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meykandal · 7 years

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The Truth Shall Set Us Free

I sit in wonder that this practice of the Quakers is hidden deep within the folds of the Quaker community, it’s like having to dig for buried treasure. Until recently I had only thought of the Quakers as advocates of peace...perhaps a group positioned on a moral high ground of their own making.

If it wasn’t for the fact that something inside me called me to look into their meetings, I might have missed this simple way to find the truth within. I wanted to connect to spirit. Ever since a friend had started automatic writing in the middle of the night out of the blue - astoundingly answering questions I had put to her earlier that day - I had been running around trying to work out how I could do that myself. When I realised the Quakers have meetings where they sit in silence with others in deep contemplation, the thought occurred maybe that would do it.

But it was like a thought that occurs and then disappears when it seems a little too difficult to realise. Like seeds being sown, not ready yet to see the light. Then, after I had moved from London to live by the beautiful sea where my senses came to life, and after I had attended a psychic development circle for a year to dispel my self-doubt, I must have become ready.

After a year of sitting in the development circle, I discovered that one of my spirit guides was Abraham Lincoln, which explained why every time I stood up to try and get a message from spirit for someone in the room, I kept seeing his face in my mind… I had dismissed it each time because I thought it couldn’t possibly be someone’s relative coming through. His face appeared whoever I was trying to get a message for. I was annoyed at myself, thinking I had somehow seen his image browsing the internet and it was imprinted on my memory because of that. I had tried to shrug it off, but his image kept appearing in my mind’s eye.

Then one day in the circle we did some psychic art. We held up our drawings for others to see, and I saw my face in a drawing held up by the circle leader. I immediately recognised myself. I saw he had obviously not drawn me as he saw me with his physical eyes, because he had given me a centre parting. I had a side parting. I kept forcing my unwilling hair to stay on one side because I didn’t like my natural parting which was in the middle. He had drawn my parting as it naturally was. And right behind my face loomed a larger face, huge and close up to mine…a face I had seen during the previous few days several times as I closed my eyes for meditation. The circle leader didn’t know who that was, and I didn’t know either. All I knew was that I’d been seeing that face right up close several times.

I consulted an old friend in India, who, over the past year had found he was able to get reliable messages for me from his own spirit guide, Gangamma, Mother Ganges. I sent him a photo of the drawing and asked him to ask her who it was. The answer came, ‘Abraham Lincoln’. It was a shock to both of us. I hadn’t ever shared with him that I’d been seeing Abraham Lincoln’s face in my mind all this time. And then came a huge wave of relief, like my body had been holding the tension of an unanswered question, and now it could let go.

I began reading up on Abraham Lincoln, I didn’t know that much about him. But as I began reading his biography, I learned that he came from a Quaker heritage. And the pieces fell into place. Now I understood why I’d had thoughts about going to a Quaker meeting on and off over the years. I looked up my nearest meeting and saw it was just ten minutes’ walk away, there was nothing difficult about it this time. I went along.

As soon as I sat down in the room I felt good. I did what I had started to do when I know I need to connect with unfamiliar or distant people, I imagined that I was made up of atoms of vibrating energy, and each other person in the room was made up of atoms too, that we were reflections of each other, all one big mass of energy at one with the energy of the universe, all love, all compassion, all kindness, all magnificent, all powerful, all free. And I sank into bliss. As three different people stood up and spoke I marvelled at the beauty of their words and let the energy of the thoughts sink into me. At some point during the meeting, I felt a deeper release as my body unfolded from a tension I didn’t know I was holding. By the time the meeting was over it was like I had experienced a miracle within me.

Each time I went to the meeting was unique. And the more I discovered about the practice of sitting to listen in silence for spirit, of how it was used to make decisions in business meetings, how it was used to help members with problems, I was enthralled. I read up as much as I could; each time I read about the practice of listening to spirit, and the thoughtful insights that came from it, it touched me deeply. It even moved me to a state of ecstasy that I took into my everyday life. What could be more enlivening, more enriching than sensing the spirit within?

And I wonder why I needed to dig so deeply to find it? I wonder why the public knowledge about the Quakers is more about their stance on peace, and not about this beautiful practice? Because surely this beautiful practice is the heart of what it is to be a Quaker, isn’t it?

The truth shall set you free. I’m not a Christian but I know this phrase. And it keeps echoing in my mind, as if it needs to be spoken again and again. I know that seeking the truth is at the heart of what it is to be a Quaker. That is the core attractive power of the movement is. ‘The truth shall set you free’…why is truth so attractive? Because somewhere deep within we recognise truth matters to us, and we recognise that it will set us free. The phrase ‘the truth shall set you free’ itself recognises that freedom is a deep desire for every human being. Free in all ways. Freedom from worry, anxiety, freedom to speak the truth, freedom from slavery, freedom from violence, freedom from physical needs, freedom of movement, freedom to travel to any country, freedom to live anywhere on this planet, freedom to love anyone we choose, freedom to leave anyone we don’t want to be with anymore, freedom from any outside authority, freedom to be guided by our own authority within, freedom to be unique, freedom from labels that categorize us and separate us, freedom to find the work we enjoy, freedom from physical ailments, freedom to be who we really are. All kinds of freedoms, because the intrinsic nature of freedom is that it has no limits.

I ponder on the fact the Quaker practice embodies the seeking of truth for freedom, yet freedom is not one of the values Quakers propound. They state their values as: truth, equality, simplicity and peace, even sustainability. But in their literature freedom is nowhere to be found. I’m not sure why it is absent.

