
discover our unique purpose in life
actualise all our glorious potential
and—by accepting and understanding we have seeds for doing great harm to others and to ourselves—we can learn how to not water these destructive seeds within us.
Accepting a problem is the end of it. Accepting the limitations to our existence is the end of those limitations. It’s all in your mind. It’s all in your head. The beauty and the brutality, the magic and the shit. Nourish your seeds wisely and you will thrive! This is actually classic Buddhism, and perhaps the key message of all religions. Until they were politicised by people long-since dead.
My summary is this: I believe that as social creatures it is our human nature to be great, wonderful, wise, kind, compassionate and loving human beings; I believe it is a human nurture gone wrong, a human nature which has perverted our intelligence and hidden from us our human essence that has led to so much hatred, conflict, suffering, war and all the rest of it.
Once we learn how to regain our intelligence and our innate human essence, and then do it, we become skilled in starving those seeds of brutality…
Truly our work is to unblock our mind, unblock our heart and unleash our spirit.
Until next week, all the best
Philip
