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I’ve had an interesting discussion offline with a reader who recounts how some lightworkers she’s known have regarded helping the poor as perpetuating people being on the dole.
As a philosophy, the extreme version of this point of view is called social Darwinism.
If we discuss Maslow’s hierarchy of needs – the physiological being the first and most important, relatively speaking – then we’ll encounter people who will feel that we’re making things worse.
In all the projects I’ll be “sourcing” (being the ultimate source of but not a worker in), everyone, as far as I’m aware is concerned with levelling the playing field, righting wrongs, freeing people, relieving poverty. You remember that CEO Michael said that his guidance was for us to start with basic needs and freedoms.
If we don’t relieve need, no one will have any attention on anything that we might consider higher. There’s nothing higher to a starving person than filling their belly.
Krishnamurti, she reminds me, said:” “The man who has no food in his stomach obviously cannot find reality – first he must be fed.” And she repeats a saying popular among some who work in the social services arena – “Peace will be found when the hungry are fed.”
I also recall Swami Vivekenanda saying something to the effect that you cannot teach starving people spirituality.
And if we don’t free people, their resentment will remain so high that anything we say about spirituality would sound like hypocrisy to them.
So I want to be very, very clear myself that, like Micki, who sent in the email, my own personal priority is basic needs and freedoms. And I don’t say that simply because Michael did. I feel it in my bones.
You know I’ve worked on refugee claims and heard the most heart-rending stories. I know what the deprivation of freedom is like and how many people are deprived of their freedom in this world right now. I also worked on the Hunger Project for some time and know how widespread hunger is in the world.
And, yes, I also know that around fifteen percent of the money our projects distribute will go to scams. I got it. That’s just what’s so.
That’s no reason to deprive the other 85% of a level playing field. We have to get off focusing on the cost and see the dramatically-increasing benefits. We have to get off attending to what are essentially Third-Dimensional matters.
In the old Third, people scammed us and all we did was worry about getting scammed, looking foolish, and losing money.
But now we’re feeding a tender shoot and that always involves risk. One needs to put a fence around a tender shoot to keep the cows away. One needs to water it and weed it.
That tender shoot is global love. Freshly planted. Very delicate.
Our distribution of funds (1) to the disadvantaged, starving, and enslaved of the world is the planting of that tender shoot of global love.
In our part of the world, the people who get the short end of the stick are the homeless, the sick, the aged, single parents, orphans, foster children, the disabled and others, among women and men. In other parts of the world, the dispossessed and enslaved are increasingly found to be women, the number going up the less humane the people.
This work is what’s being asked of us. We ourselves don’t need help. We’re making it, some of us by the skin of our teeth but we are. But those others will never listen to a discussion of heart consciousness as long as they live in forced marriages, under a burqah, are starving and homeless on an uncaring city street, raped in jail, and so on.
We volunteered for serious business. It wasn’t to throw dollars in the air and dream of a Lamborghini. We asked to be financial wayshowers to plant the tender shoot of global love in what was previously a desert for so many people. We’re tasked with turning that desert into a watered plain.
Footnotes
(1) Whether directly or through aid agencies and groups.