Saturday, August 8, 2020 - James Baldwin’s & Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s insight for Huey Lewis and the News.
Have you ever heard of Gaia? It’s a website. You can watch yoga videos there. You can follow along with the yoga videos as you watch, but you do not have to. I signed up for a seven day free trial three days ago; though it might actually be an unusual number of days –––– eleven or twelve.
Or I may be remembering the price of a monthly membership: $11.99 if you elect to be billed monthly, or about two dollars less if you sign up for an annual plan.
Gaia is new age. Its goals, as far as I can gather, are well-intentioned and important: transcendence, enlightenment, healing (individual as well as societal); and harmony (on the inside, as well as on the outside). I skipped past the yoga videos. I meditate; but I haven’t reached a point in my life wherein I’m ready and wanting to devote the time and energy that it takes to begin a yoga practice.
With yoga I imagine, one has to ––– like most anything else –––– start from somewhere. Over the last three or four years, with meditation I have found and am developing a deeper and deeper way in. But yoga is different. I can’t find an entry point, nor have I found a motivation for looking for one. I run. And I meditate.
When it comes to physical and mental and spiritual and emotional exercise and development I’m either moving forward or sitting still. I do like the idea of yoga ––– a practice that I’ve long-envisaged as a halfway point in between running and meditation: paying close attention to the body while moving the body, slightly, and not quite sitting completely still. If I do find the entry point into yoga, I’ll first break the news here.
Gaia is more than yoga videos. It’s a place on the internet for people who have grown tired of fighting and scraping by; who have also become (even if only a little bit) disenchanted with the motivational coach-speak of personal development circles; and who also ––– and perhaps this is the most important: have not quite found a religion ––– a spiritual home, in which they can comfortably sink into.
Gaia is new age, but Gaia is NOT a spiritual home. It’s a website on the internet; that’s all. It’s not anything to get wrapped up in or washed away by. One cannot rely upon the videos and articles on Gaia’s website to direct and affirm one’s emotional, mental, or spiritual path. It’s not what the website is there for. And any website which purports to be on the internet for such purpose –––– I would run from, and fast.
Gaia features videos created by people who believe in the power unconditional love, which is a mighty force. A mighty force indeed. A force so mighty that in fact, very clearly I can draw a line between what my life felt like (and looked like) before I had known how to consistently (and at will) experience and enjoy its power.
There is a Huey Lewis and the News Song from 1985: “The Power of Love,” which knows this to be true:
"The power of love is a curious thing
make one man weep, make another man sing
Change a hawk to a little white dove
That’s the power of love.”
Through quoting Huey Lewis and the News, I jest, but only kind of. As it is true, indeed, that the power of unconditional love is, in fact, a curious thing. This much I know for sure: were it not for the power of unconditional love, I would not be here this evening, writing these words.
This is one of the many vagaries and joys of writing: to write at all is an act of love. To get words down is to express that one’s heart is beating; that there is air and breath in the lungs, and that the mind is working through something ––– anything at all. It doesn’t have to be important. It’s love all the same. And even if the words that appear are overflowing with hate, the fact that they’re there at all ––– means love is at work, and a transformation is possible.
This is what Huey Lewis and the News got right: the power of love is a curious thing. And this is where their 1985 smash hit left off: love is curious because its source, as well as its application, are often wildly misunderstood and misapplied. This is one reason why enhancing love with unconditional love can be advantageous.
To go further, I need the help from two of the greatest minds of the last one hundred years: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and James Baldwin. About three months ago I was standing in my apartment and looking out the window, where two helicopters were hovering –––– and for a while ––– above Midtown Manhattan. Our nation (again) was waking up! Enough (again) had become enough.
Through conversations with family and friends and within my own social circles, one common theme that resurfaced, again and again, was the idea that this time –––– things were different. Things had to change -–––and fast. This idea ––– that things were different this
time ––– was a speculation. And like all speculations, the depth of its truth, was only limited by how deeply we believed in its premise. And we, of course, “we” is relative.
Here’s what I knew then, and what I still know now: this time, for me personally, it’s been different. Here’s why: (the power of) unconditional love.
This is what I know and can feel within myself now, which I did not know (nor could feel within myself) when I first heard that Colin Kapernick was taking a knee: Unconditional love is more of a frequency ––– a vibration that one holds and embodies ––– as opposed to any one act (or series of acts), or any one thought (or series of thoughts).
It’s a state. It just is. And once you learn to access this frequency and hold this vibration –––– the frequency and vibration of unconditional love ––– you can watch your world start to change.
