We Need Both Outer Work And Inner Work To Truly Free Ourselves

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

It’s brutal keeping track of the criminality of the empire lately. I personally don’t see how anyone could do it without an accompanying discipline like healing work, meditation, mindfulness, self inquiry, or other forms of inner work.

Whenever I talk about the importance of inner work with this stuff I’ll get people dismissing it as self-indulgent navel gazing nonsense and a distraction from the outer work of actually changing our material circumstances, but really nothing could be further from the truth. To have a consistent discipline of inner work is to take responsibility for your own psychological bullshit instead of spreading it around in ways that hurt the people near you and make the world a worse place.

It is absolutely true that the world and the cruel systems which guide it urgently need to change, and it is absolutely true that much of the suffering and mental illness we see in our society is due to the material, financial and psychological stress that people are placed under in this sick capitalist dystopia we find ourselves in. But that doesn’t mean you get to shirk your own adult responsibility to do the hard work necessary to bring the unconscious mechanisms of your own suffering and dysfunction into consciousness where they can be healed.

The truth is that even if you could snap your fingers and magically transport us into a socialist utopia where we are no longer ruled by tyrants and everyone has what they need, people would still find ways to make themselves miserable and would still act out their unconscious woundedness on the folks around them, because that’s just what the human mind does at this point in our development as a species. You see evidence of this all the time in the self-destructive behaviors and abusiveness of the rich and famous despite their having all their material needs taken care of.

So, as well as it might play in some circles, it’s just not good enough to blame all our suffering on the system. Doing so just encourages people to keep masturbating their inner wounds on everyone around them instead of growing up and doing the hard, uncomfortable work of becoming a conscious human being. 

And conscious human beings are what we’re going to need if we’re going to win this thing. We’re never going to be able to bring about the actions necessary to topple the empire and create a healthy world if we’re still being whipped about by unconscious forces within us caused by early childhood trauma, maladaptive coping mechanisms, unhealthy belief systems and inaccurate assumptions about our reality and our experience, like the overwhelming majority of humanity is right now. Hell, if we were handed a perfect utopia today we’d destroy it in a matter of weeks just out of our own internal chaos and restlessness.

It’s actually often the people most interested in fighting the world’s evils who are most in need of inner work and discipline. It’s just an unfortunate fact that activists are frequently some of the most unconscious and irresponsible people you’ll ever meet, often using their rightful opposition to injustice and systemic abuses to hide all varieties of inner dysfunction and act out their inner demons on the people within their own faction. Most of the internal feuding you see on the western left is nothing other than garden variety drama addiction, trauma reenactment and attention/approval-seeking masquerading as Very Important Discourse about a hot social justice issue or the correct understanding of Marx or whatever.

Just as we all have a responsibility to help create a healthy and truth-based world, we also all have a responsibility to develop healthy and truth-based minds. We can make up any number of excuses for our failure to do so, or we can suck it up and do the work. This gives us the necessary inner stability to directly face the empire’s cruelty even in nightmarish hellscapes like Gaza, and it lets us move far more effectively in the world because we’re being guided by truth and compassion instead of flying blind guided by nothing but our own inner wounds.

I won’t tell you what kinds of inner work you should do because only you can know what will work best for you, but I will tell you that becoming a conscious person with a serene and harmonious mind takes a lot of work, a lot of consistent dedication, and a lot of courage. What matters is your intention to uproot any untruth and disharmony within yourself, and a sincere curiosity about where such things might exist within you.

As individuals none of us have the ability to single-handedly uproot all the unkindness and falsehood in our world, but we can each as individuals uproot the unkindness and falsehood within ourselves. And by doing so we make the world a kinder and more truthful place by just that much, because we tended the little plot of land we were given—our own personal slice of the human plight—with care and responsibility.

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