I am reminded of a time when I felt acutely how freedom mattered to me more than life itself. I had taken a refugee boat from Sri Lanka to escape the war which was intensifying. When I arrived on Indian shores I was put in a refugee camp, and then released because, being a British citizen, the British Embassy had made a phone call to intervene on my behalf. But then immediately the Indian police put me in prison. And while I was in prison I had the clearest vision of the injustice that state authorities can mete out arbitrarily on anyone in their territory.

It was like a huge Monty Python foot that had come down and squashed me, taking away that which made me alive. I suddenly saw that we had created a world where there was no free place to escape to. Whichever place we might go to in the world, there we would find a state authority that could squash us like this, take away our freedom, the most precious thing in life.

I yearned to be with my loved ones, I thought I might spend the rest of my life in prison, away from them, die there eventually. Nothing mattered as much as freedom. Not prison conditions, not the concrete beds, not the sanitary conditions, not the food. I was happy to endure anything if only I got my freedom. But the thing I did have was the other women in the prison. We shared love. In the months I was there the 20 or so women who shared my prison cell and I were loving to each other, and that was what sustained us. Virtually none of them could read nor write. I saw the beauty of their souls, some single mothers trying to do the best they could to live their lives until the state had taken away their freedom. Taken them away from their children. Preventing them from even knowing what had happened to them, whether they were even safe. Freedom and love are the most powerful forces we have within us. And I wonder, though Quakers do speak of love, I haven’t heard of the importance of freedom in the Quaker movement.

And yet I see that the desire for freedom can’t be an experience that is alien to the Quakers in history. As I read up on Quaker history I see it is not just slaves who cry for freedom, it is not just the many who have joined freedom struggles around the world who cry for freedom, the Quakers must have done so too. In the 1700s more than 60,000 Quakers were imprisoned in Britain. Surely, they must have felt the deep desire for freedom? Many Quakers left to find freedom in America. So the desire for freedom cannot have been absent in Quaker experience. And yet freedom doesn’t seem to be vocalised as a value to be cherished.

In my reading I saw that when the Quakers settled in America they didn’t respect the freedom of the Native Americans. They were so focused on forcing peace on them that they forced the Native Americans as if they were wild cattle into subservience. Forcing them to adopt English customs. They stripped from them everything that they held dear, their spiritual identity, their dignity, their free will. And without that who can stand up for themselves against any hostile force.

So while Quakers say they treated the Native Americans kindly compared to others, it was a kindness that came from paternalism, in fact not kind at all but controlling. A controlling paternalism that destroyed the spirit within and it was the necessary precursor to the Native American genocide, without which that genocide may not have even taken place.

The Quakers then and now still care more about peace than they do about freedom. Like many Western people feeling powerless to control the militarism of their own armies, they instead try to control the other, forcing a peace of subservience on people who are targets of their army’s militarism. And we wonder why genocide abounds in the modern world. There is no peace without freedom. In fact, it’s only in true freedom that we can find our way to peace.

What the Quakers did to kill the spirit of the Native Americans, the Western world has gone on to do to similarly to the rest of the world. After colonial rule ended, instead of withdrawing and allowing the people freedom, the West set up a system of control, creating the rest of the world as a system of states with armed authorities, administering the law and tax collection and prisons. And far from being free, these states are held by the reins through the United Nations, where the Western powers can whip other states into ‘correct’ behaviour. The people are imprisoned within the states, restricted from leaving one state and from entering another, even if their loved ones are there. And the state has been allowed all the weaponry to bomb the people, to tear their life in shreds through armed force. Which has happened in Sri Lanka, as it has, and still is happening, right across the world.

Not many people understand what the war in Sri Lanka was about. In one short sentence, the war in Sri Lanka was about resisting genocide.

There were no end of Western organisations preaching peace to the people who were trying to find ways to resist genocide. They preached peace, but they didn’t help the people resist genocide. Instead of helping, the world instead blamed the people for fighting back. They called them terrorists because they used arms to resist as David did with Goliath. They preached peace to them, while the violent state had the entire force of the world on its side and tore the people to pieces. And meanwhile, the people who resisted by arms on one side, on the other poured out poetry and song about the sweetness of freedom. During the 30 years of war there was a massive resurgence in art, in song, dance, drama and poetry, because the desire for freedom demands creative expression.

The people who preached peace did their best to hide the evidence of genocide as it unfolded over the decades. As well as hide the evidence that the ‘terrorists’ were not actually terrorists. These peace organisations also took it on themselves to speak on behalf of the people who had never asked them to speak for them. And when the final genocide happened in 2009, with between 40,000 to 100,000 people killed by Sri Lankan forces in the last months, the people who had preached peace did their best to cover it up. They either covered up the fact of the genocide, or covered up their collusion with it when the facts started spilling out. And so perhaps some of you can understand that talk of peace and reconciliation is a further affront when the survivors of that genocide are still living under the rule of the army that carried it out. Right now, freedom is all I care about, and all they have ever cared about.

I ask the Quakers, if the truth shall set us free, and we find our own individual truth in the energy of Quaker meetings, why is it not those beautiful meetings which proliferate around the world? Why do Quakers proliferate instead the preachers of peace who in their ego don’t recognise the violence within themselves? Why instead don’t Quakers extend to the world the gift of silent listening to the spirit within, the truth within. Extend the practice as a loving offering to all the people who in such difficult circumstances are crying out for truth and freedom. I am sure together we can find creative ways to do this, I can already think of several. Or am I missing something?

#quakers #peace #freedom movement #spiritual #spiritual awakening #native american #sri lanka #the truth shall set you free

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