Free The Slaves: Part 2

An Invitation to the Integral and Evolutionary Communities

We appreciate all of the responses, both online and off, to my post last week, Free the Slaves.  At Integral Life Spiritual Center we are now putting together a working group to carefully study the phenomenon of human trafficking from an evolutionary and integral perspective.

Our goal is practical.

Integral Spirituality is moving off the matt, out of the academy and into the world.

So in this working study group we want to answer a practical question; how can we make a real and practical difference in making peoples lives better?

Particularly we want to respond to the cry of the oppressed, the unjustly accused, the falsely imprisoned, the powerless and the enslaved. Consciousness and Culture are beautiful but if they do not translate into an engaged
compassion that moves one to act for other-beyond one’s own ego or ethnocentric matrix- then the beauty is hollow indeed.

So the purpose of our study is not to publish a paper, although we will certainly share our findings; rather our purpose is direct and practical; we would like to see how we might be able to skillfully participate in freeing the slave world over, therebye ending once and for all this heart rending and horrific defacing of divinity.

I want to invite you, as a first step, to participate in this group. It will involve at a minimum reading, perhaps some posting, phone calling, emailing and some conference calls. 

At a second stage, for those who sign up to be modern day abolitionists it may involve much more. 

A couple of notes are in order in response to some of the responses to the post Free the Slaves. Anyone who has read the literature on human trafficking knows very well that 28 million slaves in the world today are not able to walk away. They are trapped in ways no less horrific and in many cases more horrific then the slaves in the American South.

We will in future blog posts share with you the first person stories on the different forms of human trafficking so we move the victims from being abstract it’s in the 3rd-person, to living breathing “thou” people that we care for and love in the 2nd-person, and ultimately to people whose pain we feel  – in the 1st-person – and are thus moved to realize our authentic human obligation, which is, to get off our asses – stop business as usual -and do something to help liberate all people from their slavery. 

I want to  – in this blog - share four very simple but hugely important points in relation to human slavery. {which is euphemistically referred to as human trafficking}

1) Love your Neighbor as Your Self

It is time. It is time to build a new Underground Railroad. Made up of people who care. Made of people for whom Kanzeon, the Bodhisattva of compassion is not a name or even a meditative realization, but a Call to Action.

The motivating virtue at play here is the very elemental invocation of Love Your Neighbor as Yourself.

This principle disclosed by the infinite in the books of Leviticus and Mathew is understood by the mystics to demand action not merely compassion.

“As yourself” is the operative phrase!

If you were a domestic slave in the state of Florida who was held as the property of your owner, what would you want the world to do?

If you were a sex slave in Germany, forced to serve 20 clients a day without protection, under the threat of extreme beating, disfigurement or harm to your family, what would you want the world to do? 

If you were a ten year old labor slave in India working at a marble quarry, whose father has borrowed twenty dollars a decade ago, which was used to enslave him by adding on interest to the debt that he could never pay - and as a result- You- his daughter, was born into slavery, what would you want the world to do?

Love is a principle of action. Love is as Love Does.

Let Us Free the Slaves!

2) Disposable People:

In some very important ways the danger to slaves today is much worse then it was at the height of the slave trade that imported slaves much the way one would import cattle cargo. You see, a couple of hundred years ago transporting slaves was a costly and complex business. Each slave took up a place on a ship. The ship could only hold so many slaves even when crowded into inhuman conditions. The trip was long and expensive for the slave trader. The slave trader passed on this cost to the slave buyer. Therefore the buyer, who had paid a pretty penny for ‘his’ slave had, at the very least an economic interest in keeping his slave healthy and alive. Today we live in the age of what Kevin Bales has called in relation to the slave trade, ‘Disposable People'. If your eight Bosnian girls whom you have hired as prostitutes in your night club are burned out and destroyed by servicing twenty clients a day and they break down; no problem; you can easily have a another batch brought over at minimal expense and risk. Because of the ease of the economic ease transportation, globalization, immigration and poverty, human beings have become expendable. Slaves today in much of the world have become the Disposable People.

3) Why We Narrow our Circles of Caring?

Does everybody on this list care about human slavery in the their highest and most authentic self? Of course they do. So why do we do so little? The answer is that we believe there is nothing we can do about it! We begin to narrow our circle of caring because the gap between caring and effective action is so huge that the pain becomes unbearable.

But know, we can begin to do something. So call us and sign up for our working group and work with us to build this Under Ground railroad world over.

4) Integral Life Spiritual Center has three major purposes.

To plan, design, teach and host Integral Spiritual Experience.

To move forward the great conversation about the emergent properties of a trans-lineage World Spirituality wave of evolutionary and integral consciousness. 

To work to address the issue of human trafficking in a skillful and effective way.

All three of these goals are really one. As in classical Christianity – three are but three faces of the one; the holy trinity.

ISE begins with Unique Self. How to – from an enlightened integral and evolutionary perspective to identify your Unique Self and Unique Life Purpose.

Slavery is precisely the opposite of realizing your Unique Self. A slave is a means to someone else’s end. The slave has been reduced from a thou to an it- commoditized and objectified in a way, which makes divinity scream in pain. To free the slaves is to recognize that every human being is unique. No one is replicable and therefore no one is replaceable. There are not extras on the set of the human drama. Uniqueness confers on every being infinite dignity and infinite adequacy.

Every human being has a unique story. That story has infinite value, worth and dignity. The right to live one’s story, to tell one’s story and have it received is the fundamental right of every human being. And until that right is met, until the stories of our lives are lived and told we will go on desperately craving them.

Your Unique Self story is beyond the pettiness of your daily lives, beyond the ego, even beyond your non-distinct authentic selves. Every human being has a faculty of consciousness called Unique Self.  This is their unique story manifesting at the highest level of their enlightened engagement with Samsara.
 

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Marc Gafni
Director
Integral Life Spiritual Center

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