Where help is
Living in the Kali Yuga
I lift up my eyes to the hills— from where will my help come? My help comes from the LORD, who made heaven and earth. – Psalm 121:1-2
I am reading Andrew Harvey’s luminous account of his sojourn in the northernmost part of India, A Journey in Ladakh. The book is part memoir, part travelogue, and part encounter with Tibetan Buddhism. Although it is one of Harvey’s earlier books, it may be his best from a purely literary perspective. It contains insights that feel eerily contemporary, even though it was published in 1983.
In the course of his travels, he befriends a Buddhist monk named Nawang. At one point, Harvey asks Nawang how it feels to be in exile from his homeland, Tibet, which was occupied by China. Nawang confesses that he grieved for some time, but as a Buddhist he acknowledges that nothing is permanent. He tries to take a larger view.
“It is not so important that one small country falls. The danger now is the loss of spiritual vision in a whole world. And our task, whether we are Tibetans or Americans or Englishmen, is to keep that vision alive, to see that it lives through the dark times we live in, which will get darker.”
“Do you really think that?”
“Oh yes,” Nawang said. “Certainly. This is Kali Yuga. The Age of Destruction. Everything is ending, everything is falling away. But why should that frighten us?”
“It frightens me.”
“You want a philosophy that says, ‘Man will get better. Man will change the world. There is hope.’ That would be a lie. This world is illusion. But within this world and within man there are great powers – powers of love, of healing, of clarity, that can lead man to liberation. The worse the time, the more we should look for those powers within ourselves, the more deeply we should strive to obtain them and live them, for our own sake and for the sake of others. Our terrible time makes the choices clear for us. We will not be able to hide from our spiritual responsibilities; we will not be able to pretend that we can go on living without taking thought for our salvation and that of others. We will have to invoke the deepest strengths of our spirit to survive at all.”
He paused and smiled. “There is one consolation.”
“What is that?” I asked.
“It is said that at the end of the Kali Yuga all the Buddhas and Bodhisatvas will help men with especial force.”
“Let us hope so.”
“You sound doubtful.”
“No, not doubtful. It is hard at this time to believe in any help.”
“That is because you have not yet found where help is.”[1]
We are living in an age of massive dislocation and suffering on an unprecedented planetary scale. All of our institutions are experiencing disruption and decline. We no longer have a shared cosmology, mythos, and ethos that give us a sense of meaning and purpose.
In the absence of structures of meaning, the options seem to be one or another form of nihilism: expressed either in widespread isolation, addiction and deaths of despair, or in unbridled will-to-power celebrating cruelty, domination, and destruction for their own sake. It is the worship of Thanatos - Death.
It is difficult to face this reality squarely, but the only way to find an alternative response is by seeing the situation clearly, without illusion. That is the first step. The second is to accept that we will not be able to fix these problems. This is a multi-dimensional global process that has destabilized the biosphere and unleashed a set of cascading conditions that will now play out on a geological time scale. The best we can hope for is to mitigate and survive them.
The third step is to choose life in the midst of death. It is to make a conscious decision to build sustainable community at the local level where the best of the human spirit is cultivated. Our responsibility now is to gather, protect, preserve, and transmit the highest human values and the wisdom of our spiritual traditions. We must become the shell carrying the seed that will take root and bloom in the age to come – an age we cannot see and may not experience for many lifetimes.
Finally, we must dedicate ourselves to the inner work of healing and the spiritual disciplines that strengthen our capacity to be of service to others. We need to dig deep wells through which the living water of the Spirit can continually cleanse and refresh us. It is only from a place of deep spiritual grounding that we will find the wisdom and courage to act skillfully and compassionately. The quality of our leadership depends upon the depth of our spirituality.
The good news is that when we walk this path, the way of the Cross, we discover where help is. Help is in us, between us, and in our connection with the divine Source of Life and Love. When we experience this connection, when it becomes for us the touchstone of reality, we find the help we need. The saints and angels come to our aid with power.
[1] Andrew Harvey, A Journey in Ladakh (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1983), p. 166-167.
Yes.
Wow! Powerful!