Trump: The Ultimate New Age Guru

To me Trump is kind of like a new age guru gone off the rails. The cult leader whose desires ultimately consume him and his followers in a blaze of nuclear-ego-meltdowns. OK, thankfully, for humanity's sake, the meltdown hasn't yet occurred, but what he says is what will be--reality be damned. The one dominant theme in his campaign and his life, as far as I can tell, is truth is malleable. 

He illustrates, in a kind of DarthVadar-like mirror image, what my herbal teacher Susun S. Weed writes about in her book Healing Wise: "there is no longer and objective statement or an objective universe." Safe to say she meant the wisdom gained by exploring the joys of the Wise Woman tradition, a tradition I'm not sure Trump is willing to wade into very much. He seems far more Heroic if we're following along with Ms. Weed's paradigms as described in her masterwork of healing and understanding life. I'd phrase the Trump-thrill-ride-experience more in a Huxley-like way to say, what one perceives is what one will discover. 

New-age prophets of every variety have been touting these immutable axioms for instant fulfillment for decades now. You know, the gospel of prosperity thingy. That technique sadly (up till now, anyways) never worked for me, even though I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s when many self-help gurus advocated creating your own reality. I definitely bought into it (wished it were true) and bought a lot of self-help books, and attended way too many (very expensive) lectures over the years (never Trump University, thank heavens).  I don't really think any of it EVER did any one thing for me.

So, what changed me (at least the part of me that can be changed or perhaps even the part that never changes)?

Kindness, beauty, art, the natural world, music, and especially an awareness, mostly through myth and personal narratives I've tripped over, of a force which acts on human will greater than our material/physical limitations--a spirit within us that yearns for some kind of other-worldly triumph over impossibly difficult life circumstances and that somehow I, too, could tap into that and that maybe I could even help someone else, ease their suffering in some way. 

An awareness of Grace in my life; in other words, despite my all too numerous fuck-ups, God or The Creator (or whoever or whatever you feel represents the Divine, perhaps even just Chance or Fate or "The Universe" as my generation likes to call it) had been far kinder to me than I really deserved and that I must somehow pay that Grace forward--that's really the meaning of life to me.

While I'm on the subject of semantics, my generation spent far too much time WORKING ON OURSELVES.  I've found the fastest way to eclipse our issues and truly alter reality is to find someone "worse off" and help him or her. We quickly lose our ego that's causing us to suffer when being of service to someone else AND. . .wait for it. . .we make the world a better place in the process! 

All of us are going to get sick and die, so why not simply do some good while we are here. 

Stop obsessing about all this stuff--sometimes life is far more simple than we make it out to be. 

Do good. Right now. Be kind. Right now. 

Don't wait until we've worked on ourselves to save the world. Save one person and we've succeeded. 

Spend a little less time in the gym or yoga studio or obsessing over wacky diets, most of which tell us what we must remove from our diets, and by definition do not nourish, as nourishment never comes from removing something, only adding (Susun Weed again). 

Get up. 

Get out. 

Do some good. 

We all have so much power within us--power literally to change reality--more power than a thousand nuclear bombs or a million terrorists to do evil.  

Accessing this power means forgetting our tiny little selves and connecting with infinite bliss that surrounds us as we transcend our own suffering.


Photos Courtesy of Island Sunrises