A Letter from Alberto Villoldo

I am writing to you today to urge you to register to vote and to VOTE! And to invite you to get everyone you know to register and to vote their values and their conscience!

A friend of mine, a Buddhist priest of some renown, once told me how dismayed he was that people often discontinue their Zen practice once they began to feel better. Zen isn’t about feeling better, he told me, it’s about making a difference in your life and in the world. Shamans believe the same. They understand that you are only healed as far as you can be an agent for positive change. I learned during my travels in the jungle and the Andes that spirituality is intimately connected to the well-being of your village. You cannot live for long in bliss on top of a mountain disconnected from the rest of humanity, tempting as this idea may be. This is not true bliss, but escapism. True bliss is about taking up your role as a co-creator of the world, fixing what is wrong and being steadfast in defending what is right. It means channeling your bliss into action and doing what needs to be done to help others have an opportunity to heal as well.

In America, we are discovering that the king has no clothes, that our democracy has become a mediocracy promoted by advertisers and the media. We’re realizing that health care and financial security in old age is nonexistent for large numbers of our fellow citizens. That real incomes have not increased in the last decade. That the financial institutions we were told would be around forever were built on foundations of arrogance and greed, not solid ground. Our children are inheriting a debt that can never be paid off and a war that cannot be won by military means.

We readily embrace popular morality, unaware that of how limited our awareness is and how much we are shaped by our culture’s latest morality. Morality changes with the times. One hundred years ago it was considered moral to deny women the right to vote (and to torture, beat, and starve those women who disagreed). Not so long ago, it was considered moral to enslave African Americans. I am old enough to remember “Whites Only” signs on the beach near where I lived as a child in Florida. But while morality changes with the times, ethics are universal, and withstand the test of time. The shamans of ancient America understood that they had to embrace universal ethics and be true to themselves and their beliefs, regardless of how much that went against the mores of society. It was the role of the shaman to point out when the king was wearing no clothes, regardless of how regal everyone else perceived him to be.

Typically, only 54 percent of Americans vote in a presidential election. Yet all of us feel entitled to an opinion about what is wrong in our world today. We have the opportunity in these coming elections to vote our conscience, and to vote our values. The future of our ecosystem depends on it, and so does the future of polar bears, drought-stricken villages in Africa, and people in war-torn areas from the Middle East to Georgia.

My Zen Buddhist friend tells me he believes that meditation is the single most powerful political act. He reminded me that the word conspiracy comes from the Latin conspirare, which means to breathe together. The world is always afraid of people who breathe together, dream together, and act together. I urge you to take your meditation to the voting booth. I am making this my yoga for the next few weeks until the election and I hope you will consider doing the same.

The results of this election will determine the kind of world our children and grandchildren inherit. We can choose the path of peace and envision a better way, or we can choose the path of denial. We can choose to focus only on our own well-being, or we can remember that we are all one being in consciousness, and attend to our collective healing.

The future is in our hands! Let’s take action together!

With Love
Alberto Villoldo