Personally, I do not know whether it is possible to reach this frequency and to hold this vibration (of unconditional love), without meditation. Personally, I know that I do not have a chance, at all, to hold this vibration without meditation. The beauty of all of this is that it requires a practice.
This is not a state that is reached once, and then checked off of a list. Instead, the only reason that I can spend this evening, writing these words, and expressing these feelings and ideas, is because I have spent three or four years growing and developing my meditation practice, and working with an incredible therapist and healer, who has revealed to me the truth of my own power, and the value of learning to consistently hold this vibration ––– the vibration of unconditional love.
Perhaps other people can get by without meditating and still embody unconditional love. I cannot.
Let me be clear: it is not that I become harmful, or vengeful, or hateful, or selfish when I am not embodying this state. In fact, I may be nicer to other people when I am not embodying this state. Why? This is because embodying the state of unconditional love includes holding a love, respect, and honor for myself. Saying no when I mean no. And yes when I mean yes. And not appeasing or pleasing for the mere sake of keeping a farcical and fraught sense of peace.
Gaia is new age. There is a lot on their website. I will never watch all of it. But if you click around for a while and watch a few of the videos there, you’ll come across strategies and tips for experiencing healing and empowerment, as well as entry-points for learning to embody and hold the frequency of, of course, unconditional love.
Recently, I was reading Notes of a Native Son, and came across a powerful paragraph regarding the realities of the power of unconditional love. And two weeks ago, I read a piece from The New Yorker’s July 27th, 2020 archival issue “Voices of American Dissent,” which features an important quote from Dr. King.
I will present a passage from Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son (“Everybody’s Protest Novel”), and then I will leave you with a quotation from The New Yorker piece, which originally appeared in the magazine’s August 29th, 1964 issue, and was written by Calvin Trillin: “Letter from Jackson - Plane to Mississippi: An encounter with Martin Luther King, Jr.” With my entire heart, until next time.
- Isaac Myers III
_______________________
“But unless one’s ideal of society is a race of neatly analyzed, hard-working ciphers, one can hardly claim for the protest novels the lofty purpose they claim for themselves or share the present optimism concerning them. They emerge for what they are: a mirror of our confusion, dishonesty, panic, trapped and immobilized in the sunlit prison of the American dream. They are fantasies, connecting nowhere with reality, sentimental; in exactly the same sense that such movies as The Best Years of Our Lives or the works of Mr. James M. Cain are fantasies. Beneath the dazzling pyrotechnics of these current operas one may still discern, as the controlling force, the intense theological preoccupations of Mrs. Stowe, the sick vacuities of The Rover Boys. Finally, the aim of the protest novel becomes something very closely resembling the zeal of those alabaster missionaries to Africa to cover the nakedness of the natives, to hurry them into the pallid arms of Jesus and thence into slavery. The aim has now become to reduce all Americans to the compulsive, bloodless dimensions of a guy named joe.”
- James Baldwin.
_______________________
“Across the aisle from King, there happened to be sitting a stocky, nice-looking young white man with a short haircut and wearing Ivy League clothes. He looked as if he might have been a responsible member of a highly regarded college fraternity six or eight years ago and was now an equally responsible member of the Junior Chamber of Commerce of a Southern city that prided itself on its progress. About halfway between Atlanta and Montgomery, the plane’s first stop, he leaned across the aisle and politely said to King, in a thick drawl, “Excuse me. I heard them calling you Dr. King. Are you Martin Luther King?”
“Yes, I am,” said King politely.
“I wonder if I could ask you two questions,” the young man said, and Young, Vivian, and Less, all of whom were seated behind King, leaned forward to hear the conversation. “I happen to be a Southerner, but I also happen to consider myself a Christian. I wonder, do you feel you’re teaching Christian love?
“Yes, that’s my basic approach,” King said. “I think love is the most durable element in the world, and my whole approach is based on that.”
“Do you think the people you preach to have a feeling of love?” the young man asked.
“Well, I’m not talking about weak love,” King explained. “I’m talking about love with justice. Weak love can be sentimental and empty. I’m talking about the love that is strong, so that you love your fellow-men enough to lead them to justice.”
. . .
“Well, I think you are causing violence,” the young man said.
“Would you condemn the robbed man for possessing the money to be robbed?” asked King. “Would you condemn Christ for having a commitment to truth that drove men to crucify him? Would you condemn Socrates for having the views that forced the hemlock on him? Society must condemn the robber, not the man he robs.”
